Soporific

So, I found myself spending a few rapt hours yesterday night reading about municipal finances in Canadazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz whoops sorry there. Sleep-inducing or not, it's worth pointing out some of the conclusions in light of the whole "Toronto is running out of money" thing that's going on lately.

First of all, the fiscal imbalance (in the sense that the word is usually used) really is dubious. For the last 20 years, Federal and Provincial governments across Canada have, on average, managed to keep their revenues growing at the same rate as expenditures (indeed, in most cases revenues have grown faster than revenues, especially in the last decade.) And as others have pointed out (notably Andrew Coyne) the provinces have the same taxing powers when it comes to the most important revenue pools (personal and corporate income, sales taxes) so there's no reason why, even if provincial expenditures are becoming burdensome, they can't raise revenue in response. Instead, at both the federal and provincial levels, governments have been cutting taxes.

(All authors agree that, despite the serious effect Paul Martin's cuts to transfer payments had on provincial budgets, those effects are dwarfed by the effects of tax cuts made by provincial governments themselves in the 1990s. If the provincial governments find themselves fiscally unbalanced, it's because they shot themselves in their own fiscal foot.)

Nevertheless, provinces have mostly managed to keep revenues growing at the same time as expenditures. They've managed to do this, in most cases, by offloading many expenses on to the municipal level of government (and this is the direct cause of the current predicament Toronto is in.) If the "fiscal imbalance" exists anywhere in Canada, it's unquestionably the relationship between cities and the provincial governments. Over 90% of municipal revenue comes from one tax -- property taxes. Property taxes are a horrendously bad choice to fund the level of government closest to the people -- unlike income and sales taxes, property taxes don't expand proportionally to the economy or to the demands on services. Indeed, when property values climb rapidly in a growing economy, many cities are pressured to cut taxes in order to avoid punishing homeowners. The net effect of this, plus provincial laws mandating very narrow circumstances in which cities can accrue debt, is that cities have had their expenses grow faster than their revenues, the only one of the three levels of Canadian government for which this is generally true.

Worse yet, the cities bear the brunt of a lot of costs they simply cannot control in any sense -- water services being the best example. Ontario dictate the standards to which water services must be kept (a very good thing) but the money comes from cities.

The solution would be simple enough: allow municipalities to levy small income and sales taxes. Not only would the revenue be sufficient to do things like, uh, maintain our roads and plumbing, but the revenue would be more stable and grow proportionally to the economy. There are well-proven techniques in other countries to deal with issues of tax competition between governments, and mobility among taxpayers (trying to escape taxes by moving to another jurisdiction, for example.) But this will not happen, because Canada apparently lacks the capability for rational self-governance.

The other necessary step would be to make federal loans available for infrastructure -- the Feds have access to cheaper money than anyone else (bonds at lower interest than provinces or P3s) so it's the best deal.

P2P Cellphones

This technology looks so promising it hurts. Too bad it'll never take off in North America. Thanks, regulatory capture!

A new way of making calls directly between phones, for free, is being trialled by a Swedish company.

It is hoping to dramatically improve communications in the developing world.

Swedish company TerraNet has developed the idea using peer-to-peer technology that enables users to speak on its handsets without the need for a mobile phone base station.

What? No network needed? But how will we screw people for millions provide quality customer service? No surprise, the cell phones are claiming the technology doesn't work.

"One of the biggest things against us is that the big operators and technology providers are really pushing against us, saying this technology doesn't work and it doesn't have a business model," he said.

"This is fine - just join us in Lund and see how the technology works, and ask our customers how our business model works."

Yeah, the business model is soooo complicated: Make phones. Sell phones for more than it costs to make them. Don't bother customers with bills for the network they aren't using and you didn't need to build.

Like I said. Complicated.

In a perfect world, we'd find much better things to do with the radio spectrum than AM radio and legacy television broadcasts, and this would be one of them. In reality, Rogers, Bell, CTVGlobemedia, Canwest, and Telus would burn Ottawa to the ground if we ever tried something as rational as encouraging this.

Doing big things takes big money

So now the US is talking with the Sadrists in Iraq. You know, the guy who the US has tried to kill more than once, and proclaimed a threat to the Iraqi government as well. Actually, the US has been negotiating with the Sadrists since 2006. On the one hand, this is probably the least-bad option for the US at this point. On the other, this means that between the Kurds, the Sunni, and now the Shia you've got the US arming or funding or training all three sides in the looming Iraqi civil war. That's gonna be one hell of a party, but the outcome's not really in doubt: the Shia get power, the Sunni get subdued, and the Kurds (probably) get screwed, again.

Meanwhile, CBC radio ran an interview tonight with Asadullah Khalid saying -- and he's following the lead of Hamid Karzai, here -- that we need to negotiate with the Taliban. Which we might as well do, because the Taliban are retaking all the places we supposedly just cleared out. You know, like they always do.

You know, I've been thinking about the Russo-Japanese war recently. A relatively small war, the Japanese and Russians fought over who would control the Korean peninsula. I say "relatively" because despite the relatively low importance other great powers saw in the conflict, it totally destroyed the Russian Navy and gave Japan the toehold on the Asian mainland it needed to begin it's empire. And the Japanese recognized it's importance: during the war, Japan in fact spent nearly 25% of it's GDP on military spending, according to some estimates. (This number would translate to 250 billion dollars in Canada's money.) The Japanese in fact didn't spend a larger portion of their wealth on military spending until 1942, when they'd managed to blunder in to a global war.

The point, pardon the digression, is this: foreign policy (even in "small" theaters) is expensive. You cannot, in fact, do it on the cheap. You can especially not wage war on the cheap with small armies under-equipped to do their jobs. If you try it, you might as well just accept that you're not going to "win" in the way westerners are used to winning. Negotiations usually follow this bleak realization. Not because it's at all complicated, but because our egos and preconceptions get in the way.

That deaf, dumb, and blind kid

Little Tommy Friedman:

I heard China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, address an international conference here in Dalian, and what impressed me most was how boring it was — a straightforward recitation of the staggering economic progress China has made in the last two decades and the towering economic, political and environmental challenges it still faces.

How nice it must be, I thought, to be a great power and be almost entirely focused on addressing your own domestic problems?

No, I have not gone isolationist. America has real enemies that China does not, and therefore we have to balance a global security role in places like the Middle East with domestic demands.

Yes, it would be just horrible to have an "isolationist" foreign policy -- you know, one where America's foreign policy doesn't involve decennial invasions of darker-skinned countries.

After 9/11, we tried to effect change in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world by trying to build a progressive government in Baghdad. There was, I believed, a strategic and moral logic for that. But the strategy failed, for a million different reasons...

Reasons 1 through 999,990 being "it was a stupid fucking strategy, and Thomas Friedman was too stupid to see that from day 1." Reason 999,991 being that Friedman's description of this strategy cannot be accepted as gospel -- America's war aims are far, far too obscure to give them this most generous gloss. The alternative explanation -- that America wanted a friendly regime in Baghdad more than it cared about democracy, ice cream, and puppies is frankly just as supportable, given existing evidence.

Now, the actual good part of the column is that he explores what China is doing while America wastes blood and treasure in Iraq -- new energy research that has exploded in the last five years. Of course, one of the fundamental antiwar criticisms of Iraq was that it was a strategic distraction -- America has rivals in the world, and even some honest enemies, and wars cost money and lives, and maybe America shouldn't be wasting them with rivals waiting in the wings.

Thomas Friedman famously dismissed that by basically saying Iraqis had to be killed by the thousands because Afghanistan wasn't gratifying his American Imperialist ego enough.

And the rage returns....

North Pole sheds Florida-sized weight

Ack!

From September 3 to September 9, researchers say 69,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappeared, roughly the size of the Sunshine State.

Scientists say the rate of melting in 2007 has been unprecedented, and veteran ice researchers worry the Arctic is on track to be completely ice-free much earlier than previous research and climate models have suggested.

"If you had asked me a few years ago about how fast the Arctic would be ice free in summer, I would have said somewhere between about 2070 and the turn of the century," said scientist Mark Serreze, polar ice expert at the NSIDC. "My view has changed. I think that an ice-free Arctic as early as 2030 is not unreasonable."

70,000 square miles -- or, a bit smaller than Syria --lost in 6 days. Let's see what next summer is.

The words "tipping points" have been overused, but what if we're seeing one in the rearview mirror right now?

Greenland is disintegrating

Always more bad news from the arctic:

The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.

Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea-level rise and make predictions this February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change far too low.

The glacier at Ilulissat, which supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago.

Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat yesterday: "We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year."

Let's remember that there's a matter of our own survival here, even if this is happening "up there" in the arctic: no serious climatologist thinks that the Greenland ice sheet can survive in the absence of the arctic ice cap -- with the arctic now predicted to be ice-free by 2030, maybe 2050, Greenland is going to start disintegrating even faster than it is now, and has the potential to raise the sea level by 20-30 feet.

We don't need no steenkin' WEP password...

So, I'm currently blogging from the space outside the main library at the academic institution that I'm now attending. Spent one hour in line getting my student card, and then went to the library to get my wireless network set up.

Me: So, how do I get on the wireless network?
Librarian: Well, you log on to your student account to get the password.
Me: And, uh, how do I log on without wireless access? None of these computers is free, right?
Librarian: Uh, yeah. Screw that, here's the password.

So thank you, whoever you are, you security-foiling but eminently rational librarian.

Too easy

Emperor Hirohito, August 1945: "...the war has not progressed entirely as we would have wished."

Gen. Petraeus, September 2007: "[The surge] has not worked out as we had hoped."

Killing the unborn

So this has been kicked around by a few people, notably Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum:

Stephen Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a key proponent of the patchwork-quilt strategy. But even he emphasizes that the idea would be a political nonstarter if it resulted in a lot more American deaths. The American public, he said in a phone interview, will support overseas deployments of troops—even for many years—as long as not many get killed. For instance, 64,000 U.S. troops are still in Germany, 60 years after the end of World War II and 16 years after the end of the Cold War. American soldiers have been keeping the peace in Bosnia now for more than a decade since the defeat of Slobodan Milosevic. In both operations, virtually no American soldiers have died as a result of hostile fire. (Biddle is a member of Petraeus' advisory panel, but he emphasized that his views here are entirely his own.)

Biddle also said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years—and that, even so, it would be a "long-shot gamble."

I wrote recently that I'm skeptical of the retrospective look on Gen. Shinseki's famous "hundreds of thousands" testimony, which a lot of progressives (including myself, for a time) took to mean that Shinseki was simply saying the war in Iraq was a bad idea. I don't think we can say what Shinseki meant. As Biddle makes clear here, it's totally possible to say that "victory" is nearly impossible, but still believe that something should be done.

But imagine that the US did, in fact, stay in Iraq until at least 2027. That would mean that a sizeable chunk of the soldiers fighting in Mesopotamia would have been born in 2009 (or possibly later) -- that is, they would have been born after George Bush left office, and the war is expected to last 20 years more. Given the state of the Democratic Party, it's not out of the question...

Here in Canada, we've had a number of generals say, essentially, that victory in Afghanistan requires a committment of decades. Generals can say what they like, but the rest of us should realize what this means -- we've lost. There's no way that Canadians will maintain a sizeable force of soldiers in Afghanistan for decades. It's simply not going to happen. Comparisons with peacekeeping, or even with better-known counterinsurgencies (Ireland) are meaningless for a variety of reasons. If "victory" requires 20 years of war, Canadians simply are not going to accept those costs. And if the payoff is so small, there's no real reason for them to do so.

No, wait, fear China.

Yikes.

A sharp drop in foreign holdings of US Treasury bonds over the last five weeks has raised concerns that China is quietly withdrawing its funds from the United States, leaving the dollar increasingly vulnerable....

"We won't know if China is behind this until the Treasury releases its TIC data in November, but what it does show is that world central banks are in a hurry to get out of the US. They don't seem to be switching into other currencies, so it is possible they are moving into gold instead. Gold is now gaining momentum across all currencies and has broken through resistance at 500 euros," he said.

Look who's evil now!

That's right world. Fear us.

...yes, chalk this up as another data point on the whole "carriers are obsolete" argument. The Canadian Navy, with used submarines, snuck up on a British Carrier. We've recently seen the same trick carried out by the Chinese on a US carrier group, so it's not like we're that special. I don't pretend to be knowledgeable enough to say the carrier/sub argument is over -- indeed, it'll probably only ever end with one kind of twisted and broken hull on the bottom of the ocean.

E-books.... just around the corner, this time, maybe?

I remain confused as to why, exactly, publishers seem to be getting excited about e-books. I'm excited, because I think the environmental and consumer benefits would be large. But if I were a self-interested publisher, I'd do everything in my power to keep my books from being released in digital format for fear of being Napsterized. And I say that as a strong critic of copyright laws. Nevertheless, with Sony releasing the Reader, publishers began working with electronics manufaturers to create online bookstores. Now, it seems, Amazon is working on it's own e-ink reader project, which may turn out to be the killer app or teh suck. Color me optimistic:

Several people who have seen the Kindle say this is where the device’s central innovation lies — in its ability to download books and periodicals, and browse the Web, without connecting to a computer. They also say Amazon will pack some free offerings onto the device, like reference books, and offer customers a choice of subscriptions to feeds from major newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the French newspaper Le Monde.

The device also has a keyboard, so its users can take notes when reading or navigate the Web to look something up. A scroll wheel and a progress indicator next to the main screen, will help users navigate Web pages and texts on the device.

People familiar with the Kindle also have a few complaints. The device has a Web browser, but using it is a poor experience, because the Kindle’s screen, also from E Ink, does not display animation or color.

That's not a show-stopper for me. This might be:

Some also complain about the fact that Amazon is using a proprietary e-book format from Mobipocket, a French company that Amazon bought in 2005, instead of supporting the open e-book standard backed by most major publishers and high-tech companies like Adobe. That means owners of other digital book devices, like the Sony Reader, will not be able to use books purchased on Amazon.com.

Good God. The DRM market for music is falling apart as we speak, and any drm on text is going to be even more useless than the DRM on music -- and that's saying something. What could posess Amazon, watching so many before it fall of this cliff, to think that maybe, if they're lucky, they'll grow wings?

Nerd stuff

Zero punctuation reviews Bioshock.

If you haven't watched the rest of Zero Punctuation's reviews of video games, you're living a life of shame and deprivation.

Slightly-fresher lake chronicles, cont.

So polar ice has hit a new record low, showing a precipitous decline year-on-year. I cropped this picture to show Canadians that, yes, huge chunks of the Arctic are now ice-free. The Northwest Passage is described as "the most navigable that people have see since monitoring began".



That magenta line shows the average sea ice extent from 1979-2000, so August 2007 is already obviously below that. To put it another way, this isn't just a usual summer melt -- this is way out of the norm. But the truly terrifying piece is this one, showing the declines for the last 20 years or so:



This is the single largest year-on-year decline shown, if I'm reading this right. That said, you can also see that some previous declines have been followed by substantial recoveries the following year -- not enough to offset the decades-long trend, but we should be prepared, next summer, for the possibility of a larger icepack than this summer. No, it won't mean that global warming is a hoax.

(Update: Just to be clear, the averages shown in the figures above are the August averages, not the yearly averages.)

Ooh, shiny

So now China is working on scramjet-powered missiles, theoretically capable of flight at Mach 5+.

I have nothing really to add to this, except to say that with scramjet missiles and energy-beam weaponry likely to debut during the 21st century, the next major-power war is going to make the German blitzkrieg look like a duel of angry snails.

Yes, bash economists

Matthew Yglesias asks if the progressive movement need do so much economist-bashing. Ezra says, in so many words, that he'll keep bashing economists until economics as a field starts bashing itself -- in the absence of real self-policing, the rest of us have to step up to the plate. In this sense, we're basically just treating economists the way we treat journalists.

It should come as no surprise that I'm closest to Ezra on this one than Matt. So long as economists refuse to actually marginalize their craziest brethren, I feel no compunction about calling them all crazy by association until proven otherwise. And it's not like this is a radical demand, right. I'm not asking that economists spend more time working on the costs of systemic unemployment, or work to develop better measures of sustainable growth -- I'm not even sure that these are, in the end, proper concepts for economics to study. Simply shouting down the "only-and-always-tax-cuts" partisans in public debate would be of inestimable value. And if people like Paul Krugman had rethought their knee-jerk committment to globalization a decade ago when it could have done some good, that would have been nice too.

