Egregious Moderation

Moving Operations to http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation

2007-06-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

I'm moving operations to http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation.

Matthew Yglesias: Busying Giddy Minds with Foreign Quarrels

2007-06-03T14:57:00.001-07:00

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Matthew Yglesias: Via Scott Horton, Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein notes that the geniuses in the Defense Department seem to have been deliberately courting US-China conflict:

While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon “neocons” took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian. “The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”
This is, of course, no surprise. Francis Fukuyama has recounted that during the 1990s doldrums Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan discussed the fact that their "Neo-Reaganite" foreign policy required a new enemy, and that people in their circle debated whether to make the enemy China or Islamism. They reached the conclusion that China was the best option, only to reverse course after 9/11 and put the emphasis on Islamism. In either case, they regard US-China conflict -- and, indeed, conflict between the United States and other countries generally -- as something to be encouraged.

Matthew Yglesias on the Madness of Paul Berman

2007-05-29T13:15:00.001-07:00

Paul Berman is the best of the best of the best of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders:

Matthew Yglesias: I have no real intention of reading a 28,000 word Paul Berman essay on why Tariq Ramadan is bad in The New Republic, so I'll refrain from commenting on the substance of things. I will note that Ian Buruma's Iong New York Times Magazine article on Ramadan reached very different conclusions and I'm more likely to take Buruma's word for it than Berman's.
That said, the very fact that Berman wrote such a thing reminded me of Josh Marshall's years-old essay on Berman and "the Orwell Temptation". Josh described the temptation primarily in terms of a tendency to overblow the world-historical significance of Islamist terrorism in order to make intellectuals feel more important, like they're living at really important times. In Berman's case, though, this impulse also exhibits itself in a pretty weird conception of the role of the intellectual in world-historical times. Way back in his March 2003 essay on Sayyid Qutb Berman was saying things like this:
It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.
As Brian Weatherson argued at the time there was something very strange about this. 9/11 certainly made the philosophy of Sayyid Qutb a more interesting topic for the intellectually inclined, a more valid subject for New York Times Magazine articles. Nevertheless, it takes a curious frame of mind to believe -- as Berman appears to believe in complete earnestness -- that defeating al-Qaeda requires us to first engage in close reading of the works of a man who died forty years ago, and then for us to muster an army of intellectuals to refute his philosophy.
Here, again, implicit in the essay on Ramadan is the notion that, on some level, for al-Qaeda to be defeated it's necessary for hawkish western left-wing intellectuals to win an internecine argument with other western left-wing intellectuals about the merits of Tariq Ramadan's work. It's just a bizarre idea, a weird picture of how the world works; as if Soviet Communism collapsed because books about the superiority of free markets were really convincing rather than because books about the superiority of free markets were true and therefore societies featuring free markets outperformed the Soviet bloc.

Talking Points Memo: One Must Never Fear to Negotiate

2007-05-27T18:22:00.001-07:00

Josh Micah Marshall writes:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 27, 2007 - June 02, 2007 Archives: Rice sat at the witness table in Hearing Room 106 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building explaining why "those who talk about engagement with Syria and Iran" are all wet. "That's not diplomacy -- that's extortion," she said. The administration has already reversed course on its policy towards Syria, with Rice having engaged in direct, bilateral talks with Syria' foreign minister a few weeks ago. But direct discussions with Iran were always considered far more controversial. As far as the Bush gang is concerned, Iran needs to be isolated, not engaged. To talk to Iran is to "reward bad behavior." We've gone a quarter-century without talking to Iran, and Bush wasn't about to strike up a conversation, especially given the Ahmadinejad regime.
At least, that was the policy. "U.S. diplomats said Monday's scheduled talks with Iran will be limited to discussions about Iraq's security, and not about the unresolved issues of detained Americans in Iran or the country's nuclear program. The meeting in Baghdad will be the first public and formal meeting between U.S. and Iranian representatives since the United States cut off diplomatic relations 27 years ago. 'The issue at hand in the meeting between [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq] Ryan Crocker and the Iranian representative ... is going to be focused on Iraq and stabilizing Iraq,' U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said last week."
I don't disagree with the diplomatic decision, but it's worth noting that after years of saying talks with Iran would be reckless and irresponsible, the Bush gang is grudgingly accepting the reality that Dems have been pushing for quite a while. Would it be rude to point out how often this has happened of late? Dems said Bush should talk directly to Syria; Bush said Dems were weak to even suggest it; and Bush eventually came around. Dems said Bush should talk to North Korea and use Clinton's Agreed Framework as a model for negotiations; Bush said this was out of the question; and Bush eventually came around. Dems said Bush should increase the size of the U.S. military; Bush said this was unnecessary; and Bush eventually came around. And Dems said Bush should engage Iran in direct talks, particularly on Iraq. It took a while, but the president came around on this, too.
For years, all we've heard from the right is that Bush is a bold visionary when it comes to foreign policy, and Dems are weak and clueless. And yet, here we are, watching the White House embrace the Dems' approach on most of the nation's major foreign policy challenges. Now, if Bush could just bring himself to accept the Democratic line on Iraq, too, we'd really see some progress.

Unqualified Offerings on Glenn Greenwald

2007-05-25T17:26:00.001-07:00

Suicide Bombings vs. Air Raids:

Yes and No § Unqualified Offerings: Glenn Greenwald (note: now I’m doing it!) has what is generally an excellent item about the real enthusiasm for attacks on civilians, and the transformation of the Republican Party into “from Falwell/Robertson social conservativsm obsessed with abortion and gay rights into a macro version of the Little Green Footballs comment section, obsessed instead with, literally excited by, detaining and torturing people, maximizing government domestic surveillance, starting still new wars in the Middle East and being far more brutal with the current ones.” There’s one thing he doesn’t quite get around to saying and one thing where he misses the point.
First, he’s right to leave aside the specific tactic of “suicide bombing” to focus on the question of attacks against civilians. Suicide bombing is simply a way to kill people that guarantees the perpetrator himself won’t survive. The suicide bomber can target military personnel, government officials, supply convoys or just plain folks. So can any other combatant, legal or illegal, uniformed or not. Suicide attacks give us the heebie-jeebies for reasons separate from the morality of the target: suicide attacks freak us out because they’re very hard to defend against, they are sneaky by design, and they betoken a level of commitment on the part of the attacker that unsettles us back in the hindbrain. Since it scares us, we prefer to pretend that one person killing himself to blow up a pizza place is somehow more abominable than a thousand people safely firebombing every pizza place in a city from the air, as well as every house and garage and grocery store and restaurant and factory.
9% of Muslims refused to answer the “Are suicide attacks against civilians ever justified to defend Islam.” If I were a Muslim, I might join the 9% on the “Wow, you’ve really constructed that question to carefully apply to what a few people who look like me do, haven’t you?” grounds. The real ethical question is, “Are deliberate attacks against civilians ever acceptable?” Greenwald has the data on just where you can find enthusiasm for the idea that they are.

Gideon Rachman: Still Heading for the Exit in Iraq

2007-05-25T17:24:00.001-07:00

Gideon Rachman writes, in the FT:

Gideon Rachman's Blog: Still heading for the exit in Iraq:
The decision by Congress to authorise extra funding for the Iraq war - without setting a deadline for withdrawal - is being portrayed in some places as a capitulation by the anti-war crowd. Not at all. It simply means that the crucial political struggle over withdrawal from Iraq has been delayed a few months. The real battle is going to take place in September. At that point, all of the American troops set aside for "the surge" will have been in Iraq for several months. In September General David Petraeus, on whom so many American hopes are hanging, is also due to give a crucial "status report" to Congress. If the news looks bad, then Congressional moves to get the troops out will begin in earnest. The Iraqi insurgents will doubtless factor this into their calculations. President Bush is already predicting a bloody August.
Earlier this week I met a couple of senior Republican politicians. One of them was still strongly pro-war and convinced that progress is being made; the other was wavering. But both were worried that Congress is still liable to pull the plug on the war effort prematurely. And both see September as the crunch month. By then, the presidential election campaign will also be in full swing. With the Iraq war more unpopular than ever, the campaign is only likely to increase the pressure to get out of Iraq. It was notable that in yesterday's vote, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted against authorising new spending for the war. They know which way the wind is blowing.

A Soda Can Is Filled with Soda. An MOI Is Filled with Shiite Militiamen

2007-05-22T18:50:00.001-07:00

I thought this quote from Spencer Ackerman's Nation article was clear. Kevin Drum apparently didn't:

Spencer Ackerman: Let me take you on a journey into the beating heart of war journalism. What happens when you've got a quote that seems vivid and redolent, rich in texture, emitting a bouquet of meaning and insight, but... may in fact be a word salad? The answer: print that sucker. Indulge me here.

Kevin reads my Nation piece, pulls out this passage:

The MOI is the Ministry of Interior, arguably the most powerful department in the Iraqi bureaucracy. It has control of the police, and since 2005 it has been an instrument of Shiite political power.... Haider gets nervous when I press him about MOI complicity with the militias. He picks up a can of Pepsi from his desk. "I can't say anything about the MOI, but here's an example. This is a soda. You know what it is, and what it consists of."

and remarks, "Say what?" Rightly so. Let me explain....

Colonel Haider was pretty open to talking to me after Lt. Sherrill indicated that it was OK with him. I immediately started asking him about militia infiltration.... He pointed to the Ministry of Interior as the source of the problem. I continued to ask him about this. All of a sudden, a routine U.S. checkup on his operations became a case of an American reporter, escorted by the very U.S. soldiers checking up on the station, pressing him about the perfidies of his superiors. He grabbed a soda can on his desk, gave me that quote, and evaded further questions.

Now, as I wrote down Haider's words, I thought to myself: "Yeah, that's right... a soda. I know exactly what it is, and what it consists of. Much like I know what the MOI consists of. A soda can consists of soda! The MOI consists of Shiite militiamen!"...

I must have gone back and forth with taking that quote out of the piece a million times. If I took it out, I would have a situation where I took the reader right up to the edge of raising the MOI trouble but not crossing the threshold.... [W]hile nearly every police commander blamed the MOI at least partially for infiltration, it would have been awkward to suddenly switch characters, especially because I wanted to ground the piece in a specific police station. So, finally, I opted for the Pepsi quote, and figured that it would make sense in context.

Tell me, faithful commenters: was this a mistake? Be my ex-post-facto editor. Citizen journalism advances another step!

Spencer Ackerman: Training Iraq's Death Squads

2007-05-21T15:33:00.001-07:00

Spencer Ackerman writes:

Training Iraq's Death Squads: One of the reminders of Ali's sacrifice is a framed photograph on his cluttered desk. In it, his young son wears the oversized camouflage helmet of Lieut. Jonathan Sherrill, a 24-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, who leads a platoon of the 57th Military Police Company, which oversees fifteen police stations like Khadimiya here in western Baghdad. Sherrill doesn't smile much out on patrol, but in the photograph the diminutive lieutenant wears a grin almost as large as the one plastered on Ali's overjoyed son. When Sherrill walks into Ali's office on a March afternoon, the besieged major's chubby, mustachioed face lights up. An aide rushes to bring sodas for Ali's friend.
"He's one of the hardest-working IPs I've ever met," Sherrill tells me, using the ubiquitous military acronym for Iraqi Police. "He's doing good, and making sure the station gets what it needs." But what the station--and Iraq--needs is not solely measured in items on an acquisition order. Roving the hallways are men only nominally controlled by the police chain of command. "I'm happy with the loyalty of many of the men," Ali tells me after he finishes briefing Sherrill on the day's progress. "But we're suffering with the newer IPs, because I don't know exactly if they come from a militia or some political party." It's a fear echoed by practically every IP commander the 57th becomes partners with. Several told me that many of their police are little more than militiamen in uniform.
"If they belong to the religious guys, it poisons their mind," Ali continues. "Now, in the station, the guys who join can collect information on the other sects. When they get into civilian clothes, they go out and kill the other sect." Ali shrugs. "I have no control over that." The bed in his office underscores both his hard work and the fact that many of his own officers, like the insurgents they are supposed to fight, have placed Ali under siege. Some are suspicious of his closeness with the US military. Some will kill him as part of inter-Shiite factional strife. Others will simply target him for money.
Out of this material comes the long-term US strategy in Iraq. This year's troop surge--an infusion of five combat brigades to Baghdad, along with an additional 2,200 military police and thousands more support forces--brought a return to greater American combat operations, but commanders emphasize that the ultimate goal remains preparing Iraqis to secure their country. Since June 2006, this task has fallen, in part, to the 57th. The company doesn't provide direct training to the IPs; but it advises them on a relentless routine of manning checkpoints, neighborhood patrols, logistics maintenance, payroll and strengthening the chain of command.
"We make them operate their system for when we're not here anymore," explains Capt. Rob McNellis, the 57th's 30-year-old company commander. "If we can help, then absolutely, we'll give them everything we've got, but the focus has shifted." That focus has, by all accounts, yielded improvements in Iraqi police competence. The days when policemen ran from the insurgency are mostly over.
These days the danger is the opposite: that militia-loyal policemen, mostly Shiite here in Baghdad, will use their increased US-gained skills to scourge their Sunni enemies. McNellis and his superiors contend that while they cannot end infiltration, they can curb militia abuses. They hope that the mentorship they provide will force the police to rise above its maculate origins. "There is militia infiltration to varying degrees at the stations," says McNellis, "but nothing succeeds like success."...
The broader problem is that sectarianism remains deeply entrenched. Gen. David Petraeus, the highly regarded commanding general in Iraq, has stated that success can only come through a political settlement. Yet practically every significant reconciliation effort pushed by the United States--a relaxation of the de-Baathification law, a more equitable distribution of the nation's oil wealth, a new round of provincial elections--has bogged down in Parliament. Popular sentiment is no less divided. According to a March poll by ABC News, more than 95 percent of Sunnis believe Baathists should be allowed back into government positions, while two-thirds of Shiites and Kurds reject the idea. Only 4 percent of Sunnis believe their lives will improve over the next year, though 51 percent of Shiites remain optimistic....
The problem runs deeper than the Interior Ministry. Every significant political organization in Iraq fields its own militia as an insurance policy against losing power. For the United States to insist on total militia demobilization would require a massive expansion of the war and cost it whatever Iraqi allies it still has--with no certainty of success. "My own personal view is that it's not realistic to expect in this country for militia groups to be eliminated altogether," says Col. Mike Galloucis, commander of the 89th Military Police Brigade, the parent unit of the 57th. "Militia groups are interwoven throughout the fabric of the country, including the government. But you can always go after bad behavior. You can establish the basic principle of what's acceptable and unacceptable: the notion that everyone accepts the law, no one is above the law, and if you violate it--and I don't care what your sect or your name is--you will be punished." Galloucis's approach led to the firing of several top police generals last fall after the colonel presented Bolani with "a thick packet" of information detailing their corruption.
The result is a trade-off. Police stations do not face US-pushed mass purges of corrupt officers, which would risk further destabilizing a maturing force. But as long as militiamen remain in the police, official cover will exist for kidnappings, murders and other human rights abuses, undermining the rule of law that Galloucis seeks to promote. Proof of specific police complicity in sectarian attacks can be hard to acquire, limiting US ability to get Iraqi commanders to take action. "You can buy a police uniform downtown," McNellis points out....
More than four years into the war, the discrepancy between the scope of Iraq's challenges and the ability of the United States to alleviate them is greater than ever. The commander of Iraqi police in western Baghdad, Gen. Saleh Alany, insists that the United States can't leave--"the terrorists would win"--but says the real problem in Iraq is the entire "generation that was born in the 1980s, during the war with Iran," whose minds have been corrupted by violence. He includes his own men in his assessment: "Loyalty is the biggest problem. The security forces don't have loyalty to the country. They're loyal to the different parties, or other forces." Alany's dim view of the new Iraq is surely colored by his status as a veteran of Saddam's Republican Guard. But if he's right, then to improve the quality of the police force entails increasing the lethality of the militias.
Major Ali in Khadimiya needs no reminder. He picks his security detail personally--he must be wary of those assigned to guard him because of whom they might actually work for. He fears being transferred to the MOI, and vows to take his men to the ministry with him if he is. "I need to know who they are," he says. "Otherwise, they'd kill me." Sherrill sees help on the way. "It's all about weeding out the bad apples," he says, "and for the most part, we've been doing that." After Sherrill leaves, there will be another lieutenant to lend his helmet to Ali's son, and more US troops to mentor Ali's progress. But even with them there, Ali must still fear the uncertain loyalties of his own men, and what they will do with their newfound skills.

Spencer Ackerman on the Legacy of Tony Blair

2007-05-19T18:12:00.001-07:00

Playing "Greeks to American Romans," as Harold MacMillan put it, was a winning strategy for British politicians for a long time. Not for Tony Blair. Spencer Ackerman sums it up:

toohotfortnr: it's a crying shame, you left a trail of destruction: Michael Gerson and Tony Blair, Gladstonians against the Horde:

In our conversation, Blair would not be drawn into second-guessing on failures in early stages of the Iraq war -- troop levels, de-Baathification and the like. Those debates, while "perfectly legitimate," do not account for decisive factors beyond the control of the coalition, particularly the bombing campaign of al-Qaeda and Iran's strategy of "containing America" by seeking to "bog them down in Iraq."

"If those two external elements were not there, this thing would be very nearly manageable," Blair told me. "Sometimes you have to come to a very simple conclusion, which is that your enemies decided to fight you."

This is an exculpation? That al-Qaeda would make use of the U.S.'s position of occupying an Arab (mostly) country? Or that Iran would seek to turn its encirclement by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to its advantage? And that the U.S. would find those two developments to be nearly insurmountable amid the other rigors of occupying Iraq? Even if Gerson's infatuation with a morality of intentions can't penetrate the veneer of what's happened in Iraq, Blair should know that a foreign policy that invites a "decisive" response from its adversaries can't possibly survive. And if the point of it all is to nurture human rights while protecting one's interests, then neither objective is served by its collapse.

Ezra Klein on Immigration

2007-05-19T18:07:00.001-07:00

Ezra Klein writes:

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: THE STATE OF PLAY ON IMMIGRATION. Spent some time Picking Up The Damn Phone this afternoon, and got a much better sense of the political path the immigration bill still has to traverse. First, expect the temporary guest worker program to tumble from 400,000 to 200,000 workers, as Jeff Bingaman and Dianne Feinstein's amendment passes yet again. But this is a more complicated win than it appears at first glance: There's concern among certain liberal groups that if you drop the guest worker program too low, you simply amp up illegal immigration, which is actually worse.
Enter H.R 1645, the STRIVE Act. The House will spend June creating their own version of the immigration bill under the leadership of Zoe Lofgren, a Silicon Valley Democrat (so expect a much greater number of visas for high-skill workers in the final bill) and former immigration lawyer. She'll be under heavy pressure from unions and left-leaning groups to use Luis Guttierrez's STRIVE Act as the basis for her bill. STRIVE, which has a long list of cosponsors ranging from Rahm Emmanuel to Dennis Kuncinich to Silvestre Reyes to Jeff Flake, has a few advantages over the Senate bill, the most notable being its treatment of guest workers, who, after 5 years, $500, and evidence of English and US history classes, can apply for citizenship.
If such a bill is adopted in the House, the legislation will move to Conference with the Senate, which the Democrats control (liberals will remember the many times that Republicans used Conference in recent years to make compromise bills into conservative wish lists). Current thinking is that Bush will sign just about anything that emerges from the process, be it far to the left, or, as with the Sensenbrenner bill he approved last year, far to the right. He needs the accomplishment.
One last thing: The folks I talked to believe this is the year. Two years from now isn't an option. The particular political circumstances we're in are nearly unique: Bush has nothing left to lose but his involvement still provides cover for Republicans, Democrats can get an immigration bill without full ownership over it, the space is open for the subject because the President won't allow action on other liberal priorities and the Congress won't countenance any conservative agenda items, and so on. You have the RNC defending a bill that, were it offered under a Democratic president, they'd be tearing apart. Meanwhile, this just won't be a priority for the next president: President Democrat will want to do health care, not amnesty, and President Republican will want to get reelected someday. So this is the shot. --Ezra Klein

Ross Douthat Has a Modest Proposal (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)

2007-05-19T16:36:00.001-07:00

Ross Douthat proposes that people write about stuff they know something about, and not write about stuff they don't know anything about:

Ross Douthat: Kinsley on Hitchens: Matt's right that Michael Kinsley's review of God Is Not Great offers some profound insights into how the the media-public intellectual complex works. It's also a textbook example of how that complex works. First, Christopher Hitchens writes a polemic that ranges across religion, religious history, philosophy and science. Then, the editors of the New York Times Book Review decide to commission a review from Michael Kinsley, presumably because both Hitchens and Kinsley are well-known figures in the media-public intellectual world and "Kinsley on Hitchens" has a nice ring to it. Never mind that Kinsley has never evinced any expertise or even any particular interest in the topics and arguments that Hitchens is covering - it's Kinsley on Hitchens! How can they go wrong?
And sure enough, Kinsley has produced a review that, because he's a smart guy and a good writer, has some interesting things to say about Hitchens' career, but has absolutely nothing of interest to say about the book itself. Indeed, the review is essentially a felicitously-written plot summary, which lists some of Hitchens' arguments and deliberately shrugs off analysis. For instance:
The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the “argument from design” (that only some kind of “intelligence” could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all? Whether sallies like these give pause to the believer is a question I can’t answer.
But you're reviewing the bloody book! Should they give the believer pause? Has Hitchens devastated religious faith, as he plainly thinks he has? I'm glad he's entertaining - but is he persuasive? Does his book confirm you in your nonbelief, or leave questions unaddressed? Hitchens takes these questions seriously - shouldn't the reviewer, whether an atheist, a believer, or somewhere in between, have the decency to do the same?
Ah, but it's Kinsley on Hitchens. Brilliant!

Matthew Yglesias On the Labor Movement and Hillary Clinton

2007-05-18T11:48:00.001-07:00

Matthew writes:

Matthew Yglesias: Here's the full-length version of Ari Berman's "Hillary, Inc." taking a good hard look at Senator Clinton's team of business-oriented advisors. Matt Stoller piles on further and adds "I hope that someone organizes a PAC or 527 against her brand of centrism, and points out the wild inconsistencies from the left." But now here's the rub. It's hard to make hay about, say, the Clinton campaign's ties to union-busting when large labor unions won't do it.
As best I can tell, most labor people would prefer that she not be the nominee, but they're not going to do much of anything about it. They think, after all, that if she wins she'll need to be at least somewhat attentive to their concerns, but that if they tilt against her and she wins anyway, then they'll really be fucked. All of which is probably true, but of course also makes it much more likely that she'll win. Nation writers and progressive bloggers, sad to say, can't communicate this kind of thing to working-class voters in a particularly effective manner.

Bernard Chazelle on Nicolas Sarkozy and France

2007-05-18T09:57:00.001-07:00

Over at the Rootless Cosmopolitan weblog, Bernard Chazelle writes:

Rootless Cosmopolitan » Blog Archive » Getting Sarkozy - and France - Wrong: The story has been all over the media: Nicolas Sarkozy might not be an easy man to like but France is the “sick man of Europe” and tough love is what it needs. If its new president’s odes to the liberating power of work and paeons to “the France that gets up early” grate on the ears of his 35-hour-work-week nation, so be it....

Nice story. Too bad it bears so little connection to reality... to get [France] all wrong seems a bit of an art form in the U.S. media. On any given day, Tom Friedman can be found berating the French for “trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.” Friedman’s genius is to suppress in the reader the commonsense reaction—Indian engineers have no life—and improbably redirect the pity toward the French. That takes some skill....

Productivity is higher in France than in [Britain and the U.S.] (and 50% more so than in Japan). But pity the French: with their 35-hour work week, 5-week paid vacations, and 16-week paid maternity leaves, they work 30% fewer hours than Americans. Maybe that’s why they live longer (81 years vs 78) and infant mortality is lower (4.3 vs 7 per 1000). Unless the reason is France’s health care system: the best in the world, according to the World Health Organization. Or perhaps it’s the narrower inequality gap: child poverty in France is half the British rate and one third the American....

José Bové, the Astérix of French politics, has burnished France’s antiglobalisation image by ransacking McDonald’s outlets wherever he can find enough TV cameras to capture his exploits. But while France has been noisily scoffing at globalization for decades, it has quietly become one of the most globalized nations on earth.... for the last 10 years, France’s net foreign investments (FDI) have ranked in the top 5, and its net FDI outflows have been the world’s largest; foreign investors own 45% of all French stocks....

What, then, is wrong with France? Simply put, the French system serves the interests of two-thirds of the population (the insiders). The outsiders (the young and the old) have been knocking at the door for 40 years. The sons and daughters of North-African immigrants have paid the highest price. While a few might be seeking a new Muslim identity, which their parents shunned, the overwhelming majority of them have no greater desire than to integrate into secular French society.... The crisis of the projects is France’s biggest challenge in the years ahead. The problem is rooted in the twin evil of racism and the insiders’ fierce defense of the status quo. Sarkozy’s presidency will succeed or fail on his ability to break the door open to let the outsiders in, and create jobs for the unemployed youths.

Sarkozy is blessed with all the attributes of a successful politician, including a unique gift for being a jerk. In the back alleys of the banlieues, France’s former top cop comes off as just another white racist thug.... Sarko’s open admiration for the rancid views of my former Ecole Polytechnique colleague, Alain Finkielkraut, makes one wonder....

I... note that while other politicians regurgitate the same tired “solutions” to the crisis of the banlieues—namely, building more community centers named after great poets—Sarko has suggested somewhat more adventurous ideas, such as a restructuring of labor relations, a more flexible labor market, hiring incentives, and even that big French bugaboo, affirmative action, all the while reaffirming France’s traditional rejection of communautarisme. But he is a figure of hate among minorities and, unless he can repair his image and build bridges, he will not accomplish much. The issue of ethnic integration towers above all others. The future of France hangs in the balance. Jacques Chirac, the friendliest and most ineffective French president in memory, spoke endlessly about solidarity but never did a thing about it....

Unlike Chirac, Sarko is a true man of the right. Being France, of course, that still puts his agenda, though not necessarily his character, to the left of Kucinich. But he faces a French left that, unlike its American version, lost the battles but won the war. France typically elects rightwing presidents to implement leftwing policies. The consummate pragmatist, Sarko will not fight his battles on ideological grounds.... [H]e intends to use his (likely) new majority in parliament to pass a minimum service public transportation law to dull the effect of transit strikes.... His likely selection of Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister is a master stroke. The highly popular founder of the Nobel-prize winning Doctors Without Borders is a former Communist who worked for Mitterrand, campaigned for Ségolène Royal, and, as the chief advocate of the wooly concept of “droit d’ingérence” (right of humanitarian intervention), played Bush’s useful idiot in the run-up to the Iraq war. His selection is a canny way to please, annoy, and confuse everyone all at once.

French foreign policy is framed within a “Gaullist consensus” that has been remarkably consistent over the years. On the European front, Germany will remain France’s only indispensable partner.... The axis will put the final nail in the coffin of Turkey’s EU admissio.... True to his faith in industrial policy (which seems to have escaped the eagle eyes of his neoliberal admirers stateside), Sarko will strong-arm the European Central Bank into putting downward pressure on the Euro. He will fail.

