# Posted 11:36 PM by David Adesnik  

DEMOCRATIC TRIUMPH OR WASTE OF PAPER? It looks like Iraq will have an interim constitution by tomorrow in spite of Friday's sudden cancellation of the signing ceremony. One of NRO's guest authors thinks that the document just papers over more profound conflicts. For example:

One need look no further than the controversy over December 2003's IGC decree 137 which introduced sharia (Islamic religious law) in the place of secular family law to see how poorly democratic values are entrenched. Passed at a time when key secular members of the IGC were out of the country, and the chairman of the IGC was a Shia Islamist, decree 137 was denounced by the Kurds, women's groups, and some secular parties as undemocratic and discriminatory. Ambassador Bremer refused to sign decree 137, which meant that it could not be implemented.

Although decree 137 never had any force, the IGC bowed to pressure from women's groups in particular and symbolically repealed the decree on February 27, 2004. The reaction of some of the Shia Arab members of the IGC to the February 27, 2004 vote was troubling and revealing. Unhappy at losing the vote on decree 137, eight Shia members of the IGC walked out of the session when women's groups in the room cheered and shouted their pleasure at the vote. The eight Shia members did not just accept their defeat with ill grace. They then attempted to nullify their defeat through the interim constitution negotiations, a bid to put Islam on the statute books by every route available. The Shia Islamists and their allies are likely to continue with these tactics and can be expected to seek to undermine the current compromise text.

From a different perspective, this might just be a story of democracy at work. After all, there were no violent protests, no denunciations of the democratic system as anathema to Islam. Just hardball politics of the kind you see in any modern state. Of course, the Shi'ites can afford to be patient because they expect to dominate the new Iraq. But calculated or not, that kind of restraint on the part of a brutally repressed and suddenly liberated people suggests a certain faith in the democratic process. (Thanks to BM for the link.)
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# Posted 11:16 PM by David Adesnik  

FILM CLASSICS -- THE READERS RESPOND: Some very interesting comments have arrived in respose to my recent film reviews. Commenting on my review of M*A*SH, EJB says:

Take it from somebody who grew up with the "military life," specifically the United States Army Medical Corps. You don't have a clue, son. There is not and has never been a more dedicated, disciplined, and dynamic enterprise on the face of the planet...Not that we don't enjoy the humor ourselves, but especially after years of TV saturation, the leftist portrayal of "military life" was and is now an extreme disservice to our country and our people.

There is a difference between theater and reality. Your post reveals you don't know one from the other, just like that other Rhodes scholar who "loathed the military."

EJB's comments are pointed but fair. While I meant no offense, my review of M*A*S*H never challenged the film's portrayal of the Army Medical Corps. In retrospect, I should've made it clear that I was approaching M*A*S*H as a suggestive satire about military life, not an actual account of any specific soldiers or units. One reader who speaks to that point is naval officer CL, who writes:

Re: Your point about the US military juggernaut -

I was aboard one of our carriers in the Gulf last spring, and after another planning meeting broke up "requiring better problem definition," [I] remarked that very thing to one of our Royal Navy liaison officers.

I said to him that it can certainly look like a well oiled machine from the outside looking in. From the inside looking out it sometimes resembles a lunatic asylum, with all the inmates rushing around banging their heads on the walls. Through some sort of mysterious brownian movement, at some point all the lunatics bang their head on the same wall, and that one gives way into another room. Where the process repeats, and progress is marked.

The brownian movement metaphor seemed particularly apt to me. Think of the military as an observable, physical object, subject to Newtonian physics. You can gather simultaneous data on position and velocity, and so predict where it will end up.

At the unit level, the physics are closer to sub-atomic levels. It's quantum mechanics. The closer you are to determining position, the further you get from velocity, and vice-versa. One is forced to speak in terms of probabilities.

How does "it all come out fine in the end?" To quote from the movie Shakespeare in Love, "It's a mystery."

I fully agree. Whether we're talking about the US military, the US government or major corporations such as Microsoft and Ford, there is something inexplicable about their ability to function. And yet they do.

Moving on to the cultural side of things, NC remarks that

I recently rewatched MASH myself. What I found interesting was the initial hostility of Hawkeye and Trapper John when they first meet Frank Burns. They come into the tent where Frank is teaching [Korean teenager O-Jon] English [by using] the Bible. This leads to much mockery and the gift of a girlie mag to the kid, continuing as Frank kneels to pray at the foot of his cot, and sometime later [more] mockery of his refusal of a martini. This is all before Frank shows himself as the classic military martinet, perhaps earning the abuse that he suffers. Maybe as I've aged I have become more conservative (yet still agnostic, long haired, etc...) , or just sensitive, but the prejudice against Frank was in a sense shocking.

I fully agree. Most anti-authority films (think Animal House) protect the moral integrity of their protagonists by having the 'bad guys' break the rules first. But there's no mistaking what happens in M*A*S*H. Hawkeye is relentlessly cruel toward Frank Burns and Nurse O'Houlihan.

Perhaps the director wanted it to be that way, or perhaps the novel on which the film is based emphasizes that Hawkeye is anything but a Boy Scout. Either way, if the portrayal of Hawkeye's cruetly was intentional, I think it was a good decision from an artistic perspective. It shows that Hawkeye's behavior is a reflection of his character, not a sudden response to minor provocations by Burns or O'Houlihan.

It also adds sophistication, both moral and analytical, to the anti-authority message of the film. Hawkeye is rebelling against a system, not against one or two bad officers. Moreover, Hawkeye's cruetly suggests that the irrationality of the system may provoke the response it does because it is dealing with humans and not with angels. Of course, the irrationality of the system reflects the fact that it is composed of humans and not of angels.

Now, going back a bit further in time, there have also been some interesting comments made about Blackboard Jungle and To Sir, With Love. WS writes that

I had the pleasure of meeting Ron Clark, a real "To Sir With Love" teacher, last week at my corporate conference, where he was the featured speaker. His story is amazing and he is an terrific speaker. After falling in to teaching in his home town in rural North Carolina, Ron set out to teach in Harlem. He was the only white person in the school and he was given the very worst class. The transformation which took place, and he tells his story very well, was nothing short of fantastic. By the end of the school year he got nearly one-third of his class of 37 into the best junior high in the city. A school which only took 30 kids total by application and interview each year. His secret was teaching respect and civility as a foundation. Check out his website and his book. If you get a chance to hear him speak you won't be disappointed.

No doubt about that. Even those teachers who succeed in more favorable circumstances need tremendous strength of character and often have astounding stories to tell. Nonetheless, I think it is often hard to express exactly how one goes about transforming sullen and dejected students into curious and thoughtful ones. As I mentioned before, both Blackboard and To Sir find it hard to express the cause of that transformation. If Clark can put it into words, he is most assuredly an impressive speaker. Finally, DS writes that

I attended Bronx public schools starting in 1948, so I can report on actual conditions then. Blackboard Jungle was a best selling book before it was a movie. The author Evan Hunter (Ed McBain) has written a gazillion books, mostly mysteries, and remains productive today.

Back when Blackboard Jungle was written, some inner city high schools did indeed have the type of crime problems portrayed in the book. It was also the case that much of the general public was not aware of these problems, so the book was quite shocking. The movie was less shocking, as I recall, since the book had already made its point.

It is striking that after forty years of increased spending and increased attention from state and federal governmental entities, the problems of inner city schools have gotten a lot worse.

If only we knew how to fix them...

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# Posted 11:37 AM by Patrick Belton  

I DON'T GET IT. Is he joking or something? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

MORE ON GREEK ELECTIONS: A friend of ours in Greece writes to add his analysis of the elections taking place there today:

The Olympics are thought of as apolitical, really, and not something to get worked up about. Indeed a recent poll has show an alarming apathy towards them amongst the public. Also, I wouldn't say ND are 'edging ahead'. I have been here in Greece for a couple of years now. Last summer ND led PASOK by about 5 points. Since then, one of the two main issues has reared is ugly head: that was union power. I think it was September when the Govt capitulated to one of the major civil service unions, seemingly because it was scared of this 5% gap widening. This opened the floodgates, and it was 'beer and sandwiches' all round. Teachers, Lecturers, Doctor, Taxi drivers, and, yes, even prostitutes (here everything is unionised!) went on strike. I was worried that we were in for a winter of discontent, but somehow they managed to pay them off or stand them down. The damage was done, however, and a weakened government has just been limping along for a couple of months. The overall economy has moderate growth but is too resistent to structural change. Nothing for either party to really shout about. The other main factor is just the feeling that it is time for a change, that the present lot have become (too) corrupt and indifferent to their needs. Evidence for this is that when PASOK announced the PM would be retiring to let his foreign minister contest the election, their ratings jumped 5 points to make it 3 behind. The new guy, Papandreou, is no more popular a polician than the old one, Simitis, but just the change did them a lot good (but not good enough, unless the polls are wrong).

So, in summary, I'd say government weakness, corruption and staleness are what weigh on people's minds, and whether Papandreou can breathe new life into the Socialist party, or whether (possibly painful) economic and social structural reform by Karamanlis is desired.

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# Posted 8:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

GREECE VOTES TODAY: Turnout is expected to be high.

The main choice is between two political dynasties that have dominated modern political life.

On the right is New Democracy conservative leader Costas Karamanlis, nephew of a former prime minister who led Greece out of military dictatorship.

On the left, is Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) leader George Papandreou, grandson and son of former prime ministers, who is bidding to win the fourth consecutive election for the socialists since 1993.

Conservatives are edging ahead in what is anticipated to be a highly close result, and in which bloated bureaucracy and the country's embarrassing abysmally stalled preparations for August's Olympic games have become the most pivotal issues. Economist reviews the issues and political dynamics, while Guardian, scaremongering, fixates on a marginal far-right parliamentary candidate who has been expelled from the conservative coalition. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:29 PM by Patrick Belton  

AND HAPPY HOLI DAY, lest I forget! The first full moon of the Hindi month of Phagan marks Holi, an awfully nice festival which involves lots of color, and a fellow named Kamdev-the Love-god. What else could you want?

Okay, maybe a picture of Ganesh. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:01 PM by Patrick Belton  

CHINA TO INCREASE MILITARY SPENDING MARKEDLY: See BBC. Analysts suggest that the decision was taken principally to intimidate the Taiwanese electorate, facing a largely symbolic referendum calling on China to end its military intimidation of the island; students of the Chinese military also further suggest that the poorly paid, trained, and equipped People's Liberation Army will require years and substantial funding to arrive at being a modern fighting force. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:24 AM by Patrick Belton  

A VERY HAPPY PURIM to all of our readers! Purim is a marvellous holiday in which yids and goys alike the world over can join hands in celebrating the fact that many Jewish women are, in fact, quite hot. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

FROM BBC: Extra Police Target 'Ned' Culture. Gee, even though democracy promotion has its opponents, we never knew NED was that controversial... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:08 PM by David Adesnik  

SYNONYM WATCH: At the risk of offending some very dangerous people, I'd like to remind Patrick that "jarhead" is also a synonym for "Marine". But I guess I don't really have much to worry about. The Marines can only come and get me if the Navy agrees to ferry them to my door. I may be a lifelong civilian, but I root for Army. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:20 PM by Patrick Belton  

IRAN UPDATE ON WINDS OF CHANGE: I've always liked Winds of Change since its debut, which I've always considered one of the best blogs focusing principally on the international affairs beat. In fact, we like it so much, that we're heading over there every Friday to pitch in with their democracy update. Our first piece is up there now, and is on Iran after the elections. Y'all come back, now! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

NOTHING TO DO IN CHICAGO OVER THE WEEKENDS? So, come hang out with us! Our foreign policy society's Chicago chapter is meeting this Sunday evening. So don't eat your bratwurst alone this weekend - come join our chapter presidents, the Crescat authors, Sunday at 7 at the Cosi at 116 S. Michigan. (They'll be talking about foreign aid and the Millennium Challenge Account, by the way.)

In fact, you can hang out with all your favorite bloggers - our LA chapter is getting off the ground under the inspired leadership of Robert Tagorda, and our newest member Pejman nobly emits the admirable sentiment "I regret that I only have one blog to give for my country." So drop us a note, and come hang out with the cool kids! (Okay, maybe not all the cool kids yet - we're still working on CalPundit....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:01 AM by Patrick Belton  

MEA CULPA: It is, after all, a Friday in Lent. So let me apologize to one and all for referring to Marines as soldiers in my last Haiti updater. As everyone knows, the only appropriate synonyms for Marines are, first, Marines; second, riflemen (because every Marine is a rifleman); and under duress, "personnel," "America's finest," and "studs."

Okay, I wrote it, will you let me go now? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:57 AM by Patrick Belton  

FEELING DEPRESSED? Then go read about the end of the universe. It might cheer you up. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:59 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG FILM CLASSICS -- M*A*S*H: Born in 1977, I have some vague memories of M*A*S*H as a television show that everyone seemed to love but which I didn't understand. Especially that guy who was always wearing women's clothes. This past weekend, I finally had the chance to see the movie that started it all.

I didn't watch the film with any particular expectations in mind, since the few episodes of M*A*S*H that I saw on television left no impression on me. However, I did expect the film to be somehow anti-army or anti-war. It's important to keep in mind that one can be critical of the army without being critical of the war, or vice versa. A book like Catch-22 can expose the insanity of military life without suggesting that the US shouldn't have been fighting in Europe. If anything, the unquestionable necessity of the Second World War adds an important dimension to the tragedy of Catch-22, since the confusion and injustice that Heller portrays are part and parcel of a just cause.

That said, M*A*S*H came across as apolitical. It doesn't dwell on the human cost of war. The main characters are surgeons in a military hospital, but they never philosophize about the terrible human cost of war. The patients themselves have nothing to say, literally. There are no scenes of convalescing soldiers, only bodies under white sheets on the operating table. Hawkeye and Trapper John have no qualms about going to play golf in Japan. For them, being a military surgeon is just a job they never asked for.

The target of the film's satire is the hypocrisy and bureaucracy of military life. The villians of the camp are the bible-reading major and the uptight head nurse. The great joy of the film is to show how those who have a healthy disrespect for the mindless regimentation of military life can use the army's own rules against it. In a sense, the fact that the film takes place in a military hospital in Korea is almost irrelevant. It is simply a film about defying authority, wherever it may be found.

Perhaps this is not how the film came across in 1970. In the midst of the Vietnam war, it may not have been necessary to show the bodies or talk about the war in order to make a political comment. Simply ridiculing the army may have been enough. In that context, the incompetence portrayed in the film may have suggested that the irrationality of military life was responsible for our failure in Vietnam.

But in 2004, that message doesn't come across. Today, the American military is a high-tech juggernaut. At least to those of us on the outside. I have a friend in the service whose view of military life roughly corresponds to the one in M*A*S*H. All I ever hear from the captain is how the radios never work and the clowns in charge have no idea what they're doing. And yet somehow, it all comes out fine in the end.

I think the lesson here is that M*A*S*H and Catch-22 and other works in that genre remind of the inevitable absurdity of military life. Even in the most efficient army on earth, there is no escape from bureaucracy and confusion. And humor. God only knows what it was like to serve on the Iraqi side. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:25 AM by David Adesnik  

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR: "He has issues with his wife, and he has issues with his kids, financial issues, you know, the kids aren't listening, the kids aren't doing this and that." -- Comment made on Canadian television by a former friend of Osama bin Laden. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:42 PM by David Adesnik  

GAME OVER: Come on, Josh. It's time to admit it. You and me and Patrick are all just lackeys of the extreme center. We are on the payroll of an independent voters' PAC that rejects all principles on principle. Our only purpose in life is to prevent the emergence of coherent ideologies. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:01 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE WASHINGTON POST has a quite good piece this morning on Uzbekistan's Karimov and the ambiguities of a U.S. alliance with a chronic human rights violator. Other with-your-coffee op-ed pieces today: the Economist on Iraq and the case for gay marriage, TNR on feminism in China and non-proliferation, and CS Monitor on criminalization under international law of WMD proliferation; and, in the blogosphere, Andrew's recollection of Allistair Cooke's brilliant career as a radiowave essayist, Eugene's consideration of whether Clinton could constitutionally serve as VP, Dan's recommendation of two books defending free trade, Winds of War's military analysis of the Haiti operation, Kevin's obituary for the primary season and just criticism of the policy response to the awwful water I wuz drinkin in Washington, Robert on rumors regarding replacing Cheney (but not with Clinton) and further counterarguments to Huntington's unworthy and silly piece (see also Matt), and the Crescat authors take up the question of implications of (some form of) world citizenship for foreign aid.

Want cream and sugar with that? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

SETTING UP A WEBSITE? Then for heaven's sake, don't go to www.your-site.com to host it.

This company, whose implicit motto seems to be "you get what you pay for with our cheap service," just lost all of our foreignpolicysociety.org email that hadn't been downloaded, and had the cajones to send around this non-unduly-apologetic email:

What this means for you is that any email that was on the server prior to today at 1pm EST and has not been retrieved has been lost and is non-recoverable. Any emails that have been sent to an account after 1pm that we host will be either returned to the sender or the messages will go into the queue of the sending server and be set to retry to deliver the message for up to 5 days. Redelivery attempts are the most common response to this sort of problem. We regret that this has happened and that the redundancy of the mail system did not work as intended.
....

[The kicker:] Thank you for choosing Your-Site. Please tell your friends and business associates about us. Should you refer a new customer to us, we'll credit your account for one free month!

There - now, as you've asked, I've told my friends and business associates about you. Anything else, while I'm at it? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:06 AM by David Adesnik  

KERRY AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, PART II: In the previous post I made some general points about the speech on national security that Kerry delivered last Friday. In this post I'd like to take a closer look at the text. No, that is not an indirect way of saying I am going to give Kerry a fisking. It means I think that the speech is good enough to look at in detail. The first substantive point in the speech begins with Kerry's observation that

As we speak, night has settled on the mountains of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. If Osama bin Laden is sleeping, it is the restless slumber of someone who knows his days are numbered. I don’t know if the latest reports – saying that he is surrounded – are true or not. We’ve heard this news before.

We had him in our grasp more than two years ago at Tora Bora but George Bush held U.S. forces back and instead, called on Afghan warlords with no loyalty to our cause to finish the job. We all hope the outcome will be different this time and we all know America cannot rest until Osama bin Laden is captured or killed.

What Kerry is saying is that whereas George Bush was afraid to sacrifice American lives in order to capture Osama bin Laden, John Kerry has the authority to order such a sacrifice because of his record as a war hero. Leaving aside the specifics of Tora Bora, this passage shows why Kerry's war record isn't just a biographical artifact. It is a personal trait that will change the way he makes critical decisions. After all, imagine Bill Clinton saying that he would send American soldiers' to their deaths in the same situation where George Bush wouldn't. No one would believe it. And when Clinton got into office, he had to tread lightly on the generals' turf. But Kerry would be in a much better position to handle them.

Next, Kerry observes that

This war isn’t just a manhunt – a checklist of names from a deck of cards. In it, we do not face just one man or one terrorist group. We face a global jihadist movement of many groups, from different sources, with separate agendas, but all committed to assaulting the United States and free and open societies around the globe.

As CIA Director George Tenet recently testified: “They are not all creatures of bin Laden, and so their fate is not tied to his. They have autonomous leadership, they pick their own targets, they plan their own attacks.”

At the core of this conflict is a fundamental struggle of ideas. Of democracy and tolerance against those who would use any means and attack any target to impose their narrow views.

The War on Terror is not a clash of civilizations. It is a clash of civilization against chaos; of the best hopes of humanity against dogmatic fears of progress and the future.

Identifying "jihadism" as our opponent is a significant step. It entails the affirmation that this is a war of ideas, because one can stop terror with airport security, but one can only stop suicide bombers by destroying the ideology that animates them. Of course, there is a trade off here. By adopting language similar to that of George Bush, Kerry admits that the President has been right about something very important. Kerry will have to decide for or against such trade-offs on a lot of security related issues. He will have to calculate how much he needs to concede in order to show that he is "serious" about security without giving away so much that he presents no alternative to Bush. Apparently, Kerry's strategy for transcending this dilemma is to try and attack Bush from the right. Hence his statement that

I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the War on Terror; I believe he’s done too little.

Where he’s acted, his doctrine of unilateral preemption has driven away our allies and cost us the support of other nations. Iraq is in disarray, with American troops still bogged down in a deadly guerrilla war with no exit in sight. In Afghanistan, the area outside Kabul is sliding back into the hands of a resurgent Taliban and emboldened warlords...

The President’s budget for the National Endowment for Democracy’s efforts around the world, including the entire Islamic world, is less than three percent of what this Administration gives Halliburton – hardly a way to win the contest of ideas.

I'm somewhat surprised that Kerry is using quagmire language, e.g. "bogged down" to describe the situation in Iraq. With both guerrilla attacks and American casualties falling significantly, it seems strange to say that victory is not in sight. To be sure, the insurgents' murder of scores of Iraqis is horrific. But it is American casualty figures that matter to the electorate. As for NED and Halliburton, the good news coming out of the oil fields suggests Kerry might want to be more careful here as well. Like them or not, Cheney's boys are doing their country a great service and an expensive one. Although highly speculative, my sense is that Kerry hasn't been watching Iraq carefully enough to sense that the media's pessimism may not be worth investing in. Turning from Iraq to Al Qaeda, Kerry argues that

Working with other countries in the War on Terror is something we do for our sake – not theirs. We can’t wipe out terrorist cells in places like Sweden, Canada, Spain, the Philippines, or Italy just by dropping in Green Berets.

It was local law enforcement working with our intelligence services which caught Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramsi Bin al Shibh in Pakistan and the murderer known as Hambali in Thailand. Joining with local police forces didn’t mean serving these terrorists with legal papers; it meant throwing them behind bars. None of the progress we have made would have been possible without cooperation – and much more would be possible if we had a President who didn’t alienate long-time friends and fuel anti-American anger around the world.

I don't get it. How can Kerry attack Bush for his failure to cooperate with foreign intelligence services while citing as evidence our successful capture of Shaikh Mohammed, Bin al Shibh and Hambali? Moreover, law enforcement cooperation with our European allies doesn't seem to have suffered despite the conflict at the United Nations. As such, Kerry returns to stronger ground with his accusation that our

Troops are going into harm’s way without the weapons and equipment they depend on to do their jobs safely. National Guard helicopters are flying missions in dangerous territory without the best available ground-fire protection systems. Un-armored Humvees are falling victim to road-side bombs and small-arms fire.

And families across America have had to collect funds from their neighbors to buy body armor for their loved ones in uniform because George Bush failed to provide it.

Again, this is the kind of accusation that Kerry can only level because of his war record. While I vaguely recall hearing that the body armor situation had been dealt with, this sort of oversight on Bush's part is exactly what Kerry is in a position to take advantage of. Another oversight relates to non-proliferation. According to Kerry,

Today, parts of Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal are easy prey for those offering cash to scientists and security forces who too often are under-employed and under-paid. If I am President, I will expand the Nunn/Lugar program to buy up and destroy the loose nuclear materials of the former Soviet Union and to ensure that all of Russia’s nuclear weapons and materials are out of the reach of terrorists and off the black market.

I strongly support Nunn-Lugar, but if I were Kerry, I'd focus a lot more on Pakistan. After all, here is a supposed all in the war on terror who has been selling nuclear secrets to our most dangerous enemies. Bush said that other nations would have to be with us or against us. Yet Pakistan is allowed to play both sides. There are reasons for treating Pakistan differently, some of them good. But as far as campaign logic goes, the situation in Pakistan seems like a perfect demonstration of how Bush's short-sightedness is undermining American security. The final subject that Kerry tackles is homeland security. He wants more firefighters and police. He says that

We need to provide public health labs with the basic expertise they need but now lack to respond to chemical or biological attack. We need new safeguards for our chemical and nuclear facilities.

And our ports – like the Port of Los Angeles – need new technology to screen the 95 percent of containers that now enter this country without any inspection at all. And we should accelerate the action plans agreed to in US-Canada and US-Mexico “smart border” accords while implementing new security measures for cross border bridges. President Bush says we can’t afford to fund homeland security. I say we can’t afford not to.

I'm not in a good position to comment on these recommendations since I have given in to my preoccupation with "foreign" policy and decided not to focus on the painstaking details of securing the homefront. By the same token, the media also seems to have lost interest in the story. But my gut instinct is that we've gotten lucky since 9/11. Who would've guessed there wouldn't be even one more attack on America soil (assuming the anthax letters were homegrown)? Not I. So perhaps Kerry should play this one up a little more. It seems tailor made for Kerry's interest in showing that he is far more serious Bush about winning the war on terror.

All in all, I think that Kerry gave a strong speech albeit a mild one. I have seen him breathe a lot more fire, especially when Howard Dean is involved. But perhaps the time has not yet come for that. Right now, Kerry may want to build a foundation of trust before going on offense. After all, the world is an uncertain place and you never what opportunity fate might throw his way.
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# Posted 11:44 PM by David Adesnik  

KERRY AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF: It seems that Kevin Drum is the only one talking about the speech on national security that Kerry gave last Friday at UCLA. While Kerry's decisive victory over Edwards is obviously the bigger story, I hope that this speech gets some more attention, because I think it says a lot about how the national security issue will play out over the next six months.

Now, Kevin hits the nail on the head when identifies Kerry's proposal to add 40,000 soldiers to the US military as the headline news in Kerry's speech. As Kevin points out, Bush can't match the proposal without vindicating those critics who insist that we simply don't have enough boots on the ground in Iraq. Thus, Kerry now has a major issue on which he can credibly present himself as more hawkish than Bush.

The subheadline of Kerry's speech is his insistence that the United States has a "solemn obligation" to finish the job in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the Senator explains,

Whatever we thought of the Bush Administration's decisions and mistakes -- especially in Iraq -- we now have a solemn obligation to complete the mission, in that country and in Afghanistan. Iraq is now a major magnet and center for terror. Our forces in Iraq are paying the price everyday.

And our safety at home may someday soon be endangered as Iraq becomes a training ground for the next generation of terrorists.

Kerry's vague comments about the administration's "decision and mistakes" indicate that he isn't confident enough to directly attack the administration for its conduct of a war that Kerry himself voted to authorize. In fact, I was generally suprised by the restraint Kerry showed in criticizing the President's record on foreign policy. Perhaps it is not a matter of choice. On a lot of security issues, it is all but impossible for Kerry to attack the President without falling into the stereotype of a Massachusetts liberal. In contrast, Kerry had no qualms about using far more punishing language to attack Howard Dean's foreign policy in December than he is using to attack Bush's now. While Josh Marshall may love Kerry for being a fighter, it already seems that he is giving ground on the most important issue in the election.

The one point Kerry tries to hammer on relentlessly is Bush's disrespect for our allies. Yet when Kerry says that "As President, [he] will not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake," he is again giving away the middle ground to Bush. Yes, one can argue that since there were no WMD in Iraq Bush was wrong to go to war without the Security Council. But Kerry can't say that without raising the question of why he voted for the war in the Senate.

Getting back to Kerry's talk of a "solemn obligation" in Iraq, I think it is important to point out that Kerry portrays the situation in Iraq as nothing more than a burden for the United States. As he strongly implies, the situation we now face in Iraq is a product of President Bush's "decisions and mistakes". In contrast, President Bush tends to portray the situation in Iraq as being a historic opportunity as well as a heavy responsibility. It marks the beginning of the democratic transformation of the Middle East. Such language, however, is entirely absent from Kerry's speech. To some degree, that is just partisan politics. Bush wants to spin the occupation as a historic event while Kerry wants to use it against the President. Now that Bush has unveiled his Greater Middle East Initiative, Kerry doesn't want to validate it by talking about the importance of democracy promotion. Yet if the promoting democracy weren't so important, why do we have a solemn obligation to ensure its success in Iraq? While this kind of subtle coloration of Kerry's words probably won't matter to much of the electorate, it does indicate to me that President Bush may have a better instinctive grasp than John Kerry does of what's at stake in Iraq.

On a similar note, I have to admit that I am disturbed by Kerry's statement that

It is time to return to the United Nations and return America to the community of nations to share both authority and responsibility in Iraq, and take the target off the back of our troops...

We must offer the UN the lead role in assisting Iraq with the development of new political institutions.

Does Kerry really believe that any other nation will provide enough troops to take American soldiers out of the line of fire? The best we can hope for is a token force from France and Germany that will add some legitimacy to the occupation. Then again, no one in Iraq seems to be complaining that the occupation is too American. After all, the insurgents even kill UN employees. What I want to know is, when would Kerry offer the UN "the lead role" -- not a lead role, but the lead role -- in the definition of Iraq's political future? Before or after it puts enough blue helmets on the ground to give our troops a rest? While the American public respects the UN, I don't think that giving it a quid without getting a pro quo is likely to create the impression that Kerry is serious about national security.

There is no question that Kerry's speech was a good one. If you take a closer look, its strengths become more apparent. But there are still strong indications of how divided Kerry is about whether to attack Bush's foreign policy from the left or from the right. Perhaps the answer is both. Yet by trying to have it all, Kerry may only reinforce the notion that he doesn't have a real position on the issue.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:48 PM by Patrick Belton  

THE EMBATTLED CHAIRMAN OF SHELL, Sir Philip Watts, has resigned in the wake of revelations that Shell had overestimated considerably its reserves, and on the heels of widespread criticism from investors for (among other things) not having been on the conference call announcing the 20% decrease in its proven reserves. Along with Sir Philip, oil and gas head Walter van de Vijver (once considered Watts's likely successor) was also removed by the boards. Vice chair Jeroen van der Veer, who is known principally for his fondness for golf, will take over as the firm's head. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:59 AM by Daniel  

MORE VEEPSTAKES. Jonathan Alter offers his thoughts. But he forgot to include one important candidate. Richardson seems like a good choice: the Latino factor, and the Mountain West will be up for grabs to a greater extent than the South. Plus, his foreign policy credentials can't hurt.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

GOOD NEWS FOR COFFEE DRINKERS: And this courtesy of the always enjoyable Adrianne at Listen, My Children:

Compared to non-coffee drinkers, men who drank more than six eight-ounce cups of caffeinated coffee per day lowered their risk of type 2 diabetes by about half, and women reduced their risk by nearly 30 per cent, according to the study in Tuesday's issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. Nevertheless, experts said more research is needed to establish whether it really is the coffee or something else about coffee drinkers that protects them.

"The evidence is quite strong that regular coffee is protective against diabetes," said one of the researchers, Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health. "The question is whether we should recommend coffee consumption as a strategy. I don't think we're there yet."

Type 2 diabetes, formerly called adult-onset diabetes, typically shows up in middle-aged people. The disease is on the rise and is striking more and more young people as Americans become fatter and less active.
...
[And here's the kicker!...] There was a more modest effect among decaf drinkers: a 25 per cent risk reduction for men and 15 per cent for women. There was no statistically significant link between diabetes and tea.

So drink coffee, it's good for you! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:47 AM by Patrick Belton  

NEW STUDY reveals OxBlog to have only six readers - the three of us, and our moms. The other 16,000 hits a day consist of Josh, David, and me hitting "reload" compulsively throughout the afternoon.

A warm welcome to all of our new readers! We hope you enjoy what you find here, and come back to join us often! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

POLITICAL TRENDS IN WEST BANK AND JORDAN: For those of our readers who are in Oxford, tonight at 8 pm our good friend historian Mezna Qato will be discussing contemporary political trends in the West Bank and Jordan, where she's just returned from field research. The event will be in St Antony's, in the New Room of the Hilda Besse building, at 8 pm, and is part of our foreign policy society's events series. Whether or not you're able to make it, you might want to look at this essay on contemporary Palestinian political trends, which Mezna recommends. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:24 AM by Patrick Belton  

IN THE WAKE OF YESTERDAY'S TERROR ATTACKS, two pieces on the changing nature and threat of Al Qaeda, in the Washington Post and in the Christian Science Monitor. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE ECONOMIST reviews events in Haiti. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

DO YOU SEEK HAPPY AND LONG LIFE, and to live, with the psalmist, to see the children of your children and (if you do really well...) peace upon Jerusalem? If so, then you should read my mother-in-law's piece:

Ninety percent of the most cheerful quarter of the nuns [as determined by psychologists coding diary-style essays the aforementioned nuns wrote in 1932] turned out to be alive at age 85 compared to only 34 percent of the least cheerful quarter.

...the nuns in this study lived very similar lives.  They ate the same kind of food. They didn't smoke or drink or use drugs or get sexually transmitted diseases [thanks, Mom].  They didn't have husbands or children. They had the same access to good medical care. 

And if instead you want a different (and more Protestant) perspective, go to Kierkegaard: "Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate." Either/Or, vol. 1, sct. 1 (1843, trans. 1987). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:30 AM by Patrick Belton  

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS releases shortlist of candidates for this year's foreign policy book prize. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:21 PM by David Adesnik  

IRAQI TIME BOMB: Matt Yglesias thinks that Iraq's interim constitution is a

Recipe for civil war down the road, especially as crucial issues like the borders of the Kurdish region remain undefined. Unfortunately, we're seeing a confluence of interests between the Bush administration and various internal groups that would like to undermine either the integrity or the democratic character of a future Iraqi state. Both just need to keep a lid on the situation for a few months yet so America can claim victory and go home before the real fights begin.

While it might be nice if the interim constitution represented a permanent consensus on religious tolerance and human rights, I don't see how Matt can expect a temporary document to accomplish the tasks of a democratically-elected constitutional convention. If the interim constitution sought to pre-empt those debates that will take place once the convention begins, it would be taking away the Iraqi people's right to control their own future.

Matt also quotes Juan Cole to the effect that no one in Iraq will have any incentive to compromise once the convention begins. But the interim constitution wouldn't then become a default point of compromise since it is supposedly just the product of a Bremer-Chalabi collaboration.

According to Matt, the time bomb within the time bomb is the preservation of the Kurdish militia known as the pesh merga. As &c. observes,

So much for the state's monopoly of force. If a future Iraq can survive as a unitary state with separate, ethnically based militaries, it will truly be something new under the sun.

But Matt seems to forget the Kurds are the faction most dependent on American protection and therefore most amenable to American influence. American diplomats have made it clear that Kurdish secession is intolerable. Kurdish leaders know that America won't protect them from predatory neighbors if they choose to go it alone. So while there are always reasons to say that the glass is half empty, this time it is at least half full. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:50 PM by David Adesnik  

TNR TACKLES HAITI: Adam Kushner writes that

Despite the complexities of the unfolding situation in Haiti, two things can be said with certainty: Haiti is better for the fact that Jean-Bertrand Aristide is now in exile. And the world is better for the fact that we put him in power ten years ago.

I agree. (Link via Matt Yglesias) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:30 AM by David Adesnik  

TERROR STRIKES: Multiple suicide bombings have left more than 140 dead in Baghdad and Karbala. The victims were Shi'ite worshippers celebrating the holy day of Ashura. This mindless violence achieves nothing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

HAITI UPDATER: 300 Marines are now in Port-au-Prince, with Secretary Rumsfeld reporting that the U.S. deployment there is likely to reach 1,500 to 2,000, while lasting no more than three months before handing over peacekeeping responsibilities to the United Nations. The Pentagon has not yet made statements about the rules of engagement governing the deployment (whether, for instance, troops will be permitted to fire on looters, or only in self defense). The Washington Post is reporting that the plan for political stabilization of Haiti will continue to draw upon the Caricom plan formulated by the Caribbean nations before Aristide's depature, calling for an independent prime minister and unity cabinet to be chosen through compromise among Haiti's political movements, and with representatives of the Lavalas party and Prime Minister Yvon Neptune taking part in Aristide's stead. The U.N. is planning to send a team to Haiti within the next several days to assess requirements for its eventual peacekeeping mission, as well as the effects of political instability on possible efforts to ameliorate the humanitarian situation. The NY Times reports that the constitutionally mandated legislative ratification of the succession to office of interim president Boniface Alexandre, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, cannot happen because the legislature is not at present meeting. Rebel leader Guy Philippe seems to hope to make his rebel force into the army of his nation (at present Haiti's army is disestablished). Both Philippe and rebel leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain (a former death squad leader and assassin) have expressed support for the US deployment.

The Globe points to the irony that the Bush administration, so vitally against nation building in candidature, is now engaged wholeheartedly in the creation of democratic structures of governance in failed states, and winning support for this policy with a skeptical electorate. This is not, incidentally, the first time a president came into office to adopt policies he had campaigned against in his predecessor - for only one example, as a candidate Clinton attacked the first President Bush mercilessly for his Realist, great-powers-comity stance toward China which left no room for human rights considerations; then, after a year, he adopted precisely the same policy under the guise of engagement. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:50 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE NO-INCOMPETENT-DICTATOR-LEFT-BEHIND PROGRAM: CNN chooses this moment to run a story with the title "Aristide no stranger to struggle," that includes choice bits like

Along the way, he learned French, Latin, English, German, Spanish and Hebrew but is most eloquent in the native Creole that he used to exort Haitians to rise against the 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship.
...
But the man who once fired the hearts of Haitians to pursue freedom himself is being called a dictator.

Go figure. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:14 AM by Patrick Belton  

EXTRA, EXTRA! The foreign policy society which I head up puts out a newsletter each week of upcoming foreign policy events and job openings. Here's this week's edition, and if you'd like, you can sign up to receive it by email.

In other news, our Southern California chapter is now open for business - and headed up by no less a statesman of the blogosphere than Robert Tagorda! Thanks, Robert! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:48 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG FILM CLASSICS -- SIDNEY POITIER DOUBLE FEATURE: The films on the agenda for today are Blackboard Jungle (1955) and To Sir, With Love (1967). The films work very well side by side since both tell the story of first-time teachers who take jobs at inner city schools only to discover that their students are completely out of control. In time, however, the teachers' dedication and empathy transforms their students into mature young men and women.

The side-by-side comparision of Blackboard and To Sir is also instructive because Poitier plays the rebellious student in the first film and the teacher in the second. Both performances are masterful. As student Gregory Miller, Poitier blends the sullen resentment and untapped potential of many an overlooked and underprivileged young man.

Poitier is even more impressive as Mark Thackeray, the out-of-work engineer who makes the decision to teach in London's East End. Thackeray is a fascinating combination of social awkwardness, intellectual ambition, human warmth and latent rage. Each one of his interactions with his students brings out an unexpected combination of these traits.

While Blackboard and To Sir were made only 12 years apart, they seem to be a full generation apart. The acting in Blackboard is of the stilted, artificial kind that seems so jarring to the modern viewer. (Poitier's performance is an exception and, as a result, seems far ahead of its time.) In To Sir, we come face to face with young men and women who would seem in place in any high-school classroom in America today, despite the fact that they are British and poor and living in 1967.

The difference in acting styles also accentuates the difference of the messages conveyed by the respective films. The message in Blackboard is explicity political and often makes the film seem more like a modern parody of 1950s culture than an actual product of the time. The strangeness begins with the film's trailer, which preceded the main feature on my copy of the cassette. In the manner of Reefer Madness, it promises to convey a shocking truth that naive and patriotic Americans have for too long ignored.

Given what inner-city schools are like today, one immediately begins to wonder whether any thing that happened in the 1950s could really have been all that bad. There are no guns in the film and drugs play a very minor role, so you figure that things can't really be all that bad. On the other hand, protagonist Glenn Ford (playing Rick Dadier) is beaten badly by his own students in a planned nighttime attack. The same students appear to be professional criminals who rob trucks after class. And at the climax of the film, one of them pulls a knife on Ford in class. Did things like that really happen in the 1950s? I don't know.

