OxBlog

Sunday, March 28, 2004

# Posted 6:17 PM by Patrick Belton  

I IMAGINE IT WOULD BE UNGENTLEMANLY to say we was robbed, so let me instead just warmly congratulate the 'tabs on their victory at Henley this afternoon.
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# Posted 5:48 AM by Patrick Belton  

NASRALLAH IS ATTEMPTING to draw Hezbollah and Hamas closer together: at a memorial in Beirut's southern suburbs for Sheikh Yassin, Hezbollah's Secretary-General told Hamas's Khaled Meshal,
We in Lebanon are with you. Be sure that your blood is our blood and your sheikh is our sheikh. We share the same destiny and this means that our fight is one
Hamas, on the other hand, is widely being considered by analysts to be working at its maximum capacity already, making claims of accelerated activity against Israeli targets principally rhetorical. (And for Palestinian voices calling for peaceful intifada, see Palestinian intellectuals' ad, Muslim WakeUp, and Palestinian Catholic priest Raed Awad Abushlia.)

UPDATE: Dan Drezner has more on Palestinians calling for nonviolence.
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# Posted 4:39 AM by Patrick Belton  

HAPPY SPRING FORWARD DAY, EVERYONE!

UPDATE: Yanks have to wait a week.....
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Saturday, March 27, 2004

# Posted 12:31 PM by Patrick Belton  

HINDI GRAMMAR QUOTE OF THE DAY: If you want to request food, khana, the failure to produce aspiration will result in kana. That is, you will end up asking for a one-eyed person.

UPDATE: Our beloved Adrienne points out that Tamils have no aspirations.
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# Posted 10:03 AM by Patrick Belton  

DIPLOMACY OF IRISH PM AHERN HAILED in restoring direction to sidetracked talks about the EU Constitution. There's more on the Irish presidency here, and on the constitution here.
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# Posted 7:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE'S SASHA ISSENBERG ably, but a bit harshly, takes down David Brooks's red state-blue state distinction by poking holes in it.

After challenging individual assertions by Brooks about, say, Nascar, QVC, and Doris Kearns Goodwin audiences, Issenberg draws the conclusion that Brooks is feeding into prejudice under the guise of public intellectualism,
There's even a Brooksian explanation for why he has become so popular with the East Coast media elite. Blue Americans have heard so much about Red America, and they've always wanted to see it. But Blue Americans don't take vacations to places like Galveston and Dubuque. They like to watch TV shows like The Simpsons and Roseanne, where Red America is mocked by either cartoon characters or Red Americans themselves, so Blue Americans don't need to feel guilty of condescension. Blue Americans are above redneck jokes, but they will listen if a sociologist attests to the high density of lawn-abandoned appliances per capita in flyover country. They need someone to show them how the other half lives, because there is nothing like sympathy for backwardness to feed elitism. A wrong turn in Red America can be dangerous: They might accidentally find Jesus or be hit by an 18-wheeler. It seems reasonable to seek out a smart-looking fellow who seems to know the way and has a witty line at every point. Blue Americans always travel with a guide.
Leaving aside the obvious fact that Issenberg can't help invoking the red state-blue state distinction even in the act of criticizing Brooks for coining it, I wonder, more broadly, whether he might perhaps discount just a bit too drastically the reliability of lived experience - the "does it ring true?" test - as a guide for an essayist: even if most Marylanders or New Jerseyans are in fact Nascar watchers, and if there are substantial coastal enclaves like Austin, Texas solidly ensconced in red America, Brooks isn't necessarily purveying stereotypes to his buying audience when he seizes onto status details, Tom Wolfe-like, to summon up the distinction between a secular, educated, suburban (and gentrifying-urban) liberal America on the one hand and a godly, more traditional America on the other. This is distinction most readers and commentators would, based on their lived and reflected-upon experience of American social reality, place more evidentiary faith in than in particular demographic points of information about the moment's sales of No Ordinary Time on Amazon.com. As, I think, they should.

Nor is this to say that considered lived experience of social reality can't contain prejudices and biases which can and should be battered down by cannonades of evidence - only to say that something like Scottish enlightenment philosopher and epistemologist Thomas Reid's notion of common sense should also guide us in steering a path between the assumptions we live by and points of information which are adduced to challenge and demolish them.

One last point before leaving the topic: Issenberg (in what I do want to acknowledge again as a witty, provocative essay) depicts Brooks as an ersatz, faux public philosopher, and quotes approvingly an academic who bemoans the tempora and mores which in the place of a public space which once had "Holly Whyte, who got Jane Jacobs started, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Galbraith," has now given us "David Brooks as your sociologist, and Al Franken and Michael Moore as your political scientists." That, though, is clearly the fault of academics - the serious sociologists, political scientists, and ethicists whose presence in public debate the author laments - who have not risen to addressing a public audience in a creative way which captures the imagination and frames sensed realities in new ideas, language, and distinction. That pundits and reporters have seized the ground only indicates that scholars in the social sciences have in our generation been more preoccupied with academic politics and narrow disciplinary disputes than in fulfilling the role of public intellectuals (or, like Cornel West, have sought fame in the public eye without carrying with them insightful or creative ideas) - and this is a true trahison des clercs.

UPDATE: Wonkette and Easily Distracted both have takes on the piece, too.
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# Posted 7:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

GEE, THANKS, DAD: Father of a deploying medic, about his son: "In war, as we've learned through all our history, who gets killed and who doesn't is just happenstance. But if I can raise the odds, then I'll feel better."
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# Posted 7:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

RIGHT TO COUNSEL WATCH: In south Texas, a judge had to reprimand the prosecuting and defending attorneys in a sexual assault trial after both of them took to referring casually to the defendant in open court as "this monster".
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# Posted 6:00 AM by Patrick Belton  

THESE ARE PROVING ADDICTIVE: Today's selection of Jewish humour is brought to you by the blogosphere's resident ventriloquist, Joe Gandelman.

I flew El Al Airlines. They have two stewardesses. One serves the food, the other says, eat...eat...

I tried selling a Jewish game show to NBC but they didn't like it. I thought it was a great title: The Price Is Too Much.

Brooklyn radio station: This is KTV radio broadcasting at 1600 on your dial..but for YOU 1550.
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# Posted 5:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

LOTS OF STUFF GOING ON OVER AT OUR FOREIGN POLICY SOCIETY: Our vice president, and my good friend, John Ciorciari will be moving back from Asia in order to join our foreign policy society's Washington chapter; and, since he needs a day job to support him while in Washington, he will also be entering government as the senior advisor to the assistant secretary for international affairs at Treasury. Our warm congratulations, John - you've done us awfully proud!

This morning, our Africa program director, Zach Kaufman, has a letter to the editor in today's New York Times about the anniversary of the Rwanda massacre.

Also, we're running a national high school and college foreign policy essay contest, in our chapters in New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Miami, and Houston. Our essay contest asks students to "Place yourself in the position of the President's National Security Advisor, with the opportunity to propose a new initiative or a substantial change in an area of American foreign policy. What proposal would you submit to the President, and how would you argue for it? Your memo should consist of two single spaced pages, and will be judged on the merits of the quality of argument you display in arguing for your chosen proposal." Our timeline is:
April 30 -- deadline for submission of entries to local chapters
May 15 -- local chapters to determine local winners and pass along the grand prize entry to the national pool
May 28 -- announcement of national grand prize winner amidst a massive press frenzy by the President in the Rose Garden, and having the consequence of rendering all of our contest winners instantly irresistible to the opposite sex.
For more information, you could look at the essay contest page of our website, or e-mail our essay contest chair, Connie Chung.

And finally, our Los Angeles chapter is meeting this Sunday to discuss grand strategy, and our Chicago chapter will be meeting up next Sunday for a discussion of the media in foreign affairs. Do drop by if you can - the discussions should be awfully interesting! And please drop us a note if you'd like to be added to our newsletter.
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# Posted 2:28 AM by David Adesnik  

SPIRIT OF '76: I'm heading down to Philadelphia for the weekend. Back on Monday.
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# Posted 2:24 AM by David Adesnik  

YES, GENOCIDE: Nick Kristof reports on Sudan.
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# Posted 2:13 AM by David Adesnik  

A HARD MONTH IN IRAQ: After a significant drop in fatalities and casualties in February, the numbers for March have returned to higher levels. During intense fighting yesterday in Fallujah, American forces suffered their 400th combat death. Our thoughts go out to the soldiers and their families.
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# Posted 2:06 AM by David Adesnik  

WaPo CLIMB DOWN: Without admitting they ever got the story wrong, the WaPo correspondents on the Clarke beat are backing down from their initial assessment of Clarke's criticism. In a News Analysis column entitled "Bush, Clinton Varied Little on Terrorism", Dana Milbank and Dan Eggen (with an assist from Walter Pincus) write that the
[9/11] commission's determination that the two policies were roughly the same calls into question claims made by Bush officials that they were developing a superior terrorism policy. The findings also put into perspective the criticism of President Bush's approach to terrorism by Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief: For all his harsh complaints about Bush administration's lack of urgency in regard to terrorism, he had no serious quarrel with the actual policy Bush was pursuing before the 2001 attacks.

Clarke did not respond to efforts to reach him for comment yesterday.
Ouch. Anyhow, compare that passage from the WaPo to the Eggen/Pincus front pager from Thursday which reports that "The two [9/11 commission] staff reports issued yesterday appeared to confirm many of Clarke's key allegations and criticisms." Also on Thursday's front page, Dana Milbank wrote that even "Though more prominent personalities testified in the commission's two-day public hearings, the longtime foreign policy bureaucrat [i.e. Clarke] stole the show." And you thought John Kerry was prone to flip-flops...
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# Posted 1:39 AM by David Adesnik  

BEFORE THE SHOE DROPS: In this morning's installment of the Clarke saga, the WaPo highlights Bill Frist's charges that Richard Clarke's recent statements contradict his July 2002 testimony before Congress' joint intelligence committee. Since Clarke was under oath both times, any contradictions that emerge would prove extremely damaging. Whether such contradictions will emerge is an open question. Democrats who have read the July 2002 transcript say that none exist. But the public should be able to judge for itself soon enough, given both sides interest in having the transcript released.

In the meantime, I'd like to address something that has been said by a number of Clarke's defenders. Regarding contradictions between Clarke's recent statements an August 2002 briefing he gave for the press, Dan Drezner says that
I'm not terribly persuaded that this should weaken Clarke's credibility. As anyone who's worked in government should know, what's said in an official capacity will read differently than what's said when one is allowed to be candid. Clarke was acting as a dutiful bureaucrat in 2002, and not as an independent agent.
Since Dan isn't exactly a friend of either Clarke or his Democratic partisans, the fact that Dan is sticking up for Clarke on this particular point has added significance. Conceptually, I think that Dan is right to point out the obligations of an appointed official to defend his administration. Yet as Rich Lowry has pointed out, there is a difference between interpreting facts in a positive light and simply making them up from whole cloth. In the August 2002 briefing, Clarke mentions the following facts:
1) The Clinton administration did not have a specific plan for confronting Al Qaeda that it handed over to the Bush administraiton.

2) The Bush Administraiton decided in January 2001 to continue the implementation of the Clinton Administration's anti-terror policies.

3) In the spring of 2001, the Bush Administraiton decided in principle to support a five-fold increase in CIA funding for anti-Al Qaeda actions.
According to Lowry, none of these points made it into Clarke's book. Why not? It is hard to argue that these points were just a matter of spin, since they consist of facts, not interpretations. It is not as if Clarke simply said "The Bush administration worked extremely hard in its first months in office to stop Al Qaeda." That sort of statement is essentially meaningless and it would be hard to fault Clarke from backing away from it after leaving office. But what Clarke gave the press were facts.

Or were they? There is some room for interpretation regarding such terms as "specific plan", "continue the implementation of" and "decided in principle". (These are my paraphrasings, not Clarke's original words.) But if we have to pick apart Clarke's words in this counterintuitive manner, then is is rather hard to treat him as a credible witness, let alone a heroic whistleblower.

Even so, the question remains: Why didn't Clarke make any mention of the fact that he once defend Bush's anti-terror policies? If Clarke meant his statements on the administration's behalf as a form of hollow praise, why doesn't he say that? In the final analysis, I don't think Clarke intended to deceive anyone. IMHO, he comes across as quite sincere. If anything, he seems to have deceived himself.
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Friday, March 26, 2004

# Posted 4:30 PM by Patrick Belton  

THE MILITARY'S LESSONS LEARNED from the war in Iraq....

With that said, I'm off to go settle down to the Odyssey and some ice cream with my wife. (Friday nights at the Belton household get pretty wild.) Incidentally, I just had the opportunity to hear Seamus Heaney speak - I'll write up some reflections comparing him and Paul Muldoon after I sleep off the ice cream.

UPDATE: Okay, I couldn't resist. Odyssey, or Monty Python?
I hope you ... will explain to any one of your chief men who may be dining with yourself and your family when you get home, that we have an hereditary aptitude for accomplishments of all kinds. We are not particularly remarkable for our boxing, nor yet as wrestlers, but we are ... extremely fond of good dinners, music, and dancing; we also like frequent changes of linen, warm baths, and good beds, so now, please, some of you who are the best dancers set about dancing.
(The answer's here)
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# Posted 11:38 AM by Patrick Belton  

YOU'D HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO BUY IN WASHINGTON, INSTALLMENT 583: Hamas has been investing millions of dollars in real estate in the U.S., including in the southern Maryland market, according to the Washington Times.

On a related note, the EU has selected its first antiterrorism official, a former Dutch official born in New York.
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# Posted 10:30 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE VENEZUELAN GOVERNMENT'S OMBUDSMAN has released a report citing seven cases of torture and 17 more of "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment" by security services against opposition protesters at the end of February, during demonstrations that followed the invalidation of 1.57 million signatures from a recall petition by Venezuela's elections commission. It is reported that detained pro-democratic protesters were subjected to severe beatings, burnings, electric shocks, and mock executions. Opposition leaders have responded by attacking German Mundarain's report, saying it did not go far enough - it denies, for instance, that detained protesters were political prisoners. (See Officina del Defensor del Pueblo, BBC, VenezuelAnalysis, VHeadline.com, Country Report on Human Rights Practices)

UPDATE: Our friend RP writes in to add that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has also got a report on the Venezuelan situation.
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# Posted 6:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

IN LOS ANGELES? LIKE TO HANG OUT WITH US THIS WEEKEND? Rob Tagorda and our other friends in our foreign policy society's Southern California chapter will be having their first meeting this Sunday, at 5:30, at
Acapulco Restaurant
385 N. La Cienega
Los Angeles, CA 90048-4117
Phone: (310) 659-6831
1 block north of Beverly Center
Map
Among other things, they'll be discussing the concept of grand strategy, and its different forms and useful applications. Rob has a list of suggested readings and other background materials over on his website. Our San Francisco chapter had their first meeting last weekend, so now there are all kinds of places you can go to in California for friendly and bipartisan discussion of foreign affairs!
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# Posted 6:35 AM by Patrick Belton  

DISSERTATION ART: This goes out with warm wishes and sympathy to all the academics, doctoral students, and writers out there.
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# Posted 4:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

CFR WATCH: Those global conspiratorial muffins over at the Pratt House also know how to put out some pretty good scholarship when they're not busy running the world on behalf of small green aliens.

Henry Kissinger and Larry Summers co-chaired a task force on trans-atlantic relations (they identify the democratization of the Middle East as one of the principal three common interests tying together the trans-Atlantic partnership, the remaining two being nebulous-sounding and rather banal, like "maintaining our common traditions" - presumably Nato will now open a Centre for Morris Dancing at its next ministerial).

Thomas Pickering and James Schlesinger co-chair a report on Iraq one year later. Recommendations: members of both parties should nurture a consensus around staying the course in providing aid for reconstruction, military, and democracy building after the return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people; FSOs and other government officials should receive enhanced incentives to learn Arabic and serve in Iraq; IFI assistance to the oil sector should be conditional on enhanced transparency and auditing; appointing an on-the-ground assistance coordinator to serve after June 30. Surprising fact included: the CPA never received more than at most 70 percent of the personnel it was initially authorized to hire, and most have served in such short-term billets that their productive time of service was quite low.

And several more moderate unionist politicians from Northern Ireland (because heaven knows republicans never travel to New York....) spoke recently on trends there and prospects for devolution. Salient points there: the Mitchell agreement no longer has support in the unionist community, and the prospect of participation in Stormont has not been enough to induce paramilitaries to lay down their guns.

There's more, but I'm off and running to an Illuminati meeting. (I really wish those aliens would stop probing me; David and Josh never get probed.)
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# Posted 2:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

SECRETARY POWELL gave the Kennan Lecture lecture last night which, unusually, rose above the Foggy Bottom drafting bureaucratese argot to lay out thoughtful suggestions for principles undergirding a hawkish diplomacy, and the relationship between power and authority:
Power has a reputation as well that walks before it into the future, affecting what others think about us and what their reactions will be to future events. America never looks for opportunities to exercise power except in defense of our vital interests and the vital interests of our allies. We don't use force just to burnish our reputation or to enhance our credibility. As every president knows, it's better, whenever possible, to let the reputation of power achieve policy goals rather than the use of power, especially military power itself. And it's diplomacy that deploys power's reputation to do this in the form of political influence. One of my predecessors and Madeleine's predecessors at the State Department, a great American by the name of Dean Acheson, captured this idea when he wrote that "influence is the shadow of power."

But there is no disagreement in principle about the relationship between power and persuasion in American diplomacy. Everyone who understands that power is necessary, but not always sufficient for foreign policy success knows, too, that force and authority aren't the same. Not all use of force is created equal in diplomatic terms. Others will grant authority to the use of force if it falls within bounds of justice and reason. Some have recently argued that Libya s recent decision to turn away from weapons of mass destruction is an interesting thing, but they see it in terms that remind me of an old beer commercial: "tastes great/less filling, tastes great/less filling." Did they do it because of force? Did they do it because of diplomacy?

And of course, in almost every situation I deal with, it's not either/or. Diplomacy isn't the opposite of force. Diplomacy without power is just naked pleading. Power without diplomacy is incomplete. Libya's change of heart, in my judgment, wouldn't have happened in the absence of American power as a backdrop. But policy success also required American and British skills at persuasion.

A second basic principle of diplomacy follows from the first: Policy success comes easier when more actors work with you to achieve it than work against you to prevent it.

One of diplomacy's main jobs is to arrange coalitions so that one's power and one's reputation are multiplied. The fact of power alone cannot do this because power repels as well as attracts. A wise diplomacy magnifies power's attractive quality by using power to benefit others as well as oneself.

Success in diplomacy is often most advantageous when it's incomplete.... Another way to put this principle is that an adversary needs an honorable path of escape if we're to achieve our main policy goals without using force.
I'd like to come back to comment more on this speech (the complete text is here) after my coffee, but for now what seems interesting is the middle ground this speech strikes, both defending, against the left, the legitimacy of using the shadow of power in negotiations, and against the right, the legitimacy of negotiations themselves.
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# Posted 2:16 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE ECONOMIST has good pieces this morning on changes in counterterrorism policy on both sides of the Atlantic following Madrid and the Clarke testimony, gloomy Germans, lessons learned from Rwanda, HK watching China watch Taiwan, and Israelis and Palestinians. (Bagehot's newspaper also touched on blogging economics last month, for those of you who missed it....)
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# Posted 2:04 AM by David Adesnik  

NO MORE MR. NICE GUY: Is there any hope of getting past partisan antagonism and coming up with a fair evaluation of what Richard Clarke has to say about the Bush administration? No, not really. At least for now. I think a big part of the problem is that the newspapers have been portraying Clarke as an immaculate hero and the President as a black-hatted villain.

Exhibit A consists of the WaPo's two front-page stories on Clarke from Thursday morning. The first is by Dan Eggen & Walter Pincus, the second by Dana Milbank. Milbank's news analysis essay casts Clark as an selfless public servant whose eloquence enables him to silence those Republicans desperate to demonstrate that he is a hypocrite or a liar. The Eggen & Pincus article presents Clarke as a prophetic whistleblower and does nothing to question his credibility.

Now, if Clarke were so persuasive, why did Charles Krauthammer, Rich Lowry, and Romesh Ratnesar (of Time) have such an easy time coming up with compromising material?

One reason is that the Bush administration has been remarkably forthcoming with once-classified material that helps discredit Clarke. Above all, the contents of Clarke's August 2002 background briefing for the press suggest that he only became so critical of the President after leaving office. As Rich Lowry sums up,
Clarke said, "I think the overall point is, there was no plan on al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration." His book seems to confirm that, but nowhere puts it so starkly.

In his 2002 briefing, Clarke said that the Bush administration decided in "mid-January" 2001 to continue with existing Clinton policy while deciding whether or not to pursue more aggressive ideas that had been rejected throughout the Clinton administration. Nowhere does this appear in his book.

He said in 2002 that the Bush administration had decided in principle in the spring of 2001 "to increase CIA resources . . . for covert action, five-fold, to go after al Qaeda." Nowhere is this mentioned in his book.

In 2002, Clarke emphasized that the Bush team "changed the strategy from one of rollback with al Qaeda over the course [of] five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda." This is mentioned in his book, but - amazingly - as an afterthought.

Clarke in 2002 knocked down the idea that there was irrational animus toward the Clinton team on the part of the Bushies that blinded them to the necessity of strong counterterrorism. He offered himself, kept on as a holdover from the Clinton administration, as a refutation: "That doesn't sound like animus against the previous team to me." In his book, he suggests there was such an irrational animus.

Finally, in his 2002 briefing, Clarke made it clear that there was no "appreciable" change in U.S. terror policy from October 1998 until the Bush team began to reevaluate policy in the spring of 2001 and get more aggressive. His book implausibly argues the opposite, that Clinton was on the ball and Bush dropped it.
Kevin Drum has already admitted the contents of the briefing are pretty damning, although he is reserving judgment until he finishes reading Clarke's book. However, even if the Bush administration had held back the August 2002 transcript, there are plenty of other public statements Clarke made that come across as pretty damning. As Charles Krauthammer recounts, PBS asked Clarke in March 2002 whether
...failing to blow up the [Al Qaeda] camps and take out the Afghan sanctuary was a "pretty basic mistake."

Clarke's answer is unbelievable: "Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. . . . There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals."

This is significant for two reasons. First, if the Clarke of 2002 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this week -- the one who told the Sept. 11 commission under oath that "fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly [there was] no higher priority" -- is a liar.
Now if all this material was out there, why did the WaPo ignore it completely? (As Greg Djerejian points out, the editors of the NYT haven't exactly been critical of Clarke either.)

Now, at the same time that it has been lionizing Clarke, it has been tearing apart the administration. In a front page story today, Mike Allen describes how the White House has launched an unprecedented effort at character assassination. Allen devotes two short paragraphs to the August 2002 briefing and gives only the slightest hint of how much it does to undermine Clarke's reputation. If your only source of news were the WaPo, you'd come away from Allen's article thinking that the only motive behind the administration's attack on Clarke was a partisan desire to cover up evidence of its own incompetence.

Now, this isn't to say that the White House has done a terribly good job of character assassination. In fact, the rampant contradictions embedded in its effort to discredit Clarke deserve a major share of the blame for the bad press it has gotten on this issue. Consider the following (from the WaPo, of course):
Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage contradicted Rice's claim that the White House had a strategy before 9/11 for military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban; the CIA contradicted Rice's earlier assertion that Bush had requested a CIA briefing in the summer of 2001 because of elevated terrorist threats; and Rice's assertion this week that Bush told her on Sept. 16, 2001, that "Iraq is to the side" appeared to be contradicted by an order signed by Bush on Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.

Rice, in turn, has contradicted Vice President Cheney's assertion that Clarke was "out of the loop" and his intimation that Clarke had been demoted. Rice has also given various conflicting accounts. She criticized Clarke for being the architect of failed Clinton administration policies, but also said she retained Clarke so the Bush administration could continue to pursue Clinton's terrorism policies.

National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack defended many of Rice's assertions, saying that she has been more consistent than Clarke.
If that's not enough to convince you that Condi Rice is evil, just take a look at the photo published alongside the WaPo article. Moreover, adding insult to injury, Matt Yglesias says that Condi isn't even qualified to be National Security Adviser. Maybe that's why the WaPo has begun to report that Condi will be gone by the end of the year. (Condi may not be qualified, but I don't agree with Matt's argument about why.)

Now, getting back to the point, does all this mean that we shouldn't listen to anything Clarke has to say? I don't know. On Tuesday, I wrote that
I didn't mean to suggest that what Clarke said was false or that it doesn't cast doubt on the competence of the Bush administration...

[And] I don't put much stock in the administration's efforts to discredit Clarke or cover its exposed posterior
I'm going to stick by the latter half of that statement since the administration's response was utterly incompetent. They're lucky that the conservative punditocracy saved their (ahem) posterior. But as for the first half, even if Clarke didn't tell any outright lies, his accusations seem to have been profoundly misleading.

Looking back at my original post on the subject, I seem to have been far more focused on what Clarke said about Bush's response to September 11th rather than his lack of preparation for it. In that respect, I think his comments do reflect poorly on the administration. But that's beside the point because I missed the real story: that Clarke was rewriting the history of what happened before September 11th.
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# Posted 12:43 AM by David Adesnik  

ABANDONING OUR SOLDIERS: An Army survey conducted last summer reports that the suicide rate among soldiers in Iraq was far high than that of the Army as a whole. This unfortunate trend seems to reflect a lack of preparation to care for the mental health of soldiers taking part of the invasion. The same survey found that a majority of soldiers in Iraq described their morale as low and a disturbing three-fourths felt that they had been poorly-led by their officers.

It is possible that this situation has improved since last summer, when the survey was conducted. At that time, soldiers had to endure intense heat without the benefit of some of the amenities that began to arrive as the occupation progressed. Regardless, I think it is important to recognize that each and every soldier in Iraq has made substantial sacrifices on behalf of the nation.

According to the officer responsible for the survey, "This is the first time we've ever gone into an active combat theater and asked soldiers how they are doing, so we have no comparative data." One hopes that the compilation of such data will help the army address soldiers' concerns, which are no doubt extremely serious.
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Thursday, March 25, 2004

# Posted 8:21 PM by David Adesnik  

THERE HE GOES AGAIN: Evan Coyne Maloney continues to stalk the man (and woman) in the street. Pay close attention so you don't miss the sign that says "Jesus Hates Bush". I think Mel Gibson was holding that one.
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# Posted 5:18 PM by Patrick Belton  

AMPUTATIONS AND FLOGGINGS ARE NOT VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS: and other revelations from Saudi Arabia.
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# Posted 4:53 PM by Patrick Belton  

TIME WARP: I enjoy reading the YDN from time to time. This is partially because the news specials box hasn't been updated since I was a student there, so whenever I like I can step into a time warp and indulge my nostalgia for those bright college years.....
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# Posted 4:38 PM by Patrick Belton  

COURTING A GROUPIE: Our lovely and Kazakh-bound friend Amanda Butler - who happens to also be co-president of our foreign policy society's Chicago chapter - camped out outside the Supreme Court to listen to oral arguments in Newdow - her notes are here!
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# Posted 1:18 PM by Patrick Belton  

BUSH IS A LIBERAL: That's what a column in the Christian Science Monitor claims today, pointing out that under this administration's budget request foreign aid will rise to $23 billion from $13 billion in fiscal 2003. Unenlightened views on gay rights and the objection that the increase includes a fair chunk of reallocated funds aside, the Millennium Challenge Account and emphasis on greater Aids funding to Africa is a very striking side effect of the greater role of foreign policy in the United States budget. Our foreign policy society's Washington chapter had an extensive discussion of the Millennium Challenge Account several weeks ago, which included a number of discussants who worked in or studied the MCA; at the moment, at least, I can't think of anything to add to their admirably nuanced discussion of the reform in foreign aid spending.
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# Posted 1:13 PM by Patrick Belton  

I'M ONLY PRINTING IT BECAUSE IT'S FUNNY: From a reader: In light of recent events, France has raised its terror alert level from "RUN" to "HIDE." The only 2 higher alert levels available in French domestic security are "SURRENDER" and "COLLABORATE."
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# Posted 12:03 PM by Patrick Belton  

CUBA SPRING: It has been a year since Castro arrested and sent to prison seventy-five of his nation's independent journalists, intellectuals, teachers, and human rights workers. The Washington Post commemorates the anniversary, and notes the political prisoners' continued imprisonment.

And this regime still manages to have its defenders.
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# Posted 11:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

IN YET ANOTHER INDICATION that the Palestinian people are infinitely more sensible than any of their leaders, there's been an extraordinary backlash lately in the West Bank and Gaza against militant groups following the apprehension of a 14-year old suicide bomber at a roadblock in Nablus. Hussam Abdu, say reporters, had been bullied at school, and told army interrogators that he decided to commit suicide "because nobody liked me." Similar widespread Palestinian condemnations had also occurred in November and January, when Hamas dispatched mother-of-two Reem Al-Riashi at the Erez Crossing as a suicide bomber from the Gaza Strip into Israel, and when Al-Aqsa sent a youth of 17, Sabih Abu Saud, to an Israeli guardpost near the West Bank city of Kalkilya. As sad as it is that extremist organizations would place so little value on the lives either of vulnerable Palestinian adolescents or Israeli civilians, it inspires some hope that their fanaticism is seen for what it is among the Palestinian people. Incidentally, seventy prominent Palestinian intellectuals have signed a newspaper advertisement rejecting Hamas's recent call for violence against Israeli officials, and calling instead for a "peaceful intifada."

If the Palestinian people were actually permitted to run the place, rather than either the Islamists of Hamas or the corrupt coterie surrounding Arafat, it might not actually turn out half bad.

UPDATE: Brian Ulrich has more on Palestinian public opinion, and reports on a lecture by Palestinian political scientist (and track two negotiator) Khalil Shikaki. Noteworthy points: 1. over half of Palestinians support a two-state solution (including 40% of Hamas supporters, who probably give the organization their support mostly because of its success in providing public services and its lower level of corruption compared to the PA); 2. a large plurality (40%) of Palestinians don't like any of their political choices (with 35%, concentrated in Gaza, supporting Hamas, and only 20% backing Fatah); 3. even in Gaza, Hamas would probably not poll much above 35%, suggesting it would be useful to hold elections in Gaza before the Israeli withdrawal: this would prevent a complete consolidation of power by Hamas in Gaza after the Israeli pull-out, publicly reflect the proportion of Gaza's population who do not support terror, and place a great deal of pressure on Fatah to reform or risk losing support.
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# Posted 11:22 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANOTHER JEWISH-THEMED JOKE OF THE DAY, this time in honor of my blogiversary. So Yeshiva University decides to field a crew team, but unfortunately, they find themselves losing race after race. Though they even decide to begin practicing for hours each morning and evening, they never manage to finish better than dead last in any competition. Finally, wanting to safeguard his university's reputation, the Rosh Yeshiva at length decides to send Yankel to spy on Harvard's team at practice. So Yankel schleps off to Cambridge, and hides in the bullrushes off of the Charles River, from where he carefully watches the Crimson team as they practice. Yankel afterward returns to Yeshiva, and announces "I have figured out their secret." "They have eight guys rowing, and only one guy shouting...." (This courtesy Sonnny Schwartz; thanks, incidentally, for all of the kind blogiversary notes - especially to Pej and Scott!)
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# Posted 4:19 AM by Patrick Belton  

IT'S MY BLOGIVERSARY! And while you all really don't have to get me anything (no, really, you don't), I thought I would take this chance, though, to thank Josh and David for so generously letting me hang out with them here in our little cyber pied à terre, which has given me not only the chance of having some very searching and rewarding conversations with two of my closest friends and with our friends and readers, but where the three of us have also managed to have a great deal of fun together, and I hope that shows.

Writing here on OxBlog has also given me the chance while writing my dissertation to do a great deal more thinking about, say, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Muslims in Dearborn, chilly Christmasses in Alaska, really big squid, and Odysseus and the dirty hands problem, among other things, and all in the company of friends in a blogosphere which I think, for civility, fair-mindedness, and quality of argument, is one of the best areas of public space in the United States at the moment.

So a warm thank you to all of you! And personally, I'm looking forward very eagerly to many, many happy returns of the day.
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# Posted 3:37 AM by Patrick Belton  

GET LOVED, THANK YGLESIAS: In his blogads, Matt's linking to a dating website for activists which boasts the memorable motto "Take Action, Get Action."

This hypothesised causal relationship, incidentally, is precisely why one unnamed middle-aged New Yorker of my acquaintance took part in the Freedom Rides. Then he ran into someone with a face only a mother could love. He also discovered along the way that Virginia wasn't much for lovers, either. So in the end he went to law school, instead, to meet girls.
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Wednesday, March 24, 2004

# Posted 4:37 PM by Patrick Belton  

POLLS SHOW U.S. POPULACE WANTS TO STAY THE COURSE IN IRAQ: Karlyn Bowman and Todd Weiner review the evidence in Roll Call:
The early March NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 24 percent want U.S. troops out as soon as possible and 26 percent within 18 months. But 48 percent said they "should stay as long as necessary to complete the process even if it takes five years." None of the polls provides evidence of a desire to cut and run. All recent polls show that majorities of Americans believe the United States did the right thing in going to war. Fifty-seven percent gave that response in the March 18-19 PSRA/Newsweek poll.
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# Posted 3:37 PM by Patrick Belton  

OXBLOG JEWISH-THEMED CARTOON OF THE DAY INVOLVING A ROBOT: In the words of its author, Ben Baruch: "ShaBot 6000 is the continuing cartoon saga of a pious Jew who purchases a robot to work as Shabbos Goy for his household. The inquisitive robot, ShaBot, decides that he is Jewish, and is therefore unable to fulfill his duties as a servant." I ran across it just now while googling for the estimable Forward, and decided I would fulfill my Bot Mitzvah by sharing it with our friends and readers. In particular, I'd encourage you to procrastinate with me by seeing what Baruch and the ShaBot get up to here, here, and here.
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# Posted 1:25 PM by Patrick Belton  

ALL OF OUR READERS IN OXFORD, or within driving distance, should make some time to get out to the Oxford Literary Festival which the Sunday Times and Blackwell's are cosponsoring, and which is being organized by a good friend of mine. Seamus Heaney is speaking on Friday at 5:30 at the Sheldonian; also on Friday, Orlando Figes is socialising with students and talking about Tolstoy at the Union. On Saturday, Fiona Shaw reads Andromache's speeches from the Iliad and Euripides, at the Holywell Music Room at 5. On Sunday, Karen Armstrong talks about religion at noon, at Town Hall, and a film of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard will be screened at the Phoenix at 4:30, with its producer present to discuss Chekhov and the play after. These are only a few of the events going on; it really is a marvellous festival, and Brenda Garvey, of whom I'm quite fond, is to be congratulated enormously for having brought it to Oxford.
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# Posted 12:10 PM by Patrick Belton  

I KNOW ALL OF THE DISPUTANTS, so I'll merely take note of an interesting debate which has just been joined, and one in which I think there happen to be quite good points to be made on both sides. Jim Fishkin and Bruce Ackerman are about to release their book Deliberation Day, in which they argue for establishing a public holiday to set aside time each year for civic discussion of issues affecting the American republic. (There's an article version of their proposal in February's Legal Affairs, if you're interested.) The Public Interest's Brendan Conway responds this morning in the Wall Street Journal, ably arguing the classic libertarian response that among the liberties held by the American citizen, among the more significant should be counted "the liberty--most of the time--to pay more attention to, say, a child's soccer game or the NCAA tourney than to John Kerry's latest nuanced position on Sarbanes-Oxley."

I've been following idea behind "deliberation day" for some time - at Yale, I worked as a research assistant for Professor Ackerman on an early version of the book, and I've had the opportunity to attend a few of Jim Fishkin's town hall discussion events, which I found quite interesting. (Incidentally, at one recent "deliberative poll" on foreign affairs held in Philadelphia, my road trip companion and friend Adam Gordon wrote about his observations on the weekend over at the American Prospect.) My impression is that in the deliberative polls that have been held to date, there's generally substantial motion of participants' opinion toward the center ground; it's also always seemed to me that Dr Fishkin and the other organizers take great pains to prepare materials and invite guest experts covering the breadth of at least mainstream opinion on the issues at hand (Richard Haas and Madeline Albright, for instance, were both guests in Philadelphia, as were Anne-Marie Slaughter and a fellow from Heritage). And finally, unlike, say, jury duty or the draft, there's nothing coercive about this service, just a day off from work and a payment (of course, on the other hand we are in debt as a nation) for people wishing to participate.

Still, the Deliberation Day proposal is interesting enough to rise or fall on its merits, and I think Brendan has done a quite able job in presenting us with the counterargument.
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# Posted 11:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND THEY SAID ENGLISH PEOPLE WERE NO FUN: In the BBC's comments session this morning, commenters are writing a short story, line by line, using only English cliches. I can't believe this worked, but - believe it or not, when it's all said and done, it's the best thing I've read today. Here's the first bit - it begins "Giles flew in on the red eye from the Big Apple, knowing he was caught between a rock and a hard place." (BBC, starting off)...
He'd been drinking like a fish the night before; still, in for a penny... (Drew Jagger, UK) ..in for a pound, so he thought he'd better wet his whistle. (Dave Brannon, England) He left the airport to find it was raining cats and dogs. Unimpressed he spotted a well-known pub chain - not his favourite, but "better the devil you know" he thought. (Lucy Feather, England) The Aussie barmaid didn't beat about the bush. "You look dog-tired, mate. Been burning the candle at both ends?" (Madmarce, UK) "Is the Pope Catholic? Basically I've been working 24/7", Giles said. "Well there is no rest for the wicked," replied the barmaid. A high-flying salesman entered the bar. (Mike Taylor, UK) He paused by the entrance, speaking into his mobile phone: "Have your people call my people and they'll get it together. Gotta run now, cheers." Flipping his phone shut he looked at Giles and smiled. (Andy Tickner, UK) Well, look what the cat's dragged in, thought Giles. (Claudia, UK) "Long time, no see," smirked Roger. "How's life in the slow lane?" (Peter Snow, UK )"Well, at this moment in time, to be perfectly honest..." Giles is cut short as his mobile phone rings. He flipped it open. "Yes, that should be okay, just make sure we are all singing from the same hymn sheet!" "Who was that?" asked Roger. (Linda, UK) "The old ball and chain," Giles replied, rushing out of the bar. "Needless to say, I've got to get home PDQ, or there's trouble in store." (Alan Barford, UK) When Giles got home his wife was fuming. "I wish you'd touch base more often," she complained. "What I gain with you on the swings I lose on the roundabouts and I don't want anymore of it," she shouted angrily. (Adam Hewitt, UK) She stood before him, eyes blazing. "Listen up, buddy, you're way out of line, quite frankly, if you really want to know, you're dead meat. I've met someone who really rings my chimes. Know what I mean? And he's no stranger to love." The doorbell rang. (Kerry Dignan, UK) "And here he is now. C'est la Vie, basically we're on a learning curve you know what I mean, so this is the end of the line." (Marion Samson, UK) "I hear what you're saying," Giles shot back as he marched into the hallway, "but the bottom line is you've never been one to think outside the box." He opened the door. It was Roger. Well, Giles thought knitting his brows, it wasn't rocket science. (Margaret Storey, UK) Giles let Roger into the house. "I see you know about us," Roger said. "Cheer up, it's not the end of the world. It's better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." (Simon Corkhill, UK) "Oh and I suppose you will tell me next that there are plenty more fish in the sea" yelled Giles. (Victoria Chambers, UK) "Now don't blow your top!" said Roger, "Just keep your chin up and I'm sure we can make this all work out fine in the end." (Roddy Fraser, UK )"Besides, you've still got your health and you're too young to be tied down. Lets say, me and you go and paint the town red?" laughed jolly Roger. (Graham West, UK)
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# Posted 7:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

CRICKET COVERAGE: For those of our readers who'd like to follow today's match, BBC has got a good site with frequent updates. (We've had questions, incidentally, from readers looking for a good place in New York to watch fixtures, particularly ones on at odd hours in the east coast. If anyone has any suggestions, I'll be happy to pass them on here!)

