What passes for wit on the Right

via Ezra, one Don Bourdreaux has what he thinks is a witty rejoinder to the problem of wealth inequality:

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.)

And then he goes on to extol the virtues of our modern living - Google features prominently.

Ezra, I think, takes him far too seriously when he writes:

Let's imagine two worlds, one in which you live in 2004 on the median salary of $46,000 a year, and the other in which you live in 2006, but median wages had kept pace with productivity post-1973 (as they did between 1947 and 1973) and you make this world's median salary: $60,000.

Which would you prefer?

Now obviously, having all the bells and whistles of modern living plus the 30% extra salary that we're owed would be grand. But even this is taking the argument too seriously.

I can think of one very, very big reason that I would prefer to live in 1967, or even 1973, than living in the current age, whatever my paycheck.

In 1973, Don Bourdreaux would have merely been the annoying kid in class who'd just read Atlas Shrugged and wouldn't stop talking about it. In 2006, he's polluting discourse with stupid fucking hypothetical questions.

We're all gonna die

That is, if you own a home. Average home prices for over a hundred years:



Hmm... not so bad... in the mid-1990s prices really came right back to their post-WWII average. I'm sure nothing changed since then, right?

Oh, I forgot something:



Now, I vaguely remember the nasty headlines from the end of the 1980s real estate bubble. Of course, given the economic mess of the early 1990s, it was really just more noise. But I don't believe anyone has identified a single factor that would explain why home prices should not, eventually, return to their post-WWII average as they did before.

This has the potential to be very, very nasty.

Is MY an only child?

Not to turn this in to a mirror of everything Matthew Yglesias writes, but I think the answer to this question:

Say you knew two families with kids applying to college. One kid gets a 1028 on his SAT and the other kid gets a 1021. Are you really going to say something dramatically different to the parents of Kid B?

is that it's precisely the smallest differences among and between families which get magnified and blown out of proportion.

As a personal example, my twin brother emerged from my mother a whopping six minutes after I did. There's no particular reason for this, obviously. I'm not six minutes "older" than him in any real sense. Nevertheless, my brother had to endure years (and may still have to endure, I don't see him frequently) being called the "younger brother", which, in his case, is pretty patronizing.

Now there are obvious differences between my example and Matthew's, but based on my experience, I can absolutely see Kid A being treated differently - even dramatically different - than Kid B. Even better, I bet the parents of those respective, hypothetical children could get very acrimonious. Parents A will bring up their kid's extra 7 points at every opportunity - because they're rightly proud, not trying to be jerks - and Parents B will quietly seethe.

Matthew Yglesias is super-shrill!

And he was such a Nice Liberal(tm).

So, here's Iran. Outgunned by its two leading religio-ideological antagonists, Israel and Saudi Arabia, in the region. One immediate neighbor is Pakistan, with a larger population base and a nuclear arsenal. Another immediate neighbor, Afghanistan, is occupied by soldiers under the command of an American president who has spurned peace offers and threatened to overthrow the Iranian government. A second immediate neighbor, Iraq, is occupied by a larger number of soldiers from the same country. The Iranian military's equipment is outdated and essentially incapable of mounting offensive operations. So Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. Under the circumstances, wouldn't you? Don't you think a little deterrence capability would serve the country well under those circumstances?

I'm sorry to have gone on at such great length here, and a little nervous about stepping outside the "sensible" zone with my commentary on this topic, but somebody needs to call bull$#*t on the prevailing elite consensus about Iran. Of course it would be better to find a way to persuade, cajole, whatever Iran out of going nuclear -- the spread of nuclear weapons is, as such, bad for the USA. But there's no need -- absolutely no need -- for this atmosphere of panic and paranoia.

Olbermann for Prez

Sweet Jumping Jesus. Stolen shamelessly from Atrios (video at Crooks and Liars here.)

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis—and the sober contemplation—of every American.

For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence -- indeed, the loyalty -- of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants -- our employees -- with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.

It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril—with a growing evil—powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the “secret information.” It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s -- questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England’s, in the 1930’s.

It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.

It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.

It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions — its own omniscience -- needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.

Most relevant of all — it “knew” that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic’s name was Winston Churchill.

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History — and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England — have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty — and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.

Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.

His government, absolute -- and exclusive -- in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.

It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today’s Omniscient ones.

That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count -- not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion we -- as its citizens— must now address, is stark and forbidding.

But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note -- with hope in your heart — that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”

As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that -- though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: “confused” or “immoral.”

Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”

And so good night, and good luck.

Rising Tides

Apparently, they only lift the yachts after all.

Since 2000, Americans have been getting poorer, and national rates of severe poverty have climbed sharply, according to a study published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The researchers reported that the growth in the poverty rate is due largely to a rise in severe poverty and that “moderate” poverty has grown little.

The percentage of Americans living in severe poverty—earning less than half of the poverty threshold—grew by 20% between 2000 and 2004, and the proportion in higher income tiers fell. The researchers reported that the number of Americans living in severe poverty increased by 3.6 million between 2000 and 2004.

“These trends have disturbing implications for society and public health,” said Steven H. Woolf, MD, MPH, Professor of Family Medicine, Epidemiology and Community Health, Virginia Commonwealth University, and lead author of the study. The researchers found that the only category of Americans to increase in size were those whose earnings were at least $8,000 below the poverty threshold, who grew by approximately 50% between 2000 and 2004. All other income tiers decreased during these years. The poverty threshold in 2004 for a family of four was $19,307.

Link via Ezra.

Those of us who take income inequality seriously are often dismissed by those on the right because, it is alleged, we don't understand that growth benefits all. I wrote about that a while back in criticizing Paul Wells. These numbers show the lie to the old Reaganite idea. In a string of years where the economy grew (aside from a mild recession post dot-com) American poverty grew, and severe poverty grew even faster. This should also be considered a data point in the theory that when it comes to inequality, politics matters.

The left needs to take inequality, poverty, and insecurity seriously. Hell, a few more years like this and the poor are going to be the largest single demographic, so it will be a vote winner anyway.

Tom Toles is shrill

What a President does

Boy. I wonder why we never heard about this before: During the Katrina aftermath, Al Gore personally assisted with the evacuation of surgery patients for New Orleans hospitals.

Steve called back. He had found one, possibly two planes. It would cost $50,000 per flight. FasterCures would have to be prepared to sign contracts that day. I called my home office and got permission to do that. I emailed Gore and asked for his help in raising the money. He committed to paying for the planes and urged us to move forward. He also offered to bring two doctors, his cousin Col. Dar LaFon, USAF Ret’d, who served in Somalia and ran the military hospital in Baghdad after the invasion. He was board certified in Altitude Physiology and Internal Medicine. He also brought a Doctor from Vanderbilt, Dr. Anderson Spickard.

My lord. Even after being robbed in 2000, Al Gore's a better president then the squatter imposed on the US.

We need to defend the Muslim world from the Muslims

Rob at LGM has a good catch about how the rhetoric surrounding America's "necessary" wars never changes:

In Vietnam, hawks relentlessly argued that the aims of Democratic Republic of Vietnam were dominion over all of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Moreover, the North Vietnamese were supposed to be the vanguard of international communism, the doormen for Soviet and Chinese imperialism. In short, the United States was fighting against forces who had regional and global imperial ambitions, and showing weakness in the face of those forces yada yada yada. In Korea the same claims were made, with the presumed victim of the aforementioned imperialism being Japan and a terrified Europe...

There's certainly a strong argument to be made that Iraq is more strategically important today than Vietnam was in 1968, but to make that argument by hyping the goals and capabilities of the enemy is a tactic that we've seen before.

Indeed. The article that Rob is responding to is in - where else - the Weekly Standard, who've taken time off from hyping the coming war with Iran, to reinforce the left flank in Iraq:

There are three plausible grounds for pulling out of a war. First, the status quo might be both acceptable and stable... Plainly, this condition doesn't hold in Iraq today. Iraq isn't stable; it's radically unstable. A pullout now risks a regime controlled by radical Shiites like Moktada al-Sadr--another ally for Iran, to add to Baathist Syria and Hezbollah-ruled Lebanon. That isn't near-victory; it's total defeat.

Second, success may be worth too little to justify the effort. A good many opponents of the Vietnam war argued that our side was no better than the Viet Cong, that the fight was between two sets of thugs--and the thugs on the other side had more popular support. The "our side is no better" line pops up a lot these days in connection with Iraq, but it simply isn't true.

I'd actually like to see - apart from nutpicking comment threads at DailyKos - a serious war critic who's said "the US Army is no better than X", where X is whatever label you affix to the "other side" in Iraq (insurgents, baathists, etc.) Or, you know, the Weekly Standard could just stop burning straw men and actually engage the substance of criticism of the Iraq war.

...There is one more possible reason to head for the exits in Iraq: Victory is either impossible or (what amounts to the same thing) prohibitively expensive.

You know, the funny thing is that the author of this piece (one William J Stuntz) and I agree on two out of three elements to his argument. 1) As Stuntz says, the current state of affairs in Iraq amounts to a total defeat of America's war aims. 2) Stuntz states, as I have before, that the lives of soldiers lost in the pursuit of failure are wasted. See this passage:

Because the Israeli Defense Forces fought halfheartedly (more the politicians' fault than the IDF's), few Israeli soldiers died in the recent war. But those who did appear to have died in vain. In assessing war's costs, the pointlessness of deaths matters more than their number.

An excellent point, one I wholeheartedly concede to Stuntz. But while I would prefer America cease wasting lives in this futile endeavour, Stuntz believes that it's possible to turn around this - in his words - "total defeat" and pull out a win.

You know, I've been thinking pretty hard, and I'm unable to come up with an example of a war where one side flirted with "total defeat" and still managed to pull out a win, when it's forces were already fully extended. Israel took a while to get fully in to the game in 1973, but once it did the war turned quickly. MacArthur landed at Inchon and managed to send the DPRK reeling backwards. But in both cases, that was possible because both sides had huge reserves to draw upon quickly. Today in Iraq, the US has no reserves to draw upon quickly. There is no precedent I can think of where an embattled nation was able to - absent a massive increase in manpower - turn around a disastrous war.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of precendents for the war's leaders and supporters insisting that victory was just around the corner, even as the endgame was near. Sadly for those people, Steiner's 11th division never shows up.

We Always Negotiate with Terrorists, cont.

Apologies for the absence - camping trip.

I've been thinking about how best to react to the whole kerfuffle over a Liberal MP resigning his position within the party for calling for Hezbollah to be taken off the terror watch list, and direct negotiations with same.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - spare me the rhetoric about "not negotiating with terrorists". We always negotiate. Terrorism works in forcing powerful countries doing objectionable things to stop, or at least negotiate away the objectionable bits. There is in this case the additional silliness that Hezbollah was only added to the list of terror organizations in 2002, so it's hardly a long-standing policy of the Canadian government. People who want a purge of any moderate Liberals (I'm looking at you, Warren) need to explain why Hezbollah is a group that cannot in any way be reconciled with from 2002-2006, but was not in the years immediately after the 1983 Hezbollah attack killed 241 servicemen serving under the flag of our closest ally.

(Did we even have a "terrorist organization" list before 2001? If not, why not? Certainly Hezbollah's acts in the 1980s established it as a terror group.)

Frankly, it's ridiculous that Canada is coming to this game so late. Hezbollah is changing as an organization, emphasizing it's social services and it's role in the Lebanese government. (This does not, and can not, ease the actual bad, bad things that Hezbollah does.) For Canada to start demonizing Hezbollah's role in the region now, as opposed to when it was a much more destructive and destabilizing force, would really just be evidence of Canada's continuing foreign policy ineptness.

That said, what MP Wrzesnewskyj was - to put it mildly - ill timed and ill considered. Taking Hezbollah off The List now, even talking about it now, is just a bit too soon for Canadians. The Liberal party obviously can run its internal affairs the way it likes, and in terms of optics, Wrzesnewskyj's comments were pretty bad for the party.

The problem with this whole incident is that the fact is, we will - eventually - have to talk with Hezbollah, either as a NGO or as the government of Lebanon. When we do, it would be useful is we could treat matters of state with a bit more maturity than this.

China Stands Up at the UN, and Elsewhere

Fascinating article in the IHT (via TWR) about how China has become more active and assertive at the UN, especially in the Security Council. It wasn't given the press it deserved, but the real story behind North Korea and Iran is that China - counter to its historical behaviour - voted in favour of both resolutions.

China still has a delicate balance to keep (with the UN, as with so many things) but the message of the article is clear: China is gaining influence at the UN, and it's directly at the expense of the United States.

Read More...

The quality of the people China sends to New York, both as diplomats and officials, has improved noticeably. According to one UN insider, the Chinese used to take a "prophylactic" approach to placing people in the United Nations, seeking to shield them from outside influence. Now, by contrast, "they want to spread their influence."

(As China has stepped up its engagement with the UN, Washington has stood down. After the Bush administration's recess appointment of John Bolton - the man who once said "there is no such thing as the United Nations" - as UN ambassador, Bolton has thrown his weight around at the UN, but if anything his ambassadorship has telegraphed American weakness.)

It's not just at the UN. One of the most interesting stories of the last few years has been thoroughly overblown by most American observers. I'm speaking, of course, of China's increasing investments in Africa, and it's protection of some pretty harsh regimes, like the Sudanese government. If you read only American newspapers, you'd be convinced that CHINA IS TAKING OVER AFRICA!!! AHHH!!!!

The reality is a lot more complex, as always. China is providing a lot of investment in Africa, while the US has increasingly pulled its foreign assets out of Africa because of African government's refusal to give US soldiers amnesty from prosecution in the International Criminal Court. This has almost certainly hurt the war on terror, according to the Pentagon. But it's worth considering that the War on Terror may be doing more long-term damage to America's standing relative to China.

America's single-minded focus on the GWoT during the Bush years has already given China a much bigger profile in Asia then it would have already have, according to some experts:

By making Southeast Asia a "second front" in its global "war on terror", the Bush administration has signalled that "we care less about other areas of policy", Dalpino said, addressing a forum on China and Southeast Asia sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA.

Minxin Pei, director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agrees that the US "has ceded the region to China's initiative".

He said US military policies following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have played a significant role in the estrangement. But he dated the problem back to the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998, when the Clinton administration used its influence on the International Monetary Fund to impose solutions on Asian countries that supported US economic goals in the region.

During the crisis, "the US showed to the East Asian countries it really did not care about them", he said.

Conversely, the Asian crisis was a turning point for China's ties with the broader Asian region, said Ren Xiao, director of the Asia-Pacific Studies Department at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.

(I continue to be amazed at how little public attention was paid to Clinton's incredible mis-management of the 1997 financial crisis in Asia. I'm not qualified to speak to the macroeconomic merits, but from an International Relations perspective, the "Asian Flu" was an unqualified disaster for the US, and a boon for China.)

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration seems to be preparing to make the same mistakes in Africa all over again (via DefenseTech):

In what may be the most glaring admission that the U.S. military needs to dramatically readjust how it will fight what it calls 'the long war,' the Pentagon is expected to announce soon that it will create an entirely new military command to focus on the globe's most neglected region: Africa....

The Pentagon has five geographic Unified Combatant Commands around the world and responsibility for Africa is awkwardly divided among three of those: European Command, Pacific Command and Central Command — which is also responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Creating an African Command would be an important structural move to coordinate U.S. defense policy for the continent, as well as provide a single military organization for agencies like the State Department and the CIA to work with in the region.

The article definitely takes the angle that this is a new strategy to fight terrorism, which if true I expect to be disastrous. America may have already "lost Asia" due to a combination of the global market's economic cruelty during the Clinton years (not exclusively Clinton's fault, though he didn't help) and the Bush Administration's obsession - to the exclusion of other interests - with terrorism.

Africa doesn't need any lessons on the cruelty of the global market, and if the US becomes similarly obsessed with terrorism in Africa (a policy that already seems to have begun in Somalia, now with the possibility of regional war) I expect China will be doing very well in Africa in the next decade.

Some of this would undoubtedly have happened no matter who was in the White House - China's increasing economic power in Asia would have inevitably drawn the countries of Southeast Asia closer to its shores, regardless of 1997, or even 2003. China's economic growth is therefore a structural condition of the international arena. Nevertheless, it has helped Beijing a great deal to have a bunch of blithering incompetents in the White House and Pentagon.

Post-IAU mnemonics

So now that Pluto's out of the club, how do we remember the names and order of the planets? With humour!

My! Very educated morons just screwed up numerous planetariums. (Josh Mishell)

Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet (Dave Child)

"My vision, erased. Mercy! Just some underachiever now." (Delia, as spoken by Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh)

Most vexing experience, mother just served us nothing! (Bart Baxter)

Molesting Very Excitedly, Michael Jackson Sucks Underage Nipples. (Jonah Peretti)

That last one is awful, and I feel dirty just copy-pasting it.

I want one

Plug-in hybrid Cooper Mini.

200 miles all-electric range.

0-60 mph in 5 seconds.

1,500 kilometers on a full tank of gasoline.

Want it. Want it now.

Land of the Free, Home of the 'fraid

via SG, this story is just so stupid, I'm not even surprised anymore:

The man, whose name is Raed, says he was told “People are feeling offended because of your T-shirt.” Raed was wearing a shirt that said in both Arabic and English, We Will Not Be Silent. He was asked to put on another shirt instead, but all of his other shirts were in his checked baggage.

“Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” was Raed’s question, to which one of the security people replied, “”People here in the U.S. don’t understand these things about constitutional rights” Raed’s answer: “I live in the U.S., and I understand it is my right to wear this T-shirt.”

“You can’t wear a T-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘I am a robber’ and going to a bank,” was the security man’s rejoinder.

Meltdown

(No, not a post about nuclear.)

There's a fascinating article at The American Prospect about the impending meltdown in Israeli politics. Between a judicial inquiry in to the war - which will almost certainly condemn Olmert and Peretz - and a handful of corruption chargest, topped off with a rape charge for the Israeli President (!) there's going to be a (metaphorical) smoking crater where the current Knesset is concerned.

Pluto is out!

Suck it, iceball!

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is -- and isn't -- a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.

The new category of "Dwarf Planet" will consist of Pluto and (I assume) the other minor contenders for the title. I'm sure this will earn the IAU the wrath of small people everywhere.

Can I be Chinese?

Five people have been detained in China for running striptease send-offs at funerals, state media say.

The once-common events are held to boost the number of mourners, as large crowds are seen as a mark of honour.

But the arrests, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, could signal the end of the rural tradition.

Local officials have since ordered a halt to "obscene performances" and say funeral plans have to be submitted in advance, Xinhua news agency said.

Beats all the funerals I've ever been to.

Oh, YES

Governor Howard Dean (D-My Heart) with Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: But as you know, a lot of Democrats, especially Democratic senators, are also saying the U.S. should try to finish the job and not set an artificial deadline for getting out.

DEAN: Finishing the job? The job was finished. We went in there to get rid of Saddam Hussein. We got rid of him. Then we decided we were going to occupy the country, and then we decided that we would try to mitigate a civil war, which we're now in.

The problem is, the job, as far as the president keeps defining it, is a moving target. He doesn't know what the job is. He doesn't know what the end point is.

They're called "First" Nations for a reason

I've had a number of conversations recently about the Caledonia land claims dispute, and more recently the Melancthon claim.

I want to be careful, because the other side in some of these conversations might be reading, and I don't want to offend friends. So let me be clear: The vast majority of people I have talked to about this stuff (which isn't a large group) are sincere and genuine in their desire for fair solutions. That said, in a not-small-enough percentage of the discussions I've had to walk away from because people begin engaging in ugly, offensive stereotyping of First Nations. I truly wonder if anti-indian racism is the last "acceptable" form of racism in Canada.

Lost in this whole discussion is the very simple fact that all of us in Canada - and the rest of the Americas, and Australia - profit immensely from a crime of enormous proportions. These continents were stolen from their original owners. Did I, or you, personally hand out smallpox blankets or anything like that? No, but that's really beside the point. We have extracted enormous amounts of wealth from land that is only ours because it was taken violently. Our current standard of living exists only because we deliberately subjugated the original inhabitants of this land. (Make no mistake - in Canada, impoverishment and isolation was the government's deliberate policy for some time.) We continue to extract wealth from this land without any national effort to remedy this situation. Indeed, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is criticized even by voices within it for obstructing First Nations' efforts to help themselves.

Do I agree with the tactics of the Caledonia protesters? No. Do I think the Melancthon claim is a valid one? Not qualified to answer. But we whose ancestors didn't cross the Bering land bridge are treating First Nations like we stopped causing their problems a long time ago, and it's simply not true.

This is going to be the only thing I write about the whole Thomas Hubert affair. For those who didn't know, a Liberal blogger wrote the following:

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. At one point, George Washington was considered a terrorist by the powers that be. History will remember Hezbollah as an organization that stood up to the most vile 'nation' in human history.

Note that Thomas used the word "nation" (synonym for "people", "tribe") not state. To me, it's impossible to argue that this utterance - admittedly in a comment thread, and probably written in haste - is anything but explicitly, repugnantly anti-semitic. I'm going to extend Thomas a modicum of charity that his words, frankly, don't deserve. I'm going to assume that he is not, in fact, slandering the whole Jewish nation, but rather the policies of the state of Israel regarding Lebanon (the context of the quote.)

Even so, the statement is morally blinkered and stupid. No matter what you think of the war(s) in Lebanon, or for that matter the whole occupation of the Palestinian territories, Israel has vastly less innocent blood on its hands than, say, Canada or the United States.

Make no mistake: I condemn the occupation of the Territories regularly, because I believe it's unjust, illegal, immoral, and bad for Israel to boot. Moreover, I don't believe that Canada or the United States are "vile" nations today, despite our vile pasts. But on any list of nations guilty of oppression, theft, and brutality, American nations beat Israel by a long shot. And, while the solution to the palestinian occupation is clear - um, end the occupation - the solution to the social ills facing First Nations people is not nearly so clear, and we've been participating in this occupation a hell of a lot longer. Just because we've moved injustice off the front page, doesn't mean it isn't still happening.

Motes, eyes, logs, etc.

Guess Who?

Who said the following?

I love my Church, and I'm a Catholic who was raised by intellectuals, who were very devout. I was raised to believe that you could question the Church and still be a Catholic. What is worthy of satire is the misuse of religion for destructive or political gains. That's totally different from the Word, the blood, the body and the Christ. His kingdom is not of this earth.

Answer here:

Stephen Colbert!

Bonus quote:

Well, in 2003, I was in Alabama to cover the [former state chief justice] Roy Moore Ten Commandments monument thing, and I spoke to the head of the Christian Coalition down there. The whole time, the Coalition guy kept taking phone calls about tax cuts.

Ballsy

When I hear George W. Bush say this:

There must be consequences if people thumb their nose at the United Nations Security Council...

I think of Bill Hicks saying this:

"While I was in England, I got to see footage of the Rodney King trial that I was never able to see over here. I think I figured out why the LA riots occurred.

Did you guys see these cops testifying? Did these guys have balls or what? They carry their ball in a wheelbarrow. '"Cuse me, 'cuse me, man with big balls coming through. Man with big balls is here to testify.' 'Please place your right testicle on the bible.' BBBBBBBOOOOOOOOOMMMM.

This guy, Officer Coon ... is life too fucking weird or what? Officer Coon actually look into the camera and says: 'Yeah, that Rodney King beating tape, it's all in how you look at it.' The courtroom murmurs: "Jesus, what balls." ... 'Really? How would you look at it, Officer Coon?' 'Well, if you play it backwards, you see us pick King up and helping him on his way.'

War Crimes

Some people are apparently in a tizzy over Amnesty International accusing Israel of deliberate war crimes. (Thanks, Adam, for the link.)

Now, this really is one of those cases where the facts can be disputed - did Israel mean to target every building that was destroyed? - but some basics are pretty obvious, namely that Israel targeted bridges, roads, and power plants in its war against Hezbollah.

Whether you think Israel was just or not, those are also clearly war crimes. Indiscriminate destruction of civilian infrastructure is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. Which is why Amnesty International accused NATO forces of war crimes in Kosovo for the exact same reason.

The problem - for the militarily-inclined world leader - is that the international law regarding conduct of war is pretty clear, and also pretty stringent. So things that are par for the course of any military campaign these days - such as targeting bridges and power plants - are actually forbidden. Amnesty is exactly right in calling these war crimes, and the rest of the world will ignore their accusation for much the same reason.

The question that Amnesty is also raising - that Israel deliberately targeted civilians in its bombings - is far more difficult to prove. But let Amnesty present it's evidence, and let the IDF rebut it. The odds are, in any major military engagement, that some accidents are going to look like crimes, and - admit it - some soldiers, airmen, or generals will commit crimes. Airing these incidents properly, and prosecuting those (if any) responsible, is a good thing. And Israel is already far, far better at holding its leaders accountable than some war-crime-committing nations I could mention.

On forgiveness

Rob at LGM writes a post about Ken Pollack that I have mixed feelings about. Pollack, for his part, seems to have aggravated more than one blogger with this paragraph:

How Iraq got to this point is now an issue for historians (and perhaps for voters in 2008); what matters today is how to move forward.

Pollack, played a very large role himself (author of the pro-invasion text The Gathering Storm), so this looks an awful lot like ass-covering by someone unwilling to simply hide in a corner and scream, "Please for the love of God don't hurt me!"

Rob would rather, in his words, "welcome Pollack to the reality-based community than to suggest that he spend some time in a closed room with a revolver." And I agree that would be my preference as well. But. But. But Pollack - and war advocates like him - refuse to admit the basic fact that they were wrong. And not by a little bit, either. Their wrongness will take years to fully tabulate.

This isn't a reason to despise them for all eternity. Nor is it a solid reason for me to dismiss his reasearch or analysis. It is, however, more than enough reason for me to not trust anything Pollack ever says about the Middle East, ever again. (Previous works are irrelevant. Pollack got the war he wanted, and has refused to admit it.) And rather than ignore Pollack, I feel the need to remind him, loudly, until we get a very clear statement that this war was a bad idea from beginning to end.

There is the final reason that I believe many people are angry about Pollack, and that's the role Pollack played in giving "liberal hawks" cover for their own stupidity. This is unfair to Pollack - if I am holding Pollack to account for his own wrongness, the people who followed his advice are just as individually accountable. When you're wrong - about something as monumental as this war - it's no pardon to point at a guy with a PhD and say "but he was wrong too!"

Briefly Noted

I never read Sophie's World, never intended to, and (now) have lost all interest in it.

I mention this only because I had a whole bunch of friends who read this, and a teacher who reccomended it in high school. Not that Gaarder's stupidity is retroactive.

Shoshana Berman, please explain this

Troubling rhetoric from a Liberal blogger:

[Bill Graham's] comment about Canada needing to be "neutral" in this current conflict, was anti-semetic by default, from a man who voted to continue our combat mission in Afghanistan. Given the views of the terrorist Hezbollah about women and gays, I would also say that this comment is mysogynistic and homophobic by default. Canada and the Liberal Party do stand up against terrorism. We do stand up for the rights of women and gays and the freedom of religion not terrorism. We are not neutral....It is entirely possible to say I/We support Israel and its right to defend itsel against terrorists, if not necessarily all of its actions. Unfortunately, that is not what Mr. Graham said.

I personally believe the "neutral" comment is about gaining votes in the radical Muslim constituency.

1) Calling for Canada to be "neutral" in a dispute between Israel and Hezbollah is not "anti-semitic by default", whatever you believe Canada's proper role to be. This is the same BS spewed by the right when they said anyone who opposed the Iraq war was "pro-Saddam", and this kind of rhetoric should be beneath the progressive community.

2) The war having ended (for now) and the scores being tallied, it's pretty clear Israel would have been better off if they had shown more restraint, as the "anti-semitic by default" camp advocated. Somehow, anti-semites were advocating the policy that would have benefited the state of Israel. That may sound weird, but I guess Liberals are just smarter than us default anti-semites.

3) It is possible to recognize that Hezbollah, the Palestinians, or the Syrians all have some pretty despicable views, and still believe that they nevertheless have legitimate grievances against Israel, just as it is possible to recognize that Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorism and war, but harshly criticize the means Israel uses if you believe it to be too harsh or even self-defeating. Nothing in the above paragraph is incompatible with the words "neutral" or "neutrality."

4) The idea that Bill Graham took the position he did to win the Muslim vote is silly. The belief that Graham took the position he did to court the left, and further divide the Liberals from the Conservatives, is far more rational. But that would get in the way of petty accusations of anti-semitism.

5) This compulsion to pick sides in every fight is far, far more dangerous than neutrality. Canada has no means to help bring this problem to a resolution, so hewing to one side or the other is, frankly, short-sighted. I know a lot of people would love for us to come down hard against one side or the other, but the reality is that the future is certain to include both Israel and (in some form) Hezbollah so alienating one group to please the other will simply make Canada's work in the Middle East harder for no good reason.

Finally, this is bizarre:

...several MP's are coming very close to displaying the same hate for Jews unchecked.

Please, Shoshana, give us names, quotes, and references for any Liberal MPs - for that matter, any MPs at all - who you believe to be "very close to displaying" hate for Jews. Otherwise, apologize for that slander. As you say, enough is enough.

(As a blogging NDPer, I'm coming to the defense of Liberal MPs being slandered by another Liberal. Weird.)

Funny enough

Turns out Muslims don't like that phrase "Islamofascism" so much. Way to go, Bushie.

Of course, pissing off exactly the people you want on your side seems to be the dominant philosophy of the Bush administration thus far.

Don't you know there's a war on?

Well, we don't call it class war anymore, but that doesn't make the label less accurate. Ezra Klein has two interesting posts, and I think the connection is obvious, but you tell me. First, on the issue of the Fed raising interest rates to destroy worker's wages:

The Fed's abject terror of wage growth is a rather unhelpful hangover from the stagflation era. But, in the same way that economists kept trying to deal with the problems of yesteryear then, they're missing the relevant economic issues now. This society is in no danger of paying its workers too much, or seeing their salaries increase too rapidly. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Second, on GM's suicidal refusal to push for national healthcare, Ezra quotes union man Ron Bloom:

“One thing I’ve learned is that corporate America has got much more class solidarity than we do... They really are afraid of getting thrown out of their country clubs, even though their objective ought to be maximizing value for their shareholders.”

The Fed doesn't strangle wages just because they're worried about inflation. They strangle wages because they also don't care about workers. (The Bank of Canada has learned from the Fed, too.)

The Occupation: Bad for Israel.

...in other news, water is still wet.

It's slowly, slowly dawning in the Israeli press that the IDF's recent... shall we say, lackluster performance in Lebanon, is due largely to the fact that one of the best-performing militaries in the history of the Middle East has spent the last three decades variously occupying Palestine and Lebanon. Occupation armies are not, as a rule, good combat armies, and vice versa.

First, (via Jon at PastPeak) Tom Segev wrote a few days ago:

There is a generation of soldiers whose main military experience involves the oppression of the Palestinian population in the territories; they have not been trained for real war.

Like the chief of staff, the soldiers of the occupation have developed infinite arrogance. Every private is a king in the territories: If he so wishes, he allows a Palestinian to go through the roadblock; if he so wishes, he orders him to remove his pants. The power of the occupation has implanted a profound contempt for the Palestinians in many soldiers, and this is the essence of their experience as soldiers.

The Palestinian terror and its suppression have also granted legitimacy to a very serious systematic undermining of the Palestinians' human rights. The expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes, as though it were permissible routine, was carried out in this spirit as well. As opposed to the past, there was almost no protest in Israel; that is also a subject the committee of historians may want to study.

More substantively, Ze'ev Schiff (Haaretz military analyst) writes:

It turns out that many of the commanders in Lebanon learned their trade in the fighting in the territories, and they thought in terms of fighting the Palestinians. The "Palestinian model" guided the way IDF units fought the bloody battles at Maroun al-Ras and Bint Jbail. The units entered the battle and withdrew, similar to the way they operate in the Gaza Strip.

The IDF was also surprised in Lebanon by the amount of anti-tank missiles
fired by Hezbollah. The immediate reaction in the territories is to take cover in the closest home. In Lebanon, many soldiers were killed when anti-tank missiles penetrated walls behind which IDF troops had taken cover. Two weeks into the fighting, a specific order went out on how and where to take cover....

Another example is the deployment of the Golani Brigade from the Gaza Strip to Lebanon. It turns out that this excellent fighting force lacked officer expertise in coordinating with artillery batteries, something that they don't have to do very often in their policing duties.

(link via TPM) Hopefully, this will give some more impetus to the drive to withdraw from the occupation. Even though Olmert probably won't survive politically much longer, the Occupation has ruined Israel's fighting ability at a very fundamental level, and that's something the IDF can't afford.

One of these days, I'll stop

...reading Richard Cohen. I honestly don't know why I keep reading his columns - I guess I'm a masochist, plus it at least gives me decent blog-fodder.

Today's offering gives us Cohen comparing Lebanon to Czechoslovakia. Or maybe Sarajevo. Or maybe Munich. I don't know. Neither, I take it, does Cohen, who can't seem to keep his poor historical analogies straight. The first paragraph is this:

In his upcoming book about the horrors of the 20th century, "The War of the World," the British historian Niall Ferguson has a chapter called "The Pity of Peace." It is about 1938, when World War II loomed, and Britain -- especially and importantly Britain -- did precious little to stop it. The warnings of Churchill -- "believe me, it may be the last chance . . ." -- were ignored, and the government under Neville Chamberlain obstinately pursued a policy that forever after made the word appeasement one of the most odious in history. Somehow, though, it looks like 1938 all over again.

and the second paragraph, with no real explanation, is this:

The events in the Middle East are often compared to 1914 and the start of World War I. That war -- the Great War, the war to end all wars -- is actually the all-purpose war. It not only began for what seemed like a trivial reason (the assassination of someone who wasn't a head of state) but it was fought with tenacity and brutality for what now seems no reason at all. In the end, millions died and the world was utterly changed. Why?

but before we actually answer Cohen's question, he's off to the races again:

But when it comes to the Middle East, 1938 is also a pretty instructive year....

and thus begins the historically illiterate invocations of Munich, appeasement, etc etc etc.

Now, I've written before that the events of August, 1914 seem awfully familiar these days - what with a trivial act of terrorism being used by madmen on both sides as an excuse for a wider war. But that's not what Cohen writes about. So maybe it's about how larger powers outside the immediate conflict become tied to the fates of smaller belligerents? (Maybe we could replace "Israel and America" with "Austria and Germany", or "Lebanon and Iran" with "Serbia and Russia"?) But no, that's not what Cohen writes about. Maybe Cohen invokes WWI to explore how the changing nature of technology has rendered previous military calculations obsolete? No, that's not what Cohen wants to write about. Indeed, it's hard to figure out what, if anything, Cohen invokes WWI to mean.

And we haven't even got to Munich yet. But Cohen gets there alright, talking about the need for the French to get some spine or some such:

This inability of Europe to get its act together is what suggests 1938. Back then, Winston Churchill was hardly the only one who thought Hitler was intent on war. After all, the German leader was an ideological zealot and a murderer to boot. Still, England did little. Similarly, you don't have to have Churchillian prescience to see that what happened once in Lebanon can happen again. Hezbollah's avowed aim is to eradicate Israel. Listen to what it says. Pay attention. It will renew its attacks the first chance it gets. This is why it exists.

For the love of God. How does this bullshit even get published anymore? Look, Hezbollah could have the avowed aim of landing a man on Mars, and it would have as much chance of doing that as destroying Israel. The Israelis, last I checked, had just invaded Lebanon and fought pretty nasty battles against Hezbollah, something Hezbollah has been unable to reciprocate - no Shia invasion of Galilee, right? Or did I sleep through that?

Hezbollah are most certainly not nice characters, but unless their threats are backed with reality, then they are not the basis of any kind of planning or reaction on our part. To illustrate, if Israel were threatening a nuclear strike on Beirut, that would be troubling because Israel has the means to do so. Hezbollah threatening the same on Tel Aviv is fantasy.

When George Bush used the term "Islamic fascists," he had a point.

No, he didn't. He never has a point, and only the serially retarded think otherwise at this point.

But it's futile to use colorful language when, in reality, you're out of the conversation altogether. This is another baleful consequence of the Iraq war. The United States is not only preoccupied, it is loathed. The leadership it once was able to exert -- especially in the Middle East -- is a thing of the past. If its credibility is to be restored, another president will have to do so. In the meantime, as we always learn, Europe without American leadership is a mere tourist destination.

Europe: No, fuck you.

I think I will have to stop reading Cohen. There's nothing here, just catty insults against the Europeans, paranoid fantasies about invincible Arab supermen plotting to destroy Israel, and a singular inability to recognize either his own stupidity when it's put to print.

An important note from Steve Gilliard

The reality is that the US Army will be lucky to leave Iraq in one piece. The Iranian government are the prime backers of the Iraqi government. It is filled with Iranian spies from top to bottom. We cannot so much as scout the border without the Iranians know this.

These guys like fights but never imagine losing. Even people on the left cannot imagine an American Army retreating in defeat, leaving their weapons and bases behind as they scramble to get out of the country. But it can happen, and without a Iranian soldier crossing the frontier.

Steve is talking specifically about the consequences of an American strike on Iran, but let's face reality: Eventually, some Shia village is going to go through it's own version of Haditha (which is a Sunni town), and suddenly The Rape of Lucretia is going to have a great deal of current-events relevance. Or some other godawful thing will happen, and the Shia will decide that the US occupation has lasted just long enough, thank you.

The US has two choices: Leave now, of their own volition, or later, not.

It should of course be said that if the US Army is in fact forced in to a retreat, they'll kill way, way more Iraqis on their way out of the country. I can't remember if it made it in to the movie or not, but remember that the famous "Blackhawk Down" incident killed 18 US soldiers and at least 500 (and as much as 1000) Somalis.

The Evolution of the Bush Doctrine

George W. Bush, September 2002: The UN must help the US in the Middle East, or it will be irrelevant.

George W. Bush, August 2006: The UN must help the US in the Middle East, because I am irrelevant.

Bush: Felon

Glenn Greenwald puts it nice and slow for the media to understand, but I think he'll still need hand puppets.

This has been the most bizarre part of the NSA scandal all along: the President got caught red-handed violating an extremely clear law -- he admitted to engaging in the very behavior which that law says is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine -- and yet official Washington (the political and pundit classes) simply decided to pretend that wasn't the case.

They agreed to acquiesce to the administration's fiction that there are some sort of complex and difficult legal questions with which one must grapple, and that only shrill partisans say that the President is violating the criminal law. And thus, a Washington ruling class which reveled in subpoenas and criminal investigations over such towering matters as Whitewater, Vince Foster and Monica Lewkinsky has collectively decided that talk of criminality on the part of the President for how he is spying on Americans is imprudent and unserious.

He also gets at the root cause of this all - the media is unwilling to call Bush for the felon he is because, in large part, the media is complicit:

This judge, unknown to the Important People in academia and the political power centers, sitting in her little Detroit courtroom, has broken the rules. She used language which is uncouth (she pointed out the obvious -- that this President has pretenses to being a King) and refused to pay homage to the false orthodoxy that there are really difficult questions triggered by the President's refusal to abide by the criminal law. How irresponsible, unscholarly and unserious she is.

This is the same mindset that has placed off limits any real accounting for the abject disaster that our country has been lead into in Iraq. Official Washington won't accept any emphatic declarations of guilt over what happened because virtually the entire Washington establishment endorsed the invasion of Iraq, continued to defend the occupation, and is thus responsible for it. Thus, it's acceptable to offer polite and muted criticisms of those responsible, but they are not to be castigated or stigmatized in any way for their horrendous misjudgments and ongoing deceit.

On Consequences

I was just speaking with a cubicle-mate, and he remarked that - given the unlikelihood of a Nuremberg-style tribunal for the various members of the Bush Administration - the UN specifically, and International Law more generally looks hollow and illegitimate. After all, if there's no consequences to disobedience, what's to stop China, France, or whoever from breaking international law in the future if the UN is powerless to stop any nation stronger than, say, Gabon?

This, I think, mistakes legal and political punishment for a consequence. The American government, economy, and military are all going to pay heavily for the violation of international law that was the Iraq War. A short list of the consequences would be: 2600 dead (so far), $1 trillion in expendtures, and the probably-permanent besmirching of whatever good record America had pre-war.

It would therefore be profoundly stupid for the leaders of China, Russia, or whoever to look at Iraq and say, "Gee, the Americans haven't paid a price for their breach of the law. We should go do the same!"

Rather, the intelligent, reality-based response to Iraq is to look and say, "Gee, the Americans violated international law, and it turned out to be a total fucking disaster. Perhaps there's a correlation."

As much as I would love to see Bush, Rumsfeld, et al at the docket in the Hague, don't confuse personal punishment with consequences. As with so many criminals, the biggest punishment for the American government, for now, is having to live... like a criminal.

