# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik  

GRAD STUDENTS TALK BACK: Eric Tam (definitely) and Brett Marston (sort of) think my description of Yale grad students' attitudes toward undergraduates is a little one-sided.

They're right, but it seems that the attitude I described is the one that makes it into print far more than the one they describe. Would that it were not so! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:34 PM by David Adesnik  

SMALL POX: Martin Kimel reminds us that the US government isn't taking some very basic steps to protect its citizens from biological warfare. Martin says,

"It amazes me that so many American bloggers and professional pundits can argue that Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction poses such a grave danger that we must be prepared to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq, yet they remain vitually mute in the face of our government's failure to protect us against Saddam's potential use of smallpox against our cities. I agree that we must be prepared to disarm Saddam by force, but I am also convinced that our lethargic reaction to the smallpox threat places us all in great peril.

What makes this so maddening is that there is a fairly simple preventive measure here: the smallpox vaccine. The risks are relatively de minimis, the failure to act potentially catastrophic. (Anyone who believes that an outbreak will be contained after the fact, with all the ensuing panic, is kidding himself. Can you imagine people in high-density areas calmly making appointments to get themselves and their families inoculated once the first case has been diagnosed in their vicinity?) If the "first responders" in my area don't want the vaccine that's been offered them, I do -- and there are plenty of other ordinary civilians who share that view.

So, what to do? We can write letters to the White House, to our Congressional representatives, to local government officials, to anyone of influence. We can make this an issue in the blogosphere that draws the attention of the mainstream media. There are, I'm sure, a host of other things we can do. The war is just around the corner. Let's start defending ourselves at home.

If it's any consolation to our stateside readers, the UK is just as vulnerable... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:56 PM by David Adesnik  

JEWS OF DIXIE: OxBlog's intrepid reades are on a mission to figure out why it is that Hebraic Northerners assume that anti-Semitism thrives in the states of the Old Confederacy. Gary Farber, the incisive mind behind Amygdala writes that:

I don't have any kind of statistics handy, and I'm a bit loath to do other people's online research without a darned good reason (that's a hint to try googling up some yourself), but first an observation: there are and particularly were in the Sixties and earlier, far, far, far, more "blacks" in the South than Jews. So I'm hardly surprised to see anyone testify what I'm sure is completely true: that they heard far more anti-black remarks than anti-semitic remarks, and witnessed far more anti-black acts, etc. It only stands to reason.

As an anecdote, my mother, who was quite brave, took a hitchhiking trip with a friend, down through the South to visit her brother, who was then training at an Army base, in 1942. When she allowed in conversation with a truck driver that she was Jewish, he asked to see her horns. Deadly serious, no joke, that's what he (and many people) believed. Not in NYC, of course, but that's a difference between being around zillions of Jews and never having met one.

I don't recall of any Jewish civil rights workers being shot up North (Goodman, Schwerner, Cheney, you've heard of them?). And in the Sixties, the KKK was a tad more popular down South. And many other people, of course, had lesser versions of their opinions, which had a lot to say about Jews. As does, for instance, still, David Duke and others today. Where was it David Duke was in office, again?

On the other hand, Congressman Moran is not from a Southern state.

It's almost certainly as worthwhile to distinguish between urban areas and rural areas when discussing anti-semitism, as it is "north" and "south," historically. NYC is an exceptional case, for instance, as are some other large cities, but it's not as if you couldn't find anti-semitism in rural northern states, to be sure.

I think Gary says it pretty well. And whereas his mother was asked about her horns in the 1940s, I have friends who were asked about their horns in the 1990s. (It probably didn't help that my friend's last name was Horn, but anyway.)

Reader BR, a Southern native, thinks that the premise of Southern anti-Semitism should take into account the difference between Catholics and Protestants. As he observes:

I grew up in Alabama -- Mobile to be specific. I attended Catholic grade and high school from 1948 to 1960. Not once did I hear a disparaging remark from the nuns or the brothers aginst the Jews. Oddly enought Mobile has a substantial Catholic, and I suspect, a respectablely sized Jewish populations.

Growng up, I never heard my father or anyone else saying anything bad about Jews, but the Blacks were another story. Also I do not recall any synagogues being defaced. I think the KKK was never very big in Mobile because of the relatively large Catholic population and obviously the KKK never welcomed Catholics, Jews, and Blacks with open arms (or sheets.)

PS Mobile is a seaport and it is my opinion that seaports are generally more tolerant about cultural differences.

Another reader -- one who happens to share the initials DH -- adds that all those who think of the South as more anti-Semitic should take into account the often more offensive racism and anti-Semitism of the North. As he recalls,

I lived in Atlanta, and traveled the across the deep south, but no further north than Richmond until I went to Hofstra U. ( Long Island ). I am 39, from a white, Southern Baptist upbringing. My experience is similar to the DH you quote, but coming along at the tail end of the desegregation struggle, I heard very few openly expressed anti-black comments either. Prejudice was not extinguished by any means, but race problems had become a source of regional shame. I remember being stunned to hear my roommate from New England unselfconsciously ask me, "How can you stand all the niggers down there?" The "N-word" was considered a hyper-obscenity in my southern circle of friends.

In college, my incompetence at identifying Jews by racial characteristics or surname was a source of amusement, as was my confusion of their term "JAP" with John Wayne's epithet for his enemy in old war movies. I had always thought of Judaism as a religious belief that one could not know of a stranger. The Jewish friends of my childhood were simply kids whose religion had an inconveniently unsynchronized, but recognizably similar Sabbath ritual.

White Northerners I met in college all seemed to assume that whatever racial prejudices they harbored were at least better than what went on down south, and thus excusable.

A point worth making. Last but not least, blogger Dan Gelfand adds that

among my father's generation (he's 52), the perception of southern anti-Semitism seems to have at least partly resulted from the murders of Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman. It's something that seems to have stuck in the heads of many people. That said, I don't really know how much of that perception is actually true.

In closing, I offer a thought and a joke. The thought: Northern Jews' strong identification with the civil rights movement has led them to assume that the racists of the South must have also been anti-Semites. Regardless of our white skin, we know that Teutons and Anglo-Saxons often consider us to be less than white.

And the (moderately offensive) joke:

In 1944, a lonely southern dowager sent a telegram to the local army base to let it be known that she would be glad to host two or three young G.I.'s for Saturday dinner. She requested, however, that only white soldiers be sent.

On the appointed day and time, the dowager's doorbell rang and she walked out onto her porch. Standing there were three of the blackest soldiers she had ever seen. Taken aback, she stammeringly asked them, "Are you sure your commanding officer sent you to the right address?"

Calmly, one of the soldiers responded, "I'm sure that this is the right address, ma'am. Lieutenant Goldstein never makes mistakes."

Cheers! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:35 PM by David Adesnik  

IRAN'S NUCLEAR STRATEGY. Get the bomb, stop America. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:26 PM by David Adesnik  

DAMN GOOD POST: Amygdala lays down the law of how to separate veiled anti-Semitism from legitimate criticism of neo-conservatives. Don't come back here until you're done reading it.


Judith Weiss' response is also well worth your time. Finally, don't forget Jonah Goldberg's devastating attack on those who attack neo-conservatives because they are afraid to admit they are anti-Semites. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:01 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE BLOGGYFOTTOM: Ben Berman has a long and thoughtful post on the dilemma of the liberal hawks. One of Ben's best points is that

it is naïve to think that war in Iraq will not increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks during the conflict. However, increased terrorism would be a strategic decision on the part of Al Qaeda, and not a direct result of the US invasion. Those who want to do harm to the US and the West need no further incentive, but an invasion of Iraq will be an opportune time to strike.

If there's a backlash, it will be planned. Anyway, go and read the rest of Ben's post. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:43 PM by David Adesnik  

THE SOUTH RESPONDS: Unhappy with my observation that anti-Semitism is more common south of the Mason-Dixon line, reader DH responds:

I do not doubt that you and some of your friends may perceive that anti-Semitism is much more common in the South than in the North. However, in making statements based on such "perceptions" about groups of people, I think it's important to be careful that the perceptions stem from actual facts instead of stereotypes that themselves create the perception. To be more blunt, I think it's likely that the reason you and others perceive that Southerners are more likely to be anti-Semitic than Northerners is a general stereotype of white Southerners as bigoted. In this particular instance, I doubt that the stereotype has any basis in fact.

I grew up in Mississippi during the segregation era (I'm 49 and white) and although anti- black statements were as common as air, I can't remember ever hearing an anti-Semitic statement. It was not until I went north to law school (in Chicago) that I ever heard seriously anti-Semitic statements, all from Northerners. In the apartheid-era South that I grew up in, there were only two racial groups - whites and blacks. At that time, the key fact was that Jews were white. (Interestingly, the same was true for Chinese, who were declared "white" by law for purposes of segregation.) Even today, when I visit less enlightened relatives, I may hear anti-black comments, but I just don't remember any anti-Jewish remarks.

I have no doubt that polls would show that white southerners are more likely to be biased against blacks than whites in the rest of the country. But I am not aware of such polls showing this is true with respect to anti-Semitism. Are you? Without such evidence, I think it's best not to make generalizations about groups of people.

DH is right. I don't have evidence, just experience. If any of you have thoughts on this one, let me know. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:36 PM by David Adesnik  

GREED: Seems a French corporation has been smuggling military supplies to Iraq as recently as this January. While there's no reason to think that the government has anything to do with it, I figure an American company would probably have the decency to sell illegal arms to China instead.

Thanks to RB for the link. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:30 PM by David Adesnik  

SMARTER THAN SMART: The inimitable Howard Veit thinks that Elizabeth Smart was never kidnapped in the first place. Howard was a private investigator once, so maybe it's a good hunch. Sure would explain a lot.

Anyway, while you're over at Oraculations, don't forget to enjoy some of the other bizarre, twisted and hi-f*****- larious posts. I think Howard may be even more evil than the Angry Cyclist. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:12 PM by David Adesnik  

CLINTON ON BUSH: In a speech at New York's 92nd St. Y, the fomer Arkansas governor said that he would've done a better job of handling the economy and lining up allies than his successor.

On the one hand, Clinton's attacks weren't much better than cheap shots. But the simple fact that he does support the war shows that he has a certain minimal degree of integrity. Cough--cough--Algore--cough--cough...

(Thanks to reader JW for the link.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:57 AM by David Adesnik  

PROCRASTINATION: This is the end of the line. I've now descended from racial politics, to crime news, to internet quizzes to the controversy surrounding statues that resemble reproductive organs.

I've stayed away from that last one despite Andrew Sullivan's pronounced interest. But since Glenn asked whether there is a double-standard regarding such stautes on university campuses, I thought I'd add my two cents.

At Yale, there is exactly such a statue, known as the Women's Table. It was designed by Maya Lin, better known for her work on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. The Table is the regular site of demonstrations and counter demonstrations about gender issues.

From this photo, it's hard to tell that there is anything even vaguely reproductive about the statue. But if you look at the Table from above, it looks exactly like an Oval Orifice. In fact, the Table has even been the victim of a "symbolic rape".

Anyway, it's time for me to go to the gym. Sensei Ohta is visiting, and I have the chance to move one step closer to being a black belt if I impress him enough. Cheers! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:33 AM by David Adesnik  

MY ROLE MODEL is Franklin Roosevelt. At least according to this political stereotypes quiz. Could be worse. He did kick some Nazi a**.

I'm guessed that Josh would come up with Ronald Reagan, but I was wrong. He got Ralph Nader. Go figure. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:10 AM by David Adesnik  

SENSATIONALISM: I know I should be more concerned about the Middle East, but this Utah kidnapping case is just too weird. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:49 AM by David Adesnik  

MUSLIMS VS. ANTI-SEMITISM? We all know that James Moran (D-VA) is an anti-Semite. The real question, though, is "Will Arab-American groups say anything about Moran's remarks?"

Thanks to reader SR, we have our first answer. According to Khalid Turaani, executive director of American Muslims for Jerusalem (AMJ),

“Anti-Semitism is repulsive and intolerable. At the same time it is profoundly un-American to stifle discussion of the well-documented Israeli push for committing American troops to invade Iraq. Israel is a big factor in our decision to go to war...Israel Firsters want a war sooner than later, without regard for American interests or American lives."

Let me translate that for you in case you were having some trouble: "Anti-Semitism is bad, but American Jews are traitors who will sell out America on Israel's behalf."

The hypocrisy continues on AMJ's website. The highlight is AMJ's "Congress Watch", a comprhensive rating of all 535 congressmen's support for the Palestinians. At the end of the report is the AMJ "Hall of Fame" which includes (drum roll please): James Moran. Not to mention Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney.

There's a Hall of Shame as well, which includes hateful reactionary Arab bashers such as Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein.

Also worth reading are some of the AMJ press releases, which do their best to pretend that Israeli soldiers show the same malicious disregard for human life as Palestinian suicide bombers. As is obligatory, the AMJ tries to compare Israeli crimes to the Holocaust.

After all, Auschwitz was nothing more than a justified response to fundamentalist Jews who strapped dynamite to themselves and wandered into Munich beerhalls. Right.

All this should really come as no surprise. As Daniel Pipes has shown, AMJ is nothing more than a moderate front for vicious anti-Semitic agenda. Sadly, the war on terror will have to confront enemies within the United States as well as abroad. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:48 AM by David Adesnik  

THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT: Social Democrats, USA "is the successor to the Socialist Party, USA, the party of Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas and Bayard Rustin and is a member of the Socialist International."

You'll have to admit, these aren't the sort of folks you think of as hawks. But they are. They support the war against Saddam. And -- more importantly -- they are stronlgy in favor of a serious commitment to building democracy in postwar Iraq. Click here for a copy of an open letter to the President on behalf of democracy in Iraq, signed by an SDUSA official as well as neo-cons like Robert Kagan. Strange bedfellows, I say...but all for a good cause!

UPDATE: Special thanks to readers MC and TM who point out that SDUSA is one of the splinters that resulted from the break up of the original American socialist party. Closer to the neo-cons than one might expect, SDUSA has often taken a hawkish line on foreign policy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:32 AM by David Adesnik  

MAD COWS AND ENGLISHMEN: The anti-war crowd here seems to be enjoying its civil disobedience. As Giants & Dwarfs reports,

I have just witnessed a mild form of the LA riots or the French Revolution. Around two o'clock this afternoon, a huge mass of school kids (I estimate about 500), most of whom seemed to be about 14, 15 years old, turned up in the main shopping street of Oxford (Corn Market Street) carrying anti-war posters and chanting "No to War!" Some were wearing T-shirts that said: "Let's bomb Texas. They have oil too." They hung around the city center for a good hour and a half. Eventually they stormed Oxford Castle. Then the mob turned violent. They began to hurl rocks at busses and innocent by-standers (such as your humble correspondent). Later they occupied Carfax, the very heart of the city, and blocked buses. Security guards and the odd police officer tried to protect a nearby mall, when the kids threatened to go there next. I spoke to a couple of them, and they told me that they had broken out of their classes, with the tacit support of their anti-war teachers. "The teachers can't let us go, because it's illegal and they'd get sacked, but they wanted us to go", a girl told me. Almost all were pupils from Cheney School (If only the Vice President knew what they are doing in his name), where I imagine some unpleasant conversations will have to take place with staff tomorrow morning.

Not to be outdone, Oxford's students (participating in a larger demonstration) broke into an actual air force base. The BBC reported this as a criminal activity. In contrast, I received the following message from Rhodes Scholars Against the War maillist:

Thank you to everyone who came to our events this week, especially those who came to lie in the cold street on Saturday for the die-in, and those who made the journey to RAF Fairford on Sunday.

Our action at Fairford was a great success, with Oxford students breaking into the base successfully and blocking the take-off of a C-17 transport plane, as well as supporters having a picnic near Gate 14 and the B52 bombers...keeping a vigilant eye on them while they ate. We received coverage on the BBC (both on the TV and on
their website), Radio 4, and in the London Metro....please don't forget about the presence of these bombers in our backyard.

While, in a literal sense, this is sabotage, I'm not going to get worked up about it. These protesters will convince themselves of their own righteousness, ignore the Iraqi liberation once it happens, and then go back to protesting globalization like they did before September 11. Ho-hum. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:05 PM by David Adesnik  

UNBELIEVABLE: Thanks to RS for sending this my way. It is an

"Interesting video of the AC-130 Specter gunship in action. Note the ability of the crew to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants (not firing on the mosque, which was right next to the target). It is also important to remember there are Special Forces teams on the ground that spotted the target and determined that the Afghanis in the area are combatants."

[Note: The link above will directly open a wmv file.]

UPDATE: Here is some more information about the AC-130. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:48 PM by David Adesnik  

ANOTHER NEW BLOG: I wonder if any country will ever pass the one-blog-per-person barrier. All I can say is that I'm doing my bit. In addition to OxBlog, I belong to Nathan Hale, a DC-area blog started by some friends of mine. It has lots of long, thoughtful essays about US foreign policy.

Also visit the Ranting Rantionalist, a new blog which describes its aspriations as follows:

Hopefully, my rantings will at least vaguely interest those of you who crave rational discourse. I am similarly hopeful that you liberal, subjectivist, collectivist simpletons are roundly agitated and annoyed. The ideas expressed on this Blog will not be subject to any form of political correctness. Facts and thoughts, no matter how unpalatable or taboo, will be presented in an unflinchingly honest fashion. It is my belief that political correctness is a shocking and fetid fact of modern intellectual life; nothing to expand it's already ubiquitous presence will be fostered here.

Read some RR posts and you'll see that Nick means business. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:27 PM by David Adesnik  

WATCH OUT, ANDREW: OxBlog's good friend The Agonist has had some bad luck lately. A fellow IR student, Sean-Paul found out that his university had cancelled his research grant, which would have enabled him to write his book on the Silk Road. Thanks to cuts in federal and state funding, Sean-Paul doesn't have any personal savings to put toward his research. So...

In a bold move reminiscient of Andrew Sullivan, Sean-Paul has decided to turn to the blogosphere for support. He doesn't need $100,000, only $2500. And instead of earmarking it for personal consumption, Sean-Paul will be spending the cash on a worthy intellectual endeavour.

If 100 people pledge $25 each, Sean-Paul can write his book. Or make that 99. This OxBlogger has put his money where his mouth is. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:15 PM by David Adesnik  

WARMONGERING ILLUSTRATED is the name of a new blog run by two law students at the University of North Carolina. Some recent highlights include their comments on the unknown merits of the UN Security Countil and their very own fisking of Jimmy Carter's NYT op-ed.

And don't forget to check out WMI's gonzo journalism exploits, which include crashing anti-war rallies and a contest for silliest anti-war poster. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:51 PM by David Adesnik  

ANTI-WAR, ANTI-LOGIC: In a razor-sharp yet idiosyncratic essay, historian Perry Anderson exposes the untenable logic on which the anti-war movement rests. (Special thanks to reader AG for bringing the essay to my attention.)

Anderson's sharpest point is his refutation of the argument that a unilateral invasion of Iraq will undermine either the institution of international law or the trans-atlantic alliance on which it depends. As he observes:

Historically, the United States has always reserved the right to act alone where necessary, while seeking allies wherever possible. In recent years it acted alone in Grenada, in Panama, in Nicaragua, and which of its allies now complains about current arrangements in any of these countries? As for the UN, NATO did not consult it when it launched its attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, in which every European ally that now talks of the need for authorisation from the Security Council fully participated, and which 90 per cent of the opinion that now complains about our plans for Iraq warmly supported.

I might add that the unprecedented influence that the United Nations has at the moment is in part a response to American (and European) disrespect for its mandate. As I've said before, an invasion of Iraq is thus as likely to strengthen the UN as it is to destroy it.

The idiosyncratic side of Anderson's argument emerges in the form of warm praise for arch-realists Kenneth Waltz, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Incomprehensibly, Anderson endorses Waltz's bizarre hypothesis that the spread of nuclear weapons will make the world safer. Perhaps Prof. Anderson has not heard of a man by the name of Kim Jong Il?

All in all, Anderson's essay is well worth reading. Yet, as always, caveat emptor.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:55 PM by David Adesnik  

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO CHARLATANRY: A while back, OxBlog linked to the Angry Cyclist's exposee of casualty counter Marc Herold's dishonest methods. Now, AC reports that Herold has a book-length version of his pseudo-scholarship coming out.

But the really great thing is that Jeneane Garafolo has become a casualty counter as well, and has begun to double Herold's figures! (Read the whole interview. It's absolutely hilarious.)

PS The Angry Cylcist took the Evil Test and it turns out he is very, very evil. I am not surprised! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:40 PM by David Adesnik  

DOLLARS AND SENSE (AND POUNDS): Reader KB reports that the BBC's commentary on the potential costs of a war with Iraq consists of many worst case scenarios and very little common sense.

As KB asked in a letter to the BBC, "What about the cost of NOT going to war?" Hard to put a number on that, but considering that Saddam Hussein will have an untouchable stockpile of chemical weapons if we don't disarm him now, I imagine military spending will rise to take that fact into account.

Anyhow, the really disappointing thing about the BBC's doomsday scenario is that it's so moderate. The BBC seems profoundly concerned that the UK may have to spend 10 billion pounds. Surely the BBC could've called Bill Nordhaus and gotten him to say that the cost of war will be 50 times that!

Frankly, the BBC's concern about this sort of pocket change reminds me of all the Oxford students who become indignant at the thought that they may someday have to pay a few thousand pounds a year for the privilege of attending their nation's best university. Show them a tuition bill from Harvard and they might realize that the British government is covering the costs of an education that will make them rich while the rest of Britain struggles to get by. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:23 PM by David Adesnik  

STURM UND DRANG: Avid OxBlog reader Steve Sturm now has his own blog. We are proud to be one of three blogs on his roll, along with Instapundit and the Daily Dish.

In an interesting turnabout for a hawk, Steve lays responsibility for the UN's dithering on the shoulders of Bush and Blair. After all, if they are serious about Iraq, why are they letting incoherent French and German objections get in their way?

I definitely have some sympathy for this view, but I think sometimes Steve takes it a bit far, for example holding Blair responsible for depending on the British left in Parliament. Remember: Blair is the one responsible for transforming the Labour Party from a retrograde and unelectable socialist dinosaur into the monopoly party of the British center. It is because of this triumph that the United Kingdom has been able to stand by the side of the United States in opposing Iraq.

In another interesting post, Steve takes on all those bleeding-heart humanitarians who say you can't put a price on human life. Steve does, and he breaks down the price structure according to nationality and political beliefs.

Generously, Steve declares that a Frenchman is worth .8 of a Brit. What I don't get is why a Frenchman is worth five times as much as an Iraqi civilian. I mean, hey, the Iraqi people are actually Bush's strongest supporters outside of the Dallas city limits!

Keep it up, Steve!

UPDATE: Steve responds to my comments on Blair. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:57 PM by David Adesnik  

WHO'S A HOOSIER? As our Hoosier readers have pointed out, I incorrectly referred to Dick Lugar as (R-IA) instead of (R-IN). My apologies for the mistake. I can assure you of this much, however: I know Lugar is from Indiana. I just mixed up the Iowa and Indiana abbreviations. Now imagine if I'd written (D-IN)... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:00 PM by David Adesnik  

THIS IS A JOB FOR OXDEM!!! Wouldn't it be nice if the entire Bush administration had a firm commitment to democratizing Iraq? Then Josh and I could actually spend time working on our dissertations. But before I get to the bad news, here's some good:

Daniel Drezner's brilliant column in TNR exposes the false premises of the nonstop talk about how hard it will be to bring democracy to Iraq. As he observes,

...it is intellectually fashionable these days to believe that local conditions always triumph over grand theory. But the local conditions argument overlooks a crucial detail: Over the past century, international factors have been more important than domestic factors in determining the success of democratic transition and consolidation. And the international factors surrounding Iraq are more favorable than one might think.

Read the rest of the column to find out what those factors are. (Tony Smith, if you're reading this, I know you deserve credit for the "international factors" argument as well.

The bad news is that international factor #1 (the US government) can't get it's act together. Also in TNR, Lawrence Kaplan provides a devastating account of the State Department's efforts to trade democracy for stability in postwar Iraq. [Full text for subscribers only.]

Foggy Bottom's strategy for ensuring stability is to leave most of the centralized Ba'ath power structure in place after the war, rather than signing off on a federal constitution that would give considerable authority to Iraq's provincial governments. As Jacob Levy explains in (guess where!) TNR, a federal state structure is the best means of balancing ethnic voting blocs as well as stopping authoritariansim from emerging at the center.

The main flaw in Kaplan's account is its whitewash of the Iraqi opposition-in-exile supported by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. As both TNR and OxBlog have argued, however, there is good reason to believe that the opposition-in-exile is power hungry, incompetent, and unable to command the loyalty of anyone actually living in Iraq.

Thus, an extended US occupation may be quite a good thing if it gives time for indigenous democratic forces to organize themselves and draft a workable constitution. If the State Department directs the occupation, that may never happen. However, there are signs that the Pentagon will insist on taking control if an extended occupation is what the president decides on.

So things may work out all right in the end, thanks to a strange sort of dumb luck that combines the best of the Pentagon and State Department's flawed proposals for rebuilding Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:03 PM by David Adesnik  

MR. 100%: Jackson Diehl always comes through with a column that unmasks the idiocy of conventional wisdom and shows what real common sense is.

This time, his subject is the shopworn discussion of whether Bush is personally responsible for the marked rise in global anti-Americanism. Josh Marshall, E.J. Dionne and Richard Cohen all say yes.

Howard Kurtz argues, that criticism from such quarters is quite credible, since Marshall, Dionne, and Cohen have consistently argued that Iraq is a threat that must be dealt with. I don't think such criticism is all that suprising, however. For centrist liberals such as M, D and C, there is a tendency to recognize the importance of dealing with threats forcefully, but also a tendency to believe that American arrogance is the cause of any resentment our policies generate abroad.

Ironically, this fear of arrogance is itself quite arrogant, since it assumes that other governments are so beholden to their emotions that their reactions to US decisions depends not on such decisions' actual content, but on whether or not their presentation is "arrogant". As I've said before,

" A unilateral invasion of Iraq is simply unacceptable in Europe. No amount of spin can change that. What the US has to decide is whether invading Iraq is important enough to disregard criticism of it."

Now that I've said my piece, we finally comeback to Jackson Diehl's column, which is the first one I've seen to make a similar point. As he writes:

Some would argue that what increasingly looks like a severe rift in the Western democracies was entirely man-made -- and that clumsy and arrogant acts by the Bush administration started the trouble...

These explanations seem too simple -- deeper historical forces, and not just personalities, are prying old allies apart. For the past decade, France and Russia have tried to make the Middle East a theater for containing the growing global power of the United States. Both strongly opposed the Clinton administration's attempts to respond forcefully to Saddam Hussein; both undermined U.S. containment of Iran. In doing so, they satisfied themselves that the world remained "multipolar," to use Chirac's term -- at the price of letting a couple of rogue states off the hook.

Diehl goes on to argue, however, that this sort of conflict cannot account for the hesitation of Mexico, Chile and Turkey to support the US. In these three cases, bad diplomacy has made all the difference.

While I think that the administration did a reasonable job with Turkey, I am still extremely impressed by Diehl's subtle analysis. The question is, when will the NYT hire him to replace Maureen Dowd?

PS Mickey Kaus makes a similar point to Diehl's in his March 10 post. [Is it me, or does Kaus not have permalinks?] (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:08 PM by David Adesnik  

SAUDI REFORMERS: The Sunday WaPo had an article on conservative Muslims supporting democratic reforms in Saudi Arabia. Predictably, the US Embassy is doing nothing to build a relationship with them.

No less predictably, the article raises unsubstantiated fears about an Islamist victory were the Saudis to hold open elections. As always, the Post's correspondent makes no effort to distinguish peaceful Islamists from their violent counterparts. Yet as OxBlog observed some time ago, this is a critical distinction both in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Muslim world.

While peaceful Islamists are often anti-American, they often condemn terrorists as un-Islamic. As the conduct of the current Saudi government shows, a peaceful anti-American democracy may be preferable to a nominally pro-Western dictatorship. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:53 PM by David Adesnik  

BREAKIN' THE LAW: Both the NYT and WaPo have had articles in the past couple of days on the challenges of law enforcement in Afghanistan. The coverage is welcome, even if the content isn't all that original.

More interestingly, President Bush called Hamid Karzai to apologize for his grilling by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the hearing,

"Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) warned that if Karzai told the committee everything was going well, "the next time you come back, then your credibility will be in question. Hagel said later that he felt the administration had "coached" Karzai.

While it's hard to know exactly what Hagel meant, I sense that he wants to make sure the administration doesn't forget about Afghanistan. In the mold of Richard Lugar (R-IN), Hagel seems to be one of few Senators who understands the importance of addressing fthose foreign policy issues that may have a critical impact on American security but not attract much attention from the media. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:32 PM by David Adesnik  

ANTI-SEMITISM: Instapundit has the round-up of reactions to Rep. James Moran's (D-VA) anti-Semitic remarks.

I have to admit, I'm having a hard time getting worked up about this, since it is so cliche. Southerner says Elders of Zion control America. I'm the sure the Anti-Defamation League will deal with it. Then again, I thought nothing of it when Trent Lott made his infamous remarks. A racist from Mississippi. Shocking.

But here's an interesting question: Will Arab-American groups say anything about Moran's remarks? That would be impressive.

CLARIFICATION: A reader has sarcastically observed that my comment above about Southerners is just as enlightened as Moran's comment about Jews. I beg to differ. It simply my own experience and that of many Jewish friends -- yes, some of my best friends are Jewish! -- that anti-Semitism is much more common in Southern states than in the North. While most Southerners -- and almost all the Southerners I personally know -- are very open-minded, there are a disproportionate number that aren't. Thus, my comment entailed an observation. Moran told an out and out lie. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:49 PM by David Adesnik  

MONEY TALKS: Has the Pentagon begun to accept that it alone can build a democratic Iraq? In a suprising announcement, it unveiled American plans

"to pay the salaries of 2 million or more Iraqi bureaucrats and soldiers to help stabilize Iraq after the fall of President Saddam Hussein, Pentagon officials said yesterday in revealing new details of a broad strategy to occupy and rebuild the country.

Soldiers in Iraq's regular army would be paid for construction work and such tasks as clearing rubble and land mines, officials said. Teachers, police officers, hospital staff and other government workers would collect salaries for delivering a measure of normalcy in the early months after a possible U.S.-led invasion."

I'd have to imagine that the Pentagon is taking on this incredible responsibility because it understands that a half-hearted approach to occupation cannot work. As a peacetime Powell Doctrine might have said, one goes in with overwhelming funds, or one doesn't go in at all. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:00 PM by David Adesnik  

PREACH IT, SENATOR: McCain is an OxDem man:

Isn't it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness? Wouldn't people subjected to brutal governments be encouraged to see the human rights of Muslims valiantly secured by Americans — rights that are assigned rather cheap value by the critics' definition of justice?

Let's hope that he shares out commitment to the hard work that comes after liberation. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:53 PM by David Adesnik  

CANNON FODDER: No, this isn't another post about civilian casualties. It's a post about karate.

I'm beginning to sense that brown belts are the karate equivalent of World War I infantrymen. They go out there knowing they are going to be slaughtered. My first fight at last Sunday's tournament actually wasn't all that bad. My opponent was very conservative, and we spent most of the time trying to establish a better position to attack from, rather than simply attacking.

He got ahead 1-0, however, and then I had to chase him during the last 30 seconds of the match in order to try for an equalizer. I tried, but his fist "equalized" my nose. I actually bled, though not much. The only consolation was that my opponent went on to win his next three matches and qualify for the final round. At least I lost to someone good.

What hurts more than losing is losing without a fight, which is what happened in my second match. Around 30 seconds in, my opponent swept my front leg. I barely resisted. It was 5:30pm, I'd gotten three hours of sleep the night before, and I had been at the tournament since 8:30 that morning.

I just sort of floated with my opponent's leg sweep, feeling that it was almost natural to follow the force he generated rather than resisting it. Of course, turning my back ended the match. I didn't feel a thing. My opponent barely touched me. All he needed to do was show that he could've hit me had he wanted to.

When I got back on Sunday night, I started working on my presentation for today's OxDem panel discussion. And that is pretty much all I have done since then.

I haven't written one word of my thesis since last Friday. I've put up one real post on OxBlog. But now that's all behind me and I'm back in business.

The panel came off quite well in terms of audience reaction. Regardless of their political views, members of the audience seemed to believe that it was an enriching discussion. They also were very positive about our decision to have a student-centered discussion rather than a lecturing profession.

Later on, Josh or I may post some sort of summary or partial transcript. Don't expect any sound files, though. Our recording device was none other than the hand-held tape recorder I used to conduct interviews for my senior thesis in college.

In political terms, it's hard to know if the panel was a success or not. Naturally, we didn't expect anyone to change their views in the space of an hour and a half. I think our main concerns was to demonstrate that one can be very well-informed and still support both the use of force against Iraq and democratization afterward.

From my perspective, it was most important to demonstrate this fact to the significant number of Americans in Oxford who are very hesistant to make their views about the war known, since they do not want to bear the responsibility of justifiying their position if it comes anywhere close to supporting for the war.

On some level, I am uncomfortable with such individuals' unwillingness to take a stand and make an effort to become informed. On the other hand, one has to have a tremendous amount of information at one's fingertips in order to respond to accusations that a war will result in hundreds of thousands of civlian deaths, that it will undermine the United Nations and that it will provoke a terrorist backlash throughout the Middle East.

On behalf of all those who sense that these are simplistic and false arguments, Josh and I tried to show that there is a solid case to be made for confronting Saddam and embarking on a project of democratization in the Middle East. Beyond that, we're just keeping our fingers crossed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:53 PM by David Adesnik  

WISHFUL THINKING? Jacob Golbitz of Innocents Abroad is beginning to think about what sort of international order will emerge in the aftermath of the Second Gulf War. His thoughts are well worth reading. As Jacob himself suggests (via e-mail, no permalink), one might think of his work as a neo-conservative/realist approach to international politics.

In short, Jacob argues that the now-apparent lack of common interests within the ranks of democratic nations will bring to an end the brief era of international cooperation that lasted throughout the 1990s.

The central point on which I differ with Jacob is his exclusive focus on common interests and disregard for common ideas. As is always the case with realists, their realism shades into ivory tower abstraction when they insist on thinking of states as having only interests but not ideas.

To be fair, Jacob never explicitly states that ideas do not matter. But his analysis is clearly interest-driven.

From my perspective, the current conflict between the United States and Europe should not be read as the downfall of an outdated international order. Rather, it is a further demonstration that shared democratic ideals are not enough to ensure constant coordination between American and European foreign policy.

Remember that not one of the United States' dissenting allies has indicated that it would do anything to stop a US invasion or defend Iraq should war breakout. Realists take note: the balance of power is still dead.

In time, the current Euro-American rift will become yet another memorial to the unprecedented flexibility of alliances between democratic nations. It was that flexibility that ensured our victory in the Cold War, and which will ensure our victory in the war on terror. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:57 PM by Daniel  

I SWEAR, I FREEDOM KISSED HER. You thought America's relations with France had already hit rock bottom? Order some fries on the hill. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:25 AM by David Adesnik  

BACKLASH UPDATE: Will an invasion in Iraq provike a Muslim backlash? Martin Kimel says yes. I say no.

Today's evidence is on Martin's side, though, with the Washington Post reporting that scholars at Al-Azhar University (the Harvard of the Islamic world) calling for jihad in the event of an invasion.

The Al-Azhar declaration states that, "According to Islamic law, if the enemy steps on Muslims' land, jihad becomes a duty on every male and female Muslim." Funny how twelve years of US stepping on Saudi land hasn't provoked that kind of statement before. In light of most Arabs' negative views of Saddam, I sense that having US troops cross the border from one Muslim land to another won't make a lasting difference. But we'll see. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:55 PM by David Adesnik  

ARROGANT GRADUATE STUDENT: No, this is not an autobiography. ;) It's about the strike at Yale and Corey Robin, the former graduate student (now a professor in Brooklyn) whose rantings made the op-ed page in yesterday's NYT. Here's what he had to say: In 1991

graduate students went on strike. I did, too — reluctantly. But on the picket line, something happened to me. As we marched around the freshman quad, an undergraduate yelled out his dorm window, "Get back to work." For the first time in my life, I felt like a maid. And suddenly I realized that this was how other workers at Yale — in the dining halls, the labs, the offices — routinely felt. I kept marching, determined never to forget what it's like to work at a place like Yale.

The university's administrators like to claim Yale has changed. And it has — thanks in part to the unions, which do as much as any professor to teach students about the dignity of work. But old habits die hard. On Wednesday, an undergraduate columnist in Yale's student newspaper ended her essay with a message to Anita Seth, the leader of the graduate students' union: "Oh, and Anita? Go teach a section."

How do students so young exercise such breezy command? Where do they learn such imperial disregard, talking to teachers — and dishwashers and janitors — as if they were personal servants? I don't know, but I don't blame the students. They've just learned a lesson from Yale.

Typical. For whatever reason, pro-union grad students at Yale delude themselves into believing that Yale's undergraduates are the heartless scions of an American plutocracy, rather than the middle-of-the-road middle-class liberals that they actually are. (FYI Nader came within 20 or so votes of beating Dole at the Yale polling station when I was a sophomore in 1996. Clinton was far ahead of both of them.)

But I won't say any more, since a letter to the Times has said it best:

Mr. Robin does Yale students a disservice when he transplants the opinion of one conservative columnist onto the entire student body. As a Yale sophomore, I have noticed an attitude on campus that is quite distant from the "imperial disregard" of which he accuses undergraduates.

The vast majority of students have treated strikers with respect, whether or not they agree with union demands. In fact, most of the students I have talked with support Locals 34 and 35, and have become increasingly dissatisfied with the way Yale's administration treats its workers.

While I wouldn't say that students supported the strikers demands' all that strongly when I was there, respect for the members of Locals 34 and 35 and the tremendous amount they did for us was semething almost everyone could agree on. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:31 PM by David Adesnik  

THE POLITICS OF AL JAZEERA: Tom Brokaw (yes, that Tom Brokaw) has an op-ed in the NYT which argues that the rise of Al Jazeera is responsible for fierce anti-war sentiment in the Arab world.

If not for Al Jazeera, Brokaw says, the state-run Arab media might have been able to persuade the Arab street that US policy isn't so bad after all. I'm not so sure. Considering that the Arab media have long been filled with hateful anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Western diatribes, I have a hard time believing that Al Jazeera made any sort of difference.

That point aside, it is important to recognize Brokaw's argument as the current version of the liberal cliche that if the US was just better at explaining it policies, people wouldn't resent it so much. In his column, Brokaw sympathetically quotes a Pentagon planner who says that "We've done a terrible job out here explaining why we're going after Saddam Hussein." (For a similar view, visit Bloggy Fottom.)

But the real problems are the policies themselves. A unilateral invasion of Iraq is simply unacceptable in Europe. No amount of spin can change that. What the US has to decide is whether invading Iraq is important enough to disregard criticism of it. I, for one, say yes.

And I suspect that there will be much less criticism once we find Saddam's chemical weapons stockpile and show the French and Germans what they are pretending doesn't exist. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:14 PM by David Adesnik  

SILLINESS: "Anti-French feeling has been carefully fomented by Republican officials, Rupert Murdoch's media empire and other administration allies." -- Paul Krugman (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:04 PM by David Adesnik  

TECHNO-OPTIMISM: Patrick Ruffini looks forward to the days when the US military will be able to knock off a dictator a month. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:50 PM by David Adesnik  

QUIET DIPLOMACY: Sean-Paul has a pair of excellent posts on diplomatic efforts to reduce tension with North Korea.

The one point I'm going to take issue with is Sean-Paul's description of these efforts as "appeasement" and "Clintonian". What they may indicate is that the US has recognized the futility of stopping North Korea from going nuclear. If that's the case, Clintonian appeasement may have been preferable.

(I can't believe I just said that! Then again, even Charlie K. thinks that "the time for appeasement may indeed have arrived.") (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:25 PM by David Adesnik  

STARVING CHILDREN: Yes, we're back in bad news mode. In response to my post on the UN estimate that 1 million childen will die of malnutrition in the event of war, reader PM told me to take a look at this article in Slate by Fred Kaplan, which exposes the highly questionable premises on which the UN study was based.

Kaplan's criticisms stung enough for CASI, the NGO which published the UN estimate, to post a response on its website.

I didn't find the response all that convincing, since its essential premise is that the US will completely disregard the effects of its warfighting strategies on Iraqi civilians. While there is no question that the Pentagon is less than honest about such issues, it's record in Afghanistan and Kosovo shows that it takes them quite seriously.

Last but not least, make sure to take a look at Brookings scholar Michael O'Hanlon's article on US and Iraqi military casualties in a second Gulf war. In urban fighting, the US may have to accept thousands of casualties. That is a very sobering thought.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:51 PM by David Adesnik  

BLOGGY FOTTOM is the name of new foreign policy blog launched by Benjamin Berman, previously known as the author of the second funniest OxBlog lightbulb joke.

Ben is a liberal hawk who has lots of very sensible things to say about foreign policy. Especially interesting is his Call to Unite in Disarming Iraq.

Read it and you'll see that Ben is much closer to the Kevin Drum model of liberal hawkishness than to my own. In other words, Ben's domestic politics are as aggressively liberal as his stance on foreign policy.

In contrast, I am a liberal hawk by virtue of my belief that America must promote liberalism -- in the form of democracy and human rights -- across the globe. We must do so because the liberal principles on which American was founded are universal.

However, I do not believe that these liberal values are identical to those that animate the Democratic agenda on social policy. Rather, both parties promote agendas that represent different variants of the same liberal values on which America was founded. As I see it, the choice between them is more often one of pragmatism than of principle.

So Ben, welcome to the blogosphere! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:05 PM by Daniel  

THE JEWS. There has never been and never will be a consensus within the "community." There are many many voices in the community. Read Oxblog if you want examples of Jews disagreeing.

In his column today, Bill Keller quotes a Republican strategist who says: "If the policy (the Iraq war) succeeds in the war and the peace....you'll see a further tectonic shift of Jewish political support, both in terms of money and votes, toward Bush. That's not why it's being done, but it will be a consequence if they're successful." I agree that Jewish money will flow toward Bush--Jews who are interested in foreign policy tend to be more hawkish and active politically. But I disagree with the contention that Jews will vote in significantly higher numbers for Bush.

Broadly speaking, Israel is not the top issue on which American Jews vote. Like other Americans, Jews are deeply concerned with domestic issues like the economy, choice, education, the separation of church and state, health care, social security, and the environment. In polling from the 1990s, Israel did not make the top 10 of issues. With the second intifada and 9/11, one could argue that Israel and foreign policy in general has become a greater concern for American Jews. Still, I don't think matters pertaining to Israel will be the decisive factor for Jewish voters in 2004.







(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:13 AM by David Adesnik  

PSEUDO-SCHOLARSHIP: A while back, I mentioned radical academic Marc Herold as author of a study claiming that US bombs killed 4,000 Afghans. My spider-sense said something was wrong with his work, but I didn't know what.

Now I do, thanks to the Angry Cyclist. Tech Central Station also has a column on Herold's absurd methodology. And the Weekly Standard points out that Europe's great newspapers have all taken Herold at his word, in addition to providing further evidence that Herold is charlatan.

For some extra amusement, check out the e-mails that went back and forth between Herold and the Angry Cyclist. Many thanks to Prof. Herold for reminding me why, exactly, I intend to leave the academy as soon as I get my doctorate. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:43 AM by David Adesnik  

EXPAT: Another New Yorker marooned on this harsh desert isle? Yes! Hear all about it at Belgravia Dispatch. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:55 PM by David Adesnik  

OIL SHOCK? According to CSIS expert Anthony Cordesman,

"there is a chance - 10 percent or less - that the war will take a significant turn for the worse. Damage to oil fields, high casualties, or effective use of WMD would send the price of oil surging to $80 per barrel, according to CSIS economists."

In contrast, Nordhaus never estimates the chance that the war will result in extensive damage to oil production facilities. While he acknowledges that things might turn out well, he describes such optimism as naive.

Reading his paper, you get the sense that the chances of a $500 billion spike in the price of oil are better than even. But he never says so explicitly. In short, I think Nordhaus is protecting himself. He wants to scare people about the cost of the war, but isn't confident enough in his own work to take a clear stand on the issue.

Also: after surfing the web for a while, it seems that no one has really tackled the issue of indirect costs other than Cordesman and the CSIS staff. But the CSIS folks have done a lot. The reports on their Iraq website are very in-depth. I won't say more than that until I get some sleep.

If you happen to know of any other experts who have responded to Nordhaus or come up with independent projections of the war's impact on global markets send an e-mail my way. Until then, g'night. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:53 PM by David Adesnik  

DOLLARS AND SENSE: Some of my anti-war friends have been hyping Yale economist William Nordhaus' estimate that a war would cost $1.6 trillion, if one takes into account its costs on stock and oil markets.

If one ignores, for the moment, indirect costs such as the impact of war on global markets, it is clear that the actual cost of fighting Saddam, including a military occupation, will come in at under $200 billion. That number reflects indepedent estimates made by the Congressional Budget Office, the Democratic staff on the House Budget Committee and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a non-partisan think tank.

$200 billion ain't peanuts, but if the President thinks we can afford a $670 billion tax cut, $200 billion for national security doesn't seem like such a bad idea. But what about Nordhaus? He thinks the CBO, Budget Committee and CSBA estimates are optimistic, but doesn't suggest that fighting Saddam would cost all that much more than they say.

When it comes to occupation, Nordhaus says it could cost anywhere from $75 to $500 billion. The low end figure is the cost of keeping 75,000 troops in Iraq for five years. The high end figure is for 200,000 troops over 10 years. (See page 21 of Nordhaus' report.) Considering that Nordhaus is an alarmist, those figures don't strike me as all that alarming.

Nordhaus' estimate of the war's impact on oil markets assumes the "destruction of most of Iraq?s oil-production capacity along with one-quarter of the productive capacity of other Gulf states," pushing oil prices up to $75 per barrel or $3 per gallon of gas. If that happens, it would cost the US up to $500 billion. (P.29)

Another potential cost of war is a recession similar to that of 1991, which Nordhaus estimates at a cost of $200 to $500 billion. (P.35) If all of these things go wrong at once, the total cost to the US would be about $1.6 trillion. If things go as planned, the total cost will be only $120 billion. (P.39)

Frankly, Nordhaus' numbers don't seem all that realistic. But I'm not an economist. So I'll report back when I've found someone who knows more than I do. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:38 PM by David Adesnik  

SILVER LINING: Finally, some good news (but still no permalinks). On 31 Dec 2001, the WaPo reported that

“The delivery of unprecedented amounts of wheat to Afghanistan over the past month has averted a major famine this winter, international and American relief officials said last week.

Although they are wary of claiming total victory, officials said they believe the overall food supply in Afghanistan is now sufficient and conditions are stable enough to deliver food throughout most of the country.

"There will be no famine in Afghanistan this winter," said Catherine Bertini, executive director of the United Nations' World Food Programme, which trucks the food aid into Afghanistan. "There will be deaths, because the country was in a pre-famine condition this summer before the war started. But it will be isolated, and not large-scale."

Not exactly a suprise. Unless, of course, you believed the NGO prophets of doom who declared that millions would die of famine because of the war. In case you don't believe that anyone would have predicted that sort of disaster, I thought I'd provide some sample quotes. Here's a Guardianr eport from 22 Sept 2001:

“Fourteen British charities, including Oxfam, wrote an open letter to Tony Blair yesterday warning that up to 5m people face starvation.”

Next, check out India's Hindu from 14 Oct 2001:

“…the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner (UNHCR), Ms. Mary Robinson warned of a looming humanitarian crisis if the aid effort was not stepped up. "There is a desperate situation for hundreds of thousands - perhaps up to two million - of the Afghan civilian population who desperately need food," she said.”

Back on the homefront, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that

“The Senate passed Wellstone's amendment [calling] for the United States to put as much effort into providing humanitarian aid as it is on the military front in its dealings with Afghanistan. Without more U.S. aid, Wellstone said, 100,000 Afghan children could die this winter from hunger and disease.”

On 5 Nov 2001, U-Wire reported that

“Sarah Zaidi, a director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights, said last Monday that "millions -- literally millions -- of Afghan civilians will starve to death this winter unless the U.S. military suspends its attacks and allows the U.N. to re-establish effective food distribution."

Fortunately for the people of Afghanistan, the US ignored this sort of absurd advice. The American victory in November 2001 brought with it the food that Afghanistan had been so desperate for. But consider this fact, from the 6 0ct 2001 issue of Britain's New Scientist:

“Afghanistan has suffered a three-year drought that has been largely ignored by the Western media. Many thousands died of hunger in the mountains last winter, despite a UN programme of food aid. This year's harvest was again half that of a normal year, and much less in areas such as Badakhshan in the rebel-held north-east. The UN warned of an impending "famine without precedent" just a week before the events of 11 September.”

In other words, if not for the war, there would have been a "famine without precedent". Believe it or not, the war saved countless Afghan lives. Yes, one thousand innocent civlians lost their lives to American bombs. But even the most jaded anti-war activits would have to admit that those thousand died to save tens of thousands of their countrymen.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:41 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE GLOOM AND DOOM: My research on civilian casualties continues. (I apologize for the lack of permalinks, but I'm using Nexis-Lexis.) The most interesting conclusion from today is that landmines from Afghan's previous wars kill far more people every year than American airstirkes did in 2001. According to Agence France Presse (21 Sept. 2001):

“Explosions of landmines and left-over ammunition caused on average about 88 casualties a month in Afghanistan in 2000, and that was a sharp decline from the 1999 level.

About half of 2,812 casualties treated in an 18 month period were children and most were civilians, according to the ICRC, but it says the figure does not take into account those who die on the spot…

The United Nations and relief agencies in Afghanistan have cleared about 215,000 anti-personel mines in a decade, out of several million thought to be scattered over the Afghan landscape.”

Perhaps this isn't surprising considering that even Bill Arkin from Human Rights Watch reports that

“…what I've observed on the ground is that there was a battle against al-Qaeda that is actually more impressive than I thought. Here in Kandahar is an example. It's amazing how you can see one house that has bombed specifically because there were in Arabs in the house and yet the next door houses have not even been damaged at all. And all over the city, where there's very few civilian casualties in fact, it's amazing how you can pick out specific al-Qaeda houses that were bombed. And the neighborhood all knows that Arabs were there.” (CNBC -- Hardball, 22 Mar 2002)

Even the United States' notorious cluster bombs seem not to have caused much collateral damage. According to the Boston Globe (22 Feb 2002):

“The Pentagon, severely criticized for its widespread use of cluster bombs in Iraq during the Gulf War, has dropped far fewer of the munitions in Afghanistan and has largely avoided civilian areas, focusing instead on enemy troops, tanks, and airfields, according to initial investigations by the United Nations.

UN mine-clearing specialists, working with a Pentagon list of 188 sites hit by cluster bombs, have examined 20 so far and found only one site near a civilian area. The Globe has obtained the previously undisclosed site list.”

When comes to putting facts like this in context, I think Peter Beinart got it right in TNR (19 Nov 2001). Beinart starts with the assumption that Afghan civilian casualties may have reached the 500 mark in mid-November.

Then consider the events of August 8, 1998. On that day, the Taliban took Mazar-e-Sharif from the Northern Alliance. They entered a multi-ethnic city with a substantial population of Hazaras, a Persian-speaking, Shia minority clustered near the Iranian border. The Taliban despised the Hazaras --first, because the Hazaras had fiercely opposed their rule, and second, because the Sunni Taliban considered the Shia Hazaras to be infidels.

And so the conquering Taliban governor addressed the Hazaras from the loudspeaker of a city mosque. According to Human Rights Watch, Mullah Manon Niazi declared that, "Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shia. They are kofr (infidels)... If you do not show your loyalty, we will burn your houses and we will kill you. You either accept to be Muslims or leave Afghanistan." With that, Taliban soldiers went door to door. They looked for people with Asiatic features, supposedly a Hazara characteristic. Hazaras were told to convert on the spot--and say a Sunni prayer as proof. Those who did not were killed immediately or taken to the city jail from which many were transported to the countryside and then executed. To teach the few remaining Hazaras a lesson, Manon Niazi decreed that the dead bodies remain on the streets for close to a week. Asiaweek estimated the dead at over 6,000.”

While the US may have invaded Afghanistanin order to stop Al Qaeda, its war of self-defense also became a war for freedom and human rights. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:19 PM by David Adesnik  

FISKING TIME: This NYT editorial just p****d me off. So here goes:

With yesterday's barely veiled French and Russian threat to veto a war resolution, the United Nations Security Council appears to be rapidly approaching a crippling deadlock over Iraq. That would be the worst of all possible outcomes. It would lift the diplomatic pressure on Iraq to disarm and sever the few remaining restraints that have kept the Bush administration from going to war with its motley ad hoc coalition of allies.

"Motley" and "ad hoc"? That makes it sound like our allies are Tanzania and Vanuatu, not Britain, Spain, Italy and sixteen other countries in Europe (counting Poland). In fact, the sudden emergence of this coalition might have something to with the fact that almost all of its members belong to a relatively well-established alliance that goes by the name of 'NATO'.

As for "Ad hoc", that's a better description of the anti-war coalition, comprising the quixotic French, a German chancellor mired in an economic crisis and assorted African dictators along for the ride.

The rupture in the Security Council is not just another bump in the road in the showdown with Iraq. It could lead to a serious, possibly fatal, breakdown in the system of collective security that was fashioned in the waning days of World War II, a system that finally seemed to be reaching its potential in the years since the end of the cold war. Whatever comes of the conflict with Iraq, the world will have lost before any fighting begins if the Security Council is ruined as a mechanism for unified international action.

First of all, I'd like to inject a dose or reality into conservative dreams and liberal nightmares about an unauthorized war with Iraq crippling of the United Nations. The past six months have made clear just how much the UN matters to Europe. 1441 played a critical role in persuading almost all of Europe's governments to support the United States.

If the US goes to war over a French and/or Russian veto, that will show that the French and Russian vetos are worthless, not that the UN is irrelevant.

As for "the system of collective security" that the NYT is so fond of, might I ask to whom it has provided security? I believe that the UN plays a critical role in international politics, but providing security is not something that it has ever been able to do. Ask the Bosnians. Ask the Kosovars. Ask the Rwandans. What the UN does do is help rebuild nations after dictators have wrecked them and/or the United States has overthrown those dictators with force.

The first casualty is likely to be the effort to use coercive diplomacy to disarm Iraq. The unity of the Security Council last November in backing Resolution 1441 without a dissenting vote, combined with the movement of American forces to the Persian Gulf region, changed the equation with Iraq. Though Saddam Hussein is far from full disarmament, he has given ground in recent months by permitting the return of arms inspectors after a four-year absence and, more recently, by beginning to destroy illegal missiles. With more time and an escalation of pressure, Mr. Hussein might yet buckle.

The Times has it exactly right: Saddam won't disarm unless someone steps up the pressure. The French and Russians clearly don't understand that. They insist on taking at face value Saddam's charade of complaince.

Thus, it seems there are two ways to go from here -- but both begin with the President declaring that he will go to war with or without the United Nations. If the President's declaration produces a compromise with the French and Russians, that might step up the pressure on Saddam. If it doesn't produce a compromise, Saddam will face a very clear choice of disarming or having it done for him in much less pleasant way.

...the French and the Russians are not the only ones who brought us to this point. Mr. Bush and his team laid the groundwork for this mess with their arrogant handling of other nations and dismissive attitude toward international accords. Though they mended their ways to some extent after Sept. 11, and initially tried to work through the Security Council on Iraq, the White House's obvious intention to go to war undermined that effort.

Ah, now I see. If the US had just signed on the dotted line at Kyoto, then the French and Germans would get behind the war effort. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

As for the "arrogant handling of other nations", why have only the French and Germans taken such great offense while the rest of Europe supports the United States? Could it be that Gerhard Schroeder had an election to win? Or that Jacques Chirac dreams of multipolarity?

Finally, we come to "the White House's obvious intention to go to war". Perhaps the French and Germans would've been more cooperative if the US wasn't serious about disarming Iraq by any means necessary? Didn't the NYT admit just a few sentences ago that 1441 "combined with the movement of American forces to the Persian Gulf region" forced Iraq to make concessions?

There may be a few days more for diplomacy to play out on Iraq, but it is already clear that the great powers on the Security Council, particularly the United States and France, have brought the United Nations to the brink of just the kind of paralysis and powerlessness that they warned would be so damaging to the world.

Hold on. Is it the paralysis or Saddam Hussein we're worried about here?

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# Posted 7:24 PM by David Adesnik  

COMMON SENSE: From a NYT article on Catholic attitudes toward the war:

"The rest of the world sees us as a big bully," said Lucas Gallegos, 80, a retired pastry chef who travels frequently to Europe to teach his craft. "But if we can come out of this and show the world that we didn't go in there to conquer and take the spoils, but to bring about peace, then we will show that it was a just war."

So much for the average American being ignorant. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:07 PM by David Adesnik  

STRANGER THAN FICTION: Picking up on a recent Onion headline, Josh Marshall says the Korean spy plane incident is Kim Jong Il's way of trying to get Washington's attention.

Marshall adds that the administration has no policy whatsoever on how to deal with North Korea because the State Department doves are deadlocked with the Pentagon/Cheney hawks. Sounds plausible. If the NYT and WaPo showed more of an interest, we might know if that were really the case. But I'm going to withhold judgment for a bit, since it seems that both the hawks and the doves have an interest in keeping North Korea offstage until the Iraq situation is resolved. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:10 PM by David Adesnik  

RUSSIAN EXPLETIVES: In his semi-pornographic anti-NYT rant, Josh somehow avoided mentioning that Russian pop stars Tatu are full-fledged members of the celebrity anti-war movement. As the NYT reports, Tatu explicitly defied Jay Leno's request to be apolitical by "wearing T-shirts that used a potent Russian expletive to denounce the possible war in Iraq."

I raise this point because the OxBlog readership tends to be both pro-war and pro-Tatu. But you can't have it both ways. While I know where my priorities lie, I do recommend that If your preference for Tatu wins out, you buy yourself one of their expletive-laden anti-war T-shirts. You can also get a Tatu thong, if that's what you're into.

(OxBlog thanks Dima from Overspill for bringing said apparel to our attention.)


(1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:56 PM by David Adesnik  

SADDAM'S CASUALTIES: He kills so many people it's hard to keep track of. According to Jan. 2003 HRW report, there have been between 250,000 and 290,000 disappearances in Iraq. This figure does not include genocidal attacks on the Kurdish population using chemical weapons. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:39 PM by David Adesnik  

KOSOVO FIGURES: Just read the HRW report on the air war in Kosovo. Civilian fatalities numbered 500. To get a sense of what sort of accuracy that figure reflects, consider this:

In the first month of Operation Allied Force, NATO reported that it averaged around 350 sorties per day, with nearly 130 attack sorties. By the fourth week, it was flying nearly two-and-a -half times the number of attack sorties per day than it flew during the first three weeks. NATO reported in early July that it had flown a total of 37,465 sorties, of which 14,006 were strike and suppression of air defense (SEAD) sorties and 10,808 were strike-attack sorties. By the end of the conflict, NATO had attacked over 900 targets.

As more NATO forces were introduced and the attacks continued, the percentage of PGMs being used also declined. In the early days of Allied Force, "smart" weapons constituted more than 90 percent of the ordnance employed. By mid-May, this had declined to only 10 or 20 percent of the total, with guided weapons constituting about 35 percent of the 26,000 weapons employed throughout the course of the war

In short, the ratio of bombs to civilian fatalities was 50 to 1. If only Serb bullets had been as kind to the Kosovars. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:17 PM by David Adesnik  

CASUALTY PREDICTIONS: The Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI) has published a set of confidential UN documents that project the extent of the humanitarian crisis in postwar Iraq. Sadly, 1.26 million children will be at risk of death from malnutrition, assuming that the war lasts 2-3 months.

While I haven't had the chance to read up on this sort of thing much, I get the sense that the UN produces these short of shock figures before all conflicts. With any luck, I will be able to compare the Afghanistan projections to the postwar reality. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:52 PM by David Adesnik  

THE BENEFITS OF DIVERSITY: Still more from Human Rights Watch: (Their website has a ton of stuff. You should visit it!)

On October 7, 2002, UNICEF stated that “child malnutrition remains a major concern, with almost one-third of all children in the south and center of Iraq suffering from chronic malnutrition.”

South and center, huh? What about the rest of Iraq? Ah, yes. Here we go:

The northern Kurdish population has fared better than those in the central or southern areas. WFP [the UN World Food Program] supplies food to the north, recent harvests have been good, and the local population has been able to retain much of what it grows because the central government refuses to purchase grain from northern farmers.

Who knew? Human Rights Watch spreading capitalist propaganda...
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# Posted 1:37 PM by David Adesnik  

THOSE DAMN UNILATERALISTS: According to Human Rights Watch,

Unlike other conflict situations where refugees are able to cross international borders in search of safe haven, Iraqis could become trapped in the midst of a conflict in their own country. Iran, already host to the world's largest refugee population, has sent mixed messages about whether it will allow Iraqi refugees into its territory. Turkey has unequivocally stated for months that it will not honor its international obligation to allow refugees to enter its territory and will set up camps inside Iraq. "Turkey must open its borders to refugees fleeing an emergency at home," [HRW refugee protection expert Alison] Parker said.

Outside of the immediate region, western governments have also prevented Iraqis from seeking asylum in their territories. Europe in particular has policies already in place specifically geared to block Iraqis. These measures include visa restrictions and policies that return Iraqi refugees to "safe third countries" such as Turkey, or to places inside Iraq that are allegedly "safe," such as northern Iraq. All such restrictive policies should be lifted for Iraqis fleeing now and as a consequence of war, the briefing paper urges.

People, haven't you heard of international law? It's not a joke! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:36 PM by David Adesnik  

CASUALTIES FROM THE FIRST GULF WAR: Via Human Rights Watch:

Middle East Watch concludes that the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a direct result of injury from allied bombs and missiles will ultimately be calculated in the thousands, not the hundreds. At the same time, we are reasonably confident that the total number of civilians killed directly by allied attacks did not exceed several thousand, with an upper limit of perhaps between 2,500 and 3,000 Iraqi dead. These numbers, we note, do not include the substantially larger number of deaths that can be attributed to malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care caused by a combination of the U.N.-mandated embargo and the allies' destruction of Iraq's electrical system, with its severe secondary effects

To put this in context, consider that

Repeatedly during the bombing campaign allied commanders suggested that in urban areas where civilian populations were likely to be found, allied air forces were using the most sophisticated munitions at their disposal to minimize the risk of collateralcivilian harm. The U.S. Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, estimated that some 90 percent of these so-called "smart" weapons hit their targets.

Yet according to Gen. McPeak, precision-guided bombs accounted for only 7,400 of the 84,200 tons of munitions dropped by the allies during Operation Desert Storm, or a mere 8.8 percent, some of which was used to attack hardened targets in the Kuwaiti military theater. The remaining 91.2 percent consisted of unguided weaponry -- so-called "dumb" bombs -- with a reported estimated accuracy rate of only 25 percent.

While downtown Baghdad was said to have been attacked with only precision weapons, the Pentagon and its allies have remained silent about the type of munitions used in other urban areas. It appears likely that at least some of the munitions used in urban areas outside of downtown Baghdad were unguided -- "the same dumb iron bombs that fell on Berlin, Pyongyang and Hanoi," in the words of one former U.S. army officer. For example, Basra, which was largely off-limits to foreign reporters during the air war, appears to have suffered considerably more damage to civilian structures than Baghdad, where a small international press force was present.

84,200 tons of munitions, only 8.8% of which were precision-guided and the US still only 2500-3000 civilian casualties. Somewhere, a Russian is smiling. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:08 PM by David Adesnik  

EVIDENCE FOR SEWALL: From the 31 Oct 2001 issue of Salon:

Continuing in the tradition of the Gulf War, the most press-managed conflict in history, government officials have attempted to control information through spin control, with tightlipped briefings, vague official statements and praise for "highly accurate" and "precision-guided" weapons that still occasionally miss. Instead of preparing the public for the inevitability of civilian casualties by explaining how American soldiers are trained to avoid them and describing what went wrong when they occur, the Bush administration and the Pentagon have instead created expectations that can't be met. Disappointment, if not anger, is the inevitable result.

Plus:

Studies conducted after the [Gulf] war proved the [negative] expectations to be far-fetched. Human Rights Watch, the most trusted source for civilian casualty data, found that the number of civilian deaths in the Gulf War was "historically low" -- but more that 3,000 civilians were still killed.

"Considering the extent of the campaigns, these numbers are very low," Kohn says. But because the Pentagon led people to believe that there would be virtually no civilian casualties -- showing only pictures of successful targets hit at briefings -- the numbers seemed disturbingly high, he adds.

Of course, the US looks good compared to certain other members of the UN Security Council:

While U.S. military actions over the past 12 years have demonstrated dramatic improvements in keeping noncombatants from harm, other major wars have shown just the opposite. Russia's 1994-1996 war in Chechnya was excoriated by human rights organizations, the State Department and other governments. Russian armed forces made few attempts to focus exclusively on military targets, using scorched-earth tactics harking back to Vietnam and the Second World War. They completely leveled Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, killing, according to Rachel Denbar of Human Rights Watch, "conservatively 15,000 to 20,000 civilians."

What was that about everything on grand scale??? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:30 PM by David Adesnik  

AFGHAN CASUALTIES: In February 17, 2002, the Boston Globe ran a front page story on its somewhat-comprehensive study of Afghan casualties. The study included strong data on 830 civilian deaths, plus a projection of a few hundred more. (Sorry, no permalink -- stil using Nexis-Lexis.)

What's interesting about both this study as well as the one by the LA Times which I cited before is that both are presented as revelations of brutatlity that the US government has refused to acknowledge. The following quote gives a sense of how the Globe spins the issue:

Along with faulty intelligence and the imprecision of aerial warfare, a large number of deaths can be attributed to the selection of targets in civilian areas. One high-profile example occurred during the war at Tora Bora when a US warplane hit the home of an associate of Osama bin Laden at the suggestion of Afghan commanders who knew he was not there. That attack in Pachir Agam killed an estimated 70 villagers.

The conflict's very nature, analysts said, played a role as well. When the war shifted from the dispatch of the Taliban to the narrower hunt for bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and a few top cohorts, the task became more difficult. In at least three such targeted attempts, US bombs killed scores of villagers - many children among them - who had no connection to the top terrorists or their associates.

In past weeks, the Pentagon has faced questions from the media as well as some Afghan officials about the military decisions that resulted in civilian casualties.

General Tommy R. Franks, the commander of the war in Afghanistan, defended the campaign as "the most accurate war ever fought" in US history. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has steadfastly maintained that the war has cost relatively few civilian lives.

"If one were to take this activity in Afghanistan and rank it as to the number of civilian deaths" and the care taken by US forces to avoid them, Franks said, "I can't imagine there's been a conflict in history where there has been less collateral damage, less unintended consequences."

But one need look no further back than the estimated 500 civilian deaths in the 1999 Kosovo war to undercut that claim.

My first reaction to this is that Sarah Sewall was right about how bad the US military is at dealing with civilian casualty issues. If I were confronted with hyperbolic statements like the one by Tommy Franks, I'd also go looking for injured children.

On the other hand, the attitude of the Globe and LAT correspondents makes a mockey of Marc Herold's accusation that they are corporate stooges. God bless John Peter Zenger!
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:17 PM by David Adesnik  

BAD ATTITUDE: Sarah Sewall, a program director at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights and a former Clinton State Department official, has some harsh words for the US military regarding its attitude toward collateral damage. In a Boston Globe op-ed (PDF available here), Sewall writes that

Operation Enduring Freedom showed that senior US officials remain ill-equipped to manage expectation and consequences of collateral damage. American responses to civilian deaths in Afghanistan remain ad hoc, reactive and defensive.

Rather than publicizing their efforts to avoid civilian casualties, the US military avoids such discussion. Officials express generic, passive-voiced regrets about civilian deaths. When faced with allegations about American responsibility for civilian casualties, officials often have little information to share; this allows initial reports and exaggerated allegations to shape public perception. Even when the United States does investigate such allegations, the findings are rarely publicized, leaving the impression that the American forces have whitewashed problems or ignored an opportunity to learn.

I don't know if Sewall is right about all this, but her advice sounds good. And one reason is trust her is that Marc Herold has accused her of being a corporate stooge. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:03 PM by David Adesnik  

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: The civilian casualty issue going to come up at the OxDem panel discussion, so I thought I'd better be prepared. Here's what I've found so far:

Radical firebrand Marc Herold, a professor of the University of New Hampshire, has conducted an allegedly comprehensive study which concluded that Allied bombing resulted in the death of about 3,600 Afghan civilians. In an essay blasting the the "corporate" media's undercounting of Afghan casualties, Herold observes that

those who generate low overall numbers of civilian casualties stress the faulty intelligence provided by Afghans [they absolve themselves of responsibility], point to an alleged proclivity of the Taliban to inflate such figures, and uncritically accept that the new precision-guided munitions kill mostly the 'bad guys.'

Others like myself point to a very simple, powerful single explanation: The thousands of Afghan civilians who perished under U.S bombs did so because U.S. military and political elites chose to carry out a bombing campaign using extremely powerful weaponry having high margins of error and with huge killing and blast radiuses in largely civilian-rich areas."

Unsurprisingly, Herold goes on to demand that American officials be brought up on war crimes charges.

Frankly, I was surprised that Herold's casualty count was so low. Even so, I am inclined to place a lot more trust in a comprehensive study by the LA Times which put the casualty figure at somewhere between 1000 and 1200. (Sorry, no permalink.) According to author David Zucchino,

“The Times reviewed more than 2,000 reports of civilian casualties from US, British and Pakistani newspapers and international wire services. After eliminating duplicate accounts, the survey identified 194 incidents of civilian casualties from the start of the bombing until Feb. 28, when the air campaign was largely completed. The reported death toll, including estimates in some cases, was between 1,067 and 1,201. The Times excluded 754 civilian deaths reported by the Taliban but not independently confirmed, as well as 497 deaths that were not identified as civilian or military.

“These numbers suggest a very low civilian casualty rate compared with earlier Afghan conflicts. During battles among warlords in Kabul in the early 1990s, more than 50,000 civilians were killed according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. In the western city of Herat, an estimated 20,000 civlians were killed in a matter of days by Soviet air raids in March 1979, just a fraction of the estimated 670,000 civilians who died during the ten year Soviet occupation.”

Typical. The Soviets always have to do everything on a grand scale, just to show off.
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# Posted 7:23 PM by David Adesnik  

SEX AT YALE: OxBlog is really letting its standards go these days. Anyway, the Atlantic Online has a long article about "Sex Week" at Yale.

Actually, the article doesn't really tell you anything about sex at Yale, only people at Yale talking about sex elsewhere. On the bright side, Al Goldstein was there! Al Goldstein!!! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:07 PM by David Adesnik  

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE: A sympathetic David Ignatius interviews Dominique de Villepin for the WaPo. You'd think Villepin would have taken the opportunity to offer more than condescending remarks about his American counterparts. Or is it Ignatius who left all of Villepin's substantive remarks on the cutting room floor? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:53 PM by David Adesnik  

MOTHERLAND SECURITY: We can't have homeland security without guarding old stocks of WMD in Mother Russia. While the US has spent $6 billion to protect Russian weapons since 1992, federal auditors have just released a report that holds both the Putin and Bush administrations responsible for unnecessary delays.

According to Duncan Hunter (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, the US has failed miserably to ensure that its money is spent on projects that actually enhance American security rather than padding the back pockets of Russian politicians.

Condi, where are you on this one? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:41 PM by David Adesnik  

MY FRIENDS IN THE 101ST are now on the ground in Kuwait. They may be at the head of our charge into Baghdad. Take care of yourselves, guys. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:21 PM by David Adesnik  

OPERATION ANACONDA: On Sunday, the NYT published an interesting first-hand account of the largest battle during the Afghan invasion, written by a reporter from the Army Times. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:26 PM by David Adesnik  

INSTAPORN: While I extend my congratulations to Glenn Reynolds for having an attractive wife, I don't think he should've posted a photo of her in an official Instapundit.com t-shirt (baby doll version). By the same token, I don't think Glenn ought to announce every time he and the Instawife get to spend time alone in hotel rooms. TMI, Glenn, TMI.

Now don't go thinking I'm some sort of puritan. Pictures of J.Lo are fine. But personal stuff weirds me out. I don't mean personal stuff of a non-sexual nature. That kind of thing helps create the friendly, informal atmosphere that makes the blogosphere so much fun to be a part of. But I'd say significant others are out.

While I don't expect to change Glenn's mind on this point, I am hoping to prevent Dan Drezner from making the same mistake. Dan, even if your wife is so stunningly beautiful that we will be forced to ogle her for days on end, that is all the more reason not to post any photos. Besides, if you're gonna post that kinda stuff, you may as well get a web cam and turn the post into a profit-making venture.

Vive la difference! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:14 PM by David Adesnik  

LIBERAL HAWKS DROPPING LIKE FLIES: I go away for the weekend and all hell breaks loose. Once willing to confront Saddam, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias and Sean-Paul Kelly are now sitting on the fence and about to fall leftward.

While Dan Drezner and Dima Guberman have already posted interesting replies, I think that their position slightly to the right of Kevin, Matt and Sean-Paul (on foreign policy), prevents them from saying what liberal hawks need to hear.

While I am probably somewhat to the right of Kevin, Matt and Sean-Paul as well, I think that my foreign policy stands are so fiercely liberal that I might be able to persuade them that their confidence in the need to confront Saddam is faltering prematurely.

So let's begin at the beginning: What is troubling the liberal hawks? As I pointed out a few days ago, we are deeply concerned about the depth of the President's commitment to promoting democracy in the Middle East.

This concern is clearly significant for Kevin, who writes that "George Bush has given us precious little reason to think that he really cares about" democracy in the Middle East. Matt comments that "there seems to be little reason to believe that the administration actually will accomplish the humanitarian objective."

Now I agree that one ought to have serious concerns about Bush's commitment to democracy promotion. But why have Kevin and Matt become so worried in the immediate aftermath of the speech in which Bush went further than ever before in spelling out his commitment to promoting democracy throughout the Middle East? (Not just in Iraq, a point Kieran Healy seems to miss.)

While talking the talk is not the same as walking the walk, one has to realize two things about Bush's speech. The first is a general point which relates to all political speeches: When polticians make explicit promises, they can either be punished for breaking them or forced to live up to them. As for punishment, I ask you to recall the immortal words of America's 41st president: "Read my lips. No new taxes."

As for being forced to live up to one's promises, that is the subject of my doctoral dissertation. Interestingly enough, the promises I discuss are Ronald Reagan's promises to promote democracy abroad. He didn't exactly mean it, but first the Democrats and then even most Republicans began to demand that Reagan live up to his word.

The second point about Bush's speech is that it didn't serve a political purpose. American support for the war has almost nothing to do with promoting democracy in Iraq. Opposition to the war has even less to do with Bush's less than 100% credible stance on promoting democracy in Iraq. The fact that this speech happened at all indicates that forces within the administration were pushing for it. Obviously, Paul Wolfowitz. But if you take a look at Stephen Hadley's op-ed in the WaPo, you'll see that NSC seems to be behind the idea as well.

Now we come to the second concern of the liberal hawks. According to Kevin, there

is a good reason for war, but only barely. Saddam does pose a threat, but it's a fairly distant threat and there's reason to think that a policy of containment could be made to work for at least several more years. When you put this together with the larger damage the war will do to our international relations, the whole thing only barely passes the smell test.

On the question of whether Saddam is a threat, I refer the wavering hawks to fellow lib-hawk, Josh Marshall, who points out that the issue isn't whether we have to confront Saddam, but when.

While Kevin thinks containment "could be made to work for several more years", I doubt it. The UN can't keep its inspectors on the ground forever, perhaps a year at best. Eventually, they will either have to declare that Saddam is lying or give Saddam a clean bill of health and just go home. If they go home, then there would be no justification for further sanctions or, for that matter, futher inspections. Without sanctions, containment will fall apart. Without sanctions, Saddam will have the funds necessary to build nucelar weapons. And fast.

Now you might ask, what if the Bush administration decided not to provoke a crisis in Iraq and just leave sanctions in place? That idea might have been defensible a year and a half ago. But now the die is cast. And I don't mean that we have too many troops in the Gulf to pull back now. We could.

But there will never be another Resolution 1441. We have have pissed off the French, the Germans and the European street, but the leaders of 19 nations are behind us. That will not happen again if we back off now. Like it or not, it's now or never.

A third point of liberal concern is that Bush has already done too much damage to America's international standing. As Matt says, the administration has

created a situation where the overwhelming majority of the global population opposes an American invasion. These bad feelings about the United States are having an extremely detrimental effect on our interests elsewhere.

Pardonnez moi? Which interests is Matt referring to? Europe hasn't done any damage to our the American effort to reign in North Korea. (Josh Marshall might note that we screwed that one up ourselves. Same with Turkey.)

Germany is still in charge of the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. European intelligence services are still working with us to destroy Al Qaeda, a project that has met with considerable success lately. The only interests we can't achieve because of European anti-war sentiment are the disarmament and democratization of Iraq.

As for the effects that aroused anti-American sentiment might have in the future, I think there is every reason to believe that once we overthrow Saddam, set up a transitional government and put Saddam's WMD arsenal on display, the anti-war majority will initiative an impressive effort to pretend that it was behind America all along. ("No, really. We knew it had to be done. We just wanted it to be done with UN approval." Nice try, Jacques.)

So that's my two cents on the issue. Bottom line: Bush is more committed to democracy than ever before. We have to confront Saddam either now or later. If we win, Europe will forget we weren't supposed to. So pull out your principles and stand tall, my friends. This is a war for a liberal cause.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:49 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT BACKLASH? Max Boot writes that

When the United States finally took firm action, by invading Afghanistan, there was no rejoicing in the Arab street and no sign of increased recruiting for al Qaeda. The prospect of spending the rest of their lives in Guantanamo Bay may even dissuade some of the more faint-hearted Islamists from taking up arms

My point exactly.

Btw, the rest of Boot's column is worth a read as well. It makes a point that should be pretty self-evident by now, i.e. that confronting Iraq hasn't stopped us from smoking out the remnants of Al Qaeda. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:18 PM by David Adesnik  

NSC SHUFFLE: Josh Marshall picks up a story from UPI (reprinted in the Washington Times), which reports that NSC Middle East director Elliott Abrams has given the boot to three NSC analysts who might have challenged his harder line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This change does matter, and Marshall is right to argue that it is evidence of an unwillingness to consider opposing views. But he goes too far when he says that the Bush administration's efforts to politicize the national security bureaucracy have reached "unprecedented levels".

W. hasn't come close to what Reagan did, cleaning out whole bureaus in the State Department and sending decorated ambassadors with thirty years experience into premature retirement. Thus, when Marshall argues that this administration's unwillingness to hear opposing views has damaged its foreign policy, his charges ring hollow. The administration has done plenty wrong, but not because it hasn't been aware of other options. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:16 PM by David Adesnik  

TIME IS MONEY: It's hard to know what to make of the Turkish parliament's rejection of a US aid package in exchange for its granting the right to let the US use Turkish territory to launch an invasion of northern Iraq. While there were more MPs for the deal than against it, there were a few too many absentions for the deal to become binding.

The Turkish government can submit the deal to parliament again, but would almost definitely have to wait at least a week before doing so. As long as the government can persuade a handful of MPs to switch from absention to non-votes (i.e. not showing up in parliament for the vote), the deal will pass.

That seems to be what the US Army wants, though it's hard to know whether it really means it when it says that it can't afford to wait another week. In light of how hard it would be to hold northern Iraq without Turkish support, I have to imagine the Army is mostly talking tough to put pressure on the Turks.

What may influence the Turks more than the Army, though, is the fact that the Turkish stock market dropped 11% within minutes of opening today in response to the prospective loss of American aid in exchange for basing rights. The currency also fell 5%.

All in all, I expect Turkey to come around. The government is too concerned about Kurdish independence to give up the role in northern Iraq that it would get in exchange for working with the US. Its economy also needs US aid quite badly.

One ought to note that many more government MPs than expected voted with the opposition on the aid deal. However, I sense that these defection represented the widespread hope that the deal would pass in spite of such defections, so that defecting MPs could tell their constituents they stood up to the United States without having to shoulder resposibility for actually doing so.

Even so, this unplanned opposition may have made opponents of the bill aware that they have enough momentum to stop the deal. Do they? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall is spinning the Turkish situation as a major failure on the administration's part. His main point is that we pissed off the Kurds in order to get a deal with the Turks that never came through.

As with North Korea, I think Marshall is jumping the gun on this one. The Administration got a solid commitment from the Turkish government, which was dealt a suprise setback by its own supporters. While the Kurds weren't happy with the deal, it was hardly the "sell out" of "an incipient democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan".

But every cloud has a silver lining. I'm glad to see that Josh is even more concerned about democracy in the Middle East than I thought he was.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum is also spinning the Turkish situation as a Dick Cheney fiasco, mostly in response to NRO's decision to blame the State Department. People, can we have some patience? (Or at least blame the Turkish government's incompetence rather than that of Dick Cheney or Colin Powell.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:07 PM by David Adesnik  

AMERICA'S DIRTY TRICKS: The Guardian has published an NSA memo which apparently indicates that the US is bugging the office and home telephones of other nations' UN representatives.

No comment yet from the NYT, WaPo or Reuters. But according to the Independent, US prepares to use toxic gases in Iraq. That's the real headline. But the article says that what the plans to do is use pepper spray to control crowds. Yes, the same pepper spray that police use everywhere. But which is banned according to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), since it may lead to chemical escalation.

On the toxic front, the article mentions that US Special Forces may use variants of the knock-out gas with which Russian commandos accidentally killed a couple hundred hostages in a Moscow theater last October. The gas would be used in bunker raids. While I have some definite reservations about violating the CWC, I have to imagine that the Special Forces are slightly more competent than their Russian counterparts, and won't be killing be people by accident. After all, we have bombs that can do that. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:38 PM by David Adesnik  

THE BRITISH PAPERS: None other than Thomas Carothers told me that as an American in Britian, one of the most important decisions I would make is what paper to read. While talking to Tom back in early 2000, I had no idea that the choices were all a step down from the Washington Post. And I don't think Tom had any idea that I could avoid the decision entirely by reading American papers online, an option not available to Tom back when he was here on an unnamed, yet still prestigious fellowship.

But sometimes, when I go away for the weekend, I find myself cut off from cyberspace and forced to read the bricks-and-mortar broadsheets that get sold around these parts. This was one of those these weekends. And as always, I found something of interest alongside the colorfully incoherent anti-American ranting that passes for political commentary in these parts.

First of all, the Times reported on Friday that in just 82 minutes, one of its correspondents tracked down four of Britain's eight most wanted criminals, relying on nothing more than his internet connection and public records. Two questions on that: First, if this guy is so good, why doesn't he spend some more time catching bad guys? Second, just what the hell do the police here do all day?

The Times also picked up the following quote from Spanish PM J.M. Aznar, who observed that

“I did tell the President that we need a lot of Powell and not much of Rumsfeld,” said Señor Aznar, referring to Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State. “Ministers of Defence should talk less, shouldn’t they? The more Powell speaks and the less Rumsfeld speaks, that wouldn’t be a bad thing altogether.”

With all due to respect to a loyal ally, I think Mr. Aznar has it wrong. Nothing short of replacing George W. Bush with Jimmy Carter could calm down anti-war Europe.

Friday's Independent led off with a headline declaring: Blix Damns Iraq: Too Little, Too Late. While the Indy isn't the Guardian, a headline like that still meant there were no kinds words from Blix that might be spun into good news for the anti-war movement. (NB: The Guardian tried pretty hard, though.)

Inside the paper, an article covering Bush's speech on postwar Iraq kindly observed that

Critics will dismiss the rhetoric as a familiar example of US self-interest, grudgebearing and paranoia clothed in a pious idealism. But the idealism is not entirely phoney.

But lest the Indy sacrifice its street credibility, it balanced this feint praise with a headline informing its readers that "Bush's blueprint for future conceals a declaration of war." No way! Bush in favor of war???

Moving on, we come to the editorial page, where the Indy featured a point-counterpoint on American efforts to bring democracy in the Middle East. I have to admit I was impressed. I only expected a counterpoing.

Finally, we get to this quote from a masthead editorial in today's Indy. Yes, I read it online. And no, I am not making this up:

"...on the eve of war we'll settle for Saddam's game-playing, and urge the conviction Prime Minister to be more pragmatic. Whatever the motives of Saddam, the UN weapons inspectors are making some progress."

As they say in New York, don't hate the playa, hate the game.
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# Posted 4:40 PM by David Adesnik  

HUGH GRANT NOT ANNOYING: In specific cases. As a general rule, I can't stand the man. But on Saturday night I rented About a Boy, the Hugh Grant film based on the Nick Hornby novel.

Above all, the movie is hilarious. Grant shows that he can do comedy with the best of them. But give plenty of credit to co-writers/co-directors/co-siblings Chirs and Paul Weitz, better known for the adolescent brilliance of American Pie.

The film also works because of Nicholas Hoult, who plays the boy (Marcus). It takes a damn good child actor to make this kind of script work, since it depends on real interaction between the kids and the adults. IMHO, Hoult demonstrates that Episode I might have been able to live up to the hype like if its script didn't call for Young Anakin to act like an idiot.

(I won't pass judgment on Haley Joel Osment, since I have to assume that he was doing what Lucas wanted. Besides, he was quite good in The Sixth Sense.)

[CORRECTION: Reader TG points out that Anakin was played by Jake Lloyd, not Haley Joel Osment. As such, I feel compelled to offer a heartfelt apology to Mr. Osment, whom I never intended to slander in such a spiteful and malicious way. Looks like OxBlog ought to stick to politics...]

One extra fun thing about watching About a Boy was that I was watching it with a friend in her way-too-hip flat in Islington, the same London neighborhood where much of the film takes place. For once in my life, I felt like a legitimate resident of this lovely island rather than an interventionist cowboy.

Last but not least, check out the soundtrack by Badly Drawn Boy as well as any other film with Rachel Weisz in it. It's not every day that you say yourself: "I can't believe she's not a shiksa." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:31 AM by Daniel  

CIVIC DUTY, KOSHER HOGS. Two articles in today's NY Times today made me laugh out loud. They should do the same for you--the first one is about a potential juror in a federal court case in Manhattan, while the second one covers members of a nomadic tribe's trip to Florida this month. Enjoy.


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# Posted 4:35 PM by David Adesnik  

IF I WERE SADDAM: Which I am! Buwahaha! Anyway, reader FJ comments that

At the risk of sounding heartless, I believe that the greatest risk facing human shields after the shooting starts is being executed by Hussein's henchmen and dumped on a pile of bomb-strewn rubble for a propaganda photo-op.

At the risk of sounding even more heartless, I have to admit that if I were Saddam, that's what I'd do. Thus, if I were a human shield, I would spend my time in Tel Aviv nightclubs. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:32 PM by David Adesnik  

BUREAUCRACY: Spent four and a half hours at the Home Office today waiting to get my student visa renewed. When I finally got to talk to a clerk, he told me that since I was more than three months overdue for a renewal, he couldn't process my application, so I should send it in by mail.

That sounded bad. After all, I had bothered to go to the Home Office in person because I want to travel in March, so I couldn't wait for a by-mail renewal. (Of course, I could've sent the application in three months ago, but whatever.)

Then, surprisingly enough, the clerk tells me I should go ahead and travel, but bring my renewal application with me and hand to the immigration officer when I return to London. It's that simple. Now, it would've been nice if there had been a notice on the Home Office immigration website explaining that late applications can be processed at the airport, but I figure I came out ahead compared to the people who left the Office after shouting matches with the clerks.

Thankfully, that's all in the past now. I'm now at an Easy Everything internet cafe, having just wolfed down some of the best pizza in England at a SoHo cafe. After this, we head out to party. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:46 PM by Daniel  

THE UNION COMES AROUND. They've come a long way since their 1933 decision to "in no circumstances fight for king and country." Our friend Jackie Newmeyer delivered a stirring presentation.

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# Posted 10:39 PM by David Adesnik  

THE ARAB BACKLASH: Martin Kimel has responded in detail to my thoughts on whether or not there will be an Arab backlash in the event of a US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. (I can't figure out where to find permalinks on Martin's page, so if you don't mind, just hit CTRL+F and search for OxBlog.)

Martin's first point is that the projected length of the US occupation will be at least two years, a fact which might reinforce impressions of imperialism. If the occupation of Iraq follows the German and Japanese precedents, however, there will be municipal and provincial elections after around a year of occupation. Thus Iraqis will have considerable control of their own lives even if a US general has the final say on issues of national importance. As such, Muslims in neighboring states will probably recognize that the occupation is not an imperialist venture.

Martin next raises the issue of whether Muslims will perceive the US as anti-Islamic if -- or perhaps because -- it has chosen to bring democracy to Iraq. To support that point, Martin refers to bin Laden's statement that the war on terror is an anti-Islamic crusade regardless of whether or not it topples dictators such as Saddam. My guess is that most Muslims don't really buy into that sort of underhanded logic. Even if Muslims have their doubts about democracy, I don't think there is any reason they should see it as fundamentally un-Islamic, provided their views on having a good time are less strict than those of the Taliban.

The most interesting point Martin makes is one about the psychology of perception. Whereas I figure that most Muslims are either somewhat open-minded about the US or fully convinced that it is an imperialist power, Martin suggests that any given individual may have a tipping point at which one more American insult send them over the edge.

While I have some background in political psychology, I don't think I can offer decisive statements about how the average human being thinks, let alone how Arabs and Muslims form their political perceptions. Even so, the tipping-point model seems somewhat improbable. It essentially posits that certain classes of events transform open-minded individuals into closed-minded ones.

Regardless of the fact that such a transformation doesn't really fit with what I know about the psychology of persuasion (let alone common sense), I'm enough of a novice at this to be less than sure about my position. Still, even if one grants that individuals may have tipping points, is the invasion of Iraq the sort of event that might send people over the edge?

I tend to doubt it. First of all, the impact of an invasion on non-Iraqis will be much less direct than it is on the people of Iraq. As such, it is hard to imagine that it would affect their psychology so dramatically. Second, another invasion of Iraq would not be all that different from the first one, even though Saddam had more directly provoked his neighbors in 1991.

To support the tipping point logic, Martin provided the example of Yusuf Qaradawi, a Muslim televangelist who has long supported suicide bombing, but then supported the US war in Afghanistan, while now denouncing the prospective invasion of Iraq. Leaving aside my previous argument that the US can work with men such as Qaradawi to reform Arab governments (an argument Martin strongly disagrees with), I'd have to say Qaradawi is not a likely to have a tipping point.

First of all, Qaradawi is an intellectual, and thus much less likely to have impulsive views about politics. If there is an uprising in response to the US invasion of Iraq, it will come from below, not above (although those above will take advantage of it). Moreover, the simple fact that Qaradawi could back an American war against an Islamic state suggests that he is far too open-minded to be thrown over the age by American aggression against a secular dictator like Saddam.

So those are my thoughts. As someone with only a primitive knowledge of Middle Eastern politics, I won't stand by them without reservations, especially when confronted with solid arguments like Martin's. But I think I've made a logical case and one that does pretty well on the facts. Let me know what you think. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:24 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE ON HUMAN SHIELDS: Tommy Franks announced yesterday that he couldn't guarantee the safety of the human shields who have set up camp in Iraq. Which brings me to some interesting mail I got in response to my last post on the Iraqi shields.

Lawyer BVK writes that

In response to your (perhaps rhetorical) question re Human Rights Watch's statement on US culpability for killing human shields, they are in part right. Legal responsibility can lie on both sides of an action, even if one side initiates it. For example, when a criminal takes a hostage, the police cannot simply shoot through the hostage to kill the bad guy. Even though the criminal has initiated the situation by putting a hostage between him and the gun, the police officer has a responsibility to assess whether there is a means of apprehending/killing the criminal without endangering the life of the hostage. he end result might be shooting the hostage to get to the criminal, but absent a good justification (more lives would be in danger otherwise) that cop is going to jail.

Here, however, there are two key differences. First, these human shields are not hostages. That probably makes no difference under international humanitarian law (keeping in mind international law is not always well defined), because the crime is using civilians to shield military objectives or targets. Whether or not the shields voluntarily assumed that role doesn't matter, unless in doing so they could be said to have ceased being civilians and instead have become combatants. In the Iraqi case, that argument wouldn't fly. Whether or not the "coalition of the willing" attacks Iraq, he has committed a war crime by deploying civilians as human shields to impede military operations.

Second, international law does not impose the same constraints on combatants as domestic law does on police, although Human Rights Watch almost got the standard right. When faced with human shields, the rule the United States must follow is that "any loss of civilian life incidental to the attack on legitimate military targets must be reduced to what is absolutely necessary to accomplish the mission." Additional Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions. Mission is defined broadly; you must look beyond the particular target of a bomb. In Iraq, it could be construed as broadly as something such as "take the city of Baghdad" or, more likely, a bit more narrowly like "take and secure high level military and government facilities and occupants."

Although again not entirely clear under international law (and as we see the number of war crimes trials increase, the law will develop), the other parties deployment of human shields is not an affirmative defense that gets you off the hook for a charge of targeting civilians. The United States and its allies will have to review its target list with the knowledge that certain targets are shielded by civilians and assess whether hitting those targets is absolutely necessary to accomplishing the mission. In the case of electrical plants, the answer may very well be yes. Cutting off the regime's power may be essential, especially in a night attack. I also have read that human shields might be deploying at water facilities. Although unlikely to have been on any target lists, I can't imagine the coalition forces could contend that hitting water plants knowing civilians were present was absolutely necessary to the mission. Of course, many civilians will die; some may be human shields. But with precision bombs and decent target selection, legitimate war crimes charges arising from killing human shields are not a high risk here.

Sounds good to me. Non-lawyer MJ adds that "There is a difference between an innocent civilian human shield in the form of an Iraqi held against his will and a volunteer who chooses to stand where bombs are likely to fall. I don't consider volunteers to protect targets to be civilians at all." I think I'm going to side with BVK on the legal merits and MJ on moral grounds. Regardless, the US should probably do its best to avoid hitting the shields f(if possible) for the practical reason that it will lead to another damaging public fight with assorted European governments. If only the shields were willing to deploy themselves in Israel instead, all this trouble could be avoided... (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:56 PM by David Adesnik  

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY: KUWAIT. (For earlier posts in the Islam and Democracy series, click here.)

On the front page of today's WaPo there is a long article entitled "Democracy in Kuwait is Promise Unfulfilled". While this headline is 100% accurate, the article does not explain why it is that Kuwait is no closer to democratic rule than it was at the end of the Gulf War.

As the Post correctly reports, Kuwait is a "tightly controlled hereditary emirate" with an elected parliament. While the franchise is restricted to male citizens over the age of 21, elections are essentially fair. Reading the Post article, one has no idea what the significance of parliament is in this tightly controlled hereditary emirate.

Trying to figure out what was going on, I turned to an article by Georgia State Prof. Michael Herb in the Oct. 2002 issue of the Journal of Democracy. It turns out that the Emir's son, the Crown Prince, appoints the cabinet, which is responsible to the Emir and not to the parliament. The cabinet does not need a vote of confidence in parliament in order to take office, nor can it be removed by a vote of no confidence.

The ministries of defense, interior and foreign affairs (known collectively as the ministries of sovereignty) are reserved for members of the royal family, while the rest of the cabinet posts are distributed in a manner reflecting the balance of power in parliament.

The one prerogrative the parliament itself has is to vote no confidence in individual ministers, a prerogative it took advantage of in July 2002. Ironically, the vote reflected an effort by conservative Islamist, Shi'ite and tribal deputies to oust a liberal finance minister. Their effort failed, but narrowly.

Neither the WaPo article nor its JoD counterpart gives much sense of how much control the parliament has over the government, although the latter observes that "the government does sometimes lose important votes, as was the case with parliament's refusal to give women the vote." In a bit of bad reporting, the Post implies that the defeat of women's suffrage was an unmitigated defeat for democracy, rather than exploring the possibility that the conservative opposition's successful resistance to a government sponsored initiative indicates that the royal family does not wield, as the Post would have it, "unquestioned power."

A second critical oversight in both articles is their failure to examine what it is that Kuwait's Islamist opposition wants. Both simply refer to the Islamists as fundamentalist, with the Post mentioning their unsurprising habit of saying nice things about Palestinian martyrs and Osama bin Laden. But are the Islamists interested in taking control of the state? Do they acknowledge the legitimacy of the royal family? Would universal suffrage increase their influence or reduce it? Would an Islamist majority in parliament use it influence to open up the government or just demand special privileges for fundamentalists?

Herb writes that

"fears that an Islamist takeover will result from a partial transition [to democracy] are exaggerated. As much as the sad expereince of Algeria shows the very real dangers of ill-considered attempts at democratization, it is unlikley in the extreme that an Algerian scenario will play out in the Gulf: The ruling families there are too deply ensconced to be ousted by Islamists."

Thus, in Kuwait, the future of democracy depends on the willingness of the Emir and his family to grant their subjects both civil rights and a greater voice in government. In the absence of strong pressure from Washington, however, there is every reason to believe that they won't.

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# Posted 8:24 PM by Daniel  

TAKE THAT, PROTESTERS. Max Boot on the negative effects of peace marches. He's on shaky ground when discussing Vietnam, but elsewhere his argument is sound.

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# Posted 7:52 PM by David Adesnik  

AFGHAN FUNDAMENTALISM is alive and well. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:48 PM by David Adesnik  

WaPo JINGOISM: In an extraordinary editorial, the editors of the Washington Post defend themselves from charges of "jingoism" and "drumbeating for war", charges levelled in countless letters to the editor. (Seems NYT subscribers read the Post as well...)

But more than a response to critics, the editorial is a sober and well-reasoned case for fighting Saddam Hussein should he refuse to disarm. If you know someone who isn't sure that the United States is on the right path -- and still open to the argument that it might be -- let them know what the WaPo has to say. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:01 PM by David Adesnik  

STEALING GORE'S PLAYBOOK: Yes, the President has committed the US to nation-building in Iraq. But now it's called reconstruction. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:53 PM by David Adesnik  

IN MEMORIAM: Mr. Rogers. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:46 PM by David Adesnik  

SUPREME IRONY: Reader JS writes in with a very clever way of preventing Iraq from launching Scud attacks on Tel Aviv: Send in the human shields! Surely the anti-war movement can come up with a few volunteers for this mission...

Thanks to JS, I also thought of the following: Why not stop Palestinian suicide bombings by having human shields on every public bus and in every nightclub in Israel? After all, clubbing is almost as much fun as going to protest marches! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:31 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT BIAS? As Josh reported earlier, the good news is that the President's speech on promoting democracy in the Middle East sound like his speechwriters have spending their free time over at the OxDem website.

And yet somehow, the NYT managed to report that Bush's speech was about "stability" in the Middle East and the importance of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You have to get around half way through the article before you get to any mention of Bush's vision for a democratic Middle East. While it's one thing to be skeptical about the President's commitment to promoting democracy abroad, pretending that he hasn't addressed the issue is just absurd.

On an even more bizarre note, a NYT masthead editorial criticizes Bush for focusing his speech on democracy in Iraq when what he really should have been talking about is the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. People! Make up your mind!

Unsurprisingly, the WaPo seemed to have no problem figuring out the point of Bush's speech. As the second sentence of its report reads,

Looking beyond hostilities to topple Saddam Hussein -- an outcome administration officials have increasingly portrayed as inevitable -- Bush also sought to assure doubters across the globe that the ultimate U.S. goals in the region are not imperialist but democratic.

Sort of makes you wonder why the cover price of the NYT is so much higher than that of the Post. Maybe it's the cost of remedial journalism classes for all of its correspondents. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:20 PM by David Adesnik  

PROOF I AM A CENTRIST: I took the "How evil are you?" quiz and discovered that I am neither good nor evil, just neutral. According to the quiz's creators this means

Moderation toward all things! Although you do have inner demons, you can more than control them, and often find yourself in the position of peacemaker, balancing things out.

I also took the liberty of filling in the answers I think Josh might give, and it turns out that he is "Good". Go figure. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:10 PM by David Adesnik  

ANOTHER JAPAN? Josh Marshall ruminates about the tremendous difficulty of transforming Iraq and concludes that the only right thing to do is go all out to promote democracy. But he warns that anything less than wholehearted commitment will result in both failure and a backlash throughout the Arab world.

One point is take issue with is Marshall's argument that those who compare Iraq to Germany and Japan

miss an important part of why Germany and Japan worked. It's called World War II. One of the reasons the Germans and the Japanese stood still for what we accomplished in their countries is that we had just spent a couple years thoroughly bludgeoning their countries. Day and night bombing against major population centers, the disruption of the economies, the very real threat that if it wasn't us it'd be the Russians taking over, etc.

By 1945, we had pretty much destroyed the Germans' and Japanese' will to fight. And they were pleasantly surprised when they discovered how relatively benign our rule was. The same set of circumstances won't apply to Iraq. And that should be a cause of real concern.

I'm surprised Marshall thinks the "same set of circumstances won't apply to Iraq." But everyone there has suffered for years because of Saddam's corruption and brutality. While some Iraqis might blame the West for sanctions, the Japanese and Germans would have been able to make an even stronger case for blaming the Allies for their carpet bombing.

Moreover, I think there is every reason to believe that Iraqis will be "pleasantly surprised when they discover how relatively benign our rule" is.

Speaking as a historian, I think that what Marshall really misses is the way in which the Allied victory in World War II utterly discredited the vicious ideologies that taken root in both Germany and Japan before and during the war. The shock of defeat was in part a product of the utopian visions that Hitler and the Japanese imperialists forced on their erstwhile subjects.

I'd imagine that Iraq's Ba'athist ideology is already too discredited to be hurt by another Iraqi defeat. But more importantly, the ideology of democracy has already spread to both the millions of Iraqis living in exile as well as the Kurds of the North. While I have no illusions about the democratization of Iraq being easy, it is important not to give in to unfounded pessimism.

On that point, I agree with Marshall, who concludes that "Believe it or not, this [post] isn't meant to say we shouldn't try to accomplish this [objective]. Once the decision for war is made it is really the only policy we can pursue. But the scope of enterprise is awe-inspiring."



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# Posted 10:52 PM by David Adesnik  

VACLAV HAVEL "MORALLY REPUGNANT"? Boy will Josh be pissed off when he reads this. Warning: those allergic to Noam Chomsky should not follow the previous link. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:47 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT IRAQIS? The National Review reports on the British anti-war movment's efforts to stop Iraqi dissidents from expressing their views. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:39 PM by David Adesnik  

RWANDAN GENOCIDE, PART II: As described below, I am in the midst of trying to figure out what sort of moral responsibility the United States bears for its failure to stop the Rwandan genocide. The question I want to answer in this post is "What did the United States government know about the genocide and when did it know it?"

According to historian and activist Alison Des Forges, the US knew what was happening as soon as the massacres began on April 6, 1994. According to political scientist Alan Kuperman, neither the US, the UN, nor Des Forges herself understood the dimensions of the violence until April 20, at which point it would not have been possible to save more than a fifth of the eventual victims.

While I thought Kuperman made a much stronger case, the issue itself is significant enough to merit a third opinion. So I turned to the work of Samantha Power, former executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights and author of "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (For a summary of her views from the Atlantic Monthly, click here.)

(NB: While aware of all the praise and awards that Power's book has won, I also chose to consult it because Samantha graduated from Yale a few years before I did and held the same Junior Fellowship at the Carnegie Endowment after graduating. When I was considering whether or not to accept the Fellowship, Yale referred me to Samantha, who recommended it enthusiastically. Not that I would've turned it down anyway, but she did help persuade me.)

Power's condemnation of the US is unequivocal. As she writes,

The Rwandan genocide would prove to be the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were murdered. The United States did almost nothing to try to stop it. Ahead of the April 6 plane crash, the United States ignored extensive early warnings about imminent mass violence. It denied Belgian requests to reinforce the peacekeeping mission. When the massacres started, not only did the Clinton administration not send troops to Rwanda to contest the slaughter, but it refused countless other options...Remembering Somalia and hearing no American demands for intervention, President Clinton and his advisers knew that the military and political risks of involving the United States in a bloody conflict in central Africa were great, yet there were no costs of avoiding Rwanda altogether.

While I haven't made it through all of Carr's chapter on Rwanda yet, the evidence so far seems to support Kuperman's account more than it does Des Forges' or her own..

While Carr documents the elaborate Hutu preparations for the genocide, there is insufficient evidence that either US or UN officials knew what might happen. In April 1993, one UN rapporteur explicity warned of a possible genocide in Rwanda, pointing to 2,000 political murders that had taken place since 1990. Yet as Carr notes elsewhere, Hutu violence claimed the lives of 50,000 victims in neighboring Burundi in October 1993.

Was this an indication that such violence might spread to Rwanda? Or that warnings of violence in Rwanda were exaggerated when compared to the situation elsewhere? According to Carr's interviews with US diplomats stationed in Rwanda in April 1994, they were fully committed to the UN brokered peace process and expected no major violence. Wrong (and/or self-serving) as such perceptions might, they don't provide much traction for the view that Washington should have known better.

On January 11, 1994, UN peacekeeping commander Gen. Romeo Dallaire cabled New York to let the UN know that a Rwandan informant had warned of an impending genocide. According to Carr, Dallaire assessed the informant's report as "reliable." According to Kuperman, Dallaire

raised doubts about the informant's credibility in this cable, stating that he had "certain reservations on the suddenness of the change of heart of the informant. . . . Possibility of a trap not fully excluded, as this may be a set-up." Raising further doubt, the cable was the first and last from Dallaire containing such accusations, according to U.N. officials. Erroneous warnings of coups and assassinations are not uncommon during civil wars. U.N. officials were prudent to direct Dallaire to confirm the allegations with Habyarimana himself, based on the informant's belief that "the president does not have full control over all elements of his old party/faction." Dallaire never reported any confirmation of the plot.

Unfortunately, neither Carr nor Kuperman indicates where one can find the original text of the memo. Even so, Kuperman seems to be on firmer ground here.

The next point of conflict between the Kuperman and Carr accounts concerns Gen. Dallaire's state of mind in April 1994. According to Carr,

Dallaire and other foreign observers passed through two phases of recognition. The first involved coming to grips with the occurrence not only of a conventional war but of massive crimes against humanity. The second involved understanding that what was taking place was genocide.

Carr's interviews with Dallaire suggest that he reached the first stage of recognition on April 9 and the second stage on April 10, at which point he requested 5,000 reinforcements.

In light of the fact that Dallaire had the benefit of hindsight while being interviewed, it is worth wondering whether he exaggerated his own awareness of the genocide and commitment to stopping it. If Dallaire's statements to the British press in April 1994 are any indication, what he told Carr was just about an outright lie.

In Foreign Affairs, Kuperman writes that Dallaire

identified the problem as mutual violence, stating on April 15 that "if we see another three weeks of being cooped up and seeing them [the Hutu and Tutsi forces] pound each other" (The Guardian), the U.N. presence would be reassessed...

On April 11, The New York Times reported that fighting had "diminished in intensity" and Le Monde wrote three days later that "a strange calm reigns in downtown" Kigali. The commander of Belgian peacekeepers stated that "the fighting has died down somewhat, one could say that it has all but stopped" (Paris Radio France International). On April 17, Dallaire told the BBC that except for an isolated pocket in the north, "the rest of the line is essentially quite quiet." Only on April 18 did a Belgian radio station question this consensus, explaining that the decline in reports of violence was because "most foreigners have left, including journalists."

In light of Dallaire's failure to understand what was going on around him, one has to wonder what decision makers in Washington understood -- especially since the American diplomatic corps had left Rwanda shortly after the outbreak of violence.

Quoted in an interveiw with Carr, the second-ranking US diplomat in Rwanda claims, after returning to Washington, to have told State Department colleagues that the violence in progress was nothing less than "genocide" in progress. In the absence of documents to corroborate this claim, however, one has to suspect that it is no more accurate than Dallaire's.

On April 11, a talking points memo informed Frank Wisner, the undersecretary of defense for policy, that "unless both sides can be convinced to return to the peace process, a massive (hundreds of thousands of deaths) bloodbath will ensue." This memo is the closest one comes to hard evidence that the American government knew what was happening. Yet its reference to the peace process suggests that Washington had completely failed to recognized that Hutu extremists had already begun their genocide and that no diplomatic options were left.

The first mention of genocide in an American document seems to be in a May 9 report by the Defense Intelligence Agency. By that time, however, the dimensions of the killing in Rwanda were well known to the public. All in all, there just doesn't seem to be evidnece that the US understood just how serious the Rwandan massacres were.

Should the US have responded with force even if the massacres taking place did not amount to genocide? From a moral perspective, the obvious answer is 'yes'. But after the humilitation of Somalia and the lackluster response to the ongoing genocide in Bosnia, there is little reason to believe that the US or any other country would have done something in the event of violence that wasn't severe enough to warrant the term genocide.

TO BE CONTINUED.

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# Posted 9:38 PM by David Adesnik  

WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES: For the moment, Oxford has been electronically severed from the outside world. Thanks to my private cable modem connection, I can still post. However, I cannot check my e-mail, so don't expect responses to anything you've written me lately.

In contrast, Josh can check his e-mail, but can't access any sites outside of Oxford, so he can't post on OxBlog. Now you might ask, how could I know all this if Josh and I live on opposite sides of the electronic divide?

Well, I'm not proud to admit it, but I actually called Josh on the phone. It made me feel so...so...primitive. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:33 PM by David Adesnik  

RWANDA: THE PREVENTABLE GENOCIDE? In the Wall Street Journal, Josh and I wrote that

In light of the strength that dissidents from Prague to Belgrade to Baghdad have found in America's founding principles, we disagree with those who believe that America lacks the moral integrity necessary to bring democracy to Iraq.

If one wants to defend such claims of moral integrity, however, one has to account for the American failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide of April 1994. While this failure might not invalidate American aspirations to liberate Iraq, it nonetheless constitutes a significant challenge to America's perception of itself as defender of the downtrodden.

Turning first to Foreign Affairs, I ran across a long critique of the conventional wisdom that the timely dispatch of 5,000 troops to Rwanda could have prevented the genocide. (My apologies for linking to FA summaries rather than the full text, which I only have access to thanks to subscription database.)

The crux of Kuperman's argument is simple: Rwanda's Hutu genocidaires murdered half of their victims between April 6 and April 21, 1994, with two-thirds of the murders accomplished by the end of April. The United States and the UN Security Council were not aware of the fact that a genocide was in progress until April 20. Thus, even the most rapid possible deployment of US and/or UN forces could not have stopped the killing before mid- to late May, at which point more than four-fifths of the 500,000-600,000 victims of would have already been dead.

In a response to Kuperman, Alison Des Forges -- a Yale-educated historian, Human Rights Watch consultant and author of the definitive account of the Rwandan genocide -- asserts that

Two days, not two weeks, after the slaughter began on April 6, U.S. officials knew that extremists with an avowedly genocidal agenda had murdered legitimate Rwandan authorities and were claiming control of the government...As an April 8 State Department briefing made clear, U.S. officials also knew that Hutu soldiers had been killing Tutsi for two days and that the violence was not limited to the capital."

Kuperman responds to Des Forges by reminding of her own words, published in the Washington Post on April 17, 1994. In a column there, she failed to even raise the prospect of "genocide".

Unwilling to trust Kuperman on this point, I pulled up Des Forges column on Nexis-Lexis. It turns out that Kuperman was understating his case. According to Des Forges,

Whatever the circumstances of the crash [that killed Pres. Habyarimana], it provided extremists within the ruling group with the long-sought pretext for wiping out their opponents. Within an hour of the announcement of Habyarimana's death, the elite presidential guard launched a search-and-destroy mission...

If the world really cares what happens in Rwanda -- beyond the gaping at photos of unspeakable horrors -- it will bring all pressure to bear on the RPF and what remains of the Rwandan army general staff to effect a ceasefire.

In short, the fiercest critic of US inaction in the face of genocide could not bring herself to recommend armed intervention by the US or the UN at the height of the killing.

To be continued...
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# Posted 5:56 PM by David Adesnik  

(KA)BULL MARKET: The WaPo has a nice article on entrepreneurs in Karzai's Afghanistan. Businesses of all sorts seem to be thriving, from hamburger joints to internet cafes.

What's missing in the article is any sense of whether this trend reflects more than the usual boomlet that follows the infusion of international aid (and American military spending). From Phnom Penh to Sarajevo, international aid has produced bubble economies that pop once the aid stops flowing.

The article also fails to give the reader any sense of whether Kabul's growth is reaching the countryside. In light of the fact that Kabul is the only town guarded by Western forces, I wouldn't be surprised if it also the only town with successful entrepreneurs. In some respects, the success of the economy may be the best indicators of whether Hamid Karzai remains the mayor of Kabul or becomes the president of a united, democratic Afghanistan. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:20 PM by David Adesnik  

IMMUTABLE LAWS AMENDED: Law Five states that "Europeans are always right." As today's MoDo column demonstrates, Law Five ought to now read as follows: "Old Europe is always right. New Europe is always wrong."

Take this bit of wisdom for example: "As one Soviet expert put it, 'Bulgaria used to be Russia's lapdog. Now it's America's lapdog.'" Huh? Did I miss the American tanks rolling into Budapest, Prague and Warsaw? Actually, there may well be American tanks stationed in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw over the next few months, if Donald Rumsfeld has his way. By invitation, of course, but you can't expect MoDo to worry about small details like that.
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# Posted 3:07 PM by David Adesnik  

ANOTHER NERVOUS LIBERAL HAWK? I'm willing to count Tom Friedman in on this one. He has been more consistent than any other first-tier columnist in focusing on Middle Eastern democracy. As he puts it,

When it comes to building democracy in Iraq, the Europeans are uninterested, the Americans are hypocritical and the Arabs are ambivalent. Therefore, undertaking a successful democratization project there, in a way that will stimulate positive reform throughout the region, will require a real revolution in thinking all around — among Americans, Arabs and Europeans. If done right, the Middle East will never be the same. If done wrong, the world will never be the same.

Amen. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:00 PM by David Adesnik  

UNBRIDLED ELITISM: A NYT masthead remarks that

The nation may be cruising toward one of those moments of cultural humiliation when the world compares the number of people who watch the Hussein interview with the 40 million who last week watched Joe Millionaire pick wholesome Zora over Sarah, the presumed gold-digger.

While I don't want to go on the record endorsing Joe Millionaire (since I haven't watched it), I get the sense that watching JM involved actual suspense, whereas we know that Saddam Hussein will just tell the same old lies. American people - 1, NYT - 0.

UPDATE: After Dan Rather finished interviewing Saddam, the dictator turned the tables on Rather and began to interview him, albeit off camera. Now if CBS broadcast that, it might get more than 40 million views. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:52 PM by David Adesnik  

LOWER MANHATTAN HORSE RACE: The Think team has edged out Daneil Libeskind in the latest stage of the competition to redesign the World Trade Center.

While the politics of it all aren't that interesting, make sure to click on the box to the right of the article, labeled "Envisioning Downtown: New Plans for Ground Zero". It has very impressive virtual reality videos of each of the seven designs under consideration, thus offering a fuller perspective than the slide shows on the LMDC website.

Of course, OxBlog's still supports the design of dark horse architect Robert Thompson, who deserves your attention even if he's a long shot for the contract. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:35 PM by David Adesnik  

LESSONS OF KOSOVO: Paul Wolfowitz seems to agree with OxBlog that ethnic violence will not present a serious threat to postwar Iraq, despite its devastating effects in Kosovo.

As Wolfowitz told the NYT, Iraq's "ethnic groups have not had decades of slaughtering one another as happened in the Balkans. The problem in Iraq is a regime that slaughters everybody, it's equal opportunity repression,' he said." Sounds sorta like an evil version of the 14th amendment... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:55 PM by David Adesnik  

NATION BUILDING AND ETHNIC VIOLENCE: Will postwar Iraq descend into a maelstrom of ethnic, communal religious violence? Looking for answers, I came across this article by Ted Gurr, a professor at the University of Maryland.

According to Gurr, ethnic warfare across the globe was a rising trend in the last decades of the Cold War. While the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia both saw multiple ethnic conflicts break out in the last years of their existence, even more ethnic conflicts emerged in southern hemisphere nations unaffected by the Eastern European revolution.

While these outbreaks of violence led numerous pundits to declare that ethnic warfare would be the dominant security issue in the post-Cold War era, the fact is that old conflicts are settling down while fewer new ones are emerging. One trend that bodes well for postwar Iraq is that "The new democracies of Europe, Asia, and Latin America were especially likely to protect and promote minority rights."

If you think about it, that conclusion seems almost self-evident. The ethnic conflicts in Kosovo, Sudan and East Timor were responses to the brutal repression ordered by authoritarian governments. The Chechen conflicts fits into this framework as well, since Russia's democratic facade did not influence its behavior toward the Caucasus.

Well, that's the good news for today. Don't expect much more.

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# Posted 8:58 PM by David Adesnik  

NATION BUILDING: In the next couple of weeks, OxDem will host a panel discussion about war and democracy in the Middle East. Although charmed by our professors' valiant efforts to cure insomnia, we decided this ought to be a panel made up entirely of students. As such, both Josh and myself will be participating.

In order to put our best foot forward, we thought it might be a good idea to do some research in advance. One of the questions I'm interested in whether or not the UN/NATO nation building efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo have been successful, as well as what lessons they might hold for the occupation of Iraq.

If you happen to know much about this topic, it would be great to hear your thoughts. If not, then keep reading and finding what my first forays into the literature have turned up:

Writing in Foreign Affairs, David Rohde, a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, observes that Kosovo

"remains widely corrupt, lawless, intolerant of both ethnic and political minorities, and a source of instability. The mission in Kosovo is proving even more daunting than the one in nearby Bosnia."

What Rohde recommends to fix the situation is

a firm [NATO/UN] commitment to a politically aggressive, properly funded, long-term mission that uses the rule of law and economic reform to affect the lives, livelihoods, safety, and, to the extent possible, views of average Albanians and Serbs. Changing the destructive aspects of ordinary people's attitudes is both the most pivotal and the most daunting task the NATO and U.N. missions face in Kosovo.

According to Rohde, one of the most dangerous legacies of Milosevic's wars is the memory of atrocities committed by rival ethnic groups. In light of the strong collectivist ethic that animates both the Albanian and Serb communities in Kosovo, both sides tend to believe that entire communities, rather than individuals, should be held responsible for atrocities.

Compared to casualty figures in Bosnia, however, the figures for Kosovo are relatively low. Estimates place the number of murdered Albanians at 7,000, with 1,000 Serbs killed as a result of revenge attacks during the NATO occuaption.

Alongside ethnic violence, crime threatens the nation building process as well. According to Rohde,

The desire for order among Albanians is growing. But donor nations have so far provided only half of a requested 4,700-member U.N. police force. And with a critical shortage of international prosecutors and judges, there is no effective court or prison system in Kosovo. According to frustrated NATO officials, suspects arrested for crimes, including the murder of Serbs, have been released after a night or less in jail. The cycle of impunity continues.

In the absence of sufficient funding, however, the prospect for improvement are not great. Thus, Rohde recommends

Last, and most important[ly], all NATO countries -- particularly in Europe -- must follow up their military effort with far larger economic commitments. As of mid-March, the U.N. mission had received only $190 million of the $415 million it requires. It has nearly run out of money twice.

So I guess the first lesson of Kosovo is obvious: Don't expect results if you don't commit resources.

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# Posted 8:01 PM by David Adesnik  

THE VISSER VIEW ON 2004: Retired blogger Michiel Visser writes in to remind us that there is one Democratic contender with a credible record on national security: Bob Graham. You can read about that record here in the Miami Herald.

What makes Graham an especially interesting candidate is that he is not just from Florida, but that he has won five consecutive statewide races there (2 for governor, 3 for the Senate). As Michiel points out, had Gore taken Clinton's advice and chosen Graham instead of Lieberman, a Democrat would almost definitely be occupying the White House right now. Will Graham become the dark horse winner of the Democratic primaries? (Drum roll, please...) Maybe! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:56 PM by David Adesnik  

DUMP MUSHARRAF: Following the OxBlog line, the WaPo says the US better tell Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf that if he doesn't stop supporting Al Qaeda and undermining Afghan sovereignty, he will become an American target in the war on terror. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:47 PM by David Adesnik  

ANOTHER NERVOUS LIBERAL HAWK: Mike McFaul is one of the few scholars, liberal or otherwise, to have made a compelling case on both moral and pragmatic grounds for establishing democracy promotion as the foundation of US foreign policy.

Perhaps unsurprisinlgy, McFaul shares the concerns of so many liberal hawks that the Bush administration is not truly committed to promoting democracy either in the Middle East or elsewhere.

While the election day costs of backpeddaling on democracy promotion are probably not all that high, if the President is serious about presiding over the liberation of the Middle East he will need hawks -- both liberal and conservative -- to make his vision a reality. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:32 PM by David Adesnik  

HUH? The WaPo reports that

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, has condemned both sides for their stance toward the shields. "If Iraq uses people as human shields, that is a war crime," said Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director. "But Secretary Rumsfeld only told half the story. . . . If the United States attacks targets that are shielded by civilians without demonstrating an overwhelming military necessity to do so, that would be a war crime too."

While, on ethical grounds, I believe that the US should not attack sites "protected" by human shields unless absolutely necessary, I don't understand how doing so could be a crime. If deploying human shields is a crime, then doesn't the government responsible for their deployment bear all legal (if not moral) responsibility for the shields' welfare? Perhaps some of you lawyers out there can help me out on this one. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:58 PM by David Adesnik  

BETRAYAL OF THE LIBERAL HAWKS: Peter Beinart's editorial in the current edition of the The New Republic speaks for all of us who believe that the United States' moral integrity and moral authority in the years to come will rest not on whether the Security Council supports a US-led invasion of Iraq, but on whether the United States commits itself fully to the building of a democratic Iraq.

Even though a democratic Iraq is still nothing more than a vision at the moment, commentators across the center swath of the blogosphere have already begun to demostrate a serious concern for its welfare. On the center left, Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias have begun to ponder their separation from the main stream of anti-war sentiment.

While both Kevin and Matt have mixed feelings about their support for invading Iraq, both recognize that they are willing to stand out from the crowd because of the hope that overthrowing Saddam Hussein will mark the beginning of a march toward freedom in the Middle East. At the same, they have little hope that the Bush Administration will rise far enough above partisan politics to commit to lasting change in Iraq.

Without expressing the same reservations about hewing toward the center, Josh Marshall has begun to subtly suggest that the President's half-hearted commitment to Afghanistan is an indication of what is in store for postwar Iraq. Unsurprisingly, he is no more optimistic on this count than Beinart.

On the right of center, Andrew Sullivan has declared that

the administration needs to be put on notice by its supporters as well as its opponents. Many of us signed onto this war not merely to protect the West from terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, but as an attempt to grasp the nettle of Arab autocracy. If we make no effort to foster democratic institutions, the rule of law and representative government in Iraq, then we will lose the peace as surely as we will have won the Iraq war. And losing that peace means losing the wider war on terror as well.

Without presuming to speak for my eloquent colleague, I think that Josh shares Andrew's lack of confidence in the administration. In our recent column in the WSJ Opinion Journal, Josh and I wrote that

We are deeply troubled by last week's news that the Bush Administration failed to request any money for reconstruction in Afghanistan in the 2003 budget, and we applaud Congress for stepping in to add the funds. If the administration ever turns away from postwar Iraq in a similar manner, OxDem will be there to remind it that its job has only just begun. Until the people of Iraq share the freedom that Americans cannot live without, America's mission must go on.

As it turns out, the BBC report that provoked our concern about the non-funding of Aghanistan may not be correct. But what is more important perhaps is that Josh and I immediately seized on the BBC's account as a credible indication of the President's lack of commitment.

For months now, we have been waiting for the administration's firm but vague rhetoric to become the foundation for concrete indications that there is a commitment to democratic reform. Just yesterday, Paul Wolfowitz "vowed that the administration would never back a 'junior Saddam Hussein.'"

But how much influence does Paul Wolfowitz have? According to Beinart,

The unhappy truth is that, if the Bush administration wins the war but betrays the peace, the political consequences for the president will be small. Once the fighting is over, the American press will turn its attention elsewhere, just as it has in post-Taliban Afghanistan. But the consequences for hawkish liberalism will be great. Having been played for fools, most liberal hawks will retreat to a deep skepticism of American power...[but] Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney won't lose sleep if Chevron and Crown Prince Abdullah run things in post-Saddam Baghdad rather than Kanan Makiya. Paul Wolfowitz will either shut up or resign.

I think that Peter is right about the costs being relatively low provided that criticism of the administration comes only from the left.

As the downfall of Trent Lott demonstrated, the most effective criticism comes from within. Thus, the first indication of the political costs of abandoning Iraq will be whether the Weekly Standard and National Review are willing to put the administration on notice, as Andrew advises. On this count, there is some hope. Both publications, especially the Standard, have demonstrated that their commitment to conservative principles is greater than their concern with the public standing of Republican politicians.

While criticism from the right may count for the most, bipartisan support for such persepctives will matter as well. To that end, Josh and I have founded OxDem. After all, a commitment to rebuilding Iraq rests not on conservative principles, but American ones. If the American public can be roused enough to prioritize Iraq after the war, there is no question what sort of postwar Iraq they will demand.

While I cannot make a compelling case for why the administration should actively commit itself to reconstruction on the grounds of self-interest alone, I will say that the faith of my generation in American power as a the bearer of American ideals is something the President ought to consider. As Beinart observes,

The '90s created a historic opening in the liberal psyche. And the Bush administration has exploited it. Its suggestion that war might not only free the people of Iraq but also set off a democratic chain reaction throughout the Middle East is tailor-made to appeal to liberals newly hopeful about American power. The national security argument for this war may be based on pessimism about the inevitable spread of weapons of mass destruction, but the political argument is based on post-1989 optimism about America's ability to bring liberal government to every corner of the globe.

That opening can be undone if the war on terror does not bring a better life to the people of the Middle East. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:40 PM by David Adesnik  

JACKSON DIEHL. As always, a must read. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:36 PM by David Adesnik  

NAPOLEON COMPLEX: What makes Robert Kagan stand out from other commentators on the right is that he never lets trite jargon get in the way of serious political analysis.

Rather than ranting about the Axis of Weasels or 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys', Kagan's column on France in today's WaPo recognizes that clashing ideas and ideologies are what drive the current conflict between France and the United States.

According to Kagan,

"Americans make a serious mistake if they believe France is simply engaged in petty churlishness. Chirac and de Villepin believe they, and ultimately they alone, are defending the European vision of world order."

Thus, the challenge facing the United States is not shame France into compliance with its reasonable demands vis-a-vis Iraq, but to demonstrate that it has a more compelling vision of order and justice. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:51 PM by David Adesnik  

BLOGCEST: While I'm not sure about the ethical implications of plugging Josh's work, I'm going to do it anyway. His column over at TechCentralStation is great, and you should read it if you haven't already. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:11 PM by David Adesnik  

FUZZY MATH: The Cardinal Collective reports on the SF Chronicle's efforts to figure out just how many people marched in last weekend's protests.

With the help of aerial photos, the anti-war Chronicle has estimated that there were only 65,000 marchers, not 200,000 as both the police and the march's organizers claimed. Score one for impartial reporting!

PS On the politics and history of crowd-counting, see this article by Noam Scheiber. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:57 PM by David Adesnik  

CLEAN AND GREEN: These days, it's hard for environmental and development issues to get much attention in the mainstream media. But our Oxford colleague Matt Prescott is running a blog that covers these issues in depth and with considerable sophistication.

A good post to start with is Matt's report on an informal meeting at the Oxford Union with Jim Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank. Keep up the good work, MP! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:19 PM by David Adesnik  

"IF I WERE PRESIDENT..." is the title of a series of essays on foreign policy by the top four Democratic contenders for the 2004 nomination. (I am much obliged to Greg, of the very worthy Greg's Opinion, for bringing the essays to my attention.)

The most important thing to note is that only one of the four -- John Edwards -- spoke of promoting democracy in the Middle East as a critical objective in the war on terror. Good for him.

In general, the essays reflected that bland sort of campaign trail rhetoric that one might have expected. All of the four criticize the administration for its handling of North Korea and/or Homeland Security without giving any reason to think that they could've handled the issues better.

There was also a lot of vague talk about cooperating more with allies and avoiding international isolation. And, of course, no mentions of the 19 European nations who declared their support for America's firm stand against Iraq.

All in all, there isn't much reason to think the Dems will overcome their image as the weaker party when it comes to national security. I wish it weren't so. Only serious debate between two credible parties can ensure an optimal US foreign policy. Besides, credible Democratic contenders might hire a certain OxBlogger to be one of their campaign's foreign policy consultants...

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# Posted 1:46 PM by David Adesnik  

FITTING IN: It seems that one of our American predecessors at Oxford tried considerably harder to fit in (politically speaking), than Josh and myself. He now regrets trying. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:00 PM by David Adesnik  

KAGAN VS. AYERS: In a post on Robert Kagan's recent interview with the NYT Magazine, I professed ignorance as to whether the NYTM always was so harsh on its subjects or just the conservatives.

Thanks to reader MG, you can now compare the Kagan interview with one of ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers. While the interview wasn't harsh, it wasn't soft either. More importantly, you don't need to ask tough questions to get Bill Ayers to say things that make Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan look like paragons of open-mindedness, moderation and logic.
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# Posted 9:52 PM by David Adesnik  

LE MONDE C'EST BON! Matt Yglesias takes advantage of his Francophonics to discover some interesting details about Hans Blix's ultimatum to Saddam.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Reader RF points out that Blix's published letter to the government of Iraq mandates the destruction of the missile production facilities what Matt is concerned about. Plus, Blix now seems to be demanding evidence to back up Iraq's claim that it has dismantled its WMD arsenal. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:41 PM by David Adesnik  

NOT JOSH CHAFETZ: Oxford student? Yale graduate? Former TNR staffer? It's Asher Price, of course. Check out his article on terrorist activity in the UK. Andrew Sullivan trashed it, but I think it's really good. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:20 PM by David Adesnik  

RUFFINI GOES HOLLYWOOD: What if a Republican became the star of the West Wing? This post is pure genius.

Also, check out Patrick's challenge to prevailing definitions of peace. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:12 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE ANTI-SEMITISM: It's not every day that a three-thousand year-old phenomenon gets referred to as "news". But news it is when the prominent Americans of both right and left have begun to make anti-Semitism acceptable once again.

But this is America. We are going to fight prejudice and we are going to win. Let the anti-Semites be warned.

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# Posted 8:35 PM by David Adesnik  

DEMS' AUTOPSY RESULTS: Noam Scheiber on how pollsters hijacked the 2002 campaign.

Plus, how Wes Clark is undermining his own reputation as the last Democratic hopeful with serious credibility on national security issues. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:19 PM by David Adesnik  

US INVADES THE PHILIPPINES: The WaPo takes the administration to task for dispatching US forces to fight Muslim guerrillas without providing any public justification for it -- a surprising choice considering that this is only the third time US ground forces have been ordered into combat since the Gulf War.

What really gets me about this decision is the fact that Republicans spent so much time complaining about how the Clinton administration stretched US forces too thin by deploying them to protect interests that were far from vital. Or as Condi put it, it isn't the job of the 82nd Airborne to walk kids to school.

Now while there may be good reasons to fight in the Philippines, it's hard to imagine that our objectives there as important as they are in Iraq, Afghanistan or a half dozen other Middle Eastern/Central Asian locales. Focus, people. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:04 PM by David Adesnik  

DICTATORS FOR PEACE: Having offended the 19 member states of New Europe, Jacques Chirac is now looking for other allies in his struggle to prevent a US invasion of Iraq.

Chirac's new friends consist of dozens of African heads of state, who have issued a joint statement declaring that "There is an alternative to war." While I am no expert on African politics, I have to imagine that the democratic credentials of Africa's heads of state don't exactly match those of New Europe.

And I'd also have to imagine that while there are alternatives to war, quite a few of Africa's heads of state chose war first when it came to solving their own problems. It looks like the only one who can save Chirac now is Hans Blix.

UPDATE: Instapundit links to Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe's praise of Chirac. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:49 PM by David Adesnik  

BLIX'S MOTIVES: A week ago, Blix was saying that the level of Saddam's cooperation with the inspectors was acceptable. Now he has told Iraq that it has to dismantle its outlawed missiles by March 1 or else.

What accounts for the change of heart? I think Blix has had just about enough of being attacked from all sides. He wants either to be left alone to finish the inspections the way he wants them done or to wash his hands of the whole matter and let the US armed forces take over.

There is, of course, the chance that either the Americans or the French have been tacitly supporting what seems like Blix's independent initiative. If the US knows that Saddam will refuse Blix's demands, then the deadline will end the diplomatic struggle at the UN. If the French know that Saddam will accept Blix's demands, then Blix's new credibility will force the US to accept an indefinite extension of the inspections.

Hold on to your seats... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:23 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE ENGAGEMENT: In an NYT op-ed, the Clinton administration's US Trade Rep argues that freeing Middle Eastern markets from crippling state restricitons will promote trade and, by extension peace.

While I am all for freer markets and more trade, no one should have any illusions about their bringing peace. Remember what trade theorists said in Europe before WWI? That's right: that the nations of Europe would never fight because it would disrupt trade. While one example does not an argument make, the fact is that trade has no record of preventing wars.

Clinton's Trade Rep also says that trade will promote growth, thus reducing poverty and, by extension, terrorism. How many times do we have to go over this? The "root causes" of terrorism are not poverty and deprivation. Bolivians haven't shown much of an interest in bombing the Pentagon, have they? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:42 PM by David Adesnik  

GRATUITIOUS SYMBOLISM: Must every NYT/WaPo article about foreign nations' attitudes towards the United States include references to the local McDonalds?

In today's profile of Polish attitudes toward the US, a Polish economist jokes that he is buying a McKielbasa (yes, there really is such a thing) because it symbolizes Polish-American cooperation.

Amusing enough. But the problem is that journalists have begun to treat local attitudes toward McDonalds as a proxy for local attitudes toward the US. Whenever rioters trash a McDonalds it is seen as a sign of anti-Americanism. But these rioters are the same people who patronized McDonalds before they trashed and the same people who will go back again once the franchise is rebuilt.

(You might be thinking, "Really? Isn't trashing one of your usual hangouts a little hypocritical?" Yes, it is. But I can personally verify that in Argentina, McDonalds was still extremely popular despite being victimized in riots the year before. In contrast, local banks still hadn't taken the armor plating off of their branch windows.)

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that focusing on McDonalds can be quite misleading. Take the Poland profile for example. People there seem to like McDonalds. But polls show that more than half are against a war with Iraq. Guess which fact gets more attention? In fact, there wasn't a single quote from an anti-war Pole.

(Yes, I am capable of complaining about media bias that favors the right. Though is suspect this was just incompetent reporting.)

Interestingly only 2000 protesters marched against the war in Warsaw, despite majority opposition. Now there's an interesting phenomenon. Maybe the NYT correspondent should explain that.

Btw, the NYT profile of East German attitudes toward the US is also a striking example of unbalanced journalism, this time in the usual leftward direction. It seems East Germans hold the US responsible for their impoverishment (relative to West Germans, not Eastern Europeans) but give the US no credit for holding off the Soviet threat or supporting reunification.

A more perceptive reporter might've wondered whether it is in East Germans' self-interest to oppose the war. Unlike the EU applicants to their east, the East Germans already enjoy the benefits of memberships, in addition to the massive subsidies the West Germans have poured in since reunification. If Germany and France can prevent the US from invading Iraq, thus reinforcing their dominance within the EU, that will directly benefit the East Germans.

Looking at domestic politics, the East Germans also have a strong interest in pulling Germany to the left, since so many of them support the Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS, the successor to the East German Communist Party. A successful invasion might pull German politics to the right, making it harder for the PDS to form coalition governments at the state level, let alone the national one.

And here's one more reason to think that East German attitudes on the war reflect less than high-minded pacifism. Surprisingly enough, it's a reason I pulled from today's NYT, so some editor should have noticed what was going on. Anyway, it seems that Germany's high-cost/high-regulation markets are of much less interest to foreign investors than low-cost/low-regulation Eastern European markets. Stronger Franco-German control of the EU means less of a threat from freer markets in Eastern Europe.

(Conversely, Poles' lack of interest in marching despite their anti-war prefences may reflect an interesting in keeping foreign investment flowing.)

Finally, I can testify from personal experience that McDonalds is quite popular in East Germany. Thus the NYT would be wise to remember that there always those willing to bite the hand that feeds them. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:26 PM by David Adesnik  

DUKAKIS IN A TANK: Josh Marshall comments on the lack of any Democratic politicians with credibility on national security issues. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:11 PM by David Adesnik  

RELUCTANT HAWK: Kevin Drum compiles a long list of administration missteps in preparing for war.

If you click on Kevin's links, though, you'll see that what he's worrying about is mostly a set of bad ideas that are floating around Washington but don't seem to have all that much of a chance of becoming official policy. Still, it's worth reading about all these bad ideas, because:

a) some of them will make it further up the policy ladder and have to be shot down.

b) anti-war activists will use them as evidence that the US has bad intentions for postwar Iraq.

Remember, knowing is half the battle! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:57 PM by David Adesnik  

HOMELAND INSECURITY: A pair of former NSC officials explain how Al Qaeda might launch its next attack -- and what we can do about it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:40 PM by David Adesnik  

FLORIDA PALESTINIANS arrested for supporting terror attacks in Israel.

Take a look at the brief bios of the men arrested. Educated men. University lecturers. Poverty is not the problem. The problem is hate. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:31 PM by David Adesnik  

INSTAPUNDIT EXPLAINS BLOGGING to the British media. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:27 PM by David Adesnik  

CHIRAC AND A HARD PLACE: New Europe responds to French EUnilateralism.

(And the German opposition weighs in as well.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:51 AM by David Adesnik  

LAUGH 'TIL YOU CRY: Video from last Saturday's protest in New York. Josh actually posted this link a couple days ago, but I didn't click on it because I had no idea how outrageous it was. Now I know.

PS Quick Time and broadband required. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:32 PM by David Adesnik  

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Compare the following opinion columns by Iraqi National Congress leaders Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya. Chalabi's is from the WSJ, Makiya's from the Guardian. (Also note the Guardian's fawning interview with Makiya).

The first thing you will notice about the two columns -- both critical of the US plan for a military government in postwar Iraq -- is how much softer Chalabi's tone is. Sensibly, Chalabi observes that

For Iraq to rejoin the international community under a democratic system, it is essential to end the Baathist control over all aspects of politics and civil society. Iraq needs a comprehensive program of de-Baathification even more extensive than the de-Nazification effort in Germany after World War II. You cannot cut off the viper's head and leave the body festering. Unfortunately, the proposed US plan will do just that if it does not dismantle the Baathist structures.

Chalabi's harshest criticism of the US plan is that it would "ultimately leave important decisions about the future of Iraq in the hands of either foreign occupiers or Saddam's officials."

In contrast, Makiya writes that the American plan's

driving force is appeasement of the existing bankrupt Arab order, and ultimately the retention under a different guise of the repressive institutions of the Baath and the army.

This difference in tone reflects the fact that: a) Makiya has no official position in the INC and can thus say things that Chalabi can't; and b) Chalabi dares not antagonize the Wall Street Journal and its readers with anti-American tirades like Makiya's, since it is the only leading American newspaper whose editors openly support the INC.

But the real question here is why the journalistic standard bearers of the British left and American right have adopted identical positions on how to run postwar Iraq. The answer to this riddle can be found in the following quote from Makiya's column:

The plan is the brainchild of the would-be coup-makers of the CIA and their allies in the Department of State, who now wish to achieve through direct American control over the people of Iraq what they so dismally failed to achieve on the ground since 1991.

Now, as any good conspiracy theorist knows, the CIA stopped directing coups in the 1970s. With Langley out of action, its responsibilities fell not to the State Department, but rather to the Pentagon.

Surely, you ask, a professor of Middle Eastern studies such as Makiya must know this? Of course he does. But Makiya and Chalabi also know that it is the Pentagon which has waged bureaucratic war against the State Deparment on the INC's behalf.

In a classic irony of the post-Vietnam era, America's generals want to hand over responsibility for their mission to Iraqi civilians while the State Department insists that the US armed forces govern Iraq in the aftermath of an invasion.

Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has taken the side of the Pentagon and decided to support the INC. The Guardian, on the other hand, has gleefully taken advantage of the opportunity to publish anti-American invective from a nominal American ally such as Makiya. Presumably, the Guardian's editors have no idea that they have become the unwitting implements of a Pentagon conspiracy.

Having cut through the strange politics of the INC's coverage, we come to the more practical question of whether the United States should support the INC. The answer is no.
The State Department recognizes -- correctly -- that the INC has failed to demonstrate that it can function as a unified whole, rather than as a collection of egos and factions. Nor has the INC shown that it has a realistic sense of how to construct a democratic state.

In addition, State recognizes that the INC has only limited support in Iraq itself, as a result of its long-term exiles tenuous connections to the current population. Moreover, neither the INC nor the other exile organizations effectively represent either the Kurds of northern Iraq or the Shi'ites of the south. As such, the INC's constant insistence that it should head a transitional postwar government would be a much greater affromt to the ideal of democracy than would a US military occupation.

With the US military in charge, Iraqis of all ethnic, religious and political backgrounds can be sure that those with the final word in Baghdad will play by the rules and not favor any particular faction. Only in such an environment can democracy flourish.

Update: Read Overspill's insightful comments on Chalabi's column. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:53 PM by David Adesnik  

COVERT REACTION: Is the administration getting ready to double cross the Kurds? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:40 PM by David Adesnik  

2+2=5? Is there such a thing as a NYT math correspondent? If so, the foreign affairs desk needs some tutoring. In an article on anti-Americanism, Jane Perlez reports that

As the possibility of war against Iraq rises, especially a war that the United States may fight virtually alone, so does anti-Americanism in the streets, newspapers and cafes of foreign cities.

Now as far as I can tell, there is a significant difference between fighting alone and fighting with 19 European allies.

But then again, perhaps I just don't understand the new math, which goes something like this: Give that France = 8 allies, Germany = 8 allies, and Belgium = 3 allies, the total number of US allies equals 19-8-8-3 = 0. Amazing. It's the first mathematical proof of unilateralism!

Also worth noting is the same article's absurd report on anti-Americanism in Pakistan, which it attributes to our opposition to Saddam, support of Israel, and victory over the Taliban. Not once does the article suggest that the real cause of Pakistanit resentment is American support for dicator Pervez Musharraf. But it seems that if the Times can figure out how to hold either American or Israeli militarism responsible for something, all other causes are demoted to being footnotes. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:24 PM by David Adesnik  

NYT RETRACTS HEADLINE: Yesterday I pointed out the absurdity of the NYT headline: "Israelis Arrest 3 Women in a Joke Gone Wrong."

If you follow the link today, you get to the same story, except for the headline, which now reads: "Woman Offers Details of Israeli Detention Methods". Oh and the number of unnamed dead Palestinians in the add-on below is up to eleven. Glad to see the Times still has its priorities straight. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# 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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