The following are commonly recognized as U.S. foreign policy mistakes - not by everyone, mind you, but by many mainstream thinkers: Supporting the coup in Iran in the 50s and then the Shah up to the revolution; supporting the anti-monarchist coup in Iraq in the 60s; backing Saddam Hussein during the 80s; energetically fueling the rise of Islamic fundamentalism during the 80s to try and counter communism in general, and the Soviets in Afganistan; backing brutal dictators throughout Central and South America because they promised to hold back communism.

There's more, but that gives you an idea. What many mainstream apologists say about this is, "We now know that was a bad idea - it wasn't so clear at the time."

And that's false. Lots of people knew at the time that these policies were mistaken and dangerously counterproductive.

So what will we look back on a generation from now and say "We now know it was a bad idea - it wasn't so clear at the time"? Well, lots of things, of course. But one is U.S. policy in Central Asia. We know now - right fucking now - that the policy is a mistake. And it will be false to say that we didn't know - or couldn't have known - that that's the case.

Read this for details.

No government which actually took the Chomsky-Wolfowitz Theory of Root Causes seriously would behave this way. The theory really is right: Supporting authoritarian governments which violate human rights in the name of U.S. foreign policy imperatives is dangerous and counterproductive in the long run.

We know this. We know this right fucking now and there are no excuses.

Since I'm in a fair and balanced mood today, I'd like to point out how shitty Canadian corporate behaviour abroad so often is. The Canadian government never tires of glorying in its wonderful reputation, but is usually too corrupt and unprincipled to deal with any of the counterexamples.

Here is one fine counterexample. Spread it around. The only way to change this sort of thing is to shame the appropriate people.

Question: If you were George W. Bush and you wanted to strike a blow against the popular idea that you're a mere puppet whose strings are masterfully played by your sinister VP . . . would you really want to insist that you're only going to appear before the 9/11 commission with your VP holding your hand?

Who do you think he asked for advice on this one?

John Gray will rue the day he tried to fuck with Gavin Sheridan.

Well, I'm shocked. It turns out that the U.S. is not, as a matter of international law, supposed to detain people in Guantanamo, at least in the way it has so far. This, according to a U.N. committee on human rights.

I know, I know. Doesn't the U.N. have bigger - or, um, more offending - fish to fry? And what credibility can it possibly claim when Syria gets a spot on human rights committees? And so on and on.

But there's a serious point here. There are occasional calls to reform the U.N. and give its human rights claims more teeth - the sort of thing that would put Syria and other countries on the hot seat. I'm all for that. Let's not fool ourselves, though. The U.S. would also be reluctant to see genuine reforms, since genuine reforms would make criticisms like the one I mentioned above all the more difficult to brush off. I think the Bush admin's treatment of the ICC gives a decent idea of how it would treat any really fair and open reform of international measures to promote human rights. That's a pity, because for all its failures, the U.S. really is crucial to the development of the kinds of norms and practices that would benefit everyone in the long run. That's sort of why I harp on this so much.

Mulling this over yesterday reminded me of a book I read a while ago, Richard Falk's The Great Terror War. Falk wrote the book after 9/11. It's a serious attempt to think through some of the difficulties raised by 9/11 and especially the implied threat in 9/11 of something far worse to come. If I remember correctly, one of Falk's main points is that the threat of "mega-terrorism," as he calls it, justifies some modification to existing international law. The solution here is not to just break international law, but to attempt to craft some principled and suitably restricted modifications to it.

Well, the devil is in the details, of course. But the basic point seems fine to me. The virtue of Falk's approach is that he balances a willingness to recognize the difficulty of fighting "mega-terrorism" (the phrase just didn't catch on) against the obvious worry that many countries, including the U.S., would abuse their new powers in the name of fighting terror.

It is my sad duty to report that the U.S. has done pretty much the reverse of what Falk recommends. The administration's official position is that it is following international law in Guantanamo (because the captives don't qualify as legitimate prisoner's of war). If you think about it, this implies - rather perversely and contrary to what the admin actually believes - that existing international law crafted years ago under entirely different circumstances is perfectly suited to handling fresh challenges involved in fighting an international group of loosely organized terrorist cells.

On the other hand, the administration's unofficial position is that it hardly matters if the detentions are illegal. The administraton demonstrates this contempt for the law every time it brushes off fundamental challenges to the detentions - as if it weren't obvious that the Geneva Convention requires that the detainees be brought before a tribunal, at the very least, to determine their status. (I've read conflicting reports about conditions at the camps. I'm not sure what to believe, but the point is that the conditions are irrelevant - or rather, the fundamental objection is not to the conditions of detention, but rather to their legal justification. Another thing to note is that it was the military brass that pushed the hardest for the Geneva Convention, and many of the better features of Guantanamo are probably due to its intervention.)

The result of all this sqeamishness about international law has been deeply unsatisfying. In a situation where the administration might have been able to seize the momentum to refashion crucial legal tools necessary for fighting a long struggle against terrorist groups like AQ, it chose at once to deny the need for these crucial tools while at the time unnecessarily undermining the legitimacy of its own behaviour.

This isn't a problem without consequences, either. The finer points of international law can make a huge difference in how well the U.S. is able to coordinate its counterterrrorism activities with other countries. To take one modest example which most Americans will likely never have heard about, there was an enormous fuss in Canada when Canadian troops in Afghanistan handed over suspected AQ members directly to U.S. troops. Why, you ask? Because doing so made Canadian troops complicit in a clear violation of the Geneva Convention - a rather bigger deal up North than it is here. The Canadian government no doubt took heed of the heat it took over this, as, I'm sure, did other governments. If you think that doesn't make a difference, think again.

Ah, lost opportunities and squandered good-will . . . We're in the vicinity of the defining quality of the Bush administration.

This column by William Safire covers a bunch of stuff that we already knew about the UN during the 90s plus other stuff that I hadn't heard before. Unfortunately, because it's William Safire it may be partly hallucinated. I could always wait for the correct- oh, never mind.

Anyway, the outlines of the story are clear, even if Safire tells it slant. The fact is, the UN was seriously and progressively corrupted by Iraq during the sanctions regime. That's a big story and I think anyone who hopes that the UN might some day be a credible institution should favour a thorough examination of who did what and when and for how much.

The answer to the question of whether 9/11 was preventable matters for lots of reasons. Here's one that people aren't talking about much: The more preventable you think it was simply relying on the security measures and laws in place before 9/11, the less inclined you may be to support the Patriot act and other administration terrorism-combatting measures.

I think this really influences the admin's calculations. For it has repeatedly insisted that the newer measures are absolutely necessary to prevent another 9/11 - which is harder to do if you could have prevented 9/11 without the same measures.

The point I'm making isn't supposed to be decisive or anything. For you might argue - as the admin has - that even if 9/11 could have been prevented with the measures in place at the time, 9/11 woke everyone up to the possibility of more terrifying future attacks which wouldn't be prevented by the measures in place before 9/11. Fair enough. I'm making a point about politics, as much as about logic.

The best response I've seen so far to the Bush admin's smear attack on Clarke is the title to this post.

Forget morality for a moment. There are really solid prudential reasons why being a party in any way to this is downright dangerous for the U.S. in the long run.

I understand that Uzbekistan is strategically important. But it's not worth it. It's just not worth it.

Saudi Arabia to Bush's re-election campaign: Pththththt!

Seriously, I'm no economist, but isn't cutting oil production when prices are already pretty damn high, and at a time like this, just a big kick in the crotch for the U.S.'s economy?

Note to enterprising journalists: Keep a very close eye on U.S. oil reserve levels in the next few months. If they drop quite a bit, you're probably seeing the results of a short-term effort to disguise the extent of the problem until the election is over.

Oh sure, I talk a great talk about social justice and fighting poverty. But how can I know for sure that if I were a billionaire I wouldn't just hunker down and play with this all day in my indoor swimming pool?

If you're an eccentric trillionaire who reads this blog and you're into pointless social experiments . . . well, call me. There's only one way to really settle this question.

Back to work. I swear.

I interrupt my holy-crap-I'm-so-busy silence to confess that yesterday's two full-page ads in the NYT for Linux alternatives to Microsoft gave me a big boner.

Look out, MS. A rag tag band of computer rebels has created billions of dollars worth of OS value, and they're acomin' ta get ya!

That is all.

I'm still puzzling over something that I unfortunately don't have time to explore now in any sort of detail. I think proponents of intervention in Iraq have been very sceptical that Iraq's sovereignty could have counted for much before the war, given the character of the Ba'ath regime under Iraq. If recognizing sovereignty implies some sort of deference to the regime which claims it, then why not think that the depraved character of the regime makes any sort of deference, including recognition of sovereignty, out of question? Noticing this, the thinking goes, will help us to see why the U.S. had the right to intervene for humanitarian reasons.

Here's a question I've asked before, but not seen discussed elsewhere let alone answered: How would we have felt if Iran had intervened in 2003 on a humanitarian pretext to depose Saddam Hussein?

I have to confess, as much as I dislike Saddam Hussein, and as much as I'm attracted to the idea that Iraq's sovereignty couldn't have counted for much under Saddam Hussein, I don't think I would have been very happy about it. The fact is, I don't trust Iran's leaders. I wouldn't have trusted their intentions, or had much faith in their ability to do much good in Iraq (beyond, of course, getting rid of Saddam Hussein).

If any pro-war types are reading this, I'm curious: Do you share my reaction? If you do, do you notice that your dislike for Saddam Huseein can survive undiminished even as you frown at the thought of a humanitarian intervention to depose him?

So this is something I suppose I wouldn't mind seeing discussed a bit. One moral you might draw from this is that some (popular) accounts of humantarian intervention move too quickly from the claim that Iraq's sovereignty was compromised by the despicable character of the regime to the view that the U.S. therefore had the right to intervene. For even if a country's sovereignty is as compromised as can be, we might still doubt that it's a sort of "humanitarian sitting duck" - that just anyone has the right to intervene.

I've written about ths once before. But so what. I'm still mulling it over. And I haven't seen anyone else ask the question in exactly this way. Any help appreciated.

That's the homework for the day. Think about it and let me know.

Now I have to go mark an enormous stack of exams.

p.s. Spare me the outrage about comparing Iran and the U.S. I don't mean they're exactly alike in every respect. In some ways, Iran would have been a more appropriate intervener; in other ways, of course, a less appropriate one. Enumerating those differences, and reflecting on why they make the difference they do, is one of the points of the exercise.

John Quiggin asks why no one is talking about Zarqawi anymore.

And it's a damn good question.

Light posting ahead . . . I'm really busy. Amuse yourself by clicking on the linked blogs to the right.

And don't forget to buy your "No Bush in '04" thongs. Link also to the right.

Newbie blogger Noam Chomsky writes:

There is reason to believe -- as Halliday and von Sponeck had argued -- that if the vicious sanctions regime had been ended the population of Iraq would have been able to send Saddam Hussein to the same fate as other murderous gangsters supported by the US and UK: Ceausescu, Suharto, Marcos, Duvalier, Chun, Mobutu.... -- quite a rogue's gallery, some of them easily comparable to Saddam, to which new names are being added daily by the same Western leaders, whose values are unchanged. If so, both murderous regimes could have been ended without invasion. Postwar inquiries, such as David Kay's, add weight to these beliefs by revealing how shaky Saddam's control of the country was in the last few years.

We may have our own subjective judgments about this matter, but we should at least have the honesty to recognize that they are completely irrelevant. Completely. Unless the population is at least given the opportunity to overthrow a murderous tyrant, as they did in the case of the other members of the rogue's gallery supported by the US and UK (including the current incumbents), there is no justification for resort to outside force to do so. Another truism, which has repeatedly been pointed out -- and systematically ignored within the doctrinal system.

I would like to know what those reasons are. Just about the only thing Saddam Hussein was good at was maintaining power. I do think that the sanctions regime helped to further entrench Saddam Hussein in power. And we'll never know what might have happened if the sanctions had been lifted. But all we have to go on here are reasonable guesses, and Chomsky's parallels aren't especially encouraging.

Chomsky also focuses in this post about the sanctions regime. I don't read enough Chomsky to know exactly what his full view of the matter is. I expect if he had a bit more time he would have mentioned that the deliberate destruction of the civilian infrastructure during the actual Gulf War campaign caused many of the deaths in the early days of the sanctions. Sometimes those deaths get lumped in with the general problems with the sanctions (Kenneth Pollack's book has some great examples of this). And, I think Chomsky would agree, that lets coalition military and political leaders off the hook way too easily. These were war crimes, don't forget. It's also worth noting that the sanctions regime grew more effective as time went on - in the year before the war there were credible reports that health was improving in most parts of the country.

What I'm less confident Chomsky would say - or at least be inclined to dwell on at any length - is the extent to which Saddam Hussein's own response to the sanctions regime damaged the country. He played all kinds of stupid, pointless games precisely because he saw that it worked to his advantage to have his Iraqis dying under the sanctions regime. That's also an important part of the story.

The Bush Administration: weak and unassertive.

Why would you be so willing to piss off France and Germany and yet so absolutely terrified of uttering even the slightest hint of criticism against Saudi Arabia.

Oh, how I yearn for an "Old Saudi Arabia/New Saudi Arabia" comment from Rumsfeld, if only because it would get him fired.

I've noticed in the past year that an increasing number of pundits, professional and amateur, are claiming to have supported the full-scale invasion of Baghdad back in 1991. For some the point is "better late than never" for others it's "too late now, but don't think me soft". I might be wrong, but from where I sit the ranks of the "full deal, first time" crowd seems to swell as the particulars of the case recede into the mists of history and memory. If you'll indulge me in a hackneyed comparison, this reminds me a bit of attendance at Woodstock, which underwent a curious inflation as the years went by. Of course, some people did want the full deal for Iraq back then, and I'm sure most people are being sincere, but many of these claims strike me as the pundit's version of, "Man, I was there. I used the can right after Jimi."

It's worth sorting through the retrospective case for the whole deal to distinguish the plausible elements from the elements of sheer fantasy. I'll bet you can guess already which I think predominates.

First the positives. Back in 1991 folks in the South of Iraq were generally much keener for the U.S. They hadn't yet been stabbed in the back, slaughtered with impunity and then ground down over a decade of sanctions and neglect. Indeed, the entire country was still much keener on the U.S. in general, and in much better shape by almost every measure. Rebuilding would have been correspondingly that much easier. Remember also that the sanctions played an important role in the maintenance of Saddam's power, since he was able to use the resulting corruption to enrich his clan and tighten belts everywhere else. Interestingly, the Kurds were less supportive of the U.S. than they are now, since their betrayal was in the not very distant past, and they had yet to benefit from the protective umbrella of air support that George the elder reluctantly bestowed upon them. But on balance, in this respect the U.S. had a lot more going for it back then than it does now.

If it had taken place in 1991 the full deal would also have come at a better time, as an immediate response to something unequivocally wrong, rather than as an ad hoc war tied to an unrelated threat. The U.S. had assembled an impressive coalition - savour the memory - and enjoyed quite a bit of support in the region, at least compared to now. The U.N. had given its stamp of approval. And don't forget that back in the day the U.S. had a much larger military, so it would have had the boots on the ground to ensure immediate stability in the aftermath of a regime-toppling invasion.

Moreover, the full deal would have obviated the need for the crippling sanctions, the cat and mouse inspections game, the gradual corruption of the entire region as Saddam bought off the various players with oil and promises of more oil, and many other consequences that not even the mother of all battles could love.

Fine. But I think that many pundits are holding this rosy picture in their minds and then adding more of their favourite details without much regard for how the whole is supposed to hang together. For one thing, as the advocates of ad hoc coalitions are always reminding us, broad coalitions are fragile things built on compromises. The fact is that most regional support for the coalition - think especially of Saudi Arabia - was only built on the explicit promise and the honest expectation that George the elder would never try anything as crass as democracy-building in the Middle East (See Kuwait, post 1991 restoration). If George had marched on Baghdad, the coalition would have fallen apart, or at least undergone a dramatic thinning at exactly the time it needed allies in the region the most. (And yes, I'm implicitly conceding that this time around, it would have been very hard to get together a genuinely multilateral democracy-promoting invasion of Iraq.)

Recall also that the first time around the State Department, fearful of a leak which would undermine the coalition, basically refrained from any planning for a new regime in Baghdad. This time, the uber-hawks chucked out the wisdom accumulated over a decade of peacekeeping missions. But remember, in 1991 there was no planning, and no decade of intensive peacekeeping missions to look back on for lessons. I'm not suggesting that they would have been flying completely blind, just that inexperience can be functionally equivalent to the kind of the arrogance that turns its back on experience. The Greeks used to say that you should practice pottery on a small jar. Iraq was a jumbo-sized pottery project for people who hadn't worked much with clay in a long time.

Rumsfeld's post war plan of winging it might have been an error on a world-historical scale, but we should also bear in mind that the capture of Baghdad itself, and the toppling of the regime, was an extraordinarily impressive military feat. Those of us, present company included, who fretted about a bloody street-by-street fight through Baghdad were proven spectacularly wrong, thank goodness. But as far as I can tell, much of that strategy was developed in the light of fairly recent military experience and made possible by high-tech communication systems which weren't available in 1991. The plan was also developed as a direct consequence of, and partly to provide evidence for, Rumsfeld's idiosyncratic views about modern warfare. Why think that the toppling of Baghdad would have been as quick and easy in 1991? Well, as I suggested, I think daydreaming pundits are holding fixed the elements of the story they like and substituting better elements from imagination when it suits them. Isn't punditry fun, kids?

Remember too that back in 1991 Saddam's military was both larger and far better equipped than it was more than a decade later. The main part of the army might well have turned on Saddam and joined the U.S. - after all, much of the regular army mutinied after 1991 on a hint from George the elder. But the Republican Guard fought hard even in lousy conditions. If the Guard had been withdrawn into the city I shudder to think of how things might have turned out. It's quite possible possible that you would then have had a brutal, drawn out siege played by Saddam for all it was worth on the world stage as Georgie's coalition fell apart for once and for all.

But suppose that the coalition had been able to decapitate the regime quickly and easily, the coalition had held together, the Guard had capitulated, and a large standing coalition army had been able to hold the peace in the immediate aftermath. And forget the inconvenient fact that George the elder had zero interest in democracy promotion. What would the prospects for success have been in that case?

Well, obviously better than the picture I've painted so far. But still, I think, problematic. On the one hand, the whole country, and especially the South, would probably have been more amenable to compromise than it is now. Even so, it would not exactly have been smooth sailing. Possible complications include: strong tensions as the imperatives of demography clashed with Sunni Arab historical entitlements, lack of support in the region, the meddling of Iran, alarm in Turkey, insurgency from nationalists, and so on. In other words, many of the same things the U.S. faces now.

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait presented the world with an extraordinarily thorny issue, and none of the options available to anyone were especially good. Some time I'll try to write about the other options; just to give you a sneak preview, they all sucked for various reasons. But the pundits who fantasize about how great it would have been if the U.S. had just done it right the first time - well, as people who were "at Woodstock" will tell you, not every flashback is reliable.

Innocent question about Richard Clarke: Clarke's very credible testimony at the 9/11 Commission has been a nightmare for the Bush admin. Of course, I would say that, wouldn't I?

But there are a few things about his remarks that puzzle me. For example, I'm not sure what to make of Clarke's story about being buttonholed by the President in the situation room and told, semi-coherently, to investigate an Iraq-AQ connection. As some people have pointed out, there's not really anything wrong with being asked to double-check something like that. But more importantly, Clarke describes the President as threatening and intimidating when he asks the question.

Does Clarke strike you as the sort of guy who would be intimidated by Bush?

No, he does not strike me that way either. I suppose that's why I find the spin he puts on this story a bit odd.

. . . More on Sudan from The Head Heeb, a great source of Africa news, among other things.

UPDATE: And for those who just can't get enough, there is also this.

Show me the Nuance!

(If I were a better man, I would not have written that header.)

Mr. Maguire (Minute Man) has graciously responded (to this) in the comments section of his blog. Watch as the bristles slowly go down on both our necks:

I'll follow the link, say "thank you" for the kind words as I skip past them, and highlight this:

...recently, MM's blog has been awfully limp. My guess is that this has to do with the total collapse of any rational basis for trust in George W. Bush. Of late, MM has been flailing at Kerry, which is perfectly respectible, but unless I'm mistaken there just isn't the same love for the task I used to see in his writing.

I agree that it looks like a long spring and summer ahead of us. "Us", of course, being anyone who sticks around as my morale is ground down to a fine powder.

Anyway, I appreciate the clarification. Since members of the lying, crooked RAM hear explanation (1) a lot (hey, follow his links), I got a litle bristly.

On a sheer tastelessness front, however, well, I threw in the "glazed over" to warn folks that plot twists lay ahead. Since it was in there for shock value, I can't complain if folks were shocked. I also tossed in the bit about "it may be a wonderful opportunity for the US to show it is a multilateral do-gooder" just to show my sensitive, caring side, and you can bet that won't happen again anytime soon.

Now, there is a rule about never, ever explaining jokes, and I won't break that now. However, let me respond to this:

Look, can you imagine someone writing a post like this about mass murder elsewhere in the world?

No, I can't either. But the story *is* in Africa, and I have been reading versions of it since the Biafran babies in the early 70's. Tribal warfare with famine and starvation as a military tactic are common in Africa and rare elsewhere. My perception is that the American public is de-sensitized, and I chose a fairly ghastly way to illustrate that.

Secondly, I am intrigued by the notion that more folks in this country can identify Jar Jar Banks, and are familiar with the controversy around him, then will ever know about the "janjaweed". Steven Spielberg made "Schindler's List", and good for him, but is anyone in Hollywood ever going to make a big film about the Sudan specifically, or African atrocities generally? "Black Hawk Down" was not really about the locals, I don't think. "The Killing Fields" obviously doesn't count, and ties in to our post-Vietnam angst.

So, big finish, do I really think rape and murder are funny? Let me get back to you. Did I choose an arguably tasteless way to illustrate some of the challenges Mr. Kristof might encounter on his current crusade to rally the American public? I think so.

And I still say, we are not going to war against the janjaweed.

If you've been following this, I objected to a post of Maguire's. He responded. I tried to clarify my position. He clarified his.

Folks, just feel the nuance!

If I can just make a few more comments before Maguire decides for once and for all that he's sorry he ever acknowledged my existence . . .

First, Maguire seems to treat all of Africa as of a piece: the whole place is always going to pot and what the hell can you do? This is an idea with real consequences, most of them unfortunate. For example, it was the idea that the U.S.'s experience in Somalia shed helpful light on the situation in Rwanda in 1994 that led the Clinton people to conclude it was better to do nothing. In fact, Somalia's political culture was (and is) utterly unlike Rwanda's and thinking the two cases relevantly alike was about as silly as trying to predict the U.S.'s behaviour from closely studying Peru.

(Sorry, but I can't leave Rwanda that quickly. I'm not an expert on the region, but the reading I've done convinces me that the case probably offered one of history's all time bargain basement resources-to-lives-saved deals - even if you ignore the role that the genocide had in destabilizing neighbouring countries and plunging the region into a bloody war. Too bad the lives weren't strategically significant. The Hutu Power government had an anxious eye on world opinion, especially France's and the U.S.'s, during the buildup to the genocide. They were probably highly deterrable. Moreover, even jamming radio stations or bombing a few of them would have saved thousands and thousands of lives.)

There are times when intervention is sensible and times when it's unlikely to do much good. I haven't the faintest idea whether an intervention would be useful now in the Sudan. Frankly, I doubt it, but I'm not really sure. A full and careful case for intervention would have to consider the prospects for success, peaceful alternatives, past behaviour, the current burdens and committments of the would-be interveners, and so on. But the main thing is that while much of Africa is a mess, it's also highly differentiated politically and culturally. So it can be deeply misleading to try to generalize about the continent.

Second, notice how quickly Maguire moves from talk of intervention to talk of doing nothing. It wouldn't be fair of me to suggest that this is a settled tendency on Maguire's part. I haven't read his site carefully enough to say. So let me just say that this basic tendency is extremely common. The problem with it is that there is a usually a whole range of measures short of an intervention that are often open to parties who genuinely wish to make a difference to some troubled area. In the case of the Sudan, these might include: support for Chad as it copes with a refuge crisis, publicization of the issue internationally, targetted sanctions, organized diplomatic pressure, the right kind of incentives, and so on.

If I can briefly break my rule and free associate about another region of Africa, it's now pretty clear that three million people died in central Africa over the last few years in a war fueled very much by demand for resources which were snapped up by companies from Western countries (and non-Western countries, of course). Putting an end to that would not have dried up the conflict right away, but it's the sort of measure which is realistic and achievable but which falls well short of an intervention.

Finally, I can't resist twitting Maguire for his remarks about holding on to support for Bush. Now that I've got his attention - if I still have his attention - I might as well ask him: What in the world is there left for a supporter of Bush to believe in? That Bush restored honour and integrity to the W.H.? That Bush would bravely hold the line on domestic spending? That Bush would attack terra effectively?

I admit that I live a blinkered little world in which people willing to praise Bush are as rare as mercury-free tuna. (The last time I actually heard someone say something nice about Bush in person was a few months ago on the subway. He was a drunk, homeless fellow whose admiration for Bush seemed rooted mainly the latter's willingness to kill Arabs - at least judging by the things that he was shouting.) So perhaps my astonishment at Maguire's stamina on this issue is an artifact of my limited experience. I am also, I blush to confess, a Canadian. But what appeal could Bush possibly hold for someone who actually follows the news? I'm hard-pressed to work up much enthusasm for Kerry, but for Pete's sake, what would it take for Maguire to abandon Bush?

Isn't the least demoralizing position for a Republican at this point something like: "Yeah, Bush has deeply disappointed me. He's screwed up everything he's attempted and betrayed the principles that led me to the Republican party in the first place. In order to save the credibility of the party, and my own damn credibility, I'm recommending that we cut him loose. This pains me, since I have nothing but contempt for the losers in the Democratic party who will no doubt do things I hate. But I've come to see that Bush is bad in a way that transcends politics. And anyone who believes in accountability has to believe that the buck stops with him. Let's cut our losses, regroup, develop credible alternatives and push for a real candidate the next time around."

I'm being condescending, I understand. But it's the best I can do in the circumstances. And I'm right, no?

The Minute Man detects furrowed brows over at See Why. The brows were furrowed here over this. Minute Man responds:

UPDATE: Oh, dear, a furrowed brow. Follow the links to see why. I'm not sure what is being insinuated with the "Hint", but that is why I have a comments section. I would be especially delighted if the explanation noted my post that, by non-coincidence, followed this one.

MM is right that my hint is unclear. Here is the original post, hint and all:

Wow, this is really tasteless.

What it is about this case that makes it safe to make ignorant and tasteless jokes about ethnic cleansing, rape and mass murder? (Hint: The events are occurring in Africa.)

I regret the "hint", because it's multiply ambiguous. To take two extremes, it might mean either:

1. Hey, I betcha if we jump MM in the parking lot and steal his wallet, we'll find his secret KKK membership card - and who knows what else?

2. Wow, that's really insensitive. The mass killing is going on as we type. Do you think we might hold off on the Ewok jokes and complaints about glazed eyes at least until it's over? Look, can you imagine someone writing a post like this about mass murder elsewhere in the world? Run through the substitutions yourself: "Nicolas Kristoff warns us about . . . as our eyes glaze over." It's not impossible, since people are tasteless about a lot of things. Still, it's much easier to find this sort of tastelessness when people write about Africa. Would that it were not so.

For the record, it was the second interpretation I had in mind. One hint that that is so is that I complained that the post was really "tasteless", rather than "racist". Still, the topic is pretty charged, so I might have made that clearer.

That said, it really was tasteless. Most people who have a blog end up writing stupid or insensitive things. So why not just admit it and move on?

(A glimmer of doubt creeps in: What if it's just that Kristof bores MM, and not ethnic cleansing? Well, no one could be faulted for finding Kristof boring. Still, it's unclear and the Ewok jokes don't exactly point in a promising direction. MM seems to perk up at the chance to make a 12-year-old's joke about Kristof's subject.)

Anyway, a general point about MM. He's usually wrong, but he can also be very funny. That's why the lucky devil has a spot on my blogroll. If I wanted to explain the appeal to my liberal friends, I would say "He'll have you laughing out loud - through gritted teeth." I even nominated him for some stupid blog award or other once (stupid, because I was crushed by the competition when my own site was judged). But recently, MM's blog has been awfully limp. My guess is that this has to do with the total collapse of any rational basis for trust in George W. Bush. Of late, MM has been flailing at Kerry, which is perfectly respectible, but unless I'm mistaken there just isn't the same love for the task I used to see in his writing. Can any sentient person really throw themselves heart and soul into any part of an effort to retain George W. Bush? My hope is that Kerry will win, the Republicans will regroup and present themselves as a more credible alternative, and MM will grow funny again, just like the old days.

UPDATE: Oh yes, and kudos to MM for not sulking about "political correctness".

Bush Fulfills Campaign Promise

In three years, Bush has managed to bring together an astonishing coalition of critics, from Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill right on down to Noam Chomsky. That is an astonishing accomplishment, matched only by Nixon at the peak of his powers.

Give the man some credit. He's a uniter and not a divider.

Wow, this is really tasteless.

What it is about this case that makes it safe to make ignorant and tasteless jokes about ethnic cleansing, rape and mass murder? (Hint: The events are occurring in Africa.)

UPDATE: Get yer latest here.

Thanks to a link a week or two ago from Brad DeLong, I've been enjoying this very odd blog recently.

It's very, very odd. But funny.

Via Robert Tagorda, I see these remarks by Peter Feaver, which I'd like to riff on briefly:

[Madeleine] Albright is partly correct; there was a pre-9/11 mindset that shaped Clinton-era responses. The mind-set was "counterterrorism as law-enforcement." The role of the military was at best a supporting one. Moreover, because the uniformed military themselves opposed a military role, the law enforcement mind-set was reinforced by Clinton's pathological civil-military relations. Even if President Clinton wanted to conduct military operations against al Qaeda, he was simply too weak a commander in chief to prevail over a military that wanted nothing to do with a war in Afghanistan.

The Clinton record on military operations was clear: frequent resort to low-risk cruise-missile strikes and high-level bombings, but shunning any form of decisive operations involving ground troops in areas of high risk. The Clinton White House was the most casualty phobic administration in modern times, and this fear of body bags was not lost on Osama bin Laden. Indeed, al Qaeda rhetoric regularly "proved" that the Americans were vulnerable to terrorism by invoking the hasty cut-and-run after 18 Army soldiers died in the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" events in Somalia -- a strategy developed and implemented, ironically enough, by the same Richard Clarke who torments the Bush team today.

So Albright is correct that Operation Enduring Freedom, the campaign to topple the Taliban, was not possible with a commander in chief who was afraid to lead the public to accept the human costs of war.

After quoting a bit more, Tagorda remarks:

Seriously, I think there's something to be said about how Clinton's "pathologies" limited his military options, as well as how Bush's leadership helped the push for decisive action, and they should have probably been raised before the commission. But, at the same time, Feaver seems to put more emphasis on these factors than they deserve. In the end, public awareness is the "elephant in the room." Though we should also examine other dimensions, we should stress that they existed within the broader context of public attitudes at the time.

I'd just like to point out that one of the main reasons for Clinton's uneasy relationship with the military was that his draft-dodging was held against him. It may be hard to remember, but this was a huge issue for many people and Clinton was never allowed to forget it.

I think that's why it drives me so completely bonkers that Bush gets a pass on all the Vietnam stuff. I don't mean he gets a pass in the press - though it's also that. He gets the most leeway in the popular idea that he's a decisive military leader who has some right to prance around on aircraft carriers. And that supposedly gives him much greater leeway to use military force. None of the people who sneered at Clinton for his Vietnam era behaviour are able to work up much resentment at Bush for behaviour that was even less principled in its way than Clinton's. And this shows itself in countless little differences in reporting and public opinion.

So, yeah, there's lots of pathology here. But I'm not sure it's the sort we hold against Clinton or give any credit to Bush for - not at least if we're being consistent.

Heh.

A nice little bit of political jujitsu on the question of same-sex marriage.

Via Metafilter.

Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff to Antonin Scalia:"Tisk tisk, we know where the real ethical quandry is, you naughty boy."

Hope none of them ever have a case before the Supreme Court.

I wonder if this is the sort of unintentional quasi-plagiarism that could happen to anyone. Here is Fred Kaplan, bless his soul, defending Richard Clarke:

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop.

And here is Josh Marshall, bless his soul too, also defending Richard Clarke:

So Cheney's claim is that Clarke "wasn't in the loop ... on a lot of this stuff."

Consider what that means.

Clarke, as we've said, was the counter-terrorism coordinator at NSC. That means he ran the inter-agency process on terrorism issues. Cheney says Clarke wasn't in the loop; but that means that he actually ran the loop.

It's an obvious point, and an obvious retort. Still . . .

Anyway, I've wondered once or twice if Krugman was unconsciously deriving inspiration from Marshall too. The "up-is-down-ism" crack in one of his latest columns struck me as very Marshall-istic in tone.

Just thought I'd point that out.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, and another thing. Why does Marshall cut out the "frankly" in Cheney's comments? That "frankly" is very like Cheney. I have the (perhaps mistaken) impression he says "frankly" a lot in interviews, especially when he's lying.

Just a quick snark: Hitchens was right about at least one thing. Remember John Walker Lindh? The kid joined the Taliban and got right up close to bin Laden lickety-split. After 9/11, Hitchens was one of the few people to point out what an enormous hole this blew in the theory that the B.L was an invisible and untracable international man of mystery. If someone wants to ask a real question at the 9/11 hearings, why don't they bring up Lindh?

Also: I can understand that 9/11 changed a lot of perceptions within government, and that it's best to focus on what happened after 9/11 rather than what happened before it. But was it really so hard to figure out that the US mainland would be targeted by Islamic extremists? I mean, give me a break. My impression may have something to do with the fact that I'm such an outrageous, over-the-top geek that I was reading books on blowback before 9/11. But it's not like that should have put me in a better position to judge these things than the people tasked with the security of the U.S. No?

I really do like Abu Aardvaark. Don't always agree with him, but he is a really wonderful voice in the blogosphere, and someone I learn from regularly. This is yet another example what makes him invaluable: it's a nice explanation of why the U.S.'s media strategy in Iraq is so bloody awful.

Mr. Aardvaark confesses that he's beating a dead horse. Ah yes, but the brute really deserved it.

Hurrah!

Busy, busy. I've got a few crushing deadlines coming up, so I'm going to try to go a little lighter on the blogging. Don't complain! I know you don't read all the posts anyway. Hell, I don't read all the posts. My Proust-like blogging frenzies have gotten a bit out of control lately, and as much as it hurts, from now on I'm going to have to limit myself to 5000 words a day, tops.

By the way, I've updated the post immediately before this one, to ward off a possible misunderstanding (of mine).

One other thing. I read somewhere recently that some rich lawyer blogger was rewarding readers for pointing out spelling mistakes or places where his prose could be improved. He was giving out big bucks too, so I don't know why you're wasting your time here. But, except for the fact that I'm really very broke, it seems like a splendid idea to me. In the year I've been blogging, I think my writing has improved a bit. But it's still so wretched most days I can hardly bear to look at the screen. So if you have any suggestions or corrections or admonishments, by all means send them my way.

Some problems I'm already aware of:

-Tense problems, especially involving subjunctives. "He should have seen that it is wrong to think that it would be fair to . . . . " Help! This just gums up my prose when I'm trying to talk about what would have been right to think about the war and describing things that are still the case. That kind of thing.
-Long, unwieldy sentences. I need to break these up into tasty bite-sized pieces.
-Lame jokes.
-Piss-poor proof-reading.

Anyhow, if you read something that has you wrinkling your nose, cut and paste it into an email and try to shame me into better prose. Thank ya in advance.

The March of Progress Goes On!

Norm has responded to another one of my posts.

Norm's first response to me was a bit of a fiasco (UPDATE: For me, I mean.). I had much unhatched chicken reproduction unit on my face after that one. This one, I think, leaves us both looking just fine - at least if you were disposed to think that before you read it. For the disagreement noted here is a poor, malnourished little thing indeed. Norm mentioned in the course of a post that the anti-war crowd ought to just move on. I responded, agreeing with most of the post, but adding a dissenting note or two. Norm has now pointed out that the dissenting notes have actually gotten a lot of play on his blog. And so they have. Duly noted.

Too much agreement is a bad thing, so let me protest the hook Norm uses as an excuse to get the post going. The hook is a letter in the Guardian:

Asked why she was protesting on Saturday... an anti-war demonstrator replied: "Because I have the right to tell the government that I don't approve of what it did." Fair enough, but the invasion gave the Iraqi people a similar right, which Saddam's continued existence would have denied them. Apparently this hadn't occurred to her. Extraordinary.

Now, you see that's exactly the kind of silliness that had me throwing tantrums at Norm a few months back. Why oh why does the letter writer assume that this hadn't occurred to her? What presumption - what galling presumption - to judge this from a simple remark about the protester's entirely legitimate displeasure with the government! And why does Norm approve of this? Does he not detect an unpleasant echo of the Cold War superhawk's refrain "Why do you hate freedom so?" which always carried with it the implication that to reject his methods was equivalent to hating freedom?

Good golly, it hath driven me mad!

Anyway, as a result of Norm's post, I've just discovered another very interesting looking blog, Short Hope Unfiltered. Interesting, I say, but for that reason it's all the more annoying that it lacks an RSS/Atom feed. Dude, it's 2004 - where's your frickin' feed?

Finally, it seems to me that Norm is now doing warm-up exercises to prepare for the tougher stuff ahead. I don't want to rush him - and I wouldn't presume to dicatate the exact sequence in which he refutes me. For what it's worth, though, it's really this post that I'm dying to see an answer to.

UPDATE: Now that I've slept on it, it occurs to me that I may have misunderstood the letter Norm quotes. If the letter writer is responding to an original piece in the Guardian which I haven't seen, it might be that there is enough context in the original piece to start throwing around blame. If so, then I suppose I would scale down my criticism a bit. Whatever the case, though, it's annoying to be playing this game of look-how-stupid-a-random-person-who-disagrees-with-me-is. It's one thing to point to prominent spokepeople on the left and scrutinize them for stupidity. It's another to pick some person off the street and pretend that a great deal hangs on it either way. A lot of people protested for perfectly good reasons and a lot of people came down on both sides of the issue for wildly idiotic reasons. I think that really ought to be acknowledged.

Mark Felber asks the essential question, and gives a pretty decent answer:

I guess the essential question is this: What would it take for Bush's supporters to believe that the Iraq war was policy from the start, and that the War on Terror and US intelligence were cynically twisted to bolster public support for this agenda? Who would have to leave the administration, write a book, and go on "60 Minutes" with anecdotes and documents before America's Bushies began to smell something rotten?

You can answer in the Comments below, but it's my suspicion that if George W. Bush himself resigned, wrote a book entitled "I Lied to You All, Especially About Iraq," and confessed tearily to Lesley Stahl that he'd been "a very, very bad boy," the next morning Scott McClellan would express President Cheney's disapproval, assert that Bush missed most of the meetings that involved national security and Iraq, and point out that Bush was never really in the administration's inner circle.

And a lot of folks would buy it.

Rice is still refusing to testify under oath at the 9/11 commission.

The piece I've linked to doesn't even offer her explanation. In fact, I've never even read the official reason for this, let alone the real one. They're going to take a huge amount of flak over this - it's a bloody election year, remember. What the hell is going on? What does she know that makes her testifying under oath so dangerous that a rational cost/benefit analysis rules it out of the question?

WTF?

Wow!

Read this extremely interesting interview with Norm Geras. It's far better than a blog entry, and much more to my taste, since he very carefully qualifies many of the claims that he leaves unqualified on his blog. (And I'm a hopeless qualification-addict.)

Very long, but very worth reading.

Via BertramOnline.

An observation: Everyone is gearing themselves up for the admin's anticipated smear job on Clarke. But, really, was the smear job on O'Neill so bad? What are they going to do?

Course I'm not the one standing in the line of fire.

UPDATE: Instant support for this observation, via War and Piece.

The ever-thoughtful Mark Kleiman writes:

Today's New York Times reports that the fall of the Baathist regime in Iraq has given heart to dissidents in Syria. That's exactly the sort of thing the "neocon" architects of the Iraq invasion were hoping for. Like the end of the Iraqi tryranny, it has to be, on any reasonable accounting of the costs and benefits of going to war, an entry on teh credit side.

I wish that those who criticize the war were more willing than they seem to be to acknowledge its benefits, as I wish that those who still think it was a good idea were more willing to acknowledge both that the fear of a major Iraqi WMD program was central to the argument for war as it was actually made at the time and that it has proven in retrospect to have been seriously overestimated.

What the anti-war and pro-war sides have in common is an almost total unwillingness to acknowledge what seemed obvious to me: this was a hard problem, with no obvious right answer. No which side you were (or are) on, there are patriotic, humanitarian folks who know more than you do about the problem who disagree with you. If that were better understood, there might be a little less vitriol in the conversation.

Well, that sounds a bit like stuff I've said here at See Why. Still, I'd like to make a few qualifications to Kleiman's point.

Set aside for the moment reservations about the NYT piece expressed by the equally thoughtful Abu Aardvaark. For it's a rare policy that has no advantages whatsoever, and so I have no objection, in principle, to recognizing all kinds of benefits of the war. Grant, then, Kleiman's point that people should be more willing to acknowledge the benefits of the war, even as you forgive those who drag their feet a bit because they (correctly) see that concessions about benefits are often twisted into drammatic rhetorical victories by their political opponents.

And yet, as much as I like what Kleiman is trying to do in this post, I'm looking for a little more nuance on this question of vitriol.

As far as the prudential case for the war goes, I think Kleiman is just wrong: It wasn't a hard problem, and there was an obvious right answer. I think smart, well-meaning people were suckered into thinking that it was a bright idea, but that's because I think that smart, well-meaning people can be suckered into all sorts of stupid ideas. Study enough intellectual history, and you'll start to think that that's the rule, rather than the exception. It's now commonplace to point out how the war on Iraq diverted resources from other worries like instability in Pakistan, rebuilding Afghanistan, fighting AQ, and so on. But during the buildup to the war, I watched in astonishment as one highly intelligent person after another focused on the question of Iraq with laser-like intensity and to the almost complete neglect of the broader foreign policy priorities that we could all agree on. It was stupid. Forgivable, but stupid. But recognizing this is also compatible with respecting people's intellectual and moral capabilities.

We don't have to choose between seeing the question as difficult and seeing it as a cause for vitriol - even if the questions we're debating are life and death issues.

As far as the humanitarian case for war goes, I think it was a very difficult call. And although I think the humanitarian case was premised on a number of naive assumptions, I think anyone who has read much about Saddam Hussein's regime will be familiar with the deep longing which comes over one as page after page of atrocity goes by. (And anyone who has spoken with Iraqi exiles knows this feeling even better.) For many this longing was overpowering. And this I respect very much. No vitriol for these chaps. Impatience, exasperation, sharp questions, the odd rhetorical jab - we're only human, after all - but no vitriol.

But before you swear off the vitriol altogether, consider that there were many people who supported the war for reasons that were both stupid and immoral, and for whom the humanitarian argument was a cynical and insincere cover. There were reasons and there were reasons, some of which we should respect, and some of which we should be in the business of shaming as vitriolically as we can. Kleiman is absolutely right that we ought to be careful not to impugn the integrity of people simply because we find them on the other side of this difficult issue. You're relying on a very odd intellectual taxonomy if you just lump Rumsfeld in together with Norm Geras. They don't fit together at all, even if they found themselves on the same side of the issue. But some people on the other side of the question, like Rumsfeld, are just plain asking for it.

Now, there are more controversial cases. Kenneth Pollack, for example, was highly regarded for his extremely careful and influential book on Iraq. But as a public intellectual with a high degree of influence, I think he had correspondingly high responsibilities. He failed, in my opinion, and miserably at that. His book is in fact a deeply dishonest work, as I would have documented by now if I weren't such a lazy bastard. I don't think he should be readmited to polite society, not at least until he does a more honest penance than one slick, ass-covering article in the Atlantic Monthly. From me Pollack gets nuttin' but scorn.

Innocent question of the day

Why did it take until a week ago for me to learn that Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11th Commission, has a whopping conflict of interest?

I spend half my life reading the news. I suppose this coulda just slipped past me. Things do, especially now that I've reached the hoary old age of 30. But still . . .

Re: Richard Clarke interview

Good golly, if Bush can survive this . . .

It doesn't matter if Kerry is exposed as the long lost brother of Bashir Assad, or it turns out he secretly sports an "authentically French" tatoo on his butt, or he is revealed to be a member in good standing of a secret Washington intern dating service.

If Bush can survive this, I just give up . . .

. . . No, I don't. But you know what I mean.

Re: Torture.

Forget the moral problems with it for a moment. There are also rather formidable epistemological problems with it.

Here's an interesting piece in the NYT. Powell is apparently traveling through the Middle East promoting democratic reform. The first paragraph is worrying:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell sought this weekend to allay the furor in the Middle East over the Bush administration's proposed democracy initiative for the region, assuring the leaders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that there was no intention to impose reforms on their countries.

But the key word here is "impose". Powell is pushing the line that reform has to come from within, and has to draw on the resources of the local culture.

But when he was asked in Saudi Arabia whether the United States would be satisfied if the Arab League adopted a democracy resolution, Mr. Powell bristled.

"It's not a matter of satisfying the United States," he said. "It's a matter of satisfying the aspirations of the people in the Arab world."

That's not a terrible line to take, but rhetorically and substantively.

But notice the careful deference to the region's rulers reported in the piece. It stands in quite jarring contrast to much of the admin's tough talk. Once again, the problem with the Bush admin is not that it's arrogant and pushy - it's that it's arrogant and pushy and cowardly and appeasing in turns, and always at the wrong times with the wrong people. Compare, for example, this diplomatic line with the (wholly counterproductive) warnings and admonitions for the people of Spain that we heard from senior administration officials recently.

Powell has a difficult task here. There really is a risk of backlash if he pushes very hard, very fast. But against this are two considerations which suggest he ought to be pushing a lot harder and a lot more publicly than he is. First, there's the fact that the U.S. is strongly associated with the undemocratic autocrats in the region. Never push governments in the public eye, and you never really get a chance to challenge that perception. The second is that so long as this is just words, it doesn't count for shit. To take one example, Powell needs to make clear that further assistance to Egypt is out of the question barring a long list of democratic reforms. Until he does that and other things in that spirit, the U.S. is simply enabling authoritarians in the region and then tisk-tisking them about it. Everyone knows this, so this sort of talk only adds to the cynicism about the U.S. in the region (and elsehwere) if it isn't followed up in any way.

Let me conclude with one observation: At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kuwaiti women were still not allowed to vote. In fact, torture is quite routine in Kuwaiti prisons, and there are a whole host of other human rights concerns about the place. And this was 12 years after the country had been restored by the U.S. The U.S. had a dozen years to push for reforms in a tiny country which was completely dependant on it for security and which owed it an extraordinary debt.

Kuwait is much better now than it would have been under Saddam Hussein. But it is very much worse than it would be if the U.S. had cared one whit for reform in the country. So if the U.S. couldn't - or wouldn't - induce very much change at all in that case, why oh why would anyone believe that it could - or would - induce it in Iraq in almost incomparably more difficult circumstances?

In the past, I've complained a bit about yesterday's march (unequivocally here; rather equivocally here), but this kind of complaining is just silly. Really, it reads like a Nabakov story in which an unreliable narrator slowly reveals just how unreliable he is.

This isn't especially impressive either. I can understand strong disagreement with the anti-war crowd, even anger. But there's a palpable contempt here that seems to extend to the whole anti-war movement, and which strikes me as unfair and counterproductive.

Different people had different reasons for supporting or opposing the war. Contempt is fine, when it's appropriate. I have a finely honed contempt for Rumsfeld, for example. But throwing everyone on the other side into the same pile just isn't right. In fact, it's a decent sign that you're missing something.

Recycling

I just want to reaffirm my disgust at Colin Powell's cynical attempt to use the Halabja massacre to score political points. Colin, if you can't say something true, then don't not say something that isn't false. Got it?

I also want to say that I'm sort of pleased with myself for coining a new phrase: The Chomsky-Wolfowitz Theory of Root Causes. It's catchy and mildly amusing, and I urge everyone to use it.

Finally, I just can't stop thinking about this passage from a Thomas Friedman piece that I quoted earlier:

The real reason for this war - which was never stated - was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic - it's not in the rule book - but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could - period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

Sorry, Thomas, but some things aren't true even if they're said by people who say that they're true even if George W. Bush believes them.

I feel a primal scream coming on . . . .

By the way . . . if you read this site regularly, you're probably a news addict like me. In that case, if you're not using an RSS aggregator, you're probably wasting a lot of your time.

Very briefly, an RSS aggregator gathers together the "feeds" that your favourite sites offer. For example, check out the link at the top right of this page which says "Atom Feed". It's not very pretty when you click on it in a web broswer. But if you enter that address into an RSS aggregator then your aggregator will poll my server at set intervals to notify you when the site has been updated.

This doesn't sound like much, but it makes a huge difference in practice. I can monitor hundreds of pages without ever opening my browser, and very quickly since the entire page doesn't need to load to figure out whether it's been updated. That means that I can get much more procrastinating done in a given amount of time.

You can get a list of aggregators here. I use the FeedDemon. Unlike most aggregators, it actually costs money. But it's one sweet little app.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, and if you have a blog and don't have an RSS/ATOM feed, then by golly get off yer duff and get one! Email me if you can't figure out how to do this.

For anyone in the NYC area:

Please join us for the following event:

Remembering Rwanda: Africa in Conflict, Yesterday and Today
NYU Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South, Room 914
Monday, March 22, 2004, 7:00-8:30

The presentation will discuss the devastating events culminating in the death
of over 500,000 Rwandans in 1994 and highlight the similarity of conflicts and
human rights abuses in Africa today. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A.
Seating is limited, and admission is free. The speaker will be Human Rights
Watch Africa Division Counsel and Harvard Law School lecturer, Binaifer
Nowrojee.

The event is sponsored by Human Rights Watch and Co-Sponsored by NYU Black
Family Reunion, NYU African Students Union, and the NYU Undergraduate Law
Society.

Jay Rosen to stupid campaign strategy stories: "Die, strategy news. Do it this year, 2004. And we'll dance the dance of real politics on your grave."

Amen, brother. Amen.

UPDATE: Napsterization has a nice discussion of this as well.

Random Sunday musing: I'm really a bit surprised that Left Blogistan hasn't made more of the fact that Paul (or Jerry or whatever) Bremer is a close (former) associate of Henry Kissinger.

I'm not saying that it's never discussed. Juan Cole made a remark about it the other day. Still, given the extent to which Kissinger is hated on the left I had expected it to be added to the standard litany by now.

Three more piles of vomit cleaned up, and I'm also futzing about with Mozilla Firefox (am I really ready to take the big plunge?)

So perhaps it won't be like Chariots of Fire today . . .

The first paragraph in today's Today's Papers:

The NYT leads with the president's short-term campaign strategy: Define John Kerry as indecisive before Kerry manages to define himself. To that end, Bush has outspent Kerry 10-to-one since Kerry clinched the nomination March 2.

But . . . but, I splutter, Bush is getting his ass kicked in the blogosphere - or at least, the part of the blogosphere I hang out in. 10-to-one? Perhaps I might have noticed if I didn't live in New York City, or if I watched television.

And I wonder why I suck at calling elections. Hello (hello, hello, hello) is there anybody (anybody, anybody, anybody) else in the echo chamber (chamber, chamber, chamber) who has the same problem (lem, lem, lem)?

Recently I wrote:

This piece by Paul Krugman is really very good, but I find this throwaway remark attempting to exonerate Clinton highly suspicious:

There has been much speculation about whether officials ignored specific intelligence warnings, but what we know for sure is that the administration disregarded urgent pleas by departing Clinton officials to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda.

Unless I'm mistaken, the source of this story is . . . Clinton or someone close to him. That doesn't mean it's false. But the burden of proof is pretty high here. I want to see briefing papers and transcripts before I buy this one. (Though perhaps the Bush admin's failure to immediately leak the relevant briefing papers and transcripts says something.) Whatever the case, I'll wager that "urgent" is a bit over the top.

It looks like I may get my briefing notes, after all.

Just to pat myself on the back a bit, I'm willing to admit that Krugman was right, even though I've harshly criticized him in the past. Now why can't Andrew Sullivan do the same thing?

The dog is sick. For some reason this invariably happens when my wife is away. I swear it's not a quality of care issue. I think he's just a moma's boy.

So, hardly any sleep last night. And I just spent a lot of time cleaning up vomit in several hard-to-reach places around the apartment.

After the dog and I went for a refreshing 3am spin, he kept me awake by wimpering and climbing on top of me repeatedly. Not sure if I ever really got back to sleep.

Deep thought at 4am while listening to a car alarm sound off for the second time in 10 minutes: Given that the car is almost certainly not worth stealing, that no one looks when they hear a cheap car alarm go off, and that it is 4am - perhaps this ought to count as a capital offence. A worthy exception to my general position against capital punishment, no?

Unfortunately, all this sets me behind in my blogging. Will I catch up? You betcha! It'll be just like in Chariots of Fire when the guy slips in the mud (for me: vomit) and then gets up and wins the race!

Hurrah!

Torture yourself with this column by Oliver North.

Via Boing Boing

Harry urges you to do something for the Marsh Arabs.

He's right too. If you can spare anything, you should.

From Back in Iraq:

"Who would prefer that Saddam's torture chambers still be open?" Bush asked. "Who would wish that more mass graves were still being filled? Who would begrudge the Iraqi people their long-awaited liberation?"

Well, no one is. What's being begrudged is the way Bush screwed up the march to war in the United Nations, the lack of post-war planning and the sheer arrogance the White House has shown to anyone who disagrees with them. When John Kerry said more foreign leaders supported his candidacy, it was a gaffe not because it isn't true, but because it is.

So good on ya, Mr. President, that Saddam is gone. And I sincerely mean that. I was in Iraq in July 2002 and saw the front between the Kurds and the Iraqi troops. I talked with survivors of the Halabja massacre. I met with families who had fled Kirkuk when Saddam "Arabized" them out of their homes. I was there during the war, and saw how happy many Iraqis - Kurds and Arabs alike - were that Saddam was gone.

But things are not going well now, and that's mostly your fault, Mr. President. I didn't oppose the war in Iraq because I'm a pacifist - I wholeheartedly supported Afghanistan. And I didn't oppose it because I'm a supporter of tyrants. I opposed it because it was poorly planned from the get-go, cynically sold to the American people, alienating to American allies and a distraction from the real enemy - al Qaeda and its constellation of terror groups. You have yet to convince me that toppling Saddam was worth the deaths of 676 coalition troops and thousands of Iraqi conscripts and civilians despite the immediate benefits of the war. A year later, I'm not alone in still wrestling with this conundrum, and your simple black and white, "no neutral ground" statements don't make the issue any clearer.

Now compare this to this snippet of an interview with Hitchens that I just found on Normblog:

Whitney: So you would consider then supporting the war in Iraq a properly leftist position?

Hitchens: Yes, I think it's the only one. The leftist position is that co-existence with totalitarian dictatorship is undesirable and impossible. That's the [principal] position. That is, or should be the left position. It used to be.

Got that? It's not just the correct position, or the position that he arrived at after carefully weighing the terrible consequences on either side. It's the only position.

I'm pretty damn sure I'm right about the war, but at least I can see why a well-meaning person would support it. Hitchens apparently can't. I think this explains a lot about his writing: He gets some great rips off, but the underlying argument is almost always extremely weak. That must have something to do with the fact that he doesn't seem able to think through the kinds of considerations that might move (the smarter and more decent among) his political opponents.

I am reliably informed that another person has bought a "Not Bush in '04" thong. (See the link to the right.)

Kinky - and political!

(I don't make any money from this. I think my friend is just aiming to recoup his losses.)

Via Rubber Hose, I found this very funny mini-mocumentary on the Homeland Security warning system.

Charles Krauthammer tells us how to win the war on terror:

How is it won apart from hunting down terrorists and destroying terrorist regimes? By reversing the Arab-Islamic world's tragic collapse into oppression, intolerance and destitution, in which popular grievances are cynically deflected by repressive regimes and clergy into the virulent anti-Americanism that exploded upon us on Sept. 11, 2001. Which means trying to give desperate and oppressed people a chance at the kind of freedom and prosperity that we helped construct after World War II in Europe and East Asia.

Yes, there's more to it than that, of course, but I think it's worth pointing out that this claim, which I like to call "the Chomsky-Wolfowitz theory of root causes," is really on the right track. The problem is that the Bush administration is stuffed to the brim with cowardly appeasers who refuse to stand up to authoritarian governments like Egypt's and Uzbekistan's because these governments offer some short-term strategic advantages.

What follows is the same old sad dynamic drearily familiar from the Cold War: U.S. policymakers tell the public that now isn't the right time to push crucial allies on human rights since they have bigger fish to fry. The authoritarian governments know perfectly well what they can get away with so long as they offer nominal support to the fish-frying effort. And everyone in the whole bleedin' world comes to associate the U.S. with the authoritarian governments, including anti-government radicals. Much pain and long-term instability ensues.

I honestly wish that Bush were a little less diplomatic and nuanced here, that he was a little more unilateral in insisting on human rights, that he was a bit less cautious and fearful about offending allies.

I had another argument with a friend about the march tomorrow ("We Still Oppose the War"). My first take on the march is here. What follows is a rather idealized version of the argument.

Her: I can't believe you're not going to the march. What the hell is the matter with you?

Me: It's a terrible idea. Before the war I was able to rally behind a fairly straightforward slogan opposing it, despite all my differences and reservations about many of the standard reasons given for rejecting it by my fellow marchers. But now, now - even though it was a mistake, and I want Bush and his gang punished for it, I do badly want the project to succeed. It's partly just a question of where I want my energy to go. It's not too late to punish the pepole who led the U.S. into war, but it is too late to actually oppose it. Now I want to turn to finding solutions for the mess that the U.S. is in, and I desperately want to avoid advocating any position that would make things worse by prematurely drawing troops down. I admit, the U.S. has done little to justify any confidence here, but I still think things would be much, much worse if they just up and left. And the organizers of the protest are calling for exactly that.

Her: Yeah, I don't want them to just up and leave either. Fine, but you don't have to agree with everything that they say. You're marching to express your anger at how badly things have gone and at how dishonest the Bush administration has been. If you were willing to march to show your anger before the war, and you haven't changed your mind, then why not march now?

Me: You know what, the bit about calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops is just so irresponsible that I refuse to have anything to do with them.

Her: You're not listening. I agree with you here. It's not as if they're just going to pull out and leave because we're saying that. You agree with the basic point that the war was wrong. That should be enough. What are you going to do, hold your separate "nuance rally"? Make your own sign with your own message if you feel that strongly.

Me: What will it say? "Don't withdraw the troops"? Anyway, saying that the Bush administration isn't in any danger of taking the advice of protesters is wrong in two ways. First, the pace of withdrawal is really too fast. They're already doing it, and at an irresponsible pace. Second, this bullshit about "Don't worry they won't take us seriously" is exactly the sort of nonsense that discredits the opponents of the Bush administration. The only way we can succeed is by formulating credible alternatives and trying to win people over to them. So I'm not going to console myself with the thought that no one really wants to draw down troops.

Her: Well, if you're in favour of strategic voting, why do you reject strategic marching? Look, you said yourself in a recent post that you think people should vote democrat even if the democrats are a bunch of corrupt weasels. And you've voted in the past for political parties you weren't happy with because you thought that on balance they were the best possible alternative. And you're like most people in that respect. So why does everyone treat marches so differently? Why do reservations count so much more when it comes to marching? How can you justify that?

Me: I hadn't thought of that. I suppose I was really upset for the reasons I mentioned. I guess you have a good point about "strategic marching". But I suppose this effort seems to me badly focused. I'm also sceptical about it because I think that by framing it in the way they have the organizers have made it especially easy to misrepresent. But your point is a good one - perhaps I was a bit too harsh, at least towards the people who decide that on balance they do want to march.

Her: Also, think about this: You've said that it's now too late to get the UN and Europe really involved. You're right in the sense that most European countries are extremely reluctant to do anything now that would help out Bush. They're quite aware that Bush pinned his reputation on the invasion, and they're not willing to lift a finger to do anything that might help him get reelected. But are you so sure that it's too late? That it's absolutely impossible?

Me: Yes, why not? It's just too politically difficult at this point for the leaders of these countries to send troops off to fight and die in a war that their own citizens opposed so deeply.

Her: But what if Bush really backed down? What if he admitted serious errors of judgment? What if he did that in a way that made it politically much easier for the U.S.'s allies to support the U.S. in Iraq? Here's my basic question: Are you saying it's politically impossible - or that it's politically highly unlikely, given how proud Bush is, and how climbing down in this way would doom him politically?

Me: I admit, I suppose I was thinking the latter was the case. Bush really would have to back down in such a way that sealed his fate politically. And I was assuming that he wouldn't do that.

Her: Then you've rather misrepresented the case against future U.N. and European involvement here. That's because you've just accepted without questioning it the assumption that Bush isn't going to back down in ways that would produce a better outcome for the country but a worse outcome for himself and his party - in other words, that it's just out of the question for Bush to act like a real leader willing to do what is best overall. Don't you see how much you've conceded to Bush by framing the issue in this way?

Me: Woah! Look at the time. Don't you have to go now? Hey, is it hot in here?

Welcome to See Why, the home of self-doubt and internal contradiction.

The invaluable John Quiggin makes a point I had been meaning to make about the Spanish election and a popular fallacy about the "general will".

In general, I think there is a lot of very confused talk about collective judgments. But discussions of the Spanish elections took the confusion to a new level. At least, I've noticed it more lately. Unfortunately, these confusions are closely connected with a whole series of confusions about collective responsibility. But that's for another day . . .

*Sniff*

This is just so romantic.

Light posting recently. A friend is visiting from out of town. . .

From Slate today:

Oddly enough, the same shadowy Islamist group that claimed responsibility for the attack—and then offered a Pan-European truce following the Socialist Party victory—also supports President Bush against the more "cunning" John Kerry. "We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections," wrote Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade in an e-mail to London's al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. "We know that a heavyweight operation would destroy your government, and this is what we don't want. We are not going to find a bigger idiot than you." (The group is thought to lack credibility by many Western intelligence agencies, especially after it tried to claim credit for last year's U.S. power blackout.)

I think it's all but certain that the shadowy Islamist group here is a bunch of jokers. Their attempt to claim responsibility for the power blackout last summer has to have been one of the silliest and least successful attempts to scare Americans ever. So the say-so of this group counts for nothing. But it's also worth pointing out that if I were in a radical militant Islamic group, I would certainly be rooting for Bush. He really is a dream come true - so divisive, so hated, and with so little credibility. I'm not sure I would be bothering to point this out if I hadn't seen how stubborn the "A vote for Kerry is a vote for bin Laden" idea is in some quarters.

Earlier today Calpundit - excuse me, Political Animal - attacked a column by Thomas Friedman in Today's NYT:

SPANISH APPEASERS?....Speaking of Warmongers vs. Appeasers™, Tom Friedman's latest column is simply revolting:

The new Spanish government's decision to respond to the attack by Al Qaeda by going ahead with plans to pull its troops from Iraq constitutes the most dangerous moment we've faced since 9/11. It's what happens when the Axis of Evil intersects with the Axis of Appeasement and the Axis of Incompetence.

....I understand that many Spanish voters felt lied to by their rightist government over who was responsible for the Madrid bombings, and therefore voted it out of office. But they should now follow that up by vowing to keep their troops in Iraq — to make clear that in cleaning up their own democracy, they do not want to subvert the Iraqis' attempt to build one of their own. Otherwise, the Spanish vote will not be remembered as an act of cleansing, but of appeasement.

So even though the Spanish voters elected the Socialists for perfectly good reasons completely unrelated to appeasement, and even though the Socialists were planning to withdraw from Iraq all along, and even though the Spanish populace never believed the war in Iraq had anything to do with fighting terrorism in the first place, and even though Friedman acknowledges that the Bush administration has shown demonstrable incompetence and a transparent lack of dedication to really building democracy in Iraq — despite all that the Spaniards should change their minds and do what Tom Friedman wanted them to do all along simply because al-Qaeda committed a horrible terrorist act on their soil. If they don't follow Tom Friedman's advice, they are appeasers.

This is both preceded and followed by a steaming mound of wishful thinking unmatched since LBJ saw a light at the end of the tunnel.

This kind of stuff belongs on the pages of a third tier warblogger, not the op-ed page of the New York Times. It's juvenile and disgusting.

There's an interesting response to this by Laura Rozen over at War and Piece:

I don't understand Kevin Drum's hostility to Tom Friedman's oped. The bulk of Friedman's piece is a smart, Kerry-esque critique of the Bush administration's "pig-headed" insistence on doing the Iraq post-war on the cheap -- and risking real failure. The second part -- that encourages the West to redouble its efforts at bringing stability to Iraq, vs. pulling out and dividing -- seems sensible enough.

I agree it's no good calling Spanish voters "appeasers" for rejecting the party that brought them into the Iraq war, and voting for the party that has on its agenda fighting the war on terror, and pulling Spanish troops out of Iraq. But the point cannot be lost that if Al Qaeda's terror attacks are shown to be effective at getting the countries targeted by their attacks to do what Al Qaeda and its affiliates want, is a dangerous precedent. Isn't it? Why is this a left-right thing?

The Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic used to take UN peacekeepers hostage and handcuff them on airport tarmacs, to prevent NATO from conducting air strikes to try to stop mass slaughter of Bosnian Muslims. And you know what the only thing Mladic understood was? Beating the crap out of the Serb forces. Because we were bloodthirsty "warmongers" as Drum calls us? No, because we learned over four years of witnessing mass slaughter and abuse that justice and basic human decency demand that those with the power to do so stop these atrocities however we must.

Why can't people understand that real thugs like Mladic and Al Qaeda terrorists have to be countered with unblinking force? That submitting to their demands does not mean that they think better of slaughtering 7,000 people in a few days work, or blowing up our buildings, trains and airplanes, but that they are emboldened? This is something I think prominent Democrats came to understand, among them Bill Clinton, Wes Clark, Madeleine Albright, and Richard Holbrooke. This is something Tony Blair came to understand as well.

What I think is at issue here is that the Spanish electorate does not think being in the Iraq war was the right thing to do in the first place. So, now what? Now that they have been attacked, do they stick with a policy the majority wasn't crazy about it the first place? Or change their behavior, even at the risk of seeming to comply with their attackers demands? I don't know the answer.

But I think it's extremely important to note that France was this week threatened by an Islamist group with a terror attack because of its decision to ban headscarves at public schools, and France has rejected any role at all in the Iraq campaign. I really believe these attacks should not be only understood as payback for sending troops to Iraq.

And Friedman surely has more insights into the Arab world than many of us. And I think his last point is powerful.

"The notion that Spain can separate itself from Al Qaeda's onslaught on Western civilization by pulling its troops from Iraq is a fantasy. Bin Laden has said that Spain was once Muslim and he wants it restored that way. As a friend in Cairo e-mailed me, a Spanish pullout from Iraq would only bring to mind Churchill's remark after Chamberlain returned from signing the Munich pact with Hitler: 'You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.'"

My take: I certainly lean towards Rozen on this, though I'm probably more sceptical about the wisdom of Clinton, Blair and co.

One quibble, though. Rozen writes, "So, now what? Now that they have been attacked, do they stick with a policy the majority wasn't crazy about it the first place? Or change their behavior, even at the risk of seeming to comply with their attackers demands? I don't know the answer." Well, I don't want Spanish troops out of Iraq for the same reason I don't want American troops out. But I don't think we gain anything from worrying about whether something looks like appeasement. These people are nuts. They interpret all kinds of behaviour in ways that are pointless to try to adjust to. So although I hope that Spain stays in Iraq for the time being, I don't think that has anything to do with concern about the appearance that it is complying with attackers' demands.

If Kevin Drum's response is disproportionate considering the actual content of this Freidman column, it's possible that his vitriol makes more sense if you assume he's had something building against Friedman for a long time. And indeed, many of us have. The one thing I completely disagree with in Rozen's post is the claim that Friedman has some special insight into the Arab world. I think that Friedman is certainly a well-meaning guy. He is obvious trying to be a good foot-soldier on the side of the forces of goodness. But he shoots himself in the foot so often it's a mirace he can get around unassisted.
Even when Friedman says something true in his columns it's always either trivial or obvious. In fact, I don't think I have ever read something both true and not immediately obvious in one of his columns. It's mostly pap, and very badly written pap at that. The more I read really excellent commentary on the internet, the more I come to resent Friedman's position which guarantees him such a wide audience.

Just to get something off my chest, I'll always hold it against Friedman that he wrote this in Slate not long ago:

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.
This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

I accept the use of force to deal with threats. I'm certainly willing to fight and die to preserve an open society. But in this quotation you have, in compressed form, some of the most confused thinking about the war. Friedman conflates the good things - willingness to respond to terror - with a war which (whatever you thought of the humanitarian case for it) was as strategically inept as any in modern history. Friedman's point here is just grotesquely stupid. And when I read enough of this sort of garbage, I get on edge. Perhaps Drum was too.

Get your Kosovo updates here.

Hot damn! I wish someone could be considerate enough to sue me. In case you missed it, some obscure blogger pissed off the NYT. They threatened to sue, he played the perfect victim (which he was; the NYT people were being idiots)- and is now appearing on a bunch of T.V. and radio shows. Read, in his own words, how much fun he's having. Jerk.

Garner to Bush: Fall Guy, Schmall Guy.

Today's papers also writes:

Most of the papers front Vice President Cheney's big entrance into the campaign. In a speech, he ripped into Sen. Kerry, charging that he's a waffler and weak on defense. Pointing out that Kerry ultimately voted against $87 billion bill for Iraq—Kerry had supported an alternative that would have funded the operation through scaling back Bush tax cuts—Cheney said, "The senator from Massachusetts has given us ample doubts about his judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security." One unnamed Bush campaign adviser told the Post, "This is the beginning of the process of trying to detoxify [Cheney] and make him back into the political asset that he should be."

I imagine his aides hold their heads with anxiety every time Cheney ventures into the public sphere. They're better off just hiding him away, as they did earlier on in the term when they discovered that he was turning into a lightening rod. The press hates Cheney, and he regularly says things that makes them hate him even more. Since no strategist would voluntarily take this kind of risk, I think it's possible that Cheney is insisting on this "detoxification" effort over the advice of people around him. Or not. Who knows?

Theme of the day: Trying to understand political strategy from the Bush admin's point of view. It's a potentially soul-destroying exercise, but a useful one. Perhaps if I keep going I'll feel like C.S. Lewis after he finished the Screwtape letters.

Regarding yesterday's bombing in Baghdad, today's Today's Papers writes:

The papers note that officials said they suspect Islamic militants, specifically Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. But the NYT notes, "No specific evidence was offered implicating Mr. Zarqawi." And in a little noticed story a few weeks ago, the LAT questioned the focus on Zarqawi. As the subhead put it, "Critics say an accused terrorist's role in Iraq attacks is exaggerated, noting weak evidence."

I was scratching my head remembering the LA Times story myself. Here's the funny thing: If I were in charge of the admin's press strategy here, I would be trying to downplay any possible connection between Zarqawi and pretty much anything out there. Doing so just reminds people that the admin apparently had the chance to take him out before the war but refused. What's going on here? Did someone not get a memo or something?

Josh Marshall writes:

One of the things we hear again and again from the administration is that Saddam Hussein still had both the intention and the capability to build and possess weapons of mass destruction.

Isn't this a logical fallacy?

I mean, if you have the intention to build WMDs and the ability to build them, then you have WMDs. It's about as close to 2 + 2 = 4 as you get in human affairs.

Not that this is the biggest bit of ridiculousness coming out 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days. But it's worth noting.

We can infer from the fact that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction that he lacked either the intention or the ability to have them. Something is missing from the equation. Maybe he had the intention to build them later. Maybe he was working to get back the ability. But he really couldn't have had both.

It's just 'p's and 'q's.

It's only a logical fallacy as Marshall states it. But there's a perfectly sensible way to restore logical consistency, and that's to be clear that you're refering to future capabilities. And it's really not crazy to think that if Saddam Hussein had been able to get the sanctions lifted, his capabilities would have expanded considerably.

Not at all a convincing case for war, for reasons I've gone into a hundred times. But all the same it's not a logical fallacy when stated clearly and properly.

From yesterday's Today's Papers:

The Washington Post's top non-local story says that with various GOP-centered ethics scandals percolating in Congress, good-government types are bemoaning and some Democrats are seriously regretting the deal they made with Republicans back in the 1990s not to launch ethics probes against each other. The House ethics committee has been essentially mothballed by the informal agreement. "The ethics oversight process in the House is completely paralyzed,"said one Republican who now heads a non-partisan watchdog group. The Democratic House leadership has opposed re-invigorating the ethics committee.

I fall firmly in the people-shoulda-voted-for-Gore camp. But sheesh! No wonder people feel that with the Democrats and the Republics the way they are, the establishment is playing some clever good cop/bad cop routine that screws them over no matter what. Yeah, go vote Democrat. But you don't have to like it for one damn minute. What a bunch of corrupt little weasels.

Also, from the same source:

A Page One piece in the NYT details the U.S. military's practice of paying civilians and their families who've been wounded or killed by American forces in Iraq. And how many civilians have been killed or wounded? "We don't keep a list," said a Pentagon spokeswoman. "It's just not policy."

As many people have pointed out, this certainly appears to violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. That's because you have to take reasonable precautions to minimize harm to civilians - and as I understand it, part of taking reasonable precautions is bothering to collect statistics that allow you to chart and track the problems that do occur. Looks like a classic case of negligence to me, at the very least.

He said, He said

Certain things are true. But wacky journalistic conventions often prevent reporters from just coming out and saying them. This piece in the times is a great example of that. The piece contrasts two speeches, one by Kerry and one by Cheney. The piece makes some kind of attempt at balance, but ends up falling flat on its face. Thus, after reporting a series of outrageous lies from Cheney, more than half-way through the piece, the reporter finally gets around to telling us what's wrong with them:

After Mr. Cheney's speech, the Kerry campaign issued a rebuttal, calling Mr. Cheney "the wrong man to challenge John Kerry on defense." Aides to Mr. Kerry found quotations that showed Mr. Cheney expressing varying views over the years, including advocating cutting some of the same weapons systems that Mr. Cheney was faulting Mr. Kerry for wanting to cut.

Moreover, the Kerry aides said, the Bush administration did send troops to Iraq without proper equipment. And they noted that the Pentagon in the summer of 2003 sought to hold down growth in pay and benefits, saying the budget could not sustain higher salaries for the military.

OK, so Kerry aides said this. Is it true? If it's true and independently verifiable (it is both), then why did the reporters let this go until the story was more than halfway gone? Why do the reporters distance themselves from the facts by reporting them as if they are merely one side of a dispute in which - who knows? - either side might turn out to be correct?

A real reporter like Dana Milbank of the WaPo would have handled this differently. After each one of Cheney's lies, he would have reported the facts as we know them. And he wouldn't have hidden behind the "he said, he said" format, as the authors of the Times piece did.

(I haven't gone trolling through the blogosphere yet today. But I imagine a lot of people are saying the same thing. My apologies for what is almost certainly not an original post.)

Yesterday Cheney gave the best possible retort to Kerry's point that the whole world is rooting for Bush to lose the election:

He derided Mr. Kerry for suggesting last week that certain foreign leaders, whom he later would not name, wanted Mr. Kerry to win the election. "American voters are the ones charged with determining the outcome of this election — not unnamed foreign leaders," Mr. Cheney said.

As a tactical matter, that is a much smarter move than trying to deny that it's true. The first wave response from the admin's supporters all took that tack, with the disasterous result that it merely focused attention on the issue. This response plays on American pride. It may be enough to distract people from noticing that while the U.S. presidency is not a global popularity contest, the U.S. does incur significant costs when it is represented so badly abroad, and by such a complete moron.

Forget about what Rumsfeld is saying in this video. The real scandal here is that Rumsfeld dyes his hair.

In the Bush Whitehouse, that's a big no-no.

Sorry . . . I'm in a very Wonkette sort of mood today.

Josh Marshall sounds like a demanding boss. Evidently he's a stickler with the "No Crapping on Someone's Desk" rule that most people are willing to just let pass once in a while.

What's next? No spitting in people's faces? No hilarious karate-workout-ambushes? If people lose their sense of humour this way, what's the point of going to work at all?

I gather they will live to rue the day they tried to fuck with Brian Leiter.

Recently on a long bus ride, I sat next to a young woman wearing a hijab. So I sat down and wrote me this little Thomas Friedman article:

The other day on a long bus trip I happened to sit next to a young woman wearing a hijab . . . and a pair of jeans. That's just the clash of modernity and tradition that has the Bush administration reeling and on the run.

But the young these days are resolving this conflict themselves. My seatmate chattered on her cell phone with a friend who turned out to be, gasp, a boy. And yet, far away from the eyes of her parents, she nevertheless dutifully continued to wear her hijab.

It's thoughtful meditation on chance encounters like this one that leads me to think that I've almost solved the mystery of how so many people in the world can use cell phones and the internet, and yet still reject our wars of conquest.

As I said to Bill Clinton and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia over dinner last week, the world really is getting smaller. And as it gets smaller, we're all packed in closer together.

I asked my seatmate where she was headed. She told me that she was returning to school, after a weekend in New York City. She studies biochemical engineering, but has no interest in pursuing a job in the field after school. Instead, she hopes that her degree will make her a superb addition to any number of call centers around the world.

That is so true.

Anyway, as modernity advances, we have to do more to make sure that more young people get off the bus of despair before it explodes.

Of course, if this had been a Maureen Dowd column, it would have contained the line: "But while France struggles to keep the abaya's in abeyance, the Bush administration's secrecy has cast a veil over the rationale for its feminism-busting invasion of Iraq."

UPDATE: Just to be clear, the target of the post is Friedman and his trite little anecdotes that are supposed to illustrate either false or utterly uncontroversial points. I've got nothing against the hijab, the French are out of their gourds for trying to ban the hijab in schools, etc. etc. etc.

Very bad news from Iraq.

If the Pentagon is allowed to take over the responsibilities of the State Department, why shouldn't it be allowed to take over responsibility for the administration's science and research priorities?

Fair is fair.

Department of Everything I Read On the Internet Is True . . . Via The Modulator, comes this very funny story about the alarm raised by phony websites reporting on the risks of - yes - dihydrogen monoxide. (Think . . . think . . . think . . . got it!)

Department of Lost Opportunities . . . My last name is "Young". Hence the name is this site. (Repeat my initials for as long as it takes for you to get it.) Not especially clever, I thought when I chose it, but it would do.

Now in a blinding flash I've seen how much better things could have been. Yes, you guessed it. I should have called the site "www.youngfu.blogspot.com". Humourous but combatative. Alas . . .

I have a much younger brother who enjoys scrapping around. I've taught him all the great Youngfu moves ("Youngfu - passed from brother to brother for . . . two years."), the most fearsome of which is "trembling hand of fear".

So I had the idea a long time ago. Just never quite made the connection.

Doesn't matter, though. This site is not long for the world. Soon - I hope - I will be moving to much fancier digs and blogging away with a few friends. I'll continue to write political commentary, but the idea is that we'll do much more than that. My role at the site will be that of a benevolent dictator. As an official title, I've settled on "Scaliwag-in-Chief".

Stay tuned. Should happen within the next month.

Via the Whiskey Bar, I see that Robert Kagan said this:

Are Europeans prepared to grant all of al Qaeda's conditions in exchange for a promise of security? Thoughts of Munich and 1938 come to mind.

What I would like to know is whether there is any event that doesn't somehow call Munich to mind for people like Kagan. The lessons of Munich are very important - no serious person would turn his back on them. But it devalues and distorts the historical lessons when Munich becomes shorthand for "Don't expect an argument from me, Bub." Alas, I think this is usually what it means these days. And by "these days" I mean the last 50 years.

(Billmon's Kagan-bashing at the very end of that long post is especially good.)

In the same post I read:

Then came the administration's decision to invade Iraq, taken with out any consultation with the Europeans whatsoever -- even though they had significant economic and strategic interests in Iraq (just as America does in the Saudi theocratic police state) and were far more exposed to the potential fallout (oil shocks, refugees, etc.) than the United States.

When I first read this, I furrowed my brow and thought, "Bollocks!" Bullocks, because there was quite a bit of consultation before the war - the admin desperately wanted approval from allies. But then I realied that he is actually right, since the decision itself was made long before the efforts at "consultation" began.

I remain uncomfortable with one comment though. The significant economic and strategic interests which Europe had in Iraq don't really weigh on me very much. Who cares if a cynical French government had decided to cut a deal with Saddam Hussein? Not I, I must confess. The parallel with Saudi Arabia is certainly helpful here, but only in a dialectical context which strongly favours Billmon (the dialectical context being one in which Billmon argues against defenders of the administration). Outside of that dialectical context, the argument collapses. For Billmon rightly rejects the legitimacy of the U.S.'s interests in coddling the Saudi theocracy. So even if the parallel between U.S./Saudi Arabia and Europe/Iraq were exact (which I do not concede), it wouldn't really help Europe's case. On the analogy, Europe is just as bad as the U.S. here - and that doesn't generate a lot of sympathy.

I just read this post at Brad DeLong's site. It's short, but not, if you're me, very sweet:

A change in state: today I stopped drinking lattes, and started drinking iced lattes. It was 85 degrees. Summer is icumen in.

I read this beside a giant cafe window that looks out on a very snowy winter scene. Very. Snowy.

*Sigh*

War has terrible costs, but so, often, does avoiding war. When I write about what was gained in going to war with Iraq, I usually mention the Southern marshes and the Marsh Arabs. Want to know more about this? Read this. You just have to read it if you want to face up honestly to the costs that inaction carried.

I don't read Mark Steyn. It's just pointless. But Pogge subjected me to an excerpt of a recent column of his, much against my will. And so I noticed this:

"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will like the strong horse." So said Osama bin Laden in his final video appearance two-and-a-half years ago. But even the late Osama might have been surprised to see the Spanish people, invited to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding.

I noticed this because there's an obvious and a very embarrassing response to this, at least if you're a cheap, partisan hack like Steyn.

Here is the text of Colin Powell's remarks on the 16th Anniversary of Saddam Hussein's attack on Halabja, released the other day by the State Department:

SECRETARY POWELL Sixteen years ago, Saddam Hussein massacred the innocent people of Halabja as part of his systemic campaign of pillage and murder against the people of northern Iraq. In just a few short hours, more than 5,000 Kurdish men, women and children were slaughtered with poison gas. Afterwards, they lay where they fell, babies still folded in the loving arms of their mothers. As President Bush said of the Halabja massacre, "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning."

What happened in Halabja was but a particularly gruesome case of the crimes of Saddam Hussein against the Iraqi people. Those crimes were perpetrated against Arabs and Turkomen as well as Kurds, Christians as well as Muslims, Sunni as well as Shi'a. As we remember the victims of Halabja, let us not forget the uncounted thousands of innocent citizens who died by the brutal hand of this terrible dictator. On this day of remembrance, the American people send their deepest condolences to the people of Halabja, and to all Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein's repression.

For 15 years we have stood witness on this day to the victims of Halabja, that their deaths not be forgotten. But this year is different. This year the dreams of the Iraqi people to be free from the terror of the Saddam Hussein regime have come true. This year our bereavement has finally been lightened. This year a new light shines on Iraq, a light of freedom, a light of hope, and a light of justice.

The people of Halabja have built a memorial to the victims of Saddam Hussein's evil, a moving testament to those who died. I visited that memorial last September and met with some of the families who had lost loved ones during those terrible times. I resolved then, as we are all resolved now, that the building of Iraq must continue. Iraqis will redeem the loss of those who have gone down to the grave, at Halabja and elsewhere. They'll do it by building a free and prosperous nation, a nation whose government respects the human rights of all its people.

The United States is proud to have helped make such an Iraq possible. And now the people of the United States stand ready to assist the people of Iraq as they take their rightful place among the community of nations. We pray that this springtime will bring the sweetness of consolation to those who mourn, and that justice and peace be the inheritance of every Iraqi family.

The massacre at Halabja calls out for commemoration, but this statement is an object lesson in how not to commemorate a tragedy. The worst line, I think, is the bit about 15 years of standing witness. Everyone in the region knows that the U.S. did everything it could to block condemnation of the massacre in the U.N., to erase it from memory because it was inconvenient at the time. And when everyone knows this, it's far less offensive to say nothing than to lie to their faces.

You might say, "Ah well, stop focusing on the U.S. The point here is Halabja, which you concede is an appropriate event to commemorate." But the problem with that is that the statement weaves U.S. self-congratulation into the commemoration at every opportunity. It's not me to who dragged U.S. misdeeds into this. It's Colin Powell who had the very poor taste to try to score points off it, and by doing so silently raised the whole issue anew.

And you might say, "Ah well, just let it go. It's past now, and the complicity was indirect, the responsibility secondary." But there is a very good reason that people just can't let these things go. We want a break from the past. We want to believe that things will be different from now on. But many of the same people are still calling the shots, and they've never accepted responsibility. This refusal to accept responsibility is more than a frustrating evasion - it's alarming. Without an frank and open discussion of these and other failures, we're doomed to go on like this, adding fresh failures as we go.

The Withdrawal Method

Not the most original headline, but I couldn't resist . . . Via Keywords, I discovered that the anti-war protests I mentioned earlier are much worse than I originally thought. As far as I can tell, the protesters actually plan on calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

I marched against the war. I continue to think it was a terrible mistake. I don't want the U.S. to have its grubby little paws on Iraq for the long term. But do these protesters have any idea what they're calling for? Do they have any idea what the consequences would be if anyone took them seriously?

Look, I want U.S. troops home soon too. And I know that it's easy for me to write this, since I'm not the one who has to get shot at all day in the blazing heat. But if U.S. troops stay a bit longer, they might - they just might - be able to avert a civil war. They just might be able to help Iraq muddle through long enough for things to gell together - and then Iraqis just might have a long shot at something better than the hell they've had to endure these long years. But if the U.S. pulled out now, that slender chance would vanish, and there would be nothing but killing and despair.

Yesterday, after reading the Keywords post, which I recommend, I wrote to a colleague of mine who plans to attend the march. I hope it's ok for me to reprint his reply, in part:

Well, 'bring the troops home in 90 days' just doesn't have the same ring to it. Of course we couldn't pack up and pull out in a couple of days, but this isn't what anyone (sane) is asking for. Many sane people are suggesting that we look past the false dichotomy of keeping things as they are now or pulling out in a couple of days giving no thought to the security of Iraq. An international *peacekeeping* force could be assembled fairly quickly *if* we turned over control of *everything* to the UN. Once such a force was on hand, we could pull out. As long as we're there and doing our modern day Arab facade thing, Iraq will be unstable. The sooner we get out and let the political chips fall where they may, the better chance the country will have to stabilize and the sooner it will start. US presence in Iraq at this point is purely antagonistic, regardless of the level of sincerity had by anyone who is on the IGC or part of the CPA or Bush administration as regards the long-term well-being of Iraq. (Not that I think any of them are sincere on this score.)

When I first read this, I thought "let the political chips fall where they may" was one of the most heartless things I had ever read. But then I realized that my colleague is of course assuming that the UN would be there to prevent a civil war. The problem is that it's too damn late for the UN. The US has screwed that all up. It's too late, and very few countries are willing to risk the lives of their citizens to help the US. So it's very naive to depend on this in defending the slogan.

I'm not sure what the "dichotomy of keeping things as they are now or pulling out in a couple of days giving no thought to the security of Iraq" is supposed to be. Things are actually moving very swiftly now towards a transitional power, more swiftly than I'm comfortable with.

At any rate, it seems to me that my colleague might concede the substance of my point if he saw how hopeless it would be at this point to rely on the U.N. But then his case would rest entirely on the political merits of the slogan "Bring the troops home". Here, he's even more mistaken. If he's already lost a well-meaning lefty like myself, how well does he think this slogan is going to play with regular folks? If the literal meaning of the slogan is bad, I think it's easily twisted into a hundred worse shapes. So it hasn't even got popular appeal going for it.

I've been trying to think of the best case one could make for my colleague's view of the situation. And the best I can do is this:

"Come on, take a hard look at yourself and what you're saying. You may have a genuine humanitarian concern for the people of Iraq, but you've unwittingly become an apologist for imperial power. You know what you remind me of? You remind me of some stuffy Brit from a hundred years past fretting about what might happen if the wonderful civilizing and benevolent influence of the British were suddenly withdrawn from the savages and they were left to their own devices. Our stuffy Brit would have likewise been driven by a sort of humanitarian concern - but he would have thereby entirely missed the big picture, which is that on the whole Britain's paternalistic rationale for involvment masked naked imperial ambition which had nothing to do with anyone's good and did a whole lot of mischief as a result. Unjustifiable then, and you know it, and so unjustifiable now."

And since I'm writing for both sides, let me point out that the analogy cuts both ways. I do condemn empire. I do see how it was unjustifiable - and also how humanitarian concerns were used to support it nontheless for the duration. But consider the case of India. The British had no business there, regardless of the good they may have thought they were doing. But when they left, after years of procrastinating, their depature occurred with criminal haste and carelessness. And what we got was possibly avoidable: partition and two, then three, mutually antagonistic countries, and eventually the very serious risk of nuclear war. An extra 6-12 months and a great deal more care was justified even though the imperial enterprise in which the British rule of India was enmeshed was an utter fraud.

Once you're in, you stand to do a great deal of damage depending on how you leave. That is another lesson of empire, beyond the one urging cyncism about motives which everyone seems to have absorbed from recent events.

Questions about self-determination are as slippery and morally difficult as most questions about power. No one should think that they're doing Iraqis any favours by letting them just work things out as soon as possible. I tried to argue for this, and explain why my attitude doesn't simply collapse into objectionable paternalism here.

After months of posting about Normblog and pestering poor Norm with emails, I've finally succeeded in goading him into a reply . . . only to discover that I had clumsily botched the first post he chose to write about. Let me explain.

The original post was, I thought, a masterpiece of brevity:

The procedural objection to the war . . . point and counterpoint.

Now, any competent user of English would have assumed that I intended to contrast two opposed views. And that's exactly what Norm did. Hence his puzzlement when he discovered that my "counterpoint" wasn't much of a rebuttal at all.

If I had been a comptent user of English, I might have avoided this. I might have written instead, "Here is a very sensible point about the procedural objection to the war. And the only plausible response is to basically concede it, but at the same time to try to hold onto the root intuition that procedure and international law matters. The procedural objection to the war has some real force, but it can't stand on its own. I try to explain this, and other related arguments, here".

Arg!

I take full responsibility for wasting Norm's (and your) time with careless wording. But at least we're making progress in the sense that the apparent disagreement between Norm and me has been reduced, if only a little.

So far we have something less than an epic clash of views about which bloggers will still be talking days from now . . .

Re: Abortion . . . Except for the fact that as a man I have to rely on imaginative sympathy rather than experience, this captures my feelings about it pretty well.

What he said

Wow, this post by Juan Cole is exceptionally good. The point about opportunity costs is one I've been hammering on for a long time here at See Why? But Cole does a better job than I've so far done at explaining it clearly.

This piece by Paul Krugman is really very good, but I find this throwaway remark attempting to exonerate Clinton highly suspicious:

There has been much speculation about whether officials ignored specific intelligence warnings, but what we know for sure is that the administration disregarded urgent pleas by departing Clinton officials to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda.

Unless I'm mistaken, the source of this story is . . . Clinton or someone close to him. That doesn't mean it's false. But the burden of proof is pretty high here. I want to see briefing papers and transcripts before I buy this one. (Though perhaps the Bush admin's failure to immediately leak the relevant briefing papers and transcripts says something.) Whatever the case, I'll wager that "urgent" is a bit over the top.

In the course of one of the least focused columns I have ever read, George F. Will actually manages to say something true:

Vladimir Putin used bribery and intimidation to pull people to the polls after a campaign in which the state apparatus propagandized for him and marginalized his competitors. In the process, Putin managed to further delegitimize himself with a 71 percent landslide.

I'm glad that conservatives are twigging to what a wretch Putin is. It's taken a long time, especially considering the fact that Bush's policy on Russia is really the same old failed Clinton policy on Russia. You'd think the strong association with Mr. Woody would diminish psychological resistance among conservatives to attacking the policy. But perhaps Bush ruined things for them by staring deeply into Pooty-Poot's eyes and pronouncing himself satisfied.

David Brooks is trying to be sympathetic to the cowardly Spanish. He doesn't want to think them despicable:

I'm resisting that conclusion, because I don't know what mix of issues swung the Spanish election during those final days. But I do know that reversing course in the wake of a terrorist attack is inexcusable. I don't care what the policy is. You do not give terrorists the chance to think that their methods work. You do not give them the chance to celebrate victories. When you do that, you make the world a more dangerous place, for others and probably for yourself.

So, like, even though Brooks doesn't know why Spain voted as it did, he still knows exactly what it means? Most of the evidence I've seen so far suggests that people were furious about being lied to in the aftermath of a tragedy by people who hoped to make a political gain from it. Shouldn't Brooks consult an opinion poll before he draws this conclusion? No, here's what Brooks feels entitled to conclude: "Al Qaeda has now induced one nation to abandon the Iraqi people." Or perhaps AQ has now created the conditions for one stupid government to completely blow its credibility immediately before an election.

While we're on the subject of not giving terrorists what they want, I'd like to point out that every time Hamas commits an atrocity against Israelis, the Israeli government breaks off talks with the P.A. Now I know that there are very thorny questions about complicity of both the active and the passive kind between the PA and other terrorists groups. Still, it's absolutely obvious that the suicide bombings are aimed at breaking down the talks. They're aimed at provoking collective punishment to further radicalize the Palestinians. That's the point. And it always works. In other words, in this case the terrorists are repeatedly given the chance to think that their methods work. I've yet to see a conservative commentator point that out. Don't give them what they want, my ass.

On the weekend I noticed that Colin Powell said that the war remained justified because Iraq posed a long term threat to the region whether or not it actually had WMD. I meant to blog about this but didn't have a chance until now.

The interesting thing is that Powell is actually right. Of course Saddam Hussein would have resumed his WMD programs had the sanctions lifted and his country been awash in oil revenues again. (Or perhaps not if he concluded that WMD were not much use against his main adversaries. Nevertheless, no responsible forecast would have been based on such an optimistic assumption.)

The trick is that Powell's conclusion doesn't follow from his premises. And this is because - for the hundredth time - the prudential case for the war collapses as soon as you see that the question was not how dangerous Iraq was, but rather how dangerous Iraq was compared to the other threats the U.S. had to deal with. A proper prudential argument had to place Iraq within the broader context of what was going on in the world - and it had to answer hard questions about the allocation of resources, since more resources thrown at one aspect of a problem often mean less devoted to another. (I don't mean to imply that we're always playing a zero sum game here. Still, there are very real limits on resources, as we're now discovering.)

Now, here's why I bring this up, even though I've said all this before. Over the last year and a half, I've taught a class on the war, discussed it for countless hours, and read literally thousands and thousands of articles about it. And not once - not once - have I ever seen anyone supporting the war face this elementary point squarely, yet alone give a convincing answer.

Not once.

So . . . some of the prisoners recently released from Guantanamo are talking up a storm about abusive conditions there. I haven't the faintest idea whether their story will hold up. In fact, it seems just yesterday that I was reading stories about how cushy the conditions in Guantanamo are.

Whatever the case, I think it's pretty clear that the only responsible reaction is this:

Outside independent review — ideally judicial review — is essential either to rebut these claims convincingly or to root out and punish those responsbile if the uglier charges are at all true.

The extremely sensible Yglesias says something odd:

If -- as much of the right keeps telling me -- yesterday's election in Spain really is a victory for al-Qaeda in the war on terror, and George W. Bush is leading the global war on terror, does it follow that Bush is mismanaging our side and leading to our defeat?

No, of course not. In any struggle there are setbacks and Bush never promised that anything would be easy. The standard to measure Bush's performance against is not whether any attacks occur but whether more attacks occur than you think are likely to have occurred if you had done something else.

I think Bush fails when measured up against that standard, but it's not the one that Yglesias mentions.

This is just insane:

A United Nations panel has awarded more than $200 million US in damages arising from Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The bulk of the money will go to families of more than 600 Kuwaitis who disappeared during the war.

The families were not able to file their claims for compensation sooner because they did not know what had happened to their missing loved ones.

That issue was resolved after last year's U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The bodies of the more than 600 missing Kuwaitis were found in mass graves.

A spokesman for the UN Compensation Commission, Joe Sills, said DNA tests established their identities.

"For some 15 years, their families have lived without knowing what their fate was," Sills said. "And the commission dealt with this, and they agreed on a ceiling figure of $200,000 for each of these claims."

The compensation is considerably less than the $720,000 US sought by the Kuwaiti government for each family. However, Sills says the awards are only for mental pain and anguish.

Families of the deceased have until the end of this month to claim compensation for loss of, or damage to, property.

The compensation commission received the funds from a portion of sales of Iraqi oil under the UN's "oil-for-food" program.

These families have suffered a great deal, but Kuwait is very, very wealthy and Iraq is utterly destitute. I have no doubt that the Kuwaiti government could have come up with this money in a moment if concern for the families had been an issue. There is already a great deal of resentment in the region towards the small, extremely wealthy Gulf states - which apparently explained some of the schadenfreude over Kuwait's plight after Iraq originally invaded. So why oh why does the Kuwaiti government keep kicking Iraq while it's down?

The Agonist quotes Stratfor:

Stratfor comments: The Islamists are thinking over their effect on the Spanish election. They are also aware that an election is coming in the United States and they would dearly like to bring down President George W. Bush. They must know that presidents always get a bounce after an attack, and that that bounce bleeds off over the course of months when no progress appears to be made. That would argue that an al Qaeda attack in the United States should come in the spring or summer. The mention of "Black Wind" in a militant communiqué clearly refers to a dirty bomb or chemical attack, but al Qaeda has rarely been kind enough to telegraph its punches. However, there can be little doubt now that we are in a new phase of the war. Having won the first phase, the United States is facing a sustained counterattack.

Why suppose that AQ wants to bring down Bush? The man is a deeply polarizing leader who discredits the U.S. on the international stage. That's exactly what AQ wants. Exactly. This sort of nonsense is important to combat because it plays directly into the foolish idea that a vote for Kerry is a vote for bin Laden.

Today's Papers writes:

Sen. John Kerry took heat yesterday over comments he made at a March 8 fundraiser at which he said, "I've met foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy, they look at you and say, 'You gotta win this; you gotta beat this guy.'" According to the LAT, WP, and NYT, Colin Powell (and reporters) challenged Kerry to say which leaders, and a Republican taunted him at a "town hall" meeting in Bethlehem, Pa.: "Were they people like the president of North Korea?"

The one problem with the taunting being, of course, that everyone knows that most people around the world, leaders and citizens, are rooting for Kerry. What Kerry says is absolutely correct. If I were a Bush supporter, I would not want to explore this line of attack. If I were absolutely committed to it, I suppose I would push the "it doesn't matter" line - not the "wow, Kerry is deluded line". Cause on this point at least, he's not deluded at all.

The view from elsewhere . . . This piece in Canada's Globe and Mail gives a nice rundown of public opinion and the Iraq war.

Josh Marshall makes a point that also struck me. He remarks on:

just how little Spanish or other Western intelligence services seem to have known about this. There was no chatter, no hints. The entire operation seems to have slipped through entirely unnoticed by anyone. That suggests the possibility that we're really flying blind on the actual terrorist threat, or at least that it's quite possible for al Qaida or affiliated groups to launch a major attack without our even getting hints that it's going to occurr, let alone being able to stop it.

That is not good. Not good at all.

One point about "chatter" is worth making. The U.S. admin is notoriously closed. It refuses to tell anyone pretty much anything except the official storyline. But for some damn reason I'm always reading about this spike in chatter or that spike in chatter. And the news reports about official responses are often fairly specific. Think of the cancelled flights from France to L.A. recently.

Well, I for one would like a little more of the useful information that the admin has (who said what and when and why and on what basis and to whom, etc.) and a little less information on all this chatter. The reason is pretty obvious. If you're a terrorist trying to figure out whether your communications are secure, wouldn't it make sense to put out teasers once and while and see if anyone bites?

I'm not sure. Pehaps the admin's blabbing about chatter this and chatter that and canceling specific flights on supposedly good information is some incredibly clever double-game in which they try to screw with them psychologically. But it's hard to see exactly how that might work.

Anyway, now something really awful happens and there's no damn chatter. I do hope the media gets around sometime to asking why that is so.

A footnote to the last post . . . I noted at the end of the post that the Zarqawi story was simmering on the internet, but hadn't boiled over in the mainstream. If it does boil over, it will fit the same pattern established by the Plame affair and the Trent Lott resignation: An outrage, a general lack of interest from the press, a simmering interest in the blogosphere, and finally a breakthrough from the blogosphere to the mainstream.

Now, I know that the internet is supposed to speed up politics. But isn't this pattern a case of the internet slowing politics down? The Plame affair and the Trent Lott resignation both give excellent examples of something that might well have just blipped by unnoticed in the swirl of events . . . in a slower age. The internet changed that by keeping the story alive - in effect, by slowing things down, and giving us more time to reflect on them.

Ha! It's counterintuitive day at See Why?

OK, for the first time I think I understand how the Zarqawi/Northern Iraq story is supposed to work. If you figured this out a long time ago, please be patient with me. I'm a bit slow. The allegation driving the story, for anyone who missed it, was that before the Iraq war, the Pentagon repeatedly drew up plans to take out the shadowy terrorist figure Zarqawi when the admin had good intelligence on his whereabouts in Northern Iraq. And the admin repeatedly nixed the plans.

When the story first surfaced, I just couldn't make any sense of it. In spite of my obvious willingness to believe the worst about Bush and his gang, none of the rationales on offer struck me as at all plausible. The Bush admin allegedly held off on attacking Zarqawi's base because they needed a pretext for the war - remember that Zarqawi figured in Colin Powell's UN presentation. But that made no sense to me, because they already had everything they wanted as far as pretext went. The Bush admin also allegedly held off because they wanted to keep allies on board during the diffcult diplomatic process leading up to the war. But that made no sense to me either, since I think they could have gotten away with bombing a piddly terrorist base. After all, they were vigorously bombing all over Iraq during the buildup to the official war.

So I was sceptical. And so I remain, since there are apparently still reasonable doubts about Zarqawi and his exact significance. But finally someone has a hypothesis that at least makes sense:

Finally, and most disgracefully of all, there is the case of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the terrorist most probably responsible for the Karbala atrocity a week or so ago. For well over a year after the S11 attacks, Zarqawi’s group Ansar al-Islam was operating from a base inside the Kurdish controlled zone in Iraq, which was also part of the no-fly zone. The Pentagon drew up numerous plans for attacks on Zarqawi, but they were all vetoed on political grounds, according the NBC story linked here. There are various hypotheses about the precise grounds, all highly discreditable, but the most plausible is that a watertight plan would have required co-operation between US air forces, and Kurdish ground forces. This would have been most unpalatable to the Turkish government, which was being courted, up to the last minute, as a partner for the Iraq war2. So nothing was done, and by the time the camp was attacked at the beginning of the war, Zarqawi and most of his followers were gone.

Now that I can make sense of the rationale for refusing to go after Zarqawi, I'm more open to the story. That doesn't make it true. But at least it's coherent.

One thing that's sort of interesting is that I haven't seen much fuss about this story lately. It seems to be simmering in the internet but I haven't yet seen it boil over in public. And it should. If it's true, it's huge.

MaxSpeak reads the right wing of the blogosphere as it responds to the Spanish election. He's awfully good. Check him out.

I wrote to Juan Cole making essentially the point I made in this post. He has kindly (and quickly) responded, but I forgot to ask him for permission to post his reply. The gist of it was that Feith and co. were up to a lot of nonsense. My reply:

I completely agree with that. I suppose I just want to make sure that we always hold on tightly to the baby as the bathwater drains: I don't think there's anything objectionable *in itself* about pushing the CIA on an assessment if you're sceptical about it. And I don't think we should regard overruling the CIA as *in itself* scandalous. In fact, it turns out that the politicals ought to have seen through some of the CIA's more extravagant claims - that is, that it ought to have overruled them in the opposite direction. But I do agree that the things you point out below and in your post are scandalous.

Indeed, I must say that after years and years of complaining about CIA paranoia, monkey business and unreliability it is a bit jarring to read so many people on the left championing its judgment and integrity. Its judgments have always been political, and people on the left ought to be accutely aware of that. Cole is very careful, so I don't want to include him, but in general I've seen a lot of people writing very sympathetically about the CIA. Frankly, I think they look good now only in comparision to the nutjobs who opposed them within the admin. If you take a good hard look at the organization itself, it's really botched an astonishing number of its tasks and much of its credibility was unearned to start with.

The general point I'm trying to defend here is that the admin's crime was not to overrule the CIA - it was to overrule it for terrible reasons, while engaging in all kinds of dishonest tricks to advance its own agenda.

Wow. I just got a very generous plug from Norm Geras. If you're joining me from his site, welcome!

Norm and I do disagree very much about the war, as he points out. If I give Norm a run for his money anywhere, it's in this post.

Um, let's see. Other highlights, to try to convince you to come back. Please enjoy:

-this letter taking on Paul Berman;

-this post arguing in favour of Iraqi debt relief;

-this letter to Krugman, gently chiding him for being too easy on Republicans;

-and this post on risk and responses to terrorism.

And to determine whether I am fair and balanced, please see this post in which I spank Robert Dreyfuss for insensitivity.

I've been fretting about whether it was tasteless to write this post so soon after the Madrid bombings. Still not sure . . .

At some point we have to have a discussion about our moral responses to political violence. But I still haven't decided if I needed to do my part to initiate that discussion yesterday.

Readers?

Robert Tagorda dings the NYT, thus sparing me the trouble of making the same point.

Chalk up another point for the idea that the internet is revolutionizing participatory democracy . . .

Do Democrats suck?

. . . point and, um, let's just skip the counterpoint and add another point.

Juan Cole has this to say about a recent piece in the WaPo:

Poor Dana Priest at the Washington Post caught the frankly shitty assignment of summarizing Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Doug Feith's self-defense against Democratic critics. The article is a mere repeat of statements made to the press by Feith on June 4, 2003, and contains nothing new. It is uncritical journalism at its very worst.

The article denies that Feith's office engaged in intelligence gathering. I'm not aware that anyone ever accused them of intelligence gathering. In fact, the problem with them was that they cherry-picked other people's intelligence for reports that the professional analysts had already seen and discounted. By allowing Feith to defend himself from a charge no one is making, the article becomes complicit in a cover-up.

The article tries to take the spotlight off the dozen Neocons appointed to the Office of Special Plans, highlighting a couple of minor players instead. It completely ignores the report of a group of retired CIA officers about OSP and revelations of Karen Kwiatkowski (cited below in my piece on Chalabi). It also ignores the repeated interviews given by Greg Thielmann of the State Department, about how the OSP managed to make an end run around the intelligence pipeline that is supposed to go from analysts to policy makers. Instead, Feith and the OSP had a direct line to Scooter Libby and John Hannah in Cheney's office, and Cheney had the ear of the president. (These people are like medieval courtiers. To get the ear of the king, you get the ear of the vizier!)

It also ignores the fact that Feith earlier lied when he assured everyone that his office had never briefed the White House on intelligence matters. It turns out that it did. This procedure was so irregular that CIA Director George Tenet didn't know how to respond to it, saying he had never been in such a situation before. This article quotes Rumsfeld and Feith trying to make it look perfectly normal for the Undersecetary of Defense for Planning to usurp the intelligence analysis and briefing functions of the CIA and the DIA!

The article fails to mention that the OSP has failed to produce a single reliable document showing significant Saddam-al-Qaeda collaboration!

Rumsfeld is quoted as saying that those of us who think we were had by the Pentagon have a conspiratorial point of view. It seems the American people were never misinformed that Iraq was close to having nukes, had thousands of pounds of chemical and biological weapons, and was Usama Bin Laden's old college roommate. None of these things was alleged in spring of 2003, and the allegations had no effect on the American public's willingness to suppor the war. Gee, glad to be corrected, Mr. Rumsfeld. Nobody but us chickens around here.

You know, when you take a country to war on particular grounds, and those grounds prove baseless, the ethical thing to do is to resign.

Yes, yes and yes.

Let me add one qualification, though, because if the qualification is part of Cole's view it's only latent – and it really ought to be emphasized. As I've said before, I think it's very important to get clear about exactly what Rumsfeld and co. did wrong here. As a general rule, there's nothing at all wrong with second-guessing your intelligence community (or any other fixed agency in government), pushing it hard to see if you can force it to reexamine its assumptions, and so on. There's nothing wrong with suspecting - and then acting on the suspicion - that career professionals have fallen into a blinkered approach to a subject. In fact, it's a positive duty to do these things - and if responsible politicians didn't do it, the world would be a worse place.

So I have to say I'm getting a bit tired of all the reports that the politicals - gasp! - ignored the final and supreme judgment of the CIA. The CIA screws up all the time, and I wouldn't want to be protected by people who followed them blindly whereever they went.

So let's be very precise about how they screwed up:

First, they screwed up because they made extremely poor judgments about the intelligence reports they received. This is a first-order error, an error of substance, and not of process. They were simply extraordinarily naive about this, willfully stupid. Read this piece in the Washington Monthly, for example, to get a sense of one especially alarming part of this story.

Second, they did make genuine "second-order" errors: They refused to subject their own intelligence conclusions to a fair and open assessment within government. Hence the secret briefings behind Tenet's back.

Add to that the lies, the deceptions, the smears on the CIA, the fear-mongering and so on, and you've got an abundance of material for criminal indictments and impeachments.

But - and this is important - we should be really careful to distinguish between these very bad and harmful things, and a general unwillingness to accept what career professionals within government say. I care about this so much because I think that career professionals in government have their own prejudices and limitations, however hardworking and conscientious they are. And I can just imagine a Democratic administration, for example, trying to push a bill on health care over the (spurious) objections of some of its own economists. And then the Democrats would have to explain why it's ok for them to be sceptical about the advice of their career professionals when they just spent years bashing the Republicans for the very same sin. I think the appropriate response draws on the distinction I drew above, so we might as well start drawing it now.

I found this via Pandagon, and I must say, it is very, very funny.

Civility and blogging Norms

In case you missed it, Norm Geras is having it out with with this fellow. A tempest in a blogospheric teapot, to be sure, but it'll do as a peg to hang a few thoughts on.

As far as the substance of the debate goes, I think for me that it's a bit of this and a bit of that. But what I do feel fairly strongly about is that Norm Geras is not an "Apostate, Mad Dog who must be shot". No, to put it mildly, I do not think that Norm deserves to be shot.

Here are a few considerations that ought to weigh on us when we're deciding on what degree of civility to take up with a political adversary.

Let me dub the first the Brad DeLong Doctrine of Civility. This doctrine basically licenses the following retort to your adversaries: "If you don't want to be called a liar, then don't lie. Similarly, if you don't want to be called an idiot, then don't be one." The justification for the Brad Delong Doctrine of Civility is fairly straightforward. Political discourse can be debased in many ways, but one of the most insidious is the distortion we introduce when we fail - repeatedly - to call a spade a spade on matters of the highest importance. A norm which prohibits strong language in response to outright lies and evasions isn't a healthy one. It isn't one we can afford any longer. So let's call it like it is. DeLong's series on the media is a superb example of someone telling it like it is, and doing everyone a world of good in the process.

[UPDATE: See below]

The second consideration is that we ought to try to maximize our opportunities for rational debate. That possibility recedes as our insults get rougher. But I think it's obvious that Norm is capable of rational debate, even if *cough* he hasn't yet responded to my invitation to debate the questions which really interest me.

Third, we ought to think in general about how strong emotions work in our political and moral judgments. As far as I can tell, the Buddhists think that we should try and shed ourselves of strong emotions. Myself, I'm with Aristotle on this one: Sometimes anger or indignation, in the right amount, at the right time, in the appropriate circumstances, is the right thing to feel. Anger or indignation are indispensable tools of moral reflection: they help us pick out things which are morally salient, and which might otherwise have escaped our notice. But they also distort and mislead. I've been blinded by indignation as often as I've been enlightened by it. When you're tempted to use strong language with an adversary, you ought to think about whether the language you're using is connected with the good or the bad kind of indignation. When you're tempted to call - even in jest - for Norm Geras to be shot, chances are it's the bad kind.

Finally, we ought to cut people slack depending on why we think they've arrived at the positions they have. Norm Geras may be mistaken about the war, but he didn't support it for the same reasons Donald Rumsfeld did. He supported it for reasons that we ought to acknowledge too, even if we thought they were outweighed by other, stronger considerations. In fact, I've learned quite a bit from Norm's blog. It irritates me sometimes, but it also gets me thinking about things in new ways. And that's more than I can say for a lot of lefty blogs.

Let me finish by noting something Norm says:

Cue whoever it is that blogs at Lenin's Tomb and calls himself, sometimes, Nikolai and, other times, Lenin. Supposedly responding to this post of mine, Nik - which is how I shall refer to him just to be friendly, since he has kindly allowed himself elsewhere to speak of me as 'Norm', and why would I ever rebuff an overture like that?

Whoops! As far as first names go, I notice that I have an inconsistent policy here at See Why? I usually use full names or last names, but occasionally I slip into the habit of using first names. I think I read somewhere once that bloggers do that all the time. Anyway, I almost always use Norm Geras' first name. So: Pardon me, Mr. Geras, for being so forward. But your blog (ahem, "Normblog") is simply stuffed to the brim with Norm-this and Norm-that. That may explain why complete strangers are using your first name. No offense intended.

UPDATE: And click here for a very funny response to some recent Republican whining about incivility.

UPDATE: Oh crap. Nikolai at Lenin's Tomb thinks that I'm quoting Brad DeLong. I'm not, and I never meant to attribute the Brad DeLong Doctrine of Civility to anything he actually said. I named it after DeLong because I associate the view with him, and because I have a rather higher opinion of DeLong than Nikolai.

Matthew Yglesias writes that:

a lot of Democrats are getting too complacent at the sign of recent poll numbers. Unless something radically changes the spending equation, Bush has a very strong possibility of totally reframing this election in his favor over the next eight months.

I hope this turns out to be in the same category as Yglesias' "Dean is inevitable" prediction.

Terrorism and Political Violence

I didn't blog about the Madrid bombings the day they happened because I couldn't think of much to say beyond the fact that they were horrifying. Also, a personal crisis the same day took my mind off important matters and onto my own life.

I've been mulling over the tragedy since then, and especially the response to it. I think the response - shock, horror, condemnation, solidarity - has been entirely appropriate. And I don't want what I'm going to say to be interpreted as implying otherwise. I also don't want to imply that we should fail to give the victims of the bombing their due attention, or focus our attention elsewhere. What I want to suggest is that we broaden our attention to include other kinds of political violence, not that we look away from the terror in Madrid in some other direction.

That said, let me get to the point: What makes me uncomfortable about the coverage of the bombings is not the implication that terrorism is especially evil. It's the implication that terrorism is somehow uniquely evil, that it demands our condemnation in ways that no other kind of political violence could.

If you're a bad guy looking to be evil, the deliberate targeting of civilian victims for political ends not coordinated (or only loosely coordinated) with a state is a winning strategy. But there are other ways. You might also act on behalf of a state's official machinery to target civilian victims for political ends. And all other things being equal, this will be no less evil, no less reprehensible.

Again, the point is not to distract attention away from victims of terrorism, or to minimize their suffering. The point is that we might consider broadening our response to evil, by including more things on our list of things which set someone or some state beyond the pale.

Let me offer you a comparison. The roots of the conflict in Chechnya are tangled and complex, and there is plenty of blame to go around. But Vladmir Putin bears ultimate responsibility for what the Russian military has done in Chechnya. Credible reports of mass graves, systematic rape, illegal detentions, murder, the energetic shelling of civilian areas, mass transfers of people, and so on, are now years old. Thousands of innocents have perished at the hands of the Russian military in circumstances they have been unable to account for.

When nothing is done about this, when it continues in spite of the reports, it is obvious that responsibility rests with people who rely on such techniques to achieve their political ends. Putin is a murderer, a war criminal. He has done something on par with the bombings in Madrid. He has used calculated violence against civilians in order to achieve political ends. And he has done so without scruple or restraint.

Chechnya's plight is not exactly hidden - it does make the front pages from time to time. But for the most part the mass murders and other abuses have occurred without attracting much attention. And even when they do attract attention, they gather precious little condemnation. We treat Putin as though he is a legitimate statesman - as though he is not a very plaubile candidate for the Hague. His kind of violence is normal, safe - and if it isn't sanctioned, it apparently doesn't rise to the level required to get him shunned from civilized society.

And so, once again, it is not the universal condemnation of the Madrid bombings that is disturbing. It is the way these condemnations so often function in political discourse - whether we realize it or not - to throw the emphasis almost entirely on one kind of political violence, and firmly away from others, which seems to me as intrinsically wrong as terrorism. None of this is necessary or inevitable. We can mourn and condemn victims of terrorism without slipping into this habit. But unless I'm mistaken, we do, in ways that are more or less subtle.

Now for three qualifications, so I don't get beaten up for writing this:

First, you might argue that Putin had better ends than either the ETA or AQ (whoever was responsible for the Madrid bombings). I don't know enough about the ETA to judge that, but I do think that AQ's dreams of world Islamic hegemony are basically worse than almost anything I can imagine. But two points are worth making here: The first is that we usually don't think the ends justify the means when it comes to the deliberate slaughter of civilians to achieve political aims. And the second, of course, is that Putin's ends are not entirely creditable.

Second, I've claimed that the reaction to the Madrid bombing reveals certain attitudes about terrorism which don't match our attitudes about other kinds of political violence. But I certainly don't want to argue that our reactions to violence always have to exactly fit a careful moral calculus, so that before people express shock and horror they have to go through some rigamarole about ensuring that their response is commensurate with any other tragedy. We pay more attention to some places than others for lots of contingent or accidental reasons, and the tendency is so human I'm not sure there's anything objectionable about it, at least within limits. What I'm pointing to, though, is a disparity in response that is really quite extreme and that is therefore worth thinking about a bit.

Finally, even if we decide that terrorism is morally on par with some varieties of state violence (other things being equal), we certainly are justified in finding terrorism more alarming or frightening. And that's because state violence doesn't threaten most of the people whose blogs I'm reading, whereas terrrorism really is something that might get us. Even people who are threatened by state violence can sometimes bargain with states, make compromises, find ways to smooth over the unpredictability. But terrorism can strike anywhere: today in Madrid, tomorrow in mid-town Manhattan as my wife commutes to work.

And so there is one sense in which it is perfectly fair for people to find terrorism more awful. But it's not a moral difference, and we ought to think about that.

Interesting to hear that I'm not the only one who dislikes the Dreyfuss Report. Yesterday, I posted some criticism of the blog. Within a few hours, I received the following email from a reader in Dublin:

I have read Republic of Fear - and I find it simply impossible to believe that Dreyfuss has. I think it would be virtually impossible to write a less "pornographic" book about the Saddam Hussein regime. In fact it is not even really very journalistic - quite academic and theoretical. This is not to endorse it, nor not to endorse it - that is not my purpose. Just to say that Dreyfuss is talking out of his whatsit.

As for "neo-con linked", the Al Qaeda-linked Dreyfuss (well, Bin Laden did oppose the Iraq war too didn't he?) might have mentioned that the book was written in, I think, 1986 - a couple of years after Rumsfeld was pictured shaking hands with Saddam, several years before Saddam stopped being an unofficial ally of the United States.

Also since the book was written before Saddam's worst crimes - the Anfal campaign, the crushing of the 1991 intifada etc. - it is, let me put it politely, unsustainable to say he exagerated the crimes of the Saddam regime "ten-fold".

But forget all that. "While Saddam may have been a bad guy..." Well, really, what I mean to say is f**k Dreyfuss, you know what I mean?

I cannot believe Josh Marshall recomended this guy.

(Incidentally, that is the first, and I hope last, post of Dreyfuss's I'll be reading.)

Yours faithfully,

James Conran, Dublin, Ireland.

And if I can interrupt the discussion of politics for a minute, I would just like to say that it's, like, supercool that complete strangers read this blog - complete strangers in other countries. Time to sacrifice yet another goat to the internet Gods!

I'm sad to report that for the first time, Brad DeLong has angered me. I swear I had the idea for this post today while I was washing dishes. DeLong has somehow managed to get inside my brain in order to take my idea before I could work it up into a post.

What's especially alarming is that I don't have fillings, so DeLong must be tapping into my brain waves in some way even more insidious than the standard ESP-to-fillings route. And he's doing it while I'm in NYC and he's in Berkeley.

No one should have that much power.

I continue to dislike the Dreyfuss Report. (Click here for my first, more tentative, expression of dislike.)

Take this recent post, for example, on Kenan Makiya. By way of introduction to the man, Dreyfuss writes:

First, a little on Makiya. He is the neocon-allied, Iraqi National Congress-belonging, Harvard-connected, seemingly human rights-loving author of Republic of Fear. That book, first written in the late 1980s and then reissued in time for the war, purported to be a history of Saddam Hussein's repression. It's a nearly pornographic collection of atrocities, but it's based on accounts provided to Makiya from Iraqi exiles, who?as we know from their, umm, exaggerations on intelligence on WMD and Iraq's (nonexistent) ties to Al Qaeda?aren't exactly reliable witnesses. While Saddam may have been a bad guy, Makiya's book probably exaggerates by a factor of ten. In any case, the book made him a hero to advocates of human rights.

Woah there! First of all, this "neocon-allied" seems to be the last step in the debasing of what used to be a perfectly useful political label. I take it Dreyfuss thinks that anyone who supported the war is "neocon allied" since they teamed up with neocons who also wanted it. I'll buy this for Cheney and Rumsfeld (neither of whom count as neocons in my book), but not Makiya.

Look, lots of people supported the war for lots of different reasons. Surely there's a world of difference between supporting the war because you love American hegemony and military muscle-flexing and supporting the war because you can no longer stand to see what a brutal dictator is doing to your country. Calling Makiya "neocon allied" may be strictly true, but here I suspect it functions to dishonestly blur the difference between the very different reasons people had to support the war.

Unless I'm mistaken, Makiya was pretty ambivalent about the administration's war, and he wasn't shy about sharing that ambivalence publicly. In the end, he did decide to support the war, but, again, surely there's a difference between his supporting the war because he's talked himself into the view that it was the only way for Iraq to free itself of a nightmare and Cheney's supporting it because he thirsts after world domination.

Anyway, I confess that I haven't read Makiya's book, but what the hell is up with calling it near "pornographic"? Does Dreyfuss think that Makiya was the only one who had horrible stories to tell about Iraq? Has he ever read a Human Rights Watch report on the country? What is the basis for his claim that Makiya exaggerates "by a factor of ten"? And why does "it made him a hero of advocates of human rights" here function as a slur - something I've never actually seen before?

Dreyfuss tries to get some milleage out of the fact that Makiya's book was based on defector's reports, and you know (smirk; wink) how reliable they are. What a steaming crock of merde.

Look, there are defector reports and there are defector reports. A huge amount of human rights research is based on defector reports. There's often no other way to document atrocities. Human rights researchers who investigate defectors' stories are well aware of the difficulties: of political agendas and axes to grind. That's why they cross-examine, double check, corroborate when possible, interview multiple times, check for physical evidence, and so on. In other words, they do all the sorts of things which U.S. intelligence (that is, the parts of the intelligence community which played along with the admin) failed to do when it was assessing Iraqi defector reports.

Dreyfuss' across-the-board smear is alarming, because if taken seriously it threatens to undo an enormous body of credible evidence of human suffering, and because it unfairly impugns a method which does yield plausible results when it is applied properly. And if my reaction to it seems strong, that's because I have been worrying that this would be one dreadful consequence of the recent revelations about the INC's pre-war propoganda activities.

By the time Dreyfuss is done introducing his subject, I'm not ready to take anything he says on trust. His description of Makiya's latest endeavors makes Makiya sound pretty slimy. But then again, his description of Makiya's human rights investigations makes that sounds slimy, so the rest of the piece hardly inspires confidence.

At any rate, this blog came so highly recommended, and by people I trust, that I'm not quite ready to completely give up on it. But, as I say, I'm not at all impressed so far.

The procedural objection to the Iraq war . . . point and counterpoint.

Very bad news yesterday. Possibly lighter posting for the next little bit.

The International Crisis Group has a new report out on Uzbekistan. A few highlights from the executive summary:

Uzbekistan occupies a key strategic position in Central Asia and has a strong security relationship with the U.S. but its political system is highly repressive and its economy is barely reformed since Soviet times. Economic decline and political sclerosis threaten internal stability and undermine regional security. The international community has long urged political and economic reform, but with little success. With no significant progress on either front in 2003, it is time for the U.S., the EU and international financial institutions to begin to shift policies: reducing lending and assistance to the central government, while increasing engagement with society and the private sector.

In March 2003, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) set out benchmarks for political and economic reform that were to be met if lending was to continue. There has been little progress on any of these. U.S. attempts to promote reform within the context of a bilateral "partnership" that has a heavy security component, have also made no significant headway. There are no grounds for the State Department to certify, as required by the U.S. Congress, that Uzbekistan has made "continuing and substantive progress" on political liberalisation, human rights, and economic reforms.
. . .
There is also no evidence of overall human rights improvement. Reports suggest that torture is still widespread in places of detention, despite the government's rhetorical commitment to act against it. None of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture's 22 recommendations has been fully implemented. A government action plan against torture has had little impact on the reality of the criminal justice system. Human rights defenders and ordinary people who speak out against local or central authorities face harassment or arrest from law enforcement agencies.
Uzbekistan continues to suffer serious economic stagnation, unemployment is rising, and living standards are declining. While central Tashkent retains an air of relative prosperity, the reality for many in the capital, and even more so in the provinces, is growing poverty. The economy grew by only 0.3 per cent in 2003, according to the IMF, and GDP per capita has fallen every year since 1998, reaching just U.S.$350 per capita in 2003. With foreign investment miniscule, the regime survives by exporting raw materials, notably gold and cotton. The only way to deal with the economic crisis is through far-reaching structural reforms, but the political elite is reluctant to embrace changes that would undermine its own privileged position.
. . .
This deteriorating socio-economic environment is provoking a rising tide of popular frustration, which in some regions fosters support for radical Islamist groups. Expectations that increased Western engagement after 11 September 2001 would lead to regime liberalisation have been disappointed. Instead, there is growing disenchantment with the U.S. military presence and increasing identification of Western institutions and governments with the repressive regime.

If the EBRD, the U.S. and other donors like the EU fail to respond to Uzbekistan's refusal to move forward on political and economic reform, their own credibility and that of the wider international community will be seriously undermined in the region. There is only a limited amount outsiders can do to encourage reforms if the domestic political will to implement them is absent. When the government fails to live up to its commitments, however, the international community needs to speak out as well as work all the more with the many people within the country who want things to change for the better.

Islam and democracy . . . point and counterpoint . . .

Not sure yet what to make of Iraq's temporary constitution. But I think after all the worrying signs that the neo-cons would try to turn Iraq into a liberatarian playground, it actually looks quite promising. Jack Balkin, who knows a great deal about constitutions in general, has a nice post about it.

None of this changes my mind about the wisdom of the war, but it is very nice to have a bit of good news out of Iraq.

OK, I'm going to institute a new series here at See Why?. From time to time, I will be handing out See Why WTF?!? awards to the most awesomely silly or breathtakingly stupid thing I've seen recently.

Todays WTF award is going to have to go to this photo, of George Bush rubbing a black man's head, presumably for good luck.

Link (with a bit of background) via Metafilter.

(Just to be clear, I think this is deeply insensitive, given the historical context. But what is in Georgie's heart as he does this, I do not presume to say.)

James Fallows, who before the war wrote perhaps the best piece about what the invasion of Iraq might look like, has now gone and written one of the best pieces I've seen so far about how things actually turned out.

Now that's journalism.

From the invaluable Secrecy News:

CRS: NEW U.S. NUKE MAY BE MORE THAN A STUDY

A sharp increase in projected spending for a new nuclear weapons concept known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) suggests that the program is more than merely a conceptual study, according to an analysis this week from the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

In response to public controversy over the new nuclear initiative, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in May 2003 that RNEP "is a study. It is nothing more and nothing less."

But with a five year projected budget of $485 million dollars, it now looks like something more, the CRS said.

"The FY2005 [budget] request document seems to cast serious doubt on assertions that RNEP is only a study," wrote CRS analyst Jonathan Medalia.

A government spokesman told CRS that the large projected increase in spending for the new nuclear weapon was merely "an artifact of the budget process [and] was inserted... as a 'placeholder' to protect the option of proceeding with RNEP."

See "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator Budget Request and Plan,
FY2005-FY2009," CRS report RS21762, March 8:

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/crs/RS21762.pdf

A related CRS study on "Nuclear Weapon Initiatives: Low-Yield R&D, Advanced Concepts, Earth Penetrators, Test Readiness," newly updated March 8, may be found here:

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/crs/RL32130.pdf

Direct public access to CRS products like these is opposed by Congressional leaders such as Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), chair of the House Committee on House Administration, and by CRS officials.

I don't have much patience for the undemocratic, anti-Semitic theocrats currently running Iran, but I think it would be appropriate at this point for them to raise the issue of a double standard on questions about nuclear weapons.

If you're a rich, powerful Western government, you just might be able to persuade developing countries to drop their nuclear programs - given the right balance of restraint on your part, inducements and so on. But if you're trying to do this and at the same time pushing ahead with ambitious new nuclear programs . . . well, you're in a much more difficult position.

As I said recently, I think it's fair to accuse Colin Powell of playing good cop to Rummy's bad cop during the buildup to the war. His whole performance was a farce because it was surely clear to everyone in the administration that there was going to be a war come hell or high water, and it was clear no later than the Spring of 2002. I assume, then, that Powell's apparent reluctance about the war was mostly an act - a useful one too, since it gave him greater leverage with allies by allowing him to argue that they should support him since that would in turn give him greater leverage against the "hardliners".

Anyhow, that's how I see it. And I think it's a disgrace that Powell would spend his entire adult life working to implement the lessons of Vietnam, only to throw his support behind a war which he surely knew was flawed and dangerous.

This makes a lot of people angry, and when they're angry, they want to lash out at him and to wound him with the most cutting remarks they can find. But that doesn't make it right to say this:

Colin Powell is a Disgrace
to his uniform, to his race, to everything we used to think he stood for. There can no longer be any doubt: he's just another kiss-ass chronic liar.

It's not right to say that because of course Powell does not represent his race, and he may be slimy, but he's not any more slimy because he's black.

In response to this, Cleis writes:

Jessica Wilson's got the dirt on the disgraceful Colin Powell, apologist to power. I only disagree with her statement that Powell's a disgrace to his race ... unless we also say that Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, et. al. are disgraces to the white race ... but that sounds awful, doesn't it? Who wants to defend the white race? Oh, well, those guys probably do, but I doubt Wilson does.

My point is that while people might perceive Powell as a representative of "his race," of Black people, it's not ok to regard him that way, any more than it's ok to regard Wilson as a credit to her sex because she's a good philosopher.

Wilson's response:

UPDATE: Apropos of Cleis's good remark on this post, I hereby go on record as saying that Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Thompson, and Perle are all disgraces to their race, too, as well as their gender. And don't even get me started about Rice!

In speaking of persons being representatives of their race or gender, I hope not to offend anyone. Given the problematic nature of such categories, perhaps the better thing to say is that each of us is a representative of humanity. As such representatives, Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice and the rest of the gang are all doing miserably. Supposing for the moment, however, that the categories of race and/or gender are at all appropriately applicable (as affirmative action programs, which I support, appear to presuppose), then I confess to feeling particularly betrayed when members of categories that have been traditional targets of oppression turn around and participate in the oppression when given the opportunity, as Powell and Rice are doing.

Which is an improvement, but not by much. First, justifications for affirmative action don't seem to me to depend at all on claims about individuals as "representatives" of their races, at least not in the sense required for Wilson's point. And while there is an interesting question about the responsibilities of minorities in governments that don't really seem to take their interests to heart, the issue is trickier than Wilson acknowledges. Wilson's reasoning would also exclude people from poor backgrounds from serving - but you rarely hear that criticism. Powell's race makes him an easier target here, and that ought to give us pause.

Anyway, would we really feel better about Bush if his cabinet was all white? I don't think I would, even if do I think that Bush's policies are geared towards people who tend to be rich and white.

OK, I've shortened, sharpened, and sanitized my letter to Dissent about Paul Berman. (The original is here). Here it is, in all its shortened, sharpened and sanitized glory:

In his piece, A Friendly Drink in a Time of War, Paul Berman gives a nice twist to an old rhetorical trick: Instead of simply arguing against a straw man, prop him up in a bar and chew him out. It seems that Berman needs more lucid drinking buddies.

If the left opposed the war because its cynical about Arabs and democracy, then why does it repeatedly insist that the U.S. push Egypt, for example, on human rights - and voice opposition to more than two billion dollars worth of annual foreign aid so long as the corrupt Egyptian government resists?

If the left opposed the war against Iraq out of an unreflective hatred of George Bush, why did so much of it support his war against Afghanistan? Even people who resisted the war in Afghanistan treat reports of American casualties there differently from the casualties in Iraq - an implicit concession, surely, that whatever the merits of that war, casualties suffered in it are more justifiable than casualties in Iraq.

Berman seem to think that calling a person or a state "fascist" relieves him of the obligation to think seriously about consequences. This is dangerous nonsense. Before we support a war, even a war against a man as evil as Saddam Hussein, we have every right to consider the other struggles we're engaged in and what the likely effects of a war would be on them; the peaceful alternatives for spreading democracy in the region; the democratic costs of selling the war deceptively, since that is likely to be intrinsic to the project; whether the tremendous resources allocated to the war might be spent to far greater humanitarian effect elsewhere; the consequences of empowering deeply untrustworthy men like Cheney and Rumsfeld; the likelihood that such a wicked and incompetent administration has the wisdom, political capital or discipline to realize a democratic vision for Iraq and to avert a civil war there; whether the massive increases in military spending, and the inevitable deepening of our economic dependence on them, is healthy in the long run; whether our moral obligations to Afghanistan have been sufficiently discharged by the installation of a mayor in Kabul and a general retreat from the rest of the country; and so on.

It is revealing that Berman chooses to focus on such bad reasons to resist the war. For if he thinks the case against the war was as frivolous as that, it's no wonder he supported it.

Huh. I missed my "blogiversary" or whatever. It seems that I've been blogging now for a year and a day. My site meter tells me that I've had 4663 hits since around then - only 800 or so of which were me (that's my estimate - I don't have a breakdown).

I've had a great time doing this. I find myself continually astonished that I can type something into a web browser and be read by anyone in the world with an internet connection. I feel as if I should sacrifice a goat to the internet gods or something.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Not long ago, I discovered an excellent blog, War and Piece. In a recent post, the author of the blog writes:

I frankly don't like the tone of some liberal commentators almost gleeful about indications of a possible coming civil war. Anyone who could celebrate what that would mean not just to the Americans and the fortunes of the Bush administration, but to the Iraqis can't have thought things through.

I think that's exactly right, and it makes a point I've been meaning to blog about for a while now.

This is a tough issue, and I want to go carefully here. I think it's tricky (not impossible - just tricky) to speculate about people's motives. And I think it's silly to pounce on people for comments which fail to demonstrate the requisite balance, since the balance often emerges from a closer look at a body of work, even when it's missing from a stray comment.

And I also think it's unfair to demand that people be constantly demonstrating that they hate Saddam Hussein. Of course Saddam Hussein is evil. That was never in dispute, except at the very extremes of the debates. What was in dispute was what to do about it. During the buildup to the war, conservative commentators got a great deal of mileage out of demands that anti-war protestors demonstrate their humanitarian creditials by repeatedly condemning Saddam Hussein. And beyond the obvious point that many of these same commentators obviously couldn't give a crap about human rights, it's also legitimate to point out that there was an enormous argumentative gap between Saddam's evil and the case for war right then and there. The obsessive return to Saddam Hussein's evil often functioned in debates to obscure this point.

And, finally, it's always especially tempting to say "I told you so" when prior to the event you were insulted, lied to, called "out of touch", and so on. The anti-war crowd was treated very badly, please remember, by people who fancied themselves very competent and very worldly and who refused to listen to advice or dissent. And so when these very same people come away looking much worse, much less worldly, less competent, and you're still furious at the way they treated you, and worried about what they plan for the future . . . well, then it's very easy indeed to slip into the habit of saying "I told you so".

So I want to be careful here. There are good reasons, and understandable reasons, for focusing on the problems in Iraq, even in focusing on the things that haven't gone well. And I don't think we should necessarily stop saying "I told you so" because the issues of judgment and trust are still very much alive.

Still.

Still, I'm astonished sometimes that commentators can be so callous sometimes about the people of Iraq. Why don't I just name names? Well, the webblog The Dreyfus Report does seem to exhibit a bit more enthusiasm for Iraq's current chaos than I sometimes think appropriate. For example, read this piece on the collapse of talks about the temporary constitution in Iraq (which were salvaged shortly after the post). What happened was terrible, and Dreyfus doesn't seem very exercised by the fact that the collapse in talks was a setback for Iraqis as well as for Bremer and the Bushies.

The Dreyfus Report is a new blog, and perhaps the author is still getting his bearings. And - this is important - perhaps the qualifications I noted above apply to this blog more than I've assumed. But for now, I have to say that I'm not especially impressed. The example I gave above wouldn't be notable, except that it's very much in the same spirit and tone of the blog as a whole, at least as far as I can tell. Post after post seems to exhibit a sort of grim satisfaction with how awful it all is. What's more, it's not that hard to deliver a string of bad news without sounding so triumphal. Juan Cole does it every day.

It's important to see what's happened with Iraq, why so many people apparently want to see the U.S. fail. In the buildup to the war, the hardliners were quite explicit in stating that the allies might squawk a bit, but everyone would basically come around. Their opinions and reservations could therefore be safely ignored. Everyone blames the uperhawks for this, but take a look at Kenneth Pollack's book and you'll see essentially the same points. Silly Arabs. Silly Europeans. These nervous nellies didn't really understand the country, or the threat it posed, and anyway, a lot of the complaining was surely for domestic consumption, right?

When you frame the debate like that, you turn the aftermath of the war into a dilemma for your allies: lie down and take it, thereby confirming the point that your opinions can be safely ignored, or make life as hard as possible for the U.S., thereby pressing the point that your opinions cannot be safely ignored.

Most of the U.S.'s allies at this point have decided to let the U.S. roast for its arrogance (and they've been aided and abetted by the very same hardliners, who pretty resolutely refused to give up much control, until things were so out of control that it was very difficult for anyone to help even if they had wanted to).

As many people have pointed out, U.S. power rests very much on soft power, on the consent and support of others. And what Bush did was repudiate the old deal: The U.S. agrees to subbordinate some of its activity to international norms, and in exchange for thus binding itself, receives the support that allows it to maintain its position and influence. I think many foreign powers looked at Bush's repudiation of this old deal, and saw in the collapse of the Iraq project the possibility of really seriously bloodying the U.S.'s nose, of traumatizing it back into the old deal. (And of getting Bush kicked out of power - that simply must be part of the calculation.)

This is predictable, but not pretty. What is leaves out is that in order to stand as a monument to the U.S.'s failed policy of unilateralism, it helps for Iraq to look pretty awful. And we're talking about a country of 25 million souls.

I've written some very pessimistic things about Iraq, and I've indulged in quite a bit I-told-you-so-ing. And I'll continue to do this as long as the judgment of the hawks remains an issue. But this Schadenfreudefest - count me out.

By the way, it occurred to me that the Shorter Friedman below might be construed as anti-free trade. It's not - it's anti-Friedman.

Whether or not free trade makes sense depends on a huge number of factors, including what happens in the agreement to legitimate environmental concerns, labour standards, etc.

I will say this: I find is astonishing that after a decade of American economists lecturing the "developing" world about deficits, "fiscal discipline" open markets, etc. we've ended up getting massive deficits, steel tarriffs, and an astonishing collapse in support for free trade among the wealthy.

Shorter Thomas Friedman: Don't worry, one way or another they'll be cleaning our toilets for a long time to come.

OK, not great. But this is one of my first forays into the "shorter" genre. I'll get better at this, I promise.

Note to self: Don't read Jim Henley in the library (stiffled giggling annoys people around you).

Henley has a very classy conclusion to this piece about the economics of email spam:

So it's not all that odd that Kevin likes the virtual stamp idea more than I. Nor am I necessarily right and him wrong. As I've written before, I do not get that much spam. It's the rare day I get more than a dozen pieces. But this is because my penis is already famously massive. That's not going to be true of most bloggers.

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.)