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you

You know, I had been wondering lately if American intelligence had gotten any better in the last year or so in Iraq. Apparently not. From Armchair Generalist:

WASHINGTON -- The US military establishment has quietly undertaken a wholesale reassessment of its war strategy with a goal of identifying the mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and remedying them before the next conflict...

The studies, according to several Pentagon officials involved, have found serious deficiencies across the board. For example, US troops in Iraq have often used too much force when conducting operations in civilian areas, unnecessarily alienating local populations. They cite US commanders as being too slow to establish working relationships with local allies, and note that providing security and safety for the Iraqi people wasn't an early priority.

The military's continuing shortcomings in gathering accurate intelligence about insurgents has particularly hampered its missions: ``We know relatively little about insurgent motivation and morale, leadership, and recruitment," according to an unpublished study produced in June by the government-funded RAND Corporation.

It really astonishes me that the Americans have been fighting a war without even the basics of intelligence. Let me do my part for the war effort by asssting the US DoD with their intelligence-gathering, with this report of relevant facts.

IRAQI INSURGENT INTELLIGENCE REPORT:
A rope of sand.

Motivation: Americans are in a country not-America. In fact, this country is Iraq. Iraqis are upset by this reality, and are seeking to change it.

Morale: Iraqis are changing the above-mentioned reality with some success, thus morale is high.

Recruitment: Ever since Abu Ghraib was put under new management, it's been easy for the insurgents to raise recruits. The same cannot be said for the US.

Leadership: We said relevant facts.

This concludes this report, happily written to support Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Japan

George Will writes a stupid column today:

...both of Japan's most important East Asian neighbors, China and South Korea, now have national identities partly derived from their experience as victims of Japan's 1910-45 militarism. To a significant extent, such national identities are political choices.

Leftist ideology causes South Korea's regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA.

Well, considering that Japanese authors were talking about invading Korea going back to the 1600s, maybe Seoul can be forgiven for concluding that Japanese militarism wasn't just a fad. Hell, does anyone think that Poland is cool with Germany yet?

The choice by China's regime is more interesting. Marxism is bankrupt and causes cognitive dissonance as China pursues economic growth by markedly un-Marxist means. So China's regime, needing a new source of legitimacy, seeks it in memories of resistance to Japanese imperialism.

Actually, most of China's resistance was by Chiang Kai-shek's forces, Mao's enemies. And Mao, to whom there is a sort of secular shrine in Beijing, killed millions more Chinese than even Japan's brutal occupiers did.

When did that happen? Not Mao's massacres (which require no more evidence), but the Nationalist resistance to Japan. I was pretty sure that all the scholarship pointed towards a pretty lacklustre resistance by Chiang, and a still-ineffective but at least more vigorous resistance by the Communists. Accusations that the Communists spent more time fighting the Nationalists than the Japanese need to be tempered with the well-documented facts that Chiang was similarly more interested in fighting the Communists. Neither side saw Japan as the main fight.

On the plus side for Chiang, when he died, Taiwan at least began a transition towards democracy. Mao's death did not have similar effects, sadly. While I don't venerate Mao, I find it hard to understand why men like Chiang or Korea's Park Chung-Hee are celebrated by the American right for the changes in their countries they fought tooth and nail. Indeed, in both cases, those countries could only become democracies after the dictators died.

But men like Will aren't interested in any kind of historical accuracy. Rather, the Chinese Civil War is only useful for American pundits - as all things are - for what they mean about America, Democracy, etc. So Chiang had to be the better fighter, because otherwise we'd have to admit that Communists can do something right.

Meanwhile, it's not just the Chinese Communists and the Korean leftist pinko dopeheads who are worried about Japanese nationlism. Listen to this commie bastard:

Veteran lawmaker Koichi Kato, victim of an arson attack on one of his houses last week following his criticism of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, is warning that signs of "dangerous" nationalism are increasing in Japan.

Kato, a former secretary general of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party, also voiced concerns in an interview Friday that diplomatic policies presented by Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the most likely candidate to succeed Koizumi, are "too naive."

"In today's Japan, I see a kind of aggressive nationalism without repentance (of Japan's militarism before and during World War II) like, 'We did nothing wrong in the last war,' " Kato said.

"It would be dangerous if this (kind of mood) goes extreme. I'll sound an alarm against it in a serious manner," the 67-year-old House of Representatives member said.

In the real world, there is every reason for Korea and China - aside from their government's ulterior motives - to worry about Japanese nationalism and militarism. When high-ranking officials in Japan's party of government for the last 50 years start ringing alarm bells, there is good reason to worry. In the world of George Will's head, there's only victimhood complexes and Chinese Communism to blame.

Choose which voices you want to listen to - the voice of legitimate concern, or the voices in George Will's head.

Inequality and Ideology

So it all began when Paul Krugman (in the NYTimes, reprint here) wrote about inequality that:

What’s noticeable is that except during stagflation, when virtually all Americans were hurt by ... oil prices, what happened in each era was what the dominant political tendency of that era wanted to happen.

Franklin Roosevelt favored the interests of workers while declaring of plutocrats who considered him a class traitor, “I welcome their hatred.” Sure enough, under the New Deal wages surged while the rich lost ground.

What followed was an era of bipartisanship and political moderation; Dwight Eisenhower said of those who wanted to roll back the New Deal, “Their number is negligible, and they are stupid.” Sure enough, it was also an era of equable growth.

Finally, since 1980 the U.S. political scene has been dominated by a conservative movement firmly committed to the view that what’s good for the rich is good for America. Sure enough, the rich have seen their incomes soar, while working Americans have seen few if any gains....

And if that’s true, it matters a lot which party is in power — and more important, which ideology.

Now, Krugman does throw the explicit partisanship in, but really this isn't an argument at all about which party control government, nor is it exclusively about government actions. Some bloggers, like Brad Delong, have too-narrowly construed Krugman's argument that inequality is due to government policy. It inarguably is to some extent, but that's not what Krugman is saying. Read it again:

...what happened in each era was what the dominant political tendency of that era wanted to happen.

"The dominant political tendency" isn't the GOP, it isn't Bush, it isn't Congress or the Supreme Court. Broadly speaking, the dominant political tendency of the years 1980-2000 was Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism. While I've used two national leaders as the icons of this philosophy, they certainly didn't create the ideology - they were, at most, very prominent advocates. Ironically enough, Paul Krugman used to be one of neoliberalism's brightest lights, before he joined the order of the Shrill.

The rise of neoliberalism led to the deification of obscene wealth, and the glorification of men (like Ken Lay or Jack Welch) whose pursuit of that obscenity finds them just the other side of the law. But Marx never really goes out of style, and thesis begets antithesis, and Enron pre-2001 begets Enron post-2001, Worldcom, and Martha Stewart. (Spare me. She broke the law.)

It's been interesting to see the reaction, post dot-com, against neoliberalism gain steam. As I've said before, it's a shame that more people aren't willing to blame the people - like Krugman* - who got us in to this mess. I suppose if the American pundit class can't be expected to properly apologize and recant for a disastrous 3-year war, I can't very well expect those same pundits to apologize for a totally calamitous 20-year debacle of economic policy.

And a debacle it has been. Never mind that growth has been slower - world wide, with the almost-unique exception of China - in the neoliberal era than it was before. How about three lost decades now for Africa and Latin America? How about the final, withering blows against American labour unions? How about the seemingly permanent destruction of our expectations for what a government should do? Well, it's been a debacle for most of us. For the usual suspects, the years since 1980 have been a godsend.

Has there been growth? Yes, albeit less since Reagan than before. Has there been innovation? Yes, but prove to me the connection between Maggie Thatcher and the Internet and I'll bake you a solid gold cake. (Indeed, the Internet's foundation is a relic of the pre-Reagan period.) What we've gotten in exchange for slow growth and innovation is money shovelled to the top and higher unemployment.

Nice work, if you can get it.

*Before you think I'm being too harsh on Krugman, let me be clear: Krugman was not just a leading neoliberal advocate, he explicitly belittled the anti-globalization, fair trade movement, in some pretty insulting language. He was, at one point, not too far from Friedman's condescending language. I sincerely welcome him to our side, but it's kind of like Joe Lieberman coming out against the Iraq War after all this time.

I've been insulting in my writings too, but a) I'm not a writer for the New York Times, and b) the economists I read (Baker, Galbraith the Younger) were right, and Krugman (when it comes to the majesty of global capitalism) was tragically wrong.

Good to know

Bush, today:

We’re not leaving [Iraq] so long as I’m the president. That would be a huge mistake.

You've been warned.

Energy Solutions, Real and Imagined

(Cross-posted at Ezra's)

The problems facing us in the future when it comes to - broadly speaking - energy production and consumption are myriad, and the sheer size and number of them can make us desperate for solutions. This is not, however, an excuse for hucksters preying on the credulous. So it's with some trepidation that I see an Irish company (Steorn) is hawking an electrical generator that they claim produces energy from nothing.

(Thanks for the link, Theo!)

When your main marketing gimmick is to proudly claim your invention violates one of the fundamental laws of the universe (conservation of mass and energy) then the audience has an obligation to set our skepticism to 11. Mark Frauenfelder, at BoingBoing, has what I think is about the appropriate reaction:

Check out this video, not for an explanation of how the technology works ...but for the ways the [sic] use a variety of emotional tricks to sucker people into believing in it.

The company's credo is a George Bernard Shaw quote: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." But I'm sure Shaw would also agree that the overwhelming majority of blasphemies that go against bedrock principles of science are utter bullshit.

Just to be clear, if this turns out to be legit I'll recant, apologize, and cheer when the guys at Steorn get the well-deserved Nobel. But considering the website has exactly zero explanation for their claims, consider me unimpressed.

A less sinister, but I think equally unlikely idea came up a while ago from an interview in MIT's Technology Review, where one Jefferson Tester (who's been working on this idea for more than three decades, judging by his website) claims that geothermal energy could provide all of our energy needs in perpetuity. Tester's interview with MIT got a bit of play with the DailyKos crowd, as well as my other hangout, Gristmill.

On the surface, nothing he says is overt BS, as with Steorn. Indeed, a lot of what he says is quite right - the amount of geothermal energy available to us at great depths is fantastic, and only a small portion would be needed to drive all human industry. Better yet - unlike, say, oil - all that is required is to dig a deep hole anywhere.

Problems arise when translating this to real life. Tester's own work (a 1997 article, here in PDF) indicates that a single plant would only continue to operate for about 20 years, after which point the source rock would cool too much, and be useless (for generation) for "less than" 200 years. A 20-year deadline is a bit short to finance high-capital cost plants, and (while I continue to welcome correction) I find it hard to believe that these plants could be built cheap.

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias finds a far more mundane piece of geothermal technology appealing - effectively, geothermal heat pumps are pipes filled with water (or possibly air) buried about 6 feet deep, where the ground stays the same temperature year-round. Cools the air in the summer, warms it in the winter, and dramatically reduces the energy required to cool and heat the home.

This is kind of frustrating for me, as geothermal heat pumps were being proposed, oh, thirty years ago, as a way to reduce energy use. I can literally go to my bookshelf and find authors who, during the oil shocks of the 1970s, were advocating low-tech alternatives like heat pumps and solar water heaters. Not to slander higher-tech alternatives like photovoltaic cells or lithium-ion batteries, but solutions come in all shapes and sizes. We may well need all of them, but we really need to avoid wasting resources on dead ends.

Health Care Woes in Canada

I have, on occasion, seen American authors talk about Canada's health-care system and remark that, unlike in the US, Canadian doctors have embraced single-payer and find it superior. This is true in an academic sense (Canadian medical journals who have studied it unequivocally say our system is better) but it misses some important counter-examples.

Read More...

One of the best examples of how Canadian doctors' have a love-hate relationship with our system comes from way back in 1985, when the government of Ontario had to endure a doctor's strike over the issue of extra-billing practices by the province's doctors. More recently the Canadian Medical Association has, while being opposed by its younger members, endorsed expanding private, for-profit medical care in Canada. And now, the election of the President of the CMA has become another battleground for the fight against what many Canadians see as the Americanization of their health care system. (link via Pogge.)

The point of all this is that while Canadian doctors have accepted single-payer health care, they've done so somewhat unwillingly, and they have - since it's inception in the 1960s - continued to fight it on a regular basis. There's a lesson here for the American advocates of various health-care reforms - don't expect this fight to be over, even if you do win it once.

The one caveat is that I actually think the socialization of American health care would have an immensely salutary effect on the debate in Canada. On any number of issues, including health care, media policies, and energy issues, the presence of a wealthy, rather predatory* industry to Canada's south has seriously perverted the debate.

*at the very least, the word "predatory" defines the American insurance, energy, and media industries, if not understates their behaviour.

I swear I'll stop (planets, cont.)

Two interesting comments re: the definition of planets. First, Flocons gets the prize for wit:

This new planetary definition follows in the legacy of Esperanto. It's built around logical and unambigious rules... but in the end, the public will ignore it and use what they use already.

Second, Chris writes:

The reason the huge moons aren't now classified as planets is because they properly orbit their planet.
... It's actually a fairly nice elegant and common sense solution.

Well, kind of. What this definition strikes me as is a way to rationalize the definition of planets without changing the definition of Pluto-Charon in any way whatsoever. Which strikes me as a silly way to write what is supposed to be a label with some academic value. (Here, "academic" can be read however you like it.) I agree, Chris, that this is actually an elegant way of summing up the conventional list of planets - that is, what do all the nine common planets have in common. Nevertheless, I think the definition remain problematic.

We agree that, conventionally speaking, Pluto-Charon don't orbit the sun the same way the Earth, but not the moon, does. Rather, they orbit a point in space between the two bodies. So we've already agreed that the definition of "planet" isn't exclusive to bodies that solely orbit the Sun.

I submit that it's hard to argue that Ganymede, which indirectly orbits the sun as it is tugged around by Jupiter, is easy to distinguish from Pluto-Charon, which orbit the sun as they are tugged around by each other. Notwithstanding the IAU's distinction between "double planets", etc.

Moreover, if a body like Ceres, or UB313, are inducted in to the hall of fame, this will mean that the label "Planet" is non-exclusive, as Ceres will remain best described as a G-class asteroid, and UB313 will best be described as a Kuiper Belt ice body. So Ganymede should be able to qualify as both a Planet in its own right, as well as a satellite of a larger planet.

(Binary stars remain stars if they orbit a larger parent star, after all. Star starry star star.)

If we are making a definition of a planet that is based solely on the shape, mass, and composition of a body - without regard to its orbit - then I think it's basically impossible to define Mercury as a planet but not Ganymede, which is actually larger than the innermost planet.

And all of this needs to be kept in context - this is possibly the least important debate going on right now. But the whole idea of building a rational naming scheme with the express goal of not leaving out the last-discovered, least-known, most-insignificant planet in the solar system strikes me as silly. I have no idea why I became a partisan for Ganymede, but I did.

Good news in Iraq!

What marvellous news. In a wonderful act of constitutionalism, the Shia have decided to excercise their second ammendment rights all over each other, causing chaos in the South of Iraq. Meanwhile, the Kurds have been trying to spread God's gift of liberty to... Turkey, provoking a response that can only be described as the "birth pangs, if you will" of the New New New Iraq. The Sequel. Continued.

I guess this would be the third act in Iraq - having destroyed the Baath government in the first, and endured an out-of-control insurgency in the second, turning Iraq in to a regional black hole, like the Congo, is really the perfect way to end this disaster.

Meant to post this earlier

My favourite line from Stephen Colbert lately, ironically enough spoken during his "surprise appearance" on the Daily Show.

What are you imlplying Jon? That O'Reilly and Geraldo are narcissists enthralled with their own overblown egos, projecting their own petty insecurities on to the world around them? Inventing false enemies for the sole purpose of bolstering their sense of self-importance? Itty-bitty Nixons minus the relevance or a hint of vision? How dare you!

GM was always full of shit

Remember everyone - real Americans don't want electric cars:

SAN CARLOS, Calif. — (August 15, 2006) — The limited-edition “Signature One Hundred” series Tesla Roadster, the first high-performance electric car manufactured by Tesla Motors, has sold out in three weeks, confirming that the sleek, stylish, zero-emissions Tesla Roadster is a hit.

When the rotting carcass of the American car industry is dissected and sold to Japan, Korea, Germany, and China, I do hope someone will have the appropriate level of taste and, I don't know, punch Rick Wagoner in the mouth for killing the EV1.

Oh, and everyone with eyes saw this one coming:

The Signature One Hundred Club has attracted a diverse group of members... Some of the initial members include Oscar® winner George Clooney...

So Tesla just raised $10 million by courting the rich bachelor playboy set. Call it Bruce Wayne marketing, I guess.

Exactly

August:

Whenever a huge actor does a crap movie, the usual response is a condemnation of their refusal to turn down any role (see Walken, Christopher) or wonderment over just how much money you actually had to pay the guy to be in the movie (see Hopper, Dennis and Kingsley, Ben). Few people understand that Samuel L. Jackson wasn't recruited for Snakes on a Plane to make the movie better. He asked to be in it.

In every interview, every article about SOAP, Jackson has done nothing but emit sheer unbridled enthusiasm about the general silliness and fun of the movie, all the while acknowledging that much of it is just how much people love the "badass" character he personally embodies. To put it very simply, this is a man who finds nothing more enjoyable than making his fans happy.

I plan to see it tomorrow. Possibly intoxicated. But I'll be there.

Watch his Daily Show interview here. You've never seen two grown men have so much fun on television.

Woot for me!

Treehugger has one of my posts at Grist on their list of Favourite Green Blogs of the Week!

Hooray!

The post in question is yet another in my unseemly love letters to Bucky Fuller.

Ah, news!

DETROIT (Reuters) - A federal judge in Detroit on Thursday ordered the Bush administration to halt the National Security Agency's program of domestic eavesdropping, saying it violated the U.S. Constitution.

The ruling was a setback for the Bush administration, which has defended the program as an essential tool in its war on terrorism.

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor said the controversial practice of warrantless wiretapping known as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" violated free speech rights, protections against unreasonable searches and the constitutional check on the power of the presidency.

Despite the clear facts of the case, I expect the SCOTUS to figure out some reason why the Constitution in fact says the exact opposite of what we all think it does.

UPDATE: Reading Glenn Greenwald, I expect this will be what Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, and Judge #5 use against the constitution:

Second, the court ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to challenge the legality of the NSA program even though they cannot prove they have been eavesdropped on, because they have suffered actual harm merely from knowing that the Government is eavesdropping.

So if this case makes it through appeals and gets to the Supremes, they can simply decide that the plaintiffs didn't have standing, and dismiss the whole thing. Lovely.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington: Why does the Supreme Court hate our freedoms?

More on Planets

Wait just one minute here...

Charon, moon of Pluto, gets to be a planet because it's round and over 800 km wide, but Ganymede - moon of Jupiter - is still a moon, despite being more than 4 times the size?

...there seems to be an exception for Charon because it's less of a "moon" and more of a junior partner in the Pluto-Charon "double planet". For all the talk of keeping Pluto a planet for the schoolchildren, this is a pretty arcane reason to deny the Galilean moons of Jupiter their rightful title.

I think Ganymede is being robbed. I also think this is an important enough issue to post twice about. Finally, I think I have way too much spare time today.

Because I have nothing better to write about

Well, I'd probably be nerdy enough to write about this story eventually no matter how slow it is today:

The world's astronomers, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), have concluded two years of work defining the difference between "planets" and the smaller "solar system bodies" such as comets and asteroids. If the definition is approved by the astronomers gathered 14-25 August 2006 at the IAU General Assembly in Prague, our Solar System will include 12 planets, with more to come: eight classical planets that dominate the system, three planets in a new and growing category of "plutons" - Pluto-like objects - and Ceres. Pluto remains a planet and is the prototype for the new category of "plutons."

With the advent of powerful new telescopes on the ground and in space, planetary astronomy has gone though an exciting development over the past decade. For thousands of years very little was known about the planets other than they were objects that moved in the sky with respect to the background of fixed stars. In fact the word "planet" comes from the Greek word for "wanderer". But today hosts of newly discovered large objects in the outer regions of our Solar System present a challenge to our historically based definition of a "planet".

Now, the simplest - and I believe most rational decision - would have been to simply drop Pluto from the roster and call it a chunk of the Kuiper Belt. But noooo... scientists are so fussy. This little piece of rationalization is cute:

Member of the Planet Definition Committee, Richard Binzel says: "Our goal was to find a scientific basis for a new definition of planet and we chose gravity as the determining factor. Nature decides whether or not an object is a planet."

Right. Nature has been unable to sleep, trying to decide whether planetary body 2003 UB313 is a full-fledged "planet" or not.

Of course, every time I get to thinking about the outer solar system - that is, stuff beyond the asteroid belt - I keep thinking how much more there is to explore just within our own solar system, never mind the rest of the near galactic neighbourhood. And then I get depressed because we should already be doing this stuff.

More nuclear in Alberta news

The profit margins in Alberta keep getting slimmer, and the development costs are starting to spiral upwards. It's no surprise then that the nuclear industry is being aggressive in courting the tar sands companies. The latest comes from the Globe today:

Talks with six firms have already happened and a bigger push is now in the works, he said. Energy Alberta is targeting developers of projects that use steam injection to recover bitumen from the oil sands. That list is led by the likes of EnCana Corp., Husky Energy Inc. and Total SA of France.

Energy Alberta hopes to build a reactor worth about $3-billion by 2014 to provide steam to support the production of 220,000 barrels of bitumen a day.

As a rough guess, that probably means they're thinking "small" for nuclear, which means about 1000 MWe reactor. As it turns out, Westinghouse, GE, and the French company Areva are all pushing 1000MW reactor designs around the world, including here in Ontario. That said, Energy Alberta would be smart to think larger - if Canada is serious about increasing the tar sands production, then nuclear is pretty much the only option, aside from imported LNG.

For critics of the tar sands, just one more reason.

What is wrong with these people?

Why are they consumed with terror? Don't they know that means the scary brown people win?

From the Jerusalem Post, William Shawcross has gone totally, irretrievably insane:

Civilian deaths in Lebanon are utterly tragic. But if you watched only British television, particularly the BBC, you would be hard-pressed to understand that Israel has been forced into a war for its survival, one in which Iran has empowered its proxy, Hizbullah, to undertake the final solution of "the Zionist entity."

Well, the reason the BBC might not be willing to put that message on the air is because they're a responsible news broadcaster, not purveyors of science fiction addicted to crystal meth.

1) Israel was never "forced" in to a war. Olmert and Halutz both escalated this conflict far beyond where it needed to go.

2) Israel was never forced in to a war "for it's survival". Neither Hezbollah, Syria, or Iran have the capability to destroy Israel or pose anything more than a limited, conventional threat.

3) Hezbollah may have been "empowered" by Iran (how? A good shrink?) but nobody has presented any evidence, much less credible evidence, that Iran or Syria directed Hezbollah's attacks.

Oh, but it gets worse:

Reasonable, conventional armchair critics concentrate on the mistakes of Israel rather than the evil ideology of Hizbullah. They refuse to acknowledge that a small, decent society is now literally under the threat of death from an illegal fascistic military machine built throughout the hills, valleys, towns and villages of southern Lebanon.

I admit it. I refuse to acknowledge the above. Know why? Because it's a figment of Shawcross' imagination. Shawcross needs to show how a few thousand fighters - well armed and trained, but small in number - pose an existential threat to a country of 6 million of the wealthiest, best-armed people in the middle east. Rather than actually do that, Shawcross spins a paranoid fantasy about how Hezbollah is staffed by atomic supermen seeking nothing more than to stomp Israel flat.

If we're going to talk about terrorism seriously, lets talk seriously. Desperately clinging to beliefs that we're fighting the new Hitler are silly, and make the people who dispense such stupidity look like scared children.

Glad for 2000

Boy, when you put it like that, I'm really glad Gore lost in 2000:

In other words, had it not been for [GOP vote-theft in 2000], Lieberman would be vice president, the Iraq war in all likelihood never would have happened, and Lieberman's increasingly mutual estrangement from the Democratic Party would be unthinkable.

Except that Liberman would, in all likelihood, be the presumptive nominee for the 2008 Democratic party. And, backed by 8 years of incumbency, that would be terrifying.

Oh, and if you think that being veep would have kept Lieberman from sticking the knife in Gore's back, you're dreaming. He didn't hesitate to try and torpedo Clinton, and he was happy to scuttle Gore's attempts for justice in Florida. Given time, he would have found some way to hurt President Gore in office. If nothing else, his ridiculous crusades against Grand Theft Auto would have given the Greens the youth vote.

Actually, Hezbollah won twice

Wow. Not satisfied with merely surviving in the face of a major Israeli offensive, Hezbollah is now vowing an "unlimited budget" when it comes to rebuilding damage done by Israel.

Frankly, if I were in the Israeli or American governments, I'd be humiliated right now. First, Hezbollah "wins" against Israel by staying alive and operating as a cohesive force. Secondly, it looks like Hezbollah is also going to show the Americans what a competent rebuilding program looks like after a war.

For too long, we expected our enemies to act like idiots. In Hezbollah, we may finally - in a small way - have gotten a competent adversary. And while we used to be competent when it came to fighting wars and rebuilding, we seem to have lost any capability of that now.

Any bets on when Nasrallah becomes PM of Lebanon?

Heh. Indeed.

According to Elspeth Reeve, liberals hate Ann Coulter because everything she says is "kind of true." Lance Mannion chomps at the bit:

It's "kind of true" that some Jews are cheap, that some Irishmen drink and fight too much, that some Poles are dumb, that some black people and Mexicans are lazy, that some women are castrating shrews and battleax fishwives.

But ethnic jokes don't attack cheapness, drinking and fighting, stupidity, laziness, or castration. They attack Jews, the Irish, Poles, blacks, Hispanics, and women.

The object is to define "the other," make them objects of derision and contempt, in order to justify treating them as others and excluding them from any definition of "fellow human being."

Coulter tells the political equivalent of ethnic jokes.

When the subject is Muslims, she tells the ethnic joke equivalent of ethnic jokes.

Thank you, Oscar Mayer!

If it weren't for you, I'd have to wait whole minutes longer to eat a microwaved hot dog! God bless the Oscar Mayer corporation and its marketing subsidiaries!

I had a similar joyous reaction when Kraft introduced EasyMac. Exactly how stupid are we as a civilization that there was a market for Kraft Dinner that was mildly easier to make?

No fiber for you

Seattle: We'd like a fiber-optic network for our city.

Qwest: Nope.

Seattle: Fine, if you won't build it - we'd love to buy the service from an established player - we'll just have to build it ourselves.

Qwest: Hey, no fair!

Every time this plays out, the telcos look more and more ridiculous.

Ruled by Children

If we needed more evidence, the President is a moron:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 — President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.

Those who attended a Monday lunch at the Pentagon that included the president’s war cabinet and several outside experts said Mr. Bush carefully avoided expressing a clear personal view of the new prime minister of Iraq, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki....

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.

Wow. Who'd imagine that shia in Iraq would have any kind of solidarity with shia in Lebanon. A mystery for the ages...

And if it needed to be said, Atrios is still right: As long as Bush is president, the US is staying in Iraq. If Bush wants to stick to his guns, then we might be in for a showdown between Congress and the President when the US public realizes that withdrawal is the only sane option.

Sounds fun!

Well duh

Billmon:

A source with access to the report said its main conclusion is that Israel has no security solution to the threat of rockets launched from the West Bank against population centers. The report's authors assume that following a unilateral Israeli pullout from the West Bank, Hamas will takeover and deploy rockets.

Another conclusion is that Israel will not gain international recognition for an end to the occupation if it continues to hold significant portions of the West Bank. Similarly, it is doubtful whether such recognition would be forthcoming even if it unilaterally withdraws to the Green Line.

In another astonishing conclusion, the report noted that the sun generally rises in the east, the earth is the third planet from the sun and it does, in fact, frequently rain in Indianapolis in the summer time.

Rearview Mirrors

Earlier today, I referenced something I wrote a few months before I started blogging - November 3, 2004 to be exact. I actually dug up the piece in question, and it's amusing to me what I got right and what I got wrong, as well as the generally angry tone I had immediately after the election. I remember now how upset I was that Bush could be re-elected, despite everything that had happened.

Anyway, I thought it might be amusing to share this piece, and submit to a bit of criticism with almost 2 years having passed.

***

What Now?
November 3, 2004

Its no exaggeration or surprise to say that the results of this election are probably shocking to the rest of the world. Almost certainly, Europe will go to bed this evening wondering what the hell is going on in America. Large parts of the Arab world will finish their evening prayers wishing a new kind of vengeance on President Bush. The Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian leaderships will no doubt be trying to estimate how damaging this will be to their nations. Ironically, the people this election helps most may be the parties of the left in Europe and Canada. Canadians and Germans will likely be less supportive of any Conservative party that seems too close to President Bush.

But what does this mean for the United States and the World? Well, seeing as I predicted Kerry getting 300-310 electoral votes and 50% of the popular vote, my opinion has the weight and substance of wet tissue. However, there are some obvious consequences to the decision of the American electorate to validate President Bush's next four years, and arguably the last four as well. First off, Bush and the Republicans in Congress will have to deal with the consequences of their actions. The days of reckoning for Bushs policies were put off until after thiselection, but they cannot be postponed beyond the next. Unless there is some truly unprecedented shift in fortunes, the collapses of the USmilitary presence in Iraq, the value of the dollar, and the solvency of the Government of the United States will all come some time in the next four years. As bad as Bush 2.1 was for America, Bush 2.2 is going to be far, far worse. Too bad the People just wasted their last chance to hold the President accountable.

The issues that seem to have decided this election for Bush were moral issues. Put more plainly, the GOP is now the party where "We Hate Fags" is considered good policy. The fact that Bush's margin of victory was likely suburban voters who disagree with him on every facet except the War on Terror makes this frankly hilarious. Security Moms have just helped to elect a man and a party that will usher in a domestic agenda that they would never have knowingly voted for. Except that they just did.

Not a single American can say on November 3, 2004 that they didn't know what they were getting when they voted. They had the experience of four years of Bush in the White House and twenty years of Kerry in the Senate. Like it or not, voting Bush meant voting for the whole Republican package. At least those who voted Kerry but disagreed with parts of his platform could say that the GOP would control the Congress anyway. Voting Bush meant, essentially, voting to legitimize the Republican party platform as the leading philosophy of US politics. Not that the GOP cares too much about legitimacy.

Some could argue that voting Bush in 2000 didnt seem that dangerous. That no longer applies. Not only do we know how dangerous he is, but the world is rapidly entering an unusually dangerous phase. The increasing militancy of the United Statesis tearing the post-WWII order apart, and Bush no longer needs to fear the discipline of public opinion. And now, the world has the task of managing a profound economic (and presumably political) shift in the world order from Europe and America to China and India. These periods are never easy. Arguably, the last time the world faced a period like this, where antagonist nations were jockeying for world supremacy, was the period of roughly 1870-1945 when Germany, Japan, the United States, and the British Empire were all playing the game of empire at various times with various levels of enthusiasm. Two world wars, the razing of whole continents and the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions were necessary for that contest to come to a temporary resolution. The Cold War put history on hold, but since 1991, just as it was being declared dead, History has returned with a vengeance.

Now, faced with the rise of China and India as economic powers, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran as nuclear powers, and the increasing unification and opposition of Europe to American policy, the global situation is becoming tenser and tenser. Would anyone like to suggest that George W. Bush is capable of navigating the reefs and shoals of the 21^stcentury? Does anyone think that Bush would have made an excellent Prime Minister of Great Britain, circa 1904?

History isn't destiny, of course. But the people of the United States have just delivered a massive fuck you to the rest of the world, friend and foe alike. They have legitimated for American politics illegal war, torture, imprisonment without trial, and hysterical nativism a la freedom fries. Herbert Stein, advisor to President Nixon, once said "Things that can't go on forever, don't." This is a useful reminder for all of us in these days of despair. A quick list of things that can't go on forever:

-Iraq: Elections or no, the Iraqis have already voted with their guns. The Americans are in a position identical to the war in Vietnam invaders propping up the carcass of a hated government against its own people. The war gets worse with every day, with more Americans (and vastly more Iraqis) dying every day for an outcome that has already been determined. The only thing that will change between now and then is the body count. Being wrong on this count, and seeing a flourishing of democracy in the Middle East, would please me immensely. I would ask only one question: where is the good news Im missing?

-Oil: The life blood of western civilization, and getting scarcer every day. By some estimates, we are already at the point of peak global production. At best, we probably have little more than a decade. After that, the amount of oil available every year will begin shrinking, just as China begins trying to build an automobile industry. Given how long it takes to cycle old cars out of the market, we need to begin retiring every car on the market now, and replacing them with vastly more efficient models. The Prius will not save us, and it may already be too late. Who thinks that Bush 2.2 will be the presidency to take on Detroit and win? Nixon-to-China scenarios are possible, but do we want to risk the future on hypotheses? Well, 51% of the electorate just did.

-Trade: The US trade deficit gets larger and larger, despite the devaluations of the US dollar in recent months. This mainly has to do with China's decision to peg its currency to the dollar while investing billions in the same. Eventually, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo will stop throwing good money after bad. When that happens, the post-bubble recession of 2001 will look like an adolescent's grounding after missing curfew. The correction this time could quickly devalue the US dollar to the point where the worlds largest import market could close off almost entirely. Good for domestic US producers, bad for the other 95% of the planet. Except, hypothetically, to the Chinese. But do they want to chain their economy to a drowning man?

Despite an admittedly churlish desire to see the Americans take one in the gut, I couldn't argue that any of these problems are a good thing for non-Americans. Oil is obviously a problem the world will have to deal with, and the other two will leave the rest of the world with a problem regardless of the outcome. And so we come back to the original problem: In what universe is Bush the man to deal with these problems? His advisors have demonstrated incompetence and corruption in spades, and he has not demonstrated any ability to control them. Cheney was elected as much as Bush was. With Powell likely leaving, one of the last moderates in the government will be gone. With Rice, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft now officially unbound from any sense of restraint, we in the sane world now have the experience of wondering how much worse it can get.

When Kaiser Wilhelm fired Bismarck, the British papers called it dropping the Pilot. The Democratic Party has twice produced candidates who understood the world of the 21^st century and would have helped America find its way across these unfamiliar, treacherous waters. Somehow, the American system has rejected both candidates in favor of a man who ridicules the very idea that America should pay attention to the world in any way aside from mass violence. The fact that he is more popular today then he was in 2000 only underscores the danger of our times. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, even the Prophet Muhammad all espoused the belief that people acting in consensus would never make a mistake. I fervently hope, but no longer believe, they were correct.

***

Something I got wrong: "Ironically, the people this election helps most may be the parties of the left in Europe and Canada. Canadians and Germans will likely be less supportive of any Conservative party that seems too close to President Bush." Er, not so much with that one. The influence of Bush is debatable, but conservative parties have "won" in both Canada and Germany.

Feel free to put in your own additions to what I got wrong in the comments, now that I've broken the ice!

Next: Terrorists Want a Cookie, Need a Nap

Only in Harper's Canada:

Should 10-year-olds face jail?
Minister floats lowering age of legal responsibility
Janice Tibbetts, CanWest News Service
Published: Tuesday, August 15, 2006

ST. JOHN'S - Children aged 10 and 11 who run afoul of the law should be brought before the courts, Canada's Justice Minister said yesterday in a controversial and surprise proposal to expand the age of criminal responsibility, which is currently 12.

"We need to find ways of ensuring that children are deterred from crime," Vic Toews told the annual gathering of the Canadian Bar Association.

"We need to give courts jurisdiction to intervene in the lives of these young people."

Speaking to reporters later, he did not rule out incarceration of children under 12, but he said the courts' primary focus should be treatment programs outside the jail system.

The mind boggles. The justice system is stunningly incapable of deterring adults, and Toews thinks that 10 and 11-year olds are going to think twice about, what, stealing a candy bar?

Exactly how many violent crimes are committed by children under, say, 16 in Canada anyway?

Value Nothing: A Military Doctrine

One of the interesting things I've been hearing from more than one place regarding Israel's war in Lebanon is that regardless of the merits of Israel's actions, it was going to happen once the IDF's soldiers were kidnapped because Israel, more than other countries, has a deep, abiding connection with each and every soldier that puts on the uniform.

(We'll leave aside, for the moment, the fact that other IDF soldiers had been kidnapped before without this kind of gotterdammerung.)

If this is true - if Olmert believed, either because of priniciple or political expediency, that he had to do this because of the precious lives of Israeli soldiers - then it simply shows that this attachment to soldiers' lives is positively harmful to Israel's interests.

Let's start with the specific case: Whether you agree with the opinion that "Hezbollah won" or not, arguing that Israel has won a lasting victory in this case is difficult at best. Most observers see this as having empowered Hezbollah politically, while seriously undermining Israel's defensive credibility. If Israel embarked on this foolish war because of an attachment to two soldiers, and got a couple dozen of its own soldiers killed in the process, well that's just dumb. It served neither the immediate tactical goal (getting the soldiers back, or more generally preserving soldiers lives) nor the strategic goal (defeating the as-yet undefeated Hezbollah.)

This is not meant to be a callous argument along the lines of "it's the soldier's job to die", or more classically, "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." Rather, it's important that when states engage in international affairs, they not have too many "lines in the sand". The refusal to negotiate with terrorists is, as always, a instinctively satisfying response. It is also, as always, incredibly stupid. To go to war with all of Lebanon over 2 soldiers, or destroy Falluja over 4 mercenaries, is simply insane. It shows the enemy that they can control you, or at least goad you in to a response that you might not have thought fully through.

If Olmert or Bush had been in charge of facing down the USSR during the Cold War, I fear we probably wouldn't have survived.

Bush, 1962: The Rooskies have put missiles in Cuba? Fuck 'em, let's get our missiles in the air!

A few days ago, Kevin Drum wrote that:

It's human nature to demand action following an attack. Any action. Counseling restraint in the hope that it will pay off in the long run is politically ruinous.

Well, that's not exactly true, is it? Or at least, it explains a whole lot less than Kevin might think. Nobody now argues that the most reasonable response after the Tonkin Gulf was to begin a massive, decade-long war to... do what, exactly in Vietnam? Less understood is that there were voices in 1964 who were saying exactly the same thing, and if President Johnson had joined them (after running against war in Vietnam, after all) he could very well have held off any public clamour for war that might have developed.

More broadly, counseling restraint may be politically ruinous, but practicing restraint is quite another thing. Israel could have not changed its rhetoric one bit, but instead conducted a series of limited air strikes against Hezbollah targets, and would be far, far ahead of where it is now. Or, to put it more simply: If you can't actually talk to the public about restraint, that doesn't mean you can't lie and be restrained anyway. Indeed, the public may thank you for it later.

Equality matters

I mentioned earlier that, like Billmon, I've become increasingly cynical that even the removal of the Bush administration will change the course of things sufficiently quickly to avert the oncoming disasters. However, my personal disillusionment with the Democrats is also due to the fact that by and large, Democrats seem to have forgotten how to talk about rights, equality, and justice.

Aside from John Edwards, we have yet to see a Democratic politician with an explicit message about poverty and inequality in America. Certainly, Edwards is the only major Democratic politician who's made it central to his campaigns. (This may mean Edwards is the nominee in 2008, who knows?) Moreover, while the Dems are eager to put out bad messages about how "together, we can move America forward" or some godawful tripe like that, they singularly avoid the basic issue of justice.

From unions and health care, to women's and gay and lesbian rights, the Left has been at its best and at its strongest when it remembers that our demands are not privileges to be shared, but rights that are owed to us, and are to be demanded.

We deserve a say in our daily life in the workplace because democracy is not just for every fourth year. Democracy is something you believe in every day of your life, or it's nothing.

We all deserve health care because if our most basic asset - our physical health - can be denied us because of poverty, or the status of our employer, then nobody is free.

Women, homosexuals, minorities of all kinds, not to mention those of us in the majority, are owed equality before the law and before all of us because, in the words of Joss Whedon, "Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women." Together.

When I see someone - other than Joss Whedon - making those arguments to the public, then (maybe) I'll start to be more optimistic about our future.

Two subsidiary notes: 1) If you'd like to read the text of Whedon's speech, sans video, follow this link.

2) My girlfriend's sister's immediate reaction, upon seeing Whedon's speech: "Is he married?" (He is, but more importantly so is she.)

Lieberman Lies in the Globe

In the Globe and Mail today, there's an incredibly addle-brained opinion piece about how mean the Democratic party has been to Joe Lieberman. I swear to God, this is the very first sentence:

You'd have to look far in U.S. politics to find a finer public servant than Senator Joseph I. Lieberman.

No, you wouldn't. Any one of the men who did better than Joe in the 2004 Democratic primary - aside from being better at getting votes, a crucial skill for a politician - are also better public servants. These, however, are the second and third sentences:

And, having looked far, you still wouldn't find one. For intelligence, integrity, sobriety, and devotion to the public good, Mr. Lieberman tops the charts.

Intelligence: Lieberman believed that there were WMDs in Iraq, and continues to support the Bush administration. Aside from the moral and even religious issues (twice-married Joe is always telling us how religious he is), this is just d-u-m-dumb.

Integrity: He constantly runs against his own party, but wants the same party to hand him a Senate seat unopposed. Having been beaten in a fair fight, he's now smearing the party he still claims to represent.

Sobriety: Good to know that a U of T professor isn't above a crack at Ted Kennedy. Maybe someday, when I'm a tenured academic, I can coarsen the debate, too!*

Devotion to the Public Good: If by "public good", you mean "Joe Lieberman", then yes Joe Lieberman is devoted to the public good. Indeed, his devotion to that public good "tops the charts", as Orwin writes.

I'll spare you people because, God help us, we're only three sentences in. The other most offensive line in the piece is this:

Mr. Lieberman is apprehensive about the future of the party, and as his fellow Democrat, so am I. Will it ever grow up and become a post-9/11 party?

Unlike Mrs. Lieberman or Orwin, the Democratic party is a post-9/11 party. In point of fact, the Dems are the only post-9/12 party. You see, for people like Lieberman, Orwin, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, the only thing that ever happened of any importance to anyone, anywhere, were the attacks of September 11. The 9/11 attacks, despite being five years distant now, are still apparently the only historical event you need to know about to pontificate about national security, or be a Director of the Munk's Centre.

Knowing, and understanding, that the Iraq war is a collosal mistake, an arrogant blunder, and a national security disaster is apparently irrelevant, because it didn't happen on 9/11.

Men like Orwin and Lieberman refuse to understand that 9/11 is not the sum total of existence, much less the sum total of the national security debate. There was a September 12, and a 13 after that. The Democratic voters of Connecticut understand that questions of national security need to be answered by people who live in the present, and can anticipate the future.

Orwin and Lieberman can only see the horrors of the past, and refuse to admit their part in the horrors of the present. For that reason, if no other, men like them need to be ignored and have their authority stripped from them.

*The other meaning of the word "sobriety" - moderate, serious, temperate - can never, ever, in any way be applied to people who advocated and continue to advocate for the war in Iraq. So I'm actually being charitable here, and assuming that Orwin isn't a total retard.

The Left is right about everything, always, cont.

So at places as variegated as Atrios, The American Prospect, and Talking Points Memo, there's a bit of a discussion about how the Bush Administration has driven even middle of the road Democrats - people who spent the 1990s reading Friedman and thinking "y'know, he's got this globalization thing wrapped up nicely" - in to fits of screaming madness.

I think maybe the most interesting effect of the Bush Administration has been to rehabilitate the left in the public discourse. Casting our eyes back to, oh, 1998 or so, it's difficult to remember that even Democrats ran, screaming, from both the label "left" but more importantly most of the policy prescriptions of actual leftists. People like Robert Reich and James Galbraith were among the few to consistently and vocally raise issues of inequality and class. And they were - outside of places like The American Prospect magazine - entirely ignored. It took the capricious cruelty of the Bush Administration to make people remember two things:

1) Competence matters. The Clinton administration, for all its faults, was competent to a degree like no President since... well, maybe ever. If, after five years of Bushocracy, you still doubt this is important, I reccomend a vacation to New Orleans.

2) The economy doesn't always grow. Sometimes, the economy starts to downright suck. This cuts two ways. If the economy is growing, concerns about inequality can be muted, if only because a growth in absolute wealth silences a lot of concerns about relative poverty. This was a benefit for Clinton-style Democrats, as it let them address poverty and unemployment (which Clinton genuinely cared about) without having to use "old" Democratic ideas like stronger unions, fiscal stimulus, etc.

But the problem is - if you govern as Clinton did, and assume that growth is a substitute for improvements in equality - when the economy starts to tank again (and it always does) then the floor falls out from the people who didn't have much to begin with.

Of course, this was exactly what was being yelled by economists on the left. Problem is, the party of the Left (which Truman's Democrats unquestionably were) no longer existed. Indeed, I'm not convinced it exists today, even with the insanity of the Bush administration. Like Billmon, while I'm happy to see the Bushies driven from office (preferably with fire) I have a hard time believing that Bush's removal will harken a new age of good governance - which is not the same thing as competence, which I do believe the Dems will deliver.

The problem is that we no longer have the room or time to spare for mere competence. Far too many problems were put off for another day during the Clinton Administration, and those issues have positively worsened during the Bush years. We don't need a caretaker President in the US, we need a revolutionary. Think first term FDR, and then add some extra ambition.

Shortly before I began blogging, I emailed friends and family with a note written the day Kerry conceded the election. In it, I noted that when Kaiser Wilhelm dismissed Otto Bismarck as Chancellor of the German Empire, the British press called it "dropping the pilot."

The meaning was this: Bismarck has proven his ability to navigate the treacherous shoals of late Victorian-era European politics. He'd wielded the German military with both incredible efficiency and daring, and he'd humiliated Europe's traditional great power (France) while doing so. Unfortunately for Bismarck, his personal strength and reputation conflicted with the desire for grandeur of the new Kaiser, so Bismarck had to go. The Wilhelmine era that followed was one of crisis after crisis, eventually leading to World War I.

The short list of crises on Bush's watch would include Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation, Sino-US relations, Sino-Japanese relations, Indo-Pakistani relations, climate change, energy shortages, the disembowelling of the American treasury, and the total collapse of American legitimacy abroad.

In 2000, the American people were given the choice of continuing the Clinton legacy, and they dropped the pilot.

In 2004, they were given a chance to recant, and they stuck with their latter-day Wilhelm.

If, in 2008, the Democrats attempt to win by running for President as "Wilhelm, but more competent", or even another Clinton, then we might as well all go home. We'll already have lost.

Mantario?

Ah, a brief diversion to Canadian provincial politics.

Apparently, a pair of social scientists have raised the idea of north-west Ontario breaking off and joining Manitoba. Economically, there would be little to zero gain for the people of the northwest, but they would be far better represented politically.

(An additional historical twist: Manitoba and Ontario both claimed the area of Thunder Bay for themselves. In typical Canadian fashion, it was settled by the British.)

I don't know what to make of this idea. On the face of it, I'm not opposed to it. I generally think that political organizations shouldn't, by their very structure, marginalize people. And let's face it - any attempt to put southern Ontario and Kenora in the same province is going to marginalize Kenora.

I also tend to believe that it was a mistake to allow the existing provinces to claim all the new land Canada appropriated. Better to create dozens of smaller provinces out of the new land. Best of all, in my fantasy politics of the 1880s, to have a very centralized (but still federal) state.

Anyway, I just think the name "Mantario" is kind of funny, and thought I'd share my thoughts.

Telling

My Internet is all screwed up, but if you go to Salon.com and click on the Daou Report, you'll see the quintessence of modern political divisions.

From the left: Eric Boehlert on the Bush Administration's handling of the Press.

From the right: The virtues of killing children.

The Crazification Factor

A while back, John Rogers of Kung Fu Monkey wrote:

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is --

Tyrone: 27%.

John: ... you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

In related news, the State of Florida is now polling at 25% for Senatorial aspirant Katherine "I miss the poll tax" Harris.

I think we need to add, like, a 5% margin of error on the crazy factor. Bizarre that it should actually favor Florida of all places.

Civility in the Jerusalem Post

Yikes:

Painful retreats and peace-plans are only possible under popular prime ministers - Menachem Begin with the Egyptian treaty, Yitzhak Rabin at Oslo and Ariel Sharon and his disengagement. A discredited prime minister going ahead with such a controversial plan, whatever its merits, is a recipe for chaos and even civil war.

There's somethign wrong in a country's political culture - and I'm not speaking exclusively of Israel, as the US has the same syndrome - that the "dovish", sensible foreign policy can't actually be pursued by doves, for fear of domestic political consequences. So if McGovern had been President in 1972, it would have been impossible for there to be a rapprochement with China because "only Nixon could go to China." Or if Mondale had won in 1984 (Ha!) Gorbachev might have been a missed opportunity because as a pro-nuclear freeze Democrat, Mondale wouldn't have been able to do exactly what Reagan ended up doing at Reykjavik*.

It bears saying that this makes no sense at all.

*It also bears saying that, after tens of billions of dollars, the only thing that Reagan's SDI dreams have materially accomplished was to scuttle a Soviet offer in Iceland to eliminate all intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1996.

Me too

Yglesias:

At any rate, normally the point of MEMRI transcripts is to indicate that each and every figure in the Arab world who doesn't like Israel is also a wild-eyed extremist hell-bent on the destruction of the United States, but these MEMRI excerpts just make Qaradawi sound like a somewhat more candid version of a conventional socially conservative American religious leader. I wish they had provided the entire dialogue, since I'd really like to know how he followed-up on the claim that "lesbianism is not as bad as homosexuality, in practical terms."

First Chinese soldiers, now Muslim clerics.

Thought-provoking

via Defensetech.org, these presentations (1, 2, in PDF) from some of the designers of the F-16, F-15, and A-10 make some alarming claims.

Probably the most controversial would be that the US Air Force hasn't fielded a truly superior aircraft (superior to it's rivals, I assume) since the F-86 in the Korean War. Even worse, they both argue that the F-22 is going to be a disaster.

I have some reservations about this analysis - notwithstanding my hostility to the F-22 - because a lot of their criteria for evaluation seem to rig the game in favour of smaller, cheaper planes and don't (I think) take in to account enhanced capabilities. David Axe at Defensetech says he'll give the aviator's response to these criticisms soon.

My reservations notwithstanding, it's a very, very interesting read for anyone interested in the evolution of combat aircraft since, oh, the 1950s.

Quotes of the Day

At best, the policy is a gigantic gamble that a stable and decent regime can be established in Iraq and that this can produce reform in the other countries and a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. In this case, the United States might gain much more support and approval, if not love. But anything less will leave the United States looking neither strong nor benign, and we may find that the only thing worse than a successful hegemon is a failed one. We are headed for a difficult world, one that is not likely to fit any of our ideologies or simple theories. [emphasis added.]
-Robert Jervis on the Bush Doctrine

Barbara Tuchman, writing about Chiang Kai-Shek, said that as much as power corrupts, powerlessness corrupts even more. I've been thinking about that line a lot recently.

“Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon Foi, believes itself Right. Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God’s Service, when it is violating all his Laws.”
-John Adams, writing to Thomas Jefferson

The military IS political, and vice versa

At Ezra's, in the comments to this post, somebody makes the argument that, while the US Army may have been undermined politically, it has not been defeated militarily.

I do hate to repeat myself, but it's time once again to revisit some basic concepts of the use of military force.

Armies, air forces, and navies are means used towards specific ends. Sometimes the end in mind is something limited, like forcing the DPRK north of the 38th parallel. Sometimes the ends are more ambitious, like the unconditional surrender of Japan. But at the end of the day, these are political decisions - the US Pacific fleet would have been used much differently if, say, FDR had decided to end the war with the liberation of the Phillipines.

All this being said, it is difficult for me to understand the substantial difference in our response to the following two situations:

1) A foreign army is defeated in combat and driven off in disarray; or,

2) A foreign army is never defeated in combat, but fails to achieve a single substantive political objective and leaves the campaign in question having taken substantial casualties.

Now, obviously in a case of abject defeat the answer is simple: withdraw and sue for peace. Some people seem to be under the illusion that our response to the second situation - as it exists in Iraq today - is any different.

Arguably, not being "defeated in combat" allows the individual soldiers to retain a sense of honor and dignity. However, this is only true while simultaneously making the political leadership look much, much worse. A failure to achieve the desired ends would imply one of two things, after all: Either the ends specified were simply impossible ("the new Iraqi government will be a friend of Israel!"), the political leadership didn't apply sufficient means ("You go to war with the army you have"), or both.

In this sense, I think Iraq really is a mirror of Vietnam - the US government has committed a large fraction of the armed forces to a strategy that they no longer have the means to actually succeed. The only caveat to this might conceivably be that more means should be applied in Iraq, but in the actually-existing US armed forces today, the cupboard is bare. This leaves us only one option - withdrawal.

To round this out with another repetition:

The US Army no longer has the means to carry out any objectives in Iraq. It cannot prevent a civil war, it cannot support the Iraq government, and it almost certainly cannot take sides in a civil war without massive casualties. The US Army's presence cannot minimize bloodshed, if anything it is an aggravating factor. The US cannot help because the US does not have control. All that being true, the only sensible option is to leave - anything else just promises more bloodshed.

Good for Bill and Melinda

Bill and Melinda Gates have come off the political fence and publicly backed key causes of Aids campaigners, criticising the abstinence policies beloved of the US government and calling for more rights for women and help for sex workers.
Making the keynote speech of the opening session of the 16th International Aids Conference in Toronto, on Sunday, the Microsoft billionaire and his wife, who have previously largely confined themselves to discussing and funding non-political scientific research, spoke with passion and commitment about the social changes necessary to stop the spread of HIV/Aids....

"Abstinence is often not an option for poor women and girls, who have no choice but to marry at an early age. Being faithful will not protect a woman whose partner is not faithful. And using condoms is not a decision that a woman can make by herself; it depends on a man.

"We need to put the power to prevent HIV in the hands of women. This is true whether the woman is a faithful married mother of small children or a sex worker trying to scrape out a living in a slum. No matter where she lives or what she does, a woman should never need her partner's permission to save her own life."

This one's for the nerds

I've had a suspicion for about 9 months now that the high-definition DVD rollout was going to be a flop.

Short version of the story: Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD are very, very expensive and offer a image quality improvement that won't matter at all to anyone without a Hi-def TV. Even for people with a HDTV, most consumers will have a hard time understanding why they should choose one standard over the other.

Once the price of HD-DVD or Blu-ray burners comes down, I expect them to be snapped up for personal computer use, but until then I think most people will sit this out.

5 good years for bin Laden

(Cross-posted at Ezra's.)

Andrew Brown has a bunch of good stuff in this article in Salon, but I particularly want to point out this bit:

Of course, the presence of a large disaffected and angry bloc of Muslim voters who believe that British foreign policy is immoral and misguided creates a problem. The fact that our army in Iraq will almost certainly have to retreat, defeated, makes the problem worse. It looks as if the army in Afghanistan is fighting a much harder war than some politicians foresaw; it's also clear that America will have to pull back from Iraq, and the British army is hardly going to stay there on its own.

One may not like the fact that the invasion of Iraq has made homegrown British terrorism more likely. But it is a fact, acknowledged by almost everyone except Prime Minster Tony Blair. The trouble is that a defeat in Iraq will make the invaders seem both weaker and more immoral. This is a dangerous position to be in.

This is perhaps the clearest expression of how Bush and Blair have failed in the war against terrorism. Through our own incompetence in fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now the IDF's similar performance in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the west has shown pretty clearly a few things that we wish the enemy didn't "know":

Read More...

1) We can be beaten. Iraq, Lebanon, and possibly Afghanistan are all areas where powerful western armies have been fought to a standstill and bloodied by asymmetrical means. Especially now with Hezbollah, an organized resistance to western military power has been shown to be successful. This might not quite be unprecedented, but it's certainly noteworthy.

I would compare this to the effect of the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905. Many young Asian nationalists, including Nehru, traced their ambitions to the decisive Japanese victory at Tsushima. Once the west was proven to be vulnerable, liberation movements across the western colonies got a boost.

2) Avowedly "Islamic" armies can match western power, secular nationalists can't. (I say that al Qaeda types now "know this" only because this is almost certainly how it will be interpreted by them.) Look at the history of Israeli-Arab conflicts to get an idea of how this can be read in to history: The wars of '48, '67, and even 1973 are pretty spectacular Arab defeats, though I hesitate to call '73 a rousing victory for Israel, costly as it was.

Meanwhile, the Mujahideen drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan (US aid has probably been forgotten), the resurgent Taliban looks to be laying the hurt on NATO forces there today (how soon until some young Afghan explains how Mullah Omar wasn't a "true muslim"?) and while the Arab nationalist Saddam Hussein collapsed before the Americans (twice!), the nominally muslim resistance will almost certainly drive the US Army out of Iraq. And now Hezbollah has stood up to the IDF in the field and survived. It's not a march through Tel Aviv, but for angry muslims across the world, it might as well be.

Through a combination of incompetence and arrogance, we've probably discredited the idea of secular muslim governments for a generation, at least. With our refusal to negotiate with governments as diverse as Syria, Iran, Fatah or Hamas, we've given the impression that we're uninterested in what Muslims have to say. An attack on Iran would certainly rehabilitate the Mullahs in the eyes of young Iran, so I guess if we want to continue down this road that's the next step.

All in all, it's been a good few years for bin Laden, and we've done most of his work for him.

MIT leads the way

Let's ignore the world's martial troubles for a moment, and look at some good news: MIT has announced an in-house "Manhattan Project" to spur the development of new, innovative energy technologies.

Proposed technologies include spinach-based solar panels, new batteries for hybrid cars, super-sized capacitors for the same and more.

What's interesting is that this is a multi-disciplinary effort, involving multiple areas of the academy. What's sad is that this, on it's own, is probably going to be more effective than any of the Bush Administration's policies.

New Sy Hersh piece

Perhaps the most terrifying thing in Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker piece is that Donald Rumsfeld - Rumsfeld! - may be the only voice of sanity in the administration when it comes to Lebanon:

Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”

Saint preserve us! We have to rely on Donald "Armor? What body Armor?" Rumsfeld to save America from another disaster.

One of the weirdest things about the whole Lebanon mess has been Israeli PR's reliance on the Kosovo war as a rhetorical device. For example:

On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.) [emphasis mine - JM]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a reasonable person might expect the Jewish state not to play games with casualty figures. Other people play that game, and the Israeli government ill-serves the Jewish people when it joins in.

More importantly, the whole notion of comparing totally different situations to each other is ridiculous. But then, the neocons love this game - Iraq after we invade will be just like Japan! Bremer is the new MacArthur! Still, the Kosovo example is bizarrely bad.

The most obvious example is that we were on the side of the Hezbollah-equivalent in that conflict. NATO may not have admitted it, but NATO was effectively providing air cover for the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA were the decently-armed non-state actors, fighting against the standing army and police forces of the Yugoslav Republic. Like Hezbollah, the KLA was being supported by a number of "external" groups, such as the Albanian diaspora. After the US did things like send Richard Holbrooke to have his picture taken with the KLA, it was pretty damn clear whose side we were on.

(If you've never seen those pictures of Holbrooke and Albright with members of the KLA, I assure you, Serbs have. And they remember.)

I don't want to sound like I'm weeping over the Serbs, but the point is that drawing a parallel between Israel/Lebanon and NATO/Yugoslavia is a sucker's game. Getting taken in by such comparisons is foolish. You could just as easily - using the Kosovo example - say that NATO should take Hezbollah's side in the conflict, and it would make about as much sense. (Obviously, I don't think NATO should do that, but you get the point.)

Moving on from the ridiculous talking points of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the "good" news from Israel's setback in Lebanon is that they've pushed back the people in Washington who are advocating for strike on Iran. The bad news is that, after five years of these crazies, we can't be certain they're perceiving these events rationally. Indeed, we can be certain they're not:

The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”

Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”

I'll close with just this: If this JCS officer is right, then France's troops are going to be busy for the next few years.

Waraholics

It never ends. via Mojo Blog, Not satisfied with wars in Lebanon and Iraq, threatening wars against Syria, Iran, and North Korea, the Weekly Standard now wants to attack Pakistan.

I'm sure a detailed response to this insanity is unnecessary, so let me just introduce Mr. Joscelyn to the F-16 fighter, manufactured by a division of Lockheed Martin. It can turn at 9 Gs, reach speeds up to Mach 2, and carries up to 6 air-to-air missiles. With planes like the F-22 or the JSF not yet in full service, it is almost certainly one of the best combat aircraft in production today.

And America has so far sold Pakistan a total of 24 of them.

Joe Lieberman is insane

There's no other way to put it: Joe Lieberman has lost whatever tenuous grasp on reality he once had.

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous [!!!] than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

Two theories there: That al Qaeda is at least as evil as the Nazis, and that it is probably more dangerous than Soviet Communism. Is there anything - anything at all - that you could say to justify these statments?