Sadness

I'm working on a line of reasoning that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- their successes and failures -- can be described as much by the generation from which they emerged (the Baby Boomers) as by their own individual stories. I'll have more to say about this later, but basically I think my parents' generation did not understand at the time what a precious opportunity they had for transforming human society, and will only fully appreciate what it's like to live in a society of opportunity when we see it in the rearview mirror. Meanwhile, there's this depressing-as-hell post at The Oil Drum, Canada:

Global food prices set to rise by 50% in 5 years. Australian farmers pay 50 times more for irrigation water than in 2002. California cuts off water to farmers to save fish species, French wine growers harvest grapes 8 weeks earlier than in 1978. Russia considers a wheat export ban. Holland: bread prices to rise 20% next year. Milk named the new oil. UK: many crops just drowned. [insert deep breath] Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, had another crop-killing sweltering summer. Australia relives last year’s drought (and this time may not recover). The UN predicts a global food crisis. Topsoil vanishes at record pace. 2008 declared the Year of the Frog: up to half of amphibian species could be wiped out in coming years - the biggest mass extinction since dinosaurs disappeared. North American songbirds: going going gone, and we all know where our bees are by now. Not here.

Or maybe I'm just mourning the summer past. I was working all labour day weekend, in financial preparation for my soon-to-commence graduate studies, and frankly I'll say that working inside during the last glorious weather of the summer makes me want to stab people.

Stupid things we choose to care about, and the important stuff too

The girlfriend's computer is in the shop. Ergo, girlfriend is using my laptop. Conversation ensues:

Me: Love of mine, what happened to my Mozilla tabs?

The Girlfriend: Huh? Oh, I opened a new window so that they wouldn't be changed.

Me: OH SWEET MOTHER OF CHRIST TELL ME YOU DIDN'T OPEN A NEW WINDOW.

TGF: What???

Me: SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT MY TABS MY TABS MY BEAUTIFUL TABS.

TGF: I'm... sorry?

Me: (despondent, feminine weeping)

TGF: What did I do?

******

Okay, so I lost a week's worth of collected blog-fodder. Crud. But we've just celebrated 7 years together, which is beginning to sound kind of serious to me. And she hasn't stabbed me while I'm sleeping or poisoned the occasional lunch she makes for me. She stuck with me while I was away at school for four years, which is frankly more credit than any man can ask for, much less a shmoe like me.

Happy anniversary, sweetie. And to answer everybody and their brother's next question, yes, I'm working on the fucking ring... it's just that Vicki demands nothing less than Mithril from the mines of Moria itself. Which is why I love her.

Appropriate development for Ontatio

Rather than concentrating on corn ethanol -- a bad idea at the best of times, completely inappropriate for Ontario -- we should be looking at a diverse set of renewable energy options in Canada, including the forestry industry. So imagine my surprise when it turns out that the Ontario government is, in fact, embracing sanity on this score. Although it seems to partly rely on re-branding the industry as "biofibre", because apparently "bio-" is this year's "i-".

As the province's largest power user it is anticipated that the forest industry will use forest biofibre to replace fossil fuels to reduce the costs of heat and electricity for their manufacturing processes and at the same time offset significant electrical demand on Ontario's power system," says the draft.

But the envisioned biofibre industry would accomplish much more, including the creation of new business opportunities. "Resources such as forest biofibre will be used to replace non-renewable inputs for the production of biomaterials, bioenergy, biopharmaceuticals and other bioproducts."

Indeed, the draft continues, "the demand for forest biofibre is anticipated to increase and become more diversified."

Emerging technologies will make forest biofibre increasingly useful. New enzymes and bacteria can be used to help turn the material into ethanol fuel, and some companies considering this approach are already looking at towns like Hearst as possible sites for cellulosic ethanol plants.

Pyrolysis machines will be able to convert the biofibre into bio-oil and synthetic gas used for heating and power generation, or char for agriculture enhancement and carbon storage.

The oils extracted from forest biofibres can even be broken down or mixed into various chemicals used to produce everything from plastics to foods. On a more basic level, the material can just be burned directly for heat or electricity.

Franks for the GOP VP?

I keep predicting he'll run... Maybe we should have Franks explain his history of lying in elections during the VP debates.

Choosing to fail

Note to NATO: opium eradication isn't working. People said -- six years or so ago, now -- that it wouldn't work, and ta-da, it hasn't worked. The workable solution to this problem -- buying all the opium and using it for medicinal stocks, or just destroying it -- has worked in a number of other places, but not Afghanistan. We're deliberately choosing stupidity over intelligence, choosing incompetence over effectiveness. And not just in the military fields, either. As always, Ian Welsh has some excellent commentary:

It's simple. It'd work. But of course since drugs are EVIL, such a common sense solution will never be adopted. It's interesting to ask why - are Americans, and indeed Europeans, really so inflexible, so indoctrinated with hatred of "drugs", that they can't do what it takes to win? In so many things we see this inflexibility - this decision to keep doing things the way they have always been done, rather than to adapt to the terrain, the people and the enemy.

Our enemies, ironically, despite coming from "traditional" societies, have no such hangups. Not convinced of their own military superiority, knowing that they can lose, having to make do without half the military budget of the entire world behind them, they are able to adapt to what we do, and by refusing to play our game by our rules they are beating us. In Iraq we lose. In Afghanistan we lose. In Lebanon a militia defeated what was supposed to be one of the most elite of all Western-style militaries.

We win the open-field battles, but we are losing the wars. And it is because we can no longer see clearly; and seeing clearly we can no longer adapt. The western military, heir of the greatest military tradition in the world, a Goliath standing astride the world, is being defeated not by David with a sling, but by a swarm of ants who refuse to sit still and be smashed by our mighty club.

And the Afghan opium problem is just another example of how we insist, in the face of failure, on doing the same thing that already failed, over and over again.

Almost-fall cleaning

Here's me, trying to catch up on some things. School's coming, and I'm more and more motivated to do this whole "get my ass in gear" project. But first, let's clear out some old links:

-- US/UK catfighting over Iraq! Y'see, the British realize that Iraq is going to be an ungodly disaster no matter what they do, so they're leaving. Clearly, they don't understand how this means they hate freedom.

-- And yes, Iraq is an ungodly disaster. Let's try this:

What the NIE is saying is that, more than four years after the war began, the strategic goal has not been achieved -- and there is little evidence that it will be achieved. Security has not increased significantly in Iraq, despite some localized improvement. In other words, the NIE is saying that the United States has failed and there is no strong evidence that it will succeed in the future.

It's clear, at this point, that US troops are going to be kept in Iraq until Bush's term ends, simply to make it look like someone else "lost" the war. The immorality of it all disgusts me.

-- Or there's this: "Iraq does not exist anymore".

-- But this is interesting: despite the oft-heard claim that Iraq is an "artificial" country, that it was merely created by the Brits post-WWI, at least one historian argues that in fact, Iraq has been a single political unit for much longer than westerners realize -- 19th-century documents regularly refer to the Arabs of Iraq, and even occasionally refer to the Kurds of Iraq as well. The exact borders may have been different, but the binding of Baghdad, Basra, and occasionally Mosul as a historical community is pretty old:

Galbraith’s “Iraq was just cobbled together” thesis is similarly trite and equally misleading: it is true that for some thirty years between the 1880s and 1914 there was administrative separation between Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, but before that there had been frequent intervals of administrative unity between some or all of these areas (especially Basra and Baghdad) – as was the case under the Ottomans and Georgian mamluk rule in the early nineteenth and eighteenth century as well as during long periods of the classical Islamic age (and even under a succession of Mongol rulers after 1258, if more flimsily so).

It gives me some hope that Iraqi nationalism might put the country back together again.

-- Switching gears, slightly: 1 in 4 Canadians is facing medical costs from environmental pollution. They clearly don't understand that we can't afford not to pollute -- it would hurt the economy! See also: Pollution causes 40% of deaths, worldwide.

Dawn isn't coming. Sometimes, the sky is just dark because the sun's gone down.

Ack ack ack ack. via Ezra, Niall Ferguson -- Britain's own Ignatieff -- has a piece in the New Yorker about the Marshall Plan. And he has me most of the way through the article before he starts annoying the crap out of me. Because most of what he says is decently written, and factually correct at least. (In modern terms, the US transferred close to 3/4 of a trillion dollars during the term of the Marshall Plan. Lots o cash.) But here's the part that simply annoyed me to pieces.

In all likelihood, then, Western Europe could have pulled through without the Marshall Plan. But it certainly could not have pulled through without the United States.

This part is almost certainly untrue, despite the well-trodden view that it represents. After the end of the war, Stalin was absolutely petrified of the possibility of another war, and it's kind of bizarre to argue that Europe's economic recovery would have happened anyway without also acknowledging that Western Europe's military recovery would also have happened. The turmoil of the post-war years didn't stop the French from sending troops to Indochina or the British to Africa, or later both countries to the Suez, did it? The most likely outcome, America-free, is a less generous European social contract, not Soviet domination of every state east of the Pyrenees.

At the time that Marshall made his speech in Harvard Yard, no one could be sure that all would turn out for the best in postwar Western Europe. No one could even be sure that the United States would deliver on Marshall’s pledge. All people could remember was the sad sequence of events that had followed the previous World War, when Western Europe was swept by general strikes and galloping inflation, while the United States Senate reneged on Woodrow Wilson’s “plan” for a new order based on collective security. The Marshall Plan was not the only difference between the two postwar eras, but, to West Europeans struggling to make ends meet, it was the most visible manifestation of American good will—and a mirror image of the Soviet policy of mulcting Eastern Europe. This, more than its macroeconomic impact, explains its endurance in the popular imagination. At a time when, according to the Pew Research Center, only thirty-nine per cent of Frenchmen and thirty per cent of Germans have a positive view of the United States, that is something worth remembering, and pondering.

For authors like Ferguson, who seem to basically have an intractably sycophantic view of American power, it will always be just before the dawn of a new Marshall Plan. There's always some new bold international initiative that America could spearhead that would change the world for the better and sail past what we thought were the horizons of the possible. And yet, America never delivers. Or at least, not since the Marshall Plan has America delivered the kind of immense, nearly-unconditional aid that Europe got after the war.

Does that make America bad? No, of course not -- we don't have any claim on their money. But you'd think it would make people like Ferguson more circumspect about how central America's role is in the world. Ferguson whines about how modern Europeans just don't appreciate how good America was to their grandparents, which is probably true but also couldn't matter less. So (also via Ezra, you should really just read him instead) I find that this article on Nicholas Sarkozy has by far the more important statement about Continental views of America:

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

What Brown, Merkel, and Sarkozy all have in common is that they do not want to be defined by their response to America—either unduly faithful, as with Blair, or unduly hostile, as Chirac became. Instead, as Levitte says, they all want to normalize relations with a great power that is no longer the only power. Its military weakness has been exposed in Iraq, its economic weakness by the rise of the euro, and its once great cultural magnetism has been diminished by post-9/11 paranoia and insularity. America has recovered from worse before, and may do so again. But it is also possible that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era.

America's fall in the world (relatively speaking) is a self-inflicted wound, like they always are. After Vietnam, America's allies still believed they needed Americas protection -- now they almost certainly won't. That's going to be a radically different landscape than the late 1970s, early 1980s. Especially so if the NATO mission in Afghanistan collapses as I suspect it will.

We don't need another hero

Matthew Yglesias links to Fred Kaplan, who thinks that the US military is repeating the same mistakes as HR McMaster detailed in his survey of the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty. (I read DoD last winter, with posts 1,2,3,4 to show for it.) There's a number of things that we can say about this issue, but at root there's the problem that Caesar would have understood: there's an inescapable tension when the people who hold the weapons of state are not also the people calling the shots. Modern democracies pretend to have squared this circle, but we really haven't.

Matt says that even when Generals do raise their voices (citing Gen. Eric Shinseki) they're ignored, and not just by the President. He's right, and this is the broader argument that McMaster makes, but also Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes, his new history of the CIA. The President policy goals inevitable shape the advice he's given, not the other way around. In DoD, McMaster notes repeatedly how Generals couched their advice to Johnson and McNamara to fit the overall plan (escalation in Vietnam) while hoping, sometime in the vague future, to get the war they wanted. Weiner notes a number of occasions where the CIA provided the intelligence the White House wanted, not the intelligence that the evidence supported, and yes this goes back well before Iraq II.

Secondly, there's the problem of the advice that Generals actually provide. In DoD, McMaster makes it clear that the advice the General staff were witholding from their President was that they believed the Vietnam War could only be won with a land invasion of North Vietnam and unrestricted bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. They weren't saying this because they were trying to scare LBJ away from his policy goal -- they sincerely wanted a land invasion of North Vietnam, and hoped Johnson would call up sufficient forces and economic measures to make that possible. This was also an insane idea, and would only have added to the body count without "winning" America anything in the process. So when Matt says that Rick Shinseki was trying to warn us away from Iraq by talking about an occupation force of hundreds of thousands, I'm not so sure. It's equally plausible that Shinseki, in the tradition of the Army, simply expected Bush to make those forces available. Shinseki hasn't talked publicly about Iraq since leaving from the Army, but I think the "scaring us sensible" explanation for Sinseki's remarks is problematic.

Finally, we don't only need to listen to Generals. The biggest problem with the run up to the war in Iraq was not that we weren't warned about the consequences of invading a hostile Arab country. Plenty of voices -- all over the world -- accurately predicted the situation America now finds itself in. But in America, the only voices (apparently) that are allowed to be skeptical of military force are those currently wearing a uniform and in active duty. It's ridiculous how narrow this is, but look back and even prominent war skeptics who were "merely" ex-military were sidelined. Scott Ritter, (USMC, ret.) and former weapons inspector, was proven right but slimed and then ignored at the time. Hell, Lt. Gen Brent Scowcroft (USAF, ret.) came as close as possible to delivering poppa Bush's own spanking to his son, and was acknowledged but had zero impact. The war critics who didn't have the advantage of having killed people in America's name might as well have not existed in the American media.

Worrying about whether or not "the Generals" will speak up next time misses the point -- we shouldn't be relying on the Generals to speak about foreign policy ex cathedra in the first place. Rather, we need a media that allows war skeptics to be seen as legitimate and co-equal to the Generals. Until we fix that, pinning our hopes on whether or not we have competent officers at the Pentagon is a waste of time.

Resignations

So Alberto Gonzales is out. Woo, and might I add, hoo.

One thing that struck me is that CNN actually brought up the thing that Gonzales should have been fired for -- his authorship of Bush's torture memo: the one where Gonzales called the protections of the Geneva Convetions "quaint" and obsolete. But whatever it takes -- I'll be happy to see the last of this bunch, even if we do have to endure the boss for another 15 months or so.

Enough to make me a libertarian

There are days where I'm convinced that your average state bureacracy wouldn't be competent to organize a bake sale if you spotted them the eggs and flour. It's not just Iraq -- though it is of course that too -- but this whole hillarious farce of the Surete de Quebec agents being unmasked (in the Internet, at least) as trying to stir up a riot at the SPP meeting in Quebec is just the perfect example of how bad these guys are at doing the stuff they're supposed to be good at.

When analogies attack!

So Bush compares Iraq to Vietnam, saying that America should stay until the war is won. The Vietnamese response?

"Doesn't he realize that if the U.S. had stayed in Vietnam longer, they would have killed more people?" said Vu Huy Trieu of Hanoi, a veteran of the communist forces that fought American troops in Vietnam. "Nobody regrets that the Vietnam War wasn't prolonged except Bush."

Meanwhile, Bush also compared Iraq to the occupation of Japan, saying:

“An interesting observation, one historian put it, ‘Had these erstwhile experts’ — he was talking about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society — he said, ‘Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage.’

The response by the historian in question?

“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse.”

Read that link in particular -- Dower has a long record of opposing the war in Iraq specifically because it bears no relation to the successful occupation of Japan. But hey, when you start using Alden Pyle as a referent to support your war, you've pretty much lost any grip on appropriate comparisons...

America to the Rescue!

A decent summary of America's foreign policy for the last quarter-century.

Vietnam -- never boring!

So I was starting to wonder if the Vietnam war comparisons were getting a little stale here at my little corner of blogtopia, but then no less an august personage than George W. Bush himself compared Iraq to Vietnam yesterday. Of course, when he says it he means it in a good way. Or something.

It's difficult to know exactly which part is most offensive. There's this part:

``One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like `boat people,' `re-education camps,' and `killing fields,''' Bush said in Kansas City in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the largest U.S. veterans' group.

Of course, the killing fields were in Cambodia, not Vietnam, and it was the work of America's allies the Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, there were plenty of killing fields in Vietnam with the US there, except they were called "free-fire zones". And Vietnam had immense waves of internal refugees before the Americans left, not to mention the nearly 2 million dead by the end of the American involvement in the war.

Then there's the near-hysterical point that Bush specifically brought up the Alden Pyle character in The Quiet American. It's insane, but he actually seems to think that this reinforces his arguments, not undermines them. It's kind of like saying that the message of Star Wars is how you can always trust your dad, that's how crazy this is.

The other obvious point is, as Matthew Yglesias points out, that the worst predictions about Vietnam were in fact proven wrong by events. Yes, the war ended badly there. But the end of the war was, all things considered, preferable to continuing the oceans of blood flowing out of the Mekong.

"Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem"

Atrios, today:

Too lazy to hunt it down, but awhile back I predicted that there was an X% chance September's new FU would be rebooted with Maliki being replaced. We must give the new prime minister a chance to succeed, blah blah. With any luck it'll be Iyad Allawi! Yay! I think X was a fairly low number, though now I'd certainly put the chance of it happening on the higher side.

So now we're back to talking about a coup. But the problem isn't that the Iraqi government is led by a bad man. The problem is that the Iraqi government, as we usually understand such things, doesn't exist. Meaning that a coup, if it were started, would not be the end of things -- it would be the beginning of something new. In Vietnam, when the Americans orchestrated the coup against their picked man, Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam went through 7 successive governments in two years, and the end process was that collapse of the Vietnamese war effort and their replacement by hundreds of thousands of US forces.

So what happens if the Iraqi government collapses entirely? Well, there's no troops to send, so that ain't happening. But the odds of the American soldiers suddenly finding themselves in a much, much worse place are pretty good.

Which brings me to this -- if you haven't seen this yet, you really need to read this piece by soldiers from the 82nd Airborne:

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

It's nice to see the troops on the ground are facing the possibility that nobody in Washington seems to want to talk about: it's always possible that if the US doesn't leave Iraq by choice, it could be forced out, with a lot more dead bodies on both sides.

GM is setting up to break my heart

...because the news that GM's getting serious about rolling out the Volt is just getting me too excited. Imagine, an American company making a cutting-edge car. That'd be what, the first since the Model T?

Thank God we never listen to the NDP until it's too late

Perfect. After being told for years that negotiating with the Taliban was insane, the only spineless cowards would even think of talking with the monsters behind 9/11, and that we couldn't possibly betray our new allies in the Kabul government (who wanted us to negotiate anyway, but moving on...) we find today (via The Agonist) that the US and Pakistan are busy... negotiating with the Taliban. And preparing to pay up, big time:

The Taliban, under the command of Mullah Mansoor (brother of the legendary Mullah Dadullah, who was killed in battle this year), are in Satellite town, Quetta, to talk of teega. The next rounds are scheduled for Peshawar, the provincial capital of North-West Frontier Province, and in the Waziristan tribal areas with Taliban commanders of the southeastern provinces.

Specifically, the deals aim to stop violence in selected areas and give the Taliban limited control of government pending the conclusion of a broader peace deal for the country and the Taliban's inclusion in some form of national administration....

So after swearing up and down that we wouldn't negotiate with the Taliban -- and calling Jack Layton and the NDP naive, traitorous simps for even suggesting it -- we're finally following a rational course that we could have taken years ago, when we held a much stronger position in Afghanistan.

In other news, PM Harper has apparently informed Bush that he doesn't expect to get Parliamentary approval for an extension of Canada's mission in Afghanistan. We can, I think, deduce two things from this: First, Harper doesn't expect to have a majority by 2009, certainly not if people think he's going to keep soldiers in Afghanistan. Second, he doesn't believe that the current status quo, if it endures that long, allows him to keep troops beyond 2009.

I don't think that's necessarily true. If the rumours of Ignatieff's attempts to unseat Dion are true, I think Harper can reasonably expect the Liberal party to roll over for an extended tour in Afghanistan until, oh, 2070 or so. And btw, if the rumours of Ignatieff's attempts to unseat Dion come true, you can expect a hearty "I told you so" from this corner.

No, really, the future is solar

A data point on the march to solar power's inevitable triumph: NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter will be powered by solar panels. This is remarkable. Previous Jovian missions have been powered by on-board radioactive generators because solar panels couldn't possibly gather enough sunlight at Jupiter's distance to power the on board electronics. The sunlight available at Jupiter's distance is only 1/25th to 1/30th of the energy streaming through space at Earth's distance from the sun, so being able to sustain an unmanned space probe on such thin nourishment is truly a remarkable accomplishment.

The Legacy

via Suburban Guerilla, this little anecdote is a good illustration about why I still don't trust the Clintons -- Hillary or Bill:

Saperstein mentioned that John Edwards had already apologized about voting to authorize the Iraq war. "Why shouldn't every Democrat who voted for the war -- including presumably Hillary Clinton -- do the same thing? How were Democrats supposed to have any credibility if they wouldn't admit when they had been so calamitously wrong."

Clinton quickly went ballistic: "He leaned forward belligerently and pointed a finger at Saperstein. 'You're wrong,' he said. 'Everything you just said is totally wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.'" He went on to explain away Hillary's vote on the war and tell Saperstein he wasn't productive. "Only in this party do we eat our own. You can go on misrepresenting and bashing our own people, but I am sick and tired of it."

Clinton later apologized and realized he had made an error, but it was too late for many of the people in Austin.

I wouldn't normally judge a woman by her husband's words, except that in this case Bill is clearly speaking on behalf of his wife. And it's all garbage -- neither of the Clintons has any scruple beyond getting other Clintons elected, and neither of them has had the sense to advocate a sensible policy in Iraq. On the contrary, Bill is too wrapped up in the memory of his office and the comity of tradition (plus, he's buds with Dubya's daddy) while Hillary, I think, sincerely thinks the war was the right thing to do. (Else, why not apologize?) I was sick of Bill by 2000, and I really, really hope Hillary doesn't win in 2008.

"The only good Arab..."

Yowza. The face of American diplomacy in the Middle East:

It seems that 20-year career Foreign Service officer Patrick Syring wasn't cut out for bringing America's message of tolerance, peace and democracy to the Middle East.

Last summer, while the bloody but inconclusive war between Israel and Hezbollah raged over the skies of Israel and Lebanon, Syring reached out to James Zogby, the highly-respected head of the Arab-American Institute to let him know that "The only good Lebanese is a dead Lebanese. The only good Arab is a dead Arab."

That was in a phone message left on Mr. Zogby's voice mail.

Amazing to think that they weren't greeted with flowers and chocolates.

But my hardware man-crushes are okay

What's this, you say? A new documentary about the Apollo Program? This presents a dilemma. Either stop mocking (and applauding the mockery of) Robert Kaplan for his sloppy man-love for the B2 bomber, or be accused of rank hypocrisy for my own drooling, unthinking love of absurdly expensive toys.

Hypocrisy it is then! In my defense, the Saturn V was one of the few rockets at the time not originally intended for nuclear weapons delivery. Apollo was one of the few occasions where a large number of engineers in the US got paid well to develop systems that were never intended to kill people. The engineers a companies like Grumman, North American, and others jumped at the opportunity, just for once in the Cold War, to do something for their country that wouldn't mean a smoking crater somewhere in Asia. For an excellent read on the engineers who sent men to the moon, take a look at Angle of Attack by Mike Gray.

I ain't never heard of no "diminishing returns"...

So Robert Farley rightly mocks Robert Kaplan for getting all man-crush over the B2 Spirit bomber -- an impressive piece of machinery, if you can afford the $2 billion a pop to buy one. Which none of the poorest 30 countries of the world could not, even if they paid their entire annual GDP to get one.

The B2 is almost the perfect example of the post-WWII dynamic of our weapons getting rapidly more expensive, without a proportional increase in capability. That's not to say the B2 isn't capable, it's just that it isn't as capable as it is expensive. This is especially true when you think about the actual work it's doing, which is destroying targets in Afghanistan.

As I said, the B2 costs about US $2 billion (estimates, of course, vary.) Is there any possible target in Afghanistan that the B2 could hit that would be worth even 1% of it's value? (US $20 million?) How about 1/10 of 1%? Clearly, the B2 isn't going to get shot down by the non-existent Taliban air defenses, but every time they wheel the Spirit out of it's hangar and it takes off it's incurring maintenance and operating expenses. God forbid the thing hit a bird on takeoff! Almost by definition, using the B2 in any capacity whatsoever against the Taliban costs the US more in absolute terms than it costs the enemy. In financial terms, it's a self-inflicted wound.

This isn't surprising -- the B2 was originally designed to hit targets in a large, Asian industrial power, the USSR. The dollar-to-ruble tradeoff was supposed to be a lot more favourable, though the B2 would have also been delivering nuclear weapons at that point. The Soviets had the poor taste to disintegrate of their own accord without allowing the USAF the good time of blowing their shit up, but hope still burns -- which brings us back to Kaplan, who's also a big fan of writing pieces like "How We Would Fight China" for the Atlantic.

So it's not just sloppy puppy love for hardware that gets Kaplan's pixels flowing. The point of this gear is to be used, after all.

Stars: Up in Our Bedroom After the War

I have nothing to add to Matthew Yglesias' review, so I'm even lamer than he is.

Speaking of criminality

So the Democratic Congress -- those Lions of Legislature, those Kings of Quorum -- explicitly rejected, twice, legally-binding measures designed to constrain the White House's ability to start a war with Iran. The other foot has now been dropped, as the State Department now moves to designate a part of the Iranian military "an international terrorist organization." As Will Bunch points out, this now puts the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the same category as Al Qaeda or the Taliban and, hey presto!, gives the White House sufficient authority, absent Congressional action, to launch a war on Iran. Whee.

I would be looking for personnel changes in the Department of Defense for the next few months or so if I were you. We've been told before that the Army and Marines are vehemently opposed to any action against Iran, so if we see a resignation or two I wouldn't be surprised. Bush reportedly believes only he can save the US -- or Iran, it's not clear his delusions can be separated -- from the threat of, um, Iran. In this he's got a close ally in Cheney, who clearly never saw a Muslim nation that coudln't use a few more kilotons of high explosive.

We also know that the US government had, in secret, begun bombing the Iraqi military 6 months before the war "began" in March of 2003 -- US Air Force and Royal Air Force planes had been bombing Iraq regularly since 1991, but more than doubled the rate of bombings beginning in September of 2002, before Congress had voted to give him any such authority.

There's a real chance, therefore, that the war with Iran has already begun in some form. Secret bombings, secret ops, something like OPLAN 34A from Vietnam. We'll be told "they shot first", but it will in all likelihood be a lie. And then the US will be at war with more than 100 million Muslims, on a battlefield stretching from the western border of Iraq to the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

Does that sound like a good time to anybody else?

We also need torch-and-pitchfork insurance

Orwell lives! Bush said this, after signing the FISA ammendment -- and it's sad I didn't get to this earlier:

When Congress returns in September the Intelligence committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director McConnell, including the important issue of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

"alleged to have assisted our Nation". Priceless. Note this well: you only need "liability protection" from "allegations" if there's a good chance you've committed a crime. If you've assisted the government in committing a crime, well, the government protects it's own. But still, the Bush Administration has come as close as it can to saying, yup, they're a bunch of criminals.

Planning

James Galbraith drops the "p-bomb" -- something economists are never supposed to do:

Why, they ask, should we sacrifice in order to help future generations, who will have all the benefits of technical progress and economic growth yet to come? Because, as the Stern Review makes clear, if CO2 isn't stabilized soon, then catastrophe is certain. And extinctions and sea-level changes cannot be reversed by the wealth that might be created in the next 50 years. Facing the judgment of history, no ethical standard entitles us to condemn the future to a hot, dry, famished, and flooded world. For this reason, we must treat the costs and burdens of climate change as if they are already falling on us.

And that's the rub: They aren't. The market's real failure is that it allows for no signal from the future to the present, either from the conditions that will exist 30 years hence or from the people who will be alive and working then. The question becomes: Can we really create a market in which those far-off voices are effectively heard?...

"Planning" is a word that too many in this debate are trying to avoid, fearful, perhaps, of its Soviet overtones. But the reality of climate change is that central planning is essential, and on a grand scale. It would start with tens of billions of dollars in research to determine what is feasible, what is socially tolerable, and at what cost. A National Institute for Climate Engineering would be a good start. Departments of climate engineering at major universities would follow. Presidential candidates should take the lead by proposing a cabinet department of climate planning.

(link via Gristmill.)

I think Galbraith is being too kind. We have a plan, in fact: it's for millions and millions of people to die preventable deaths. That's our plan, and it's going swimmingly so far.

Minimizing the SPP

I had much the same reaction to Chris Hayes' Nation article that Chet describes here. Basically, Hayes starts from the premise that because delusional right-wingers are wrong about one aspect of North American integration, they must therefore be wrong about all aspects of it. Worse still, this is probably the only time a writer for The Nation would ever uncritically reproduce a Bush Administration quote -- in order to chuckle about those simple rubes in the sticks getting all ornery about nothing.

That said, I'm sympathetic because of the role played in American writing about NAFTA and deep integration by Jerome Corsi. This is the guy who helped make the word "swiftboat" a verb with regards to John Kerry, so I was already predisposed to write him off. Then, before I read about his involvement with anti-SPP activism, I saw he'd written a book about how we're not running out of oil at all, but rather there's a massive reservoir of oil at the center of the Earth, and the Russians have already tapped it so we should too. This is insanely wrong on so many levels, so I now knew the Corsi wasn't just a right-wing liar, but incredibly stupid as well. So when he started agitating about this so-called "NAFTA superhighway" I pretty much wrote it off, something I'm glad to see I was right to do.

This is an old story though: American progressives were never as agitated about NAFTA as Canadians or Mexicans were, because whatever else happens, American progressives remain American, and so it's nearly impossible to convince them (with reason) that an agreement with Canada and Mexico, those titans of the world, will threaten them. Still, it's funny that Hayes' article ran in the Nation. This is the same magazine that regularly publishes pieces about how the IMF, WTO, NAFTA, and other forms of global governance are a threat to American progressives. But none of that got in the way of publishing a piece about how much the right wing in Texas politics sure is fun to laugh at.

I don't know if there's a way for Canadians to convince American progressives that the SPP is genuinely a concern. That well's already been poisoned, and the Democratic party still belongs to the centrist wonkosphere when it comes to domestic issues -- meaning, in this case, an uncritical assumption in favour of anything labelled "free-trade".

Why foreign policy hypocrisy matters

Imagine that: The NYT runs a piece headlined: "U.S. Backs Free Elections, Only to See Allies Lose". It turns out, all over the Middle East (but especially in Lebanon) the public image of the US is so toxic, that even the hint that a candidate for election is "pro-American" can result in upset victories for the anti-American forces.

Simple democratic process: American blundering leads to popular ill will towards America. This leads to the electorate opposing pro-American candidates (or those perceived to be) and implicitly favouring anti-American candidates. Elections, therefore, lead to more anti-American governments, not fewer. The Bush Doctrine inverted: spreading democracy is harming America's foreign policy.

This is why I say the biggest failure in the post-9/11 world has been our inability to come to terms with political Islam. Of course we should have negotiated with Hamas when they won the elections in Palestine. The alternative isn't waiting for a more moderate faction to come to power -- the alternative is further radicalization, and convincing the Palestinians that we cannot be trusted in any case.

Two historical examples, which you can read however you like: In 1895, after their crushing victory over China, the Japanese were forced to give up their gains in Korea and Manchuria by European powers. No small amount of racism was at work here -- Germany, France, and Russia all refused to see Japan as an equal power with a claim to the spoils of a disintegrating China. European morality wasn't at work here* -- after forcing the Japanese out of Korea and Manchuria, the Russians went right in and gobbled up whatever they wanted. This was the first of many unequal slights the Japanese faced at the hands of the west -- including the obstinate refusal of the Europeans to agree to a racial equality clause in the Versailles Treaty after WWI. By the 1920s, the Japanese had been convinced that, no matter what Japan did, the Americans and Europeans would never allow Japan an equal position in the world unless the Japanese took it themselves by force. The Japanese feeling that the west simply couldn't be trusted led directly to the invasion of China, then later the broader Pacific War.

*Clearly, I don't want to seem like I think Japan had a right to conquer huge swaths of China. The point is that European racism and hypocrisy left a bad impression.

Example 2: After the French lost at Dien Bien Phu, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh believed that they would soon be recognized as the legitimate post-colonial rulers of all of Vietnam. The west insisted, at Geneva, that Ho be legitimized by national elections in both the north and south of the country. The Viet Minh agreed, knowing that any elections would easily bring the Communists to power -- there was no national alternative to the Communists. But the South Vietnamese eventually refused to hold elections (at American urging) for exactly that reason. This duplicity left a lasting mark on the Communists, who would basically refuse to negotiate for anything less than total American withdrawal from Vietnam for the rest of the war -- a position to which the Americans were eventually forced to accede.