While this sort of scaremongering about inner-city youth might come off as racist today, its purpose in the film is to advance a liberal agenda. After all, the moral of the story is that if a teacher never gives up on underprivileged kids, they will shine through in the end. Thus, Blackboard manages in the space of a couple of hours to be both disturbingly alarmist and naively optimistic.

In contrast, To Sir has much less of a social agenda. While it does suggest that committed teachers can resolve a systemic crisis in education, the students come away mainly with a more mature approach to the constant challenges of life in the British working class. Moreover, they begin the film far more time than their Blackboard counterparts, who are miraculously transformed into patriotic Americans.

If I were to advance one main criticism of both films, it is that the moments of epiphany at which the students suddenly abandon the Dark Side of the Force seems improbable. To be fair, real-life student-teacher relations develop subtly over the course of months. To portray them in a matter of hours is all but impossible. Still, it seems like both sets of students are following a script when they undergo their conversions. It's never clear why they reject their goodhearted teachers at first but then come around when the time is right.

In the final analysis, To Sir, With Love is the superior film, one whose artistic merit should be evident to audiences today. However, Blackboard Jungle is still plenty worth watching, both for its historical value as well as the chance to observe a magnificent actor about to become a major star.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:07 PM by David Adesnik  

FAREWELL, MON CHAT: Kevin Drum has declared an end to his cat-blogging. Having made the personal acquaintance of Inkblot and Jasmine, I can assure you that they will be missed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:01 PM by David Adesnik  

WHY ISN'T THAT FLAG ON FIRE? 20,000 South Koreans marched today in what AFP describes as a "pro-US rally". Quotations from the pro-US marchers make them seem a little bit off the wall, especially descriptions of high government officials as "North Korean sympathisers". On the other hand, I'm not sure what to make of a South Korean president who says that his nation ought to "embrace North Korea with a warm heart" despite its "eccentric" behavior. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:00 PM by David Adesnik  

ANTI-PASSION PASSION: I'm sort of proud of French film distributors for elevating their concerns about anti-Semitism above their interest in making a profit off of the Passion. But why does censorship seem to be the reflexive French response to dealing with censorship? First of all, censorship usually winds up antagonizing one's opponents and increading their resolve. Besides, given that so many anti-Semitic attacks are perpetrated by French Muslims, what good is banning the Passion? What I'd like to see is prominent Frenchmen (and -women) from all walks of life openly denounce anti-Semitism and explain why French Jews are no less French and no have no fewer rights than anyone else. The war of ideas cannot be won through futile efforts to shut down the opposition. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:41 PM by David Adesnik  

TOO MUCH GOOD NEWS: What is going on in Iraq? The NYT reports that oil production there is poised to surpass prewar levels. The NYT article on that subject is climibing the charts over at Memeorandum thanks to posts by Rob Tagorda, Greg Djerejian, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds and Rantingprofs.

I think it's worth taking a look at the NYT article in detail, since it contains so many surprises that run against the grain of conventional wisdom. Correspondent Neela Banerjee reports that

With additional production increases expected, oil exports this year could add $14 billion to Iraq's threadbare budget, compared with a little more than $5 billion last year, said a senior official with the Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupation government.

I don't know that the total Iraqi budget is, but I have to imagine that $9 billion will make a big difference in the books. This suggests, moreover, that American support may be fall back to more moderate levels and/or focus on institution-building rather than basic services such as santiation. Next up, consider this:

The revival of the oil sector is a result of the $1 billion in repairs undertaken by the Americans and Iraqis as well as some dogged ingenuity by the Iraqis in keeping their badly damaged industry running.

Usually, we hear that the American reconstruction effort is overwhelmed by chaos and getting little back in the way of results. On a related note,

The top American civil administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, appeared on Iraqi television on Friday to announce that electricity generation, a major source of discontent for this country of 25 million, had been restored to prewar levels and was expected to rise rapidly as summer approaches.

Assuming that Bremer knows what he's talking about, that's pretty impressive, especially the part about a rapid rise this summer. Of course, even silver linings have clouds:

In the north, [oil] exports have been stymied by attacks on the pipeline leading to an export terminal in Turkey. But the Northern Oil Company recently tested the pipeline and shipped a few million barrels of oil to Turkey.

Attacks on the pipeline dropped to 8 in January and February from 47 in the last three months of 2003, according to coalition officials ? a sign, they said, of the success of a new Iraqi oil police trained under an American contract.

Perhaps the reduction isn't all that surprising given that

The American military commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, said last week that attacks on coalition soldiers had been cut by half in the last three months, even as attacks on Iraqis had increased.

Accordingly, the Coalition's casualty and fatality figures fell in February to a level considerably below even that of last summer. (NB: It's not just because February is a short month. The per-day figures fell dramatically as well.) Finally, if you look at the print version of this morning's NYT, you find an interesting sentence that has disappeared from the online version of its article:

American efforts to restore Iraqi oil have been led by the Army Corps of Engineers and its principal contractor, Halliburton.

Halli-who? You mean those guys who overcharged the government for gas? Are we really supposed to believe that they do anything right or good? Well, if the NYT says so, who am I to disagree?

Anyhow, the good news isn't limited to the oil sector. The front page story about Iraq actually concerns its new interim constitution, which, if approved,

Would be the most progressive such document in the Arab world. Even before the hard bargaining began, there was wide agreement on many of its major features, including the freedom of speech, press and assembly and the free exercise of religion.

The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, equal treatment under the law regardless of gender or ethnicity, as well as civilian control over the military.

As if that weren't enough, Sunni clerics are now calling on anti-American forces to put an end to their attacks against both Iraqi civilians and security officers. The clerics' fatwa begins as follows: "Dear sons of our nation, we call upon you to close ranks and elevate yourselves above your grudges so that we may open a new chapter in the life of our country. We condemn any act of violence against Iraqi state government workers, police and soldiers, because it is aggression under Islamic law."

The document issued in Ramadi declares that killing fellow Iraqis not only runs counter to the idea of holy war, but also constitutes what is known in the Muslim world as haram, the unpardonable act of killing another Muslim.You might even say that America has won over the Sunni clerics' hearts and minds. Last August, the big names in the liberal half of the blogosphere jumped all over those of us who said that the suicide bombings in Iraq were a sign of our enemies' desperation. Five months later, it's hard to see things any other way. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:10 PM by Patrick Belton  

AND MORE ON HAITI: The Christian Science Monitor runs a piece on lessons learned from our last involvement in nation-building in Haiti. VOA reports another wave of anarchy and looting is breaking out in Port-au-Prince, and the Globe cites diplomatic sources who say that this court case about Aristide's involvement in a drug-trafficking ring gave the U.S. greater leverage on Aristide in encouraging him to leave the country. Mr Aristide, for his part, is in the Central African Republic, where he continues to seek asylum in South Africa. Both rebel and U.S. forces are in Port-au-Prince at the moment, with both apparently receiving cordial welcomes from the city's residents. A contingent of French forces is moving to secure French diplomatic sites, while a U.S. detachment has established a security perimeter at the airport. Other French and American contingents are securing a number of other sites of interest around the capital. Apparently both marines and rebels are currently to be found at the moment in the vicity of the National Palace and the surrounding park, but they are said not to be interacting with one another. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:38 PM by Patrick Belton  

UPDATER ON HAITI: The Secretary of State appeared on several morning talk shows to respond to questions about Haiti. Transcripts are here, here, and here (and a very brief presidential statement is here). Reuters is reporting that a deployment of roughly 1,000 U.S. Marines will reach Haiti within the next few days, with 200 soldiers on the ground now and another 200 to arrive later today. French, Canadian, and Latin American personnel are expected to join the US detachment shortly. The Pentagon has announced that the aims of the American deployment are to secure key sites in Port-au-Prince; protect U.S. citizens; contribute to security and stability in the capital; pave the way for the arrive of the international force; assist in delivering humanitarian aid; and repatriate Haitian migrants interdicted at sea. The Quai d'Orsay's statement is here, and the UN Security Council invoked chapter VII unanimously last night to authorize a multinational peacekeeping force (release, text of UNSCR 1529). The OAS's Secretary General has announced support for the UN resolution and Haiti's new interim president, but the body has taken no other actions. And meanwhile, a member of House of Representatives is claiming that Aristide now says he was kidnapped. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

HAPPY SAINT DAVID'S DAY! I'll be looking for some leek soup and a daffodil today to celebrate the Welsh. Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus everyone! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:22 AM by Patrick Belton  

SAUDIS SAY NO JEWS WILL BE GIVEN VISAS, then (when the WSJ points this out) quickly change website to indicate visas are adjudicated on a case-by-case basis...and then take a position of righteous indignation to a US congressman impertinent enough to question the whole shady business. Eugene and the Opinion Journal have more. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:25 AM by Patrick Belton  

DEAD LANGUAGES IN THE NYT: Jack Hitt shows there can be good writing, even in the New York Times:

Languages die the way many people do -- at home, in silence, attended by loved ones straining to make idle conversation.

''A lot of rain,'' announces Juan Carlos. The fire crackles and hisses. The rain continues, staccato.

''Rain,'' Gabriela adds.

I sit quietly, smoking my way through their Samuel Beckett dialogue.
...

When I asked Emelinda what could be done to keep Yaghan alive, she said she was already doing it, as if a formal program were under way.

''I talk to myself in Yaghan,'' Emelinda explained in Spanish. ''When I hang up my clothes outside, I say the words in Yaghan. Inside the house, I talk in Yaghan all day long.''

I asked her if she ever had a conversation with the only other person in the world who could easily understand her, Cristina Calderón, the official ''last speaker'' of Yaghan.

''No,'' Emelinda said impatiently, as if I'd brought up a sore topic. ''The two of us don't talk.''

Even accounting for Hitt's occasional adolescent slips ("Does anything say Western dominance quite like the flush of a private john?"), the magazine should be congratulated for the highly unusual and innovative step of bringing good writing to the profit-making press. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:39 PM by David Adesnik  

STANDARDIZED ART: The SAT will be getting an overhaul in spring 2005, including the introduction of an essay section. The official grading standards suggest that Hemingway and Shakespeare might not have been fit to study at America's best colleges. (Link via Pejman.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:23 PM by David Adesnik  

GERECHT-IGKEIT: Reuel Marc rages against those amoral realists who want to sell out Iran's democratic opposition in order to cut a deal with Teheran on nuclear weapons. While selling out the dissidents would be unconscionable, Gerecht doesn't seem to accept that there really isn't a "get tough" option available to President Bush when it comes to Iran.

The future of Iran is in the hands of its own people. Our role is to encourage them by making it clear time and again that their ideals are ours as well. Encouragement is no guarantee of success, but we did learn after 1989 just how valuable moral support is for those who struggle against totalitarianism. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:39 PM by David Adesnik  

DEFENDING GORE: Not Al Gore. Hollywood gore. Rob Tagorda says that The Passion has been subjected to unfair abuse. In fact, Rob says that "It's a deeply moving film -- one that leaves me wondering whether it ranks among the best I've ever seen." I'll suspend judgment for the moment since I haven't seen the film, but my gut instinct says that its detractors are the ones on the side of angels.

Finally, DK writes in with a response to my statement that "Having lived through September 11th, we have no need to watch the planes crash again and again. But are there Christians who might be inspired by this sort of film, which goes beyond the violence of gospel?" According to DK,

Yes, absolutely there are, and there has been a long tradition of this sort of thing throughout history:

1. William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience" is in large part about exactly this issue, and he gives many examples stretching from the desert fathers of the early church to 19th century America. See [here and here] (look for Suso).

2. Catholics, Episcopalians, and others treat Good Friday as one of the most important days in the Church year, observed with 3 hour long vigil services focused on remembering the Crucifixion. Other than the graphic visuals, there is little in the film that doesn't fit traditional Good Friday and Stations of the Cross services...

4. I saw the movie with a group of people from my very liberal Episcopal church, which is very strongly in favor of gay bishops and active in pursuing ties with local Muslim and Jewish groups. And we all found it inspiring. Difficult to stomach, incorrect in a few places, but inspiring.

If you're still looking for more insightful comments about The Passion, Judith Weiss has a very comprehensive set of links up over at Kesher Talk. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:17 PM by David Adesnik  

JOHN KERRY, MASTER OF NUANCE: Yet again, John Kerry has come forward with an extremely complicated explanation of why positions he has taken might seem inconsistent at first but are in fact part and parcel of a sophisticated and coherent worldview. The issue this time is gay marriage and the relevant facts have been provided by CJR's Campaign Desk. Here goes: In 1996, Kerry voted against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. This week, Ron Brownstein of the LAT asked Kerry whether his position on DOMA implied that the only way to ban gay marriage is by amending the constitution. Kerry responded to Brownstein by stating that he was wrong in '96 about the constitutionality of DOMA. Following Kerry's logic, Brownstein then asked whether Kerry would vote for DOMA if it up were put before the Senate today. Kerry evaded that question by saying that DOMA is already the law of the land.

Campaign Desk goes through all of this in order to demonstrate that a number of major media outlets have misrepresented Kerry's views on gay marriage. As far as I can tell, they have, albeit slightly. Even so, you have to have a lot of faith in Kerry in order to believe that his rhetorical acrobatics represent a sincere effort to explain his views rather than a calculated effort to explain them away. And even if the Senator's views are consistent, his decision to dodge Brownstein's final question is a pretty clear indication of the fact that Kerry does not want to let anyone know what his real views on gay marriage are.

But that's only the beginning. It also turns out that Kerry would support amendents to state consitutions that outlaw gay marriage provided that such amendents protect civil unions and the like. However, Kerry is against an amendent to the federal constitution which would do the same. These positions are consistent now that Kerry has revised his view of the constitutionality of DOMA. But what did he revise his view of DOMA? Has he changed his interpretation of the 14th Amendment, or did he misunderstand certain parts of DOMA?

Perhaps the more important question is whether it hurts Kerry more to reinforce his reputation for straddling the fence, or whether he should pay that price to avoid seeming too liberal (or too conservative?) on gay marriage. On the one hand, I sympathize with Kerry for having to make such a hard decision. On the other, I expect real answers from a candidate for President. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:56 AM by Patrick Belton  

COMING ATTRACTIONS: This week, the administration will be pushing its Middle East democracy promotion program with a trip to the region by Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, as well as upcoming discussions about the Greater Middle East Initiative with Nato allies, the G-8, and Turkey. The diplomatic push will be an attempt to win over the support of wary regional governments cautious of what they will be eager to label as American meddling. WaPo presents a summary of what it calls "the most ambitious U.S. democracy effort since the end of the Cold War": in short, it calls for the United States and Europe to press for and assist free elections, foster new independent media, help create a politically literate generation, establish a greater Middle East Development Bank modeled on Europe's postwar Marshall plan model, translate Western classics into Arabic, and give $500 million in loans to small entrepreneurs, especially women, according to the draft report. It is scheduled to be formally released in June, and it follows in broad outline the 1975 model of the Helsinki accords.

By shrewdly laying his Iraq quarrels with Chancellor Schröeder aside, President Bush has secured Germany's support for the intiative. In the opposing camp is Egypt's Mubarak, who has already been travelling the region to ask its autocratic rulers (beginning in Riyadh) for their opposition. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:14 AM by Patrick Belton  

YIDS AND GOYS SIT DOWN TO POPCORN TOGETHER: A sympathetic, evangelical Matt Labash watches Mel Gibson's Passion with a mildly wary, jocular Jew. The most amusing, and human, piece to be written so far on this whole affair results.

(Greatest hits: "The narrative necessarily implicates Jews and Romans, since there weren't many Norwegians around at the time." "In the back of the theater, two cops are present, perhaps to make sure the Jews and Christians don't turn into the Jets and Sharks, what with all the talk of anti-Semitic overtones, or perhaps just to guard against the phone bully. "Don't worry," offers Norm, in the event of a Jewish uprising. "You're with me. You'll be okay.") (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

ARISTIDE HAS INDEED LEFT HAITI:

The Bush administration said it welcomed Aristide's departure and said it was in the best interests of Haiti. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Aristide left at about 6:45 a.m. EST, accompanied by members of his security detail.

[One of his advisors] said Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president in 200 years of independence, was flying to the Dominican Republic and would seek asylum in Morocco, Taiwan or Panama.

Aristide left as fighters in a popular rebellion that erupted on Feb. 5 came within 25 miles of Port-au-Prince, the capital, and threatened to attack unless he resigned.

See also this piece from earlier this morning, on the administration's decision yesterday to increase its pressure on Aristide to leave, to leave open chances for a peaceful resolution in his absence:

Earlier in the day, senior administration officials said the United States did not want to seem to be pushing an elected leader out of office. But after a meeting of Mr. Bush's national security advisers on Saturday morning — run by teleconference from Camp David by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser — the president concluded that Washington's strong hints to Mr. Aristide that he needed to resign must be stepped up to a strong shove.

During the meeting, officials said, Mr. Bush's advisers concluded that the rebel forces holding in position outside the city were unlikely to stay there for long. "If they go in and Aristide is still sitting there, it's not going to be pretty," a senior official said Saturday evening. "So the conclusion was that the only way to get to a political solution was to exert more pressure, an evolution of what we've been doing all week."

Rebel leader Guy Philippe, who had earlier boasted that he would be in Port-au-Prince today to mark his 36th birthday, had reportedly slowed his advance into the capital city in response to a request from Washington.

So who's left to pick up the pieces of power in Port-au-Prince? The Democratic Platform opposition coalition had been led by senior socialist member Micha Gaillard, Christian Democrat Marie-Denise Claude, and Paul Denis of the left-wing Organisation for the People's Struggle. Other key figures in the political opposition include Lionel Etienne, head of the Franco-Haitian Chamber of Commerce; and industrialist Edouard Peaultre. (See AFP). The Platform Democratique, in turn, includes the Convergence Democratique (a wide-ranging collection of political and civil society groups) and the Group of 184 (which represents Haiti’s business community; website). It's not yet clear whether a restoration in order in Haiti will now follow along the lines of the French peace plan, in which a multinational police force would deploy to Haiti along with relief aid, human rights observers, and a U.N. representative; a government of national unity would be formed among political parties; and new presidential elections would take place before the summer. (The alternative, CARICOM, plan had called for Aristide to remain in power heading a government of national unity.) And the State Department has already indicated that a multinational force will be sent to the Haiti soon. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

NOT ON HAITI, but Harvard deserves to be congratulated on this program - it would be a very good thing if other universities (President Levin?) follow suit:

Aiming to get more low-income students to enroll, Harvard will stop asking parents who earn less than $40,000 to make any contribution toward the cost of their children's education. Harvard will also reduce the amount it seeks from parents with incomes between $40,000 and $60,000.

"When only 10 percent of the students in elite higher education come from families in the lower half of the income distribution, we are not doing enough," said Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard, who will announce the financial aid changes at a meeting of the American Council on Education in Miami Beach today.

Dr. Summers said that higher education, rather than being an engine of social mobility, may be inhibiting it because of the wide gap in college attendance for students from different income classes.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:45 AM by David Adesnik  

HAITI -- A DIFFERENT VIEW: CS writes that

The Administration's policy toward's Haiti is anything but coherent. Running the gamut from ignoring the coming crisis then rushing to negotiate a half baked "peace plan." Haiti under Aristide may be a lot things but a dictatorship is a bit much. Aristide has been a failure as a leader and needs to go but I remember Haiti under Duvalier and you can't begin to compare the two.

Haiti's problem is that governmental power is concentrated in the executive and in Port au Prince. Some of Aristide's critics have always hated him for a variety of Haitian reasons involving class and race and have been scheming to get him out for since he was reelected in 2000, through his incompetence and malfeasance his given them enough rope to hang him with. The "civil" opposition does not have much chance for survival as a coalition without Aristide as a focal point. Once he leaves it will fall apart. Even in his weakened condition, Aristide and his party Lavalas would still beat the opposition in a fair election. Which is propably why the political opposition doesn't want elections with Aristide around.

