War games are useful, if you actually pay attention

(Cross-posted at Ezra's.)

With all the talk of escalating against Iran lately, it might be worth remembering that the last major war game the Pentagon conducted with Iran as the enemy was Millenium Challenge, where the "Red" [mock-Iranian] forces were commanded by Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper. How did that go for the "Blue" [mock-US] forces?

From Wikipedia:

In the early days of the exercise, Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps general Paul K. Van Riper, launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles, overwhelming the Blue forces electronic sensors, destroying thirteen warships. Soon after that offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats carrying out both conventional and suicide attacks, able to engage Blue forces due to Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

For those who don't recall, the Pentagon responded to this direct challenge to their preconceived notions by essentially calling a do-over. Now, I don't think the US Navy is going to be sunk. But that's not the real lesson of Millenium Challenge. What's the real lesson? Let me turn that over to the Lt. Gen. himself:

What I saw in this particular exercise and the results from it were very similar to what I saw as a young second lieutenant back in the 1960s, when we were taught the systems engineering techniques that Mr. [Robert] McNamara [Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson] had implemented in the American military. We took those systems, which had good if not great utility in the acquisition of weapon systems, to the battlefield, where they were totally inappropriate. The computers in Saigon said we were winning the war, while out there in the rice paddies we knew damn well we weren't winning the war. That's where we went astray, and I see these new concepts potentially being equally as ill-informed and equally dangerous.

The "concepts" that Van Riper is talking about are the broad concepts of "transformation" and how information technologies were, according to the geniuses at OSD, changing the fundamental nature of warfare. Van Riper is a very vocal critic of those ideas, the kind of solider who quotes Clausewitz and other military theorists and believes that the fundamental nature of war never changes. (No surprise: in this debate, I'm far closer to Van Riper than, say, Rumsfeld.) If the worst fears about recent personnel changes in the military are correct -- that it's a prelude for an air war against Iran -- than I fear the ideas of "transformation" are going to be tested again against Iran.

In which case, the McNamara comparison is going to be more apt than Van Riper knew when he made it: McNamara's (and more importantly) Walt Rostow's ideas were also tested in war games prior to the escalation of the Vietnam War. A pair of war games in 1964 (SIGMA I and SIGMA II) tested the ideas that North Vietnam could be deterred by aerial bombing or by American land forces. How did that go? From H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty (p. 156):

The game's results raised troubling questions about the viability of the Rostow thesis. After initiating a bombing campaign, the United States confronted "the question of what to do since escalation of the war into NVN [North Vietnam] had failed to achieve desired results in SVN [South Vietnam], and the enemy appeared to be raising the ante toward major ground warfare." The American "team", however, remained "anxious to continue trying to force the DRV out of the war through air attack." Lincoln noted that once open hostilities began, consideration of "possible alternative strategies such as to negotiate" was minimal and the United States "followed through with escalation of pressures against North Vietnam to include wiping out all all DRV industrial targets" and the mining of North Vietnamese ports. The bombing, however, had minimal effect and actually stiffened North Vietnamese determination, as the Viet Cong used existing stockpiles and civilian support to sustain the insurgency in the South. General Wheeler seemed particularly impressed by the game's findings that the Viet Cong's low demand for supplies, coupled with the agrarian nature of North Vietnam's society, made the enemy resistant to the use of air power.

Or, from those hippies at the CIA:

Like the SIGMA I war game played earlier in 1964, however, SIGMA II and its depressing outcome had no apparent dampening effect on senior decisionmakers' certainty that the way to save South Vietnam was to bomb the North and employ US combat forces in the South. Strategists continued their contingency planning toward those ends as if the outcome of SIGMA II (plus SIGMA I and Robert Johnson's earlier NSC working group study) had not occurred. The realism of SIGMA II would, however, get an early confirmation: the officer playing the role of the President committed a US Marine expeditionary force to South Vietnam's defense on 26 February l965 of the game's calendar. President Johnson did send just such a Marine force on the actual date of 8 March 1965, only 10 days later than in the war game. According to Walt Elder, McCone's former Special Assistant, the DCI participated in only one session of Sigma II because he "hated all war games"; on this one occasion he went out of "innate snobbery, when he learned that the other seniors would be there."

Ah, the best and the brightest.

I don't know what the future holds for America in the Gulf. I really, really hope that Bush isn't about to launch an air war against Iran -- the potential for disaster is simply too high. If I were a religious person, I'd be about ready to pray right now. But we won't be able to say we -- or they -- weren't warned. But, we aren't able to say that about Iraq, either.

The best summary of American foreign policy, ever.

Spencer Ackerman, on the disproportionate size of the US military:

The security threats that we face as a nation have to do primarily with our position as the predominant global superpower. ... If Italy decides tomorrow that it wants to take up America's global commitments, it will find that it needs a vastly larger military to avert the disasters that hegemony tempts.

...The issue has more to do with being the global equivalent of 50 Cent -- a mercurial, violent paranoiac possessing undeniable greatness, intensely loyal to a select few, merciless to most others and determined to remain on top of the heap by any means necessary. We get ours the ski mask way. As a result, we had better stay strapped.

America is the most powerful nation in the world. Therefore, America is feared. Therefore, America is hated. Therefore, America needs to defend itself. Therefore, America is the most powerful nation in the world.

What's so hard to understand?

I'm feeling lazy today

So this will be the second post (indirectly) from the comments section: Uncorrected Proofs has a post up about eliminating the state-funded separate Catholic school board in Ontario, something I've written about (well, alluded to) before positively. But the real comedy, as always, comes from the hate mail. Since it mentions "people like" UC, I'm calling a jump-in:

People like you disgust me.

What? I showered this morning. As far as you know.

You defend the rights of women to kill babies,

But only with deli slicers!

the rights of homosexuals to marry,

Don't forget divorce! I'm crazy for divorce!

the rights of doctors to murder terminally-ill patients,

Do they make adult-sized deli slicers?

the rights of businesses to sell pornography,

It's not a right. It's an obligation.

and the rights of people to smoke pot,

Well, only when they're too young for crystal meth.

but you won't support the rights of Catholics to have our own system of education.

Because as we all know, if you've had the right to government subsidies once, you're entitled to government subsidies forever. I can't wait to try that at the welfare office.

To turn the snark off, the issue isn't whether Catholics are "allowed" to their own separate school system (why not?) but rather whether the state has a role in organizing and financing it. In the 19th century, this was a peacemaking gesture between Ontario and Quebec. In the 21st century, it's a historical relic. I'm not opposed to keeping historical relics around, if they aren't doing serious harm. I'd need to be shown some more evidence that the Catholic board is actually a negative influence in Ontario before I'd really get behind reforming it, but I'm certainly open to the idea.

Tonkin, cont.

Jon Schwarz reminds us that the "stage an incident to start a war" was also part of the rough draft for Iraq.

From the comment bag

• General blogroll policy: If you link to me on your blogroll, let me know, I'm happy to reciprocate. So Dead Issue gets added, as soon as I can get to the template editor...
  
  If you've already linked to me and you're not on the roll, just drop a note in comments or email me.


• From Sven, this link to a review of Victor Davis Hanson's screed about the Peloponnesian War made me laugh. Especially this bit:

  Some of the other mistakes are on a whole different scale. Take the title, A War Like No Other. If Hanson believes that the Peloponnesian War was really so unique, why does he spend his first chapters making far-fetched connections between that war and every other war in history? If he wanted his title to reflect what he actually argues, Hanson should have called this book A War Like Nearly Every Other, Especially Iraq.

What always gets me is the North American conception of the Peloponnesian War always sees America as Athens. Now, there are some definite similarities, but it's unclear to me why an American would see this as a good thing. What's the laudatory aspect of Athenian history? The way it turned a defensive alliance in to a vehicle for imperial power and enriching one city? The poorly thought out strategies of Pericles which brought Athens to war without a means to win? Maybe the most eerily prescient part of Thucydides is when Pericles tells the liberals in Athens -- who were arguing that Athens should take a softer line with the subject cities -- that while democracy was all well and good for Athens, the world had to be ruled as a tyranny. Athens, Pericles said, couldn't afford to let go of the empire once they had it, because the cities who'd once been Athens' subjects would turn around and destroy Athens.

I think every single conqueror in history has probably just repeated Pericles. But again, why would an American (other than crazy old Victor Hanson) ever see this as a good thing, something worth emulating?

We've already lost

Matthew Yglesias:

Goldberg notes that "Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake--thirty five per cent." Peter Beinart cites a similar poll to likewise make the point that liberals have become crazed peaceniks. Goldberg would, however, do well to provide some analysis of the substantive question. ... After all, to a remarkable degree the administration managed not to accomplish its objectives.

The primary reason why Afghanistan is in anyone's national interest, post-9/11, is to try and keep the Taliban and Al Qaeda from re-establishing a safe haven in Central Asia. Well, um, too late -- the treaty the Taliban signed with the Pakistani government gives them safe haven inside Pakistan's borders. This isn't just bad, it's substantially worse than what we had pre-9/11. After all, invading or attacking Afghanistan was always an option -- invading Pakistan will never be. (It's a nuclear power, ya dig?)

Does this mean the only reason to stay in Afghanistan is gone? No, but the main "national interest" argument has disappeared. What we're left with now is essentially a war to keep Pakistan from returning Afghanistan to it's decade-long status as proxy state for Islamabad, or basically a peacekeeping mission to keep the Pashtun insurgency bottled up in the south while a government in the north -- with no legitimacy among the ethnic majority in Afghanistan -- tries to solidify its control. Let's just say I don't like our odds.

Brave New World

Most Macleans content -- except of course for Paul Wells' blog -- makes me either yawn or yell, but there's an interesting article on the ethics of reproductive technologies.

Advances in genetic screening have made it possible to "weed out" the disorder early in pregnancies, or even in advance of them. On Saturday, the National Post reported that the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada will soon follow the American lead by recommending that all pregnant women be screened for fetal abnormalities, including Down's...

University of Toronto philosophy professor Joseph Boyle was less sure. "Information as such is a good thing, particularly if there's some kind of good use for it," he responded. "But other than having an abortion if the child is discovered to have Down's, what good is that information going to be?"...

Parents of those with Down's have reacted angrily, as well. "I'm not sure what it is about our children that society abhors," Val Surbey wrote in a letter to the Post. "I can't understand what it is that he has done that is so horrible that society is looking to eliminate others like him."

I'm pretty open to these technologies, myself. If the parents want to abort a fetus with a crippling disability, I don't see that as an issue. But I'm also for a person -- or yes, their legal guardians in concert with medical opinion -- being allowed to choose euthanasia.

Basically, I don't see any way for us to avoid these kinds of selective abortions -- the technology for scans are proliferating, and abortion is and should remain legal, and that's pretty much all she wrote. The issue of banning this kind of abortion is, if anything, more clear than terminating a "normal" pregnancy. If a woman doesn't want to bring a disorder-free child to term, what right does the state have to force a disabled child on her?

People talk about "designer babies" or scenarios out of Gattaca. That's over-complicating things. Here we have two very simple technologies -- prenatal screenings and abortions -- and both have a legitimate place in our medical toolbox. But the idea of deliberately using them in concert seems to give people the willies.

Maybe this puts me on the Libertarian side of an issue, for once. I just don't see the pressing need to forbid this kind of stuff.

Why people should read a frickin book every once in a while

Tim at Balloon Juice:

Convinced that the student revolution left Iran’s oil fields undefended, Saddam Hussein tried and failed to make a quick grab for the border provinces. After some skirmishing Hussein essentially pulled back and hoped that the Mullahs would let bygones be bygones. They didn’t. Iran sent everything it had after Iraq, with or without equipment and training, over and over again....

Anyhow, just a random thought on a Thursday afternoon. I’m sure that Iran will prove perfectly pliable to American intimidation, especially if we throw in a bombing raid or two. If that doesn’t work, well, bygones.

Rob at MyBlahg:

All that remains is the casus belli to whip the warhawks into another war fever; which for America can either come in the form of a justifiable one such as Pearl Harbour or a bogus one such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Ah, Tonkin. It's now well-established that the Tonkin gulf was, at best, a collossal fuckup by the US Navy, and at worst a deliberate falsification (though the evidence for deliberate lies is pretty thin these days.) What's less understood is that, in fact, the US had been launching covert attacks from US naval assets against North Vietnam for years before the Tonkin Gulf incident. So the North Vietnamese had plenty of reasons to assume the Maddox was hostile in 1964.

Back in the US, where the public and most of Congress had been kept ignorant of the CIA and Pentagon's work in Indochina, the Tonkin Gulf was seen as an unprovoked attack -- it was nothing of the sort. Meanwhile in the present, there's been constant rumours that the US has covert forces in Iran since last summer.

And, also via Robert, this at Glenn Greenwald's place makes me feel like I'm not paranoid enough:

• Israel's Prime Minister "accidentally" ending decades of nuclear ambiguity by unambiguously acknowledging Israel's nuclear arsenal;


• New Defense Secretary Robert Gates's extraordinary departure -- the very same week -- from long-standing protocol by explicitly describing Israel as a nuclear power;


• The arrest by the U.S. military of senior Iranian military officials in Iraq;


• The announced build-up of forces in the Persian Gulf back in December, the purpose of which -- according to Bush officials -- "is to make clear that the focus on ground troops in Iraq has not made it impossible for the United States and its allies to maintain a military watch on Iran" (UPDATE: As well as this incident revealing the placement of a nuclear-powered submarine in the Straits of Hormuz);


• The leaking by the Israeli military that Israel was developing plans for an attack on Iran using small-grade, limited tactical nuclear weapons. Though the leak was done in such a way as to create plausible deniability as to its significance -- the leak was to a discredited newspaper and leaks that a country has "planned" for a certain type of attack are commonplace and do not mean they are actually going to attack -- the leak was nonetheless deliberate and caused the phrases "Israeli nuclear attack" and "Iran" to be placed into the public dialogue, at exactly the time that tensions have been deliberately heightened between the U.S./Israel and Iran -- the purpose of which is almost certainly not a planned nuclear attack by Israel on Iran, but a ratchering up of the war rhetoric;


• Increasingly explicit advocacy by neoconservatives in the U.S. for a war with Iran, as reflected by the recent Washington Post Op-Ed by Joe Lieberman in which he really did declare that the U.S. is already at war with Iran ("While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is emerging. On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran");


• in the later stages of 2006, the President's most prominent neoconservative supporters becoming increasingly explicit about their advocacy of war with Iran;


• The transparent and deliberate use by the President throughout the last several months of 2006 of highly threatening and accusatory language towards Iran that is identical in content and tone to the language he used towards Iraq in the months immediately preceding the U.S. invasion -- often verbatim identical.

Scary Times

I can only remember one time that felt like this: when Nixon was in the last weeks of his Presidency, and people -- including the then-Secretary of Defense-- got worried that Nixon might try to start a war to distract the country from his troubles, or even stage some sort of coup. People in DC even began to speculate as to what military forces could be assembled as a counterweight in the event that Nixon, rumored to be drunk and unstable, chose to subvert the Constitution.

According to reports published after Nixon resigned, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger even went as far to tell some of the highest-ranking military officers to inform him if any 'extraordinary orders' went out from the White House and to refrain from carrying out any orders which came from the White House outside the normal military channels.

This meshes well with that interview I quoted yesterday with Chris Hedges, talking about how suddenly the status quo can disintegrate. People don't really appreciate how close America came to something much, much worse than Watergate already was.

Sony: Doomed.

Sorry, but if this is true, Sony is insane:

German Heise has interviewed Joone the founder of Digital Playgrounds at the AVN 2007 show in Las Vegas. Joone says actually said last year he is committed to Blu-ray. Now they announced four HD DVD titles in the United States. In the interview Joone says he was forced to use HD DVD, because no Blu-ray disc manufacturer would make his discs, because Sony was against it and they would loose their license.

If Sony is making no-porn a condition of getting a Blu-Ray license, they're going to die on the market. This is so bizarre, it really beggars the mind. That's why I keep using the word "if". I really can't understand why you would do this. It'd be like if Apple announced none of it's computers would access Internet porn.

I heart Chuck Hagel

The Good Republican:

To ask our young men and women to sacrifice their lives to be put in the middle of a civil war is wrong.

It’s, first of all, in my opinion, morally wrong. It’s tactically, strategically, militarily wrong.

[Snip]

When you were engaging Chairman Biden on this issue on the specific question of, Will our troops go into Iran or Syria in pursuit, based on what the president said last night?, you cannot sit here today — not because you’re dishonest or you don’t understand — but no one in our government can sit here today and tell Americans that we won’t engage the Iranians and the Syrians cross-border.

Some of us remember 1970, Madam Secretary. And that was Cambodia. And when our government lied to the American people and said, We didn’t cross the border going into Cambodia, in fact we did. I happen to know something about that, as do some on this committee.

So, Madam Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy that the president is talking about here, it’s very, very dangerous. As a matter of fact, I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam — if it’s carried out.

I will resist it.

Hagel's been a good guy for a while now, but what's shocking to me is that the poll numbers really haven't changed. I had kind of assumed that as the drumbeat of escalation really got going, we'd see a shift in public support. I guess Bush really has lost that magic touch he once had. I understood that was possible, but really, I didn't expect it.

Kevin Drum says it so I don't have to

Basically, Bush declared war on Iran, Syria, the Shia, the Sunni, and maybe the Sun yesterday night.

But I'm sure it will all turn out all right. No worries.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Without necessarily endorsing a book I haven't read -- but want to -- I found this interview with Chris Hedges about his upcoming book American Fascists fascinating, especially this bit:

People have a very hard time believing the status quo of their existence, or the world around them, can ever change. There's a kind of psychological inability to accept how fragile open societies are. When I was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, at the start of the war, I would meet with incredibly well-educated, multilingual Kosovar Albanian friends in the cafes. I would tell them that in the countryside there were armed groups of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who I'd met, and they would insist that the Kosovo Liberation Army didn't exist, that it was just a creation of the Serb police to justify repression.

You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don't understand how radically changed our country is, don't understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans.

People forget that places like Lebanon, Argentina, or even Yugoslavia were once places of peace, order, and stability -- even prosperity, of a sort. But democratic societies aren't that hard to break, provided that you don't pay attention to what your leaders are saying.

I think the vast majority of followers have no idea. There's an earnestness to many of the believers. I had the same experience you did -- I went in there prepared to really dislike these people and most of them just broke my heart. They're well meaning. Unfortunately, they're being manipulated and herded into a movement that's extremely dangerous. If these extreme elements actually manage to achieve power, they will horrify [their followers] in many ways. But that's true with all revolutionary movements.

The core of this movement is tiny, but you only need a tiny, disciplined, well-funded and well-organized group, and then you count on the sympathy of 80 million to 100 million evangelicals. And that's enough.

As repellent as it is to believe, most Nazis -- even early members, in some cases, but certainly later on -- were decent enough people. They believed Hitler had a good plan for Germany, and convinced themselves that he didn't really mean what he said sometimes. Most of all, Hitler delivered early on, with stability and then better living standards.

It's why I'm regularly horrified when people say about any leader "well he just says that because X", where X is "the media", "his base", etc.

Wrong, right out of the gate

Boy, I'd be a lot more optimistic about Iraq if I hadn't read the GOP talking points provided by Matt Yglesias:

Success is the only option in Iraq.

Swing and a miss. Defeat isn't just possible, at this point it's the likeliest outcome.

Iraq has a plan in place to enforce the rule of law equally, achieve security and bring stability to the country.

Yes, it's called the Mahdi Army. What?

The deployment of additional troops is to support Iraq’s new plan for stability.

So American soldiers will be taking orders from an Iraqi? Seems we should be talking about that, if true. If US troops won't be under Iraqi command, how are they part of the plan?

But here's the big one:

Our commitment in Iraq is not open-ended. To the extent the U.S. has offered support to Iraq, we are doing so because they have made a compelling case that they are stepping-up their commitment to equal application of the rule of law and achieving lasting security.

So what happens when the troops get there and nothing's gotten better? Do they go home? Saying it isn't "open-ended" doesn't just mean you set theoretical goals, it means that failure to reach those goals has consequences. What happens when Maliki doesn't make the cut? I don't believe that Bush is ready to pack up and go home yet.

Not Switching Yet

I'm intrigued by Apple's announcement of AppleTV. It looks like it will kind of, well, suck... at least at first. We'll see how it evolves. For now, you won't be able to download shows from iTunes straight to your ATV box, nor will you be able to use a USB stick for extra storage. It won't support ripped DVDs, nor DivX files.

But, via BoingBoing, this is the interesting bit...

The Apple TV device has HDMI and component outputs. As of the launch, it doesn't have the HDCP anti-copying technology.

As you might imagine, this is an issue to media companies and they aren't sure if they'll supply HD content. They want money but they want 'security'.

Consider that the Xbox 360 has video component HD out (no HDCP) and the Apple TV will have HDMI and component out (no HDCP).

Is the de facto standard now set by Apple & Microsoft?

Obviously both systems will be all DRMed up anyway (Fairplay and Playsforsure, we can assume) but HDCP is a truly nasty bit of technology. To see it be spurned by both Apple and MSFT makes my heart grow a size for these companies, if only a bit.

The other bit of speculation is that the hardware in the AppleTV box will be easy to port the open-source, free, MythTV software. That would give it the functionality it currently lacks, and might make me buy one after all.

Hypotheticals

Oh I wish I were this good a blogger:

Zengerle wants to lead us into a set of rhetorical questions intended to make us more thoughtful about withdrawal. To work, however, rhetorical questions shouldn't have obvious answers.

1. What are the consequences of America losing a war?
The same as the consequences of any other country losing a war, only far less so since the war was fought far away for reasons tangential to genuine US security interests.

2. What will it do to our position in the world?
The dreadful defeat will leave the US the most powerful country in the world.

This whole line of argument -- "people should be honest with the consequences of withdrawal from Iraq" -- leaves me gasping. If we'd been honest about the consequences of invading Iraq in the first place, then we wouldn't be in this mess.

Moreover, the argument that "things will be worse if the US leaves Iraq" manages to be both dubious in accuracy and utility at the same time. First of all, it could simply be untrue -- without the US there, the Shia militias might achieve a rapid victory in the Civil War and establish some kind of order. Any order, at this point, would be preferable to the status quo.

I'm not saying this will happen, but you can't simply assert that the US presence is keeping things from spinning out of control. There's certainly no historical evidence for it -- we've arrived at the current war of all against all in Iraq with an extremely heft US presence, and it clearly hasn't stopped us from getting here.

Which leads to the second point: the current trajectory of things in Iraq is horrible, and getting worse. This, I repeat, with a hefty US presence. Even if you assume the US is having a marginal positive effect on affairs in that country (the reverse could be true) it is quite clearly not enough to change the direction things are headed. At best, Americans are lightly braking the bloodletting, not stopping it, nor even keeping it from accelerating.

So whatever horrible things are going to happen in Iraq will probably happen anyway, just on a different timetable depending on the US presence. Say, for example, that the end point in Iraq is some Bosnian ethnic division between Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. Is it worth 500 American lives, or 1,000, to make sure that this happens in 2009 instead of 2008?

I've been saying this since I started this blog -- the US does not control affairs in Iraq, and hasn't since at least the spring/summer of 2004.

Which means they should get out. The President has the authority to spend soldiers' lives, but only on the condition that the objectives are achievable and in the national interest of the United States. Iraq is neither, and Bush doesn't have the right to squander human beings simply to keep from being the guy who lost Iraq.

On manners

So my last post -- accusing Conservatives of wanting Canadian soldiers dead -- was intemeperate, even by my own standards. It is also exactly a mirror of the language slung at the NDP for the last year over Afghanistan, so any Conservatives who have a problem with this should look at the beam in their eyes before screaming to me.

But let's check the scorecard for "baseless accusations of perfidy" today...

* The name of Dinesh D'Sousa's upcoming presentation at the Heritage Foundation blaming liberal Americans for 9/11: "The Enemy at Home"

* Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson this morning on Sen. Ted Kennedy and other war opponents: “hostile enemies right here on the home front."

* Sean Hannity's newest Sunday show feature targeting liberals: "Enemy of the State."

Blaming the left for 9/11 began just hours after the Twin Towers fell that Tuesday morning. So don't expect any sympathy from me on this count -- I've spent the last five years being accused of hating freedom, being a racist, and wanting the Taliban to retake Afghanistan. All because I opposed (and continue to oppose) the war in Iraq and I've tried, and increasingly failed, to square my support for NATO's mission with the conclusion that we're increasingly likely to fail in Kandahar.

Even Olaf at The Prairie Wranglers, a blogger who I respect and whose writings I enjoy, has played this game with me (albeit more politely than some) and I get fucking sick of it.

This isn't a "you did it first" excuse (even though the right objectively did, in fact, do it first) but rather a bargain: When Blogging Tories STFU about "Taliban Jack", when calling Canadians "pro-Taliban" is seen by Tories as beyond the pale in reasonable company, when we can generally have a serious debate about foreign policy without the useless competition to see who's more patriotic/bloodthirsty than who, then you'll get my apology for the post immediately below. And not a second sooner.

Bush is going to get Canadians killed

Scott said it first, but it deserves repeating: The surge of US troops to Iraq is going to expose Canadian soldiers to even more risk at a time when the insurgents in Afghanistan are gearing up for a major mobilization.

But heaven forbid we actually object to US foreign policy. That just makes us crazy lefties and knee-jerk anti-Americans, right Tories?

Why do Tories want more dead Canadians?

Bush and my cynicism with the power of law

A little story for you: Back, many moons ago, in my first year of university, I was taking Intro to Political Science, where we learned that, according to Max Weber, there are three types of authority that governments rest on: Charismatic, Traditional, and Rational-legal. Weber's distinctions left me unimpressed. I made the argument to my professor that the distinction between "traditional" and "rational-legal" modes of authority sounded awfully artificial to me, especially when you consider the way we actually act in relation to the law. Specifically, Canadians and Americans tend to refer to their respective constitutions as holy writ, or as Bill Maher has said about the Bill of Rights: "They're called amendments, not commandments!"

Let me put it another way: It is, I believe, a misunderstanding to think there's a bright line separating Weber's "traditional" modes of authority (patriarchy, monarchy, feudalism) and a legal-rational framework. Any study of French feudalism or patriarchies from primary societies quickly discovers that there are extremely substantive legal frameworks woven in each. (Though Weber can be forgiven for being ignorant of historical and anthropological research that would occur after his death.) Bluntly put, said I to my professor, there's really not that much separating our "rational-legal" world from the "traditional" one, and any effort to distance ourselves really only serves to let us pat ourselves on the back.

My professor was as unimpressed with my arguments as I was with Weber's. George Bush, on the other hand, has made my argument feel even more correct to me. His signing statements are notorious now for subverting the law, there's an open debate whether Bush will even obey Congress should it try and restrict his war aims, and Marty Lederman says Bush is even less obedient to the law than Richard Nixon. You remember how that ended, right?

Let me give a more specific example. I've been talking a lot about Vietnam lately, and one of the things that went disastrously wrong in Vietnam was the marginalization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So in the 1980s, Congress passed a new law that was a direct reaction to the trauma of Vietnam, which added a whole bunch of statutory powers to the JCS and was supposed to prevent some new McNamara from marginalizing the Chiefs in the same way.

Well, now that the Rumsfeld era is finally over, we can say at least one thing for certain: the law didn't work. Rumsfeld found whole new ways to marginalize the JCS and silence opposition in the military. This pattern can be found over and over again in the Bush II period -- laws passed, laws ignored, Congress did nothing.

So today Ted Kennedy announced a bill forbidding the introduction of new troops in to Iraq. And I love him for it. But what happens if Bush simply ignores the law, or introduces a signing statment rendering it meaningless, or using any one of the tricks he's been using all along? What happens to the law when the man charged with protecting and executing the law renders it meaningless?

Pelosi has said that impeachment is off the table. I really, really hope there's a "for now" in that statement. Because if Bush disobeys a directive of Congress, there's really no other alternative.

All you need to know

...about the so-called "surge":

Petraeus and his co-authors discussed this strategy at great length in the Army's counterinsurgency field manual. One point they made is that it requires a lot of manpower -- at minimum, 20 combat troops for every 1,000 people in the area's population. Baghdad has about 6 million people; so clearing, holding, and building it will require about 120,000 combat troops.

Right now, the United States has about 70,000 combat troops in all of Iraq (another 60,000 or so are support troops or headquarters personnel). Even an extra 20,000 would leave the force well short of the minimum required—and that's with every soldier and Marine in Iraq moved to Baghdad. Iraqi security forces would have to make up the deficit.

And all you need to know about why it's happening:

One widespread, and plausible, theory is that the surge constitutes a last-ditch effort at success. The thinking goes like this: Maybe this will work; and if it doesn't work, the United States can cut its losses and pull back without making the retreat seem like too disastrous a debacle. "We gave it our all," the president could say; "don't blame us that it fell apart." And, since Kagan and other surge-advocates are saying the plan would take about two years to succeed or fail, the next president—not Bush—would be the one who orders, and takes all the heat for, the retreat.

I am not one who likens the Iraq war to Vietnam, but there is an eerie parallel to a memo that John McNaughton, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's closest aide, sent to him on March 24, 1965, after it seemed clear that the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign was producing scant results. "The situation in Vietnam is bad and deteriorating," McNaughton wrote. The important aim now is to "avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." Therefore, it is essential "that the U.S. emerge as a 'good doctor.' We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied, and hurt the enemy very badly."

Holy Crap! Richard Cohen writes something sensible!

Richard Cohen, last seen whining about how mean Stephen Colbert was to the President at a White House dinner, seems to have snapped out of it for now:

In Iowa, during the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush answered a question about why he so ardently supported capital punishment. He offered a number of reasons, but one -- deterrence -- prompted me to raise my hand and ask a follow-up: But, sir, there is absolutely no evidence that capital punishment is a deterrent. To my astonishment, Bush conceded my point: "You're right. I can't prove it. But neither can the other side prove it's not."...

Ponder that answer for a while. What it means is not just that Bush embraced a famously irrational way of thinking -- the logical fallacy often called "proving a negative" -- but in this case he used it to overwhelm all evidence to the contrary.

Up against this kind of mentality, the rational man seeks comfort in fantasy. It was our fantasy that a new Iraqi government, formulated months ago, would so turn things around that Bush would begin a phased withdrawal. It was our fantasy that the November congressional elections would make a difference -- and that Bush would be forced, when he saw the clear sentiment of the American people, to reverse himself. It was our fantasy that the report of the Iraq Study Group would compel the president to rethink everything -- so vast was the panel's expertise, so sound its reasoning and so comforting its appropriately thinning hair. In fact, so wasted was its effort. The members were the mullers. Bush was the decider.

And so those who have decided otherwise -- a couple of four-stars, maybe the chief spook and all those awfully smart people throughout government and academia -- are ignored and/or are heading out the door. Bush listened to them when he agreed with them and refused to listen when he did not....

The execution of Saddam Hussein was Iraq in a nutshell.... It was sloppy, putrid with the stench of sectarian hatred and, as always, totally unnecessary. George Bush saw it differently by not, as is his custom, seeing it at all.

Trademark-infringing: VDH-bashing, or "What's Attic for 'stabbed in the back'?"

The guys at Lawyers, Guns, and Money won't mind extra scorn heaped on Victor Davis Hanson, I hope. If you listen to this episode of Radio Open Source (sometime venue for Ezra) you'll hear them debating the modern relevance of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. At one point, discussing the relevance of Thucydides to Iraq, Hanson says (at about 48:30):

...the text seems to suggest that Athens gave everything the commanders wanted in the field, and yet when he sums up he says that the greatest problem with the Athenian expedition to Sicily was the lack of support back home. Which people don't really want to uh, talk about much today.

That was a new one to me. I had to read various chunks of Thucydides for some classes in University, but never read the whole book cover to cover. My limited reading was that there was little doubt that the Sicilian expedition was pretty much a cockup from beginning to end. In any case, it's pretty easy to find the stuff about Syracuse -- the most crucial events are in the last two books, 7 and 8. So what the hell is Hanson talking about?

Crucially, Book 7 details the campaign in Sicily and the ensuing disaster for Athens, and not once mentions the domestic politics of Athens (though it does speak of the Spartan invasion of Athens, a common occurrence during the war.) After the troops arrive in Sicily, the next reference to domestic concerns in Athens comes at the beginning of Book 8, after the disastrous defeat in Sicily:

When the news was brought to Athens, for a long while they disbelieved even the most respectable of the soldiers...

Fox News is older than I thought!

When the conviction was forced upon them, they were angry with the orators who had joined in promoting the expedition, just as if they had not themselves voted it....

Wait a minute. I think I see what's going on here...

and were enraged also with the reciters of oracles and soothsayers, and all other omen-mongers of the time who had encouraged them to hope that they should conquer Sicily. Already distressed at all points and in all quarters, after what had now happened, they were seized by a fear and consternation quite without example.

Ah. If this is what VDH means by his remarks above (and I honestly don't know where he's pulling that, this is just my best guess) then I'd say he's misreading Thucydides. But we knew that. I think it's safe to say what frightens VDH is not the prospect that we won't support our troops at home. Rather, what frightens him is that once American involvement in Iraq comes to its ignominious end, Americans will (like the Athenians in their day) turn on "the reciters of oracles and soothsayers, and all other omen-mongers" who got them in to this damn war. That would be you, Victor. Not that I think Hanson has anything to worry about -- if we've learned anything in the last few years, it's that punditry is a risk-free profession.

Even more bizarrely, earlier in the show (at about 32:00) Hanson engages in what I was always told was the cardinal sin for historians -- counterfactual argument. He briefly states a number of things that could have gone right for Athens, leading to victory: What if X had been a better leader, what if Y had been present, what if Z hadn't happened. I wonder what he thinks about the similarities between Alcibiades and Ahmed Chalabi (both men were the most ardent voices for war, and of dubious loyalty) or between Segesta and the Iraqi National Congress?

No Alternatives

via Atrios, this piece of snotty elitism from a reporter, in response to a demand for withdrawal from Iraq:

Would you want a department store manager or orthodontist running the Pentagon? I don't think so. The reason that many politicians are squeamish about hard and fast goals of any kind in Iraq is that there is no simple response or solution -- it would have emerged by now. A withdrawal by year's end carries enormous, very serious implications.

Exactly the same game that got us in to the war in the first place:

Step 1) The media dismisses any views counter to Washington's status quo.
2003: We need to invade!
2006: We need to stay!

Step 2) The media declares that there's "no alternative", because they haven't allowed any discussion.
2003: Saddam could have WMDs.
2006: "A withdrawal by year's end carries enormous, very serious implications."

Step 3) Disaster ensures. Whee.

Ignoring Newton's Third Law

So I finished reading Dereliction of Duty today. Fantastic reading, and I'll write more about it later. But for now I want to deal with one of the key misunderstandings that McMaster identifies in the thinking that lead to Vietnam.

By 1963, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert McNamara had come to the conclusion that war per se was obsolete, and all that was necessary was to signal to the enemy how high a price you were willing to pay to deter them. McNamara had obviously developed this view during the Crisis, and in that case it served him well -- war was averted, and America's aims were achieved.

The problem is that the USSR was willing to give up Cuban missiles, in exchange for a guarantee of Cuban safety and a withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey. So not only was the sacrifice palatable to Khruschev, but there was something the US could offer that he was interested in. So when the Americans escalated the situation, Khruschev could still rationalize backing down -- Cuba was "protected" and Soviet security was improved by the removal of missiles from Turkey.

The problem with Vietnam was that a) no sacrifice of the North's aim was acceptable to them -- they saw national reunification as a matter of life and death -- and b) there was nothing the US could offer them as reward for compromise (because of A.) In this scenario, escalation had exactly the opposite effect on the North that it had on the USSR: rather than back down, the North escalated in step with the US, even though these escalations were far bloodier for the North than for the US.

Even at the close of the war, Nixon's extensive bombing campaigns only succeeded in bringing the North to agree to formalize the status quo, with Northern units still inside the South when the US left.

Which brings us to Iraq. It's almost too kind to describe this "surge" idea as a strategy, because I think it's clearly a political lifeline that Bush is grasping for to ride out the last of his tenure. Still, the insurgency's motivations aren't exactly mysterious: Yankee Go Home. And they're clearly willing to sacrifice a lot: suicide bombers exist, and have flourished in Iraq. Is there any compromise possible with these actors? No. Is there any incentive the US can give them for desisting? No. So what will an American escalation produce?

You got it -- an Iraqi escalation:

At the same time, the Mahdi Army in Sadr City has begun a conscription drive to expand its ranks. Every family with a male between the ages of 15 and 45 is being forced to relinquish him to the militia.

Escalation: designed to fail.

Things I did not know, cont.

Washington DC: Not actually built on a swamp.

Journalism Cliché watch

Olaf says:

Third: If you think any news sources is completely bias-free, you've got another thing coming.

True, which is why most of the journalists I've ever spoken with (and it's the family business, I've spoken with more than a few) don't use the word bias to discuss their professional conduct. They prefer "objectivity". It may sound like semantics, but it's possible for a journalist to concede that (as a human with an intact brain) they are indeed biased. Nevertheless, it's also possible for them to remain objective.

Another way to put it would be to say it's possible to be biased without being unfair or reporting untruths. If the Tories screw up and have a bad news day, it's not because the media hates them, it's because the government having a bad news day is what the media is supposed to cover. This remains true even if the media does, in fact, hate them.

As for the specifics of Liberal bloggers screaming about Pierre Bourque (who?) he seems to be Canada's answer to Matt Drudge, so I hereby intend to give one the amount of attention I pay to the other. Guess how much?

Meanwhile, Jenna Bush was drunkenly dragged from a club somewhere in DC

Prince William is beginning life as an army officer after arriving at the barracks of his new regiment.

William, who is second in line to the throne, will report for duty later for his first official day with the Household Cavalry.

The 24-year-old, who is joining the Blues and Royals regiment, will be based at Combermere Barracks, Windsor.

After his first year in the Army, the prince will turn his attention to constitutional affairs.

This process will be in anticipation of when he eventually accedes the throne.

By joining the Army, William is following in the footsteps of younger brother Harry.

Say this for the Europeans -- they do aristocracy right. It would be unthinkable for someone with William or even Harry's proximity to the throne to not serve, war or no.

Meanwhile, North Americans seem to allow our aristocrats to have all the wealth and power of old-school nobility without any, uh, nobility.

Woe unto the fans

Slactivist on the awkwardness that is cheering Philly against New Orleans:

I know, I know -- it's just a football game. But I also know this: New Orleans needs this. How do I know that? Because Philadelphia needs this too. And, since Philly wasn't nearly destroyed and then left to die, I'm guessing that New Orleans maybe needs this a little bit more.

Things I find amusing

1) When I put a post up at Ezra's, no matter how prominent the words "Posted by John" appear, someone always thinks it's Ezra writing. Sometimes many someones.

2) The number -- apparently limitless -- who think they might score a "gotcha" by asking whether I drive a Hybrid or something. For the record: Living in downtown Toronto, I own no car and feel no compunction to. I'm writing this by the light of a single CFL bulb. We've had freakishly mild weather, so the furnace isn't on. I think over the summer the A/C was on for all of 14 days, cumulative. I do eat more beef than is probably good for me, but Vicki and I have been making efforts to cut out the worst forms of meat. I love tofu, but when you live with Vicki, that's not optional.

(Some of these statements aren't my doing -- I live in the basement of a house, so heating/cooling decisions aren't up to me.)

I don't know why so many people assume that if I'm saying things like "people should drive less", I'm secretly just hoping there will be fewer people in the path of my Hummer.

Oh, SNAP

Paul Krugman:

But Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan appealed to Mr. Bush’s ego, suggesting that he might yet be able to rescue his signature war. And am I the only person to notice that after all the Oedipal innuendo surrounding the Iraq Study Group — Daddy’s men coming in to fix Junior’s mess, etc. — Mr. Bush turned for advice to two other sons of famous and more successful fathers?

Lessons Unlearned

This story has been making the rounds a bit -- apparently, the Iraqi Parliament is about to vote on the new national Oil Law, and it's effectively a giveaway to the usual suspects.

(But remember children, the invasion of Iraq had NOTHING TO DO WITH OIL.)

It's important not to overstate the likelihood of these agreements actually lasting. A "30-year contract" isn't likely to last 30 years, and frankly I'd be surprised if they last 30 months. Based on the experience of the oil majors in Russia, I expect the story will go something like this:

• Negotiate sweetheart deals while the government is in no position to bargain.
• The government is in a cruddy position up to the moment it begins to regain effective control of its borders and people.
• The old deals are "renegotiated" as the reinvigorated government takes control.

Honestly, I don't think this law will last longer than it takes for one side to win the civil war post-US departure. Any company that stakes its profitability on these ventures is just throwing away money.

Then there's the other thing -- the frankly queasy sight of the American government pushing this law (though Washington's fingerprints are being laundered through the IMF and World Bank) on Iraq in the middle of a bloodletting. Maybe the Iraqi Parliament has other things it could pay attention to?

Strange Bedfellows

Me and the NRA.

Extra! Extra! GM announces car I might actually buy, some day

Put this in the good news category: GM has finally confirmed that, yes, it is planning a plug-in hybrid model - the Chevy Volt. Better still, they've actually exceeded my expectations in one area: I'd assumed the first PIHs on the market would have rather short all-electric ranges (20 miles or so.) GM says that the Volt will have an AER of about 40 miles, after which it will switch to the internal combustion engine. Incidentally, 40 miles is the US average daily two-way commute. Charging capability at workplaces would make it possible to live an almost gasoline-free life. If you're an ethanol buff, it's also flex-fuel capable, sipping anything from 100% gasoline to 85% ethanol.

It being a GM car, there's some concern whether this will actually make it off the show floor and in to people's garages -- GM hasn't yet announced a battery supplier, kinda an important aspect of the car. On the other hand, given the negative publicity from the recent documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? I'd be willing to bet that GM won't strangle this baby in the crib.

Let's see what Toyota and Honda do to raise the ante. For the first time in a while, I'm actually optimistic about the automobile industry.

Bad GOP idea for the week

Long ago, in a blog far far away, I used to write a lot more about energy issues. Haven't done that a lot lately, mostly because I figure a lot of it's already been said and I have no interest in repeating myself. (I suppose I could take requests...) But every once in a while something new pops up that piques my interest. Today, it's Jackson Diehl's weeks-old op-ed in the Washington Post (somehow I missed it on December 25th) ably deconstructed by Jerome a Paris here.

The short version is: A NATO response to the Russians charging market prices for their gas is probably a bad idea. The long version is below.

To crib some beginning points from Jerome, let's point out the basics:

• The Russians haven't charged usurious gas rates to their former satellites. They've brought their contract prices up to market levels. While this is an economic shock to the long-subsidized states of the former USSR and Warsaw Pact, this isn't (or shouldn't rightly be) a cause for alarm and sabre-rattling.


• The French and Germans are doing the least screaming about this, the British and Americans are doing the most. Is this because the Germans are surrender-monkeys, or because of the downturn in British and American domestic gas production?
  
  
• Russia simply cannot afford to "cut off" Europe's natural gas. Gas is more like electricity than oil -- it moves through pipelines, and it's not possible for Russia to simply find other customers to sell to. It's either Europe or nothing. (Russia is in the process of planning and building a Siberian pipeline to Japan and China, but that's nowhere near completion and will have limited uses anyway.) In any case, scaremongering over any kind of embargo is delusional.

Notwithstanding all this, Richard Lugar wants NATO to start working on a unified response to any kind of gas cutoff to member states.

Weakening Russia's hold over European energy supplies requires measures that would be costly and difficult, such as building new terminals for importing liquefied natural gas or new pipelines to carry oil and gas from Central Asia and the Caucasus to Europe.

