Howl time is extended

I find in the mailbox a card from the publishing company Elsevier that informs me I may purchase the second edition of the three-volume Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict for a mere $795.00, a reduction from the list price of $995.00.

Uh-huh. Right.

Hello? Elsevier marketing department? Anyone home? No, I didn't think so.

Howl time!!

I just heard a radio announcer say: "Gas prices in the D.C. area are a dollar cheaper [sic] than they were...."

I wish someone would inform this person that prices are not cheaper. Prices are lower. (Goods or services are cheaper.) Why does this minor mistake annoy me? Mostly, I think, because it represents a small instance of a larger phenomenon: presumably educated, intelligent people making basic English mistakes on the airwaves every day. This is not about informality or slang or colloquialisms, which I have nothing against. It's about locutions that are obviously, patently wrong. I know that languages evolve and all that, and I know no one is perfect, but it's getting to the point where formation of a Committee for the Defense of English would not be an irrational response.

If you don't like this post or think there are errors in it, please howl in the comments.

Gaza (cont.)

A story today says Israel has let in a convoy of aid to Gaza, but a UN spokesman said only eight trucks were let through, carrying only a few days' worth of supplies. The UN spokesman added that $2000 worth of baby milk was damaged or destroyed during inspections by Israeli soldiers. Nice going.

Israel's blockade of Gaza

Israel has effectively blockaded Gaza, preventing the entry of humanitarian aid including food, and aid agencies are predicting a catastrophe if the blockade continues. On Nov. 5, Israeli forces entered Gaza to destroy a tunnel, and Hamas responded with rocket attacks, which have continued intermittently. Israel says its sealing of the borders to humanitarian convoys and other transfers of goods is a response to the attacks; if so, it seems a somewhat disproportionate response.

By the way, remember when the Bush administration was saying it hoped to have the basic framework of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement in place before it left office? This seems pretty much out of the question now, although something might conceivably happen on that front between now and January. Assuming nothing does, the Bush administration will leave office with a list of foreign-policy accomplishments that can be counted on the fingers of one hand: 1) its global initiative on HIV and other epidemic diseases in sub-Saharan Africa, which has had some success; 2) increased development assistance to Africa and Latin America; 3) improved U.S.-Indian relations; and 4) some halting progress on the North Korean nuclear front. And that's just about it. (The other side of the ledger is too obvious to need enumeration.)

Coming next week

The post on the sixteenth century, mentioned earlier, will be up next week.

Collective forgetting

In a comment on this earlier post, 'bro' suggested adding a sentence to McCain's line that Americans make history: "And then we run screaming out of the room, get trashed, go to sleep, and wake up with no memory of what happened."

This was meant humorously, of course, but it points to a non-humorous issue, namely the function of collective forgetting, which is perhaps best understood not as literally blotting out certain painful parts of a national past but as agreeing to "bracket" them. More than a century ago, the historian Ernest Renan, in his lecture "What Is a Nation?," observed that "the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things...." More recently, Anthony Marx has put it this way: "Nations drink at the fountain of Lethe, clearing their memories, before their rebirth in the Hades of modernity." (Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism [2003], pp.29-30)

Congo update

France has failed to persuade the EU to send 1500 soldiers to eastern DR Congo to augment the UN peacekeeping force (MONUC), according to a radio report I heard earlier today. The 17,000 UN peacekeepers must deal with a region with roughly 1.7 million people, as Edmond Mulet, UN Asst. Sec. Gen. for Peacekeeping, pointed out in a letter published in yesterday's Wash. Post. Meanwhile, Gen. Nkunda, whose forces have been fighting Congolese government forces as well as, apparently, some soldiers from the government's ally Angola, threatened in an interview with the BBC to overthrow the government of Joseph Kabila unless it agreed to talks. Congo's ambassador to the UN dismissed the remarks. The UN has accused both sides in the recent fighting of war crimes against civilians.

Storming a (non-existent) heaven

Every Friday, the New York Times Book Review (published in print in the Sunday paper) arrives in my in-box. My usual procedure is to glance at it and, unless there's something I urgently want to read, file it in an e-mail folder labeled (surprise) 'nyt bk review'. I just looked at this folder and was horrified at how I have let them pile up. So I quickly deleted a few, but I paused to read David Gates's review, published back in September, of Philip Roth's novel Indignation.

According to the review, the novel centers on a college student who is also the narrator and who is revealed, a quarter of the way through the book, to be dead. Roth portrays the afterlife as a place where "your actions are naggingly being judged for all time by yourself.”

Here's the conclusion of Gates's review: "...of all Roth’s recent novels, it ventures farthest into the unknowable. In his unshowy way, with all his quotidian specificity and merciless skepticism, Roth is attempting to storm heaven — an endeavor all the more desperately daring because he seems dead certain it’s not there." Listen to the way "endeavor," "desperately, "daring," and "dead certain" work together. What a terrific sentence. I've never read David Gates -- never heard of him, in fact -- but maybe I will now.

History and "history"

"We [Americans] don't hide from history. We make history."
-- John McCain

"A man has nothing to fear, he thought to himself, who understands history."
-- last line of Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise (1981)

In these two quotations, "history" is, respectively, a prize and a consolation. In McCain's congratulatory usage, the power to make "history" is what Americans award themselves for being Americans. In Robert Stone's novel, the anthropologist Holliwell, having blundered around in an imaginary Latin American country and helped wreck more than several lives, consoles himself by taking the long view. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, or something like that.

When Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous article "The End of History," later expanded into the book The End of History and the Last Man, he was careful to point out that he was not talking about history but about History in the Hegelian sense, the ostensibly progressive development or unfolding of collective human consciousness, or spirit (Geist). Did McCain's speech writer have Fukuyama somewhere at the back of his mind? Maybe. Or maybe not.

Hegelians and Marxists, among others, believe that History has a veiled or hidden logic, one that their theories grasp. History unlocks its secrets to those in possession of the key: Spirit rising to consciousness of itself, or the inevitability of socialist revolution. Marxism is not about "spreading the wealth," contrary to what certain denizens of the right-wing blogosphere said or implied during the just-concluded U.S. election campaign. Marx himself had nothing but contempt for anyone who concentrated on distribution as opposed to the forces and relations of production. He asserted that redistribution was not possible without a change in the mode of production:

"Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves [Marx wrote in Critique of the Gotha Program].... Vulgar socialism...has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation [between distribution and the mode of production] has long been made clear, why retrogress again?"

When certain conservatives charged that Obama was a Marxist, they proved only that they had not read Marx.

This post seems to have wandered away from the rhetorical uses of "history." Perhaps that's just as well. When we get too serious about these things, we can count on Shaw to puncture the balloon. In Shaw's play The Devil's Disciple, set during the American war of independence, the British general Burgoyne, facing defeat at Saratoga, is asked by a horrified subordinate: "What will history say?" Burgoyne's answer: "History, sir, will tell lies, as usual."

P.S. A link to Critique of the Gotha Program.

China notes

• James Fallows' article, "Their Own Worst Enemy," in the current Atlantic is interesting and also fairly short (which is always a plus). He argues that the Chinese government does a better job of responding to its people's needs than it has managed to convey to the rest of the world. The government has a penchant for PR missteps, unnecessarily shooting itself in the foot, as happened on a couple of occasions during the Olympics. Fallows suggests that the bureaucracy continues to value loyalty over other qualities but that local officials sometimes go their own way, frustrating directives from the top. Still, there are signs the government is learning from mistakes and beginning to present a more accurate, and therefore favorable, picture of itself to the world.
  

• China and Taiwan have recently taken significant steps toward improved relations, sparking protests from pro-independence groups in Taiwan.

One more post on the election

Some readers doubtless already have seen Andrew Gelman's interpretation of the election results, but here's the link for those who haven't. Some key findings: (1) young voters made up about the same proportion of the electorate as in 2004, but they broke Democratic by a much larger margin than in 2004; (2) Obama's gains over Kerry, on a national basis, were most substantial among minority voting groups, but Obama also improved on Kerry's percentage among white voters (Obama got 44 percent, Kerry 41 percent of white voters); (3) the election did not fundamentally re-draw the red-blue map, as Gelman says; Obama outpaced Kerry's showing in the majority of states, but he underperformed Kerry in a few states, such as Louisiana and Arkansas.

Which campaign lines will be remembered?

Despite Barack Obama's eloquence, and despite the fact that I voted for him (in a primary and then in the general election), and despite having downloaded the text of his so-called race speech from the NYT to read at some point (because somehow I missed hearing most of it at the time), I'm afraid that the single line of rhetoric I will remember from this past election may be a John McCain line: "We are Americans. We don't hide from history. We make history." This is not even a good line; it resonates with the kind of American exceptionalism I reject. But because it was the conclusion of McCain's nomination acceptance speech, and because he resurrected it in the closing days of the campaign, and because I made the mistake of watching a pro-McCain YouTube pastiche that prominently featured it, I fear it may prove to be the one line I recall from this election season. (Except for Obama's "yes, we can," but that's less like a line and more like a chant, and also the thing about 'no red states, no blue states,' but that goes back to 2004.)

So, is there some kind of Vulcan-style procedure to eliminate unwanted words from one's memory banks? I'll take it please, pronto. That McCain line is one bit of history I'd just as soon hide from.

The civilian toll continues in Afghanistan

Another wedding party, this one in Kandahar province, has been mistakenly hit by a U.S. air strike, resulting in 40 deaths, the BBC reports. Hamid Karzai is quoted as saying that his "first demand" on the Obama administration after it takes office will be to end civilian casualties.

How Virginia voted, and a few other notes

Many commenters will be putting in their two cents on the election, and I doubt I have much to add of significance. However, in view of this earlier post, I should note that Virginia went for Obama by 51 to 47 percent (based on 99 percent of precincts reporting). Missouri and North Carolina are extremely close and there will probably be recounts in those states, although they cannot affect the overall outcome. Indiana, which I predicted (in comments at DofM) would go for Obama, did, by a slim margin (roughly 23,000 votes out of more than 2.6 million cast). However, I also thought McCain might eke out a win in Ohio, on no evidence other than a hunch, and I was obviously wrong about that. No Democratic candidate has won the presidency without carrying Ohio since JFK in 1960, so I was going out on a limb there, clearly. I haven't checked the latest figures on close Senate races yet, but Elizabeth Dole's defeat in North Carolina is good news, especially given the nasty turn her campaign took at the end.

Kissinger's latest pronouncement on Vietnam

In the current (Nov. 3) issue of Newsweek, Henry Kissinger reviews Gordon M. Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. Bundy was Kennedy's and then Johnson's national security advisor from 1961 until April 1966, when he resigned and was replaced by Walt Rostow. Along with Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, Bundy was a key contributor to the decisions that led to the Americanization of the Vietnam War in 1965. Perhaps not surprisingly, this review tells one as much if not more about Kissinger than about Bundy.

Newsweek's decision to have Kissinger review the book, which was written by Bundy's former research assistant, is a bit peculiar. For one thing, most Americans born before, say, 1960 cannot read the words "Kissinger" and "Vietnam" together without being assailed by a host of largely bad memories. Yet Kissinger makes only glancing references to his own extensive involvement with the Vietnam War and adopts the tone of a dispassionate and compassionate observer: dispassionate in apparently trying to rise above the controversies associated with what he calls "the traumatic event [for America] of the second half of the last century," and compassionate towards Bundy, whom he views as someone who did his best in difficult and somewhat novel circumstances.

Kissinger briefly recounts the history of Vietnam policy-making under Kennedy and Johnson, and toward the end of the piece he distills some general lessons (for lack of a better word). Some of this is unobjectionable; who would quarrel, for instance, with the statement that "when the President is asked to consider going to war, he must be presented, above all, with an analysis of the global strategic situation on which the recommendation is based"? (In fact, of course, Kennedy and Johnson were presented with such analyses: the problem was not lack of analysis of the "global strategic situation" but that such analysis was often based on faulty assumptions.)

While some parts of Kissinger's review are unobjectionable, other parts raise hackles. For instance, he criticizes the commitment of U.S. combat troops in large numbers in 1965 "on behalf of a general notion of credibility...." Yet Kissinger himself, after coming to power with Nixon, refused to quickly terminate all American involvement on the grounds that that would have been "immoral" because it would have damaged American credibility in the world! (Michael J. Smith has a good brief discussion on this point in his Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger, pp.213-214.)

Kissinger observes that Bundy hoped a diplomatic compromise would emerge "once Hanoi's efforts to dominate South Vietnam were thwarted." This approach wrongly sought stalemate rather than victory, Kissinger maintains, and he goes on to say that "the effort required to bring about a compromise was indistinguishable from the requirements of victory -- as the administration in which I served had to learn from bitter experience." This, I suppose, is a veiled way of saying, among other things, that the "Christmas bombing" in 1972 of Hanoi and Haiphong was necessary to bring about the settlement that was reached in January 1973. Without rehashing the depressing saga of Vietnam policy under Kissinger and Nixon, suffice it to note that "the effort required to bring about a compromise was indistinguishable from the requirements of victory" is a highly tendentious statement, at best.

Finally, consider Kissinger's last paragraph. It is written in Kissingerese -- a blend of the orotund, the unctuous, and the epigrammatic -- and runs as follows:

"Throughout history, every problem [sic!] America had recognized had proved soluble by the application of resources and idealism. Vietnam proved obdurate. Mourning the assassination of a president with whom it had identified, and perplexed by an impasse to which its own theories had contributed, the intellectual establishment ascribed its traumas to a failure of the American experience and the moral inadequacy of its leaders. This turned the national debate from an argument over feasibility into a crusade increasingly settled by confrontations designed to demonstrate a moral indictment. In that sense, Bundy was victim as much as cause of the forces unleashed as America was obliged to adapt its history to a changing world."

Of course, there could not have possibly been any prior "failures" in "the American experience." There could not have been even one deep flaw or failure. Nor, needless to say, can there have been any flaws in the approach pursued by Nixon and his national security advisor/secretary of state. The flaws lay elsewhere -- in a narcissistic intellectual establishment determined to indict "the American experience" rather than rationally conduct an "argument over feasibility." Never mind that this confuses one element of one segment of the anti-war movement's critique with the whole. Never mind that it implicitly whitewashes every less than glorious moment in the American past. In this last paragraph Kissinger reveals his true colors: as a student of history who apparently fails to comprehend that questions of war and peace are not simply about "argument[s] over feasibility," and as a public servant who has never fully come to terms with his own part in prolonging "the traumatic event [for America] of the second half of the last century."

P.s. I recognize that some people believe "war criminal" is a more apt designation for Kissinger than "public servant," but I think the latter is defensible if one considers his whole career rather than particular, admittedly despicable episodes.

Goodbye to October -- and not a minute too soon

This has been a more than slightly wild month here, with the increasingly fevered commentary on the election forming a descant over the ground bass of the economic crisis and the stock market's gyrations. The right has worked itself into a frenzy over Obama's alleged "socialism," while some on the left expect the anticipated Obama victory celebration in Chicago's Grant Park to mark symbolically the emergence of a new Democratic majority. A deflation of rhetoric on all sides should follow November 4, since no one can be expected to keep up this level of intensity. The rhetorical deflation will be welcome, as far as I'm concerned.

Afghanistan: Can "a disastrous situation" be salvaged?

I've just finished watching the excellent Frontline (PBS) program "The War Briefing" about the situation in Afghanistan. (That is, I was watching when I wasn't twisting the antenna and cursing the picture on my non-cable TV.)

The quotation in the title of this post is from former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who declared in an interview in the program that Afghanistan is "a disastrous situation for the U.S." It's hard to disagree with him on the basis of the evidence summarized by Frontline. Here are some of the essentials: 1) a weak central government widely perceived as corrupt, opposed by 2) a resurgent insurgency taking advantage of sanctuaries in Pakistan and benefiting from support by the growing Pakistani Taliban movement, with 3) a grossly insufficient number of U.S. troops on the ground (33,000) given the size of the territory (larger than Iraq), leading to 4) an over-reliance on airstrikes that have produced significant civilian casualties (civilian deaths generally have doubled in the past two years), which in turn 5) increases support for the insurgents. There's a lot more going on, but that boils it down to a few of the basics.

You don't need to be a strategic studies or counterinsurgency expert to realize that the current U.S./NATO policy is failing and that one or two more brigades, as Scheuer said, are unlikely to solve the problem. Nor, probably, will getting rid of the so-called 70 caveats -- the current restrictions on rules of engagement (see earlier post and comments). Nor will more monetary support from non-fighting NATO countries, though I'm sure it would be welcome.

Someone should be, and perhaps is, asking: What will be the security consequences for the U.S. of a re-takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban? Maybe the consequences will not be as dire as some suppose. In that case maybe the best course is to try to negotiate with the Taliban, with a view perhaps to either some power-sharing arrangement with Karzai or even a de jure division of the country into separate spheres of control. That might allow the U.S. and NATO to cut their losses in Afghanistan and focus more attention on the situation in Pakistan which, as Colin Kahl says in the program, is potentially a much more serious situation for the U.S., given the recent increase in strength of the Pakistani Taliban and the fragility of the current Pakistan government. That this is not a totally crazy thought is indicated by very recent reports that the U.S. is considering the possibility of negotiating with at least elements of the Taliban. Moreover, as David Ignatius discussed in a recent Wash Post column, Saudi Arabia has begun to host a mediation effort involving the Karzai government and the main Afghan insurgent groups. Obviously it's too early to say whether anything will come of these developments.

In the meantime, it seems unfair to the 33,000 U.S. troops, and British, Dutch, Canadian, and other NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, to continue under-resourcing their operations. Of the roughly 15,000 additional U.S. troops slated for (or requested by generals for) Afghanistan, only 4,500 are currently available, according to the Frontline program. This at a time when 28,500 U.S. troops are sitting in South Korea, and thousands more are in Japan and Germany. It creates at the very least a perception of skewed priorities. I'm sure someone at the Pentagon might have a reasonable-sounding explanation for this, but few members of the public have heard it because no reporters, as far as I'm aware, have bothered to ask the question. And as I've indicated before, I do not think "reasonable-sounding" means a simple appeal to our alliance with South Korea. There is no reason the alliance cannot survive a reduced U.S. troop presence there.

Update: The exchange in the comments has got me re-thinking this last paragraph.

Civilians flee fighting in DR Congo

UN troops have joined Congolese army forces in fighting soldiers led by "renegade general" (as the BBC calls him) Laurent Nkunda, north of Goma, a provincial capital in the eastern DR Congo.

Active engagement by forces of Monuc (as the UN peacekeeping mission in DR Congo is called) is unusual but not unprecedented. They joined the fighting as angry civilians fleeing Nkunda's advance attacked Monuc HQ in Goma, shattering windows.

An excerpt from the report:

"Gen. Nkunda has threatened to take control of Goma.

The UN accused his soldiers of firing rockets at two UN vehicles on Sunday, injuring several troops. A spokesman for Gen. Nkunda denied the rebels were involved.

His rebels attacked Goma last December. Hundreds of them died as the UN used helicopters under its mandate to protect civilians.

A peace deal was signed in Goma between the government and various rebel groups at the end of January. Although he signed the deal, Gen. Nkunda has always refused to disarm while Rwandan Hutu rebels still operate in the area [he claims to be protecting Tutsis in the region--LFC].

About 200,000 people fled their homes after fighting resumed in the area in late August. The United Nations says many refugees are malnourished and some are dying of hunger."

Also, the Spaniard who's been commanding Monuc forces has resigned "for personal reasons" after seven weeks on the job. A replacement is being sought.

A death in Fallujah

As is well known, things in Iraq have improved somewhat in the past months, particularly on the security front. Kuwait, Jordan, and Syria have recently sent ambassadors to Baghdad. But people are still being killed and we are constantly told that the situation is "fragile and reversible."

Case in point (from the BBC):

The largest Sunni party in Iraq says it is suspending all official contacts with US civilian and military personnel after the killing of a man in Fallujah.

The Iraqi Islamic Party said the dead man was one of its senior members and that he had been killed during a joint US-Iraqi raid on Friday.

The party alleged that the raid had been politically motivated.

The US military acknowledge that one man was killed and another arrested during a raid in the city.

...

In a statement on its website, the Iraqi Islamic Party said that a senior party member had been killed in his bed, and five others had been arrested, during a raid in the Halabsa area of Fallujah.

"The hidden political motive behind this incident is clear," it said.

As a consequence, the party had "decided to suspend all official contacts with the Americans, both military and civilians, until the party receives a reasonable explanation about what happened, along with an official apology".

It also demanded an assurance that those responsible would be punished, compensation for the victims and the release of the five detainees.

According to the US military, US-backed Iraqi soldiers killed an armed man who had opened fire when they went to arrest a "wanted insurgent leader suspected of training roadside bomb cells," the Associated Press reports.

Endorsement watch

Partial list of notable Republican endorsements of (and, in one case, early votes for) Obama: Scott McLellan, Douglas Kmiec (see earlier post), William Weld, Charles Fried, Kenneth Adelman, Colin Powell.

More on sleep

And as long as we're on the subject of sleep:

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

-- (excerpt from) Robert Frost, "After Apple-Picking" (1914)

The sleep of reason brings forth monsters

If you still have a place to live and haven't lost a job, yet you nonetheless have a dream about the financial crisis, it means that:

(a) the sources of your unconscious are running dry
(b) the media have colonized your mind
(c) you should sit right down and write yourself a letter
(d) if you have a broker, you should have called him (or her) yesterday
(e) you will never have that dream about sex with [fill in the blank] on an island
(f) you are just a tiny bit pathetic
(g) all of the above

And the correct answer is...

Barbara Ehrenreich rocks

Her post "Report from the Socialist International Conspiracy" is funny. Also read "The Communist Manifesto at 160." Here.

On the Great Powers

Nick at Worlds Apart has two thoughtful posts on great powers in the early 21st century. Reading these posts reminded me that there is no consensus among scholars about exactly how to define 'great power' or exactly which states count as great powers. To a large extent, however, the disagreements are probably more terminological than real.

Nick argues for three categories: 'global great power' (a category currently occupied only by the U.S.), 'regional great powers,' and 'global middle powers'. To be a 'global great power', he says, a state must meet five criteria: 1) dominate its region; 2) have a first-class military, including secure nuclear second strike capability, and an economy to support the military establishment; 3) wield 'soft power'; 4) have a political system that major domestic actors see as legitimate; and 5) be recognized as a great power by other states, as reflected in holding key positions in international institutions. Of these criteria, the only one I might quarrel with is number 4, though I would not want to press the point too hard. Two of these criteria, numbers 3 and 5, suggest that being a 'global great power' requires a certain amount of prestige. Prestige is itself a contested concept and there is disagreement about whether and how states compete for it (whatever 'it' is, exactly).

So, who counts as a regional great power, to use Nick's phrase? I would say China, India, the EU, Japan, and Russia. These five plus the U.S. account for a bit more than half the world's population, three-quarters of global GDP, and 80 percent of defense spending (R. Haass, "The Age of Nonpolarity," For. Aff., May/June '08, p.45). Of these five, China and India are 'rising powers,' while the positions/trajectories of the EU, Japan, and Russia are more uncertain.

There is one other aspect of the great power role that deserves mention: great powers have, or traditionally have been thought to have, special rights and responsibilities with respect to the maintenance of international peace and security (H. Bull, The Anarchical Society, p.202). Several of the great powers arguably have not been discharging these responsibilities as they should in recent years. The U.S. invasion of Iraq; China's actions in Sudan/Darfur and Tibet and Xinjiang; Russia's war with Georgia -- while these are not 'equivalent,' and while the rights and wrongs of each particular case can be argued, it does seem to be time for the great powers to reacquaint themselves with what one writer (R. Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.173) calls "the moral significance of what is involved in being a great power."