Many Republicans in and out of the Administration have hated Aristide since he was first elected in 1991 and won't be shedding any tears if he goes. The Administration has been instrumental in blocking Haiti from receiving loans totaling $500 million from the World Bank, Interamerican Development Bank, and other multilateral institutions since 2000. USAID, IRI and other American institutions have given millions of dollars to the opposition. Many members of the armed opposition were trained by the U.S. military and the CIA. This Administration has yet to craft a balanced approach when it comes to Haiti, for example when the opposition failed to agree, yet again, to a power sharing agreement with Aristide. The Administration immediately placed the blame on Aristide, not even mentioning the opposition's intransigence. Aristide's removal or resignation does not end the crisis. Now with the US actually pushing Aristide out, it is doing harm to Latin America's transition to a democracy.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:29 PM by David Adesnik  

SCATHING: The WaPo looks at Bush's rhetoric on taxes. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:13 PM by David Adesnik  

NEWSFLASH -- HAITI A DEMOCRACY: In an interview with the NYT, John Kerry held the Bush administration responsible for the chaos in Haiti.

His message to the rebels, Mr. Kerry said, would be: "You're not going to take over. You're not kicking [Aristide] out. This democracy is going to be sustained."

According to Freedom House, Haiti

has become a dictatorship in all but name, as power has been monopolized by President Aristide and his Lavalas Family (FL) party.

Makes you wonder what kind of democracy Sen. Kerry would like to promote in Iraq. And if Bush called Haiti a democracy, you could bet that the next line in the NYT article would've read "According to Freedom House, Haiti is a violent dictatorship." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:39 PM by David Adesnik  

ON THE RIGHT TRACK IN HAITI: I haven't read more than a half-dozen articles about the situation there, but it seems like the Bush administration is handling the situation fairly responsibly. Both Colin Powell and the human rights community seem to agree that the leaders of the insurrection are a collection of notorious thugs and murderers. At the same time, President Bush has clearly identified Jean-Bertrand Aristide as the individual whose corruption and selfishness are responsible for igniting the rebellion.

Bush is now stating pretty clearly that Aristide must go. Obviously, doing so raises the possibility that the rebels may take over. Yet having Aristide go now may result in there be a lot less violence than if the rebels had to invade Port Au Prince and haul him out. Morevoer, if Aristide resigns in response to American pressure, the rebels will be robbed of the legitimacy that comes from ousting a dictator (cf. "Sandinistas").

I don't how much chance there is that the democratic opposition to Arisitide can become an interim government in the event of the President's resignation. But if the US, UN and France all support a clear pro-democracy line, the worst may not come to pass.

Oh, and by the way, notice how neither the NYT nor the WaPo said anything bad about the rebels until the last couple of days. But that's the kind of oversight you should expect when big-name correspondents fly around the world from trouble spot to trouble spot rather than really learning about any of the nations they cover. For example, last week the WaPo identifed Louis-Jodel Chamblain as a "former army officer". The NYT described M. Chamblain as "leader of the rebel troops" and quoted him as saying that

"Cap Haitien is a symbol of Haiti's freedom. This fight is to liberate the Haitian people under the regime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide."

Today, the NYT describes Chamblain and Jean-Pierre Baptiste as

Two leaders of Fraph, the Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress. Fraph was an instrument of terror wielded by the military junta that overthrew Haiti's embattled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991. It killed thousands over the next three years.

You know, you'd think that American journalists would be more skeptical when someone claims to be waging a war of liberation. After all, a few months ago, someone or other at the Pentagon said something about liberating some country in the Middle East and caught hell for it from the media. But some two-bit gang leader gets press coverage that makes him look like George Washington. Go figure. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:20 PM by David Adesnik  

ISN'T THE FRONT PAGE FOR NEWS? The NYT has a major story about the massive corruption that Iraqi officials embedded in the UN's Oil-For-Food program. Of course, it was on the NYT's own op-ed page -- ten months ago -- that WSJ correspondent Claudia Rosett argued that the Oil-For-Food program had become a total fiasco.

While the NYT cover story contains a lot of interesting information, its criticism of the UN's role in the affair is too light to even be described as a slap on the wrist. While Rossett's op-ed makes clear that widescale corruption was only possible because of ridiculously lax UN oversight, all the NYT gives us is a pathetic denial from the UN official in charge:

The director of the Office of Iraq Programs, Benon V. Sevan, declined to be interviewed about the oil-for-food program. In written responses to questions sent by e-mail, his office said he learned of the 10 percent kickback scheme from the occupation authority only after the end of major combat operations.

Yeah, right. Just this week, Rosett published another column which provides considerable evidence that either that the UN is hiding a lot of information from the public or that its accountants don't understand basic arithmetic.

On a related note, one also has to ask to what degree the French and Russians were involved in Saddam's massive kickback scheme. To its credit, the NYT raises the issue briefly at the end of its lengthy report. Hopefully, it will follow up on the issue, because even the little bit it has found is quite incriminating. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:12 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE STATE DEPARTMENT'S ANNUAL COUNTRY REPORT OF HUMAN RIGHTS has been released - it's online on the Department's website, here. A transcript from Assistant Secretary Craner's q&a with the press is here. The document is critical both of allies and adversaries, accusing China of backsliding, with arrests of democracy activists and Internet essayists and bloggers, speaking of a "dramatic worsening" of human rights abuses in Cuba underlined by long prison terms handed down to 75 human rights activists, and very critical language toward Burma and North Korea ("one of the world's most inhumane regimes"). Several allies also received critical note, including Saudi Arabia and, to an extent, Israel. On the other hand, trends toward democratization were noted in Qatar, Oman, Yemen and Jordan, as well as the Kyrgyz Republic.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias doesn't buy that Kyrgyzstan is trending toward democratization (and correctly points out that a good deal of quite execrable oppression is taking place in that country), while Brian Ulrich argues in Matt's comments that the Kyrgyz Republic is at any rate the most free of any Central Asian nation, and whether it is trending toward more or less democracy is open to dispute. Incidentally, Freedom House has two reports on Kyrgyzstan, here and here: their consensus is that corruption is rife, and initial hopes for a thriving Kryyz democracy have been dashed by growing presidential authoritarianism.

I'm not convinced yet, though, by Matt's criticism that the State Department country reports alter their analyses or pull their punches to cohere with broader government foreign policy goals. In fact, it's my fairly strong impression that the bureaucratic processes leading to the production of the human rights reports are staffed by people drawn in from the human rights community (like human rights lawyer Harold Koh from YLS, or civil rights lawyer John Shattuck), who remain in very close contact with the principal human rights organizations from whom they draw most of their reporting. The human rights groups, in turn, are generally laudatory of the human rights reports, while using them as an opportunity to criticise broader US policy - see Tom Malinowski from 2002 here, or Amnesty from this year here. This seems to me like a far more benevolent form of the common political phenomenon of bureaucratic capture - where a government agency is staffed principally by members of an industry, who continue to represent its aims and view of the world while working in the executive. And this seems to me, first of all, a good thing where the industry in question is the human rights community, and second of all, to be precisely in line with the legislative intent of Congress when late in the Nixon administration it created the Coordinator for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in Section 301 of the International Security and Arms Export Control Act of 1976. The idea then was to create an entrenched bureaucratic interest which, even in the cynical course of promoting its own bureaucratic stature within the State Department, would also tend over time to promote the cause of human rights within US foreign policy. That said, I'm personally very fascinated by the Bureau, and would be very interested to hear whether any of our friends have more to say on the point. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

OH, PRIVATISATSIYA: An interesting glimpse into the economic structure of contemporary Russia is in Forbes's just-released list of billionaires: once you scan past the palaver about Harry Potter, you get to this interesting bit:

New York was the home base of choice for the super-rich, with 31 of them living there. Moscow came in second with 23, followed by Hong Kong with 16 and Paris with 10.

Almost as many billionaires live in Moscow as in New York! That there would be comparable numbers of billionaires living in the financial capital of a nation with a PPP GDP of $1.409 trillion and that of one of $10.45 trillion is a stunning indication of the oligarchic character of a country where like medieval Western Europe there are only two true powers, declining oligarchs and a rising dirigiste state. The professional and commercial middle classes, so important for democratization, are in mother Russia dearly missed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:16 PM by David Adesnik  

LIFE IS SO COMPLEX: What ever happened to the good old days when the only issue you had to blog about was the invasion of Iraq? Now we're trying to deal with the Democratic primaries, gay marriage, The Passion, Haiti and Iraq all at once. Plus free trade. Tom Friedman has a good column on it today. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:06 PM by David Adesnik  

CHUTZPAH IN CAIRO: Mubarak isn't happy with America's latest plan for promoting demoracy in the Middle East. The Egyptian President has stated that

"Whoever imagines that it is possible to impose solutions or reform from abroad on any society or region is delusional," Mr. Mubarak said on Wednesday. "All peoples by their nature reject whoever tries to impose ideas on them."

Wouldn't it be funny if Colin Powell responded by saying "Whoever imagines that it is possible to impose dictatorship or tyranny from within on any society or region is delusional. All peoples by their nature reject whoever tries to speak on their behalf while robbing them of their freedom."

The history of the Middle East is on Mubarak's side on this one, but the idea of freedom has a habit of ignoring history. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:54 PM by David Adesnik  

THE AMENDMENT: I don't think there's much I can add to the debate about the gay marriage. Andrew Sullivan has posted insightful e-mails from many, many readers. If you're feeling more on the bitter side, then this cartoon is the way to go. And if you're just plain against love and romance, then click here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:36 PM by David Adesnik  

PORNOGRAPHIC CHRIST: Andrew Sullivan says the following about Gibson's Passion:

The movie was to me deeply disturbing. In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh. The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels. It shows a man being flayed alive - slowly, methodically and with increasing savagery. We first of all witness the use of sticks, then whips, then multiple whips with barbed glass or metal. We see flesh being torn out of a man's body. Just so that we can appreciate the pain, we see the whip first tear chunks out of a wooden table. Then we see pieces of human skin flying through the air. We see Jesus come back for more. We see blood spattering on the torturers' faces. We see muscled thugs exhausted from shredding every inch of this man's body. And then they turn him over and do it all again. It goes on for ever. And then we see his mother wiping up masses and masses of blood. It is an absolutely unforgivable, vile, disgusting scene.

The same metaphor of pornography appears in this eloquent letter-to-the-editor from the NYT, which happens to be written by my very thoughtful uncle:

As a psychiatrist, I wish to state my profound concern about the mental anguish and suffering that Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" is likely to cause not only to the young and impressionable but to anyone seeing it ("Tears and Gasps for "Passion,' " news article, Feb. 24).

Mr. Gibson's searing and prolonged depiction of sadistic violence is wrenching and traumatic. His meticulous and obsessive portrayal of torture, mutilation, bleeding and physical pain is a lurid, cruel and pornographic assault on the feelings and senses of the viewer.

The intensity and repetitiveness of this sordid and painful imagery are as traumatic to witness as watching the hijacked planes crash into the World Trade Center again and again.

In my opinion, this movie is not only blatantly anti-Semitic but is also anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and demeaning to the true meaning and message of kindness, love and compassion that are the real teachings of both Judaism and Christianity.

The comparison of the Passion to September 11th raises an interesting point. To what degree is an immediate inundation of the senses necessary to overcome the detachment that develops in time? Having lived through September 11th, we have no need to watch the planes crash again and again. But are there Christians who might be inspired by this sort of film, which goes beyond the violence of gospel? Or does a reliance on such fare suggest a spiritual failure on the part of the Church to inspire its members with the ideas that Christ stood for?

Of course, I have no answers. But I most certainly agree with the sentiments of one of the NYT's letter writers (not a relative of mine) who writes that "There is only one thing to be said about Mel Gibson's version of "The Passion of the Christ": Forget the movie, read the book. It's good." Agreed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:10 PM by Patrick Belton  

A LETTER FROM CAIRO: OxBlog's Cairo correspondent chips in with a witty and insightful letter from the land of Pharaohs and Nasser:

It is very pleasant to be back in Egypt again in spring, without having had to do any of that tiresome business of surviving the summer. Even the traffic fumes seem to be less overpowering than usual - reputedly one is a ten-cigarettes-a-day smoker here just by virtue of stepping outside the front door, which seems rather unfair to me. Anyway, I clean out my lungs three times a week by breathing in lots of steam in the sauna at the hotel gym, which is sheer heaven. I salve my conscience by not allowing myself to go there before making use of the exercise equipment, but even this has its compensations, since it is all positioned facing huge windows with a sunset view of the Nile - or, for those with slightly less elevated souls, large televisions showing CNN. The gym, I must confess, is a ridiculous extravagance, even in European terms, but it is also ridiculously luxurious. Attendants scurry to provide one with fresh towels at every opportunity - while working out, after working out, for the pool, the jacuzzi, the sauna, the (blissfully high-pressure) shower. They just have an awfully large laundry. Actually, if my landlady ever does throw me out, I think I might go and live at the gym. It is open 24 hours and provides every amenity (including toothbrushes, for no adequately explained reason) except food, which I am certain could be obtained by persuading Room Service to go a little out of their way...

Of course, the real reason for my presence in Cairo is not so that I can live the high life, but so that I can research my thesis, and I am doing that too, with grim determination. I have a wistful desire to be able to speak Arabic "properly" - though I know people who have been studying it for five years who still say the same, so I freely admit it is not a very realistic goal in my current circumstances. For the moment, I am compensating by spending quite a bit of time with non-English speaking friends, and improving my command of the colloquial language.

Last week, however, this apparently harmless pursuit nearly got me arrested. My Egyptian friend had phoned me up and asked if I would like to go with her to see the Agricultural College where she studies, and meet her fellow students. "Yes, please!" I said, thinking that it would be a fine way of spending the morning and I could always catch up on my work in the afternoon. So we met up and went on the Metro... then a taxi... then a two hour bus journey... then another taxi... It turned out that the College was in another town entirely. Our trip was enlivened by the film showing on the bus, which was called 'Mafia', all about an Egyptian who is led into bad company in Italy then arrested in Egypt and persuaded by the stern-yet-likeable detective and clever-yet-beautiful-and-yielding female police doctor to work for them. So they take him down the Nile to train him in karate and shooting-things and withstanding-interrogation and one-man-missions, and there is a comic sidekick who is fat and put-upon and nearly has to marry an ugly woman, and there is an eminent singer who explains the meaning of life to Our Hero, to the accompaniment of an all-singing, all-dancing chorus of Nubian peasants - and then we had to stop because the bus arrived. (It showed the same film on the way back, but only the first half again. I think I can guess, though, that Reformed Hero is going to bring down his erstwhile Mafia colleagues single-handed, reconcile with his Aged Father, and marry Beautiful Karate-Kicking Doctor. So I'm not worried.)

Anyway, I am getting distracted by the recollection of these glories from the anecdote at hand. When we finally got to the college, I was introduced to all my Egyptian friend’s friends (about eight of them), and the whole party headed off to explore the town. I was solemnly informed that it was a deeply historic town full of ancient monuments, but sadly we did not come across any of these during the course of our peregrinations - which did, however, take in a shopping mall and a pizza place. But at least they all talked at once with various regional accents, so it was definitely good language practice. After lunch, we headed off again, and were just wandering down a pleasantly shady street admiring the deeply historic trees (or so I was once again informed), when a large, angry plain-clothes policeman leapt out of nowhere and started shouting at us and demanding identification. (He had a difficult accent too, but this time I was rather less gratified at the opportunity it presented, and rather more concerned.) Apparently, the high wall on our left-hand side concealed a critical military installation, and one of our party was in possession of a camera. He wanted the film, the camera, and possibly our immediate attendance at the nearest police station as well. Fortunately, we had not actually been taking photos, we avowed our innocence repeatedly with shouts (from the boys), tears (from the girls) and an occasional demand in Arabic to be told what on earth was going on (from me), and eventually we were sent on our merry way. The phrase "and don't bother coming back" was definitely implied.

Of course from my point of view, this was all rather amusing, and I was certainly never at risk of anything more than inconvenience. But one of the girls was really upset. And it did bring it home to me how much, even in a relatively liberal country such as Egypt, the lack of fundamental legal rights does make confrontation with authority a risky business for the local population. Unless you happen to have credentials of some kind, you can't sit back and enjoy the spectacle of a mix-up such as this, secure in the knowledge that you have done nothing wrong. Because there is always the possibility that this will be the occasion when that is simply not going to matter...

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

TALKING ABOUT FOREIGN AID: The Washington chapter of our nationwide foreign policy society recently held a discussion on the milennium challenge account, and aspects of national development assistance strategy. Some notes are online, over on our Nathan Hale blog. Also, we've gotten a bit more of the website up for our associated young professionals' foreign policy think tank. More is coming soon!

Our foreign policy society has other active chapters in New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, and Oxford - please do just drop us a note if you'd like us to keep you in the loop about our events and other activities! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:46 AM by David Adesnik  

IS CONDI A MAN? Everyone seems to be up in arms about the racial aspect of Corrine Brown's remarks. But how about the sexism? In this day and age, people still try to undermine successful women by impying that they are not feminine enough. Calling Condi a white man just plays into that kind of prejudice. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:23 AM by David Adesnik  

BRING BACK HOWARD! Not Howard Dean. Not even Michael Howard. I'm talking about Mr. Stern.

Stern should've immediately denounced his caller for using the word "nigger". And Stern's remarks about the monkey were definitely racist, but I don't think that taking him off the air is the way to go.

If Howard Stern were a member of Congress, I'd want to get rid of him ASAP. But he's a talk show host, so his opponents should take him on in public. If he says something racist, then anti-defamation groups should denounce him. And you know what? I bet that Stern would admit he was wrong. Because he is a pervert, not a racist. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

GOOD ON HIM, PART TWO: New Tory leader Michael Howard continues to show that under his watch there will be no room for racial intolerance in his party, by sacking a Conservative MP who made an offensive and insensitive remark about the Chinese undocumented migrants who drowned while picking cockles on an English beach. While there are certain aspects of Mr Howard's programme I wouldn't want to endorse wholeheartedly, he does deserve immense respect for taking his party in a principled direction, and doing his bit to restore decency, comity, and decorum to UK public life. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

TURKMENISTAN'S PRESIDENT NIYAZOV today declared the wearing of beards and goatees illegal. Rather than any connection to Islam, as might more ordinarily be suspected for an ordinance concerning beards, it seems much more likely that Niyazov simply doesn't approve of the current fashion of goatees proliferating among the young men of Ashgabat. And this is just the latest in a string of odd prohibitions imposed by a crazed autocrat: for instance, it is also now forbidden in Turkmenistan to listen to car radios or to smoke in the street; opera and ballet performances have also been banned, on the grounds that they are "unnecessary"; and the entire health care sector of the nation is about to be laid off, to be replaced by military conscripts. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS, REDUX: Psychologist and current grad school dean Peter Salovey to replace Richard Brodhead as dean of Yale College; American religious historian Jon Butler will take over for Salovey as the dean of the Graduate School. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:26 PM by David Adesnik  

QUIET DIPLOMACY: Conservative critics of the human rights movement often insist that vocal denunciations of abusive governments are counterproductive because such governments refuse to compromise their pride by giving in to public criticism. Thus, conservatives suggest that the most effective method for advancing human rights is for the US government to make its objections known through private diplomatic channels.

There is some evidence that this quiet diplomacy approach is often preferable to public confrontation. For example, the Soviet Union reduced the number of Jews it allowed to emigrate once American activists began to draw attention to the issue. Previously, it had complied with American diplomats' request to let more Jews go.

On the other hand, there are plenty of instances in which quiet diplomacy amounted to no diplomacy. When the US government wanted to deflect criticism from anti-Communist allies, it simply said that it was going to engage in quiet diplomacy. After all, who could say that it wasn't?

I'm bringing this up because the issue of human rights came to mind with regard to Uzbekistan. As things now stand, the US is clearly in bed with the repressive Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, who -- in spite of his name -- has a habit of doing very nasty things to those who advocate the establishment of an Islamic state.

In honor of Donald Rumsfeld's recent visit, Karimov let a prominent dissident out of jail. While that is good, the US should not make the mistake of confusing symbolism with substance. Now, Rumsfeld is probably right that cooperating with Uzbekistan is necessary at this stage in the war on terror. But that doesn't mean effective pressure can't be exerted behind the scenes.

The Soviet Union could resist pressure from human rights advocates because it was a superpower. But Uzbekistan is an American client. The situation here reminds me of the one in El Salvador in the 1980s. In that instance, the Salvadoran military had no problem figuring out that anything Reagan said about the importance of human rights was just for show, since he never sent a message to San Salvador saying he would actually cut off US aid if the human rights situation didn't improve.

Then, in 1983, in response to tremendous domestic pressure, the administration sent Vice-President Bush to El Salvador to make specific demands and lay out deadlines for compliance. His visit saved hundreds of lives. It also showed that quiet diplomacy can work, but only if the administration has a sincere interest in making it work. Suffice it to say, that isn't the impression Donald Rumsfeld gives off when he's in Uzbekistan.

For more on the Uzbek situation, read Brian Ulrich. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:58 PM by David Adesnik  

NOW WHO'S THE BENEDICT ARNOLD? You can't accuse the WaPo of going soft on Kerry. Just look at this:

Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, frequently calls companies and chief executives "Benedict Arnolds" if they move jobs and operations overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

But Kerry has accepted money and fundraising assistance from top executives at companies that fit the candidate's description of a notorious traitor of the American Revolution.

Executives and employees at such companies have contributed more than $140,000 to Kerry's presidential campaign, a review of his donor records show. Additionally, two of Kerry's biggest fundraisers, who together have raised more than $400,000 for the candidate, are top executives at investment firms that helped set up companies in the world's best-known offshore tax havens, federal records show. Kerry has raised nearly $30 million overall for his White House run...

When asked for the definition of a "Benedict Arnold" company or CEO, Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's spokeswoman, said: "Companies that take advantage of tax loopholes to set up bank accounts or move jobs abroad simply to avoid taxes." She pointed to a list compiled by Citizen Works, a tax-exempt nonprofit group that monitors corporate influence, as a source of the companies that fit the candidate's definition.

According to federal election records, Kerry has received $119,285 from donors employed at what Citizen Works described as the "25 Fortune 500 Corporations With the Most Offshore Tax-Haven Subsidiaries." The list does not include nearly all of the companies that shave their tax bill by moving jobs and operations overseas, so Kerry has actually raised substantially more from firms qualifying as "Benedict Arnolds."

As if that wasn't bad enough, here's Kerry's lame excuse for his hypocrisy:

On Monday, Kerry was asked why two of his biggest fundraisers were involved with "Benedict Arnold" companies. "If they have done that, it's not to my knowledge and I would oppose it," Kerry told a New York television station. "I think it's wrong to do [it] solely to avoid taxes."

Then he sought to clarify his position: "What I've said is not that people don't have the right to go overseas and form a company if they want to avoid the tax. I don't believe the American taxpayer ought to be giving them a benefit. That's what I object to. I don't object to global commerce. I don't object to companies deciding they want to compete somewhere else.''

Of course the real victim here is Benedict Arnold. It just isn't fair to associate his name with outsourcing, since he was a living example of how enterprising Americans could persuade foreign investors to create jobs on American soil. Did the British hire some cut-rate Indian espionage firm to spy on the Continental Army? Hell no! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:30 PM by David Adesnik  

BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS: The Yale Daily News has published an op-ed that recounts how John Kerry was a very arrogant and unpopular young man during his time at Yale.

The author of the article is a member of the Yale Political Union's Liberal Party, of which Kerry was chair during his time as an undergraduate. As a former officer of the Liberal Party myself, I can vouch for the fact that no one there has any fond memories of Kerry.

But does Kerry's record of incompetence as an undergraduate really have anything to say about his ability to serve as chief executive of the United States of America? According to the op-ed's author,

Personally, I would not let Kerry circa 1966 run a public toilet, let alone a country. Hopefully, today's Kerry is a different man. Perhaps his service in Vietnam changed him for the better. Perhaps time has changed him. But maybe he has not changed. Recently Kerry mentioned that George Bush remains the same guy he was in college. If Bush didn't change, why would Kerry?

I certainly do not think a hard-drinking frat boy of the George Bush kind is any better prepared for the presidency. Still, Democrats ought to consider other options. Edwards anyone?

I think the real message here is that members of the YPU still take the institution way too seriously. While the author begins his article with a self-effacing admission that "The political union is by no means a 'cool' organization," he proceeds to judge the character of a veteran Senator according to his behavior as a 21-year old.

To be fair, my own criticism is an example of the pot calling the kettle black. I took the YPU way too seriously during my two semesters as an elected official. But one thing that has become very clear since then is how much almost everyone I knew in the YPU has grown and changed in the years since I first met them.

As a freshman first getting involved in the YPU, I remember how much I valued the sense of belonging and identity that came with membership in one of the parties. Sometimes, I did some pretty stupid things because I thought they would make other people in the YPU like me.

Now, it seems like John Kerry did plenty of dumb things as well, except without much of a payoff in terms of social acceptance. Personally, I chalk it up to him being an awkward kid like the rest of off, not some profound character flaw that will make him anything less of a President. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:35 PM by Patrick Belton  

ANALYZING TRENDS IN RUSSIA: Better than any other piece I've come across lately, this article from yesterday's FT casts insight into the trends taking place in the Kremlin behind the day-to-day political shuffle which often devours the headlines. And one of the most significant of these trends is the emergence in positions of crucial authority of the siloviki (lit: "men of power"), current and former officials in the intelligence, security, and military services. To wit,

According to a study by Ms Kryshtanovskaya, the proportion of siloviki in the uppermost echelons of Kremlin power has increased from 4.8 per cent under Mr Gorbachev to 58.3 per cent under Mr Putin. More than half of Mr Putin's 24-member informal "politburo" are siloviki. In the Kremlin one in three officials has a military or security services background, says Ms Kryshtanovskaya.

The growing presence of the siloviki has been even more startling regionally. Four out of seven presidential representatives in the regions are affiliated with the military or security services. Each of these "super-governors" has a staff of 1,500, 70 per cent of whom have a military or KGB background.

On the one hand, under the Soviet tyranny, the KGB was one of the Soviet Union's few meritocratic and functioning institutions, and its people represented many of the nation's best and brightest. On the other hand, their statist ideology leaves pauce room for democratic niceties, and to the extent they wield power, they may provide Russia with order, but little justice. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:53 PM by Patrick Belton  

SOUTH AFRICAN DEMOCRACY: Will South Africa go the way of Zimbabwe? Our friend (and South African Rhodes Scholar) Murray Wesson doesn't think so. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:34 PM by Patrick Belton  

MI5 TO EXPAND BY 50%, in response to the increased terror threat to the UK. Its staff will increase from 1,900 to 2,900, bringing the agency's numbers back up to World War II levels. Home Secretary David Blunkett will make the announcement in the Commons next week; both the Tory and Lib-Dem fractions have indicated their support for the measure. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:25 PM by Patrick Belton  

700 LIBERAL SYRIAN INTELLECTUALS have drafted a petition calling for an end to Syria's 41-year old state of emergency, release of political prisoners, and reforms toward multiparty liberal democracy. Here is their petition:

On March 8, 1963, the Council of the Revolutionary Leadership declared a state of emergency in Syria. Although 41 years have passed since then, the state is still bowed under the yoke of the emergency laws, whose effect encompasses all areas of the life of society and citizens in Syria. As a result, society is under siege, its movement is halted, its potential is damaged, and thousands of citizens are thrown into prison because of their opinions, political views, or charges that do not constitute a criminal offense.

The ramifications of the emergency law (the military laws and the special courts) have engendered special military laws, that depend to a large extent on the whim of those carrying them out.

We, the undersigned, ask the Syrian authorities to remove the state of emergency and to abolish its ramifications and its effects (legal, political, and economic), including:
* Abolition of all the military laws and all the state-of-emergency laws;
* Ceasing all arbitrary arrests;
* Releasing all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and compensating the injured parties;
* Reexamining [cases] of revocation of citizenship (for political reasons);
* Returning the exiles to their homeland, with legal guarantees;
* Opening the case of those who have disappeared, revealing their fate, regularizing their legal status, and compensating their relatives;
* Giving democratic freedom, including the right to establish [political] parties and civil associations.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:09 PM by Patrick Belton  

QUICK BLEG: Any of our readers spend time lately in the Kurdish region of Iraq? If so, we'd love to hear from you...

On a completely different note, I've returned from an absolutely lovely few days in Paris, and am looking forward a great deal to writing about my time once I've adjusted a bit more to being in my college's computer cluster rather than walking along St-Germain-des-Prés and the left bank of the Seine! (And incidentally - what's with this - just as soon as I go on vacation for a few days, we get 7,000 readers on a Sunday? It's okay, I won't take it personally.....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:47 AM by David Adesnik  

THE NOOSE TIGHTENS: US military spokesman are hinting that bin Laden is at the end of his rope. Perhaps the tabloids knew what they were talking about. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:44 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG LOVES FRANCE! In a recording addressed to President Bush, Al Qaeda chieftain Ayman al-Zawahri breaks new rhetorical ground by threatening France:

"France is the country of freedom which defends freedom to show the body and to be immoral and depraved. In France you're free to show yourself but not to dress modestly," [al-Zawahri] said in reference to the headscarf ban newly approved by parliament.

"This is a new sign of the Crusader hatred which Westerners harbor against Muslims while they boast of freedom, democracy and human rights," said the voice on the tape.

Now, OxBlog never thought that the headscarf ban was a good idea. But it's not as if Mr. Chafetz and Mr. Belton are about to strap dynamite to themselves and get on the next train for Paris. So, thank you, Mr. al-Zawahri, for reminding us -- not to mention our friends in Europe -- which side we're all on. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:16 AM by David Adesnik  

SHUTTERBUGS: If you look at today's coverage of the Haitian uprising in the WaPo and NYT, you'll notice that both have photos of the same man-in-the-street, Jean-Bernard Prevalis. According to the photo credits, they were taken by different photographers.

The NYT also has a quote from Prevalis, who was arrested by the insurgents because of his suspicions he supported the governments. He says that he is just a bricklayer.

I guess I noticed the twin photos of Prevalis because of this post from Glenn, which catches the NYT quoting the same man-in-the-street Bush critic in separate articles published weeks apart. As Glenn says, journalists know exactly where to go to get the soundbites they're looking for. But with Lexis-Nexis, such backhanded practices are becoming more and more transparent.

So what is it about Prevalis that got the attention of so many photographers? That his face was bloody? I guess that's news. But somehow you have to wonder if the audience back at home is getting the whole story if we have multiple correspondents chasing the same victim. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:57 AM by David Adesnik  

MY BOSS IN THE NEWS: As a peon at the Weatherhead Center, I know that if I don't have anything nice to say about Sam Huntington then I shouldn't say anything at all. One of the legendary scholars of his generation, Sam commands automatic respect from all of us who get our paychecks from the Center that he did so much to create.

Which is exactly why it is so delightful to see David Brooks rip into Huntington's latest book on all of our behalves. As Brooks aptly says, this is another book about the Clash of Civilizations, except this time the clash is on the homefront. And the enemy is from Mexico. Huntington's basic idea is that Mexican-Americans don't believe in the American dream. The more of the them there are, the closer they come to destroying the identity that made America great.

Now, I admit that I don't know the first thing about demographics or immigration. If Huntington has the evidence, he may be right. But it just sounds so cliche. In the early days of the Republic, they said the Germans couldn't be real Americans. Then they said the Irish couldn't be real Americans. Then the Italians. Then the Jews. Then the Chinese. Then the Koreans. And then the Pakistanis. But all of them seem to have adapted just fine and made America that much stronger. (OK, so I admit I'm not objective when it comes to evaluating the Jews.)

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how all this plays out at Harvard. Will people challenge Huntington in the hallways? Will they remain silent out of deference? Or will they have the same reaction because of pity? I'll let you know. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:13 AM by David Adesnik  

SADDAM'S LETTER TO HIS FAMILY: The Red Cross has visited Saddam in order to assess whether he is being treated properly as a prisoner of war. One of Saddam's rights as a prisoner is to send a message to his family. Since the Red Cross can't disclose the contents of Saddam's letter, I thought that I would creatively reconstruct them for your benefit:

Dear Family,

I hope that you are comfortable in your spider holes. Mine really wasn't that bad. You know sometimes, when Uday and Qusay weren't using them, I would climb down into those very small torture chambers we used to use to make our prisoners feel like they were inside a coffin. It was actually sort of fun being in there, since it reminded me of when I used to build little mud-brick forts as a kid in Tikrit.

I miss Uday and Qusay so much. Hopefully they're enjoying their 72 virgins right now. But those two used to go through 72 virgins a month back in the good old days. Of course, some of the virgins had to be shot when they didn't cooperate. Wouldn't it be funny if some of those virgins they shot were the ones Allah gave them in heaven? As Alanis Morrisette once said, "Isn't it ironic?"

By the way, have any of you spoken to Bashar lately? I know's he still angry about how I refused to give him all of my weapons of mass destructions before the Americans showed up. I don't know how many times I have to tell him, chem-bio is so passe. The future is all about laser death rays in outer space.

Besides, we had so much fun at the big party where we used up all of our WMD on those Kurds I had been saving since back in '88. The best was when I would go up to them, give them each a hot dog, and then say "Want some mustard gas with that?" You should've seen the looks on their faces!

As soon as the Americans are done with their interrogations, I'm going to start working on my next book. It's called Chicken Soup for the Dictator's Soul. You know there are a lot young, idealistic dictators out there who could use the advice of someone who's been through it all before. Even now, I really appreciate the calls I get from Slobodan and all of the Rwandan friends he's made at the Hague.

Anyhow, gotta go. They've got nachos in the mess hall tonight and if I don't get there early they'll all be gone.

Love,
Daddykins

.UPDATE: OK, so I wasn't the first one to have the fake-letter idea... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

HONI SOIT: I'm off to Paris! (Rachel and I are celebrating Valentine's Day a week late....) See you all soon, and please let us know if you'd like any psychoanalysis, tight black turtlenecks, or oddly shaped metallic buildings. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:31 AM by David Adesnik  

HEHEHE: There's some imaginative vocabulary over at Winds of Change. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:26 AM by David Adesnik  

DEAD-TREE THOUGHTS: Phil Carter has a solid op-ed on the National Guard issue in the Chicago Tribune. (Registration required) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:22 AM by David Adesnik  

EDWARDS VS. NAFTA: Terry Neal makes a pretty strong case that Edwards' anti-NAFTA stance is nothing more than shameless opportunism. I'm still pulling for Edwards' lost cause, but I don't want to see it regain momentum by catering to what is, for all intents and purposes, a special interest. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:08 AM by David Adesnik  

PITCHING WINS BALLGAMES: Wayne Hsieh thinks I'm counting chickens before they've hatched. He writes that

Don't get too confident now that you guys have got A-Rod. Your starting rotation has some questions...What happens if a starter goes down? Your farm system is pretty barren, so you won't get any help in-house. You have the money to take on bad contracts which will help in a trade-situation, but who knows what will be available...In all due honesty, I'd take Schilling-Pedro-Lowe-Wakefield-Kim over your rotation...

[The Yankees'] offense is truly impressive, but filled with aging veterans...You can take me to task if I'm wrong, but I think the BoSox will challenge you for the division. Regardless, I think both the Yanks and the BoSox will go to the playoffs--its hard to see the AL wildcard coming out of any other division. And if the BoSox have paced Pedro so he isn't gassed come October, watch out.

More specifically on the subject of A-Rod, MF writes that

I'm a long-time Mariner fan who has always been impressed with pretty much everything A-Rod has done. That being said, despite all the money and the talent he was surrounded by in Seattle and the deep pockets of Tom Hicks in Texas, he has never led a team to the World Series. Maybe he will actually
hurt the Yankees because there will be "too many cooks" and he won't react appropriately. No telling how Derek Jeter will react to another young, handsome, talented Latino in NY...this has all the makings of a "what went wrong?" scenario.

I never thought Jeter was all that good-looking, but that's probably not the point.

CORRECTION: As AD and GJ point out, Jeter is not Latino but rather half-black and half-white. There also seems to be some dissatisfaction with my low regard for Jeter's good looks, but no objective evidence that I am wrong on this count. In fact, I suspect that if I had $40 million and five World Series rings, a lot of people would think I was pretty good looking, too. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:55 PM by David Adesnik  

WILL EUROPE ACT? The European foreign ministers who negotiated November's agreement with Iran said that they would accept no more lies. Now we know Iran has lied again. The question is, will the Europeans show that multilateralism can work by getting tough with Teheran, or will they try to hold back the United States by making excuses for Iran's behavior?

Meanwhile on the homefront, some are beginning to wonder whether it's time for America to sharpen up the big stick. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:45 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE NUCLEAR FALLOUT: It turns out that Malaysian factories were also part of Pakistan's nuclear proliferation network. It also turns out that Libya had begun to generate plutonium. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:01 PM by Patrick Belton  

CLEANING UP DIRTY LAUNDRY: As part of Mexico's cleaning of its political house, and joining more fully over the past decade the community of democracies, former chief of domestic intelligence Nazar Haro has been arrested. Haro was also head of a covert paramilitary group called the White Brigade, which during Mexico's "dirty wars" of the 1960s and early 1970s was not always on the side of democracy or human rights, but generally was fairly predictably on the side of the governing PRI. The Washington Post has the story, and the National Security Archive has a truly fascinating electronic briefing book on Mexico policy in the Nixon and Carter administrations. (The briefing book is, incidentally, a collaborative effort between the National Security Archive and Proceso, a magazine which can best be described as Mexico's TNR.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:28 PM by Patrick Belton  

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMBASSADOR KENNAN! (He's 100 today!) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:35 PM by Patrick Belton  

IF YOU CALL ME A NATTERING NABOB, WHO PRODUCES SECOND-RATE ACADEMIC WORK, well, then I'll take it as a compliment: nabob, from Hindi nawwab, refers to a governor in the subcontinent under the Mogul empire. (It derives from Arabic nuwwb, pl. of n’ib, deputy, in turn the active participle of nba, to represent.) In other words, not that bad work, if you can get it.

And in turn, second-rate, to (correctly) describe the precise level of my academic accomplishment, derives, like all good things, from the Royal Navy. British naval vessels of the 18th and 19th centuries were classed principally according to the number of guns they carried. A sixth-rate ship was a frigate (i.e., as in Lord Nelson's exclamation from the quarter-deck of the HMS Vanguard before the battle of the Nile: "Frigates! Were I to die this moment, want of frigates would be found engraved on my heart!"); frigates carried between 22 and 28 nine-pounder guns and a crew of about 150, and measured between 450 and 550 tons. The Sophie of the fictional Captain Jack Aubrey, and the Surprise of the real-life, and far more dashing, Lord Cochrane on which he was based, was a ship of the sixth rate. Ships of sixth rate and above were of sufficient size to qualify as ships of the line in naval battle. On the other hand, first-rate ships, such as Lord Nelson's HMS Victory (still, incidentally, in service), boasted a minimum of 100 heavy cannon (the Victory carries 104), carried a complement of about 850 (there were 821 on board Victory at Trafalgar), and were over 2000 tons Builder’s Measure. To place the Victory's scale in context: she was constructed from approximately 6000 trees, 90% of them oak (this equates to 100 acres of woodland), at a cost of £63,176 in 1765 sterling (the equivalent of a contemporary aircraft carrier in nominal currency), her hulls are two feet thick at waterline, and the total sail area of her 37 sails is 6,510 square yards.

