Morning In America?

I'm not sure exactly how to introduce this Newsweek column from Fareed Zakaria, but I know that it is a hugely important commentary. I can't emphasize that enough. I also can say that it very much underscores my support for Barack Obama. If you didn't read Obama's foreign policy speech when I linked it before, read it (or watch the video) after you read Zakaria's piece.

There is a strong tendency on the left right now, not without justification, to want to attack and tear down everything the Bush administration has done on foreign policy, even without necessarily having a vision of what will replace it. And there is an equally strong urge, I think, on both sides of the aisle to pull back from world affairs, having been so badly burned in recent years with our mission in Iraq in shambles, with Afghanistan beset with difficulties, with economic globalism causing domestic turmoil, with public opinion of the US heading south all around the globe. These are understandable instincts, but completely wrong.

The US needs continue to be bold and aggressive on the world stage, but in a very different way than it has been in the Bush era. We need the humility to recognize that the US cannot achieve its goals alone and that the US cannot force its will upon the global community, but we also need to recognize that the world cannot move forward on its major challenges without decisive American leadership. We need to restore the image of American idealism and optimism and hope. We've seen what comes of trying to lead through bullying and stubbornness. It should be apparent at this point that our global leadership will only be effective when people want to follow us. So we must present an image that inspires.

The politics of fear have wounded us badly. Fear debilitates and diminishes us. We need to realize how truly strong America is, and that as big as the challenges facing us are, as long as America holds true to its founding ideals there are no challenges that we cannot face and overcome. As Zakaria argues, this is the message the world needs to hear, but I think it is also the message Americans need to hear. We need to restore our own pride in who and what we are before we can expect anyone else to believe in us. We need to be unafraid to engage the world, to open ourselves and our ideas up to the world, to trust in our inherent strength to overcome criticism and meet challenges even though it may be a long and difficult road.

Too many liberals, seeing how Bush has weakened the Republicans, smell blood in the water and see this as the moment to finally crush the Republicans under their heels. Tempting as that may be, I think we cannot afford to press too far along partisan lines. This is the moment, while there is a pervasive feeling that Bush has taken us in the wrong direction, when we need to build concensus, to capitalize on that sentiment to forge a broad new agreement about who and what we are and what America should represent to the world. I think Barack Obama gets all this (although I hope I'm not just projecting my hopes onto him). I don't think any other candidate in the race does.

It's A Long Time Until the Primaries

But I watched some of the Democratic debate tonight. A few thoughts:

This was not the best venue for Barak Obama. He was pretty good substantively (although he went a bit overboard in his focus on pursuing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan), but his answers, particularly early on, were not as smooth or strong as they should be. It is a bit surprising to me since the first time I saw Obama was in a televised debate for the Illinois senate primary. Obama was not one of the favored candidates in the race (and I had never even heard of him prior to tuning in), but he blew everyone else off the stage. He can do better than he did tonight, although it would be difficult to ever match the eloquence of his speeches in a debate format.

Hillary Clinton did a fine job. Most of what she had to say on Iraq and terrorism was moronic, but that was hardly unexpected. Her answers on everything else were strong, and she did a great job calling out Wolf Blitzer several times for asking unfair questions. Her performance has given me some confidence that she could win the general election, but I still worry about whether she would actually make a good president if she won.

There are moments when I really like John Edwards. At his best he can be the most honest and serious of all the Democratic candidates, but too often he panders directly to the DailyKos brand of hardline liberalism. And on a superficial level he doesn't carry the same level of gravitas that Clinton and Obama do. This is a significant problem in its own right, but especially so for someone whose degree of liberalism will leave him open to attacks on national security and terrorism. He can't afford to come off as a lightweight. But in any case, I was quite happy with what I saw from Obama, Clinton, and Edwards as a group. Any of them would make a much stronger general election candidate than Kerry was in 2004.

As for the rest, while none of them have a snowball's chance in hell, Joe Biden did a nice job and I'm happy to have him up there speaking his part. The others were mostly a waste of airtime. Richardson has gotten some press as being someone who could break into the top tier, but he might have been the weakest of the lot (which is saying something with Gravel and Kucinich out there). Hopefully the pack will start to thin out so that the main contenders can get more time at future events (although I expect Gravel and Kucinich will annoyingly hold out until the bitter end just to enjoy the free airtime).

Public Relations as Diplomacy

Here's another data point to add to my alternate reality post from the weekend. Price Floyd, a long-time State Department employee has written a column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about why he recently resigned from his position as the State Department's director of media affairs. He argues that his job was made impossible by the insistence of the Bush administration that they could do whatever they wanted in international affairs as long as they got the PR right. The State Department's job was no longer to conduct diplomacy, but rather to sell the message. Reality didn't matter, symbolism was the only focus. The only result, Floyd says, was that people now view America's messages as meaningless propaganda. Slate's Fred Kaplan comments here. It reminds me, once again, how completely on the money the Defense Science Board's terrorism report was back in 2004 (blogged on BWJ here) when they wrote:

Policies, diplomacy, military operations, and strategic communication should not be managed separately. Good strategic communication cannot build support for policies viewed unfavorably by large populations. Nor can the most carefully crafted messages, themes, and words persuade when the messenger lacks credibility and underlying message authority.
...

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.

Too bad no one listened to them...

Our First Line of Defense Against Terrorism

An update to my post about James Fallows's Atlantic article, Declaring Victory, from late last summer. There Fallows argued, convincingly, that the primary threat of terrorism today is not international terrorist networks, but disaffected local Muslims like those that bombed London and rioted across Europe last year. Muslims in the US, as opposed to those in Europe, Fallows claimed, were highly assimilated and as such provided the US with a significant security buffer. Today the Christian Science Monitor editorialized on a Pew study of American Muslims that echoed Fallows's point, finding US Muslims to be "highly assimilated". CSM argued that the US must be careful to cultivate this identification of its Muslim population with the US and take care not to allow our public rhetoric to alienate young Muslims. I concur fully and hope that our politicians take note of this warning as the 2008 elections heat up. As it stands our Muslim residents are our greatest asset in the war on terrorism and a resource we cannot afford to squander.

Update: Speak of the devil, Fallows himself blogged a few comments on the Pew study today. And what's that at the bottom?? :)

Why The Atlantic Kicks Ass

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence made big news this week by publicizing prewar analysis from US intelligence agencies predicting the difficulties that we would have in Iraq. These reports were buried by the administration in their push for war. For many this was just one more stunning revelation of the recklessness and dishonesty of the Bush administration. For readers of The Atlantic Monthly, however, it was old news. James Fallows reported on this in January of 2004, and I blogged it here in July of that year. Nice to see that the Senate is catching up. I shouldn't be snarky; this is a good thing. Now that Democrats control the agenda in the Senate they can finally drag some of these things out into the light of day, and they should. But in any case, I think kudos are in order to Fallows and The Atlantic.

Update: Apparently Andrew Sullivan is not an Atlantic reader. He was shocked and outraged by this new report. Excerpt:

Just to anger up the blood some more, it's now clear, thanks to the latest Congressional report, that this president was warned starkly about the dangers of "a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups" as a result of an invasion of Iraq. He was told that Iraq was "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" for democracy. He was explicitly informed that there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so." And yet he still sent a pathetically insufficient occupation force in 2003 - and refused to increase it for three years of growing chaos and mayhem. Even if you excuse the original recklessness, the persistence in it - until our current point of no return - is and was criminal negligence - a callous disregard for your security and mine.

The gravity of the mistake this country made in 2004 by re-electing al Qaeda's best bet is only now sinking in as deep as it should. I fear, however, that we have yet to experience the full and terrifying consequences of that historic mistake.

We All Want Out of Iraq...

...but we can't shirk our responsibilities.

I'm going to stick with Matthew Yglesias (who I've been reading quite a bit of since The Atlantic picked him up as one of their regular bloggers), although many people have expressed similar sentiments about the Iraq funding bill, particularly at the major liberal blog sites. Yglesias was disappointed that Democrats didn't fight on the funding bill to the bitter end. I dissent. I was hugely critical of the Democratic votes in favor of the original Iraq war authorization bill, and my bitterness on that front has not receded a bit these past five years. But I think that Democrats in Congress did what needed to be done with this funding bill. They fought a good fight in the public eye, passing a bill with benchmarks and defending it in the media although it was doomed to be vetoed from the start. They forced Republican congressmen to stand up and publicly support the president's policy in Iraq (a stand many of them will regret next year). They pushed the president to negotiate with them, and were rebuffed. He was not going to negotiate. And if we have learned anything about George Bush, we should know that he would not have backed down, regardless of what the Democrats did. They simply didn't have the votes to overcome a veto, and everyone knew it. That left them with but two options: capitulate or defund the Iraq war.

I want out of Iraq as much as anyone, but I would not have us abandon our responsibilities there. A precipitous and complete withdrawal is just not an option. Extricating ourselves from this mess will be a delicate operation. I believe we need to get our troops out soon, because as far as I can tell all they are accomplishing is to maintain a miserable status quo. Our presence is inhibiting any progress by the Iraqis and preventing the situation from evolving. But I have no confidence with respect to what happens when we leave. Things could move in any direction from there. Some of what might happen (and here I have visions of Rwanda) would be utterly intolerable. If we see things proceeding in that direction I feel that we will be obligated to bring the troops back in to put a lid on things and try again. Even if it costs us, even if we don't have a clear path to success. We have a responsibility, an obligation to the Iraqi people that I hope we do not forsake. We will need to be careful with our withdrawal and keep sufficient force in the region to react to events as needed. We will need to maneuver deftly to retain enough influence in Iraq to nudge things in the right direction without appearing to interfere. Defunding the Iraq war will not accomplish that. What we need is open heart surgery, and the only tool the Democratic Congress had was a sledgehammer.

This means, of course, that we will have to continue to live with Bush's management of the war for the time being. So be it. Elections have consequences, and the American people voted for the war in the 2002 midterm election and ratified that decision when they reelected George Bush in 2004. Last year's midterm doesn't erase all that. Now we're stuck with the president we have. Maybe over the next year enough Republican congressmen will defect to allow Congress to force a responsible withdrawal on Bush. If so, great. If not, then we just have to live with him until we can get a president who can deal with this conflict like an adult. The hardline "bring the troops home now" positions I see on so many liberal blogs these days are no more responsible than the policies Bush is pursuing in Iraq today. It's no cause for celebration, but Democrats in Congress did what needed to be done, and I respect them for it.

The Alternate Reality of the Right

In considering the "fighting them there so they won't come here" argument, Matthew Yglesias points out the obvious conflict between symbolism (retreating from Iraq makes us look weak) and reality (staying in Iraq causes us to actually be weak). He seems perplexed by the Right's tendency to "view national security policy as something that takes place entirely at the level of symbolism". This is, I think, not so difficult to understand. American conservatives live in an alternate reality, unable to distinguish between symbolism and reality. To them, symbolism is reality. If you listened to enough conservative radio and watched enough Fox News you'd live in that alternate reality too. Never was this more clearly illustrated than in Ron Suskind's famous discussion with an undisclosed White House official (Andrew Card, perhaps?) about how the Bush administration was in a constant process of creating its own reality. This was never a matter of the Bush administration being able to fundamentally alter the state of the world directly through their pronouncements and news releases, but rather an expression of the belief that if they can control news cycles and assert a concept of reality strenuously enough, everyone else would have little choice but to accept it as real, and the world would adjust itself to the White House's vision. It was Wag the Dog transformed from satire into official state policy. They could reshape reality through symbolism by convincing people that what they thought was true actually wasn't.

Obviously this doesn't work. There are too many competing sources of news and reality does eventually trickle in to displace this fictional presentation. The reality-based community inevitably gets the last laugh, as Suskind pointed out. This is why the administration and their supporters were always so furious about the media reporting on bloodshed in Iraq and missing the "good stories"; the media was deconstructing the administration's carefully constructed alternate reality.

But it's not hard to see why conservatives got suckered into this belief, and why they still can't seem to let go of it. Most conservative news sources are mere propaganda outlets. Witness the old Pew study finding that the more people watched Fox News the more likely they were to believe that we had found WMD's in Iraq or that Saddam was behind 9/11. Or this more recent Pew study that shows that while liberals see Republican presidential candidates in exactly the same way conservatives themselves view them, conservatives, by contrast, see all of the Democratic candidates as raving left-wing lunatics. American conservatives have replaced their own reality with symbolism, so why wouldn't it be natural for them to think the same is true for everyone else? Their own echo-chamber media has relegated them to a world that only exists in their own minds.

Al Gore and TV Culture

I was deeply impressed with this excerpt from Al Gore's new book The Assault On Reason from Time Magazine. It's heavily Amusing Ourselves to Death influenced. It makes a half-hearted diversion into being an advocacy paper for net neutrality in the closing paragraphs, but that may just be an artifact of reformatting the book into excerpt form, because prior to that turn the excerpt appeared to have a rather grander design. I'll be curious to see reviews of the whole book. I think Gore diagnosed the problem pretty well here, and I surely hope net neutrality is not the entirety of his answer. I have to concur with Andrew Sullivan, I much prefer the new public intellectual version of Al Gore to the old political candidate version. I hope he doesn't let himself be dragged into the 2008 race.

Opening Up Cellular Networks

Some time back we had a discussion here on the insistence of US cellular providers that wifi features on new phones be disabled before the phones were marketed in the US. In a column for Forbes, Tim Wu argues that the FCC should use the upcoming auction of wireless spectrum gained from the digital TV transition to enforce a right to attach rule. He notes that the exact same question was broached with respect to landline phone service in 1968, where the FCC ruled that AT&T must allow the Carterphone to interoperate with its system (a ruling the paved the way for the creation of MCI and the ultimate demise of AT&T's monopoly). The rule would force carriers who purchased spectrum in the auction to allow any device that conforms to basic specs to operate on their network, knocking down an immense barrier to entry for wireless device manufacturers. This is a good example of a pro-market regulation, carving out space for innovation and competition in an anticompetitive marketplace.

More Barack

A great in-depth profile from the New Yorker. Not too surprising to see some quotes from fellow Chicago Law prof (and BWJ favorite) Cass Sunstein, but there's also some stuff in there from Robert Putnam, from whom Obama took a seminar based on Bowling Alone. And Sunstein even throws out a Rawls reference. It's a regular BWJ-fest. Here's some of the meaty stuff:

Obama’s drive to compromise goes beyond the call of political expediency—it’s instinctive, almost a tic. “Barack has an incredible ability to synthesize seemingly contradictory realities and make them coherent,” Cassandra Butts says. “It comes from going from a home where white people are nurturing you, and then you go out into the world and you’re seen as a black person. He had to figure out whether he was going to accept this contradiction and be just one of those things, or find a way to realize that these pieces make up the whole.” In the state senate, this skill served him well—he was unusually dexterous with opponents, and passed bills that at first were judged too liberal to have a chance, such as one that mandated the videotaping of police interviews with suspects arrested for capital crimes. “In our seminar, whether we were arguing about labor or religion or politics, he would sit back like a resource person and then he would say, I hear Jane saying such and such, and Tom seems to disagree on that, but then Tom and Jane both agree on this,” Robert Putnam says. (For a couple of years, Obama participated in a seminar about rebuilding community, inspired by Putnam’s article “Bowling Alone.”) “I don’t mean he makes all conflicts go away—that would be crazy. But his natural instinct is not dividing the baby in half—it’s looking for areas of convergence. This is part of who he is really deep down, and it’s an amazing skill. It’s not always the right skill: the truth doesn’t always lie somewhere in the middle. But I think at this moment America is in a situation where we agree much more than we think we do. I know this from polling data—we feel divided in racial terms, religious terms, class terms, all kinds of terms, but we exaggerate how much we disagree with each other. And that’s why I think he’s right for this time.” Even when he was very young, Obama was scornful of, as he puts it, “people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.”

Sometimes, of course, there is no possibility of convergence—a question must be answered yes or no. In such a case, Obama may stand up for what he believes in, or he may not. “If there’s a deep moral conviction that gay marriage is wrong, if a majority of Americans believe on principle that marriage is an institution for men and women, I’m not at all sure he shares that view, but he’s not an in-your-face type,” Cass Sunstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago, says. “To go in the face of people with religious convictions—that’s something he’d be very reluctant to do.” This is not, Sunstein believes, due only to pragmatism; it also stems from a sense that there is something worthy of respect in a strong and widespread moral feeling, even if it’s wrong. “Rawls talks about civic toleration as a modus vivendi, a way that we can live together, and some liberals think that way,” Sunstein says. “But I think with Obama it’s more like Learned Hand when he said, ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’ Obama takes that really seriously. I think the reason that conservatives are O.K. with him is both that he might agree with them on some issues and that even if he comes down on a different side, he knows he might be wrong. I can’t think of an American politician who has thought in that way, ever.”

Lectures

A pretty cool web site.

Won't Someone Think of the Troops!?

I've been busy with exams lately, so I've been sitting on several things I hope to blog at some point, but I just couldn't let this one pass by. Last night Newshour had a feature on the Iraq war funding bill (you can watch it here). The story featured a moderated discussion between activists Jon Solz and Melanie Morgan. It pretty much encapsulates the entire war funding discussion in its complete absurdity (really, it's surreal, you have to watch it). It called to mind this astute post from a month ago by the Cunning Realist noting that:

Normally, U.S. troops support and serve as instruments of U.S. policy, not the other way around. Of course these aren't normal times. Now, national policy in Iraq and elsewhere is fixed around "supporting the troops" -- who are no longer the means to an end, but an end in themselves in our budding "troopocracy."

The degree to which "the troops" have become a political football is fairly sickening. There is a name for a government where the army runs the show and generals call the shots: dictatorship. Here in the US we have a republic where elected civilians give the army its marching orders. Political leadership does not end when war begins. There exists no act more fully and completely political than war. And there is no greater need for democratic political leadership than in a time of war. Did Abraham Lincoln listen to his generals and support the troops? No, he fired the generals one after another, because he was the head of state and they weren't doing the job he needed them to do to effect his political objectives. Why bother with elected officials if they are too busy worshiping the troops to make sound policy decisions? And to the extent that our elected government owes a responsibility to our military, I should think that the responsibility starts and ends with this: to make smartest and most rational possible decisions regarding the use of military force in the service of our national good. And you can't do that when the entire political debate revolves around who most loves the troops...

Losing the Independent Press and the Price We Pay

Bill Moyers made waves this week with his special report on the role of the press in the run up to the war in Iraq. His story dovetails nicely with PBS Frontline's ongoing series of reports on the state of the press. Both are available online, and well worth watching. I would start with with Part III of the Frontline series, followed by Moyers's Buying the War.

Moyers has few true revelations and little new information, but it is well worth going back and seeing how badly the press got this war wrong, and revisiting some of the more egregious false claims of the pundits. Those pundits, as Moyers points out, are alive and well in American journalism. Many have been promoted. No one has been called to account.

The Frontline report helps to illustrate why American journalism is failing. No one does real reporting anymore, save a few national newspapers, and even they are cutting back. The newspapers are still highly profitable, but their readership and their revenue is in steady decline, and so sacrifices must be made for them to maintain their high margins and keep the corporate overlords happy. This was very much my concern while researching the media ownership rules last summer. Maintaining the prohibition on TV-newspaper crossownership has long been a central goal of the Democrats with respect to the media ownership rules. While I certainly see the value in that policy, for me the financial well-being of our newspapers has to be the top concern. I'm frankly not sure whether they would be helped or hindered by relaxing the cross-ownership rule. But I think we have to be willing to try anything that might preserve our last bastions of actual journalism.

Of course, the Moyers piece illustrates that even when newspapers have the resources to perform serious research they can fail to use them when caught up in the political conventional wisdom (as was the case of the New York Times and the Washington Post with Iraq). The conventional wisdom is created in part by the efforts of political actors (the White House in particular), but also by the media itself when it parrots the lines fed to them by those political actors. When real journalism is a small slice of the news media universe it seems that it is easily cowed by the overwhelming majority of the press for whom statements issued by the White House define reality. There needs to be a critical mass of independent press for news outlets to gain the courage of numbers to be willing to take risks.

Neither of these two pieces paints the whole picture on its own, the business of the news and the politics of the press, but together I think they give us a good look at what has gone wrong. The newspapers have a long way to go before they can recoup their lost hard-copy profits through their online presence. Given how much the internet has shaken up other industries, it's not clear they ever will. If they don't we can look forward to further setbacks to the quality of journalism in the US. We need to start to consider the degree to which quality reporting is a public good. In my opinion, in a democratically governed nation, journalism is the highest order of public good. The public cannot make informed choices if there is no one to inform them. If the market is unable to provide what we need, we will have to explore other avenues.

Government Without Conscience

Recall my post on the head of the GSA holding a meeting for a Rove deputy to present Republican election strategies to GSA appointees, asking for their help in the upcoming elections? Well it wasn't just the GSA. 20 of these briefings were conducted with 15 federal agencies, including the EPA, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor, HUD, Treasury, Education, Agriculture and Energy, NASA, the Small Business Administration, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of National Drug Control Policy and USAID. The GSA administrator, Lurita Doan, faced Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee yesterday. The Committee has testimony from a half dozen witnesses that Doan asked Rove aid Scott Jennings, at their meeing in late January of this year, how GSA projects could be used to help "our candidates". As for Doan's appearance, it's clear she attended the Al Gonzales seminar on congressional hearings. She claimed to have no recollection of the Jennings presentation. Shown one of his powerpoint slides titled "2008 House Targets: Top 20", Doan claimed to have no idea what it meant. Upon the suggestion that it referred to representatives targetted in the 2008 election by the White House, Doan responded that such an interpretation was speculation. It must be fun the shamelessly lie on the stand.

What's sad is, were it not for the Democratic wins in the midterm elections, the administration might have gotten away with this stuff. I just hope we spend the next two years seeing this adminstration ripped apart and dismantled, brick by brick by brick. Hopefully it will be painful enough and leave enough of a lasting memory to deter other presidents from going down this road for a very long time.

One Scandal To Rule Them All

Josh Marshall has an interesting post tying together Prosecutorgate and the Abramoff investigation into a single mega-super-scandal. It makes sense...

I've Waited Six Years for this Foreign Policy Address

Barack Obama's foreign policy speech. He gets it all right. Not just on policy, but on tone and approach, which in foreign policy are at least as important as the X's and O's. This is where we should have been on September 12, 2001. A lot of people (primarily political junkies) already resent the Obama hype level (see Slate's Obama Messiah Watch), but the guy keeps hitting them out of the park. Andrew Sullivan's comments:

Obama's speech yesterday is his most detailed yet on foreign affairs. It is emphatically not isolationist; it is emphatically not against the use of military force when necessary; it is emphatically pro-military in its call for many more troops. On the critical issue of Iraq, Obama has taken a stand - a clear one for withdrawal, with the possibility of a strike-force over the horizon. This is a very difficult call, and the timing and execution of withdrawal will be dispositive. But one core strength of Obama's candidacy is that he got this war right when many of us got it wrong. He deserves more of a listening than many of us do. If his speech yesterday was any indication, there will be much to chew on. I'm sorry to see no commitment to a carbon tax; I'm unsure of whether diplomacy can or will work with Pyongyang and Tehran. We will all have to listen and watch Obama closely these next few months in weighing his candidacy against others'.

But this much we can already say: Obama brings something no one else does to this moment. By replacing one of the most globally despised and domestically divisive presidents in American history with a young leader half-Kansan and half-Kenyan, America would be saying something to the world: Bush-Cheney is not who we are. America is not what it has come to appear to be. This country is among the most culturally and racially and religiously diverse on the planet. America has long been a powerful and vital beacon for human rights - not, as recently, the avatar of torture, rendition and executive tyranny. The simple existence of Obama as a new president in a new century would in itself enhance America's soft power immeasurably, just as a clear decision to leave Iraq would provide much greater leverage for diplomacy and military force in a whole variety of new ways. Obama would mean the rebranding of America, after a disastrous eight years. His international heritage, his racial journey, his middle name: these are assets for this country, not liabilities.

This is the reason for his ascendancy. This is what the American people sense and the world awaits. This is what the Islamists fear. That last alone is reason to feel hope.

And the reaction over at DailyKos? Obama presents a "weak, mealy, and shockingly conservative platform. ... apparently Obama has joined the exalted ranks of the criminally misguided on foreign policy." This, of course, on one of the back pages, because the Kos front page has decided Obama doesn't exist unless they have something they can rag on him for (particularly if they can contrast him with their golden boy, John Edwards).

Sullivan likes it, the Kossacks hate it; I'm sold. I've commented before on the lack of a moderate liberal net presence as sites like DailyKos have drifted farther towards the fringe. So far I haven't found a liberal answer to thoughtful moderate conservatives like Sullivan, The Cunning Realist, Greg Djerejian, and Dan Drezner. I won't be surprised if we start to see some schisms in the liberal netroots over the next 6-8 months as the primary season heats up, and I'm hopeful something a little more reasonable will come out of it.

To close, an excerpt from Obama's address:

In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well.

Whether it’s global terrorism or pandemic disease, dramatic climate change or the proliferation of weapons of mass annihilation, the threats we face at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries.

The horrific attacks on that clear September day awakened us to this new reality. And after 9/11, millions around the world were ready to stand with us. They were willing to rally to our cause because it was their cause too – because they knew that if America led the world toward a new era of global cooperation, it would advance the security of people in our nation and all nations.

We now know how badly this Administration squandered that opportunity. In 2002, I stated my opposition to the war in Iraq, not only because it was an unnecessary diversion from the struggle against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, but also because it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the threats that 9/11 brought to light. I believed then, and believe now, that it was based on old ideologies and outdated strategies – a determination to fight a 21st century struggle with a 20th century mindset.

There is no doubt that the mistakes of the past six years have made our current task more difficult. World opinion has turned against us. And after all the lives lost and the billions of dollars spent, many Americans may find it tempting to turn inward, and cede our claim of leadership in world affairs.

I insist, however, that such an abandonment of our leadership is a mistake we must not make. America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, but the world cannot meet them without America. We must neither retreat from the world nor try to bully it into submission – we must lead the world, by deed and example.

Too Awesome For Words

I'm pretty sure this is the reason why people invented the internet.

Bush Concerned Over Heavy-handed Treatment of Protestors

...in Moscow. Is Bush concerned about heavy-handed treament of protestors in Washington, D.C.? Not so much...

Gonzales: Nothing To See Here...

AG Alberto Gonzales in today's Washington Post:

I know that I did not -- and would not -- ask for the resignation of any U.S. attorney for an improper reason. Furthermore, I have no basis to believe that anyone involved in this process sought the removal of a U.S. attorney for an improper reason.
[...]
All of these documents and public testimony indicate that the Justice Department did not seek the removal of any U.S. attorney to interfere with or improperly influence any case or investigation. Indeed, I am extremely proud of the department's strong record of vigorous prosecutions, particularly in the area of public corruption, where Republicans and Democrats alike have been held accountable for their crimes.

Recently retired career DOJ attorney Daniel Metcalfe, in a recent Legal Times interview:

Actually, I began earlier, in the first Nixon administration, as a college intern in 1971. But I was there again in the Watergate era, when I worked in part of the Attorney General's Office during my first year of law school in 1973-1974, and then continuously as a trial attorney and office director for nearly 30 years. That adds up to more than a dozen attorneys general, including Ed Meese as well as John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales.

To be sure, he continued a trend of career/noncareer separation that began under John Ashcroft, yet even Ashcroft brought in political aides who in large measure were experienced in government functioning. Ashcroft's Justice Department appointees, with few exceptions, were not the type of people who caused you to wonder what they were doing there. They might not have been firm believers in the importance of government, but generally speaking, there was a very respectable level of competence (in some instances even exceptionally so) and a relatively strong dedication to quality government, as far as I could see.

Under Gonzales, though, almost immediately from the time of his arrival in February 2005, this changed quite noticeably. First, there was extraordinary turnover in the political ranks, including the majority of even Justice's highest-level appointees. It was reminiscent of the turnover from the second Reagan administration to the first Bush administration in 1989, only more so. Second, the atmosphere was palpably different, in ways both large and small. One need not have had to be terribly sophisticated to notice that when Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey left the department in August 2005 his departure was quite abrupt, and that his large farewell party was attended by neither Gonzales nor (as best as could be seen) anyone else on the AG's personal staff.

Third, and most significantly for present purposes, there was an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it.
[...]
You have to remember that this is a Cabinet department that, for good reason, prides itself on the high-quality administration of justice, regardless of who is in the White House. Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House's domain. Even Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, did not depart greatly from the standard that Levi set; as for Meese, I knew him to be more heavily involved in defending himself from multiple ethics investigations than in bringing the department too close to the White House, even though he came from there.

More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton's second term. And even John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence; he proved that this was no mere lip service when, from his hospital bed, he refused to overrule Deputy AG Comey on what is now called the "terrorist surveillance program." Especially in the wake of 9/11, which strongly spurred the morale and dedication of Justice Department employees, myself included, I saw only a limited morale diminution in general during the first term.

But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip -- through their public affairs, legislative affairs and legal policy offices, for example, as well as where you ordinarily would expect such a connection (i.e., Justice's Office of Legal Counsel). I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren't even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.

This matters greatly to Justice Department employees of my generation. They are now the senior career cadre there, with the high-grade institutional knowledge that carries the department from one administration to the next, and when they see a new attorney general come from the White House Counsel's Office with a wave of young "Bushies" in tow and find their worst expectations quickly met, they just as quickly lose respect for nearly all of the department's political leadership, not to mention that leadership's "policy concerns." That respect is a vital thing, as fragile as it is essential, and now it's gone.

It's a great interview, the best discussion I've seen so far on this matter. And Metcalfe lays far more of it than I'd have imagined directly on Gonzales's head.

Big Lobbying Money + Complicated Subject + Stupid Tech Writer = Gigantic Mess

Subtitle: Robert X Cringely is a bloody idiot.

The job of a tech writer is to explain the universe of high technology to laymen in terms they can understand. To clarify confusing topics, to illuminate, to inform. So why does PBS's Robert X Cringely insist on writing on topics about which he so obviously does not have even a wisp of understanding? This week he writes about net neutrality, a topic inspired, apparently, by his suspicion that his broadband provider may be messing with his faxes over his VOIP service. He goes on to discuss how ISP's already implement quality of service prioritization (QoS), which he refers to as tiered service, which means that we have, in fact, never had network neutrality. It also, he says, means the internet is not a "best efforts" network as all the pundits say it is. All of this is, of course, wrong. That's not unusual for Cringely. What irritates me is that this is an important issue, and the wrong characterization that Cringely just published is exactly the line of bullshit that the lobbyists for incumbent networks are trying to sell. This makes Joe unhappy. So I'm going to take time out of my day to do Cringely's job for him.

It's easiest first to define net neutrality by what it is not:

Net neutrality is not an effort to prohibit QoS prioritization or traffic shaping. If you want to (as Cringely says in the article) give top priority to VOIP, then routing tables, then commercial broadband service, then consumer broadband service, there is absolutely no problem with that. Knock yourself out. If you want to dial down bandwidth on popular filesharing ports because the bittorrent users are clogging your network, again no problem. This is not what net neutrality is about (with one caveat I'll get to below). (And in case anyone cares, traffic prioritization is not, as Cringely believes, mutually exclusive with being a "best efforts" network (which the internet by and large is).)

Net neutrality also does not prohibit tiered service offers. If you want to give you end users a choice between a $20/mo 2mb service, a $40/mo 10mb service, and an $80 100mb service, there's no problem with that.

And here is what net neutrality is:

Net neutrality prohibits discrimination based on source. All data of the same type gets the same treatment regardless of who it comes from. So you can discriminate as much as want between different types of data, as long all packets within each class get the same treatment. The point of this is that a service provider is not allowed to favor its own websites, email, VOIP system, streaming video service, etc. over a competitor's. If you want to give your VOIP system high priority service, then Vonage gets that service too. Similarly, service providers not allowed to preference third-party services who pay them a fee. So charging Vonage for special priority carriage then turfing other VOIP providers isn't allowed either. That's net neutrality.

Where this gets tricky is where a service provider doesn't offer VOIP or streaming video over the internet, but offers an analogous non-internet-based service over the same line (phone service for DSL, cable TV for cable modems). In that case, prioritization by type acts as a proxy for prioritization by source. If you throttle down all VOIP service equally, that still gives preference to your non-internet phone service. To that extent, and only to that extent, net neutrality may have something to say about type-based prioritization.

The cable and phone incumbents have spent boatloads of lobbying money to promote the misconceptions about net neutrality that Cringely put on display in his column. Traffic shaping based on packet type is highly useful, and generally accepted as a desirably practice. Likewise tiered service offers to end users serves an important purpose in the market. If the incumbents can get everyone to believe that these things would be trashed by net neutrality, it makes their job much easier in arguing against it. This lobbying effort has been quite effective, and I see these misconceptions all over the place. It always bothers me, but much more so when I see it from a perceived authority figure like Cringely. Tech writers have a duty to clarify this issue, not to muddy it further.

And, by the way, Cringely, the reason your fax doesn't work over VOIP has nothing to do with net neutrality. VOIP uses lossy compression tuned to work with human voices, not the blips, bleeps, and squawks of a fax modem. Your fax machine doesn't work over VOIP because the fax transmission is being garbled by that compression. Buy yourself a scanner and toss the fax machine, it's obsolete.

Talking Point Punctured

Did Bill Clinton do something shady or unusual when he asked all of the US attorneys to tender resignations after he took office? Hardly. Ronald Reagan replaced 89 out of 93 US attorneys in his first two years after taking over from Carter. George H.W. Bush even replaced 88 of Reagan's US attorneys in his first two years. And George W. Bush, of course, replaced all of Clinton's US attorneys. The article doesn't say what the practice was prior to Reagan, but quotes one Carter appointee noting that turnover "is the tradition of the office. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, and when a new administration comes in, everybody knows you will have a new U.S. attorney."

Total War on Iraq

I was rather shocked today to find a column on CSM from a former managing editor arguing that the reason the US is struggling in Iraq (and didn't win in Korea and Vietnam) is our unwillingness to engage in total war. And what, exactly, does John Dillin mean by total war? The complete destruction of an enemy nation, including massive civilian casualties. As examples he cites the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sherman ravaging the American South. There's certainly a compelling argument that such tactics should never be acceptable (particularly compelling with respect to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for which there is compelling evidence to suggest the bombings were completely unnecessary to prompt Japanese surrender and had far more to do with the Cold War than WWII). But even accepting the premise that such attacks can sometimes be permissible, there's a pretty major difference between those situations and Iraq: in each of those conflicts the US faced an active state opponent, with troops in the field and territory under its control.

The idea of waging such a war in Iraq is not only absurd, but morally reprehensible in the extreme. We don't face state opposition. The Iraq government is our putative ally. We control the entirety of Iraq. For us to target Iraqi population centers for indiscriminate bombing wouldn't be waging war, but rather an exercise in genocide. At least in WWII there was always a means for our opponents to end the slaughter: unconditional surrender. What would signal a stopping point in Iraq? The Iraqi state has already conceded. It would simply be a gratuitous massacre lasting until our bloodlust had been sated.

But would it work? Perhaps if we slaughtered millions of Iraqis the insurgents would throw in the towel (although a couple million dead Vietnamese argue to the contrary). But even if they did, and even if we weren't troubled by the morality of it, where would this leave us internationally? Could anyone ever again regard us as a force for good in the world? Would our standing in the conflict with Al Qaeda and political extremism be improved? It would be an umitigated disaster.

Dillin's argument strikes me as another reflection of the general frustration that our military opponents have evolved and adapted in the days since WWII. The tactics we used there cannot work anymore, and that's no accident. It is precisely because the US military is amazingly proficient at total war that no enemy will ever allow us to bring that proficiency to bear. They know that for all our might in defeating armies and conquering territory, when it comes to holding territory over the long term, we are merely human. They can concede the field then engage us in a knife fight. And in doing so they gain the added benefit of transforming a military conflict into a political one, happily revealing our serious deficiencies in that arena. Our enemies have learned from the wars of the last century and moved on. Maybe it's time we did the same.

I Think We Took the Red Pill...

...and now we're going to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. This DOJ thing is spiraling off in a dozen directions at once:

- US attorney in Wisconsin pushed into a voter fraud case that the appeals court referred to as "beyond thin" by the Rove Machine?

- Monica Goodling, the underqualified "party loyalist" DOJ attorney who resigned last week after pleading the 5th, appears to have been a key player in the US attorney hiring and firing process.

- Another DOJ party loyalist, former assistant to Deputy AG Paul McNulty (who admitted to having given false testimony to Congress), and Goodling co-conspirator, Rachel Paulose, was appointed as US attorney in Minnesota, where she recently drove several of the office's top staffers to resign.

- The DOJ's latest excuse for firing David Iglesias (he was an 'absentee landlord') could land them in further legal trouble: Iglesias was away serving in the Navy Reserve, and his position was protected by the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act.

- This has all gotten to be a bit much for Gonzales who apparently can't keep his own bullshit straight, to the point that his staff is pulling him out of planned TV appearances. Can't wait for the Senate date...

It has gotten to be a bit much for Slate too, as they has moved their Gonzo-resignation-meter up to 86% likely. Keep digging folks...

I'm at the Wrong School

Here I had thought that the key to getting ahead was to go to a respectable top tier law school, had I but known that the pipeline to hot jobs ran through Regent University School of Law, I might have chosen differently. Who knew Pat Robertson was a legal genius? It's a school that leaves its students well prepared for the challenges of the federal hiring process, like this one:

In a recent Regent law school newsletter, a 2004 graduate described being interviewed for a job as a trial attorney at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in October 2003. Asked to name the Supreme Court decision from the past 20 years with which he most disagreed, he cited Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling striking down a law against sodomy because it violated gay people's civil rights.

"When one of the interviewers agreed and said that decision in Lawrence was 'maddening,' I knew I correctly answered the question," wrote the Regent graduate . The administration hired him for the Civil Rights Division's housing section -- the only employment offer he received after graduation, he said.

More here.

Corrupt to the Core

In order to fully appreciate the depths of the prosecutor scandal, I think it's necessary to place it into the general context of how this administration views the federal government. In that respect the new scandal involving the GSA provides considerable insight. The General Services Administration is the agency tasked with providing material support to the federal bureaucracy. They provide buildings, transportation, equipment and supplies of all sorts to the various federal agencies. It is a massive organization with a $60 billion annual budget. In January top administrator of the GSA, Lurita Doan, hosted a meeting for GSA appointees at which one of Karl Rove's deputies, J. Scott Jennings, made a powerpoint presentation on the Republican strategy in the 2008 congressional elections, identifying the hot races and the party's prospects for success. Doan then asked Jennings, "How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?"

This appears, as the article notes, to be a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, but it's not so much the legalities that interest me in this issue. I can't help but view this administration's approach as embodying the long-standing hostility of certain parts of the Republican party (not least of which being the libertarian wing of it) towards government. While he certainly didn't invent this meme, Ronald Reagan probably popularized it more effectively than anyone else. Government, we came to understand, is the problem, not the solution. I'm certainly open to arguments that the government often does things poorly or takes on tasks that are not well suited to it, but when you go from specific criticisms to a generalized anti-government dogma, I can't help but think you eventually, inevitably, end up with the Bush administration.

If you spend all of your time out of government vilifying government, how can we expect you to have any respect for the institutional integrity of the government once you're in charge? If it's all bullshit anyway, why not appoint a horse and pony show administrator to head a critical government agency? Why not use the resources of government agencies to attack your political opponents? Why not use them to sell favors to fatten your campaign coffers?

Government, whether we like it or not, prefer it big or small, is a necessity. We'll never do away with it altogether. And for all our checks and balances there can be only so much democratic and institutional oversight. Plenty of constitutional governments have failed in the past (and we're witnessing one failing in real time in Iraq), not because their constitutional structure was faulty, but because that is only one part of the equation. Another part is a culture of respect for the traditions and integrity of the institutions of government. Much of what happens in our government comes down to the degree to which federal employees feel the weight of public trust on their shoulders, and the responsibility instilled by the tradition of the offices they hold. The Republican tactic of promoting a deep suspicion and overpowering cynicism about everything related to the government destroys that culture and is now destroying the institutional integrity of our government. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. They have ended up with the government they always thought we had (but in reality didn't).

I think this is a large part of why Barack Obama excites me and Hillary Clinton terrifies me. It's going to take someone like Obama to rebuild public trust in the integrity of the federal government. We're going to need a visionary and a statesman, and someone of substantial personal integrity. Clinton, perhaps more than any other candidate running on either side of the aisle, will serve only to deepen cynicism about government. She is just the sort of plasticky, blow-dried, political-consultant-run marionette that inspires distrust of the entire political system. The Bush administration has dealt our constitutional system a serious blow. To have it followed by another administration that only deepens the growing chasm of mistrust between the American people and their government could, I think, be disastrous.

The Housing Market Bailout

I'm usually on here defending regulation from Henry and V, but this story just irks me. Ohio is raising $100m to bail out homeowners with ARMs facing foreclosure. Who the hell gets an ARM when interest rates are at their lowest levels in many decades? An ARM is a wager between you and your lender: if interest rates fall, you win, if they rise, they win. If you start from an historic low, who do you think is going to win that wager? This is a market populated by predatory lenders and foolish debtors. Dumping tax dollars in to keep it afloat may not be the brightest idea.

At This Point, I Should Just Admit...

...I'm a fan of Francis Fukuyama. He defends himself against association with Bush administration neoconservatism in this Guardian column. I think his comments are right on the money. To wit:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Finally, I never linked the global emergence of democracy to American agency, and particularly not to the exercise of American military power. Democratic transitions need to be driven by societies that want democracy, and since the latter requires institutions, it is usually a fairly long and drawn out process.

Outside powers like the US can often help in this process by the example they set as politically and economically successful societies. They can also provide funding, advice, technical assistance, and yes, occasionally military force to help the process along. But coercive regime change was never the key to democratic transition.

Malaysian Cars Suck

Apparently. This is pretty funny.

Update: Here's the video.

Who is the daddy now?

Serenity beat Star Wars to the title of best sci-fi movie,
R2-D2 move over

Google Earth

Maybe you guys have used google earth before. If you have'nt, go here and download it immediately. If you have, why didn't you tell me about it? This is frakking amazing.

I'll describe it as if you were unaware of its glory. It blends a 3-d globe with satellite images, and google place data to form a seemless explorable planet. Its like having one of those godlike CIA systems from the movies (except you can't keep enhancing any image indefinitely, unfortunately). I will never be lost again. Have you ever been baffled by obscure geographical refences in adventure novels? Not anymore. You'll know exactly what block they're on, and what the roof of the restaurant they're eating at looks like. Joe & Ceci, you live at 38° 2'51.29"N x 78°30'41.49"W and and an altitude of 564 ft (and your apartment is 0.5 arcseconds long from front to back). I could have just searched for your address, but I actually found you by hand, cruising around Charlottesville in my satellite (since I did'nt know your address off hand and this was way more fun anyhow). I'll let you guys explore it for yourselves. If you're not impressed you can go to hell.

The Commanding Heights

I watched The Commanding Heights (TCH) earlier this week and I figured that, per Joe's request, I would post a comment. It was great. I was actually teary eyed more than once while watching it. I don't suspect that anyone would be too surprised by my evaluation. It did support many my preexisting beliefs. I found the perspective on post-communist Russia to be particularly interesting and informative.

I think we could use a lot more of this sort of media. Although TCH portrays a world in which the ideas of liberal economics have triumphed, I feel that that triumph is more practical than political. That is, I believe that many governments were forced into accepting more market oriented policies because command economies had been such a debacle. But I'm not so sure that liberal economics has gained any sort of ascendancy amongst the minds of the ordinary people of the world.

I fear that should the economic winds change, people are as ready as they have ever been to embrace socialistic policies. Not to put too fine a point on it, TCH paints a picture of a grand cycle going from the economically liberal beginning of the twentieth century, through an period of government dominance, and back to the modern era of world markets, and I suspect we might well repeat the same errors in the coming century that we did in the last. This would, of course, be tragic.

Really, as an American on the ground, do you see the weight of public opinion as being in favor of free market policies? In particular, amongst the free market sentiment that you do see, is it there for the right reasons? It seems to me that socialism is still far stronger than liberalism in terms of underlying public support. It is simply a far more intuitive system. Though I may sound like some sort of conservative crank, I think that we have to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of educators and educational institutions in the U.S. still guide students toward a preference for socialism and planning over markets and individual freedom. We must simply face the fact that organization and government intervention are the products of genuine popular movements, and that laissez faire economics has probably never had widespread support.

Just look at the labor and (largely equivalent) anti-globalization movements portrayed in TCH. Do we, at any time in history see any similar movements in favor of liberalism? No, not really. I guess the American Revolution is about as close as you get. Socialism just makes for way better slogans. People want to hear that their problems are caused by the greed and evil of the rich and powerful, not that scarcity is an inevitable phenomenon and that economic limitations hold with the force of natural law. I have argued before that the drive towards communism is likely maintained by the same forces that first inspired worship of the Gods. As human beings we have a built-in tendency to interpret events in terms of purposeful action. This facility is essential to our functioning as members of complex human societies. But it also causes us to anthropomorphize and personify natural forces. Because the natural forces of scarcity manifest themselves through the market, it makes perfect sense that we blame our problems on the human faces of corporate leaders and government officials. Though such scapegoating is satisfying, it is dangerously counterproductive. We have to recognize that when oil prices, for instance, become unpleasantly high, it is not because oil producers are greedy, it is because the relationship between supply and demand has changed. We can try to deny this fact by imposing government controls, but such a lie hurts no one more than ourselves.

All right, I'll stop jabbering about free markets. If you've watched TCH you probably already have a pretty clear idea of what I'm talking about. But I do still want to comment on instabilities in the modern financial system. This is a very significant aspect of the third part of TCH. These are a very challenging problem. The solution is not at all clear. My opinion is that what we need is, in fact, a greater degree of deregulation. This is totally opposed to what most economists would suggest. But I'll say it nonetheless.

I think that governments go way to far in guaranteeing stability in their banking systems, and that we need to make it much easier for banks to fail. You see, I believe that the operation of central banks brings about a system of risk pooling in which the possibility of failure is aggregated. There is no doubt that it is possible to do away with the risk of individual bank failures by creating a centralized guarantor, but to me it seems equally clear that such a system does not eliminate risk. It merely spreads it. But this spreading means that risk is externalized, so it is entered into far more often. It means that risk goes unrecognized, so it is underpriced. And it means that the realization of risk is quickly contained, so systemic purges of risk are much less frequent. Overall, the result is that the economy ends up containing way more risk than it could have ever supported prior to bank cartelization. In a way this is good. It allows much more lending to take place, and so we have lower interest rates, and hence more development and entrepreneurship. But it is bad in the sense that the economy builds up huge amounts of risk.

Just as the containment of moderately sized forest fires allows the buildup of large amounts of fuel mass, thus increasing the possibility of huge uncontrollable blazes, so the containment of moderately sized failures in the credit system makes much more dangerous failures more likely, if not inevitable. So what I'm saying is that we need to do away with the belief that we can control risk. We need to accept the fact that risk is an inherent result of our inability to foresee the outcomes of economic decisions. Given that recognition, the best solution is to break economies into smaller cells capable of failing individually and thus making failure more common, more recognizable, and more contained.

I think that today there is more unrecognized risk in the world economy than most people could possibly imagine, and that a systemic world economic collapse is more likely than most would like to think. It is in this risk that I see the possibility that the recent trend toward economic liberalization will be undone. If we do see a global economic catastrophe, few will choose to blame it on governments doing too much to safeguard economic stability, and many more will interpret it as a predictable failure of under-regulated markets.

I'm not sure that disaggregation is possible from where we now stand. Risks that have been taken cannot be undone, and disaggregation would almost certainly bring about immediate painful realization of this fact. And even if the central banks of the world were to cast risk back upon subunits of their economies, it would not undo the recent creation of a world derivatives market, which is essentially a privatization of the role of risk aggregation. This market may truly be a market failure: a making of poor decisions that could not be subjected to the strictures of market forces until it had become to big to stop without immeasurable harm being done. But it is too late to do anything about it.

In summary, TCH is very encouraging, and made me feel very warm and fuzzy. But I for one am afraid that the trend that it illustrates might be short lived. I may be wrong. I certainly hope that I am. But if I'm not, the tragedies of the twentieth century could well be revisited in the twenty-first.

Obama's Track Record

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for digging up this slightly dated (October of last year) account of how Barack Obama kept himself busy during his two years in the Senate. Keep it in mind while you're being battered by the talking point about Obama having not done anything. The basic summary:

...I do follow legislation, at least on some issues, and I have been surprised by how often Senator Obama turns up, sponsoring or co-sponsoring really good legislation on some topic that isn't wildly sexy, but does matter. His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.

Also, a follow-up on prosecutorgate, Lincoln Caplan has an informative column on Slate on the proper role for politics in the justice system. He handily rebuts the oft-repeated canard about Clinton replacing the US attorneys when he took over by noting that in the past 25 years the number of US attorneys forced out mid-term for reasons other than misconduct is somewhere between two and five.

Mistakes Were (Not) Made

I've been holding off posting on prosecutorgate so far mostly because I've been waiting with bated breath for it to explode. This is the big one. After a nearly endless series of blunders, scams, and scandals in the Bush administration, some big, some small, this is the one that I think will go down in the history books as the defining Bush administration scandal. And I've been too intently observing it unfold to say anything. I've finally been moved, however, to respond to the line of defense being offered by Gonzalez and the White House. That line: mistakes have been made. Namely, the DOJ was not fully honest about why the prosecutors were fired. End of story. They hope, by acknowledging and focusing on this particular aspect of the problem, to obscure what lies behind it. On the Newshour last night, the Republican operative (I don't recall who it was) was quite exercised about how awful it was that the DOJ misled the Senate on this count. He was also adamant that nothing else had been done wrong and that there was nothing actually improper about the firings themselves. Bush and Gonzalez have made similar remarks.

Not so fast. The bullshit about firing these prosecutors for performance issues is the least of the problem. Even the firings themselves are not the whole of the problem. This scandal is about the politicization of enforcement of justice in the US. So far Scott Horton at Balkinization has said it best:

What is at stake here? The issue is enormous. It is whether the criminal justice system will be turned into a partisan political tool. Bush's Administration is already widely called a "hackocracy" because of his tendency to fill slots with unqualified and incompetent partisan hacks. But the crisis at DOJ goes far beyond that. Even civil service positions - which have been protected from this sort of partisan corruption since the Hatch Act of 1939 - are being politicized. The Boston Globe, for instance, has closely documented the process of weeding out qualified career attorneys from the Civil Rights Division at DOJ and their replacement with political retainers - and the same process has continued throughout the Department. But at the heart of the DOJ scandal lies political intrusion into the exercise of prosecutorial discretion - one of the areas which a democratic society most needs to shield from partisan intrusion. There is now clear evidence that Gonzales and Bush directed political prosecutions and attempted to deflect prosecutions of Republicans for political purposes. A state that criminalizes political adversaries and that cloaks the criminal conduct of its retainers is by definition a tyranny.

A study by Donald Shields and John Cragan (not yet released) shows that under Bush seven times more Democratic officials have been investigated by the DOJ than Republican officials. Match that up with the Boston Globe findings. Combine it with all of the DOJ/White House emails released by the Senate showing the overtly political nature of the firing decisions, and how they tied into politicized prosecutions. There were no mistakes made. Nothing accidental occurred here. These people knew exactly what they were doing. They created one law for Democrats and another for Republicans. The Bush administration has made a concerted effort to reduce our nation to a banana republic. Gonzalez will have to go, but this scandal ought not end there. This administration and its DOJ is rotten to the core. For the sake of our nation and our system of government the Democratic Congress needs to climb onto this scandal and ride it as far as it can take them. This sort of misconduct needs to be punished to the fullest extent possible.

From the Wacky World of Legal Compensation

Dahlia Lithwick on Supreme Court clerkship signing bonuses. Sure they're silly, what about big firm pay scales isn't?

Bushbabies, Yum!!

I was also browsing the foreign policy blog, I find this more "politically" interesting. To see pictures of bushbabies, click here, now I am off cooking some dinner

Commanding Heights

I wanted to point out a fantastic documentary we've been watching called Commanding Heights: the Battle for the World Economy. It's a 3-part, 6 hour show created by PBS in 2002 based on a book of the same title by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. You can actually watch the entire thing from that web page (although we netflixed it). It is tremendously educational about the economics of the second half of the 20th century (the entire first episode is devoted to the competition between the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek). It pulled together a lot of previously unconnected pieces for me. I recommend it highly, and I would be very curious to hear Henry's thoughts about it.

Also, unrelated, I believe this might be the greatest news report of all time (and it happened in Oconomowoc).

It's Not the Culture, Stupid

The Foreign Policy Magazine blog (a good blog to keep tabs on, by the way) noted a theme in their recent coverage invoking Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations idea. Part of it, an essay by David Frum, is subscriber only (and I've never found Frum to be much worth reading anyway), but this column about Iraq by W. Patrick Lang is interesting. The conflict in Iraq is likely to drag out in some form or another for a very long time, but in a general sense the post-mortem is already well underway. No doubt we will see a great deal of debate over the narrative to take away from Iraq and what it means for our future.

Lang's take is that we underestimated the cultural differences between Americans and Iraqis. He and Frum (as excerpted in the blog post) believe that the neocons were fundamentally wrong in thinking that most people are basically like us. Lang points to the failure of democracy in Iraq, where voters cast their ballots based on tribe or sect rather than political policies. He notes that Nuri al-Maliki is not interested in serving the nation's best interests, but in promoting the interests of Shiite Arabs.

Lang's criticisms of the naiveté of neocon policymakers is on target, but I think his underlying analysis is off. Moreover, I think the idea that there are deep and permanent (or semi-permanent) cultural rifts between Western culture and the rest of the world is a dangerous one.

Maybe Tom Friedman does, as Lang charges, take the flatness of the world too far, but I think Friedman is more right than he is wrong. I look at my experience at Motorola where on a given day I would be working (on site or remotely) with people from China, India, Australia, Japan, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan, Israel, Russia, and Spain. Not many Arabs there, granted, but we had a tremendous diversity of cultures and no conflicts that I was ever aware of. People interacted with one another with virtually no regard for national, cultural, religious, or ethnic backgrounds.

The difference between that situation and Iraq is not, I think that the cultures are any less different, but that these were people in stable political and economic situations. It's not the culture that we failed to understand in Iraq, but the basic situation on the ground. Lang is right to assert that cultural identity now lies at the bottom of the conflict in Iraq, but the point is not that there is something characteristic about the Shiite, Kurd or Sunni cultures that is the problem, but that people are choosing tribal and sectarian identities over national identities (or Friedman's internationalist identity). When that happens the results appear to be the same whether the particular cultural identity is Sunni or Shiite or Serbian or Croatian or Pashtun or Tajik or Hutu or Tutsi. Looking specifically at the cultures is digging one level too deep -- the question is how do we keep people from going tribal in the first place?

What we failed to recognize in Iraq (despite strong warnings from many quarters) was the basic lack of national cohesion and the incredibly polarizing effect of US occupation (particularly without a UN mandate and a truly international coalition). The only particular significance of the culture in Iraq was the highly antagonistic approach of the US towards Arab and Muslim populations since 9/11. The BBC poll cited in the FP Mag blog post shows a broad international agreement that the differences between Islam and the West are political rather than cultural (and this Zogby/Gallup poll also highlights the political factors driving ever-sinking Arab opinions of the US). I've also pointed out on several occasions analysis to the effect that the US is at considerably less risk of home-grown terrorism (as compared to European nations) because Arabs integrate far more effectively here than in Europe. This should also illustrate that there is no inherent or fundamental incompatibility between Western and Arab culture.

I agree with Lang that we would benefit from learning more about foreign cultures. Lack of cultural understanding has been a problem in Iraq, particularly with respect to the winning of hearts and minds and understanding how Iraqis view American actions and policies. But I think we stand to make far greater gains by understanding foreign political and social situations. There's no reason why we can't do both, but if the take-away from Iraq is to throw up our hands and declare Islamic culture completely incompatible with Western government, economics, and values we'll be making a very serious mistake.

Is Experience the New Electability?

In 2004 John Kerry became the Democratic nominee because of a consensus that he was electable. In other words nobody voted for him because they wanted to vote him, they voted for him because they thought other people would want to vote for him. Turns out they were wrong. Electability never had any real meaning in substance, although there were certain traits that people assumed defined it: a long political record, national exposure, lots of money, military service, a boring enough personality to stay out of trouble. But the reality is that no one really knew how any of these traits related to a candidate's general election prospects (and we ultimately found that they relate very poorly). Despite the utter lack of a rational basis for the electability theory, however, there was an overpowering consensus among talking heads and political wags that electability existed and had the basic form described above. I found it infuriating at the time, and still do.

A considerable amount of ink has been spilled in the past few weeks on Barack Obama's prospects as a candidate, and I'm concerned that I'm starting to feel a new, and equally unfounded (and equally pervasive), consensus forming on the matter of experience. Take, for example, this Slate column by John Dickerson. Dickerson's experience discussion is focused on Vladimir Putin's provocative remarks at the recent Munich security conference.

(As an aside I'd like to mention how remarkably refreshing it was to see Bob Gates respond to Putin in a responsible and helpful fashion. It's taken six years, but the Bush administration finally found someone who can talk foreign policy without sounding like a petulant child.)

Dickerson compares Obama to John McCain, who in Dickerson's view clearly has the requisite foreign policy experience to be a good candidate. Obama, he suggests, doesn't have the experience to "sit across from blunt and tough leaders like Vladimir Putin". But the fact is very few Americans do have experience dealing with foreign leaders. Some of them have already been president, most of the others were cabinet secretaries (who for whatever reason rarely run for the presidency), and maybe you count a few senators like McCain (and longstanding senators have hardly distinguished themselves as successful presidential candidates). In general the vast majority of presidential candidates have been in the exact same position Obama finds himself today. Why is his experience level being singled out?

Dickerson gives Obama a backhanded compliment saying that at least he has more experience than Bush did in 2000. But rather than compare Obama to the worst foreign policy president in recent memory (maybe ever), why not compare him to some of the better ones. How much foreign policy experience did Bill Clinton have when he took office (or, if you're so inclined, Ronald Reagan)? It wasn't experience that made Clinton successful, it was his intelligence, diligence, compassion, and empathy. He learned about foreign nations, analyzed problems, and was able to connect with foreign leaders and people.

And how has experience helped John McCain? Dickerson's example of McCain's response to Putin shows that at least he has some judgment, but what about Iraq? McCain has been monumentally wrong for the past four years about the biggest American foreign policy blunder in decades. How has his experience helped him there? McCain, maybe more than any other politician I'm aware of, demonstrates the danger of too much experience in Washington. He's been burned too badly and too many times and is simply not the man he was six or eight years ago. His long exposure to the viciousness of national politics has consumed him.

Obama shares all of the traits that made Clinton one of the most internationally popular presidents in US history. He is phenomenally intelligent, broadly educated and well-read, intellectually curious, and intuitively able to connect with audiences and convey important ideas so that they can be understood by everyone. And his mixed national, ethnic, and racial heritage gives him, as Dickerson acknowledges, a leg up on the competition in terms of foreign perception of him, and, by extension, the US.

As Obama gets further into the process and has to formulate more of a foreign policy agenda, I will certainly be open to substantive criticisms of his positions and plans, but can we please not discount him based on this specious conception of the need for foreign policy experience? At this point he looks at least as good as anyone else in the race on foreign policy, maybe better. Let's just wait and see what he has to say before riding him too hard.

Covering the Important News

This made me laugh. What would we do without cable news channels?

Update: And watch this to see CNN's version of the Harris/Sullivan dialogue. It's the proverbial car wreck you can't stop watching... As one of the comments suggests, replace the word atheist with black or Jew, then imagine how this clip plays.

A Dialogue On Faith

I've been meaning to point out a wonderful dialogue taking place on faith and atheism between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. It started several weeks ago and is still ongoing. Harris has, I think, done a bang-up job. It's an enjoyable read.

And Here We Are Again...

So I was recently poking around wikipedia trying to find a quote from the documentary Fog of War, and, on the Fog of War wiki page, I came across a list of 11 lessons that appeared in Bob McNamara's book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. These lessons are different from the ones that appeared in the film (that list was actually developed by the filmmaker, Errol Morris, over McNamara's objection). Reading this list I was quite stunned at how accurately and completely they sum up our current disaster. It's eerie. Keep in mind that the book was written in 1996, seven years before we embarked on our Iraq adventure. Here they are:

1. We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.

4. Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.

5. We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine…

6. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

7. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

8. After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.

9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

Score One for Edwards

After Russ Feingold dropped out of the '08 sweepstakes I was a little bit surprised how quickly liberal bloggers (the Kossacks in particular) hitched themselves to John Edwards's wagon. I didn't care terribly for Edwards in '04, and I'm not that excited about his candidacy this time either. However, Edwards scored points with me when he made waves recently by stating that he would raise taxes to support his universal health care plan. I haven't seen much critical discussion of his plan, and the details I've seen reported are fairly vague. In other words, I don't know if his numbers are realistic or if the plan is a good one. But the mere fact that the man is willing to admit that it will cost money, and that those costs will have to be offset with higher taxes speaks highly to me of Edwards. We've been hearing about health coverage as a major issue for many election cycles at this point, but nothing has been accomplished (nor we have even come close to making progress), because delivering on health care promises will be expensive and painful, and while voters have expressed their desire for health care reform, they've never ratified any willingness to make sacrifices (in terms of taxes or other spending cuts) in order to make it happen. Of course, voters have never had a chance to do so, because politicians (on both sides of the aisle) are content to promise reform while pretending no sacrifice will be necessary. If real progress is to be made, we need to have a serious and frank discussion about what it will cost and how to pay for it. Edwards is the first candidate I've seen who seems to be willing to take part in that discussion. Kudos to him. I'm a long way from jumping on the Edwards bandwagon, but I'm now willing to start taking him seriously.

Israel's Right to Exist

Since Palestinian/Israeli negotiations have been hung up for a couple years over the issue of Hamas refusing to acknowledge Israel's right to exist, international lawyer (and Palestinian advisor) John Whitbeck has written a column what the right to exist means to Palestinians. He points out that Israel has never clearly spelled out its own borders, and Israeli texts show all of Palestine as encompassed within Israel. Moreover, it would be an acknowledgment of the moral justification of the initial expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and for all that has followed since then:

To demand that Palestinians recognize "Israel's right to exist" is to demand that a people who have been treated as subhumans unworthy of basic human rights publicly proclaim that they are subhumans. It would imply Palestinians' acceptance that they deserve what has been done and continues to be done to them. Even 19th-century US governments did not require the surviving native Americans to publicly proclaim the "rightness" of their ethnic cleansing by European colonists as a condition precedent to even discussing what sort of land reservation they might receive. Nor did native Americans have to live under economic blockade and threat of starvation until they shed whatever pride they had left and conceded the point.

Forcing Palestinians to make this concession, Whitbeck argues, is a tactic in bad faith and a roadblock to progress to peace negotiations.

A Sane Iran Policy

Jacob Weisberg (with an assist from Ken Pollack) breaks down the US strategic policy towards Iran. Weisberg notes that our aggressive saber-rattling will have the same effect in Iran as it has had in so many other places around the globe: to entrench the very regime we hoped to unseat.

Such belligerence seems unlikely to produce the result we desire for a variety of reasons. For one, our bluster is essentially empty. The United States lacks plausible military options for taking out Iran's nuclear program and dealing with the potential reaction, especially now that we are bogged down in Iraq. It is also proving extremely difficult to get the rest of the world to go along with the kind of comprehensive sanctions that would bite. Meanwhile, America's hostility is supplying Ahmadinejad with an external demon for his propaganda and helping him cover over his domestic failures. This American push for futile sanctions follows a familiar pattern, extending from Cuba to Burma to North Korea to pre-invasion Iraq—places where economic isolation and threats have fueled not regime change but regime stabilization.

On the other hand, it is difficult for the US to support human rights and democracy advocates, because a) they tend to say a lot of bad things about us and b) the Bush administration is too toxic for any Iranians to want to be associated with it:

The president, who has managed to make democracy a dirty word in many parts of the world, may by now retain only the ability to taint liberal heroes with guilt by association. Last summer, Iran's other leading dissident, Akbar Ganji, declined to meet White House officials when visiting Washington, saying—with reference to both Iraq and Iran—that "you cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it."

Weisberg believes that, if the US let him, Mohamed ElBaradei could pour cold water on the situation and maneuver the parties to a negotiating table, where the US could simultaneously make progress on the nuclear weapons issue and undercut Amedinejad domestically. It's worth a shot...