Craddock: Afghanistan not winnable "by military means alone"

Gen. John Craddock, a U.S. officer and one of the commanders of NATO forces in Afghanistan, has echoed, in a speech in London, earlier remarks by Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the outgoing British commander in Helmand province. Here.

Update: For remarks by Craddock in an interview with Sky News, see here.

Kmiec for Obama

By now virtually everyone must know about Colin Powell's eloquent endorsement of Obama. I've just become aware that another Republican, albeit one less well-known than Powell, has endorsed Obama: Douglas Kmiec, professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University (Calif.), former head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Reagan and Bush I, and also formerly, for a relatively brief time, dean of Catholic University Law School (Wash., D.C.). Anyone who knows anything about Kmiec, or who has heard him on the airwaves in recent years, will find this nothing short of astounding.

Update: After writing the above, I googled "Douglas Kmiec Obama endorsement" and discovered that this endorsement is old news, though it was news to me. Kmiec endorsed Obama back in March in a Slate column. The link is here.

Wealth and inequality: what McCain doesn't understand

McCain argues that Obama wants to "spread the wealth," not create more of it. What McCain doesn't understand is that in the current context high levels of inequality are an obstacle to wealth creation. A society/economy that wastes human capital on a profligate scale, by depriving people of decent education for instance, cannot be competitive in a world increasingly driven by technology and returns to human capital.

So, practically, McCain doesn't grasp that inequality is detrimental to wealth creation; and, morally, he doesn't understand that stratospheric levels of inequality are offensive to basic notions of human dignity. As Jonathan Cohn at TNR's blog reminds us, Adam Smith did understand that. (For more on Adam Smith's views about inequality and poverty, see Samuel Fleischacker's excellent A Short History of Distributive Justice.)

How will Virginia vote?

The polls say Obama is leading in Virginia, but polls are not infallible. Can he really win the state? One scenario: Run up large margins in northern Va., especially in the areas closest to D.C.; hold his own in the northern exurbs; carry Richmond; win in Charlottesville (home of UVa) and Blacksburg (home of Va Tech) by substantial amounts; and make at least a respectable showing in the southwest and in the Shenandoah valley.

A half-century ago, Virginia was in the grip of the Byrd machine and in many parts of the state there was bitter 'massive resistance' to implementation of the Brown decision. The state has come quite a long way since then. Living in neighboring Maryland, and having spent a recent Sunday afternoon canvassing for Obama in Virginia, I feel more than a casual interest in how Virginia votes. It will be very exciting if Virginia rises to this occasion.

HC on Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth,

Then took the other as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh I kept the first for another day
But knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.

-- Robert Frost

I dusted off this old chestnut recently for a sad occasion (the unveiling of our uncle’s gravestone) and my brother asked me to do a bit about it for his blog, so why not? It’s a sweet little fall poem, and what else do I have to do, as Frost might say, but sleep? I’ll take the lines in order.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. A pure premise, simply stated and strong enough to propel twenty lines. It makes us think about the word diverge and its root, which is from the Latin vergere, to bend or incline – an etymology that Frost will bring back (to his poem and to good old English) in the last line of the stanza with the verb bend, which is almost straight from the Old English bindan, to bind or fetter, which is what the whole poem is about (fetters of time and choice and causality) – but enough dictionary games. The next line beckons: And sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler. The concreteness of the dilemma is stated with Zen-like symmetry across the line break (travel both / one traveler), and it conveys an unspoken ethical axiom -- self-splitting is unthinkable -- by (quietly, negatively) questioning it: How nice it would be to have two selves, and to send one down each road. How nice it would be to rewind history. Alas, we have to keep moving. But not before standing long, a word that sounds the way it means, and which Frost drives home rhythmically by allowing himself a rare and almost quaint (in its literariness) inversion of adverb and verb – long I stood. The next line – and looked down one as far as I could – is the least remarkable of the stanza, which is perhaps appropriate to the rhyme scheme (ABAAB), for it is that line, the fourth, that is the repetitive or “extra” one. I’ve already said something about the last line, but I’ll add that undergrowth has nice associations of unwanted complication and impediment.

The next stanza moves forward abruptly, almost brutally: Then took the other as just as fair. We wish the poem would stand longer, but this is not a speaker to worry decisions, especially such a small one (the direction of a walk), as we learn further in the rest of the stanza, in which the rationale of the choice, which was uncertain to begin with (as having perhaps the better claim), is undone, shown to be a toss-up (though as for that the passing there). Here Frost uses that fourth line subversively, not to extend a thought but to retract it, a retraction that is smuggled in or given cover by the way (in the rhyme scheme) it comes right after, literally under, the previous line, as an afterthought. Before we move on again, let’s linger on the word fair, with its suggestions of beauty, honesty, and (when it comes to the weather) promise. Note its rhyme two lines later with wear, a kind of opposite in meaning, a word that then gets underscored and moved into the past two more lines down: worn. Sad translation. And note the also (sad) felicity of the passing there, a phrase that treats all past human traffic distantly, as a single, summable thing without agents, a quantity. I didn’t say much about the third line: grassy is wonderful (you can almost smell it), and so is wanted wear, which suggests that roads have desires.

And both that morning equally lay. Suddenly, a ray of sunlight. The scene is given a time, at once simply specific and symbolic: morning, naturally. The verb choice (lay) is inspired, both for its alliterative surroundings (equally lay / in leaves) and its counterintuitive sense: we think more of leaves lying on a path than a path lying in leaves. In leaves no step had trodden black. We realize, now that it ends, that we have been reading a single sentence, almost Miltonic (for Frost anyway) in its length, throughout the first three stanzas. (Unlike Milton, Frost does not extend his sentence through elaborate syntax; he relies on the simple joining performed by the word and, which has it own drama as it moves through the poem, initiating three of the first five lines and then starting a single, different line in each of the next three stanzas.) This same line (In leaves…) also marks the second and final appearance of a color in the poem, so that the arc of the sentence is from yellow to black (symbolic, yes, but they are also two colors that just go together well, as Piet Mondrian knew). After our necessary intake of breath following this long sentence, the rest of the poem starts with an exhalation (oh), a sigh that sets the tone for the remainder. Oh I kept the first for another day. The verb kept is perfect, reminding us how useless keepsakes are, and the rhythm conveys the tossed-off nature of the thought. But knowing how way leads on to way: another fourth line, and my favorite line in the poem, with its oh-so-simple statement of the ineluctability of causation: way, way. A sighing word, especially when said twice, in fact a near rhyme for sigh. Way has both Old English and Latin sources (weg, via) but it is closer to the Old English, where Frost’s heart lies. I doubted if I should ever come back. He might have written that I would but if I should is both more colloquial and less absolute, which, thanks to the rhetorical trick of understatement, makes it even more absolute.

I realize my take on the last stanza is not everyone’s cup of tea. It seems to me that the speaker is making fun of his future, aged self, full of inflation and high sentence. Frost often likes to mock the vanity of the ego (e.g. “For Once, Then, Something”), but let’s look at the internal evidence. The speaker has simplified the story in retrospect (the way we all do) to redound more to his own credit: I took the one less traveled by. Hold on a minute: we know that at most he had a mild impulse to make that choice (perhaps the better claim) and that in fact the roads were really indistinguishable (about the same). The high-toned exaggeration of ages and ages hence is further evidence of this interpretation, and what seals the deal is the overdramatic pause across the next line break, with its insistence on the heroic self: and I -- / I took the one. Don’t you hate it when people talk like that? In this reading, all the difference comes across as almost stupidly vague. What difference? The point of the poem is that there is no difference: the speaker is not special. He is you and I. But what you and I do is precisely to think, when we look back, that we were different. The saving grace of the poem is that at least the young speaker knows that he will think that way.

I’d rather end on a note of form than content. Check out the rhythm. Iambic tetrameter (de dum de dum de dum de dum) but sprinkled with anapestic exceptions (de de dum), which gives the whole thing a nice skipping quality: how light-hearted! And note where the anapests appear: most often on the third foot (i.e., And be one traveler, long I stood) (10 times), but also on the second foot (5 times), the fourth (3 times), and the first (once). These exceptions add variety and attract attention, especially in those lines with two anapests, like Oh I kept the first for another day. But the most marked lines of all are the three with no anapests. “In leaves no step had trodden black” is one of them, and it gains a little extra sobriety and darkness as a result – as if it needed it.

-- HC

Grim food situation in Ethiopia

Aid agencies are estimating, according to the BBC, that as many as 8 million people in Ethiopia may be affected by the severe drought in the country; adding to that figure the 7 million who are always short of adequate food makes for nearly 20 percent of the population.

"Oxfam has just released a fresh appeal. It says the aid required is $260m short of its target.

But figures produced by the United Nations office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs show that $772m has already been pledged, the vast majority from the U.S., which has nearly trebled its aid to Ethiopia this year."

Ethiopia is a U.S. ally in the current geopolitical troubles in the Horn of Africa, which gives the U.S. multiple motives for trying to ensure that the current food situation in Ethiopia does not become a widespread famine of the kind that has afflicted the country more than once in the past. (Ideally, of course, humanitarian motives alone should be sufficient, but two motives are usually more effective than one.)

Almost everyone is a Keynesian now...

...except the journalists asking the questions, as Peter Howard observes.

P.s. on the U.S.-India nuclear deal

When Bush signed the bill on Oct. 8 (see earlier post), he also issued a brief signing statement (a frequent, and frequently controversial, practice) that some critics are charging undercuts promises he made to Congress about the U.S. stance on India's processing of spent nuclear fuel and other matters. The issues get rather technical and I don't claim particular expertise; however, since I've been following the U.S.-India nuclear deal in a casual way for a while, I may make at least a sketchy effort to sort out what (if anything) is going on with the signing statement, and why The Times of India is hailing it as a repudiation of U.S. "proliferation hard-liners." Stay tuned.

When economic isolation doesn't seem so bad

In recent years, most (not all) mainstream economists have argued that developing countries do best when they are integrated into the global economy to the greatest extent possible. That might have been true when the global economy was, after a fashion, working. Now that the global economy is in crisis, however, the advantages of not being fully integrated are becoming apparent. An interesting article in the Wash Post today, somewhat provocatively titled "The End of American Capitalism?," includes the following passage in which the head of the IMF notes that African countries are relatively insulated from the most damaging effects of the crisis by virtue of their comparative lack of exposure to the world economy:

"'Obviously the crisis comes from an important regulatory and supervisory failure in advanced countries . . . and a failure in market discipline mechanisms,' Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, said yesterday before the fund's annual meeting in Washington.

"In a slideshow presentation, Strauss-Kahn illustrated the global impact of the financial crisis. Countries in Africa, including many of those with some of the lowest levels of market and financial integration and openness, are now set to weather the crisis with the least amount of turbulence."

Of course, there are virtually no truly autarkic economies, so all will be affected, but it's a matter of degree. There are other interesting passages in this article, but I'll let readers ferret them out for themselves.

p.s. What the article says about China is particularly worth noting. See also this post from D. Rodrik.

France to sell reactors to India, with Russia in the wings

With the ban on civilian nuclear sales to India having been lifted by the Nuclear Suppliers Group and with the U.S.-India nuclear accord a done deal (see previous post), it may now be full steam ahead for the Indian civilian nuclear power sector. In late September, France and India reached an agreement paving the way for the sale of French reactors.

Russia is apparently also interested in getting a piece of this action. McCain is fond of saying that he looked into Putin's eyes "and saw three letters: a 'K', a 'G', and a 'B.'" Is he sure he didn't see five letters: M-O-N-E-Y?

Bill on India-U.S. nuclear deal signed

Bush has signed the bill finalizing the India-U.S. nuclear deal. More on it later, perhaps.

"The innate structures of her discourse"

Camille Paglia on Palin: a new level of the ludicrous.
From The G Spot (via LGM): here.

The editor with the action-packed rolodex

HC, who reads the New York Times for me (just kidding), draws my attention to this article about the launch of the new Tina Brown web thing, The Daily Beast (the name's from Evelyn Waugh, naturally).

The article mentions her "gilded e-Rolodex." For some reason I immediately thought of the 1950s radio figure Johnny Dollar, "America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator," the "man with the action-packed expense account." (No, I hadn't been born yet in the early '50s when Johnny Dollar was really in his heyday -- I'm not quite that old -- but I've heard the show on old-time radio revival hours.)

Anyway, Johnny Dollar had an action-packed expense account; Tina Brown has an action-packed rolodex. I already do not read Huffington, Daily Kos, TPM, Sullivan, Yglesias, Douthat, etc. Now I can add The Daily Beast to the list of hip sites that I do not read.

Yes, Virginia, there is a lunatic fringe

Courtesy of Marx and Coca-Cola, an amusing round-up of the minor party candidates.

Hoarding and panicking

Watching coverage of the financial crisis some hours ago, I heard one or two commentators say that people are "hoarding cash." The verb "to hoard" has a somewhat old-fashioned ring to my ears, conjuring up images of misers in Victorian novels mooning over their gold and silver. Presumably what it means in this context is that people are withdrawing cash from their banks and storing it (or secreting it) in their homes. If this is indeed occurring, it suggests that "panic" (from the Greek panikos: of sudden fear, as supposedly inspired by the god Pan [to quote my dictionary]) may be the right word to apply to the current situation. (Alternatively, "people are hoarding cash" could just be a dramatic way of saying "people are not spending as freely as they ordinarily do.")

On a somewhat although not totally unrelated note, the PBS news program 'Worldfocus' made its debut in this area today. The idea -- a half-hour program drawing on the reporting of various news organizations -- is a sound one, though I thought the first show's execution and content were uneven. It did include a good report on the impact of rising food prices on the poor (and the not-so-poor) in Kenya.

Those were the days...

"Those who today proclaim that the United States is in decline often imagine a past in which the world danced to an Olympian America's tune. That is an illusion. Nostalgia swells for the wondrous U.S.-dominated era after World War II. But although the United States succeeded in Europe then, it suffered disastrous setbacks elsewhere. The 'loss' of China to Communism, the North Korean invasion of South Korea, the Soviet Union's testing of a hydrogen bomb, the stirrings of postcolonial nationalism in Indochina -- each was a strategic calamity of immense scope, and was understood to be such at the time. Each critically shaped the remainder of the twentieth century, and not for the better. And each proved utterly beyond the United States' power to control or even manage successfully. Not a single event in the last decade can match any one of those events in terms of its enormity as a setback to the United States' position in the world."

-- Robert Kagan, "The September 12 Paradigm: America, the World, and George W. Bush," Foreign Affairs (Sept/Oct '08), p.38.

Well, the rise of "postcolonial nationalism in Indochina" was not "a strategic calamity" until the U.S. turned it into one. And if you don't find the last sentence of the quoted passage at least debatable, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.

p.s. For a link to the Kagan article, see the first comment.

Israel/Palestine: some signs of hope?

A friend drew my attention a while back to Ethan Bronner's Sept. 12 NYT article about what's been happening in Jenin, the West Bank city that was the site of fierce fighting in 2002, during the second intifada, when, as a center of militant activity, it was partly razed by Israeli tanks and occupied by IDF soldiers.

Now, Bronner reports:

"newly trained and equipped Palestinian security officials have restored order. Israeli soldiers have pulled back from bases and are in close touch with their Palestinian colleagues. Civilians are planning economic cooperation — an industrial zone to provide thousands of jobs, mostly to Palestinians, and another involving organic produce grown by Palestinians and marketed in Europe by Israelis. Ministers from both governments [Israel and the Palestinian Authority] have been visiting regularly, often joined by top international officials. Israeli Arabs are playing a key role."

Moreover, the neighboring Israeli area of Gilboa is something of a model of cooperation between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, Bronner writes, with the local high school staging a Bible/Koran contest featuring teams of two, a Jewish student and an Arab student, answering questions in Hebrew and Arabic.

"The head of the Gilboa regional council, Daniel Atar, is a Jew and his deputy, Eid Salem, is an Arab. Together they have built a warm relationship with the Palestinian governor of the Jenin area, Qadoura Moussa....

"One result of the discussions among the three leaders is a decision by the Israeli authorities to allow some Israeli Arabs into Jenin on a daily basis for the first time since the intifada. It has been a delicate move made with little fanfare because in principle it is illegal to allow certain Israeli citizens to do something others may not and also because movement across the boundary invites the possibility of security breaches.

"It is delicate for another reason. In recent years, Israeli Jews have grown worried that among the 1.3 million Arabs who are Israeli citizens, there is a growing radicalization and identification with the Palestinian national cause and militant Islam. Increasing their contact with the West Bank could add to those concerns.

"But Israeli Arabs have relatives here and want to do business here, and the Israeli authorities say they want to encourage that as a means of helping the Palestinian economy. If Israeli Arabs are permitted to do that in large numbers, that could represent an important change in their status in the eyes of Israeli Jews — from potential fifth column to bridge builder."

However, the situation is still a far cry from what it was in 2000, before the second intifada.

"Today the main crossing point, then the site of a sprawling market, is a maze of security towers and checkpoints. Israeli soldiers refrain from cruising Jenin by day but still carry out occasional night raids and maintain overall security control of the region. And while Israeli Arabs are now being let in, they may not yet bring cars, greatly limiting the appeal of the trip and the shopping.

"There are other concerns. The Palestinians have asked to base their newly trained battalion for Jenin in an abandoned Israeli settlement, a good spot in terms of location and infrastructure. But Israeli officials are worried about how it will play in Israel and have so far said no.

"Israeli security officials say their Palestinian colleagues are good at law and order but not at stopping terrorist groups. They say that Islamic Jihad used to be strong here and is no longer because Israel spent years destroying its infrastructure and killing its militants, setting the stage for the Palestinian security takeover. But if they relax their vigilance, the Israelis say, the situation will deteriorate. Early on Wednesday morning [Sept. 10], for example, Israeli soldiers and security men raided a home in Jenin and detonated a 30-pound pipe bomb.

"The Palestinians complain that they are often urged to arrest someone just because he wears a beard. They add that as long as they are seen as puppets of the Israelis, the project is doomed. The key is for Palestinian security officials to be seen as agents of state building. Then the population will cooperate. This requires the kind of discretion that the Israeli Army has not been known for [my italics--LFC]."

So, many problems remain, and the conditions that have enabled what progress there has been in this part of the West Bank, such as Hamas's weakness and the removal of Israeli settlements in 2005, as well as an absence of territorial disputes aggravated elsewhere by the barrier wall (this last factor is mentioned in a passing and not entirely clear way by Bronner) are not necessarily replicable. Still, this is on balance a hopeful article, as is the piece that Bronner wrote on Sept. 30 about his interview with Ehud Olmert. More on that later, perhaps (or those who are interested can look it up themselves).

VP debate: painful

I predicted to myself that watching and listening to this would be painful, and it was. The format made it less of a real debate than the previous (Obama-McCain) one. Partly for this reason and partly because they are vice-presidential candidates, Biden and Palin ended up talking past one another much of the time (as others have pointed out). A bit of the post-debate commentary on PBS was interesting, especially Ellen Fitzpatrick's remarks on how the politics of gender have changed in the last 20-25 years (I'm too tired to summarize them).

Substantively, Biden had a few good moments, but the intellectual level of this debate was lower than the McCain-Obama encounter, and the use of English was definitely worse. A complete English sentence -- subject, verb, object, clauses in the right places -- was a rather rare commodity in this debate. Palin at times sounds to me like a non-native speaker, or more specifically someone who has not grown up with the language. Admittedly, this may have something to do with regional differences: English is spoken differently in different parts of the country. Moreover, this reaction is not to meant to be snobbish or picky. I have no objection to her colloquialisms, and I don't really care deeply that she doesn't how to use the verb "to attribute." I just find it difficult to listen to her and, frankly, almost impossible to watch her (though I forced myself to do so a few times). Her efforts to channel Ronald Reagan will no doubt have greater appeal to some others, however, than they do to me.

Photo of the day

Two baboons sitting on rocks in a South African park. Here.

Diplomacy does not equal appeasement

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the Munich conference. For decades the label 'Munich' has been widely misapplied to virtually any foreign-policy move thought unwise by the persons doing the labeling. In view of this, I think it's appropriate to quote the following passage from Richard Holbrooke's article ("The Next President: Mastering a Daunting Agenda") in the current issue of Foreign Affairs:

"Both Obama and McCain agree that preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state must be a major priority. Both would tighten sanctions. Neither would remove the threat of the use of force from the table. But from that point on, their emphasis and language differ significantly. Obama has said repeatedly that he is ready to have direct contacts with Iran at whatever level he thinks would be productive, not only on nuclear issues but also on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran's support for terrorist organizations.... Obama's forthright approach has been met with cries of alarm from McCain and his supporters, as though the very thought of talking to one's adversaries were in and of itself a sign of weakness, foreshadowing another Munich. This position is contradicted by decades of U.S. diplomacy with adversaries, through which U.S. leaders, backed by strength and power, reached agreements without weakening U.S. national security. Diplomacy is not appeasement. Winston Churchill knew this, Dwight Eisenhower knew it, and so did John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush."

Needed: a Pakistan-India-Afghanistan agreement

The blog Over the Loon's Nest (see sidebar for link) mentions a piece in Forbes.com by the prolific C. Raja Mohan.

An excerpt:

"Once it recognized that Gen. Pervez Musharraf, America's strongman in Pakistan since 9/11, was part of the problem rather than the solution, Washington leaned on him to hold free and fair elections, shed his uniform and eventually resign as the president. Although the American effort to depersonalize its Pakistan policy--on which the entire effort in Afghanistan hinged--never looked either decisive or pretty, Washington got it right in the end. Its efforts were indeed instrumental in ensuring the return of civilian rule in Pakistan.

Yet it was one thing to get rid of Musharraf and entirely another to compel the Pakistan Army to mend its ways. Since 9/11, the U.S. policy in Afghanistan relied entirely on the promised cooperation from the Pakistan Army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence in hunting down Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It took nearly six years after 9/11 for the U.S. security establishment to convince itself that the Pakistan Army and the ISI were hunting with the hounds and running with the hare.

Since 2007, the U.S. has stepped up its direct attacks on terrorist sanctuaries on Pakistani soil. This policy culminated earlier this month in a foray by U.S. ground troops into Pakistan. Although this incursion, a clear violation of Pakistan's sovereignty, angered the new civilian leaders in Islamabad, it helped concentrate their minds on the stark choice that confronted them: If they did not act against the militant groups, the U.S. armed forces would.

Torn between the terrorist groups who were pressing the new civilian government to divorce itself from the unpopular U.S. war on terror, a Washington that was demanding an escalated military effort in the tribal regions, and an army that was playing both sides, Pakistan's civilian leaders appear to have chosen to go with Washington. In response, the terrorists drove a truck bomb into the Marriott hotel in downtown Islamabad on Saturday night.

Having nudged Pakistan's civilian leaders into making the right political choice, the Bush Administration now needs to assist them in two important interconnected goals: 1) gaining control over the military establishment and 2) making peace with Afghanistan and India.

In his first address to a joint session of Pakistan's parliament on Saturday, hours before the suicide bombers ripped through the Marriott hotel, the new civilian president Asif Ali Zardari said all the right things on fighting terrorism and seeking a rapprochement with Afghanistan and India.

Zardari's problem, however, is that it is the army that has always defined Pakistan's objectives toward Kabul and New Delhi and brooked no interference from the civilian leaders. Pakistan's instrumentalization of Islamic extremism over the last three decades has been part of a deliberate policy of the army to extend its influence into Afghanistan and wrest the disputed region of Kashmir from India.

In trying to regain the civilian right to set national security objectives, Zardari has reached out to both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, both of whom have responded warmly. Karzai attended Zardari's swearing in as president last week, and Singh has established a back-channel with the Pakistani leader.

The Pakistan Army, however, will not easily cede its traditional prerogative to set the policies toward Afghanistan and India and has a variety of means to wreck Zardari's attempt at regional reconciliation. That, precisely, is where the U.S. needs to step in. By coordinating a new peace initiative with Afghanistan and India, the Bush Administration can help deliver a set of visible political gains for Pakistan's civilian leaders and allow them to establish their supremacy over the armed forces.

The U.S. objectives of the war on terror and South Asia's peace and prosperity are now tied inextricably to a fundamental transformation of civil-military relations in Islamabad."

A few of Mohan's inferences here may be doubtful. Is it clear, for example, that the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott was directly linked to recent developments in the border regions? I'm not sure this has been established yet, especially as the group that claimed responsibility is a fairly obscure one. Nonetheless, a lot of Mohan's analysis seems to make quite a lot of sense. The only practical problem is that, as a very lame duck administration, the Bush people probably are in no position to start trying to help orchestrate a Pakistan-Afghanistan-India pact. That will have to go on the agenda of the next administration.

More on the debate

Two interesting short comments on different aspects of it:
David Ignatius: here.
Stephen P. Cohen (and others): here.

The first debate

There is cool, and then there is cool to the point of ice cool. Barack Obama's coolness did not serve him very well tonight. He was fine, for the most part, on substance, but he did not parry effectively enough McCain's charges that he favored "defeat" in Iraq and that by potentially talking with Ahmadinejad he would be "legitimizing" the latter's views on Israel (and other matters). These McCain gambits should have been met with more force, passion, and heat than Obama displayed. I felt that Obama risked conveying that he did not care about these matters in a visceral way. There was no expression of, indeed no hint of, real outrage or even mild anger at the huge mess and disaster that the Bush administration has created in America's relations with the world. Obama said the right things but did not seem to feel them very deeply.

The upshot was, as Michael Beschloss remarked afterward, that Obama appeared to be on the defensive for a fair amount of the time. He was very good on certain topics like the U.S. and Pakistan, where he effectively criticized the U.S. record of largely uncritical support of (the now ousted) Musharraf. McCain came back with "I don't think Sen. Obama realizes that Pakistan was a failed state when Musharraf took over [by coup in '99] ." That's wrong: Pakistan was (and is) a very troubled state but not a failed state, and Obama should not have let that go by. He was also too willing to agree with McCain on the need for missile defense and on domestic nuclear power.

Obama had a strong moment at the end, when he talked about the decline in U.S. standing and reputation in the world, but here again he probably let McCain dissociate himself from the Bush administration without sufficient pushback. He even gave McCain credit on the torture issue -- gracious but probably unnecessary (and not wholly accurate). Judged from a transcript, this debate was probably a victory for Obama. Judged as television, however -- which means judged on the impressions conveyed and the tone, rather than as a purely substantive contest -- I would have to say McCain earned at least a draw, and perhaps should be given a slight edge for being on the offensive more of the time.

Bottom line: probably not many votes are going to be swayed by this debate one way or the other. But Obama better take a dose of de-icer before the next one.

P.s.: After reading D. Nexon's reaction (D. of Minerva), I am reminded that Obama also had a good moment on Iran and the impossibility of effective sanctions without the participation of China and Russia (in response to McCain's blathering about his League of Democracies).

Barry Eichengreen on the financial crisis

See here.

Puzzle of the day

Correction (added 9/27): The number of U.S. soldiers in S. Korea is 28,500, not 37,000 as I wrote in this post. (Source: R. Holbrooke in the current [Sept/Oct '08] issue of Foreign Affairs, p.14.) This does not change the main point I was making.
---------------------------------
Sec. of Defense Robert Gates said today that the reinforcements being requested by U.S. generals in Afghanistan will not be available for deployment until spring 2009. We hear all the time that the demands being placed on the all-volunteer force by two ongoing wars are stretching it to a dangerously thin point, and I have no reason to doubt this.

At the same time, the U.S. still has, as far as I know, roughly 37,000 soldiers stationed in South Korea, 55 years after the armistice that ended (in a practical though not legal sense) the Korean War. The U.S. also has thousands of soldiers in Japan and a substantial number in Europe (albeit fewer than during the Cold War). Some of this military presence is no doubt required under the terms of existing alliances. But it's odd that relatively few people (outside of the 'usual suspects' so to speak) seem to have raised questions about the appropriateness of this distribution of military manpower (and womanpower) in a time of stretched forces.

The rationale for having 37,000 troops in South Korea has eluded me for years. They cannot really be serving any genuine deterrent function, in light of North Korea's million-man army, and if the point is to provide a trip-wire effect (i.e., a guarantee of U.S. intervention in the event of a North Korean invasion), then surely 8,000 soldiers (for example) would do that as reliably as 37,000. Do the terms of the alliance require maintenance of a specific number of American soldiers in South Korea? If not, what are they doing there? Does this make any sense? Maybe one of the many bloggers (or others) with more expertise in these matters than I possess can enlighten me on this point. I'd appreciate it.

End of an era

From today's NYT:

"The transformation of Wall Street picked up pace on Monday as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last big independent investment banks, moved to restructure into larger, less risk-taking organizations that will be subject to far greater regulation by the Federal Reserve.

The changes came after Goldman and Morgan Stanley on Sunday night received permission from the Federal Reserve to become bank holding companies. The change means they will be able to finance their activities with insured deposits but in return must reduce the amount they can borrow to make the kind of big trading bets that drove huge profits, and massive bonuses for executives, over the last several years of Wall Street’s latest Gilded Age.

Morgan Stanley moved quickly into the new era on Monday, announcing that it planned to sell up to a 20 percent stake in itself to Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Japan’s largest commercial bank, for about $8 billion. Mitsubishi has $1.1 trillion in bank deposits, which will help bolster Morgan’s stability of financing. Goldman Sachs is also expected to move to increase its deposit base and add more capital to its balance sheet.

The changes by Morgan Stanley and Goldman essentially bring to an end the era of the big, independent Wall Street investment bank and a return to the model that dominated before the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 forbade commercial banks from also owning securities firms.

Both banks said they requested the change in their status. But the changes also closely follow comments from executives at both investment houses saying their business model was not broken and that transforming into deposit-funded commercial banks would not necessarily help them perform better. This raised the question of whether the change was really voluntary, which both banks insist it was, or was mandated by a Federal Reserve eager not to have to come to the rescue of another failing financial institution."

Who cares whether or not it was voluntary? It don't see how it can possibly be a bad thing that execs will no longer be able to make tens of millions of dollars every hour by betting that the price of derivative X or swap Z will rise (or fall, as the case may be). I heard someone on the radio implying that this will reduce incentives to innovate. Rubbish. "Innovation" usually means, or should mean, useful innovation.

P.s. According to the UN Human Development Report (2007-08), the Gini coefficient for income inequality in the U.S. is .408 (where zero is complete equality and one is the most possible inequality). Mexico is at .461, Mali at .401. The degree of U.S. income inequality is now more typical of what used to be called Third World countries than of other rich countries.

Depressing

Over at The Edge, there is an essay by psychologist Jonathan Haidt on "why people vote Republican," even when it's apparently against their economic self-interest to do so. Haidt argues, in a nutshell, that the Republican party's perceived value system appeals to those who emphasize what he calls Durkheimian moral sentiments relating to collective solidarity, group loyalty, self-abnegation, and so on. (I'm truncating it more than a bit, so read the whole thing if interested.)

The Haidt piece is followed by comments from several people. The most depressing comment is by Roger Schank, a computer scientist and psychologist, formerly professor at Northwestern and Yale. An excerpt:

"When I travel, I live the life of an intellectual. In Florida, I hang out with jocks and retirees. I try not to talk politics with them. When it happens that I have no choice but to hear what they think about politics I take note of it. Here is what I have heard:

Obama is a Muslim. His pastor hates America. In fact nearly everyone outside of America hates America. If you travel outside of America, go on a cruise, so you won't have to eat whatever it is one eats in those places. You don't want to talk to the people either, but that’s not a problem because none of them speak English. And, anyway they all hate us for our freedoms. Obama will put Al Sharpton in the cabinet. Dick Cheney was the greatest Vice President in history. The Jews are running the country anyway.

I am not making this up. This is not a caricature. I wish I carried a tape recorder.

It is common to make the assumption that people are thinking when they vote and they are making reasoned choices. I harbor no such illusion. No argument I have ever gotten into with these people (despite avoiding talking to them, I sometimes can't resist saying something true) has ever convinced anyone of anything. They are not reasoning, nor do they want to try. They simply believe what they believe."

He goes on to observe that most people are not encouraged to think when they are children, so we shouldn't expect them to think when they are adults. And there's more in this vein.

Well, I hope his sample of Florida voters is not representative of the whole state's electorate. Beyond that I'm (temporarily) speechless.

Lost in the blogosphere

Occasionally I find myself lost in the blogosphere: that is, I end up somewhere unexpected as a result of glancing through comment threads and/or zapping links and whatnot.

Just now I ended up at a blog by an English professor in Halifax, N.S. Now, my own blog is not primarily about literature; however, this professor, Rohan Maitzen, seems to write well and what she writes may possibly be of interest to one or two of this blog's readers. Moreover, her profile's list of her favorite books begins with Middlemarch, which is enough to recommend her blog. Anyway, here's the link to it for those of you who might want to check it out.

The McCain-Spain thing

A minor brouhaha -- on the web, at least -- has erupted about an interview that McCain gave to a Spanish-language radio station in Florida. The interviewer, speaking quite heavily accented English, asks a series of questions about Latin America to which McCain gives pretty standard neocon-flavored answers. Then the interviewer switches continents and asks whether McCain would be willing to meet with Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, should McCain become president.

I have listened to the interview -- here's a link that can get you to the audio -- and it's clear that McCain did not hear, or did not process, the interviewer's references to Spain and Europe. McCain continued to talk about Latin America, making a specific reference to Mexico and Calderon, and refused to commit to a meeting with Zapatero specifically, clearly because he had no idea that the interviewer was asking about Spain.

Does this mean McCain is senile? No, it means he misheard an interviewer speaking with an accent and was unwilling to ask for clarification. His campaign has worsened the situation by telling the Wash Post that yes indeed, McCain is not willing to commit specifically to meeting with Zapatero. The whole thing is ridiculous. They should just admit he made a mistake and didn't hear the interviewer clearly. If they had done that, it would have been pretty much the end of the story. Now, though, his campaign's on record as saying he won't promise specifically to meet with the head of government of a NATO ally.

David Foster Wallace

My tastes in fiction tend to be rather old-fashioned, for lack of a better word, and I never was able to get past the opening pages of Infinite Jest, David Wallace's huge 1996 novel and magnum opus. But you needn't have been a fan of his work to find his recent death, at age 46, very sad.

The long NYT obituary, published Sept.14, gives some indication of his talents and accomplishments. For instance, he graduated summa cum laude from Amherst in 1985, with two senior theses: one became his first novel The Broom of the System, the other was on Aristotle. He was a "prominent" the obit says -- which I assume means nationally ranked -- junior tennis player, and tennis figures in his writing. He also received a MacArthur genius grant.

In addition to the obituary and an appreciation in the NYT, there's also a post at the blog Paper Cuts, which quotes a good passage from Infinite Jest.

Added 10/16/08: For a longer post on Wallace with more links, see here.

James Fallows on Palin's interview with Gibson

Hits the proverbial nail on the head.
Here.

Speculative capitalism in crisis

Last night I saw a 38-year-old movie that constitutes, among other things, a meditative, dreamy indictment of capitalism, or at least a certain side of it. Today, Wall Street was in free fall. Hmm....

(The movie was Antonioni's gorgeous Zabriskie Point, on which MGM, incidentally, lost millions. More reflection on it later, perhaps, when the blogging muses are in a better mood.)

Republicans stuck in the Goldwaterite past

So argues D. Brooks in his column today, which has garnered more than 280 comments on the NYT site (I haven't read the comments, but that's an impressive number). Brooks maintains that the Republican party's regnant ideology is too fixated on the archetypal rugged individual and not interested enough in promoting community, etc. Kind of obvious, but succinctly put.

He neglects to mention, however, the elder Bush's slightly communitarian "thousand points of light" speech from, I seem to recall, the '88 campaign (?). Probably just as well.

"Pushback" against U.S. in Latin America

A recent Wash. Post story (h/t: Open Source Geopolitics) about the closing next year of a U.S. air base in Manta, Ecuador contains the following passage:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, governments in Latin America are rejecting many U.S.-funded programs, particularly anti-narcotics efforts.... In Venezuela, anti-drug officials say, cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has deteriorated sharply. In Bolivia, coca farmers decided in June to expel the U.S. Agency for International Development from part of the country amid accusations that it was conspiring against President Evo Morales. The pushback resonates well politically in many parts of Latin America, where U.S. policies are often seen as security-obsessed Cold War vestiges or bitter economic pills forced down the throats of unwilling governments.

The story of the Manta air base is one in which soft balancing and hard cash come together. Among other things, a joint $6 billion Venezuelan-Ecuadoran oil refinery announced by Hugo Chavez and Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa means that the money injected by the U.S. base in Manta is no longer so important to Ecuador.

The Manta air base, which employs 450 U.S. Air Force personnel and contractors, will close in November 2009. Its main mission has been to conduct surveillance flights aiming to interdict seaborne drug trafficking. The closing of the base, on balance, seems to be a good thing. My impression is that, generally speaking, the U.S. military/drug-war footprint in Latin America has cost more than it's worth. The U.S. does not need and should not have more than 700 military bases scattered over the world. Some of them no doubt perform essential strategic missions, but the majority probably should be closed. They perpetuate the image and reality of American 'empire'. Alexander Cooley has argued that the U.S. should maintain bases in "mature democracies" but not in non-democratic countries (see A. Cooley, "Base Politics," Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005; he also has a recent book on the subject). However, one should also ask whether a given base is really serving a valuable purpose, regardless of where it is located.

HRW report on Afghanistan

Human Rights Watch has released a report on civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war. See here (latter part of the story).

From Macbeth to T.S. Eliot (with a bit of George Will in between)

Today's George Will column reminds me why I don't read him more regularly. It argues that the question "are you better off today than you were four years ago?" is silly because not everything about the quality of life can be captured statistically. True enough, but Will should know (in fact, does know) that a lot of American politics (or politics in general) revolves around basic, measurable gauges of economic 'health'. The column opens with a quote from Shakespeare -- McCain, Will says, is, like Macbeth, in "the sear, the yellow leaf" of life -- and ends with one from T.S. Eliot. In between Will manages to work in a plug for Middlemarch, proving that even he occasionally gets something right.

Small towns: Palin's rose-colored vision

Anyone who has spent 5 seconds here knows I am not a Republican. With that out of the way, I would point to one passage in Palin's speech which struck me:

Long ago, a young farmer and haberdasher from Missouri followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. A writer observed: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity." I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people. They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America ... who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars.

It is correct that a disproportionate number of enlistees come (and have come in the past) from small towns and rural areas. The rest of the passage, with its romanticizing of small towns, runs counter to what Sinclair Lewis, at least, thought about them. I lived relatively briefly in a small town in West Virginia a long time ago. If I had to guess, I'd say one finds a roughly similar mixture of human types in small towns and big cities. There are differences, to be sure, but not everyone in a small town is a Truman-style paragon of virtues.

Note to readers

For various reasons, I expect that my posting will be light this month.