Sarkozy’s pious words about changing France’s (shameful) neocolonial position in sub-Saharan Africa will come to naught.... Regarding Russia, Sarko will follow Merkel’s lead in being firm with Moscow but opposed to an aggressive stand by the U.S. The neocons’ push for a new cold war meant to reverse America’s declining superpower status, which is what the missile shields in Central Europe are all about, will be strongly resisted....

His strong support among Sephardic Jews reflect his tough stance against the antisemitic violence that flared up during the second Intifada. Many Sephardim live near or in the “hottest” banlieues and suffered the brunt of Muslim anti-Jewish hostility. Although this new form of European antisemitism has since declined, it would be tragic to dismiss it. To his credit, Sarkozy did not....

Washington will have a hard time getting its head around it, but trans-Atlantic relations have ceased to be Europe’s main focus (except in Britain). U.S.-EU relations will improve but the era of a grand common planned destiny is over.... France’s priorities outside the EU will be on the global South, while it channels its Asian policy through the EU...

Kevin Drum on Ashcroft and the Justice Department

2007-05-18T08:32:00.001-07:00

Kevin writes:

The Washington Monthly: THE NATIONAL SECURITY CURTAIN....The legal justification for the NSA's domestic spying program, originally written by the infamously hackish John Yoo, was repudiated in March 2004 by the Department of Justice after Yoo left and a new team insisted on taking a serious look at both the program and Yoo's legal arguments for it. Marty Lederman points out today that this team — John Ashcroft, Jack Goldsmith, and James Comey — was no bunch of weak-kneed liberals. They were, under every other circumstance, hardnosed conservatives dedicated to an expansive view of executive power in wartime. What's more, the NSA program was one the administration considered critical to the war on terror; repudiating a previous finding is highly unusual; their actions undermined a key legal tenet of the president's wartime powers; and they knew that both the president and vice president would be furious at what they had done.And yet not only would Ashcroft, et al., not budge — they were prepared to resign their offices if the President allowed this program of vital importance to go forward in the teeth of their legal objections.
In light of all these considerations, just try to imagine how legally dubious the Yoo justification must have been that John Ashcroft was so profoundly committed to its repudiation. It's staggering, really — almost unimaginable that anything such as this could have happened, especially where the stakes were so high.
....Moreover, the "revised" NSA program that OLC and DOJ approved some weeks after the March incident...still allowed electronic surveillance of communications as long as the NSA had a "reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda." Presumably this extremely generous guideline was required by the need to bring the program under the aegis of the AUMF....If that's the narrow version of the NSA program, just how broad and indiscriminate was the surveillance under the program that Ashcroft, et al. would not approve?
Even the Washington Post, not exactly a keen critic of President Bush's executive excesses, has had enough: "The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen."
That's a start. A little late, but a start.

Nobody Has Any Business Supporting Mitt Romney

2007-05-17T12:26:00.001-07:00

Nobody has any business supporting Mitt Romney. Nobody:

Matthew Yglesias: What was up with Mitt Romney promising to "double" Gitmo -- I mean, what does that even mean? I think it's weird that this kind of moment where a candidate for the presidency reveals that he has no clue as to what he's talking about with regard to a high-profile, controversial national security issue doesn't count as a "gaffe." Maybe if he'd sighed too much or something....

Bloix: I thought he was clear. He does not believe in trial by jury, or the presumption of innocence, or the right to counsel, or an independent judiciary, or the right to liberty. He believes that the government should be disappear people from their homes and send them to prison camps where brutal guards will beat them up at their leisure. He thinks we need more Gitmos and bigger Gitmos. He wants to recreate the gulag. You saw how excited the audience was. They understood it. Why don't you?...

War Czar Doug Lute

2007-05-16T14:37:00.001-07:00

Phillip Carter writes:

INTEL DUMP: Doug Lute: dream the impossible dream: The Washington Post (and others) report that the White House has tapped Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute to be its "war czar." In that position, Lt. Gen. Lute will be responsible for quarterbacking the "interagency process" — a Byzantine system of communication, coordination and policymaking which, in theory, is supposed to produce coherent national security strategy execution. According to the Post:
In the newly created position, Lute will coordinate often disjointed military and civilian operations and manage the Washington side of the same troop increase he resisted before Bush announced the plan in January. Bush hopes an empowered aide working in the White House and answering directly to him will be able to cut through bureaucracy that has hindered efforts in Iraq.
The selection capped a difficult recruitment process for the White House, as its initial candidates rejected the job. At least five retired four-star generals approached by the White House or intermediaries refused to be considered. Lute, a three-star general now serving as chief operations officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in effect will jump over many superiors as he moves to the West Wing and assumes authority to deal directly with Cabinet secretaries and top commanders.
"General Lute is a tremendously accomplished military leader who understands war and government and knows how to get things done," Bush said in a statement.
In choosing Lute, Bush picked a key internal voice of dissent during the administration review that led to the troop increase. Reflecting the views of other members of the Joint Chiefs, Lute argued that a short-term "surge" would do little good and that any sustained increase in forces had to be matched by equal emphasis on political and economic steps, according to officials informed about the deliberations.
Lute believed the situation in Iraq reflected the same mistakes as the ineffective and disorganized response to Hurricane Katrina, according to a source familiar with the debate. Like others at the Pentagon, he also was aggravated because civilian agencies, in his view, had not done nearly enough to help stabilize Iraq. And he was outspoken about the increasing strains on the U.S. military, officials said.
National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said Lute raised his concerns during talks before his selection. "He had the same skepticism a lot of us had," Hadley said. "That's one of the reasons we designed the strategy the way we did." By joining the White House, Hadley said, Lute can ensure that economic and political elements of the plan are implemented. "In some sense, he's part of the cure for the problems he was concerned about."
Until Bush decided this spring to create the position, the highest-ranking White House official working exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan was a deputy national security adviser reporting to Hadley. Lute, by contrast, will have the rank of assistant to the president, just as Hadley does, and report directly to Bush, while also holding the title of deputy national security adviser.

Okay, I'm still scratching my head over this one. None of my thoughts are new on this, but I thought I'd air them anyway:
1) Isn't this guy [Bush] supposed to be the "war czar"? If he can't make the interagency process work by knocking a few heads and firing a few cabinet officers, who can?
2) What's going to happen the first time that Lt. Gen. Lute doesn't get his way? Imagine a hypothetical where Gen. David Petraeus asks for more Justice Department personnel to promote the rule of law , and Al Gonzales tells him to go swimming in the Tigris. What's a 3-star general to do? Will the White House back Lute and tell Al to cough up the people? Or will Lute get steamrolled? Assuming the latter happens, will he suck it up and soldier on, resign quietly, or resign noisily?
3) How are the other agencies going to react to having yet another general in charge of policy? Maybe about as well as State reacted to having Jay Garner appointed as the head of ORHA during the early stages of the war? I understand that the military is the main effort right now in Iraq. I also understand that's a deeply flawed organizational paradigm, because counterinsurgency is a political endeavor, and it may make a lot more sense to put a political animal (someone like Robert "Blowtorch Bob" Komer) in charge. (What? You've never heard of Blowtorch Bob? Read this! And this!)
4) How broken is the U.S. national security apparatus that we need a "czar" to run it? Is the NSC that f---ed up that it needs a 3-star with some juice in the Pentagon to make things work? (This is a rhetorical question; the only possible answer is yes.) Or are the agencies that stubborn? (Again, yes.) Where and how did the National Security Act and Goldwater-Nichols Act run aground that we've come to this? (Long story.) Could it be that we have the greatest military in the world, capped by the most ineffective and bloated bureaucracy ever created?
Good luck Lt. Gen Lute — you've got a tough fight in front of you.

And Adam W:

Someone needs to tell President Bush that if you're sitting in the Cabinet Room and you don't see a President, then it's you. Regarding your second point, I recall that a major criticism of the brief Jay Garner era was that, as a lower-ranking military man, he couldn't plausibly exert any sway over higher-ranking officials below him on the org chart. I don't see how this situation is much different.

John McWhorter Claims He Is Real...

2007-05-14T21:46:00.001-07:00

One more reason not to read the New Republic is that you run into people like John McWhorter. Here he asserts that he is "real." In my experience, people who feel they have to assert their reality are the fakest of all. And so it proves with McWhorter:

Open University: August Wilson's... Radio Golf... with the message that to the extent that black people assimilate to white culture, they are losing their true "selves."... I think I understand where Wilson was coming from. He grew up in the days of Jim Crow, when a black identity was not something to be chosen, nurtured and custom-fitted the way it is now.... [I]t is really unclear to me that black Americans will be the only humans in history to never heal. I don't see the logic in it.

I, for one, feel thoroughly "real."... Yes, my wife is white. However, she sure looks real to me.... I do not accept that the life I lead is unreal, inauthentic, or broken.... Life isn't perfect, but we're making it. We're getting over, and in the process, getting over it. Wilson doesn't want us to get over it.... That might float some people's boats, but I am more interested in feeling whole right here and now. History is important--but not so much...

John McWhorter claims he is real. I say that he is fake. Here is one example: John McWhorter defending former Senator George Allen:

Similar insincerity is evident in the reaction to Allen and the macaca episode . . . . Imagine for a moment that Allen actually knew that a "macaque" is a kind of monkey, or that in French the term is sometimes used as an insult for North Africans (Allen denied having known about either). Who, then, believes that Allen would use the slur against an opposition campaigner aiming a camera straight at him? The facts of the case would suggest that Allen just made up something silly on the spot...

I say this is fake. John McWhorter was saying something he doesn't believe--that George Allen was smart enough not to behave stupidly--because no other African-American was defending George Allen. McWhorter hoped to make himself a rare and valuable commodity in the event that Allen were to have survived his close encounter with the macaques: the only prominent African-American to have taken Allen's side. A little racial arbitrage here. But behaving like this doesn't make McWhorter "real."

Here is another example:

[T]he diversity fetish leads to excusing other cultures for destructive behaviors we would condemn in our own... (witness the tendency to designate Osama Bin Laden a "madman," implying that this sane, calculating person is not responsible for his actions, whereas Dick Cheney is afforded no such exemption from sincere, visceral contempt)...

Nobody I know (and I know many) who calls Osama bin Laden a "madman" is excusing him--they are, rather, saying that we should have long since put enough resources into the search to find him and shoot him down like a dog. Nobody I know (and I know many) who calls Dick Cheney a "madman" is exempting him from contempt--indeed, their contempt is roughly double that of those who do not call Cheney a "madman." A little neoconservative arbitrage here: McWhorter is declaring his allegiance to Cheney and asserting that his opponents (the followers of the "diversity fetish") are in some ways pledging allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Once again: fake. Behaving like this makes McWhorter less real than ever.

Rising Hegemon: And as the Sun rises in the East

2007-05-14T17:07:00.001-07:00

Attaturk writes:

Rising Hegemon: And as the Sun rises in the East: The Right-Wing discovers that a French President will primarily look after the interests of ... France! Their idiotic, simplistic notions of foreign relations never fail to shock and guffaw. Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing reformer who becomes French President on Wednesday, upset both the United States and his opponents yesterday by offering the job of Foreign Minister to a Socialist veteran with anti-American credentials. Hubert Védrine, 59 — a former senior aide to the late President Mitterrand — who served as Foreign Minister from 1997 to 2002, was considering the proposal yesterday. The prospect of Mr Védrine running foreign policy has infuriated the beleaguered Socialists and amazed the diplomatic world because he is the architect of a doctrine for containing what he called the abusive “steamroller” of American power. His views on “the hyperpower” — the term that he coined in the 1990s — would appear to conflict with Mr Sarkozy’s pro-Atlantic views.
Look, Sarkozy has the advantage of becoming President four-years past the stupidity of "Freedom Fries" and various other idiocies. Like 'em or hate 'em one is hard-pressed to deny that on reflection, no matter the personal interests involved as they were on both sides, ultimately, the French were right and Bush and his supporters were wrong about Iraq.
Sarkozy saying he would like to mend fences with the United States over this silly game of mutual sarcasm equaling his suddenly ignoring overwhelming French opposition to U.S. foreign policy and militarism is a game only a Bush syncophant could fall for, and the usual suspects did hook, line, and sinker. The Bushophiles are just as moronic as ever. French conservatism is intermixed with French Nationalism, from DeGaulle to Chirac to Sarkozy they have typically been in favor of a check on American expansion and ambition. Fools as always.

Matthew Yglesias Does Not Have Any Respect for Paul bremer

2007-05-14T17:03:00.001-07:00

Nope. No respect. Not strange, not new, not old, not familiar:

Matthew Yglesias: Strange New Respect: Jim Henley and Scott Lemieux are feeling it for Paul Bremer after reading his Washington Post self-defense article. Personally, my sympathy for Bremer goes down whenever he publishes anything. I think Bremer has essentially been turned into a scapegoat for very broad intellectual errors and policy mistakes that affected a wide swathe of the American elite from 2002-2005. Rather than acknowledge that this is what happened; that certain stupendously wrong ideas gained widespread adherence in the two years after 9/11, there's been an enormous willingness to believe that, hey, no, everything's fine, it's just that Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld are really dumb.
The trouble with trying to defend Bremer from this unfair position, however, is that every time he opens his mouth he's refusing to adopt the only really viable defense he has -- that he was the fall guy for a doomed enterprise. It's not that disbanding the Iraqi Army wasn't an error, it's just that having done things the other way 'round wouldn't have produced the desired unified, democratic, and yet willing to be used as a platform for US power-projection throughout the region Iraq that Bremer was supposed to produce. He wound up making pro-chaos decisions because the country had, as a matter of national policy, chosen to adopt unrealistic and incoherent -- yet strangely vague -- war aims. The only real blunder Bremer made was agreeing to take the job under those circumstances.

Why Is Bush So Dominant Over the Republican Party?

2007-05-14T16:53:00.001-07:00

They should have revolted in May 2001--rather than follow along as Cheney established his dominance and cut the moorings connecting the White House to reality. But they didn't. Various voices discuss why:

I have puzzled for years on why Bush seems to exercise such control over the conservative movement and its institutions. Ronald Reagan didn't have anything close to the degree of support Bush has. I wish I could figure it out...

I blame 1994, and the message learned that division within a party carries the risk that 1/4 of your incumbents will lose their jobs. Like today--the most centrist 30 Democratic representatives think that they have a better chance of keeping their jobs in 2008 if Pelosi is perceived to be a success than if they cross the aisle and strike a deal to join a ruling House coalition led by Boehner and company, a ruling coalition with which they might well be in more ideological sympathy...
That's a factor, but there's a lot more to it. I'll figure it out someday.
The assessment in Ron Suskind’s 2004 article holds up pretty well, although it was mistaken about the civil war in the Republican Party...
If such a civil war had broken out, the Republican Party might still have a chance next year. I am truly baffled as to why so many Republicans seem determined to go down with the sinking ship. I can only conclude that there are Democratic candidates that are within the range of acceptability to those Republicans fed up with Bush—they would rather switch than fight...
These poll data are revealing: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18491981/site/newsweek...
Perhaps another factor I have written about is that the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Internet means that many Republicans need not ever be confronted by inconvenient facts or will always have a plausible explanation from Fred Barnes to explain them away. I really saw this last year when many Republicans were absolutely convinced that they were going to keep control of Congress, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Every single night I heard Barnes explain why the polls were wrong, but in fact they were spot-on accurate. To my knowledge, Fred has never explained why he was wrong about the polls being wrong. Yet now I am hearing the same thing—the polls showing a huge Democratic advantage next year are simply dismissed as biased or inaccurate or something...

Ezra Klein: Give Bigger Government a Chance

2007-05-13T19:28:00.001-07:00

Ezra Klein writes:

Give bigger government a chance - Los Angeles Times: Conservatives talk a lot about government failure, but over the last few years, it's really we who have failed government, depriving it of the revenue, the conscientious management and the attention needed for it to succeed. Undercapitalize a pizza joint and your customers will taste the poor ingredients, become frustrated by the long waits and grow repulsed by the grimy environs. Staff it with your unmotivated drinking buddies and the service will falter, as will the quality of the product. It's no way to run a pizza place, and it's certainly no way to run a government.
But that's exactly what we've done. With Proposition 13 and the famous California tax revolt, and with presidents whose entire domestic programs amounted to mindless tax-cutting, and with Congresses that have been happy to pass cuts and stack deficits, we have systematically deprived the government of the revenues it needs to provide basic services, even as we've come to need it to do so much more. The Bush administration has only added to the problem. The president once said: "I was campaigning in Chicago, and somebody asked me, 'Is there ever any time where the budget might have to go into deficit?' I said only if we were at war or had a national emergency or were in recession. Little did I realize we'd get the trifecta." He's right. Not only have we spent more than $500 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan and untold more on homeland security measures, but we've created, in Medicare Part D, the most expensive new entitlement since President Johnson signed the Great Society into existence. We've also increased education spending through the No Child Left Behind Act. And during all this, tax cuts have robbed the Treasury of $200 billion in revenue; the need for a two-thirds majority in the Legislature impeded the flexibility of California to raise state taxes to compensate, while Proposition 13 continued to handicap our municipalities. All that money has to come from somewhere. And the "where" isn't the high-profile initiatives that the media is watching — the Medicares and Social Securities (although they may suffer too) — but from the smaller, less-noticed, but critically important programs and departments that millions rely on.
If Congress must constantly approve high-profile emergency expenditures that funnel hundreds of billions of dollars toward Iraq, and states cannot pick up the slack, there will have to be cuts in funding for police and schools and jails and Pell Grants and the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs and the nation's infrastructure and all the rest. So is it any surprise that law enforcement is extending a beggar's cup to Philip Morris, public colleges are becoming less affordable and UC law schools are shilling for corporate dollars? And that it's all happening even as the globalizing economy demands ever higher skills, as ill and traumatized Iraq war veterans are going without care, as roads and schools are crumbling and myriad other minor catastrophes are underway beneath the notice of the national media but well within the range where they harm ordinary Americans.
Such unhappy outcomes are not merely morally unsettling, they're often economically inefficient. Government spending can be more than necessary, it can be desirable. It can step in, for instance, when the market fails to deliver public goods that society desires but private entities haven't figured out how to fund. (It's useful having a national military, right?) And it can use its regulatory power to ensure that competition works to increase well-being rather than to simply amp up industry profits. UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong once wrote that "sometimes government failures are greater than the market failures for which they purport to compensate. Sometimes they are not." The trick is knowing which is which. But if, like the Bush administration, you are blithely unconcerned with running an efficient, effective government, funding its necessary elements, presenting honest choices to the American people between tax cuts and social investment and staffing the whole enterprise with skilled professionals, you never need make those judgments as you have neither the resources nor the personnel to effectively deploy the central organizing structure of modern societies. And that's a shame.
Libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke likes to say that "Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it." Over the last few years, that's been true. But government can work, and increasingly, Americans appear to be anticipating its return. A new Pew Research Center poll finds that public support for a societal safety net and for government protections is at its highest levels in more than a decade — which suggests that Americans don't think bake sales are the way to fund their schools or that Philip Morris is really who they want subsidizing law enforcement. And in recent elections, the once popular "Taxpayer's Bill of Rights" amendments that seemed so unstoppable a decade ago are being rejected and, in Colorado, repealed, as voters finally tire of paying the costs in broken infrastructure and insufficient public services.
When asked what type of political system Americans would have, Ben Franklin famously responded, "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, he also bequeathed us a government, if we can run it. And somehow, I don't think the Philip Morris police department is quite what he had in mind.

Thomas Barnett Hates Condi Rice

2007-05-13T19:25:00.001-07:00

He writes, apropos of George Tenet's book:

While I don’t much care for tell-alls from people who didn’t do all when in office … (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog): Where Tenet’s book is worth reading is exactly on everything except “slam dunk,” like the fact that no one every seemed to seriously discuss or argue through what comes after capturing and/or killing Saddam. And that Bremer kept the CIA in the dark on both disbanding the army and de-Baathing the government. Or that Rice basically abdicated her honest broker role in the NSC, a point nobody bothered to raise in her SECSTATE confirmation hearings (ah, but there’s so much to admire in her “grit and grace” that her stunning incompetency in her previous job need not have been examined. I mean, it’s not her fault the interagency process didn’t wo . . . wait a minute, it’s exactly her fault.). Or how “nobody wanted to give Bremer specific marching orders” and that “Rice felt she could not order changes.” Or how everyone fell in love with Chalabi and let him call way too many of the big shots by proxy.

The last bit provides a stunning example of Condi’s non-role:

“What the hell is going on with Chalabi?” the President asked me at a White House meeting that spring. “Is he working for you?” [Senior CIA officer] Rob Richer, who was with me at the meeting, piped up, “No, sir, I believe he is working for DOD.” All eyes shifted to Don Rumsfeld. “I’ll have to check what his status is,” Rumsfeld said. His Under Secretary for Intelligence, Steve Cambone, sat there mute. “I don’t think he ought to be working for us,” the President dryly observed.
A few weeks later the President again raised the issue. “What’s up with Chalabi?” he asked. Paul Wolfowitz said, “Chalabi has a relationship with DIA and is providing information that is saving American lives. CIA can confirm that.” The President turned to us. “I know of no such information, Mr. President,” Mr. Richer said. The President looked to Condi Rice and said, “I want Chalabi off the payroll.”
At a subsequent meeting, chaired by Rice, DIA confirmed that they were paying the [Iraqi National Congress] $350,000 a month for its services in Baghdad. We knew that the INC’s armed militia had seized tens of thousands of Saddam regime documents and was slowly doling them out to the U.S. government. Beyond that it was unclear to me what the Pentagon was getting for its money. Somehow the President’s direction to pull the plug on the arrangement continued to be ignored.

Paging Dr. Kissinger! Could Rice have been more of a doormat?
I don’t know what’s sadder: Bush having to figure this out on his own and then telling Rice to finally do something about it or Rice not being able to follow his direct order--or the American people having to wait for Tenet’s tell-all to find out.
Tenet was clearly, in the words of the Economist, a total “time server.”
Problem is, so is Rice.
Following Powell’s empty-suit performance prior, this has been the worst pair of SECSTATES in a row in my lifetime.

The cossacks work for the Czar, Tom.

Matthew Yglesias: Why We Should Withdraw from Iraq

2007-05-12T19:28:00.001-07:00

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Matthew Yglesias: The Paradox:Benjamin R. "Randy" Mixon says he needs more troops in Diyala Province:

Mixon, speaking Friday by teleconference from Camp Speicher, outside Tikrit, to a Pentagon news conference, said that he did not have enough soldiers to provide security in Diyala. The local government is "nonfunctional" and the central government is "ineffective," he said. . . . Mixon was withering in his criticism of the Iraqi government, saying it was hamstrung by bureaucracy and compromised by corruption and sectarian discord, making it unable to assist U.S. forces in Diyala.

Why, though, isn't the reason to take the troops out? After all, what's the point of throwing ever more American blood and manpower in support of a corrupt, ineffective government? And this is the essential problem. One could easily imagine a post-war situation where Iraq had a government that was not yet competent to run the country, but showed signs of rapid improvement such that if we kept supporting it for a while more, things might turn around. In the real world, though, we're into the fifth year of this business and instead of improving, things just change and get bad in different ways -- what's the point of responding to the failures of the Iraqi government but sending even more troops to fight?

Jim Henley: Just a Smack at Liberaltarianism

2007-05-09T20:07:00.001-07:00

Unqualified Offerings writes:

Just a Smack at Liberaltarianism § Unqualified Offerings: I said at the time that the practical problem with Brink’s program is that there’s no serious constituency within the Democratic Party for the sort of entitlement restructuring that Brink made the linchpin of his original article. More generally, not just the Democratic Party but the country as a whole is trending “left” on economics, and has been since 2000. The southpaw candidates - Gore and Nader - pulled a majority of the popular vote that year, and while I would never argue that Nader’s votes “belonged” to Gore, the aggregate percentage shows where the country’s head was at economically. Were it not for a very famous incident involving airplanes I suspect we’d have seen Democratic pickups in 2002. If not for the fallacy of sunk costs, I suspect George W. Bush would have been a one-termer.

As it is, the Democrats can trace the moment of their revival as a viable political party to their uncompromising opposition to the President’s social-security proposals of 2005. That was their first political victory of the 21st Century and the fifty-millionth time the Donks have profited politically from “defending social security.” I say this not to pick on Brink, but just to clarify why libertarians can’t ground their hopes for liberal-libertarian concord in “entitlement reform.”

We’re entering an era where the public, according to all the polls, is looking for populist economic measures and the Democratic Party is going to give them some. Libertarians have the usual few unsatisfactory options. The first is to return to the bosom of the GOP and encourage them to thwart as much of the Democrats’ economic agenda as possible. In ordinary times I’d be all for this - sweet, sweet obstructionism. These are not ordinary times. Libertarians can’t in good conscience further the fortunes of the Banana Republican Party. Note that while Milton Friedman did meet briefly with Augusto Pinochet, he didn’t participate in Pinochet’s coup. The Caudillo Party needs to lose its fatally campy attraction to “swagger” before it can be trusted with so much as a seat on the student council in a rural middle school.

The second option is to continue to think long term, and continue to concentrate on saying the things we think are true, regardless of their present salability. (Gene Healy said this somewhere, I am certain, in response to Tyler Cowen back in March. I’m damned if I can find the right entry, though.) This is an entirely honorable course, and at least some libertarians ought to make it their main focus.

The third option is to try to coax the least damaging version of the populist measures coming down the pike, while trying to get “the left to be good on issues the left is supposed to be good on,” as Jesse Walker put it last year. That is, peace and civil liberties. I realize that the Democratic Party as a whole has done fvck-all for peace and civil liberties, but it contains constituencies that would like it to do more, and libertarians can swell that chorus. This means singing harmony with “dirty fucking hippies,” which will be hard for libertarians who are more anti-left than anti-state. But the hips, more than the self-styled contrarians who cluster around the New Republic and the Democratic Leadership Council, are the ones who really oppose preventive war, the unitary executive and the domestic security state.

As to the economic populism, the short answer is to prefer the simple to the complex. Treat safety-net measures with the least in social-engineering provisions as less bad than the alternatives. From and anarcho-capitalist perspective it’s all theft and coercion, and I’d never want anarcho-capitalists to stop making that point. But even anarcho-capitalists may decide that, given one’s choice of thievery, that some are less damaging than others. Now, the last aspect of this approach may be the most challenging, and call for the biggest break with habits of thought from the days when many libertarians thought of themselves as “small government conservatives.”

Every safety net entails moral hazard by lowering the price of imprudence. Welfare and unemployment insurance encourage a certain level of irresponsibility at the margins of the working world. Government pensions marginally discourage private retirement savings. National health insurance will breed incremental insouciance about diet and other personal habits. Plus, all social insurance eventually gets paid in taxes, either now or in eventual debt service, and ceteris paribus people would rather pay less in taxes than more. Politicians often try to control moral hazard by legislating against the “problem” behavior. Drug prohibition, twinkie taxes, workfare provisions, forced savings - all have been enacted or proposed to limit moral hazards stemming from safety-net programs, and not just by liberals. During the 1990s I got the impression that, having given up on eliminating welfare, Republicans had decided to settle for making it really annoying to be on welfare, based on the kinds of proposals they were submitting. Just within the last month we’ve seen calls for trans fat bans and other food prohibitions based on the logic that the health costs of such foods come out of the public treasury.

Traditionally the libertarian instinct, faced with an entitlement or social insurance program, has been to limit it somehow. And of course the libertarian instinct is also to reduce spending as much as possible, which moral hazard regulation does. I submit, though, that “social insurance plus moral hazard regulation” is the worst of both worlds from a libertarian perspective. The social insurance makes large claims on the public purse while the hazard regulation fills daily life with niggling restrictions. Therefore I think we libertarians should prefer more subsidized vice to more enforced virtue. The thing is, that will cost money. It will even in many cases be annoying. But a state that spends massive piles of money on social insurance is a less intrusive state than one that spends massive piles of money on social insurance while using that spending as an excuse to keep anyone from having fun.

The preceding is almost completely useless to Brink at the Obama vs. Hillary vs. Edwards vs. Richardson level. I’m a big picture guy! (For the duration of this already lengthy blog item anyway.) Nor does it offer libertarians much of a positive program for the pending populist moment. I’ll see what I can whip up for next time. BUT! I suspect Hillary Clinton is easily the worst of the Dem candidates by almost every criterion discussed above, little better than a Republican. Personally, I’m still hoping Richardson vaults into the first tier and believe he has time to do so.

A Tiny Revolution: Message: U.S. Government Still Mind-Numbingly Cynical

2007-05-08T11:49:00.001-07:00

A Tiny Revolution:

A Tiny Revolution: Message: U.S. Government Still Mind-Numbingly Cynical: The Atlantic just published a 26,000,000-word long article about Condoleezza Rice. At one point it mentions U.S. attempts to push Palestinian society into civil war (sub. req.):

In the fall of 2005, as part of a new push for democracy in the Middle East, Rice insisted that legislative elections be held in the Palestinian territories.... To Rice’s surprise, the elections in January 2006 were won by Hamas...

Eager to reverse the results of the election, Rice decided on a new plan of action that resulted in fighting in the streets of Gaza between Hamas and Fatah gunmen. The plan, which she developed after speaking to President Bush, was to put pressure on the Hamas government by providing the Palestinian security forces loyal to Abbas with training, intelligence, and large shipments of supplies and new weapons, paid for by the United States and by Saudi Arabia. The hope was that Hamas, faced with a well-armed, well-trained force of Fatah fighters, might be cowed into moderating its positions or relinquishing the power it had won through elections. Alternatively, Hamas might be pressured into an escalating series of gun battles, in which case Abbas, as head of the Palestinian security forces, would have an excuse to crush Hamas by force...

Hamas won the clashes, which left more than 140 Palestinians dead, and the Hamas government remained in power.

A few pages later, the author describes following Rice on her recent trip to Jerusalem:

I find a copy of Friday’s State Department Rapid Response sheet lying on the ground. “Message: Americans do not want to see Palestinians killing Palestinians. Palestinians should be living in peace among themselves and with Israel,” the document instructs, quoting Rice.

And indeed, that's exactly what Rice said in a February interview with Al Arabiya.

Message: Condoleezza Rice Most Loathsomely Unctuous Human Being Imaginable

Spencer Ackerman on George Tenet

2007-05-08T11:47:00.001-07:00

Spencer Ackerman writes:

George Tenet's Twisted Intel | The American Prospect:In his new memoir, the former CIA chief proves to be a master of non-apology apologies

Let's just leave "slam dunk" aside for a moment.

It's true that in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet goes to elaborate rhetorical lengths in denying that he had intended to characterize Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction as a dead certainty when he used that infamous phrase. And, like much else in the book, Tenet's focus on the "slam dunk" quote is actually sneaky -- he serves to obscure the real issue at hand while oscillating between contrition and a fiery, if dubious, defense of his tenure....

Tenet has always sought to ingratiate himself with his masters, whether Presidents Clinton and Bush or the GOP Congress, in order to protect himself and the CIA from criticism.... Tenet's own particular brand... involves the unctuous rhetorical tactic of conceding failure up front, only to hastily explain that, in fact, there were no real failures -- not on his part, not on his agency's part, and certainly not on President Bush's part. He's a master of the non-apology apology. Take the most important Iraq-related example of massive failure on his watch: the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The NIE, which assessed that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an ongoing nuclear weapons program, only exists because the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence requested it in September 2002, needing an authoritative intelligence judgment on the eve of the vote to authorize the war. In the book, Tenet concedes that he "didn't think one was necessary... I was wrong."...

Tenet places heavy emphasis on the "crash project" that the three-week NIE represented, and implies that weaknesses in the NIE are attributable to the time constraints faced by its chief author, National Intelligence Officer Bob Walpole.... Tenet should mention... the political constraints imposed by the Bush administration. The White House insisted... the war authorization occur before the November congressional elections, so as to enable the Republicans to use the war question as a political cudgel against the Democrats. But he mentions no such thing.....

[Tenet] bristles at the [Senate] panel's desire for an assessment of, in his characterization, "the effectiveness of planned U.S. covert and military actions in Iraq," This is a serious misrepresentation.... Graham, the Democratic chairman, requested... forecasts of what the Middle East would look like in the aftermath of an invasion of Iraq. Graham wanted the full committee to get a broader understanding of the implications of war.... Tenet, however, restricted the NIE to covering only WMD, and now disgraces himself further by implying that the committee attempted to meddle with war planning. There's an irony here: Later in the book Tenet trumpets the CIA's foresight in predicting the chaos of Iraq -- assessments that he stopped Congress from receiving when it counted....

It gets worse when he engages the famous issue of the aluminum tubes.... Nowhere in Tenet's new book can one find even a momentary contemplation of the idea that the NIE should have abandoned its conclusion about the Iraqi nuclear weapons program on account of the DOE's objection, rather than push that outlook to the margins as a dissenting view.... Tenet also gives an unsatisfactory explanation of how these dissents were scrubbed from the public version of the NIE.... In other words, the NIE was tragically misread and misrepresented -- off the hook he and the president go....

His inoculation of Bush from blame is all the more troubling because Tenet is absolutely right about a central claim in the book: The intelligence wasn't determinative of the war. The Bush administration opted to invade Iraq because of a mélange of strategic reasons, for which the public case about weapons of mass destruction was merely, in Paul Wolfowitz's words, "the one issue that everyone could agree on." The proper word for this is "deceit." It's true enough that Tenet had little hope of salvaging his reputation through his memoir, given the overwhelming disrepute in which nearly everyone, left and right, holds him. But he should have devoted much more introspection -- and apology -- to the way in which his faithful service led him to turn intelligence work into policy advocacy. It wouldn't have been very cheerleader-like. But the college basketball season has long since ended.

Francis Fukuyama: Beating an Orderly Retreat

2007-05-08T07:41:00.001-07:00

Fukuyama:

Beating an orderly retreat - Los Angeles Times: GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has promised to return to Washington in September to report on the outcome of his surge strategy. I hope he will say that sectarian killings, bombings and U.S. casualties are all down. But even if he does, I doubt he can offer a clear, plausible date by which the Iraqi army and police will be able to stand on their own without massive U.S. support. So regardless of what he concludes, we seem destined to enter the presidential election season with no credible date for a U.S. exit from Iraq. In more than four years of war, there have been countless turning points at which we were led to expect decisive political progress in Iraq: the capture of Saddam Hussein (December 2003); the turnover of sovereignty (June 2004); elections for the constituent assembly (January 2005); elections to ratify the constitution (August 2005); and elections for the Iraqi parliament (December 2005).
The surge was the last military card we had to play, and now our bluff will soon be called. In my view, there is only one condition under which we can withdraw from Iraq with our core interests fully protected and with a reasonable claim that our mission was accomplished, and that is when strong Iraqi military and police forces emerge that can operate independently of U.S. forces and prevent a takeover of the country by either Al Qaeda in Iraq, resurgent Baathists or Muqtada Sadr's Shiite militia.
Let's not kid ourselves. The situation today is in some ways much worse than the one faced by President Nixon in Vietnam 35 years ago. At that time, South Vietnam had an army with a paper strength of 1 million men that, despite its problems, was able hold on for three years after the U.S. withdrew its ground forces. The South Vietnamese army provided Henry Kissinger with his "decent interval" between the U.S. withdrawal and South Vietnam's collapse. (Indeed, Kissinger argues with some plausibility that the South Vietnamese military could have hung on indefinitely if Congress hadn't cut off funds for U.S. air support.) Nothing like that exists or will exist in Iraq for the politically meaningful future. As of November, the Pentagon claimed it had trained 322,000 Iraqi military and police, but it admitted that the actual number on hand was much lower because of desertions and attrition. Iraqi forces continue to suffer huge shortfalls in armor, weaponry, logistics and communications, and it is unclear how they would fare without American hand-holding. Serious training of Iraqi forces started late and never received adequate funding or top-level attention, despite the fact that Petraeus was at the helm of the training effort in recent years. The South Vietnamese army may have been nothing to write home about in 1972, but we are extremely unlikely to have an Iraqi equivalent by the end of 2007.
What all this means is that even if the surge, by September, is reducing violence in Iraq to some degree, it will not guarantee a "safe" exit strategy for U.S. forces. But here's the problem: Do we have any other choice than to withdraw? We could stick it out, and I suspect that we could avoid losing in Iraq for another five, 10 or 15 years, as long as we're willing to maintain high troop levels, continue to spend large amounts of money and suffer more casualties. But even the most conservative Republican candidates are unlikely to campaign on a platform of staying in Iraq indefinitely when the primary season starts next winter and the war enters its sixth year. This means that we will have to engage in a very different debate from the one we have been having up to now, a debate not about surging and not about withdrawing with our goals accomplished but about how to draw down our forces in a way that minimizes the costs that will inevitably accompany our loss of control.
This is a difficult situation, but it is necessary. The questions we need to address include: How do we reconfigure our forces to provide advice, training and support, rather than engaging in combat? How we can withdraw safely without a serious Iraqi army to cover our retreat? How will we dismantle enormous bases like Camp Liberty or Camp Victory and protect the diminishing numbers of U.S. troops in the country? Do we trust the Iraqi military and police sufficiently to turn over our equipment to them? How do we protect the lives of those who collaborated with us? The images of South Vietnamese allies hanging to the skid pads of U.S. helicopters departing Saigon should be burned into our memories. And what if the weak Iraqi government we leave behind falls or other political crises occur when we have fewer U.S. troops to respond? Can we work with proxies, resources or arms supplies to shape outcomes?
As we draw down, the civil war is likely to intensify, and the focus of our efforts will have to shift to containing it within Iraq's borders. Preventing intervention by outside forces will become an even more urgent priority. On the other hand, it is not necessarily the case that the situation will spiral out of control. Although the situation is graver in some ways than Vietnam, in others it is better. Although we have no equivalent to a South Vietnamese army, the enemy has no equivalent of the North Vietnamese army. It is hard to see any of the small factions struggling for power in different parts of the country emerging as a dominant force throughout Iraq. The presence of U.S. forces has itself been a spur to terrorist recruitment, but as it becomes clear that we are on our way out, it will be easier for Iraqi nationalists to turn against the foreign jihadists (as they have already begun to do in Al Anbar province). An intensifying civil war will be a tragedy for Iraq, but it is not the worst outcome from a U.S. standpoint to have a number of bitterly anti-American groups duking it out among themselves. Civil wars eventually come to an end when one side wins (unlikely, in this case) or when the parties exhaust themselves and drop their maximalist aims.

Clark Hoyt to Be Public Editor of the New York Times

2007-05-05T08:42:00.001-07:00

Xan writes:

This Could Be Good News | CorrenteWire: I saw this headline…Times Names Public Editor, and since I couldn’t click the mouse and raise that finger to the mouth at the same time I clicked first. Good move: "The New York Times today named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor who oversaw the Knight Ridder newspaper chain’s coverage that questioned the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war."
Hmm. Not to sound like a racetrack tout trying to pick a winner in the Derby but this dude’s bloodlines and recent workout times look good.... "His appointment as public editor takes effect May 14 and lasts two years. He will be the third person to hold the position since The Times created it in 2003, following Daniel Okrent and Byron Calame. Mr. Keller said he considered, but ultimately rejected, the idea of hiring someone from within The Times, or someone from a digital news operation."
Somebody better check local glue factories to see what might have become of those two. Meanwhile this kid sounds promising. Let’s see if he can go the distance on what’s still, like it not, the Churchill Downs of American dead-tree journalism.

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » Friday’s Mini-Report

2007-05-04T19:05:00.001-07:00

The Carpetbagger Report watches the Jonathan Weisman special:

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » Friday’s Mini-Report: * A front-page WaPo report yesterday suggested Dems were poised to give in entirely on the president’s demands on war funding, but today, the caucuses appeared to be standing relatively firm: “Congressional Democrats have signaled they’re not ready to back down in their confrontation with President Bush on Iraq, spurring Republicans to accuse them of causing political gridlock.” The House and Senate passed funding bills for the war in Iraq; Bush vetoed it. Who’s responsible for the gridlock?

Profiles in Prescience: Michael Crowley

2007-05-04T19:04:00.001-07:00

Apologetic.us reminds us of the prescient wisdom of Michael Crowley:

Profiles in Prescience: Michael Crowley | Apologetic.us: Michael Crowley, Follow the Leader: Can the Democrats survive Nancy Pelosi? The New Republic, November 25, 2002: It's no surprise that Pelosi is working so hard to dispel the notion that she's a liberal. Already, Republicans are painting her as a combination of Maxine Waters and Barbra Streisand. That's unfair: Pelosi isn't a wild-eyed ideologue; she's just a fairly typical member of the House Democratic caucus. And that's exactly the problem. The caucus was already to the left of most Democratic voters--and far to the left of the country as a whole--even before November 5. And now many of its members have decided that the lesson of last week's election disaster is that the party wasn't liberal enough. Pelosi may say her liberalism isn't her defining feature. But it's a big part of why she's about to get promoted. As Michigan Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan recently put it, "I don't think anybody's going to become the next minority leader of the Democrats that wants to go along with [George W.] Bush on the war." In other words, Pelosi was chosen in part because she's not expected to challenge the liberal instincts of the House Democratic caucus. Which is a pity. Because, unless someone saves the House Democrats from themselves, they could be looking at a long time in the minority...

Impach George W. Bush Now: "The McNulty-Rove Meeting" by Scott Horton

2007-05-04T10:17:00.001-07:00

Scott Horton writes:

"The McNulty-Rove Meeting": This morning the McClatchy Newspapers report in greater detail on a meeting between Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and Karl Rove at the White House which focused on an appearance of the number three at Justice—William E. Moschella—to answer queries about the sacking of U.S. attorneys.

According to a congressional aide, McNulty said he attended a White House meeting with Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, and other officials on March 5, the day before McNulty's deputy William Moschella was to testify to Congress about the firings. White House officials told the Justice Department group that they needed to agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired and explain them to Congress, McNulty said, according to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the transcript of McNulty's interview hasn't been made public.

McNulty said that White House officials never revealed during the meeting that they'd been discussing plans to replace some prosecutors with Gonzales aides, the congressional aide said. McNulty recalled feeling disturbed and concerned when he found out days later that the White House had been involved, the congressional aide said. McNulty considered the extent of White House coordination to be "extremely problematic."

“Extremely problematic” in this case is a code word for “grossly improper.” Moschella went to the hill the next day and made a series of statements which were in the main highly misleading—and some which were later revealed as outright falsehoods. But the whole account provided by McNulty is suspicious. He’s meeting with Rove to agree on a cover story that another official will be sent to the hill to relay . . . and then he claims that he was “disturbed” when he finds out the White House is involved at some later point? Is that really even marginally credible at this point? McNulty was a sort of stationmaster in this entire process, he knew of the core role played by Sampson and Goodling, and he certainly also knew about the secret memorandum empowering them as the Lord-High Executioners for Karl Rove. The fact of the meeting with Rove and the need to “coordinate” answers with him is self-explanatory in this regard. Moreover, McNulty’s claims of distance from the affair become progressively more stretched when we consider the critical role played by his chief of staff, Michael Elston, in attempting to pressure all the U.S. attorneys into silence in the face of a growing probe.

McNulty’s characterizations of his role are simply not credible. He’s escaping fire in this regards only because they are marginally less incredible than those of so many others—starting with Alberto Gonzales himself.

Bradford Plumer: Why Is Anybody Supporting Mitt Romney?

2007-05-04T10:09:00.001-07:00

He writes:

Bradford Plumer: If you think the main problem with the Bush administration is that its approach to the Middle East is too nuanced, you'll love Mitt Romney. Here's Shadi Hamid on last night's debate:

One thing kind of bothered me. [Romney] was talking about the jihadist/terrorist threat, and listed Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Iran... and then the Muslim Brotherhood? Huh? The Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s and represents the leading opposition bloc in the Egyptian parliament (with 88 members). The group has publicly committed itself to the rules of the democratic game. Anyway, it's unfortunate that Romney did the standard Republican mistake of thinking that all Islamists are a monolithic terrorist threat, when there are clear, obvious distinctions within Islamism, between radical Islamists (those who operate outside the political system and use violence) and mainstream Islamists (those who operate within the system and renounce violence).

Right. The Muslim Brotherhood is a large, complex organization. Some of its radical wings may engage in various unsavory activities. But the bulk of the movement has renounced violent jihad and, in places like Egypt, made a point to participate in elections (for which they've earned the wrath of Ayman Al Zawahiri). Not only that, but they represent a broad swath of "mainstream" Islam. Lumping them in with Al Qaeda is a terrible idea. See, for instance, Marina Ottaway in the pages of this magazine, or Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke's recent look at the group in Foreign Affairs. Even the Bush administration is starting to catch on--in the past few months, according to Newsweek, the State Department "cleared" at least one high-level contact with the Muslim Brotherhood. "That doesn't mean we are embracing the group," one official said. "It means we recognize that we have to listen to a range of voices." Does Romney think that's wrong? Should we just start blasting away at random? Do tell.

Fighting the Next Last War

2007-05-02T11:22:00.001-07:00

Jim Henley writes:

Fighting the Next Last War § Unqualified Offerings: Looking Sideways at Your World Since October 2001: Today’s hot article, A failure in generalship, by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, is an intriguing mix of substance and nonsense. The most quoted parts are about what Yingling views as the dereliction of senior military leadership prior to and during the early years of what he still calls, publication lead times being what they are, “the Long War.” See Cernig, and Joyner for useful overviews of that part. The single most quotable line has to be: "As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."

Here follows a series of opinionated reactions.

Yingling’s accusations can be parsed into short-term versus long-term failings. Short-term, senior leadership in the post-9/11 military failed to make clear their doubts about the practicality of conquering Iraq “with too few troops” to civilian leadership and, after that, to the public. Not enough of them were willing to sacrifice their careers for truth and duty. In fact, some of them were, Anthony Zinni and Eric Shinseki chief among them. Yingling’s real complaint is that the Rumsfeld Pentagon was able to find some generals willing to carry out what most of them recognized, per Yingling, as manifestly impractical plans.

I think I agree with Yingling on what actually happened - the Bush Administration selected for sycophants and, because the American general officer corps comprises exclusively human beings, found them. To avoid this, you either need to choose America’s generals from a purer species or have some system of, er, checks and balances to counteract the tendency of bad administrations to recreate the Army in its image. Yingling actually has a plan for this, involving - horrors! Congressional oversight.

Yingling’s longer-term j’accuse is that the US Army has actively resisted adapting itself to prosecuting counterinsurgencies despite clear indications post-WWII of their salience. Even after Vietnam the Army stubbornly rebuilt itself as a high-tech counterforce maneuver-warfare arm. My own take on this involves inferring from dribs and drabs of hints and asides: I think the Vietnam generation of junior officers who became the generals of Desert Storm and the Clinton Years agreed among themselves that getting involved in counterinsurgency warfare was profoundly unwise, and they helped build a force posture as unsuited to it as possible. “We don’t do mountains,” Colin Powell memorably said. In this I think they were correct. We’ll get to that.

In the course of this indictment, Yingling identifies a “villain” that would raise Harold Bloom’s eyebrow: An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War,” by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.

Summers was the Yingling of his day! He was the young turk telling the old farts where they got it wrong. But while it’s been many years since I read On Strategy, I think Yingling’s gloss of Summers argument is unfair. Summers argument was that the Army should have focused on “conventional warfare” in Vietnam so that the South Vietnamese Army could concentrate on the counterinsurgency aspect. Summers believed that the US Army should have been used to seal the borders from NVA infiltration and resupply while ARVN concentrated on the Vietcong. Summers believed that the US lacked ARVN’s local knowledge and that anyway, the South Vietnamese government needed to be the ones to secure their own territory. You can attack Summers’ thesis at all sorts of levels, from operational to moral, but in fact he had a theory of counterinsurgency - it was better done by local clients.

After the elsewhere-blogged passages about the failure of the senior officer corps as a whole to speak out in advance of the Iraq War when it would have done some good, Yingling makes his proposals for producing a better officer corps. James Joyner calls the suggestions naive. I partly agree, but James skips some of Yingling’s better arguments about just what Congress could do, which amounts to, really use already existing oversight prerogatives. Excerpt the first:

However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer’s potential for senior leadership.

Cynics will note that this qualification brief describes Yingling rather exactly! But there’s a pretty good chance that Yingling has already destroyed his Army career by publishing this article and probably knows it, so I don’t think we should think he’s being merely self-serving. Leaving specifics aside, Yingling is asking for a real confirmation process.

Excerpt the second:

Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty.

I like this guy! And yet. This passage can justly be called naive, and points up one of two major blind spots of the article. Yingling is very good on the institutional failings of the Army, but for a guy with a master’s in Political Science from the University of Chicago, he seems blithe about the larger institutional context in which the Army is embedded. Old soldiers never die. They go to work for defense contractors. Defense contractors lobby Congress. Congressmen babysit the contractors in their districts. The Congressmen and Senators from the regions with the biggest bases and defense plants get the Armed Services committee positions. Congressional Republicans have spent six years teaching us that a political party can put as much energy into thwarting oversight as conducting it. The relationships are all very incestuous, and beyond the iron triangle itself is a network of infantile-nationalist talk shows and bloggers who would be only to happy to demagogue against “anti-military” legislators trying to hold a general to account.

I’m sure some version of Yingling’s reforms can give us a better officer corps, even if they’re imperfectly implemented, but the truth is that the Army can only ever get so good because, at bottom it’s a bureaucracy responding to the laws of bureaucracies. (cf. the Stiftung.) This is a truth American policy needs to integrate into any grand strategy worthy of the name.

I called this a blind spot. You could argue that it’s simply outside the scope of his paper. So the other great unexamined premise of his paper. Let’s approach it by way of his conclusion:

At the Battle of Valmy in 1792, Frederick’s successors were checked by France’s ragtag citizen army. In the fourteen years that followed, Prussia’s generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like those of the past. In 1806, the Prussian Army marched lockstep into defeat and disaster at the hands of Napoleon at Jena. Frederick’s prophecy had come to pass; Prussia became a French vassal.

Iraq is America’s Valmy. America’s generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy, this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.

This is nonsense. It’s as apocalyptic as any “Dhimmitude”-obsessed girlblogger, and as unjustified. The simple fact is that nobody can make the US into their vassal via insurgency warfare. The US can lose in Iraq. (The US has, indeed, already done so.) It can lose in Afghanistan. It can suffer attacks and casualties from acts of terror at home. But no insurgency can establish suzerainty over the United States.

This I think is the issue that Yingling and the rest of the Army’s “counterinsurgency insurgents” avoid. Insurgency can’t pose an existential threat to the country. Is there a single instance of insurgency warfare conquering foreign territory? Even if you consider South Vietnam and North Vietnam to have really been separate countries, it was, as certain hawks never tire of pointing out, Hanoi’s regular Army that conquered the South. The FLN could kick France out of Algeria, but it could never rule France. Hezbollah drove Israel out of Lebanon in the 1990s using guerrilla warfare. It couldn’t use the same tactics to drive Israel out of Galilee. Insurgencies can prevent foreign or local governments from consolidating control over the insurgents’ “own” territory. Guerrilla movements that get big enough have been able to take power in their own countries.

But they can’t conquer. Insurgency is fundamentally reactive and, if not always merely “defensive” . . . parochial. A guerrilla army swims in the sea of the people, like the man said, and foreigners make a lousy sea. Even if all “the terrorists” wanted to follow us home after we “cut and run” from Iraq, they could never have remotely the effect here that they manage in Iraq. Here they lack a sea.

By and large, a country like the United States only needs to commit to an ongoing posture of counterinsurgency if it is also committed to serial military domination of foreign populations. In fact, the United States is currently so committed, on a bipartisan basis. But that’s an unwise and immoral posture that will lead to national ruin in the medium to long term. The Iraq defeat offers one of those rare moments for real national reappraisal, an openness to genuine reform. Rather than work at getting better at executing an unwise and immoral grand strategy, let’s choose a different one.

In case you think the above is merely complacent, a last thought. Yingling and his school should consider the possibility that they are the ones preparing to fight the last war. (Shouldn’t we credit the Vietnam generation of officers for not doing this? What would an Army of commandos and civil affairs specialists have done during Operation Desert Storm?) “4GW” cannot pose an existential threat to the United States. It can neither wipe us off the map nor make us bend the knee. But perhaps some way of war in embryo could. A bright guy like Yingling ought to give the matter some thought.

Thomas Friedman, Buffoon

2007-05-02T11:06:00.001-07:00

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Defending the netroots: Bloggers counter Jonathan Chait: Chait's notion seems to be that the netroots despises intellectual honesty and celebrates only shallow propaganda; but the fact is that the liberal netroots' favorite pundits are the ones who express liberal views: Who should liberals prefer? An institution like The New Republic, whose main institutional and emotional commitment is to right-wing Israeli nationalism (a commitment, I might add, frequently expressed through the sort of demagoguery, name-calling, and dishonesty Chait professes to find distasteful), infuriates the netroots even though individual TNR writers and articles garner praise. Similarly, it would be odd for liberal activists to like the DLC given that the DLC's central mission is to curb the influence of liberal activists over Democratic Party politicians. Other pundits the netroots love to hate include Joe Klein, whose work Chait also disapproves of; Thomas Friedman, a buffoon; and Maureen Dowd, who I'd hardly propose putting forward as the great apostle of seriousness about ideas.

P O'Neill Teaches Us a Language Lesson

2007-05-02T11:05:00.001-07:00

P O'Neill writes:

Best of Both Worlds: 05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007: Not just a game: A New York Times correction:

An article in Business Day on Monday about Mark Halperin, who stepped down as the political director of ABC News and will join Time magazine, misstated his role at both media outlets. He is a political — not a policy — analyst.

This distinction, between people like Halperin ("political") who can write stories about a John Edwards haircut after seeing a headline on Drudge, and a "policy" story analyzing e.g. John Edwards' healthcare plan, goes to the heart of why bloggers have so little faith in Halperin's side of the business. It's why, for example, Brad DeLong writes

I can recommend that someone interested in economic and budget policy read Atrios confident that Duncan Black is giving it the straightest shot he can. I can't say that about the New Republic's giving airtime to Greg Mankiw and Robert Samuelson, can I? And we all know that you learn a great deal more ideas and facts about the Middle East from reading Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's Daily Kos than from reading the New Republic.