First off, the idea of making an "evil metric" reminds me of the Jon Stewart line - "What we need is an evil tie-breaker! I propose each contestant be given a commercial deli slicer. And a basket of puppies!" Even if we take the statement at face value, I think you'd be hard pressed to make the argument that some guys in caves are a worse evil than the criminal organization (as the Nuremberg tribunals described the Nazi Party) that systematically razed vast swaths of Europe, and waged a kind of warfare that would have made Genghis Khan blanch.

But it's the Soviet remark that is truly bizarre. The Soviet Union, for those who (like Sen. Lieberman) have forgotten, kept tens of thousands of nuclear warheads ready to utterly destroy America, Western Europe, and their allies for decades. Bin Laden wishes he had one percent of one percent of the Soviet Union's power.

Call it the Moment Fetish: Lieberman and his fellow travellers desperately, feverishly want to believe that they live in the most important era in human history. This makes them spew the most ridiculous crap imaginable, just to feel better.

Seriously, is it just a baby boomer thing? Do guys like Lieberman just wake up every morning wishing they'd amounted to half of what their parents' generation did? (Lieberman was born in 1942, so I guess he doesn't quite count, but he's still "young" enough to carry this baggage.)

Al Qaeda and terrorism more broadly are serious threats, no doubt about it. But to compare them to the world-ending terror of the Cold War is grossly stupid. On the best day bin Laden will ever have (Sept. 11, 2001, in case you're wondering) he was still nowhere near as powerful as the Soviets. Nevertheless, recent events have shown that bin Laden and his compatriots can still feed off of the fear of an attack - fear that Liberman is now deliberately inflaming for his own small ends. This is worse than petty, it's dangerous. All it does is give aid and comfort to the very people Joe claims to want to defeat.

Oh Goody

The vast ice cap that covers Greenland nearly three miles thick is melting faster than ever before on record, and the pace is speeding year by year, according to global climate watchers gathering data from twin satellites that probe the effects of warming on the huge northern island.

The consequence is already evident in a small but ominous rise in sea levels around the world, a pace that is also accelerating, the scientists say....

A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- known as the IPCC -- estimated that during all of the past century worldwide melting ice from global warming had raised sea levels by only two-tenths of a millimeter a year, or about 20 inches for the entire century.

But, according to Chen and his Texas team, the melting of Greenland's ice cap is already raising global sea levels by six-tenths of a millimeter each year, and the Colorado group estimates that melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone is adding up to four-tenths of a millimeter of fresh water to sea levels each year. In other words, the global sea level, due to melting of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica combined, is already rising 10 times faster than the IPPC's tentative estimates, the two analyses indicate.

Gee, if it keeps accelerating, I wonder what that will mean?

Differently Abled

Eric Alterman (via Atrios) asks:

Four wars simultaneously? Led by this crew? After what we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is it me, or are the people who run this country dangerously out of their minds?

As Atrios says, the simple answer is yes.

The more complicated answer comes to us via A&I:

Lately, I've been worried that many Americans has reached a tacit conclusion about their own government that's completely incorrect and unjustified. The same willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in spite of clear warning signs that severe doubt is justified, is in operation now, just as it was in 2003. The thinking, such as it is today, runs something like this:

-Surely, the Bush Administration must acknowledge that it made horrendous mistakes in Iraq.

-Of course, anyone who recognizes mistakes of this magnitude would avoid repeating them.

-Obviously, US foreign policy in Iraq, as well as other parts of the Middle East, must now be constrained be guided less by wishful thinking (a polite term for what Thomas Ricks calls "adventurism"), and more by cautious pragmatism.

Unfortunately, this line of thinking starts with an unjustified premise—the President and his senior advisors believe the axioms and corollaries of their foreign policy in the first term to be wrong—and builds an unsustainable edifice of hope on this weak foundation. If the American electorate needs proof that the Bush Administration is unrepentant and recalcitrant, we need only look at the last couple of weeks of news coming from Lebanon....

Suffice it to say that, in their minds, the problem wasn't the strategy itself, but inadequate opportunities to take it as far as they believed it should go—not only to Baghdad, but also to Damascus and Tehran.

These people are like Peter Griffin - prompted with the line, "Did you learn anything important from all this?" their well-fed response is a smug "Nope."

All joking and light humour aside, these people are dangerous, and given the power they wield, that means we're all in danger. There's two and a half more years of these geniuses in charge, and more than enough things can go from worse to "OH GOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" in that time.

Oh My God.

It's even worse than I thought. I mean.... Jesus. It seems (via Arms and Influence) that orders have been given to the soldiers in Iraq in the form of... Powerpoint slides.

Now, in case you don't see why this is a problem, try and make sense of this (a scan of one of the slides in question.) Now, if you were a military commander, what would you think your objective was supposed to be?

There's a reason that the military typically uses clear, dry language to give written orders. Apparently, this was dropped sometime during the Revolution in Military Affairs. From Thomas Ricks' Fiasco:

"Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology—above all information technology—has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionall governing the preparation and conduct of war," commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. "To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness." It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer's glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.

The Revolution in Military Affairs needs its 18 Brumaire, and quick.

Just to be clear, this isn't just Rumsfeld's fault. Once again, Ricks' book makes it clear that the military high command (most especially Tommy Franks) is deeply responsible for this disaster.

The US Army may need to be entirely rebuilt after Iraq, like it was after Vietnam.

That Yom Kippur Feelin'

Yoel Marcus, also in Haaretz, has an interesting column comparing 2006 to 1973:

Let's start with our boastfulness and arrogance before the war. We mocked Anwar Sadat's dramatic announcement in the Egyptian parliament that he was prepared to sacrifice a million solders to win back the territories conquered by Israel. We said, at the time, that it was just hot air, that he wasn't strong enough to go to war on his own - because our celebrated intelligence network didn't know that while we were sitting here bragging, Syria was secretly planning a revenge attack on Israel in cahoots with Egypt.

By the same token, we never imagined that Hezbollah, a measly gang of terrorists, all of 2,000 men, would be more prepared for a showdown than we were, and would fight back tooth and nail despite being equipped with weapons that are bows and arrows compared to our arsenal....

In both cases, Israel was taken by surprise and fell victim to what became known as "The Conception" - in a nutshell, the belief that "they wouldn't dare."

This, of course, isn't an Israeli conceit alone. The US went in to Iraq with much the same mindset, and look what it got them.

It's difficult to overstate how badly Israeli intelligence has fallen down on the job - both today, and most especially in 1973. In Israel, the result was then (and may be now) the fall of a government and, eventually, the rise of Likud. For the US, this isn't an option - the Americans missed their "accountability moment", unless the Dems are ballsy enough to talk impeachment.

It's hard to imagine what a leader could to that would be more of a reason to be removed from office, besides leading the country in to a losing war. And yet whenever there's talk of opposing politicians in the US who continue to support the Iraq disaster, the Press repeats accusations of treason. What kind of Bizarro land do we live in again?

The Perfect Wrong

This column in Haaretz manages to get just about every possible thing wrong. I'm actually a little impressed at the sheer magnitude of wrongness. Check it out:

Should the IDF lose its aura of invincibility in American eyes, Israel's perceived value as an ally could decline sharply. This reassessment in Washington, when combined with a continuing and even heightened determination by Arab states and jihadists to destroy Israel, would be catastrophic for its security.

I'd argue with the idea that America's alliance with Israel has ever been based on Israel's military utility. In fact, I think the exact opposite is true - America's alliance with Israel has been maintained even in the face of pretty severe conflicts with America's other interests. I actually don't think this is a bad thing, but it certainly eliminates the idea that the US-Israeli alliance is performance-based in any way. I don't remember the US support for Israel waning after the 1973 debacle.

As Israel's leaders once understood, the Washington-Jerusalem strategic partnership has always been nurtured by a steady stream of Israeli successes, both in defending its own security and in advancing American interests. These successes ranged from humbling the Soviet Union's Cold War Arab clients, proving the superiority of America's weapons over Russia's (the IDF's 1982 downing of 85 Syrian MIGs being a perfect case in point), to providing invaluable intelligence and being a democracy in a sea of autocracies.

Israel's successful 1981 Osirak mission was another excellent example of its strategic value in the Middle East. An Israel that could defang Saddam's nuclear program could also credibly offer the United States help against Iran's looming nuclear threat.

Except, of course, that Osirak failed to substantially set back Iraqi nuclear ambitions. Strike two for the IDF's performance. It could be argued that the US perceived Osirak to be a success, but arguing that the IDF needs to be perceived to be victorious in their pursuits is quite different from arguint that the IDF needs to actually win.

By contrast, Israel's inability to defeat Hezbollah, at least at the tactical and operational level, makes it look less like a valuable ally and more like a liability.

I don't see how this could possibly be true. Whether or not Israel "wins" in Lebanon (whatever that would look like) the IDF is still the most advanced military in the region. Even if the IDF loses south of the Litani river, Israel has a vital strategic role in the Middle East.

This is particularly the case because of the impact - well understood in Washington particularly in the post-September 11 environment - of Arab perceptions of Israeli strength or weakness on their assessment of U.S. capabilities. The Bush administration's pro-democracy strategy also makes it far more difficult for it to ignore the stridently anti-Israeli views expressed by the proto-democratic governments in Iraq and Lebanon.

BWAHAHAHA!!!! No, seriously? Every American president since, oh, FDR has said he was pro-Democracy, and I don't remember any of them seriously debating whether or not a "proto-democracy" needed to be heard before the bombs started falling.

Whether or not Lebanon now becomes an anti-Israeli country, the US will support Israel. Period. The idea that Bush's farcial, delusional commitment to "democracy" will get in the way of that is absurd. Not quite as absurd as what follows in this abortion of an op-ed:

The political sands, however, are shifting. Anti-Israeli sentiments are rife among Democrats - 59 percent want the U.S. to be more "evenhanded" in the Middle East - some of whom appear to be convinced that the Bush administration's deposition of Saddam Hussein was masterminded by "neo-conservatives" in Israel's interest.

Senator Joseph Lieberman's August 8 loss in the Connecticut primary, and the evident triumph of the Democrats' neo-McGovernite wing, signal trouble ahead.

Because Lamont's support for Israel has been even more vocal than Liberman's? That simply makes no sense. The Dems still support Israel, and will continue to. And you've got to love the not-so-sly implication of anti-semitism in seeing people who call themselves neo-cons as, well, neo-cons.

Finally, we get to the centre of this turd:

The radical Islamist belief that the West is a "weak horse" has, of course, also been reinforced by the continuing insurgency in Iraq and the rising peace movements in Europe and the United States, but Israel is on the front line. Any conclusion of the current conflict on terms that leave Hezbollah unbowed would further undercut the West's credibility, and would squander much of the deterrent effect of Israel's past military successes from 1948 to the present.

Ah yes, it's got it all: The "weak horse" idea, the polite formulation of the idea that "the Arabs only understand force"; the stab in the back lie about anti-war movements; and the idea that if Israel ends the war now, the IDF's credibility will be shot. The first two ideas aren't worth responding to.

And I've got some sad news for anyone who thinks the IDF's credibility can be rescued from this farce: It can't. The moment the IDF had to pull out from Bint Jbeil and regroup after fierce Hezbollah resistance, Hezbollah had seriously dented Israeli deterrence. When the Israeli government started calling for international help - something Israel has never done before - deterrence was dead, rotting, and starting to stink up the joint.

There was a much smarter column in Haaretz today, but that's for another post.

Doppelganger

So CS goes to Comicon in San Diego, where she lays eyes on one Bruce Timm - "The creator of contemporary cartoon classics, "Batman", "Batman Beyond", "Justice League", and "Justice League Unlimited"' - who apparently looks like me.

(Incidentally, now I'm apparently a bad boyfriend if I don't immediately promise to bring Vicki to Comicon next year. Thanks, CS.)

Anyway, I've cropped her picture and here it is - Bruce Timm, or the guy who looks kind of like me. (I don't see it.)

Exactly Right

August on why the more extreme anti-Lieberman factions need to tone down their rhetoric:

If you say he's "no longer part of the party," you are not correct. Lieberman remains a member of the Democratic Party. He will continue to be a member of the Democratic Party during the remaining course of his Senate term, and if he defeats Ned Lamont, he will likely stay a Democrat. But he has not "stopped being a Democrat."...

Party nominations are not the same thing as registered affiliation. Lieberman losing the Democratic primary means he can't run on the Democratic Party ticket. Party affiliation and nomination are not the same: in New York, for example, candidates can run as the nominees for multiple parties at the same time...

And frankly, I think it's better to continue saying Lieberman is a Democrat: he's a Democrat that failed to appreciate other Democrats, attacked other Democrats, and as a result, the Democrats in his home state chose a better Democrat to represent the Democrats in the election. The talking point shouldn't be Democrats kicked Joe out of their party; it should be that Joe decided he would rather be elected by Republicans. Saying Joe isn't a Democrat makes him look like a martyr. Saying Lamont was chosen as the better of two Democrats makes Lieberman look like a loser.

Emphasis mine.

"I guess not everybody knows how to respond when opportunity knocks their house down."

This just might be the most stinging satire I've seen come out of the Daily Show in a while.

(If it doesn't work for you, look for the Daily Show segment "Force Perspectives".)

Lieberman

I haven't been tempted to write much about the Connecticut Senate Primary, because a) I'm Canadian, and b) It's Connecticut, for chrissakes.

But it's worth mentioning that yes, Liberman deserved to lose. Not just because he ran a crappy, awful, really bad campaign. Not just because he supported the war. And not just because he thinks women in CT can just take a short drive after they've been raped, and are looking for emergency contraception.

Actually, "just" one of those reasons would be enough, on their own.

But the thing that struck me as most telling about Lieberman was a story I first read at Steve Gilliards (I think) from a soldier who served in Iraq, and was posted on the Lamont blog:

As some readers may have heard, in January my battalion was issued substandard equipment for our deployment to Afghanistan. Originally, we were issued M-16s rather than M-4 carbines, rifles with shorter barrels and collapsible butt stocks. As a politcally active member of the battalion, I began to get in touch with Representative DeLauro and Representative Simmons, who both responded quickly and enthusiastically. Senator Dodd also responded quickly and gave me prompts on how to further validate my request for weapons.

However, I did not receive a response from Senator Lieberman’s office. I continued to leave messages for both him and his military aide, now senior counselor, Fred Downey, who reprsented Sen. Lieberman at the Battalion’s send off ceremony on Jan. 4. After several messages, I finally received a return phone call. However, I was not met with the same enthusiams expressed by other legislators; I was immediately confronted with an inquisition that seemed to have the purpose of dispelling the belief that the battalion was ill equipped. Rather than listen to our specific concerns, the “benefits” of the M16 were highlighted and teh advantages of the M4 were downplayed.

Lieberman didn't just support the war. He drank the Kool-Aid, and has played a gleeful role in defending Bush and the Republicans for their mismanagement of the war. For that alone, he deserved a strong primary challenge.

Rather than try to justify his views and actions to the people of his state, Liberman responded with the most incompetent, petulant campaign I can think of. And he lost. Good riddance.

Yellow Stars

(Cross-posted at Ezra's.)

via Think Progress: 39% of Americans believe that Muslims should be force to keep special ID. 49% say that Muslim citizens aren't "loyal" to the United States.

Ick ick ick.

The only saving grace is this:

"In every case, Americans who actually know any Muslims are more sympathethic."

In other news, I watched V for Vendetta again last night.

Our Incredible Generosity

Here's an oldie but an important goodie: A New York Review of Books article about Israel's supposed "generous offer" to Arafat at Camp David in 2000, which (the story goes) Araft rejected because he hates Jews. Basically, the real story is that a) there was never any real offer, b) Ehud Barak tried hard to conceal any real bargaining position he might actually have, and c) due to a number of events leading up to the summit, Arafat was ill-inclined to trust either Clinton or Barak. This probably sums up the whole article nicely:

Had there been, in hindsight, a generous Israeli offer? Ask a member of the American team, and an honest answer might be that there was a moving target of ideas, fluctuating impressions of the deal the US could sell to the two sides, a work in progress that reacted (and therefore was vulnerable) to the pressures and persuasion of both. Ask Barak, and he might volunteer that there was no Israeli offer and, besides, Arafat rejected it. Ask Arafat, and the response you might hear is that there was no offer; besides, it was unacceptable; that said, it had better remain on the table.

One other thing worth noting - the Camp David summit in 2000 followed Barak's failed attempt to negotiate a settlement with Syria. This was an incredible insult to the Palestinian negotiators. Syria had made - and to this day, has made - exactly zero concessions to Israel, not even a pro forma recognition of Israel's right to exist. Yet Barak was out there trying to get on Assad's good side. Meanwhile, the Palestinians had made a number of key concessions to Israel, and we constantly treated like dirt.

All told, the whole article is a useful reminder of a basic rule of diplomacy: Nothing exists in a vacuum, and we don't get to dictate how our enemies see us.

I'm a student of history, too

Fred Kaplan has an interesting column on Condi's repeated assertions (something the President has echoed) that, "as a student of history", she takes in the big picture. Condi, y'see, isn't worried about details like "Iraq is having a Civil War, and we're invited" or "Lebanon is dying, with 1/4 of the population displaced." No, Condoleeza Rice, Phd, knows that the government is going to be judged by the Muses as they weave their tapestry and tell the heroic story of Bushcules and his mighty tasks.

Meanwhile, the American people are already passing judgment on Bush, and it don't look good.

The Left and Realism

Nicholas Gvosdev, who I've quoted occasionally on this blog, is also a sometimes commenter here. He is also the editor of the National Interest, a realist foreign policy journal. According to Wikipedia, the Honorary Chairman of The National Interest is Henry Kissinger.

So there's two degrees between me and Henry Kissinger, a state of affairs I find bizarre and unsettling, given my belief that Kissinger belongs in prison. But that's basically where the left is at these days - espousing, in many places, the views of old realists like Kissinger or Scowcroft.

(My favourite Kissinger line is still his remark about the Iran-Iraq war: "It's too bad there isn't a way they could both lose.")

So do I find myself now talking in a raspy baritone, negotiating the Paris peace treaty, and advocating the aerial destruction of Cambodia? Not really, because while I appreciate and use the realist viewpoint to criticize Republican foreign policy, my core beliefs are still informed by liberals.

Probably my most basic belief when it comes to matters of war and peace still comes from Norman Angell, who wrote in the opening years of the 20th century that anyone who thought that war could gain a victorious nation wealth and power was suffering from "The Grand Illusion." In the modern era, wars are so ruinously expensive - even for the victors - that they are fundamentally irrational.

While Angell was a liberal - actually, his career in some ways resembles that of Thomas Friedman - that simple fact is neither liberal nor realist, it simply is.

Now, I'm not a particularly rigorous academic (I got my diploma, leave me alone!) so I'm free to take liberties with theory and writings that a serious professor of International Relations never would. So I can believe that Angell is right, but nevertheless think that the realists, especially the neorealists (Ken Waltz, etc.) also have some fundamental insights that liberals can't ignore.

(One of the best papers I ever wrote for school used Dale Copeland's [neorealist] theory of war and applied it to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.)

Matt adds that there's a fundamental - and crucial - difference between liberalism and Bush's nominal advocacy for human rights:

Countries rarely if ever flout the international community in a self-conscious effort to promote injustice. Indeed, national leaders during the high tide of colonialism invariably cited humanitarian rationales for imperial conquest. Whether these politicians were fully sincere is hard to assess "since one can't probe the minds of dead leaders and people's psychological motives are usually mixed. Yet certainly their writings indicate that they believed themselves to be sincere." The relevant policy question is whether or not one is willing to accept meaningful constraints on American power. Inserting a "peace, freedom, or justice" exemption to the need to "stand with the international community" is just to say that one will not. [emphasis mine.]

That distinction - whether or not you accept that America's will should be limited - is crucial, and once again I would say it is neither liberal nor realist, it just is. Andrew Bacevich (in the pages of the National Interest!) once wrote that there was almost nobody in Washington who saw fault with the idea that America should run the world, forever. Republicans and Democrats alike both find this idea to be common-sense, if they think about it at all.

But the mark of real liberals (in the international relations sense of the word) is exactly the opposite - people willing to accept serious limitations on their power, as Matt says. And this is where liberalism and realism actually do come in to conflict, or at least they have in the past. Realists generally don't talk about nations self-limiting their power.

But in this day and age, where military victories are difficult-to-non-existent, maybe it's time to make the realist argument for multilateralism. After all, we see both the US and Israel regularly appealing to the UN, NATO, or even the Arab nations for help in Iraq or Lebanon. In this sense, organizations like the UN are "force multipliers" for maintaining order in the international arena.

The old liberal argument - as far back as the League of Nations - is that a preponderance of power (all nations acting in concert) will keep the peace better than the balance of power (a bunch of roughly-equal powers, for example Europe circa 1913.) I don't know what a realist reformulation of this would be, but I think we could use one.

Domestically, the debate seems to be that the Democrats need a "serious" foreign policy to resond to the Republicans. Apparently "the Iraq war was a fuckup from beginning to end" doesn't cut it. If there is a need for a new foreign policy, going back to Clintonism would be a good start. It would not, I fear, be enough in the long run. We need to start preparing the ground for American leaders - and American voters - to accept the fact that America will not run the world forever. And every disastrous, illegal war brings that day closer, not further.

Your Media, America

(Cross-posted at Ezra's, earlier today.)

Wall Street Journal:  Some people put anti-semitic comments on Kos' site, so obviously all bloggers are virulent, violent, anti-zionist anti-semites.

Washington Post:  Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is just ducky.

Okay, there's a bit in the WaPo piece about how un-"subtle" LGF is, but reading it you'd never guess at the open sewer that is the LGF comments.

Madness

(Cross-posted at Ezra's.)

Wow.  I knew Krauthammer had issues, but... damn.

About three years ago, I saw Krauthammer flip out in synagogue on Yom Kippur. The rabbi had offered some timid endorsement of peace -- peace essentially on Israel's terms -- but peace anyway. Krauthammer went nuts. He actually started bellowing at the rabbi, from his wheel chair in the aisle. People tried to "shush" him. It was, after all, the holiest day of the year. But Krauthammer kept howling until the rabbi apologized. The man is as arrogant as he is thuggish. Who screams at the rabbi at services? For advocating peace?

I'm hardly a religious person, but I've also been to Church enough times to hear things from the pulpit I disagreed with, even stuff I thought was offensive.  But heckling the holy like it was an episode of Jerry Springer?  That never occurred to me.

Complexity

Fred Clark has an excellent post on Nagasaki.

Defenders of the indefensible want to say that these were the only choices available. Thus, they say, any objection to this indiscriminate slaughter entails the acceptance of unacceptably massive loss of life for American forces.

Let's accept, for the sake of argument, that the choices really were this limited -- that these were the only possible ways to achieve Goal X. Does my refusal of Option 2 therefore mean I accept Option 1? No. It means that Goal X cannot be achieved by any acceptable means and therefore Goal X ought not to be pursued.

The complete and unconditional surrender of Japan was not morally, tactically, strategically, economically or politically necessary. It was not necessary for victory....

Or, to paraphrase from that earlier post: You may not both 1) intentionally target and incinerate 140,000 noncombatants and 2) not be a monster.

On a related note, I'm making slow progress through Frederick Taylor's Dresden, and let's just say it's complicated my feelings a great deal. Taylor points out that while Dresden gets a lot of the press, the earlier firebombing of Hamburg (with similar, if somewhat lesser results) in 1943 was just as important, if not more so. In the aftermath of Hamburg's destruction - and the 40,000 dead - the survivors were forced by the Nazis to sign secrecy oaths swearing not to share the details of that city's demise with other Germans. Albert Speer estimated that if the RAF had been able to repeat the "success" of Hamburg 6 times or more, German arms production would have collapsed.

This example leaves me confused. On the one hand - given the general mayhem and carnage of WWII - the idea of the Allies killing 300,000 civilian deaths and bringing the war to a close in 1943 instead of 1945 is tempting - it would almost certainly spare millions of lives, in a noxious form of calculus. On the other hand, it's also obvious that all things considered, WWII ended pretty well for the Allies as it was - or at least, as good as could be expected. A 1943 end to the war would be unlikely to bring American forces on to the Continent. The most likely outcome would be a still-existing Nazi Germany dominating Europe, or in the "best case" scenario a Soviet Empire that controlled even more of Europe than it did in the real world.

What's clear is that, after Hamburg, the RAF was trying to repeat Hamburg as many times as it could. For better or worse, it only succeeded once more at Dresden. By then (February 1945) it was too late to bring the war to an early close. The reason the RAF switched to attempted mass murder is quite simple: the results of more precise efforts were, quite simply, laughable. Less than 1 out of 5 bombs was making it to within 10 miles of the target area, for a number of reasons. Effectively, the switch to firebombing was an admission of failure, because the RAF couldn't strike at the Nazi war machinery directly.

Which brings us to Lebanon. Josh Marshall wrote today:

I've thought for a while, and considered posting on it, that for all the discussion of how targetted or not targetted Israel's attacks in Lebanon are, there's pretty little discussion of the fact that all of Hizbullah's rockets are intentionally aimed at civilian areas. Every one.

This is true, and deserves to be said - my criticisms of the policies of the IDF should in no way be taken for support for Hezbollah. However, we don't grade on a cruve when it comes to these things. Israel's attacks are no more acceptable in light of Hezbollah's than Dresden was in light of the London bombings during the Blitz. "He did it first" is not a mature statement of anything, much less a national security policy.

Moreover, the question of intent really does cut both ways. Hezbollah's ability to hit Israeli citizens lies mainly with WWII-vintage Katyusha rockets, which have short range and basically no accuracy. So while Hezbollah is obviously hoping to kill Israeli civilians, they basically have just that - hope, and possibly prayer. The Katyusha makes up for a bit of this with large numbers, but essentially Hezbollah has to rely on luck.

Israel, meanwhile, is armed with laser- and satellite-guided bombs and missiles, capable of accuracy that Hezbollah would (literally) kill for. And how has the IDF used this potential accuracy? Multiple strikes in heavily built-up civilian areas such as Beirut, as well as legitimate Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. One of these methods is a legitimate prosecution of war, the other isn't. Attacks on urban civilian areas are not only politically self-defeating for Israel, they simply carry too high a risk of unacceptably high civilian casualties - a theory that the wars of the last decade have made in to fact.

Or, to put it simply: Hezbollah only manages to kill an Israeli civilian when it gets lucky. The IDF only manages to not kill Lebanese civilians when they get lucky.

Does that meet Fred's test above? I don't think so. If Israel could have achieved its aims without attacking civilian targets all over Lebanon - something I think is obviously the case - then Israel had every moral reason to do so, regardless of Hezbollah's provocations.

Prudhoe Bay shutdown

So apparently severe corrosion has shutdown the pipelines leading from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

This would be a moderate-to-big deal in the best of times, and if you hadn't noticed, these aren't the best of times for oil prices. Oddly, prices haven't moved that much.

The reason seems to be that the US west coast has adequately stocked up on crude supplies, so this (hopefully) brief interruption shouldn't do too much damage.

Now, just pray we don't get a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico...

Knackered

That's me. I don't own a car, so it's a pretty big deal for me to spend hours and hours driving. In the last five days, I've probably driven more than I've driven in the last five months.

Add a few early mornings in there and I'm pretty beat. Probably light posting today, maybe tomorrow.

All that said, I discovered this weekend that taking Highway 7 all the way back to Toronto from Ottawa is a very pleasant drive. The added length (and gasoline consumption) is more than made up for by the pleasant scenery. Just in case anybody here is planning on making the trip.

Radio Silence

The long weekend is here, and I'm off to go see family. I'll be away from any computers for the majority of the time, so don't expect anything here until Monday night or so.

Have a lovely John Simcoe day, and remember - some countries don't need a civil war to abolish slavery.

McCain, really?

Ezra says that he and Bill Clinton think that John McCain is "unbeatable" in the general election of 2008, if he survives the GOP primary. But in neither of his posts (here and here) does he explain why. A lot of people are jumping in arguing why Ezra is either brilliant and perceptive or retarded and slow, but I'd like to see what aspects of John McCain, 2008, make him more electorally acceptable than John McCain, 2000.

One thing is certain: McCain is running for President, and he's doing it far more conventionally than in 2000 - kissing fundamentalist ass all the way. But two other things are certain, as well:

1) McCain is, if possible, even more pro-war than someone like Lieberman.

2) The war in Iraq is going to get worse by 2008, if it hasn't already drawn to it's bloody conclusion.

These things may not outweigh the advantage McCain has by being the press darling, but the press is a fickle beast, too. As Rob points out, in early 1992 Bush Sr. was considered invincible. A nasty recession later, and poof.

I would think that McCain, in order to run successfully, needs to at the very least run as an anti-Bush Republican in a party of Bush Republicans. I can't see how this plan has even odds, much less is "unbeatable".

But like I said, I'd love to see Ezra's specific reasons for why McCain is da man.

Ukraine

So Yanukovych is back.

Good for Yuschenko, though. It's worth keeping in mind that even when democracies choose people we distrust, it's in our interest to work with them rather than immediately start painting this as a "failure" for western policies.

It is kind of funny to see both Lebanon and Ukraine turn out a lot more complicated than Bush probably thought they would, at the same time.

My Fantasy

So the Bush Administration's response to the Supreme Court is out, and it's basically what you'd expect: Having been told they need to obey the law, the Bush Administration is changing the law, and making it much, much worse.

Now, I'm not proud of this, but I sometimes think the perfect revenge on the Bush Administration would be, once they're out of office, to detain Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush and subject them to the Kafkaesque mockery of justice they've constructed for the rest of us.

Just a dream I have, sometimes.

Follow-up

The guys at RealClimate have a post about the Amazonian drought issue. Go check it out.

(Thanks Gar!)

First Rubin, now these jokers

My disdain for these people actually manages to get larger. First, Pat Robertson is now, in his words, "a convert" on the issue of climate change. Secondly, even Thomas Friedman is now sayinf withdrawal from Iraq is an option.

Nevertheless, I expect Robertson so campaign against the Democrats in 06 and 08, and Friedman will write columns about how the anti-war people were never, ever right.

You have to live with these people

Tom Segev, in Haaretz:

During the past 39 years since the Six-Day War, the United States did not force Israel to pull out of the West Bank, but more than once acted to block Israeli military actions. Over time, we have grown accustomed to the Americans saving us, not only from the Arabs, but from ourselves too. Not in this war. It is still unclear whether this war was coordinated with the United States; only the release of government records of the past three weeks will shed light on this. Whatever the case may be, the impression is that the Americans are linking the events in Lebanon to their failing adventure in Iraq....

It is hard to avoid the impression that the routine brutality of oppression in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is also reflected in the unbearable ease with which Israel has forced out of their homes hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and bombed civilians. No less than three weeks have passed, and only now is Rice beginning to make noises suggesting that enough is enough.

If Europe had some say in the region, Israel may have started negotiations with Hezbollah on the release of the soldiers it abducted - and hopefully, it still will do so - instead of getting mixed up in war. For some years now, more Middle East-related wisdom emanates from Europe than from the United States. It wasn't Europe but the United States that invented the diplomatic fable called the road map; it wasn't Europe but the United States that encouraged unilateral disengagement and is allowing Israel to continue oppressing the population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The United States is not engaged with Syria; Europe is. Syria is relevant not only for settling the situation in Lebanon, but also in managing relations with the Palestinians. This is the real problem. Because, even if the United States conquers Tehran, we will still have to live with the Palestinians. In Europe, they already understand this.

We've had enough of the juvenile fantasy that the "bad guys" can be defeated forever and we'll all live happily ever after. Eventually, you have to make peace with these people, even if you still hate them.

I wonder if this is the fundamental difference between Europe and the United States. America has, through military victories, usually destroyed its enemies outright, or so humiliiatingly defeated its enemies that future conflicts have been unthinkable. In Europe, those kinds of victories simply haven't existed. France was never able to destroy Germany, nor vice versa. Russia was never able to crush Finland, for that matter. Finally, after centuries of trying, Europeans have realizes that you can't destroy the enemy - you have to learn to live with them.

Because of their undoubted military prowess, neither Israel not the US have learned that lesson, and it shows in everything they do. Whether it's refusing to talk to the Kim regime in North Korea, or repeatedly smashing the Palestinian leadership into impotence, there's a hostility to the very idea of negotiating, as if it were beneath them.

It should go without saying that this is a very, very dangerous viewpoint for superpwers to hold.

Bad News for Georgie

Go ahead, slap around the Canadian lumber industry. There isn't going to be any fallout. Certainly, nothing like a major financial firm talking about energy export duties to the US.

Oops.

(Via Greg.)

The Widening Gyre

I'm usually in sync with Billmon, but I think he's, well, I think he needs a hug:

People tell me I shouldn't get hung up on this because, you know, if the Dems get in they'll make sure the seniors get their Social Security checks a little faster -- or they'll keep the Supreme Court out of the hands of legal madmen or do something about global climate change or save the whales or whatever else it is that's supposed to make the Democratic Party infinitely preferable to the Republicans.

It's not that I discount these differences entirely -- although they're easily oversold. But compared to the fate that awaits the republic, and the world, if the United States deliberately starts a war with Iran, those other considerations start to look pretty insignificant. I mean, we're talking about World War III here, fought by people who want to use tactical nuclear weapons. I'm supposed to put that out of my mind because the Dems might be a little bit more generous about funding the VA budget??? I'm sorry, but that's fucking nuts....

But I think we've run out of time. Events -- from 9/11 on -- have moved too fast and pushed us too far towards the clash of civilizations that most sane people dread but the neocons desperately want. The Dems are now just the cadet branch of the War Party. While the party nomenklatura is finally, after three blood years, making dovish noises about the Iraq fiasco, I think their loyalty to Israel will almost certainly snap them back into line during the coming "debate" over war with Iran.

Billmon's whole post is about the likely fallout from the impending US withdrawal from Iraq. Predictably, the likely results are grim, with the chance of Iran basically having free reign from the Persian shores of the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. That, of course, is what happens when you knock out the Sunni linchpin in the area.

By the 2008 elections, the question of Iraq policy could very well be which party - Republican or Democrat - will dig up Saddam's body and put it back in power soonest.

Anyway, the wider point Billmon is making is about the US government's bipartisan hawkery when it comes to Israel. Even Dean - during the primaries in 2004 - was happy to support Israel's attacks on Syria. (Remember that? Good times!) In short, with the US relationship with Israel looking more and more like the German relationship with Austria-Hungary, there's more than enough reason to be worried.

Do I, therefore, share Billmon's cynicism? Not really. The Democrats and Republicans make a good show of suporting Israel - and they're happy to sell the weapons, so long as Israel does the heavy lifting - but even I can't imagine the US actually getting out of Iraq only to go right back in to Lebanon/Syria/Iran/Whereveristan.

Billmon seems to think it will be an easy sell to convince the American people that Israel's interests are America's, and I'm not so sure. Not without a lot of groundwork, anyway. Iraq worked, in part, because the American people had been exposed to more than a decade of propaganda about how Saddam was the next Hitler. Most people still can't say the names Nasralllah or Ahemdinejad, much less figure out why exactly they need to be destroyed.

Now, before I get too far out on a limb, I should reiterate my belief that, so long as Bush is in power, you'll never lose a lot of money gambling on the evil of the White House. But it's possible that, with control of at least one of the houses of Congress going to the Dems in the fall, the Americans can restore a bit of justice (if not sanity) to their politics come November.

It's not a lot of hope, but it really is all we have, isn't it?

Waaaaaaaah

Bill O'Reilly, on Gibson being a vicious anti-semite and holocaust denier:

Nobody can make an excuse for what he did. It's inexcusable, OK? No excuses made. That point is on the record.

But there comes a point where the media and individual Americans start to enjoy the suffering of rich and powerful people.

Yes. That's obviously the worst aspect of this whole event. That the American people might start enjoying the suffering of the rich and powerful.

Where was Bill when Ken Lay died?

Well, now I don't have to read that

Rob at LGM reviews Niall Feguson's book, Colossus. My impression, from the reviews I'd read, was that it was basically one giant teary lament for the days when we could go around the world machine-gunning the darkies into submission. Apparently, I wasn't too far off.

Tesla Motors has a blog

...and they're sharing the secret plan for world domination.

So, in short, the master plan is:

Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options.

The whole thing is a good rundown on the advantages of electric cars in general, and the Tesla Roadster in particular.

Who'd a thunk?

In an event that would have been unthinkable a few months ago, in this country where politics is locked into religious lines, the Maronite Catholic patriarch the spiritual leader of the most pro-Western populace convened a meeting this week of religious leaders of other communities, Shiite and Sunni Muslims and several varieties of Christians, resulting in a statement of solidarity and photographs in Wednesdays newspapers. Their joint statement, condemning the Israeli aggression, hailed the resistance, mainly led by Hezbollah, which represents one of the sections of society.

Gee. That was entirely unpredictable, wasn't it?

Because as we all know, Israelis have abandoned their government in response to Hezbollah rocket attacks, and American abandoned Bush after 9/11. You see, everything pointed exactly towards the Lebanese population abandoning Hezbollah in response to foreign aggression.

How could it have gone wrong?

Alaska is melting

Look away, nothing to see, go about your business:

The glaciers of Southeast Alaska are shrinking twice as quickly as scientists had previously estimated, according to a new study.

The findings from Fairbanks and Juneau glaciologists are slated for publication in a leading scientific journal.

During a 52-year period, the Panhandle lost ice in 95 percent of its glacier-covered areas, said Roman Motyka, of Juneau, one of the study's co-authors.

Once again

Alan Greenspan: Lying Republican Hack.

Because of people treating Greenspan like he was a serious central banker - rather than the foot-soldier in Bush army that he was - a lot of people are going to go through a lot of misery.

But then, he is a Republican.

Hot Rocks

This has showed up in a whole bunch of places, but most recently I saw it at Gristmill. The MIT Technology Review has an interview with one Jefferson Tester, who says that we could have unlimited geothermal power, anywhere, thanks to innovations in deep drilling brought about by the oil industry in the last 20 years.

I'm pretty wary of proposals like this (largely because in previous designs, geothermal plants built outside on natural upwelling sources tend to be net energy losers) but let a thousand flowers bloom, etc.

Anyway, if he's right, the scale of energy available to us is simply enormous:

The figure for the whole world is on the order of 100 million exojoules or quads [a quad is one quadrillion BTUs]. This is the part that would be useable. We now use worldwide just over 400 exojoules per year. So you do the math, and you know you've got a very big source of energy.


How much of that massive resource base could we usefully extract? Imagine that only a fraction of a percent comes out. It's still big. A tenth of a percent is 100,000 quads. You have access to a tremendous amount of stored energy. And assessment studies have shown that this is thousands of times in excess of the amount of energy we consume per-year in the country. The trick is to get it out of the ground economically and efficiently and to do it in an environmentally sustainable manner. That's what a lot of the field efforts have focused on.

No word anywhere on what the projected costs would be, but I can't help but think these plants would have some of the cost characteristics of a nuclear plant - high initial investment, lower operating costs. This might mean the best way to build these plants would be with public financing (again, assuming it works at all.)

Still doesn't help us with liquid fuels, though.

UPDATE: Well, looking through this PDF I'm seeing a few problems. (Note, the PDF is from 1994 and may not reflect Tester's more recent work.) The biggie is that the plant life Tester cites is only 20 years, which is a pretty short life span for a major investment like that. Secondly, the price per kwh is pretty high, even by today's standards. Thirdly, the vast majority of the "energy" released by this plant is heat, which the document assumes would be sold on to a district heating grid. The problem is that most of the world isn't Denmark, and doesn't have a well-developed cogeneration grid.

But that first problem - the 20 year lifespan - seems really problematic to me. Another article by Tester (here, PDF) states that "Typically, within a period of time less than 10 times the production period, essentially complete recovery of original temperatures will occur." So a 20-year lifespan would mean the rock the plant was drawing heat from would take "less than" 200 years to warm back up again, before we could use the area again for generation.

Maybe people will be willing to finance this kind of investment, but I'm not sure I buy it. The lifespan is short (for a generating station) and the costs are still high. If the lifespan issue weren't an issue of physics, maybe I could see a work-around, but until then color me unimpressed.

This is getting old

July 31, 2006 - Perhaps the most truthful moment about Iraq came recently when a U.S. official said nothing at all. This occurred when Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker was asked at a Capitol Hill luncheon in mid-July whether the United States was “winning” in Iraq. Several agonizing seconds passed before a grimacing Schoomaker finally replied: “I don’t think we’re losing.” One of the most eloquent pauses in recent memory, it gave voice to the U.S. military's most deep-seated fears not only about Iraq, but about America’s entire strategic position in the Mideast.

The general’s honesty has not made Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld happy, military officials tell NEWSWEEK. The temperamental Rumsfeld erupted at Schoomaker after the general revealed the Army’s lack of readiness in painful detail to the House Armed Services Committee.

Yes. How dare the General inform the elected members of Congress as to the state of the nation's armed forces.

Obviously, Gen. Schoomaker hates America.

The Army’s budgetary squeeze raises questions about whether the United States can “stay the course” in Iraq even if it wants to. While the world has focused on Lebanon, Iraq has been sliding downhill fast. U.S. officials battling the counterinsurgency who were positive six months ago are now far more skeptical that the center can hold....

One U.S. Army officer who is working on police and military training in Iraq, when asked about the prospect of a collapse of the Maliki government, responded in an email: “There's a Maliki government? Since when?” He went on: “Ultimately, I think the deterioration of the Baghdad security situation gives the lie to the U.S. effort. We've stood up X Iraqi army battalions and Y Iraqi police stations, and yet, Baghdad (and much of the contested provinces like Diyala and Anbar) continues to get worse.”

You know it's bad when the notional (yup) government of Iraq is literally a joke to the soldiers. Then, Michael Hirsch brings it all home:

“How do you send the message of strength as Ronald Reagan sent it, that we don't allow these things--you inflict damage. We didn't do anything after the [attack on the] USS Cole. There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts--and bombing some caves is not something that counts.” Behind this lay the view that Arabs respond to force. Some Bush officials also liked to quote Osama bin Laden himself when he said, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like a strong horse."


For Bush and Rumsfeld, the key to a successful anti-terror policy lay in being seen as the “strong horse.” ...

Now Rumsfeld and Bush, by pre-emptively launching a war, have undercut that lesson. Until recent events, the American and Israeli armies were generally judged the most advanced in the world. In the Arab world they were seen as all but invulnerable. Today the failures of those armies against Islamist guerrillas in Iraq and Lebanon have conveyed the very opposite of the message Bush wanted to send. If the current situation continues, with America bogged down in Iraq and Israel mired in its fight against Hizbullah, then the presumption of U.S-Israeli military invincibility--which has kept Arab extremists in place for decades--will be exposed as a myth. That could embolden Islamist radicals for a long time to come. Unless he is prepared to spend a lot more on his military, defense analysts say, the president who so badly wanted to project strength will be remembered mainly for projecting weakness.

Obviously, I agree.

Ignatieff on Lebanon

I suppose it's glad he came out and said something, but this isn't going to help his campaign:

Ignatieff said it would have been too early to push for a ceasefire last week because "it was very important for Israel to send Hezbollah a very clear message" that kidnapping soldiers and firing rockets on Israel will not be tolerated.

"A ceasefire on the Israeli side becomes logical for Israel when it has achieved its military objectives and when it reaches the point of diminishing returns, and that is the point we've reached now," he explained.

Frankly, if I were Ignatieff, I'd be trying my hardest to differentiate myself from George W. Bush's foreign policies at this point. Ignatieff has, fairly or not, got a huge problem on his hands when it comes to his association with Bush's wars.

That Ignatieff apparently started thinking it was time for a cease-fire at exactly the same moment that Condoleeza Rice did is going to be difficult to explain.

TILMA

TILMA will effectively erase the border between B.C. and Alberta and, when it comes into effect next spring, will be what some economists call the most important free trade agreement in Canada since NAFTA. It's a major breakthrough in a problem that has plagued Canada since Confederation -- interprovincial trade barriers. While difficult to quantify, by some estimates these trade barriers cost Canada about one per cent of its GDP, or $11 billion, a year....

Interesting article. Hopefully, this will start the ball rolling in other Provinces.

The Onion: Hillariously Accurate

Bush Grants Self Permission To Grant More Power To Self - August 1, 2006

WASHINGTON, DC—In a decisive 1–0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers.

President Bush announces announcement of the new power-granting announcement.
"As president, I strongly believe that my first duty as president is to support and serve the president," Bush said during a televised address from the East Room of the White House shortly after signing his executive order. "I promise the American people that I will not abuse this new power, unless it becomes necessary to grant myself the power to do so at a later time."

The Presidential Empowerment Act, which the president hand-drafted on his own Oval Office stationery and promptly signed into law, provides Bush with full authority to permit himself to authorize increased jurisdiction over the three branches of the federal government, provided that the president considers it in his best interest to do so....

Though public response to the new law has been limited, there has been an unfavorable reaction among Democrats, who are calling for restrictions on Bush's power to allow himself to grant the president more powers that would restrict the powers of Congress.

"This is a clear case of President Bush having carte blanche to grant himself complete discretion to enact laws to increase his power," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said. "The only thing we can do now is withhold our ability to grant him more authority to grant himself more power."

"Unless he authorizes himself to strip us of that power," Reid added.

He just Rubins me the wrong way

I'm not sure what to make about this: via Ezra, Robert Rubin has recently had a bit of a Road-to-Damascus conversion when it comes to globalization:

it's a big deal when Robert Rubin changes the subject and begins to talk about income inequality as "a deeply troubling fact of American economic life" that threatens the trading system, even the stability of "capitalist, democratic society." More startling, Rubin now freely acknowledges what the American establishment for many years denied or dismissed as inconsequential--globalization's role in generating the thirty-year stagnation of US wages, squeezing middle-class families and below, while directing income growth mainly to the upper brackets. A lot of Americans already knew this. Critics of "free trade" have been saying as much for years. But when Bob Rubin says it, his words can move politicians, if not financial markets.

This post can be considered another in the long line of "The left is always right about everything, always" series. Rubin was, as much as anyone, at the helm of American capitalism during the 1990s, and his policies and the rhetoric of Democratic centrists flat-out mocked and belittled the people - like Greider - who criticized the American government's abandoning of the working class to the vicissitudes of the global market.

The left spend the decade of the 1990s trying to get anyone, anywhere, to listen to sweet reason when it came to the problems with globalization. In Seattle, 1999, the press and politicians finally started listening, even if they still assumed we were all stuid/crazy. But now that the worst of the pro-globalization cheerleaders - Rubin, Krugman, and others - are finally coming around, you'll pardon me if I'm not ready to make nice. The 1990s were a lost decade for the global poor, who had already had two lost decades before that. We'll be entering the fourth lost decade for Africa soon, and only now are the Rubins of the world admitting that something is rotten in Washington.

My reaction to Rubin is basically my reaction to the Generals who called for Rumsfeld's resignation a while back - "What were you doing when you could have stopped this mess?" It would have been nice if they'd come around when they were actually in power. I assume Rubin's conversion will have just as lasting an effect as those Generals, as well.

Rather than listen to the people who are only now coming around to the facts, why don't we shun Rubin like he deserves, and instead go to the people who were right all along?

Even the Conservative Wall Street Journal

The opinion page of the Wall Street Journal agrees: Israel is losing the war. But here's the scary part:

Yes, Hezbollah bears ultimate responsibility here for deliberately placing its military assets among civilians. Yet the death of those children should be counted as a crime if Israel’s purposes in Lebanon are basically feckless. A line being bandied about in Israeli security circles is that the purpose of the bombing is to show Hezbollah that “the boss-man has gone berserk.” What kind of goal is that?

Hmm. That sounds familiar...

In his first few years as president, Richard Nixon tried to force North Vietnam's leaders to the peace table by persuading them that he was a madman who would do anything to win the war. His first step, in October 1969, was to ratchet up the alert levels of U.S. strategic nuclear forces as a way of jarring the Soviet Union into pressuring the North Vietnamese to back down. A few years later, he stepped up the bombing of the North and put out the word that he might use nukes.

Oh good. So Olmert and the leadership of the IDF have adopted the brilliant strategies of Richard Nixon. Thank Yahweh that Israel has a much easier time removing it's leaders.

Of course, Nixon ended his squat in office having gone so berserk (operationalizing his theory, you could say) that the Secretary of Defense gave orders to the combat commanders of all US forces that no order from the President was to be carried out without confirmation. Meanwhile, at the end of the day the entire charade was a failure:

In neither case did this ploy have any effect whatsoever.

This should be obvious by now: You can't out-crazy nationalist insurgents. When you think about it, nationalism is a pretty crazy idea, especially if you're willing to kill people over it. (Read Dr. Seuss' "The Butter Battle Book" for more.) The idea of out-crazying Hezbollah, who've already demonstrated the willingness to use suicide bombers against the US Marine Corps, should be ridiculous too. But this is what's passing for strategy in Jerusalem these days.

On a related note, the reaction of the conservative bloggers to all this has really clarified how willing they are to justify and celebrate the worst aspects of humanity. Even when the IDF is trying (I give them the benefit of the doubt) not to be needlessly cruel, the right is laughing at the deaths of UN observers, and cheering on the horrific accident at Qana*. To paraphrase John Galbraith: The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for sadism.

(*I certainly don't pretend to have perfect knowledge of what's going on on the other side of the world, so for now I'm trying to practice what I preach - to see my opponents as fallible humans, not cruel monsters. So untl I hear substantial proof otherwise, Qana remains a horrific mistake, and the deaths of the UN observers as well.

All that said, the benefit of the doubt does not extend to the people who escalated this conflict to the current level.)

Recycled Energy

Saw this guys speak last night at Toronto City Hall, and it was fantastic. I'll have more to say later, but for now read Tyler Hamilton's piece in the Toronto Star today.

There's some real potential here.

Terrified, terrifying

This Vanity Fair article on the reactions of the Air Force on 9/11 is excellent, terrifying, and nicely conveys the horror of that day. Just in case you were bored.

Terrifying

Sidney Blumenthal:

As explained to me by several senior state department officials, Rice is entranced by a new "domino theory": Israel's attacks will demolish Hizbullah; the Lebanese will blame Hizbullah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, this is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq. "We will prevail," Rice says.

If this is what people in Washington actually believe, then the US is screwed. That simple.

Because they don't believe in it

Rob at LGM:

What is it about "hawkish" pundits that they can't understand nationalism?

Rob is talking about hawks generally, and especially the "Empire" crowd that sprung up around Niall Ferguson and assorted other public intellectuals. Basically, the existence of modern nationalism makes imperial wars much, much more difficult than they were in the bad old days of the 18th and 19th centuries. Rob again:

While the French were able to control all of Indochina in the late 19th century with a relatively small number of troops, the United States couldn't pacify half of Vietnam with a huge investment of military force in the 1960s.

Add in the spread of small weapons across the globe, and you've got a recipe for multiple disasters.

But why don't imperialists understand nationalism? It's pretty simple - the difference between a universalist ideology and a localist one. Imperialists, by definition, need to believe that the world would be better off if they ran everything. It follows, therefore, that everyone would recognize they would be better off, and sign up.

It also follows, that anyone who would choose not to be part of this grand project, or set themselves in direct opposition to it, must simply want to add to the sum of human misery. They must be either mentally ill or simply evil. So if Syria and Iran don't want to take orders from Washington, their motives are clear - they want to destroy Israel, right? And if Hugo Chavez starts supporting governments that, like him, remember the non-stellar history of American actions in South America, well he must be a Communist.

Because I don't believe in the Democratic Peace Theory, I started assuming a while ago that American policymakers would regard a Democratic China as just as much of a threat at the current version, because a Democratic, nationalist China will disagree with Washington on many (if not all) of the same important issues as the current one does. This is all part and parcel of that belief: American leaders - the ones who think America will rule the world forever - have a hard time imagining what someone else's idea of the just world would look like. That's understandable, I suppose, but the fact that other people will have other ideas isn't.

What's more problematic is that a lot of the people who advocate imperialism abroad seem to frame domestic politics in the same way: Opposition is simply illegitimate, and needs to be destroyed. See Lieberman, Joe, plus the entire Republican party.

Exactly Right

Nehemia Shtrasler, in Haaretz:

There was one moment during the war when we had the upper hand. It was the moment when Israel had succeeded in striking Hezbollah with strong and surprising force, Haifa was peaceful and the number of casualties was small. That was the right moment to stop the war, declare victory and move on to the diplomatic track.

This opportunity came when the G-8 convened on July 14, two days after the fighting broke out....

But Olmert and Amir Peretz did not know when to quit. They wanted to show the public that they, the "civilians," were more courageous than their predecessors, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. That is why they continued the war in order to attain goals that from the outset were unattainable.

The fact that the Israeli press has, if anything, been just as critical of the IDF and Ehud Olmert reminds me of my favourite rebuttal of the "anti-Likud=anti-semite" charge, from a Jewish author whose name I forget: "If being against the Likud party is all it takes to be an anti-semite, then Israel is the most anti-semitic country on Earth."

The Sorkin Doctrine

A month ago - which in blogoland is close to forever - Ezra Klein wrote a column about how good it was that the West Wing was over. Notwithstanding Sorkin et al's problems in actually calling Republicans evil, I think there are a few things that are worth gleaning from the works of Aaron Sorkin.

Start with the 1995 film The American President. One of the oft-repeated phrases in the film comes from the Chief of Staff, played by future President Martin Sheen: "We fight the fights we can win."

The phrase was used exclusively to refer to domestic politics in the film, but it's nonetheless a simple statement of when to use military force if you ever needed one. Don't commit the American military unless you're victory is assured. Commit the necessary resources for victory, because if you don't defeat is likely. Don't go starting fights - or threatening to - unless you can back up your words with muscle. A simple realist statement of international power.

(Later in the movie, the axiom is ammended to "We fight the fights that need fighting!". God knows what the Reublicans would make of that, but it does emphasize that there are national interests that even superpowers can't negotiate on.)

In an early episode of the West Wing (Sorkin's other work) an American military aircraft is shot down by Syria, and the President wants blood. He mocks the idea of a proportional response at first, saying:

Bartlet: I ask again, what is the virtue of the Proportional Response?

Admiral Fitzwallace: It isn't virtuous, Mr. President. It's all there is, sir.

Bartlet: It's not all there is.

Admiral Fitzwallace: Just what else is there?

Bartlet: The disproportional response. Let the word ring forth, from this time and this place, gentlemen, you kill an American, any American, we don't come back with a proportional response. We come back with total disaster!

You can hear Richard Cohen, can't you?

Of course, the debate doesn't end there. The military doesn't want to start bombing Damascus any more than the rest of the West Wing, and the President gets in to a loud argument with his chief of staff:

Bartlet: I'm talking about two hundred and eighty-six American marines in Beirut, I'm talking about Somalia, I'm talking about Nairobi-

Leo: And you think ratcheting up the body count's gonna act as a deterrent?

Bartlet: You're damn right I-

Leo: Oh, then you are just as stupid as these guys who think capital punishment is going to be a deterrant for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day to day lives under the possibility of execution, and their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process. So, my friend, if you want to start using American military strength as the arm of the Lord, you can do that. We're the only superpower left. You can conquer the world, like Charlemagne! But you better be prepared to kill everyone. And you better start with me, because I will raise up an army against you and I will beat you!

The President, chastened, eventually accepts the "proportional response" even though it's horrible.

The lessons for the use of military power are obvious. America has to accept a huge limitation on its power - nuking Damascus over an attack, no matter how personally offensive it is to the President, isn't an option. Israel - if it were being governed rationally at the moment - would need to accept similar limitations. The kidnapping of two soldiers is not, not, not an excuse to start bombing Beirut, as much as Israel would wish it to be. The occasional rocket attack on Galilee - yes, even if it kills people - needs to be weighed against the deaths that are caused by overreaction.

So: Fight the fights you can win, and accept proportionality in military affairs. It's not great - in fact, it sucks - but it's all there is. The Sorkin Doctrine.

Re-learning these lessons over and over is getting tiresome. Maybe dressing them up with TV shows and movies will help.

Wow.

I missed this a few days ago - amidst their recent elections, the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo miss the stability of Mobutu Sese Seko.

Even if you don't agree with all of the text of Hobbes' Leviathan, there is a simple truth there: the state - even an oppressive one, despite all of its problems - is immensely preferable to the alternative.

"Tonight, you will taste man-flesh!"

So a while ago, Jon Podhoretz opined that it was really too bad that western democracies had gotten so serious about human rights and such (is he serious?) because it prevents us from waging victorious wars in the style of the Uruk-hai, apparently.

And as for the United States, what if we have every tool at our disposal to win a war - every weapons system we could want manned by the most superbly trained military in history - except the ability to match or exceed our antagonists in ruthlessness?

Is this the horrifying paradox of 21st century warfare? If Israel and the United States cannot be defeated militarily in any conventional sense, have our foes discovered a new way to win? Are they seeking victory through demoralization alone - by daring us to match them in barbarity and knowing we will fail?

Funny, I think the most interesting thing about Hezbollah's tactics has been how "western" they are. A standing army, dug in to heavily defended positions, using rockets to strike at civilian targets. Very western indeed, albeit in a mid-20th century kind of way.

Later, at the Corner, he clarifies his remarks:

Right now, Israel has decided to halt its war because of an airstrike that caused 60-plus civilian casualties. The fundamental question I was posing is this: What if only a civilization willing to commit them ["monstrous tactics"] can successfully extirpate a conscienceless menace like Islamic extremist terror?

This is not a rhetorical question. I don't know the answer. I don't even know if this is the right question. But we are back, it seems, at the point at which Herman Kahn wrote Thinking About the Unthinkable. Even the act of trying to think through the nature of the struggle we're facing is itself deemed criminal.

Now, I think I've asked similar questions before, but there's something that I don't think anyone else has mentioned yet: If America, Israel, or anyone else finds the humanitarian cost of their illegal, unjust wars too high a price to pay, this is a very, very good thing. Maybe, just maybe, we should stop having illegal, unjust wars.

Of course, if you're a conservative, is just means we should stop caring about humanitarian costs. Typical.

You knew it was coming

Richard Cohen, who's already called anyone who's looking for Israel to be proportionate an anti-semite, just goes and jumps the shark:

Before Gibson there was Kofi Annan. I do not accuse the United Nations secretary general of anti-Semitism -- a slam-dunk in Gibson's case -- but here again there is a rush to judgment, an impatience, an anger and a general vexation that, at best, is worrisome. When an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed four U.N. observers last week, Annan was quick to say Israel had done so deliberately. Why Israel would do such a thing -- what's the benefit to it? -- went unexplained or even, it seemed, unconsidered. Annan, who later said he would await an Israeli report on the incident, was having a mini-Mel Gibson moment.

Yes, because the fact that the IDF had been told - repeatedly - that it was shelling a UN compound, and did so anyway, obviously shows that Annan was being unreasonable in assuming it was deliberate.

(Note that Gibson is not just an anti-semite, but a holocaust denier as well. So Cohen, by extension, has just called anyone who opposes Israel an anti-semite and a holocaust denier. But don't forget - it was Stephen Colbert who was rude to the President!)

And this is a funny argument:

The world has a responsibility here. If it can no longer put up with Israeli excess, with its (understandable) policy to strike back disproportionately, then it has to put an end to the slow bleeding of that country. The world -- the United Nations -- created Israel. It ought to safeguard it. It is the only way.

First off, the "world" had relatively little to do with the creation of Israel. British imperialism and anti-semitism incubated Israel, and then the Israelis-to-be carved Mandate Palestine in to their own state. Whether you think that was a good thing or not, "the World" had very little to do with it.

But let's humour Cohen for a moment. If the world created Israel, wouldn't the onus then be on Israel to obey international law - more so than other countries? Shouldn't Israel abandon all of the Occupied Territories, for a start? Shouldn't Israel obey the dictates of the World Court regarding its security barrier? Shouldn't Israel obey repeated Security Council resolutions?

In all this crap, there is one interesting point that Cohen makes, and I agree with:

War is a nasty thing, and in this war Israel has most of the firepower. Having most of the firepower means that it can do most of the damage. The consequences can be horrendous and almost unbearable to see on television. What's more, Israel has an almost mythical reputation for military prowess, a supposedly magical ability for battlefield precision, so it's all the harder to accept the fact that it, too, can make awful mistakes. The United States, after all, has done similar things in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is actually a good and important point, one that too many people are avoiding. It is quite possible that, compared to what the US is doing in Iraq, Israel is being proportional and humane. And yet the Lebanese victims of war are getting more air time than the Iraqis ever have.

I confess to being surprised that even CNN has spent a lot of time dealing with the victims of this war - the same network that questioned whether dismembered Iraqi children understood that it was all for a good cause, didn't they see that?

At the risk of repeating myself - the point is not that Israel is being needlessly cruel. In war, trying to put cruelty on a spectrum is a dodgy game at best. The point is that all wars - defensive, pre-emptive, whatever - are by definition cruel, and we have spent way, way too long pretending that our bombs don't create victims.