Or, you know, using less gas. Which, if you're concerned about global warming, you should be doing anyway. Maybe I'm in a bad mood today, but this bit really got me:

That sounds daunting at a time when NATO has its hands full trying to fight a war in Afghanistan. But the energy threat goes to the alliance's historic purpose: defending democratic Europe from attack by the autocratic and belligerent power on its Eastern frontier.

Sure, but when NATO started the "autocratic and belligerent power on the Eastern frontier" was in Germany. The Clinton administration pushed those frontiers a hell of a long way further east. Like it or not, that move -- and the ensuing departure of former satellites from Russia's sphere of influence -- is what has brought us to this point in the game. Putin sees no need to subsidize Georgian or Ukrainian industries with cheap gas -- why should he? Is there something inherently evil with charging market prices for energy?

This is all extremely silly anyway. First off, to my knowledge the US as yet imports exactly zero natural gas from Russia, making this a purely European matter. That may change in the future with LNG terminals, but even if the US does begin importing from Russia, the simplest, fastest, and cheapest way for any country to reduce its vulnerability to natural gas shortages is to unplug some air conditioners in the summer. (Warmer winters are already taken care of.)

Talk of using an explicitly military alliance as a means of "dealing with" that uppity Russian is a recipe for disaster. And, incidentally, its exactly the kind of thinking that's got America hip-deep in the big sandy. Instead of going to the military drawer any time there's even a prospect of higher energy prices, let's please consider something as radical as consuming less.

The mysterious case of the perpetual-motion pork

No, not graft, actual pork. As in breakfast sausage.

Waking up this morning, I started making breakfast for Vicki. (Note to men: make your girlfriends breakfast. They'll be yours forever.) We have this rectangular teflon plug-in griddle that my mom got from Wal-Mart many years ago, and still works just fine. It's particularly well suited for making bacon, eggs, pancakes, and today I discovered it's excellent for breakfast sausage as well.

So I'm cooking the sausages and trying to cook them evenly, and as I move one sausage, it starts rolling across the griddle. It hits the far edge, bounces off and rolls to the other side. At which point, it bounces again, and keeps on rolling, and rolling, and rolling. This goes on for like a minute before I work up the nerve to intervene.

Vicki says she woke up to the sound of me muttering, and I can only assume I was subconsciously berating the sausage for defying the laws of physics. Now she's angry I didn't wake her up to come see.

We have a weird household.

(I assume the observed phenomenon has something to do with the lubricating effects of pork fat and the energy imparted by the griddle. Anyone else have a better explanation?)

Technology marches on

Ropeadope, a seven-year-strong record label... has announced that it is going 100% pure digital. Every release will be available on ropeadope.com in the MP3 format, as well as the major online music retailers...

I asked Ropeadope founder Andy Hurwitz why he's taking his label digital, and what he expects the pluses and minuses to be.

He responded,

"Why digital? It's funny, I almost feel like this is what they asked Rykodisc back in the '80's when they started going exclusively with CDs over vinyl. [Digital is] not just the future, it's the present, at least amongst our fans. We've seen our traditional sales plummet and our digital sales skyrocket. But on top of a purely economic decision, it's an amazing opportunity for us to find and expose tons of great music and fantastic artists.

"Advantages? We now make money on every single project from record one. We don't have to deal with returns and reserves, we can sign and release a new band in a matter of weeks, and it helps bring traffic to our website.

"Disadvantages? I'm really searching for some here. I guess the only disadvantage is the learning curve--folks are still trying to understand why we're doing this and how it works. But once we're up and running I think it will become obvious."

It will be interesting to see if other labels pick up on this. If that's not just PR talking -- if they really do make money on each track sold from day one -- that's not just better, that's revolutionary. Fantastic.

Yes, yes he is.

Why I love Wikipedia: At the end of new Environment Minister John Baird's entry (dunno how long it'll stay like this) we get this bit of "trivia":

He is gayer than Liberace's poodle.

And they say it's unreliable...

[Update, a bit later: It seems there are persistent rumours that Mr. Baird is, in fact, gay. Don't bother me none of course, but I'll state for record that when I wrote the above, the idea was to mock Wikipedia's... whimsical style, not Mr. Baird. Apologies to anyone who I inadvertently offended. Now, I continue to be left short by the idea of any person siding with a party that wants to strip same-sex couples (and individuals) of their rights, but that would be the case whether Baird is gay or straight.]

Two things jump out at me about John Baird's record:

• They call him "Mr. Fixit", but he seems more like the quintessential good soldier. Started out as a moderate in the earliest part of Harris' government here in Ontario, and swung right and saw his career advance. Backed Flaherty for leader and was beaten twice -- Eves and then Tory -- but the thing that never changes is his willingness to be a cooperative mouthpiece.
  
  
• He opposed banning same-sex marriage, and worked to pass it here in Ontario. That, at least, marks him as one of the "sane" Conservatives. So huzzah for that.

More substantially, he was Energy Minister during Ontario's disaster of an attempt at privatizing Hydro. Nobody seriously pretends that the fiasco was his fault -- it was directed from the Premier's office start to finish -- but we're still paying the price here in Ontario for the bastardized hybrid system we've got here.

Anyway, with Khan's defection this morning, the official count for the Tories+NDP is 154, meaning that even if the Libs and the BQ vote against the government, it's possible for the Tories to stay in power. In order to do that, however, Harper needs to deal with the NDP.

Funny thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if the environment came out ahead in this scenario -- it's well known that the right always has the ability to "go to China" on some issues in a way that the centre and left never can. If Harper is so inclined (read: if he thinks it can win him the election) he could push a much stronger environmental plan than the one on the books, and stronger even than the one Dion could get away with.

The Liberals would then pretend they meant to do the same during their 11 years in power but just, kind of, y'know, never got around to it. They would then proceed to savage the NDP for agreeing to a deal whether it was good or not. Except... what happens if the deal actually is good, good enough to draw the BQ on side? Then the Liberals are in a hell of a bind.

I'm not saying it can only happen this way, but I wouldn't be surprised. Harper needs something to put him ahead in the polls, and the Bloc and NDP both have a huge interest in damaging the Liberals any way they can. There's the strong chance in this scenario of electing a Harper majority next time out, however.

Promotions

So General Petraeus is being promoted to top General in Iraq. Good for him. If you don't know about this Petraeus fellow, the sentence-long description of him is "the one general to leave Iraq looking better than when he came in." After his first tour in Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne division -- where he had some substantial successes under his belt -- he returned to the US to write the US Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine. Pretty much everyone has a high opinion of him -- see Spencer Ackerman and Juan Cole, for typical examples.

Which is what makes his promotion such a shame. If there's one officer that the US Army needs, it's men like Petraeus. But he's being promoted to preside over a funeral -- mourning the rotting corpse of US ambitions in Iraq. Any delusions that he can "turn things around" in Iraq would have been appropriate, oh, in August of 2003 or so. Now it's all fantasy.

One of the basic rules of war: Commanders matter (quite a lot) but they aren't miracle workers. You can do everything right and still lose.

The US will have to leave Iraq, will have to do it under Petraeus' tenure (almost certainly) and his career will bear the black mark for that failure, even if the failure isn't his. The military is not generally amenable to the "nobody else could have done better" argument, even when it's clearly true, so when disasters happen officers tend to be sacked.

One final thing to note is that at least part of Petraeus' success -- and here I don't want to take anything from the man -- is due to the fact that he was operating in some of the most heavily-Kurd areas of Iraq, where US presence is still popular. It doesn't diminish any of his successes to say that he had some advantages commanders in other locations didn't.

Um, no.

Jake Tapper of ABC News did the unthinkable -- asked Senators who voted for the Iraq War if they'd do so again. He finds that the Iraq War resolution would now be defeated, 57-43. Sure it would.

As useless as these kinds of speculation are, it's even more worthless when Salon.com writes the headline:

If senators could rewrite history, the war wouldn't have happened

I don't know how many times we have to go through this. Even at the time, the White House was very clear: If they'd lost the vote in 2002, they were going to claim the right to invade Iraq based on the resolution passed after 9/11. The same way Bush claimed that if they lost at the UN, they'd still claim the right to invade based on the resolutions passed in 1996.

If the Senators had done their duty and voted against Bush, there would still have been a war. Bush would simply have ignored them. What their votes would have contributed was ending the war more quickly once it became the disaster it has.

Monsters, monsters, monsters

Unconscionable. Jose Padilla -- American citizen, and probably innocent by the standards of western justice (which, pre-9/11, would've just meant "innocent") -- has been tortured and abused to such an extent that he's lost his mind. Literally driven to insanity by the cruelty of the Bush regime.

And now:

...there are even some within the government who think it might be best if Padilla were declared incompetent and sent to a psychiatric prison facility. As one high-ranking official put it, "the objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this person."

Step 1: Torture the victim until insanity sets in.

Step 2: Declare the person insane.

Step 3: Keep them locked up, medicated, and silenced for the rest of their lives.

As Digby notes, we've seen this before.

There's something horrible about watching a friend and ally adopting all the worst aspects of paranoid power. January 2009 can't come soon enough.

The good news yesterday was the beginning of real change in Congress. Even better news is that the Dems are apparently coming out against Bush's escalation in Iraq.

Haw friggin haw

You may remember -- or not -- a while back the Associated Press reported that 6 people were burned alive outside a mosque while the Iraqi Army sat by and watched. This would just be one punctuation of the general grotesquerie that is Iraq, except that the right-wing bloggers seized on this report, and specifically a source they claimed didn't exist named "Jamil Hussein", as an attempt to discredit the report (and reinforce the myth of the left-wing defeatist media.)

In one sense of course, it was always meaningless. It's not like you can fake the society-wide violence and destruction, even with the occasional planted story.

In any case, the Interior Ministry of Iraq today confirmed that yes, Jamil Hussein exists, and yes, he's an Iraqi soldier. And having been identified, he's now likely to be arrested and tried. Good work, right wingers!

The first time I've watched Leno in a long, long time

Masi Oka (Hiro Nakamura on Heroes) on Leno - talking about his first job as a coder for ILM, his switch to acting, and his childhood as a Japanese-American nerd.

Great entrance, especially if you remember this.

That's my girl

Vicki asks:

What would happen if you put Schrodinger's cat and Pavlov's dog together in the same room?

A brief, funny blog post. But when someone asks you that in the kitchen, it's impossible not to spend the next few hours with that question running through your mind. Does the dog both drool-and-not-drool until the bell is rung?

Tell me you're not still using IE

Brian Krebs at the Washington Post has a funny post: After looking at the number of security holes in IE and Firefox, combined with the number of days it took to patch them, Krebs has the total number of days for which each browser was "insecure".

Internet Explorer: 284 days, or just over nine months.

Firefox: Nine days.

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So despite the fact that HDTVs sold like hotcakes this Christmas, high-definition DVD players mostly languished on the shelves. That's serious - if either rival standard (HD-DVD/Blu-ray) had won out, the industry probably would have let things go on. But it's pretty clear now that standard war has stalemated, and it's harming sales. So we're seeing three responses, two legitimate and one not:

Dual-format drives: LG is set to unveil a dual-format that will be capable of playing both HD and Blu-ray DVDs. Once LG does, you can bet other brands will follow - there's already rumours of a Samsung model.

Dual-format discs: Warner Bros. is announcing a new format of disc that would contain both HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats, with the possibility of a later disc that would contain DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray all in one. Not only would this be a gift to consumers (although they'd probably end up paying more) but retailers would love it -- in the long term, it would reduce the number of formats on their shelves from 3 to 1.

Piracy: Arrr. Whatever method industry chooses, there's plenty of reasons not to buy either format, including a truly nasty level of DRM (potentially, you could buy a disc, put it in your player, and find it unable to play. Then try returning an opened DVD these days.) But what if you really, really, really want the pretty pretty pictures? Well, you take a look at backupHDDVD v1.0, released today. Apparently, the AACS encryption system that BR and HDDVD share can be circumvented, if not actually "cracked". Or something. I'm not entirely sure. In any case, no level of encryption stays bullet-proof for very long, especially for consumer goods.

Link-dump

Nuclear war: Bad for humans, good for global warming. Nuclear winter = cooling, war = less consumers for SUVs. It's practically a win-win!

Saudi Arabia and America: Turns out America exported it's own version of Jim Crow to Saudi Arabia when they first set up shop in the 1940s. But remember everyone, nothing America ever does in the past is relevant to the present.

700 Million middle-class Chinese consumers by 2020. Vaguely terrifying and exhilarating all at once. If we survive to 2030, I think we might actually make it after all on this crazy chunk of iron and silicon we call home.

The Market never fails. Never!

via Battlepanda, this is a fascinating story: Dallas Food Blog did a major 10-part series on some boutique brand of chocolate that's one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, in the world -- as much as $2,000 a pound. Turns out, the company (Noka) is buying commercially available chocolate, changing the ingredients not one whit, doing an amateurish job making the chocolates, and putting it in fancy boxes. The price reflects absolutely nothing of substance, and derives entirely from good PR.

I'm with BP on this one when she says:

Mark Thoma at the Economist's View, in particular, characterized the scandalously high prices charged by NoKa chocolates as a market failure. Well, if we count price anomalies caused by good advertising, branding and public relations as market failures, this really throws off the assumption that the market is essentially efficient.

Of course it does. The only consistent definition of a "market failure" seems to be "grossly unethical behaviour that even economists can't justify."

This is what bothers me about how we view a "market failure" -- it presumes that the default position is that the market will act efficiently, and that "failures" are the exception. (And here it's probable that I've simply been raised in a neoliberal environment for my entire life, and get cranky over things like this.) But the lesson of Keynes is that, in fact, the market naturally tends towards crisis. And the lesson of Stiglitz is that information asymmetries are everywhere, and that market failures are therefore inevitable. That is, market "failures" are part of the system. Hell, if you define unreasonably high prices as market failure then software, pharmaceuticals, and much of the media and fashion world exist in a permanent state of market failure. So how can it be a failure, if it's clearly what the market is built to do?

A rational society would recognize that there are many areas where business has no business, and would further recognize that some areas of the market need the strictest regulation. There are clearly a whole bunch of things that the market alone doesn't do well (like prevent abusive chocolatiers from fleecing their customers) because that's not what the market is designed to do. Indeed, the market is perfectly designed to produce unethical behaviour, and is only restrained by the moral sense of the actors involved, or the force of law. Only people who've drunk too deeply of Adam Smith's demon rum would believe otherwise.

Better examples abound -- look at the US medical insurance industry, which seems to exist for the sole purpose of not insuring people who need medicine. "Market failure"? No, because the market doesn't exist to properly and universally insure the sick. Calling it a market failure is like driving your Civic in to a lake and describing the inevitable disaster as an "automobile failure" -- it's not meant to do that, don't ask it to.

If you want universal coverage at fair prices, go to the state. If you want market insurance, accept more poor and dead people -- especially children and seniors. But don't, as a country, choose market insurance and whine about how it's not serving everybody. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves...

Now, I don't actually care a whole lot about some poor saps who got suckered in to paying exorbitant prices for mediocre chocolate. (Dymaxion World Shopping Tip: Chocolate is never more valuable than gold or platinum. DWST service is provided free, because I'm a dirty Commie.) But in my continuing battle to rehabilitate a direct government hand in the economy, I'll take any example that's reasonably interesting. Then I will make it boring.

Oh jeebus somebody smack him

Compassionate conservatism at its best, via Spencer Ackerman:

One of McCain's aides tells me that two years ago, campaigning with McCain, George W. Bush asked him if the senator would like to work out with him. Told that McCain did not, could not, really "work out," Bush replied, "What do you mean?"

For the record: John McCain was tortured severely by the North Vietnamese during his imprisonment. His range of motion in his arms and legs is extremely limited -- something an observer can immediately see in his Daily Show appearances! -- and this makes things like push-ups or bench presses extremely difficult.

George W. Bush: Stupider, crueler, and more oblivious than you think, even when you already assume he's stupider, crueler, and more oblivious than you think.

Like getting socks on Christmas morning

...when what you wanted was a motorbike. Chris Hitchens:

The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against "the Persians" and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.

How could it have come to this?

How, indeed? It's almost as if Hitchens has forgotten his role cheering this war, defending those prosecuting it in spite of Himalayan-scale incompetence. Now, they manage to lynch a guilty man -- I, too, thought it was impossible -- in such a way that one of the world's worst people ends up looking sympathetic to his own victims.

Hitchens no doubt thought his pretty little war would have a different climax. Problem is, he and his side spent the last 4 years agitating for this war, sliming the Democrats who called for competence, and denigrating anyone who called for a measure of Jus in Bello.

Hitchens, well, hitched his wagon to this train. It takes some real gall to wake up out of his bourbon-induced stupor, look around, and say "But it wasn't supposed to be like this! Why is a chimp driving this thing?"

And Hitch seems to have decided he's not so wild about the Iraqi democrats-to-be, after all:

The shabby, tawdry scene of Muqtada Sadr's riffraff taunting their defenseless former tyrant evokes exactly this quality of hysterical falsity and bravado. While Saddam Hussein was alive, they cringed. Now, they find their lost courage, and meanwhile take the drill and the razor blade and the blowtorch to their fellow Iraqis.

How could it have come to this? Who could possibly have predicted that toppling Hussein would unleash sectarian hatred? Why were those people ignored?

Oh, that's right. There were ignored because Christopher-goddam-Hitchens was on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News every other day.

For those problem alcoholics/climate change nerds

An interesting discussion about an apparently-common attempt to deny climate change facts: English vineyards. (Link is several months old, sadly. Bad me!)

Apparently, morons climate change denialists believe that:

a) There were vineyards in England during the medieval period, therefore it must have been warm.

b) There are no vineyards in England today, therefore it cannot be as warm now as it was back then.

c) It must therefore be "cooler" now than it was back in the golden bright days of English wine-making.

