Information Addict

2004-08-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

Ever reliable, conventional wisdom tells us that the Middle East is fertile soil for conspiracy theories. If Israel-Palestinian peace talks broke down (in my little imaginery world, such talks exist) and Israel claimed that it was because Arafat wanted too much while the Palestinians charged that Sharon was demanding the ritual sacrifice of every first-born Palestinian male, the latter would have some tractrion. More realistically , there is some truth that U.S. support for Israel has something to do with the domestic Jewish lobby while the love fest between our government and the House of Saud has something to do with oil. Taken to extremes, of course, such connections can morph into crackpot, LaRouche-like ravings. Then again, its not surprising that oppressed people would be given to speculation when interpreting the opacity of government workings.

Given the above, I am not sure it is a good idea to have a media blackout in Najaf.

The US Army is not exactly viewed as an objective source: Iraqi police ordered all journalists to leave the holy city of Najaf on Sunday, just as a new U.S. offensive against militants hiding out in a revered shrine there began. Concerns about the interim government's commitment to freedom of the press were sparked Aug. 7 when officials order the Baghdad office of the pan-Arab television station Al-Jazeera closed.

2004-08-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

Looks like the Washington Post is also focused on the subject of undermining regulations . Apparently, it is the topic de jure. Unfortunately, I fear it may be too late and too complex to actually become part of the larger political debate. The paragraph that caught my eye in this article, the first of three, was about the proliferation of "voluntary" requirements, an idea I find utterly silly:

It has made sense to strengthen the agency's relationships with businesses, encouraging voluntary compliance. To do so, OSHA has created a new kind of voluntary program, intended to foster "trusting, cooperative relationships" between the government and groups of industries and professional societies, according to an agency fact sheet. These new alliances, as they are known, depart from a central tradition throughout the agency's history: They are allowed to exclude labor unions.

2004-08-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

"Most people are busy just trying to make a living," he said. "And with all the
focus on Iraq and bin Laden, it gives the administration an opportunity to take
a lot of loot out the back door without anybody noticing."

Today's NY Times has great article on the rollback of regulations underway by the Bush Administration:

The administration's 2004 budget proposed to cut 77 enforcement and related
positions from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, while adding
two new staff members whose jobs would be to help industry comply with agency
rules.

I don't have a particular preference for big or small government. I actually think there is a choice between good and bad, necessary and unnecessary, etc.. Some regulations are poorly drafted. Some are impossible to enforce. Some are outdated. Getting rid or reshaping regulations can be a healthy process. The Administration, however, has slashed the costs of regulation to about 1/8th of Reagan's free-for-all 80's. It would seem that we are moving into a situation where one self-interested faction is getting too much power. I was not surprised by this observation:

Some analysts argue that the Bush administration has introduced rules favoring
industry with a dedication unmatched in modern times. "My thoughts go back to
Herbert Hoover," said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. "No president
could have been more friendly to business than Hoover" until the Bush
administration.

It tracks the tenor a recent article in the American Prospect:

For most Americans, the last four years have represented a low point in our
economic history. But for the big-business interests financing the Bush
campaign, these have been high times. In previous eras, and even under previous
Republican administrations, corporate America was one of a number of players in
the public-policy arena. But under the Bush administration, big business is both
the player and the referee, having finally won its decades-long campaign to
eliminate the boundary between executive suite and public office.

2004-08-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Kristof has a long attention span. I am grateful anytime he moves on to a subject of great import because I find him informative. His recent articles on nuclear terrorism are must reads. For entertainment, I, of course, enjoyed these lines:

The Nunn-Lugar program to safeguard the material is one of the best schemes we have to protect ourselves, and it's bipartisan, championed above all by Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican. Yet President Bush has, incredibly, at various times even proposed cutting funds for it. He seems bored by this security effort, perhaps because it doesn't involve blowing anything up.

The best hope for stopping Iran and North Korea (and it's a bleak one) is to negotiate a grand bargain in which they give up nuclear aspirations for trade benefits. Mr. Bush's current policy - fist-shaking - feels good but accomplishes nothing.

President Clinton's approach to North Korea wasn't a great success, but at least North Korea didn't add to its nuclear arsenal during his watch. In just the last two years, North Korea appears to have gone to eight nuclear weapons from about two.

2004-08-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

Shame on me.

In a post last night, I lashed out at the Administration's simplistic view of success in the war on terrorism. (a phrase I dislike because the tactic "terror" will always exist) I was responding to speech by Richard Clarke and a new ad from the Bush campaign.

In the speech as in his book, Clarke invoked the movie The Battle of Algiers. In the final scene, the French authorities cross out the final picture on the organizational chart of resistance fighters. As the movie fades out the viewer is informed that the French were forced to abandon Algiers within two years. The point is the French battled the organization not the ideology and in the process created more enemies than they vanquished. Clarke links this to the chart (cards, in the book) that Bush requested after 9/11. Clarke imagines a self-congratulatory Bush placing large X's over pictures.

The ad reflected the image. In it, Bush speaks of bringing enemies to justice. I could not understand how he was going to score political points by calling attention to the fact that UBL remains at large. The AP article on the ad referred to Bush's claim that two-thirds of senior Al-Qaeda leaders have been killed or captured. The claim launched me into the aforementioned tirade on how to measure progress. I, however, did not question the underlying assertion. Shame on me. A chart in the recent Economist called my attention to my negligence:

"In October 2001, the United States produced a list of the 22 'most wanted terrorists'... So far only three of the 22 have been captured or killed."

2004-08-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

I watch the wires all day long. I am an addict and I need help. Sometimes it gets confusing. For example, these two simultaneously released headlines:

Iraqi Cleric Says to Fight Until Death or Victory (Reuters)

Cleric Seeks Truce to End Najaf Fighting (Associated Press)

2004-08-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I find the obession with "flip-flopping" annoying. People change their minds on issues. Worse, "gotcha" journalism often takes two quotes entirely out of context so that they appear contradictory. Finally, politicians say different things to different audiences. Those are the rules of the game. A prime example of this tendency would be Lincoln's statements on slavery before the the election of 1860 as detailed in Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition.

Of course, most of my conservative friends don't want to hear about it. They weary me with bromides about character and credibility. The only way to get around these tired discussions is to go over the long litany of Bush flip-flops. Thanks to American Progress for condensing the list.

2004-08-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

A few pieces of spin that are getting play elsewhere.

1) The administration unable to keep the public in the dark about drug reimportation has decided to pull out the trump card:

"Cues from chatter" gathered around the world are raising concerns that terrorists might try to attack the domestic food and drug supply, particularly illegally imported prescription drugs, acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester M. Crawford says.

2) Not only are we worried about Canadian pharmo-terrorism, but also those Hattian jihadis:

According to the attorney general, releasing this young Haitian would tend to encourage mass migration from Haiti, and might exacerbate the potential danger to national security of nefarious aliens from Pakistan and elsewhere who might be inclined to use Haiti as a staging area for migration to the U.S.

3) President Bush is the homosexual messiah because he has saved gays from the gravest threat: the estate tax

KING: Gay people would honestly say they want the benefits of a
marriage.

G. BUSH: Well, you can do that through the legal process. You know, people
have said to me, well, if you're gay, you can't inherit because -- and you don't
get the exemption from income tax. Well, my answer there is get rid of the
inheritance tax forever, the death tax, which I'm trying to do. And there are
ways to make sure gays have got rights. And you can do so in the law.

2004-08-12T21:52:00.000-07:00

Watching Richard Clarke speak at the ACLU convention. Clarke, on whom I have a nonsexual crush on, has been an ACLU member for over 30 years. Given his personality and the ACLU stereotype, I'm surprised. Then again, I often make mistaken assumtptions.

He repeated something that I read in his book about Bush requesting an organizational chart (in the book, its cards) with pictures and names of the "managers" of Al Qaeda. Bush wanted to cross them out as they were captured or killed.

This made me think of two things. The first was the top-down orientation of our CEO president. For him, only the people at the top matter. Publius over at Legal Fiction has a long post on this topic. Second, is the rather widespread notion that we are fighting a fixed number of individuals. It is the same kind of zero sum thinking that makes more jails a solution to crime.

2004-08-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

I am so happy Alan Keyes is running for something. It's nice to have such a badass of bombast trolling around and claiming mononpoly on the basic principles of justice. I just listened to him on NPR go on and on about Obama having a "slaveholder's mentality" because of his pro-choice stance. He even chided the host for implying that slavery had some relation to race.

The host then gave Keyes a chance to expound on an issue of his choosing. The most important issue other than abortion: gay marriage. With the wars, the defecit, jihadist terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the retirement of the boomers and the exploding costs of health care and energy, it never ceases to amaze me that gay marriage is even on the agenda.

I do give Keyes credit for consistency. He thinks abortion is murder and is therefore unacceptable even in cases of rape and incest. Given the premise, such a conclusion is required. It is the premise that gives the pro-lifers all their moral force and it gripes me that some posit without extending their logic. Abortion, if it is murder, is indefensible in the case of rape or incest. Furthermore, all mothers and doctors should be convicted of first-degree murder if they initiate the procedure. Also, pregnant women should be charged with manslaughter for any negligence that results in the death of the fetus. The logic is inescapable.

Such arguments are often met by a retreat to the potential life position. This deflates the prolife case by leaps and bounds. Now, they are not protecting life, but potential life. It is very clear exactly what rights potential life is supposed to enjoy. The issue is then debatable, not absolute. Once it is debatable, the rationale of choice is wholly defensible.

I am quasi-pro choice. That is, I am uncomfortable with abortion but would never vote for my discomfort to be statutory law that bound others. I do, however, agree with many of the jurisprudential critiques of Roe and Casey. I am not convinced that choice is enshrined in the Constitution. I think it is a perfect example of a state-by-state issue, even though I would certainly vote against it.

My stance that it should be a political question also recognizes that it isn't. This is one reason why I can't understand how people like Keyes run primarily on the issue. There is not much a Senator or any elected official can actually do about abortion. They have three options. 1) They can create silly little laws that make abortion more inconvenient. 2) They can hope that a Supreme Court justice retires and that their newly constituted Court would actually take on abortion again (This was the Reagan strategy that ultimately met defeat with Casey) 3) They can pass a constitutional amendment.

A constitutional amendment makes much more sense in the case of abortion, which has been read into the federal constitution, than gay marriage, which heretofor has not been federally recognized and seems unlikely to be so even after Lawrence and under the 'full faith and credit" clause. Of course, you don't hear anything about the amendment because it brings with it the same logic I have already reviewed,

2004-08-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

Toxic words on toxic waste. AP reports on the Bush speech in Nevada:

President Bush on Thursday defended his decision to use Nevada's Yucca
Mountain as the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump, an unpopular move in a
swing state that he won four years ago. "I said I would make a decision
based upon science, not politics. I said I would listen to the scientists."

The article responsibly investigates the assertion:

Dozens of scientific studies remain incomplete and a recent federal appeals
court ruling raised questions about whether the waste repository will be built,
or at least meet its target of 2010 to begin operation.

It's actually good journalism as evinced by this passage:

Bush accused Democratic Sen. John Kerry of pandering to Nevada voters by
playing both sides of the issue, part of a broader effort to cast the
Massachusetts senator as someone who bends to the political winds.

"He says he's strongly against Yucca here in Nevada, but he voted for it
several times," Bush claimed.

That is not exactly true.

Each time Kerry has faced the simple choice of voting whether or not to
send waste to Yucca Mountain, he has voted against it. But he has voted for some
measures that had provisions to allow nuclear dumps there. Some 16 years ago,
Kerry voted for an overall budget bill that included a provision favoring
putting the nuclear waste in Nevada.

The best is this new refrain:

Bush defended the tax cuts in his speech at a Las Vegas union hall, which the
Bush campaign packed with hundreds of Republican supporters."All I ask is to be
careful about all of this talk about taxing the rich," Bush said. "The so-called
rich hire accountants and lawyers to maybe not pay as much. And therefore in
order to meet all of these promises, guess who ends up getting stuck with the
bill? The working people."

I am not exactly sure where to begin. It is true enough that tax evasion creates revenue gaps. There are two ways close that gap: crackdown on the evasion or raise taxes. Bush makes two assumptions. The first is that increased enforcement is impossible. This is a canard unless you critically underfund and tie the hands of the IRS, both of which the Bush administration has done quite effectively. The second assumption is that if taxes are raised to make up for this gap, they will be raised on the working class.

The best thing about the statement, however, is that we have finally found the worst rationale for the Bush tax cuts: Might as well because the rich are going to evade taxes anyway. It is amazing how far we have come from giving back the surplus to a short term stimulus to creating jobs to this.

2004-08-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

I am not politically deft. I do not doubt Republican advertising savy, but I fail to understand why Bush's new ad call attention to the fact that Usama Bin Laden remains at large:

President Bush vows in his latest campaign ad to "bring an enemy to justice
before they hurt us again" although Osama bin Laden remains at large and only
one U.S. defendant, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been charged with crimes related to
the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Apparently the campaign in positing that two-thirds of bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network has been "brought to justice" since the attacks. They really should read the New York Times:

For the past several months, the president has claimed that much of Al Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured; the new evidence suggests that the organization is regenerating and bringing in new blood.

2004-08-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

Once again, somethings are not as simple as somepeople make them appear.

I am often berated for not disowning John Kerry because he did not back the enormous $87 billion dollar spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. (Naturaly, Kerry's "I voted against it before I voted for it" doesn't help. It is yet another example of Kerry's lackluster skills as a straddler. Kevin Drum has a great post on that topic.) I try to explain to my more conservative acquaintances that there were different versions of the bill. They accuse me of obfuscating. Credit the Daily Howler with pointing me to fact that Bush threatened to veto one of the versions of the bill. It should provide the proper ammo for rebuffing the attacks; it moves the argument from (1) irrefutable evidence of anti-Americanism because Kerry did it to (2) need for further exploration because Bush could never do anything wrong.

Here is the article:

The Bush administration threatened for the first time Tuesday to veto an $87
billion package for Iraq and Afghanistan if Congress converts any Iraqi rebuilding money into loans.

2004-08-11T10:33:00.000-07:00

The logic: The United States must be lead by the "right" people. Bush is the "right" person to be president. Thus any action to keep him president is prima facie "right". Silly notions about politicization, undermining the war on terror or mendacity are completely misplaced. A good example is this irresponsible story in the LA Times:

Heightened terror alerts and high-profile arrests of suspected Islamic extremists have international security experts and officials concerned that the Bush Administration's actions could jeopardize investigations into the Al Qaeda network.

Officials in Pakistan reportedly said Tuesday that Washington's recent disclosure of the arrest of a suspected Al Qaeda operative, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, allowed other extremists under surveillance to disappear.

British security officials are angry over recent U.S. revelations of terrorist threats and arrests, said Paul Beaver, an international defense analyst based in London. He said the attitude among some British intelligence officials was that the "Americans have a very strange way of thanking their friends, by revealing names of agents, details of plots and operations."Along with such criticism, the administration faces questions at home about how it handles terrorism investigations and alerts.

Several senior U.S. counterterrorism officials have expressed concern in the last week about the amount of information leaking out, saying it has begun to have a direct and negative effect on efforts to round up suspects and gain insight into any conspirators.

"It is really hurting our efforts in a very demonstrable way," said one official, who declined to elaborate.

Larry Johnson, a former senior counterterrorism official at the State Department and CIA, said Tuesday that the leaks were part of a pattern in which the administration had undercut its own efforts to fight terrorism by divulging details when doing so was deemed politically advantageous.

"Protecting secrets and sources is serious business," he added. "Regrettably, the Bush administration appears to be putting more emphasis on politicizing intelligence and the war on terror. That approach threatens our national security, in my judgment."

2004-08-11T09:20:00.000-07:00

So sad when genius becomes lazy. Many have written on Nialls Ferguson abandonment of academic rigor and his new dedication to broad generalizations and bold hypotheses on a huge number of targets. His views on empire try to refute Paul Kennedy's "imperial overstretch", but he should worry about mental overstretch. His Op-Ed in today's LA Times is a prime example comes to this conclusion:

You see, the most remarkable thing about the transatlantic divergence in working
patterns is that it has coincided almost exactly with a comparable divergence in
religiosity, both in terms of observance and belief. There is surely something more than coincidental about the simultaneous rise of unbelief in Europe and the decline of Weber's work ethic.

Ferguson, playing off Weber, even goes as far as to label it "The Atheist Sloth Ethic and the Spirit of Collectivism." His main evidence is anecdotal, comparing the summer work environment in New York and London. He pairs this with survey data on religiosity, vacation time and unemployment.

A first and obvious problem is his use of Weber, who focused on Protestantism as it had emerged out of Catholicism. Ferguson expands the thesis to include all religions including Catholicism. Not being an expert on Weber, it seems to me that a thesis that compares one religion to another is not particularly useful when comparing religion to lack thereof.

Another glaring problem is that Ferguson uses religious survey data from the all of the United States, but uses New York as his example. It might be more helpful if Ferguson were actually using data that compared New York and London.

Ferguson's hypothesis would seem to have a problem explaining the widespread poverty in South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America where religion is firmly entrenched. Even if Ferguson's hypothesis is limited to the first world it could be tested by matching the United States against itself. That is, a rise or decline in religiousity would match a rise or decline in unemployment or productivity. Unfortunately for the wild speculation does not hold. The CUNY survey demonstrates that religious identification decreased in the United States from 1990-2001, a time of markedly low unemployment and increased productivity.

Ferguson, an immicon, ends his piece with the quip "If I weren't on holiday, I'd write a book about it." Fortunately for him, someone did. In today's Internation Herald Tribube two sociologists introduced their findings:

There is, of course, an element of truth in these stereotypes, but as descriptions of two supposedly different cultures, they are far too simplistic. The lesson to be learned from comparing work cultures is not that Europeans should become more like Americans, nor that Americans inhabit a different, more materialistic culture. It is that Europeans have gained politically and socially what many Americans say they want individually but have been unable to achieve politically. Americans, too, would like to have employment security, more flexibility, more leisure, fewer worries about health care and pensions, but the United States still has a long way to go.

I would be loath to say that Americans and Europeans share the same attitude towards work, but I seriously doubt religion has much to do with it.

2004-08-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a trip to see family in the Midwest. I spent time with my relatives in rural Ohio and in Chicago. I will try not to devolve into Brooksian pop sociology, but I found both groups rather interesting. In Ohio, my relatives are rural white poor; on welfare with more illegitimate children than high school diplomas. In Chicago, my family is urban middle class: strong marriages, cute kids, picket fences and unions.

Both were insular in their own way. In Ohio, convincing them that politics mattered was a Sysiphian task. Pointing to cash assistance, food stamps and housing subsidies, they acquiesced that government policies affected their lives, but they just could not connect it to paying attention and voting. In Chicago, politics always matter, but local politics rule. Daley, the City Council, Springfield were far more important than Kerry and Bush.

They also shared a certain social conservatism. Their positions on race, religion, homosexuality, and abortion were more Republican than they were Democrat.

The Chicago clan was far more politcally literate than those in Ohio, but not as much as I expected. They knew to vote; they knew to vote Democrat, but beyond that, they paid little attention to taxes, war, spending or any other policy. Furthermore, the Chicago group was much more given to complaints and bold assertion that they could not back up with facts or figures.

My family represented two groups that I often rail against: those that don't vote and those that simply vote the party line. They are both part of the composite that makes up the infuriating electorate.

My simplified view of the electoral landscape sees three culprits for the sad state of American politics: parties, money and people.

Much has been made about the evisceration of the parties. I don't buy it. Their power is not as manifest, but it still plays an important role. True, the silly presidential primary system has changed the nature of the game for that office, but local offices and the House are still very much party affairs. This is especially true given the rampant gerrymandering and the virtual elimination of unsafe districts. When victory in a party primary is tantamount to an election victory, the purists and exteremists that control that process are given a ridiculous amount of power. Also, since they are the only ones with the energy, obsesssion and time on their hands to follow Congressional (or City Council, or whatever) voting, their ideology holds sway even when the voting is done.

I am forever hearing complaints about money and special interests. Unfortunately, campaign finance reform is subject to the law of unintended consequences. McCain-Feingold has not reduced the amount of money poured into campaing coffers, but simply reorganized the way contributions are made. Instead of large donors, candidates are beholden to the more furtive masters of the rolodex. A case in point is the recent uproar over the Swift Boat idiots. It was rather refreshing that they were backed by one big donor whose politics and methods are widely known. It was a relief from plowing through the articles that detail Pioneers and Rangers and how they arranged for such large contributions. I don't see how Ken Lay giving $200,000 or raising $200,000 makes a difference in the final analysis. It just makes it harder to track.

Finally, there are the people. Some just don't care. Some are in it only for themselves (subsidize my business, cut my taxes). Some have only one issue (Guns; Abortion; Gay Marriage) Some treat the parties like sports teams. (Go Republicans! Liberals are American hating pussies!) Some make incompatible demands (Lower my taxes; Increase my services) Some don't think their demands are incompatible because they have subscribed to various myths (Eliminating "waste" could cure the deficit; Immigrants cause the decifit; Welfare causes the decifit; Bad administration is the only difficuly facing education). All of these groups share a similar distaste for reality that interferes with their beliefs; they categorically refuse to pay attention.

Reform is possible. Moves to instant runoffs, districts drawn by bipartisan, professional committees, and reworking of electoral apportionment could make politicians more beholden to the moderation of the majority than the extremes of minorities. Taking money out of the system through public financing, forcing television to give politicians airtime and limiting how much they themselves could spend on commercials would lessen the hold of moneyed interests and decrease the pressures of the constant campaign. Yet, I, for the life of me, have yet to see a solid proposal for a better electorate.

The media deserves quite a bit of blame, but what can they do if people choose FOX News over PBS, Rush Limbaugh over NPR. If I owned a station, it would be difficult to put on a show featuring Bill Moyers rather than Little Russ. Even if the former is the ten times the journalist, the latter gets ten times the ratings. Similarly, as a politician, the guy who promises universal health coverage, reduced taxes and a budget surplus is going to get more votes than one who admits that expanded coverage either means more money or less benefits and that the Laffer curve is an absurd construct.

The panaceas/silver bullets/cure alls always revolve around the press, education and leadership. When the first is done right, we ignore it. We refuse to fund the second. We do not reward the third. I have a visceral dislike for George Bush and his policies, but a part of me always feels like we are getting what we deserve.

2004-08-10T11:06:00.000-07:00

"Now I have to face stupid reality!" - Homer J. Simpson

From the New York Times:

While the findings may result in a significant intelligence coup for the Bush administration and its allies in Britain, they also create a far more complex picture of Al Qaeda's status than Mr. Bush presents on the campaign trail. For the past several months, the president has claimed that much of Al Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured; the new evidence suggests that the organization is regenerating and bringing in new blood.

From Krugman:

Finally, many apologists have returned to that old standby: the claim that presidents don't control the economy. But that's not what the administration said when selling its tax policies. Last year's tax cut was officially named the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 - and administration economists provided a glowing projection of the job growth that would follow the bill's passage. That projection has, needless to say, proved to be wildly overoptimistic.What we've just seen is as clear a test of trickledown economics was we're ever likely to get. Twice, in 2001 and in 2003, the administration insisted that a tax cut heavily tilted toward the affluent was just what the economy needed. Officials brushed aside pleas to give relief instead to lower-and middle-income families, who would be more likely to spend the money, and to cash-strapped state and local governments. Given the actual results - huge deficits, but minimal job growth - don't you wish the administration had
listened to that advice?

From The Wall Street Journal:

"I support the idea of creating a personal saving account for younger workers," Mr. Bush told his audience.
The problem with that idea is finding the money to pay the current generation of retirees, if revenue from current workers is diverted into the workers' own accounts. As a leading proponent of creating private accounts from Social Security, South Carolina's Sen. Graham said he hopes Mr. Bush will promote the idea, which is the single biggest unfinished item from the 2000 campaign platform. But Mr. Graham has been willing to address the $1 trillion transition costs, whereas Mr. Bush has not. Mr. Graham would raise the amount of wages subject to payroll taxes to cover costs. But Mr. Bush has said he won't raise taxes or reduce benefits...

From the Washington Post:

Increasing the number of low-income students who attend college is an ambitious goal, and one that intuitively seems as if it might appeal to precisely the voters both candidates are courting. That makes it all the more odd that the president barely addresses it. Or perhaps, given his campaign's assessment of the issue, it isn't surprising: If a problem doesn't exist, after all, it doesn't require a solution.

From Brookings:

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld probably spoke too soon when he suggested in late July that Iraq "continues to calm down." Casualty levels remain high - for Iraqis and foreigners, citizens and soldiers alike. Car bombings, rates of violent crime, and insurgent attacks on foreign and Iraqi security forces show no signs of abating. And according to the most recent American intelligence, the Iraqi resistance is now substantially larger than previously estimated.

2004-07-23T14:15:00.000-07:00

These are the people we trust to conduct war, secure peace and build democracy.

in·ad·ver·tent (nd-vûrtnt)adj.
1. Not duly attentive.
2. Marked by unintentional lack of care. See Synonyms at careless.

The Pentagon on Friday released payroll records from President Bush's 1972 service in the Alabama National Guard, saying its earlier contention the records were destroyed was an "inadvertent oversight."

The Pentagon had said that the payroll records for that time period had been inadvertently destroyed.

2004-07-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

My thoughts exactly.

WaPo Editorial:

IT'S STILL NOT clear why former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger improperly removed secret documents from the National Archives last year. Whether it was a mistake or not, Mr. Berger's conduct, the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI, was reprehensible, and he was right to resign as a Kerry adviser.

Still, it's hard not to be repulsed by the reaction to the affair by President Bush's campaign spokesmen and Republicans in Congress. They have suggested, without foundation, that Mr. Berger took the papers to benefit Mr. Kerry, who says that he knew nothing of the matter; House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has spoken, with gross hyperbole, of a "national security crisis." Having squelched congressional examination of a genuine national security scandal -- the involvement of U.S. military commanders in grave violations of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq -- House leaders, including Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), have rushed to announce hearings on the Berger affair. As happened so often during the Clinton administration, they are treating a real but apparently limited case of misconduct as an opportunity to misuse congressional oversight powers to wage partisan warfare.

It's worth noting that news of the months-old investigation of Mr. Berger just happened to leak on the week before the Democratic convention, and two days before the release of the Sept. 11 commission's report -- which covers serious lapses by President Bush as well as President Bill Clinton. Officials at the Bush White House had been briefed on the Berger probe. Could that be a coincidence?

NY Times Editorial:

Exactly why Samuel Berger removed copies of classified documents from the National Archives last October is not clear. If, as Mr. Berger says, the removal was simply a blunder, it was inexcusably careless legally and daft politically.

Meanwhile, the Republican hyperventilating is overdone. The same Congressional leaders who shrugged at the leaking of a C.I.A. agent's identity to punish her husband, a critic of administration policy, demand hearings on Mr. Berger. The politicians should all let the Justice Department do its job.

Of real concern is that bleeding, yet again, of politics into criminal justice. After initially claiming it knew nothing of the case, the White House has had to admit it was informed. That sort of heads-up taints both sides. It leaves the White House open to questions about whether it timed a leak to the release of the 9/11 panel's report, and it feeds cynicism about the independence of federal prosecutors.

2004-07-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things just get strange.

Bush wants to be a peace president:

"For a while we were marching to war. Now we're marching to peace. ... America is a safer place. Nobody wants to be the war president. I want to be the peace president."

The Republicans reject a tax cut:

Several Republican congressional and administration officials said the president rejected as insufficient an offer by GOP leaders for a two-year extension of expiring tax cuts for parents, married couples and workers. Bush, in the midst of a difficult re-election campaign, wants a five-year extension of the tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire on Dec. 31. Many conservative lawmakers prefer a five-year extension of expiring tax cuts, hoping not only for the economic benefit but also for the political boost on an issue that favors the GOP.

The Republicans urge an investigation:

The main investigative committee in the Republican-led House will look into allegations Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger mishandled highly classified terrorism documents, lawmakers said Wednesday.
Even though the matter already is the subject of a Justice Department criminal probe, House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis said the panel has "a constitutional responsibility to find out what happened and why."

2004-07-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

Best Kerry profile I've read:

John Kerry is a good, tough man. He is curious, grounded after a public and personal life that has not always been pleasant, a fan of ideas whose practical side has usually kept him from policy wonkery, a natural progressive with the added fixation on what works that made FDR and JFK so interesting. I know it is chic to be disdainful, but the modern Democratic neurosis gets in the way of a solid case for affection. Without embarrassment, and after a very long journey, I really like this guy. As one of his top campaign officials, himself a convert since the primaries ended, told me recently, this is pure Merle Haggard. It’s not love, but it’s not bad.

2004-07-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

Support our Troops?

The House on Wednesday sided with the chamber's Republican leaders to embrace spending restraint over an expansion of a program to improve family military housing.

In a near party-line 212-211 procedural vote, lawmakers signaled their willingness to remove a $500 million expansion of the housing program from a $10 billion military construction bill for next year.

2004-07-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

I enjoy statistics, forecasts and most things involving numbers. I, however, have long since stopped even paying attention to the "rosy scenarios" that keep coming from the Administration. Case-in-point:

The Pentagon faces a $12.3 billion shortfall through September for the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its worldwide effort against terrorism, congressional auditors estimated Wednesday.

The amount is triple what Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, projected in April he would need to make it through September. Lawmakers of both parties said at the time that his projection seemed too low, so the projection was not a surprise.

After Congress provided $87 billion last November for Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House began this year insisting it would need no extra money until next year. Under congressional pressure, it requested $25 billion in May for use beginning next October, when the government's new budget year begins.

2004-07-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

The reason why Juan Cole should have a regular spot on some national broadcast:

The same techniques used to get up the Iraq war are now being applied by the political Right in the United States, including President Bush, to Iran. These include innuendo, guilt by association, vague fears, and hyped capabilities. If Bush gets a second term, it seems very likely that his administration will make war on Iran.

Here is the Common Sense test: Usama Bin Laden is a fanatical Sunni Muslim surrounded by other fanatical Sunni Muslims and was nested in the Taliban, who are fanatical Sunni Muslims. Iran is Shiite, a branch of Islam that fanatical Sunni Muslims absolutely hate. In Afghan politics, 1996-2002, at the time it was dominated by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Iran was allied with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Iran was trying to overthrow the Taliban and crush them and al-Qaeda.

Who is Helped by these Crazy Allegations?
- The Likud lobby in Washington
- Old-time US intelligence and diplomatic officials who have a grudge with Iran
- The US military-industrial complex
- Iranian expatriates
- Al-Qaeda

2004-07-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Some Arnold stats from the LA Times:

Total dollar amount of the 2003-04 budget signed by ex-Gov. Gray Davis: $99.1 billion.

Total amount of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first budget after promising to shrink government: $103 billion.

Schwarzenegger's whereabouts just hours after vowing to stay in Sacramento and fight like a warrior to end the budget stalemate:

Beverly Hills fund-raiser.Amount raised at Beverly Hills fund-raiser by Schwarzenegger, who earlier promised to end fund-raising during budget season: Roughly $400,000.

Amount Schwarzenegger has raised for himself and committees he controls since the day he said he doesn't need anyone's money because he has his own: $30 million.

2004-07-21T08:52:00.000-07:00

Some headlines are just a gift, overshadowing Berger:

Grand Jury Steps Up Inquiry Into Possible Halliburton Ties to Iran

A Halliburton controversy erupted Tuesday, fueled by a grand jury investigation into whether the oil services giant violated federal sanctions by operating in Iran while Vice President Dick Cheney was running the company.The investigation centers on Halliburton Products and Services Ltd., a subsidiary registered in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Dubai that provided oil field services in Iran. The unit's operations in Iran included Cheney's stint as chief executive from 1995 to 2000, when he frequently urged the lifting of such sanctions.

2004-07-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

Krugman just gets brutal on it this morning. His main theme:

When Tom Ridge offered a specifics-free warning about a terrorist attack timed to "disrupt our democratic process," many people thought he was implying that Al Qaeda wants George Bush to lose. In reality, all infidels probably look alike to the terrorists, but if they do have a preference, nothing in Mr. Bush's record would make them unhappy at the prospect of four more years.

