The Last Argument

Between Bad and Also Pretty Bad

2007-12-31T05:57:00.000-08:00

Could we think of anyone worse to run the country of Pakistan than the corrupt, power-mad Musharraf?

Well, not quite, but ...:

Benazir Bhutto's 19-year-old son Bilawal has been chosen to take over her Pakistan People's Party, after her assassination on Thursday.
Bilawal, who will be a titular head while he finishes his studies at Oxford University, said: "My mother always said democracy is the best revenge."

Ms Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who will run the party day-to-day, said it would contest upcoming elections.

But it is unclear whether the vote will go ahead as planned early next month.

So on one side we have a man who will suspend elections in order to prevent a challenge to his office, and on the other we have a party whose leadership can be passed by matrilinear succession. One is a tyranny, the other a dynasty.

Okay. Just so we're clear who the hero is.

All For One

2007-12-11T06:03:00.000-08:00

When you vote for a party candidate, you are doing your best to strengthen the success of that party. This matters if the leadership of that party openly espouses corruption and torture.

Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Like Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee:

According to Hayden, "the leaders of our oversight committees in Congress were informed of the videos years ago and of the Agency's intention to dispose of the material. In a news release that he put out this evening, Jay Rockefeller claims that the Intel Committees were not "consulted" on the use of the tapes "nor the decision to destroy the tapes." But he does not deny that he was informed of the agency's intent to dispose of the tapes, and he acknowledges that he learned of the destruction one year ago, in November 2006. And this is the first time he has said anything about it. Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at which point he expresses outrage and incredulity -- but reveals nothing.

Like Senator Hillary Clinton:

In her first response at the debate, Clinton portrayed herself as an opponent of Mr. Bush's policies on Iran. "The Republicans are waving their sabers and talking about going after Iran," she said. "I want to prevent a rush to war."

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the sharpest critic of Clinton all evening, jumped on that statement.

"She says she'll stand up to President Bush on Iran; she just said it again," Mr. Edwards said. "And in fact, she voted to give George Bush the first step in moving militarily on Iran, and he's taken it. Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney have taken it. They've now declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction. I think we have to stand up to this president."

If you're truly voting on principles, rather than party membership - that is to say, blindly picking Democrat because that's how your daddy raised ya - then don't vote Democrat. There's bound to be a less craven, less corrupt candidate out there whom you can write in. Hell, write your own name in. You're guaranteed to be less likely to cave on the issues you find important than the candidate of your choosing. Who's more likely to represent your own interests - you yourself, or a stranger who promises to defend you?

But you - or your hypothetical write-in, or your favorite third-party candidate - couldn't win an election, you tell us? It takes the backing of a billion dollar party machine to get into office? Of course it does. It's illiterate to suggest otherwise. And it's equally daft to suggest that, despite receiving these billions in lobbying dollars, that the Democrats are somehow the party of "principle." The "anti-war" party. Or that any obvious and incontrovertible appearances to the contrary are only the result of "bad Democrats."

A commenter on IOZ's site put it best: a vote for Kucinich is a vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. A vote for Obama is a vote for Jay Rockefeller as Chair of Senate Intel. When you vote for a Democratic candidate, you're voting for the Democratic party. Every phone they tap, every house they bomb and every civilian they torture is on your head.

Massachusetts Candidates, Then and Now

2007-12-06T13:31:00.000-08:00

Mark over at Cosmic Variance, in comparing John F. Kennedy (the 20th century's most prominent Catholic presidential candidate) and Mitt Romney (the 21st century's first Mormon candidate), unwittingly quotes a lie

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Kennedy told the Houston ministers, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.”

Kennedy was seeking to take his then-controversial faith off the table by embracing the constitutional and secular nature of the American republic, and by asking voters to judge him on his own words and deeds rather than as a representative of his church. If Romney were trying to accomplish something similar, one could only commend him. But his task is more perplexing and difficult than that.

No, he wasn't.

Kennedy was trying to allay the fears of a predominantly Protestant voting bloc. They worried that he would take his marching orders from a foreign ruler - the Pope - rather than the national interest. To put them at ease, Kennedy engaged in a neat bit of speechifying.

Whenever Romney discusses his Mormonism, he's committing the same prevarication that Kennedy did - standing out as the moral and Christly candidate because of his open religion, while painting himself as reasonable instead of extreme.

Mark seems to think that Romney is a significantly worse man than Kennedy was ("wipe away your tears as you realize how far backwards our politicians have moved"). He's not. Candidates for the most powerful office that the human species has yet enshrined have not become any more venal recently. All of them will trumpet the values most convenient to the current audience - their position on The War, the death penalty, stem cells, etc - and silence them as appropriate.

The Old War Is The New War

2007-12-06T06:24:00.000-08:00

U.S. Now Arming Sunni Insurgents Again

Iraq's main Sunni-led resistance groups have scaled back their attacks on US forces in Baghdad and parts of Anbar province in a deliberate strategy aimed at regrouping, retraining, and waiting out George Bush's "surge", a key insurgent leader has told the Guardian.

US officials recently reported a 55% drop in attacks across Iraq. One explanation they give is the presence of 30,000 extra US troops deployed this summer. The other is the decision by dozens of Sunni tribal leaders to accept money and weapons from the Americans in return for confronting al-Qaida militants who attack civilians. They call their movement al-Sahwa (the Awakening).

[...]

Besides Ramadi, the Awakening movement was also operating in Sunni-majority districts of Baghdad, such as Ameriya, Adhamiya, and parts of Ghazaliya and Jihad. [A resistance cell leader] predicted it was unlikely to last for more than a few months. It was a "temporary deal" with the US and would split apart as people realised the Americans' true intentions.

He cited last week's announcement that the Bush administration plans to work with the Shia-led government of Nuri al-Maliki on arrangements for long-term US military bases and an open-ended occupation in Iraq.

Glenn Reynolds reads no deeper than the temporary lull of violence as proof that the U.S. is "winning the war" (against whom? the Shia militias? the Sunni insurgents?). Arming one set of religious radicals to aid the war against another, though, will not end the war. It didn't end the conflict in Afghanistan; it didn't end the Iran-Iraq squabble; it won't end the U.S.'s meaningless brawl.

Deadliester and Deadliester

2007-11-06T09:37:00.000-08:00

2007 Is Deadliester Year for US in Iraq

BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. military on Tuesday announced the deaths of five more soldiers, making 2007 the deadliester year of the war for U.S. troops, according to an Associated Press count.

Five U.S. soldiers were killed Monday in two separate roadside bomb attacks, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, director of the Multi-National Force-Iraq's communications division.

"We lost five soldiers yesterday in two unfortunate incidents, both involving IEDs," Smith told reporters in Baghdad's heavily-guarded Green Zone.

At least 852 American military personnel have died in Iraq so far this year — the highest annual toll since the war began in March 2003, according to AP figures. Some 850 troops died in 2004.

The surge is working!

Who Are The Good Guys Again?

2007-11-03T09:50:00.001-07:00

Pakistan's Musharraf Declares Emergency

Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency on Saturday, ahead of a crucial Supreme Court ruling on his future as president, thrusting the country deeper into political turmoil as it struggles with spreading Islamic militancy.

Seven Supreme Court judges immediately rejected the emergency, which suspended the current constitution. The government blocked transmissions of private news channels in several cities and telephone services in the capital, Islamabad, were cut.

"The chief of army staff has proclaimed a state of emergency and issued a provisional constitutional order," a newscaster on state Pakistan TV said, adding that Musharraf would address the nation later Saturday.

Remember, folks - this raving dictator is an ally of the U.S. The other raving madman - the democratically-elected President of a country which used to receive U.S. aid between the 1950s and the late 70s - is a threat to world sovereignty.

Got it? Because it's important you remember that the U.S. is a defender of freedom, at all times and in all places. It's not like the U.S. picks its allies as a matter of geopolitical convenience. Oh, no. The U.S. sides with Pakistan and threatens Iran as a matter of principle.

The Devil Next Door

2007-10-29T06:09:00.000-07:00

We overheard Bush deliver a speech last week. We were passing by a TV tuned to Fox News. The President spoke eloquently of "those who suffer as a result of the human rights abuses on the island some 90 miles from our shore." We stopped, confused. Then we realized he meant that portion of Cuba which the U.S. is not leasing, and kept walking.

Naked At The Monolith

2007-10-26T05:40:00.000-07:00

Phil Nugent talks about Bush:

Bush's presidential career demonstrates that some are born despotic, some achieve despotism, and some have despotism thrust upon him. I think that Bush had it thrust upon him; I really do think that he ran for president partly just to appease his Oedipal issues and partly because he needed to do something with his life and he didn't think he could pass the written test to become a pirate. I think that his original vision of being president was that he'd play golf and work out and read to kiddies and throw the opening pitch at the World Series for four years while the country ran itself, and every once in a while he'd go somewhere and read a text to a crowd that would then cheer for him. 9/11 must have impressed the poor little guy the way a solar eclipse would have impressed a caveman; he knew that God was sending him a message, and he must have decided that the message was that he would now have to be a Great Man, but it didn't make him any smarter or more capable.

He goes on to write more about Rudy Giuliani, with which we also agree. However, this struck us as the newest and most potent insight.

None of the People, None of the Time

2007-10-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias doesn't get it:

This is a big structural failing of the American elite. It reflects in part the fact that conservative elites have refused to play the role of honest brokers, the preference of the right's main institutions to propagandize their audience rather than seeking to inform them with an honest, factually accurate presentation of the hawkish view of Middle East policy. It also reflects a large failure of our non-ideological institutions, a completely inability of "the establishment" to succeed in setting national discourse on an even keel. And last it reflects the fact that for several years the main opposition institutions in the United States -- most of all the Democratic Party -- failed for years to aggressively push back. For the year months or so after 9/11, "respectable" folks were expected to spend more time and energy worrying about marginal leftists than about the dangerous radicals peddling made-up facts who just so happened to control the institutions of government.

(1) Of course the establishment spits propaganda. That's what makes them the establishment.

(2) Is it really on the Right's "main institutions" that are guilty of this? Never the Left? The Democratic Party never seeks to sway public opinion in order to further its political agenda? Follow-up question: how many cells in Guantanamo Bay has Nancy Pelosi closed this week?

c/o Ioz

August 1968

2007-10-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

IOZ waxes poetical after someone defended the DailyKOSsacks with that hoary chestnut: "at least they're TRYING something!" We lack IOZ's gift for doggerel - and that's some inspired verse, truly - but we can steal, and steal, and be a villein:

"August 1968"

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

- W.H. Auden

The burden of proof falls on the so-called progressives. We don't have to prove our thesis that the Democrats secretly want to continue the war in Iraq, and expand it further into Iran - that thesis is impeccable. Rather, you have to prove that the Democrats want to end war, curb imperial expansion and bring American soldiers home.

The Greatest Lover, Horseman and Economist

2007-10-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

From our friends at Cafe Hayek, some excellent quotes from Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter:

The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.

[...]

Humanity does not care for freedom. The mass of the people realize they are not up to it: what they want is being fed, led, amused, and above everything, drilled. But they do care for the phrase.

[...]

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with keeping in the saddle that they can't bother about where they go.

The End of the Innocence

2007-10-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

Who Is IOZ?: Secure in His Person

The case of Khaled al-Masri is indicative of this point. An innocent man was kidnapped, spirited away to a secret American prison in Afghanistan, degraded, abused, tortured, and then dumped in the middle of another foreign country. The executive condones it. The Congress accedes to it. The courts ignore it out of deference to the executive. Through what mechanism will a free Republic be restored? Through the courts? The Congress? The Presidency?

Cheer up. Life under Augustus was still pretty good, and almost indistinguishable from a real Republic.

Who Is IOZ?: The Devil You Know

2007-10-01T06:03:00.000-07:00

Ioz on the true "radicals"

If Digby, DailyKos, and the rest of Donkle Netrootsia were as serious as they endlessly claim to be about ending the war in Iraq, about truly yanking the center of American politics a few centimeters to the left, about getting the Democratic party as an institution to represent their milquetoast democratic socialist agenda, then they'd do precisely what that "coalition of influential Christian conservatives" is doing: threaten to bolt the party; threaten to support a third party; threaten to stay home. If they were serious about it, they would indicate in certain terms to the party-in-Congress that their majority is contingent on their effectuation of a particular agenda. But dear lord, then Cokie Roberts might call them radicals, or worse, leftists! Someone call for the smelling salts.

Digby, DailyKos, and the rest of the Netrootsia isn't serious about ending the war in Iraq. That much is patently clear. Against efficacy they weigh respectability, whose measure is a Congressional majority and respectful copy by Tim Russert's staff writers. Ennobling, isn't it? Respectability wins every time, because respectability brings institutional authority. "Dirty hippies" is the grossest of self-flattery. The real dirty hippies are the black-masked anarchists, the sign-waving ANSWER kids who the imagined leftwing of the Democratic party roundly condemn for daring to bring up the School of the Americas or IMF shock-therapy economics at an antiwar rally. The real dirty hippies don't care what Katie Couric calls them.

We were at the thousand-strong rally outside UMass Boston in 2000, protesting the lack of inclusion of third party candidates. We were among maybe eight or ten libertarians. All the rest were ardent socialists, anti-corporate guerillas or just well-read college students with a free evening.

And as embarassing as we find their Marxist politics, it pains us further to think that any of them might be voting Democrat today.

The Moron Conspiracy

2007-09-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

We've never been able to buy into the notion that there's a Grand Shadowy Conspiracy of people in charge - that a secret council of Halliburton, Joe Lieberman and the New York Times meet once a week to determine how best to ruin the cause of liberty. Rather, the problem is this: there's no incentive in the power structure for any one agent to act in the cause of liberty, and plenty of incentive not to.

Keep this in mind when reading Iranian President Mohammed Ahmadinejad's remarks at Columbia this past weekend:

Smiling and occasionally laughing as he explained Iran's culture and outlook on the world, Ahmadinejad drew the biggest jeers from students for stating that his country has no homosexuals.

"In Iran we don't have this phenomenon, I don't know who you told this," he exclaimed, while also insisting that Iran was a "victim" of terrorism and not an instigator.

Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of Israel and downplayed the Holocaust, said he was open to meeting survivors of the devastating Nazi pogrom against the Jews.

"But let us remember then where did the Holocaust happen to begin with? It happened in Europe. And given that, why is it that the Palestinian people should be displaced?" he said earlier via satellite to Washington's National Press Club.

[...]

Asked about Iraq, Ahmadinejad again denied Iran was providing advanced weapons to Shiite extremists to use against US troops.

"We think, in fact, the (US) military should seek an answer to its defeat in Iraq elsewhere," he said, insisting Tehran wanted a stable Iraq on its border.

President Ahmadinejad claims that Iran doesn't have any homosexuals (wishful thinking on his part, perhaps); that he doesn't deny the Holocaust but he wants Europe to pay the price for its politics; and that he wants a stable Iraq.

Given all this, can't you imagine an alternate universe in which Iran was seen as an ally by America's most vocal conservatives - the Malkins and the Coulters and the Kaplans and the Ledeens? They want the same things we want! They come from the same Judaic tradition! They're the "good" kind of Muslim, just like the ~~Sunni~~ ~~Shia~~ well, whichever kind the Taliban were when they were helping the U.S. defeat Communism, but not the kind that the Taliban are now.

Why is Iran the next target of the U.S. instead of the next friend in the region? The same reason Pakistan is an ally instead of an enemy: pure coincidence. This is not an ideological battle, no matter what the conservatives tell you. It is the falling out of decades of oil wars, religious extremism and U.S. intervention. Conservatives want war with Iran not because of any deep convictions on their part but because no one's told them different.

We Report, Who Decides?

2007-08-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

Report Finds Little Progress On Iraq Goals - washingtonpost.com

One of eight political benchmarks -- the protection of the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature -- has been achieved, according to the draft. On the others, including legislation on constitutional reform, new oil laws and de-Baathification, it assesses failure.

The protection of the rights of minority political parties. This, less than a month after the Sunni bloc of Parliament walked out mid-session. This, after two hundred died in a suicide bomb attack on a Kurdish Yazidi sect. And that's just in the last thirty days.

The report claims that "de-Baathification" has failed. Have they not heard? The U.S. has been strenuously trying to re-Baathify Iraq. The Army has been recruiting and arming Sunni militias. They've been chiding al-Maliki for not kowtowing to the wishes of Sunni politicians.

Ioz makes the point that we have no reason to trust a report issued by the same government that is occupying the country being reported on. But that's a very Ollie Stone view of the federal government of the U.S. The government is not some monolithic entity. It's a series of competing factions, all of whom pledge nominal allegiance to the same godhead. The GAO faction has just issued a report, which the Democratic faction will make a lot of noise about, the Executive faction will pretend to acknowledge and the Journalist faction will foam about for four days and then forget. Meanwhile, the troops going from house to house in Basra will, if they hear about it, scratch their dented helmets and say, "De-Baathification? Shit, is it that time of year again?"

I'm Afraid of Americans

2007-08-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

We never thought the day would come when we'd disagree with Ioz. Consider this a temporary hiccup in what has been, so far, a long and beautiful friendship.

