Stop Being So Damned Sensible, RJ Samuelson

Samuelson on presidents and the economy. This guy puts other political writers to shame every week. He is the guru of Reality-Based Policy.

Democracy Doesn't Mean You Can Vote for Hamas

Speaking of problems with democracy.. CSM reports that Hamas is appearing increasingly dominant in Palestinian elections. First off, I told you so. That aside, the E.U. and the U.S. are quite unhappy about this turn of events and are threatening repercussions should Hamas gain a majority of the Palestinian legislative council. Not so excited about democracy anymore? It's not at all clear yet that Hamas could win a national majority, but if they do, the E.U. will demand that they renounce violence or forfeit aid money (as if that ever stopped Arafat's Fatah party from doing anything). The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a resolution threatening to cut off all support for the Palestinian Authority if Hamas has any participation in the government.

This is pure stupidity. I've argued before, and I'm sure I'll argue again, that there will not be a peaceful settlement of this conflict without Hamas' participation. They already have an effective veto over the process through violence, which they exercised over the Oslo agreement. It sure seems like it would be better for everyone if they could exercise their veto through voting in the Palestinian legislature rather than through detonating bombs in cafes in Jerusalem. Here there is an opportunity to mainstream Hamas, to bring political leaders within the organization to its front and into legitimate negotiating positions, and to support and strengthen Palestinian democracy, all in one blow. And it looks like we want to squander the opportunity...

Spreading Democracy

I haven't had a Democracy is Hard to Do(TM) post for a while, so here's a good one. Fred Kaplan discusses a book called Electing to Fight in relation to the recent elections in Iraq. The book argues that emerging democracies are more prone to violence and instability than any other type of government, and stresses the importance of establishing democratic institutions over holding elections. They see all the hallmarks of disaster in the emerging Iraqi government. Established democracies, they agree, tend to be peaceful. But the process of democratizing is dangerous and loaded with pitfalls.

A Healthy Change for the Military

I've complained about this more than a few times, so I'd like to give some recognition where it's due. It seems the U.S. military has (somewhat belatedly) realized that peace-making and peace-keeping (that dreaded nation-building stuff) is an important part of their mission and something that they should train their soldiers to do. This may come too late for Iraq, but it's a step in the right direction.

The End of Faith, God Willing

I recently finished reading Sam Harris' book The End of Faith. It was a fascinating read that really made me rethink the utility and danger of faith, most prominently demonstrated by religion. In particular, Harris is concerned by faith that is out of reach of both criticism and debate. This is especially dangerous in the Big Three religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), all of which claim that their religion is the only true religion and that those not subscribing to it are damned. Thus the setup for inevitable conflict. The only reason that Christianity has mellowed, Harris claims, is due to secular influences. I would very much agree.

Such criticism of faith and religion is not new. What was new to me, however, were Harris' criticisms of religious moderates. He claims that moderates are complicit in the acts of terrorism or harm done by religious extremists. Because moderates believe in at least some of the dogma of a given religion, they have no grounds on which to argue against a completely literal interpretation of the religious text. In other words, they are on the same spectrum of belief as the extremist, where at some level their faith becomes dissociated from reason.

Harris covers a broad range of topics in the book. One I would like to mention is torture, given the recent press coverage and Joe's recent post (see Torture Nation, 10/7). Harris' arguments were a little harder to follow here, but I believe his main thrust is that torture is no different than collateral damage caused in a war. In other words, in fighting a war, both are potential unfortunate consequences necessary to succeed. He seems to forget about intention through all of this: there is certainly no intention to kill innocent bystanders in a war (although we might expect this to happen), but there is clearly intention to torture someone as a means to an end.

With that said, I continue to struggle with the torture issue. In the oft-cited example, a captive holds information about a bomb he has planted that will kill thousands of people, but he is unwilling to give that information. Should he be subject to torture that we might save thousands of lives? Assuming we know him to be guilty and involved, the answer is clearly yes from a utilitarian perspective. And yet, therein lies the potential of gross misuse of torture, for how can we ever truly know whether we have the right man? Is the information gained by torture reliable? From a practical standpoint at least, there are many doubts about cost-benefit of torture.

I would encourage everyone out there to read Harris' book (by the way, Harris has a degree in philosophy and is a doctoral candidate in neuroscience - I love him already). I would also love to hear any discussion on these issues. Some excerpts from the book you might enjoy:

“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.” (page 19)

“We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words— ‘Jesus,’ ‘Allah,’ ‘Ram’—can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.” (page 35)

Fuck Iowa and New Hampshire

Pardon my language, but seriously. I can't believe this is the best we can do to remove their nominating privilege. And still they bitch and complain. Let them have their primaries last, I say. Actually, I say let's have a national primary. Please! I understand that arguments about how this would decrease attention to the individual states (particularly small states), and I sympathize with that. But the way the press covers these things (something around 80% of the coverage is coverage of the "horse race" rather than coverage of candidates and issues), and the way people react to it (voters in later primaries vote to reward winners in early primaries), the primaries are effectively over after the first 4-5 states. Better to have the states get less personal attention than to have the same five states select the presidential nominee and have everyone else locked out of the process.

Memo to South Korea

Dear South Korea,

Apparently you have not figured out how this antitrust thing works. The proper procedure after you find Microsoft guilty of multiple antitrust violations is to roll over and play dead. Alternately you could send Bill Gates a fruit cake. Certainly you don't make them remove Windows Messenger from their operating system, because that harms customers, who obviously have no reason to want Windows without Messenger. Please try to learn from our example.

Thanks,
U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division

Gold Rush

It's been some time since I've posted anything on currency issues. It appears Henry was ahead of the curve on investing in gold. Gold recently hit a 22-year high, and is getting a fair amount of attention from the press. The very fact of this attention may signal that the market has already made its move, at least for now. But score one for the anti-fiat-currency libertarians...

Torture Nation

I had thought that the Bush administration's policies favoring torture grossly misrepresented America's values to the world. Apparently not. The polling data at the bottom of this CSM story little more than a third of Americans believe that torture should not be used in interrogations. A slightly higher number favor the use of torture "sometimes" or "often". Have we always been like this? Or has the media's "fairness" on this controversy (treating both sides as substantively equal) legitimized torture for some Americans? It's disturbing in any case...

Stylin' Like Saddam

Ths is weird, yet somehow predictable...

The Sweet Smell of Corruption

CSM is also running a wonderful editorial on corruption in Congress. It still burns me up how many people argue against campaign finance reform...

Expert Opinions on Iraq

CSM has a bit on a Strategic Studies Institute report on the continuing occupation of Iraq. The authors doubt that the U.S. will be able to put down the insugency before leaving, or train Iraqi security forces sufficiently to do the job themselves. Moreover, they suggest that the U.S. start to consider that an undemocratic government may be necessary to create a stable Iraq. Additionally they argue that a timetable for withdrawal would not be helpful.

There is also a link to an NPR interview with a former director of the NSA, who argues that the best thing we can do for democracy in Iraq is leave now.

The Brick Testament

It never ceases to amaze me what people put on the internet. Brilliant.

So Stupid It Hurts

So we're planting P.R. pieces in Iraqi media outlets. I can't say I'm shocked. As some of the comments in the story point out, these sorts of stunts continue to drag our credibility through the mud. I can't help but recall the Defense Science Board's insightful Report on Strategic Communication (blogged here). Now a year old, I still believe it to be the single most intelligent document on the War on Terror. The report stated:

"Information saturation means attention, not information, becomes a scarce resource. Power flows to credible messengers. Asymmetrical credibility matters. What's around information is critical. Reputations count. Brands are important. Editors, filters, and cue givers are influential. Fifty years ago political struggles were about the ability to control and transmit scarce information. Today, political struggles are about the creation and destruction of credibility."

There are some very smart people in our government. Sad that nobody pays attention to them. Al Qaeda doesn't need to destroy our credibility. We do it to ourselves, over and over and over again.

Exercises In Futility

I feel somehow obligated to blog articles where some poor idealistic fool writes about the budget deficit and fiscal discipline. As if anyone cared. I have to say I like the line about the House deficit reduction plan giving new meaning to the phrase "women and children first" (I wish Holt would have said who originated it).

Random thought: I know there are various organizations that send questionnaires to political candidates to survey their positions on various issues. I'd like to see one in the form of a spreadsheet that provides an extremely dumbed down version of the federal budget (ie. on the income side provide the rates of the major tax brackets (with built in calculations to reflect the revenue change that results from adjustments to the rates) and an "other" category encompassing everything else, on the spending side have military (including foreign interventions), social security, medicare/medicaid, homeland security, and "other" encompassing everything else). On one line have the actual numbers as of this year. On the next line invite the candidate to fill in the budget that they would institute if they were king. I'm tired of politicians talking about reducing the deficit, but never committing to any sacrifice (on either the tax side or spending) that would make it happen. This system would apply a very simple reality check to the usual B.S. rhetoric.

Can This Be Real?

Cuz it kind of looks like it is. The U.S. denies it, while the UK seems more concerned with supressing the potentially incriminating evidence, but the story going around is that Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera. In Qatar. And wasn't joking. Reportedly, Blair talked him out of it. I imagine his exact words were something like: "Are you out of your fucking mind, you daft bastard?!" Just when you think you've heard it all...

Update: Howard Kurtz had the same reaction - "can this possibly be real?" His conclusion? No, based on the fact that it would be unbelievably stupid. Like that's ever stopped this administration before... I think the least credible part of the story is the fact that Bush would run it by Blair before he did it.

Idiot America

Consider this a follow-up to my Defense of Intellectualism from Sept. 5. There is an Esquire article by Charles Pierce rambling across blogs and internet message boards titled Greetings from Idiot America, reprinted in full in many cases (almost certainly without permission, but what the hell). Here's one of the reprints. It is, I think, an issue of critical importance, but one on which I have no idea how we can gain traction. One would hope that the utter disaster that has been Bush's gut-based presidency would have some impact, but the man did after all win reelection...

The Murtha Discussion

Aside from the laughable attempts to tar Congressman Jack Murtha as a coward or Michael Moore, the more serious conservative response to Murtha's proposal to leave Iraq is well stated by neocons Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol in this Weekly Standard article. Murtha gave no consideration to the consequences of our leaving Iraq, they complain. The Iraqi military lacks the capacity to stand on its own, they argue (sidenote: but haven't we been constantly hearing about the many thousands of Iraqi troops who have been trained for a couple years now? I guess that was all BS. But then we already knew that..). There could be civil war, and in any case it will be a huge victory for Al Qaeda, they worry.

I think these are good considerations and important points, but they miss a fundamental preliminary question: can we still win in Iraq? Because if we can't, every point raised by Kagan and Kristol is utterly irrelevant. Murtha argues that it is a lost cause. Unless that point is rebutted, his position must prevail over Kagan and Kristol's. They answer this charge with the flat statement that "victory is in fact possible, though it will require a longer war than anyone would like." That is not at all clear to me.

I have been (and remain) reluctant to abandon the mission in Iraq owing simply to the magnitude of our current obligation to the Iraqi people and the high stakes that Kagan and Kristol detail. However, I am becoming increasingly doubtful about our long term prospects for success in Iraq. I see no signs of the insurgency slowing or Iraqi government gaining control. As Murtha noted, the Iraqis don't want us there, and, in fact, at least some Iraqi leaders view the insurgency as legitimate resistance to occupation. There was a column by Helena Cobban (a CSM foreign affairs columnist) that I thought I had blogged (although it appears I never did) from the summer that presents a credible argument that our presence in Iraq is no longer helping matters. At this point I think we have to look very seriously at whether it is worth staying. I am on the threshold. The prospect of a civil war in Iraq worries me greatly. But if all we are doing is delaying it until our eventual and inevitable withdrawal, we are performing no great service. No matter the stakes, if we can no longer win this war, or if we are making matters worse by staying, we must withdraw.

In this case, Kagan and Kristol's points only go to underscore the general stupidity of the Iraq war in the first place. It was always a gamble of the highest stakes with dubious prospects of success. We have paid a high price for it already in many regards (casualties, money, reputation). Now whether we choose to remain or withdraw, the price will only escalate. I wonder if it is only now that the magnitude of this blunder is beginning to settle in for the neocons.

In the end, I believe this to be a more costly mistake than Vietnam. Where in Vietnam our policy was driven mostly by paranoia of communist dominoes falling (which never actually occurred), here I agree with Kagan and Kristol that this would be a victory for Al Qaeda of real importance. Al Qaeda has operated under the belief, drawn from U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia, and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, that the West is weak and has no stomach for fighting. This is a fundamental element of their strategic approach and philosophy. And here, in the most high profile arena possible, we may prove them right. Nonetheless, we cannot allow this to obscure reality in making our choice. If truly this is a lost cause we must not throw more good lives and money after bad. Our military has been courageous and true, and we owe it to them. To quote John Kerry (from when he used to be cool): "How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

A 21st Century Rivalry

There's a good story on CSM about China's growing military capacity. In particular it describes a rapidly growing modern core group within the military. It predictably focuses on China's improved ability to challenge the U.S. in Taiwan, but I think the more interesting issues lie further in the future and on a much broader scope.

It's a pretty common meme at this point that China is poised to emerge as a top global rival to the U.S. Assuming that China's economy continues to grow at a rapid rate (and there are some potential problems there, particularly in the banking system) this seems almost inevitable. But I think suppositions that this would somehow mirror the Cold War are dead wrong. I'm not sure how this rivalry would unfold, but I highly doubt that it would resemble the Cold War. The contours of the Cold War were defined by the all-encompassing differences in the economic systems of the two sides that made the complete severing of ties between them possible and desirable.

The key to China's growth has been the modernizing of its economy and its embrace of free trade. The U.S. and China a crucial trade partners, and I don't see that changing. While China will undoubtedly become more assertive in its foreign policy and more apt to challenge the U.S. as its military and economic power grows, there will be a huge economic incentive for China and U.S. not to let things get out of hand. Of course, both sides will need to be wary, as nationalism can lead people to do stupid things, and no doubt there will be domestic political points to be scored by railing against the other side (indeed this is already the case in the U.S.). Flashpoints will emerge and tensions will flare. But money speaks loudly, and I think will hold things together in this case. The dynamic between the U.S. and China will likely be something we haven't seen before.

Another Leak Investigation?

In the wake of the Washington Post's story on the CIA's secret detention facilities, it appears that we may see another high profile leak investigation. The CIA has requested that DOJ investigate the matter and pursue criminal charges for the release of classified information. Likewise (also mentioned in the NYT story) several top House and Senate Republicans have called for a joint Intelligence Committee investigation into the leak. Already several reports are drawing comparisons to the Judy Miller story (see Howard Kurtz's 11/14 column). I think this story would provide an excellent contrast to the Miller story.

The problem with Judy Miller's effort to hide behind press secrecy protection is that the facts of her case flew in the face of the intent of such protections. The idea is to protect whistle blowers and encourage them to bring to light topics, otherwise hidden from the public, that may be critical to the public discourse and democratic oversight of government actions. Judy Miller exposed details meant to crucify one such whistle blower, details that were otherwise irrelevant to the public discourse. Nor was it a simple or direct impeachment of Joe Wilson's credibility or an attack on the substance of his reports. The Plame story was simply an effort create insinuations about Wilson's qualifications and generally besmirch his reputation and possibly (depending on what you're willing to believe about Libby and Rove) to exact revenge by ruining Plame's career. Hardly a lofty testament to the value of an independent press.

The Post's CIA detainee story, by contrast, contained exactly the sort of critical information that the public deserves to see, and should be given every available legal protection. This is not to say that there should be no oversight of how classified information is exposed or that press organizations should not exercise caution in disclosing it (as the Post did in refusing to name the countries where the detainment centers are located). This was information that the public did not know and had no reason to suspect about government policies that go directly to the heart of what our values are and how we conduct ourselves.

This will admittedly cause difficulties for the CIA in its effort to continue to pursue these policies, difficulties that the CIA can claim impair its mission and endanger national security, but these difficulties arise from the outrageousness of the conduct itself. I fail to see how the exposure of this information will in any way impact on the actions of Al Qaeda relative to the CIA, nor the actions of the CIA relative to Al Qaeda, except to the extent that this is now propaganda for Al Qaeda and a source of domestic and international political problems for the CIA. This is not the case of an agent or undercover program that, once exposed, can no longer no long serve the assigned mission. Secrecy is not critical to the function of a prison camp. The exposure of these policies hurt the U.S. and the CIA not because it imposes functional problems, but because the policies are stupid.

The only reason they were likely secret in the first place was probably to avoid political fallout, in both the U.S. and the host countries. That is not, to my mind, a valid reason for government secrecy. If a democratic country allows its government to conceal its actions because the public would not like those actions, something has gone seriously wrong. If some investigation does arise from this leak, I certainly hope that a critical element of that investigation is to discover why exactly the public did not know about these facilities prior to the leak and to inquire into the validity of the profferred justifications for concealing the facilities.