« March 30, 2008 - April 5, 2008 | Main | April 13, 2008 - April 19, 2008 » April 6, 2008 - April 12, 2008 ArchivesApril 6, 2008LinksJack Shafer sure is right about this. The linking norms in the online versions of newspaper articles betray a very narrow-minded effort at profit-maximization that doesn't seem to understand that at the end of the day a website is only going to be profitable if its content is something people are going to want to read. The Trouble With WarIt sounds almost absurd to need to point out that "war is usually bad" but in a world where John McCain is taken seriously, more people need to listen to John Quiggin: Finally reaching a conclusion, the central error in pro-war thinking is the belief that every war has a winner. On the contrary, in war there are far more losers than winners, and in most cases there are no real winners apart from the merchants of death mentioned above. Even those who seem to win have usually sowed the seeds of future disaster. The only sane response to war is to end it as soon as possible. It's obviously possible to find a few exceptions to this in history, but they're really, really rare and as he says "I’m more and more convinced that arguments for war, or about the conduct of war, that rely solely on WWII should come under the same embargo as other arguments that invoke Hitler and Nazism." WWII aside, the main class of successful wars seems to be things like Gulf War I, where a campaign was undertaken for very limited defensive objectives. Over time, I think the wisdom showed by George H.W. Bush and other coalition leaders at that point when they decided not to press momentary advantage and transform the fighting into a larger war with only illusory gains looks more and more impressive. Expiring AuthorityBruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway note that the current legal basis for the U.S. military operation in Iraq is the second prong of the 2002 AUMF which grants the president the authority to use the military to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." But here's the rub. The most recent U.N. resolution expires on Dec. 31, and the administration has announced that it will not seek one for 2009. Instead, it is now negotiating a bilateral agreement with the Iraqi government to replace the U.N. mandate. But of course Bush (and John McCain!) want a permanent American military presence in Iraq, but they know congress won't authorize such a presence. Hence, the only solution available to them is to ignore the law and the constitution and just keep the troops. Ackerman and Hathaway suggest merely continuing the U.N. resolution for another year, which will give the next president a legal basis for doing whatever he's been granted a mandate to do (since no matter who wins the troops can't be made to suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke in January). But, obviously, for that to happen the administration would need to concede that it lacks the legal and constitutional authority to ignore congress and they'll never do that. Please StopHillary Clinton once again tries to pretend that she was more against the Iraq War than Obama was. It turns out that this is true if you ignore the events of 2002, and those of 2003, and those of 2004 and then misportray the events of 2005. Charlton HestonCharlton Heston, not a very good actor but in his way a great one, has died. To me, Planet of the Apes is vital, though your mileage may vary. His political trajectory was a little silly, but also in a very fitting way utterly typical of the larger trajectory of American history. His death, we hope, comes at a time when the great backlash of which he was a part is finally receding. Rest in peace. Per MinuteHow much should we think about a player's per minute stats versus his per game stats? Dave Berri argues: Let me close by noting that I don’t think that people should solely look at WP48 or just per-minute stats. If you did that, Jerome James - who posted a 1.341 WP48 - would have been the first half MVP. James, though, only played five minutes in the first half of the season, so his WP48 doesn’t really mean much. I think the players who are playing at least 30 mpg are exactly the players we should penalize for lower minutes. After all, a great player who offers you 32 minutes per game is genuinely less valuable than a great player who offers you 40 minutes per game. Things like stamina, injury resistance, and ability to avoid foul trouble are all part of what makes for a useful player. It's the players who play less than that who we shouldn't penalize. Of course you don't want to rely on tiny samples like in the Jerome James example, but a guy who's playing well in 15 minutes per game is probably limited to 15 mpg by coaching decisions -- decisions that might be wrong, or might indicate a jam-up of good players at the same position one of whom should be traded -- rather than fatigue. Good Advice
There's something a bit absurd about this Washington Post headline: "Bush Listens Closely To His Man in Iraq: In White House Deliberations on War, Gen. Petraeus Has a Privileged Voice." This makes it seem as if Bush suddenly arrived in the White House in media res sometime in 2007 and starting trying to figure things out. The surge was already underway, different advisors had different takes, and Bush came to rely on General Petraeus who now has a "privileged voice" in deliberations. But that's not how it went at all. Bush has, from the beginning, always listened to people who tell him what he wants to hear -- starting a war with Iraq is a great idea, continuing a war with Iraq is a great idea. If Petraeus told Bush tomorrow that he should admit failure and open up a regional dialogue on how best to manage an American withdrawal from Iraq, suddenly his privileged position would be gone. The stature of various advice-givers is baked into the cake of the content of their advice and it's not at all hard to tell what Bush wants people to tell him. Photo by Staff Sgt. Lorie Jewell, U.S. Army The Case for Moving OnOftentimes as a dictatorial regime enters its waning days you face a choice as to whether or not to offer the leaders guarantees if they agree to give up power. The downside is that this seems to create bad incentives -- the bad actors get away scott-free when it would be better for evil to be punished. The upside is that with guarantees they may actually give up power, whereas regime leaders who know that if they give up power they'll be treated harshly will probably hold on to power with the utmost brutality. Timothy Burke, thinking of Zimbabwe, says this kind of thinking is bunk: So even if we understand people like Mugabe and his inner circle as calculating, incentive-evaluating, rational deciders, I think there is every reason for them to laugh behind closed doors at the hubris of the experts and activists, whatever the latest policy nostrum on tribunals, interventions, sanctions, golden parachutes or so on might be. Because what anyone outside of the rarified settings where generic 12-point plans for peacemaking and incentivizing prosecutions for genocide are composed knows is that every such action is and will be sui generis. The sand castles that the experts build today around one case will be washed away by the tides of history in short order. What happened in the end to Charles Taylor or Auguste Pinochet or Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic has little implication for tomorrow’s dictator and mass murderer. Because the people who play with constructing the machinery of incentive aspire to a kind of reliable managerial authority that they will never have, they are writing blank checks that no one will ever cash. Whether or not someone like Robert Mugabe dies peacefully in his bed, lives out his last years far from his home country, ends up in a pleasant prison while the United Nations dithers for a decade over his fate, is shot by an up-and-coming rival, or ends up torn to shreds by a mob is a matter of particular circumstance. That’s probably something most authoritarians know already, having ridden the vissitudes of history as far as they have. I guess that seems plausible enough, though I find it pretty unsatisfying as a conclusion and though perhaps it's just technocratic hubris, I'd like to try to see some data. From Intention to RealityAs Ilan Goldenberg says it's wrongheaded to give John McCain credit for professing a desire to improve relations with allies and rejoin the international community. It would be perverse to think that George W. Bush actually wanted the United States to become so isolated. The point is that Bush wanted to pursue policies of rogue state rollback and unilateral preventive war that are incompatible with the United States having a strong relationship with its actual and potential allies around the world. And John McCain wants to pursue those exact same policies; indeed, he was making the case for them before Bush was. What matters isn't what McCain says he wants to accomplish (an enduring peace based on freedom!); we need to be asking what would the actual consequences of his policies be. Car PatrolNormally you can find me ranting against the environmental and public health ills of over-reliance on cars, but Tyler Cowen offers this quote from Peter Moskos' Cop in the Hood which reminds us that it's also had a devastating impact on police work: Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol -- the cornerstone of urban policing -- has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, "The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime." The big rise in crime rates over the course of the 1960s and 70s rapidly became more grist for the mill of America's ideological battles, but a lot of what we can do to reduce crime seems to involve basically un-ideological management tweaks. Unfortunately, cities have been very slow to respond to research with actual shifts in policy. But there's tons of evidence to suggest that cops doing patrol work need to spend less time responding to calls and much less time in their cars. Beyond the factors noted above, when you're driving a car you need to be watching the road or you're cause an accident. But to do effect patrol you need to be watching what's happening in the neighborhood, not just breezing past it. Mark Penn GoneAt least kinda sorta. Here's Maggie Williams' statement: After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as Chief Strategist of the Clinton Campaign; Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign. What exactly the demotion from Chief Strategist to guy who provides polling and advice means I couldn't quite say, but good semi-riddance. UPDATE: Perhaps with reduced campaign responsibilities (and no more Colombia work) Penn will have more time for sniper training. Death by BlogI have to say that I found this article about the stresses of being a full-time blogger a bit bizarre. Yes, it's true that I sometimes feel run a bit ragged by my job (and I've gone a few years without ever having a post-less day), but basically everyone feels that way about their job sometimes. And to me the most draining times are really those times when I've undertaken substantial work on top of the blog. Most of all, to me having flexibility in my schedule is a great blessing compared to the conditions most people have to work under. In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty good job and I consider myself pretty lucky. SymbolismNYT reports from Baghdad that "the Green Zone attacks Sunday were, symbolically at least, a sign that forces hostile to the United States are still able to strike at the heart of the American nerve center and seat of government power in the capital of Iraq." It seems to me that they were a pretty literal sign -- the Mahdi Army wasn't shooting metaphors. Now on the merits of the issue of course it would be good for the Iraqi government to demobilize and disarm militias. But it seems plain as day that what the government is trying to do is disarm Muqtada al-Sadr's militia while keeping other, rival militias like the Badr Organization as well-armed as they please. Practically and politically speaking, that doesn't give the Sadrists any reason to comply. And there don't seem to me to be any genuinely good reasons of national interest or cosmic justice for the United States to be serving as backup muscle in this operation. April 7, 2008Monday Harding Blogging
Via Kathy G., Beverly Gage reminds us that Warren G. Harding was widely rumored to have had some black ancestry, thus -- if true -- making him the "first black president" by one drop rule standards. Of course, as Anthony Appiah has pointing out if we were to seriously try to apply this rule, we'd get some pretty odd results: While most Americans understand this to mean that some African Americans will "look white," they mostly suppose that this phenomenon is rare in relation to the African American population as a whole. But in fact, it seems that very many -- perhaps even a majority -- of the Americans who are descended from African slaves "look white," are treated as white, and identify as such. To put the matter as paradoxically as possible: many people who are African American by the one-drop rule are, are regarded as, and regard themselves as, white. The crux of the matter is that we have have a lot of ancestors once you start going four or five generations back. Under the circumstances, relatively small levels of interracial child-births generate a huge number of people with at least some black ancestry. And conversely, most black Americans have some white ancestors. McCain on BasraJohn McCain tries to grapple with the Battle of Basra: “Look, I didn’t particularly like the outcome of this thing, but I am convinced that we now have a government that is governing with some effect and a military that is functioning very effectively,” Mr. McCain said of the Iraqi operation. He spoke in a taped Fox News interview that was broadcast Sunday. If even outcomes McCain says are bad ones constitute evidence of progress in Iraq, well then of course we can't listen to Democrats' counsels of retreat and defeat. After all, an outcome McCain likes is progress and an outcome McCain doesn't like is also progress so if McCain is in the White House there will be outcomes, and irrespective of the outcome McCain will cite it as progress and evidence of the need to continue. But don't call the man a "warmonger" -- he tells us he hates war; he just likes starting 'em and continuing 'em forever which isn't at all the same thing. The Case for DisenfranchisementI see we've got a book advertising with us called Why Women Should Rule the World which reminds me that it kind of seems to me as if granting women the franchise in 1920 was an inadequate remedial measure for having denied it to them for over 100 years earlier. Really there ought to be a 100-year span during which men can't vote. That would have more procedural fairness and it would also lead to substantively good outcomes as women have, in general, sounder electoral preferences than do men. UPDATE: I've actually made this modest proposal before, it seems. Getting CloserTo say, as the U.S. Institute of Peace apparently does, that we're no closer to achieving our goals in Iraq seems to me to involve implicitly conceding what ought not to be conceded -- namely that we have coherent goals in Iraq. In the Bush/McCain framework, our troops are in Iraq and they're fighting, so it stands to reason that they must be fighting some coherent force of "bad guys" who they've chosen to identify with al-Qaeda, with Iran, or with both. Conversely, those Iraqi forces who are currently aligned with us must be good guys. Objectives, in this view, involve helping the good guys to beat the bad guys, thus securing our interests in beating back Iran and al-Qaeda. That framework simply lacks sufficient contact with reality to be achievable. So instead we're doing . . . who knows what? General Petraeus seems to have succeeded in making Iraq less deadly for U.S. forces. But of course avoiding casualties isn't a viable goal for a war. Our casualty rate is still way higher than it would be if we left Iraq. But in terms of its real goals of preventing GOP members of congress from deserting the administration and thus ensuring that the Iraq problem would get handed over to the next administration, the surge has been a stunning success. A Sense of ProportionMy expectations are low, and I even understand why Jeremiah Wright's gotten more coverage than John Yoo's love of torture, but the apparent fact that "Yoo and torture" shows up only one tenth as often as "Obama and bowling" in Nexis over the past thirty days really does make you think we're plumbing new depths of terribleness in our press' sense of what matters. Obama = BushHillary Clinton goes after Barack Obama again on the issue of specifics: ABC News' Eloise Harper reports: Speaking in Eugene, Ore., Sen. Hillary Clinton went further than she has before drawing a comparison between Sen. Barack Obama and President Bush, saying he gave a lot of "speeches" too, but lacked "specifics." As I've said ad nauseam this idea that Obama doesn't have specific policy proposals is BS. But Clinton's now moved on to a new form of BS about George W. Bush. The point about Bush and policy details isn't that he was vague in 2000 it's that when you looked up his policy proposals you could see that they were really, really, really right-wing. There is, by contrast, nothing in Obama's policy proposals that hints at secret rightwingery. Instead, you'll find few major policy differences between Clinton and Obama, though you will find that Obama's health care plan is less far-reaching than Clinton's. Even on this front, however, Obama and Clinton are light-years closer to each other than either is to Bush or McCain. A FootnoteAt the end of a pretty long post Marc Ambinder reports "Penn's mistake notwithstanding, he still retains the confidence of the Clintons and will still play a major role in the campaign. What does that tell you about the quality of advice the Clintons believe him to impart?" To me, this has always been the Penn issue, and it's really not an issue that firing -- or pretending to fire -- Penn can resolve. At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton is the kind of person who has looked at Mark Penn's work in US politics over the past 10-15 years and deemed him to be a valuable source of insight. Someone who thinks that can (and does) easily pass the "better than John McCain" bar, but it still makes her a poor choice to lead an attempted revival of progressive politics in the United States. Women Under the SeaThe objection that co-ed submarines would be logistically problematic has always seemed to me to be a reasonable concern on the part of the Navy, but the obvious remedy wasn't to ban women from submarines it was to create some all-woman submarine crews. Now it looks like the Navy's going to take things in that direction. Robot WatchThis battle bot isn't quite as threatening as some of the other recent efforts we've seen by the military-industrial complex to ignore the wisdom of sci-fi and create military robots who will inevitably enslave their human masters. Its saving grace is that it appears to require a human pilot sitting in the cockpit. Still, one could imagine these devices evolving, post-rebellion, into something like the Cylon raider animal/robot hybrids. Vigilance! Worst President EverIn a History News Network poll, 61 percent of historians say that George W. Bush has been the worst president ever. It's very hard to know what to make of these kind of questions. How can you possibly try to evaluate someone like, say, Andrew Jackson in contemporary terms? At any rate, it will surprise no one to learn that I think Bush has been a very bad president. More interestingly, I also take the view that Bush is probably correct to think that history will remember him kindly. American presidents associated with big dramatic events tend to wind up with good reputations whether they deserve them or not. One possible Bush analogy would be to Woodrow Wilson, who did all kinds of things with regard to civil liberties that look indefensible today and whose foreign policy ended as a giant failure, but who was associated with both big events and with big ideas that were influential down the road. Someday, I bet there will be democracies in the Middle East and some future Republican president will figure out a way to put meat on the bones of "compassionate conservatism" and Bush will be looked upon as a far-sighted figure who made some mistakes in a difficult period of time. Will he deserve a good reputation? No. Will he get one? I'd say yes. Beyond the Dalai LamaGood magazine has an interesting interview with a person who I didn't even know existed, Tibet's prime minister in exile, Samdhong Rinpoche. Absolut Counterfactual
It seems Absolut Vodka got in a bit of hot water over this ad, which they ran in Mexico in days when the combination of the information superhighway and worry about immigration to the USA makes it a sensitive subject. Absolut is apologizing when, as Ross says, they really should have just gone bigger and given every country a fantasy map of its own. I'd like to see a United States of North America in which one of our various efforts to conquer Canada succeeded and the stars and stripes now fly all the way to the Arctic Circle. Or Absolut Habsburb in which Charles V's empire stays together. Pow!Via Peter Suderman, an excellent new Dark Knight trailer: Just watch to see someone call a copyright foul. Paid Family LeaveNew Jersey moves to a system of paid family leave financed by a payroll deduction (but don't call it a tax!) which is probably the right way to handle this. Their complaints notwithstanding, the burden on employers of this kind of system is pretty marginal. In essence, it amounts to a smallish redistribution of income away from people without major family responsibilities to those who have them. That, in turn, seems like an eminently reasonable thing to do given that the kids are the future and all. Seat Michigan!A clever video: One wonders if it really would have hurt Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire if she had objected in advance to stripping Florida and Michigan, rather than agreeing to the plan at the time only to change her tune ex post. Advertise With Me Instead!Clearly, the first step to getting climate change under control is to put a price on carbon, either through a tax or else through a cap and trade system. But trying to work exclusively through that mechanism probably won't work, we need, in my opinion, to go further through massive subsidies for BP's products and other efforts to help them market themselves as the "green" oil company. Alternate RealitySean Wilentz argues that if we had winner-take-all primaries then Hillary Clinton would be beating Barack Obama handily. This is definitely true if we just hold all the actual voting and campaigning constant, and then reapportion the delegates along Wilentz's hypothetical lines. However, it seems likely that both campaigns would have adopted different strategies if the rules were different from what they actually are. Meanwhile, the actual race is close enough that I have no doubt that there's some plausible alternative candidate-selection mechanism under which Clinton would win fairly comfortably. Equally, though, one can imagine alternative mechanisms under which Obama would win comfortably (something very much like the current system, say, but in which California holds a caucus instead of a primary). It's just not clear what the significance of this sort of thing is. I definitely regard the current method of candidate selection as flawed and think we should change it moving forward, but the alleged desirability of some change (and the changes Wilentz proposes are not, I think, actually desirable) hardly retroactively invalidates outcomes already achieved. [For the record, my preference would be for the nomination to be decided through a series of closed primaries that would be scheduled so as to ensure a speedier resolution than what we're seeing this cycle and with some rotation of the states so that no one or two states exercises NH/IA-style disproportionate influence; a system like that would, plausibly, have raised the chances that Clinton would be the nominee in 2008 but I still think it would be systematically preferable over the long haul to the current one] Unless, That Is, You Count All the New StuffI'm not sure how much I should burden the blog with purely local commentary, but The Washington City Paper's Jason Cherkis once stepped to blogosphere-fave and sometimes-colleague Murray Waas in a really untoward manner, so I suppose it's worth pointing out that his coverage of local issues has its problems, too. For example, he says "The neighborhood surrounding the ballpark hasn’t changed all that much. It’s still mechanic shops and liquor stores." I was really against the DC stadium giveaway and in retrospect I'm still against it, but as Avent says it's inconceivable to me that someone who had actually been to the neighborhood would say that. There's all this new stuff there and more under construction. It's true that they don't seem to have used a laser to surgically remove each and every mechanic shop and liquor store from the area, but that's good -- it's positive-sum development where lots of new stuff has gone up where, previously, there was nothing. Union Busting -- Now With Bullets
Via Ezra Klein, an eye-opening chart from EPI about the business climate in Colombia. Clearly, you've got some rule of law issues that could be problematic for your firm. But on the plus side, Colombia's the kind of place where you can hire someone to just go murder any pesky union organizers or other malcontents who are trying to disrupt the sweet, sweet flexibility of your local labor market. Given Burson-Marsteller's significant union busting practice, I'm actually a bit surprised that Mark Penn was such an advocate of the Colombia free trade deal. After all, if more companies start deciding to take Colombia-style shortcuts then B-M could be out a good deal of work. Worse, with a trade deal in place, B-M could actually see its clients looking to outsource their work to Colombian paramilitaries. Or maybe Penn was looking to add a sniper brigade to his firm's work. The Rankin FactorHillary Clinton tries out some Girl Power but Holly Yeager has the facts: “Remember, Jeannette Rankin was elected before women could vote ... so who says men won’t vote for a woman?” Clinton asked the crowd. It's true that women across the U.S. didn't get the right to vote until 1920. But in Montana, thanks in part to Rankin, women got the right to vote in 1914 (which anyone who has ever played "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego" would know). I miss that game. This is a reminder, however, that I think you can't talk about flaws in Hillary Clinton's campaign without mentioning the collapse in her support among African-American women. Clinton started the campaign very well-regarded in the black community and doing extremely well among black women but eventually lost the vast majority of that support. In retrospect, the collapse of Clinton's black support sometimes feels obvious, but if you'd predicted in advance that white women would back Hillary, black men would back Obama, and they'd both split white men and black women and then Clinton would win because there are many more white women than black men in the electorate I think people would have considered that a reasonable-if-crude assessment of the situation. TrollopIt seems that John McCain is the kind of straight-talker who lets his wife know how he really feels, describing her as a "cunt" and a "trollop" when he's displeased. What do you think the age cutoff is below which it becomes utterly implausible that someone would use the term "trollop" in a non-ironic context? April 8, 2008Freedom!It smells so sweet: Meanwhile, security forces were reported to be blocking al-Sadr's supporters from traveling to Baghdad from outlying areas to attend an anti-U.S. rally scheduled for Wednesday. After all, in what kind of country would members of an opposition political party be allowed to attend a rally to protest the presence of 150,000 foreign soldiers on their soil? The cause of democracy requires that these people be shut down because of, I guess, something having to do with Iran and let's just agree not to think too hard about the fact that our allies in the Iraqi government are also Iran's main proxies in Iraq. AmCon BlogI'm not a paleocon myself (obviously) but I also think it's clear that one reason U.S. politics has gotten so out of whack over the past several years is that the balance within the GOP coalition has shifted so decisively against the paleo faction. For that and other reasons, a stronger paleo voice in the world is, in my view, a good thing and The American Conservative magazine has, over the years, published many valuable articles (also some crazy stuff) that I doubt would have seen the light of day elsewhere. This throat-clearing by way of welcoming AmCon's new blog to the 'sphere.
Blaming MalikiI'm really not sure about the approach Carl Levin is taking to these hearings. Basically, he's saying the Iraqi government is inept and hasn't done what it needs to do. I think this is essentially true, but I'm not sure it supports the conclusion Levin and I are both aiming at. After all, if Iraq has failed to meet all its benchmarks, maybe that shows the need for us to stay in Iraq? It sets the bar such that all the defenders of an open-ended engagement need to do is to claim that some progress has been made in the right direction so, yes, we're disappointed but blah blah blah blah. The current situation calls for a broader strategic argument that doesn't merely consist of nitpicking with Ryan Crocker about the precise state of Iraqi politics. The point I would make is that our current allocation of resources reflects bad priorities (primarily Bush's desire to rescue his legacy) and that the ongoing American presence in Iraq is per se contrary to our real interests which involve refocusing on the core problems of al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, and then getting moving on a broader international policy agenda that includes economics, climate change, etc. Levin, to his credit, is moving on to some of these points, namely that Iraq is plagued by problems that fundamentally don't have very much to do with us and that are simply beyond our capacity to solve. McCain's MaximalismIt's striking the extent to which John McCain remains an advocate of a wildly unrealistic, maximalist vision of the mission in Iraq. He says that not just some modest improvements are possible if we stick around, but that a "peaceful, stable, democratic Iraq is within reach" and that it will become "a force for stability and freedom." Meanwhile, he's saying all kinds of crazy stuff. For some reason he thinks that if we leave that would "almost certainly require us to return to Iraq or draw us into a wider war." He's also now claiming he doesn't want our troops to stay in Iraq for a minute longer than is necessary, when the Bush administration is already moving toward a permanent presence -- a goal he's specifically endorsed in the past. McCain said the Maliki government is moving to disarm all militias, which isn't true. And he keeps portraying backing Maliki as some kind of anti-Iranian measure when there's just no reason to see it that way. Obviously, though, since McCain's a straight-talker, he should be allowed to get away with a fundamentally dishonest presentation of the issues. On The BrinkGeneral Petraeus just said that Iraq was "on the brink of civil war" eighteen months ago, from which brink it's now been brought back. Now it seems to me that if we'd had a large pitched battle in Chicago or Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, we would say that the United States was currently in a state of civil war. Netroots NationAs you've probably heard if you read blogs, the event formerly known as "YearlyKos" is now "Netroots Nation." But you may not have heard about the exciting Netroots Nation fundraiser happening on Wednesday (i.e., tomorrow) here in DC at The Mott House. I guarantee you this is the only fundraiser whose organizers would think it made sense to list me as a draw, but more interesting people like Russ Feingold and Reps. Brad Miller (NC-13) and Lloyd Doggett (TX-25) will also be there. Come on out -- the donations they're asking for ($35 or $50) aren't big, it's an important institution-building cause, should be a good time, and they're promising "free food, cheap drinks, lively conversation & progressive camaraderie" all of which are good things. Trollop RevisitedSo yesterday I blogged this story about John McCain having called his wife a "cunt" and a "trollop." The story was the kind of thing that's known in the journalism business as "too good to check," which is to say I just kind of linked to it thoughtlessly without considering the sourcing. The sourcing, however, is not very good -- "Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident" which wasn't reported on at the time and of which there's no evidence over the past 16 years outside of Cliff Schecter's book. Cliff's a good guy, and no doubt reporters from Arizona really did tell him this anecdote. But still, if I'm honest with myself about what I would think of this story if it were being told about a politician I admire, I'd say it was mighty thin and the reality is that it's thin as an anti-McCain story too. There is, clearly, ample evidence that McCain has a short fuse and an occasional penchant for inappropriate name-calling, but there's no evidence that this particular incident happened that meets a reasonable journalistic standard. The Iranian RolePetraeus and Crocker both seem committed to a "blame Iran for problems" approach to their hearings. In this context, it's worth looking at this in the broader context of US-Iranian relations. Iran is adjacent to Iraq. The United States has no diplomatic relations with Iran, and the U.S. government has branded Iran a member of the "axis of evil" and suggested that we are aiming to overthrow the Iranian government. Under the circumstances, it would obviously be hugely irresponsible of Iran to just let us consolidate an Iraqi regime that's to our liking. This is, simply put, a fight the Iranians can't back down from. It's the difference between us worrying about Iranian influence in Iraq (cause for concern) and us worrying about Iranian influence in Canada (panic!). The Iranians, in short, are never going to stop backing different Iraqi factions and trying to advance their interests there. Under the circumstances, there are basically three realistic options we could pursue. One would be to simply leave Iraq and acknowledge that, in practice, it's difficult for any outside actor to manipulate Iraqi events precisely to the outside actor's liking (just aask the United States). Another would be to attempt a rapprochement with Iran on a higher level, which would lay the groundwork for US-Iranian cooperation in Iraq. A third would be to combine the two. But staying in Iraq in force while also maintaining a hostile relationship with Iran is just a recipe for frustration. As long as our big picture relationship with Iran is this bad, Iran is bound to some extent to be impeding whatever it is we're trying to do in Iraq. Warner's QuestionJohn Warner still wants to know if this work in Iraq is making America safer. Petraeus, tellingly, continues to have no real answer to this question, though in his better moments he's (correctly!) noted that answering such questions isn't really his job. Lieberwhat?Joe Lieberman is probably beyond shark-jumping at this point, but his statement that Iraqis have made more progress on political reconciliation since September than have Americans is really pretty appalling. To state the obvious, America has a heated political debate, but liberals and conservatives aren't shooting mortars at each other and we don't have pitched battles in the streets. To compare the situation in Iraq to the persistence of strong partisan disagreement in the United States is idiotic. Victory
In a TAP Online column, I make the point that the surge has already succeeded: General David Petraeus' testimony Tuesday and Wednesday of this week will be another chapter in U.S. foreign policy's long-running "is the surge working?" debate. The General and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will offer up some good news counterpoints to the not-so-good news out of Basra from the last weekend of March. But in the ways that matter, there's no need to debate in the present tense -- the surge isn't working, it's already worked, and the question is what the Democrats plan to do about it. The real question, I argue, is whether or not the next Democratic president will resist taking the bait. The "residual forces" issue is still lurking out there, and if President Obama (or perhaps Clinton) agrees to grab the baton and take responsibility for Iraq it'll be a major blunder. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl Jeremy M. Giacomino Winning in AnbarPetraeus made reference just now to a report from several years ago which described the war in Anbar Province as "lost." Now, obviously, he wants to say things are totally turned around. And certainly the situation has changed a great deal. But hasn't it essentially changed because we substantially surrendered to the insurgency? It used to be that we were fighting the insurgents, trying to establish the authority of the Shiite government, and they were fighting back against us. Now we're paying the insurgents, not trying to establish the authority of the Shiite government, and they're not fighting against us any more. That's certainly good news for American soldiers serving in Anbar, but that just goes to show the wisdom of trying to bring goals in line with reality, not that can-do spirit can produce victory everywhere. Let Them Eat Empty Slogans!The Weekly Standard unleashes an anti-Chinese yelp that concludes that "prosperity, while a great public good, is a meager substitute for the greater public good of natural rights such as the freedom to publicly oppose one’s government, to legitimate state authority through elections, and to worship God as one sees fit." I saw this via a somewhat appalled Kerry Howley and I'd like to associate myself with her remarks -- the improvement in human welfare associated with Chinese reforms and economic growth over the past 25 years has been simply enormous and to dismiss it like that purely in order to work oneself up into a greater fit of self-righteous fury at the PRC dictatorship is absurd. Meanwhile, all this is pretty meaningless since I don't think China faces, in practice, a prosperity/democracy tradeoff and I also don't think the United States really has meaningful policy levers through which to impact the course of events in China. Still, I think it's an interesting slice of the neoconnish mindset which is defined, in part, by the heroic conception of politics you see here. In this view, politics isn't just one activity among many where we can weigh, say, the right to vote against the ability to afford food and decent shelter and some people might decide, hey, subsistence farming sucks more than life under autocracy. This seems to me to be roughly parallel to the idea that the primary aim of our foreign policy should be to adopt the appropriate stance of indignation vis-a-vis foreign actors (China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Saddam, Zimbabwe etc.) rather than to adopt policies that advance some kind of concrete goals. Normal people think, it seems to me, that political engagement or policy shifts are worthwhile just insofar as they actually deliver some kind of goods -- health care or freedom or lower bus fares or cleaner air -- not simply as a venue in which to show virtue and accumulate "higher public goods." Not a Monster!Hey now! After long months of primary campaigning, things snap back into a new perspective as Hillary Clinton takes her turn at the questioning. She looks very tired but also substantially better-prepared than most of her Democratic colleagues, and she has very good questions (thus far Jack Reed and her are in a different league from the other Democrats) plus at the end of the day she and I are on the same side, and these Republicans are the other side. Always good to return to earth. I'll look forward to this primary being over and all the liberals pulling in the same direction. Buy My Book!I'm getting word that pre-ordered copies of Heads in the Sand are shipping out today. If you haven't ordered yours yet, hurry up! After all, what have I ever asked y'all to do for me? Nothing, that's what. Except to buy my book. Hendrick Hertzberg says it's "not just a razor-sharp analysis cum narrative of the politics of national security in general and the Iraq war in particular, it's also an enthralling and often very funny piece of writing." Jamie Kirchick, by contrast, says it sucks while Ezra Klein calls it "very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." Who are you going to trust? SOFAThis meta-wrangling over the Bush administration's refusal to subject its planned agreement for a long-term US military presence in Iraq is a bit silly. It is worth making the point that Bush's effort to bypass the Senate is pretty dubious. But obviously Bush is bypassing the Senate because he thinks it would lose a Senate vote. But if he would lose a Senate vote, then the Senators who would hypothetically vote no ought to be spending some time making the case on the merits against a long-term presence and not purely making the meta point that Bush should go to the congress. The crux of the matter, of course, is that seeking a long-term presence in Iraq plays into the propaganda of anti-American forces around the world. It's a very unpopular idea with Iraqis, and it's unpopular throughout the Arab world. Given its unpopularity, it shifts the nature of the mission in Iraq toward a war for the sake of permanent bases, which isn't a cause worth fighting or dying for, and it helps fuel instability in Iraq. Oops!Can someone ask Petraeus and Crocker about this: "Iraq's top Shiite religious leaders have told anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr not to disband his Mehdi Army, an al-Sadr spokesman said Monday amid fresh fighting in the militia's Baghdad strongholds." That looks like Sadr's checkmated Maliki to me. First Maliki tried to crush the Mahdi Army with force. He couldn't. Then both Sadr and Maliki agreed on a political deal to kick the dispute upstairs to the religious authorities. Then the authorities backed Sadr. Meanwhile, as Rich Lowry's friend observes "Sadr's militia is now virtually the only militia left in Iraq that still maintains an outlaw posture, the only one that still challenges the authority of the Iraqi Security Forces or the Coalition." Lowry's pal sees this as bad news for Sadr, but that's wrong -- Sadr's forces are endorsed by the local religious authorities and they're the only ones untainted by collaboration with the extremely unpopular foreign occupiers. That's the position you want to be in. She Just Can't Quit Mark PennNote Marc Ambinder's reporting that despite having been fired by the Clinton campaign, Mark Penn's responsibilities with the Clinton campaign are unchanged. I would also recommend Michelle Cottle's piece on Penn and why the Clintons like him so much. I would summarize her conclusions as saying that the Clintons rely heavily on the political advice of someone who doesn't like liberals or liberalism because they, like Mark Penn, don't really like liberals or liberalism. Bill Nelson?I was watching Bill Nelson's questioning, and found myself surprised by how impressed I am. He's not much of a progressive hero, but he definitely seemed to be on his game, and several other people watching said the same thing to me. Spencer Ackerman has the transcript but the crux of the matter is that Nelson eschewed the kind of preening that you often see from a Senator and opened with a strong rat-a-tat of brief, pointed questions that underscored the surge's inability to achieve its stated goal of political reconciliation. Later, I thought he veered off course, but he deserves some props. The Yglesias PlanMy plan for fixing Iraq: Victory has never been so delicious. Principle ThreatEvan Bayh's doing an excellent job of homing in on the fact that the Intelligence Community regards the principle threat to the United States as emanating from Central Asia, making it rather perverse for us to be dedicating five times the level of resources to Iraq. He also wins huge plaudits from me for mentioning, in response to something Ambassador Crocker said, that "I would only caution us not to take our marching orders from Osama bin Laden." Exactly so. It's really lunatic of hawks to keep citing OBL's desire to fight us in Iraq as a reason for us to fight him in Iraq. He likes the fight in Iraq because it's favorable terrain for his cause and his propaganda and lets him pose as the defender of the Arab world against American domination. They're suggesting we act like bulls running at the toreador's cape. What Might Have Been?
Ever since two one-sided deals sent Kevin Garnett to Boston and Pau Gasol to Los Angeles, I've been thinking about how pleased the NBA central office must be about the prospect of reviving the storied Lakers-Celtics rivalry with a meeting between two historic large market franchises in the NBA finals. It occurs to me, however, that there's a very plausible scenario in which the league gets something catastrophic like a New Orleans—Detroit matchup. Especially out West, we've got closely matched teams in quality and huge gaps in marketability between squads like LA, Phoenix, Houston (think of the China market -- and, yes, they've learned to love T-Mac over there) and laggards like New Orleans and Utah. Look for conspiracy theories to abound if the officiating in the playoffs seems to smile upon the more marketable squads. Photo by Flickr user TheMikeLee used under a Creative Commons license PollingI can't help but wonder what it is about this polling data that seems to have convinced Republicans that unequivocal support for an open-ended American military presence in Iraq is a smart political strategy for November. Whatever the surge may or may not have achieved, it certainly hasn't changed the fact that a large majority of people would like to see us packed up from Iraq in a year or less. The Printer Was Created By ManThe robot threat grows more serious, as a New Zealand-based team creates a self-replicating printer. The good news is that it's only a printer -- little capacity to rebel and enslave humanity. Meanwhile, the currently existing military robots daren't rebel and enslave humanity because they can't build new robots. But if the battlebots start talking to the self-replicating printers, we're going to be in a world of pain. The Lugar FactorDick Lugar is showing an independent-mindedness that was really lacking from any of the Republicans on the armed forces committee. I'll be interested to see what Chuck Hagel has to say. If I had been born yesterday, I would say I had hopes that Lugar could somehow lead the GOP to a return of sanity, but unfortunately we've seen this show before and while Lugar seems well-meaning in some ways he's also steadfastly ineffectual, with no ability to persuade the White House to moderate its course and no stomach for fighting the administration. Where the Enemy IsIn a noteworthy exchange, Joe Biden showed off some mad hearing skillz and got Ambassador Crocker to concede that it would be better for America to eliminate actual al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area than to eliminate AQI in Iraq. Crocker is, of course, correct. Arming the SOIGeneral Petraeus says he wants to clear up a misconception, arguing "we don't arm any of these Sons of Iraq." This seems to basically be true. But they're still armed groups that we give money to -- money which can be spent to buy weapons. It's kind of a distinction without a difference. Petraeus argues that it's money well spent that saves us cash in terms of vehicles and equipment destroyed and (of course) in terms of lives lost. That makes perfect sense to me, but reducing casualty rates isn't a real success in any kind of strategic terms -- leaving Iraq would achieve those goals easily enough. Meanwhile, unfortunately every time I hear the phrase "sons of Iraq" I think of the "Sons of Batman" from The Dark Knight Returns. I assume, though, that it's not a deliberate reference. The Kagans We NeedHaving earlier noted that the United States of America is suffering from a dire shortfall of Kagans, the good news is that we now have more words written by Fred Kagan that ever before, courtesy of National Review. In the course of a 5,000+ word essay he pulls of the neat trick of analogizing his opponents to Neville Chamberlain in the second graf. The general structure of the argument seems to be that, given that Chamberlain was skeptical of the merits of fighting a war over a "far-off country of which we know little" any and all refusal to fight wars in such countries is likely to lead to Adolf Hitler conquering the world. I mean that characterization pretty seriously. Iranian InfluenceThere's a lot of good people on the Foreign Affairs committee, but Barbara Boxer is kind of a breath of fresh air. She talks like a smart, fairly knowledgeable liberal rather than like a paid-up member of the establishment looking forward to a CFR banquet in her honor. She's driving home the point that it's a bit perverse to be worried about the potential for Iranian influence in Iraq at a time when the President of Iran is being feted by the government of Iraq that we're backing. You can tell that Ryan Crocker finds her annoying, perhaps even "unserious," but it's good to see someone in a position of influence who's serious enough not to take all this gobbledygook seriously. Voinovich!George Voinovich seems really pissed off! I'm not entirely sure exactly what he's saying we should do in Iraq, but there is something nice about seeing someone -- a Republican no less -- expressing some frustration with the situation. Now just as I'm typing, he kind of seems to be saying he would favor setting a deadline for withdrawal, but I'm not really sure. Obama's QuestionsClearly his true métier is the formal speech rather than this sort of committee work. Still, I think Obama's line of questioning did a good job of underscoring the ultimately hollow nature of the strategy being pursued currently in Iraq. We need to stay because of these various problems, so we need to stay, and what we're doing is working, and yet somehow there's no path from Point A to Point B -- no way to connect the dots between what's happening now, and a situation where the problems have actually been solved. Olympic BoycottHillary Clinton says George W. Bush should boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Steve Clemons says she's wrong. In the real world, can anyone imagine this making a difference either way, either to US-China relations or to the PRC's human rights conduct? I can't. If we actually tried to ruin the olympics by withdrawing our athletes and trying to get other countries to do the same, that might at least hurt someone's feelings, but it hardly seems worth debating the merits of doing something totally trivial. Still, in retrospect I really do wish they hadn't given the Olympics to China. It would have been much better to award the games to some other city, for the official rationale to just be that the other city was better on the merits, but then for off-the-record there to be some suggestion in the press that China's authoritarian politics might have played a role. Not that the IOC thinks there should be political criteria! On the contrary, IOC members were so eager to avoid politicizing the games that some shied away from the idea of an inevitably-controversial Beijing Olympics. It's clearly not viable to have a formal "no human rights abusers shall host the Olympics" rule, but it couldn't hurt for the world's democracies to signal, informally, that a more rights-respecting government would help China achieve the sort of recognition as a great power that it's looking for. But now that the schedule's already been set, it's hard to see any protests as doing anything other than showing how ineffectual the west is in its efforts to prod China to change. ObscuredA colleague notes that Doug Feith's book came out today only to be totally buried beneath all the coverage of the Petraeus/Crooker hearings. Thus, Feith's book sales have become yet another casualty of the war he did so much to bring about. It's a bit like rain on your wedding day. Meanwhile, my book's official release isn't 'till April 25 but apparently Amazon is now shipping orders and some people even have it in their hands. If you read a copy, send me some email and let me know what you think -- I'm obviously eager to post self-aggrandizing emails, but your questions, comments, concerns, and disagreements are also welcome and can be grappled with in this very forum. April 9, 2008Harding and Civil RightsIlya Somin argues that Warren Harding is an underrated president, citing among other things W.E.B. DuBoise's praise for his progressive record on civil rights. Conventional understanding in the United States tends to view racial issues as just frozen in time between the Civil War amendments and Brown v. Board of Education but there was in fact vibrant debate and non-trivial change during the intervening 80-100 years. Woodrow Wilson's administration, for example, actually took positive steps to entrench segregation more deeply than it previously had been, there were failed efforts at anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s, etc. On DistractionsI think Kevin Drum's being too kind to Fred Kagan here (and really "too kind" is not a difficult bar to pass when you're talking about Kagan), in semi-endorsing Kagan's argument that Iraq can't be a distraction from the "real" war on terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan because nobody wants to mount a huge invasion of Pakistan. That's true as far as it goes, but it doesn't really go all that far. For one thing, the "Afghanistan" side of "Pakistan and Afghanistan" is a place where there's a role for an increased U.S. troop presence, both directly and as a signifier to our NATO allies that we're actually taking this seriously and they ought to take it seriously, too. But beyond that, the large American deployment in Iraq involves more than just the 100+ soldiers who are there -- consider our foreign language, diplomatic, and human intelligence resources. All of those things are in shorter supply than are soldiers per se, and all could be useful in Pakistan without any talk of an invasion. And perhaps most of all there's the question of high-level attention. From the President on down, there are a lot of busy people in the military, diplomatic, and intelligence chains of command and at the top level of the interagency process and having them make Iraq their own top priority, and a top priority on the agenda of every international meeting has real costs. So, yes, it's true that I don't have a brilliant off-the-shelf "let's eliminate al-Qaeda in Pakistan in twelve easy steps" scheme, but it's still the case that everything we try to do there is made more difficult by the scope of our commitments in Iraq. Today's HearingI don't think I have the heart to try to watch and liveblog today's House version of the Petraeus/Crocker testimony. Watching the Senate version yesterday all day on television nearly drove me insane. Of course if anything particularly noteworthy happens, I'll say something, but life's too short to watch this all over again. 100 YearsTo back up something Josh Marshall's been pounding, the idea that there's something unfair about the "out of context" use of John McCain's line about being willing to stay in Iraq for 100 or 10,000 years is pretty silly. Obviously, it's hard to quote anyone or refer to anything without taking it a bit out of context. But the context in which McCain is saying this stuff, is a context in which McCain genuinely believes that there is no level of resources which would be too great for the United States to invest in his futile quest for some ephemeral concept of "victory" in Iraq. There's no amount of money that's too much to spend, there's no amount of time that's too long, and there's no amount of American deaths that's too many. Of course McCain hopes it doesn't take 100 to achieve that end state. But since his vision of the end state is utterly unrealistic (and includes a fantasy vision in which we peacefully organize a 10,000 basing agreement or something) it might as well. Clearly in a literal sense President McCain can't commit us to anything more than eight years of additional war in Iraq, but he's given us no indication that he would pull out any sooner than that, and no reason to believe he can succeed any faster than that. Maybe the DNC and the RNC can reach some kind of agreement in which both parties stipulate that we won't discuss the year 2108, but McCain will admit that he'll gladly have our troops still fighting in Iraq in 2016. But probably not. And so as long as the hawks persist in not presenting to the public what they're actually talking about, the doves are going to have to use the footage available -- which is McCain talking about 100 or 10,000 rather than eight -- to make the point that in their more candid moments the hawks do concede that they're talking about a long hard slog in Iraq. All McCain's Base Are Belong To PeaceA further thought on John McCain's "as long as our soldiers are not being wounded or maimed or killed" proviso to his Iraq forever policy. If we're so sure the soldiers aren't going to be in harm's way, then what's the base for? We're all very glad that our troops in South Korea aren't engaged in combat, but the point of having them there is that they might have to engage in combat. The hope is that they deter war with North Korea, but the risk is that they won't. In McCain's world our troops need to continue fighting, killing, and dying in Iraq indefinitely in order to create a situation where, at some point, it becomes safe for them to stay in Iraq for no reason? It doesn't seem like he's genuinely thought this idea through. Maybe instead of lashing out at his critics, McCain should take some time to consider the issue and come up with a new position. Trouble in ParadiseLaura Rozen reports on conservative grumbling about Sheldon Adelson and Freedom's Watch. It hardly seems fair to me to blame Adelson for not having single-handedly created a MoveOn-style mass movement. That's just not the kind of thing one person can do. And of course it took MoveOn years worth of campaigning to become the MoveOn that it is today. And beyond that, the essence of the MoveOn project is to identify things that progressives are interested in that aren't being done aggressively by the existing infrastructure -- what the right seems to want is for a vast new organization to spring up to support exactly what they're doing right now. That, of course, is what every politician wants but it's not how you create a new grassroots movement. I bet that if a new grassroots movement were springing up on the right, most pillars of the conservative movement would like it very much -- it'd probably be Huckabeeish or some other trend that's well-represented in public opinion but poorly represented in DC. Open-Ended Commitments
