Another step forward (?) for commodified, homogenized education

According to a front-page story in today's Wash Post by Michael Birnbaum (link here), the Montgomery County, Maryland public school system is selling the rights to an elementary school curriculum-in-development to Pearson, a huge, for-profit publisher of textbooks and other educational materials. The superintendent says the school system is broke and needs the money. That may be, but public school systems should not be striking these kinds of deals with for-profit companies, certainly not with enormous conglomerates like Pearson. Such a deal carries the potential for conflicts of interest and, more importantly, it doesn't seem right. In return for a two-and-a-quarter million dollar advance and a smallish percentage of royalties, school officials "will open their classrooms to prospective customers [of Pearson] and speak on behalf of the program at Pearson's request."

And who's going to buy the product? The article's second paragraph says the curriculum will be sold "around the world," but is that likely? Most countries want to control their own curricula, I would think. Why should a school district in country X buy a pre-packaged curriculum designed in the United States? More likely is that the Montgomery County curriculum will be sold to other U.S. school systems. But which ones? Surely states like New York and Massachusetts, for example, which have their own elaborate educational bureaucracies, standards, and system-wide tests, could not possibly have any interest in this, or so I would guess. But Pearson obviously thinks it can sell it, otherwise it wouldn't be shelling out the 2 million bucks. A clue may be that, as the article reports, the curriculum, although geared to give more time to social studies and art by "integrating them" with reading, writing, and math, also "will be aligned with new common core standards for math and reading that are quickly being adopted across the country, including Maryland and the District."

The whole thing, in short, seems to further the tide of commodification and homogenization that appears to be engulfing public education in this country.

'The Wounded Platoon'

I've been meaning to mention the Frontline program of this name, which I saw last month and which is worth watching, especially if you're interested in or concerned about the psychic effect of war (PTSD, etc.) or "hidden" physical effects (TBI, e.g.) and how the U.S. military does or doesn't address these.
On a related note, I saw in the library today Nancy Sherman's new book The Untold War. Unfortunately I probably won't get a chance to read it, at least not any time soon.
P.S. See also here.

Loosen the blockade

Freud's Little Hans, in the famous case study of that name, said: "Doing's not wanting, and wanting's not doing," or something to that effect. Adopting (or adapting) this syntax, one might say: "Moral's not (necessarily) legal, and legal's not (necessarily) moral."

In more standard English: Some people may have had time to absorb the dueling salvos of pundits and experts, self-appointed or otherwise, about the legality of the Gaza blockade. I have had neither the time nor inclination to do so. I glanced at a Charles Krauthammer column, which I couldn't bring myself actually to read, which cited a piece by Leslie Gelb that apparently defends the legality of the blockade. That view, however, is strongly disputed here, on the grounds that Israel remains in "effective" occupation of Gaza, controlling among other things its airspace and territorial waters, despite the 2005 withdrawal of settlers.

Apart from the question of its legality, the blockade in its current form is politically and morally bad, restricting as it does certain essential humanitarian items including medical equipment. The Obama admin. is apparently bringing some pressure to bear on Israel to reconsider how the blockade is administered, and the Israeli government itself is reviewing the matter. A loosening would be only a temporary improvement in an awful situation, but that would be better than nothing. All this is certainly not to deny Israel's legitimate security concerns vis-a-vis Hamas, but there must be a better way of balancing the considerations than the situation that exists now.

In January 2009, in a comment attached to this post, I expressed the view that an action (or actions) could be immoral even if lawful under international law, and I'm basically just reiterating that.

J. Sides versus M. Lilla

Mark Lilla has a New York Review piece on the Tea Party that has been getting some attention. John Sides at The Monkey Cage thinks Lilla is wrong, among other things, to argue that there has been a secular (i.e. non-cyclical) decline over time in the U.S. population's trust in government. I think Sides makes some telling criticisms on a number of points, but on this particular point he hasn't completely convinced me. I left a comment at his post explaining why.
Update: Sides responds here.

Lunacy on stilts

All Things Considered ran a piece this evening about a new shopping mall in East Harlem whose tenants -- mostly big retailers -- have agreed to hire a proportion of their work forces from among local residents. One of the retailers (Best Buy, I believe, though don't quote me on that) was reported to be proud that it had hired one of every two local applicants.

Why were the others turned down? Well, some of them, when asked in the interview why they wanted to work for the company, had replied that they needed a job -- and this was disqualifying!!

Here we have a program designed to encourage and facilitate the hiring of poor, inner-city residents, and an applicant fails if s/he tells the prospective employer that he or she wants to work for it because he or she needs a job. What is the applicant supposed to say? "I like meeting new people"? "I've always wanted to work for Best Buy/Costco/whoever"? "My goal is to be the manager of a retail establishment and this job will be a first step toward that goal"? Your guess is as good as mine. The point is that honesty is penalized and b.s. is rewarded. To someone immersed in the through-the-looking-glass culture of corporate America, this may make sense. To a sane person with some distance from that culture, it is crazy -- totally, thoroughly nuts.

Quote of the day

Ari Shavit, writing in Haaretz:

"During the 2006 war in Lebanon I concluded that my 15-year-old daughter could have conducted it more wisely than the Olmert-Peretz government. We've progressed. Today it's clear to me that my 6-year-old son could do much better than our current government."

Full column here.

Civic spirit, sacrifice, and the draft

The question Should the U.S. bring back the draft? has been hovering around the edges of political discourse in this country for a while, notwithstanding that the chances of its happening are minimal to zero. The reason the question continues to hover, I think, is that it taps into an ongoing uneasiness about the distribution of sacrifice at a time when the U.S. is involved in two active wars (albeit one of which, Iraq, appears to be in a gradual end-phase as far as U.S. military involvement is concerned).

The point of this post is not to offer a yes or no answer to the question, but simply to raise the issue, which I've not done here before (to the best of my recollection). Given the approach of Memorial Day, this seems like an appropriate time to do it.

I'll start with a quotation, something Michael Sandel wrote five years ago:

"Notwithstanding the outpouring of patriotism in the immediate aftermath of September 11, and the sacrifices being made by the soldiers in Iraq, American politics lacks an animating vision...of the shared obligations of citizenship. A few weeks after the terrorist attacks of 2001, President Bush...was asked why he had not called for any sacrifices from the American people as a whole. He replied that the American people were sacrificing by enduring longer lines at airports. In a 2004 interview in Normandy, France, on the anniversary of D-Day, NBC's Tom Brokaw asked the President why he was not asking the American people to sacrifice more.... Bush seemed mystified, replying, 'What does that mean, "sacrifice more"?' Brokaw offered the example of World War II rationing and restated his question: 'There's a great sense, I think, that there's a disconnect between what the American military people are doing overseas and what Americans are doing at home.' Bush replied: 'America has been sacrificing. Our economy hasn't [been] as strong as it should be, and there's -- people haven't been working. Fortunately, our economy's now strong, and it's getting stronger.'

"That Democrats did not seize the theme of sacrifice, and that Bush scarcely understood the question, testifies to the dulled civic sensibilities of American politics in the early years of the twenty-first century. Without a compelling account of the public purpose, the electorate [in the presidential election of 2004--LFC] settled, in a time of terror, for the security and moral certitude they associated with the incumbent President." [1]

Sandel's approving reference to Brokaw's mention of World War II is one of many indications that, as the historian David A. Bell wrote a couple of years ago, "in the United States, our equivalent of the [French] legend of [the mass levy of] 1793 is the legend of World War II. Particularly today..., the years 1941-45 have come to be regarded as a veritable American Golden Age.... instead of treating the war [WWII] as a truly exceptional moment in American history -- a combined moment of industrialized mass warfare and real national peril -- we treat it as a paradigmatic one. It has become the standard against which we measure ourselves and, not surprisingly, find ourselves wanting." [2]

Bell went on to argue that the civic reason for reinstating the draft -- to even the distribution of sacrifice and "provide the population as a whole with a common civic experience" -- receives little support from "the overall history of modern Western democracies":

"At the height of the French Revolution, during a legislative debate on the war, a deputy to the Legislative Assembly grandly declared that 'if we are not yet Spartans or Athenians, we will become them.' But in fact, we are not Spartans or Athenians, and will never become them. Which is to say, we will never accept the infringement on individual liberty represented by conscription other than as a direct response to extreme danger. To do otherwise is simply not in our civic nature." [3]

I'm not certain that experts in the history of systems of military service (of which I'm not one) would agree that "we will never accept the infringement on individual liberty represented by conscription other than as a direct response to extreme danger." The last time the U.S. had a draft was during the height of the Vietnam War, and in that case publicly articulated opposition to the draft was couched, for the most part, in terms of opposition to that particular war. It was not primarily framed in terms of "we are not Spartans or Athenians" and therefore conscription, except in highly unusual circumstances, is alien to our "civic nature." How much doubt this casts on Bell's argument is, I suppose, debatable -- opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft was, to use the jargon of social science, overdetermined -- but it does perhaps suggest that the question is a bit more complicated than Bell allows.
--------------------------
1. Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (2005), p.3.
2. David A. Bell, "When the Levee Breaks: Dissenting from the Draft," World Affairs (Winter 2008), p.66.
3. Ibid., p.67.

Yoo on Kagan

John Yoo's critique of Elena Kagan's views on presidential power raises some rather odd questions, such as: What if Congress forbids the President from firing a subordinate? Come on, Prof. Yoo: How often has that happened in, say, the last 30 years?

Prince of shlock

We're approaching the summer movie season, when good actors embarrass themselves by appearing in bad movies. Case in point: Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The synopsis, which I take from IMDb, goes something like this: An adventurous prince teams up with a rival princess to stop a villain from destroying the world with a sandstorm.

Would you pay ten dollars to see this? I think I might pay ten dollars not to have to know about it. Too late for that, unfortunately.

Sure, let's hold joint naval exercises, what a great idea...

In response to the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel two months ago, apparently by North Korea, the U.S. has announced that it will hold joint naval exercises with the South. The main point of this kind of thing is to demonstrate U.S. support for the South. However, if the presence of 28,500 U.S. soldiers in South Korea does not already show enough support for the South, it's hard to see that joint naval exercises will add much. As Selig Harrison observed on the NewsHour tonight, there are other steps that might make more sense, such as, for starters, settling the long-running maritime boundary dispute between the two Koreas. Even though the disputed boundary apparently did not figure in the latest incident, it has been an ongoing source of tension. I don't know the details of this dispute at all, but in theory at least most maritime boundary disputes are not that intractable (unless they involve title to islands, which I don't believe is the case here). Lock the parties in a big room or two, along with a bunch of experts, maps, surveys, fancy technical equipment, food and drink, and let no one out until the thing is settled. With the maritime boundary issue out of the way, they could get on to some other matters, like finally negotiating a formal end to the Korean War.

Annals of self-defeating decisions

Israeli immigration officials have barred Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank, where he was scheduled to speak at Birzeit University. An Israeli interior ministry spokeswoman said the whole thing is just a misunderstanding. Chomsky's Palestinian host was of a different opinion. You don't particularly have to be a Chomsky fan to realize that this is a classic case of a government shooting itself in the foot.

Sexual abuse and terrorist activity: is there a connection?

Jessica Stern, lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School and author of The Ultimate Terrorists, gave a talk recently at the University of Maryland that I attended. Part of the talk covered the same ground as her article "Mind Over Martyr: How to Deradicalize Islamist Extremists" (Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2010; link here [full text requires subscription]).

Rather than summarize the whole talk or article, I'll focus on one point. Stern writes:

"One element worth examining...is the potential impact of sexual abuse on radicalization. Much has been written about the role of radical madrasahs in creating terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere.... Outside of the Pakistani press, however, little note is made of the routine rape of boys at such schools. Also troubling is the rape of boys by warlords, the Afghan National Army, or the police in Afghanistan. Such abuses are commonplace on Thursdays...because Friday prayers are considered to absolve sinners of all wrongdoing. David Whetham, a specialist in military ethics at King's College London, reports that security checkpoints set up by the Afghan police and military have been used by some personnel to troll for attractive young men and boys on Thursday nights. The local population has been forced to accept these episodes as par for the course: they cannot imagine defying the all-powerful Afghan commanders. Could such sexual traumas be a form of humiliation that contributes to contemporary Islamist terrorism?"

The answer is not known, but in her talk Stern mentioned that several jihadists she has interviewed have hinted at this. The Western press has reported in recent years on the rape of women and girls in war zones, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. Scholars who study the intersection of gender and conflict also have written about the sexual exploitation of women and girls. But the fact that males can be and are victims of sexual exploitation has not been as widely discussed (except in the context of the clergy abuse scandal), and the possible connections to terrorist recruitment and behavior have not been investigated.
-----------------
Note: See also the Frontline (PBS) program "The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan"; link here.

Let's wait for the hearings

I've commented at Crooked Timber (see the comment thread attached to this post) about Obama's choice of Kagan for the Supreme Court and am not going to repeat myself at length here. I would have preferred a different nominee, but this choice is defensible, and it may turn out to be better than some now think. Perhaps we shouldn't rush to judgment and should wait for the confirmation hearings, though they have in recent years become something of a pre-scripted farce. Still, the hearings do reveal a little about how a nominee handles herself or himself in a highly public situation. For a biographical profile of Kagan, see here.

Symbolic milestone in Red Square

For the first time, soldiers from Britain, the U.S., and France have participated in a V-E Day parade in Moscow. The event was not entirely free of diplomatic tensions, however, as Vladimir Putin apparently disinvited both Prince Charles and V.P. Biden. On the other hand, official relations between Russia and Israel may be improving.

Symbols and symbolic occasions, of course, have been and still are important elements of international politics, although evidently I haven't paid a lot of attention to them in this blog. A search on "symbols" turns up only one post, for a quoted reference to border walls as "symbols of separation."

Point counterpoint

Today's issue:

Did nationalism -- or proto-nationalist sentiment -- exist in late-medieval and early-modern Europe?


No, says Daniel Nexon:

"Early modern European politics...lacked a fundamental feature of contemporary politics: nationalism. The tight connection between nation and the state represented by the ideal of 'national self-determination' simply did not exist in dynastic agglomerations.... Local identities remained far more important than the still inchoate notions of patria or nation.... Dynasts might, often through propaganda, argue that their dynastic interests and the interests of their holdings were synonymous. Sometimes they succeeded, but there was nothing obvious about the harmony of dynastic ambitions and the interests of a kingdom or principality. As J.H. Shennan remarks, 'We should beware of misinterpreting aspects of the consolidation of princely authority in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as evidence of proto-national sentiment.' " [1]

Yes, says Norman Housley:

"...the extent to which the members of Europe's political communities felt united by national feeling in the late Middle Ages remains hotly disputed.... Bernard Guenée provided a useful analytical framework for the ways in which national sentiment developed. Nomenclature (Francia, Alemania, Polonia, and so on), a common language, a sense of geographical cohesion, shared religious traditions (above all, 'national' saints), and the consciousness of a common history, were all important motors for national feeling; while for the historian, they form indices for the strength of that feeling at any given point. Thus, for Guenée, 'the fact that neither the states nor the subjects of the duke of Burgundy had a common name was more of a threat to Charles the Bold than the policies of Louis XI'.... Guenée and others have also placed emphasis on dynastic continuity, administrative advances, a sense of resentment against privileged and intrusive foreigners, and above all the homogenizing burden of war, as contributory factors in the growth of national feelings. Some historians, including myself, believe that the result was a national sentiment of considerable vigour, which was closely bound up with the development of European statehood." [2]

-----------------------
1. Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe (Princeton Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 94-95.

2. Norman Housley, "Pro deo et patria mori: Sanctified Patriotism in Europe, 1400-1600," in P. Contamine, ed., War and Competition Between States (Clarendon Press/Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 225-226.

David Rohde interview

I caught part of this on the radio this afternoon. Click here.

What's at stake in the British election

Courtesy of Henry Farrell, here's a link to a piece on the Foreign Affairs website about the UK election.

I read the first two paragraphs of the piece. In the second paragraph, the authors manage to work in the famous line from The Communist Manifesto, "all that is solid melts into air."

As the (generic) kids say, I'm like: O-kay, I can read the rest of this later.

David Obey won't seek re-election

One of the leading liberal Democrats in the House and chair of the Appropriations Committee, he has been in Congress since 1969. This is not welcome news.

Jupiter and Mars

With protests in Greece, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in New York, and various other things going on, is it frivolous to post about a song? Of course, but this blog flies under the radar to such an extent that I've decided it doesn't matter.

Last night's 'American Idol' (yes, I do watch it occasionally) reminded me how much I like 'Fly Me to the Moon,' made popular by Sinatra (though others have sung it, and someone else, perhaps Tony Bennett, might have sung it first). Unfortunately, a quick search of Youtube just now did not yield a version that I especially like. The closest was this 1966 TV clip of Sinatra singing it in front of Nelson Riddle's orchestra. The decor and everything else has a rather dated feel, but it can't spoil the song.

The clip is here.

(And/or you can go to the 'Idol' website and watch last night's performance of the song by Aaron [don't remember his last name], which was quite good.)

Ethnic grievances and civil conflict

Some political scientists think that grievances of ethnic groups stemming from (real or perceived) injustices are so widespread that they cannot be causes (or proximate causes, at any rate) of civil wars or conflict. But in this post, Lars-Erik Cederman explains why he and some other researchers believe the jury is still out on this issue.
[Hat tip: The Monkey Cage]

Has Obama "spread the wealth"?

Looking back at this old post and the comments attached to it, I was reminded of the ruckus that Republicans made during the 2008 presidential campaign about Obama's alleged redistributionist beliefs. The then-candidate's remark to 'Joe the plumber' about "spreading the wealth" became a club that Republicans wielded mercilessly until election day.

Well, the Obama administration has been in office now for 15 months. Has it embarked on a concerted effort to redistribute wealth and income? Hardly. Rather, the administration's efforts on domestic policy have focused in large part on measures either to restore the status quo ante or to shore up safety nets in the face of the ongoing effects of the recession and the financial crisis. Health care reform as passed will, at some future point, raise tax rates a bit on upper-income taxpayers, and Congress I believe let the '01 Bush tax cuts, which primarily benefited the wealthy, expire. [Correction, 7/27/10: I was premature on this. They haven't expired yet.] But those are the only measures I can think of offhand which might be claimed to have some kind of redistributive effect. (Giving millions of more people access to health insurance, which the health care reform bill has as one of its main aims, is laudable but will not directly change the distribution of wealth or income much, if at all.)

In fact, it's the administration's relative lack of concern with redistribution, and its failure to move more aggressively to reduce unemployment and invest more heavily in public works, that has disturbed (to use a mild word) elements of the Left (or the progressive movement, if you prefer that terminology). For example, writing in the current issue of Democratic Left, Joseph M. Schwartz says:

"...the claim that the president's stimulus plan saved more than 2 million jobs...provides little solace to the some 25 million Americans either unemployed, underemployed, no longer searching for work or working far fewer hours than they need. Yet the administration is celebrating the creation of 140,000 (mostly temporary) jobs in March, when it would take job growth of 350,000 per month over the next 4 years (!) to replace the seven million jobs lost in the Great Recession (plus employ the 120,000 young persons who join the labor force each month)....

"President Obama fears that embracing the revenue-raising powers of progressive taxation opens him to charges of being a tax-and-spend, weak-on-defense and craven-on-terrorism Democrat.... Yet what good does the president's buffing his neoliberal credentials do when such policies won't lower unemployment rates? These rates virtually guarantee electoral defeat for his party in 2010 and for himself in 2012! Why not tell the truth: that amid a collapse in private investment and consumption, only massive counter-cyclical public investment in alternative energy, mass transit, and infrastructure can put Americans back to work and restore the consumer demand needed to spur private capital investment?"

So there you have it: far from Obama's having fulfilled right-wing fears that his "socialist" administration would embark on a massive redistribution of wealth, 15 months after Obama took office the leading theoretician of Democratic Socialists of America is complaining about insufficient "counter-cyclical public investment" in terms that he probably could have applied in the same way to every other president since FDR! Chances are that no president will ever favor measures that will satisfy Joe Schwartz and those (like me) who share his domestic-policy views, because structural forces constantly push presidents to the perceived middle of the political spectrum. In any case it was always clear that Obama, despite his remarks to Joe the Plumber, was not a committed redistributionist. The whole idea was preposterous, a right-wing fantasy cooked up in a desperate, futile effort to salvage McCain's presidential campaign.

Quote of the day

Last month marked the 35th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. So for today's quote, here's one of the concluding paragraphs from Christopher Lasch's 1971 essay "The Foreign Policy Elite and the War in Vietnam" (reprinted in his The World of Nations, 1974). I'm not sure I agree entirely with everything in it, but that would have to be the subject of another post sometime.

"The [Vietnam] war is more than a generalized expression of American culture; it is also the particular expression of a particular class which has for too long played the dominant role in our affairs. This was not a war thrust on the country by reactionaries or marginal elements; it was a liberal war, the culmination of twenty years of cold war carried out under liberal auspices and reflecting the traditions of a ruling class supposedly enlightened, mature, and superior to the grosser strains in American life. The pretensions of the political elite have been thoroughly shattered by this debacle, and if the American people have learned anything from it, they will not again turn to a Johnson or a Kennedy merely because he presents himself to the public as more moderate than a Goldwater or a Nixon."

Russian archives on Katyn Forest massacre are now online

See here.

Fred Halliday, 1946-2010

Scholar of the Middle East and international relations. Obit from The Guardian here.

[Hat tip: The Virtual Stoa]

Update: More here.

Strategy against al-Qaeda

Via this blogger, I came across Nicholas Lemann's review in The New Yorker of various recent books on terrorism. One of the books Lemann discusses is Audrey Kurth Cronin's How Terrorism Ends (Princeton Univ. Press). According to the review, Cronin urges, among other things, trying to separate local grievances from al-Qaeda's global ideology:

" 'Bin Laden and Zawahiri have focused on exploiting and displacing the local concerns of the Chechens, the Uighurs, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat in Algeria, and many others, and sought to replace them with an international agenda,' Cronin writes. The United States should now try to 'sever the connection between Islamism and individualized local contexts for political violence, and then address them separately.' It should work with these local groups, not in an effort to convert them to democracy and love of America but in order to pry them away, one by one, from Al Qaeda. ('Calling the al-Qaeda movement "jihadi international," as the Israeli intelligence services do,' she writes, 'encourages a grouping together of disparate threats that undermines our best counterterrorism. It is exactly the mistake we made when we lumped the Chinese and the Soviets together in the 1950s and early 1960s, calling them "international Communists." ')"

Cutting the connection between al-Qaeda's international agenda and its local affiliates sounds sensible, especially since the affiliates already appear to be at least partly driven by local concerns. Take the recent suicide bombing aimed at the British ambassador in Yemen, presumably carried out by al-Qaeda-in-the-Arabian-Peninsula. The intended target was a high-ranking Western diplomat, but that in itself does not mean that the motive for the attack was a grandiose global ideology, as opposed to a desire to strike at a perceived ally and patron of the Yemeni government. And the recent bombings against Shias by al-Qaeda-in-Iraq seem more like a response to the killing of that group's two top leaders than part of an effort to further the establishment of a new caliphate.

The U.S. press, citing intelligence sources, has drawn a portrait of al-Qaeda's central leadership as increasingly isolated somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and increasingly unable to communicate effectively with its various branches. The connections that Cronin calls for severing on the plane of ideology may thus already be tenuous on the level of organization -- and that in turn may furnish an opening for pressing forward with a strategy of "address disparate threats separately."

Quote of the day

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
-- T.S. Eliot, Philip Massinger (1920)

[Hat tips: HC and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 14th ed.]

UK election: the second debate

Here and (a pre-debate post) here.

If I'd been writing the letter

Harvard College recently sent admissions notices to 2,110 of the 30,489 applicants to its Class of 2014 -- an admissions rate of 6.9 percent. The linked article notes that applications have doubled since 1994, with half of that doubling coming since the university introduced a series of financial aid initiatives, aimed at students from middle- and lower-income families, in 2004.

If I'm not mistaken, an applicant to Harvard 30 or 35 years ago had roughly a 1-in-5 chance of getting in. Now the odds are roughly 1-in-15 (or 1-in-14). This year, as has no doubt been the case for a while, far more students than the total admitted had perfect SAT scores and ranked first in their high school classes.

Some of the 28,000-plus applicants who got the "we regret" letter from the Harvard admissions office at the beginning of this month are probably mature and self-confident enough to have shrugged it off; but others of these kids, maybe especially the ones with amazing records, were perhaps quite disappointed (and at least a few, eighteen-year-olds being what they are, were probably crushed). Now, I don't know what the Harvard "we regret" letter says, but I'm willing to bet a fair amount of money that it doesn't say what, IMHO, it should.

If I'd been writing that letter, I'd have said something like this:

"Dear Sally/Tom/Peter/Julia/Jason/Alberto/whoever:
We regret [etc.]. We know this is not the letter you wanted to receive from us. We had an enormous number of exceptional applicants and could only admit one in fourteen. We have to consider all kinds of things in making our decisions, and although we could have admitted, for example, a class comprised entirely of high-school valedictorians, that would not have resulted in the diversity that Harvard, like every other institution, aims to have in its student body. So while we considered each applicant very carefully, in the end you should take our decision not mainly as a reflection on you, but rather mainly as a reflection of the constraints under which we were operating.

"Since we work here, the undersigned obviously think that Harvard is a good university. But we also know that, as the country's oldest university, it is shrouded by a mystique which obscures the reality that Harvard is not better than many other institutions whose faculties, students, and programs are just as good and just as distinctive. In any case, the quality of your college education and experience will depend principally on you, not on the particular institution you attend. There are no automatic or guaranteed tickets to success (however one might define success), and you will come to realize sooner or later that the institutional name on your diploma is less important than what you did in the course of earning it. Even in a status-conscious society such as ours, reputation goes only so far, and in the end it cannot substitute for individual efforts (or, for that matter, cover up our own shortcomings). We hope that these observations will help you put our decision in proper perspective.

With all best wishes for your future [etc.]
Sincerely,

I thought it was Hallmark

"...as Plato said, I just want to remind you to be nice to one another...."
-- Sarah Palin, in a speech in Hamilton, Ontario

[HT: House of Substance]

Be wary of labels

D. Drezner draws attention to a recent NYT article that describes Obama's foreign policy as "more realpolitik" than G.W. Bush's. I don't think this description illuminates much, but could any minimally sane foreign policy be less "realpolitik" than G.W. Bush's? With a few exceptions that I've discussed before, Bush's foreign policy was pretty much a disaster, and the action that historians will mention first, the Iraq invasion, was the antithesis of realpolitik. So in this context "more realpolitik" means "less crazy."

R.P. Wolff's (online) memoirs

My blog-reading circuit has gotten pretty restricted lately, but I happened to glance earlier this evening (well, it's technically morning now, isn't it) at Brian Leiter's blog, which I rarely look at, and as a result I discovered Robert Paul Wolff's blog with his memoirs, which apparently a lot of other people have already discovered. There's a lot of it (the memoir, that is) and I've only been able to look at parts of it very quickly, but it appears to be well worth a look for those who have the time and are likely to be interested (and the best way to find out whether you're in that category is to go over and take a look).

Wherein the break is briefly interrupted

The local PBS station just aired Daniel Goldhagen's film about genocide, Worse than War (made to accompany his book of the same name). It has some powerful and emotional moments.

It also has an argument and a set of policy recommendations, none of which I have the time or inclination to go into, at least not now. But one or two reactions may be worth noting. Most of Goldhagen's scholarship (including his prize-winning undergraduate thesis and his Ph.D. dissertation, which became the famous and controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners) deals with the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This film however deals with genocide in general, focusing on various instances of it, especially fairly recent ones (e.g., Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s; Guatemala in the '80s; Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; and Darfur).

Goldhagen argues in the film that genocidal political leaders are not "crazy" but are "rational calculators" (his phrase) who weigh costs and benefits; if they are made to realize that genocide will not 'pay' because they will be punished swiftly, then they will not order it. This description may very well apply to Slobodan Milosevic or Omar al-Bashir. Goldhagen does not say explicitly, however, that this description applies to Hitler. And whether the "rational calculator" label applies to perpetrators, as opposed to leaders, is less clear still. (As Goldhagen mentions at one point, surviving concentration camp inmates were sent on forced death marches in the very last days of Nazi Germany, even after officials in the Nazi hierarchy had ordered killings to stop; the organizers of the death marches ignored those orders.) Goldhagen also observes that genocidal leaders mobilize and play on prejudices that people already have; of course, since such prejudices are usually irrational, "rational calculators" have to know how to mobilize and harness irrationality. In the process, however, isn't it possible that these "rational calculators" may come to believe the myths that they start out by exploiting? If so, does that make them less rational? These questions were not really addressed in the film; perhaps they are addressed in the book.

[The break from posting will now resume.]

Another break

The press of other things means that I must take another longish break from posting.

On this day in 1865...

...Lee surrendered to Grant, ending the Civil War. The NYT front page from 145 years ago, with the generals' correspondence leading up to the surrender. [Hat tip: HC]

Justice Stevens

Justice Stevens's announcement that he will be retiring at the end of this Supreme Court term prompts the reflection that he changed fairly dramatically (and for the better, in my opinion) over the course of his tenure on the Court. He was not always firmly in the Court's liberal wing. He had a somewhat restrictive view of the First Amendment in his first years on the bench, writing for example the 1978 "seven dirty words" opinion (FCC v. Pacifica) that upheld regulation of broadcast "indecency."

In more recent years he could be counted on to vote with the so-called liberal bloc (a somewhat misleading shorthand, but one that seems to be entrenched in media usage). His dissenting opinions in Bush v. Gore and in the recent campaign finance case (Citizens United v. FEC) will surely be remembered as two of his finest hours.

(For my post on Citizens United, type "Citizens United" into the search box, upper left corner. For a list of highlights from Stevens's opinions, by USAToday's Joan Biskupic, click here.)

P.S. If you want a comment thread on this, you can go to The Volokh Conspiracy blog, where a one-sentence post "Justice Stevens to Retire" already has more than 100 comments. Of course some of them appear to be odious, hateful, ill-informed garbage, but hey, it's the Internet...

Update: There was a fairly informative discussion of Stevens and his legacy on the NewsHour tonight (which I saw after writing the post). The participants know much more about the subject than I do, and I found only one or two of the remarks questionable.

Second update: A column by a former clerk to Stevens.

Haiti, Pakistan, and education

Now here's a bit of a twist: reading a piece of online writing in a hard-copy newspaper. In the Wash. Post for April 1, which happens to be in front of me at the moment, there's an excerpt on the op-ed page from Lee Hockstader's entry for that day on Post Partisan, the paper's opinion blog. He writes about last month's UN conference on Haiti called to receive pledges of support and to discuss reconstruction. $5.3 billion was pledged for the initial two-year recovery program.

Hockstader notes among other things that Haitian president Préval's speech at the conference called for help for Haiti's educational system, "which even before the earthquake had produced an illiteracy rate of almost 40 percent for adults and a quarter of all children with no experience of school whatsoever." In January I had written a brief note about a W.Post article on Pakistan's public schools; the article referred to half of all adults in the country not being able to sign their name. Since it's too late to look up the exact figure, I'll interpret this as meaning that Pakistan's illiteracy rate is (roughly) 50 percent, higher than Haiti's. Pakistan is of course less poor than Haiti, so this is further evidence if any were needed that you can't infer facts about 'human development' just from GDP per person.

Nuclear posture review

Good post on it by R. Payne here.

Wikileaks video

Assuming it's authentic, this is very disturbing. Even though the quality of the video is somewhat poor and it's difficult to discern some details, it shows a July 2007 attack by U.S. helicopters on people in a Baghdad street who the helicopter crews seemed to think were armed (and a few of whom may have been carrying weapons -- hard to tell), but which ended up killing civilians, including two Reuters employees, and wounding two children.

Misunderstandings

The Preacher of the Pontifical Household, in a sermon delivered in the Pope's presence and printed on the front page of the Vatican's official newspaper, read from a letter apparently sent to him by a friend that compared recent criticisms of the Pope to anti-Semitism. The Vatican has said that the sermon does not represent its official view and that such an analogy could "lead to misunderstandings."

This might be funny if it were not so absurd and outrageous. For one thing, the letter writer has a deficient grasp of anti-Semitism and of prejudice in general. "The use of stereotypes and the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism," the letter said. The writer was no doubt trying to say that the sins or errors of some Church officials should not be attributed to all of them or the institution as a whole, but the attempted analogy doesn't work. That's because anti-Semitism and racism usually start and end with attributions of collective guilt: there's no need to "pass from" a putative individual guilt to collective guilt because the evil nature of the entire group is simply assumed. "Misunderstandings" indeed.

Quote of the day (2)

"Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine together inherited more than 4,000 strategic nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. As a result of negotiated agreements among Russia, the United States, and each of these states, all of these weapons were returned to Russia for dismantlement. Ukraine's 1,640 strategic nuclear warheads were dismantled, and the highly-enriched uranium was blended down to produce low-enriched uranium, which was sold to the United States to fuel its nuclear power plants. Few Americans are aware that, thanks to the Megatons to Megawatts program, half of all the electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the United States over the past decade has been fueled by enriched uranium blended down from the cores of nuclear warheads originally designed to destroy American cities."

-- Graham Allison, "Nuclear Disorder," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2010, pp.82-83

Quote of the day (1)

From W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (Norton, 1965), p.56:

"Harriet Martineau's two volumes, The History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, covering the years 1815 to 1846, were published in 1849; by 1855, but for the Crimean War, it would have been possible to speak of forty years' peace. Within that period British troops had been in action against Gurkhas, Pindaries, Mahrattas, Sikhs, Afghans, Burmese, Chinese, Kaffirs, Ashantis and Boers. Ships of the Royal Navy had bombarded Algiers, routed the Turks at Navarino, operated against Mehemet Ali, underwritten Latin American independence, blockaded Buenos Aires and the Piraeus, captured slavers and waged war on pirates from the Caribbean to the China Sea. Assam, Sind, the Punjaub [sic] and a great part of Burma had fallen to British arms. Quae caret ora cruore nostro? [What coast does not know our streams of blood? -- Horace; translation courtesy of a loyal reader.] It was natural that a country which lived by its foreign trade and its foreign investments should protect and extend them, in the last resort by force; it was remarkable that so many of its inhabitants did not realize that this had been done for years and treated the Crimean War as something different, not merely in scale but in kind, from anything that had happened since Waterloo."

(Actually, not so remarkable if one accepts a distinction between wars that involve more than one Great Power and wars that do not.)

Break

I will be taking a break from posting for all of March.

Operation Moshtarak

On Thursday ISAF and Afghan forces raised the Afghan flag over the central market in Marjah (the town in Helmand province that has been the focus of this latest operation). This symbolic act means relatively little in itself, as a U.S. brigadier general obliquely acknowledged in an interview on the NewsHour Friday evening when he said that more remains to be done to clear the area of IEDs etc.

The real question, though, is whether Operation Moshtarak will eventually be able to claim some kind of long-term success, or whether the Taliban will just return to the area after the 'surge' begins to wind down in 2011. (This is one of a number of questions raised by V. Yadav at DofM a while back.) The operation so far has cost the deaths of 14 ISAF soldiers and twice that many Afghan civilians. Especially in view of this, it will be regrettable, to say the least, if it turns out that this operation does not have lasting effects. I'm not necessarily arguing it won't, I'm saying the overall situation is such that one has to worry about this.

Let's hope that those who have lost their lives in this operation have died for something more lasting and significant than the raising of a flag over a town's central market. Let's hope that the Afghan 'surge' will turn out to do what its proponents claimed it would. The jury is still very much out.

A civilian nuclear deal with Pakistan?

A little over a year ago, in December '08, I had occasion to write:

"One aspect of a [U.S.] diplomatic strategy might be to offer Pakistan a nuclear deal similar to the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal, on condition that Pakistan take a more vigorously constructive and helpful stance toward the U.S./NATO position in Afghanistan. Now that the A.Q. Khan network has stopped functioning [I might have been premature in this judgment], even if Khan himself remains something of a revered figure in certain Pakistani quarters, there is no principled reason to deny Pakistan the same sort of nuclear arrangement that India has with the U.S. (Concerns about the long-term stability of the civilian government, however, admittedly might be a complicating factor.)"

I was therefore interested to read Christine Fair's recent op-ed column ("Pakistan Needs Its Own Nuclear Deal," Wall Street Journal, Feb. 11; available on her website) in which she proposes "a conditions-based civilian nuclear deal" between the U.S. and Pakistan. She writes:

"This deal would confer acceptance to Islamabad's nuclear weapon program and reward it for the improvements in nuclear security that it has made since 2002. In the long shadow of A.Q. Khan and continued uncertainty about the status of his networks, it is easy to forget that Pakistan has established a Strategic Plans Division that has done much to improve safety of the country's nuclear assets."

What would Pakistan have to do in return?

"First, Pakistan would have to provide the kind of access and cooperation on nuclear suppliers' networks identified in the Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation. Second, Pakistan would have to demonstrate sustained and verifiable commitment in combating all terrorist groups on its soil, including those groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba that Pakistan often calls 'freedom fighters' acting on behalf of Kashmir and India's Muslims."

Although recognizing that this proposal would be hard to sell in both capitals, Fair thinks it is worth "putting...on the table now."

Unlike the linkage schemes I criticized here as overly ambitious, this one appears to make some sense. Recently, however, there has been increased cooperation between Pakistan and the U.S., especially in the area of intelligence sharing and related matters (see Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung, "Greater U.S. pressure led to Pakistan arrests: new level of cooperation emerging in struggle against Afghan Taliban," Wash. Post, Feb. 19, p.A1). As reported on the NewsHour today, Pakistani officials say that almost 15 senior and mid-level Afghan Taliban figures have been captured recently. If this sort of cooperation continues, the need for a nuclear deal may become less pressing. But it's hard to know whether it will continue.
P.s. Jim Walsh offers a somewhat different (i.e. more skeptical) view of Pakistan-U.S. intelligence cooperation.

'Behind Taliban lines'

The Frontline program of this title, which aired last night, is worth watching; the second half of the program (also worth watching) dealt with Pakistan's public schools, mentioned earlier here.

Annals of lunacy

Via Yglesias: A right-wing blogger saw a book by Nathan Glazer on Michelle Obama's bookshelf and concluded that she must be a secret Commie because the book is called The Social Basis of American Communism. Any comment would be superfluous.

The Straussian in Ford's White House

Here.

Kipling, again

Kipling has come up here before -- see this post and Hank's comment on it. Now I notice a BBC piece about Kipling's boyhood home in Mumbai: plans to turn it into a museum have been dropped and it will instead become a gallery for the work of local artists.

The piece, the transcript of a broadcast on BBC's Today show, contains this among other things:

"Some of Kipling's work, including lines like 'And a woman is only a woman; but a good cigar is a Smoke', jar with critics today [what a surprise--LFC]. But the debate surrounding their actual meaning remains active and vigorous.

For instance, one of his most famous poems, which begins: 'Take up the White Man's Burden/ Send forth the best ye breed' does not refer to British Imperialism at all but celebrates the US occupation of Cuba and the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War."

It's true that the poem "The White Man's Burden" was addressed to Americans in the wake of the Spanish-American War. It may also be true that there is "active and vigorous" debate about its meaning, although I would tend to doubt that it's all that active. It is, after all, hard to read a poem describing the colonized as "Your new-caught sullen peoples,/Half-devil and half-child," as an ode to universal equality.

An old textbook but still a good one, James Joll's Europe Since 1870 (1973), quotes the first stanza of the poem in a footnote (p.102) and adds: "It is worth noting that the general tone of the poem is pessimistic: the colonial administrator is there 'to seek another's profit and work's another gain,' and his reward is 'the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard.'" Pessimistic or not, the poem's central message embodies, as Joll observes, the basic imperialist assumption that "advanced" peoples had a duty to "bring civilization and good administration to the backward ones...."

Quote of the weekend

"The train was pretty empty, just a gaggle of Bronxville soccer moms going into the city to spend money. There was something creepily alike about all of them, as if they were the same model of car, just different years: one wore a white sundress with pink stripes, another wore a pink sundress with green polka dots. They all wore sandals and had designer sunglasses perched atop their similarly coiffed heads. I found this spectacle somewhat depressing, because I had always thought, or hoped, that adults weren't necessarily as hobbled by mindless conformity as so many of my peers seem to be. I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well -- adult. That adults weren't cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would cease to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood. But beneath their gloss of confidence and entitlement, I could tell the ladies were nervous, almost scared, for they knew they didn't belong in the city anymore -- once they married the investment banker and moved to Bronxville they ceased to be New Yorkers. The city is cruel in that way."

-- Peter Cameron, Some Day This Pain Will Be Useful To You (Picador, 2009), pp.214-215.

Tariq Ali on Obama's foreign policy

The current issue of New Left Review carries a piece by Tariq Ali (available on the NLR website) that purports to be an analysis of Obama's foreign policy. I say "purports" because even a quick look at the piece -- and that is all I have given it (though I have saved a copy for more careful reading later) -- reveals that Ali's fundamental assumption clouds whatever analytical acumen he might otherwise have been able to bring to bear.

Ali's fundamental assumption is that the U.S. is an aggressive imperialist state and that every president since at least Jimmy Carter has used the Middle East as the fulcrum from which to extend the malign hand of American power across the globe. Ali calls U.S. actions in Afghanistan imperialist aggression, he calls the actions of Pakistan in South Waziristan, Swat, and Bajaur "domestic ethnic cleasing," he labels Judge Richard Goldstone a "notorious time-server of 'international justice'" -- note by the way the quotation marks around "international justice" -- and he depicts Mahmoud Abbas as a servile client of the U.S.

Ali labels Obama's speeches in Cairo, Oslo and elsewhere as cant, hypocritical and emollient "homilies" designed to cover the fact of imperialist aggression with a tissue of banalities. Ali of course omits to note that these speeches contained a certain amount of self-criticism -- God forbid that anything should be permitted to disturb the picture of the U.S. as an unrelievedly malign hegemon.

Now, I have long had some sympathy for aspects of the left-wing critiques of U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. has tended to define its geopolitical interests much too expansively, so that even in periods of relative strategic retrenchment the long hand of American power can be seen in hundreds of military bases that ring the globe. And the U.S. has been far too uncritically supportive of whatever the Israeli government of any given moment chooses to do vis-a-vis the Palestinians. The U.S. should long ago have brought real pressure -- i.e., monetary and aid pressure -- to bear on Israel to change its stance on settlements, boundaries, and the other issues that will need to be resolved in any final Mideast settlement. The U.S. should realize that a clearer focus on Palestinian concerns and historical and contemporary grievances would ultimately benefit not only the Palestinians but Israel as well, by assuring the Iatter of a Palestinian neighbor that has an incentive to observe and implement any peace settlement. (In this respect, W.R. Mead's call for a "Copernican shift" in U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have fallen largely on deaf ears in Washington.)

Having said that, I find Ali's piece to be a polemic masquerading as analysis. Starting from the assumption that the U.S. is by definition incapable of doing anything right, that it operates through a network of uniformly bloody, crooked and despotic puppets, and that virtually any entity that violently resists the American "empire" cannot be too misguided and indeed is probably praiseworthy simply by virtue of that resistance, Ali naturally comes to the conclusion that there is continuity between Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama -- they are all stewards of empire, he says, and all that has changed from Bush II to Obama is the "diplomatic mood music." Obama cannot be much different from Bush, in this perspective, because the structural imperatives of "empire" are what dictate policy, and rhetoric is conceived as simply a gossamer blanket thrown over a bloody fist.

But rhetoric and policy are not two hermetically separate compartments. The 'real world' of international politics does not consist only of the use of force, whether military or economic, and the cutting of deals of one sort or another. You don't have to be an IR scholar -- all you have to do is follow the news semi-attentively -- to realize that much of what goes in international relations is talk, and to that extent rhetoric is not separate from policy; it is policy. To dismiss Obama, as Ali does, as a "president of cant" is to ignore this point, among others. As for the rest, you can read the piece and judge its merits for yourselves.

P.s. In the section of his piece on Iraq, Ali refers to "Eastern European prostitutes" who service the large American military base at Balad. However, the New York Times article he cites in a footnote refers to "Mila from Kyrgyzstan" as a masseuse not a prostitute. I leave it to readers to determine whether this apparent inability to distinguish between f***ing and getting a massage says anything about Ali's perspicacity in general. (Also, Kyrgyzstan is not in Eastern Europe.)

Quote of the day

From a column published under Nicolas Sarkozy's name in Le Monde in early December (my trans.):

"I say to my Muslim compatriots that I will do everything so that they can feel that they are citizens like all others, enjoying the same rights to live in accord with their faith, to practice their religion with the same freedom and dignity. I will fight against all forms of discrimination.

"But I also want to tell them that in our country, where Christian civilization [la civilisation chrétienne] has left a deep trace, where the values of the Republic are an integral part of our national identity, anything which could appear as a challenge launched at that heritage and those values would doom to failure the establishment of an Islam in France which, without renouncing any of its essentials [sans rien renier de ce qui le fonde], could travel the path to inclusion in our social and civic compacts [note: this is a very loose translation of the last phrase of the passage: aura su trouver en lui-même les voies par lesquelles il s'inclura sans heurt dans notre pacte social et notre pacte civique]."

Of rule, revenue, and raging violations of the Fourth Amendment

No one much likes to be taxed. Many Americans, however, actively hate to be taxed. The U.S. is, relatively speaking, an undertaxed society, especially since the Reagan years, and local, state, and federal governments must try to find ways to raise money that do not involve taxation. This is a problem even in good economic times, and in bad times an acute one. Here's a small example: Every two years I receive a notice in the mail telling me that I must take my car to a facility to have its emission system checked to make sure that it's not violating Maryland's emissions laws. I duly take my car to the facility, fork over fourteen dollars, watch while the technician does something -- and the 'something', to someone's credit, seems to have gotten quicker and more streamlined over the years -- and am handed a piece of paper saying that my car has passed the test. What does this accomplish? Well, I suppose it gives a number (albeit a relatively small number) of people jobs, and I am, all things weighed, definitely in favor of that. It also may make a very marginal contribution to cleaner air, but this is doubtful it seems to me, since how many owners of polluting vehicles are going to obey the notice? -- more than likely they're just going to rip it up. That leaves the real purpose of the exercise: to raise money for the local and perhaps the state governments, and to raise it in a way that does not involve taxation. (I think I'd rather pay fourteen extra dollars in tax every two years and be spared the time and inconvenience of taking my car in for the emissions check, but my preference is presumably not widely shared.)

This is all by way of preface to expressing some -- well, outrage seems the appropriate word -- at seeing tonight's NewsHour report on so-called DUI checkpoints in California. I say "so-called" because the real purpose of these checkpoints, the report made clear, is to find people driving without licenses, impound their cars for thirty days, and then either collect the fines that people pay to retrieve them or, if no one retrieves the vehicle, auction it off. The result is that millions of dollars flow into local government coffers, specifically the coffers of the local police agencies (with a chunk going to the towing companies). Never mind that the people whose cars are impounded are overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants (who often need their cars in the most imperative sense as their survival may depend on driving to a job); and never mind that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has already ruled that the warrantless impoundment of cars under these circumstances is unconstitutional. (The state's legal powers-that-be claim to be waiting for another ruling from the Ninth Circuit but I couldn't see anything unclear about the first one, judging from this report.) After all, the Ninth Circuit ruling is just a piece of paper to those who want to ignore it, and it would be hard as a practical matter (though not impossible, I think) to hold the entire police force of a city in contempt of court.

Now there are probably good reasons from a safety standpoint to get unlicensed drivers off the road, as a Berkeley professor suggested at the outset of the piece. But it's not clear that the impoundments accomplish this. One person interviewed said that when his car was impounded he just went out and bought another. He knew he was doing something illegal by driving unlicensed but he needed a car to get to his construction job. (Presumably some people in that situation can't afford to buy another car, but there were no statistics presented on that. And if you search hard, you can find some pretty inexpensive cars out there. How about driving unlicensed and in a clunker? What gain for safety then?)

If you want to reduce unlicensed driving, do it openly, not under the cover of a DUI check. If you want to reduce drunk driving, how about raising the age for a driver's license? If you want to raise revenue, do it the old-fashioned way, however unpopular. Don't have local police run ostensible DUI checkpoints whose real aim is to find undocumented immigrants driving without licenses and impound their cars for thirty days before selling them to the highest bidder. These checkpoints are discriminatory. They are unconstitutional. They are one small but not insignificant result of a society too immature, and a political system too dysfunctional, to fund essential public services in a conscionable, sensible way: by paying for them directly. The country of course is in the midst of an economic crisis and a recession, but this story underscores a more permanent problem in the U.S.: the survival of a me-first, devil-take-the-hindmost mentality that may have been in some ways beneficial during the first century or so of the republic's existence but became counterproductive in the twentieth century and is unqualifiedly disastrous in the twenty-first.

Lowther's linkages; or, could a nuclear Iran be good for the U.S. and the Middle East?

In a recent New York Times op-ed ("Iran's Two-Edged Bomb," Feb.9), Adam Lowther argues that a nuclear Iran might be a blessing in disguise for the U.S. and the Middle East. He should have settled for making the point that a nuclear Iran would pose less of a threat than is generally supposed. Instead Lowther produces an intricate and implausible linkage scenario that makes the most convoluted aspects of Bismarck's diplomacy look like tiddlywinks by comparison.

Here's the gist of his argument: (1) a nuclear Iran threatens countries in its region, including, e.g., Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states; (2) the U.S. could offer security guarantees to these countries mainly in the form of "a Middle East nuclear umbrella" and in return (3) the U.S. would demand: (a) wide-ranging democratic and other reforms in Arab autocracies that would drain some of the major breeding grounds of Islamist militancy; (b) higher oil production and lower oil prices from the oil-producing countries and (c) cost-sharing by those under the 'umbrella' for the expense of maintaining it. The result of all this, says Lowther, could be defeat of al-Qaeda and other similar groups; "a victory in the war on terrorism"; lower oil prices; a "needed shot in the arm" for the U.S. defense industry as weapons systems are exported to U.S. allies (read: client states), etc.

Now I happen to think that Western governments and foreign policy establishments exaggerate the potential bad consequences of Iran's getting nuclear weapons. But Lowther's scenario rests on some weird assumptions. First is the notion that trading a U.S. nuclear umbrella for fundamental reforms in Saudi Arabia and other allies is something these allies would go for; if they felt as threatened by a nuclear Iran as Lowther says they would, why couldn't they turn to China or Russia for security guarantees instead of the U.S.? Unlike the U.S., China and Russia would not demand those pesky domestic reforms; instead they would probably be content with economic rewards and concessions. Secondly, Lowther seems to think it would be a wonderful thing to create a Cold War-style regional balance in the Middle East, with a nuclear Iran playing the role of the USSR and Saudi Arabia et al. playing the role of Western Europe under a U.S. nuclear umbrella. How this arrangement, even if it did lead to domestic reforms in the Arab autocracies, would result in the demise of Islamist militancy is something of a mystery. Doesn't Lowther recall that one of al-Qaeda's main complaints was the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia -- i.e., in proximity to some of Islam's holiest sites -- during and after the Gulf War? The notion that the extension of a U.S. nuclear umbrella over Saudi Arabia would persuade al-Qaeda and similar groups that they should give up the struggle, because the price of said umbrella would be a fundamental transformation of the Saudi polity, doesn't really compute. Where is the evidence for the argument that autocracy breeds discontent which breeds terrorism; therefore get rid of autocracy and you are on the road to getting rid of terrorism? Are those attracted to the jihadist worldview really interested in seeing a parliamentary democracy in Saudi Arabia? To be sure, they want to remove the current Saudi regime, but I was under the impression that it was that regime's links to the U.S. that is one of their prime grievances.

The main argument of Lowther's column has the feeling of a fantasy, of a Rube Goldberg contraption dreamed up at a desk. Instead of arguing that a nuclear Iran could lead to all good things from "victory" in the "war on terror" to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, Lowther should have written a column about why in fact a nuclear Iran poses less of a threat than is widely thought, how states that acquire nuclear weapons generally do not become irrational or insane in their foreign policy behavior, and why the West should therefore not be getting its knickers into such a twist over the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Now Lowther does make the point at the end of the piece that "unless the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, and his Guardian Council chart a course that no other nuclear power has ever taken, Iran should become more responsible once it acquires nuclear weapons rather than less." But this sensible sentence has been preceded, unfortunately, by so many non-sensible sentences that I doubt many people will still be reading.

Did you hear about the Catalonia referendum?

A couple of months ago Catalonia voted for independence from Spain. Two asterisks: the referendum was entirely symbolic, and although it passed by a wide margin the overall turnout was low.

HC's pithy if perhaps slightly unfair verdict: "Sounds like something out of an early Woody Allen movie."

But seriously: it's a lot better to hold symbolic referenda than to kill people (cf. ETA, etc.).

Polonius vs. Goldman Sachs, with a note on oligarchy

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be."
Polonius, in Hamlet I.iii

That old blowhard Polonius -- does anyone pay much attention to him? Certainly Hamlet didn't, if memory serves. And Goldman Sachs, among others, isn't. One way Goldman has managed to post record profits recently is by borrowing and lending the federal government's money, as Paul Solman's reporting on the NewsHour this evening made crystal clear. As a bank holding company, Goldman borrows from the Fed at extremely low interest rates (a fraction of one percent), then loans the money back to the government by buying Treasury bills, which pay, say, 3 1/2 percent. Result? Big profits, big bonuses...and a sense among those hearing this that, hey, wait a minute, this just doesn't seem right. One hedge fund manager, not connected to Goldman Sachs, told Solman that the solution was either to raise interest rates or pass a lot of new laws and regulations "as thick as a phone book." Given what seems to be occurring, I think the right phone book might not be unwelcome just about now. But don't hold your breath.

Not long ago, one of the political science journals carried a piece called "Oligarchy in the United States?"* I haven't read it, but here's a sentence from the abstract: "Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political influence than average citizens and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in certain key areas."

To paraphrase Claude Rains in Casablanca: I'm shocked, shocked to find oligarchy going on here.
Or Rains as an appropriately cautious academic: I'm shocked to find that oligarchy may be going on here.
-------------------
*Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page, "Oligarchy in the United States?," Perspectives on Politics (December 2009), pp.731-751.

Drones -- again

Vikash Yadav at Duck of Minerva argues that a leadership decapitation strategy via drone strikes is not effective against the Taliban and associated networks in Pakistan. He says it creates only temporary disruption and causes civilian casualties. But this raises a question I just asked in comments there: what other military strategy against the Pakistani Taliban is available to the U.S.? This may be a case where doing nothing is preferable to doing something ineffective, but persuading the CIA and Pentagon of that would, I suspect, prove to be difficult.
Update: Yadav's reply is now up at the DofM comment thread.

The campaign finance case (Citizens United v. FEC)

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision last month in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is an example of judging divorced from reality. To mention at the outset something that has occasionally gotten lost, this case was not about direct contributions to candidates by corporations: such contributions remain illegal, although corporations’ PACs (political action committees) may contribute to candidates. Rather, Citizens United had to do with advertising by corporations that endorses or advocates the election of a particular candidate, either directly (vote for X) or by criticizing a candidate’s opponent (Y is no good; therefore [implied message]: vote for X). The decision basically says that it is unconstitutional to prohibit corporations from financing such ads with money in their general treasuries. The main reason? According to Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, corporations are speakers and money is speech, and the statutory provisions in question violate the First Amendment by "banning" political speech. As the dissent argues, "ban" is a misnomer since the law at issue deals with one method of financing speech; corporations have been and still are free to form PACs, solicit contributions to them from shareholders, employees and their family members, and use that money to fund their electoral communications. The majority pooh-poohed this point.

In overturning a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which held that the government has a compelling interest in checking the "corrosive and distorting effects" of unlimited corporate spending in election campaigns, the Citizens United majority purports to regard ‘the marketplace of ideas’ as incorruptible and inherently self-correcting. In the majority’s view, speakers -- defined to include corporations -- speak; the electorate then separates the wheat from the chaff, the true from the false, irrespective of how much one side’s voice is amplified by the money at its disposal. That the electoral process almost certainly does not and almost certainly will not work in this way in a polity and society where corporations have a privileged position -- and where their organizational attributes allow them to amplify their influence on the electoral process -- is reasonably obvious, or so one would have thought, to anyone who has not been living under a rock.

(Note: At the oral re-argument of the case last September, which I heard broadcast on C-Span radio the day the decision came down, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, arguing for the government, declined to offer a strong defense of the "antidistortion rationale" of Austin, though she did of course urge the Court not to overrule the case. The government, it’s now clear, was going to lose regardless of who said what at oral argument, but Chief Justice Roberts in his concurrence made a point of quoting Kagan’s statement that Austin was not the clearest opinion (she either said "not the most pellucid" [which is how I had heard it on the taped broadcast] or "not the most lucid" [which is how Roberts quotes her from the transcript].)

As Justice Stevens’s dissent points out, the Citizens United decision will greatly advantage corporations vis-à-vis political parties, since parties are prohibited from raising and spending "soft money." As the dissent also points out, the majority failed to understand that the regulations at issue did not pit certain interests having nothing to do with the First Amendment against the claims of free speech. Rather, the questions raised by limits on corporate money in elections bring one kind of First Amendment interest into tension or conflict with another kind. Since I can't say this better than Stevens did in his dissent, I will quote him:

"All of the majority’s theoretical arguments turn on a proposition with undeniable surface appeal but little grounding in evidence or experience, 'that there is no such thing as too much speech,' Austin, 494 U. S., at 695 (Scalia, J., dissenting) [footnote omitted--LFC]. If individuals in our society had infinite free time to listen to and contemplate every last bit of speech uttered by anyone, anywhere; and if broadcast advertisements had no special ability to influence elections apart from the merits of their arguments (to the extent they make any); and if legislators always operated with nothing less than perfect virtue; then I suppose the majority’s premise would be sound. In the real world, we have seen, corporate domination of the airwaves prior to an election may decrease the average listener’s exposure to relevant viewpoints, and it may diminish citizens’ willingness and capacity to participate in the democratic process.

"None of this is to suggest that corporations can or should be denied an opportunity to participate in election campaigns…or to deny that some corporate speech may contribute significantly to public debate. What it shows, however, is that Austin’s 'concern about corporate domination of the political process,' 494 U. S., at 659, reflects more than a concern to protect governmental interests outside of the First Amendment. It also reflects a concern to facilitate First Amendment values by preserving some breathing room around the electoral 'marketplace' of ideas….

The majority seems oblivious to the simple truth that laws such as §203 do not merely pit the anticorruption interest against the First Amendment, but also pit competing First Amendment values against each other. There are, to be sure, serious concerns with any effort to balance the First Amendment rights of speakers against the First Amendment rights of listeners. But when the speakers in question are not real people and when the appeal to 'First Amendment principles' depends almost entirely on the listeners’ perspective [this is a reference to the majority’s argument that the regulations deprive listeners of valuable information--LFC] it becomes necessary to consider how listeners will actually be affected."

I also urge those interested to read the powerful concluding section of the dissent.

A mess indeed

Wash Post headline re the snow storm: "A Historic Mess." That about sums it up.
I hope people in the area are managing to stay warm. I'm not writing this at home, which has no power. Still, nothing compared to an earthquake.

Angkor Wat exists

Two notes:

1) I will have a post up on Citizens United v. FEC; aiming for next week.

2) I can't resist saying this somewhere, and while perhaps it more properly belongs on the comment thread attached to this recent Duck of Minerva post, I'm going to put it here instead. ProfPTJ, in the course of explaining his philosophy-of-science position of "ontological monism," distinguishes it from a rejection of "common-sense realism" and writes: "One need not make profound ontological investments in order to assent to the proposition that Angkor Wat exists, even if one is very unlikely to ever go there and see it in person."
Well (how can I say this without sounding smug and insufferable?) I have actually been to Angkor Wat, albeit a very long time ago as a young child (seven-ish I'd say, maybe six) with my parents and brother. (We were living in E. Pakistan, as it then was, at the time, and we were either going on home leave or coming back from it.) This was obviously before the U.S. pulled Cambodia into the Indochina conflict and Angkor Wat became a dangerous place. I think I have no direct first-hand recollections, but there are photos somewhere, and for present purposes I admit them into evidence as equivalent to first-hand recollection. One of our fellow tourists was an Oxford don, no longer alive, whose books I read years later in college. Anyway, I don't have to make any ontological investment, profound or otherwise, to assent to the proposition that Angkor Wat exists.
And on that insufferable note, I wish you a nice weekend.

One reason why the proposed 2011 budget is $3.8 trillion

Some things, discretionary but judged to be necessary, cost a lot of money. For instance, the proposed budget allocates $7 billion to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and complex. As J. Lewis points out, the administration sees this as linked to its efforts "to find votes in the Senate for ratification of the START Follow-on Treaty and, at a later date, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty."

France and the veil

Wearing the full veil has become a hot-button issue in France, but the reasons may not be immediately obvious to many of those who don't live there. If countries can be said to have ideas of themselves, then assimilationism, the notion that Frenchness is a matter primarily of culture rather than birth, is an element of France's idea of itself. And "culture" here implies acceptance of certain substantive principles. Note, in the BBC article linked above, the French immigration minister's reference to "the principles of secularism and equality between men and women," acceptance of which is considered, at least in this official view, part of what it means to be French.

I recently had a conversation with the sociologist Rogers Brubaker (ah, the pleasures of name-dropping), and afterward I took a quick re-look at his book Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992), which I had read a long time ago. The book brings out, among other things, what Brubaker calls "the weakness of the ethnic moment and the correlative strength of the assimilationist moment in French self-understanding" and the way in which Frenchness has been defined "in social and political rather than ethnic terms, as a matter of social becoming rather than intrinsic being" (p.112). For his bio and more recent books, click here.

P.s. Two relevant blog posts: here (from last July) and here.

Counterintuitive findings on Islamist militancy in Pakistan

The current issue of International Security carries an article by Jacob N. Shapiro and Christine Fair, "Understanding Support for Islamist Militancy in Pakistan," which is based on a survey of urban Pakistanis. According to the abstract, they find that poverty, personal religiosity, and support for sharia law, among other things, are poor predictors of support for militant groups, as is faith in the country's democratic process. The last line of the abstract ventures to suggest, on the basis of the findings, that economic development, democratization and the like "may be irrelevant at best and might even be counterproductive" in the effort to reduce support for militancy.

The absence of a link in the urban setting between poverty and militancy is not, I think, too surprising, but the statement that those "who support core democratic principles...are not less supportive of militancy" sounds so counterintuitive that one suspects the abstract has been consciously written as a tease, to entice people to read the whole article. It will be interesting to see if people do read it and if it stirs debate.

Yes we can -- well, maybe

"Let's end tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas." Pres. Obama said this numerous times during the '08 campaign. The line reappeared in his State of the Union speech, which shows how politically difficult it is to change this part of the tax code. Actually, right now it's politically difficult to do much of anything, at least in terms of legislation. The Founders, we are continually told, wanted a constrained, self-checking government, but this is ridiculous.

On foreign policy and trade policy, the State of the Union speech broke little new ground: the U.S. needs to export more - no surprise; trade should be on a level field - no surprise; we are in danger of being overtaken in technological innovation by other countries - no surprise. It was nice, however, to hear Obama reaffirm his commitment to a nuclear-free world. He also mentioned repealing the don't-ask-don't-tell policy (a line noticeably not applauded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff).

As for the rest of the speech, I thought Obama struck a number of reasonably good notes. The focus on unemployment was both substantively and politically necessary, as was the emphasis on measures to help small businesses borrow and to encourage them to hire. The spending freeze (not to take effect until 2011, since "that's the way budgeting works") was also something he probably did not have much choice, at least politically speaking, but to propose.

Moreover, it was entirely appropriate, despite what some have said, for Obama to criticize the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance case that came down last month. I've read parts of the opinions, which taken together total more than 180 pages, and I had thought about putting up a separate post about the case, but I probably won't. I'm guessing readers of this blog are not that interested in the fine points of First Amendment law. Suffice it to say that the decision is pretty awful. Justice Alito's reaction to Obama's remarks during the speech, and the comment the reaction has occasioned, is a tempest in a teapot.

Obama's appeal to rise above partisanship and divisiveness was both eloquent and expected, though whether it will fall on receptive ears remains doubtful. "The politician looks to the next election, the statesman to the next generation": I seem to recall this line from an essay -- I don't remember which one -- by John Rawls, who was presumably repeating a distinction that had been drawn before. How many of the politicians in Congress are statesmen or stateswomen in this sense? Hmm...

Blog mini-roundup on Canada (specifically the proroguing of Parliament and related issues)

Here, here and here.