And for the ruggers fans in the audience, I'll take this moment to note that the Ireland side is doing rather well at Six Nations..... (And in what other sport, incidentally, would the France coach, preparing to square up against the England side at Stade de France, be quoted in the papers as saying about his opponent "England are the best team in the world, they are like a machine....it is always a great pleasure to face the English"?)
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# Posted 3:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE DAY'S NEWS, OFF PAGE ONE: A City College professor is pushing a brand of "philosophical counseling", telling the NYT "you don't have to be clinically depressed or burdened by childhood guilt to want help with the timeless questions of the human condition -- the persistence of suffering and the inevitability of death, the need for a reliable ethics." (Other philosophical counselors, offering the Socratic examined life to their patients, say that Lou Marinoff is not the best trained or most representative member of their field; he is, though, author of ''Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems.")

In deshi news, India is rebuffing an American offer to extend Major Non-Nato Ally status to it as well as to Pakistan. Also, in the lead-up to Lok Sabha elections, BJP is running a series of adverts cataloguing the country's nationalist leaders, and then, cutting to a shot of Italian-born Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, warning ominously "and now there is a conspiracy to hand the country over to a foreigner." (BJP is also running on an India "feel-good" campaign of national pride.)

Next door, Uzbek militants, possibly from the IMU, have been found among Al Qa'ida fighters in their hive of villainy in tribal Wana; Uzbekistan's Karimov has requested their extradition to deal with them himself. (He has, after all, had lots of practice before now with his own people.) Also, MMA's general secretary is decrying the incursion of federal troops into tribal areas, as an act threatening to the country's territorial integrity and something which the Brits never even succeeded in doing.

The Boston Globe reports further on the Harvard med-trained star surgeon who left a patient on the table to cash his paycheck (and then the pederasty fell out of the closet). A Claremont McKenna professor vandalized her own car with racist and sexist slogans, organized protests against the perpetrator (erm, herself - but self-hatred has never been that unusual a thing in an academic...), then was caught in the deed. WaPo looks into the world of Olympic ping-pong ("A mild game for geeks? Rather, think big-time steroid scandals, Byzantine romances, groupies, and a lot of glue sniffing"). And The Nation (see, who complained we never linked to them?) details the Camus-Sartre break-up, portraying Camus as the more sympathetic and nuanced character, and Sartre as the more flawed, simplistic, and dogmatic. (Sartre was, however, capable of seeing before his generation the need for French withdrawal from Algeria, and coming up with put-downs such as, to Camus, "I have at least this in common with Hegel: you have not read either of us.")
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# Posted 12:15 AM by David Adesnik  

I AM DETERRED: This morning, two Finnish businessmen were slain in Baghdad. Their death raises to ten the number of humanitarian and reconstruction workers slain over the past two weeks.

Until now, I have been giving very serious consideration to spending next year working in Iraq. From the beginning, my parents didn't want me to go. But now the warnings are coming from all sides. In a long discussion with a member of the NSC staff, I was explicity told that there is no point in going to Iraq to become a target.

To a certain extent, I am embarrassed by my lack of resolve. If our soldiers are risking their lives to secure Iraq, why shouldn't I assume some of that same risk in the process of rebuilding it? But the difference is that they are trained professionals and I am a rank amateur. Moreover, our soldiers are not just protecting Iraq but leading the reconstruction effort.

At this moment, humility seems to demand that I recognize my the relative of unimportance of any decision I make for or against working in Iraq. Yes, the Coalition needs more civilians willing to engage in public service. But even if the civilians are driven off, the Army will still be there. And the people of Iraq are as committed to reconstruction as ever. I may be deterred, but that is hardly a victory for Ba'athist terror.
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Tuesday, March 23, 2004

# Posted 11:58 PM by David Adesnik  

NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE? There isn't much sympathy for Ariel Sharon's decision to kill off Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. The WaPo and NYT both have editorials up condemning the Israeli action. Both editorials ask the same essential question: What will Yassin's death accomplish in terms of making Israel safer?

On the other hand, why would Yassin's death make Israel any less safe? The NYT writes that
Hamas will now redouble its efforts to send human torpedos into Israel. The Palestinian Authority will be even less inclined to confront terrorists in its midst and less able to coax Hamas into observing a cease-fire.
But when did the PA ever accomplish much in terms of controlling Hamas? And isn't Hamas already trying its hardest to kill Israeli civilians? The WaPo argues Yassin was moving in the direction of accepting a long-term truce with Israel in exchange for withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.

To his credit, David Ignatius explains why Sharon thought that killing Yassin would make Israel safer. In short, Sharon wanted to demonstrate that Israel's coming withdrawal from Gaza does not represent a victory for Hamas. Given how Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon emboldened Hezbollah, Sharon's logic isn't exactly off base. Still, Ignatius raises the important question of whether killing Yassin will make it that much harder to restore order in Gaza after Israel pulls out.

In the short term, there is no question that Israel will be less secure. The killing of Yassin was a direct challenge to Hamas (and Fatah) to show that they are not impotent in the face of Israeli violence. Unsurprisingly, Israelis have chosen to stay home rather than risk becoming the victims of the next terrorist strike. Yet while 81% of Israelis believe the death of Yassin will lead to more attacks against Israel, 60% of them support it nonetheless. After all, what is the difference if the bombers detonate themselves this week in honor of Yassin rather than next week in honor of someone else?

And there will be a someone else. Hardline statements by Israeli officials suggest that more targeted killings are in the works. For its part, Hamas has chosen two of its hardliners to replace Yassin. (But how moderate are its sofliners anyway?)

Frankly, I wish there were an upbeat note on which to conclude. But there isn't. Instead of peace, the most we can look forward to is a wall.
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# Posted 11:11 PM by David Adesnik  

HEARINGS AND LISTENINGS: In the course of my dissertation research, I've learned how important it is to read the transcripts of congressional hearings rather than relying on newspaper summaries. If I were in the habit of taking my own advice, I would then read the transcript of today's hearing before the 9/11 commission rather than letting the NYT and WaPo do my intellectual work for me. However, after spending three and a half hours today looking at microform transcripts of Reagan-era hearings on human rights in El Salvador, I no longer have the will to read any further.

So here are my impressions of the summaries: Not much happened because both the Clinton and Bush administration officials called to testify refused to either admit their own failures or accuse others of taking their eye off the ball. Depending on one's perspective, the preliminary findings released by the 9/11 commission were either restrained in their criticism or forceful in their accusation of incompetence.

Surprisingly, it's the WaPo which presents the report as more damaging than the NYT. But regardless of one's take on the issue, nothing all that damaging came out. Personally, I thought that revelations in early 2002 about the failure of the FBI to follow up evidence of Al Qaeda activity in the United States said a lot more about the administration's nonchalance.

Anyhow, things may get more interesting on Wednesday when Richard Clarke testifies. What I'd really like to see are copies of the memos he sent to his superiors warning about the threat from Al Qaeda. Without a close look at the language he used -- and the response that it generated -- it will be hard to know whether his warnings were stunningly prophetic or just business as usual. Surprisingly, even the NYT's editors write that
Mr. Clarke's central complaint -- that the president failed to respond to his urgent request for a cabinet-level meeting on terrorism until days before 9/11 -- is far from conclusive evidence that the administration failed to take the threat seriously until disaster struck.
On a harsher note, the NYT adds that
The most persuasive part of the critique by the former anti-terrorism czar concerns the administration's obsession with Iraq. Mr. Clarke says he and intelligence experts repeatedly assured top officials -- and Mr. Bush himself -- that Iraq was not involved in 9/11 or in supporting Al Qaeda. This fall, when the public has to judge Mr. Bush's decision to invade, voters will know that the president's own counterterrorism adviser had warned him that he was on the wrong track.
That last sentence is a remarkable non-sequitur. In spite of speculation that Saddam might provide chemical or biological weapons to anti-American terrorists, the bread and butter of the Administration's case against Iraq was always that it had failed to disarm. What does that have to do with Clarke's comments about 9/11?

For a more persuasive indictment of the Bush administraiton, take a look at Matt Yglesias' new column in TAP. Matt makes a solid case that terrorism was far from being a Bush administration priority before 9/11. On the other hand, he goes overboard by insisting that the administration tried "to deny that terrorism is a serious threat" and that it favored "abandoning [Clinton's anti-terror strategy] in favor of doing, well, nothing." (Emphasis in original).

So where does this all leave us? Pretty much where we started. There isn't much to praise about Bush's handling of the anti-terror issue before 9/11, but there is still nothing out there solid enough to inflict serious damage on the President's re-election campaign.
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# Posted 6:09 PM by Patrick Belton  

PROMOTING DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST: Carnegie and an ad hoc trans-Atlantic roundtable sponsored by the German Marshall Fund have both released interesting pieces on the subject of democracy promotion in the Middle East. They're worth closer comment, but for now, I'd like to just extract a few ideas from the Marshall Fund piece:
  • as institutional innovations, McFaul and coauthors call for the establishment of a Department of Democracy Promotion, headed by an official of cabinet rank; a trans-Atlantic Forum for Democracy Promotion to coordinate bilateral and multilateral democracy initiatives; and a Trust for Democracy in the Middle East to which both the United States and Europe would contribute funds;
  • in the area of security, they suggest an OSCE-like regional security regime for the Greater Middle East, and an expansion of Nato's Partnership for Peace programme into the area;
  • they call, too, for massive increases in the democracy promotion budget, to the level of $400 mn in the States and 500 mn Euro in the EU;
  • and finally, the authors would like western diplomats to greatly expand their attention to local imprisoned democracy activists, and for human rights and democracy to be raised by every visiting head of state on every trip to the region.
These are all good ideas, it seems to me, but they could be augmented by an effort to restore some form of a bipartisan consensus to this aspect of American foreign policy - a commitment to assist usefully in the democratization of the Middle East would at the very least need to be sustained at a high level of funding and political attention for a large number of administrations, and a new centrist grand strategy of democracy promotion would have to be guarded not only against realists on the right and isolationists on the left, but against the inevitable desire to associate a policy with the party of the president who originated it.
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# Posted 1:58 PM by Patrick Belton  

WITTY RESPONSE TO THAT HEADLINE CONTEST: Via BBC, Mice grow human breast tissue.

Entries? (Example: "Dr Rosenberg, what are you doing in there? Dr Rosenberg! Put that mouse down!")
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# Posted 1:26 PM by Patrick Belton  

ANSWER TO DAVID (SEE BELOW): Of course. Why else would it be a crime?
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# Posted 10:12 AM by David Adesnik  

A QUESTION FOR PATRICK: If drinking Coca-Cola is like drinking the blood of Colombian workers, is eating croutons like eating the brains of British children?
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# Posted 9:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

BENJAMIN SMITH COVERS LAST WEEKEND'S ANSWER PROTEST IN NEW YORK:
The mass of demonstrators, who streamed in a 40-block loop around the grottier southern chunk of Midtown, weren't all as hard core as their leaders. But the crowd has changed, and shrunk, since the huge protests last spring. Last year there were more parents with children, more neatly dressed forty-somethings, more mainstream city Democratic politicians. Saturday, from Madison Square Park to Times Square, I only saw one Dean for America fleece and one Kerry button on the thousands of protesters. More common was a Star of David, connected with an "=" sign to a swastika.
The rally was, in ANSWER's plans, a warm-up to this summer's Republican National Convention:
In August, New York City will be flooded with people like Teresa Gutierrez, a squat woman in a red beret and sunglasses who faced the crowd squarely to deliver an important message: "One of the corporations that we hate so much is Coca-Cola," she told the protesters. "Never ever drink Coca-Cola again. Drinking Coca-Cola is like drinking the blood of Colombian workers." If these people didn't exist, Karl Rove might have to hire actors to play them.
Of course, on the other hand there are lots of unemployed actors floating around the West Village....
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# Posted 5:20 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF NHS-RATIONALITY AT WORK: One of Britain's leading vascular neurosurgeons, Terence Hope of Nottingham, was suspended yesterday over allegations that he took an extra serving of croutons from the hospital canteen. All of the operations that he was scheduled to perform have been postponed, and thanks to his alleged crouton thievery, the neurosurgeon is currently at home tending to his garden (wearing, according to reports, a long ginger wig, in response to the now-constant presence of newspaper reporters outside his house). One paper notes:
The waiting time for brain operations in Nottingham is 39 days for out-patients. A report in 2000 by the Society of British Neurological Surgeons said patients were dying needlessly because of a shortage of surgeons and specialist beds.
UPDATE: Our friend Scott Burgess points out that the Telegraph has released pictures of the stunningly ginger-wigged Dr Hope, who in a close judge's call manages to overtake Sasha as the winner of this week's OxBlog's OxBabe of the week prize.
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# Posted 2:12 AM by David Adesnik  

OUCH! Matt Yglesias has some pretty harsh words for OxBlog because of its declaration that there isn't much new about Richard Clarke's allegations. Now, I didn't mean to suggest that what Clarke said was false or that it doesn't cast doubt on the competence of the Bush administration. But Clarke doesn't add much to the story that the media has been telling for quite some time now about the way this Administration works. Thus, I think it's interesting that Matt
detect[s] a lot of optimism that the latest Richard Clarke stuff may drive the stake through Bushism. Certainly, I hope so. Then again, by my lights Bush should have been done for long, long ago. Personally, I've gotten my hopes up far too many times that one thing or another would -- at last -- finish off the man's reputation and support. Nevertheless, nothing ever really seems to stick. I hope I'm wrong, but fear otherwise.
Actually, lots of things stick. The media has been very consistent in portraying Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. as militant ideologues with only a minimal interest in the facts (a portrayal that I think has a lot of substance to it). And there seems to be a consensus that the Bush Administration is fundamentally incapable of telling the truth about its tax or budget programs. (Ditto.)

But what I think Matt is driving at when he says that "nothing ever really seems to stick" is that Bush has pretty good approval ratings and is pulling even with Kerry in the polls. If things stuck, the average American voter would have an overwhelming desire to punish Bush in November. But that's just not the case. Why? One might point to the fact that voters trust the Republicans far more than they do the Democrats when it comes to national security. But that just begs the question. Why don't revelations such as Clarke's lead voters to trust the Democrats instead? I don't have a definitive answer for that one, but I think it has to do with the fact that the Democrats don't seem to know what their own foreign policy is.

Anyhow, I'm sure we'll have lots more chances to discuss the issue since the White House has now launched an aggressive counterattack against Clarke. For more on Clarke, take a look at TPM, where Josh Marshall is blasting both the NYT's soft coverage of his allegations and Condi's improbable account of what was really going on at the NSC.

Now, I don't put much stock in the administration's efforts to discredit Clarke or cover its exposed posterior. But when it comes down to getting votes, I think there are only two questions that really matter: Did Bush ignore (and then withhold) compelling evidence that Al Qaeda was preparing a major attack? And did Bush knowingly lie about Iraq's possession of chemical and biological (not nuclear) weapons? Unless Clarke can answer one or both of those questions in the affirmative, his revelations won't amount to much more than a very loud footnote.
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# Posted 1:46 AM by David Adesnik  

NEW JERSEY VS. IOWA, THE REMATCH: My friend from Chicago seemed to have discovered a chip on the collective New Jersey shoulder. JM writes that
I can see how your friend came to the conclusion that
Iowa was the New Jersey of the midwest. A few quick facts seem to bear this out:

Population per sq. mile:
Iowa: 52.4 N.J: 1,134

Hispanic
Iowa: 2.8 N.J.: 13.3

Foreign-born
Iowa: 3.1 N.J.: 17.5

Black
Iowa: 2.1 N.J.: 13.6

White
Iowa: 93.9 N.J.: 72.6

Asian
Iowa: 1.3 N.J.: 5.7

Clearly your friend has spent a lot of time in both
states.

Sincerely,
A baffled NJ resident
Actually, my friend spent the first 18 years of his life in New Jersey and is fully aware of its ethnic diversity. What his comment was really driving at is the fact that both Iowa and New Jersey natives are almost magnetically drawn to the nearby metropolises of Chicago and New York. On a related note, MH writes:
Hey! Hey!

My grandparents were from Iowa and I'm in NJ, so you insulted me twice! :-)
OxBlog didn't mean to offend anyone. I've got lots of friends from New Jersey and a select few from Iowa (including the fabulous PH -- you go girl!). On the other hand, I won't be moving to Des Moines or Newark anytime soon...
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# Posted 1:24 AM by David Adesnik  

JACK KELLEY VS. JAYSON BLAIR, PART II: Joe Gandelman weighs in on this subject and adds some interesting comments to my own. As Joe points out, Jack Kelley doesn't seem to have had well-placed advocates within the editorial staff, a la Jayson Blair. Whereas such advocates defended Blair despite initial indications of his deceptive behavior, no one seems to have gone to bat for Kelley. Thus, there are grounds for arguing that the Kelley scandal resulted from the dishonesty of a single reporter whereas the Blair scandal reflected the presence of institutionalized ethical deficiencies at the New York Times.

Now what about the blogosphere's response to the Kelley scandal? Calpundit (Can I still call him that? --ed.) and Atrios have argued that conservative critics have demonstrated far less interest in the current scandal because it doesn't further their ideological interests. On the other hand, Ed Driscoll reports (after consulting Technorati and Memeorandum) that 25 blogs, many of them conservative have been following the story.

Now, I wouldn't go as far as to say that there is no ideological dimension here. But the real issue is that USA Today just isn't the New York Times.
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Monday, March 22, 2004

# Posted 6:37 PM by Patrick Belton  

HAPPY SPRINGTIME! Today, incidentally, is the first day of the Hebrew month of Nisan; in Mexico, crowds surround the ancient Aztec temple at Teotihuacan to celebrate the onset of springtime.
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# Posted 6:18 PM by Patrick Belton  

ROUND-UP: Haaretz has a number of good pieces about the removal this morning of Sheikh Yassin: Shin Bet chief Dichter argued against Yassin's removal, saying that the strategic risks outweighed benefits; Yassin's strategic, moral, and organizational leadership was such that no one will be capable of filling his shoes; one commentator sees the possibility of fracture, with some splinter wings of Hamas perhaps aligning with Al Qa'ida. Thus one reporter:
Among those who will be in the new collective leadership are Mahmoud a-Zahar, who survived an assassination attempt last year and has kept a low profile since; Ismail Haniya, Yassin's bureau chief in recent years and another of the pragmatists who have been in close contact with the Palestinian Authority; Rantisi, who leads the hardline in the organization, is opposed to any cease-fire deal with the PA and rejects proposals by pragmatists to turn the movement into an international political organization, preferring to emphasize its military activities.

Rantisi, who has survived an Israeli assassination attempt, is the closest of the current leadership to the military wing, and his position has been greatly strengthened over the past few months, particularly without Abu Shnab as a counterweight. Indeed, as of now, there is no real counterweight to Rantisi.
Shimon Peres announced his opposition to the action against Yassin. WaPo offers up a passable review of Yassin's life. NYT draws attention to the different US and European responses to the action; while Europeans considered Yassin's removal (to my mind, dubiously - has anyone seen a fleshed-out argument?) as a violation of international law, the Americans limited their response to an indication it was "troubled" by this morning - the last, given that it followed by only hours an unreserved vote of support on television by the national security advisor for Israel's legal and political right to take out terrorist leaders, was undoubtedly a response to head off Arab and European criticism of the United States as being too solidly in Israel's camp.

UPDATE: Our friends at Crooked Timber give me grief for using the word "removal," wondering "And what does this new usage imply about companies who carry out furniture removals?"

I do balk, though, at referring to the killing of Sheikh Yassin as an "assassination." While I have great sympathy for Palestinian liberals, and I want always to be loudly in support of those who work toward a Middle East in which two reformist liberal democracies can live and prosper in peaceful trade with one another, Yassin brooks no sympathy from me. He was a terrorist, not an official of any properly understood political party or the Palestinian para-state, and the question of whether Israel was right to kill him lies only in the realm of strategic, not moral, debate. And so I balk at referring to him as assassinated. I do think we could all agree, though, on the somewhat more clinical and objective, and equally true, "dead."
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# Posted 10:31 AM by David Adesnik  

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR:
"We are a people not afraid of death, and when one of us dies, it's like a wedding day for him," Yassin said. "One who is martyred attains a very high spiritual level, and so his death is like a celebration -- we offer candy, sweets and cold drinks, because we know he'll be so high in heaven."
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Sunday, March 21, 2004

# Posted 6:06 PM by Patrick Belton  

AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY, they rested.

(In the meantime - and until the eighth day rolls around - you might check out our foreign policy think tank's policy paper on North Korea.....)
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Saturday, March 20, 2004

# Posted 8:24 PM by David Adesnik  

NYT BLASTS MUSHARRAF: And he damn well deserves it.
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# Posted 8:23 PM by David Adesnik  

IOWA IS THE NEW JERSEY OF THE MIDWEST. That's what my friend from Chicago says. I'm not sure who should be more insulted.
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# Posted 8:10 PM by David Adesnik  

SPEAKS FOR ITSELF:
A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for a citizen of Syria, run by the Baath Party of President Bashar al-Assad, to make a documentary film with the working title, "Fifteen Reasons Why I Hate the Baath."

Yet watching the overthrow of Saddam Hussein across the border in Iraq prompted Omar Amiralay to do just that. "It gave me the courage to do it," he said.

"When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next," he added, having just completed the film, eventually called "A Flood in Baath Country," for a European arts channel. "The myth of having to live under despots for eternity collapsed."
My compliments to the NYT for putting this story on the front page. The Times also ran an excellent front page story yesterday looking back at the past year in Iraq through the eyes of a single family. I thought this passage was particularly interesting:
Three weeks after the bombardent, the [Imaris] returned to Baghdad. American soldiers were cruising the streets.

"They looked young, they looked strong," Abu Abbas said. "We wanted to give them food and flowers, but we were embarrassed by what we had to offer."
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# Posted 7:56 PM by David Adesnik  

HYPOCRISY TEST: Kevin Drum expects that the paladins of the right-wing punditocracy will ignore the Jack Kelley/USA Today scandal because it won't afford them the chance to attack the liberal NYT. Kevin writes:
I know that everyone — and I mean everyone — is probably tired of this comparison even before it's made, but, um, Kelley's fabrications are actually a lot worse than Jayson Blair's, right? And they went on for a much longer time, right? And there are a lot more of them, right?

But, er, um, Kelley is white, isn't he?

I really don't think it's unfair to ask Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan when they're planning to start their 24/7 coverage of this affair. Surely, at the very least, they should start baying for editor Karen Jurgensen's resignation, shouldn't they?
I don't really expect the Kelley affair to get that kind of attention either. But ask yourself the following questions: How often do you read USA Today? Does anyone consider USA Today to be the United States' paper of record and its standard-bearer of journalistic integrity?

(You don't have to answer those questions. They were rhetorical. Oh, and one bonus question for all you bloggers out there: How many times have you linked to a USA Today story in the past six months?)
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# Posted 7:35 PM by David Adesnik  

IS IT NEWS? Ex-NSC counter-terrorism director Richard Clarke says that the Administration was already thinking about Iraq in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. As Pejman correctly points out, we knew that almost two years ago thanks to Bob Woodward.

What Clarke adds to that story is the allegation that Rumsfeld wanted to go after Iraq instead of Afghanistan. According to Woodward, "everyone agreed that destroying al Qaeda was the first priority". If a second, credible source confirms Clarke's allegation, it might begin to get some serious play. Otherwise, Clarke will become just another Paul O'Neill.
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# Posted 3:44 PM by Patrick Belton  

SUSHI REDUX: A few days ago, I posted that Kim Jong Il's Sushi chef, now in retirement, had written that his boss particularly enjoyed eating fish which were still alive, and moving around on the plate, which he consumed "with gusto." Now by including this tidbit, I'd meant to imply that Kim was first of all, weird, and second of all, most likely kind of a nasty fellow. Then, I was disabused from my dogmatic slumber when I got this from one of our friends and readers in a cold college town in Massachusetts:
This is pretty standard in Asia - when I was working there last summer we had to eat fish that were fried in the middle but not at the head or tail, and were still alive when brought out to the table. This is a huge nouveau riche type specialty in Asia, and everyone pretty much "ate it with gusto"...so I don't know what that quote was about, really. If the intent of the quote was to prove somehow that Kim is a monster, then it's really a bit short-sighted. But who knows - maybe you were commenting on his status as multimillionaire, who are generally the only people who can afford to eat live fish in good restaurants in Asia.
Thanks, Zoë! (Though I've got to admit, it still sounds a little weird to me....)
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# Posted 7:12 AM by Patrick Belton  

INTERESTING: A pan-African Parliament was launched this week by the Organization of African Unity, modelled on the European Parliament. There are aspirations that it will play a role in continental integration and in the harmonisation of laws of member states. The principal problem at the moment is funding; member states, most of which are strapped for cash, are being assessed to pay for the costs of maintaining the assembly.
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# Posted 6:02 AM by Patrick Belton  

JUST NOTICING: I was just looking for a US-UK plug adapter to replace one which had broken. Not to criticise, but isn't it odd that the International Gays travel accessories online store only features photographs of heterosexual couples?
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# Posted 12:30 AM by David Adesnik  

THE SPANISH IMBROGLIO: This issue got big while I was out West and out of touch, so I've been playing catch up the last few days. From what I can tell, the heart of the debate revolves around whether it was the Madrid bombings themselves or the Aznar government's incompetent effort to lie about evidence of Al Qaeda's involvement that led to the Socialists' victory in last Sunday's elections.

The question of whether or not Aznar's government lied about the evidence seems to have been answered in the affirmative. Still, it is more than possible that the Socialists' would have won the election regardless. That is the point made in an excellent essay by Timothy Garton Ash (link via TPM):
Rightwing American commentators charge Spanish voters with "appeasement". This is crass. More than three-quarters of the Spanish electorate turned out for a massive defence of democracy in the face of terror. Every single Spanish voter was a soldier in the "war on terror". They voted different ways for all sorts of reasons. Historically, high turn-outs have favoured the left. Some of the former communist electorate voted tactically for the socialists. Many swing voters punished the conservative government of Jos? Mar?a Aznar for initially attributing the attacks to the Basque terrorist organisation Eta. And, yes, some emotionally blamed him for having made Spain a more likely terrorist target by supporting Bush's war on Iraq. But to say that this vote adds up to "appeasement" is a stupid slur.

So far as the Spanish voters' intentions are concerned, the election result was not subjectively a victory for al-Qaida. But it is, as Marxists used to say, an objective victory for al-Qaida. The Madrid bombings look likely to do exactly what a message posted on a radical Islamist website months ago said they should do: exploit the election moment to knock Spain out of the "Crusader-Zionist" coalition in Iraq. Conclusion: terror works.
So now what? According to Robert Kagan,
The Bush administration needs to recognize it has a crisis on its hands and start making up for lost time in mending transatlantic ties, and not just with chosen favorites. The comforting idea of a "New Europe" always rested on the shifting sands of a public opinion, in Spain and elsewhere, that was never as favorable to American policy as to the governments. The American task now is to address both governments and publics, in Old and New Europe, to move past disagreements over the Iraq war, and to seek transatlantic solidarity against al Qaeda.
That kind of advice is very, very surprising coming from Neo-Conservative #1 -- and all the more important because of it. On the other hand, Kagan seems to have written his column before becoming aware of the backlash against Aznar's deception. Would he still describe the Spanish elections as "al Qaeda's most significant geopolitical success since Sept. 11, 2001" if the elections results were a reflection on the Spanish Prime Minister's dishonesty rather than the Spanish public's supposed receptiveness to blackmail?

Then again, as Garton Ash points out, the precise cause of the Spanish conservatives' defeat may simply be irrelevant. We need to demonstrate that terrorism simply does not work. The best way to do that is to capture Osama bin Laden. In the meantime, we do have to improve relations with Europe and work harder than ever to promote democracy in Iraq.
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Friday, March 19, 2004

# Posted 11:38 PM by David Adesnik  

TPM CALLS KETTLE BLACK: Greg Djerejian seems to have caught Josh Marshall throwing some hypocritical accusations in the direction of Richard Perle. I'm no fan of Perle, but I think Greg is right about this one. And I'm not surprised that Josh Marshall has lost his step. His overwhelming resentment of the neo-cons has begun to damage his otherwise sharp sense of when to follow a story.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall defends himself, albeit indirectly.
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# Posted 11:27 PM by David Adesnik  

A PSEUDO-ECONOMY FOR A PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY: TM writes in to provide some context for my earlier comments about Russian economic growth:
I worked as a banker in Russia from 1997-2000 and can give some missing perspective. Russia's current "boom" is due entirely to $38-per-barrel oil. Each $1 rise in the oil price adds $1B to the Russian state's foreign reserves. Though structural demand and supply conditions may well keep oil prices high long-term, it's useful to think of the Russian economy as another version of Nigeria: an oil-addicted primitive economy in which basic market institutions are either stunted or non-existent. 
 
Today's Russia is not capitalist. Capitalism requires a vast infrastructure of laws, mechanisms, practices designed to channel savings into productive investments, and Russia's banking system is so corrupt and primitive that the majority of Russian savings are either spirited abroad (as in the case of most of the "oligarchs"' ill-gotten profits) or stuffed under mattresses.
 
When I worked at Citibank, our emerging markets development matrix put Russia in the same category of market development as Nigeria and Indonesia: the banking system is a shambles, with very little credit available to firms and households; foreign direct investment outside of the oil sector is minuscule (Poland has attracted many times the amount of FDI that Russia has--even when one INCLUDES the oil sector); and the amount of daily trading on the local capital marketslocal  market capitalization barely exceeds the size of a single top-tier US high net worth brokerage account.
 
Secondly, to the point about inequality, I haven't seen the data or the methodology behind the "inequality coefficient" Shleifer references, but there's one data point that suggests a different picture. On the most recent Forbes List of Billionaires you will find 31 New Yorkers and 23 Muscovites. Note that there are fewer than 20 billionaires in France and the UK combined, and only a handful of billionaires in countries such as Brazil and Mexico that have similar population size as Russia and that also have spectacular concentrations of wealth...
 
Finally, about the productivity improvements that Khodorkovsky et al. have supposedly made with their oil companies: Given the extreme incompetence of soviet management, and the dearth of capital investment during the last 30 years, it would be impossible for anyone but a moron not to raise the return on invested capital in Russian firms.
 
The real challenge for Russia is to create a rudimentary banking system. Khodorkovsky like most oligarchs has his own "bank", called Menatep, and his record here is one of fraud, incompetence and outright theft of depositors' assets. The banking and currency crisis that he, other corrupt "bankers" and the Yeltsin regime perpetrated in August 1998 destroyed the lifetime savings of millions of Russians. For this felony alone the man should go to prison.
 
The oligarchs have looted Russia and destroyed any hope of that country entering the ranks of the leading economies of the world for at least two generations. For anyone but a Geneva jeweler or a London or Costa del Sol estate agent, there is no silver lining to this cloud.
I'm no economist, but I wouldn't be surprised if Russia's economy was no more substantive than its constiutional order. As Mike McFaul has noted, that sort of relationship between growth and democracy is the norm in Eastern Europe.
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# Posted 4:39 PM by David Adesnik  

LAYING THE SMACKDOWN ON RUMSFELD: Yes, I got this video clip from MoveOn.org (via Matt Yglesias). But the SecDef does make a complete fool of himself.

On an unrelated note, Matt has graciously admitted that New Haven has the best pizza in the United States. While Matt believes that good pizza can generally be found throughout the nation, he notes that he has not yet found it in Washington, DC.

As a former resident of the nation's capital, I must sadly inform Matt that he is not going to find it there. The best DC has to offer is Bertucci's, which is actually pretty good but nothing to write home about.

UPDATE: Eve Tushnet writes
Bertucci's? Oy Gott! No.

Doubtless you have already gotten fifty of these emails, but I must add my voice to the chorus:
Pizzeria Paradiso. It's in Dupont Circle (20th and P-ish), it's teeny tiny thus there are long waits, and
it serves pizza that is (I will say this) BETTER THAN SALLY'S. (I never made it to Pepe's, so take my words with however much salt that warrants.) BETTER THAN SALLY'S!

Also, if you like Chicago-style (I do), Armand's is fantastic. There's one on GA Ave in Silver Spring, one at Friendship Heights, one in the general Farragut North area, and one at Union Station. I have no idea how it compares to pizzas in actual-factual Chicago, but it is really, really good.
You know, I did eat at Paradiso once. It was quite good, but I wouldn't have put it in the same league as Sally's. Maybe I was just there on an off night. As for Armand's, I think it's pretty run of the mill. Or perhaps it's gotten better since I left town. Frankly, I'm surprised that I don't see eye to eye with someone like Eve who is known for having good taste. Oh well.

Now for those of you in Alexandria, Mark the Pundit recommends Generous George's. And finally, getting back to DC, TB writes that
Two places sell world class pizza in the DC area. The Italian Store in the Lyon Park Shopping Center off of Spout Run has great Pizza and great sandwiches too. Don't try walking in to get a slice on the weekend. The place is mobbed. And then there is Faccia Luna; they make it all over the place now.
Spread the word.
I haven't heard of either place, but I'm an open-minded pizza lover, so I'll be sure to give both a try when I get the chance!
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# Posted 3:04 PM by Patrick Belton  

IN SAN FRANCISCO, AND LONELY TONIGHT? Our foreign policy society's Bay area chapter is having its first meeting (6 pm, Berkeley Faculty Club) - stop by!
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# Posted 3:00 PM by Patrick Belton  

KOSOVO HAS ERUPTED IN VIOLENCE, with ethnic Albanians attacking Serb homes and churches in each city in the province. Clashes have occurred in every city in Kosovo, and 500 have been wounded, with 31 dead. Almost 1,000 Serbs have fled their homes, and a U.S. admiral on the ground has called the events tantamount to ethnic cleansing, in the region that gave the world that term. A second trustworthy commentator (National Interest's managing editor) has quoted a UN source as calling the last days' events "Kristallnacht". "It was all planned in advance," said a UN spokesman in Kosovo, noting that rumours (falsely) blaming Serbs for the deaths of several Albanian children circulated only shortly before busloads of armed Albanians arrived in Kosovska Mitrovica to begin razing the city's Serbian quarter. The UN, in response to the nationwide planned violence, with typical courage withdrew its missions from at least three cities in Kosovo. Nato allies are preparing to send additional peacekeepers.

Our thoughts are with the innocent members of both Kosovar communities who are suffering now the reprisals and aftermath of this act of genocide by Albanian leaders.
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# Posted 8:14 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE PUBLIC RECORDS OFFICE has placed Shakespeare's will online. (There are others, too, but you have to pay for those.)

Can't read it? Here's another version, this not in the Bard's own hand.
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# Posted 4:47 AM by Patrick Belton  

TAIWANESE PRESIDENT, VP SHOT IN LEAD-UP TO ELECTIONS: Both President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu survived the assassination attempt, and elections are proceeding as scheduled. (CNN, Bloomberg) There is yet no word as to whether China was involved in the attempt; the Chinese government has been quite belligerant in the past months to indicate its preference for Mr Shui-bian's opponent, who is less forceful a proponent for Taiwanese independence. The Chinese government is refusing to comment on the assassination attempt.
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Thursday, March 18, 2004

# Posted 5:40 PM by David Adesnik  

PRIORITIES & FRIVOLITIES: While reading Rob Tagorda's excellent blog is one of my priorities, tonight there will be an emphasis on frivolity. In about an hour, I will be meeting up with Rob and his lovely wife Noemi to celebrate Rob's upcoming move to Cambridge, Mass. Rob isn't excited about the weather in Cambridge, but I'm sure he'll learn to live it. Brrr!
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# Posted 5:30 PM by David Adesnik  

CONTEMPT: The WaPo slams the Bush Administration for holding back evidence about the costs of its Medicare bill and threatening to fire the actuary who just wanted to tell the truth.
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# Posted 5:29 PM by David Adesnik  

RUDE: Spain's Prime Minister-elect has bluntly stated that he wants John Kerry to win in November. I'm sort of suprised, since just yesterday I told Steve Sturm that the Bush administration will not voice its dissatisfaction with the results of Spain's recent election since doing so would be a gross violation of diplomatic protocol.

Moreover, such offensive statements tend to have the exact opposite of the intended effect, since voters don't want to be told by foreign politicians -- especially American presidents -- whom they should vote for. Of course, most Americans will never hear what the new Spanish PM said, since Spanish PMs don't get paid much attention on this side of the Atlantic (unless Democratic presidential candidates foolishly remind voters that Europeans never support Republicans).

UPDATE: Steve Sturm adds some thoughtful comments to my response.
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# Posted 5:03 PM by David Adesnik  

RUSSIA'S RESURGENCE & PUTIN'S APOLOGISTS: As expected, Vladimir Putin prevailed in a landslide this past Sunday to win a second term as President of Russia. To its credit, the Western media has consistently challenged both the fairness of Sunday's elections as well as the substance of Russia's supposedly democratic order. However, there is a growing backlash against this negative coverage among professional analysts of Russian politics. In the lead essay of the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer and UCLA political scientist Daniel Treisman lash out at what they see as one-sided coverage of Putin's accomplishments. Their article begins as follows:
During the last 15 years, Russia has undergone an extraordinary transformation. It has changed from a communist dictatorship to a multiparty democracy in which officials are chosen in regular elections. Its centrally planned economy has been reshaped into a capitalist order based on markets and private property. Its army has withdrawn peacefully from both eastern Europe and the other former Soviet republics, allowing the latter to become independent countries. In place of a belligerent adversary with thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at it, the West finds a partner ready to cooperate on disarmament, fighting terrorism, and containing civil wars.
In contrast, consider what's Stanford Russianist Michael McFaul has to say about the subject:
In his first term in office, Putin continued a brutal and ineffective war in Chechnya, acquired de facto control of all major national television networks, turned both the Federation Council and State Duma into rubber stamps, and tamed regional barons who once served as a powerful balance to Yeltsin's presidential rule. He has arbitrarily used law enforcement structures to jail or send into exile political foes. He has removed candidates from ballots and rigged regional elections; harassed and arrested human rights activists, outspoken journalists, and environmental leaders; and weakened Russia's independent political parties and civil society.
The most striking difference between these two descriptions of Putin's record is the way in which Shleifer and Treisman provide vague descriptions of Putin's supposed accomplishments while McFaul relies on specific and detailed evidence to demonstrate what has gone wrong in post-Soviet Russia. What Shleifer and Treisman do get right, however, is that Russia's economy is in the midst of an unheralded boom. Of course, this is no secret. McFaul praises Putin's economic record as well. The WaPo reports that Putin "oversaw a dramatic economic expansion". But who would notice those five words in the midst of a lengthy article devoted to the semi-democratic nature of Sunday's election?

Shleifer and Treisman marshall an impressive array of evidence to demonstrate how far Russia's economy has come under Putin. In spite of having a stagnant GDP for most of the 1990s,
Retail trade actually rose 4 percent between 1990 and 2001. And average living space per person rose from 16 square meters in 1990 to 19 square meters in 2000. The shares of households with radios, televisions, tape recorders, refrigerators, washing machines, and electric vacuum cleaners all increased between 1991 and 2000. And private ownership of cars doubled, rising from 14 cars per 100 households in 1991 to 27 cars per 100 households in 2000. The number of Russians going abroad as tourists rose from 1.6 million in 1993 to 4.3 million in 2000.

Russia has, without doubt, experienced an increase in inequality, in both income and consumption. But indicators suggest that there has been improvement even at the bottom of the social pyramid. Since 1993 (the first year for which comprehensive figures exist), the percentage of Russia's housing with running water has increased from 66 percent to 73 percent; the share with hot water from 51 to 59 percent; and the percentage with central heating from 64 percent to 73 percent. Since 1990, the proportion of Russian apartments with telephones has increased from 30 percent to 49 percent.
In other words, a vote for Putin isn't a vote against democracy or even a vote for stability. It is a vote for real improvements in national wealth and standards of living. The next point Shleifer and Tresiman make is that widespread condemnation of Russia's post-Soviet economic reforms has been perilously misguided. First of all, critics of the post-Soviet era tend to dramatically exaggerate the efficiency of the Soviet economy. While GDP may have fallen in absolute terms after 1990, the substance of such economic indicators has changed dramatically. Whereas Soviet figures rested on high production of second-rate military equipment and unwanted consumer goods, newer statistics reflect the actual production of useful goods.

Now, when Shleifer and Treisman get into their more detailed discussions of the Russian economy, it is hard for a non-expert such as myself to evaluate their evidence. Nonetheless, their arguments seem plausible and well supported. For example, they point out that there is only a tenuous link between capitalism and inequality in Russia, since inequality hits its peak in 1994, well before capitalist reforms had reconfigured the economy. Shleifer and Treisman also argue that the economic power of the oligarchs has neither damaged the economy nor resulted in unsustainable growth, since the oligarchs' firms have performed extremely well while investing unprecedented amounts in capital stock.

Of course, nothing Putin has achieved on the economic front justifies his agressive efforts to promote what his own officials refer to as "managed democracy". It is also damaging for experts such as Shleifer and Treisman to downplay Putin's anti-democratic measures by arguing that "Even in rich countries such as Italy and the United States, journalists shape their broadcasts to fall into line with the views of media tycoons such as Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch." That sort of comparision is simply absurd. Unless the Bush Administration decides to put all of Fox's competitors out of business and throw George Soros in jail, there can be no comparison between the state of journalism in the United States and Russia.

Lest one argue that Putin's anti-democratic measures have paved the way for economic growth, one should take note of Michael McFaul's observation that there is no connection between rigging elections, shutting down opposition media and the efficiency of the private sector. Moreover, "The experience in the postcommunist world is clear: The fastest democratizers are also the fastest economic reformers and the most successful economies."

As such, the Bush administration should not hesitate to demand that Putin's stop undermining the foundations of Russian democracy. Colin Powell should not be saying that "I have some concerns, but I don't think democracy is in trouble in Russia." It is. And when the US ignores that fact, it damages our own credibility as a global advocate of democratic reform. Moreover, Putin is hurting our efforts to win the War on Terror by waging a brutal and senseless war in Chechnya. While we can't force Putin to change his ways, we can keep the global spotlight on his authoritarian and aggressive behavior. Ever the self-interested pragmatist, that kind of negative attention may just keep Putin in line.
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# Posted 5:02 PM by Patrick Belton  

WAPO EDITORIALIZING ON SAUDI SUPPRESSION OF REFORMERS: This, it seems, is precisely why we need to be backing Arab reformists against their governments, rather than backing off whenever we stand the risk of hurting the feelings of a petty dictator:
What prompted the arrests, Saudi sources say, was a plan by the reformers to establish an independent human rights organization. The professors first asked permission to set up the group, only to be told that the government planned to establish its own human rights organization. Predictably, the official group rolled out last week excluded the dissidents as well as other notable government critics. So the reformers revived their plan for an independent organization -- only to be dragged from their classrooms by Interior Ministry officials, purportedly for "questioning."
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# Posted 10:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

LETTING MY FRIENDS DO MY WORK FOR ME: Today is the day after Saint Patrick's Day. That means, I'm not blogging much today. Instead, go read Kevin's new blog over at Washington Monthly, Winds of Change on (among other things), China and terrorism, and Robert on Saudi suppression of dissidents (and the fact that Harvard weather sucks). At TNR Online, Easterblog is a must read on graduation rates in NCAA basketball, and Jesus mini-series spin-offs. Thomas Friedman is at his best on the Axis of Appeasement. (What's that? It's what happens when the Axis of Evil intersects with the Axis of Incompetence.) Also,
Unless President Bush dispenses with his discredited argument for the war — W.M.D. — no one will hear or listen to what I believe was always the only right argument for the war and is now the only rationale left: to depose the genocidal Saddam regime in order to partner with the Iraqi people to build a decent government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world — because it is the pathologies and humiliations produced by Arab misgovernance that are the root causes of terrorism and Muslim extremism.
Also, sticking with the theme of the post indicated in the header - our foreign policy society releases today a policy paper on North Korea, as well as launching the website for our high school and college foreign policy essay contest. Let us know what you think!
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Wednesday, March 17, 2004

# Posted 10:23 PM by David Adesnik  

THE UNKNOWN BLOGOSPHERE: The 2004 "Bloggie" awards were announced on Monday. While I recognized most of the nominees in the politics category, that was about it. A nice reminder that there are whole worlds out there that we don't even know exist.
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# Posted 10:03 PM by David Adesnik  

ACADEMIC POLITICS MATTER! Ralph Luker has been following the disturbing story of two tenured professors at the University of Southern Mississippi whose jobs were terminated for reasons that the university president refuses to elaborate.

Ralph isn't happy with OxBlog because I recently dismissed these sorts of academic crises as "tempests-in-a-teapot". Perhaps that description was a bit harsh. I fully support all those who actively defend the right of free speech. It's just my sense that such incidents happen so often on campuses across the nation that one shouldn't approach them as landmark battles in a national culture war. (NB: I was unaware of the USM affair before today. The "tempest" comment was about academic politics in general.)

As Kikuchiyo observes, the ivory tower has a strong propensity to overestimate the significance of its own affairs. As Henry Kissinger once said, "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." That isn't the whole story, but it is a big part of it.

Kikuchiyo is also right to speculate that OxBlog takes a similar approach to academic slugfests regardless of whether they take place in the Ivy League or the Mississippi Delta. While Ralph detected a note of condescension in my original comments, the fact is that my lack of interest in academic politics reflects my experiences at Yale and Oxford, rather than any sense that political controversies only matter if they happen at Yale or Oxford.

Finally, I don't think Ralph was being fair to Salma Hayek.
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# Posted 9:33 PM by David Adesnik  

MURDER, AGAIN: In Baghdad. Our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones.

UPDATE: I wouldn't exactly call it good news, but the death toll for yesterday's blast has been revised sharply downwards.
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# Posted 12:07 PM by Patrick Belton  

I HAD BEEN EXPECTING somewhat in vain a Saint Patrick's extravaganza on Google this morning, but I am proud however to note that www.google.ie delivers quite satisfactorily. Many thanks, Google; and Tá an t-ádh orm inniu - I'm indeed feeling quite lucky today.

Speaking of Saint Patrick's extravaganzas, The Irish Times provides admirable coverage of Dublin's St Patrick's Day festival, which this year invited entries inspired by the concept "glorious." In Galway, a city I nurse warm feelings toward, today's parade will be a re-enactment of the Battle of Knockdoe, fought 500 years ago this year. And the Taoiseach joined Manchester's Irish community this afternoon to open the parade in that city. (The Irish community of Oxfordshire, I should note, will incidentally be congregating tonight in the OxBlog branch office at 109 Rawlinson Road.)
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# Posted 5:46 AM by Patrick Belton  

BEANNACHTAI NA FEILE PADRAIG ORAIBH!!!! A very happy feast of Saint Patrick to all of our readers. With luck, I'll have a bit more to say about the topic before the day's over, but in any event I wish all of our friends a lovely Saint Patrick's Day.
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# Posted 5:36 AM by Patrick Belton  

EURASIANET INTERVIEWS NATO'S senior civilian official in Afghanistan about the security situation there, and steps forward.
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# Posted 3:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND OVER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF "ROOT CAUSES," the forces of reaction also do not rest - the Saudi government arrested several prominent reformists. According to Reuters, the detainees included former university professors Abdullah al-Hamid and Tawfiq Qussayer, politics professor Matrouk al-Faleh, publisher Mohammed Said Tayyib, and poet Ali al-Dumaini. Tayyib had been one of the driving forces behind a petition, which attracted 800 signatures, calling for an elected parliament and an equal role for women.
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# Posted 3:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

THERE'S A GREAT DEAL OF ACTIVITY ON THE EU ANTI-TERROR FRONT in the wake of the Madrid bombings:
The EU will also hold an emergency meeting of EU interior and justice ministers on Friday before a summit of European leaders on March 25-26. The issue of terrorism is sure to overshadow scheduled talks on economic reforms.

Among EU proposals being floated after Thursday's Madrid train bombings is the possibility of appointing a special EU anti-terrorism czar, Reuters reported. (CNN)
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Tuesday, March 16, 2004

# Posted 6:30 PM by Patrick Belton  

DEMONSTRATIONS IN IRAN AND SYRIA: Eye on the World has a roundup of coverage.
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# Posted 12:02 PM by Patrick Belton  

AND MORE MID-EAST READING MATERIAL: Carnegie's Amy Hawthorne has released this month's Arab Reform Bulletin. Of particularly noteworthy mention are excellent pieces on the interim Iraqi constitution, gestures toward reform in Saudi Arabia, trends in Saudi Islamism, and retrograde motion in Yemen.
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# Posted 10:40 AM by Patrick Belton  

MIDDLE EAST TRENDS: The always excellent Middle East Intelligence Bulletin has released its new issue, with insightful pieces on Hezbollah and its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Syria and upcoming Lebanese elections, Bashar's consolidated control in Syria, and Iran after the elections.
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# Posted 7:20 AM by Patrick Belton  

BELGRAVIA DISPATCH responds to Juan Cole's (dubious, in my view) reading of Spain's electoral decision as a defeat both for Al Qa'eda and (purportedly) fascist, Straussian neo-conservatism.

That disagreement aside, Cole is sponsoring a very admirable translation project aimed at producing Arabic translations of books about American democracy, the American Jewish community, and Western scholarly histories of the Mid East, as well as other works from the Western liberal tradition which are not readily available in Arabic translation.
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# Posted 5:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

"ONE OF THE LONGEST JOURNEYS IN THE WORLD is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan": William McGurn reviews Norman Podhoretz in the New Criterion:
Podhoretz asks how [Sir Isaiah Berlin] squared his Zionism with his continued appearance in a publication (The New York Review of Books) that regularly published enemies of Israel such as Noam Chomsky and I. F. Stone. Berlin responded with a witticism. “I see,” he responded. “You are accusing me of being a fellow-traveler of a fellow-traveler.”
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# Posted 4:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE: A poll commissioned by BBC and carried out by Oxford Research International (full disclosure: we didn't do it!) found that 70 percent of Iraqis feel things are going well or quite well in their lives; 56 percent believe things are better now than they were before the war; more Iraqis believe the US-led invasion was right (49%) than feel it humiliated Iraq (41%), and only 20 percent of respondents wanted Iraq to become an Islamic state.

BBC concludes, "it suggests that the reporting of the daily attacks on the occupying forces in Iraq could be obscuring another picture. This opinion poll gives a glimpse into the real life of Iraqis, who appear to be overwhelmingly pre-occupied with bread and butter issues - whether the lights go on or not, and the restoration of the economy."

(Question for the NYT's Dan Okrent: is this what you meant when you told us about rowback?)
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# Posted 4:34 AM by Patrick Belton  

LUST: IT'S NOT JUST FOR CLERGY ANY MORE: Lucky in cards (or Russian roulette, for you in the Volokh side of the blogosphere), but unlucky in love? Finding that your love life has gone straight from Valentine's Day to Lenten abstinence? Then you might read Nicholas Blincoe's review of Simon Blackburn's expertly treatise on lust, part of an OUP and New York Public Library series on the seven mortal sins. ("One wonders what the other six contributions to the series are like ...'Gluttony: without it, I would be only half the man I am,' 'Anger: better out than in,' or 'Sloth: wake me up when it's over.'"). A few furtive glances:
[In the Symposium, as the hours drag on] we learn that the real object of desire is not young men but rather elderly ones, and our ultimate aim is not pleasure but wisdom. One sees why everyone at the symposium was drunk: they had to be legless to swallow Plato's argument, as the great philosopher clumsily substituted one object for another, until he ... made the squat septuagenarian Socrates the pin-up boy of ancient Athens.

At this point, I would like to call expert witness Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays, who sang "Son, I'm 30. I only went with your mother 'cause she's dirty." Blackburn finds even more eloquent voices, like that of Edna St Vincent Millay, a poet of the 1920s who provided a role model for Dorothy Parker. Millay's sonnet number 61 admits a lover's proximity had led her to "feel a certain zest/ To bear your body's weight upon my breast", but adds, "let me make it plain:/ I find this frenzy insufficient reason/ For conversation when we meet again."
Read on, and you can discover Blackburn's concept, in reading Hobbes, of "fungibility", "which frankly sounds more like something caught from sex than a concept to help explain it."
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# Posted 4:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Kim Jong Il's sushi chef, on his employer (from WaPo):
"He particularly enjoyed sashimi so fresh that he could start eating the fish as its mouth is still gasping and the tail is still thrashing," Fujimoto said. "I sliced the fish so as not to puncture any of its vital organs, so of course it was still moving. Kim Jong Il was delighted. He would eat it with gusto."
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Monday, March 15, 2004

# Posted 9:37 AM by Patrick Belton  

HAPPY IDES OF MARCH! The Roman calendar - as well as the Julian calendar, and the idea also persisted to greater or lesser extents through the Renaissance - revolved around three days in each month- the Kalends (1st day of the month), the Nones (the 7th day in March, May, July, and October; the 5th in the other months), and, of course, the infamous Ides (the 15th day in March, May, July, and October; the 13th in the other months). The remaining days of the month were designated by backwards counting from the closest Kalends, Nones, or Ides - so yesterday was Pridie (or II) Ides, Saturday was III Ides, Friday was IV Ides, and so forth until Nones, March 7th. So happy Ides - and now you have all sorts of other Roman calendrical days you can celebrate throughout the year, too.

More importantly though, for present purposes, this sets up a bad joke.
It's a little known fact that Julius Caesar did not die from stab wounds by Brutus, but, rather, was poisoned. During a sumptuous banquet which they both attended on that fateful Ides of March, Brutus slipped some poisonous hemlock leaves onto Julius' salad. (Thus making the world's first Caesar's salad - no, that's not the joke, wait for it....)

When Julius slumped over into his salad, Brutus feigned concern and asked, "My dear friend Julius, how many hemlock leaves have you eaten?" To which Julius gasped in reply: "Ate two, Brute."
There are more here, but they aren't as funny.
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# Posted 2:56 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND BABY MAKES TEN: Could we have a tenth planet? It's seeming increasingly likely: the recently launched Spitzer Space Telescope, in spite of the obvious impediment of sounding in nomenclature somewhat like a Luftwaffe invention, has discovered an orbiting world as large as, or slightly larger than, Pluto.

Named Sedna after the traditional Inuit goddess of the ocean, it orbits 10bn kilometres from Earth in a region of space known as the Kuiper Belt (or KB, for those in the know or who care to use the lingo). That there seem to be a large family of Kuiper Belt Objects, as they're called - leftover parts, in essence, from the creation of the solar system - has been known for some time: these include a number of minor planets, but before Sedna none yet had been discovered to rival Pluto's 2,000 kilometer diameter. Though it's unclear as yet whether ten planets will result from Sedna's discovery, what seems likely to happen is that there won't any longer be nine - either Sedna gets counted, or Pluto suffers demotion to the ranks of a large number of Kuiper Belt Objects lounging about in the most exotic tourist location in the solar system.

UPDATE: Noting the Latinate names of the current registry of the club of planets (Mercury, Venus, and the rest), reader James asks "Ye Gods! Why Sedna?"

AND ANOTHER UPDATE: BBC has a picture. Also, our New Haven friends might be interested to know that one of the discoverers, David Rabinowitz, does his stargazing from Science Hill.
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Sunday, March 14, 2004

# Posted 4:24 PM by Patrick Belton  

THE SOCIALIST PARTY HAS CLAIMED VICTORY in Spain's elections. See CNN, El País.

As Joe Gandleman has pointed out (see also here), the Socialists have promised to withdraw Spain from the Iraq coalition in the event of their election. Which is to say, of course, that the terrorists got what they wanted - assuming that Al Qa'eda was indeed behind the attack - to deter a European country from further participation in Iraq, after punishing it for its involvement to this point. But to be fair, on the other hand the Spanish government has gone out of its way to play down the Al Qa'eda implications (which would make it vulnerable) in favor of ETA (which would strengthen it). An attribution of the attack to Al Qa'eda would have made Aznar's party vulnerable, having brought the country into Iraq and provoked the terrorists' ire; an attribution to ETA would have strengthened the party, having amassed a strong record in combatting the separatist group. Aznar's government is seen as having played politics with the investigation, which if true would have been unworthy both of the commitment to principle which brought his government into Iraq and of the continued trust of his nation. And at any rate any nation which had suffered the unprovoked tragedy which Spain did in the March 11th attacks may be given considerable leeway in forgiving actions it takes while grieving.

The webpage of the party, whose full name is the Partido Socialista Obero Español, is here.
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# Posted 7:16 AM by Patrick Belton  

CLOSE BUT NOT QUITE: Much has been made, in Tech Central Station as well as elsewhere, of the claim that the March 11th attacks in Madrid occured precisely 911 days after the 9-11 attacks in New York. Close, but not actually correct. By my count, March 11, 2004, was actually the 912th day after September 11th, 2001.
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# Posted 6:41 AM by Patrick Belton  

MORE PURPORTED AL QA'EDA STATEMENTS OF RESPONSIBILITY: Yigal at MEMRI posts a translation and commentary on the alleged Al Qa'eda statement released in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on March 12. Reuters releases a second ostensible claim of responsibility from Al Qa'eda, released Saturday night. The purported spokesman, who spoke in Arabic with a Moroccan accent, claimed to speak on behalf of the military spokesman of Al Qa'eda in Europe, an Abu Dujan al Afgani. The statement was released on a videotape dead-dropped into a waste paper bin on Madrid's outskirts, after a television station received a call informing them that the tape would be there.
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# Posted 1:57 AM by David Adesnik  

BOMBS AWAY: I'm off to the west coast to board an aircraft carrier in San Diego and then observe Air Force exercises outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. I'll be travelling with the rest of the fellows from the Olin Institute. Our priority is to hit the casinos. Back on Wednesday.
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Saturday, March 13, 2004

# Posted 9:27 PM by Patrick Belton  

COME TALK TRADE: Our readers in Washington are all warmly welcome to join our foreign policy society's Washington chapter on Sunday evening for a discussion comparing multilateral and bilateral approaches to freer trade. The event will be at 7:30 at the Bertuccis in Clarendon, and our guest speaker will be Andreas Sennekamp (Georgetown Law).

Also, our San Francisco chapter will be getting off the ground this coming Friday, March 19, with an event on globalization at 6 pm at the Berkeley Faculty Club. Nayan Chanda of the Yale Center for Globalization (and editor of its magazine, YaleGlobal) will be the guest speaker. There is unfortunately a door charge of $15, but it buys a great deal of food.

Penultimately, we're running high school and college foreign policy essay contests in each of the ten cities in which we have a chapter; please let us know if you'd like to volunteer and pitch in!

Finally, we've got new pages up for a few of our programs, in democracy promotion, Trade, Security, and Development, and Asia. Please do drop us a note if you've got any ideas for resources you think we should link to from any of these pages (or if you can at least think of a particularly funny way to make fun of what we've got so far...).
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# Posted 4:17 PM by David Adesnik  

CRUSHING OF DISSENT: I have to admit, I don't follow any of Glenn's "Crushing of Dissent" links when they expose political correctness at America's universities. I guess I just don't believe that all those tempests-in-a-teapot really have much significance. But this time, Glenn has linked to a parody of the NYT by Robert Cox that had to be pulled off of Cox's site when the Times threatened legal action.

That's just pathetic. If the NYT cared so much about its integrity, perhaps it should've kept an eye on Jayson Blair. On the other hand, this sort of vindictive behavior is an implicit admission of just how vulnerable professional journalists are to the criticism of intelligent amateurs. Viva el blogosphere!

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman observes that Robert Cox "couldn't BUY this kind of advertising." That's absolutely right. Cox has already gotten a hundred times more exposure than he would have if the Times said nothing. His work is being distributed by dozens of websites. I guess all we can hope for is that the NYT will sue OxBlog someday.

UPDATE: I was sort of curious whether anyone left-of-center would pick up on this and what their take would be. Kevin Drum answers both questions in an impressive manner:
This goes beyond mere bullying and descends into paranoid — and hypocritical — lunacy. The Times certainly has the right to protect its copyright, but at the same time you'd think the publisher of the Pentagon Papers would show a little more respect for free speech and a little more tolerance for criticism.

They should be ashamed of themselves.
Amen. Kevin also has a very solid post up on Social Security.
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# Posted 4:01 PM by David Adesnik  

STANDING AS ONE: Inspirational photographs from Spain. (Via Instapundit)
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# Posted 3:55 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG CULT CLASSICS: It is the destiny of certain films to fade gloriously into the star-studded past, admired by masses and critics alike. It is the destiny of other films to become the secret possession of an enlightened few who share their obsessions with their closest friends but are never able to justify it to America's mainstream. A masterful film in that latter category is Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog. It is the ultimate embodiment of assassin cool. Forest Whitaker plays the title character, an inner-city ascetic who lives according to the Way of the Samurai. He is a professional killer who handles a gun with the elegance that the Samurai once handled their swords. Whereas Hollywood has glorified the non-chalance of the shotgun-wielding action hero, Jarmusch's Ghost Dog is an intense and meditative individual who recognizes that an instrument of death must must be treated with sacred precision.

The great challenge facing so many martial arts films is how to translate the lexicon of the contact weapon -- sword or fist -- into the language of the bullet-riddled present day. In Way of the Dragon, Bruce Lee granted himself the miraculous ability to disarm polyester gunmen with wooden darts. Other films, such as the Once Upon a Time in China series, have made the wiser decision to cast themselves as period epics in which the world still had a place for pure martial artists. Jarmush transcends this divide by having his protagonist endow a firearm with the philosophical elegance once reserved for the sword and the fist. The result is unforgettable.
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# Posted 3:00 PM by David Adesnik  

US PREZ HAS ILLEGITIMATE SON: I'm referring to Grover Cleveland of course. In the Week in Review, Elisabeth Bumiller provides a welcome reminder that the campaigns of today aren't even close to as vicious as those of yesteryear. Historians have been making this point for some time, but the press doesn't often pick it up.

Anyhow, there was one paragrpah from Bumiller that struck me as somewhat disingenuous:
Generally, the campaigns of the 19th century were meaner than the ones today, in large part because the newspapers of the era took sides and were often subsidized by the political parties. "There was almost no restraint on what could be said in the partisan press," said Bruce J. Schulman, a professor of history and American studies at Boston University. "Party organizations were much stronger, and the partisan attachment of voters was much more loyal. Politics then was not about trying to convert voters based on issues. There were more or less no swing voters. It was all about getting your army of voters to the polls."
Although no expert on the subject, I think Prof. Schulman is right about the changing nature of partisanship. Nonetheless, Bumiller is really pushing the envelope when she credits the relative civility of modern campaigns to the rise of objective journalism. As Harvard prof Thomas Patterson documents in his excellent book Out of Order -- not to be confused with the Rod Stewart album of the same name -- the modern media has taken upon itself the mission of exposing every presidential candidate as a liar, an exaggerator and a hypocrite.

To be fair, the candidates often do much of the journalists' work for them. Even so, journalists have chosen to focus their coverage on the candidates' inconsistency and spin rather than the substance of their policy proposals. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps voters should have a healthy cynicism about the candidates they elect. In fact, the modern press may do a far more effective job of character assassination than the partisan press ever did because today's journalists are detached enough to focus on actual lies and inconsistencies rather than generating the outrageous rumors of yesteryear (or of post-Soviet Russia). Whereas 19th century voters could easily discount the output of the other side's spin machine, today's journalists are neutral enough to ensure that whatever they report has to be taken seriously.

Perhaps the best way to put it is that thanks to the media, the negativism of modern campaigns is more substantive and disciplined than ever before.
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# Posted 2:19 PM by David Adesnik  

WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS: Ahhh. A perfect Saturday morning. Slowly getting out of bed at noon. Fresh pancakes and hot coffee for breakfast. All that was missing was waking up next to Salma Hayek. Anyhow, I did come across this interesting report in the Yale Alumni Magazine over breakfast:
"Scientists have found the oldest known fossilized animal that is definitely male. The pinhead-sized yet proportionately well-endowed ocean-dwelling creature was retrieved from 425-million-year-old rocks in the United Kingdom. Dubbed Colymbosathon ecplecticos, Greek for "amazing swimmer with a large penis," the animal is remarkably similar to a group of modern crustaceans known as ostracodes."
In other news about impressive endowments, Jesse Jackson is demanding that Yale place at least 5% percent of its assets in the hands of minority asset managers. I think Yale's response to Jackson was about right: When it comes to the endowment, we're color-blind. We only see green.
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# Posted 1:52 PM by Patrick Belton  

RITA KATZ has posted this week's terrorism headlines. Last week's were here.
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# Posted 12:45 PM by Patrick Belton  

THOUGH IT INSISTS ON explaining Putin's successes with recourse to a pat theory about "Russia's love affair with strong leaders," BBC manages to include today a black joke of the later Soviet period, and we always like those. Here goes:
A black joke of the later Soviet period supposedly quotes a history book of the 21st century: "Who was Adolf Hitler?"
Answer: "A petty dictator who lived in the time of Joseph Stalin."
Interesting, but like usual, you can do better than the BBC just by pilloring random sites from the internet:
A delegation from his native Georgia leaves Stalin's office after an hourly meeting. Stalin realizes that he cannot find his pipe and calls Dhzierhzynsky to find out if anyone from the delegation took his pipe. After 30 minutes Stalin finds the pipe under the table and calls Dhzierhzynsky to let the delegation go. Dhzierhzynsky answers Stalin's call: "I am sorry Comrade, but one half of the delegation already admitted that they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning."

A person comes to a post office and complains: "These new stamps with Lenin do not stick..." The clerk answers: "Comrade, you probably spit on the wrong side."

A grandson complains to his grandfather after a trip to the Soviet Union: "You told me that there is a lot of gold, silver, food, and beautiful women, but all I found was poverty..." The grandfather asks:" And whom did you go with?" The grandson answers:"I went with a traveling company." "That's why..." The grandfather says after a while: "I went with Marshal Pilsudski, in 1920, during the Polish-Bolshevik War."

On his trip to the Soviet Union, President Kennedy saw many drunks. He asked Breznyev about it. Surprised Breznyev replied "...and there are no drunks in the US, in NYC?" "No" answered Kennedy. "When you come to NYC, you may shoot first three drunks you see." After 6 months, Breznyev came to NYC, and walked out of the Soviet embassy. He shot first three drunks he saw, and came back, and went to sleep. When he waked up next day, he read in the New York Times "A bald, short gangster shot three employees of the Soviet embassy."

In a Soviet pre-school, the teacher describes the Soviet Union to the children: "In the Soviet Union all kids are happy. In the Soviet Union all kids have lots of beautiful toys and live in great apartments..." Suddenly one child starts to cry and scream: "I want to go to the Soviet Union!"
UPDATE:
One of my favorite Soviet Era jokes is this one.  In 2072, a boy asks his father, "Dad, who was Leonid Brezhnev?"  His father answers, "He was a politician who lived at the time of Solzhenitsyn."
Michael
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Friday, March 12, 2004

# Posted 10:19 PM by David Adesnik  

DEMOCRAT WITH A SMALL 'D': Few statesmen have done more to promote democracy abroad than Oscar Arias. As President of Costa Rica in the late 1980's, he played a critical role in Central America's transition to democracy, a task once thought impossible. In today's WaPo, Arias defends Jean-Bertrand Aristide's 1995 decision to abolish the Haitian military. And I agree with him.

While some might conclude that the absence of such a force paved the way for February's chaos, I would argue that the minimal human cost and peaceful outcome of the crisis were a direct result of the fact that Haiti had been demilitarized. I regret that a hundred or more Haitians may have died, but am glad that there was no return to the pre-Aristide era, when death tolls rose into the thousands and tens of thousands. Moreover, the absence of a reactionary military establishment all but ensured that French and American peacekeepers could take up their posts without a challenge. Instead of mourning the dead, Haitians can now focus on rebuilding their nation.
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# Posted 9:54 PM by David Adesnik  

REMEMBERING THE WOUNDED: Bob Herbert has posted a thoughtful tribute to a wounded veteran of the Iraq War.
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# Posted 9:23 PM by David Adesnik  

SISKEL & EBERT & OXBLOG: I don't know why, but when OxBlog goes Hollywood, we get some extraordinarily thoughtful responses from our readers. Even though it's been seven days since I posted my initial thoughts about M*A*S*H, the mail is still coming. Writing in from Chicago, Prof. JL notes that there is surprising resemblance between the Hawkeye-Burns relationship in M*A*S*H and the Bunny-Fudd relationship in some classic Looney Toons:
The phenomenon you note -- viciousness being a response to provocation -- is played out nicely in 1940s and 1950s cartoons. Chuck Jones usually required that Bugs Bunny be (playfully) mean in response to a provocation. Jones's typical introduction of the shift from mild
victim to strong attacker was Bugs saying, "Of course, you know, this means war!" An exception is Chuck Jones's Duck Amuck, where Bugs as animator torments
Daffy Duck without provocation. Other Bugs directors, such as Bob Clampett in the early 1940s, allowed Bugs to attack without provocation. Although both worked, the Clampett approach was more artistically daring.

The Warners cartoonists of the 1940s were all aware of this issue and Tex Avery, after he left Warners for MGM, did a great commentary on this process in an MGM cartoon, Bad Luck Blackie (1949). It is too long to describe in detail, but Joe Adamson in Tex Avery: King of Cartoons (pp. 89-93) has a long description. It starts with a mean dog, swallowing and disgorging a little kitten, cruelly laughing. Once our sympathies are aroused against the dog, the kitten allies with a black cat. Together,
they torment the dog through the rest of the cartoon, which ends with the kitten cruelly laughing as the dog did at the beginning. The bulk of the cartoon is pretty funny, but the opening and closing are quite disturbing because you are indeed sucked in to root for the brutal treatment the dog gets--and seemingly deserves. At the last moment, Avery lifts the veil to let you know how he has manipulated your sympathies.
I think JL is right, although my memories of Bugs & Duffy are a little bit hazy. It's also interesting how in almost every episode of M*A*S*H, Burns has to antagonize the audience before Hawkeye is allowed to have a go at him. This sitcom/cartoon logic: the characters have no apparent history and must reenact their morality each time the camera starts to roll. Next up, SC tries to provide a little more context for my perceptions of M*A*S*H:
Just to clear up some misconceptions...

Heller wrote in the intro for a limited edition run on Catch 22 that he was using the war/military as a satirical tool to make fun of how crazy civilian corporate life was in the 1950's. It's not a criticism of "military life" so much as it is of "civilian life". He seemed to go out of his way to clarify this point precisely because there'd been so much confusion about his intent. It'd probably be more accurate to say he was making fun of the militarization of US corporate culture that to say he was mocking the corporate nature of US military culture.

Regarding MASH. It'd probably be worth your time to rent the full feature DVD version and listen to what Altman himself says about the project, intent, and public reaction. He had innumerable problems clearing both the studio and the ratings board due to his insistence of keeping some of the more graphic operating room scenes, which for the time were extremely controversial. Altman suggests that he was able to get away with as much as he did mainly because there were a couple gigantic war films in production at the same time (Patton was one), and he was able to get most of what he wanted because of the small scale and obscurity of his production. So although you're certainly entitled to your personal, subjective interpretation of the film, it's worth noting that MASH (like Catch 22) was meant by its creator as a
broad social commentary and not a specific critique of military culture alone.
You know, I may just go back and rent the DVD again so that I can listen to the commentary track. Getting a director's insight into his own work is one of the great benefits of upgrading from VHS to DVD. However, when you rent DVDs, you don't often want to watch the movie twice in the space of four or five days. But when I own the DVDs, I tend to go through as much of the extra material as possible.
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# Posted 12:19 PM by Patrick Belton  

SPANISH EMBASSIES: Glenn posted a link to Spanish diplomatic representations in the United States, and encouraged readers to send flowers or other expressions of sympathy. I think this is a very poignant idea, and wanted to add this list of Spanish embassies and consulates in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, for our readers who are in the rest of the world. To our Spanish friends: we are grief-stricken alongside you.
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# Posted 9:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE WEEK IN DEMOCRACY: OxDem and our foreign policy society's democracy program contribute a weekly democracy briefing to our friends over at Winds of Change. This week's is up now, with updates on the Mid-East initiative, the Iraqi constitution, Syrian protests, Russian elections, and the Palestinian legislature.
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# Posted 8:47 AM by Patrick Belton  

MORE ON THE INDIA-PAKISTAN CRICKET LINEUP: OxBlog's friend Alex Massie writes in with more background for the India-Pakistan international tomorrow:
www.cricinfo.org is likely to have access to at least a radio broadcast and quite possibly video too. The BBC's site may also be of use.

It's true that this is the first full series in 14 years but the two sides did play three matches in 98-99 in India and have played numerous one day matches against one another on neutral territory such as Sharjah and even, somewhat bizarrely, Toronto. A test between the two at Eden Gardens, Calcutta (capacity 100,000+) would be one hell of an experience.

Incidentally, one way of understanding or appreciating the changing nature of India is through its cricket team. India has always produced some wonderfully talented players, but they have tended to be a fragile side that often crumpled under pressure. (Their record outside of India is, frankly, atrocious). It was as though they didn't truly believe they could dine at top table.

These days however they play with a grand swagger, fearing no-one and are confident (rightly so) that they can give anyone a run for their money. They played a thrilling series in Australia over Christmas that showed they could compete with the best in the world. (one of the good things about being back in Scotland from the US for the holidays was being able to get the cricket on TV).

Also - there's probably no sportsman in the world in any sport who plays under as much pressure as India's batting genius Sachin Tendulkar (a joy to watch incidentally - you could say he combines Barry Bonds' ability with the grace of Joe Dimaggio). His face is everywhere in India - on TV, plastered on billboards - and when he bats he does so with the expectations and hopes of a billion people on his back. Somehow he manages it, retaining a serenity that is quite remarkable.

One other point - cricket in India is one of the essential components that glues this remarkable country together. Rich and poor, Hidu, Muslim and Sikh alike are united in their passionate love of the game. (It was a pretty significant moment when Mohammed Azharuddin, another swashbuckling batsman, became the country's first Muslim captain in 1989).

Pakistan, meanwhile, though a team that also has more than its share of talented players have for the last fifteen years often played in a style that suggests they feel an unfair world is constantly conspiring against them.

Hopefully this series can be the beginning of a fresh rapprochement between the two countries.

yours etc

Alex Massie


UPDATE: AND MORE INDIA-PAKISTAN CRICKET - It turns out that coverage of the match is live online at the BBC website. Also, a friend whose sympathies lie more with the Pakistani side responds to our email above:
Hey there,

In reply to your friend Mr. Massie's comments on India and Pakistan's cricket teams. As an erstwhile avid fan of the Pakistani team,I sort of (as ridiculous as this sounds) took a little bit of offense to that last paragraph on Pakistan's team. I mean, I would agree with him if he said "Pakistan's team has spent the last 15 years royally sucking" but to say "Pakistan, meanwhile, though a team that also has more than its share of talented players have for the last fifteen years often played in a style that suggests they feel an unfair world is constantly conspiring against them." is really rather odd. What does he mean by that?

Having lived in Pakistan and seen the ludicrously bureaucratic mess that is the administration of the Pakistani cricket team, not to mention the absolute lack of any semblance of competition below the national level (we have teams that represent a popular brand of soap playing against a team that represents a provincial police force playing on a dirt pitch about once a year) AND the fact that most of the best players are recruited from absolute nowhere with very little quality coaching at the high school or college level (most of the team at any given time is functionally illiterate) I think it's amazing that the country has produced the level of talent that it has and has performed so well against the bizarrest odds time and again to win the cricket world cup in 1992 and to play in the final in 1999.

What Mr. Massie said about the pressure that Sachin Tendulkar faces could easily be applied to Waqar Younis, Waseem Akram, Inzamam ul Haq and Imran Khan in their prime. Also, I think a lot of the coverage he receives is pretty welcome to him - until last year I saw him sponsering rather trivial products like ballpoint pens on prime time television - so I'm sure he's not exactly recoiling from all the attention he receives.

I mean, most of the things he said about the Indian cricket team (and how cricket unites all indians etc etc) is absolutely true about the Pakistani team too. Maybe we just don't sell ourselves as well as the Indian team does!

well, what a rambling email. I'm not much of a writer!

sincerely,

R,
AND EVEN MORE!
...In the above paragraph, it should be noted that the Nawab of Pataudi and Ghulam Ahmed, also Indian Muslims,  have captained the Indian side back in the 50s and 60s.

Deshis like me are happy to see references to Holi festival and cricket in your blogs.

Are you guys exploring Indian cuisine at Ox beyond chicken tikka and samosas ? Try a south indian dosa-idli-vadai for breakfast or weekend brunch or a Gujerati thali meal at one of the joints near Euston Sq station / St Pancras area in London.
 
Thank you,
 
Cheers
 
Swami
Thanks very much, Swami! And our congratulations, as India's now won the match by five runs.
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# Posted 8:02 AM by Patrick Belton  

STUDENTS DISCOVER MRS KENT THE MUSIC TEACHER WAS REALLY THE DUCHESS OF KENT. The Duchess, who thought it would be great fun to teach children music, had been teaching primary students in Hull music for the past eight years, incognito. Her students did always seem to have rather nice field trips, including visits with the Halle Orchestra and to London's Westminster Abbey, where the school choir sang with opera singer (and Yorkshirewoman) Lesley Garrett.
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# Posted 7:46 AM by Patrick Belton  

ROH IMPEACHED: South Korean Prime Minister Koh Gun will assume the powers of the presidency until South Korea's Constitutional Court decides whether President Roh should be removed from office -- a trial which could take up to half of a year. In a scene recalling some of the choicer moments of Parliamentary and Congressional history, "some [legislators] threw their shoes at the speaker while others wept, yelled, crouched on the floor or sang the national anthem." (CNN)
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# Posted 7:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

WASHINGTON POST ON 3/11: Hear, hear:
THE BUSH administration's clumsy diplomacy and its critics' hyperbolic charges of "unilateralism" sometimes obscure the fact that the United States has had true and valuable allies in the war on terrorism. Yesterday one of the best of those, Spain, suffered a blow as shocking and as terrible as any the enemy has landed since Sept. 11, 2001. Authorities said that more than 190 people were killed and more than 1,200 injured when 10 backpacks crammed with compressed dynamite exploded on four trains in Madrid at the height of the morning rush hour. It remained unclear last night who was responsible; police initially blamed the Basque ETA organization but later discovered evidence pointing to al Qaeda. Either way, as Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar put it, "March 11, 2004, has taken its place in the history of infamy."
See also the New York Times, which poignantly notes "We are all Madrileños now.".
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# Posted 6:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

PAKISTAN-INDIA INTERNATIONAL IN KARACHI: In a historic match fraught with symbolism of warming ties between India and Pakistan, the two nations' cricket sides will face each other in Karachi tomorrow morning. In a friendly held yesterday, Pakistan's A - which did not include some of the best Pakistani players - stood down the India side by six wickets. India and Pakistan have not held a cricket series in fourteen years; the Kerala News have a history of the rivalry.

I'd be very interested to hear whether any of our South African or cricket fancying friends might know whether the international is to be webcast, and if so, where (and when)? I'll be very happy to share the information with our readers.
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# Posted 3:07 AM by Patrick Belton  

FERN HOLLAND, SELFLESS HEROINE OF OUR GENERATION: I've never read an obituary before of someone whom I didn't know but who as instantly seemed intelligible, and the same sort of person as most of my dear friends. May those who knew and loved her have at least the consolation of knowing she died with heroism, and in the pursuit of what was right.
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# Posted 2:55 AM by Patrick Belton  

OVERNIGHT DEVELOPMENTS UPDATE ON MADRID BOMBING: Moderate Voice has a linkfest. Also, Ha'aretz presents an insightful analysis by columnist Ze'ev Schiff. (Thanks to our reader John Hobbins for pointing out the latter.)
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# Posted 12:16 AM by David Adesnik  

NAZIS VOTE REPUBLICAN: David Broder makes a solid point. Whatever you think of George Bush's 9/11 ads, they're nothing compared to FDR and the WWII-era Democrats abuse of patriotism at the polls. On the other hand, it looks like Bush has stolen a page from his father's playbook by trying to scare voters with menacing images of dark-skinned criminals.
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Thursday, March 11, 2004

# Posted 11:55 PM by David Adesnik  

THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN: Two weeks into the race for the White House and some people have already had enough. Kevin Drum is one. Josh Marshall may be another. And Dan Drezner is on the fence.

I'm not sure that I care one way or the other. The process of governing has already become a permanent campaign. From the moment a President takes office, he works on building public support for his agenda while keeping a watchful on his approval ratings. Well, duh, isn't that what Presidents are supposed to do?

Not exactly. For the past forty years or so, governing has resembled a permanent campaign. But before that there really was a divide between electioneering and policymaking. Now, I'm not saying that political considerations didn't have an overwhelming impact on policy. But in the days of Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, politics between elections had more to do with closed-door bargains than public appeals for support. Depending on your perspective, the old system may have been more or less democratic and more or less efficient.

Anyhow, that doesn't mean I want to see a Kerry-Bush catfight dominate the news for the next eight months. I think it's fair to say that the more we hear about the candidates the less we will hear about what's going on outside of this country. Then again, no one is stopping from reading foreign newspapers, so if I get caught up in the catfight I've only got myself to blame.
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# Posted 11:35 PM by David Adesnik  

SPEAK OF THE DEVIL: I was going to write about Bush's flip-flops and Kerry's foreign policy. But the WaPo beat me to it. It's better that way, since I had a couple of drinks at dinner. If I had to write an editorial in this condition, it would probably wind up being about something stupid, like whether or not John Kerry uses Botox.
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# Posted 11:15 PM by David Adesnik  

DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: If you ever get bored with our Congress, check out South Korea.
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# Posted 11:09 PM by David Adesnik  

KISS MY BRASS: It's not every day you run into a four-star general. But tonight I attened a dinner with the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael W. Hagee. By the way, he looks a lot younger and less intimidating in real life than in his photo on the Marine Corps website.

The purpose of the dinner was for Hagee to share his thoughts on the future of warfare. The talk was off the record, but my buddy Captain K said it was the same canned routine you always get. As far as I can tell, Hagee's message was about the same as the one on the Marine Corps website: our strength is our people. We are flexible, adaptable and fast. Nonetheless, it was an interesting talk, with some good war stories and insight into the challenges of rapid deployment.

I sort of suspect that Hagee only described his talk as off the record in order to give the impression of greater intimacy. Without breaching confidence (which I can get away with now that John Ashcroft is on the disabled list), I think I can tell you all that the only impolitic thing Hagee did was take some very mild cheapshots at NATO. Moreover, he had a very sympathetic audience, consisting mostly of security studies faculty who like to feel that they're inside the machine.

The best story of the night came from Captain K and was not told within earshot of the Commandant. Apparently, one of K's sailors went down to Davy Jones' locker as a result of auto-erotic asphxiation. That shouldn't be funny, but the Navy medical team found him dead "in mid-stroke". Not knowing exactly what happened to their son, the sailor's parents demanded access to all of the evidence gathered as part of the official investigation of his death. Thus, it fell to Captain K to write a letter suggesting to them that the evidence -- including detailed photos of the "crime scene" -- were more graphic and disturbing than they could handle.

It's actually not the first time K had to handle this kind of bizarre situation. Another one of his soldiers discovered after shipping out of Bangkok that his new wife was a man. However, he told K that he loved "her" very much and that they were saving up for an operation to make "her" a real woman. And to think Kevin Drum was worried that true love no longer exists.
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# Posted 4:34 PM by Patrick Belton  

LONDON NEWSPAPER SAYS AL QA'EDA-AFFILIATED GROUP CLAIMED RESPONSIBILITY FOR SPAIN ATTACK - which of course, they might have an incentive to do even if they hadn't carried off the event, but if true could very likely make 3/11 Europe's 9/11.

The announcement ran in Al Quds al Arabi:
The newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi said it received a five-page e-mail from the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri claiming its "death squad" had penetrated "one of the pillars of the crusade alliance, Spain."

"This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America's ally in its war against Islam," the unverified claim said.
WaPo has added:
The statement to the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper said, "We have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck one of the bases of the crusader alliance," and called the attacks "Operation Death Trains."

The statement, which was faxed to Reuters, was signed by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades. That group also has claimed responsibility for the November bombing of two synagogues in Turkey and the August bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
Reuters, for its part, has:
We bring the good news to Muslims of the world that the expected 'Winds of Black Death' strike against America is now in its final stage...90 percent (ready) and God willing near," the letter said.... A copy of the letter was faxed to Reuters in Dubai.
Also, Spanish investigators have found detonators and a Qur'anic tape in Arabic in a stolen van near Madrid.

Several thoughts at the moment: the coordinated aspect of the attacks in different locations, as well as the scale of casualties, would both tend to be points in favor of an Al Qa'eda attribution; further, Al Qa'eda had threatened Spain as an ally of the United States's in the Iraq war; Eta as a matter of practice has always telephoned a warning prior to an attack in public; and finally, Eta has not produced a massive attack in years, with the number of its operatives pared after a series of high-profile arrests. On the other side of the balance sheet, a new generation of leaders will be coming into their own in Eta precisely on account of those arrests; and the timing, 72 hours before elections predicted to return a right-of-center party, would seem to suggest a domestic group. Of course, there always remains the analytic possibility that Eta and Al Qaeda may have joined forces - in the way that Hamas and the IRA share weapons and operatives (and in their case, post-colonial ideology), and may both be found in FARC-controlled areas of Colombia - they may simply have decided that both groups could agree on having Spain as an enemy. Like everyone, I'll be following the news very closely for the next few days, to see how the attribution dilemma unfolds.
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# Posted 1:41 PM by Patrick Belton  

PERHAPS OF INTEREST ONLY to some of our readers, but this is by far the best language website I've yet come across. In addition to well-writen pages on such topics as polite usages in French letters, there's also an admirable page on French gestures. I think this one is my favorite.
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# Posted 10:39 AM by Patrick Belton  

OXFORD TO GET RID OF BRITISH UNDERGRADUATES (BBC). "Aaah, that's just wishful thinking," says American postgraduate student.
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# Posted 4:36 AM by Patrick Belton  

MONEYMAN RETIRES: The Pentagon's Comptroller, Under Secretary Dov Zakheim, has announced he will be leaving the Defense Department. Dr Zakheim, incidentally, got his doctorate in this neck of the woods, and has written on subjects close to my own current research area on Congress and U.S. great power relations. As Janine Zacharia reports, he will be going to work with Rachel at the international affairs consulting firm Booz Allen.
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# Posted 1:00 AM by David Adesnik  

MARRIAGE AT THE POLLS: Andrew Sullivan points out that Bush's approval rating on the gay marriage issue is 44 in favor, 52 against. While the polls on this issue are volatile and their meaning not 100% clear, a 52% negative rating still suggests that Bush is losing ground because of the issue.
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# Posted 12:13 AM by David Adesnik  

FLIP-FLOP PING-PONG: Rob Tagorda and Matt Yglesias are swatting back and forth the question of whether John Kerry is an unprincipled opportunist or a contemplative man of nuance. I think this issue is an extremely important one because now seems to be the time when the media is defining for itself who the candidates are. If the flip-flop story grows legs, every profile of Kerry from now until the election will have to spend time evaluating the evidence for and against the charge. Regardless of whether such profiles convict or pardon the Senator from Massachusetts, the simple fact that the issue is constantly in play will become a serious liability.

Getting back to Matt and Rob, the debate started with Matt's column in TAP, which argues that the flip-flop charge is a artificial one created by the Bush administration and picked up by journalists with a compulsive interest in embarrassing the candidates. Rob's first response to Matt implies that Matt is attacking a strawman, since he debunks conservatives attacks on Kerry's record while ignore what the WaPo and TNR have to say.

Matt then got the jump on Rob by pointing out that he had already responded to the WaPo and TNR pieces in question. Undaunted, Rob responded with some original research by using Nexis-Lexis to pore over back issues of Kerry's hometown paper, The Boston Globe. Unconvinced, Matt shot back that the Globe has it in for Kerry and that its evidence is less than compelling.

So where do I stand on all of this? I don't know yet. I spent an hour and half tonight reading just some of the many articles devoted to the flip-flop question. What struck me as most surprising was Matt's statement that if you "look at Kerry's words and deeds with the pre-existing assumption that he's a man of principle and integrity" you will that find his positions to be consistent and nuanced. Yet "if you go into it assuming that Kerry is an opportunist, you can read the events to support that conclusion." While Matt's comments refer specifically to Kerry's vote to authorize the use of force against Saddam in October, they seem to reflect his general take on the issue.

What surprises me so much about Matt's approach is its implication that there is no right answer to the question of whether or not Kerry has flip-flopped on the major issues of the day. It all comes down to a question of trust. While Matt may be right, "Trust me" is a very hard message for a candidate to run on. To be sure, Bush's less-than-forthright approach to the deficit, the 9/11 commission, the WMD question and his National Guard service record make it just as hard for him to ask for the voters' trust. But as the challenger, Kerry has to show that he is better than Bush, not that he isn't worse.

Asking for the voters' trust is also an invitation for journalists to challenge a candidate's reputation. When Jimmy Carter promised that he would never tell a lie, journalists did all they could to catch him telling one. And Gary Hart...well don't ask about Gary Hart. The point is that Kerry can't lay the flip-flop issue to rest by telling either voters or journalists to trust him. In fact, doing so would only ensure that the issue stays on the table. And even now, there may be enough evidence out there to cast doubt on Matt's "pre-existing assumption that [Kerry]'s a man of principle and integrity". Consider the opening grafts of the NYT profile devoted to the flip-flop question:
When Senator John Kerry was speaking to Jewish leaders a few days ago, he said Israel's construction of a barrier between it and Palestinian territories was a legitimate act of self-defense. But in October, he told an Arab-American group that it was "provocative and counterproductive" and a "barrier to peace."

On Feb. 5, Mr. Kerry reacted to Massachusetts' highest court's decision legalizing same-sex marriages by saying, "I personally believe the court is dead wrong." But when asked on Feb. 24 why he believed the decision was not correct, he shot back, "I didn't say it wasn't."
Later on in the Times' profile, Kerry explains that
He had criticized the Israeli wall before the Arab-American group in October because its path was then expected to deviate widely from Israel's border into West Bank villages ? though he conceded he had not made the distinction clear at the time.
Perhaps Kerry is telling the truth. But why does it always seem that Kerry has to pull this kind of rabbit out of his hat in order to reconcile apparently inconsistent views? By the same token, Kerry has recently revised his 1996 conclusion that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. This subtle distinction has enabled Kerry to argue against Bush's proposed amendent banning gay-marriage but in favor of state-level amendents that have the same effect. If one assumes that Kerry is "a man of principle and integrity", then all is well. But isn't it just a little too convenient how Kerry has revised his passionate and long-held views on gay marriage just in time to present a more moderate face during his presidential campaign? Again, there's no evidence to show that Kerry is being opportunistic. But my gut instinct says that this guy has to be watched.

Tomorrow: Bush's flip-flops and Kerry's stance on the war.
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Wednesday, March 10, 2004

# Posted 7:54 PM by David Adesnik  

CIRCUMCISIONS TO GO AHEAD AS PLANNED, COWS & CHICKENS CELEBRATE: Even though thousands of Israeli rabbis are on strike, its foreskin-choppers are still hard at work, since Jewish law does not require them to have rabbinical oversight. However, the meat industry is at a standstill because it does require oversight in order to produce kosher products. As a lifelong Jew, I'd just like to say that there's something a little funny about a religion that is more strict when it comes to protecting farm animals than when it comes to protecting the tender vessels that hold the future of our people.
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# Posted 1:49 PM by Patrick Belton  

WELL-DESERVED GREATER ROLE FOR NED: The U.S. government's new democracy-promotion plan for the Middle East has made a good first move in selecting a worthy organization as its spearhead - the National Endowment for Democracy, which has supported indigenous democratic movements in their early stage in places from Poland to South Africa, will receive a doubled appropriation this year, with the additional money being used to support the activities of dissidents, women's rights campaigners, human rights groups, press organizations, and new political parties.

I can't think of a worthier cause, or a more trustworthy organization to give a prominent role in it to.
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# Posted 11:03 AM by Patrick Belton  

MORE IN THE AMBIGUOUS TITLES DEPARTMENT: There's a Norwegian health care provider called Noraid. Perhaps all those sponsors of terror in South Boston Irish pubs could give to them instead?
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# Posted 10:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE "TOO LATE FOR THAT" AMBIGUOUS HEADLINE AWARD OF THE DAY: From CNN, "Washington sniper gets life"
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# Posted 5:17 AM by Patrick Belton  

JUSTICE FOR SIERRA LEONE: The Sierra Leonean war crimes tribunal, which is paid for and managed by the United States and Britain, will be opening today. (See its website, and BBC.)
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# Posted 3:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

SISTANI WATCH/READING LIST: I'd promised you all yesterday a running compendium of pieces on the Iraqi constitution, Sistani, and the Iraqi Shi'i, so I'm before you here this morning to deliver. We're also having a discussion tonight on analyzing Sistani, the SCIRI party, and trends in the Iraqi Shi'a community, here in the Oxford chapter of our little foreign policy society, so if any of you feel like heading out to Oxford, you're warmly welcome.

As far as understanding Sistani goes, Spencer Ackerman has written on the subject on his TNR blog, Iraq'd, CFR does a backgrounder, CS Monitor, which I'm increasingly impressed by, has a piece, and NPR ran a profile which is basically an interview with Juan Cole. Also, RFE has a brief profile, and Slate has a piece, too.

As far as understanding SCIRI goes, FAS has a profile - the WaPo had one as well, a third one dates to the pre-war period - and other worthwhile pieces are here and here.

I haven't come across any pieces that are quite as good about the trends among the Shi'a in general - perhaps because what those trends really are is somewhat more nebulous. The best I've found are CS Monitor, Guardian, Juan Cole, and Juan Cole's blog.

Please let us know if you run across any other pieces you think we should include in this list!

UPDATE: Steve Den Beste wrote a lengthy and insightful post today on the constitution, and particularly electoral incentives it attempts to introduce toward moderation and compromise
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# Posted 12:27 AM by David Adesnik  

M*A*S*H NOTES: After talking so much about the film that started it all, I decided that I had no choice but to start watching the series that made M*A*S*H a household name.

After watching the first half-dozen episodes on DVD, it's not hard to figure out why everyone says that the series is simplistic, self-righteous and far more political than the film. These characteristics emerge in the series pilot, which develops and amends one of the important subplots in the film, the fate of Ho-Jon, the young Korean who works for Hawkeye.

In the film, we first meet Ho-Jon along with Maj. Burns, the pretentious martinet surgeon who later becomes Hawkeye's main adversary. When Hawkeye first meets Burns, he is teaching Ho-Jon to read by using a Bible as an instruction manual. Hawkeye's [As M points out, it was actually Hawkeye's associate Duke Forrester who gave Ho-Jon the girlie mag --ed.] response is to give Ho-Jon a girlie mag. During the film, Hawkeye becomes very close to Ho-Jon and does his best to protect him from the war. When the Korean military subjects Ho-Jon to a pre-draft physical, Hawkeye gives him medication that artificially raises his blood pressure. The Korean physician in charge sees through this ruse, however, and Ho-Jon enters the army.

In the pilot, Burns shows no demonstrable interest in Ho-Jon's welfare. Instead, Hawkeye persuades his alma mater to accept Ho-Jon as a foreign student but discovers that Ho-Jon will need $2000 to cover the cost of travel, etc. Thus, Hawkeye organizes a raffle to raise funds for Ho-Jon while Burns tries to throw a wrench in the works because Hawkeye's plans violate military regulations.

Another change in Burns character in the first episodes is that he becomes a mindless poster boy for American propaganda. Whereas in the film Burns was simply strict, his strictness now becomes an extension of his naive belief that Korea is a good war. This point comes across best in Episode Six, in which Burns desperately tries to get the lead role in a propaganda film being made by an Army public relations unit.

In contrast, Hawkeye's breaks into the storage room where the undeveloped film is being kept and destroys it in order to protect the homefront audience from this sort of propaganda. Then, Hawkeye persuades Col. Drake to let him direct the film, which turns out to be a Marx Brothers farce set in the 4077th. The Marx Brothers' mock-up is actually one of the most brilliant things I've seen on television. Alda's impression of Groucho is fantastic and the machine-gun sarcasm of the dialogue doesn't give you even a second to recover.

When the mock-up ends, Hawkeye appears on screen by himself, out of costume and delivers a solemn lecture on the human costs of war. This is M*A*S*H at its most self-righteous. In lesser ways, this leitmotif appears again and again throughout the first six episodes. It is also a rhetorical device for battering Burns and other defenders of the war, since they are often shown to be far less concerned about the human cost of war than are Hawkeye, Trapper John, etc.

Yet at the same time that the series meditates on the costs of war, it also sanitizes it. The bowdlerization first becomes apparent as the M*A*S*H theme music plays at the beginning of the episode. The haunting lyrics of the original song have been taken out. But perhaps one simply cannot have a primetime television show declare that
Through early moring fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are with held for me
I realise and I can see

That suicide is painless,
That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

The game of life is hard to play
Gonna to lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
So this is all I have to say
The fact that Marilyn Manson chose to do a cover of the song only emphasizes the fact that it was something mainstream America just wasn't ready for. (NB for our British audience: The Manic Street Preachers have covered the song as well.) While one can argue that the removal of the lyrics was an inevitable concession to the network censors, it does reflect the absence of the darker psychological aspects of the film as well. In the original, the men of the 4077th sing the song during a mock funeral for one of their comrades who has chosen to commit suicide because he is unable to confront his latent homosexuality.

Given that psychiatrists still defined homosexuality as a perversion and a pathology at the time the film was made, its portrayal of the issue is both far ahead of its time as well as sensitive and sophisticated by today's standards. However, I'm going to have to reserve judgment on this issue until I get to watch the later episodes of the series, in which a more prominent role is played by the cross-dressing Corporal Klinger. Still, Klinger does appear in some of the early episodes and is nothing more than a clown.
[I screwed this one up bigtime. The potential suicide is a response to impotence, not latent homosexuality. Serves me right for letting my politics get in the way of dispassionate analysis. And thanks to CM for pointing this out. --ed.]

One final aspect of the series I'd like to comment on is the contrast between its paternalistic liberalism and the politically correct liberalism of today. In Episode Five, Hawkeye runs across a sergeant who has purchased a Korean woman named Young Hi from her family for a price of $500. While Young Hi is at best an indentured servant and at worst a slave, she bears it all with constant chirpiness and no complaining. After delivering a lecture about the hypocrisy of buying slaves during a supposed war of liberation, Hawkeye hatches a plan to win Young Hi in a fixed poker game with the visiting sergeant.

When Hawkeye wins, he grants Young Hi her freedom. The catch is that she doesn't want it. In fact, Young Hi is so dedicated to being a servant that when Hawkeye sends her to Seoul she sneaks back to the 4077th and starts cleaning again. At that point, I was beginning to expect that the scriptwriters were going to pull a fast one on the audience. Surely Young Hi wasn't really all that servile and self-denigrating. Her ridiculous pidgin English dialogue made her seem like a complete fool. It had to be an act put on for the Americans' benefit. As good liberals, the scriptwriters were surely luring the audience into believing that Koreans aren't as self-aware or assertive as Americans, only to have Young Hi drop the mask once the audience had bought into her act.

Bottom line: she doesn't. Instead, Hawkeye teaches her how to be an individual. He teaches her to interact with other members of the M*A*S*H unit as an equal. Hawkeye also contacts Young Hi's family so that she can return to them. But when Young Hi's brother shows up to claim her, he makes it clear that he intends to sell her once again, but this time for double or triple the price. At first, she goes along with it, telling Hawkeye that family is the most important thing for Koreans. But within thirty seconds of leaving the base, Young Hi strides right back and announces that she told her brother off because she learned from Hawkeye how to be an individual.

On one level, there's a good message in this story about the universal value of freedom. On the other hand, it is absurdly condescending to suggest that Hawkeye's 72-hour lesson in civics could persuade a Korean woman to turn her back on her family. It makes Young Hi seem even more naive then she did when she accepted her role as the sergeant's slave. Are we supposed to believe that Koreans have no personalities of their own, but instead willingly conform to the dictates of their American masters? Isn't that exactly the kind of Great Society paternalism that supposedly got the United States involved in the same war that M*A*S*H was devoted to protesting?

But remember, that was 1972. Ethnicity and gender weren't mainstream liberal concerns. Thus, Hawkeye's relentless womanizing -- and the passive acceptance of it by his giggily-jiggily nurses -- might strike today's audiences as no less disturbing than the racial caricature known as Young Hi. All in all, M*A*S*H is truly a relic of its time.
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Tuesday, March 09, 2004

# Posted 12:28 PM by Patrick Belton  

PAKISTAN FIRES A LONG-RANGE MISSILE. This would be more upsetting if they could also point it somewhere.
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# Posted 10:20 AM by Patrick Belton  

PLAYING WITH MY FOOD: CNN reports this morning that McDonalds's salads have a greater fat and caloric content than the fast food company's hamburgers. Wow, that's really neat, in a sort of troubling kind of way.

So, illustrating what I do when I'm skipping lunch to work on my dissertation, I used the McDonalds's website nutrition calculator to run a few sample meals, and the CNN article was right. It turns out the trusty cheeseburger has 330 calories and 14 grammes of fat, of which 6 are saturated. The Crispy chicken California cobb salad has 370 calories and 21 grammes of fat, of which an identical 6 are saturated.

You can draw whatever moral you like, but my suggestion is to just go have a burger!

UPDATE: Baude says get the salad.
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# Posted 6:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

READING THE NEW IRAQI CONSTITUTION: This will be a developing post, as I come across analyses and commentaries on the interim Iraqi constitution which was adopted yesterday. The text of the constitution is here, on the CPA's website. George Washington University's Nathan Brown has released an admirable article-by-article commentary on the text and drafting process, and Noah Feldman, who consulted to the constitution's drafters, analyzes the document in a lengthy interview to the AP.

Several months ago, the International Crisis Group had written a report about vexing issues hanging over the drafting process. And among the more noteworthy journalistic reporting, the Christian Science Monitor discusses the issues which hung over the Shi'i reticence to sign:
The Shiites, which account for about 60 percent of Iraq's population, had reservations about a Kurdish-backed clause dealing with a permanent constitution as well as the composition of the presidency.

The clause states that the permanent constitution will fail if two-thirds of the population of three provinces object. With minority Kurds controlling the three northern provinces of Dohuk, Suleimaniyeh, and Arbil, Shiites feared that the clause granted the Kurds a veto.

The Shiites had also wanted a council of five presidents in which three would be Shiites and the other two split between a Kurd and a Sunni. The interim charter instead provides for one president and two deputies.

The dispute was resolved when Ayatollah Sistani was persuaded by Shiite council members to drop his objections and allow the signing to proceed. Any further delays in passing the document risked upsetting the transfer of sovereignty from the US-led coalition to an Iraqi interim government on June 30.
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# Posted 3:03 AM by Patrick Belton  

CUTE LOCAL CUSTOMS WATCH: Under a picture with the sunny caption "Will there still be a place for ancient beliefs?", BBC runs the following:
Haunted by "strigoi" - the undead - villagers on the slopes of the Carpathian mountains exhume a corpse from the graveyard and drive a stake through its heart to banish the evil spirit.

They burn the remains of the heart, mix the ashes with water from the local well and drink it, to complete the macabre ritual.

...all this took place in February 2004 at a village in Dolj County, south-western Romania.
After noting this is after all rather weird, BBC goes on to say "the 'Strigoi Show', as the TV dubbed it light-heartedly, has prompted such a stir about local customs and culture." Not one to abandon such an admirable stride once it had hit it, the BBC finishes strong with the conclusion, "Romania's metropolitan press may argue that its ancestral customs are out of line with "modern European civilization", but the new Europe may be all the poorer for it if they disappear completely."

Cutting-edge political scientists quickly then appeared on the scene in south-west Romania, arguing that in a Transylvanian mountainside infested by Nosferatu, it is only rational to engage in collective actions to burn and drink the heart of grandma. They then quickly engaged in a bitter war over whether most of the village should then free ride, which resulted in someone's graduate student not getting tenure.

When asked by a local village bystander what they were doing, the political scientists replied, "It's our culture. Go away."
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# Posted 2:19 AM by Patrick Belton  

YESTERDAY WAS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY, so it is only appropriate today to commemorate several instances around the world in which our age is spectacularly yet to reach equal dignity for one half of humanity. In Iran yesterday, the Basij thuggery suppressed with batons a rally to mark the date. In Afghanistan, self-immolation, along with other forms of suicide, have in the face of harsh tribal tradition become endemic as a mode of escape from lives of enforced marriage followed by subsequent spousal battery. Even in the incontrovertibly liberal United States, the chief officer of the Air Force in the Pacific has just received a report that 92 accusations of rape involving Air Force personnel had been reported to the Pacific Command from 2001 to 2003. To his credit, General Begert has exercised sterling leadership to indicate that his service will not tolerate rape in the ranks, and has ordered changes in training, reporting practices, and the means of recourse available to assaulted female personnel; at the same time, we should note that his desire to counteract the problem was motivated by the horrible disclosure last year of more than 50 reported rapes or assaults over the past decade at his service's Academy.

The state of women in the world has not yet arrived at the level of dignity enjoyed by its men, and on International Women's Day we must all commit ourselves to ensuring that it one day does.
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Monday, March 08, 2004

# Posted 10:40 AM by David Adesnik  

RHODES SCHOLAR IGNORES PALESTINIAN TERROR: I received the following message on the Rhodes Scholars' e-mail list this morning:
Dear Friends,

As some of you may already know, this weekend saw another Israeli incursion into Palestinian territories, leaving 14 dead (including 4 children) and over 50 wounded in what the Israeli army is calling a "pin-point operation." While killings like this are all-too frequent, they are set against the backdrop of a 37-year-long military occupation that has been condemned by the UN, International Red Cross and Crescent, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and a vast majority of the world community. Most recently, this occupation has taken the form of a physical wall that is even now being used to encircle Palestinians and further limit their dreams of a nation-state. The Jewish-only bypass roads will remain in place, only now they will be diverted so as to avoid the ghettos in which Palestinians will be imprisoned on their own land.

I am writing to all of you because, at the threshold to the second century of Rhodes Scholar history, we face an important ethical moment, and I would like to call upon us all to face that moment with all the moral fortitude with which we, as a global community, saw the downfall of apartheid. Not only are the histories related in light of Israel's arms dealings with South Africa in the face of an international embargo against the apartheid state, but the creation of bantustan-like Palestinian ghettos and the systematic disenfranchisement of that entire nation also speak their own truths. It is no longer enough for us to congratulate ourselves on the marriage of the Rhodes Trust and Nelson Mandela. We must speak out when we see the Israelis perpetrating the same crimes we now feel safe in criticizing South Africa for having committed for nearly half a century. President Mandela has long spoken out against Israel's ilegal occupation of Palestine, even calling for military resistance
against the Israelis in the name of an independent Palestinian state.

I would like to invite all of my colleagues and friends in the Rhodes community to write to me privately, so that we may discuss the eventual creation of a Rhodes Scholars Palestine Forum. A multiplicity of political beliefs and ideas is welcome; only a desire to see a free and peaceful Palestinian state is required. I look forward to meeting and discussing this historical crisis with each of you. Thank you for your consideration. Until then, I am --

Truly yours,
C.H.
In response to Mr. H's e-mail, I sent a message back to the list that read as follows:
Dear Friends,

As some of you may already know, February 22nd saw another suicide bombing in Jerusalem that targeted innocent men, women and children. While killings like this are all-too frequent, they are set against the backdrop of a 56-year-long record of terrorist attacks against the state and citizens of Israel, the first and oldest democracy in the Middle East.

Most recently, this terrorism has taken the form of repeated suicide bombings intentionally designed to slaughter as many civilians as possible. The victims are Arabs as well as Israelis, Muslims as well as Jews. In an effort to negotiate peace, the State of Israel offered the Palestinian people their own state on their own land -- including more than 90% of the territory in the West Bank and Gaza. However, the Palestinian Authority rejected this offer and launched a second wave of violent attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. With little hope left for a negotiated peace, Israel has chosen to construct a physical wall to protect its citizens from unceasing attack.

I am writing to all of you because, at the threshold to the second century of Rhodes Scholar history, we face an important ethical moment, and I would like to call upon us all to face that moment with all the moral fortitude with which we, as a global community, saw the downfall of the Taliban/Al Qaeda regime in Afghanistan. Not only are the histories related in light of Al Qaeda's murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children in New York and Washington, but both Al Qaeda and Fatah and Hamas are driven by the same radical anti-Semitic ideology of hatred that condones murder in the name of God.

It is no longer enough for us to congratulate ourselves on the marriage of the Rhodes Trust and Nelson Mandela. We must speak out when we see Palestinian organizations committing the same crimes they have committed for more than half century -- since long before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. President Mandela has long spoken out against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, even calling for military resistance against the Israelis in the name of an independent Palestinian state. As a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mandela's one-sided criticism of the State of Israel is shameful and hypocritical. As the author of a peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa, Mandela should be also support peace and freedom in the Middle East.

I would like to invite all of my colleagues and friends in the Rhodes community to write to me privately (and cc: C.H.), so that we may discuss the eventual creation of a Rhodes Scholars Arab-Israeli Peace Forum. A multiplicity of political beliefs and ideas is welcome; only a desire to see a true and lasting peace in the Middle East is desired. I look forward to meeting and discussing this historical crisis with each of you. Thank you for your consideration. Until then, I am --

Truly yours,
David
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# Posted 9:04 AM by Patrick Belton  

BUNNIES ON MARS: There are more things on heaven and earth, wascally Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.....

There's more news from Mars here and over here, too.
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# Posted 3:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND THEY SAY GREAT POLITICAL ORATORY IS DEAD: But they haven't been listening to Congressman Major Owens, of Brooklyn, whose website promises "Issue updates, legislation, rap poems, event schedule." Didn't think rap and the Congressional Record met that often? Well, that's just because you haven't read "Towers of Flowers," his effort after 9/11:
Pyramid for our age, Funeral pyre, Souls on fire;
Monumental Massacre, Mound of mourning, Futures burning, Desperate yearning, Excruciating churning;
For all the hijacked years, Cry rivers, Feel the death chill, Iceberg of frozen Bloody tears;
Defiant orations of Pericles, Must now rise, Out of the ashes,
Jefferson's profound principles, Will outlive the crashes.
Funeral pyre, Souls on fire, Lincoln's steel will, In the fiery furnace;
There's also his less-known work, Message to the Republican Mob, which begins
Before you merely mauled welfare mothers, But now you’re messing with The Great American Middle Class; We’ll kick your rear! Grandfathers are full of fear, New anger after every tear.
Read them a few times; they have a way of sticking with you.
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# Posted 3:10 AM by David Adesnik  

QUICK, COVER YOUR ASSES! If you read Saturday's papers, you probably thought that the failure of Shi'ite leaders to endorse the new Iraqi constitution was a sign of bad things to come. After all, the NYT reported that
The delay represented a major embarrassment for the American officials here, who had guided the negotiations on the constitution and helped break numerous deadlocks. L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator, was supposed to appear at the ceremony and the sign the completed constitution.

Television cameras from around the world stood arrayed around an empty stage. Dozens of Iraqis who had gathered for the ceremony got up and left.
The WaPo reported that
The Shiites' refusal to sign was regarded by some council officials as a stark indication of the deep divisions that exist between rival religious and ethnic groups, suggesting that a consensus on the interim constitution reached earlier this week may not have been as solid as U.S. and Iraqi officials had claimed.
But now the Shi'ites have withdrawn their demands and the constitution should be approved tomorrow. So, did the NYT report today that Friday's "major embarrassment" didn't materialize? Or that Paul Bremer has been successful in encouraging Iraqis to work together? And what about the WaPo? Did it report that the Shi'ites' compromise is an indication of how ethnic and religious divisions may not be as profound as originally thought?

Since those were all rhetorical questions, I won't bother telling you the answers. The fact is that professional journalists have a remarkable habit of overlooking their own short-sightedness. Unsurprisingly, the same correspondents at the Times (Dexter Filkins) and the Post (Rajiv Chandrasekaran) covered both the Shi'ite walkout on Friday and the Shi'ite compromise earlier today. Their coverage demonstrates how committed both men are (subconscioulsy, I think ) to telling the story of how America is going to fail in Iraq. Of course, it's hard to tell a consistent story when the facts keep getting in the way.

Consider the Times' and the Post's respective interpretation of Ayatollah Sistani's role in this affair. Initially, Filkins reported that
The delay demonstrated anew the political power of Ayatollah Sistani, the country's most powerful religious leader. Despite repeated avowals that he would remain above the push and pull of politics, and that he would keep Islam separate from the state, he has repeatedly shown his willingness to involve himself in political debates.
Taken unawares by the Shi'ites' compromise, Filkins now writes that
The change of heart by the Shiite leaders appears to represent a retreat by Ayatollah Sistani, who touched off the impasse last week by expressing his concerns to the Shiite leaders.

Until Sunday, the ayatollah had all but dictated to American officials the terms of such important political questions as elections.
Filkins wants us to believe that suddenly, on Sunday, Sistani decided to stop bossing the Americans around. Yet this change was apparently too subtle for Chandrasekaran to note, since he's still reporting that
The Shiites' initial refusal to sign provided a clear demonstration of the political influence of Sistani and other top clerics.
Now, as I said above, I don't think that any of this WaPo/NYT spin is conscious. We're simply dealing with reporters who think in terms of deadlines and put together a story each day that makes sense of the known facts. Such reporters have little incentive to go over the previous day's dispatch to see how it looks in hindsight. After all, they're not bloggers. If Filkins messes up, Chandrasekaran won't mention it in his article. And neither one will have an inbox full of criticism if today's dispatch abandons the insights of yesterday.

But it isn't only deadline pressure and the absence of peer review that is responsible for what's going on here. If that were the case, coverage of Iraq wouldn't be so uniformly negative. Rather, there is a basic narrative of failure in the reporters' heads that transforms deadline pressure and the absence of peer review into a conveyor belt for the reproduction of their profession's conventional wisdom.

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

Now, foreign policy is no science. But some looser version of this principle must apply here as well. To be a policy, as opposed to a theological position, there must be some potential results that would show the policy was not working. The proponents of the policy should be able to say ahead of time that if this or that result happens, the policy has failed...
Marshall intended his comments as criticism of those naive Iraq hawks (specifically myself and Ralph Peters) who insisted that every suicide attack was a sign of the insurgents' desperation. While I don't think Josh was being fair to us naive optimists, his comments about falsifiability do explain a lot about why Dexter Filkins, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and the rest of the Iraq press corps almost never recognize the shortcomings of their own work. On those days when bad news comes out of Iraq, e.g. Friday, they describe it as evidence that Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket. When there's good news, e.g. today, they put their failure narrative aside for the moment. Thus, it's very hard to change the coloration of the news that's coming out of Iraq.

In the long term, correspondents sometimes begin to recognize what's going on. Certain facts are simply too hard to ignore. When American tanks rolled toward Baghdad, the media stopped reporting that the invasion had become a quagmire. Of course, there is no clear geography of success or failure when it comes to nation-building. If history is a guide, the first big positive story to come out of Iraq will be the elections held in late 2004 or early 2005. Often, the first election held after the fall of a dictatorship provokes a dramatic response in terms of both turnout and popular enthusiasm. Examples of that trend include El Salvador, Cambodia and South Africa.

Of course, what all of us would most like to see is a peaceful transfer of power from one elected Iraqi government to another. That is the most reliable indication that democratic norms are taking root. But in nation that is almost 2/3 Shi'ite, the opposition may not win a national election for quite a while. In fact, that sort of stability wouldn't be surprising. The first West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, held office for 14 years. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party was at the helm for even longer. Which means that in Iraq, we will have to look at the quality of everyday life to figure out whether or not it is a democracy.

There won't be a happy ending to the story in Iraq because there won't be an ending at all. But we can make sense of what's going on if we pay close enough attention.

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Sunday, March 07, 2004

# 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?
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# 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.
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Saturday, March 06, 2004

# 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.
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# 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.
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# 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.
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# 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...
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Friday, March 05, 2004

# 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.
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# 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!
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# 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....)
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# 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?
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# Posted 8:57 AM by Patrick Belton  

FEELING DEPRESSED? Then go read about the end of the universe. It might cheer you up.
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# 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.
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# 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.
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Thursday, March 04, 2004

# 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.
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# 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?
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# 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?
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# 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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Wednesday, March 03, 2004

# 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.

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# 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.
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# 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.
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# 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!
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# 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!
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# 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.
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# 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.
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# Posted 5:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE ECONOMIST reviews events in Haiti.
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# 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).
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# Posted 4:30 AM by Patrick Belton  

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS releases shortlist of candidates for this year's foreign policy book prize.
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Tuesday, March 02, 2004

# 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.
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# 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)
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# 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.
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# 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.
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# 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.
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# 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!
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Monday, March 01, 2004

# 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.

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# 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.
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# 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.
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# 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.
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# 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.
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