Of goats, gibbons, and the election season

I caught an interview today on All Things Considered with Rand Paul's Democratic opponent in the Kentucky Senate race, Jack Conway. Robert Siegel pressed Conway on a "controversial" (Siegel's word) ad criticizing what Paul did in college. Something about joining a group that deprecated Christians, worshipped "false idols," etcetera.

Look, it would be a disaster if Rand Paul were elected to the Senate, and I guess you do what you have to do (within certain elastic limits) to try to ensure that doesn't happen. On the other hand, I honestly don't give a flying **** what Rand Paul did in college. If he had had sexual intercourse with a mountain goat while engaging in lewd acts with a gibbon, I would regard it as irrelevant to his fitness to be a U.S. Senator.

Gentlemen never sue

The name of Theodore Roosevelt (class of 1880 at Harvard) is invoked at the very beginning of the movie The Social Network. The actor playing Mark Zuckerberg confidently, if a tad bizarrely, informs his girlfriend that TR’s membership in the Porcellian Club is what ensured his eventual accession to the presidency of the U.S.

Theodore Roosevelt – who as a Harvard undergraduate spent on club fees and clothes in two years a sum of money that would have sustained the average American family of the time for six years* -- is in some ways (but only some) a fitting patron saint for this movie, whose themes of money and class would not have been foreign to him. However, the only character in the movie that TR would really have understood is the rower who is reluctant to sue Zuckerberg because that’s not what “gentlemen of Harvard” do. The rest of the movie -- including the computers, the drugs, the parties, and the sexual situations – would have been, it is pretty safe to say, either incomprehensible or shocking (or both) to TR. That’s not a criticism of The Social Network, of course, but it is an indication of how much certain aspects of the world have changed in the last 125 years.

As for the movie on its own terms: it’s entertaining – especially the scene in which the actor playing Larry Summers appears – but I would take most of it with a few grains of salt.

---------------

*Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (paperback ed., Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), p. 259. For TR's views on masculinity, race, etc., in historical context, see Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Vintage Bks., 2005), pp. 355ff.

Sacked for gridlock

In the months leading up to Yuri Luzhkov's sacking as mayor of Moscow, Russian state-run TV apparently had criticized him for gridlock on the roads and the destruction of historic buildings, among other things.

If U.S. mayors could be fired or otherwise removed for gridlock, Washington, D.C. would not have the same mayor for more than a few weeks at a time.

A ghost laid to rest?

Reporting for the NewsHour last night on the dramatic rescue of the miners in Chile, Jonathan Franklin said (I'm paraphrasing) that the ghost of General Pinochet had been left at the bottom of the mine shaft. Meaning, presumably, that many people outside the country thought first of the Pinochet era when they thought of Chile, but now the first thing to come to mind will be the rescue. I don't know whether any of that's right, but it was an interesting remark.

Preview

Coming in November later this month:

Rhetorics of empire

NIMBY, Okinawa version

"The [Japanese] government is...struggling to decide how to implement an agreement with the US to move a Marine air base to a new site on the southern island of Okinawa. Opposition to the deal was underscored when voters in the area that is the proposed new site [of the base] backed opponents of the deal in a local election on Sunday."

-- from a recent article in the FT

A note to readers

A while ago I announced a summer break from posting, which I proceeded not to observe. Well, now I'm announcing a fall break from posting (even though fall is not quite officially here yet). This one I think I'll stick to, because the next couple of months are looking pretty busy.

Who speaks for the Iranian government?

The Iranian newspaper Kayhan, which is under the supervision of the office of the country's Supreme Leader, has called Carla Bruni Sarkozy a prostitute and said she deserves to die (the comments were prompted by Bruni's public intervention in the case of an Iranian woman who was condemned to death by stoning for adultery). But a spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry has said, in effect, "cool it." He has attempted to distance the foreign ministry from the newspaper's comments, insisting that critics can be taken to task without the use of insults.

So who speaks for the Iranian government? Kayhan or the spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry? Perhaps they both do. Autocratic regimes don't always speak with one voice. Even some totalitarian regimes don't always speak with one voice. Thus it was misleading for the Daily Telegraph to go with the headline "Iran calls Bruni a prostitute." In fact, "Iran" did no such thing. A newspaper that may represent one element of the regime did. There's a difference.

For links on this episode (brouhaha, whatever) see the Wikipedia entry on Kayhan, under the heading "Controversies."

Mystifications of the deficit hawks

Notwithstanding that the word economics comes (partly) from the Greek word for house (oikos), the analogy between the economic affairs of a private household and the economic affairs of a country -- an analogy beloved by the so-called deficit hawks -- does not work. A government is not a private household and the principles of household economy have only a marginal relevance to economic policy at the level of a nation-state.

Regrettably, neither Pres. Obama nor his advisers have publicly confronted and rejected this false analogy, and as a result it has largely held sway in public debate. As F. Llewellyn and J. Schwartz write in the current issue of Democratic Left:

The mass media reinforces the dominant conservative ideological view that the government should manage its finances as if it were a private household -- instead of realizing its power to expand long-term growth (and fiscal balance) by engaging in productive public investment.... And as President Obama has refused to take this ideology head-on, he is likely to suffer political losses in 2010 and could lose in 2012.... Even if the Democrats retain control of both chambers of Congress in 2010 and the president is re-elected in 2012, a cross-party alliance of deficit hawks could prevent passage of the real reforms we need.

Llewellyn and Schwartz call attention to a March for Jobs on Oct. 2 in Washington, which "represents the first nationally coordinated grass-roots effort to push back against the right wing, tea party, deficit hawk politics that captivate the mainstream media and the political class." I'm no longer much of a demonstration goer, but this is one demo I intend to make.

Noted

The Michigan War Studies Review.
(For those interested in military history.)

Dept. of dogmatic pronouncements

"...philosophy remains the only humanistic discipline that really teaches students to think critically and analytically...."
-- Brian Leiter, in the NYT

This statement is so absurd one wonders how the New York Times could have published it. On second thought, maybe one doesn't.

Carpe diem

When certain sociologists and psychologists find themselves insufficiently occupied, they invent new phases of the life cycle. That's one possible, admittedly somewhat cynical reaction to the piece in the NYT magazine on 20-somethings taking longer to reach 'adulthood' as conventionally defined. My patience for this kind of article tends to be so limited that I doubt I would have read much beyond the first couple of pages in the print version (which comes out Sunday); confronted with the online version, I read even less. However, I read enough to get the gist and enough to furnish an excuse for a post.

My take on this topic is much influenced, not surprisingly, by my personal history. When I was in my 20s, I wish someone had said to me: "Look, you will only be this age once. Don't feel that you need to rush into a career. Take some time to reflect on what you really want to do, perhaps travel, perhaps just mess around. Don't be afraid to take a rather low-paying, low-status job for a while when you need money. Explore, be adventurous." As best as I can recall, no one said this, or anything like this, to me, nor was it, I think, standard advice in that era (what era? well, just to fix a date, I turned 22 in June 1979, in fact on the very day I graduated from college). I went through college in four years without taking any time off (stupidly), and although I did take a one-year break from school between college and law school, I spent most of that year working. I then went straight through law school and on graduating I considered myself lucky to find a job (because graduating with a so-so record from an o.k. but non-elite law school in 1983 was not a recipe for being inundated with job offers). I wish someone had asked me at some point why I was in law school at all, but no one, as best I can recall, did. And, just to take another example, my college roommate's path was even more lockstep than mine: he didn't take any break at all between college and law school, but went straight through, getting his law degree in '82. (True, he went to a more prestigious law school than I did, and he seems to have liked his subsequent career; but I digress.)

The point is that when I see these hand-wringing articles about why young people are taking so long to 'grow up,' I think: 20-somethings should be allowed to take their time to grow up. They shouldn't feel they have to hit certain benchmarks (schooling, career, marriage, children) by a certain point, nor should society at large be concerned by their lack of interest in doing so. I do understand why people are worried about the phenomenon of young people moving back in with their parents, but that's not the central issue here. The main issue is that you're only 25 once. Readers of a certain age may remember that old TV ad (was it for beer? yes) in which the announcer intones: "You only go around once in life." A banality, of course, but it's true: you only go around once. This need not be a prescription for hedonism; rather, a prescription for considering possibilities. Maybe more middle-class kids should even think about (gasp) serving in the military. Or working for a cause, even if the job is difficult and ill paid (though many are doing this already, I admit). But I would say to a young person: whatever the exact course, step off the treadmill for a while; trust me, it will be there waiting for you when you get back.

The Pakistan floods and the media

It has been noted that the flooding in Pakistan has been getting less TV coverage than the Haitian earthquake did. That may be true, but the TV news that I watch (when I watch any), namely the NewsHour, has been covering the flooding quite extensively. Yesterday there was an interview with Holbrooke about it.

Noted

A new book collects interviews with Irving Howe from the last 15 years of his life, i.e., the mid-'70s to the early '90s.

P.s. (added 8/18): Some months ago I happened to run across a 1948 review by the young Howe of a book by Eric Bentley on Bernard Shaw. Published in the Trotskyist New International, the review contains some things Howe would not have written in later years, but it shows the skills as writer and polemicist that were evident throughout his career.

Canadian casualties apparently increase support for candidates of the governing party

...according to this paper. The results run counter to some findings on the political impact of casualties in the U.S. (though the paper doesn't discuss why Canada is different from the U.S. in this respect, just notes that it is different, or at least seems to be).

'Hearts and minds': an historical perspective

B.D. Hopkins's article "The Problem with 'Hearts and Minds' in Afghanistan," published in the Summer 2010 Middle East Report (site here; subscription required), makes several interesting points. The phrase "hearts and minds" was first used in 1891 by Sir Robert Groves Sandeman, agent to the British governor-general in Baluchistan. "What came to be known as the 'Sandeman system,'" Hopkins writes, "was based on the recruitment of local tribesmen into the edifice of imperial governance." In at least a limited sense, the system worked for the British insofar as Baluchistan under the Raj was relatively peaceful and "was considered a quiet backwater of imperial administration."

A traditional colonial power, however, had certain advantages that the U.S. today lacks, Hopkins suggests. A colonial power "is plugged into local information networks and has deep ties of patronage through which it draws on a collaborating elite," whereas an 'imperial' state (as distinct from a colonial one) lacks comparable "roots and interests in local society...." Formal colonialism is extinct (well, virtually extinct), for which Hopkins is (presumably) grateful, yet this makes the task of counterinsurgency more difficult, he argues. There is no equivalent in today's Afghanistan to the British settlers in Kenya or Malaya who helped give "the colonial state...a vested interest in the outcome of counterinsurgency efforts." (Although it must be noted that the British counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau in Kenya was very brutal and hardly something one would wish to duplicate.)

Hopkins concludes by "doubt[ing] the success of any US strategy [in Afghanistan] at this point." Others think it still may be possible to salvage an acceptable outcome, as three authors recently argued in Foreign Affairs. Who is right? I'll leave readers to reach their own judgments.

One-year retrospective on the EU's Eastern Partnership

In May '09 the EU launched its Eastern Partnership Initiative. The idea was to offer Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia closer political and economic links to the EU in exchange for domestic reforms. How has it worked? Judging from a paper (actually I only read the summary) done a few months ago by the Madrid-based think tank FRIDE, the answer would seem to be: Not very well. The link is here.

It seems that no one likes the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba

...which is not too surprising since, as I've noted before, it makes no sense.

[Hat tip: D.R.]

Noted

Bacevich riffs on Fukuyama to proclaim "The End of Military History." Find the link here.

The world according to Fortune

In a commentary on last night's Nightly Business Report (PBS), Allan Sloan, senior editor at large of Fortune magazine, argued that the "real bailout" was not TARP (the Troubled Assets Recovery Program), but rather such measures as the Federal Reserve's keeping interest rates close to zero. He said, among other things:

"The real bailout is the stuff you don't see and that didn't have a dramatic congressional vote, the way TARP did. The Fed keeping short-term interest rates at almost zero is a huge, huge subsidy to banks and investment houses. It's a major reason they're now making so much money and it's a huge penalty to America's savers and retirees, whose income on money market funds and short-term CDs is almost nothing."

How nice to see that Mr. Sloan is concerned about America's "savers and retirees." But what about America's workers and the economy as a whole? Wouldn't things likely have been worse than they were, and for almost everyone, if the Fed had not kept interest rates close to zero? One hardly needs to be an economist to see that an extraordinarily severe recession prompted this reaction and that the Fed would have been criticized if it had not lowered interest rates in the face of mass unemployment and severe contraction. Now, it's true I don't know how much low interest rates actually helped the economy, and I'm aware of reports that it remains difficult for small businesses to borrow because banks are still wary of lending. But it does seem to me that describing the policy of low interest rates as nothing more than a subsidy to banks and a penalty on savers, without any reference to its intended effect on the economy generally, is not likely to promote (to quote Mr. Sloan again) "understanding" as opposed to "grandstanding."

P.s. On a somewhat related note, see today's Wash Post article about the Democrats' renewed emphasis on the U.S. manufacturing sector.

Fisk on Israel, the EU, and NATO

With a sarcasm that may not be entirely unjustified, Robert Fisk blasts Israel's close political-military ties to NATO and the EU. It's no doubt the case, as Fisk writes, that Britain spends millions of pounds annually on weapons licenses for Israel and that NATO conducts military exercises with Israeli soldiers (as indicated by the recent helicopter crash in Romania in which several IDF members were killed).

Let's suppose, however, that NATO and the EU were to hold Israel more at arm's length. Would that affect its military capabilities? Almost certainly not, not as long as the U.S. is committed to $3-billion-plus in annual military aid to Israel aimed at ensuring that Israel maintains what is called in Washington policy circles its "qualitative military edge," or QME. The U.S.-Israel military relationship, and its untouchability in U.S. politics, makes the EU and NATO angles a sideshow. The problem is not so much that the U.S. gives Israel a huge amount of military hardware as that this connection is treated as effectively separate from U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In attempts to put pressure on Israel to stop settlement construction, for instance, the U.S. begins with one hand tied behind its back, since Israel knows that the U.S. would never threaten to cut down assistance or do anything else that would jeopardize Israel's QME. (Occasionally in the past the U.S. has withheld loan guarantees, but this sort of action has been very rare.) If you deprive yourself ab initio of your main source of leverage, you aren't going to be able to exercise much leverage: that's pretty obvious.

The UN water rights resolution

The UN General Assembly today declared access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation a human right, in a resolution that no country opposed but on which 41, including the U.S., abstained. The abstainers raised various objections, one of which had to do with the status of an ongoing 'process' on the subject at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, another with the alleged absence of a basis in international law for declaring the right to water a "free-standing" right (as the British delegate put it).

2.6 billion people, or roughly 40 percent of the world's population, lack access to sanitation, and nearly a billion people lack access to clean water. This resolution, like all General Assembly resolutions, is non-binding and must be seen as aspirational. It apparently does not commit states to any specific actions, though it does call on them to "scale up" efforts to transfer technology and expertise that would improve the situation. Aspirational resolutions are not meaningless, and abstaining on this particular one makes little sense. It only makes the abstainers look small-minded and mean-spirited. Moreover, pronouncements about the "existing state of international law" merely reinforce the accurate perception that international law in this respect is in need of renovation.

Update: S. Carvin at Duck of Minerva has a longer post about this here.

Trundling out The Liberal Tradition in America

I know I said I was reverting to silence, but hey...one of the benefits of writing an obscure blog is being able to ignore one's own pronouncements.

I just skimmed through a piece by Michael Desch (published as part of a symposium in PS, available here), who uses a line from Louis Hartz's classic The Liberal Tradition in America to explain the continuity between the Bush and Obama counter-terrorism policies. There is in fact some continuity; indeed, in certain respects -- e.g., more use of special forces operations in various parts of the world, more use of drone strikes -- the Obama admin has taken a more 'pro-active' counter-terror line than the Bush administration. (On the other hand, the Obama admin has been less inclined to sacrifice civil liberties on the altar of counter-terrorism than the Bush people were.)

Hartz's book, published in 1955 (when he was in his mid-thirties), has had a long afterlife. Desch quotes a sentence about liberalism's finding non-liberal ideas "unintelligible" and the effect this has on foreign policy. (I confess to never having read Hartz's book; I have, however, read Robert Packenham's 1973 book Liberal America and the Third World, which uses Hartz to explain and criticize U.S. efforts to advance 'political development' in poor countries.)

As a postscript, it should be pointed out, to avoid possible misunderstanding, that Hartz was not using "liberal" mainly in the liberal-versus-conservative sense of contemporary political debate, but rather to refer to a basic set of ideas that go back to the Founding and that have been broadly shared across the American political spectrum.

P.P.S. For discussion of Hartz's career at Harvard, which ended with his early retirement from teaching in 1974, see Paul Roazen's introduction to The Necessity of Choice: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Transaction, 1990), his edition of Hartz's lectures on that subject.

And one more thing...

...before I revert to silence for a while. This post throws light on one of the reasons so many immigrants, particularly from poorer countries south of the border, are in the U.S. illegally -- the reason in question being that the U.S. makes it virtually impossible for unskilled workers to get green cards that would enable them to migrate legally.
H/t: IPE at UNC (link at the sidebar).

60th anniversary of start of the Korean War

The NewsHour tonight had a segment on this, including a 90-second-or-so refresher on the background. I won't say more, because I'm on a summer break from posting.

Let them eat dark chocolate

A recent issue of Perspectives on Politics (vol. 8, no. 1, March 2010) carries a symposium on Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), by Douglass North, John J. Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NW&W).

The first review in the symposium is by Jack Snyder, who writes that NW&W "aim at nothing less than explaining democracy, economic development, and domestic social peace, which, they say, tend to go together for reasons that have heretofore eluded explanation by social science. The 'omitted factor' that they say causes these good outcomes is the 'open access' pattern of social relationships, based on impersonal rules that provide universal access to the benefits of political and economic organizations (p.13)."

Snyder hastens to assure us that this is more than "an all-too-familiar paean to the benign efficiency of democratic and market institutions, which," he notes with considerable understatement, "might be off-putting to some readers in the wake of the global financial meltdown." Rather, NW&W's distinction between open-access societies and limited-access societies (which they call "natural states") has, according to Snyder, "profound implications for efforts to engineer democratic and economic development."

"Like recent research on red wine and dark chocolate, everything you thought was bad for you turns out to be good, and vice versa. Orderly corruption and electoral manipulation turn out to be good in natural states, because they preserve social peace and allow the gradual development of rule-governed relations among elites [except, one might think, in places where civil wars are already ongoing, but never mind that--LFC]. Natural states advance toward impersonal social relations by partial steps as they mature. Instead of making an unsustainable leap to create encompassing impersonal categories like 'citizen,' they create semi-impersonal categories that treat all individuals of a given status -- nobles, clerics, whites, party members -- as juridical equals. Once rule of law and impersonal forms of organization are established among elites in this way, such practices can be extended to the entire population, if an elite faction sees an advantage in it."

Snyder observes that this supports "the view that successful democratic transitions need to be carried out in a sequence," starting with the construction of administrative and legal institutions and only then moving to "unfettered mass electoral politics."

Fair enough, I suppose -- but it seems to me that the stuff about natural states advancing gradually rather than "leap[ing] to create encompassing impersonal categories like 'citizen'" fails to capture certain important events in "recorded human history" -- such as, say, the French Revolution. Since I've only read the review, not the book itself, I hesitate to be too critical. Still, it does give one pause.

The summer break from posting...

...will now resume.

Grumpy observation of the day

I've been listening to some, not all, of the Kagan hearings. Today Kagan said (among many other things, of course) that a judge's or Justice's personal moral values should have no connection to her judging, and that constitutional adjudication is "law all the way down" (while acknowledging that many difficult legal questions arise on which reasonable judges can disagree about what the law requires, etc.). The notion that a judge's personal moral values have, and should have, absolutely no connection to his or her judging in any constitutional cases seems divorced from reality, and when an extremely intelligent person is put into the position of having to say something like this, perhaps the time has come to get rid of public confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees.

At least Kagan did say forthrightly that the original intent of the framers is only one factor that should be considered, and not always the most important or appropriate one, in deciding cases; she pointed out that many of the Supreme Court's free speech cases have interpreted the First Amendment in more expansive ways than the framers would have. That was a point well made -- and, incidentally, it served to highlight the absurdity of some assertions made by Senators about the framers. Sen. Cardin, for instance, said that the framers would have agreed with Brown v. Bd. of Education. This statement is either fairly pointless -- requiring one to ask what Madison, had he been alive in 1954, would have thought of the Brown decision -- or completely ahistorical. As anyone who has ever taken a junior high school civics class or a basic U.S. history course probably recalls, the Constitution tolerated not only segregation but also slavery (though it did provide for the eventual abolition of the slave trade), and it took the Civil War, and the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, to change that. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison viewed the original Constitution, because of its failure to confront slavery, as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." It's not necessary to endorse this precise language to see that the pre-Civil War Constitution was a deeply flawed document, something that should be kept in mind whenever people start blathering about the supposedly sacrosanct intent of the Framers.

Summer break

I'll be taking a break from posting for a couple of months (starting now).

The Colombian election

Here.

The yuan saga continues

The Chinese central bank's somewhat vague statement that it will move toward a "more flexible" exchange rate has drawn a range of reactions, from welcoming to highly guarded. This will be an important issue at the G-20 and beyond.

Time warp, Pakistan version

Today, northwest Pakistan is one of the more dangerous places on earth. It was not always so.

In 1965 an American couple then residing in East Pakistan with their two young children took a combined business-pleasure excursion to West Pakistan (leaving the children at home). The trip was reported in a letter to a relative in the U.S. For personal reasons I have redacted first names.

March 24, 1965
...Did I write you about our trip to West Pakistan -- [we] were gone from Feb. 28 - March 8 and left the children here [i.e., in Dacca] with a young American school teacher. All went very well. [The writer's husband] was a delegate to the Pakistan Economic Conference in Peshawar so we had a free trip. Drove to the Khyber Pass and had a two-day holiday in the beautiful Swat valley. Also caught the first day of the famous Horse Show in Lahore. Next trip: April 11-18 -- with the children.

Let's hope a time will again come when travelers are able to write "drove to the Khyber Pass and had a two-day holiday in the beautiful Swat valley."

Voltaire and coffee

A recent comment thread on Crooked Timber about the new Texas curriculum guidelines led me (once again inwardly bemoaning certain deficiencies in my education) to glance at the long-ish Wikipedia entry on Voltaire. At the end of the section headed "Legacy," there is this: "Voltaire was also known to have been an advocate for coffee, as he was purported to have drunk the beverage at least 30 times per day. It has been suggested that high amounts of caffeine acted as a mental stimulant to his creativity" (citing a 2005 Washington Monthly review of a book on the history of coffee).

Thirty times a day? Yikes. I drink one cup of coffee in the morning -- and not even every morning, sometimes forgoing it in favor of tea. But then, I'm no Voltaire (chorus: Boy, you can say that again!).

'The African Renaissance' in stone

I haven't referred a lot to Africa here, especially not recently, but I found this post by Timothy Burke, with accompanying photo, interesting. (More substantive remarks on it later, time permitting.)

Democracy, deception, and war

In my inbox today was an e-mail from the journal International Security containing links to a podcast and to a recent article by John Schuessler. The podcast is a conversation about the article between Schuessler and the journal's editor, Sean Lynn-Jones. (Links below.)

The article, which I have only looked at quickly, examines the ways in which FDR (allegedly) tried to "manufacture" public consent for entry into WW2 by deceiving the public about some of his actions and intentions. Schuessler concludes that this is one case in which deception of this sort was in the national interest. (Note: For a better summary of the article's argument, see the link at the end of this post, which will take you to the abstract; you can also download the pdf of the article for free.)

From a theoretical standpoint, what is going on here, as I understand it from the podacst and a glance at the article, and put in an oversimplified fashion, is this: Dan Reiter and Allan Stam have argued that democracies tend to win the wars they fight, in large part because leaders, constrained by the necessity of obtaining public consent, generally choose to enter wars where victory is likely to be easy. Schuessler says: Hang on a minute. What about those cases where the leader thinks that, for security reasons, a war is necessary, but the war does not promise to be quick and easy? In those cases the leader may resort to deception rather than take his or her chances with trying to persuade the public directly of the war's necessity. America's entry into WW2 and the way FDR approached it, Schuessler argues, was such a case. (Obviously, the reference here is to the period before Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. declaration of war against Japan was a foregone conclusion, and Germany's declaration of war on the U.S. brought it directly into the European war, thus fulfilling FDR's original aim, at least according to this argument.)

Now, this argument may be right, but how often are such cases likely to arise? Schuessler himself suggests in the podcast that WW2 was exceptional. If it was an exceptional case, then it may reveal some interesting things about when and how a leader resorts to deception, but it can't pose a severe challenge to the Reiter/Stam thesis. The most it can it do is present an addendum to the thesis, i.e.: yes, leaders of democracies generally choose "easy" wars, but in rare cases 'realist' reasons will incline them to "non-easy" wars and then deception may come into play. Of course one has to add a couple of other complications: (1) wars that most people think are going to be "easy" but turn out not to be (e.g., Iraq 2003); (2) wars that leaders believe mistakenly are necessary for security reasons (I would be very inclined to put the Vietnam War in this category).

So, deception -- accepting for the sake of argument the claim that FDR did engage in it -- may have been in the national interest in the run-up to U.S. entry into WW2, but more often, or so I would argue, deception will not turn out to be in the national interest (Vietnam, Iraq). When in doubt, then, the rule of thumb for a leader in a democracy should probably still be: Go directly to the people, explain your case straightforwardly, and hope they agree with you that the costs -- even if they promise to be high -- are worth bearing. (Whatever you think about the "Afghan surge," for example, it is clear that this is basically the approach Obama took when explaining why he ordered it. Admittedly the example is not on all fours since it involved an ongoing -- i.e., inherited -- war, and an undeclared one.)

Links: podcast; article.

The oil & energy speech

Without wanting to have turned it into a seminar, I think it would have been appropriate for the President to mention the historical roots of U.S. oil addiction -- namely, the cult of the private car, c. 1950 to the present, and the decisions it brought in train in terms of how the country's infrastructure and cities were developed. Otherwise, it was a decent speech, but it will take more than speeches to start tackling this problem as it should be tackled. Real political courage would have entailed proposing an increase in gas taxes, for example -- but in an election year and with a recession still not shaken, that was never in the cards.

Afghanistan: a sober assessment

Actually "sober" is an understatement for the picture that emerged from the NewsHour discussion tonight with Bacevich, Nagl, and Chandrasekaran.

Hitler and Mussolini in Florence, 1938

From Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (Vintage pbk., 1995), p.42:

Hitler exhausted his Italian host by spending four hours in the Uffizi. Mussolini, trailing behind, was heard to murmur in exasperation, "Tutti questi quadri... [All these pictures...]." Their guide, the anti-Nazi director of the German Art Institute, Dr. Friedrich Kriegsbaum, tried to keep the Führer moving along, fearing that Mussolini might give Hitler something he particularly admired, such as Cranach's famous Adam or Eve.

...and if you don't think this is funny, we don't have the same sense of humor.

The detritus of war

Leila Fadel, reporting from Fallujah, had a piece in the June 4 Wash. Post ("U.S. Military's Castoffs Find a Market Among Iraqis," p.A8) about the stuff left behind by U.S. forces. A few excerpts:

"The remnants of the U.S. occupation of Iraq are being sold to the highest bidders in yard sales across the country. The outskirts of cities like Baghdad, Fallujah and Ramadi -- once bastions of the Sunni insurgency -- are now destinations for bargain hunters interested in items such as generators and trailers. As the U.S. military draws down to 50,000 troops by the end of the summer, the junk left behind is quickly becoming part of the Iraqi landscape.... Entire villages pitch in to buy large generators and water purifiers, which are then shared. Many Iraqis still lack reliable running water and electricity.... [N]ew [U.S.] rules allow commanders to donate equipment worth $30 million at each base they hand over....

Rukaya Abdul Aziz, 32, recently held her youngest child inside her new home. Her past two houses were destroyed in U.S. attacks, she said.... The only shelter she and her husband...could find to replace their homes was a trailer once used as a latrine. They scrubbed it clean, took off the back and used concrete to build an extra room. 'We wanted something that wasn't American, but this was the biggest we could afford,' she said. 'We had no choice.'"

Judt on Israel

A friend kindly draws my attention to Tony Judt's NYT op-ed column today, which is worth reading. I would quibble with only a couple of his points, one of which is the statement that "Israel belies the comfortable American cliché that 'democracies don't make war.' "

First, 'democracy promotion' has taken a back seat in the Obama admin's foreign policy compared to that of G.W. Bush (type "democracy promotion" into the search box, top left-hand corner, if you want to see my earlier post on this), so it's not clear that "democracies don't make war" is still considered a truism in official circles, if indeed it ever was. (I haven't read the Obama admin's recently released National Security Strategy, which they're required to churn out periodically, so I don't know what the new NSS says about this, if anything.)

Second, insofar as Judt might perhaps be trying to make a reference to what IR types know as "the democratic peace," he's garbled it. The 'democratic peace' theory (DPT for short) holds that 'mature' or established democracies do not make war with each other. It does not say that democracies are peaceful; it only says they are peaceful in their relations with each other. Thus only a war between two countries that are both considered (or coded) as democratic contradicts DPT. Indeed a whole body of contested research maintains that democracies not only make war, but tend to do so more successfully than non-democracies. This controversy in the literature couldn't exist if there were not a full historical record of democracies' involvement in wars.

OK, so much for the pedantic side-excursion. Judt's main points -- including that Israel should be willing to negotiate with Hamas before Hamas meets all of Israel's current preconditions -- seem right to me.

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.)