First off, any sentence which begins "The fact that so many Americans read The Quiet American ..." cannot be taken seriously, no matter what follows the ellipsis. So few Americans have read Graham Greene. One of the great wits and keen insights of the twentieth century (evangelical Christian or no), Greene deserves a wider audience than the occasional college classroom. We wonder what Bill Kristol would have to say re: Greene's "Vietnam defeatism" upon reading The Quiet American - until he discovered that it was written in 1955.

Second, Alden Pyle does not appear to be naive. Alden Pyle is naive. He has a great amount of espionage sophistication, sure. He knows just who to talk to and just what disasters to engineer in order to put General The in power. But he's a child. He genuinely believes in the redemptive power of the West's saving touch. You can tell it in the eager nature of his confessions: his desire to find a common creed with the West's other representative in Saigon (the aged and cynical Fowler). You can tell it in the health food sandwiches he eats.

Alden Pyle is naive because he has not yet realized that "war" means "babies killed by bomb shrapnel." Thomas Fowler is cynical because he has.

We do agree with Ioz on one point: the poor choice of the word "bumbled." America did not bumble into Vietnam. The Armed Forces did not misstep. They executed their duties with the full efficiency available to them - the systematic effort to wipe out an insurgency (read: a civilian population) - and used every weapon at their disposal. The only bumbling came from the intellectuals back home, who defended Vietnam as a front in the War On ~~Terror~~ ~~Fascism~~ Communism. The only missteps came from thinkers who believed the Evil Empire was the one the U.S. was fighting.

The Ineffable Gap Between Dream and Reality

2007-08-21T09:49:00.000-07:00

Tony Karon suggests that the U.S. is asking the wrong questions on Iran:

Imagine, for a moment, that U.S. troops invading Iraq had, as they neared Baghdad, been fired on by an artillery unit using shells filled VX nerve gas — an attack that would have lasted minutes before a U.S. aircrew had taken out the battery, and may have brought a horrible death to a handful of American soldiers. Imagine, further, that the conquering troops had later discovered two warehouses full of VX and mustard gas shells. And later, that inspectors in a science lab had discovered a refrigerator full of Botulinum toxin or even anthrax.

The Administration and its allies in the punditocracy would have “proved” their case for war, and the media would have hailed President Bush as the kind of Churchillian visionary that he imagines himself to be. And goodness knows what new adventures the Pentagon ideologues would have immediately begun planning.

Now, ask yourself, had the above scenario unfolded and the “case for war” (on the terms accepted by the media and the Democrats) been proven, would Iraq look any different today? Would it be any less of a bloodbath; any less of a quagmire for U.S. troops; any less of a geopolitical disaster; any less of a drain on U.S. blood and treasure? Would the U.S. mainland or U.S. interests and allies worldwide be any safer today? In short, would the Iraq invasion seem any less of a catastrophic strategic blunder had the U.S. discovered some caches of unconventional weapons in Iraq?

The answer to all of those questions is obviously no.

WMDs are such an old, hoary lie (it takes a true poltroon like Jim Lileks to keep pushing the "Saddam had chemical weapons!" story) that we forget sometimes that they were the loudest and most prominent justification for invasion. But the quantity of nerve gas in Baghdad - be it a molecule, a mole or a metric tonne - has nothing to do with the thousand year old tensions between Shia and Sunni, or the uncertain position of the Kurds. And yet all of that is what's making Iraq such a hell today.

Clearly, "does Saddam have WMDs?" was the wrong question.

Keep that in mind as the discussion turns toward the (inevitable) invasion of Iran. Granted, there are certain questions of moral weight to answer first:

For the record:

First, there is no evidence that Iran is actually building a nuclear weapon; merely that it is building a civilian nuclear energy program with all elements of the fuel cycle permissible under the NPT that would, in fact, put nuclear weapons easily within reach should they opt to build them.

Second, even if Iran did possess nuclear weapons, the idea that it would use them to initiate a conflict in which Tehran would certainly be destroyed is based on tabloid-style alarmism about the nature of the regime in Tehran — in fact, Iran’s Islamic Republic has long proved to be guided more by unsentimental realpolitik than by revolutionary fervor in the pursuit of its national interests and regional influence.

Third, Iran is not “interfering” in Afghanistan and Iraq any more than the U.S. is; it has close ties with the dominant Shiite and Kurdish parties that represent three quarters of Iraqis, for whom its involvement in Iraq is welcome. Thus the recent rebuke to Bush by both Karzai and Maliki on the question of Iran’s role in their countries. Even the Administration’s claims that Iran is targeting U.S. troops in Iraq are largely unproven: In a remarkably shallow treatment of complaints about the New York Times coverage of the issue, its public editor concedes simply that the Times should have told readers of its previous coverage to provide “context” — there is no serious questioning of the contention that because Iran has been known to supply the know-how to build “Explosively Formed Projectiles” (EFPs), any time an EFP is used in an attack on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the perpetrators are an Iranian proxy. This is worth dwelling on, because it’s typical of the ignorance on various issues — the extent of President Ahmedinajad’s authority in Iran, for example — propagated by the Times. A simple technical exposition of what an EFP is reveals that the technology is easily copied by anyone with know-how and access to very basic munitions. It’s not an actual weapon; it’s a method of building an improvised explosive device to pierce armor. The idea that the use of EFPs in Iraq is automatically a fingerprint of Iran is ridiculous. Someone ought to tell the Times. And by the way, even if Iranian proxies were attacking U.S. forces in Iraq, that wouldn’t signal intent to undermine the Iraqi government; it would simply be an escalation of the secret war between Washington and Tehran. And that’s a war that this President, his deepest psychological scars laid bare by his failure in Iraq — a wound that the psychotic Dick Cheney will press and press — may be ready to escalate by launching an attack on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Indeed, it is not Iranian “interference” that Iraq and Afghanistan fear; it is being caught in the crossfire between the U.S. and Iran.

1938? Don’t make me laugh. Nazi Germany was the most powerful military nation on earth, and in 1938 it was poised to invade its neighbors. To make the same claim about Iran is just plain ignorant.

(the above is Karon again, by the way)

So, let's ask the same questions that should have been asked about Iraq: can the U.S. win a land war in Iran? No:

Iran is scarier than Iraq in every way you can name. First of all, it's physically way bigger, three times the size of Iraq. The population is 65 million, nearly three times as many as Iraq. The Iranians are young, too. Their birthrate is way down now, around 2 kids per woman, but back in the Khomeini years it was one of the highest in the world. So right now, the Iranian population has a demographic profile that's a military planner's dream: not too many little kids to take care of, but a huge pool of fighting-age men -- about 18 million.

And it won't be just young, fit men fighting us. Thanks to the invention of the suicide car bomb, guerrilla commanders will have someplace to send 70 year old volunteers: down to the garage to pick up a Plymouth packed full of fertilizer bomb. You don't have to be young to put the pedal to the metal.

[...]

The Iranians, unlike the Iraqis, have always been willing to die for their country. In the Iran-Iraq War (1980-89) thousands of Iranians volunteered to charge across Iraqi minefields, knowing they were going to die. It scared the Hell out of the Iraqis. They threw everything at those crazy Persian suicide charges, even poison gas. And the Iranians just kept coming.

[...]

The Iranians already hate us. They have since 1953, when the CIA staged a coup to get rid of a popular Lefty Prime Minister, Mossadeq. Way back in the 70s, when most of the world still kinda liked us, crowds in Tehran chanted "Marg bar Amrika," "Death to America."

We're also getting told we'll be able to exploit the ethnic divisions inside Iran. The fact is, Iran's ethnic problems are nowhere near as bad as Iraq's. More than half of the population is ethnically Persian. The next-biggest group is the Azerbaijani, about a quarter of the population. They squabble with the Iranian majority from time to time, but they're fellow Shi'ites, they intermarry all the time- there's no real hatred between them. There are a few Arabs in Western Iran, maybe 3% of the population. But if you're thinking we could bring them over to our side, forget it. Saddam already tried that during the Iran-Iraq War and got nowhere. And if they're not going to rebel for a fellow Arab who lives next door, you better believe they won't rise up to help us Christian Crusaders.

That leaves us with the Kurds, who are about 10% of the Iranian population. There are all kinds of factions in Kurdistan, all of them armed and ready to kill each other, so we might be able to sign up a few of the really crazy gangs to work with us. But they would have zero chance of controlling a country as big, fierce and clever as Iran.

That's what the U.S. has to look forward to in Iran. Remember, both of the two leading Democratic candidates for President - Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton - voted in favor of a resolution that will be used to justify invading Iran. And no leading Republican candidate is any more rational on the matter.

U.S. casualties in Iraq have been relatively light so far. In Iran, there will be a slaughterhouse without end.

A Well-Functioning Machine

2007-08-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

The plan has always been a civil war (via UO):

But what do you think “As they stand up, we’ll stand down,” means, anyway? It means and meant getting Iraqis to fight other Iraqis. We’ve taught Shiites and Kurds - in Iraqi Security Force uniforms - to attack Sunnis. Increasingly we enjoin Shiites to attack other Shiites (ISF vs Mahdi Army) and Sunnis to attack other Sunnis (tribal alliances versus Al-Qaeda in Iraq).

[...]

No, I don’t think the US intended grand-scale ethnic cleansing and mass-casualty sectarian bombings. I think that even so reptilian an overlord as Dick Cheney regrets that part, at least reflexively. But it’s a spiraling dynamic we set in motion. Want to bring armed elements of Iraqi society to heel using Iraqi forces? Do those armed elements have a level of popular support? Congratulations: you want an Iraqi civil war. A nice tiny one, maybe. But a civil war.

We quibble with Jim in only one respect - whether or not Cheney "wanted" massive internecine slaughter in Mesopotamia. We suggest that, frankly, he didn't care.

This is how you can tell your imperialist machine is working - when the gross, awful evidence of what you intend stands in naked view (Iraqis slaughtering each other at the behest of their Western overlords) and nobody seriously objects. If Dick Cheney kidnapped Kurds and Iraqis and made them fight to the death on a private island for his own enjoyment, the world would recoil in horror. If he says it's "so we don't have to fight them here," people debate him on those terms (how effective is the bloodsport in Fallujah at preventing terrorism in the U.S.?). But nobody asks whether it's objectionable on face that the U.S. is there in the first place.

Why Iraq Is Falling Apart

2007-08-13T06:28:00.000-07:00

Who Is IOZ?: Bref

In the 1920s, following the first World War and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the British took over territorial Iraq under a League of Nations Mandate, imposed a Sunni Hashemite monarchy, dropped white phosphorous on the Kurds, and enacted a series of land reforms that allowed Sunni tribal leaders to consolidate property, wealth, and political power. For the next fifty years, Iraq was governed by a Sunni monarchy, a Sunni-dominated pseudo-republican military regime, a Sunni-dominated technocratic elite, and finally a Sunni strongman in the form of Saddam Hussein.

Five years ago, the United States invaded Iraq, deposed its Sunni dictator, stripped the Sunni minority of its sinecures in goverment and largely of its right to participate in government, and, bowing to pressure from a now-empowered Shi'ite majority, sponsored parliamentary elections which, unsurprisingly, resulted in a Shia-dominated goverment. The Shi'ite government naturally allied itself with the coreligionist government of neighboring Iran. The remnants of the Sunni government and military apparatus began an insurgent campaign. Shia groups organized militias and began to exact revenge for past repressions as well as to enact their own repressions of the remaining Sunni population. A variety of terrorist groups, some with ties to major Iraqi factions, others loyal to more radical, less nationalistic agendas filtered into the cracks and began blowing shit up.

The United States, fixated on Iran as its next great enemy, began to identify Shia groups with Iranian affinities as its principle enemy in Iraq. The Shi'ite government with its many ties to both Iran and to Shia militias, began supporting the idea that terrorists were the principle enemy in Iraq. The Sunni insurgents, seeking to arm themselves against their Shia masters, began cooperating with the Americans in combating "al Qaeda" in order to gain weapons and funds. The Americans, reacting to domestic political opposition to the idea of refereeing a civil war between Sunni and Shia acceeded to the idea that it was "al Qaeda" and "foreign fighters" causing the most damange in Iraq. This had the added benefit of allowing American politicians to blame perpetual bogeyman Iran. Iran, after all, is foreign to both America and Iraq. Who cares if the terrorists are or are not separated from the Iranian government by a thousand-year-old religious schism? America, in any event, gave everybody even more guns than they already had. This, my friends, is the strategy.

All of the above is objectively true (except for the last sentence, which is so well-documented an assertion as to almost be textbook factual).

Please! Will some Iraq hawk tell us what the "plan for victory" is here?

God of the Gaps

2007-08-07T13:01:00.000-07:00

Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias: Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable

Back in the old days, there was no concept of religion being a separate magisterium. The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works. In not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe. But you will find plenty of scientific claims, like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud and grasshoppers having four legs. (Which is a metaphor for...)

Back in the old days, saying the local religion "could not be proven" would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." From a Bayesian perspective that's some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Albeit it doesn't prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent - it could be alien teenagers.) The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn't even know the difference.

We've made this same point ourselves in the past. The idea that certain parts of the Bible are just colorful metaphors or instructive parables, and that certain parts are to be taken at unannealed face value, is a rather recent invention:

If we accept that it's okay to adhere to Jesus's exhortations to charity, but to ignore Deuteronomy's commands to stone heretics and burn adulterers, then what criteria are we using for such selection? What filter do we pass the 'word of god' through, that healing the sick emerges but slaying the infidel is left behind? Whatever this filter is, whatever benchmarks we use to determine what parts of the Bible to follow and what to ignore, it must obviously be taken from outside the Bible itself. For the Bible itself does not instruct its readers to ignore anything that sounds "barbaric" or "outdated"; the Bible does not invite you to pick and choose. So if the Bible's more moderate adherents apply some sort of filter to it, that filter must - of necessity - come from their own moral sense.

As Yudkowsky points out in the Overcoming Bias post - read it in its entirety, it's a gem - religion used to make plenty of Unambiguous Pronouncements about law, nature, cosmology, sexuality, history and ethical behavior. Western civilization has slowly come to realize that none of those Pronouncements were, in fact, true ... except in the fields of ethics and metaphysics. And from thence the claim that religion is a "seperate magisterium" - meant to answer the "why" questions while science is left brushing its feet in the "how"s.

But are ethics any less scientific than biology, a subject on which the scientific method has shown the Bible to be unquestionably wrong? Ethics is the study of how we ought to act. We hypothesize that certain actions will yield certain results. We study history and current events to see if those hypotheses bear out. Certainly, the muddle between different teleological schools of thought makes the science of ethics harder to pin down than biology. But biology has gone through its feuds as well and scientists have not stopped trying to uncover its secrets.

The case for atheism - the case against God - is as strong today as it's ever been. Only tomorrow will it be stronger.

The Song Remains the Same

2007-07-25T06:10:00.000-07:00

Thoreau lays it down:

So, I was thinking about the fact that the Dems insist there’s nothing they can do without a two-thirds majority. There are two problems with that sort of talk:

1) Even if they can’t over-ride a veto, they could still just refuse to pass a spending bill for Iraq, NSA spying, and other obscenities. And if a few Democrats refused to go along and tried to vote with the Republicans to get a majority on a spending bill, I’m sure that between filibusters and the procedural powers of the House and Senate majority leaders and committee chairs, Reid and Pelosi could find a way to fix this. If they really wanted to, and if they were prepared to take some risks for the sake of the Republic.

They might not have all the power, but they have enough, if they’re actually willing to do something about this mess.

2) We’ve heard this talk before. Republicans spent decades insisting that they really do want to roll back the scope of the federal government. But first they needed more power. Well, they finally got the Congress, the White House, and the chance to appoint a bunch of judges.

Last I checked, they didn’t exactly decrease the size, scope, or intrusiveness of the federal government.

Ideology is a rationalization. It's what politicians sell to voters to get donations. We don't deny that some politicians may genuinely be opposed to or in favor of certain practices - like, say, abortion. But any electioneer worth his sand would ditch that principle like a plate too hot from the oven if he thought he could profit in doing so.

As to why the Democrats aren't acting on Iraq? on the President's various crimes? There's no mystery.

A False Sense of Security

2007-07-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

Commander Pleads For Time to Secure Iraq:

BAGHDAD (AP) -- If the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq is reversed before the summer of 2008, the military will risk giving up the security gains it has achieved at a cost of hundreds of American lives over the past six months, the commander of U.S. forces south of Baghdad said Friday.

How did people even write before they had the ability to use hypertext? We have no idea and, frankly, don't care to find out.

The Road To Hell

2007-07-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

Eric Falkenstein on Mahalanobis:

It's good to know what evil really is: good intentions, enthusiastically applied, on a bad theory. These people are creating utopias or protecting some principle, and the mere sadists are just opportunists. The idea that killing a politician who won two democratic elections, because one disagrees (strongly!) with them is based on the premise that Bush actually stole the election, or that he is in fact cynically trying to favor big business knowing this merely sucks the life out of average people, or some other caricature. [British historian Eric] Hobsbawm thinks we should give him credit for his intentions, which as applied rationalized both terror and an unimaginable bureaucracy. As Nietzsche said, no one lies like the indignant, and they lie to promote a greater good. It is facts that matter, because facts constrain theories, and if you assume the wrong facts, your theory that explains those facts is wrong, and an extreme application of that theory is evil.

