A message to Obama re Pakistan?

The FT reports Robert Gates saying on Thursday that the U.S. would consider joint military operations with the Pakistanis inside Pakistan if asked - but that we haven't been asked. Odd. Is this how we ask? Also odd: in the midst of a story otherwise devoted to retailing Gates' comments, in slips two cents from a "congressional aide' that might be construed as a rebuke to Obama:

“Joint combat operations would spark serious domestic opposition in Pakistan,” said a US congressional aide. “But unilateral operations by US troops would spark a true conflagration.”

Mr Gates stressed that the US was not considering undertaking large military operations inside the country, saying “we’re talking about a very small number of troops, should that happen.”

Obama asserted last August that as President he would be willing to attack al Qaeda inside Pakistan without approval from the Pakistani government: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will" (Reuters, 8/1/07).

Obama's 'what I meant' moments

Repelled as I've been by Hillary's "Obama loves Reagan" attack line, it must be admitted that Obama has an unfortunate tendency to dig deeper when he's in a hole. It is really not true that he didn't praise Reagan's policies. He did, implicitly, by acknowledging that Americans felt that government had grown unaccountable after "the excesses of the 60s and 70s." To say that the Republicans have been "the party of ideas" because they "challenged conventional wisdom" also implies that there was a there there - his later qualification suggests that those ideas are stale now, but not that at least some of them weren't good ideas at some point. In fact, his time frame in the 'party of ideas' comment was screwed up. I suspect he meant to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas in the 1980s; these ideas were corrupted, became self parodies, were driven to an extreme in "the last ten or fifteen years." It's the time confusion that's enabled Hillary to suggest that he spoke approvingly of 'bad ideas' like huge tax cuts for the rich, wars of choice, government by lobbyist, budgeting by earmark, etc. etc. since that's basically been the Republican agenda since they won control of Congress in 1994.

Another time Obama 'dug deeper' was in the YouTube debate, when he said he'd meet five rogue leaders in the first year of his presidency. Hillary was absolutely right to call him out; he sounded naive. I suspect he didn't fully absorb the question and didn't mean to say that he'd meet all five personally within a year--just that, on principle, it makes sense to be willing to meet when there's something to be negotiated. But in post-debate dueling he went the other route and tried to suggest that Hillary wouldn't be willing enough to negotiate with rogues.

Wherefore base? Bastardy base?

Andrew Sullivan, plumping as ever for Obama and McCain, submits to his own 'base instincts' while worrying about those of the electorate:

The chart above shows the remarkable polling similarities in John McCain's recent primary successes. After a slow decline, at some point late last year, voters sensed he really was their best bet on character, policies and viability. And so the battle now is really one between the worst base instincts of both parties and their most promising candidates for the general election. It's about the defensive figures of the past defending their turf and power against their own parties redefining themselves for the center. I'm hoping McCain and Obama manage to defeat these forces of entropy.

While he has totally bought in to the promise of Obama as a "uniter," Sir Sullivan, as many have noted, has some polarizing tendencies of his own (ya think?). I support Obama, but I recognize that there are plenty of good reasons to support Hillary. And while I admire McCain and have been disgusted by the campaign Romney has run, a large corner of my brain suspects that Romney would be a better president - I think he's ten times smarter than McCain, and intelligence counts for something if not everything.

Sullivan, like too many commentators, has succumbed to the assumption that if voters don't go his way they've gone to hell in handbasket. In the inscrutable mind-heart-gut calculus, many may conclude that Hillary's toughness and Romney's brains are qualities needed in a President. How can Sullivan, or anyone, be certain that McCain won't drive the U.S. off another pre-emptive cliff, or that Obama could handle a world-threatening crisis like, say, nuclear war between India and Pakistan? All of us should trust that the electorate is smarter than we are. Not infallible, but on the whole an effective decision-making engine.

Truth and Transformation

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson has put his finger on how Obama is hitting Bill Clinton's hot button. The nub is that the 'hope' Obama holds out is that his presidency will surpass Clinton's - that he will play Alexander to Clinton's Phillip:

Bill Clinton's brilliance was in the way he surveyed the post-Reagan landscape and figured out how to redefine and reposition the Democratic Party so that it became viable again. All the Democratic candidates who are running this year, including Obama, owe him their gratitude.

But Obama has set his sights higher, and implicit in his campaign is a promise, or a threat, to eclipse Clinton's accomplishments. Obama doesn't just want to piece together a 50-plus-1 coalition; he wants to forge a new post-partisan consensus that includes "Obama Republicans" -- the equivalent of the Gipper's "Reagan Democrats." You can call that overly ambitious or even naive, but you can't call it timid. Or deferential.

In fact, Obama's pitch for voters to join a coalition that could make him a 'transformational' President has grown more focused and explicit as the Clintons have ratcheted up the ferocity of their attacks. On Jan. 5, in the ABC debate, he said that while Bill Clinton deserved "enormous credit" for "balancing budgets," "we never built the majority and coalesced the American people around being able to get the other stuff done." On Jan. 14, he said that Reagan did build that majority ; he "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it." Finally, last night in the CNN debate, he said in effect that the Bill Clinton could not do this because the Clintons are not in the habit of telling the truth:

Now, this, I think, is one of the things that's happened during the course of this campaign, that there's a set of assertions made by Senator Clinton, as well as her husband, that are not factually accurate. And I think that part of what the people are looking for right now is somebody who's going to solve problems and not resort to the same typical politics that we've seen in Washington...the larger reason that I think this debate is important is because we do have to trust our leaders and what they say. That is important, because if we can't, then we're not going to be able to mobilize the American people behind bringing about changes in health care reform, bringing about changes in how we're going to put people back to work, changing our trade laws. And consistency matters. Truthfulness during campaigns makes a difference.

And then there's the explicit pitch, that Obama can do the transformational:

What I do want to focus on, though, is how important it is, when you talked about taking on the Republicans, how important it is I think to redraw the political map in this country. And the reason I say that is that we have gone through the 2000 election, the 2004 election, both of which were disappointing elections.

But the truth is that we as Democrats have not had a working majority in a very long time. And what I mean by that is a working majority that could push through the kinds of bold initiatives that all of us have proposed. And one of the reasons that I am running for president is because I believe that I can inspire new people to get involved in the process, that I can reach out to independents and, yes, some Republicans who have also lost trust in their government and want to see something new.

So the pitch boils down to: because I don't lie like a Clinton, or polarize like a Clinton, I can be the transformational leader that Bill was not and that Hillary can't be. Yes, that would bring the blood to Bill's cheeks and the bile to his tongue.

Obama is a complex thinker. As the Clintons have ratcheted up their attacks, he has integrated his response into his critique of Clintonism: according to Obama, their distortions of his record demonstrate why Hillary is likely, as Bill did, to fail to win the trust and therefore the support of a working majority.

Hillary: Don't Tread on Me

I wonder if Hillary is not playing in some sense on people's widespread love to hate her. Watching her tear into Obama, I found myself very disturbed but also thinking that not too many people on earth would want to mess with her. Not to get into tailoring gender-based epithets, I wonder if some won't feel toward Hillary something like what FDR said about the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza: he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch....

Perhaps, too, in weighing the pros and cons of attacking Obama without any too-tender regard for scrupulous accuracy, the Clinton team decided to send a message to Republicans: don't tread on me. The old egg fry: this is your candidate on Hillary.

The Lying Clinton Meme

Barack Obama seemed hesitant as he went after Bill Clinton on Good Morning America today - lots of blinking, lots of pauses. Still, this carefully measured stop-lying-about-my-record counterattack may well be effective, because without using the word "lie," Obama chimed several times in several minutes on the Clintons-can't-quite-tell-the-truth meme that is lodged, with good reason, in our collective psyche:

You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling...He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts -- whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas.

I completely understand his wanting to promote his wife's candidacy, and Michelle is out there doing the same thing on my behalf. But I do think think that there should be standards of honesty in any political discourse. That's part of the change I want to bring about. If you have something that just directly contradicts the facts coming from a former president I think that's a problem because people presume that a former president if going to have more credibility. I think there are certain responsibilities that come with that.

I understand him wanting to promote his wife's candidacy. She's got a record that she can run on. But I think it's important that we try to maintain some -- you know, level of honesty and candor during the course of the campaign. If we don't, then we feed the cynicism that has led so many Americans to be turned off to politics."

What I don't want is a situation in which we are so driven to just win that we are willing to say anything, and over time, you know the American people just get turned off because they don't believe what politicians say (my emphasis).

As is usually the case with Obama, his choice of words displays simultaneously his mode of "fighting" - that is, criticizing his opponents - and his mode of "uniting" - acknowledging the element of legitimacy in his opponent's efforts. (As Mark Kleiman points out today, Obama is "perfectly sincere about wanting to make major progressive change without using demonization as a primary political tactic." That goes for Bill Clinton as well as Ronald Reagan.) His tone was more in sorrow than in anger, his stance that of an adult calling timeout when a child's game overheats. Almost every allegation was couched in either praise of (Bill) Clinton or acknowledgment that his support for Hillary is itself legitimate. The rhetoric was masterful; again, I'm not so sure about the delivery. It's that hesitancy that I think made me lean toward Hillary after watching several debates this past fall.

The moment of Clintonian dishonesty that ABC focused on in the aftermath was not that egregious. According to Bill, Obama “said that since 1992, the Republicans have had all the good ideas." Obama actually said, ``I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10 to 15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.''

Okay, Obama didn't say the ideas were 'good,' but generally, challenging conventional wisdom is thought to be a good thing. Perhaps Obama got his time frame wrong; earlier in the interview, he had acknowledged that the American people were ready for Reagan's call to shrink government, strongly implying that doing so was a "good idea": "I think they [the American people] felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating." (He might have added, but didn't, that "peace through strength" was a good idea, in that our military buildup pressured the Soviets into attempting the reforms that unraveled their economy.)

Obama made his comment more inflammatory by shifting the time frame from the Clinton years to the present--a frame in which the only "ideas" Republicans have acted on are huge tax cuts for the wealthy, government by lobbyists and budgeting by earmarks, and war of choice to preempt imaginary threats.

Obama is on firmer ground calling Bill Clinton out for dismissing his claim to have consistently opposed the war in Iraq as a "fairy tale." There Clinton was engaging in a classic smear-the-Senator maneuver, mis-characterizing up-or-down votes as complete representations of a policy position. Like most Democrats in favor of withdrawing active combat troops from Iraq, Obama did not vote to cut off funding for them while they're there. End of story.

Rolling over for Rove?

Watching a Jan. 16 speech by Karl Rove to a Republican group on C-Span tonight, I got a sense of why the Dems keep rolling over for Bush on the FISA bill. Rove said that the leading Democratic candidates, Hillary and Obama, were in favor of preventing US intelligence from listening in on the conversations of terrorists if their phone calls passed through the US. That is of course a gross distortion of the position of those who are trying to maintain a modicum of FISA oversight over unchecked monitoring of Americans' phone and Internet communication. But the way it was framed - they want to keep those who are trying to keep us safe from tuning in on those who are trying to kill us -- seems to make the Democrats quake in their boots. Here's one more 'nod to Dodd,' who's vowing again to filibuster any bill that guts FISA and grants telecom immunity.

On the whole, Rove's criticisms of Hillary and Obama were so limp and familiar that I began to wonder if the Republican attack machine might be as tired as the party's policy precepts. But I wouldn't count on it.

Wolf Munch Rock Awards III

cont. from Wolf Munch Rock Awards Part I and Part II

Wolfgang Munchau, eponymous co-recipient of the inaugural Wolf Munch Rock Award for analytical potency in op-ed writing, has devoted sustained attention in recent weeks to the likely fallout from the subprime crisis. Like his colleagues Rachman and Wolf, Munchau wears no ideology on his sleeve: his focus has been on teasing out how one credit market segment is likely to affect others, and how central bankers and fiscal policymakers might best alleviate the crisis. Several themes have emerged so far from his analysis:

• The crisis is likely to be neither short nor mild; credit sqeezes and default waves are likely to wash over several other market segments, including credit cards, credit default swaps, and loans financing leveraged buyouts.

• Central banks are a bit clueless and a bit powerless. Interest rate manipulation will not suffice to restore credit markets to health; the right kind of fiscal stimulus will also be needed.

• Global 'decoupling' from U.S. economic conditions is nascent -- too weak at present for, say, Asian economies not to suffer from a U.S. downtown, but real enough that that recession here need not mean recession there. Munchau's forecast: "this year marks the start of an asymmetric global economic downturn that is likely to persist for some time and will probably be quite unpleasant, but which will be well short of catastrophic."

Methodically, without any sturm und drang, Munchau has provided lay readers with a serial tutorial on the way credit markets affect each other and the businesses and households that depend on credit in various ways. You cannot read him and maintain much hope that the subprime crisis will blow over any time soon.

Reagan-Clinton in '08

Naturally, Obama is getting slammed, by Edwards and others, for praising Reagan in an interview with the editorial board of the The Reno Gazette-Journal early this week:

I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

This is absolut Obama. As with most of his flashpoints, this is the fruit of long meditation, the development of a philosophy of power that's really been a lifelong project, and a continuation of his critique of Clintonian incrementalism delivered in the pre-New Hampshire debate (and discussed here). At the same time, Obama here is telling a simple empirical truth that most Democrats don't want to hear. Reagan did catch the country's mood and did change the country's direction - directly, by articulating and sticking to a few simple principles, in contrast to Clinton, who skillfully effected incremental change under the radar. Part of the difference is that the Republicans were a harder-assed opposition than the Democrats, part of it that Clinton squandered tons of political capital early -- and then again, once he'd won reelection, through Monica Lewinsky.

Much of the difference was character - and that's not all to Clinton's detriment. He is multiples smarter than Reagan was, and in a thousand details of spending and tax policy, he made government more effective and more responsive to the needs of less privileged people. After Reagan put liberalism on a diet, Clinton figured out ways to do more with less. Obama is really breathtakingly ambitious. What he's really trying to tell us, without breaking the modesty barrier, is that he combines Reaganite clarity of vision and Clintonian intellect.

Admittedly, Obama's paean to Reagan doesn't get into the really hard part for Democrats: that Reagan's stewardship through the disintegration of the Soviet Union was remarkable, and that a large part of "what people were already feeling" when he took office was that the United States needed to confront the Soviets more aggressively. Acccording to Robert Gates, Reagan was probably the only person in his government who believed his own "peace through strength" rhetoric -- that is, believed that if we convinced the Soviets they could not outspend and outarm us, we would be able to negotiate reductions in nuclear weapons - indeed, he believed we could negotiate an end to nuclear weapons. When Gorbachev began to change Soviet behavior abroad, Reagan was ready to deal. He didn't 'cause' the Soviet breakdown but he midwifed it very skillfully, as did Bush Sr. after him.

Many brands of bipartisanship are pious blather. The deepest bipartisanship, though, is recognition that a one-party state is not a good thing, that if your side won all the time they would screw things up, and that the electorate tacks back and forth between ideological poles, much as competent presidents themselves tend to tack between rival camps within their own administrations. Obama is bidding to tap into this deep bipartisanship. That means hurting Democratic feelings.

When economists preach

Heaven protect us from the moral clarity of economists. In a New York Times op-ed (Jan. 16), the University of Rochester's Steven E. Landsburg tells us that since we're all beneficiaries of free trade, we owe nothing to its victims. Claiming that "all economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners," Landsburg asks, "Does it [our collective benefit] create a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs proposed by Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney?"

Landsburg's answer" "Um, no." We don't feel that we need to compensate our pharmacist when we decide to buy shampoo more cheaply online, and so we shouldn't feel that need when our car buying decisions lead to auto industry layoffs. In the world economy it's every man for himself, and that's exactly as it should be.

This argument is ridiculous. Granted that no one has an intrinsic right to any given job or type of job; granted too that I do not personally 'owe' a Detroit auto worker if I buy a Hyundai. Still, we have a collective interest in creating conditions that foster prosperity for large groups of our fellow citizens -- and a collective responsibility, when old established ways of doing things (e.g., heavily unionized large industries) have trapped large numbers in in low-opportunity skill sets. Elected officials are literally hired to create conditions that maximize opportunity for individuals and so help the economy adapt to the "creative destruction" of which Landsburg is obviously enamored.

As citizens, too, we may collectively choose tradeoffs that limit the undoubted benefits of free trade, i.e. low prices There's some truth to Landsburg's claim that "protectionism" is a form of bullying, since one group generally pays more for another's benefit, as manufacturers using steel did when Bush imposed tariffs on steel imports. But not all forms of "protectionism" are morally equivalent. If a town wants to zone to keep big box stores out, that is its prerogative. We may not 'owe' our local pharmacist anything. But we may decide, collectively, that we'll all pay more to keep him or her on the block. As consumers, we all vote with our wallets. As citizens, we occasionally muster the will to vote with something else.

You run in poetry....

Since Andrew Sullivan has opened season on electoral op-verse, here goes: three once- and one future- (?) presidents basking in the endless summer of lyric immortality...

Bye, George (1993)

"Read my lips - no new taxes"
worked better in theory than in praxis.

Relic (1997)

Don't call it a mess
on Monica's dress,
that site of encounters ethereal.
Transformed at a touch
(with a gasp and a clutch)
into true Presidential material.

Responsible Partyboy (2002)

As a deeply moral man
of inherent nobility,
I'm calling for corporate
responsibility.
It works for me.
Each day I bless
corporate responsibility
for my success.


Let's Hope it Doesn't Come to This (2009)

There once was a President, Clinton,
who won her election by hintin'
her Rival Obama
had rich psychodrama
in his heart of darkness a glintin'.

c. Asp of Xpostfactoid

Hillary bankrupt on bankruptcy?

Live-blogging Nevada Dem debate, 1/15:

After each oozes sympathy for families at risk of foreclosure, Russert challenges Hillary and Edwards on their support for the harsh 2001 bankruptcy bill. Wide opening for Obama -- the only one to oppose 01 and 05 bills. But he keeps the gloves on. He doesn't hit Hillary on judgment for being for 01 bill before she was against it (voted for it, happy that it didn't pass). I'll say it for him: judgment again, consistency again.

Broadly, this has been a lovefest - subtext of penance for the dirt of the last two weeks. Broad agreement on Iraq. Hillary points out that Republican candidates are all on Bush's wavelength, warming up to decades-long occupation.

Hillary panders on sovereign funds' bailouts of U.S. banks: she's going to make World Bank and IMF set rules for them? By what authority? It's their money, isn't it?

Revenge of the Communists

At the height of U.S.-Soviet collaboration during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt imagined a fusion of economic systems: 60% ours, 40% theirs. The collapse of the Berlin Wall and breakup of the Soviet Union would seem to have consigned this vision to the dustbin of history. But Yale's Jeffrey Garten, marking The unsettling zeitgeist of state capitalism in today's FT, suggests that "the era of free markets unleashed by Margaret Thatcher and reinforced by Ronald Reagan is fading away." Garten brings the surging growth of China, Russia and India into focus as a retooled statism that retains a strong tincture of communist aims and impulses.

While Garten acknowledges that "governments are reacting against the excesses of free markets" - citing "soaring income inequality," unsupervised product quality and poor financial risk management - he sees this turn of the wheel mainly as a negative:

The implications are worrying. While prudent regulation in selected areas can be justified, the new zeitgeist is likely to produce too much government intervention, too fast. We can expect less productivity, less innovation and less growth, since governments have many goals that the private sector does not. These include employment generation, income redistribution and the aggrandisement of political power. The expansion of regulation will also open up new possibilities for trade disruption. For example, countries may block the importation of goods that do not meet their precise national environmental standards.

Since Garten acknowledges "soaring income inequality" as an "excess," one might think he would acknowledge the need for a degree of income redistribution. And many would consider strict enforcement of national environmental standards a good thing. Most Americans, on the other hand, would regard the post-Communist mix of one-party dictatorship and state-controlled capitalism "worrying." But wherever one stands on the free market/state regulation spectrum, Garten has brought a really arresting global trend into sharp focus. He sees state intervention on the rise not only in the post-communist east, but in the US, the EU, China and the WTO.

Even during the Cold War, there was wide variation within the free world in the degree of state control over the economy; France, Japan and Korea achieved high growth rates in economies in which priorities and investment were heavily shaped by the government. It's true that for a long season, chronic economic woes in Japan and Europe seemed to auger a continuing shrinking of the welfare state, state ownership of economic resources, and state regulation. But now, Garten shows, the pendulum is swinging back toward governmental assertiveness. The EU is showing renewed competitive vigor vis-a-vis the U.S., and in the U.S. itself, a still-tentative but emerging confidence in the Democrats seems to point toward universal health coverage, stronger environmental regulation, and rollback of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Plainly, the end of economic history has been greatly exaggerated.

Romney's Creationism

Romney's "Faith in America" speech on Dec. 6 was appalling on so many fronts, I believe that one noteworthy prescription got short shrift:

We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history (my emphasis)

Whoa. How does this play out in history class? "The nation was at risk of being divided forever, but then God turned back Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg..." This is creationism, as surely as teaching that God created all species is creationism. History, taught with any intellectual honesty, entails a respect for provable fact and supportable hypotheses. To "teach" that God's hand guides human activity is to indoctrinate, pure and simple.

Niall Ferguson's Fog of War

The War of the World, Niall Ferguson’s attempt to identify the macrotrends of the twentieth century and divine where humanity is headed next, has all the characteristics of the typical Ferguson tome: sweeping scope, counterintuitive hypotheses to explain world-shaking events, great narrative drive, and detail drawn from a huge and eclectic mix of sources that render how events were experienced and interpreted by individuals. Compared to Ferguson’s prior oeuvre, however, the book is oddly formless – its theses weakly supported and at times almost forgotten in the welter of narrative detail.

Through hundreds of pages detailing mass slaughter by the Nazis, Soviets, Japanese and allied powers, the central thesis – the steady decline of the West throughout the century – seems almost a non sequitur. Of course the Western powers had less absolute governmental control and economic dominance in 2000 than in 1900 - but that would have been true even if the 20^th century had unfolded in Utopian harmony and unchecked economic growth. Indeed, those Westerners who scared up the specter of the “yellow peril” in the early 1900s would probably have been surprised by the extent of American and European economic dominance, not to mention American military dominance, a century later.

Ferguson’s second main thesis – that ethnic conflict, particularly in heterogeneous regions of multi-ethnic empires, was the main trigger of twentieth century bloodletting – is not really supported. The Baltics may have lit the fuse to World War I, but the ensuing death struggle of the great powers was not primarily about ethnicity. The Soviet Union exercised brutal imperial control over a “graveyard of nations” and peoples, but “the race meme” was not the prime driver of Soviet brutality. The Germans, who made a depraved religion of race, were a relatively homogeneous people; the Japanese, committed mass murder in China and much of the rest of Asia, were probably the most homogeneous large nation on earth. “The race meme” was certainly a major contributor to twentieth century violence, and the breakup of decaying empires fueled ethnic conflict. But the worst ethnic conflict was not driven by powers emerging from decayed empires.

A third thesis – that the ethnic powder keg was generally touched off in periods of economic volatility – is interesting, but Ferguson doesn’t invest much effort in proving it. What seems sloppiest is Ferguson’s overall framing of 20^th century violence. His delimiting of a “50 Years War” from 1903-1953 amounts to little more than a list of conflicts within that period. His claim that there was scarcely any diminution in violence in the century’s second half seems preposterous – he simply rattles off a long series of dreadful conflicts without any effort to compare casualty totals. Indeed, his evidence support the claim that the twentieth century was the most violent ever is relegated to an appendix. This lack of statistical analysis is surprising for a scholar whose roots are in economic history and who generally amasses a mountain of data in support of often startling, revisionist claims.

The War of the World exhausts and troubles the reader by the sheer weight and depth of its chronicle of ‘what man has done to man.’ By reminding us of the sudden descent into violence following the long period of relative peace and globalization leading up to World War I, it leaves one haunted by the sense that the next cataclysm may be just around the corner. Ferguson takes a passing swipe at Fukuyama’s The End of History, which posits that humanity as a while is trending toward democratic capitalism. But Ferguson does not really demonstrate that the West has ‘declined’ in any meaningful or undesirable sense, or that nations and international institutions have learned nothing about avoiding and containing outbreaks of violence, or that democracy is not spreading and worldwide violence diminishing.

Dissing the Electorate II

A postscript to the prior post about Christopher Caldwell's complaint that HIllary Clinton successfully yanked the chain of New Hampshire voters: it always irks me when people disparage the electorate, which I believe is smarter than all of us. That's not to say that we're collectively always right, but that Lincoln's can't-fool-all-the-people-all-of-the-time formulation is still the deepest wisdom. It's patronizing for Caldwell to spank voters for allegedly "identifying" with Hillary. He just does not know why people voted for her or why the polls were wrong. No one really does. Caldwell also implies that because women in NH favored Clinton by margins roughly comparable to those by which men favored Obama, women's votes are more based on emotion, or 'servile' identification, than men's. If the gender gap were reversed, would he accuse women of hormonal voting?

In my 80% Democratic home town, I heard many friends and neighbors complain bitterly after the 2004 election agony about the alleged stupidity of American voters. I see Bush's '04 win as the end of a long unfortunate causal chain stretching from Monica through Gore's awful campaign through our Constitutional electoral college flaw through 9/11 and Bush's wartime bonding and finally through Kerry's dithering. It wasn't till after Katrina that the worm turned on Bush. Later than many of us would have liked - but when it turned, it turned decisively.

To be fair, Caldwell may be on to something in suggesting that politicians' histrionics -- and, I would add, sophisticated media manipulation -- may corrode voters' decision-making powers -- and even, for a long season, "fool all of the people some of the time." Saturation negative advertising, for example, apparently has worked in many cases. So does fear, as exploited by Bush after 9/11. But I suspect that the electorate adapts over time to manipulative techniques. One of the more refreshing things about this election so far is that neither negative advertising nor a huge campaign chest have gotten Romney any traction so far.

Dissing the Electorate

In today's Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell bemoans Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire turnaround as an ominous descent into the Politics of the Personal.

Leave it to a Weekly Standard stalwart to speak with certainty when everyone else -- all the titanic media egos across the political spectrum -- is tentative.

Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire victory in the wake of polls showing her an average of eight points down is one of the great mysteries in recent political history -- a delightful reminder that the future remains opaque to polls, pundits and betting markets. Clinton's internal life is equally a riddle wrapped in an enigma. But Caldwell is blithely certain that Hillary planned her tear-up and won because of it, and that this electoral melting, triggered by mass identification with the soul-baring would-be monarch, is a sign of mass "servility."

Never mind that exit polls show that Clinton's margin among people who made up their minds in the final days was nearly identical to her overall margin. Never mind that speaking in "elegant parallelisms" after a year of nonstop campaigning is more likely a reflex as a sign of premeditation. Never mind that Clinton remains almost terminally unhistrionic as she opens herself up to voter q-and-a (after Iowa) and buries her interlocutors in a mass of wonkish policy detail.

I'll take a 'servile' electorate over a certain pundit any day.

McCain and Lieberman's Bridge to Nowhere

John McCain and Joe Lieberman's paean to the surge (subscription required) in today's Wall Street Journal is not quite a victory jig. It does not crow. It does not deny the dilemma of having to draw down troops over the next half year without any signs of political progress in Iraq. The tone is only mutedly triumphal

But McCain and Lieberman don't answer any important questions either. How can the reduction in violence be maintained with fewer U.S. troops? What can we do to foster a functioning government on the ground after a year of failure on this front as marked as the success in reducing violence? Finally, most crucially, what is the "victory" which we're told in the closer "must remain our objective in this long, hard and absolutely necessary war"?

McCain provided a key part of his own answer in a different context, telling a questioner that our troops may be in Iraq for decades. "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea 50 years or so...that would be fine with me." Problem is, our history in those countries provides no obvious model for Iraq. In both cases, our military presence was a function of the Cold War -- justified not by continuing internal instability but by our geopolitical struggle with the Soviet Union. Is McCain suggesting that it may take decades for Iraq to achieve stability, or that we need a permanent military presence in the Arab world, perhaps as a counterweight to Iran? If the former, maintaining stability in a non-functioning state is far different from maintaining a military deterrent to outside invasion (Korea) or boosting our own global military capability (Japan); in both cases, our troops were lodged in stable, prosperous countries. On the other hand, to suggest that the U.S. might need troops in Iraq as a counterweight to Iran is a sign of "Cold War Withdrawal Syndrome" -- the neoconservative craving for a Soviet-scale enemy against which to project American power and America's role of global bulwark against an Evil Empire.

And indeed, the McCain-Lieberman manifesto indulges the ideological shadow puppetry that gathers up disparate forces of different kinds of Islamic militancy and projects them as an Empire-sized monolith:

had we heeded [opponents of the surge's] calls for retreat, Iraq today would be a country in chaos: a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, overrun by al Qaeda and Iran....

Whereas, a year ago, al Qaeda in Iraq was entrenched in Anbar province and Baghdad, now the forces of Islamist extremism are facing their single greatest and most humiliating defeat since the loss of Afghanistan in 2001

al Qaeda. Iran. al Qaeda in Iran. Forces of Islamist extremism. All one? It is true that our botched occupation created a toxic brew in which Saddam loyalists, external al Qaeda agents, and Shiite militias accepting varying degrees of support (though probably rarely control) from Iran could all contribute to violent anarchy in one place. But it was the very failure to distinguish between utterly different and often warring 'forces of Islamist extremism" that got us into McCain's projected 100 year occupation to begin with. And the most dangerous of those forces -- al Qaeda Central -- has enjoyed a resurgence in Afghanistan/Pakistan that's more germane to our security than the "humiliating defeat" of their proxies in Iraq. That remarkable comeback would not have happened had we maintained focus on Afghanistan

To recognize that sad fact does not point a way out. But neither do McCain and Lieberman.

It won't be possible to judge whether the surge has 'worked' until we see whether the progress of the last year can be maintained as our forces are reduced, as all acknowledge they must be. But neither will we ever know whether the concerted diplomatic effort recommended by the Iraq Study Group - accompanied by the first stages of a phased withdrawal - would have moved Iraq more quickly toward developing a functioning government of its own.

The Fairy Tale about the 'Fairy Tale'

For the record, Bill Clinton did not say that Obama or his campaign or his message of hope were a fairy tale. What he said was that Obama's claim to have consistently opposed the war in Iraq was a fairy tale. Here's the transcript:

"Second, it is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, numerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say, that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004 and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?' Give me a break.

"This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen.

"This whole thing" is plainly Obama "trumpeting his superior judgement and how he had been against the war in every year."

The Lipitor Election

For a moment this morning, I stepped back from thinking about the individual candidates and let a surge of hope for the country as a whole wash over me. Like most Americans, I've felt that the country has gone off the rails in recent years -- in preemptive aggression, massive tax cuts and deficits, a tenfold increase in lobbying, and, most importantly, in the Bush Administration's shredding of the Bill of Rights and assault on the separation of powers. I thought, 'the great virtue of a democracy is that it can self-correct -- as long as it's still a democracy. But are we?'

Doors were slamming on multiple avenues of choice and change. Start with the K Street Project, an enterprise corrupt to its core and breathtaking in its arrogance. Think about the premise - to coerce lobbying firms into hiring agents of one party only and to contribute to one party only. That's not only pay-to-play, pure and simple, but a move toward a one-party state. Couple that with ever more radical gerrymandering techniques, a national Rove-led attempt to disenfranchise as many poor voters as possible in the name of stopping imaginary 'election fraud', the selective prosecution of Democratic elected officials, the stacking of the judiciary with right wing ideologues who would support the power of the state at every turn. Then pile on the Bush Administration's assertions of unchecked executive power - in signing statements that negate key parts of laws passed by Congress, in twisted legal documents that assert the President's right to abrogate any law in the name of national security, and in the assumed power to deem anyone the executive branch chooses an "illegal combatant" who can be detained indefinitely and tortured at will.

You had to wonder: could restrictions on media freedom and assertions that Administration critics were security risks and ultimately "illegal combatants" be far behind? (Bill Kristol, who called for the NYT to be prosecuted for breaking the warrantless wiretapping story, was fired up, ready to go.) The path to step-by-step demolition of democracy was nicely marked out by Vladimir Putin, embraced as a soulmate by Bush.

Those dangers are still real. Elect a Giuliani or a Romney, and who knows what new executive powers they would seize in the wake of a major terrorist attack? But in the interim, democracy has struck back. A self-correction is in mid-course. Political choice remained real enough, and the media free and robust enough, to make it clear to two-thirds of the country that we were led to war on false premises; that the war was disastrous to our national interests; that the nation was being bankrupted to fund tax cuts for the wealthy; and that the environment was being terminally neglected. And so, in 2006, despite all the gerrymandering, the imbalance (over many years prior at least) in campaign funds, the 95% incumbency return rates, we had enough of a turnover to change the balance of power. On a state level, changeovers in legislatures and governorships reduced the overall power of Republican assaults on voter eligibility and equal access to polls.

Now, say what you like about this primary season, the choices are real and manifold; the debates have their moments of lucidity amid all the idiocy; money has been proved already not be decisive, and there is no way anyone claim that the results are not in the hands of voters. In the general election, there's still a danger that the electoral college or faulty voting equipment will skew the results. But those dangers (substituting old-style ballot box fraud for dicey electronic equipment) are as old as the Republic.

The electorate is smarter than all of us. That dawned on me about a dozen years ago, while I was reading a biography of Eisenhower; it occurred to me that I probably would have voted for Stevenson as my parents did, and I would have been wrong. Later I came to feel the same way about Reagan - who did not 'cause' the Soviet Union's breakup but certainly midwifed it, smoothed the glide path, gave Gorbachev the running room to do the job. So the electorate is at least smarter than I am, and I'm no dumber than the average voter.

That's not to say that the electorate doesn't make mistakes (sometimes pushed over the edge by our creaky Constitutional machinery) , just that it always eventually corrects them -- as long as the arteries of choice remain unclogged enough for information to flow.

Plaque builds slowly; our hearts can function with up to 95% blockage (as Bill Clinton's did just prior to his quintuple bypass). Democracy is resilient (if ultimately killable) like that. Sweeping statements that we're not a democracy because of lobbying, or incumbency, or widening income gaps are false as long as there's enough 'democratic function' to change course. I can see a descent past that line. But we're not there yet.

Short of a terror-induced executive power grab, the greatest threat to democratic functioning is the proliferation of lobbying. The most important chord in Obama's aria melody might be his promise to change the rules of the game so that lobbying is held in check. Edwards of course also promises to "take on" "lobbyists", but the weakness there is personalizing the battle, as if the problem will go away if an evil coterie of individuals is smitten. On this question Robert Reich's Supercapitalism is helpful. According to Reich, the escalation in lobbying is a function of supercapitalism, i.e. the hypercompetition in which each company and industry strives for competitive advantage on the legislative front (as in every other arena). Companies lobby not because they're conspiring to squeeze out the public interest, but to fend off rivals' attempts to gain advantageous legislation. The result is near-complete corruption of the legislative process as companies compete to buy legislation. The good news is that corporations are not reveling in this relentless arms race. Changing the rules of the game may be in everyone's interest.

Obama and McCain may both have the will and the skills to do this. Both have had more than one success on this front. Another day, another post for that one.

Will-fully Misleading?

UPDATE 4/6/10: David Brooks joins Will in misrepresenting Stephen J. Rose's household income figures as individual income

George Will, slamming the populism of Edwards and Huckabee, uses some pretty dicey-looking numbers to paint a picture of a wealthy electorate:

Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 — because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled, from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "So," Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder." Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.

According to U.S. Census figures, in 2006, 19% of U.S. households earned over $100,000. Households in the top two income quintiles , those with an annual household income exceeding $60,000, had a median of two income earners while those in the lower quintiles (2nd and middle quintile) had median of only one earner. These numbers suggest that a small percentage of "Americans" earn over $100,000. The median household income is $48,201.00 (a handy summary is at Wikipedia*).

This is not to say that Edwards doesn't overstate the economic distress of Americans generally. It's fine to emphasize the continued prevalence of poverty in the U.S., which Edwards rightly calls shameful. It's also fair to stress that middle class income has stagnated, that income inequality is rising, and that there's been a massive risk transfer to households over the past 2-3 decades (e.g. in pensions, healthcare costs, and homeowners' insurance). But when Democrats start speaking as if the majority of Americans are in acute economic distress, it puts them out of tune with much of the electorate.

UPDATE, 5/6/09: What Rose actually said, in a Dec. 23, 2007 Washington Post op-ed, is that between 1979 and 2007,"the number of people in households that bring in more than $100,000... rose from 12 percent to 24 percent." Rose doesn't say whether the 1979 percentage is inflation adjusted. But he's a reputable economist, so let's assume that it is.  His broad point that per capita income has risen in this period holds -- though it's largely offset by the rise of one-income households, the fraying of the safety net, and the disproportionate rises in the cost of housing, higher education and health care.

* While the Wikipedia article places the 19% of U.S. households earning over $100k in 2005, the 2006 Census figures show the same percentage.

Race and IQ: Breastfeeding Shows no Link

Contra Will Saletan at Slate, recent studies of the IQ boost that breastfeeding seems to give most babies provide no evidence of a link between race and IQ.

Obama Praises Bill Clinton, and Buries Him

Barack Obama may have hit the gamer in the nomination battle in last night's ABC debate. Hillary was working all night to make the case that she was the real "change" agent because she has gotten change done in the past. By contrast, she suggested that Obama's promise of change is mainly talk. When she cited Bill Clinton's balancing the budget as a major accomplishment of 'change', Obama delivered this multi-tiered response:

Look, I think it's easier to be cynical and just say, "You know what, it can't be done because Washington's designed to resist change." But in fact there have been periods of time in our history where a president inspired the American people to do better, and I think we're in one of those moments right now. I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes -- not incremental changes, not small changes.

I actually give Bill Clinton enormous credit for having balanced those budgets during those years. It did take political courage for him to do that. But we never built the majority and coalesced the American people around being able to get the other stuff done.

And, you know, so the truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

As with many of Obama's best formulations, this seemed simultaneously to rise to the moment and be the fruit of long reflection. He exactly captured the strength and the weakness of the Clinton presidency in an assessment that is generous, fair, but dead-on accurate as a critique. Bill Clinton outmaneuvered the Republicans year after year on budget essentials but he never built the coalition (generous of Obama to say "we never built...) to reform health care, or revamp energy policy, or build any other major policy bridge to the 21st century. Hillary would say that's because the vast right-wing conspiracy sabotaged them at every turn. But Bill kept handing them swords to gore him, so he never built the trust that underlies a mandate. So Obama manages to bury Clinton and to praise him. "I give him enormous credit" but....

On top of this, Obama has here the perfect response to the "he's just talk" line of attack. Politics is almost literally all talk. You've got to be good in the cloak room, at the negotiating table, on the debate floor. What gives a politician the ultimate strength to push through change, though, is to convince the mass of voters to support his or her effort for something major like health care reform. "Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens." That says it all. That's a real political philosophy at its deepest.

Also, note the organic riff on "the fierce urgency of now": But in fact there have been periods of time in our history where a president inspired the American people to do better, and I think we're in one of those moments right now. Obama's slogans are the fruit of long reflection. They don't become fixed like a smile for the camera; they weave themselves into his language and ripen over time. He manages to shake off that broken record effect that encrusts almost every campaign.

Atonement

Is there an element of atonement in Americans' response to Obama? Not atonement for centuries of slavery and racial discrimination, but for the Bush Administration's preemptive aggression, flouting of international law, disdain for allies, and widespread use of torture? Perhaps on some level a lot of Americans want to send the world a message that we're turning the page, we've sickened on the attempt to unilaterally impose our will on the world--we're changing our 'cheere,' to borrow an expressive medieval term that means the face, facial expression, the attitude, the point of view.

Nod to Dodd

Those of us who consider the rollback of unchecked executive power essential to the survival of democracy in America owe a nod to Dodd, the only candidate to put 'restoring the Constitution' at the center of his campaign. Last night, his farewell email to supporters included this pledge:

The fight to restore the Constitution and stop retroactive immunity does not end with my Presidential campaign. FISA will come back in a few weeks and my pledge to filibuster ANY bill that includes retroactive immunity remains operative.

Neither Obama nor Clinton nor Edwards has devoted enough attention to ending torture, indefinite detention, warrantless spying, and the Bush Administration's insanely expansive 'interpretation' of the 'unitary executive' theory, which boils down to a free pass to the President to violate any law at his discretion.

I watched Obama's "closer" speech before the Iowa caucuses, and it included a couple of brief gestures toward the importance of restoring "American values" and our place in the world, i.e. ending torture and unlawful imprisonment. Those were the largest applause lines in the speech. He needs to do more on this front.

It Takes a Leader: the Creativity of Evil

In Questioning the Banality of Evil, The Psychologist Jan. 2008, S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher bring into sharp relief the danger posed by current American leaders and would-be leaders whose chief appeal lies in fear-mongering and demonizing of real and perceived enemies. Those who execute tyrants' orders (and enemies) are not affectless functionaries but enthusiastic believers:

A spate of books...suggest that very few Nazis could be seen as ‘simply following orders’ – not least because the orders issued by the Nazi hierarchy were typically very vague. As a result, individuals needed to display imagination and initiative in order to interpret the commands they were given and to act upon them. As Ian Kershaw notes, Nazis didn’t obey Hitler, they worked towards him, seeking to surpass each other in their efforts. But by the same token, they also had a large degree of discretion. Indeed, as Laurence Rees (2005) notes in his recent book on Auschwitz and the ‘final solution’, it was this that made the Nazi system so dynamic. Even in the most brutal of circumstances, people did not have to kill and only some chose to do so. So, far from simply ‘finding themselves’ in inhumane situations or inhumane groups, the murderers actively committed themselves to such groups.

How do conditions arise in which such self-selected executors - and executioners - are free to fulfill their potential? When enough people feel threatened enough, demagogues pick up the charge:

we do not interpret the world on our own, as many social psychological models tend to imply. Rather, people are surrounded by would-be leaders who tell them what to make of the world around them...Indeed, tyrannical leaders only thrive by convincing us that we are in crisis, that we face threat and that we need their strong decisive action to surmount it. In the BBC study, participants as a whole may have become relatively more authoritarian, but it still needed active leadership to exploit this and to make the case for a new tough regime. The role of leaders becomes particularly pernicious when they suggest that ‘our’ problems come about because of the threats posed by a pernicious outgroup. In this way they can begin to take the groups with which we already identify and develop norms of hostility against outsiders. Their role becomes even more dangerous when they tell us that ‘we’ are the sum of all virtues so that the defence of virtue requires the destruction of the outgroup that threatens us. These are the conditions which allow groups to make genocide normative and to represent mass murder as something honourable (Reicher et al., 2006).

While Andrew Sullivan finds insight here into jihadist ideological commitment, I'm more concerned about the implications for the U.S. Can you hear the crowds chanting Rudy, Rudy, Rudy? Americans have been badly frightened in the past six years, and the Rovian message machine has kept the fire stoked. Worse, the Bush Adminstration has laid bare the fact that the tissue of statutory and common law in which our vaunted civil liberties are embodied is kept intact not so much by "the consent of the governed" as by the consent of the governing. Our leaders before 43 have for the most part adhered to norms and taboos that have restrained their power. Now, for six years, the executive has imprisoned whom it wishes indefinitely without trial, tortured at will, spied on Americans in violation of the law, and asserted the president's right to disregard laws passed by Congress when he deems doing so essential to national security.

Americans are resilient and seem to be rejecting Bushian fear-mongering at last. If nothing else, we're used to the media skewering our leaders to the point where few of us take their pronouncements at full face value, and Bush at least has not meddled much with freedom of the press. But we've been subject to six years of of intermittent code orange. My fear is that some electoral accident - e.g., a Bloomberg 3rd party run - will throw the election to a dictator-in-waiting like Giuliani or possibly Romney. Romney doesn't seem a thug by nature, just a chameleon. But in his vocal support of torture and absolute executive power we would do well to take him at his word. We need a President who will roll back the executive power grab. Otherwise, dictatorial power is there for the taking.

Wolf Munch Rock Awards II

cont. from Wolf Much Rock Awards I, here

Martin Wolf, the FT’s chief economics columnist, also wrote an end-of-year retrospective, in this case focused on the likely fallout from the subprime crisis. Like Rachman, he introduces his list of observations casually– in this case, of reasons Why the credit squeeze is a turning point for the world: “Why do I believe this? Let me count the ways.”

Wolf, like Rachman, doesn’t use lists as ideological bludgeons to suggest he’s cornered the market in causality in a neat ideological package wrapped around a simple solution. This is not “The Eight Steps Central Banks Must Take to Avoid a Depression.” In fact Wolf offers up more questions than answers:

Third, the crisis has opened up big questions about the roles of both central banks and regulators. How far, for example, do the responsibilities of central banks as “lender-of-last-resort” during crises stretch? Should they, as some argue, be market-makers-of-last resort in credit markets? What, more precisely, should a central bank do when liquidity dries up in important markets? Equally, the crisis suggests that liquidity has been significantly underpriced. Does this mean that the regulatory framework for banks is fundamentally flawed? What is left of the idea that we can rely on financial institutions to manage risk through their own models? What, moreover, can reasonably be expected of the rating agencies? A market in US mortgages is hardly terra incognita. If banks and rating agencies got this wrong, what else must be brought into question?

Those questions would seem to point toward a need for a firmer government hand on the economic tiller. But the next point tacks the other way:, toward less intervention:

Fourth, do you remember the lecturing by US officials, not least to the Japanese, about the importance of letting asset prices reach equilibrium and transparency enter markets as soon as possible? That, however, was in a far-off country. Now we see Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary, trying to organise a cartel of holders of toxic securitised assets in the “superSIV”. More importantly, we see the US Treasury intervene directly in the rate-setting process on mortgages, in an attempt to shore up the housing market. Either, or both, of these ideas might be good ones (though I strongly doubt it). But they are at odds with what the US has historically recommended to other countries in a similar plight. Not for a long time will people listen to US officials lecture on the virtues of free financial markets with a straight face.

In fact, each of Wolf’s eight points reads like a discrete essay. Each highlights either lessons learned or questions raised, and in each case, Wolf goes where the evidence takes him. Not all of his essays are so free-form; some point toward a policy prescription. But generally, these pieces are inquiries, not briefs – essays in the original sense of “trials,” thought processes laid out on the page.

Wolf Munch Rock Award

Andrew Sullivan has announced the winners of his dyspeptic annual "awards," designed for the most part to highlight the dogmatism, intellectual dishonesty, mindless aggression, and self-promoting pretensions of our punditocracy.

As an antacid, let me introduce the first annual Wolf-Munch-Rock Award. Named for Financial Times columnists Martin Wolf, Wolfgang Munchau and Gideon Rachman, mainstays of that oasis of dispassionate analysis the FT Comment page, this award goes to an observer of world news and trends whose writings exhibit deep (if understated) expertise, fact- and evidence-based exposition, wide-angle perspective on large-scale trends, and theses based more on observation and analysis than ideology.

First year winners by decree: Martin Wolf, Wolfgang Munchau, Gideon Rachman. As an example of the way these guys deploy facts in support of a thesis --or plow through facts as they replay their search for a thesis - take Gideon Rachman's recent Five events that have defined 2007.

Rachman begins with a disarmingly modest, seemingly pedestrian justification for the 'exercise':

If you want to make sense of world affairs, it is useful to identify the most significant events. Also, I like making lists. So here goes.

Rachman's choices: 1) The surge, 2) Putin's Munich speech (accusing the Americans of "an almost uncontained hyper use of force ... that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts"), 3) the credit crunch, 4) Petrochina becoming the world's most valuable company (for a while), and 5) Musharrraf's 'mini-coup' in Pakistan. An odd mix of the military, the political, and the financial. Random? Bound only by his love of list-making? Not quite:

Is there a common theme linking these five events? Clearly. The link is the growing strain on the world's sole superpower. America is locked into a draining and demoralising war. Russia, an old adversary, is becoming more assertive. China, a new rival, is on the rise. Pakistan, a vital ally, threatens to fall apart. The US economy is under more strain than for years. Happy new year.

Surprise! A general unifying theory, delivered, again, with a modesty that implicitly acknowledges the complexity of events and the provisional nature of such judgments (as does the use of the perfect tense in the headline). This is not "the decline of the west," not a Jeremiad against American hubris, not a trump of doom - just a clear-headed look across disparate theaters at a "growing strain."

Wolf Munch Rock Award Part II is here
Part III is here

Shrieks on a Plane

Professor Bainbridge warns that unrestricted cell phone use on planes is on the way. Everyone who doesn't have the luxury of shutting off a hearing aid knows how bad this will be. And yet, there may be cause for all-too-distant hope. As a 10-year commuting vet on New Jersey transit, I’ve noticed an evolution in cell phone use on rush-hour commuter trains: most regular commuters do keep it down. Their fellow commuters have perfected the slow head-turn and glare, and the occasional ‘can you keep it down?’; most of us have grown at least marginally sensitive to the common interest in peace. It’s different, though, on weekend and off-peak trains: grandma doesn’t have a clue, teens don’t care, show-and-shopping excursionists are oblivious. I imagine that plane passengers will unfortunately be more like the off-peak crowd, except maybe on the major biz shuttle routes.

Attention, passengers: earplugs are cheap and reasonably effective, if a bit uncomfortable. They're not really good enough if the yakker is right next to you.

Torture in Democracies: Rinse, Repeat

Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy. published an article this weekend in the Boston Globe (“Torture, American Style”) that recast my understanding of the place of torture in the history of the U.S. and all the western democracies. Surprise:

Torture isn't an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.

In one instance after another, democracies developed new torture techniques, refined them, and then exported them to more authoritarian regimes. Americans didn't just develop electric power; they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations from Arkansas to Seattle. Magneto torture, a technique favored by the Nazis involving a portable generator, was actually developed and spread by the French. Waterboarding and forced standing owe their wide use to the Americans and British.

Rejali details multiple forms of torture employed by law enforcement and the U.S. military throughout U.S. history: electrotorture "in police stations from Arkansas through Seattle" in the first third of the twentieth century; waterboarding in the Philippines and then in military prisons and police stations in the same period; magneto torture in Chicago law enforcement in the 1970s (apparently imported by veterans who had learned torture techniques in Vietnam). Eradicating these practices has been a constant struggle:

[H]istory shows that the cycle of torture can be broken. Americans put an end to most domestic torture between 1930 and 1950. We did this, in part, by exposing torture. The American Bar Association's 1931 report transformed American law and policing. The document was cited in court decisions; newspapers and true crime books drew on the group's investigations to educate the public as to what the modern face of torture was. And police chiefs instituted more checks on police behavior, including clear punishments for violations of the law and regular medical inspections for detainees.

This history lesson is literally "disillusioning." Yet it's also oddly reassuring. It's not true that the U.S. definitively rejected torture 200 years ago and has now opened the floodgates. As with many evils -- political corruption, financial fraud, athletes' substance abuse -- the fight against torture is chronic and cyclical and must be fought in every generation.

Myth: democracies don't torture. Fact: democracies regularly sniff torture out, debate it, and usually reject it. Of course, that equilibrium could be destroyed any time; a public's sensitivities can be coarsened, its values corrupted, by sensational TV shows and demagogic politicians. But that danger, like its antidote, is perpetual.

Supergurus against Torture?

After invoking Gandalf in his case against torture (Torture as the Ring?), Andrew Sullivan has now drafted Yoda as well. Both supergurus warn against the seductive powers of the dark side.

I am tired of people trotting out Gandalf's two or three humane homilies to lend profundity to their arguments. Tolkein was as morally simplistic as Bush. The Lord of the Rings is built on the pernicious fantasy that agents of evil are purely and unambiguously evil, that wars are fought against inherently and irremediably evil enemies, that kings are fighting a constant rearguard action against the weakness of their people, and that history is a long tale of degeneration.

There are few evils more clear-cut than torture, which is why the campaign against it suits Sullivan's earnest nature, and why he has been so effective on this vitally important front. But fantasy-world invocations should be left to the neocon fabulists.

Bloomin' bromides revisited

Update to 12/15 post: a bit of unsolicited campaign advice to The Admirable Bloomberg is now in the Financial Times. Postscript: don't do it, Bloomberg! What a cruel irony if you were to throw the election to Giuliani...

Upholding Dodd-ering Civil Liberties

Chris Dodd has pledged to filibuster any FISA bill that grants retroactive immunity to telecom companies that have colluded in the Bush Administration's illegal and unchecked spying on Americans' phone traffic. Here is one response to Dodd's call for statements of support:

While America sleeps, our core Constitutional liberties are being stripped away as the Executive claims power to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants. Astonishingly, the Democrats continue to roll over and ratify the President's right to spy at will on Americans, hold suspects indefinitely without trial, and torture those deemed rightly or wrongly to have information about future terrorist attacks. Chris Dodd has been the only Presidential candidate with the courage not only to speak out in general terms against these outrages, but to take time out from campaigning to arrest the capitulation of the party he wants to lead. Anyone who acts effectively to check the steamrolling of the spineless Democratic leadership on this front deserves the support of all Americans who value the rule of law and the separation of powers.

Bloomin' Bromides

In one of his split-the-difference, both-parties-have-lost-their-way and I'm-the-statesman-of-the-center feints, Michael Bloomberg positioned himself as a brave supporter of beleaguered free trade in the Financial Times last week.

Bloomberg has proved himself a highly capable executive and a fact-based, analytical policymaker. If I were magically empowered to appoint the next President, I might well choose him. All the more disappointing, then, that his free trade manifesto (America must resist protectionism, 12/11/07) amounts to little more than a collection of anodyne bromides. America "must capitalize on opportunities and confront the challenges" of increased global trade. "Countries that open fair access to new frontiers will be the winners." "We have a responsibility to prepare today's students for tomorrow's economy." Visionary.

If Bloomberg wants to help us truly "confront the challenges" of globalization, he might let us know his thinking on some hard questions: should bilateral free trade agreements between the U.S. and developing countries include stricter labor and environmental standards? Should U.S. tax policy provide incentives for companies to keep or create jobs at home? Should developing countries unconditionally embrace free trade, or protect key industries as Korea and Japan did?

Bloomberg purports to admire both Bush Sr. and Clinton for their courage in supporting free trade in 1992. At that time, it truly did take courage to tell laid off factory workers that the U.S. could not protect them from globalization, but only help them to retool their skills, as Clinton did. But today that's received wisdom, if not achieved policy. If Bloomberg is positioning himself as a presidential contender who tells the unvarnished truth, he'll have to show more 'courage' than he did in this piece.

Debriefing Kiriakou: What if Torture Works?

The Brian Ross interview with former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who interrogated Abu Zubaydah, is disturbing in the extreme in that Kiriakou declares reperatedly, matter-of-factly, and with apparent certainty that Zubaydah yielded large amounts of actionable intelligence as a result of torture, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation. These claims completely contradict Ron Suskind's account, in which sources say that Zubaydah was a psychotic with limited knowledge of Al Qaeda operations who, upon being tortured,

began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

According to Kiriakou, waterboarding was "like flipping a switch" that made Zubaydah decide it was Allah's will (revealed in a dream) that he should talk -- and "the threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks." Kiriakou claims that Zubyadah subsequently served as a reliable reality check for other intelligence that came in. Kiriakou also portrays him as rational, knowledgeable, far from insane in any conventional sense, and a high-level al Qaeda operative-- a logistics chief, a financier, and a close associate of Bin Ladin.

Kiriaku also counters the claim that other interrogation techniques are more effective than torture. He claims that the key differentiator was speed; that building trust or willingness (which he dismisses as impossible with the religious fanatics of al Qaeda) or engaging in psychological warfare are time-consuming, whereas waterboarding was, again, 'like throwing a switch."

Is Kiriakou to be believed? Over time, will enough Kiriakous speak out to create a general acknowledgment that torture can produce actionable intelligence? If so, we opponents of torture lose a major comfort and must rely on a braver and more nuanced cost-benefit assessment. Such as: the harm that torture does to the society that authorizes it outweighs the harm -- the deaths and destruction -- that it may in some instances prevent. We have already seen that torture cannot be contained with the circumspection that Kiriakou portrays - where every step, every slap, is deliberated and authorized. Instead, we have dozens of people killed in custody, thousands detained (in Iraq) under brutal conditions, and all kinds of random and sadistic abuses, the knowledge of which has generated so much further hatred against us throughout the Muslim world. Nor can its target be limited to "known" terrorists - witness the mistaken renditions and the abuse leveled on Iraqis rounded up virtually at random. American citizenship is no shield -- ask Jose Padilla. In concert with the denial of due process and the President's assumed power to deem anyone an enemy combatant, there is nothing to prevent its being inflicted on an ever-widening circle of alleged 'enemies of the state.' That is the real danger.

Andrew Sullivan points out that "The Zubaydah torture does not fit the category laid out by Charles Krauthammer as the criterion for legalized torture. It was done not because we knew something and needed to nail it down. It was done because we knew nothing and needed to find out more. The attacks it allegedly foiled were not catastrophic and not on the mainland of the United States." Does this kind of cost-benefit analysis make sense - that is, is the 'ticking time bomb' argument relevant? Is it wrong to torture someone if you think that doing so might thwart unknown attacks saving hundreds or thousands of lives, but right to torture in an attempt to thwart an attack known to be pending that might take hundreds of thousands or millions of lives? I think the answer is that the '24' scenario is a false choice, highly unlikely to occur in its pure form. Sullivan is right that it's fatal for a society to greenlight torture in anticipation of that choice. That's Cheney's 1% solution -- a permanent state of emergency authorizing absolute executive power because of an eternal risk of catastrophe.

In fact, that risk has been there throughout the nuclear age, and the remote possibility of a terrible choice has always been part of the burden of the terrible responsibility of those charged with the security of millions of people. I imagine that every president has left a corner of his mind open to the possibility of an emergency that will force him to act outside the law. But to pre-authorize a crime in a vanishingly unlikely scenario is not a solution.

Who Says Cheney isn't Pole-Driven?

A relaxed Dick Cheney in shirtsleeves, “his big chair swiveled” toward the target, took quite a stick to his Democratic opponents in a testosterone-charged pas de deux with Politico this week.

The lede gets all-to-quickly to the upshot:

Vice President Cheney warned in an interview Wednesday that a premature withdrawal from Iraq would invite “further attacks” against the United States and said he has been surprised by the weakness of the Democratic Congress.

Cheney fingers Dingell and Murtha as representatives (d) of this ‘weakness’:

[Dingell] and Murtha “and the other senior leaders … march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker,” Cheney said. “I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened.”

...When asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, “They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected.”

Hmm...weaklings with small sticks, at least one of whom would force a premature withdrawal if he were more potent. That would be a pity, with consummation nigh:

We’re sort of halfway through the surge, in a sense. We’ll be going back to pre-surge levels over the course of the next year.”

Fortunately, the would-be withdrawers need not be stymied for long. Our premature-predictor-in-chief assures us that a “self-governing democracy [will] be firmly established in Iraq” by January 2009.

And if the U.S. can’t surge to that swift and satisfying conclusion, other enemies are poised to stick it to us. Take Iran, with its hot pursuit of superpower status:

“The long pole in the tent in terms of developing nuclear weapons, traditionally, historically, has been developing fissile material.”

It'll take a big stick to keep that long pole out of the nuclear end zone.

In any case, it’s reassuring to know that our avuncular veep does not demand perfection, or absolute power. Counterinsurgent NIEs, images of soldiers holding naked prisoners on leashes, news of destroyed torture videos—it’s alll in term’s work:

“Everything leaks,” he said with a chuckle.

That's why there's no safety in premature withdrawal.

A Still, Small Voice Says Israel is Right

Israeli unanimity about Iranian determination to build a bomb is troubling - though I must say that Israelis were also unanimous in support of leveling much of Lebanon in a futile attempt to crush Hezbollah. Nonetheless, Israelis have had their eyes fixed on Iran's nuclear efforts for nearly two decades, and a high level of Mossad confidence in that neighborhood seems more credible than the graded confidence levels of the NIE. Most troubling, Israeli intelligence experts don't dispute the core fact noted in the NIE - Iran's suspension of its 'nuclear weapons program' -- they just dispute its significance.

The New Republic's Yossi Klein Halevi has this from Shabtai Shavit, former head of the Mossad:

"My assessment is that, after they decided to aim for nuclear weapons, they advanced on three parallel tracks: enriching uranium, creating components for a bomb, and developing missiles. The missiles are ready for operation. As for enrichment, they have encountered all kinds of problems, like exploding centrifuges. I estimate that they made great progress, and very quickly, on the military track. Since they have problems with the uranium enrichment track, they can allow themselves to delay the military track, and wait for progress with uranium." [Halevi adds] Given that world attention has been focused on the military track, a tactical Iranian concession made sense.

This makes the Occam's Razor cut. It's the explanation that requires as few assumptions as possible -- in marked contrast to the NIE's judgement that Iran's nuclear activities are guided by a 'cost-benefit approach.' As another of Halevi's sources asks sarcastically, is it "a cost-benefit approach for one of the world's largest oil exporters to risk international sanctions and economic ruin for the sake of a peaceful nuclear program?"

One might respond that the perceived benefit is not energy but prestige, and risk management (keeping up with the Husseins), and keeping options open, i.e. getting 20 years of preparation out of the way so that a bomb can be produced at short notice. But the fact remains that getting the uranium enriched is the hardest part -- and that effort is going full steam ahead.

A Democrat "for" McCain

Financiers, who know how to hedge, often contribute to candidates in both parties. Why not the rest of us? This letter accompanied my contribution today to the McCain campaign:

Dear Senator McCain:

While I will almost certainly vote for the Democratic nominee in 2008, I am contributing to your campaign because I fear for the future of American democracy should a proponent of torture and the destruction of American civil liberties such as Rudy Depends-who-does-it Giuliani or Mitt Double Guantanamo Romney win a major party nomination.

This contribution is to honor your sustained and essential opposition to torture, suspension of habeas, assertions of unlimited executive power, and wholesale flouting of the Bill of Rights. Should you win the Republican nomination, I will rest assured that Americans are not prepared to sell their ancient liberties for a little bit of perceived security.

I should add that I believe that your support of President Bush’s misadventure in Iraq contributed to that disaster; that your campaigning for Bush in the 2004 election helped bring on four more years of assault on our core liberties; and that the ‘compromise’ you green-lighted in the 2006 Military Commissions Act ratified the Administration’s abuses. I am also disappointed by your repudiation of your own principled opposition to the Bush Administration’s irresponsible tax cuts, and by your cozying up to corrupt theocrats.

Nonetheless, on the all-important issue of torture and civil liberties, history will recognize that you stood as the conscience of a party run amok with fear-mongering and power-grabbing.

American democracy cannot function without (at least) two viable major parties. Should you win the nomination, the Republican Party will have taken a giant step toward a return to responsible governance.

Gates "Validates"

Vintage Robert Gates here, as reported by Mark Thompson in Time :

Indeed, Secretary Gates, in Afghanistan this week, told reporters that the U.S. intelligence community has "more confidence than ever before" that Iran had a nuclear-weapons development program, one that Iran continues to deny it ever possessed. He urged the international community "to join the United States in bringing pressure to bear on the Iranian government" to keep its nuclear-weapons efforts dead. This, he said, will help "ensure that what apparently was a suspension in 2003 becomes a policy of the Iranian government and that they agree to the requirements of the international community in terms of their enrichment program." Iran, he said, had merely suspended — not terminated — its nuclear-weapons efforts. Tehran continues to "keep its options open," he pointed out. "As long as they continue with their enrichment activities, then the opportunity to resume that nuclear weapons program is always present."

However, Gates left no doubt where he stands on how to proceed, saying that the revised NIE shows that non-military measures are the best way to curb Iran's nuclear program. "If anything," he said in Kabul, "the new national estimate validates the Administration's strategy of bringing diplomatic and economic pressures to bear on the Iranian government to change its policies."

First, do everything possible to forestall reckless and ruinous military action (thank God there's at last a match for Cheney in bureaucratic infighting). Then tack about to highlight the remaining danger and head off a collapse of meaningful pressure. Simultaneously get across that Iran remains dangerous and yet responsive to concerted international action. Finally, magically recast the Administration's saber rattling as the hard-nosed peace through strength negotiation he would have it be.

"From the Shadows": Did Gates Shape the New NIE on Iran?

Having just finished Robert Gates' excellent book 1996 From the Shadows, my immediate reaction upon reading of a new National Intelligence Estimate that downplays the likelihood of Iran developing nuclear weapons before 2015 is that Gates, a 25-year CIA veteran and former DCI, very likely had a shaping hand - if not in the report itself, then in its release. Until quite recently, Gates has kept a very low profile since becoming Secretary of Defense about a year ago, but the evidence is strong that he has had a calming, rationalizing effect on Bush Administration policy and rhetoric. Last week, in a speech at Kansas State University, he astonished Pentagon observers by telling students that the U.S. needed to boost the State Department's budget -- that is, redress the balance between hard power and soft power. Prior to that, the only public comments of his since taking office that I can remember cropping up in mainstream news were two checks to belligerent Administration rhetoric-- to say in one instance that Congressional debate on war financing put useful pressure on the Iraqi government, and in another that Hillary Clinton's request for contingency withdrawal plans was reasonable. Both of these interventions are in keeping with the balanced assessment in From the Shadows of the five presidents Gates worked for (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr.). In the final section of that book, Gates notes that doves and hawks worked effectively, though often in bitter competition, to keep those five presidents on containment course, and that Congressional intrusion on foreign affairs could be meddlesome and counterproductive but also served as an essential check on executive power. Also, as a top member of Bush Senior's national security team, he lauds that team's cohesion and mutual trust, born of confidence that the National Security Adviser Scowcroft (and deputy Gates) would present all views to the President. The unwritten sequel haunts the book like a shadow limb: that Bush 43 in so many ways destroyed the balance born of separation of powers, bipartisanship, and competition of views within prior administrations.