# Posted 11:07 PM by David Adesnik  

TREASON AND FAITH: The Army has charged a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo with betraying his country. Phil Carter provides the analysis. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:47 PM by David Adesnik  

ARAFAT'S ERRAND BOY: In July, the American media rallied to the defense of Palestinian academic Khalil Shikaki, who became the victim of a local mob after he planned to announce the results of an opinion poll which purported to show that Palestinians had no interest in actually exercising the right of return.

Online, Daniel Drezner put up comprehensive and well-written posts tracking the media's reaction to the Shikaki incident. And OxBlog linked to those posts.

And why not? It was a great story. Brave academic discovers that a negotiated peace is possible, but extremists try to shut him up. Liberals and conservatives could both love it.

But now there is serious reason to believe that Shikaki is a charlatan who never deserved our sympathy. According to an article written by a friend of mine at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, Shikaki's opinion polls relied on question and methods designed to elicit exactly the answers that he -- and top Palestinian officials -- wanted to hear. As Max tells it,

The problem is that the poll makes relocating to Israel an unappealing option for most Palestinians since it stipulates a priori that "only a small number" of refugees will be allowed to "return," and that the fortunate few may have to wait "several years"...

Conversely, the respondents who opted to settle outside of pre-1967 Israeli land were led to believe that they would receive unrealistically generous amounts of financial compensation...of those who opted for financial compensation over relocating to Israel, two-thirds of the respondents believed they were entitled to anywhere between $100,000 and half a million dollars.

In the text of his press release, Shikaki does acknowledge, "The estimates for a fair compensation were much higher than the estimates of what would actually be paid." Yet in publicizing his findings in the American and Arab media, he avoids mentioning this fact.

Good work, Max. Hopefully this will get some more press.

What still isn't clear is why Shikaki did what he did. On the one hand, a real desire for peace may have tempted to manufacture evidence providing hope for a negotiated settlement. On the other hand, Shikaki may have been Arafat's errand boy, helping to lull the Israelis into accepting a sucker's deal in which they acknowledge the right of returning -- believing that Palestinians won't take them up on it -- only to find Israel deluged with refugees.

As Shikaki himself told an audience at the Brookings Institution,

"We consulted very heavily with Palestinian negotiators as we planned the instrument, that is, the questionnaire...

"We worked with them, we asked them what questions they wanted asked, and we proposed questions to them, and the eventual final product was one that essentially tried to include as much as possible the questions that negotiators were interested in answers to."

That just doesn't sound good... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:12 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT THE SOLDIERS ARE THINKING: As I said, I don't know. But here's an op-ed by one reservist, and some comments from a journalist friend of mine in Iraq:

Purely from anecdotal experience, American soldiers are very
disillusioned. From high ranking officers to grunts, they are incredibly
cynical (especially for Americans) about why they are there, hate being
there and take advantage of every opportunity they can to tell journalists
this, and that they want to go home.

Of course it varies from unit to unit, but the 3 month extension was a huge betrayal and destroyed whatever moral[e] was left. Eventually I'll write an article about that. I've been spending a lot of time with American military guys though, and
that's my impression. They also dislike the civilian CPA guys, who they
think are incompetent and ignorant, and I tend to sympathize with that view.

While I might conjecture that my journalist friend tends to attract soldiers with political opinions similar to his own, I am confident that he reports what he sees, no more and no less. So take it for what it's worth. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:54 PM by David Adesnik  

IT'S ALL CHALABI'S FAULT: This is partisan sniping, but it has the ring of truth -- probably because I've never trusted Ahmed Chalabi. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:45 PM by David Adesnik  

FREE MARKET OR FREE FOR ALL? The NYT has an interesting article on private security firms in Iraq. The basic message is that locals understand how to provide security whereas foreigners don't. If that's the case, then the free market in security is doing great things for Iraq.

But I still have questions. Most importantly, how do we know that these private guards don't use excessive force? Unless instructed to respect the rights of those they must confront, there is no reason to believe that their experiences under Saddam has taught them to behave in an appropriate manner.

Also, will private guards and their superiors cooperate with law enforcement officials? Or will they become a law unto themselves? Excited at the prospect of demonstrating that American incompetence is a reflection of American ignorance, the NYT forgot to ask if those who have local knowledge share the American vision of civil and human rights. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:27 PM by David Adesnik  

AT WHAT PRICE, HERR SCHROEDER? In a NYT op-ed, the German Chancellor makes nice to America and says Germany will help rebuild Iraq. He doesn't say what Germany expects in return. In other words, caveat emptor.

UPDATE: M. Chirac hints at the price. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:04 AM by David Adesnik  

HISTORY SPEAKS: Matt Yglesias has a column up on the unimpressive record of generals-turned-presidential-candidates. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:52 PM by David Adesnik  

SEEING RED (STATES): Kevin Drum has some interesting comments on the distribution of federal tax dollars at the state level. Plus, Megan McArdle responds and Kevin responds back. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:47 PM by David Adesnik  

GOOD NEWS: As always, Glenn is collecting soldiers' stories from Iraq, with a very strong emphasis on good news. Today, the theme is soldiers getting angry at distorted news coverage that presents the occupation as a disaster.

While it's nice to read these stories, I still wonder whether the frustrated and disappointed GIs are holding back out of deference to their superiors. I know for sure that officers critical of the Administration are extremely reluctant to say anything at all.

Perhaps the truth will come out only after the troops have come home and are able to speak their minds. Of course, by that time the truth may be speaking for itself in Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:22 PM by David Adesnik  

BAD NEWS: In Afghanistan and Iraq. Here's an idea: When the US finishes training the new Iraqi Army, send half of it to Afghanistan! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:14 PM by David Adesnik  

LOTS AND LOTS OF CLARK: Both Ryan Booth and Howard Kurtz have extensive round-ups of the media's take on Big Wes' candidacy. I'd also recommend this WaPo profile of the candidate, which leans slightly toward the favorable.

For the latest news, see this story from tomorrow's Post. As the General told a Florida audience, he "probably" would've voted in favor of the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq.

"Probably"? Umm, excuse me for asking a stupid question, but shouldn't a four-star general have a more definite position on whether the war in Iraq was a good idea? How about a four-star general who later became a CNN analyst? While I'm wiling to give Clark a pass on his underdeveloped domestic agenda, this is a little much! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:44 PM by David Adesnik  

IS DEMOCRACY PERFECT? No, of course not. Nor are the New York Yankees, but they just keep on winning and winning and winning. And, if politics were baseball, democracy would be the New York Yankees. And democracy would've won the last 20 World Series in a row, not just 5 of the last 10.

(I tempted to say that Communism would be the Red Sox, but that's an insult to Communism since it gave the Yankees more of a challenge than the Red Sox ever did.)

So, you might ask, why I am going on at length with this random analogy? First of all, because it's fun, and I've been feeling a little too serious lately. Said analogy is also a very indirect reply to John Coumarianos, who infers from my recent mention of Tocqueville that I am unwilling to admit that democracy has its flaws.

As I see it, John just can't tear himself away from a certain nostalgic attachment to era of Marie Antoinette. He writes that

However unjust aristocracy was, it never risked demagoguery because popular consent is not the ticket to rule in that kind of regime. Leaders or statesmen in aristocracies are more self-confident, more free to say what they think, and less apt to flatter.

Whoa there. Wasn't flattery often the essence of court politics? Think Louis XIV. Now old Louis certainly was confident -- as were many of royal colleagues -- but often to the point of demanding that their every whim become state policy.

As for demagoguery, what about Bismarck? Yes, Bismarck. He kept the German people in line almost entirely through demagoguery. When he wasn't just having his opponents (mainly Catholics and socialists) beaten and imprisoned, that is.

Now, you might say Bismarck is not the best example because the Second Reich was a mixed regime, sort of a semi-electoral military dictatorship. But I think the point is a general one: in the absence of elections, the ruling class often finds itself in permanent crisis, struggling to win the consent of downtrodden subjects who have little love lost for the government.

Now what about John's point that one of democracy's most noticeable defects

is the lack of training or educating a political class, including inattention to the ambition and desire to rule among potential leaders.

Frankly, I'm not persuaded that autocratic states ever did much in the way of educating a truly competent political class. The real exception to that rule seems to have been Imperial China, not any of the European aristocracies that John is thinking of. As I see it, no state has ever produced a leadership class to match the United States' scientists, cabinet secretaries, entrepreneurs, generals, scholars and (perhaps) artists.

And why (other than having such a large population) has the US been able to produce constantly such outstanding inviduals in all of these categories? Because the meritocratic order taps the vast potential inhrent in that great unwashed mass once consigned to irrelevance by the old aristocracies.

Now, let me throw out a provocative idea to end this post with: One of the most important distinctions between neo- and paleo-cons is that the neo-cons have liberated themselves from the unjustiable nostalgia that leads paleo-cons to idealize the past.

While conservatism is often associated with an attachment to the past or a suspicion of change, neo-conservatives buck that trend and win their conservative stripes by making an unflinching commitment to a traditional set of core values -- traditional in the sense that they have hardly changed at all since being articulated by great thinkers such as John Locke and James Madison.

As Louis Hartz memorably observed, American radicals are fundamentally conservative and vice versa, thus producing a remarkable degree of stability and consensus in the American body politic. While I don't identify myself as a neo-conservative or a conservative at all, I have much greater respect for a conservatism built on a foundation of values than one built on the quicksand of a nostalgic attachment to the ever-changing past.

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

# Posted 11:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

ISSIE THE HURRICANE VS. DC: Okay, so the federal government is closed (cheering libertarians everywhere), the subway is closed (cheering perhaps a few Saudi princes), and insurers are expecting over $1 billion from a hurricane which is anticipated to inflict more flood than wind damage. But on the bright side, Issie the Hurricane is making some wicked surfin' waves in New York (namely, on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, where physicist Richard Feynman grew up). (The five Queens residents who were regular surfers before Issie are kvetching about all the newcomers, saying by right of prior possession they should have the waves all to themselves...leading to ethico-legal questions about whether Queens surfers can surf in the same water twice....) Glenn links to the Axis of Isabel, which includes the excellent LT Smash although there aren't too many posts up on the subject yet. And in other news, phone and internet providers are readying technicians to deal with massive outages, the NRC is preparing plans to shut down nuclear reactors lying in the hurricane's path, and insurance share prices are taking a huge price hit. And powerline workers are being shipped east from as far as Wisconsin and Louisiana under existing cooperative deals between utility companies to deal with natural disasters.

But on the other hand, if rain makes you sleepy, you could take a nap and thereby learn something neat about your personality. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:17 PM by David Adesnik  

GOD FAVORS SMALL GOVERNMENT: How else can you explain Hurricane Isabel forcing DC to shut down tomorrow? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:12 PM by David Adesnik  

EXPERT SAYS TOO FEW JEWS: Always great to see a piece I agree with in the NYT. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:05 PM by David Adesnik  

BUSH SMACKS CHENEY UPSIDE HEAD: The NYT headline is: "U.S. Has 'No Evidence' Linking Hussein to 9/11, Bush Says". I have to admit, it's surprising to see Bush discipline Cheney in this sort of way. It means either that Cheney recognized he was wrong and wanted Bush to clarify the matter, or Bush recognized the threat to his credibility that Cheney's remarks presented.

I suspect it was the latter. Which is good, because you want to see the President fully in control of his own Cabinet and his own Administration. I might also add that it's nice to Rumsfeld coming out against Cheney as well. Again, a noteworthy event because the relationship between Cheney and Rumsfeld seems to have been extremely close up until now.

More broadly speaking, it's nice to see that the Administration is willing to demand honesty from one of it's own, because admitting mistakes has never been its forte. If this keeps up, the media may actually start being nice to George W.! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:05 PM by Patrick Belton  

SWITCHING PLACES: Hey all, so I've resurfaced in England, after several weeks of looking suspiciously as though I'm stalking Josh across college towns (I mean it - Princeton, New Haven, now Oxford - when does the madness stop, I want to know?). More from me on the perils of British Airways and thoughts on being back in Oxford, as soon as I plop my feet up and recover from some jet lag. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:26 PM by David Adesnik  

HOWARD DEAN: TOO POPULAR? From Tapped, of all places. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:19 PM by David Adesnik  

THE CHALABI LOBBY: Confirming prior suspicions about his value as an ally, Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi is now backing the French push for a near-immediate (some might say premature) end to the occupation.

Four other members of the Governing Council have joined Chalabi in his demands, but the WaPo unfortunately provides almost no detail about their perspectives on the issue or possible motivations. The WaPo article does strongly suggest however, that the Governing Council is functioning in an unhealthy and undemocratic manner thanks to its members selflishness. Bottom line: If the US turns over sovereignty to the Council within a month as per the French demand, all hell will break loose.

By the way, Michael Ledeen still has a high opinion of Ahmed Chalabi and writes that the media has been ignoring his achievements:

[Chalabi is] actually president of the Governing Council this month and has already two major accomplishments. First, he got an economic package approved that includes direct foreign investment, a flat tax and low tariffs. Second, he seems to have worked out an arrangement between the Kurds and Turks that will permit some Turkish military/security involvement.

I don't know anyone who is writing this, I quite agree that the media are all writing the opposite. But look at Chalabi's admirers: Perle, Hoagland, Cheney... and then look at his major enemies: Tenet, Powell...

I guess we now have to add Villepin to that list of admirers. Strange bedfellows, no?
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:04 PM by David Adesnik  

NYT CORRESPONDENT BLASTS CORRUPT MEDIA: In case you haven't already followed Glenn or Andrew's link, follow this one to John Burns' indictment of the Western media sycophantic and immoral behavior in pre-war Iraq.

UPDATE: Dan Drezner compares Burns' honesty to the hypocrisy of Christiane Amanpour. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:47 PM by David Adesnik  

IRAQI WOMEN SUFFER: This NYT op-ed describes the harrowing ordeal of women in those areas of Iraq where law and order have broken down. It also makes the valuable point that focusing on women's rights and security can have an extremely beneficial effect on the democratization process.

But the NYT op-ed is also very frustrating because it briefly notes that no reliable crime statistics are available, then goes on to imply that the sort of brutal crimes it describes are pervasive -- and that under Saddam things were much better. Admittedly, that seems to be the trend in most big media articles on Iraq. Still not good.

The article also hurts itself by including such perverse comments such as "A formerly first-world capital [Baghdad] has become a city where the women have largely vanished." Well, at they're indoors instead of being beaten and raped by Saddam's henchmen.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:23 PM by Patrick Belton  

FAREED IN THE WAPO TODAY: Urging the American Odysseus to ignore the French, German, and UN sirens arguing for an accelerated turnover of the Iraqi administration to a wholly elected government, Fareed writes: "Popular sovereignty is a great thing, but a constitutional process is greater still. The French know this. The French Revolution emphasized popular sovereignty with little regard to limitations on state power. The American founding, by contrast, was obsessed with constitution-making. Both countries got to genuine democracy. But in France it took two centuries, five republics, two empires and one dictatorship to get there. Surely we want to do it better in Iraq."

UPDATE: Ruel Gerecht has something similar to say in this week's Weekly Standard. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:19 AM by Patrick Belton  

THIS looks bad. I think I'll go to England and get myself out of harm's way..... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:01 AM by Daniel  

CLARK IS IN. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:25 PM by David Adesnik  

FRIKKIN' IDIOTS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: I try to keep my temper under control when it comes to politics. But take a look at this item in the New York Times:

Dr. Faiq Amin Bakr, director of the Baghdad Central Morgue for the past 13 years, reels off the grim statistics that confirm to Iraqis that they have entered what they see as a terrifyingly lawless twilight zone: 462 people dead under suspicious circumstances or in automobile accidents in May, some 70 percent from gunshot wounds; 626 in June; 751 in July; 872 in August. By comparison, last year there were 237 deaths in July, one of the highest months, with just 21 from gunfire.

Yes, the New York Times is actually trusting Saddam's coroner to provide it with accurate statistics about the number of "suspicious" deaths in Iraq. No wonder the same article -- a straight news piece, mind you -- informs us that

Iraqis, in general thrilled to be freed from the long, sinister rule of Saddam Hussein, had high expectations that the arrival of the Americans would utterly transform their lives.

As the occupation enters its sixth month, however, they are looking for something, anything, they can hold in their hands that assures them that the future will be better — and they cannot find it.

Well, if you let Saddam's coroner tell you how good life was under the old regime, it's going to be pretty damn hard to figure out why life under the American occupation might be just slightly better. Frikkin' idiots. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:15 PM by David Adesnik  

NARROW-MINDED RIGHT-WING FUNDAMENTALISTS: Thought I was talking about American Christians? Shame on you. It's the Hindu right whose reckless behavior is providing recruits for Osama bin Laden. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:53 PM by David Adesnik  

DOING THE MATH: Boomshock points out that his recent Tech Central Station column (which I should've read before today) makes a point very similar to my own: that corrupt and incompetent allied forces can undermine American foreign policy. Robert's case in point is the Philippines, and he offers an excellent account of how graft is preventing the Filipino security forces from becoming an effective ally in the war on terror. And don't even remind me about Afghanistan... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:43 PM by David Adesnik  

FALLUJA (A CLARIFICATION): CM points to this SF Chronicle article which contains something approximating an explanation for the friendly-fire incident that left 8 Iraqi police officers dead. According to the Chronicle,

The U.S. military issued an apology for the shooting and said an investigation had begun. However, military spokesman Lt. Col. George Krivo said the Americans only fired after they were "attacked from a truck by unknown forces."

"Coalition forces," he said, "immediately returned fire and the subsequent engagement lasted approximately three hours. Regrettably during the incident extensive damage was done to the (Jordanian) hospital and several security personnel were killed, including eight Iraqis and one Jordanian national."

Frankly, that doesn't sound like much of an explanation. How does one get into a three-hour-long battle with one's allies? Presumably, at some point the enemy would no longer be "unknown". For that matter, why did the Iraqis keep firing back for 3 hours? If they were on the US side, why not surrender and clarify matters afterward?

One other factor to consider is that the engagement happened at night. (Once again, thanks to CM for the link.) Yet as the article points out, the Americans had night vision equipment. And the Iraqis seemed to understand quite clearly that they were fighting their friends. It just doesn't add up. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:21 PM by David Adesnik  

DEFENDING BROOKS: I gave the NYT's newest columnist a big thumbs up for his first column and a big thumbs down for his second. However, John Coumarianos of Innocents Abroad thinks that I'm missing the point. John says:

I appreciate that it's not nice to be told you're part of a generation whose members exist to pad their resumes, but becoming more purely meritocratic has at least some disadvantages. There's really nothing to aspire to anymore, culturally or socially. Kids at better schools aren't social climbers anymore; and however distasteful it might have been when that sort of thing existed, at least there was a vision of a class to climb toward. Much better now to get your MBA than try to be a gentleman...

Additionally, although he's middle-aged, I don't think Brooks is part of the old generation as Adesnik implies; his generation is like the one coming of age now -- living in the wake of WASP-dom. I also think Adesnik overplays the "manliness" aspect of what Brooks seeks to remind us of. Brooks' larger point is that pure meritocracy has replaced a kind of faux aristocracy, and this has significant political and social consequences -- most of them good, but some of them not so good. He's not really talking primarily about prep school hazing rituals.

My response: At least since Tocqueville, American conservatives have insisted that mediocrity is the price of equality. But I don't buy it. Is it an accident that meritocratic America is both the most powerful nation on earth as well as the home of its most brilliant scientific and scholarly minds? I don't think so. As for having something to aspire to, I'm more interested in bringing democracy to the Middle East than getting an invitation to the local country club. Besides, I've heard that they don't accept applications from Jews and blacks.

UPDATE: Greg Djerejian has more. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:09 PM by David Adesnik  

POLISCI JUNKIES RESPOND: Among its readers, OxBlog is fortunate enough to have a number of experts on the theory of international relations. Thus, when I begin to ramble about the theoretical implications of current events, there is an informed audience waiting to challenge my arguments.

In this instance, PS writes that

...the second claim you make is that realists have become essentially pacifists who don't want the US to use its 'massive firepower'. I think realism has always been quite cautious about the use of force, going back to Morgenthau's opposition to Vietnam. Defensive realists look back at world history and see that the use of force often leads to self-encirclement, balancing, and eventually defeat. The Second and Third Reichs and Napoleon are their key examples.

Offensive realists like Mearsheimer are quite happy to make arguments about using force when necessary, but prefer an offshore-balancing role for the US. And defensive realists love Bismarck, who used force but in a way that didn't attract a backlash. Machiavelli only counseled the use of force under specific conditions, not indiscriminately.

So institutions can sometimes be helpful and relevant (realists don't discount the utility of NATO in the Cold War), and force is a good way to get yourself 'smacked on the snout' (as Mearsheimer puts it) if used improperly. A state is most successful if it doesn't need to use its armed might. Caution and pragmatism - sounds like realism to me. . .

My response to PT ran as follows:

Thanks for the comments, almost all of which I agree with. You're very right to point out that caution is an integral aspect of realism, one that I did not mention in my post but am well aware of. Yet rather than undermine my point, examining this caution demands that I broaden it.

Is it not ironic that realists from Morgenthau on have described force as the ultima ratio yet almost always argued against using it? Moreover, think of how many realists admired the Soviet Union for their supposedly judicious-yet-bold use of force. (Not that such gambits were succesful, mind you. The Realists figured that one out in hindsight.)

Rather, the fact is that realists have always admired force in others yet counseled against the United States using it suggest that there is something fundamentally disingenuous about the application of Realism to 'real life'. And now, with the United States more powerful than ever -- the first unipolar power since Imperial Spain, perhaps Imperial Rome -- the Realists are once again arguing against the use of force. Seems to me that if they took their own principles seriously, they would have to argue that this is the optimal time for the United States to use force, i.e. when no balancing coalition even has the potential to exist.

As critics have long pointed out, Realism fails as a practical doctrine because it has no ethical foundation. I am liberal hawk who believes that the use of force must be consistent with democratic principles. There are also liberal doves who argue for prioritizing the construction of international institutions above all else. While I disagree with the doves on that point, I acknowledge that their argument has a serious ethical foundation. In contrast, what Realism has is a disposition: self-critical pessimism. While this sort of disposition often plays a valuable role by provoking challenges to the reigning conventional wisdom (think Morgenthau on Vietnam), it cannot, in the final analysis, stand on its own.

Finis. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:40 PM by Patrick Belton  

THE NINTH CIRCUIT DELAYS CALIFORNIA RECALL VOTE: Here. The basic argument seems to be that six counties (including L.A. and San Diego, and including 44 percent of California's registered voters) were still using punch-card systems (of the sort which led to such Floridian invocation in 2000 of the name of St Chad, martyr). Appeal to the Supreme Court is likely (and, indeed, virtually invited by the Ninth, which held off implementation of its court order for a week to permit appeals), and one already-gossiped scenario would see the recall vote postponed to March and California's next-scheduled primary election. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:28 PM by Patrick Belton  

PLAYBOY PLANNING AN ISSUE ON THE WOMEN OF WAL-MART: Yup, that's the gist of this report from CNN. Not to be negative or anything, but given that the articles aren't worth reading anymore (with Tom Wolfe, Bertrand Russell, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Updike and their successors having moved on since the 1970's to the more tame pages of Atlantic Monthly and its ilk), I'm not really sure this is going to win Heffner any readers. But maybe I'm wrong.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:47 PM by David Adesnik  

HEADLINE NEWS: Andrew Sullivan catches the BBC red-handed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:44 PM by David Adesnik  

WILL BLOG FOR FOOD: Matt Yglesias is now getting paid to write about politics, something he used to do for free. In his second essay for The American Prospect, he argues that the networks carelessly let 9-11 anniversary coverage imply that there was a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

While I'd say that Matt is focusing on some details that are less than significant, it is interesting that the networks weren't explicitly critical of Administration efforts to link Iraq and Al Qaeda. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:35 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT WMD? Josh Marshall expects the Kay Report will be an embarrassment for the Administration. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:29 PM by David Adesnik  

THREE IN A ROW FOR KEVIN! Given that most people read blogs from the top down and not the bottom up, this will probably be the first link to CalPundit you see on OxBlog today, not the third.

But I assure you that it is. Scroll down if you don't believe me. Anyhow, Kevin thinks that Paul Wolfowitz's sudden change of heart about the connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda was prepared well in advance.

I have to admit, I shrugged off Wolfowitz's correction of his intial statement figuring that it was a sign of honesty. After all, it isn't everyday that a Bush official admits making a mistake that big, no matter how glaring it is.

But Kevin's right: it looks bad. Even if I still tend to believe that Wolfowitz's mistake was an honest one, it is a powerful indication that what he wants to believe sometimes gets the better of what he knows to be true. We're all guilty of that, but only one of us is Undersecretary of Defense.

UPDATE: Why do I trust Wolfowitz? Because Cheney is so much worse. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:18 PM by David Adesnik  

COMING SOON: CalPundit actually went and interviewed Paul Krugman. Good for him. The full interview will be up soon. Meanwhile, here's a quick look at what Big Paul had to say. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:16 PM by David Adesnik  

INFIDELS FOR DEAN: CalPundit wonders whether Democrats have become too instinctively hostile to religion. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:10 PM by David Adesnik  

WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS: Glenn has come across a rather interesting photo. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:07 PM by David Adesnik  

POWELL READS OXBLOG: Today, the Secretary told reporters

that more progress was being made in securing and rebuilding Iraq than had been emphasized in news reports, mentioning for example new parent-teacher groups at local schools.

If Cheney or Rumsfeld said that, I probably wouldn't have posted it. Yet thanks to his role as the opposition within, Colin Powell has developed a stunning sort of credibility on almost every issue on the foreign policy agenda.

That doesn't mean the rest of the Cabinet listens to him. Rather, it makes Powell a compelling spokesman for the government whenever he does happen to agree with its policies. That's why his February presentation at the UN won over fence-sitters on both sides of the Atlantic.

As such, I expect that Powell's current criticism of the French for trying to impose a premature end to the occupation of Iraq will ensure that the United States stands its ground. Mind you, the French aren't all that likely to change their position. But the Bush Administration can now count on domestic opinion agreeing that the French proposal is a bad idea.

One illustration of that point is the NY Times' description of the French proposal as "unrealistic". In an otherwise blistering editorial, that is just about the only point the NYT concedes to the administration.

Ironically, the US may still rush the democratization process even if it isn't as reckless as France wants it to be. According to Paul Bremer, sovereignty might be restored by the middle of next year, by which time Iraq would already have held national elections and approved a new constitution.

To my mind, that still sounds extremely unrealistic. We waited four years to give the West Germans a truly autonomous government and six more to return official sovereignty. The Japanese held national elections after a much shorter interval, but their postwar governments had severely limited powers in the first few years after the war.

Of course, when it comes to democratization the final word doesn't belong to history. It belong to Tom Carothers. Whereas it may not be surprising to hear an idealistic hawk like myself advocate a longer occupation, Carothers is a pessimistic dove in addition to being the foremost expert on democracy promotion in the United States and perhaps the world. As Carothers put it back in April,

Elections should not be rushed. In societies riven by ethnic or religious divisions, and where experience with democracy is absent, early elections are often perceived as a winner-take-all process and can aggravate rather than resolve political conflict. The administration should nurture a period of growing pluralism and participation in which the contending Iraqi groups have time to learn to work with each other in new institutions rooted in compromise and openness. In difficult political transitions, national elections are often best put off for at least several years.

Back then, pessimists like Tom were worried that Bush & Co. would rush the occupation, declare victory, pull out, and leave a mess behind. Now Bush is in it for the long haul and the French being reckless. Oh, the irony. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:35 PM by David Adesnik  

DO THE MATH: According to the NYT,

The number of American troops in Iraq fell to 127,000 last week, down roughly 10 percent from a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and L. Paul Bremer, the American administrator, envision Iraqi security forces totaling 186,000 by 2005. They already count 46,000 Iraqi police now on the job, heading toward a goal of 65,000 or 75,000. They want a new Iraqi Army of 40,000 (right now 1,000 are being trained) and 15,000 members of a civilian defense corps, though they acknowledge it could take five or six years to get there. They also want 3,700 border guards, twice the current number. And for every one of those Iraqis who step into the street or the desert, some American is supposed to be going home.

There's a big story here that very few correspondents or policymakers are focusing. Just how good are these tens of thousands of Iraqi security officials? Are they competent? Corrupt?

These questions are tremendously important for two reasons. First of all, it's become clear in recent weeks that the shortage of American manpower is the most important constraint on American occupation policy. If Iraqi security officers can actually do their job, then the whole "Should we go to the UN?" and "Should we expand the Army?" debates will be unnecessary.

Second of all, the (apalling) quality of our allies is perhaps the most overlooked factor in explaining American setbacks in Third World conflicts. For example, what is the lesson of Vietnam? One side says that America cannot win immoral wars. The other says that it cannot win wars with one hand tied behind its back. Others say America can't win Third World conflcits if it it doesn't understand foreign soldiers. Still others say America underestimated Vietnamese nationalism.

To be fair, almost everyone recognizes that South Vietnamese forces were less than motivated and less than competent. But almost no one lists that as the primary cause of American failure. Mostly, I think because American generals avoided acknowledging that fact by relying on more and more American soldiers and American firepower. For one account of just how devastating South Vietnamese failures were, take a look at Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, specifically his account of the battle of Ap Bac.

[NB: My office mate, who's about to get his Ph.D. in the history of the Vietnam war, says that Sheehan's book, like most of those about Vietnam, suffers from an excessive reliance on American sources. I'm more than willing to acknowledge that point, but don't think it bears on my argument directly.]

The issue of allied forces is also very much on my mind because of my own dissertation on Reagan and Central America. In Reagan's time, arguments about El Salvador were very similar to those once had about Vietnam. The Administration kept insisting that it couldn't win with one hand tied behind its back. Its opponents kept insisting that America could never win an immoral war in which it backed brutal military officers against popular guerillas.

But as I see it, the real problem was the incompetence and corruption of the Salvadoran military. While it's brutality cost it heavily in terms of popular support, its incompetence and corruption cost it far more on the battlefield. When it comes down to it, you can't win a civil war when your officers are getting rich by selling American weapons to the guerrillas. The parallels to Vietnam are disturbing.

That said, one of my main concerns about Iraq is the quality of indigenous security forces. In Vietnam and El Salvador, it may not have been possible to come up with better allies, especially because the US was dealing with entrenched regimes. But Iraq is different. The past weighs heavily on the present, but little would stand in the way of an aggressive effort to ensure the honesty and competence of the new police and military forces. Thus, the real question is whether American policymakers will show enough of an interest in such issues to prevent another disaster. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:30 PM by David Adesnik  

POP PSYCHOLOGY: It was going to happen sooner or later. David Brooks was going to trot out his hackneyed opinions about how in the good old days tough schools educated tough men, while today's schools produced indecisive relativists:

Unlike today's top schools, which are often factories for producing Résumé Gods, the WASP prep schools were built to take the sons of privilege and toughen them into paragons of manly virtue. Rich boys were sent away from their families and shoved into a harsh environment that put tremendous emphasis on athletic competition, social competition and character building...

As anyone who has read George Orwell knows, this had ruinous effects on some boys, but those who thrived, as John F. Kennedy did, believed that life was a knightly quest to perform service and achieve greatness, through virility, courage, self-discipline and toughness.

The Protestant Establishment is dead, and nobody wants it back. But that culture, which George Bush and Howard Dean were born into, did have a formula for producing leaders. Our culture, which is freer and fairer, does not.

As a product of "today's top schools", let me just say that Brooks has no idea what the #@$%& he is talking about. At both Yale and Oxford, I met countless young Americans with a fierce and principled commitment to making America a better nation, both at home and in its behavior abroad. These students spanned the political spectrum, left, right and center.

Moreover, America's top schools produce so many potential leaders precisely because they abandoned the cruel and unusual methods that Brooks seems to cherish. While still athletic and sociable, abandoning excessive competition in those fields has given today's students more time to focus on A) their studies and B) happy, fulfilling friendships and relationships. As a result, we now have students whose better adjustment to academic and social life gives them a stronger foundation on which to build their civic commitments. So don't worry, Mr. Brooks. When your generations runs out of momentum, ours will be ready to take the reins.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:03 PM by David Adesnik  

FALLUJA: The funeral for 10 Iraqi security officers killed by US troops brought a large and angry crowd onto the streets of Falluja. Still no explanation from Army spokesman as to why US soldiers fired on friendly forces. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:27 PM by David Adesnik  

KRUGMAN: CHAFETZ IS "PART OF THE MACHINE". In an interview with Buzzflash, Paul Krugman observes that

...a good part of the media are essentially part of the machine. If you work for any Murdoch publication or network, or if you work for the Rev. Moon's empire, you're really not a journalist in the way that we used to think. You're basically just part of a propaganda machine.

Whereas if you work alongside Howell Raines and Jayson Blair... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:07 PM by David Adesnik  

ALL SORTS OF -LATERALISMS: Boomshock has some good observations about the US-North Korea talks. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:30 PM by David Adesnik  

SEND IN THE EUROPEANS? Todd Bass points to an Economist article which says that the French and Germans couldn't send more than a few thousand troops to Iraq even if they wanted to. This fact doesn't seem to trouble Robert Hunter, though. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:44 PM by David Adesnik  

DUMP PAKISTAN: This column in today's WaPo reminds us just how bad a "friend" Pakistan has been to the United States. It is a point that can't be made often enough, especially given the Bush Administration's naive belief that Pervez Musharraf is our "ally" in the war on terror.

Even though regime change is not an option, Musharraf is so hated by his own people that if the US publicly disavowed his government, it might fall within a matter of months. Mind you, that is not just the opinion of an outsider, but one voiced by many of the Pakistani students I met at Oxford. While theirs is not the final word on Pakistani politics, it is not one I would lightly dismiss. If only the Bush Administration would listen...

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:23 PM by David Adesnik  

A SECOND BLOGIVERSARY: This week, Dan Drezner marked the completion of his first year online. Looking back, he offers some interesting advice to aspiring bloggers. All I would add is "Read everything Dan Drezner has to say. He's one of the absolute best." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:20 PM by David Adesnik  

HONEY, YOU FORGOT MY BLOGIVERSARY: I am almost forgot to mention it, but one year ago today was when I first posted on OxBlog. After introducting myself, I put up my first substantive post, in which I wrote that

Today's war on terrorism has much in common with the war on Soviet expansion. It will only end when our enemies cease to be who they are. While negotiations on specific points may be possible with certain of our enemies (Iran comes to mind), we can not negotiate an end to the war on terror. By the same token, we were able to negotiate specific arms-control pacts with the Soviet Union but never an end to the Cold War.

As such, it may be best to think of the war on terrorism as war in which our enemy is an ideas as much as it is a state or a terrorist network. We are fighting against the idea that violence against civilians is legimitate.

And so we still are. In my next post, I set the tone for the coming year by declaring my disappointment with the NYT and WaPo. I also had some very harsh words for President Bush, who marked the first anniversary of Sept. 11th with a NYT op-ed that came close to advocating an amoral sort of realpolitik that was almost Kissingerian in nature. Thankfully, the President seems to have learned a thing or two since then.

And I myself have learned a lot more than that. It has been absolute pleasure to be a part of OxBlog and I don't hesitate to say that I have learned just as much from contributing to OxBlog as I have from my academic research. I am deeply grateful to Josh for the opportunity to join OxBlog, and I owe many thanks to all those other bloggers and audience members who have inspired and challenged me with their original thoughts.

Here's to another great year! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:58 PM by David Adesnik  

DEAN/CLARK '04? CalPundit takes the WaPo report at face value. Josh Marshall says its a rumor spun out by Dean operatives desperate to discredit Clark, who seems just about ready to announce his candidacy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:37 PM by David Adesnik  

THE SADNESS OF WAR: Today's NYT has a thoughtful article on soldiers' often frustrating efforts to adjust to American life after serving in Iraq. It documents many of the subtle and unexpected ways in which a parent's absence can disrupt a family's well-being.

My one criticism of the article regards from its implicit message that the destruction of soldiers' personal lives is a pervasive and almost inevitable byproduct of service abroad. To be fair, civilians often underestimate the stress that military service places on one's personal life. Yet the Times' article gives no sense that such challenges can be overcome, sometimes producing stronger families in the long run.

If I were to take my critique one step further, I would speculate that the Times' description of dysfunctional veterans is drawn directly from the stereotype of Vietnam veterans as disturbed and violent loaners, often with unacknowledged mental health problems. Still, such a conclusion would be premature since this is one of the few recent stories on the subject.

On a related note, Phil Carter recommends this WaPo article on those soldiers whose tragic job it is to inform the families of the fallen that one of their loved ones has died. It is a powerful reminder once again that it is not only soldiers', but also their families, who give up so much for the good of their country. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:02 PM by David Adesnik  

END FARM SUBSIDIES: Michael Lind says it's the right thing to do, but won't help poor third world farmers. David Ignatius, however, is more optimistic. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:50 PM by David Adesnik  

FLYPAPER: Greg Djerejian has some very sensible and justifiably harsh comments about Andrew Sullivan's take on the issue.

Greg also has some very intelligent comments up about the President's recent speech, especially his misuse of the term 'responsibility'. Finally, Greg recommends this excellent WaPo article on the cabinet infighting that persuaded President Bush to go back to the UN. The article ends on a rather interesting note:

"Rumsfeld lost credibility with the White House because he screwed up the postwar planning," said William Kristol, a conservative publisher with close ties to the administration. "For five months they let Rumsfeld have his way, and for five months Rumsfeld said everything's fine. He wanted to do the postwar with fewer troops than a lot of people advised, and it turned out to be a mistake."

Amen. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:31 PM by David Adesnik  

REMEMBERING 9/11: Judith Weiss has a comprehensive set of links up over at Kesher Talk. Dan tells his own story over at Reason of Voice. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:52 AM by David Adesnik  

SEPTEMBER 11th: In memory of all those who lost their lives. In honor of those who laid down their lives so that others might live. In tribute to the principles for which Americans have given lives for over two hundred years.

Even though my parents live in Manhattan and I have visited them often during the past two years, I resisted visiting Ground Zero until just a few weeks ago. I am a proud New Yorker and I simply did not want to come face to face with the living evidence that my proud city had been brought low.

Was this response an irrational but harmless defense mechanism? Or was it somehow a fundamental avoidance of the issues at stake in post-Sept. 11 America? I don't know.

What difference does not visiting the Towers' site make if I know that they have fallen? Is that sort of avoidance a measure of comfort that I deserve given the emotional cost of watching them fall? Or is it a self-destructive sort of repression that will prevent me from dealing with the issues and emotions that I will one day have to face?

What if the purpose of not visiting Ground Zero was to enforce on myself a certain level of humility? I never want to be the kind of person that says "You don't understand because you weren't there." I believe that we can share our experiences. I believe that September 11th was an attack on universal principles of freedom and tolerance.

By avoiding Ground Zero, was I avoiding the obvious challenge to my belief in the universality of such principles? Is it completely absurd to speak of universal principles when there are thousands of bodies under the rubble? After all, September 11th didn't make New York different. It made it the same as Beirut and Kinshasa and a thousand other places.

Toward the end of August, I met a friend for lunch in the financial district. Walking home afterwards, I found myself just one block away from Ground Zero. How could I not go?

Enough time had passed that I didn't expect anything dramatic to happen. I wouldn't be overcome with emotion. In fact, I don't think I would've been overcome with emotion if I had visited the site much earlier on. Still, I avoided it.

By now, Ground Zero doesn't seem like a hole. It is more of an oasis. A wide open space in downtown, but one you can't go inside of. It is a construction site. As a New Yorker, I've always loved construction sites. They are the best expression of the vitality of urban life. Of renewal.

When I was six years old, all of the students in my first grade class submitted posters to an I Love NY poster contest. I drew a construction site, with "I [Heart] NY" printed on the mast of a crane.

I am almost wish that nothing would be built at the World Trade Center site, that it would remain a construction site forever. I don't want a memorial. I don't want anyone to walk on that ground again.

I just want there to be a quiet place in downtown. A reminder that this city I love could have its heart ripped out of chest but still march onwards, stronger than ever before. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:13 AM by David Adesnik  

NEO-CON CONFUSION: I agree with what Josh Marshall says about neo-conservatives. You heard me. I agree. With Josh Marshall.

Josh may harbor an antagonism towards the neo-cons that borders on the pathological, but because he really is interested in them, he often notices important things that other people don't.

Right now, the important thing is that neo-cons seem are very unsure of how to constructively criticize the Administration's laissez-faire attitude toward rebuilding Iraq. As Marshall notes, these attacks are coming from

the branch of neoconservatives who really take democratic imperialism seriously.

Marshall clearly understands something that almost no one else (especially not Maureen Dowd) does: that neo-cons are extremely principled and ideological and that few top officials in this administration are neo-cons. You may not like the neo-cons principles or ideas, but they do have them and other conservatives don't.

So what happens when neo-con paladin George W. Bush begins to act like either a paleo-con or a rubber-spined realist? For a good answer, take a look at Kristol & Kagan's comprehensive essay on Iraq in last week's Standard. (Also see Kagan's WaPo column.)

What you see is that Kristol & Kagan are doing their best to insist that the President and his top advisors are unsure of how to implement the neo-cons' agenda, rather than confronting the possibility that Bush & Co. may not share that agenda at all. This gambit, of course, is a variation on the classic Republican game of capture-the-President, which conservative pundits wind up playing almost every time the GOP captures the White House.

What I can't figure out about Kristol & Kagan is whether they really believe that the White House shares their ideals, or whether they think that the only hope of changing the Administration is through friendly criticism. On the one hand, Bush's recent speech makes it hard not to believe that he is a true believer in the cause of democracy promotion. On the other hand, there has never been any indication that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice or Powell share the President's enthusiasm.

I guess this is all just leading me back to what I already said once today: that there is room in the center of the American political spectrum for a principled foreign policy that unifies left and right through reference to traditional American principles. Ah, pipe dreams. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:13 AM by David Adesnik  

SHOW ME THE MONEY: In my last post on going to the UN for help, I asked whether other nations would actually contribute a substantial number of troops to the occupation even if there were another UN resolution. But I forgot to ask whether the French or anyone else would provide the financial aid that the Bush administration seems to be looking for.

On this one, I think Josh Marshall is right. Why the hell would any of the governments we antagonized decide to pony up? Does the Bush Administration really expect all that much help? At what price? So I'm still thinking what I was yesterday morning:

What I want to know is whether the Bush Administration has suggested approaching the UN because it knows that it can work out a good deal, or whether its own deficient planning has resulted in the sort of confused and ad hoc decisionmaking that the Bush campaign once identified as the cause of Clinton's foreign policy troubles.

I guess the only silver lining here is that the US can cover the financial costs of the occupation if we so choose. After all, there are plenty of tax cuts just waiting to be rescinded...

ALSO: Marshall is right that Donald Rumsfeld is a schmuck.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:44 PM by David Adesnik  

THE OTHER SEPT. 11: The NYT deserves considerable praise for telling a story not often told in the northern parts of the America. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:38 PM by David Adesnik  

FOR POLISCI JUNKIES: I noticed the following in a too-long-to-be-fiskworthy NYT piece from today:

"In the cold war you could argue that American unilateralism had no cost," [U. Chicago] Professor [John] Mearsheimer continued. "But as we're finding out with regard to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, we need the Europeans and we need institutions like the U.N. The fact is that the United States can't run the world by itself, and the problem is, we've done a lot of damage in our relations with allies, and people are not terribly enthusiastic about helping us now."

For the uninitiated, Mearsheimer must come off as just another member of the liberal academic establishment. But he is actually the foremost advocate of "offensive neo-realism" whose reputation rests on anti-multilateralist works such as "The False Promise of International Insitutions".

Mearsheimer is also famous for predicting back in 1991 that the end of the Cold War would lead the EU to fall apart, thus returning Europe to the balance of power politics of the prewar era. Oops.

In short, this is a huge "I told you so" moment for neo-liberal and constructivist scholars. What's interesting about this for non-academics is that it is a powerful indication of how even the most tough-minded and cynical academics, i.e. neo-realists, have transformed their theoretical principles into an argument against the use of force.

The foundation of neo-realism is the belief that we live an anarchic world where armed might is the decisive force in world politics. Yet these same neo-realists expect the United States not to deploy the massive firepower that it has.

To be fair, a tough-minded realist can argue that the invasion of Iraq was a waste of valuable firepower that might be better employed elsewhere. But that isn't what Mearsheimer is saying. He's actually talking about the positive worth of international institutions. And we're hearing the same from other prominent realists such as Stephen Walt and Bill Wohlforth. (Fareed Zakaria pretty much belongs on the list as well.)

Journalists often confuse neo-realists and neo-conservatives. I've seen Kagan & Kristol referred to as both. And this sort of confusion makes some sense, because neo-realists were far more likely to support tough American foreign policies during the Cold War (although some were noticeably liberal).

But now a divide has emerged. Neo-conservatives believe in the use of force to promote American values. That position has almost no defenders in the academy today. It is considered primitive and naive. And that is why the reconstruction of Iraq is so important. If a stable and democratic Iraq emerges from the current occupation, the foundations of the academic study of international politics will have been shaken.

If the rebuilding of Iraq fails, the lesson drawn will be that idealistic rhetoric is nothing more than a cover for the short-sighted and self-destructive policies. While simplistic, that may be the right lesson to draw. I am hardly persuaded that Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. have any broader strategic vision for the use of American power.

It is sad that there is no American political party that would have both waged war on Iraq and taken reconstruction seriously. I believe that the absence of such a party is more of a historical accident than a reflection of deeper currents in American political life. With proper leadership, a party espousing such an approach could demonstrate that the center-ground in American politics is not the home of abject compromise, but rather a vital and principled foundation for a unifying foreign policy derived from traditional American values. Someday. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:57 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG VS. EVOLUTION: Just some evidence for you to think about. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

LET'S SAY A MAGICIAN decides to spend 44 days with no food, all while encased in a transparent box suspended over the Thames. Whether this represents a wise decision or not is a separate matter. But what would the response of the local townspeople be? Well, if the town happens to be London - and in this case it is - then it would apparently be to regularly throw eggs at his box in an attempt to dislodge him, taunt him with the smell of fish and chips, and beat a drum underneath to wake him up while he is sleeping. ("We were watching him at home on TV and it was really dull so we thought we would come down and liven things up. I wanted to wake him up,'' the drummer told London's Evening Standard.) So much for London hospitality - betcha the tourist board is going to have a field day with this. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

PHYSICIST OUTLIVES WRITER OF HIS OBITUARY: And by seven years, too. Edward Teller, creator of the hydrogen bomb, died yesterday at Stanford at 95. The author of his (pre-written) obituary, Walter Sullivan, former science writer for the NYT, died in 1996. Not too bad an achievement for Dr. Teller, eh? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:18 AM by David Adesnik  

BUSTAMANTE VS. SCHWARZENEGGER: The race tightens. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:54 PM by David Adesnik  

MATT ON THE MOVE: Mr. Yglesias is now writing for Tapped. His old site will live on, but focus on the non-political issues that aren't a part of Tapped's portfolio. So good luck to Matt at his new job and here's to reading Tapped! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:37 PM by David Adesnik  

READ MY LIPS: NO NEW TAX CUTS. It isn't everyday that OxBlog agrees with Paul Krugman. And while I don't speak for Josh or Patrick, I'm willing to speculate that they would agree with Krugman as well.

Leaving aside the partisan invective, Krugman's column basically says that it is embarrassingly irresponsible for the Bush Administration to push for massive tax cuts, run up a massive deficit and then ask for an $87 billion supplmental appropriation for Iraq.

In spite of its insufficient planning, the Administration should have known that the costs of war and reconstruction often outstrip pre-war estimates. I can't imagine that legislators on either side of the aisle would have objected if the Administration deferred its tax cuts pending the outcome of the situation in Iraq.

But that wasn't going to happen. This Administration has an ideological commitment to tax cuts and wasn't going to waste a golden opportunity to have them written into law.

So what now? Both George W. Bush and Karl Rove most certainly remember the damaging price that Bush 41 paid for breaking his promise of "no new taxes". They aren't going to admit they were wrong, although they may well limit their requests for further cuts.

As far as the nation's finances go, what's going to happen now is what happened under Reagan: the United States took advantage of its perfect credit rating in order to finance both tax cuts and military spending through increased debt. Thanks to spectacular economic growth in the 1990s, we never had to face the terrifying prospect of heading into a serious recession with a massive debt on our shoulders.

But there was one victim of Reagan's largesse: George Bush the Father. He had to break his "no new taxes" promise because there was simply no way for the government to go into further debt. That is a danger that the Bush the Son may have to face because of his current policies...in his second term. Thus if Bush the Son does have to reverse on tax cuts, then the Republican candidate in 2008 may be seriously damaged. The result? President Hillary.

UPDATE: CalPundit is also hitting Bush hard on the costs of the war/occupation. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:05 PM by David Adesnik  

QUAGMIRE! The death toll is rising. The government is trapped in its own incompetence. And the people are losing faith in their leaders. So isn't it fair to say that the French have sunken into a quagmire? (No wonder they didn't want to fight Saddam. They can't even beat the weather.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:48 AM by David Adesnik  

THE PURPOSE OF BRINGING IN THE U.N. (SOME TENTATIVE THOUGHTS): I still have a lot of news to catch up on, but have come to a few speculative conclusions after going through a dozen or so news articles about the Bush Administration's turn to the UN for help in Iraq.

First of all, no one seems to agree on why the United States is (or should) ask for UN help in Iraq. As best as I can tell, the fundamental issue is that we simply don't have enough troops to man the occupation forces past next march. While there has been a lot of talk about training Iraqi police and paramilitary forces, I'm guessing that the Administration: A) Doesn't know if they'll be ready in time and/or B) Doesn't have all that much confidence that they will be effective once deployed.

According to Joe Biden,

"The costs are staggering, the number of troops are staggering, we're seeing continuing escalation of American casualties, and we need to turn to the U.N. for help, for a U.N.-sanctioned military operation that is under U.S. command."

Lest one think that Biden is making a partisan point, one should note that John Warner (R-VA) has said that

"These casualties are beginning to unnerve Americans, and it concerns me...As I traveled through my state last month, people in very respectful tones came up to me and said, `John, we have to do something.' "

In other words, Biden and Warner want the Security Council to draw up a new resolution so that other nations' citizens can die instead of our own. While it's good to know that Biden and Warner are looking out for their constituents, the parochialism of their viewpoint is disturbing. After all, what good is it for a Frenchman or a Belgian to die instead of an American?

The problem here, as Phil Carter so ably pointed out, is that Americans often confuse success with a low casualty rate. While every effort should be made to minimize casualties, our purpose in Iraq is to build democracy and stop terror. Will bringing in the French and Belgians accomplish that task? If you believe that a multilateral occupation is more likely to succed, then yes. But Biden, Warner and others like them don't seem to be willing to say that. Perhaps they simply assume it. Or, as I suspect, they are unwilling to confront powerful arguments against the efficacy of a multilateral nation-building effort.

The next big question which no one has answered is what kind of quid pro quo the UN will demand for its consent. Before the Bush Administration approached the UN, Kofi Annan held out the prospect of the US maintaining a leadership role while sharing "decisions and responsibility with others". But now the NYT is reporting that

several Security Council members, like France and Russia, have said repeatedly that they would not support a measure that allowed the United States to maintain full military and political control.

Which brings us to the real question: What is it, exactly, that France and Russia want to change about the occupation? According to Dominique de Villepin,

"It is time to move resolutely into a logic of sovereignty for Iraq. A true change of approach is needed. We must end the ambiguity, transfer responsibilities and allow the Iraqis to play the role they deserve as soon as possible."

You can't disagree with that. It sounds exactly like what Donald Rumsfeld has been saying about giving the people Iraq more responsibility for their future.

While my spider-sense indicates that the French have some other agenda, the fact may be that they don't expect much of a quid for their pro-quo because they just aren't going to give that much to the occupation in terms of either time or money. While the French military has drawn up plans for the dispatch of up to 10,000 troops, other officials are insisting that France is already overcommitted to other peacekeeping projects. Thus, the French may be satisfied with the already impressive public relations victory they have scored by having Bush come back to the UN.

But if the French won't send troops, who will? I doubt that too many other European hold-outs would reverse course because of a new UN resolution. The real manpower will have to come from India, Pakistan and Turkey. Now, the prospect of having Indian troops is a good one -- after all, they are from a democratic country with a pretty good human rights record. Turkey is democratic as well, but less so. And its shared border with Iraq means that the Turks may turn a blind eye to smuggling, etc. Pakistan? I don't even want to go there. As thanks for its help in Afghanistan, we're already putting up with an incompetent dictator who is holding up peace talks with India and probably letting his subordinates indulge their taste for jihad by harboring all sorts of Islamic radicals. That is, when they aren't busy sending nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea.

The last big question for tonight is whether turning to the UN is a good thing. In a surprisingly judicious editorial, the WSJ argues that it may be worth the public relations cost of looking foolish if a new resolution lets Indian or Turkish forces focus on peacekeeping while mobile and heavily-armed Americans hunt down Ba'athist insurgents. Provided, of course, that France and Russia really want to help Iraq govern itself, rather than just forcing a US withdrawal or establishing their own fiefdoms in Baghdad.

What do I think? I'm not sure. What I want to know is whether the Bush Administration has suggested approaching the UN because it knows that it can work out a good deal, or whether its own deficient planning has resulted in the sort of confused and ad hoc decisionmaking that the Bush campaign once identified as the cause of Clinton's foreign policy troubles. I can imagine Rumsfeld wanting to go to the UN because he is desperate for troops, Cheney going along because he wants someone else to his nation-building for him and Powell agreeing because he cares more about rebuilding trans-Atlantic relations than rebuilding Iraq. And who would disagree if Powell, Rumsfeld and Cheney are all on the same side? Wolfowitz?

That's where Bush's speech comes in. He sounded much more like a Wolfowitz than a Powell, a Cheney or a Rumsfeld. He really seems to think we can get things right in Iraq. But how does the UN fit into the President's plans? I just don't know.

UPDATE: In an impressive debut column, David Brooks suggests some answers. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:27 PM by David Adesnik  

WE DIDN'T START THE SAFIRE: Yes, I pretty much agree with Bill Safire's point in today's column. But his presentation is so harsh and one-sided that I think he is doing more to hurt the cause of reconstruction than to help it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:07 AM by David Adesnik  

COMING SOON...A lengthy post on the Bush Administration's efforts to get the UN involved in Iraq. So far, this looks like a big "I told you so" moment for liberal critics of the occupation. And conservatives seem to think it's pretty embarrassing, too. I'm gonna need some time to figure this all out. In the meantime, take a look at what Kevin Drum has to say here, here, here and here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:38 PM by David Adesnik  

NOT EVERYONE LIKED THE SPEECH: Josh and I may have liked what the President said, but I think it's only fair to post some critical views here as well. For example,

The speech was Mr. Bush's first extended address about Iraq since he declared an end to major combat operations in a May 1 speech. He was more triumphal then, asserting that "the United States and our allies have prevailed."

But 149 Americans have died in Iraq since then, compared with the 138 in the invasion itself. The United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was bombed last month, a low point in the United States' now five-month-old occupation...

In his 18-minute speech, Mr. Bush did not mention Osama bin Laden, who has so far eluded American capture in Afghanistan. He also did not mention the failure so far to find any unconventional weapons in Iraq, the major stated reason that the United States went to war. Nor did Mr. Bush dwell on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which he once predicted would abate if Saddam Hussein was ousted from power in Iraq. That conflict has worsened."

Despite sounding like something out of The Nation, the quotation above is actually from a straight news piece in the NYT written by Elisabeth Bumiller. While I'm still not enough of a Times-watcher to differentiate all that effectively between its correspondents' individual biases, I've long considered Bumiller one of the most biased.

Of course, when it comes to outright ridiculousness, no one can match Howard Dean. While I may have been defending the man just over a week ago (and still stand by what I said), the good Doctor isn't going to score any OxBlog points by saying that Bush's speech is

"beginning to remind me of what was happening with Lyndon Johnson and Dick Nixon during the Vietnam War."

Asked to explain the analogy to Vietnam, Dr. Dean said: "The government begins to feed misinformation to the American people in order to justify an enormous commitment of American troops, which turned out to be a tremendous mistake."

So it looks like Dean has bought into the quagmire myth hook, line and sinker. His first comment demonstrates that he has very little ability to distinguish between "nation-building" in Vietnam and nation-building in Iraq. However, his second comment shows that he isn't exactly ready to go public with that view. Instead of actually commenting on the supposed failure of the occupation, Dean's responded with a non sequitur about Presidential deception. Yes, yes, we've all heard about the uranium. But tonight's speech wasn't about uranium. From context, it seems clear that Dean's initial use of the Vietnam analogy concerned the President's decision to commit ever more resources to a failing cause. But he didn't have the guts to follow up that line of criticism.

Now, you might ask, why do I invest so much effort criticizing a candidate whose foreign policy I already know I don't like? Because I still haven't made up my mind what I would do if it were Dean vs. Bush in November '04. It's a question Josh keeps putting to me: What incentive does Dean have to be responsible about national security if even the most security-minded Democrats (e.g. me)will vote for him on domestic grounds?

With comments like the ones he made tonight, Dean has come that much closer to persuading me that I just can't trust him on national security. I may not like Bush's instincts or truly, truly trust him. But it seems that Dean's instincts are even worse. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:54 PM by David Adesnik  

SCHWARZENEGGER '08: The NY Times says immigrants should have the same right as everyone else to run for President. Yet strangely, the NYT's masthead editorial avoids any mention of Big Arnie. While that isn't exactly a sin, it does point to an important omission in the Times' remarks. Whereas the NYT says that letting immigrants run is the right thing to do, it fails to point out that there is also considerable room for bipartisan compromise on the issue precisely because both parties have important leaders born abroad. Welcome to Schwarzenegger vs. Granholm in '08. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:44 PM by David Adesnik  

PROUD OF GEORGE W. Two years ago, I never thought I'd write those words. Yet in the face of intense criticism from all sides, George Bush has held fast to his ambition of bringing democracy to Iraq. I felt truly proud when the President declared that:

In Iraq, we are helping the long-suffering people of that country to build a decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East. Together we are transforming a place of torture chambers and mass graves into a nation of laws and free institutions. This undertaking is difficult and costly - yet worthy of our country, and critical to our security.

The Middle East will either become a place of progress and peace, or it will be an exporter of violence and terror that takes more lives in America and in other free nations. The triumph of democracy and tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and beyond would be a grave setback for international terrorism. The terrorists thrive on the support of tyrants and the resentments of oppressed peoples. When tyrants fall and resentment gives way to hope, men and women in every culture reject the ideologies of terror and turn to the pursuits of peace. Everywhere that freedom takes hold, terror will retreat.

Naive as I am, I recognize that many of the President's critics will write off the above as empty rhetoric. In response, I have two things to say. First, there are striking differences between tonight's speech and the President's February remarks on the rebuilding of Iraq. Whereas in February the President said that Iraq and its people are "fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom", he has now made it clear that the United States will ensure that the people of Iraq fulfill their democratic potential. This is a major commitment of presidential credibility. It is no different than a campaign promise. The President and advisers know that if he does not live up to his word, he will pay a heavy price.

My second point about the President's speech also concerns credibility. While almost every American president has spoken eloquently about fighting for the democratic cause, few have done as much for democracy as they have said. Yet George Bush is keeping 130,000 US troops on the ground in Iraq, where they are working extremely hard to build a democratic state amidst the ruins of the Ba'athist dictatorship. Not since Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur has the United States taken such dramatic action on behalf of the democratic cause.

Also surprisingly, the President explicitly committed himself to promoting democracy in Afghanistan, a country whose name he did not even mention in his February speech. While the President's actions re: Afghanistan have not been all that impressive up to this point, this kind of public commitment may begin to change that.

The question I am left asking myself now is "When will the disappointment come?" Proud as I am of the President for saying what he has said, part of me still suspects that he does not truly understand either what he is saying or the magnitude of it. This was the selfsame President who ran against nation-building as a candidate.

To be fair, it is not in the nature of Presidential speechmaking for the President to engage in the sort of introspective and confessional discourse that might convince listeners such as myself that he has recognized his previous errors rather than just chosen to forget them. Nor can the Presidently openly disavow the anti-nation building position of advisers such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and (possibly) Powell. The best one can hope for is an explicit and unequivocal commitment to doing that right thing. And George Bush has given us that. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:54 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG COMES, ABBAS GOES: Josh is on his way to New Haven and I have moved into my new office at Harvard's Olin Institute. I really don't have any idea what's been going on in the real world this past week, although I can recommend an excellent BBQ joint near my office. Even that ornery Texan by the name of Chafetz thought it was good.

Speaking of ornery, things aren't going well in the Middle East, with Mahmoud Abbas resigning and the unknown Ahmed Qurei ("widely seen as the only internationally credible alternative to Mr. Abbas" -- NYT) emerging as the front-runner in the race to replace him.

Also, thumbs up to Israel for avoiding civilian casualties by using fewer explosives in their effort to kill Hamas "spiritual leader" Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Yassin survived the attack thanks to the small size of the Israeli bomb. But I'm guessing that he won't be able to run far enough or fast enough to avoid the next attack, given that he's a paraplegic.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:40 PM by Patrick Belton  

I'M PACKING TODAY. David's up at Harvard unpacking. And Josh's in transit. However, if any of our readers would like to come by and pitch in with the packing, I'm sure any of the three of us would be very happy to blog orally to provide entertainment..... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:48 PM by David Adesnik  

ARABS LESS ANTI-SEMITIC THAN HARVARD: At least in this one instance. (Thanks to MV for the link.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:17 AM by Patrick Belton  

THANK GOODNESS THERE'S A BBC, PART I: Thinking Negatively Really Does Make You Depressed (headline from this morning's UK edition) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:16 AM by Patrick Belton  

THANK GOODNESS THERE'S A BBC, PART II: Jazz Greats Blighted by Drugs, Alcohol, and Mental Illness." Wow. Pretty soon they'll be saying the same thing about heavy metal.....
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

JESSE JACKSON ARRESTED AT YALE: Several minutes ago, as part of a sympathy demonstration in support of striking service and clerical employees, Jesse Jackson was arrested after blocking traffic at the intersection of Elm and College. (See NYT, Yale's side, and the unions' side). Incidentally, Jesse has been arrested in connection with civil disobedience in New Haven before: in 1993, he was cited for public disturbance in connection with demonstrations in support of striking health care workers at Yale/New Haven Hospital. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

"DROP DEAD GORGEOUS" REALITY PARALLEL OF THE DAY: 40 of 100 semi-finalist contestants at the Miss Italy beauty pagent developed acute allergic reactions on their big night to a metallic decorative design used in their costumes, triggering massive rashes, puffy cheeks, and tearing. (Kind of gives the other 60 an advantage.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

"UMMM, RIGHT" QUOTE OF THE DAY: Via CNN: "For his part, Pollard contends that he was an Israeli patriot, spying not against the United States, but for Israel." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:43 PM by David Adesnik  

ACK! Glad to see Patrick's had a chance to get online. My landlord still hasn't finished installing the new windows in my place, so I haven't been able to move in yet. Expect the hiatus to last a bit longer. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:24 PM by Patrick Belton  

A LETTER FROM OXBLOG'S NEPAL CORRESPONDENT: It's not Labor Day over there, thanks to the wonders of the international date line...so OxBlog's friend Joel Hafvenstein is at the office, logging long hours to bring us some ....

Bad news from Nepal.

When I was there last week, the peace talks with the Maoists were at an obvious impasse. The rebels yesterday cancelled the ceasefire, and have since assassinated one military colonel in Kathmandu, wounded another, and knocked over multiple banks in the south -- attacks clearly well-planned during the months of the peace process. The government has declared them terrorists, and America may well follow suit. A conflict which had already escalated exponentially since 2001 looks likely to get much bloodier.

See this article from Nepal News.

This time, the Maoists may also be directly targeting political leaders, not just military, police, and low-level party hacks and development workers. An attack on former PM Deuba's convoy on Monday (before the cancellation of the ceasefire) was described by apologetic Maoists as a mistake:

See here and here.

But they just made a (perhaps successful) assassination attempt against Devendra Raj Kandel, the hard-nosed Home Minister under the last Deuba government, which suggests that this time, the gloves are coming off. (Here's an interview indicating why Kandel was so hated by the Maoists: ) And the house of another political leader (negotiator in the recent govt-Maoist peace talks) was firebombed.

One of the more striking changes about Kathmandu this time was the number of sandbagged military emplacements that had sprung up around every major crossroads and government building. It's really come to look like a country at war. Which, sadly, it once again is.

Joel

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:48 AM by David Adesnik  

JOURNEY TO THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC...of Cambridge, that is. I'll be on the road today, headed up to my new place. Chances are no blogging tomorrow, either. With Patrick and Josh also in transit, expect light posting until after Labor Day. Happy BBQ! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:16 PM by David Adesnik  

SPEAKING OF BIRKENSTOCK LIBERALS...Kevin Drum writes in [via e-mail] that

I actually thought "Birkenstock liberal" was a perfect term.  In two words it brought forth a whole slew of connotations and describes perfectly a certain kind of person.  I knew exactly what she was talking about.

Yet as RO points out, Dean himself has rejected the phrase "Birkenstock liberal" as an unfair cliche that the media relies on to marginalize him. RO writes that

Howard Dean used the phrase "Birkenstock liberals" during the Portland
stop during the "Sleepless Summer" [tour].

The Portland stop was two days before the New York stop that Jodi Wilgoren was reporting on.

Dean used the phrase as an example of something the press had been calling supporters of his campaign. I believe this makes the use of the phrase by Jodi Wilgoren all the more outrageous and seriously moots Kevin Drum's disagreement with your assessment.

Kevin seemed to believe it was nothing more than an "evocative" turn of phrase, in fact it would appear to me an example of a reporter using a loaded term she or he knew was objectionable to the subject of his or her article for no more reason than to poke a sharp stick at the subject and see what would happen.

At any rate, the audio from Portland still seems to be available in
the list at the bottomg of the main www.deanforamerica.com page. Dean may
have used the phrase in Falls Church the day before that, indeed he may
have been using it for some time before I became aware of it, but he
was definitely using it before Jodi Wilgoren used it to "review" the
Bryant Park speech.

Responding from the right, the ever-insouciant EP observes that

Please inform your readers, that the NYT not withstanding, there are many people who wear Birkenstocks who are not only not liberal, but rabidly conservative.  I am one such myself.  Not only that, but I lived in Vermont, yes Vermont, for many years before coming to my senses and moving to Florida...[D]uring those many years, I wore these extremely comfortable shoes (the sandal variety -- easily the most telltale politically and even occasionally with rag socks)  knowing full well that I was taken for one of 'them' even though I knew I was just funning them.

At risk of setting myself for a "yo-mama" joke, I'll add that my own mother wears Birkenstocks and is a centrist Democrat who voted for Giuliani and against Bloomberg.

On a more serious note, Rabbi MB -- a supporter of Howard Dean -- writes that

I think you identified an important factor in what drives media bias and why even institutions that are typed as liberal are often damaging to liberal and progressive causes.  To the jaded NYT, any one who claims to speak for the people or involve them in Democracy is playing the political game.  The more earnest they are, the more they must be knocked down. 

The elitist bias of a paper like the NYT not only leads to the dismissive tone that marked Wilgoren's article, but also makes the paper less likely to do the journalism necessary to document the abuses of the system perpetrated by some conservatives or Republicans.  Its only newsworthy when a  Republican crosses the stereotype and cares about social issues or when a Democrat can be exposed as a fraud or irrelevant. 

Unfortunately other mainstream news sources are not interested in seeing the nuanced picture you present and take every opportunity to bash "liberal bias" as a purely ideological phenomenon. All of us -- conservative, progressive, libertarian, or liberal -- with a serious commitment to resolving iddues and revitalizing the democratic process are done a disservice by elitism and media bias.

In contrast, Kevin Drum [same e-mail] asks

You completely lost me with the Julius Caesar stuff.  How did you draw all those conclusions from a simple paragraph saying that Dean's crowds were remarkably high this early in the campaign?  The "elitist liberal intelligentsia distrusts the common man"?  Isn't that a bit of a stretch from a fairly unexceptionable paragraph?
 
Anyway, I'm not trying to hammer you.  I'm just curious why you reacted so strongly to an article that seemed fairly ordinary to me.

Kevin is right to ask that sort of question. Wilgoren's article alone is not sufficient evidence to demonstrate an anti-populist bias in the mainstream media. I reacted so strongly because, in the course of my research, I have come into contact with a significant body of scholarship that assaults the mainstream "liberal" media for its anti-populist/anti-radical bias.

Thus, I was not deriving a conceptual framework from a single NYT article. Rather, I was applying a pre-existing conceptual framework to it. In that light, I think Wilgoren's word choices are extremely significant.

(For those interested in further reading, the classic work on this subject is Todd Gitlin's The Whole Word is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left)

Last but not least, a factual correction: Both Kevin Drum and VC -- an editor at a major metropolitan daily -- point that correspondents do not write the headlines for their own articles. As VC incisively observes,

One should not attribute a headline, bad or good, to the reporter who writes the story under the headline, since she almost certainly had nothing to do with
it and very likely never even saw the headline until, like you, she picked up a
paper the morning it was published.

Point taken. That's all for now, but if you're looking for more, surf on over to the Sarcastic Southerner for more on Dean.

UPDATE: Aziz over at Dean2004 (the unofficial Dean blog) is glad to have a "righty" on his side. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:19 PM by David Adesnik  

BOMBING UPDATE: Four suspects in the Najaf bombing have ties to Al-Qaeda. See Tacitus and Instapundit for some more details.

Also, Michael Ledeen writes in that

Sometimes I think that there is a real death wish in the West, which simply will not look at our greatest enemy in the Middle East, namely Iran.  Anyone looking at the devastation in Najaf, as at the UN hotel/office building in Baghdad, has to think automatically of Imad Mughniyah, the Iranian-created operational chieftain of Hizbollah.  

In the eyes of the Iranians, Hakim was guilty of treason, since they had fed him and supported him for twenty years, then sent him into Iraq, only to have him turn out to be altogether reasonable and even pro-American.  He said at a meeting about 12 days ago that Iraq would never have peace so long as Iran kept sendng terrorists into the country.
 
He was on an Iranian hit list that includes the grandson of Khomeini and other moderate Shi'ite clerics.
 
Many are saying that no Shi'ite would commit such an act at the Shrine of Ali.  But Iran feels that the Shrine of Ali is theirs.  It is, after all, where Khomeini lived in exile.  And Iran claims control over the Najaf clerics.
 
Of course the Iranians would not send their own people directly to the site to do the deed, and of course the Iranians would have Baathist or Sunni "suspects" all ready for the police.
 
Meanwhile they are organizing the extraction of Saddam from Iraq to Iran.  I suppose fairly soon there will be a banquet of chiefs of state in Tehran, with Osama, Mullah Omar, Hekmatiar, Saddam and Khamene'i....

I know this is extremely serious, but doesn't that sort of banquet remind you of the opening scene in The Naked Gun, where Leslie Nielsen bursts in on a meeting of Qaddafi, Khomeini, Arafat and then rubs the birthmark off of Gorbachev's head? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:43 AM by David Adesnik  

IRAQ BOMBING: Ninety-five men and women, including Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, lost their lives in Najaf today. They were the victims of a car bomb placed outside the Imam Ali Mosque by unknown terrorists.

The death of Ayatollah Hakim is a major setback for American efforts to cultivate and cooperate with a moderate Shi'ite leadership. Perhaps the best one can hope for is that Hakim's martyrdom will enshrine his non-violent and pro-democratic approach to reconstruction as the reigning standard for Iraqi Shi'ites.

The prime suspects in the Najaf bombing are renegade Ba'thist forces. After the bombing, Najaf police officers arrested four men in connection with the bombing, all of them former members of Saddam's intelligence services. According to scholar-blogger Juan Cole,

this bombing was the work of Saddam loyalists. Baqir al-Hakim had waged a long terrorist and guerrilla war against the Baath. He cooperated with the Americans. When Saddam called on Shiite clergy to declare jihad on the US a couple of weeks ago, Baqir and others rejected the call forcefully and attacked Saddam as a tyrant. No believing Shiite would blow up a huge bomb right in front of Imam Ali's shrine. The truck bomb has become a signature of the remnants of the Baath, as with the attack on the United Nations HQ. The Saddam loyalists may hope that Shiite factions will blame one another and fall to fighting an internal civil war, adding to the country's ungovernability for the Americans.

I myself am wondering whether the Ba'athist were hoping to provoke a Shi'ite-Sunni conflict rather than a Shi'ite civil war. After all, it is hard to imagine that Iraq's Shi'ite wouldn't unite in the face of an external attack. And this afternoon, a Shi'ite protest march made its way into a prominent Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad after a Shi'ite imam called for vengeance. Fortunately, there was no violence.

It is hard to know how the bombing will affect the relationship between Coalition forces and the people of Iraq. Matt Yglesias writes that

One thing the hawks are right about, is that Iraq is not another Vietnam and it's not going to be one in the future, either. On the one hand, the US has gotten much better at avoiding things like the slaughter of innocent villagers. On the other hand, our military opponents do things like blow up mosques that will almost certainly not endear them to the broad mass of Iraqis. But as I said before, each unhappy intervention is unhappy in its own way. The risk in Iraq is not that things like blowing up mosques is going to drive us out of the country. Rather, the risk is that mosques (and oil pipelines, and police stations, and UN buildings, etc.) are just going to keep getting blown up because the occupation authority is understaffed, underfunded, and led by a group of men in Washington DC who've evinced an utter inability to manage public policy. Infrastructure may continue to degrade and central authority may become utterly ineffective. Just like in the last country we invaded.

Kevin Drum shares Matt's concerns about security, writing that

I wish we had a better idea of just how strong these remnants of the Baathist movement are these days. For all the talk about how we're making progress, they sure seem like they're still able to cause an awful lot of damage.

I suspect that this will not be the last attack on a Shi'i holy site. As the NYT noted about the shrine in Najaf,

There were no American forces in the vicinity, as senior Najaf clergymen had made it clear they did not want troops patrolling anywhere near the holy site. A compromise proposal to train a 300-member local police force has been awaiting financing, a Marine officer said.

As was the case with the UN bombing, it seems that Ba'athist insurgents have become adept at locating high-profile targets that are not protected by American forces. Perhaps that is an indication that the Ba'athists no longer believe they can achieve significant success against Americans, with success defined as inflicting more than a handful of casualties at once.

Of course, the security of American forces will provide little comfort to vulnerable Shi'ites. In the aftermath of the bombing, it became apparent that some Shi'ites held the United States responsible for the lack of security. Thus, the challenge ahead is for the occupation government to forge an agreement with Shi'ite leaders that can ensure the security of their gathering places without relying on either an intrusive American presence or an independent Shi'ite military force.

Will that happen? According to an NYT news analysis, today's bombing exposed a disappointing lack of leadership ability on the part of both the occupation government and the Iraqi interim council. The article makes a strong case that a stalemate has resulted from both the Americans insisting that the Iraqis become more assertive while the Iraqis counter that the Americans haven't given them enough power.

Regardless, I think this bombing demonstrates the need for greater Presidential leadership on Iraq. It is time for President Bush to deliver a simple and powerful message to the people of Iraq: "We share your desire for an end to the occupation and the return of self-government. The faster that you demonstrate your commitment to democratic ideals and institutions, the sooner our day of departure will come. The harder you work to fulfill Ayatollah Hakim's vision of an Islamic democracy, the sooner you will be able to honor his memory through the establishment of a free Iraq. God bless and good night." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:58 PM by Daniel  

COME AND RIDE MY ONE TRICK PONY. Ian Buruma provides an excellent overview of America's relationship with Israel and explains why conventional wisdom about "Jewish interests" driving American foreign policy toward Israel simply doesn't match up with the historical facts. He did not talk about AIPAC (the primary American lobby group on behalf of Israel) and its transformation in the late 1970s/early 1980s, or the cultural ties (value affinity) that bind America and Israel. I think those are two very important factors to consider.

One line with which I disagree: "It may well be that Israel's interests coincide with those of the United States for the moment, but this should not be a given, never to be examined or reassessed." America continually examines and reassesses its relationship with Israel, but in the broadest sense, there are certain parameters beyond which no President will go. AIPAC's reorganization and increased national power in the past 25 years as well as the cultural bond/value affinity argument helps explain these limits. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:36 PM by David Adesnik  

AIR FORCE SHAME: Winds of Change rounds-up the history of the Air Force academy's epidemic of sexual harrassment and rape. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:37 AM by Patrick Belton  

WORTH READING: So after a pleasant and somewhat long cigar- and bourbon-accompanied premarital guys' night out between best man and groom, Vi and I have returned to the maid of honor's house to do what's only appropriate....blog on US foreign policy.

To wit: Thomas Donnelly has a very good piece on long-term strategies for Iraqi democratization being laid down in the UK MoD. Donnelly's praise for the MoD is effusive and, it seems, justified: while the Office of the Secretary's comparable report omits "not only broader strategic questions but operational and tactical issues that might raise awkward questions about the Bush administration's planned defense program," the UK effort "represents one of those rare occasions when a government grades itself with some rigor." The special relationship, it would seem, is alive and well.

Also worth reading is a piece by Michael Novak in which he points out the lengths the press has undertaken to exaggerate U.S. casualties in Iraq: "In the 118 days between May 1 and August 26, there were 63 American battlefield deaths in Iraq. About two weeks ago, the left-wing press recognized that this did not sound as dramatic as they wished. So they started totaling all military deaths in Iraq, including those from accidents, which happen in military life every day, everywhere. This brought the total up by another 78. They're more comfortable with that total number, 141. But the true battlefield number is 63. ... In the first stage of the war, from March 19 until April 30, 112 Americans died in combat, and 29 in various accidents. In those first 42 days, that meant almost 3 combat deaths per day. In the 118 days since then, there has been about one combat death every other day--63 in 118 days. (The accidental deaths have been fairly consistent: 29 in 42 days early on, and after May 1, 78 in 118 days.)" The challenge for responsible, national-security minded Democratic contenders is to offer helpful suggestions, and yes, criticisms about the U.S.'s commitment of time and money to making Iraq a pivotal functioning democracy for the region and validating America's status as a principled foreign policy actor - this, of course, instead of seizing on (even exaggerating) each suggested mis-step of U.S. policy simply to attack a President with every criticism with which the left would take pleasure in seeing him attacked. Responsibility, idealistic patriotism, and a commitment to seeing politics stop at the water's edge were a trademark of both parties for the vast majority of the Cold War...and they should be once again. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:05 PM by David Adesnik  

HOWARD DEAN, VICTIM OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA: That's right. I'm about to stick up for Howard Dean. Not because I particularly like the guy, but because the NYT should hold its correspondents accountable for their slanted reporting.

The correspondent in this instance is Jodi Wilgoren, the very same one who did her best some months back to whitewash the terrorist murders committed by David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. So, one might ask, why would the same correspondent who defends the Weather Underground give Howard Dean a hard time?

As far as I can tell, Wilgoren is following one of the unwritten rules of the trade: romanticize Vietnam-era leftism as much as you want, but don't make nice with the aggressive leftists of today. After all, they might provoke a conservative reaction that threatens low-key mainstream leftists like the ones who work on 44th Street.

Up front, Wilgoren is pretty good to Dean, giving him a favorable headline that reads "In a Long Presidential Race, Dean Sprints". Positive as it is, the headline is accurate because Dean really is campaigning a lot harder than his opponents.

The first hint of of what's going comes in the second graf, where Wilgoren describes Dean's supporters as "rabid". As if being excited about Dean were some sort of violent pathology. While I think the Doctor's supporters are often misguided, such comments belong on the editorial page, or at least in a news analysis column.

Later on, Wilgoren informs us that "the feisty crowds were filled with Birkenstock liberals whose loudest ovations always followed Dr. Dean's anti-war riff -- there were few union members, African-Americans or immigrants." There is a lot of substance in that sentence, but it's hard not to notice a ridiculous phrase like "Birkenstock liberals" that belongs on the pages of the National Review.

While most of us are aware of the vague correlation between footwear and political preferences, invoking this sort of stereotype in the news is both counterproductive and misleading. As best as I can tell, "Birkenstock liberals" refers to those liberals who are not black, not union, and not immigrants. Does it refer, then, to middle-class white liberals? Young liberals?

Perhaps all this guesswork isn't worth the time, since the term "Birkenstock" might just have been thrown in to provide some color. Yet at the same time, it carries the sample sort of implication as the term "rabid" -- that Dean's supporters are outside the mainstream, so caught up in their idiosyncratic lifestyle that their views aren't worth taking seriously.

First of all, is that really the case? I doubt it. My sense is that Dean's campaign -- and especially his fund-raising -- isn't getting its momentum from granola-crunching Berkeley undergrads. As far as I can tell, there is a sizable portion of the American public that was firmly anti-war and is forcefully anti-Bush. They have to be taken seriously.

In another telling passage from the article, we hear that

"He's not running a campaign, he's running a movement," [according to] Natasha C., one of four people the Dean campaign invited to chronicle the trip on their Web logs. "These are protest-size crowds, these are not politics-size crowds, and that's the critical difference."

But it is unclear what the movement is for.

Holy unwarranted editorializing Batman! I may not like what Dean is for, but you've got to pretty thick not to recognize that his supporters have a socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and Jimmy Carter-emulating agenda. But why the cheapshot if most NYT correspondents like that kind of agenda?

Because the elitist liberal intelligentsia distrusts the common man, even when he is on their side. Toward the beginning of the article, Wilgoren writes that

The staggering, seemingly spontaneous crowds turning up to meet [Dean] — about 10,000 in Seattle on Sunday and a similar number in Bryant Park in Manhattan last night — are unheard of in the days of the race when most candidates concentrate on the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire and would seem formidable even in October 2004.

Not just unheard of, but unwelcome. Taking their cues from Julius Caesar, correspondents fear that the latest incarnation of Marc Antony will turn the mob to his own ends. Howard Dean one day, Rush Limbaugh the next.

Strangely, this is one issue on which the academicians are far ahead of the correspondents. Beginning in the late 1980s, a veritable flood of books and articles began to demonstrate that the American public is actually a moderating force, drawing politicians back from the ends of the ideological spectrum. Even on foreign policy, which scholars long considered the issue area in which the public makes the worst choices, it became clear that American voters recognized that they wanted something to the right of Jimmy Carter and the left of Ronald Reagan. (Click here to read more about the Rational Public.)

In short, it's time for the Times to get with the times. It may be true that

the people buying the "Doctor is in" buttons [at Dean's rallies] were mostly aging flower children and the tongue-studded next generation.

But that sort of provocative details shouldn't pass for serious political reporting. In all fairness, there is a lot of interesting information in Jodi Wilgoren's article, much of it not reprinted here. But at just those moments when Wilgoren needs to provide more depth to her initial observations, she wanders off course and provides us instead with substandard cliches.

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# Posted 2:54 PM by David Adesnik  

DEMOCRATIC DOMINOS: MA further elaborates my earlier point about the role of Austria and West Germany in opening up the Eastern Bloc. He writes that:

Although the details of the story have been rather forgotten here in Britain or the US, it was very precisely a series of planned, deliberate acts by the West Germans and Austrians that brought about the end of communism in Europe.

First some background: In the constitution of West German state the right of East German citizens to become West Germans was automatic and guaranteed.

Every single DDR citizen who succeeded in getting out - and, as you state, it became harder and harder - was automatically a West German - as soon as they crossed the border they got a passport, some money, help finding a job, accomodation etc. All W German governments, left and right, were equally punctilious in fulfilling this.

Furthermore, during the 1970s and 1980s East Germans living near the border and near Berlin (you will remember that West Berlin was an enclave in the middle of East Germany) could receive West German TV automatically. (Of course, the West Germans boosted their signal as much as they could in those areas).

By the mid 1980s, it had become so difficult for the DDR government to persuade people to live in areas that couldn't get the signal that they were actually forced to retransmit it, rather than attempt to jam it, to cover the whole country.

Thus practically everyone in East Germany had access to West German and they could not only get uncensored news, but could see for themselves just through the medium of ordinary everyday programming that life in the West was materially richer, freer, safer and just more exciting than their own.

In 1988 the W German government, deciding to test Gorbachev to the limit, came to an agreement (money changed hands) with both the Hungarians and the Austrians, that the Hungarians would announce that, on a given date, they were going to allow people to leave Hungary and go to Austria without exit visas. This meant that anyone in Hungary after that date, Hungarians or any other of the Warsaw Pact nations could leave the country. Now, this didn't affect the Hungarians and others too much, because they would still need visas, work permits etc to stay in Austria or anywhere else, but obviously everyone in the DDR knew that they COULD stay in West Germany. In effect, because the whole border between East and West was an extension of the Berlin Wall, by making the announcement the Hungarians announced that they were opening a gate through which anyone could pass.

So, in March 1989 (I'm not at the home, so can't check the exact dates) [the] Hungarian Govt did announce that they were going to open their border to Austria on a given date in August. Of course, this got huge play on W German TV, the implications were spelled out in black and white, and so that August literally millions of East Germans booked their annual holidays in Hungary and succeeded in crossing the border. By the time the DDR government realised what was happening it was too late, because although they had built the wall between East and West, there was only basic border security between the countries of the Warsaw Pact. Even when they tried to stop people going directly to Hungary, all anyone had to do (as many did) was go to Czechoslovakia, and then cross into Hungary.

The fact that the DDR had, almost at a stroke, lost the core of its "middle class" led to the panicked decision to open the Berlin Wall, which led to the collapse of the state, and to a ripple effect which spread to Czechoslovakia, Romania and eventually to the USSR itself.

So, as I say, although the mere existence of West Germany did not lead to the collapse of communism, the fact that the it was there, and the (too often unacknowledged) courage and determination of Helmut Kohl and other West German leaders did indeed lead to the collapse of communism.

Very well said. Finally, in response to my observation that

"As for Cuba, it's an island. Its residents would all be in Miami now except for the fact that it's a helluva lot harder to survive a rafting trip across the Gulf of Mexico than a subway ride to West Berlin."

BB wisely responds that

The fact that when we catch them attempting it, we drag them back to Castro's warm embrace, doesn't [that] have anything to do with it? At least if somebody made it across the Berlin wall we didn't toss them back over...

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# Posted 2:41 PM by David Adesnik  

BODY COUNT: Phil Carter has some insightful comments on the fate of American soldiers in Iraq. He also has quite a good post on Ashcroft up. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:55 PM by Patrick Belton  

ADMINISTRATION TAKES OXBLOG'S ADVICE, YET AGAIN: CNN is reporting this morning that the administration "is considering having a multinational force in Iraq to be sponsored by the United Nations but under U.S. command." The network quotes Deputy Secretary of State Armitage as saying that among several ideas being explored, "one is a multinational force under U.N. leadership, but the American would be the U.N. commander." They must have been reading this this (and this). Glad to hear OxBlog's record in setting U.S. foreign policy remains strong.

With that said, I'm off now for a few days of Labor Day blogcation in Rochester, where I have the happy pleasure of serving as best man as my close friend Vi Nguyen (the handsome guy to my left there) weds his lovely fiancee Amanda Houppert. OxBlog threw him a stately weekend-long bachelor's party last week, which included a black-tie dinner Friday night at the Harvard Club hosted by David and myself, and an ensuing weekend up in the Catskill Mountains alternating between athletic TR-esque hiking and subsequent restful snacking on Eggs Belton and grilled chicken. (We in OxBlog were seeking to patronize the Borscht Belt, even if we didn't patronize the Borscht). See you guys Monday! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:27 PM by David Adesnik  

WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR? In honor of the 25th anniversary of Animal House, the NYT has an essay charting the film's influence on the countless frat-house flicks that have followed in its wake.

It's a good essay, but I'd like to expand on one point. Film critic Elvis Mitchell says that the lovable misfits of Delta house won us over because they were rebelling against an American establishment with authoritarian habits. Mitchell even quotes director John Landis saying that the creators did their best to make the bad guy frat come off as Nazis.

Now, back when I was in college, I had a hard time convincing my friends that there was any political content in Animal House. Sort of the same way that my friends now aren't willing to believe that there is any political content in professional wrestling.

To be fair, I'm not going to pretend that AH was a political film, rather than one about college. But it's message is very clear, and it isn't just about rebels vs. fascists. It's about the World War II generation vs. the Cold War generation that sunk the United States into the quicksand of Vietnam.

It's no accident that campus enforcer Doug Niedermeyer is in charge of the ROTC unit, or that the Dean threatens to notify the draft board that the men of Delta house have been expelled are no longer entitlted to deferments. In spite of AH's happy-go-lucky charm, the characters' lives are on the line. That is an important reason why AH is so much more compelling than recent knock-offs like Old School, in which the main characters are running away from adult life rather than resisting death.

So what about the WWII vs 'Nam symbolism? Again, it's no accident that Delta has a motorcycle riding member named D-Day who wears a vintage Army helmet, or that John Belushi tries to inspire his troops by referring to Pearl Harbor. Perhaps the most telling Vietnam symbolism in the film comes at its end, when the camera freeze-frames on each of the main characters and reveals their future. Niedermeyer goes to Vietnam and gets killed by his own troops. His buddy Greg becomes a Nixon White House aide and is later raped in prison.

A murder and a rape. In context, they seem downright hilarious. They are punishments that these men deserve. But here, in a essay focused on politics, it becomes clear just how brutal these punishments are. Hidden in humor, they are indication of just how deadly serious Animal House was.

Today, the WWII generation has become the "Greatest Generation", known for its unmatched sacrifice and courage, not to mention its hard work and family values. But before Tom Brokaw took advantage of the vets' fading memories to recast their image, the men of WWII were once a symbol of how a melting-pot nation came together to face down an authoritarian menace.

The men of WWII were not Boy Scouts. They were a little bit wild, a little bit like the men of Delta House. They were the embodiment of democratic freedom. They were individuals. They broke the rules and they had a good time. But when push came to shove, they were willing to put it all on the line and lay down their lives for the freedoms they cherished. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:25 PM by David Adesnik  

GILLIGAN AND THE SKIPPER: Kevin Drum says Instapundit and others have been misintepreting a recent story about Andrew Gilligan losing his position at the BBC and being exposed as a liar.

I think Kevin has a point about how Glenn, myself and the British media have been confused about what Gilligan's alibi actually was. But from Kevin's post, you get the sense that he actually believes Gilligan's alibi and wants to ignore the multitude of evidence which points to Gilligan's malicious incompetence as a correspondent. With any luck, Josh will clear this all up next time he logs on. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:05 AM by David Adesnik  

WEDDED TO MY PRECONCEPTIONS: Tacitus thinks I'm refusing to accept reality. To back up his point, he provides a list of about a half-dozen (recent) fatal attacks on Coalition forces outside the Sunni triangle and in Shi'a majority locales, which I described as free of anti-American resistance.

Tacitus most definitely has a good eye for detail, but are ten or so fatalities supposed to persuade me that there is real resistance outside the Sunni Triangle? Also note that Tacitus assumes Shi'ites were responsible for the attacks outside the Triangle. I didn't see any evidence of that in the news articles he links to (Daily Telegraph excepted since I couldn't open the links.)

Tacitus also points to intra-Shi'ite conflicts, some violent, to demonstrate that things are not going well. Hmmm. A strange point to make given that upstart Shi'ite clerics such as Moqtada Sadr are attacking their more established elders for being too pro-American.

Finally, Tacitus isn't happy that I accused him of still living in Vietnam. Actually, I'm willing to take that one back. I don't read Tacitus on a regular basis, so perhaps I should've been less harsh in my judgment.

Now, while I won't give the NYT or WaPo a free pass for their Vietnam mindset, I am willing to let history go when it comes to fellow bloggers. And frankly, Tacitus is providing a much more interesting challenge to my views on Iraq than left-wing pessimists such as Kos.

Also, Tacitus' comments section on this post has a very sophisticated debate on the course of events in Iraq, with both sides well-represented. In short, I'm perfectly happy to agree to disagree. Tacitus is now on my regular reading list. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:30 AM by David Adesnik  

THE DICTATOR NEXT DOOR: Matt Yglesias isn't happy with NRO's Jed Babbin for arguing that democracy in Iraq will bring down the dictatorships next door. Matt writes that

you hear this (or something like it) all the time, but is it true? What's the evidence supposed to be? Certainly the establishment of democracy in West Germany and Austria didn't exactly topple the dictators in East Germany. A democratic USA's been just a hop a way from a dictatorial Cuba for a bit over 100 years. Or does Babbin just mean that the Saudi (or Syrian or whatever) regimes can't persist indefinitely? Clearly, it's better for a regime to be situated near other like-minded regimes, but dictatorships and democracies sit side-by-side all the time for decades.

Note to Matt: The East Germans had to crush a nation-wide rebellion in 1953 and build a wall around West Berlin in 1961 to keep their entire population from walking away. Lucky for them, the Soviets were there to bail them out on both occasions. My question: Will anyone be there to bail out the Syrians, Saudis or Iranians?

As for Cuba, it's an island. Its residents would all be in Miami now except for the fact that it's a helluva lot harder to survive a rafting trip across the Gulf of Mexico than a subway ride to West Berlin.

Finally, what about the fact that "dicatorships and democracies sit side-by-side all the time for decades"? As Samuel Huntingon has aruged, democratization comes in waves. In contrast to Huntington's dumber arguments (See "Clash of Civilizations") this one has some real substance to it. (And problems, too, but that's another story.)

So far, no democratic wave has hit the Middle East. But if Iraq goes that way and Iran follows, would you want to be in Mubarak or Assad's shoes?

UPDATE: To be fair, Matt's been putting up a lot of good posts on Iraq, for example here, here, and here. There is no question that Matt takes the importance of reconstruction seriously. He just happens to be more critical of the situation on the ground than I am.

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# Posted 2:08 AM by David Adesnik  

ANOTHER POST NOT ABOUT IRAQ: Back in the September 10th era, the Weekly Standard ran a cover story [no permalink] lamenting the absence of patriotic themes in post-Cold War professional wrestling. (Hey, it's not Bill Kristol's fault. It wasn't easy to come up with good cover stories before Chafetz started writing them.)

Anyway, I'd imagine that Kristol and Kagan would swell with pride if they knew that Vince McMahon had given the Tag Team Championship to Rene Dupree and Sylvain Grenier, aka "La Resistance."

Representing the Good Ol' USA are D-Von and Bubba Ray, the Dudley Boys. The Dudley are crude, ignorant, violent and much-loved by wrestling fans across the world. Apparently, when it comes to certain aspects of world politics, unilateralism pays off. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:54 AM by David Adesnik  

A POST NOT ABOUT IRAQ: Instead, a post about drinking beer, watching football and having bikini-clad models jump up and down on trampolines. A day in the life of Patrick Belton? No! It's The Man Show on Comedy Central. New hosts, new season. Lowest common denominator. God, does it get any better than this? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:30 AM by David Adesnik  

IRAQ -- READERS RESPOND: Prof. DN thinks I have been making a mountain out of molehill. He writes that

This doesn't seem all that complicated to me. Whether Islamicists or Baathists were responsible for the UN bombing, the US is fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq. The aim of the enemy is to disrupt reconstruction and lesson the effectiveness of the occupation at
delivering goods and services to the Iraqis. There's no evidence either way that the US is "winning" or "losing," just that the occupation is difficult and probably requires a lot more resources than the Bush administration initially earmarked.

A reasonable point. If the occupation were a football game, we'd still be in the first quarter. But even after a few minutes of play, you begin to get a sense of what the opposing sides' respective strengths and weaknesses are. If DN is right and the occupation demands far more resources than initially planned, than it is fair to say that the United States is "losing".

On the other hand, if anti-American forces have given up on the struggle for hearts and minds (as DN strongly implies) than the US may have a decisive advantage. It's as if the Ba'athists and fundamentalists have given up on short-yardage plays in the first quarter and are already throwing Hail Mary passes.

On a related note, BG writes that

I'm afraid I just don't buy the example you use as an empirical example of how we are winning the "hearts and minds." You said

Early on in the quagmire debate, OxBlog also pointed to one clear empirical indicator of whether or not the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people were on the American or the Ba'athist side. That standard was to judge whether or not the people were protecting the 55 men on the Pentagon's most wanted list. My answer then was no and my answer now is still no. 38 of the 55 are dead or in prison because the Iraqi people are helping us find them.

Isn't it entirely possible for an Iraqi to despise both Saddam and America? Just because someone hates the Ba'athists doesn't mean they accept the occupation. Take a guy like Moqtada Sadr, the radical Shia cleric. He hates/hated Saddam. He's clearly not on the Ba'athist side. Does that mean he's on our side? Would he protect Ba'athists in his midst? Of course not. He'd probably kill any senior Ba'athists without thinking twice. But how can you claim that his hatred
of Saddam equals an acceptance of American rule? How can this be seen as anything close to empirical?

BG is right that I didn't elaborate on my point sufficiently. If you take a look at my original post on the subject, however, you may get a better sense of what I'm driving at. In it, I wrote that

If you read the WaPo's latest report on the capture of the Ace of Diamonds, you begin to get a sense of how desperate the top leadership of the deposed government has become.

Abid Hamid Mahmoud spent his last hours as a fugitive in the house of a couple who didn't even want him there. Mahmoud had no significant weapons, cash resources, nor means of transportation...

Mahmoud's desperate condition suggests that the Ba'ath has not been effective in organizing resistance and that it's support among the population is rather shallow. With any luck, such conditions will result in the ultimate capture of Saddam Hussein, who has been pronounced alive (if not well) according to US experts.

While this sort of evidence does not imply an "acceptance of American rule", it shows that most Sunni in Iraq (not to mention Shi'ites and Kurds) have decided that an American occupation is far better than Ba'athist rule. That is a critical part of the struggle for hearts and minds. In fact, it is a form of conditional acceptance.

I grant BG's point that certain Shi'ite clerics may resent the US almost as much as they did Saddam. But take BG's own example of Moqtada Sadr. Even he seems willing to accommodate a temporary American presence. While Sadr advocates the establishment of an Islamic republic, he has not said that it should be an authoritarian rather than a democratic one.

In the end, what matters is not whether the people of Iraq accept American rule, but whether they accept democracy.

On a more theoretical note, "C" writes that

I have been following your debate with Josh Marshall. FWIW, I am predisposed to your side of the debate, so you can take the following with a grain of salt.

The problem with establishing a benchmark in social science, as opposed to the physical sciences, is that success is also measured against alternative "universes" defined by paths not taken.

For instance, are Bush's economic policies successful? Looking at economic performance in terms of the real data is insufficient; one must determine whether Bush's policies are better than alternatives. Looking merely at the fact that unemployment rates have risen does not mean Bush's policies are unsuccessful; they might actually be better than alternatives under which unemployment would have risen further.

So, too, trying to establish a benchmark for success with Mideast policy must make an estimate of where the U.S.'s position would be if alternative strategies had been followed. In other words, it's not enough to establish benchmarks to measure a policy; you must also argue that the path the administration has taken is better than what might have occurred had
the administration taken alternative paths.

This is a long-winded way of saying what Dan Drezner has been saying all along: it's not that pre-emption is a good policy, it's that it is better than the alternatives.

Most definitely a valid point (although I'm not sure that Bush's economic policy is the best illustration of it!)

The last comment of the night comes from Michael Ledeen, who continues to make time for OxBlog despite his professional commitments. Michael writes that

on the "hearts and minds" question, I think that the mullahs and the Assads believe that if they drive us out of Iraq -- which is their intention, as they have said all along -- they will thereby win fealty from the masses.  As Lyndon Johnson once famously said, when you've got them by the balls, the hearts and minds usually follow...[Let's hope the mullahs and the Assads are as successful as LBJ was in 'Nam! --ed.]
 
It is certainly desperation in the sense that the Terror Masters are fighting for survival;  if we win, they're doomed.  But don't try to read the minds of Iranians with a logical Western decryption device.  They are very cunning and very devious.
 
Finally, on the "Iraqi secret service" theory.  Maybe, maybe.  But as soon as I heard the story I said "the guards were obviously paid off."  You don't need the secret service; it's enough to have people who want/need money, or are blackmailed to accept it. 

When I was a correspondent in Italy years ago, and people asked me how it could be that Italian terrorists broke out of jail so often, so easily, I said, "Well, what if you were a guard and somebody came to you and said, 'Look here, if you will just arrange not to be in Cellblock 4 at midnight, we'll pay you three years' salary, and will promise NOT to murder your daughter...'"
 
It works, believe me.  Just about every time.

Fair enough.

To conclude, I guess I should mention that there were actually lots of positive responses to my post as well, including this one from Steve Sturm, who takes the critics to task for applying inconsistent standards when judging the progress of the occupation. He is right. But that's their job!
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# Posted 1:24 AM by David Adesnik  

IRAQ -- LOOKING BACK AT THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER: In yesterday's posts on the occupation, I set out for the record those positions which both OxBlog and its critics had taken vis-a-vis the occupation of Iraq during the months of April, May and June. This post will pick up where the last one left off. (If you want to know why I am investing so much time and effort in this project, click here.)

In the last days of June, I elaborated at length on my argument that the American media had become fixated on the superficial resemblance of the occupation of Iraq to the war in Vietnam. Surprisingly, certain liberals agreed with my conclusions as much as did conservatives.

In July, the big news in Iraq was the death of Uday and Qusay Hussein. To my surprise, even those invested in demonstrating the existence of a quagmire recognized an American victory when the saw one.

In August, it was all quiet on the Middle Eastern front until the double bombing of Jerusalem and Baghdad. Then I put up this post which led to an avalanche of criticism followed by this four-part series on the state of the occupation as it is right now.

So there you go. Thankfully, this post has turned out to be shorter than expected. So now I can stop navel-gazing and get back to current events. TTFN.



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# Posted 12:52 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG -- INTROSPECTION AND HISTORY: What began as a response to my critics became an unexpected exploration of my intellectual development over the past five months.

While compiling material for yesterday's posts on the occupation of Iraq, I became more aware than ever of how blogging enhances one's self-awareness and forces one to take responsibility for one's thoughts and actions.

For dedicated historians of the self, it has always been possible to gather together journal entries, personal correspondence and other documents in order to assemble an intellectual self-portrait. However, thanks to blogging, the investment of time and effort necessary to become aware of one's own political development has fallen to the point where it has actually become an inviting prospect.

In our heads, we tend to keep an informal score of our own rights and wrongs on the issues of the day. Unsurprisingly, such informal scores tend to ignore losses and emphasize wins, thus suggesting to ourselves that we have far more insight and credibility than we actually do.

At the same time, such informal scores tend to reduce the value of actual wins, since all one can to say to one's opponents long afterward is "I'm usually right and you're usually wrong." And they can say the same thing right back. Or just make fun of you for your groundless self-confidence.

However, in the blogosphere, one must hand over to the reading public the right to measure the worth of your latest post against the value of your older ones. If a blogger is not consistent in his or her views, the reading public (especially other bloggers) will impose consistency from without.

Even professional journalists rarely have to endure this sort of scrutiny. While a record of their work is available in every public library, who actually spends their spare time burrowing through stacks of old newspapers? (Nexis-Lexis is beginning to change all that, but subscriptions are not yet priced for the general public.)

In the process of compiling material for yesterday's posts on Iraq, I found it disturbing to read hundreds of paragraphs that I myself had written but whose contents I would not have recognized in the absence of a byline. Thus, to take either the credit or the blame for the contents of those paragraphs seems rather strange.

At the same time, there were discernible patterns of thought that gave a distinct personality to what I had written. On the other hand, I would not have recognized such patterns if not for the convenience of the OxBlog archive.

In my next post, I will finish off the project that I began yesterday. Yes, it is a response to my critics. But much more importantly, it is a process of learning about myself. And it enables me to recognize that which is so distinctive about belonging to a community of individuals -- a.k.a. the blogosphere -- that has made a similar commitment, more or less formal, to learning about themselves.

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# Posted 12:05 AM by David Adesnik  

AFTER CHAFETZ EXPOSE, HEADS ROLL AT BBC: Andrew Gilligan will no longer be reporting for the network. Instapundit has more. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:04 PM by Patrick Belton  

THREE NOT-SO-EASY PIECES, CONT'D: This month's issue of the RAND Review includes pieces by senior RAND analysts James Dobbins and James Quinlivan.

Dobbins's piece extracts lessons from the U.S. experience in building democratic nations after wars, from Germany on. The most pertinent:

"Unity of command is as essential in peace operations as it is in war. This unity of command can be achieved even in operations with broad multilateral participation when the major participants share a common vision and tailor the response of international institutions accordingly."

"There is no quick fix for nation-building. None of our cases was successfully completed in less than seven years."

"Multilateral nation-building is more complex and time-consuming than a unilateral approach. But the multilateral approach is considerably less expensive for individual participants.

"Multilateral nation-building can produce more thorough transformations and greater regional reconciliation than can unilateral efforts."

"There appears to be an inverse correlation between the size of the military stabilization force and the level of casualties. The higher the proportion of troops relative to the resident population, the lower the number of casualties suffered and inflicted. Indeed, most of the post-conflict operations that were generously manned suffered no casualties at all."

And as though the point weren't driven home yet: "Many factors—such as prior democratic experience, level of economic development, and social homogeneity—can influence the ease or difficulty of nation-building, but the single most important controllable determinant seems to be the level of effort, as measured in troops, money, and time" (emphasis added).

Quinlivan focuses more on the ratio of policing officers to residents in historical experience:

"Peaceful populations require force ratios of somewhere between one and four police officers per thousand residents. The United States as a whole has about 2.3 sworn police officers per thousand residents. Larger cities tend to have higher ratios of police to population."

"Although numbers alone do not constitute a security strategy, successful strategies for population security and control have required force ratios either as large as or larger than 20 security personnel (troops and police combined) per thousand inhabitants. This figure is roughly 10 times the ratio required for simple policing of a tranquil population."

" The British are acknowledged as the most experienced practitioners of the stabilization art. To maintain stability in Northern Ireland, the British deployed a security force (consisting of British army troops plus police from the Royal Ulster Constabulary) at a ratio of about 20 per thousand inhabitants. This is about the same force ratio that the British deployed during the Malayan counterinsurgency in the middle of the 20th century.

More recently, successful multinational operations have used initial force ratios as large as the British examples or larger. In its initial entry into Bosnia in 1995, the NATO Implementation Force brought in multinational forces corresponding to more than 20 soldiers per thousand inhabitants. After five years, the successor Stabilization Force finally fell below 10 per thousand. Operations in Kosovo during 2000 showed the same pattern; the initial forces were sized at somewhat above 20 per thousand."

"The population of Iraq today is nearly 25 million. That population would require 500,000 foreign troops on the ground to meet a standard of 20 troops per thousand residents. This number is more than three times the number of foreign troops now deployed to Iraq.... For a sustainable stabilization force on a 24-month rotation cycle, the international community would need to draw on a troop base of 2.5 million troops. Such numbers are clearly not feasible and emphasize the need for the rapid creation of indigenous security forces even while foreign troops continue to be deployed."

Quinlivan's implication is that the U.S. should draw as much as practicable on an indigenous policing force, which would require a smaller footprint (instead of, i.e., the five nondeployed uniformed soldiers required for each soldier in theatre). Both authors' arguments conduice too towards bringing foreign troops onto the ground in Iraq - but under unified, U.S.-led command and control, and a clear commitment by the U.S.'s partners to establishing a democracy in Iraq and staying for as much time as that takes. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:59 PM by Patrick Belton  

A SAD DAY IN INDIA: Two powerful car bombs exploded today in Bombay, killing 46 and injuring over 115, with initial suspicion resting on the Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Students' Islamic Movement of India. This is the fifth bombing in Bombay since December 2002. See CNN, Times of India, BBC. Hawken Blog has thoughts and is paying an eye to developments.

According to the Times of India, the bombs exploded in the boots of two taxis, one near Mumbadevi temple in Bombay's jewellery district, and the other in a parking lot near the Gateway of India. The bombs occasioned immediate calls from the BJP and Shiv Sena for the resignation of the Congress-led state government. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:38 PM by Patrick Belton  

SCOTS GAELIC FOR VIETNAMESE SPEAKERS: and you think I'm joking.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:46 AM by Patrick Belton  

L'HOMME NIKITA: Writing in the pages of the LRB, Neal Ascherson gives us a remarkably well-rounded portrait of a remarkably complex man, Nikita Krushchev:

His personality was horribly deformed; his crimes were unforgivable. And yet his lust for the new was disarming. I will never forget a story Taubman tells about his London visit in 1956. What, he asked his Foreign Office escort, was that odd 'oo, oo!' noise coming from the back of the crowd? The diplomat explained that people were booing, an expression of disapproval. Khrushchev grew thoughtful. In the back of the car, he said experimentally to himself: 'Boo!' And then again: 'Boo!' He liked it. For the rest of the day, he went around exclaiming 'Boo!' to all kinds of puzzled people. He had learned something.

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# Posted 11:11 AM by Patrick Belton  

THREE NOT-SO-EASY PIECES: This Weekly Standard piece by Bob Kagan and William Kristol is worth noting. The authors begin by repeating - correctly - that "American ideals and American interests converge ... a more democratic Middle East will both improve the lives of long-suffering peoples and enhance America's national security." They then applaud statements to that effect by Condoleezza Rice and President Bush calling for a "generational commitment" to Iraq and the Middle East comparable to the U.S.'s commitment to Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. And in this, the security advisor and the president are also indeed applauseworthy: the intertwined task of promoting democracy and pursuing counterterror in the Middle East is as obviously central to U.S. security today as creating a secure, commercially prosperous free Europe was then.

Rather than basking solely in admiration for the president's bold, long-term vision, however, the authors are quick to measure current performance in Iraq up to its metric. They point to the successful performance of the U.S.'s mission at hand requiring two more divisions in Iraq - divisions which, thanks to the prior administration's short-sightedness, the nation simply does not have. But most interestingly, they then offer these two criticisms:

[Show me the money:] There has also been a stunning shortage of democracy assistance, at a time when, according to surveys taken by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Iraqis undergoing an explosion of political activity.... The price tag [for everything], which may be close to $60 billion, will provide fodder for opportunistic Democratic presidential hopefuls who are already complaining that money spent inIraqwould be better spent in theUnited States. But, again, the time to bite the bullet is now, not six months from now when Iraq turns to crisis and the American campaign season is fully underway

[And show me the diplomats:] Until recently, only a handful of State Department employees have been at work in Iraq. The State Department, we gather, has had a difficult time attracting volunteers to work in Iraq. This is understandable. But it is unacceptable. If the administration is serious about drawing an analogy with the early Cold War years, it should remember that the entire U.S.government oriented itself then to the new challenge. We need to do the same now. The administration must insist that the State Department pull its weight.

This paragraph, though, seems both their most stirring and their most correct:

Make no mistake: The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq. Indeed, there is more at stake in Iraq than even this vision of a better, safer Middle East. The future course of American foreign policy, American world leadership, and American security is at stake. Failure in Iraq would be a devastating blow to everything the United States hopes to accomplish, and must accomplish, in the decades ahead.

I could not agree more completely, and endorse everything that I have quoted, as far as the authors go. However - and although they are two writers I respect deeply on the subject - I think they might be too quick to reject out of hand the prospect of looking overseas for soldiers. The authors seem to think of the matter as a choice between two options: simply asking our dedicated soldiers to do more of what they have been doing so well, or giving the entire enterprise over to the internationals - in which case either Kofi and Jacques Chirac will be the ones to determine the pace of Iraq's democratization, or still worse, we may suffer "the possibly unfortunate effects of turning over the security of Iraqis to a patchwork of ill-prepared forces from elsewhere in the world."

Hmmm. Though I agree with Kagan and Kristol on their other points, this particular bit seems a bit of a false dichotomy. Without doubt, the army's current deployed force is woefully insufficient for the task (this in numbers alone, not training or personal devotion). But first of all, we can't simply send more U.S. troops over, because we don't have them. A friend in the Office of the Secretary of Defense told me over lunch last week that bringing additional divisions online - as are indisputedly needed at the moment - would take five to ten years, with emphasis more on the ten than the five. (An important lesson from U.S. history: don't throw your armies away. you might need that.) As far as extending the current pace of deployment - anyone considering this as a viable notion should flip back a few issues in one of my favorite magazines to a piece by another talented Kagan who writes on national security matters (this time Fred). Kagan begins by noting that of the 495,000 troops in the U.S. Army, 370,000 are deployed at the moment. And this already represents a substantial overdeployment relative to the normal requirement to have two units at home in "yellow" and "red" stages - training, tending to base duties, recovering psychologically from overseas service in a combat zone, and rescuing families from divorce - for every one unit serving overseas. At the army's current size, following this rule would allow us to sustain an indefinite deployment of three and two-thirds divisions between different theatres. At present, we have the equivalent of over five out, in Iraq alone, and they aren't enough. Equally seriously, massive overdeployment of the reserve component has ceased to make service in the Reserves any longer an attractive path for amateur patriotic professionals with families and civilian careers. Speaking personally, I know at least several OxBloggers were giving serious consideration to service in the Reserves after 9/11 - but at the current deployment pattern, the price would simply have been too high to balance with beginning families and civilian national security careers. The damage this may have inflicted on the reserve component may in fact be incalculable.

On the other hand, bringing in Allied forces does not mean surrendering U.S. command and control, or democracy promotion aims. Indeed, both would be strengthened by having more feet on the ground to further consolidate security in Iraq. This is not to underestimate interoperability problems with even NATO allies, or the caution that we should take in the drafting of a UN resolution to permit the entry into theatre of peacekeepers from other democracies, like India. And a careful balance will have to be struck, between giving countries sufficient operational control over their own forces to secure their deployment of those forces, while retaining a preeminent role for U.S. leadership in the theatre to make sure that democracy promotion and order is what in the end results. But such complexities must be dealt with, as it is the path which must be taken.

That bit excepted, I heartily endorse everything Kagan and Kristol have said. More, please. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:33 AM by David Adesnik  

RESPONSE TO MARSHALL, PART TWO: (Part one is here.) In early May, I confessed that contradictory coverage of the situation in Iraq made it hard to know whether the occupation was head for success or failure. Since then, my confusion in the face of conflicting press reports has been a running theme of my commentary on Iraq.

While confident that the pessimists consistently get the story wrong, I haven't been willing to say that things in Iraq are necessarily going right. The point? That even in the midst of this extended I-told-you-so, I'm not willing to say that Iraq will become known as an American success story anytime soon. But I am very sure that the pessimists Cassandran pronouncements reflect fundamental misperceptions rather than a balanced assessment of the evidence at hand.

Of course, OxBlog gets things wrong as well. I really didbelieve that American negligence led to the sack of Baghdad's National Museum. Then again, the pessimists didn't exactly get that one right...

It may also be worth noting that I have criticized the US occupation policy at times, even if I haven't pronounced it a failure. Examples of such criticism include my response to rumors of the US implementing a shoot-on-sight policy to deal with looters, my criticism of a US ceasefire with the Mujahedeen e-Khalq, and my blasting of ignorant comments made by Donald Rumsfeld. I admit that I'm an optimist, but I'm sure as hell no Republican cheerleader.

Moving on, OxBlog continued in late May to argue that American GIs were up to the task of befriending the Iraqi people and serving as the embodiment of the United States' democratic values. While there seem to be serious morale problems inside the American camp, I think it is fair to say that the soldiers have still done an admirable job of interacting with those around them. I can't think of any reports of serious misconduct, and even the NYT is getting all teary-eyed about the GIs reaching out to appreciative locals.

In mid-June, OxBlog was gratified to see both the NYT and the WaPo running stories on the restoration of order and basic services in Baghdad. While things are still not great on this front, it might be worth noting that criticism on this front tends to ignore just how far things have come since the end of the war.

Mid-June also marked the beginning of the quagmire debate that has raged on ever since Ba'athist insurgents began to pick-off American soldiers in Baghdad. OxBlog's comments at the time remain surprisingly valid two and a half months later:

I see no evidence of a self-sufficient resistance movement which can survive independent of Ba'athist ties. Nor does Tacitus provide any. Besides, the fact that almost all of the attacks on US soldiers have been in the former Ba'athist strongholds of Tikrit and Falluja demonstrates just how closely tied the attacks are to the fallen dictatorship.

Now here's some food thought: Remember the good old days when our big concern about postwar Iraq was the potential for Shi'ite resistance to the occupation?
Well, even back then OxBlog was pointing out that anti-American violence was coming from the Sunni community, not the Shi'ites. So? The bottom line is that only that small minority who benefited from Saddam's rule seems interested in resisting the occupation.

If resistance had spread outside the Baghdad triangle, I would gladly accept that this prediction was wrong. But it hasn't so I won't.

Early on in the quagmire debate, OxBlog also pointed to one clear empirical indicator of whether or not the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people were on the American or the Ba'athist side. That standard was to judge whether or not the people were protecting the 55 men on the Pentagon's most wanted list. My answer then was no and my answer now is still no. 38 of the 55 are dead or in prison because the Iraqi people are helping us find them.

To Be Continued...
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# Posted 1:23 AM by David Adesnik  

MARSHALL CALLS OUT OXBLOG: In response to the comments that Ralph Peters and I made after the bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad, Josh Marshall wrote that

There's a basic principle in scientific theory: an hypothesis, to be a real hypothesis, must be capable of disproof. In other words, for an hypothesis to be a valid basis for research, there must be some data which, if found to be true, would prove the hypothesis was false. Otherwise, there's no way to test it.

Now, foreign policy is no science. But some looser version of this principle must apply here as well. To be a policy, as opposed to a theological position, there must be some potential results that would show the policy was not working. The proponents of the policy should be able to say ahead of time that if this or that result happens, the policy has failed...

So I think it's time for the hawks to give us a few examples of events that would show that our policy was not working or at least facing setbacks. You know, just so we can put down some benchmarks, so we can know what we're working with...

If Josh Marshall had been paying closer attention to my constant stream of writing on the occupation of Iraq, he would know that I have held to a single, observable standard for measuring the success or failure of the occupation. Instead of spending his time in the OxBlog archives, Josh chose to direct a small-minded accusation at my work: that it is a product of ideological blindness.

Given that caustic condescension is one of Mr. Marshall's trademarks, I'm not going to take his comments personally (even though I may hit back once in a while.) In fact, since I know that Josh meant well, I will do his homework for him and evaluate the evidence at hand according to my standard for measuring success and failure in Iraq.

In short, I want to know one thing about Iraq: Who is winning its hearts and minds? Strictly speaking, one cannot provide a definitive answer to such a question. Thus, one has to search for proximate indicators from which one can infer a defensible answer. In the following paragraphs, I focus in greater detail on the indicators I have chosen and evaluate the degree to which their reliability has held up over time.

In the opening days of the occupation, I spent a good amount of time asking what standard foreign observers should rely on during the course of the occupation to measure its success. In Foreign Policy, a pair of top-flight scholars argued that the struggle for women's rights would become the decisive front in the democratization process. I disagreed.

In fact, the standard I chose -- that of hearts and minds -- reflected a continuation of my prior interest in the Arab world's reaction to the invasion of Iraq. Most experts predicted a widespread backlash against American imperialism throughout the Arab world.

However, OxBlog insisted firmly and explicitly that the popular reaction in the Arab world would amount to nothing more than scattered and short-lived protests. Exactly as Josh Marshall would've wanted, this site laid out explicit criteria for what sort of evidence would confirm its interpretation. As a result, OxBlog took home all the bragging rights when its prediction turned out to be right.

Anyhow, the real point here is that OxBlog chose the hearts-and-minds standard because of my initial conclusion that the United States' reservoir of good will on the Arab street was far greater than most talking heads cared to believe. While critics mocked the phrase "liberation" during the opening weeks of the war, those who had faith in Iraq resentment of Saddam Hussein ultimately had the final say on the matter. (For those keeping score, Josh Marshall was on the losing side of that one, too.)

During the second week of the occupation, I had an extended discussion with Kevin Drum about whether or not the United States needed to enhance the legitimacy of the occupation by granting a leadership role to the UN. As I saw it, Iraqis wouldn't care about whether the US or the UN were in charge, but rather about whether the US lived up to its promise of letting Iraqi citizens have a taste of the freedom and prosperity that Saddam denied them. Given that opposition to the US occupation consists of Ba'ath loyalists and migrant Islamists, I think it's fair to say that I laid out a clear standard for judging this one and that the evidence came down on my side.

Also during the second week I reviewed the state of homefront support for the United States' occupation policy. While American citizens haven't shown much enthusiasm for the occupation, they haven't come across as resentful either. So let's call this one a tie and take a rain check.

In week three, the first signs of Shi'ite unrest led pundits to speculate that the euphoria of liberation had worn off and that the US would not be welcome in Iraq for long. Ever the dissident, OxBlog responded that

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.

Given that Sunnis have been responsible for almost every attack on US forces since the occupation began, I think it's fair to say: Score for one for OxBlog. (So now it's three-zip. But who's counting?)

Week four was marred by a disturbing event that led some critics to assert that American soldiers were too violent to win over Iraqi hearts and minds. The event in question was the death of Fallujah-based protesters at the hands of American G.I.s. While dismayed, OxBlog insisted that "peaceful co-existence is possible with all those except the remaining partisans of Saddam." Make that four-zip.

To Be Continued...
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# Posted 7:15 PM by David Adesnik  

A LESS-TOLD STORY: Click here for an interesting article about CIA operations in Iraq. It's from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and was written by an old friend of mine who is well on the road to establishing himself as a foreign correspondent. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion