Mousavi + Obama

This image is on Mousavi's Facebook page, accompanying Obama's June 20 statement calling on the government of Iran to respect human life and human rights.
















I am surprised that the Mousavi campaign would yoke these images together, given Khamenei and Ahmadinejad's rhetoric branding the demonstrations as the tool of U.S., Brit and "Zionist" interference.

Between the Basiji and the Green Wave

Can Mousavi win the hearts and minds of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji? Conversely, can he hold the hearts and minds of his most passionate followers? Two pieces highlighted in this morning's Daily Dish -- one by the New Yorker's Laura Secor and the other by "Simin Mesgari" (pseudonym?), a Green Waver writing in The Street, a samizdat newspaper circulating among the protesters -- pose each of these questions in turn.

Secor:

I think there is still a battle being waged for the hearts and minds of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij. Successful nonviolent movements in other countries have depended on the cooptation of the rank and file in the armed forces; one remembers the moving scenes of Serbian riot police embracing demonstrators...

Iran is not Serbia. The relationship between the people and the revolutionary shock troops is far older and deeper than anything that took root during Milosevic’s relatively brief tenure. By 2000, Milosevic’s fiefdom was rotten to the core; it survived on corruption, the fear of exposure on the part of many criminals and war profiteers, and hostility toward the world. The Islamic Republic, by contrast, was born in a people’s revolution and built on faith in a religion that is deeply held by most Iranians. The state’s ideology is not the hollow construct of political elites, as communism was by the time it collapsed in much of Eastern Europe. Rather, Iranian Islamism was forged over decades, in long struggle with the despotic regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, and from the potent raw materials of Iranian nationalism and Islam. Although the country’s constituency for democracy is vast and growing, the regime has a constituency, too, and it is passionately loyal and heavily armed.

The purpose of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij is the defense of the Islamic Revolution and the Supreme Leader. Rarely have the true believers in the militias been forced to consider the possibility that these two functions might come into conflict. Such a moment may have arrived...

Mesgari:

Mousavi knows too well how deep the wound is. He also knows that his green bandage is only a first aid cover for this wound and not a cure....

Mousavi knows that not all “this” is for him.

He knows very well, and we also know very well that had there been a “better” candidate than Mousavi with a “lesser evil past” which had chosen yellow colour for his campaign, the nation would have gone yellow and Mousavi would have demoted to Ahmadinejad’s position. …..

Velayat-e Faqih or the “Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists” is the red line which Mousavi has expressed he won’t cross – this red line is now being crossed by those wearing green....

It would seem that the more immediate problem -- with the longer odds -- is the one framed by Secor. But Mesgali's challenge raises the core longer term question. The 1979 revolution got past the Shah and then was hijacked by the most ruthless and autocratic among the contestants for power. Mousavi, as Karim Sadjapour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has pointed out, is no Khomeini -- he's the Gorbachev, the Kerensky, the reformist not the revolutionary. As Secor points out, though, Iran's current power structure is not "rotten to the core" in the sense of having lost all support; it still has the buy-in of at the very least a large minority. A reformer who professes passionate loyalty to the state apparatus he helped found may be the best hope for change Iranians can believe in.

Mousavi's Paradise Lost: Khomeini's Republic

There is much to honor in Mousavi's statement issued today: his pledge never to hurt a countryman, his call for freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, rule of law.

And yet, he advances those principles in service of a delusion: that to uphold them is to return the revolution coopted by Ayatollah Khomeini to its pure origins, in which these principles flourished. From the start of his campaign, Mousavi has called for a restoration of the rule of law as established by the Islamic Republic. That is, for restoration of something that never was. Today, he laid out a vision of paradise lost, paradise to be regained:

30 years ago, in this country a revolution became victorious in the name of Islam, a revolution for freedom, a revolution for reviving the dignity of men, a revolution for truth and justice. In those times, especially when our enlightened Imam [Khomeini] was alive, large amount of lives and matters were invested to legitimize this foundation and many valuable achievements were attained. An unprecedented enlightenment captured our society, and our people reached a new life where they endured the hardest of hardships with a sweet taste. What this people gained was dignity and freedom and a gift of the life of the pure ones [i.e. 12 Imams of Shiites]. I am certain that those who have seen those days will not be satisfied with anything less. Had we as a people lost certain talents that we were unable to experience that early spirituality? I had come to say that that was not the case. It is not late yet, we are not far from that enlightened space yet.

The "enlightened Imam" would be the man who massacred tens of thousands of opponents and crushed all dissent, who prolonged ruinous war with Iraq for six fruitless years after turning back Iraq's initial territorial gains, and in that war sent teens and even preteens in waves of thousands to clear minefields with their bodies (the first Basiji, today's murderous militia); who imprisoned women in the hijab and generally set women's rights back fifty years: who murdered the leaders of the Baha'is and made second-class citizens of the rest; who impoverished the country with his contempt for economic management; who united the people by demonizing the United States (against whom Iranians did have ample cause for resentment) and institutionalizing the murderous Antisemitism that now, adopted in full by Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, threatens the world's stability -- who in short, made Khamenei look like a piker when it comes to crushing human rights and subverting the Republican government Mousavi professes to value.

Mousavi casts his current rivals as destroyers of "Republicanism"and hence of the Revolution:

If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven. This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism. Imam’s fantastic art was to neutralize these dichotomies. I had come to focus on Imam’s approach to neutralize the burgeoning magic of these.

He treasures the notion that Islam and Republicanism are compatible. Perhaps they are. But Khomenei united them in demonic form by modeling the Islamic Republic after Plato's Republic -- the oldest blueprint we have for totalitarianism. The Guardian Council that falsified the vote count last week was a real-world enfranchisement of Plato's ruling class of philosopher kings. Khomeini's republicanism like Plato's, is based in absolute faith in the absolute wisdom of an educated elite invested with absolute power.

His rewriting of the history of the Islamic Republic notwithstanding, Mousavi has committed himself to the human rights that Obama today cast as the universal law of humanity:

As I am looking at the scene, I see it set for advancing a new political agenda that spreads beyond the objective of installing [sic] an unwanted government. As a companion who has seen the beauties of your green wave, I will never allow any one’s life endangered because of my actions. At the same time, I remain undeterred on my demand for annulling the election and demanding people’s rights. Despite my limited abilities, I believe that your motivation and creativity can pursue your legitimate demands in new civil manners.

We advise the authorities, to calm down the streets. Based on article 27 of the constitution, not only provide space for peaceful protest, but also encourage such gatherings. The state TV should stop badmouthing and taking sides. Before voices turn into shouting, let them be heard in reasonable debates. Let the press criticize, and write the news as they happen. In one word, create a free space for people to express their agreements and disagreements. Let those who want, say “takbeer” and don’t consider it opposition. It is clear that in this case, there won’t be a need for security forces on the streets, and we won’t have to face pictures and hear news that break the heart of anyone who loves the country and the revolution.

Leaders can be transformed by the contract forged with their followers in the crucible of events. Mousavi's pledges to institute the rule of law and respect human rights constitute a religious man's strongest oath to his people, made with the world listening, in mortal political combat with those whom he charges with trampling those rights. Let's hope that if by some miracle he does come into power he will work to fulfill these pledges, whatever his delusions about the blood-soaked Khomeinist past -- and his own role in it.

The MSM 'defeats' Mousavi

One quick-drying bit of reporter-speak keeps getting my goat as the drama in Iran unfolds:

BBC 6/20: Defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi repeated calls for the election to be annulled on the grounds it was rigged.

Reuters 6/20: Defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi said on Saturday he was "ready for martyrdom"

Xinhua 6/20 : Iran's former Prime Minister, defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi renewed his call on Saturday for cancellation of last week's disputed presidential election.

AHN 6/20: The planned rally was confirmed by the wife of defeated candidate Mousavi, Zahra Rahnavard, through her page on Facebook

Wash Post 6/18: Many people around the world have replaced their online photos with the words "Where Is My Vote?" against a green backdrop, the color of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign.

Defeated how? By whom? In what sense? Why grant the electoral fraud that validation? Why linguistically codify a result that's still a wee bit contested?

Standoff in Iran?

PressTV, the Iranian state outlet, acknowledges that there was a "rally" today and characterizes violence as "sporadic":

Despite warnings by Iranian police, protesters have staged an illegal rally in Tehran to cry foul over what they call 'vote-rigging' in Iran's presidential election.

Police used batons and water canons to disperse the protesters who gathered near Tehran's Enqelab Square on Saturday.

Sporadic clashes were reported between security forces and the protesters.

While there appears to have been much disgusting Basij violence, it also seems that the government so far has held back from a full-scale Tiananmen crackdown. Videos seem to show that although protesters were kept from massing in major squares, they did manage to fill streets and stay out en masse.

Mousavi, meanwhile, called for a general strike in the event that he is arrested. The fact that he's had the opportunity to make that call indicates something of a standoff.

About that ballot recount offer: a fig leaf for a redo?

Iran's Guardian Council's announcement that it would recount 10% of the election ballots was universally ignored as an empty gesture. And so it surely is. Still, today's PressTV report includes a detail that makes the proposed recount at least theoretically significant: the 10% would be chosen randomly:

The Council has said it is ready to recount a random 10 percent of the ballot boxes in the last Friday's presidential election.

"Although the Guardian Council is not legally obliged ... we are ready to recount 10 percent of the (ballot) boxes randomly in the presence of representatives of the candidates," the electoral watchdog's spokesman, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodayi said on Saturday.

One must assume that the "random" selection would also be rigged. If there were away to verify that it was not, however, the results could be significant. It could even provide a fig leaf for Khamenei to walk back his endorsement of the results.

"On your head be it...."

Iran's Security Council preemptively places blame for crackdown on Mousavi. From PressTV, the Iranian state vehicle:

Iran's Security Council has warned defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi against 'the consequences' of backing street rallies.

"It is your duty not to incite and invite the public to illegal gatherings; otherwise, you will be responsible for its consequences," Iran's Security Council, a body affiliated with the Interior Ministry replied Mousavi's letter in which he had criticized the law enforcement forces for failing to prevent attacks on protestors during the street rallies.

"It is your responsibility to prevent the public from attending such rallies instead of making accusations against the law enforcement," it added.

"We believe this is an organized network which is most probably affiliated to foreign-related groups and deliberately disturbs the peace and security of the public. Of course we have already ordered the law enforcement forces to deal with the issue," read the letter.

Yup, the Great Satan and the Jews are pulling the strings, manipulating all those millions.

Thing is, it did happen once. The U.S. -- and all Iranians -- are still paying the price for the CIA-directed coup against Mossadegh in 1953.

"Mousavi is not Khomeini, and Khamenei is not the Shah"

While no one knows what the endgame will be in Iran, Karim Sadjapour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace speaks with authority about the personalities of the principals and the dynamics of their power struggle (h/t Steve Coll):

The weight of the world now rests on the shoulders of Mir Hossein Mousavi. I expect that Khamenei’s people have privately sent signals to him that they’re ready for a bloodbath, they’re prepared to use overwhelming force to crush this, and is he willing to lead the people in the streets to slaughter?

Mousavi is not Khomeini, and Khamenei is not the Shah. Meaning, Khomeini would not hesitate to lead his followers to “martyrdom”, and the Shah did not have the stomach for mass bloodshed. This time the religious zealots are the ones holding power.

The anger and the rage and sense of injustice people feel will not subside anytime soon, but if Mousavi concedes defeat he will demoralize millions of people. At the moment the demonstrations really have no other leadership. It’s become a symbiotic relationship, Mousavi feeds off people’s support, and the popular support allows Mousavi the political capital to remain defiant. So Mousavi truly has some agonizing decisions to make.

Rafsanjani’s role also remains critical. Can he co-opt disaffected revolutionary elites to undermine Khamenei? As Khamenei said, they’ve known each other for 52 years, when they were young apostles of Ayatollah Khomeini. I expect that Khamenei’s people have told Rafsanjani that if he continues to agitate against Khamenei behind the scenes, he and his family will be either imprisoned or killed, and that the people of Iran are unlikely to weep for the corrupt Rafsanjani family.

As the Shah tentatively cracked down, killing dozens of protesters here and hundreds there, those seeking his overthrow kept coming back for more. Sadjapour suggests that while Khomeini was more ruthless than the Shah, Khamenei may prove more relentless than Mousavi. Rafsanjani is a wild card, though. And the Iranian people have that Shiite reverence for martyrdom. But can any people resist a truly ruthless crackdown? Perhaps only when the soliders in the tanks refuse to roll.

Who speaks for the Islamic Republic?

The battle between Mousavi and Khameneiis playing out as a contest over which of them speaks for the rule of law as established by the revolution of 1979.

In his Friday Prayer speech earlier today, Khamenei drew all four candidates within the circle of "love" that he claims the Islamic Republic to be ("the elections of the 12 June was.... a show of their love for their regime") and casts the post-election resistance as the work of evil outsiders :

The competition for the election was very clear. Enemies and dirty Zionists tried to show the election as a contest between the regime and against it. That is not true, all four candidates support the regime." [He lists the government positions of the opposition candidates]. All of the candidates are part of this system and regime. Zionists and the bad Britishradio said it was a challenge to the regime.

"The issue is inside the system. The dispute is not against the revolution. The dispute was among candidates and there was a positive and negative effect. People were able to judge, they felt part of the system. All views were available to the people.

That "all four candidates support the regime" -- or did before the vote count -- is not only true, it also taps into the central theme of Mousavi's campaign and of his post-election protest. Back on April 3, the Iranian government vehicle Press TV reported:

[Mousavi] added that freedom of information should become a basis for both the government and economy, warning that overlooking the Iranian constitution and its contents posed a major challenge to the country.

"The issue of non-compliance with Iranian rules and regulations is the biggest problem that the country is currently faced with," he said.

Then, on June 13, Mousavi claimed authority to contest the vote in the name of the Revolution of 1979 and the law established by the revolutionary regime:

I advise all officials to halt this agenda at once before it is too late, return to the rule of law and protect the nation’s vote and know that deviation from law renders them illegitimate. They are aware better than anyone else that this country has been through a grand Islamic revolution and the least message of this revolution is that our nation is alert and will oppose anyone who aims to seize the power against the law.

And on June 14, he effectively cast those in control of the vote count as destroyers of the state:

The events that we all have witnessed in the past days were unprecedented in the Islamic Republic. The reason for the fearful concern of the people is due to the extreme sense of danger for the great achievements of the (Islamic) Revolution. Those who after massive cheatings have declared these unbelievable results for the presidential elections are now out to establish these results as undisputed facts and start a new chapter in the history of our country.

Now, Khamenei is trying to use this weapon of Mousavi's against him. He has drawn a line and declared that anyone who continues to protest the official election returns is aligned with the "Zionists" and evil western diplomats:

The guardian council has said that if people have doubts they should prove them. I will not follow false allegations. In all elections some are winners and some are losers. Correct legal procedures should be followed to ensure trust in the process. "The candidates should be careful about what they say and do" [Mousavi doesn't seem to be there]. "Some diplomats from the west are showing their real face and that they are enemies. The worst are the British.

The street is the place of living and trading. Why are you taking to the streets? We have had the election. Street demonstrations are a target for terrorist plots. Who would be responsible if something happened?