Of all the pro-college talking points out there, the one I find most baffling is the one offered by my colleague Herschel Nachlis, namely the idea that the NCAA game is somehow more open and free-flowing. I'm troubled by this critique precisely because I sympathize with it, but to me the worse offender here is the amateur game with its long shot clock and sluggish pace. Now it's true that because NBA defenders have more tactical acumen, and are larger, stronger, faster, quicker and more experienced, that there is, literally speaking, less space in which for an offensive play to develop. But that lack of space aside, the vastly greater skill levels of NBA players allows them to run more efficient offenses against superior defense with a shorter shot clock and a longer three point line. To me, advantage: NBA. Photo by Flickr user terren in Virginia Drawing DistinctionsMy friend Justin Logan sounds a call for the United States to abandon the concept of nation building. I'm sympathetic to the impulse here -- I find it enormously frustrating that a lot of people look at Iraq and say to themselves "we need to get better at this." No, we don't. What we need to do is to not do that again. But that still raises the issue of what "this" is. As my other friend Mark Goldberg says: That said, I still think that there is a great need for nation building and post conflict reconstruction in today's world. Enter UN Peacekeeping, which has a demonstrated (if under-appreciated) record of success in post conflict zones. Rather than trying to do a better job of invading and occupying countries, it may make more sense to broaden our support for the one organization that has some experience and expertise in this line of work. It's worth saying that this isn't because of some kind of UN pixie dust that makes blue helmet missions work. Institutional knowledge factors are in play, but as I argue in Heads in the Sand a big peace of the puzzle is simply that it's very different to get involved in post-conflict reconstruction when you're talking about acting as a third party who steps in to keep the peace after a conflict ends, and getting involved in post-conflict reconstruction when the conflict that you're "post" was an invasion. In other words, helping to keep the peace when the parties to a conflict in a failed state are looking for a way out of the abyss is very different from deliberately smashing up a bunch of eggs and then deciding you need an omelet recipe. On top of that, there's the matter of structure and legitimacy. The U.N., precisely because of many features that sometimes annoy Americans (universal membership, clumsy decision-making structure, etc.) is an exceedingly poor tool for domination, which makes it a good tool for reassuring people that you're not there to dominate them. Doing more to support these blue helmet missions would be much cheaper than another year in Iraq and would do more good besides. Polling as WitchcraftOne thing that's interesting to me about the way our politics works is that pollsters have this almost witchdoctor-like role in political campaigns. They're extremely important, influential advisers and they're wielding all this survey data and entrails and so forth, but at the end of the day they really seem to just be winging it every bit as much as anyone else. Take this from yesterday's NYT article on disagreements between Mark Penn and Geoff Garin: Inside the Clinton team, Mr. Penn advocated increasingly sharp attacks on Mr. Obama as Mrs. Clinton’s best option. Long before he joined the campaign, Mr. Garin argued that her route to success lay more in presenting her strengths than in assailing her opponent. This is obviously a big question, and yet two well-regarded pollsters have no kind of consensus over it, and it's clear enough that you're not going to resolve the dispute by surveying more people or staring longer at existing surveys. But so what, exactly, is the special authority of the pollster supposed to be? What Happens In JanuaryIt seems that Rep. Ellen Tauscher actually thought up an original and potentially informative practical question to ask General Petraeus -- what's he going to do if in January 2009 his commander-in-chief says he wants to withdraw from Iraq and needs his theater commander to start drawing up plans and giving advice on logistics? Apparently, Petraeus wasn't content to say something straightforward about how he'd do his job: "I would back up," he said, "and ask what's the mission, what's the desired endstate. And then you advise on resources..." Tauscher said the goal would be to keep the security gains of the surge, fix the readiness problems of the military and cut U.S. costs in Iraq. He then backed up and said "I absolutely support the idea of civial control of the military" (good to hear!) but still didn't say either that he would offer the requested advice or that he'd resign in protest and let someone new come on board. This kind of thing -- resistance from inside the command structure to implementing a new president's electoral mandate to end the war -- is likely to be a substantial political landmine for the next administration. It's one of several reasons why I think it's absolutely vital to campaign on a clear and unambiguous determination to genuinely end the war (i.e., without this residual business) to ensure that there's no doubt in anyone's mind about where the country stands. Lost in Iraq
Today's Washington Post editorial on Iraq and the Petraeus/Crocker testimony seems to me to be a brilliant summation -- as Post editorials often are -- of the blinkered conventional wisdom of the establishment. You can say many bad things about the Bush/McCain/Kagan worldview, most of all that it's completely detached from reality, but at least one has to concede that if the real world were like the world they're describing, then their policy conclusions would follow. The Post, however, knows they're wrong, knows that things are much bleaker in Iraq than they say, knows that the costs of an indefinite commitment there are high and the prospects for success low, but just wants to do it anyway. Because, hey, why not? But at the end of the day, the Iraq problem, though thorny, isn't ultimately all that thorny. We really can just walk away. I first came around to the "set a deadline" point of view in late 2004. In the three years since that strategy was rejected, basically every single bad consequence (ethnic cleansing, civil war, Iranian influence, al-Qaeda propaganda gains) that I was warned would follow from leaving happened even though we stayed. There's no sense in looking at a complicated, unpredictable situation that crucially depends on dozens of variables outside of our control and simply assuming that all potential ills will flow from U.S. military withdrawal and all potential goods will flow from a continued presence. It's not being glib to assert confidently that if we do leave Iraq and stop squandering our blood and treasure that, that no matter what happens the United States of America will endure and most likely Iraq will, too. This idea has taken grip that it's the height of seriousness to contemplate Iraq with nothing but dread and agony, but insofar as the upshot of this is merely to produce paralysis and to de facto endorse the policy prescriptions that follow from the hawk faction's fantastical analyses, there's nothing serious about it. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen The Future of Real EstateBrad DeLong says home prices won't fall all the way back to their 2000 values: "We aren't buiding more superhighways, there are no major transportation improvements on the horizon, America is filling up, and so land-value gradients are on the rise. If the income distribution continues to erode, we will wind up with higher prices for scarce positional goods--chief among which is location, location, location." That sounds correct to me, but of course it's locally specific -- the huge price run-ups in, say, Arizona didn't have much to do with objective supply constraints and many of these far-flung exurbs where we're seeing a lot of foreclosures right now aren't especially well located. But beyond the medium-term outlook for home prices (which even on the "optimistic" view isn't very good in the aggregate), this is yet another reason to rethink some of our policies regarding land use. As Kevin Drum says, the idea that home prices won't crash all that much is appealing, but the prospect of ever-higher prices for housing over the long run is a bad thing. And it's not as if it would be impossible for more people to fit into, say, DC -- the main supply constraints are regulatory in nature and the regulations could be relaxed. Similarly, Manhattan's not about to be criss-crossed with expressways, but NYC-related congestion could be ameliorated through congestion pricing if the State Assembly weren't being so brain-dead. There are ways to make it affordable for people to live within a reasonable travel time from where they want to go, it's just a question of whether or not we want to do those things. Some of those things would cost money (more transit) or require fees (congestion pricing, higher prices for street parking) but others would be deregulatory measures that could greatly increase the efficiency of our investments in the built environment. And the overall implication for our quality of life are large. Mapping CarbonI'm a sucker for a good map, but this map of U.S. carbon emissions just looks an awful lot like a map of American population density. As such, it doesn't contain a ton of useful information as "let's get rid of all the people!" isn't much of a proposal for avoiding catastrophic climate change. I'd be much more interested in seeing something that normalized by population (or economic output) and thus gave us some sense of which parts of the country are efficient compared to the others. Their Next StepAndrew traces another step in the machines' inevitable rise to world domination: A computer capable of telling which women are the attractive ones. In conjunction with their three-dimensional printers, the machines will be able to use this technology to create the sexy spies who ultimately lead to our downfall. Veep Thoughts: Stick to Basics
Kate Sheppard adduces some pretty good reasons to think that putting Condoleezza Rice on the ticket could be a smart move for John McCain. I think there's a lot of truth to what she says, but at the end of the day one needs to return to the fundamentals. It'd be hard for the incumbent party to hold onto the White House amidst serious economic problems and an unpopular war. McCain's viability as a candidate rests on him not being seen as four more years of Bush. That means you don't want a Bush cabinet official on your ticket, and certainly not a Bush cabinet official well-known for her close personal relationship with the President. I have a similar reaction to Marc Ambinder's suggestion of Joe Biden for Barack Obama. Biden's a sometimes maddening figure, but he's been impressive lately and there's a lot to be said on his behalf. But putting someone who voted for the war, even someone who did so half-heartedly and after making a quasi-promising effort to restrain Bush, seems to muddy way too much of the argument Obama is making. The Harding DebateD. offers some dissent from recent pro-Harding revisionism in the blogosphere, arguing that there's less than meets the eye about Harding's progressive record on race. I wouldn't, however, quite be so dismissive of Harding's efforts to rollback the Wilson-era crackdown on civil liberties: Most of all, Harding's administration could afford to be less demagogic because (a) the Great War was over, and thus the rationale for anti-civil libertarian wartime measures was reduced; and (b) its support for restrictive immigration laws allowed the party in control of the government to claim that it was taking action to prevent "alien radicals" from entering the country in the first place (and thus making emergency deportations unnecessary). The implication here that Presidents are typically loathe to aggregate power to themselves and their appointees, making the relevant variable whether or not they can "afford to be less demagogic" seems backward to me. Projections
There's something brilliant about this slide from General Petraeus' presentation. We all know that straight-line extrapolations from past trends aren't a good way to reason. But it's a bit fishy when your future projection follows a completely different trend from the past. Of course, how much we appropriate is under our control, so we can just do this if we like. But I'm not sure what it's supposed to show. What He SaidPhil Carter, at his new WashingotnPost.com home, reviews the Petraeus/Crocker fest: They overstated the threat posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq in an effort to justify the mission -- a mindset that has generated a deeply flawed strategy. They also overplayed the surge's success -- downplaying or discounting factors that likely did more to create today's improved security conditions. While their "Anaconda" strategy looks cool on a PowerPoint slide, it confuses the issues of control and influence, putting too much stock in America's ability to engineer success in Iraq. And, perhaps most tellingly, the two men made the case for perseverance without placing Iraq in the context of vital U.S. national interests, offering only apocalyptic predictions of what would happen if we don't stay the course. Indeed. And, look, one can hardly blame them. It's bizarre to take two officials with such a limited (albeit, obviously, important) mandate and have the administration throw them out there as frontmen for a hugely controversial policy that implicates every aspect of national strategy. The Lemming StrategyI did a Current in which I briefly wonder why it is Republican members of congress seem to have convinced themselves that the alleged success of the surge is a great campaign issue for them. All the data I can find indicates that the war continues to be extremely unpopular, with only a third or fewer of the public wanting some kind of open-ended commitment to seeing the job through. The Colombia Trade DealLike Atrios, I was kind of curious as to what the actual content of the looming free trade agreement with Colombia is. As best I can tell (peruse the text if you're interested) this actually involves very little changes on the US side at all. In essence, Colombian goods already flow very freely into the United States except for in our more famously protected sectors (agriculture, etc.) and what we're offering Colombia here is a very solemn promise to keep it that way. Colombia, meanwhile, is agreeing to implement a series of neoliberal reforms on a variety of issues, most of which don't have much to do with trade as it's traditionally understood. As has become typical in these deals, Colombia agrees to undertake various intellectual property reform measures, various investment rules, something having to do with their telecommunications sector, etc. I would be very surprised if the IP rules in question were actually a good idea for Colombia, and can't really evaluate the rest of it. Colombia's getting very little out of the deal per se, but its government does get a lot of military support from the US government, and many provisions in here are of interest to American businesses and may well be the sort of thing a right-of-center government would want to do anyway but likes to use the framework of a "deal" to help sell the measure. All things considered, this seems to have almost no implications for American well-being, and if I were a member of congress I think I would consider this an excellent moment to let me vote be dictated by pure partisan politics or possibly corruption. If I were a blogger, I would say that lowering barriers to the importation of foreign goods on a unilateral basis would be good policy for the United States and that using bi- or multi-lateral trade negotiations to try to get other countries to adopt "pro-business" policies is a pretty dubious undertaking. Implicit BiasJohn Sides and Kevin Drum discuss some provocative evidence suggesting that around a quarter of the population -- including both men and women -- have a strong implicit bias against the idea of putting a woman in the White House. That's sobering information, if true. On the other hand, it's not really all that surprising -- all of us have grown up and continue to live in a deeply gendered world and participate in a popular culture that's suffused with a lot of sexist assumptions. Most people would probably say that they're not affected by such things, but there's something arrogant about it. I try to do my best, but I've taken things like the Project Implicit tests and they show pretty clearly that I'm not without sin. That said, the political implications of this, though real, are also limited. Whether or not I have some subconscious bias against female politicians, I also have a large very conscious bias against Republican politicians, against proponents of extending the Bush tax cuts, against advocates of "rogue state rollback," against politicians who favor Social Security privatization, etc. Long story short -- if Hillary Clinton emerges as the Democratic nominee then I'm not going to hesitate to vote for her, notwithstanding any subconscious prejudices I may or may not have or any mean blog posts I may or may not have written about her. Pew on the Middle Class
