# Posted 10:30 PM by David Adesnik  

KRUGMAN. If I hadn't spent two minutes reading his column, I could've re-brushed my teeth instead. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:25 PM by David Adesnik  

DEAD HORSE BEATEN: The NYT headline reads: "Israelis Arrest 3 Women in a Joke Gone Wrong."

Unsurprisingly, one of the arrested women claimed that the arrest was "a painful joke" while the Israeli army commented that intelligence reports had indicates the women might be potential suicide bombers. Typical.

But the Times doesn't even explain who supposedly played a joke on whom. Do Israelis soldiers arrest people for fun? Did one of the soldiers know the women being arrested? This coverage is closer to being surreal than it is to being prejudiced.

And to cap it all off, a Reuters dispatch added on at the end of the story informs us: "2 Killed in Gaza Clashes". So, even though two human beings actually lost their lives, the big story of the day was that the Israelis arrested someone by accident for unknown reasons?

Ah, humanity. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:10 PM by David Adesnik  

BEHOLD THE QUAGMIRE: As is customary before each American military engagement, the NYT has begun to speculate whether it will become another Vietnam. As one scholar has observed, this is how the NYT and other media outlets imply criticism of administration policy when they are concerned about criticizing it directly, usually because it is so popular.

To give you some sense of how far the media will go in its search for quagmires, here are a couple quotes from 1989:

Panama “might end up looking far more like Vietnam than like Grenada." -- NYT

There is “the possibility of a long and decidedly unheroic slog through the jungles and mountains of the isthumus in search of Noriega” -- Dan Rather

[Cited by Jonathan Mermin, Political Communication, Vol. 13 No. 2, 1996, p.185]

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# Posted 8:16 PM by David Adesnik  

BRITAIN'S ANSWER TO A.N.S.W.E.R., PART II: After my initial, disappointig foray into the rumored conspiracy at the heart of the British anti-war movement, I decided that I ought to look for information about the Stop The War Coalition (SWC) and Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) in the most obvious place of all: their websites.

What I found there (or rather what I didn't find) seems to suggest that both organizations have something to hide. While the SWC website provides contact information for the hundreds of organizations that have affiliated with it, it provides virtually no information about SWC itself or how it is run.

Try as I might, I could not find a full list of the SWC's officers. It does have a steering committee of 30-plus individuals, but gives no indications of what this committee does, when it meets or how it was "elected". (And to get to the steering committee page you have to notice a small box to the left of SWC's statement of objectives on the site's index page).

If you follow the link called "press" on the SWC index page, you come to a list of press releases followed by dozens and dozens of photographs of past marches, which take quite some time to load. If you wait for them to finish and scroll all the way down to the end of the page, you finally come to a list of officers responsible for press relations. Their names are Andrew Burgin, Alistair Alexander, John Rees and Lindsey German.

If you then go back to the steering committee page, you can find out a little more about these four. Andrew Burgin works at a socialist bookshop in London. A Google search turned up this op-ed he wrote for the Guardian.

There is no information there, however, about Alistair Alexander. If you head over to Google, you find out that the Guardian has a technology correspondent by the name of Alistair Alexander and that a private individual by the same name has decided to post pictures of his piercings on the web, including his Prince Albert.

As far as I can tell, there is no reason that all three Alistair Alexanders aren't the same person. But who knows?

Finally, we come to Lindsey German and John Rees. Who do they represent? You guessed it: the Socialist Wokers Party. German, according to the press site, is also the "convenor" of SWC, a position entailing some degree of authority that the SWC website doesn't see fit to mention. If you look at the pressclips at the bottom of yesterday's post, however, you will notice that German seems to be the SWC spokesmen quoted most often by the British papers (and never identified as an SWP figure). The other leading spokesman is Andrew Murray of the railway union ASLEF.

The other officer mentioned on the SWC homepage is Jane Shallice, the treasurer. When I ran her name through Google I ran across an SWC press release on a small anti-sanctions site that actually listed German, Murray and Shallice, along with a few others, as officers of SWC. Interestingly, the site also contains a long rant about the authoritarian methods that the Socialist Workers' Party exploits in order to crush resistance to its leadership of the British socialist movement.

According to Google, Jane Shallice is also a regular contributor to the Socialist Review, the monthly magazine of -- you guessed it -- the SWP, which is edited by -- you guessed it again -- Lindsay German.

The last thing about the SWC webpage worth mentinoning is its statement of principles. According to the site, "The resolution below, setting out the Coalition's platform, was ratified at public meetings held in October 2001 in London." In addition, thes statement notes that "The Stop the War Coalition was formed on September 21st, 2001 at a public meeting of over 2,000 people in London."

Who was invited to these meetings? Who ran them? What was said? Where exactly were they held? What does ratification entail? What else did these meetings ratify? Who knows. The SWC certainly doesn't seem interested in sharing the answers to these moderately important questions.

(By way of contrast, the Socialist Alliance, another leftist organization whose website I ran across while surfing, published minutes of its executive committee meetings, has a copy of its constitution online and provides all sorts of other relevant information about its inner workngs.)

So there you have it. Somehow, I expect there will be more to come.













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# Posted 3:34 PM by Daniel  

GARY HART has received quite a bit of heat for his comments in two speeches in the San Francisco area last week, which some in the punditocracy said might be criticism of Jews and immigrants.

He gave another speech at Oxford yesterday on "National Security in the 21st Century" which was very similar to the one he delivered here a few weeks ago. I had the opportunity to speak with him yesterday for a few moments before the speech about his comments, and he provided this answer:

"I didn’t have anybody in mind. My response was, I thought I would hear something from the Cubans. What is my argument in reverse? I did some interviews with the Jewish press, and I said I would find this very hard to argue the negative, that there are occasions where Americans should put their country of origin ahead of America? Absurd."

Tucker Carlson, who said: "He was talking about Jewish Americans" is, in my opinion, is wrong. How many Jews are originally from Israel? Sure, those of us from a certain wandering tribe are all "from" Israel at some point, but I would describe my original homelands as somewhere in Eastern Europe. I don't think Hart will win, but he certainly has a better chance than Al Sharpton, regardless of what NRO says. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:08 AM by David Adesnik  

HATCHET JOB: This past Sunday, the New York Times' Magazine featured Robert Kagan -- FYI the conservative foreign affairs expert -- in its "Questions For... " column.

While the accompanying photo was quite flattering, the interview itself crossed the line from being tough to being a hatchet job. Instead of asking serious questions to a serious thinker, the Times' correspondent resorted to ad hominem attacks.

In four consecutive questions, the Times tried to get Kagan to admit that he was a chicken-hawk. In responding to this discredited charge, Kagan was polite enough not to ridicule his interviewer. But that's Bob for you. He's just a nice guy.

The Times' other line of attack consisted of a less than surprising but more than pathetic effort to tar Kagan as chauvinist, in both the sexist and nationalist senses of the word. The title of the interview, "Europeans are Sissies", says it all.

Kagan, of course, never used the words. He is far too sophisticated to resort to name-calling. And the Times should have known that, because the occasion for the interview was the publication of Kagan's new book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.

I'll end this post with a caveat: Perhaps the "Questions For..." column is consistently tough on all its subject, not just conservatives. But there is no question that the Times has a bad habit of publishing soft bios of hardcore leftists such as Leslie Cagan and Bill Ayers. (Note the publication date on the Ayers piece.)

If the Times wants to protects its reputation as the paper of record rather than the paper of the left, it better clean up its act. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:50 PM by David Adesnik  

BRITAIN'S ANSWER TO A.N.S.W.E.R.: For a million protesters turn out, someone has to do a lot of setting up in advance. As Americans discovered in the aftermath of the DC anti-war protests last month, those someones sometimes turn out to be Stalinists, organized under the umbrella of a front-organization knowns as ANSWER (an acronym for "Act Now to Stop War and End Racism") .

Unsurprisingly, the NY Times, Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets provided misleading and superficial coverage of ANSWER's role in the protests. Again unsurprisingly, the blogosphere was one step ahead of its professional cousins, thanks in large part to Instapundit.

In the aftermath of Saturday's protests in Europe, however, neither the mainstream media nor the blogosphere has shown much interest in who was responsible for getting people out on the streets. I didn't think about myself much until I sat down for a drink with an anarchist friend of mine who had led the Oxford contingent down to London for the anti-war march.

In to response to a few basic questions about his organizing efforts, my friend launched into a tirade against the Stop the War Coalition and its controlling member, the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP). According to my friend, the SWP has a long-running habit of setting up front organizations to control Britain's social movement du jour. Before 9/11, they used the front known as Globalise Resistance to control the anti-IMF/World Bank movement.

What makes the SWP truly objectionable, however, is not that it is opportunistic, but rather that it is authoritarian and manipulative (or as my friend put it, 'Bolshevist'). Even though its pretends to organize broad coalitions, SWP does its best to exclude all others from the planning process. Meeting times are never announced so that outsiders never have the chance to interfere with SWP proposals, which reflect the input of the same unelected executive committee that dominates all SWP activities.

SWP has also refined the art of co-opting other participants in its pet movements. Typically, it tries to flood participating organizations with its own publicity material, espousing idiosyncratic SWP views on all sorts of matters. This material includes items such as protest placards that amateur protesters would have to invest a considerable amount of their own time in making if they weren't given them by others. Thus, to the casual observer, it might seem that these protests are full of SWP backers.

A final practice that particularly irritates my friend is SWP's efforts to spell out which slogans will be chanted at every march. Thus, in London this past Saturday, my friend direct the Oxford anti-war marching band to drown out an SWP speaker who was trying to get the crowd to chant his slogans. Ahh, the beauty of the united Left.

Now, presumably, my friend's comments on SWP and its tactics aren't the final word on the matter. After all, he has a very personal interest in ensuring that others see SWP for what it (allegedly) really is.

So what does the British press say? The Guardian, it seems, isn't saying much at all. Even in its Special Report: The Anti-War Movement, information on the Stop the War Coalition and the SWP is hard to find.

One correspondent reported that "British marchers have spurned isolation for solidarity, and fear for fury. Their momentum came almost from nowhere...they bore no social or political barcode." Hmmm...

Another commented that "There were, of course, the usual suspects - CND, Socialist Workers' Party, the anarchists. But even they looked shocked at the number of their fellow marchers: it is safe to say they had never experienced such a mass of humanity."

The Guardian's editorial page asserted that "This weekend's march in London was both pluralistic and altruistic. Those opposing a war included not only lifelong dissenters and those who view American foreign policy as the root of all terrorism but also deeply unradical adults and children of all colours, faiths and ages. It was, in the words of one television reporter, the "mother of all focus groups".

Finally, in its round-up of web-reporting on the anti-war protests, the Guardian does link to this informative piece about the far left's dominant role of American protests. But when it comes to SWP, I'm still looking...

Now, surely if the Guardian has something to hide the Telegraph will expose it. But the Telegraph seems to agree that

The centre of the capital was paralysed by noisy but peaceful people from many political backgrounds. Former members of the Armed Forces, clergymen and young children all joined the march to Hyde Park.

While it takes a few cheapshots at the unreconstructed Communists in the crowd, it also quotes Stop the War Coalition spokesmen at length.

Well, it getting late and I'm getting discouraged. But I will be back on the story tomorrow.





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# Posted 8:16 PM by David Adesnik  

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY: PAKISTAN. Welcome to the latest installment of OxBlog's series on democratic reform in the Islamic world. Earlier posts have covered democratic reform (or the lack thereof) in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Algeria. And so on to Pakistan:

This morning, the Washington Post reported that "Despite Pakistan's reputation as a hotbed of Islamic radicalism, its economy is projected to grow this year at a respectable rate of 4.5 percent."

The second half of this sentence is, of course, a total non sequitur. While Islamic fundamentalism is hardly a source of economic growth, a 4.5% increase in GDP is not all that remarkable for any given country unless such growth persists over the long-term. Even basket case economies have good years.

What this strange sentence from the WaPo actually demonstrates is the sort of prejudices that tend to inform coverage of Islamic politics. Correspondents assume that poverty is the cause of Islamic fundamentalism while economic growth is a precursor of democracy. From an empirical perspective both of these statements are highly problematic. Moreover, their application to the situation in Pakistan demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of that country's domestic order.

The Post's first premise is a reference to the ever-popular and still discredited theory that the best way to fight terrrorism is to address its so-called "root causes": poverty, low education and lack of economic opportunity. One clear illustration of how tenuous the link between poverty and terrorism is one UN relief worker's observation about the Palestinian suicide bombers she studied:

"None of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs. More than half of them were refugees from what is now Israel. Two were the sons of millionaires."

So what of Pakistan? The Post is right that it has a reputation as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, albeit as a result of bad reporting like that of the Post.

Regardless, the fact is that Islamic parties won an unprecedented share of the vote in the 2002 parliamentary elections in Pakistan. While their 15% share is not all that impressive, if their support continues to grow, they could become a significant political force.

The prospect of an Islamic victory at the polls suggests, of course, that democracy in Pakistan will have the same impact that it did during its initial trial run in Algeria: it will provoke a vicious civil war, but this time the winner will have access to a nuclear arsenal.

The problem with the Pakistan-Algeria analogy is that Islamist victories in Pakistan were the direct result of Pres. Musharraf's efforts to destroy mainstream democratic parties that might challenge his rule. Incompetent and corrupt as Pakistan's democratic governments were in the 1990s, their failures never led to rise in Islamist sentiment. Only Musharraf has done that, thus following the precedent set by Pakistan's Reagan-era dictator, General M. Zia.

Unsurprisingly, the WaPo reported that Islamist election victories reflected a reaction to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Anyway, in addition to stoking the embers of Islamic fundamentalism, Musharraf has also been providing Kim Jong Ill with considerable support in his quest for nuclear weapons. With friends like this who needs enemies?

Speaking seriously, Musharraf's behavior forces us to revise the Cold War era conventional wisdom that the United States must sometimes support right-wing dictators in order to hold off the great evil of Communism. As Lawrence Kaplan has argued, the US will have to support not a few unpleasant regimes in order to win the war on terror.

But as Musharraf's behavior shows, Islamic dictatorships may be greater threats to American security than Islamic democracies even in the short-term. Unfortunately, the Bush administration seems to be completely oblivious to this fact, especially as far as Pakistan is concerned.

So then, is there any hope for getting rid of Musharraf? When Musharraf overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999, the people of Pakistan filled the streets cheering for their new president. Numerous Pakistanis truly believed that Musharraf would give Pakistan its first honest, efficient government. Working in Washington DC at the time, I met one World Bank official who decided to give up his job and take a 90% pay cut in order to move back to Pakistan and works for the government. I was impressed.

Such delusions did not last long, however. The depth of anti-Musharraf sentiment became extremely apparent to me at a recent lecture hosted by Oxford's Pakistan Discussion Forum. The speaker was opposition MP Sherry Rahman.

Ms. Rahman went on at length about the corruption and decadence of Pakistan's military elite, with the audience -- consisting mainly of Pakistani students at Oxford -- nodding assent. Thus, I was surprised at the hostility that the audience demonstrated once the post-lecture Q&A began. As I suspected and later confirmed, these students were respectfully attacking Rahman for her abject failure to admit that Pakistan's secular parties demonstrated throughout the 1990s that they are no less corrupt and decadent than the military is now.

Rahman's lack of political self-awareness, whether calculated or sincere, seems to be somewhat pervasive in Pakistan, at least according to friends' accounts. I myself heard former PM Benazir Bhutto speak last summer, only to be disappointed with her obsessive self-glorification and total unwillingness to address any criticism of her record.

Thus what prevails now in Pakistan even among the educated is a sense of hopelessness about politics. There simply are no legitimate options. There are only dictators, thieves and fundamentalists. The sole consolation for Western advocates of democracy promotion is that the people of Pakistan want better.

Should an honest and committed leader emerge, the people will follow him in building democracy.
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# Posted 1:14 PM by David Adesnik  

YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME (PART II): Turns out that while I was fighting for a lost cause at the Reading tournament this past weekend, the rest of the Oxford team was having a field day at the BUSA (think British NCAA) championships.

While official results aren't up on the web yet, my teammate Vincent took home gold medals in both kata and kumite, while the men's team won a bronze medal in the team kumite competition.

Go Oxford! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:03 AM by David Adesnik  

GARRY KASPAROV weighs in on Deep Blue and the purpose of computer chess. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:52 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG CAUGHT LYING: In a recent conversation with an eminent scholar, I was asked how it is that the Washington Times can claim that all of the OxBloggers are in their early 20s.

In order to protect the privacy of this eminent scholar she will be referred to, from this point on, only by her initials, MOM. As MOM pointed out, there is at least one OxBlogger who is already 25 years old. I responded that 25 still counts as early 20s and that until I turn 26 in May, the Times quote will remain as is.

Moreover, if the pot may be so bold as to call the kettle black, it may be observed that MOM herself is about to reach an important birthday, one that may or may not rhyme with the word "shifty". Congratulations! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:43 AM by David Adesnik  

YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME. That's a pretty good description of my time at yesterday's shotokan tournament. Except, of course, for the part about winning some.

One of the rough things about these tournaments is that both the kata and kumite sections are done elimination style, so you are out after one minute if you don't win. Not that I object to this method. With hundreds of competitors, there isn't any other efficient way to do it. But it is pretty damn frustrating for the 50%+ of participants who show up and then go home after getting three minutes of fight time.

As one of those frustrated 50%+, I'm now going to take advantage of this forum to rant. Here goes: I am sick of excuses. Last week, "the soft bigotry of low expectations" provided me with a considerable degree of comfort after my mediocre performance against Cambridge. But not this time. This time, getting knocked out of the tournament just makes me want to go back and win. Bad.

The men's kata event was the first of the day. I knew my chances weren't good, because as a brown belt, I was know thrown into the same bracket as all of the black belts. In the first match in my bracket, a brown went up against a black with the expected result. The good thing about it was that I could see that this guy (the brown) was at least as bad as I was. So the embarassment of losing would be mitigated. But a few matches later, a brown belt took down a black. Then came my match. It wasn't even close.

There are three judges in elimination round kata matches, each voting for you, your opponent, or a tie. I don't even know what the vote in my case was. I didn't look and I didn't ask. I was bad, even by my own standards. On the next to last turn before the end of the kata, I lost my balance and had to interrupt my rhythm to stabilize myself. Not that I really have any rhythm in the first place.

At the end, the head judge raised his white flag, indicating that my opponent had won. (I was the "red" team, for scoring purposes.) And that was that.

I now had a couple of hours before my kumite match, so I had a chance to watch everyone else. The first thing I saw was the kata competition for adults of kyu (rank) 4 thru 6. I am third kyu, which is one higher than fourth since the progression runs backwards. In other words, I was watching those who had anywhere from three to nine months less experience than myself, who's been doing karate for two and a half years.

If there was one word that summed up what I saw, it was schadenfreude. Of the 20 or so people in the 4-6 bracket, I easily could've beaten 15 of them. Not that this was saying much. You often hear that promotions are given out too easily at karate clubs, and while I have no doubt benefited from this fact, it's impact on the 4-6 bracket was self-evident.

At the same time as the 4-6 kata matches, there was a brown/black kata competition for children going on in the next ring over. These kids were fantastic. And when I say kids, I mean really little kids, 6-8 years old. Maybe they weren't as good as adult black belts, but they were a helluva lot better than me. I have the utmost respect for their teachers.

From my own time as a classroom volunteer, I know that getting kids to sit down, shut up, and pay attention to anything (except Pokemon) is all but impossible. As I learned last Friday night, when I taught my first karate class (another total accident resulting from the fact that a half dozen novices didn't know that our club's training session had been cancelled), even teaching adults karate is very hard. They pay attention, but it just isn't an easy subject.

A little later on I got to watch the team kumite competitions. Basically, this was a chance to size up my competition before the individual kumite matches. A few things seemed pretty clear. First, the brown belts were totally dominated by the black belts. But even the black belts had technical flaws so glaring that they were evident to someone with as little experience as myself.

Seeing this basically confirmed what Rob Redmond says, which is that Shotokan's unflagging emphasis on karate form entails a total neglect of karate applications. The most significant flaws I saw were a failure to keep one's guard up and a reckless willingness to use kicking techniques even when competitors clearly lacked the speed or proficiecy to use them effectively.

These were the weakness I hoped to exploit in my own matches. If you kick before you're good enough to do it, you basically turn yourself into a slow-moving, off-balance target that is about as hard to hit as the side of a barn. Thus, my strategy was to wait for my opponent to do something stupid so I could take advantage of it. Call it Bill Buckner thinking.

(On a side note, addressed mainly to those of you who practice dynamic martial arts with an emphasis on application, I'd like to point out that form is the theoretical foundation on which all application is based. At the expense of the short-term development of fighting ability, shotokan prepares its students to function at a much higher level later on.)

It turned out that my strategizing didn't matter all that much. My opponent in the kumite was a 2nd-degree black belt who was smart enough not to try anything stupid. On the other hand, he lacked both the natural talent and training to dominate me despite having a half-dozen years more experience. In this sense I was lucky, since some of the other brown belts in my bracket were beaten in under 15 seconds, literally.

I felt especially bad for one of them. He was a skinny guy, around 30, with bad teeth and a harmless look on his face. The ref said go. His opponent lowered himself into fighting stance, then suddenly launched his leg into a crescent sweep, surprising Mr. Brown Belt and throwing him off balance. Before he could recover, or even look up, he had been punched three times and the match was over.

My match began slowly. Since one solid point (or two half-points) wins, everyone was playing conservatively. We moved back and forth, feeling each other out. After a minute or so we began to get more aggressive. Then he scored a half-point, but I had time to make up.

I remember vividly one point in the middle of the match where I was throwing punch after punch, with my opponent blocking but unable to counter. I could feel that I had him. It was my time. If my punches were just that much faster, that much better timed, that much closer to the target, I could've dominated him. It was that feeling of being so close but so far that is now driving me, making me want to win more badly than ever.

The thirty-second bell rang. I was still down one-half point to none. I had to attack or give up any hope of winning. But I haven't trained enough to mount a forward offense, which is much harder than defending and taking advantage of your oppoents mistakes.

Like an NFL team ahead by 10 with a minute to go in the fourth, my opponent gave up ground rather than staying close and risking a big play. I went after him, had him in the corner, but got wild with my attack. It was off target and he had no problem countering back to my exposed side. I felt it cleanly, felt how far I was from blocking it or even seeing it coming. And that was it.

As etiquette demands, I stayed around to watch the rest of the matches in my bracket. The black belts were better than the ones I had seen at first, but the browns were underwhelming. I think I could've taken any of them. Having come so close but so far in my own match, I was dying for another chance. But that will have to come some other time.





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# Posted 7:43 PM by David Adesnik  

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS! Off to another karate tourament. Will check back in sometime on Sunday. In the meantime, will contemplating Rob Redmond's guide to sparring. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:10 PM by David Adesnik  

DREZNER VS. MARSHALL: Dan takes apart Josh's accusation that the US is at fault for the bad blood in NATO. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:57 PM by David Adesnik  

EXPAT IRAQIS FAVOR WAR: Not exactly news, but this is example is so acidly bitter it's worth noting. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:53 PM by David Adesnik  

IRAQI ANTI-SEMITISM: Not exactly news, but this example is so stupendously offensive it's worth noting. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:50 PM by David Adesnik  

NUMBER CRUNCHING: CalPundit exposes the lengths that the National Review will go to in order to excuse Bush's reckless deficit politics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:05 PM by David Adesnik  

BUSH SCREWS AFGHANISTAN: I like to give the President the benefit of the doubt on democracy promotion issues, but when a budget cotains all of $0 for rebuilding Afghanistan, you have to suspect that his rhetoric is empty.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall is on the case as well. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:46 PM by David Adesnik  

UNPREDICTABLE: Josh and I seem to agree what makes the WaPo op-ed page so much better than its NYT counterpart is that the columnists at the WaPo are not so damn predictable. The latest indication that we are right: E.J. Dionne's defense of a Republican president's habit of filling his speeches with the language of God.

I'm firmly against God talk in politics, but Dionne has me convinced. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:36 PM by David Adesnik  

GRIN AND BEAR IT: Promoting democracy in the Middle East will mean working with Arab reformers whose positions on foreign policy are anathema to the United States. For example, Yusuf Qaradawi. He supports both Palestinian suicide bombings and the right of women candidates to stand for office in Bahrain's municipal election.

During the Cold War, the United States sold out democracy in the developing world when foreign democrats showed the slightest signs of straying to the left. Our reward was the rise of Khomeini.

However unpleasant men such as Yusuf Qaradawi are, their challenge to fundamentalist authorities is one of the rare sources of criticism that devout Muslims perceive as legitimate. And sometimes, there are signs that reformers such as Qaradawi will support reforms that benefit moderate Islam.

In his case, the fact that that each of his three daughters has a PhD from British universities indicates that Qaradawi's brand of moderate Islamism may well give birth to a new generation that is educated enough to demand for itself the democratic rights that all Muslims deserve. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:31 AM by Daniel  

BLIX MIXED. Both sides will get ammunition from this presentation. Syria's presentation was especially persuasive, especially when they called American policy racist and focused entirely on all of the injustices committed by Israel. I also appreciate Iraq's new law banning nuclear weapons programs. I think France just surrendered, but my French isn't so good. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:09 AM by David Adesnik  

HAPPY FIRE EXTINGUISHER DAY! According to an executive order just signed by the President, today has been renamed Fire Extinguisher Day. The President has asked that Americans celebrate this special holiday by walking the streets with fire extinguishers and spraying anyone (or anytwo) engaged in public displays of affection. When spraying, please remember to offer your friends the traditional Fire Extinguisher Day greeting: "Get a room!" (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:00 PM by David Adesnik  

HORNET'S NEST: "Why must the United States attack Saddam Hussein if that will only anger much of the Islamic world?"

The WaPo has one answer to this question: that the United States unwillingness to back a decisive intervention in the Middle East is precisely the reason why lesser attacks such as the first WTC bombing, the Khobar towers explosion, the twin embassy explosions and the attack on the USS Cole led to the climactic terrorist assault on 9/11.

Rather than offer a second answer, I'd like to challenge the question's premise, i.e. that an American invasion of Iraq will provoke a harsh fundamentalist response. This premise rests on twin assumptions that fundamentally contradict one another.

The first is that the Arab man-in-the-street is so firmly anti-American that he will be confuse the liberation of Iraq with the reimposition of Western imperial rule. The second is that the Arab man-in-the-street is not so firm in his anti-American convinctions, but that American agression against the Arab world will provoke him to violence.

You can't have it both ways. Naturally, there are different degrees of anti-Americanism in the Arab world, and it is hard to know exactly what different subsets of the Arab population believe. As such, it is hard to provide a definite answer to the question of how a US-Allied invasion of Iraq will affect public sentiment in the Arab world. Nonetheless, I'd like to make some tentative observations.

First, I believe that most Arabs are open-minded enough not to rush to judgment immediately. No doubt, even those who are not firmly anti-American will be deeply suspicious of American motives. Thus, there may well be riots or other disturbances. However, if it becomes clear that the West has replaced Saddam with a government more democratic than any other in the Middle East, the initial outburst of anti-Americansim will abate. While the Arab may be able to tell whatever lies it wants about the Zionist entity, it will be much harder to deceive the public about the true nature of postwar Iraq, about which they will learn from fellow Arabs and Muslims.

If my scenario provides a ballpark estimation of Arab reaction to the invasion, then there is little reason to fear that forceful US intervention will provoke a mad rush of enlistments at Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas headquarters. While these organizations will no doubt take advantage of the initial chaos to launch attacks and win political and financial support, their gains will pale in comparison to the credibility that the US wins if, and that is a very definite if, the US wholeheartedly commits itself to rebuilding a democratic Iraq.

Now what if I am wrong? What if most Arabs already are so firmly anti-American that even the sudden establishment of a Norway on the Euphrates will not disabuse them of their anti-imperialist sentiments? If that's the case, then their support for terrorist organizations and willingness to overthrow conservative dictatorships is probably already at a maximum. It's hardly something that could be made worse.

And what if Arabs are more open-minded than I project? Then there isn't all that much reason to fear a sudden and devastating turn to fundamentalism, since such Arabs will be open-minded enough to judge the American occupation of Iraq on the merits, albeit from a suspicious vantage point.

As a final bit of support for my view of the Arab street as more open-minded than that derogatory term makes it out to be, I'd like to cite a couple of facts I picked up from Stephen Schwartz's book The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror. (Btw, big shout out to Doubleday for sending me a complementary copy.)

Even though I have serious reservations about Schwartz's credibility as an author, there is the occasional bit of prose that seems well-documents. The one that impressed me was Schwartz's description of the reaction of Balkan Muslims to the American war effort in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Naturally, one might expect the direct beneficiaries of American intervention to have kinds words for it. (This implies, of course, that liberated Iraqis will be well able to recognize that American intervention has changed their lives dramatically for the better.) Even so, the degree of Bosnian and Kosovar enthusiasm for the US was surprising. Here are some samples:

"The world has split into a modern civilization and one of barbarism and terrorism. Bosnia-Hercegovina has chosen to ally itself with the civilized world. It has decided to part of the solution, not part of the problem." -- Bosnian Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija

While the Saudis have also offered similar (if far more equivocal) endorsements of US policy, the Bosnians have backed up their rhetoric by aggressively routing out Al Qaeda affiliates in their own backyard. In March 2002, for example, government raids in Sarajevo produced evidence that helped tie the Chicago-based head of a major Islamic charity to Osama bin Laden.

"Every Albanian in Kosovo knows that without the help of the United States we would have been devastated by Serbian imperialism." -- Daut Dauti, Kosovar journalist.

Despite occasional descriptions of the Kosovar KLA as Muslim terrorists, both the KLA and the Kosovar religious leaderships have taken the American side in the aftermath of 9/11. And there are indications that Turkish Muslims know where there interests lie as well. According to one journalist and former diplomat,

"The United States, [after] it could not convince our European friends, stopped the Serbian aggressors with a military-intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Now, mind you that neither Balkan nor Turkish Muslims are Arabs, who have a political history and culture that is much more conducive to anti-American fundamentalism. Even so, there is hope that the Islamic ties between these nations will foster a recognition that the US may be in the process of doing more for the cause of Arab freedom than any Arab leader has ever done.




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# Posted 7:57 PM by David Adesnik  

McGRORY RECOVERS: After briefly leading us to believe that she more than just an aging Maureen Dowd, Mary McGrory returned to form today with her usual mixed-up logic and cheap shots at the administration.

But why am I even putting up links to a column I think no one should read? Because all of you should suffer through the column the same way I did! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:51 PM by David Adesnik  

NO, THIS IS 91....2! The WaPo reports that Edward Roland

"suffered a heart attack at home after his release from the hospital following treatment for bone and liver cancer. His mother said her family called 911 for help. The medics were dispatched at 6:01 p.m. But -- get this -- the medics' shift had ended at 6 p.m., one minute earlier, so they drove back to the firehouse to hand off the emergency call to the next team coming on duty. The new team didn't arrive at Mr. Roland's home with intravenous medications and heart-monitoring equipment until 6:26 p.m. Kept waiting for help for 25 minutes, Mr. Roland, 51, was dead by the time the medics arrived."

And you thought Chief Wiggum was fictional.
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# Posted 7:47 PM by David Adesnik  

GREEN(SPAN) WITH ENVY: Ever-impotent in their quest to publicize the absurdity of the administration's budget, the Democrats must be just a little bit jealous of Alan Greenspan's ability to destory the administration's credibility in a single hour. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:40 PM by David Adesnik  

[While I'm not going to put up all my posts in both Spanish and English, this one seemed to be fit for translation:]

DERECHOS HUMANOS EN COLOMBIA: Aunque sea necesario ayudar a las fuerzas armadas Colombianas, hay que ensenarles respetar los derechos humanos de la poblacion. En este momento, me parece que los Guerreros Frios de la administracion Bush no han aprendido nada de los conflictos latinos de los 1980s, cuando se demostraba que no se puede vencer el terrorismo guerrillero sin asegurar que las fuerzas armadas de gobiernos aliados merecen el apoyo de la poblacion local.

HUMAN RIGHTS IN COLOMBIA: Although it is necessary to support Colombia's armed forces, the US must teach them to respect the human rights of those living in combat zones. At this moment, the unconditional support of the Bush administration's Cold Warriors for the Colombians indicates that they didn't learn the most important lesson of the Latin American conflicts of the 1980s -- that one cannot defeat guerilla terrorism without ensuring that allied forces win the hearts and minds of locals by respecting their human rights. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:21 PM by David Adesnik  

COLD CASH OR COLD TURKEY? A guarantee of considerable economic aid played a critical role in persuading the Turkish parliament to support the basing of US troops in that country. When doling out the aid, the US should take a page from the IMF playbook: make each installment contingent on good behavior, especially Turkish cooperation in supporting Kurdish rights in northern Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:09 PM by David Adesnik  

CULTURAL INSENSITIVITY: Max Boot adds a solid article to the growing collection of works explaining why this war is not for oil. It turns that even Jimmy Carter has said that this war has nothing to do with oil.

But what was really noteworthy about Boot's column was this quote: "Europeans are projecting their own behavior onto us. They know that their own foreign policies have in the past often been driven by avarice...After more than 200 years, Europe still hasn't figured out what makes America tick."

Now, how often do you hear that the problem with American foreign policy, or even Americans in general, is that they don't know enough about foreign cultures? And while I'm all for learning more about other cultures, no one ever seems to recommend that other nations learn more about us.

While Americans themselves often insist that America has no culture, it does. And that culture has a lot more to it than McDonalds, Coca-Cola and MTV. Not that those other things are all good. As one Vietnamese immigrant observed, the cardinal elements of American culture are money, God, sex and guns. (That statement wasn't meant to be entirely negative. Said immigrant became a millionaire, occasionally had good sex, and was a devout Buddhist.)

Thus, when one thinks about the cause of the current tensions between the United States and France, it is important to recognize that cultural misunderstandings are at play. But Europeans are not the only who misunderstand American culture. In fact, numerous Americans do as well, especially that branch of the American left which believes that this is a war for oil.

The lesson here is that before one assumes responsibility for learning about other cultures, it is of supreme importance to learn about one's. As the Delphic Oracle said, "Know thyself." This lesson applies to nations as much as it does to individuals. While it will never possible to learn about all, or even most of the foreign cultures with which the United States interacts, it is possible to know ourself well enough to be aware of recurrent, sometimes self-destructive patterns in our behavior.

Yes, Mr. Chirac, that lesson applies to France as well.

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# Posted 6:29 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT'S A FEW MILES BETWEEN FRIENDS? It's hard to know what to make of the latest Iraqi breach of 1441. On the one hand, it was Iraq's own 12,000 page report that provided the Blix Boys with enough evidence to demonstrate that Iraq has missiles whose range exceeded UN guidelines. (Thus emphasizing once again that the inspectors cannot find anything Iraq doesn't let them find.)

So, did Iraq want its missile program to be discovered? That wouldn't be so unreasonable. The Iraqis claim that the outlawed missiles, once loaded with explosives and guidance systems, would have a range within the UN limit. Did Iraq want to provovke a split between the US and the rest of the Security Council by tempting Cheney and Rumsfeld to declare that missiles with a range 30 miles too long are an excuse to go to war?

On the other hand, the whole missile affair may be a serious Iraqi screw-up, with the entire Security Council soon demanding that Saddam turn over large numbers of missiles he has already deployed in the field. If he doesn't, it would be very hard for anyone to argue that he is not in material breach of 1441. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:35 AM by Daniel  

INSPECTIONS. This shows why they simply will not work. Blix doesn't notice a thing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:27 PM by David Adesnik  

BASHAR BASHING: &c. fisks David Ignatius' profile of Syrian president Bashar Assad. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:03 PM by David Adesnik  

THE COST OF VICTORY: Joseph Biden, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee "said Bush must remain committed to the rebuilding effort if he launches a war, even if it means limiting his proposed tax cut or curtailing his domestic agenda."

On the one hand, Biden's statement is a disingenuous effort to assert that Bush ought to let the Democrats run the show in Washington until the United States finishes its job in Iraq. On the other, I really will be disappointed with Bush if he stops focusing on Iraq after the war in order to work on his domestic agenda.

Then again, W. learned from his father that victory in Iraq is worthless if the voters believe that it has taken priority over their demands. That is why the Oxford Democracy Forum exists -- to make sure that electoral politics don't preempt America's mission to promote democracy abroad.

UPDATE: The Iraqi opposition-in-exile certainly isn't making Bush's job any easier. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:44 AM by Daniel  

STICK TO PAINTING. The NY Times offers us a sentimental and sympathetic look at Nelson Mandela and his new role as an artist. The article offers a one sentence reminder that "last month, he made headlines by sharply assailing President Bush and the American push for war with Iraq." Yes, I know--this article is about his painting career, not his politics. But I am still disturbed by the Mandela's comments and unsure about just how much of a free pass he deserves.




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# Posted 1:05 AM by David Adesnik  

HATING AUSTRALIANS: The Bali attack was not random. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:03 AM by David Adesnik  

MICHAEL LERNER BANNED: Now even Tikkun and The Nation think International ANSWER has gone too far. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:45 AM by David Adesnik  

SULLIVAN SLAMS PROFLIGATE PRESIDENT: Andrew has nary a kind word for the 2003 budget. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik  

DIDN'T DOWD IT: Spinsanity teaches MoDo a lesson in interpreting poll results. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:30 PM by David Adesnik  

SADDAM IN A BOX: Mort Halperin thinks we should reinforce the status quo. Innocents Abroad knows better. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:38 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG VS. ISRAEL? Yesterday, OxBlog praised the WaPo's in-depth account of a brutal firefight in the Gaza Strip.

Yet, as both reader IW and fellow blogger Judith Weiss pointed out, the same story that I praised has become the subject of a five-fingered fisking by Meryl Yourish.

What gives? After all, OxBlog is usually the first to denounce anti-Israel media bias. In this instance, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that while Meryl makes some good points, she is grasping at straws.

Here's why:

The article begins with the classic image of a Palestinian boy, 13-year old Mohammed Jibril, terrified by Israeli tanks and helicopters. That's cliche, but not exactly unfair. Moreover, Mohammed isn't all that innocent. For some reason, he is running around at night with his father, brother, and a number of other men, most of whom

"were shooting at [Israeli Lt. Col. Tal] Hermoni's tanks with AK-47 assault rifles...[Jibril] also saw some Palestinian fighters throwing hand grenades and others in black ski masks planting mines in the paths of the tanks."

Talk about lax parenting. Anyway, the Post's correspondent, Molly Moore, then interrupts her narrative to tell us the point of her article:

"That [this] has been the consistent pattern of the grueling standoff between Palestinians and Israelis: urban guerrillas armed with assault rifles and homemade explosives battling a military partially financed with U.S. money and equipped with some of the most lethal fighting machines in the world. The result is a startling imbalance in casualties."

Meryl thinks that this reference to US financing is bascially an implicit statement that US support for the Israeli government is responsible for Palestinian deaths. While references to US financing tend to have critical connotations, Moore's description of the Israelis' opponents as "Palestinian gunmen" and "urban guerrillas" suggest that the Israelis are hitting the right targets. If this were a story about innocent civilans lost in the crossfire, Meryl might be right. But it isn't.

Surprisingly, Meryl doesn't comment on the following paragraph, which seems to be lifted directly from the New York Times'anti-Israel repertoire:

"Approximately one of every four Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip has been a child or youth under the age of 18 who, in many instances, was playing, sleeping or standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to an analysis of tallies from three Palestinian human rights organizations that monitor deaths in Gaza.

While the Post doesn't question the validity of such reports, it is worth remembering that the focus of the Post's article is little Mohammed Jibril, who finds himself in danger not because he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time", but because he ran into battle along with his father and brother.

Another passage Meryl passes over is this one, which makes the Israelis look rather good:

"This [mission] would be different, Hermoni recalled telling his men -- the first time in the current uprising that an Israeli commander took his tanks into the heart of Gaza City. The mission, he warned them, would be difficult, dangerous and particularly sensitive because of the potential for civilian casualties in such a populous setting."

All in all, Moore does a good job of detailing Israeli views of what happened. This is a pleasant change from the Reuters and AP dispatches where the headlines reflect Palestinian accounts while the Israelis' views are buried in the next to last paragraph.

Meryl also focuses on the Post's apparent effort to downplay the significance of the Palestinian threat, via passages such as this one:

"You are wounded, you see your cousin die in front of you. All your friends are there, most from the resistance," Hussan said. "They are fighting with Kalashnikovs and hand grenades. It was like toys against a tank."

While the Post does not explicitly comment on Hussan's lack of credibility, it does provide its readers with this credible Israeli account of the dangers of Palestinian weapons:

"Ingrained in [Levinson's] psyche and training were the images of three Merkava tanks that were disabled when they rolled over Palestinian explosives during the past year. Seven soldiers died in the three incidents. They were a reminder that he was not invulnerable, no matter how crude the Palestinian weapons."

Next, Meryl takes issue with the Post's acceptance at face value of Palestinian claims that three of the Gaza fatalities -- aged 16, 17 and 20 -- had arrived at the scene for the sole purpose of caring for the wounded. Now, Meryl is right to point out that Palestinian eyewitnesses have a very poor record of reporting the truth and that the Post should be more critical of claims that dead Palestinians were non-combatants.

Still, the fact that these three victims chose of their own free will to enter a battlezone implicitly rebuts Palestinian human rights organizations' claims that young victims of the war are innocent bystanders.

Meryl ends her commentary by asking the Post to

"Spare us any more articles on the poor, downtrodden Palestinian 'resistance' fighters, who are forced to use inferior weaponry. Even when there is parity and beyond, the Arab armies have been defeated time and again by the Israelis."

Admittedly, the Israelis have a good record even when they are outmanned and outgunned. But when it comes to this specific article, it is hard to detect any real sympathy for the Palestinian tactics that produce such one-sided casualty figures.

If anything, the article seems to imply that the Palestinian leadership is callously sacrificing its children despite the relative hopelessness of such amateurs taking on professional and well-armed Israeli forces. There is an implicit agenda of sympathy in the Post's report, but it is for the Palestinian youths who have been tricked by their elders, not the Israelis who have no choice but to defend themselves.

As Golda Meir said, "We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we can never forgive you for making us kill yours." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:32 PM by David Adesnik  

OIL=DICTATORSHIP: Is it inevitable? As one WaPo op-ed writer points out,

Nearly every country with an economy dominated by oil is corrupt and dictatorial, whether in Latin America, Africa, the Caspian, Southeast Asia or the Middle East. The notable exception is Norway.

Oil is unique. Great wealth, controlled by the government, is created without labor or risk. So rulers have no accountability to the people, because they do not need the consent of the governed.

The implications for postwar Iraq are self-evident. Fortunately, the author goes on to describe a number of simple, common sense ways to ensure that Iraq's natural resources benefit its people rather than its politicians. I hope Condi is paying attention. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:20 PM by David Adesnik  

BLIX NIX EURO TRICKS: "The principal problem is not the number of inspectors but rather the active cooperation of the Iraqi side." -- Hans Blix (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:16 PM by David Adesnik  

MY ENEMY'S ENEMY: If you think NATO has problems, then the Axis of Evil is really in over its head. The Post reports that Iran and the US are negotiating minimal cooperation agreements regarding a potential US-Iraq war.

OK, OK. So I am being sarcastic and taking a back-handed shot at the administration. I support talking to Iran about Iraq, but it does expose the absurdity of referring to it as part of an axis. Then again, 'informal association of evil' just isn't as catchy.

Oh, and as for the 'evil' part, that's right. Iran has indicated that it will start developing the potential to build nuclear weapons. They say you need a revolution... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:58 PM by David Adesnik  

THE PEOPLE SPEAK: A new WaPo poll says that Americans favor war without a UN resolution 57-40 provided that allies such as Britain, Italy and Australia come along. Without allies, the split is 50-47.

In its analysis of the poll, the Post asserts that

"most Americans are unwilling to commit the United States to the kind of postwar rebuilding effort that many inside and outside the administration say will be essential to bringing economic and political stability to the country."

This conclusion reflects the fact that 56% of the public says that America should not commit to rebuilding Iraq "if that means the United States would need to keep 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for several years and would spend 15 billion dollars a year rebuilding Iraq."

But it's premature. As I've warned before, answers to stand-alone poll questions tend not to expose the complex reasoning process behind the answers to yes-or-no questions. Morevoer, stand-alone questions cannot account for the impact that a changing situation on the ground might have on the American public.

But before going there, let me just say this: the fact that 37% of Americans do support a nation-building effort that entails putting 50,000 troops on the ground and spending $15 billion a year is stunning. The last time so many Americans supported an effort of that magnitude was -- come on, you know the answer -- Vietnam.

Now what if the President had stated in a nationally televised address that the US ought to commit 50,000 troops and $15 billion to rebuilding Iraq? I expect the split would be better than 37-58.

And what if NATO and the UN pledged considerable manpower and resources of their own to the reconstruction effort, as they have in Bosnia and Kosovo? Again, the split would probably be a lot better than 37-58.

What it will come down to in the end is whether the President is willing to personally commit himself to the democratic future of the Middle East. If he tells us that the war and terror cannot be won and that America cannot live up to principles unless we rebuild a democratic Iraq, then the people will follow.

If Bush stays silent and accepts a democratic facade in Iraq, no one will object either. Mr. President, the ball is in your court. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:33 PM by David Adesnik  

SADDAM NOT RATIONAL? That's not news, but Josh Marshall makes the case short and sweet. Make sure to check out the Cardinal Collective's comments as well. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:26 PM by David Adesnik  

BLOGGING THE DOLPHIN: CalPundit interviews Josh Marshall, providing a marvel of blogospheric introspection. Humor aside, the interview provides a lot more insight into the relationship between blogging and journalism than many of the other articles that have tackled the same subject.

CalPundit also deserves considerable praise for finally figuring out on behalf of us all how an amateur can earn himself a link on TPM.

Finally, don't forget to check out the many other great CalPundit posts that are now up, on subjects ranging from France, to gun control, to opinion polls, to the comprehensive case for taking out Saddam. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:43 PM by David Adesnik  

DREZ TO IMPRESS: Daniel Drezner has a wealth of interesting posts up now, including his take on the Franco-German plan for avoiding war in Iraq, a delightful fisking of Guardianista views on Eastern Europe, a comment on the altruism of pundits, and some ideas about computer simulations might tell us about international relations. Enjoy! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:37 PM by David Adesnik  

AIN'T JUST A RIVER IN EGYPT: Jackson Diehl never fails to impress me. He has done more than any other journalist to get Americans to think about promoting democracy worldwide and especially in the Middle East.

His latest column profiles Egyptian heir apparent Gamal Mubarak, who vistied the White House last week in search of an endorsement of his presidential aspirations. While Mubarak the younger presents himself as the sort of reform-minded, technocratic dictator that Fareed Zakaria praises, I say that a dictator is a dictator is a dictator. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:19 PM by David Adesnik  

AND THE OSCAR GOES TO...Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei. These guys can be optimistic about anything. While that used to get under my skin, I now like it. No one will ever be able to say that the UN inspectors were carrying out Donald Rumsfeld's order.

On second thought, nix that. Someone will figure out a way to implicate the Pentagon. But not many will listen.

UPDATE: CalPundit points out that the Blix Boys may not be so naive, at least in this instance. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:11 PM by David Adesnik  

BRUTAL FIGHT IN GAZA: An outstanding piece of war journalism. It speaks volumes for itself. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:03 PM by David Adesnik  

EX-EXILES: Five of Hamid Karzai's ministers are Afghan immigrants to the United States who have returned to rebuild their homeland. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:53 PM by David Adesnik  

ANNALS OF ANTI-AMERICANISM: I thought I had a good point. When and if Saddam falls, US occupation forces will find the weapons he has been hiding, thus offering conclusive proof to all those who now suspect that the American case against Iraq is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

But no. According to Gary Smith,

"I was making the case that if we go into Iraq and discover weapons of mass destruction, then the world would come to realize we'd been right...And [this couple] told me, 'If that happens, it's only because the CIA planted them.' I was floored.""

What can you to say that?

The WaPo article in which Smith is quoted also cites another amusing albeit ad hominem attack on our friends across the Atlantic:

"Scratch an anti-American in Europe," Denis MacShane, Britain's minister for Europe said recently, "and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard, or to have an article published in the New York Times."

Aside from this pair of anecdotes, the WaPo article unfortunately has very little to offer. Like most articles on anti-Americanism, it is a compilation of pro- and con- statments, poll results and irresponsible speculation. It does not address the fundamental question at the heart of the Euro-American divide: How does one differentiate legitimate criticism of the United States from unjust criticism that reflects anti-American prejudice?

The article also fails to address the related question of whether the current wave of anti-Americanism is a passing trend, a reaction to American behavior, or the beginning of a new stage in Euro-American relations. Ideally, I would try to provide some answers to these questions, but for that I would need considerably more free time. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:30 PM by David Adesnik  

SUNDAY ON A BRITISH TRAIN: As I headed back from Cambridge on Sunday afternoon, I had the chance to sit down on the train with a proper British newspaper, rather than reading American papers online, as has become my custom.

While there were no great surprises in the Independent, there were some things of value one wouldn't find in an American paper. The first that comes to mind is this column by William Shawcross, entitled "Why This Paper is Wrong About Bush and Blair's Stance on Iraq."

Shawcross takes upon himself the responsibility of doing in 800 words what no American columnist dare would. In the United States, columnists have the luxury of being able to comment on only the latest developments of the current diplomatic drama rather than justifying it as a whole.

While the general content of Shawcross' article is familiar to American readers, I cannot think of case in which so much has been said in so little space. So read it for your own good. And if there is someone you know who needs to be set straight about the importance of confronting Saddam, just point them in Shawcross' direction.

While on the train, I also ran across the Independent's effort to fisk Tony Blair. In short, the paper's work was less than impressive. But it did force me to ask whether one can fisk a fisking. If so, can one fisk a fisking of a fisking? I don't know. I just don't know. It's all sort of a like an Escher drawing -- you don't know where it ends and where it begins.

Finally, the Indpendent provided me with my recommended daily allowance of righteous indignation, all in a single headline: "It's About Time the US Got Over 9/11."

What can you say to that? The column that follows is unremarkable. But the headline is a twisted knife in an open wound. I guess all I can say is this: We'll get over it when the Towers are standing again and when Bin Laden and Saddam are sharing a prison cell at the Hague, watching CNN report on the first elections in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

In London I switched trains, catching an outbound departure for Oxford. While there was much left to read, I ran into a good friend on the platform whom I hadn't seen since Novemeber. He told me he's getting married, so I spent the ride up to Oxford catching up with him (and talking some politics), all of which was a pleasant contrast to the headlines in the Independent.

DP, if you're reading this, I hope that you and JB enjoy every moment of your lives together. Congratulations. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:03 PM by David Adesnik  

AFFIRMATIVE (KARATE) ACTION: The President has warned us that we must rise above "the soft bigotry of low expectations." You know what I say to that? Hell no!!!

Low expectations are the one thing that preserved my dignity during this past weekend's karate match against Cambridge.

Upon arriving at the gym, the Oxford captain duly informed me that I had been promoted to the first team for kata (performance), since Oxford's fifth man turned out not to practice shotokan, but another style of karate instead. In so many words, I asked the captain "Are you out of your f$%# mind?"

First of all, I did not want my puny karate compared to that of the many mighty blackbelts on the Oxford and Cambridge first teams. Second, and perhaps more importantly, members of the first team have to perform two kata, rather than the one demanded of second team members. In other words, I would have to go on cold in the second round. All I had going for me was low expectations.

The captain didn't care and told me to just do it. And things turned out OK, although for all the wrong reasons -- mainly teammates who are much better than myself but lost it under pressure. I was safely fourth out of Oxford's first five. I was even ahead of one or two of the Cambridge five, as well, and they didn't have Bill Buckner moments. But we still lost. Bad.

Next came kumite (sparring). No surprise promotions here, a fact I was very glad about after watching the first team's matches. What was a surprise, though, was that the second team's matches were going be scored 'Ippon' (up to one point) rather than 'Sambon' (up to three). What that means in practice is that two punches (each worth half a point) can end the match.

I lasted around sixty seconds. I thought I had a chance at first because I was one belt higher than my opponent, which might have made up for his being a good six inches taller. But he scored on a kick, then a punch and that was it.

The punch was to my jaw and hard. I did not want to chew for the rest of the night. But what I really didn't like was that it ended the match. Getting smacked just made me mad. I wasn't tired. I wasn't hurt. I wanted to fight back. But that will have to wait for next weekend, when I go to the KUGB southern regional tournament.

So there you have it folks. Saved by the soft bigotry of low expectations. Time to head back to the dojo. Sayonara. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:56 PM by David Adesnik  

24 FIGHTING CHICKENS: Light blogging for me this weekend. I'm going to be in Cambridge, representing Oxford in the annual varsity sports competition. My event is shotokan karate, both kata (performance) and kumite (sparring).

I am going to come home with a black eye. This is my first real fight and I am the least experieced member of the Oxford team. In fact, I'm only on it because there aren't ten good fighters around.

So, if I don't get back to posting on Monday, it may be because I am physically indisposed. In the meantime, check out my favorite karate site, Shotokan Planet, known informally as "24 Fighting Chickens." If you know any good shotokan sites, send'em in and I'll post'em.

Wish me luck. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:47 PM by David Adesnik  

DREZNER VS. ZAKARIA on democracy promotion. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:30 PM by David Adesnik  

FOUL LANGUAGE: Pejman adopts Josh's habit of using the word "snarky". (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:17 PM by David Adesnik  

INSIDE FRANCE: Winds of Change takes you there. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:11 PM by David Adesnik  

NOT EVERYONE IS CONVINCED: Jim Henley notes that US statements of fact have an uneven record. But he doesn't seem to appreciate that the false claims he mentions did not reflect extensive evidence compiled by the NSA and CIA and then released for the explicit purpose of persauding both the American people and America's allies.

UPDATE:Kevin Drum makes a very similar point. Andrew Sullivan as well. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:01 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE ON IRAQI CUISINE: Reader Stephen St. Onge makes an excellent point about Iraq's food distribution program. He begins by pointing to the following passage in the WaPo article I initially responded to:

"Iraqi officials note with pride that the entire rationing system is computerized, in a way almost nothing else is here. The Trade Ministry maintains a database that lists the name, address and identity-card number of every Iraqi who receives a ration.

"If a family moves, it must inform the ministry of the new address to keep receiving food handouts. If a new child is born, parents must submit a birth certificate to receive infant formula. If there is a death in the family, relatives have three months to notify the ministry, although officials said names often are automatically deleted from the database as soon as the Health Ministry prepares a death certificate.

"'It's updated all the time,' said Ahmad Mukhtar, a U.S.-educated engineer who supervises the computer center. 'Births, deaths, marriages -- it's all there.'

"Mukhtar said the database is primarily used to distribute food, but the information also is shared with other government agencies."

Stephen notes that "In short, the Iraqi food distribution system is used to keep tabs on the population's whereabouts. If you don't register with them, then you starve."

So much for being above politics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:54 PM by David Adesnik  

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND STATISTICS: Impressively, both WaPo/ABC and CNN/USA Today/Gallup produced overnight polls gauging America's response to Powell's speech.

Unfortunately, neither Gallup nor the Washington Post has any ideas what its numbers mean. According to Gallup, its poll "suggests that the speech had a limited impact". It backs up that position by noting that 81% of those interviewed did not change their position on the war because of Powell's speech. A more intelligent comment might have been that having 19% of Americans change their views on a major issue because of a single speech is an event of historic proportions.

As Gallup's numbers show, support for an invasion rose from 50 to 57 percent, while opposition fell from 22 to 15 percent. While the unsure category stayed about the same (28 down to 26), that stability masks the fact that a significant percentage of unsures have decided to support the war, while an equally significant percentage of opponents are now unsure of their position.

What neither Gallup nor a WaPo storyabout the polls points out is how remarkable it is that both Bush's State of the Union speech and Powell's UN address significantly increased support for an invasion. This sort of double-bounce has almost no historical precedents.

A general rule of thumb is that a major televised speech by the President leads to a short-term increase support for his views. That a speech by a cabinet member could have a similar effect is remarkable in its own right. The fact that the cabinet member's speech was only a follow up to an earlier presidential address makes its impact all the more remarkable.

Is there any way to account for this kind of anomaly? Absolutely. Very few presidential addresses are focused on courtroom-style issues of guilt, innocence and evidence. But in this case, Bush laid out a standard for judging evidence of Iraqi weapons development while Powell followed up with the evidence itself.

Since the resultant change in public opinion reflects a public assessment of evidence rather than a response to presidential charisma, there is every reason to believe that this change will be permanent.

Another major finding which both Gallup and the WaPo failed to report is that Powell's speech dispelled Americans' doubts about whether Saddam is cooperating and whether he has chem-bio weapons. In a poll taken before Powell's speech, around half of all Americans thought that Saddam has outlawed weapons and is hiding them from the inspectors.

According to last night's WaPo/ABC poll, more than 70% of Americans believe Saddam has weapons and is hiding them. According to Gallup, 60%+ believe that Powell made a "very strong" case for Iraq having weapons and hiding them while another 20%+ believe he made a fairly strong case. In light of the fact that just a few weeks ago 70% of Americans thought the administration needed to publicly present evidence of Iraqi violations, the new numbers represent a tidal wave of support for the administration.

Back then, 70% also supported giving the inspectors a few months or more to continue their work. But according to the WaPo/ABC poll, 59% of Americans think the inspectors should now have a few weeks or less.

The one issue on which America remains (somewhat) divided is whether the US should invade even without UN support. Two months ago, the split 37-58 against. Now the split is 49-46 in favor. That change reprsents the combined effects of Bush's speech, Powell's speech and the fact that most of Europe now supports an invasion.

But what is hard to figure out is why 46% still want UN support even if 75%+ believe that clear evidence of Iraqi violations constitutes a legimitate cause for war. Those numbers just don't add up.

My guess is that most Americans take it for granted that UN support will be forthcoming now that there is an iron-clad case against Iraq. But if the UN doesn't get on board, the American public may turn against it, and that turn may last a lot, lot longer than the war in Iraq.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:09 PM by David Adesnik  

POOLS OF BLOOD: I am for the war and have mixed feelings about the bombing pool.

As a private individual, I am not against the idea. I know that Josh's fully respects both our nation's soldiers as well as the inevitable innocent victims of a war with Iraq.

However, as someone who makes public statements about the war, I believe that it may be best for OxBlog not to have a pool. Reducing war to a game can be too easily misread as callous. While I tend to believe that those who misinterpret are responsible for their misinterpretations, in this instance I believe that the citizen's obligation to raise the level of public discourse outweighs such concerns. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:45 PM by David Adesnik  

MEA CULPA: When confronted with Donald Rumsfled's periodic assertions that Iraq and Al-Qaeda have been working together, I tended to assume that the SecDef was grasping at straws. It seems that Colin Powell shared my suspicions. According to the NYT,

Until about three weeks ago, Mr. Powell was said to be reluctant to go before the Security Council with a case connecting Al Qaeda with the Iraqi leadership.

But now all that has changed. As the evidence shows

"Al Qaeda affiliates, based in Baghdad, now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his network, and they are now operating freely in the capital for more than eight months."

The best indications of how convincing the evidence are the brand-new justifications for avoiding war that the administration's opponents have rolled out. According to a NYT news analysis,

"Mr. Powell did not appear to make an airtight case that the Saddam Hussein regime is plotting with Al Qaeda to attack the United States and its allies."

If not, then what are Al Qaeda's forces doing in Baghdad? Back when there was no public evidence that Saddam and Al Qaeda were cooperating, it made sense to argue that there were no joint attacks being planned. To deny it now is absurd. In the same analysis, the author cites an arms control experts who says that

"Just because there is a terrorist cell in Iraq, [it] does not prove that Saddam Hussein is ready to transfer mass destruction weapons to Al Qaeda for use against the United States."

Alright. I can agree with that. But Al Qaeda did not rely on chemical or biological weapons on September 11th, either. Now who's grasping at straws?.

Last of all, we come to the NYT editorial board's justification for delaying an invasion of Iraq. It is that

Because the consequences of war are so terrible, and the cost of rebuilding Iraq so great, the United States cannot afford to confront Iraq without broad international support.

Yes, the consequences of war are terrible. But they will not be any less terrible if the French and Germans support the war. Yes, the cost of rebuilding Iraq will be great. But it pales in comparison to the cost of being on guard against Iraqi aggression for another decade.

What is most striking about these arguments is what they don't say. What has happened to the NYT's insistence that war cannot be legitimate without UN support? What has happened to its insistence that the arms inspectors have an actual purpose other than to delay a conflict?

If the Times had admitted that its opposition to the President -- as well as that of the Germans and French -- had been based on tenuous assumptions about the efficacy of inspections and the willingness of the Iraqi government to cooperate, I might have developed a newfound respect for its editorial board.

Rather than exempting itself from the critical analysis to which it subjects public figures, the Times must acknowledge that its own behavior ought to be subject to investigation. In short, it is time for the appointment of an Ombudsman. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:37 PM by David Adesnik  

KURDS SHOW THE WAY: Barham Salih, co-prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, declares that the Iraqi people are ready for democracy if the West is wiling to help them. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:14 PM by David Adesnik  

DEAFENING SILENCE: Ted Barlow observes that conservative bloggers haven't spoken up at all to defend the administration's budget. This centrist doesn't plan on speaking up either...nor does he endorse much of the nonsense critcism that has mocked the administration's efforts. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:06 PM by David Adesnik  

ACTUALLY, JOSH, what I was trying to say is that I want us to be judged on the merit of our work, rather than having dazed admirers confuse our good looks with our charm, wit, intelligence and humility. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:02 PM by David Adesnik  

THOUGHTS ON GROUP BLOGGING: Eugene Volokh says "YES!" Kevin Drum says "NO!" (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:56 PM by David Adesnik  

THE TRUTH ABOUT HARVARD: Matt Yglesias reports that before sitting down to watch Colin Powell's UN address -- and discovering that none of his Harvard classmates were interested in it whatsoever -- he

"would have thought that America's best and brightest would take more than a passing interest in the critical events in world affairs, but I've long since learned my lesson on that score. If it won't help you get into law/medical school or get a consulting/I-banking job the kids just don't care."

Ironically, two local sanitary workers (who Matt refers to simply as "janitors") decided to take some time off the job to watch the Secretary of State deliver his speech. It's good to see that Princeton alumni are interested in the world affairs.

PS Can you guess where I went to college? (No rewards for correct answers.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:47 PM by David Adesnik  

LIBERAL SELF-INDULGENCE: Now Matt Yglesias has a picture of himself up as well. OxBlog has no intention of following suit. While we at OxBlog most certainly are not relativists, we must admit that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:41 PM by David Adesnik  

APPEASING NORTH KOREA? I've defended the President's North Korea policy, but I may soon have to admit that the critics were right when they said that Bush has no plan and is going to negotiate without preconditions.

UPDATE: North Korea seems determined to take advantage of the US focus on Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:17 PM by David Adesnik  

THE LATEST POLLS: Can a brief series of multiple choice questions accurately gauge how Americans think about the complex issues of war and peace? Having explored the nuances of public opinion polling in the process of conducting research for my dissertation, I would have to say "It depends".

No, that is not a very exciting answer. But it is a good one. Before the 1980s, it was taken for granted that the American public had volatile and incoherent opinions about politics, both foreign and domestic. By extension, this volatility and incoherence rendered Americans vulnerable to manipulation by both the media and the government.

In the 1980s, scholars began to discover that the premise of volatility and incoherence had led public opinion researchers to rely on methods that created an impression of volatility and incoherence even when there was none. In contrast, the United States had a rational public that derived its opinions on current events from a fixed set of values and updated its opinions when new information became available to it.

The revolution in public opinion research led scholars to recognize that simple yes-or-no questions about individuals likes and dislikes failed to show how decisions whether or not to support a given policy or politicians reflected a complex process of reasoning.

With that in mind, I turn to the results of the latest Gallup polls on Iraq. As of Feb. 3, 58% of Americans support an invasion while 38% are against. Of the 58%, 31% have firm views whereas 27% have open minds. In contrast, only 13 of the 38% that oppose war have fixed views while 25 have an open mind. (4% have no opinion.)

Now, then, what is likely to change peoples' minds? 86% percent say that if Iraq has ties to Al-Qaeda, an invasion is justified. If it has chemical and biological weapons, 85% support an invasion. If Iraq is obstructing UN inspections, 76%.

What, then, do Americans believe is the state of affairs in Iraq? 39% percent believe Iraq has ties to Al-Qaeda, whereas 48% think such ties are possible and 10% rule them out. 50% believe Iraq has chem-bio weapons, whereas 44% think it probably has such weapons and 4% insist it doesn't. 52% believe Iraq is obstructing inspections, 38% believe it probably is and 8% believe it isn't.

So what does all this mean? First of all, that real opposition to war consists of only the 13% who have are firmly against it, since these 13% seem to be the same individuals who believe that even if Iraq is obstructing inspections, has chem-bio weapons and also ties to Al-Qaeda, war still isn't justified.

As for the 25% who are uncertain in their opposition to war and the 27% of those who are unsure of their support for it, the main issue seems to be UN approval, which 40% of respondents say is a necessary prerequisite for war. However, I sense that these 40% take it for granted that the UN will support an invasion if the US presents evidence that Iraq has outlawed weapons and/or ties to Al Qaeda.

The even division of this unsure 40-50% into tentative supporters and opponents of an invasion seems to reflect the even division of the American public on the dual issues of whether it is Iraq or the inspectors that bear the burden of proof and, consequently, whether the inspectors should have more time to search.

The one scenario which Gallup's poll doesn't explore is whether Americans would support a war if the UN opposed an invasion despite its recognizing that Saddam is blocking inspections and has chem-bio weapons. That situation would provide a true test of America's commitment to multilateralism.

If the French respond positively to Colin Powell's UN address, push may not come to shove. If it does, I expect unilateralism (defined as the US plus eleven European allies not including Germany and France) to win out.

Powell simply provided too much evidence that Iraq has engaged in the outright and effective deception of US inspectors. (Even the eminent CalPundit agrees!) When the next poll comes out, expect 70%+ to be for an invasion, with 50%+ firm in their views. In short, I strongly disagree with Cal, whose interpretation of the recent poll is that "the American public is still deeply conflicted about the entire question". (Note the new picture of CalPundit [aka Kevin] that is up on his website. He now looks like a real adult instead of a congressional intern.)

The only thing Americans are unsure about (and not all that unsure) is whether Saddam is guilty as charged. Gallup's polls have effectively shown that beneath the simple 58-38 yes-no split on Iraq, there is a stable and coherent set of preferences according to which Americans will judge the performance of both their own government and of the United Nations.

Saddam, if you are reading this, I advise you to disarm very, very soon.

UPDATE: Reader JV points out that, according to Tom Friedman, Americans will only support a quick and easy invasion and are not interested in its occupation and reconstruction. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:55 PM by David Adesnik  

REBUILDING NEW YORK: A while back, I posted a link to the website run by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is responsbile for selecting an architect to rebuild the World Trade Center.

While I didn't say so at the time, I found all seven of the designs under consideration to be deeply disappointing. They were lifeless, even deformed. Sadly, the damage of September 11th has scarred New York and the United States forever. But that is exactly why we need a new World Trade Center that represents our highest ideals, not our broken spirits.

Since the initial unveiling of the designs, two new ones have been added to the list. They are not much different. From the nine, two have been named semifinalists. But before the final decision is made, I'd ask you to take a look at a design proposed by a 23-year old amateur architect who has only visited New York twice in his life.

In its simplicity, Robert Thompson's design is far superior to that of the professionals. Of all its elements, the one which struck me most was the recommendation that the new World Trade Center have just a single tower. A circular tower of glass with vertical bands of aluminum. I think it is a perfect symbol of the unity that September 11th has left in its wake. Its circular shape invokes the tradition of associating circles with regeneration and wholeness.

These simple lessons are what is missing from the complex designs of the professionals. While I don't know if there is time left to reconsider the official designs, there is always hope.

Robert, thank you and good luck.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:27 PM by David Adesnik  

THE MYSTERY DEEPENS: The WaPo reported on Monday that Saddam's food distribution program is a model of honesty, efficiency and non-partisanship. Yeah, right. This was a job for the web's number one debunkers, Spinsanity.

In response to my anguished cry, Spinsanity's Brendan Nyhan sent over a pair of very interesting links which suggest that there is a lot more to this story than the Post is letting on. First up is a link to a January 2001 CNN interview with Denis Halliday, the former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq.

According to Halliday, the sanctions have

"led to the deaths of possibly more than one million people in ten years. Now that is a tragedy. And that begins to meet some of the definitions of the United Nations Convention on Genocide."

That last word was not an accident. Halliday's observation was a direct response to the CNN moderator's demand that he justify his earlier description of the sanctions as genocide.

As far as Saddam's long term record is concerned, Halliday says this:

"Before the [Gulf] war, all Iraqi children were given breakfast and lunch in the school system. So, the fact is that we, the United Nations of the West, have demolished the human rights of the Iraqi children. There's no history of the Baath Party not meeting the basic human rights of Iraqi children. In summary, I think we have no basis to be suspicious of Baghdad’s approach to its own children."

Hmmm. When it comes to weapons of mass destruction, Halliday also has a somewhat unusual perspective. As he notes,

"According to some of the experts, including Scott Ritter, Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction capability today. Even Hans Blix...has said that he does not believe that Iraq has redeveloped weapons of mass destruction.

I believe that today we see a huge demonization of Iraq, an exaggeration of Iraq's threat "to the neighborhood" and a huge capacity for military aggression amongst the neighbors of Iraq. Today, in fact, it is Iraq that is disarmed and surrounded by countries, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which are heavily armed by Europe and North America. This is not a situation that encourages Baghdad to cooperate."

Folks, you can't make this stuff up. Anyway, getting back to the food program, Halliday comments that

"The Baath Party -- as led by President Saddam Hussein, of course -- handles the entire oil-for-food program. That means they do the contracting; they do the handling and processing of, for example, wheat into flour; and they handle distribution of these foodstuffs in the country. According to my current successor in Baghdad, who is an expert on the world food program, Baghdad does an extremely efficient job of food distribution."

Well, what did you expect him to say? Somehow, I sense that the WaPo shouldn't have trusted the current UN coordinator to provide an objective evaluation of the Iraqi program.

Moving on, we come to the second link sent over by Brendan, which takes you to an 1999 WaPo op-ed by Clinton NSC chief Sandy Berger. He pointed out that

"Currently, the United Nations allows Iraq to spend up to $5.2 billion in oil revenue every six months for humanitarian purposes. Saddam is so indifferent to the suffering of his people that he still refuses to make full use of this allowance. But the food supply in Iraq has grown, and soon will provide the average Iraqi with about 2,200 calories per day, which is at the top of the United Nations' recommended range.

Assuming Berger has the calorie figures right (and if you met the man, you'd know he's no stranger to calories), there shouldn't be anyone starving in Iraq. Yet two years after Berger published his op-ed, Halliday cited UNICEF data which recorded that "some 4-5,000 children are dying unnecessarily each month."

Is there any way to resolve this inconsistency? Perhaps. According to reader LK,

It's actually a common misconception that the main problem with the sanctions regime is malnutrition and starvation--which, though still a major problem, does not compare to the massive malnutrition and starvation that characterized the period before the oil-for-food program was initiated. The program, for all its faults, has helped. A lot. The current problem has to do with Iraq's inability to fix water treatment plants, electrical systems, and other kinds of infrastructure that we who live in developed nations take for granted. Without clean water and
quality health services, tens of thousands of Iraqis die from easily preventable illness every year.

LK also provides this comment from another former UN huminatarian coordinator, Hans von Sponeck, who said that

"What really continues to be a severe problem, with implications for health treatment, healthcare, for electricity and water supply, is [the blocking of] anything that has to do with chemicals, laboratory equipment, generators, chloride, any water purification inputs, communication equipment. For example, it took over a year to release ambulances because they were blocked since they contained, as they should – in America you don’t have an ambulance without communication equipment inside - but they had communication equipment and they were blocked. So the Iraqis did not have access to such an important thing as an ambulance. So it is a saga that is really unbelievable."

That's all I have to report right now. Send in more info if you have it. My spider-sense says that the story isn't over yet. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:15 PM by David Adesnik  

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SMOKING GUNS: John Mueller points out that the now-infamous satellite photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba showed nothing more than a set of cylindrical objects in an open field. According to RFK, no one in the cabinet had any idea what the photos were of, but trusted the CIA.

That's why Colin Powell is right to say that there won't be a smoking gun, but rather that the US will provide evidence from "which any sensible person can deduce that [the Iraqis] are hiding something and that they are going to great lengths in foiling the work of the inspectors."

NB: The NYT might consider hiring John Mueller as a fact checker. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:00 PM by David Adesnik  

NEIN! According to Christian Democratic leader Angela Merkel, the crushing setbacks suffered by Schroeder Social Democrats in recent state elections indicate that the Chancellor "was not successful [for] a second time in exploiting the fears" of the electorate and that his party's rejection is "a very important signal for [Germany's] allies."

At first, I wrote Merkel's statement off as optimistic spin, figuring that Schroeder lost because the Germany economy is in serious trouble. But today I had lunch with a German friend who assured me that many, many Germans are deeply concerned by Germany's isolation from Europe (and the US) and that the Chancellor's conscious effort to play the anti-war card failed for that reason.

That was good to hear, but I'm still not sure. Was the voters' message that Schroeder simply shouldn't be focusing on foreign policy when there are hard times at home? I recall one American president who learned that lesson the hard way...

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:47 PM by David Adesnik  

"POOR AND UNEDUCATED" is what America's soldiers are NOT. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:37 PM by David Adesnik  

SADDAM NOT A RELATIVIST: In an interview broadcast on Iraqi television, Hussein declared that "there is only one truth" regarding the state of Iraqi weapons programs. His observation fits in nicely with our President's declaration that if Iraq's use of torture "is not evil, then evil has no meaning."

While this happy philosophical consensus won't do much to resolve the current crisis, it's better than having Saddam say that nuclear weapons are nothing more than a social construct. Imagine trying to draft a UN resolution to deal with that... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:18 PM by David Adesnik  

WE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH: Responding to Chris Mooney, Kevin says bloggers are rarely honest enough to admit their mistakes.

I don't have numbers on this one, but I sense bloggers actually are pretty good about admitting mistakes, since they know that their credibility and their readership will disappear overnight if they are no better than their competitors. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:08 PM by David Adesnik  

INSIDE THE PENTAGON: Sean-Paul reports on his conversations with an officer in the US air force. (Click here for the second half.) The news is interesting, but it isn't good. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:45 PM by Daniel  

GARY HART. A few clarifying points on Hart's speech. Regarding the four questions Bush needed to answer, Josh said that for the first question, Hart did not mention a single time the now 11 allies who co-authored an op-ed expressing support for the US position. That is true--but the complete version of Hart's first question was, "Who will go with us beyond the nominal stuff? Which nations will contribute boots on the ground?" What concerns Hart is the idea of rhetorical support from other nations without a significant military commitment. Hart's third question referred to the costs of the war. In his words, "Larry Lindsay said it would cost $100 to $200 billion, and he was fired."

Hart all but guaranteed another attack on the U.S., referring to the 21,000 containers arriving at our 361 ports, 1 to 2 percent of which are inspected. He predicted a shift toward Israeli style security measures (bags inspected everywhere, and so on) when America is attacked again.

I agree that his answers about the UN were hopelessly vague, but let's give him a chance to brush up on his knowledge. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:43 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE UNREALISM: Innocents Abroad exposes the flawed logic at the heart of the belief that Iraq can be deterred even after developing nuclear weapons. (For OxBlog's views, click here.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:08 PM by David Adesnik  

KISSINGER'S LOST CHILDREN: Bill Kristol on how Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz found their way from the realpolitik of the Ford Administration to the idealpolitik of George W. Bush. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:48 PM by David Adesnik  

SULLIVAN VS. RAINES: Andrew takes the NYT to task for its Iraq coverage. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:47 PM by David Adesnik  

CALLING SPINSANITY: There is something very wrong with this WaPo article, but I don't know what.

It says that Saddam's food distribution program is a model of honesty, efficiency and non-partisanship. While it is hard to doubt Hussein's intelligence, I have a hard time believing that a brutal totalitarian regime would rise above politics when it comes to an issue as crucial as food rationing.

Anyway, what follows is a list of questions, which I hope that some of you will send me answers to.

1) The article cites widespread praise for the program from common Iraqis. Presuming that the Post's correspondent was only able to talk to such individuals in the presence of a government minder, is there any reason to believe what they say?

2) The article quotes a UN food inspector, who is deeply impressed by Saddam's efforts and declares that he has not encountered any corruption. In contrast, Iraqi exiles say that rations are withheld from dissidents. Is there any reason to believe that this UN inspector is any better at finding out what Iraq is really up to than Hans Blix and Co.?

3) Aside from a brief reference to malnutrition, the article reports that Saddam's food program has kept all Iraqis well-fed, especially after the UN oil-for-food program began. What happened to all the desperate, starving individuals which critics of UN sanctions have talked so much about?

4) 50,000 Iraqi merchants function as distributors for the food program. Who are these individuals and how did they get their jobs?

Happy hunting. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:26 PM by David Adesnik  

THE ANTI-DICTATOR: Hamid Karzai has indicated that he may not run for president in next year's Afghan elections. He said

"I want leaderships in Afghanistan, a multiplicity of leaderships. I want the Afghan people to have choices. I don't want them to be stuck with one man...because of a lack of choice."

Karzai's example will bring the Islamic world one step closer to freedom. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:11 PM by David Adesnik  

BACKSTAGE POLITICS: Bill Safire tells the story of how the Gang of Eight managed to come together on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Safire notes that conducting diplomacy via op-ed is a striking departure from tradition. But IMHO, what's even more striking is that a rift between the US and France is being resolved not, as usual, by backroom diplomacy, but by the forceful public statements of nations once considered bit players on the world stage. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:58 PM by David Adesnik  

THE UNREALISTS: Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer are at it again. Back in November, these towering scholars of international relations argued that the United States has nothing to fear from a nuclear-armed Iraq. I dismantled their argument then and stand by my position now.

You'd think that Walt and Mearsheimer might have learned something from the ongoing stand-off with North Korea: that the US has a very limited ability to influence dictators who can threaten the lives of tens of thousands of civilians in neighboring states allied to the US. If we give Saddam enough time, he will develop a missile that can take out Istanbul or Tel Aviv.

Most disturbing of all for those who call themselves realists, Walt and Mearsheimer propose no alternate course for dealing with Iraq. They say we're safe as long as the inspectors are on the ground. But the inspectors will have to come home sometime. And then what?

UPDATE: Links fixed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:34 PM by David Adesnik  

TOM FRIEDMAN ASKS: Why do Europeans refuse to eat genetically modified foods but consume tobacco in massive amounts? And what does that say about their politics? Read the column. It's worth a laugh. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:26 PM by David Adesnik  

STICK TO BASKETBALL, BILL: Sen. Bradley weighs on the invasion of Iraq. Included below are the highlights of his column, along with some slightly sarcastic comments.

1. "Young Muslims around the world will see U.S. action without U.N. approval as neocolonialist, motivated more by a desire for Iraqi oil than Iraqi freedom." Whereas young Muslims great admiration for the other four ex-imperialist powers on the Security Council will persuade them that the invasion of Iraq is a justified expression of altruism.

2. "Bush did not acknowledge that a unilateral invasion risks destabilizing Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Egypt." Pakistan perhaps. As my posts on Saudi Arabia and Egypt have suggeted, their dictatorships are far too dominant to be challenged in the short term. As for Pakistani fundamentalists, I'm not sure they really care what the Security Council thinks.

3. "The major foreign policy job of the American president is to maintain healthy relations with the great powers -- Europe, Russia, China and Japan." That's funny. I thought foreign policy was about promoting American security and ideals. And wait. Did Bradley just say that Europe is a great power? What's its telephone number?

4. "Bush's strong remarks ignored the fact that military actions often have unpredictable consequences." Whereas Security Council assent will make the consequences of war predictable?

5. "To act without specific consultation [from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey] on the structure of postwar Iraq invites their alienation and their adventurism among Iraq's ethnic groups, making it that much more difficult to establish a multiethnic, democratic Iraq." Pray tell, Mr. Senator, what lessons about democracy we can learn about democracy from the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

6. Here's what Bradley doesn't say: "Being able to display vats of anthrax or rail cars full of chemical warheads should silence those who now criticize President Bush for undue haste and recklessness. It could compel international cooperation that is lacking now." Thanks to Jim Hoagland for the quote.

Oh well. It's not as if the Democrats had much credibility on security issues to lose anyway. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:47 PM by David Adesnik  

SEMESTER ABROAD IN QATAR? The progressive emir is moving to implement educational reforms designed by the Rand Corporation. Less Islam, more English. Once the lessons on constitutionalism begin, then I'll really be impressed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:00 PM by David Adesnik  

LOVE THOSE COMMUNISTS! Alisa in Wonderland weighs in on the Fascism vs. Communism debate. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:33 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT IS ANTI-AMERICANISM? More precisely, how does one differentiate legitimate criticism of the United States from unjust criticism that reflects anti-American prejudice? As things now stand, Europe's role in military affairs is that of obvserver and critic. As such, its influence rests on the perception of its criticism as sincere and constructive, rather than disingenuous and resentment-driven.

Identifying prejudice demands a definition of prejudice. Webster's provides some guidance on this matter, but not much. It offers multiple definitions including both "an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge" and "an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics".

At first glance, the dependence of such definitions on controversial concepts such as 'sufficient knowledge' and 'irrational hostility' suggests that prejudice is in the eye of the beholder. But from experience, we know that it isn't. As an American, the first example of prejudice that comes to mind is that of racial prejudice. The segregation of schools, water fountains, public buses and swimming pools offered concrete evidence that prejudice can be very, very real.

In the case of Europe and the United States, we have no such evidence to rely on. Instead, Americans notice prejudices in the words and concepts through which Europeans express themselves. The reverse pattern is evident as well, with Europeans often detecting a definite closed-mindedness in American thought and speech.

This contrast, however, does not reduce the value of drawing on examples such as racial prejudice in the United States, since physical manifestations of prejudice such as segregated housing are reflections of prejudiced thoughts. In fact, one might say that segregation was not an example of prejudice, but rather an example of discrimination that reflected the prejudice known as racism.

Thus it comes as no surprise that the end of segregation has not brought an end to prejudice. What has changed is that we now must argue about whether an specific instance of mistreatment reflects prejudice, or instead the simple lack of concern that one stranger often shows to another.

In a recent experiment, researchers sent out pairs of resumes which were identical except for the fact that one of them had a "white" name on it, where as the duplicate had a "black" one. Perhaps not surprisingly, the researchers found that employers were considerably more likely to offer interviews and jobs to applicants with white names. (For the moment, I'm going to take it for granted that the results obtained from the experiment were valid. Eve Tushnet isn't so sure.)

Even if one assumes that this experiment documents a clear instance of discrimination, it is hard to know exactly what was going through employers' minds while the resumes were being read. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that any of the readers consciously said to themselves that because an applicant had a black sounding name, he or she was less likely to be competent regardless of what the resume indicated.

Instead, it is probable that the presence of a black name subconsciously raised the standards to which an applicant would be held. Thus, while reviewing black applicants' resumes, employers believed that they were making an objective, rational decision based on tangible evidence.

Before applying the lessons of this example to the trans-atlantic divide, it is worth considering for a moment the possibility that there were some employers who consciously decided to turn down applicants because they were black. Even then, it is hard to demonstrate that this decision reflected prejudice, defined as a belief that is irrational or based on insufficient information.

I would guess that if there were employers who consciously decided to turn down black applicants, it is not because they consciously resent blacks or believe that they are inherently inferior. Rather, they may believe that since there is a greater statistcal probability that a black individual has committed a crime, it is rational for their firm to reject black applicants in order minimize the probability that they are hiring lawbreakers.

Such behavior is, of course, illegal. The law preventing it, however, reflects a moral imperative rather than logical one. Yet what if the employer in question believed that his firm should avoid hiring blacks because they are, on average, taller? In that case, the employer would be damaging his own interest in finding competent employees. In that sense, he is irrational. But is he prejudiced? For all we know, he is simply a fool.

Now what if an employer rejected black applicants because he believed that they are, on average, shorter than others? We could even stipulate in this case that the job in question is best performed by tall employees, e.g. filling shelves in a bookstore. Again, it is hard to know if the employer is racist rather than simply a fool.

Wisely, the law bars all racial discrimination regardless of motive. Why is that? After all, the market might benefit if fools lost business because of their irrationality. I think the answer here has to do with the cultural context in which decisions are made. Because of the history of racial prejudice in America, it makes sense -- both moral and economic -- to assume that the mistreatment of black job applicants reflects prejudice, defined as per Webster's.

With regard to European anti-Americanism, there is no such historical context to faciliate observation or decision-making. Rather, it might be more accurate to say that the prevalence of pro-American sentiment alongside anti-American sentiment in much of Europe prevents one from relying on historical context as a decisive indicator.

Even if one were to focus on the short span of time separating September 11th from the present, one would have to acknowledge that pro-American sentiment is no less strong than its negative counterpart. As Le Monde's banner headline declared on September 12th, "Nous sommes tous des Américains." -- "We are all Americans."

In the face of such compelling empathy, one has to have an extremely sensitive method of detecting anti-Americanism if one wants to assert that it exists. To that end, it is worth reconsidering the most probable explanation for the outcome of the resume experiment described above: subconscious prejudice. To be more specific, the prejudice consists of a subconscious belief that blacks are either less competent employees, more prone to criminal activity or something along the same lines.

The specificity of such prejudices is extremely important, since it enables them to co-exist with general attitudes toward a given group that are not necessarily biased or even negative. As Eve Tushnet points out, some of the employers profiled in the resume may well have been black.

Clearly, such individuals are not prejudiced against blackness itself, but rather against specific traits they associate with elements of the black population. Thus, it might not be accurate to refer to such prejudice as racism. A wealthy and highly-educated black employer might associate black-sounding names with "gangsta" behavior that he considers embarrassing to black Americans as a whole and thus a tangible threat to the struggle for equality.

For all its misguided nobility, this is still prejudice. However, it reflects an intricate mixture of cultural, socio-economic and racial biases. If one is searching for the essence of anti-Americanism, one has to develop methods sensitive enough to detect even this sort of prejdice, the kind that reflects the best of intentions.

TO BE CONTINUED (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:06 PM by Daniel  

THE SHUTTLE. Very sad article in the Washington Post about Israel's reaction to the news about Ramon.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:51 PM by David Adesnik  

THE FINER ASPECTS OF BOMBING: A friend at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy has an interesting brief up on US-Israeli military cooperation.

CORRECTION: Sorry for the bad link. To access the policy brief, follow the link above THEN click on the "Policy Watch" link and scroll down just a bit to "#702: Easy on the Stick". (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:33 PM by David Adesnik  

MATTHEW YGLESIAS IS BACK! He's disillusioned with Howard Dean and outright mad about the administration's double talk on the deficit, which may well be wrecking the economy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:20 PM by David Adesnik  

HYPE-HYPE-HYPE: Here's a Newsweek exclusive that gives a preview of the evidence Colin Powell will present to the UN. So much for not raising expectations. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:56 AM by David Adesnik  

WHAT DID THEY KNOW and when did they know it? The WaPo has a cover story on the history of US intelligence regarding North Korea's violation of the 1994 accord. While the report raises important questions about the administration's strategy for dealing with Kim Jong Il, it hardly justifies Josh Marshall's hyperbolic criticism of the administration. (Btw, if you follow the link to Marshall, be sure to check out his sensible comments on Iraq as well as his interview with Ken Pollack, the leading expert on Iraq's WMD program.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:34 AM by David Adesnik  

AYATOLLAH YOU SO: Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, the premier critic of Iranian theocracy, has emerged from house arrest and returned to the political stage. He has already said that, "Chanting death to this and that is not the way to run a country. We have lost our prestige in the world. We are constantly falling behind."

In a direct challenge to Islamic authorities, Montazeri declared that "Ayatollah Khamenei was 'not infallible' and could be challenged by Parliament." Montazeri was once Ayatollah Khomeini's heir apparent, but had a falling out with him. As befits a close ally of Khomeini, he was firmly anti-American. How much of that sentiment remains is unknown. Regardless, Montazeri is a force for democracy.

For more background on Montazeri, see Pejman's Tech Central Station column from December. Pejman's post on the State of the Union has also led me to wonder whether Bush's firm support for Iranian democracy had something to do with Montazeri's release from house arrest. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:52 PM by David Adesnik  

DID SADDAM GAS THE KURDS? A former CIA analyst, one who was in charge of reporting on Iraq in the 1980s, says there is no hard evidence. Disturbing if true, but the author is wrong to say that if not for the Kurdish incident, Saddam would have a good human rights record.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: WSJ's Best of the Web says that the CIA analyst in question has a long record of distorting evidence in order to defend Saddam. Thanks to JL for pointing this out. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:30 PM by David Adesnik  

AXIS OF COJONES: Josh is not happy with the phrase of Axis of Vassals. He has a point.

And besides, I now have a better idea, thanks to Bob Kagan's column on our European friends. Introducing, the "Axis of Cojones". (Click here if you need a translation, and here if you want to put the translation in context.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:09 PM by David Adesnik  

DUELING HEADLINES: "Palestinian Deaths Mount in Israeli Raids" -- Washington Post, Jan. 31. "Ambushed Israelis Kill Assailants" -- David's proposed alternative. Read the article and see which you think fits better. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:54 PM by David Adesnik  

JUST ANOTHER '-STAN': US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has sought to allay concerns that the challenge of reconstructing Iraq will lead the United States to forget Afghanistan. As the WaPo reports, Khalilzad

told an audience that included senior officials from Kabul that he has become aware of worries that the United States will "forget" Afghanistan.

"I can unequivocally tell you that will not be the case. Our commitment to the future of Afghanistan is unshakable. Iraq will not reduce that commitment," Khalilzad said.

As the President noted in the State of the Union address, "In Afghanistan, we helped liberate an oppressed people. And we will continue helping them secure their country, rebuild their society, and educate all their children -- boys and girls." If I were Hamid Karzai, I'd say that Bush's statement isn't a bad start. Though one might wonder whether Bush's failure to use the word 'democracy' means that he isn't all that concerned about whether it is Karzai that presides over a rebuilt Afghanistan. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:20 PM by David Adesnik  

UNDER OUR NOSES: North Korea has taken the next step toward producing weapons-grade plutonium. They know that with the US-Iraq confrontation coming to a head, the US cannot divert its attention from the Middle East.

The real question is this, however: If we don't take Saddam out now, will North Korea take advantage of each future crisis to enhance its weapons program? And will Saddam move to advance his each time North Korea causes trouble? I think you know the answer.

UPDATE: ElBaradei has taken a tough stance regarding North Korea, but the Administration has declared his conclusions to be premature. I think ElBaradei is right, but the Administration may not want to divert its attention from Iraq. There also seems to be a good old-fashioned scandal brewing in the South.

UPDATE: The WaPo contradicts the NYT and says the administration is taking North Korea's actions seriously. Possibly, these conflicting accounts represent a difference of opinion between the State Dept and the White House, with the WaPo taking its lead from the former, the NYT from the latter. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:41 PM by David Adesnik  

THE GAME IS AFOOT: CalPundit has responded to my challenge with quite a sensible post.

Expect a response here sometime this weekend. In the meantime, read what Time and The New Republic have to say about anti-Americanism. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:34 PM by David Adesnik  

MANDELA THE STRATEGIST: Our friend Nelson has asked whether the US is ignoring the UN because the Secretary General is a black man. Actually, I think the real reason is that the US no longer trusts any nation or organization headed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Incidentally, Mandela does not describe his strategy for getting rid of Saddam or protecting the Iraqi people from him. My guess would be that it goes something like this: George Bush should spend twenty years in prison until the moral force generated by his noble self-sacrifice convinces the international community that it must impose sanctions on Iraq that ultimately force it to embrace democracy.

UPDATE: Considering that Mandela is getting on in years, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on him. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:23 PM by David Adesnik  

THOSE WACKY CANUCKS: I was trying to pick out the juiciest line in this article, but I just couldn't. Read the whole thing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:16 PM by David Adesnik  

EU-NILATERALISM: The Washington Post reports that [The European] Parliament adopted 287-209 with 26 abstentions a non-binding resolution saying: "Breaches of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 currently identified by the inspectors with regard to weapons of mass destruction do not justify military action."

Funny, I didn't know that the EU had a right to decide when international law applies and when it doesn't. Then again, it's a non-binding resolution, so maybe the EU is just pretending to be unilateralist becaues what it really wants to do is show America what it feels like to be abused a mean old bully on the other side of the Atlantic.

Even funnier, the NY Times managed to report the EU resolution without mentioning that it contradicts 1441. According to the Times, "the European Parliament voted 287 to 209 in Brussels to urge the United States not to take unilateral military action against Iraq, because Baghdad's dealings with the weapons inspectors did not 'justify military action'." "Dealings", huh? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:05 PM by David Adesnik  

LIFE IMITATING ART: On Wednesday morning, the Weekly Standard wondered when Europe would get around to condmening Bush's anti-AIDS program as American unilateralism. Answer: Thursday. As the old saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:58 PM by David Adesnik  

AXIS OF VASSALS: While "Axis of Weasels" may be a much cleverer (albeit inflammatory) invention, I think that America's eight newfound European friends deserve a similar nickname of their own: the Axis of Vassals.

I came up with the name after reading that Elmar Brok, a German legislator had remarked on Blair and Berlusconi's visits to the White House by observing that ""The race of the vassals has begun."

Now, a vassal isn't necessarily a good thing to be. Webster's defines a vassal as:

1: a person under the protection of a feudal lord to whom he has vowed homage and fealty: a feudal tenant
2: one in a subservient or subordinate position

Now, I don't believe that the Gang of Eight (the old nickname for our European friends) are vassals of old Uncle Sam. As they themselves point out, "The real bond between the U.S. and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the rule of law."

But by referring to them as the Axis of Vassals, it should remind those on both sides of the Atlantic how intolerant the alleged spokesmen of Europe can become when forced to recognize that the rest of Europe is more interested in the values its shares with the United States than the interests that it doesn't. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:20 PM by David Adesnik  

"OCCUPY US -- PLEASE!" That was the demand that one Kurdish man made to an American visitor in northern Iraq, who has gone on to describe her experiences on the WaPo op-ed page.

While the details provided in the column are quite interesting, the main message is nothing new: That sanctions have not prevented northern Iraq from becoming both more prosperous and more free than it ever was before. This fact demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt that it is Saddam Hussein and not the West which is responsible for impoverishing and brutalizing the rest of Iraq.

Finally, one point I haven't thought of before: None of the major media outlets seems to have ever published a news item or even an op-ed claiming that life in northern Iraq has not improved dramatically over the past decade. That may be the best evidence out there for what Iraq would be like without Saddam Hussein. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:48 PM by David Adesnik  

DISTURBING SILENCE: Tom Friedman says the US should help Arab leaders convince Saddam to step down. Everything Friedman says makes sense. It's what he doesn't say that's disturbing.

Nowhere in Friedman's column does he explain how it will be possible to promote democracy in Iraq if Saddam is replaced with a cooperative general. This silence is striking in contrast to Friedman's assertion last week that the only hope for ending terror in the Middle East is a democratic transformation.

But perhaps we should go easy on Tom. Self-contradiction seems to be pervasive on the pages of both the NYT and the WaPo. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:30 PM by Daniel  

SOTU. Overall not bad, but his last few lines seemed to push the limits of the Establishment Clause:

"Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.

We Americans have faith in ourselves but not in ourselves alone. We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.

May He guide us now, and may God continue to bless the United States of America."

So....the President tell us to place our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. Bush also asks asking him to guide us--is that official government endorsement of religion? What about those pesky non-believers?

I am far from an expert on these matters, but those are some of my thoughts. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:13 PM by David Adesnik  

MY, HOW (THE NEW YORK) TIMES CHANGE: On Sunday, Howell Raines told us that

"The inspectors alone will never disarm Iraq. But they can slow Mr. Hussein's weapons programs, leaving more time for diplomatic efforts to remove him from power and for Washington to mobilize the international support it now lacks."

Just two days later, Raines has informed us that Hans Blix's findings

"argue strongly for giving the inspectors more time to pursue their efforts and satisfy international opinion that every reasonable step has been taken to solve this problem peacefully."

If one were being generous, one might say that Mr. Raines wants the inspectors to find a smoking gun so that the rest of the Security Council will back an invasion. But it sure as hell sounds like he's saying that the inspectors can't disarm Iraq, so we should give them more time.

CLARIFICATION: Josh points out (via e-mail, no link) that while Howell Raines has the final say on editorial matters, it is Gail Collins and co. that actually write the NYT editorials. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:51 PM by David Adesnik  

MY OLD BOSS ON THE WARPATH: Before heading to Oxford, I worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, or CEIP for short.

My thesis advisor in college used to make fun of CEIP's name. "'International Peace', huh? They're a little behind schedule on that one, aren't they?" And, in fact, CEIP has quite a history, at least in the pre-WWII of taking some terribly naive stances on world politics.

Now, before I say what I'm going to say next, I'd like to point out that all of the Junior Fellows at Carnegie, including myself, were afraid of nothing more than the president of Carnegie, Jessica T. Mathews. Thus, when it came time to put on the annual Christmas comedy show, most of us were hesitant to say anything about Jessica. But in the end, she seemed to take it all pretty well.

Hopefully, Jessica will demostrate the same merciful attitude toward what I am about say, which is this: Her op-ed in today's Post sets a new standard for incoherence and naivete.

To my knowledge, Jessica is the first person to have argued that the US shouldn't enforce 1441 even though Iraq is obviously in material breach. Huh?

But at the same time, she says that inspections should go on for another year, even though there is no reason to believe Saddam will cooperate. Huh?

The reason for going to all this trouble is because the "aim of U.S. policy must be to put the onus on each of the permanent members of the Security Council, in particular, to place its complete commitment behind the intent of Resolution 1441 to disarm Iraq."

Uh-huh. So the purpose of US foreign policy should be to get the rest of the Security Council behind a resolution that has no chance of accomplishing anything.

Based on my experience at Carnegie, I'd have to say that what's really going on here is a spectacular demonstration of verbal acrobatics designed to provide some sort of justification for not doing anything to offend Europe. This is pathological multilateralism.

If even Jessica Mathews knows that Saddam is in material breach but Jacques Chirac won't acknowledge it, then what is multilateralism worth? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:24 PM by David Adesnik  

YOUR OWN MAN SAYS SO: According to the WaPo, Hans Blix's report to the UN provides all the evidence that the Security Coucil needs to declare that Saddam is in material breach.

The Post is right, of course. And now that you think about it, aren't you glad that Hans Blix has been so incompetent and uncooperative up until now? I mean, absolutely no one can say that Blix gave such a damning report because he is an American frontman. As such, Hans Blix has given the Bush administration exactly what the French and Germans fear most: credibility. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:06 PM by David Adesnik  

CALPUNDIT VEERS LEFT: Here's Kevin on America bullying Europe:

Lincoln Plawg asks: The question for the US is, of course, what position could the Europeans take up, short of supine submission to each and every US proposal, that the Administration would approve?

I've been wondering that myself. Are Europeans even allowed to disagree with U.S. policy anymore?

That's the whole post, word for word. Kevin, I've praised your work very highly before. You put up more thoughtful, in-depth posts than almost any other blogger. So why is it now acceptable to bash America without a solid argument to back the bashing up?
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:45 PM by David Adesnik  

FAREED ZAKARIA, OPTIMIST: Zakaria thinks a US invasion of Iraq will benefit the Middle East. A definite surprise coming from the man who gave us "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy" and "Our Way: The Trouble With Being the World's Only Superpower." Then again, anyone who endorses OxBlog has to have a bit of the naive idealist in them.

Even so, I almost expect Newsweek to declare that this column is a fabrication, a subtle reminder of Time Magazine's unmasked incompetence. But why look a gift horse in the mouth? Here is Zakaria striking conclusion:

There are always risks involved when things change. But for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I’ll take my chances with change.

Damn right. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:12 PM by David Adesnik  

CHUCK HAGEL, MAN OF PRINCIPLE: I don't agree with a word Hagel says, but you have to give him credit for opposing his own party's President at a time when the nation is opposing the brink of war.

One might argue that Hagel's words are nothing more than a cynical effort to track polls which show a majority of independent voters opposing a war without UN approval.

But why oppose a President who demonstrated just two months ago that he is willing to fight hard for his party's Senate candidates and then lead them to victory? Principle. Or perhaps Hagel is an idiot. One of the people I trust most when it comes to foreign policy, someone who happens to share Hagel's affiliation with the GOP, has firmly insisted for years that Hagel is, in fact, an idiot. Only time will tell.

At the moment, John Kerry seems to be chasing the idiocy crown. In the same WaPo article which quotes Hagel, Kerry accuses the Bush administration of "alienating our longtime friends and allies, alarming potential foes and spreading anti-Americanism around the world" through its "blustering unilateralism." Isn't one supposed to alarm one's foes? More importantly, didn't Kerry learn what happens to democratic contenders who blame America for anti-Americanism? Campaigning for the primaries may cost Kerry come Novermber.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:43 PM by David Adesnik  

SAFIRE UNBOWED: Among the first to insist that Saddam has significant ties to Al Qaeda, Bill Safire says that time has proven him right and that Colin Powell knows it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:35 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG IS IRRELEVANT. There is no need to comment on Hans Blix's report to the Security Council. It speaks for itself. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:33 PM by David Adesnik  

BLAIR'S GAMBLE ON MORAL CLARITY: Today's NYT article on Tony Blair's defiance of British public opinion complements a similar article in the current issue of The Weekly Standard.

Both articles are excellent overall, especially in their portrayal of Blair's principled stand in the face of overwhelming opposition. And while both Warren Hoge and Irwin Stelzer are clearly sympathetic to the Prime Minister, they underestimate his political talents by an order of magnitude.

One comes away from both authors' work with a sense that Blair's commitment to principle may have robbed him of the leadership role he nurtured so carefully both in Britain and throughout Europe. Yet rather than sacrificing his achievements, Blair's is gambling that an Anglo-American triumph in Iraq will establish him as the greatest Prime Minister since Churchill.

Neither Hoge nor Stelzer explores what effect a successful invasion of Iraq -- followed by the revelation of overwhelming evidence that Saddam Hussein has been lying to the Security Council -- might have on Blair's reputation. When the weapons are found, German and French intransigence will have been exposed as a self-righteous and outright selfish endeavor that protected the government of a brutal tyrant.

When the weapons are found, German and French aspirations to international leadership will have been set back a generation. In contrast, Britain will have won the lasting gratitude of the lone superpower in addition to having established itself as the one nation other than the United States with the potential to lead the international community.

Perhaps most important of all, Blair will have left behind his life as a politician and become a statesman. In democratic nations, the highest praise is reserved for those leaders who, as a matter of principle, sacrifice their standing in the short term only to win great admiration later on when their principles are vindicated. This is that path that Churchill followed in resisting Chamberlain's appeasement of Adolf Hitler and insisting that Britain must stand up for what it believes.

Perhaps none of this will come to pass. And even if it does, Blair may share Churcill's legacy of defeat at the polls in the aftermath of war. But Churchill changed what it means to be British. In Blair's commitment to principle one senses that he is more interested in forging a stron gBritish identity for the post-Cold War era rather than ensuring victory at the polls.

Wisest of all, Blair knows that no amount of rhetoric, of spin, will convince others that he is right. Only events can change the public mind. That is Blair's gamble. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:39 AM by David Adesnik  

$200 MILLION? Some people will pay anything to get their names into the NYT and the WSJ. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:43 PM by David Adesnik  

NO WINNERS: Yossi Klein Halevi on Tuesday's election in Israel:

Sharon cannot really win this election. Even if he forms the next government, he has already lost his most precious asset--his progress in reversing a lifelong reputation for recklessness and becoming a symbol of stability and consensus. Sharon's achievement had been to subordinate ideology to national unity. He sacrificed the agenda that defined his political career, opposing a Palestinian state, to rally Israelis around the agenda that defined his military career, fighting Palestinian terrorism. In so doing, he recreated the two preconditions for every past Israeli victory: national cohesion and the ability to take the war into enemy territory.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:21 PM by David Adesnik  

COULD YOU REPEAT THAT? Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a neurological condition, not a liberal conspiracy. In a classic case of ideology overwhelming science, almost every major coservative voice in the media -- The National Review, The Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, Thomas Sowell, Policy Review, Phyllis Schlafly, Jonah Goldberg, Frank Fukuyama, and more -- have declared that ADD and its cure, Ritalin, are what has resulted from the liberal desire to medicate childhood and emasculate American boys.

What makes the TNR expose of this trend so intriguing is that it is written by a conservative and cites sources -- most of them medical experts -- who are also conservative. And then it ends by making a conservative case for the seriousness of ADD and the value of Ritalin. As the author explains, ADD medication

"reflects and reinforces conservative values. For one thing, [these medications] increase personal responsibility by removing an excuse that children (and their parents) can fall back on to explain misbehavior and poor performance...Moreover, unlike liberals, who tend to downplay differences between the sexes, conservatives are inclined to believe that there are substantial physiological differences-- differences such as boys' greater tendency to suffer ADHD."

There are a number of lessons to be taken from the Ritalin debate. First is the way in which the partisan media can become an echo chamber reinforcing prejudices on each side of the liberal-conservative divide. (Regular visitors will know that this is not a disingenuous attack on the conservative media, since I am a constant and vocal critic of liberal media bias.)

Second, pundits need to take special care in addressing the relationship between science and public policy, since it is all too easy to let simple applications of ideology substitute for the hard work of scientific research.

Third -- and most important from my personal perspective -- is recognition of the fact that no individual knows enough about enough issues to avoid becoming reliant on ideology as a guide. We all have our own prejudices, and errors are inevitable. As such, the best test of objectivity may be whether one is honest enough to admit one's mistakes and try to do better next time.

This point has personal significance for (aspiring?) centrists such as myself, since we have no ideology to guide us. Uncomfortable with the confident statements of pundits on both left and right, centrists are often most liable to become cynics. But that I am not. I believe that a better effort can be made, and that the media has a long way to go before it can claim that human imperfection is the only thing standing in the way of fairer reporting. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:24 PM by David Adesnik  

FASCISM VS. COMMUNISM: Most visitors to the blogosphere tend to scroll down from the top of pages they visit rather than scrolling upwards from the bottom. While practical, reading from the bottom up doesn't work when one encounters a series of posts that are incomprehensible when read from last to first. Since this weekend's running debate about the history and moral status of Fascism and Communism is just such a series, I have assembled a set of links below which will should make it easier to follow what Josh and I have been saying.

1. David comments on Glenn Reynolds' view of Communism.

2. Josh argues that Communism's dangers must be recognized.

3. David responds that Josh is oversimplifying.

4. Josh demands examples of Communist governments that were not totalitarian dictatorships.

5. David provides them.

6. Josh insists that Communism is a governing philosophy which must be judged according to how its adherents governed.

7. David takes issue with Josh's standards of judgment.

8. Coming soon? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:08 PM by David Adesnik  

FASCISM VS. COMMUNISM REDUX: Josh is standing by his assertion that Communism and Fascism are moral equivalents, a point I have already deconstructed once. As before, Josh's argument rests on the construction of artificial standards for judging the moral worth of an idea.

In his most recent missive, Josh avers that "Nazism, like Communism, is a governing philosophy, and must be judged according to the way it governs. And that is overwhelmingly brutal." While my knowledge of philosophy pales in comparison to that of Mr. Chafetz, I sene that the term "governing philosophy" is no different from the more general term "political philosophy". Therefore, there is no reason to judge a given political philosophy solely according to how it governs, rather than how it functions in opposition, in the social and economic realms, or in the academy.

This point is critical because Josh absolutely refuses to acknowledge the moral significance of many non-Stalinist Communists search for social justice. Forced to admit that this positive aspect of Communistm did exist, Josh now responds that "Nazis supported some worthy causes, as well (decreasing unemployment and raising the standard of living for the working class, for one). Are we wrong to judge them, too, 'according to their political record alone'?"

There is a very simple answer to this question. The Nazis who wantd to raise living standards for the working class were the same Nazis who murdered 6 million Jews. But the Communists who worked for decades to organize labor unions throughout the United States and Western Europe often (not always) had nothing to do with Lenin, Stalin or other brutal Communist dictators.

That said, perhaps I can offer Josh a thought which will make him comfortable with accepting the multifaceted nature of Communism. It goes like this: Throughout the Cold War, at a time when Communism threatened to overrun the nations of Western Europe as well countless others, prominent figures on the intellecutal and political left sought -- sometimes naively and sometimes disingenuously -- to mitigate perceptions of a Communist threat by comparing the Communist record favorably to that of the Fascists. In doing so, these figures referred to the same positive aspects of the Communist legacy that I have referred to in my posts.

Such arguments were deeply flawed in both moral and political terms because they sought to mitigate the brutality of existing Communist governments through reference to the positive actions of those Communists who sought legitimate forms in the West. I rejects such arguments unequivocally. Nonethless, it is a historical fact that Communism gave rise to both brutal and humane political movements, the latter of which ought to be recognized for their contribution to social justice.

NB: Josh also raised the point that Marxism inspired socialists and social democrats as well as Communists. Thus, I was wrong to say that "political movements based on Marx's ideas have referred to themselves as Commuist rather than Marxist." What I should have said was that "political movements based exclusively on Marx's ideas have referred to themselves as Commuist rather than Marxist." Socialism and social democracy have a complex intellectual heritage which draws on many sources other than Marx. In contrast, pure Marxist political movements, as far as I know, prefer to refer to themselves as Communist. And it is these Communists who sometimes fought for social justice. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:24 PM by David Adesnik  

RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA: "Saddam Hussein is obviously a brutal dictator who deserves toppling. No one who knows his history can doubt that he is secretly trying to develop weapons of mass destruction...The inspectors alone will never disarm Iraq." Is this the Washington Times? The National Review? The Weekly Standard? Josh Chafetz? All wrong. It's the New York Times.

Anti-war commentators are becomig desperate. They can no longer pretend that inspections might work or that Saddam does not have proscribed weapons. They are searching for any justification whatsoever to hold off an invasion. Consider, for instance, what the Times has come up with to counter its admission that Saddam is in material breach of Resolution 1441:

Mr. Bush has never...been clear about exactly why we are preparing to fight. Sometimes his aim appears to be disarming the Iraqis or punishing Baghdad for defying the United Nations; sometimes the goal is nothing short of deposing Mr. Hussein. The first lesson of the Vietnam era was that Americans should not be sent to die for aims the country only vaguely understands and accepts.

The critical flaw in this argument is that the American public would not hesitate for a second to support the invasion of Iraq if it shared the Times' belief that "No one who knows his history can doubt that he is secretly trying to develop weapons of mass destruction." As polls have shown, what Americans want is more evidence of Iraqi non-compliance, not a justification for enforcing 1441.

Ironically, the Times has backed itself into the same corner as French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who said just a few days ago that "Already we know for a fact that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs are being largely blocked, even frozen. We must do everything possible to strengthen this process." As Jonah Goldberg points out, "if France knows [this] for 'a fact,' then France also knows for a fact that Iraq has such weapons programs. After all, you can't block or freeze what doesn't exist..."

In the final analysis, no self-respecting multilateralist can argue both that Iraq is in material breach of 1441 and that the United States should hold back from enforcing the UN's stated will.
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# Posted 12:03 PM by David Adesnik  

AN ANSWER FOR VENEZUELA from Harvard's top scholars of Latin American politics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:57 AM by David Adesnik  

CHAFETZ AND DOWD CLOSE TO AGREEMENT: Confounding those who predicted that Maureen Dowd would not apologize for her use of a fabricated Time Magazine story to whack George, old MoDo has fessed up.

Then, in a rhetorical twist reminiscient of the mighty Chafetz, she asks "Why keep a tradition of honoring the Confederacy...

Of course, the rest of her question demonstrates why see and Josh C. will never she eye to eye: "...while you're going to court to stop a tradition of helping black students at the University of Michigan?" I would comment on the offensive nature of that remark, but I think it's abject stupidity is fairly self-evident. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:43 AM by David Adesnik  

POT, KETTLE, BLACK: From the NYT article on the secular-religious divide in Israeli politics:

"Israel is becoming more religious — both Jews and Arabs," said Rabbi Yaakov Solomon, 28..."But the secular side is becoming more and more extreme."

A member of Parliament from [the religious nationalist party] Herut, Michael Kleiner, has advocated bombing Palestinian cities and killing 1,000 Palestinians for every Jew killed in the conflict.

Now give me some of that old time religion! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:52 AM by David Adesnik  

JOSH ASKS, "Can you name a single Communist government that was not a totalitarian dictatorship?" First of all, yes. Second of all, that's the wrong question to ask.

While short lived, the Commuist governments of Guatemala in the 1950s and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s were not totalitarian dictatorships. For the definitive account of Jacobo Arbenz and Guatemalan Communism, see Piero Gleijeses' book, Shattered Hope.

While some revisionists have sought to argue that Arbenz was never a Communist, Gleijeses shows both that he was and that he went to certain lengths to hide that fact from both domestic and international audiences. However, Gleijeses also shows that Arbenz was an aggressive social reformer who did more for the Guatemalan poor in his few years in power than the rest of Guatemala's governments did ever.

In addition, Arbenz was a democrat, who won the presidency in free and fair elections. Moreover, he did not move to prevent further elections that might have brought the opposition to power. Of course, Eisenhower had no interest in promoting democracy, and thus ordered the CIA to overthrow Arbenz, thus ushering in three decades of brutal dictatorship which resulted in the the death of tens of thousands of innocent Guatemalans.

While I am not as familiar with the Dubcek/Swoboda government in Czechoslovakia, I will tell you what I learned from John Gaddis, a historian who has never been accused of exaggerating the merits of Communism. While Dubcek and Swoboda were not elected, they began to grant Czechoslovakians rights which were unheard of in the Communist bloc. Their reforms culminated in the legendary Prague Spring of 1968 and the brutal Soviet invasion which brought it to an end.

While Dubcek and Swoboda had no interest in resisting Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact, they did advocate "Communism with a human face". There was no chance, however, that the Soviets could remain passive in the face of living proof that their Communism lacked the humanity of its Czech variant.

What the tragic history of Guatemala and Czechoslovakia illustrates is that there were few opportunities for a better Communism to flourish in a world divided by the Cold War. The brutality of Communism was a result of the conscious decisions of brutal individuals such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their violent avant garde. While I value economic freedom enough to reject Communism out of hand, it is foolish to write off all Communists as no different from Stalin.

This brings me to Josh's second point, that he has no idea who I'm thinking of when I say that there were many idealistic Communists who fought for social justice. I mentioned the role of Communists in 19c. Europe, but Judith Weiss at Kesher Talk has reminded me of the critical role played by Communists in the American progressive movement of the interwar era. As Judith notes, according to

a new book about civil-rights activist Anne Braden, from the turn of the century up to WWII, if you thought segregation and Jim Crow were wrong, if you thought women should be able to get birth control and credit in their own names, if you didn't think Modern Art was the harbinger of social chaos, and if you wanted to find others like yourself and maybe even do something to further your ideals, you ended up hanging out with Communists. That's where the action was. Although its flawed ideas and the application of those ideas by fanatics led to economic ruin and enormous human-rights abuses which I have no desire to whitewash, Communism was at its core an ideology of human rights at a time when social inequalities were vast and many still believed in the divine ordination of social and gender heirarchy.

I can provide some independent confirmation of Judith's point, since in my course on American with the legendary David Montgomery, we learned about the critical role of Communists in organizing America's industrial unions.

All this should demonstrate why Josh's question about whether or not there have been good Communist governments is the wrong question to ask. Governments were not the only forum in which Communists were active, so to judge them according to their political record alone is counterproductive.

On a final note, I'd like to respond to Josh's belief that I am "conflating Communism with all Marxism". First off, Josh's distinction is valid, since there are many scholars who work within a Marxist analytical framework but are not Communists. Yet as far as I know, political movements based on Marx's ideas have referred to themselves as Commuist rather than Marxist. After all, he didn't call it "The Marxist Manifesto".

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# Posted 8:14 PM by David Adesnik  

HOLD ON, JOSH. It isn't easy to have two conversations at once. But thanks to the information revolution we can try.

In response to my argument that Stalin's brutality should not reflect on either Marx himself or other well-intentioned Communists, Josh asks, "Should we then refrain from thinking ill of all fascists because not all of them wound up to be genocidal maniacs?"

Sorry, Josh. The old "Communist-fascist switch" isn't going to work on me. Fascism tends to refer to Nazism, Mussolini's Italian fascism, and other European derivations thereof. None of them had any redeeming value. In contrast, there were many idealistic Communists, especially in the 19th century, who turned their ideological commitment toward the ends of social justice. Since I made that point before and you didn't respond to it, I'll assume that you agree.

As for your argument that a commitment to historical materialism entails a belief that Marxism in practice is the "true Marxism", I'm not sure where you're coming from. On the most basic level, historical materialism refers to the belief that one can only understand history in terms of the economic forces that shaped it. Some historical materialists interpet this mean that ideas are a "superstructure", i.e. nothing more than a reflection of the economic "base" that serves as their foundation.

While some historical materialists may have asserted that one can judge an idea according to the historical developments which bear its name, doing so contradicts historical materialism by assuming that the idea itself rather than associated social forces were responsible for those developments.

Even so, one has to reckon with the fact that Communism had "a tendency to churn out murderous despots", and thus, you add, "deserves our scorn." Frankly, it's hard to scorn a tendency. Do we scorn Christianity because it had a tendency to launch crusades and pogroms? Islam because of its terrorists? In the case of such complex phenomena, I prefer to hold invididuals accountable for their own actions and beliefs, thus preserving a sense of the ways in which controversial ideas can produce different outcomes in different situations.

Getting to your last point, I think it important to recognize that there are many on the Continent who "no longer wear the badge of Communism" but are still suspicious of those who refuse to recognize the distiction between Stalinism and Western European communism. And, while I am well aware of Herr Fischer's record, the fact remains that he is the German foreign minister and that he is far from the only European minister who has a similar background. While I understand your reluctance to accommodate those such as Joschka, I think that doing so is infinitely better than provoking conflicts which only benefit Saddam Hussein. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:30 PM by David Adesnik  

JOSH, I AGREE that you are on logical ground when you point out that one cannot oppose an invasion of Iraq after supporting an attack on Yugoslavia unless one identifies the current war as a matter of blood for oil. But I'm not sure that those who now protest against a war on Iraq ever supported what happened in Kosovo.

The anti-war movement of today is an outgrowth of the anti-IMF/World Bank activism that we now associate with the innocence of September 10th. If memory serves, the anti-IMF/World Bank movement more or less opposed the bombing of Yugoslavia as a matter of aggressio albeit for moral ends. While I won't defend that statement any further without the chance to do some research, I think it is generally correct.

Those who did support the war in Kosovo, such as Chirac and Schroeder, do not now rely on simplistic arguments about waging war for oil. Instead, they defend the semi-plausible argument inspections need more time to work.

As such, I think that "No Blood For Oil" reflects the transition of Marxist analytical thought from intellectual paradigm to common sense throughout much of Europe. This is not to say that "No Blood For Oil" is a flawed argument because of its intellectual pedigree. The real issue is a lack of evidence.

More importantly, I sense that many of those who accept the logic of blood for oil reject Marxism and Communism as firmly as ourselves. This is what I mean when I say that Marxist analysis has become common sense. In Europe, one will not find oneself alone on either the left, the right or the center if one identifies the search for wealth as the foundation of foreign policy, especially American foreign policy. In contrast, Americans think of foreign policy in terms of security and ideology.

It is this divide, no less than the one between multilateralists and unilateralists, that has prevented the Western democracies from coming together to bring justice to Saddam Hussein. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:09 PM by David Adesnik  

INSTAPUNDIT'S INSTACOMMUNISM: Glenn Reynolds says that

It's not McCarthyite to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology's true nature.

Not so fast. While there isn't much good to say about the Communist record in world politics, it is important both as a matter of principle as well as matter of pragmatics to recognize that the Communism of Mao and Stalin was not the Communism of either Karl Marx or his Western heirs.

As a matter of principle it is important to recognize that the intellectual contributions of Marx and the Western Communist tradition -- as well as their passionate commitment to social justice -- should not be blackened by an unjust association with those who turned Marxism to their own brutal ends. In contrast, there was only one Nazism, that of Adolf Hitler.

From a practical persepctive, simplistic denunciations of Communism ensure the widening of the gulf that separates America from Europe. While 1960s radicals such as Joschka Fischer have become more moderate in the process of becoming mainstream political and social figures, few of them have forgotten what it was like to believe in the human potential of Communism. Misguided as their faith was, they still stand ready to denounce as unthinking conservatives those who cannot separate Soviet Communism from its Western European counterpart.

While paying closer attention to European sensibilities may not have a tangible impact on the current coflict over how to disarm Saddam Hussein, a greater willingness to talk politics with the Europeans on their own terms may help them build an intellectual framework for the post-Cold War era that is not anchored in the conflicts of the Cold War. With such a framework in place, it may become possible to avoid such coflicts the next time the West has to confront a brutal dictator bent on developing weapons of mass destruction. After all, no one benefits from such coflicts except the dictators themselves.

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# Posted 5:26 PM by David Adesnik  

COMMON SENSE FROM DOWN UNDER: Patrick Porter -- a good friend of mine, a rising force among historians of Europe, an Australian and an avowed multilateralist -- has this to say about the logic of "No Blood For Oil":

For some analysts it is obvious that a lone superpower will capitalise on opportunities to secure its economic interests. For protesters it is immoral to sacrifice blood for oil. For either, it is often a 'real' reason, even the lone reason, behind the camouflage of Bush's stated reasons [for wanting to invade Iraq].

[Yet] one does not have to be an expert on the global oil economy, American foreign policy or Middle Eastern politics to realise how simplistic this is.

Is it so obviously in America's oil interests to attack Saddam Hussein, which risks destabilising the region and alienating other Arab nations? The enormous costs of such a war, which might precipitate a US recession, must also have occured to the US administration. Can we really sensibly say that the US is prepared to gamble its domestic prosperity and foreign economic resources so recklessly for more oil? If anything, this so-called dollar-driven war might well involve considerable economic sacrifices. If this is an oil-driven war, it comes with profound risks...

Finally, even if hypothetically America could enrich itself and its oil reserves without risk or complication, that is not enough. Causality requires demonstrating a link between acts, interests, objectives, and events. The nexus between oil and foreign policy must be proven. It is not clear that nation-states, particularly powerful ones reacting to acts of war, always define their interests in purely economic terms. It might be true that despite everything, oil plays a significant role in US objectives. But like any other thesis, it needs evidence.

I make this argument as someone opposed to unilateral pre-emptive strikes. One can still challenge the legitimacy of America's position in relation to Iraq. But under serious analysis, the oil thesis emerges as little more than cheap rhetoric.

Naturally, OxBlog is sympathetic to Patrick's views. What's really interesting about them, though, is their focus on the logic of causality. While some of us often take it for granted that the left will always argue that greed is the engine of aggression, one has to ask why anti-war protesters are so wedded to this specific empirical position, as opposed to the more defensible ethical position that war is unthinkable unless one is attacked first.

Or perhaps one should ask, which comes first: the belief that war is wrong, or the belief that this is a war for oil and therefore it is wrong? Do those who assume the former simply accept the latter because it reinforces their position? I don't know.

Rather than arguing against the anti-war position, the more interesting question may be what leads people to it. While I'm not all that concerned about the self-defeating American anti-war movement, it might be interesting to know what really drives European anti-war sentiment. Resentment of American power? Self-interest? Sincere pacifism? Or the belief that this is a war for oil? If we knew, we might be able to avoid the constant conflicts that set back our efforts to disarm and overthrow Saddam Hussein. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:10 PM by David Adesnik  

NIHILISM OR NAIVETE? Patrick Ruffini has an interesting post up on the deficit of constructive thinking in the anti-war movement. As Patrick sees it, the inability of anti-war thinkers to offer any serious proposals for protecting the United States or confronting brutal dictators in the Middle East qualifies as a form of nihilism.

I tend to disagree. Whether explicitly of not, the leadership of the anti-war movement tends to believe that anti-American sentiment is a natural reaction to American aggression. Therefore, if America resists the impulse to invade Iraq, it will have taken the first step toward redressing Middle Eastern grievances. This view is logically consistent, albeit sadly naive.

What Patrick might argue is that opposing war from a leftist or liberal perspective is hypocritical. On the left, as Patrick observes,

There's no discussion of peaceful ways to achieve regime change — or even any recognition that this brutal, illiberal dictator needs to go. No speaking out in solidarity with repressed Iraqi minorities or women. No exploration of ways to trigger democratic change in the region. No plan for challenging regimes they believe to be even worse, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea.

But if one truly believes that American aggression is the foremost existing threat to human rights, than prioritizing the anti-war campaign is not hypocritical.

In the final analysis, the absence of constructive recommendations on the left may be the reason that it's influence is so limited. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:54 PM by Daniel  

WHO'S YOUR DADDY. According to Bill Keller, Dubya's political one is Ronald Reagan. I especially agree that both "have made a political virtue of being -- in Bush's word -- ''misunderestimated'' by the political elite." There is nothing better than low expectations--Bush welcomes them.


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# Posted 10:48 PM by David Adesnik  

ANGRY CHICKEN FARMER, PART DEUX: Earlier this week, OxBlog took the NYT to task for its groundless allegations about Iraqi public opinion. Now as if to mock the Times, the WaPo has covered the same story but gotten it right.

Once again, the hero of the story is an angry chicken farmer, Mr. Anwar. Whereas the NYT made Anwar seem like a legitimate symbol of Iraqi grievances, the WaPo pointed out that

Anwar's anger would not have rated so much as a footnote in the annals of arms inspections in Iraq if the Information Ministry had not convened a news conference for him today and then organized a field trip to his farm, where he showed off a hole about 18 inches wide and four feet high in the storage building."

In other words, the most apalling instance of UN abuse Saddam could come up with was the vicious destruction of a brick wall on a chicken farm.

(NB: I have nothing against chicken farms or farmers. A while back, I defended them from the wrath of the vegetarians. Nonetheless, I find something humorous about a disgruntled chicken farmer becoming the NYT's symbol of Iraqi national pride.)

Anyway, the Post also outdid the Times by pointing to the real significance of Chickengate, which is that

Anwar's comments, delivered with government imprimatur, suggested Iraqi officials have once again shifted their stance toward the inspections, abandoning the conciliatory attitude they projected when the top two U.N. weapons inspectors visited Baghdad on Sunday and Monday.

Note to Howell Raines: The WaPo is now accepting applications for summer internships. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:25 PM by David Adesnik  

DELUSION OF THE DAY: According to E.J. Dionne, Rep. Charles Rangel's proposal to restart the draft "struck a nerve because virtually all Americans know there is a hole in our post-9/11 expressions of patriotism. 'What we're going through now,' Rangel said in an interview, 'is patriotism lite. Put a flag on your lapel. Put a flag on your car. Put a bigger one on your SUV.'

WHAT??? Rangel is basically saying that this is a war for oil, and that rich, white Americans will be happy to send poor black Americans off to fight for it.

If there were even a shred of evidence behind Rangel or Dionne's assertions, then the tens of thousands of protesters who demonstrated against the war should have consisted mainly of the families of soldiers, not the privileged children of the middle-class (led by unrepentant Stalinists).

And, if memory serves, the inequalities of the Vietnam-era draft were the reason middle-class students (think Clinton) got deferrals or joined the National Guard (a la Quayle and Bush). At the same time, the Department of Defense was thinking of every way it could to find more soldiers without offending the middle-class, even if that meant lowering the passing grade on intelligence tests so that men once considered mentally incompetent could be sent off to fight the Vietcong.

So here's to the men and women of the United States' all-volunteer armed forces. Men and women who of their own volition have said they are willing to lay down their lives for a country they believe in. I am honored to have them carry our flag. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:53 PM by David Adesnik  

GRADE INFLATION: Saddam will get a 'B' for his compliance with inspections according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Perhaps 'Incomplete' would be more accurate.

Then again, according to Paul Wolfowitz, "we know from multiple sources that Saddam has ordered that any scientists who cooperate during interviews will be killed, as well as their families." I guess what's going on at the UN is the same thing that goes on at universities when a student is on the brink of failure. Rather than file all the paperwork necessary to confirm a failing grade, the professors simply pass the student on to the next level and the next professor. The game continues until the dean or provost has to make a final decision and enforce the rules so that the university's reputation remains intact.

In a unipolar world, there is only one dean and he has had enough of uncooperative professors. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:12 AM by Daniel  

TONIGHT, PETER BEINART WILL BE PLAYING TOM FRIEDMAN. Beinart on affirmative action. He opens up his article much like a Friedman column.

I do feel that it is inconsistent and unfair to be against affirmative action based on race and ethnicity while allowing for other preferences such as geography and family history. You can't be against some preferences some of the time or for them when they suit you.

"But, if affirmative action is justified when it helps the political fortunes of the GOP, why isn't it justified when it helps create a racially diverse college campus?"

Is it fair to be against one type of non-merit preference but not others? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:42 AM by David Adesnik  

SNOOKERED! HOODWINKED! BAMBOOZLED! Turns out the whole Confederate wreath story was a fabrication. Time has issued a retraction and taken the story off its site, but without any explanation for how the story got there in the first place. See Josh Marshall for details.

Now, I hope the whole story doesn't end here, because it has become a case study in media irresponisibility and bias. What I really can't figure out is how Time got quotes from the United Daughters of the Confederacy saying that Bush Sr. had stopped sending wreaths in 1990. According to the Time retraction, what Bush Sr. actually did is change the date of the wreath's sending from Jefferson Davis' birthday to Memorial Day. Good for him.

In addition to Time, the biggest losers from this whole debacle are the Daughters of the Confederacy and other organizations associated with the same cause, whose offensive views were picked up by the mainstream. Oh yeah. And all the bloggers who now have egg on their face because they made so much of the initial story.

Mr. President, I owe you an apology. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:18 AM by Daniel  

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Hillary Clinton, the Junior Senator from New Jersey or New York, I think, makes good points about the potential pitfalls (including constitutional problems) of Bush's percentage plan. She is right that there is "no one-size-fits-all approach to one of our country's most complicated problems."

Where she loses me is her support for the University of Michigan's policy, which I think is pretty absurd--awarding a student 20 points out of 150 for being member of a historically underrepresented minority.

I have a problem with Michigan's specific policy--20 points for ethnicity, 3 for a perfect essay, and 12 for a perfect score on the SAT--not the broader idea of taking race into account among several factors (schools already take factors like gender, geography, athletics, and if parents attended). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:08 AM by Daniel  

CONDI MAKES HER CASE. As far as she is concerned, Iraq's actions constitute a material breach. Let's see what happens with our erstwhile allies when we "rub their nose in reality."

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# Posted 10:08 PM by David Adesnik  

BLIX STILL A UNILATERALIST: Fred Barnes has the story. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:10 PM by David Adesnik  

GET READY FOR HYPOCRISY: The President has already begun to sell his 2004 budget even though Congress hasn't passed 11 of the 13 budget bills for 2003. Why does that matter? Think of it this way: at the same time that the President is trying to present his 2004 spending plans as generous, the GOP leadership in Congress will be doing away with the social programs that Bush promised for 2003. But what's really ironic is that Congress is only cutting these programs because the President's Office of Managment and the Budget (OMB) told it to save $10 billion...at the same time the President is calling for almost $700 billion in tax cuts. This is going to get ugly.

UPDATE: A little more hypocrisy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:27 PM by David Adesnik  

BUSH THE TRAITOR: Says who? Josh Chafetz. That's who. As Maureen Dowd informs us, Bush has

quietly reinstituted the practice — which lapsed under his father in 1990 — of sending a floral wreath on Memorial Day from the White House to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, where those nostalgic for the Old South celebrate Jefferson Davis.

Yet as Josh has observed, the secession of the Confederacy was "the single greatest act of treason in American history." Moreover, "what, precisely, do [Jefferson] Davis and the Confederacy stand for that is so good that it outweighs both their position on slavery and their act of treason?" I dunno. I guess Josh will have to ask the President.

UPDATE: Mike Daley writes in to say that I'm being very unfair to Josh. He points to this post by the Minute Man which exposes some problems with the original Time Magazine story that Dowd drew on for her column.

That said, I stand by my post. Those who glorify the Confederacy directly associate the Arlington memorial with the legitimate (as they see it) cause of Southern independence. As such, the President was wrong to recognize it with his public support.

Anyway, here are some quotes from a speech given at the Arlington memorial on Jefferson Davis' birthday in 1999. If Bush had heard the speech he might have thought twice about sending flowers.

"This monument captures ideals and accomplishments that still existed at the end of the War for Southern Independence. Thank God it does not depict the beginning of the Reconstruction Era, the most disgusting, disgraceful and destructive period in United States history from which the South has never fully recovered...

"[19th century] Europe was the scene of radical new ideas about religion, politics and social order. During those years a steady stream of New England intellectuals went to Europe and drank deeply from the wells of the radical social philosophers. These New England intellectuals were really elitists who returned to America convinced that Southern Biblical Christianity ought to be suppressed because it was a stumbling block to the progress of mankind...many of [them], incidentally were Abolitionists..."

"There was indeed a profound difference in theology between the North and the South in ante-bellum America. The Northern intellectual leadership preached a heretical and socialist Gospel. The South held on to a robust, traditional, Trinitarian Christianity..."

"If we Southerners continue to allow people to refer to this war as the Civil War we will be participating in the subversion of the noble reasons for which our ancestors took up arms to defend their lives, homes and culture from Northern aggression. If we continue to use the term Civil War we are encouraging the general public to believe that the war was fought only because of the South's obsession with maintaining slavery which is a bald-faced lie. I believe that the term Civil War was a Yankee euphemism for Northern aggression leading to the destruction of the South and her culture..."

The one good thing I can say about the speech is that it's very pro-Jewish. Really.

2ND UPDATE: No, I don't actually think Bush is a traitor. Nor does Josh. As Mr. Chafetz points out via e-mail, one cannot be a traitor without actively supporting a treacherous cause. I was just being snarky. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:04 PM by David Adesnik  

NYT CLAIMS OMNISCIENCE: Given how hard it is to figure out what the American public is thinking, one has to marvel at the ability of the NY Times to figure out what the Iraqi public wants.

According to an NYT headline, "Iraqis Ambivalent on Inspections". Thanks to an extended interview with a disgruntled chicken farmer, one learns that he resents the UN inspectors for tearing down a brick wall on his farm.

One also hears from an imam at a new mosque in Baghdad about which the inspectors wanted information. As he cleverly asks, "Are they looking for weapons of mass destruction or are they investigating the faith in our hearts? This is provocative to the Muslims of Iraq."

Perhaps what is more provocative to the Muslims of Iraq is when the government murders their chosen imams and replaces them with Saddam's henchmen. So forgive me if I don't grant all that much credibility to the opinion of this specific imam.

Speaking in broad terms, the Times concludes that Iraqis' "anger seems fueled in part by wounded pride, of what they see as arrogant foreigners banging down the closed doors of a sovereign nation." And there you have it, folks. The world's greatest newspaper telling us that the people of Iraq think the UN is more arrogant than Saddam.

UPDATE: Apparently, there is a glimmer of recognition on the NYT editorial board that government intimidation prevents Iraqis from being honest. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:25 PM by David Adesnik  

ALLIES OF THE AXIS: Trent Telenko has quite an interesting post up on the Pakistan-North Korea connection and what it says about the failure of Clinton's non-proliferation efforts.

Also, don't miss Trent's post on the unreported but pervasive corruption that may bring down North Korea. No question about it -- Winds of Change is back with a vengeance. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:54 PM by David Adesnik  

A (VERY SNARKY) RESPONSE FOR JOSH: While "snarky" is, in fact, a real word -- defined according to Webster's as a derivation of "to annoy, perhaps alteration of nark to irritate" -- that does not mean it should be used. The word itself is, well, snarky.

But let me get to the point. Josh's analogy between Michigan's affirmative action program and the Democratic primaries is flawed. Whereas an unlimited number of Michigan applicants can receive a full score of 150, the total primary vote cannot exceed 100%. Therefore, to give Sharpton a 13.3% bonus is absurd.

As for Josh's more general point -- that if affirmative action applies to education, it should apply to politics as well -- the fact is that it does. Remember the whole racial redistricting controversy in the 90's? While I don't have a strong position on the issue, I think that defenders of the Michigan system can be loyal to their principles by supporting the creation of such districts while rejecting a primary bonus for President Sharpton. (Has a nice ring to it, huh?)

Last but not least, I'd like to say that if one accepts Josh's premise that the institution of the presidency has a history of racism, blacks certainly aren't the only groups left out. The answer: Condi/Chafetz '08. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:19 PM by Daniel  

NOT EXACTLY. In her article discussing some interesting parallels between John Kerry's campaign and that of Michael Dukakis, Joan Vennochi refers to John Sasso as "Dukakis' strategist." However, Dukakis fired John Sasso during the Democratic primaries in early 1988 because of the unscrupulous manner by which Sasso leaked the fact that Joe Biden cheated in law school. Sasso likely would have advocated, and the campaign might have implemented, a tougher strategy against Father Bush's race baiting attacks. So to call Sasso "Dukakis' strategist" is a bit misleading. Read all about this in "What it Takes" by Richard Ben Cramer ,which is an excellent account of the 1988 campaign (and note the similarities with 2004, at least on the Democratic side).

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# Posted 10:31 PM by David Adesnik  

ACID FLASHBACK: According to German Foreign Minister (and former 60's radical) Joschka Fischer, "Iraq has complied fully with all relevant resolutions and cooperated very closely with the U.N. team on the ground...we think things are moving in the right direction, based on the efforts of the inspection team, and [they] should have all the time which is needed."

In contrast, 75% of Americans say that Saddam has not cooperated. Only 11% think diplomacy has a "good chance" of resolving the US-Iraq conflict. (Scroll down to Questions 9 & 10 of the survey for the relevant data.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:16 PM by David Adesnik  

THE LATEST POLLS: Seven out of ten Americans approve of the President's handling of the war on terror. Seven out of ten would also give UN inspectors several more months to search for weapons in Iraq. Seven in ten also said that the US should go public with its own evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

So what does this all mean? As Tocqueville once said, public opinion contradicts itself. OK, so what does that mean? According to scholars, the public often has conflicting prefences and thus does not decide what it wants until elected officials persuade it that one course of action is better than another. Thus, if the President can take advantage of his State of the Union address to make a strong argument for invading Iraq -- and the Democrats continue to provide no clear alternative -- the public will follow the President.

For the moment, the invasion of Iraq has become a partisan issue. 58% of Democrats are against it, 55% of Independents for it, and 78% of Republicans for it. As I see it, the issue here is trust. Republicans are sure that Bush has evidence that Iraq has banned weapons, independents are somewhat sure and Democrats doubt it. If, in the State of the Union, Bush says that he knows Iraq has banned weapons -- even if he doesn't produce a smoking gun -- expect a considerable increase in independent and Democratic support for an invasion.

While the European public won't trust Bush until he has hard evidence, Americans will recognize that Bush will be putting his credibility on the line by saying flat out in the most important speech of the year that he knows Iraq has what it says it doesn't have. Bush knows the importance of living up to unequivocal commitments. His father said "Read my lips: no new taxes" -- and was punished heavily for breaking his promise.

Bush's overall approval ratings stands at 59%. However, he has fallen below the 50% mark for his management of the economy and 61% think his tax cut benefits the rich (in contrast to 23% who see it as even-handed). But when it comes to Iraq, those numbers don't matter. Only hardcore opponents of the war think it is a diversion from economic problems at home. As the WaPo points out, only 45% of the public supported the Gulf War before it began. It might have added that even that number was very high by historical standards. If Bush goes, America will be behind him. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:41 PM by David Adesnik  

LAUGHING LEFTWARDS: "If You're Happy and You Know It, Bomb Iraq" (Sung to the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands):

If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.
If the markets are a drama, bomb Iraq.
If the terrorists are Saudi,
And your alibi is shoddy,
And your tastes remain quite gaudy,
Bomb Iraq...

If the globe is quickly warming, bomb Iraq.
If the poor will soon be storming, bomb Iraq.
We assert that might makes right,
Burning oil is a delight,
For the empire we will fight,
Bomb Iraq...

If we have no allies with us, bomb Iraq.
If we think that someone's dissed us, bomb Iraq.
So to hell with the inspections,
Let's look tough for the elections,
Close your mind and take directions,
Bomb Iraq!

While it would be hard to fit more slander and prejudice into one song, it still made me laugh a lot. Perhaps if the anti-war movement were led by humorists instead of Stalinists, it might not constantly embarrass itself.

PS For more information about the song's author -- e.g. the fact that he named his son 'Ocean' -- click here.

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# Posted 10:22 PM by David Adesnik  

STUPID, STUPID, STUPID: Maybe I'm just in a bad mood and need to vent. But this is really stupid. Read this and this and you'll know why. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:15 PM by David Adesnik  

RUSSIA WORKING WITH CIA: In North Korea of all places. The strange thing about the story is that it all comes from a single, anonymous "intelligence official". My guess is that the North Koreans already figured out what's been going on, then told the Chinese and everyone else, so now there's no harm in letting the leaking the story to the NYT. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:01 PM by David Adesnik  

WARLORD BECOMES PEACELORD: Hard to know if it will last, but an Afghan warlord who had been giving Karzai a lot of trouble seems to be coming around. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:56 PM by David Adesnik  

SUDDENLY, LATIN AMERICA MATTERS: Thanks to the ongoing crisis in oil-rich Venezuela, Latin America is finally getting some attention from the North American media. What's especially nice about this round of coverage is that some of it transcends the enduring stereotypes that often prevent Washington journalists from providing any sort of informed analysis.

The place to begin is with Peter Beinart's attack on the Bush administration's neglect of Latin politics. As Beinart points out, Bush has done nothing to fulfill his campaign promise that "I will look south, not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental commitment to my presidency." Fair enough, but then again virtually every President since Eisenhower has attacked his predecessor's neglect of our neighbors to the South, only to ignore them himself once in office. JFK was the exception to this rule, and for that reason he is still worshipped throughout Latin America. For details, see the work of historian Stephen Rabe.

Still, one could have expected more of Bush despite the fact that September 11th forced him to focus on more pressing matters. The administration's response to Venezuela's April coup attempt was an embarrassment. Paul O'Neill's pointless provocations of Argentine and Brazilian politicians provoked constant tension in the United States' relationship with those nations. New American steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies have undermined Latin support for free trade. Bush has completely ignored Mexican Pres. Vicente Fox despite their once-close relationship.

Still, Beinart goes to far when he asserts that "While the Bush administration looks the other way, anti-Americanism is making a comeback. Left-wingers have won elections in Brazil and Ecuador, and governments across the continent are retreating from free-market economics."

Just like Josh Marshall, Beinart assumes that left-wing cadidates are anti-American and anti-free market yet presents no evidence to back up that claim. In fact, Brazil's Lula and Ecuador's Lucio Gutierrez have run on moderate platforms despite their identification as leftists.

On the bright side, Beinart avoids the bleeding-heart alarmism of the NYT's latest round-up of Latin politics. In it, one learns that Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela and Cuba are going to form an "axis of populism".

While associating Lula with Hugo Chavez is bad enough, implying that he in any way resembles an iron-fisted dictator like Castro is offensive. While Lula shares the (Latin) American left's nostalgia for Castro's popular revolution, he is a democrat through and through. (In contrast, it's hard to know what to make of Gutierrez, since he has a record similar to Chavez's but has embraced democratic politics in a way Chavez never did.)

Ironically, the Times article ends by quoting Latin America expert Michael Shifter, who observes that "The worst scenario [for Latin America] would be if the United States begins to lump all of these leaders together, in other words sees Lula and Gutierrez the same way they see Chávez, and talks of an axis of evil," Mr. Shifter said. "Then the risk is it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy." From context, it is apparent that the Times is quoting Shifter sympathetically. Why, then, does it engage in exactly the sort of alarmism that Shifter warns of?

Before answering that question, one has to recognize that the Beinart-Marshall-NYT fear of a Latin backlash against the US is not a recent development, but a constant trope of US coverage of the Western Hemisphere for at least twenty five years. In response to the marked Republican prefernence for supporting right-wing Latin dictators, liberals in both Congress and the media insisted on emphasizing the danger of a Latin backlash.

In context, such concerns made sense. Supporting Somoza, Pinochet, et al. solidified the US reputation for disregarding its ideals south of the border. The liberals' concerns, however, have degenerated into a primitive form of alarmism that has begun to overlap with anti-Communist paranoia of surviving cold warriors such as Henry Hyde, chair of the House I.R. committee, who declared that Lula will join Castro to form a Latin "axis of evil".

If the left wants to correct its perceptions, it will have take its own advice and pay more attention to Latin America. As I learned in Argentina this past summer, living in Latin America for even few months enables one to see through the US media's stereotypes of the region. Of course, as long as the Times and Post are only willing to send a single correspondent to cover the entire region, there is little hope for improvement.

Frankly, neither paper would lose out if it decided to fire its Latin American correspondent and just reprint articles from The Economistand the Financial Times instead. (Though, in the Post's defense, it ran a very sensible editorial on the Argentine economic crisis just yesterday and publishes continually good work by Marcela Sanchez.)

Perhaps what disturbs me more than anything else about misguided US coverage of Latin America is the possibility that coverage of every other region may be just as misguided, but that I wouldn't even know it because I never had the chance to spend time in and study those regions the way I did Latin America. I guess that why, on the eighth day, God created The Economist.

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# Posted 7:54 AM by Daniel  

THE DEATH PENALTY. I highly recommend Scott Turow's essay about it from The New Yorker a few weeks ago.

Like Turow I have wavered on the issue, but he makes a very convincing argument that the system (in Illinois, for that matter) is fundamentally flawed. I do not have a problem with the abstract idea of the death penalty (people like Ted Bundy and Timothy McVeigh help me feel that way), but think that in its current form the system does not work properly.

Governor Ryan's sweeping gesture--an arbitrary move itself, as victim's rights groups and death penalty proponents point out--will most likely have the unintended consequence of setting the death penalty abolition movement back. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:55 PM by David Adesnik  

INDISPUTABLE SIGN OF SUCCESS: Now PBS is showcasing bloggers as well. What next, NPR?

But seriously...my parents watched the show and told me it was a must see. Then again, if I studied fish instead of blogging, they would be telling me about the wonderful icthyology specials on public television. Wait a second...I was trying to be serious. Let me just say this: Read Pejman's detailed review of the show. Looks like it really was good work. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:06 PM by David Adesnik  

PREACHING TO THE CHOIR: It's easy to mock the anti-war protesters. But the real quesiton is, what does it accomplish? If anything, exposing the foolishness of extreme views only tempts one to ignore legitimate criticisms of American policy.

Then again, it's just so much fun to mock. Take this quote for example: "'Saddam Hussein is not a good person, but he has not attacked us directly...' said Magda Saldana, 60, an elementary school teacher. 'The Iraqi people do not have to suffer because they have a madman for a leader.'" Power Line observes: "Well, actually they do." (See this post if you have any doubts.)

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# Posted 6:37 PM by David Adesnik  

SADDAM BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT: Is there anything evil he doesn't do? Damian Penny posts a fascinating story on Saddam's destruction of the Iraqi marshes in order to facilitate the murder of their rebellious inhabitants. Two in a row for Damian! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:27 PM by David Adesnik  

NASCENT SAUDI DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT: The Christian Science Monitor reports. For an in-depth look at the prospects of democracy in Saudi Arabia, click here. (Thanks to Damian Penny for the link.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:40 PM by David Adesnik  

ANYONE ELSE FROM GREENWICH VILLAGE? If you grew up there, as I did, you are almost definitely familiar with the culinary delights of Balducci's. Sadly, however, this greatest of all markets has now closed. RIP. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:28 PM by David Adesnik  

DRUNK WITH POWER: "Venezuela's national guard today seized warehouses full of beer..." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:10 PM by David Adesnik  

KRISTOF SOBERS UP: Quite a reasonable column today. Which leads me to the following slanderous hypothesis: Kristof's work is so inconsistent because he's drunk half the time. (Note to NYT legal consultants: This is supposed to be humorous. I think.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:20 PM by David Adesnik  

WE HAVE A WINNER: OxBlog sends a shout out to contest winner SH and runner-up BB. Here are their respective answers:

Q: How many OxBloggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: More than two. Because David keeps turning it to the left, and Josh keeps turning it to the right.

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Q: How many OxBloggers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: One, but the real question is whether said bulb relinquished its bulb-breaking program "before" a change was needed or "in exchange" for the threatened darkness that would ensue if a broken light bulb occurred. The difference is more than a matter of semantics, as "an exchange" in and of itself signifies appeasement, although no pundit has the courage to state this fact (with exception to the estimable CalPundit). Oxblog made clear yesterday, last week,and in a fifth grade essay that appeasement will only encourage the light bulb to break its agreement of steady, soft luminescence more readily in the future. Therefore the bulb must accept that there will be no further broken filaments in the future "before" negotiations on a change can take place.

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NB: The second answer is a parody of this post on North Korea from a short while back. As far as the first answer goes, I am not a self-identified liberal. Still, as a centrist, I am to the left of Josh. And the whole idea of turning the lightbulb "right" and "left" is extremely clever.


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# Posted 4:08 PM by David Adesnik  

SADDAM IN NORTH KOREA? According to Donald Rumsfeld, "I ... personally would recommend that some provision be made so that the senior leadership in that country and their families could be provided haven in some other country, and I think that that would be a fair trade to avoid a war."

Powell has said the same, so this seems to be a firm administratio position. And it's a good one. While letting Saddam escape punishment for his crimes against humanity would be deplorable, it is a compromise that will save the lives of American soldiers, Israeli civilians, Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi civilians...as long as the United States does not compromise its commitment to a democratic Iraq.

If Saddam walks out, someone will take his place. No matter who it is, they must have no choice but to give way to an American occupation government. This will be necessary in order to ensure both the appropriate disposal of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as well as the full elimination of the Baathist regime.

I am concerned that Cheney and Rumsfeld will work out a deal with the incoming leadership whereby full access to all WMD materiel and documents are given up front in exchange for the right to stay in power during the transition to democracy. That, however, would be nothing short of a betrayal of the Iraqi people. Leaving unelected successors in place would be no different than installing an Iraqi Musharraf, a pro-Western dictator whose selfishness, ignorance and incompetence undermine democracy while promoting fundamentalism.

That said, one has to wonder where Saddam will go if he heads into exile. North Korea? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:48 AM by Daniel  

ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I'M THINKING? Josh doesn't want him to be Oxford's Chancellor, and Israelis are looking for "a leader with a serious domestic national agenda, someone who has ideas on how Israelis can live together and heal all of the internal divisions — someone who would be culturally inclusive, religiously respectful, educationally compassionate and diplomatically hardheaded. They are looking for an Israeli Third Way." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion