# Posted 10:35 PM by David Adesnik  

"IRAQI PARALLELS TO THE INTIFADA are now complete," according to Kos. Foolish as that statment sounds, I have to admit that I immediately thought of the West Bank and Gaza when reading about the death of a dozen or more civilians during a protest march in Iraq that ended in a firefight between US forces and Sunni gunmen.

Coverage of the incident had all the hallmarks of dispatches from the West Bank and Gaza. The soldiers tell a plausible story but cannot verify it. Friends and relatives of the victims tell a slightly less plausible story interspersed with absurd anti-American remarks), but one that will immediately be believed by those looking for an excuse to resent the occupation forces.

But for the moment, it's important to keep things in perspective. One tragic incident does not an intifada make. Moreover, there are encouraging signs of US-Iraqi cooperation.

But what I would really like to see is a thorough investigation of the shooting at Fallujah. What makes similar incidents in Palestinian areas so maddening is that one hears the same story from both sides over and over again without ever finding out who was right and who was wrong. Now, I generally believe what the Israelis have to say about such incidents, given that Israelihas a powerful opposition press as well as impressive human rights organizations, whereas as the PA has neither. But such arguments tend not to persuade the skeptics.

What the US military needs to do is establish a relationship with the Iraqi public based on total candor. Hatred makes that sort of relationship impossible in the West Bank and Gaza. But the interest of Iraq and the United States are similar enough to make honesty work. While neither the Bush administration nor the US military has a great record on this sort of thing, I think that fear of another intifada may be enough to give the upper hand to common sense. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:15 PM by David Adesnik  

JOHN KERRY, HYPOCRITE: I am still in touch with my inner dove. So today, I'm going to defend Howard Dean, who told Time.com that

"We have to take a different approach [to diplomacy]. We won't always have the strongest military."

No, I'm not going to defend the actual content of his remarks. But I won't criticize it either, since what Dean offered up is nothing more than a vague cliche that implies his support for a more multilateralist foreign policy.

What I am going to do is defend Gov. Dean from the Kerry campaign's offensive suggestion that Dean's comment

"raises serious questions about his capacity to serve as commander in chief...No serious candidate for the presidency has ever before suggested that he would compromise or tolerate an erosion of America's military supremacy."

As Will Saletan points out, Kerry himself used to talk about the inevitability of China's growth to superpower status back in the mid-1990s. So I guess being a "serious candidate" requires a short memory.

But let's say Kerry had said no such thing. Attacking Dean's competence as commander in chief is the stuff of gutter politics. I may strongly criticize Dean, but I don't suggest that his views on military spending make him unfit for office or indicate that he doesn't have America's best interests at heart.

But what makes the Kerry campaign's remarks so disgusting is that, just a few weeks ago, Kerry harshly criticized Republicans for attacking his patriotism after Kerry called for "regime change" in the United States.

While I thought Kerry should have taken back his rather stupid remark, Josh Marshall defended him on the grounds that

"there is only one way to deal with [Republican] bullies: you must fight back against them with at least the ferocity and intensity that they use against you."

But as this most recent attack shows, fighting back with that sort of ferocity just leads to character assassination and hypocrisy.

Kos argues that the Democrats can't start throwing mud at one another if they want to stand a chance in 2004. I agree. In contrast, ByWord is perversely proud of Kerry (his man in 2004) because Kerry is

aggressive and smart - he picks the fights he wants, and then goes out and starts them...

He's playing the Democratic Primary game on a different level than anyone else in it. It really is a pleasure to watch him work.

While I'm not naive enough to say that fighting dirty doesn't work, I think that when one's hypocrisy is as transparent as John Kerry's, it's hard to go all that far in presidential politics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:01 PM by David Adesnik  

CRY FOR ARGENTINA, DAMMIT! Leading the pack after the first round of Sunday's presidential election is former Argentine President Carlos Menem. A victory for Menem in the second round would be a tragedy of historic proportions. He is a corrupt and megalomaniacal charlatan.

Discosure: I am not a neutral observer of Argentine politics. As I've mentioned before, I spent the past summer as an intern in the Argentine Senate, working for Rodolfo Terragno, one of the few men committed to honest politics in a den of thieves.

Thankfully, there is a good chance that Menem won't win. His negative ratings have been in the 60s or higher for the past fifteen months. The WaPo notes that Menem's opponent, Gov. Nestor Kirchner of Santa Cruz, "has a reputation for running a clean government."

With any luck, the Post will do a little more research on Kirchner before the final balloting next month. Having a reputation for clean government in Argentina is like having a reputation for chastity in a brothel. It's all relative. While Kirchner doesn't seem to have authored the sort of billion dollar scams that earned Menem his reputation, people I talked to in Buenos Aires observed that Kirchner seems to share the difficulty of most Argentine provincial governors in distinguishing between the provincial budget and his personal allowance.

If there is hope for Argentina, it is that its citizens are slowly beginning to recognize that widespread corruption is the primary cause of their suffering. However, they must learn to criticize not only their politicians but also themselves. As a very perceptive friend of mine in the Senate observed, the politicians are of the people, and the politicians will only change when the people change.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:49 PM by Patrick Belton  

IF WE START GETTING INSANE NUMBERS OF HITS...well, I'd be surprised, but nonetheless OxBlog is now proudly Google's first result for "aesthetic neo-cons' nudity."

Note to Entertainment Weekly: if you're still looking for a cover theme for next week..... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:40 AM by Patrick Belton  

NO MORE BOWING and curtseying to the Royal Box by players at Wimbledon's Centre Court (except for the rare occasions royals are actually present). Seems a bit sad, actually, somehow. One of the more important roles of the monarchy and the traditions that surround it seems simply to be to make the country more aesthetic- this along with, and instrumental to, its functions in establishing continuity with Britain's national past, and providing a ceremonial emblem of British statehood who is above politics. Thus it is paradigmatic of Bagehot's "dignified" parts of the state - existing to excite the devotion and loyalty of the people, rather than actually to govern (this latter being the work generally of the Commons - the constitution's "efficient" part). In fact, go read Bagehot's The English Constitution here whenever you have a free evening - his arguments are lively and his style extraordinarily memorable. (Although of course I defer to Josh on constitutional book recs...)

In other sports news (and betcha didn't know neo-cons did sports commentary, eh?), some Iraqis in Najaf utterly decimated a platoon of marines: in soccer, where they defeated a side of combat-boot-clad marines by a score of 7-0. But in true Arab fashion, the Najaf Poets and their supporters were gracious hosts: "They were cheering for the Iraqi side, but they were also rooting for us, because we were getting beaten pretty bad," Major Mark DeVito told Reuters. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:07 AM by Patrick Belton  

MEMRI posts an excellent part one of a two-part political profile of new PA Prime Minister Abu Mazen. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:08 AM by David Adesnik  

THIS WEEK'S SHI'ITE MEME: Via Daniel Drezner. For last week's meme, click here. For OxBlog's comments on last week's meme (which anticipate this week's meme), click here. Don't worry if all those pronouns throw you for a loop. Just read the posts. You'll get it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:13 PM by David Adesnik  

IN TOUCH WITH MY INNER DOVE: Go figure. Tom Friedman writes one of his most hawkish columns to date, but I'm going to attack it from the left. I actually like most of what Friedman said. But there is one point I have to disagree with. Friedman writes that:

As far as I'm concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull [of a political prisoner], and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me.

Yes and no. If that skull is enough, why didn't a single advocate of war justify it on humanitarian grounds before it happened? Even OxDem's own Josh Chafetz argued that

Democratization itself cannot be enough to justify military action...But I maintain that democracy must always be the outcome of military action, even if it is not the cause. So what, then, is the justification for using force in Iraq? Simply put, it is security.

I agreed with Josh then and I agree with Josh now. Both of us have long believed that the case for humanitarian intervention in Iraq is even stronger than it was in Kosovo. Both of us knew that should Saddam fall, apalling evidence of his brutality would come to light.

But neither the President nor any of his principal advisers ever sought to justify the war on humanitarian grounds. The one context in which the humanitarian issue was raised was in response to anti-war protesters' irresponsible assertion that a war against Saddam would result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. As well he should have, Tony Blair shot back that the brutality of an invasion would pale in comparison to the brutality that the people of Iraq have suffered under Saddam. Yet the Prime Minister did not go on to argue that Saddam's brutality, by itself, justified an invasion.

This apparent contradiction within both Blair's logic and my own illustrates the importance of defining "justification" before asking if it has been found. On the one hand, a justification exists for all those acts that are inherently just. Thus, by virtue of being just, the liberation of Iraq was justified. Yet such a definition of justification fails to grapple with the importance of one's intentions.

In other words, if someone does the right thing for the wrong reason, are they justified? Even without providing a general answer to that question, I think one can apply it to the invasion of Iraq. If, after consulting all the relevant evidence, the President had good reason to believe that Saddam possessed WMD, then it is hard to condemn him for ordering the nation to war even if he turned out to be wrong.

Still, it would be fair for critics of the war -- and even moreso, its supporters -- to distrust the President from now on, given his constant insistence, without reservation, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the case for preemptive war against WMD-armed adversaries would suffer irreparably if the United States turns out to have been wrong about Iraq.

In fact, there is reason to believe that the United States' credibility will be damaged for years to come if it turns out to have been wrong about Iraq. Even on the homefront, voters will wonder whether the government knows what it is talking about when it comes to foreign affairs.

In such a climate of distrust, it will be very hard to either fight the war on terror or achieve any other important objective. If that is the price of not finding Saddam's weapons, then it becomes much harder to say that the war was justified.

Yet considered in isolation, one would still have to say that the war was right. When it comes to justification, one's answer is often a matter of context. There is no question that we should celebrate the liberation of Iraq. But that may be not enough to make it justified.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:00 PM by Patrick Belton  

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Strictly speaking, talking to the National Enquirer or others of like ilk, in and of itself, is neither illegal nor unethical. Rather, it is akin to drinking water out of a toilet bowl -- dumb, distasteful and, when observed, embarrassing." Salt Lake City Tribune Editor James Shelledy, in a letter to readers apologizing for the fact that two of his staff had dealt with the Enquirer on an article embarrassing to the family of kidnapped teenager Elizabeth Smart (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:04 PM by Patrick Belton  

JUST WHEN I GO AND PRAISE the (wonderful) D.C. International Film Festival....

...which remains an absolutely beautiful, incredible gift to the city's residents and visitors - last night I went down with a lovely Kuwaiti friend and saw a film entitled Guerreros set in Kosovo, which struck me as a Spanish version of Black Hawk Down, centered around bureaucratic cowardice and the disintegration of a military mission into chaotic tragedy.

However, of course then the French would have to go and enter a pornographic film for their entry. I mean, come on: "Marie-Jo and her two loves"? Geesh.... I ask, have you people no shame?

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:35 PM by Patrick Belton  

PATRICK'S FAVORITE HEADLINES OF THE DAY: Brought to you by the OxBlog Information Minister (motto: "where knowledge is power....and I have fairly negligible amounts of either")

via CNN: "Van Gogh, Picasso art found behind public toilet." (Christ, can't they appreciate art in Europe?)

via WashPost: "All-Reality TV Channel Planned" (Nooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!! When are they going to start paying actors again?)

again via WashPost:"Boy Makes Waves in Girls' Lacrosse" (yes, yet another vicious instance of cruel sex discrimination yields....)

and via CS Monitor: In Greece, 'I want to know' means 'I care'. (Incidentally, second graf reveals Greek-American J. Edgar Hoover cared a great deal for most prominent Americans and civil rights leaders during his tenure as FBI chief....) (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:00 PM by Patrick Belton  

AXIS OF EVIL, PART "TOO"?: More on Franco-Saddam and Russo-Saddam cooperation is emerging from the remnants of the bombed-out Mukhabarat headquarters. (Regarding the initial nature of all of these reports as they come in, see Josh's excellent caveat above.....)

The British press is reporting that documents being discovered in Baghdad indicate Moscow provided Saddam with lists of assassins available for "hits" in the West. Moscow also provided Saddam with intelligence, it now turns out, on conversations between PM Blair and other Western leaders. In other stories over the weekend, it's also emerging from Iraqi intelligence files that the French foreign ministry kept Saddam informed about every development in American planning to which they had access. (We've covered Russo-Saddam cooperation before here, and Franco-Saddam cooperation recently here.)

The U.S. has long and appropriately adopted a strategy of carrots and sticks in its sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive relationship with Russia. Fortunately, the U.S. is showing that it will now also respond to France's active alignment with Iraq against the US and UK with the appropriate sticks, and later with carrots as they are earned. As the NYT reports, a White House official told a visiting French official "I have instructions to tell you that our relations have been degraded." And administration officials have indicated their intent to sideline France within NATO and at international conferences.

This response of measured anger is appropriate. As enjoyable as it can regrettably be to bash the government of France when its actions contravene all of the decent norms of mankind, we can never take joy in the treachery of an ally, especially when it is of this magnitude. The utter and complete degradation of the Franco-American alliance, initiated by France, should be recognized by the US by its downgrading of all political (if legal are impracticable) expressions of that alliance - and then restoring these as soon as they are earned. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

WOO-HOO!!!! My love, I'm extraordinarily proud of you. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:12 AM by David Adesnik  

SOMEONE NAMED BELTON has a fantastic op-ed in today's WaPo. No, it isn't Patrick. It's his better half. Congratulations, Rachel! (And our condolences to Kevin Drum, who will now have to confront this brilliant argument against letting the UN have a leading role in postwar Iraq.)

And did I mention that Rachel is a founding member of OxDem? We're everywhere! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:13 AM by David Adesnik  

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: Nir Rosen, a friend of mine from junior high school is now a correspondent for Time Magazine in Baghdad. You can read his first article here.

Now, some of you might be thinking that this a good thing, since surely David's friends will take an even-handed approach to what is happening in Iraq. Dream on! My friend is one of the most hardcore leftists I have ever met. His mission in Baghdad is to document and expose the inner workings of American imperialism. This is the same guy who insisted that the United States bombed Kosovo in order to expand into the Balkan marketplace.

But whatever you think of Nir, you should know that he is a committed journalist and that nothing will stop him from getting the story. A few years back, he left a comfortable life in DC to head for the wilds of Bosnia. Then he crossed over into Serbia -- still under Milosevic at that time -- and was thrown in jail for meeting with the opposition. So expect some great stories from Baghdad.

Leaving politics aside for a moment, you should know that Nir is a good friend and genuinely nice person. And 99% of that time, that's more important than politics.






(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:14 PM by Patrick Belton  

FOR THOSE OF OUR READERS IN D.C.: If you haven't yet been to any of the films being shown in the International Film Festival....well, there's still plenty of time, and the selection of films from all over the world is absolutely stunning. It's running until May 4th, at various theatres around town and such other venues as the Freedom Embassy (um, I meant....). It's an amazing tribute to the city of Washington, D.C. to have assembled such a fine tribute to international film, and for the 17th consecutive year no less. I'm very impressed - kudos! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:21 PM by Patrick Belton  

BAGHDAD GOV'NUR FALLS: Nothing about this yet in the American press, but the Mexican and British presses are reporting that the US has taken into custody the self-proclaimed mayor of Baghdad, Mohammed Mohsen al-Zubaidi, for blocking US attempts at restoring basic services. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:08 PM by Patrick Belton  

NOW WE PAUSE FOR SOMETHING TRULY IMPORTANT: Namely, in my favorite city of New Orleans, it's the New Orleans Jazz Festival. See their website, named, as usual, www.nojazzfest.com - which stands for New Orleans Jazz Fest, and not the anti-jazz protest movement "NO Jazz Fest!"

All readers who are reading this within at the very least a 50-hour drive to N'Orleans should instantly call in sick for tomorrow, get in their cars, and drive without any further delay to Preservation Hall. The only exceptions we're willing to consider are for currently serving military - for y'all, mais cher go on down to the live webcast on N'Orleans channel WWOZ, and listen to it nonstop for the next several days. Although ya'll'd be missin' out on le gumbo, the oyster po'boys, and all the other delicious Louisiana cuisine. So drive on down and laissez les bontemps roulez....

Now back to your usual diet of politics and foreign affairs.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:04 PM by David Adesnik  

KISSING COUSINS: Turns out Santorum isn't the only one who thinks a right to privacy protects first cousins' right to marriage. (Thanks to JAT for the link.)

Plus, Andrew Sullivan is still going strong.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum responds to Josh's post on Democratic homophobia. Yes, it exists. But there is no getting around the fact that Democratic politicians are the only ones with a solid record of defending of gay rights. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:02 PM by Patrick Belton  

LITERARY INTERLUDE: Maureen McLane, a prize fellow at Harvard, writes a lovely review of poet Henri Cole's latest work, Middle Earth. In one memorable passage, McLane writes that in Cole's hands metaphor

becomes a dazzling figure for the self that is not identical to itself, the always self-estranged subject, the self amazed by its origins, the distances it has traveled, the desires it has fed, the death it always faces. ''My heart as innocent as Buddha's / . . . I eat sugar like a canary from a grown man's tongue / . . . I cling like a cicada to the latticework of memory.''

Go read the whole thing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:52 AM by David Adesnik  

SYRIA ISN'T NEXT: PeakTalk was way out in front of the headlines on this one. Last Sunday, Pieter pointed to a little-noticed memo from Donald Rumsfeld which called for regime change in Pyongyang. Pieter then predicted that the memo would put North Korea back in the headlines.

On Friday, we find out the North Koreans have admitted having nuclear weapons. On Saturday, we find out that China is embarrassed and concerned by the North Koreans' unexpected admission. And today we find out that a major interagency brawl over North Korea has been going on in Washington.

Way to go, Pieter!

While this sudden flurry of activity may come as somewhat of a surprise, it makes a lot of sense if you bring Rumsfeld's regime change memo into the picture. Knowing that Rumsfeld had his way with Iraq, the North Koreans saw his most recent regime change memo as the writing on the wall. Hoping to deter the Pentagon, Pyongyang insisted that it had nuclear weapons. And the rest is history.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:54 PM by Patrick Belton  

IRAQ, AL QAEDA, AND FRANCE: CNN just posts this story on documents being found in the headquarters of Saddam's intelligence service which demonstrate that there were meetings taking place between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda. (UPDATE 1: Transcripts of the documents have now been released.)

Also, the Sunday Times is reporting today that France provided Saddam with regular reports on French dealings with American officials - including contents of private transatlantic meetings and classified diplomatic cable traffic. (UPDATE 2: A day later, this link required registration; however, Fox News carried a report by the same Sunday Times correspondent, Matthew Campbell, on Monday.)

You've gotta hand it to France - now that there's no Soviet Union to provide leaked cables and highly classified military information to (as new records show they did during most of the Cold War), it's not easy finding a replacement. Now who will they turn to now that we've taken away their Tikriti playmate? Les pauvres. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:46 PM by Patrick Belton  

SCHASTLIVOI PASHKI to our Russian readership!

Today is Orthodox Easter, so Xristos Voskres to all of you who are celebrating it today - now go enjoy some some cirnaya paska and lamb. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:16 PM by Patrick Belton  

BEING DONE WITH PRESS CONFERENCES FOR THE DAY: Our friend Jeff Hauser poses one of his always provocative questions by pointing out this quote by Josh Marshall, which he presents as a challenge to neo-cons: (This is a quick response, incidentally, written over a hasty pb&j being quickly consumed in the leadup to a birthday party.)

"For intellectuals, however, there is always a temptation to take momentous, morally serious questions and make them out to be slightly more momentous and world-historical than they really are. Call it the Orwellian temptation. George Orwell not only epitomized what an intellectual can and should be. He has also become the symbol of the role the best intellectuals played in those critical mid-century years. Along the way, however, the image he cast--or rather his ghost, or his shade--has also become part of the pornography of intellectuals

First, I should be impelled by a certain requisite amount of humility to disclaim that I, personally, am not an intellectual - but rather, at absolute best, a pseudo-intellectual. However, I do know several intellectuals - for instance, my good friends and coauthors (one of whom also, incidentally, is a scholar-athlete).

Second, I think the answer lies in the recognizing that there are important turning points in intellectual and (more obviously) political history, and intellectuals write to attempt to bring these about, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. They do so by attempting to change the way in which we conceptualize the social and political universe in which we live - and in particular, the extent to which we're willing to view as acceptable particular dimensions of the status quo by which we're surrounded. We tend to categorize portions of the status quo as alternatively problematic or acceptable, and to different degrees, and important shifts in intellectual and the ideational aspects of political history often happen by prominent thinkers (Thomas Paine, Betty Friedan) shifting the ways in which we categorize particular aspects of the status quo - and the relative priority we give to aspects of the status quo we agree are unacceptable. For instance, it is historically largely up to writers and crafters of ideas to fashion competing arguments about which of these are acceptable, or, conversely, problematic - transitions from religiosity to secularism in liberal democracies (less so in the U.S.); the lack of democracy and respect for individual political rights in much of the developing world; or the legal-political protections given to labor migrants across particular international boundaries, such as Mexican nationals laboring in the United States, or Europeans within the Schengen area.

What a Kissingerian realist may claim is acceptable - a lack of democracy in large regions of the world in the service of stability, prioritizing with Goethe order over justice - a neo-con may not, believing that only a foreign policy of democracy promotion truly fulfills both the United States's ethical ideals and secures its long-term security. And changing our categorizations of acceptability versus unacceptability (a postmodernist would have written something along the hideous lines of "un/acceptability" - but, then again, I could live with that since it's on second glance a rather nice disparagement of the UN), in this case about the acceptability of a lack of democracy remaining in large portions of the world, generally can't be done without making strong cases. To impute a questionable "pornographic" or "Orwellian" label to neo-cons for attempting to make what's actually a quite large change in our way of viewing the rest of the world seems to me, somehow, unwarranted. I grant that it would be irresponsible to treat minor political decisions as though the future of the world somehow hung in the balance on its outcome, but conversely, minor political decisions are generally the linchpins for broader pervasive changes in the political moment, when the latter occur (eg, the colonial response to the Stamp Act) - and rhetorical considerations aside, in this case the degree of weight being given to these issue does seem to me to be truly concomitant with the significance of the matter.

There's much more to be said, but friendship duties must temporarily prevail. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:57 PM by David Adesnik  

OUT OF THE DOGHOUSE: Kristof is back off of the unreadable list for now, thanks to yet another OxDem-friendly column as well as fairly reasonable mea culpa admitting that the doves -- himself included -- made extravagantly wrong claims about what might go wrong in the event of war. (Actually, his second mea culpa in the past six months.)

I think I'm going to have to fall back on my original diagnosis of Kristof as a columnist with split-personality disorder. Insightful one day, kneejerk liberal the next. Strangely enough, Kristof accounts for his own bad predictions by saying that they were the work of "[his] my body double while I was on vacation." I figure Dowd and Krugman have actually been writing the columns in question and submitting them as Kristof's work without him knowing about it. Remember, you heard it here first. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:53 PM by David Adesnik  

CHUTZPAH: Jordan's Foreign Minister says all the right things about how Arabs must launch their own indigenous movements for democratic reform. How unfortunate that King Abdallah II has spent the past few years destroying what is left of his father's reforms in order to consolidate his own personal dictatorship. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:41 PM by David Adesnik  

RUMSFELD VS. TEHERAN: From the NYT:

"A vocal minority clamoring to transform Iraq in Iran's image will not be permitted to do so," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "We will not allow the Iraqi people's democratic transition to be hijacked for ? by those who might wish to install another form of dictatorship."

Not bad for the SecDef. All I would've added is something about how only those who participate in the democratic process and win the support of the Iraqi people will have a right to say how Iraq is governed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:07 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT FOLLOWS is the transcript of a press conference held by OxBlog Information Minister Mopatrick Saeed Al-Belton on the subject of OxBlog Vice-President-For-Life David Adesnik's remarkable achievements in today's all-Britain karate tournament:

MSaB: Ladies and gentlemen of the press, thank you for coming this afternoon. As expected, I will begin today's briefing with the announcement of excellent news from the front. According to initial reports, David has won a tremendous victory in the first round of the kata event. Thus, I can confidently say that the black belts' ordeal of humiliation has already begun. Are there any questions?

Q: Yes, Mr. Al-Belton, I was wondering if you could let us know who David's opponent in the first round was.

A: I have no interest in embarassing the unfortunate individual who was humbled before David's might. Next?

Q: Mr. Minister, I've just received notice from a reporter embedded at the tournament that David apparently had no opponent in the first round. Could you explain?

A: There is nothing to explain. If the coward was afraid to even show himself in the ring, then let him bear the resultant shame.

Q: According to a confidential source at black belt headquarters, David received a bye in the first round because there were an odd number of participants in the tournament. Do you have any comment on this?

A: I have had enough of your impudence. Let's move on to more important things. We now have a report that in the second round of the kata event, David performed a mighty version of heian shodan.

Q: Having checked the rulebook, I'm fairly sure that this is an elimination round, so wouldn't you agree that the real question is not how well David did, but whether he did better than his opponent?

A: If that were the case, it was only because David wanted to take advantage of the overconfidence of his potential opponents by letting them think that he is not at his strongest.

Q: So basically, you've conceded that David was knocked out of the kata bracket immediately? What can you tell us about his performance in kumite?

A: Don't put words in my mouth. However, because I am gracious enough to share with you as much of the truth as possible, I will let you know about the kumite. It seems that in the kumite event, David has chosen to demonstrate his courage by not accepting a bye in the first round. So there. I have disproven your silly pig-dog notions about his victory in the kata event being gratuitous.

Q: The al-Karateka network has just broadcast a report that David was seen being smacked in the face. Can you verify this?

A: I have no evidence to back up this sort of malfeasant roguish claim. What I can say is that half of the match is over and that David is still bravely holding his own against the blackbelt forces.

Q: Al-Karateka is now reporting that David was hit by a reverse hook kick to the face, thus eliminating him from the tournament. Can you verify this?

A: Don't trust anything you hear from al-Karateka. Because of their slanderous nincompoopery, we have expelled all of their correspondents from OxBlog.

Q: Eyewitness accounts now confirm that David is crumpled on the floor and his face is a bloody mess. Isn't it about time you admit you have no idea what the hell you are talking about?

A: There are oceans of blood all around David! It is the blood of his hegemonistic black belt pig-dog enemies who have futilely sought to oust him from this tournament.

Q: Mr. Minister, why are you stuffing all of your papers into that attache case? And why is your finger on the trigger of your 9mm sidearm? Are you in a rush to get somewhere?

A: I have no more time for any of your knavish skullduggeries! This conference is over.

[OK. So I made up the part about being crumpled on the floor with my face a bloody mess. But the rest is all true. I swear! -ed.] (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:38 AM by Patrick Belton  

LIKE ALLEN DULLES, it will to her great credit be said of Baroness Park that she kept the secrets. Nonetheless, the former principal of Somerville College, Oxford, and humble, brave, dryly self-deprecating MI-6 officer - whose long quiet labor in the service of democracy and the interests of her nation was rewarded with a peerage - most likely still has some interesting vignettes she might share to those of you who care to trek up to her flat on Woodstock Road. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:53 AM by Daniel  

TAKE THAT, RICK. YOU AND YOUR PARTY. Dan Savage on Santorum and the G.O.P. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:46 PM by David Adesnik  

CONFIDENT OF VICTORY: This will be my last post for the night, because early tomorrow morning I will be heading off to Birmingham to participate in the KUGB's annual all-Britain karate tournament. Even though I do not have a record of success in such competition, this time things will be different.

The foundation of my triumph will be my opponents' assumption that I am a spent force. Expecting to meet with negligible resistance, they will soon find themselves caught in a quagmire.

My opponents' initial attacks -- designed to instill "shock and awe" -- will only demonstrate how impotent they are. Unable to recognize their own failure, my opponents will carry on with their conventional battle plan only to find themselves paralyzed by my unconventional strategies of resistance.

As the fight drags on, my opponents will find their own morale flagging because of their initial overconfidence. In contrast, I will find myself strengthened by the moral support of all of those other underrated fighters -- contemptuously referred to as "brown belts" -- who have decided to join the struggle against unipolar black belt hegemony.

For an official announcement of my victory, please visit this site again tomorrow, when OxBlog Information Minister Mopatrick Saeed Al-Belton will have exclusive results from the tournament. While you may be accustomed to visiting other sites for results, I am sure that by now you have had enough of the lies propagated by the mainstream sports media.

Until then... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:15 PM by David Adesnik  

COMMEMORATION: As OxBlog's Australian correspondent reminds me, April 25th marks the anniversary of the day in 1915 on which the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landed on the shores of Gallipoli. April 25th is now known as ANZAC Day, the day on which Australians commemorate both the tragic loss of life that followed the Gallipoli landing, as well as the sacrifices made by all Australian soldiers since that time. May they rest in peace. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:40 PM by Patrick Belton  

NUDITY, NUDITY, NUDITY: As is OxBlog's long tradition, this post actually is about nudity. More specifically, it's about Dixie Chicks, the relationship of art and politics, and some reflections on the politicized use of the body.

First of all, to begin with what I hope to be the quite obvious: any functioning democracy needs to create flourishing, broad spaces for conceivably quite brutal dissent, with bare-minimal (no pun) strictures imposed on dissenters (like, obviously, that they obey laws and don't become violent, threaten individual liberties, or give support to a foreign intelligence service: but these are, and should be, absolutely minimal strictures applying equally to all citizens regardless of their degree of support for the government in power). Strauss may have pointed out that Socrates and the city will perennially be at cross-purposes, but contemporary liberal democracy has taken the strong stand that the city must give a wide berth in the Forum to all those who would be the day's Socrates. Furthermore, this berth must not merely be legal and political, but also normative and moral: a polity which does not engage its dissenters in civic conversations runs the risk of fragmenting itself into poles which merely shout past each other, the greatest danger of our own republic. As Senator Fulbright put it (disclosure who paid for a large portion of my recent education, and whom I am therefore strongly disposed to think well of), dissent has become an article of faith in democracies. I support in the strongest terms possible performers' rights to criticize the President of the United States in their concerts - although frankly, it may detract from my aesthetic opinion of their art, as at least crassly-politicized art is generally less likely to be any good. And given the foreign venue of the Dixie Chicks' concert in which they criticized the U.S. President, there was something pandering about their comments. However, my response, and I hope yours, would not be to criticize the notion of artistic political protest, but rather to either (1) treat their opus on aesthetic grounds, or (2) to deal with the content of their political arguments, and not their propriety in making them.

We do a fair amount of the latter here, so I'd like to deal with the former for a moment - i.e., the aesthetic dimensions of politicized nudity, a frequent phenomenon in contemporary politicized art. Obviously, the Dixie Chicks' Entertainment Weekly cover had me thinking of Karen Finley, the famous "chocolate smeared woman" whom NEA opponents loved to attack. So I went back and read several interviews with Finley. Her work is confrontational, radical, includes copious amounts of profanity, and intentionally deals indelicately with controversial issues such as rape - and is, unquestionably, art. There's a complex structure of meaning and signification in her work, as clearly comes across in reading through several transcripts of her pieces. (I leave aside entirely for the moment the issue of whether she should receive public funding; frankly, I'm not sure what the role should be of politics, and, through it, popular aesthetic and other value judgments, in funding artists. Without having considered the issue much, I'm inclined to think that public funding for controversial artists represents neither a human right nor an abomination, but instead a public decision through complex layers of political process.) Now I'm not sure that the next time Karen Finley performs in Washington or in New Haven I'll necessarily go see her, but her work undoubtedly qualifies her as an artist - and, after all, I may even go see her in the end.

I'm not sure this is true for the Dixie Chicks, in their recent act of politicized nudity on the cover on Entertainment Weekly. In an attempt to seem profound and artistic, the band members had written on their bodies controversy-laden words like "Dixie Sluts" and "Traitors." The whole episode reminded me, more than anything else, of some of the exhibitionist displays I'd seen on various University of California campuses that attempted to legitimate themselves by pretending to be political, and thence, artistic and profound. Rather than artistic (and intentionally controversy-provoking) nudity like Karen Finley's adventures with chocolate, that of the Dixie Chicks seems rather more a combination of marketing stratagem with pretentious non-statement. After all, nudity is a wonderful way to recover popularity, since, first, people generally like or are at least well-disposed to it, and second, it doesn't force you to engage at all the arguments or opinions that you voiced that had made you unpopular. And writing the words "Dixie Sluts" on their bodies doesn't seem to engage their earlier debate at all, but rather seems only a diversionary tactic that seeks to divert ad hominem criticism of the president into issues of sexuality, and therefore to cover them (ironically) with the veneer of the more respectable feminist cause established by women such as Ms. Finley.

Politicized art is only generally, not necessarily, less valuable aesthetically: the tension seems to be more of an empirical than an essential matter, and it's easy to think of important and beautiful artistic works that have been both political and have endured as noteworthy aesthetic creations. Most of the spiritual repertory goes into this category; so does much folk music out of the labor protest genres, and jazz (such as many pieces by the recently-departed Nina Simone). A general pattern seems to be that the most memorable songs depict the particular in a way that gets at something universal. The duality is inescapable, since either one without the other becomes somewhat vapid and unsturdy. Thus when we hear the evocative words "Go down Moses, way down in Egypt-Land....Tell old Pharoah: Let my people go," we instantly know that they are simultaneously and powerfully about contemporary blacks, the ancient Hebrews, and sadness and the search for freedom as an inescapable part of the human condition. All would-be political artists of our day should take careful note. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

WINNER FOR THE "NEVER-BEFORE-SAID SENTENCE CONTEST": From one of our closest friends - "So there I was racing down the stairs in Saddam's palace at the ruins of ancient Babylon on Easter morning when I tripped on the marble and fainted into the arms of a Catholic priest." (true) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

LABORATORIES OF DEMOCRACY, sure, but state legislatures come up with really kooky ideas at times. To wit: a "scarlet letter" law in Florida under which, before giving a child up for adoption, mothers were required to publicize their sexual histories in great detail in newspaper ads. Not only did this odd idea also encompass rape victims and underage girls who had been victims of abuse - but the rallying cry for lawmakers in the bill's passage was Baby Emily, a Florida girl put up for adoption in 1992, but whose convicted rapist father contested her adoption. Injustice, sure.

A Florida appellate court struck down the law on Wednesday, the state's lawyers having refused to defend it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:24 PM by David Adesnik  

'I TOLD YOU SO' FROM THE LEFT: Kos smells blood and is beginning to smile at the though of Bush being impeached if we don't find any WMD. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:14 PM by David Adesnik  

LOOTING: Glenn Reynolds thinks that widespread criticism of American passivity during the chaos is unfair, given certain evidence that the looting may have been well-planned and hard to stop. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:00 PM by David Adesnik  

ADVICE FOR GARNER: Columnist David Broder is blasting Jay Garner for his imperial naivete. Admittedly, even I'm a bit uncomfortable with Garner's statement that

To get [the Iraqis] comfortable with self-government I don't think will take long...Once they're comfortable with it and they realize where they are and what they have, I think they'll take off. I have high hopes for this."

If Garner knew what was best -- both for himself and for the United States -- he would keep his opinions to himself. Especially after its embarrassing failure to predict how the invasion would turn out, the media is looking for an administration official whose naivete and hubris will render him or her vulnerable to humiliation.

Even for those journalists who are not interested taking the administration down a notch, the constant imperative to expose politicians' incompetence will ensure that every sign of things going wrong in Iraq will become a big story. If the occupation authorities insist that things are going well, every thing that goes wrong will become an even bigger story.

A considerable amount of academic literature suggests that journalists measure the significance of world events according to the expectations generated by the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department. This point has really been driven home to me during my research on the Reagan administration's policy on Central America . At this point, having read through five years of headlines, it is has become self-evident that the more a politicians denies that a problem exists, the more likely that any evidence of that problem's existence will become a front-page story.

Consider this example: In 1982, there were approximately 50 US soldiers working as instructors for the armed forces in El Salvador. According to their rules of engagement, these soldiers were permitted to carry sidearms, but not rifles. Such restrictions reflected the Reagan's administration's desire to demonstrate that the presence of 'advisors' was not going to result in an incremental commitment of the kind that (allegedly) led to the American involvement in Vietnam.

After CNN produced footage of US instructors carrying rifles, Reagan ordered an investigation of the incident, which of course made the front page. The next day, when the US Ambassador in El Salvador sent one of the officers home for disregarding his orders, it made the front page again.

The point here is that the newsworthiness of a given event often reflects journalists' expectations much more than it does the events significance. In light of the widespread fear that El Salvador would become another Vietnam, there was no chance that the presence of 50 advisers would grow into the presence of half a million soliders. But because of such fears, the rifle incident became an important one.

So, on the off chance that Gen. Garner or any other occupation officials are reading this post, I'm going to list a few guidelines that may help you avoid bad coverage:

1) Always talk about the complexity of the situation in you are facing. Journalists love nothing more than someone they can portray as having a black-and-white worldview.

2) Always talk about the importance of respecting and learning from foreign cultures. Journalists love nothing more than someone they can portray as an Ugly American.

3) Always talk about the local population's interest in dignity and autonomy. Journalists love nothing more than someone they can portary as an imperial proconsul.

4) Always talk about the United States' less-than-perfect record of promoting reform abroad. Journalists love nothing more than someone they can portray as an ignorant patriot.

5) Never remind journalists of their own mistakes. Journalists hates nothing more than someone who tells them how to do their job.

Just in case it wasn't self-evident, points one through five summarize the worldview that journalists developed in Vietnam and have carried with them ever since. While the original generation of war correspondents has mostly retired, its worldview has become that of the mainstream media establishment. You can't work against it, only around it. The only protection from it is success.

Gen. Garner, I wish you the best. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:23 PM by David Adesnik  

LIONS AND TIGERS AND SHI'ITES, OH MY! On Monday, the WaPo ran a front page headline that read "Officials Argue for Fast U.S. Exit From Iraq." On Wednesday, it ran a front page headline that read "U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites". Coincidence? I think not.

As one might expect, these stories reflect the input of anonymous "senior officials in the White House and Pentagon" (Mon.) and "Bush administration officials" (Wed). While I firmly support the practice of anonymous quotation, there are times when it becomes problematic. After all, wouldn't it be convenient for those who want the US out of Iraq as fast as possible to play up the intensity and unexpected nature of Shi'ite resentment?

To be fair, there are indications in the text of the WaPo articles that they do not quote the same officials. First of all, the identification of Monday's officials as "senior" is significant. Next comes the fact that the first quotation in the Wednesday article comes from a State Department official, not a White House or Pentagon man.

In addition, that same article observes that "Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy." Thanks to the passive voice, it's impossible to tell whether this sentence paraphrases the opinion of "some administration officials" or whether it is a semi-factual observation made by the article's authors. Either way, the firm anti-Chalabi spin on this point suggests that it also has its origins in the State Department.

The important thing, I think, is not to overplay Shi'ite antagonism to the American occupation. Today, the front page of the WaPo tells us that "Iraqi Shiites Grow Uneasy Over U.S. Occupation; Cleric Says Americans Must Leave". Take a closer look at the evidence, though, and you'll see that this story is just a reincarnation of journalists' refusal to believe that Iraqis appreciate their liberation.

According to the Post, an anti-occupation "statement by Abdul Aziz Hakim, one of a variety of clergy vying for power among Shiites in Iraq, was another sign of growing unease among Iraq's 60 percent Shiite majority over U.S. intentions." Strikingly, the WaPo's correspondent don't think to ask whether Hakim is playing up his anti-American stance because he is "vying for power". If memory serves, Middle Eastern politicians occasionally resort to disingenuous anti-Americanism in order to fire up emotions and deflect criticism of their other shortcomings.

In this case, Hakim has good reason to deflect attention from the fact (which the Post duly notes) that he is the brother of SCIRI's Teheran-based leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim. This is a classic of Middle Eastern politics: hide your own flawed nationalist credentials by attacking the United States. Thus, for the Post to call Hakim's words an indication of "growing unease" among Shi'ites is questionable to say the least.

Thankfully, US officials don't seem prone to rush to conclusions as fast as the media has. As Jay Garner said,

"I think the bulk of the Shia, the majority of the Shia, are very glad they are where they are right now...Two weeks ago they wouldn't have been able to demonstrate."

Exactly. There is every reason to believe that most Iraqi Shi'ites are greatful for their liberation. In fact, many indigenous Shi'ite clerics are open to working with the United States. What we have to watch out for are the ambitious men with friends in Teheran.

One important strategy for winning Shi'ite support has nothing do with religion. It has to do with reconstruction. According to the lede of another front page story in Wednesday's WaPo,

In a milestone of sorts, Baghdadis have begun shooting their automatic rifles in celebration rather than anger as electricity is gradually restored to one neighborhood after another in a darkened city noisy with generators.

If we move fast on the reconstruction front, Iraqis of all denominations will recognize that an American presence serves their own immediate interests, in the short-run and possibly over an extended period of time.

What's also important to recognize is that the United States shares a critical interest even with the most provocative Shi'ites leaders. We want to leave and they want us to leave. Clearly, there is reason to suspect that some Shi'ite leaders want the Americans out so that they can establish their own theocratic dictatorship. That is why, rather than getting defensive when the legitimacy of our presence is challenged, we ought to demand that all those who challenge it specify what they want to replace it with.

If the radical fundamentalists have to admit exactly what it is they are after, I expect they will lose considerable support. In order to make that happen, what the United States has to do is prevent the radicals from assuming the mantle of Iraqi nationalism. But if we don't get defensive and continually remind the people of Iraq that we want to leave as well, it shouldn't be all that hard.

Of course, the way to make clear that we are serious about leaving is not by having "senior administration officials" share their thoughts with WaPo reporters. That kind of diplomacy undercuts American authority by emboldening anti-American politicians without having an impact on Iraqi public opinion. What we need are clear statements from Jay Garner (which we seem to have) and, more importantly, from the President.

UPDATE: Kos misses the anti-Chalabi spin of Wednesday's Post article. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:12 PM by David Adesnik  

PILE ON! The WaPo blasts away at Santorum, with arguments that seem surprisingly familiar. Richard Cohen adds that:

In 2001, 1,393 hate crimes were committed against gay and bisexual Americans -- 14.3 percent of total hate crimes.

That's an important point, because we can't afford to forget that homophobia, just like racism, has real physical victims. Perhaps the most eloquent argument against Santorum's bigotry is simply this: Remember Matthew Shepard.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:14 PM by Patrick Belton  

BOLSHOI MOLODETS!!!!: Guess who's going to be giving the University of Minnesota's valedictory speech this spring? If you guessed OxBlog's friend David Simon, you're right on the money, even if it is in rubles. So a big shout out and bravina to our friend David!!! And the best thing is, next fall he and his good friend Heidi are both coming here to Oxford and my college, the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, courtesy of some fat dead Zimbabwean benefactor of the New World Order.

He and I made friends by the Coke machine at CFR two summers ago, and not only is he going to be president someday, he's a really sweet guy to boot. (I just had to go and embarass him in front of all his future IR MPhil classmates....) Congrats, David! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:50 PM by Patrick Belton  

SANTORUM WATCH REDUX, OR SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE: a CNN headline this morning reads: Polygamists angry at gay link.

I can't even bring myself to make a joke here. Sometimes real life does it for you. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

NEEDED A REMINDER THAT CUBA'S GOVERNMENT IS PRETTY DOWNRIGHT EVIL? Feeling tempted to tag along to one of the multiple peregrinations of Yale seniors to Cuba, because, heck, it's slightly illicit and the food and salsa are so darn good there? Then for homework, go and read this.

For those of you who are on a slim diet of clicks in the pre-summer run up (and for those you who aren't, then also check out this and this and this and...), the article (from this morning's WaPo) shows how pervasive the Cuban police state apparatus has become: Cuban domestic intelligence placed agents in the human rights community, and as friends and executive assistants to noted academics suspected of harboring reformist views, and as journalists posing as sympathetic to reformers. When after fifteen years' time, these agents then became presidents of leading human rights organizations (as did Odilia Collazo, Agent Tania to her handlers), confidantes and assistants to leading academics - with access to their files and email passwords (as did Aleida de las Mercedes Godinez, or Agent Vilma), or president of an independent journalists' association with friendships to key reporters (as did Nestor Baguer, Agent Octavio), the Cuban government was able to develop comprehensive information on the most intimate thoughts, musings, or emails of these journalists, human rights organization members, academics, etc. - with the goal of imprisoning the latter for two decades for "subversive activities" (as happened to 75 noble people earlier this month, including some of Cuba's best-known poets, journalists, human rights workers, and professors). Absolutely sickening - this regime is a blight on the hemisphere, and on the democratic aspirations of mankind.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:22 PM by David Adesnik  

VOLOKH ON FOODCRIME: "If meat is murder, then chicken is manslaughter, eggs are kidnapping, and milk is sexual harassment."
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:09 PM by Patrick Belton  

SUSPICIOUS: I just received a letter addressed to me and asking for a $25,000 contribution to the President's re-election campaign. (A year of law school, or dinner. Yeah, why not....)

What's interesting about this is that, not only am I not registered as a Republican, but having just moved into Washington, absolutely no one had my name or address. Being a bad citizen (and not that interested in politics...), I hadn't yet gotten around to registering to vote. And the WaPo and all of my magazine subscriptions (for the oh-so-curious and my stalkers: the Economist, NY and London Reviews of Books, and the New Yorker) are jointly in Rachel's and my name.

However, I had sent my resume to the National Security Council to apply for a position on its staff - even though my chances of getting a job there from a cold letter were between zero and none, given that this administration unlike its predecessor has drawn together an NSC staff generally composed of tenured faculty. However, being from an absurdly wealthy working-class southern family and having married into an equally wealthy dynasty which inhabits a log cabin in Alaska, I just had nothing better to do with those 37 cents. Neither Rachel nor any of my neighbors received the letter.

I'm therefore left, for want of a better explanation, with the conclusion that this administration is making a practice of adding people applying for positions in the administration (including such nominally nonpartisan bodies as the NSC staff) to the White House's political database of potential contributors.

Now, I support much if not most of what this administration has done in foreign policy. But mixing governing and re-elective databases, and sending letters asking for fairly massive donations to people who had applied for foreign policy positions in the administration seems, somehow, slightly crass if not downright unethical. I say this not from any ideological or partisan motivation for attacking the president, but simply from a strong remembrance from my time as a congressional staffer of the strong ethical firewall that had been erected between casework and campaign databases, and in general between government and campaign offices.

Too many more of these letters, and, and, I just might even get around to registering to vote in D.C.!!!! (New Haven, I found out, has kicked me off the rolls - fair enough, since I'm not dead yet.)

UPDATE: A number of readers, including some Republican staffers admirably concerned to make sure that the White House was in compliance with campaign finance laws, have asked me for more information about which precise fundraising push the letter was part of. Our Republican readers particularly wanted to ensure that all this didn't controvene somehow the legislated individual donor limits of $2,000 per campaign cycle.

Now my actual invitation hitched a ride to the Pentagon with Rachel this morning on the dashboard of my car, but I believe it was for this fundraiser - the House and Senate Republicans' presidential dinner on May 21. Dinner tickets are $2,500 each, and tables were the big-ticket item at $25,000 each.

I'm inclined to be fairly confident the organizers' lawyers were probably pretty fastidious on this point (this confidence in the wisdom of campaigns comes in spite of having served on the staff of many of them....), but I'd nevertheless be very interested if anyone could give me a bit more information on the point.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:42 PM by David Adesnik  

FINGERS CROSSED: Martin Kimel thinks that pointing out media bias plays a critical role in keeping journalists honest. I hope. [Martin's post is the first one for Monday, April 21st.] (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:26 PM by David Adesnik  

STILL TELLING'EM SO: The WSJ's editors are a little late with this one, but their list of absurd predictions is quite impressive. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:06 PM by David Adesnik  

MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY: This is a proud day for Josh, who has been the driving force behind OxBlog ever since it came into being one year ago today. With his razor-sharp logic, fierce commitment to principle and compelling written style, Josh has built OxBlog into a formidable institution. I am proud to be associated with it and profoundly grateful for the generosity Josh has shown by letting me a be a part of it. Happy Blogiversary! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:56 PM by Patrick Belton  

ACTUALLY, I had just been recovering from our massive blogiversary gala ... Thanks to David and Josh, yes, for a great first year, but most importantly for being kind enough to provide me with cover - even though some of you noticed that there was something ever so slightly Irish about the guy "photographed" below.....

More seriously, an ENORMOUS thanks and congratulations to Josh (i.e., OxBlogger 1.0) on your baby blog's one-year birthday!

And to OxBlog: many happy returns of the day! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:53 PM by David Adesnik  

SANTORUM DECORUM: CF writes in to say

I think that Sen. Santorum raises a valid point: if the U.S. Supreme Court finds a new "sexual privacy" right or other emanation under a penumbra that guarantees government non-interference in private sexual matters, how can we avoid applying that to consensual incest or adultery?...At worst, I think, you can accuse [Santorum] of being insufficiently supportive of the rights of gays to have private sexual freedom.

I agree with the first half of CF's argument. Once the Court extends the right to privacy to homosexuals, it will have to extend it to all other forms of consenting sex between adults. Now, since I don't really know anything about constitutional law, I suggest you go read Eugene Volokh's explanation of why this is so. Gene, of course, would like to see the right of privacy extended to all forms of consenting sex. (Gene writes as if he has no personal interest in the matter, but don't you ever wonder about him and Sasha being so close? ;) )

Now, regardless of the fact that Santorum is correct from a legal perspective, that doesn't mean he isn't a homophobe. Consider Santorum's statement (while answering the same quesiton in which he made his constitutional argument) that the constitutional right to privacy

destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

How, I ask, is sodomy "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family"? I know many loving gay parents who have raised wonderful children. Some are married. Some are not. But the important point is that parents' sexual practices have no apparent impact on their children. (And if you consider that state laws often define oral sex as sodomy, I'd have to imagine that the number of loving parents who practice sodomy must number in the millions.)

If Santorum were really worried about those things which "destory the basic unit of our society", he would spend his time worrying about spousal violence, child abuse and divorced parents who renege on child welfare payments. But for some reason, Santorum thinks that having less-than-traditional sexual preferences is a greater threat to one's children than beating them or refusing to buy them food and clothing. You know why? Santorum is a bigot.

Of course, you could have figured that out pretty easily from Santorum's strictly consitutional argument that

if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

Would anyone actually place homosexuality in the same context as incest and adultery if they weren't a bigot? If you or I were to argue against the existence of a right to privacy, we could draw on a wide array of valid arguments, none of which rest on immature fears about a right to privacy resulting in widespread incest or adultery.

Whatever the legal similarities between homosexuality, incest and adultery, the sociological differences are profound. And if one happens to accept a realist approach to the law -- as Jack Balkin recommends in this instance -- social behavior has significant legal ramifications. As Balkin points out, there was a time when Americans thought of pre-marital sex as no less offensive than homosexuality and would have felt comfortable with state regulation of pre-marital behavior. Today, of course, any such regulation would be struck down without a second thought.

As Balkin argues, the most persuasive explanation for the Court's changing attitude is that it accepts social norms as a legitimate source of constitutional interpretation. Thus, the real question isn't whether the protection of gay rights might provide a constitutional foundation for the protection of incest and adultery. The question is whether social acceptance of homosexuality will result in social acceptance of incest and adultery.

As Gene points out, adultery has already become so widespread that the prosecution of adulterers is now unheard of, even if there is no effort underway to legalize such behavior. Once again, if Santorum's real interest were protecting the family, he would be speaking out against the adulterers, not the homosexuals. If anything, Santorum should be arguing that adultery promotes homosexuality and not vice versa. But that kind of logic might undermine the Senator's mindless campaign against gay marriage.

So what about incest? Is there anyone out there who will take advantage of a Court ruling in favor of homosexuality to advance the cause of incest? [Insert West Virginia joke here.] As Dan Simon asks, why do Santorum's critics, OxBlog included,

find it outrageous and offensive that anyone would compare gay sex with (presumably consensual) polygamy, incest and adultery, because the latter are all.....uh, what? Icky and disgusting? Prohibited by the Bible? Just not done, you know, by Our Sort of People?

I admit, of course, that there is no rational case to be made against consensual polygamy, adultery or incest. If it turns out that all sorts of well-adjusted adult siblings (say, Gene and Sasha) have been hiding their love for one another until now, I might be willing to hear them out. But for the moment, incest tends to be associated with predatory and often violent behavior. Polygamy often entails abuse as well. And adultery is almost always associated with deception. Santorum knows that. If he thinks homosexuality belongs in the same category, then he is a bigot.

Now, the fact that Santorum has refused to apologize suggests that he really is a bigot. According to the Senator, "My comments should not be construed in any way as a statement on individual lifestyles." Especially not those lifestyles that "destory the basic unit of society," right? What a hypocrite.

No less absurd is Bill Frist's statement that "Rick is a consistent voice for inclusion and compassion in the Republican Party and in the Senate, and to suggest otherwise is just politics." Of course, the politics here are actually Frist's. He's not a bigot. But sure as hell isn't going to let the Republicans suffer the same sort of embarrassment they did because of Trent Lott.

At the same time, I don't really agree with Rep. Barney Frank's (D-MA) statment that "This kind of gay-bashing is perfectly acceptable in the Republican Party." Acceptable only in the sense that Bill Frist would rather defend Santorum than sacrifice him to Democratic critics such as John Kerry and Howard Dean. I have no doubt that most Republican politicians recognize the right of homosexuals to full and equal protection under the law, even if many of them harbor private doubts about its morality. What there is now is a struggle between those who want to leave the party's gay-bashing rhetoric behind and those embarrassing few like Santorum who just won't let go.

So enough of all this Santorum bashing. Let's remember the nice things he's said about homosexuals. For example:

"In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case might be."

Damn. And I was about to propose to Rover.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Andrew Sullivan is all over Santorum, both on his website and in Salon. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:35 PM by David Adesnik  

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS? Not exactly. Turns out the 82nd Airborne caught five Ba'ath terrorists and an Al Qaeda operative who had intended to bomb Shi'ite mosques in Karbala. Memo to Rumsfeld: Next time, deploy some of those guys from the 82nd around Paris' synagogues. (Via Instapundit) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:03 PM by David Adesnik  

REAGAN REDUX: While I happen to be reading Alexander Haig's memoirs as part of my research project on the Reagan era, his book is well worth reading for anyone interested in the making of American foreign policy. Above all, there are disturbing parallels between Haig's recollections of divisive debates over foreign policy within the Reagan cabinet and the divisions that have emerged in the current one.

In both cases, such divisions have been played out in the public sphere rather than behind closed doors. As CalPundit points out, the inconsistency of the administration's stated policy on Iraq has reached an unacceptable level.

Of course, such observations are hardly original. And I don't just mean that OxBlog has made the same point before. In December 2000, I was relaxing on the beach in Thailand with CM, an Army Ranger, now stationed at Fort Drum with the 10th Mountain Division. An obsessive reader, CM had his head buried in The Prince while I had my head buried in the sand. Metaphorically, that is.

At one point, CM read out a passage in which Machiavelli describes the situation of a prince who lacks sufficient knowledge of public affairs to personally direct the affairs of his kingdom. Machiavelli notes that such a prince ought to entrust all important decisions to a single adviser, since the presence of multiple advisers would result in arguments that such a prince lacks the ability to resolve.

Of course, CM noted that The Prince's advice stood in direct contrast to the stated position of the Bush campaign, which was that the President-elect would compensate for his deficient knowledge of foreign affairs by surrounding himself with a broad array of expert advisors.

This is not to that history has proven the Italian right and the Texan wrong. In fact, Bush's surprising success as a foreign policy President suggests that old Niccolo may not have the final say on affairs of state. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that the internal divisions reported in the press have constantly threatened the integrity of Bush's foreign policy.

While one might argue that this sort of public debate is an admirable model of open deliberation in a democratic context, I think that such an interpretation is simply not tenable in light of the fact that the President's advisors disagree over what the United States' policy is, rather than what it should be. At times, one might even use the term insubordination to describe certain individuals' response to presidential decisions.

While I am most definitely an optimist on certain counts, I don't expect the President to impose any sort of discipline on his subordinates any time soon. The Reagan precedent suggests that such divisions only become worse over time.

In certain instances, a lack of presidential oversight can have dramatic consequences. In Reagan's case, those consequences became known as Iran-Contra. Regardless of whether one considers the actions of Poindexter and North to have been criminal, I think is fair to say that the Reagan administration suffered extensive damage as a result of the President's public admission that he had no idea what his own National Security Advisor was doing.

(Note to Republicans: I hope you don't feel I'm picking on your favorite presidents. As everyone knows, Eisenhower and Nixon were in firm control of their cabinets, while Carter had to confront divisions similar to that of his successor.)

For the moment, I am fairly confident that President Bush has enough control of the Cabinet to ensure that there is no second Iran-Contra. But that doesn't mean that existing divisions are not damaging. Given that there are any number of American adversaries waiting to take advantage of unexpected developments in postwar Iraq, the President would be well advised to discourage such adventurism by demonstrating that his administration cannot be led astray from its stated objectives.

UPDATE: Dan Simon defends the Presidents' mangerial style, at least with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:00 PM by David Adesnik  

ARE THE NEO-CONS FRENCH? In his 1984 memoir, Alexander Haig, the one time Secretary of State to President Reagan, observed that the increasingly successful Republican party

has even attracted a class of intellectuals, called neoconservatives, who used to be liberal Democratic intellectuals and still sound like liberal Democratic intellectuals, as a Frenchman who learns English late in life will typically still sound like a Frenchman when he speaks our language. There are also some real conservatives in the party.

Keep that in mind next time you pick up a copy of The Weekly Standard. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:55 PM by Patrick Belton  

THANKFULLY, SENATOR SANTORUM is garnering some of the condemnation merited by his recent prejudiced remarks which have no place in the polity, and debase the chamber to which he belongs.

HOWEVER, as I remember the modus ponens from a mostly-forgotten class in logic, I now have the permission of one of the most conservative Republicans to do, basically, anything....

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

Clearly the antecedent clause holds (well, okay, more precisely...in 1996 the Court struck down an anti-gay amendment to the Colorado Constitution on equal protection principles, and is considered likely to reverse its 1986 5-4 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, since only three justices from that ruling remain on the Court), so therefore I (and I assume of course he meant me) now have the right to anything, including...hey, a doctorate from Oxford (and, gee, why not a junior professorship at Yale, just while we're at it) without doing any academic work these days more substantive than blogging. (Hey, wait...no, never mind.)

Of course, Santorum has no credibility whatsoever at the moment to speak about moral issues, so this is all fairly, err, academic. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:06 AM by Patrick Belton  

MANISCHEWITZ WATCH: On the seventh day of Pesach, my true love gave to me....dry, stale, stinking unleavened bread. Mmmm...let's try that again.

So at breakfast this morning, I noticed an extraordinarily skillful bit of marketing by Mr. Manischewitz. I admit - I was in desperate search of reading material, since Berkowitz's virtue book was in hiding somewhere underneath my bed with volume two of We the People - it's a really broad church down there. So I was reduced to reading a cardboard box. Anyway, I'm now the proud owner of a 50 cent coupon for any "Guiltless Gourmet" product. Splendid marketing - by labelling their chicken soup as blissfully guiltless, you're automatically made to feel vaguely guilty about eating all other brands. For instance, at the moment I'm sipping vaguely-guilty coffee and contemplating a moderately-guilty protein shake in an hour or so. That's remarkably skillfully done.

(Okay, I know, it's actually Rabbi Manischewitz - as I read on their history page. But I felt better dissing on a faceless, abstract, corporate "Mr." Manischewitz than a real-life Cincinnatian peddler and shochet from the nineteenth century. And yes, by now you've probably figured out that it was my intention through panning Manischewitz to write them a paean. So there.)

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:24 AM by Patrick Belton  

SHOTS ACROSS THE BOW OF STATE: Newt Gingrich, who currently serves on the Defense Policy Board, will apparently make a speech this morning at AEI to promote State Department reform. (See this story from the morning's WaPo.)

In the past, I've considered criticisms of the State Department here, because like any human institution, the State Department is inherently in continual need of reform. I simply happen, as a foreign policy hand, to know State best. (Incidentally, the idea of institutional sin, which received a compelling formulation in the anthropological assumptions of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, has been very influential in forming the intellectual worldview of most post-WWII foreign policy realists, from Kennan and Morgenthau to Kissinger).

What's needed, however, are creative ideas about how to reform and revive a human institution that's inescapably in need of continual reform, rather than merely another inning in the traditional Republican pastime of State-bashing. Hopefully the former Speaker will begin a process that will produce such needed creative ideas; we'll be looking on attentively, and eagerly. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:46 AM by Patrick Belton  

PLOV WATCH: The Soros Foundation's brainchild EurasiaNet continues to be an absolutely stellar source of analysis and reportage on Central Asia and the Caucasus. It's definitely worth checking out.

Among pieces it's featured lately - Taliban author Ahmed Rashid warns that Taliban leaders have fled to Pakistan under the secret shelter of sympathetic ISI officers, and are using Pakistan as a base from which to launch operations against Hamid Karzai's government. Switching countries, Tajikistan has been something of a bright spot in the region, even as its economy attempts to recover from devastation, because since the end of its civil war in 1997, the Islamist opposition has been taking part in politics and elections, and apparently moderating greatly as a result, becoming a "normal" political party. However, in an interview, IRP chief Said Abdullo Nuri (whose political opponents charge him with untoward involvement with Iranian intelligence) decries President Imomali Rahmonov's current potentially-destabilizing efforts to amend Tajikistan's constitution to permit him to serve beyond his seven-year term, and join his neighbors in the region's ruler-for-life club.

Finally, this piece analyzes the overlap and divergence in interests between Iran and the New Iraq. Iran worries that a strongly pro-American New Iraq will not develop close relations with it, whereas a fragmenting Iraq will be an irritant to Iran's security situation. Iran's interests lie in seeing Iraq's Shiites, principally Ayatollah Hakim's Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution of Iraq, secure a key role in the new Iraqi politics; Iran will try to provide as much help, in ways both public and quiet, to this party as it can in the coming months. A prominent role for the Islamist party is clearly very much not in the U.S.'s interest; however, a resurgence of the Shi'a theological school in Najaf could conceivably provide a point of reformist theological criticism of Iran's mullahs (as there are signs Qom in Iran slowly may be becoming). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:50 AM by Patrick Belton  

GETTING MARRIED? EVER? Then check out the Bad Bridesmaids' Dresses Compendium. You'll be glad you did. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:38 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHAT MONTY PYTHON CHARACTER ARE YOU? And I'm not just linking to this only because it told me I was King Arthur. You can be the judge of the quiz's accuracy here:

You are an idealistic king, but not very bright. You hate the French and all those bloody peasants.... You also have the keen ability to distinguish between African and European Swallows.

Idealistic. Not excessively bright. Francophobic. Hmmmmmm..... Naaah. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:17 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT DID I DO? A reporter made an innocent mistake. Well, not all that innocent. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:06 PM by David Adesnik  

SLIPPERY SLOPE or just too much KY? Atrios is blown away by just how offensive Rick Santorum's views of homosexuality are. Damn right. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:42 PM by David Adesnik  

MATT ON MY SIDE: Whodathunkit? Matt Yglesias agrees with my critcism of Josh Marshall. But Dan Drezner takes Josh's side. Strange days, my friends, strange days. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:39 PM by David Adesnik  

THE LOYAL OPPOSITION: I will be the first to admit that I am a passionate advocate of promoting democracy throughout the Middle East and that passion is not well-known for its contribution to patient and self-critical analysis. In theory, this sort of passion might lend itself to either an overly optimistic or an overly pessimistic frame of mind. (Such pessimism might result from impossibly high expectations for democratic reform, against which all actual reforms appear deficient.)

In practice, I recognize that I am much more of an optimist on this count than a pessimist. Thus, in order to prevent myself from discarding evidence that goes against my expectations, I have decided to appoint a loyal opposition to my optimistic views. I stumbled across this idea just yesterday, while reading the Daily Kos.

In the event that you aren't familiar with Kos, it is a blog firmly rooted in the left wing of Democratic politics. I read it for the first time around four months ago, but quickly lost interest because its approach to Iraq seemed to be motivated by such a visceral hatred for George Bush that its authors became incapable of serious analysis.

Since then, Kos has become a higher being on the left-wing of the blogosphere, right alongside Atrios, Josh Marshall, and CalPundit. Returning after four months, I also sensed that the quality of the site had improved even if its profound resentment of the President and his party is still there.

After reading a number of Kos' posts on the occupation of Iraq, it became evident that its creators (especially Steve Gilliard) are committed to the dual proposition that a democratic Iraq would be a very good thing but that the ignorant cowboys in the White House are to f*** things up. On the face of it, the opposing halves of this dual proposition are logically compatible.

However, it often seems as if Kos is more concerned with showing the world that it is right about Bush than ensuring that the people of Iraq have the sort of government they deserve. Nonetheless, there seems to be a genuine commitment on Kos' part to making sure that the development of Iraq stays front and center on the United States' political agenda.

I very much hope that is the case, since I have decided to appoint Kos, at least temporarily, as the loyal opposition to my own personal optimism. One might say that Kos is my mirror image: passionate about democracy but fundamentally inclined to pessimism. Therefore, it can be expected to focus on exactly those bits of information that an optimist might ignore.

Now, I haven't told the folks over at Kos that they have suddenly had a new set of expectations imposed on their writing. In time, I may decide to send an e-mail their way or post a few messages on their discussion boards. But for now, I don't think that a higher being such as Kos need be concerned about an interest taken in its work by one third of OxBlog. (Of course, if all of you start going over to Kos and leaving messages on its boards, its proprietors may begin to wonder what happened to its readership.)

So for now, let me just comment on a couple of Kos' posts. First up, Kos pulls no punches when saying that the sack of Baghdad was apalling, that the US had ample warning of what was about to happen but still did nothing, and that Rumsfeld's reaction to the riots and looting has shown just how small-minded and ignorant he can be.

Leaving some of Kos' more extreme rhetoric aside, I think one simply has to admit that the administration failed. Moreover, this failure seems to be a direct extension of leading officials' inability to admit that their President has committed them to nation-building and that they cannot persist with their self-defeating efforts to think outside the military box.

Moreover, accusations of failure regarding the sack of Baghdad are far from being the exclusive province of the far left. As Ken Pollack writes,

The looting and lawlessness that continue to prevail in large parts of Iraq were entirely predictable, and almost certainly preventable by the presence of coalition troops charged with keeping the peace. While this may seem like a minor problem, it is one that could have very severe consequences if not quickly resolved.

So if Ken Pollack and Robert Fisk agree, you have to wonder about those who don't. (Note to CalPundit: See, I am capable of reading Robert Fisk with an open mind. But he's still an idiot.)

Moving on, Kos has shown a marked interest in the role that SCIRI (The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) will play in the reconstruction. In short, it is going to be a very, very dangerous one. While one has to discount some of Kos' pessimism, which often borders on the absurd, the premise here is pretty solid: the heavily-armed friends of Iran's mullah-led dictatorship have the potential to cause a lot of trouble.

It seems that we all have the terrible misfortune to live in interesting times. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:38 PM by Patrick Belton  

IRAQI DEMOCRACY OP-ED WATCH: For now, just a compilation (with responses and analysis to come). Kenneth Pollack argues for a UN role, and a long horizon of international involvement; Michael O'Hanlon and Roberta Cohen see a humanitarian crisis looming; James Steinberg sees Asian support for the Iraq war as one of the untold stories, with important and complex implications for the U.S.'s security relationships with Japan, the two Koreas, and China; Bill Safire writes on France and Russia's blackmailing act over releasing UN sanctions on Iraq (as does IHT's Claudia Rosett), and urges more commitment to tracking down Iraqi financial assets worldwide.

Most significant, perhaps, is this timely piece by noted columnist Matt Spence on lessons to be learned in exporting democracy.

UPDATE: Our friend and blogger Zach Mears writes in to suggest a few additional pieces: a Foreign Affairs essay by Adeed and Karen Dawisha on several Iraqi assets which may facilitate democratization there; Stanley Kurtz on lessons to be drawn from India's experience (and Zach's response); Mark Fineman on rebuilding the police and judicial systems; and Fareed Zakaria on why bringing liberalization to Iraq will require much more commitment than simply bringing democracy (Fareed finds, however, that whiskey and sexy will likely be significantly easier to introduce).
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:13 PM by Patrick Belton  

MAZAL TOV to Kevin for his blog's dazzling new website. Quick question: do the two bodies of water represent (a) the Bay area, (b) the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (possibly with a red sun off in the direction of Japan - very internationally minded), or (c) possibly even the Arabian desert with several islands (oases? lighthouses?) of democracy? In any case, congratulations!

UPDATE: Kevin informs me that you can only see the fabled lovely "second ocean" if you're using a Mac. Others may call it a bug, I say it's yet another instance of enhanced Mac functionality. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:26 PM by Patrick Belton  

WHAM, BAM, SHUKRAN: Okay, so I know that doesn't really rhyme. Our friend, the Hauser Report's Jeff Hauser, just emailed me this troubling piece from the morning's WaPo, on which Josh Marshall has also commented today.

The tenor of the piece is that a number of well-placed officials are already looking for excuses to pull the U.S. out of Iraq as soon as possible, whether or not there's a functioning democracy left there when we leave. The WaPo cites several unnamed officials at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid as expecting to measure their time in Iraq in "months, not years"; in a similar vein, OMB director Mitchell Daniels recently prognosticated that Iraq "will not require sustained aid."

Possible optimistic interpretations? One may be that the WaPo is attempting to generate a public outcry at the start over the possibility of a quick withdrawal, therefore ensuring that the political environment inside the Beltway is strongly in favor of a sustained, honorable commitment to the Iraqi people. Another might be that these numerous statements on background could be trial balloons from the administration, plumbing possible public responses to different levels of post-war commitment. Of course, there's also the more disheartening third possibility, which is that many segments of government and the military are sufficiently unsympathetic to tasks falling under the rubric of "nation-building" that they are already beginning to look for any excuse to leave, irrespective of the consequences for the U.S.'s credibility as a promoter of democracy.

On the good guys' side, it's emerging, are an unlikely coalition of the willing - USAID administrator Andrew Natsios, Under Secretary of Treasury for international affairs John Taylor, former SecDef Schlesinger, and such voices from think-tankery as CFR's Rachel Bronson and RAND's James Dobbins. And there are glimmerings of hope from the highest levels of the administration: President Bush, in a February 26 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, promised "a sustained commitment" and drew the appropriate analogies to the duration of American commitments to Germany and Japan. General Garner, for his part, commented in an interview over the weekend that the United States would persevere until democracy was established.

As, of course, it must. Our international credibility for the foreseeable future hinges on as much, as do the very crucial questions of stability and democratization in the Middle East and Gulf. And God help us if we don't make good on our promises to the Iraqi people:

lisaanon min rutab wayadon min khashab: a tongue of ripe dates and a hand of wood.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

IRANIAN JOURNALIST AND BLOGGER ARRESTED: A friend of OxBlog's from North Carolina writes to draw our attention to this tragic story about well-known Iranian writer Sina Motallebi, who was arrested yesterday, apparently for giving interviews to Persian-language radio services outside of Iran. His blog WebGard (now inactive) was among the five most popular Persian-language weblogs.

Blogger Jeff Jarvis is keeping tabs of the story here. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has made the commendable suggestion that we all contact the Iranian mission to the UN to protest Mr. Motallebi's arrest; the mission's email address is iran@un.int. Written letters to your congressional delegation drawing their offices' attention to this would also be very much in order.

UPDATE: I've just put my money where my mouth is and written my congressional delegation - if any of you would like to do the same, please feel free to draw on (or add to) this letter:

Dear Senator:

I am a foreign policy professional in the Washington, D.C. area, and I am writing to you in a personal capacity to express my great concern at the arrest this weekend of Iranian journalist Sina Motallebi for granting interviews to Persian-language radio services outside of Iran.

I would be very grateful if your office could please forward my letter with your own letter of concern to the Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs. I would also be very grateful for any resolution of support for Mr. Motallebi which your office may be willing to introduce in this session of Congress.

With many thanks and all best wishes,

Patrick Belton

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:47 AM by Patrick Belton  

"SEAL" OF APPROVAL: Okay, so even if the Beeb can't do news, at least on occasion it can succeed in being cute.

This morning, the BBC reports on "Andre," a seal stranded in a fresh-water river in Scotland who was eating up several thousand pounds of salmon (hey, can't fault his taste) and causing great concern among the area's professional fishermen. Finding themselves unable to catch the seal, the local fishing authority finally issued him a permit - saying "the least we could do until he is caught, is to make it legal."

An accompanying letter to the seal read "We have decided to issue you with a fishing permit for the season. This will allow you to fish in Loch Lomond and the River Leven. It will also allow you to fish in the River Fruin and the River Endrick."

On second thought, it just occurred to me that it actually isn't the Beeb at all being cute here, but instead it's the bubbling up from less stuffy heights of the irrepressible dry, benevolent British sense of humor that self-important institution so rarely actually embodies....

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:05 PM by David Adesnik  

RUMSFELD VS. REALITY? Daniel Drezner reports. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:56 PM by David Adesnik  

ONE MORE THING to add my very long response to the NYT Magazine: Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy, I am proud of you and your service to our country. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:53 PM by David Adesnik  

BRITISH CINEMA: You know what makes a movie funny? Five shots of Jack Daniels before you go inside! Actually, for Shanghai Knights you don't even need it. A great laugh and a great action flick. A worthy successor to Shanghai Noon.

(Yes, I know it opened in February in the United States. But we're still catching up on this side of the pond.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:33 PM by Patrick Belton  

GLIMMERS OF HOPE: (courtesy A&L Daily) Apparently some signs are now emerging that at least some of the precious holdings of Iraq's National Museum may have escaped looting in a hidden basement vault. See this, and this. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:26 PM by Patrick Belton  

RIP to the Partisan Review - the granddaddy of the New Republic and New York Review of Books, which has now passed into American intellectual and literary history after 68 often glorious years. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:59 AM by David Adesnik  

HACKNEYED STEREOTYPICAL CLICHES: We talk a lot about the media and its biases. We compile evidence and publish indignant criticism. But we don't often ask whether all of this one-sided coverage actually has an impact on its audience. After all, it stands to reason that if we know better than to believe what we read, so does everyone else.

In my academic work, I've come across a fair amount of literature that covers the influence of mainstream media on public opinion. Its conclusions support both sides of the argument. On the one hand, most individuals are fairly resistant to new information that calls into question their established beliefs. If presented with both sides of an argument, most individuals can evaluate their relative merits.

But if presented with only one side of an argument, we are surprisingly susceptible to persuasion. What no one seems to know is exactly how one-sided a source of information has to be in order to become persuasive. By the same token, no one seems to know at point the one-sidedness of an argument becomes so self-evident that it proovkes suspicions of bias.

Naturally, I don't have any answers to these questions. (Although I will recommend my favorite book on the subject, whose title is "Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology".)

So, then, where is this post heading? I'm not sure. My original intent was to comment on the less-than-subtle anti-military prejudice which runs throughout one of the major articles in this week's NYT Magazine. It really p****d me off.

On the other hand, I am beginning to wonder whether such constant criticism of the New York Times serves much of a purpose. If we all know to read the Times critically, what exactly is the point of saying so again and again? That's why I began this post with my comments about assessing the impact of the media rather than just its contents.

But you know what? NYT bashing can be fun. After all, if we don't vent, we'll explode. And maybe one day our backlash against the Times will force it to either raise its standards or to admit that the Washington Post has now become the United States' paper of record. But for the moment, let's talk about 'Good Kills' by Peter Maass.

The table of contents warns us that

To get to Baghdad, the marines of the Third Battalion fought the old-fashioned way — by shooting as many of the enemy as they could. Their victims weren't all soldiers.

So, is this another My Lai? Has the United States lost its moral compass? Let's find out.

Up front, we find out that

The Third Battalion had a consistent strategy as it moved toward Baghdad: kill every fighter who refused to surrender.

Oh, that Third Battalion. Coming up with new and brutal strategies that might offend the sensitivies of ignorant America. Where did this whole idea of killing the enemy come from? Why didn't we learn anything from the Native Americans, who believed that the greatest act of courage in battle is to touch one's enemy without hurting him? Surely that would have brought down the Ba'athist dictatorship as fast as an actual military strike.

Or at least wound the enemy instead of killing him. Aim for the arms and legs. Sure, it might have taken a little longer to get to Baghdad, but think of the moral triumph it would have represnted. Instead of telling us that the invasion had stalled in its second week because of fierce Iraqi resistance, the media should have reminded us of how ineffective the mighty Repubican Guards actually are. Then we could've gone easy on them instead of pursuing this nonsensical strategy of killing them instead.

Moving on, we find out that

The unit's commander, Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy, had a calm bearing that never seemed to waver as he and his troops made their way through Iraq...

When I spoke to him on the southern side of the Diyala bridge soon after the battalion arrived there on the morning of April 6, he was in a serene mood. ''Things are going well,'' he said. ''Really well.''

When Colonel McCoy told you that things were going well, it meant his marines were killing Iraqi fighters.

Now I get it. It is the brutal Col. McCoy who has brainwashed his soldiers into thinking that war involves death. If McCoy had any conscience at all, he never would have said that things were going well. Intead, he would've delivered an agonizing and self-critical appraisal of his personal responsibility for the devastation of Iraqi society.

Later on,

[McCoy] was sitting in the front seat of his Humvee, with an encrypted radio phone to his left ear. He had the sort of done-it-again pride in his voice that you hear from a business executive who is kicking back at the clubhouse as he tells you he beat par again.

You see, what's really disgusting about McCoy is not that he's a killer, but that he is so non-chalant about it. But is it really his fault, or is McCoy's depravity just the byproduct of a capitalist order that fails to differentiate between the ethics of business and the ethics of war?

In the heat of battle, McCoy radio's his commander in order to inform him that

''We're killing them like it's going out of style. They keep reinforcing, these Republican Guards, and we're killing them as they show up. We're running out of ammo.''

Oh my God! A direct quote! Surely this is incontrovertible evidnece of McCoy's brutality. In theory, one might say that McCoy's words are a sort of black humor, a desperate attempt to mask his own fear of dying in a hail of Iraqi bullets. Or worse, a hail of friendly fire. No, no, that is way too far-fetched. McCoy is a killer.

For McCoy

This war was not about hearts and minds or even liberation. Those are amorphous concepts, not rock-hard missions. For Colonel McCoy and the other officers who inflicted heavy casualties on Iraqis and suffered few of their own, this war was about one thing: killing anyone who wished to take up a weapon in defense of Saddam Hussein's regime, even if they were running away.

Though a killer he may be, McCoy is no fool. He sees right through all of the politicians' talk about hearts and minds and liberation. How could violence have anything to do with freedom? As M. Chirac has so often reminded us, war never solves anything.

In an attempt to educate his military hosts about the perils of war, the author of this trenchant essay

suggested to Colonel McCoy one morning that Iraqi civilians might not appreciate the manner in which his marines tended to say hello to the locals with the barrels of their guns raised...

[But] ''They don't have to like us,'' he said. ''Liking has nothing to do with it. You'll never make them like you. I can't make them like me. All we can do is make them respect us and then make sure that they know we're here on their behalf. Making them like us -- Yanks always want to be liked, but it doesn't always work out that way.''

Just like George Bush and the French. If only McCoy had tried to be nice, surely things would've have turned out differently.

Perhaps the greatest moral dilemma facing McCoy and his troops was how to deal with the threat of suicide bombers. How does one tell if an approaching vehicle contains fanatical militia or just desperate civilians who won't stop for warning shots or anything else? After the battle, McCoy's soldiers discovered that innocent men and women had been killed along with the armed militiamen. Lest the Marines fail to recognize the tragic nature of the situation

A journalist came up and said the civilians should not have been shot. There was a silence, and after the journalist walked away, a third marine, Lance Cpl. Santiago Ventura, began talking, angrily.

''How can you tell who's who?'' said Corporal Ventura. He spoke sharply, as though trying to contain his fury. ''You get a soldier in a car with an AK-47 and civilians in the next car. How can you tell? You can't tell.''

Of course, it is always the journalists who have the last word. As the author informs us,

When I visited the kill box down the road from Diyala bridge the morning after the battle, I noticed that the destroyed cars were several hundred yards from the marine positions that fired on them. The marines could have waited a bit longer before firing, and if they had, perhaps the cars would have stopped, or perhaps the marines would have figured out that the cars contained confused civilians. The sniper [from the Third Battalion] knew this. He knew that something tragic had happened at the bridge. And so, as we spoke in Baghdad, he stopped defending the marines' actions and started talking about their intent. He and his fellow marines, he said, had not come to Iraq to drill bullets into women and old men who were just trying to find a safe place.

Finally, the confession. Confronted by the New York Times, even the most hardened soldier cannot fail to recognize that he is a war criminal. Just like Vietnam. We sent American boys overseas to become merciless killers. But there's more:

Collateral damage is far easier to bear for those who are responsible for it from afar -- from the cockpit of a B-1 bomber, from the command center of a Navy destroyer, from the rear positions of artillery crews. These warriors do not see the faces of the mothers and fathers they have killed. They do not see the blood and hear the screams and live with those memories for the rest of their lives. The grunts suffer this. The Third Battalion accomplished its mission of bringing military calamity upon the regime of Saddam Hussein; the statue of Saddam fell just a few minutes after the sniper and I spoke. But the sniper, and many other marines of the Third Battalion, could not feel as joyous as the officers in the rear, the generals in Qatar and the politicians in Washington.

As we all know, bomber pilots, naval officers and artillery crews are far too ignorant to recognize that their actions may result in the death of innocent civilians. Just like innocent civilians in the United States, they remain blissfully unaware about the true nature of war.

But let's not forget the generals in Qatar and the politicians in Washington. They should know better. How dare they be joyous? What they should have done is obvious. They should never have started this war. Then they would have had a right to rejoice.

They could have basked in the praise of the New York Times editorial board while Saddam Hussein went about his business, stockpiling chemical weapons and murdering those who resisted his tyrannical rule. That is the true nature of peace.
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# Posted 10:05 PM by David Adesnik  

THINKING ABOUT A FRAPPUCINO? Think again. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:40 PM by David Adesnik  

FIRST TIME AS TRAGEDY...As Paul Kennedy would have it, the lesson of history is that the United States is foolish to expect that it can transform the Middle East. As Matt Yglesias would have it, the lesson of history is that Paul Kennedy has a habit of making extremely pessimistic predictions that turn out to be extremely wrong. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:37 PM by David Adesnik  

AN ANSWER FOR KEVIN: Revealing quite a bit about the premises on which his wordview rests, Kevin Drum asks

Now, it's true that the UN has its problems, and I certainly know that conservatives just generally despise the UN, but this got me thinking. What exactly do they have against letting the UN have a say in rebuilding the Iraqi government? How would they mess it up? By proposing tax rates that were too progressive?

What's the deal here?

Kev, where do I start? How about with this op-ed from the NYT which explains how the UN Oil-For-Food program is the living embodiment of opacity, bureaucratic incompetence, greed and one-sided politicization? Now, I myself have pointed to some of the problems one might run into if American coporations dominate the reconstruction process. But very, very few those corporations could match the UN bureaucracy vice for vice (except when it comes to greed, of course.)

Even when it comes to opacity, American corporations tend to be far more transparent than the UN, the IMF or the World Bank. And if working on government contracts, it won't be hard at all for the occupation authorities to demand a full accounting of corporate behavior.

In a later post, Kevin raises some other questions about the occupation and the importance of multilateral legitimacy. He writes:

[Fred] Barnes, I think, is absolutely correct that establishing a decent successor state in Iraq is a long process that requires considerable commitment from the United States. If we're serious about it, we'll stay put for a while.

But the critics are also right: a long and substantial occupation by the United States is just begging for trouble. Not only will it leave the unavoidable taint of neo-colonialism, but it also acts as a magnet for terrorist recruiting. The kind of young Arab who leans toward terrorism will almost certainly be easier to recruit if the local al-Qaeda representatives have an occupying force of Americans to point to year after year.

I suspect there's no really good solution to this, but there's an obvious one that could at least help: the United Nations. Or, more to the point, the United Nations with the full backing and commitment of the United States. Properly constituted, a UN force could provide the stability and guidance Iraq needs without the symbolic provocation that the United States military represents.

First of all, let's think about the logic of the terrorist recruitment point. What Kevin is saying is that the simple presence of American armed forces -- regardless of whether they are promoting democracy and rebuilding infrastructure or hijacking the oil industry and installing dictators -- will lead young Iraqis into the arms of Al Qaeda. This argument suggests, as so many backlash arguments do, that Arabs are incapable of evaluating the actual impact of American behavior simply because they have reasonable suspicions about American motives.

The same criticism applies to Kevin's point about the "taint of neo-colonialism". What exactly is neo-colonialism? A temporary occupation whose purpose is political and economic reconstruction, or the installation of a puppet government that will faciliate foreign exploitation of Iraqi natural resources? I think the people of Iraq won't have all that much trouble differentiating the one from the other.

Now what about the UN? The Oil-For-Food program already demonstrates why the United Nations may not be a source of "stability and guidance". But I'd like to provide a few more. First of all, major decisions regarding the occupation will be subject to Security Council approval. Given the drawn out and ultimately failed bargaining process that prevented the emergence of any sort of consensus on the invasion of Iraq, there is every reason to believe that conflicts over occupation policy will be no less intense.

Instead of focusing on the interests of the Iraqi people, the Security Council will approach all decisions in terms of whether they steer Iraq in a pro-American or anti-American direction. Moreover, no one will have serious concerns about what might happen if the occupation fails, since such an event could always be blamed on the other members of the Council. (One might even say that three of the members have an incentive to promote failure, since it would discredit the invasion.)

Now, if only the US and UK run the occupation, it will almost definitely be steered in a pro-American direction. BUT, if the US and UK direct the occupation, their reputations will be invested in its success. Moreover, since the United States and United Kingdom have already defined success as the emergence of a stable and democratic Iraq, their interests are closer to those of the Iraqi people than any of the other Security Council members.

On some issues, there will be considerable conflict. When it comes to awarding contracts, there is no question that an American occupation will favor American corporations, probably unfairly. But that is a small price to pay for an occupation authority with a single-minded commitment to success.

The one serious concern I have is that the US will provide political and economic support to Iraqi political parties that are explicity pro-American, regardless of their merits or shortcomings. But even that sort of misconduct is better than a situation in which each of five powers is searching for proxies who will advance its interests on the playing field of Iraqi politics.

Kevin, I hope can persuade you on this one. If we can establish a bipartisan consensus on the importance of an American-led reconstruction effort, then Gen. Garner & Co. can focus on getting their job done instead of worrying about politics back on Capitol Hill and in Turtle Bay. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANOTHER OF THE HONORABLE MEN PASSES: Sterling Professor Emeritus Franz Rosenthal passed away this week in Branford. Professor Rosenthal, who fled Berlin after Kristallnacht, then became a U.S. citizen and contributed his skills as an Arabist to his new country and to the OSS during the Second World War.

Returning to the academy - and luckily for Yale, to New Haven - there was no portion of Arabic studies he did not touch, from a monograph on "Humor in Early Islam"(later works dealt with "Gambling in Islam" and "The Herb: Hashish Versus Medieval Muslim Society") to meaty, comprehensively annotated translations of Ibn Khaldun's Muwaddimah and the histories of medieval historian at-Tabari.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhirajioon. May Allah give him the reward of his labors.
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# Posted 11:12 AM by David Adesnik  

INTELLIGENT IRAQ: According to a NYT report on Gen. Jay Garner, head of the Coalition's reconstruction effort,

The general appeared confident that, with help from talented Iraqis, he would succeed.

"Arabs are very proud people," he said. "Proud as we are." In particular, the Iraqis are "pretty sophisticated" and have a "lot of wealth, it's just not been shared among them."

"There's an intelligentsia," he added. "The Arabs are great traders, they're organized." He believes, he said, that the Iraqis are "motivated, even though they've lived under a mushroom for 25 years."

Even discounting the inexplicable reference to Saddam as a mushroom, Gen. Garner's remarks seem pretty formulaic and unconvincing. The funny thing is, he knows what he's talking about.

UPDATE: Many of you have written to say that living under a mushroom is best understood as living like a mushroom, i.e. being kept in the dark and fed manure. There is even one former mushroom farmer out there (MD), who can verify that that actually is the best way to raise the fungi in question.
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# Posted 9:21 AM by David Adesnik  

CHILDREN'S PRISON: Reader BG suggested that I link to the following story about Palestinian teenagers in Israeli detention centers. It's a sad story and one well worth reading.

What I take issue with is BG's suggestion that I post this story in order to balance out previous mentions of the children liberated from Iraqi prisons. While I condemn all Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, the suggestion that such violations constitute a parallel to what has happened in Iraq is without any justification whatsoever.

First and foremost, the overcrowding and lack of due process in Israeli jails pales in comparison to the filth and torture of their Iraqi counterparts. There are a hundred other nations whose jail systems should be criticized before one turns to Israeli violations.

Second, there are considerable indications that the teenagers in Israeli prisons are actually guilty of crimes, in contrast to the innocence of the Iraqi 'inmates'.

Finally, one ought to note just how many of the Palestinian detainees are represented by Israeli/Jewish lawyers, many of who represent Israeli human rights organizations that are fiercely critical of the government. Pray tell, where are the Ba'athist lawyers fighting for the welfare of Saddam's prisoners?

Compared to every other Western nation that has found itself or its armed forces besieged by a relentless opponent -- whether the US in Vietnam, the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya & Northern Ireland -- Israel has comported itself in an exemplary manner. Moreover, these other nations almost always encountered such threats overseas, far from the homeland where their fellow countrymen worked and lived.

Only the people of Israel face an existential threat on an everyday basis. And yet their commitment to the principles of democracy and human rights does not waver.

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# Posted 8:37 AM by David Adesnik  

AFGHANISTAN: The good news and the bad news. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:50 PM by David Adesnik  

HEY, I KNOW THOSE GUYS! Take a look at this Daily Standard piece about two lonely anti-Syria protesters at the White House. Both of them were a couple of years behind me in high school and were (still are) good friends with my brother. I may not favor war with Syria, but these guys are definitely entertaining. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:34 PM by Patrick Belton  

A SAD INCIDENT for Harvard this week. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:24 PM by Patrick Belton  

HOMEWORK!!!: (Dissertations don't count, for those of you who were curious.) The Presidential Commission on Bioethics has added to their website a thoughtfully selected electronic bookshelf of selections drawn from classical and modern literature and philosophy, all broadly bearing on bioethics. More precisely, the selections deal, mostly through literature, with the questions of what it means to be a link in a branching chain of generations; to pursue scientific discovery; to search for perfection, excellence, and human flourishing; and to experience vulnerability, suffering, and ageing. It's an excellent set of selections, which bridge Homer, Ovid, Tolstoy, and Richard Feynman - and for those of you somewhat hungrily experiencing bread and/or meat deprivation today and looking for some searching readings to situate it all within, I heartily recommend them. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:52 PM by David Adesnik  

YOU DID NOT TELL ME SO: Josh Marshall thinks that conservatives are getting a little uppity with all of their "I Told You So"s. With tens of thousands of Muslim protesters calling for an end to the occupation, Josh thinks conservatives shouldn't get too smug just yet. Summing up, Josh writes that

Like it or not, the fate of America and Iraq are now fastened together for at least several years. I don't pretend to know how it's going to turn out. But the one thing I think we can be confident of is that none of us are going to emerge from this with our hubris intact.

My guess is that's about as close as TPM is going to come to an admission of how wrong it was about certain aspects of the war. Might it not be more accurate to say that one side of the debate has already had its hubris obliterated, whereas the other will probably take some hard shots over the next couple of months but still look pretty good in hindsight?

Now, if you are a fan of TPM (and I very much, am despite my constant efforts to throw elbows in Josh's ribs. In fact, it is precisely because I have so much respect for TPM's role as the #1 blog on the center-left that I am constantly throwing elbows in its ribs) you should take a careful look at Josh's recent posts on North Korea. He makes a pretty strong case that the US has backed into exactly the kind of bilateral talks that it insisted for so long on avoiding. While Josh thought just a couple of days ago that the Bush administration might have come up with a partial victory by persuading the North Koreans to engage in multilateral talks, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

What this all means, of course, is that OxBlog (more specifically, David) was very wrong about the administration's handling of the Korean issue and that Josh (Marshall, not Chafetz) was right. See? That wasn't very hard at all... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:38 PM by Patrick Belton  

A BIT OF HUMILITY ON GOOD FRIDAY: I enjoy Joseph Bottum's columns, but I have to take issue with his Weekly Standard piece yesterday where he takes a bit too much pleasure out of a recent churlish, juvenile incident in which Sioux Falls, South Dakota's Catholic bishop wrote to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and attempted to order Senator Daschle to stop identifying himself as a Roman Catholic in his congressional biography.

Both Dashle's office and Bishop Robert Carlson's quickly issued statements downplaying the communication as personal correspondence, intimating that the correspondence had leaked. Carlson, however, has been quoted as crusading publicly against Senator Daschle in the past, urging his flock to vote against the senator, and intimating it was sinful to do otherwise.

As is of course his right, both as a citizen and as a religious leader. Religious leaders, like any other citizens, should be able to apply political pressure to elected representatives to attempt to compel them to act according to their own personal ideas of the good. However, to threaten a legislator with excommunication solely because of a disagreement with his voting record confuses religious and political roles to too great an extent. A bishop taking that step is not acting as a cleric-in-the-polity, applying political pressure within the political sphere to bring about, as a citizen and civic leader, political results in keeping with his own religious aspirations. (Religious leaders who act in this way enrich substantially the political conversations of the republic by contributing viewpoints culled from centuries of ethical and philosophical reflection within their traditions. And it is this latter, commendable, prophetic tradition of American religious leaders which has given us Martin Luther King's beautiful writings about nonviolence not as sterile passivity, but as a powerful moral force for social transformation; stirring Catholic encyclicals on the economic needs of the poor; and important ethical contributions to American politics by America's rabbis and imams.) However, Bishop Robert Carlson is acting along a less American and much more medieval model of the relationship of Church to prince, a model in which excommunications were bandied about lightly to compel officials to submit to Rome's (often quite venal) authority at the peril of losing their souls - a far cry from the much more difficult, and American, route of using religious arguments to convince a majority of your fellow citizens to vote with you.

The bishop of Sioux Falls has if he chooses every canonical right to call on United States Senators to stop identifying themselves as Catholics in their official biographies; however, I might suggest to the Catholic bishop of Sioux Falls that he in turn should revise his official biography to stop calling himself a U.S. citizen. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:25 AM by David Adesnik  

CIVILIAN CASUALTIES: Building on my comments and Josh's article in the Daily Standard, Phil Carter has some interesting thoughts about civilian casualties and the future of American military operations.

Also make sure not to miss Phil's excellent post on the upcoming after action review for this war. And finally, make sure to read Phil's comments on American forces' use of body armor as well as the first firefight encountered by the 4th Infantry's 1st "Raider" Brigade, which was Phil's old unit. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:07 AM by David Adesnik  

RALLY-ROUND-THE-[BURNING]-FLAG: Daniel Drezner explains why anti-Americanism will never become a lasting part of electoral politics in the democratic states of Europe, Asia and Latin America. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:55 AM by David Adesnik  

WAR HERO AND PRESIDENT: Almost. In the NYT, Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan observes that

Unless the Democratic nominee can make a compelling and convincing case--a case built on story and persona instead of just rhetoric--that he can keep Americans safe in a dangerous world, we're looking at McGovern-like results.

&c. responds:

It's certainly true that biography matters somewhat when it comes to establishing foreign policy credentials. But can it completely make up for a dovish position? Here's one hint: In 1972, the Democrats nominated a World War II hero for president. The results, as Jordan would put it, were McGovern-like.

Ouch! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:18 PM by David Adesnik  

BIASED POLLS: I don't think I have ever seen a question as biased as this one:

8. How do you feel about the possibility that the United States will get bogged down in a long and costly peacekeeping mission in Iraq? Would you say you're very concerned about that, somewhat concerned, not too concerned or not concerned at all?

Given the considerable attention which polling firms devote to asking neutral questions, I have absolutely no idea how this one got through. Even if you look at the rest of the questions in the same survey, you see that considerable care was taken to ensure neutrality.

The answers given to the question above are hardly surprising: 31% are "very concerned" and 42% are "somewhat concerned". In an article on public opinion, the WaPo naively reported that

A darker undercurrent of American opinion is the growing majority of those who say they are at least somewhat concerned about becoming bogged down in an expensive peacekeeping mission in Iraq. Fully 73 percent expressed this view, compared to 62 percent last week.

I actually read the WaPo article before looking at the raw data and assumed that it was unfairly paraphrasing the actual question that was asked. In fact, it was just parroting it .

To get some idea of what Americans actually think about the occupation, talk a look at this Gallup poll from last week: 33% of Americans expect a significant number of troops to remain in Iraq for six to twelve months, while 28% expect the occupation to last more than twelve months and 21% expect the occupation to last more than two years.

In addition, 51% of respondents believe that it will be somewhat difficult to create a stable democratic government in Iraq while 31% believe it will be very difficult. Perhaps that's why so many Americans expect a long occupation.

Moreover, there is evidence -- this time from the WaPo/ABC poll -- that Americans don't simply expect a challenging occupation, but are committed to one as a matter of principle. When asked how important it is to "help establish a new government in Iraq", 47% said that it is "absolutely essential" while an additional 41% said that it was "very important but not essential".

The striking contrast between this data and the answers to the biased question above show just how important it is for polling firms to maintain a neutral stance.

Thus, despite all of the pundits' carping about the President's failure to prepare the American public for a significant commitment to reconstruction, these poll results show that he has done quite a reasonable job.

Another very interesting finding in the polls is the American public's enduring respect for the United Nations and their belief that it is an important source of international legitimacy. To see what I mean, take a look at the following results:

5. For each item I name, please tell me who you think should be in charge of that - the United States or the United Nations?

4/16/03 - Summary Table

United United Both Neither No
States Nations (vol.) (vol.) opin.
a. awarding contracts to companies
for rebuilding the infrastructure
in Iraq 41 51 3 3 2
b. helping establish a new government
in Iraq 39 55 4 1 1
c. maintaining civil order in Iraq until
a new government is established 45 49 4 1 1

This kind of data provides considerable support for OxBlog's earlier argument that the 'unauthorized' invasion of Iraq would not and has not done much damage to the United Nations. Also consider the following results, this time from the Gallup poll:

How important do you think it is for the U.S. to restore good relations with France, Germany and other western nations that opposed U.S. military action in Iraq -- very important, somewhat important, not too important, or not important at all?

Very important 51%, Somewhat important 24%, Not too important 11%, Not important at all 12%, No opinion 2%.

What this shows is just how resilient the transatlantic relationship is. At least on one side of the pond, the public recognizes that the community values which unites the democratic West is far more important than than the temporary conflict that has divided it. As this pundit once observed,

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 4:10 PM by Patrick Belton  

GEN X MEETS HEROISM AND SELF-SACRIFICE: Glenn links to this piece by Victor Davis Hanson on this generation's military, and its Gen X variant of heroism; the most memorable (and poignant) paragraphs are up on InstaPundit. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:26 PM by Patrick Belton  

SAD THAT YOU'LL NEVER GET TO READ YOUR OBITUARY?: Be consoled (after all, you're not even dead!!!) - The Smoking Gun ran across portions of CNN's pre-prepared obituaries for world leaders on their website during a Google search. Now you don't have to wait until your favorite head of state (or, alternatively, Fidel Castro) dies to see what they were like. Inexplicable downside - many of their obits seem to make the not-yet-decedents bear a distinct resemblance to Ronald Reagan. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:02 PM by David Adesnik  

HE'S BAAAAACK: Actually, I can't say who "he" is. But he is an Oxford-based blogger who departed the blogosphere for a short time before returning as a member of Giants & Dwarfs, where he has some interesting comments up on Frank Fukuyama and Pim Fortuyn. [Note: Permalinks not working for the moment. May God smite Blogger as he did the Egyptians.] (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:58 PM by David Adesnik  

RIGHT SAID FRED: I like hearing what Fred Barnes has to say, but I don't often agree with it. This time, however, he has hit the nail right on the head:

The president will be under enormous pressure from Europeans, Middle East leaders, and top advisers in Washington to withdraw American troops and civilian officials from Iraq within months, not years. He shouldn't. The military occupation of Japan after World War II lasted seven years, and Japan is homogenous, not divided as Iraq is among three often hostile ethnic groups. American forces won't need to stay that long, but it will take at least a year, maybe two or more, to restore order, foster a viable economy, and establish democratic institutions with roots deep enough to survive.

Barnes might have added that the pro-withdrawal voices will insist again and again that with each passing day, more and more Iraqis will come to view the American presence and an unjust and imperial one. Unless there is hard evidence to back up such claims, however, one should regard them with the same distrust as one did the premature declarations that the people of Iraq had no interest in an American-led liberation.

What I expect is that Iraqis' reactions to the occupation will be conditioned on the success of the Coalition's reconstruction efforts and its willingness to cooperate with local leaders. No doubt there will be some degree of growing discomfort with the American presence. No proud nation wants to be constantly reminded of its dependence on more powerful friends. But if democratic governments emerge at the local and provinicial levels and are complemented by a reasonably competent bureaucracies in the capital, then Iraqis will accept the postponement of their return to full sovereignty.

Finally, I am very glad to know that an influential conservative such as Fred Barnes is committed to an occupation that will last long enough to establish the viability of democratic government in Iraq. In light of my research into the Reagan administration's democracy promotion policies, I have long been concerned that conservatives would pay lip service to democratization while disavowing it in practice. (I know JVL disagrees with my interpretation of that administrations' intentions, but we have agreed to disagree.)

When the current administration began to talk about democracy promotion while refusing to provide any details about the postwar settlement, I became rather suspicious. In contrast, Josh had more faith in Condi & Co. (even if it was motivated in part by his schoolboy crush on Ms. Rice.)

In time, I have come around to Josh's point of view (on the democracy issue, not the crush issue). Ever since the President openly committed himself to a democratic order in his February 26th speech at AEI, I have been willing to trust the administration on this point. So far, it has been doing an admirable job. Here's to more of the same.

PS I disagree with everything in Barnes' editorial except for the passage I cited. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:53 PM by Patrick Belton  

A CHICKEN MAKING THE ROUNDS: Couldn't resist. I'm happy to attribute if anyone cares, or dares, to claim ownership:

Why did the chicken cross - okay, you get the picture....

SADDAM HUSSEIN This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

MOHAMMED ALDOURI The chicken did not cross the road. This is a complete fabrication. We do not even have a chicken.

SECDEF RUMSFELD Now at the left of the screen, you clearly see the satellite image of the chicken.

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH The chicken is either on our side of the road or not. There is no middle ground here.

PAT BUCHANAN To steal a job from a hard-working, white, American. Of course.

JERRY FALWELL Because it was gay! Isn't it obvious? That's what they call it, "the other side." I say we boycott all chickens.

MARTHA STEWART Hey, I had a standing order at the farmer's market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level....

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

A SAD DAY FOR BRITAIN: This morning Sir John Stevens releases the third report of an official investigation into collusion between loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland and rogue elements within UK military intelligence and the RUC's Special Branch (see BBC article here). The report finds that rogue government employees - apparently including a currently serving Brigadier and British military attache - aided and abetted UDA paramilitary henchmen in the 1989 murder of Catholic solicitor Pat Finucane and the 1987 killing of Protestant student Adam Lambert (which is thought to be a case of mistaken identity), and also subsequently obstructed the efforts of official inquiries up to the present.

This news is sad, and even sadder when considered against the history of collaboration between London and Dublin against operations of both republican and loyalist terrorists in troubled Ulster. The record of the two governments in jointly combating all forms of terrorism in the province is perhaps not spotless, but it is strong nevertheless. However, if currently serving figures in the Army and police conspired in the recent past to turn the world's oldest democracy into a state sponsor of terror, then they will justly deserve every punishment and ignominy incumbent upon them under the law.
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# Posted 8:32 AM by David Adesnik  

OUCH! Anne Applebaum slams the UN Human Rights Commission in one of the most devastating columns I've read lately. Yes, yes. We all know that it's hard to take the UNHRC seriously when it is headed by Libya, and when its annual activities involve blasting Israel and praising China.

But Applebaum goes much further and shows how the Commission has become one of the primary vehicles for providing multilateral legitimacy to brutal and systematic violence in places such as Sudan and Checnya. And it isn't just the dictatorships (or even the French) who are to blame. The US is one of the main reasons that the Commission has made such pitiful efforts to censure Russia.

In short, the UNHRC is a vehicle through which the United Nations' commitment to protecting national sovereignty can ride roughshod over the UN's much weaker commitment to human rights. While conservative critics of the UN tend to laugh off the Commission as just another manifestation of misguided and ineffective idealism, the fact is that it is a highly effective and dangerous body that threatens a transatlantic interest in protecting human rights.

Considering how entrenched the interests represented by the commission are, it is hard to accept the suggestions of thoughtful reformers who assert that the United States' victory in Iraq offers both the UN and its critics to reshape the institution in a way that will enable it to become a serious defender of human rights. The fact is that the UN will never take on that role for as long as its commitment to state sovereignty prevails over its lip service to human rights.

Now, this doesn't mean either that the UN has no productive purpose to serve or that it will find itself irreparably weakened by the "unauthorized" war in Iraq. As I've argued before, the UN will be strengthened in certain ways even if it is weakend in others. But when it comes to taking action against unrepentant dictators, whether in the Balkans or the Middle East, the United States will have to lead the way. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:09 AM by David Adesnik  

WHEN "I TOLD YOU SO" GETS UGLY it becomes Schadenfreude. (I'm not going to translate that, since fluent German is a pre-req for reading OxBlog.) Not that ugly is bad. In fact, I enjoyed every line of Noemie Emery's and Jonathan Last's Schadenfreude compilations in the Daily Standard.

At some point, though, one has to recognize that scoring debating points at the expense of The Nation and Indymedia has its limits as a serious genre of political discourse. Now I don't mean to say that either conservatives in general or the Daily Standard in particular have forsaken serious political analysis for the sake of taunting the left. But it has become a little much, especially in the blogosphere.

As someone living in Oxford with both a Union Jack and the Stars & Stripes hanging in his window, I know that a lot of us had to put up with a lot of taunts from the left before and during this war. And we needed to get that frustration out of our system. But now its time to get serious. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:57 AM by Patrick Belton  

ONE OUT FOR THE AXIS...BUT HOW WILL IT PLAY IN TEHRAN?: Mixed metaphor. So sue me. Switching regions now to the mid-east (surprised?), an important signal coming out of Iran nowadays may well be an interview by former president Rafsanjani (via MEMRI), in which the conservative leader suggests Iran can follow a more pragmatic policy of accomodation toward the U.S. without compromising the ideals of the Islamic revolution. He also indicates that the traditionally conservative Expediency Council, which he chairs, may be willing to take action on the issue (thereby bypassing the at any rate reformist Majils, but perhaps with a higher chance of carrying the acquiescence of Supreme Leader 'Ali Khamenei).

One particularly apropos quote which captures the tenor of the interview is this one: "Our ideology is flexible. We can choose our expediency on the basis of Islam. Still, to put the country in jeopardy on the grounds that we are acting on an Islamic basis is not at all Islamic."

Rafsanjani's statements likely reflect a tentative pro-U.S. probe on the part of Iran's conservative establishment. If this is the case, then it was undoubtedly triggered by the fall of Baghdad, and a subsequent recalculation of Iran's international position by at least a portion of the mullahtocracy. If the Bush administration can parlay its toppling of the tyrant of Tikrit into a more pro-western line by Tehran (and an end to Iran's support for Hizbollah, worldwide meddling, and terrorization of dissenting Iranian emigres) - and that's still a big if - then chalk it up as two important wins for the Wolfowitz crowd. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

BUT DID THE IRAQI SPIES LIKE BORSCHT? .... The Moscow Times picks up on this AP story indicating Moscow's involvement in teaching surveillance and eavesdropping techniques to Iraqi intelligence agents on Russian soil, including at least five agents who received training in September 2002. Documents currently being unearthed by U.S. personnel in the Mukhabarat's former headquarters in Baghdad are shedding light on the precise form and extent Russian-Iraqi intelligence cooperation took under the Hussein regime.

By way of personal sidenote: My last few posts on the subject notwithstanding, anyone who knows me can vouch for my credentials as a long-standing and ardent Russophile. But my admiration for the culture which within a century produced Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova, and Bulgakov contrasts sharply with my disappointment with a government which helped to sharpen the covert talons of this hidious regime. Perhaps my feelings toward Russia broadly parallel my sentiments toward France: a wholly magnificent and cultured nation, the vast majority of whose political manifestations over history have to greater or lesser extents been evil. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:03 AM by Patrick Belton  

NEXT YEAR IN TASHKENT: Stephen Blank of the Army War College has this interesting short piece in SAIS's Caucasus/Central Asia Analyst. More and more analysts of the former Soviet Union are speculating about the involvement of Russian intelligence in November's attempted coup against Turkmenistan's President Niyazov. Russia has apparently been making ample use of U.S. and world involvement with Iraq to push Russian air bases into Central Asia, and the U.S. military presence out. This nostalgia-informed enterprise, which has so far seen participation of the military, diplomatic, and intelligence services, is not in the U.S.'s interests, nor the region's, nor Russia's. Drug cartels and domestic oil interests are pushing Russia's efforts in the region on their government contacts to serve their own interests, but Russia has neither the economic nor the military capability to sustain a Warsaw-type security domination over Central Asia. The likely outcome will be instead to create further pockets of anarchy in the region, while stealing away Russian resources which could better be deployed in the furtherance of longer-term Russian interests.

The header, by the way, is only the first in a series of bad Pesach allusions to come.... The rhythms of this beautiful holiday have a way of resounding in your head. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:15 PM by David Adesnik  

DA MAN: Within the academy, there is no advocate of democracy promotion either as passionate, as clear-thinking or as well-spoken as Mike McFaul. Whereas most other scholars of comparative politics and US foreign policy take for granted that American intervention is either irrelevant or counterproductive by its very nature, McFaul has carefully sought to document the conditions under which American involvement can advance the democratic cause.

For all those reason -- and because Mike is a really nice guy -- don't miss his excellent column on democracy promotion in today's WaPo. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:55 PM by David Adesnik  

FOOLS AT THE PENTAGON: If you haven't already, go read Josh's Daily Standard article now. As Josh and I have shown before, anti-war activists make irresponisble predictions about civilian casualty figures before the US goes to war and then inflate the body count once the war is over.

Yet for some unknown reason, the Pentagon is refusing to take advantage of its critics' embarassing failure by conducting an authoritative study of civilian casualty figures in Iraq. As Josh points out in the Standard, the media -- both American and European -- respond to this silence by publishing the absurd figures provided by anti-war activists.

Unfortunately, this total incompetence when it comes to public relations is nothing new at DoD. As OxBlog noted before the war began, Pentagon spokesmen tend to alternate between hyperbolic bragging about the accuracy of American weapons and evasive, superficial responses to media interest in the actual performance of such weapons on the battlefield.

The apparent cause of the Pentagon's self-destructive behavior is its paranoid belief that being honest with the media will only intensify journalist's negative portrayal of the military. While the history of animosity between the military and the media is well-known, the fact is that the media have always been kinder to the military when they believe that it is being honest. That was true at the height of the war in Vietnam and it is true today.

While no amount of honesty could have prevented some negative coverage of setbacks in Vietnam, the fact is that the military is now covering up its success. Yet its rationalizations for doing as absurd as ever. The WaPo quoted one Air Force general who argued that

it has been more cost-effective to pour resources into increasingly sophisticated weaponry and intelligence-gathering equipment...

He suggested that once the Pentagon started down the track of studying collateral damage caused by bombs, it could lead to endless assessments.

"I do wonder if we're going to do this every time the Army fires an artillery shell or every time a Special Forces soldier fires a 50-caliber" gun, he said.

Of course weapons development is more effective when it comes to saving civilian lives. But if no one can show that this objective has actually been accomplished, unfounded accusations of military cruelty will continue to abound.

As for the prospect of "endless assessments", that just doesn't seem credible. NGOs such as Human Rights Watch have conducted excellent studies of civilian casualties figures everywhere from Gulf War I to Kosovo despite running on a shoestring budget.

While such reports go some way toward countering the disinformation distributed by anti-war activists, the latter still get considerable play in the media. The only way to level out the playing field is for the military to take its head out of the sand, the fork out of its tongue and talk straight about what actually happens on the battlefield. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:18 PM by David Adesnik  

CULTURAL BORROWINGS: Reader AJ has an interesting idea for how the US can help rebuild Iraq's National Museum and demonstrate its good intentions at the same time. He writes that:

Like most people, I'm saddened by the loss of many priceless exhibits from Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities. It's unfortunate that the U.S. was unable to prevent what happened there.

Still, if the U.S. government is smart, it might be able to use this unfortunate event to garner some goodwill. I imagine that there have to be many items of Persian or Iraqi origin in various U.S. museums. The government ought to contact such museums and see if they might donate or at least loan exhibits until the lost items are recovered or replaced.

I'm no expert on American museums, but there are certainly a few in Britain that have one or two artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:58 PM by David Adesnik  

CUBIN INTERRUPTED: The representative from Wyoming has a vocal corps of supporters who have been writing in to defender her good name. The rallying point for Cubin's supporters is the fact that she never got to finish what she was saying. So how can you call someone a racist if you don't even know what they said?

Here's how: First of all, consider Cubin's actual words --

"My sons are 25 and 30. They are blond-haired and blue-eyed. One amendment today said we could not sell guns to anybody under drug treatment. So does that mean if you go into a black community, you cannot sell a gun to any black person, or does that mean because my--"

Cubin finished her thought about selling guns in black communities and was moving on to explain the relevance of this point to her sons. Cubin herself said that much.

Now, I will agree with Tim Noah that Rep. Watt (D-NC) should've let Cubin finish what she was saying, since there's no telling how much more absurd her statement would have become if the thoughts behind it had seen the light of day. But I have no idea how Tim can say that "Cubin never did explain how she'd intended to finish that sentence." [Emphasis in original]

With that point taken care of, we can move on to the actual substance of Cubin's remarks. James Taranto has slyly observed that Cubin was actually defending the rights of the disabled. Given that the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act includes drug addicts among the disabled, how can one prevent such individuals from buying a gun. I'm no lawyer, but I'll guess that the state has a compelling interest in preventing blind Americans from carrying firearms. The same logic applies to drug addicts.

James' more serious point is that

No one, racist or not, could possibly think that a law barring gun sales to people in drug treatment would mean, in the words of Cubin's rhetorical question, that "if you go into a black community, you cannot sell a gun to any black person." Besides, Cubin was arguing against this amendment. If she were a racist and she thought the amendment would keep the guns out of the hands of blacks, wouldn't she endorse it?

Close, but no cigar. (Not even a Cubin...hehehe.) The plain meaning of Cubin's words is that a logical extension of a ban on selling guns to drug users would consist of a ban on selling drugs to blacks.

As for the the suggestion that if Cubin were a racist she would endorse the amendment I say this: Cubin is a passionate defender of Second Amendment rights. What her remarks suggest is that she accepts African-American gun ownership as a constitutional right that one cannot compromise without endangering the rights of all Americans to bear arms. The logic underlying such a position is quite familiar: all of us accept the right of the Ku Klux Klan to say whatever it says in order to ensure that the rest of us can speak our minds.

Next up, Andrew Blumson takes note of how ironic it is that Josh and I have descended to the level of the "witch-hunt[ing]", "politically-correct" left. With regard to the substance of Cubin's statement, Andy argues that it

can be read as a suggestion that all blacks are drug users. It can also be read as an attempt (rather infelicitous, but she was speaking extemporaneously) to draw an analogy between laws that target 'all people in drug treatment' and laws that target 'all blacks'. It seems plain to me from the evidence cited in the post linked above that the latter was at least much closer to Rep. Cubin's intent.

Well, it seems pretty plain to me that the first interpretation is the correct one and that the second one is fairly unrealistic. How can I be so sure? Let me explain.

Cubin first said that "One amendment today said we could not sell guns to anybody under drug treatment." Her next sentence begins with the words "So does that mean if...", which clearly indicate that the scenario described after the word "if" is a scenario that would exist in a hypothetical world where said amendment had become law. As we all know, the scenario Cubin was describing runs as follows: "if you go into a black community, you cannot sell a gun to any black person."

Clearly, Cubin is not comparing the amendment in question to a hypothetical amendment that targets all blacks. She is arguing that the amendment in question might have the actual effect of targeting all blacks. Which leaves us exactly where we began: calling for either an immediate apology from Cubin, or active condemnation by her fellow partisans.

Finally, reader JAT points out that "the very liberal Barney Frank and David Obey were among several Democratswho explicitly voted with the Republicans not to censure her remarks...
It is of course possible that Barney Frank and David Obey are merely insensitive to cries of discrimination, but I doubt it." Point taken. If any of you know exactly what Frank and Obey were thinking, please share.


(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:20 PM by David Adesnik  

DEFINING "CAKEWALK": The conservative way and the liberal way.

Plus last year's definition and Josh Marshall's comments. (NB: It's a long post from TPM, so you may just want to scroll down to the final paragraph, where the relevant comments are.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:33 AM by David Adesnik  

EUGENE VOLOKH, GENDER THEORIST: One might expect the eminent Prof. Volokh to devote his scholarly writings to pithy observations about our nation's proud constitutional heritage. Instead, the eminent Professor has decided to jump on the academic bandwagon of gender theory and indulge himself in unfounded speculations about the social construction of biostimulant technologies.

(Sadly, I have to admit that my own academic standards are not what they once were, since I loved everything Gene had to say.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:02 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE: While doing some research for my dissertation, I came across the following pair of quotations, both in The New York Times.

The first is the more dramatic. In a Week in Review essay from March 8, 1981, Bernard Gwertzman reported that

In a toast at the end of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's recent visit, Mr. Reagan said it was necessary to have the ''vision'' to see there would be a time when there would be no Communists. Just as Winston Churchill after Dunkirk had prophesied that Hitler would someday be gone, so, Mr. Reagan said, it was time to ''begin planning for a world where our adversaries are remembered only for their role in a sad and rather bizarre chapter in human history.''

Back in the present, however, the Administration has been slow getting machinery together to deal with very real Communists. The first interagency discussion on strategic arms was only held last week and the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has not been named; the main candidates seem best known for their hostility to arms control. The Administration suffers from internal lack of coordination...

Just as the abolitionists once dared to believe that slavery would one day end, so Reagan prophesied the end of Communism. And today we should not doubt that there will be an end to dictatorship and terrorism as well.

The second quotation is also from the March 8, 1981 edition of the Week in Review. It is taken from the transcript of a debate between former US Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White and US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick. During the debate, White observed that

The idea that Latins [sic] are not capable of democracy is just racist nonsense. The Latin Americans are perfectly capable of democracy if we want to assist democracy, but if we place ourselves against democracy and on the side of an oppressive military, then democracy is going to fade away. And this is the great contribution of the human rights policy of the Carter Administration which I will defend forever. That policy gives you a litmus test to distinguish between people who are anti-Communist only because it serves their purposes to stay in power and people who share authentic Western values...

If you replace the words "Latin Americans" with "Muslims" and "Communist" with "terrorist", then the Ambassador's warning is no less applicable today than it was two decades ago.

[And no, there are no permalinks to NYT articles from more than twenty years ago. For the full text, see Lexis-Nexis. Or better yet, visit a library!] (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:33 PM by Daniel  

BYE BYE YASSIR. In a well argued essay, David Makovsky demonstrates why Arafat is done and how European and Arab leaders can help make this a reality. However, if history teaches us anything, it is this: Arafat will find a way to hold on longer than conventional wisdom predicted. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:20 PM by Daniel  

DEMS GETTING READY TO RUMBLE. Rob Brownstein's thoughts on the 2004 Democratic presidential race. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:47 AM by David Adesnik  

A SCHOLAR'S LAMENT: Even though no human life was lost during the sacking of Baghdad's National Museum, I feel that I have lost a part of myself after learning of the theft and destruction of so many priceless monuments to the brilliance of ancient civilization. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:32 AM by David Adesnik  

LEARNING FAST: Yesterday, I taunted Gulf News editor Abdul Hamid Ahmad for implying that Iraqis are not Arabs. At the same time, I expressed a certain hope that images of the Iraqi people celebrating an American victory would "force Arabs throughout the Middle East to reconsider their definition of Arab identity."

That it would happen this fast I couldn't've imagined. Writing in today's Gulf News, the selfsame Mr. Ahmad observes that

With the stunning and shameful collapse of the Iraqi regime and its Baathist reign, another Arab era has vanished, turning the pages of contemporary Arab history and opening a new chapter...

When the winds of change started to blow, it was not only the regime that came tumbling down, but all the institutions as well. And a stark reality was revealed: that these institutions were virtual phantoms as far as the people were concerned. They were under the complete command of the regime. The people were not allowed to participate in the establishment and running of these institutions...

This situation should no longer be prolonged or repeated in other Arab countries. Single party monopoly suppresses all types of political participation and only leads to the suffocation of people, politically and socially. Political and social turmoil reach a boiling point - a pressure cooker waiting to burst...

Democracy should not merely be exercised superficially - displayed without any substance. Instead, it should become a part of public life where every Arab citizen is virtually a partner in any development process instead of just remaining marginalised. This is the change that should replace totalitarianism and monopoly of power by a single party...

While I don't want to overplay the conversion of a single editor to the democratic cause, I think that such an event is still worth noting. With any luck, it won't be the last.

(For more on Arab media reaction to the war, take a look at today's column by Jefferson Morley.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:19 AM by David Adesnik  

IRAQIS STILL NOT ARABS: "The morning after Baghdad was liberated, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, editor of The Gulf News, wrote, like so many of his colleagues: 'This is a heartbreaking moment for any Arab, seeing marines roaming the streets of Baghdad.'" -- Tom Friedman, 13 Apr 2003.

While such statements are good for a laugh, I think there is a more serious point to be made here as well. By celebrating their liberation from Saddam by Western forces, the people of Iraq will soon force Arabs throughout the Middle East to reconsider their definition of Arab identity.

As indicated by both the statement above and others like it, opposition to all manifestations of Western or American power has become a part of modern Arab identity throughout much of the Middle East. (Fascinating, isn't it, that neither the Iranians nor the Turks are ethnic Arabs...)

Before the fall of Baghdad, no American president, no matter how eloquent, could have persuaded the Arab world that an American presence in the Middle East would benefit its inhabitatns. But a picture is worth more than a thousand words. It says things that words cannot say.

Let us hope that a decade from now, the images projected by the people of Iraq will still be as inspiring as they are today.



(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:00 AM by David Adesnik  

DEMS ON WAR: The Brothers Judd have compiled a list of the Democratic presidential candidates' responses to the war in Iraq.

[Apologies for the dead link above. As far as I can tell, there is a temporary access problem with the Brothers Judd April archives. But you can still go straight to their homepage and scroll down to the Dems post.] (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:29 PM by David Adesnik  

WHY NO BACKLASH? An Arab journalist tackles the question. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:06 PM by David Adesnik  

CUBIN REVOLUTION: Yesterday, I called on principled conservatives to condemn Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-WY) for her racist remarks on the House floor. While Josh proudly answered the call, a number of readers have sent in passionate defense's of Cubin's conduct. In fact, one of them suggested that I apologize to Cubin for calling her a racist.

According to this line of thought, such accusations of racism reflect the misinterpretation of Cubin's statement on the House floor. According to JAT,

Rep. Cubin's position, agree or not, is that while drug addiction may in fact be correlated with violence at some level, and that those who use drugs are more likely to be people to engage in gun violence, that there is not a causative relationship. Therefore, she argues that it is an arbitrary and irrational basis to deny someone the right to buy a weapon....

To illustrate her point, she pointed out that it is a well-known fact that, deplorably, gun violence is higher in the inner city and (related to that) among blacks. No one denies this sad fact. Therefore, there is a clear *correlation* between being black and being more likely to engage in gun violence. Therefore, Rep. Cubin pointed out
that under the same logic of the amendment she was opposing, one would make gun sales illegal to blacks. EVEN THOUGH, as she stressed, this was an ILLEGITIMATE INFERENCE, as there WAS NO CAUSATION, and that this was something that OUGHT NOT BE DONE.

Her argument is an obvious reducto ad absurdum. She's attempting to claim that her opponents' argument, when logically followed, naturally leads to the restriction of sales of weapons to blacks. This being ridiculous, she asks that one of the premises be discarded-- that it is right to restrict gun sales based on correlation like drug use.

While JAT has an interesting point about causation vs. correlation, I think his interpretation of Rep. Cubin's remarks is far too generous. What Cubin said was that

One amendment today said we could not sell guns to anybody under drug treatment. So does that mean if you go into a black community, you cannot sell a gun to any black person, or does that mean because my -- "

From what I can tell, this is not a sophisticated argument about the nature of causation, but rather a crude suggestion that drug addiction is a black problem. Even if there is statistical evidence that per capita drug use is greater in black communities , there is no question that it is a pervasive problem in other communities as well. [NB: This is not my area of expertise, so I have no idea what sort of statistical evidence exists.]

For Cubin to suggest that a ban on selling guns to drug users might result in a ban on selling guns to black Americans is disturbing evidence of her belief that drug addiction is a black problem. While one might consider this simply to be a mistaken belief, it is hard to know how any non-racist individual could make such a mistake.

This conclusion raises the question of whether one should condemn not just Cubin, but also those congressmen who voted against censuring her. As JC asks,

How would you deal with the solid phalanx of Republicans who voted against taking down Cubin's remarks? Doesn't this vote suggest an insensivity, to use a polite word, widespread in the ranks of the party whose presidential candidate in 1964 voted against the Civil Rights Act? Whereupon the party began its
surge of support in the South? A party whose core view of the remaining large disparities between the races is that they are now the fault of cultural deficiencies among blacks who don't take advantage of the opportunities afforded them, and not a matter of national concern?

As far as I can tell, what happened on the House floor was that representatives on both sides of the aisle witnessed an intense cofrontation between a Republican representative (Cubin) and a Democratic one (Mel Watt). In the midst of such confrontations, congressmen tend to close ranks and support their own regardless of the merit of the issue.

In this case, however, such partisanship is unacceptable. Thus, I hope that the GOP will quickly recognize its mistake and condemn Cubin. If it does not, then one might have to answer JC's questions in the affirmative.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:32 PM by David Adesnik  

THE CHALABI LOBBY: After landing in Nasiriyah, the INC's Free Iraqi Forces are headed for Baghdad to help restore order. This suggests, of course, that the Pentagon is preparing INC chief Ahmed Chalabi for bigger and better things.

As I've written before, I have serious reservations about the decision to support Chalabi and his ambitions. And I am having a hard time finding anyone who seems to disagree.

Some of Chalabi's critics, for example the CIA, are politically motivated. Others, such as Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose, are veteran analysts with no apparent axe to grind.

Perhaps most surprising are the words of caution from Robert Kagan, who writes that

some Bush officials may want to support the political fortunes of people they have known and trusted for many years, such as Ahmed Chalabi.

It's understandable, but it's a mistake. Chalabi is undoubtedly a good man. While in exile, he labored long and hard against Saddam Hussein. If he can now muster genuine support in Iraq, through his own exertions, then the world should wish him well. But the United States must not give him a leg up over other potential leaders, and especially those who may now begin emerging from within Iraq. As Paul Wolfowitz put it last Sunday, "You can't talk about democracy and then turn around and say we're going to pick the leaders of this democratic country." Exactly right, so the United States shouldn't help Chalabi or anyone else position himself as Iraq's Charles de Gaulle in the waning days of the war. If it ever starts to look as if the United States fought a war in Iraq in order to put Chalabi in power, President Bush's great success will be measurably discredited.

Given Kagan's prominence among neoconservatives, one begins to wonder if anyone other than Richard Perle believes that Chalabi should play a leading role in postwar Iraq.

Wolfowitz's position on the Chalabi issue is hard to discern. While Kagan does cite Wolfowitz to support his argument, the vagueness of Wolfowitz's comments suggests that, for the moment, he is still undecided. And Kagan knows it.

By citing Wolfowitz's public statements as evidence against Chalabi, Kagan is trying to remind Wolfowitiz that he will seem hypocritical if he decides to set Chalabi up as head of a provisional government. What Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush think of Chalabi is even less apparent. My guess is that they are waiting for a consensus to emerge from below, even if they tend to favor the Pentagon on such matters.

Taking this lack of clarity into account, one ought to revisit Josh Marshall's argument that this is going to be an "AEI occupation". Chalabi's departure for Baghdad supports that point. The question in my mind is whether the Pentagon will let him do anything once he gets there.

Finally, on a related note, take a look at Stanley Kurtz's response to Josh's recent article in the Washington Monthly. Josh defends himself well from some of Kurtz's criticism, but I think that much of it is right on. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:23 PM by Patrick Belton  

WELCOME HOME to our rescued POWs. We missed you. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:43 PM by Daniel  

HERE'S SOME OUTRAGE. Yes, former Reagan Assistant Press Secretary Dale Petroskey (who has since admitted that he made a mistake) had the right to do as he pleased, but have Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon's comments really put our troops in further danger? I didn't recall Bull Durham's political undertones, but Jim Caple watched it again and helped me refresh my memory. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:49 AM by Patrick Belton  

NEATEST ARTICLE FROM THE WaPo WEEKENDER: Richard Harrington's piece "When Klezmer Met Salsa" is just plain cool. My personal favorite quote: "When asked why Jews loved the music, Tito Puente once said, 'The minor keys, man, the minor keys.'" (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:05 AM by David Adesnik  

THE DEFINITION OF "VS.": Ampersand has respond to my post entitled "Feminism Vs. Democracy Promotion?"

Ampersand suggests that

The "vs." in David's title makes no sense: Whether gender egalitarianism is a precondition of democracy (as the Foreign Policy article suggests) or democracy a precondition of gender egalitarianism (as David argues), in both cases the interests of feminism and democracy are aligned.

As both a feminist and an advocate of democracy promotion, I believe that the interests of feminism and democracy promotion are in fact aligned. However, the authors of the Foreign Policy essay imply that one cannot promote democracy unless one first promotes feminism. As such, they are insisting that one must delay the promotion of democracy until after the successful promotion of feminism. Hence the use appearance of "vs." in the title of my post.

Let me be clear: I do not believe that one must choose between feminism and democracy promotion. As Ampersand suggests, the interests of both may be best served by pursuing both at once. Let us hope that all feminists recognize this point and decide to throw their weight behind the efforts of the United States and the United Kingdom to promote democracy in Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:01 AM by Patrick Belton  

ONE SIGN THE U.S. IS GIVING a needed increase in political commitment - and bureaucratic heft - to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is this article out of Ha'aretz. According to the article, DCI Tenet has created a heavily-staffed new department within the CIA to support the implementation of the "road map" process as it unfolds, and also hopefully to build confidence between Israel and the PA by monitoring both parties' compliance to any agreements they may make within that process. In addition, one team within the Agency's new department will be involved in the much-needed reform and reorganization of the Palestinian security services. The U.S. has, perhaps justly, come under criticism for disengaging from the peace process - this last move, however, represents a substantial and welcome commitment to seeking a political solution if one can even possibly be found.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik  

TRENT LOTT JR.: This past week, Rep. Barbara Cubin made some extremely offensive racist remarks during a debate on the floor of the House of Representatives. And she has refused to apologize. As both the WaPo and Josh Marshall ask, "Where is the outrage?"

To be sure, there is a war going on which has distracted just about everyone from idiocy on the homefront. And Cubin isn't exactly a power player like Trent Lott. However, the fact that she isn't Majority Leader should make it that much easier to punish her for her misconduct. Moreover, Cubin is from a very safe Republican district, so there is almost no risk that punishing her will benefit the Democrats.

So here's what I propose: I'd like to all prominent conservative publications and websites to insist that Cubin apologize immediately or have the GOP run a strong candidate against her in the 2004 primary. Hopefully, that will give the issue enough weight to get mainstream attention and force Frist, Hastert, etc. to condemn their fellow partisan.

I'll let y'all know if this happens. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:41 PM by Patrick Belton  

RECONSTRUCTING IRAQ WATCH: I'm compiling a working list of articles and proposals relevant to building democracy in Iraq. I'll read over the ones I have so far tonight and comment tomorrow: please let me know if there are articles and other materials that aren't here that you'd suggest I include! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:24 PM by Patrick Belton  

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Jim Woolsey, explaining to an astonished lunchtime audience why he is an environmentalist: "Even hawks need somewhere to nest" (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:57 PM by David Adesnik  

LETTER FROM EGYPT: OxBlog's correspondent in Cairo is not as optimistic as I am about the political significance of Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf. He writes that:

As a resident of Egypt, I suspect that the problem is not simply one of a few bad governments hiding the truth from their people. The Arab people are complicitous in this process as well. Here in Cairo virtually none of my very well-educated students and friends see al-Sahhaf as a liar even now. As recently as a few days ago, many Egyptians were telling me that the U.S. couldn't even defeat Iraq, and is now finished as a superpower. They asked me how I could stand living in the West, where the media lies to its people and receives no objective truth.

The optimistic scenario is that regime changes in the region will change the mindsets of the populace and make it easier for them to engage in badly needed self-critique. But I fear that there is a cultural dysfunctionality here and not just a political one. There is a tendency here to use statements not as propositional truths, but as bargaining positions. When one's bargaining position becomes untenable here, instead of modifying it, one simply changes the subject. In the 1967 War, after it became clear that Nasser's media had lied about the supposed conquest of Tel Aviv and even about the supposed American bombing attacks on the Egyptian Air Force, there were no consequences for the government. Sure, it was a highly authoritarian state, and one wonders whether a _true_ regime change would alter things. Maybe. But I continue to hear the wildest conspiracy theories in the Arab world about the most indubitable realities, and am reluctant to blame that entirely on the governments.

This may be sounding like some sort of "the Arabs aren't ready for democracy" argument. It's actually not-- I'm in favor of democracy throughout the region. But I also know that I'm going to go back to school tomorrow and hear highly westernized and pro-democracy/anti-Mubarak Egyptians tell me that Baghdad hasn't really fallen, that the Jews are behind 9/11, that U.S. Special Forces are stealing baby food from warehouses in Iraq and taking it back to America, and other nonsense of this kind.

Anyway, I hope that you're right and I'm wrong. It would be wonderful if the utter falsification of al-Sahhaf's claims were a show-stopper for absurd Arab media rhetoric.

I think the most interesting thing reported by our friend in Cairo is the way in which Arabs criticize the lies and subjectivity of the Western media. While such assertions may be nothing more than a "bargaining position", it suggests that the Egyptians have a certain understanding of difference between truth and falsehood, spin and reality.

For a broader look at the culture of truth and fiction in the Middle East, OxBlog's Tel Aviv correspondent, BM, recommends David Pryce-Jones' "The Closed Circle".

OxBlog: Where the Arab-Israeli peace process has already succeeded! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:45 PM by David Adesnik  

FEMINISM VS. DEMOCRACY PROMOTION? In an unusual article in Foreign Policy, a pair of top-flight scholars of comparative politics argue that

A society’s commitment to gender equality and sexual liberalization proves time and again to be the most reliable indicator of how strongly that society supports principles of tolerance and egalitarianism. Thus, the people of the Muslim world overwhelmingly want democracy, but democracy may not be sustainable in their societies.

At the same time, the authors rely on data from the World Values Survey to argue that

...democracy has an overwhelmingly positive image throughout the world. In country after country, a clear majority of the population describes “having a democratic political system” as either “good” or “very good”...in the last decade, democracy became virtually the only political model with global appeal, no matter what the culture. With the exception of Pakistan, most of the Muslim countries surveyed think highly of democracy: In Albania, Egypt, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey, 92 to 99 percent of the public endorsed democratic institutions—a higher proportion than in the United States (89 percent).

As far as I can tell, what this data shows is that there is no significant relationship between democratic values and "less permissive [attitudes] toward homosexuality, abortion, and divorce." If those were serious problems, then Texas would probably be a dictatorship.

But seriously, I think the authors make far too much of the existing correlation between women's rights and democratic government. To be fair, they do admit that women's rights were a late development even in the world's most democratic nations. This suggests that democracy may be the cause of women's rights and not vice versa.

Still, the authors seem to ignore the greatest potential flaw in their data: that the correlation between dictatorship and a lack of gender equality is spurious. Fifteen years ago, the existence of a dozen or more Communist nations in which women had equal rights (in principle if not usually in practice) would have prevented quantitative studies from detecting any relationship between democracy and gender equality.

Thanks to political forces that had nothing to do with women's rights, the nations of the Soviet bloc (Central Asia excepted) made a tentative transition to democracy. One unexpected side effect of this transition has been the emergence of a (probably spurious) relationship between sexism and dictatorship in the Muslim world. It would be foolish to let such a statistical anomaly stand in the way of efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:49 PM by Patrick Belton  

POISON IVY: Some of the comments made by distinguished professors during this recent anti-war rally at Yale were, frankly, disgusting. Professor Paul Gilroy, chair of African-American studies, felt it necessary to trot out that old canard, that "the geopolitical interests of Israel" had determined the U.S. course of actions; Sterling Professor of Law Bruce Ackerman (disclosure below) personally insulted the president's intelligence and continued the identification of "Sterling" with "Partisan Democrat" by saying "if we, and by that I mean the Democrats, had won the election in November, we wouldn't be at war right now."

Personally, even though I was cautiously in support of the war, and cheered its progress, I acknowledge there were many good reasons to have questioned it, and many good people did. (Furthermore, although I support many of this administration's foreign policy initiatives, I maintain my registration in the Democratic party, albeit in its centrist and more hawkish wing.) But making allegations of Jewish conspiracies and mocking the president's intellect, however, is not only not the way to criticize U.S. policy, it's outside the bounds of civil political discourse. It's also, incidentally, against most if not all of the values for which Yale as an institution stands.

To back up: I cherish my connection with Yale, much more than I do my affiliation with any other institution - and this for reasons which go beyond crass considerations of academic prestige, and which have instead to do with the deeply ethical, healthy attitudes toward life that I find associated with that university. I continually find in that beautiful place a truer idealism than I'd found in Catholic seminary, a nurturing fondness of quirkiness and individualism, and an exhilerating sense of the potentialities of human existence. Of the truly excessive number of universities amongst which I've shlepped, it is the one which I consider my alma mater; and more than during any other time in my life, it was as a student there that I (for better or worse) grew into who I am now. I've furthermore been happy to work periodically as a research assistant for Professor Ackerman - who is an exceptionally nice man, whose work on constitutional law and social theory is rigorously argued and almost poetically written, and who relishes a love of no-holds-barred intellectual argument like no man or woman I've ever come across.

However, it was with shame that I read about the descension of Yale political discourse to the level of the ad hominem and anti-semitic remark to which these noted professors let themselves be a party. Doing so violated the standards both of Yale and of the nation. Ph.D. candidate David Goldenberg summed it up quite nicely:

"I thought that their speeches were crafted very carefully to draw whimsical chuckles from jaded leftists in the crowd," Goldenberg said. "It was long on wit, short on wisdom. It was rhetoric without content, opinion without foundation, but worst of all, it was above all an ego enhancement session for a group of smug intellectuals. In short, [it was] a session of group intellectual onanism."

Amen, brother. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:20 PM by Patrick Belton  

WHY TONY BLAIR ROCKS, NO. 386: It wasn't enough that he brought the special relationship to new heights by being the United States's most steadfast ally all the way from September 11 to V-I day: now he's going to star on an episode of The Simpsons. As though we needed more reasons to love this guy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:52 AM by David Adesnik  

THOUGHTS FOR SEAN PAUL: Until now, I have said nothing about the misconduct of Sean-Paul Kelley, who committed serious acts of plagiarism in his role as editor of The Agonist. I consider Sean-Paul a friend, and was thus saddened to find out what he had done.

In light of the significant praise that I have given Sean-Paul's work in the past, I feel compelled to make some sort of statement about the situation in which he now finds himself. First of all, I am extremely disappointed to find out that the success of a friend was a product of deception. I was very proud of what Sean-Paul had achieved, both for himself and for the blogosphere.

Most disturbing of all is the fact that Sean Paul refused to acknowledge the impropriety of his actions until they were well-publicized. Rather than admit wrongdoing, he shamefully sought to accuse his critics of duplicity.

For the moment, Sean-Paul has continued to serve as a collator of war-related news. Perhaps that is appropriate, at least until the end of the current conflict. Afterward, however, I would like to see Sean-Paul return to his pre-conflict role as a voice of informed opinion. My initial praise for him was a response to the intelligence of his commentary. Regardless of the impact that the current scandal has had on his credibility as a presenter of facts, I believe he is still well-qualified to comment on those facts' significance.

Finally, with regard to the impact that Sean-Paul's situation will have on the credibility of the blogosphere, I believe that it will -- and should -- have a negative effect. We work in a medium that is susceptible to manipulation and must acknowledge that fact.

Meryl Yourish is right to observe that the presence of plagiarism in the mainstream media does not mitigate its presence in the blogosphere. When a mainstream journalist commits an act of plagiarism, it is often another mainstreamer who exposes his misconduct. As Meryl observes, this does not and should not repair the damage done to the mainstream media's credibility, regardless of the pride it can take in effectively policing itself.

Thus, while we should all acknowledge the integrity and effort that Strategic Armchair Command invested in exposing Sean-Paul's misconduct, SAC's achievement should not make the rest of us complacent. What we can be proud of, however, is that we are beginning to develop a capacity for self-regulation which parallels that of the much more established mainstream media.

As Ken Layne rightly points out, it was the mainstream media that offered unstinting praise for Sean-Paul without making any effort whatsoever to verify the appropriateness of his methods. Thus, our elder cousin may have something to learn from us.

(For a comprehensive set of links to other bloggers' comments, please see this post by Dan Drezner.)

Sean-Paul, I am sure that this experience has been very hard on you. But I am sure that if you learn from it, you will be able to rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of all but the most unforgiving critics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:53 AM by David Adesnik  

CNN SCANDAL: Glenn has this one covered, with posts here, here and here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:40 AM by David Adesnik  

"I TOLD YOU SO", PART II.: Andrew Sullivan is leading the charge with "I Told You So" compilations here and here. Highlights include Eric Alterman and Edward Said, in addition to the usual suspects at The Guardian.

Alterman, however, has been gracious enough to admit how wrong he was, along with Gary Kamiya. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:53 PM by David Adesnik  

BRICKS AND MORTAR: For the first time ever, I am going to meet the bricks-and-mortar version of someone I have only known as a blogger. That someone is London resident Greg D., author of the Belgravia Dispatch.

Now that I think about it, it really isn't all that weird. I've had to arrange various interviews and meetings online without ever meeting my counterparts in person. And, way back in the day, there were people I only knew via telephone who I then went on to meet in person.

Anyway, since I am in London and unable to blog much, why not check out some of Greg's very interesting posts, especially on Ahmed Chalabi, humanitarian aid in Umm Qasr, and the unilateralism of Woodrow Wilson.

And if you want some laughs as well, take a look at Greg's posts on Howell Raines' self-defense. Oh that Howell...
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# Posted 10:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

BANDWAGON. JUMP. REDUX. The lovely and always insightful EG writes in this morning from the Lower East Side:

I stop in every now and again at Oxblog when I can take some time off from
grad school (ie, when I can justify utter procrastination.) As I'm not a
foreign affairs expert, I usually don't feel the need to argue. However, as
a New Yorker I do feel fairly confident in responding to your post about the
recent, and anomalous, "pro-war" rally at Ground Zero. I'd see the rally
more as an interesting case of local political factions using highly
symbolic, contested turf as a staging ground for domestic struggles over (at
most) state-wide financial issues. My read: "the war" is a red herring [for
the union members who staged yesterday's rally in support of the war]. The
real issue is, as usual, the money. Pensions, health insurance, and budget
cuts are in danger, and the union wants to remind Pataki -- a far more
doctrinaire Republican than Bloomberg -- that he in part owes his reelection
in largely Democratic New York to union endorsement. What better way to
drive the message home than with a public demonstration in favor of a cause
that most New Yorkers are at best lukewarm about? Two weeks ago, New York
was recovering from huge, diverse (120,000 plus) anti-war protests that saw
protesters and bystanders alike indiscriminately hauled off to jail. While
it's true that some New Yorkers support the war, before this union rally
there's been no institutional efforts (like, say, the Clear Channel rallies
in Texas) to create public pro-war spectacle. Big rallies require immense
amounts of planning and coordination. I'd argue that many of the traditional
pro-war factions don't see any local political benefit to staging a rally in
New York. Only people who need to reinforce their ties to Albany have the
motivation. Ergo, the union rally.

Yours from the ambivalent left,
Liz

Thanks! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:19 PM by Patrick Belton  

VIVE la démocratie, le whiskey, et le sexy!: Looking for something happier after the previous two postings, I ran across Andrew's new motto, which did the trick quite nicely. Bravo! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:58 PM by Patrick Belton  

SHAMEFUL: An FBI counterintelligence officer had an affair with a Chinese agent (who became a prominent California Republican fundraiser in the 1990s), and provided her with classified U.S. material for over a decade. Not only is this treasonous, it's damned bad manners. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:21 PM by Patrick Belton  

SEE BANDWAGON. JUMP. New York has a pro-war rally today which attracts 25,000. Not to criticize, but - where were all these New Yorkers two weeks ago, when our troops were on the verge of a dangerous conflict in which many of them expected chemical weapons to be unleashed on them? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

MORON WATCH: Anti-Semitic Virginia Democrat Jim Moran tumbles farther toward his political doom with ridiculous comments last night that Jewish organizations were planning to direct and take over the campaign of his next electoral challenger. (The meeting unfortunately ended before he could begin distributing copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:49 AM by David Adesnik  

IRAQIS ARE NOT ARABS: According to Egyptian political scientist Diaa Rashwan,

"The Arab street is very frustrated, and to America, I repeat, I repeat, I repeat, the real war hasn't started yet. We have to be careful with such euphoria. It will only increase the feelings of anger in the Arab world. No Arabs want to welcome an occupying power."

One can safely infer from Rashwan's final words that Iraqis are not Arabs. Right?

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether the Egyptians themselves are Arabs. According to one man quoted by the WaPo,

"If the U.S. really wanted democracy, they would have taken out just about every Arab leader we have. This is very suspect."

If such sentiments are representative of Egyptian public opinion, then one can safely infer that Egyptians aren't Arabs, either. They're neo-cons!

BTW: The headline of the WaPo article cited above is: "TV Images Stir Anger, Shock and Warnings of Backlash." Surprise! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:40 AM by Patrick Belton  

RORTY AS A PRAGMATIST: Cambridge philosophy don Simon Blackburn situates Rorty's work here within the pragmatist tradition of Dewey and James - i.e., the mostly American philosophical tradition which seeks to bypass arguments about whether statements are indeed truly representative of the world by substituting a criterion of whether they are useful for human projects (though the human project of pragmatism does however turn out to have its problems).

Personal sidenote: disappointingly enough, I discovered crestfallen on my arrival at Oxford that my donnish advisors did not adequately appreciate the humor in being called "Don Yuen" or "Don Paul." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:33 AM by Patrick Belton  

FAREWELL TO CONCORDE: After concerns about financial viability loom, the good ship Concorde will be standing down come autumn. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:36 PM by David Adesnik  

ANOTHER BLOGCHILD: This one has multiple parents, but OxBlog is one of them. So take a moment to visit Zach Mears. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:34 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE ON IRAQ IN THE 1980s: After reading OxBlog's recent post on the Jimmy Carter-Saddam Hussein connection, Randy Paul brought to my attention this online collection of documents about US-Iraq relations in the 1980s.

The collection was put together by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has done more than any other institution to ensure public access to information about United States foreign policy. I spent six weeks at the Archive in 2001, and Josh has written about some of the issues they are now working on. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:00 PM by David Adesnik  

REACHING OUT TO IRAQ: A good friend has suggested that that the people of the United States and Great Britain reach out to the people of Iraq by contributing to the resolution of Iraq's humanitarian crisis.

One organization that has done especially good work for the people of Iraq, even during the war, is the Red Cross. Its most impressive achievement was the restoration of water and electricity to Basra while it was surrounded. To get more information about the Red Cross's efforts in Iraq or to make a donation, click here.

Another option is to support the work of UNICEF, which helped position aid supplies on the Iraqi border so that it could react quickly in the event of war.

Finally, if you are a blogger, why not post these links on your site and help spread the word? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:45 PM by David Adesnik  

A HERO FISKED: Until now, I have been unstinting in my praise of Jackson Diehl, who has devoted column after column to the cause of promoting democracy across the globe. But Monday's column has an unpleasant side to it, one that subtly and condescendingly mocks both Israeli and American hawks without ever challenging their arguments head on.

Taking matters into his own hands, Martin Kimel has subjected Diehl's arguments to a trenchant fisking. NB: Martin is still working on his permalinks, so you will have to either scroll down to the relevant post or use the Find command.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:41 PM by Patrick Belton  

BELOW THE BELT(ON): Have you ever noticed the world is full of pundits who put their own words in other peoples' mouths and then criticize them? Calpundit's Kevin Drum just helpfully provided us with another sterling example of this. Ordinarily one of the better and more enjoyable liberal members of the blogosphere (together with a personal favorite, the well written and always entertaining Hauser Report), Kevin very forgivably slipped up the other day and, after rather airily advising his readers "don't worry about the substance" or context of what I'd actually written (which, for the record, was to praise US Ambassador Sandy Vershbow as "one of the few gems of the Foreign Service"), he then rather groundlessly put words in my mouth and incorrectly accused me of being "contemptuous of government agencies and government employees." First of all, since I personally make a habit of slipping-up most days - fairly continuously, actually - I really don't mind at all. Second, though, since Kevin was nice enough to express interest in my views of the U.S. Foreign Service, I thought I might as well develop them in further detail. Gratuitous misreadings of my post notwithstanding, I have no negative views of "government agencies and government employees" in the abstract, although having worked in the State Department and agonized over whether to enter the Foreign Service, I do have some sociological comments about that particular service and things it does well, as well as things it does badly.

Between Yale and Oxford I spent a summer working at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels, and I passed several months of my first year at Oxford in deciding whether or not to accept a position I'd been offered in the Foreign Service as a political officer. Based on my first-hand experiences, my personal reflections on the Foreign Service are these. The people it attracts are generally competent, often even attractive in their breadth of interests and adventurousness. However, as an institution it tends to socialize its youthful, talented members toward (to generously paraphrase Kennan, its most noted alumnus) irony wrapped in sarcasm and shrouded in bitterness; depreciation of the experience or insights of individuals outside that particular bureaucracy; and a disposition toward anecdotal rather than analytical thought, characterized by a reliance on the argument from "well, I was there," which is somewhat analogous to the 19th century Catholic Church's overindulgence of the argument from authority.

My impression, at least, is that many of these norms represent a social response to the experience of stultifying in the middle levels of a large bureaucracy - if joining they expected their profession to confer them status and the ability to provide intellectual contributions to the process of diplomacy, they then however encounter work which is anonymous, routinized, and more bureaucratic than diplomatic. These socialization pressures are certainly very strong, and the only people who seem to escape them are those who, by virtue of talent conjoined with luck, and perhaps connections of mentorship, rise quickly to the upper echelons of the service, and thus bypass the normative pressures of its middle levels - Toria Nuland, Thomas Pickering, and the aforementioned Vershbow being prime examples. Ambassador Pickering , a famously kind man, was nice enough to speak to me about my decision whether or not to join; it was clear that he approached all of his tasks at the junior and middle levels with an entrepreneurial disposition to make his work matter, however routinized or menial. Thus as a vice-consular officer he made sure to discover who in the society in which he was serving would make useful contacts for the embassy, and he ensured he would be the officer adjudicating their visa applications whenever they applied for visas; in this way, as a FS-03 he generated useful contacts for the embassy in the commercial and political elite of the nation in which he was serving. But the Pickerings, Vershbows, and Nulands rise up quickly through the stratosphere of the Foreign Service, leaving behind a cynical, ironic remnant of their A-100 classes who often gripe at everyone: the political appointees who occupy the top tier of the department's offices, the administrations whose naiveté they deride, and which ultimately exercise executive power, the non-diplomats (generally derided as kooks or fools) who dare to comment on the issues on which they work.

It was not always this way: these particular bureaucratic delicts are common to diplomatic and intelligence services (and to some extent officer corps) everywhere since the old boys' networks that had taken the places of aristocratic remnants in these professions (a transition which in the U.S. dates broadly to the Rogers Act of the 1920s) in turn yielded to anomic bureaucracy and impersonal, rule-based administrative structures in the 1970s. It differs among bureaucracies and nations: the British Diplomatic Service is still quite cohesive and relatively unbureaucratic, perhaps because it maintains a fast track and all sub-ministerial posts may be aspired to by career diplomats (as opposed to the U.S., where generally only one Under Secretary of State and several assistants and deputy assistants are drawn from the career ranks); within the United States, the CIA's directorate of operations, with its emphasis on mentorship and apprenticeship in the learning of tradecraft, remains closer to the old-boy than the bureaucratic model; and the strong normative commitments present in the officer corps give it a normative cohesion not present in civilian services. There are some things the Foreign Service does well: while officers are not trained or encouraged to think strategically rather than anecdotally, at the tactical level their work is generally quite competent. Some things it does not: personnel from the directorate of operations, for instance, are by the nature of their socialization and training much more open to useful information and perspectives coming from non-official channels than Foreign Service officers who are socialized only to really respect the opinions of the diplomatic caste. This creates noticeable blind spots. Their cynicism generally makes them less pleasant to deal with, and less ideal representatives of the country, than, say, the action-oriented gregarious officers of the DO or the touchingly loyal officers in uniform. There are of course always exceptions.

So that's my two paragraph anthropological dissection of the Foreign Service, and some of its strengths and pathologies. I'm happy to admit that portions of it may be gloriously wrong, but having been close to the subculture for extended periods of time it strikes me as generally accurate. But now more important activities call than the dissection of diplomats - most notably at the moment, dinner. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:57 PM by David Adesnik  

ANOTHER DEEP THOUGHT from John McCain: "The sea lamprey does not, in my opinion, pose a clear and present danger to our national security." But if it did, the Marines would kick its a**! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:31 PM by Patrick Belton  

BOB KAGAN'S COLUMN in today's WaPo is worth a read. Briefly, he argues that the U.S. should avoid three temptations with respect to New Iraq: first, overly seeking to punish Europe, Russia, or China for their opposition to the war (which would complicate Blair's attempt to reknit Britain's ties to Europe, and drive an isolated Germany into the welcoming arms of neo-Gaullist France); second, overly promoting Ahmed Chalabi as a democratic leader of New Iraq (a good man who nevertheless has questionable credibility and support back in Iraq, where he hasn't lived in decades), instead of allowing democratic leaders to come to the fore under their own power; and third, abandoning public diplomacy, instead of publicizing Saddam's depravities as more are discovered, and working to convince Europe and the Arab world that our war was just. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:27 PM by David Adesnik  

A BLOG OF NOTE: In light of the blogosphere's recent obsession with the very British humor of Monty Python, I thought I would take this opportunity to introduce Setting the World to Rights, a blog that also has a sense of humor appropriate to those who live on a small island off the coast of France. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:13 PM by Patrick Belton  

SORRY SORRY SORRY for the slow blogging from my end the last few days - the confluence of several universities' spring breaks temporarily turned the Belton household into a hotel operation out of a bad joke. But Messrs. Schwartz, Mogg, and Desai having all safely survived the experiment with no (permanent) bodily injuries, now back to blogging..... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:32 AM by David Adesnik  

"I TOLD YOU SO" WATCH: The time has come for those who had faith in American war plans to mock those who didn't. All I add is a note of caution, lest those who now mock become overconfident and leave themselves open to having the tables turned.

Right now, the NYT website is running a headline which says "Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital; U.S. Says Hussein Has Lost Grip on Baghdad" That would seem to resolve the 'liberation' question. (And if the NYT isn't good enough for you, check out the Guardian for similar reports.)

Moderation aside, I have almost no sympathy for those who predicted an indifferent or even hostile response to Coalition forces by the people of Iraq. Believing that an entire population would prefer Saddam's brutality to a foreign occupation is unjustifiable. What's especially nice is that even some of the Arab media are broadcasting images of the liberation to audiences in the Middle East.

On the military front, Andrew Sullivan has been outing all those who spoke without hesitation about the coming quagmire. The list of the outed includes Johnny Apple, Robert Wright, Josh Marshall and, of course, Robert Fisk.

All in all, being wrong is a forgivable thing. In the best of cases, such errors reflect the imperfection of human judgment. In others, partisan preferences are responisble for false expectations. Of course, many of those who were right about the war were only right because of their own partisan prejudices.

For the moment, what I am most interested in is whether those who were wrong will have the decency to admit that they were. Unsurprisingly, Maureen Dowd seems to have failed this test already. Oh well...

UPDATE: Cheney himself has broken his wartime silence in order to to indulge in a round of 'I told you so'. Also, the WaPo has an in-depth look at Arab media reaction to the occupation of Baghdad.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:23 PM by David Adesnik  

SPARTAN TRIUMPH: Andrew Sullivan wryly notes that the stunning British victory in Basra is evidence of how effective an army that respect homosexuals can be.

Sullivan asks: "How did [the British] manage not to collapse as a military force? After all, they allow openly gay soldiers in their units, thus undermining unit cohesion, destroying morale, wrecking troops' privacy and making it impossible to fight. A miracle against all the odds, I suppose."

I guess now we know why the Republican Guard failed to demonstrate all that much unit cohesion, morale, or battlefield effectiveness: they just didn't have enough homosexuals. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:16 PM by David Adesnik  

THE ARABIAN ORWELL: Thus far, both the mainstream media and the blogosphere have held up Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf as an object of ridicule. In fact,

During al-Sahhaf's denials on Monday, an Arabic translator for one of Britain's global satellite TV stations couldn't control himself and broke out laughing on the air.

Fair enough. I'm not going to defend al-Sahhaf the way I did Peter Arnett. Even Robert Fisk is struggling to find a good word to say about the man.

But I want to do is think seriously for a moment about the political implications of al-Sahhaf's performance as the public face of Iraqi resistance. The first commentator to think seriously about al-Sahhaf's role has been Slate's Tim Noah, who made a compelling case that al-Sahhaf says what he says to order to turn back the wrath of Qusay Hussein and other Saddam henchmen who might have his head if he faithfully reported Iraqi defeats. (Thanks to Josh for the link.)

Presuming that Noah is correct, al-Sahhaf's behavior bears a striking resemblance to that of high officials in both Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, who faced the simple choice of fabricating the truth or being killed. According to one historian, the death of 30 million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward stemmed in great part from a nationwide effort to provide Beijing with false reports of agricultural and industrial success that confirmed its predictions of national greatness. Acting on such reports, Mao and his inner circle made further predictions of success, and so on.

While the dysfunction of totalitarian regimes is now a matter of conventional wisdom, this was not so until well after the end of the Cold War. Realists such as George Kennan and Henry Kissinger long insisted that the Politburo's immunity from public opinion enabled it to carry out foreign initiatives far more daring and sophisticated than those of the United States. Given the apparent success of the Soviet Union in military affairs, such conclusion were hard to resist. Thus, in the mid-1980s, policy intellectuals found themselves enraptured by Paul Kennedy's "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", which foresaw American becoming a victim of 'imperial overstetch'.

As critics are fond of saying, Kennedy got things half-right; the Cold War did end when one of the superpowers fell prey to imperial overstetch. Kennedy just failed to guess which one. While I would still hesitate to say that the Coalition victory in the current war has come at less cost then expected, the low cost of that victory surely reflects the dysfunction of the Iraqi regime.

The analysis of al-Sahhaf's lies must not end with the fall of Baghdad, however. While such lies may be an indication of the Ba'ath regime's dysfunction, they may now become a direct cause of other regime transitions in the Middle East.

I expect that al-Sahhaf will soon become a symbol for all those Arabs who have long suspected that their own state-run media tell nothing but lies. Instead of wondering whether the endless repetition of such lies reflects the kernel of truth at their core, Arabs will become more confident that such lies can be unmasked when confronted with force.

It is hard to know what effect this changing awareness will have on Middle Eastern politics. In an optimistic scenario, it will force unmitigated dictatorships such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia to give a greater voice to civil society and nascent opposition groups. In a less optimistic scenario, the crumbling facade of state propaganda will heighten both public anger and government repression, resulting in widespread human rights abuses and even civil war.

The clearest beneficiary of al-Sahhaf's self-pardoy is Al Jazeera. Now more than ever, Arabs will know that only an independent news source can provide them with reliable information. The fact that Saddam expelled Al Jazeera from Iraq during the war will only heighten its credibility. Of course, this market for information may well result in the establishment of competitors who will challenge Al Jazeera role as the pre-eminent non-Western news source.

Perhaps the most surprising beneficiary of al-Sahhaf's charade will be the United States. At minimum, his lies will remind American citizens that we still face opponents who will lie straight through their teeth in order to justify their own brutality. In the two decades or so since the death of Mao and Brezhnev, that point has often been forgotten, even if there are those such as Milosevic who effortlessly built on their precedent.

But there is also the chance that the exposure of al-Sahhaf's lies will force Arabs to confront the inadequacy of their own knowledge about the United States and its motives. For the moment, there still may be millions of Arabs who believe what al-Sahhaf has to say. But as Al Jazeera and others broadcast news of the American victory, even the most faithful will be disillusioned.

While countless residents of the Middle East have no doubt enjoyed al-Sahhaf's no-holds barred rhetorical attacks on the United States and Britain, these same residents will recognize that such boldness comes with a price. This sentiment was intimated by one man quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle:

"He's the comic relief of the war," said Salwa, a 59-year-old Egyptian teacher. "At the same time, he's the voice of victory that we want to believe."

Some might say that the more compelling voice of victory belongs to Al Qaeda, that Saddam's fall will benefit only those who offer an even more radical alternative. But I disagree. I suspect most Arabs will recognize that both Saddam and Bin Laden are examples of what happens to those who act the Arab world's fantasies of violent revenge.

In order to consolidate the gains made thanks to al-Sahhaf, the United States must now show that American ideals follow the American flag. Remembering al-Sahhaf, the people of the Middle East will demand credible accounts of life in occupied Iraq. If that life becomes evidence of democracy's viability in the sands of the Middle East, then the alternatives will become clear: Act on one's pride and become a martyr, or admit that what one's enemy has to offer is the best option available.

UPDATE: Dan Simon comments on Orwell's pessimism and its application to al-Sahhaf. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:42 PM by David Adesnik  

FILL IN THE BLANKS: I came across an interesting article from a few years back while doing research for my dissertation. Let's see if you can guess whose names I've left out of its opening sentences:

The drums around Washington have begun to beat out faint but persistent signals heralding what could become the strangest diplomatic seduction scene of this troubled political year. Judging by the drift of pronouncements of knowledgeable commentators, and the cautious entreaties of National Security Adviser [BLANK A], the [BLANK B] admiistration is adopting a distinctly flirtatious attitude toward Iraqi strongman Saddam ("the engineer of revolution") Hussein. Coming at a time of increased tension between Iraq and Iran on the one hand, and the US and Iran on the other, the US feelers are not likely to be ignored by the pragmatic Hussein, whose strategies for Iraqi hegemony in the Middle East are well known.

Tough one, eh? Perhaps making this a multiple choice test would be better. The choices are (for Blanks A/B):

a) Henry Kissinger/Gerald Ford
b) Zbigniew Brzezinski/Jimmy Carter
c) Robert MacFarlane/Ronald Reagan
d) Brent Scowcroft/George H.W. Bush
e) Anthony Lake/Bill Clinton

Did that help at all? It's hard to say, since all of the answers are fairly plausible. The easiest of the five to eliminate is actually choice 'c' (MacFarlane/Reagan), since why would I bother with guessing games about an administration that everyone knows was in bed with Saddam Hussein?

Actually, I wouldn't even bother you with guessing games if the answer were anything except 'b' (Brzezinski/Carter). Who knew? Mr. Nobel Peace Prize himself warming up to the Ba'athist butcher. The article cited above is from the The New Republic's May 3, 1980 edition. The author was Amos Perlmutter, whom one would have to describe as almost prophetic.

Here are some other highlights from the article:

Already stories have appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post painting pictures of a moderate and benign Iraq as the logical successor to Iran as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and a likely candidate for closter ties with the United States...

"We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq," [Brzezinski] said...

To the administration, Iraq and Hussein now loom as the protectors of Saudi Arabia and its oil...

A gesture of friendship with the West and the United States seems rife with opportunity for Iraqi action against Iran, action that the US might be forced to sanction...

Hussein's involvement in the brutalities and violenc eof recent Iraqi political history is first-hand and continuous...

Last and most ominously, Iraq is the only Arab country attempting to develop a nuclear capactiy -- with the active help of Italy and France...

Our policymakers, particularly Brzezinski, should take off their blindfolds and look at Iraq for what it really is: a state inimically hostile to US interests, under a regime steeped in bloodshed and violence.

As Yogi Berra once said, "It's like deja vu all over again." Or perhaps it would be better to recall the words of Karl Marx, who said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But the third time is always the charm. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:25 PM by David Adesnik  

READING OXBLOG, PART II: The mainstream media are beginning to notice that the prospects for an Arab backlash have been somewhat exaggerated. The Economist is now asking:

If secular nationalism has failed the Arabs, will they turn to violent Islamism instead? It is unlikely. Over the past 20 years, Arabs have watched the Islamic revolution in Iran, which once hoped to export revolution to the Arabs as well, fail in war against Iraq and then fail in economics too. In countries where radical Islam turned violent, such as Egypt and Algeria in the 1990s, it has succeeded mainly in scaring the middle classes and secular intellectuals, who might otherwise have pushed for political reform, into accepting ruthless state repression. A few pious and violent hearts, offended by the spectacle of infidel intrusion, will no doubt respond to the Iraqi war by taking up arms alongside al-Qaeda. But though some Arabs admired the attack on the twin towers, most know that religious war against the West is no answer to their difficulties. The chances of Iraq igniting such a war is slim.

Did someone once make similar points about Egypt and Algeria. Nah, couldn't be...

Moving on, Tom Friedman writes that

To read the Arab press is to think that the entire Arab world is enraged with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and to some extent that's true. But here's what you don't read: underneath the rage, there is also a grudging, skeptical curiosity — a curiosity about whether the Americans will actually do what they claim and build a new, more liberal Iraq.

While they may not be able to describe it, many Arabs intuit that this U.S. invasion of Iraq is something they've never seen before — the revolutionary side of U.S. power. Let me explain: for Arabs, American culture has always been revolutionary — from blue jeans to "Baywatch" — but American power, since the cold war, has only been used to preserve the status quo here, keeping in place friendly Arab kings and autocrats.

Arabs able to patiently think and evaluate empirical evidence? Nope, never heard that one, either.

(That last link was actually to my first ever post on the backlash myth. I've been working on this same rant for almost two months now! Man, will I luck dumb if the backlash starts tomorrow. But if you're a pro-wrestling fan, you know that the Backlash begins on April 27th with the return of Goldberg!)

Last but not least, we come to the WaPo, which seems to be distancing itself from its earlier insistence that the backlash is well underway. On the front page of yesterday's paper, Glenn Frankel reported that

For Muslims throughout the world, the war in Iraq has set off a wave of anger, sadness, frustration and despair.

What it hasn't done, so far at least, is produce a flood of jihadist recruits willing to die for President Saddam Hussein's cause, or a backlash strong enough to topple Arab governments with close ties to the West, according to interviews conducted over the past week with Muslims around the world.

The televised daily scenes of civilian casualties, humiliated Iraqi prisoners of war and triumphant American warriors rolling through southern Iraq have left a bitter taste in the mouths of millions. But political Islam, a potent if divided force, appears torn between its fear and suspicion of the West and its long-standing hatred of Hussein, who is perceived as one of the most secular and totalitarian of Arab leaders.

Resenting Saddam more than they fear the US? No way! [The OxDem FAQ linked to a Yahoo! news story on this point, but the link has expired.)

Now, you'll have to excuse for a minute while so I can get all of this righteous indignation out of my system. Of course, f you're really sure that a backlash is coming, make sure to visit the NYT, which is still turning up evidence for it all over the place. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:49 PM by David Adesnik  

READING OXBLOG? Following our precedent, Slate rips into the NYT's R.W. "Johnny" Apple for his turnaround on the war. (Thanks to Dr. BL for the link) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:43 PM by David Adesnik  

BBC'S CHARLATAN: Daniel Drezner reports that the BBC is uncritically citing Marc Herold's civilian casualty counts for the current war. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:45 PM by David Adesnik  

FEELING LAZY? You are not alone. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:26 PM by David Adesnik  

POWER OF THE PURSE: So far, the struggle for power in postwar Iraq has played out as a battle between the Pentagon on the one hand and a coalition of the State Department, the British government and the United Nations on the other.

But now there's another gunslinger in town who links it his job to play sherriff. They call him Congress. We learn today that

Congress has already rewritten the emergency request for $2.5 billion in reconstruction assistance that Bush submitted last month, with the Senate barring the money from use by the Pentagon. The House has insisted that it go through the traditional State Department aid agencies. "The secretary of state is the appropriate manager of foreign assistance, and is so designated by law," said Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz), a House Appropriations Committee member, expressing a view widely held across party lines.

While $2.5 billion may not sound like enough to warrant congressional concern, that isn't the point. When Congress wants to influence American foreign policy, it does so by taking advantage of its power of the purse. While the executive branch controls almost every aspect of foreign relations, the appropriations process is a bottleneck at which Congress can stop almost any initiative it deems undesirable.

For a concise and incisive overview of Congress' powers in the realm of foreign relations, see James Lindsay's "Congress and the Politics of US Foreign Policy."

In the process of conducting research for my doctoral dissertation, I have become well aware of how Congress can face down the executive no matter determined he is. Even though Reagan asked for negligible sums to aid the Salvadoran armed forces and Nicaraguan contras, Congress forced him to invest a massive amount of political capital in a battle that lasted throught Reagan's entire time in office -- and which he eventually lost.

Information -- distributing it, hiding it, interpreting it -- was the tactical focus of the interbranch struggle to dictate policy toward Central America. As today's WaPo report indicates, the same is true with regard to the Bush administration and the struggle over postwar Iraq:

Despite repeated requests for more information and for a meeting with Garner, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) said he and his staff have received only "inconclusive and not very comprehensive views" on Garner's plans. The Pentagon has refused requests from Lugar and other committees to meet with Garner. With Garner's team awaiting entry into Iraq, the Defense Department "has refused requests by the staff of the Appropriations Committee to brief us, and has its people sitting around a swimming pool in Kuwait drawing up plans," said a senior congressional aide...

In what members said was an unprecedented move, Bush asked for the $2.5 billion reconstruction fund to be appropriated to the White House itself, presumably to be distributed through the Pentagon. A memo prepared by senior GOP staff for the House Appropriations Committee noted that the arrangement would erect a "wall of executive privilege [that] would deny Congress and the Committee access to the management of the Fund. Decision-makers determining the allocation . . . could not be called as witnesses before hearings, and most fiscal data would be beyond the Committee's reach."

It's worth noting that the Bush administration has already provoked Republican congressmen to the point where they are willing to break ranks and oppose the administration's plans. It took Reagan quite a while to let things slip that far.

All in all, initial reports suggest that the Bush administration's well-known obsession with secrecy and awkward managment of legislative affairs will shape its approach to the occupation. (NB: Josh disagrees on the legislative affairs point.)

For the moment, it is unclear where the President himself stands on hte occupation issue. My guess, however, is that he will broker a compromise which favors the Pentagon.

As a matter of principle, I like to Congress win when the executive tries to undermine its oversight of foreign relations. But in this case, I think Congress favors an inferior policy while the secretive Pentagon has a much stronger case. So what is to be done?

Hopefully, the Pentagon will open up and give Congress the information that it both wants and deserves. The public deserves this information as well. There is every reason to believe that Congress will go along with the administration's preferred policy provided that the administration shows respect for congressional opinion.

If it doesn't there is good reason to believe that Congress will fight tooth and nail to stop the administration, regardless of the impact that such a conflict would have on America's interests abroad. When Congress feels that it has been slighted, it tends to put all practical concerns aside and focuses on punishing those who have slighted it. Assuming the White House fights back (as it did under Nixon and Reagan) the usual outcome is a compromise that is worth than either of the original policies under consideration.

In light of America's compelling interest in the democratic reconstruction of Iraq, the administration ought to work with Congress rather than against it. Congress has a long record of favoring democracy promotion, and there is every reason to believe that it will want to entrust that task to the Pentagon rather than those who support the United Nations. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:36 PM by David Adesnik  

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: The more I read of the Republic, the more ignorant I know I am. From Socrates' perpsective, I guess that makes it the perfect book.

By posting my thoughts on OxBlog, I hope that I can draw more of you into this coversation about Plato so that you can help me appreciate his work. The more I read, the more I recognize that I cannot begin to understand Plato's significance without being able to place him within the context of the Western philosophical tradition.

Unfortunately, in contrast to Josh, I did not participate in Yale's Directed Studies (DS) program, which introduces a select lot of freshman to the great works of Western civilization. Therefore, I want to take advantage of the fact that the readers of this website have a wealth of untapped knowledge. What I post will consist more of questions and speculations than of answers.

Then again, turnabout is fair play. Instead of blogging to advertise my opinions to the world, I will now take advantage of my blog to learn from it. Here goes:

In Book II, Sec. 358-59, Glaucon observes that

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; --it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.

To the modern reader (or at least to this modern reader), Glaucon's observation presciently anticipates the work of Locke, Rousseau and others on the social contract. A footnote to the Penguin edition of The Republic (Pp. 45-46) observes that Enlightenment philosophers were more interested in providing a legal justification for state sovereignty, whereas Glaucon's interest is in the moral foundation of obedience to the law.

That seems fair. But what I find much more striking about Glaucon's words are the way in which they prefigure Rawls' description of the 'original position' which exists behind the veil of ignorance. Justifiably, Rawls has been attacked for describing the original position in a manner so abstract that it becomes impossible to derive any sort of ethical precepts from it. In contrast, Plato (through Glaucon) seems to deal with a more concrete situation in which actual victims of injustice engage in an effort to draw up a constitution for civil society. Will Socrates later explain why this approach to the law is deficient?

I imagine so, since the Republic is famous for its identification of the sovereignty of the philosophers as ideal. On the other hand, some have argued that Rawls' original position is nothing more than an elaborate disguise for the rule of the one philosopher, namely Rawls.

For the moment, I'd like to contrast Glaucon's description of the origin of the law with Socrates' description of the origin of society later on in Book II, Sec. 369. It reads as follows:

A State, I [Socrates] said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. Can any other origin of a State be imagined?

--There can be no other.

Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to supply them, one takes a helper for one purpose and another for another; and when these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the body of inhabitants is termed a State.

--True, he [Adeimantus] said.
And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and another receives, under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.

--Very true.
Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

What I find especially interesting about this passage is its description of a society that has come into existence not because of a social contract, but because of mutual needs. If memory serves, Locke argues that the state of war between man and man only comes to an end with the conclusion of a social contract. Yet here, a peaceful and cooperative society exists in the absence of a social contract.

Alternately, one might say that it is exists in the absence of a conscious social contract. Rather, it seems that an implicit recognition of the value of cooperation has led to the creation of an informal social contract. Perhaps the more formal one described by Glaucon above is the one that communities institute in order to resolve those conflicts that are not amenable to resolution via the cooperative division of labor.

These different models of conflict and arbitration seem to prefigure some of the game theoretic models of international cooperation developed by political scientists. From what I know, the sophistication of such models pales in comparison to the game theory applied by economists. But that is the sad fate of international relations; to recylce the detritus of other social sciences. (What, me melodramatic?)

In short, Glaucon's scenario accounts for the resolution of zero sum conflicts, whereas Socrates' describes the natural outcome of positive sum games. Is it going too far to suggest that Plato had some fundamental awareness of these different scenarios, even if he was not able to apply the language of modern game theory? I guess I will have to read on and find out.




(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:46 PM by David Adesnik  

CONGRATULATIONS! All the best to JA and MP on their engagement! Jon and I were roommates for three years in college and one year thereafter. We've been through it all together. We go way, way back.

I haven't met the bride, but I am fully confident that anyone who has won Jonathan's respect and love is someone it that I will be proud to know for decades to come. I wish the bride and groom a wonderful life together, a wonderful family, and all the happiness in the world. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:17 PM by David Adesnik  

THE RUMSFELD REVOLUTION: A noted historian writes that the Secretary of Defense's dominant role in strategic decision-making is unprecedented -- with the exception of Robert McNamara's dominance in the age of Vietnam. So maybe that Marx guy was wrong about history repeating itself. We'll see. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:45 PM by David Adesnik  

CAN'T FIND A VEDDER MAN: As a die hard Pearl Jam fan, I wasn't all that happy to read about Eddie Vedder's sophomoric anti-Bush protest. (NB: If he had gone after Gavin Rossdale, that would've been justified. But I'm talking about President Bush.)

But as Josh always says, we'd never be able to appreciate great art or music if we spent time worrying about their creators' politics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:26 PM by David Adesnik  

AIRLINES: Heh heh heh. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:25 AM by Daniel  

WHERE WILL SHE SEE HERSELF? According to some scholars, Sandra Day O'Connor sympathizes with plaintiffs like herself. Will she side with the University of Michigan because she sees the parallel in her own life--that bright, hard-working students sometimes deserve a few extra points? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:07 AM by David Adesnik  

TO BE ARNETT TO BE: I have yet to come across a single individual who shares my opinion that NBC was wrong to fire Peter Arnett. Doesn't matter. I'm still not convinced.

But just so you know, I do think Arnett is an idiot. On April 1, Arnett wrote that

"Tariq Aziz told me the U.S. will have to brainwash 25 million Iraqis because these people think exactly the same as Saddam does.

"Maybe he is wrong, maybe not."

Does that mean that if Saddam lived in Najaf, he also would've cheered for the American soldiers who had come to liberate the town?
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:43 PM by David Adesnik  

DEMS BACK REGIME CHANGE: John Kerry has announced that

"What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States."

Unsurprisingly, the GOP denounced Kerry for his absurd comparison of George Bush to Saddam Hussein. Kerry responded that "I'm not going to let the likes of Tom DeLay question my patriotism, which I fought for and bled for in order to have the right to speak out."

Somewhat surprisingly, Josh Marshall is going to bat for Kerry. While Josh has no love lost for Republicans, this seems to me to be the wrong issue over which to pick a fight. It's hard to interpret Kerry's original statement as anything other than a comparison of Bush to Hussein, which really is quite offensive.

But according to Josh,

The particulars of Kerry's remark are almost beside the point. This is no better than cheap bullying practiced by the president's hacks. And, in political life as in personal life, there is only one way to deal with bullies: you must fight back against them with at least the ferocity and intensity that they use against you. They understand nothing else and deserve nothing better. There's no reasoning with them, no apologizing to them, no hashing out the particulars of remarks you've made.

Bullying, bluff and aggression have been the signature modus operandi of the president's political operatives in domestic politics for the last two years. How many veterans will get their patriotism questioned by the president's operatives and placemen before we see the mainline pundits say enough is enough? Recently, we've seen Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt and now John Kerry get the treatment. The president's operatives are using the presence of an American army in the field -- Americans fighting and dying in Iraq-- not only to land a few easy shots on the president's opponents but to hit them so hard that they're afraid to hit back. Don't miss the point of this: it's to scare anyone out of uttering any criticism. And it's a cheap use of American blood.

2004 has begun. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:07 PM by David Adesnik  

MANUFACTURED OPTIMISM: "As American troops rushed to the outskirts of Baghdad, many people seemed to have the impression that the war was all but over." -- Michael Gordon, NYT military correspondent

"Just days ago, people were saying we were bogged down, and now they're saying, `Describe for us and give us the names of the government that's going to be running Iraq in the future.' We're still in the middle of war." -- Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary

Interesting how Gordon never says who it is that think the war is "all but over". Unless he meant the White House press corps. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:01 PM by David Adesnik  

EATING CROW: Last week, the NYT's R.W. "Johnny" Apple compared this war to the one Vietnam. This week, Apple is the author of a news analysis essay explaining how remarkable progress in the march on Baghdad has turned back fierce criticism of the administration's war plans.

I have to guess someone at the Times thought this was a proper way for Apple to face up to his own prejudices. Who knows. Maybe Apple volunteered for the assignment in order to show he's a big enough of man to admit when he's wrong.

Still, Apple's essay doesn't quote even a single individual who suggests that last week's criticism reflected the media's desperate search for a story rather than an actual setback in the conduct of the war. Johnny, don't you read Bill Keller's opinion columns?

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:41 PM by David Adesnik  

EVEN MORE BACKLASH: While this op-ed by Sens. Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel deserves a more in-depth response, for now I'll focus on one sentence that really got to me:

...a military occupation, even temporary, that includes only American and British soldiers could fuel resentment throughout the Middle East, bolster al Qaeda's recruitment and make Americans a target for terrorists everywhere.

I get it. Right now, tens thousands of Arabs are thinking to themselves "I guess I'm OK with the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, even if it violated international law and led to the death of innocent civilians. But an exclusive Anglo-American occupation? What chutzpah! I trusted George Bush and Tony Blair up until now, but this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. I'm off to join Al Qaeda!" (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:21 AM by David Adesnik  

IS THAT NEWS? "The BBC's Rageh Omaar, whose activities are restricted by authorities, says he saw no American troops in the centre of Baghdad."

OxBlog's David Adesnik, whose activities are restricted by the fact that he lives in England, also says that he saw no American troops in the centre of Baghdad. This report was confirmed by Josh Chafetz and Patrick Belton, thus ensuring that it represents the objective truth, and not just a shadow on the wall of a cave.

CORRECTION/UPDATE: Reader ZM points out that the quote I attribute to the BBC does not, as things now stand, appear verbatim on its website. This afternoon, when I originally cut-and-pasted it from the BBC to OxBlog, it appeared as it does above.

This leads me to believe that BBC edited its website without giving public notice of its decision. I find such an explanation plausible, because I know that both the NYT and Reuters edit their websites without giving notice.

Even so, it is fully possible that my own incompetence led me to misquote the BBC and then forget that I had done so.

FYI, the BBC now reports that:

BBC correspondents say they have not seen US troops in the centre of Baghdad...[Six paragraphs later:] The BBC's Rageh Omaar, whose activities are restricted by authorities, witnessed the evidence of recent fighting littering the main roads, with Iraqi tanks and armoured personnel carriers still on fire.

Naturally, I find this to be rather confusing. If US troops didn't destroy those tanks and APCs, who did? Moreover, it is not even clear from context whether Omaar is reporting from Baghdad or elsewhere (although elsewhere on the BBC website he is listed as a "BBC correspondent in Baghdad).

If any of you can help me figure this one out, it would be much appreciated. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:24 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT, ME WORRY? Daniel Drezner mocks a pessimist. Andrew joins in. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:21 PM by David Adesnik  

JUST VIOLENCE: Mickey Kaus reports on just how far Iraq is going to intimidate deserters. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:11 PM by David Adesnik  

SACHS AND VIOLENCE: Steve Sachs is back in the blogosphere, with excellent posts on both the serious side of war (suicide bombing) and the less serious side as well (booby trapped pencils).

Welcome back to a good friend and a first-rate thinker!

WARNING: The links in this post don't seem to be working. Typical Blogger. We'll try to fix the problem ASAP. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:58 PM by David Adesnik  

MOCKING THE CLUELESS: CalPundit does it, and well. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:50 PM by David Adesnik  

OIL AND BANKRUPTCY: The LA Times reports that Iraq needs far more help than even its oil can provide. (Link via CalPundit.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:40 PM by David Adesnik  

KRISTOF ON OCCUPATION: "Sensitivity and diplomacy managed to turn around public opinion [toward the US] in Japan and Germany." Funny, I thought it had something to do with the fact that people actually resented Hitler.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:31 PM by David Adesnik  

LOVING SADDAM: NYT journalist Ethan Bronner has published a long essay on the almost incomprehensible phenomenon of Iraqi adoration for Saddam. Perhaps the most disturbing observation in Bronner's column is this:

In 1995, Mr. Hussein held his first popular "referendum" and "won" more than 99 percent of the vote. Everybody abroad dismissed it, but my sense was that an honest poll would still have given him a victory — with 55 or 60 percent.

In an otherwise judicious discussion of the subject, it is shocking assertion that will undermine Bronner's credibility in the eyes of countless readers.

In addition to the judiciousness of the rest of his essay, Bronner's derives credibility from the fact that he has had considerable contact with Iraqi citizens in the absence of government minders. Thus, it is not the Iraqi government but rather Bronner's own prejudice and ignorance that have rendered him judgment so extremely flawed.

Perhaps I would believe that a majority of Sunni Arabs support Saddam, at least as a necessary evil. But how can anyone believe that the Kurds would vote for the same man that made them victims of genocide?

Moreover, is there any reason to believe that Shi'ite Iraqis would vote for a man who has crushed them and their religion with a brutality hardly less extreme than that which devastated the Kurds? Mind you, two-thirds of Iraqis are Shi'ites. To win an election without their support is all but impossible.

Finally, even when it comes to the Sunnis, I believe that whatever delusional adoration they have for Saddam is a reflection of their subjection to mind-numbing propaganda. As Josh has pointed out, even Al Jazeera's fierce anti-Americanism has not prevented it from exposing the injustice of Arab dictators.

In the process, Al Jazeera's broadcasts have destroyed Saddam's image within the Arab world as a savior. Just as the end of World War II delivered a perceptual shock ot the misguided supporters of militarist brutality in Germany and Japan, there is every reason to believe that those Iraqis who now have true faith in Saddam will recognize him for what he is once he is gone.

This is not to say that such Iraqis will either come to appreciate the United States or develop a commitment to democratic politics. But they may well be disgusted with themselves for what they once were.

While Bronner's essay is well worth reading, one must ultimately regard it as a sad monument to the ways in which prejudice can color the work of even the most hardworking journalists. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:08 PM by David Adesnik  

DEEP THOUGHTS: No, not by Jack Handey. But rather by the intrepid readers of OxBlog.

BA warns:

For the love of heaven, do not, on any account, let the first commentary on Plato you read be Karl Popper. Like many early analytic philsophers, he read the tradition quickly, uncomprehendingly, and poorly. I say this as a card-carrying analytic myself (although perhaps my membership has
lapsed).

DW and MY agree on this point, with DW adding that Allan Bloom's translation and commentary are infinitely preferable.

With that point made, we come to a discourse on the Republic by EK, whose advice I sought in my first post on Plato. I'd just like to preface EK's comments by saying that we have known each other for almost twenty years. At Yale, we had the joint privilege of taking a seminar on Thucydides' Peloponnesian War (highly recommended by BS) with Donald Kagan. In my four years at Yale and three at Oxford, I have never been in a seminar with anyone (professors excluded) who made as many intelligent and substantive points as E. So it's a privilege to have him writing for OxBlog. Here goes:

Allan Bloom's introduction to the Republic (which is in the edition he translated) is an invaluable source. Bloom (borrowing from Leo Strauss) decimates the common assumption that Socrates speaks for Plato, and attempts to read the
Republic for what it is --- a play with different characters in which the author's position cannot simply be conflated with the protagonist's, but must be teased out of the action and the narrative.

Along those lines, Josh's bland assertion that "our knowledge of truth and justice [has] advanced beyond that of Plato's time" is based on his premise that Plato supported "a dictatorship of the philosophers." The only argument for that premise, however, is that, in the Republic, Socrates supported "a dictatorship of philosophers." This argument is weak. Exhibit A in the case against Socrates = Plato is the dramatic structure of the Republic (see Bloom for this). Exhibit B is Plato's later
dialogue, the Laws, in which the Athenian Stranger (who takes Socrates' place as Plato's protagonist) argues for a mixed constitution similar (at least broadly speaking) to the mixed constitution later described by Aristotle and Polybius.

All I'm getting at here is that for Josh to prove that "our knowledge of truth and justice [has] advanced beyond that of Plato's time," he can't just say: (1) Plato was an antidemocrat, (2) we now know antidemocrats are bad, and (3) therefore, our knowledge of truth has advanced. The argument has several severe flaws: First, for the reasons summarized above, Plato's view is not that simple. Second, our own Constitution has profoundly undemocratic elements. The Senate was originally conceived of by many as an aristocratic check on the House of Reps (note that the original Constitution did not allow for the direct election of senators -- this was changed by the 17th Amendment). Hence, the six-year term limits that insulate senators from their constituents. The president, moreover, who is not directly elected (though, of course, the electoral college now votes strictly as they are told to vote), also served as a check on direct democracy. Finally, the notion of a written Constitution that's hard to
change and that can be enforced by the judiciary is itself antidemocratic.

The point is not that there haven't seen significant innovations since Plato -- that's obvious (Josh's example of federalism is a good one, though I'm not sure that was the Founders' idea. See Tocqueville's "Old Regime and the French Revolution," in which he describes the British county system in the 18th century and contrasts it with the French administrative apparatus). The point is that Josh turns Plato into an anti-democratic straw man.

The game is afoot!

CORRECTION: The letter I cited yesterday was from Jefferson to Adams, not vice versa.

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# Posted 6:29 PM by David Adesnik  

OK, I ADMIT IT: This Krauthammer column is eminently readable. But if Ignatius keeps pretending that Saudi princes are unbiased observers of Middle Eastern politics, he's going on the unreadable list. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:27 PM by David Adesnik  

FIGHTING AL-JAZEERA: This column argues that it would be a waste of money for the US government to go ahead with its initial plans to launch a US-funded Arabic-language satellite television network in order to compete with Al Jazeera.

I tend to agree, especially given Josh's point that Al Jazeera does a surprisingly effective job of advancing US national interests. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:20 PM by David Adesnik  

IRAQ'S PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT? The WaPo reports that Donald Rumsfeld has called for the immediate establishment of an Iraqi civilian government in US-occupied areas.

Talk of a civilian government becomes especially interesting when placed alongside reports that the administration is considering the possibility of declaring victory without occupying Baghdad or destroying the Ba'ath regime. Were victory declared, the creation of a civilian government would become imperative.

Personally, I think that such a false victory would be both an embarrassment for the US as well a major strategic failure. After promising "nothing less than complete and final victory," the President can't well decide that halfway is good enough. More importantly, would everyday Iraqis cooperate with the US-backed government if they still believed Saddam had a chance of retaking the rest of Iraq? I think not.

The one bit of good news to come out about reconstruction is that even Colin Powell doesn't want the UN to play a leading role in the process. As the SecState observed,

"It was the coalition that came together and took on this difficult mission at political expense, at the expense of the treasury, the money that it costs, but at the expense of lives as well.

"This is not to say that we have to shut others out, and not to say that we will not work in partnership with the international community, and especially with the United Nations."

The second half of that is open to multiple interpretations, but I seriously doubt Powell would have come out with the first half if he didn't mean it. Unlike the SecDef, he seems to recognize the value of not pissing off the Europeans just for the hell of it. That part about working with the UN is just a conciliatory, non-specific and non-committal bit of diplomatic outreach.

Now, if the US does dominate the reconstruction process, does that mean that the Pentagon and its Iraqi allies in the INC will have exclusive control? Josh Marshall thinks so, and points out that even the WaPo editorial board is concerned.

While I am no fan of Ahmed Chalabi and the INC, I have a sense that the Pentagon will have to compromise with State over running Iraq even if Powell agrees with Rumsfeld on keeping out the UN. But I could be wrong.

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# Posted 5:54 PM by David Adesnik  

FOURTH-RATE REPORTING: File it under "Backlash": Today's WaPo is running a story with the headline "Secular Pakistanis, Upset By War, Turn to Religious Parties."

Yes, the religious parties are gaining strength. No, it is not because of the war. It is because Pakistan has a dictator supported by the Pentagon.

While the Bush administration looks away, Musharraf is crushing Pakistan's secular political parties, his main rivals for power. The secular parties themselves are profoundly corrupt, an important reason why most Pakistanis have not spoken up on their behalf.

While the incentive of popular support might normally provoke an effort at reform from within, none of the parties has much interest in fighting internal battles at the same time that they are struggling to defend themselves from Musharraf.

When it comes to foreign policy, Pakistanis' sense of betrayal at the hands of the Bush administration provides evidence enough (in their eyes) that all the President's talk of fighting terror and liberating the Middle East is nothing more than a cover for an imperial exercise. Thus, if Pakistanis hate the war, it is not because of the war per se, but because their opposition is a means of advertising their resentment of United States foreign policy vis-a-vis Pakistan.

(Incidentally, that is an illustration of my earlier point that Arab/Muslim opposition to the war is all talk. Opposing the war is just a convenient way of venting other grievances.)

Perhaps the most dangerous bit of misinformation in the WaPo article on Pakistan is its sympathetic quoting of a young man who asserts that "In the next elections, the MMA will win a clear landslide victory." Not a chance. Pakistanis have never shown much interest in Islamism and will probably continue to keep their distance.

The one bit of interesting and valuable information reported by the WaPo is that Pakistan's Islamist alliance has shown a remarkable degree of self-restraint in its anti-Americanism. For example, it sometimes instructs protesters not to burn American flags. As one leading Islamist politician observed, "We must differentiate between Americans and the administration."

Thus, even if the Islamists had the potential to win the next election, it might not be a terrible thing. This is an especially important point, since most of those who are against democracy promotion in the Middle East warn that democratization in Muslim lands will lead to victory at the polls for radical fundamentalists.

Warnings of anti-American backlash tend to reinforce such fears by implying that the Islamists who benefit from anti-Americanism are always terror-driven radicals.

As I've said before and will surely say again, the real threat to American interests and ideals in the Middle East is not the people, but the dictators.

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# Posted 10:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

REMEMBER AFGHANISTAN?: Pakistan (for the record: a bad country) is courting influence and trying to choke trade between Afghanistan and India (for the record: the world's largest democracy). Afghanistan, a landlocked nation, depends on Pakistan for exports to India and sea shipments, an historic point of leverage for Islamabad over Kabul. Russia and India, in response, are planning to construct a highway to provide Afghanistan with maritime access through Iran, in order to prevent Afghanistan from falling too much under Pakistan's control.

In other news, NATO appears disposed to assume some of the peacekeeping responsibilities in Afghanistan currently being carried out by the UN. More worryingly, the traditional booming Afghan drug trade appears to be returning - a distressing sign for regional stability and western interests, since in the past it has tended to come under the control of regional Islamist terrorist organizations such as the IMU.

Don't remember Afghanistan? That's okay - you're in good company with lots of senior U.S. policymakers. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:59 AM by Patrick Belton  

FOLLOWING UP ON DAVID'S POST, the AP is reporting this morning on a warehouse south of Baghdad loaded with Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare as well as bottles of atropine, a nerve agent antidote. Further, one bottle has been found which was labeled "tabun" - the nerve agent believed to have been used by Iraq during its war with Iran. More no doubt to come.

Putin, at least, is beginning to make nice to Washington - although his foreign and defense ministries are holding out. Putin is responding to several weeks of having Ambassador Sandy Vershbow (full disclosure: a former boss of mine, and one of the few bright gems of the Foreign Service) telling him in detail about all the economic sticks which the U.S. could apply to Russia.


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# Posted 9:04 AM by David Adesnik  

DEAD HORSE RESURRECTED, BEATEN: Is it still appropriate to use the term "material breach"? While the concept seems somewhat irrelevant at this point, would the UN Security Council be obliged to pass a resolution approving the use of force when and if chemical weapons are found? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:05 PM by Patrick Belton  

THANKS TO THE GLORIES OF LAPTOP COMPUTING, I spent an incredibly beautiful afternoon writing today in the nation's capital, while eating a hot dog (mustard, no ketchup: the small sacramental ways I grasp precariously at the identity of an exiled New Yorker) from the shadow of the Washington Monument. It was a bright early April day, and from my spot underneath an orchard of cherry blossoms opposite the White House, there were 47 American flags visible within a single field of vision (including somewhat distant ones over the Old Executive Office Building and State Department which may have been close calls, since I needed prior knowledge to know they were U.S. flags, and not, say, district ones or for that matter the green flags of the Ottoman prince).

I was overcome by the simple pleasure of eating my hot dog while joggers mixed with identically-beshirted tourists and executive branch officials temporarily released from their cubicles. Now granted, our popular culture can at times be philistine - whichever country's can't? - but I'd like to see all the Europeans who make a lifelong sport out of anti-Americanism just for once trying a hot dog on a warm spring day on the Mall. They just may like it.
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# Posted 6:50 PM by David Adesnik  

WELL-READ READERS: As a neophyte in the world of ancient philosophy, I have much to learn from OxBlog's eminent readers.