2004-07-20T10:09:00.000-07:00

I can't see how this is defensible. Absolutely no interest in passing legislation that is simply necessary rather than popular or lucrative:

Nearly one year after the power blackout that left 50 million people in the dark, frustrated Democrats began a push on Tuesday to get the Republican-controlled House to schedule a vote on legislation that would improve the U.S. electricity grid.

With time running out for Congress to pass a comprehensive energy bill, Democrats are demanding a vote on stand-alone legislation that would impose and enforce electric transmission reliability standards on U.S. utilities.

The Bush administration and Republican lawmakers insist that electricity issues can be addressed only in a larger energy legislation package that also includes billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil, natural gas and coal firms.

2004-07-19T21:28:00.000-07:00

Recently there was a discussion on EconLog in response to an article about addiction to government subsidies. The moderator questioned whether anyone could name an industry that thrived after being removed from subsidies. One response that caught my eye:

Aha, I get it, it's a trick question -- most of the industries that are considered thriving receive plenty of government assistance...

Agribusiness (as Arnold cites)
Defense (no explanation needed)
Energy (direct subsidies, military services, etc.)
Pharmaceuticals (protection from imports, massive funding of research)
Banking/Financial Services (multiple government bailouts, tolerance of tax evasion, etc., etc.)
Mining/Logging(access to public lands on very generous terms)
Media(access to public airwaves on very generous terms)
Retail(food stamps and Medicaid for employees)

2004-07-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

Elections are one thing, demoncracy another, and constitutional liberalism yet another. Of course, who needs such details when you are trying to score political points. As always, making a mess now, but looking good is preferable to doing things the right, hard way:

Everywhere in Afghanistan, democratic principles that need to incubate are being wholly ignored or bypassed. Thus while most of the debate on whether to hold elections "on time" has centered on security concerns, there are more compelling reasons to move slowly: the lack of prerequisite laws, a public that is completely uninformed about the fundamental nature and responsibilities of democracy, the absence of civic education, improper monitoring and registration techniques, an utter lack of democratic processes, and the fact that the government is ill equipped to hold elections. Most Afghans don't even know what democracy means.

Imposing impractical deadlines on Afghans, particularly as they may be seen as favoring a particular candidate, imperils the democratic development that promotes good citizenship in an organized society. Elections must be delayed until the people can vote with some understanding of and experience with their new laws and processes and principles that, when understood, compel them to vote in the first place.

2004-07-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

A good political plan if you are anti-regulation; target the little people:

Last year, for the first time, the poor were more likely than the rich to have their tax returns audited, new Internal Revenue Service data compiled by Syracuse University researchers shows. The I.R.S. audited 1.36 percent of all tax returns filed by people making less than $25,000 last year, compared with 1.15 percent of returns filed by those making $100,000 or more. Since 1988, audit rates for the poor have increased by a third, from 1.03 percent, while falling 90 percent for the wealthiest Americans, from 11.4 percent.

Then, they don't complain when you don't investigate people who it might be a good idea to monitor:

The federal agency that checks compliance with gun laws inspects only about 4.5 percent of the nation's federally licensed gun dealers each year, far below the agency's own goals, according to a Justice Department review released Monday.

At that rate, it would take the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives 22 years to inspect all 104,000 federally licensed gun dealers, according to the review by Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department inspector general. ATF's goal is to check each dealer once every three years.

Of course, it might also stem from the undeniable reality

Gay Marriage is a major threat:

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., says that amending the Constitution to ban gay marriages is really a form of homeland security. "The future of our country hangs in the balance," he said before this ploy by his Republican leadership went down in defeat Wednesday, "because the future of marriage hangs in the balance."

Assault Weapons are not.

In March the Senate passed a renewed ban as an amendment to a gun industry immunity bill, which was the NRA's top legislative priority. President Bush issued a statement of administration policy calling the assault weapons ban amendment "unacceptable." The gun industry is licking its chops waiting for the ban to expire. In an upcoming report from the Consumer Federation of America, "Back in Business," one assault weapon manufacturer's sales and marketing director told us, "When the AWB sunsets, which I fully expect it to do, we will be manufacturing pre-ban style weapons and shipping them to the general public through distribution systems and dealers the very next day without doubt . . . .We look forward to Sept. 14th with great enthusiasm."

2004-07-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Chait of TNR on why this regime is not just partisanship as usual:

What does it mean to call the president "undemocratic"? It does not mean Bush is an aspiring dictator. Despite descending from a former president and telling confidants that God chose him to lead the country, he does not claim divine right of rule. He is not going to cancel the election or rig it with faulty ballots. (Well, almost certainly not.) But democracy can be a matter of degree. Russia and the United States are both democracies, but the United States is more democratic than Russia. The proper indictment of the Bush administration is, therefore, not that he's abandoning American democracy, but that he's weakening it. This administration is, in fact, the least democratic in the modern history of the presidency.

2004-07-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

On Lehrer last night one the directors for The Project For Excellence in Journalism was on talking about campaings and metanarratives. He pointed to Gore the liar and Bush the dim; Kerry the flip-flopper and the eroding credibility of Bush. He discussed how such narratives harden overtime. What he failed to mention was that some are true and some are not. Gore wasn't a liar. Kerry is not a flip-flopper in any real sense. Bush, however, does come off as dim. Bush's credibility has been eroded. I know its silly, but I think discussing the veracity of metanarrative is as important as point them out. To throw them all in together is to imply that they are all the same.

As usua, The Daily Show came to the rescue. John did a short stint between commercial breaks on conventional wisdom. His final thought "Talking points, true because they're said a lot"

Speaking of John Stewart, I was recently reading a transcript of his interview with Bill Moyers. Some of the more choice quotes:

MOYERS: I do not know whether you are practicing a old form of parody and satire.
STEWART: Uh-huh.
MOYERS: Or a new form of journalism.
STEWART: Well then that either speaks to the sad state of comedy or the sad state of news. I can't figure out which one. I think, honestly, we're practicing a new form of desperation. Where we just are so inundated with mixed messages from the media and from politicians that we're just trying to sort it out for ourselves.

I am a tiny, neurotic man, standing in the back of the room throwing tomatoes at the chalk board.

MOYERS: And what is the media doing to help us sort us out?
STEWART: Oh. they're not. Yeah, no. That's, yeah, they sat this one out. Yeah, they're not getting involved. It's very tiring. And they have weather reports to give. Nah, the media is not interested in fairness. The media is… Look, politicians have figured out the media. Let's face facts. When television first appeared it proved itself to be a vital insight into the process.
Nixon — you mentioned the Nixon-Kennedy debates. It was… at that point, politicians didn't know how to handle the media. So Nixon could say, "I look fine. I don't need make-up. These lights won't make me sweat. I'm sure I'll come off as calm and collected and eloquent."
And then, as he was sweating and looked, you know, maniacal, he ended up losing. Well, at this point… so at that point television was ahead of the game. Politicians have caught up. They understand that 24-hour news networks? They don't have time for journalism. They only have time for reporting. They only have time to be handed things and go, this is what I've just been handed by the administration. And they read it.
So now that the administration knows that, and they're very disciplined, they can manipulate what goes on the air and what sets the agenda. And that's what they do.

I enjoy watching FOX NEWS and I think every country should have their own Al-Jazeera.

MOYERS: And they vote for these politicians.
STEWART: No. They vote… less than 50 percent of the country. The country is, look, the general dialogue is being swayed by the people who are ideologically driven.
The five percent on each side that are so ideological driven that they will dictate the terms of the discussion. The other 90 percent of the country have lawns to mow, and kids to pick up from schools, and money to make, and things to do. Their lives are, they have entrusted… we live in a representative democracy.
And so, we elect representatives to go do our bidding, so that we can get the leaves out of the gutter, and do the things around the house that need to be done. What the representatives have done over 200 years is set up a periphery — I think they call it the Beltway — that is obtuse enough that we can't penetrate it anymore, unless we spend all of our time. This is the way that it's been set up purposefully by both sides. In the financial industry, as well. They don't want average people to easily penetrate the workings because then we call them on it.

2004-07-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

Resident Sinophile Jason Tower answers my astonishment at the Chalmers Johnson op-ed on US saber rattling:

It has caused quite a sensation on the list-servers that I subscribe to, mainly because there is no doubting Professor Johnson's credentials; I personally do not have access to information that either confirms or denies the intelligence upon which it is based. It doesn't seem like most of the people on the China-Pol list serve know a whole lot.

What I can say right now is that he is correct in his statements about the goals of the anti-China lobby. However, unless the neo-conservatives already consider their cause damned, I really do not see how they would stand to benefit from provoking an armed conflict with China.

First, Johnson notes China's capabilities with respect to "holding off" 1-2 aircraft carriers. This is in fact something of an understatement. Over the past 6 years the PLA has been working feverishly to develop the capability to use ICBMs to blow up a US carrier stationed within a few hundred miles of its territorial waters (dont quote me on the exact distance). Think for awhile about the domestic implications of that NY Times headline: China blows up US Aircraft Carrier, 85 planes, 400 US fatalities. That would sound real good for the neocons. And what would be the US response? All out war on China? Seems pretty inconceivable to me, especially under the assumption that China does not move to attack Taiwan, how would they ever manage to sell that one? Al-Queda links?

Second, US hostilities could actually move China to attack Taiwan. This would also be utterly disastrous, as they have the abilities both vis-a-vis information warfare, and saturation missile attacks to bring Taiwan to a total standstill. Would this be desirable for the neocons? Really dont see much incentive in there if they give a damn about maintaining power.So why bring all of that firepower into the region in July /August? Might it have anything to do with the fact that Taiwan will electing the Yuan just a few months after that? I would go more with an explanation along those lines rather than a neocon military conspiracy to provoke war with China..

.I'm no more a fan of the neocons than you are, but Johnson's conclusions seem to be going a little bit far, especially his interpretation of China's response to the US bringing the carriers into the region. If you'll recall, in 1996 we did just that in response to those missiles being lobbed over the Taiwan Strait. What happened? Beijing made a huge fuss, and the PLA made it priority number one to learn how to take out a couple of carriers, because that was the only way that it could maintain its power in the region. Now the US proposes impinge on Chinese regional power with this new display of bravado. Not surprisingly, China's response is to up its capabilities. This doesn't mean that China is any more likely to attack the US though (once again unless the US becomes involved in a China-Taiwan conflict). The one wild card that Johnson overlooks is what Chen Shuibian does during this operation in August. Will he be emboldened by the US presence to move towards changing the name of the county or the flag (two things he said he would not rule out)? This should be the main concern. Johnson leaves this out of his analysis (granted perhaps because it is just a brief news article).

Getting down to my bottom line, the US is foolish to be sending that kind of firepower into the region at this stage in the cross stage relationship. However the US will not move to provoke war (although it might indirectly cause Chen to cross the red-line, and provoke a Chinese attack against Taiwan). The US has nothing to gain with that many carriers in the area, and stands only to lose. Finally, I dont think that the neocons intend to start a war with China. They have done some pretty stupid things, but I dont think they would ever be able to sell this one, unless once again they already know that they are damned, and that we will be seeing a new administration in 05.

2004-07-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

Something to remember the next time we demand transparency:

The Bush administration is withholding information from U.N.-sanctioned auditors examining more than $1 billion in contracts awarded to Halliburton Co. and other companies in Iraq without competitive bidding.

Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, the U.N. representative to the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), said that the United States has repeatedly rebuffed his requests since March to turn over internal audits. It has also failed to produced a list of other companies that have obtained contracts without having to compete.

The dispute comes as the board released an initial audit by the accounting firm KPMG on Thursday that sharply criticized the U.S.-led coalition's management of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenue. The audit also raised concerns about lax financial controls in some Iraqi ministries, citing poor bookkeeping and duplicate payments of salaries to government employees.

The Pentagon did not specifically answer questions about withholding information to auditors.

2004-07-16T08:41:00.000-07:00

"Pseudopopulist theather", I like it:

For more than three decades, the Republican Party has relied on the "culture war" to rescue their chances every four years, from Richard Nixon's campaign against the liberal news media to George H. W. Bush's campaign against the liberal flag-burners. In this culture war, the real divide is between "regular people" and an endlessly scheming "liberal elite." This strategy allows them to depict themselves as friends of the common people even as they gut workplace safety rules and lay plans to turn Social Security over to Wall Street. Most important, it has allowed Republicans to speak the language of populism.

The amendment may have failed as law, but as pseudopopulist theater it was a masterpiece. Each important element of the culture-war narrative was there. Consider first its choice of targets: while the Senate's culture warriors denied feeling any hostility to gay people, they made no secret of their disgust with liberal judges, a tiny, arrogant group that believes it knows best in all things and harbors an unfathomable determination to run down American culture and thus made this measure necessary.

2004-07-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

That damn symbolism thing again:

Iraq City Becomes Symbol of Resistance

Through Web sites, headlines and graffiti, the Arab world is celebrating the people of Fallujah as victors over a superpower. The three-week siege is inspiring "a literature of resistance and war," said Egyptian novelist Gamal el-Ghitani. "Fallujah is a symbol, in one of the worst eras we have witnessed, that it is not impossible to stand up to America." Evan Kohlmann, a Washington-based consultant on terrorism and security affairs, said they want to turn Iraq into the next Afghanistan — a rallying point for a full-scale attack on the West.

2004-07-15T22:54:00.000-07:00

A great article on historian Niall Ferguson:

Ferguson seems to see his role as pushing America towards the realization that only by ridding itself of its isolationist and politically correct tendencies, and having the confidence of its moral convictions, can it save the world by occupying it.
In this, Ferguson is not unlike many of the leading figures in the Bush administration, hard-minded conservatives who prides themselves on seeing things more clearly than others can. It is not an uncommon sensibility among smart conservative thinkers, who mostly come out of the academy, with its decidedly liberal cast, and in many cases come to see themselves as figures of deep intellectual honesty, who can see through orthodox thought and skewer conventional thinking.
This brand of honesty is seductive and in many ways needed, helping us see through calcified thinking and can reveal hidden truths. But it also contains its own pathologies: The tendency to distrust the evidence and arguments of others, and an inclination to follow one's own theory to bewildering, and sometimes damaging, logical extremes.

2004-07-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

An interesting analogy from Tom Oliphant:

Imagine you were Bush's instructor at Yale. He has turned in his exam, and you have noted that his assertion that David Copperfield dispatched Uriah Heep with the fireplace poker is contradicted by Dickens's novel itself. To save his skin, Bush comes to you and claims with a straight face that he used the Cliffs Notes version to study and that the fact he got it wrong should be ascribed to the cheat sheet, not to him. What would you do? I'd flunk him in a heartbeat.

2004-07-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

Chalmers Johnson is something of a dour figure. Let us a hope he is no Cassandra:

Operation Summer Pulse '04 was almost surely dreamed up at the Pearl Harbor headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command and its commander, Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, and endorsed by neocons in the Pentagon. It is doubtful that Congress was consulted. This only goes to show that our foreign policy is increasingly made by the Pentagon.

These ideologues appear to be trying to precipitate a confrontation with China while they still have the chance. Today, they happen to have rabidly anti-Chinese governments in Taipei and Tokyo as allies, but these governments don't have the popular support of their own citizens.

If American militarists are successful in sparking a war, the results are all too predictable: We will halt China's march away from communism and militarize its leadership, bankrupt ourselves, split Japan over whether to renew aggression against China and lose the war. We also will earn the lasting enmity of the most populous nation on Earth.

2004-07-14T15:55:00.001-07:00

This morning's Progress Report has a short item on Republican propaganda guru Frank Luntz. They discuss his widely circulated memo encouraging the GOP to use "common sense" regarding any new giveway to whatever industry wants to pilfer the environment. In this case, it was the recent controversey over logging.

Voltaire said "There is nothing so uncommon as common sense". I wouldn't go that far. It is common sense for people to want to pay more in taxes. It is also common sense for people to want more and better services from the government. It is common sense that the two have to be balanced. There is, unfortunately, no common sense as to exactly where the proper balance lies. That is the entire reason for politics. Every policy decision involves such compromises. To call your policy "common sense" is to imply that their is broad agreement. In the case of the decision to open protected forest land to logging, this is pure mendacity.

Luntz is indisputably a master of such word tricks. He is the genius behind "death tax". He scares me and not just because he is so good at what he does. I saw him interviewed on NOW. He was defending his memo that advised GOPers never to discuss Iraq without invoking 9/11. What got to me, is his description of what he does. He claims that he explains to people why their feelings are right. This is worse than the standard Oprahizaton of America. It is an inversion of political leadership. The gold standard of a leader is someone who represents his constituents interests rather than their opinions or prejudices. The current trend is to simply act as a barometer of those opinions and prejudices. What Luntz does is take it one step further and actually help people justify their opinions and prejudices.

2004-07-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

2004-07-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

Juan Cole being his usual on-point self:

So, no, Americans are not safer, Mr. Bush. They face the threat of substantial narco-terrorism from Afghanistan. Iraq is a security nightmare that could well blow back on the American homeland. Pakistan remains a military dictatorship with a host of militant jihadi movements that had been fomented by the hardline Pakistani military intelligence. Saudi Arabia is witnessing increased al-Qaeda activity and attacks on Westerners. And the Israeli-Palestine dispute is being left to fester and poison the world.

These are not achievements to be proud of. This is a string of disasters. We are not safer. We face incredible danger because of the way the Bush administration has grossly mishandled the Middle East.

2004-07-13T23:52:00.000-07:00

Why professional economists should be consulted instead of politicians. From Brad DeLong on the Bush Administration Employment Forecasts:

I can find nobody who can add--and have never found anybody who can add--who will defend this forecast in public, or even sketch out in public a scenario for how this forecast could have ever come to pass.

It is difficult to make an employment forecast that goes as erroneous in as short a time as the Bush administration's has. Nevertheless, they managed.

2004-07-13T23:11:00.000-07:00

RAMBLING

I just enjoyed another genius edition of The Daily Show. I remain thoroughly convinced that it is the best non-PBS journalism on television. I enjoy the veil of humor, but it is the critical framework that really gains my admiration. The Daily Show refuses to take politicians at their word and is willing to speak truth to power. Thankfully a show that simply parrots its own soundbites ala the network news could not survive on Comedy Central. Whereas FOX is sicening blend of ideological cheerleading and partisan self-righteousness, The Daily Show is actually what FOX purports to be "fair and balanced". I see nothing unfair or imbalanced with calling a spade a spade, even if it may seem impolite. The press is not supposed to be polite.

For the record, I am a snob when it comes to television news. The only shows, other than the aforementioned, that I watch religiously are BBC World, Charlie Rose and the Jim Lehrer Newshour, NOW and Washington Week. I will sometimes record 60 Minutes if they have a big interview like Richard Clarke or Anthony Zinni.

CNN Headline News is on at school. It is absolutely atrocious. I understand that it is premised on providing the bare facts, but most of the soundbites are so egregious that qualifications really are necessary. Not that the international or political coverage take up much time since they seem to be obsessed with hackneyed fluff that is found on the pages of Reader's Digest. I catch regular CNN at the gym on occasion. It is just as bad, if not worse. The scariest part is that CNN is allegedly the best of the bunch. Between adherence to market forces, media conglomeration and the conservatives working the refs (Eric Alterman smarter than me), it is a sad sad state of affairs.

Robert Samuelson on the same topic:

Political campaigns are exercises in exuberant irrationality. People say things that they know are untrue; indeed, if they believed some of these things, they ought to be barred from office. But the media treat these routine untruths as respectable statements that ought to be analyzed and debated.

Probably this is the best democracy can do: a common-sense judgment culled from much exaggeration, simplification and distortion. We in the media will enjoy ourselves. But those of us who think we're a powerful force for clarity and candor ought to sober up. Mostly, we're part of the clatter.

2004-07-11T19:48:00.000-07:00

We don't distort science because we don't distort science.:

More than 4,000 scientists, including 48 Nobel Prize winners and 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences, accused the Bush administration Thursday of distorting and suppressing science to suit its political goals.

Administration officials rejected the criticism Thursday, as they did when the same letter was released in February bearing the names of 62 prominent scientists.

Every detainee has the right of review, except for those detainees that don't have the right of review.

Despite pledging yearly reviews for all prisoners held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Pentagon officials tentatively agreed during a high-level meeting last month to deny that process to some detainees and to keep their existence secret "for intelligence reasons," senior defense officials said Thursday.

Under the proposal, some prisoners would in effect be kept off public records and away from the scrutiny of lawyers and judges.

2004-07-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

We live in the age of celebrity, indeed...and the thought that Kobe Bryant might allow the Nuggets to court him in free agency as some sort of trial tactic really is disgustingly plausible. Quite provocative!

2004-07-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

By the way, I continue to be impressed by how Mr. Kerry plays Vietnam. He served four months in Vietnam, and everyone thinks it was years. Peggy Noonan

Information Addict...just out of curiosity is this true? I really thought he did a year and signed on for an additional stint.

2004-07-08T11:48:00.000-07:00

The European Court of Human Rights can grasp its own principles of "federalism" with respect to abortion...probably the right decision:

Europe's top human rights court rejected an appeal Thursday to grant full human rights to a fetus, saying national governments must decide the issue themselves... The 17-judge panel ruled the issue of when the right to life begins "was a question to be decided at national level ... because the issue had not been decided within the majority of states" which have ratified the European Convention on human rights.

The Burger Court in Roe v. Wade could not...only the right decision for the outcome-focused, constitutionally disingenuous. If only the tables were turned...

The court's sensitive approach reflected deep differences over abortion across the continent.

"The decision was welcomed by a leading abortion rights group that filed arguments warning that accepting a right to life for a fetus could make abortions illegal in all 45 countries that recognize the court's jurisdiction."

2004-07-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

This is the actual lead of an AP article:

The White House sought Thursday to minimize President Bush's ties with indicted former Enron chief Kenneth Lay, saying it has been a long time since they talked and suggesting it was only a passing friendship.

When Bush was governor of Texas, he called Lay "Kenny Boy" and Enron was a big financial backer. Bush has received more than $550,000 in donations from Enron, its employees and their relatives during his political career — the most from any source.

2004-07-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

So, we really trust these guys. First, they can order us out of the country. Now, they are simply making up powers. Today's declaration is a recipe for tyranny:

Article 1: Can declare a state of emergency anywhere for any reason.

Article 2: It can be extended indefinitely, although it must be renewed every 60 days.

Article 3: List of the Prime Minister's Powers
1) Search, Seizure and Detention
2) Curfew
3) Freeze Assets
4) Control Communications
5) Restrict Transportation
6) Close Public Places
7) Suspend Weapons Licenses
8) Control All Security
9) Seek Assistance of the U.S.

Article 4: Right to a Judge

Article 5: Issuance of Orders; Prison Terms of Three Years

Article 6: Can Appoint Military Governors

Article 7: Judicial Review for Criminals

Article 8: Power to Release Accused

Article 9: Approval of the Presidential Council; Review by the Kurds

Article 10: Declaring the End of the Staet of Emergency

Article 11: Cannot nullify the Transitional Administrative Law

Article 12: Cannot delay elections

Article 13: Law effective immediately

I agree with the sentiment that "Borrowing Saddam Hussein's big stick for a short period of time is fine if it's for the interest of the people,". Of course, the last part is really the problem. Remembering Federalist 51:

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The Administration is concerned with good and bad people, our Founders did not believe in "good people" so they focused on good and bad structures. It may be necessary; it may work, but unchecked authority is a very bad structure.

2004-07-07T17:49:00.000-07:00

Rules for us.

The United States didn't have authorization from the U.N. nuclear watchdog when it secretly shipped from Iraq uranium and highly radioactive material.

"The American authorities just informed us of their intention to remove the materials, but they never sought authorization from us," said Gustavo Zlauvinen, head of the IAEA's New York office.

A U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was some concern about the legality of the U.S. transfer because the nuclear material belonged to Iraq and was under the control and supervision of the IAEA

IAEA inspectors left Iraq just before last year's U.S.-led war. After it ended, Washington barred U.N. weapons inspectors from returning, deploying U.S. teams instead in a so far unsuccessful search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

An exception was made in June 2003 when Washington allowed an IAEA team to go to Tuwaitha to secure uranium after reports of widespread looting when the fighting ended.

The IAEA recovered most missing material and Zlauvinen said the uranium was put in sealed containers and left for the Americans to guard.

But because U.S. authorities restricted inspections of Tuwaitha, the IAEA team was unable to determine whether hundreds of radioactive items used in research and medicine across the country were secure.

Rules for everyone else.

The White House welcomed a June 19 statement by the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) asking Iran to allow further inspections of its reactor sites.

The IAEA statement is "international reinforcement of the president's message yesterday that the world, broadly speaking, joins together in fighting proliferation and making certain that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. He spoke to reporters on Air Force One June 19 as they accompanied President Bush on a day trip to Minnesota.

Iran "needs to comply" with the IAEA, Fleischer said.

2004-07-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

My father is convinced that the Administration has Bin Laden on ice somewhere and will be parading him out some time in October. A new article in The New Republic makes clear that he is wrong on both counts. They don't have him and are shooting for July, during the Democratic National Convention.

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. "Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn't change because of an election," says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. According to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

2004-07-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

Why he's Josh Marshall and I'm, well, not:

Implicit , however, is an assumption which now permeates much of the debate about foreign policy in this year's campaign. That is, that however successfully or wisely the goal has been pursued, the Bush administration is the champion of democratization as a strategic goal on the world stage while John Kerry is the advocate of a more traditional foreign policy Realism, which prioritizes stability and alliances with existing powers over democratization and the export of American values

Perhaps the clearest sign of the ubiquity of this assumption is that it is not only advanced by the president's advocates but -- from a different and more critical perspective -- by his opponents as well. Many of them fault the president for a heedless or ill-conceived neo-Wilsonianism, which will damage US national security by pursuing illusory or improbable goals. But talk is cheap.

And when you look at the actual record I think there is very little evidence that the assumption is at all valid. I don't mean simply that the Bush administration has been unsuccessful or incompetent in pursuing its plans for democratization. I don't even mean that they've been hypocritical or inconsistent. I mean that democratization as a moral or strategic goal simply doesn't figure into the White House's plans.

In essence, if you support the US war on terror, how you run your country is your own business. But pleading broader geostrategic interests as a defense for supporting dictatorships and human rights abusers is irrelevant as a defense precisely because it is always the defense -- and sometimes even a valid one.

Of course, the two cases where the Bush administration's advocates would beg to differ would be those two cases I chose to set aside at the outset: Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, I think that at any time in recent history any American government would have attempted to put in place a government that is at least nominally democratic in any state it overthrew. And the case of sorry inattention to Afghanistan makes a very good argument for the proposition that actual democratization is very lower on the list of the administration's priorities.

2004-07-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

I am so easily confused:

The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the C.I.A. and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons.

Among the many problems that contributed to the committee's harsh assessment of the C.I.A.'s prewar performance were instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence in order to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programs, according to government officials.

While the Senate panel has concluded that C.I.A. analysts and other intelligence officials overstated the case that Iraq had illicit weapons, the committee has not found any evidence that the analysts changed their reports as a result of political pressure from the White House, according to officials familiar with the report.

I just don't get it.

Senior Bush administration officials are pressuring CIA analysts to tailor their assessments of the Iraqi threat to help build a case against Saddam Hussein, intelligence and congressional sources said.

In what sources described as an escalating "war," top officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere have bombarded CIA analysts with criticism and calls for revisions on such key questions as whether Iraq has ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, sources said.

The sources stressed that CIA analysts--who are supposed to be impartial-- are fighting to resist the pressure. But they said analysts are increasingly resentful of what they perceive as efforts to contaminate the intelligence process.

The intelligence officials are responding to the political leadership, not the other way around, which is how it should be," said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The politics are driving our intelligence assessments at this point."

CIA officials who brief Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on Iraq routinely return to the agency with a long list of complaints and demands for new analysis or shifts in emphasis, sources said.(LA Times 10/11/02)

2004-07-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

From Warren:

The U.S. House of Representatives is about to consider a bill that, if passed, could cause the mathematical lunacy record to move east. First, the bill decrees that a coveted form of corporate pay -- stock options -- be counted as an expense when these go to the chief executive and the other four highest-paid officers in a company, but be disregarded as an expense when they are issued to other employees in the company. Second, the bill says that when a company is calculating the expense of the options issued to the mighty five, it shall assume that stock prices never fluctuate.

The House's anointment of itself as the ultimate scorekeeper for investors, it should be noted, comes from an institution that in its own affairs favors Enronesque accounting. Witness the fanciful "sunset" provisions that are used to meet legislative "scoring" requirements. Or regard the unified budget protocol, which applies a portion of annual Social Security receipts to reducing the stated budget deficit while ignoring the concomitant annual costs for benefit accruals.

And Henry:

During the Clinton administration, Congress spent millions of tax dollars probing alleged White House wrongdoing. There was no accusation too minor to explore, no demand on the administration too intrusive to make.

When President Clinton was in office, Congress exercised its oversight powers with no sense of proportionality. But oversight of the Bush administration has been even worse: With few exceptions, Congress has abdicated oversight responsibility altogether.

Republican Rep. Ray LaHood aptly characterized recent congressional oversight of the administration: "Our party controls the levers of government. We're not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to try to cause heartburn."

Republican leaders in Congress have refused to investigate who exposed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. They have held virtually no public hearings on the hundreds of misleading claims made by administration officials about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda. They have failed to probe allegations that administration officials misled Congress about the costs of the Medicare prescription drug bill. And they have ignored the ethical lapses of administration officials, such as the senior Medicare official who negotiated future employment representing drug companies while drafting the prescription drug bill. The House is even refusing to investigate the horrific Iraq prison abuses.

Our nation needs a more balanced approach. Congressional oversight is essential to our constitutional system of checks and balances. Excessive oversight distracts and diminishes the executive branch. But absence of oversight invites corruption and mistakes. The Founders correctly perceived that concentration of power leads to abuse of power if unchecked.

2004-07-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

The NY Times with some good Independence Day fodder:

Virtually every time the Bush administration feels cornered, it falls back on the argument that the president and his officials are honorable men and women. This is an invitation to turn what should be a debate about policy into a referendum on the hearts of the people making it. But this nation was organized under a rule of law, not a dictatorship of the virtuous. The founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights specifically because they did not believe that honorable men always do the right thing.

And Walter Isaacson:

Thus the Declaration of Independence is, in effect, a work of propaganda — or, to put it more politely, an exercise in public diplomacy intended to enlist other countries to the cause.

If you are trying to persuade people to join with you, there are three general methods. You can coerce them with threats, convince them by pointing out their own interests, or entice them by appealing to their ideals.

Rather than caring for the opinions of mankind, President Bush jokes, "Call my lawyer," when the concept of international law is raised. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld saw little need to distribute the Geneva Convention rules to American soldiers dealing with prisoners.

Machiavelli famously advised his prince that it was better to be feared than loved. By that standard, the United States is doing rather well.

2004-07-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

"If you aren't gonna play by my rules, I am gonna take my ball and go home"

The Bush administration has decided to withdraw nine U.S. soldiers serving in United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa and the Balkans, citing the U.N. Security Council's refusal this month to renew a resolution shielding Americans from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, U.S. and U.N. officials said Friday.

"U.S. servicemen participating in these missions were not at risk of prosecution," said Richard Dicker, an expert on the court at the New York-based advocacy group, Human Rights Watch. "This seems to be a petulant response to the Bush administration's failure to ram through the Security Council a resolution exempting Americans from prosecution by the court."

2004-07-03T11:28:00.000-07:00

American soldiers who defeated the Iraqi regime 15 months ago received virtually none of the critical spare parts they needed to keep their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles running. They ran chronically short of food, water and ammunition. Their radios often failed them. Their medics had to forage for medical supplies, artillery gunners had to cannibalize parts from captured Iraqi guns and intelligence units provided little useful information about the enemy. These revelations come not from embedded reporters or congressional committees but from the Army itself.

I'm gonna guess and say poor planning, too rushed and undermanned:

Most significantly, military planners did not anticipate the effectiveness or ferocity of paramilitary forces that disrupted supply columns and mounted suicide charges against 70-ton Abrams tanks. Some of those same forces, using tactics refined during the invasion, are part of the current insurgency.

The report does say that the military's "running start" — the strategy of launching the invasion before all support units had arrived — made it difficult for commanders to quickly adjust from major combat to postwar challenges. Because combat units outraced supply and support units, combat commanders were caught unprepared when Hussein's regime collapsed after three weeks.

"Local commanders were torn between their fights and providing resources — soldiers, time and logistics — to meet the civilian needs," the report said. "Partially due to the scarce resources as a result of the running start, there simply was not enough to do both missions."

At least we have symoblism:

Among other highlights, the report revealed that the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad before cheering Iraqis was the brainchild of a U.S. Marine colonel, with help from a psychological operations unit.

Apparently though, we are not very good at it:

Efforts by psychological operations units to persuade Iraqi forces to surrender largely failed, the study concluded.

Despite success in minimizing damage to oil fields, the psychological units "produced much less than expected and perhaps less than claimed," the authors said. Some leaflets baffled Iraqi forces, while others were outdated, forcing units to resort to loudspeaker broadcasts, the report said.

2004-07-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

I was once scolded by an economist friend for being of the opinion that a company should have a social conscience and such a conscience would not be a major effect on profitability. It was a subject that recently came up in conversation about Wal-Mart and Costco:

Surprisingly, however, Costco's high-wage approach actually beats Wal-Mart at its own game on many measures. BusinessWeek ran through the numbers from each company to compare Costco and Sam's Club, the Wal-Mart warehouse unit that competes directly with Costco. We found that by compensating employees generously to motivate and retain good workers, one-fifth of whom are unionized, Costco gets lower turnover and higher productivity. Combined with a smart business strategy that sells a mix of higher-margin products to more affluent customers, Costco actually keeps its labor costs lower than Wal-Mart's as a percentage of sales, and its 68,000 hourly workers in the U.S. sell more per square foot. Put another way, the 102,000 Sam's employees in the U.S. generated some $35 billion in sales last year, while Costco did $34 billion with one-third fewer employees.

I have modified my former position from "should" to "could". I have long since given up the naive hope that companies will act as anything but profit maximizers. Furthermore, I don't even consider them rational actors. Very often the short term obsessions of managers and stockholders trump long range planning leading often to smoke and mirrors accounting and even outright criminality. Michael Porter, an expert on competitive strategy at the Harvard Business School was recently on Charlie Rose and he specifically highlighted as a major misconception the idea that shareholder and company interests are congruent.

Given this penchant for profiteering, there are two choices: abolish capitalism or regulate the market. Opting for the second, you would have to construct a series of rules that assumes companies will get away with anything they can. The minimum wage would be an example of a rational response. Recent moves on energy policy and prescription drugs are not.

State Senator Joe Dunn lead the inquiry into Enron et al. He explained to me one evening that he and his fellow Senators had a very hard time understanding the nature of the problem. They continually looked at output rates and usage patterns, while all along the professional economists were explaining to them that their problem wasn't technical, it was simple economics. They worked tirelessly to express to the committee that energy prices cannot be regulated by the market because it is not fungible; consumers cannot choose to not use energy like they could eat chicken if beef gets too expensive. Now, if the energy companies had played strictly by the rules of the market, there would have been no crisis. Unfortunately, competition was not as profitable as collusion. If you keep in mind companies as short-term profit maximizers rather than rational market actors, the crisis is not surprising. We experienced this on a national level back in August:

Well, I don't think it's a question so much as is there enough transmission. I think there is a different problem. It's more that we are in a transition here; we're restructuring the electricity system. And we're going from a highly vertically integrated, regulated system that we used to have to a more market-like system. And that requires a different set of rules in order to operate reliably and efficiently.

That problem there was not the ugliness of price gouging, but simply that the federal government had deregulated electricity and made compliance with its standards "voluntary":

We have rules, we have business and we have reliability and operational rules and right now the rulings we operate by are all voluntary. We think it is essential that they become mandatory. When we examine this, the cause for this is attributable to two possibilities: one would be that we have not studied this particular system state, and that we haven't designed the rules properly to meet this particular condition. The other possibility is that some of the operators were not playing by the rules. They were just simply not following the standards.

Not getting into lobbying and special interests, the government had adopted my formerly naive attitude. They assumed that the companies would be good actors. It was a mistake destined to be repeated. Today, AARP released research that showed precisely what so many had been predicting would occur with the new prescription drug coverage:

Even after the new Medicare law promised billions of dollars in government spending on prescription drugs, makers of best-selling medications raised prices quickly, nearly triple the rate of inflation

The basic formula behind the card is this: Different groups partner with pharmaceutical companies to offer discount drug cards. Those cards lock in the buyers to a certain supply. The companies are not restricted from raising prices after the cards are purchased. The government cannot use its massive buying power to negotiate lower prices or import from Canada. Absolutely Genius!

2004-06-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

A personal observation: I get the impression from reports, interviews and polls that the transfer of sovereignty has played well with the Iraqi populace. It seems that the Allawi government is getting the benefit of the doubt. I, however, remain unconvinced that this is a positive development.

One of the many narratives that has emerged about the troubles of the occupation has focused on the grandiose delusions of the neoconservatives. The "Paris in '44"/"cakewalk" mentality has been much derided. What is missing from such valid criticisms is the recognition that the neoconservative dreamworld was far more grounded than Iraqi expectations. Whereas the neoconservatives planned to liberate a functioning state and simply graft on constitutional liberalism, the Iraqis figured the United States could seamlessly overthrow Saddam and resurrect what they knew to be a failed state. The Iraqis were more realistic about what needed to be done, but, as a result, more naive about what could be done.

We were, for the most part, greeted as liberators. Our failure to work miracles quickly used up the political capital that initial euphoria provided. Our plans and resources for reconstruction were ad hoc and insufficient. Their expectations were absurd. The combination did serious damage. I worry that the dynamic is about to repeat itself.

Nothing magical happened two days ago. Symbolism is important. But just as Bremer made himself look silly when he discussed low tariffs while Baghdad lacked power, Allawi will only get so much mileage from "sovereignty" if he and his government (and the US) are unable to move quickly on security and services. The current upswing could presage another sudden loss of legitimacy. The slow process of building liberal democracy is not well endured by a populace sold on the idea of the silver bullet.

2004-06-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

What's in a national symbol?

Former Iraq viceroy L. Paul Bremer's heels had barely scuttered across the tarmac to his plane Monday when the new Iraqi government proudly unfurled the nation's flag.

But wait a minute! That's not the flag the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council agreed on after an extensive artistic competition. Remember that snappy blue Islamic crescent on a field of pure white, with two blue stripes representing the Tigris and Euphrates and a third stripe to symbolize the country's Kurdish minority? The pale blue was just like the main color of the flag of Israel.

It was deemed a beautiful symbol of the New Iraq. But for some reason the Iraqis, probably because they aren't used to democracy, objected.

So the flags surrounding the new interim government are the same old red-and-green and-black flag of yore. They even have the "God Is Great" writing, which Saddam Hussein added after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

It might have something to do with that Maslow guy and something about a hierarchy of needs:

More than a year into an aid effort that American officials likened to the Marshall Plan, occupation authorities acknowledge that fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way. Only three months after L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator who departed Monday, pledged that 50,000 Iraqis would find jobs at construction sites before the formal transfer of sovereignty, fewer than 20,000 local workers are employed.

Supplies of electricity and water are no better for most Iraqis, and in some cases are worse, than they were before the invasion in the spring of 2003.

In the initial months of the American occupation, the hard-earned lessons of earlier nation-building campaigns by the United States and the United Nations in places like Bosnia, Afghanistan and East Timor were ignored by Pentagon planners, who tried to rush ahead with showcase infrastructure projects before securing public safety and a sense of participation, critics say.

"We mostly did what we know how to do, instead of what needed to be done," said James Dobbins, a retired diplomat who led American recovery efforts in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and elsewhere and said it was a mistake to put the Pentagon in charge of Iraq's economy. "That's what the Army Corps of Engineers does: it hires multinational corporations to build infrastructure."

Critics like Mr. Dobbins, who has not worked in Iraq but was President Bush's envoy to Afghanistan after the American invasion there, say many of the problems should have been foreseen.

"What the Iraqis needed was security, and with that they could get their electricity back on themselves," said Mr. Dobbins, who is now with the Rand Corporation and is chief author of a 2003 study, "America's Role in Nation-Building From Germany to Iraq."

Well, at least we turned it into a model libertarian economy, just ask us:

In an interview last week, Bremer maintained that "Iraq has been fundamentally changed for the better" by the occupation. The CPA, he said, has put Iraq on a path toward a democratic government and an open economy after more than three decades of a brutal socialist dictatorship. Among his biggest accomplishments, he said, were the lowering of Iraq's tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws and the reduction of import duties.

Then again, there is that damn reality always getting in the way:

At the same time, an economy that is supposed to become a beacon of free enterprise remains warped by central controls and huge subsidies for energy and food, leaving politically explosive policy choices for the fledgling Iraqi government.

"It's hard to make the economy start working with such irrational prices," said Keith Crane, an economist at the RAND Corporation who advised the Coalition Provisional Authority last year. "And in the long run it doesn't make sense to build refineries so they can sell gas for three cents a liter."

2004-06-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

More on the disconnet between the people and politics. The one conclusion that he doesn't come to is how the disconnect effects voter apathy. (Witness, on this point, the recent low turnouts in the EU elections). Still, a good piece.

If the country were more polarized, you'd expect to find it in the polls. You don't. After scouring surveys, sociologist Paul DiMaggio of Princeton University concluded that "the public actually has become more unified in attitudes toward race, gender and crime since the 1970s."

What's actually happened is that politics, and not the country, has become more polarized. By politics, I mean elected officials, party activists, advocates, highly engaged voters and commentators (TV talking heads, pundits). In his search for polarization, sociologist DiMaggio examined many subgroups by age, race, sex and education. None exhibited more polarization, with one exception: people who identified as "strong" Republicans or Democrats. That's about 30 percent of adults.

The result is a growing disconnect between politics -- and political commentary -- and ordinary life. Politics is increasingly a world unto itself, inhabited by people convinced of their own moral superiority: conspicuously, the religious right among Republicans; and upscale liberal elites among Democrats. Their agendas are hard to enact because they're minority agendas. So politicians instinctively focus on delivering psychic benefits. Each side strives to make its political "base" feel good about itself. People should be confirmed in their moral superiority.

2004-06-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

Georg W. Bush:

"Really what you're talking about is France, isn't it? And they didn't agree with my decision. They did vote for the U.N. Security Council resolution. ... We just had a difference of opinion about whether, when you say something, you mean it."

Washington Post:

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales assembled reporters in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building last week for what has become an administration ritual: disavowing the conclusions of official documents.

Administration memos -- some of which appeared to sanction torture of prisoners -- were "unnecessary, over-broad discussions" and "not relied upon" by policymakers, Gonzales said. "In reality, they do not reflect the policies that the administration ultimately adopted."

A week earlier, it was Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's turn to step away from an official document, this one State's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which showed the number of terrorist incidents worldwide falling to the lowest level in more than three decades. "Unfortunately, the data that is within the report, the actual numbers of incidents, is off, it's wrong," Powell said. "And I am regretful that this has happened." A revised report showed that 625 people died in terrorist attacks in 2003, not 307 as first reported.

The most embarrassing are cases in which good-news reports by the administration turn out to be based on errors, omissions or wishful thinking. As Powell did this month with the global terrorism report, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson earlier this year distanced himself from a report by his agency that played down inequalities in health care for minorities. The original version was edited to remove many uses of the word "disparity" and the description of the inequality as a national problem. "I think people just wanted this to be a more positive report and made that editorial position known," Thompson said in congressional testimony. "It was a mistake."

Likewise, just nine days after the White House Council of Economic Advisers predicted that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs this year -- an extraordinarily rosy forecast -- Bush declined to back his own economists. "People can debate the numbers all they want," spokesman Scott McClellan said.

In other cases, top Bush officials have dismissed as insignificant administration documents with embarrassing conclusions, such as the interrogation memos. For example, when the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to agencies calling for spending cuts in 2006 in education, homeland security and other high-profile domestic priorities, the White House belittled the importance of the memo, saying it was a "process document" and did not represent administration plans.

Before that, the administration publicly disavowed -- or at least tiptoed away from -- a budget memo calling for spending cuts next year, unrealistically upbeat reports about job growth, Medicare prescription costs and minority health care, and optimistic assumptions in a proposed regulation governing mercury emissions.

Democrats say this is no accident. "It's either political manipulation or incompetence," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a former top aide to President Bill Clinton. "I know it's not incompetence." Emanuel, with Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), alleges "a rampant pattern of crafting government reports to match the administration's political objectives."

2004-06-29T08:38:00.000-07:00

Jesse freakin Helms, never thought I would be agreeing with him. Looks like he isn't the only one who suffers from prejudice:

I would not have voted for [President Bush's] tax cut, based on what I know. . . . There is no doubt that the people at the top who need a tax break the least will get the most benefit. . . . Too often presidents do things that don't end up helping the people they should be helping, and their staffs won't tell them their actions stink on ice."

2004-06-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, collateral damage isn't a bad thing:

The occupation of Iraq has increasingly undermined, and in some cases discredited, the core tenets of President Bush's foreign policy, according to a wide range of Republican and Democratic analysts and U.S. officials.

When the war began 15 months ago, the president's Iraq policy rested on four broad principles: The United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets. Washington should be willing to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk. Iraq was the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism. And Baghdad's transformation into a new democracy would spark regionwide change.

But these central planks of Bush doctrine have been tainted by spiraling violence, limited reconstruction, failure to find weapons of mass destruction or prove Iraq's ties to al Qaeda, and mounting Arab disillusionment with U.S. leadership.

"Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth -- democracy promotion -- is hanging by a sliver," said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and now director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center.

The president has "walked away from unilateralism. We're not going to do another preemptive strike anytime soon, certainly not in Iran or North Korea. And it looks like terrorism is getting worse, not better, especially in critical countries like Saudi Arabia," Kemp said.

As a result, Bush doctrine could become the biggest casualty of U.S. intervention in Iraq, which is entering a new phase this week as the United States prepares to hand over power to the new Iraqi government.

Some analysts, including Republicans, suggest that another casualty of Iraq is the neoconservative approach that inspired a zealous agenda to tackle security threats in the Middle East and transform the region politically.

"Neoconservatism has been replaced by neorealism, even within the Bush White House," Kemp said. "The best evidence is the administration's extraordinary recent reliance on [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan and [U.N. envoy] Lakhdar Brahimi. The neoconservatives are clearly much less credible than they were a year ago."

2004-06-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

Nice to see someone writing lucidly about abortion:

Nothing I have said is a defense of abortion. There are strong arguments from natural reason to oppose it, including a presumption in favor of personhood where the possibility exists. That they are not so strong as to command general assent does not free anyone from the duty of considering those arguments seriously, and of making a decision in conscience based on that consideration.

All I am saying is that the bishops have no special mandate from their office to supplant the individual conscience with some divine imperative. For them to say that this is a matter of theology is, simply, bad theological reasoning.

2004-06-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

Lead by example. Lesson 1 "Transparency"

Billions of dollars belonging to Iraq is not accounted for by the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was given responsibility by the United Nations (news - web sites) for the country's finances, British lawmakers and aid activists said Monday.

There are glaring gaps in the handling of $20 billion generated by Iraq's oil and other sources since the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein ended last year, according to reports from the Liberal Democrats, Britain's third-largest political party, and Christian Aid.

The Christian Aid report also said the majority of Iraq's reconstruction projects have been awarded to U.S. companies, which charge up to 10 times more than Iraqi firms.

There was no immediate reaction from coalition officials to the reports.

The United Nations gave the U.S.-led coalition responsibility for the Development Fund for Iraq after the fall of Saddam in May 2003. It stipulated that expenditures must be shown to be in Iraq's best interest and that all revenue should be paid into a simple fund. But Christian Aid and the Liberal Democrats said no audit on the money was carried out until April.

"For the entire year that the CPA has been in power in Iraq, it has been impossible to tell with any accuracy what the CPA has been doing with Iraq's money," said Helen Collison from Christian Aid.

The Liberal Democrats' study cited the accounting firm KPMG, which criticized the coalition for not metering oil production and questioned its spending.

"This apparent discrepancy requires full investigation," said Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for foreign affairs.

"The cost of reconstruction of Iraq is considerable and those countries who are being asked to contribute will want to know that Iraq's own resources are making a maximum contribution," he added.

Aw screw it, just pay it lip service:

The Bremer law calls on parties to "strive to the extent possible to achieve full transparency in all financial dealings"

2004-06-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

Sovereignty has passed, kind of:

U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer has issued a raft of edicts revising Iraq's legal code and has appointed at least two dozen Iraqis to government jobs with multi-year terms in an attempt to promote his concepts of governance long after the planned handover of political authority on Wednesday.

Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless overturned by Iraq's interim government, restrict the power of the interim government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country's democratic transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support.

The effect of other regulations could last much longer. Bremer has ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the interim prime minister he selected, Ayad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi's choices on the elected government that is to take over next year.

Bremer also has appointed Iraqis handpicked by his aides to influential positions in the interim government. He has installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry. He has formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. He named a public-integrity commissioner who will have the power to refer corrupt government officials for prosecution.

Many of them reflect an idealistic but perhaps futile attempt to impose Western legal, economic and social concepts on a tradition-bound nation that is reveling in anything-goes freedom after 35 years of dictatorial rule.

The orders include rules that cap tax rates at 15 percent, prohibit piracy of intellectual property, ban children younger than 15 from working, and a new traffic code that stipulates the use of a car horn in "emergency conditions only" and requires a driver to "hold the steering wheel with both hands."

2004-06-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

I aqree with the former RNC chairman:

Candidates in that district have to be concerned with winning only the primary; the general election is a foregone conclusion. Winning the primary requires that they talk only to the local party activists -- usually the party "purists." In more than 90 percent of congressional districts, success in the dominant party's primary is tantamount to election.

If a candidate need talk only to those who are most fervent in support of the party, he or she doesn't have to listen to, or even speak to, people in the center, much less those of the other party. As a matter of fact, candidates seen cozying up to people on the other side of the political aisle might put their own primary prospects at risk.

There is an alternative. One state has chosen a better route: In Iowa, the districting is done by an independent commission, and, as I understand it, the rules are fairly straightforward. They seek to draw districts that are compact and contiguous -- both happily appropriate constitutional terms -- and, to the extent possible, ones that adhere to county lines. All this without regard to party. The result: Most contests in Iowa really are contests.

2004-06-24T23:29:00.000-07:00

AP: US President George W. Bush insisted in an interview broadcast the world was becoming a safer place despite a spate of deadly attacks in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

AP: Significant acts of terror worldwide reached a 21-year high in 2003, the State Department announced as it corrected a mistaken report that had been cited to boost President Bush's war on terror. Incidents of terrorism increased slightly during the year, and the number of people wounded rose dramatically, the department said Tuesday.

Al Qaeda still has a functioning leadership despite the death or capture of key figures, and estimates suggest al Qaeda operates in more than 60 nations around the world, the International Institute of Strategic Studies said in its Strategic Survey 2003-4.

The terrorist group poses a growing threat to Western interests and attacks are likely to increase, the institute said.

CBS: "Overall, risks of terrorism to Westerners and Western assets in Arab countries appeared to increase after the Iraq war began in March 2003," institute director John Chipman told a news conference to launch the annual survey.

WP: Iran made good on recent threats yesterday and announced that it will resume building equipment essential for a nuclear weapons program, despite its agreement with three major European powers.

In diplomatic terms, Iran's defiance was seen as a direct challenge to the United States, which is trying to convince allies that it is time to punish Iran at the Security Council.

AP: North Korea has threatened to test a nuclear weapon unless Washington accepts Pyongyang's conditions for a freeze of its nuclear weapons program, a senior U.S. official said.

On Friday, the North renewed a demand for the United States to drop its "hostile policy," though it made no public response to the American proposal. "It is high time the U.S. made a responsible, bold decision," said the North Korean official newspaper Minju Joson, quoted by the North's main news agency.

AP: Bush was asked whether he was satisfied with the level of political, economic and military support coming from European nations in Iraq.

"First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq. Really what you're talking about is France, isn't it? And they didn't agree with my decision. They did vote for the U.N. Security Council resolution. ... We just had a difference of opinion about whether, when you say something, you mean it."

BBC: Europe's leaders may be divided on the Iraq crisis, but the majority of people across the continent are united in their opposition to war, polls suggest. From Portugal to Russia, opinion surveys suggest that without a further UN resolution, most Europeans are overwhelmingly against war - and even a second resolution would not convince many of them. (From before the war)

Now, its not just that Bush said these things, it the fact that I think he may actually believes them. He wasn't talking to a group of supporters in Oklahoma; he was doing a radio interview in Ireland. The first point can be disputed, but I just don't understand how you can tell people that they supported something that they know they didn't support unless you have somehow convinced yourself that they did. Also, now is probably not the best time for "when you say something, you mean it"

FALLUJAH, Iraq, May 1 -- Covering their faces with checkered head scarves, militiamen loyal to a former Iraqi army general jubilantly took to the streets of this battle-scarred city Saturday to celebrate what they called a triumph over withdrawing U.S. Marines (WP)

Iraqi police were back on the streets of Najaf yesterday after the US authorities dropped their demand for the arrest of the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and withdrew their troops from the holy city. (Guardian)

Originally, the US-led coalition showed little interest in involving the UN in Iraq, despite talk of its vital role. However, as security deteriorated and as opposition to the US plans for choosing a new government grew, President Bush turned to the UN and in particular, the UN secretary general's advisor, Lakhdar Brahimi, for help. (BBC)

2004-06-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

I accept the need for realistic policies, but how can we continue to give voice to the fiction of "full sovereignty". It just makes us look silly:

The Bush administration has decided to take the unusual step of bestowing on its own troops and personnel immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for killing Iraqis or destroying local property after the occupation ends and political power is transferred to an interim Iraqi government, U.S. officials said.

The issue of immunity for U.S. troops is among the most contentious in the Islamic world, where it has galvanized public opinion against the United States in the past. A similar grant of immunity to U.S. troops in Iran during the Johnson administration in the 1960s led to the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the issue to charge that the shah had sold out the Iranian people.

Then again, I am not sure anybody really believed it in the first place:

Here we go again. The United States is about to fall prey to its own propaganda.

President Bush has repeatedly said we will grant "full and complete sovereignty" to Iraq on June 30. We've said we'll turn over Saddam Hussein for trial and punishment and that the occupation will finally be replaced by Iraqi self-rule. But these grand promises are as unbelievable as they are unattainable.

2004-06-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brian
Krugman's latest article speaks for itself. And as you can see he's flailing...it's even worse than his last one.

The failure to publicize the apprehension of a white terrorist is not further evidence that John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general...unless we are working with some strange definition of "evidence."

Go back to what Krugman originally wrote about the memo..."Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn't apply to interrogations of enemy combatants "pursuant to [the president's] commander-in-chief authority." In other words, the president is above the law."

If there is a constitutional basis for commander-in-chief authority, and there is, then yes, then the law can't be applied against the president in certain contexts...but he's not above the law when constitutional doctrine (the highest law) dictates that Congress cannot regulate the interrogation of battlefield combatants. Krugman has a position, an opinion, a perspective, a conclusion, but no argument, I'm afraid.

Casey's response
Krugman's latest article has a very straightforward argument: John Ashcroft is a bad AG because he lets ideology blind him. I provided ample evidence that Krugman is not alone in making that observation. You can take exception to it, but it is an argument.

By the same token, I also provided a number of experts who came to the same conclusion as Krugman on the memo. I must apologize for him not putting it in standard legal memorandum format, full of references, citations, and quotations from germaine cases. Krugman, however, writes an "op-ed" column. He is paid and read precisely for his opinion. If you would like the legal background arguments, I once again direct you to Miami law professor Michael Froomkin.

The memo then argues (pp. 33- ) that any criminal statute such as the Torture statute, which might be read to limit the President’s authority to wage war must be read to avoid this constitutional problem. It’s certainly right that reading statutes to avoid constitutional problems is a good interpretive strategy. The problem here, as I’ve suggested previously, is that there isn’t actually much of a constitutional problem here: a President negotiated the statute, the Senate ratified it, both houses of Congress passed implementing legislation that a different President signed. Treaties are the law of the land. Once implemented in legislation (few treaties are “self-executing,” so legislation is almost always needed), the President has a duty to take care that they be faithfully executed unless Congress relieves him of that obligation. That didn’t happen here.

The memo argues (p. 35) that Congress “may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.” Either this is just bunk, or the Geneva conventions, the prohibitions on the use of poison gas, all the rest of the web of international agreements to which the US is a party, are so much tissue paper. We’re no longer committed to the rule of law, but the rule of force. (In fact what the OLC seemed to argue for in other memos was a double standard in which international law still applied to everyone else.)

I understand that you disagree. I understand that you don't like Krugman. Still, I would prefer that you respond to what he says rather than just calling him names. Also, it seems that Mr. Ashcroft has problems much more concrete than the anger of a Princeton economist:

A watchdog group sued Attorney General John Ashcroft on Wednesday for classifying previously public documents pertaining to a whistleblower's claims of security lapses in the FBI 's translator program.

Citing national security, Ashcroft recently classified documents related to the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former linguist at the FBI. The lawsuit charged that reclassifying materials that had previously been in the public domain is illegal and unconstitutional.

In 2002, Edmonds told her bosses of her concerns about shoddy translations and suggested one interpreter with a relative who works at a foreign embassy may have compromised national security. Edmonds was fired soon after.

"This is an extraordinary and dangerous abuse of power by Ashcroft to improperly use the classification system to hide information that the Justice Department finds embarrassing," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the project.

Also, it would seem that Krugman is very much not alone:

A Declaration Calling for the Resignation or Removal of John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States

An Attorney General whose character is thus marked by acts which define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the chief law enforcement officer of a free people. We, therefore, as free men and women devoted to the security and well-being of these United States, solemnly publish and declare, That Attorney General John Ashcroft should be removed from office and a successor named who will restore the honor, integrity, and good name of the Department of Justice.

2004-06-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

A familair story:

The case offers a window onto what critics describe as a haphazard reconstruction effort. U.S. officials, under pressure to produce results, sometimes cut corners. Million-dollar deals have been done overnight, sometimes with shadowy partners. Critics say the effort also has been hampered by Pentagon cronyism.

Many involved in the troubled reconstruction of Iraq have come to believe that the Pentagon's reliance on a cadre of people who were close friends with senior officials such as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz hampered the rebuilding effort.

The Pentagon failed to tap a broader pool of talent with more recent and relevant experience in creating basic services such as air transportation, critics say.

In fact, I read it a week ago:

The Pentagon may have wasted billions of dollars in Iraq because of a lack of planning and poor oversight, top congressional and Defense Department investigators said Tuesday. David M. Walker, head of the General Accounting Office, told a congressional panel that Defense Department planners had failed to adequately determine the needs of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and to effectively oversee the billions of dollars' worth of contracts issued.

Though Pentagon officials blame any mistakes on the pressure of the war's early days, the investigators said they had found ongoing waste in the contracting process a year after the invasion was launched in March 2003. In remarks to reporters, Walker speculated that the total losses from waste could amount to "billions."

Never fear, however, the optimist is here:

But even under questioning from House Democrats, Mr. Wolfowitz never wavered from an optimistic posture as he cited "enormous progress" in the effort to stabilize Iraq and hand over responsibility for governing and security to the Iraqis.

Mr. Wolfowitz, who just returned from a five-day visit to Iraq, told House Armed Services Committee members that he heard military personnel from the United States and its allies, as well as Iraqi citizens, say the world does not realize the successes achieved as Iraq moves toward sovereignty on June 30.

Of course, it was optimism that got us into this mess:

The optimism lies in the conviction that if the United States confronts "evil" enemies, it can win. The proof is, of course, the Soviet Union's fall. Ronald Reagan came to office calling not for détente but for outright victory over the "evil empire." Ten years later the empire was gone. Nearly all the members of today's defense leadership were part of Reagan's team. The memory of that success lies behind George W. Bush's promises that terrorists will be not just contained, like drug traffickers, but beaten, like Nazis and Soviets.

There is quite a bit of trouble with optimism:

Could there be an emptier claim made on behalf of someone hoping to lead the United States of America than to say that he is "optimistic"? Optimism may or may not be part of the American character, but it is pretty insufficient as either a campaign promise or a governing principle. If the objective situation calls for optimism, being optimistic isn't much of a trick or a distinction. If the objective situation calls for something closer to pessimism, the last thing we want is some Micawber whistling past the Treasury Department.

We don't want a president who sees the silver lining in every cloud. We want a president who sees the cloud and dispels it. We want someone who will make the objective situation justify optimism, not someone who is optimistic in any objective situation. If optimism is hard-wired into the American character, it should be especially important to have someone sober at the wheel of the car. Of course such clearheadedness is a hopeless ideal. But it is odd that politicians of every stripe now feel the need to promise that their vision will be clouded.

And if forced to choose between a leader whose vision is clouded by optimism and one clouded by pessimism, there is a good case that pessimism is the more prudent choice. Another name for pessimism is a tragic sensibility. It is a vivid awareness that things can go wrong, and often have done so. An optimist thinks he can pop over to Iraq, knock Saddam Hussein off his perch, establish democracy throughout the Middle East and be home in time for dinner. A pessimist knows better.

2004-06-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

From chronicles of the strange:

More than a dozen lawmakers attended a congressional reception this year honoring the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in which Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be "reborn as new persons."

At the March 23 ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) wore white gloves and carried a pillow holding an ornate crown that was placed on Moon's head. The Korean-born businessman and religious leader then delivered a long speech saying he was "sent to Earth . . . to save the world's six billion people. . . . Emperors, kings and presidents . . . have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

Some Republicans who attended the event, including Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (Md.), said they did so mainly to salute the Washington Times, a conservative-leaning newspaper owned by Moon's organization.

2004-06-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

A superb op-ed:

President George W. Bush's efforts to build democracy in Iraq are underpinned by a misguided view of America's own democracy. He believes that American democracy works because Americans are innately good people, believing in values of tolerance and respect for others and guided by religious faith.
.
In his view, Americans don't need checks and balances so much as reminders of basic American values and America's overriding moral mission to bring freedom to the world. Similarly, abuses of power, as at Abu Ghraib prison and beyond, do not represent the failure of the system, but rather the deviant behavior of a few bad people.

2004-06-22T15:58:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brian

No Casey, here's what Krugman actually wrote:

"No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history... We can't tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft's post-9/11 policies are protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest otherwise...[goes through his pieces of evidence, and finally]...But most important is the memo."

I'm sorry but I don't see the logical flow to Krugman's polemic. Whatever the professors credentials, time and again he abandons his credibility wherever he editorializes or writes outside his area of academic scholarship. I read his column. I read the memo. I disagreed with his argument. I disagreed with his thesis statement.

I can't hunt down all the experts...I don't wish to. As you are aware, there is at least one law professor whose analysis differs from that of your Miami law professor. An equal and opposite expert, by my judgment. Since you have some constitutional questions in there, there are bound to be more experts than you yourself would ever be able to hunt down. There might even be some actual law that is relevant.

Finally, I can understand how upsetting it seems that international law is not readily, if at all, enforceable. That's a problem, obviously, for people who think world government should be stronger or that the US should avail itself to the International Criminal Court. But because there really is no real world high tribunal and no true world government (so long as security powers have their vetos), groups and experts who pontificate on treaty obligations...the meaning of "torture," as an example...are really just acting as lobbyists. The Red Cross in its capacity of saying this or that conduct is torture is reallying just lobbying for this or that conduct to be sanctionable, which for a lot of reasons is not going to happen, though it sure succeeds in making our government look bad.

I stand by what I originally wrote.

Posted by Casey:

In your original post, you opined soley on the issue of the memo, so that is the excerpt I pulled from the article. Had you made any comments about the thesis, I would have included it. Your argument was that any literate person would agree with your analysis. In this post you echo that conclusion, stating that Krugman in positioning himself thus "abandons all credibility."

I cited multiple experts whose views closely tracked Krugman's. This was not an attempt to persuade you that Krugman is correct, but rather to demonstrate that individuals well versed in the subject had come to similar conclusions. Your admission that there are dueling experts only fortifies my contention that Krugman's position, while not necessarily correct, is certainly intellectualy defensible.

I would note that the memo was the subject of an Administration press conference this afternoon:

The Justice Department disavowed a memo written in 2002 that appeared to justify the use of torture in the war on terror. The memo also argued that the president's wartime powers superseded anti-torture laws and treaties.

That 50-page document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, will be replaced, Justice Department officials said. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales said that some legal memos contained "unnecessary and overbroad discussions" that could be "subject to misinterpretation."

It appears that you are not the only person to take umbrage with Krugman's thesis, which he again addressed today:

After my last piece on Mr. Ashcroft, some readers questioned whether he is really the worst attorney general ever. It's true that he has some stiff competition from the likes of John Mitchell, who served under Richard Nixon. But once the full record of his misdeeds in office is revealed, I think Mr. Ashcroft will stand head and shoulders below the rest.

Some other views on Ashcroft:

1)The trouble is, Ashcroft sometimes lives up to his critics' caricature—making it hard to object too strenuously to the substance of their complaints, even if those complaints are sometimes unfairly or sloppily drawn.

2) As the attorney general took the stand at the hearings this afternoon, any viewer would have expected him to face a very big hook indeed. The evidence was mounting that, of all the negligent screw-ups in this tragic and woeful tale, Ashcroft may have been the most thoroughly negligent.

3) The truth behind the utter failure of the Moussaoui trial will not be that the U.S. court system was inadequate to the task of convicting a terrorist but that the attorney general had insufficient faith in the system to let it do its work. By bringing bogus charges, making grandiose claims, and standing in the way of anything resembling a fair trial, the government has proved that you can't stage a mockery of a trial and expect real justice to result.

4) Attorneys general have had wide latitude to selectively enforce the laws of which they approve. But Ashcroft has granted himself the further right to actually rewrite and reinterpret settled law—based only upon his personal beliefs and preferences.

Finally, the International Red Cross is the official monitoring organization recognized by the Geneva Conventions. Although their pronouncements are not accompanied by coercive consequences, their opinions represent more than simple lobbying.

2004-06-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

Fiscal conservatives?

House Republicans may use the $417 billion defense bill for something other than financing the military — raising the government's borrowing limit later this year. When the House debates the defense spending measure on Tuesday, it is likely to add an innocent-sounding provision saying the government's credit rating should be protected. Should GOP leaders decide to use the defense measure to also increase the debt limit, that provision would be amended to specifically raise the borrowing cap. Voting to increase federal borrowing is an embarrassing vote for many lawmakers, especially in an election year. Tucking the measure into a highly popular bill like the defense measure is one way to help ensure passage of the debt ceiling increase. Officials expect the current $7.4 trillion borrowing limit to be reached this summer. Bush administration officials have told congressional aides that the Treasury Department might be able to dip into various cash accounts and delay a need for a debt ceiling increase until after the November elections. But no one is certain whether that is a viable option.

Opposition to entitlements?

With all the subtlety of finger-painters, the House produced a masterpiece of bad legislation this week: a study in grease, pork and blubber, to use lawmakers' descriptions of a stunning special-interest bonanza for all manner of American businesses. The blubber — a tax break affecting native Alaskan whalers — was a last-minute inclusion in a bill that began as a simple $5 billion fix for a tariff problem but was transformed into a $143 billion juggernaut of special-interest favors.

The frisson of lobbyists was palpable as goodies were voted for bow-and-arrow makers, dog-track owners, sonar fish-finder makers and scores of other businesses that have nothing to do with the trade issue at hand. That problem — a modest substitute for a tax subsidy for exporters that was ruled illegal by world trade courts — remains uncorrected. So the meter has been running since March as the European Union levies billions of dollars in retaliatory sanctions on a wide range of American products.

The penalties grow each month, yet the outlook is for even more pork-barrel bargaining. The Senate's rival $167 billion business cornucopia awaits a compromise with the House version, and lawmakers estimate that September is their earliest chance to haggle seriously over the final product.

All sense of urgency and proportion has been lost in Congress's frenzy. The House even dared to adopt an unjustifiable payoff of almost $10 billion for tobacco farmers, whose deadly products can no longer be propped up by price supports. One $3.6 billion amendment lets residents of states with no income taxes start deducting their sales and local taxes on federal returns.

The Bush administration has stood by as Congress seized the tariff issue to bend the business tax code out of shape. Clearly, the two houses' dueling Christmas trees should be scrapped in favor of a simple, limited tariff fix. But Congress shows no will to do that as long as there is one more corporate lobbyist to be comforted and campaign coffers beckon.

2004-06-21T17:59:00.000-07:00

"I'm a neoconservative who's been mugged by reality,"

What a quote from a die hard:

in choosing Agresto, the White House shunned scholars with greater acceptance in academic circles, many of whom had opposed the invasion, in favor of a conservative loyalist who had spent much of his career criticizing the U.S. academic establishment.

2004-06-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

An excellent, but depressing piece.

In an interview last week, Bremer maintained that "Iraq has been fundamentally changed for the better" by the occupation. The CPA, he said, has put Iraq on a path toward a democratic government and an open economy after more than three decades of a brutal socialist dictatorship. Among his biggest accomplishments, he said, were the lowering of Iraq's tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws and the reduction of import duties.

Several current and former CPA officials contended that key decisions by Bremer favored a grandiose vision over Iraqi realities and reflected the perceived prerogatives of a military victor. Critics within the CPA also faulted Bremer for working to advance a conservative economic agenda of tax cuts and free trade instead of focusing on the delivery of basic services.

"There was this grand idea that we were going to turn Iraq into a model nation, a model democracy, with an ideal constitution and an ideal economy and an ideal military," said a State Department official who spent several months working for the CPA. "It was just naive."

"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."

On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience.
In the final days of the CPA, many officials have succumbed to bitterness. Some blame military commanders for not asking for more troops to stabilize the country. "They had enough soldiers to ensure that Saddam's men didn't come back to power, but there were nowhere near enough to make the country safe enough for us to do our work," a CPA reconstruction specialist said.

Military officials say CPA personnel spend too much time in the 258-room headquarters. "Nobody has any idea what they do back in that palace," a senior Marine commander in Fallujah said recently. "We certainly don't see any results."

Several veterans of other reconstruction operations characterized civilian-military relations in Iraq as the worst they have encountered. "It has been poisonous," the reconstruction specialist said.

The other major conflict within the occupation bureaucracy has set the legions of young staff members chosen for their loyalty to the Bush administration against older, more liberal diplomats from the State Department and the British Foreign Office.

Because many of the 2,300 projects to be funded by the $18.6 billion are large construction endeavors that will involve foreign laborers instead of Iraqis, they will result in far less of a local economic boost than the CPA had promised, another senior official involved in the reconstruction said. The projects were chosen largely without input from Iraqis.

"This was supposed to be our big effort to help them -- 18 billion of our tax dollars to fix their country," the senior reconstruction official said. "But the sad reality is that this program won't have a lot of impact in it for the Iraqis. The primary beneficiaries will be American companies."

Elsewhere in the palace, the sense of regret is far more pronounced. The senior adviser to Bremer said he felt "a sense of opportunity that slipped away."

"The ambition for us was a grand one. We had great things in mind for them. We believed we could do it," he said. "But we didn't keep our promises."

2004-06-16T17:56:00.000-07:00

From Brian:

Now that the USDOJ memo is available, most literate people should be able to put to rest the idea that government attorneys make bad faith analyses of the law for the sake of consolidating the power of the President. Paul Krugman is not one of those people. Also, put to rest the idea that the memo was drafted as an opinion letter that somehow absolves those who act on it from culpability. The fact is the DOJ uses and provides guidance memos. It doesn't mean the guidance is not wrong, but it certainly doesn't mean it's scandalous that it was drafted in the first place.

What that idoit Princeton proffesor Krugman actually wrote:

Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down: if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain that accompanies "serious physical injury, such as organ failure," it's not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn't apply to interrogations of enemy combatants "pursuant to [the president's] commander-in-chief authority." In other words, the president is above the law.

Similarly, confused soul Miami legal professor Michael Froomkin:

This is not a draft, but it’s not an action document either. It’s legal advice to the Counselor for the President. The action document was Gonzales’s memo to Bush.

This OLC document is a legalistic, logic-chopping brief for the torturer. Its entire thrust is justifying maximal pain

Lots of the (lousy) criminal law legal reasoning in this memo is picked up in the Draft Walker Working Group memo

This memo also has a full dose of the royalist vision of the Presidency that informs the Draft Walker memo. In the views of the author(s), there’s basically nothing Congress can do to constrain the President’s exercise of the war power. The Geneva Conventions are, by inevitable implications, not binding on the President, nor is any other international agreement if it impedes the war effort. I’m sure our allies will be just thrilled to hear that. And, although the memo nowhere treats this issue, presumably, also, the same applies in reverse, and our adversaries should feel unconstrained by any treaties against poison gas, torture, land mines, or anything else? Or is ignoring treaties a unique prerogative of the USA?

Also, the possibly illiterate Philip Carter, lawyer and military affairs expert:

no amount of caveating can save the latest Defense Department memorandum on the legality of torture (first reported by the Wall Street Journal) from being construed as what it is: a cookbook on how to conduct illegal torture and get away with it.

the Pentagon's lawyers point to the executive power of the president to act both as commander in chief of the military and as chief prosecutor. The memo contends that the sole discretion to prosecute wars and prosecute criminals lies with the president, and if the president wants to set aside laws (like the torture and war-crimes statute), he can do so by declining to prosecute them.

So many stupid experts, how will Brain ever hunt them all down?

2004-06-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

This passage makes clear that we were, in fact, greeted as liberators:

Since U.S. forces drove to Baghdad and overthrew President Saddam Hussein in April 2003, the 138,000 American soldiers stationed here have lost their status as liberators in the eyes of most Iraqis. Polling by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority has chronicled a steady souring of opinion, with the most recent surveys showing about 80 percent of Iraqis with an unfavorable opinion of U.S. troops.

"It was discovered that the freedom in this land is not ours. It is the freedom of the occupying soldiers in doing what they like, such as arresting, carrying out raids, killing at random or stealing money,"

"What Saddam did was awful, but what the Americans are doing is worse,"

2004-06-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

Fox News may need to revise their What We've Accomplished feature:

One crucial area that has seen solid improvement is basic utilities. After years of neglect, Iraqis have electricity for only part of the day. By this summer, the average Iraqi will have electricity for 16 hours a day, 40 percent above pre-war levels.

AP:

But with electricity in Baghdad flowing at less than half prewar levels and a scorching summer ahead, many Iraqis see the struggle to ensure adequate power as a metaphor for a U.S.-led reconstruction mission gone bad.

"We've seen nothing but empty promises," shopkeeper Raad Ghalib said

Before the war, Baghdad residents enjoyed about 20 hours of electricity a day. Today, they're lucky to get eight, usually broken into two-hour runs, or less.

For most, the power shortages are baffling — and the U.S.-led coalition is to blame.

"Even when the Americans were bombing us, the lights didn't go out," said one man, Hikmat Abdul-Wahid, standing outside his darkened house. "How can things be worse now? Even Saddam gave us electricity."

I understand about 20/20 hindsight, but the same FOX report said this:

Since the end of Saddam, a fully functioning legal and judicial system has been developed. More than 600 judges are working in courtrooms across the country. Iraqis charged with crimes now have rights that would have been laughed at under the old regime: the right to remain silent when they're arrested; the right to a fair, speedy and open trial; the right to a defense lawyer at all stages of the process.

The following day the Washington Post printed this:

U.S.-led forces routinely rounded up Iraqis and then denied or restricted their rights under the Geneva Conventions during months of confinement, including rights to legal representation and family visits

Military intelligence officers estimated that 70 percent to 90 percent of "the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake." Of the 43,000 Iraqis who have been imprisoned at some point during the occupation, only about 600 have been referred to Iraqi authorities for prosecution, according to U.S. officials.

"This is just like the days of Saddam," said Khalid Saadi Awad, who wanted to enter the building to see whether his cousin was on trial. "The Americans have established a secret court."

2004-06-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

What:

"the Bush military budget is being spent on a force structure that does not match today's security challenges because it is designed for a cold war style large-scale conventional challenge that we no longer face."
As Congress moves ahead with a huge new defense bill, lawmakers are making only modest changes in the Pentagon's plans to spend well over $1 trillion in the next decade on an arsenal of futuristic planes, ships and weapons with little direct connection to the Iraq war or the global war on terrorism.

Why:

So far this year, the debate in Congress over the defense bill has largely skirted the budgetary or strategic implications of this buildup, largely because Republican and Democratic politicians are unwilling to appear weak on defense after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"In the public mind there is clearly a present danger, so we can't trim back the defense budget in any manner even though counterterrorism spending only accounts for a small part of it," said Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives.

Why it matters:

"We are in a massive train wreck financially," Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) recently told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces, which he chairs. "The time has come to be tough about the way we are spending money on programs that we cannot see the ability to fund" in later years.

Other lawmakers are concerned that a defense budget that gives the Pentagon the resources to challenge adversaries in the air, sea and on land throughout the world for the next half-century will inevitably further skew the nation's foreign policy toward military intervention.

The current defense budget, said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), "is consistent with the Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz view of the world that we will essentially abandon 'soft' power -- diplomacy and the use of international institutions -- and will concentrate on 'hard' power -- military strength that we exercise alone."

2004-06-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

U.S. intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the handlers provided to military investigators.

The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by a U.S. Army general to be "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses."

"Using dogs to frighten and intimidate prisoners is a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, an international organization based in New York. "It's a violation of U.S. policy as stated in the Army field manual, and it's a violation of the prohibition against cruel treatment."

Appearances aside, this does not conflict with this:

What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law," Bush told reporters at the close of the G-8 summit in Georgia.

Asked whether torture is ever justified, Bush replied, "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. ... The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."

The entire focus of the Justice/Defense memos is to argue just this point: the activity is lawful. The memos are not stellar examples of legal reasoning and would probably be laughed out of court, but they do lend credence to the common refrain of "our lawyers reviewed it."

As much as I personally like the idea of lawyer's opinions having some sort of binding authority, they don't. Also, I have some faith in common sense being able to cut through the garbage that is overwrought parsing. Still, I have to say that "the lawyer's approved it" defense is significantly more satisfying than "the Constitution as bureaucratic red tape" utilitarianism.

Jose Padilla has been detained as an enemy combatant and questioned. Had we tried to make a case against Jose Padilla through our criminal justice system, something that I, as the United States attorney in New York, could not do at that time without jeopardizing intelligence sources, he would very likely have followed his lawyer's advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right.

2004-06-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

I have an obsession with dating shows. The magic of DVR (TiVo) allows me to speed through all of the day's shows in under ten minutes. Although I do not consider those willing to subject themselves to such scrutiny and humiliation to be representative of the population, there is one disturbing trend that reflects something I have observed even in law school: a female sense of entitlement, specifically to men's money.

I consider wandering off into the territority of gender generalization to be dangerous business. Yet, I am deeply disturbed by the idea of money as a prerequisite for a relationship. At its base, it is prostitution.

Many cultures long used women as commodities. Marriages solidified alliances, ended feuds and consolidated holdings. Now, it seems women are commodifying themselves. I read something along these lines in yesterday's New York Times While the wives of Stepford have advanced since 1975, along with the rest of us, not everything has panned out the way feminists envisioned. American women today tend to delay marriage; we have careers; we demand that men do their share of the housework; we expect to be equal partners. At the same time, we have internalized a piece of Stepford, becoming, metaphorically speaking, our own Stepford husbands — imposing a conformist definition of beauty and femininity. Girls' and women's magazines incessantly promote perfect thighs, abs and hair, and achieving the perfect look has moved beyond diet and exercise. More and more, we place ourselves willingly under the knife, happily embracing the plastic.