Khamenei has just washed his hands of the blood he's preparing to spill -- and in fact smeared it not only on Mousavi but on Rafsanjani:

"Rumours spread that were not true, and gave a bad image to the previous government. Calling the president a liar is that good? This is against the truth. The 30 years of the revolution was turning black." Khamenei talks about the rumours about Hashemi Rafsanjani. He praises Rafsanjani as "close" to the revolution. "The youth should know that... He was at the service of the revolution. I do have some difference with him, but people should not imagine something else between him and the president.

Again, Khamenei is at once asserting that all rivals within the current leadership circle are "part of this system and regime" and warning them not set themselves against it. Rafsanjani, however, is the only rival who might have the constitutional power to in turn cast Khamenei as the one outside the law. Rafsanjani is Chair of the Expediency Council, which according to the Economist in 2005 "was given an undefined 'supervisory authority' over all three branches of government," and head too of the Assembly of Experts, which "can also theoretically dismiss the supreme leader if he fails to meet specific criteria or becomes unable to execute his duties satisfactorily."

"Who would be responsible if something happened?" The rival histories are being written already.

Iranian attitudes toward Israel: the TFT poll

The now-notorious poll of the Iranian electorate conducted in May by Terror Free Tomorrow and the New America Foundation may not have shed much light on the final presidential vote, given that less than half of those surveyed expressed a preference for any candidate, and that the poll was conducted a month before the vote in a short campaign that changed radically in the final weeks. But its basic methodology was sound. And the survey does contain a wealth of data about Iranian beliefs on a wide range of issues.

That includes some chilling -- albeit somewhat contradictory -- data on Iranians' attitudes toward Israel. The 1000 respondents were asked which statement was closest to their own opinons: "I would favor a peace treaty recognizing the State of Israel, if an independent Palestinian State is established" or "I oppose any peace treaty recognizing the State of Israel, and I favor all Muslims continuing to fight until there is no state of Israel in the Middle East." 269 (26.9%) favored the peace treaty; 615 (61.5%) opposed any treaty and favored fighting until Israel, pardon the interpolation, vanishes from the page of time. 8.9% didn't know; 2.7% refused to answer.

Respondents were also asked, however, about their attitudes toward "several proposals which some Iranian diplomats were willing to give to the United States in return for normal relations." Among them: "recognizing Israel and Palestine each as separate, independent states." Here, 35% strongly favored the two-state solution; 17.1% somewhat favored it; 9.1% somewhat opposed, 27.2% strongly opposed; 10.3% didn't know, and 1.4% refused to answer.

Almost twice as many respondents were willing to support a two-state solution in this context as in the prior one. It would appear that a good number of Iranians are willing to put their hatred of Israel on ice in exchange for normal relations with the U.S.

Iranians also consider Israel to be the country that poses the greatest threat to Iran -- with some justification, given Netanyahu's loud saber rattling. 44.1% said that Israel was the greatest threat to their country, vs. 37.9% for the United States and just 2.1% for Russia -- which, incidentally, might indicate that Mousavi's recent effort to portray Ahmadinijad as a Russian tool will not have much resonance.

I must say that I will remember Iranian policy preferences toward Israel when reading accounts of Iranians' apparent growing enthusiasm for nonviolence as a means to effect political change at home. At the same time, one might hope that success in nonviolent resistance at home might dispose Iranians more favorably toward nonviolent resolutions of conflicts abroad. Indeed, a major reason for Mousavi's strong support is Iranians' wish for a less confrontational foreign policy, a wish demonstrated by the response to the second question about Israel cited above. In fact the subtitle of the TFT report on their Iranian poll is "Iranians Continue to Back Compromise and Better Relations with US and West." But it's worth remembering that if Iranians do indeed manage to unclench their collective fist, they may yet hold a rock under the armpit for Israel.

The wrest is silence

Today's march through Tehran, captured in this short video from a height that shows its massive length and breadth, makes me feel for the first time that something unstoppable is at work here - that this outpouring of popular will can't simply be crushed, Tiananmen Square style -- though the regime may well try. Maybe it's the silence -- is that Islam's contribution to the nonviolent toolbox? Islamic velvet? Beneath it perhaps lurks the Shiite passion for martyrdom that unseated the Shah. If massacred, these people will keep coming back for more -- in 40-day intervals.

Autocracy, inflation, revolt, crackdown

A few weeks ago, social scientists Michael J. Lamia and James Raymond Vreeland published the results of an exhaustive statistical study of the factors that lead countries to transition to democracy. One ostensibly surprising conclusion was that rapid GDP growth does not correlate with such transitions:

Regarding transitions to democracy, we find that economic growth has a robust negative effect. This finding, standing in stark contrast to modernization theory, suggests that autocracies with strong economic performance are unlikely to see democracy emerge. Instead, economic contraction causes dictatorships to break down. Also in contrast to modernization theory...the level of GDP per capita does not have a robust relationship with the emergence of democracy (p.2).

We have an interesting finding for economic growth: it makes dictatorships more likely to survive and lowers the chances for democracy to emerge (p. 27).

Is this really so surprising? No one wants to change a winning game. As long as an autocracy delivers the goods, people are likely to tolerate it. However, these researchers also found that

autocracies with strong economic performance are unlikely to see democracy emerge. Instead, economic contraction causes dictatorships to break down.

What happens when rapid economic progress gives way to economic stress? Perhaps that is the danger point for many autocracies.

Such was the case in the runup to the Tiananmen Square crackdown in China in 1989. From 1984-1988, China's average yearly growth rate (not compounded) was 12.1%, according to Chinability. In 1989, growth slowed to 4.1%, shrinking to 3.8% the next year before soaring again to 9.2% in 1991 and never dipping below 7% thereafter. The major economic stress point in the months prior to the student protests, however, was runaway inflation, which led to widespread calls for increased centralized control of the economy after a period of liberalization.

The Chinese people ultimately accepted continued authoritarianism after the Tiananmen crackdown. Prior to the 1989 dip, they had experienced a dozen years of extraordinary growth, and after a two-year slowdown in 1989-90 the country resumed its torrid wealth creation. Some may lament the wealth-freedom tradeoff. But the government has credibility to the extent that it's fostered the commonwealth for a generation.

Iran's current crisis is also occurring at a moment of economic pressure following a period of growth. Since 2000, according to the Congressional Research Service, GDP growth has averaged about 6.4% per year; this year, in the midst of the world financial crisis, it's projected at 3.5%. But again, the chief stressor is inflation: the official CPI was 17.1% in 2007 and 28.0 in '08, the real rate is higher, and the costs runups hit people where they live, in housing and food prices. Unemployment is also high - 12.1% in 2007 -- and Iran suffers the world's biggest brain drain, according to the IMF, as its young population goes abroad in search of opportunity.

Unlike the Chinese in 1989, Iranians today widely consider their country to be mismanaged economically. Ahmadinejad has held interests rates artificially low, fueling inflation. The international sanctions bite, and foreign investment is low.

A Tiananmen-style crackdown could happen at any time in Iran. But the Iranians have less cause to accept their government's heavy hand than the Chinese did. There is no upside to acquiescence -- no promise of prudent economic stewardship, or of stability and increasing foreign engagment.

Gary Sick's pre-election call

As the world wonders whether the post-election unrest will delegitimize the Iranian regime that's been headed for the past twenty years by Ayatollah Khamenei, it's worth stepping to recognize that election contest prior to the vote laid the groundwork.

Back on June 10, Gary Sick noted that Ahmadinejad's debate performances must have triggered cognitive dissonance for millions of Iranians on several fronts -- most notably in his implicit indictment of his own purported puppet master:

[Ahmadinejad] broke crockery left and right by associating his opponents with what he claimed was a history of corruption and catastrophic errors dating back to the earliest days of the Islamic Republic. That, of course, is the system that he represents and that he extolls in every public appearance.

