# Posted 6:32 PM by David Adesnik  

HE SAID THAT?

"I'm not a liberal at all. I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action or the American Veterans Committee. I'm not comfortable with those people." 

Answer: John F. Kennedy. 
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# Posted 6:12 PM by David Adesnik  

JOE WILSON?  NEVER HEARD OF THE GUY.  If you scroll past Howard Kurtz's report on blogs, you get to this:

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's allegations that President Bush misled the country about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium from Africa was a huge media story, fueled by an investigation into who outed his CIA-operative wife. According to a database search, NBC carried 40 stories, CBS 30 stories, ABC 18, The Washington Post 96, the New York Times 70, the Los Angeles Times 48.

But a Senate Intelligence Committee report that contradicts some of Wilson's account and supports Bush's State of the Union claim hasn't received nearly as much attention. "NBC Nightly News" and ABC's "World News Tonight" have each done a story. But CBS hasn't reported it -- despite a challenge by Republican Chairman Ed Gillespie on CBS's "Face the Nation," noting that the network featured Wilson on camera 15 times. A spokeswoman says CBS is looking into the matter.

Newspapers have done slightly better. The Post, which was the first to report the findings July 10, has run two stories, an editorial and an ombudsman's column; the New York Times two stories and an op-ed column; and the Los Angeles Times two stories. Wilson, meanwhile, has defended himself from what he calls "a Republican smear campaign" in op-ed pieces in The Post and Los Angeles Times.

 I am disappointed but not surprised.  Btw, the Senate report does a helluva lot more than "contradict some of Wilson's account".  It pretty much shows that he is a liar, not Bush.
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# Posted 5:45 PM by David Adesnik  

WHY DO BIG MEDIA SUDDENLY CARE ABOUT BLOGS? Last night, in a dark wooden corner of an Irish pub, he said to me that journalists now think bloggers are important because bloggers have been invited to cover an event -- the Democratic convention -- that journalists describe as inherently unimportant.

Who was "he"?  I wish I remember.  The only name I remember from last night is Sam Adams.  But the point is still valid.  If the convention is a pseudo-event produced for the benefit of the media, then by virture of getting invited, bloggers have become newsworthy.

I've also noticed that the same few bloggers are getting all of the attention.  Since one of them is Patrick Belton, I think that's just great.  But it means that other blogs are getting left out and that journalists are limiting their own supply of information.  For example, all but one of the bloggers mentioned in Howard Kurtz's convention-blogging round-up also get mentioned or quoted in Jenny 8-ball's round-up at the NYT.

If you're willing to invest the time, the best article about bloggers at the convention belongs to Carl Bialik & Elizabeth Weinstein at the WSJ.  After a brief introduction, they let more than two dozen bloggers speak for themselves.  In fact, each one gets a whole paragraph rather than a single quote.

Now let's turn the question around: Are bloggers going to tell us anything interesting about the convention that we wouldn't read about in a newspaper or political magazine?  I don't know.  It's too early to say.  But I'm curious.
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# Posted 8:46 AM by David Adesnik  

"IF HITLER WERE ALIVE TODAY, HE'D HAVE HIS OWN BLOG": That's an actual quote from a recent editorial in the Sioux Falls (SD) Argus-Leader.  As Jon Lauck explains, the editors are not happy about bloggers' criticism of their liberal, pro-Tom Daschle bias.

So what are the editors planning on doing about the "nutty opinions" that pervade the blogosphere, "thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue"?  Starting their own blog, of course.

(If Hitler had a blog, I bet he'd call it "Instafuehrer"!)
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# Posted 1:36 AM by Patrick Belton  

OXBLOG IN THE NEWS: We'll be on NPR tomorrow at 11, for those of you who might like to tune in. You can listen to the program afterwards here, too.

Also, we made today's NYT and Washington post - thus WaPo's Howard Kurtz:

Patrick Belton of Oxblog, an Oxford graduate student and self-described centrist who worked for Bill Bradley in 2000, sees the convention as "a wonderful time to take a snapshot of all different factions, who's on the rise and who's on the relative wane."

Belton has invited his blogging brethren out for a drink because "we have to cultivate a reputation for delightful alcoholism." The former Richmond resident [that's libellous] adds: "There's a lot happening on the margins that the more established media, by dint of time and space limits, just aren't able to cover. Blogs don't have word count limits."

And NYT's Jenny '8-ball' Lee:

"I look forward to the world that exists in the margins," said Patrick Belton, a 28-year-old Oxford University graduate student who blogs at Oxblog.com and calls himself a "liberal hawk."

"It will be interesting to get around the televised spectacle and see it as a meeting place for the different factions of the party," Mr. Belton said.

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# Posted 1:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

GETTING TO BOSTON: The play by play....

7:00 pm - enter Boston, at Boston South Station. Conversation with reporter from Tucson Jewish Post. Quote: 'I work there, but I'm not a Zionist. My son says, Mom, you can't become a Zionist, even if you work there.' Button: 'Bush Lied, People Died'.

Number of policemen with uzis in South Boston T-station: 4 or 5. Lots of young 20something men in suits with laptop bags. Falun gong women in yellow shirts.

7:08 Park Street station, red line: someone asks about my iBook, and whether I'm there for the convention. Quote: 'They've closed down some of my favorite restaurants, especially bagel cafe, where I go before church. Closed for convention. Unhappy.'

same time, place: on walks badged, glasses-wearing blonde 20something with shirt reading 'Boston & The Gilette Company Welcome You.' (Taking the college bowls sponsorship concept to new heights - the Gilette Democratic Convention.)

7:13 pm: Kennedy staffer: 'I love all these Democrats being here. It's like being a Jew in Israel'. OxBlogger: 'but usually, just being in Boston has the effect of surrounding you with Democrats, doesn't it?'

7:19 pm, Harvard station, red line: Decide, in spite of having been a student at yale, that I will like Harvard just fine if it has a toilet somewhere.

8:00 pm, Bloggers drinks. censored. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

THOUGHTS ON THE CONVENTION OF THE BLOG: The 2004 conventions will be remembered as the conventions of the blog; just like the 1952 Republican convention was the convention of the television, and the 1924 conventions were the conventions of the radio. Each symbolised the rise of a new technology to mediate between the political space of the public square and the personal, domestic space in people's living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchen counters. (We started OxBlog in April 2002; Glenn Reynolds began InstaPundit in August 2001, and the rush of widely read politics blogs followed then in his wake.)

Each of those forms of communication represented, and recreated, political events differently. What makes blogs different is the restoration of the human voice behind them, in line with the Victorian newspaper or Bagehot in today's Economist, quite different from the 'we' of today's editorial page and the unindividuated speech on page one. Today's newspapers reflect a positivist philosophy of knowledge coming from the 1950s and Karl Popper, when they attained their present form - each draws one authoritative representation of each political event, and exists in splendid isolation, ignoring the others like mildly distasteful neighbours. The blogosphere reflects the epistemology of the moment, Jurgen Habermas's intersubjectivity, where many individuals speak with each other and compare their different representations of the political event. The blogosphere also fits the same social moment as the new economy - it's decentralised, younger, quickly adaptable, and better describable by chaos theories of spontaneous order than Weber's models of bureaucracy, which correspond better to the career foreign correspondent services of the print newspapers, themselves mirrored on that ideal type of bureaucracy, the Foreign Service.

Blogs are personal - there's a human voice behind them; bloggers write as an humble 'I,' not as the powerful, quasi-sovereign editorial 'we'. As a blogger, you engage in running, for the most part respectful conversations with other bloggers to your right and left, which might well turn out to be our age's running conversation of the republic. As a technology for representing politics and mediating between public and domestic space, blogs share neither television's passivity, nor print journalism's unspoken biases, and largely due to these running conversations with other blogs - which as a blogger keep you honest, and continually making explicit, questioning, defending, and reframing your assumptions. You also have the opportunity to place in the foreground many things that in print journalism ordinarily happen off the page - for instance, editors'-office discussions about whether to run a particular sentence, or unattributed source, or whether a particular elicitation of fact is misleading. In the blogosphere, those editors-office conversations take place in the running conversations between blogs, and are all visible to the reader, who's then given the opportunity to make up her own mind.

Which is, of course, rather more democratic; and that in turn gets us back to the conventions, and their place in history. Writing before the Democratic convention of 1924, The Nation speculated the coming campaign would mark a faddish cycle of broadcast journalism, but by 1928 politics would surely abandon the radiowaves to return to more sensible, solider stuff. The New Republic, more optimistic, speculated that radio might instead last for a few more campaign cycles. Broadcast journalism was here to stay, and so is internet journalism today. Eighty years afterward, bloggers such as OxBlog are looking forward to the Convention of the Blog to unveil to a broader audience an exciting new medium for politics, and to use it to get around the televised spectacle which conventions have become, and give some light to the remnants of real politics which still exist there. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

MY ADVICE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Or, Why Kerry Shouldn't Run Away from Democracy

As I've noted here once before, November's will be the sixth election to turn on a referendum for a foreign war - like 1812, 1844, 1896 (the latter two before the fact), 1954, and 1968 before it. The outcome will be decided not by reliably Democratic voters who are lining up to see Fahrenheit 9/11, but by swing voters who want American troops kept in Iraq to provide the security for a stable democracy to emerge, and who aren’t convinced by Bush’s record there.

Democrats should be careful of running away from democracy promotion and toward, of all things, the realpolitik foreign policy of Bush I – an administration which never saw an oppressive government it didn’t like. Kerry staffers privately admit to doing as much, saying that an Iraq-wearied public won’t stand for Wilsonianism and wants a return to cold national interests. The problem is, this will sell out most of what the Democratic legacy stands for at its root in foreign policy: from Wilson’s Fourteen Points to FDR’s Four Freedoms to the Clinton administration's intervention to halt genocide in Kosovo (another war fought without UN sanction). It would also be bad politics.

The Kerry campaign's syllogism runs something like this: 1. Bush is associated with democracy promotion, 2. the American people are tired of both, so 3. therefore, run on realism. However, both premises of the argument are faulty: 1. there are votes to be had in democracy, and 2. Bush's record there is assailable. That voters support promoting democracy is evident in the Chicago Council on Foreign Relation's latest poll, which finds 71 percent of Americans favoring democratic assistance. 85 percent of respondents in the same poll also find helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations to be 'very' or 'somewhat' important. Before hurrying to repudiate tout court the Democratic legacy in promoting democracy and human rights, Kerry might instead give pause to the votes of the swing 20 percent of Americans who are (according to a recent New York Times poll) committed to democracy in Iraq, but disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraqi reconstruction.

Furthermore, Kerry can make a convincing argument that he can do much better than the current administration, drawing on the easy overseas popularity coming to an Atlanticist, multilateralist Democrat who would strike Europeans as, subconsciously, one of them. The fact is, campaign rhetoric aside, Bush's performance in promoting democracy is neither uniformly good, nor is it uniformly bereft of accomplishment. On the one hand, in countries from Uzbekistan to Pakistan to Egypt, the Bush administration has pursued security alliances with undemocratic, frequently dictatorial leaders, ensuring that the next generation of anti-regime protesters view the U.S. as the enemy rather than friend of their nationalist or democratic aspirations. On the other hand, in August 2002, the U.S. applied intense pressure to the government of Egypt after its arrest of democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, including a moratorium on new aid to Egypt as long as Ibrahim remained in prison. The State Department announced on July 13 that it was freezing all aid to the government of Uzbekistan as a rebuke against its human rights record. Madeline Albright’s brainchild the Community of Democracies has since in this administration been carefully fostered by Paula Dobriansky. Like the Clinton administration's, the Bush administration's National Security Strategy gives pride of place to expansion of democracy in the world. There's more than enough here to make an argument on both sides.

To have two candidates running to convince the American people they can better advance democracy in the world, now that's a grand prospect. Instead of running for the vote of Richard Nixon’s ghost or Moore’s viewers, Kerry needs to convince voters in the center that not only is democracy promotion not the exclusive preserve of neocons, but multilateralist Democrats can in fact with their broader international support do the same job, better. Democracy promotion has the potential to be one of a core set of issues at the heart of a new bipartisan foreign policy consensus, along with prosecuting the war on terror and the reconstruction of Iraq, building up the nation’s pitiably overstretched army, and acting to shore up the degenerating security situation in Afghanistan, and with both tickets trying to convince the public they can pursue this centrist foreign policy better than the competition.

Optimistically, it now stands in the interests of both candidates— not merely the nation and its citizens —to reach for a centrist politics in foreign affairs to displace the fiery populism whose flames were stoked over the last decade by Gingrich and Gore, and which led to the heated partisanship in witness since the 2000 result. And the rest of us – those not munching on our popcorn this summer – can finally have some measured hope, for that reason. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:35 AM by Patrick Belton  

A WARM HELLO to everyone coming to see us after our interviews on CNN yesterday and C-SPAN's Washington Journal program this morning - we hope you'll come back often! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:18 PM by David Adesnik  

A LATTER DAY VAN DOREN: The WaPo profiles Jeopardy! super-champ and millionaire Ken Jennings.  The best part is how all of his personality quirks get under Alex Trebek's skin.  For example:

"Tell us some deep, dark secret about yourself," Trebek implored somewhere in the seventh week, after exhausting his supply of cue cards listing Jennings's hobbies and amusing anecdotes.
"You know," Jennings deadpanned, "I killed a man down South once."

Not PC according to Ralph Luker, but still pretty damn funny.
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# Posted 11:15 PM by David Adesnik  

THE REAL TALKING POINTS MEMO:  One-sided?  Perhaps.  Intensely partisan?  No doubt about it.  But this clip from The Daily Show is both very interesting and very funny.  (Hat tip: G.p)
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# Posted 11:02 PM by David Adesnik  

SANDY BURGLAR: I don't want to touch this one with a ten foot pole.  The amount of time it takes to master all the details of a scandal is just too much.

That said, a few quick thoughts.  First, Greg Djerejian is right; the NYT's first article about the Berger incident was pathetic.  Second, Berger really f***ed over Kerry bad by not letting him know the first thing about the investigation.  My guess is the Berger expected to be cleared and didn't want to say anything until after he was confirmed as Secretary of State or Defense.

Finally, Berger's motives remain a mystery.  Josh Marshall (who saw nothing wrong with the Times' coverage of the story) also admits to being befuddled and writes that:

I think a lot of Democrats are going to be asking why Berger didn't see this coming down the pike, step aside from his prominent advisory role with the Kerry campaign, and avoid at least the immediate partisan political dimensions of the current predicament almost entirely.

I say it with much less than no pleasure. But I'm wondering. And I don't have a good answer.

I don't have a precise answer, either, but Josh might begin by asking whether perhaps, just perhaps, arrogance, selfishness, disloyalty and contempt for open government are personality traits on which Republicans do not have a monopoly.

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# Posted 10:50 PM by David Adesnik  

UNCOMMON SENSE: As I mentioned before, I'm in the midst of reading Thomas Paine's classic treatise, and so I thought I would share some of the more interesting parts.  This is from Chapter One:

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil...

In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world.

In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought.  A thousand motives will excite them thereto; the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same.

Thanks to my deficient knowledge of the Englightment, Paine's emphasis on the human need for companionship strikes me as quite interesting.  From my cursory reading of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, I have the sense that in their states of nature, man has no inherent desire to interact with his fellow human beings.  Instead, their is only fear.

# Posted 10:35 PM by David Adesnik  

WHO IS YGLESIAS SLEEPING WITH? Yes, I know.  You're thinking to yourself, "What the hell is happening to OxBlog?  If I wanted this kind of trash I'd spend my time reading Wonkette!"

But don't worry.  The subject of this post has no sexual connotations.  But would I really have gotten your attention by writing "Who is Yglesias co-habitating with?" or "Who is Matt's new roommate?"

Well, the answer is Kriston from Grammar Police, a trenchant, White Stripes-lyrics-quoting and highly-educated blog that I just read for the first time (even thought it's already been around for a whole year).

Now, if pictures are to believed, Kriston is a guy, which must have disappointed Matt considerably.  However, Kriston is extremely liberal, thus disproving the old saying that 'politics makes strange bedfellows roommates'.


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# Posted 7:38 PM by David Adesnik  

NOBODY & EVERYBODY:

The former New Jersey governor said that of all the millions of words spoken by Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, the commission could find only one reference to terrorism. That, he noted, meant that reporters had not been asking about the subject. Which, of course, underscores how totally unprepared the country was--not just the last two administrations and Congress, the CIA and FBI, but the media as well--for the horror that was to be inflicted on us.

Despite the first World Trade Center attack, the bombing of the East African embassies and of the USS Cole, no one was prepared. 

That's from Howard Kurtz, who rounds up some of the recent reactions to the 9/11 Report.  Perhaps the NY Daily News put it best:

"WE BLEW IT, BUT THERE'S NOBODY TO BLAME."

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# Posted 12:40 AM by David Adesnik  

MEET THE NEW BOSS: Even the liberal New Republic is praising the hard work and intellectual honesty of Philip Zelikow, the Republican staff director of the 9/11 Comission.

While Zelikow's reputation for fair-mindedness isn't exactly news, I thought I'd point it out since I'm going to start working for Dr. Phil come August 1st.  Prof. Zelikow won't be my direct supervisor, but he is the director of the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Having finished up my time as an Olin Fellow here at  the Cambridge Clown College Harvard, I will now be headed down south to become a fellow at the Miller Center Fellow, where I hope to finish up my dissertation by the end of next January.

I am very excited about moving to Charlottesville, and not just for the weather or the scenery. The Miller Center stands out from all other academic institutions of its kind because of its sincere commitment to produce scholarship that educates the American public.

Instead of the statistic- and game theory-laden political science that predominates at Harvard (although not so much at Olin), Miller embraces a historical approach that combines common sense with uncommon scholarship.

One interesting indication of its interests in promoting public discussion is its requirement that all fellowship applicants submit a hypothetical proposal for a NYT op-ed.  While there are better papers out there, the concept behind this admissions test is sound: that the ultimate validation of political scholarship is its ability to educate the public and guide the hand of government officials.

I subscribe to this philosophy whole-heartedly and look forward with considerable excitement to living in Virginia.

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# Posted 12:24 AM by David Adesnik  

EVEN THE LIBERAL NEW REPUBLIC: Crossing partisan lines to support Republican initiatives is a time-honored tradition at TNR.  That lesson was driven home earlier this evening when I sat down with a copy of the Congressional Record from 1986. 

In March of that year, Congress confronted the single most historic as well as the single most divisive foreign policy vote of Reagan's second term in office: Whether or not to support $100 million of military aid to the Nicaraguan contras.  Throughout the debate, Republicans cited TNR's eloquent editorial on behalf of the contras.

The 1986 contra votes (there was more than one) were far more divisive than the fall 2003 vote on Iraq.  Two-thirds of the American public was against the contras.  Vicious red-baiting from Pat Buchanan and the rest of the White House communications staff polarized Washington.

After a round of initial setbacks, Reagan got what he wanted.  I often ask myself which side I would have voted for if given the chance.  In spite of benefiting from two decades of hindsight, I still don't know the answer.

Thus, there is no moral to this story just yet.  But what I will say is that inspiring and impassioned debate did not come to an end with the demise of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.  The quality of the debates I have read is truly historic. 

Congress had its share of fools in the 1980s (some of them still in office), but then again, it is a representative body.
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# Posted 12:07 AM by David Adesnik  

DA CONFESSIONS OF ALI G: A first-rate interview in the NYT.  Plus, the second MoDo column that consists entirely of retelling Ali's jokes.  Finally, 'respet' to the NYT for finally starting to put relevant hyperlinks in their articles.
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# Posted 11:53 PM by David Adesnik  

ONE MAN'S FREEDOM FIGHTER:

It's been the misfortune of the Palestinian people to be stuck with Yasir Arafat as their founding father, a leader who has failed to make the transition from romantic revolutionary to statesman.

That's from a masthead editorial in the NYT.  Perhaps someone should explain to the editors: 1) The difference between romantic revolutionaries and anti-Semitic terrorists.  2)  That terrorists are not known for becoming accomplished statesmen.  (Except for Lenin, whose accomplishments as a statesman were quite impressive but rather unfortunate for those of us who are not Communists.)

To the NYT's credit, they are now calling for Arafat's resignation.  So, better late than never.

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# Posted 11:46 PM by David Adesnik  

A REMINDER OF WHO'S EVIL: Blowing up soldiers.  Blowing up police stations.  Blowing up a hospital?  The insurgents in Iraq are completely out of control.

On the bright side, the attack finally resulted in a NYT article without a single negative comment directed at the occupation.  Then again, it still took the NYT until the eleventh paragraph of its report to explain that the insurgents had fired on the hospital, not the Americans or the Iraqi government.
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# Posted 11:07 PM by David Adesnik  

NEWSFLASH: THE BRITISH ARE DRUNK.  In the UK it's a fact of life.  But the NYT provides an admirable summary of the evidence:

"There is a clear and growing problem in our town and city centers up and down the country on Friday and Saturday nights," said [Prime Minister] Blair, whose son, then 16, was found vomiting and incoherent on a London street four years ago after an evening of drinking.

Wow.  Sixteen.  He had Jenna & Barabara beat by a good two years. 

Government statistics show that Britons on average drank the equivalent of 8.6 liters of pure alcohol each in 2001, nearly double the rate of 1951. That translates into more than 86 bottles of wine, or 350 pints of beer...

While people in a number of countries still drink more overall, Britons (and the Irish, as well) are likelier to go on drinking binges, consuming five, six, seven or more drinks in a single session. "Binge drinking is now so routine that young people find it difficult to explain why they do it," a recent Home Office report said.

That's not fair!  They reason they can't explain what they're doing is because they're drunk! 

On weekends, 70 percent of emergency-room patients are involved in drink-related incidents. Deaths from chronic liver disease in England, a crucial indicator of alcohol-related harm, have shot up more than fivefold since 1950...

Dr. Atkinson said he did not know why Britons tended toward violence and accidents after drinking.

Either the good doctor is being quoted out of context or socialized medicine has resulted in idiots becoming doctors. 

The northern [European] countries, including Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, are more ambivalent about alcohol, relying on it as a crucial social lubricant while also treating it as something that needs to be tightly controlled lest it spin out of control.

Having lived in the UK, I'd say that by 'tightly controlled', what the Times actually means is "available to anyone old enough to shave."

Even genteel Cambridge has had so many problems with street drunkenness that it is debating whether to forbid outdoor drinking.
"Youth culture is just drink, drink, drink," said Eleanor Smith, a 57-year-old retired secretary who lives off Mill Road, one of the rowdiest drinking spots in Cambridge. 

Perhaps Oxford is different from Cambridge, but I'd say that youth culture in Britain is also about "drugs, drugs, drugs" and "sex, sex, sex".  (For the record, OxBlog thinks of itself as firmly anti-drug.)

# Posted 6:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

NEW OXBLOG FEATURE FOR THE CONVENTION: So this afternoon, I'll be taking off for a couple of blissful days in New York, involving seeing friends, having roast beef at Katz's and Mexican in Spanish Harlem, and napping with a few friends in Central Park (during the day, that is). It's the best city in the world, and I've missed it. I'll also be filming an interview, it looks like, with CNN to debate a yet-to-be-named blog sceptic at the Kennedy School of Government, and I'll let our readers know when that appears, in case any of you might be interested. I'll then reappear in Boston Sunday night, in time to host blogger's drinks (at The Field, in central Cambridge, at 7ish...)

More to the point, though, I've been able to give some thought to the way we'll be covering the Democratic convention. I don't see electronic media emerging as a competitor for broadcast and print journalism, but rather to complement them by doing things they're not by nature well suited to do. Blogs, for instance, don't share the word limits of print press or the time limits of network news. We're free to write as long as we feel is warranted by an interesting turn on events; or to say that nothing at all interesting happened that day. This is partially the result of the prose style, and partially the bliss of writing in a largely amateur medium.

One feature that I'd like to introduce here is something called roughly 'you ask the questions'. This is partly an admitted attempt to shovel off work onto our readers, partly one to take advantage of all the really quite extraordinary expertise of our readership, and partly also to try something that this prose style is conduicive toward - it's easier to ask readers to suggest questions for our interviewees when they're reading us at their computer, after all. Compared with calling in to C-span or writing the New York Times's ombudsperson, an aspect of interactivity is simply built into blogs, because unlike the last two media, the internet is naturally a two-way medium of communication.

So on here, I'll let our readers know which people we're going to be interviewing and when, and then during the interview, I'll pose the questions that we've received from our readers. The DLC and PPI have been quite nice to us in extending a large number of interviews with their principal staff; we'll also be conducting interviews with people in the Kerry foreign policy circle, and with members and staff from the foreign policy and national security committees of Congress.

I think this way of drawing on our readers to shape our coverage is rather democratic; and that in turn gets us back full circle to the convention. The conventions of both parties, and resembling in this respect both chambers of Congress, have principally evolved since 1976 as spectacles oriented toward televised consumption. The symbiosis has been less than mutually beneficial to each of the two species, though, with television decreasing its coverage markedly since 1976, when gavel-to-gavel coverage ended for all networks with the exception of ABC (which had ended its four years before), and more so in each convention thereafter. From the perspective of the media, particularly broadcast media, coverage is quite limited - NBC, for instance, will broadcasting only three hours from this year's convention, mostly to be taken up by the grand speeches and the roll call of the states; but from the perspective of the convention, it is still organised toward generating images on television which will sway voters to vote for the party's candidate. There's less substance, conveniently just as there's less room to catch it up in.

But there remain nonetheless those peculiarly political aspects of conventions that have in recent years been overtaken by the convention-as-spectacle elements, which a subversive medium like the blogosphere can seek to recover and reinvigorate. To film a declining few minutes of 'roll call of the states' footage, the parties have gone to the trouble of gathering representatives of every faction, region, and personality orbit within the party together in one place. So a blog-writer may as well take the opportunity to go and speak with them all.

The Democratic Party is, at the moment, a remarkably heterogeneous assembly, with Clintonites, Kennedyites, Deaniacs, and all the other personalized neologisms spinning around their respective charismatic centers. Blogs such us ours will be looking forward to spending more time speaking with people within each of those orbits - to inspect how the world looks from their perspective, what trends and trajectories may be important for their inhabitants, and which developments in their orbit they believe are underreported in the print and broadcast media.

And writing as an amateur and the equal of the person who is the subject of our journalistic gaze that moment will, I think, compel us to relate to the delegates we cover as individuals, with respect and humility, and without film crews hovering over our shoulders - or, still worse, the journalistic impulse to treat them as 'cute', with their profligacy of buttons. Personally, I'm very much looking forward to the opportunity. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:06 AM by David Adesnik  

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME: It was an extraordinary night at Fenway Park.  It was the first time that I had been to Fenway since moving to Boston last fall.  In fact, it was the first time I'd been to Fenway since I was in high school.

Sitting thirty rows up in the bleachers, we were in the ideal place to see some spectacular plays in the outfield.  In the first, Oriole shortstop Miguel Tejada stole two runs away from the Red Sox with a diving catch.  

In the seventh, Johnny Damon crashed into the centerfield wall, while Oriole DH David Newhan sped around the bases for an inside-the-park home run.   It was only the second inside-the-park job I'd ever seen.

What made this action all the more satisfying was Fenway Park itself.  I've been to a half-dozen ballparks in my life; none is as intimate as Fenway.  The stands huddle around the field, spilling over with the sellout crowds that come to the ballpark night after night.

Alas, I am a Yankee fan.  Still, I was rooting for the Red Sox.  In part, because they deserve so much pity.  But more importantly, because the people of Boston have truly made baseball worth of its designation as America's pasttime.
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# Posted 1:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

JUDICIAL STUDMUFFINS: Underneath their Robes - think Wonkette, for the judicial set - has released the results of its 'superhotties of the federal bench' contest, conducted by polls of its readers. The results? Kozinski takes the cake for the guys, Kimba Wood for the womenfolk. Personally, I would have gone for Souter and, of course, Kleinfeld. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

WELL, AT LEAST WE HAD AN ARMY OF ONE...then this made him/her leave. (Warning: link not suitable for those easily offended by dried food designed to be rehydrated using urine.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

10 YEARS OF BLAIR: It is ten years ago today that the MP for Sedgefield was confirmed as the new leader of the Labour party. He would on 2 May 1997 become the nation's youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool at the time of Waterloo. Of postwar governments, only Thatcher's lasted longer. Writing both as an American and as a longtime resident of Britain, I regard with great sadness the prospect he will ever have to go.

His political skills are without parallel in his own country, and abroad mark him as the only equal of Clinton. In the final question time before Parliament's summer recess, Blair's task was to defend the war in Iraq in the face of charges of flawed intelligence. He defended it, as was right, as an 'act of liberation for the Iraq people', saying that MPs should 'rejoice' in the result - a conscientious evocation of Margaret Thatcher at the Despatch Box after the Falklands. The magnificent assessments of his performance spanned party lines: the Guardian headlined that he 'survives Commons Iraq debate unscathed', the Daily Telegraph swooned that he 'showed he is a great survivor', and the tabloids joined the chorus.

He has reinvigorated centrism in Britain, as the DLC and similar organisations did for the United States. Again like his transatlantic partner, Blair's mark was to make many of the economic reforms of Thatcherism palatable to the left. As a result, the British economy has in our lives never been stronger. Whereas a quarter-century ago it had fallen past the Federal Republic of Germany and France, and was about to fall past Italy as well, it is now closing in on Germany for the European crown, and its per capita GDP mark it as the second richest country in Europe past Luxembourg.

It is a sad truism of British politics that, as Enoch Powell lamented, 'all political careers end in failure.' Baroness Thatcher is recalled now for the poll tax. Perhaps in the end Blair will be the final casualty of the Iraq war; his ratings are dismally low at the moment in satisfaction (36%) and making Britain a 'fairer' place (22%), and 55 percent believe he lied in the lead-up to Iraq. If so, it would be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, and one in which its protagonist met his fate heroically. But perhaps he will live to die another day - he still commands a 5-point lead over the perpetually inept Tory opposition. If he does, it will be greatly for Britain's benefit.

UPDATE: Oh goodness, I've done something wrong with the per capita gdp - there's some measure by which Britain is the second-best off in Europe, but I won't be able to dig it out for a quick bit as I'm about to fly to New York. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:14 AM by David Adesnik  

LIFE IMITATES ONION: Via Pejman.
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# Posted 2:40 AM by David Adesnik  

DOES JOE WILSON MATTER?  The extremely charitable Matt Yglesias has graciously sought to straighten out some of OxBlog's muddled thinking.  Yesterday, I admitted that

Frankly, I'm still confused as to why top-ranking administration officials were so eager to distance themselves from the 16 words if Wilson's accusations were so exaggerated.

Matt's answer is that while Wilson exaggerated his role in exposing the mendacity of the 16 words, the words themselves were simply untenable. 

But I beg to differ.  Wilson claimed that his February 2002 report exposed the Italian documents on Iraqi-Nigerien relations as forgeries.  But the CIA didn't have those documents until October 16, 2002.

Nine days earlier, on October 7th, George Bush delivered an address in Cincinnati which the CIA aggressively edited to ensure the accuracy of Bush's comments about African uranium.  As Tom Maguire points out, what the CIA removed were very specific claims about the Nigerien uranium that it couldn't back up. 

Then, shortly after the Cincinnati speech, the CIA suggested replacement language that was extremely similar to the 16 words that ultimately made it into the SotU.   What the CIA suggested was "Sought uranium from Africa to feed the enrichment process."  What Bush ultimately said was "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

As Tom points out, the similarity of these two statements debunks Matt's claim that the CIA specifically objected to the SotU language (aka the "16 words") as early as October.

Now, since Matt wasn't able to help me resolve my initial confusion about the efforts of Rice, Tenet, et al. to distance themselves from the 16 words, I've come up with a hypothesis of my own: Wilson's accusations may have been false, but they drew attention to the fact that the American, British and French intelligence services had all based their conclusions about the Nigerien uranium on a set of forged documents.

Arms inspector Mohammed El-Baradei publicly exposed the documents as forgeries in March 2003.  What I can't figure out is when, exactly, the US government learned out that the documents were forged. 

This post from TPM suggests that the British didn't identify the documents as forgeries until at least February 2003, i.e. after the State of the Union.  My best guess is that if the UK didn't know until February 2003, neither did the US.

So, in conclusion, my hypothesis is that the Bush administration's panicked response to Wilson's accusations reflected its embarrassment about the forgeries, not Wilson's false accusation that the administration lied.

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# Posted 2:18 AM by David Adesnik  

BASHING THE ECONOMIC LEFT: DLC enforcer Matt Yglesias has some tough words for Thomas Frank and Barbara Ehrenreich.  Just as I did when I read Ms. Ehrenreich's column, Matt wonders how she could claim that "millions have absorbed [Nader's] message".  Or for that matter how switching her support from Nader to Kucinich counts as moving toward the mainstream.

Matt's problem with Tom Frank is Frank's commitment to the fanciful notion that if the Democratic Party took a hard left on the economic front, it could win back all of the working-class cultural conservatives who prefer the GOP's cultural politics to the Democrats lukewarm efforts to protect the working man.

The question here is, how many working-class conservatives really think that there isn't much off a difference between Democratic and Republican economic policies?  If Bush tax cuts haven't convinced them that the Democrats are the party of the working-class, nothing will.
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# Posted 1:26 AM by David Adesnik  

RETHINKING THE DECISION TO INVADE: I'd like to acknowledge the recent NYT editorial that cast a critical glance at the positions that the NYT had taken in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Ever since the Jayson Blair scandal and the departure of Howell Raines, the Times seems much more committed to initiating public discussion of its own shortcomings.  On the other hand, politics are politics and even this recent mea culpa has its shortcomings.  For example, the Times writes that

We [] fault ourselves for failing to deconstruct the W.M.D. issue with the kind of thoroughness we directed at the question of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, or even tax cuts in time of war. We did not listen carefully to the people who disagreed with us...We had a groupthink of our own.

Pardon my asking, but who thought that Saddam didn't have WMD?  Scott Ritter?  By pretending that there were reliable sources it didn't listen to, the NYT suggests that there were also reliable sources that the White House and CIA ignored because of their supposed groupthink. 

Yet  in spite of an overwhelming consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, George Bush had his doubts about the existence of Saddma's stockpiles until George Tenet described American intelligence on Iraqi WMD as a "slam-dunk".  Moreover, Bush decided to subject Saddam to a test  -- UN inspections.  On that subject, the NYT writes that 

If there were no weapons, we thought, Iraq would surely have cooperated fully with weapons inspectors to avoid the pain of years under an international embargo and, in the end, a war that it was certain to lose.

That was a reasonable theory, one almost universally accepted in Washington and widely credited by diplomats all around the world. But it was only a theory.

What the Times fails to point out is that disbelieving such a theory entailed having faith in Saddam's honesty and good intentions.  As Stephen Sestanovich points out on today's op-ed page, Bush was right to act based on this theory:

When America demanded that Iraq follow the example of countries like Ukraine and South Africa, which sought international help in dismantling their weapons of mass destruction, it set the bar extremely high, but not unreasonably so. The right test had to reflect Saddam Hussein's long record of acquiring, using and concealing such weapons. Just as important, it had to yield a clear enough result to satisfy doubters on both sides, either breaking the momentum for war or showing that it was justified.

Some may object that this approach treated Saddam Hussein as guilty until proved innocent. They're right. But the Bush administration did not invent this logic. When Saddam Hussein forced out United Nations inspectors in 1998, President Clinton responded with days of bombings - not because he knew what weapons Iraq had, but because Iraq's actions kept us from finding out.

Sestanovich isn't grinding a partisan axe here.  He was a high-ranking ambassador under Clinton in addition to being a well-regarded expert on Russian affairs.

# Posted 1:11 AM by David Adesnik  

SOLDIERS FOR KERRY? The WaPo has a long report up on our soldiers growing antipathy toward their Commander-in-Chief.  The article is an important reminder of just how much military families suffer when soldiers deploy for combat overseas.

To a degree, the article seems like a compilation of quotes from disenchanted soldiers and their families, rather than a balanced portrait of how the war and occupation have affected soldiers' political opinions.

Even so, the contents of the article match up well with what I heard just a few days ago from a veteran infantry officer who works at the Pentagon.  He made the important point that Navy and Air Force personnel remain as conservative as ever because they do not have to staff the occupation.

Yet the army may have approached a historic turning point.  The question is, can the Democrats capitalize on this opportunity?  I believe that the key to doing so is, in the event of a Kerry victory, investing massive resources in the military so that we have more soldiers to share the burden of foreign operations and far better services available for the families left behind.

Of course, one can also lighten the load on military families by avoiding further conflicts and ending the occupation of Iraq.  But if the Democrats choose that course, they will only reinforce their reputation for a lack of seriousness when it comes to national security.

While big government may not be a popular cause, the Democrats can only gain by investing the resources necessary to protect America's military families. 
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# Posted 5:46 PM by Patrick Belton  

RUSSIAN CUSTOMER SERVICE: As though you needed another reason not to fly Aeroflot:

(BBC)Two flight attendants have attacked a passenger in an unprecedented case of reverse air-rage, according to Russia's leading airline.

An Aeroflot spokeswoman said the incident occurred after the passenger, named as Artyom Chernopup, said the men were drunk and not doing their job. Russian media said the alleged victim left the plane with a black eye and reported the incident to the police.

A Nizhnevartovsk airport representative told Izvestiya newspaper that a medical examination after the flight showed the cabin attendants were heavily intoxicated.

Another passenger told a forum on the avia.ru civil aviation website that the stewards distributed in-flight meals only when the plane started its descent, and managed to spill large quantities of food on the floor. "At this point I noticed something was wrong," the passenger said. "Only about half the meals ended up on the tables or in the laps of passengers, the rest ended up on the floor. "We left the plane with lunch-boxes crunching beneath our feet."

Correspondents say intoxicated passengers are common on Russian flights, but this incident was unprecedented.

When they're really mean, they actually give you the food. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:11 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG MEANS ACCOUNTABILITY: If bloggers want to boast that they are more accountable and more responsive than the mainstream media, than bloggers must ruthlessly expose their own mistakes.
 
To that end, I have decided to inaugurate a new feature here on OxBlog.  Each week, I will put up one post that evaluates the work that OxBlog did exactly twelve months earlier.
 
Today's post will cover July 13th through July 19th of 2003.  Strangely enough, the big issue in the middle of last July was the same as the big issue in the middle of this July: Joe Wilson.  In a post entitled Clintonizing Bush, I criticized MoDo and TPM for comparing the Bush's comments about Iraq's search for uranium to Clinton's unforgettable comment about what the definition of "is" is.
 
But was I smart enough to see through Joe Wilson's facade of righteous anger?  In short, hell no.  In that same post on Clinton and Bush, I wrote that

the Administration's inability to get its foot out of its collective mouth is making it harder and harder not to ask just what the White House has to hide. Just a few days ago, George Tenet took the fall for the administration after Condi Rice insisted that the CIA was responsible for letting the '16 words' into the State of the Union. Now Tenet says his staff never asked him to evaluate the 16 before they went into the President's speech.

Frankly, I'm still confused as to why top-ranking administration officials were so eager to distance themselves from the 16 words if Wilson's accusations were so exaggerated.
 
Now what about the significance of the scandal?  My comments on Clinton & Bush linked to an OxBlog post from the week before that said

While I agree that Uranium-gate says a lot about the irresponsible spin doctoring that is characteristic of this administration, Josh seems to think this story has the potential to become a major scandal. Why else would TPM focus so obsessively on every unfolding detail?  But the fact is, Uranium-gate will never become much more than a diversion from the more important issues of the day. Why? First of all, because Niger's alleged sale of uranium to Iraq was never more than a peripheral aspect of the case for going to war.

In hindsight, I'm inclined to admit that Josh may have been more right about this than I was.  Combined with the impact of Richard Clarke's exaggerated allegations, Wilson's charges helped fix in place, at least among Democrats, an image of Bush as an outright liar. 
 
On the other hand, the fact that neither Wilson nor Clarke addressed the issue of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons meant that Bush's case for war still wouldn't be thought of as a lie, even it if did turn out to be wrong.  As it turns out, Wilson actually wrote in February 2003 that

There is now no incentive for Hussein to comply with the inspectors or to refrain from using weapons of mass destruction to defend himself if the United States comes after him.

And he will use them; we should be under no illusion about that. (Hat tip: Glenn)

So how does OxBlog come out looking after all of this?  Not so great, but it could've been a lot worse.
 
Alongside Joe Wilson, another important issue from last July was the imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi.  While OxBlog is still 100% behind Ms. Suu Kyi and the Burmese democracy movement, I can't say that I've kept us with this issue as much as it deserves.
 
According to a quick browse of the OxBlog archives, it's been eight months since I've said anything about Burma at all.  Patrick did note last November, however, that the Burmese junta offered to release Suu Kyi, although she refused to be let out until other prisoners were liberated as well.
 
According to news reports on the official website of Ms. Suu Kyi's supporters, she is still under house arrest.  Last week, Kofi Annan called for her release and upbraided the Thai government for not doing more to pressure its neighbor.
 
On July 8th, President Bush renewed the sanctions that the US imposed on Burma after arrested Suu Kyi last year.  The Senate supported the President by a vote of 96-1.
 
In both the WaPo and NYT, coverage of the situation in Burma has been sparse.  Perhaps inevitably so.  There have been no big events there, only the same quiet repression that keeps the people of Burma impoverished and enslaved.


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# Posted 10:48 PM by David Adesnik  

KEEPING UP WITH JONES: Joe Gandelman has posted a very thoughtful response to Alex Jones' anti-blog temper tantrum in the LA Times.  For more links, head over to Instapundit.
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# Posted 9:45 PM by David Adesnik  

THE WILSON WARS: I pretty muchagree with Kevin Drum's conclusion that Wilson's

Credibility as a source is definitely tattered, but perhaps not quite as thoroughly demolished as his enemies are claiming.

It's also important to point out, as Matthew Continetti does in The Weekly Standard, that the problem is not Wilson's credibility as an intelligence source while working for the CIA, but rather the bombastic attacks he launched against the Bush administration after going public in May 2003.
 
For an opposing perspective on the Wilson wars, check out Josh Marshall, who is still defending Wilson pretty aggressively, perhaps because Marshall's own chestnuts are now in the fire.  As Marshall puts it,

The truth is that we simply don't know whether the Iraqis ever 'sought' uranium in Niger or Africa in the years leading up to the war, though all the evidence we thought we had for such a claim has turned out to be baseless.

Josh has also been pretty insistent about defending the role of Valerie Plame (aka Mrs. Joe Wilson) in recommending her husband for the Niger trip.  While Josh is right that Plame didn't make the decision to send her husband to Niger, Wilson has explicitly stated that she had absolutely nothing to do with it, which is a flat out lie.
 
On another front, Josh takes issue WaPo ombudsman Michael Getler's response to Josh's critique of Susan Schmidt's embarrassment of Wilson in the Post last week.  Both sides score some points, but the whole debate is something of a red herring since the most important charges against Wilson don't get addressed.
 
Once you get past all of the specific questions about what Wilson did or did not say and whether it was or wasn't true, you come back to the basic question of "Who cares anyway?"
 
According to Kevin Drum, the Wilson story is

Hardly a Page 1 blockbuster...Wilson doesn't really matter much anymore except as political sport. The only real issue on the table right now is whether anyone in the Bush administration outed his wife as a CIA agent, and that's a matter under investigation by the FBI.

  I disagree with Kevin pretty strongly.  As Susan Schmidt noted in the WaPo,

Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.

The fact is that Wilson's attacks did considerable damage to Bush's credibility.  The heartfelt conviction of most Democrats that Bush lied about the WMD rests to a considerable degree on Wilson's charges as well as the exaggerated criticisms of Richard Clarke. 
 
What's at stake right now is nothing less than the critical issue of whether George Bush is a liar.
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# Posted 10:39 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANOTHER VILLAGE LET THEIR IDIOTARIAN SLIP OUT: In a remarkably insubstantial, whiny piece, Alex Jones of the Kennedy School of Government manages to do precisely what he accuses blogs of: making vituperative arguments driven by emotion rather than fact, and marked by remarkable lack of engagement with facts or evidence, or an understanding of the subject matter at hand.

Jones lists the following as the 'common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar'. Oddly, this seems to describe fairly well the fare of most politics shows broadcast over cable networks at the moment. Blogging, as I've experienced it, is characterised by polite running conversations, backed up by evidence. I have to respond to friends on my left such as Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias, and ones to my right such as the Winds of Change. Maureen Dowd doesn't.

Bloggers, says Jones, also 'don't add reporting to the personal views they post online'. Perhaps Jones doesn't understand the point of opinion journalism, which is to add commentary, analysis, and criticism to the facts covered by the news, as well as to examine the very process by which the news outlets report and represent those facts in their reporting.

It would seem that the director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press at Harvard has a thing or two to learn about the press. Let's hope, for his sake, that he does. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

MORE SHOCKING INJUSTICE FROM THE INJUSTICE FACTORY IN TEHRAN: An Iranian court yesterday suddenly halted the murder trial of an Iranian intelligence officer accused of involvement in the death of Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi, after hearing one day of testimony about Ms Kazemi's torture and death in Iranian detention.

The sudden halt of the trial took place after the court heard testimony on Saturday from Ms Kazemi's mother, Ezzat Kazemi, that when she received her daughter's body, her breasts had been burned and a hand and foot had been broken. The mother was forced to consent to the immediate burial of the mauled corpse.

The journalist was tortured and killed one year ago, after she attempted to photograph a Tehran prison that is notorious for holding political prisoners. On Sunday, Canadian ambassador Philip MacKinnon and other diplomats and journalists were barred from entering the court.

Nobel peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, who represented the Kazemi family, has said that the trial was intended as a coverup to protect senior members of the Iranian judiciary who were involved in the torture and murder, including Tehran prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi.

For more, see NYT, and EUBusiness for the European response. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:29 PM by David Adesnik  

REPORTING MOMENTUM: In spite of regular car-bombings in and around Baghdad, the combination of the June 28 handover and the lowered intensity of American soldiers' war against Sunni insurgents has led to a temporary sort of optimism in the press. In an essay on the dangers of reporting from a warzone, Ian Fisher observes that

Something in Iraq has shifted, even if it is unclear exactly what or for how long. In the last few weeks, since the new Iraqi government took over, the hair-trigger tension has slackened, and many Iraqis are permitting themselves the luxury of hope in the midst of a long and unpleasant occupation.

In a separate article in the NYT, we read that

Gradually, ever so imperceptibly, the ground is beginning to shift.

The legions of American soldiers who not so long ago erected checkpoints and roared across the capital, guns pointed out of their Humvees, have diminished.

In their place, Iraqi officers are manning checkpoints and swooping down on suspected criminal gangs. Led by their American counterparts, Iraqi soldiers are combing through palm groves in search of weapons caches. One vanguard unit of the new Iraqi Army, known as the Iraqi Intervention Force, is allowed to patrol the streets without Americans.

More and more, the public face of security here is Iraqi.

Of course, if there is a major bombing tomorrow and three or four American soldiers begin to die each day, we will hear that putting an Iraqi face on public security was a failed experiment. Like Fisher, I wonder how long the current calm can last. I may be an optimist in general about the occupation, but I am firmly against reading too much into short term trends.
 
UPDATE: Jim Hoagland, of all people, thinks that the current calm in Iraq is an illusion created by deficient press coverage and Bush administration spin.  Josh Marshall agrees.

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# Posted 11:05 PM by David Adesnik  

NATTERING NABOBS: The negative thrust of campaign journalism has begun to engulf the Democratic candidates. Although written in a light-hearted tone, this John Edwards profile in today's NYT resorts to simplistic stereotypes about the candidates that sound more like a Bush-Cheney press release than a dispatch from the paper of record. First, we learn that

Mr. Edwards has been talking up Senator Kerry this week like a used-car salesman urging his customers to look past the dents.

Colorful? Yes. Substantive no. Then there this:

Mr. Edwards spins Mr. Kerry's life story as a veteran, prosecutor and senator, assuring voters, "If you have any question about what John Kerry is made of, just spend three minutes" with the men who served with him in Vietnam.

Perhaps the bar for what counts as "spin" has dropped. Perhaps it refers to anything other than a recitation of accepted facts. But I think that the word still carries a strong connotation of manipulation or even dishonesty and thus shouldn't be used in place of "said" or "announced" or "declared". Moving on,

That [Mr. Edwards] is giving Mr. Kerry such a glowing sales pitch is, in a sense, a tacit admission by the campaign that Mr. Kerry has not done a particularly good job of selling himself.

That's pretty much just an editorial comment, and this isn't even a news analysis piece. Besides, what exactly do you expect to hear a vice-presidential candidate say about the man above him on the ticket? Finally, there's this:

While Mr. Kerry can sometimes come off as stiff and aloof on the campaign trail, Mr. Edwards is in effect vouching for Mr. Kerry, telling voters that Mr. Kerry is really a lot like him - a candidate in touch with the common man.

Kerry may not be Mr. Warm, but I don't think there is much ground for stating as a simple matter of fact that he is stiff and aloof. I generally react positively to his demeanor, which I also think has improved since last fall.

Well, I guess the bright side here is that the media is being even handed in its negativism. That is how it persuades itself that it is honest and detached and not being manipulated by the candidates. But if we want more Americans to get out and vote on election day, then we have overcome the sort of kneejerk negativism that turns so many Americans off to electoral politics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:19 AM by David Adesnik  

THE SEARCH FOR EGYPTIAN DEMOCRACY: The New Yorker has published a mournful but still quite interesting portrait of political life in Egypt. The launchpad for David Remnick's essay is President Bush's bold (if you're an idealist) and foolhardy (if you're a realist) declaration that

The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.

To be sure, contemporary reality offers little in the way of evidence that Egypt is ready for a democratic opening. Then again, after Egypt invaded Israel in 1973, who expected that a peace treaty was just six years away? (That's my point, not Remnick's.)

The moderately good news about Egypt is that the Muslim Brotherhood, the organized face of political Islam, has become a passive, unmenacing and unpopular (albeit still extremist) organization. Ever since the horrific slaughter of seventy tourists at Luxor in 1997, terrorism has been afraid to show its face.

Or to be more precise, Islamist terrorism has been afraid to show its face. State-sponsored terrorism, in the form of pervaisve torture and arbitrary imprisonment is a simple fact of life. Mubarak has no ideas, so he tortures instead.

Nonetheless, Remnicks seems to suggest that it is not Mubarak's brutality but rather America's aggression in Iraq that truly angers the Egyptians. Remnick reports that

In an atomized political culture like Egypt’s, the one issue that has energized, and enraged, the political opposition today is American foreign policy under George W. Bush. I had dozens of meetings in Cairo—with government officials, religious leaders, opposition figures, intellectuals, students, working people—and nearly every session began with a speech on the perfidy of the Bush Administration

I don't doubt that Egyptians hate Bush or even that they hate him much more than they hated Clinton. But is this outpouring of hatred a direct consequence of American behavior, or rather a sublimation of the intense hatred that Egyptians are not allowed to direct at their own government?

After all, there is a fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of Egypt's hatred. Egypt was the first Arab state to recognize Israel and, as a result, has come to benefit from annual, eight-figure infusions of American aid. If the Egyptian people had their say, would their government turn down this aid and sever ties with Israel? Or would Egyptians follow the Gulf states' tradition of declaring their love for Palestine while abandoning the Palestinians to their fate?

Unfortunately, Remnick doesn't provide much in the way of answers. His focus on Egyptians' assessment of US foreign policy and, to a secondary degree, the prospects for Egyptian democracy, consume all of his efforts.

Remnick's article ends on a hopeless note. He suggests -- accurately, I think -- that Mubarak has absolutely no interest in presiding over any sort of liberalization. Thus, it is only a matter of time before Cairo explodes just as Teheran did in 1979.

While I am more inclined than Remnick to believe that the Egyptian people want democracy, I find myself compelled to agree that that Mubarak's repression is paving the way for a radical revolution.
 
CORRECTION: As Gary Farber points out, Egyptian aid is in the ten-figure range, not the eight-figures mentioned above.  Stupidly, I knew that Egypt gets a couple billion a year from the United States, but somehow thought that there are eight significant digits in 1,000,000,000.
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# Posted 12:01 AM by David Adesnik  

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONSERVATISM AND RACISM? According to Bob Herbert, not much. Herbert accuses Bush of cynically using black Americans as props to create a false image of inclusivity for the Republican Party.

Now, I'm going to agree with Herbert that the GOP convention in 2000 was pretty shameless about directing its cameras toward the few black faces in the crowd. But what about Herbert's statement that the GOP has been "relentlessly hostile to the interests of blacks for half a century"?

Has Herbert forgotten which party governed the Solid South and enforced Jim Crow right up through the end of the 1960s? Has Herbert forgotten that it was a Republican president who used armed force to desegregate a southern university?

But forget about the past. The question is, are Republicans hostile to black Americans now? All of the examples Herbert cites of Republican hostility seem to have no racial component. Supporting tax cuts? Not enough job creation? Not enough health care?

Sure, you can make a good case against Republican policy on most of those issues. But the GOP's policy agenda derives from its conservatism, not its antipathy toward black America. Yes, some of these programs hurt poor blacks. But they hurt poor whites just as much.

Playing the race-card is the worst thing Bob Herbert can do to address this issue. Declaring the black agenda and the liberal agenda to be identical is just one more way of damaging American liberalism by making it seem to be a projection of narrow racial interests rather than an inclusive strategy for improving America as a whole.

CORRECTION: Ralph Luker points out that I have confused the desegregation of the University of Mississippi with the desegregation of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. The former took place while Kennedy was president. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:46 PM by David Adesnik  

LAST OF THE NAVEL GAZING: Josh and Patrick have already put up their thoughts about OxBlog's appearance on Page One of the NYT, so I thought I'd add my two cents as well.

According to the NYT, OxBlog was "set up by three Rhodes Scholars". Actually, OxBlog was set up by one Rhodes Scholar -- Josh Chafetz -- who is the Founding Father of our website. (You can read his first ever post right here.) Josh had a bit of help from Anand, Arielle, and Dan, all whom are excellent individuals (or so I've heard!)

But the fact is that Josh is our George Washington. He worked hard to give this site a reputation for quality and then did Patrick and myself the favor of bringing us aboard. I don't think any of us ever thought early on that what we were doing was front page news. It was a just a fun way to write and argue with an intelligent audience about subjects we like. And it still is. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:24 AM by Patrick Belton  

I LEARN SOMETHING NEW ABOUT MYSELF EVERY TIME I READ ABOUT MYSELF IN THE PAPER, CONT'D: Today I learn from the Times that we're a bunch of young Buckleys. (Yesterday, for those of you keeping track at home, I learned from the Boston Herald that I'm English; the day before, I found out from the Philadelphia Inquirer that I 'bristle with attitude'.) Personally, I've always seen, and described, myself as a centrist, but if it's in the Times it must be true, mate - and whatcha gonna do about it? The more pertinent question is, from my perspective, can I show my face in New York after this? Because I am heading there on Thurdsay ... unless the person at immigration reads the Herald and doesn't let me in.

Or on the other hand, maybe I can seek asylum in the Buckley residence in Connecticut. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:51 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANY OF OUR FRIENDS WHO spent time as students in New Haven will probably be interested to know that the National Labor Relations Board ruled yesterday by a 3-2 margin that graduate students shouldn't be considered workers from the perspective of right-to-organise laws, reversing an earlier decision from four years ago.
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# Posted 5:49 PM by Patrick Belton  

AIDS - THE NEGLECTED SECURITY THREAT: Our good friend, and Nathan Haler, Greg Behrman has been spreading the message of AIDS as a security threat everywhere lately - in the pages of the NYT and Newsweek, and on the luscious sweet soundwaves (hey, it's a Friday evening, after all) of NPR. What's even more poignant is that he's doing this as a memorial for his father, who died while we were students together at Oxford. Good work, our friend.
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# Posted 2:19 PM by Patrick Belton  

EVERY TIME I READ ABOUT MYSELF IN THE PAPERS, I discover something new about myself. For instance, today I found out in the Boston Herald that I'm a Brit. So now my goal is to become a dour Brit; but sadly, that might involve less of both 'bristling with attitude' and occasions when I'm allowed to be 'tickled pink'. Life is so full of tragic choices. Sad.
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# Posted 4:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

OXBLOG IN THE PRESS: The Philadelphia Inquirer is kind enough to mention us this morning; thanks!

For the first time, bloggers will be covering the action, such as it is, on the floors of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

The Old Media that still scribbles in notebooks will confront the New Media of digital pamphleteers. Bloggers are calling it historic.

"The 2004 conventions will be remembered as the conventions of the blog, just as the 1952 Republican convention was the convention of television, and the 1924 conventions were the conventions of the radio," wrote Oxford graduate student Patrick Belton on OxBlog (oxblog.blogspot.com).

Two years ago he [actually, Josh] started a blog - short for Web log, a journal mixing news and opinion and bristling with attitude. Now Belton is flying from England to pick up a convention pass.

I never knew I bristled with attitude before. But then again, I also wasn't aware until shortly that I got tickled pink, either. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

SLATE'S THE FRAY HAS an insightful dissection of myths and false truisms in intelligence reform. A sampling:

First, however, it is essential to understand what is not wrong with the CIA or the IC -- and there are many pet complaints that don't add up. ...

6.It is not necessarily a problem that intelligence analyses are sometimes wrong or not quite right.

Intelligence work is mostly a matter of solving puzzles and making guesses about probabilities. It should go without saying that much intel is going to be wrong, at least in part. But we have a tendency to expect perfection and to call anything less than that an intelligence "failure." Take 9/11. The fact is that we had for years mountains of "intelligence" – most of it in the newspaper – telling us that al Qaeda was a deadly threat and would attack us anyway it could. Plus, we had a lot of solid intel from the IC about who was doing what, where and how. But it is the USERS of intel who failed to draw the right conclusions from the intel. Even near-perfect intel does not automatically mean that military commanders or policy makers will make the best use of it. Prior to the pivotal naval battle at Midway in 1942, Naval intelligence knew the size and composition of the Japanese force and the timing of the attack. Nonetheless, the battle was nip and tuck and won largely due to dumb luck. On the other hand, the supposedly "massive failure" of CIA to forecast the Soviet collapse had almost no effect, since such a forecast doubtless would have been met with derision and the US responded to the changes in the USSR and East Europe with highly successful policies anyway....

I believe the following are real problems:

1)The process for developing the "national intelligence budget," should be focused on allocating funds among the three intelligence collection functions – human, communications and imaging – since only by doing so can the impact of resources be evaluated.

Now, Congress demands a budget divided by operations, R&D and procurement. This is what made it possible for the NRO to obtain and salt away a huge sum for future investments never made. More important, we want to be able to tell what we get out for each dollar we put in....

4)The IC needs centralized doctrine, training and management development.

Intelligence officers in various agencies have no common understanding of their mission or common doctrine about how it should be carried out or shared training in how to manage its various components. ...

6)The FBI should be taken out of the counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism business, except insofar as it is the proper law enforcement agency to be called upon when someone should be arrested. It's intelligence functions need to be placed in a new counter-intelligence agency patterned along the lines of the British MI-5.

The FBI has always been a disaster – or a joke – in this line of work. That's not because FBI agents are stupid; it's because they are cops, and intelligence is not police work. Since 9/11, they may have got better at it, but the true extent of any gains will be forever obscured by the fact that the Bureau has reportedly put as many as 40% of its employees on counter-terrorism duties (compared to about 5% before 9/11).

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# Posted 11:48 PM by David Adesnik  

HAPPY BASTILLE DAY! It's time to put our small differences aside and remember that French fries are freedom fries and freedom fries are French. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:36 PM by David Adesnik  

A NOTEWORTHY FACT:

Private investment has all but vanished [in the West Bank and Gaza]. But donors stepped in, doubling their contributions, to a billion dollars a year, an amount equal to one-third the Palestinian gross national product last year of $3.1 billion. That works out to roughly $310 a person, more aid per capita than any country has received since World War II, the World Bank says. (Source: NYT)

If the Palestinian Authority is that dependent on foreign aid, then the UN and EU (and US?) should be able to exert some pressure on their favorite insurgents. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:55 PM by David Adesnik  

COMMON SENSE: While visiting Cambridge, my very generous uncle and aunt recently gave me a 1940's vintage edition of Tom Paine's classic pamphlet. As I wander through it, I thought you might enjoy the occasional quotation. The following comes from the introduction, page vii in my edition:

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire sword, declaring war agains the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling.

Paine's universalism is breathtaking. How could an unknown man on an unknown continent on a planet ruled by monarchs and despots declare that the cause of America is the cause of all mankind? There is simply something magical about the principles that animated Paine and his fellow revolutionaries.

The stunning triumph of democratic ideals in the few short years since 1776 (or perhaps 1688?) seems to have no historical parallel except for the triumph of monotheism in its Christian and Muslim incarnations. These ideas are so powerful that they seem to go leaping acros cultures and continents, building empires that die but are reborn.

Not long ago, we feared that Communism belonged in this same pantheon beside democracy and monotheism. Some may fear that radical Islam now possesses a similar strength. But I do not. To be that powerful, an idea must liberate the human spirit. Islam has that power, but not when it is bound to hatred, violence and terror. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:17 PM by David Adesnik  

SPIDERMAN IN GIULIANI'S NEW YORK: I saw Spider-Man 2 last night. I liked it. I liked it a lot. But I have some quesitons. And I'm going to ask them, right after warning you that if you haven't seen the movie yet you should stop reading this post right now.

The most disturbing thing about Spider-Man's New York is how crime-ridden it is. Shotgun wielding crooks driving down major avenues in convertibles? Come on! And then things really get nuts when Spidey goes into temporary retirement.

First we get another ridiculous car chase. Then the Daily Bugle tells us that crime is up 75% since Spidey retired (thus implying that crime was also that bad before Spidey showed up). Finally, someone gets mugged in broad daylight in an "alleyway" that Peter Parker -- and hundreds of other people all around him -- can see. When I was growing up in NY in the 1980s, it was pretty rough. But Spider-Man's New York is absolutely nuts.

Next question: If Otto Octavius/Doc Ock has access to incredibly strong bionic arms, why hasn't any other criminal tried the whole bionic-arm shtick before? It's not as if Ock is some sort of specialist in robotics. He's a physicist, for god sakes. Moreover, why does the rest of Doc Ock's body become just as resilient as the bionic arms they get welded to his body? Is Doc Ock also that strong in the Spider-Man comics?

Finally, a humorous question. When Peter Parker rescues that little Asian girl from the burning building, why does he just assume that the first Asian couple he meets outside are her parents? It's not as if there are only two Asian people in New York. And responsible heroes should get some sort of verification but giving away rescued children.

Of course, if you're watching the movie, you know that the Asian couple are the girl's parents because the camera cuts to them three times during the rescue scence. But Peter Parker has no way of knowing that! He's inside a burning building! Is there any justification for this? Perhaps. Maybe it's sort of a Spider-sense in reverse. Instead of picking up trouble, it picks up anti-trouble.

So there you have it, my rant about Spider-Man 2. Take it all with a grain of salt. I'm not actually trying to criticize the film. These are just some things I sort of noticed. For some philosophical questions about the film, check out Matt's comments and the responses from Henry and Brayden.

Also, check out the comments on Matt's post for some speculations about who Spidey's next super-villain will be. As the closing scene of the film indicate, Harry Osborn is getting ready to return as the Green Goblin (or possibly the Hobgoblin). But is the introduction of John Jameson a hint that Venom may play a role in Spider-Man's future? I certainly hope so. He is one of the coolest villains ever.

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# Posted 9:55 PM by David Adesnik  

"THIS ISSSUE IS NOT GOING AWAY": That's what Bill Frist had to say about the anti-gay marriage amendment. And you know what? Frist is 100% right. This issue is going to come up again and again every time another state allows gay marriage.

Whatever their personal views about homosexuality, more and more Americans are beginning to realize that depriving homosexuals of their rights is no different than depriving racial and religious minorities of theirs. From where I stand, the President's effort to write prejudice back into the constitution is both shameful and divisive.

Now let me be clear about my personal views. I have absolutely no reservations about homosexuality. It is not immoral. It it is not bad for society. A gay marriage or a gay family is just as good as a straight one.

I don't know whether homosexuality is a product of nature or a product of nurture and I don't really care. Religion is a product of nurture and therefore a matter of choice. I reject discrimination on the grounds of religion. Ethnicity (or at least skin color) is a product of nature and I reject discrimination based on ethnicity.

I recognize that many religious traditions object to homosexuality on ethical grounds. Those same religions also reject pre-marital and extra-marital sex on ethical grounds. And yet not one member of the House or Senate would consider supporting a constitutional amendment to discriminate against fornicators or adulterers. (It would put their jobs on the line, after all.)

I look forward to a day when Americans consider homosexuality and heterosexuality to be not just a private affair, but rather a way of life that must be tolerated in its public expression the same way we tolerate the expression of diverse religious and ethnic heritages. Only then can it be said that gay Americans have secured their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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# Posted 4:52 PM by Patrick Belton  

WAIT, JOSH, is that why Kerry hasn't given his democracy-promotion strategy speech yet?
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# Posted 5:44 AM by Patrick Belton  

INCIDENTALLY, a neat new website, walkingaround.com, lists every ethnic and national group in the world, and where precisely to go in New York City to find the corresponding neighbourhood. Examples: want Greeks? go to Ditmars, in Astoria. Germans? Gerritsen Beach, in Brooklyn. Syrian Jews? Ocean Parkway, also Brooklyn. Fun for hours! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

LA RESISTENCIA NO VALE NADA: Mexico's attorney general Rafael Macedo and several of his staff have been implanted with microchips to allow their whereabouts to be traced in the event of kidnapping, and to serve as safeguards giving them secure access to a new national crime database. If the Borg should also assimilate taquitos, count me in! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

GOOD THINGS FROM ME, at comparative first blush, about the selection of Edwards as Democratic vice presidential nominee presumptive. His economic populism aside, the senator's foreign policy proclivities are much closer to this blog's - and, if polling data be trusted, to the nation as a whole - than his running mate's.

This may just well be precisely not because of what Senator Edwards is, but instead what he is not - a foreign policy professional. It may be somewhat ironic for me to assert, given the field of my research training, but it seems to me nonetheless that presidents without foreign policy backgrounds - Clinton, the current President Bush, and to this category add Edwards as a vice presidential candidate - come much closer to reflecting the broadly held assumptions of the American people about, for instance, the role democracy and human rights should play in foreign policy, than do the foreign policy professionals. The amateurs may do imperfect jobs at instantiating those beliefs under the pressure of office - q.v., entries for the Clinton and Bush administrations - but they still cut a compelling contrast with the Kerrys and George H.W. Bushs who have, by foreign policy service, imbibed the realist assumptions of the foreign policy establishment, and its associated sublimation of national value processes to interests and power in their rhetoric.

Edwards, in this schema, emerges as a blissful naif - who on that score, can be expected to hold beliefs much closer to the American people's strong Wilsonian inclinations. And this seems something which is worth applauding. One only hopes that Edwards will wield as much influence with the head of his ticket as Vice President Cheney has been reputed to wield with his. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:35 AM by David Adesnik  

JOE WILSON'S COMEUPPANCE: This week's big report from the Senate Intelligence Committee has broken both ways; it says we invaded Iraq because of bad intelligence but that it was the CIA's fault, not George Bush's. The sub-head coming out of the Senate report is the evidence that Joe Wilson was way off the reservation when he accused George Bush about making up the uranium-in-Niger story.

Unsurprisingly, this development has provoked a collective 'I told you so' from the right, which long suspected Wilson of being a partisan hack. But it isn't just the hard right that's disavowing Wilson. Kevin Drum, for example, thinks Wilson's credibility is pretty much shot.

Josh Marshall has come to Wilson's defense, but Dan Drezner and Greg Djerejian have shot him down pretty thoroughly. As someone who didn't follow the Wilson-Plame affair all that closely in the first place, I'm still struggling to get my hands around the details. But unless the Senate report got something very wrong, this game is over. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:03 AM by David Adesnik  

BAGHDAD TRAFFIC REPORT: USA Today (link via KD) reports that increasing respect for traffic cops is an important sign of progress in Baghdad:

Adnan Kadhum of the Baghdad traffic police says he noticed the change about 10 days ago: The city's notoriously unruly drivers suddenly started obeying his commands. They stopped when he signaled for them to stop; they went when he signaled for them to go.

"Before, you found hardly anyone listening to you," the 27-year police force veteran says. Kadhum, 48, spent his days flailing around in 105-degree heat, sometimes waving his pistol in a futile attempt to make motorists follow his commands. "Now, by barely moving my hand, I get respect."

This article is actually from July 7th, so 10 days earlier would have been just around the time of the handover, give or take a day. Of course, that could just be a coincidence.

More importantly, does it really make sense to infer national trends from the behavior of crosstown traffic? I don't have a definitive answer to that question, but I can offer a theory and an anecdote. Thanks to Rudy Giuliani, most people are familiar with the broken windows theory of crime. Basically, it's the idea that crime expands exponentially when small crimes go unpunished.

Two summers ago, I was living in Argentina in the midst of that nation's worst economic crisis ever. Across the country, crime was spinning out of control. One afternoon, I was driving down a major thoroughfare in Buenos Aires with a friend. He casually ran a red light and explained to me that because the government had ruined everyone's life, he didn't feel compelled to obey traffic laws anymore.

The logic didn't make much sense to me, since running red lights in Argentina is an especially good way to get killed. (In a car crash. The death squads haven't been active for more than twenty years.) In contrast, I understood exactly why my friend ignored the currency trading laws Argentina had recently put on the books -- it was a great way to make a lot of money fast without much risk.

Conclusion: Traffic may not be rational, but it makes sense all the same. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:21 PM by David Adesnik  

A LENINIST AT THE NYT? In a subtle allusion to the writings of Lenin, Brad DeLong charges NYT debutante Barbara Ehrenreich with practicing a "brand of left-wing politics [that] is an infantile disorder".

Pray tell, what has Ms. Ehrenreich done to deserve this denunciation from a fellow traveler? According to Brad,

Left-wing politics is, for [Ehrenreich], primarily a means of self-expression. The point is not to actually do anything to make the United States or the world a better place..

The point, by contrast, is to assume an appropriate oppositional stance, and to feel good about oneself. Witness her argument that what upper and upper-middle class American women should do is to fire their nannies in order to avoid their children "growing up with the world's class and racial hierarchies stamped on their emerging little world views"--thus depriving relatively poor women of jobs and opportunities they found it worthwhile to grasp.

Hmmm. A female columnist who complains ad nauseam but never comes up with practical solutions? I can't believe the NYT would ever want one of those on its op-ed page!

But moving on, Brad also points to the irresponsibility of Ehrenreich's anti-Gore activism during the 2000 campaign. As she wrote in The Nation:

We are being summoned to save this inveterate bribe-taker [Gore --ed.] because "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." That in itself is a disturbingly Orwellian proposition, easily generalized to "Don't challenge the system, you'll only make it worse."

In spite of all this, Kevin Drum tries to rescue Ehrenreich by explaining that

In politics both policy and persuasion are necessary. Brad has policy in abundance, but Ehrenreich would probably think it bloodless and, in the long run, ineffective, because it does not change people's minds. Likewise, Ehrenreich has polemics and persuasion in abundance, but without good policy this simply produces a mess.

But does Ehrenreich, or Maureen Dowd or Michael Moore really change minds? I don't think so. Just like Rush Limbaugh, they mostly throw red meat to the faithful. There is something to be said for mobilizing the base, but these folks only cater to the extreme half of their partisan base.

As for the NYT, would hiring a Naderite really add much diversity to their op-ed page?

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias offers a non-apology on Ehrenreich's behalf which Brad declines to accept.

On a related note, Henry Farrell takes issue with Brad's allusion to Lenin. While "infantile" is a harsh word, I think that Brad gets the historical analogy just right. Lenin used that word to denounce left-wing Communists whose radicalism threatend to undermine mainstream Communism and ensure the triumph of its class enemies. Brad is using it to attack Naderites who delivered the 2000 election into the hands of George Bush.

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# Posted 7:36 PM by Patrick Belton  

OXBLOG ON CNN: It's the same AP story, but nice to be popping up there nonetheless! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:11 PM by Patrick Belton  

THEY CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: That is, the bishop's response in the second graf...

Cache of child porn found at seminary
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- A vast cache of child pornography and photos of young priests having sex has been discovered at a Roman Catholic seminary, officials said Monday, leading politicians and church leaders to demand a criminal probe and the resignation of the bishop in charge.

Bishop Kurt Krenn, who oversees the diocese, refused to step down, however, dismissing the images as a "childish prank."
...
As many as 40,000 photos and an undisclosed number of films, including child pornography, were found.

ed: Pretty massive prank, if you ask me. But it wasn't the child pornography that the bishops were concerned about...

The Austrian Bishops Conference issued a statement pledging a full and swift internal investigation. "Anything that has to do with the practice of homosexuality or pornography has no place at a seminary for priests," it said.

Krenn, a conservative churchman, told Austrian television he had seen photos of seminary leaders in sexual situations with students, but he described the images as part of an elaborate prank that "had nothing to do with homosexuality."

It was straight child porn, people, straight child porn....nothing to worry about here.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:27 PM by Patrick Belton  

ANYONE WHO'S EXTRAORDINARILY BORED can read my encyclopedia of politics articles on Nietzsche and Hume, and let me know if you have any suggestions.... (This, incidentally, is for the same guy who read my thesis chapter.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:25 AM by Patrick Belton  

THIS CONVERSATION seems to me to be rather silly. The question is whether elections ought to be postponed in the event of a terrorist attack. Constitutionally, this is probably allowable, as long as it is done (or expressly delegated) by Congress, and with a key role being played by state legislatures: it falls under Congress's competency under Article II, Section 1 to set a single national date for the meeting of presidential electors for the electoral college's election of the president, currently codified at 3 U.S.C. 7. The method and timing of the electors' selection rests solidly in the hands of the state legislatures, under Article II, which gives them complete power to determine how the electors are to be selected (including whether even to hold a popular election at all, which is a matter for the state constitution to work out). But it falls under Congress's powers to determine when the electoral college must meet, and so it could theoretically postpone the meeting of the electoral college, giving states the ability, if they so chose, to move their elections back as well. (Compare this with the case of the timing of congressional elections, which under Article I, Section 5, Congress can move entirely under its own discretion - the Constitution grants Congress the power to set the dates of popular elections to the House, which the 17th Amendment extends to the Senate as well). Congress couldn't extend the term of the president past four years (article II), but it could, by moving the date of the convening of the electoral college, give the states the opportunity to postpone the election of their presidential electors - consonant with the 20th amendment fixing the term of the president as lapsing January 20, after which point under current legislation the Speaker succeeds to the empty presidency if a president-elect or vice president-elect has not been selected.

But the more pertinent question, it seems, is political - which in turn ought to be read against the context of American political history. The presidential election of 1864 was held at the ordinary time, in spite of the existence of a civil war threatening the very continued existence of the polity, at least in an unfractured form. By analogy, elections under the shadow of a terrorist attack probably ought to be held at the ordinary time as well.

This issue shouldn't be read together excessively with continuity of government and doomsday planning, but there are also useful analogies, I think, to be drawn from the very conservative principles which have guided government continuity planning. In this, the US is distinct from Britain in that the constitutional forms of the government - the cabinet, both chambers of Congress, the Supreme Court, the executive agencies- are all to be preserved intact, underground if need be, in the event of an utter armageddon. By contrast, the Commons, in its doomdsay scenario, has legislation ready for emergency use to dissolve itself and relegate all executive power to civil defence commissioners in eleven districts throughout Britain, who will be expected to relinquish emergency command to the national government as soon as possible after the catastrophe. Other measures are in place to ensure the survival of the Government - but not their families- and the Royal Family.

The only area where current US constitutional arrangements are silent, and possibly lacking, is how the Congress is to be reconvened should large numbers of its members be killed or incapacitated. Under the House's interpretation of its quorum rules, a majority of living members may meet to constitute the House. This interpretation is fine as long as the surviving members of Congress are ambulatory, but it doesn't permit the House to meet - even to amend its quorum rules - if, say, a majority of members are living but incapacitated - although there may possibly be room for exercise of speaker's discretion. Reconstitution of the Senate may be immediate, with governors being permitted under the seventeenth amendment to fill vacancies by temporary appointment, but the House, as the people's body, may only be constituted by direct election. Where constitutional ambuity might lie is, among other issues, the selection of the Speaker by an indeterminately constituted or unconvenable House, who might well be called upon to immediately succeed to the presidency. CRS has a report on this and related questions, as does Brookings.

But these latter issues involve catastrophic, nationwide devastation of an order principally contemplated during the darkest days of the Cold War, and the discussion of even these doomsday issues has been marked by careful, salutary regard for the continuity of the constitutional forms . It seems to me that the appropriate political response to a grave terrorist attack which did not challenge the territorial or economic viability of the United States should be guided by similar, principally conservative, concerns - to make as little change as possible due to the attacks in the political life of the republic. Josh? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:57 AM by David Adesnik  

IRAQ BODY COUNT: Bob Herbert mentions in passing, without reference to his source, that 10,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the US invasion began. To the best of my knowledge, the US military still refuses to investigate the issues, thus opening up the field of play to much less reputable institutions.

One of those less reputable institutions is Iraq Body Count, which currently reports that between eleven and thirteen thousand civlians have died in Iraq. That name may ring a bell, since Josh took a careful look at IBC's flawed methodology shortly after the fall of Baghdad. At the time, IBC had calculated that 1,800 civilians had been killed during the invasion.

According to Human Rights Watch, there is no reliable count of how many civilians have lost their lives during the invasion and the occupation. So, has IBC done anything to improve the situation?

Well, one interesting feature on its site is a list, by name, of 700 civlians killed in Iraq. Next to each name is the individual's age, sex, place of and time of death, cause of death, and source of information about their death.

The fourth entry in the IBC lists refers to the "family of Metaq Ali", 29 of whom died as a result of a US air force attack. Thanks to Google, I was able to track down the wire report that provided IBC with the information about their deaths. It lists none of the 29 names of Ms. Ali's family members. Moreover, there is no verification of their deaths other than Ms. Ali's testimony.

While I am inclined to believe that Ms. Ali is telling the truth, I don't see how a responsible civilian casualty monitoring organization can rely on a single account provided by a witness it never interviewed. Moreover, it takes a lot of chutzpah for IBC to pretend that it knows the names of the 29 individuals allegedy killed by the American attack.

Scrolling further down the list, one notices that it often lists the cause of death as simply 'gunfire'. At first, I assumed that 'gunfire' meant Coalition gunfire, since the title at the beginning of the list says "Named and Identified Persons Killed as Result of Military Intervention in Iraq". But scrolling down a little further, I noticed that it includes more than 90 entries for individuals killed by a massive suicide attack on the offices of two Kurdish political parties this past February.

In other words, IBC is counting Iraqis killed by terrorists attacks -- this one possibly committed by Al Qaeda -- as victims of American intervention. In some abtract sense, this is true. If there had been no American invasion, it is highly unlikely that terrorists would have killed those specific individuals. On the other hand, if there had been no American invasion, it is absolutely certain that Saddam would've killed thousands of other innocent men, women and children.

Even so, it still worth asking whether IBC's own guidelines recommend including the victims of terrorist attacks, or whether the inclusion of the February attack in Kurdistan was a mistake. Answer: I'm not sure. According to IBC's published guidelines,

The test for us remains whether the bullet (or equivalent) is attributed to a piece of weaponry where the trigger was pulled by a US or allied finger, or is due to "collateral damage" by either side (with the burden of responsibility falling squarely on the shoulders of those who initiate war without UN Security Council authorization). We agree that deaths from any deliberate source are an equal outrage, but in this project we want to only record those deaths to which we can unambiguously hold our own leaders to account. In short, we record all civilians deaths attributed to our military intervention in Iraq.

The decision to include deaths resulting from "'collateral damage' by either side" (emphasis added) suggests that the victims of terrorist attacks should be included. On the other hand, 'collateral damage' usually refers to civilians accidentally killed during military operations, not civilians intentionally killed in order to provoke widespread fear. Moreover, IBC's desire to record only those deaths for which one can "unambiguously hold our own leaders to account" forces one to ask how the victims of terrorist bombings can possibly be included in this total.

Now let's turn to the main IBC database where the incidents responsible for the 10,000+ civilian casualties are included. At the top of the list, there is note which says

In the current occupation phase the database includes all deaths which the Occupying Authority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conventions and Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation.

Even though I am not familiar with the Geneva and Hague regulations, I'm guessing that suicide bombings are not something that the Occupying Authority can be expected to prevent. Even so, that is the description that IBC itself gives to incidents 'k223' and 'k224'. I'm also pretty sure that incident 'x340', in which two kidnapped Iraqis had their throats slashed, was not the responsibility of occupation forces.

However, the prize for total absurdity goes to entry 'x344' which includes upwards of 1600 deaths described as "violent deaths recorded at the Baghdad city morgue". For details about the morgue reports, see this AP report, cited by IBC. To be fair, IBC notes (see above) the Occupying Authority is responsible for maintaining law and order. Still, what IBC is basically doing is holding the US responsible for street crime.

Before finishing this extra-long post, I think it's worth asking whether anyone takes IBC's numbers seriously. Well, one quick answer to that question comes from IBC's own news clippings site. The sad news is that Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, Reuters, and the BBC. On a personal note, I am particularly concerned about Linda Colley, a very talented professor of mine at Yale, who took the IBC figures at face value in a column in The Guardian. (Although I guess it's possible that there are two British Linda Colleys.)

But, hey, who expected from better from our less-than-unbiased media? As Josh pointed out last year, major media outlets were already swallowing the IBC propaganda hook, line and sinker. Plus ca change... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:50 AM by David Adesnik  

YOU CAN'T HAVE DEMOCRACY IF IT ISN'T SAFE TO VOTE: There's trouble brewing in Afghanistan. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:27 AM by David Adesnik  

WaPo IMITATES BELTON: You be the judge of whether the Post is getting its editorial ideas from Patrick. On the bright side, Patrick did make a pretty important point, so I'm glad it's getting a wider audience. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:19 AM by Daniel  

So much fun, I watched it twice. Turn up the volume and enjoy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:59 PM by Patrick Belton  

FAR BE IT FROM ME to provide a counterexample to my good friend Josh, but Rachel and I have actually been reading the online text of the Odyssey to each other each night lately as bedtime reading.... I treasure as much as anyone the aesthetic experience of a beautifully made book, particularly one obtained in a second-hand book shop and having the smell and craftsmanship of decades woven into its spine - but there's also an extraordinary convenience to being able to call on the contents of Project Gutenberg or the entire Harvard Six Foot Shelf for your bedtime or breakfast reading, without so much as a trip to the library... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:09 AM by Patrick Belton  

CAMPAIGN TRAIL QUOTE OF THE DAY: 'He has an accent and I don't,' Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, when asked to identify differences between himself and nominee presumptive John Kerry (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:07 AM by Patrick Belton  

NATHAN HALER AND OXFRIEND GREG BEHRMAN has an important and timely piece on AIDS in this morning's International Herald Tribune:

AIDS threatens global security: A subversive plague
By Greg Behrman

On Sunday, epidemiologists, scientists, public health experts and leaders of nongovernmental organizations will convene in Bangkok for the 15th International AIDS Conference. They will debate the costs and the prevention strategies; they will report on progress in the science. Yet one of the most important dimensions of this pandemic will be almost entirely overlooked: that it is fast becoming one of the greatest threats to U.S. and global security.

In the past 20 years, approximately 60 million people have been infected with HIV; 20 million have died. Eight thousand people - nearly three times 9/11's death toll - die of AIDS every day. By 2010, experts predict 100 million infections worldwide and 25 million AIDS orphans.

AIDS has taken its greatest toll in sub-Saharan Africa, and it is there that the pandemic presents the most immediate threat to global security. AIDS is killing the most productive and needed people: doctors, government officials, teachers. The disease is not only devastating families and communities; it is eviscerating national economies.

All seven southern African countries have adult infection rates above 17 percent, and in two it is 35 percent. Some employers train two or three workers for every job, such are the chances that a worker will become infected and die. Some African armies are believed to have infection rates as high as 50 percent.

The implications for global security are profound. AIDS can reverse the strides many African countries have made toward democratization. Warlords, corrupt dictators and rogue leaders might seize power in weakened states. Lawlessness and disorder can breed violence and conflict.

By 2010, 25 percent of U.S. oil imports are expected to come from Africa, so the United States will be increasingly drawn in to participate in combat and peacekeeping missions there.

In 2002, the White House National Security Strategy declared that for the first time, weak states pose a greater danger to U.S. national security than strong states. What is making states weak today? In sub-Saharan Africa, it is AIDS.

Somalia, Sudan and Kenya have already provided harbor for terrorists. As the disease tears the sub-continent's states apart, terrorists will find more refuge in the rubble. Though there are more Muslims in Africa than in the entire Middle East, Islamic radicalism is still the exception rather than the rule. But the instability and suffering that AIDS is spreading through the continent might well feed radicalism.

Across Europe and Asia, the pandemic's next wave poses longer-term challenges to security. The peril is greatest in Russia, where AIDS is growing faster than anywhere in the world. There are roughly 1 million infections in Russia, and the number is expected to climb to 5 to 8 million by 2010 - a level at which AIDS could generate instability. To Russia's south, India will soon become the country with the highest absolute number of infections in the world. Its HIV-infection tally now stands at around 5 million, and by 2010 that number may reach 20-25 million.

In many ways, India is Africa five to 10 years ago. With large numbers of migrant laborers, widespread prostitution, a flimsy health infrastructure and a mind-boggling state of denial among government elites, AIDS is poised to leap to Africa-like proportions. This in the world's largest democracy, a nuclear power and a key U.S. strategic ally in a volatile region.

Secretary of State Colin Powell recently declared that HIV/AIDS is "the greatest weapon of mass destruction on the Earth." Yet the global community has not met AIDS with the resources, priority and urgency that the gravity of the threat requires. AIDS is the greatest moral crisis of our time, and it is a vital threat to U.S. and global security.

Greg's recent book, which really is a must-read, is The Invisible People: How the U.S. Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, The Greatest Humanitarian Crisis of Our Time. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

A FEW FIRST THOUGHTS ON THE CONVENTION OF THE BLOG: I'm excited that we'll have a role in covering the convention as a representative of the new media, and blogs in particular. The 2004 conventions will be remembered as the conventions of the blog; just like the 1952 Republican convention was the convention of the television, and the 1924 conventions were the conventions of the radio. Each symbolised the rise of a new technology to mediate between the political space of the public square and the personal, domestic space in people's living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchen counters. (We started OxBlog in April 2002; Glenn Reynolds began InstaPundit in August 2001, and the rush of widely read politics blogs followed then in his wake.)

Each of those forms of communication represented, and recreated, political events differently. What's different about blogs is the restoration of the human voice behind them, more in line with the Victorian newspaper, or Bagehot in today's Economist, but quite different from both the 'we' of today's editorial page and the unindividuated speech on page one. Today's newspapers reflect a positivist philosophy of knowledge of the 1950s and Karl Popper, when they attained their present form - each draws one authoritative representation of each political event. The blogosphere reflects the epistemology of the moment, Jürgen Habermas's intersubjectivity, where many individuals speak with each other and compare their different representations of the political event. I think the blogosphere fits in the same social moment as the new economy - it's decentralised, younger, quickly adaptable, and better describable by chaos theories of spontaneous order, than Weber's models of bureaucracy, which correspond to the career foreign correspondent services of the print newspapers.

Blogs are personal - there's a human voice behind them; you write as an humble 'i,' not as the powerful editorial 'we'. You engage in running, for the most part respectful conversations with other bloggers to your right and left, which might well be our day's running conversation of the republic. As a technology for representing politics and mediating between public and domestic space, blogs don't share the passivity of television, or the unspoken biases of print journalism, and because of these running conversations with other blogs - which as a blogger keep you honest, and continually questioning and reframing your assumptions. Something about blogging also forces you to be humble, because you write as an 'i' instead of as 'we', and you relate to people you cover as individuals, which induces respect and humility.

More importantly, though, all this pretentious babbling about German philosophers aside, I'm looking forward awfully much to meeting the other bloggers who will be there. Wonkette writes in that 'if we're lucky' she'll even join us for bloggers drinks. And I think it'll be fascinating to use blogging the convention as a way of getting around the televised spectacle which conventions have become, and looking for the relics of real politics that still exist there - through talking with and interviewing representatives of different factions and groups within the party, to see what's new in their orbits, what trends they think are important, and how the world looks from where they sit, as well as getting to talk to delegates from different parts of the country where I don't get to travel all that often. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:11 AM by David Adesnik  

JUST IN CASE AL & TIPPER WEREN'T ENOUGH: The Dems are still the party of love in 2004. The Washington Times isn't happy about it, but OxBlog loves love! (Link via Pandagon)

UPDATE: And there's more love where that came from. (Hat tip: Bo Cowgill.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:41 AM by David Adesnik  

I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THEY HAD COWS: The North Korean state-run media recently reported that Dear Leader Kim Jong Il gave his personal seal of approval to the hamburger. The Dear Leader was also quoted as saying that

"I've made up my mind to feed quality bread and french fries to university students, professors and researchers even if we are in (economic) hardship."

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if Kim has his own personal McDonalds hidden away somewhere along with his DVD collection and Courvoisier. (Hat tip: TMV) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:00 AM by David Adesnik  

AMERICA HUMBLED, PART II: RECONSTRUCTION WITH A CAPITAL 'R'. Yesterday, I suggested that Hollywood's perceptions of Japan in the 1980s can teach us an important lesson about US-Iraqi relations. Today, I explore how that great fable of the Reconstruction, Gone With the Wind, can broaden our perspective on the reconstruction of Iraq.

But first, a confession: I am completely ignorant of the extensive literature, both popular and academic, generated by Gone With the Wind. I come to the film with fresh eyes, except for the fact that I am still in possession of a Gone With the Wind refrigerator magnet that once belonged to a very sweet and very pretty girl whom I dated for just a short time in college. Much like Scarlett O'Hara, she was a very smart girl who was much tougher than she looked.

Of course, one shouldn't romanticize the past. Accustomed to Hollywood's obsession with political correctness, I was shocked by Gone With the Wind's shameless apologia for the ante bellum South. It is a fairy-tale kingdom without class warfare, racial violence, or religious hypocrisy. It's only apparent flaw is the tragic enthusiasm of its chivalrous young men for confronting the Yankee aggressor on the battlefied.

Perhaps most shocking to modern audiences is the servility of Scarlett's (former slaves) after the surrender at Appomattox. The film doesn't provide even the slightest hint that they were dissatisfied with their old lives or that they now want something more from life than to wait hand and foot on their former masters.

Of course, this servility is an integral part of the fantasy that animates Gone With the Wind. At first, one might dismiss this fantasy as unremarkable given that Jim Crow was alive and well in 1939, when Gone With the Wind debuted. Yet given the prominence of Iraq in today's headlines, I found it impossible not to think of Gone With the Wind as a window into an alternative universe in which Americans are not only the occupiers but also the occupied.

In both the American South and in Iraq, the victory of Washington's armed forces secured the immediate objectives for which the war was fought. Yet in both cases, the victors also hoped to promote their democratic values by transforming the thought processes of the society against which they had just fought. Sadly, the political fantasy at the heart of Gone With the Wind demonstrates just how poorly the Union Army did as advocate of racial justice.

At first, one might hesitate to attribute this failure the cultural divide between North and South, since the culture of both was fundamentally American. Even the racism of the South was not much greater in intensity than that of the North, in spite of the latter's abolitionist impluse. While it had economic roots as well, Jim Crow was an expression of the idea that black Americans should not share the same fundamental rights as their white counterparts.

Given the similarity of Northern and Southern culture, why did the North fail to cultivate in the South even the minimal respect for racial equality that existed in the North? Given that the cultural divide between the United States and Iraq is far greater than that between North and South, is there any hope for a successful transmission of the democratic impulse?

That, of course, is a trick question. If the Iraqi people do not want democracy, there is nothing we can do to make them want it. In that sense, democracy cannot be exported. Yet if the people of Iraq want to embrace democracy as their own, then the United States can prevent opportunistic elites, violent insurgents, and social chaos from disrupting the transition. In that sense, democracy can be promoted.

One hundred years after the end of the Civil War, federal officials returned to the South to enforce Washington's expectations of racial justice. After a century of social and cultural change, their efforts had the chance to be more successful. Thus, I fear that in Iraq it may be another hundred years before women enjoy the basic rights that no American could live a dignified existence without.

However, within democratic nations, democratic values have a habit of burrowing into and taking over every social insitution with which they come into contact. They just need some time. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:14 PM by David Adesnik  

ONE STEP FORWARD? Saudi Arabia has announced that municipal elections will be held in early September. The municipal ballot will be the first elections in Saudi Arabia since the 1960s.

The big question is, will the elections be real? Will the campaigns be fair? Will organized parties be allowed to emerge on a regional and/or national basis? And if the United States doesn't watch the process closely, will the Saudi princes rig the vote? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:05 PM by David Adesnik  

RUSSIAN ROULETTE, PUTIN STYLE: Paul Klebnikov, a US citizen and senior editor of Forbes' Russian-language edition, was gunned down near his Moscow office yesterday. Klebnikov's aggressive reporting earned him numerous enemies in Russia's corporate underworld.

But the real point here is that journalists don't get murdered when governments care about human rights and the rule of law. While the Putin regime may not have been involved in Klebnikov's murder, it's pervasive corruption and assault on free speech are what makes this sort of violence possible. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

HEY LOOKEY, WE'RE IN USA TODAY, FORBES AND THE BOSTON HERALD TODAY!
(Note to self: stop making fun of USA Today, at least for a respectable period of time...) Here's what they're saying about us.

Belton, 28, a doctoral candidate in international relations at Oxford University, said he was "tickled pink" when he learned by phone Thursday he had been accepted. [ed: Belton, 28, swears he doesn't ordinarily use phrases like 'tickled pink'] (Notifications were sent by postal mail, but Belton said he hasn't checked his mailbox in days.) [ed: That's because work frequently appears there]

"It will be great fun to participate in the symbolic first convention of the blog," said Belton, who said he's now "trying to scrape the pennies together" for a flight from England.
...
[Convention spokeswoman Peggy Wilhide] pointed to the approval of at least one "right-leaning" blog, Oxblog, though the co-founder who applied, Patrick Belton, is a registered Democrat who considers himself centrist.

Hey, thanks, guys! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:20 AM by David Adesnik  

AMERICA HUMBLED: In the midst of an aggressive American effort to export its democratic ideals, I think it may prove beneficial to empathize with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan by trying to remember those moments in American history when the success of others led to a loss of confidence in our own way of life.

While the the people of Iraq (if not their leaders) have demonsrated an admirable thirst for democracy and human rights, it is never easy for a proud people to admit that foreigners know best, especially in the midst of a foreign occupation. This is not a trait peculiar to Iraqi culture but rather one that Americans share as well. Thus, it may be cultural similarities that are a greater barrier to cooperation in Iraq than cultural differences.

I have begun to appreciate this point more fully over the past ten days thanks to a pair of films that portray Americans in the midst of radical self-doubt. The first is an obscure comedy from the 1980s named Gung Ho. The second is Gone With the Wind, which I had never seen for myself despite its iconic status in the lore of American film.

Gung Ho takes place in a small Pennsylvania town where the close of a local auto factory has led to massive unemployment, the shuttering of countless stores, and a general loss of faith in American industry. In the opening scense of the film, Hunt Stevenson (played by Michael Keaton) travels to Japan in order to persuade the fictional Assan Motor Corporation to invest in the closed factory and bring the town back to life.

When the Assan executive jet arrives at the local airport, the town has assembled on the runaway to meet with hand-lettered signs saying "We Love Japan" and "We Love Assan". The crowd waves miniature Japanese and American flags, while a delegation of local women wear kimonos and the town's children demonstrate their minimal knowledge of karate.

Watching this scene, it was hard not to think of the first moments after the liberation of Iraq, when the celebration of freedom had not yet been marred by the burdens of occupation and reconstruction. The amazing thing, of course, is that the Americans in Gung Ho are not the liberators but the liberated. They welcome the Japanese with a certain reverence reserved for saviors and not for guests. The Japanese are inscrutable, but that only increases their allure because they possess the secret of prosperity.

Even though my memories of the 1980s are hazy at best, I do remember that powerful sense of foreboding that Americans had about the impending superiority of the Japanese. Their wealth seemed unlimited as they began to buy up America. Today we would welcome such investment as an antidote to outsourcing and an excessive dependence on imports. But that is only because we have regained our confidence in the American way of life.

Unsurprisingly, cultural differences lead the Americans in Gung Ho begin to lose patience with the Japanese executives in charge of their factory. In spite of Hollywood's usual passion for political correctness, Gung Ho perpetuates crude stereotypes about the Japanese as authoritarian, cold-hearted and even cruel. In contrast, the greivances of the American factory workers come across as mostly justified, even if their reactions to the Japanese are somewhat intolerant.

When the conflict becomes more than the Japanese can take, they threaten to pull out their investment and go home. Hoping to save the day, labor rep Stevenson (Keaton) persuades the Japanese factory boss to strike a deal: If the Americans can break the one-month production record set by Assan's Japanese workers, then Assan will stay in Pennsylvania. The outcome, of course, is predictable. But what never gets explained is how American workers who weren't productive enough to keep their factory open when it was managed by fellows Americans have suddenly become able to outperform their legendary Japanese counterparts.

In the meantime, the soft-hearted Japanese factory boss begins to embrace his workers' relaxed and individualistic style. Eventually, he stands up to his own boss and demands that the Japanese executive be able to take time off to spend with their pregnant wives and graduating children. Thus, what began as a film about American inferiority ends as a fairly tale about superior American values. Instead of being grappled with, reality disappears.

Now, if Americans in the relatively prosperous 1980s couldn't accept that they actually had what to learn from the Japanese, imagine how hard it must be for Iraqis to accept American tutorials in the midst of an occupation. Now, it would be wrong to suggest that the Ba'athist and Sadrite insurgencies in Iraq are a reflection of cultural differences. In truth, they are a reflection of violent totalitarian ideologies that most Iraqis reject.

Yet I wouldn't be surprised if the everyday business of fixing generators, laying sewage pipes and training security forces suffers from a clash of American and Iraqi egos. In Gung Ho, the cartoon-like rigidity of the Japanese executives prevents them from recognizing that they should compromise with their American workers rather than just demanding that they accept Japanese habits.

Of course, I'm hardly the first one to suggest that cultural differences will complicate our efforts to promote democracy in Iraq. All I hope to add to this debate is the suggestion that cultural similarities may, in fact, cause more trouble than differences. While Iraqis may share our thirst for democracy, they also share our incomparable pride, a trait which make them just as reluctant to learn from us as we were to learn from the Japanese.

To be continued. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

'DROUGHT-CRAZED KANGAROOS TURN DEADLY': Look, I know I shouldn't for some reason find this as funny as I do, but this just came up from the antipodes:

Drought-crazed kangaroos turn deadly
By Elizabeth Colman
July 09, 2004

IT'S an unusual sight - a kangaroo holding a struggling dog under water until it drowns.

But as Australia lies gripped by the big dry, the nation's proud mascot is turning deadly in the capital.

Killer kangaroos have claimed the lives of two dogs and injured at least one person in Canberra in the past week...

[Wildlife ecologist] Dr [Murray] Evans this week issued guidelines to locals living in the bush capital on how to steer clear of an attack by the cuddly looking marsupials. The danger signs are clear - don't approach a kangaroo "when it is standing up and looking straight at you, sometimes it also will growl and snort", Dr Evans said.

"Some people think the kangaroo is being friendly and it's not."

Would they perhaps be willing to part with a few of those, to send several to Iraq?

UPDATE: From our reader MH: 'If the 'Roos are drought crazed, where is this water coming from that they're drowning the dogs under? and why aren't they merely drinking the water instead of murdering dogs?' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:14 AM by David Adesnik  

THE HEROES OF AL-JAZEERA: The subtitle of this film should have been "If Michael Moore Had a Brain". Control Room, a documentary by Jehane Noujaim, takes us inside Al Jazeera's Qatar headquarters during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. With a subtlety not often found in the midst of a presidential election, Noujaim portrays the producers and correspondents of Al Jazeera as the last true heirs of Woodward & Bernstein -- unarmed men and women unafraid to speak truth to power.

The critics' praise for Control Room has been overwhelming. In the NYT, A.O. Scott writes that it is

An indispensable example of the inquisitive, self-questioning democratic spirit that is its deep and vexed subject.

Ann Hornaday of the WaPo writes that it is

The first movie of the year to qualify as urgently important...

This engrossing portrait of competing notions of truth is at once a thrilling real-time chronicle of the birth of a free press and a sophisticated philosophical treatise on the nature of objective reality.

In other words, liberal film critics love Control Room because it advances a firm leftist critique of American ignorance and ethnocentrism while presenting itself as an unbiased and self-aware observer of America at war.

One of the twin protagonists of the film is producer Sameer Khader, who describes Al Jazeera as an institution committed to advancing the ideals of freedom and democracy by providing an alternative to the state-run Arab media. I agree that Al Jazeera plays a critical role in challenging the information monopoly of the Arab dictatorships, but Noujaim drops this point right after Khader makes it.

Instead, Control Room focuses on how Al Jazeera challenges American military propaganda in a manner (supposedly) far more effective than than the (supposedly) co-opted and covertly patriotic journalists of the American media establishment. This is exactly the point that Michael Moore tried to make in Fahrenheit 9/11, but Noujaim does it with far greater panache.

Noujaim systematically builds up her subject's credibility by demonstrating that it has made all the right enemies. First, Donald Rumsfeld accuses Al Jazeera of broadcasting nothing more than Iraqi propaganda. Then an Iraqi spokesman accuses Al Jazeera of broadcasting nothing more than American propaganda.

Then comes Noujaim's coup de grace: After interviewing an American activist who denounces the war as part of an oil-driven imperial project, Khader (the producer mentioned above) berates his subordinate for booking an interview subject with such a one-sided perspective. The subordinate meekly protests that he assumed an American activist wouldn't voice such unfair criticism of his own country.

What better way to establish Al Jazeera's cross-cultural empathy and commitment to journalistic detachment than showing how its employees can recognize when American citizens are criticizing their own government too harshly? Well, I for one am not impressed. Any journalist not on an Arab government's payroll should be able to recognize that Chomsky's court jesters do not have much to contribute to a serious news program.

When not demonstrating Al Jazeera's supposed impartiality, Noujaim tries to demonstrate her own fairness by giving a young US Army spokeman the chance to defend his government's actions. According to the Boston Globe,

Noujaim's film is at its best in its sympathetic and complex portrayal of Lieutenant Josh Rushing, an earnest young US army press officer at CentCom whose naivete about war and news-gathering slowly crumbles before our eyes.

Whereas Michael Moore's bombast often results in the audience siding with his victims, Noujaim's kindness toward Rushing lets us forget that she has cast this one lieutenant as the living embodiment of American ignorance.

Rushing, however, is far from ignorant. What he is is overmatched. Facing off against the second protaganist of the film, veteran Al Jazeera correspondent Hassan Ibrahim (formerly of the BBC), Rushing doesn't stand a chance. To make matters worse, Noujaim devotes the rest of her narrative to undercutting almost all of the points that Rushing makes.

For example, Rushing asks at one point why Al Jazeera insists on portraying the invasion of Iraq as a threat to the Arab world when, in fact, Saddam Hussein has slaughtered far more Arabs than any other ruler alive today. Rushing also asks why Al Jazeera's standard cut-to-commerical montage interlaces footage of American soldiers and war planes with footage of wounded Iraqi civilians. Why not show what Saddam's soldiers have done to the Iraqi people?

In spite of this warning, Noujaim includes extensive and explicitly gory footage of wounded Iraqi civilians without ever pausing to ask whether the Iraqi people suffered more, day in and day out, under Saddam Hussein. Like Fahrenheit 9/11, Control Room doesn't even try to put a number on how many Iraqi civilians lost their lives during the invasion. Instead, Noujaim just replays and replays Al Jazeera footage in which Iraqis stand in front of their bombed out homes asking if this is what George Bush meant by freedom and demoracy.

According to Human Rights Watch, there are no reliable counts of how many civilians died during the invasion, although the number seems to be in the thousands. Saddam's own government announced during the final week of the war that there had been 1,254 civilian deaths. Whatever the true number, it pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands murdered by Saddam. It also pales in comparison to the one million deaths projected by leading humanitarian NGOs.

The saddest thing about Control Room is what it could have been. The rise of independent networks such as Al Jazeera is a revolutionary development in the Arab World. Instead of recycling standard leftist criticisms of the war, Noujaim might have asked whether the democratic aspirations of Al Jazeera's producers and correspondents have awoken similar aspirations in the network's 40 million Arab viewers. Whereas Saddam Hussein fell to American arms, the best hope for the liberation of Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia may be Al Jazeera.

CORRECTION: BH wisely points out that Iran does not speak Arabic, so Al Jazeera is somewhat irrelevant. Besides, Iran is a pretty dumb example given that it has such a strong indigenous democratic movement. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:31 PM by Patrick Belton  

STUPID, DUMB, AND SHORT SIGHTED: No, not one of the three OxBloggers. It's the House of Representatives voting today 281-137 to cut $10.5 million from the budget allocation of the National Endowment for Democracy in order to give it to a small-business-loan pork program. The National Endowment for Democracy's projects in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and elsewhere represent the nation's principal diplomatic and aid-based ways for strengthening democratic institutions and countering terrorism, and should be the very last budget line to take money away from to go spend on buying pork. Democrats voted 193-2 for the short-sighted, and silly, amendment, while Republicans split. Both should be ashamed of themselves. Rep. Frank Wolf said 'The reality of this amendment is that this is a subsidy to put money in the bankers' pockets. If you were helping the poor or the hungry...I would support the amendment.'

Instead of spending $11 million to support democratic reformers in countries where U.S. interests are vitally engaged, what are our tax dollars going to? Funny you asked:

• $500,000 for Disneyland buses in the district of Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-California)

• $2.2 million in pork for North Pole, Alaska, population 1,570. (Which corresponds to $1,401 for every man, woman, and reindeer in town, courtesy of Senate Appropriations Chair Ted Stevens, R-Alaska).

• $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Coralville, Iowa, thanks to the efforts of Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)

• $200,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A further $100,000 for the Kids Rock Free Educational Program. What would Rock and Roll do without government support?

• And the Congressional Pig Book 2004 has a more complete list, identifying $22.9 billion of pork in the appropriations bills - so much, they've been heard squealing on their way across the Capitol from the House to the Senate.

Now, I'm sure all of these are worthy projects. But I'm not yet nearly convinced that building, say, a "Blue-Gray Civil War Theme Pack" in Kentucky ($225,000) is more deserving of the tax dollars of the nation than helping democratic reformers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. In fact, I think it's fairly silly and short-sighted. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:45 PM by Patrick Belton  

BOSTON BOUND: We've just received a very nice call from the DNC, saying very kind words about our blog and inviting us to cover the Boston convention as an accredited blogger. I have some thoughts on blogging and the convention, but England is currently beginning a neodiluvian period and so my more immediate thoughts are on the subject of drying off. In the more immediate term, though, I'd be very interested to hear which other bloggers will be at the convention - it would be nice to throw a blogger party and see everyone who will be there. Please drop us a line! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:02 AM by Patrick Belton  

COOL NEW SITE: If you're like me - or even if you're not really that much like me - you probably often run across monetary amounts from other decades and centuries, and are never quite sure how to convert, say, £500 from 1975 into 2002 money, to say nothing of the £63,176 it cost to construct the HMS Victory in 1765, or the two shillings which you may be fined at Yale for going 'to a Gunning, Fishing or Sailing ... any Court, Election, Town-Meeting, Wedding, or Meeting...which may Occasion Mispence of precious Time without Liberty first obtain'd from the President or his Tutor' (1745 rulebook). Well, a really delightful new site run by Economic History.Net now lets you convert the purchasing power of sterling for any years in between 1264 and 2002 - your 1975 five-hundred quid, for instance, equate to a whopping £2,577.60 in 2002; or £41, 6s, 2d in 1900; or £65, 3s, 9d in 1800 (yes, the pound actually rose in value over the nineteenth century); £7, 0s, 11d at the accession to the throne of Queen Elizabeth; or even £3, 8s, 10d in 1264, the year of the Battle of Lewes and eight years after Simon de Montfort called the first Parliament at Oxford.

Other sites on EH.Net let you do similar calculations for the U.S. dollar, compare the value of unskilled labour across centuries, and compare the UK consumer price index, and average nominal and real earnings, from 1264 to 2002. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:57 AM by David Adesnik  

DOES BUSH CARE ABOUT DEMOCRACY AT ALL? Josh Marshall says no, not at all. Rob Tagorda and Dan Drezner provide a pair of counter-examples. Kevin Drum says the marginal importance of those counter-examples just proves Josh's point.

I'll agree that those counter-examples, while important, are far less than heroic. But I am going to dispute Josh's point that Iraq doesn't count in Bush's favor because

at any time in recent history any American government would have attempted to put in place a government that is at least nominally democratic in any state it overthrew.

Liberals have been predicting for almost a year now that Bush would cut and run rather than face a tough re-election fight with 150,000 troops still on the ground in Iraq. Well, that hasn't come to pass.

And I think it's fair to ask whether John Kerry would have shown the same kind of resolve if he were President when the occupation appeared to be headed southward. In fact, just a few months ago, Kerry began to flirt with the self-destructive idea that there can be stability without democracy in Iraq. With Kerry in the White House, Iraq might suffer the same neglect that Bush has inflicted on Afghanistan.

Kerry's flaws aside, it is hard not to resent the hypocritical way in which this administraiton needlessly embraces dictators in Russia and Central Asia while the President recites paeans to the universal truth of democracy. Then again, Iraq is the big one. If we win there, if the Iraqi people win there, the future will be very different for the Middle East. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:28 AM by David Adesnik  

THE WaPo F***S UP: Ombudsman Michael Getler explains when the use of said expletive is permissible. While respecting the Post's decision to print said expletive, OxBlog's conservative inclinations ensure that it will continue to use asterisks liberally. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:58 AM by David Adesnik  

HOW CORRUPT IS THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY? So corrupt that its own terrorist brigades have begun to protest. Then again, the good folks in Al-Aqsa might never have raised the issue if Israel hadn't prevented them and their kind from carrying out a single suicide bombing over the past four months. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:46 AM by David Adesnik  

A BUCKET OF WARM SPIT? Josh Spivak argues that the rising influence of the vice-presidency is good for the United States. I agree 100%, but I'm not sure that Kerry has an influential role in mind for Edwards. Nor am I so sure that Edwards wants to take an active policymaking role, a role that might distract him from the onrushing presidential campaign in 2012.

For an opposing perspective on the vice-presidency, take a look at this comprehensive overview of all those vice-presidential candidates who later made a run for the Oval Office. (Hat tip: DS) Its author suggests that

The historical message is unambiguous: vice-presidential candidates tend to lose as presidential candiates. Or they become undistinguished presidents -- at best!

A somewhat strange conclusion, given that John Adams, both Roosevelts and Harry Truman were all vice-presidents. [Correction: RR points out that FDR was a VP candidate (1920), not an actual VP. My imprecise writing is to blame for the confusion, since the list I linked to above includes both nominees and sitting vice-presidents.]

If you still want to hear more about Edwards, check out the latest from TNR. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:59 PM by Patrick Belton  

AND SOME SO-CALLED 'REALISTS' STILL SAY WE OUGHT TO BE COUSINING UP TO THESE GUYS:

American and Iraqi joint patrols, along with U.S. Special Operations teams, captured two men with explosives in Baghdad on Monday who identified themselves as Iranian intelligence officers....

The arrest of  the two Iranians suspected of attempting to carry out a vehicle bombing has focused new attention on how Tehran is trying to protect its interests in the country it fought for eight years in a devastating war. (Fox)

These, please note, are the intelligence officers who aren't otherwise engaged photographing vulnerable spots in New York City to pass to their friends in Hizbullah...and also aren't the Iranian Revolutionary Guard uniformed officers who seized eight British servicemen inside Iraqi maritime boundaries, either.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: 'Whenever they do this, we lose.' Martin Suarez, a bystander in Peru observing shamans' rituals ostensibly intended to help the national side in an upcoming Latin American football tournament. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:29 AM by David Adesnik  

MY MOM HAS A CRUSH ON JOHN EDWARDS: If middle-aged women with Ph.D.s are falling for the guy, who won't? It just goes to show that Joe Trippi was right when he said that

Throughout the primary campaign I was stunned at how fast Edwards's support grew among women once he got rolling and received some press attention...Seriously, I think Edwards opens up a bridge to women and young people that goes beyond Kerry's own reach and well beyond Cheney's.

Then again, it is usually male voters that the Democrats need to work for.

Moving on to more substantive issues, I'm surprised that no one seems to be talking about what a tremendous personal success this is for Edwards. Last fall he was a dead-in-the-water primary candidate who might not have been able to hold on to his own Senate post. It seemed that Edwards was all ambition and no substance, reaching for higher office long before he deserved it.

In hindsight, Edwards comes across as a savvy politician who understood how to achieve national prominence by leveraging his impressive charisma. In spite of Edwards' unflinching insistence that he was running for president and not VP, it is hard to believe that he didn't think of himself as ideal candidate for the second half of the Democratic ticket, regardless of who was on top.

Moreover, sitting vice-presidents have a remarkable record of becoming their party's next presidential candidate. So six months from now, a man who just recently was trial lawyer with no political experience may become heir apparent to the White House.

So that's my two cents about Edwards, but there's lots more to say. Check out Instapundit and Pejman for comprehensive round-ups, as well as the TNR debate Josh mentioned earlier. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

FROM OUR AFGHANISTAN CORRESPONDENT: This week, a look at warlords, in and out of Kabul....

Most Western news coverage of post-Taliban Afghanistan presumes something like the following narrative: The early failure of the American-led coalition to shore up the Kabul government of Hamid Karzai led to a renaissance of warlords throughout Afghanistan. The power of these regional military commanders and the weakness of the central government has led to all sorts of disasters: an increase in poppy cultivation, a rash of human rights abuses (especially against women), and a severe blow to the rule of law throughout the country. However, the U.S. is reluctant to antagonize the regional commanders, needing their cooperation in hunting down the remnants of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. So the U.S. continues to wink at the warlords, leaving Karzai impotent to rule the country of which he is nominally President.

Most of this story is of course true. But the main element of the proposed solution -- strengthening Hamid Karzai and the central government against the regional commanders -- I would argue is misguided. Instead, the U.S. and Afghan governments should demand disarmament and elections from all warlords, but (assuming the warlords win at least the first round of provincial elections) should also allow their regional governments to retain considerable powers. The U.N. and editorialists everywhere are right to propose expansion of ISAF, the international security force (now run by NATO) that has brought relative stability to Kabul. Its role, however, should not be to extend the authority of the central government, but rather to enforce the general disarmament program, to firmly moderate disputes between local commanders, and to defend journalists, political parties, and activists who lawfully challenge the interests of the dominant warlord. Western donors should encourage regional governors to respect human rights, follow the rule of law, and wean their farmers off poppy by rewarding those governors who do so with increased development assistance.

In an earlier dispatch, I briefly laid out my reasons for being wary of fostering a strong central government in Afghanistan. Here in more detail is my sense of current trends shaping Afghan politics, and the conclusions I draw from them. I'd welcome any comments from more knowledgeable souls who happen to be reading this.

First: the Taliban movement is a spent force in Afghan politics. This is not to discount the dangers from the continuing violence in southeast Afghanistan; there, the U.S. faces an insurgency that will likely fester for years to come. But the distinctive features of the Taliban regime -- the stifling theocracy supported by foreign funds and arms -- are unlikely to be successfully revived. What the Western coalition and the Karzai government face in the south is less a Taliban resurgence than a Pushtun insurgency, whose leaders include former Taliban but also fellow Pushtun Gulbuddin Hekmetyar (who was fighting the Taliban five years ago). Bereft of Saudi and Pakistani support, this movement stands little chance of sweeping Afghanistan like the mullahs in the late 1990s. Rather, the south-eastern resistance threatens a return to the ethnic civil war and chaos of the early 1990s. The Kabul government no longer face a movement capable of taking over the country; rather, it faces regional insurgencies, capable of making the country ungovernable.

The Taliban were initially welcomed in Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan for bringing stability after a long and devastating civil war. This welcome will never be repeated. Across the north, resentment of ordinary Afghans toward the Taliban remains intense. The mullahs are remembered chiefly for their hostility to music, sport, and many other small joys of life. My friend Mumtaz recalls being beaten with a leather-covered piece of steel rebar for refusing to give up his wedding ring (an "unIslamic" adornment, according to the Taliban border guards who wanted to take it from him). The Taliban demand that all men grow long beards is well known; but some mullahs also enforced a cleanliness code which included the shaving of men's armpits. These Taliban would check men for shaven armpits, and if they found an unshaven offender, they would wind his body hair around a pencil and yank it out. Add to these sorts of unpleasant abuses the fact that most of the Taliban were from Afghanistan's majority Pashtun ethnic group, and it's understandable that the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and people of other ethnicities living in central and north Afghanistan would sooner see the country dismembered than see it ruled again by the Taliban.

Islamist bullying continues to afflict Afghans living under conservative warlords like Ismael Khan in Herat or Sayyaf in Paghman. But notwithstanding the efforts of its conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice (an ally of Sayyaf), Kabul is moving into a new era. Modestly clad women appear as newsreaders on TV, while sexually suggestive Hindi film posters adorn shopfronts about town. Even in areas where Sayyaf's militia have harassed shopkeepers for playing music in public, the shopkeepers' first response was, "Look, the Taliban are gone now -- we can play music if we want to." The stadium used as an execution ground by the Taliban was packed on May 14 by thousands of fans of the popular Afghan singer Farhad Darya (including several excited friends of mine -- who unfortunately only mentioned the concert to me after it had already taken place). On other days, the stadium is used to train the dozen or so athletes who will compete in the Athens Olympic games this summer, including two women.

General bitterness against the foreign sponsors of the Taliban is intense, especially among Afghans who have traveled enough to know that Pakistanis and Arabs do not live by similarly restrictive creeds. One of my Afghan friends lived in the Emirates for a while, and recalled attending a festival where a group of young Arab men changed into Western clothes and began enthusiastically to dance to a Michael Jackson pop tune. His response was incredulity: "They send us mullahs to teach us Qur'an, and they teach themselves break-dancing?" These days, both the Pakistani and Saudi governments have realized the folly of fostering Islamists in their backyard. Without their extensive support, no neo-Taliban movement is likely to win out on a national scale.

With the Taliban gone, what has replaced them? Unfortunately, control of the Kabul government is widely perceived as having passed from one ethnic group to another: from Pashtuns to Tajiks, and in particular, to the Tajik clans from the valley of Panjshir. Resentment over this fact runs deep. I'm reminded of a lamentable conversation I had with an Afghan colleague who, until that point, I had quite liked. We were on a long trip in a project vehicle, and I was being instructed about the general canniness of the Afghan people. "The Afghans are very clever people. They tricked Brezhnev. They tricked your president, too. There is a saying here: They killed the serpent but they hatched the dragon." My colleague fell silent, glancing around darkly. I assumed he was talking about how in driving out the Russians, America financed the Islamist elements that eventually gave birth to the Taliban. But later, when we were out of the vehicle, he clarified for me in a hushed voice, smiling nervously and without humor. "You must understand, the Panjshiris are in charge here. The drivers are almost all Panjshiri, and the guards. There are things I can not say when I am in the car. They watch us, and they plot, and they report back to their Centre. It is all underground." He named a number of my good friends at the office. "They have all connections, this is why they get jobs -- this is why they are the ones chosen for the overnight trips. The Americans are very foolish. They threw out the Taliban, but they put the Panjshiris in power, and they are very much worse."

The long valley of Panjshir begins two or three hours northeast of Kabul, and is legendarily defensible. Ahmad Shah Massoud held it against the Soviets for a decade; he emerged to fight over Kabul with his fellow mujahidin commanders in the early 1990s, then was driven back to Panjshir again by the Taliban. Massoud was the primary military commander of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance until his assassination by suicide bombers on September 9, 2001 -- two days before Osama bin Laden ensured that the Northern Alliance would receive enough American assistance to retake Kabul and expel the Taliban.

Massoud's successor was Mohammad Fahim, a fellow Panjshiri Tajik. While helping the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum drive the Taliban out of northern Afghanistan, Fahim also pushed south, occupying Kabul despite American requests for restraint. He successfully angled for the three most powerful positions in the new interim government, claiming the post of Defense Minister for himself and the Foreign and Interior Ministries for his allies Dr. Abdullah and Yunus Qanuni. (Qanuni lost the Interior Ministry in negotiations at the loya jirga of 2002, and became Education Minister instead). All three men were Panjshiri, Tajik, and leaders of the Jamiat-e-Islami faction of the mujahidin. They ensured that other influential governorships and posts (police chief of Kabul, district heads around the Kabul area) went to Jamiat members and allies. Far more than Hamid Karzai and his fellow West-friendly technocrats, these men compose the central government of Afghanistan.

Fahim's control of the Defense Ministry gives him de facto control over the Afghan National Army (ANA). Given the circumstances in which America ousted the Taliban, it was probably inevitable that the new army would be dominated by the top military commander of the Northern Alliance. But as I discussed in an earlier post, the perception that the army is a tool of the Jamiat warlords greatly diminishes the effectiveness of the internationally-led disarmament program -- what warlord will agree to give the army a monopoly on force when that army is set to be controlled for the foreseeable future by an arch-rival? Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to work closely with Fahim in operations against Taliban remnants -- and against warlords who might otherwise get too uppity.

Here is where the narrative of a central government barely able to maintain control outside Kabul seems to me to be only partly true. Fahim is a highly canny man, and is playing an intricate power game against the other warlords. The last few months have seen violence or the threat of violence in provincial capitals throughout Afghanistan. This has largely been portrayed in Western media as a sign of the continuing failure and weakness of the central government. I believe that it is instead a sign of the Kabul government's ongoing attempts to extend its power to the major cities, in areas where it cannot hope to control the countryside -- and in some cases it is succeeding.

In April, just before I arrived in Afghanistan for this trip, the papers reported that warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum had driven out the Kabul-appointed governor of Faryab province and seized the capital, Maimuna. The headlines were dramatic, painting a picture of a violent coup d'etat, a gauntlet tossed in Karzai's face. CBS News described it as a "major burst of militia violence," like the outburst in Herat earlier in March. The local military commander, Hashimi Habibi, claimed that "fierce fighting" was underway. Maimuna is a long ways from Kabul, and it was nearly impossible for any news agency to actually get reporters on the ground to observe the ostensible coup. So they reported what the Interior Ministry told them.

I got a rather different story from a British friend who lives and works in Maimuna. He said there was no major militia fighting going on -- that for most of the people of Maimuna, the first they knew of the "coup" was when a whole lot of Afghan National Army soldiers appeared in the streets. There had been a demonstration the day before that ended in a charge on the governors' mansion, but it had not led to major militia fighting. I asked him who was in charge now in Maimuna. He shrugged. "The Army, I suppose," he said. The more I discussed the situation with him, the more it seemed that Dostum had been the dupe rather than the perpetrator of the seizure of Maimuna.

Abdul Rashid Dostum is one of the more infamous warlords in Afghanistan and the top ethnic Uzbek commander, dominating several northern provinces. During the Soviet occupation, he sided with the Russians until just before they were driven out, then switched sides and won lasting control of Mazar-e-Sharif, the main city of northern Afghanistan. His human rights records is appalling. While he ran Mazar, he held public executions at which criminals were crushed beneath tanks, and he was almost certainly responsible for ethnic cleansing in the wake of the Taliban defeat in the north. He is now a Deputy Defense Minister and special advisor to Hamid Karzai, with effective control over security affairs in the north (which allows him to maintain his militia and its political arm, the Junbesh party). As discussed earlier, this control is sharply contested in the area around Mazar by Atta Mohammad, the local commander of Fahim's Jamiat-e-Islami.

Faryab province is on the margins of Dostum's sphere of influence. Its former governor, Anayatullah, and its local military commander, General Hashimi Habibi, had been Dostum's clients. But in April Habibi went over to the Tajiks, declaring that his loyalty was to Marshal Fahim and the national government. Dostum seems to have decided that his initial response would be through street politics, not military confrontation. His Junbesh party organized a protest against Governor Anayatullah, accusing him (probably accurately) of using state funds to buy votes in the upcoming elections. At the height of the protest, four to six people were killed when Anayatullah's guards clumsily opened fire -- the only casualties, I believe, that were actually documented from the "fierce militia fighting" in Maimuna. This enraged the crowd and terrified the governor, who was smuggled out the back window of his mansion by British Army Gurkhas, managing to break his leg in the process.

I've found no evidence that Dostum was in any position to take advantage of this sudden power vacuum in Maimuna -- he seems to have been as surprised as anyone. But the central government moved immediately. Hence the sudden appearance of the Afghan National Army in the streets, and stern statements from the Defense and Interior Ministers (Fahim and Jalali) condemning Dostum's "aggression," and U.S. warplanes hovering ominously over the Uzbek warlord's home in Shiberghan. Dostum shrilly threatened to bring the government down if the Defense and Interior Ministers were not both sacked for this "outrage," and protested that this was aggression by the government, not his militia. The Ministers weren't sacked, of course, and the news coverage of Dostum's protests was dismissive -- everyone knows that Dostum's an expansionist (and a right bastard to boot). But in this case his outrage seems to have been genuine. The Maimuna kerfuffle was a sharp demonstration of the Kabul government's ability to project power – a pre-emptive slap on Dostum's wrist, and an expansion of control over one provincial capital.

According to the standard narrative, this would be cause for cheer: a point for Karzai against the warlords. But it's not. It's a point for one set of warlords against another set of warlords, for Fahim and his clients against Dostum and his clients. And the Panjshiri warlords are scarcely more pleasant than Dostum. A couple of government ministers are, like Karzai, technocrats returned from the West (Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani and Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali); they are generally willing to accept criticism and dissent. The former mujahidin commanders are generally not. Anyone in doubt on that point should browse through the Human Rights Watch report of one year ago entitled "Killing You Is A Very Easy Thing For Us," which extensively chronicles the human rights abuses perpetrated by warlords in the Kabul government and those allied to them.

Sayyaf is probably the worst; his militia has been allowed to bully, rape, and murder with impunity right next door to Kabul. But even the less brutal mujahidin are scarcely West-friendly. As Education Minister, Qanuni has promoted thuggish conservatives who intimidate female teachers, accusing them of Westernization and Communism. The Jamiat has retained control of the intelligence services, Amniat-e-Melli ("National Security") and used them to intimidate and harass independent journalists and political opponents. A journalist described his interrogation by the Amniat and their transparent hostility to the democratic project in Afghanistan. "Their main argument was that democracy was doomed to defeat and will end in catastrophe. They were calm and polite at first and listened to my arguments. But then later, they said that what we do, our party, is in favor of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the United States." The Jamiat know who their potential enemies are.

The main threat to Afghanistan right now is disintegration in a tide of ethnic insurgency. Many extremely intelligent people see this, and argue that we need to counter it by strengthening the powers of a multi-ethnic central government in Kabul. But it is extremely hard to guarantee that a government stays multi-ethnic, especially if one sincerely tries to add democracy into the mix... witness the contorted and at times catastrophic attempts to balance between Sunnis, Shias, and Maronites in Lebanon. The current dominance of Panjshiri Tajiks is unbearable to many Afghans; a Pushtun dominance following free and fair elections would only reverse the problem. I suggest that the best solution is to devolve a great deal of economic and political power to the provincial level -- don't give the warlords a prize to fight over in Kabul! The Kabul government (with firm supervision from the US and other Western nations) should concentrate on developing and deploying a neutral army and police force to disarm the militias and provide security in the regions. That means biting two political bullets: shoehorning Fahim out of the Defence Ministry, and expanding NATO troops throughout the country (to put teeth in the disarmament program and help an initially weak Afghan security force keep the peace). These are important steps no matter what; but I fear that if they are carried out without also giving more power to the regions, they will only convince every warlord that they have to control Kabul in order to survive.

The new Afghan constitution is not, it must be admitted, particularly friendly to my devolution plan. It envisions elected provincial councils which "take part in securing the development targets of the state... and give advice on important issues falling within the domain of the province." These councils are to work "in cooperation with the provincial administration," the appointed governor and his administrators. In other words, the elected office serves a mainly advisory role, while the most powerful provincial office is appointed from Kabul. This leads to unfortunate attention-getting devices like the recent fighting in remote Ghor province, where commander Abdul Salaam demanded that Karzai appoint him to the local administration, and invaded the provincial capital when no appointment was forthcoming. (At least, that's the story... the Afghan National Army was promptly deployed to the provincial capital to eject Salaam back into the countryside, and I suppose it's possible that as with the Maimuna fighting, the government exaggerated Salaam's offences. But there have been credible casualty reports coming out of Ghor).

On the other hand, the constitution also states that "The government, while preserving the principle of centralism, shall in accordance with the law delegate certain authorities to local administration units for the purpose of expediting and promoting economic, social, and cultural affairs, and increasing the participation of people in the development of nations." It doesn't explicitly spell out the division of labor between the councils and the appointed administrators. Since all these institutions are a bit fluid, I propose that the governor should be elected -- preferably, even, that the Chairman of the elected council should be the governor -- and that the central government should delegate extensively to the elected governor. If the Kabul government then focuses on security issues and creating a safe space for local elections, hopefully the attention of the warlords will turn to vote-winning, and not to replaying last decade's fight for Kabul.

Incidentally, if you happened to find this an analysis that you haven't read in the print media, i.e., where print journalists -- especially those focusing on politics -- are far more mediocre, their authors mixing fact with opinion and under no obligation to be either fair or accurate, or even to leave their comfortable hotel bar and do their own reporting when they can just rely on the reportorial herd, then why don't you email the Washington Post's Brian Faler and let him know? Tell him we sent you! (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:50 AM by David Adesnik  

YOUTH GONE WILD: Republican Voices describes itself as a website "committed to getting more talented Republican minds onto the internet, especially among the youth". Site editor "Emil Levitin" writes that he

prefers to stay anonymous as he, being 11 years old, is still a hostage to the American public school system. You might think: how silly it is to hide one's political views, as if we lived in a dictatorship.

Well, in a small liberal town in Massachusetts, this is exactly the case. Living in an era of political patronage in the job market and education this is the only wise way to hide all I have to say about politics from the oppressive majority.

No, that isn't a typo. "Emil" sent me an e-mail saying that he is an actual 11-year old. I guess I have no reason to doubt it, except for the fact that it is very hard to believe that an 11-year old can write so well.

Anyhow, Emil, cheer up! If things really get bad, you can apply for political asylum in Idaho or Montana. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:56 AM by Patrick Belton  

WAPO ON BLOGS: In a piece on bloggers and the Democratic and Republican conventions, the Washington Post's's Brian Faler sneers the following:

Independent blogs -- especially those focusing on politics -- are far more freewheeling, their authors mixing fact with opinion and under no obligation to be either fair or accurate.

Funny, the first time I read that sentence, I thought they were talking about print journalists. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:34 AM by David Adesnik  

PRE-EMPTION VS. PREVENTION: Matt Yglesias explains why one is very different from the other and why the Democrats need to understand the difference.

Two small points: First, "pre-emption" has become a Democratic code word for everything that is wrong with Bush's foreign policy, so it may make sense for the Democrats to use it even if their definition is ahistorical.

Second, Matt describes World War I as the best-known example of a preventive war. I strongly disagree. Germany attacked Russia because the German leadership wanted to divert the working class' attention away from domestic politics. The prevention hypothesis was once quite popular but now has much less support. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:48 AM by David Adesnik  

HOW TO DEFEND MICHAEL MOORE WITHOUT COMPROMISING YOUR OWN INTEGRITY: Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias have their basic strategy worked out: Accuse conservatives of hypocrisy for criticizing the same flaws in Moore that they refuse to recognize in Bush.

Now, I'm going to have to agree with Matt that George Bush is President and Michael Moore is just a filmmaker. But the outright ridiculousness of Moore's accusations trumps anything the White House ever came up with. Bush's public statements may have been irresponsible, but Moore is right up there with Pat Buchanan and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Even the most committed liberals should be ashamed of him.

UPDATE: DA points out that Krugman is making the same argument about Bush being President and Moore just a filmmaker. Yet in contrast to Matt and Kevin, Krugman makes the untenable statement that Fahrenheit "has yet to be caught in any major factual errors". (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:35 PM by David Adesnik  

A CLOCKWORK FIASCO: Once again, the NYT has provided its readers with an incompetent (and threfore misleading) interpretation of the latests polls. Let's start with the first sentence from this Adam Nagourney/Janet Elder report:

President Bush's job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

According to the raw data the NYT provides, the President's approval rating is actually up one point compared to last month.

So what gives? As far as I can tell, the NYT is discounting last month's poll since it was conducted by CBS alone, rather than CBS in conjunction with the NYT. If that is the case, then Bush's approval rating has fallen to its lowest point ever. Later on in the article, however, the NYT refers to last month's CBS poll in order to support its contention that the presidential race is getting closer. But if that's the case, then the NYT headlines should've read: "Bush Closes Eight Point Gap, Pulls Even With Kerry."

Now let's move on to Sentence #2:

The poll found Americans stiffening their opposition to the Iraq war, worried that the invasion could invite domestic terrorist attacks and skeptical about whether the White House has been fully truthful about the war or about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

That's just plain wrong. According to the NYT/CBS poll, 48% of Americans still think that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. That's down one point from last month but up one point from two months ago. The percentage opposed to the war has held constant at 46 for three straight months. On a similar note, 54% believe that Americans troops should stay in Iraq "as long as it takes to make sure Iraq is a stable democracy." 40% disagree.

Now, it might be fair to say that opposition to Bush's handling of Iraq has "stiffened". Only 36% of Americans approve of how he's handled the situation there, the same percentage as last month. 58% disapprove, up one point from last month. The WaPo, however, had Bush's Iraq approval rating at 44% just two weeks ago.

So where did the NYT's bad numbers come from? Well, Question 63 asks whether

"As a result of the United States' military action against Iraq, do you think the threat of terrorism against the United States has increased, decreased, or stayed about the same?"

The three-way split on this quesiton is 47-13-38. Last month it was 41-18-39. In other words, a majority still think the risk of terrorism has stayed the same or fallen, even if that majority has gotten slightly smaller since one month ago.

Finally, we come to the Times' observation that the public is "skeptical" about Bush's public statements. Question 60 asks whether

"In his statements about the war in Iraq, do you think George W. Bush is telling the entire truth, is mostly telling the truth but is hiding something, or mostly lying?"

That's a terrible question. Unless someone is extremely pro- or anti-Bush, they're going to say "mostly telling the truth but is hiding something". In fact, that's what 59% said, with the other 40% split evenly on the pro- and anti-Bush sides. Question 65 asks the same question with regard to Abu Ghraib and gets a similar answer, although the "mostly lying" percentage is higher.

So there you have it. A six paragraph explanation of the mistakes that the NYT made in just two sentences. If I corrected all the other mistakes in the Times' article, I'd be up until sunrise. However, there is one more passage I'd like to comment on. According to Nagourney and Elder,

There was compelling evidence [in the poll] that [Bush's] decision to take the nation to war against Iraq has left him in a precarious political position...the poll's findings left little doubt about the extent to which Mr. Bush's decision to go to war is proving to be perhaps the most fateful of his presidency.

Apparently, wish fulfillment is now an acceptable substitute for analysis at the New York Times. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:24 PM by David Adesnik  

A NYT PARDON FOR BUSH? Tomorrow's NYT has a major story on how the CIA failed to provide President Bush with significant information that suggested the absence of an Iraqi WMD program. While quoting a CIA spokesman's denial of the charges, the article clearly sides with the Senate report that levels the accusations.

If this story pans out, it is definitely good for Bush. I don't think it will make much of a difference in the polls, however, since most Americans seem to be believe that Bush told what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's WMD. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:07 PM by Patrick Belton  

JACKSON DIEHL ON NATO: It's worth reading. Some samplings:

• Yet, after months and months of haggling, European governments were only barely able to commit at Istanbul to staffing three new provincial centers, each with a couple of hundred troops. The cup-rattling forced on Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer was humiliating: With 26 nations and 5 million men in arms to draw on, Scheffer struggled to obtain just three helicopters for the Afghan operation.

• Yet, even if the Europeans were more enthusiastic, they might have little to contribute. Germany, the largest country in the European Union, has 270,000 soldiers in its army -- yet (ed: that's the third yet yet, for those of you keeping score at home) its commanders maintain that no more than about 10,000 can be deployed at any one time. No matter the politics, the German Parliament is unlikely to authorize an increase in the current ceiling of 2,300 troops for Afghanistan. And Germany is the largest contributor to the NATO operation -- France, which has never liked the idea of NATO operations outside of Europe, has only 800 soldiers there.

• NATO: Keep the Myth Alive (an administration slogan from the Pentagon) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:13 PM by David Adesnik  

SAME OLD, SAME OLD?

"I'm no bomb-thrower," said Mr. Cheney. "But I think it's time to go to war."

--Rep. Richard Cheney (R-WY), quoted in the New York Times, April 24th, 1985, in reference to the worsening relationship between Republicans and Democrats.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:40 AM by David Adesnik  

QUICK, BEFORE IT'S TAKEN DOWN! Right now, the WaPo homepage is running a headline that says "Cheney Swings for Bush". Unsurprisingly, the actual headline on the front page of the WaPo print edition reads: "Cheney May Be a Mixed Blessing for Bush Team". I'm guessing the scatological online version will come down before lunchtime. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:07 PM by Patrick Belton  

HIGH POLITICS, AT A LOWER VOLUME - OR, WHY THE KERRY CAMPAIGN SHOULDN'T RUN AWAY FROM DEMOCRACY PROMOTION: Quietly, on a day when Saddam Hussein appeared in an Iraqi court to answer under law charges against him, Polish troops reported discovering warheads containing the deadly chemical nerve agent cyclosarin in their south-central zone of Iraq. The possible uncovery at last of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and his lawful arraignment before the bar of an Iraqi court made for an understated contrast with the loud tones of Michael Moore’s latest disjointed film. At the moment, what we need are more such high politics, at low volume.

November's will be the sixth election to turn on a referendum for a foreign war - like 1812, 1844, 1896, 1954, and 1968 before it. And things in Iraq, surprisingly, are not going badly. Coalition fatalities have been lower each month – 140 in April, 84 in May, 50 in June. Early indications suggest that Iyad Allawi actually commands considerable respect from the Iraqi people. If he succeeds in institutionalizing political liberties while conducting counterinsurgency operations, Iraqi democracy may flourish after all.

This is not a result Democrats should be so quick to run against. The election will be fought not over American voters who are lining up to see Fahrenheit 9/11, but ones who want American troops kept in Iraq as long as necessary to make Iraq a stable democracy, and aren’t convinced by Bush’s record in handling Iraq. To win over these key centrist votes, Democrats should argue the Kerry administration would do the same thing Bush did, but better – with a real commitment to Afghanistan, a larger army which allows reservists to actually be the part-time soldiers they signed up as, and an ability to draw on the easy popularity overseas coming to an Atlanticist, francophone Democrat whom Europeans can feel is, somehow, one of them.

In particular, Democrats should be careful of running away from democracy promotion and toward, of all things, the realpolitik foreign policy of Bush I – an administration which never saw an oppressive government it didn’t like. Kerry staffers admit to doing as much, saying that an Iraq-wearied public won’t stand for Wilsonianism, and wants a return to cold national interests. The problem is, this will sell out most of what at its root the Democratic legacy stands for in foreign policy: from Wilson’s Fourteen Points to FDR’s Four Freedoms to the Clinton administration's intervention to halt genocide in Kosovo (also a war fought without UN sanction). Though you could be murdered in New York or Boston this summer for saying so, the Clinton and Bush records aren’t that far apart, really: both national security strategies gave pride of place to the promotion of democracy, and Albright’s brainchild the Community of Democracies has since 2000 been carefully nursed by Paula Dobriansky. There is a new bipartisan consensus raising its head in America, and at its heart is agreement over a resurgent terrorist threat, the national need to combat patiently the conjunction of illiberalism with instability abroad, and the necessity to build up an army of much more than one to be able to deal with a new worldwide footprint of deployments.

And it is in both candidates’ interest to reach out to swing voters on their ability to prosecute this consensus at the center, instead of running for the votes of core partisans who will not be staying home come November 2. Rather than hurrying to repudiate the Democratic legacy in promoting democracy and human rights, Kerry should instead court the support of the swing 20 percent of Americans who are (according to a New York Times poll from this week) committed to democracy in Iraq, but disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraqi reconstruction. Instead of running for the vote of Richard Nixon’s ghost or Moore’s viewers, he needs to convince swing voters he can be more hawkish in the war on terror, in building up the nation’s pitifully overstretched army, and in acting to remedy the degenerating security situation in Afghanistan; he has a chance to show that not only is democracy promotion not merely the exclusive preserve of neocons, but multilateralist Democrats can with their broader international support do the same job, better. The same holds for the incumbent: Bush’s legacy is not bad, and he must only sell it to voters, though through a skeptical press.

More importantly, it now stands in the interests of both candidates—and not merely the nation and its citizens —to reach for a centrist politics in foreign affairs to displace the fiery populism whose flames were stoked over the last decade by Gingrich and Gore, and which led to the heated partisanship in witness since the 2000 result. And the rest of us – those not munching on our popcorn this week – can finally have some hope, for that reason. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:26 PM by David Adesnik  

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA! Time for barbecue and fireworks. See ya tomorrow. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:22 PM by David Adesnik  

INTERVIEWING MYSELF, PART II: Part one is here.

Noting that most of the conservatives I know tend to read the conservative blogs and most of the liberals go to the liberal blogs, my question is whether you ever feel that blogging is some sense is simply just preaching to the choir?

I definitely get that feeling sometimes. But I also get a constant stream of e-mail from conservative readers defending the President and his advisers from OxBlog’s criticism. And most of these critics write back on a regular basis, which implies pretty strongly that they are reading OxBlog because it provides a perspective so different from their own.

Alongside such anecdotal evidence, there are surveys (conducted by Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and Dan Drezner) which show that while the majority of a site’s readers tend to agree with its perspective, there is a significant minority that sees things very differently. Moreover, almost everyone seems to read Instapundit and The Daily Dish sometimes, if only to find out what the other guys are thinking.

Is the Blog a permanent fixture in our culture?

At first, I thought the answer was definitely ‘no’. After all the irrational exuberance that surrounded the internet bubble, what reason was their to believe that a minor HTML application would have a lasting impact on our culture? But what’s really persuaded me otherwise is seeing the way that top-flight professional journalists have come to embrace blogging as a means of expression. At the New York Times, Nick Kristof and Dan Okrent have their own blogs. At The New Republic, everyone seems to have their own blog.

While there may have been a lot of hype at the beginning about how bloggers are the vanguard of a grassroots revolution, I think that blogging is here to stay not because of its accessibility, but because it is a medium that works just as well for a professional as it does for a college student or a homemaker.

Do your experiences being Jewish influence your postings on your Blog? For instance, Daniel Drezner told me that he tends to avoid ever writing about the Israeli-Palestinian issue because it is both depressing and ultra-polarizing and he finds it easier to avoid it?

As I mentioned above, my religion plays an important role when I write about religion. But I don’t think it plays much of a role in my discussion of politics. A few years ago, I felt exactly the way Dan does about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can’t get away from Israel when you go to yeshiva. But you can avoid it in college and graduate school.

That all changed after 9/11. I realized that my intentional ignorance left me totally unprepared for the day when the Middle East became a matter of life and death for Americans, and not just for Arabs and Israelis. With Iraq dominating the headlines, I don’t write about Israel as much as I want. But I am committed to learning more.

Do you ever find instances where you feel the need that you should note that you are Jewish in your blog? At least one blogger told me he feels the need when discussing issues like anti-semitism or policy on Israel.

There aren’t too many goyim with names like ‘David Adesnik’. I also mention my Judaism pretty often in contexts that don’t have to do with Israel or anti-Semitism. Since most of OxBlog’s readers are regulars rather than one-timers, they know to take my religion into account when writing about related subjects.

Overall, how has Blogging changed your life and how do you balance it with all the other demands on you?

I have a relatively hard and fast rule that I don’t start blogging until I’m done with my work for the day. That’s why so many of my posts go up after midnight. Being unmarried and under 30, my schedule is generally pretty flexible. I haven’t thought about this before, but I’m guessing that most serious bloggers tend to be younger and have fewer children. Then again, Glenn Reynolds doesn’t fit any of those profiles.


I was wondering if you could comment on how your blog has propelled you into the mainstream and more traditional press. Without Oxblog, would you have had the opportunity to write for a publication such as the Weekly Standard? A large part of my article will concentrate on how bloggers are shaking up traditional media and providing competition for the press "elites," if you will.

That’s a tough question. I think the fact that I work with Josh Chafetz is at least as important as the fact that I write for OxBlog. Josh was an intern at The New Republic before he founded OxBlog. He has always had his finger on the mainstream pulse.

As a result, there are a lot of editors out there who read OxBlog. But even if they read OxBlog because of Josh, they also wind up reading a lot of what Patrick and I have to say. When I pitched my article on Reagan to the Weekly Standard a couple of weeks ago, I got one of the editors’ e-mail address from Josh. I still needed to have a marketable idea, but connections gave me the chance to market it.

Of course, there are other ways to get into the Weekly Standard. Five years ago I published a book review in the Standard. I got the editors’ attention that time around because I was working for Bob Kagan. So merit alone wasn’t responsible.

But even if connections have helped me break into the the mainstream, the fact that I am blogger makes me want to shake up the media and challenge its elites. In that sense, blogging is more of an attitude than it is a profession.

(1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:02 AM by Patrick Belton  

OH, BBC: Showing your customary high regard for diplomatic detail and factual correctness, you keep referring to Japanese former Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka as Wakiko Tanaka. It kind of reminds you of an M&M joke (i.e., You know why the BBC reporter got fired from his first job at an M&M factory? Because he kept on throwing away the W's and the E's...)

UPDATE: We get results - hiya to our readership at the Beeb! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:28 PM by David Adesnik  

NOT JUST BETTER: Richard Cohen does an excellent job of making a classic point: Israeli democracy is not just morally superior to the brutal dictatorships that surround it. It also sets a standard for tolerance and introspection that is a model for other democratic societies, especially those at war with terror. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:07 PM by David Adesnik  

THE GODFATHER PASSES ON: Marlon Brandon, age 80. In the WaPo, Stephen Hunter provides a tribute to Brando's tumultuous life and career. With regard to The Godfather, Hunter writes that

Opinions vary, but I think this has to be the single greatest American movie and his the single greatest film performance. But why quibble? It's enough to say that the rogue genius, coming off 10 years of failure, managed to tame his demons long enough to give himself up to the dark part of Don Corleone: father, husband, leader, visionary, diplomat, killer. Somehow he resolved these complexities into a single coherent being, and yet was secure enough to have no need to dominate; his willingness to fit into an ensemble of another new generation of actors was estimable.

I couldn't agree more that The Godfather is the greatest American film ever made. More than fitting into an ensemble, Brando transformed it. I don't think it is possible to say whether it was Brando, Pacino, or James Caan whose performance deserves to be known as the greatest ever. Because it is simply impossible to disentangle their greatness from one another.

Nor would such greatness have been possible without the vision of Francis Ford Coppola. If you share my obsession with The Godfather, I strongly recommend getting a hold of the DVD box set, which contains Coppola's voice-over commentary on all three films as well as extensive documentary and archival footage. (And if you're a real purist, you can bring the disc with Godfather III back to the store and insist that it is artistically deficient.)

Finally, a bit of Brando trivia. Hunter opens his profile of Brando by recounting a legendary scene from The Wild One:

In 1954, a babe had a question for Johnny Strabler, who leans next to his gleaming hog, in a pathetic small town in the middle of nowhere.

"Johnny, what are you rebelling against?"

Johnny doesn't even have to think. Every line in his body expresses the answer, as does the contemptuous power of the machine, the beautiful sullenness of his face, the slouch of his heavily muscled body as it contorts the leathers that drape him like knight's armor, the rakish tilt of his cyclist's cap pulled across his broad forehead.

He replies, "Whatta ya got?"

Having just watched the film on video last week, I'm pretty sure that Brando is indoors and without his motorcycle when asks his infamous question. Moreover, he is in a corner and the camera delivers a medium-long shot, so its pretty hard to see the "beautiful sullenness of his face" or "the slouch of heavily muscled body".

Even though Brando's "Whatta ya got?" is the one legendary moment that survives from an otherwise fourth-rate film, it seems the director had no idea that the line was particularly dramatic, and certainly not that it was destined for immortality. All of that came from Brando. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:28 PM by David Adesnik  

CLINTON RECONSIDERED: This is the best review of Clinton's memoir I've read so far. The review's author is erstwhile Clinton biographer David Maraniss, who approaches the memoir as a historical document rather than a publicity circus, which one can discard after it has been ridiculed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:08 PM by David Adesnik  

A NEW HEARTHROB FOR THE GIRLS OUT THERE: Us guys are pretty happy with Maria Sharapova. But what you ladies have been waiting for is Colin Powell. No, really. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:57 PM by David Adesnik  

INTERVIEWING MYSELF: A journalist researching a story on Jewish bloggers recently asked me to do an interview. Since I decided to the interview by e-mail, I actually have a record of what I wanted to say. And since only one or two quotes will make it into the final article, I figured I'd post the rest of the interview here on OxBlog:

When did you start doing the blogger thing and why?

I was at Patrick’s wedding in August 2002 when I had my first real conversation with Josh. I had met him once or twice at Oxford, but didn’t really know him all that well. He told me about this website he’d started called OxBlog.

Later that week, I read OxBlog for the first time. I was so taken with Josh’s writing that I read all of his archived posts, going back to April of that year. Then I sent him a message asking if could join the site.

I think I became a part of OxBlog because I felt that I had something to say and wanted an audience to hear it. Not just a passive audience, but one that would react and criticize and challenge.

What's your main purpose with your blog? Is it to generate a discussion? Promote a viewpoint? If you had to describe the overriding purpose or point of the blog-- what would it be?

The overriding purpose of my blogging is to educate myself. You have to do a lot of reading before you have something coherent to say, and you have think a lot harder about what you’re going to say when you know that thousands of intelligent readers are watching every word you say.

Before I started graduate school, I worked for one year as a researcher at a Washington think tank. I had just graduated from college and had lots of academic knowledge that I was proud of. But I quickly realized that if I didn’t pay close attention to the issues of the day, my academic knowledge wouldn’t have much application.

When I started blogging in September 2002, I had just finished my second year of graduate school. I knew at the time that I wanted to do policy work rather than going in to academia. But this time around, I wanted to graduate with a strong handle on current events, so that my academic knowledge would do me some good.

Within a month or so of putting up my first post, I knew that blogging was the best way possible to prepare myself for leaving the ivory tower.

Are there are topics you specifically avoid talking about on the Blog or that you find uncomfortable?

The toughest judgment calls all have to do with how much personal information I decide to give out on the blog. One of the most attractive things about blogging is that when you read a blog, you feel like you are talking to a real human being. In contrast, professional journalists tend cultivate an air of authoritative objectivity, which I find to be both artificial and cold.

Blog readers tend to have warm feelings about their favorite authors, so you can count on them to be a sympathetic audience. Who wouldn’t be tempted to explain to a sympathetic audience of thousands why their ex-girlfriend is a heartless bitch? But from where I stand, telling strangers about your personal life is a way of running away from your problems while violating the privacy of those around you.

Still, that doesn’t mean you should impose a blackout on your personal life. For example, last year I did a running series on my impressive run of first-round losses in some amateur karate tournaments. I’ve never been a good athlete, so the stories were pretty amusing.

I also decided to post on OxBlog about my mother’s ordination as a rabbi in May 2003. I was extremely proud of her – as I’ve always been – and decided that I had the right to shep some nachas in the blogosphere.

Of everything you've written or debated on your Blog thus far, what do you perceive as having gotten the most attention or reaction from people? Is there any one thing that stands out?

What always surprise me are the passionate responses I get every time I write about religion. When I write about religion, I tend to get mail from readers who’ve never written in before, but who’ve suddenly decided to compose long and thoughtful essays on subjects that are very clearly close to their hearts.

The discussions that result from these letters – many of which I’ve posted on OxBlog – are extremely educational. Despite attending a yeshiva day school for 13 years – or perhaps because of it – I find that my knowledge of Christianity is almost negligible.

When Mel Gibson’s Passion came out a few months ago, I suggested in one post that the Gospels were inherently anti-Semitic, or at least anti-Judaic. In response, I received detailed theological arguments to the contrary from a half-dozen Christian perspectives. While I’m still not sure what I think about this issue, I know for a fact that Christians across the United States are putting a lot of thought and care into answering this kind of very hard question.

In contrast, 13 years of yeshiva education left me with the impression that Christians were instinctive anti-Semites who aren’t even open-minded enough to face up to their prejudices.

In your opinion, how have bloggers affected the nation's political dialogue and/or the political process?

In rare instances, for example the Trent Lott affair, bloggers have had a visible impact on events of national importance. But the real significance of our work as bloggers is that way that it has become a resource for professional journalists.

As armchair columnists, bloggers depend on the mainstream media for almost all of their news. As a result, bloggers are at least as critical of the journalists who provide us our information as we are of the elected officials who run our country. In contrast, the journalists themselves focus almost entirely on the politicians and rarely, in the midst of deadlines, to reflect on the quality of their work.

Of course, there is a big political divide on the issue of media bias. Almost every blogger to the right of center spends an extensive amount of time deconstructing the New York Times and other papers in order to show how journalists’ personal beliefs influence their coverage, in spite of their professed objectivity.

Almost every blogger to the left of center argues that conservatives’ complaints about media bias are nothing more than a diversion from the actual failures of elected officials, failures that show up in the paper because they are simply a matter of fact. The exception to this rule are those bloggers to the far left of center who insist that the media defends Republican interests from behind a veil of objectivity.

To be continued. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:12 PM by Patrick Belton  

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I think we have a new Russian heartthrob:




Maria Sharapova, 17, had this to say to Serena Williams, whom she played against in the finals on Centre Court:

'Serena actually I have to take this way from you for one year, I'm sorry,' she said, as she accepted the Venus Rosewater Dish on Centre Court at Wimbleton. 'I know there are going to be so many more moments when we're going to play. I'm sure we're going to be here another time and hopefully many more times in other grand slams, fighting for the trophy, so thank you for giving me a tough match but I'm sorry I had to win today.' She then called her mother.

And we had thought - prematurely, it turns out - that all class was gone from sports. What a dear. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:47 PM by David Adesnik  

PANTS ON FIRE: Spinsanity isn't letting Moore get away with a single, solitary lie. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:35 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG "HUMOURLESS": That's the verdict from Ed Cone, who says my extended critique of The Onion is "thuddlingly self-serious" and that "The Onion could have a field day with this guy". Ed also gets in a good shot by noting Rhodes Scholars are short on credibility when it comes to accusing others of being elitist.

Actually, no. Rhodes Scholars may be part of an elite, but 'elitism' refers to those who look down on the mass public. When push comes to shove, I've got a lot of faith in the aggregate rationality of the American public.

Anyhow, here's something funny just in case my posts have been getting you down lately:

My dad was...not a very bright man. When I was 6, I asked him where babies came from, and he said, "The stork!" I replied incredulously, "You f***ed a stork?"

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:57 PM by Patrick Belton  

FRANCE: 'WHEN WE DO IT, IT'S MERELY EXPRESSING AN OPINION....'

'We are opposed to the application of the death penalty under any circumstances.' Deputy FM Pozzo di Borgo, commenting on whether the sovereign government of Iraq would choose to apply the death penalty to Saddam Hussein after a fair trial convicted him of genocide.

'But when they do it, it's meddling....'

'Not only did he go too far, but he went into territory that isn't his. It's a bit like if I told the United States how they should manage their relations with Mexico.' President Chirac, responding to President Bush's comment that Turkey was and should be part of Europe. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:46 AM by Patrick Belton  

GO AHEAD, CALL THEM COWBOYS: My in-laws, also frequently known as Judge Andrew and Professor Judy Kleinfeld, have a piece in this month's AEI Magazine. Congrats, mom and dad! (And the rest of you will have to read their article in print, although the table of contents are online.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:18 AM by Patrick Belton  

IRAN WATCH, II: Christian Science Monitor has a round up of the coverage. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:15 AM by David Adesnik  

A GUIDE TO POLITICAL NEUROSES: The following is an excerpt from an essay by Arthur Koestler, best known as the author of Darkness at Noon. It appeared in the inaugural issue of Encounter in 1958:

Eternal Adolescents

The young radical intellectual of Bloomsbury, St. Germain de Pres, or Greenwich village is a relatively harmless type. Often his radicalism is derived from adolescent revolt against the parents or some other stereotyped conflict which makes him temporarily despair of the world. But some of the young radicals never grow up; they remain the eternal adolescents of the Left.

One variety of this type is frequently found both in the United States and in France, though rarely in England. Young X. stars as an enthusiastic Communist, is soon disillusioned, found a Trotskyite opposition group o ten people, discovers that six of the ten form a secret "opposition bloc" within the group, is disillusioned, founds a little "mag" with a hundred per cent true anti-capitalist, anti-Stalinist, anti-pacifist programme, goes bankrupt, starts a new little mag, and so on. All his struggles, polemics, victories, and defeats are storms in a tea cup, confined to the same small circle of radical intellectuals -- a kind of family which thrives on quarrels and mutual denunciations, and yet coheres by virtue of some unique dialectical glue. A classic example is the group of Marxist-Existentialists around Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, with their perennial quarrels and schisms. The sectarian may be said to suffer from the incestuous type of political libido.

A different type is Y., the busybody, whose name is on every "progressive" committee, whose voice is raised in protest against every injustice, who has embraced every good cause under the sun, and has never achieved anything on earth. Y. is the political equivalent of the nymphomaniac; he suffers from an excess of political libido. This kind of neurosis, too, flourishes chiefly in the climate of the Left, -- for, generally speaking the Left is politically over-sexed.

Finally, there is Z., the political masochist. With him, the parable of the mote and the beam has been reversed. The slightest injustice in his own country wrings from him cries of anguish and despair, but he finds excuses for the most heinous crimes committed in the opposite camp. When a coloured tennis player is refused a room in a London luxury hotel, Z. quivers with spontaneous indignation; when millions spit out their lungs in Soviet Arctic mines and lumber-camps, Z.'s sensitive conscience is silent. Z. is an inverted patriot, whose self-hatred and craving for self-punishment has turned into hatred for his country or social class and yearning for the whip that will scourge.

Coming across Koestler's thoughts in the midst of the great Michael Moore publicity fest, it is hard to escape the thought that the radical left, down to the midst specific details of its personalities, has changed not at all over the past fifty years.

On the other hand, Koestler's polemic provides an important reminder that responding to such critics often brings out the worse in us. Read in context, it is far from apparent that Koestler intended his guide to political neuroses as a satire of the left, even though that is how it will strike the modern reader. Surely, it would not be hard to identify the political neuroses of conservatives as well.

The final lesson to be taken from Koestler's writing is that we have nothing to fear. Even at the height of the Cold War, when Communism presented an existential threat to Western civilization, the radical left was a source of amusement rather than a meance. Now, as we confront the dangerous but hardly overwhelming threat of Islamist terror, we would do well to remember that Michael Moore & Co. are nothing more than comedians, regardless of their intentions. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:41 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHO KNEW? ELECTIONS ACTUALLY CAN BE FUN! And that's mostly thanks to blogger Tom McMahon, who's created a 'guess the presidential election year by the electoral college map' quiz. Fun for hours! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:40 AM by Patrick Belton  

IRAN WATCH: Defence Minister Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons yesterday that the six Royal Marines and two Royal Navy sailors detained by Iran for four days had not strayed into Iranian waters, and were operating inside the Iraqi border when they were forcibly escorted into Iranian territorial waters and then detained. (AP, FT, BBC) Some analysts believe Tehran was retaliating for British support of a recent International Atomic Energy Agency resolution deploring its lack of cooperation with nuclear inspectors.

In other Iranian news, two security guards attached to Iran's UN mission have been expelled from the United States for espionage, after surveilling New York landmarks and infrastructure. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:42 AM by David Adesnik  

ONLY AT OXFORD: A friend of a friend got the following message when she requested a book from the stacks at the Bodleian:

Author : Crepaz, Markus M. L., 1959-
Title : Democracy and institutions : the life work of Arend Lijphart
Barcode : N13413942
Shelfmark : M00.E13957 [...]

Item located on unsafe bookcase - may not be fetched.
PC

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:49 AM by David Adesnik  

GIVE HIM ENOUGH ROPE: David Brooks says absolutely nothing in one of his recent columns. But he really doesn't have to, since Michael Moore says it all himself.

Of course, just because Moore has his foot in his mouth doesn't that Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't full of lies: this Newsweek column (link via Sullivan) is particularly devastating.

Now, you might ask, why is the liberal media turning on Michael Moore? Because the media always goes after major public figures who accuse of it being biased. As Newsweek tells us,

Moore also this week contended that the media was pounding away at him “pretty hard” because “they’re embarrassed. They’ve been outed as people who did not do their job.” Among the media critiques prominently criticized was an article in Newsweek.

In my own discussions with journalists, I've found them to be at least as annoyed by leftists' accusations that they are conservative mouthpieces than by conservatives' accusations that they are inveterate liberals. So don't expected Moore's bumpy ride to end anytime soon. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:23 PM by David Adesnik  

PEELING THE ONION: How can you criticize a polemic for being one-sided? How can you criticize a satire for being unrealistic? This pair of rhetorical questions has come to serve as the first line of defense for Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11.

However, the answers to the these questions are, in fact, pretty straightforward. Even though argumentation is an inherent aspsect of polemics, taking a position does not entitle one to ignore the evidence and logic presentd by one's opponents.

Satire is subject to a similar, albeit more subtle standard. While it is hard to criticze an isolated bit of satire for being unfair or one-sided, a satirical work that employs the same caricatures and stereotypes over and over again may reinforce one's prejudices rather than opening one's mind.

Which brings us to The Onion. I love The Onion. I read it every week. But I laugh a lot less at The Onion's political humor than I do at its brilliant send-ups of America's social habits and popular culture.

The reason I laugh a lot less is that The Onion's political humor employs the same caricatures and stereotypes over and over again. Moreover, these satirical devices collectively form a coherent ideology that is both extremely elitist and extremely liberal.

To be frank, I have a lot more trouble with The Onion's elitism than I do with its liberalism. Liberalism is a good thing. Liberal ideals, both classical and modern, have contributed immeasurably to American political discourse. Yet The Onion's brand of elitism, when cloaked in humor, has the potential to breed a disturbing sort of cynicism.

This elitist cynicism is especially harmful when it interacts with The Onion's liberalism, because it results in a sort of embittered partisan politics that renders liberalism all but irrelevant to mainstream political debates.

On some occasions, it might be necessary to perform a comprehensive search of The Onion's archives in order to substantiate the accusations made above. Yet this week, the content of a single issue of The Onion provides more than enough evidence for the points I am trying to make.

The Onion presents Americans as ignorant, self-centered and conformist. Under "Latest Headlines", the first story The Onion presents is one entitled American People Ruled Unfit to Govern:

In a historic decision with major implications for the future of U.S. participatory democracy, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 Monday that the American people are unfit to govern...

As a result of the ruling, the American people will no longer retain the power to choose their own federal, state, and local officials or vote on matters of concern to the public.

The article proceeds to detail how Americans' apathetic ignorance of basic facts renders them incapable of making informed decisions. As it often does, The Onion puts its own editorial position in the mouth of a scholar/pundit:

In spite of the enormous impact the ruling would seem to have, many political experts are downplaying its significance.

"It doesn't really change anything, to be honest," Duke University political-science professor Benjamin St. James said. "The public hasn't made any real contributions to the governance of the country in decades, so I don't see how this ruling affects all that much."

The theme of public ignorance returns in the very next headline, which reads "Hero Citizen Can Name All 50 States". The content of the article is fairly predictable, so The Onion doesn't get too many points for creativity here.

The obedient and conformist nature of the American public finds expression in an opinion column entitled "I Should Not Be Allowed To Say The Following Things About America". The basic message here is that only the mindless faith that the American public has in its leaders can explain public support for George Bush's idiotic foreign policy:

As Americans, we have a right to question our government and its actions. However, while there is a time to criticize, there is also a time to follow in complacent silence. And that time is now.

It's one thing to question our leaders in the days leading up to a war. But it is another thing entirely to do it during the occupation of a country...

Why do we purport to be fighting in the name of liberating the Iraqi people when we have no interest in violations of human rights—as evidenced by our habit of looking the other way when they occur in China, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Syria, Burma, Libya, and countless other countries? Why, of all the brutal regimes that regularly violate human rights, do we only intervene militarily in Iraq? Because the violation of human rights is not our true interest here. We just say it is as a convenient means of manipulating world opinion and making our cause seem more just.

That is exactly the sort of thing I should not say right now.

Well, so much for subtlety. The second opinion column in this week's Onion bears the optimistic title, "Hang In There! You Live In The Richest Nation In The World!" The author of the column asks

You know that old saying, "Life begins at 40"? Well, not in Sierra Leone! The life expectancy there is 38! I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto!

Did you know that the U.S. makes up only 4 percent of the world's population, yet we have a third of its automobiles and consume a quarter of its energy supply? Keep that in mind the next time you get passed over for that big promotion at work!

That first line about Sierra Leone is actually pretty funny, even if it is a knock-off the old Onion headline "Teenager in Burundi Has Mid-Life Crisis". Anyhow, the bottom line is that Americans just don't care about the tremendous suffering of the 5 billion men, women and children who live in the developing world. As long as they've got their Big Macs and their SUVs, they will believe Bush's lies and remain blissfully ignorant of the world around them.

If I were to defend The Onion at this point, I would argue on its behalf that its clever exaggerations identify and amplify serious defects in American civic life. But since I'm not defending The Onion, I am going to argue that reality in America is almost exactly the opposite of what The Onion describes.

As I've explained before, the American public actually has a very strong record of rational decision-making:

Before the 1980s, it was taken for granted that the American public had volatile and incoherent opinions about politics, both foreign and domestic. By extension, this volatility and incoherence rendered Americans vulnerable to manipulation by both the media and the government.

In the 1980s, scholars began to discover that the premise of volatility and incoherence had led public opinion researchers to rely on methods that created an impression of volatility and incoherence even when there was none. In contrast, the United States had a rational public that derived its opinions on current events from a fixed set of values and updated its opinions when new information became available to it.

This conclusion reflects the research of America's leading experts on public opinion, most importantly Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro.

On a related note, there is good evidence out there that instead of being passive conformists, Americans are extremely skeptical of anything their government says. Ever since Watergate and Vietnam, opinion polls have registered a sharp and continuing decline in the level of trust that Americans have in public institutions.

Interestingly, Americans have less faith in journalists than before, but still expect them to tell the truth far more often than politicians do. Perhaps that is why fewer and fewer Americans describe President Bush as honest and trustworthy.

In the final analysis, the skewered vision of American politics presented by The Onion may be clever, but instead of educating its audience, it reinforces misleading stereotypes that embittered elitist use to justify their pessimism about America's thriving democracy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:14 PM by Patrick Belton  

POSSIBLE RESPONSES TO DISCOVERING, VIA FRIENDSTER*, THAT ONE'S EX-GIRLFRIEND HAS CHANGED HER SEXUAL ORIENTATION IN THE PERIOD SINCE YOU BROKE UP WITH HER:

The pessimistic response: (this courtesy me), that one must have put her off from one's half of the species entirely

The optimistic response: (this courtesy of OxFriend Josh Cherniss), that one must have made the remaining portion of one's half of the species seem unattractive by comparison. I rather like this one.

*And no, I'm not linking to her profile, as I still like her a great deal and am very fond of her. And for the record, I support this sort of thing, although I'm not entirely sure in this case precisely what sort of thing it is that I'm supporting. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:42 AM by David Adesnik  

HOW THE EVIL CONSERVATIVES TRICKED ME: Last week, The New Republic devoted itself to asking the fundamental question facing every liberal who supported the invasion of Iraq: "Was I wrong?" It's a damn good question.

At the moment, TNR has made about half of its "Was I Wrong?" essays available on its website. There is one excellent essay in the bunch. In their column, the editors of TNR write that "We feel regret--but no shame." Knowing now that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, one cannot be glad that America went to war. Yet given what we knew in April of last year, there is nothing to be ashamed of.

In contrast to the editors, Ken Pollack, Fareed Zakaria and Anne Applebaum all refuse to accept responsibility for their decisions. Instead, the accuse the Bush administration of putting on a moderate face and tricking them into believing that the President and his advisers would deal responsibly with the aftermath of an invasion.

Given the Bush administration's early opposition to nation-building and irresponsible neglect of Afghanistan after the occupation of Kabul, I don't see how anyone could have expected the Bush administration to do much better in Iraq. After all, the reason Josh and I founded OxDem was because we believed that conservatives and liberals would have to work together in order to ensure that the Bush administration didn't abandon Iraq the way it had Afghanistan.

Nonetheless, TNR's contributors invent some impressive rationales for explaining away their faith in the Administration. By the far the most elaborate and the most delusional belongs to Anne Applebaum, an author for whom I have great respect. Applebaum writes that

I had taken it for granted that the administration's big hitters--Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and, to some extent, even Powell--were united, if nothing else, by one common experience: All had been staunch opponents of the Soviet Union. That meant not only that they'd been right about the cold war, but that they knew that we had won it only partly thanks to U.S. military strength...

After September 11, I was certain that the Bush administration, packed with old cold warriors as it was, would also treat the war on terrorism as a moral and ideological battle, a struggle for hearts and minds, and not just an opportunity for the United States to show off its advanced weapons systems.

If Applebaum had been paying attention in the aftermath of Reagan's death, she would have noticed that conservatives eulogized the President by praising his unmitigated commitment to confronting Soviet aggression. That is how the Cold War was won. It had nothing to do with compromise. Only strength.

That is the same point that conservatives have been making for years. It is the same argument they made while Reagan was President. That goes for neo-conservatives like Wolfowitz as well as hawkish realists such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. Powell (and Rice?) may have been more moderate, but no one suspected them of being the dominant force within the Bush administration.

Zakaria's self-justification is similar to Applebaum's, except without the historical baggage. He writes that

The biggest mistake I made on Iraq was to believe that the Bush administration would want to get Iraq right more than it wanted to prove its own prejudices right. I knew the administration went into Iraq with some crackpot ideas, but I also believed that, above all else, it would want success on the ground. I reasoned that it would drop its pet theories once it was clear they were not working. I still don't understand why the Bush team proved so self-defeatingly stubborn. Perhaps its initial success in Afghanistan emboldened it to move forward unconstrained. Perhaps its prejudices about Iraq had developed over decades and were deeply held. Perhaps the administration was far more divided and dysfunctional than I had recognized, making rational policy impossible.

What on earth persuade Zakaria that the Bush administration was in the habit of changing course under fire? From tax cuts to the war on terror, the Bush administration has distinguished itself by sticking to its guns come hell or high water. If you like what the administration has done, you praise its Reagan-esque resolve. If you dislike what the administration has done, you criticize its stubborn intransigence. But you can't pretend that the administration is known for accepting compromise.

On a related note, I'm not sure how Zakaria can reasonably depict the occupation of Afghanistan as an example of responsible policy making. As Patrick's recent post illustrates, there was never much of a commitment to Afghanistan by either the Bush administration or any other NATO powers. This much has been self-evident since the first months after the fall of the Taliban.


In addition to Applebaum and Zakaria, Leon Wieseltier and Ken Pollack also try to present themselves as innocent victims of Bush's faux moderation. I won't go into examples, however, especially since I already commented on Pollack's essay in an earlier post.

What I will comment on is Kevin Drum's take on Applebaum. As Kevin reminds us, he was one of the very few liberals who supported the war almost until it began, but backed out specifically because he didn't believe Bush was serious about post-war reconstruction. Savoring Applebaum's conversion from hawk to dove, Kevin forgets to ask why she had faith in the Bush administration even when it was so obvious to him exactly what to expect.

Back when Kevin changed sides on the war, I thought he was behaving somewhat strangely since Bush, in his address at AEI, had just made his most explicit commitment to promoting democracy in Iraq. Since that time, Kevin has periodically insisted that the Bush administration was about to cut and run, abandoning Iraq to civil war rather than risking a backlash at the polls when Bush came up for re-election. Instead, the President -- true to form -- has only become more emphatic and intransigent in his insistence that Iraqi will be rebuilt and democratized, come hell or high water.

While there is ample room to criticize Bush's follow through on this sort of ambitious rhetoric, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Bush has shown far more dedication to the daunting task of nation-building than anyone (especially OxBlog) expected. Thus, it is doubly ironic that embarrassed liberal hawks now insist that they only supported the war because they were tricked.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:13 AM by David Adesnik  

A RISING TIDE: Kevin Drum points to an interesting column by Ron Brownstein, whose statistics show that economic growth in the 1990s benefited both ethnic minorities and the American poor even more than it did the white upper-class.

Both Kevin and Ron argue that these numbers were the direct result of Clinton administration policies such as welfare reform, minimum wage hikes, increased tax credits for the working poor and health care programs for working-class kids. While supporting all of those policies, I don't know enough to say one way or the other whether such limited programs can dramatically alter the distribution of our national income. My gut instinct says no.

Anyhow, I'm still pretty surprised to learn that things turned out so well for middle- and working-class Americans in the 1990s. After being inundated for three years by British denunciations of our merciless capitalist system, I began to take it for granted that there was an inherent trade off between equality and opportunity. So, for once, I'm glad to know that my opinions were ignorant and wrong. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:17 AM by David Adesnik  

DON'T SMILE: Here's the latest NYT compilation of bad news about reconstruction in Iraq. The less newsworthy good news can be found here. It's also worth noting that Coalition fatalities were down yet again: 50 in June vs. 84 in May vs. 140 during April, the bloodiest month of the occupation. As always, the numbers are courtesty of Lunaville. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:49 PM by David Adesnik  

THOSE POOR, INNOCENT SAUDIS: Dan Drezner's recent TCS column points to an important finding by the 9/11 that has been completely: there is no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda.

I have to admit, I took it for granted that such a relationship existed. By extension, I partially bought into the common belief that the Bush administration hasn't done enough to bring the Saudi government into line. But the egg on my face is nothing compared to what this says about Michael Moore, who spends the first half-hour of Fahrenheit 9/11 constructing highly speculative conspiracy theories about the Saudi responsibility for international terror.

Moving on, Dan has also put up some good posts on Iraq which point to informative articles in the WaPo, Time and elsewhere. Most surprising of all are early indications that Iyad Allawi actually commands considerable respect from everday Iraqis, something that the NYT and Spencer Ackerman thought impossible. The question now is how long his popularity will last, especially if Allawi demonstrates more concern about crushing insurgents than he does about institutionalizing political freedoms.

Finally, don't miss Dan's latest TNR column on outsourcing, which shows how deeply the American public believes in scapegoating foreign workers for domestic job losses. So I guess I shouldn't let anyone know that OxBlog has been farming out its work to some grad students on the far side of the Atlantic... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND NOW FOR A LOOK INSIDE AFGHANISTAN: OxFriend Michael Bhatia and two other American and British security analysts have just published an exhaustive indictment of the appallingly insufficient extent of Nato and international security assistance to Afghanistan, in a report with the title 'Minimal Investments, Minimal Results: The Failure of Security Policy in Afghanistan'. (The pdf file is lengthy but well worth the download.)

Several excerpts:

• 'Are the principal factional commanders less powerful, less abusive of their fellow citizens, or less brazen in their dealings with the central government now than they were in 2002? Has the opium crop been eliminated, reduced, or even held constant since 2002? Is the physical security of Afghan citizens, government officials, NGO workers, or national and international troops better now than in January 2002? Tellingly, and regrettably, the answer to all three questions is 'no'.'

• 'ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) however, was never resourced to move outside of Kabul in a more than symbolic way, and when it finally did, has focused more on its own security than that of Afghans. Despite Afghanistan being widely proclaimed as Nato's highest priority, the unwillingness of Nato member states to adequately resource ISAF with troops and equipment has seriously undermined the ability of ISAF commanders to do their job effectively.'

• 'Prime Minister Tony Blair's 2003 declaration that the international community 'will not walk away from' Afghanistan missed the real question: When will the international community really walk into Afghanistan, and make the necessary commitments and investments that will give the Afghan people a reasonable chance at building a peaceful and stable country?'

• 'In addressing one of the key sources of insecurity in Afghanistan - factional commanders - the Government of Afghanistan, the international community, and even the international military forces appear plagued by timidity. The Government often shrinks from confrontation and instead engages in short-term deal-making that often undermines long-term policy objectives. International military commanders assert they can only stay in Afghnistan 'with the consent' of the factional commanders, and thus cannot afford to be confrontational or assertive in their dealings with them. This attitude sells short the moral authority of the government and the military power of the Coalition and ISAF, and it sells out the people of Afghanistan for whom this may be the most pressing of all security issues'.

The whole report is worth reading - its summary of the current situation in Afghanistan is succint and detail-rich, and the writing and analysis are compelling and convey a much needed sense of urgency. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:17 AM by David Adesnik  

OUR FIRST LOOK INSIDE FALLUJA: Back in junior high, Nir Rosen was a scrawny kid who could draw just about anything if you have him a pen and paper. He bought overpriced designer jeans and paid for them by installment.

Nir never had much respect for authority and once got suspended for a having a haircut that was more cut than hair. Girls liked him. He left our school after 9th grade and I didn't see him more than once or twice in the next seven years.

In the fall of 1999, I was crossing N Street near Dupont Circle when a heavily-muscled man with short hair and a very attractive woman on his arm called out my name. It was Nir. As we caught up over the next few months I found out that he wanted to be an investigative journalist.

Like the kids who made their by driving down to Central America in the 1980s, Nir figured the best way to get things done was to go where the action was and write about it. When I saw first saw him, he was saving up for a trip to Bosnia and Yugoslavia.

In the meantime, he was trying to get through college and making ends meet by working assorted jobs. He had been a bouncer in Georgetown bar for a while, but discovered that it wasn't an enjoyable job unless you really liked hurting people. Most of his colleagues did.

After the invasion of Iraq, Nir shipped out for Baghdad without hesitating. Early on, he got an article published in Time Magazine. Since then, he has freelanced for newspapers including the Pittsburght Post-Gazette and the Asia Times.

But now Nir has hit the big time. He has the lead essay in this week's New Yorker, entitled "Home Rule". Congratulations are in order, since writing about Falluja from the inside takes a lot of courage, in addition to the literary talent expected of all contributors to the New Yorker. A lot of older correspondents won't risk going into the heart of the Sunni Triangle, but I'm guessing that only made it more attractive for Nir.

The story Nir has found is a fascinating one. In the absence of American soldiers, Falluja has reverted to a sort of clerical rule embodied in the person of Sheikh Dhafer al-Obeidi. In spite of having his authority granted by Falluja's most senior Sunni cleric, Dhafer struggles to reign in the foreign jihadis in town while also collaborating with the nominal mayor and the former general appointed by the United States to maintain local security.

The individuals and events that Nir describes demonsrate just how accomplished he has become at integrating himself into foreign cultures. Still, there are important questions that Nir seems to have left unasked. While consulting an impressive cross-section of local authority figures, Nir doesn't give us much sense of what the broader mass of Falluja residents wants for themselves. Does their resistance to the American occupation stem from an ideological commitment to Ba'athism, a religious commitment to Islam or an attachment to the extensive material benefits that Saddam once bestowed on his favorite subjects?

Nir hints at an answer to this quesiton when he writes that

In the first few months after Saddam’s government fell, the city had been fairly stable internally. Religious and tribal leaders had appointed their own civil management council before the Americans arrived. Falluja did not suffer from looting, and government buildings were protected. Tight tribal bonds helped maintain order. Early in the occupation, however, a demonstration protesting the Americans’ takeover of a school building had turned bloody, and a cycle of attacks and retaliation began, with the resistance increasing in sophistication. Local fighters were joined by rogue mujahideen and jihadis from other Arab countries, and, as in the rest of Iraq, the violence and disorder spiralled out of control.

I must admit that I am quite suspicious of the implicit suggestion that it is all the Americans' fault. First of all, American soldiers began to clash with Sunni gunmen in Falluja less than three weeks after the fall of Baghdad. The march that first led to violence was actually a celebration of Saddam's birthday. (I'm not sure if this is the same march that Nir refers to above.)

In other words, the residents of Falluja are not simply anti-American but are (or at least were) actively pro-Saddam. This pro-Saddam sentiment explains why there was no looting: the residents of Falluja didn't hate Saddam and suffer under his rule the way the rest of Iraq. Moreover, how much stability was there in Falluja if protest marches turned violent during the first weeks of the occupation?

All in all, it is somewhat misleading for Nir to describe the intense conflict in Falluja as a product of minor disturbances that "spiralled out of control". A spiral implies a lack of responsibility and a lack of awareness on the parts of its participants. In Falluja, the violence was not part of a spiral, but of the rabid anti-Americanism of the Ba'athist dictatorships most fervent supporters.

After describing Falljua's hybrid political order as "a controversial experiment in Iraqi autonomy", Nir concludes his article by writing that

As the handover to sovereignty began [in late June], the experiment with self-rule in Falluja looked more and more like a desperate measure that had been taken too late.

In other words, the handover itself is simply Falluja writ large: "a desperate measure...taken too late." While there is much to criticize about the handover, Nir's comparison of Falluja with Iraq as a whole is profoundly misguided, if not atypical of American journalists in Iraq.

After all, how can one predict the attitudes and behavior of Shi'ites and Kurds -- let alone most Sunnis -- from the attitudes and behavior of Saddam's most loyal supporters? Journalists' refusal to acknowledge such religious and tribal differences led to their prediction in early April that Moqtada Sadr's Shi'ite insurgents would join with their Sunni counterparts in a national revolt against the American occupation. For most correspondents, Sadr's defeat and Sistani's support for the Americans discredited such predictions. Yet Nir still holds to them quite fast. He writes that

Falluja is one of the most religiously conservative towns in the “Sunni triangle,” but the recent confluence of the Shiite uprising led by Moqtada al-Sadr and the siege of Falluja by the marines had created a curious alliance that transcended religious differences.

In our arguments about the occupation, Nir has insited without reservation that there is an anti-American consensus lurking just below the surface of Iraq's intensely factionalized politics. In his essay in the New Yorker, this article of faith makes itself manifest.

Nonetheless, I think Nir deserves tremendous credit for risking his life -- literally -- to educate the American public about critical events in one of the most important but least well-known parts of Iraq. Regardless of any reservations I have, there is no question that I have learned a lot from Nir's impressive work. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:15 PM by David Adesnik  

MOORE IS LESS: Over at TNR, Richard Just deliciously deconstructs one of the most disingeuous aspects of Fahrenheit 9/11.

And while we're on the subject, let me just say that Paul Wolfowitz desperately needs a makeover from the boys at Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Even though I have a lot of respect for Wolfowitz, it was almost impossible not to cringe during Fahrenheit 9/11 when Wolfowitz pulls a comb from his pocket, puts it in his mouth and then slurps on it as if it were a greasy popsicle.

After fixing his hair with the spit-waddled comb, Wolfowitz then slurps on his fingers and runs them through his hair. All the while, the Deputy Secretary of Defense has an impish grin on his face, the kind you see on children who know that they can get away with picking their noses in public because their parents are too tired to stop them.

Even though it's sort of mean and unfair for Moore to include this kind of gross-out footage, it's not as if Wolfowitz didn't know he was looking into a television camera. Like it or not, images are political.

On the other hand, it's good to know that the mainstream media didn't make a big deal out of the Wolfowitz gross-out footage, even though they clearly could've done so. After all, making fun of someone's poor grooming habits doesn't isn't all that mature.

Then again, Moore seems to have a sense of humor about his own appearance, so I guess it's okay if he sometimes calls the kettle black. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:07 AM by Patrick Belton  

IRAQ A SOVEREIGN COUNTRY, AS OF THIS MORNING: In a surprise move aimed at disrupting terrorist attacks timed around the formal handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi government, the United States and United Kingdom transferred sovereignty this morning to the Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Allawi. Joe Gandelman takes an exhaustive look:

The U.S.-led coalition transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government Monday, speeding up the move by two days in an apparent bid to surprise insurgents who may have tried to sabotage the step toward self rule.

Legal documents handing over sovereignty were handed over by U.S. governor L. Paul Bremer to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in a ceremony in the heavily guarded Green Zone. (from AP)

And from an announcement this morning by FM Zebari:

Mr Zebari said the deteriorating security situation in the country was one of the reasons why the date had been brought forward.

"We will challenge these elements in Iraq, the anti-democratic elements, by even bringing the handover of sovereignty before June 30 as a sign we are ready for it," he said.

He added: "We have made some very good progress in terms of the new security council (in Iraq) and the return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people to take away the level of occupation we have suffered a great deal from.

"There are many Iraqis who are standing up to the challenge. We are here to seek more help and assistance, training and equipment."

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# Posted 9:43 AM by David Adesnik  

GOING TO THE CHAPEL: One of my best friends from high school is getting married today. Back tomorrow night. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

NATO AT 55: Over the next two days, the elected leaders of the twenty-six nations which comprise Nato will be assembling in Istanbul to decide together which directions they will take the 55-year old alliance. (More formally, and to use the quaint language peculiar to the venerable transatlantic alliance, Nato’s governing North Atlantic Council will be convening at the level of heads of state and government.)

What will happen in Istanbul? Here’s one set of predictions:

• Afghanistan: Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has called Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan the central issue for this summit. Unfortunately, Nato’s limited capabilities at the moment make it unlikely the alliance will do much to expand ISAF’s reach from Kabul and Kunduz, which it controls at present. Look though for about five nationally-run Provincial Reconstruction Teams (provincially based nation-building units of 80-200 troops each scattered around the country) to be reflagged as part of ISAF.

• Iraq: The Bush administration would like to see Nato assume responsibility for the southern central sector of Iraq, currently controlled by a 6,200-strong multinational brigade led by Poland. Military planners at SHAPE dispute whether there are enough troops available to undertake both an expanded mission in Afghanistan and a new one in Iraq, and President Chirac famously told a Hungarian newspaper in February he did not see ‘in what conditions a Nato commitment in Iraq would be possible.’ On the other hand, the German government has indicated it could support a Nato mission, if the sovereign Iraqi government requests it. Iraqi Prime Minister Ilyad Allawi duly wrote to Nato’s Secretary General the week before the summit, to request Nato’s assistance in developing the Iraqi security forces after the transfer of sovereignty. Prediction: We've already seen an abstract commitment to agreeing to PM Allawi's request by Nato ambassadors in the run-up to the summit, though with no word about actual troop commitments. At the actual summit, it takes back seat to Afghanistan.

• Bosnia: Look for Nato to announce the successful completion of its decade-long SFOR mission in Bosnia. France will be happy to see the EU pick up Bosnia as an important new mission, and troop-strapped Nato leaders will be happy to see it go.

• Counterterror: Nothing will happen here, unfortunately. Though adopting terrorism as a Nato mission is a principal U.S. aim, France, Germany, and Belgium are too firmly committed toward steering the counterterrorism enterprise into the EU rather than Nato headquarters. A cosmetic package of measures will be rolled out, though, and look for the U.S. to receive increased measures toward intelligence sharing, a Rumsfeld favorite, as a consolation prize.

• Middle East Initiative: Another principal American aim for this summit, it has little European support, apart from a surprisingly sympathetic Germany. Nato staffers are indicating the Mediterranean Initiative—Nato’s outreach program to the Arab world—will be relaunched under a new name as a Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. Look for talk of ‘supporting indigenous reform’ and ‘joint understanding over security issues.’ (Further hint: don’t look too hard for talk of ‘democracy’ or ‘women's rights’.)

• Working with the EU: The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) is France’s baby, which it sees as the EU’s alternative to Nato (without the pesky Americans). Other countries, after the rather paltry European contribution during Kosovo, see it more as a program to build up European defence capacities, and get more ‘bang for their Euro’. The December 2002 ‘Berlin Plus’ deal provided the EU with access to Nato operational planning and shared assets for operations in which Nato as a whole is not engaged. The British government deftly hijacked in December France’s ambitions to lead the ESDP as a breakaway military province from Nato, by ensuring that the EU planning cell would be located at SHAPE—the alliance’s military headquarters. ESDP undertook a fairly successful several-month long maiden mission in Macedonia last year, but as regards capabilities, European leaders still have to demonstrate, even under the ESDP, that they will be capable of getting more ‘bang for the Euro’.

So Nato will finally get out of Bosnia; the Middle East Initiative—which Germany, at least, supports—will go nowhere; the U.S. wants improved counterterror, but won’t get it. France wants EU-Nato relations worked out, and they will be, partially. Meaningful alliance participation in Afghanistan and Iraq will be hindered by the capabilities gap. And so on.

If this catalog of predictions leaves you feeling somewhat underwhelmed, it’s because of the basic problem of the alliance—which is cash. While the US contributes 3.3% of its GDP to national defence, 12 of the 19 pre-2004 Nato allies contribute less than 2% of theirs. To look at it another way, the US picks up the tab for 64% of Nato military expenditures ($348.5 million, 2002), while all other allies together contribute only 36% ($196.0 million). For their part, European governments are facing budget shortfalls and budget pressure from ballooning pension costs.

What comes out of this is a capabilities gap. Of 1.4 million soldiers under Nato arms in October 2003, allies other than the US contributed all of 55,000. Nearly all allies lack forces which can be projected away from the European theatre. SACEUR General James Jones testified before Congress in March 2004 that only 3-4% of European forces were deployable for expeditions. Then there are the problems of interoperability: there is a recurring problem of coalition-wide secure communications which can be drawn on in operations. Allies other than the U.S. have next to no precision strike capabilities, although these are slowly improving. The US is generally the sole provider of electronic warfare (jamming and electronic intelligence) aircraft, as well as aircraft for surveillance and C3 (command, control, and communications). The US is also capable of much greater sortie rates than its allies.

The other problem is political will, which is most in evidence on the issue of terrorism. There's been progress (beginning with the 2002 Prague Summit) toward the creation of a Nato Response Force capable of sophisticated counterterror missions. There's also been progress toward the drafting (which has been done) and implementation (which hasn't) of a military concept for counterterrorism. But allies still strongly disagree about whether counterterrorism should even be one of Nato's primary missions - so the principal task of the US at the moment lies in the area of creating political will among allies to adopt counterterrorism as a Nato responsibility. That we have not done so is at least in part our fault - Allies felt rebuffed after they gave the US unprecedented political support through invoking Article 5, and then were not consulted in the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan. For their part, the civilian leadership of the Pentagon believed Kosovo had been an unacceptable example of 'war by committee', and political interference from allies would prevent a quick and decisive Afghanistan campaign. Perhaps it might have, but now at Nato the United States is facing the consequences in the form of less enthusiasm for counterterror missions.

The result of this impecunity and general want of resolve is, something like a Horatio Alger novel adapted by a rather perverse naturalist, a litany of unfulfilled promises. Addressing the operational inadequacies of Nato was to be the subject of the Defence Capabilities Initiative launched at the April 1999 Washington Summit—but the DCI was widely regarded as too broad and unfocused. To remedy this shortfall, the Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC) then grew out of the November 2002 Prague Summit and in an act of military humility instead suggested individual allies tailor their contributions by focusing on specific capabilities they might actually be able to handle (strategic lift for Germany, aerial tankers for Spain, unmanned aerial vehicles for a group of six other allies). As far as how well the PCC has performed—well, don’t expect too many presidents and prime ministers to be slapping each other on their backs in self-congratulation in Istanbul.

And then there’s counterterrorism. The US had encouraged adoption of counterterror as a core alliance task since the Clinton administration, and particularly during the runup to the Washington Summit in April 1999. With some assistance from Germany and Belgium, France led opposition to its adoption even then, preferring to see the EU built up as a pillar of European security and Nato reduced in importance. (This opposition overlaps with France's hostility to out-of-area missions, which counterterror operations would largely be, and which would also expand Nato's role in the world). On the other hand, under the leadership of recently retired Secretary General Lord Robertson, Nato’s staff established an internal terrorism task force to coordinate the work of different staff offices touching on the issue, and made some staff-level progress on civil-military emergency planning and consequence management. The military concept for counter-terrorism received approval at the November 2002 Prague summit - it includes proposals for a standard threat-warning system, establishing standing forces dedicated to post-attack consequence management, creating standing joint and combined forces for counterterror operations, and creating civil assistance capabilities which could be used after a WMD attack. The Nato Response Force (NRF) was adopted by the Prague Summit, which called for initial operating capacity by October 2004 and full operational capacity by October 2006.

These would indeed be useful tools in countering terrorist threats around the world, but there are reports these capabilities will not be fielded until before the end of the decade, if at all. Another unfulfilled promise of the Prague Summit was the launching of a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical analytical lab and event response team, which remain unimplemented - among other things, Nato's Weapons of Mass Destruction Centre has a current staff of only 12 people. Also, France has successfully hindered efforts to give Nato’s Civil-Military Planning Directorate operational capabilities for post-terrorist attack consequence management, preferring to see the EU take up the policy area.

These are dire situations, indeed, to greet President Bush and his aides when they arrive in Istanbul, but the luxury is not generally permitted to presidents to give up and run home from Nato summits. In general, the task facing the US - and President Bush - at Istanbul is twofold: to try to build political will, while playing mostly against the French, to actually implement these paper counterterror programs; and to show domestic voters his administration can indeed play well with others, while bringing home tangible results for American national security from multilateral fora. Note to Bush staff— points to strike from the administration’s lexicon: Talk of ‘Old Europe’ offends the Poles and other Central European countries, who object to any division of the European continent. The idea of a divided Europe understandably has different historical resonances for them. Likewise for Secretary Rumsfeld’s talk of ‘coalitions of the willing’. Have any dissenting aides read the North Atlantic Treaty (1949), which grounds allied decisionmaking on a principle of consensus. It worked for us during the Cold War, and it can be made to work again. It’s not as though France's presence in Nato is a particularly new invention, after all. Also, talk of removing the legitimating presence of North Atlantic Council unanimity from the implementation of Nato military might scares the bejesus out of European allies, whose history makes them particularly touchy about violations of borders and national sovereignty, even when absolutely morally warranted.

For the Kerry campaign, their task will instead be to stay clear of the easy temptation to claim France would be an enthusiastic Nato ally today if it weren't for the Bush administration. It wouldn't, and claims it would (example: mantra-like invocations of Le Monde’s September 12th 'Nous sommes tous Américains'), are likely to come across as partisan. The Kerry camp will also have a two-fold task. First, without retreating into tired talking points about ‘unilateralism’, it needs to sell voters the message that US presidents can't command Nato allies to do anything, they can only convince - and then make the case that this administration hasn't succeeded terribly well to date in that task. Second, it will have as well to show voters that Kerry and his aides can grapple creatively—and in a prose style more elevated than the sound bite—with complex alliance issues of national security, in an election which promises to be decided on precisely national security.

It's a crucial moment, really, for both the president and the senator from Massachusetts – who in his basic foreign policy outlook resembles no one among recent presidents so much as Bush I, who was at least good at alliances. For the Kerry camp, Istanbul represents an opportunity to make the case to voters that its vaunted multilateral approaches can contribute meaningfully to national security. And for the Bush administration, the Istanbul Summit represents a chance to show its critics that it can indeed work creatively in multilateral fora, and more importantly and even against expectations, produce results there. And at the North Atlantic Council and on the summit’s margins, its task will be to work to create a consensus for orienting Nato to the war on terror, which is where its efforts badly need to be. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion