« 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 |