The 40 million Iranian voters who watched this astonishing spectacle, and who had never heard a serious word of criticism about the Islamic government on national TV, scarcely knew what to think. His accusations, if true, cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the revolutionary state.

Although Ahmadinejad’s barbs were aimed primarily at former president Rafsanjani, whom he suspects of orchestrating the opposition, these charges also apply even more directly to the Leader, Ayatollah Khamene`i, who has had supreme authority over the Islamic Republic since at least 1989. If Iran is this wasteland of corruption, inefficiency and strategic mistakes, what does that say about the wizard who has been guiding this process almost since its inception?

Indeed, Sick's June 10 post highlights the deep fissure within the Iranian regime that pointed toward a rigged election. Its prescience about the likely rigging -- and Khamenei's likely acquiesence -- lends authority to Sick's conclusion:

No one in Iran appears to be fully in control of events that have a potential to mark a turning point in the history of the Islamic revolution.

Of course, the unlikelihood that the status quo in Iran can be restored does not rule out the possibility that the crisis will produce a more repressive regime.

Reza Pahlavi seconds Nate Silver

Nate Silver's blog tagline, "Politics done right," amounts to an admonition: "do the math." To a verbally inclined baby boomer who felt free to blow off math in mid-eleventh grade, 538 has offered a sobering demonstration that while the truth may set you free, the math very often reveals the truth.

On Monday, Silver took a dive into Iranian pre-election polling data, which according to pollsters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty of Terror Free Tomorrow showed that Ahmadinejad was indeed likely to win the "real" vote count. Focusing on the large number of respondents who would not reveal or had not made a choice, paired with wide margins in favor of reformist policy positions, Silver found evidence of multi-level voter intimidation. His conclusion:

The point that few commentators are realizing -- Al Giordano is an exception -- is that this story really isn't about the way that the votes were counted. It's about whether Iran is capable at this point of having an election in which the democratic will of its electorate is properly reflected. If Ahmadinejad hired a bunch of thugs to hold every Iranian at gunpoint while they were casting their ballots, it would not have been difficult for him to get 63 percent of the vote -- indeed, he'd probably have wound up with very close to 100 percent. This would be an election -- and there would be no need at all to tamper with the results. But it wouldn't be an expression of democracy. We need to separate out those two concepts. Ahmadinejad, as far as we know, did not go so far as to hold anyone at gunpoint. But the tentacles of fear in Iran run deep.

Are good math skills are proxy for experience? Exiled Reza Pahlavi, the 48-year-old son of the last Shah of Iran, needs no numbers crunching to assess the regime that deposed his father. Here's what he told the WSJ:

"We have a major paradigm change right now," he said. "It's a mockery to call any of these theatrics an election process. However, given the limits the Iranian people have, that was the only way to show the whole world they are against the established regime. Now they have gone to questioning the very legitimacy of the regime, and it's unfolding before our very eyes."

Of course, Pahlavi is hardly an unbiased observer. Nonetheless, the congruence with Silver's analysis is striking.

I should add, too, that it doesn't require advanced math skills to contrast the poll numbers for the candidates with the poll numbers for policy positions. But it's the habit of mind that counts. And often, Silver's mathematical analysis goes far deeper.

Orzag hones in on doctors' incentives

Peter Orzag has a new sound-byte (or stat-byte) to counter those who want to lump social security together with Medicare/Medicaid under the aegis of "entitlement reform."

For some time, Orzag's mantra has been "healthcare reform is entitlement reform." In today's FT, he distills why that is:

Our fiscal future is so dominated by healthcare that if the US can slow the rate of cost growth by just 15 basis points a year (0.15 percentage points), the savings for Medicare and Medicaid would equal the impact from eliminating Social Security’s entire 75-year shortfall.

Having framed the imperative to cut healthcare costs, Orzag continues in the FT piece to channel Atul Gawande, as he has at least three times on his blog. Whether or not Gawande has helped to focus Orzag's thinking, there's no question that his tale of two healthcare markets has helped Orzag focus his rhetoric on changing doctors' incentives to prescribe unnecessary care:

We must also address the forces making the healthcare system unaffordable and inefficient. The system creates incentives for doctors and hospitals to provide more care, not the best care. A lack of information on what works leads to huge variations in the quality of care and its cost. As Atul Gawande has described in the New Yorker, there are cities such as McAllen, Texas, that spend close to twice the national average on healthcare and do not get better results than lower cost, high-quality cities even in their own state or region.

The US must move towards a higher-quality, lower-cost system in which best practices are universal – rather than concentrated only in some parts of the country. The administration has therefore put forward initiatives such as health IT, research into what works, prevention and wellness, and changes in provider incentives (my emphasis).

The focus on eliminating unnecessary care is in turn helping Orzag -- and Obama -- to draw together two parts of their healthcare pitch: reduce costs, extend coverage. Two weeks ago, Jonathan Cohn noted that Obama seems to find it politically helpful to focus rhetoric on the cost-reduction side of the equation. As Orzag makes clear, however, it's runaway costs that have swelled the ranks of the insured and underinsured -- and runaway costs will make universal coverage impossible if they're not reined in.

What Gawande has handed Orzag is a demonstration that unnecessary procedures are a prime driver of healthcare inflation. That makes it possible for Orzag and Obama to suggest that costs can be effectively reduced without compromising quality of care -- thus defanging the bogey of "healthcare rationing."

As the administration trains its sights on removing financial incentives to prescribe unnecessary treatment, it's interesting that Obama has floated tort reform as a counterweight. Easing the constant threat of litigation hanging over doctors would be powerful compensation for reducing the financial incentives that bias some doctors toward prescribing operations, tests etc. that may not be necessary.

See also:
Did Obama read Atul Gawande? I, II, III.

Is Iranian resistance "about" Mousavi?

Andrew Sullivan quotes Mousavi's newest message and follows with a comment:

I have submitted my request for canceling the elections to the Guardian Council. I am certain recent reactions are not for me, but it is out of concern for the new political order that is being imposed on our country.

It is important to understand what is going on. There has been a fascist coup after the elections stripped Ahmadinejad of any legitimacy. The resistance is religious as all mass movements in Iran are. The government is fascist. And the regime has split open, leaving the worst elements desperately and brutally trying to restore their control by force.

"The resistance is religious." And there's an Animal Farm irony to Mousavi's stance: he warns that the original (presumably pure, shining) Islamic Revolution is at risk of giving way to "a new way of political hegemony which is being forced upon us" (June 14). He is now spokesman for the rule of law in the name of an Islamic Republic that from an American perspective never respected it, but that is now sweeping away its inadequate but to some extent functioning channels of response to the popular will. It's as if one of Lenin's original cadre were resisting a less murderous Stalin in the name of the revolution's original ideals.

A second irony is that while Mousavi insists "it's not about me," the resistance may yet be shaped by his strategy -- peaceful pressure to convince the mullahs to step back from the brink, then reform their Islamist regime in order to save it. Events could overwhelm his leadership from two directions -- brutal crackdown or a revolution that sweeps away the Islamic Republic. But so far he's something of a dam holding both sides back.

A running mate for Ahmadinejad?

Today, Ahmadinejad displayed his understanding of the democratic process:

When asked about protests and complaints, Ahmadinejad said that it was important to ask the opinions of "true Iranians" on the elections. "Like the people you meet at my rallies," he said.

Great minds think alike:

"We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe" -- here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers -- "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

Come to think of it, they're both pretty good at handing out petrodollars, too.

Mousavi's brinksmanship: resistance within the law

As previously noted, Mousavi is claming the authority to reject the official election resultsin the name of the Revolution of 1979 and the law established by the revolutionary regime. In the campaign, he said, " "The issue of non-compliance with Iranian rules and regulations is the biggest problem that the country is currently faced with" (my emphasis). Yesterday, he called on the authorities to "return to the rule of law."

Today, Mousavi -- a stalwart of Khomeini's revolution and prime minister through the Iran_Iaq War -- has developed this "faithful reformer" stance into a coherent strategy of resistance, almost Gandhiesque in its (misplaced?) faith that he and his followers are dealing with an adversary capable of being shamed into doing the right thing, and somewhat Obamaesque in calling for restraint from both sides of a conflict.

In a June 14 letter to compatriots, Mousavi first of all refers to the Islamic Republic in the past tense, clearly defining the election's theft as the end of the Republic and the beginning of a new dictorial regime:

Dear compatriots, I have received numerous reports of unrest and clashes from all over the country. I’m confident these (protests) are not because of my person but due to a growing concern for a new way of political hegemony which is being forced upon us. The events that we all have witnessed in the past days were unprecedented in the Islamic Republic. The reason for the fearful concern of the people is due to the extreme sense of danger for the great achievements of the (Islamic) Revolution. Those who after massive cheatings have declared these unbelievable results for the presidential elections are now out to establish these results as undisputed facts and start a new chapter in the history of our country.

Next, more remarkably, Mousavi serially warns those currently in power that the people will not accept a new dictatorship, takes for himself and his supporters the mantle of protectors of the rule of law as established by the Islamic Republic, pledges to work himself within legal channels to have the election results nullified, and calls on his supporters to find peaceful means of resistance:

We respect and abide by the constitution and the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran and regard our supreme leader as one of the important bases of our regime and (thus) will peruse our political struggle within the structure of the law. We hope that the future events prove the falsehood of our fears (of dictatorship and tyranny), but never the less, we warn that no one who cares and supports the Islamic Revolution (of 1979) will tolerate this (rigging the election), this is after all our national responsibility and patriotic duty that we owe to the thousands who sacrificed their lives for this country. Dear people, Today, I officially asked the guardian council (who oversees the elections in IR) in a letter to nullify the outcome of this election and I regard this (the nullification) as the only possible way for regaining the people’s trust and cooperation with the government. I strongly urge you again to peacefully protest and defend your legal rights civilly and without confrontation and violence all over the country. We have officially asked the authorities to give us the permission for large scale demonstrations in every major city throughout the country for tomorrow, so that people can demonstrate their protest against the way the election was conducted and its results peacefully. I believe that the authority’s compliance with this request is the best way to manage the current outbursts of anxieties.

Finally, having urged his supporters to avoid violence, Mousavi appeals directly to law enforcement not to turn on demonstrators, not to forfeit their own legitimacy:

Out of care and respect for our police (law enforcement), I urge them not to use violence against the spontaneous protests so not to let that the people lose their trust in them. These people are your brothers and sisters and have come to the streets in protest to defend theirs and your own rights. The might of our armed forces and the police has been and will always be only due to its unity* with The People. In hope of better days Mir Hossein Mousavi - 24 Khordaad 1388 (14 June 2009) Tehran

What a bold attempt to ride the tiger. Mousavi's letter includes a profession of loyalty to Supreme Leader Khamenei as a "basis of our regime" but also a veiled warning to Khamenei not to abrogate that regime; a call to followers not to accept the election results but also not use violence; and an appeal to the police not to give Iran its Tiananmen Square moment. This is leadership. Mousavi is moving with calm, confidence and courage.

The limits of Republican 'rethink'

A useful Times article about Republicans beginning to rethink the Reagan mystique points toward without quite focusing on an elemental political truth: success ought to (but rarely does) suggest its own limits. If you succeed in cutting taxes, you can't indefinitely keep cutting taxes. If you succeed in building up the military, you can't indefinitely keep building up the military. If you succeed in reducing regulation, you can't indefinitely keep reducing regulation.

Here's the Times' chief example of a Republican "rethink":

“I don’t use him publicly as a reference point,” said Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a Republican who lately has emerged as a potential national party leader. Mr. Daniels instead has urged fellow Republicans to “let go” of Mr. Reagan as a contemporary symbol....

Mr. Daniels, too, hails his former boss for “timeless” principles like suspicion of big government and appreciation of the importance of individual freedom and opportunity. As he tackles issues in Indiana — education policy lately is a hot topic — he says he asks himself whether Mr. Reagan would approve.

There's no indication that Daniels has asked himself whether Reagan's policies fit the country's needs today.

Did Obama read Atul Gawande? - part 3

UPDATE: Orzag hones in on doctors' incentives

First Peter Orzag, then Obama, and now the New York Times editorial board are making a manifesto of Atul Gawande's powerful demonstration that a major driver of healthcare inflation is doctors' financial incentive to prescribe unnecessary procedures (and often invest in the providers, such as medical imaging centers).

Adopting Gawande's tale of two healthcare markets, Orzag wrote in his blog on June 8, We need to reform the health care system so that it rewards the right kind of innovation – the Mayos, not the McAllens. Yesterday the Times picked up the thread

A glaring example of profligate physician behavior was described by Atul Gawande in the June 1 issue of The New Yorker. (His article has become must reading at the White House.) Dr. Gawande, a Harvard-affiliated surgeon and author, traveled to McAllen, Texas, to find out why Medicare spends more per beneficiary there than in any other city except Miami.

None of the usual rationalizations put forth by doctors held up. The population, though poor, is not sicker than average; the quality of care people get is not superior. Malpractice suits have practically disappeared due to a tough state malpractice law, leaving no rationale for defensive medicine. The reason for McAllen’s soaring costs, some doctors finally admitted, is over-treatment. Doctors perform extra tests, surgeries and other procedures to increase their incomes.

and drew the conclusion:

There is disturbing evidence that many do a lot more than is medically useful — and often reap financial benefits from over-treating their patients. No doubt a vast majority of doctors strive to do the best for their patients. But many are influenced by fee-for-service financial incentives and some are unabashed profiteers.

To be fair, doctors are victims as well as perpatrators of our healthcare system dysfunction. They waste insane amounts of time and resources fighting with insurance companies to get paid. And they're driven by the constant hair-trigger threat of malpractice lawsuits (and malpractice insurance profiteering) to order unnecessary tests and procedures. You might say that defensive medicine, and the "entrepreneurial spirit" that Gawande found infecting some medical communities, are the yin and yang of wasteful healthcare spending in the U.S.

Gawande may be emerging as the Jacob Riis of 21st centure healthcare. And perhaps, when we're ready, of cruel and unusual punishment as well.

Revolution from within

Mir-Houssain Mousavi, in his letter to the people of Iran calling on them not to accept the announced election results, claims authority in the name of the Revolution of 1979 and the law established by the revolutionary regime:

I advise all officials to halt this agenda at once before it is too late, return to the rule of law and protect the nation’s vote and know that deviation from law renders them illegitimate. They are aware better than anyone else that this country has been through a grand Islamic revolution and the least message of this revolution is that our nation is alert and will oppose anyone who aims to seize the power against the law.

Indeed, Mousavi's campaign has in large part been about establishing the rule of law. On April 3, a month after entering the Presidential election, he said, ""The issue of non-compliance with Iranian rules and regulations is the biggest problem that the country is currently faced with."

Human Rights Watch's true-blue conservative

Early this year, David Brooks put on his Big Think cap and counterpoised against our society's alleged individualist shibboleths a communitarian ethos put forward by political scientist Hugh Heclo in a book published last summer, On Thinking Institutionally. As relayed by Brooks:

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

While Brooks never used the word "conservatism" he was plainly holding up this "institutional" ethic as a kind of Platonic conservative ideal. Proud professionals devote their lives to "saving" the honorable essence of institutions that themselves conserve the distilled wisdom of generations.

From this standpoint, Tom Malinowski, Washington Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch, is a true-blue conservative. Consider his call to trust in the accumulated wisdom of core U.S. institutions in his June 9 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution:

Seven years after Guantanamo opened, a stable set of rules for determining who should be detained and with what degree of due process has still not emerged.

Some of these problems are due to the inherent flaws of the system. But many are the inevitable result of creating any new system from scratch, especially one that deviates so much from standards with which US courts are comfortable and American lawyers are familiar. America's civilian criminal justice system, on the other hand, has been around for more than 200 years. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has been around for almost 60. We've had all that time to get the kinks out of the system, to establish stable rules, to train a cadre of lawyers and judges who know those rules, and to develop special procedures for special kinds of cases, including those involving terrorism.

If we try again to create a new system from scratch, if we rely again on trial and error to work out the rules, the result will again likely be more error than trial. Eventually, stable rules may emerge, after all the legal challenges and legislative re-dos are exhausted. But how long should we be prepared to wait to get to that point? Five years? Ten years? Can the United States afford more years of controversy over how to detain suspected terrorists?

To Obama, who has signaled that he wants to revamp rather than scrap the improvisations of the Bush administration - military commissions and preventive detention -- Malinowski points out that there's a kind of infinite regress in trying to reproduce the due process protections of the criminal justice system in a new regime that grants the Federal government powers the whole purpose of which is to short-circuit those protections:

Theoretically, one could design a system of preventive detention that affords detainees such a high level of due process and judicial review that it would not look like Guantanamo, or even Guantanamo-lite. But if you allow protections similar to those already provided by federal courts and courts martial, why go to the trouble of creating a new system at all?

Commentators as diverse as Andrew Sullivan, Martin Wolf and Jack Goldsmith have pointed to a kind of conservatism in Obama -- a propensity to retool rather than radically remake existing institutions, a reform impulse that aims to restore institutions to working order. With regard to treatment of detainees, Obama promises to work within our political institutions, in concert with Congress and the courts, to revamp military commissions and create Constitutional rules for preventive detention. But reforming and "conserving" Bush's radical, ad hoc exercise of this power may simply serve to codify core violations of Constitutional principles as previously understood. As Diane Marie Amann, a law professor at UC Davis, warned in the wake of Obama's May 20, speech on national security:

He signaled a plan by which they — and perhaps other detainees yet to be arrested? — could remain in custody forever without charge. There is no precedent in the American legal tradition for this kind of preventive detention. That is not quite right: precedents do exist, among them the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Japanese internment of the 1940s, but they are widely seen as low points in America’s history under the Constitution.

President Obama promised that his “new legal regime” — words identical to those Bush Administration official John Yoo used in 2002 –- will provide an array of “fair procedures.” That ought to be a given, for the Constitution requires due process before liberty may be deprived. But no amount of procedures can justify deprivations that, because of their very nature violate the Constitution’s core guarantee of liberty.

Time will tell how "institutionally" Obama thinks about the U.S. Constitution.

As if Marcus Garvey had his way

Via Goldblog, I'm reminded of a familiar thought prompted by Andre Aciman's reminder of an Exodus on the NYT op-ed page:

The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) "proud tradition of tolerance" of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.

I have often thought that the single best justification for the State of Israel is the fact that Jews were an oppressed minority throughout the Middle East who had a chance, mainly after the founding of the state of Israel by mainly Ashkenazi Jews, to build a home in a sliver of land carved out from the vast acres of their former oppressors. Yes, European antisemitism was more virulent than the Muslim variety, but Sephardic Jews were very much second-class citizens in Arab lands. It's somewhat as if African Americans got hold of a piece of the Arizona desert and built their own state there.

Did Obama read Atul Gawande? - cont.

Last week, I wondered whether Obama had read Atul Gawande's eureka-inducing article on why U.S. healthcare costs are so high, noting that Obama cited Gawande's chief example of a care center where costs are low and outcomes excellent, the Mayo Clinic, while highlighting before a Senate audience the imperative to reduce dramatic variations in costs among different communities.

Had I done my homework, I would have known that the answer was "yes" -- or more precisely, that Obama's brain on healthcare, Peter Orzag, not only read read Gawande, but went to town blogging on Gawande's conclusions and in particular on Gawande's spotlight on McAllen TX, the low income town with one of the highest per capita Medicare tabs in the country. On May 28, Orzag noted that Gawande's tale of two healthcare markets richly illustrated his own theme that some markets pay dramatically more for healthcare than counterparts, with no apparent benefits. Then, on June 4, he delved deeper into McAllen's high costs, comparing them with his own favorite poster child for low costs/good outcomes, Grand Junction, CO:

For example, at the end-of-life, nearly half of all McAllen Medicare patients see 10 or more physicians, significantly more than the national rate of 30 percent (and in Grand Junction, Colorado, it is just 11% – more than four times less than the rate in McAllen). Also, McAllen’s Medicare patients have 50 percent more cardiac surgery procedures as the national average (about 24 per 1000, versus about 16 per 1000), four times the ambulance spending during end-of-life, and eight times the home health care costs. Medicare spending per enrollee in the last two years of life also varies greatly among McAllen and other peer hospitals.

This week, Orzag was at it again, converting Gawande's core contrast into a policy mantra:

It’s certainly true that medical innovation is essential to improving treatment – and thus health outcomes – for us all. And it’s also true that we need to encourage doctors and researchers to explore and experiment in ways that lead to medical advances that save lives and improve their quality. But, today, the American health care system doesn’t always reward the best medical innovations – and one need look no further than McAllen, Texas to see that this is so.

Despite having a demographic profile similar to El Paso, Texas, and despite having had similar Medicare expenditures as El Paso as recently as 1992, McAllen’s spending grew about five times faster in the years since than in either El Paso or the United States as a whole. In return, McAllen got more medicine (more tests, more surgeries, more time in waiting rooms), but it didn’t get better health – McAllen scores lower than El Paso (and the U.S. average) in measures of health care quality. McAllen "innovated," and certain doctors and hospitals were financially rewarded, but I think we can all agree that this isn’t the kind of innovation we desire.

To get the most from innovation, we need to align incentives toward quality rather than intensity. The Mayo Clinic, synonymous the world over with cutting-edge medicine, has among the country’s lowest Medicare costs per beneficiary. Smaller medical markets, too, have managed to achieve such results: Grand Junction, Colorado is one of the lowest-cost and highest-quality places in the country to be treated. We need to reform the health care system so that it rewards the right kind of innovation – the Mayos, not the McAllens. And the Administration’s proposals aim to do precisely that through bundling of payments, incentives to reduce hospital readmission rates, and (as discussed below) a process through which MedPAC’s recommendations would enjoy fast-track protections in Congress (my emphasis).

Obama is singing from the same choir book. As in his June 2 address to senators, so in his June 2 letter to Senators Kennedy and Baucus, he highlighted the Mayo Clinic, replicating Gawande's thesis in the process:

We should ask why places like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and other institutions can offer the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm. We need to learn from their success and replicate those best practices across the country (my emphasis).

Compare Gawande:

Most Americans would be delighted to have the quality of care found in places like Rochester, Minnesota, or Seattle, Washington, or Durham, North Carolina—all of which have world-class hospitals and costs that fall below the national average. If we brought the cost curve in the expensive places down to their level, Medicare’s problems (indeed, almost all the federal government’s budget problems for the next fifty years) would be solved. The difficulty is how to go about it. Physicians in places like McAllen behave differently from others. The $2.4-trillion question is why. Unless we figure it out, health reform will fail.

Among other cost-cutting measures, Obama also called for "'accountable care organizations'" to improve the quality of care for Medicare patients - apparently a bid to create the kind of outcomes-focused peer group Gawande highlighted in the Mayo Clinic.

Not to mix up cause and effect: Orzag has seized on Gawande's field research because it so precisely illustrates his own pet theses. But still it's remarkable to see that high quality piece of research and writing working its way so swiftly into the political process.

Updates:
Did Obama read Atul Gawande part 3
Orzag hones in on doctors' incentives

A really naive anti-terror idea

As a kid, I was a serial rereader of a children's version of the Odyssey. I seem to remember feeling some anxiety about Odysseus' method of converting the sorceress Circe, who had turned all his men into swine, into an enduring ally. The God Hermes accosts Odysseus en route to Circe's house and gives him this plan of action:

Here, take this potent herb, and go to the house of Circe, and it shall ward off from thy head the evil day. And I will tell thee all the baneful wiles of Circe. She will mix thee a potion, and cast drugs into the food; but even so she shall not be able to bewitch thee, for the potent herb that I shall give thee will not suffer it. And I will tell thee all. When Circe shall smite thee with her long wand, then do thou draw thy sharp sword from beside thy thigh, and rush upon Circe, as though thou wouldst slay her. And she will be seized with fear, and will bid thee lie with her. Then do not thou thereafter refuse the couch of the goddess, that she may set free thy comrades, and give entertainment to thee. But bid her swear a great oath by the blessed gods, that she will not plot against thee any fresh mischief to thy hurt, lest when she has thee stripped she may render thee a weakling and unmanned.’

It was hard for a 20th century eight year-old to grasp how an oath could be a reliable defense against rooted malice. I seem to remember telling myself that extracting an oath would work best on an immortal -- you can't doubt the enforcement power of the gods if you are one. But in Homer, humans also enjoin other humans to swear similar oaths that they will do no harm - for example, the slave Eumaeus recounts how in his childhood his nurse, plotting with a Phoenician merchant to sell him into slavery, made the merchant swear an oath not to harm her before accepting an offer to travel with him to see the house of her parents (from which she had herself been sold into slavery). Plainly, she felt that an oath would have force even from a person with whom she was plotting treachery.

Oaths are in fact perhaps the oldest human enforcement mechanism. One that just broke into the news is a voluntary ethics oath developed this spring by an Harvard MBA student and signed by over 400 Harvard Business School grads this year.

More than once, while reading about the difficulties and dangers of determining which Guantanamo detainees should be freed, and the Pentagon's highly disputed claims that some 14% of freed detainees have "rejoined the fight," it's occured to me that this is a population that might be particularly disposed to take an oath seriously.

Suppose those detainees against whom there is no compelling evidence of terrorist activity or membership in terrorist groups were induced to swear in the name of Allah to a Muslim cleric whose authority they were bound to respect that they would renounce violence and do no harm to any person on the basis of nationality, creed or any other group identity? Such an oath would not be a stand-alone defense, but rather a kind of insurance policy taken out on those slated to be freed, as two thirds of Guantanamo detainees already have been.

Under criminal law, where a suspect is presumed innocent until proven guilty, oaths would have no place. Sworn voluntarily, however, as an inducement to countries that are considering providing asylum for detainees, oaths might have a place. Prisoners of war, too, have sometimes been required to take oaths as a condition of release - for example, in the U.S. Civil War. Guantanamo detainees' status is ambiguous; whether they should be treated as criminal suspects or prisoners of war, or accorded some variant of the in-between status of created by the Bush Administration under the 'enemy combatant' rubric remains a contested issue.

It may be that militant Islamists have some doctrine releasing them from obligation to oaths coerced by infidels and administered by anyone serving them--particularly in light of the various insults to Islam that were part of "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Still, if clerics with the right credentials could be recruited to administer such oaths, might they have some effect with at least some detainees?

How will Obama raise tax revenue?

Robert Reich hypothesizes that Ben Bernanke is helping the Obama administration prepare the ground for new taxes on the wealthy:

But Bernanke also wants to deliver a message to Congress, a message the White House doesn't want to deliver because it's politically awkward: Congress will have to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to finance universal health care and reduce looming budget deficits. Such tax increases won't slow down the economy because the wealthy don't spend that much anyway (that's what it means to be wealthy -- you've already got most of what you need), but may be necessary, at least to ward off inflation fears.

What sort of higher taxes on the wealthy? Bernanke didn't say, of course, but the White House has already floated limits on deductions and seems willing to consider taxing employee-provided health benefits for employees over a certain income. And maybe lifting the cap on Social Security payroll taxes, at least for workers earning over $250,000 a year.

More radical ideas batted around by Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver a couple of months ago: create new tax brackets far above the current top level of $357k -- or make tax brackets "infinitesimal," i.e. ratcheting up proportionately for every extra dollar earned. As Silver pointed out, the current top bracket threshold is anomalously low compared to those of prior eras.

Obama denounces Holocaust denial, loses Arab students

The Times Lede blog has a fascinating set of responses to Obama's speech from Arab students. For the most part, they appreciated Obama's courage and directness and gestures of respect; their responses are nuanced and complex.

Deeply disturbing, though, are students' reactions to Obama's discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Three out five students who reacted to this issue rejected Obama's attempt to be even-handed, specifically his parallel treatment of Jewish and Palestinian suffering. One of these three negative reactions was overtly antisemitic, a second implicitly so. All three reacted angrily at what they saw as an insinuation that Israel's existence was justified by Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

Obama did not say that. But he seemed to. These reactions, prejudiced though they are, highlight a lacuna in Obama's presentation that did register with me* when I heard it:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

There's almost a sleight-of-hand in this passage that sits oddly with its brutal honesty. First, the passive construction "the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries" avoids saying who persecuted them, e.g., perhaps, Muslims as well as Christians. Then comes the statement of Holocaust fact, followed by the assertion that Holocaust denial is poisonous, and then by a claim that Holocaust denial prevents peace -- apparently, Obama seems to imply, by further traumatizing traumatized Israeli minds.

What's missing is a statement of why Israel has a right to exist. Perhaps such a statement should not be necessary. But Obama did come near enough to suggesting that its justification lay in the Holocaust to make the absence of an explicit justification felt. And into that gap rushed the inference that the Holocaust was the reason that Arabs should accept Israel's existence -- which touched a raw nerve in these three students. Here are excerpts from their reactions, starting with a weirdly "doublethought" Holocaust denial:

Tarek Hefni

Tarek Hefni, 20, is a student of computer science at Cairo University from Giza, Egypt

I did not feel very comfortable regarding the two state solution and regarding treating the Holocaust as a fact. It is still a debatable issue and should not be taken as granted....

Lede Blog Editor's Note:We asked Tarek to clarify his objection to President Obama’s statement that the Holocaust is a fact in his speech today in Cairo. Here is what he told us:

I admit a genocide has taken place! That’s a fact. However, the numbers are really doubtful. I also don’t see any relevance between people being killed by other nation and building a homeland in a different land. Again the genocide did take place. I just doubt the numbers.

Kholoud Khalifa Kholoud Khalifa, 22, who majored in journalism at the American University in Cairo and describes herself as an “Egyptian-Austrian Muslim,” watched the speech in Mohandesien, Egypt.

I was troubled by his words regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict and those on democracy. The others were okay, they were expected — violent extremism in all of its forms didn’t really hit a nerve. Iran’s nuclear controversy is just filling white space, but claiming the Holocaust justifies a Jewish homeland and then saying it’s wrong too, what was it? Oh, uttering the same about Jews because it revokes past emotions is atrocious. For 60 years the Palestinians have been displaced, killed and terrorized and it’s disparaging to think of it as a tragic event rather than a genocide. To me, that thought confirms only one thing — his views of Palestinians are no different to those of Zionists.

Riham El Houshi

Where Obama really lost us is Palestine. He didn’t beat around the bush, at least, and made it clear right away that the American bond with Israel was unbreakable.

But he has clearly failed to understand that the problem Muslims have is not seeing both sides of the conflict, but seeing the conflict in historical context. I can safely say that Muslims do not and never will feel responsible for the Holocaust, and do not think it justifies setting up a Jewish state upon Palestinian lands. Lands, which, have shrunk over the decades as settlements have continued to rise and more and more territory has been annexed.

And despite the beauty of the words he used about Jerusalem, it was heavily symbolic talk about a messy issue. Palestinians and Israeli may agree on everything, but they will never relinquish their rights to Jerusalem as the capital of their respective nations.

It must be said, too, that two of the six students published by The Lede accepted Obama's assertion that a two-state solution is necessary. But still, there's a frightening glimpse here of the depth of hatred for Israel among educated young Arabs. Obama, for his part, should be commended for directly confronting Arab anti-semitism. But he needs to rethink the sequencing of fact, logic and association with which he served up this root of bitterness today.

* I must confess to conveniently forgetting this perception while writing the prior post.

UPDATE: The Times reports a Muslim Brotherhood official's reaction very similar to that of the students cited above:

...in Jordan, Rohile Gharaibeh, deputy secretary general for the Islamic Action Front, the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood, rejected any reference to the Holocaust. “The Holocaust was not the doing of the Muslims, it was the Europeans, and it should not come at the cost of the Palestinian people or the Arabs and Muslims,” he said.

More on Obama's speeches:
2029: Look back in wonder
The Gospel according to Obama
What Will.i.am had to work with

An honest broker for Israelis and Palestinians

It's often said that in the Bush years the U.S. lost credibility as an even-handed mediator in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. So among the many extraordinary balancings and tensions confronted in Obama's speech to the Muslim world today, it's worth noting that his paired precis of the plights of Israelis and Palestinians was balanced almost literally to the last syllable:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Word count for the first paragraph: 108. For the second: 107. That literally equal allocation was surely not entirely conscious, but parallelism it reflects must be deliberate. Nor is it accidental that grievances are cited for Jews, Muslims and Christians. Evoking the religious groups' suffering picks up on a the speech's central theme: conflicts that go back decades and centuries must be confronted, and that they can be resolved on the basis of values shared by all three religions - and by all civilizations.

Indeed, the speech as a whole was based on those principles, laid out at the beginning: speak the truth, confront tensions openly, resolve them on the basis of shared values. Obama laid out hard truths for every interested party, including Israelis and Palestinians:

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.

At present, the force behind this semantic even-handedness comes from the Obama administration's unequivocal insistence that Israeli settlement growth must stop. That's the new element in the equation. How the emerging confrontation with the Netanyahu government on this issue plays out will go a long way toward determining how this speech will be viewed in retrospect.

Did Obama read Atul Gawande?

It looks like Barack Obama read Atul Gawande last week.

Gawande's article in last week's New Yorker examining why healthcare is so expensive in the U.S. drew eurekas from hosts of readers. The main culprit, Gawande's exhaustive look at one of the country's most expensive healthcare markets suggests, is paying doctors by the procedure and thus creating financial incentives for prescribing expensive treatments. Gawande's Exhibit A is McAllen, Texas, where Medicare spends twice as much per capita as it does down the road apiece in El Paso. The reason seems to be that doctors in McAllen infected one another with an "entrepreneurial spirit":

One afternoon in McAllen, I rode down McColl Road with Lester Dyke, the cardiac surgeon, and we passed a series of office plazas that seemed to be nothing but home-health agencies, imaging centers, and medical-equipment stores.

“Medicine has become a pig trough here,” he muttered.

Dyke is among the few vocal critics of what’s happened in McAllen. “We took a wrong turn when doctors stopped being doctors and became businessmen,” he said.

Gawande's Exhibit B is the Mayo Clinic, where those incentives have been neutralized:

The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.

“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.

No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs.

Now listen to Obama, addressing Senate Democrats working on healthcare reform (as excerpted by Jonathan Cohn):

I want to just make mention of something that I've talked to many of you privately about. I want to say this publicly. As we move forward on health care reform, it is not sufficient for us simply to add more people to Medicare or Medicaid to increase the rolls, to increase coverage in the absence of cost controls and reform. And let me repeat this principle: If we don't get control over costs, then it is going to be very difficult for us to expand coverage. These two things have to go hand in hand. Another way of putting it is we can't simply put more people into a broken system that doesn't work.

So we've got to reform the underlying system. And this means promoting best practices, not just the most expensive practices. And one of the things I'm going to be discussing with the health and the finance committees is how can we change incentive structures so that, for example, places like Mayo Clinic in Minnesota are able to provide some of the best health care services in the country at half or sometimes even less of the costs than some other areas where the quality is not as good. What we should be--and by the way, that's not just unique to Mayo. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, same thing: top-notch quality, lower costs.

Now, the Mayo Clinic's success is not exactly a secret, and Peter Orzag, Obama's budget director, is one of the country's foremost experts on healthcare costs. So maybe this exhortation didn't come straight out of Gawande. But it's hard to shake the impression that the article was in Obama's mind.

UPDATE: Peter Orzag, Obama's healthcare brain, has been all over the Gawande article.

Mark Penn: sloppy with data?

Mark Penn biweekly "microtrends" column in today's Wall Street Journal surveys research showing "that women are succeeding in an ever-widening range of areas, while there is a statistically significant and growing group of guys who are just not going to make it." The findings are broadly familiar: men are likelier than women to be overweight, alcoholic, imprisoned, felled by heart attacks; they are underperforming women academically and increasingly in the workplace.

While there's nothing controversial in the column, a couple of errors and rhetorical sleights of hand made me wonder just what kind of value Hillary Clinton got from Penn as data guru.

Here's the one out-and-out error:

Almost three-quarters of men are obese, compared to fewer than two-thirds of women.

Three quarters of men are obese? Well, no. In the chart Penn links to (from the annual report of the Dept. of Health and Human Services) , the category from which his stat is drawn is labelled "Overweight (includes obesity)." "Overweight" is defined as a body mass index at or over 25 kilograms/meter; "obese" is at or over 30. We don't know what proportion of the total are obese -- or in fact whether there may be more obese women than men (and conversely, more merely overweight men than women).

The actual figures for the combined category (from 2003-2006) are 72.6% for men, 61.2% for women. I'm not sure what Penn gains by indeterminate rounding. At first I thought he was exaggerating to strengthen his case, but in fact his vague formulation understates the spread.

Next, this:

In December 2007, before the economic crisis set in, unemployment rates were roughly equal, but this time it's the guys who have been laid off in greater numbers. The unemployment rate surged from 4.4% to 7.2% for men, but from 4.3% to only 5.9% for women.

Those end-point unemployment figures sound a bit low...turns out they're from December 2008. It might make sense to mention that.

One more instance. There's nothing technically inaccurate here, but the data pulls against the implied conclusion in a way that should be acknowledged:

More women in the workplace, more female-led families and more sexual equality in general might be expected to cause women to pick up men's bad habits, or be exposed to greater dangers. But for the most part, that hasn't happened.

In fact, men continue to outstrip women in most of the downers of life. A record 1.5 million men are in the clink, up 600,000 in the last decade. Only 115,000 women have committed crimes worthy of jail -- and while that's doubled in the last 10 years, more men continue to wind up in jail by a ratio of nearly 15-to-1.

In other words, the number of men incarcerated increased 67% in a decade, while the number of women incarcerated increased 100%. Not exactly a roaring success story for American men. But it does look like women have "picked up men's bad habits" on this front. Their percentage of the overall prison population has risen.

I'll confess to feeling a bit petty in this post. But the column does make me wonder how rigorous Penn was in Microtrends -- or in his work for political and corporate clients. A look back at his WSJ opus might be in order.