So yes, our actions actually matter. And our hypocrisy matters a great deal. The problem is, the western electorate (and in particular the US and Canada, I fear) have a deep and abiding amnesia about foreign policy. Worse still are the aspects of foreign policy that are conducted totally in secret. In the case of the Muslim world, our only real option -- if we're serious about democracy being a good thing -- is to negotiate with the elected governments of the Muslim world, including Hamas. Hell, forget democracy for a moment -- the Iranian government isn't wildly democratic, but it's the legitimate government of Iran, recognized as such by all sane countries.

In Palestine, we've instead gone through this bizarre Kabuki where we said the Palestinians had lived under Fatah corruption and autocracy for too long, so they had to hold an election. The election held, we declared that Hamas was illegitimate, and began working day and night to reinstitute... Fatah corruption and autocracy. Go us. Nobody seriously thinks this isn't going to bite us in the ass again, soon, right?

Some various pieces of good news

--Algeria, with enough solar potential to power the world 4 times over, is working on tapping that resource as oil and gas run low.

--Cheap(er) electric cars! From China! And also from Norway! If I were Tesla, I'd feel nervous about my $100,000 sports cars... There's actually an interesting subsidiary point here: Norwegian and Chinese manufacturers are both aiming for an electric car of roughly the same price range. Clearly, China's low-wage manufacturing isn't determinative in where a company starts building. Put it another way: If Canadian governments were serious about the environment, we could certainly lure one of those companies here, and incidentally help Canada's manufacturing sector.

--But we don't have a serious environmental policy, or if we did we would already have built a national electrical grid by now. It's absurd that this might be torpedoed by Charest -- but I'm told he's the most federalist premier in a generation, right?

--Universal Music slowly walks away from DRM technologies. They join EMI in having embraced rational thought only after all else failed them.

--Oh yeah, and some guy named Karl quit his job.

Not that being correct won us anything

Ezra Klein on the war debate of 2002:

These were the two cases. They existed -- both of them -- before the conflict. They had, as Packer details, high profile adherents. The anti-war case was internally coherent, rigorous, and in the final analysis, utterly correct. Not accidentally correct, but accurate in its particulars and predictions. No wonder those who got it wrong are so anxious to argue that nobody truly got it right.

In a related topic, Atrios has been taking Shadi Hamid to task for basically being a pro-war voice. When someone writes approvingly about the members of the Democratic Party who were most explicitly rejected in the last election -- the faux-bipartisan, "serious people" who supported the war -- you've written yourself a ticket for a blogosphere-style smackdown. If Atrios hadn't done it, somebody else would have.

The larger point for the Democrats would be: could we please, please think up some foreign policy that doesn't amount to Republican-lite, "the US should slap around small countries when necessary"? It's alarming how at ease the nominal "left" of the foreign policy consensus is with the idea of America maintaining a unilateral foreign policy based on some nebulous idea that global security is dependent on America being able to smack the Iraq of the 2010s.

A-doy

Reuters:

Years of economic policy mistakes after the fall of Saddam Hussein left unemployed young Iraqis easy targets for recruitment by al Qaeda and other insurgents, a U.S. Defense Department official said on Sunday....

Brinkley said early economic planners had made the understandable mistake of assuming that a free market would rapidly emerge to replace what he described as Saddam's "kleptocracy", and create full employment.

I dunno, I think that comes awfully close to editorializing in the news -- the article's language, to me, obscures whether it's Lindsey or the writer who thinks it's "understandable" that American policymakers drank so deeply of the free-market kool-aid. (The sentence just reads wrong to me, your mileage may vary.) I don't expect Marxism from a wire service, but if "kleptocracy" was given quotation marks, understandable merited them.

As for the larger point, this was clearly one of the many mistakes made during Paul Bremer's year in Baghdad -- the market fundamentalist "shock therapy" administered in Iraq was a deliberate policy of destroying the existing economy with the express purpose of making Iraq a more compliant market for international capital. That it failed totally is just another example of your average Bush administration competence.

One of those "not pretending to have answers" posts

(Cross-posted at Ezra Klein's. Some repetition from previous posts.)

If you haven't read the NYT piece on Afghanistan today, you really owe it to yourself to. Rob Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money has some thoughts on whether this retroactively de-legitimizes the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place.

I don't really know the answer to that question in my own head, but my suspicion that Afghanistan is going to end very badly for NATO makes me think it's time for us to leave. (The short version of my argument these days is that nobody has seriously considered enduring the costs that an actual success in Afghanistan would entail, so the forseeable future is bloody back-and-forths between us and the Taliban. Add martial and political incompetence to the mix, and, well...)

That said, I think there's two points I'd like to make in response to Rob's argument: one response to a specific point, and another more general argument.

First, the specific point. Rob writes:

It's certainly reasonable to argue that the Bush administration was too inept to successfully reconstruct Afghanistan, but that argument goes only so far. First, I was confidant at the time... that the US would receive significant international support during and after the invasion. No matter how badly the Bush administration performed, it was reasonable to believe that other countries would pick up much of the slack. This expectation has not been disappointed...

This, I think, underestimates the quantity and kind of incompetence the Bush administration has delivered in Afghanistan. The US troops under the ultimate command of George W. Bush make up most of the ISAF (NATO) forces in Afghanistan. Incompetent leadership of 17,000 (of 35,000 give-or-take) has an obvious determinative effect on the success of the international mission. No matter how competent 6,000 British are, they simply cannot undo the damage that the US Air Force is doing. Then you've got the reliance on high-technology weaponry as a substitute for manpower (vintage Rumsfeld, as if he'd never left) which is actively harmful to securing the loyalty of the Afghan people, or even the British army, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out recently.

Then there's the broader point which I think needs to be made: Rob writes that "Afghanistan isn't Iraq", in the context of arguing that the war hasn't failed. In the words of the Vietnamese officer, that's true, but it's also irrelevant. I fear that Iraq has become such a freakish horror-show that lesser, but still incredibly bad defeats seem somehow pleasant by comparison. But for those keeping track, the government of Afghanistan doesn't seem inherently more stable than that of Iraq, it's internal security is challenged by more quiet but far better organized threats, the Taliban and AQ can still set off explosives and kidnappings more or less at will throughout the country, and worst of all, Al Qaeda have gone from being protected by a barely-medieval failed state in 2001 to being protected by an industrially-armed nuclear power, nominally an ally, in 2007. And the self-inflicted stupidity that NATO's dealing with doesn't seem likely to stop any time soon -- NATO has agreed to use smaller bombs in its air strikes, a kind of comical gesture that totally fails to understand the real harm these things do to the war effort.

Whether this makes the invasion of Afghanistan retroactively a bad idea, I don't know. I supported the invasion in 2001 and for a long time after (declaring my bias, not appealing to seriousness) but the news from Afghanistan was worse in 2003 than 2002, worse in 2004 than in 2003, worse in 2005 than 2004, etc etc until today. There's some wishful thinking that the US could leave Iraq and transfer the freed troops to Afghanistan. I think the political impulse to remove troops from Iraq is likely to have a similar effect in Afghanistan -- "welcome home from Baghdad, now get on the plane to Kabul" doesn't seem like it would play well in Peoria.

Fundamentally, I don't think any western capital, including D.C., is really convinced anymore that Afghanistan's fate is a matter of vital importance. If we were, we'd have changed our policies a long time ago. But even the nominally pro-war party in Canada doesn't think the situation is serious enough to merit postponing precious, precious tax cuts.

PSA: Wear a helmet

So I took my first spill on my bike in about a decade this evening. Nothing serious (breathe, mom!) but I'm a bit bruised and skinned in places. A few thoughts:

-- Yes, you really should wear a bike helmet. If the first bounce of my head off the pavement didn't convince me of this, the second one most certainly did. (EDIT: Just to be clear, my head was helmeted when said bouncing occurred.)

-- In mean old nasty Toronto, within a few seconds of my fall I had not one but two people helping me to my feet and asking if I was okay. The crazy thing? They both headed off in separate directions as I was leaving -- two total strangers, to myself and to each other, stopped to help me. People who think Toronto people are rude or uncaring haven't lived here.

-- There's a moment in a fall like this that seems to occur exactly after you've stopped worrying about the immediate past ("I guess I won't make that green light after all...") and before you've started worrying about the immediate future ("So, about my eyeglasses...") where you're left with nothing to do but contemplate the onrushing concrete. For just a second, I think I understood seriously self-destructive behaviors: there really is a moment of exhilaration there. (Don't worry, I'm not about to throw myself in to oncoming traffic.)

Anyway, how was your evening?

This would never have occurred to me.

And now I feel like I should delete my facebook account.

Air strikes in Afghanistan: counter-productive, but now in smaller payloads!

So last week, NATO made a bit of news by saying "yes, we're going to continue the incredibly counter-productive strategy of substituting land forces with airpower, but we're going to start using smaller bombs."

War as a Monty Python sketch, I swear.

This has real consequences -- the American reliance on airpower has been so disastrous that the British (who are describing the fighting in Helmand province as the worst they've seen in Afghanistan since 2001) have asked the US to leave the area of operations entirely. To put it another way, the American way of war has proven so bad that it totally outweighs any advantages the British might have perceived.

Commenter Technetium took me to task for describing our progress in Afghanistan as "jack shit" last week, and sent me a few links to, I imagine, change my thinking -- or at least add to my thinking. (Please, nobody should ever hesitate to do this.) But I'm not about to take back those words, largely because of stories like this. We're proceeding from the (probably correct) view that, if we leave Afghanistan, the Taliban and others will reemerge and challenge the Karzai government for control of the country. At the same time, we're using methods that a) guarantee more popular support for our enemies and b) do nothing to actually win the war. (Air strikes are always, always, always ineffective against rural, low-tech insurgencies.) Our current posture, therefore, is nothing but a holding action. We refuse to commit sufficient resources to actually conclude this war in a meaningful sense. So the war goes on. So we have to stay longer. So the costs, in lives and dollars, continues to go up.

This is what I meant when I used those words, and I still mean it. The only meaningful definition of "progress" when it comes to foreign wars is "getting closer to the day when our soldiers can successfully come home." And I don't believe we're heading in the right direction. I'm not even sure that's a possibility anymore.

Save yourself some money, read me instead

The Globe and Mail, today:

The next time the Canadian government tells you it has secrets it needs to keep to protect national security, feel free to laugh out loud....

Mr. Arar is an Everyman who in the name of national security was made to endure some of the worst that the state can do to a human being. It was the United States that deported him. But important people in the RCMP and Canada's Foreign Affairs Department helped ensure that he stayed a good long time in his Syrian cell. Afterward, when Judge O'Connor tried to get the truth out, the Canadian government fought him in court for a year to keep the lid on 1,500 words.

We now know that the public had a right to see those words. They remind us of how fragile our civil liberties can be in a dangerous time.

Me, on an unrelated matter, January 2007:

So, very slowly children: If the government says it knows something you don't, and refuses to tell you what it is, the government is lying.

I suppose it's too much to ask that the Canadian people consider not electing either of the parties who spent the last few years lying to us about Maher Arar, right?

Reliable old nuclear power!

An unexpected build up of algae on a lake-water intake system used for cooling has forced Ontario Power Generation to temporarily shut down one of its Pickering nuclear reactors until the fast-growing green muck is cleaned up.

Experts say bad-smelling blooms of Cladophora algae are linked to warmer water temperatures and are likely to get worse as a result of global warming and high phosphorous levels caused by lawn fertilizers, agricultural runoff and detergents entering the lake.

Any nuclear reactors built in Canada are, more than likely, going to be built along the great lakes (whose water levels are dropping and becoming warmer with climate change) or possibly along the Athabasca (which is similarly threatened.)

People don't think of the number of inputs nuclear power takes -- daily use of fossil fuels to mine uranium being just one, but also vast amounts of cold water for cooling. If the available water is too little, or too warm, the reactor has to shut down.

Solar and wind do not face similar constraints.

Busy busy busy

Not a lot of time to blog, and on top of that my internet's down at home. In the meantime, you can read my feverish anti-nuclear ravings here at the Great Canadian Debate.

New Shiny Blogging!

Now brought to you via my shiny new laptop!

Morning thoughts

It's difficult to achieve a standard distribution of blueberries in a pancake.

The solution I've happened upon is to go for maximum blueberry density in each and every pancake.

Add butter + syrup = yum.

Well now I don't know what to do

Walking to the store might be worse for the planet than driving?

Although this one seems obvious to me:

The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

Well, yeah. When we all die from lethargy-induced diabetes or heart failure, the sheer fact of fewer humans would benefit the planet rather nicely, I suppose. Maybe that explains America's high obesity rates: a secret plan to combat global warming!

More seriously, the point of the article is how awful our food-production system in the west really is: food is so energy-intense (read: petroleum-intense) that you're better off putting the gas straight in to your gas tank for basic mobility.

Mitt Romney sez: US should be more like Hizbullah!

No, seriously. He said it. Video here, too.

The crazy thing is how non-crazy his actual argument is. (Basically, if poor people need health care in the muslim world, they get it from Hizbullah and Hamas, when the US could provide it better and win friends in the process.) But if Barack Obama had said it, can anyone imagine it not being played on Fox News for 72 hours straight?

Bizarre. Here we've got one of the front-runners for the Presidential nomination, saying something eminently rational, and the right-wingers are already calling for his head on a stick.

Paradoxes of occupation

So one of the long-term problems in Iraq has been (and will be) the difficulty in standing up a "national" army instead of a sectarian one. Iraq, of course, had a national army that the United States deliberately destroyed. But whatever.

Here's the problem for the US, and any other occupying army, anywhere: foreign countries have no legitimate claim to nationalism. It's kind of obvious, and it shouldn't even need to be said, but we will never, ever be able to tell the Iraqis what's good for their country, especially as long as our "advice" comes at the business end of an Abrams tank.

But suppose we succeeded in creating, from the ether, a truly national Iraqi army. What would it's first order of business be? To ask the US to leave. Because they don't intend to do so, the second order of business would be to force the issue. Ergo, America can never succeed in creating an effective, national army in Iraq.

The problems go deeper. The most nationalistic people in Iraq will not, in any possible future, volunteer in large numbers to serve in the collaborating regime propped up by the great Satan. If drafted, they will betray their units to other forces -- such as the Sadr JAM. The most nationalistic Iraqis, if they exist in the sense that we mean that word, are already fighting the occupation (and have been for years) in the hopes that their sectarian force will come out on top once the Americans leave. National unity through victory.

So this leaves the Americans with all the problems of the occupation still, but unable to put a native face on it. Worse still, because the Americans still have military objectives in Iraq, they need to arm various factions -- Sunni, Shia, Kurd -- as auxiliaries. But of course, all this does is arm the three sides of Iraq's eventual civil war.

A year and a bit too late

Ignatieff comes to his senses! Kind of! And about 18 months too late for it to matter for his career!

"The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president," Ignatieff writes in a reference to U.S. President George Bush.

"But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion."

There's also this bit:

In it, he is harshly critical of Bush. Ignatieff says that, unlike intellectuals who bat about ideas, political leaders can ruin millions of lives if they fail to understand realities.

"Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself," Ignatieff writes. "It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take care to understand himself." That's why Bush did not hear "warning bells" inside himself about Iraq, Ignatieff writes.

So should we be reassured or not that Ignatieff gave up the more intellectually competitive life of academia for the drooling insipidity of politics?

And why oh why is Michael Ignatieff, MP for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, still seem more at home in the pages of the New York Times? Couldn't he have found a way to speak to people who might actually vote for him?

Huh?

Peter Worthington in the Sun:

While one has sympathy for anyone in Taliban (or al-Qaida) hands, one also cannot escape the conclusion that it is largely the fault of captives that they are in such a precarious and frightening situation.

Yeah, I mean, when you dress like that you're just asking for it, right?

On the other hand, the fact that peaceful, decent people like the Korean Christians are captured and killed by such as the Taliban, is more evidence why Canadian and NATO troops are needed in that country -- not for the sake of hostages, but to help bring peace, security and a modicum of freedom to the Afghan people.

So: almost five years of war, and Afghanistan is still too dangerous and chaotic for civilian groups to do their work without fear of abduction and execution. So those civilian groups should all leave, and spare the military the need to rescue them -- but also, presumably, hurting or halting many promising development projects.

But -- and this is what's left me reeling and cranky this morning -- the fact that, after 5 years of this, we've still accomplished jack shit is a sign that we need to stay longer, accomplishing further jack shit but without having to worry about pesky civilians.

How many more years, exactly, of accomplishing jack shit are we supposed to sign up for again?