This is a pretty striking trend. Politically, it's a bit tricky since the salient trend is the dramatic narrowing of the better/worse gap, but the betters still outnumber the worses. You want to tap into the sentiments of the growing "worse" bloc, but still can't let that kind of sentiment dominate what you're saying since there are all these "betters" out there still. April 10, 2008If At First You Don't Succeed, Try Again With Bigger Countries
Todd Gitlin alerts us to a new Robert Kagan book excerpt in The New Republic. Kagan's idea, it seems, is that since neoconservatism has proven such a complete and utter failure as an approach to the challenge of transnational terrorism and WMD proliferation, we ought to use use it as a guide for dealing with Russia and China instead. If you're a sociopath like Kagan, a renewal of Cold War-style conflict with other great powers is good news because, as Todd says, it serves the goal of "conjuring a proper target for unilateralist belligerence." A decent, humane person begins looking at this question by recognizing that a renewal of great power competition would be an enormous disaster. Arms races are a large waste of resources that could otherwise be invested productively. China's integration into the global economy has brought some benefits to rich world consumers and enormous benefits to Chinese people. What's more, though China has been in many ways a bad actor with regards to human rights issues in the developing world, it's also true that the end of the Cold War has had enormous humanitarian benefits for the developing world in the form of a drastic reduction in the level of proxy conflicts. To make a long story short, nobody can say for sure that a hostile US-China relationship can be avoided. But the costs of a cycle of hostility would be enormous. The sensible thing to do is not, in the first instance, to begin "preparing" for a cycle in ways that would likely make such a cycle inevitable. Rather, the sensible thing to do is to try to avoid entering the downward spiral through what, in Heads in the Sand, I call an effort to keep up the work of constructing a rule-governed world order oriented around cooperation. At the end of the day, though the American and Chinese government are animated by different kinds of values, our interests are largely compatible. Both of us have a lot to gain through cooperation on security problems like climate change, transnational terrorism, and WMD proliferation as well as through continued trade and investment. What we need to work on, in the first instance, is devising rules of the road that secure our main interests but that are also compatible with a reasonable conception of Chinese interests. This doesn't serve the neoconservative craving for the dubious glories of advocating that others engage in combat, but it will help us build a more prosperous, safer, and ultimately freer world. U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Denver Applehans JamisonmaniaThe Wizards have been using Gilbert Arenas as the "face of the franchise" for a while, but last season many fans came to suspect that Caron Butler might be the team's best player -- a theory their continued War CrimesI'm pretty sure you call the activities described in this ABC News blockbuster "war crimes" and the people who committed them -- "the most senior Bush administration officials . . . members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee" -- are war criminals. I once upon a time thought that Bushite detestation of the International Criminal Court was some kind of principled defense of war crimes and war criminals. It's become clear, however, that the concerns are all too practical and personal -- it's vital for the Bush administration that the guilty go free and the laws go unenforced, because otherwise they'd be looking at cells in the Hague. One doubts this crew ever will face legal sanction, but I can at least hope that the threat of prosecution crimps their travel plans in retirement. In Defense of TancredoTom Tancredo's a bit of a loon, so I sympathize with the desire to mock him over the fact that he wanted to ask General Petraeus about whether or not members of the Central American MS-13 gang were operating in the US military in Iraq. That said, by the time House Armed Services got to ask questions, all the main Iran topics had been discussed to death, and the problem of gangs (including MS-13) in the military is a real one. UnawakeningRobert Farley notes that just as General Petraeus in Iraq is doubling down on the proposition that backing disparate local armed warlords constitutes a form of "bottom-up reconciliation," military commanders in Afghanistan are moving in the other direction and concluding that in order to build state capacity they need to be more careful about the loyalties of people they work with. People Hate Iraq
According to Gallup, Americans don't just dislike the Iraq War, they downright dislike Iraq. Not as much as they dislike Iran, but they're pretty unenthusiastic about the place. What's more, though Americans have distaste for the Palestinian Authority, they don't fear it. But when asked to name America's top enemy in the world Iraq took second place (have people not heard that Saddam's been deposed) behind Iran but ahead of China and North Korea. No real point to make about this, just thought it was an interesting glimpse at the public mood. Is George Borjas a Cylon?George Borjas, every immigration-restrictionist's favorite economist, has a post up suggesting we look to Japan where they're planning to massively scale-up the use of robots as an alternative to the immigration of unskilled labor. That sounds like a great alternative if you don't care about the interests of immigrants themselves at all and are also willing to overlook the fact that once we become dependent on robot labor they're going to rebel and enslave us. One really needs to wonder whose side Borjas is on. McCain's Divided Loyalties?The New York Times would like us to believe that though John McCain thought we should mount a land invasion of Serbia in 1999, argued for a policy of rogue-state rollback in 2000, chaperoned Ahmed Chalabi around town for years, began beating the drums for an invasion of Iraq in 2002, and has threatened war with North Korea and Iran that he's really torn between two factions of advisors -- hawkish neocons and more sensible realists. One problem with this theory is McCain's record. As McCain likes to note, he has a lot of experience national security issues -- he's not some obscure governor being tutored by some eminences grises -- and his record shows that sometime in the 1990s he swung to become the most consistently aggressive hawk in the U.S. Senate. Another problem is that, as Justin Logan points out, all the "realists" and "pragmatists" the Times can find are Iraq War supporters just like their neocon antagonists. I would add that a further problem is that, again, when you're talking about a guy like McCain who's been engaged with these issues a while it's worth looking beyond the circle of foreign policy dudes who've given McCain an official endorsement to seeing who he's actually hired. If you'll look, you'll find that McCain Senate and campaign staffs both contain a ton of people whose resumes include stints at The Weekly Standard and/or the Project for a New American Century -- that's the network he's tied into. The Paralysis StrategyFred Kaplan remarks on the paradoxical logic of Iraq: "Their unwavering stance amounted to this: Further pullouts might trigger defeat; the costs of defeat are too horrible to ponder; therefore, we shouldn't ponder further pullouts." One way of looking at this is to say that it doesn't make any sense. Another way of looking at it is to say that so many people hold to this view that it must make sense from some perspective. Taking that latter approach, I think you need to postulate a person who doesn't care at all about the interests of Americans, Iraqis, or anyone else but does care a great deal about his reputation, a reputation that's been tarnished by years-worth of advocacy for the war in Iraq. This person's basic insight would be that it's unlikely that Iraq will stay in a state of chaos forever. If we leave Iraq, then some stuff will happen in Iraq, then eventually Iraq will become stable and the reputation of the war supporters will be permanently stained. By contrast, if we just commit to hanging around in Iraq indefinitely, then the odds are that sooner or later stability will emerge in Iraq. At this point, the war supporter can claim vindication of his views and begin a campaign to celebrate the heroic steadfastness of himself and his fellows in the face of the liars, smears, and cowardice of the anti-war faction. That's not Petraeus or Crocker, who basically are just in a position right now where their job is to carry water and help Bush run out the clock, but I do think it's a decent model of the incentives (I'm not a mind-reader, I don't know what lurks in these people's hearts) facing a John McCain or a Mike O'Hanlon or a Fred Hiatt at this point. Cities' Rights!Reihan explains why New York City secessionism is the only way forward in the wake of congestion pricing's defeat. Posts About the Book Will Continue Until Every American Owns a CopyMy initial plan had been to say no more about James Kirchick’s review of Heads in the Sand, thinking that it might be too petty. But it’s been suggested to me that a response would be a good way to explain a little bit more to you, the reader, what Heads in the Sand is all about, rather than merely hectoring you about your deep moral obligation to buy a copy so here goes. Continue reading "Posts About the Book Will Continue Until Every American Owns a Copy" » For the KidsThe early education proposals of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama explained -- interestingly, they're not really the same, and even though the campaign's gone on forever they haven't been argued about, either. Farm Bill Follies
Via Kevin Drum, a nice precis of the disastrous new farm bill which will make our current disastrous agricultural policies even worse. Bad for the environment, bad for public health, and bad for international development and trade -- it's really, really bad. Frustratingly, consensus that our current policies are bad is about as widespread across the ideological spectrum as it could possibly get and yet given the realities of U.S. political institutions it doesn't make any difference. Photo by Flickr user Aunt Owwee used under a Creative Commons license The Trouble With Proxies
Joe Klein wonders why American blood and treasure is being expended over which Shiite group controls which town in Iraq: "Perhaps it is that Sadr's Mahdi Army is the most potent force opposed to long-term U.S. bases in Iraq—and that a permanent presence has been the Bush Administration's true goal in this war. I suspect the central question in Iraq now is not whether things will get better but whether the drive for a long-term, neocolonialist presence will make the situation irretrievably worse." One shouldn't, however, underplay the extent to which the Bush administration may have no real motive at all. When you're establishing an indirect rule relationship with a local proxy like Maliki and his regime, you risk circumstances in which the tail wags the dog. We like Maliki because we have "influence" over him. To retain that influence, we need to be useful to him. He wanted to fight Sadr, but couldn't take him down alone, so our troops had to fight, too. His fights are now our fights, even if his fights don't really have anything to do with our interests. DoD photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet, U.S. Air Force You'll Laugh, Cry, and Beg For MercyNew York magazine goes long and deep on the disaster of the Dolan/Thomas Era. I will say that I think knocking Thomas for poor draft choices is a bit unfair. Yes, there are guys you wish he'd taken who he passed on, but the draft is inherently uncertain and I think his record in that record stands up as totally okay. The Missing TradeTim Lee delves deeper into the myseriously low proportion of trade in the text of the US-Colombia trade deal. This has, of course, become utterly typical. I wish people were more aware of this reality. Some of these deals may be good for America, others may be bad, and yet others (like this one) probably just won't make much of a difference either way. But however you want to argue the merits of any particular deal, reference to a trade model out of an economics textbook is neither here nor there. Dan Drezner explains that the deal is really about cementing the US-Colombian bilateral relationship. Maybe so. I would just observe that free traders spend a lot of time rending garments over the alleged ignorance of their protectionist adversaries but seem to have remarkably little time for self-scrutiny about all the dishonesty and funny-business that goes into the forming and passing of these agreements. As I wrote initially, I'm all for lowering American barriers to imported goods, but it's hard for me to see an agreement like this one as particularly germane to that issue. McCain for BoycottJohn McCain calls (conditionally) for a boycott of the opening ceremonies. Key line: " I believe President Bush should evaluate his participation in the ceremonies surrounding the Olympics and, based on Chinese actions, decide whether it is appropriate to attend. If Chinese policies and practices do not change, I would not attend the opening ceremonies." It's interesting that all the presidential candidates seem to believe this is good politics. Threatening to boycott the ceremonies per se seems unlikely to accomplish anything, but if the Chinese leadership sees that Western politicians come under intense pressure to have nothing to do with the PRC when the PRC cracks down, that should be food for thought in Beijing. Six Months At a TimeGood stuff from MoveOn: Heads in the Sand actually opens with a discussion of Friedman Units and the "endless war in little chunks" approach to the world that our elite consensus has saddled us with. The Good GuysI went to a Netroots Nation fundraiser in town yesterday evening and on hand to talk a bit were some of our best, most solid progressive members of congress, including Senator Russ Feingold and Reps. Lloyd Doggett, Rush Holt, and Steve Cohen. I'm not sure I'd ever heard any of those guys actually speak before or not, but one way or another there's this nice warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from listening to the real good guys of the political world. So much of what happens when you blog is focused on complaining about bad actors, but the morale boost that comes from the reminder that there are good people out there fighting the good fight is really nice. Boston's Worst NightmareI don't think anything or anyone is going to stand in the way of the Celtics' march to the 2008 NBA Championship. Still, it warms this Boston-haters' heart to know that the thoroughly mediocre Wizards seem to have their number. That said, I find that my distaste for the Hub is actually on the decline. It was very frustrating to me to constantly be hearing Kevin Garnett blamed for the Timberwolves' problems (he didn't have enough "leadership" it seems) when it was eminently clear that he was one of the top players in the game and just saddled with terrible teammates. This year, I think he's gotten his vindication and that's all to the good, even if it does bring cheer to the undeserving people of Massachusetts. Opening UpIncidentally, anyone persuaded that the NBA game is insufficiently wide open and exciting should definitely check out tonight's Denver vs. Golden State matchup. The teams are basically tied for the last spot in the Western Conference playoffs, both are quite good, and the play at the fastest and second-fastest paces in the league. Should be a very exciting game. I think the Warriors are sentimental favorite for basketball fans everywhere, so I'll definitely be hoping they win. The Nuggets are, however, are perennially interesting team for anyone interested in basketball statistics. Conventional commentators are constantly overlooking Denver's defensive prowess because the team plays at a high pace. Two on McCainI think Peter Beinart overstates the case that a well-run presidential campaign augurs a well-run presidency but there's probably something to the idea. Certainly Jason Zengerle's account of John McCain's campaign and how it's divided into two warring factions makes you wonder a bit. He seems to be someone who's so into the love of his groupies that he doesn't want to make any decisions that might alienate either faction even a little, even if that means creating all kinds of chaos and problems. April 11, 2008Everyone an AthleteAndy Rotherham notes that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have perilously low college graduation rates, and yet schools actually know how to give people the help they need to stay in school they do a pretty good job with their athletes and what's needed is to extend the same kind of support to everyone. Strategic ConfusionWhen Michael O'Hanlon sneezes, the resulting mucous becomes two op-eds in prominent newspapers. Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Kagan are all regular columnists. But when CAP's Brian Katulis and Matt Duss want to bring some facts into the discussion it winds up in The Baltimore Sun. Fortuately, thanks to the magic of the internet, a Sun article can be read anywhere. Let's hope it is: Speaking before Congress, General Petraeus said, "Iran has fueled the violence in a particularly damaging way through its lethal support to the special groups," referring to Shiite splinter groups allegedly receiving support from Iran. According to the general, the recent clashes between Shiite groups stretching from Basra in the south all the way to Baghdad "highlighted the destructive role Iran has played in funding, training, arming, and directing the so-called special groups." But we need resolve or else people get bolder! Show Me The Attack AdsIf David Brock can really put $40 million together to start "defining" John McCain, that would go a long way to raise my confidence about a Democratic victory in November. McCain's doing very well in the polls, but in my view it's an open question how much of that is simply a result of the fact that the majority of Americans have never heard McCain criticized from the left. A New GambitMark Krikorian proposes a novel argument for keeping the Mexicans out -- their grandchildren might be insufficiently supportive of Israel. His Corner colleague John J. Miller's not buying it but does dub it "creative." I'll agree with that. BlurbsHenry Farrell notes that Doug Feith's blurbers seem to be damning him with faint praise. If, indeed, you can even call "It will certainly anger many readers because it takes a different position that most other accounts on the wisdom of going to war in Iraq, on what mistakes were made, and on what made them" praise at all. Contrast that with, say, Heads in the Sand which Fred Kaplan calls "a smart, vital book" and I think your choice in spring foreign policy reading is clear. Captain AmnestyNow in poster form. The Arik ScenarioNoah Millman sketches out a scenario in which John McCain, like Ariel Sharon, upon being confronted with the burdens of office tempers his views in a more pragmatic direction and surprises people. It definitely could happen. Heck, maybe McCain could be the Nixon who goes to Teheran. But as Millman says it's "a fairly audacious hope, given how McCain has positioned himself over the past decade." And, indeed, while there's a general unpredictability about these things the safest assumption seems to me to be that McCain roughly believes what he's been saying all this time. It's not as if he's a guy with a lifelong passion for economic policy who started imitating Bush's lines when he decided to run for President. He's in the military, then he's dispatched by the military to represent their interests in congress, then he's a member of congress and senator himself who's always been interested in military issues who was "talking like Bush" before Bush was talking like Bush. In other words, he's probably thought this all through and if he wins intends to govern accordingly. Maybe not. We can have hope. But I wouldn't count on him reversing course. Opportunity of a LifetimeIt's interesting to learn that investors seem to be rushing to buy Iraqi debt and the risk premium is declining even though "the central government could face challenges from the rising influence of provincial rulers." Certainly I look forward to when rescuing holders of Iraqi bonds from default becomes the rationale for why we can't leave Iraq. Was Steve Kerr Right?A lot of proponents of the Shaq deal are now claiming vindication, but while the trade's certainly worked out better for Phoenix than I expected, I'm not at all certain they're right. Obviously, having a healthy Shaq playing right now is better than having an injured Shawn Marion not playing. But if you think, as most people do, that the Matrix could play fine were the Heat not tanking then I still don't really see it. In March, Shaq offered Phoenix 13.5 points and 10.4 rebounds whereas Marion offered Miami 13.6 points and 13.0 rebounds. Shaq turned it over more than Marion did. And if the trade helped Phoenix's interior defense, it's hurt them on the perimeter. So, Yglesias, how do you explain the Suns' success since the trade? Well part of the answer is recalling that at the time of the trade Phoenix was sitting atop the Western Conference with a 34-14 record. It was always a really good team. But since the trade Amare's started taking more shots and so he's now scoring somewhat more points and the team's doing no better than it was previously. So while there doesn't seem to be a blunder here, once you consider the cap implications it still doesn't look so hot to me. When you consider the fact that if Phoenix's ownership had been willing to spend like this just a little while back, they could have resigned Kurt Thomas and not sold their draft picks, and they'd be in even better shape today. French Analogy PodcastingIf you click over here you can subscribe to the Atlantic's podcast series, now on iTunes and all proper. The most recent episode features yours truly and Reihan Salam talking about how, yes, Barack Obama bares a certain resemblance to Ségolène Royale, but John McCain is (so far) no Sarkozy. His shortness and lack of fundraising prowess also come up. The Really Weird Case for John McCainIt came to my attention the other day that there are political junkies in this country who have not yet seen this bizarre John McCain ad: To be clear, this is not a joke. It's an actual product of the McCain campaign. Ted Williams! A rock star with no head! Smoke! Ratting out your friends! More Praise for HITSCommenter eriks says Heads in the Sand: "I got the book yesterday and the Preface is the best summary of the Friedman Unit that I've seen. I'll read more when classes finish." Woo! Praise is always welcome -- send me an email -- but I'll also take on your criticisms and disagreements if you're inclined to try to get a response. The bad thing about bloggers writing books is that we torment you with nagging about the need to buy our book. But the good thing is that if you do buy the book, you're also buying in to a vast interactive new media experience. DeterrenceI don't have any strong objections to the idea of extending the US "nuclear umbrella" to protect Israel in case of an Iranian nuclear attack, but Charles Krauthammer is aware that Israel already has its own nuclear arsenal, right? I assume that an Israeli threat of a nuclear second strike is going to be a good deal more credible than anything a third party could offer. This is, after all, presumably why Israel went through the trouble of building the nukes. McCain as Burkean
Jonathan Rauch, writing in The Atlantic, makes the case that John McCain should be understood not as a conservative heretic but as an old-school Burkean conservative at a time when much of the GOP may have come unmoored from those traditional roots. I think there's a lot of truth to this analysis (though I don't really think it can account for everything McCain did early in the Bush administration -- a lot of the positions he staked out for a couple of years there seem explicable primarily as driven by anti-Bush pique that he eventually got over) but it neglects the whole topic of foreign policy. Which is fine -- the other issues are important, too. But foreign policy questions are McCain's passion, he's chosen to put them at the center of his campaign, and there's really nothing at all Burkean about McCain's take on them. The "our country is democratic, democracy is awesome, therefore we should try to conquer the entire world in the name of spreading democracy" syllogism at the core of McCain "Enduring Peace Built on Freedom" is straight out of the French Revolution. The Cossacks Work for the CzarSam Stein reports on Paul Begala's view of the Clinton campaign: Begala, who has served as a CNN analyst during this election cycle, spent much of the event touting Sen. Hillary Clinton as a capable and experienced candidate who shouldn't be sullied by her chief strategist's mistakes. Asked how the New York Democrat could end up in her current predicament -- even Begala said it looked, at this moment, like Sen. Barack Obama would win the nomination -- he put the onus on Penn's ill-conceived game plan. This doesn't really add up. Knowing who to hire, who to listen to, who to ditch, and when is a very important part of the job of a candidate, a president, or, indeed, any kind of executive of manager. Clinton can no more be unsullied by Mark Penn than George W. Bush can be unsullied by Donald Rumsfeld or Doug Feith. Nobody's going to run a large organization without making some personnel errors, but Clinton's association with Penn is longstanding, broad, and deep. It's hardly the entirety of her political persona, but it's a inescapably large element of it. Anarchy in the IraqGraeme Wood argues in a Current that it probably takes a little lawlessness and anarchy to make an imperial outpost like the Green Zone and its associated supply lines and protective networks function. I'm not at all certain that Graeme would agree, but this has long been part of the traditional case that empire abroad will undermine the idea of a democratic republic at home. The corruption and sexual violence that's the subject of his piece is part of that, and the emergence of an active duty theater commander as one of the top GOP surrogates in an election year should probably be seen as another part. All this is, further, related to things like the Bush administration's funny-business with the looming status of forces agreement with Iraq. The administration claims that it's not customary to submit a SOFA for congressional approval, so they're free to conclude it as an executive agreement. That seems plausible, perhaps, until you consider that this is hardly the same as a peacetime SOFA -- following the expiration of the controlling U.N. resolution at the end of the year, the SOFA will be the only legal basis for the continued presence of American forces in the middle of a war zone. And while lots of folks on the Hill are complaining about this, everybody thinks that he will, in practice, be able to get away with it. After all, it's become an entrenched precept of U.S. politico-media culture that any failure of congress to pony up the funds necessary for the president to do whatever he wants constitutes an abandonment of "the troops." This turns the constitutional scheme on its head, but it's where we've come to, and the trend certainly didn't start with George W. Bush. Talking to HamasTo wend a bit of a middle path between Messrs. Klein and Chait, I think it's perfectly reasonable for an American president to say that he wouldn't have any diplomatic talks with Hamas as long as that's Israel's position as well -- after all, what would they talk about? Hamas can't make concessions to the United States nor is there much of anything the United States would concede to Hamas. So in that sense, Barack Obama's refusal to expand his generous meetings policy to Hamas is both defensible policy and a good cheap talk way of saying something that "pro-Israel" folks like. The more meaningful question facing an American administration would be what kind of counsel/pressure/whatever they give to the government of Israel regarding holding talks with Hamas. The Bush administration, in line with their general approach to the world, has always signaled unconditional support for Israel's preconditions for dealing with Hamas, even though it was the Bush administration that engineered Hamas' rise to power. It seems to me that the reasons it's smart for the U.S. to, as Obama suggests, negotiate in a meaningful way with countries like Syria and Iran are roughly the same as the reasons why it would be smart for Israel to negotiate with Hamas without preconditions. Whether or not Obama agrees with that or communicates those sentiments to the Israelis is the more substantial issue. In Defense of Good StuffI think Ross Douthat makes many good points in response to Robert Kagan's "Neocon Nation" but let me remark at greater length on the problem Ross identifies and then passes over lightly in favor of a different problem: The first is the broadness of its argument, which elides the fact that those “variations” within the interventionist camp can be very significant indeed, and that the shared belief in "American power and the ability of the United States to use that power to beneficial ends in the world" is for many critics of neoconservatism the beginning of the argument, rather than the end of it. I think this is what comes of dwelling too long in rhetorical foxholes alongside people who accuse their political opponents of holding "anti-American" views. Obviously, the vast majority of Americans are going to believe that American power ought to be used to beneficial ends in the world. It would be bizarre, after all, to hold a self-conscious believe that American power ought to be used for malign ends. That's just human psychology, not a fact about our political culture or our foreign policy. The whole game is in answering questions like what kind of power? what kind of uses? which ends are beneficial? Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel both believe that Germany, as Europe's largest nation, ought to play a significent role in the affairs of the continent and this tells us nothing at all about either of them or their policies. Some people believe that things like invading Iraq will help secure beneficial ends. Others believe that a defensively-oriented military posture combined with an economy open to foreign goods and immigrants will best secure beneficial ends. Some think the United States ought to secure beneficial ends by working to strengthen and uphold international institutions and laws, whereas others regard these institutions as tools of the week designed to prevented us from bringing the beneficence of unilateral hegemony to the world. This is the entire content of our foreign policy debate. For neocons to stand amidst the wreckage that their ideas have wrought vaguely muttered that everyone who believes that it's good to do good stuff really agrees with them is a little absurd. BlurbsJustin Logan notes that the "McCain's no neocon" theory is a bit hard to square with the fact that McCain also blurbed Robert Kagan's book. It's true that Kagan (this Kagan!) is the neocon writer who's most likely to garner praise from non-neos, but he's still very much a true believer in that approach to foreign policy and the McCain blurb reflects how deeply enmeshed McCain is with that circle of thinkers. The Legitimacy Difference
Unfortunately, I'm now having trouble tracking down the specific comment, but someone asked the other day with regard to Heads in the Sand what's the difference between liberal international and just "imperial adventures I approve of." That's an important question, because I do think some liberals basically see it that way. But the difference that I see (and this is in no way an original-to-me idea) has to do with legitimacy and institutions. One alternative to an imperial conception of America's role in the world would be to adopt a "mind our own business" posture. The liberal alternative rejects this, but also rejects the idea that the purpose of our engagement with the world should be to try to come out as top dog in an endless struggle. Instead, it seems international conflict as negative sum and international cooperation as positive sum. With that understanding, liberals seek to build and strengthen institutions that facilitate cooperation and offer less-destructive means of resolving conflicts. Liberal internationalist willingness to use force abroad should, following the above, be constrained by ideas about legitimacy. The currently prevailing ideology in the United States holds that, in essence, we have a right to use force unilaterally against countries whose WMD or human rights policies we don't like, but no other country has this right and we have no need to apply the same standard to different countries. The liberal sees that this is incoherent and unworkable, and though agreeing that the United States rightly concerns itself with WMD and human rights issues in foreign countries, thinks these need to be dealt with through some kind of reasonable legal, procedural, and institutional frameworks -- the U.N. Security Council, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA, etc., etc., -- and that flaws in these frameworks should be dealt with through good-faith efforts to improve the frameworks rather than to cast them aside. The general idea is that American power should be used in way that's sustainable rather than threatening to the rest of the world, because it gives adequate deference to the fact that other countries have their own interests and perspectives. Of course these ideas don't fully specify a foreign policy -- the Security Council could authorize something foolish or impractical and existing rules and institutions are often in need of change of one kind or another. But it does generate a framework within which to think about this. We want and need to be involved in the problems of the world, but wish to do so in a constructive, legitimate manner that involves working with other countries according to the established rules of the game as laid out in treaties, etc. rather than fooling ourselves into thinking that if we cast off all restraint we'll be able to remake the world with ease. Photo by Flickr user etobicokesouth used under a Creative Commons license April 12, 2008Obama and LincolnGarry Wills has a fascinating essay in The New York Review of Books comparing Barack Obama's race speech to Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union address. Wills makes the case that though the situation today is of lesser magnitude than the occurrences of 1860, that Obama and Lincoln faced structurally similar challenges of needing to stay true to their promise of change while offering reassurance that they weren't closet radicals. Of course it should be said that for all Lincoln's greatness, he only got 40 percent of the vote in the 1860 general election, so arguably wasn't all that successful in reassuring people about his views. London CongestionCongestion pricing is working out great in London. Let me add my voice to the chorus pointing out that distributive concerns are a canard in this context. At the moment, the only jurisdictions contemplating congestion pricing are those that already feature fairly extensive public transit networks. In places like that, lower-income people are disproportionate users of public transit. Measures that tax drivers and use the funds to boost transit service help folks at the bottom. One might note that congestion pricing is also good for people who really really like to drive. It's not, after all, just a fee in exchange for which drivers get nothing. Rather, the fee is the price you pay for less crowded roads. To some people, that'll be a price that's not worth paying and they won't drive (hence the reduced crowding) but to others it'll be a price that is worth paying and those people should be understood as beneficiaries of the policy, even though they're literally the ones paying the price. The CounterpuncherOne thing I like about Barack Obama is that when he hands himself lemons, he tries to make lemonade as you see in his response to those who criticized his characterization of the public mood in Pennsylvania. Recall that the whole meetings with the political leadership of rogue states started as a gaffe, but eventually became a synecdoche for willingness to move beyond the conventional wisdom of a broken establishment. I have no idea whether this particular response to this particular controversy will "work" but it's still the correct approach and one that shows, I think, a more sophisticated grasp of media dynamics than we've seen from most Democrats over the past few years. Cynicism and ColombiaI'm increasingly seeing arguments that the real importance of the Colombia trade deal is political, rather than economic. Colombia has made important strides over the past several years, and the Colombian government is our proxy of choice in South America enmeshed in conflict with guerillas backed by Hugo Chavez. But there are two ways to read the security/trade linkage here. One would be that this deal is a favor to the Colombian government that we should do to bolster them. Another would be that this deal is a favor to the U.S. business enterprises who run the Bush administration that the Colombian government has agreed to in order to retain the support of the American security apparatus for their counterinsurgency. Interpretation one is getting all the press, but if you read the agreement the Colombians seems to be making almost all the policy changes, suggesting interpretation two. What's more, though interpretation one is certainly the more high-minded argument to make in your magazine, blog post, or congressional speech argument two seems, if true, more convincing on the merits. China's SemisuperpowerdomJames Fallows has a fantastic post on the contrast between the outsider's view of China as a rapidly-rising superpower and the view from inside of China as a very poor country wracked with enormous problems and challenges. I Scream You Scream
Folio proclaims The Atlantic to be one of their ones to watch: The Atlantic Technically speaking, I think it was the all-star team of blogging talent that did the Web 2.0 era dragging. I also haven't actually heard anyone scream or seen anyone kick. But whatever. I was fascinated by the entry that followed: Lenny Dykstra | Publisher, Player's Club I grew up watching Dykstra on the great cocaine-fueled Mets teams of the mid/late-1980s and had really no idea what had happened to him since retirement. I'm glad to see he's doing well for himself, but one sort of needs to wonder how many subscribers a magazine like this could possibly attract. The Vice Presidency
Andrew quotes from Arthur Schlesinger's 1974 Atlantic piece on the evils of the Vice Presidency: It is a doomed office. No President and Vice President have trusted each other since Jackson and Van Buren. Mistrust is inherent in the relationship. The Vice President has only one serious thing to do: that is, to wait around for the President to die. This is hardly the basis for cordial and enduring friendships. Presidents see Vice Presidents as death's-heads at the feast, intolerable reminders of their own mortality. Vice Presidents, when they are men of ambition, suffer, consciously or unconsciously, the obverse emotion. Elbridge Gerry spoke with concern in the Constitutional Convention of the "close intimacy that must subsist between the President & vice-president." Gouverneur Morris commented acidly, "The vice president then will be the first heir apparent that ever loved his father." It's interesting to me how conceptions of the Vice Presidency have changed over time. As we saw on John Adams last week, the first Vice President was not deeply involved in the counsels of George Washington's administration. He did, however, succeed Washington and become the second president. Then Jefferson and his party took power, and for a while succession ran to the Secretary of State with Madison succeeding Jefferson, Monroe succeeding Madison, and John Quincy Adams succeeding Monroe. This makes a certain kind of sense, since the SecState needed to be someone in whose abilities the president had a lot of confidence whereas the Vice President could be an expendable ticket-balancer. But then in the second-half of the twentieth century we wound up with a lot of Vice Presidents who either became President or at least secured their party's presidential nomination -- Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Gerald Ford, Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore -- which creates demand to try to pick a plausible president, and in the case of both Gore and Dick Cheney saw the Vice President emerge as an important member of the administration. But of course everyone hates Cheney now, so maybe we'll see a move back away from that. Certainly, I think most indications are that John Kerry picked John Edwards for VP despite a lack of personal rapport betweent hem. The Trouble With SadrRich Lowry lists six reasons why Americans should die fighting Muqtada al-Sadr:
Item six is absurd -- we should tilt against Sadr because we've urged such a tilt in the past? Better to stick to a five-point plan. On point four, yes Sadrist forces participated in sectarian killing of Sunnis, but so did Badr Brigade forces so this seems like an un-compelling reason to take sides in a JAM-ISCI throwdown. Point five seems extremely dubious -- reconciliation is the effort to get the different Iraqi factions to work out an agreement amongst themselves rather than fighting, having some factions engage in pitched battles with the Sadrist faction isn't a step toward reconciliation, it's evidence of the absence of reconciliation. Point one is accurate, but pretty lacking in context. It's not as if Maliki is running some kind of even-handed drive against partisan militias -- he's turning the state security forces over to militias aligned with his government while cracking down on the party militia of one party. Meanwhile, that party was part of his government until the United States helped engineer their departure. Our beef with Sadr antedates the Maliki government and has no particular relationship to the parliamentary coalitions of the day. Points two and three get to the heart of the matter. We oppose Sadr because Sadr opposes the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Indeed, at times he opposes it through violent means that lead to the death of our troops. But "killing people who oppose the U.S. military presence in Iraq" isn't a reasonable rationale for the U.S. military presence in Iraq. This is what's led Joe Klein to speculate that the anti-Sadr tilt is driven by our quest for permanent military bases. Sadr is an opponent of what we're doing in Iraq, but he doesn't have some larger conflict with the United States -- he's not plotting an invasion of Delaware, he's willing to sell oil on an open market, etc. -- and while his credentials as a liberal democrat are highly suspect, so are those of the people we work with in Iraq (and Saudi Arab, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, etc.) all the time. That's not to say we should partner-up with Sadr or wish him particularly well in his adventures, but it's just to reiterate the point that we could easily afford to adopt a posture of indifference to Iraq's internal political disputes and just go home. |
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Heads in the Sand