Department of the Surreal

Chalabi to the Neo-Cons: You were useful idiots.

This piece comes via the Guardian, so adjust for ideological Doppler effect as necessary.

Still, I just can't believe that Chalabi is saying these things. As I've said before, I always fancied Chalabi the consummate insider, the player, the man who could manipulate and handle and persuade. But when I see him on T.V. (that is, a television program's website) or read his comments in the newspaper, I get the impression of a man who is almost completely tone-deaf. How did he do it? How the hell did he do it?

Just listen to the man:

``This is a ridiculous situation. Every story that comes out in the press says: `Defectors have an ax to grind, don't believe them.' ... Before the war, they kept saying that, ... so why did the CIA believe them so much?'' Chalabi asked.
CIA officials were skeptical, he said: ``Now you're telling me that despite all this public evidence, the United States government took our word without checking out the people?'' "

None of this makes any sense, if only because Chalabi still needs some support within the U.S. government. He sure as hell isn't going to be able to leverage his position by appealing to ordinary Iraqis. So what is his angle? Why say this? Can these quotations really be accurate?

Brain . . . melting . . . down . . .

Is it me, or does George F. Will not seem especially enthusiastic about the coming election?

Sure, you still know which way he'll vote. And he feels obliged - old habits die hard - to trot out nonsense about security, etc.

But his column just doesn't seem to have that "Bring it on!" spirit . . .

This piece in the New York Review of Books was pretty influential in shaping my view of the country before the current mess got to the front pages recently. It was very hard on Aristide, and fairly bleak about the prospects for the country under his leadership.

I'm still mulling things over - and I have to say, I haven't heard many great things about Aristide, even from his defenders - but I'm inclined these days to think that the recent intervention there was a terrible idea. Pogge has a great post on the subject, from a Canadian perspective.

As I say, I'm still mulling things over. But I'm leaning towards Pogge's view of events.

Another thought about the Brooks' piece, which is actually quite interesting in the way that it reveals some of his prejudices.

Brooks seems to think a) that Democrats have a unreflective hatred of rich people; and b) both Bush and Kerry (and before him, Dean) are blue-bloods, and that cancels out the Democratic complaint that Bush is an undeserving rich guy.

I think the thing to see is that it isn't Bush's wealth or priviledge that is especially enraging. It's his sheer inability to see past them. It's this inability that seems so strongly connected to the policies he pushes, policies which have extraordinarily harmful long term effects on people who aren't as sheltered as he has always been.

If Bush had enjoyed all his advantages and then turned around and attempted to put into effect policies which benefited people outside of his social class it would have been another story altogether.

Dodging Vietnam is another great example. It's not just that Bush dodged Vietnam. Lots of people did that. It's that he dodged it while supporting the war, that he never seems to have reflected on the unequal burden involved in the fighting, and that he drew no broader lessons from it. That's why Dean's dodging the draft wasn't like Bush's dodging the draft.

That's the point of the strong dislike for Bush's pampered past, and it's not the sort of thing that is neutralized by pointing out that Kerry is filthy rich. It's interesting that Brooks doesn't seem at all aware that this is the main point of all the criticism.

OK, just viewed the Bush ad. I'm not sure I see what all the fuss is about.

Yeah, he fudges on the official date of the recession, but it's still fair to imply that the dot com bubble wasn't his fault. (What was his fault was his complete failure to do anything constructive about it. So, fine, blame him for the next bubble.) And yeah, he invokes Sept. 11th, but only as one of a series of challenges facing the country. The administration has done some pretty offensive and cynical stuff with 9/11. Still, what's the big deal with this ad?

Who says Mark Kleiman is unreasonable?

Not me.

In honour of David Brooks' latest, I reprint part of an old post:

Abolish tenure at the New York Times editorial page! Abolish it now! Dump Dowd! Dump Safire! Dump Friedman! Dump (the well-intentioned, but very boring) Herbert! And dump that jackass Brooks on the sidewalk without cabfare home!

Why does the Times editorial page infuriate me so? I realized the other day that it's not just that its influence is undeserved. The main thing is not that it's bad, but that it is so unnecessarily bad.

There are very few people who would turn down the opportunity to write for the OpEd page of the New York Times. Money isn't an issue. It may be unearned, but the OpEd page has prestige that basically makes money no object. And so the Times can have anyone they want. Anyone.

That means that those who call the shots either a) believe that the NYTimes OpEd page has a tenure policy which ties their hands; or b) are so stupid that Thomas Friedman is the best person they can think of in the whole world to write about foreign policy (and so on and on and on).

Just think about that: The best. They can think of. In the whole world.

The mediocrity of the Times page is a wholly voluntary matter, a gory, self-inflicted wound whose remedy is a few hours on the phone hiring and firing the right people.

Abolish tenure at the New York Times! Abolish it now!

That is all.

UPDATE: That's not all. On a lark, I rewrote the post and sent it to the editors of the NYT and Mr. Brooks:

To the editors,

David Brooks' latest column reminds me why I loath the Times' Op-Ed page. It's not that its influence is almost wholly unearned. Nor is it even that the quality is generally so low. It's that it is so unnecessarily low. There are few people in the world who would turn down a column in the Times. That means that the Times can have anyone they want. Anyone. And that means that the people who write for the Times are the very best people that the management at the Times can think of. The mind boggles. David Brooks is, apparently, the very best person in the world to inform about U.S. domestic politics; Thomas Friedman the very best to enlighten about U.S. foreign policy; Maureen Dowd the very best to trivialize the issues of the day; and so on. What makes this mediocrity so infuriating is that it is wholly self-inflicted - and easily remedied by a few hours on the phone hiring and firing the right people.

What in the world is your excuse?

Henry Farrell has an interesting post up at Crooked Timber about how the Europeans are likely to react to Kerry.

I think he's basically right here:

Kerry offers a clear alternative to the current administration. When he says that he’ll reopen discussions on Kyoto, and will “replace the Bush years of isolation with a new era of alliances,” he’s signalling that he’s willing to play ball with the allies, and to accept that the US can be constrained by international institutions as well as using them to constrain others. Indeed, he points to the need to create new multilateral institutions to deal with emerging international problems. There’s good reason to believe that the Europeans will be prepared to sign on to this agenda; it’s in everyone’s interest to tackle nuclear proliferation and other, nastier problems coming down the pipeline. What they’re looking for is not to dethrone the US (except, perhaps the French elite in its less disciplined daydreams) than to get a US administration that they can work with, which will listen as well as give orders. We’d likely see transatlantic tensions ceasing to be an angst-ridden crisis-in-motion over whether there’s a real set of common transatlantic interests at all. Instead, they’d return to their more usual state of institutionalized grumpiness over anti-dumping measures, burden-sharing and the like (perhaps with the odd missile crisis thrown in for savour).

The one qualification I would add is that Nixon, Reagan and Bush II point to a worrying lesson for Europeans, which is that contructive cooperation with moderate Republicans and Democrats is likely to be interrupted every few years by a complete idiot yahoo who is perfectly happy to undo much of the progress they've made in the meantime. When this threat hangs over Kerry's head the entire time he is attempting to convince international partners to play ball, it can really influence how much faith these partners are willing to put into international institutions in the long run.

I've just read through Tony Blair's speech on Iraq. I must say, like Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias, I think it's quite a good speech qua speech, that is, qua piece of rhetoric. And I too long to hear Bush make a speech like it.

In the end, though, the speech is utterly unconvincing. And that's because it continues to conflate the terrorist threat with the threat posed by Iraq. It just wasn't reasonable before the war to think that Saddam Hussein was in league with bin Laden. It just wasn't.

Blair's response is basically: Well, we couldn't afford to take that risk.

And the obvious response is: But in refusing to take that risk, you chose to take quite a few others. By refusing to take that risk, you diverted energy and resources away from other, graver problems.

When it comes to Iraq, people who make the prudential case for war always end up relying on the point that it's better to be safe than sorry. And perhaps they would be right if there were no other threats in the world than Iraq. For then it would simply be a choice between dealing with Iraq and not dealing with it. But while the U.S. and Britain dealt with Iraq, problems around the world continued to fester, problems which were far more intimately connected with the threat identified by Blair.

I also notice something alarming in Tony Blair's depiction of the Islamic fascism. He says he noticed:

the increasing amount of information about Islamic extremism and terrorism that was crossing my desk. Chechnya was blighted by it. So was Kashmir. Afghanistan was its training ground. Some 300 people had been killed in the attacks on the USS Cole and US embassies in East Africa. The extremism seemed remarkably well financed. It was very active. And it was driven not by a set of negotiable political demands, but by religious fanaticism.

Now part of this is just confused. It's quite right to say that there's no negotiating with bin Laden, since apparently the man wants to restore the Caliphate, among other things. And it's entirely possible that there are extensive ties between bin Laden and the militants in Chechnya. But it's quite obviously not the case that the conflict in Chechnya is driven by religious fanaticism.

To be fair, Blair isn't offering some lengthy analysis of the conflict there. Still, I think he's conflating things that are quite different, and in a revealing way. The conflict in Chechnya is very complicated. It involves religion, organized crime, historical injustices, etc. But in its current phase, I think it is also driven by ruthless barbarity on the part of the Russian army, by its senseless slaughter of so many civilians. This was an essential part of the story, into which Islamic radicals have now insinuated themselves. I say this is revealing because Blair leaves out the inconvenient part: the complicity of Vladmir Putin, a man he regularly socializes with as part of his diplomatic responsibilities. But although Blair is perfectly happy to wage war on Iraq to deal with Islamic fascism, he is not willing to stand up to Putin for his role in fomenting it. Tough choices, indeed.

As I said, there may be no negotiating with Islamic fascists, but there are many conflicts into which Islamic fascists have insinuated themselves which are perfectly open to negotiation. Kashmir, which Blair mentions, is one of them. If you really wanted to sap the appeal of Islamic fascism, you might think about attempting to resolve the conflict there. It's a very difficult conflict, but not a hopeless one. Bringing some peace and stability to the region would have done far more to undermine the appeal of Islamic fascists than a war on Iraq, at considerably less cost. And it would have played a major role in stabalizing Pakistan, which was probably more crucial than anything else in the war on Islamic radicals.

Again, there were more peaceful, constructive and focused ways of responding to the threat that Blair identifies. At the end of the day, he should stick solely to the humanitarian case for war, since I think it collapses much less quickly than the prudential one.

Yglesias has a lucid discussion of the basic problem with Blair's speech:

On the substantive front, there's a lot a person could say in response, but frankly it's all been said before. The main thing I would say is that Blair isn't really addressing anything that's happened in the past eleven months. My read on the past eleven months in Iraq is that, basically, the Coalition has fucked everything up and we very well may see a civil war down the road. Certainly, I don't anticipate an Iraqi democracy anytime in the near future. Given that the WMDs, questions of honesty aside, did not, in fact, exist everything really hangs at this point on the situation not being all fucked up. The situation, however, is all fucked up. Given that, there's really no defense that can be made.

The fucked upedness of the whole situation has really been underappreciated by most people. It's vitally important, I think, to read the three major Iraq blogs and see how, heatedness of rhetoric aside, they basically all agree. There's Bob Dreyfuss super-dove ("holy fucking shit is this fucked up!"), Juan Cole dove ("it's all fucked up!"), and Spencer Ackerman ex-hawk ("unfortunately, it's all fucked up").

I have already mentioned my belief that libertarians are kooky. Now Belle Warring relieves me of the need to explain why I think so, by doing a perfectly good job of it herself.

Don't miss a very interesting post over at Normblog. It ranges over a few topics, mostly very well. Here is Norm on sovereignty. After making clear that sovereignty is an important value, he writes:

Yet every - or maybe it's nearly every - value has its limits, has sometimes to be made an exception to, and the principle of sovereignty comes under this general rule. There is an established lineage of moral thinking about international affairs, including thinking specifically within the tradition of international law, that respect for national sovereignty, as important as it is, does have its limits. These limits are set high. They do not permit one state to invade another merely because the former disapproves of the latter's internal policies, or because 'we' don't share some of 'their' values or customs or practices, or because some of those strike us as, or indeed are, bad. However, beyond a certain threshold of what I will call, for short, basic humanity, where a state has begun to violate on a large scale some of the most basic rights and/or needs and/or requirements that go with any kind of tolerable existence, then that state is no longer to be seen as enjoying the protection of the principle of national sovereignty.

I have said much the same thing for several years, and I remember saying so repeatedly during the lead-up to the war in the class I taught on just war theory. In general, then, I always thought it was wrong to base opposition to the war on some sort of respect for Iraq's sovereignty.

Still, a few things are worth noting here. One is that although Norm is hearkening back to a long tradition in international affairs, in fact he's proposing a significant departure from it. Norm is right that the tradition refuses to recognize sovereignty as an absolute value, but he doesn't mention that the tradition sets the bar higher than he apparently wants it. The tradition has always insisted that sovereignty only be compromised by an ongoing and massive humanitarian crisis. It has never countenanced interventions against totalitarian states, no matter how barbaric and cruel. And by the time the U.S. and Britain got around to invading Iraq, the mass graves were already full with people long dead. Perhaps the best shot at establishing an ongoing crisis would be to point to the destruction of the marshlands in the South. But even that falls well short of the standard traditionally insisted on. Now, as a matter of fact, I'm inclined to draw the threshold much closer to where Norm draws it. But I don't think there's much point in representing that view as in any way traditional. I think Norm and I should just admit that our moral intuitions here are pretty revisionary in spirit.

The second thing to note is that for all my sympathy with Norm's point, I still think it's important not to lose grip of why in general our intuitions about sovereignty have traditionally been so robust, even in the face of serious injustice. We have to be careful not to suppose that the case for sovereignty rests solely on the intrinsic merits of the state which claims it. For it may have value apart from that.

To focus your thoughts on this point, forget that the U.S. and Britain overthrew Saddam, and imagine that Iran had done it instead, and had done it citing Norm's point about Iraq's sovereignty as part of the defence of their behaviour. Iran's case would be, essentially, look, you yourself admit that Iraq's sovereignty counts for nothing, so why are you objecting to our violating it? In fact, on your account, there's not much "it" to violate here.

Even those of us who hate Saddam Hussein might well have objected to such a war, and for many of the reasons many of us objected to the recent one: we wouldn't trust Iran to promote democracy; we would fear that new powerful and destructive forces would be unleashed which might bring even more harm to the people of Iraq; and so on. But we might well also say, on top of all that: Look, just because Iraq's sovereignty is intrinsically worthless, doesn't give just anyone the right to violate it. Which is another way of saying, perhaps Iraq's sovereignty counted for something after all, even if the regime was perfectly undeserving of respect.

I'm not supposing here, even for the sake of argument that the U.S. and Britain are morally on par with Iran. (Nor am I saying that they are not. I don't want to argue about that today.) The point is that we might start out very sceptical about Iraq's sovereignty if we saw it as entirely dependent on the character of the regime, and end up feeling that it had some real (though not absolutely, obviously) force, even in spite of everything we know about the regime.

So although I have long been sympathetic to Norm's views here, I'm also ready to admit that I haven't been able yet to pin down my views with any confidence.

Norm's post is also interesting for its argument that the anti-war movement should move on. He writes:

Those who opposed the war in the full knowledge, or some reasonable level of knowledge, of the character and record of the Saddam regime, had their reasons; and while some of these reasons weren't good ones, some of them also were: amongst which I would put the concern about international law, the principle of adhering to established multilateral procedures and the fears about the level of likely casualties, both civilian and military. I would hypothesize, however, that with many if not all of the opponents of the war who were genuinely attached to these considerations and not merely using them as a cynical cover for something else, there will have been some sense of, some feeling for, the considerations pulling in the other direction, the ones that I've invoked above under the formula of a common humanity. So my suggestion is as follows. People who opposed the war but with a proper sense of the other considerations, the ones that moved us left-liberal supporters of the war, should be willing to move on. All said and done, they didn't agree with what was done, but what was done removed a scourge and they will recognize that and look to what is now the best possible course forward for the people of Iraq. And those, on the other hand, who can't move on? It's hard not to conclude that what they want is an alibi. It seems that the considerations which moved us to support the war were not only outweighed for them by their reasons against the war; they just don't count for very much at all. If that's how you think, then you better make real sure that people are talking about something else.

Again, there's a lot to that. In fact, in a way it reminds me of an email I recently wrote to a friend inviting me to a march called "We STILL Oppose the War". Listen to what a pill I can be:

I found the sticker in my mailbox as you promised. I confess I am a bit disappointed that the movement has not come up with a more compelling slogan behind which to rally. The world "STILL" says no to war? Putting the "STILL" in caps makes it a bit more emphatic, but it's not enough to disguise the essential lameness of the message.

Back before the war, I was proud to march against it, even if I wasn't always comfortable with the company I was keeping. And I thought it was completely stupid to say, as the critics did, that we should have been protesting Saddam's outrages, or whatever.

But, dude, this march is, like, so 2003! And while it was a terrible mistake, the war also created an opportunity. If the slogan were "Now really deliver democracy to the Middle East" or something like that and we got to ding the Prez for hanging out with Tunisian dictators I'd be all over it. As it is . . .

As well as being the wrong message substantively, I think it's also a bit maladroit politically. The message is not just negative (which is fine sometimes, especially since placards are usually too small to write much on), it's also retrospective in a way that isn't particularly effective. There are far better ways to frame the issue so that it remains a powerful political argument against Bush and co. E.g., a march against the current commission to investigate intelligence failures. That's a bit subtle, but at least then you'd be urging something constructive (i.e., get a real commission, bucko).

I dunno, but I think on March 20th I'ma gonna sit on my duff and blog.

Your politically unreliable friend,

cy

So obviously I agree with part of Norm's message. I think as far as the people of Iraq go, we ought to recognize a real opportunity. That means, among other things, strongly supporting measures to build democracy there, wherever possible.

But in other ways, I think it would be downright unhealthy for anyone to move on. The fact is that Tony Blair, for example, is a liar: He lied about when the decision to go to war was made. He lied about the evidence. He lied about the rationale for war. He's still lying about the threat posed by Iraq. He lied about the costs of the war. And where he didn't lie, he still screwed up. And so did Bush's administration, except much, much more so. These are not your run of the mill "Who did you play hide the salami with this week?" lies. They are lies which were essential to selling a war, which is the gravest decision a country's leadership can make. To walk away from this because a few months have elapsed, and anyway, some real good might come of it, would be to reward behaviour that a healthy political culture should never tolerate. And that, I think, is one of the reasons that the lies about WMD ought to remain important - even if I turn out to be entirely mistaken about the consequences of the war, and Iraq does very well for itself over the next few years. Even if you think the war has had superb results, I think your attitude should be: Thank you and good bye.

(To anticipate an objection: Norm and others probably don't think that Blair lied, or lied as much as I think he lied. Fine. But remember that the people Norm is asking to move on do believe that Blair lied. So one question is, given that assumption is it reasonable to move on from bashing Blair? And the answer, I think, is no.)

(Of course, another reason to thoroughly investigate the intelligence failures is that credibility on this issue is extremely important as the U.S. and Britain attempt to fight against terrorism. Only a very careful housecleaning will help to restore credibility now, and that, by itself, is enough reason not to let go of this issue.)

UPDATE: After sleeping on it, I found myself wondering whether my claims about Blair's lack of honesty had been too harsh. To be honest, I haven't followed Blair nearly as closely as Bush, but here is how it seems to me.

I think it is clear that Bush decided to go to war against Iraq sometime in the late Spring of 2002. I think many people knew that, including for example King Abdullah of Jordan. These people knew perfectly well that the decision had already been made, and almost nothing would avert it. And so they also knew that the monkey business with the UN and the inspectors and so on was for show, that it wouldn't influence the outcome either way. And these people - people like Blair and Powell - played their part, as good cop to Rumsfeld's bad cop during the buildup to the war. And in this way they participated in a dishonest selling of the war.

Now, that's not to say that the principals thought Iraq harmless and wanted to invade anyway. The general view that Iraq was dangerous was surely widely held. But they all lied about the specifics, whether it was Colin Powell making false claims about the consensus in the intelligence community about the aluminum tubes, or Tony Blair's 45 minute claim (and please don't tell me he only said it once: it was repeated endlessly once he said it).

I have no idea what the inside of Tony Blair's head is like. But I do think that there's an abundance of evidence to suggest that he led his country into war without the sort of full and frank discussion of the reasons for it and the costs. And that is a very serious thing to do.

Now Blair wants to emphasize the humanitarian aspect of the war. And you might think: Ah, the war did so much good that I'm prepared to tolerate a little bit of trickery here and there to bring about so much good. Would you disagree?

And I must concede that there are times when I suppose it is necessary to lie, if some overwhelming good comes of it. But notice that it's probably even more necessary to be honest about the costs and rationale of a humanitarian war than one fought for straightforward reasons of national interest. For the success of a humanitarian war - and this one in particular - depends very much on the support of the people, and when they discover that they didn't get the war they bargained on they are less likely to support it. And that matters too.

I think all this sticks, even when you're quite fussy about distinguishing between false claims made sincerely and lies. And, as I said above, even if you are very happy with the outcome of the war, you should see that it doesn't speak well for a political community if it puts up with this sort of thing.

Slate's Today's Papers reports the controversy over Bush's 9/11 ads in this way:

The controversial shots in Bush's new ads feature a charred World Trade Center facade and, in one case, firefighters carrying a flag-shrouded body. "For the most part 9/11 families are very sensitive to someone using images of our loved one's death for their own ends," the offended director of one victims group told the Post. Then, apparently without irony, her group announced that it would hold a news conference on the issue at ground zero

Which is silly, of course. There's surely a world of difference between a politician using ground zero as a backdrop and a group devoted to the memory of people who died there doing so.

By the way, this debate reveals that many people are still up to their old sloppy tricks with the word "political" (and cognates). Sometimes "political" means cheap partisan posturing that is unrelated to substantive issues. Sometimes it refers a pressing issue requiring debate in the political community. It is very much to our detriment that we use the same word to refer to both of these. (Bush does this all the time: Someone will challenge him on a point of substance, and he will call it "political", meaning, of course, that it doesn't dignify a response.)

This story is starting to get a lot of attention. The gist of it is that the Bush administration nixed three times - as if in a fairy tale or something - plans to take out Zarqawi when he was in Northern Iraq. This happened after September 11th, and when the admin had credible evidence that Zarqawi was plotting evil things for America. If true, the story is absolutely damning, for obvious reasons.

If true - but right now, I can't really make any sense of it. Here's the explanation for the admin's failure to go after Zarqawi:

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

This makes no sense at all, since at the time the admin was bombing the crap out of Iraq in anticipation of the full-scale war. It was bombing its communication system, its anti-aircraft installations, its supply chains, and it was doing it with increasing vigour as the war drew nearer.

Given this, what harm would a little bombing of a terrorist camp do? It's just very hard for me to believe that the admin would refrain from something like this because of what the neighbours might think.

I suppose it is just possible to argue that bombing the terrorist camps in Northern Iraq would undermine the case for war by demonstrating that the U.S. wouldn't need to invade in order to deal with terrorist threats in Iraq. That's the only explanation I can think of for holding off, and it's pretty stupid.

Look, I'm happy to admit that the principle of charity doesn't usually apply when you want to interpret the admin's actions. I complain all the time on this site that the admin is stuffed with mouth-breathers. But the story as I understand it is just too wacky to believe - at least without strong confirmation. And remember that the admin has made some fairly serious enemies in the military. This might be a leak or a spin calculated to damage the admin.

For now, handle with caution.

UPDATE: OK, so I walked the dog, listened to a little music and mulled things over. And, yes, eventually it hit me that just a few posts ago I was dinging the Oxbloggers for being naive. Am I being naive here? Is it always a mistake to give the benefit of the doubt, no matter how small? Well, consider the best case against the admin here, put nicely by Josh Marshall:

Ansar was a Sunni Islamist terrorist group operating from Iraqi Kurdistan which had ties of some sort and degree with al Qaida. Zarqawi, a Jordanian national and accomplished terrorist bad guy, had set up shop with Ansar and he too was affiliated with al Qaida -- though again the degree and closeness of the connection is a matter of some controversy . To add to the storyline, Zarqawi had apparently been to Baghdad for medical treatment.

So Zarqawi and Ansar were in Iraqi Kurdistan. Thus they were 'in Iraq'. And they were linked to al Qaida. So al Qaida was 'in Iraq'. That was the argument.

Now, there was a pretty big problem with this argument. Namely, the US and the UK had made Iraqi Kurdistan into a virtual Anglo-American protectorate through its no-fly zones which kept not only Iraqi air power but basically all of Saddam's forces out of the region. The Kurds themselves had already set up a de facto government, though the region where Ansar was operating from was one they didn't control.

In other words, saying Ansar was operating out of Iraq was deeply misleading in anything other than a narrowly geographical sense since Ansar was operating from area we had taken from Saddam's control. Saddam might as credibly -- perhaps more credibly -- have charged us with harboring Ansar as vice versa.

....

In any case, to review, using Ansar and Zarqawi as proof of a Saddam-al Qaida link had serious evidentiary and logical problems. But that didn't stop the White House from making it a centerpiece of their argument -- as Colin Powell did during his presentation at the UN.

In the immediate lead-up to the war there were various parts of the White House's argument for war that were becoming weaker by the day. That, after all, was what was happening with the inspectors themselves who were, in the weeks and months just before the war, generating lots of new evidence that threw many of the earlier suspicions of WMD into real doubt -- particularly on the nuclear front.

The reports we have now about the White House's refusal to move against Zarqawi are still incomplete. And I think we've got to keep open the possibility that there were military or diplomatic restraints we were operating under that are not yet clear.

But if the reports bear out, the White House's reasons for not moving against Zarqawi when we could have don't seem to require much explanation. If we got rid of Zarqawi and Ansar the much-trumpeted Iraq-al Qaida, already so profoundly tenuous, would have collapsed altogether. To put it bluntly, we needed Zarqawi and Ansar.

That would mean it was a political decision -- one intended to aid in convincing the American people of the necessity of war -- for which we are now paying a grave price.

Yeah, yeah. Suppose so. Still, as long as the AQ-link was a load of crap and everyone paying attention knew that, why not bomb 'em in Northern Iraq and then claim that you had to go in to finish the job? They didn't need Zarqawi and Ansar to go to war with Iraq. They needed to scare people into thinking that Saddam Hussein was in bed with them, and it didn't matter much whether the story was in the past tense or not.

As long as your pretext is absurd, you might as well eliminate your enemies while you're at it, no?

Then again, I suppose nothing should suprise me.

Uggabugga gives Thomas Friedman a taste of his own medicine.

Heh.

Riverbend writes:

Before Ashoura, there was a lot of talk about civil war. We talk about it like it concerns a different set of people, in another country. I guess that is because none of us can believe that anyone we know could be capable of senseless violence. After this massacre, and after seeing the reactions of Sunnis and Shi'a alike, my faith in the sense and strength of Iraqis has been reaffirmed. It has been like a large family- with many serious differences- reuniting after a terrible tragedy to comfort eachother and support one another.

That is a very reassuring things to write. I certainly hope she is right.

Watch Brad DeLong and Mathew Yglesias laugh at Josh Chafetz, one of the famous Oxbloggers.

The chaps over at Oxblog are obviously nice guys and all. But on the bad days it's difficult to find anything else on the internet that can really match their displays of hopeful credulity.

DeLong and Yglesias are laughing at Chafetz because he really wants to see the President make a good speech setting out his views on the war on terror blah blah blah. Of course the President has already made some fine speeches. The problem is that no one except people like Chafetz listen to them anymore (that is, hardly anyone) because they are repudiated daily by the administration's actual practices.

Chafetz won't care what I think. But it'll probably get his goat to have DeLong laughing at him. I hope it does him some good.

UPDATE: I can't believe it. I completely missed the obvious joke when I wrote this post. What I should have written was: "The president has given several fine speeches promoting democracy and freedom around the world, but to judge by his actions, he was only joshing." Get it? Eh, anyway . . . .

Link Roundup

Busy, busy, busy. A bit of linkage in lieu of a real post:

The Guardian asks a few experts whether the war on Iraq was legal.

Laurence Lessig writes an extremely candid and honest piece about his failure to win an important intellectual property rights case before the Supreme Court. He may have lost the case, but the guy is clearly a class act.

Joseph Nye explains why so much of the recent talk about an American "empire" is misleading and dangerous. OK, I admit recently I may have used the "E word" once or twice. But let the record show that my official position is pretty much the same as Nye's. I only use the "E word" when I've had too much coffee. Honest.

Read Maureen Dowd's latest column and ask yourself: is there any subject she couldn't trivialize? After that, read David Brooks, along with Mark Schmitt's criticisms. Finally, say it all together, my friends: Abolish tenure at the NYT!

If you're feeling down, ask yourself: Why be gloomy when the world is filled with excellent blogs, discussing interesting subjects . . . like the rationality of suicide?

Dwight Meredith has an excellent post on Cheney and Scalia's hunting trip.

That's all for now. Over and out.

I read a lot of commentary on American politics, and I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone lean yet on the best analytic technique available for predicting the outcome of the Presidental election: height.

As most people know, the taller man consistently wins American presidential elections.

Kerry is 6'4'', is he not? I'm not sure how tall Bush is, but I'm pretty sure he's shorter than that.

So . . . forget the polls; forget Iraq and its effect on the electorate; forget the economy; forget the FMA; forget the lies, the evasions, the distortions, and the criminal investigations.

Forget all that.

It would appear that Kerry could do little more than drool all over himself between now and November and he could still wrap this sucker up.

If you go by the best predictor we have, that is.

I'm stickin' with it. (Doesn't hurt to cross your fingers, too.)

Just a short post to make a point I've been meaning to make for a while. During the buildup to the war, the dialectic often went:

ANTI: The war is wrong because it violates international law.
PRO: Ah, but is international law really an absolute value? Would you oppose any war that violated international law? Is international law really the argument stopper you claim it is? Don't you know that international law contains the following absurdities . . . ?

ANTI: The war is wrong because it lacks a Security Council resolution backing it.
PRO: Ah, but is every war lacking a SC resolution illegitimate? Would you oppose any war waged without SC backing? Don't you know what a joke the SC so often is?

ANTI: The war is wrong because it is waged without international support. It is deeply unpopular.
PRO: Ah, so you would support it if it were popular? How much stock do you really put in other people's opinions? Is a war necessarily unjust if it lacks international support?

And so on. There's a lot to say about each of these (idealized) exchanges. But today I just want to make a fairly basic point about the nature of reasons.

I think a great many anti-war protestors (not all, of course!) did their side a disservice during the debate over the war by relying uncritically on each of these three strategies of argument. For of course it is possible to imagine just wars that violate international law. And of course it is possible to imagine just wars lacking in popular support or the support of the security council. If we frame our rejection of the war simply in terms of the failure of the war to meet these criteria, and insist that they hold no matter the circumstances, then the anti-war position begins to look a lot less plausible.

The obvious rejoinder to each of the PRO responses above is that a reason doesn't need to be an absolute reason (i.e., one that always defeats other reasons) to be a good reason for something. What is important here is that on top of everything else the war violated international law, and so on. And all other things being equal that's a negative, something that ought to be weighed into the balance in deciding whether to support it. That doesn't mean I commit to reject every war that violates international law, because there may be extreme circumstances in which I will accept illegal wars. But don't try and twist that admission into the claim that the whole matter is irrelevant.

An analogy with domestic law is appropriate here: All things being equal it's bad to break the law. But there are sometimes unjust laws that ought to be broken. By accepting that I don't concede that lawbreaking is morally irrelevant. It ought to be weighed in the balance. In normal circumstances, it ought to count quite a bit.

It is surprisingly hard to find reasons which defeat other reasons regardless of the circumstances. Most of our decisions involve reasons which are not decisive, but which, in combination with other reasons, yield plausible answers about what to do. The need for eggs by itself may not be enough to get me to the store, and neither might the need for bread. But if I'm out of both, I might find myself with good enough reason to go. Reasons are like that.

At any rate, as I said, I think many anti-war protesters botched things by imprecisely describing the moral and prudential significance of three reasons to avoid the war: that it violated international law, that it lacked the backing of the SC and that it was deeply unpopular. For they often suggested or implied that each of these by itself was a perfectly decisive reason to reject the war.

But not everyone who complained that the war on Iraq was an illegal and unpopular war left themselves open to the PRO responses I mentioned above.

I'm currently rethinking my position on Haiti. But I interrupt this rethinking to point out that what Aristide says about the matter might not be true. Or rather, I interrupt this rethinking to point to Needlenose, who will explain it for me.

Well, this is nice. I'm getting a modest little Henelanch from Highclearing, after rising to the Henley challenge.

Figures I'm too busy to post much today or tomorrow.

And more good news: Dissent just wrote me to say that they're interested in publishing my letter about Paul Berman - without the satire or insults, of course. Newcomers to the site will find my reaction to the pro-war left in that letter, and also in my comments on Norm Geras.

Juan Cole writes:

US Permits Iraq Oil pipeline to Iran

The Financial Times reports that the Interim Governing Council has concluded an agreement with Iran to build a pipeline across the Shatt al-Arab. The US civil administrator, Paul Bremer, is said to have approved the plan. The US has faced severe financial problems in Iraq, slowing the rebuilding process and permitting continued high unemployment. Stabilizing Iraq has to be the highest priority of the Bush administration before Nov. 2, and so obviously they won't stand in the way of any step that will bring in big money at this point. The pipeline from Kirkuk to Turkey is still closed because of repeated sabotage, but the south has been more secure in this regard.

What burns me is that the IGC is not an independent government, but is rather an appointed organ of the Bush administration. In allowing the Iran pipeline, Mr. Bremer is de facto contravening the US economic boycott on Iran. It is as part of that boycott that the Department of the Treasury is threatening to lock up American editors who edit scholarly submissions from Iran for publication in the US! It is all right for an organ of the Bush administration to sell Iran billions in petroleum, but God forbid a penniless editor should strike out a comma from an Iranian scholarly paper.

Hypocrites.

MaxSpeak provides the full text of a piece by Jeffrey Sachs on the subject of Haiti. It contradicts absolutely everything I've read or thought about the subject, but I'm not inclined to dismiss Sachs lightly since I think he is decent and thoughtful and very bright.

Don't miss it.

Jim Henley wants to know whether any liberal bloggers are linking to this piece by Seth Ackerman in MoJo about Clinton's Iraq policy. I hadn't linked to it because I hadn't seen it, but now, thanks to Henley, I have read it, and am very happy to link to it.

I would also like to rise to Henley's challenge and say, for the record that Clinton's Iraq policy was perfectly good . . . to poop on!

I think that the Bush admin has been so bad that the left has gotten very lazy. Recently, it's been easy to forget how awful and misguided and dishonest Clinton's policies often were. But, of course, the appropriate standard for judging an admin is how good it could have been, not how good it is compared to Bush.

Ackerman's article is an excellent antidote to this sort of nonsense. One of the central themes of Ackerman's article is the misuse of the Hussein Kamel debriefing, which any regular reader of this blog will know is a favourite hobby-horse of mine. Let us ride a little, shall we?

Hussein Kamel, of course, was Saddam Hussein's trusted son-in-law. He oversaw the WMD programs in Iraq before his defection to Jordan in 1996. His defection frightened the regime into releasing a lot of material to the inspectors before Kamel could spill it (if memory serves, some wag once called it Iraq's only preemptive strike). And then he returned to Iraq and his (extremely predictable to everyone but himself and perhaps even to himself) slaughter.

After detailing the very enthusiastic and widespread use of the Kamel debriefing to give all good Americans the willies, Ackerman tells us about what the interview actually said:

A fifteen-page typewritten U.N. document stamped "SENSITIVE," the transcript made it clear that almost everything the world thought it knew about Iraq's WMD was wrong. It was minutely detailed and often quite technical, a cross-examination of one specialist by another. And although Kamel used different words at different points in the interview, his story was always the same. He stated it most simply on page 13:
"All weapons -- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed." The destruction took place in the summer of 1991.
What about chemical weapons?
"I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons."
An inspector inquired about anthrax. "Were weapons and agents destroyed?"
"Nothing remained."
How about the 819 Soviet-made missiles Iraq was known to have purchased in the 1980's?
"Not a single missile left, but they [kept] blueprints and molds for production. All missiles were destroyed."
In other words, the defector who had been cited time after time, over eight years, by two presidents and their cabinets, as the source that proved Saddam was still hiding a deadly arsenal of chemical and biological weapons -- that defector had actually said the opposite: Not only did the weapons not exist, they had been destroyed before Clinton was even elected. "

Ackerman is also dead-on in diagnosing one of the main reasons for the need to exaggerate Hussein's WMD capabilities:

The terms of the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire had stated that economic sanctions against Iraq were to be lifted once it had complied with its postwar obligations, chiefly disarmament. Yet in the years after the war, Washington had quietly made clear that it would never contemplate lifting sanctions as long as Saddam remained in power -- whether or not he had disarmed.

That's exactly right. Ackerman argues persuasively that inflated WMD estimates were essential to the Clinton policies of sanctions and containment, which were deeply unpopular and always in danger of crumbling away. Without good evidence of a serious threat they would have been even harder to maintain.

Perhaps my favourite part of the piece was Ackerman's criticism of Kenneth Pollack, the former CIA analyst who swayed so many waverers before the war, and who has now magically expunged any fault attaching to himself with a single piece in the Atlantic Monthly. This is almost orgasmically good:

Even now, the distortions continue. In his what-went-wrong article in The Atlantic, Pollack tersely acknowledged, almost in passing, that Kamel had in fact revealed that "all actual weapons had been eliminated." But this acknowledgment came almost a year after the Kamel briefing was leaked on the Internet. As for Pollack's widely read 2002 book, in which several pages are devoted to Kamel's revelations, no such admission can be found there. On the contrary, Pollack had portrayed the defector's testimony as further proof that Iraq "still possessed considerable equipment, documentation, and even weapons."

Yes, Pollack needs his nose rubbed in this at every turn.

OK, any reservations about the piece? Well, at times Ackerman almost makes it sound as if Clinton's Iraq policy was a product of simple irrational pique. It's worth recalling that the basic worry that motivated Clinton and others, I think, was that whether or not Saddam Hussein had any actual weapons, if the sanctions completely fell apart, he would have been able to draw on very healthy oil revenues in order to rebuild his WMD programs, and in particular his nuclear weapons program. If successful, this would have made him much harder to contain. And all this is true, Kamel or no Kamel. Whatever else you think about them, the sanctions and containment policies were a response to this fear.

Now Ackerman does say, at one point, that

by early 1995, work had been completed on what The New York Times called "the most sophisticated and comprehensive technological and human monitoring system ever imposed on a country." Its purpose was to ensure that even after inspectors had destroyed Iraq's weapons, it could not rebuild them using dual-use equipment. The system was permanent. Even after sanctions were lifted, the monitoring regime would stay in place.

I'm not sure I understand Ackerman's point here, since the point he seems to be making is a bit silly. I don't think that this was ever really an option. Once the sanctions were lifted, it is extremely doubtful that Saddam Hussein would have countenanced a permanent monitoring regime. And in such a case, it would have been politically impossible to rally support for a second round of sanctions. No. If you want to argue for alternatives to the Clinton policy, you need to suggest something plausible, and Ackerman doesn't do it.

The other point is that even though Ackerman is entirely right about what Kamel said, it's not as though it was crazy to assume that Iraq would resume its programs after the inspectors left Iraq in 1998. There was evidence both ways, there were conflicting reports, and there was a lot of exaggeration. But let's not get carried away and pretend that because Kamel said it was all gone in 1996 that it would stay gone forever.

Now, as it happens, I think that there were sensible alternatives to the Clinton policies, but all of them carried risks and none of them were perfect. I won't go into them now, because this post is long enough. But I will say that a) Clinton's policies sucked, and in a way that prepared the ground for Bush's policies; b) which were even worse; but c) be careful, because none of the options were very good, and you can't really get a sense of how bad Clinton's policies were without an appreciation of the plausible alternatives; and d) Ackerman really doesn't help us on that question.

I'm not sure if that would completely satisfy Henley. Writing this post made me aware that my views on this subject no longer completely satisfy me. I'm going to have to rethink a lot of things from the ground up. What I have made up my mind about is that the lying about Iraq had long precedent in Clinton's admin. What the Bush admin did was lie on the way to a war. That's worse, but not by as long a shot as some Dems want you to think.

The friend of mine who is selling the "No Bush in '04" t-shirts advertised on this site left me a message yesterday to let me know that someone bought a "No Bush in '04" thong.

I have a nagging feeling that there's a smutty joke to be made out of this, but . . . too . . . innocent . . . to . . . think of it.

Ah well, get 'em before they're irrelevant!

Steve Outing, who writes a column on media criticism for Editor and Publisher, takes up the issue of journalists blogging here. It's a worrying article, and not just because I still toy with the idea of a career in journalism (and write a very opinionated blog).

Here's the gist of the piece: As a general rule, editors and publishers don't like journalists to have blogs. There are two main worries. First, by containing sensitive material or scurrilous gossip, blogs can damage the reputation of the news organization. Second, by providing evidence of a journalist's personal views, blogs can compromise the news organization's independence and impartiality.

According to Outing, the NYT has the strictest blogging policies. The passage on this from his article is quite illuminating, and worth quoting at length:

Of the companies I surveyed for this report, the Times was the most restrictive, by far. NYTimes.com Editor-in-Chief Len Apcar puts it bluntly: "I don't like the concept of the personal blog in terms of The New York Times."

Blogs are a fine medium, says Apcar, and he's been introducing staff-written blogs to NYTimes.com in recent months -- and hints that more experiments are to come. But in terms of a staff member writing a personal blog: forget it, for the most part.

A Times reporter wanting to write a personal blog on bee-keeping might be allowed to do it, but the paper's policy is that even such an innocuous blog must be approved by newsroom management. The same goes for a family blog. A Times correspondent in Iraq might introduce topics or opinions on his family blog that if disseminated widely -- always a possibility online -- could call a reporter's objectivity and credibility into question.

"We're The New York Times," says Apcar. "With our leadership position in the industry comes a burden of complete transparency." When the Times makes a mistake, lots of people write about it, so the company tries to avoid putting itself in a position of potential conflict. "What makes us uncomfortable is getting into a situation where people erroneously divine motives for our coverage," he says -- something possible when a reporter speaks too freely on a personal blog and those words inadvertently reach a wider audience.

This is, frankly, a crock o' you-know-what. We're all human. We all bring potential conflicts and biases to work with us in ways that are unavoidable. But the best way of dealing with this is try to make reporters' personal views on subjects more public, if in fact they're willing to share them. If this were the norm, I expect we would be less surprised by the ways that bias influences reporting, often in subtle ways, and probably a lot more savvy about detecting and correcting for it. (Apcar might ask himself whether he has a better or worse sense of a story's import if he is well acquainted with the reporter who wrote it.)

Anyway, reporters' baises are often clear enough, even without a blog. During the buildup to the Iraq war, for example, I knew perfectly well what Judith Miller thought about the war and its justification. There would have been no harm, and no little illumination in learning more about her personal views on that and other matters. The shame in that case was not having a reporter who was biased one way or another (though she clearly screwed up). It's the complete failure of the NYT as an institution to take responsibility for its role in passing along distorted intelligence. It's both troubling and revealing that Apcar feels comfortable dictating the out-of-work behaviour of his reporters while presiding over a newsroom that has completely failed to take this responsbility seriously. (But then perhaps I'd have a better sense of Apcar's decision if he had a blog.)

Apcar is right about one thing: people have extremely high expectations for the Times, and accusing the Times of bias is a hobby of cranks and sceptics the world round. But this crank thinks that legitimate concerns about objectivity and bias would be diminished by greater openness. I think the Times is moving in this direction, with the appointment of Daniel Okrent as public editor. It may well annoy Apcar to have Okrent poking his damn nose around the newsroom, double-checking and second-guessing his decisions, and then - shock! - writing about them. But every time I see Okrent question the Times in the pages of the Times, I feel a little bit more respect for the newspaper.

Openness can sting. But it works. I think blogs would be similarly inconvenient, since they would probably expose the Times to more legitimate questions about its reporting. But in the end, legitimate questions are interesting and good, and besides they're the sort of questions that were there all the time, whether you realized it or not. If I were in Apcar's position, I would encourage my reporters to blog. In the long run, despite the embarrassment and the awkward questions and the accusations, I think I'd have a better newsroom. (People might complain even more, in spite of a gain in quality. But the point is that over time there would be less legitimate complaining. And anyway, they're big boys and girls at the Times. I'm sure they know how to take criticism by now.)

A retraction, of sorts.

I haven't written on Haiti much, because I simply haven't known what to say about it. But I did say this a little while ago:

Aristide has simply no legitimacy and has - against the odds - run Haiti into even worse shape than Venezuela is in the minds of the most ardent anti-Chavez crowd. The 2000 elections in Haiti were a sham, and to say that Aristide isn't a populist anymore would be putting it mildly.

If the US government wants to signal that it is no friend of Aristide it has my full blessing.

The main target there was actually a reporter who compared U.S. interference in Venezuela with some mild statements declining support for Aristide. And I don't back off of that.

But it was irresponsible of me to be so cavalier about the U.S.'s attitude to Haiti without thinking through exactly who was supposed to replace Aristide if he took the hint and left. And now, it seems, he's done exactly that. Aristide, I am convinced, was an absolute disaster for Haiti. But if the armed thugs who just helped to force him from power are any indication, some of the alternatives may be even worse.

Since I expressed approval for the U.S.'s refusal to support Aristide, the admin's position seems to have flip-flopped a few times. The front page of today's Times seems to suggest that the final push was the President's call, made after a meeting with all his advisors. I wonder what they said at the meeting. In particular, I wonder if they bothered to think through what would happen once Aristide left, and whether - having gotten involved to this extent - they would be willing to fill the power vacuum they just helped to create.

I really hope someone has a plan. I know I didn't when I shot my mouth off in that earlier post.

I think this NYT editorial sums up the conventional wisdom on Clair Short's recent allegations that Britain spied on Kofi Annan, among others, in the leadup to the war. Here's a sample:

Ms. Short's charges should be placed in a realistic perspective. Spying on the conversations of even friendly diplomats has a long history, and those who follow intelligence issues will not be surprised by the latest allegations. The news here may be less the surveillance and more the willingness of a former cabinet official from Mr. Blair's own party to reveal such sensitive intelligence information in public.

Still, if Mr. Annan's communications were intercepted, laws, as well as diplomatic crockery, may have been broken. Substantive harm may have been done as well. For Mr. Annan to perform his delicate job effectively, many of the people he talks with need to be sure their words will be kept confidential.

Basically: yeah, in theory it's bad, but grownups do things sometimes that they're not proud of.

One wonders if either the NYT or anyone sticking to the conventional line on this subject would react with such composure if the news were that the French or the Russians, say, had bugged Bush's office.

The issue here is not whether they would like it less. Of course Americans want their team to win, so that would explain part of the difference in reaction. The issue is whether the reaction to French or Russian bugging would have a moral dimension.

Betcha it would.

After a few weeks of 40-50 hits a day, my blog is back to the 20s and 30s. I'm not completely sure, but the dip might be connected to my offering an ATOM feed, since it is just barely possible that some readers now read me in a way that my site meter can't pick up.

Or perhaps the internet's consensus view is just that my blog sucks.

*Sob*

And another thing . . .

Here's another way of making a point I've made in my remarks about Normblog's position on the Iraq war.

Everyone agrees that North Korea is ruled by a vile regime, as vile at Saddam's Ba'ath party was. But as far as I can tell neither Norm nor anyone on the pro-war left has advocated just going in and attacking North Korea.

And rightly so: For one, the human costs of such a plan rule it out immediately.

But they do not accuse themselves of failing to "resist evil" when they fail to advocate a war against North Korea, as they do accuse the anti-war left for failing to advocate a war against Iraq.

Now, I think that the obvious and immediate risks of attacking North Korea are considerably more daunting than the obvious and immediate risks of attacking Iraq were prior to the war. But I think that if you take a hard look at the likely long term consequences of the war in Iraq, there's a good case to be made for the view that the cases are considerably closer than a first glance might suggest.

So here's one thing worth noting: That last observation is a non-moral claim, in the sense that it's a predictive claim about how things are likely to turn out, not about how they ought to turn out. And here's the next thing: If Norm and other had accepted this non-moral claim, their position on the war against Iraq might well have been the same as their position on North Korea, i.e., don't do it.

And that despite the fact that they - and we - are all anxious to resist evil.

A while ago, I lamented that the press gave Cheney such an easy ride in the 2000 election. One of the points I made is that Cheney had been happy to support Oliver North, thereby revealing his position on lying to Congress, among other things. Now the invaluable National Security Archive has released its Oliver North file. The press release reads:

Washington D.C., 26 February 2004 - The diaries, e-mail, and memos of Iran-contra figure Oliver North, posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive, directly contradict his criticisms yesterday during a TV talk show of Sen. John Kerry's 1988 Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee report on the ways that covert support for the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s undermined the U.S. war on drugs.

Mr. North claimed to talk show hosts Hannity and Colmes that the Kerry report was "wrong," that Sen. Kerry "makes this stuff up and then he can't justify it," and that "The fact is nobody in the government of the United States, going all the way back to the earliest days of this under Jimmy Carter, ever had anything to do with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan resistance. Nobody in the government of the United States. I will stand on that to my grave."

The Kerry subcommittee did not report that U.S. government officials ran drugs, but rather, that Mr. North, then on the National Security Council staff at the White House, and other senior officials created a privatized contra network that attracted drug traffickers looking for cover for their operations, then turned a blind eye to repeated reports of drug smuggling related to the contras, and actively worked with known drug smugglers such as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to assist the contras. The report cited former Drug Enforcement Administration head John Lawn testifying that Mr. North himself had prematurely leaked a DEA undercover operation, jeopardizing agents' lives, for political advantage in an upcoming Congressional vote on aid to the contras.

Among the documents posted today are

* Mr. North's diary entries, from the reporter's notebooks he kept in those years, noting multiple reports of drug smuggling among the contras. A Washington Post investigation published on 22 October 1994 found no evidence he had relayed these reports to the DEA or other law enforcement authorities.

* Memos from North aide Robert Owen to Mr. North recounting drug-running "indiscretions" among the contras, warning that a known drug-smuggling airplane was delivering taxpayer-funded "humanitarian aid" overseen by Mr. North.

* Mr. North's White House e-mails recounting his efforts to spring from prison a Honduran general who could "spill the beans" on the secret contra war, even though the Justice Department termed the Honduran a "narcoterrorist" for his involvement in cocaine smuggling and an assassination plot.

* Mr. North's White House e-mails and diary entries on his personal meeting on 22 September 1986 with Noriega, following up Noriega's offer to "take care of" the Sandinista leadership if the White House would help "clean up his image."

* The text of the Kerry subcommittee report. Pages 145-146 directly quote 15 North notebook entries related to drug trafficking.

Please bear this in mind the next time you see the press huff and puff about Cheney. They knew he was rotten. They all knew, but they didn't bother to do much about it.

Phil Carter makes some interesting points about landmines and cluster munitions.

A footnote to my recent discussion of Norm, the pro-war left, and other things . . . : I just want to say that the pessimistic forecast of Iraq's future I made before the war (and which underlay some of my opposition to it) was almost entirely focused on the period after a transition to self-government.

I was, it turns out, wildly optimistic about the period following "major combat operations" and self-government. I gave altogether too much credit to Rumsfeld and assumed that he wouldn't allow looting, chaos, etc. And I assumed that if Rumsfeld was going to scrap a year's worth of planning by the State Dept at the last minute it would be because he actually had something to replace it with. The real worry, it seemed to me at the time, was how the US would respond to the powerful tensions within the new state, and whether it could prevent - or resist being sucked into - a civil war several years down the road.

Which is to say: The current mess, and the limited progress being made in clearing it up, are not really relevant to that argument.

I'm very glad to hear about day to day improvements in the new Iraq. But many of them are returns to a baseline I assumed as part of my pessimistic forecast. And my basic concern remains the same: that they will all be wiped away in a wave of violence two years from now.

Today in the East Village I think I spied with my little eye a punk lookin' guy putting on lipbalm.

What is the world coming to?

I suppose everyone gets dry lips. Still, lipbalm seems only a few steps removed from ordering tall chai latte mochachinos.

According to Sistani's website, I am in fact allowed to have anal sex with my wife, so long as she consents. For reasons that are unclear to me, however, it is also supposed to be undesirable. I must say, the Koranic exegesis on this issue is a little thin:

As deduced from narration anal sex is permissible; but it is strongly undesirable. Permission is bound to wife’s agreement and consent to anal sex. If she is not consenting, it would be impermissible.

If I had to guess, the underlying reasoning is probably: The Koran doesn't rule it out, so it's technically ok; but it's obviously icky, so try and avoid it, ok?

Readers of this blog will know that I detest Kenneth Pollack (though I grudgingly acknowledge his astonishing ability to distort and mislead without getting called on it), and that I like to rant, from time to time, about misuses of the Hussein Kamel interview among other things.

I thought I was doing a good job with these issues, but I've just discovered an astonishingly good discussion by Jim Henley of Pollack's case for war which puts everything I've written on these subjects to abject shame. It dates from March of 2003, and demonstrates, I think, that any intelligent person could have put together the pieces and seen through most of Pollack's claims pretty much around the date of composition. It's shameful that so few people in the media bothered to do this. (Does it bother any of them to be so completely outclassed and out-thought by an amateur?) And it's doubly shameful that Pollack gets to rehabilitate himself with so little fuss. The guy's a fraud, and if I wasn't so lazy I would get around to rereading his book for more evidence of this.

(Just to be clear, there was an honest (though totally unconvincing) prudential case for war, but it wasn't Pollack's - appearances notwithstanding.)

Libertarians are kooky, but Henley can sure write. He has a fantastic and thoroughly addictive blog.

In Slate Magazine, I read that a drunken Harold Bloom made a heavy-handed pass at his student Naomi Wolf which included the pick-up line, "You have the aura of election upon you."

That's just so Harold Bloom (known to me only through his books): over the top, pretentious, and silly. It is, I concede, slightly more classy than what I say to my wife ("I've got romance in my pants!").

I feel badly for Wolf - both because it sounds like it was a deeply disconcerting for her, and because she is now getting raked through the coals for the piece in which she wrote about the experience. I can't imagine Harold Bloom is happy either - most of us adjust our moral compass to the times more than we recognize, and at the time it was less clear how creepy it is to hit on students.

EDIT: I fixed a typo in the first draft of this post which is too embarassing to mention. Thanks to Pogge for the heads-up.

My wifeykins has a show coming up:

Saturday February 28th
5C Cafe/Cultural Center
68 Avenue C (at the corner of E5th Street and Ave. C)
New York City
7:00pm - 9:00pm (two sets)
Cover: $8.00

We are really excited about this show because it's the
first time we are performing as a duo in over a year
and we are performing some new material. There will
be some new originals and our new project of songs by
composer, Joe Raposo. Most of you might know him from
your childhood. He was a main composer for Sesame
Street and The Muppets (he wrote "Bein' Green", "Sing"
and so many others).

I should add that this isn't really a show for kids, though they might well like it. At any rate, if you want to listen to samples of their recent CD click here. It's not for everybody, but I am sure that it is for more people than have heard it at this point.

Michael Young has the right reaction to the news that Richard Perle has resigned from the Defense Policy Board:

Is Perle so selfless as to resign on Bush’s behalf? Now say that again without howling with laughter. Either someone told Perle to walk, I'm guessing, or he wants to leverage his position while this administration is still in office.

I've got my money on the former possibility too. What's nice about Perle's announcement is the explicit recognition that the position Perle occupied does reflect on the administration - from which there is little to prevent the inference that up till now Perle's bosses have been comfortable with the way he reflects on the administration. This is not to say that Perle's attitudes are the attitudes of the administration, full stop. But it does confirm very nicely the point that that the admin - or elements in the admin - think his attitudes are valuable and serious.

Now, I think this makes some trouble for what has now become a standard line among some defenders of the Bush admin's diplomacy. It goes like this: "Of course Bush isn't a unilaterialist. He went to the UN; he tries to work with allies; he says conciliatory things at every opportunity."

The obvious objection to this is that unilaterialism is a matter of degree, and that Bush can be far more unilateral than either precedent or prudence permit without being wholly unilateral. I'm happy to admit that many of the critiques of the admin which push the "unilaterial" criticism push it altogether too far, and in annoyingly simplistic directions. But even after we've discarded the nonsense, we're left with a very serious criticism of the admin.

But there is another objection, too, which is that if you're serious about working with allies, you don't necessarily want someone in a position of prominence - with the implicit sanction of the admin - mouthing off all over the world about how feckless your allies are and how great it is that the U.N. is dying, since that is a fate it richly deserves. What one hand extends in diplomacy, the other truculently snatches away. When Perle writes a piece called "Thank God for the Death of the U.N." (Friday, March 31st, 2003, in the Guardian) and receives no formal rebuke from the administration, he is correctly assumed to be representing at least one line of thinking about the matter within the admin. For my part, I always figured that Perle was a convenient proxy for Rumsfeld to make his attitudes towards adversaries and allies felt when decorum interfered with fuller expressions of irritation. (And while Rummy is awfully frank, I also doubt that he has said publicly all he has to say about the French, for example.)

I suppose Perle's recent book (co-authored with former Bush speechwriter, David Frum) brought the basic tension here out so clearly that it could no longer be ignored. And that's when Rummy's excellent two-for-one deal on cakes finally collapsed.

I'm not so keen on Nader, but this interview with Chris Matthews is almost sympathy-inducing.

If I were Matthews, and I had just given such a bankrupt, absurd performance, I don't think I'd be able to look at myself in the mirror. Course, if I had his money, I'd be too busy enjoying my personal masseuse, fancy stereo, etc. to have much time left for mirrors and whatnot.

I think Thomas Friedman thinks very well of himself. Here he is today:

I've been in India for only a few days and I am already thinking about reincarnation. In my next life, I want to be a demagogue.

Yes, I want to be able to huff and puff about complex issues — like outsourcing of jobs to India — without any reference to reality.

Oh Tommy, we never suspected that you wanted to huff and puff about complex issues without any reference to reality. Next you're going to tell us that sometimes you're tempted to drop your wearying role as a master prose-stylist.

Among other things, some of them quite sensible and welcome, Riverbend says this in a recent post:

I get really tired of the emails deriding Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya for their news coverage, telling me they're too biased towards Arabs, etc. Why is it ok for CNN to be completely biased towards Americans and BBC to be biased towards the British but Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya have to objective and unprejudiced and, preferably, pander to American public opinion? They are Arab news networks- they SHOULD be biased towards Arabs. I agree that there is quite a bit of anti-America propaganda in some Arabic media, but there is an equal, if not more potent, amount of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim propaganda in American media.

But this is precisely the point. It's not OK for CNN to be completely biased towards Americans or the BBC towards the British, nor does Riverbend herself think so. She regularly trashes the biases of the Western media - and thank goodness she does.

There's a fairly obvious point here which seems to snare a lot of people in practice. Your opponent is committed to X and Y. You point out that if X is really true, as your opponent falsely claims, then she is not entitled to Y. All of this is perfectly fair, but you cannot reject Y on this basis. For your grounds for rejecting Y were dialectical: They depended on premises you don't accept. American officials want an absurdly biased Western media in their favour, and fail utterly to examine the thousands of ways that bias creeps into reporting on their own activities. But at the same time they want the Arab media to hew to a different set of standards - which they're not in consistency entitled to press for, given their own standards. Therefore there is nothing wrong with pointing that out. But since you rightly reject bias in reporting in the first place, you can't defend it elsewhere without yanking the carpet from under yourself.

I suspect that Riverbend's considered view might be different from the one she's written. And I suppose it's easy for me to trash one paragraph taken from a long post. After all, I'm not the one who has to answer all those damn emails about why don't you Arabs love us, look how much we do for you, and so on and so forth.

But the post set me off because I see a lot of people - and sometimes myself - thinking about political issues in this way. It's most common, I would guess, when it's most tempting, and most tempting when your opponents are both loud and very confused. And then you can spend all day swatting down their positions by simply exposing the internal contradictions. You are not entitled, you can say quite accurately to your opponent, to anything you say on this issue, given these other things you say. And you can do that all day without ever emerging to give a full substantive defense of your own position starting from premises you are willing to defend, rather than ones you simply accept for the sake of argument.

This is a very risky position to be in - an intellectually dangerous one, in my view - and it underscores the importance of always ensuring that you have someone on hand to argue against you intelligently. So I wish on Riverbend the same thing I always wish for myself: really smart and well-informed people who think you're dead wrong and who are willing to explain in detail why that's so.

Busy, sick, traveling. Probably won't be posting much this week.

I would like to say, however, that Kerry's response to Bush's Federal Marriage Amendment is really lame. From the point of view of principle, I think Kerry's position is bankrupt.

As a political matter, I've gone from thinking that this issue is a loser for Democrats to thinking that this is actually something that might on the whole be a winner for them. Yes, I understand the potential that this issue has to mobilize Bush's base, something he badly needs with the economy and the war the way they are. But if Kerry had a bit of imagination, he might frame the issue in a way that makes Bush look very bad.

This is one line of attack, for example: "Bush isn't just opposed to gay-marriage - by proposing to amend the constitution he wants to take the most extreme legal measure to oppose it. And yet, it obviously has no hope of passing. And he knows that. So it's a cynical move to pander to a group who isn't going to get what they want anyway."

If Kerry pushed that line hard, taking every opportunity to rub it in the noses of Bush's base that they aren't going to get what they want anyway, and Bush knows it, he might do very well for himself on balance.

As it is, Kerry's position is just a big damn disappointment.

If you're bored, check out this hilarious column by Jim Hoagland. It's so out there I can't be bothered to comment on it. But I do want to make this point: It says something about American political culture, about the political values among the media elite, that Hoagland gets paid to write this nonsense.

UPDATE: Sorry, that was a lame post. How about this:

SHORTER JIM HOAGLAND: If we don't transfer power in Iraq to a group of unelected, unpopular and, in some cases, deeply corrupt Iraqis, we put our whole democratization plan for the Middle East in jeapordy.

I wanted to believe that Chalabi is an evil genius. I wanted to believe that because I didn't want to believe that the U.S. launched an empire-threatening war on the basis of anything less than the seductive and utterly convincing word of an evil genius, an evil genius of such intellect and manipulative powers that no one could listen to him without coming under his sway.

Alas, it turns out that Chalabi is not an evil genius. Would an evil genius go on about being heroes in error, as a more or less complete excuse for feeding the US disinformation for years?

Now, you might think that Chalabi is getting a bad rap, that his words are twisted out of shape by an evil press. You might think, "Well, you just had to be there when Chalabi was pitching this whole thing". Except that when I saw Chalabi interviewed on the Frontline documentary a few months ago, I was astonished to find that instead of an evil genius, he really is a bumbling idiot. A totally unconvincing, bumbling, transparently unreliable idiot. It's not just that I wouldn't buy a used car from the man. I'd be wary of selling him my car. That's how bad he looks in interviews.

And now I'm thoroughly depressed. Because I wanted to believe that Chalabi was an evil genius. I really did.

Brad DeLong experiences culture shock at the Wash-Your-Pet

A clash of cultures:

Stranger: My dog has a little dandruff. Do you find the oatmeal, the aloe vera, or the chamomile shampoo works best with your dog?

Me: My dog was sprayed by a skunk. And that was after she rolled in a mixture of fresh cow manure and mud.

What I hate is when my beagle rolls in dead birds. Beagles are cute, but dead birds are stinky. Real stinky.

Calpundit puzzles over the massive failure of responsibility on the part of the Republican party that led to Bush's candidacy in the first place.

Yesterday I speculated about the long term political effect of the war in Iraq, predicting that it might well shift foreign policy thinking leftward, or at least make leftwing critiques of US foreign policy more palatable for the mainstream.

Today, the NYT prints an Op-Ed by Noam Chomsky, which is sort of, um, surreal. (Brian Leiter seems to find this as odd as I do. He also points out that the Op-Ed follows on the heels of a not-too-harsh review of Chomsky's latest book.)

I think even if you dislike Chomskey, you should admit that this is ok. This past year, in particular the Op-Ed page has had some outrageous pieces. Condi Rice's piece on why she knew Saddam was fibbing, for example. Or Mark Medish's "Make Baghdad Pay". If they can print that trash, they can print Chomsky too, as far as I'm concerned, even if they don't like it one little bit.

What are the long term political/cultural implications of the war in Iraq? Well, here's one way to think about it, though I admit it's just a guess. Wherever they fell on the political spectrum, most people recently had the unnerving experience of finding someone to their left whose judgment about the war - at least with respect to the prudential questions - has turned out to be more sound than their own: more sound about the evidence, about the motives of the players, about the delusional quality of much of the pro-war camp's grand plans, and so on. (Of course, the extremely low quality of much of the anti-war commentary counts against this to a certain extent. But even people who looked like wingnuts got some stuff right, and anyway the point I'm making is mainly a sociological one. And the sociological point really turns more on general impressions than strict standards of evidence and rationality.)

I don't mean that it's all over. If things drammatically improve in Iraq over the next few years, then this will certainly change. But right now (and probably permanently), that's the way things look.

It's not often that you get that kind of clarity on a single issue which is at the absolute centre of political debate for an extended period of time. Probably the last time this happened was Vietnam, an issue which helped to gell together a whole set of instinctive reactions about the appropriate uses of US foreign policy for years, at least in the minds of a great many people.

So my guess is that the long term result of the war will be a shift - in ways both obvious and subtle - to the left in thinking about US foreign policy. That doesn't mean that everyone in the State Department will be wearing Chomsky t-shirts, or that the grand neo-con dreams will just vanish from the scene without a trace. But it may mean that leftwing critiques which weren't previously acceptable in the mainstream will get a more receptive hearing. Certainly it will be harder for years to come for hardliners to push the condescending line that their political opponents, they are sad to say, simply don't understand power or the way the world works, and so on. And this will be morale sapping for defenders of "muscular" approaches to American power. This sort of thing really does seem to have the power to induce broad shifts across the political spectrum.

Just a guess.

If I'm right, then one worry might be (as Kenneth Roth recently pointed out) the long-term discrediting of humanitarian intervention. And although I think humanitarian interventions ought to be very carefully scrutinized, there are circumstances in which they are not simply acceptable, but, I think, obligatory. Rwanda falls into this category I think.

(It is true that parts of the right opposed the war, especially the libertarian right - the Cato Institute, for example, struck hard at the plans for war early and often. Still, the left dominated the dissenting party, which then gradually filled with centrists as time went on, and is now swelling to include more and more right wingers. And, again, I'm making a sociological point here, which is that a lot of people had to have noticed this. I certainly did.)

I wasn't sure when it happened how significant the Bush administration's recent breakthrough with Libya was. After all, Libya was, as everyone knows, not exactly on the verge of a bomb. Still, I think it's now quite clear that the breakthrough was huge, since it blew the cover off a significant part of the global underground trade in nuclear technology and fissile material. New details about this trade seem leak every other day - this piece in the NYT is a nice example, as is this piece in the WaPo - confirming that Pakistan was the key player in this whole mess, but also spreading rippling circles of blame ever wider.

This is not, by the way, a commendation for the Bush admin. It's absurd to say that Bush needed to invade Iraq to get these results. In fact, the whole thing confirms my impression once again that Pakistan is the key not only to problem of the terrorist groups the US faces, but also the problem of proliferation. I think historians will look back and wonder at the good fortune of the US to have found the key its two major foreign policy challenges concentrated in a single state (less complicated than two states!) - and feel deep astonishment that the US responded to this good fortune by promptly invading a completely different country.

Innocent question: Who has the worse human rights record, Cuba or Tunisia? I bet it's close, and I'm no expert on either, but the smart money is probably on Tunisia.

Ah, moral clarity. Gotta love it!

Here's the sad thing (or at least one sad thing): the official neo-conservative diagnosis of the Middle East has some real merit. Remember that the official neo-con position is that US support for authoritarian governments breeds resentment and extremism in the long run, that it is neither moral nor prudent to support them, and that the US ought to vigorously promote democracy in the region and change it's ways. But we're at the point that the really suspenseful part of Bush's meeting with Tunisia's dictator was finding out whether he would gently reprimand him or not.

Was it worth it?

Here's what Tunisia has to offer Bush:

* Short term help in rounding up extremists within Tunisia.
* Intelligence gathering help in the region.
* Political support of very dubious value.
* (I'm not sure if the US "renders" suspects to Tunisia, but that might be part of it.)

In exchange, here's what Bush sacrificed in meeting with the Tunisian dictator:

* Long term stability in the region, since, as the neo-cons say, authoritarian governments supported by the US end up producing extremists very hostile to the US.
* Any pretense to sincerity about human rights. . .
* . . . and therewith any pretense to coherence in his official political program.

I'm not convinced this is a decent trade. (In fact, it doesn't even strike me as a plausible Machiavellian strategy, since the crafty Italian was always careful to advise the prince to appear virtuous and to carry out his wickedness in quiet.)

As it is, I think the comparison with Cuba helps to make clear that besides the rhetorical support it offers, morality has nothing to do with the substance of Bush's foreign policy. It's entirely about power and control. If the Tunisian matter were an isolated event, it would be one thing. But the fact is that we find the same pattern again and again in US dealings throughout the world. At a certain point, more benign interpretations of the relationship between the beliefs and actions of the central figures in the admin become simply too strained even for a gullible chump like myself. Not even they believe this crap. They just couldn't.

Norm, the Anti-War Left, and a whole lot of other things . . .

Reading Norm Geras' site hasn't led me to change my mind about the war. That's because, as I'll argue in a second, I think he dodges the hard questions for his position. But I have changed my mind on another matter as a result of reading him. Let me explain.

Norm's "beat", if you like, seems to be collecting stupid or insensitive things that people on the anti-war left have said, exhibiting them, and then adding a general comment or two about the deplorable state of the left. Generic Lefty Commentator remarks that "nothing of value" was accomplished by the war, and Norm huffs and puffs about the claim for a while, pointing out (perfectly reasonably) that apparently deposing a brutal dictator isn't "of value" for Generic Lefty Commentator, and what do you suppose that says about the left with which Generic Lefty Commentator identifies? Then he waxes lyrical about a time when Generic Lefty Commentators were all opposed to oppression, instead of apologists for it.

All of this used to enrage me, not because I disagreed with Norm about his targets, but rather because I usually agreed with him so strongly that I thought he was picking on straw men, and that's just a waste of time. I also thought that it was unfair to impugn the integrity of anyone on the left who disagreed with him by associating them with the stupid positions.

Well, I still think that Norm ought to be more careful to distinguish between what stupid lefty commentators say and what an intelligent and sensitive lefty commentator might say in response to the issue. It's often unclear reading Norm whether he thinks that the stupidity and insensitivity noted in his targets is intrinsic to any attempt to argue against the war or not. I strongly suspect his settled view is that it is not intrinsic at all, but when he polemicizes that's not always especially clear. And it's not as though it would take a great work of imagination to figure out what an intelligent and morally serious anti-war position would look like. There are plenty around; for example, my own.

Still, the more I read Norm's site, the more I see that he's not just picking at the margins here. Like any good collector, his collection has real diversity and breadth. He's managed to capture a lot of prominent people on the left saying some extraordinarily insensitive and stupid things. And I no longer think it's fair for me to dismiss this as simply picking on straw men. For one, part of public commentary involves attempting to shame commentators for saying stupid things: without this public discourse would not be self-policing. And of course you can't do that without picking on straw men. Moreover, there's nothing wrong with collecting evidence of a trend, and that includes stupid ones.

So in one sense, my straw man complaint was unfair: there are perfectly good reasons to spend time on stupid opinions. (God knows, I do on my own site.) But I think my objection can be sharpened in a way that leaves it with a considerable sting: While it's not objectionable to thrash a straw man for the reasons outlined above, what is objectionable is thrashing him and then claiming you've won the brawl with his side. Now I confess that I have not read every post Norm has written on Iraq. If someone can point me to where he has met the case I make below, I'll take this back. But I suspect that Norm joins Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman and many others on the pro-war left in doing exactly that.

I have the feeling that we're not getting anywhere in the debate over Iraq, since both sides have dug pretty much in. At least, this seems true for those who took the humanitarian argument seriously. (The prudential argument was shot a long time ago, I think.) Well, if we're not making progress, perhaps it's time to get meta on the issue. Here are two ways we might do that: First, I think we should spend more time thinking about what plausible arguments on either side ought to look like, that is, what the main burden of argument is for each position. Second, I think we ought to distinguish as clearly as we can between the moral differences which apparently divide us and the factual assumptions we're making. It's worth doing this, because I think a great deal of the time what look like moral differences are actually differences produced by a difference about the facts of the case. I'll explain more clearly in a moment.

As far as the the main burden of the argument for each position goes, I think that the anti-war position needs to deal honestly with the sorts of things that move Norm. Although there was no ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq at the time of invasion (strictly defined - but how strictly to define it is a serious question itself), life in Iraq was still pretty hellish, and might well have gotten worse had the regime remained in power. The regime was on the verge of destroying for good the Southern marshlands, wiping out the homeland of the Marsh Arabs who had lived there for over a millenium. The Kurds in the North were threatened in the long term. And torture, disappearance and fear were features of daily life.

(I've not only read this; I've also heard first-hand reports. For what it's worth I dated an Iraqi exile for 3 years, and heard my full share of how utterly degrading and nightmarish Saddam Hussein's rule has been for the people of Iraq. (The experience also allowed me to listen to what someone thinks of a CNN commentator crowing that a building in your hometown just went up "like a Christmas tree" and what they think of a culture in which it is unexceptional to say something like that.))

As Norm repeatedly points out, to argue against the war is to argue in favour of a state of affairs in which this is allowed to continue. It is not, as Norm sometimes seems to imply when he's especially heated, to desire these things for their own sake. But it is to affirm a preference for a world in which these states of affairs obtain whatever else obtains. All of this means that anyone who takes human suffering seriously and hates oppression would want to take a very hard look at all the ways in which the situation of Iraqis might have been improved, up to and including a war of liberation. I don't think there's any point in denying any of this.

This is a heavy burden, but, as I've suggested, I think the burden is even heavier on the pro-war side. It is this: It's not enough - not nearly enough - to say "If Iraqis are freed by this war, then the war will be justified." Suppose that all other complications and questions are cast aside and we accept the conditional. We are still left with with the very sticky question of that dubious antecedent. And you need to explain why it was reasonable to think that the US would be able to actually free Iraqis. For this war may have deposed Saddam Hussein, but it does not deserve to be called a war of liberation until Iraqis are actually free. And they will not be free until they live under some plausibly respresentative government which does not also torture them. They will not be free if a civil war results from the post-war chaos. They will not be free if another strong man takes Saddam Hussein's place. And what intelligent and sensitive critics of the left wanted - and never received - was some explanation of how the US was going to manage all of this, given its track record and given the quality of its current government. It did not escape us that the US has been either unable or unwilling to bring democracy to Egypt despite massive infusions of aid for decades, and so surely we can be forgiven for doubting whether the US would be able or willing to bring democracy to Iraq in unbearably more difficult circumstances. (Please don't give me a song and dance here about Bush's conversion in the aftermath of 9/11. There is an extraordinary amount of evidence that Bush never underwent any such conversion, or that if he did, he never took it seriously.)

There is much more, but let me just allude to it: You must also remember not to consider Iraq in isolation, apart from any other issue. Energy and resources devoted to Iraq are energy and resources diverted from other worthy causes. It cost 15 billion dollars just to get the troops to the theatre of war. The total cost of the war may end up around a half a trillion dollars (just for the US), plus, of course, a great deal of political damage to the US. It's not heartless to ask whether we could have gotten a better humanitarian bang for our buck elsewhere: the other lives saved and improved also count, just as much as the lives saved and improved in Iraq. And so on.

I don't want to give the impression that my entire case depends on this one point. But it is certainly enough to get us started, and I think it gives the general picture of the sort of worry a pro-war argument ought to address. The fact is, no amount of stupid comment collecting relieves Norm (and the others) from addressing this, especially if they're consistently questioning the moral seriousness of the war's critics.

Now, the way I've framed the burden of argument for the pro-war side makes a number of assumptions about the facts, and this will eventually bring me to the second of the two ways I suggested we might get "meta" here. First, though a bit more about the assumptions: Prior to the war, I assumed that a civil war in Iraq was probable absent an extraordinary effort and show of wisdom on the part of the occupying powers. That's not because I'm pessimistic about Arabs and their cultural capacity for stable democracies, nor was it because I doubted that a great many individual Iraqi's thirsted for a stable democracy, nor was it because I thought Iraq especially riven by sectarian divisions (if anything, I think I rather underestimated that). My impression was based on a particular understanding of how ethnic bloodletting and civil conflict tends to arise: not from seething ethnic tension or the aggregation of many individual resentments, but for structural reasons having to do with poverty and instability, the struggle over valuable resources, little or no democratic tradition, the presence of historical grievances which can be exploited, and no tradition of an independent media.

Iraq has all these in spades. That is not to say that civil conflict is inevitable, or that everyone should just throw up their hands, or that a war of liberation is absolutely ruled out of order under any circumstances. (On the contrary, we're now on the hook for a great deal of work.) But it is to say that the conditions in Iraq were obviously explosive and that only a very sure, and a very steady hand could defuse them. It is to say most emphatically that unless you plan to do this properly, you had best not do it at all. You had best turn your attention and resources to the vast number of opportunities for spreading democracy and freedom elsewhere in the world - to those projects which have been passed over because of the war in Iraq.

So these are the empirical assumptions I'm working with, or at least some of them. This is already a long post, and I'm leaving out a great many other points and qualifications I would make if I had the time (and if I thought you did). Let me distinguish at this point two different sorts of moral disagreements. I don't want to call them "deep" and "shallow" because they're both serious, so let me call them "deep" and "deeper". A deep moral disagreement is simply a disagreement about a moral issue, for example, whether the war in Iraq was justified. But two people can have identical positions on morality and still differ about a moral issue if they differ on the non-moral facts. E.g., suppose Norm and I both think that wars ought to be waged in such and such conditions. We still might disagree about a particular war if we disagreed about whether the conditions obtain. A deeper moral disagreement is one in which two people disagree about the specifically moral premises in their positions, so that even if they agreed about all the facts, they would still disagree about the specific issue.

Now, I think that a very large number of people share roughly my assessment of the facts. And although I have no doubt that Norm has successfully identified many stupid and insensitive people, I do wonder if he's missing the fact that some people share these factual assumptions without making them explicit, and so sound worse to his ears than they should. In other words, they find the antecedent I mentioned above so absurd that they won't entertain the conditional. Implicit, perhaps, in (some of!) their thinking is the view that of course they would have welcomed the freedom of Iraqis, if freedom had actually been on offer, but it wasn't, so the war was totally unjustified. And in that case, we have a result which might surprise Norm: The disagreement he has with (some of) these apparently stupid and insensitive people isn't even a deeper moral disagreement - it's just a deep one.

Let me finish by making two pleas to Norm and other pro-war lefties. First, without disparaging your work collecting stupid and insensitive comments on the left, I'd like to suggest that (as far as I've noticed! - correct me if I'm wrong) you really are dodging the difficult questions. So please either answer the main objections to your position, as I understand them above, or suggest what you think the main burden for your side actually is. Second, I think we all need to be clearer about the factual assumptions we're making. I've very briefly sketched mine. What are yours? Are you less pessimistic than me about the outcomes? Or are you just as pessimistic but you think that there was nothing to do but try? (Christopher Hitchens once confirmed for me that he falls into the latter camp.) That way, at least we'll be able to figure out how deep our moral disagreement goes.

Who invented "gravitas"?

Every once in a while I read about something really stupid or evil that Cheney has said or done, and I wonder who helped to spread the inane idea that Cheney added "gravitas" to Bush's campaign.

Well, I'm sort of incompetent with lexis-nexis, and lazy to boot, but I did a bit of digging. As far as I can tell from a half-assed and cursory look at the evidence (hey, I've got a thesis to write - leave me alone!), this whole idea of gravitas surfaced first as a diagnosis of what the Bush campaign was lacking. As early as June 15th, 2000, for example, Richard Cohen, writing in the WaPo, wrote about bridging Bush's "Gravitas Gap", but his recommendation was that Bush tap Ridge, despite his pro-choice position. A few days before Cheney's selection, Richard L. Burke noted in a July 23nd piece in the Times that Representative John Kasich of Ohio seemed sadly lacking in "gravitas" despite the fact that on the ticket he "would bring vitality and a knowledge of Congress".

So that's sort of interesting: Gravitas came to life first as a criterion, and only second as an attribute attaching to Cheney himself.

Bush officially tapped Cheney on July 25th, 2000 (though Cheney had set off a flurry of speculation a few days before by switching his voting registration from Texas to Wyoming), and the choice was widely perceived as a very strong one.

We know now (or perhaps I should say: anyone who cares to know knows) that Cheney has been absolutely awful as a Vice President, and that his awfulness is magnified precisely because the President lacks the good sense to know that Cheney lacks good sense. And so a very good question is: How much of this could we have known in advance? The basic answer is that Cheney has exceeded even fairly pessimistic forecasts in his performance, but that there was a great deal of evidence in his record to support a robust pessimism long before the press corp clued into the fact that something was not quite right with the man.

Here is one example, especially striking in view of the fact that Bush campaigned on the issue of integrity. Very few reports from the time mention that Cheney had stumped for Oliver North's earlier congressional campaign. That is, at this time Cheney ran on the VP spot his position on lying to congress was fairly easy to infer. It was: It's just fine. And, while the extent of Cheney's radicalism wasn't clear at the time, he had quite a right wing voting record from his time in Congress, and was notoriously secretive as Secretary of Defense under the elder Bush.

In other words, there was plenty of evidence that this was exactly the wrong sort of man you would want to pair with an intellectually weak President, let alone trust in a position of power.

I think the award for worst judgment about Cheney will have to go to George F. Will who couldn't get enough of the choice. The day after his selection Will gushed:

Two years ago, probably at least a plurality among thoughtful Republicans believed that Dick Cheney would be the best president the party could produce in this cycle. But you cannot steal first base, and you cannot become president without the political strengths, including family assets, that Bush brought in crushing abundance to the nomination contest.

Stupid Dick for not being born rich and connected. Anyway, the brilliance of the move, according to Will was that

Bush has done something simultaneously reassuring and radical. The choice of Cheney reassuringly confirms the impression that Bush (like Reagan) is someone who recognizes quality, and is comfortable around people more experienced and, in their areas of expertise, more able than he. The choice of Cheney is radical because of the rarity--can you think of a comparable one?--of a vice presidential selection based so much on merit.

Insert mindless Gore-bashing lies here, blah, blah, blah. Will ends his column thus:

so perhaps we will be spared attempts to portray Bush as other than what his choice of Cheney confirms that he is--a competent, decisive executive who has risen in the family trade (politics), and who has a gift for finding good help.

So that's George F. Will. What about the New York Times? It's editorial page on July 25th seemed reasonably pleased with Bush's decision to tap Cheney, though it was mostly taken up with listing the pros and cons of the decision. Among the pros, the editorial noted that Cheney would give a "gravitas injection" to Bush's campaign. The Times editorial did not find any space to mention Cheney's position on the ANC during the 80s, or his apparent position on lying to congress. Note the phrase the editorial uses. It confirms (again, contrary to my first impression) that "gravitas" was already an old cliché by the time it was attached to Cheney, and this explains the desparate attempt to freshen it up with the "injection" metaphor. Evidently, the editorial writers had forgotten that David Brooks had penned a long, boring article a few days earlier (July 21st) (in which he complained about how boring and grownup the Bush campaign was) which described the "gravitas implants" that the candidate was getting from GOP elders. The Times, it seems, was very taken with the idea of combining medical metaphors with the "gravitas" theme.

And so it goes. In piece after piece Cheney is praised as safe and solid. Voters are repeatedly assured that Cheney has gravitas without delving much into his actual record.

In general, then, the media demonstrated an exceptional lack of curiosity. In fact, the main worry about Cheney seemed to be his heart – which has proven defective in the meantime, but not (for the most part) in the medical sense originally intended by the doubters. Attributing "gravitas" to Cheney functioned as a substitute for hard thinking about Cheney's record and character and whether they really suited him for the role. Once the "gravitas" label which had been floating around as a criterion got stuck to Cheney, few journalists bothered to reexamine the assumptions built into it. Few journalists bothered to ask in the first place why the GOP would be so unserious about the Presidency – the most powerful political position on the planet – that it would select a candidate for the job widely acknowledged even by his supporters to be desperately needing someone with "gravitas". Few journalists bothered to wonder how a gravitas-challenged President might interact with his artificial gravitas support once he was president. And that's because few journalists – precious few – were doing their damn jobs.

One word links:

Chutzpah!

Corruption!

Timothy Noah explains how Bush has squandered the US's military strength.

I'm so sick and tired of hawks crowing (heh) about how Bush showed the world that the US means business. Look, Bush's Iraq adventure tied down the military, depleted revenues, and shredded US credibility. The US is in a much weaker position now with respect to its traditional adversaries. Assuming that the leaders of these adversaries read the frickin newspaper, I'd call that a net loss, even if nobody doubts anymore that Bush is just crazy enough to start a war if someone tries to call his bluff.

. . . Feeling new strength . . . but still feeling like crap.

Back soon. A thousand blog posts marinating in my brain while I languish in bed . . . must . . . write . . . soon.

Ugh. Head cold. Nothing serious, even considered as a cold. But it's sapped my will to blog.

I will return to action swinging (flailing?) sometime soon.

If you're in the NYC area and like jazz, you might want to check out Eivind Opsvik at the 55 Bar. I've heard them a number of times (and - full disclosure - know some of them personally through my wife who plays with them). Really solid show.

Eivind Opsvik, Sunday, February 22 - 9:30 PM
Eivind Opsvik - Bass, Tony Malaby - Sax, Jacob Sax - Keyboards, Gerald Cleaver - Drums

"Eivind Opsvik has an unusual gift for writing small, poignant pieces of music. The color and mood of it, along with it's rhythmic patterns, bleed over into pop, and the sound
has a sheer, weightless quality. Scandinavian aesthetic filtered through more aggresswive swing-ready players." -Ben Ratliff, New York Times

A letter to the NYTimes:
Chance of publication: 0.000001%

Jeffrey Gettleman writes that "[i]nternational isolation and sanctions imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 had already shattered a public health care system that was once the jewel of the Middle East". That is quite correct, but it leaves out the third major cause of the collapse of Iraq's civilian infrastructure: the deliberate destruction caused by the Allied bombing campaign during the first Gulf War (see, for example, this piece by Barton Gellman: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/0623strategy.htm). Gettleman's piece is about the current state of the public health care system in Iraq, so he needn't have dwelt on this point. But to leave it out entirely while naming the other causes is to play a small part in wiping this campaign from the public's memory.

A small complaint about this piece by Jane Meyer in the New Yorker about Dick Cheney. Mayer writes:

A source who worked at the N.S.C. at the time doubted that there were links between Cheney’s Energy Task Force and the overthrow of Saddam. But Mark Medish, who served as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. during the Clinton Administration, told me that he regards the document as potentially “huge.” He said, “People think Cheney’s Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues,” referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task-force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush’s energy policy. “But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.”

Meyer's description of Medish is awfully slight, especially in a piece that scrupulously checks out everyone's angle before reporting his point of view. Here's what Slate Magazine had to say about an Op-Ed piece written by Medish not too long ago:

Yesterday's NYT had an op-ed by a guy named Mark Medish arguing that Iraq's massive foreign debt shouldn't be forgiven. In order to be a legit country, Medish wrote, Iraq "must respect one of the first principles of the rule of law: contracts should be honored." Or as the headline put it, "MAKE BAGHDAD PAY." Now here's the fun part: The Times describes Medish as "a lawyer, [who] was deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury from 1997 to 2000." As a blog called HipperCritical first noted, that leaves out one itty-bitty thing: The bio-line in a WP article Medish wrote last month said, "Medish a lawyer in Washington and was a senior Treasury and National Security Council official in the Clinton administration. He represents international corporate creditors of Iraq."
Bonus hypocrisy! Medish wrote an op-ed last year for the Financial Times arguing that Russia's old debt should be ... yes, forgiven.

I took a crack at Medish at the time. Now I'm not sure exactly how it might influence his opinion of Cheney, but I think a reader might want to know this before coming to an all-things-considered judgment about what Medish thinks of Cheney.

Course, none of this is to deny that Cheney is the epicenter of evil in the Bush admin.

Jonathan Rauch writes:

So it is time to admit that the war was premised on a mistake. Had I known then what I know now, I would have opposed it. Next question: Does that mean the war itself was a mistake? Yes. But it was a special kind of mistake: a justified mistake.

A policeman shoots a robber who has killed in the past and who brandishes what seems to be a gun. The gun turns out to be a cellphone. The policeman expects a thorough investigation (and ought to cooperate). In the end, if he is exonerated, it is not because he made no mistake but because his mistake was justified. Reasonable people, facing uncertainty, would have thought they saw a gun.

. . .

The truth he hid, however, was not his weapons but his weakness. Or perhaps his minions were hiding his weakness from him. In either case, his power and prestige depended upon his fearsome reputation at home and his defiant posture abroad. He was contained but could not afford to let anyone know it, for fear of being invaded or overthrown. So he waved what looked like a gun and got shot.

From the start, I have argued that it was a) rational to think that he had WMD programs; b) not rational to think that he had any actual nuclear capability; c) rational to think that he would pose a long term threat to US interests in the Gulf if allowed to develop his programs; d) totally irrational (from a prudential point of view) to invade, even given a) and c).

If Rauch wants a satisfactory defence of his claim that the war was a (prudentially) justified mistake, he needs to deal with my (very powerful) arguments in favour of d). Otherwise, he should feel even more silly than he allows. To quote my advice to someone who wants to make a serious pro-war argument:

Remember, do not be satisfied with establishing that Iraq would have been dangerous. Alas, you have a tougher roe to hoe than that, my warmongering friend. You need to establish that Iraq would have been more dangerous than all the other dangerous dangers out there, so dangerous that it was worth diverting resources and attention away from all these other dangers. Remember, Iraq was only ever one part of a much larger worry about the proliferation of nuclear technology and fissile material. (Tip: Remember to say something about Pakistan.) Your argument needs to explain why it made sense to focus so much time and energy dealing with this one aspect of this larger problem.

I find this point so obvious and basic that I'm continually astonished that so many apparently intelligent people manage to get through their entire lives without ever so much as glancing up against it.

The general pattern here is: Don't evaluate X by itself; evaluate X in context, including the counterfactual context. Here are a few examples:

i) Don't say "Policy X was sensible; everything turned out fine." It's nice that everything turned out fine, but to know whether X was sensible we need to know whether there were alternatives to X which might reasonably have been expected to turn out even better than X. It might be that X's turning out well was a lucky break. (If I take you for a very dangerous car ride against your will, it's no excuse for me to point out that we got home safe. This misses the point. You're angry because of the risk I took, not the outcome I brought about.)

ii) Don't say "Things are better off now in respect A since we've adopted policy X". It's nice that things are better off now - if they are - but they might have been a whole lot better if we'd adopted policy Y. (Suppose I spend 1000 dollars buying my wife a new pair of shoes. She's better off in the sense that she now has a pair of shoes she didn't have before. But she'll rightly roast me for getting such a crappy value for my dollar and for all the other lost opportunities that my dogged pursuit of the shoes has cost us.)

iii) Don't say "We must do X, since doing X would address policy priority Y." Even if we all like policy priority Y, we don't have a complete argument in favour of X until we know how Y fits into all our other policy priorities.

Now i) always puts me in mind of the loony Cold War hawks. Please don't look back and tell me that prudence was the name of the game since everything turned out all right. We got out of that by the hairs of our collective chinny-chin-chins. ii) pins the humanitarian case for war to the mat, since the humanitarian argument usually compares the current outcome of the war against the outcome in which we had done nothing at all. But surely the relevant comparision is between the current outcome and an outcome in which a comparable amount of economic and diplomatic capital had been spent on some other humanitarian mission. And - as the ref counts to three - let me note that I could have gotten you a whole lot more humanitarian bang for your buck elsewhere. iii) is the error that Rauch appears to be making.

Sorry to rant. Just trying to get this out of my system.

Gall durn it. More prolific posting has knocked a decent (by my standards) post down the page.

Don't miss this See Why exclusive!

Gregory Djerejian writes:

Risibility Meter

Running high, very high.

"To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics — the pictures."

Paul Krugman, in today's NYT, taking the concept of "linkage" to absurdist, um, lows.

I confess, I don't get it. It would help if Djerejian explained, using short sentences and small words so I can understand, exactly why this is absurd.

If you think:

a) the President has a deeply dishonest economic policy devoid of substance;
b) the President has wrapped himself in the flag and invoked patriotism repeatedly to defend policies which have nothing to do with the flag or patriotism;
c) the President lied about his service in the national guard and then hypocritically pranced about on an aircraft carrier as part of a photo-op, something no Democrat would ever be able to get away with;
d) the President has an undeserved reputation for probity and integrity which constitutes the core of his appeal to many voters;
e) the lies about the national guard service are directly relevant to the question of whether the President deserves his reputation for probity and integrity;

if, as I say, you believe all these things, then the linkage doesn't seem so bad at all. So, the question for Djerejian is: which assumptions does he reject? or can you accept all these assumptions and still believe the linkage is "absurd"?

Krugman's point, if I understand correctly, is that Bush's policies are sold by pushing flattering images of the man. If people judged purely on merit, he would have no appeal whatsoever, or at least not enough to get him close to re-elected. It's worthwhile, then, to try to puncture all the silly image-making that surrounds Bush, by pointing out the jarring gap between image and reality.

Fareed Zakaria writes:

The European Union has spent more money in postwar Afghanistan than the United States

Is that true? Really? Wow. I suppose someone has to do it.

Charlie K actually asks a decent question:

"The single most puzzling -- and arguably most important -- question of the day is the one no one raises in public: Why have we not been attacked again? . . . Let's say that al Qaeda is so badly hurt that it cannot organize another Sept. 11 with 19 hijackers, four planes and years of training. Yet how much training, how much planning can it take to pack a few trucks with explosives and blow them up in crowded shopping malls? Considering the economic and psychological havoc that would wreak, why haven't they done it? "

Why indeed. I don't think this is the most important question of the day (that's what to do with North Korea), but it does have a decent shot at being the most puzzling. What the hell is going on? This is more than a theoretical question, of course, since I spend most of my time in NYC and my wife spends all her time here.

While we're at it, let me ask a question about ancient history. Why did bin Laden first deny that he was behind the Sept. 11th attacks? Was it because his Taliban protectors begged him not to? Was it because he wanted to guage reaction to it before claiming credit? Was it so that stupid conspiracy theories would flourish in the absence of an explicit confirmation? Cause even if I were a hard core Islamic radical who wished nothing but death on the West, I still think I would have lost a bit of respect for bin Laden at the fact that he just didn't seem to have much of a press strategy after things turned out pretty much as planned.

Salam Pax continues to defy easy categorization. He's so damn likeable. Here he is, responding to an American soldier:

Anyway, all that doesn’t matter now. Saddam is gone, thanks to you. Was it worth it? Be assured it was. We all know that it got to a point where we would have never been rid of Saddam without foreign intervention; I just wish it would have been a bit better planned. Does this mean that I will be wearing a (I [heart] Bush) t-shirt? NO, because I don’t believe there is any altruism in politics and the way he sees the world scares me.
What I do really and sincerely hope for is that the day you and other soldiers and US civilians here don’t have to stay behind those high concrete walls isn’t too far away; and that you feel safe walking in the streets without those hard and heavy flak jackets, so that we can sit and talk about these things in a Karrada Street tea shop.
There are many challenges Iraqis have to face now, so please stick around a bit longer and try helping us get thru them. One of the more serious challenges is the fact that Iraq has become a sort of an open playground for many political and religious factions who are using Iraq as a fighting ground.
So there you have it [Mr. Somewhere-in-the-north-of-Iraq], and by the way you never told me whether you had a blog or not.

Man, I wish there were more people like Salam in the world.

David Adesnik is amused:

THE LITTLE THINGS: This sentence from the NYT amused me: "American soldiers responded with a firestorm of gunfire and cannon, and the shooting lasted for at least a minute." What would you call it if the Americans kept on shooting for two or three or even five minutes? An inferno? Would an hour-long battle count as hell-on-earth?

Cause, you know, it's impossible to shoot a lot in a minute. Especially with today's crappy weapons.

Liberal weenies. God, the nerve.

Chun the Unavoidable doesn't mind if Iran gets nukes:

Having said that, who gives a damn if they build themselves some nukes? They ain't going to bomb Tel Aviv, people. Israel has an eradication deterrent. Iran might conceivably deter Israel or (more plausibly) the U.S. from an invasion if they have nuclear weapons, but I can't think of any reason why this is a bad thing at the moment.

I've argued about this with a friend of mine who agrees with Chun. Certainly, I don't see how the US can sound the alarm on proliferation while pressing ahead on the development of mini-nukes, among other things. (And do NOT tell me that the character of the respective regimes justifies the vast difference in attitude. This gets the US wrong, but even if it didn't, there would be a real question left about how much difference in attitude could be justified by the differences in the characters of the regimes.)

Still, there are some really wacko religious people in Iran. I don't trust wacko religious people, whether they're Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or whatever. Plus, the more countries that have the bomb, the greater the chances of a miscalculation. We can't afford another Cuban Missle Crisis. Anywhere.

Wow. Saddam Hussein's Iraq really couldn't get anything right.

It's sort of interesting to reflect on the tendency to overestimate Stalinist societies. During the Cold War, many hawks tended to overestimate the strength, resolve and capabilities of the USSR. Now, that's not to deny that the USSR was a very serious danger. All those nukes pointing at the US were real, and they came alarmingly close to being actually deployed. And the USSR was able to do an extraordinary amount of damage to its victims (Afghanistan being perhaps the most gruesome example). Still, the broad tendency in estimates of Soviet strength and capability was to overrate it, and the tendency was more pronounced the further to the right you got. I suppose it's neither here nor there, but I've always thought I detected a note of wistfulness in the real hardliner's descriptions of Soviet capabilities during the Cold War. If I'm right, that wistfulness entered into their accounts of the relative strengths of the societies partly because they saw openness as a real liability for their own side, without ever really understanding the damage that a closed society can do to itself without anyone noticing.

I suspect the same thing happened with Iraq. Everyone knew, of course, that part of what made Saddam Hussein so worrying was the sheer impossibility of his ever getting good advice. The hawks said that repeatedly. And yet, and yet, people never followed this through to its logical conclusion: that although Iraq might well be able to do extraordinary amounts of damage (e.g., Kuwait) in this spite of this liability, it was a state enormously handicapped by its lack of openness. One wonders how much of Iraq's perceived strength on the part of many (not all, of course, or even most) hawks was due to a half-conscious (to be charitable) jealousy stemming from the fact that at least Saddam Hussein didn't have to put up with all those damn protesters getting in his way, and that in their eyes this represented some kind of real net gain for him.

Now, two cases does not a pattern make. But these reflections make it natural to speculate about North Korea. The state, which has the power to wipe out most of my wife's extended family, scares the bejeesus out of me. It doesn't need nuclear weapons to do this. It has enough concentrated conventional artillery fire staged along the border to destroy a great many souls within the space of half an hour. This much I believe. The options for dealing with North Korea are all of them deeply unpalatable. Buy off North Korea's nukes program? Perhaps - perhaps - necessary, but a truly revolting thought, since the price would be very steep, and would essentially go to propping up the regime. Ignore it? Not a happy thought either, if it sparks an arms race in the region, or raises the risks of war further, or North Korea essentially becomes the next Pakistan of nuclear proliferators.

One wonders, though, exactly how far along North Korea actually is. Might there even be doubledealing among North Korea's nuclear scientists? This country is not exactly a meritocracy: How much of the strange noises we hear coming from the government are the result of sheer incompetence and how much the result of a cunning strategy to throw the US off balance? And although there's no evidence whatsoever that the state is on the verge of a breakdown, one can't help wondering how much internal strength is actually does have.

None of this is to say that it would be prudent to assume the best about the country. But it might lead us to downgrade our estimate of its sheer offensive capabilities, and our estimate of its aggressive intentions. North Korea has nothing whatsoever to gain from actually initiating a war. Unlike the Iraq of August 1990, it has no vulnerable neighbour, and unlike that same Iraq, its leadership can have no doubt about the US's view of such any aggression. A closed, paranoid society like North Korea's often has its hands full clamping down on dissent, and brutalizing its citizens. So although we ought to regard North Korea as a serious threat as a potential nuclear proliferator, and a very serious threat if its existence is threatened, and a horrible burden to its citizens, I doubt it now represents the aggressive threat that it once clearly was.

So what to do? This is, I think, the hardest policy question there is today, bar none. (The case of Iraq was much easier. An invasion was unjustified. Now that they've invaded, a early pullout would be unjustifiable.) In Bush's shoes, I'm not sure I could bring myself to offer aid to North Korea, even at existing levels. If I did offer North Korea an aid package, it would be with strict conditions attached to its disbursment, conditions strict enough that North Korea would probably reject it. If I was going to bribe any country in the region, it wouldn't be North Korea, it would be China, since that is really the state with the most leverage over it. I suppose I would try to work with China to press very hard for internal reforms in North Korea, pointing out that it would do little longterm good to China to see North Korea slip into further poverty and risk of complete collapse. And I would try to contain the proliferation threat with increased surveillance, and interdiction efforts. I would also sign a non-aggression pact (consistent with interdiction efforts), recognizing that while the state is going to be paranoid and detached from reality for a long time to come, constantly threatening it with war probably isn't the best way to stop it from spurring an arms race. But while I would be much less threatening militarily, I would attempt to draw as much attention as possible to North Korean human rights abuses, and I would put pressure on every government with serious dealings with North Korea to do the same. This does have an effect, though it takes real effort, consistency and a willingness to subbordinate other policy priorities to it when you're forced to choose.

All of this leaves North Korea with a serious ongoing humanitarian crisis and risks leaving it a serious proliferator. But if you can figure out how to actually improve the lot of North Koreans, please do let me know. Right now they're being held hostage by a nut job, and any attempt to rescue them - as things are now - would lead to enough widespread suffering to nullify the results of the effort. And although there's a very real risk to refusing to buy off North Korea's nuclear program, it's probably containable.

When are people going to understand that it's not strictly right to say that the Bush administration is aggressive and unilateral? It's far more accurate to say that they're aggressive when they shouldn't be and spineless when it would be quite fair to set a nose or two out of joint . For example, it's high time the admin got tough with Uzbekistan. Every once in a while the admin makes a half-hearted attempt to push the country in the right direction, but it's not enough. If Rummy were as blunt with the government of Uzbekistan as he is the the government of Germany, it might do a whole lot of good.

Quick rebuttal of the day:

101 War Pundits: Every intelligence service in the world including our friends in Europe and the Middle East thought that Saddam Hussein had WMD. So we were all wrong. Let's spread the blame around.

Quick response: Set aside the fact that that isn't true. Set aside the fact that to the extent that it is true, many of them were convinced partly because they couldn't believe the US would be so gung ho without having damn good evidence. To make things simple, then, assume that you're exactly right. The main problem is that almost no one else actually wanted to go to war, in spite of this belief. Think about that for a moment before you go trumpeting their intelligence estimates. Those very same intelligence estimates included the view that war would be imprudent even so.

This story in the Times on Haiti is offensively bad. The first paragraph gets things off to a rocky start:

As the Haitian crisis deepens, with violence flaring and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide locked in an impasse with his opponents, the Bush administration has placed itself in the unusual position of saying it may accept the ouster of a democratic government.

Alas, it's not unusual at all. This is the writer's way of expressing disapproval (and it speaks volumes that it is) for the policy. After I read this, I had a sinking feeling about where the story was going to end up. And yes, the sinking feeling was right. The author was setting us up for a Venezuela comparison.

The stance recalls the administration's initial response to the April 2002 coup attempt against another elected, populist leader in the hemisphere, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. American officials touched off an outcry by appearing to blame Mr. Chávez for the uprising and consulting with his would-be successors.

Oh jeez. I suppose a foolish but ambitious reporter might get it into his head that if the admin took it on the nose for monkey business on Venezuela, why not be the first to hit it again for failing to support democracy in Haiti? Except, of course, that the two cases are very different. I don't have a very high opinion of Chavez: The guy seemed to genuinely enjoy hanging out with Saddam Hussein and Castro, and his former prediliction for coups isn't exactly endearing. Still, my understanding is that he was elected in a real election, and that the coup attempt against him was an extremely rotten business. The U.S. richly deserved taking it on the nose for supporting it after the fact, and deserved rather more than that if - as may have been the case - it supported it before the fact.

Haiti by contrast is just absolutely fucked. Aristide has simply no legitimacy and has - against the odds - run Haiti into even worse shape than Venezuela is in the minds of the most ardent anti-Chavez crowd. The 2000 elections in Haiti were a sham, and to say that Aristide isn't a populist anymore would be putting it mildly.

If the US government wants to signal that it is no friend of Aristide it has my full blessing.

If I'd had my act together during the Winter break, I would have written something about Kenneth Pollack which included some of the points made in this excellent guest post over at Body and Soul.

Brian Leiter weighs in on the AWOL story. Leiter was responding to this:

"Candidly, I don't see what the big deal is. If you asked me, would I want the George Bush of 1972-ish as my President, the answer would be an emphatic no! By Bush's own admission, he had a serious problem with alcohol up until he went cold turkey at age 40 in 1986. Bush has also implied that he may have used drugs prior to 1974, which may explain any missed national guard physicals. But so what? #1: We knew all this in 2000. #2. The question is not whether I want the George Bush of 1972-ish as President; the question is whether I want the George Bush of 2004 as President. The question for me is whether his track record since 2000 on national security and the economy justifies voting for his reelection. The national guard business is just a partisan red herring designed to divert attention from the real issues."

Leiter's response is as follows:

Partisanship is in handsome supply all around, so let's drop that silliness. I agree that Bush should be judged fundamentally on his "track record," and on that basis he should at a minimum not be re-elected. But voters, correctly or not, focus on issues of "character," and being a young man who, first, dodged real military service at a time when such service was life-threatening (as it is now, thanks to that same fellow), and then, second, failed to fulfill his surrogate military duties, has some bearing on figuring out who the man is today. Certainly when juxtaposed with his lifelong career of mediocre accomplishment, professional failures, and special breaks, it suggests a lack of maturity, responsibility, and competence--attributes that might, perhaps, be deemed relevant in an election. And since it is of a piece with so much that came after, I can see no reason to consign these character traits to 1972.

Let's be candid. Should we really not care that a guy who himself dodged real military service has been entrusted with the power to put the lives of those in the military at risk? If you are a parent, and especially if you are the parent of children who are in or might be in the military, wouldn't you feel more confident if the person making the judgment about risking the lives of your children were someone who had, in his own life, confronted the dangers of military service directly and responsibly? Such a person would know, firsthand, what war means, what its consequences are, what its costs are. Surely such a person is more trustworthy on life-and-death military decisions than someone who ran from war, who even ran from surrogate military service. Such a person is irresponsible, not serious, not worldly; such a person might not be your top choice to decide the fate of your children.

Or so a voter, or a parent, might think.

I agree with the first bit, but the second paragraph seems mistaken. After all, Clinton basically dodged service, and while I'm not a big fan, I never thought it was fair to expect him to cringe every time he was in the presence of someone from the military (as he was expected to, and as far as I can tell, as he did throughout his first term). Prince Hal theories are usually pretty unconvincing, but I don't want to rule them out completely. If Bush had turned from a callow youth into a mature and sensible statesman, I don't think I would object much to his youthful mistakes, so long as he came clean about them.

The main point is one that Leiter only mentions in passing when he says "I realize that it is embarrassing for the party of macho war-mongering to have a guy who shirked his military duties at the top of the ticket". The Democratic party has, for reasons which remain completely opaque to me, been saddled with the monstrously stupid reputation for being less capable of handling foreign affairs than the Republican party. Make no mistake, there's a lot to be ashamed about in the records of Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton. But how anyone can believe this absolute bullshit after Nixon, after Ford, after Reagan, and after the Bushes is one of the great enduring mysteries of American political culture.

Remember also that this is an issue partly because Bush has no real platform, no real strengths. The only thing to recommend him to anyone is this strange idea that he's a firm, honest and steady military leader with the right to prance around on aircraft carriers without making apologies to anyone (in contrast to Clinton, who seemed to feel obliged to tiptoe around the military because of his past). There's nothing more to Bush than this stupid lie and if pointing out that he has no right to prance around on aircraft carriers helps to puncture the lie, then more power to the people exposing it.

I wonder what the real story is with Bush's National Guard "service". The story is so complicated that I'm having a lot of trouble following it. I get the main point, that we know Bush lied about a couple of things, and that his refusal to come completely clean hints at something darker. But the story now seems to involve people coming out of the woodwork to say this or that about where Bush was or wasn't. And the problem with that is that there are so many people who hate Bush and/or crave attention, that there's a serious risk of taking a false lead too seriously and burying the real story. I hope that my side plays scrupulously fair here. Otherwise we're just gonna end up with a left-wing troopergate story.

That said, I hope there's more dirt there to be found and that people find it and rub Bush's nose in it.

Cooohoool!

The National Security Archive has updated its collection of documents relating to the Iraq/WMD debate. Looks very helpful. Check it out.

The Onion | Saddam Hussein Rules Over Cell With Iron Fist

Funny.

Advice to the pro-war camp

Still looking to justify the war? Tired of looking stupid in front of your friends? I've assembled a few handy tips to bear in mind as you compose your pro-war arguments. They won't save you, since your position is wrong. But they will at least guarantee that you're worth the trouble to refute.

First, please, please, please don't base your argument on a link between AQ and Iraq. If you absolutely must then remember that you need to do more than demonstrate a link. You need to demonstrate that it was a priority to deal with this particular aspect of the war against AQ, such a priority that it was worth diverting resources and attention away from countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

If you want to make the prudential case for war, don't focus on what we now know Iraq had (zilcho, baby). You'll just look silly. You need to point out that, although the intelligence was contradictory, there was a serious case to be made for Saddam Hussein's intention to dominate the Persian Gulf someday. Point out that Iraq was extremely hard to monitor after the inspection process broke down in 1998, that Saddam Hussein clearly did have nuclear ambitions in the past, and that it would have been downright imprudent to assume that he had just dropped them. You may point out that although the U.S. outspent Iraq 400 to 1 on their respective militaries, a few nuclear armed missiles in Iraq's pocket would have been a serious force multiplier, since Iraq would have been able to threaten Saudi oil fields with them.

Do not - I repeat, do not - argue that it was reasonable to assume that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of becoming a nuclear power. It just wasn't. Rather, argue that if the sanctions had completely crumbled, S.H. would have had considerable oil revenues at his disposal, and these would have made it much easier for him to circumvent the import restrictions which we now know put such a crimp in his style.

(Note: Before you cite the Hussein Kamel defection as part of the Scary Iraqi Story, be sure to actually read the debriefing notes. They don't actually say what you probably thought they said, if your impression of what they said was based on what you remembered other hawks saying they said prior to the war.)

Remember, do not be satisfied with establishing that Iraq would have been dangerous. Alas, you have a tougher roe to hoe than that, my warmongering friend. You need to establish that Iraq would have been more dangerous than all the other dangerous dangers out there, so dangerous that it was worth diverting resources and attention away from all these other dangers. Remember, Iraq was only ever one part of a much larger worry about the proliferation of nuclear technology and fissile material. (Tip: Remember to say something about Pakistan.) Your argument needs to explain why it made sense to focus so much time and energy dealing with this one aspect of this larger problem.

Finally, when you're making the prudential argument, focus your energy on nuclear weapons. Casual talk about WMDs which slip-slide from chemical weapons to nuclear ones and back is not a way to impress an informed audience. In fact, there are good dialectical reasons for you to stress the differences between such weapons, since the Pentagon used chemical weapons during the fighting in Iraq (napalm).

There was also a humanitarian case for war, and here you have a much better shot at plausibility. Point out that the U.S. stopped the devastation of the marshes in the South of Iraq just in the nick of time, thus reversing one of the great environmental catastrophes of the 20th Century and saving the homeland of the Marsh Arabs. Raise the perfectly reasonable question of why people like Ken Roth insist that a humanitarian intervention could never be justified by serious repression. You have my blessing if you want to say, once or twice, "never? no matter what?". Point out that Iraq lived under the near certainty of a bleak future, whereas now it at least has a chance for something better.

(You might - you just might - get away with claiming that you had no idea before the war how badly Rumsfeld would fuck up the early days of the occupation. This is risky, however. No one, to be fair, foresaw the extent of the fuckup. Still, you did have the example of Afghanistan, its nearly total neglect, and you did have extensive background information about the characters of the principals involved in this sordid farce. Anyhow, use this line of defence sparingly, humbly, and cautiously, if you use it at all.)

As I said, in the humanitarian argument you have a stronger case, because the suffering in Iraq was so serious and widespread that it justified the contemplation of very serious remedies. But for the love of Pete, don't think that being morally serious is as simple as putting on your sad face when you hear stories of repression and then pushing as hard as you can for any old war. Being morally serious requires more than the simple thought, "By golly, someone ought to do something about that." Being morally serious requires that you give a convincing account connecting the war you advocate to the alleviation of the suffering which is supposed to justify it. So here is your task: You must explain why it is likely that Iraq will avoid a serious sectarian struggle which turns it, over the next 5 or 10 years, into another Lebanon. No points here for taunting your opponents for lacking faith in Arab culture. You weren't exaggerating when you spoke of Iraq's brutalization at S.H.'s hands, so don't hesitate now to think through what the lingering effects of that brutalization are likely to be, and how much effort and time will be required to undo them. Don't flinch from asking, in this connection, how likely Bush is to actually do what is necessary, especially when many of the crucial tests come during an election year. The mere chance for something better than Saddam is not sufficient to justify his overthrow. You need to establish that it was reasonable to think that that something better would come about. Otherwise you just threw the dice on the fate of 25 million souls.

You're right to be defensive, since things are going badly. But take heart. The regime in Iraq was so awful that it ought to have provoked a visceral response in every decent person prompting them to think seriously about its removal. There was a serious issue here, which is now being clouded by a great deal of unhelpful rhetoric. If you take my advice, you probably still won't have a successful argument for war, but what you will have is a position worth debating.

I sent a letter to the NYTimes today:

In a recent column fantasizing about President Bush's interview with Tim Russert, David Brooks feels obliged to trot out that old canard that liberals have trouble grasping evil. As a self-identifying liberal, I would like to assure Mr. Brooks that I have no such trouble. I cringe when Mr. Bush uses the word not because I disagree with him about the application of the term to Saddam Hussein or bin Laden, but because Bush's use of the word is usually a prelude to some new piece of stupidity. It's not evil I have trouble with, Mr. Brooks, it's inept and incompetent responses to it.

A friend of mine has printed up a bunch of nice looking t-shirts which read "No Bush in '04".

Take a peek here to buy online. Or write to him at notbushin04 at hotmail and get it at a lower cost.

He's not looking to make a profit. He'd just like to make back his initial investment.

Steven Aftergood's invaluable Secrecy News hits the bible thumpin', war-mongerin' Bushies where it hurts:

INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT IN THE BIBLE

It is often noted that espionage is an ancient enterprise with
roots at least as old as the Bible.

But what is rarely if ever recalled is that intelligence
oversight and accountability are *also* part of the Biblical
record, and that the Deity imposed a severe penalty upon those
who distorted intelligence and inflated threats.

A Washington Times op-ed writer today attempted to defend the
CIA by citing the first half of the Biblical precedent.

"Some Americans find in the CIA a convenient scapegoat, failing
to recognize that throughout history espionage has been used to
protect peoples from their enemies. Ancient Israel had spies:
'Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan [to see]
whether the cities they dwell in are camps or strongholds.'
(Numbers 13:17-19)," wrote Ernest W. Lefever of the Ethics and
Public Policy Center in the Washington Times, Feb. 11, p. A18.

What Dr. Lefever failed to mention is that the spies sent by
Moses came back with a hyped National Intelligence Estimate,
with unhappy results.

"The land, through which we have gone, to spy it out, is a land
that devours its inhabitants... and we seemed to ourselves like
grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them." (Numbers 13: 32-33).
Only Joshua and Caleb dissented from this majority view.

Because they wittingly or unwittingly exaggerated the
capabilities of the Canaanites, God sentenced the spies to
death, displaying no judicial deference to the intelligence
agencies.

"The men who brought an unfavorable report about the land died
by a plague before the Lord," we are told.

"But Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh alone remained
alive, of those men who went to spy out the land." (Numbers
14: 36-37).

U.S. Military May Run Out Of Money

Whoops! (But look at where this story is reported. It's just a bunch of whining, pinko commies.)

(via The Agonist)

Here's the condensed version of the recent news about same-sex marriage: Bush is in trouble on every front, and even many of his strongest supporters are struggling to contain their disappointment. So strap on your seatbelts, cause it's gonna take a whole lotta gay-bashing for Bush to win this one.

Uh oh. Scandal up in Canada. But throughout the entire thing, Canadian legislators are demonstrating a high level of maturity:

Liberal MPs backed Mr. Martin by rising to give him eight standing ovations, while Conservative MPs derided them by making seal noises.

Nice touch, those seal noises.

This is likely to be the funniest review of the Frum/Perle book.

In fact, it's the funniest review of anything I've read in a long time.

(Via . . . I haven't the faintest idea, but thanks whoever you are.)

Well, I seem to be cured.

A while ago I picked up Christopher Hitchens' book A Long Short War or A Short Long War or whatever and read about half of it while riding around on the subway. There is real evidence in the book that Hitchens genuinely cares about the well-being of Iraqis, which is more than I can say for a great many pro-war folks. Still, not a single piece in the book is free of idiotic remarks, fallacious inferences and all the rest. There's precious little honest argument, and almost no attempt to actually engage with positions other than his own. There is, in fact, almost no evidence that he even understands the more plausible anti-war arguments, since his attention is riveted nearly continually by the weakest and silliest anti-war arguments. As I've said in the past, it's fair enough to pick your targets, especially if you have personal reasons for venting at them (as Hitchens does). What's not fair - or honest - is pretending that these are the only reasons someone might have for opposing the war, or that in discussing and refuting the stupid reasons you've made a convincing case for anything. Hitchens even managed to take positions I agreed with and mar them in some way or another. But whereas in the past - as this post and this post make clear - I had been enraged by Hitchens, I noticed that this time I felt mostly undisturbed.

So, I've given up on Hitchens, though I may still read him from time to time to see if he's recovered. But main thing to see is this: It's really Hitchens who's given up on himself. No one who took himself seriously could write something like this.