It is not men (or at least, not men alone) who do this to us. Indeed, Paramount's Web site for "The Stepford Wives" hardly mentions husbands.

I will leave the reasons behind self-commodication to those who are more sociologically inclined. I can imagine my more paleolithic friends arguing that women are just attempting to reclaim their natural roles. On the other end, I have heard that women are reacting rationally to continued patriarchy, behaving in a manner most consistent with maximizing their social position. Although I prefer this latter explanation, I can't help but think that it is far too phallocentric. In the end, I don't pretend to be able to explain women.

Recently, on NOW with Bill Moyers, an expert on the third world stated that educating young women has been proven to be the most leveraged investment a developing nation can make. In a similar vein, earlier in the week, Charlie Rose interviewed the founder of the Grameen Bank, the model of microlending. He makes loans almost exclusively to women for numerous reasons and it is impossible to argue with his success.

I don't deny that women still face obstacles in this country. At the same time, I can't help but wonder how much power men really have.

2004-06-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

Pardon my pessimism on Iraq, but I still have a very bad feeling:

Security: No

Misguided U.S. training of Iraqi police contributed to the country's instability and has delayed getting enough qualified Iraqis on the streets to ease the burden on American forces, the head of armed forces training said Wednesday.

"It hasn't gone well. We've had almost one year of no progress," said Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who departs Iraq next week after spending a year assembling and training the country's 200,000 army, police and civil defense troops.

Power: No

The U.S.-run coalition had made its ability to guarantee adequate electricity supplies a benchmark of success in restoring normalcy to Iraq. However, sabotage and frayed infrastructure have impeded efforts to eliminate power outages, especially in the capital.

More than a year after the occupation began, power cuts are common nationwide, in some places topping 16 hours a day. Demand is rising with the advent of summer, with temperatures already topping 100 degrees.

Constitution: No

The resolution adopted unanimously late Tuesday by the U.N. Security Council makes no mention of the Transitional Administration Law, which will serve as Iraq's temporary constitution after the new interim government takes power on June 30 and until a new constitution is written and approved in a referendum late next year.

International support beyond words: Probably not

It remains unclear how the resolution will translate into additional concrete support from other nations -- a fervent desire of the Bush administration, long criticized for not giving other countries more substantive roles earlier. Top U.S. officials have conceded that additional foreign security forces are likely to remain unattainable until the violence diminishes

South: Not excatly resolved

After months of losing hundreds, if not thousands, of men in battles with the U.S. military, firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr appears to be more popular than ever in Iraq.

American coalition leaders were optimistic that last week's truce calling for al-Sadr to move his men out of the holy cities of Najaf and Kufa was a sign of a weakened leader.

But many Iraqi religious and political leaders say al-Sadr's public appeal is higher than ever and that he and his followers seem poised to gain ground in Iraq's political arena, threatening America's plans for the country.

If elections were held today, polls and interviews on the street suggest, the virulently anti-American al-Sadr would command a big percentage of the vote.

Center: Could be better

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - Rebels killed Wednesday 12 members of an Iraqi security force entrusted with pacifying the country's most restive town, officers in the force said.

Eleven Iraqis, including women and children, were killed on Tuesday in clashes between U.S. forces and insurgents near Falluja, hospital sources said.

North: Not so great

A crisis for the new Iraqi government loomed Tuesday as Kurdish leaders threatened to withdraw from the Iraqi state unless they received guarantees against Shiite plans to limit Kurdish self-rule.

In their letter, Mr. Talabani and Mr. Barzani wrote that the Kurdish leadership would refuse to take part in national elections, expected to be held in January, and bar representatives from going to "Kurdistan."

That would amount to something like secession, which Kurdish officials have been hinting at privately for months but now appear to be actively considering. "The Kurdish people will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq," the letter said.

2004-06-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

The new tactic for fighting terror: pretend things are better than they are

The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated by the Bush administration.

Several U.S. officials and terrorism experts familiar with that revision effort said the new report will show that the number of significant terrorist incidents increased last year, perhaps to its highest level in 20 years.

A just-issued Congressional Research Service report has concluded that the statistical errors are just the latest in a series of problems that the "Patterns" report has faced in recent years.

The congressional study said that the State Department report — despite the perception of its objectivity — was unduly influenced by political and economic considerations.

2004-06-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

The history of revolutions always seem to begin with rebellion. In the case of Afghanistan, the Taliban won popular support by leading the rebellion against the rule of warlords:

Among Afghanistan's 20 million people, many living in refugee camps around the country and in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, the Taliban success inspired hope for an end to years of chaos and suffering at the hands of the divided mujahedin.

The Taliban--some Afghans call it "the mystery army"--spilled out of madrasahs, or religious schools, in the remote southwestern region five months ago, basically in reaction to the abuse and extortion perpetrated by various mujahedin groups. The movement grew rapidly, and within weeks its fighters swept through nine of the country's 30 provinces, disarming mujahedin gangs, threatening to execute drug traffickers and bandits, and meeting surprisingly light opposition. Along the way, their numbers swelled from a few hundred to an army now estimated at 25,000 and backed by more than 200 captured tanks, other armor, artillery, helicopters, even a dozen MiG-23 jet fighters.

The march was capped last week by a remarkable strike in which advance units of the Taliban stormed into the headquarters of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a renegade former Prime Minister and one of the country's most potent warlords (Time 02/27/95)

This is the light in which I view the current developments:

President Hamid Karzai has accepted the support of powerful mujahedeen leaders for the presidential elections scheduled for September, indicating he will continue an alliance with them in a future government. His move has dismayed many Afghans who were hoping that the nation's first democratic elections would herald an end to the power of the warlords, who have dominated politics for the past decade.

Mr. Karzai insisted Thursday that he had not made a deal with the faction leaders and was opposed to a coalition government. Yet it is clear that Mr. Karzai, rather than testing his popularity by standing alone, has opted to join forces with the mujahedeen, men who fought the jihad, or holy war, against the Soviet occupation in the 1980's and who have been his traditional allies over the years.

But his joining forces with the jihadi leaders, many of whom still retain armed militias and pay only lip service to the central government, has dismayed some.

"The deal that has taken place is against the national benefit and the will and desires of the people of Afghanistan," said another presidential candidate, a doctor from Kabul, Massouda Jalal.

She accused Mr. Karzai of agreeing to give half the cabinet posts to Mr. Sayyaf and Mr. Rabbani in return for their support in the elections. Mr. Karzai was concerned that he could not win the election without their support, she said.

A coalition with the mujahedeen would prolong the many problems facing the government, she said. "With this coalition, the reconstruction of Afghanistan will not take place, collection of weapons will not take place, we will keep on having instability and anarchy, the unfairness of the current situation will not improve, and the free will of the people will not be implemented," she said.

Technocrats in the government, who have battled with the mujahedeen leaders to push through reforms, particularly in the areas of disarmament and reform of the police, military and intelligence service, expressed their concern that without a genuine popular mandate, the future president would not be able to achieve much change.

I am a realist that accepts the imperatives of choosing lesser evils, but I cannot help but wonder if longterm stability is being sacrificed on the altar of political expediency:

Since he was installed as Afghanistan's interim leader following the U.S.-led ouster of Islamic Taliban rule in late 2001, Karzai has been belittled as an American puppet, an indecisive leader and a hypocrite who touts democratic ideals while making backroom deals to cling to power.

U.N. officials and other foreign observers here have expressed increasing concerns that slow and regionally lopsided voter registration, delays in disarming regional militias and mounting Islamic militia attacks could undermine the credibility and security of the elections.

Many Afghans say they believe Karzai is under U.S. pressure to hold elections soon to provide President Bush with a foreign policy success and bolster his reelection chances.

2004-06-07T11:05:00.000-07:00

So now we are going to disband 9 Iraqi militias. Sounds like a good step.

Nine major political parties agreed Monday to disband their militias, the interim prime minister said, although radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's fighters did not join the agreement. None of the nine militias has been fighting the government and most are controlled by mainstream political movements represented in the government.

Then again, we've tried it before:

The U.S.-led coalition tried to persuade the militias to disband last year but failed because leaders were unwilling to give up their armed fighters at a time of deteriorating security.

Juan Cole is doubtful:

This announcement should be seen as a pious hope rather than as a political reality. I can't say how many times I have reported here plans for the dissolution of the militias.

In fact, disbanding militias does not appear to be our strong suit:

The Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration program, which began last fall, has been floundering. Afghanistan's top warlords have been reluctant to cooperate, and the mujahedin fighters have felt betrayed, jeopardizing the chances of bringing security to the nation before a general election planned for September.

"It's a big failure," said Andrew Wilder, head of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a think tank in Kabul. "We have no hope of rebuilding Afghanistan when the rule of gun is outside Kabul."

Referring to the U.S.-led war that toppled the Taliban regime, Wilder said: "In the first six months after November 2001, the warlords wouldn't have thumbed their noses. But now they know the United States has problems in Iraq and feel they don't have to listen."

By this month, about 40,000 men loyal to rival militias were to have been disarmed, with the rest turning in their guns over the next three years.

So far, only about 6,000 have responded. The most powerful warlords in the country, such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, Atta Mohammed and Ismail Khan, have been reluctant to surrender their weapons and their men because they would lose power.

The only group of citizen-soldiers we seem to be able to weaken is our own.

The Iraq mission is placing new stress on the active-duty Army as it leans more heavily than it has in decades on the Guard -- which, with 350,000 troops, rivals the active force in size. That new reliance, in turn, is raising concerns about the Guard's long-term ability to recruit and retain troops, and it is provoking more immediate worries in states that rely on the Guard to deal with fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. Parts of the Guard are beginning to stagger under the burden. Nearly three years into the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world, Guard commanders said they have shed the "weekend warrior" image their force once had. But several said they are deeply worried about how the citizen-soldiers will react to the repeated deployments into combat zones that they now are facing -- and even more about the responses of the families and employers.

2004-06-05T14:08:00.000-07:00

Viva La Reagan Revolucion!

2004-06-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

A great interactive site on the federal budget.

2004-06-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about the Kurds, but most of the slight mention they receive in the Iraq coverage paints a different picture than this:

It is hard to find people here willing to talk openly against either of the ruling Kurdish parties. While nowhere near as oppressive as Saddam's regime, the U.S.-backed Kurdish leaders of Northern Iraq have virtually banned dissent. The area even has its own secret police, the Asayeech, to keep people in line.

2004-06-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

A new report:

The tax cuts are often portrayed by their supporters as painless and simply “giving people their money back.” But the numbers presented above indicate that the substantial majority of American households ultimately will be made worse off by the tax cuts, because the tax cuts ultimately will have to be financed. Different methods of financing would generate variation in the particular results, but this basic finding that most households end up being worse off is likely to continue to hold unless a significant portion of the tax cuts themselves are repealed. The reason is that the tax cuts scale back (or even eliminate) many of the most progressive elements of the federal tax system, including the estate tax, the taxation of capital gains and dividends, the top income tax rates, and the phase-outs of certain exemptions and deductions for households with high incomes. It is unlikely that any method of financing those changes, other than repeal, will be as progressive as the tax provisions that have been scaled back.

2004-06-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Great new article by Josh Marshall on Kerry's foreign policy:

Democratic foreign-policy hands tend to be less ideologically driven than Republican ones. Their strengths lean toward technocratic expertise and procedural competence rather than theories and grand visions. This lack of partisan edge is best illustrated by the fact that two of Kerry's top advisers served on Bush's National Security Council staff as recently as last year (Beers as senior director for counterterrorism, and Flynt Leverett as senior director for Middle East initiatives). The team that advised candidate Bush in 1999 and 2000—the so-called "Vulcans"—was practically the mirror opposite of the Kerry team. Though all its members had served at least one stint in government, most had held political appointments rather than working for decades in the security bureaucracy, as Beers did. And whereas Kerry's team is the embodiment of the nation's professional national-security apparatus, key members of Bush's team, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had spent entire careers trying to overthrow it.

2004-06-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Round and round we go, where it wil stop, nobody knows:

George Bush:"Mr. Brahimi made the decisions and brought their names to the Governing Council. As I understand it, the Governing Council simply opined about names. It was Mr. Brahimi's selections and -- Ambassador Bremer and Ambassador Blackwill were instructed by me to work with Mr. Brahimi. As we say in American sports parlance, he was the quarterback."

Brahimi suggested that the United States had wielded considerable influence in the selection process through the U.S.-led coalition and its chief administrator, L. Paul Bremer.

"I sometimes say, I'm sure he doesn't mind me saying that, Bremer is the dictator of Iraq," Brahimi told reporters. "He has the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement in this country." (AP, June 02, 2004)

George Bush:"One of the interesting things I've heard, Terry, from other leaders, are you really going to pass full sovereignty? And the answer is, yes, we're going to pass full sovereignty."

As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.

In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover.

In many cases, these U.S. and Iraqi proxies will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens. The new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials and others familiar with the plan.(Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2004)

George Bush:"The naming of the new interim government brings us one step closer to realizing the dream of millions of Iraqis -- a fully sovereign nation with a representative government that protects their rights and serves their needs."

"A month ago, they said we needed to bring in Brahimi because the Governing Council doesn't have much legitimacy and people don't want the Americans to decide these things," Clawson said. "And now, gosh, it looks like we're back to the Governing Council and the Americans deciding these things." (Los Angeles Times, June 02, 2004)

2004-06-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

"For President Bush, this is the season of the straw man."

Milibank is absolutely correct. He doesn't, however, get to the crux of the matter: straw men work. The Coulter/Limbaugh portrait of treasonous, slanderous "liberals" is malleable enough to easily accomodate any of the pseudo-postitions outlined by Bush. Being mendacious and effective are not mutually excluse. Eric Alterman observed something along these lines in hie review of Robert Reich's new book:

The great contribution of this book is Reich’s ability to demonstrate that liberals often do not respond to the arguments that conservatives make because they do not understand the locus of most of these arguments' appeal to Americans. Morality and patriotism are not conservative or liberal values, but conservatives have, of late, managed to annex them in part because liberals did not know that the argument was taking place at all. Reich offers a compelling portrait of the subterranean debate underway on the chat shows and talk radio programs that helps make sense of the thing in ways I had never considered.

2004-05-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

No more confusion:

what Mr. Brahimi ultimately accomplishes may turn out to be less a revolution than a rearrangement, less a new cast of characters than a reworked version of the same old faces.

The reason, Iraqis are beginning to say, has been the unexpected assertiveness of American officials and their allies on the Iraqi Governing Council

For my part, we could put Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in charge and I wouldn't care as long as it helped.

Originially, we thought that the universal recognition of American exceptionalism combined with gratitude would imbue our endevour with legitimacy. Instead, we have been struggling to gain that legitimacy and have donce an exceptionally poor job. Emblematic of this failure is the low esteem the populace displays for the Interim Governing Council.

I was under the impression that our alleged deference for Brahimi and his push for nonpolitical technocrats was a move away from the IGC and designed to confer some legitimacy on the quasi-sovereign entity that is to play such a vital role between the handover and the elections. Yet, here we are with the same people in the same roles. I have heard two explanations. The first is that the Bush Administration just doesn't learn and used Brahimi as a rubber stamp to perpetuate the failures it refuses to acknowledge. The second is that the IGC used the leverage we provided them agaist us and Brahimi in order to preserve their own power. My guess is that is some mixture of the two.

2004-05-31T10:53:00.000-07:00

Unprecedented

The charges were all tough, serious -- and wrong, or at least highly misleading. Kerry did not question the war on terrorism, has proposed repealing tax cuts only for those earning more than $200,000, supports wiretaps, has not endorsed a 50-cent gasoline tax increase in 10 years, and continues to support the education changes, albeit with modifications.

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total.

And Unprecedented.

President Bush is using Air Force One for re-election travel more heavily than any predecessor, wringing maximum political mileage from a perk of office paid for by taxpayers.

2004-05-30T15:55:00.000-07:00

Newsweek has been fantastic over the last few months.

Bush insists that 'a few American troops' dishonored the country. But prisoner abuse was more widespread, and some insiders believe that much remains hidden