Everyone thinks they're a hero. Everyone thinks their intentions will whitewash their actions. More terror has been inflicted on the world in the Twentieth Century in the name of "at least I'm doing something!" than was probably inflicted in the five centuries prior.

Every time someone insists to us that the evil of Josef Stalin or Chairman Mao is not indicative of communism's failures as a whole, we ask them this: if Stalin had been elected President of the United States in 1918, how many U.S. citizens could he have killed? Would every state governor have cooperated as he confiscated food en masse? Would no citizen have risen up in arms as his neighbors were herded off into slave labor camps? What's the most that President Stalin could have killed in the U.S.? One million? Five million, at the outside? But not twenty million? Okay.

It's The Territory, Stupid

2007-07-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

A Bruce Schneier essay in Wired that's worth reading in its entirety. But we'll draw out the important parts:

People tend to infer the motives -- and also the disposition -- of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors. If you see someone violently hitting someone else, you assume it's because he wanted to -- and is a violent person -- and not because he's play-acting. If you read about someone getting into a car accident, you assume it's because he's a bad driver and not because he was simply unlucky. And -- more importantly for this column -- if you read about a terrorist, you assume that terrorism is his ultimate goal.

Like most cognitive biases, correspondent inference theory makes evolutionary sense. In a world of simple actions and base motivations, it's a good rule of thumb that allows a creature to rapidly infer the motivations of another creature. (He's attacking me because he wants to kill me.) Even in sentient and social creatures like humans, it makes a lot of sense most of the time. If you see someone violently hitting someone else, it's reasonable to assume that he's a violent person. Cognitive biases aren’t bad; they’re sensible rules of thumb.

But like all cognitive biases, correspondent inference theory fails sometimes. And one place it fails pretty spectacularly is in our response to terrorism. Because terrorism often results in the horrific deaths of innocents, we mistakenly infer that the horrific deaths of innocents is the primary motivation of the terrorist, and not the means to a different end.

I found this interesting analysis in a paper by Max Abrams in International Security. "Why Terrorism Does Not Work" (.PDF) analyzes the political motivations of 28 terrorist groups: the complete list of "foreign terrorist organizations" designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. He lists 42 policy objectives of those groups, and found that they only achieved them 7 percent of the time.

According to the data, terrorism is more likely to work if 1) the terrorists attack military targets more often than civilian ones, and 2) if they have minimalist goals like evicting a foreign power from their country or winning control of a piece of territory, rather than maximalist objectives like establishing a new political system in the country or annihilating another nation. But even so, terrorism is a pretty ineffective means of influencing policy.

This theory explains, with a clarity I have never seen before, why so many people make the bizarre claim that al Qaeda terrorism -- or Islamic terrorism in general -- is "different": that while other terrorist groups might have policy objectives, al Qaeda's primary motivation is to kill us all. This is something we have heard from President Bush again and again -- Abrams has a page of examples in the paper -- and is a rhetorical staple in the debate.

The Abrams' paper Schneier refers to can be found here (.pdf file).

Even sensible people (Jon Wilde of Distributed Republic, nee Catallarchy being one example) can make the mistake of believing that al Qaeda "hates us for our freedom." This analysis fails in the armchair for a few reasons:

(1) Jihad has been a pillar of Ismaili Shi'a for centuries. Radical, anti-Western ideologies like Salafist Islam (the brand to which al Qaeda subscribes) have been around since the 1800s. Yet Arab terrorism has only blossomed in the West in the 20th and 21st centuries. What has changed on the Arabian Peninsula in the last century that might have caused that?

(2) Why do Arab terrorists devote most of their attention to London (we're ignoring the few futile idiots that have been caught in the United States, such as the geniuses who tried to ignite a fuel line with a blowtorch at JFK Airport)? Wouldn't France, Germany, Belgium, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Ireland or any other largely Westernized country make an easier target? In other words, why do Arab terrorists devote most of their attention to the countries that have a sizable presence in the Persian Gulf?

(3) If the face value claim that Arabs attack the West for its ideology is to be swallowed without hesitation, should the face value claim that the West attacks Iraq in the name of "freedom" be taken equally seriously? If not, why not?

Impish Impeachment Questions

2007-07-03T09:36:00.001-07:00

The Office of the Executive has grown even more contemptuous in recent days, with Bush claiming executive privilege to avoid answering a subpoena, Cheney arguing that he's not part of the executive branch, and therefore allowed to avoid NARA requests for classified intel and, most recently, President Bush commuting Scooter Libby's sentence after he failed to make appeal. This is on top of the Military Commissions Act, various deceptions about the war in Iraq, and other crimes.

So why haven't the Democrats started impeachment proceedings?

(1) Political cowardice - they're so in love with power for its own sake that they fear their tenuous hold on a few Congress seats will slip if they lift a finger in the air to object;

(2) Opportunism - Bush is on his way out anyway, and if precedent is set for the Executive to claim this kind of power, why not save it for Obama/Clinton/Edwards/whoever?

(3) Sympathy - they don't find anything wrong with what he's doing; they just wish he were a little more genteel about it. Like Clinton's overseas adventures in Somalia, or Reagan funnelling weapons to Saddam Hussein.

You tell us.

Surprise! It's An Empire!

2007-06-28T06:08:00.000-07:00

The House passed a resolution last week condeming Iran's (fictitious) attempts to create nuclear weapons. Two Representatives voted against it: Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

Arthur Silber takes the opportunity to remind us that the U.S. is, in fact, an Empire:

And that, as they say, is the ball game. In this manner, the Democratic House concedes, sanctifies, and gives its nearly unanimous support to the major propaganda point of the Bush-Cheney-Israel drive to war with Iran.

Thank God the Democrats took back Congress. That's all I can say. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened! Why, we might be on our way to a nuclear world war!

[...]

Kucinich does make one serious mistake in his comments, when he says, "The United States House may unwittingly be setting the stage for a war with Iran." C'mon, Dennis. The United States has a long history of aggressive war -- the Spanish-American War and the Philippines occupation, Vietnam, numerous covert operations all over the world (including endless such operations in the Middle East ever since World War II), the Clinton interventions of the 1990s -- on top of which, every leading national politician, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, agitates endlessly for confrontation with Iran. There is nothing remotely "unwitting" about any of this. Endless wars and unceasing slaughter didn't just "happen" while we were minding our business elsewhere. We believe we are entitled to world hegemony. It is our destiny to rule the world. We will have our way. "Unwitting"? Please.

[...]

Of course, if the Democrats actually disagreed, there are a number of actions they could take. But they do not disagree, so they won't take those actions. In the same way, there are a number of actions leading liberal and progressive bloggers could take in an effort to get Democrats to at least try to prevent Armageddon. But they have done next to nothing, other than endlessly blather about how awful it would all be (with nary a mention of the invaluable aid to the Bush-Cheney-Israel war program now provided by the Democrats themselves), and there is no indication they ever will. So I say again that, if the worst should happen, I don't want to hear a single goddamned word from any of these people.

In case anyone ever asks you why you don't vote Democrat if you hate Bush so much, link 'em here and tell 'em why.

Darkness, Imprisoning Me

2007-06-25T06:20:00.000-07:00

For democracy, any man would give his only begotten son:

TAMPA, Florida: He lies flat, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling, tubes and machines feeding him, breathing for him, keeping him alive. He cannot walk or talk, but he can grimace and cry. And he is fully aware of what has happened to him.

Four years ago almost to this day, Joseph Briseno Jr. was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range in a Baghdad marketplace. His spinal cord was shattered, and cardiac arrests stole his vision and damaged his brain.

The 24-year-old is one of the most severely injured soldiers — some think the most injured soldier — to survive.

"Three things you would not want to be: blind, head injury, and paralyzed from the neck down. That's tough," said Dr. Steven Scott, head of the Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center at the Tampa VA Medical Center, where Briseno has twice been hospitalized for extensive care. In recent days, Briseno was hospitalized yet again, this time at the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center.

[...]

He has had other trials: surgeries, procedures and medications for bladder problems, high blood pressure, the opening for his breathing tube, dead tissue on his tongue — even an ingrown toenail. The latest is the bone disease, osteoporosis.

He can respond to questions by grunting or grimacing, and occasionally can say "mom" or "go," but not consistently. He often opens his mouth.

"We believe he is very frustrated because he wants to say something. Those are the hardest times for us, especially when he's sick or not feeling well. He just lays there. We don't know what's wrong with him," Joseph Briseno said.

They pray that he will continue to improve, not get worse. And they hope to move to Tampa, where they believe their son can get the best care.

These are always and everywhere the spoils of war.

Neither Korea, Nor Vietnam, Nor Fish, Nor Fowl

2007-06-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

Jim Henley lays it down regarding America's "long-term commitment" to Iraq:

1. 50,000 troops isn’t enough to “prevent” shit. Eric Martin points out that three times that many troops isn’t stopping an ongoing meltdown along the Turkish border.

2. American troops are not epiphytes. They can’t hang on trees and get their sustenance from the air. 50,000 troops will require massive daily supply convoys, or, to use the military term, “targets.” If the US doesn’t “patrol” beyond the bases, the bases will be even more subject to mortar attacks than they are now.

3. So long as American troops are in Iraq, everyone is going to believe that America still owns the place and is responsible for whatever happens there - the pressure, domestic and international, to get out of those bases and deal with whatever badness is going on at the moment will be massive.

4. For just a moment can we acknowledge the grotesque moral bankruptcy of a policy that amounts to “We’re going to take up space in your country but we don’t give a flying fuck what happens to you people?” Because that’s what the “residual force” while “abandoning the effort to stop sectarian violence” means. At least have the decency to not crash on Iraq’s couch if you’re going to ignore the family feud.

No one who is not a party hack should accept this “residual force” nonsense for half a second. I’d call it a betrayal of the ever-growing antiwar movement if I thought the Dem front-runners gave a damn about the antiwar movement in the first place.

Point out the gross incompetence with which the United States has conducted its Iraq adventure, to say nothing of the sheer immoral arrogance with which the U.S. abrogated the right to dictate the affairs of nations, and you'll get a lot of sympathetic nods from the so-called anti-war left. "Yeah," they'll say, "but things would just get worse if we left now."

How? How could things possibly get worse? Shia, Sunni and Kurd slay each other with abandon, and gleefully turn their guns on any American GIs who interfere. There are two inevitable end states from the current situation:

Shia and Sunni continue violently feuding, as they have since shortly after the Prophet's death, while the Kurds pick away at the fringes; or
One side emerges triumphant and subsumes the whole of Iraq in nationalist fervor.

The presence of Americans can only delay one of the above outcomes. They cannot alter it.

How Civilized Men Might Live

2007-06-14T06:39:00.000-07:00

Over on The Volokh Conspiracy, an attorney for the recently ruled-on Al-Marri weighs in on the nature of terrorism and security:

Whether one trusts or distrusts President Bush and the manner in which he has prosecuted "The War on Terror," the powers he has asserted to himself (to the Executive Branch) -- the power to detain an individual lawfully present insde the United States based solely upon a Presidential edict and the triple hearsay declaration of a Pentagon bureaucrat -- could easily be abused by him or a future resident of the White House. Of course, while anything is possible, it is fair to say that to date no terrorist has obtained (much less detonated) a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world, whereas elected leaders routinely abuse power; such is the history of man. I do not think of myself as an alarmist, but I am alarmed that educated people can characterize as "bizarre" the possibility that government powers could be abused. Indeed, it was in response to such abuses that the Bill of Rights was amended to the Constitution in the first instance.

[...] I should add that I am the "Mark Berman" who is identified as al-Marri's "Next Friend" in the caption of the Fourth Circuit case, and have represented him since he was a run-of-the-mill criminal defendant, charged in the Southern District of New York with credit card fraud and possessing of constitutional rights. My views are those of an advocate. As a personal aside, however, I have spent the past year "commuting" back and forth from Israel where my family has been living. Israel, of course, is a very small country that lives not only with the threat of terrorism and war on its home soil, but actual terrorism and war on its home soil almost every day. It is surrounded not by giant friends and allies like Canada and Mexico but by hostile neighbors in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. All of its borders (including those with Jordan and Egypt) are porous. Until it built a security/border wall and fences, Israel's Palestinian neighbors would successfully send their youth to blow themselves up in Tel Aviv cafes, Netanya hotels, and Jerusalem buses. Rockets launched from Gaza fall on Sderot and surrounding areas daily, almost two years after the last Israeli left. Plus, there is the growing threat of complete nuclear annihilation by Iran. All to say that Israelis have a lot to be afraid of in actuality, and not only hypothetically.

[...] Yet, one does not often see or hear the sense of panic and fear mongering that has become charcteristic of American discourse regarding terrorism and its suppression (by politicians and the media, and which is implicit in the hypo which started this discussion). Israel is not a country that has a Constitution or a Bill of Rights like ours, yet, even here, fully justified fear of future terrorist attacks has not led to a police-state system inside of Israel in which people can be detained indefinitely without charge simply because the Prime Minister says so. The police are free to act aggressively to protect the population, but there is still a legal process with recourse to the courts; whether that process should be more robust or applied more even-handedly can be debated, but the point is that the decision to idefinitely detain an individual is not left to executive say-so alone, which is the authority President Bush has asserted under our Constitution.

Why Rich Nations are Rich, Why Poor Nations are Poor

2007-06-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

Eric Falkenstein on Mahalanobis says it best:

Jeffrey Sachs in this Vanity Fair puff piece. "We have enough on the planet to make sure, easily, that people aren't dying of their poverty. That's the basic truth."

Uh huh. But developing countries need more than peace and technocrats, they need the rule of law and property rights, which Sachs's donations really don't address. For example, there's this anecdote on one of Sachs's little experiments in Africa

Today, Ahmed Mohamed, the leader of Dertu's Millennium Villages Project, is trying to explain to the local people the benefits of hay. If you gather and dry the tall grass now, he tells them, you will have food for your animals the next time the drought comes.

It's hard for me to believe that no one has thought about cutting grass and saving it. I'm sure they are uneducated but that's a pretty basic idea for someone who lives off the land. Rather, it is probably very difficult to save because of the lack of law and order, including the ability to store things without theft, or have the right to then sell them in a future drought (at, presumably, higher than-average prices). Then again, if they really never have thought of cutting and saving grass, they really have zero chance of becoming a modern society on their own.

Falkenstein's observation is an excellent example of why capitalism is what will make the poorest countries in the world rich. Consider:

(1) What makes some countries wealthier than others? It's not natural resources: tiny Luxembourgh and middling Ireland share the top 10 with the U.S. and the United Arab Emirate. It's not labor supply: China and India have had more laborers than the U.S. for years, but are only recently starting to be competitive (and even then we're not holding our breath).

What makes some countries wealthier than others is capital. The ability to turn unskilled labor into a manufacturing powerhouse, to produce in hours what used to require days, to turn ideas into reality - that's what makes wealth.

(2) Capital requires savings. Robinson Crusoe, stranded on a desert island, must set aside time to make a net. This net will allow him to catch exponentially more fish, but he has to forego consumption for a brief time in order to make it. A net is a primitive example of capital - and you have to save up to get it.

In a modern society, you don't have to do the saving yourself. You can get a loan from a bank and borrow someone else's savings. But the same principle applies: someone had to forego consumption at some point in order to give you access to capital.

(3) Savings require security. There's no point to saving money, food or any resource if you don't think you're going to be around tomorrow. You can't forego consumption if you're struggling to eke out the minimum that you need to survive. "Live every day as if it were your last" is a romantic sentiment in first-world countries; it's a comic joke in poorer ones.

Further, savings requires some security on what you actually save. As Falkenstein comments, there's no point to stockpiling hay if some unscrupulous neighbor is just going to steal it. Who would dream of starting a farm in Zimbabwe? Or opening a factory in Venezuela? Why put money into something that you can almost count on seeing destroyed?

(4) ... sadly, at this point we run out of easy answers. Security can be imposed through brute force, with cops and armed soldiers, but this is often a pretext for more coercion and seizure (see: Mugabe; Chavez; etc). If everyone looks to his own security, the situation can easily deteriorate into civil war and rioting.

As Steven Landsburg has pointed out, the immense wealth and quality of life that the human race has experienced in the last 300 years is a fluke in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps feuding and barbarism are our species' lot in life.

Let's hope not, though.

Some Small Hope

2007-06-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

In the context of Captain Keith Allred's decision to dismiss the case against Salim Hamdan (one of the more infamous Gitmo detainees), Scott Horton of Harper's draws some interesting historical parallels

I think for instance of Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, a minor masterpiece which is not read and appreciated as it should be today. And reading Judge Allred’s opinion, for some strange reason, I kept hearing the words of Edmund Burke in the background, growing louder and louder with each subsequent paragraph.

The Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol is a simple document – the transmission to two law-enforcement officers of his constituency of an act that the government of Lord North has put to Parliament. The act suspended the great writ of habeas corpus - not for the good burghers of Bristol, of course, but only for a group of murderous insurrectionists who then stood in open and bloody revolt against their lawful sovereign. And the act went further, namely, it provided that these miserable wretches, whose insolence and defiance now extended to the seas, could be labeled pirates at the King’s discretion, and thus robbed of the right to be tried in courts. They would be dealt with in a summary fashion by the King’s military. And the act also provided that these miscreants could be transported across the ocean to England and held there to await their summary disposition – a step which justified the suspension of habeas corpus, since otherwise an English court might demand an accounting for their brutal treatment and incarceration.

[...]

Let the Great Writ stand, said Burke, and from this point be suspicious when the Government employs the label “pirate” to shorten the rights of those it sees as enemies. These words reflect the sum and the spirit of the rulings out of Guantánamo. They reflect the spirit of liberty.

Oh yes. Exactly who were those vermin insurgents who by Lord North’s design were to be stripped of habeas corpus, subjected to military trials with no rights and held in the crudest and most abusive conditions? They were the Americans, and the conflict was our Revolution.

We urge you to read the article entire, but thought it germane to draw eyes to these salient points.

The Moral High Ground

2007-06-08T11:59:00.000-07:00

The CIA's favorite form of torture

According to news reports, the White House is preparing to issue an executive order that will set new ground rules for the CIA's secret program for interrogating captured al-Qaida types. Constrained by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which contains a strict ban on abuse, it is anticipated that the order will jettison waterboarding and other brutal interrogation techniques.

But President Bush has insisted publicly that "tough" techniques work, and has signaled that the CIA's secret program can somehow continue under the rubric of the Military Commissions Act. The executive order will reportedly hand the CIA greater latitude than the military to conduct coercive interrogations. If waterboarding goes the way of the Iron Maiden, what "tough" techniques will the CIA use on its high-value detainees?

The answer is most likely a measure long favored by the CIA -- sensory deprivation. The benign-sounding form of psychological coercion has been considered effective for most of the life of the agency, and its slippery definition might allow it to squeeze through loopholes in a law that seeks to ban prisoner abuse. Interviews with former CIA officials and experts on interrogation suggest that it is an obvious choice for interrogators newly constrained by law. The technique has already been employed during the "war on terror," and, Salon has learned, was apparently used on 14 high-value detainees now held at Guantánamo Bay.

The Salon article goes on to describe how sense-dep has already been used and the potential side effects (hallucinations, psychosis, etc).

Also, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released some documentaton on America's gulags:

In the most comprehensive accounting to date, six leading human rights organizations today published the names and details of 39 people who are believed to have been held in secret US custody and whose current whereabouts remain unknown. The briefing paper also names relatives of suspects who were themselves detained in secret prisons, including children as young as seven.

[...]

The 21-page briefing paper, “Off the Record: US Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the ‘War on Terror,’” includes detailed information about four people named as “disappeared” prisoners for the first time. The full list of people includes nationals from countries including Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan and Spain. They are believed to have been arrested in countries including Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan, and transferred to secret US detention centers.

[...]

“Off the Record” highlights aspects of the CIA detention program that the US government has actively tried to conceal, such as the locations where prisoners may have been held, the mistreatment they endured, and the countries to which they may have been transferred.

It reveals how suspects’ relatives, including wives and children as young as seven years old, have been held in secret detention. In September 2002, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two young sons, aged seven and nine, were arrested. According to eyewitnesses, the two were held in an adult detention center for at least four months while US agents questioned the children about their father’s whereabouts.

Similarly, when Tanzanian national Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was seized in Gujarat, Pakistan, in July 2004, his Uzbek wife was detained with him.

The human rights groups are calling on the US government to put a permanent end to the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, and to disclose the identities, fate, and whereabouts of all detainees currently or previously held at secret facilities operated or overseen by the US government as part of the “war on terror.”

What makes the U.S. a better nation than Pakistan, Iran or Afghanistan under the mujahdeen? Its secular tradition? Its respect for human rights? Its sterling civil liberties record? Its adherence to the Western Enlightenment tradition?

What about the United States is worth defending?

Republican Debate Nonsense

2007-06-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

Unqualified Offerings are on a roll today.

Who would Jesus nuke?

The most chilling part of last night’s debate was, of course, when 10 of the 11 candidates fell all over themselves to assert that they aren’t afraid to pre-emptively nuke Persians. But the most inspiring moment was when Ron Paul labeled our embrace of pre-emptive war as the biggest moral crisis of our time. Since he was speaking before a Republican audience, he remarked that this was an abandonment of Christian notions of “just war.”

Interestingly, on the question “what is the biggest moral crisis of our time?”, all of the other candidates spoke about abortion. Meanwhile, the only obstetrician on the stage preferred to talk about war.

Killing unborn children: bad. Bombing civilians: acceptable.

Also, we have a Modest Proposal:

Didn’t see the Republican debate tonight [...] Mrs. Offering had to watch it but she was good enough not to tell me about it when I got home. My suggestion is, let’s save time. Just have the candidates torture each other and give the nomination to the last one to break.

Stop 'Em At The Thirty-Eighth Parallel; Smash Those Yellow Reds To Hell

2007-05-31T06:03:00.000-07:00

Bush Compares Iraq to Korea (AP)

President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday.

The comparison was offered as the Pentagon announced the completion of the troop buildup ordered by Bush in January. The last of about 21,500 combat troops to arrive were an Army brigade in Baghdad and a Marine unit heading into the Anbar province in western Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Perry Wiggins, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there are now 20 combat brigades in Iraq, up from 15 when the buildup began. A brigade is roughly 3,500 troops. Overall, the Pentagon said there are 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. That number may still climb as more support troops move in.

The administration warns that the buildup will result in more U.S. casualties as more American soldiers come into contact with enemy forces. May already is the third bloodiest month since the war began in March 2003. As of late Tuesday, there were 116 U.S. deaths in Iraq so far in May - trailing only the 137 in November 2004 and the 135 in April 2004. Overall, more than 3,460 U.S. service members have died.

First: does this mean we've officially stopped comparing Iraq to the Second World War? Have we abandoned the notion that Fallujah is the site of our generation's civilizational clash? Yes? All right, good.

Second: anyone who thinks a comparison between Iraq and the Korean War will stand is a fool. The Korean War ended with a cease-fire and the partitioning of the country, enforced by mechanized battalions on the border. But if the violence in Iraq ever ends, it will not end with a cease-fire. Neither the Shia nor the Sunni nor the Kurds are fighting with conventional weaponry - it's not as if the U.S. can keep an eye on their tank brigades and make sure they stay parked. Nor is the violence likely to end with a partitioning of the country into three religious monocultures. For one, the Kurds are sitting on most of the good oil. For another, the Sunni are in a vastly dwarfed minority in Iraq; setting them a place aside just makes them an easier target.

In fact, there's only one point of congruence in Bush's silly analogy: the inevitable ill will that half a century of U.S. troops overseas will build in the country being occupied. We envision a country with Shia, Sunni and Kurds at each other's throats in an unending melee, pausing only occasionally to slake their anger on the blond-haired, blue-eyed National Guardsmen cruising Sadr City in Hummvees.

Cognitive Biases and Intelligent Design

2007-05-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

As spurious as we usually find Wikipedia, its "anything goes" style of categorization produces some interesting lists. For example: here's a list of known cognitive biases.

Some of our favorites include:

Endowment effect: "The fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it."
Anthropic bias: the tendency for one's evidence to be biased by observation selection effects (in biochemistry, sometimes called "carbon chauvinism")
Observer-expectancy effect: when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it
Von Restorff effect: the tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.

But our new and instant favorite is inarguably the Texas sharpshooter fallacy:

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a logical fallacy where information that has no relationship is interpreted or manipulated until it appears to have meaning. The name comes from a story about a Texan who fires several shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.

[...]

One cannot use the same information to construct and test the same hypothesis — to do so would be to commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

[...]

Attempts to find cryptograms in the works of William Shakespeare, which tended to report results only for those passages of Shakespeare for which the proposed decoding algorithm produced an intelligible result. This is a fallacy, because somebody else selecting different passages would find a different pattern (or more likely, no pattern). A similar fallacy happened with cryptograms in the Bible.

Richard Feynman once made a facetious observation during a lecture. "This morning, I saw the most remarkable thing," he said. "Right in front of me on the drive in was a car with the license plate 'FG7-82S'. Can you imagine? What are the odds of that happening?" The implicated enthymeme - that we wouldn't consider such a license plate special unless it spelled something like 'H3Y - Y0U', and that such "specialness" is entirely a function of the observer's expectations - struck us as delightfully bracing. Apply this anecdote at will to creationists everywhere.

Ludicrously Real

2007-05-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

Adnrew Sullivan: "Verschärfte Vernehmung"

The phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Other translations include "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation". It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.

Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own.

[...]

Freezing prisoners to near-death, repeated beatings, long forced-standing, waterboarding, cold showers in air-conditioned rooms, stress positions [Arrest mit Verschaerfung], withholding of medicine and leaving wounded or sick prisoners alone in cells for days on end - all these have occurred at US detention camps under the command of president George W. Bush. Over a hundred documented deaths have occurred in these interrogation sessions. The Pentagon itself has conceded homocide by torture in multiple cases.

[...]

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

How can a rational human being defend the United States as "the good guys" in this war? Or in any future war, so long as these techniques remain tacitly approved?

Giuliani Emerges From His 9/11 Cryostasis Chamber

2007-05-16T06:21:00.000-07:00

People ask us sometimes why we don't vote.

Reuters:

Asked by a moderator if he was suggesting the United States invited the [September 11th] attacks, [Ron] Paul said: "I'm suggesting we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it. And they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said: I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier."

An irate Giuliani interrupted and asked for a chance to respond.

"That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq," said Giuliani, who leads national polls in the Republican race.

"I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th," Giuliani said to wild applause, asking Paul to withdraw the comment [emphasis mine]

(A) What could your having lived through the World Trade Center razing have to do with your ability to judge its geopolitical causes? How would the sheer historical accident of you having been in New York City on a certain day grant you special, magical insight into the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East? Why does your surviving the attack give you a supernatural glimpse into the past at its cause?

The answers, of course, are "nothing," "it doesn't," and "it still doesn't," respectively. But the 9/11 reflex has been rubbed so raw in Mayor-for-life Giuliani that it's his response to everything. Even when it's irrelevant, as it is here.

In case it wasn't obvious: Giuliani is no more qualified to speak to the causes of September 11th than any other pundit, wonk or noodnik. Having been in Manhattan on the day of the attacks does not bestow upon him special awareness of the mind of the mystic Arab.

(B) So Giuliani has never before heard the notion that U.S. involvement in the Middle East - the presence of troops in Saudi Arabia, our enforcement of a no-fly-zone over Baghdad, the Battle of Mogadishu and all that jazz - enraged Osama bin Laden into stirring up an attack? He's never heard that theory? He's never read any of the fatwahs that bin Laden has issued? Never cruised a rightwing webjournal and read the author railing against "failure-obsessed leftists" who want to blame America for all global terrorism? Never? Not once ever?

Because we're pretty sure we started hearing that on September 12th, 2001. And have heard it with moderately increasing volume ever since.

Now it makes perfect sense to us that Giuliani wouldn't believe this theory in a million years. It flies in the face of the Right's five-year narrative ("they hate us for our freedom"), a story that's grown more and more tattered in the time being. So we see no problem - save a certain bizarre fantasism - with Giuliani insisting it Just Ain't So.

But to claim never to have heard the idea? "So you say people download music off the Internet now? And play it on portable machines, no larger than a Walkman? Well, God bless 'em, but I'd have to see that to believe it myself."

(C) This is (part of) why we don't vote. Not just to avoid legitimizing an illegitimate system, not just because there's no candidate even within a hair's breadth of our key issues, but because it's a waste of our time. For every one person who studies the issues, checks the candidates' actual voting records and comes to an informed conclusion, there's two hundred meatheads who break into "wild applause" whenever someone mentions 9/11, Saddam Hussein, the flag or our troops.

We can't outreason two hundred fools' gut reactions, so why bother?

Where are the Anti-War Candidates?

2007-05-04T07:04:00.000-07:00

Thoreau gives us pause:

I don’t have the energy to blog [the Republican candidates' debate] play by play, and I guess it doesn’t matter because no pro-war candidate will win next November if US troops are still dying in Iraq.

To which we respond:

We disagree. Taking as read that one of the current candidates (Dem or GOP) must win, and that Ron Paul or Gravel will not be the nominees, then, almost tautologically, a pro-war candidate will win the election.

Who are the anti-war candidates in either party? Ron Paul was the lone Republican against the war last night. So there's no anti-war candidate on the GOP side.

On the Democrat side, Barack Obama wants troops in Congo, Darfur and wants to do to Charles Taylor the bang-up job the U.S. did to Saddam Hussein. Senator Clinton is wants "no option off the table" when it comes to dealing with Iran, a country with no aircraft carriers and no nuclear arms capability. Joe Biden wants more troops in Afghanistan and a no-fly zone over Darfur. Bill Richardson has the same tired speech every Democrat candidate has: our wasteful imperialist adventurism in Iraq has distracted us from the real imperialist adventurism in Iran and North Korea, etc. And John Edwards isn't going to win, so we didn't bother looking him up.

Seriously - where are the anti-war candidates? Where are the candidates who oppose nation-building, "all options on the table" and pre-emptive strikes? Where are the isolationists? Where are the candidates who would declare, as President Clinton declared over a decade ago re: Haiti, that the United States is "not the world's policeman"?

Who Is IOZ?: The Con

2007-05-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

Who Is IOZ?: The Con

As you've all noticed, the popular Donkle complaint centers on the "incompetence" of the Bush administration, although I do admit that there seems lately to be a modest, though surely temporary, uptick in the portion of Americans who consider foreign adventurism itself a bad idea.

The danger of a character like Obama--or Hillary Clinton, for that matter--is that they will more "competently" execute these adventures. Now the consequences will be no less awful; in fact, they may be worse for Americans.

People keep telling us that Obama is the candidate who's going to shake us out of our anti-voting apathy. Right. Sure. Because the one thing we want in a C-in-C is a more effective Bush.

Ohhhh-oh, The Guns of Nixon

2007-03-20T18:22:00.000-07:00

Bush Warns Dems To Take Offer On Firings

A defiant President Bush warned Democrats Tuesday to accept his offer to have top aides testify about the firings of federal prosecutors only privately and not under oath or risk a constitutional showdown from which he would not back down.

Democrats' response to his proposal was swift and firm: They said they would start authorizing subpoenas as soon as Wednesday for the White House aides.

"Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That's the formula for true accountability," said Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

[...]

Bush said his White House counsel, Fred Fielding, told lawmakers they could interview presidential counselor Karl Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and their deputies - but only on the president's terms: in private, "without the need for an oath" and without a transcript. [emphasis mine]

Does this sound familiar? Vaguely:

April 30: Nixon refuses to hand over the tapes, but provides more edited transcripts to the Judiciary Committee. He appears on national television to announce his decision to release the transcripts. There is public shock at the general tone of the conversations and the foul language used by Nixon and others. The expression "expletive deleted" enters the vocabulary.

A judiciary committee demands access to White House inside information. The Executive refuses, offering instead limited access.

We see two possibilities here:

(1) As with Watergate, the Executive is trying - poorly - to conceal something grievously incriminating. This could be a drastic change for momentum.

(2) As with Iraq, the Executive suspects that the Democrats don't have the stones to push this into a partisan battle, with real blood on the chamber floor. So far Leahy's the only country heard from. Time will tell.

We hope for outcome the first; we fear for outcome the second. Stay tuned.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Loves Big Brother

2007-03-16T05:41:00.000-07:00

Forgive us for being slow.

But when the neoconamorata argued so fervently for extraordinary rendition, for lawyerless tribunals and for the Military Commissions Act, they used the "ticking time-bomb scenario" (an absolute fiction, by the way) to justify it. These terrorists hold vital information to the War of Terror, they said. Allowing them to go through the clunky rigmarole of due process will just let their plots unfold, they said.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, having been imprisoned by the U.S. for over three years (after having been snatched, tortured by the CIA, and then deposited quietly in Gitmo), just now confessed to:

1. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

2. The 9/11 attacks, "from A to Z."

3. The shoe bomber operation to down two American planes.

4. A 2002 shooting in Kuwait that killed an American marine.

5. The Bali nightclub bombing that killed more than 180 in 2002.

And twenty-five others, including assassination attempts on Pope John Paul II, President Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

So we now have a benchmark. It takes three and a half years of torture to make a terrorist mastermind confess the details to attacks that have already taken place or never happened. Even when allowed ruthless efficiency and zero oversight, the U.S. government still can't finish on time or under budget.

Looks Like Them Duke Boys Are Up To Their Old Tricks Again

2007-03-14T06:44:00.001-07:00

Our man Ioz has been fighting the thankless fight, trumpeting for months now that the Democrats are not America's anti-war party. The actions of Democratic leadership before the Iraq civil war, during the Iraq civil war and now, in the failing days of the Iraq civil war, indicate nothing but a conflicted desire to distance themselves from the war's executors while embracing Middle Eastern war further.

How can we say this? Because the Democrats want to go to war with Iran:

Iran's intransigence demands a firm response from the international community, not just the United States. Make no mistake: keeping the lid on nuclear proliferation, stopping terrorist attacks on U.N. member states, responding to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic threats to destroy Israel -- these are matters of collective security.

What nuclear proliferation? What terrorist attacks? And what plausible apocalyptic threats?

[We'd like] effective diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force, which the United States must supply as a substitute for what will otherwise be a perpetually on-the-brink-of-war conflict between Israel and Iran, alongside the possibility of growing rivalry between Tehran and Sunni Arab states.

The "credible threat of force" is the growing carrier group stationed in the Persian Gulf. The "effective diplomacy" is ... um ... well, what do you say to a regional power that's trying to meddle in the affairs of the same state that you're trying to meddle in?

America comes off looking like the podunk sheriff in this one, sweat glistening through his stubbled chin as he bellies up to your car window. If you jaunt through town with too big of a gun or too fast of a car, he'll do his best to rein you in patronizingly. "Whoa there, son - shootin' the bad'uns is our job. You just go home and lay that silly little head down." But if you keep giving him lip, he'll draw down on you and ask questions later. I swear, judge, I thought that wallet was a gun. I thought that water-filtration plant was a heavy-water uranium reactor. Me and my deputies and my posse and a few of my drinking buddies and the SWAT team just opened fire to defend ourselves in the line of duty.

The Scarlet S

2007-02-21T06:19:00.001-08:00

Why doesn't the U.S. just start branding sex offenders?

Branding wouldn't be any more medieval than the current roster of punishments. If a seventeen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl swap naked digital photos, they're both guilty of "exploiting" themselves, or each other. In Ohio, you can now be placed on a sex offender registry without ever having been convicted of a sex crime. Rapists are no more likely to be recidivists than any other criminal, but they're required to identify themselves for the rest of their lives as such. And now vigilante groups collaborate simultaneously with local police departments and national TV shows to convict accused sex offenders in the court of public opinion before they're ever brought to trial.

To sum up: if you're accused of a sex crime, you are no longer considered innocent until proven guilty. You are not entitled to be punished under a reasonable standard of law. And you are not considered rehabilitated once released back into the real world. Modern standards of jurisprudence do not apply to you, you filthy perv.

So why doesn't the U.S. brand them? The courts would be saved a great deal of trouble, as no trial or incarceration would be needed. Just hold the struggling victim down, ignoring his pleas of innocence, and apply a white-hot iron S to his forehead. And then give him an hour on the rack, just to be thorough.

What's that? Branding someone for a crime is inhumane, you say? Is it any less humane than any of the above?

Free speech means free speech for people you disagree with, or else the concept is meaningless. Similarly, due process means due process for people you loathe, or else it's not due process at all. It's injustice and cruelty.

Why We Disagree With Charles Murray

2007-02-19T12:47:00.000-08:00

Though we're fans of evolutionary psychology, there's one pretty big region where we part company with the likes of Steve Sailer and Charles Murray. That's on the issue of race.

Race is a completely arbitrary biological concept when it comes to the human species. There are certain differences in the genetic code, depending on where you look (varying susceptibility to anemia, for instance), but nothing that prevents any two humans from producing viable offspring.

Charles Murray (in The Bell Curve) made a lot of noise about differences in IQ distribution among various races. Steve Sailer seems to have taken up that trumpet after him. One of the subjects that frequently comes up is how blacks tend to (tend to, Sailer always stresses) have lower IQs than whites.

Even if the history of IQ tests weren't already fraught with questionable academic standards (independent of the racial controversy) - and even if the scary "yeah, so?" implications were lingering unanswered behind every such assertion - and even if testing of this sort hadn't historically been used to deny black people access to liberties that white people take for granted (i.e., voting), there'd be one obvious test that this theory fails. Ockham's Razor.

Is there a simpler explanation for why black people might score lower on IQ tests than white people? Well, if you asked us to name the ten worst U.S. institutions of the last two centuries, slavery, public schools, housing projects and the War on Drugs would be among them.

War on Drugs: More than ten percent of all black men in their twenties are in prison - most of them for drug-related crimes.

Housing projects: Do we really need to go into the failure of welfare in the U.S.?

Public Schools: Education spending per pupil has doubled in the last thirty years, but graduation rates have not changed. Massive federal mandates to save schools turn into graft and cushy contracts to corporate cronies. Public schools put your child's mind in the hands of bureaucrats accountable to no one. And public schools are overwhelmingly filled by ethnic minorities - particularly black children.

Slavery: A net loss for black people, we can safely say.

Of course, none of these problems can be solved by more spending, more regulation or more state control. The answer to all of these save the lattermost is for the government to back off (whether quickly or slowly we can debate later).

But if forced to choose which sounds more plausible - the idea that black people are inherently less smart than white people, or that maybe the U.S. gave them a bad rap for their first three and a half centuries on the continent - we have to side with the second explanation. The one that we know is true.

The Green Lantern Theory of Full Employment

2007-02-12T06:31:00.000-08:00

Oh, Matt. Matty, Matty, Matty, Matt.

Just when we'd started thinking that common cause could be made with the Left - on ending the war, halting America's overseas adventures - Matthew Yglesias waxes enthusiastic over Barack Obama's vagueness:

"Let's be the generation that ends poverty in America. Every single person willing to work should be able to get job training that leads to a job, and earn a living wage that can pay the bills, and afford child care so their kids have a safe place to go when they work. Let's do this." [Ed. - section in quotes is Obama's Feb 10th speech]

That's the way to go, isn't? To be frank, nobody can be quite sure precisely what combination of policies can get this done. The thing to do, even in the absence of political constraints, would be to try some stuff. You'd need to make some existing things more generous, you'd need to try some reforms here and there, you'd need to start some new initiatives and . . . you'd need to be prepared for the fact that some of it probably wouldn't work and you'd need to try something else. Goals are good.

Matt! If Bill Kristol made such an airy, pointless speech about the War in Iraq - declaring the need for victory but leaving blank the means to reach it - you'd excoriate him. And rightly so. But Obama gets a pass on domestic policy because ... because why, exactly?

Let's see: a theory of political action based on the notion that it doesn't take empirical knowledge or reasonable warrant or credibility in the field, but WILL - pure and untarnished WILL - to make good things happen. The idea that you don't need a concrete policy or a realistic plan of action or an exit strategy so long as you have good intentions. That sounds pretty ludicrous, doesn't it? Where have we heard that before?

Oh, right: from Matt Yglesias himself:

As you may know, the Green Lantern Corps is a sort of interstellar peacekeeping force set up by the Guardians of Oa to maintain the peace and defend justice. It recruits members from all sorts of different species and equips them with the most powerful weapon in the universe, the power ring.

Suffice it to say that I think all this makes an okay premise for a comic book. But a lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.

People who think that America can accomplish anything through military force - if only America has the willpower - are WRONG. People who think that America can accomplish anything through domestic policy - if only America has the willpower - are NO LESS WRONG.

For shame, Matt. You used to be cool.

Aqua Teen Boston Force

2007-02-02T10:29:00.000-08:00

On the same day as several terror arrests are made in Britain, police discover a "suspicious device" at the Sullivan Square subway station in Boston, MA. They wisely shut down all of Interstate 93 Northbound until the device is harmlessly destroyed.

Four additional packages are found throughout the day, some affixed to bridges and some near hospitals. The Longfellow Bridge, Storrow Drive and river traffic on the Charles River are shut down.

By the late afternoon, we discover that the devices are Mooninites, cartoon characters from the TV show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They were placed by local artists at the behest of Turner Broadcasting, as a "guerilla marketing" scheme for the show's forthcoming movie.

The two artists are formally charged the next day with causing a hoax (unlikely, since there was no intent to terrorize) and causing a disturbance.

More here and here.

To the Howie Carrs and John Gibsons of the world, who call these two hipsters "criminals," we ask the following:

(1) If you don't believe that shutting the city down over devices that were known at the time to be non-threatening is an overreaction, then what would be? The first "package" found at Sullivan Square was destroyed by water cannon. Whoops - false alarm. It's at that point that rational people would stop panicking, not panic further.

Does a rash of fire alarms suggest a city ablaze? Does a rash of people calling 911 and hanging up indicate a crime spree? Then how do a rash of false bomb scares demand shutting the city down?

(2) If you don't believe that charging these two kids with formal hoaxing (which, again, requires deliberate malicious intent) is an overreaction, then how come Boston is the only city doing it? Why didn't Atlanta, New York or any of the other cities where these packages were known to be located - before January 31st, by the way - flip out and start shutting down roadways?

(3) Remember the Mission: Impossible 3 bomb scare? Promo companies put devices inside paper boxes that played a little commercial, in the style of an IMF briefing, when the box was opened. However, these devices weren't always mounted very well, leading several civilians to open vending machines and see boxes with wires fall out and start ticking.

We don't recall Howie Carr or John Gibson being very outraged then.

(4) Several defenders of paranoia have said that "not all bombs look like bombs." So is it the job of the citizenry to report anything that has wires sticking out of it? Any piece of mechanical equipment that they don't recognize? Anything that ticks and buzzes?

The Boston Police who responded to these reports and examined the devices were just doing their job. The bureaucrats who ordered the city of Boston paralyzed - literally, by shutting down roads, and figuratively, with fear - get no such pass.

Jon Chait: Dumb or Boorish?

2007-01-31T06:30:00.000-08:00

We know that we don't take liberals to task as often as conservatives, so we offer the following sop: Jon Chait's is-he-stupid-or-just-not-funny essay on the 22d Amendment in The New Republic (quoting from Matt Yglesias because of TNR's firewall):

If we had a straight dictatorship, Bush would long ago have been dragged out of the White House either by an angry mob or by disgruntled generals. (Note to oversensitive conservatives: I'm strongly against both dictatorships and assassinating Bush or any other president.) If we could vote for whoever we want, regardless of prior service, Bush would probably be dumped unceremoniously in 2008. Only our kooky current system lets him retire undefeated.

Is Jon Chait illiterate or just failing at being funny?

Can he think of ANY 20th Century dictators who were ousted after a mere 7 years? Pol Pot, maybe, if you only count his tenure as Prime Minister - but he really got the ball rolling in 1969. So that's ten years. Ceausescu lasted for over twenty, Pinochet for about twenty-five and Stalin for more than thirty. And these were dictators who killed their own citizens. As terrible a President as Bush has been, he's not a democidist.

Is his hatred of Bush so irrational that he can't be satisfied with the man's departing from office after 8 years, and would abolish the 22d Amendment - thus ending the American Republic - just to give him a punch on the nose?

Is this what passes for thought at The New Republic?

D'Souza's March

2007-01-29T09:23:00.000-08:00

Someone help us. Is D'Souza playing stupid or actually this stupid?

From an editorial in The Washington Post:

In the pages of Esquire, Mark Warren charges that I "hate America" and have "taken to heart" Osama bin Laden's view of the United States. (Warren also challenged me to a fight and threatened to put me in the hospital.) In his New York Times review of my book last week, Alan Wolfe calls my work "a national disgrace . . . either self-delusional or dishonest." I am "a childish thinker" with "no sense of shame," he argues. "D'Souza writes like a lover spurned; despite all his efforts to reach out to Bin Laden, the man insists on joining forces with the Satanists."

It goes on. The Washington Post's Warren Bass writes that I think Jerry Falwell was "on to something" when he blamed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on pagans, gays and the ACLU. Slate's Timothy Noah diagnoses me with "Mullah envy," while the Nation's Katha Pollitt calls me a "surrender monkey" and the headline to her article brands me "Ayatollah D'Souza." And in my recent appearance on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," I had to fend off the insistent host. "But you agree with the Islamic radicals, don't you?" Stephen Colbert asked again and again.

Why the onslaught? Just this: In my book, published this month, I argue that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks. President Jimmy Carter's withdrawal of support for the shah of Iran, for example, helped Ayatollah Khomeini's regime come to power in Iran, thus giving radical Islamists control of a major state; and President Bill Clinton's failure to respond to Islamic attacks confirmed bin Laden's perceptions of U.S. weakness and emboldened him to strike on 9/11. I also argue that the policies that U.S. "progressives" promote around the world -- including abortion rights, contraception for teenagers and gay rights -- are viewed as an assault on traditional values by many cultures, and have contributed to the blowback of Islamic rage.

"All I said was that Joycelyn Elders and Dan Savage should take some responsibility for the 3,000 people who were murdered by Wahabbist Sunni sympathizers on September 11th! And somehow, people got mad at me!"

Dinesh, sahib, let me help you out. Liberal critics aren't mad at you because they want to suppress your truthiness. They're not mad at you because your theories contradict theirs. They're mad at you because you're calling them killers.

However, D'Souza's march gets back on the beat in his penultimate grafs, thus:

The second reason [that everyone's mad at me] can be gleaned from the common theme in the reviews: that mine is a dangerous book. But if a book says things that are obviously untrue and can be disproved, then it is not dangerous -- it is merely fiction and should be ignored. A book is dangerous only if it exposes something in the culture that some people are eager to keep hidden.

And what is that? It is that the far left seems to hate Bush nearly as much as it hates bin Laden. Bin Laden may want sharia, or Islamic law, in Baghdad, they reason, but Bush wants sharia in Boston. Indeed, leftists routinely portray Bush's war on terrorism as a battle of competing fundamentalisms, Islamic vs. Christian. It is Bush, more than bin Laden, they say, who threatens abortion rights and same-sex marriage and the entire social liberal agenda in the United States. So leftist activists such as Michael Moore and Howard Zinn and Cindy Sheehan seem willing to let the enemy win in Iraq so they can use that defeat in 2008 to rout Bush -- their enemy at home.

Here D'Souza touches on an overlooked weakness in Western liberalism.

In the years since America went to war with Iraq, leftists in the West have found themselves in the awkward position of defending Muslim fundamentalism ("how dare the French forbid students from wearing veils! how dare those Norwegians publish political cartoons that insult the Prophet!") while attacking Christian fundamentalism ("how dare evolution make apologies for creation myths", etc). The problem: religious fundamentalism is all of a piece. To insist that an ancient, contradictory text holds the inspired word of a god denies common sense.

D'Souza, however, is the first conservative commentator we've read who doesn't take the converse of the Left's theme (Muslim fundamentalism BAD; Christian fundamentalism GOOD) but takes, instead, the contrapositive (all forms of fundamentalism GOOD). So bravo to him for a foolish consistency, we guess.

Setting The Stage for Iran

2007-01-25T07:56:00.000-08:00

Who Is IOZ?: Largely United.

Quoth the man:

[C]onsider that the moment of greatest, loudest whoopery in the chamber [during Bush's State of the Union Address - ed.] followed the dauphin's line-in-the-mud line that "the world will not allow the regime in Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons." Dennis Kucinich nearly lost his toupee in the updraft as every other member of his party leapt to their hooves all around him. There is a lesson here: The failure of the occupation of Iraq has not fundamentally altered the premises and assumptions of the governing class.

Emphasis the author's, but we draw attention to it as well. Has the failure of Iraq taught the U.S. that the threat of radical, martyr-driven, wahhabist Islam cannot be stopped by occupation and imperialism? No, it has not.

Groundwork is being laid now for the Next Big Lie - that while Iraq (ahem) didn't actually HAVE weapons of mass destruction, per se, Iran definitely does. That while the citizens of Iraq, a hodgepodge of virulently angry Muslims of different feuding factions, lumped together by the Sykes-Picot Treaty, didn't greet us as liberators, the Iranian people long for the soothing balm of democracy, American-style.

Actually, we're not as worried about Iran as we are about Iraq. Given that the entire premise of the Iraq debacle - namely, "Iraq the Model," Iraq the grateful recipient of liberation at gunpoint - was at best naive and at worst a lie, we could expect nothing but failure there. But the premise of the 2008 Iran Debacle should be remarkably straightforward: kill them all, and let God redeem his own. Whether you find that refreshing or disheartening, we leave as an exercise for the reader

Nothing is Over! Nothing!

2007-01-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Matthew Yglesias, this bizarre op-ed from the Washington Post: Retreat is Not An Option. The title alone stirs us with reminders of The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel. Early in the movie, Rommel has just received a direct order not to abandon an untenable post at El Alamein.

Rommel: It's an order, Bayerlein, a military order from General Headquarters. A clear, straight, stupid, criminal military order, from General Headquarters.

Bayerlein: And what are you going to do, double the insanity by obeying it? We've got the best soldiers in the German Army here. They may be just hanging on now, but they're still a force, they're still fighting. If we take them out now, they can fight again tomorrow. But this! This is sheer madness! It's out of the Middle Ages. Nobody had said "Victory or Death" since people fought with bows and arrows. Why, this is an order to throw away an entire army.

Victory or death. Retreat is not an option. Asking people like Lizzie Cheney what it would take to falsify her hypothesis - at what point she would accept that the U.S. cannot "win" Iraq - wastes everyone's time. She would never accept that the U.S. cannot win. She does not accept the U.S.'s military superiority as a matter of reason (better morale, better training, better arms, better intel) but as an article of faith.

So why dwell on her arguments, so-called, when the title alone gives away her madness? Because it's fun.

We are at war. America faces an existential threat. This is not, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed, a "situation to be solved." It would be nice if we could wake up tomorrow and say, as Sen. Barack Obama suggested at a Jan. 11 hearing, "Enough is enough." Wishing doesn't make it so. We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere, sometime. We can't negotiate with them or "solve" their jihad. If we quit in Iraq now, we must get ready for a harder, longer, more deadly struggle later.

Note that this paragraph contains no facts, no statistics and not much of an argument. Though we prefer not to flatter bald assertion with pure reason, we'll try.

Thus: to call the cultural clash between watered-down Western Protestantism (i.e., the U.S. and Europe) and radical Islamic theocracy (i.e., the factions of whom al-Qaeda is currently the most prominent) a "war" strains the bounds of metaphor. A "war" has a formal and technical definition (we've always liked Clausewitz's); the tidal shifts of religion do not meet that definition. While we do not believe Islam is a "religion of peace" - any more than Christianity is - we don't believe that calling something a war which isn't a war helps.

· Quitting helps the terrorists. Few politicians want to be known as spokesmen for retreat. Instead we hear such words as "redeployment," "drawdown" or "troop cap." Let's be clear: If we restrict the ability of our troops to fight and win this war, we help the terrorists. Don't take my word for it. Read the plans of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman Zawahiri to drive America from Iraq, establish a base for al-Qaeda and spread jihad across the Middle East. The terrorists are counting on us to lose our will and retreat under pressure. We're in danger of proving them right.

Of course, the United States stepped in a bear trap. Of course, gangrene is setting in. But removing the injured foot now would hurt! A lot! What are you, some kind of pussy?

Note also the fascination with "losing our will", already suitably mocked by Matthew Yglesias' Green Lantern theory of diplomacy.

· Beware the polls. In November the American people expressed serious concerns about Iraq (and about Republican corruption and scandals). They did not say that they want us to lose this war. They did not say that they want us to allow Iraq to become a base for al-Qaeda to conduct global terrorist operations. They did not say that they would rather we fight the terrorists here at home. Until you see a poll that asks those questions, don't use election results as an excuse to retreat.

This is a comical failure of rhetoric, something we might clip and show to students as an exercise. "Now class - at what point does Libby smuggle in a false dichotomy, between maintaining troop levels in Iraq or between an increase of terror attacks in the U.S., in her essay?"

· Our soldiers will win if we let them. Read their blogs. Talk to them. They know that free people must fight to defend their freedom. No force on Earth -- especially not an army of terrorists and insurgents -- can defeat our soldiers militarily. American troops will win if we show even one-tenth the courage here at home that they show every day on the battlefield. And by the way, you cannot wish failure on our soldiers' mission and claim, at the same time, to be supporting the troops. It just doesn't compute.

If webjournals count as evidence of the U.S.'s prospects in Iraq, we can think of several that bolster the argument for withdrawal. Note as well Lizabet laying the ground for a First Blood narrative eightteen months from now. "They wouldn't LET us win!"

To the hawks still holding out hope for Iraq, we must ask the following:

(1) What in your eyes would constitute "victory" in Iraq?

(2) If entering Iraq was a bad idea in 2003, why is it a good idea to stay? (And if it wasn't a bad idea, then where are the weapons of mass destruction?)

(3) What in your eyes would constitute "failure" in Iraq? If it's not bad enough now for the U.S. to withdraw, how bad would it have to be?

The End of Faith, the Edge of Reason

2007-01-18T08:23:00.000-08:00

Though we devote most of our attention to politics in this webjournal, our charter demands that we put reason foremost in all avenues, not just politics. Therefore, suffer us for a time while we speak about religion:

1. There is no evidence for the substantial claims made by any of the world's major religions. While we don't have the time to debunk every supposedly "miraculous" healing attributed to Lourdes or to touching the relics of some molding saint, there is no proof of the transubstantiation of the Communion wafer into the body of Jesus. Or of Mohammed's ascension to heaven on a winged horse.

The holy texts of those faiths - the Bible, the Koran - do not constitute "proof," as we have no one's word to take for the Bible's authenticity but the Bible's. And a subjective, unverifiable feeling that cannot be distinguished from a lie (e.g., "faith") is not proof. Faith is proof that you believe in something; it is not proof of that thing.

2. In any other arena of human experience - medicine, geology, aeronautics, football coaching, wedding planning, cooking, auctioneering, dog breeding - an assertion advanced without evidence would be laughed aside. Even in the fuzzier disciplines, where bold assertions can seem equally unprovable (e.g., "no one knew the emotions of man better than Shakespeare"), there is at least a marshalling of evidence and the possibility of debate. But it is possible to debate the importance of Shakespeare and still be considered an English scholar. It is not possible to debate the fact that an angel spoke to Mohammed and still be a Muslim.

3. The respect that religion is accorded in the realm of public discourse vastly outweighs its contributions.

4. Some would argue that religious belief leads to remarkable good works - charity, education, etc - that counter, if not outweigh, its tremendous evil. But any such charity must, of necessity, come from a very selective interpretation of the Bible. And to selectively interpret the Bible smashes the assertion that it is the inspired word of a god.

If we accept that it's okay to adhere to Jesus's exhortations to charity, but to ignore Deuteronomy's commands to stone heretics and burn adulterers, then what criteria are we using for such selection? What filter do we pass the 'word of god' through, that healing the sick emerges but slaying the infidel is left behind? Whatever this filter is, whatever benchmarks we use to determine what parts of the Bible to follow and what to ignore, it must obviously be taken from outside the Bible itself. For the Bible itself does not instruct its readers to ignore anything that sounds "barbaric" or "outdated"; the Bible does not invite you to pick and choose. So if the Bible's more moderate adherents apply some sort of filter to it, that filter must - of necessity - come from their own moral sense.

We can also anticipate the next response: that Jesus himself told his followers that he was "creating a new covenant." Does that mean that moderate Christians can ignore the Old Testament? Well, no - because there is no reason to believe that Jesus was the Son of God unless he fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah. Unless Jesus was of the lineage of David, born of a virgin in the village of Bethlehem, he is not the son of God - he's merely a particularly popular Jewish cultist from the time of Augustus Caesar. The appearance of Jesus does not invalidate the Old Testament. That's why the Torah and the life of the Prophets is included in Biblical canon, for Christ's sake.

Besides, no moderate Christian completely ignores the Old Testament - they're all fans of the Ten Commandments, for instance. So how did they decide which parts to follow and which parts to ignore? See above - their own moral sense.

(We devote the most time in the above block to moderate Christianity - Protestantism and Roman Catholicism - because we are the most familiar with that strain)

5. Armchair reasoning, as well as an empirical study of history, demonstrates that the greater a populace's religious belief, the greater the evil it perpetrates. The logic above proves that anyone who accepts monumental claims about metaphysics and ethics without evidence must be delusional. A survey of the last twenty centuries proves that it is fundamentalists - the Inquisition in Europe, the jihadi in the Middle East - that slaughter millions, torture mercilessly and wreck nations.

Surge!, pt III

2007-01-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

Quoted for truth (Scott "Dilbert" Adams on his weblog):

President Bush has unveiled his plan to achieve the top goal of his presidency: a popularity rating of zero. The only risk to his plan is if this Iraqi “surge” concept actually works. So let’s examine his chances.

On the American side, all we have to do is stretch the military to the point of breaking, spend tens of billions of dollars, and do what has never been done, i.e. secure a major Iraqi city and let the highly capable Iraqi government forces hold it. And popularity-wise, it would be helpful to do that without any casualties. This is the same successful strategy that has brought democracy to several blocks in Kabul, except at night.

On the flip side, the insurgents will be faced with the insurmountable task of going on vacation outside of Baghdad until all the surging is finished. Then they can wander back, all tanned and rested, and pick up where they left off. They might face some stiff resistance from the three or four Iraqi government forces who inadvertently shoot in their general direction, but that will allow the insurgents some much needed practice in torturing and kidnapping. It’s good to stay sharp.

We would ask at this point, of the true believers who claim victory is still attainable: what would "victory" look like?

A peaceful Iraq? Nuke Baghdad. There's nothing quieter than a sea of glass.

A peaceful, civil Iraq? Withdraw. The Shi'a will take charge, execute all the Sunni they need to get things in line.

Stability in an oil-rich country? Withdraw. Same result as above. Once Moqtada realizes that he needs money to run a country (and finance terrorism), he'll put his least corrupt men on pipeline duty and resume exporting light sweet crude.

A peaceful, civil Iraq with equal legal and cultural protection for two sects that have been warring for over a dozen centuries? We submit that it cannot be done.

Surge!, pt II

2007-01-11T06:12:00.000-08:00

From the Commander-in-Chief's address last night (c/o Drudge; link will probably be archived before long):

When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement. We thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together – and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.

But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq – particularly in Baghdad – overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam – the Golden Mosque of Samarra – in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.

That last paragraph is a lie. It is factually untrue. Shia "death squads" (if one could call the 60,000-strong Mahdi Army a "squad") have existed and operated since before 2006. And the idea that Sunni insurgents wanted retaliation - that they wanted anything, that a strike on a Shia holy site was not an end in itself in the quest for glorious martyrdom - is absurd.

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders, and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review. We consulted Members of Congress from both parties, allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts. We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group – a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. In our discussions, we all agreed that there is no magic formula for success in Iraq. And one message came through loud and clear: Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

There's another lie. The President did not benefit from the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. He has been planning the surge since at least mid-November - three weeks before the Report was released. In fact, the Baker report took Bush's plans into account, not the other way around.

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September the 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.

Considering that the U.S. has been the leader so far in toppling moderate (read: not radically Islamic) governments, creating chaos in the region and using oil revenues to fund its ambitions, we wonder if this is genuine concern or adolescent envy. Regardless, Baghdad was a much harder place for Shi'a and Sunni terrorists to operate in before March 2003.

Given that the premises of the speech rest on lies and historical revisionism, it shouldn't surprise anyone when Bush's additional 20,000 troops fail to stem the chaos. Violence will certainly decrease in the winter and spring - as it always does - but the Administration will search for a new bogeyman once we reach the deadliester months of autumn.

The Sleeping Giant AWAKENS ... er ...

2007-01-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

We must issue an urgent warning to our Commander-in-Chief: the Democrats are gunning for him:

Democratic leaders said Tuesday that they intended to hold symbolic votes in the House and Senate on President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Baghdad, forcing Republicans to take a stand on the proposal and seeking to isolate the president politically over his handling of the war.

Senate Democrats decided to schedule a vote on the resolution after a closed-door meeting on a day when Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts introduced legislation to require Mr. Bush to gain Congressional approval before sending more troops to Iraq.

[...]

The office of Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, followed with an announcement that the House would also take up a resolution in opposition to a troop increase. House Democrats were scheduled to meet Wednesday morning to consider whether to interrupt their carefully choreographed 100-hour, two-week-long rollout of their domestic agenda this month to address the Iraq war.

In both chambers, Democrats made clear that the resolutions — which would do nothing in practical terms to block Mr. Bush’s intention to increase the United States military presence in Iraq — would be the minimum steps they would pursue. They did not rule out eventually considering more muscular responses, like seeking to cap the number of troops being deployed to Iraq or limiting financing for the war — steps that could provoke a Constitutional and political showdown over the president’s power to wage war.

Symbolic votes. Non-binding resolutions. Debating whether to interrupt the Democrats' carefully choreographed pageantry of legislature. Ted Kennedy.

We take back every harsh thing we ever said about the Democrats, because clearly they mean business. Obviously, they're not afraid to stake their careers and their integrity by standing in the way of the Executive Juggernaut. Political cynics like us be damned - they're going to take a stand against Not Having Taken A Stand In The Past.

Centuries from now, historians will look back and recall not the Congress's shameful rollover on torture with the Military Commissions Act, nor their mealy-mouthed inadequacy after every pillar of the Iraq strategy had been smashed, nor their fascination with legislative trivia (the minimum wage?!) over the life and death of American fighting men. No, history will remember Nancy Pelosi and Ted "The Kennedy Not Currently In Rehab" Kennedy as heroes for debating whether or not to spend time voting on a non-binding resolution. Bravo.

Surge!

2007-01-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

Where is President Bush's predicted surge of Iraq troops going to come from?

Quoted from the Iraq Study Group Report:

Nearly every U.S. Army and Marine combat unit, and several National Guard and Reserve units, have been to Iraq at least once. Many are on their second or even third rotations; rotations are typically one year for Army units, seven months for Marine units.

Are there 20,000 combat troops free, unspoken for in other parts of the world? Are troops going to be called up for their third and fourth rotations? We don't believe, Chip Rangel notwithstanding, that there's any real chance of the draft being reinstated. But, beyond that, we just don't know where these twenty thousand men are.

[Edit: WSJ Editorial Board member Robert Pollock says that you could increase the number of troops simply by cutting everyone's vacation:

"[A]ll that means is decreasing the length of some breaks from tours of duty and increasing the lengths of some tours of duty." Pollock added: "That's not a hard thing to do."

So it's not a question of bringing in fresh troops - it's putting additional strain on the troops already there. That makes sense.]

Also:

April 2004 Deadliest Month for U.S. Troops in Iraq

October [2006] On Pace To Be Deadliest Month In Iraq War for U.S. Troops

December [2006] Deadliest Month in Iraq War for U.S. Troops

Why even change the typesetting at this point? "This month has been the deadliest for U.S. troops in Iraq since, well, the last time it was the deadliest."

(Note: this should not be confused with the deadliest month for Iraq civilians - currently July 2006)

Our prediction is made: if truthiness was the Word of the Year for 2006, then 2007's Word will be deadliester.

What's The Story, Morning Glory?

2007-01-02T07:01:00.000-08:00

Gerald Ford died. While every man's death diminishes us, we have difficulty finding anything of merit to say about his presidency.

Many otherwise reasonable people claim that his absolute pardon of every crime Nixon committed allowed the nation to "begin healing." That's a metaphor. A nation is an abstract concept; it does not suffer actual wounds. "Freeing slaves" is an accomplishment. "Signing a treaty" is an accomplishment. "Starting a war" is an accomplishment (whether good or bad, it is at least something).

But "facilitating healing" makes sense only if you buy a certain paradigm of nationalism already, to which we do not subscribe. This leaves us with only the act to judge on its own merits - pardoning one of the most grievous abuses of presidential power since, well, recently. Strike that - not just one of the most grievous abuses. He ordered "a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."

All metaphor about damage to the "national fabric" aside, the criminal trial of a former president would have done some exquisite damage to the papal sanctity in which the office is held. It would have set an excellent precedent and put future presidents on their toes. Instead, we hear a collective sigh of relief from the Old Boys' Club that parades through the Oval Office every four years. Don't worry, guys - no matter how badly you fuck up, the guy behind you can tidy up your spoor.

And for those of you who still buy into the "closing a dark chapter" metaphor, let us ask this: how crooked would Nixon have to be not to deserve a pardon? What if he'd ordered his ministers without portfolio to rob the psychiatrist of the man who released the Pentagon Papers, paid those ministers in campaign funds, ordered those same ministers to wiretap the offices of his political rivals, fired an independent prosecutor rather than cooperate with him in an investigation, and fixed some speeding tickets? Would that be enough? If the most profligate criminal to ever occupy the White House did not merit prosecution, what kind of criminal would?

Also this weekend: the government of Iraq executed a former ally of the United States. The U.S. does not intervene to stop his death, going only so far as to ferry his body some place that it won't be torn apart (Tikrit; apparently he's huge there).

As our man Ioz has noted, the New York Times obituary does not mention once Saddam Hussein's debt to the U.S. during his rise to power or during his struggles against Iran. Why not? Why wouldn't the New York Times remind the world that the U.S. backed this dark horse? Why didn't President Bush mention the long and jovial relationship that his father, President George H.W. Bush, or his former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had with the recently deceased?

Because that would mean admitting that the United States had made a mistake. That would be a hard case to make for war: "yes, our last military adventure in Baghdad was a grievous mistake that ended with the installation of a thug who gassed thousands of Kurds. But this time!" The only way to advance the argument for war is to don the mantle of all our past heroes (evoking comparisons to World War II and bombing Berlin) while ignoring all their past mistakes. No reasonable or moral argument can evolve from such evasion, however. Either you take responsibility for the mistakes of your predecessors or you part ways with them and take responsibility for your own decisions. Our current C-in-C wants the best of both worlds.

It's this Orwellian national varnish that makes the deaths of Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein oddly symmetrical in our minds. Both of them stand as emblems of a nation that sees nothing wrong with "closing dark chapters." What a handy metaphor that evokes! This book troubles us; let us close it. This man wronged us; let us forgive him. This man no longer suits our purposes; let us sit on our hands while he dies.

Can anything good come of the events of this weekend? Perhaps. Pinochet (another U.S. mistake) died in bed, but Hussein was executed by the government of the country he thought he was saving. Maybe this will be a warning to would-be dictators in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia and South America: the United States giveth; the United States taketh away. If you reach for that precious military aid from Uncle Sam when it comes to executing dissidents or installing your junta, reach with a chary hand.

Second, even among the United States' fighting men, the varnish is starting to peel:

"First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial," said Spc. Thomas Sheck, 25, of Philadelphia, who is on his second tour in Iraq. "So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?"

How Long, O Lord, How Long?

2006-12-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

Scenes of the Iranian conference on Holocaust denial greet us with nightmarish pomp - gold text on burgundy background, legions of attentive faces in the audience. While the "scholars" hosting this terror dress it in bland enough language (a "review of the Holocaust"), the purpose is clear, given the motley composition of the invitees:

Among those representing the United States was the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, whose prepared remarks, issued by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said the gas chambers in which millions perished actually did not exist.

Robert Faurisson, an academic from France, said in his speech that the Holocaust was a myth created to justify the occupation of Palestine, meaning the creation of Israel.

Sixty-seven representatives from 30 countries, all ready to argue or outright deny that six million people were slaughtered through what amounted to technocratic ritual. Can you imagine anything more absurd?

Yes, but only just:

Frederick Toben, from Australia, said Mr. Ahmadinejad had opened an issue “which is morally and intellectually crippling the Western society.”

“People are imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust,” he added. Mr. Toben said that he was jailed for six months in 1999 for his ideas and that there was a court order in Germany to arrest him if he again spoke against the Holocaust.

While Holocaust denial offends us, repression of speech repulses us absolutely. The idea that someone should be imprisoned for stating an opinion - no matter how absurd or hateful that opinion might be - should rankle in the stomach of everyone who loves freedom and reason.

These men, "scholars" in name only, do not have a leg to stand on. They deserve the harsh eye of public scrutiny to be turned on their lies and pomps with full force. But only in a free society, with a free exchange of ideas, can such scrutiny be brought to bear. Let these dissemblers suffer the rotten fruit and the harsh rejoinders of a public audience, not the relative security of a prison cell.

The Iraq Report (Part Two)

2006-12-07T07:58:00.000-08:00

Now that we know who the players are, we can follow the playbook.

Prime Minister al-Maliki has suggested the following essential steps towards national reconciliation:

"revising de-Baathification, which prevents many Sunni Arabs from participating in governance and society." In the U.S.'s quest to strip Saddam Hussein and his cronies of power, they also alienated the Sunni, of which the Baath Party was largely comprised. So in order to build a state which has some semblance of democratic representation, the U.S. will need to at least partly rebuild the regime they razed.
"sharing the country’s oil revenues" The Shia and the Kurds have no reason whatsoever to vote for this process, as they're already sitting on the biggest piles of oil. Tariq al-Hashimi, leading the Sunnis in parliament, has suggested redistributing oil revenue based on population - an odd scheme which would favor the majority Shia more than anyone.
"demobilizing militias" This will not happen. As we noted previously, militias run the infrastructure of Baghdad. Unless al-Sadr is booted out, the Mahdi Army will remain the elephant in the dining room that is Iraq.
"settling the future of Kirkuk" Kirkuk is a Kurdish city with large Arab and Turkish factions. The Kurds want Kirkuk to be part of the autonomous Kurdish region; the Arabs and Turks want no such thing. Kirkuk is, incidentally, rich in oil.

In addition to al-Maliki's milestones, the following very pressing issues can not be resolved:

Infrastructure. Again, basics like water and electricity are in the hands of al-Sadr, who has shown no haste in supplying them to the Sunni regions of Baghdad. Sunni insurgents respond with sabotage against pipelines or power lines (IEDs to take them down; snipers to pick off the first responders). The most skilled technicians were either excluded from the new Iraq government by de-Baathification or (wisely) fled the country.
Economics. The report tosses in a few hopeful notes about wheat output in Kurdistan and reduction of gasoline subsidies. But those are trivia compared to inflation (50%), unemployment (hovering at 40%) and foreign investment (less than 1% of GDP). The sorry economic condition is a symptom of the sectarian violence. No one will invest in a country plagued by civil war. Consequently there is no capital, and therefore no growth.
Oil. We considered making this a subset of Economics, but it deserves its own heading:
Iraq produces around 2.2 million barrels per day, and exports about 1.5 million barrels per day. This is below both prewar production levels and the Iraqi government’s target of 2.5 million barrels per day, and far short of the vast potential of the Iraqi oil sector.

[...]

Corruption is also debilitating. Experts estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 — and perhaps as many as 500,000 — barrels of oil per day are being stolen. Controlled prices for refined products result in shortages within Iraq, which drive consumers to the thriving black market.
Let's be generous and call it 200,000 barrels being lost to corruption. So just strike the ".2" from the "2.2 million" barrels per day. That's ten percent of Iraq's oil production - their only export.

The Iraq Report (Part One)

2006-12-07T07:22:00.000-08:00

Taken from the Iraq Study Group's official report (.pdf) (emphasis ours in all instances):

Attacks against U.S., Coalition, and Iraqi security forces are persistent and growing. October 2006 was the deadliest month for U.S. forces since January 2005, with 102 Americans killed. Total attacks in October 2006 averaged 180 per day, up from 70 per day in January 2006. Daily attacks against Iraqi security forces in October were more than double the level in January. Attacks against civilians in October were four times higher than in January. Some 3,000 Iraqi civilians are killed every month.

This is the equivalent of one World Trade Center razing every 30 days.

Most attacks on Americans still come from the Sunni Arab insurgency. The insurgency comprises former elements of the Saddam Hussein regime, disaffected Sunni Arab Iraqis, and common criminals. It has significant support within the Sunni Arab community. The insurgency has no single leadership but is a network of networks. It benefits from participants’ detailed knowledge of Iraq’s infrastructure, and arms and financing are supplied primarily from within Iraq. The insurgents have different goals, although nearly all oppose the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq. Most wish to restore Sunni Arab rule in the country. Some aim at winning local power and control.

Al Qaeda is responsible for a small portion of the violence in Iraq, but that includes some of the more spectacular acts: suicide attacks, large truck bombs, and attacks on significant religious or political targets. Al Qaeda in Iraq is now largely Iraqi-run and composed of Sunni Arabs. Foreign fighters — numbering an estimated 1,300 — play a supporting role or carry out suicide operations. Al Qaeda’s goals include instigating a wider sectarian war between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia, and driving the United States out of Iraq.

There was no tangible connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda prior to the invasion of Iraq. The power gulf that the United States created has since given them purchase.

Shiite militias engaging in sectarian violence pose a substantial threat to immediate and long-term stability. These militias are diverse. Some are affiliated with the government, some
are highly localized, and some are wholly outside the law. They are fragmenting, with an increasing breakdown in command structure. The militias target Sunni Arab civilians, and some struggle for power in clashes with one another. Some even target government ministries. They undermine the authority of the Iraqi government and security forces, as well as the ability of Sunnis to join a peaceful political process. The prevalence of militias sends a powerful message: political leaders can preserve and expand their power only if backed by armed force.

Here are some of the major militia players:

The Mahdi Army, led by Moqtada al-Sadr, may number as many as 60,000 fighters. It has directly challenged U.S. and Iraqi government forces, and it is widely believed to engage in regular violence against Sunni Arab civilians. Mahdi fighters patrol certain Shia enclaves, notably northeast Baghdad’s teeming neighborhood of 2.5 million known as “Sadr City.” As the Mahdi Army has grown in size and influence, some elements have moved beyond Sadr’s control.

The Badr Brigade is affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. The Badr Brigade has long-standing ties with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Many Badr members have become integrated into the Iraqi police, and others play policing roles in southern Iraqi cities. While wearing the uniform of the security services, Badr fighters have targeted Sunni Arab civilians. Badr fighters have also clashed with the Mahdi Army, particularly in southern Iraq.

If the U.S. could even pick sides in a Sunni vs. Shia civil war, they would still be caught in the crossfire between feuding Shia factions.

This is the status of America's armies:

Nearly every U.S. Army and Marine combat unit, and several National Guard and Reserve units, have been to Iraq at least once. Many are on their second or even third rotations; rotations are typically one year for Army units, seven months for Marine units.

This is the status of Iraq's army, into whose hands the United States is supposed to have been transitioning power since "Mission Accomplished" two and a half years ago:

Significant questions remain about the ethnic composition and loyalties of some Iraqi units — specifically, whether they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda. Of Iraq’s 10 planned divisions, those that are even-numbered are made up of Iraqis who signed up to serve in a specific area, and they have been reluctant to redeploy to other areas of the country. As a result, elements of the Army have refused to carry out missions.

This is the status of Iraq's police, who are primarily responsible for stopping attacks and sectarian skirmishes on the ground:

Iraqi police cannot control crime, and they routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention, torture, and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians. The police are organized under the Ministry of the Interior, which is confronted by corruption and militia infiltration and lacks control over police in the provinces.

This is the status of Iraq's infrastructure:

The Facilities Protection Service poses additional problems. Each Iraqi ministry has an armed unit, ostensibly to guard the ministry’s infrastructure. All together, these units total roughly 145,000 uniformed Iraqis under arms. However, these units have questionable loyalties and capabilities. In the ministries of Health, Agriculture, and Transportation controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr the Facilities Protection Service is a source of funding and jobs for the Mahdi Army. One senior U.S. official described the Facilities Protection Service as “incompetent,
dysfunctional, or subversive.” Several Iraqis simply referred to them as militias.

So the U.S.'s efforts at propping up Iraq's infrastructure are directly funding one of the most radical Shi'ite militia leaders. And Iraqi citizens themselves recognize that the FPS - whose job is to guard roads, pipelines and power supplies against sabotage - is no more than another militia, whose loyalties lie with one faction or another.

The results of Operation Together Forward II [started in August 2006] are disheartening. Violence in Baghdad — already at high levels — jumped more than 43 percent between the summer and October 2006. U.S. forces continue to suffer high casualties. Perpetrators of violence leave neighborhoods in advance of security sweeps, only to filter back later. Iraqi police have been unable or unwilling to stop such infiltration and continuing violence. The Iraqi Army has provided only two out of the six battalions that it promised in August would join American forces in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has rejected sustained security operations in Sadr City.

The Iraqi government, to put a bold face on it, ordered the U.S. to release an aide of al-Sadr's, suspected to head a death squad. al-Maliki has not just rejected sustained security operations; he wants the United States to quit screwing up his budding friendship with the Shia militia.

Security efforts will fail unless the Iraqis have both the capability to hold areas that have been cleared and the will to clear neighborhoods that are home to Shiite militias. U.S. forces can “clear” any neighborhood, but there are neither enough U.S. troops present nor enough support from Iraqi security forces to “hold” neighborhoods so cleared. The same holds true for the rest of Iraq. Because none of the operations conducted by U.S. and
Iraqi military forces are fundamentally changing the conditions encouraging the sectarian violence, U.S. forces seem to be caught in a mission that has no foreseeable end.

What does it mean to "clear" a neighborhood? The enemies of the United States include Shia militias and Sunni insurgents. Their preferred methods of attack are sniping, improvised explosive devices and other means of guerilla warfare. How do you clear a neighborhood of everyone who might be building a bomb?

And further, why should the United States have any reasonable expectation that the Armyr or Police - whose loyalties are to clerics and militias first - will aid in keeping a contested neighborhood clear?

The Shia, the majority of Iraq’s population, have gained power for the first time in more than 1,300 years. Above all, many Shia are interested in preserving that power. However, fissures have emerged within the broad Shia coalition, known as the United Iraqi Alliance. Shia factions are struggling for power—over regions, ministries, and Iraq as a whole. The difficulties in
holding together a broad and fractious coalition have led several observers in Baghdad to comment that Shia leaders are held “hostage to extremes.” Within the coalition as a whole, there is a reluctance to reach a political accommodation with the Sunnis or to disarm Shiite militias.

Takeaways:

(A) The United States is dealing with a sectarian conflict that was ancient when the Battle of Lexington was being fought. The idea that 140,000 troops could impose anything resembling peace is laughable.

(B) Again, even if the United States chose to side with the Shi'ites (and there is no indication that they will), the infighting within the Shia coalition would still prevent us from creating any real stability.

(C) The stakes are too high for the Shia to surrender anything of importance.

The U.S. deals primarily with the Iraqi government, but the most powerful Shia figures in Iraq do not hold national office. Of the following three vital power brokers in the Shia community, the United States is unable to talk directly with one (Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani) and does not talk to another (Moqtada al-Sadr).

Imagine trying to retake France and being unable to coordinate with deGaulle.

The report goes on to describe the three major Shia players (not naming al-Maliki as one, bizarrely enough):

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whom every Shi'ite leader seeks the approval of and who is the only Shia seeking "moderated aims." Of course, the U.S. hasn't spoken to him.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). SCIRI wants to divide Iraq up into Sunni and Shia regions, with the Shi'ites taking nine provinces in the south. SCIRI and Iran are on good terms.
Moqtada al-Sadr, who controls the 60,000-strong Mahdi Army, as well as the ministries of Health, Agriculture and Transportation. When your militia has grown to half the size of the national police force (and is better armed and appointed), you control the infrastructure and the Prime Minister orders U.S. troops away from your power centers, you are in charge.

But enough about the Shia. On the Sunni side, we have:

Tariq al-Hashimi, one of Iraq's two Vice Presidents and head of the Sunni bloc in parliament. His big issue is re-Baathification - in other words, installing the people that the U.S. invaded Iraq to depose in the first place.
Sheik Harith al-Dhari, head of the Muslim Scholars Association, the most influential Sunni faction in Iraq. He's close with both the Sunni insurgents and the Sunni bloc in the government. There's a warrant out for his arrest.

The majority of Kurds, including Massoud Barzani (leader of the KDP and President of the Kurdish regional government) and Jalal Talabani (leader of the PUK and President of Iraq), would like an independent Kurdistan, believing that they can sit back while Sunni and Shia pick each other off. The downside, of course, is that the Kurds are sitting on most of Iraq's precious oil. It would only be a matter of time before one faction or the other amassed enough power to go after them.

# # #

The stage is now set, the players all assembled. More to continue in later posts.

One Day More To Revolution

2006-12-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

Coyote and Cafe Hayek are tag-teaming Lou Dobbs and the rest of the modern protectionists (remember when conservatives used to be in favor of the free market?). We have little to add to their insight, except paraphrasing some much-needed Bastiat.

Let's say we are from Paris. We have some fine Burgundy that it cost us 800 francs to grow, harvest, press and bottle. We ship it to London (price of shipping included in that 800 francs).

We sell it in London for 600 pounds sterling. Since we have no use for pounds back in Paris, we buy a consignment of wool stockings for those 600 pounds. We ship this back to France and sell it for 1000 francs.

France is now richer, in that the nation has gotten rid of some surplus wine and received some much needed stockings. Britain is now richer, in that the nation has unloaded some excess stockings and taken in some delicious wine. And, sweetest plum of all, we are richer for the deal.

We have also increased France's "trade deficit" with Britain by 200 francs. We imported more than we exported. Allow us a moment's peace until the horror abates.

It takes a mind of the singular genius of Lou Dobbs or Pat Buchanan to argue that a transaction which benefits everybody requires immediate government action and a precipitous halt.

Dobbs and his ilk would argue that since the excess is in the form of U.S. government securities, not actual product, that that is where the real threat lies. This changes the above argument - and the truth of the matter - not one iota.

A buyer in England, having francs that he cannot spend in London, invests them in Frankish treasury bonds. What can he do with these bonds? He can hold them until they mature for a tiny yield. He can find an eager buyer to sell them to for a larger profit. And that's it. Regardless of whether the Englishman sells his French bonds for a small profit or a large one, the government of France has already received whatever francs he paid for them. Regardless of whether the Englishman makes a mint on the deal or barely covers his cost, the government of France still owes the final holder of those bonds whatever it promised to pay. The fact that the bonds are held by an Englishman as opposed to a Frenchman should matter not one whit to the government of France, unless they have a particular antipathy towards Britain.

Substitute "China" for England and "the U.S." for France.

If someone could please tell us why any of the above is a bad thing, we'd thrill to hear it.

Gentleman-Rankers On A Spree, Damned From Here To Eternity

2006-11-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

Our Daily Ioz, favorite rabble-rouser of the first water, points us to this gem uttered by Congressman Charlie Rangel (D, NY):

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) has long advocated returning to the draft, but his efforts drew little attention during the 12 years that House Democrats were in the minority. Starting in January, however, he will chair the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. Yesterday he said "you bet your life" he will renew his drive for a draft.

"I will be introducing that bill as soon as we start the new session," Rangel said on CBS's "Face the Nation." He portrayed the draft, suspended since 1973, as a means of spreading military obligations more equitably and prompting political leaders to think twice before starting wars.

"There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," said Rangel, a Korean War veteran. "If we're going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can't do that without a draft."

First (and we echo the sentiments of Ioz here), given that the President to whom he refers avoided going to Vietnam, in spite of conscription at that time, what makes Congressman Rangel think Congress will treat future wars with any more reluctance? We assure you no child, nephew, cousin or neighbor of a member of the United States Congress will serve as a conscripted GI unless something goes terribly wrong. What is the point of getting all that power, after all, unless you get to use it?

Second ... well, here we must confess a weakness. We were tempted to throw this triumphantly in the face of any Democrat or liberal who claimed that the November election was a repudiation of the Commander-in-Chief's cowboy diplomacy. "So much for that," we would cry, "Rangel's a Democrat and he's as imperialist as the next Republican." However, given that Rangel has proposed this bill twice before in the last four years (once to be voted down near unanimously, once to die without even being introduced), it seems clear that this is not an act of political opportunism. Else why advance the bill before, when he lacked the votes to support it? This is clearly a pet crusade of the Congressman's, no more attributable to the Democrats as a whole than to New Yorkers as a rule.

Third, history soundly rejects Rangel's reasoning. If the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the police action that followed cannot be taken as a war entered on "flimsy evidence," then no war of the last century can.

Milton Friedman, RIP

2006-11-17T14:27:00.000-08:00

Most popular libertarian-ish economist of the 20th century dies at age 94

Many of us first became aware of the virtues of free markets through his Free To Choose. We at The Last Argument have also read much of his son David's work and correspond with his grandson Patri. The world is darkened by his loss but brightened by his memory.

Truth, Justice and David Ricardo

2006-11-16T08:40:00.000-08:00

We love Cafe Hayek, really we do, but sometimes Russ Roberts needs to reign it in.

We first discovered Russ through his novel, The Invisible Heart. It's one of those delightful gems where characters deliver dialogue not to advance their motivations but to prop up arguments. The protagonist, a passionate defender of free markets, entertains stock objections to capitalism from his students with good cheer and aplomb. As a passionate defender of free markets myself, we found the rhetoric unremarkable; as a passionate defender of the good novel, we found the story equally dull. It's books like this (seconded only to L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach) that make us cringe before announcing our libertarian sympathies.

But we love Cafe Hayek, and Roberts' ability to disperse economic ignorance - like a drop of soap in a dishpan of dirty water - more than makes up for his literary failings. So it is with gentle good humor (a polite roll of the eyes, a patronizing nod) that we find Professor Roberts fabulizing again.

He declares his intention, in a recent post at Cafe Hayek, to be to "teach and understand a concept that many would label the single most important insight of the discipline," namely, the Ricardian principle of comparative advantage. We agree with Professor Roberts that the importance of comparative advantage cannot be overstated. We agree also that the short shrift this idea gets in most economics classes verges on the criminal. Literally criminal, since ignoring the benefits of trade has led to thousands of worthless regulations (i.e., theft) for centuries.

What we cannot agree with is his hackneyed prose:

"Funny, you mentioned 'plunder.' " Pam said. "It's such an old-fashioned word. I had an economics professor who actually talked a lot about plunder. He said until the birth of capitalism, plunder was the main way you got ahead. You knocked your neighbor over the head and took his stuff. Here's the interesting thing about plunder. Plunder looks like it merely rearranges the economic pie."

"That's right," Pete said, happy to forget their troubles for a moment and think about the impact of plunder. "Theft means more for me and less for my neighbor. The total amount doesn't change."

"That seems right but my teacher pointed out that theft actually makes the size of the pie, properly measured, smaller."

"What's 'properly measured' mean?" Pete asked.

Camus would snicker behind his beret. Descartes would roll his eyes. Ayn Rand would probably take him to task for not pressing the point hard enough, but you see where we're going.

If Professor Roberts is so hard up for an illustrative analogy to teach the importance of comparative advantage, let him take this one for free: the Justice League.

The Justice League is a team of the most powerful superheroes on the planet: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Flash, The Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern and others ad hoc. Each of them has a specialty: Batman is the world's greatest detective, Aquaman has undisputed rule over the oceans, the Flash can run at the speed of light, etc.

But Superman is better than all of them.

Pre-Crisis, Superman could fly around the planet Earth fast enough to go back in time. He could hear sounds from practically anywhere, see through anything with his X-ray vision, and juggle suns. He could be a better detective than Batman, a better warrior than Wonder Woman and a faster mover than the Flash. If the chief export of a superhero is Justice, then Superman could produce more Justice than any other member of the League.

So why does Superman hang out with those guys? Because the Justice League produces more Justice than Superman acting alone. Batman may not be able to see through walls, but he can uncover clues while Superman is off pounding asteroids. Superman can fight more effectively than Wonder Woman, but he'd be better served by flying to Alpha Centauri and back to get this week's MacGuffin while Wonder Woman deals with those robot zombies. By sharing his time with these people, Superman produces more Justice than he would alone.

And since Justice is what Superman wants most in the world, he benefits by sharing time with people who are worse than him at everything.

That last sentence bears repeating, because that's the truly remarkable conclusion of Ricardo's theory: you can benefit by trading with people who are worse than you at everything. The very act of trade enriches all parties. Commerce benefits everyone who participates, even if you think the other party has nothing to offer. The world doesn't need a Superman - Superman needs the rest of the world.

We always prefer to check for existing analogies before constructing torturous bridges of our own: the audience is more likely to recognize a common reference than follow our lengthy explanations. We do dearly wish that Professor Roberts would take the same tack. He is, at times, like the Fisher family in his own example - trying to do everything by himself (produce brilliant economic theory and write novels) rather than trading with those who could do the latter better.

Minimum Wage

2006-11-06T14:20:00.000-08:00

Brad Hicks of Livejournal has a post today regarding a minimum wage initiative in Missouri. He defends it with the usual rhetoric we'd expect from someone who writes glowing paeans to FDR:

The statement, which you have already heard and will hear again, that "raising the minimum wage raises the unemployment rate, by making businesses lay off those who aren't worth the extra money" is not a proven fact. It is, at best, a hypothesis. During the stagflation of the 1970s, back when Republicans were arguing that the US economy was in the toilet, not because of Vietnam-era runaway deficits and the OPEC oil embargo but because, thanks to the unions, the middle and working classes had it too good, it even became a popular theory. But until you test a theory, it remains only a theory. And the theory that raising the minimum wage causes increased unemployment has been tested. Repeatedly. The minimum wage has risen 26 times since it was first introduced back in 1938. And none of those times did it result in increased unemployment. Not one. On the contrary, we have seen substantial periods of rising unemployment twice in the last several decades. Both of them coincided with long gaps between raises in the minimum wage, from 1981 to 1990 and from 1997 to the present.

The minimum wage is one of those examples that pains honest economists, because the evidence against its benefits is so simple and the statistics marshalled in its defense so complex. We labor on regardless.

When Brad says that the correlation between minimum wages and unemployment is "at best" a hypothesis, he is wrong. Consider a supply and demand graph, familiar to any student of economics. Label the vertical graph "Price of Labor" and the horizontal "Supply of Labor." Find the point where the two curves intersect.

Now draw a horizontal line above the equilibrium. That is the effect of a minimum wage - an artificial "price floor," forbidding any business to charge a price for labor beneath it. If we raise the price from $2.30 (the equilibrium) to $3.00, then the supply of labor now outstrips the demand for labor. This results in labor shortages or, as the papers call it, unemployment.

To say that a minimum wage will not cause unemployment, one or more of the following must be true:

The price is already well below its equilibrium, and this price floor will raise the price of labor to that level. This would mean that the demand for labor is outstripping the supply - that there are more open jobs then there are job seekers. In this thought experiment, the unemployed are idle dreamers who must be coaxed out of unemployment by the tempting offer of a higher wage. This strikes us as patently false; we list it simply for the sake of completeness.
The demand curve for labor is so inelastic that a change in price will not significantly affect the quantity of labor demanded. Elasticity is the extent to which a change in price results in a change in demand. A sharper change means a greater elasticity.

Below is an example of a perfectly inelastic demand curve.

Examples of goods with inelastic demands include cigarettes and gasoline - it takes a great change in price to produce a small change in demand. State governments have taken advantage of this datum to level significant taxes on both products, claiming an inexhaustible source of revenue.

Obviously, the demand curve for labor cannot be perfectly inelastic, or none of us could ever be fired. However, we'd be willing to entertain the argument that headcount is fairly static for large businesses. The investment of capital and machinery requires some minimum number of persons x to operate it and a cost-efficient business would be operating as close to that minimum as possible already. If the jobs need to be filled, would this business fire a handful of people should the minimum wage rise?

A possible argument, though we've never heard anyone other than ourselves make it.
The few people that the minimum wage fires are masked by an increase in spending from the bottom tier's now-higher wages, which leads to an increase in business revenues, which leads to expanded investment, growth and the hiring of more workers. This is the Keynesian money multiplier. While we could devote a week's worth of webjournal posts to debunking Keynes, we'll simply say for now that we don't find the idea that one dollar can be counted as ten if spent by the Department of Labor to be compelling.
The theory of supply and demand is a lie.

In short, if the minimum wage does not cause unemployment, it falls to those who argue for the minimum wage to explain why. The idea that a price floor does not result in a shortage contradicts the foundation of modern economics. Progressives will cite statistics, as Brad does, but a statistic is not an argument. It is at best support for an argument - an argument we have yet to hear.

Can we think of reasons why the minimum wage might cause people to lose their jobs, yet this change is not reflected in the statistics? Yes.

Here's one hypothesis: The businesses hit hardest by minimum wage increases are the smallest of small businesses. Larger businesses, like Target, Sears or WalMart (which actually pays significantly more than the national minimum wage on average), can defray the added costs more easily. So a raise in the minimum wage transfers workers from mom-and-pop stores to Big Box corporate warehouses. Huzzah for big business! If progressives are sabotaging one of their cherished goals in service of another, that's their kitty to mind, of course.

But above all else, the argument for the minimum wage fails on one simple, praxeological level. It presumes that a government agency - any agency - knows the cost of running a business better than the business itself. The most casual audit of Department of Defense expenditures, or the cost of rebuilding your county courthouse, should lay that myth to rest.

Spending More To Get Less

2006-10-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

Care of CoyoteBlog comes a study from the Goldwater Institute regarding Arizona public schools. The author summarizes the findings on Cato's blog:

"[P]ublic schools spend one-and-a-half times as much per pupil as do private schools. Or, looked at the other way, private schools spend a third less than public schools."

How is it public schools spend more money, yet are consistently and inarguably worse? Hmm. Let's think, folks; let's think real hard.
"Teachers make up 72 percent of on-site staff in Arizona’s independent education sector, but less than half of on-site staff in the public sector."

This doesn't rattle the backboard for us as hard as the first stat does. Your typical public school will have a larger student body than your typical private school. We wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are certain diseconomies of scale when dealing with swarms of unruly teenagers. If you can get by with a 100:1 administrator-to-student ratio with less than 1000 students, but need a 50:1 ratio with 10,000 students or more, we don't think that necessarily means public schools are less efficient. At this point, though, you could confront us in a dark alley with Ockham's Razor: "public schools are bureaucratic nightmares" is the simpler explanation.
"When teachers’ 9-month salaries are annualized to make them comparable to the 12-month salaries of most other fields, Arizona independent school teachers earned the equivalent of $36,456 in 2004 — about $2,000 less than reporters and correspondents. The 12-month-equivalent salary of the state’s public school teachers was around $60,000, which is more than nuclear technicians, epidemiologists, detectives, and broadcast news analysts. It’s also about 50 percent more than reporters or private school teachers earn."

We have never been sympathetic to the argument that teachers are underpaid. We'll agree that teaching is hard work (that's why we don't do it), but we believe the salary is roughly commensurate to the work involved. Of course, when you have a powerful union protected by the State negotiating your contracts, your wages may be just a little inflated.

Next time someone throws you the old chestnut that schools are underfunded, toss it right back at them: "compared to what?" The word under- in underfunded implies a benchmark to measure against. To what field should our nation's public schools receive comparable funding? Power plants (see nuclear technicians, above)? Police departments (see detectives, above)? Health care (see epidemiologists, above)?

Though the Goldwater Institute limited its study to Arizona, we'll bet you your next paycheck that you could duplicate the results in most of the states. Public schools have pretty consistently failed the children of this country and it's not for a lack of spending. The state of AZ is getting $5,100,000,000 (.pdf) in federal money for Fiscal Year 2007. That five billion, one hundred million dollars, if left in the hands of taxpayers, could pay the elementary and middle-school tuition of one million, three hundred and seventy-eight thousand children (taking the Goldwater Institute's figure of $3700 per year as an accurate average).

The absolute inefficiency of public schools is a mystery to anyone who hasn't studied von Mises or Hayek. To the rest of us, it's a mystery why you'd debate it. The function of prices in a market economy is not simply to acquire profit, but to communicate information. High prices communicate a high demand and a low supply; beggarly prices tell the opposite story. No bureaucracy can be as efficient as the price system when it comes to disseminating the relative supply or scarcity of various goods, or the various demand or disinterest in multiple services.

Anyone who condemns prices (e.g., "you can't put a price on a child's education!") is condemning knowledge. There aren't many places where you can get a job by defending ignorance, though the local school board will undoubtedly welcome you.

Superstition in Mainstream Politics

2006-10-04T09:13:00.000-07:00

CoyoteBlog, one of our favorites, posted this intriguing thought comparing the American Left's views on economics with the American Right's views on evolution:

In fact, the more I think about it, the more economics and evolution are very similar. Both are sciences that are trying to describe the operation of very complex, bottom-up, self-organizing systems. And, in both cases, there exist many people who refuse to believe such complex and beautiful systems can really operate without top-down control.

For example, certain people refuse to accept that homo sapiens could have been created through unguided evolutionary systems, and insist that some controlling authority must guide the process; we call these folks advocates of Intelligent Design. Similarly, there are folks who refuse to believe that unguided bottom-up processes can create something so complex as our industrial economy or even a clearing price for gasoline, and insist that a top-down authority is needed to run the process; we call these folks socialists.

It is interesting, then, given their similarity, that socialists and intelligent design advocates tend to be on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Their rejection of bottom-up order in favor of top-down control is nearly identical.

This Manichean bias, to view the complex interchanges of millions of individuals on a historical stage as a battle between Good and Evil, has been documented by Umberto Eco, among others. History rarely vindicates the elaborate conspiracy theory.

Speaking of: we have yet to see any truly compelling theories as to how oil companies are manipulating the price of gasoline, why they would do so to favor the Republicans (since about a quarter of their multi-million dollar lobby goes to Democrats), and what evidence there is to connect the two. Conspiracy theories almost never hinge on substantial evidence and falsifiable hypotheses. Rather, theorists take the indication of several prominent coincidences, the stroked chin and the arched eyebrow as sufficient proof. We remain harder to convince.

Are We Better Off?

2006-09-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

One of the minor debates that swept through the weblog network in the last few weeks was whether or not the United States' economy was better off in the last few years.

Are We Worse Off?

Howard Dean thinks so, saying that:

"incomes today are $1,000 less for the typical household than during Bill Clinton's final year in office; incomes for the typical working-age household have declined every year since the president took office [...] Incomes have fallen because wages -- which provide 75% of income for typical families -- are stagnant for most workers. Under Mr. Bush, wages for college-educated workers increased only 1.3% between 2000 and 2005, as compared to 11.3% during Mr. Clinton's last five years. For the nation's lowest-paid workers, the situation is even worse, as the minimum wage is worth less now than at any time in at least 50 years."

First off, those numbers strike us as remarkably charitable - "cherry-picked" would be the euphemism were we playing basketball. Why do we compare household incomes from the next-to-next-to-last year of Bush's term to the last year of Clinton's? And considering that the last five years of Clinton's presidency were the economic boom universally referred to as the "tech bubble," is it really surprising that wages grew exponentially (as the bubble grew) and then dropped suddenly (as the bubble burst)?

But perhaps Mr. Clinton simply capitalized on a lucky spike in an otherwise sorry trudge. An August 30th editorial in the New York Times suggests that real household income has only grown an average of 1% annually since 1967.

Are We Better Off?

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek uses those dates as a jumping-off point for a further argument, suggesting that the United States, and the world at large, are much better off today than we were in 1967.

But I ask: would you prefer to live in 1967 with today’s real median household income ($46,326) or live today with 1967’s real median household income ($35,379)? (These figures are expressed in 2005 dollars, by the way.)

Given these two options, I’d choose to live today with only 1967’s real median household income. The reason is that the economy today offers so very many more options than did the economy in 1967 – or even the economy of that halcyon year, 1973. Today I can buy cell-phone service; today I can buy cable television with hundreds of channels, including ones that specialize in sports, cooking, history, and science; today even the cheapest automobiles are safer and more reliable than were the finest cars for sale in 1967; today I can buy telephone answering machines (with caller-ID), microwave ovens, CDs, personal computers, Internet service, and MP3 players. Today I can watch movies in my own home – in color – whenever I want without having to wait for one of the three or four available television stations to telecast a movie for viewing on a black-and-white television.

Boudreaux certainly paints a rosy picture of the technological marvels afforded to the average household in 2006. But does the availablity of consumer goods necessarily mean the country is wealthier?

Consider: for several years, American consumers have maintained a rate of savings near zero percent, if not trending into the negative (CNN). Americans consume more than they earn on average. Their chief investments are their houses; the only way the linked CNN article can say that Americans are not perpetually in debt is by counting houses as savings. And as the housing bubble continues to deflate, we recall that housing is not a form of savings but, like all investments, a form of gambling.

If we apply for every credit card which solicits us, rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and fill our homes with plasma televisions, personal saunas and vacuuming robots, are we better off or worse off than if we'd saved? If ninety out of our one hundred neighbors do the same, are we a wealthier neighborhood or a poorer? If electronics companies, seeing the sudden burst in consumer spending, plow their budgets into R&D to come up with newer and more useful tools, is that a wise investment or a bad one?

Boudreaux and the Cafe Hayek regulars have harped in the past on the federal deficit racked up by profligate government spending in the U.S. If we may paraphrase Adam Smith, can folly in a great kingdom be considered prudence in a private household?

Does It Matter?

We cannot change places with our predecessors in 1967, or even ourselves in 1999, so it seems futile to debate. And assigning credit for the market's successes to one President and blame for the market's failings to another seems presumptuous. Not even Stalin could grow enough grain to feed Russia through central planning, and neither Clinton nor Bush nor Alan Greenspan have control over private production that approaches Papa Joe's.

But even if we could presume so, it seems to us blindly hopeful to presume that electing the same party as one gold-thumbed President could yield the same moneyed fruit. The market is such a vastly complicated affair that economists cannot even agree on how to measure its most important statistics. Who are we to presume that we know the factors that made one populace rich and another in the same geography poor? Who are we to say that we can duplicate those factors, even if we know them?

We have little faith in the power of any one person or faction to regulate the culture or economy of a society. We refrain from the debate entirely.