On the other hand, the sixth-rate Sophie was good enough for Aubrey, and its equivalents for Nelson - so think I'd be quite embarrassed, actually, to be classed an unworthy four ratings higher. But in any event, being a second-rate nattering nabob sounds to my ears at least like a quite pleasant prospect. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:33 AM by Patrick Belton  

SPEAKING OF POSTPONING ELECTIONS, the US is also considering responding to continuing violence in Afghanistan by postponing elections there which were currently scheduled for June. CS Monitor has a round-up - which includes an NYT piece on changing counterinsurgency towards sending small groups of soldiers to live in villages and gain the trust and cooperation of their residents, a BBC story about dramatic improvement in US-Pakistani cooperation, and the FT's speculations on whether increased violence in the south augurs a springtime insurgency there. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:59 AM by Patrick Belton  

FAME!!! Our first and foremost groupie, our lovely Rachel Belton, has had the honour of having a virus named after her! It deposits a file named oxwife.scr on your hard drive, which (unlike Rachel) takes over your computer, makes you spend lots of time cleaning things up, and keeps you from doing any work. (The link is to a Chinese antivirus information site, by the way, and not to the virus itself). Thanks, guys! But hey, what about the rest of us? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik  

THE JOURNALISTIC ELITE: Try not to laugh too hard. (Link via TPM.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:49 PM by David Adesnik  

A PRECEDENT TO BUILD ON: Rob Tagorda reports on Bush's public recommendation that Tunisia open up its press and its political process. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:43 PM by David Adesnik  

GORE INVENTED THE INTERNET, DEAN INVENTED THE BLOG: A senior adviser to Gov. Howard writes that

Along the way, Dean for America added a new word to [the] campaign lexicon -- "blog": It's a noun and a verb! The Dean Weblog, or Blog, helped inspire legions of young devotees. More than once I was reduced to tears when reading blog posts, as person after person told stories of how Howard Dean had inspired them to become involved in politics for the first time.

And I suppose that Glenn Reynolds invented sliced bread. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:37 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE UNILATERALISM, PLEASE: Haiti had descended into a state of anarchy, "but the Bush administration would rather leave the answers to Caricom or the United Nations or France. It's an inexcusable abdication." I agree with the sentiment, but I can't see any reason not to let France or the UN handle the Haitian crisis. We should use our political leverage to influence the outcome, but the stakes are low, so why not let France or the UN show that they are able to promote democracy when given the chance?

UPDATE: Well, it might violate the Monroe Doctrine... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:28 PM by David Adesnik  

THEY MUST'VE BEEN DRUNK: The Bush campaign team "has even prepared a couple of ad scripts targeting long shot Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio congressman." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:25 PM by David Adesnik  

PLAYS WELL WITH THE OTHERS: The US and UN are getting along surprisingly well in Iraq, despite the high stakes at play in the transition process. For just a moment, all those who constantly denounce the UN (myself included)should recognize that it seems to be playing a genuinely constructive role as an honest broker in Iraq. By the same token, all those caricature George Bush as a reckless unilateralist incapable of working with the United Nations should give his administration credit for doing so right now. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:19 PM by David Adesnik  

ENJOY THE SILENCE: Maureen Dowd is on vacation. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:15 PM by David Adesnik  

DEMOCRACY KNOCKS ON THE DOOR: Tom Friedman says that rather than antagonize Arabs, the invasion of Iraq has strengthened advocates of reform. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:04 PM by David Adesnik  

PAYBACK IN SPADES: "A bad day is when (1) you get arrested (2) by the people who once worked for you and (3) they tell you exactly what they think of you." That's what happened to the Four of Spades, Iraq's former minister of the interior.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:37 PM by Patrick Belton  

WAR IN IRAQ? KANT WOULD HAVE APPROVED. English thinker Roger Scruton (whom Martha Nussbaum calls "a Wagnerian romantic and a Thatcherite conservative") argues for the war in Iraq on Kantian grounds. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:35 PM by Patrick Belton  

LOTS OF GOOD RESEARCH ON RECIDIVISM AND JUVENILE CORRECTIONS: Our good friend David Pozen, who's been a classmate in New Haven and Oxford, has released several new papers on the relationships between recidivism in juvenile offenders and privatisation (increases recidivism but lowers short-term incarceration costs) on the one hand and peer effects on the other (which he shows to increase recidivism, too). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:42 PM by Patrick Belton  

ON THE EVE OF A CORRUPT ELECTION which will undoubtedly install a conservative majority and add the Iranian parliament to a trifecta of judicial, clerical, and now political institutions controlled by hardliners, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi announced today that she would not vote, in protest against the mass disqualification of reformist candidates. Abstention will be widespread, in fact - Agence France Presse's correspondent this morning found only one passer-by who was planning to vote, after speaking with three dozen.

Still, there will be an election, even if it has already been determined that its results will not reflect the preferences of the Iranian people, and the San Francisco Chronicle details the parties which will contest it. The Coalition of Builders of Islamic Iran, incidentally, is the party which has been designated to win, and it has said it will pursue a "Chinese" model of governance - presumably, economic development, authoritarian political control, and courting on its own terms of a West which does not truly care about human rights within its borders (see Kerry, below).

Here is the round-up of coverage: Washington Times, Agence France-Presse, Asia Times, Guardian, Radio Free Europe, Boston Globe, Al Jazeera, WaPo. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:21 PM by Patrick Belton  

HAVE A WSJ SUBSCRIPTION? If you do, then you can read a good essay asking whether we have the backbone necessary for democracy promotion in Iraq, by Larry Diamond (and his research assistant). If you don't have a subscription, you can still read about a friend of ours who somehow landed on the WSJ front page after single-handedly rebuilding the Iraqi stock exchange. Oh, he's 24. (Yeah, I know - that's what my mother said, too.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:35 AM by Patrick Belton  

SOME OF OUR READERS are in Oxford. Some of our readers enjoy roast beef sandwiches. Therefore, (*) it may well be the case that some of our readers both are in Oxford, and enjoy roast beef sandwiches.

In that case, you may not want to go to the otherwise quite lovely people at the Alternative Tuck Shop. Everything else there, on the other hand, is quite good. On the other hand, you could just subsist on cookies from Ben's Cookies.

* Proof is by Soundness Theorem, and is to be found overleaf. Oh wait, blogs don't have an overleaf. Guess I got off easy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:23 AM by Patrick Belton  

CHICAGO POST: Dan Drezner has some awfully good posts up on the trade adjustment assistance program, the effects of the low dollar, and the fun of demographics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:53 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE IRANIAN STUDENTS FIRE A SHOT AGAINST KERRY: We just received a copy of an open letter sent to the Senator's office by the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran. Like all of the best Persian literature, it's fairly lengthy - but the substantive bit is in these paragraphs:

We have read how you refer to the theocratic regime in Iran as a "democracy;" we have heard how, if elected, as the president of the United States you intend to "engage" this barbaric regime; this very terrorist regime that your own State Department lists as the most active "State Sponsor of
Terrorism." Why is it, Senator, in all your statements, you don't, even once, mention the oppressed and suffering masses of Iran? Obviously, as long as there is such preoccupation with appeasing the regime the people of Iran don't even enter your equation!

But, Senator, on February 8, 2004, Tehran Times, Mehr News Agency, as well the newspapers in the United States reported that: "The office of Senator John Kerry, the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary in the U.S., sent the Mehr News Agency an E-mail saying that Kerry will try to repair the damage done by the incumbent president if he wins the election." [Note: the email the students are referring to is here.] And, includes your statement: "... America needs the kind of leadership that will repair alliances with countries on every continent that have been so damaged in the past few years, as well as build new friendships and overcome tensions with others." Adding further: "He believes that collaboration with other countries is crucial to efforts to win the war on terror and make America safer."

Sir, diplomacy does not mean strengthening totalitarian regimes at the expense and the agony of the citizens of that country. Protracting the Islamic Republic's survival in Iran would only prolong our pain and suffering.

It goes on for a bit (and on, and on, God love 'em), but the students' letter does raise the interesting question of what Senator Kerry's views are toward Iran, especially as he increasingly becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee - and, moreover, how these will evolve and change during the course of the campaign. Senator Kerry's spoken on Iran once before in a major foreign policy speech (at the candidates' obligatory courtesy call on the Pratt House):

Iran also presents an obvious and especially difficult challenge. Our relations there are burdened by a generation of distrust, by the threat of nuclear proliferation and by reports of al Qaeda forces in that country, including the leadership responsible for the May 13th bombings in Saudi Arabia.

But the Bush administration stubbornly refuses to conduct a realistic, non-confrontational policy with Iran, even where it may be possible, as we witnessed most recently in the British-French-German initiative.

As president, I will be prepared early on to explore areas of mutual interest with Iran, just as I was prepared to normalize relations with Vietnam a decade ago. Iran has long expressed an interest in cooperating against the Afghan drug trade. That is one starting point. And just as we have asked that Iran turn over al Qaeda members who are there, the Iranians have looked to us for help in dealing with Iraq-based terrorists who threaten them. It is incomprehensible and unacceptable that this administration refuses to broker an arrangement with Iran for a mutual crackdown on both terrorist groups.

...

And as president, I will engage Iran and I will renew bilateral negotiations immediately with North Korea, and I will seek a new international protocol to track and account for existing nuclear weapons and to deter the development of chemical and biological arsenals in the future.

I can see how that would give the student protesters heartburn. It will be interesting, though, to see how Senator Kerry's views evolve during the course of the campaign, especially as he's often shown an admirable willingness to bend them to respond to the rough-and-tumble of politics.

UPDATE: A reader just called the Kerry campaign, and was told that the Iranian news agency received the Kerry position paper by subscribing to his website:

One of his staff (Heather can't-recall-last-name) explained that Kerry's campaign website offers visitors the ability to sign up to receive email from the Kerry campaign. Someone at the Iranian news agency signed up and THAT is how they received the position paper from Kerry. The article in the Tehran Times made it sound as though Kerry had emailed them specifically. That was not the case.

Thanks! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:57 AM by Patrick Belton  

LEX GALLICA: From NYT, on how the bureaucratic processes of the dirigiste state deal with the approval of marriages between the living and the dead: "Anyone wishing to marry a dead person must send a request to the president, who then forwards it to the justice minister, who sends it to the prosecutor in whose jurisdiction the surviving person lives." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:35 PM by Patrick Belton  

ARAB REFORM: Carnegie has an awfully good February issue of their Arab Reform Bulletin out, with articles on Hizbollah, the Egyptian Brotherhood, and democracy in post-Islamist societies. Amy Hawthorne and Carnegie deserve ample praise for introducing such a consistently substantive and sympathetic addition to the public conversation on liberalization and reform in the Arab world. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:20 AM by Patrick Belton  

WE'VE NEVER BEEN ENDORSED BY A WOODEN PUPPET BEFORE, BUT... Chicago- and foreign-beat-hardened reporter turned ventriloquist turned blogger Joe Gandelman - and his puppet John Raven - were kind enough to make us their blog of the day over at Moderate Voice. Thanks! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:23 AM by David Adesnik  

THE NEW NEO-CON REVISIONISM: In a column challenging Democrats to overcome their post-Vietnam confusion on foreign policy, David Brooks writes that

Democratic foreign policy in the 1970's was isolationist at worst, modest at best. Democrats eschewed flag-waving and moralistic language about the Soviets. Jimmy Carter talked about root causes like hunger and poverty. For many liberals, as Charles Krauthammer recently said, "cold warrior" was an epithet.

This is revisionism at its worst. Jimmy Carter is the one who restored moralistic language to the American dialogue with the Soviet Union. While Carter may have talked about hunger and poverty, he always talked about them in the context of human rights, a fundamentally American concept. As Carter memorably said, "Because we are free, we cannot be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere."

Moreover, one must recall that it was Nixon and Kissinger who purged moralistic language from the US-Soviet dialogue in the process of pursuing an amoral realpolitik approach to all aspects of US foreign relations. Carter recognized the fundamental contradiction between this realpolitik and America's democratic ideals and used it to his advantage. While Carter's human rights policy may have lost its way on many occasions, there is no question that it restored idealism and morality to the American agenda. It is for exactly this reason that John Lewis Gaddis observes that

If you asked what was one of the distinctive features of Ronald Reagan's presidency as far as foreign policy was concerned, one of the most important aspects of it was that he actually agreed with Jimmy Carter on the promotion of human rights, that he was as serious about this as Carter was. That made human rights a priority on the conservative, Republican agenda, surely reflecting the early neoconservative influences on foreign policy.

Once considered a realist, Gaddis' has been approaching neo-conservatism since 9-11. Months before Bush's February 2003 pledge to promote democracy in Iraq, Gaddis praised the President for his bold vision of a democratic transformation in the Middle East. [NB: Link is to a .pdf file. Download with caution.] While Gaddis might not identify himself as a neo-conservative, his most recent comments resemble those of Kristol, Kagan and Krauthammer more than they do any other foreign policy school of thought. (If Gaddis were Jewish, he'd fit right in with the neo-con crowd. Yet as someone who has known Gaddis for some time, I can assure you that he is one of the most goyish people you will ever meet. On the other hand, he is married to one of the nicest Jewish girls around.)

The purpose of establishing Gaddis' neo-con credentials is to show that Brooks' revisionism doesn't even make sense from a neo-con perspective. However, there are serious flaws with Gaddis' observations as well. What Reagan understood was democracy, not human rights. In theory, democracy was supposed to serve as the ultimate guarantor of human rights. Yet when Reagan prioritized democracy promotion -- most notably in El Salvador and Nicaragua -- he did so at the cost of the local populations' human rights.

Almost inevitably, promoting democracy entails a short-term risk to human rights. A dictatorship in the process of being overthrown often tramples on its subjects. Yet Reagan didn't simply trade off democracy for human rights. Rather, he showed a revolting callousness toward the ramifications of his chosen policies. Most notably, Reagan constantly defended the integrity of the Salvadoran military despite overwhelming and public evidence that it was responsible for tens of thousands of murders. Yet even declassified documents from both the CIA and the State Department show that the relationship between the Salvadoran military and El Salvador's notorious death squads was well-known and well-documented.

Moreover, one cannot even say that Reagan defended the Salvadorans in public out of political necessity. Declassified documents also show that Reagan defended them in private. This should not come as a surprise, however, since Reagan was never a liar. He simply believed the lies that he told. For these reasons, I find Gaddis' description of Reagan to be simply indefensible. More importantly, this oversight in Gaddis' comments points to an important similarity between himself and Brooks: both men want to write Carter out of the history of US foreign relations. Brooks gets rid of Carter by denying his idealism. Gaddis gets rid of Carter by declaring that his idealism was redundant.

Apart from the abstract importance of getting history right, these twin revisionisms point to important differences between liberal hawks and neo-conservatives. As some prominent liberal hawks have suggested, the problem with neo-conservatives isn't with what they believe but with how they believe it. In short, they aren't self-critical enough. This, of course, is a purely ad hominem attack. But it may be called for in light of Brooks' and Gaddis' disturbing effort to cleanse neo-conservatism of its Reagan-era sins.

After all, it is only by washing away such memories that Brooks and Gaddis are able to embrace Bush's foreign policy almost uncritically. As Gaddis writes, the Reagan-era pro-human rights

Trend has continued into this administration, which has moved even more radically and more firmly in this direction. So, ironically, this conservative Republican administration is really the most radical American administration we have seen in years in terms of its promotion of democracy abroad in places that were earlier regarded as inhospitable to it.

I agree with Gaddis that the resemblance between Reagan and Bush is striking, but not always in a good way. Like Reagan, Bush seems to be far better at talking about his ideals than putting them into practice. Hence the troubled occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Thankfully, Bush has done nothing to compromise human rights in the manner of his predecessor. For that reason, I find it far easier to accept Bush than to accept Reagan. Yet when this administration praises the democratic virtues of Vladimir Putin and Pervez Musharraf, I begin to wonder if Bush really understands a damn thing he is talking about. That is why I am a liberal hawk and not a neo-conservative.



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# Posted 7:58 PM by David Adesnik  

FREE TRADE DEFICIT: Dan Drezner praises the EU's sensible approach to outsourcing, bashes its reactionary farm subsidy policy and says that the real issue here is technology, not the lure of low wage labor markets in the Third World. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:04 PM by David Adesnik  

FATALITIES CONTINUE, BUT CASUALTIES FALL: Roadside bombs killed three American soldiers yesterday. Even so, the overall fatality rate has fallen this month, although not by much. In contrast, the casualty rate continues to fall, with weekly totals dropping below thirty.

Unfortunately, I have no idea why the fatality and casualty tolls are out of sync. Perhaps the insurgents are focusing their resources on fewer but better attacks. Perhaps it's all just a statistical anomaly. Anyhow, while victory and defeat can't be measured with a body count, it is nice to know that fewer of our soldiers are having to sacrifice their well-being. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:03 PM by Patrick Belton  

WITHDRAWAL: AN EFFECTIVE METHOD? CS Monitor ponders whether the US will delay the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq out of concern for the security situation in the country and worries over the possibility of a civil war.

But unlike most commentators who've placed the onus on an on-time handover on the White House's desire not to carry the Iraq occupation into the autumn's elections, the Monitor argues it's the other way around - Bremer and the Baghdad-based contingent of officials are pushing a transfer of sovereignty on schedule in order to maintain credibility with the Iraqis (and with an eye to Sistani's response to a delay). On the other hand, it's the White House which is most wary of the prospect of a civil war, joined in this by the State Department. Secretary Rumsfeld, on the other hand, along with the ranks of the Pentagon (excepting the deputy secretary and officials in line with his line of thought), are reputed to be quite eager to pull out of Iraq, and hand responsibility over to Foggy Bottom in the bargain.

(Any southerners in the readership are welcome, if they like, to instead refer to a possible Iraqi civil war as a "war between the sheikhs.") (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

STRATFOR ON PAKISTAN: Stratfor's weekly analysis argues that Musharraf has consented to escalate the fight against Al Qa'ida within Pakistan's borders, after presented, allegedly, with an ultimatum from DCI Tenet that the US would do so itself if Pakistan did not. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

GRATUITOUS THESIS/CLINTON JOKE: Congrats, Josh!

As part of my own dissertation work at the moment, I'm reading through the Public Papers of the Presidents for the past two decades to see what various Presidents have said about China policy. I'm also doing the same thing in the Congressional Record - the idea is then in the end to be able to say something about how the President and Congress interacted in making China policy at important moments. (An early draft, if you're interested, is here).

So, over the next few days, I might be sharing a few funny moments with our readers out of the Public Papers and the Congressional Record. (The alternative is alcoholism.) So here's one amusing bit that appears in the "Remarks to the China and United States Women's Soccer Teams Following the World Cup Final in Pasadena, California, July 10, 1999," at p. 1185 of the second volume of presidential papers for 1999. I'd like to draw your attention in particular to the stage direction the editors include at bottom.

The President (to the China's women's soccer team). I want to say to the whole team how much we admire your performance in the whole World Cup. You were magnificent today, and we were very honored to have you in our country. You will win many more games.

[After greeting China's team, the President proceeded to the locker room of the champion U.S. women's soccer team.]

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# Posted 3:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

OPEN QUESTION: So Comcast is attempting to buy out Disney. Does this mean that my broadband internet will begin coming with a Mouse? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:37 AM by Patrick Belton  

FAREED ON GETTING OUR BUDGETARY HOUSE IN ORDER: Drawing on Oxfordshire exile Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria says that the greatest threat to the United States's new engagement with world comes from the Bush administration's spendthrift addiction to butter. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:03 AM by Patrick Belton  

LE PLUS CA CHANGE, ET LE CHINE: James Mann, of CSIS and formerly the LA Times and one of the leading analysts of contemporary China within journalism or the academy, contributes a piece to today's WaPo on how in human rights, China hasn't changed over the past decade - the rest of the world has just lowered its standards:

The problem is that in fundamental ways relating to human rights and political repression, China today is not much different than it was a decade ago. Yes, China has been brought into the international community, if we define that phrase exclusively in terms of economics. But ordinarily the international community is not defined solely by membership in the World Trade Organization.

Chirac is right about one thing -- something has changed over the past decade. But it's not China. Rather, the rest of the world has become far more tolerant of the same Chinese political repression that it condemned in the early 1990s. A lifting of the EU arms embargo would be one more big step in this tawdry policy of accepting repression.

From permitting the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit prisoners in its jails, to allowing unauthorised public meetings or making the smallest statement of remorse for using arms against its peacefully protesting citizens, the Chinese regime has not budged in the slightest toward international norms of decency and human rights. On the contrary, from 1989 on, it's the West that has positively run, under three consecutive US presidents, to erase from the public stage all criticism whatsoever of the way Beijing treats its subjects. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:40 AM by Patrick Belton  

PUTTING NUMBERS ON A BIG, BIG PROBLEM: Over 4,450 Catholic priests can be documented to have been accused of committing sexual assault on minors over the past 52 years, according to a report commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and written by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. To put this number in perspective - there are only 44,000 priests currently serving in the United States; and even though the report entirely discards incidents involving a further 3,300 priests who had died, and only deals with incidents in which a victim of abuse has come forward, the number still represents over 4 percent of all priests who served in that period.

CORRECTION: 3,300 incidents involving dead priests weren't counted, rather than 3,300 dead priests. (Some dead priests may have been serial pedophiles.) Still, the point remains that even without taking a single dead priest into account over 4 percent of American priests have been accused of sexual assault of minors - an unforgiveably large amount of rape of children, and an unforgiveable betrayal of trust. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:03 PM by Patrick Belton  

STRATEGY UNDER SPIRES: Our friends in Oxford are very warmly welcome to come along this Wednesday to listen to our think tank's Eurasia Director, Paul Domjan, lead a conversation on different contemporary analytical techniques which may be used in making strategies for the future. Our meeting will be held in the New Room at St Antony's (Hilda Besse building), at 8 pm on Wednesday, and the more, the merrier. Some optional readings which are useful on the subject are on our foreign policy society's blog.

We also have frequent meetings in Washington, New York, Chicago, the Bay, LA, Boston, and New Haven, and a think tank we're getting off the ground - please just drop us a note if you'd like to be kept in the loop!

UPDATE: And a friend in our San Francisco chapter was kind enough to suggest a few more, which we've added here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:49 PM by Patrick Belton  

CRYSTALIZING THE FOREIGN POLICY CONVERSATION: Charles Krauthammer presented the Irving Kristol lecture at AEI last week, which was a quite good analysis of the four most noticeable currents within the contemporary American foreign policy conversation (i.e., isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism, and global democratization). One of his more interesting moves in this lecture is to propose the rechristening (errr, brising) of neoconservatism as democratic globalism - which, inasmuch as it makes muscular, idealistic democracy promotion into more of an option which both political parties can adopt, is something of which we who are the tradition's partisans can wholeheartedly approve. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:51 AM by Patrick Belton  

AMERICA AND ASHURA: Reza Aslan has a piece in Slate on the background of Ashura, and its potential this year for politicization in the context of the Iraqi Shi'a community's flexing of its political muscles. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED DUMBING DOWN OF CULTURE: While the NYT public editor makes a virtue of his newspaper's reporting on candidates' hairstyles and sartorial choices, the BBC does the Grey Lady one better with substantive, in-depth reporting on crop circles, psychics, and, yes, a webcam of a BBC reporter spending a night in a haunted hotel. Considering that one of the stronger arguments to be made in favour of publicly funded broadcasting is that high culture won't survive in a fully market-driven public sphere (and, therefore, the likes of Classic FM's "relaxing" Mozart will drive out the more serious, undebased cultural coinage of a BBC 3 or 4), it's not entirely clear why funds from the public treasury should be drawn upon to provide broadcasting fare which seems, if anything, a fair cut below what the market left to its own resources will provide. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:02 AM by David Adesnik  

JOSH MARSHALL TURNS THIRTY-FIVE: Congratulations to a savvy journalist who has helped the blogosphere earn its reputation as both informed and influential. It's an especially happy birthday for Josh, since he thinks there a real chance that America will get rid of its President come November. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:41 AM by David Adesnik  

DEFENDING KERRY: Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum respond to the WaPo. Whereas Matt bashes the media for manufacturing artificial criticisms, Kevin says that

one of the things that has long bothered me about Kerry is the fact that he seems to take such deliberately calculated positions on so many issues. This is a gut reaction on my part, not something I have documentary evidence of, but he often seems to be trying just a little too hard to simply come up with a position — any position — that won't piss off anyone on either side too badly.

Still, Kevin thinks Kerry had solid-yet-complex rationales for all of his positions. And both Matt and Kevin like the fact that Kerry prefers knowledge to ideology when it comes to decisionmaking.

The one issue I really want to take up with Matt concerns Kerry's attitude toward reconstruction. As Matt correctly observes,

Kerry (and Dean and Edwards) all very clearly said at the time was that their "no" votes should not be interpreted as opposition to appropriating large sums of money for the reconstruction of Iraq. Rather, they felt that the $87 billion was being misappropriated and financed in an unsound manner (increased borrowing) and that if the request could be defeated in the Senate it would be possible to negotiate a different, better deal with the president.

That's not a bad justification for voting against the bill. But what has Kerry done since then to show that he actually cares about nation-building and democracy promotion in Iraq? Edwards has at least made a serious effort to lay out a democracy promotion agenda. But with Kerry, you get the sense that he was doing exactly Kevin says he always does: looking for the position that will piss off the fewest people.

What I really want to hear from Kerry is this: "George Bush got us into the wrong war and prevented the UN from giving us any real help with reconstruction. But it is simply wrong to see the occupation of Iraq as a burden. Rather, it is a historic opportunity for the United States to address the root causes of terrorism by bringing freedom to the Middle East. The Bush administration is letting this historic opportunity slip away, but I can guarantee you that my administration won't."

Naturally, I disagree with the first sentence of that paragraph. But I put it in there to show that a sincere commitment to rebuilding Iraq is fully compatible with most Democrats' insistence that the war was wrong and that the peace is being lost. Do I expect John Kerry to say anything like this? No, not really. I think he really does see the occupation as a burden and does not want to antagonize those Democratic voters who share that view. But I do hope that Matt and Kevin, who have consistently emphasized the importance of doing Iraq right, will come out and say that if Kerry really cares about rebuilding Iraq he should say so unequivocally. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:12 AM by David Adesnik  

ORIGINAL REPORTING BY CALPUNDIT: Kevin Drum has been doing lots of original reporting on the Bush/National Guard issue. He's convinced that Bush had his military record "cleansed" while governor of Texas, but that there's not enough evidence left to prove it. Also, I agree with Matt that the Administration's stop-and-start release of Bush's military records has made the White House look both incompetent and dishonest. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:29 AM by David Adesnik  

MORE RIDICULOUS THAN MAUREEN DOWD: The Yankees sign A-Rod. That's just crazy. Don't the Red Sox at least deserve a chance to challenge us for the division title? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:40 AM by David Adesnik  

WAPO MASTHEAD CHALLENGES KERRY: Read the whole thing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:26 AM by David Adesnik  

JUDEOPHOBIA IN BRITAIN: It's not exactly anti-Semitism. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:21 AM by David Adesnik  

A HERD OF BLACK SHEEP: The following paragraph is from a WaPo article about George Bush's National Guard service:

Bush was unquestionably out of step with his generation and, as his mother has said, a late bloomer. While many of his 1960s contemporaries were openly challenging authority and convention, Bush held on to his father's values and ambitions, but with little success at the time. He partied and drank, clashing with his father after a night of carousing in 1972, and supported a war that many of his peers reviled.

But don't those facts show that Bush was actually very much in step with his generation? He didn't want to go to Vietnam, he took drugs, and he didn't follow his parents' advice. Only compared to the rest of the Ivy League and the Northeast was Bush clearly outside of the mainstream. For better or worse, the same could be said today. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:50 PM by David Adesnik  

WISHING FOR A LIBERAL HAWK: Tom Friedman is fantasizing about John Kerry. Meanwhile, MoDo is fantasizing that Ahmad Chalabi tricked Bill Clinton and Hans Blix into believing that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Wait, did I say Clinton and Blix? I meant Bush and Cheney. MoDo conveniently avoids explaining how Clinton and Blix, let alone almost all foreign intelligence agencies, became convinced that Saddam had WMD. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:48 PM by David Adesnik  

FOREIGN FIGHTERS LAUNCH DEADLY ASSAULT ON IRAQI POLICE: Fifteen Iraqi police and several civilians died in today's attack. Of the four assailants killed in the raid, one was from Lebanon and two from Iran. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:29 PM by David Adesnik  

NYT BLOG DEBUTS! The first NYT blog -- referred to officially as a "Web journal" -- belongs to none other than Public Editor Daniel Okrent. The format of Okrent's journal will be familiar to all those who inhabit the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as the blogosphere. The journal consists of brief posts which contain links to those documents and articles to which Okrent refers. Each post has a permalink attached in order to give it a unique URL. And, finally, readers have the right to respond by posting comments.

(NB: "Kristof Responds" is almost a blog. If it linked to other authors' work, it would be there. Still, there's no question that Kristof deserves considerable credit for interacting with his readers.)

I say that this is a victory for openness and transparency at the New York Times. Its own in-house critic has chosen to adopt the means of communication preferred by the Times' most inveterate critics. I think we are beginning to see a transformation in the way that journalists define their responsibility to their readers.

While journalists' have long -- and deservedly -- insisted that they serve the public by publicizing information about public figures and institutions, they have always hesitated to let anyone outside of the journalistic profession define how such service ought to be performed. As a result, journalists ensured that they themselves were largely spared from the oversight to which they subjected other influential men and women. But we may now be seeing the beginning of a day and age in which journalists acknowledge their responsibility to justify their methods and decisions to the reading public.

The reaction to such oversight is not surprising. As Okrent reports in his most recent column,

A lot of people here believe that The Times should be as open to examination as those The Times itself examines each day; their welcome has been generous and heartening. What's worse than I expected is the overt hostility from some of those who don't want me here...

One reporter ripped me up and down about how offensive it was that the staff had to endure public second-guessing, how it makes reporters vulnerable to further attack, how the hovering presence of an ombudsman can hinder aggressive reporting. When I objected - "I don't think your complaint's with me; I didn't invent this job" - the reporter hissed, "You accepted it!"

I think that this sort of reaction is indicative of many journalists' condescension towards the reading public they are supposed to serve. This reporters response is reminiscent of something that might have been said in the Nixon White House in the midst of Watergate. How dare the public insist on its right to know! That's not in the Constitution!

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the Times' staff has begun to assert its right to criticize Okrent in public. For example, NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller told the WaPo that one of Okrent's columns was "ill-informed". That is something that should happen more often -- a powerful journalist should be forced to empathize with all those who are constantly misrepresented by the news media. Perhaps, over time, this will teach journalists to respect their subjects a little more.

Even now, these initial moves towards transparency are forcing journalists to begin grappling with one of the most complex and explosive issues in the media world: bias. If Okrent's mail is any indication, the criticism he gets is predominantly from the NYT's left. To understand the following quotation from Okrent's column, you have to know that he wrote it as an imaginary interview with himself, i.e. he both asked and answered the questions. Hence:

Q. Speaking of editors, when are you going to write about the editors' evident pro-Bush, anti-Republican, Likud-sponsored, Israel-hating bias?

A. Not soon. I'm reading carefully; I'm taking notes; a few readers have kindly offered to keep track of what they perceive to be bias. I'm going to wait until I've bird-dogged this one over time before I come to any conclusions.

Strangely, it seems that those who object most to the Times' coverage would like to see it become more like The Nation. Perhaps that is inevitable in a liberal metropolis like New York. Perhaps the majority to the Times' right has assumed that there is no hope for change. Which is why I am going to conclude this column with a salute to the one man whose unorthdox and brash journalistic style forced the Times to confront its own failures. His name is Jayson Blair.

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# Posted 5:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

EXCITING PROGRESS THIS WEEK in Cypriot peace talks, which under substantial coaxing from Kofi Annan, and the shadow of a standing EU offer of accession to at least the Greek moiety of the island if there is no reunification by 1st May, have resulted in a drafted plan calling for reunification refendera in both communities in late April. See VOA,

On May 1...the European Union will grant full membership to 10 countries, including Cyprus.

EU leaders have made clear that they will allow the Greek Cypriot south of the island to join, even if a deal is not reached. And European leaders have also repeatedly warned that failure to re-unite the island could have an impact on Turkey's own chances of opening membership negotiations with the EU.

Analysts say Turkey's decision to persuade veteran Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash to agree to resume talks on the basis of the latest U.N. plan is rooted in Turkey's desire to be given a date for the membership talks to start when European leaders meet for their last summit of the year in December.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded the north of the island in the wake of an abortive coup attempt by Greek Cypriot nationalists, aimed at uniting the island with Greece. Under the terms of the U.N. plan, some 35-thousand Turkish troops on the island would gradually withdraw, which could lead to the establishment of a loose federation of the Turkish and Greek communities on Cyprus.

See also NYT:

According to the plan [agreed on Friday, under Secretary General Annan's brokerage], the two sides will reconvene on Thursday in Cyprus under a tight timetable calling for them to agree by March 22 on reunification language that can be put to simultaneous island-wide referendums in April.

Technical committees on laws and treaties will work out details, also starting next week, and the United Nations will preside over a separate committee on the financial and economic aspects of reunification.

If the two parties are unable to reach agreement themselves, the pact calls for Turkey and Greece to enter the talks. If differences still persist by March 29, Mr. Annan will have the power "to fill in the blanks," according to United Nations diplomats. The proposed date of the referendums is April 21.

"Very much as a last resort, the secretary general, with reluctance, will have the last word," said Álvaro de Soto, the Peruvian diplomat who is Mr. Annan's special adviser on Cyprus and who will lead next week's talks.

Athens, Ankara, London and Washington engaged in busy overnight diplomacy, and a European Union official in Brussels said Friday that they had no interest in becoming directly involved, thus taking the air out of the Greek Cypriot proposal.

If the Secretary General is able to succeed in bringing this 40-year conflict to a peaceful close, it will be one of the great successes of his organisation in our decade toward public order and human dignity, and will win justly deserved praise even from this often sceptical quarter. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY to all of our readers! We love you guys. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:34 PM by Patrick Belton  

OUR FRIENDS THE SAUDIS are bribing journalists. On the other hand, with a record like this they probably need to. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:01 PM by Patrick Belton  

YLS'S LEA BRILYAMER on conflict of laws, full faith and credit, and gay marriage. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:18 AM by Patrick Belton  

READING LIST: Here's a quick round-up of a few interesting pieces that appeared recently....

A former intelligence analyst, and current professor at the National Defense University, writes on intelligence community reform in Policy Review. Nicholas Eberstadt writes in the WaPo about the demographic emptying of Russia, and William Safire writes in FT about Russia's withdrawal from the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. Kaus has some wonderful stuff on Kerry, not all of which is about sex. John Gaddis, a friend of all the OxBloggers, goes for a Q&A session with the Council on Foreign Relations on Bush administration grand strategy. Brookings releases a report on global governance and shortcomings in the UN Millennium Declaration (as well as getting the Upstate economy going again). CSIS has loads of good stuff: on political trends in China, the Sudan peace process, AIDS in India, and Mid-East oil. Carnegie has pieces on women's rights in the Arab world (as well as liberalization and democracy promotion), proliferation strategy, and the effects of Nafta on Mexico.

TNR meanwhile runs a piece on France's idiotic veil law, while the Weekly Standard analyzes the administration's human trafficking policy. (The latter, incidentally, was also the subject of a talk here by Yale Law's Dean-Designate Harold Koh last night, who kindly stuck around to talk with some of us after his talk and again over lunch today). Also in the Standard, Jonathan Last writes a requiem for Clark, and neo-con-babe-turned-budget-geek Katherine Mangu-Ward analyzes the Bush budget. In New Haven, the Yale Corporation met and decided to jazz up Science Hill, reach out to China, and hike up tuition 5%. And here in Oxford, Oxford students are getting beaten up by townies left and right - incidentally, just days after a student newspaper printed a cover showing that basically every individual on every side of the BBC-Blair-Kelly-Hutton debacle had done some time in the local uni.

So - nothing to do for Valentine's Day? Don't want to duke it out with local hooligans, or visit a Parisian red light district? It's okay: cuddle up with OxBlog tomorrow. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:14 AM by Patrick Belton  

MORE SUPPORT FOR TRANSLATING WESTERN POLITICAL DISCOURSE INTO ARABIC: This time from Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:30 AM by David Adesnik  

IT'S MINE! ALL MINE! Matt Yglesias formulates the Adesnik Thesis. I might formulate it somewhat differently myself, but as they say, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Even better, Matt apparently thinks that I'm so well known that he doesn't have to use my first name, mention OxBlog, or link to anything I've written. And Matt should know, because he is famous.

What this all reminds me of is a story my father used to tell about his ambitions. If memory serves, the son of one of my father's colleagues married the daughter of violinist Itzhak Perlman. In the NYT wedding announcement, it identified the bride by simply saying that "Her father is the violinist." My father said that he would know that he had hit the big time if one day I got married and the newspaper identified me by saying "His father is the scientist." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:08 AM by David Adesnik  

SPINNING THE POLLS: The WaPo reports that

A majority of Americans believe President Bush either lied or deliberately exaggerated evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify war, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

If you scroll down a ways, you find out that 21% believe Bush lied while 31% believe he exaggerated without lying. Putting those numbers together to create a majority seems rather suspicious. If the WaPo wanted, it could just as easily have run a headline that emphasized a different finding from its most recent poll: that 68% of Americans think Bush really believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The WaPo also reports that

the president's declining ratings related to Iraq were most striking. Approval of his handling of the situation there has fallen to 47 percent, down 8 percentage points in the past three weeks.

Actually, there's nothing particularly striking about that. If you look at the supplementary data provided on the WaPo website, you discover that Bush's rating on Iraq is almost exactly where it was at the end of last October. His rating shot up when we captured Saddam and has slowly returned to where it was beforehand. The WaPo also observes that

The survey found that, for the first time since the war ended, fewer than half of Americans -- 48 percent -- believe the war was worth fighting, down 8 points from last month. Fifty percent said the war was not worth it.

To put that number in perspective, you again have to go to the supplementary data. It turns out that 58% of American think that the war in Iraq contributed to the United States' long-term security. In addition, 57% believe that the war can be justified even if we don't find any WMD Iraq. In contrast, 24% think that finding the weapons is critical to justifying the war while 17% think the war simply wasn't justified. On a related note, 61% of Americans still believe Iraq had WMD, a 28-point drop since December. All in all, it seems hard to agree with the WaPo's conclusion that

Questions about Bush's use of prewar intelligence, in addition to feeding doubts about his honesty, have sent his performance rating plummeting.

Given that Bush's overall approval rating has dropped 8% while his approval rating for handling the economy has dropped 7%, it seems a lot more sensible to conclude, as a great American statesman once said, "It's the economy, stupid." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:39 PM by David Adesnik  

OCTOBER SURPRISE: MoDo expects Osama bin Laden to suddenly appear in American custody just before the presidential election. Well, at least she's actually predicting something instead of just talking about sweaters. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:31 PM by David Adesnik  

THE LITTLE THINGS: This sentence from the NYT amused me: "American soldiers responded with a firestorm of gunfire and cannon, and the shooting lasted for at least a minute." What would you call it if the Americans kept on shooting for two or three or even five minutes? An inferno? Would an hour-long battle count as hell-on-earth? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:24 PM by David Adesnik  

THE DANCE CONTINUES: Are inspections working, or are Iranian confessions an indication of the fact that Teheran simply cannot be trusted?

Iran is an interesting case for the concept of inspections because it seems to lie halfway between Libya, the willing participant and Iraq, the intransigent opponent. It seems that Teheran will do its best to keep inspectors in the dark, but compromise when confronted with evidence of its misbehavior.

Given that there is no military option on the table, it seems the best option for the United States to throw all its weight behind ensuring the seriousness of the inspections process. Then again, it may be best for certain top officials to say nothing about the issue, since they have a way of antagonizing the UN and the rest of NATO whenever they decide to speak out. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

IRANIANS MEET AMERICANS, FIND THEY'RE NOT GREAT SATAN AFTER ALL: In one unusual benefit of having a large number of uniformed and other Americans on their border, a large number of Iranians have been having personal contact with Americans, and liking them. This the same week, incidentally, that marked the 25th anniversary of the declaration of the Iranian theocracy, which that April executed all prominent dissenting Iranians, and in November violated the laws of decent nations by seizing 66 American diplomats to hold as hostages, intended to force America to return the Shah from his exile there to face what would have been certain execution. You've come a long way, baby.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:45 AM by Patrick Belton  

CLIMBING UP THE HILL: Several interesting appearances within the last fortnight by State Department officials making the cross-town trip to the oak-panelled committee rooms of Capitol Hill. In particular, Assistant Secretary Anthony Wayne testified yesterday on progress in Iraqi economic and financial reconstruction, DAS Randall Schriver spoke last week on both Chinese military modernization and cross-Strait relations and China's membership in the WTO, Under Secretary Margaret Tutwiler testified on reforming public diplomacy, and coordinator for Afghanistan William Taylor presented a report card on Afghan reconstruction.

Also of interest are recent testimonies by executive branch officials on terrorist financing, Syrian support for terrorism, the state of counterterror operations in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and U.S. policy towards Iran, Central Asia and Colombia. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:55 AM by Patrick Belton  

EWWWWW: Just ask yourself - does the world really need a magazine devoted to photographs of undressed Harvard undergraduates? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:33 PM by David Adesnik  

WISHFUL THINKING: According to a Pentagon report, top Iraqi officials amazingly persuaded themselves that George Bush was not serious about going to war. If only they had listened to Chirac and Schroeder...

Also, I didn't know that

Dr. [David] Kay, the former chief C.I.A. weapons inspector, has said that his team learned that no Special Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons — but that all of the officers believed that some other Special Republican Guard unit had them. He said it appeared that the Iraqi officers were the victims of a disinformation campaign by Mr. Hussein.

It makes you wonder. Were all of Saddam's efforts to deceive UN arms inspectors just part of an effort to persuade his own government that such weapons existed? After all, if Saddam believed that Bush wasn't serious about going to war, then he had no reason to be concerned about committing the sort of material breach that would have been picked up by US intelligence agencies.

What I still want to know was whether Saddam thought the US wouldn't attack despite believing Iraq had WMD or whether he assumed that we wouldn't attack because we knew that the WMD were a fabrication designed to fool Saddam's own henchmen. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:20 PM by David Adesnik  

SADNESS AGAIN: Another suicide bombing claims dozens of lives in Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:53 AM by Patrick Belton  

DISCUSSING HOMELAND SECURITY IN THE WINDY CITY: I would be awfully remiss if I did not take very grateful note of the kind support for the inaugural meeting Sunday of our foreign policy society's Chicago chapter that was graciously extended by Dan Drezner ("bipartisan, idealistic, nuanced"), the Crescat authors ("drop by!"), and Proculian Meditations ("dupes and running dogs ... figuring out what national security policy best serves the interests of the capitalist class"). Thanks, folks!

Will Baude and Amanda Butler's notes from the meeting are up here. Tonight, our Oxford chapter is meeting at 8 pm in the New Room in St Antony's (in Hilda Besse - ask the porters) for a talk by Zach Kaufman (Magdalen) on the history of war crimes tribunals from Nurenberg to the present, with a particular view toward the implications for an eventual trial of Saddam. His catchy title: "Dealing (with) the Ace of Spades." Many more events coming up soon in the Bay, LA, New York, DC, and Boston - please drop a note if you'd like to be kept in the loop! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:58 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG FILM CLASSICS: I've been watching a lot of old movies lately, so I thought I would review some of them here. After all, you don't hear much about films once they become a few months old, let alone a few decades. And if you want to hear about new releases, the professionals have a lot more interesting stuff to say than I do. So here goes...

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a 1962 western directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. Offhand, I don't think I've seen any John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart films before (which tells you a lot about how ignorant I am on the subject of film). So what you're getting here are the impressions of a total novice.

First of all, the vintage acting style in Valance struck me as extremely artificial and melodramatic. The characters didn't seem to interact with one another so much as deliver monologues while standing near one another. While this approach seems deficient from a 21st century perspective, I imagine that it has its own strengths which I'll come to appreciate over time.

That said, I still found Jimmy Stewart extremely annoying. He's like a WASPy version of Woody Allen, except not at all funny. While you pretty much know that Stewart, the hero, won't get shot and killed, that didn't stop me from hoping. On the other hand, I liked Wayne's performance a lot more, althought it was hard not to laugh when he ended every sentence with the word "pilgrim" (as in "You look mighty tired there, pilgrim.")

Anyhow, once I got past the culture shock of watching a 40-year old film I really began to like it. Valance is a story about a classic dilemma in American life: should we resist force with force, or strive to establish just laws that prevent others from using force unjustly? The scenario plays out as follows: Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) is a young Eastern-born lawyer headed for the frontier. On his way, he is robbed and beaten by the outlaw Liberty Valance. Upon arriving in the town of Shinbone, Stewart discovers that no one has the courage to make Valance pay for his crimes.

The only thing that prevents Valance from taking over Shinbone completely is the fact that Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) can draw a gun just as fast as the outlaw himself. Apalled by this situation, Stewart resolves to put Valance on trial. Stewart carries on even though Wayne insists that his approach is naive and will only result in Stewart's getting killed.

There is also a very strong political element in the film, since the territory is in the midst of a struggle to decide whether or not it wants to join the Union. At the same time that Stewart tries to bring Valance to justice, he is also trying to organize the townsfolk to vote for statehood. However, it turns out that Valance has been hired by rich cattle ranchers to scare the voters out of joining the Union.

From the perspective of February 2004, Valance seems to be a film about democracy promotion and nation-building. In academic circles, one often hears that democracy is about more than elections. It is about the rule of law. It is about having a free press. It is about ensuring that those with wealth cannot distort the political process.

As it turns out, Hollywood knew that 40 years ago. Thus it might be a good idea to have a special screening of Valance in the White House theater. It might remind George Bush that the challenges facing Iraq and Afghanistan today are similar to those Americans faced in the West 120 years ago.

However, the film might also serve as a reminder to critics of the administration that the use of force is often necessary in order to put American ideals into practice. As Stewart discovers, you can only take the high road in those lands where the law is already sovereign. On the frontier, you need a gun. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:13 AM by David Adesnik  

LOOKING FOR BUSH: Kevin Drum has a whole lot of posts on the President's newly released military service records. Just keep on scrolling. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:06 AM by David Adesnik  

PUNDITS IRRELEVANT: Not much to say after Kerry's wins in Virginia and Tennessee. I can't say I'll miss Wes Clark, although there was a time in early January when he looked pretty attractive as the only viable alternative to Dean. So much for foresight. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:59 AM by David Adesnik  

ONCE A TYRANT, ALWAYS A TYRANT: Saddam rules in prison. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:35 AM by David Adesnik  

A SAD DAY IN IRAQ: The terror continues. Our condolences to the victims, whose only crime was wanting to participate in the rebuilding of their country. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:18 AM by Patrick Belton  

iBROKE: My iBook is sadly iBusted, so iWill be writing slightly less than usual on the iBlog and iThesis for the next several days. iSorry. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:20 PM by David Adesnik  

BLACK IS WHITE, UP IS DOWN: Glenn Reynolds thinks CNN may be spinning the Zarqawi memo as proof that anti-American insurgents are growing stronger, not weaker.

But I think that this is a case of sheer incompetence, not bias, a possibility that Glenn acknowledges. If you read the article attached to the headline, its gets the story right. The headline just seems out of place, like some sort of accident.

Unfortunately, I can't even find the original story on the Netscape/CNN site. Instead, there is a similar report bearing the headline: "Letter: Bin Laden Has Recruiting Problems". Of course, that's somewhat misleading as well, but at least they're getting closer... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS, REDUX: Psychologist and current graduate school dean Peter Salovey to replace Richard Brodhead as dean of Yale College; American religion scholar Jon Butler will take over as dean of the Graduate School.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:19 AM by Patrick Belton  

IT'S ALL IN THE ADVERTISING, PART 31 OF A SERIES: Statravel.co.uk includes this Valentine's Day special on its website:

If you fancy a quaint little number, then we have the perfect weekend break for you to impress. This delightful hotel located in the area of Montmartre and minutes from the Sacre Coeur and Moulin Rouge has to be a bit of a find.

Area of Montmartre, by Moulin Rouge - so basically, you're saying that it's right plunk in the middle of Paris's red light district? (Unless this is a fairly heterodox species of British "Valentine's Day special"?) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:50 PM by David Adesnik  

BUSH VS. RUSSERT: There are two basic ways to think about Tim Russert's hour-long interview with the President, broadcast this morning on NBC's Meet the Press. One is that Russert went soft. The other is that the debate about the missing WMD has been played out to the point at which every thrust and parry on both sides of the aisle has become extremely easy to predict.

While Russert certainly could have been nastier and interrupted the President more often, there is an expectation (perhaps unjustified) that even journalists will show a certain amount of deference to the Commander-in-Chief when talking with him in person. Besides, Bush is usually willing to hang himself if you just give him enough rope.

Anyhow, Russert did get to ask the tough questions that everyone expected. For example:

The night you took the country to war, March 17th, you said this: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."...

How do you respond to critics who say that you brought the nation to war under false pretenses?

Or:

Can you launch a preemptive war without ironclad, absolute intelligence that he had weapons of mass destruction?

And:

Looking back, in your mind, is it worth the loss of 530 American lives and 3,000 injuries and woundings simply to remove Saddam Hussein, even though there were no weapons of mass destruction?

Finally:

The Bush-Cheney first three years, the unemployment rate has gone up 33 percent, there has been a loss of 2.2 million jobs. We've gone from a $281 billion surplus to a $521 billion deficit. The debt has gone from 5.7 trillion, to $7 trillion, up 23 percent. Based on that record, why should the American people rehire you as CEO?

While relatively tough, those questions are also relatively predictable. How much you wanna bet that Bush's prep team asked him almost exactly the same questions in their rehearsals for the Russert interview?

Of course, the fact that the questions were so predictable makes the President's lackluster responses even more disturbing. While Bush managed to hit his talking points, his stumbling defensiveness made the interview hard to watch, even for someone like myself who thinks that there are perfectly good answers to all of Russert's questions about the war.

Now, we know George Bush is going to stumble. We can forgive him for being less than eloquent. But more important than the fact of stumbling is the way in which it conveyed a total inability to think through the issues in a sophisticated manner. Throughout the interview, Bush seemed like he was struggling to remember what he had been told to say at rehearsals. This, after 18 months of having Iraq in the headlines?

But personally, far more disturbing than this stumbling was Bush's defensiveness. Everyone response came across as an almost desperate effort to pretend that Russert's questions hadn't really hit on one of the administration's major failures. Bush came across as someone who simply couldn't admit to the American public when something had gone wrong. If Bush had just come into the interview and said, calmly and confidently, that of course there were major intelligence failures, I think he would've won a lot of respect without losing anything in political terms. Everyone already knows the weapons aren't there. Admitting is the best damage control strategy.

Now, there was one point at which the confused and defensive Bush gave way to a calm and confident alter ego. In the middle of a question about nation-building (which he was in the midst of fumbling), Bush suddenly got this look in his eye as if he knew exactly what the right answer was. He said that

The best way to secure America for the long term is to promote freedom and a free society and to encourage democracy. And we are doing so in a part of the world where people say it can't happen, but the long term vision and the long term hope is -- and I believe it's going to happen -- is that a free Iraq will help change the Middle East. You may have heard me say we have a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. It's because I believe so strongly that freedom is etched in everybody's heart, I believe that,and I believe this country must continue to lead.

The change in the President's body language was astonishing. It's the kind of thing that doesn't show up in transcripts, the kind of thing that made me glad I actually got up so damn early on a Sunday morning in order to watch the interview.

When Bush started talking about democracy promotion and the universal desire for freedom, his words began to flow in a way they hadn't before. And you couldn't help thinking that the words were coming straight from his heart. With Reagan, you could dismiss it as acting. But with Bush, it's hard not to believe he's sincere.

Now, that doesn't mean that Bush truly understands what kind of effort serious democracy promotion entails. It doesn't mean that he will notice when the US begins to compromise its principles in countries that don't make the headlines. But it gives me a certain confidence that he understands why the reconstruction of Iraq is vital to our long-run victory over the forces of terror. That is why Bush put himself on the line for the $87 billion reconstruction bill. That is why we still have 120,000 troops on the ground. While I can't shake my suspicions that Bush (or Cheney or Rumsfeld) is getting ready to cut and run, the fact is that the President has shown a surprising willingness to stay and fight for what innumerable critics have long dismissed as a lost cause.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:50 PM by David Adesnik  

WAITING FOR MODOT: Who says that there's no such thing as good political art? This dramatic tour de force is a masterpiece worthy of Chekov. Letting an author of such brilliance work as a mere columnist is a travesty, an outright betrayal of all that is good and pure about the American theater. Thus, I suggest that the New York Times fire her immediately. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

IN A STEP OF EXTRAORDINARY IMPORTANCE in the evolution of Japan's use of its military, the first convoy of troops drawn from Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force crossed into Iraq today to participate in reconstruction and peacekeeping activities. They will deploy in the southern city of Samawa, and will eventually build up to 1,000 air, ground, and naval personnel, in line with legislation passed in July to permit the deployment of Japanese military units in non-combat zones abroad. The deployment will likely receive additional legislative authorisation from the upper house of the Diet tomorrow. Christian Science Monitor has a great deal more. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:18 AM by Patrick Belton  

JIM WOOLSEY ON this question, in the WSJ op-ed page:

So which is it: Are America's spies a gaggle of fools for believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or is the Bush administration a gang of knaves for lying us into a war?

One of Jim's most interesting points has to do with the scale of the biological weapons in question:

Take anthrax. The Iraqis admitted they had made 8,500 liters (8.5 tons), and Colin Powell in his February speech to the U.N. Security Council noted that the U.N. inspectors thought Saddam could have about three times as much. But even this larger amount would weigh only some 25 tons in liquid form--slightly more than one tractor-trailer load. If reduced to powder, as Mr. Powell suggested in his speech, it could be contained in a dozen or so suitcases.

His final conclusion, I also think, is also noteworthy:

[A] three-part emphasis on human rights, terrorist ties and WMD programs would have been solidly in line with the president's own explicit policy. A three-legged stool is more stable than a one-legged one, but for some reason the administration decided not to make all three parts of its case in justifying the decision to go to war. As a result, its very heavy emphasis on WMD to the exclusion of the other two bases of its strategy has left the administration vulnerable to the failure to find WMD stockpiles.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:54 AM by David Adesnik  

THE GRUNTS' WAR: The WaPo has an excellent article on what fighting insurgents means for the common soldier. But as the article also makes quite clear, there are no common soldiers. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:36 AM by David Adesnik  

JUST HOW LIBERAL IS JOHN KERRY? That's the question of the day over at the NYT, which has up an in-depth look at Kerry's two decades in the Senate. The profile opens with lavish praise of Kerry's work as chairman of special committee established for the purpose of investigating whether or not there were still American POWs in Vietnam. I don't know much about the issue, but it does seem that Kerry deserves credit for navigating a political minefield and helping re-establish US-Vietnamese relations. On the other hand, characterizing some of Kerry's critics as "zealots steeped in Rambo movies" doesn't exactly suggest that the NYT is taking an even-handed approach to the issue.

After the POW issue, we get to the bread and butter: Kerry's strong support for abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and environmental protection. I think he's been on the right side of every one of these issues. However, he has broken with the Democratic majority on NAFTA and welfare reform, positions that I also support. Even so, it's probably fair to describe Kerry as "solidly liberal", even if he doesn't seem to want that label himself.

The one major error in the NYT profile concerns Kerry's role in the Iran-Contra affair. The Times writes that Kerry's

ad hoc investigation paid off. Suspicions about Colonel North increased. The Foreign Relations Committee began a formal inquiry. Documents found in a plane that was shot down in Nicaragua indicated involvement by the C.I.A. And in November 1986, a Middle Eastern newspaper reported that United States arms had been secretly sold to Iran with the proceeds diverted to support the contras.

While Kerry's deserves credit for paying attention to the issue before many other Senators did, it is absurd to imply that his work contributed to any major revelations of the Reagan administration's misconduct. What blew the case wide open was the plane crash mentioned above. The fact that a Nicaraguan soldier shot down a plane and that one of its American crewmen survived was a matter of sheer luck -- bad for the President, good for the Constitution. Without that plane crash, there would've been no story.

As for the Iranian connection, the story of American arms shipments was broken by a small Lebanese paper called Al-Shiraa. Again, that was a matter of considerable luck. Kerry did not in any way lay the foundation for it.

But enough about what the NYT did write. Far more important is what it didn't. If you compare the NYT article to it's counterpart in the WaPo, you'll be left asking yourself how the NYT managed to avoid any mention of Kerry's double-speak justifications of his votes against the first Gulf War and for the second. The WaPo reports that

Nowhere has Kerry been challenged more for voting one way and talking another than on Iraq, both for his vote in support of the war in 2002 and his vote opposing the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

In 2002, he voted for the resolution authorizing Bush to go to war unilaterally, but then became one of Bush's harshest critics for having done so. Kerry, in his floor speech before the vote, warned Bush to build an international coalition through the United Nations, but the resolution did not require the president to gain U.N. approval before going to war. Kerry later said he was voting not for the use of force but for the threat of force.

In January 1991, Kerry opposed the resolution authorizing Bush's father to go to war to eject Iraq from Kuwait, arguing that the U.N. sanctions then in place should be given more time to work. When former Vermont governor Howard Dean recently challenged Kerry to square those two votes, aides said that the 1991 vote was not one in opposition to the use of force, just as Kerry has said his 2002 vote was not in support of the use of force.

In his 1991 floor speech, Kerry accused President George H.W. Bush of engaging in a "rush to war" -- language similar to that he used in criticizing the current president on the eve of the Iraq war a year ago. Kerry argued in 1991 that there was no need to pass the resolution to send a message threatening force against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, although that was his justification for supporting the 2002 resolution.

Before and after last year's war on Iraq, Kerry criticized the president for failing to assemble the kind of coalition Bush's father put together in 1991. But in his 1991 floor statement, Kerry was dismissive of the elder Bush's coalition. That effort, he said, lacked "a true United Nations collective security effort," and he was critical of the then-president for trading favors for China's support and cozying up to Syria, despite its human rights record.

"I regret that I do not see a new world order in the United States going to war with shadow battlefield allies who barely carry a burden," he said then. "It is too much like the many flags policy of the old order in Vietnam, where other countries were used to try to mask the unilateral reality. I see international cooperation; yes, I see acquiescence to our position; I see bizarre new bedfellows and alliances, but I question if it adds up to a new world order."

Now how does the NYT spin the issue? It writes that

In 1991, [Kerry] opposed sending troops to fight in the Persian Gulf war. But he voted in 2002 to authorize fighting in Iraq, and he supported military action in Panama, Somalia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

"I think he's a moderate Democrat ? very liberal on social policy and reasonably conservative on foreign policy and defense matters," said former Senator Warren B. Rudman, Republican of New Hampshire.

How clever. Using an out-of-context quote by a Republican to make Kerry seem to have a far more consistent record on national security than he actually does. I doubt Karl Rove will be so kind.

All in all, it looks like I'll be facing the usual dilemma this November. I can get the domestic policies I like by voting Democratic and the foreign policies I like by voting Republican. But no matter which way I vote, the chances of getting a straight-talker in the White House aren't very good. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion