Tyler Drumheller: "We Probably Gave Powell the Wrong Speech"

"We Probably Gave Powell the Wrong Speech"

The former chief of the CIA's Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, discusses the United States foreign intelligence service's cooperation with Germany, the covert kidnapping of suspected terrorists and a Bush adminstration that ignored CIA advice and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Drumheller, do you still dare to travel to Europe?

Drumheller: Yes, absolutely. I was a great friend of the Europeans. I grew up in Wiesbaden. I love Germany very much.

SPIEGEL: Arrest warrants have been issued in Europe for a number of your former colleagues. They are suspected of involvement in the illegal kidnappings of suspected terrorists as part of the so-called "renditions" program. Doesn't this worry you?

Drumheller: No. I'm not worried, but I am not allowed to discuss the issue.

SPIEGEL: One of the cases is the now famous kidnapping of Khalid el-Masri, a German-Lebanese who was taken into custody at the end of 2003 in Macedonia and later flown to Afghanistan. How could the CIA allow an innocent person to be arrested?

Drumheller: I'm not allowed by the agency to comment on any of those cases or the so-called "secret prisons." I would love to, but I can't. We have a life-long secrecy agreement and they are very, very strict about what you can say.

SPIEGEL: The renditions program saw the kidnapping of suspected Islamist extremists to third countries. Were you involved in the program?

Drumheller: I would be lying if I said no. I have very complicated feelings about the whole issue. I do see the purpose of renditions, if they are carried out properly. Guys sitting around talking about carrying out attacks as they smoke their pipes in the comfort of a European capital tend to get put off the idea if they learn that a like-minded individual has been plucked out of safety and sent elsewhere to pay for his crimes.

SPIEGEL: We disagree. At the very least, you need to be certain that the targets of those renditions aren't innocent people.

Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences.

SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called "war on terrorism"?

Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

SPIEGEL: Perhaps the White House wanted to gloss over its own responsibility.

Drumheller: Let me give you a general thought: From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism. It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President (George W.) Bush and his entourage could blame someone else. The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush Administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions.

SPIEGEL: Investigations in the European Parliament and the German parliament, the Bundestag, are trying to ascertain the extent to which European governments cooperated with the CIA after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. How close is the relationship?

Drumheller: On terrorist issues very closely -- we did some very good things with the Europeans. Two weeks after Sept. 11, August Hanning (the head of the German foreign intelligence service, the BND) came with a delegation to discuss how we can make cooperation better. Elements of the Bush administration developed the view that European personal privacy laws were somehow to blame, that the Europeans are too slow. We can be very frustrating to work with. I always said, 'Stop preaching to them.' The Europeans have been dealing with terrorism for years, we can learn from their successes and failures. Its not a good spy story, but it's actually how you do this.

SPIEGEL: How important is Europe to the CIA?

Drumheller: The only way we will ever be able to protect ourselves properly is if we can get a handle on the threat in Europe, since that is the continent where fanatics can best learn their most crucial lesson: How to disappear in a Western crowd. Europe has become the first line of defense for the United States. It has become a training ground for terrorists, especially since the war in Iraq has heralded an underground railroad for militants to go and fight there. It is being used for young fanatics in Europe to be smuggled into Iraq to fight Americans and, assuming they survive, to return home, where they present a more potent threat than they did before they left. Since the odds against penetrating the top of al-Qaida are phenomenally high, we must pursue the foot soldiers.

SPIEGEL: But given the uproar in Germany and all over Europe, it looks highly unlikely that they will cooperate fully with the CIA.

Drumheller: The guys who attacked the World Trade Center didn't fly from Kabul to New York. They came from Hamburg. So the value in befriending the local intelligence services in Europe instead of alienating them is clear: We need to ensure that they are telling us everything they know.

SPIEGEL: But it was your agency that was coming up with all the wrong information concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. To what degree is the intelligence community responsible for the disaster?

Drumheller: The agency is not blameless and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA. But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war.

SPIEGEL: One of the crucial bits of information the Bush administration used to justify the invasion was the supposed existence of mobile biological weapons laboratories. That came from a German BND source who was given the code-name "Curveball." An offical investigation in the United States concluded that of all of the false statements that were made, this was the most damaging of all.

Drumheller: I think it is, it was a centerpiece. Curveball was an Iraqi who claimed to be an engineer working on the biological weapons program. When he became an asylum-seeker in Germany, the BND questioned him and produced a large number of reports that were passed here through the Defense Intelligence Agency. Curveball was a sort of clever fellow who carried on about his story and kept everybody pretty well convinced for a long time.

SPIEGEL: There are more than a few critics in Washington who claim that the Germans, because of Curveball, bear a large part of the repsonsibility for the intelligence mess.

Drumheller: There was no effort by the Germans to influence anybody from the beginning. Very senior officials in the BND expressed their doubts, that there may be problems with this guy. They were very professional. I know that there are people at the CIA who think the Germans could have set stronger caveats. But nobody says: "Here's a great intel report, but we don't believe it." There were also questions inside the CIA's analytical section, but as it went forward, this information was seized without caveats. The administration wanted to make the case for war with Iraq. They needed a tangible thing, they needed the German stuff. They couldn't go to war based just on the fact that they wanted to change the Middle East. They needed to have something threatening to which they were reacting.

SPIEGEL: The German government was convinced that "Curveball" would not be used in the now famous presentation that then US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave in 2003 before the United Nations Security Council.

Drumheller: I had assured my German friends that it wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Dont worry about that."

SPIEGEL: But it turned out to be the centerpiece in Powell's presentation -- and nobody had told him about the doubts.

Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

SPIEGEL: After the war, the CIA was finally able to talk to "Curveball" -- something the BND had never allowed before. What was the result?

Drumheller: In March 2004, a fluent German-speaking officer, one of my best guys, who had a scientific background went to Germany and worked for about two weeks. Finally, at the end of it, Curveball just sort of sat back and said: "I don't have anything more to say." But he never admitted. People here always ask, was he polygraphed? Well, lie detector tests aren't used very much in Germany.

SPIEGEL: Do you think it would have make a difference if the Germans had allowed you to question Curveball earlier?

Drumheller: If they had allowed us to question him the way we did in March of 2004, it would have. Maybe the whole story would have turned out in a different way.

SPIEGEL: In your book, you mention a very high-ranking source who told the CIA before the war that Iraq had no large active WMD program. It has been reported that the source was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri.

Drumheller: I'm not allowed to say who that was. In the beginning, the administration was very excited that we had a high-level penetration, and the president was informed. I don't think anybody else had a source in Saddam's cabinet. He told us that Iraq had no biological weapons, just the research. Everything else had been destroyed after the first Gulf War. But after a while we didn't get any questions back. Finally the administration came and said that they were really not interested in what he had to say. They were interested in getting him to defect. In the end we did get permission to get back to the source, and that came from Tenet. I think without checking with the White House, he just said: "Okay. Go ahead and see what you can do."

SPIEGEL: So what happened?

Drumheller: There were a lot of ironies throughout this whole story. We went on a sort of worldwide chase after this fellow, and in the end, he was in one place, and our officer was in another country asking for permission to travel. I called up people who were controlling operations, and they said: "Don't worry about it. It's too late now. The war is on. The next time you see this guy, it will be at a war crimes tribunal."

SPIEGEL: Should you have pressed harder?

Drumheller: We made mistakes. And it may suit the White House to have people believe in a black and white version of reality -- that it could have avoided the Iraq war if the CIA had only given it a true picture of Saddam's armaments. But the truth is that the White House believed what it wanted to believe. I have done very little in my life except go to school and work for the CIA. Intellectually I think I did everything I could. Emotionally you always think you should have something more.

Interview conducted by Georg Mascolo and Holger Stark.

Brad Setser: Larry Summers on Globalization

I am intrigued by a comment the often provacative Larry Summers made at a Davos seminar:

Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard University president, delivered some harsh criticism of the way globalization has been pitched to the public. Making the intellectual case for free trade and then simply “paying off” some of the losers in globalization, Mr. Summers said, will not work for world leaders trying to sell the current round of global trade talks to a skeptical polity.

“That’s the Davos lie,” Mr. Summers said during a dinner Friday night.

I wonder what Summers thinks would work?

One of the things that has struck me about the current politics of trade is that the losers aren't really paid off -- either formally or informally. The various government programs that help displaced workers are small. The heads of private equity firms don't, for example, don't tend to raise funds for charities to help workers displaced by booming US imports of auto parts, even though private equity firms clearly have been among those who have benefited heavily from the United States ability to import China's savings surplus.

In some areas, paying people off the losers is rather hard. Compensating US farmers for the loss in market value of their land should the US ever really give up its agricultural subsidies would be quite expensive -- as, for that matter, would compensating US homeowners for their losses should the US every stop subsidizing mortgage interest. Once a subsidy gets capitalized into asset values, watch out ...

I suspect Summers believes that the integration of China and India into the world economy have such profound implications -- including such profound implications for who wins and who loses from trade -- that old policies for managing trade-related dislocation aren't enough. But I don't really know ...

One way of "selling" trade is to emphasize the benefits from imports -- not just the gains from exports. It is pretty hard to argue, for example, that the majority of the gains from US trade with China have come from expanding US goods exports. Sure China buys some Boeings, but China clearly buys far more US debt than US goods. Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley never tires of emphasizing how much the US gains from importing cheap Chinese goods and cheap Chinese financing.

But that doesn't address the concerns of those worried about competition from cheap Chinese labor -- or the concerns of those of us who worry that the US has become a bit too dependent on cheap Chinese financing.

Update: For more, see the Economist's (libertarian-tending) blog, Free exchange, which basically argues that the business men who see the opportunites brought by globalization are right, and the intellectuals worried about its risks are wrong. Business, the argument goes, must do a better job of explaining globalization's broad benefits (i.e. cheap goods -- big profits and big CEO salaries don't count as broad benefits). I suspect that won't work. I would be surprised if the average American hasn't already figured out that Walmart's everyday low prices are largely made in China. The average American also, I suspect, has figured out that the latest round of globalization -- the one that has made the Russian businessmen and their "nieces" the toast of Davos -- hasn't brough with it lower prices for many other things they buy, little things like oil and gas ...

Patrick Cockburn: US soldiers in Iraq kill 250 men from 'apocalyptic cult'

American and Iraqi troops killed about 250 armed men alleged to belong to an apocalyptic Islamic cult who were planning to attack the religious leadership of the Shia in the holy city of Najaf, according to Iraqi political, military and police sources.

The battle took place in the orchards around Najaf and a US helicopter was shot down during the fighting, killing two crewmen. Hundreds of fighters drawn from the Sunni and Shia communities who gathered amid the date palms were followers of Ahmed Hassani al-Yemeni who claims to be the vanguard of the Messiah according to Iraqi politicians. His office in Najaf had been closed 10 days ago.

Details of what happened are sketchy. The US forces used tanks and F-16 fighter bombers. An Iraqi military source said the dead wore headbands declaring them to be "Soldiers of Heaven". The Najaf governor Asaad Abu Gilel said the authorities had discovered a conspiracy to kill some of the senior clergy.

Anarchic violence reached new heights across Iraq. Mortar bombs exploding in the courtyard of a girls' school in west Baghdad killed five children and wounded 21 in the latest atrocity in the escalating sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia.

"The shrapnel hit her in the eyes and there was blood all over her face ... she was dead," said Ban Ismet, a 15-year-old girl wounded in the legs, speaking in hospital of her friend Maha who was killed by the bomb.

The mortaring of the Kholoud Secondary School in the Adil district was the latest tit-for-tat attack between Shia and Sunni in this highly contested area. The school is Sunni and the killing of the children was most likely carried out by Shia militiamen who have been attacking Adil from the north. Sunni in Baghdad are increasingly being driven into the south-west quadrant of the city.

The school headmistress Faziya Swadi said that two mortar bombs exploded in the courtyard of the school, breaking the windows and spraying the pupils with broken glass as well as shrapnel. The stone steps and pathways were smeared with blood. Hours later weeping parents were placing bodies of their children in wooden coffins.

Wherever Sunni and Shia districts are close together in Baghdad there are frequent killings. Each community sees itself as being the victim of unprovoked aggression. Sectarian animosities are particularly high because the Shia rite of Ashura takes place tomorrow when they commemorate the martyrdom of the Imam Hussein at the Battle of Kerbala in AD680. Hundreds of thousands of Shia are making the three-day pilgrimage on foot from Baghdad to Kerbala.

Seven people were killed yesterday by three bombs, two left in markets and one on a bus, in Shia neighbourhoods.

Some 150 people, mostly Shia, have been killed by bomb attacks in Baghdad over the past week. But probably a majority of the 25 to 50 dead bodies, often bearing marks of torture, that are found by police every morning in the capital are Sunni. This is because the police and police commandos are Shia and often detain and kill Sunni at their checkpoints.

Mixed neighbourhoods are disappearing in the capital. The sectarian cleansing started in 2005 and gathered pace after the destruction of the Shia al-Askarai shrine in Samarra in February 2006. Bomb attacks on Sadr City on 23 November last year killed 215 and wounded 250 more. Shia retaliation led to another mass flight of Sunni. Since there are no Sunni safe havens in Iraq, either in Baghdad or outside, many members of the community are fleeing to Jordan and Syria.

In a sign of the unreliability of the security forces some 1,500 policemen have been sacked in the province of Diyala north-west of Baghdad. The new police chief Ghanim al-Qureishi said the men were fired because they fled instead of fighting when insurgents attacked the provincial capital Baquba in November.

BooMan: Did Ari Fleischer Commit Perjury Today?

Did Ari Fleischer Commit Perjury Today?

by BooMan Mon Jan 29th, 2007 at 08:53:02 PM EST

I think I may have found evidence that Ari Fleischer committed perjury today. If Ari Fleischer did not commit perjury today, then former Time Magazine reporter John Dickerson is a big-time liar. First I will introduce the principals, then I will provide the setting and significance of this testimony, and, finally, I will set off the comments of Dickerson against the testimony of Fleischer (and I will do it in pretty color-coded boxes).

Most of you will remember Ari Fleischer as President's Bush's first press secretary. He served as press secretary from the inauguration in January 2001 until July 14th, 2003 (coincidentally, the same day that Robert Novak's column appeared). Fleischer testified today that he had lunch with Scooter Libby on July 7th, 2003 (the day after Joseph Wilson made his appearance on Meet the Press and his editorial appeared in the New York Times). During that lunch, Fleischer testified that Libby told him the name 'Valerie Plame' and that she was responsible for sending her husband to Niger. Later that same day Fleischer boarded Air Force One and headed to Africa with the President, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and a host of other officials.

Fleischer testified that four days later (July 11th) while in Uganda, he told reporters David Gregory (NBC), Tamara Lippert (Newsweek) and John Dickerson (Time Magazine) that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was responsible for sending him on the trip.

John Dickerson no longer works for Time. Last I knew, he worked for Slate Magazine as their Chief Political Correspondent. On February 7, 2006 he wrote a column for Slate wherein he revealed that a 'senior administration official' had given him a tip: 'go ask the CIA who sent Wilson'. That senior administration official was Ari Fleischer and they had that conversation in Uganda on July 11th, 2003.

You may have aleady noticed a discrepency in the story Dickerson told and the story Fleischer testified to today. Dickerson said that Fleischer gave him a tip to go ask who sent Wilson. Fleischer said he straight-up told Dickerson (and Gregory and Lippert) that Wilson's wife was responsible.

This discrepency has enormous potential consquences. Fleischer claims that he did not understand the information Libby was giving him about Plame was classified even though Libby told him it that it was 'hush-hush and on the Q.T.' If he didn't think it was classified then he wouldn't be worried about off-handedly telling Dickerson about Plame. But, if he didn't give her name away as he claims, but rather, told the reporters to seek out the 'low-level person' in the CIA that was responsible for sending Wilson...then he knew the information was classified.

Fleischer has immunity for the leak of Plame's name, but he doesn't have immunity against perjuring himself in this trial. Therefore, he would be crazy to lie on the stand. And, yet, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he did exactly that when he testified today. Unless, that is, John Dickerson is a big-fat liar...

Spencer Ackerman: All Americans see on TV screens are Sunnis slaughtering Shiites and ethnic cleansing in the streets.

yeah that's the other side of this life:

Lally Weymouth jawbones with Adel Abdul Mehdi:

Unfortunately this is true. But this is only one part of the picture. Only 12 months ago, we had elections and 12 million people voted, Sunnis and Shiites.

Yes, and as a result, all Americans see on TV screens are Sunnis slaughtering Shiites and ethnic cleansing in the streets.

Also, if I'm Adel Abdul Mehdi, and a reporter mentions to me at the World Economic Forum that I'm Bush's favorite to replace the of-course-sovereign PM Maliki, I'd walk into the Swiss foreign ministry and seek asylum.

Mark Kleiman: Better drug policy in nineteen easy steps

Well, maybe not so easy.

I have an essay in the current issue of The American Interest intended as a standing-on-one-foot guide to practical drug policy reform. The introduction lays out what I take to be the central facts; what follows is a set of fairly specific recommendations for action, intended to be illustrative rather than comprehensive.

There's something in the essay, I trust, to offend almost everybody, but most of it reflects a near-consensus among the small tribe of academic drug policy analysts. (Most of my colleagues disagree with me about eliminating the minimum drinking age, and I'm just about alone in having any interest in hallucinogen policy.)

As a teaser, here are the specific policy recommendations:

Enforcement

Don’t fill prisons with ordinary dealers. Lock up dealers based on nastiness, not on volume. Break up flagrant drug markets using low-arrest crackdowns.

Treatment

Encourage problem drug users to quit without formal treatment. Pressure drug-using offenders to stop. Expand opiate maintenance. Work on immunotherapies.

Prevention

Say more than “No.” Don’t rely on DARE. Prevent drug dealing among kids.

Alcohol and tobacco

Deny alcohol to problem drinkers. Raise the tax on alcohol, especially beer. Eliminate the minimum drinking age. Encourage less risky forms of nicotine use.

Miscellaneous

Let pot-smokers grow their own. Get drug enforcement out of the way of pain relief. Create a regulatory framework for performance-enhancing chemicals. Figure out what hallucinogens are good for, and don’t let the drug laws interfere with religious freedom. Stop sacrificing foreign policy and human rights objectives to drug control.

Footnote I didn't choose, and wouldn't have chosen, either the title or the photos. Other than that, everything in the piece is mine; Adam Garfinkel and his crew were both generous with editorial suggestions and non-directive about substance.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: History is a machine for the generation of irony

Today is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 125th birthday. Presumably in commemoration, Blood and Treasure links to FDR’s message to the Maghreb in October 1942, as American troops arrived to reinforce the battle against Hitler’s Afrika Korps:

Praise be unto the only God. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O ye Moslems. O ye beloved sons of the Maghreb. May the blessing of God be upon you.

This is a great day for you and us, for all the sons of Adam who love freedom. Our numbers are as the leaves on the forest tress and as the grains of sand in the sea.

Behold. We the American Holy Warriors have arrived. We have come here to fight the great Jihad of Freedom.

From late January 2007, this reads like a bit from a Ken MacLeod novel, only in the past.

Virginia Postrel on Kieran Healy on Organ Transplants

Organ transplants are at once the most amazing and frustrating of medical miracles. A new kidney or heart can cure someone who would otherwise die or, even in less than ideal circumstances, extend life and improve well-being. The surgical skill and pharmaceutical innovation required to make transplantation work are wonders of human ingenuity.

But there is still no such thing as a truly new organ. Unlike insulin or artificial hips, organs so far cannot be successfully manufactured. They come only pre-owned, usually from young, healthy people who have died suddenly in traumatic accidents that destroyed their brains. Rainy weekends increase the organ supply. Helmet laws reduce it. The more than 94,000 Americans on the waiting list for organs are, in effect, waiting for someone else to die so that they can live.

This grisly calculus posed enormous cultural problems for early transplant advocates, as Kieran Healy, a sociologist at the University of Arizona and a contributor to the blog Crooked Timber, notes in “Last Best Gifts.” “Public ambivalence about transplantation was overcome, in part, by arguing that donation was the ‘gift of life,’ ” he writes. “The success of this idea now makes it more difficult to garner support for a market for organs.” By emphasizing altruism, transplant advocates gave comfort to the bereaved, conferring meaning on a tragic event and justifying what might otherwise seem like desecration. This early success helps explain why, even in the face of a critical shortage of organs, many leaders in the transplant field oppose any financial incentives for organ donors, including tax credits or payment toward funeral expenses.

The “gift of life” story is useful but, according to Healy, oversimplified. Shaped by a strongly anticommercial ideology, it places too much emphasis on the division between giving and selling. It doesn’t acknowledge the diverse ways in which people define the social meanings of exchange, regardless of whether money is involved. The fable of heroic altruists also misleadingly emphasizes the motives of the donor (or the donor’s family) over the system in which the decision to give or not takes place. “The voluntary donation of human goods is an organizational accomplishment,” Healy argues...

Ezra Klein: This is the sort of writing few Washington writers will do, as many of them want to one day work for The New Republic, and see no reason t

Matt is doing important work exposing and naming Marty Peretz's anti-Arab sentiment and unthinking, unblinking, expansionary strain of Zionism for the hateful, violent ideology it is. This is the sort of writing few Washington writers will do, as many of them want to one day work for The New Republic, and see no reason to torch that particular bridge. The past few years have seen that hold weaken, as The New Republic's increasing alienation from the left has convinced many young writers that it's not the place for them -- now or in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Peretz is rarely held to account, largely because there's an odd, tacit understanding that he's a cartoonish character and everyone knows it. As Glenn Greenwald writes:

I had not written more about Peretz because it seems as though there is some sort of tacit agreement that Peretz's hate-mongering won't be held against The New Republic, and that, for whatever reasons, Peretz will be accepted as a more or less mainstream figure despite spewing bigotry of the type one finds on white supremacist sites (albeit directed elsewhere). And since New Republic writers don't, to my knowledge, spout the same hate-filled diatribes, perhaps there was a sense that Peretz is even more irrelevant than the magazine itself and therefore does not merit any real discussion.

Hence his ghettoization to "The Spine" blog, where his separation from the "real staff" of the magazine he owns would be all the clearer, at least to those able to decipher the signal (on most magazine sites, of course, having your own blog while the majority of writers share a group site is a sign of respect for a particularly worthy pundit, not an implication of buffoonery).

The New Republic operates under an odd set of rules that's clear to the staff, made clear to their friends, and basically unknown to the world at large. That's partly why the rise of the blogosphere has been so wrenching for the magazine: Magazine writers used to get feedback from an array of people they knew and a couple letter-writers. So it used to be understood by majority of the sort of people Jon Chait got feedback from that Jon Chait was not, in fact, connected to or in agreement with Marty Peretz.

But with the rise of the net, the number of discernible voices increased exponentially, and they don't totally get why a magazine shouldn't be judged, at least in part, by its editorial line and the opinions of its editor-in-chief and owner. They don't know that Jon Chait is a likable guy or that The New Republic is one of an exceedingly small number of outlets willing to cut checks to young, liberal writers. Their experience of the magazine, in other words, is normal, untempered by the special rules of reading much of elite punditry has offered to TNR And so they judge TNR as an institution, and see the actions and published opinions of its longtime leader as, in fact, somewhat relevant to their assessment of the magazine.

In any case, this post is mainly to show support for Matt, who's doing the right thing for the right reasons, and not letting careerist considerations stifle his speech. It occurs to me too that TNR may want to avoid provoking Spencer on these matters. It is in fact the case that TNR chock-full of good writers, among them Chait, Cohn, Scheiber, Lizza, etc. But the magazine is led, and many of the final decisions made, by a rather intolerant zionist who holds deeply objectionable views, and whose average post implies or explains that Arabs are an uncivilized, near-barbarous people who have no culture worth mentioning and can't even do work. The problem is that this is the sort of thing that can be admitted privately, but not publicly, and it puts many writers (though not, I should be clear, all -- some folks at TNR agree with Marty) in a tough spot. Fine. But there's no reasons so many others should be complicit in the illusion.

Dean Baker: Global Warming is Serious: Why Can't the Post Treat It Seriously?

In a front page article on President Bush's changing statements on climate change, the Post tells readers that he will spend $29 billion on "climate science, aid, and incentives." Is there even a single reader of this sentence, apart from those actually working on climate policy, who has any idea what this commitment means?

For beginners, how about telling readers the time frame for this spending? My understanding is that the $29 billion will be spent over ten years (approximately 0.1 percent of projected spending), but I don't have any clear idea of what this money refers to, so I can't say that for certain. It would also be helpful to know to what extent this money involves an additional commitment of resources -- the government has spent money for decades on climate science and various programs that encourage conservation.

In short, reporting this $29 billion in projected spending provides no information whatsover. Couldn't the two experienced reporters who wrote this piece recognize that they were not providing any information to readers? Couldn't their editors?

Paul Krugman: Who Was Milton Friedman?

I don't want to push the religious analogy too far. Economic theory at least aspires to be science, not theology; it is concerned with earth, not heaven. Keynesian theory initially prevailed because it did a far better job than classical orthodoxy of making sense of the world around us, and Friedman's critique of Keynes became so influential largely because he correctly identified Keynesianism's weak points. And just to be clear: although this essay argues that Friedman was wrong on some issues, and sometimes seemed less than honest with his readers, I regard him as a great economist and a great man.

Milton Friedman played three roles in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. There was Friedman the economist's economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.

Did the same man play all these roles? Yes and no. All three roles were informed by Friedman's faith in the classical verities of free-market economics. Moreover, Friedman's effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there's an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman's theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there's much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing....

Keynes didn't make an all-out assault on Economic Man, but he often resorted to plausible psychological theorizing rather than careful analysis of what a rational decision-maker would do. Business decisions were driven by "animal spirits," consumer decisions by a psychological tendency to spend some but not all of any increase in income, wage settlements by a sense of fairness, and so on.

But was it really a good idea to diminish the role of Economic Man that much? No, said Friedman, who argued in his 1953 essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" that economic theories should be judged not by their psychological realism but by their ability to predict behavior. And Friedman's two greatest triumphs as an economic theorist came from applying the hypothesis of rational behavior to questions other economists had thought beyond its reach.

In his 1957 book A Theory of the Consumption Function—not exactly a crowd-pleasing title, but an important topic—Friedman argued that the best way to make sense of saving and spending was not, as Keynes had done, to resort to loose psychological theorizing, but rather to think of individuals as making rational plans about how to spend their wealth over their lifetimes. This wasn't necessarily an anti-Keynesian idea—in fact, the great Keynesian economist Franco Modigliani simultaneously and independently made a similar case, with even more care in thinking about rational behavior, in work with Albert Ando. But it did mark a return to classical ways of thinking—and it worked. The details are a bit technical, but Friedman's "permanent income hypothesis" and the Ando-Modigliani "life cycle model" resolved several apparent paradoxes about the relationship between income and spending, and remain the foundations of how economists think about spending and saving to this day.

Friedman's work on consumption behavior would, in itself, have made his academic reputation. An even bigger triumph, however, came from his application of Economic Man theorizing to inflation. In 1958 the New Zealand–born economist A.W. Phillips pointed out that there was a historical correlation between unemployment and inflation, with high inflation associated with low unemployment and vice versa. For a time, economists treated this correlation as if it were a reliable and stable relationship. This led to serious discussion about which point on the "Phillips curve" the government should choose. For example, should the United States accept a higher inflation rate in order to achieve a lower unemployment rate?

In 1967, however, Friedman gave a presidential address to the American Economic Association in which he argued that the correlation between inflation and unemployment, even thought it was visible in the data, did not represent a true trade-off, at least not in the long run. "There is," he said, "always a temporary trade-off between inflation and unemployment; there is no permanent trade-off." In other words, if policymakers were to try to keep unemployment low through a policy of generating higher inflation, they would achieve only temporary success. According to Friedman, unemployment would eventually rise again, even as inflation remained high. The economy would, in other words, suffer the condition Paul Samuelson would later dub "stagflation."

How did Friedman reach this conclusion? (Edmund S. Phelps, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics this year, simultaneously and independently arrived at the same result.) As in the case of his work on consumer behavior, Friedman applied the idea of rational behavior. He argued that after a sustained period of inflation, people would build expectations of future inflation into their decisions, nullifying any positive effects of inflation on employment. For example, one reason inflation may lead to higher employment is that hiring more workers becomes profitable when prices rise faster than wages. But once workers understand that the purchasing power of their wages will be eroded by inflation, they will demand higher wage settlements in advance, so that wages keep up with prices. As a result, after inflation has gone on for a while, it will no longer deliver the original boost to employment. In fact, there will be a rise in unemployment if inflation falls short of expectations.

At the time Friedman and Phelps propounded their ideas, the United States had little experience with sustained inflation. So this was truly a prediction rather than an attempt to explain the past. In the 1970s, how-ever, persistent inflation provided a test of the Friedman-Phelps hypothesis. Sure enough, the historical correlation between inflation and unemployment broke down in just the way Friedman and Phelps had predicted: in the 1970s, as the inflation rate rose into double digits, the unemployment rate was as high or higher than in the stable-price years of the 1950s and 1960s. Inflation was eventually brought under control in the 1980s, but only after a painful period of extremely high unemployment, the worst since the Great Depression.

By predicting the phenomenon of stagflation in advance, Friedman and Phelps achieved one of the great triumphs of postwar economics. This triumph, more than anything else, confirmed Milton Friedman's status as a great economist's economist, whatever one may think of his other roles...

Blake Hounshell: The Bomb Iran Conference

The Bomb Iran conference Home » blogs » Blake Hounshell Wed, 01/24/2007 - 6:52pm. While the early Davoisie arrivals were sipping their carbon-neutral San Pellegrino and munching on organic canapés, another conference was taking place elsewhere in the world. No, it wasn't the World Social Forum, a.k.a the anti-Davos assembly being held in Nairobi, Kenya. It was another sort of thing entirely: a seventh annual high-level Israeli security meeting in the Mediterranean resort town of Herzliya. Judging by the sound bytes I'm reading, you could call it the Bomb Iran conference. U.S. government officials as high as Gordon England and Nick Burns were in attendance. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was also there, as were his rivals John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Romney went for a strained historical analogy: I believe that Iran's leaders and ambitions represent the greatest threat to the world since the fall of the Soviet Union and before that Nazi Germany." Expect more of this over-the-top rhetoric from both sides of the aisle. What to do about Iran is going to dominate the American debate from now until 2008, and beyond. In President Bush's speech last night, he stressed again the consequences of failure in Iraq, warning that a U.S. defeat could embolden a dangerous Iran. So it's timely that for this week's Seven Questions, FP spoke with Dr. Ali Ansari, an expert on Iran at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, about the Bush administration's policy toward that country (Iran, not Scotland). Check it out.

Duncan Black's Reading List for Understanding American Journamalism

So, what to read? In no way am I trying to come up with a comprehensive list, and certainly one could reach farther back in time. None of this stuff "begins" at a specific point in time, really. If not for the return of the Iran Contra crew I'd probably not even start until we get to Clinton, but it's probably necessary to reach back for a bit of a reminder. So, in rough order. First, the Reagan years. Haynes Johnson's book suffers from being boring, but it's a pretty good Reagan era primer, or at least I thought so a few years ago when I read it. Some of the general social critique I imagine is a bit dated. Hertsgaard's On Bended Knee (Tom Tomorrow just reminded me to include this). Next, Lawrence Walsh's book about Iran Contra. Next, Eric Alterman's history of the punditocracy. Then, Sidney Blumenthal's book The Clinton Wars, which I think is especially useful for its earlier chapters. Gene Lyons' Fools for Scandal. Conason & Lyons Hunting of the President. For the fictionalized version, Philip Roth's The Human Stain. David Brock's Blinded by the Right. The book that Josh Marshall never wrote about "Clinton hatred" in the 1990s. Marvin Kalb's One Scandalous Story. The book that Bob Somerby never published about the Gore campaign coverage, or just go read the Daily Howler archives. Toobin's Too Close to Call. Late edition - Johnson's The Big Chill. Alterman's What Liberal Media. David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine. Wolcott's Attack Poodles. Boehlert's Lapdogs. I haven't read any of the books about the press and the Iraq war coverage (aside from Boehlert's, which gives it some coverage), though I guess as a first stab I'd recommend Massing's articles in the NYRB. The Unseen War. Now They Tell Us. Unfit to Print. Iraq, the Press, and the Election. Obviously the point isn't that I agree with every idea or opinion expressed in these books, but they provide a rough narrative strand which certainly informs my view of recent history and the media and one which I think is, to a great degree, shared in the "netroots."

Paul Kiel: Iraq's Absent Parliament

Today's Must Read By Paul Kiel - January 24, 2007, 8:41 AM The New York Times checks in on democracy in Iraq, where "nearly every session" of the parliament has been adjourned since November... because as few as 65 of the 275 members there showed up. Why? It's irrelevant: "Deals on important legislation, most recently the oil law, now take place largely out of public view, with Parliament — when it meets — rubber-stamping the final decisions." Also, the country is very dangerous, and despite the $120,000 salary, the members say they can't afford adequate protection -- one member says that he uses 40 guards when he's in Iraq, and the salary only buys 20. And, well, there's the fact that the job has inevitably disappointed members who "were here for the game, for prestige, for the money,” as one puts it. As a result of the rampant truancy, the Speaker is contemplating "fining members $400 for every missed session" and replacing absentees. But... there's a problem. "For the proposals to be put in place, a majority of members in Parliament have to be present to pass them."

Gideon Rachman: Israel's World View

Israel's world view

Before leaving Israel yesterday, I and some colleagues had the chance to talk to various members of the Israeli military and foreign policy establishment. Obviously, they were well aware they were talking to journalists, so one must discount for spin. But here, briefly, is how they see the world:

Iran: The Israelis are obsessed with the development of an Iranian bomb. They say it will be the first time an "enemy state" has the capacity to exterminate Israel. They think the Iranians are 12-18 months away from crossing the technical threshold and three years away from having the bomb itself. They acknowledge that the Americans seem to think that Iran is further away than that - perhaps five years. There is time for diplomacy to work, and they think President Ahmadinejad is not in a secure position. But they clearly think that it is most likely that Israel and the United States will soon be faced by the decision over whether to take military action. They hope the US will do it. But the strong implication is that Israel will take action alone if necessary. But they are far from sanguine about the potential regional consequences, in terms of a wider war, terrorism and so on.

Lebanon: They see Hizbollah as a branch of the Iranian state. They say that Hizbollah has substantially rebuilt its military capacity, although it is inhibited to some extent by the presence of the UN. Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, has been a pleasant surprise to the Israelis. They regard him as a tough, courageous patriot - but they also think he is very vulnerable. Long-term the Israelis are gloomy about the prospects for Lebanon, because they believe a talented and mobile Christian community will emigrate in large numbers.

Syria: They see Syria as an active member of an Iranian-led radical camp. But they confirm newspaper reports in Israel of informal, "back-channel" talks on a peace deal with Syria - and they reckon President Assad may be interested in a deal. They seem pretty contemptuous of Assad. One gets the impression that while the Iranians scare them, the Syrians do not.

Iraq: They are worried by an implosion of Iraq after the Americans leave. Possible consequences include Iraq becoming a new centre for "global jihad", and the destabilisation and implosion of Jordan, under a wave of Iraqi refugees.

The Saudis: The Israelis seems to love the Saudis at the moment - and they think the Saudis are increasingly warm to them, since both sides have a mutual interest in containing Iran. But the Israelis are also worried by a nuclear arms race in the region. The Saudis could go nuclear quite quickly, possibly because they have an arrangement with Pakistan. Other countries that are thinking of going nuclear, in response to the Iranian programme, are Egypt and Turkey.