Posted by P O'Neill at 1:07 PM

Comments on Jonathan Chait

2007-05-02T11:03:00.001-07:00

John Emerson:

John Emerson: If you want specifics: Chait's Norquist comparison was nasty and overblown, his smug magisterial tone was highly annoying coming from an overpaid tool whose track record is mixed at best, and his description of the pre-netroots Democratic Party was dishonest. The DLC party was about selling favors to big business, enforcing a blindly hawkish message, and keeping the left at bay. It wasn't about civility, high principles, and thoughtfulness.
DLC Democrats would rather control a weak losing party than be a faction within a winning party, and in the 2000 election they got their wish. But in the 2006 election the Democrats dumped Lieberman and gained control of Congress. Chait is trying to reposition himself in the new landscape, but he isn't going at it right, and there are those who are disinclined to try to help him out much.

Kevin Drum:

The Washington Monthly: THE NOISE MACHINE....Jon Chait has a long article in the New Republic today about the netroots and how it's changing liberal politics. It's not a bad piece, though Chait obviously struggles to come to a firm conclusion about what the netroots is really all about. This is a predicament I can sympathize with, since I've been blogging for five years myself and I still have a hard time putting my finger on it. Is it about ideology? Sort of, but not really. Party loyalty? Yes, though not for everyone. Iron-fisted organizational discipline? Sure, except when it's not. In some way, the netroots is all about defining what it means to be a "good Democrat," but beyond that it's a helluva slippery phenomenon, one of those "I know it when I see it" kind of things.
So, bloggerlike, I'll skip the whole question for now and instead highlight this passage about the creation of the right-wing noise machine in the 90s:

Liberals made several attempts to recreate the conservative message machine — Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, and countless others attempted and failed to create talk-radio programs. Most people concluded from these failures that liberals simply didn't want partisan vitriol of the sort offered up by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. They wanted high-minded discussions of the sort found on National Public Radio. Nonconservatives, wrote The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg in 2003, "wouldn't think it was fun to listen to expressions of raw contempt for conservatives."
This analysis, shared by nearly all observers just a few years ago, turns out to be completely wrong. Maybe an audience for raw partisan liberal attacks existed all along but was ill-served by piecemeal forays into talk radio. Or maybe the audience was born suddenly by the shock of the Bush years. In any case, it is obvious that a sizeable liberal audience was not being served the red meat it craved. "People were hungry for strong, unapologetic liberals, and those were completely absent from the media landscape," Moulitsas writes. "I mean, who did progressive [sic] have supposedly representing their side? Joe Frickin' Klein. Is it any wonder blogs grew in response?"

I've heard variations on this theme too many times to count, but is it really true? Daily Kos, which is unique in the political blogosphere, gets about 500,000 readers a day, and after that there's a huge gap to the next most popular liberal blogs, which average 100-150,000 readers. By national radio and TV standards, that's not "sizeable" at all. It's puny — and it's not growing much either. So it seems to me that Hertzberg was basically right: in the context of what it takes to support mass media, there just aren't very many liberals who are interested in listening to hour upon hour of seething resentment and raw contempt. That seems to still be a mostly conservative vice.

But it's still early days, I suppose. It took movement conservatives a couple of decades to build up their audience, and maybe it'll take liberals that long too. Or maybe not. Olbermann is doing pretty well these days, isn't he?

Steve Clemons Tells Us About the Nelson Report: Impeach the Fools Now

2007-05-02T11:02:00.001-07:00

Impeach the fools now, before something even worse happens:

The Washington Note: The Nelson Report -- 30 April 2007: Sometimes insider gossip seems to confirm what all us outsiders think we're seeing, so, for what it's worth. . . we're hearing that some big money players up from Texas recently paid a visit to their friend in the White House. The story goes that they got out exactly one question, and the rest of the meeting consisted of The President in an extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he's doing things would be OK. . . etc., etc. This is called a "bunker mentality" and it's not attractive when a friend does it. When the friend is the President of the United States, it can be downright dangerous. Apparently the Texas friends were suitably appalled, hence the story now in circulation.

Its relevance to various current issues is all too obvious, including the fate of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. Ask anyone at or close to the Bank, and you know, just as a professional, that Wolfowitz's effectiveness is finished, no matter what. But there are now other issues in play, assuming you think that the US role in selecting the Bank leadership remains important. Here's a private comment summing up the entire situation, from a Loyal Reader out in the real world of the Rocky Mountains, who happens to be a lifetime Republican, and a business person. We pass it along, as it is representative of comments we get ALL the time from Republican friends. . . a mixture of hyperbole, irony, and angst. . . and is thus a cautionary tale in itself:

"You know, if Bush would stop his self-indulgent stubbornness for half a day, he could see plain as day that he has an opportunity to retain American control of the World Bank by easing Wolfie out. If he tries to keep Wolfie in that spot, American control could end. I really wonder whether his failure to distinguish between necessary toughness and catastrophically shoot-ourselves-(America)-in-our-foot pigheadedness results from biological anomaly. His inability to harvest experience, and so to think and form successful judgments, is just so inexplicable."

Assuming the Europeans want Wolfowitz out badly enough to compromise with the White House on his replacement, ARE there qualified Republican players available, at this point? One might be tempted to remind Bush that then-Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick wanted the Bank very much, and one might be tempted to add that Zoellick would have been a perfect choice professionally and personally. . . one who would never have embarrassed himself, the President, and his country, as Wolfowitz seems intent on doing. One would probably be wrong to remind Bush of all this, and in any event, indicators are Zoellick rather enjoys making a zillion dollars as a big time investment banker, and so maybe he's not available.

One might then be tempted to suggest the former Asia Subcommittee chair, Rep. Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican whose defeat last Fall came almost entirely due to the war in Iraq, and who would be seen by most of the rest of the world as a superb choice from his days as a Foreign Service officer, and his three decades in the House, during which he served on both Foreign Affairs and, if memory serves, the Banking Committee. Of course Leach is a "liberal Republican". . . an endangered species, and not one generally found south of the Pecos River. . . and he was a persistent critic of Bush North Korea policy until the White House finally took his advice, and let Asst. Sec. State Chris Hill actually practice diplomacy. Leach is probably still waiting for the thank-you call on that. But if temperament, talent, and training has anything to do with it, and with Wolfowitz now absolutely untenable, perhaps the White House might want to give Leach a call, over in his Wilson Center office. Just a suggestion.

Grim Old Party - New York Times

2007-04-30T18:04:00.001-07:00

David Brooks says that Newt Gingrich is the Republicans' savior. Rather odd, because Newt was the person who defined Republicans as hard-right tax-cutting fundamentalists in the 1990s:

Grim Old Party - New York Times: The Republicans suffered one unpleasant event in November 2006, and they are headed toward an even nastier one in 2008. The Democrats have opened up a wide advantage in party identification and are crushing the G.O.P. among voters under 30. Moreover, there has been a clear shift, in poll after poll, away from Republican positions on social issues and on attitudes toward government. Democratic approaches are favored on almost all domestic, tax and fiscal issues, and even on foreign affairs.
The public, in short, wants change. And yet the Republicans refuse to offer that. On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along. They privately believe the country needs new approaches to the war against Islamic extremism, but they don’t offer them. They try to block Democratic initiatives, but they don’t offer the country any new ways to think about the G.O.P. They are like people quietly marching to their doom....
The party is blessed with a series of charismatic [presidential] candidates who are not orthodox Republicans. But the pressures of the campaign are such that these candidates have had to repress anything that might make them interesting.... Mitt Romney created an interesting health care reform, but he’s suppressing that.... Rudy Giuliani has an unusual profile that won him a majority of votes on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, of all places, but he’s suppressing that.... John McCain has a record on taxes and spending that suggests he really could take on entitlements. But... he suppressed that.... Fred Thompson may enter the race as the Authentic Conservative, even though deep in his heart he’s no more George Allen than the rest of them.
The big question is, Why are the Republicans so immobile? There are several reasons. First... the conservative movement has grown a collection of special interest groups that restrict its mobility... the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform. Anybody who offers unorthodox social policies gets whacked by James Dobson.... Second... the corrupting influence of teamism... sticking together with other conservatives, not thinking.... Third, there is the oppressive power of the past... the sacred parameters of thought.... Fourth, there is the bunker mentality. Republican morale has been brutalized by the Iraq war and the party’s decline. This state of emotional pain is not conducive to risk-taking and free and open debate. In sum, Republicans know they need to change, but they have closed off all the avenues for change.
The tale is not entirely hopeless. McCain seems now to be throwing off his yoke. Newt Gingrich is way ahead of his colleagues when it comes to new ideas and policies. The libertarians and paleoconservatives have been losing for so long they are suddenly quite interesting. There are even a few of us who think it is time to revive the Alexander Hamilton-Theodore Roosevelt legacy. Change could, miraculously, come soon. But the odds are it will take a few more crushing defeats before Republicans tear down the self-imposed walls that confine them.

Condi Rice, Stupidest Woman Alive

2007-04-30T17:58:00.001-07:00

This would drive anybody shrill:

The Raw Story | Rice backs off Iraq 'imminent threat' claim, then redefines term George Stephanopoulos asks Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice if Iraq ever posed an "imminent threat" to the United States. "I think that -- an imminent threat. Certainly Iraq posed a threat," Rice responds. "The question was, was it going to get worse over time or was it going to get better." Rice goes on to say that the Bush administration assessment was that the threat from Iraq was "getting worse" and had to be dealt with.
"But [Iraq was] not an imminent threat," presses Stephanopoulous.
"George, the question of imminence isn't whether or not someone will strike tomorrow, it's whether you believe you're in a stronger position today to deal with the threat or whether you're going to be in a stronger position tomorrow," replies Rice. "It was the president's assessment that the situation in Iraq was getting worse from our point of view."
Rice's redefinition of the term "imminent threat," comes just over a month after former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton appeared on CNN claiming that the President never made the argument that Saddam Hussein posed an "imminent threat." As RAW STORY reported last month, a number of Bush administration officials used the term in the run up to the Iraq war.

Glenn Greenwald Watches Journamalist Adam Nagourney

2007-04-24T11:26:00.001-07:00

And Glenn is not a happy camper:

Suburban Guerrilla » Eat the Press: I’m not one who subscribes to the view that our Beltway culture is so irredeemably vapid and broken that the entire political system is doomed, but those who do believe that were bequeathed several new gifts today for use in support of that claim, including:
(1) This article by The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney, in which he recounts the central role he and the Times played in the “John-Edwards-Loves-His-Hair-Like-a-Sissy” story, by publishing anonymous “Breck Girl” smears back in 2004. The smears were from what Nagourney back then called “Bush associates” (but which he today describes as people at “senior levels of the Bush political operation”). That article granted anonymity to “Bush associates” to call Edwards a girl and to say that John Kerry “looks French.”
For some entirely indiscernible reason, it appears that Nagourney woke up recently and was hit with the realization that maybe one of the reasons why such petty and vacuous stories dominate our political discourse is because he and his esteemed colleagues at The New York Times eagerly offer themselves up as instruments for disseminating such personal smears. Announces Nagourney, as though he has discovered some sort of complex, previously unknown Truth:
"Our story may have had the result of not only previewing what the Bush campaign intended to do, but, by introducing such memorably biting characterizations into the political dialogue, helping it."
Really? So if the New York Times uncritically publishes petty, anonymous personal smear quotes about Democratic candidates in its front page section without printing any response or critical analysis of any kind, that actually has the effect of helping to introduce such smears into our political discourse? Apparently, it took Nagourney three years to discover that novel journalistic insight.
Most amazingly of all, Nagourney still is incapable of making the connection between his stories with the “Edwards-is-a-Girl” theme and the comments last month from Ann Coulter that everyone — just everyone — agreed were so very, very wrong. Other than the fact that Coulter used a prohibited word and Nagourney (and Maureen Dowd and The Politico and on and on and on) did not, the stories are precisely the same — both in design and in effect.

The Daily Background: Double Plagiarism at CBS News

2007-04-23T16:14:00.001-07:00

The Daily Background watches as journamalist Katie Couric commits double plagiarism:

The Daily Background » Blog Archive » Double plagiarism at CBS News: By Arlen Parsa: Welcome, Raw Story and Reuters readers! Please consider subscribing to our RSS feed for more content like this...

Katie Couric’s news team has admitted to committing plagiarism... with an almost wholesale copy and paste job of a commentary written for the Wall Street Journal. Couric has a daily webcast segment which CBS calls “Katie Couric’s Notebook” which is regularly promoted on their website as well as an official YouTube account. The segments (typically lasting about a minute) are portrayed as Couric’s own personal opinions on various relevant topics. She signs off each one by saying “I’m Katie Couric, and that’s a page from my notebook.” On the CBS website, they are posted under the name “Katie Couric.”
But last week, Couric read nearly word-for-word a commentary piece published in the Wall Street Journal about libraries. The network promoted Couric’s segment as her own work- not the work of a producer or the Journal. “Only On The Web: Sales of juvenile books have risen dramatically in recent years, as kids skip the library and head for the store. Katie Couric says the local library still has much to offer,” a promotional description read. It turns out that Couric does not even write her own commentaries; CBS has admitted that they are written by her team of producers in first person to make it seem as though she is sharing candid thoughts. A CBS producer has been fired for plagiarism, although the company has not released the producer’s name.
Obviously, this type of situation would never have happened in the first place had Couric bothered to write her own brief commentaries instead of reading someone else’s work from a TelePrompTer.
Ironically instead of only portraying someone else’s work as hers in the library “Page from my notebook” as she normally does, Couric portrayed someone else’s work which was already being portrayed as someone else’s work: a double case of plagiarism.

Matthew Yglesias on General Petraeus, Plan F, and Phil Carter

2007-04-23T14:29:00.001-07:00

Matthew Yglesias writes this:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: Big Heel: Phillip Carter's coverage of Iraq continues to be enlightening, though his rhetorical pitch is far too kind. Consider this:

Gen. Petraeus and his brain trust have devised the best possible Plan F, given the resources available to the Pentagon and declining patience for the war at home. But the Achilles heel of this latest effort is the Maliki government. It is becoming increasingly clear to all in Baghdad that its interests—seeking power and treasure for its Shiite backers—diverge sharply from those of the U.S.-led coalition. Even if Gen. Petraeus' plan succeeds on the streets of the city, it will fail in the gilded palaces of the Green Zone. Maliki and his supporters desire no rapprochement with the Sunnis and no meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Indeed, Maliki can barely hold his own governing coalition together, as evidenced by the Sadr bloc's resignation from the government this week and the fighting in Basra over oil and power.

The point about Achilles' heel, as you'll recall, is that he was invulnerable everyplace else. What Carter's talking about here is as if Achilles were a totally normally person. A nice guy, smart maybe, kind to kids and his "Achilles heel" was that he dies if you stab him. Political reconciliation isn't part of Petraeus-style counterinsurgency, it's the whole thing. His counterinsurgency field manual is all about trying to design military operations that can effectively support an effective political process. The "surge" is, at best, such a military operation. But if the political process isn't effective -- which, by all accounts, it isn't -- then there's nothing there.

Words of Power: Election Fraud As Information Warfare, And A National Security Issue

2007-04-23T14:27:00.001-07:00

I have never seen a Republican explanation of this:

Words of Power: Words of Power #22: Election Fraud As Information Warfare, And A National Security Issue: In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent - a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39) "When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud," concludes Freeman. "The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud - and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party." The evidence is especially strong in Ohio…. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Was The 2004 Election Stolen?, Rolling Stone, 6-1-06

Counterinsurgency

2007-04-22T18:56:00.001-07:00

Frank Hoffman gets really medieval on Edward Luttwak:

Luttwak's Lament (SWJ Blog): Dr. Luttwak’s specious article. Dr. Kilcullen is too much of a gentleman to suggest that someone has not taken their medication.... Dr. Luttwak may long for the gruesome effectiveness of “the Roman model,” but he has badly misdiagnosed the disease and his overemphasis on kinetic solutions reflects poorly on his grasp of history and a bad use of history out of context. The Romans were smart enough to minimize their footprint and maximized local leadership and control over government, taxes, and religion. The benefits or “carrots” of Roman rule were more obvious than its costs, but clearly the “stick” (more accurately the gladius and pilum) was available when necessary. >But to overlook the lessons of Algeria, Vietnam, and various Middle East conflicts is remarkably selective use of history. Now that’s malpractice in my book.... What [the Field Manual] does not do is justify the need to “out terrorize the terrorist” because we recognized that such an approach is utterly incongruous with modern environmental conditions, in particular, a global media presence and an enemy that is facile enough to exploit even the perception of excessive violence to its twisted ends.... >The introductory chapter mentions religious identity and “religious extremism” as a modern day complication. But the manual offers few indications that our Classical approach, the product of the anti-colonial Revolutionary War era remains just as valid without any change. The manual alters its emphasis on non-kinetic factors and its numerous admonitions about violence with the admission that “killing extremists will be necessary.” This does not satisfy the blood lust of Dr. Luttwak apparently...

Mark Kleiman: "Conservative" = "Lying racist"? Who Knew?

2007-04-20T16:29:00.001-07:00

Mark Kleiman trashes Ross Douthat and company:

The Reality-Based Community: "Conservative" = "Lying racist"? Who knew?: 1. Professional racist Steve Sailer writes a dishonest, bigoted anti-Obama screed for The American Conservative, in which he grossly misrepresents Obama's Dreams from My Father. 2. Assistant editor Alex Koznetski, having failed to convince his bosses not to print a piece of lying trash, quits The American Conservative in protest. 3. Ross Douthat makes fun of Koznetski:

If you're not at least somewhat conservative, you probably shouldn't go to work for a magazine called, um, The American Conservative. And if you do, you probably shouldn't get all outraged and resign in protest when they turned out to be, um, conservative.

So telling racist lies is a natural and expected part of being, "um, conservative"? (Douthat doesn't challenge Konetzki's careful account of the falsehood of Sailer's review, or Sailer's own solidly racist credentials as a contributor to the VDare website.)
Am I missing something, or did Douthat just imply that "conservative" connotes "lying racist"?
If I were a non-racist, non-lying conservative, I'd be offended. It will be interesting to see if there are any still around.

Remove the "Almost", Jason

2007-04-19T19:02:00.001-07:00

Jason Zengerle writes:

The Plank: it seemed like some conservative commentators were almost hoping that the murderer was an Islamic terrorist. He wasn't. But that hasn't stopped some of these conservative commentators from trying to link Cho Seung Hui to Islamic terrorism. Witness Charles Krauthammer's performance last night on Fox News (via The Corner), during which he discussed the pictures Cho sent to NBC:
If you look at that picture, it draws its inspiration from the manifestos, the iconic photographs of the Islamic suicide bombers over the last half-decade in Palestine, in Iraq, and elsewhere. That's what they end up leaving behind, either on al Jazeera or Palestinian TV. And he, it seems as if his inspiration for leaving the message behind in that way, might have been this kind of suicide attack, which, of course, his was.

Or maybe the picture draws its inspiration from a South Korean movie. Or maybe there was no "inspiration" at all for what Cho did--other than his clearly severe mental illness. But I guess it would be unfair to expect Krauthammer--who only was once a practicing psychiatrist--to consider that possibility.

Michael Kinsley bears a very high karmic burden for inflicting Charles Krauthammer on an unsuspecting and innocent America. I'm just sayin'.

Journamalism Watch: Colbert King Sucks Up to Fred Hiatt

2007-04-19T17:30:00.001-07:00

Colbert King's farewell memo:

Washington City Paper: The District Line: Colby King's Farewell Memo: A Post editorial stands for something, even when the desired action does not occur. A Post editorial is an expression of the considered opinion and collective wisdom and values of the best minds in the business. It is not the special province of any writer, no matter how prolific or dogmatic he/she may be in his/her views. Allow a Post editorial become the vehicle for the expression of one person's point of view--or a minority of the board's point of view--and the editorial loses its value, even though it might be selected to lead the page. I offer this thought because Fred has assembled a first rate staff--good minds that produce great work when they all contribute to an editorial, even though there may be one writer. Editorials simply must not be used to advance one individual's causes or views. That's what columns are for

So why doesn't he dare say the truth: the work Fred Hiatt's "first rate staff" has produced on Iraq in particular and on the Bush administration more generally has been a disgrace and an embarrassment, harmful to the profession of journalism and to the country.

Dan Froomkin on the Journamalism of Matt Cooper

2007-04-18T11:11:00.001-07:00

From Froomkin's White House Watch:

Dan Froomkin - White House Blocks E-Mail Delivery - washingtonpost.com: Cooper's Tale: Former Time reporter Matthew Cooper writes in his new magazine about his own personal travails as a witness in the Scooter Libby case. He evidently sees himself as quite the martyr. (At one point, describing his thinking about the possibility of going to jail to protect sources Libby and Rove, he writes: "I could do the full Mandela.") Cooper describes all sorts of tensions involved in being a celebrity reporter for a corporate behemoth, caught between a special prosecutor and promises of confidentiality to top presidential aides. But he doesn't seem to have been the least bit troubled by his failure to do his job -- if you consider the job of a journalist to inform the public, or at the very least not willfully misinform the public. There is no sense in this piece that Cooper ever felt the urge to report his way out of his bind -- and find some way to tell the public what really happened. By contrast, in this October 2003 story, for instance, his magazine reported: "White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are 'ridiculous.' Says McClellan: 'There is simply no truth to that suggestion.'" Cooper (along with at least two of his fellow contributors to that story) knew that to be an utter falsehood. But they printed it anyway, without any context or -- as far as I know -- any qualms.

Glenn Greenwald on Modern Journamalism

2007-04-18T11:09:00.001-07:00

He writes:

Glenn Greenwald - Salon: none of this is substantive criticism. It is just petty, cheap personality-based mockery of the strain that dominates (and degrades and destroys) our political discourse -- it is Al Gore inventing the Internet and claiming to be the inspiration for Love Story, and John Kerry wind-surfing and speaking French. It is all just mindless gossipy shorthand intended to fuel right-wing caricatures and platitudes that have nothing to do with substance and everything to do with demonizing the personality of these political figures in order to render them ugly and embarrassing -- hence, Edwards is a girlish fop and Obama is an intellectual lightweight who relies on empty fancy-sounding buzzphrases in lieu of substance.
What is notable here is not so much the specific petty attacks, but the method of how they are disseminated and engrained as conventional wisdom among our Really Smart Political Insiders. This is the process that occurred here, and it is the process that repeats itself endlessly:
STEP 1: A new right-wing gossip (Ben Smith) at a new substance-free political rag (The Politico) seizes on some petty, manufactured incident to fuel personality caricatures of Democratic candidates.
STEP 2: The old right-wing gossip (Drudge) uses his old substance-free political rag (The Drudge Report) to amplify the inane personality caricatures.
STEP 3: Right-wing hacks with pretenses of respectability -- like Mickey Kaus and others -- follow the script by "analyzing" the gossip and embracing it.
STEP 4: National media outlets -- such as AP and CNN -- whose world is ruled by Drudge, turn the gossip into "news stories."
STEP 5: Our Serious Beltway Political Analysts -- in this case, the very somber and smart Substantive Journalists at The New Republic -- mindlessly repeat all of it, thereby solidifying it as conventional wisdom, showing that "even Democrats and liberals are embarrassed by their candidates."
One should note here that Step 5, the Final Stage, is almost always sponsored by those who endlessly proclaim how irresponsible and substance-free and unserious political bloggers are, and who thereafter write pieces which do nothing other than repeat the latest Drudge gossip.

James Fallows on Paul Wolfowitz

2007-04-18T10:45:00.001-07:00

Fallows writes:

James Fallows | Author and Journalist » Blog Archive » Wolfowitz = Swaggart, chap. 1: I was wrong to suggest that Paul Wolfowitz was like Robert McNamara. That is disrespectful to McNamara. The better comparison is to Jimmy Swaggart. Let me explain, through the roundabout medium of Norman Podhoretz....
That is, [Podhoretz] could end up agreeing with my specific arguments if he believed I was, deep down, in favor of American strength.... But he might think something different if he suspected that I was merely grabbing another argument to denigrate the military. That is: first he’d figure out whether I was with-him or against-him. That would tell him whether to agree or disagree with my analysis. He didn’t put it quite that bluntly — and he was perfectly affable about it — but that was the point.
Everybody is like this to some degree. But in modern U.S. politics, I think the neocon/Bush comb is more “tribal” in its thinking than anyone else is. If you’re on the team, it’s very hard for you to do or say anything wrong. If not, the reverse. For instance: no organ of either the “mainstream” or the actually leftist press is as disciplined about propping up allies, no matter what, and shooting enemies on sight as are the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and most of what’s on Fox News....
This brings us back to Paul Wolfowitz. A natural extension of the in-group/tribal approach to life is the inability to ask or wonder: how would this look if the other side did it? How will it look to people who mistrust us or don’t automatically believe that everything we do is for a higher cause? This is a kind of political autism — an inability to sense or imagine other people’s reactions — and it runs the gamut. How would we feel about someone else “water boarding” our prisoners? How would we feel about the other political party intercepting our phone calls or emails? How would we like it if there were no right of habeus corpus? What would the world be like if everyone did what we are doing now?
The question Wolfowitz apparently failed to ask, is: given that I am basing my entire tenure at the World Bank on a crusade against corruption, how will it look if I extend special favors to a handful of political confidantes plus my girlfriend? Considering how many speeches I have given about those who use public office to do private favors, can I afford to dole out favors this way? Do the words “Caesar’s wife” ring any kind of bell? Or the name Jimmy Swaggart?...
And that’s why cozy self-dealing is such a problem for Paul Wolfowitz. He has said he is sorry, which is more than Cheney, or Rove, or Rumsfeld, or Gonzales has managed to choke out. But — already in a complicated position at the Bank, because of what he calls “my previous job” — he has guaranteed that no subsequent speech on his central topic, the evil of self-dealing, will ever be taken seriously by anyone he hopes to convince. Say this for Robert McNamara: he has lived his post-Vietnam life with an awareness of what he can and cannot say or do. Paul Wolfowitz, you’re no Robert McNamara.

Eunomia · The Nationalist Lectures A Bishop On Catholicity

2007-04-17T20:27:00.001-07:00

Good Law write:

Eunomia · The Nationalist Lectures A Bishop On Catholicity: "I replied that I expected the Vatican to proceed in a more catholic manner than that." -Michael Novak. This from the man who went as the lackey of Mr. Bush to tell Pope John Paul II what just war really meant (because Novak & Co. had the better understanding of the matter)! Talk about audacitas! So it took Novak two whole days to spit at Pope Benedict’s Urbi et Orbi address? He’s clearly starting to lose his anti-Vatican reflexes.
Novak is, of course, attacking Pope Benedict for saying, “Nothing positive comes out of Iraq.”  Because so many “positive things” come from Iraq. This is partly true, if you count Christian and other Iraqi refugees as ”positive things.” This reminds me of one First Things contributor attacking Pope Benedict last summer for saying that “war is the worst solution,” because, well, it is. Even though what the Pope said was true and consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church, as I tried to show at the time, it was too wobbly of a statement for our jingo friends at First Things.  Naturally, there would hardly have been reason for folks at First Things to comment on the Pope’s remarks in that case had the war going on at the time not involved Israel or the United States.
This week, Fr. Neuhaus at least manages to dismiss the Pope’s opinion without piling on with quite so much obvious hypocrisy, but he did have this unintentionally amusing remark:

Admittedly, it is galling when Catholics and others who are usually blithely indifferent to church teaching seize upon a papal opinion with which they agree and, suddenly becoming hyper-infallibilists, elevate it to dogmatic status.

Imagine how much more galling it is to watch those who claim to defend adherence to the entirety of church teaching justify “preventive” war to “prevent” some theoretical future threat. It is not only “preemptive war” that cannot be found in the Catechism. Then there is that bothersome “last resort” qualification, which the FT crowd seems not to understand. For them, it would seem as if all that you need to have a just war is a convenient pretext that there may be some future threat of aggression from another state (of course, using this dubious moral reasoning, terrorist attacks against the U.S. are just anticipatory strikes against the people who would try to attack them later anyway–emptying just war of all meaning cuts both ways).  By the same sort of thinking, Iran would be justified in launching preventive strikes against Israel’s preventive strikes that are designed to prevent Iran’s preventive strike, and on and on it would go ad nauseam–all in the name of perfectly just self-defense, of course.  It turns an admirable aspect of the Christian moral tradition into a respectable cover for the brutal logic of rival mob bosses racing to off each other. Pretty clearly, this talk about “defensive” preventive war simply repackages whatever is about to happen as self-defense (not unlike what the Germans did when they invaded Belgium in 1914) and the person saying it will then take umbrage at the suggestion that this is all a lot of propagandistic nonsense. In a world where everyone is theoretically a potential aggressor (except maybe Liechtenstein and Vatican City), it no longer matters who actually strikes the first blow or provokes the conflict, and so it also no longer matters whether the supposed threat from the other state is even real. It might be real, and that is good enough for the quack court theologians of this administration. With every state a potential aggressor (with only the likelihood of aggression preventing us from, say, ”defensively” occupying Canada), every war can become more or less justifiable. The horrors that this sort of perverted reasoning could lead to are not hard to imagine: if you believe a hostile state is developing nuclear weapons with the intent to use them against you, how long before it becomes the respectable First Things position that the “preventive” and “defensive” use of “tactical” nukes against that state is justified? Depending, of course, on the “prudential judgement” of the magistrate, that is!
Nobody is more blithely indifferent to Catholic teaching on war than Catholic neoconservatives. His creative and, it seems to me, dishonest description of George Weigel’s awful article defending the just war merits of preventive war is a small contribution to this bad old tradition of indifference.
Now Novak isn’t satisfied with describing the address as a “low point.” He wants you to know just how much good news there is in Iraq:
Under Saddam, scholars say there were between 75-125 murders of civilians every day. Bad as the murders are now under sectarian vengeance, the numbers of dead every day rarely reach that total, and most days are considerably below it.
Leaving aside the total lack of sourcing for this claim (”scholars say” is the laziest citation in the world), let’s think about those latter claims. This murder rate presumably refers to all of Iraq in the Saddam era. In Baghdad alone during the past year, there have routinely been 2,000-3,000 deaths per month that have been counted and reported, which means approximately 66-100 dead per day in Baghdad, at least during the last year. (Incidentally, violent sectarianism has gone hand in hand with the politicisation of sect and ethnicity in the elections, which makes it unclear how those elections can be credited as something genuinely positive.) I believe these figures do not normally include the victims of car bombs, which might raise it still higher. That means that sectarian killings and other murders in Baghdad easily account for much of this supposed pre-war murder rate for all of Iraq, and this may hardly scratch the surface of what is happening elsewhere in the country (for which we have far less reliable numbers).
Of course, the threat of random catastrophic violence of the car-bombing type automatically makes life in Baghdad worse than it ever was before the war. It is bizarre to suggest otherwise. Add to that the tens of thousands (or perhaps more) of civilians who have been or are being slain during combat operations, and you obviously have a significantly worse situation, before you even take into account deteriorating living conditions and so forth. Millions of Iraqis, who are usually the educated professionals who have the means to get out, have fled this country that is apparently enjoying a Giulianiesque recovery from a rabid Saddam-era crime spree.  Our open borders friends usually like to talk about how immigrants are “voting with their feet” when they come here in droves, but watch as they switch gears and pretend that millions of people fleeing a country tells us nothing about the horrible state of that country when we are talking about Iraq.
And, yes, Novak has actually cited the Sadrist rally protesting the occupation as proof of something good coming out of Iraq. Why, look, they’re free! Well, yes, I suppose they are after a fashion, and look how many of them have chosen to use that freedom.

Matthew Yglesias: Dennis Ross Is a Little Insane

2007-04-17T20:24:00.001-07:00

Matt writes:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: This is really much more Dennis Ross' field than mine, so I'd be interested to hear what others have to say about it, but I think the Israel-Palestine agenda he outlined in a column yesterday is a little insane.... This seems badly, badly flawed to me and indeed, overwhelmingly likely to produce the following outcome:

Olmert and Abbas make a cease-fire agreement. Someone from Hamas violates the cease-fire agreement. Israel re-occupies the territories. This discredits Abbas an ineffective in improving the condition of Palestinians. Hamas wins the election. Dennis Ross proclaims that conflict has been "transformed between a national conflict into a religious conflict" and America must get "out of the peace-making business for a long time. As Ross says, the upshot of this will be that "Islamists will be able to dominate the most evocative issue in the region." A great victory for Iran, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Israeli settlers, etc., unfortunate for Israel, bad for the United States, and terrible for the Palestinians. But so why is Ross proposing it?

Any conflict-resolution scenario needs to cope with potential spoilers, which is an intrinsically difficult task. The one thing you really can't do, however, is signal to the spoilers in advance that a single provocation is likely to derail implementation and derail it in a manner likely to bring the spoilers to power. You're just setting yourself up for failure.

Yes, Alberto Gonzales Was Out of the Loop

2007-04-16T14:55:00.001-07:00

Marty Lederman:

Balkinization: this was a White House -- not a DOJ -- initiative, and its function was to remove U.S. Attorneys who were not acceptable to the President and his advisers. It makes sense, in that light, that Kyle Sampson would work closely with the White House on the process, and that the Attorney General would be inclined to go along with the White House's final decisions if he were satsified that there was a solid basis for them. So far, so good -- and it wouldn't be terribly out of the ordinary, either, except that it's increasingly clear that this was part of a much more extensive Rovian White House operation to use the mechanisms of government to skew elections to Republicans.

Robert Waldmann Names the Four Horsemen of the Stupidoclypse

2007-04-15T21:09:00.001-07:00

He writes:

Robert's Stochastic thoughts: Recognise the Four Horsement of the Stupidoclypse by one certain sign which they use as to signal membership, like Lassallians saying "the iron law of wages": They claim that the 2006 Democratic Senatorial victory was narrow even though only 9 Republicans were elected to the Seanate in the whole country.

Mickey Kaus
And
Charles Krauthammer
"The Democrats say they are carrying out their electoral mandate from the November election. But winning a single-vote Senate majority as a result of razor-thin victories in Montana and Virginia is hardly a landslide."
are horsement of the Stupidoclypse.
I think that Fred Barnes and Morton Kondrake are the other two, but as far as google tells me, they haven't confirmed it yet.

Discourse.net: Fred Fielding Tries to Save His Reputation?

2007-04-15T20:40:00.001-07:00

Michael Froomkin writes:

Discourse.net: Fred Fielding Tries to Save His Reputation?: Heard an interesting snippet on NPR yesterday, and I found the transcript at NPR : Documents Show Justice Ranking U.S. Attorneys. Here’s the key quote:
In a letter Thursday, White House Counsel Fred Fielding told Congress he won’t budge from his original offer — to let Congress interview White House staffers privately, with no oath or transcript.Sources tell NPR that Fielding actually wants to negotiate with Congress about how the interviews will take place. But Fielding has not been able to persuade President Bush to go along.

Assuming this is accurate, the most likely back story to this leak is that Fred Fielding is trying to save his reputation. And that means there’s some really bad stuff lurking behind the stonewall. It also fits the public image of Bush as stonewaller-in-chief. (Shorter GW Bush: ‘Congress, read my lips, no Iraq withdrawal. But come on by for a chat and I’ll be happy to harangue you as long as you listen quietly.’)

An alternate explanation for this story is that someone, perhaps Fielding perhaps someone else, is trying to put pressure on Gonzales or the White House to see reason. But I think that’s less likely here. In previous administrations, leaks like this used to be salvos fired in internecine wars among the palace guard. That’s been remarkably not the case in this administration due to a combination of exemplary message discipline and know-nothing disinterest in both reportage and reality. Then again, Fielding earned his chops in two of those earlier administrations…

Just What Has Paul Wolfowitz's Lover Shaha Riza Been Doing at the State Department?

2007-04-15T20:39:00.001-07:00

Steve Clemons writes:

The Washington Note: America Spent $35 million on Foundation for the Future Where Wolfowitz Lover Worked -- but State Department Does Not Know Where the Office is Located: Beyond the question of what Shaha Riza's compensation was and how she got it -- is what she has been doing and for whom. She was reportedly seconded to the multi-nationally supported "Foundation for the Future," which was really a part of America's public diplomacy game plan.
For those interested, this is a pdf of the "Chair's Summary" from the "Third Forum for the Future" held November 30-December 1, 2006 at Dead Sea, Jordan. The roster of donors to the Foundation for the Future, launched with $56 million, included a seed grant from the U.S. for $35 million: United States: $35 million European Commission: 1 million euros Spain: $1 million United Kingdom: $1 million Switzerland: $1 million Denmark :$2 million Netherlands: $1 million Greece: $1.5 million Turkey: $500,000 Italy: TBD Hungary: In kind Jordan: $1 million Qatar: $10 million Bahrain: TBD
But strangely, few seem to know much about the Foundation for the Future at the State Department. To be fair, maybe some do -- but in this interesting exchange between a journalist and State Department Deputy Press Spokesman Tom Casey, it is clear that the Foundation for the Future is not a high priority at State.
Here is the interesting exchange highlighting that no one seems to know how to make a call to the Foundation for the Future -- (does Shaha Riza have an office or phone extension wherever this office may be?):
QUESTION: I wanted to ask you something kind of on the margins of the whole World Bank Shaha Riza matter, and that is that, as you remember, Secretary Rice announced the formation or at least the launch of this Foundation for the Future in, I think, November of 2005.
And at least as far as -- well, it's very hard to find this foundation. You go to their website. They have a website but there's no phone numbers, there's no address. They appear to have not given out any grants.
They haven't set up office, that at least one can find. And considering it was launched with some fanfare at the time, I'm just curious if you could bring us up to speed a little bit as to what this foundation consists of and where you -- where it seems to be going. I don't even -- it's hard to see how much money it is that the U.S. has put into this, for one.
MR. CASEY: Neil, I actually haven't, unfortunately, briefed myself on the latest activities from the Foundation. Look, as you know, this was something that has emerged out of the Forum for the Future process. It has an international board of directors representing -- with representatives from most of the participating regional countries there as well as an executive directorate. In terms of the amount of money involved at this point and some of the specific grant programs, I'll have to look into it for you. I just don't have that at my fingertips. Sorry.
QUESTION: Are you taking the question?
MR. CASEY: Yes, I'm taking the question.
QUESTION: But is Ms. Shaha a consultant or a fulltime employee of the board? What is her status?
MR. CASEY: My understanding is she is an individual seconded by the World Bank as an advisor to the board of directors of the Foundation for the Future.
QUESTION: But she's not on the board?
MR. CASEY: No.
QUESTION: So her official title is advisor or consultant?
MR. CASEY: My best understanding is advisor to the board, yeah.
QUESTION: So what does she do as the advisor? I mean, does she help advise on grants, or do you know what her job is?
MR. CASEY: I do not have a job description for her, no. Again, I think that's a question you could ask some of the board members.
QUESTION: Do you know where the office is?
MR. CASEY: No, but I don't know where the office is for a number of parts of the State Department offhand, Matt. So I will get you -- I will get you guys more information.
QUESTION: Isn't there an agreement for the office to be based in Beirut?
MR. CASEY: I'd have to check. I honestly don't know the details on the specifics of the foundation.
One question beyond the Wolfowitz-Riza Scandal is how many "consultants" does the Department of State (or other Departments like DoD, DoE, and others) have along these lines?
Remember the odd case of Matthew Freedman working under then Under Secretary of State John Bolton's office? Few knew what he did or what his responsibilities were justifying his six figure consultant's salary -- which he maintained while consulting private firms that had business with the government.
How much of this is happening throughout the government?
-- Steve Clemons

Matthew Yglesias Gets Counterfactual!

2007-04-15T20:36:00.001-07:00

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: Mallaby's Wolfowitz Dissembling: Sebastian Mallaby would win my "wanker of the day" prize were we to dispense such shrill awards here. Brad DeLong has the goods on his bizarre coverage of Paul Wolfowitz. For years, he slams Wolfowitz's critics and defends his actions. Today he concedes this actions are indefensible -- you can't alienate your staff, make anti-corruption your signature issue, and then be incredibly corrupt -- but won't call for Wolfowitz to be sacked or acknowledge his previous coverage of the issue....

A comment:

And yet he's one of the less creepy conservative writers out there, especially compared to other writers at the WP. Being a good conservative writer these days is like losing an ugly contest.

Matthew Yglesias: Michael Kinsley Is Playing a Second-Rate Imitator of Himself

2007-03-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

Michael Kinsley is a brilliant writer who, unfortunately, has spawning about four dozen unbearable second-rate imitators. Sometimes, though, it's like he's playing a second-rate imitator of himself: "I’m sorry, but I just can’t see how firing eight can be heinous but firing 93 is perfectly OK. Nor can I see—if the issue is neutral justice—how firing someone from your own party is worse than firing someone from the other party." I can't imagine that Kinsley can't actually see the difference here. The issue, obviously, isn't the crude quantity of firings, but the nature of the firings.

Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in an election, took office a few months later, and swiftly fired all of Bush's appointees for US Attorney jobs. He then replaced them with people chosen, in practice, by the relevant local political stakeholders -- that state's Democratic Senators, if any, and a more complicated process in states represented by two Republicans. The message this sends to people working in US Attorney's offices throughout the country is that . . . US Attorneys will lose their jobs if the partisan control of the White House switched. George W. Bush, by contrast, fired a handful of US Attorneys who had displeased the Bush team's political fixers, under circumstances where (contrary to historic practice) the White House got to hand pick their successor. The message this sends to federal prosecutors throughout the land is that US Attorneys' are now considered part-and-parcel of George W. Bush's political team and that those who fail to act accordingly will be sacked.

The implications of the two actions are entirely different. There's no indication what Bush did was illegal. Rather, he operated within his legal discretion. We grant the president a certain amount of discretion, however, primarily on the theory that if he uses that discretion in an abusive or unwise manner, his opponents will make political hay out of it.

A world in which there's 100 percent turnover of US Attorneys when partisan control of the White House switched, but who otherwise can expect to continue in their jobs as long as they maintain basic standards of conduct, has no particular implications for the neutral administration of justice. A world in which US Attorneys are subjected to the day-to-day whims of the West Wing has completely different implications.

Sahar: The Number

2007-03-20T20:47:00.000-07:00

The Number

Every time I tell myself that my next blog will be a pleasant story of days of old, I am confronted with a different story that needs to be told.

A friend of mine called me to tell me the bad news. Her brother had been kidnapped, and the ransom set at $100,000.

For any Iraqi, such an amount spells disaster.

Selling all they could sell, the whole extended family pitched in to save the poor man. They told the abductors that they couldn’t manage more than 20,000. (It is common knowledge that none can sell his house or his car; the odor of ready cash would attract others).

Surprisingly, the criminals said “OK, have a woman bring the money to …..”. After leading her on a merry dance, a boy of sixteen or seventeen approached her, took the money and said, “We will contact you”. And that was the last they saw of them.

Two weeks later, their women combing the hospitals and then the morgues, had found no trace of Hani.

They were told to speak to the contractor. “What contractor??”, “The one who is in charge of burying all the unidentified bodies we get.” “What??”

So they asked around, and were directed to an ordinary looking man, who was not at all surprised to hear of their dilemma.

“Yes, I’m in charge of burying the bodies that are not claimed. There is no room for all these bodies in the morgues. You must identify him first, and I will direct you to his grave.”

“ How can we identify our brother??”

“Don’t worry; I’m well set up!” He walks towards a really posh car, opens the door, takes out the latest laptop, and sets it on the bonnet. “I have here photos of all the bodies I bury. Each one is given a number that is engraved on the headstone of his grave in Nejef. Browse.” True enough, Iyman said, her sister started looking through hundreds of photographs, of the head and shoulders of people killed in the streets, without their folks knowing about them; but didn’t find her brother’s photo.

“Try Abu Haider, or any of the others.” The contractor advised. “They are just as conscientious as I am.”

“We found his picture! We have his number!” crying “His face was all bruised and there was a hole drilled in his forehead! Oh, Sahar! He died in pain! His hands were tied above his head!”

They went to the wilderness that was being used as burial ground, on the outskirts of the city of Nejef. But there was no trace of Hani’s grave. They inspected each and every grave, each and every headstone for his number. But it was not there. They looked in all the graveyards, not just this one, but the number was not to be found.

Justin Logan: Spinned Surge

2007-03-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

The job of neoconservative writers analyzing the Iraq war has largely been to obscure objective analysis and provide talking points for war supporters. Robert Kagan's column in Sunday's Washington Post (promptly distributed by the White House in its "Iraq Update" email early Monday) fulfills that role with aplomb. Simultaneously smearing opponents of the war (not to mention journalists) as praying for failure and proclaiming that "the surge is succeeding," Kagan adds to his regrettable legacy of undue optimism.

There are some basic problems of logic in his attack on the media. Kagan suggests that American journalists are so invested in seeing the surge fail to pacify Iraq that he is forced to "wonder if the Post and other newspapers have a backup plan in case it does." But then Kagan goes on to use information from, well, American journalists to assemble data indicating that violence in Baghdad has ebbed; that Iraqi attitudes have turned from pessimism; that an oil sharing law is nearing completion; that the Iraqi Ministry of Interior recently conducted a purge of its personnel; and that the Mahdi Army has gone to ground. Kagan closes by pleading that "no one is asking American journalists to start emphasizing the 'good' news. All they have to do is report on what is occurring, though it may conflict with their previous judgments." But, of course, American journalists have provided the very fodder for Mr. Kagan's argument.

The more troubling aspect of the Kagan piece, however, is the substantive claim: that the surge is working. The first problem with this argument is that the surge has hardly gotten underway yet. Earlier this month, none other than General David Petraeus remarked that "we've just started" with the surge and that only two of the five projected brigades had even arrived. The claim that two brigades (less than 10,000 troops) have transformed Baghdad is either mendacious or simply daft. A more sober view comes from President Bush, who recently announced his plan to send almost 5,000 more U.S. troops into Iraq on top of the 21,500 already promised.

A more honest line of argument, which Kagan flirts with making in his article, is that the recent downtick in violence is partly a result of Shia militias having gone to ground in Baghdad, content to sit out the surge as long as possible, wait for it to fail (a failure manifested by Sunni insurgents' ability to wreak havoc, surge or no surge), and then reemerge as the protectors of the Shia faithful. The recent bombings during the Shiite celebration of Ashura are one alarming indicator that this process easily could unfold.

But the most damning fact about the "surge is working" narrative is that the violence in Iraq always has been cyclical, with dips in violence occurring every year in the months from January through March or April. So, in fact, the decline in violence Kagan observes was entirely predictable, and indeed was predicted. The Pentagon's own "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq" report pointed out that by the end of 2006, the violence in Iraq had reached its highest level since the war began, and so the downtick should be viewed in that context. But what appears likely to happen is what has happened since the beginning of the war: these temporary downticks do not stop the overall upward trend of violence in Iraq. See page 20 of the most recent "Iraq Index" from the Brookings Institution for glaringly obvious proof of this ratcheting up of violence in the country.

The president and supporters of the war protest that we should "give the surge a chance to succeed" before criticizing it. But since the plan in place defies, for one, the joint Army-Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual authored by General Petraeus himself, this is akin to wishful thinking. (By the metric of Petraeus and countless others, to run a serious counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, we would need 500,000 troops; if we could somehow sequester Baghdad and only fight there, we would need roughly 120,000 troops.)

A miracle in Iraq just may happen, and all Americans would be relieved if it did. It may also happen that Israelis and Palestinians decide that fighting is not in their interests and spontaneously lay down their arms. Banking on such events, though, is an unsound basis for the formation of national policy.

To borrow Kagan's own formulation, no one is asking neoconservative polemicists to admit how wrong they have been, consistently, about the Iraq war. All they have to do is begin looking at facts and data instead of pretending that wishful thinking and spin can save this disastrous war.

Scott Horton: The Struggle to See What Is Right in Front of Your Nose

2007-03-20T20:45:00.002-07:00

There are times in the last six years when I've felt like I was trapped in one of those science fiction movies from the fifties. A focal character has discovered a group of ruthless aliens out to destroy the world, disguised as human beings and accepted in the fold of the community. He could go denounce them in a wild-eyed way to his friends and neighbors - but who would ever believe him? I got an early, very deep look into the heart of the Bush Administration. I was shocked at what I saw and at first didn't trust my own eyes and ears. That disinclination to believe what we directly observe is almost always a mistake, sometimes a serious mistake. And yet for years it's been a steep uphill struggle to get the American public to see and understand what is in front of them, and the danger it presents to our nation and the world. The Bush team are not strange monsters from outer space; in fact they are human. All too human. Their failings are the sort that commonly mark the weak-minded man who comes to wield great power without oversight and accountability. Today Alberto Gonzales reiterates his claim that "mistakes were made" - though supposedly not by him - and George Bush stands behind his long-time personal counselor, saying that he approved the sacking of the eight US attorneys, and there was nothing the matter with that decision. These excuses are flatly dishonest, and the suggestion that their actions were consistent with established practice of other governments is pernicious. What is at stake here? The issue is enormous. It is whether the criminal justice system will be turned into a partisan political tool. Bush's Administration is already widely called a "hackocracy" because of his tendency to fill slots with unqualified and incompetent partisan hacks. But the crisis at DOJ goes far beyond that. Even civil service positions - which have been protected from this sort of partisan corruption since the Hatch Act of 1939 - are being politicized. The Boston Globe, for instance, has closely documented the process of weeding out qualified career attorneys from the Civil Rights Division at DOJ and their replacement with political retainers - and the same process has continued throughout the Department. But at the heart of the DOJ scandal lies political intrusion into the exercise of prosecutorial discretion - one of the areas which a democratic society most needs to shield from partisan intrusion. There is now clear evidence that Gonzales and Bush directed political prosecutions and attempted to deflect prosecutions of Republicans for political purposes. A state that criminalizes political adversaries and that cloaks the criminal conduct of its retainers is by definition a tyranny. In 1946, George Orwell penned a series of essays that are, I believe, the most important to appear in the English language in the last century. He pointed to the emerging challenge of totalitarianism. He mapped the working of the totalitarian mind. How would it undermine the foundations of a liberal democratic culture like that of the United Kingdom or United States? It will assault our language. Our political institutions. Our political culture. It will try to build a party state and to accumulate unchecked executive power in the hands of a single person or a small leadership cadre. The tools used are potent but perhaps not easily recognized. As Orwell noted in the essay "In Front of Your Nose," men who aspire to totalitarian rule will attempt to persuade their subjects of preposterous untruths - things that, extracted from a political context - surely no one would ever believe. The current debacle over the cashiered US Attorneys threatens to develop into such an exercise, though I am encouraged that both the media and the public are awakening from their slumber and coming to understand what is before them. The evidence of what has happened and why is all about us. It is obvious. Yet Bush and Gonzales insist that we ignore what we have seen and read and accept instead their dishonest characterizations. America will survive as a democracy and its institutions will survive only if we remain conscious of the idea of our democracy. And only if we keep our eyes open and recognize what is right in front of our noses. But, as Orwell says, it requires a constant struggle.

Matthew Yglesias: No, When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?

2007-03-20T20:45:00.001-07:00

I had really thought Jon Chait's initial reply to Joe Lieberman's deranged complaint that "there is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism" was perfectly adequate, but Jonah Goldberg seems interested in this goofy debate perhaps we should turn the question around: Why does opposition to the anti-war movement inspire greater passion among conservatives than does opposition to Islamist extremism?

In my opinion, it's a mixed bag of motives. Hating liberals has been a core element of American conservatism since long before anyone knew or cared what Islamist extremism was. What's more, a lot of conservatives are greedy. Write a book about how Hillary Clinton is like Musolini and you might sell some copies; get paid. Of course, that doesn't really excuse it since the reason liberal-bashing books sell better than earnest tomes about counterterrorism policy is, precisely, that conservatives are more emotionally invested in liberal-bashing than in opposing Islamism. There's also the fact that your average conservative probably doesn't know any radical Islamists personally, so they kind of carry a psychological grudge against liberals that they don't share with regard to Islamist extremists.

Dana Milbank on Alberto Gonzales

2007-03-14T14:40:00.001-07:00

Dana Milbank on Alberto Gonzales:

Dana Milbank - The Grand Elusion - washingtonpost.com: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced the cameras for all of nine minutes yesterday, but he managed to contradict himself at least four times as he fought off calls to resign over the firing of U.S. attorneys. "Mistakes were made," he said in fluent scandalese, but "I think it was the right decision. ""I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice," he posited, but "I . . . was not involved in any discussions about what was going on." "Kyle Sampson" -- Gonzales's chief of staff -- "has resigned," he said, but "he is still at the department." And, finally, "I believe in the independence of our U.S. attorneys," Gonzales maintained, but "all political appointees can be removed . . . for any reason."

He had the look of a hunted man in his appearance at the Justice Department. He wiggled his toes inside his shoes and shifted his feet. He spoke too loudly into the microphone. He arrived 18 minutes late, gave well-rehearsed answers and appeared intent on getting out as fast as he could, ignoring reporters' shouts of "Sir! Sir!....
Schumer said he was unsatisfied with Gonzales's sacrifice of his chief of staff. "Kyle Sampson will not become the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy." Echoing a phrase used in the Libby trial, the senator continued: "The cloud over the Justice Department is getting darker and darker." Before the day was out, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Ted Kennedy (Mass.) and other Democrats joined Schumer's call for Gonzales's head. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), giving the news conference with Schumer, was not so bloodthirsty. "I'm more reserved, in general, than my colleague over here is," she said of Schumer....

Reporters were happy to help. They besieged a woman carrying a box labeled "Xerox," elbowing one another to grab still-warm bundles of e-mails. It didn't take much searching of them to find evidence of the political nature of the firings and the White House's role. "WH leg, political, and communications have signed off," deputy White House counsel William Kelley wrote to Sampson and then-White House counsel Harriet Miers in December 2006. Other e-mails, from Sampson, had him "waiting for a green light from the White House" and asking Miers and Kelley to circulate the firing plan to Karl Rove's "shop."...

Even. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the administration's most faithful legislator, said "the appearances are troubling" for Gonzales. "I'm concerned," Cornyn said with Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) at his side. "This has not been handled well." The best Cornyn could offer Gonzales: "In Texas, we believe in having a fair trial and then we have the hanging."

Gideon Rachman: How to help the huddled masses through immigration

2007-03-14T14:37:00.001-07:00

Gideon Rachman: How to help the huddled masses through immigration

Gideon Rachman's Blog: Next week I hope to visit the US. I will put it no more strongly than that. I have learnt not to take my right to visit America for granted – ever since being ignominiously deported in 2003. When I rang my wife from Dulles airport to tell her that I was being put on the first plane home, she briefly feared that I was about to reveal a double life as an international drug-smuggler or pornographer. Nothing so interesting. I had simply forgotten to get myself a journalist’s visa.
The best stories of this sort usually involve the innocent foreigner being shackled or bundled off to the state penitentiary. Not in my case. The officials dealing with me were polite, sympathetic – but implacable. I protested feebly that I was a former Fulbright scholar who had lived in the US for several years. I had written for American journals, I knew important people, Britain was fighting alongside the US in Iraq. None of it cut any ice. As one of the immigration people explained: “We could have made an exception before 9/11, but not now.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY.... From General Tony McPeak

2007-03-13T20:44:00.001-07:00

The Washington Monthly: QUOTE OF THE DAY....From General Tony McPeak (ret.): "America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment. If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference."

Jim Henley: Parallelism Is Not Argument

2007-03-13T20:34:00.001-07:00

Jim Henley: Parallelism Is Not Argument:

Out of the Mouths of Neobabes II § Unqualified Offerings: [Eliot] Cohen tries to make a nigh-Riemannian parallelism do the work of argument. He wants you to think that if we had fewer bombers, the kidz would be listening to Chinese rappers, or maybe Islamofascist ones. Curiously, the era when American (and British) bands started dominating global culture was the heyday of Team B, who insisted that the Communist bloc had the beleaguered West utterly outclassed militarily. Those where the days when a sequence of red and blue bar graphs could bring the insecure American a parapornographic thrill of doom. Look how tall the red bar is on the tanks graph! The missile graph! The fighter plane graph! “What did you scare yourself with before ‘dhimmitude,’ Grandpa?” “Commitude, children!” Curiously, the kidz did not start listening to Russian bands. Because Russian bands sucked. Vaclav Havel got into Velvet Underground and brough the whole fraudulent arrangement down like a chainsmoking, diffident Samson. And the Velvets didn’t even sell!

Cohen can’t show that “American military power” causes the Internet, only that they both use “information technologies.” I am aware of the internet’s roots in DARPA, thank you. But Cohen can’t make the case that people grew the actual internet as it developed out of ARPANet because America has troops all over the place, so he doesn’t even try. Best not call attention to the fact that people glommed onto the internet instead of other candidates - e.g. Minitel - because people could make it into something cool, for a bunch of semi-compatible definitions of cool.

And of course he closes with a question trying to pretend it is its own answer. It’s not. And I daresay Pervez Musharraf would want to know just what Cohen means by “free trade.” Meantime the kidz love the manga, even though, mascot or no, the Japanese military is nothing to write home about.

What the neocons’ libertarian-inclined friends should have noticed about them early is just how little faith neoconservatives have always had in the market as such.

Hilzoy: War Is Not The Instrument He Thought It Was

2007-03-13T20:33:00.001-07:00

Hilzoy: War Is Not The Instrument He Thought It Was

Ezra Klein: "War Is Not The Instrument He Thought It Was": Hilzoy has a long and beautiful post on why using war to set up democracy in other countries is so difficult. There are lots of reasons for this, but the reason she discusses hadn't really occurred to me before:

we should never forget how astonishing it is that people vying for power are willing to concede even when they believe that the rules have been broken, out of respect for the rule of law and for courts they believe to be profoundly in error.

In many countries, there are no established procedures for resolving conflicts, and certainly none that command the kind of allegiance that would lead people to yield even when they believe that they deserve to have won. In those countries it will always be tempting to think: well, this election was stolen from us, and this year-old Constitution is unfair; why not fight for a better one? Wouldn't our opponents do the same?

This is especially likely in a country in which the price of losing a political struggle has always been not just being in the minority party in Congress, but death or subjugation. And it takes a long time to learn to trust that losing power will not cost you your life or your freedom, when all your experience to date has taught you the opposite.

When you use force to liberate a country, like Kuwait, that has only been occupied for a short time, you can hope that its people will accept their previous government, and that whatever made that government function in the past will have survived. But when you liberate a country like Iraq, a country whose people have been brutalized, you risk loosing Hobbes' "war of all against all" on its people. You remove the sovereign who has kept that war in check, without thereby creating any of the political virtues that allow alternate forms of government, like democracy, to function.

Lawrence Eagleburger: $1 Billion of Counterproductive Insanity

2007-03-13T20:32:00.001-07:00

Lawrence Eagleburger: $1 Billion of Counterproductive Insanity:

Think Progress » $1 billion of counterproductive insanity.: Lawrence Eagleburger on the massive 1,000-employee U.S. Embassy in Baghdad: “I defy anyone to tell me how you can use that many people. It is nuts…it’s insane and it’s counterproductive…and it won’t work,” says the Republican former secretary of state and member of the Iraq Study Group. “I’ve been around the State Department long enough to know you can’t run an outfit like that.

Belle Waring: And a Pony!

2007-03-13T20:31:00.001-07:00

Belle Waring: And a Pony!

John & Belle Have A Blog: If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride -- A Pony!: You see, wishes are totally free. It's like when you can't decide whether to daydream about being a famous Hollywood star or having amazing magical powers. Why not -- be a famous Hollywood star with amazing magical powers! Along these lines, John has developed an infallible way to improve any public policy wishes. You just wish for the thing, plus, wish that everyone would have their own pony! So, in Chafetz' case, he should not only wish that Bush would say a lot of good things about democracy-building and fighting terrorism in a speech written for him by a smart person, he should also wish that Bush should actually mean the things he says and enact policies which reflect this, and he should wish that everyone gets a pony. See?...

Kieran Healy: Ye Ladies of Easy Leisure

2007-03-13T20:30:00.001-07:00

Kieran Healy: Ye Ladies of Easy Leisure

Crooked Timber: Now that’s more like it. The end of bastardy! The rise of female contraception! Divorce! Sex education! Cars! Maggie Gallagher could learn a thing or two from Leon Kass. If you think society is being dragged to perdition by a bunch of car-owning, pill-popping, body-piercing, career-oriented, degree-granted, sexually confident, frequent-flyer, atheistic sluts then just come out and say it. And the best part is, Leon is just warming up.

He continues:

The change most immediately devastating for wooing is probably the sexual revolution. For why would a man court a woman for marriage when she may be sexually enjoyed, and regularly, without it?

Well, it’s not as if I’m going to make my own pot roast, now is it?

Many, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. Only respectable women were respected; one no more wanted a loose woman for one’s partner than for one’s mother.

Those were the days. Men could be men, and women could be modest—except for the ladies of easy leisure, who were available for extramarital sex, backalley abortions, syphilis, etc.

The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well- banked affections. A virtue, as it were, made for courtship, it served simultaneously as a source of attraction and a spur to manly ardor, a guard against a woman’s own desires, as well as a defense against unworthy suitors. A fine woman understood that giving her body (in earlier times, even her kiss) meant giving her heart, which was too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and lover forever.

Except for understandable lapses—see above re: women of easy virtue.

Once female modesty became a first casualty of the sexual revolution, even women eager for marriage lost their greatest power to hold and to discipline their prospective mates.

Because of course being subordinated in this manner, and having all of the negative consequences of sexual activity fall entirely upon you, and living under an all-pervasive double standard is of course the greatest kind of power that anyone can have. It’s like, Inter-Continental Ballistic Modesty! Men wish they had that kind of power. But, alas, we are weak beings:

For it is a woman’s refusal of sexual importunings, coupled with hints or promises of later gratification, that is generally a necessary condition of transforming a man’s lust into love.

In fact, we are so weak that even our self-control is entirely your responsibility.

Women also lost the capacity to discover their own genuine longings and best interests.

See above re: pot roast. Also Valium.

Apparently this is the first of a three-part series. You know, the sad thing about this sort of thing is that the entry of women into college and the workforce since 1945, the sexual revolution, and the increase of geographical mobility really are huge social changes. They really have had tremendous consequences of all kinds for individuals, families and whole societies. Entire branches of social science are given over to trying to understand them. Leon Kass’s horror at the way the world has turned out is unsurprising. His desire to return to some kind of Victorian nightmare is just about understandable. But it’s bad sociology and it’s appalling moral philosophy as well.

Spencer Ackerman: Suicide Bomber Tactics in Afghanistan

2007-03-02T12:43:00.000-08:00

Since at least 2004, Iraq-style tactics -- suicide bombings, recorded kidnappings and executions, and in particular improvised explosive devices -- have been trickling into Afghanistan, to the point where some observers have feared the "Iraqification" of that country. It's not something to be sanguine about, as today's suicide bombing outside of Bagram demonstrates. But according to a new Jonestown Foundation analysis by Brian Glyn Williams and Cathy Young, there's something of a silver lining: suicide bombings are indeed up -- as of late February, there have already been 21 suicide bombings in 2007; that's nearly as many as in all of 2005 -- but they're ... not killing many people.

Astoundingly, of the 21 attacks carried out this year, in 16 cases the only fatality has been the suicide bomber himself. In the 17th case, the suicide bomber succeeded in killing himself and one policeman. In two other cases, the suicide bomber was arrested or shot. This translates to 19 Taliban suicide bombers for one Afghan policeman, hardly an inspiring kill ratio for would-be-suicide bombers. In most of these cases, the suicide bombers attacked foreign convoys on foot or in cars and were unable to inflict casualties on their targets. Typically, the suicide bombers' explosives went off prematurely or their bombs failed to kill coalition troops driving in heavily armored vehicles.

In only three of the 21 cases for 2007 were there notable fatalities. In the first successful case, a suicide bomber killed two Afghan policemen and eight civilians (Camp Salerno, Khost, January 23). In the second case, three policemen were killed (Zherai District, Khost, February 4). In the third case, the February 27 attack on Bagram Air Base while Cheney was visiting, the bomber succeeded in killing 15-23 people (including two to three coalition soldiers). Such numbers hardly compare to Iraq where suicide bombers often carry out synchronized attacks that regularly kill anywhere from 60 to 130 people. Such uninspiring statistics beg the question: what are Afghanistan's suicide bombers doing wrong?

Williams and Young studied 158 suicide attacks since 2001 and found an answer. While Iraqi suicide bombers target civilians and soft targets in order to sow destabilization and provoke/respond to sectarian violence, nearly all Taliban suicide bombings -- and in Afghanistan, resistance to the presence of foreign forces and the Karzai government is overwhelmingly Taliban -- are focused on Afghan or U.S./NATO security forces. The two researchers assess that unlike the Iraqi insurgents, al-Qaeda or Shiite militias, the Taliban has to cleave the population away from the Karzai government, but in the process must "avoid losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by needlessly killing civilians." The trouble is that it works. Members of the International Security Assistance Force have in some cases balked at taking up operations in suicide-bomb-heavy territory. Worse still, Williams and Young find that freaked-out ISAF forces have responded by upping their tolerance for collateral damage. Little is more provocative in Afghanistan than civilian deaths at foreign hands; in that sense, the Taliban gambit does show some success. Consider what you've got here: a localized insurgency that needs to deny Karzai and his allies control of Afghanistan and finds that even ineffective suicide bombing can have some utility as a deterrent force. Yet it remains a force with limited potential for growth among the civilian population and it's fearful of inflicting civilian casualties. Basically, this is about as favorable terrain for counterterrorism as ever there is (saying that while recognizing that no counterterrorism campaign is really favorable). Here's where you want to put Petraeus and his COIN wise men.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: Underrated Webloggers of Our Time: Hilzoy

2007-03-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

Hilzoy, of Obsidian Wings.

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

Much more at the post; read it all. Why doesn’t this woman have an opinion column in a national newspaper?

Joshua Micah Marshall: Another Bush Screw-Up that Staggers the Mind

2007-03-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

White House: Okay, maybe the North Koreans don't have a uranium enrichment program after all.

You have to be relatively deep into the minutiae of North Korea policy for this story. But it's a big one. The Bush administration is now saying they're really not even sure the North Koreans have a uranium enrichment program for the production of nuclear weapons.

A 'senior administration official' tells the Times, "The question now is whether we would be in the position of having to get the North Koreans to give up a sizable arsenal if this had been handled differently."

That, as they say, is something of an understatement.

This gets a tad tedious. But bear with me because it's important.

Speaking very broadly, there are two big ways to make nuclear weapons -- with uranium and plutonium. Each involves different technical challenges and processes. And each has a different bang you get versus the complexity of the task of putting the thing together.

The big issue with North Korea has always been their plutonium production. Back in 1994, they were on the brink of being able to produce bombs with the plutonium they were making. The US came close to war with the North Koreans over it. But the two countries settled on something called the 'Agreed Framework' in which the North Koreans' plutonium production operation was shuttered and placed under international inspection in exchange for fuel oil shipments and assistance building 'light water' nuclear reactors.

We don't need to get into the details of the agreement at the moment. The relevant point is that from 1994 to 2002 the North Korean nuclear weapons program was frozen in place. The strong consensus judgment was that they had not yet made any nuclear weapons. And during that period they could not access the plutonium they had already produced.

It was on the basis of this alleged uranium enrichment program -- which may well not even have existed -- that the US pulled out of that agreement. This allowed the North Koreans to get back into the plutonium business with a gusto. And they have since produced -- by most estimates -- at least a hand full of nuclear weapons, one of which, albeit a rather feeble one, they detonated last October.

So now let's review that quote from the senior administration official: "The question now is whether we would be in the position of having to get the North Koreans to give up a sizable arsenal if this had been handled differently."

Frankly, it's not much of a question.

Because of a weapons program that may not even have existed (and no one ever thought was far advanced) the White House the White House got the North Koreans to restart their plutonium program and then sat by while they produced a half dozen or a dozen real nuclear weapons -- not the Doug Feith/John Bolton kind, but the real thing.

It's a screw-up that staggers the mind. And you don't even need to know this new information to know that. Even if the claims were and are true, it was always clear that the uranium program was far less advanced than the plutonium one, which would be ready to produce weapons soon after it was reopened. Now we learn the whole thing may have been a phantom. Like I said, it staggers the mind how badly this was bungled. In this decade there's been no stronger force for nuclear weapons proliferation than the dynamic duo of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

Bjorn Staerk: What Went Wrong?

2007-03-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

After the September 11 terror attacks people looked for books that could explain the new world they lived in. One of the authors they found was the historian Bernard Lewis, whose "What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response" became a bestseller. Lewis looked at the Muslim world's failure to deal with the West's military and economic superiority. Islam had seen itself as the center of the world, but the West pricked their bubble, and Muslims have been struggling ever since with a volatile mix of envy and hatred towards it.

This is not an essay about Bernard Lewis, or his ideas. I bring him up because the same question keeps spinning around in my head these days, only now with a different subtitle: "What Went Wrong? Islamist Impact And Western Response". When I look around me at the world we got, the world we created after 2001, that's the question I keep coming back to: What went wrong? The question nags me all the more because I was part of it, swept along with all the currents that took us from the ruins of the World Trace center through the shameful years that followed. Iraq, the war on terror, the new European culture war.

This mirror of "What Went Wrong" wouldn't be a story on the same scale, but it has the main theme in common. It would be about Westerners who had their reality bubble pricked by people from an alien culture, and spent the next couple of years stumbling about like idiots, unable to deal rationally with this new reality that had forced itself on them. Egging each other on, they predicted, interpreted, and labelled - and legislated and invaded. They saw clearly, through beautiful ideas. And they were wrong.

Who were these people? They were us. "Us"? This seemed a lot clearer at the time. Us were the people who acknowledged the threat of Islamist terrorism, who had the common sense to see through the multicultural fog of words, and the moral courage to want to change the world by force. It included politicians like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, it included the new European right, it included brave and honest pundits, straight-talking intellectuals in the enlightenment tradition.

And then there were people like me, who labelled ourselves "warbloggers", and called our friends "anti-idiotarians". Phew, all those labels! Now, anyone who knows me knows that I've been drifting away from where I started for years. They're going to laugh if I pretend that I've ever been an Islamophobe, or that I was among the most eager of the Bush supporters, and use that to claim special insights into these people. Some of the ideas I criticize I believed for a long time, some for a short time, and some I never liked at all.

And by "us" I don't mean that everyone thought alike, I mean that there was an identity based on an unspoken agreement about who were "ok" and who weren't. And - God help me - I was ok. I haven't been for a while now, but it's only recently I've realized just how little there's left of what I believed five years ago. Our worldview had three major focus points - Iraq, terrorism and Islam - and we were wrong about all of them.

Iraq

There aren't many people left who believe that it was a good idea for the US, Britain and their coalition to invade Iraq in 2003. At least fifty thousand Iraqis dead, (or a hundred, or several hundred), maybe two million refugees, and who knows how many more when the Americans finally give up and leave. Supporters of the war have dropped off one by one, for different reasons. Some neo-conservative intellectuals believe that the plan was good, but that George W. Bush screwed it up. There might be something to this. With smarter people in charge, the odds might have been better. But this assumes that a smarter administration would have embraced their plan to invade Iraq in the first place. I don't think it would, and I think the blame belongs with the thinkers who pushed for war, as much as the officials who carried it out.

Every war must have a war party, a group that actively tries to sell war to the government and to the public. For Iraq, that war party was us - neo-conservative intellectuals, and pundits and bloggers who were sympathetic to them. Without all these people arguing for war, legitimizing it, begging for it, an invasion would have been difficult.

Anyone who argues for war plays with dangerous forces, so they must do it responsibly or not at all. Foolish wars have led countries to disaster. They have caused the deaths of millions. History and psychology tells us that war parties tend to be over-confident, paranoid and emotional. So the minimum you should expect from a responsible war supporter is that they are aware of this bias, and do their best to counterbalance it.

It's not enough to believe that you are right. You have to be actively open-minded, you have to listen to your critics, and encourage devil's advocates. You have to set up a robust information structure that makes it as difficult as possible for you to ignore reality. This is the only good way to prevent self-deception. It works. And we did not do it.

What we did was the opposite. At every level, from the lowliest blogger to the highest official, war supporters set up filters that protected them from facts they did not want to hear. We saw what we wanted to see, and if anyone saw differently, we called them left-wing moonbats who were rooting for the other side. We defined the entire mainstream media establishment as irrelevant, leaving more biased, less experienced "new" media as our primary source of facts. We ignored reasonable critics, and focused on the crazy ones, so that we could tell ourselves how incredibly smart we were.

Among the bloggers there was a sense that there were all these brilliant people, who knew so much about history, war and society, who had previously been without the tools to express themselves. Thanks to the wonders of amateur media, we could now finally exploit this huge reservoir of expert knowledge. And when you contrasted the lazy neutrality of the old media with the energy of the new, it certainly could seem that way. Here were people who regularly would write thousands of words about the historical context of Islamist terrorism, who could write brilliantly about freedom and democracy, who commented boldly on the long trends of history. How could such people be wrong?

But what we saw was not expert knowledge, but the well-written, arrogantly presented ideas of half-educated amateurs. This, too, went all the way from the bottom to the top. It often struck us how well the writing of the best of the bloggers measured up to that of pro-war pundits and intellectuals. We thought this showed how professional the amateurs were, when what it really told us was how amateurish the professionals were.

And so we came to believe that we could invade Iraq and plant the seeds of a new, democratic Middle East. Yes yes there were also the nukes, but we saw beyond that, towards a spring of freedom that would delegitimize terrorism and fanaticism all over the region. Some people will tell you that they never pretended this would be easy, that they always knew it might not work. There are no certain outcomes, and if you have a good chance of success, that chance is worth taking, even if it doesn't end well. Also many argued - and I think I may have been one of them - that instability would be a good thing for the Middle East. The stability of these authoritarian and extremist regimes was precisely the problem. A little chaos would only do the region good.

When I think of this chaos argument today I am struck with horror at the stupidity of it. There's no secret about what happens when a state collapses. It might go well, but when it doesn't, there is no upper limit to how badly it can go. Millions of people may die. Fanatics and sadists fight their way to the top, trampling the weak down beneath them. In our vision of a liberated Baghdad, we saw the beginning of a new Eastern Europe. Now, I have nightmares of Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Algeria, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan.

As for the chance of success, what gave us the idea that we could estimate this? There are some now who say that even if the war supporters got a lot of things wrong, so did the opponents, so there you go, that's uncertainty for you. Everyone was wrong, but at least we were on the side of freedom, and they were on Saddam's. But that's just not true. The opponents were right. They said this was extremely risky, they said it might result in countless deaths and instability. They got a lot of details wrong, but that's just the point. For the Iraq invasion to go right, war supporters had to get many predictions right. Opponents knew that if any of those predictions were wrong, the whole thing could fail. So the smart choice was to be cautious.

War opponents said a lot of things that were stupid, cynical and deluded. Some war supporters find comfort in this, I don't. The opponents were, on the whole, right. We were wrong, and people in Iraq will pay for this mistake for a long time.

Terrorism

The war on terrorism has not been a disaster, but there too we went wrong. And not just Iraq war supporters. This mistake crossed party lines and infected mainstream thought through most of Europe and North America. We got the threat wrong, and we got the response to it wrong.

Right after September 11, civil liberties activists warned us not to overreact. Attacks like these, they said, were a classic threat to individual freedom. We had to make sure that we didn't fall into xenophobic hysteria and authoritarian solutions. We listened to this, we nodded, and then we all went ahead and ignored it.

There were of course no anti-Muslim riots, no massacres, no overt authoritarian measures. But everyone agreed that terrorism was such a large threat that we had to give the state new powers to fight it. The most extreme examples were the cases of torture by proxy and imprisonment without trial by the US, but all over the West there has been a new wind of authority. Some argued that freedom of speech should be restricted for Muslim extremists, others that the police needed more powers of surveillance.

The British CCTV system, built partly in response to IRA attacks, shows how eagerly people may trade freedom for security. All it takes is a permanent climate of fear, and the calm, soothing voice of authority telling you it knows how to make you safe. I'm not saying that we've become unfree, or are about to. But I think the path towards it is open. The only response to terrorism we can imagine is to give more power to the state, and once given, that power will be hard to take back.

I'm pessimistic about this, because the underlying mechanism of trading freedom for security so strong. The security is often illusory, giving us little more than a temporary reduction of anxiety. The anxiety soon returns, and more freedom must be traded away. Just as a war frenzy can spin out of control, so can a panic for law and order in the face of terrorism. Especially so since the alternative is so depressing and counterintuitive.

As I wrote earlier (Living With Terrorism), the right way to fight terrorism is to be stronger than our fear of it. There are many things we can and should do to prevent terrorist attacks, but we have to treat fear as the single most damaging weapon terrorists have. Compared to a panicked public, a bomb is relatively harmless. With weapons, terrorists can only do as much damage as a weapon can do. Through fear, they have the full powers of state and society to play with.

When terrorists attack, we should resist the immediate impulse to "do something". We should not be "swept off [our] feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, 'Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you.'" I don't believe this is realistic. I believe that our civil rights are in the hands of terrorists. The more bombs, the less patience people will have with personal freedom. We'll hear all the old arguments, presented as new, about suicidal liberalism, the chaos of freedom, and the importance of moral unity. We already are. And that's why I'm a pessimist. We were wrong about terrorism, we still are, and I suspect we always will be. At best we can hope for long periods of calm where personal freedom is allowed to reassert itself.

Islam and the culture war

The last major mistake we made was about Islam, and especially the role it got to play in what we might call a European culture war. The European culture war is a war in defense of secular, but Christian-based, enlightenment values against Muslim extremists, multiculturalists and naive leftists. It is a war for the "soul" of Europe, as Pat Buchanan said about the American counterpart.

Europe's culture warriors often come from the right, like me, but many also from the left. What they have in common is frustration with what they see as a deadening centre-left consensus among the elites - politicians, academics, journalists. There's a sense that there is this great fog of dishonesty that we must chase away with reasoned and courageous thinking. The elites believe in little, they tolerate anything as long as it is foreign, and despise everything that is solid and proud in European culture. That's why they aimed so much hatred against Christian pseudo-fanatics, while letting genuine Muslim extremists in through the back door. They told us that Europe's worst enemy was itself, when of course the real threats come from the outside.

The culture warriors want to restore Europe's sense of purpose, and restore some of its old values - including our Christian heritage. Not necessarily Christianity itself, but they admire its moral firmness. The elites believe nothing, and that makes us vulnerable to Muslim extremists, who are blessed with a complete lack of uncertainty and a total committment to their religion.

Islam is the key to the European culture war. There is a sense that we have been infiltrated and betrayed, that Europe is slowly falling apart from the inside, and it is all because of Muslim immigration. Millions of unintegrated muslims, most of whom are at odds with basic European values, and many of whom actually despise our culture and want to make it more Islamic - and a few of whom are willing to kill us to accomplish this. Most culture warriors don't believe that Islam is inherently evil, they believe it can be secularized - Westernized, but they all believe it is the key to everything that is happening, not least for what it reveals about our own elites.

Here's why I'm frustrated: I'm not sure where all this went wrong. I can look back at what I believed some five years ago, and what motivated me to hope for exactly the kind of thing we now have - a grassroots reaction to the centre-left multicultural consensus, edging steadily in on the mainstream - and I'm not so sure that I was wrong. This idea that it should be ok to discuss Muslim extremism, and make demands of immigrants, and not meet cruel traditions with a tolerant smile, I certainly still believe that. And this rebellious reaction I had to the media consensus, there was nothing wrong with that. And we really do need to revive some liberal and rational strands of thought that somewhat inaccurately go by the name of enlightenment values.

But there must have been something wrong with that starting point, nevertheless, because why else would so many people who adopted it gradually turn it into something distasteful and frigthening? Or maybe it was like that from the beginning, and it just took me a while to notice. However it was, their lack of doubt bothers me now, their self-righteousness and anger, their clear labelling of people as either corrupt enemies or enlightened friends.

I'm bothered by their humorless sarcasm and gotcha-approach to cultural criticism. I worry that their defense of European culture has become rationalized chauvinism. I'm dumbstruck by their choices of intellectual heroes. And I fear that their constant indignation and certainty will inspire a popular revival of xenophobia.

I realize that it is precisely in reaction to such behavior that the "multicultural" worldview makes sense. We do need to doubt ourselves. We do need to worry at least as much about our own potential for evil as that of the foreigners. We do need to meet other cultures with some humility and respect. We do need to have mixed feelings about our own culture, admiration tempered by wariness, as with a wild animal. We do need to listen to people who believe differently, instead of just lecturing them. Not because there is no right or wrong, true or false, and not because every culture is equal, but because the alternative is so dangerous. The road of the righteous champion of the Army of Light.

So it appears that I believe all of these things, both the essential ideas of the culture warriors and those of their multicultural enemies. This might be a contradiction - I'm not sure. It would seem that I'm both anti-elitist and elitist, that I understand both those who want to confront and those who want to talk. And maybe that's not such a bad place to be.

I know how the culture warriors feel about such doubt, they see it as weakness, a fear of moral clarity. But I see something cold and inhuman in their clarity. Give me conflicting ideas, isolated incidents, and individuals. Keep your angry visions, I'll do just fine with doubt and curiosity.

And now..?

Now I try not to do it all over again. I think I'll begin by writing down, in big letters, somewhere I can't help but notice it: "Warning! Objects in blogs are smaller than they appear."

Richard Cohen Needs to Fire Himself Now

2007-03-02T12:38:00.000-08:00

In his February 27 column, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen faulted "some of my colleagues" who "caricatured" former Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign "as a serial exaggerator, a fibber, a pretender -- the guy who invented the Internet, who was the model for the novel (and movie) 'Love Story,' who applied one too many coats of passion to that kiss he delivered to his wife, Tipper, at the Democratic National Convention in 2000." Cohen himself, however, contributed to this "caricature" of Gore in 2000, even after he acknowledged that the portrayal of Gore as dishonest was baseless.

Cohen wrote in his February 27 column:

It's a joke, isn't it? I mean, it was Gore who was universally seen as the flawed man, uncomfortable in his own skin and, therefore, in this TV age, incapable of uniting the nation. He was caricatured by some of my colleagues as a serial exaggerator, a fibber, a pretender -- the guy who invented the Internet, who was the model for the novel (and movie) "Love Story," who applied one too many coats of passion to that kiss he delivered to his wife, Tipper, at the Democratic National Convention in 2000. There were so many reasons not to vote for him -- none, in retrospect, much good.

At the time, however, Cohen himself frequently propagated the image of Gore as an "exaggerator." For example, in his October 12, 2000, Post column, Cohen wrote:

In Reagan's case, these stories were dismissed by his supporters and characterized as charming eccentricities. Yet, some of the same people and editorial organs now get the vapors when confronting one of Al Gore's exaggerations. Gore, for some reason, is a liar while Reagan was just a marvelous storyteller.

I am not going to sit here and defend Gore's exaggerations. I wish he wouldn't make them. I wish he did not say he had been to the Texas fires when he hadn't. (Maybe he ought to have said concentration camp.) I wish he had not compared his dog's prescription plan to his mother-in-law's. I wish he had been a bit more modest about his role in developing the Internet or, way back, in describing his Vietnam War experience.

In fact, Gore never claimed that he "had been to the Texas fires" -- a reference to wildfires that broke out in Parker County, Texas, in 1998. Gore simply stated that he went "down to Texas" at the time the fires broke out -- not to the site of the actual fires, as Cohen implied. At the October 3, 2000, presidential debate, Gore said: "First, I want to compliment the governor on his response to those fires and floods in Texas. I accompanied James Lee Witt down to Texas when those fires broke out." Gore later acknowledged that he mistakenly claimed that Witt, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had accompanied him on the trip to Houston, when, in fact, it was Witt's deputy who had accompanied Gore. An October 4, 2000, Associated Press article quoted Gore saying: "I was there in Texas, in Houston, with the head of the Texas emergency management folks and with all the federal emergency management folks. If James Lee was there before or after, then, you know, I got that wrong then." As USA Today reported on October 11, 2000: "Gore said Tuesday that he had made 16 or 17 similar trips with Witt and simply confused those with the one he made to Texas with Witt's deputy."

However, the Bush campaign, Gore's critics, and the media seized on Gore's misstatement that Witt had accompanied him, casting Gore as a liar or an exaggerator. The October 4 AP article cited above quoted Bush saying: "Of course, it turned out he didn't (make the trip with Witt). This is a man -- he's got a record, you know, of sometimes exaggerating to make a point." On the October 4 edition of CNN's Crossfire, co-host Mary Matalin said: "He did not accompany James Lee Witt in '96 or '98. He never toured any of the fire zones. He did get a briefing in the pilots lounge at the airport when he went down to campaign for Governor Bush's opponent."

Cohen also wrote in his October 12, 2000, column:

Gore's burden is his association with Bill Clinton, whose behavior was largely overlooked by the press until it could be overlooked no more. So now we study Gore for the telltale signs of a larger problem. But what could it be? He has been vice president for eight years, a senator and congressman before that. No one who has worked with him calls him a liar. He is just an exaggerator.

[...]

Gore's abiding, overriding and maybe insurmountable handicap is that he is no Reagan--he lacks the man's charm. Where Reagan could dismiss his critics with a wave of his hand and some disarming joke, Gore just digs in more, tries harder and smiles like the groom at a shotgun wedding.

It seems true that Reagan sometimes could not distinguish between what he had seen on film and what he had experienced firsthand--and so his stories, strictly speaking, were not lies. With Gore, it's not clear if he gets confused or knows at the time that he's taken things too far. But the outcome is the same: False is false.

Cohen also questioned whether Gore was "real" and suggested he was a "pretender." In his October 12, 1999, column, Cohen wrote:

Whatever else you -- or I -- might say about [former Senator Bill] Bradley [D-NJ], he has conducted himself with dignity, with the strong suggestion that there are things he will not do and positions he will not take just to become his party's nominee. His manner assures us that, just as he had a life before this presidential race, he will have a life afterward. He seems to know who he is.

I wish I could say that about Gore. But there is something both frantic and synthetic about the campaign's move to Nashville and all this talk about home. It was only done, after all, when the campaign got into trouble. It's not so much a move as a retreat. Besides, if Gore has to be on location to be real -- if he has to be in Tennessee to be the sort of person he really is -- then what is he going to do if he wins the presidency -- move the White House to Nashville?

Albert Gore was first elected to Congress in 1976. He has been a public figure since his twenties, a national figure since his thirties, a presidential candidate by his 40th birthday (in 1988) and vice president since 1993. All this searching for roots, all this stuff about home, suggests something I'm sure he does not intend. It's not that we really never knew the real Al Gore. It's that he never really knew himself.

In his November 2, 1999, column, Cohen wrote:

"The male body is home to me, my rocket, my whirlpool." So wrote Naomi Wolf in her book, "Fire With Fire" which will soon be required reading along the campaign trail. Wolf -- sometimes a feminist, sometimes not, but always controversial -- has just been revealed as a secret Al Gore campaign adviser, apparently teaching the vice president how to be a rocket and a whirlpool. Some of us, though, would settle for just plain Al Gore.

But it is more and more clear that no one, least of all Al Gore, knows who that is. This is why he moved his campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville, why he has gotten some new suits (it's the whirlpool look), and often appears in leisure clothing. He is newly energetic, sometimes manic and moves like a character in some speeded-up silent movie. I suppose this is what happens when you're a rocket.

[...]

An alpha male would not have hidden her. An alpha male would not have been afraid to be up-front, maybe introducing her to the press and saying -- in effect -- I'll take your best punch. And an alpha candidate would have realized that Wolf's presence on the payroll was going to leak. After all, she was pulling down big money. Others had been fired. This was Washington. This was politics.

Mostly, though, an alpha candidate would not need Wolf at all. He would not have to be told who he is and how to dress. He would be led by conviction -- out of a solid sense of who he is. Gore keeps signaling that's not the case. Maybe, come to think of it, he's a whirlpool after all. His campaign's going down the drain.

Notably, in his August 10, 2000, column, Cohen defended Gore against false claims that he was a liar:

In contrast, poor Al Gore has not been able to make a single exaggeration or the slightest fib without the hall monitors of the press issuing multiple demerits. In fact, even Bush got in on the act. In Philadelphia he poked fun at Gore's purported claim to have invented the Internet.

Trouble is, Gore made no such claim. Instead, he spoke as a legislator who really had been among the first to grasp the importance of the Internet: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He did. You can look it up.

Similarly, Gore did not say he had discovered the Love Canal toxic waste debacle, nor did he claim that the character in Erich Segal's "Love Story" was based entirely on him. Yet for these and other supposed statements--some, I grant you, sloppily worded--a brace of commentators has called Gore a liar. A full listing plus an account of what Gore really said was published in the April issue of the Washington Monthly.

Andrew Northrup on the Journamalism of Tom Friedman

2007-02-27T08:29:00.000-08:00

Blognerds are probably well aware that, at long last, someone in a respectable publication has pointed out that Glenn Reynolds is completely insane. The article in question - by one Paul Campos - compares Reynolds to Ward Churchill, who, if you don’t know, is … um, I don’t know who he is, either. A community college professor or something. But, if you moved in Fox News circles a couple of years back, he was big, big news, which gave them something to talk about besides, you know, reality, and, as an added bonus, probably boosted his lecture fees above the $0.00 level. So I gather the comparison is apt, except that Reynolds gets published in mainstream periodicals, gets his opinions taken seriously on television, is still considered the go-to authority for all issues related to the internet, and is generally treated like a charter member of the Broderian Council of Acceptable Opinion in all matters.

The comment that got him in trouble - that the government should be murdering Iranian scientists and religious leaders, because we have been continuously at war with them for thirty years - was a bit blunt, but wasn’t really unrepresentative of his views. Why should this be getting attention all of a sudden? Fans of his oeuvre could probably think of a handful of crazier comments right off the top of their head - in fact, I immediately thought of that time in 2003 when Prof. Christmas opined that, seeing as we were already at war with France and all, we should probably start some nice proxy wars in Africa. (This was the winner of the first-ever proto-Kippie Award for wingnuttery. Memories.) Now, as this was some time ago, I naturally assumed that this was early-2003 Reynolds riffing on one of conservo-blog intellectual (and MSM-published opinionator) Steven den Beste’s interminable explanations of how France was an integral part of the Transnational Progressive Islamofascist Dhimmocracy, or whatever. (Full disclosure: I have never managed to read an entire SdB post. I’m not convinced that any of them actually end.) In the event, though, he wasn’t.

He was riffing on Thomas L. Fucking Friedman, September 2003, NY Times:

It’s time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq’s transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.

France wants America to sink in a quagmire there in the crazy hope that a weakened U.S. will pave the way for France to assume its “rightful” place as America’s equal, if not superior, in shaping world affairs.

Of course, this is the same Tom Friedman who was telling us at the time that we needed to invade Iraq because we just had to kill some Arabs. We just had to, OK? Something about a bubble or something, too - you had to be there, man, it all made perfect sense. I know it seems weird now, man, but it was this magical time, like the Golden Age of Athens or some shit - The Summer of War! - when we all just knew we were going to change the world. All that stuff our parents told us about Vietnam and all that shit? We were just going to blow that away, man, just tear down their world and build it all up new, like better than ever, like nothing you’d ever seen before! Reynolds was the man, and den Beste was the brains, and everybody was in it together, for freedom and shit. It was great. And the music … well, the music kind of blew, actually. Nickelback was big. And the drugs were pretty crappy. No sex to speak of. But the blogs! Man, you shoulda seen the blogs! Outtasite!

And where are they now? Steven den Beste has stopped illuminating the great cycles of human history, and now writes exclusively about porny Japanese schoolgirl cartoons. Reynolds never got past that summer, never learned how to change with the times, and now he’s Kid Charlemagne. I don’t know what happened to Friedman - he’s behind the Times Select wall now, probably writing about globalization or whatever, or whatever anime den Beste was into 6 months ago. Funny how everyone grew up.

The past really is another country. I would like to bomb it.

Glenn Greenwald on American Journamalism

2007-02-27T08:28:00.000-08:00

This New York Times article today, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and John M. Broder, on the debate among Congressional Democrats over how to end the Iraq War, encapsulates so much of what is wrong with our national media. These are the first two paragraphs of the article:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 -- Congressional Democrats, divided over how to press President Bush to alter his policy in Iraq, are wrestling over whether to use the power of the purse to wind down the war, and they seem headed for a confrontation among themselves, possibly as early as next week, over a proposal to revoke the 2002 resolution authorizing the war.
Some Democrats acknowledge that they are in a sticky situation as they try to map out a strategy that will appease the antiwar left, which is pushing for conditions on war financing, without alienating moderate Democrats and Republicans who fear being painted as unsupportive of the troops.

There are so many lazy and fact-free assertions in these two paragraphs -- which shape the entire article and which, in some sense, are also shaping the overall Iraq debate -- that it is hard to know where to begin.

The insularity of these reporters means that some conventional premise arises among them, typically based in long-standing political stereotypes that they themselves created and perpetuated, and they are then incapable of thinking about issues in any other way even when facts make inescapably clear that their premises are false (the premise that Democrats are politically endangered by their "antiwar left" was the basis for an entire Fox show hosted by Wall St. Journal ideologues last week, and that theme then arrives unscathed in the pages of The New York Times this morning).

In what universe is it the case that demands for an end to the Iraq War are emanating from the dreaded and cliched "antiwar left"? According to the latest Pew poll:

Public support for the war in Iraq continues to decline, as a growing number of political independents are turning against the war. Overall, a 53% majority of Americans believe the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible - up five points in the past month and the highest percentage favoring a troop pullout since the war began nearly four years ago.

That's not a majority merely against the war, or against the surge, or wanting a gradual withdrawal. Those numbers are much higher. This is a majority of Americans favoring "bring[ing] troops home as soon as possible." That's quite an "antiwar left" we have here. And:

[I]n the current survey, 55% of independents say they favor bringing the troops home as soon as possible, compared with 40% who believe the troops should remain.

And, for good measure: "Among Democrats, roughly two-thirds (68%) want Congress to stop funding in an effort to block the troop buildup" and "more Democrats also support a troop withdrawal than did so in January (74% now, 66% then)." So apparently, 3 out of 4 Democrats -- along with a majority of independents -- are now part of the "antiwar left."

And they're not the only ones: "By roughly three-to-one (71%-23%), Republicans believe that U.S. forces should remain in Iraq until the situation there is stable." So almost a quarter of Republicans are now part of the "antiwar Left." And this December, 2006 CNN poll makes the point clearer still.

The national media continues to depict demands for an end to this war as the by-product of the fringe "antiwar left," and perpetuates the banal myth that Democrats face political peril because they have to satisfy this fringe element of their party. In fact, the true fringe group is the group of hard-core war supporters who support the President's desire that the war continue indefinitely. Did Stolberg and Broder happen to notice the results of the 2006 midterm election?

The Times article discusses what appears to be the genuine debate taking place among Democrats over the best strategic option for ending the war. Some, for instance, favor Jack Murtha's plan of incrementally increased limitations on funding tied to troop readiness, while others, such as Rep. Joe Sestak, favor (as his quotes from the article make clear) a different legislative strategy for ending the war -- namely, "setting a date for withdrawal of all forces from Iraq." And Harry Reid and Joe Biden are identified as advocating "rewriting the war authorization."

But those are not left-right conflicts or the by-product of some sort of self-destructive demands from the "antiwar left" that Democrats are being pressured to satisfy. Instead, these are just healty and encouraging tactical debates among Congressional Democrats who share their same objective -- namely, finding the most effective legislative weapon for compelling an end to the war, because that is what not only the overwhelming bulk of Democrats want, but also a clear majority of Americans.

To enable their lazy and fictitious storyline -- "Democrats are in trouble due to shrill demands from their radical leftist fringe" -- Stolberg and Broder invent a complete fiction: namely, that the dreaded "antiwar left" is "pushing for conditions on war financing," and such measures "will alienat[e] moderate Democrats and Republicans." But to the extent there is such a thing as the "antiwar left," it is not in any way attached to the specific tactic of imposing conditions on war funding.

Instead, war opponents favor whatever Congressional measures will work to compel an end to the war -- whether that be a recission of the AUMF or a modification of it or anything else. And that is what a majority of Americans want, according to virtually every poll. Who are the people on the "antiwar left" demanding a funding cut-off as opposed to other binding measures to end the war? They don't exist -- at least not in any substantial degree, if at all -- so Stolberg and Broder just made them up and then depicted these unnamed, imaginary de-funding absolutists as representative of the "antiwar left" which, in turn, became the basis for their whole "antiwar left" article.

The entire theme of the article is factually false and fictitious. It is designed to perpetuate a cliched drama where none exists, and to depict war opponents, rather than war supporters, as a small and radical fringe whose unreasonable demands are -- just as happened in 1972 -- endangering the Democrats. There is not a word about the danger to Republicans of continuing to tie themselves to one of the most unpopular wars in our nation's history.

And this NYT article presents the perfect opportunity to make the only response worth making to the self-defense offered yesterday by Newsweek's Richard Wolffe, who continues to claim that the media criticisms voiced by bloggers are misguided because bloggers are supposedly demanding that reporters act as "partisan advocates." That is just a complete distortion of the criticisms of the press made by bloggers.

Virtually no bloggers call for journalists to advance partisan storylines or advocate partisan views. Rather, they want them to report on matters with factual accuracy, and not slothfully pass on claims from government officials without investigating them for truth or perpetuate lazy storylines that have no basis in fact. That means that reporters should not disseminate anonymous government claims about Saddam's bulging weapons arsenals and expansive alliances with Al Qaeda, nor should they recklessly repeat patently false claims about Nancy Pelosi's demands for large private planes, nor should they falsely attribute anti-war views or demands for the war's end to the "antiwar left."

The laziness of reporters and their insatiable quest to curry favor with government officials continuously causes them to uncritically pass on false information, to protect the officials over whom they are supposed to be exercising scrutiny by granting them anonymity to disseminate government propaganda, and to perpetuate myths which their inside-government sources want to maintain. The complaint about journalists is about inaccuracy, gullibility and sloth, not a lack of partisan vigor. This New York Times article illustrates the fundamental deficiency in our nation's press -- as well as a principal element of media criticism -- quite vividly.

Rodger Payne: The Comedy of Great Power Politics

2007-02-27T08:26:00.002-08:00

Next Wednesday in Chicago -- that's February 28, at 8:30 am -- at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, I'll be presenting a paper called "The Comedy of Great Power Politics in the 21st Century." Warning: that's a pdf, which I posted on my rarely used University homepage. On the same panel, my friend Nayef Samhat is presenting "The 'Comedic Turn' and Critical International Relations Theory." If those titles sound strange to you, read my paper (and Nayef's once it is available) and pass along your comments. Better yet, come to the panel. If you are an IR theorist, you probably already guessed a little bit of what we are up to -- or at least what ideas we are challenging. After all, neorealist John Mearsheimer called his last book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Realist theorists of international relations are pessimists and embrace tragic narratives. Classically, the main character of a tragedy was a noble, the story was set in the "great hall" or on the battlefield, and the plot featured the downfall of the protagonist -- often his death. Realist theory is primarily about great powers, their story is set in the competitive "high politics" arena of the international system, and the plots are typically gloomy (featuring war, imperial overstretch, etc.) My paper argues that contemporary great power politics, by realist standards, seems more like a farce than a tragedy -- no balancing behavior, no great power war for decades, the US and China are major trading partners, NATO is thriving, weak and failed states are viewed as the major threats, etc.

Susie: Ethics Roundtable

2007-02-27T08:26:00.001-08:00

Sy Hersh on CNN just now:

John Negroponte was seen as too ethical to sign off on the things the State Department wanted him to do.

This John Negroponte… so imagine how bad their proposals must have been.

Bradford Plumer: Poverty? Not a Problem

2007-02-27T08:20:00.000-08:00

So the reporters at McClatchy snapped on the rubber gloves, plunged into the dark cavities of the Census Bureau, and pulled out a stunning statistic: "Nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty"--a category that includes individuals making less than $5,080 a year, and families of four bringing in less than $9,903 a year. That number, by the way, has been growing rapidly since 2000. The article itself hits the usual refrains--noting that the United States spends less on anti-poverty programs than any other industrialized country outside of Russia and Mexico--but I found this bit near the end quite striking:

The Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation shows that, in a given month, only 10 percent of severely poor Americans received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in 2003--the latest year available--and that only 36 percent received food stamps. Many could have exhausted their eligibility for welfare or decided that the new program requirements were too onerous. But the low participation rates are troubling because the worst byproducts of poverty, such as higher crime and violence rates and poor health, nutrition and educational outcomes, are worse for those in deep poverty.

I doubt those are the only reasons for the low participation rates. As David K. Shipler reported in The Working Poor, welfare agencies spend a great deal of effort dissuading people from applying for assistance. They'll ask single mothers who come in a few perfunctory questions and then--illegally--refuse to give them an application. Or they'll design "Kafkaesque labyrinths of paperwork" that turn any attempt to obtain benefits into a full-time job. Anything to ease pressure on state budgets. Luckily, the Bush administration has taken note of all this and decided to... eliminate the Census's Survey of Income and Program Participation, so that nosy researchers can no longer figure out how many eligible families are receiving assistance. Problem solved!

Scott Horton: Doing God's Work

2007-02-23T17:30:00.001-08:00

Two Hundred Years Ago Today, the Global Campaign for Human Rights Achieved Its First Victory "As soon as ever I had arrived thus far in my investigation of the slave trade, I confess to you sir, so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for the abolition. A trade founded in iniquity, and carried on as this was, must be abolished, let the policy be what it might, - let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest till I had effected its abolition." - William Wilberforce, speech before the House of Commons, May 12, 1789, Hansard vol. 28, col. 68 Today the cause of universal human rights celebrates an important anniversary. On this day two hundred years ago, the Parliament at Westminster voted an act for the abolition of the slave trade. A few decades later, Parliament also voted the manumission of slaves throughout the British Empire. By that time, in the 1830's, the trafficking in slaves was viewed as a jus cogens crime by legal scholars around the world and the global movement to abolish slavery altogether was well launched.

Ezra Klein: Why Punditry S----

2007-02-23T17:28:00.000-08:00

This is nothing personal to Jonah, but why is he going on NPR today to talk about global warming? Does he actually, uh, know anything about global warming? Forget whether his opinion on it is accurate, given the universe of possible participants in a debate about climatological science, a generalist political journalist from The National Review doesn't sound like the most enlightening choice. Indeed, I shouldn't be on talking about global warming either. Not only haven't I read, but I can't even understand, most of the scientific literature on the issue. NPR's listeners deserve better.

This is, in fact, a pretty generalized problem. I was on CNBC recently talking about the President's health care proposals, and not only did the host have no clue what she was talking about, but the generic political consultant I was matched against was similarly out of his element. The difference between a standard deduction and a tax credit seemed totally misunderstood, and no one had any clue what reform plans were floating around Congress. It was embarrassing. There's no way the audience was elevated by that discussion. And yet, these shows can attract experts. And they can choose journalists, non-profiteers, and others who focus in the relevant issue area. But all too often, they just choose...anybody. Balance overwhelms expertise, media skills -- a function of being repeatedly broadcast on the media -- trump analytical ones. It's a shame.

Leonard E. Burman, Jason Furman, Greg Leiserson, Roberton Williams: The President's Proposed Standard Deduction for Health Insurance

2007-02-23T17:27:00.000-08:00

The paper describes the new standard deduction for health insurance, proposed in the FY2008 Budget, and evaluates the extent to which it would meet its stated goals of expanding health insurance coverage and restraining healthcare spending, and its effects on the distribution of tax burdens in the short and long terms. The basic approach would improve the market for health insurance, but inadequate attention was paid to problems in the nongroup market or those facing households with low incomes. In consequence, the plan could actually reduce overall insurance coverage. The paper suggests a variety of ways in which the proposal could be improved so more people would be covered, including those with low incomes or in poor health.

The text below is an excerpt from the complete document. Read the full paper in PDF format.

Introduction

President Bush's FY 2008 budget proposes major changes in tax incentives for health insurance and health care. His plan would eliminate most current tax exclusions and deductions for health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs; for the first time, employer contributions to health insurance would be included in taxable income. In place, the plan creates a separate standard deduction for health insurance in the federal income and payroll taxes for all taxpayers who obtain qualifying health insurance. The plan's intent is to increase the tax incentive to purchase some form of insurance while eliminating the current system's bias in favor of insurance provided through employers and reducing the current tax incentives for over-consumption of health care services and the commensurate under-consumption of other goods and services.

The president's plan also contains several health proposals that lie outside the tax sphere and are not discussed in detail in this analysis. The plan has a vague proposal to allow states greater flexibility to redirect their existing uncompensated care funds to support greater access to affordable health insurance for those with low incomes or chronic health conditions. There are few details on how this would be accomplished. The president also reproposes his Association Health Plan initiative to allow small businesses to purchase health insurance through trade associations and other groups without being subject to state insurance regulations.

The tax proposal is innovative and a step in the right direction, but without substantial expansions and revisions the plan as a whole would weaken existing pooling arrangements and create substantial risks for the current system of health insurance coverage. The proposal implicitly acknowledges that there are no easy answers and spells out some tough choices. It attempts to move forward on the twin problems of the rising number of uninsured and rising health spending without increasing total tax subsidies for health insurance; in fact, as proposed it would even reduce the long-run deficit.

The president's plan effectively turns the existing tax subsidy for health insurance into a kind of voucher. It would increase the amount of tax relief that subsidizes acquisition of some health insurance while eliminating the tax advantages at the margin for increased consumption of health care over all other goods. The proposal will almost certainly encourage some people who currently lack insurance, particularly middle-income families, to get it. And the core of the new proposal is not biased towards the provision of favored forms of insurance (e.g., high deductible policies) over other forms of insurance that could reduce spending (e.g., managed care or plans with higher copayments).

However, as under current law, the subsidy will be more valuable for high-income people than for those with lower incomes who most need help. In fact, low-income households with no income tax liability would get very little help, as is true under the current structure. These limitations could easily be addressed by converting the proposed standard deduction into a flat credit or even a sliding-scale credit that is larger for low-income families.

A more fundamental concern about the plan, as proposed, is that the standard deduction would be available to all who obtained qualifying insurance, whether through an employer or as an individual. That would level the playing field between employer-sponsored insurance and insurance purchased in the individual market. But removing the existing advantage for employment-based plans would lead some employers, especially small and medium-sized businesses, to stop offering health insurance to their employees, exacerbating a trend that is already well underway. Assuming that employers raise wages when they stop offering health insurance, healthy employees will often be able to use their wage boost to purchase inexpensive health insurance in the individual nongroup market, but many who have health problems, especially those with low incomes, will find health insurance unaffordable. Mitigating or remedying these problems would require some combination of expanded public programs, new pooling arrangements, fundamental reform of the individual market, or additional subsidies for targeted groups, such as small employers that offer health insurance, people with chronic health conditions, and low-income households.

The administration proposes to provide states with incentives to address the problems in the nongroup market, but those promises may not be backed by adequate funding. Moreover, the tax changes would go into effect regardless of whether or when states created the complementary programs to expand the nongroup market.

This paper summarizes the proposal and its likely effects on the health insurance market and the level and distribution of tax burdens. We also recommend some modifications that could transform the proposal from a risky change that might destabilize existing insurance into a proposal that would reduce the ranks of the uninsured without collateral costs for vulnerable workers.

Scott Horton: A Tale of Two Georges

2007-02-23T17:26:00.000-08:00

Crossposted from Huffington Post

"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause... for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country." - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775 On February 22, HBO premieres Rory Kennedy's documentary The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. The date is George Washington's birthday. There could be no more appropriate date to launch this documentary, because the experience of Abu Ghraib presents a direct challenge to the legacy of the greatest of America's Founding Fathers. Before America had a Constitution, a Bill of Rights or a Congress - before the institution of the Presidency - it had its first surviving institution, which was the Army. And its first commander-in-chief - the only one to bear that title without simultaneously being president - was the great militia veteran of the French and Indian War, a man whose experience in warfare towered over others, George Washington. From the outset of their confrontation with the British monarchy, the Americans were labeled as traitors and insurgents. They were denied the status of honorable soldiers in arms and were treated shamefully. Even as Washington issued the order quoted at the outset, he knew that all 31 of the prisoners taken by the British at Bunker Hill had died in captivity, many under unsettling circumstances. Of the 2,607 Americans taken prisoner at the capitulation of Ft Washington, all but 800 had died in captivity by 1778. The continental press was filled with accounts of the brutal and inhuman treatment of Americans taken by the British throughout this period. Against a loud public outcry of "eye for an eye," George Washington stood fast. He made it a point of fundamental honor (and that was his word) that the Americans would not only hold dearly to the laws of war, they would define a new law of war that reflected the humanitarian principles for which the new Republic had risen. These principles required respect for the dignity and worth of every human being engaged in the conduct of the war, whether in the American cause or that of the nation's oppressor. They also required respect for the religion and cultural values of foreign peoples. He wrote, "While we are contending for our own liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the rights of conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men, and to Him only in this case are they answerable." Following the Battle of Trenton in 1776, Washington set firm rules for the treatment of prisoners in American custody. "Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands," he wrote. In all respects the prisoners were to be treated no worse than American soldiers; and in some respects, better. Through this approach, Washington sought to shame his British adversaries, and to demonstrate the moral superiority of the American cause. He also anticipated that the prisoners, treated with such attention and care, would reconsider their loyalties by the end of the war and embrace the American cause (his expectation was fulfilled - nearly all of the surviving prisoners of Trenton, for instance, settled in America and attained citizenship, many after US military service). But Washington makes clear that he took this approach in the end because of his experience in the wilderness, and the lesson he learned there: soldiers who mistreated prisoners, who took up cruel practices, were bad and unruly soldiers - the discipline and morale of the entire fighting force was undermined by such conduct. For Washington, the issues were clear on both a moral and practical level, and his guidance was given with firm conviction. Washington's rules on the treatment of prisoners were doctrine of the United States Army for 227 years. From Washington's perspective, they were not marginal matters. Rather, they defined the United States in relationship to the rest of the world. As David Hackett Fischer writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning account, Washington's Crossing: "In a desperate struggle [he] found a way to defeat a formidable enemy... [He] reversed the momentum of the war. [He] improvised a new way of war that grew into an American tradition. And [he] chose a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution." But early in 2002, a later George W, one who knew no military service, decided he knew better than the Founding Father. The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib makes clear that what transpired in that notorious Iraqi prison was not the misdoings of a few "rotten apples," but rather the foreseeable consequence of policies shaped at the highest levels of the Bush Administration. We should keep in mind that Abu Ghraib itself contained abuse that was mild compared with incidents that occurred elsewhere, including more than one hundred deaths in detention - a significant portion of which are linked to torture. Venting at the constraints of international law, which they deemed quaint and outmoded, and seemingly ignorant of the proud American tradition behind that law, policymakers like Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales were determined to dabble in what Vice President Cheney called the "dark side." The consequences of this gravely mistaken departure from America's foundational values have been exactly what Washington foresaw in his charge of September 1775: shame, disgrace and ruin. We should celebrate George Washington's birthday this Thursday by remembering the man and the values for which he stood. And we should redouble our efforts to restore that message of fundamental decency with which our nation came into being. While Congress took an important step forward with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, it was caught by White House trickery the following year in the Military Commissions Act, which has stripped away the writ of habeas corpus, and thus left the Administration unaccountable for the mistreatment of prisoners. If we are to purge this nation of the shame of Abu Ghraib, habeas corpus must be restored, and offenders must be held to account. George Washington would expect no less. He said as much.

Dan Froomkin: A Shaky Briefing on Iran?

2007-02-16T21:36:00.000-08:00

For a long time now, Bush administration officials have been promising reporters proof that the Iranian government is supplying deadly weaponry to Iraqi militants.

The administration finally unveiled its case this weekend, first in coordinated and anonymous leaks to a trusting New York Times reporter, then in an extraordinarily secretive military briefing at which no one would speak on the record, journalists weren't allowed to photograph the so-called evidence, and nothing even remotely like proof of direct Iranian government involvement was presented.

The result: The White House got the headlines it wanted.

But there is plenty of reason for reporters to be suspicious of the administration's claims.

And looking at the big picture, one can't help but wonder: Is this deja vu all over again? Is the Bush admininistration once again building a faulty case for war, this time against Iran? And is the press going along for the ride?

The Gordon Piece

Michael R. Gordon started the ball rolling in the Saturday New York Times: "The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran."

This is about as close as Gordon gets to skepticism: "The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete."

Gordon acknowledges the obvious context -- "Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile," he writes -- but then gives his sources a pass: "The officials said they were willing to discuss the issue to respond to what they described as an increasingly worrisome threat to American forces in Iraq, and were not trying to lay the basis for an American attack on Iran."

It was up to Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher and blogger Glenn Greenwald to put Gordon's own report in context.

"What is the source of this volatile information?" Mitchell asked. "Nothing less than 'civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies.'

"Sound pretty convincing? It may be worth noting that the author is Michael R. Gordon, the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion."

Writes Greenwald: "Over the past few weeks, The Los Angeles Times has published several detailed and well-documented articles casting serious doubt on the administration's claims that Iran is fueling the Iraqi insurgency with weapons. . . .

"But today, The New York Times does precisely the opposite -- it has published a lengthy, prominent front-page article by Michael Gordon that does nothing, literally, but mindlessly recite administration claims about Iran's weapons-supplying activities without the slightest questioning, investigation, or presentation of ample counter-evidence."

And as Greenwald notes, Gordon's story appears to violate quite a few of the basic journalistic rules for avoiding the media's government-enabling mistakes in Vietnam and Iraq that I tried to sketch out for NiemanWatchdog.org last week.

Ezra Klein: Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-Semites

2007-02-16T21:34:00.000-08:00

Sort of without me noticing, TNR's various blogs, writers, and outlets have been hosting a rollicking debate on anti-semites. Bret Stephens, for instance, thinks what's really important is a finely tuned ant-semite-radar, because, "spotting an anti-Semite...requires forensic skills, interpretive wits, and moral judgment." That, I think, is among the most hilarious lines I've ever read, at least until we get to the totally earnest conclusion of, "still, were it up to me Judt, Mearsheimer, Carter et al would be run out of polite society. What's wrong with that?"

Alan Wolfe proceeds to inform Stephens of exactly what's wrong with that. David Greenberg timidly disagrees, and says, "I rather wish that the same outrage that attaches to using the term anti-Semite would attach to using words like "Nazi," "apartheid," and "war crimes" in reference to the Jewish state." Which is weird, because a few sentences earlier, he positively endorses the use of the term "anti-semite" "to shake the scales from the eyes of naifs" who believe words like "apartheid" and "war crimes" can be used in good faith. So it's really not clear what he thinks of any of these words. Alan Wolfe responds in his customarily graceful, devastating, fashion.

And elsewhere, Marty Peretz -- I swear to God -- criticizes George Soros for a spate of delayed JetBlue flights. Could The Spine even get more awesome? The answer is no, my friends. The answer is no.

Greg Sargent: David Brooks And The Doctrine Of Pundit Infallibility

2007-02-16T21:32:00.000-08:00

David Brooks' column in the New York Times today perfectly illustrates what can usefully be called the Doctrine of Pundit Infallibility -- or DOPI for short. Brooks writes:

Far be it from me to get in the middle of a liberal purge, but would anybody mind if I pointed out that the calls for Hillary Clinton to apologize for her support of the Iraq war are almost entirely bogus?...
Today, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party believes that the world, and Hillary Clinton in particular, owes it an apology. If she apologizes, she’ll forfeit her integrity. She will be apologizing for being herself.

Putting aside Brooks' argument about Hillary, this one sentence is worth dwelling on, because it perfectly captures our new DOPI -- pronounced "DOPEY." It shows that a pundit like Brooks, who did plenty of relentless cheerleading for the Iraq conflict, can freely operate in the full knowledge that he'll face no ridicule or derision whatsoever from valued colleagues for very visibly heaping scorn on the people who, unlike him, were right about the war.

Also amusing is the fact that Brooks says liberal Dems want the "world" to apologize to them. Actually, they want people like Brooks himself to own up in a serious way to getting it wrong. When Brooks writes a column about Hillary with this headline:

...it's hard to escape the conclusion that he's really talking about himself.

It's also instructive to take note of the way Brooks essentially mischaracterizes what war opponents now want. I'd say they don't want an "apology" so much as they want war supporters to acknowledge their mistake, partly so that, you know, this sort of thing doesn't happen again. Is that so tough to grasp?

Finally, note Brooks' assertion that liberal Dems want the world to apologize to them. Actually, I'd say that most opponents of the invasion want war backers to acknowledge their mistake to the relatives and friends of these people:

Digby: Polarizer In Chief

2007-02-16T21:30:00.000-08:00

ABC News' Teddy Davis Reports: In the forthcoming issue of Texas Monthly, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd writes that President Bush's "gut-level bond" with the American people "may be lost" and that "wholesale change" is needed in Iraq. "Sending in a small contingent of troops is likely going to be seen as not helpful," Dowd writes. "He'd be much better off with the public if he said, 'This is a mess, we made mistakes, and the only way to fix it is a wholesale change.' And that could mean either a serious increase in troop strength or withdrawal." Dowd opines that Bush's problems stem from his success in the 2002 midterm elections. ". . . when all the levers of power in Washington became Republican, creating consensus seemed to become unnecessary at the White House."

Well now, that seems like quite a mistake doesn't it? I'll bet the president wishes he hadn't done that. Who do you suppose told him he didn't need to gain consensus to govern effectively?

In late 2000, even as the result of the presidential election was still being contested in court, George W. Bush's chief pollster Matt Dowd was writing a memo for Rove that would reach a surprising conclusion. Based on a detailed examination of poll data from the previous two decades, Dowd's memo argued that the percentage of swing voters had shrunk to a tiny fraction of the electorate. Most self-described "independent" voters "are independent in name only," Dowd told me in an interview describing his memo. "Seventy-five percent of independents vote straight ticket" for one party or the other. Once such independents are reclassified as Democrats or Republicans, a key trend emerges: Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of true swing voters fell from a very substantial 24 percent of the electorate to just 6 percent. In other words, the center was literally disappearing. Which meant that, instead of having every incentive to govern as "a uniter, not a divider," Bush now had every reason to govern via polarization.

Let the self-serving re-writing of history begin.

Matthew Yglesias: "I See No Loyalty Here, Sir"

2007-02-14T15:25:00.000-08:00

To me, the striking thing is how infrequent it is to actually see non-critics of America's Israel policy make the argument that current policy serves the vital interests of the United States (TNR's editorial line, for example, from which some authors obviously deviate, has tended to deny that American policy should be governed by considerations of the national interests; the recent TNR article on the Iranian nuclear program didn't so much as mention American interests). I would genuinely be interested to read an article making the case that it serves American interests to make Israel the largest recipient of American foreign aid dollars. Were someone to put together a strong argument to that effect, then others could read it and put together counterarguments. I think we could, then, have a reasonably civil disagreement about a fairly standard political question, "should our policies be like this or would it be better to change them like this?" instead of a vicious argument about whether Israel is "bad" or its critics are anti-semites.

After all, it's not as if the US's failure to appropriate $3 billion in annual aid to Costa Rica is driven by a sense that Costa Rica is a uniquely horrible country. In fact, it's a rather nice country. We're just not that generous with our foreign aid. But Israel's a weird target for all that aid. Why not a poorer country like Bangladesh? Or one more objectively threatened like Taiwan? At the end of the day, I don't think a failure to think these things through actually constitutes "dual loyalties," it just constitutes a failure to think these things through. A rigorous assessment of national interests might prompt a clash of sentiments or loyalties, so people simply don't do it; and the core element of America's policy vis-à-vis Israel -- heavy financial support whose rationale is unclear -- just goes undiscussed.

Unqualified Offerings: Glenn Reynolds Says: "Assassinations R US"

2007-02-14T15:24:00.000-08:00

One of the saddest, despair-inducing phenomena among many in the current American political crisis has been the wholesale moral corruption of people who once were principled and reasonable libertarians or liberals. Among the more disturbing public descents into true depravity has been Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds’ Bush-era ideological trajectory. Some months ago he breezily noted claims that the death, maiming and carnage in Iraq are no more of a big deal than the homicide rates in American cities such as Philadelphia.

Now, he is openly advocating the assassination – assassination — of civilians in nations with whom we are not even at war. Glenn Greenwald, who is now blogging at Salon (brief ad click-though req’d), documents how extreme and contrary to American values and law is Reynolds’ latest horrific pronouncement:

Every administration, Democratic and Republican, have agreed that creating death squads and engaging in extra-judicial assassinations is so repugnant to our political values and so destructive to our moral credibility around the world that an absolute ban is necessary — including at the height of the Cold War…

. And what is most striking is that these anti-assassination prohibitions apply (a) to wartime and (b) even to foreign leaders of nations who are at war. But here, Reynolds is actually advocating that we murder scientists and religious figures who are “radical,” whatever that might happen to mean in the unchecked mind of George Bush.

If we are to be a country that now sends death squads into nations with whom we are not at war to slaughter civilians — scientists and religious figures — what don’t we do?

Yesterday, the popular Republican blog Red State advocated war with Iran and embraced having it spread throughout the Middle East. Now, the respected (look, he is, whether readers here like it or not) law professor Glenn Reynolds is advocating extra-judicial murder of civilians at the whim of George W. Bush — and Hugh Hewitt thinks that’s a great idea. As Greenwald documents, these Bush supporters are embracing a policy Abraham Lincoln explicitly rejected as barbaric during the height of this nation’s bloody Civil War.

It may be a cliché, but those generally exist because they are based in truth; more than a few Bush supporters would have us become the things we purport to hate. We are well down the road of national vitiation already, but not far enough for Glenn Reynolds.

Wonkette: Army Brass Beg 24: "Stop Torturing Everybody"

2007-02-14T15:22:00.000-08:00

U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan has pleaded with the producers of a popular teevee show about torturing Arabs to please stop torturing everybody. With the military now forced to accept high-school dropouts, felons, drug addicts, fatsos, gang-bangers, rapists, cretins and half-wits in a desperate attempt to meet the Pentagon’s demand for more bodies, Finnegan is bothered by the show 24 because young recruits now believe it’s “patriotic” to torture and murder Muslims.

“I’d like them to stop,” said Finnegan about the show’s endless torture scenes. “They should do a show where torture backfires.” (Ha ha, there is a “show” like that. It’s called Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.)

The general (also the dean of West Point) took the Army and FBI’s top interrogators to the production company, but 24 co-creator and executive producer Joel Surnow didn’t show up — he was talking on the phone with Fox News chief Roger Ailes.

Majikthese: Froomkin Nails Iran Briefing Story

2007-02-13T13:58:00.000-08:00

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post:

For a long time now, Bush admininstration officials have been promising reporters proof that the Iranian government is supplying deadly weaponry to Iraqi militants.
The administration finally unveiled its case this weekend, first in coordinated and anonymous leaks to a trusting New York Times reporter, then in an extraordinarily secretive military briefing at which no one would speak on the record, journalists weren't allowed to photograph the so-called evidence, and nothing even remotely like proof of direct Iranian government involvement was presented.
The result: The White House got the headlines it wanted.

Read the whole thing.

Matthew Yglesias: Mike Gerson and Condi Rice: Worst Speechwriters Ever

2007-02-13T13:57:00.000-08:00

Worst Speech Ever

This is really shocking:

In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the "Axis of Evil." Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush's controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn't ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan's ringing denunciations of the "evil empire."
Once again, Iran's reformists were knocked back on their heels. "Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized," says Adeli. "The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America's intentions."

In short, Michael Gerson and Condoleezza Rice, purely in order to make a speech that (a) sounded good, and (b) pretended not to be exclusively about Iraq, set the United States on a collision course with Iran. That's really got to be a historic speechwriting blunder.

Naturally enough, Gerson's paid a high price for his role in instigating this destructive conflict. After continuing to serve for years in the White House he's been forced to accept a humiliating position as a Council on Foreign Relations fellow and a columnist for some obscure magazine called Newsweek.

War and Peace: Doug Feith: Lyingest Man Alive

2007-02-13T13:56:00.000-08:00

Former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith on Fox News Sunday: my office never said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Perhaps he has forgotten this leaked Feith memo, cited favorably by the Vice President, and published by the Weekly Standard: "OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. ...."

William Odom: Victory Is Not an Option

2007-02-13T13:55:00.000-08:00

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating "nonbinding resolutions" that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of "who gets the blame" could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East.

No task is more important to the well-being of the United States. We face great peril in that troubled region, and improving our prospects will be difficult. First of all, it will require, from Congress at least, public acknowledgment that the president's policy is based on illusions, not realities. There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question:

First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly "constitutional" -- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

Strangely, American political scientists whose business it is to know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone who dared to mention the many findings of academic research on how democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions favoring it.

This is not to say that Arabs cannot become liberal democrats. When they immigrate to the United States, many do so quickly. But it is to say that Arab countries, as well as a large majority of all countries, find creating a stable constitutional democracy beyond their capacities.

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis' rising animosity toward the United States. Even supporters of an American military presence say that it is acceptable temporarily and only to prevent either of the warring sides in Iraq from winning. Today the Iraqi government survives only because its senior members and their families live within the heavily guarded Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and military command.

As Congress awakens to these realities -- and a few members have bravely pointed them out -- will it act on them? Not necessarily. Too many lawmakers have fallen for the myths that are invoked to try to sell the president's new war aims. Let us consider the most pernicious of them.

The Poor Man: Easy Answers to Stupid Questions, Part Double Infinity

2007-02-13T13:54:00.000-08:00

Q: Mike Allen of the Politico asks:

Barack Obama’s free ride is ending. […]

Now, Obama’s about to endure a going-over that would make a proctologist blush. Why has he sometimes said his first name is Arabic, and other times Swahili? […]

Even his name offers fodder for the critics. When he was growing up, his family, friends and teachers called him “Barry.” Then as a young man, he started insisting on “Barack,” explaining in a memoir published in 1995 that his grandfather was a Muslim and that it means “blessed” in Arabic. His dad, who was Kenyan, had gone by “Barry” — probably trying to fit in when he came to the States, his son figured. On the campaign trail during his 2004 Senate race, Obama told reporters that “Barack” was Swahili for “blessed by God.”

Whatever its origins, the exotic, multicultural name – so open to interpretation that some Irish folks he ran into assumed “O’Bama” must be one of theirs – is just one of the tools Obama has used to create a captivating narrative about himself as a post-partisan messiah for a nation weary of Potomac combat.

Arabic was so instrumental in the “birth” of Swahili that many non-linguists at one moment wanted to class it as a dialect of Arabic. The truth is that the various Arab trading posts attracted several speakers of different but related Bantu languages. These Bantu speakers could not communicate using a specific Bantu language, but they all needed basic rudiments of Arabic lexis to carry out commercial transactions [*cough* slave trade *cough*]. This situation led to the development of a lingua franca around each Arab trading post. But since, on one hand, the various Bantu languages demonstrated a high degree of lexical and morphosyntactic similarities, and, on the other hand, all these speakers interacted with one and the same common external language, Arabic, the resulting lingua franca in the various settlements, ended up by becoming mere dialects of a new language spoken by the coastal inhabitants - Swahili.

Shorter A: Stop. Writing. Forever.

Of course, at the moment the only people I hear raising this non-question are semi-literate talk radio nonentities like the galactically stupid Debbie Schlussel. But I lack access to the Politico’s patented FuturVision® Time-Travelling Journalistic Interocitor, and so cannot say with certainty what retarded insinuations will - as inevitably as the sunrise, and through nobody’s aggressive idiocy - soon be appearing in the stories which The Magical Press Elves cobble together while all good journalists are fast asleep all snug in their beds. And now, as a good journalist, Mr. Allen has fulfilled his obligation to repeat whatever “somebody” with a transparent agenda just told him anonymously, without once questioning whether he is being played for a complete idiot. For that would be partisan. And we mustn’t do that.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who, in the midst of the biggest debacle since Vietnam, hopes that Obama will “speak …” - wait for it! -”with civility”. If any of readers live near me, and own a sniper rifle, please kill me. Just get me in your crosshairs and take me the fuck out already. I can’t take it anymore.

Matthew Yglesias: Striking!

2007-02-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

"What is striking," sagely observes Charles Krauthammer, "is how much of the debate in Washington about Iraq has to do not with the war but with the words." In reality, the most striking thing is that Charles Krauthammer, America's Worst Columnist, continues to be published weekly in The Washington Post. Take, for example, this feeble effort at a gotcha. He notes that the Senate unanimously confirmed David Petraeus and then asks, "If you really oppose the surge, how can you not oppose the appointment of the man whose very mission is to carry it out?"

I promise that Jonah Goldberg could do better than this in his sleep. After a cup of coffee he'd probably even find a way to paint surge opponents as Nazi sympathizers.

To answer Krauthammer's question, nobody opposed Petraeus's appointment because there was no reason to oppose it. The "surge" is the president's plan and whichever general was in command in Iraq would be ordered to carry it out; someone has to be in command of the troops in Iraq even if the troops' mission is to withdraw; and just about everyone seems to think Petraeus is a good general. What's more, the president is always granted very broad deference in these kind of decisions.

What's striking is that Krauthammer obviously knows all of this and is just using his column as an opportunity to write in bad faith. The president is extremely unpopular since at this point everyone knows that he's inept, lazy, corrupt, etc. Petraeus, by contrast, gets good press. So the idea is to paint this as Petraeus's war rather than Bush's. Hence, war opponents should oppose Petraeus' appointment and the argument will be made even though it makes no sense.

David Wessel: Bush's Course on Budget Parallels Iraq

2007-02-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

The numbers in President Bush's budget add up -- arithmetically. If his assumptions come true, the deficit will evaporate in 2012.

But there are a lot of ifs -- if Iraq and Afghanistan cost only $50 billion in 2009 and nothing thereafter; if the president and Congress hold growth in annually appropriated domestic spending well below inflation; if they let the alternative minimum tax reach deeper into the middle class or raise taxes on others to prevent that; if Congress squeezes $66 billion (4%) from Medicare over five years.

OK. Give him a break. A presidential budget is an opening bid, not an attempt at stating a consensus.

But is it sound? If former Republican Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton led a budget commission like their Iraq Study Group, what would they say?

They would hardly need to rewrite their cover letter. "There is no magic formula … . However, there are actions that can be taken to improve the situation and protect American interests," they said in the Iraq report. "Many Americans are dissatisfied, not just with the situation...but with the state of our political debate … . Our country deserves a debate that prizes substance over rhetoric, and a policy that is adequately funded and sustainable."

William Gale of the Brookings Institution think tank -- populated by deficit-fearing Democratic wonks who have been trying to find common ground with deficit-fearing Republican wonks -- has been thinking a lot lately about the parallels between Mr. Bush on Iraq and Mr. Bush on the budget.

"The Bush administration's two signature policies have been the war in Iraq and consistent pressure for tax cuts," he argues. "On the surface, they look quite different and were advocated by different parts of the administration. Look a little deeper and some common patterns emerge -- so maybe this says something about the principles or management style of the Bush administration."

It is a provocative and illuminating exercise. Let Mr. Gale kick it off: The president took the U.S. into Iraq with "falsely rosy scenarios" about the post-Saddam landscape there, he says. Mr. Bush built his tax cuts in 2001 on a similarly unrealistic hope that the budget surplus was large enough to cut taxes without creating deficits.

Let us keep going. As Iraq proved different and more difficult than anticipated, and contingency planning was regarded by the Bush White House as a sign of weakness, rather than prudence, Mr. Bush vowed to "stay the course." When then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan argued for "triggers" to undo tax cuts if budget reality didn't match projections, the White House scoffed. Even when the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drove spending on homeland security and the military far above projections, Mr. Bush didn't revisit his fiscal strategy.

Smart critics, even inside the administration, were disregarded and shunned...

Dan Froomkin: Washington Journamalism on Trial

2007-02-09T13:56:00.000-08:00

Washington Journalism on Trial

By Dan Froomkin Special to washingtonpost.com Thursday, February 8, 2007; 1:34 PM

If you're a journalist, and a very senior White House official calls you up on the phone, what do you do? Do you try to get the official to address issues of urgent concern so that you can then relate that information to the public?

Not if you're NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert.

When then-vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby called Russert on July 10, 2003, to complain that his name was being unfairly bandied about by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Russert apparently asked him nothing.

And get this: According to Russert's testimony yesterday at Libby's trial, when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record.

That's not reporting, that's enabling.

That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable.

Many things are "on trial" at the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse right now. Libby is the only one facing a jail sentence -- and Russert's testimony, firmly contradicting the central claim of Libby's defense, may just end up putting him there.

But Libby's boss, along with the whole Bush White House, for that matter, is being held up to public scrutiny as well.

And the behavior of elite members of Washington's press corps -- sometimes appearing more interested in protecting themselves and their cozy "sources" than in informing the public -- is also being exposed for all the world to see.

For Russert, yesterday's testimony was the second source of trial-related embarrassment in less than two weeks. The first came when Cathie Martin, Cheney's former communications director, testified that the vice president's office saw going on Russert's "Meet the Press" as a way to go public but "control [the] message."

In other words: Sure, there might be a tough question or two, but Russert could be counted on not to knock the veep off his talking points -- and, in that way, give him just the sort of platform he was looking for.

Russert's description of how he does business with government officials came when prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked him whether there were "any explicit ground rules" for his conversation with Libby.

According to someone taking meticulous notes at the courthouse yesterday, Russert replied: "Specifically, no. But when I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it's my own policy our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission."

In his cross-examination, defense attorney Theodore Wells sounded incredulous that Russert wouldn't have asked Libby some questions. After all, former ambassador Joseph Wilson had gone public just four days earlier with his provocative charge that the administration manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq. Wilson had done that in a New York Times op-ed -- and on "Meet the Press" itself.

"You have the chief of staff of the vice president of the United States on the telephone and you don't ask him one question about it?" Wells asked. "As a newsperson who's known for being aggressive and going after the facts, you wouldn't have asked him about the biggest stories in the world that week?"

Russert replied: "What happened is exactly what I told you."

Tim Burke: Don't Expect Zimbabwe to Improve Much Soon

2007-02-09T13:55:00.000-08:00

Much as I think Mugabe is loathsome, and that his loathsomeness was consistently underestimated by many observers and commenters of Zimbabwe's politics in the 1980s, it's important not to overlook the more systemic problems in the postcolonial Zimbabwean state. Mugabe is not in fact a charismatic authoritarian who somehow overwhelmed an otherwise competent or well-functioning liberal democracy and drove into ruin. He's certainly an autocratic and unscrupulous control freak, and has been ever since he first entered politics. But what has happened to Zimbabwe since the late 1980s has as much to do with a wider circle of people around Mugabe, both in the ruling party and in important and powerful institutions, including the military.

When Mugabe dies, I wouldn't expect things to get magically better. First, because much of what gave Zimbabwe a promising economic and social outlook circa 1988 has been thoroughly and structurally destroyed. Second, because at least some of the people around Mugabe have instincts just as self-destructive and have every reason to inhibit good management or democratization (as they will likely be the ones prosecuted by a vengeful reformist regime).

The problem with fantasizing about unilateral military action in this case is connected to this problem. You could drop a bunch of Special Forces guys on the presidential palace in Harare, take out Mugabe, and change absolutely zero. Frankly you could occupy the country with UN forces and change absolutely zero. What's needed is a huge change in the fundamental architecture of the Zimbabwean state and a change in the basic composition of the thin upper range of the most powerful elite. Those are not transformations which occupiers can readily bring about (something which I'd think should be screamingly apparent to everyone by now).

About the only positive short-term scenario is that some of the younger, smarter, more competent guys in ZANU-PF who have been carefully keeping their heads low through the last decade will move aggressively on Mugabe's death to push aside hacks like Didymus Mutasa and clean out the bureaucratic house. But to really succeed at that, they'd have to reverse a lot of brain-drain and draw back competent managerial and professional elites who have (wisely) left for other countries