Horatio Alger re-exploded

How much socioeconomic mobility is there in the U.S.? Not as much as many Americans believe. From a piece in Wash Post today by Isabell Sawhill and Ron Haskins:

"...recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they're adults.

If you are born into a middle-class family in the United States, you have a roughly even chance of moving up or down the ladder by the time you are an adult. But the story for low-income Americans is quite different; going from rags to riches in a generation is rare. Instead, if you are born poor, you are likely to stay that way. Only 35 percent of children in a family in the bottom fifth of the income scale will achieve middle-class status or better by the time they are adults [middle class being defined here as an income of $50,000 a year for a family of three]; in contrast, 76 percent of children from the top fifth will be middle-class or higher as adults."

Sawhill and Haskins go on to qualify this picture by noting that the U.S. "is exceptional" in the opportunities it offers to immigrants, relative to other 'developed' countries. But the basic data on mobility should not come as a big surprise. It is, of course, possible, as the 35 percent figure given in the quotation suggests, to rise from a poor or working-class family into the ranks of the middle-class or the affluent, but it's not likely. It probably requires a combination of individual talent, work, and luck (with "luck" construed to include the traits that one is born with and the quality of parenting one receives, among other things).

Anyone who doubts that the reproduction of social class takes place in the U.S., and who wants to consult something livelier and more anecdotal than the abundant academic literature on the topic, can browse through, say, a 30th anniversary Class Report from an elite college or university and note where the alumni's children are going to college. Anecdotal? Sure. Probative of anything in a strict social-scientific sense? No. But nonetheless quite revealing.

P.s. Last year I noted a piece by William Deresiewicz which bears on this last point.

Nukes: A lot of recent writing

See the Fall '09 World Policy Journal, the Fall '09 Daedalus (link here; includes a piece by Schelling), and Lieber and Press in the current Foreign Affairs. I haven't read any of this (have other things on the plate right now).

Another take on liberalism (and the Left)

Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism, which I reviewed earlier, is reviewed by Harold Meyerson, who also discusses Doug Rossinow's Visions of Progress. The latter deals with "the left-liberal alliance of the period from 1880 through 1940," with particular reference to the Farmer-Labor parties of the 1920's and '30s and the Popular Front (1935-39). Meyerson concludes, correctly in my opinion, that a weak Left in the U.S. hurts American liberalism; a stronger Left could help push through the "next generation of liberal reform."

Resignation in protest

Here.

We few, we happy few (um, maybe not quite so few, relatively speaking)

This interesting article by James Glanz (hat tip: HC) is also a bit of a mess. Some historians now think the English were not quite so outnumbered at the Battle of Agincourt (Oct. 25, 1415) as has long been assumed. Other historians disagree. Only military history buffs are going to be able to get really worked up about this.

The article's messiness comes from another point: the alleged similarities between the Hundred Years War and contemporary counterinsurgency conflicts. Really? Yes, like, riilly. I'm no expert on medieval warfare, but I think this kind of analogy has to be approached with extreme caution. The article mentions Conrad Crane, military historian and lead author of the not-entirely-uncontroversial revised U.S. Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual (see the symposium on it in Perspectives on Politics, June 2008), "some of [whose] own early historical research involved a comparison of strategic bombing campaigns with attacks on civilians by rampaging armies during the Hundred Years’ War, when England tried and ultimately failed to assert control over continental France." I haven't read Crane's work, but I assume he points out that attacks on civilians in the Hundred Years War were partly motivated by the fact that the armies, and the roving bands of armed men that hung around and sometimes supplemented the armies and were sometimes indistinguishable from them, needed to seize food and provisions from local civilians to continue campaigning. (There was also no doubt a good deal of rape and pillage as well.)

Yes, as Mr. Glanz suggests, the Hundred Years War could be seen as a kind of civil war into which an outside power "intervened," except the "outside" power -- England -- had long claimed dynastic title to, and in part controlled, sections of France. Moreover, the Burgundians were not just a "faction," as this article says; Burgundy was a separate polity, distinct from the kingdom of France, from the late 14th century, and a very powerful one well into the 15th century. Do these historical nitpicks affect the contention that there are parallels between the Hundred Years War and contemporary counterinsurgencies? I'm going to duck that for now. Those who are interested can ponder the question at their leisure. (And see also Alexander Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, which I mentioned previously in a comment thread here.)

It ain't rocket science

Glancing through Amy Chua's piece forthcoming in print in this Sunday's NYTBkReview, I see that she observes that most or all current writers on U.S. foreign policy are advocating a return to the past in some form or other. She concedes that this may not be all bad: foreign policy "is not modern dance: tried and true may be better than avant-garde and visionary."

It's not modern dance; it's also not rocket science. Which explains or helps explain why basic ideas and principles which have been around for a while keep getting dressed up in new outfits and applied to new circumstances. The trappings are different, but the underlying notions are, on the whole, familiar.

That doesn't mean, of course, that there are not serious debates about the right way forward; there are. But even a nodding acquaintance with previous debates will reveal that voices from the past keep on echoing.

Two political scientists on the Afghanistan decision

Here (plus comments).

The paradoxical Donald Rumsfeld

The current issue of Foreign Policy Analysis contains an illuminating article about Donald Rumsfeld's 2001-06 tenure as Sec. of Defense, with particular reference to Iraq: Stephen Benedict Dyson, " 'Stuff Happens': Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War," Foreign Policy Analysis 5:4 (2009): 327-347.

Dyson argues that Rumsfeld was a paradox: a bureaucratic in-fighter who wanted to be in control of decision-making but, once in control, believed rather fatalistically that he and others could have relatively little impact on the course of events. This "paradoxical combination of a bureaucratic infighter style and a highly complex, somewhat fatalist worldview" (p.345) produced results that, given the larger context of the Bush administration's policy process, were nothing short of disastrous.

Here are a few key sentences from the article's conclusion (p.344):

"The case of Rumsfeld and Iraq points up the dangers of a 'CEO-president' and weak national security advisor.... The danger with a president as hands-off as Bush is that the principals are left to fight things out among themselves, and the most skillful and ruthless among them prevails. Of course, the most skillful and ruthless are not necessarily those with the best ideas."

Drawing on, among other material, interviews with some of those who served in the Bush administration, Dyson's article notes that Rumsfeld was not ideologically committed to the Iraq war in the way that, for instance, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz was. This raises the question of what Rumsfeld's time as Sec. of Defense would have been like if the Iraq war had not been launched. My recollection is that during the period just after 9/11, Rumsfeld's public pronouncements, while they could be irritating in tone, were sometimes blunt (in a good way) and sensible. He seemed to manage the initial fall '01 operation in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom, as the Pentagon styled it) reasonably well, despite the failure to capture Osama bin Laden. For much of Rumsfeld's tenure, the war in Afghanistan was on a fairly low boil, as U.S. attention and resources focused on Iraq and the Taliban regrouped and bided their time. It's difficult to predict exactly what would have happened, say with respect to Afghanistan, if the Iraq invasion hadn't taken place. But on the evidence of Dyson's article, "the interaction of Rumsfeld's style with the styles of those around him and the nature of the issues" (p.345) would have meant that, even if the Iraq war hadn't occurred, Rumsfeld's time in office would have produced unsatisfactory results.

Sudan: carrots and sticks

A mixture seems like the right approach.

See Miroslav Nincic, "The Logic of Positive Engagement: Dealing with Renegade Regimes," Int'l Studies Perspectives 7:4 (2006).

James Bond meets Heidegger

The Thrownness of Being: Shaken Not Stirred. (A new book currently flying off the shelves.)

Movies as a register of social change (also known as the cigarette post)

There are worse ways of getting an inkling of how certain aspects of daily life in the U.S. have changed in the last 60-odd years than to watch a "serious" movie from the 1940s. (Of course, another way is to have been alive yourself in the 1940s, but some of us weren't born yet.) In this case the movie happened to be "Mildred Pierce" (1945), for which Joan Crawford won an Oscar for best actress. First off, in this movie everyone smokes constantly. Second, the language has that kind of clipped, slightly stilted inflection that you also hear in, for example, Bogart movies of the period, and the actors seem to be boxed into a fairly narrow emotional range, even when the script calls for them to really emote. (Bogart and Bergman managed to break out of the box in "Casablanca," but if you've seen the movie and its famous last scene several times -- and who hasn't? -- you may well agree with me that that's mostly due to Bergman.)

Anyway, back to "Mildred Pierce": 1) as I said, everyone smokes all the time (and drinks); 2) the police don't read suspects their rights (because the Miranda decision was twenty years in the future); 3) the only African-American character given any substantial camera time (and not much at that) is a female servant with an artificially high voice; 4) the themes are pretty much timeless ones (love and money, basically) but they are handled in a way that shows, among other things, Hollywood's timidity at the time about depicting sex.

Interestingly, the war (I mean World War II of course) is only a very oblique presence in this movie: in one scene there are a few men in sailors' uniforms; in another there is a passing reference to manpower shortages; and that's about it. By Hollywood standards of the time, and notwithstanding Crawford's performance, I think this is probably no better than an average movie. A film like "Double Indemnity," for example, from I think roughly the same period, is quite a bit better.

But the most obvious thing, and the one to which I keep returning, is the cigarettes, because they are ubiquitous in the movie and because I happen to hate cigarette smoke. Even within my own lifetime, this is one aspect of daily life that has changed quite dramatically. When my parents had company over when I was a child, there were at least a couple of ashtrays in the living room; not only did my father smoke, but it was assumed that at least a couple (maybe more) of the guests would be smoking. Nowadays one can still see people smoking in bars, on the street, or occasionally in their cars -- and soldiers in the field often smoke, or so media images suggest -- but when was the last time you were in someone's house for a social occasion and saw someone smoking? It really has become, to a large extent, unusual and frowned-upon behavior (to which I say: thank goodness).

Well, I seem to have diverged somewhat from my original intentions in this post, but hey, this a blog, man. Deal with it. Oh, and put out that cigarette, do you mind? Thanks.

The S. Waziristan campaign...

...has begun. In a remark made to the Wash. Post back in June, the Pakistani army spokesman predicted the effort to pacify the region would be "a long haul."

Kerry-Lugar-Berman signed

Yesterday, in the midst of a wave of suicide bombings in Pakistan, Pres. Obama signed the 5-year, $7.5 billion civilian aid package for Pakistan. A statement released by Sen. Kerry and Cong. Berman, which addresses concerns about infringement on Pakistan's sovereignty, was made part of the bill before its signing. The Pakistani foreign minister has told the country's parliament that he is now satisfied on this score.

Frontline: 'Obama's War'

Everyone should see this program, which aired this evening. If you missed it, you can go to the PBS website and watch it online.

I'm not going to write at great length about it, but of the various disquieting aspects -- and there were several -- perhaps the most disturbing was to hear the Pakistani Interior Minister and the Army spokesman deny that the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network are even in Pakistan (let alone that the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, has been supporting them). And then to hear, after that, Richard Holbrooke say he was sure the Pakistanis know these groups are a threat to them as well as Afghanistan. Know they're a threat? The Pakistani officials don't acknowledge they're even in the country!

"Obama's War" is a well-done, informative piece of journalism, with the scene shifting between Helmand province, Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington. The counterinsurgency position in the current debate, about which I had lots of doubts to begin with, seems even less persuasive to me after watching this. I don't think that's because the program is unbalanced but because the difficulties involved become so evident, particularly in one moment in which a Marine, with an inadequate interpreter, interacts with some local people in Helmand. He asks for their help and they reply: "how can we help you? We don't even have swords. If you can't defeat the Taliban with all your weaponry, then we can't help you." Their reply mostly misses the point -- he wasn't asking for their military help -- but it underscores the difficulties involved in what is euphemistically called "cross-cultural communication" as well as the broader difficulties of entrusting this kind of mission to well-meaning but -- to the local population -- very foreign young men with guns. You can't overgeneralize from one encounter, but the effect nonetheless is very sobering.

Minute of envy

"Pride, Envy, and Avarice are the three sparks that have set these hearts on fire."
-- Dante, Inferno, canto VI, line 74
(with a hat tip to the 1968 edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, ed. Emily Morison Beck)

We think of envy as an ugly emotion, but is it always? Envy often comes jumbled up with other emotions that we see as more benign (I don't mean pride and avarice, obviously). Because there are so many different kinds of people in the world, there are a multitude of reasons for envy, both good and bad. I'm not sure I'd want to be someone who didn't feel envy at least occasionally; it shows you're alive. (I think I'll probably take a pass, however, on visiting whichever circle of hell Dante's describing.)

Wazirstan update

An interesting analysis by the BBC's M. Ilyas Khan considers why the Pakistani army has not yet launched the operation in S. Wazirstan that seemed imminent this past summer.

He settles on two main reasons:

"Any action against the Baitullah Mehsud group [i.e. the Taliban group that was led by the late Baitullah Mehsud] in South Waziristan could draw in to the conflict militant groups based in the Wazir tribal areas of South and North Waziristan.

These groups are part of the al-Qaeda affiliated Haqqani network and have peace agreements with the [Pakistani] army.

They have so far concentrated exclusively on fighting inside Afghanistan, and many analysts consider their activities central to the army's perceived security interests in Afghanistan.

Any hostilities with them may harm these interests, analysts say.

Another reason may well have been the so-called Kerry-Lugar bill which promises $1.5bn (£0.95bn) in annual aid to Pakistan for the next five years. [This bill is for non-military aid and has been passed by both houses of Congress. It contains various conditions, some of which apply to U.S. security assistance as well as civilian aid. -- LFC]

The bill, which has been in the works for well over a year, has become hugely controversial recently due to some clauses that the military look upon as detrimental to its interests.

Last week, the army publicly denounced the bill at a time when the government was defending it, thereby sparking a rift within the political establishment....

But while the army considers its options for a re-think, attacks such as the one on its central headquarters in Rawalpindi on 10 October indicate that the options it has are indeed limited, and time is running out."

And throughout all this, the majority of the Pakistani army remains stationed, as far as I'm aware, on the border with India, unable to contribute directly to any operations in the west.

I guess this is why I never got beyond Ec 10

For a university to lay off 250 staff members because its endowment has fallen to $26 billion -- that's billion with a "b" -- seems, somehow, rather insane. Yes, I know about imbalanced budgets and all that, but it still seems a bit nuts. Glancing through this NYT article (hat tip for it to L. Sigelman at The Monkey Cage) leaves a bad taste. Not because of the hot breakfast stuff -- that's trivial nonsense -- but because of the way the NYT writes about these things. Breathlessly and, dare I suggest it, not overly intelligently. As for the stuff about the supposed horror of "being quadded" -- that was being said more than 30 years ago and it was way overblown then. Why don't they yank their reporter out of Cambridge, Mass. and tell her to go cover some interesting stories somewhere else? Perhaps that wouldn't be as much fun as hanging around Mass. Ave. and recycling decades-old clichés, but it would be better for the NYT and its remaining readers.

The peace prize

My belated two cents (or rather, two sentences): The award of the prize to Obama can be seen as a sort of vote of confidence in the changed tone of U.S. foreign policy in several key areas. Let's hope that the vote of confidence turns out to have been justified.

Prediction

If I had to guess, something like this -- click through to Gelb's piece -- is probably what the Obama admin will do with the Afghanistan decision.
P.s. See also Mark Grimsley on this: here.

It's nice that they're reading about Vietnam but...

...Jon Western asks the right question. This debate is about Afghanistan, so why aren't they reading books about Afghanistan in the White House?

I have read neither Lessons in Disaster nor the Lewis Sorley book that it is supposedly dueling with. But I just quickly read the PW summary of Sorley at Amazon, and my equally quick (i.e., off-the-cuff) reaction is this: One could make a good case that the Vietnam War was lost after the Tet Offensive -- not military but psychologically. So what happened on the ground after that was in some sense irrelevant to the outcome. However, the Vietnam War was one thing and Afghanistan is another. Historical analogies are always perilous because it is so difficult to make intelligent, wise use of them in decision-making. So, decision-makers, put down the Vietnam books and start reading some books on Afghanistan, please. Thank you.

Une petite confusion

Le scandale du jour.

"The BBC's Emma Jane Kirby, in Paris, says that the revelation that a senior cabinet minister was involved in sex tourism, just as the country holds negotiations with Thailand to discuss ways of fighting it, will inevitably embarrass Mr Sarkozy's government."

---

Ya think?

P.s. A close observer of French politics weighs in on it here.

Cross-dressing controversy causes commotion

Here.

Bangladesh and climate change

Here.

The birth-order thing

I just caught about ten minutes of Michael Sandel on the Diane Rehm show. (As an irrelevant aside, I'm not a particular fan of Diane Rehm. As another irrelevant aside, I'm also not one of those people who would walk across a blazing desert or stand for three hours in the rain to hear Sandel, although he's obviously both smart and a gifted teacher.)

A caller asked Sandel what message he leaves his students with at the end of his "Justice" course, and Sandel replied that, in order to get students to question the extent to which they are personally responsible for their success, he asks all the first-borns to raise their hands. About 75 to 80 percent of the hands go up, Sandel said, illustrating his point about the random (or morally arbitrary) components of 'desert' and confirming the prevailing wisdom that first-borns are more striving (at least partly because they are more conformist, presumably, though Sandel didn't mention that).

I am skeptical about the whole birth-order thing. But since I haven't read Born to Rebel and know next to nothing about the scientific debate on the subject, I suppose I should exercise a heroic degree of self-restraint and refrain from further comment.

P.s. A long article appeared last month on Sandel and his course
in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Nothing to disclose

The Federal Trade Commission has announced new endorsement-disclosure rules for bloggers. From an article in today's Wash. Post:

"Bloggers who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday.

"The agency, charged with protecting consumer interests, had not updated its policy on endorsements in nearly three decades, well before the Internet became a force in shaping consumer tastes. The new rules attempt to make more transparent corporate payments to bloggers, research firms and celebrities that help promote a product."

Because this blog does not routinely promote products (it may very occasionally mention one favorably, though I can't recall offhand having done so), it is not surprising that I have received no payments from any corporate interests (in fact no payments, period) since the blog's start. Nor have I received any free books, free merchandise or free anything from any publisher, manufacturer or whatever. Zip.

Saddling up at containment gulch; or, The X article rides again

Nicholas Thompson, author of the recent book on Paul Nitze and George Kennan (The Hawk and the Dove), tries to apply some lessons of Kennan's famous X article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," to the struggle with global jihadism.

Thompson mentions, among other things, Kennan's view that some parts of the world are more important for U.S. national security than others. True enough. I would caution, however, that this lesson should be stripped of Kennan's implicit (and sometimes not-so-implicit) racism. Not many people these days would want to go around quoting Kennan's 1962 statement that the capacity for democracy is "peculiar to peoples who have had their origins on or near to the shores of the North Sea."

With that caveat (and maybe one or two others that readers can supply themselves), I think we could all do worse than re-read the X article, and then re-read it again.

What about the Tobin tax?

Here (latter part of the article).

Dr. Kagan's Iran prescription; or, Will the real Robert Kagan please stand up?

"Forget the Nukes" is the provocative title of Robert Kagan's Wash. Post column today. Never mind the "secret" uranium enrichment facility, never mind the long-range missile test; the main issue, he says, should be capitalizing on the regime's weakness by quickly applying "crippling" sanctions. This will give heart to the opposition, whose leadership "is engaged in a struggle to the death with the regime," and "might" -- I emphasize his use of might -- lead the regime to fall. At least the chance of that happening is greater than the chance that the current Iranian regime "will give up its nuclear program voluntarily," he contends.

Hmm. Let's ponder this for a sec. Just because the leadership of the Iranian opposition is locked in a death struggle with the regime does not mean the opposition as a whole is so committed. I have great admiration for the courage and determination displayed by those who demonstrated in June against the fraudulent elections. But I don't know enough about the workings of the Iranian opposition or its composition or internal dynamics to say whether sanctions will give it the boost Kagan supposes. Has there been a broad clamor within the opposition for the imposition of sanctions on the regime? If there has been, Kagan doesn't mention it.

In the column's last paragraph, Kagan makes another bet. "Americans have a fundamental strategic interest in seeing a change of leadership in Iran." Why? Because "[t]here is good reason to believe that a democratic Iran might forgo a nuclear weapon...or at least be more amenable to serious negotiations." And even if it does go nuclear, a democratic nuclear Iran will be far less dangerous than an autocratic-theocratic nuclear Iran, he maintains.

Indeed? Is this the same Robert Kagan who has been writing about the return of old-fashioned great-power politics in the twenty-first century? Interests and power rule, the hard-headed calculations of geopolitical advantage drive policy -- isn't that the message he's been delivering lately? Now, in this column, a slightly different tone seems to creep in -- domestic politics matters, what political scientists call (in typically sterile fashion) "regime type" counts for something. Of course, it's true the two positions are not in direct or logical contradiction, but there is arguably a tension in the messages here. Why is there "good reason" to suppose that a democratic Iran might give up nukes when its regional ambitions and the configuration of forces in its environment will be, presumably, pretty much the same? Neighboring Pakistan has nuclear weapons; Afghanistan is in turmoil (and don't forget the Iranian regime has never been friendly with the Taliban); and Iran, democratic or not, would want, one would think, to consolidate the increased influence that the Iraq war and its aftermath bestowed on it.

(Of course, if you believe Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the regime will stop short of actually developing a weapon once it has the capacity to do so. In which case regime change, from a "strategic" standpoint, becomes less urgent.)

There is a lot of "might" and "maybe" in Dr. Kagan's prescription. The "right kind of sanctions could help the Iranian opposition topple these still-vulnerable rulers [Ahmadinejad and Khamanei]," he asserts. But what are the "right kind of sanctions," and exactly how would they help? Until convincing answers to these questions are forthcoming, the judgment on "Forget the Nukes" must be the old Scotch verdict: Not proven.

Update: As another blogger observes, recent developments in the negotiations indicate that by not "forgetting the nukes," the Obama admin and the Europeans have achieved some progress on the issue.

Are governments losing control over national borders? In a word: No.

According to John Robb, "governments worldwide are losing control over all of the classical forms of national power from borders to finances to communication to media to economic activity to security to trade flows (of all types)."

Focus on the first item in this list: borders. Are governments worldwide losing control of their borders? No.

Next month, a conference on "Fences and Walls in International Relations" will be held at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The conference's call observes that:

"...some 26,000 kilometers of new political borders have been established since 1991 (Foucher 2009), and states have declared their intention to dig in behind fences, barriers and built structures. Moreover, the post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods have seen the rise of border walls, symbols of separation which seemed to be on the way out in the wake of decolonization...and were believed to be entirely finished and done with after the fall of the Berlin Wall."

Border walls are back in a big way, and walls often mean more control of what goes in and out of the national territory. They won't always work -- I am skeptical about the extent to which the mostly-uncompleted wall/fence along the U.S.-Mexican border will reduce undocumented immigration -- but on the whole, the more walls, the more control. The notion that states have lost control of their borders is wrong.

P.s. This is not to say that border fences/walls are necessarily a good idea. See, for example, here.

"Choice" vs. "necessity" is no way to think about war

Pres. Obama called the Afghanistan campaign a "war of necessity," and the NATO Secretary-General has now echoed this formulation.

If "necessity" is set in opposition to "choice," as it was in Obama's original statement, the dichotomy is misleading. As others have pointed out, every war involves a choice. Even World War II -- properly held up as a model of a justified, inescapable war and one in which the definition of victory and defeat was far clearer and more obvious than it is today in Afghanistan -- was a war of choice. We can all be grateful that Britain in 1940 acted as she did, but it was still a matter of choice. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as "a war of necessity." The phrase is not helpful.

Those were the days (encore)

"In the early days of the Cold War it was assumed that any Communist revolutionary was a Kremlin agent. Ho Chi Minh's independence movement, Ambassador William C. Bullitt explained in 1947, was designed to 'add another finger to the hand that Stalin is closing around China.' Mao Tse-tung was on a short tether from Moscow, according to Dean Rusk in a speech made two years after the Chinese revolution. Mao's regime was 'a colonial Russian government.' "

-- Richard J. Barnet, "The Security of Empire," in R.W. Gregg and C.W. Kegley, eds., After Vietnam: The Future of American Foreign Policy (Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 42-43.

Rory Stewart on Afghanistan

I hadn't intended to post again until October, but I just heard an interview with Rory Stewart, now at the Kennedy School, who wrote a book some time ago about his walk across all of Afghanistan. I'd seen the book but not read it, nor had I heard him speak before. In this interview he made a quite persuasive case that the current U.S./ISAF goals in Afghanistan are unachievable and very unrealistic. After granting the currently requested troop increase (which, Stewart thinks, would be politically impossible to refuse), Obama should not approve any further increases, he argued. The strategy's aims need to be reworked to focus on what is possible over the long term at an acceptable cost. Afghanistan, he observed, is decades behind Pakistan in virtually all respects, and Pakistan of course is hardly an exemplar of democratic stability; the creation of a functioning state of any sort in Afghanistan will take decades. Ten to twenty thousand special forces and other troops should be able to keep al- Qaeda from re-establishing a major presence in the country, he suggested, and that's about the best that can be hoped for in terms of a concrete security objective. Not everyone will agree with him, of course, but I was impressed by his lucidity and knowledge of the country. The interviewer was Lynn Sherr, substituting for Bill Moyers on his program; I assume the program's website (Bill Moyers' Journal, PBS) will be putting up a transcript.

Break

I am taking a break from posting for a few weeks (at least).

Riding to the rescue of the L-word

A review of:
Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism (Knopf, 2009)

Apart from having the same first name, what do William Kristol and William Wordsworth have in common? If this riddle appeals to you, you may like Alan Wolfe’s The Future of Liberalism. An effort to restate liberalism’s tenets for a non-specialist audience and to show that liberalism remains superior to competing “isms” in its ability to cope with modernity, the book is best approached as a series of connected essays in persuasion, to borrow a phrase from John Maynard Keynes. However, even readers who are not fully persuaded will likely pick up some bits of new knowledge along the way.

So what about the two Williams, the poet and the neocon? According to Wolfe, Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives have a romantic sensibility that denigrates caution, realism, and common sense in favor of grandiose dreams of democratic triumphalism. Like Wordsworth -- who heaped scorn on “mere safety” in his pamphlet attacking the 1807 Convention of Cintra (which allowed Napoleon’s defeated army to withdraw from the Iberian peninsula) -- Kristol et al. have a dangerously “heroic” view of the world which substitutes wishful thinking for an analysis of inconvenient realities. The flaws in this worldview became all too evident in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. In drawing a connection between nineteenth-century romanticism and present-day neoconservatism, Wolfe may be on to something. It’s true that Wordsworth celebrated the French Revolution (“bliss was it then to be alive, but to be young was very heaven”), and it’s hard to imagine Bill Kristol, had he been around in 1789, saying that -- but no parallel is going to be a perfect fit. As the book proceeds, Wolfe detects the malign hand of romanticism in other places, from the writings of the liberal Paul Berman to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire.

The Future of Liberalism revolves around several reiterated contrasts. Liberalism à la Wolfe sides with “interests” not “passions”; culture not nature; empiricism not “ideology” (a bad word in Wolfe’s lexicon). Wolfe’s liberalism is hopeful but cool, generous but ironic, committed unapologetically to its values but not in an overexcited, “ideological” way. This message is illustrated by various excursions into the history of ideas, featuring heroes (e.g., T.H. Green, Benjamin Constant, Lionel Trilling, John Dewey, Kant) and non-heroes (e.g., Carl Schmitt, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Marx, Rousseau, and, yes, Wordsworth). These excursions are generally well executed but they necessarily involve compression, and compression has its pitfalls. For example, anyone who wants to understand Max Weber’s famous distinction between an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of ultimate ends would be well advised not to rely too heavily on Wolfe’s brief summary of Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation.”

Wolfe’s liberalism has something in common with the tradition of political realism and its emphasis on the responsible exercise of power. “It takes ideological politicians to bring out the true virtues of realistic ones,” he writes (p.125), and he characterizes “a liberal global order” as one “in which as many governments as possible avoid romantic dreams, shun unrealistic expectations, and dampen religious and ideological enthusiasms.” (p.106) He says kind things about realists like Reinhold Niebuhr although the appropriation is partial: Niebuhr’s stress on responsibility is highlighted but not his view of the fallen nature of humanity. Wolfe’s preferred ground is Arthur Schlesinger’s vital center, “a place obviously distinct from the totalitarian right, but at the same time marked off from what Schlesinger [in 1948] called ‘doughfaced progressivism,’ which believes in ‘the more subtle sensations of the perfect syllogism, the lost cause, the permanent minority, where life can be safe from the exacting job of trying to work out wise policies in an imperfect world.’ ” (p.118)

This “exacting job,” however, is not one that Wolfe seems especially eager to take on. Admittedly his book is not intended to be a programmatic manifesto; he believes that liberalism’s philosophical basis is more in need of reviving than its programmatic ideas. But sometimes philosophical and programmatic considerations intertwine, and in these cases the book is less than satisfying.

The clearest example is Wolfe’s approach to the issue of equality. At the outset he writes: “How much actual equality there is in a society will vary from one to another, and one can imagine different kinds of liberal societies with different degrees of it. But any society that closes off opportunities for people to achieve their full human capacities, or that allows persistent inequalities to stifle the desire on the part of its least fortunate members to develop them, would not be a liberal one.” (p.12) This simultaneously suggests and evades a significant question: When do “persistent inequalities” become so persistent and deep-rooted that they stop being merely blemishes on a liberal society and start undermining its foundations? Consider the contemporary United States with its large underclass, astoundingly high incarceration rates, high levels of income and wealth inequality, and an educational system that relegates many children, especially poorer ones, to inferior schools from which only the unusually determined and lucky emerge with a decent education – at some point it becomes difficult to claim that such a society is giving a majority of its citizens opportunities “to achieve their full human capacities.” Wolfe endorses Michael Walzer’s view that there should be “a series of dams that prevent inequalities in some spheres of life from spilling over into others where they do not belong.” (p.82) Walzer’s Spheres of Justice divides the world into various domains – work, wealth, office, love, divine grace, and so on – and argues that different principles of just distribution apply in each. That’s fine in some ways, but it’s not much help in determining how much inequality in life chances is too much.

Wolfe says repeatedly that liberals want to maximize individuals’ ability to control their destinies, but the devil is in the details of how this principle is put into practice. Take welfare reform. Wolfe praises Bill Clinton’s abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) inasmuch as it represented a blow against dependency and the perpetuation of a “permanent welfare class” (p.248). On the other hand, “whether or not forcing mothers of young children into the workforce was the appropriate way to do this can and should be questioned, but the notion of overcoming dependency should not be.” (p.248) You can’t have it both ways: either ending AFDC was justifiable or it wasn’t. Wolfe’s discussion of equality and inequality would have benefited from a more thorough engagement with the tradition of democratic socialism, for which his occasional references to R.H. Tawney are not an adequate substitute. And when it comes to the transnational or global dimensions of inequality, Wolfe does not have much to say, apart from some fairly brief remarks on immigration and globalization toward the end of the book.

The Future of Liberalism has a thoughtful chapter on religion, which argues that liberalism properly understood is not hostile to religion and that freedom of religion is a meaningful principle worth defending. Here Wolfe’s hero is John Leland, a nineteenth-century “itinerant Baptist preacher from Massachusetts” and "the most important American never to have been the subject of a full-length biography" (p.165) who strongly supported separation of church and state and favored keeping organized religion out of politics, a position that Leland’s contemporary heirs in the Southern Baptist Convention have abandoned. In this chapter and elsewhere, Wolfe criticizes certain contemporary foes of liberalism, such as Stanley Fish, who, under the influence of postmodernism-poststructuralism, charge liberalism’s Enlightenment values with incoherence. He scores points against the postmodernists, which is useful if not especially novel. As already mentioned, however, socialist critiques of liberalism are either neglected in this book or treated summarily.

The book ends with a ringing plea for liberals to have the courage of their convictions and to recapture the spirit that animated the liberal accomplishments of the past. Wolfe’s decision to conclude in this way highlights what is perhaps the book’s most striking omission: its failure to acknowledge fully that liberalism’s problems of the last forty years have not been simply the result of liberals’ cowardice and complacency. The massive alterations in the operations of capitalism on both domestic and global levels, the weakening of organized labor in the advanced industrial countries (notably but not exclusively the U.S.), and reaction to the impact (real and perceived) of the movements of the '60s all had as much if not more to do with the electoral victories of Reagan, Thatcher, and some of their successors as did the timidity and miscalculation of their liberal opponents. Ideas don’t float freely, as Wolfe is well aware, and the best ideas don’t always win in the ideological marketplace; ideas exist in a context shaped by underlying economic and social forces, and a rigorous analysis of those forces is largely missing here.

Nonetheless and to end on a positive note, The Future of Liberalism makes me want to re-acquaint myself with the classics of the liberal tradition, and for that I thank the author.

Rising religiosity in the Israeli army

See this piece on military rabbis in the Israeli army. Discount the piece's slant, if you don't like it, and just focus on the facts reported. If they're even partly accurate, it's disturbing.

A missed opportunity: Guy Raz, Paul Wolfowitz, and one bad interview

I don't regularly listen to All Things Considered (ATC) but I hear snatches of it now and again, often if I happen to be driving when it's on. This Saturday afternoon I heard Guy Raz, the ATC weekend host, interview Paul Wolfowitz. The ostensible subject was a piece Wolfowitz wrote for Foreign Policy (a piece I was aware of but have not read) apparently criticizing the "realist" view -- as Wolfowitz labels and interprets it -- that other countries' internal political arrangements are their own concern and should be off-limits to U.S. foreign policy. Or, to quote or closely paraphrase Wolfowitz from the interview, he was criticizing the notion that "other countries' internal affairs is [sic] their own business" and should be insulated from U.S. interference of any kind, including peaceful efforts to promote democracy, womens' rights, etc.

There are more than a couple of interesting questions that could have been raised about this. First of all, does any analyst or commentator or academic or whatever hold the view Wolfowitz is labeling "realist"? If not, why bother criticizing it? If so, who are they? Second of all and more important, how is Wolfowitz defining "internal affairs"? When is intervention, peaceful or otherwise, in another country's internal affairs warranted and when is it not? If no bright-line principle can be stated, what kinds of considerations should be weighed? How does Wolfowitz's approach jibe, if at all, with the well-known axiom that, from the standpoint of international law and diplomatic norms, a country's internal affairs are indeed mostly its own business? And so on.

Unfortunately, Raz did not ask most of these questions, preferring to spend time needling Wolfowitz about the Iraq war and his role in its planning. Now far be it from me to suggest that Wolfowitz does not deserve to be needled, badgered, and hounded about his role in the Iraq war. The fact that Wolfowitz's reputation has survived Iraq sufficiently unscathed to permit him to be a visiting fellow at AEI and a writer of pieces for Foreign Policy in itself is suggestive of how gross mistakes, no matter how blatant and horrible, go basically unpunished in Washington policy circles. Nonetheless, the subject of the interview was supposed to be the "realist" doctrine of non-interference in internal affairs -- actually less a "realist" doctrine than, as I've already indicated, a basic principle of international law -- and it would have been nice if Raz had pressed more on this subject. He could have conducted just as tough an interview if he had asked fewer questions about Iraq and more about what Wolfowitz came to talk about, since it's a subject that people have been debating forever. Toward the end Raz started to ask some pointed, relevant questions but by then it was too late. This was not one of Nat'l Public Radio's finer moments, IMHO.

But wait!, I hear you crying. Wasn't the invasion of Iraq an extreme case of intervention in another country's internal affairs and aren't questions about Iraq therefore very relevant to the subject? Well, no. The very fact that it was such an extreme case means that it's not especially useful as a point of interrogation -- in this context.

P.s. James Fallows links to the unedited, longer version of the interview. I'm not sure I'm going to listen to this 37-minute version (indeed, I'm almost certainly not going to), but I'm providing this link as a service to this blog's hordes of readers.

An unwarranted assumption

A front-page piece in Wednesday's NYT discussing the possible consequences for U.S.-Japan relations of the Democratic Party of Japan's election victory (Mark Landler and Martin Fackler, "U.S. Is Seeing Policy Thorns in Japan Shift," NYT, 9/2/09, p.A1, continued p.A10) contains this passage:

"[Incoming P.M. Yukio] Hatoyama's views [as expressed in an excerpted article from a Japanese journal that appeared in English translation recently on the NYT website] sent many in Washington's diplomatic establishment scurrying to learn more about him and the Democrats. That highlighted a problem: While American officials and academics have spent decades cultivating close ties with the Liberal Democrats, who have governed Japan for most of the last half century, they have built few links to the opposition."

And whose fault is that? Surely it wasn't prudent to assume that the Liberal Democrats would be in power in Japan forever.

Two faces of India

Harley-Davidson is breaking into the Indian market, selling its bikes starting at $14,000 each, while in the state of Orissa people are dying from contaminated water supplies.

Will vs. Kristol on Afghanistan

George Will calls for withdrawing ground forces from Afghanistan and using drones, cruise missiles, air strikes, and special forces units to focus from offshore on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Bill Kristol replies that this is a recipe for "retreat" and "defeat."

I'm not sure either one of them has it quite right, although Kristol, as usual, manages to sound obnoxious even when he's making arguments that don't have to sound that way. Will should have mentioned that the U.S. is already using drones in the Pakistan border regions, and while arguably this has had some results in eliminating elements of the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership (e.g. Baitalluh Mehsud; Usama al-Kini), the strikes have also caused civilian casualties, weakening support for the U.S. among the population. On the other hand, I share Will's distress at the rising U.S. casualties -- and, I would add, casualties in the ISAF forces from the other countries in the coalition. There comes a point at which such sacrifices can no longer be justified.

I don't know whether we are at that point. Stephen Biddle offers a depressing assessment in a recent article in The American Interest. He writes that "the strategic case for waging war is stronger than that for disengaging, but not by much: The war is a close call on the merits." Both reinforcement and withdrawal can be legitimately criticized, he says, and while he favors the former "on balance," he sees "no easy way out of Afghanistan, no clear light at either end of the tunnel, for President Obama."

A bit more on Kennedy

I've just been looking at the op-ed page of Thursday's Wash Post, which I bought in hard copy. It's entirely devoted to reflections on Ted Kennedy by regular columnists Will, Broder, Dionne, and Cohen, plus some shorter reflections by others. E.J. Dionne tells a story of Kennedy calling him and leaving an empathic message which Dionne found after returning from spending the day at the hospital in '95 with his ill young son (who recovered). David Broder also ends his column on a personal note. And George Will concludes that Kennedy's life showed "a substantial positive balance," though Will, as one might expect, also works some criticism into his column.

Appropriately, I guess, I'm finishing up Alan Wolfe's book on liberalism and will be posting a review in due course.

Edward M. Kennedy

Off-the-cuff thoughts (more considered ones may come later):

His record of legislative accomplishment, which was very impressive even if one did not agree with every one of his positions, was a tribute both to his own skill and that of his staff, which was always one of the best in the Senate. (Not that I knew this first-hand, but it was what everyone said.)

In 1980 I supported his campaign for the Democratic nomination and even ran as a candidate for Kennedy delegate. (I think I might have gotten ten votes or so; I know my late grandmother voted for me because I personally escorted her to the voting booth.) One of the most vivid political memories I have is watching Kennedy's speech at the 1980 Democratic convention, probably the greatest convention speech of the last 40 or 50 years. It was written by Robert Shrum and delivered superbly by Kennedy. The line in the speech about Ronald Reagan having no right to quote FDR still sends shivers down my spine. Great stuff. Kennedy will be missed, especially now with health care reform on the front burner. R.I.P.

P.s. John Sides links to an audio clip from the 1980 speech.
And National Journal collects reminiscences of former aides and others.

Memo to whom it may concern: the "art community" has no "special rights" under the First Amendment

A poster at Reason opines that artists have a duty to question authority because the First Amendment gives the art community, as "counterpart" to the press, special rights (or, in other words, singles out artists for specific attention).

Um, no. The First Amendment, in relevant part, reads: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...."

Nothing about special rights for artists, and as far as I'm aware the Supreme Court has not interpreted the First Amendment as giving artistic expression any higher level of protection than that afforded to speech generally. Law school was a long time ago, but my recollection is that speech deemed commercial can be somewhat more easily regulated than political speech, and that artistic and literary expression is also (with the exception for obscenity) at the core of the First Amendment. But special rights for artists, because they are "counterparts" of members of the press? No. You can still argue, of course, that artists have a duty to criticize those in power, but any such duty cannot convincingly be rooted in the U.S. Constitution or the system of checks and balances. The press as an intended check on government power, yes. Artists as an intended check on government power -- I don't think so.

[Hat tip: The House of Substance]

Round-up of Afghanistan articles

T. Greer has a post listing some recent contributions to the debate on Afghanistan policy and strategy. (The only one I've glanced at is Stephen Biddle's piece in The American Interest, which I happened to pick up in hard copy.) You can find all the links at Greer's post.
P.s. See also Foreign Policy's new AfPak Channel (link FP at sidebar).

Afghanistan election

Will there be a run-off? Not clear yet.

Would I vote?

If I were an Afghan living in Helmand province or in the eastern parts of the country which, like Helmand, must be considered active war zones, would I vote in the imminent election? It takes courage to vote in a war zone, more courage than I suspect I have. The NewsHour broadcast a British ITV report from a district in Helmand this evening, showing a meeting (shura) of Afghan elders being addressed by a government official and a British officer. After the meeting, one of the attendees remarked to the reporter that he wouldn't vote on Thursday if his own father were on the ballot.

The debasement of public debate

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others, Churchill once supposedly remarked. One of democracy's virtues, at least as it is presented in civics books and the writings of some political theorists, is deliberation: the calm, reasoned, informed discussion of the pros and cons of alternative policies. Deliberation in the real world can never be purely disinterested: individuals and groups have economic and other interests and, in a capitalist democracy like that of the U.S., can be expected to organize to try to advance those interests in the public arena. But if deliberation cannot be disinterested -- if we cannot decide public policy questions behind a Rawlsian 'veil of ignorance' in which no one knows his or her particular socioeconomic position -- we nonetheless can, or at least we should, expect deliberation to adhere to certain minimal standards of civility and intelligence.

Public debate, of course, has often departed from such standards. To stick with the U.S. context, personal invective and ad hominem attacks have been a feature of American politics from the beginning. The Federalists and the anti-Federalists often attacked each other in the vilest terms imaginable, as did, especially somewhat later on, the proponents and opponents of slavery. The dispute over the Bank of the U.S. in Andrew Jackson's administration was hardly a model of temperate discussion. Many other examples could be given. Reasoned deliberation, purged of emotionalism and personal accusations, is a liberal ideal that is realized only very imperfectly in practice, when it's realized at all.

That said, it is nevertheless discouraging to observe the level and tone of debate now occurring on the subject of health care reform. The immediate occasion for this observation is my reading today of Charles Krauthammer's Wash Post op-ed and a few of the many reader comments on it. I disagree with Krauthammer's general opposition to any overhaul of the health-care system. But his specific point in this column, that prevention is not a 'magic bullet' when it comes to health care costs, is worth considering and debating on the merits. While some of the reader comments do address the merits, many others do not. Instead, they fling ad hominem charges -- a few go so far as to suggest that Krauthammer is endorsing human suffering, which he is not -- and they observe that Krauthammer has been wrong on other issues, such as the Iraq war.

Now it's true that Krauthammer was wrong on the Iraq war -- in my opinion he's been wrong on nearly every foreign policy issue of the last thirty years, or however long he's been writing his column. But that does not mean that he is necessarily wrong about the issue of prevention and costs. Some commenters point out that he underestimates the aggregate societal benefits of prevention, while others observe that his argument does not distinguish clearly between more-expensive and less-expensive types of prevention. Those commenters are contributing to reasoned debate. The commenters who hurl epithets -- "Nazi," "moron," "idiot" -- are not, any more than the people screaming and shouting at town meetings are.

The U.S. health care system, like the U.S. tax code and some other aspects of the American system, is byzantine, very wasteful, costly, inefficient. It produces excellent care for some while relegating others to second-tier treatment or none at all. As a 'developed' country with no universal or near-universal health insurance, the U.S. is an outlier. These are all obvious statements and they suggest that some kind of comprehensive reform is urgently required. I don't think myself competent to weigh in on the details of the current proposals, except to say that members of Congress should try to exercise the courage to admit that some taxes will probably have to be raised -- and not necessarily only on multimillionaires -- to fund the required reforms. Some savings can come from more administrative efficiency and competition (and maybe even from basic forms of prevention), but more taxes will still likely be necessary. I also tend to favor a public option. Beyond that, I can't contribute much to the substantive debate. But I feel that people committed to reasoned deliberation should speak up against the debased public discourse currently surrounding this issue.

Blog mini-roundup, etc.

-- JM at Marx and Coca-Cola (link at the sidebar) has a late June post (the last long one up there) linking to, among other things, a Thomas Frank WSJ piece on regulatory capture.

-- Guest blogger Conor Foley is holding forth at Crooked Timber (link at sidebar) on issues related to humanitarian aid and advocacy, starting with a post on Darfur.

-- Rodger Payne at Duck of Minerva announces he will be blogging on climate change at the e-ir site.

-- Hank at Eclectic Meanderings has reviews of books on Baron de Steuben (Drillmaster of Valley Forge) and on the fall of the Roman Empire.

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And in view of Sec of State Clinton's recent stop in the Dem. Rep. Congo, I take note of an article by two Swedish researchers in the June 2009 Int'l Studies Quarterly: Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, "Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC)," pp.495-518.

Hugo Chavez channels Herman Wouk

Referring to a recent agreement between the U.S. and Colombia giving the U.S. access to some military bases in Colombia, Hugo Chavez has said that the arrangement could lead to war in South America. Speaking at a meeting of the Union of South American Nations in Ecuador, Chavez said that the "winds of war are beginning to blow" across the region, according to the BBC.

The U.S. is of course already giving Colombia a substantial amount of money and support to fight drug trafficking and the Farc -- indeed Colombia gets more U.S. 'aid' (defined broadly) than any other South American country by far -- and the Obama administration says that the agreement in question simply updates Plan Colombia, as the initiative was called when it was passed during the Bush administration. As in the case of U.S.-India relations, the Obama admin seems to be following the Bush admin's approach with respect to Colombia. Following the Bush lead on India makes sense, but the same is perhaps not true in the case of Colombia. There were many critics of Plan Colombia at the time of its launch, and my impression (although admittedly I have not followed it) is that its record is mixed at best. Be that as it may, Chavez's remarks are unnecessarily incendiary. Perhaps they will be discounted because of who uttered them, but no politician, regardless of ideology, should go around talking about the "winds of war" unless the situation realIy warrants it. The 'winds of war' was an o.k. title for Herman Wouk's WW2 epic novel, but that's about it.

Leaked memo on Israel-U.S. relations

Via Open Source Geopolitics (citing an AP report):
A memo by the Israeli consul in Boston, criticizing the Netanyahu government's settlements policy and approach to relations with Washington, was leaked to an Israeli TV station, which read part of it on the air. The memo apparently contains, among other things, a line saying that American Jews are being put in a "problematical position" by the tense relations between the two governments. Without having data to hand on this, I suspect that a great many American Jews disapprove of the Netanyahu govt's settlements stance and would feel "distanced" from that government whether it was openly spatting with the White House or not.

"The sheriff at the gates"

From The Boston Globe's site: how the Bard might have seen the Incident on Ware Street.

Here's a taste:

CROWLEY: Back speaks no man to the Sheriff; I arrest thee!

GATES: Knowest thou who I am? That I am coy with the Daily Beastmistress, Milady Tina? That I am most down with Lady Oprah, the Queen of afternoon tele-dalliances? That I am sworn liege to Dr. Faust, of whom Marlowe wrote? That I unravelest literary mysteries at the Greatest University Known to Man?

CROWLEY: Of Tufts you speak? Even so, thou art under arrest.

[Hat tip: Lee Sigelman at The Monkey Cage]

Looking behind an endnote

I'm reading Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism (2009). On p. 45, Wolfe refers in passing to "some scholars [who] have relied on sociobiological arguments to develop theories of international relations supportive of neoconservative understandings of how the world works." Curious about which scholar(s) Wolfe had in mind (I guessed Bradley Thayer, author of a book on Darwinism and IR), I turned to his endnotes. My guess was wrong. The single work Wolfe cites in this connection is Stephen P. Rosen's War and Human Nature (2005).

It happens that I'd read Rosen's book, but it was a while ago and I didn't remember it especially well, so I took it down from the shelf. "Relie[s] on sociobiological arguments to develop theories of international relations supportive of neoconservative understandings of how the world works" is not, I think, a particularly good description of much of what Rosen is trying to do. In his chapter 2, for example, "Emotions, Memory, and Decision Making," Rosen draws on animal and human research to argue for the importance of "emotion-based pattern recognition" in decision-making. Pattern recognition happens when the brain processes information "in blocks or chunks" (p.34), and "pattern recognition of events associated with past emotional arousal radically reduce[s] decision-making time" (p.35). With respect to foreign policy decision-making, Rosen hypothesizes, among other things, that "if decisions are made on the basis of emotion-driven pattern recognition, the decision will be made quickly and early in the process, despite the complexity of the situation and the availability of contradictory analysis and data" (p.55). He then examines several historical cases where this kind of decision making (arguably) occurred.

The argument may or may not be persuasive, but at least this chapter of War and Human Nature would appear to have little to do with "neoconservative understandings of how the world works." Indeed one might well be able to apply 'emotion-based pattern recognition' to the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. I doubt that the results would be pleasing to neoconservatives.

Satellite photos of retreating Arctic ice

Here.

[Hat tip: The Int'l Interest]

'Afghanizing' the war

Either Shields or Brooks (I don't remember offhand which one) said last night on the NewsHour that Americans by and large are not paying attention to Afghanistan despite the fact that there were more ISAF casualties in July than in any month since the initial invasion in 2001. Gen. McChrystal is calling for much larger numbers of Afghan forces (and, perhaps, still more U.S. forces), more U.S. civilian experts are needed to work on development and related reconstruction issues, and the presidential election of Aug. 20 is approaching. One would hope that the attention deficit diagnosis is incorrect.

Writing in the current Foreign Affairs, Fotini Christia and Michael Semple say that "the 'patriotic' Taliban [i.e. those willing to break with al Qaeda and similar elements] must be allowed to claim some of the success for the Afghanization of the country's security. Commanders and fighters should be formally associated with or absorbed into the police or the army, for example, which would allow the foreign troops to slip into the background." Christia and Semple understand that this is not going to happen soon and they suggest that there should be a U.S.-supported "low-profile but intensive dialogue between internationally backed mediators and the networks of [Afghan Taliban] commanders in Pakistan.... Insurgent networks cohere at least as much on the basis of social and economic interests as on political and ideological grounds; thus, the success of engagement will depend on building confidence. Much tea will have to be drunk to persuade commanders to realign."

Those parasite blues

Just glanced at Michael Massing's New York Review piece on the blogosphere, which he appears to defend against its critics. He notes approvingly that some blogs (mostly fairly big operations, often with staffs) actually break news rather than just comment on it in "parasitical" fashion.

This particular blog is, of course, parasitical in the sense that I do not break news or do original reporting (nor would anyone be likely to send me a 'hot tip' since this blog's audience is quite tiny: why send it to me when you can send it to TPM or a zillion other more-read places than here?) On the other hand, as regular readers (all two or three of them) are aware, I don't limit myself to commenting on current events but have been known to throw in the occasional post about a scholarly article, the occasional essay about one subject or another, and even the occasional post on poetry. (And I must nod here in the direction of HC, whose guest commentary on that Longfellow poem has attracted a steady, if modest, stream of interest ever since its publication.)

Being a "parasite" in the Massing sense doesn't bother me too much. In a (very) former existence, I wrote (for pay) pieces about court decisions and other products of the legal-governmental bureaucracy. In that existence or incarnation I was a paid parasite but also a heteronomous (ooh big word!) one: they (my superiors) told me what to write about and I wrote about it. As a blogger, by contrast, I am unpaid and autonomous, but still, much of the time, parasitical. That's how the cookie crumbles.

U.S. defense budget: same old story

See today's WP article "Pork-Padded Defense Bill Weighed by House."
It has garnered 500 comments (as of this writing) on the Post's website.

India's behavior on its border with Bangladesh

Not good. Via Christopher Albon.

More on the Indian sub launch and U.S-Indian relations

NightWatch for July 27 writes that the U.S. missed "a strategic opportunity" by not helping India with its nuclear submarine development, leaving this to the Russians instead.

But it's not as if the U.S. has been ignoring its relationship with India. On the contrary. The Bush admin negotiated the nuclear power deal with India, and the Obama admin is following the same basic policy of strategic engagement. Sec of State Clinton's recent visit to India resulted in what is called an end-use monitoring agreement, which helps to pave the way for weapons and reactor sales. To quote the BBC story:

"India is seeking to buy fighter aircraft and nuclear reactors - deals that are expected to generate multi-billion dollar contracts, for which several US companies are bidding.

India also announced on Monday that it had approved sites where American companies will build two nuclear power plants."

In light of this, I find it hard to get very exercised about the Russian-Indian cooperation on submarine development. Sometimes it pays to ask naive, simplistic-sounding questions, like: What does difference does it make? Here the answer, it seems to me, is: Not very much. The only consideration that occurs to me is that if the Indian subs are based on Russian designs it may be harder for the U.S. Navy to do certain collaborative things with them. I'll leave it to others who know about such technical things to argue about this.

Update: Card check

This happened a while ago, but I just now found out that Senate Democrats have dropped the card check provision from the Employee Free Choice Act. See here and here. (And for my earlier post on this, here.)

Anchors away

About a year ago, I noted (citing an LGM post) that India had leased a Russian nuclear submarine. Now India has launched its own nuclear sub, which was built with Russian help.

The 'cultural' roots of attitudes toward redistribution

The June 6th Economist carried a summary of a study exploring whether "cultural" factors influence opinions about redistribution. The authors of the paper, Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal, looked at data from the European Social Survey "on the attitudes of over 6,000 immigrants who have moved from one of 32 countries in the survey to another." Their bottom-line finding, in the Economist's words, is that "views about redistribution in an immigrant's home country are a strong predictor of his own opinions," even if he (or she) left the home country twenty years before. So, for example, a Pole or Romanian living in Britain probably would be more likely to favor more redistributive policies than a native Briton of roughly the same educational and income level. The effect also holds for children of immigrants, though not as strongly. This is interesting, although judging from the summary the paper does not address what precisely it is about one national "culture" that makes it more (or less) pro-redistribution than another.

Cronkite and Vietnam

We've been reminded in recent days of Walter Cronkite's broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968, when he declared, after having traveled to Vietnam in the wake of the Tet Offensive, that the war was going to end in a stalemate and the U.S. should embark on negotiations.

Kathleen Parker, in an appreciative column about Cronkite, notes that his critics say the Tet Offensive was a defeat for the Viet Cong (the NLF) and that his famous broadcast ushered in an era of supposed media bias. (Actually Parker refers to the North Vietnamese not the NLF, but it was mainly an NLF operation.) In truth, the Tet Offensive was both a defeat and a victory for the NLF: in strictly military terms it was a defeat, but in psychological terms it was a victory. It showed that the NLF, after several years of being subjected to American air power and fighting American ground soldiers, was capable of launching and carrying out a sustained operation against a large number of population centers in the South, and the NLF's penetration of the U.S. embassy in Saigon was a major propaganda coup. Cronkite's reaction was entirely understandable in view of the official American assurances that the war was being won and that the enemy was on the run.

The attack on "foreign law"

Today's Judiciary Committee hearings on the Sotomayor nomination featured a lot of discussion about the supposed evils of making reference to international law and the law of other countries in constitutional adjudication. At the end of today's proceedings, two conservative law professors delivered statements on this issue; I may have occasion to say more about those statements after I've had a chance to read them (or re-listen to them). Regrettably, the Democrats missed an opportunity to come to the defense, so to speak, of international law and foreign law. They did not invite a witness to counter specifically the testimony of the two law professors I referred to. None of this will affect Sotomayor's confirmation prospects, of course, but it may affect the broader debate on this topic.

The latest issue of PSQ, etc.

That's Political Science Quarterly. I don't subscribe but happened to see the current issue in a bookstore today. It carries, among other things, pieces by Juan Cole (on Pakistan and Afghanistan), Christopher Fettweis (a historical analysis of terrorism), and John Mueller (war is nearly extinct, or on the road to extinction, or whatever). I almost bought it but in the end decided not to shell out the thirteen bucks. It does appear to be an interesting issue, however.

On a lighter, indeed somewhat frivolous note: What's up with the weather in D.C.? While all eyes (or many eyes) are on that increasingly meaningless ritual known as a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the meteorological gods are bestowing some totally atypical, gorgeous days: sunny, not very humid, slightly breezy; in a word, idyllic -- especially by the standards of the swamp that is Washington and environs. I'm sure we've done nothing to deserve this, but I hope the masters of meteorological fortune remain so gloriously confused.

Civilians can return to Swat, Pakistan govt says

Since I've written in previous posts about the Pakistani army's (apparently completed) operation in the Swat valley (as well as about its anti-Taliban offensive more generally), this is just a quick line to note that I heard, in a passing mention in a news summary a couple of nights ago, that the government has now said it's safe for millions of displaced civilians to return to the area. That's all I've heard about the official announcement, however; those who are interested should be able to find out more with a little effort.
Update: see here.

A journalist blogs from Helmand province

Here.

A Marine helicopter unit compares service in Iraq and Afghanistan

Interesting piece in today's NYT.

McNamara: some suggested reading

Having said that I'm not going to be writing very much in July or August (see post for July 2 below), I think I can be excused for not making any substantive comment on McNamara in the wake of his death.

For those who may be interested, however, I'll mention a few books that might be worth a look. Deborah Shapley's biography of McNamara Promise and Power is well regarded but I haven't read it so can't comment directly; Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead I've read bits and pieces of; Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest I haven't looked at in a long time. I also have not read most of McNamara's Vietnam apology In Retrospect.

Two books that I have read, both of which contain interesting material on McNamara and Vietnam and both of which I can strongly recommend, are:

Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton U.P., 1992; also in paperback). This was the author's dissertation, so not all of it is easy going, but especially for those interested in how policymakers use and misuse historical analogies, it's very valuable.

David Milne, America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (Hill & Wang, 2008). This excellent, impressively researched work on Rostow is interesting on a number of points, including the relationship between Rostow and McNamara. (I reviewed this book in the Winter 2009 issue of New Politics; the review itself is not available for free but some other parts of that issue, as well as parts of the current Summer 2009 issue, are. The NP website is here.)

"A true world political authority"

The new papal encyclical on social/political matters calls, among other things, for a strengthened UN and "a true world political authority."

McNamara

Just saw the news of his death. I may have some comment later.

Ilie Nastase, anyone?

So I'm watching the quite amazing Federer-Roddick Wimbledon final. The NBC announcer has noted several times the presence of Borg, Laver, and Sampras in the past champions' seats near the court. Yet who is sitting behind Borg, clearly visible? Why, none other than Ilie Nastase. OK, he was no Borg, Laver or Sampras, and he had a temper and he was controversial. But he was still a pretty darn good tennis player. Yet neither Ted Robinson, the announcer, nor John McEnroe, commenting with him, has seen fit to mention Nastase's presence.
P.s. Manuel Santana was also there; I believe Robinson did mention him once.

July and August at H/P

July and August are probably going to be largely downtime here. I do have one or two posts planned, but I don't expect to be posting very often.

Technology and accidents

Several recent highly publicized plane crashes, along with the accident on the D.C. subway system (Metro), have got me thinking, albeit not very coherently, about accidents and technology. The Metro accident hits closest to home for me. Was it the kind of thing bound to occur sooner or later given the (presumed) pitfalls of reliance on an automated computerized system, or could it have been prevented by, say, a back-up system? Such a back-up would no doubt have been expensive, but I believe airplanes have them, at least in a rudimentary form, and so do, I believe, nuclear power plants, so why shouldn't subways? Perrow's work on 'normal accidents', which I've heard about but not read, suggests that not all accidents can be eliminated, especially in technologically complex environments; still, that is no reason not to try to make transport and other systems as safe as possible.

The Metro accident is a tragedy, obviously, for those who were killed and injured and for their families; it also will inconvenience everyone who uses, either regularly or occasionally, the Red line, as service on that line will be slower than usual. Moreover, because the whole Metro system is going to be operating in manual (non-automatic) mode for an indefinite period (at least according to what I heard last night on the news), the service on the system as a whole will be slower. Of course, safety matters more than speed, but in a metropolitan area already choking on its traffic -- an area where one can easily get the impression that no one does anything except drive around all day and clog up the roads -- anything that makes the subway less fast and efficient is bound to be unwelcome, to say the least.

On a related issue: See this post on the projected high-speed rail line between San Francisco and L.A.

Waziristan: "a long haul"

As a part of the Pakistani army prepares to launch what may -- or may not -- be an imminent assault on Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud's forces in South Waziristan, and as a separate Taliban faction in North Waziristan announces its withdrawal from a 2007 peace deal, Pamela Constable reports in yesterday's Wash Post ("Pakistan Treads Warily as New Fight Looms," WP, 6/29, p.A8) that some observers are beginning to raise questions about the operation.

A retired Pakistani government official named Roedad Khan, writing in The News International paper, "recalled [a] 1930s operation in which 40,000 British and Indian forces failed to crush Mirza Ali Khan, known as the Fakir of Ipi, a religious and tribal leader in North Waziristan... [Roedad Khan] warned that by attacking next-door South Waziristan, the army could open a 'massive, self-inflicted wound.'"

Interviewed by Constable, a Pakistani army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, brushed aside such concerns, insisting that Mehsud is no longer seen "as a Robin Hood figure" by the public and that the terrain in S. Waziristan is more hospitable for an anti-militant campaign than the terrain in Swat, where the Pakistani army recently completed an operation against the Taliban and re-took the city of Mingora, albeit at the cost of creating some two million internally displaced people.

But the army spokesman conceded that problems will remain even if Mehsud is defeated. "'The tribal areas have been neglected for 50 years,' [Abbas] said. 'We will do our part, but there has to be follow-up by the civilian administration, better governance, more development. This is going to be a long haul.'"

That much seems pretty certain.

P.S. The continuing U.S. reliance on drone strikes in the border regions continues to raise controversy. More on this later.

Frank Rich on equal rights

Here.

Beat it, I'm watching 'Thriller'

Not really, but why throw away a good post title? (And no, I didn't copy it from anyone, though someone has probably used it already unbeknowst to me.)

Everyone was saying on TV yesterday that he watched Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, etc. I don't know much about dancing (virtually nothing, in fact), but to me Michael Jackson's moves didn't resemble theirs much at all. But he could dance all right, no question about that.

Extra credit question: Which noted IR scholar has published a book about Fred Astaire? If you think you know, give the answer in the comments. The honor system is in place, so don't cheat by looking it up first!

Smuggling by children on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border

A depressing story on this subject last night on the NewsHour. Check out their website if you missed it.

Waltz symposium

In my e-mail inbox today is the table of contents for the June issue of International Relations (published by Sage), which carries the first part of a symposium titled "The King of Thought: Theory, the Subject, and Waltz," with a well-known cast of contributors. Thought I'd mention it in case someone is stopping by here who is interested but may not get the table-of-contents alert. (As to whether I'm going to read the articles themselves -- very unlikely, but I did look quickly at a few of the abstracts. At least a couple of the pieces will probably be of interest to those with theoretical preoccupations.)

Pakistan border update

As strikes by U.S. drone aircraft in the border regions continue, resulting in a number of deaths, a breakaway Taliban figure in northwest Pakistan who criticized Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud has been killed. The death of Qari Zainuddin "is being seen as a setback for the government in its efforts to isolate Mehsud ahead of the security forces' next phase of their anti-Taliban offensive in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, says the BBC's Mike Wooldridge in Islamabad."

However, as noted here, the bigger obstacle to the next phase may be the apparently insufficient number of soldiers the Pakistani army is committing.

Yes and no

Yes, I am aware of the events in Iran; no, I have nothing especially original to add at the moment to the abundant commentary in the traditional media (e.g., I just heard an interesting edition of the public radio program On Point on the subject, with Shaul Bakhash and others) and in the blogosphere.

Earth to Netanyahu

I said I'm taking a break unless something demands comment. Netanyahu's speech today does. His condition that a Palestinian state have "no army [and] no control of its air space" (to quote the BBC report) is absurd. The possession of an army of some kind has become a symbolic marker of modern sovereign statehood. Costa Rica and a few other states have no army, but they are very much the exception. The condition that any Palestinian state be demilitarized is a complete non-starter, as Netanyahu must know.

Update: As one commentator wrote in Ha'aretz (quoted here), "It is unlikely that a single responsible Palestinian worthy of the name will accept this junk." (This is someone's translation from Hebrew to French and then my translation from French to English, but it gets the gist of it.)

Break

Barring an event that absolutely demands to be commented upon, I will be taking a break from posting for all of June.