Problem: There are over 400 English vineyards in operation today, with one in Scotland.

Interesting....

We'll see how far this goes.

NEW YORK - As if its options woes weren't trouble enough, Apple Computer Inc. said Friday it is facing several federal lawsuits, including one alleging the company created an illegal monopoly by tying iTunes music and video sales to its market-leading iPod portable players.

The case, filed July 21, is over Apple's use of a copy-protection system that generally prevents iTunes music and video from playing on rival players. Likewise, songs purchased elsewhere aren't easily playable on iPods.

Cute phrasing - "aren't easily playable on iPods." A more accurate phrase would have been "not legally playable on iPods". To play another company's copy-protected songs on an iPod, you either need to a) defeat Apple's DRM software, or b) defeat the other companies'. Either act is illegal under American law, and until the courts rule otherwise, that means for home use too.

So the only reasonable tactic is to buy the CD (possibly DRMed as well!) or buy your tunes from eMusic.

Reason #MMMCCCXVIII why I'm glad to be Canadian

Retired Gen. John M. Shalikashvili:

Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers....

I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.

I suppose at this point the classy thing for me to do would be lauding Gen. Shalikashvili for writing this op-ed in the NYT. But I can't help but think of the tens of thousands of lives that have been ruined because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Now the good General thinks maybe those queers are all right after all, just because Uncle Sam needs some more bodies in Baghdad? Sorry, that's crap.

In the early Clinton years, we had a choice between two approaches. There was roughly the Clinton choice and the Shalikashvili choice: Clinton's civilian leadership said, essentially, screw the military (for now), they'll get used to gays, and meanwhile there's an issue of human rights to fix. The military said, essentially, no screw you, we ain't takin' no fags. Well, turns out the Clinton people were right - the military did get used to gays, but men like Shalikashvili still want to keep believing they were right to keep discriminating anyway.

Blech. Even if it's turning out for the better now, it's.... depressing.

Big Wheel Keeps on Turnin'

A small country with a legacy of colonialism. An ineffective government, with a civil war being abetted by foreign powers. An American President desperate not to withdraw America's forces from the scene, but convinced disaster awaits if America's prestige is allowed to falter. A general sense that the war may very well be unwinnable, but that the government needs to escalate forces anyway, to show that America did everything in it's power to avert disaster.

Iraq, 2007? Try South Vietnam, 1964.

Almost done Dereliction of Duty, and it makes me sick how little we've learned. The bubble that McNamara and others built around first Kennedy, then Johnson is a clone of the one Cheney and Rumsfeld built around Bush. But specifically the period of late 1964 to early 1965, as Johnson was debating how to respond to the Gulf of Tonkin and other North Vietnamese provocations. (Which themselves were responses to American attacks, but more on that later.) What most struck me was the position that some took - essentially, they argued that even if America ended up losing in Vietnam (remember, this is before the massive increases in men that were coming) it would be worth fighting to show that America wouldn't simply abandon its other allies.

Problem was, all these forces were being committed to Vietnam based on a theory that couldn't be falsified. The idea was that North Vietnam would eventually buckle if Washington simply showed how serious it was to defend the South. So when the North failed to buckle under, it wasn't evidence that the North viewed reunification as vital to it's national interests - it was seen as proof that Washington hadn't "communicated" its will effectively. So the US got put on the treadmill for an eventual force of over 500,000 men in Vietnam. And they still lost.

Two things to draw from this: One, you really do need an obvious negative result in any theory. But better still, don't waste human lives on a fucking theory. Two, it may very well be impossible to create a reputation contrary to your adversary's perception of you, especially if your adversary is actually correct. The North Vietnamese gambled correctly that America would not sustain a long, costly, losing war in Indochina. Washington gambled on some other outcome. Oops.

Saddam really cared about America, y'know?

Has to be seen to be believed: Saddam Hussein's note of condolence to President Reagan after the Challenger blew up.

At least now they'll both get to catch up. By the fire, if you get my meaning.

And as we all know, nothing bad ever happened in Iraq ever again.

So... Saddam Hussein is dead. When Bismarck said the Balkans weren't worth "the bones of a single Pomeranian Grenadier", he was apparently delusionally wrong. Pomeranian Grenadiers -- or Iowan Infantrymen -- are quite cheap, especially if you throw their bones away in far-away places and don't raise anyone's taxes. So cheap, in fact, that you can throw away 618,000 American bones (with the dead alone!) in the pursuit of a single Arab tyrant.

Remember, other Arab tyrants are on Dubya's hit list.

Nixon should have been hanged, cont.

Was at a family gathering, and talked a bit about Nixon. My father said, quoting him inexactly, that "as angry as I was then, Ford's pardon of Nixon was probably the right thing to do."

Oh, you couldn't frame a more perfect scene of generations at loggerheads -- politely, of course. I think my dad might have expected me to call him a sellout to the man, but I already called him a flag-burning hippy a few days earlier for impugning the majestic Canadian Goose. (The only time the word "majestic" will be used for that rodent of the sky, btw.) Still: Dude, what happened to you? You used to be cool.

My argument is simple: Nixon paid no meaningful price for his actions, so nobody's behaviour changed. Republicans continued to be criminals -- see Iran-Contra, the multiple felons of the Reagan-Bush administrations, and the continuing abuses today. Democrats continue to have to pick up the mess, and get blamed for the outcomes.

My father countered with the Church Commission, and the layers of oversight added during the Carter administration. Call me cynical, but a six-year interregnum between the fall of one attempted tyrant (Nixon) and the rise of his constitution-shredding heir (Reagan) isn't exactly a golden age of peace and justice. Hell, the English managed to go 11 years without a King, and we've got monarchy imprinted in our genes.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, let's ask ourselves why no German army has crossed the Rhine since 1945. Numerous reasons -- including 6 million Soviet soldiers on the wrong side of the Polish border! -- but surely one of the reasons that a Franco-German war is unthinkable today is because in Germany today, it is a crime punishable by imprisonment to deny Hitler's crimes. I'm not wild about those laws, but at it's root the law comes from society, and in this case society chose to silence lies. Consequently, two generations of Germans have been raised without being allowed a doubt of Nazi perfidy.

Pan right to the modern Republican Party, specifically Ford's pardon of Nixon. This is literally the antithesis of Germany's laws -- not only is it perfectly acceptable to argue that Nixon committed no crimes, by the conventions of modern writing, all we ever get to call Nixon is an alleged criminal. That his guilt is well-documented and a historical fact doesn't matter in modern debate. The Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reillys of today thrive on that ambiguity. Instead of being constrained by the bounds of taste, or in the German example the bounds of law, they argue that the White House that defiled the Constitution three times before a breakfast of tranquilizers and scotch was "patriotic" and "ambushed by the liberal media."

Was Ford's pardon of Nixon healing? Probably, in the same way a lobotomy is therapeutic. But it robbed Americans of their memory of how vile he was. Remembered accurately, Nixon would be recalled as the man who was so insane by 1974 his National Security Advisor told the military not to obey any of Nixon's orders without his concurrence. The rule of law in America was so imperiled it fell to men like Henry Kissinger to keep the President from bringing the US Army in to the streets of Washington during the Watergate endgame.

Finally, I'm highly skeptical of the argument that America couldn't withstand the stress of the criminal trial of an ex-President. The biggest piece of evidence here is the simple fact that Ford's pardon was probably the biggest hit in the polls and President has ever taken in the modern era -- Ford lost 20% in the polls, extremely rapidly. Without the pardon, Ford may very well have been re-elected. How can that possibly be squared with the idea that America is too fragile for accountability?

More than the law, more than the men (and occasional women) who hold office, what matters in politics is the stories that we tell ourselves. The Liberals will always have a hard time in Alberta because of the story - not the reality - of the NEP. The Southern US continues to live a lie about the Civil War, and American race relations continue to suffer because of it. Hell, look at our current situation: Because of the commonly-held stories about 9/11 (Hussein planned it!) Bush got away with murder for five years. There's always a certain amount of falsehoods to our histories, but an honest nation would try to get the big stuff factually correct.

Ford's pardon robbed America of even the chance of writing the proper ending to Nixon's story, and for that he earns his place beside the other Republican Presidents of the 20th century - where they weren't mediocre, they were positively evil.

Happy 2007, Everyone

A lot of the bloggers I've read seem to have had a miserable 2006, and are waiting for 2007 to pick up their moods. I don't see what all the complaints are about. I had a great year!

-Finally got my BA, allowing me to return home to Toronto,
-Where I now get to live with my girlfriend (being apart for 4 years -- even just the gap between Ottawa and Toronto -- sucked ass. Don't do it.)
-Everything else is pretty minor, all things considered. But I also had a short-term job in the summer that I really enjoyed and have now been unemployed for 4 months.

Leading to my New Years Resolution: Get a job before the last of my savings run out! Also, lose some weight.