# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik  

2+2=PARANOIA? Under the heading "Scare Tactics Work", I recently read in the WaPo that:

Less than one month after Kerry threw out the suggestion that Bush might reinstate the military draft, a new poll shows nearly half of younger voters swallowed the Democratic nominee's bait, hook, line and sinker.

The University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election survey found about 50 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds believe Bush will bring back the compulsory draft. It also found this group is often clueless about the candidate's views. "Young voters are much more misinformed about the presidential candidates' positions on the draft than the population in general," said Kate Kenski, a senior analyst for the group. Bush has repeatedly denied he would reinstitute the draft.

It turns out that this sort of ignorance is no accident. The LA Times reports that Rock The Vote, an officially non-partisan organization supported by MTV, recently

Sent fake draft cards to nearly 640,000 e-mail addresses.

"You've been drafted" was the subject line of the message sent by Rock the Vote. The message contained an image of a draft card addressed to the recipient and warned, "real cards may be in the mail soon if the situation doesn't improve."...

Rock the Vote political director Hans Riemer said the group was trying to inform its members about the limits of U.S. military forces, not persuade them to vote for a particular candidate.

"It would be crazy if young people went to the polls and didn't factor this into their votes, however they come down on it. It's very real," said Riemer. "We're one major military conflict away from the draft. I don't see why candidates get to talk about war all day long and we can't talk about a draft."...

Last week, House Republicans sought to dispel suggestions that the war in Iraq could lead to a new draft by hastily bringing the idea to a vote and defeating it in a 402-2 vote.

I met Hans during the GOP convention. My sense is that he really believes what he's saying and that he has no idea how liberal and partisan his non-partisan activism really is.
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# Posted 11:42 PM by David Adesnik  

NOBEL PRIZE FOR TINFOIL HAT? Reader MM points to Ms. Maathai's bizarre comments, recorded in this AFP dispatch:

Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that...

"It's true that there are some people who create agents to wipe out other people. If there were no such people, we could have not have invaded Iraq," she said.

"We invaded Iraq because we believed that Saddam Hussein had made, or was in the process of creating agents of biological warfare," said Maathai.

"In fact it (the HIV virus) is created by a scientist for biological warfare," she added.

I guess there are two ways you can look at this. If you're conservative, it serves as a useful reminder that Nobel Peace Prize winners are often out of touch with reality. If you're liberal, it demonstrates that only someone thoroughly out of touch with reality could've supported the invasion of Iraq.
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# Posted 11:39 PM by David Adesnik  

'STROS WIN! 'STROS WIN! Chafetz delirious.
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# Posted 6:16 PM by Patrick Belton  

BEST PARTISAN DEMOCRATIC APPEAL INVOLVING A CARTOON AND A YIDDISH ACCENTED GRANDMOTHER: here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:09 PM by Patrick Belton  

INTO THE ARAB MIND: Retired Col. Norvell De Atkine, who teaches at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and is an 'incurable romantic' about the region in which he served during tours in Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, in this issue of Middle East Quarterly corrects some of the more misguided factual errors in Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece 'The Gray Zone' about the book The Arab Mind, by the cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai, and its rather less sinister role in Army education about the Middle East than Hersh imagined. De Atkine also presents his own thoughtful, nuanced exposition of the psychology of the Arab world, its potentialities, and his reflections as an area officer traversing the semipermeable membrance separating it from the West. He is, in the end, touchingly an optimist: in a concluding sentence worthy of T. E. Lawrence, he writes 'Ultimately, the Arabs, who are an immensely determined and adaptable people, will produce leadership capable of freeing them from ideological and political bondage, and this will allow them to achieve their rightful place in the world.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:48 AM by Patrick Belton  

OUT OF THE MAILBAG: You wrote in, and in droves, with your own favourite funny stupid national anthem tricks. Here are just three selections:

On the subject of state songs, you should be aware of that of Maryland, my favorite, by far.  You can find it here. Don't stop reading before you get to the last verse.   - Aaron Gurwitz (friend, incidentally, of OxParents Prof. Adesnik and Rabbi Hauptman) In re: 'It was adopted as the State song of Maryland in 1939 and remains so today, possibly because, as Richard Marius points out in The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry, it has had little competition.'

Was rather surprised you didn't mention the Japanese. ed.: Duly remedied It's a lovely song with a somewhat mournful melody, glorifying the reign of the emperor (may you reign for 8000 yrs, etc.) Does he get time off for good behaviour? Some people think it sounds kind of evil. Very different, in any event, from the majority of national anthems. - Adrian Jensen, Columbia

You may already know this, but as far as outdated state songs go, Texas had a strong claim until recently.  From 1959 to 1993, we persisted in claiming, every time we sang "Texas, Our Texas," to be the "largest and grandest" state -- pointedly ignoring that other large upstart with oil so recently admitted to the Union.  (I remember being sentenced by my seventh grade Texas History teacher to stand in the corner for a half an hour back in, oh, about 1970 or so for arguing that I shouldn't have to sing a song that contained such an obvious lie.)  By act of the Texas Legislature in 1993, however, the song lyrics were amended to "boldest and grandest," which certainly puts those mellow Alaskans back in their place!  (Rumor was that the Legislature was trying to work in something about "Big Hair," but couldn't get the rhythm to work.) Plus, we have our own flag pledge. Best regards, Beldar

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# Posted 6:28 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANDREA GRIMES, a senior journalism student at NYU and shameless anglophile, is on assignment, blogging about the British reaction to the US elections. Her prose is sharp, and bears situating in the tradition of one of my favourite writers, who also wrote his reflections as an American intellectual in England. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:47 PM by David Adesnik  

UNKNOWN HEROES: Congratulation to Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. I never heard of her until today, but she seems to be a truly remarkable women who has made a tremendous contribution to the growth of human rights, democracy, and environmental protection in her native Kenya.

One passage in the WaPo article about Maathai struck me as unusual, however. Correspondent Emily Wax writes that:

The tall and velvet-voiced Maathai joins past laureates who include former president Jimmy Carter, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr.

Wax might also have written that:

The tall and velvet-voiced Maathai joins past laureates who include amoral egomaniac Henry Kissinger, incompetent terrorist Yasser Arafat and imaginative liar Rigoberta Menchu.

No disrespect is meant toward Ms. Maathai, yet is important to remember that the favor of the international community is a capricious thing. Thus, we should do our best to remember that thousands and thousands of heroic activists who struggle for freedom will never win a Nobel Prize, thus entitling them to the protection that it affords.

Until just a few days ago, Wangari Maathai was one of those activists. Had she been imprisoned or murdered -- she was beaten and arrested in 1999 -- we might never have known.

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# Posted 10:55 PM by David Adesnik  

AFGHANISTAN VOTES: During a pit stop on the way home from Washington, I saw this morning's top headline in the Post: Afghan Election Disputed. I thought to myself, "Typical. Just typical. And it was probably our fault, too."

When I got home, I saw the next headline up on the WaPo website: Afghan Election Concerns Subside. As of right now -- 10:55 PM on Sunday -- the abbreviated headline on the WaPo homepage reads: "Concerns Subside on Historic Afghan Election".

I guess the Post isn't all that worried about corruption anymore, otherwise it wouldn't make much sense to call the elections historic. For the moment, the evidence of election-tampering seems thin. Even the initial WaPo article on the subject contained nothing more than allegations by losing candidates.

Yet I have heard quite often that the number of registered voters in Afghanistan is greater than the number of eligible ones. So I guess the story isn't over yet.

But whatever the outcome, one story will remain: the massive turnout of Afghan voters. As is so often the case when a long-suffering nation is finally given the chance to vote, the public response has been overwhelming.

The people of Afghanistan have affirmed that even in those nations with no history of democratic rule, there is still a profound human desire to have a voice in the halls of government.

UPDATE: Robert and Glenn have both posted solid election round-ups.

UPDATE: AS writes in that:

The number of registered voters exceeded AN ESTIMATE of eligible voters. But, in reality, nobody has a clue how many eligible voters there are in Afghanistan. There hasn't been a census, there are no birth certificates or ID cards, there is LITERALLY NOTHING to inform us as to how many eligible voters there are. Moreover, millions of refugees have returned to the country -- but, again, nobody knows how many.

So, some people guessed at a number of eligible voters, and the number of registrations exceeded that guess.

Good point.
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# Posted 6:44 AM by Patrick Belton  

DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER: We may not have always agreed with what he had to say, but as a prominent man of letters and thought who did much to engage the world of intellectual introspection with the society around him, we will mourn the passing of Derrida.

Several introductions to what indeed it was that he had to say are here, here, and here. By way of requiem, we include one exchange Derrida had a year ago with several filmmakers who were producing a documentary about his life and contribution to contemporary thought. At one point, wandering through his library, one of the filmmakers asked Derrida, 'Have you read all the books in here?'

'No,' he replied, 'only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:02 AM by Patrick Belton  

SING A NEW SONG: National anthems are by far a fairly execrable lot. China's March of the Volunteers and Ireland's Soldier's Song are melodically unfortunate, and in those instances where the tune is halfway worthwhile, the wounded, martial, defensive nationalism of (royalist) Rouget de Lisle's La Marseillaise is typical of the genre (e.g., 'Entendez-vous, dans la compagnes. / Mugir ces farouches soldats / Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras / Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes', a.k.a., 'Do you hear in the countryside / the roar of these savage soldiers? / They come right into our arms / to cut the throats of your sons, your country.' They get worse: see Mexico's '¡Guerra, guerra! Los patrios pendones / En las olas de sangre empapad. ... Antes, patria, que inermes tus hijos / Bajo el yugo su cuello dobleguen, / Tus campiñas con sangre se rieguen, / Sobre sangre se estampe su pie,' a.k.a., 'War, war! The patriotic banners saturate in waves of blood.... May your countryside be watered with blood, / On blood their feet trample.') A very bloody lot, these songs.

There are better exemplars in the canon. Italy's actually sounds like a feisty Neapolitan number, and India and Pakistan have both done fairly well with theirs. For its part, America, I have always felt, would do much better with the stirring simplicity of 'God Bless America', echoing the godly simplicity of both the frontier and the first Puritan cities of New England, than the bombastic pyrotechnics of the current national anthem, with its melodic past as a drinking song, and its unfortunate susceptibility for mauling at the hands of minor-order pop stars clutching microphones at sporting games and political conventions.

I bring this up because I was just listening to Haydn's string quartet in C, Op. 76, No. 3, first performed in 1797 and most commonly known to all except Haydn scholars as the Deutschlandlied. In the more liberal spirit of 1848, Deutschland was not 'uber alles' with regard to, say, the remainder of Europe and lesser races of humanity to Germans, but rather to, say, Bavaria or Brandenburg in the loyalties of citizens of a country seeking unification. Also, while most second verses are embarrassing, q.v. those of God Save the Queen and the Star Spangled Banner, the Deutschlandlied's is rather nice - invoking Deutsche Frauen, Deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang - while Deutchland uber alles may have to be consigned with its unfortunate associations to the symbolic dustheap of history, who could object to German women, German wine, and German song? Read against the European experience, it seems that from the perspective of her neighbours, keeping the Germans pacifically drunken, copulating and singing seems, by and large, A Good Thing. One of the more poignant conversations in contemporary Germany is the extent to which these symbols of German national identity can, at some point, be separated from association with the horrors of Naziism, without disrespect for the memory of those horrors' victims. It's hard to become too worked up, as an interested observer, over the ultimate disposition of the name of the state of Brandenburg, but the Deutschlandlied is preeminently from an artistic standpoint not only worth saving, but justified of being elevated, in its original Age of Enlightenment spirit, to a model. The world could make do with more national anthems of Haydn string quartets, and several fewer evoking a readiness to discard the nation's youth against invaders. There is enough blood of youth spilt in the world as it is.

The second anthem which has been on my mind lately is Virginia's state song emeritus. For practical purposes, however Virginia has not at the moment got a state song, as the present one is generally regarded as unperformable at the moment - mostly because of its references to 'old massa', which clearly have got to go. Ditto, of course, for 'old darky' - the lyrics clearly require a rather massive scrub. But what's interesting to me, at least, is that no one has ever pointed out the extraordinary potential, from the standpoint of racial integration and recognising the contributions of Virginia's quite substantial black population to the state's history, in having a state anthem in the voice of a black Virginian, and furthermore written by a black Virginian, James Bland. It's usually, and quite justly, been criticised for nostalgic references to slavery, of which the principal reference is 'Massa and Missis have long gone before me, Soon we will meet on that bright and golden shore.' The question, though, is how much these references contaminate the entire song, and to what extent these can instead be excised and it can be made to about something else entirely - not nostalgia for segregation and slavery, but instead one of the few recognitions in America at the level of state symbolism of the experience of the African-American people who live there. For my part, I would be rather saddened to see the nation's canon of symbols stripped of one of its few examples of the latter. Attempts to come up with a bland, saccharine cookie-cutter anthem have, for their part, by and large been predictably execrable; witness, for a particularly apropos example, sausage maven Jimmy Dean's attempt to bribe official status for his own forgettable anthem 'Virginia'. My impression, however, is that symbolic lines are probably far too firmly drawn in the American south, and aligned with emotionally laden positions (which are often quite reactionary - see, of course, debates over other much more discardable symbols in other states in that region), for any sort of creative updating of a tradition to make it cohere with modern aspirations while engaging the history of the region.

So there, that's the liberal case for 'Deutschland Uber Alles' and 'Carry Me Back to Old Virginny'. I think I'll unplug my computer before I can get myself into any more trouble today. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:57 PM by Patrick Belton  

WHY DO MOST (NOT ALL) COMMONWEALTH COUNTRIES DRIVE ON THE LEFT? On our OxBlog-does-motorworks kick for the week, we thought you might find this interesting - it all has to do with preserving the right hands of feudal Europeans for their epynomous feuds. (Then, in turn, the States and Napoleon's France wanted to be different from Britain and, in the latter case, traditions associated with the Bourbon monarchy as well.)

Incidentally, and while on the subject of carblogging, tomorrow morning I'll amusingly enough be getting up at 6 to...:

(1) catch a series of buses straight across England to a small town in Devon
(2) get there at 5:50 pm (after, of course, doing thesis work the whole way), and quickly test drive and purchase a lovely £300 used coupe
(3) learn how to drive a manual transmission car
(4) apply knowledge gained in the previous step and transport self and car across England to Oxford. Take quick nap and have delightful dinner with friend from India.

If all this goes as planned, I can show off car (step 2) and manual transmission driving ability (step 3) to all of our readers on Sunday (see 4). But if any amusing adventures have taken place (well, more than I've accounted for) between now and Sunday evening, well, you'll have a chance to read about them in detail then, too. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

WE FOUND OUT WHO RUNS THE COUNTRY WATCH: Together, that is, with the (sexually desirable) Jewish Rhodes Scholars and the (less so) little green men in Arizona. CNN busts out a quote this morning from the U.S. Security Administration, as, in fact, does Reuters, perhaps following its lead. Now we on OxBlog (and our minions at Google*) have heard of the Transportation Security Administration, and even that true eminance grise the Social Security Administration, but perhaps CNN has actually stumbled on the true possessors of power in this grand republic?

Or maybe no one actually edits the stuff.

* I had a very nice brunch in Williamsburg with two Googleniks, the last time I was in New York. They were very nice. (Even when I brought up their male leader's propensity for wearing a dress in close proximity to news cameras.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:38 AM by Patrick Belton  

NOT DEAD YET WATCH: One of the most interesting dimensions of the reigning pontiff, wherever you stand with respect to his tenure, is his prior life as a dissident intellectual in Poland - there aren't many senior clerics in any religion who had youth remotely comparable to his, spent working in a Kraków stone quary by day, and by night studying Husserl and helping to keep Polish intellectual and literary life alive during Nazi occupation, by helping to found underground organisations such as the 'Studio 38' experimental theatre group, meeting in basements in evenings following his days of forced labour . This is why it's truly wonderful that in spring of next year, the Italian publishing house Rizzoli will publish a transcript of a series of searching conversations on the philosophy of history the Pope had in 1993 with two Polish intellectuals, professors Josef Tishner and Krzystof Michalski. Memory and Identity, as it's to be called, apparently struggles with questions of the meaning of history in a world after the evils of war and collapse of grand Hegelian narratives. For my part I'll certainly be reading it.

Though his philosophical corpus from before his papacy still awaits collation into a convenient volume, scholars have finally begun to delve into the window into wartime and postwar Polish intellectual life provided by this fascinating man, Wojtyła: see, for starters, here, here, here, here, and here. Much of this, as would be expected, is by devout Catholics; it would be quite nice to see an interesting engagement with the topic from the perspective of more secular intellectual historians, as well. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

SIZE MATTERS: William Boyd, who knows something about both genres, compares short stories with novels. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:09 PM by David Adesnik  

48 HRS. IN VEGAS: I'm here right now for the annual conference of the Latin American Studies Association. This internet cafe is closing in 5 minutes, so I'll keep my comments brief. The most interesting thing I've noticed so far is that there will be a panel tomorrow morning on the subject of: "The Ideas of Che Guevara: A Socio-Political Alternative in the Contemprary Context?"

Most of the participants on the panel are from universities in Cuba. I was hoping that one of them would give a presentation entitled: "How to Persuade American Scholars that You Are a Legitimate Academic Even When You Are the Payroll of a Communist Dictatorship."
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# Posted 5:04 PM by Patrick Belton  

CARLOS FUENTES WATCH: Any of our readers in London who might like are warmly welcome to join a friend and me to hear a reading by one of our age's great novelists, at Carlos Fuentes's lecture next Tuesday evening at Canning House, at 7:30. Tickets range from £12 down to £5 for concessions, and Lord Garel-Jones will be chairing. If you'd like to reserve a ticket, please phone Claire Rivett at 020 72352303 ext. 222, and do say we sent you! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:59 PM by Patrick Belton  

LIGHT BLOGGING FROM ME TODAY as I ponder the used car market and Pejman's advice. Incidentally, for those of you who might eventually find yourselves in the same situation, Yahoo has a useful feature which allows you to check the blue-book value for any car you like.

Pictures of the Oxmobile forthcoming when available! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:39 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHY A YALE EDUCATION REALLY WAS WORTH ALL THAT MONEY WATCH: What other alumni association (okay, don't answer that)* would give official sponsorship to an event with the title 'First Quadrennial Presidential Debate Drinking Game'? (a.k.a., Wednesday, October 13th, River Place North Building #242, 1121 Arlington Blvd., Arlington, VA.)

And come on, you're not really going to buy 79,250 first-class stamps a year, anyway. Or, for that matter, 1,333 of these.

* particularly if you went to school in Texas (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:36 PM by Patrick Belton  

PEUGEOT QUOTE OF THE DAY: As I’m about to purchase a fine specimen of this species, for all of 100 pounds, I thought I might pass on a particularly memorable quote I ran across: 'There seems to be some polarization on the issue of Peugeot's image: one camp says that it has no image because the Americans haven't heard of them; the other says they suck.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:04 PM by Patrick Belton  

SCOTT BURGESS does another admirable job at fact-checking the Guardian, this time their environmental editor:

John Vidal, the Guardian's environment editor, demonstrates either incompetence or dishonesty today with his comments concerning Exxon's greenhouse gas emissions. Here's what he has to say:

"But its greenhouse gas emissions in 2003 rose 2%, to 135m tonnes. To put that into perspective, the UK last year emitted some 150m tonnes. Exxon is now as great a carbon polluter as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines combined - that's about 350 million people."

Pretty eye-opening stuff - except that it's not true.

Exxon's report does in fact read: "In 2003, our direct equity GHG emissions increased 2 percent to 135.6 million tonnes ..."

However, a look at the accompanying graph indicates that the measurement is being made "on a CO2 equivalent basis."

The figures Mr. Vidal cites "to put that into perspective" are expressed in terms of carbon equivalent, not CO2 equivalent. As we learn from the US Environmental Protection Agency: "Carbon comprises 12/44 of the mass of carbon dioxide; thus to convert from CO2 equivalent to C equivalent, one multiplies by 12/44. [.273]"

So Guardian can't multiply. It makes sense, actually - they all went to Balliol,* after all.

*rival college at Oxford to my own (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:56 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND THE OXBLOG PRIZE IN ECONOMICS GOES TO: ‘Bidding on eBay: Strategic Behaviour in Second-Price, Continuous-Time, Fixed-Duration Auctions’, by German academic Axel Ockenfels and Harvard’s Alvin Roth. And who said game theory could never be useful?

Sidenote: the best bit of the article comes on page four, in which the authors describe the strategies of proxy bidding and sniping bidding (i.e., where you wait until the final seconds - thereby incurring a risk factor whose terms combine the possibility someone else will outsnipe you with the countervailing risk your internet connection won't record your sniping bid if it falls too close to the end of the auction). In November 2000, the designers of the web service esnipe.com, which automates sniping bidding, put their company up for sale. Amusingly, the first bid came on day ten of the auction, the last day. And the last three bids, including a bid which won the auction at a final price of $35,877.77, came in the last minute during which time the price rose over $10,000, from $25,300 (one increment over the second highest bid one minute before the end.)

In either case, though, you may want to think twice before purchasing nuclear powered submarines off of eBay, nice company though it is. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:11 AM by Patrick Belton  

NERDS DO SEX: Hey, it got your attention. OxBlog’s model* friend the lovely and svelte Orli Bahcall, who truth be told is no nerd, is as Nature Genetics editor the eminence grise behind this piece in the Economist showing that male philandering existed at least several tens of thousands of years before the birth of Bill Clinton.

More on nerdsex (oh, the hits we’ll get today…) here and here. And lest you think she only has mitochondrial DNA on the brain, Orli's also the mind behind Nature's popular mutant of the month feature.

* Models infectious diseases
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# Posted 6:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

PUT DOWN OF THE DAY AWARD: 'A ping, qualified by a thud.' Rival composer Virgil Thomson on John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:14 PM by David Adesnik  

LIVE BLOGGING-LITE: I am watching the debate, but I don't think I'll be doing a minute-by-minute commentary. However, I will be on BBC FiveLive after the debate, which you can listen to online. (There's a button on the upper right-hand side of their homepage that says "Listen Live".)

9:12 PM: Cheney mentions El Salvador. I guess he reads David Brooks. Or OxBlog.

9:57 PM: Right at the beginning of the debate, John Edwards hit the administration hard for relying on Afghan warlords to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. Edwards comments' were especially interesting because Kerry said almost exactly the same thing in his debate with President Bush.

Will this become the Democrats' preferred avenue of attack on Bush's ability to fight the war on terror? My sense is that this sort of criticism can only go so far because the decision to rely on the warlords was apparently made at the opertional level by Tommy Franks. As with Abu Ghraib, I think the President was too far removed from the situation on the ground for him to be held responsible by the voters.

10:07 PM: Bloggers often get criticized for saying whatever crosses their mind rather than searching for information and crafting evocative sentences. Yet I notice that both the NYT and WaPo have already posted lengthy articles about tonight's debate. The quality of their writing is certainly excellent. But I won't comment on their content because I can't analyze the articles at the same time that I'm trying to watch this debate.

10:24 PM: Here's the Factcheck.org commentary on Halliburton that Cheney mentioned earlier.

10:26 PM: Cheney is recalling how when he was in Congress, there was much more bipartisanship. Yet just this afternoon, I was reading through a congressional debate about Nicaragua from 1988 and I can assure you, bipartisanship is not what I saw.

Edwards asks if Washington has ever been more divided. Another topic that came up in my research today was Iran-Contra. You know what? Things really aren't that bad in the United States of America right now. As for Iraq...

10:45 PM: Ix-nay on the Ee-Bee-See-Bay. It turns out I won't be on BBC 5 tonight. But Alex Dryer from TNR is on right now with Clifford May from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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# Posted 5:29 PM by Patrick Belton  

COMMENTARY DOES FICTION: Come on, when's the last time you've read a short story? That's what we thought. Commentary leads with a piece of fiction this issue, in a tradition for that magazine which extends back to Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and I.B. Singer. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:35 PM by David Adesnik  

THE REAL VICTIMS OF OUTSOURCING: Robots. Yes, robots.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:12 PM by Patrick Belton  

WHO LET THE DOGS OUT? An extraordinarily intelligent dog in the Battersea Dogs Home managed every night to unlock his own kennel, and then those of all the other dogs in the home. Staff were perplexed to arrive every morning to find the dogs enjoying their freedom (you can take our doggie toys, but you can never take our liberty!), until they installed cameras in the building to reveal what was happening. If you have any soft spot for dogs whatsoever (this means you, Josh), do watch the video. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

WE HAVE A WINNER: Readers may remember that several months ago, our foreign policy society announced an essay contest, in which we asked students to submit a memo to the president, written in the name of the National Security Advisor, and arguing in one thousand words for a policy position of the entrant's selection. Our judges were instructed not to rank entries based on the position espoused, but rather solely on the essays' use of evidence and logical structure of argument. Our judges also did not know the names, university affiliations, or any other personal details of the students whose essays they ranked. We can now happily announce our results, and our winners.

Winners of the 2004 Nathan Hale Foreign Policy Society essay contest:

1st Place, Zachary Constantino, American University
2nd Place, Peter Jeydel, Princeton University
3rd Place, the rather auspiciously named Nathan Hale, Columbia University

And our prize books were duly inscribed copies of the following three:
 
A Short History of International Affairs, 1920-1939, by G.M. Gathorne-Hardy, Oxford University Press under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1934. (third place)
Memoirs, Sir Anthony Eden, London: Cassell & Company, 1960 (second place)
Nelson, Carola Oman, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947. (first place)

Here is a copy of the letter which we sent to our three prizewinners. I'd like to publicly thank our essay contest chair, Connie Chung from our San Francisco chapter, as well as our chapter presidents and judges for all of their help. We'll be holding another essay contest in the spring, and a series of foreign policy in the schools events through each of our local chapters - please get in touch, if you're an educator or community worker and we can be of any help! Similarly, if you live in a city where we have a chapter and might be interested in either participating in or helping to organise our foreign policy society's community outreach activities, please let us know! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:18 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER WATCH: We on OxBlog love Brahms, as the composer of his century most capable of incorporating the lyricism of the Romantic movement with the intelligible classical structure bequeathed by the century that preceded him. We also - and by 'we', I mean Josh and David - love buxom Germans with a lovely sense of phrase. We therefore note that at 7:30 pm BST (half past two pm EST), our own classical idol will be performing roughly one half of the Brahms Double Concerto, under the baton of Kurt Masur. The programme also includes Dvorak's New World Symphony, and you can listen online here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHY DEMOCRACY IS GOOD FOR YOU: The NYT runs a piece by several scholars at CFR offering a counterargument to the position that economic development must precede political democratisation. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

THREE DEGREES OF OXBLOG: When I pointed out below that OxBlog stands, interestingly, two degrees of separation from American Taliban John Walker Lindh and the sniper John Muhammad, and embarassingly, a single degree from Kevin Bacon, it hadn't occurred to me until a reader pointed it out that that since of course Lindh met Osama, that makes me and the big tall guy three degrees of separation from each other. (You think that sounds bad to us, imagine what he would think about being three degrees of OxBlog: take that, UBL!)

But, as is hopefully the case with most things on this blog, it gets better. We just heard from a reader (one) who met a lady (two) who smooched Hitler (spits coffee out, I mean, three).

OxBlog: Cavorting with people who cavorted with people who cavorted with the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Hitler, since 2002! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:51 AM by Patrick Belton  

DEPARTMENT OF SCHADENFREUDE: Here's a headline you don't see everyday, 'Amnesty Slams Canada' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:55 AM by David Adesnik  

BREMER BLAMES EVERYONE (EXCEPT HIMSELF): In a less than surprising revelation, Paul Bremer attributed the shortcomings of the occupation to a shortage of boots on the ground, especially during the post-invasion looting that contributed so much to a climate of lawlessness.

The WaPo put Bremer's story on the front page and presented it as a blow to the Bush administration's credibility. Fair enough. But they at least should've questioned Bremer's motives. After all, isn't it convenient that all of the most important problems existed before he was appointed as head of the CPA and were the responsibility of someone else?

Not that Bremer's self-interest excuses Bush in any way. But what about the decision to disband the Iraqi army? Did Bremer defend that in his speech or simply pretend that it wasn't a problem? While there is only so much room on the printed page, the WaPo website should provide a transcript of Bremer's remarks.

More importantly, the Post's soft treatment of Bremer is a further indication of the lower standards to which presidential critics are held. Not long ago, the major papers paid minimal attention to the disintegration of Joseph Wilson's credibility, even though his initial accusations once dominated the front page.

While I understand that a president should be subject to far greater scrutiny than a whistleblower, the effectiveness of that scrutiny depends on the credibility of the whistleblower.
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# Posted 1:29 AM by David Adesnik  

THE MANCHURIAN INDONESIAN CANDIDATE: One thing that newspapers are supposed to be good at is reporting the basic facts of story. According to this wire report in the WaPo, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri has finally admitted that her opponent prevailed in a recent election.

But what do we know about her opponent, a certain Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono? Apparently, he led "the country's anti-terrorist effort as Megawati's security minister." Actually, I'd like to know a little more about the man is about to become the head of the world largest Muslim democracy -- and its first president elected by direct balloting.

According to WaPo article from Sept. 24, Yudhoyono is a retired general. But that's all the Post tells us, even though early returns suggested that Yudhoyono had won by a landslide with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Now, when you say that someone is a former general, especially in a country with a military notorious for human rights abuses, it's important to provide a few more details.

On Sept. 21, the Post reported that Yudhoyono (or is it Susilo?) is "a retired army general with U.S. military training who portrays himself as a cautious reformer." Yudhoyono "bolted the cabinet in March to challenge Megawati" and is "a moderate Muslim described by his associates as an intellectual". So what, is he like the John Kerry of Indonesia? That would be nice.

Yudhoyono's religious affiliation is clearly an important issue in place like Indonesia, but is he a "moderate Muslim", or as the WaPo reported on Aug. 20, a "secular nationalist"? Perhaps he's both. Or perhaps he flip-flopped. Or perhaps he has a nuanced but fully consistent position on this all important issue.

Anyhow, the good news is that Gen. Yudhoyono is not Gen. Wiranto, the third place finisher in the election who

has been indicted by a special U.N.-backed tribunal examining crimes against humanity during a wave of militia killings in East Timor after its 1999 vote for independence from Indonesia.

That's a relief. But I'm still trying to figure out who the hell this Yudhoyono guy is.

UPDATE: Here are a few facts from The Economist [via Lexis-Nexis]:

Though he served under [the former dictator] Suharto, Mr Susilo is regarded as untainted, and he has worked well for successive democratic administrations...If he has a weakness, it is that he has revealed little about what policies he might adopt if elected, campaigning more by exuding what appears to be a popular mixture of calmness, geniality and competence—plus a reasonable singing voice. --July 10, 2004

By Mr Wiranto's own account, Mr Susilo is the better singer...Women, it is said, admire his looks. --July 2, 2004

Well now I feel better. Good looking people never abuse human rights or set up dictatorships.
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# Posted 1:24 AM by David Adesnik  

THE POLLS: As usual, RCP is the place to go for the latest information. As their chart shows, Kerry's resurgence is for real (although RCP hasn't yet factored in the results from this WaPo/ABC survey which still shows Bush ahead by 5).

The question now is whether Kerry's resurgence will last. On specific issues, especially Iraq and the War on Terror, Bush still has a sizable lead in both in the WaPo survey that shows him 5 points ahead overall as well as the Gallup poll that shows him tied with Kerry.

However, in the Gallup poll, Kerry has made up a lot of ground on both issues. Whereas Kerry was 14 points behind Bush (41-55) on the question of who will do a better job in Iraq, the margin is now just seven (44-51). On terrorism, Bush's 61-34 lead has narrowed to 56-39. On the economy, Kerry has come from behind and turned a 45-51 deficit to a 51-45 advantage.

The question I have is whether presidential debates are governed by a law of diminishing returns. Assuming Kerry wins the second and third debates, will each of his victories result in a similar rise in the polls? Or have expectations now risen to the point where Kerry can only make up ground if Bush's performance is worse than ever before?

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# Posted 1:09 AM by David Adesnik  

DEJA VU ON CAPITOL HILL: From the Congressional Record for July 28, 1988:

Mr. Oxley: ...to say that Mr. Rather's conduct last Monday evening was unprofessional is an understatement. In our society, where the media are entrusted with great responsibility, there is simply no excuse for Mr. Rather's conduct or the CBS news department defense of it.

The objectivity and trustworthiness of the media are crucial in a democracy, especially in an important Presidential election year...Mr. Bush correctly stated that Dan Rather was dwelling on mistakes of the past, not reporting news.

Oxley's condemnation of Rather was a response to rather's aggressive behavior in an interview with Vice-President Bush. I actually don't know much about the incident, so I can't say whether Oxley's remarks are justified. I just happened to come across the remarks while reading about Nicaragua and found them to be rather, well, remarkable.

On a related note, it seems that someone offered the Memogate documents to Michael Moore while he was filming Fahrenheit 911, but Moore turned them down because his fact-checking department had doubts about the documents' authenticity. In other words, CBS literally had lower standards than Michael Moore. That's disturbing.
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# Posted 1:07 AM by David Adesnik  

MURDERED AGAIN: Another car bomb in Iraq. While I understand that such attacks reflect our failure to provide a reasonable measure of security, it still seems to me that killing innocent civilians will result in a backlash against the insurgents.

After all, when Israeli soldiers accidentally kill Palestinian civilians, we assume that it will only provoke greater resistance. When American airstrikes result in death of Afghan and Iraqi children, we assume that the survivors will resent the United States. So if Iraqi terrorists intentionally kill their own countrymen, shouldn't we presume that they will provoke a similar reaction?
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# Posted 6:22 PM by Patrick Belton  

BIGGEST LAUGH IN AGES AWARD goes to this short film by Bruno Bozzetto describing, in side-splitting detail, the endearing differences between Europe and Italy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:16 PM by Patrick Belton  

TWO DEGREES OF OXBLOG CORNER: Longtime OxBlog friends will already know that I am two degrees of separation from the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh - who before any of the rest of us had heard of him, figured prominently in a friend of mine's 'you'd never believe my crazy roommate from when I was studying Arabic' stories. (Short version: white kid pops up from California, dressing in a white robe and turban, and introduces himself as Sulayman. Don't even ask what he was like in the bathroom.)

Well, interestingly, I've just become aware that I'm also two degrees of separation (and I'm not exactly sure I'd want to be any fewer....) from sniper John Muhammad. Remember when he called a church and left the message 'I am God'? Well...I just found out from a New York Times article that the priest on the other end was no other than a distant cousin of mine for whom I used to serve as an altar boy, Msgr. William Sullivan. Sullivan, the Times goes on to report, didn't think the phone call worth reporting to the police.

I'm not sure there's an edifying point here, but the possibilities for a more fully instantiated two-degrees of OxBlog game are fantastic (especially given that both David and I attended a DLC shindig at which Kevin Bacon was playing the...wait for it...harmonica in the corner). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:36 PM by Patrick Belton  

ENGLAND HASN'T CHANGED MUCH IN 300 YEARS WATCH: BBC Radio 3 was just playing Purcell's ode to English weekend evenings, 'There are Pleasures Divine in Love and in Wine.' So not only have Friday nights of drunken sexual congress comfortingly not changed much in this country since the Baroque period, but we also find out from the same composer that the same is true about the nature of English roses. Purcell has two different pieces about different sorts of English women, 'She who lives for love, but finally discovers the joys of wine', and ' She who lives for love, but soon discovers the joys of wine'.

This all has me feeling strangely comforted. Though I don't believe Purcell did have an ode entitled 'She who nonetheless believes her midriff is worth showing.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:19 PM by Patrick Belton  

DID FOX NEWS PHOTOSHOP PICTURES TO MAKE BUSH TALLER? One of our readers writes in to say that's how it looks to him. Here's the evidence he sent in - a photograph which ran in AFP showing a substantial height difference (ed: so did the French make him look shorter?) and one which ran on Fox, with the two contenders seeing eye-to-eye. Both photographs are from the same moment - when the two shook hands - and don't seem at least to be from different perspectives.

Coming after a series of mainstream media mess-ups in the latter portion of this campaign (the Swift Gate memo, Fox's manicuregate story...), revealing biases and distorted reporting toward the left and the right on the part of the putatively objective media, it's no wonder that this has been the election of the blog....

If any of our readers have insights on one side or another of this question, please send them to me and I'll be happy to run them. And note to Fox: if this is true, could you perhaps make me just a bit taller too?



MAILBAG: Answer: probably not. One of our friends found the image Fox used in the AP's image database, and another friend (a research scientist in a real science who probably, ahem, should have been working on his dissertation) suggests that Bush may have been leaning in during the photograph in which he looks shorter. The interesting moral to the story (all OxBlog stories have edifying lessons - see above) is probably that each outlet took the photograph that made 'their' candidate look taller. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:23 AM by Patrick Belton  

HERE'S ONE REPUBLICAN I CAN ENDORSE WITHOUT HESITATION: Lisa Marie Cheney, running to replace James 'I like to hit people' Moran in Virginia's 8th. It's hard to think of many politicians not sporting short mustaches I wouldn't support in preference to Moran.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:49 AM by David Adesnik  

SWEEEEEEEEEEEET! (BY PROXY): Why hasn't Josh put up a euphoric post about the Astros' stunning victory in the NL wild-card chase? I don't know, but I'm guessing that he is wandering the streets of Houston in a drunken stupor right about now, overturning cars and lighting garbage cans on fire. (That was a joke, Josh, a joke.)

I'd also like to post a second "Sweeeeeeeeeeeet!" on behalf of Robert Tagorda, whose Dodgers clinched the NL West title. However, I can only hope that the 'Stros and the Dodgers lose in the playoffs so that neither of them has to suffer the indignity of losing to the Yankees in the World Series. With the D-Backs and Marlins out of the playoffs, the Bombers will be unstoppable.
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# Posted 10:28 PM by David Adesnik  

MY FAVORITE PESSIMIST: Of all the armchair pundits (e.g. OxBlog) with a serious interest in Iraq, I think that Swopa is perhaps the best-informed member of the pessimist majority. If you want to be a serious optimist, you have to be able to respond to Swopa's arguments.

Commenting on Dexter Filkins' upbeat report in today's NYT, Swopa points to evidence within Filkins' story that suggests a possible alignment of Moqtada Sadr's interests with those of Ayatollah Sistani. The basic point of Filkins' story is that Sadr's intention to disband his militia and enter the electoral process will enhance the legitimacy of the January 2005 elections. Filkins writes that:

Mr. Sadr's overtures toward the political mainstream, if they develop into a full-blown commitment, would represent a significant victory for the American-led enterprise here, just a few months before nationwide elections are to be held in January...

Iraqi officials say they are encouraged by Mr. Sadr's recent overtures, and some believe that this time Mr. Sadr might be serious. The reason, they say, is the political and military defeat that Mr. Sadr suffered in Najaf, where the Mahdi Army was badly mauled by American forces and where Mr. Sadr himself was ordered to capitulate by Ayatollah Sistani.

Yet where Filkins sees capitulation, Swopa sees collaboration. Building on suggestions that Sistani fears the rigging of the January elections by the Shi'ite parties within the interim government, Swopa projects that Sistani will align with both Sadr and the Sunni insurgents to form an anti-occupation front that can either win the elections outright or destroy their legitimacy by refusing to participate.

As it so often does, this argument about Iraqi politics comes down to speculations about Ayatollah Sistani's perceptions and motives. First and foremost, I tend to disagree with Swopa's suggestion that Sistani feels "a bit left out in the cold" by the United States and the interim government. Having won every stand-off with the Americans in which he has participated, Sistani should understand just how much influence he has over American actions.

Second of all, I have serious questions about the possibility of any sort of extended cooperation between Sunnis and Shi'ites. In April, the Times and the Post ran major stories about emerging cooperation between Shi'ite and Sunni insurgents. Nothing came of it.

The cooperation of the non-violent Sistani with fundamentalist Sunni fighters seems even more improbable given the Sunnis' intense antipathy toward Shi'ite beliefs. Of course, nothing is impossible. Yet it was this same Sunni fundamentalism that Saddam relied in the last years of his reign to justify vicious oppression of the Shi'ites -- a fact that neither Sadr nor Sistani is likely to have forgotten.
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# Posted 8:44 AM by Patrick Belton  

LOOK, I'M NOT ORDINARILY FOR POLITICS being about this sort of thing, but hey, Senator Kerry does look pretty funny playing football.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:55 PM by David Adesnik  

STYLE IS SUBSTANCE: Sam Rosenfeld defends this unlikely point. At least he's honest about his motives.
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# Posted 11:49 PM by David Adesnik  

BREAKING FOR THE CHALLENGER: The Prospect provides evidence to back-up of the often-heard claim that undecided voters break for the challenger.
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# Posted 10:54 PM by David Adesnik  

UNDER THE INNOCUOUS HEADLINE "U.S. Effort Aims to Improve Opinions About Iraq Conflict", the WaPo suggests that the administration has embarked on a new, desperate and deceptive effort to spin the war in Iraq. (As opposed to the old one, which wasn't desperate.)

The Post's evidence seems pretty good, although it still quite amusing to watch its correspondents write as if they are being detached and objective, rather than advancing their own (probably valid) interpretation of events.

But you know what? The administration is getting what it deserves. Even optimists such as myself can't defend the upbeat assessments coming out of the White House. While I stand by my previous definition of the word "puppet", it does look pretty ridiculous for American diplomats and even a Bush-Cheney spokesman to be involved in the drafting of Allawi's speech. Even in the midst of a re-election campaign, that's going too far.
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# Posted 10:49 PM by David Adesnik  

HEHEHE! From the WaPo editorial page:

WE RECEIVED THE following letter from a woman in Yonkers, N.Y.: "Dear editor: This debate made it clear: John Kerry is a leader we can trust to tell us the truth when it comes to our nation's security. George Bush has had his chance; I'm ready for a new direction."

Cogent, succinct, personal -- everything we look for in a letter. So why are we writing about it here, instead of publishing it in the columns to the right? Unfortunately, the letter, perfect in every other way, arrived in our electronic in-box Thursday afternoon, four hours and 14 minutes before debate moderator Jim Lehrer posed his first question.

As they say in Chicago, vote early and vote often!
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# Posted 10:40 PM by David Adesnik  

DEJA VU c.2002? My cache as a political strategist isn't all that high at the moment, since I seem to have underestimated the impact of Kerry's victory in Thursday night's debate. Even so, I have my suspicions about the Kerry campaign's decision to capitalize on its victory by emphasizing their candidate's domestic agenda. The WaPo reports that:

The aftermath of the debate produced a strategic change for the Kerry campaign, which had used the two weeks before it to launch an argument about Bush's record in Iraq that was designed to take pressure off Kerry's often-contradictory statements on the subject. Heading toward the final two debates that will dwell on domestic policy, Kerry advisers said they will use a big advertising buy to help talk about Bush's economic record...

"This represents a very aggressive move to the domestic agenda," [Kerry strategist Tad ]Devine told reporters yesterday as he described a 15-state, $7.7 million ad buy.

The Democrats tried to run away from foreign policy in 2002 and paid for it dearly at the polls. Admittedly, Kerry position on the issue is much stronger than it was a few days ago and he is headed into a debate specifically about domestic issues. Even so, my (unreliable) instinct says that Kerry should hammer away at Bush on the national security front.
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# Posted 10:34 PM by David Adesnik  

SUCCESS IN SAMARRA? The Post's coverage of the recent battle in Samarra consists almost entirely of US and Iraqi officials describing their success. But even Glenn struck a cautionary note, citing this warning from StrategyPage:

The real battle for Samarra [will] take place in the next few months. The people fighting American troops at the moment, and getting killed, are the dummies. The smart guys just hide their weapons and wait for an opportunity to take over the town again. If the new police force cannot hunt down and arrest most of the smarter gangsters and terrorists in the next few months, Samarra will lapse into anarchy again.

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# Posted 7:28 PM by David Adesnik  

ALCOHOLISM + CONSERVATISM = LIVE-BLOGGING? As promised, I've taken a closer look at live-blogging to see if it really added anything to Thursday night's debate.

The first thing I noticed was how many live-bloggers were depending on alcohol to get them through the night. Unsurprisingly, VodkaPundit was the most committed drinker, with TLB and myself also raising our glasses.

The next thing I noticed was that live-blogging seemed to be an overwhelmingly right-of-center activity (with moderates such as myself and Prof. Drezner included in that category.) Marshall, Yglesias, the TNR boys, Tapped -- nothing. The exception to the rule is Kevin Drum, whose sparse comments suggests that he wasn't terribly excited about what he was doing.

Kevin did point out, however, that the NYT's Kit Seelye live-blogged the debate on the NYT website. I think that's really interesting because one of the few things that live-blogging does is force you to be share your perceptions before they are inflenced by other people's opinions.

Of course, I'm sure that Seelye was especially careful not to post anything that might compromise her reputation for objectivity. In fact, I thought her comments were probably too kind too Bush, almost as if she were concerned about coming across as overly critical.

Even so, I think if we began to see a broad array of professional journalists live-blog on a regular basis, we'll get some interesting insights into how the news is made.
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# Posted 7:09 PM by David Adesnik  

FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY? Newsweek's latest poll has Kerry ahead. (Hat tip: Kos)
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# Posted 7:01 PM by Patrick Belton  

GET YOUR CHRISTMAS PRESENTS NOW WATCH: Today we feature the splendid line of products at www.giantmicrobes.com (whose motto triumphantly proclaims: 'We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes—only a million times actual size!'). To quote from their website,

Now available: The Common Cold, The Flu, Sore Throat, Stomach Ache, Cough, Ear Ache, Bad Breath, Kissing Disease, Athlete's Foot, Ulcer, Martian Life, Beer & Bread, Black Death, Ebola, Flesh Eating, Sleeping Sickness, Dust Mite, Bed Bug, and Bookworm (and in our Professional line: H.I.V. and Hepatitis).

This Christmas, why don't you help that little person in your life have exciting dreams all year round with their Ebola plush toy? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:12 AM by David Adesnik  

FOX'S CBS MOMENT: Josh Marshall has a whole lot of posts up about an article on the Fox website that fabricated quotes by John Kerry. The quotes themsevles are mind-bogglingly ridiculous, for example:

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

After being challenged, Fox took down the article and excused it as a bad attempt at humor. Not the most credible excuse, but what else can you say about something so bizarre? I just hope Dan Rather is glad to see that bloggers are also giving his competition a hard time.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias takes exception to my characterization of the Fox episode as a "CBS moment":

It is, of course, no such thing. CBS was embarrassed when it was revealed that they had published a story containing an untrue element.

Heh. "Untrue element".
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# Posted 1:01 AM by David Adesnik  

IMAGINE if American citizens were beheading Iraqi insurgents instead of vice versa. Imagine if Americans intentionally slaughtered civilians in order to terrorize them into submission. Imagine if Abu Ghraib were not a national embarrassment, but an official policy.

If you can imagine all of those things, then you can imagine how lowAmerican credibility was with regard to promoting democracy in El Salvador in the early 1980s. The Salvadoran military did all of things described above -- and worse -- yet President Reagan not only insisted on providing the Salvadorans with weapons while denying that they committed such atrocities.

It is only by appreciating this contrast that one can appreciate how much greater American credibility is today than it was the last time that a tax-cutting cowboy embarked on a "crusade for freedom" designed to spread democracy to the four corners of the globe.

Earlier this week, I agreed with David Brooks that the success of American-backed elections in the midst of the Salvadoran civil war suggests that similar elections can work in Iraq. In contrast, three individuals with a very impressive knowledge of El Salvador have argued that the Salvadoran experience demonstrates exactly why next year's elections in Iraq are bound to fail.

The most important points of contention in this analogical debate are first, whether the 1982 & 1984 elections were, in fact, the success that America likes to remember; and, second, whether or not the elections were responsible, over the long-term, for the consolidation of (a still imperfect) democracy in El Salvador.

Marc Cooper, a journalist who covered the Salvadoran elections in 1982 and almost got killed in the process of doing so writest that:

There’s only one small problem with Brooks’ version of Salvadoran history: It’s false.

And one difference between Brooks and me when it comes to that Salvadoran election day of March 28, 1982 – I was there and he wasn’t.

Of course, Diane Sawyer was also there, along with a small brigade of network produces and anchors. All of them ready to document the miracle that the Reagan administration was producing: the supposed birth of democracy in the midst of a barbarously bloody civil war.

Cooper's accusation of media complicity in an American propaganda exercise reflects the prevailing sentiment of the American left in the 1980s, a sentiment best represented in the work of NYT correspondent Raymond Bonner and of Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation. Hertsgaard was particularly harsh, comparing the Salvadoran vote in 1982 to elections in Bulgaria.

What I have found in my research, however, was that the American media expected to cover the abject failure of the March 1982 elections, not their surprising success. In my dissertation, I write that

As election day approached, the press conveyed a sense of foreboding and distress similar to that of the administration’s critics on Capitol Hill. One New York Times headline read “Violence and Cynicism Mar Campaign for Next Month’s Vote”. The week before the election, a front page story in the Washington Post began by reporting that “Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas [of San Salvador] said today that ‘the violent propaganda’ of the parties involved in next Sunday's election has raised doubts about whether the vote can be ‘peaceful and free.’” Newsweek observed simply that “the voting seems likely to backfire.”

[NYT, 27 Feb 1982:A3; WP, 22 Mar 1982:A1; Newsweek, 1 Mar 1982:16.]

Democratic congressmen and academic experts shared the expectations of the national media. It was precisely because expectations for the elections were so low that their success resulted in such wildly positive press coverage. Sample headlines from the morning following the election -- all of them on the front page -- included:

“Turnout Heavy in El Salvador; Thousands Vote Despite Rebel Threats”

“Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations…Votes Cast Amid Gunfire”

“Rural Voters, Despite Fears, Hike for Miles”

[WP, 29 Mar 1982:A1; NYT, 29 Mar 1982:A1 – Col. 6; NYT, 29 Mar 1982:A1 – Col. 5]

Even so, Cooper is right to say, with regard to the violence, that,

It wasn’t just insurgents trying to stop voting. It was, instead, another day of battle in a country suffering in its third year of internal war.

More than anyone, President Reagan popularized the notion that most Salvadorans risked their lives in order to vote. For the next six years, he would answer questions about El Salvador by describing a woman who was shot guerrillas but refused to seek medical attention before being allowed to vote.

The woman was real, although she wasn't representative. However, the Salvadoran guerillas made a major mistake when one of their commanders announced to the Washington Post that the guerrillas were simply against elections and therefore would try to disrupt them with violence. In contrast to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas who won popular support, both at home and abroad, by paying lip service to democracy before taking power, the Salvadoran guerrillas didn't recognize the importance of downplaying their Marxist-Leninist ideology. (NB: According to the American left, the guerrillas were social democrats.)

So what is the lesson here with regard to Iraq? Cooper writes that:

Given the complete lack of physical security, how does anyone in their right mind believe there can be an open and democratic campaign over the next four months? With car bombs and ambushes multiplying daily, does anyone think someone is going to go out and canvass door to door?

As it turns out, liberal critics said exactly the same thing about El Salvador in 1982. The danger, however, wasn't from the guerillas but from the Salvadoran armed forces who made a habit of slaughtering opposing campaign workers. Among the harshest critics was Robert White, whom Carter appointed as ambassador to El Salvador, and whom Reagan promptly fired because he of strong support for human rights (White, that is, not Reagan). In 1982, White testified before Congress that:

Maj. D’Aubuisson [the right-wing candidate] enjoys the protection of a hardline military as he goes around the country spreading his gospel that he will napalm the country of all its Communists, whereas President Duarte [the center-left head of the interim junta], as I said, is a practically a prisoner and does not dare to go out to those places.

As White's comments illustrate, America's moral position in El Salvador was far worse than it now is in Iraq. Imagine if Allawi's henchmen murdered opposition activists on a regular basis while Bush said nothing, lest Allawi let up in his battle against the insurgents.

Tactically speaking, the sitation in Iraq is better in some respects and worse in others. In El Salvador, the military's official status meant it could operate in the open and attack opponents at will throughout the country. In Iraq, the insurgents operate openly only in a few select areas. However, the Salvadoran military's support for the electoral process ensured that the election itself would take place, whereas in Iraq the insurgent may be able to disrupt it.

The final point I want to raise about election day in El Salvador concerns the prospect of fraud. Salvadoran politicians later admitted that they inflated the official turnout numbers in order to heighten the perception that the Salvadoran people supported the election process. In a rare instance of consensual fraud, the three main parties agreed to increase the turnout in a proportional manner so that the underlying result of the election would be preserved. As a result of this consensus, none of the parties complained about the fraud, thus ensuring that when it was discovered three months later, the American public would pay far less attention to the fraud than they did to the election itself.

Nonetheless, the actual turnout -- 1.1 million as opposed to 1.5 million (in a nation with only 2 million-plus eligible voters) was still far greater than the 500,000 to 800,000 projected by American experts. More importantly, the voters interviewed by a wide array of observer missions expressed tremendous enthusiasm about the opportunity to vote.

On a related note, Bill Barnes, who has a doctorate in Latin American politics, points out [via e-mail] that

With regard to the 1982 constituent assembly election, it was considered to be dangerous to fail to vote. There was no registration. Soldiers and police would frequently ask to see the identity documents on which certification of having voted was to be stamped, in a context in which the FDR- FMLN had called for a boycott of the election, and death squads linked to the army and the police were killing on the order of 800 people every month for suspected links to the FDR-FMLN.

Barnes comments, based on the writings on numerous scholars, reflect what is close to being a consensus opinion in the field. However, there are two problems with it. The lesser problem is that Salvadoran voters never expressed as much fear as American scholars attributed to them. One might object, however, that Salvadoran voters were not inclined to reveal their true feelings to elections monitors.

The second problem is that there is no documentation of Salvadoran soldiers abusing or killing anyone because of their failure to vote -- in spite of the fact that 40-45% of the electorate failed to vote and that the Salvadoran armed forces killed thousands of people for other well-documented (if scarcely justifiable) reasons.

In sum, the El Salvador elections really did resemble the coming elections in Iraq because of widespread expectations of failure in the United States and the presence of a security threat that had the potential to disrupt the electoral process.

That is my position on election day 1982 in El Salvador. In my next post, I'll look at the long-term implications of the Salvadoran elections and whether or not there are similar reasons to be optimistic about Iraq.
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# Posted 9:18 PM by David Adesnik  

EVEN THE LIBERAL NEW REPUBLIC is trashing Bush's performance in last night's debate. The criticism I agree with most strongly is Peter Beinart's argument that Bush's attack on Kerry for demoralizing the troops is dishonest and undemocratic. Here's the money graf:

When critics said the Iraq war would embolden Islamists to attack the United States, Bush supporters scoffed that the terrorists needed no encouragement--they were already doing everything they could to kill Americans. But, if the terrorists can't be emboldened--if they are always doing their utmost to kill Americans-how can John Kerry be emboldening them now? At a recent rally in Columbus, Ohio, Bush said, "These people don't need an excuse for their hatred. I think it's wrong to blame America for the anger and the evil of the killers." But evidently, it's OK to blame John Kerry.

Next is up is Ryan Lizza's entertaining and insightful analysis of the post-debate spin. Long story short, the Bush folks barely had the confidence to pretend that their man won.

On a more substantive note, Spencer Ackerman dismantles Bush's assertion that the the United States has already trained 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen. Kerry wasn't ready to make Bush pay for that one last night, but he should hammer on it relentlessly in the weeks to come. If Bush changes his numbers, Kerry can call him a flip-flopper. If he sticks with his numbers, Kerry can call him a liar.

Now we get to the question of whether last night's debate will have all that much impact on the race. The formerly-pessimistic Jonathan Cohn is now optimistically hoping that voters are fed up with Bush:

Time and again, Bush retreated to the same old line of attack: that he would protect America because he had strong conviction, while Kerry would weaken America because he changes his positions. Whether or not the charge is true, by now it is simply getting dull. Maybe voters finally started noticing that Bush frequently had nothing else to say when it came to defending his record--because, in fact, that record is so hard to defend.

Sticking with my position from last night, I'm going to disagree with Cohn and agree with ex-TNR man Fred Barnes, who says that

It's the voters outside the Washington-New York-Boston axis who matter. And Bush's firm insistence on a few key points--notably the need for resolve in Iraq--and his repetition of these points, is likely to have appealed to them. Repetition is Bush's long suit.

First of all, who let Boston into our axis? (The axis of yuppie?) There may be a Bos-NY-Wash corridor thanks to Amtrak, but there is no axis. Anyhow, what I really want to see is how much last night's debate closed the gap between Bush and Kerry on whom voters trust to handle the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq.

Regardless, the debate was a high-water mark for Kerry. While David Skinner tries to argue that Bush came across as more presidential because he "had an air of superiority" that was "above Kerry's nitpicking", Skinner highlight precisely that evidence which demolishes his own argument; on eleven separate occasions, Bush said that "this" -- meaning the presidency -- is "hard work".

Said with confidence, such a statement might come off as presidential. But when Bush's relies on it as a plea for sympathy, it's just pathetic.


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# Posted 9:03 PM by David Adesnik  

WE ARE COMMON KNOWLEDGE: Tonight was the final night of Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions. The winner took home a quarter of a million dollars. But what's really surprising is that one of the categories in Double Jeopardy! was "Blogs".

So now it's official. Educated Americans are supposed to know what a blog is. The first question -- excuse me, answer -- in the blogging category was what 'blog' is short for. (If you don't know, then close this browser right now.)

The only political blogger who got his name mentioned on the show was Lawrence Lessig. The answer question to the $2000 question answer was Margaret Cho. I didn't even know she had a blog. [And now that I've taken a look at it, I'll have to revise my statement that Lessig was the only political blogger mentioned.]

The only question is, what next for bloggers? Glenn Reynolds hosting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?


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# Posted 8:57 PM by David Adesnik  

MAKING AN OFFER YOU CAN'T REFUSE: You can't line a catbox with a webpage -- that's why you should subscribe to the paper version of the Washington Post.

Right now, new subscribers can get 12 weeks of home delivery for just $1.50 a week. Pay attention now: $1.50 isn't the delivery charge. It's the price of seven papers plus delivery. The cover price of seven papers at the newstand (six weekdays plus one Sunday) is $3.60.

Even though I'm a blogger, I'll take paper over pixels any day. You can carry it from room to room, you don't have to plug it in, you can flip back and forth from page to page, you can read it from any angle, you can spill coffee on it. What's not to love?
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# Posted 1:27 PM by Patrick Belton  

MISS THE DEBATES? Because, say, they were on at 2 in the morning where you live? Then you can watch them here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:48 AM by Patrick Belton  

WEEKEND READING WATCH: Don't be put off from the National Security Archive at George Washington University just because they spin each document they release (the latter in nearly every instance providing a fascinating fine-grained glimpse into American diplomatic history) to be about: (1) US hypocrisy in Latin America, or (2) generally, see (1). (Note: Lest this post reesurface in any future confirmation hearings involving me by any committee of the US Senate, I am for the record also opposed to US hypocrisy in Latin America, as well as hypocrisy and the seven mortal sins worldwide, with the possible exception of one or two I haven't yet made up my mind about.)

Because, with a degree of success unparalleled really in the internet world, the Archive's staff manage to declassify and place on their website more spellbinding soundbites of foreign policy actually in the making, per ounce of bandwidth, than anywhere outside of Condi Rice's hotmail inbox.

Cases in point (and only selecting two from among the more recently posted documents): first, this telephone transcript of Kissinger being informed of the fall of Saigon by a wire service reporter, and second, Kissinger's personal goodbyes after Ford's loss to Carter from Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin (in which Kissinger tells Mr Nyet 'I will miss you too. If it is possible to have a Marxist friend....'). Hunt around the website for more - all of it makes fascinating reading.

UPDATE: OxBlog's friend Randy Paul writes to add: 'Not to mention that the National Security Archives also has the best collection of Elvis meeting Nixon photos here.'

The handwritten letter (on American Airlines stationery) from Elvis to President Nixon is endearingly awful, as is Haldeman's scribbled response to staffer Dwight Chapin's memorandum line 'In addition, if the President wants to meet with some bright young people outside of the Government, Presley might be a perfect one to start with': 'You must be kidding'. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

BAD RESEARCH WATCH: The Malthus award, for unthoughtful extrapolation of present trends into the future, goes to no other than our own university's researchers who extended into the future the comparative rates of improvement of male and female sprinting world records - neglecting to note that women have not been competing in the 100 meters as long or with as broad a base of competitors as men - and lo and behold, arrived via an Excel worksheet at the conclusion that women would beat men at the 100 meter sprint by 2156!

Also, in the papers this morning:

A wonderful review of the history of Granta magazine. Best quote, describing 1979 on the banks of the titular river at Cambridge: 'as far away from me and this office in north London, to which we moved from Cambridge in 1989, as the email message from the penny black.'

Non sequitur headline award... goes to the Independent for: 'Tony Blair was heading into hospital for heart treatment today - as The Independent can reveal that he has bought a Georgian house for about £3.5m in central London' (cynical comment from cynical reader: aha - obviously he has been stressing over the UK housing market bubble)

Ig Nobel awards released, at Harvard. They include:

Medicine - to Steven Stack and James Gundlach, for revealing through analysis of US radio playlists that as the amount of country music played went up, so did the white suicide rate

Public Health - to high-school student Jillian Clarke, for disproving the validity of the five-second rule about the safety of eating food dropped on the floor (which 70 percent of women and 56 of men believe. And they say we're slobs.)

Engineering - to Donald Smith and his father, the late Frank Smith, for patenting the comb-over

Economics - to The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India

Peace - to Daisuke Inoue, for inventing karaoke in 1971

Recipients receive, in the words of the official announcement, 'prizes made of extremely cheap materials and a medallion that's pretty awkward to wear'. The most amazing discovery is that you're actually allowed to quietly decline an Ig - everyone who has ever publicly been awarded one has consented.

UPDATE: I WAS GRIEVOUSLY WRONG, GO AHEAD AND EAT IT!: OxBlog's readers write in in droves to defend the five-second rule. The complete body of research is here, and shows that most floor surfaces are remarkably bacteria-free. Matt Boulous from MIT adds 'I do not believe that the 20-second rule (for fancy chocolate) was tested.' OxBlog is happy to stand corrected (as soon as I'm done licking up that spilled Glenmorangie, that is). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:46 PM by David Adesnik  

IS LIVE BLOGGING A WASTE OF TIME? Live blogging embodies everything that professional journalists say is wrong with the blogosphere. Live blogging involves the publication of every thought that crosses your mind with almost no censorship. But perhaps there is something good about getting the raw reactions of hundreds of well-informed viewers without hindsight getting in the way.

So, what I'm going to do now is go read some of the just-finished live-blogging and see what it adds to the debate. (But don't expect me to live blog about live-blogging. I'll report back tomorrow.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:43 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE OF THE SAME: Kevin Drum writes that "Bush is just relentlessly on message. The same phrases over and over and over...." That's why he's doing so well, Kevin. He's consistent.
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# Posted 9:03 PM by David Adesnik  

LIVE BLOGGING, BROUGHT TO YOU BY PABST BLUE RIBBON: The candidates just walked in. I don't expect all that much in the way of entertainment, so I'll have plenty of PBR by my side.

9:01 PM: Kerry says he can make us safer by leading stronger alliances. Not what I would've said. How about the war in Iraq is diverting resources from the war on terror? After all, alliances don't really make us safer, per se. Their role -- as Kerry himself just said -- should be to absorb casualties and costs in Iraq. [9:30 -- To clarify, I don't think that that's what their role should be.]

9:05 PM: President Bush, will America be more vulnerable to a terrorist attack if John Kerry wins on November 2? Bush is completely dodging the question and rambling about all sorts of things. But you know what? The question was a trap, trying to get Bush to say something offensive.

9:07 PM: Kerry says Iraq represents a "colossal error of judgment". I think he needs to hit harder. I think he needs to brand Bush as a liar and a hypocrite, the way Bush branded him as a flip-flopper. But nice shot about outsourcing the hunt for Bin Laden to Afghan warlords. Misleading, but sharp.

9:10 PM: Nice job by Bush of citing Kerry words to support the decision to invade Iraq. Notice Kerry nodding in assent when Bush cites him -- in order to show that he is confident hasn't been caught flip-flopping.

9:13 PM: Bush is trying to explain why the occupation of Iraq is part of the war on terror. He keeps saying "freedom" and "democracy". But he already has the neo-con vote.

9:16 PM: Kerry says that what makes him different from Bush is that he can bring in the allies. That is not enough. The polls show voters trust Bush more on national security. Kerry won't change that by reminding people that Europe likes him.

9:20 PM: Bush is rambling again, trying to explain what he did for homeland security. Kerry sounds much more confident. Bush: "Of course we're doing everything we can to make America safe." He sounds desperate.

9:22 PM: How will you know when it's time for America to bring its troops home? Bush's answer is mostly about Iraqification.

9:25 PM: Ouch! Kerry says Bush Sr. knew that an occupation would meet with Iraqi hostility. Bush insists on a response and says that a commander-in-chief shouldn't discourage the troops. That sounds naive.

9:26 PM: Kerry says, unequivocally, that invading Iraq was a mistake. The Republicans will try their best to make him pay for that.

9:30 PM: Bush hit the nail on the head. Allies won't send troops to fight what the US President calls the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. To bad Bush didn't sound confident when he said it.

9:31 PM: Cheapshot. Kerry did not denigrate the contribution of our soldiers. Plus, Bush sounds desperate.

9:36 PM: Talk about a softball. Lehrer asks Kerry to give examples of Bush being a liar. And Kerry then insists that Bush hasn't lied, only been less than candid. Josh Marshall must be kicking himself.

9:38 PM: Bush goes back to Kerry's own words. Solid.

9:42 PM: Bush tells the story of praying with the widow of a fallen soldier. A first-rate performance.

9:47 PM: What a strange argument. Kerry thinks that the biggest problem with the occupation is that he hasn't made it clear that we want to leave Iraq and that we don't have designs on Iraqi oil. It sounds to conspiratorial.

9:50 PM: Have we really trained 100,000 troops in Iraq? That seems like a fact Kerry should be able to dispute.

10:05 PM: Every time Bush is in trouble he talks about "freedom" and "democracy" as the way to win the war in terror. How many times has Kerry used either of those words? What is his vision for winning the war on terror?

10:21 PM: I was hoping that Bush would connect the dots and say that democracy in Russia is critical to acheiving a global victory in the war on terror. If democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is critical why not in Russia?

By the same token, why didn't Kerry challenge Bush to be consistent? Why not ask him why he demands democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan but not Russia? I think it is because Kerry doesn't believe there is an integral relationship between promoting democracy and winning the war on terror.

10:24 PM: "The future belongs to freedom and not to fear." If so, why doesn't Kerry talk about promoting democracy in the Middle East.

10:26 PM: Good closing statement from Bush. I bet he memorized it.

So, where are we now? I don't think anything changed tonight. But when nothing changes, the leader in the polls is the one who benefits.

10:30 PM: It's John Edwards! ( On NBC.) He really is too handsome for his own good. And I had no idea he had such a strong southern accent. Serves me right for not watching television enough.

Brokaw reminds Edwards that the French and Germans want nothing to do with Iraq. Edwards says John Kerry could do it.

Now it's Giuliani time. He's says John Kerry is destorying the troops' morale. That's low. But he is right that Kerry has provided absolutely no rationale for why we should stay in Iraq.

Brokaw asks Giuliani to comment on Musharraf's insistence that the war on Iraq is hurting the war on terror. Why didn't Lehrer ask something about that in the debate? Anyhow, Giuliani is providing the ridiculous answer (often given by George Bush) that we need to go on offense against the terrorists. But how does the war in Iraq relate to that? Much as I support it, building democracy is not the safe as hunting down terrorists planning attacks on American territory.
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# Posted 8:51 PM by David Adesnik  

SOMETIMES SPIN IS GOOD: Citing Krugman and Kurtz, Kevin Drum laments that

The thing to watch is less the debate itself than the post-debate spin war. In 2000, for example, most viewers thought Al Gore did fine, but over the following week, as more and more journalists jumped on board the spin bandwagon, opinion finally morphed and Gore's performance was officially declared dismal. Expect more of the same this year as reporters start talking to each other after the show and adopting each others' views out of fear that they've missed the crucial storyline that everyone else picked up on.

It's not hard to detect Kevin's slight resentment of the fact that intelligence proved to be a considerable disadvantage in the 2000 debates. But I don't think that Kevin should differentiate between the true content of a debate as watched by viewers and the post-debate spin influenced by journalists and campaign operatives. Consider, for example, what happened in 1976 (summary courtesy of Howard Kurtz -- from the same column Kevin cites):

The classic example of a debate that morphed into a debacle was Gerald Ford's Oct. 6, 1976, faceoff with Jimmy Carter. A Washington Post story the next morning relegated to the 32nd paragraph Ford's statement that there was no Soviet domination of countries such as Poland. But the next day Carter called the remarks a "disgrace" and "very serious blunder," and on Oct. 8 a Post front-page story began: "President Ford's observation that 'there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe' poses an immediate problem for him." The media furor lasted for days until Ford acknowledged the obvious, by which time the damage had been done.

Ford should have been punished for his incomprehensible statement, but he wouldn't've been if the media didn't step in. Audiences often need to be told what the significance of what they're watching is.
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# Posted 11:33 AM by Patrick Belton  

AFGHNISTAN BLOGGING: OxBlog's Afghanistan correspondent follows up on his recent insightful contribution about the elections in Afghanistan:

Let me add a few qualifications to my cautious optimism about the Afghan situation. Afghanistan is still a country two or three disasters away from collapse. If the assassination attempt on Karzai last week had succeeded, the election would have been thrown into total disarray. If two or three of the major local warlords decide to take up arms against the president, the Afghan National Army might fall apart, and with it any pretense of a national government. If many Afghans continue to feel that their personal economic situation is in decline -- the most troubling bit of the Charney poll of Afghan opinion is that 37% feel less prosperous now than under the Taliban, and only 10% more prosperous -- they may begin looking around for new regime options.

Moreover, there are a whole lot of ways we could still screw things up. The estimates from this year’s poppy harvest are in, and it’s clear that despite the best efforts of the Brits (who were saddled with the thankless task of stemming the drugs trade), Afghanistan will supply roughly three-quarters of the world’s illicit opium this year. This is a new record; and it was largely unavoidable. Afghan farmers have got to eat, and it’ll be a couple more years before all the money the West is throwing into Afghan agriculture allows the farmers to make a better living from (say) fruit and nut exports than from poppy. In the meantime, fairly or unfairly, the poppy explosion is a clear political vulnerability for Bush. There’s a well-established narcotics eradication lobby in Washington, which has grown rich off the war on drugs (spraying and burning crops on a large scale requires lots of money) and can offer the President a dramatic, tough response to the problem. This would turn thousands, if not millions, of Afghan farmers against us and against the Kabul government – just in time for the parliamentary elections next year.

Despite the obvious potential for things to go wrong, Peter Bergen, and Craig Charney, and one or two others are contributing to a more optimistic meme on the upcoming elections. I think they’re right. Matt Yglesias draws attention to exaggerations in Bergen’s piece, but I think calling them “factual problems” is a bit strong. No, Dostum has not entirely stopped his sparring with Atta Mohammad up north; but the intensity of their conflict did noticeably diminish over the last few months, as Dostum geared up for his presidential bid. Similarly, it is too early to state that Fahim and Ismael Khan have been “neutralized.” But their power has been directly challenged by Karzai, and they have backed down, losing a great deal of face. Assuming Karzai wins the election, we’re likely to see a new Defense Minister in a month or two, and Fahim knows it. So does Bergen, and I think we can forgive him a little blurring of the achieved and the anticipated.

The gravest questions about the elections have been raised by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), a very fine local think-tank, in a report released a week ago. Their report is sobering, and I whole-heartedly agree with them that we ought to defer the April 2005 parliamentary elections til the end of the year at least, to allow for more voter education, political party formation, and a proper census. The AREU authors are also right that the imminent presidential election demands many more trained monitors than we currently have, and will doubtless be marred by intimidation and irregularities in many parts of the country. “It is impossible to know how many flaws in the process it would take to cross the invisible line between an election that is accepted as legitimate and one that is not,” they warn.

I’m optimistic on this one because I think Karzai will win, and that a clear majority of Afghans want him to win. Because of his popularity, he’ll get legitimacy; that “invisible line” of acceptable flaws will be farther out for him than for others. His record of the last few months leads me to believe that he’ll then use this legitimacy to aggressively push the national disarmament program, even when that requires him to challenge multiple warlords simultaneously. For all the fragility of the current situation, I think we can see the outlines of a positive way forward.

Who takes the credit if the election is successful? David writes:

At first blush, the impending success of the Afghan presidential elections seems like a major victory for George W. Bush. But what does it say about this administration or about the United States that things are far better off in the country where we only have a handful of troops and have kept a much lower profile throughout the occupation?

I think it says most about Afghanistan, a country exhausted by twenty years of war and desperately hungering for some sort of normality. In Afghanistan as in Iraq, we went in with enough soldiers to win the war but too few to bring real security to the country. In Iraq, the results have been disastrous to date (and provide sufficient reason to turf out George Bush in November). In Afghanistan, by bringing security to Kabul, keeping the Taliban on the run, and leveraging our limited remaining firepower to keep the warlords in line, we’ve somehow muddled through so far. But it wouldn’t have been enough without millions of Afghans already on board, eager to try a new system that promises an end to violence. They registered to vote despite the fact that we didn’t put enough soldiers on the ground to protect them. We should also recognize the valiant efforts of the UN (which was in charge of the registration effort, and lost several employees). All in all, a successful Afghan election will be nothing for President Bush to be ashamed of, but no reason for triumphalism either.

Next year’s parliamentary elections will be the greatest challenge to date. It’s easy for war-weary Afghans to vote for national unity in picking a president, but it’s in voting for regional representatives that the ethnic conflicts will really come out. How many representatives will each region get? Will political parties mirror ethnic divisions, or regional ones, or ideological ones? Elections will likely be more closely contested, and thus more likely to be derailed by procedural flaws and irregularities. There will also have to be a lot more voter education for people to understand how the legislative system works. A number of worthy organizations have begun preparing for these challenges. If this October election goes well, we’ll have that much more reason to hope.

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# Posted 8:11 AM by Patrick Belton  

BUT WILL THEY SHOW SENATORS GAMES? For those of our readers who don't live in the States but might be interested in watching the debate tonight, BBC News 24 (which my television licence-paying friends tell me channel one turns into at some point in the night) will be showing the debate beginning at 1:50 UK time. In Ireland, you're stuck watching the equally scintillating Oireachtas Report on RTE. And if you've got an internet connection, as many of our readers are reported to, you could always watch on C-Span.

MORE: Our friend Pierre writes in that for those of our readers in Oxford, you can pop over to the St Antony’s College buttery, which will be open for the duration.  (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:52 PM by David Adesnik  

KERRY PRAISES WOLFOWITZ: You thought it couldn't happen, but here's a direct quote:

Secretary Armacost and Secretary Wolfowitz, with whom I spoke earlier today, have really been exceptional. In their testimony before this committee both of them were instrumental in in aiding us [sic] our effort to try to frame an intelligent and sensitive response to the situation there and to try to help in whatever way we could to set up a structure of accountability for the election process. It was their candor that I think helped to build a bipartisan foreign policy policy and the success that we saw.

The election process Kerry was referring to is the one in the Philippines in 1986. His statement, made before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is from February 27th of that year. (The hearing number is 99-645, its CIS reference number is 86-S381-20, and Kerry's statement is on page seven.)

By most accounts, Wolfowitz did a very good job of aiding the 1986 transition to democracy in the Philippines. I can't say much more than that right now because I've only just started my research on the subject. But if it does turn out that Wolfowitz played in an interesting role in tearing Reagan away from his support for Manila strongman Ferdinand Marcos, then I think it would say a lot about Wolfowitz's motivations and integrity with regard to Iraq.
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# Posted 9:30 PM by David Adesnik  

NATIONAL PASTTIME RETURNS TO NATION'S CAPITAL: I'm totally psyched. But the big question is, what are going to call the new team?

I'd be happy with the 'Senators'. Baseball is the sport of tradition; when you say 'Washington', you naturally think 'Senators'. Or has that name become jinxed? Washington has already lost its Senators twice, and I don't think it could survive losing them again.

So what other names would work? First, a word of caution. Whoever decided to call the DC basketball team the Wizards should be prevented from suggesting any names. Same goes for the Mystics.

A good name embodies local identity and local traditions. That's why Senators worked so well. But perhaps the new name should reflect the city's local identity rather than its role as the federal capital.

The 'Crack-Smoking Mayors' might be a fun name, but it just isn't tasteful. Same goes for the Washington Carjackers. How about the Washington Eagles? Philadelphia might have a problem with that. And again, it sort of refers to the government.

What about a name that refers to Greater Washington's new role as the a capital of the high-tech industry? [JK rightly points out that DC is nothing compared to northern California.] The Washington Lightning doesn't sound bad, although Tampa Bay might object. How about the Washington Thunder? Not exactly a reference to high-tech, but it sounds cool.

Hmmm. I guess I'll have to keep my thinking cap on for a while to come up with some better ideas.
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# Posted 8:49 AM by Patrick Belton  

DOZENS SEEK ASYLUM IN CANADIAN EMBASSY IN BEIJING: Details are unfortunately not entirely clear at the moment, but a group of 44 North Koreans have sought asylum from the Embassy of Canada in Beijing. To get past Chinese security, they disguised themselves as construction workers, complete with yellow hard hats. According to the CBC, hundreds of North Koreans have sought asylum in South Korea by way of foreign embassies and consulates in China since 2002. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:24 AM by Patrick Belton  

PLOUGHMAN'S SANDWICH: Personally, it gives me sincere pleasure somehow to partake in a nation which has a National Ploughing Championships opened in person by the Taoiseach and expected to draw over 150,000 people. As the RTE note this morning, 'More than five kilometres of steel trackway has been laid to ease conditions for the crowds as they make their way around the ploughing competitions and the 700 trade stands.' Sin sin, níl aon scéal eile agam. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:25 AM by David Adesnik  

THE SOFT PARADE: Howard Kurtz writes that:

If you were watching the network evening news in June, July and August, you would have seen somewhat favorable coverage of John Kerry -- six out of 10 evaluations were positive -- and somewhat unfavorable coverage of President Bush.

If you were watching Fox News Channel's 6 p.m. newscast, you would have seen about the same coverage of the president. But Kerry's evaluations were negative by a 5 to 1 margin.

That finding, by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, might suggest that some Fox folks have it in for Kerry. Or it might suggest that the broadcast networks are too easy on Kerry, who the group says has gotten the best network coverage of any presidential nominee since it began tracking in 1988.

Really? 1988? I wonder which candidate got all the positive coverage back then. [CORRECTION: GH points out that I have misinterpreted Kurtz's sentence. What he's saying is not that Kerry has gotten the most positive coverage since 1988, but that CMPA has only been tracking the subject since then.]

Btw, in contrast to certain NYT authors and other assorted journalists, Kurtz is one of the few mainstreamers who really seems to understand what blogging is all about.
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# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik  

NAVEL-GAZING: In its cover story about Democratic bloggers, the NYT Magazine managed to recycle all of the negative stereotypes about the blogosphere that professional journalists have done so much to perpetuate.

First and foremost, the story perpetuates the notion that blogging is an alternative to journalism, rather than a forum for opinion and analysis, just like the op-ed page. The cover photo (at least I think it is), shows Wonkette sitting at her laptop with Johnny Apple and Jack Germond looking over her shoulders.

Instead of Apple and Germond, it should be Krugman and Krauthammer. Unsurprisingly, the false comparison of bloggers to straight news reporters results in the false perception that bloggers are excessively partisan. Without much effort, the suggestion that bloggers are excessively partisan transforms itself into the suggestion that bloggers lack substance.

This suggestion isn't a result of political prejudice, since this is an article about liberal bloggers (and there are no indications that the author is a closet conservative). While I might agree that Josh Marshall's blog has become has become "an irate spitter of well-crafted vitriol aimed at the president", it is also much more than that. TPM provides a tremendous amount of information, much of it hard to find, as well as lots of original ideas.

I don't like most of those ideas and the information provided reflects an obvious partisan agenda, but doesn't that description fit almost every columnist at the NYT?

The NYTM story amplifies its message that bloggers lack substance by focusing on its subjects' personalities and personal quirk far more than their ideas. For Wonkette, that's fine, although following her around won't really help you figure out what most bloggers do.

As for Marshall and Kos, their personal lives are amusing because they are pseudo-celebrities in my world, but hearing about Marshall's coke habit (diet, that is) doesn't do much to educate the off-line masses.

To top it all off, the NYTM perpetuates the notion that real journalists have better ideas because they spend more time crafting their sentences. Take for example, what the NYTM says about Kaus:

In 1999, Mickey Kaus, a veteran magazine journalist and author of a weighty book on welfare reform, began a political blog on Slate. On kausfiles, as he called it, he wrote differently. There were a thousand small ways his voice changed; in print, he had been a full-paragraph guy who carefully backed up his claims, but on his blog he evolved into an exasperated Larry David basket case of self-doubt and indignation, harassed by a fake ''editor'' of his own creation who broke in, midsentence, with parenthetical questions and accusations.

All that outrage, hand wringing, writing posts all day long -- the care and maintenance of an online writing persona -- after five years, it takes its toll. I had talked to Kaus earlier in the summer at a restaurant in Venice, Calif., and he had said he didn't know how much longer he could stand it. After the election, he said, he might just give up.

There is no doubt that the unlimited right to publish ensures the publication of some low-quality material. But as a whole, the caliber of debate on the upper-tier blogs tends to be very high.

In the final analysis, I don't think that professional journalists' unfair assessment of blogs does all that much harm. Our reputation will rise and fall with because of what we do, not because of what others say. If we keep exposing the incompetence of veteran anchormen, they won't be able to write us off as amateurs. For the moment, even bad PR is good PR. The more people who know that we exist, the more people will learn about what we really do.
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# Posted 10:07 PM by David Adesnik  

GORE CALLS DEMOCRATS "NEO-ISOLATIONISTS": The WaPo quotes Al Gore as saying that:

"There is a neo-isolationist impulse that has come out of the Vietnam experience that has not been put in perspective in the [Democratic] party,"

"The nominating process has served to push the candidates to the left and make each of them scared they will be outflanked on the left by someone who plays to this neo-isolationist impulse. Therefore the mainstream Democratic voter listening to the dialogue feels disillusioned and confused about where the traditional Democratic consensus has gone."

Did I mention that this was what the Post reported on October 22, 1987? My, how the times change. And how they don't: mainstream Democratic voters are still trying to figure out whether the dovish demands of the primary campaign have damaged their party's credibility on issues of national security. After all, if not for Howard Dean, John Kerry might never have flip-flopped on Iraq.
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# Posted 3:48 PM by Patrick Belton  

TAKE MY WIFE! PLEASE! Any of our Washington readers who would like a witty, attractive, Oxford academic and foreign policy hand - no, this is Belton femme, not Belton homme we're talking about - can have her for only $200 between the 11th and the 22nd! (Actually, it's an even better deal than that - she gives you the 200 bucks, plus lots of witty conversation about Democratic foreign policy and rule of law building!) She'll be hiding most of the time writing like mad. She's also a very nice roommate - I can vouch for her. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:47 PM by Patrick Belton  

BUT NO WORD YET ON WHETHER OSAMA WILL HAVE INK DONE: The Washington Times is claiming that Al Qa'eda is seeking ties with gangs with presences bridging Central America and the United States.

In other things happening in the world today off the headlines, China and Russia have signed an agreement increasing oil and gas cooperation between the two nations; China also reiterated its strong support for Russia's WTO bid (see China Daily). Japan's Foreign Minister has endorsed revising the Japanese constitution to allow the country to take on a larger role in world security (Reuters). North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister has claimed that the nation now possesses a nuclear deterrent (AP). Opposition is hardening to President Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan (Eurasianet), analysts see Russia as going Soviet (ditto) as it seeks a new policy toward its CIS neighbours (and ditto). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:12 PM by Patrick Belton  

DEPARTMENT OF TRULY IMPORTANT THINGS: Anne-Sophie Mutter appeared on Radio 3 this afternoon, and I had before this never heard her rendition of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D. Mutter, performing as a prodigy of Karajan, was often justly critiqued for a rather thin tonality, but now in her maturity and after drawing on years of concertising in the Modern repertory, her phrasing in the Brahms was marked in its originality, and her intensity throughout was breathless. As with many people, this concerto ranks among my favourite pieces, and Mutter made me feel as though I was hearing it for the first time. Brava.

UPDATE: One of our friends remedies a point I'd neglected: 'Sure, but really ya gotta love those dresses that she had sprayed on, too. Really enhances the live Mutter experience.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:05 PM by Patrick Belton  

DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA: I'm with Bill Kristol on this one.

As citizens of the Euro-Atlantic community of democracies, we wish to express our sympathy and solidarity with the people of the Russian Federation in their struggle against terrorism.  The mass murderers who seized School No. 1 in Beslan committed a heinous act of terrorism for which there can be no rationale or excuse.  While other mass murderers have killed children and unarmed civilians, the calculated targeting of so many innocent children at school is an unprecedented act of barbarism that violates the values and norms of our community and which all civilized nations must condemn.

 At the same time, we are deeply concerned that these tragic events are being used to further undermine democracy in Russia.  Russia’s democratic institutions have always been weak and fragile.  Since becoming President in January 2000, Vladimir Putin has made them even weaker.  He has systematically undercut the freedom and independence of the press, destroyed the checks and balances in the Russian federal system, arbitrarily imprisoned both real and imagined political rivals, removed legitimate candidates from electoral ballots, harassed and arrested NGO leaders, and weakened Russia’s political parties.  In the wake of the horrific crime in Beslan, President Putin has announced plans to further centralize power and to push through measures that will take Russia a step closer to authoritarian regime.

(more)

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# Posted 1:29 PM by Patrick Belton  

FUN WITH OUR REFERRAL LOGS:
  28 Sep, Tue, 16:11:10    Google:  oxblog  
  28 Sep, Tue, 16:13:16    Google:  oxblog  
  28 Sep, Tue, 16:23:29   Yahoo:  oxblog  
  28 Sep, Tue, 16:24:43    Yahoo:  instructions on making a french beret  
  28 Sep, Tue, 16:25:33    Yahoo:  oxblog  
  28 Sep, Tue, 16:48:23    Google:  oxblog  
  28 Sep, Tue, 17:18:03    Google:  oxblog (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:07 AM by Patrick Belton  

BLOGOSPHERE QUOTE OF THE DAY: Is from Joe Gandelman. "What happened [to Kerry's lead]? In two words: Bob Shrum. Kerry's chief strategist, complete with his 0-7 record in national campaigns, decided to sit on his candidate's lead. The Democratic convention then became The Vietnam Experience -- but in retrospect, in political terms, it was Apocolypse Now." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:57 AM by Patrick Belton  

REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS does wonderful work in highlighting the causes of independent journalists being suppressed by their governments for seeking to practice their trade. They have online petitions on behalf of twenty-five journalists at the moment, in countries from Burma to Uzbekistan, and including two imprisoned Iranian online journalists.* Why don't you take a break and go sign them all!

*(Quote from the site: "The community of Iranian bloggers has been organising for several days to show its opposition to the censorship of Emrooz, Rouydad and Baamdad, websites that support Iran's main reform party. Dozens of Farsi-language blog pages have been renamed Emrooz and are displaying articles taken from the Emrooz site.") (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

YOU UGLY: One supposed, previously, that high fashion consisted largely, or at least in part, of the application of taste in the pursuit of distinctiveness - a salvaged set of Edwardian cuff links or art décoratif Swiss watch from the 1940s, inexpensive in its time and on eBay but in its way beautiful, and reflecting an aesthetic you're unlikely to get for more money over the counter at Debenham's. No more. The New York Times, in its foray into male fashion, reveals that at its root is actually utter mindless conformism. To wit, two photographs accompanying the story:

example one, 'Andy Gilchrist founded AskAndyAboutClothes.com after he retired. He owns 300 ties'.



example two, 'Steve Brinkman, in his closet in San Antonio, moderates at Styleforum.net, a Web site for discussing men's fashions.'



Note the subtle similarity between the two fashion-conscious gentlemen? This is the wave of the future. All men of middle age in America are condemned to look precisely, and Matrix-like, like these two fashion mavens. Resistance is, as they used to say on the Left Bank in the stylish cafes of St Germain des Pres during their Satrean heyday, inutile. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:09 AM by David Adesnik  

FEELING OPTIMISTIC? If you're a Democrat, check out Electoral-Vote.com, which has Kerry only trailing Bush by 46, rather than the 70 electoral votes projected by RCP. But there's even good news at RCP, which just decided to list Pennsylvania -- a must-win state for the Democrats -- as leaning Kerry.

Of course, there's plenty of bad news at RCP, too. For example, this John Kerry quote from a Senate debate on November 9, 1997:

We must recognize that there is no indication that Saddam Hussein has any intention of relenting. So we have an obligation of enormous consequence, asn obligation to guarantee that Saddam Hussein cannot ignore the United Nations. He cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly in this Nation. If he remains obdurate, I believe that the United Nations must take, and should authorize immediately, whatever steps are necessary to force him to relent -- and that the United States should support and participate in those steps.

Just to be on the safe side (as Reagan said, "Trust but verify"), I decided to look up Kerry's speech myself on Lexis-Nexis. First impression: the speech is very long. The Senate really does cultivate a fondness for listening to one's own voice. Anyhow, there are lots of other good quotes in the speech, too. For example:

Saddam Hussein, who unquestionably has demonstrated a kind of perverse personal resiliency, may be looking at the international landscape and concluding that, just perhaps, support may be waning for the United States's determination to keep him on a short leash via multilateral sanctions and weapons inspections.

Or if that sort of Bush-ian logic isn't enough for you, try:

It is unthinkable that we and our allies would stand by and permit a renegade such as Saddam Hussein, who has demonstrated a willingness to engage in warfare and ignore the sovereignty of neighboring nations, to engage in activities that we insist be halted by China, Russia, and other nations.

And finally, there is this passage, which sounds like it was spoken by some sort of Texas cowboy:

In my judgment, the Security Council should authorize a strong U.N. military response that will materially damage, if not totally destroy, as much as possible of the suspected infrastructure for developing and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, as well as key military command and control nodes. Saddam Hussein should pay a grave price, in a currency that he understands and values, for his unacceptable behavior.

This should not be a strike consisting only of a handful of cruise missiles hitting isolated targets primarily of presumed symbolic value. [What a stupid idea that would be. --ed.] But how long this military action might continue and how it may escalate should Saddam remain intransigent and how extensive would be its reach are for the Security Council and our allies to know and for Saddam Hussein ultimately to find out.

Of course Kerry being Kerry, there was a bit of nuance:

I believe it is important for [the Security Council] to keep prominently in mind the main objective we all should have, which is maintaining an effective, thorough, competent inspection process that will locate and unveil any covert prohibited weapons activity underway in Iraq. If an inspection process acceptable to the United States and the rest of the Security Council can be rapidly reinstituted, it might be possible to vitiate military action.

If we had just given Hans Blix a few more months... But a few more months may have been too long. As Kerry explained:

I submit that the old adage "pay now or pay later'' applies perfectly in this situation. If Saddam Hussein is permitted to go about his effort to build weapons of mass destruction and to avoid the accountability of the United Nations, we will surely reap a confrontation of greater consequence in the future. The Security Council and the United States obviously have to think seriously and soberly about the plausible scenarios that could play out if he were permitted to continue his weapons development work after shutting out U.N. inspectors.

It is not possible to overstate the ominous implications for the Middle East if Saddam were to develop and successfully militarize and deploy potent biological weapons. We can all imagine the consequences. Extremely small quantities of several known biological weapons have the capability to exterminate the entire population of cities the size of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. These could be delivered by ballistic missile, but they also could be delivered by much more pedestrian means; aerosol applicators on commercial trucks easily could suffice.

But who would put biological weapons on a truck? Could it be...could it be...could it be....a terrorist? And since when does Saddam have collaborative relationships with that kind of terrorist?

The real irony here is that Kerry actually makes the case for attacking Saddam far more eloquently than Bush. What is the world coming to?

UPDATE: Blargh thinks the situation facing Kerry in 1997 was very different from the one facing Bush in 2004.
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# Posted 1:59 AM by David Adesnik  

TALKING THE TALK, PART II: Last Thursday night, Jim Lehrer interviewed Iyad Allawi. Not an impressive performance, but not bad for someone who isn't accustomed to being confronted by tough questions. Unsurprisingly, this exchange made Josh Marshall go ballistic:

JIM LEHRER: What would you say to somebody in the United States who questions whether or not getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth the cost of more than a thousand lives now and billions and billions of U.S. dollars?

PRIME MINISTER IYAD ALLAWI: Well, I assure you if Saddam was still there, terrorists will be hitting there again at Washington and New York, as they did in the murderous attack in September; they'll be hitting also on other places in Europe and the Middle East.

Allawi should learn that he doesn't do himself any favors by imitating Dick Cheney at his worst. On the other hand, Marshall doesn't seem to recognize how much of an incentive there is for Allawi to please Bush whatever the cost. If one is going to insists, a la Joe Lockhart, that Allawi is puppet, one should base that judgment on what Allawi does in Iraq, not on his public statements before an American audience.

That said, Allawi's behavior in Iraq isn't all that popular either. As both MoDo and the NYT editorial board point out, the PM has restored the death penalty, kicked al-Jazeera out of the country, and given himself the power to declare martial law.

The death penalty argument against Allawi is quite amusing, given that the insurgents have made a practice of beheading innocent prisoners. (And, of course, our own country has the death penalty as well.) The argument about Al Jazeera is more valid, although I'd be far more interested in knowing how Allawi treats the Iraqi media, which I think is doing quite well.

Finally, martial law. Declaring it is a classic way of subverting constitutional limits on executive power. But has Allawi declared it? I don't know. And how much difference would martial law make in those provinces already engulfed in a civil war?

Yet even if the critics' dismissals are extremely premature, it's probably a good idea to be suspicious of a Prime Minister who began his political career as a loyal Ba'athist. As Roger Simon points out, "Totalitarian societies don't normally breed saints. Survival is Hell." While a comparison to Chalabi may set the bar too low, Allawi doesn't seem like a bad choice.

The critical test for Allawi will be his administration of the national elections and constitutional convention next year. If he shows any signs of trying to thwart the democratic process and maintain his grip on power, OxBlog will come down on him -- and Bush. Hard.
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# Posted 1:50 AM by David Adesnik  

THE OLD MASTERS' DUEL: Parcells and Gibbs coached a game for the ages, with Dallas prevailing over Washington 21-18. Behind by eleven, Gibbs' Redskins mounted a fourth-quarter charge that put them within field goal range of a tie as the final seconds ticked off the clock. If Gibbs had just one more time out, I'd still be downstairs watching the game.
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# Posted 1:45 AM by David Adesnik  

COMBAT JOURNALISM: The front page of the Washington Post tells the heart-rending story of four Iraqi National Guardsmen who were killed (and a fifth severely wounded) in a single explosion because they didn't have the same equipment as the Americans soldiers around them. Perhaps it simply isn't possible to provide the Iraqi Guardsman with the same expensive equipment that we give to our own soldiers. But even if that were the case, the Guardsmen's deaths would be no less tragic.
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# Posted 1:29 AM by David Adesnik  

YOU STOLE MY ANALOGY! I'd been thinking about writing an article comparing the January 2005 election in Iraq to the March 1982 election in El Salvador. But David Brooks has beat me to it:

Conditions were horrible when Salvadorans went to the polls on March 28, 1982. The country was in the midst of a civil war that would take 75,000 lives. An insurgent army controlled about a third of the nation's territory. Just before election day, the insurgents stepped up their terror campaign. They attacked the National Palace, staged highway assaults that cut the nation in two and blew up schools that were to be polling places.

Yet voters came out in the hundreds of thousands. In some towns, they had to duck beneath sniper fire to get to the polls. In San Salvador, a bomb went off near a line of people waiting outside a polling station. The people scattered, then the line reformed. "This nation may be falling apart," one voter told The Christian Science Monitor, "but by voting we may help to hold it together."

If Brooks were allowed to write more than 800 words, he might have described congressional Democrats fierce opposition to the Salvadoran election. The Democrats, along with almost all journalists and scholars, dismissed the election as a farce that subverted democratic principles while aggravating El Salvador's civil war. Moreover, they predicted that the Salvadoran electorate would stay home rather rather than participate in a US-manufactured vote.

Truth be told, the Democrats didn't have a bad case on the merits. The unmitigated brutality of the Salvadoran armed forces made it impossible for either the civilian or the guerilla opposition to participate in the elections even if they had wanted to do so (a fact which Reagan administration officials simply refused to acknowledge.)

In contrast to the Iraqi insurgents' limited, sectarian base of support, the Salvadoran guerrillas had a national, ideologically-motivated following, which may have comprised more than a fifth of the electorate. In terms of the war of ideas and battle for hearts and minds, the situation in El Salvador resembled Vietnam far more than Iraq does today.

Yet because the United States was truly committed to a democratic outcome, it ultimately persuaded the Salvadoran electorate to side with its elected government. On a related note, another fact that Brooks might have pointed out if he had more space was that the democratization of El Salvador facilitated the end of its horrific civil war.

As the Cold War drew to and end , the guerrillas recognized that they had no hope of securing victory on the battlefied. By that point, El Salvador's democratic institutions were well-enough established to offer the guerrillas a fair shot of winning power at the ballot box. Today, the (ex-)guerrillas control more seats in the National Assembly than any other party.

Exploring the long-term impact of El Salvador's partial elections in 1982 and 1984 is extremely important because they may change the minds of some very intelligent individuals, like Phil Carter, who are taken aback by the notion of a partial vote.

In one of the rare posts on his site with which I disagree, Phil asks his readers to

Imagine the following hypothetical: California and Florida were swept up by sectarian and gang violence. At the same time, their voting apparati were determined by various agencies to be notoriously unreliable. It became clear that any vote in these two states would be greatly influenced by violence, and that the results would be unreliable at best. Setting aside the Constitution for a moment, the powers that be decided to hold the 2004 election anyway — but to the exclusion of votes from California and Florida. The rest of the country constituted enough of a quorum for these powerful people — who needs those pesky Californian and Floridian votes anyway?

So you're a Californian or a Floridian — how do you feel? I'd feel pissed, personally. I'd also feel incredibly disenfranchised, and I sure as heck wouldn't support the new government or believe in its legitimacy.

But what if there were no hope of holding fair elections in California and Florida for another five years? The lesson of El Salvador is that the central government's best strategy for winning the allegiance of "lost" provinces is to demonstrate its commitment to democratic norms in the terrority that it does control.

Right now we say we are fighting a war for democracy, but I would forgive most Iraqis for being skeptical of that claim. Yet we won't persuade them otherwise until we show that we will respect the wishes of all those are Iraqis who are willing to participate peacefully in national elections.

The prospect of finally having a say in one's own government after decades of repression is extremely powerful. At the moment, I believe we have no choice but to satisfy the demands of those Shi'ites and Kurds who want to elect their own leaders now.

If this Shi'ite-Kurdish state demonstrates respect for its citizens' rights, both personal and political, the residents of Sunni Iraq will begin to ask themselves whether they truly prefer to be ruled by violent Islamic fundamentalists. For the moment, the alternative to fundamentalist dictatorship is American occupation. But if the alternative were an elected Iraqi government, the results might be very different.

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# Posted 1:32 PM by Patrick Belton  

WE'VE BEEN KEEPING THE AUTHOR OF Finnegan's Wake* from short-term liasons with Quinnipiac University students. ( OxBlog: making the world a better place, one small step at a time.)

*The blog, not the novel. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:22 AM by Patrick Belton  

NICE AS IT'S BEEN TO RUN A THOUSAND-MEMBER ORGANIZATION BY CUTTING AND PASTING EMAIL ADDRESSES FROM WORD (Note: it's also been suggested that we only had two members, who were each receiving five hundred copies of our newsletter), our foreign policy society is setting up yahoo groups for each of our local chapters, beginning for starters with Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Fran, Los Angeles, and Puerto Rico. More coming! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND WE THOUGHT WE HAD THE MARKET COVERED ON BAD PUNS WATCH: By way of an email from a publicist, we find out that Runners World is leading with an article on "Bush v. Kerry: Who's More Fit To Be President?".

Also, just for kitsch value,

Also in the new issue, RW looks at the importance of running to the 75 or so members of Congress who run regularly, and why many of them are convinced that they better serve the public by doing so (“Every one of us who exercises regularly would say we do our jobs better because we take this time out,” says one.)

Among the notable runners in Congress are, of course, Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS), the former world record holder in the mile; Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), who’s run seven marathons as well as the John F. Kennedy 50-Mile race in Maryland; Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), the senate majority leader who once ran two marathons in 13 days; and 72-year-old Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN), referred to as the dean of the unofficial Congressional Runners Caucus.

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# Posted 7:49 AM by Patrick Belton  

SENT TO LIE ABROAD FOR THEIR COUNTRY: A handful of pseudonymous Foreign Serivce officers have begun a blog to discuss foreign policy, diplomacy, and why obese middle-aged men on the beach in Tel Aviv wear such skimpy speedos. (Okay, they haven't yet picked up the last topic, but should.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:50 AM by Patrick Belton  

FREELY OFFERED SLOGAN FOR BREAD MANUFACTURERS ASSOC: Why don't this morning, have bread instead? (Arrived at over the breakfast table; hey, you get what you pay for around here!) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:59 AM by David Adesnik  

GO READ EVERYTHING ON PHIL CARTER'S WEBSITE: I've said the exact same thing before, but it's still true.
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# Posted 1:36 AM by David Adesnik  

BASS ACKWARDS: An American diplomat with experience in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan says that successful occupations rebuild local governments and local communities before focusing on large-scale, long-term projects like roads, bridges and power plants. However, the Pentagon's experience with military construction led it to focus on large-scale, long-term projects first. But the bottom line is security, and no one is sure how to acheive that in Iraq. (Hat tip: PC)
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# Posted 10:52 PM by David Adesnik  

ACCOUNTABILITY WATCH: I've fallen behind on my commitment to re-evaluate my posts from one year ago with the benefit of hindsight. In fact, it has been more than a month since my last "Accountability Watch" post.

In short, hindsight has not been kind to those of us who were optimistic about Iraq. On August 20th, 2003, I wrote that

The sensless destruction of UN headquarters in Baghdad demonstrates just how desperate the Ba'athist underground has become. For as long as the Ba'athist remnants held fast to their strategy of assassinating American soldiers, they could plausibly represent themselves as rebels against a foreign occupation.

Josh Marshall responded that

There is a notion being peddled by certain conservative columnists that the bombing of the UN mission in Baghdad is actually a sign that the bad guys are on the ropes. Now, that strikes me as a rather creative of interpretation of the event.

The intensification of the insurgency of the past twelve months demonstrates that the bad guys were most definitely not on the ropes. Nonetheless, I think my point about the insurgents' failure to acheive any sort of broad-based legitimacy still stands.

In the midst of pervasive and ever-more confident comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, it is important not to forget that the Sunni insurgents have no vision for Iraq and no ideology to galvanize their supporters. In Vietnam, our opponents had both Communism and nationalism on their side.

To be sure, the divide between Ba'athists and Islamists among the insurgents is not as dramatic as I once portrayed it. Even so, the brand of fundamentalist Islam advocated by some of the insurgents is anathema to both the Shi'ite majority and the Kurdish minority in Iraq. In spite of its growing strength, the insurgency has no apparent hope of overcoming its ethnic and sectarian origins.

In addition to challenging my interpretation of the UN attack, Marshall also argued that my optimism (as well as Ralph Peters') was a product of dangerously ideological and unscientific thinking. In response to Josh's call to "put down some benchmarks" against which the optimists and pessimists can measure their success, I tried to define what I meant by the struggle for hearts and minds.

In a follow-up to the hearts and minds post, I reconsidered my prediction from June 2003 "that only that small minority who benefited from Saddam's rule seems interested in resisting the occupation." I concluded that

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

And now it has, so I will. The Sadrist rebellion demonstrated that there anti-occupation sentiment thrives among Shi'ites as well. Yet precisely because the Shi'ite leadership continues to support the American program of democratization, Sadr's rebellion failed. While it is hard to gauge what percentage of Shi'ites supported Sadr, my sense is that the overwhelming majority supported Sistani.

Shortly after the UN bombing, another attack took the life of moderate, pro-democratic Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. At the time, I wrote that

The death of Ayatollah Hakim is a major setback for American efforts to cultivate and cooperate with a moderate Shi'ite leadership.

Given our surprising ability to get along with the enigmatic Ayatollah Sistani, it seems I was wrong to doubt the future of US-Shi'ite cooperation. Recognizing the benefits of democratization for the Shi'ite majority, Sistani has been even more insistent about holding elections than our own government has. You might say we won Sistani's mind without winning his heart. And that's good enough for me.

Turning to the home front, I declared in early September of last year that I was actually proud of George W. Bush for his commitment to promoting democracy in Iraq. Swimming against a cynical tide, I argued that Bush

Has now made it clear that the United States will ensure that the people of Iraq fulfill their democratic potential. This is a major commitment of presidential credibility. It is no different than a campaign promise. The President and advisers know that if he does not live up to his word, he will pay a heavy price.

So was I right or wrong? I think John Kerry & Co. would certainly say that Bush hasn't fulfilled his promise to rebuild and promote democracy in Iraq. I'm more inclined to say that Bush has been sincere but ineffective, at least in the short-term. What I was clearly right about was that Bush never intended to cut and run. Iraq gets bloodier and bloodier, but it's John Kerry who talks abour bringing the troops home.
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# Posted 9:12 PM by David Adesnik  

THE VOTES THAT COUNT are the ones in the swing states. And no one puts more effort into tracking those votes than the guys at Real Clear Politics. RCP's state-poll survey from last Tuesday shows how much ground Kerry has lost even in those states that Gore won back in 2000.

If you want to translate state-by-state polls into an overall picture of the election, check out RCP's Electoral Vote Count, which is updated daily. Right now, Bush has 291 and Kerry 221 with 26 votes in the toss-up column.

Of course, RCP knows just as much about the emotional side of politics as it does about numbers. As Tom pointed out last Tuesday,

Even though mistakes have been made and a good number of Americans are uneasy about the War in Iraq and the direction of the country in general, when given a choice between a leader who is committed to fighting and optimistic about winning or a leader who exudes the attitude that because the going is tough we ought to get going, Americans almost always prefer the former.

Even though Kerry's position on Iraq is more nuanced than just "let's pull out", the image he projects is certainly not of someone who wants to fight and win.

If you think Iraq is a hopeless mess, then you are probably cursing the average American voter for being so damned optimistic. But that's a whole 'nother debate.
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# Posted 7:55 PM by David Adesnik  

GROWING UP GAY IN AMERICA: OxBlog is second to none in its commitment to promoting and protecting gay rights. But I'd still rather have journalists report on the issue fairly rather than taking my side.

Dominating the front page of today's Washington Post is the first installment of a four-part series on growing up gay in America. The continuation of the story fills up two entire pages inside the front section.

The protagonist of today's installment is a young gay man in Oklahoma named Michael Shackleford. Like so many young gay men, Michael has had to endure ridicule, intimidation and vandalism. But those facts alone should speak for themselves, instead of being embedded in a narrative designed to portray Michael as a hero and those around him as mindless thugs.

Here's how the Post describes its four-part series:

In the courts and in popular culture, gays in America experienced an unprecedented push toward the mainstream over the past two years. But far beneath the surface, away from the spotlight of the historic advances and conservative backlash they detonated, are the ordinary lives of young people coming to terms with their homosexuality. [No permalink -- this quote is from a sidebar on Page A17]

Now, if the opposite of a "historic advance" is a "conservative backlash", then there is no question about which side the Post is taking in this debate.

In one of the early paragraphs of Michael's story, correspondent Anne Hull writes that

While the rest of the country is debating same-sex marriage, Michael's America is still dealing with the basics.

In other words, rural Oklahoma is full of ignorant hicks. Ignorant hicks who probably don't read the Washington Post. But even so, the cause of gay rights would benefit from even-handed coverage of such areas that takes the views of its residents seriously rather than dismissing them as backwards and irrelevant.

To the Post's credit, it invested considerable resources in telling Michael's story:

With the Shackelford family's permission, The Washington Post spent hundreds of hours following Michael over the past year as he came to terms with being gay, a journey that paralleled Oklahoma's fight against same-sex marriage.

The events and direct quotes in this story were witnessed by this reporter.

Reading the article, however, one gets the sense that the author spent hundreds in search of evidence that Michael is the victim of his neighbor's ignorance. And it seems that none of those hours were spent trying to understand why Michael's neighbors consider homosexuality to be anathema.

After observing that Michael's America is still "dealing with the basics", Hull observes that

There are no rainbow flags here. No openly gay teacher at the high school. There is just the wind knifing down the plains, and people praying over their lunches in the yellow booths at Subway. Michael loves this place, but can it still be home? What if the preachers and the country music songs are right?

In other words, the problem is Christianity (and possibly country music). Without question, there is a strong relationship between conservative Christian beliefs and antipathy toward homosexuals. Yet instead of helping us to understand this relationship, Hull seems determined to expose Christian ignorance:

The damnation mixed with the bluest skies, so beautiful and round. The greater Tulsa phone book has 13 pages of church listings; there are 133 churches alone that begin with the word "First." One Tulsa church that bills itself as a "hardcore, in-your-face ministry" constructs an elaborate haunted house each Halloween where live actors depict various sins. Last year's spook house featured a gay male pedophile...

One day in PE class, a good-looking preppy guy on the bleachers strips off his T-shirt in the hot gymnasium. Before Michael can catch himself, his eyes drift. Stop looking at me, the other boy tells Michael in a voice loud enough to humiliate. This is the turning point at school. His secret is out.

"He was wanting to kick my ass," Michael later recalls. "I told my dad about it. He said, 'I'd kick your ass, too, if you were looking at me.' " Officially, ass-kicking is not allowed on school grounds since Oklahoma adopted anti-bullying laws... [Whereas schoolyard violence was previously encouraged. --ed.]

It was a Sunday morning that Janice Shackelford will never forget. Michael had a friend staying over. Church was starting in an hour, so Janice knocked on her son's bedroom door. "Time to wake up, guys," Janice remembers calling. She tried the door, but it was locked. Next to the door were some blinds hanging over a glass panel. Janice peeked through and saw Michael and his friend on the floor, kissing.

She ran across the house to her bathroom. She thought she was going to vomit. She wanted to scream but could only sob, so uncontrollably that when she called Michael's father, he thought Michael had been killed in a car wreck. Somehow Janice still went to church that morning, where she broke down and told a friend that she'd discovered her son lying with another male.

For the next month, Janice barely slept. At work, she'd be shuffling papers at her desk and become choked with emotion. The vision of Michael on the floor haunted her. As the shock eased, she launched into action. She walked around Michael's room reading passages from the Bible, forcing Michael to listen. She researched Exodus International, the Christian organization that says it can "cure" homosexuals.

To Hull's credit, she does portray certain rare instances of Christian tolerance. After discovering that her son was gay, Janice Shackleford

Called her insurance company and requested the name of a Christian counselor. To her amazement, the Christian counselor didn't tell Michael that homosexuality was wrong. Janice found a second counselor. This one said that he couldn't be "pro or con" when it came to homosexuality. She felt as though the mental health industry was against her until someone gave her the book "Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth," which asserts that gay activists successfully pressured the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality as a mental illness from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Suddenly, Janice realized why she'd hit so many roadblocks. "The gay movement had gone into the politics and changed everything," she says. "Now it's not even a disease or sickness."

No one seemed to understand that Michael's eternal life was at stake. Janice feared that Michael would go to hell and be apart from her in the afterlife. "I'm afraid I won't see him again," she says, her voice breaking.

This passage elegantly shows how intense homophobia can co-exist with unconditional love. Only by understanding this relationship better can we hope to overcome the tragedy and heartbreak that such homophobia generates.

I hope that the next three installments in the WaPo series demonstrate more of this sort of sensitivity towards the complex motives behind homophobia.
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# Posted 7:41 PM by David Adesnik  

BRODER'S HEAD BURIED IN THE SAND: I thought I really liked where this column was heading:

We don't yet know who will win the 2004 election, but we know who has lost it. The American news media have been clobbered...

It is hard to overcome the sense that the professional practices and code of responsibility in journalism have suffered a body blow. After almost a half-century in this business, I certainly feel a sense of shame and embarrassment at our performance...

The common feature -- and the disturbing fact -- is that none of these
damaging failures would have occurred had senior journalists not been blind to the fact that the standards in their organizations were being fatally compromised.

And then somehow, Broder manages to blame the failure of his fellow journalists on the bloggers and the politicians:

As the path from the White House and political campaigns to the slots as TV anchor or interviewer or op-ed columnist or editor was trod by more and more people, the message to aspiring young journalists was clear. The way to the top of journalism was no longer to test yourself on police beats and city hall assignments, under the skeptical gaze of editors who demanded precision in writing and careful weighing of evidence. It was to make a reputation as a clever wordsmith, a feisty advocate, a belligerent or beguiling political personality, and then market yourself to the media...

When the Internet opened the door to scores of "journalists" who had no allegiance at all to the skeptical and self-disciplined ethic of professional news gathering, the bars were already down in many old-line media organizations. That is how it happened that old pros such as Dan Rather and former New York Times editor Howell Raines got caught up in this fevered atmosphere and let their standards slip.

Wow. Let me repeat that: Wow. Is Broder really saying that bloggers helped create the atmosphere in which "old pros" like Rather and Raines decided to compromise their standards? I could swear that it was the "skeptical" and perhaps even "self-disciplined" bloggers who helped expose Rather's incompetence/prejudice.

Memo to all (self-)important journalists: You can insult us all you want and tell us that we don't belong to your profession (perhaps because most of us don't get paid.) But your accusations will become more and more pathetic if we keep exposing your failures, instead of vice versa.
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# Posted 7:32 PM by David Adesnik  

OSAMA WOULD VOTE FOR BUSH: Michael Kinsley must be running out of original ideas. Do we really need another anti-Bush pundit speculating without evidence that the war in Iraq was the best thing for Al Qaeda since sliced bread?

Kinsley is right about how ridiculous it is for (certain) Republicans to insist that Osama would vote for Kerry. And he comes close to being really right when quotes Dennis Hastert's comment about Osama's preferences that "I don't have data or intelligence to tell me one thing or another."

If you want to know who Osama would vote for, then ask yourself this: Who would Hitler vote for in the next Israeli election? Labor or Likud? A religious candidate or a secular one?

Answer: The question itself is ridiculous. The United States and Al Qaeda are going to continue their fight to the death regardless of who wins in November.
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# Posted 3:23 PM by Patrick Belton  

ACADEMIC, CHORISTER, SPY: Robin Burk remembers Beate Ruhm von Oppen, her former teacher. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:17 AM by Patrick Belton  

BUT IF I GIVE YOU A BAR OF... CHOCOLATE WILL YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? The Church of England to offer a bar of chocolate to each person attending services. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:32 AM by David Adesnik  

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE: Pejman is such a hopeless romantic.
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# Posted 2:06 AM by David Adesnik  

SECOND TIME AS FARCE: Last month, Laura Rozen & Co. published a fascinating article about the efforts of Iran-Contra impresario Manucher Ghorbanifar to hijack U.S.-Iranian relations once again. What I find most amazing is that anyone at the Pentagon would trust a pathological liar (see here for details) who already came close to bringing down one Republican administration.
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# Posted 1:51 AM by David Adesnik  

THE AFGHAN MEME: Suddenly, there is a spreading wave of optimism about a nation most of us had given up for lost. Leading the charge is Peter Bergen, whose liberal credentials force you to take his optimism seriously (although MY raises some concerns about the accuracy of his report). One also has to give credit to OxBlog's most excellent correspondent in Kabul, whose first-hand observations have garnered the attention of Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, and the National Review.

My gut instinct is that this is all too good to be true. But that's all I have to go on. Just like everyone else, I've paid a lot more attention to Iraq than I have to Afghanistan. At first blush, the impending success of the Afghan presidential elections seems like a major victory for George W. Bush. But what does it say about this administration or about the United States that things are far better off in the country where we only have a handful of troops and have kept a much lower profile throughout the occupation?

With the benefit of hindsight, we'll probably realize that Afghanistan was simply much closer to being "ready" for democracy than Iraq. For some reason, the warlords and the heroin trafficking and the ethnic divisions didn't wreck the occupation. Even so, the prospect of success in Afghanistan only underlines how violent Iraq has become.

UPDATE: Brian Ulrich isn't so optimistic about the upcoming Afghan election.
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# Posted 1:46 AM by David Adesnik  

BUT CAN HE WALK THE WALK? Iyad Allawi can definitely talk the talk. I just wish I could believe what he's saying. Then again, if I were Prime Minister of Iraq and I saw George Bush way ahead in the polls, I would also say exactly what he wants to hear.
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# Posted 1:40 AM by David Adesnik  

DIVORCING THE SECURITY MOMS: Noam Scheiber explains how the mainstream media ignored the evidence and created a meme. You know, Scheiber really ought to show a little more respect for his professional colleagues. Otherwise, they may start suspecting that he is a blogger.
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# Posted 1:28 AM by David Adesnik  

MEA CULPA (SORT OF): Jay Rosen takes a closer look at CBS's plans to investigate itself.
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# Posted 1:20 AM by David Adesnik  

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY: Apparently, that's Al Qaeda's new strategy. The LA Times also insists very forcefully that Muslim outrage at the invasion of Iraq has created a new generation of terrorists. That's a respectable hypothesis, but every time I hear it I want to know why the invasion of Iraq was so different from the invasion of Afghanistan.

If Muslims -- especially Arabs -- tend to believe that the Mossad and the CIA were responsible for September 11th, why was the invasion of Afghanistan any less provocative than the invasion of Iraq? Are Muslims and Arabs so committed to upholding international law that they will murder Turkish, Iraqi and Indonesian civilians in order to vent their outrage?

What I'm getting at, of course, is that American journalists project their own moral judgments onto the behavior Arab and Muslim terrorists. It is possible, of course, that Arabs and Muslims did perceive the invasion of Iraq as a uniquely offensive act. But if so, why? And what is the evidence?
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# Posted 11:11 PM by David Adesnik  

REAPING THE REWARDS OF MULTILATERALISM: David Brooks savages the United Nations (and especially the Security Council) for its apathetic, lackluster and selfish response to the massacres/genocide in Darfur.

According to Brooks, the irony here is that George Bush has played by all the rules of the multilateral game with regard to Sudan, but still can't get the UN do anything about the problem.

But there is another irony here as well. If lackluster intelligence hadn't led the United States to invade Iraq, it could now assemble a coalition of the willing to stop the genocide in Sudan (as it did in Kosovo), thus vindicating all of those unilateralists who insisted that the United Nations lacked the moral authority to stop the United States from invading Iraq.
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# Posted 7:09 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT WENT WRONG IN IRAQ: Of all those following the occupation closely, I may have been the last to read Larry Diamond's thoughtful essay on Iraq in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

FYI, Diamond is a full professor at Stanford and probably the world's foremost authority on democratization in the developing world. Diamond was also an adviser to the CPA who spent an extensive amount of time in Iraq. (Apparently, not all of the CPA's advisers were neo-conservative ideologues from AEI.)

I'm not familiar with Diamond's most recent work, but I read numerous publications of his (and even met the good professor in person) while working at the Carnegie Endowment almost five years ago. Diamond's most important work is probably Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. It is a comprehenisve survey of the literature on democratization, which (IMHO) puts slightly too much emphasis on the importance of economic factors.

The main argument of Diamond's essay in Foreign Affairs is twofold. First of all, we didn't put enough boots on the ground. Second of all, we didn't do enough to build up the interim government's legitimacy. Diamond writes that:

In truth, around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq largely secure after the war. But doing so would also have required different kinds of troops, with different rules of engagement. The coalition should have deployed vastly more military police and other troops trained for urban patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace maintenance and enforcement. Tens of thousands of soldiers with sophisticated monitoring equipment should have been
posted along the borders with Syria and Iran to intercept the flows of foreign terrorists, Iranian intelligence agents, money, and weapons.

But Washington failed to take such steps, for the same reasons it
decided to occupy Iraq with a relatively light force: hubris and ideology. Contemptuous of the State Department's regional experts who were seen as too "soft" to remake Iraq, a small group of Pentagon officials ignored the elaborate postwar planning the State Department had overseen through its "Future of Iraq" project, which had anticipated many of the problems that emerged after the invasion. Instead of preparing for the worst, Pentagon planners assumed that
Iraqis would joyously welcome U.S. and international troops as liberators.

There is no question in my mind that we needed to go in with a lot more troops. I'm just not sure that "hubris and ideology" are the reasons we didn't. With the army struggling to maintain the current force level of approximately 150,000, one has to wonder whether we even have another 150,000 troops.

It is also important to remember that in March of 2003, there was a major conflict within the Pentagon about the size of the invasion force necessary to overwhelm Iraq. If Rumsfeld admitted that Shinseki was right about the need for an occupation force of 300,000, then Rumsfeld would've had to abandon his ambitious plan to demonstrate that a lighter, faster invasion force could win the race to Baghdad.

With regard to the CPA's strategy for restoring security, Diamond writes that:

The occupation compounded its original errors of analysis with two
strategic miscalculations. First, it launched a de-Baathification campaign that was much too broad, excluding from any meaningful role in the future state anyone who had held any kind of high-level position in the party, regardless of whether they were directly involved in serious crimes. And the most aggressive and politically ambitious advocate of radical de-Baathification, the controversial Ahmed Chalabi, was put in charge of the program.

The second mistake was made in May 2003, when, as one of his first official acts, Bremer ordered the dissolution of the Iraqi army. The army had already collapsed and scattered at the end of the invasion, and intensive vetting of its officer corps would have been necessary before it could have served any positive function in the new Iraqi state. Still, by formally dissolving it, the CPA lost the opportunity to reconstitute some portions of it to help restore order, and it left tens of thousands of armed soldiers and officers cut out of the new order and prime candidates for recruitment by the insurgency.

Emphasizing Bremer's premature decision to dissolve the Iraqi army is one of the most common criticisms of the CPA. But how much difference is there between "reconstitut[ing] some portions" of the old Iraqi army and inviting old soldiers to join the new, de-Ba'athified Iraqi armed forces?

On the related issue of de-Ba'athfication, does the available intelligence indicate that a significant number of "good" ex-Ba'athtists chose to join the insurgency because of Bremer's decision to take a hardline? Or are the Ba'athist elements within the insurgency just Saddam loyalists who never would have been acceptable to the CPA?

As for Chalabi, there are no excuses to make on the Pentagon's behalf. Yet when comes to explaining the current surge of violence in Iraq, focusing on Chalabi isn't all that useful. His advocates at the Pentagon gave up on him months and months ago.

On the issue of legitimacy, Diamond observes that

Washington should have done two things to fill [the legitimacy] gap: increased international participation in the political administration of the country (although this would have been difficult given international opposition to the war), and put legitimate Iraqi leaders in visible, meaningful governance roles as soon as possible.

The most straightforward way to do this would have been to hold
elections.

Yet:

The experience of other postwar transitions, however, counseled strongly against a rapid move to national elections. With no electoral register, no administrative framework to organize balloting, no electoral rules, and no time or space for new political parties to emerge and mobilize, early national elections (any time within the first year of occupation) could well have precipitated a disastrous slide toward violence and polarization-even civil war. And they would likely have been swept in the south by Islamist parties, which
enjoyed the huge initial advantage of having pre-existing organizations built up either underground or in exile in Iran.

In other words, Bremer and Bush correctly chose the lesser of two evils. Besides, is there any reason to believe that either the Sadrite or Sunni insurgency has gained momentum because the United States waited too long to hold elections? If anything, the insurgents' strength reflects numerous Iraqis' fear of a democratic order. Whereas the Sunnis fear the emergence of a Shi'ite majority, the Sadrists fear that democracy is incompatible with fundamentalist Islam.

The rest of Diamond's essay focuses on the conflicts of interest that prevented both the Interim Governing Council (IGC) and (after June 28, 2003) Iyad Allawi's "sovereign" government from achieving greater legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi public. However, the relationship between this lack of legitimacy and the growing strength of the insurgents seems tangential at best.

Mostly, Diamond's account focuses on the objections that the Shi'ite majority and the Kurdish minority have had to the IGC and its successor. Diamond also describes the lackluster public relations campaign that enabled the critics of Allawi's government to damage its popularity. But the Kurds and the Shi'ites are not the problem in Iraq. And I suspect that even the most effective public relations campaign could not have won over the Sunni insurgents.

The questions I want answered are economic and military. First of all, to what degree has the economic chaos in Iraq reinforced popular support for the Sunni insurgents? Alternatively, is the insurgents' success a purely military phenomenon? With a secure base of operations in Fallujah and other cities west of Baghdad, the insurgents may now be able to plan far more elaborate and ambitious operations.

It is with these questions in mind that I will turn to Anthony Cordesman's 108 page report on reconstruction.
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# Posted 4:16 PM by David Adesnik  

CLIMBING BACK IN THE SADDLE: I haven't written much about Iraq in a while, which is unfortunate given that it is far and away the most urgent challenge facing the United States as well as the most important issue in this election other than 'character'.

To be sure, my unending such for a reliable used car has gotten in the way. But I also think that I have been avoiding the issue because the news coming out Iraq is so bad and because I have invested so much of credibility in a more positive outcome. On a related note, I've fallen an entire month behind on my "Accountability Watch" posts, probably because they will compel me to go back over all of my optimistic posts about Iraq from last fall.

For the moment, I guess what I'll do is just post a couple of the pessimist/realist arguments that have been getting me down, so I'll have a starting point for my own further research. Kevin Drum asks:

Is George Bush in "fantasyland" regarding Iraq, as John Kerry says? I
realize that's the fashionable position among lefty partisans, but it's honestly hard to come to any other conclusion these days...

So now we're on Plan D, a feebly disguised version of Plan C: the elections will proceed as scheduled and that will fix everything. It's unlikely that anyone below the level of cabinet secretary actually believes this, but it's impossible to say so because there's an election coming up. An American election, that is.

That election, and the political considerations that go along with it, have been driving our military strategy for the past two years. Before the war, we passed up a chance to take out terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi — for political reasons. We invaded with too few troops — for political reasons. We lowballed the cost of the war — for political reasons. We ignored the UN and then turned around and pleaded for their help — for political reasons. Then we installed Iyad Allawi as president behind the UN's back — for political reasons.

And just recently we've learned that the Marines were yo-yoed
in and out of Fallujah — for political reasons. The president has bizarrely dismissed his own intelligence agencies' analysis of Iraq as "guessing" — for political reasons. He's ignored the advice of his own generals about troop requirements for the upcoming elections — for political reasons. And assaults on Baathist enclaves have been postponed until December — for fairly obvious political reasons.

Responding to one of my recent posts, Matt Yglesias writes that:

What David's missing is that a democratic outcome for Iraq in the medium term is off the table. The question is how long will US forces continue to be engaged on Iyad Allawi's side in the Iraqi Civil War not whether or not we'll stay the course until we generate a democracy.

Soon after the January 20 Inauguration Day we're going to have some
fraudulent elections in Iraq which will return a National Assembly composed of roughly the same elements as the present Interim Government -- i.e., Baathists who became dissilusioned with Saddam before the war, a couple of varieties of Shiite fundamentalist, the Kurdish parties, and a smattering of Communists. These folks will face, throughout 2005, the following dilemma. The longer US
forces remain in Iraq the more dissilusioned the Iraqi populace will grow with their regime and the more support the armed opposition (i.e., the Sadr Movement and whatever we care to call the Sunni insurgency) will gain as the authentic voice of (Arab) Iraqi nationalism. On the other hand, the sooner US forces leave, the sooner the government (along with the militias of pro-government parties) will need to stand on their own against the armed opposition.

For the moment, I'm so behind on the issue that I really don't have much to say in response. The best I can do is cite a recent Fareed Zakaria column on the subject, a column that is more optimistic than one might expect from someone who writes books about democracy promotion is bound to fail. Here's Zakaria:

But for all its resilience, the insurgency has not spread across the
country, nor is it likely to. Its appeal has clear limits. While it has
drawn some support from all Iraqis because of its anti-American character, the insurgency is essentially a Sunni movement, fueled by the anger of Iraq's once-dominant community, which now fears the future. It is not supported by the Shiites or the Kurds. (The Shiite radical Sadr has been careful not to align himself too closely with the insurgency, for fear of losing support among the Shiites.) This is what still makes me believe that Iraq is not Vietnam. There, the Viet Cong and their northern sponsors both appealed to a broad nationalism
that much of the country shared.

Hence the temptations of a "Shiite strategy." Such an approach
would view the Sunni areas in Iraq as hopeless until an Iraqi army could go in and establish control. It would ensure that the Shiite community, as well as the Kurds, remained supportive of Allawi's government and of the upcoming elections. It would attempt to hold elections everywhere -- but if they could not be held in the Sunni areas, elections would go forward anyway. That would isolate the
Sunni problem and leave it to be dealt with when forces become
available...

In Iraq the one truly pleasant surprise so far is that there has been
little religious and ethnic bloodshed. Many of the experts who counseled against an invasion predicted that after Hussein's fall, the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds would tear each other apart. Nothing like this has happened. The problems -- of resistance, nationalism and anti-Americanism -- have been quite different. But the balance is fragile. If the United States and the Iraqi government played a
sectarian strategy, things could unravel.

Zakaria's column sums up the basic logic on which my optimism has always rested: that the American plan for holding elections advanced the most fundamental interest of Iraq's Shi'ite majoirty. That is why Ayatollah Sistani favors elections and why he and other influential Shi'ites have helped the United States confront Moktada Sadr. If Iraq turns out to have even a semblance of democracy 18 months from now, it will be because the interests of the United States and the Shi'ite majority have overlapped throughout the occupation.

The most important unanswered questions now are whether credible elections can be held with minimal or no Sunni participation and whether the Allawi government can expected to run the process fairly. I guess all we can do for the moment is hope.
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# Posted 9:17 AM by Patrick Belton  

KOL NIDRE WATCH: The haunting melody has echoes in the Catholic plainsong; both are thought to derive from the eleventh century and the singing school at St Gall, with the affecting sighing introductory falling and rising affixed by some unknown southern German hazzan in the mediaeval period. Read more here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

ON A SOMEWHAT LESS elevated plane, Sebastian Horsley manages to begin an essay in the Observer with the sentence, 'I remember the first time I had sex - I still have the receipt.' (It's downhill rather quickly from there.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

OAKESHOTT VERSUS BERLIN: Noel Malcolm compares them side by side. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

POLITICAL SCIENCE MERCIFULLY NOT THE ONLY BUNK SCIENCE WATCH: Howard Garb, one of the coauthors of "What's Wrong with the Rorschach?" and the head of psychological testing for the United States Air Force, argues that in over 30 Rorschach studies, the famed inkblot tests have a marked tendency to label healthy people as seriously mentally ill. In one 2000 study, for example, 100 mentally sound schoolchildren were given the Rorschach and the majority received scores indicating they were borderline psychotic. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:44 PM by Patrick Belton  

IT'S ALMOST SUNDOWN HERE, so to all of our Jewish friends, we wish a very gentle fast. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:28 PM by Patrick Belton  

FOOTNOTE IN HISTORY: This week, incidentally, is the anniversary of the death of Göran Kropp of Sweden, who bicycled to Mount Everest from his home in Sweden, summitted the mountain without the aid of oxygen tanks or assistance, and then cycled back to Sweden with his gear. He was, the history books record, the first person to do so. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

THIS GUY flew around the world in a single-engine Cessna turboprop. It sounds like fun. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE ALL-IMPORTANT ELECTIONS: In Afghanistan, not the United States. Our swashbuckling Afghan correspondent delves into admirable detail:

A quick update on the imminent elections – the October ones, not the November ones. The last few months have been a thrilling and astonishing time for Afghanistan. A Karzai victory remains the most likely outcome on October 9, but the implications of that victory look rather different now than they did at the beginning of the year.

First: the clear losers of this election are the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and rebels against the Kabul government. With just over two weeks remaining before the Afghan presidential elections, the malcontents have already lost. For months, they have threatened to create a generalized atmosphere of fear in which no one would dare go to the polls. It is safe to say that they have failed. They failed to prevent mass voter registration; the murders of many brave election workers did not deter millions of Afghans from registering for the vote (some more than once, but that’s another story). The handful of explosions and attacks that the Afghan insurgents have managed in the last few weeks are pitiful in comparison to (say) the daily uproar in Iraq. And they have run out of time. Whatever atrocities they manage to commit in the coming days, it is hard to imagine anything dramatic enough to deter more than a handful of likely voters. Another bomb or two before October 9 is not going to do the trick. The insurgents simply cannot affect enough of the country to manage widespread voter intimidation.

By contrast, President Hamid Karzai has been breathtakingly aggressive and effective over the last two months. On July 7, I wrote that the most powerful man in the Kabul government was widely perceived to be Defense Minister Fahim, the chief Panjshiri Tajik warlord. I argued that the central government was stronger than it was given credit for – that it had in fact been expanding its power in the face of various regional warlords – but that its achievements strengthened Marshal Fahim and the Panjshiris, not Karzai and his technocrats.

How much can change in a few weeks. On July 26, at the last minute before declaring his candidacy, Karzai dramatically broke with Fahim and dropped him from his Vice Presidential slot. He replaced Fahim with Ahmad Zia Massoud, ambassador to Russia and brother of the late Panjshiri hero Ahmad Shah Massoud – probably the only Tajik who for sheer symbolic value comes close to matching Fahim as an electoral asset. (It also helps that Massoud is reportedly backed by former President Rabbani, who retains a considerable political base among northeastern Tajiks). Kabul braced for a confrontation, as troops supportive of Fahim gathered in the streets of the capital. But NATO, forewarned by Karzai, also had tanks in the streets to deter the Defense Minister’s loyalists from any rash action. Fahim merely stated that he was disappointed and would support his Northern Alliance comrade, Education Minister Yunus Qanuni, in his hastily-declared candidacy for President.

The message of the demotion was clear: Karzai intends to run a government that is not beholden to any of the major warlords. (Or rather, a government beholden to Zalmay Khalilzad, American ambassador and arguably the country’s foremost warlord). Karzai then proceeded to directly challenge the most recalcitrant and independent regional governor, Ismael Khan of the western province of Herat. Here again, he replaced a hero of the jihad with a civilian former ambassador (Khairkawa, former envoy to Iran and Ukraine). And so far, this move also appears to be successful.

If you’d asked me back in July which warlord Karzai should take by the horns, I certainly wouldn’t have recommended Ismael Khan. Khan has kept the Kabul government at arm’s length since the fall of the Taliban, building an autonomous western fief with Iranian support. He only reluctantly yielded to Karzai a share of the customs income from Afghanistan’s border posts with Iran and Turkmenistan. He’s prickly, has a loyal following in Herat, and was one of the warlords least receptive to the disarmament process. Of all the regional commanders, I would have judged Ismael Khan one of the most likely to resist his demotion by all means, up to and including armed force.

However, he was genuinely weakened by a bout of fighting in Herat province in August. He was attacked by a rival warlord, Amanullah, who rallied the ethnic Pashtuns of southern Herat and marched on the provincial capital. In the past, Amanullah has demanded that a Pashtun-majority province be carved out of Herat; his assault on Ismael Khan reportedly had the support of at least one or two Pashtun ministers in Kabul, along with the governor of neighboring Ghor province. Karzai and the Americans condemned the attack, negotiated a truce, and flew in a couple of Afghan National Army battalions to keep the peace.

At this point, Karzai determined to remove both battling warlords from the picture. Amanullah was whisked off to Kabul and quietly placed under house arrest. And on September 11, Karzai “promoted” Ismael Khan to lead the national Ministry of Mines and Industry – a mild insult to a man who had previously been offered a Vice Presidency and the Interior Ministry. Ismael Khan accepted his replacement as governor of Herat, but declined the ministerial position, stating that he was not qualified and preferred to stay in his home city to serve the people.

As news of his dismissal spread, riots ensued and several NGO offices in Herat were burned down. I heard a harrowing story from an expat who worked at the UN office in Herat; he spent September 12 in hiding, moving from cellar to cellar one step ahead of the mob, and finally escaped with only his passport, digital camera, and the clothes on his back. Yet though the riots were terrifying at first hand, they did not amount to any sort of armed rebellion against the new governor. Peace was quickly restored, and has been holding up for the last couple weeks. Governor Khairkawa has stated that genuine disarmament of all militias in the province will be his top priority (for his own good, it had better be). Ismael Khan has suggested that after the election, he might accept a Kabul ministerial post if offered one for which he is qualified. It seems entirely possible that Karzai will succeed in moving one of the toughest warlords into retirement.

And so we come to the election. Some chaos and ballot-rigging can be expected from local commanders (both loyal to and opposed to Karzai), and there are probably more voter registration cards than voters floating around out there, but hopefully not enough to invalidate the overall result. First votes are always sloppy, especially in post-conflict areas, but the practice of democracy has to begin somewhere. As for the likely outcome, Charney Research carried out a remarkable Afghan national poll this spring which should be required reading for amateur Afghanistan psephologists. Methodologically, it’s as solid as one could hope for (their sample was actually gender-representative, 50-50). It suggests that Hamid Karzai is popular throughout the country, not just in Pashtun-majority areas. Outside the south and Herat, he’s extraordinarily well-liked. The jihadi leaders (warlords) are far less popular – only in Panjshir, where they benefit from the aura of the martyred Massoud, are they at all well-regarded. Afghans plan to vote in great numbers, and expect the vote to make a difference. The majority of women expect to vote, and are even more favorably inclined toward Karzai than are the men. Nothing is certain, but a Karzai victory (always likely) is by far the most probable outcome next month.

What then? Though I can’t help cheering the extraordinary daring, speed, and skill with which Karzai has taken on the warlords over the last few months, I’m still concerned by the Kabul government’s drive to centralize power. Back in July I wrote that removing Fahim as Defense Minister and expanding the disarmament program “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.” Much will depend on what alternatives the victorious Karzai ends up offering warlords like Fahim and Ismael Khan. These men could still render their regions of the country ungovernable if they do not consider cooperation with Kabul worthwhile. And if more of the regional warlords began to resist the government, we would quickly feel the inadequacy of the troop numbers which America and its allies have thus far committed to Afghanistan.

But the political skill demonstrated by Karzai since July, and the popularity he clearly possesses, are reason for optimism. Afghans themselves are optimistic. The country has passed its major political challenges reasonably well since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 – forming a transitional cabinet, drafting and approving a constitution, maintaining a steady civilian government in Kabul. The next milestone, Afghanistan’s first free presidential election in over a decade, also looks to be a qualified success. For now, that’s quite an achievement.

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# Posted 4:45 PM by Patrick Belton  

TELLING STATISTIC: According to figures released today, in the past year in Northern Ireland over 1,200 people were intimidated into leaving their homes by paramilitary violence. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:45 PM by Patrick Belton  

FRANK FUREDI calls for a culture war. Against pop culture, that is. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:43 PM by Patrick Belton  

OPEN DEMOCRACY hosts an interesting debate between a European and an American on which model is better. Except this time, the European is defending the American model, and the American is speaking out for the European. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:22 PM by Patrick Belton  

YOU CAME, YOU SAW, you checked out the counter at the bottom and helped us turn one million. And four of you even sent us in screenshots to prove it. So I say, Jacob Kaufman, Scott Wickstein, Alexander Sudnik, and Darren whatever the heck your last name is, all of you get Oxford bookmarks with our gratitude (small print: bookmarks are liable to be replaced with shot glasses, master's degrees, or whatever else turns out to be fairly cheap at the bookstore).

As Jacob (not the one from Democratic Underground, but a homonym) says,

Dear OxBlog,
I am not the millionth reader. Nor am I even the million-and-first reader. But I am the one-million-three-hundred-and-eightyth reader. I realize that there are 758 readers closer to a million then me. I am betting that their desire for bumper stickers is not as great as mine and that they will have forgotten about the contest.

Thanks, everyone, for helping us turn a million! (Josh and David wouldn't let me say 'thanks a million', unfortunately....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:02 PM by Patrick Belton  

WATCHA DOIN' SATURDAY? (ed: starving) If you're in New York, why don't you go protest against some mullahs? A number of friends of a free Iran will be protesting Saturday between 5 and 7 pm at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, at 47th and 2nd Avenue. The protest is timed to coincide with a gala which the Iranian ambassador will be throwing on behalf of foreign minister Kharazzi. Our Iranian student friends ask what the party's all about:

Is it for the murder of another American citizen beheaded by the terrorists that are supported by the Mullahs?

Is it for the death of another US Service member blown to bits by the explosives supplied by the Mullahs?

Is it for hanging of that outspoken sixteen year old girl who refused to become the temporary wife of a "religious" judge who personally fixed the noose around her neck?

Or is it to congratulate the Mullahs for bringing the oppressed nation of Iran much closer to a catastrophic confrontation with the free world by stepping up their dangerous nuclear dare game?

Whatever the reason for that hosting may be, Javad Zarif and gang should not be let to have a merry old time as if everything is fine and dandy.

Hey, this is New York after all. You've gotta figure, these guys are at least as bad as Republicans.

So, go! Take pictures! Send them in! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

SO WHAT'S GOING ON IN THE WORLD: Note, this briefing is especially designed for those of our readers who have locked themselves into closets (though closets with Microsoft Windows) in order to write their long-overdue thesis and return to the good graces of their department and humanity. Moving right along...

Nato has agreed to expand its involvement in Iraq, over resistance from Germany and France. Its training mission geared toward training Iraqi security officers will expand from 50 to roughly 300 personnel. (Reportedly, Nato staffers have also eagerly offered to donate the massive 'death star' sculpture gracing the alliance's headquarters in Brussels; no word over whether the sovereign Iraqi government would reject the present outright, or simply try to discreetly sell it on eBay.)

Syria (seeking to remove itself from the "to-do" list of a putative second Bush term...) has agreed to cooperate with the United States and Iraq in stemming the flow of terrorists and funds across the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Russia and China are engaged in talks connected with Russia's bid to join the WTO, and China's efforts to secure a steady supply of Russian oil for its quickly growing economy as well as for the super-super-deep fried General Tso's chicken at Wok Around the Clock....

Musharaff has made an overture to Indian PM Singh for a final status agreement on Kashmir, at the second day of the UN General Assembly session.

Japan believes that North Korea may be preparing to test a short-range ballistic missile, with troops and equipment redoubling around the country's missile launch bases.

Nigeria is attempting to create a role for itself in mobilising an African Union response to ending the genocide in western Sudan, but is indicating the AU would require hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out a peacekeeping role.

And finally, to answer your 'what's going on in ungoverned swaths of the Sahara desert today?' questions... As part of the US-Trans Sahara Counter Terrorist Initiative, American Marines have trained a counterterror force in Niger to operate against Al Qa'eda-linked militants in ungoverned swaths of the Sahara desert. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:09 AM by David Adesnik  

NEO-SWING STATES: Why are Wisconsin and Minnesota now up for grabs? TNR explains. And why does it matter? Because,

Even if Bush loses Wisconsin and Minnesota this year, just being competitive is enough to significantly tilt the balance of power in a presidential election. "Every day that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were in Minnesota, they weren't in Florida," the then-mayor of St. Paul, Norm Coleman, proclaimed to a crowd in 2000. This year, it's the same story--while Kerry was spending time with farmers in rural Wisconsin and unemployed Iron Belt factory workers in northern Minnesota, he wasn't in any of the other swing states he desperately needs to capture.

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# Posted 1:05 AM by David Adesnik  

SHERLOCK WIZBANG? Kevin Aylward puts two and two together. It seems like another blow has been struck by the Google-blogger alliance.
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# Posted 1:02 AM by David Adesnik  

NO SUCH THING AS BAD PUBLICITY: I just came across a nasty profile of James Taranto in New York magazine. In a brilliant display of post-modern irony, the profile's author mounts a one-sided and partisan attack against Taranto for being too one-sided and partisan.

Anyhow, I like Taranto so I enjoyed reading about him regardless of what the article said. And there were definitely some interesting tidbits about James' resume, such as the fact that he got his start in journalism working on a newspaper distributed by the homeless. See, even the Wall Street Journal has a heart!
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# Posted 6:58 PM by David Adesnik  

IT'S AMAZING HOW FAR SOME PEOPLE WILL GO to persuade you that imaginary countries like Niue actually exist. Apparently, Patrick & Steve have even inserted a Niue page into the CIA World Fact Book.
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# Posted 6:33 PM by David Adesnik  

IN WASHINGTON, CHIRAC SAID:

I have come to tell you that we continue to uphold the same ideals of freedom, to be driven by the same will, to face the dangers that confront us all together: terrorism, war, hunger, poverty, new diseases, drugs, and yet other dangers. In the face of so many trials, so many threats, we are resolved, as you are yourselves, to go on fighting and affirm the importance of our ideals. We are side by side in all these great struggles.

That is an exact quote of what M. Chirac said...on March 31, 1987. For his part, Ronald Reagan reminded the assembled guests that war never solved anything:

Lady Liberty, as magnificent as she is, would be nothing but an empty symbol had not the American and the French peoples, time and again, joined together in moments of peril, joined together in common sacrifice to preserve and defend freedom itself. Three years ago I stood on the windy beaches of Normandy and, as Frenchmen and Americans, recalled together the most perilous days of the Second World War. And this spring Americans will join in celebrating the 70th anniversary of the arrival in France of the American expeditionary force of World War I. Indeed, Mr. Prime Minister, from Yorktown to Belleau Wood, from Normandy to Beirut, Frenchmen and Americans have stood together and, yes, died together in the name of peace and freedom.

OK, so maybe I mischaracterized Reagan's statement a bit. Whatever. Finally, here is an interesting passage from M. Chirac's toast during the State Dinner held in his honor at the White House:

France is more than an ally; France is a faithful friend. America is
sometimes convinced that she is insufficiently loved and does not always, however, set sufficient store by the intensity of France's feelings for America. These feelings are not only the result of the trials we have always borne side by side. They are not solely due to the fact that we share the same values: liberty...

Finally, one cannot forget the French people's unanimous agreement not to give in to terrorist blackmail and remain in adversity, one and
determined.

The funny thing about all of this is that France & Co. spent most of the 1980's ridiculing the ignorant cowboy in the White House whose middle initial was 'W'. (Yes, his name was Ronald Wilson Reagan.) But things got better as tensions with the Soviet Union relaxed. So I guess Bush could hold some sort of summit with Saddam...
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# Posted 3:16 PM by Patrick Belton  

STEVE'S INVESTIGATIVE POST about Niue goes some considerable way toward explaining this guy on their website.

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# Posted 3:01 PM by Patrick Belton  

CHARTER SCHOOLS: The New Democrat-aligned PPI has released two reports recently assessing charter public schools and their performance, in New York City and in Indianapolis. Lessons learned: (1) these schools do best when public officials adopt an active approach to engaging in recruiting qualified applicants to run charter schools and engage thereafter in ensuring their success, rather than viewing themselves as neutral arbiters whose role is limited to accepting or rejecting applications. (2) they also do best when public officials evaluate their performance along comprehensive and measurable criteria and publicise their performance to citizens. (3) charter schools are often at a funding disadvantage compared with public schools, particularly in the start-up phase; cities such as Indianapolis have raised the success rate of charters by creating a facilities fund to remedy this financial gap. In New York, they enjoy broad political support (including, extraordinarily, from teachers unions), but changes in statutes are neccessary in order to remedy funding and other disadvantages. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:52 AM by David Adesnik  

LESSONS FROM THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR:

So, friends and neighbors, salute Halley's comet. Salute that space shot to ``U-ra-nus'' -- I'm too old-fashioned to call it ``Ur-a-nus.'' [Laughter]

That's from Reagan's speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in January 1986. Maybe if there were a little more potty-mouth humor in politics today, we could ratchet down the level of tension a little. Of course, things can get out of control when you have a President named Bush.
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# Posted 8:01 AM by Patrick Belton  

IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME: OxBlog is, as our readers know, a big fan of the classics. We're also big fans of geeky things you can do with the internet. So it's only natural that we'd share with our readers the debut of a website collecting online the complete texts of several leading classical Greek grammars and other supplementary materials (note: something to do on Friday nights!). The online offerings include free electronic versions of North and Hillard's classic Greek Prose Composition as well as a handbook by two teachers at Boston Latin. And speaking of Latin, the National Endowment for the Humanities has funded the transcription on another website of Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, another classic of classics. Fun for hours! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

TEAM OXBLOG: Incidentally, in the Department of Big Mistakes and Bad Life Decisions, I'm just signing up for the Paris marathon April 10th - not to run it at all for time, but just to look at the pretty Paris. Should any of our readers be willing to commit an equally big mistake in judgment, please do just let me know, and we can have a team OxBlog running down the Champs Élysée.

Less ambitious readers can join OxFriend Kristin in the support vehicle and spray us with water as we go. You'd still get to come to the OxBistro with us afterwards.

(Note, though, that the rules explicitly do not permit a refund in the event of 'an accident or illness resulting from the explosion of a device or part of a device designed to explode following the transmutation of an atomic nucleus or core'. So don't say we didn't warn you!). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:51 AM by Patrick Belton  

SHLOMO BEN AMI, a thoughtful and perceptive Israeli statesman who has spoken here at Oxford on numerous occasions, pens a piece today in Haaretz making the case for an international peacekeeping presence in Gaza. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:05 AM by David Adesnik  

IF YOU ARE OPPOSED TO GAY MARRIAGE, then don't click here.
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# Posted 12:58 AM by David Adesnik  

IS BUSH NATURALLY RIGHT? John C. from Innocents Abroad highly recommends UVA prof Jim Ceaser's essay on George Bush's surprising embrace of a philosophy of natural right(s) long associated with progressive rather than conservative causes.

John points to Bush's speech today at the UN as a particularly good illustration of what the essay is talking about. I tend to agree, but with two important caveats. First of all, incumbent presidents almost always invoke America's founding principles to justify whatever policies they advocate, especially foreign interventions.

Second of all, the president's opponents almost always criticize such activism from a realist perspective. That is why, just five years ago, America had to confront that bizarre situation in which liberal Bill Clinton was bombing Yugoslavia while Trent Lott was suggesting that Clinton "give peace a chance".

Of course rhetoric does matter (as OxBlog itself often says). One of the ways it matters is by setting as expectations. Thus, Ceaser forecasts that if Bush is defeated, the Republican party will abandon his political philosophy:

But if a Bush loss in November will lead to internal party upheaval, a victory will not only solidify his mark on the party but on the country as well. A Bush victory will eclipse in its immediate impact the incumbent re-elections of Bill Clinton in 1996 or even of Ronald Reagan in 1984, when the campaign messages were broad and vague. Reagan’s “morning in America” and Clinton’s “a bridge to the twenty-first century” stood for little. In contrast, since Bush’s foreign
policy has been the decisive issue of the 2004 election, Democrats would find the meaning of his victory impossible to deny. It would also give the sanction of the majority to the president’s vision for the Republican party.

While Ceaser is 100% right about how specific Bush's re-election campaign has been, I still doubt whether a victory this November would transform a Republican Party that still harbors both numerous realists as well as small-government conservatives.

Even Bush's commitment to his own principles is less than robust. If the next Republican president is a realist or small-government conservative, Bush's precedent may not matter.
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# Posted 11:24 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT TO BOB NOVAK AND ALCOHOLISM HAVE IN COMMON? Novak writes that the Bush administration has a secret plan to pull out of Iraq right after the election. As Michael Young points out, the political logic behind Novak's column is absurd. (Hat tip: MY) And yet there is something vaguely plausible about it.

Last month, I was at a party at my brother's place in New York. Under the influence of more than one alcoholic beverage, a mutual friend of ours by the name of JL confided to me that he was absolutely going to vote for Bush because the President has the right vision for America's foreign policy.

But, JL added, he wouldn't be surprised at all if Bush turned right around after his inauguration and let Iraq fend for itself. In contrast to Novak, whose story about a secret plan reflects the perverse wishes of his evil realist soul, JL is an avowed neo-conservative advocate of global democracy promotion.

I told JL that I understood his fear. But why? I wasn't so sure about Bush's commitment to democracy promotion before the war because he had no record on the subject. But now, with the death toll rising and John Kerry still attacking him on the subject day in and day out, Bush refuses to budge.

So why don't I believe in the President fully, the way he seems to believe in himself? My best guess is that it's because Bush can't provide a substantive, intellectual foundation for his policy. He says all the right things (which are composed by his speechwriters), but those right things aren't grounded in a sophisticated -- yes, nuanced -- analysis of American history and the current global situation.

In contrast, John Kerry is able to provide a substantive, intellectual foundation for just about any foreign policy. After all, he was a champion debater at Yale. But without firm principles to guide him, Kerry doesn't seem to know which argument should carry the day.

However, when unsupported by evidence, principles alone are subject to radical change. That's why so many first-generation neo-conservative began their political lives as leftists or even Trotskyites. And that, I suspect, is why George Bush was able to abandon his antagonism to nation-building so suddenly after 9/11.

Of course 9/11 changed everything. But most realists who opposed nation-building before 9/11 also opposed it afterward. Neither Cheney, nor Rumsfeld nor Rice seemed to have any change of heart about the subject. And given the political cost of the occupation, all three of them must wonder whether the President's sudden conversion to the democratic cause may cost them their jobs this November. (Or at least that's whey they were thinking before the GOP convention.)

Political psychologists often argue that politicians persuade themselves with their own rhetoric, even if they fail to persuade their audience. While such arguments can be taken to extremes, I do think that they have a fair amount of validity. Like Bush, Reagan was a late convert to the democratic cause whose fervor seemed to intensify the more he spoke about his passion, regardless of the disturbing situation on the ground -- for Reagan in Nicaragua, for Bush in Iraq.

Indoctrination via repetition has its drawbacks, however. Like Reagan, Bush is much better at selling his policy than he is at implementing it. Thus, if the situation on the ground deteriorates enough (in part because of the administration's own failure), another about face may be in the cards.

On this point, Reagan's case doesn't provide much guidance. In the aftermath of the Iran-Contra revelations, Reagan lost control of his Nicaragua policy to Congress. Moreover, abandoning the Contras would've entailed only limited costs for the United States, especially compared to pulling out of Iraq.

So where does all of this analysis leave us? Nowhere, but with a marked sense of foreboding about the future of Iraq.
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# Posted 5:57 PM by Patrick Belton  

MILLIONTH READER WATCH: Okay, we've actually had our millionth reader some time ago, since we haven't had the counter on the bottom from the beginning of OxBlog. However, even if it wasn't present at the creation, it's still kinda cool to see it change numbers. So, to celebrate, the reader who writes to us either with the number at bottom of OxBlog reading 1,000,000 when he or she loads it; or failing that, with the number at bottom closest to and over one million, will receive - gasp - a free bumper sticker (or bookmark, or something) from one of the three universities we're living at! And this is on your honour- come on, if you're willing to lie for a bumper sticker, that's actually kind of sad.

So may the best (okay, best is a strong word - perhaps, randomly selected) reader win! Oxblog: rounding to the nearest million, one million readers served, and counting.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:37 PM by Patrick Belton  

MORE EUROPEAN SECURITY: Radek Sikorski says there are signs that European perceptions of the threat from terrorism are beginning to converge with those of the United States, and paradoxically, the war in Iraq is convincing Europeans that they need a more capable military to give them greater influence over how the West uses force beyond its perimeter.

Sikorski concludes with five suggestions for improving European defence capabilities. (Example: #5, European nations should reduce duplication of staffs and capabilities. If each U.S. state had its own general staff, its own army, navy, and air force, U.S. defence dollars would be as misallocated as they currently are in Europe.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

I DON'T KNOW IF WE'VE GOT ANY GEORDIES in our readership, but if we have, you really ought to go see Euripedes's (it's thought) Alcmaeon in Corinth at the Northumbria Live Academy, in which a friend of mine is Nikarete, Priestess of Aphrodite - who, as my friend says, is '(wait for it...) a pimp and brothel-keeper'. Alcmaeon completes the trilogy begun by The Bacchai and Iphigenia at Aulis - where Iphigenia is about the collision between public ambition and private sentiment during social and moral crisis, self-sacrifice and the politics of redemption, and the temptation, timely in an age which has given us Charles Graner and Abu Ghraib, to invoke the barbarism of the enemy to justify inhuman acts; and Bacchai elaborates the human quest for faith, deriving from both terror and hope, in which redemption produces persecution, and compassion, cruelty; Alcmaeon, in the twenty fragmentary lines that are left of it, is less clear in what its themes were meant to be, but seems to grapple with the unanticipated consequences of human action, and the contrasts between memory, anticipation, and social reality. This Alcmaeon, by the way, is produced by a Dubliner, Colin Teevan.

Of Nikarate, incidentally, Asklepiades (c. 156-28 BCE) writes

Nikarete’s face, sweetly moistened
by her desires
and frequently shown
at her gabled window,
was dried by Kleophon
at her door below
and, dear Kypris, his eyes’
sweet blue-bright lightning.

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# Posted 7:19 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE EPISTEMOLOGISTS DECIDE to field a Little League team, and three of them volunteer to serve as umpires. They go into a bar after one game, and after they've got their drinks the critical realist says "Yeah, well, I call 'em as I see 'em."  The direct realist responds "Well, I call 'em as they are!"  Then the Berkeleian idealist pipes up and says, "Shoot, they ain't anything till I call 'em!" (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:25 PM by Patrick Belton  

ANOTHER PROMISING ACADEMIC ANNOUNCEMENT AT H-NET that we're again, err, behind. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:07 AM by Patrick Belton  

EUROPEAN SECURITY WATCH: The Barcelona Report proposing a new security doctrine for Europe has been delivered to Javier Solana, and a copy of the report is here. The report urges creation of a European Human Security Response Force for post-conflict situations, in which 5,000 of the 15,000 personnel would be readily deployable civilian staff prepared to serve in such scenarios, such as aid workers and lawyers. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:55 AM by Patrick Belton  

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS WATCH: (You know, the aliens with green pointy heads who control the outcome of world events through Jewish Yalie Rhodes Scholars...) Since I've recently groundlessly (see, that's a pun, get it?) made fun of their coffee, and would very much like to be hired back there at some point in my life, here's a magnanimous review of some of the cutting-edge research being done by 22-year old research assistants and being passed off as the work of our nation's foremost diplomatic and security minds:

For starters, there's a synopsis of the leading three proposals for intelligence reform. Moving right on, you've got reviews of the Sunni insurgency and democratic prospects in Iraq, all selling for free dollars. Interested in UN reform? Well, there's a distinguished panel (no, not that distinguished panel) making recommendations to the Secretary General this session of the GA. Rounding up, you might have a look at their scorecard on progress in counterterrorism and implications of the U.S. State Department's decision to refer to Darfur as genocide.

Make that extra milk and sugar, by the way. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:39 PM by David Adesnik  

SHOOTING THE BULL: This big-time shout out is for all of you who wrote in when I said that I needed advice about buying a Ford Taurus. Here's what you had to say:

I had an ’89 Ford Taurus Wagon. It was getting a bit creaky when I
hit a bison in Yellowstone and the car got totaled. But it had 255,000
miles when the bison/car interface took place...

The Taurus was not trouble-free. Two fuel pumps, two water
pumps. But heck, after a trip to the moon (mileage-wise) even “lifetime” parts tend to disintegrate. --PS

I’ve had a ’95 Taurus for 5 years, and except for normal things that would be expected to break (it has 130,000+ miles on it) it has been super reliable, and it’s great in snow. I live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so we have a lot of experience with snow/transportation issues! --KG

[Tauruses] are real sh***y...While its true that Japanese cars are more
reliable than their american counterparts, not all Japanese car makers are created equal...

If you want to buy a Mazda, Nissan or Mitsubishi, you might as well buy that Ford Taurus, because they are hardly any more reliable than an American car. --SP

For what it's worth...I bought a 93 Taurus wagon with 40,000 miles in 1996. Since then I've put another 130,000 miles on it and have been very happy. Maintenance has been reasonable - nothing lasts forever and assorted bits have been repleced, but my Taurus is far from dead at 11 years and 170,000 miles. --BM

David, stay away from Taurus. We had one that we bought used and it was great for a while. At about 100,000 miles, it started costing us money constantly, a thousand here, a thousand there, to fix it. -- AF

So the funny ending to this whole story is that I'm probably going to buy a Honda Accord. It's from 1990, but only has 86,000 miles on it and has had just one owner. If the mechanic gives it a clean bill of health, I'll buy it, hopefully for just over $2000.

If I hadn't come across the Accord, I probably would've gone with the Taurus, but I may not need the car for more than a year or two, so I'd rather save the extra two grand. As LS puts it,

The best deal if you are just looking for reliable transportation cheap, is the oldest car you can find with the fewest miles, as depreciation is a huge cost leveler.

Besides, owning a car that's fourteen years old appeals to the historian in me. (Oh, if any of you are inspired by my example, an '87 Accord with 87,000 miles and just one owner went up on the DC Craig's List today. My loss!)
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# Posted 9:35 PM by David Adesnik  

IRONY, CONTINUED: I'm sitting on the steps outside my friend's brownstone. I can't get in because he's still at work. But I'm using his wireless connection to blog.

The Information Age: Where your friends' networks are more accesible than their homes.

On a related note, my friend Josh (not Chafetz) lives at the corner of Vermont Ave. and Q Street in Washington, DC. Before visiting him, I'd never ventured this far east of Dupont Circle. The gentrification process had already begun before my time in Washington about four years ago. But I had no idea how far it's gone.

[NB: I am now indoors, and it is now two hours later. I have learned that writing outdoors is quite charming, but results in many mosquito bites.]

I parked my car earlier tonight at the intersection of 12th and Vermont, well in sight of an abandoned lot that betrays no signs of gentrification. (If you aren't familiar with the local geography, don't worry -- just focus on the concepts.) Having promised to buy my friend some quality beverages, I set off in search of a beverage merchant.

I walked two blocks west to 14th St., a major thoroughfare once known as the border fence that separated civilized Washington from what lay beyond. This time, however, I was coming from beyond.

Populated by auto repair shops, empty lots and the occasional run-down grocery story, 14th St. was once the polar opposite of Starbucks-laden Dupont Circle. For no particular reason, I chose to walk south on 14th. On a single block, there were half-a-dozen buildings under renovation or being built from scratch.

The only open storefront belonged to a Chinese take-out joint. Thus the street was lonely, but something very important was clearly going on. Then, as I approached P Street, I saw the bright windows and letters belonging to the inner sanctum of gentrification: Whole Foods.

If memory serves, there was absolutely nothing on that block (P St. between 14th and 15th) when I left DC just over four years ago. But it wasn't just whole foods. Across the street from it was a luxury apartment building, newly built. The retail space on the ground floor belonged to an upscale bar teeming with late-twenty- and early-thirty-something.

And, yes, there was a Starbucks. After purchasing four fine bottles of Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter, I called Josh on the phone to express my total amazement at what had happened to our neighborhood. His opinion of the matter is especially worth having because he both works for Washington's foremost real estate development corporation and because he is the author of an in-depth biography of James Rouse, one of America's great urban planners.

(Please buy the book now, or Josh won't let me stay with him next time I'm in Washington.)

Hard at work at 9:00 PM on a Sunday, Josh didn't have time for a long conversation. But he did note that the same local residents fortunate enough to get jobs at Whole Foods can no longer afford to live in their own neighborhoods. Oh, the irony.
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# Posted 6:10 PM by Patrick Belton  

DEPARTMENT OF IRONY WATCHING: This via AP has our department working overtime this week: (and on a Sunday, that! union regulations should forbid such exorbitant demands on irony watchers...)

Mental health counselor Ryan C. Moore, 54, who treats anger management problems and addictions, was arrested Friday and charged with aggravated battery for allegedly ordering his two pit bulls to attack a group of people riding out Hurricane Frances inside his office building.

Good thing he didn't treat mass murderers.

(And for you Rortyians out there, our departments of contingency and solidary watching will be appearing on alternate Tuesdays...) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:35 PM by Patrick Belton  

BLOGOSPHERE QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Kevin reminds us why he's darned near our favourite blogger, laying out his rules for commentors: 'no vitriol, no yelling, and no insults unless they're really funny. ' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:09 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHY IS IT THAT the Times sends better people to review Lloyd Webber's latest monstrosity (best line: It isn't unpleasant, but it doesn't begin to capture what makes Collins's book such an enduring page turner. What's the theatrical equivalent of page turner, anyway? Stage burner? Scene speeder? Whatever the term, it does not apply here.) than to interview Arthur Miller (best line: It doesn't matter,'' he said. ''It's my truth. It's not your truth.'' My truth, your truth -- conversations with Miller tend to move beyond the quotidian and enter such depths quickly. We met in his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a cramped one-bedroom in a red-brick building of the sort commonly described as prewar. Miller, who turns 89 next month, is still a forceful presence, a tall, long-limbed man prone to unapologetic silences. etc... even more formulaic writing follows, if you have the taste for it it)? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:18 PM by David Adesnik  

CAR BLOGGING: I am on a mission: to by a reliable and moderately attractive used car for under $4000. I've looked at four cars today and, to my surprise, the best one I saw was a 1998 Ford Taurus with 70,000 miles on it.

After all, the rule of thumb with used cars is that you buy Japanese or you regret it. (Anti-Americanism is acceptable in the automotive world because it is objective.)

I also looked at a '99 Mazda Protege and a '97 Nissan Sentra. I had high hopes for the Protege because it only had 47,000 miles on it. But when I took it to a mechanic, I found out that it needed $750 of maintenance and repair work, most of which should've been done 20,000 miles ago.

Now, if all of these details haven't already bored you to death, I'm guessing that you have an opinion about either used cars in general or Tauruses in particular. So let me hear it! I could use some advice, you know.

Also, the man selling the Taurus sells used cars as sort of a hobby. It isn't his job, but he likes to make a little extra money off of it. What that means is that he never drove the Taurus himself, but instead picked up as a trade-in from someone who bought a nicer car off of him.

The whole concept of an amateur dealer raised some red flags in my mind, but I figure there's no problem with it as long as a mechanic says the Taurus is OK. Any thoughts?
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# Posted 5:28 PM by David Adesnik  

PHIL CARTER IS BACK from his well-deserved, post-bar exam vacation. As always, Phil is the best source in the blogosphere for information about the United States military. Recent posts include discussions of interrogation reform at Abu Ghraib and how to increase the number of American soldiers ready to serve abroad.

Before going away, Phil put up a very interesting post about the Army's new Kevlar helmets and why they aren't protecting our soldiers in Iraq. Generally speaking, I'd just like to note how strange it is that our soldiers actually war armor.

Growing up, I just assumed that armor was a relic of the Middle Ages that couldn't stand up to modern firepower. But as Phil points, the armorers (and "armor-ees") of today are facing the same challenges that they did more than a thousand years ago.
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# Posted 8:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

DEPARTMENT OF BURNING QUESTIONS ANSWERED: The Audhumlan Conspiracy (note to self: keep watch for conspiracy of blogosphere conspiracies) answers the question everybody's been asking since 1920 - namely, what does TRB stand for in the New Republic?

UPDATE: Baude's not convinced. (What is it with those Yale 1Ls and evidence?) Fortunately, however, the "TRB=Brooklyn Rapid Transit" explanation is backed up by no lesser source than its former author Richard Strout in an oral history interview at the Truman presidential library. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:59 AM by Patrick Belton  

IRONY WATCH: Bus-full of policemen robbed in Rio.

(Of course, as our friend Randy points out, at least this time they're not doing the robbing....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHERE HAVE ALL THE INTELLECTUALS GONE? Frank Furedi poses the question with a book by that name (Continuum, 176pp), and Terry Eagleton's review is an admirable read. Some snippets:

• In fact, there are dim-witted intellectuals just as there are incompetent chefs. The word "intellectual" is a job description, not a commendation.

• One mark of the classical intellectual (more recently dubbed a "theorist") was that he or she refused to be pinned to a single discipline. Instead, the idea was to bring ideas critically to bear on social life as a whole. In this sense, Polly Toynbee is an intellectual but most Oxbridge dons are not. In fact, a snap definition of an intellectual would be "more or less the opposite of an academic".

• A society obsessed with the knowledge economy, Furedi argues, is oddly wary of knowledge. This is because truth is no longer precious for its own sake. Indeed, the idea of doing something just for the hell of it has always put the wind up philistine utilitarians... At an earlier stage of capitalism, knowledge was not so vital for economic production; once it becomes so, it turns into a commodity.... Now, knowledge is valuable only when it can be used as an instrument for something else: social cohesion, political control, economic production.

• "Student-centred learning" assumes that the student's "personal experience" is to be revered rather than challenged. People are to be comforted rather than confronted.

• In what one American sociologist has termed the McDonaldisation of the universities, students are redefined as consumers of services rather than junior partners in a public service... Meanwhile, libraries try frantically not to look like libraries, or to let slip intimidatingly elitist words such as "book".

Furedi makes the courageous case, against the cultural move away from challenging standards and toward warm fuzzies, that excellence and popular participation are not bound to be opposites, and that paternalism and condescension weigh instead on the side of the ledger sheet of those who claim they are. Both Furedi and Eagleton are well worth reading. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:13 PM by Patrick Belton  

ADAM PHILIPS has a lovely piece on the role of nuisance in philosophy in the Threepenny Review (which, incidentally, costs $6.25 at the annual subscription rate):

"Interesting philosophy," Richard Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, "is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things...it [the half-formed new vocabulary] says things like, 'try thinking of it this way'— or more specifically, 'try to ignore the apparently futile traditional philosophical questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions.'"

Something about what Rorty calls, in his blandly tendentious phrase, "interesting philosophy" needs a nuisance... If a substitute is a constant reminder of what it is substituting for—if a new lover becomes a compulsory and compulsive allusion to the one you have lost—it is a mixed blessing.

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# Posted 3:25 PM by David Adesnik  

THE IMPENDING HYPOCRITE: Robert Kagan scores again. Read the whole damn column. Here are the money grafs:

The Bush administration has turned a blind eye to anti-democratic trends in Russia. Secretary of State Colin Powell made a strong statement against Putin's treatment of opponents last spring, and he expressed concerns about Putin's actions yesterday. But the White House has been relatively quiet. And the president's voice, the only one that really matters, has not yet been heard...

A White House official commented to the New York Times that Putin's actions are "a domestic matter for the Russian people." Really? If so, then the same holds for all other peoples whose rights are taken away by tyrants. If the Bush administration holds to that line, then those hostile to democracy in the Middle East will point to the glaring U.S. double standard; those who favor democracy in the Middle East will be discredited. That will be a severe blow to what Bush
regards as a central element of his war on terrorism...

Did the United States help undo Soviet communism only to watch as tyranny takes its place? Is that the legacy President Bush wants to leave behind?

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# Posted 2:12 AM by David Adesnik  

CHARTER SCHOOLS: Professor D reports on a new, comprehensive study of charter schools' impact on their students proficiency in reading in math. Sadly, it seems that a certain newspaper has decided to pay far less attention to the new study than to a shoddy, partisan research project it recently splashed on the front page and endorsed in a masthead editorial.
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# Posted 1:55 AM by David Adesnik  

KERRY "DECORATED...BUT NOT HIGHLY DECORATED" IN VIETNAM: Who would dare say such a thing about John Kerry? The Swift Vets? A Fox News broadcast? No! It's the New York Times!

On December 4, 1986 [no permalink] the Times reported that:

During the Vietnam War, then Second Lieutenant [Oliver] North was once swept from the deck of a tank by its revolving turret. But, according to a battle citation, he grabbed a grenade launcher, climbed back onto the tank and led an attack that killed seven North Vietnamese soldiers. On another occasion during his 11-month tour he led three assaults on an enemy position until it finally fell.

He was decorated for such actions, but not highly decorated. He was
regularly promoted, but not rapidly promoted. He took a serious, studious interest in such subjects as revolutionary warfare and military history, but one friend remarked that ''anyone who tells you Ollie North is a military intellectual is crazy."

According to the Times, North won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. If he had won a third Purple Heart, he could've been a war hero like John Kerry. If he had won a third Purple Heart, he also could've gone home after four months instead of finishing his tour of duty.

NB: I consider Oliver North to be a not just a pathological liar, but a traitor to the Constitution. Col. North did far more damage to American democracy than any of our Communist adversaries ever did. I guess it just goes to show that you shouldn't put a war hero in charge of our nation's foreign policy.
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# Posted 11:49 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG DEFENDS THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Before getting carried away with self-congratulation about Dan Rather's change of heart, I think that the blogosphere ought to remember how much of its success it owes to the mainstream media -- and I don't just mean the free publicity they give us once in a while.

The bottom line is that the media listen. In the spite of their condescencion and self-righteousness toward us non-journalists, the media have much less of an appetite for obstruction than most government officials. Thus, it is just plain offensive when Bernard Goldberg says that

"CBS News is acting the way the Nixon administration did during Watergate. I'm really sad to say that Dan Rather is acting like Richard Nixon. It's the coverup, it's the stonewalling."

Think about how long it took Reagan to admit he traded arms for hostages or how long it took Clinton to admit that he slept with an intern. In contrast, Rather's arrogance and contempt for his critics only lasted a few days.

The media's willingness to listen also extends beyond those cases where it is obviously in the wrong. In spite our constant, slashing attacks on the journalistic establishment, more and more journalists read our blogs -- either because they want to or because they feel compelled.

Journalists listen because their sense of professional self-worth depends on it. Their sense of superiority over the politicians they cover rests on their honesty and open-mindedness. Thus, when confronted with serious and substantive criticism, journalists listen -- in spite of the critics' often disrespectful tone.

In spite of all their flaws, American journalists' unflagging efforts to confront authority figures and challenge conventional wisdom created the environment within which bloggers can thrive. Even though our instincts are Oedipal, America's bloggers are very much its journalists' children.

UPDATE: Yes, I know I just got finished praising the media. But I also just came across a priceless quotation from a December 5, 1986 NYT article [no permalink] on journalists' efforts to cover the Iran-Contra scandal fairly:

Many of the editors said their self-consciousness about fairness was, in large part, a legacy of what they called ''excesses'' by the press during the Watergate and post-Watergate era.

For instance, Dan Rather, who reported on the White House for CBS News during the Watergate scandal and now anchors the CBS
Evening News, said he ''often'' talked about the tone of the coverage with his staff. ''I like to think I learned from my mistakes during that period, and I emphasize and keep emphasizing accuracy and fairness.'' Mr. Rather said.

The author of the piece is none other than Alex S. Jones, currently the director of a media studies program at Harvard and author of an LA Times op-ed that listed the "common attributes of the blogosphere" as:

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.

Erroneous assertions? Blustering know-it-all? Prof. Jones, how dare you compare us to CBS!
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# Posted 7:30 PM by David Adesnik  

HOW THE TIME FLIES: Robert Tagorda reminds his readers that yesterday was Daniel Drezner's second blogiversary. So I went to Dan's site looking for the official announcement so I could post a link to it. And here's what I find:

Yesterday [my] blog celebrated its second birthday. Which means it's also the two-year blogiversary of both Jacob Levy and David Adesnik -- congrats to both of them as well.

Yes, congratulations to me (and Jacob). You know, I'd never forget my own birthday. Then again, I'm only 27 and it seems that lots of middle-aged folks tend to forget theirs. And since blog years, like dog years, pass by much more quickly than real time, maybe this third of OxBlog has reached middle age. So I guess it's time to buy a sports car and father some new blog-children.
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# Posted 7:06 PM by David Adesnik  

WHY SEAN HANNITY IS WORSE THAN DAN RATHER: Nice try, TNR, but you're just plain wrong. Here's the argument:

Dan Rather may have indeed been duped, but even if that is the case, his mistake was far less problematic than the offenses against journalism perpetrated daily by Fox News...[W]e ought to be much more concerned about the willful journalistic contortions of the latter than the alleged sloppiness of the former.

Fox reporters hide behind the conceit that they are opinion journalists, and media critics therefore hold them to a lower standard--as if being in the business of opinion journalism frees Fox from the obligation to deal in facts.

It should be clear from this week's torrent of commentary that Rather is held to very high standards by his critics... No one at the Post, the Times, ABC, or NBC is doing the same for Fox's journalists.

Since I don't watch Fox, I can't comment on its integrity. But that is exactly the point. Ten million Americans watch Dan Rather every evening and they trust what he says. Fox's audience is a fraction of that.

When Rather breaks a story, it goes straight onto the front pages of the major daily papers. When Fox comes up with something like a doctored photo of John Kerry with Jane Fonda, no one cares until independent sources validate its authenticity.

But that really isn't the point. No one thinks that CBS lies to its audience on a regular basis. The issue is whether Rather's transparently partisan decision to publicize the forged Killian memos indicates that one ought to interpret all CBS broadcasts as an extension of its correspondents' liberal politics, the same one way one interprets all Fox broadcasts as an extension of its correspondents' conservative politics.

As I've pointed out before, I'm not in any position to comment on the partisan content of either Fox or CBS broadcasts, because I don't watch them. The purpose of this post is simply to expose the false premise on which TNR's argument rests, i.e. that the focus of Memogate is Dan Rather's "alleged sloppiness" rather than the ideological biases that inform his broadcasts.
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# Posted 6:58 PM by Patrick Belton  

CALL FOR PAPERS: Over at H-Net, a call for papers for a foreign policy working papers series. We admit we're biased, because it's the Nathan Hale think tank that's behind it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

RACE STUDY GROUP: Over the past year, I'd had conversations with a few friends about racial divisions in Washington and some of the other cities in the East Coast in which we'd lived, and in the end we agreed on the need to have a broader, rigorous, pragmatic conversation about race and racial integration in the United States (and, to some extent, Britain). For myself I have nothing in the least authoritative or new to say on the subject, but it's one I've been wrestling with personally since living in Washington, D.C., and I'm awfully interested to take part in a searching conversation on the subject with friends whose idealism and intellect I respect. So we've decided to begin a race study group, under the working title Hands Across Our City. You're very welcome to join us.

Our thought is at first to run our forum as a series of electronic seminar-style conversations, where different members lead different discussions on racial division and integration from the perspective of academic or professional disciplines in which they have backgrounds (urban studies, law, economics, literature, different species of policy, and so forth). In the longer term, we've already spoken about the possibility of some subset of us perhaps working to start an ngo, to find ways at the civil society level to counteract racial division in the cities we live in.

It might also turn out that we'd have insights gained together in this conversation that we might want to carry over into writing, perhaps in the form of a magazine article or series of op-ed pieces laying out proposals for combating racial division at different policy and, perhaps more significantly, community levels. We might even turn out to be sufficiently ambitious as to collaborate together in writing an edited volume, looking at racial integration from the perspective of different academic and policy disciplines, and perhaps developing proposals and insights in greater depth.

As a first step toward getting this conversation going, we've set up some links to some of the better academic, policy, and journalistic writing on racial integration, and a growing online library of conference papers and other research. We'd love to hear from you if you have ideas you'd like to share, or if you'd like to come be part of our project. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:09 AM by Patrick Belton  

AN APPEAL: The Russian consulate in Britain has distributed an appeal for assistance to support the victims of the Beslan terrorist attack, which I am very happy to pass on to our readers.

As you are well aware, millions of people around the world are setting up funds to help the victims of Beslan. However, we have identified an area of need that has, so far, been overlooked. Julia and I are from Rostov-on-Don, Glasgow's twin city, which is located in the same region of Russia as Beslan. During the news coverage it was broadcast that some of the most critically ill victims have been sent to hospitals in Rostov-on-Don, which is the biggest city in the region. Today we contacted the Rostov hospitals directly to find out what is going on. We have learned the following: 

11 critically wounded children have been transported to the Rostov Regional Children's Hospital. All of them are unconscious with multiple gunshot wounds. This is a very good hospital, but it is not equipped to deal with so many intensive care patients at the same time. Dr. Feodor Sharshov, chief consultant of the intensive care unit told us that the situation is absolutely desperate because they do not have enough equipment to deal with all the cases at once. Despite staff working 24 hours a day, three of these children have already died. He told us that they desperately need the following equipment:

1. Original Infusomat Tubings

2. Infusomat Volumetric Infusion Pumps for use in anaesthesia

3. Perfusor Compact S syringe pumps for paediatrics and neonatology

This equipment is required to maintain life support and is manufactured by Braun Melsungen AG. We managed to contact a representative of the firm in Rostov-on-Don and have been told that if the money is paid to the company's account, the equipment can be delivered to the hospital overnight.

This is a real chance to save some lives. If you have any thoughts on how to raise the money please help us. Time is of the essence, we need to collect the money as soon as possible and transfer to their account. We are a charitable organisation ourselves and can use our account to transfer the money from. We will accept any and all donations, which should be sent to:

The Russian Cultural Centre
10 King Street
Merchant City
Glasgow
G1 5QZ

Cheques should be made payable to the Russian Cultural Centre (Beslan Appeal).

Lev and Julia Atlas, Directors
The Russian Cultural Centre
0141 6493270 Russian Cultural Centre
tel/fax 0141 5530733 Russian Cafe-Gallery
07968977763 Julia's mobile

Please contact the Cultural Centre directly if you have any questions or would like to offer support. There are also Russian Cultural Centres in the United States and Ireland (although visitors to the last will be faced with the enigmatic notice 'The Russian Cultural Centre in Ireland do not creation at the moment').

UPDATE: Our friend Tatiana rang the head of hospital in Rostov, where the children from Beslan are presently being treated: 'Today I talked to the Head of the Hospital. He said that at present the Hospital is really in need of a new absortiometer for acid base composition of blood (sorry, I translate literally because I don't know the medical terminology). He said this is really what now we need for children from Beslan.'

I'm really grateful to everyone who has forwarded this appeal on, and particularly to the pediatric emergency department of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, which has been enquiring into whether it could be of help. If any of our medical readers might be in a position to assist in donating this last piece of equipment, we would be tremendously grateful. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:46 AM by Patrick Belton  

ENGLISH TO ENGLISH DICTIONARY: OxBlog's friend Jamie Metzl, as good a candidate as you'll ever find deigning to run for the House, took away just a bit of all of our faith in politics when he lost a heartbreaker in Missouri's fifth Congressional District last month. But that's not the point. Instead, the Kansas City Star gave a start to those of us accustomed to the English language as it's spoken in Ireland and Britain - where 'getting a leg up' refers to the act of amorosity. We knew politics made strange bedfellows, but apparently not enough to match Metzl and Cleaver: 'If Metzl wants a leg up, he won't get it from Cleaver, who is still smoldering from all the attacks.' But not smouldering enough, apparently.

UPDATE: Yes, 'shag carpets' kind of crack me up, too.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:14 PM by David Adesnik  

WISCONSIN SWINGS: Captain Ed reports on a new poll that puts Bush ahead in the Badger State. There are also indications that Bush is pulling ahead in Ohio. Finally, El Capitan had this to say about Russia:

In the end, it looks like Beslan will give Putin the excuse to push to his eventual destination just that much faster than before. Spain may have been the first terrorist victory, and the Phillipines the second, but Russia may be the first time their action resulted in the loss of liberty that they hate. Despite Putin's call to work closely with the US on counterterrorism -- assistance that will pay off very well in the years to come -- I can't help but think that Russia will wind up paying a much steeper and more permanent price than Beslan.

Hear, hear.
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# Posted 6:16 PM by David Adesnik  

CLASSIC HEADLINES: On May 20, 1986, the NYT ran a story on its front page entitled "Pentagon Fears Major War if Latins Sign Peace Accord". It was the most memorable bit of Cold War satire since the immortal exchange from Dr. Strangelove in which the general yells, "There is no fighting in the War Room!"

[CORRECTION: OxBlog should fact check its memory. We are much obliged to NM for pointing out that it was the President in Dr. Strangelove who said "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."]

If you read the story (which I came across while working on my dissertation), the headline sort of made sense. The Pentagon was concerned that the Central American republics, including Nicaragua, would sign a peace treaty that lacked enforcement mechanisms. If so, the Pentagon expected Nicaragua to violate the treaty's disarmament provisions, ultimately provoking a major war in which the United States would have to participate.

While technically accurate, the NYT headline managed to mock the Pentagon's alleged paranoia. Given that Nicaragua was the most controversial foreign policy issue of the day and that a major vote on US policy was approaching in Congress, the White House didn't appreciate the NYT's humor.

In order to understand the Pentagon's thinking, take the Times' headline and substitute 'Churchill' for 'Pentagon' and 'Chamberlain' for 'Latins'. As any student of history knows, a bad treaty can pave the way for an even worse war. While Nicaragua may not have been a threat compared to Nazi Germany, the Pentagon's concerns were hardly unfounded.

This all may seem very distant now, since the Nicaraguan civil war ended in 1990 and Latin America has fallen off the United States' list of global priorities. But there's probably a lesson buried in there somewhere.
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# Posted 6:10 PM by David Adesnik  

REAGAN ON GAY MARRIAGE: This is from an interview with the New York Times in March 1986:

Q. Mr. President, can I ask you a New York question? New York City, after considerable debate and controversy, has just approved a bill banning discrimination in housing and jobs for homosexuals. What is your position on that?

The President. Well, I know that this is a very touchy question, and I am one who believes in the rights of the individual -- individual freedom. But I do have to question sometimes whether individual rights are being defended in this particular field, freedom of the individual, or whether they are demanding an acceptance of their particular lifestyle that others of us don't demand. For example, should a teacher in a classroom be invoking their personal habits and
advocating them to their students as a way of life?

Q. Yes.

The President. Teachers habitually don't do that. Their personal life -- --

Q. But this bill, I don't think really covers that. It basically guarantees
to homosexuals equal treatment in hiring policies and gaining housing, these sorts of things. Essentially applies the same antidiscriminatory measures as are applied to blacks, as to women, to other people. Do you think that's all right?

The President. Well, I've said -- but again, I haven't actually involved
myself in what this law contains up there, so I don't know what I'm speaking of. But what I'm saying is that how would we feel if a teacher, male or female, a heterosexual, insisted on the right in the classroom to discuss their sexual preferences and why and whether they believed in complete promiscuity or not? We would be quite offended and think that our children should not be exposed to that.

Reagan's struggle with his own commitment to individual freedom is emblematic of the struggle that is going on within the Republican Party today. Even though the question has changed from jobs to marriage, the logic is the same: If Republicans can't show that treating homosexuals the same as heterosexuals hurts somebody, they will have to tolerate it.
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# Posted 8:57 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANNIVERSARY BLOGGING: I have just gotten back from three days of hiking with Rachel in England's Celtic-flavoured west country, to celebrate our second anniversary. Devon is lovely - it adjoins Cornwall, and is the landscape of the Baskervilles' Hound and the relics left behind by the pre-Roman Celts of the Dumnonii (whence Devon; Exeter for its part contracts Isca Dumnoniorum). I thought I might share some of what we came across.




Personally, I feel that the most human attribute is the capacity to feel wonder. Monkeys laugh; pigeons use tools; but the capabilities to sense awe and wonder seem to strike close to the core of what is most uniquely human. It is inherent in the nature of language to shy away from such contact with reality, through imposing layers of words and meanings - thus 'wonder-ful' and 'awe-ful' have become but banalities for rather nice and bad.

There is a Celt appearing in the landscape in several of the pictures, who ought in general be disregarded.

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# Posted 2:08 AM by David Adesnik  

THOSE SWINGIN' VOTERS: I've been hesitant to jump on the "What went wrong with the Kerry campaign" bandwagon because President Bush has been up in the polls for less than two weeks now.

A month ago, I expected John Kerry to become the 44th President. (Maybe that says more about my ignorance than anything else.) If Kerry pulls even again in the polls, we'll hear about what the Bush campaign did wrong.

This kind of analysis is really just the product of a false hindsight that tends to see the past through the lenses of the immediate present. That said, Kerry's dive in the polls has provoked some interesting analysts from his fellow Democrats.

Responding to Michael Tomasky's argument that Republicans win elections because they just play dirtier, Kevin Drum says that

It's a big mistake for us liberals to kid ourselves into thinking that
Republicans win elections solely because they fool people into voting for them. It's not just that this is a debilitating mental attitude — although it is — but it's also not true. Our main problem isn't that this year's campaign has ignored the issues, our main problem is that the #1 issue in this campaign is national defense, and on that issue — like it or not — the majority of Americans favor the Republican position.

I agree, but I would add three words to the end of Kevin's sentence: "for the moment". The issue isn't simply that Americans favor the Republican approach, but that Kerry has failed to outline a clear alternative.

But Josh Marshall disagrees. He thinks Kerry should avoid the temptation of trying to explain how he would deal with an impossible situation like Iraq. Rather, Kerry should hammer home one simple point: that George Bush is responsible for creating the impossible situation in Iraq. This is the right way to go because

the key to winning an election is often simply a matter of bringing to the surface of the public consciousness what voters already really know. They know Iraq is a disaster. They know it's President Bush's fault.

But do American voters really "know" that? Consider this headline from last Friday's WaPo:

Polls Suggest War Isn't Hurting Bush: Mounting Deaths in Iraq Have Not Resulted in Major Backlash in Public Opinion

As the Post points out, the current poll results don't reflect the fact that American fatalities have just passed the 1,000 milestone. But I think the analysis behind the article is solid. For quite some time now, I've been critical of journalists who read their own beliefs about the occupation into the results of opinion polls.

In spite of increasing violence, more Americans think the invasion of Iraq was worth it and more American think it has contributed to our national security. Perhaps most importantly, 53% think Bush will handle the situation better, as opposed to 37% for Kerry. In early July, the split was 47-47.

The most recent polls also show that OxBlog got something very wrong in its analysis of previous results. After the 9/11 Commission announced that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam and Al Qaeda, Bush's honesty ratings took a nose dive. OxBlog observed that

The big question now is whether the damage done to Bush's reputation for honesty is permanent... perhaps the impact of the intensive coverage of the Commission's finding will slowly fade during a long, hot summer.

Or perhaps not. My gut feeling says that American voters pay far more attention to a President' personal characteristics than they do to what's happening on the ground half a world away. Bush may recover some of his lost ground, but I suspect that a significant amount of the damage will be permanent.

Oh how wrong I was. Take a look at the answers to question 14a in the new WaPo-ABC poll. 48% say Bush is honest and trustworthy while only 35% say the same about Kerry. In late June, only 39% said Bush was honest while 52%said the same about Kerry.

What is going on here? You might say it's the Swift Vets, but I don't buy it. My best guess is that the Republicans' relentless hammering away at Kerry's flip-flop on the war has persuaded voters that he can't be trusted. As for Iraq, I don't think that the handover fooled anyone or that there has been insufficient coverage of the recent violence.

But maybe Josh Marshall really is right. Kerry hasn't focused on the failures of the occupation, even though he talks about bringing the troops home. In fact, Kerry's decision to rail against Bush for "opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America" suggests that the President really is doing his best to deal with the situation in Iraq.
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# Posted 1:36 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG FORGED THIS POST: I haven't followed this whole CBS thing all that much, but figured that I ought to weigh in now that I've come up with a snappy headline for my post.

I'm also weighing in now because it seems like an easy call. Why? Because:

A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush's National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.

The big question now is whether the WaPo will put it on the front page when CBS finally admits it was swindled. (By whom? And why?)

The apparent lesson of this whole story is that Rather & Co. were so desperate to shift the focus from Kerry's military record to Bush's that they went public without fact-checking their story first.

The irony, of course, is that Rather & Co. were so angered by the Swift Vets' unfounded allegations that they decided to fire back with unfounded accusation of their own.

Yet whereas the Swift Vets acknowledged their ideological and partisan motives, Rather operated from behind a veil of objectivity. Whereas the Swift Vets had to wait months before getting publicity for their work, Rather & Co. had immediate access to an audience of millions (plus front page coverage in the next morning's papers).

If Rather didn't already have a reputation as the most liberal of the network anchors, I might be inclined to write this episode off as an unavoidable low point in an otherwise impressive career. But I just don't have that much faith in Dan Rather.

On the other hand, it's sort of interesting how much interest the blogosphere has shown in Rather's work given that none of us seem to watch CBS on a regular basis. After all, how many posts do you see that begin with "Last night on CBS..."?

However, there are still 10 million Americans watching each of the networks nightly broadcasts -- a total audience of 30 million. And if the blogosphre's raison d'etre is to factcheck big media, shouldn't we be watching what other people actually watch?

Probably. But it's just so boring. Television takes a lot of time to present very little information. It entertains but doesn't inform. Well, there are three of us on this website, so maybe we could take turns watching...or if the Volokh Conspirators each gave 30 minutes of their time, they could watch Brokaw, Jennings and Rather every night of the week!
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# Posted 7:06 PM by David Adesnik  

WE ARE LOSING THE WAR ON TERROR. In the name of security, we deprive our citizens of their constitutional rights. In the name of democracy, we enforce a hostile occupation. In the name of human rights, we brutalize countless prisoners. And day by day, our soldiers get shot down one by one in the futile hope of winning a war we never should have started.

That is what I would say to Vladimir Putin if I were a Russian citizen. Putin's war on terror is a sick and perverted mirror image of America's just cause. In the aftermath of Chechen terrorists' horrific attack on the children of Beslan, we stood as one with the Russian people. And now we must stand with the Russian people against the government whose authoritarian deception and incompetence has left them increasingly to terrorist attacks.

In the Washington Post, Russia expert and democracy promotion advocate Michael McFaul writes that

Putin needs to reevaluate not only his strategy for fighting terrorism, but also his plan for building a strong and effective state...

Each of Putin's political changes increased the power of the Kremlin and decreased the power of other political actors and institutions. The
restructuring has not produced a more effective state, but a weak, corrupt and unaccountable regime: authoritarianism without authority...

Beslan is the most horrific terrorist attack in Russia but not the first.
The list of victims is as long as it is shocking: More than 300 died in
apartment bombings in Moscow and two other cities in the fall of 1999; 120 hostages died in the standoff at the Moscow theater; more than 270 people, including the Kremlin-backed president of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, died in eight incidents between December 2002 and May 2004. In June, 92 were killed at a police station. On Aug. 24 two passenger jets exploded, killing 89, and 10 more died on Aug. 31 when a suicide bomber struck outside a subway station in Moscow...

Over the last four years, Putin's advisers have explained the rollback of democratic practices as part of a trade -- less freedom for more security. But Putin has not delivered on his part of this deal, as Russians now have less freedom but no more security.

Imagine our response in the United States if Al Qaeda continued to launch attack after attack while the Bush administration did nothing more than shut down the New York Times and CBS. That is the only way to understand what Putin has done.

Yet just today, Putin announced plans to replace Russia's elected regional governors with Kremlin-appointed bureaucrats. In addition, Putin will force members of the Duma, the lower house of parliament, to run on centrally-controlled party lists instead of running as independent candidates.

And let us not forget the atrocities that Putin is responsible for in Chechnya. In January, Human Rights Watch informed the UN Commission on Human Rights that

Russian forces round up thousands of men in raids, loot homes, physically abuse villagers, and frequently commit extrajudicial executions. Those detained face beatings and other forms of torture, aimed at coercing confessions or information about Chechen forces. Federal forces routinely extort money from detainees’ relatives as a condition for release. “Disappearances” remain a hallmark of the conflict, and their frequency rose sharply in early 2003. According to statements by pro-Moscow Chechen officials, in the first half of 2003 an average of two people went missing every day, many of them after being detained by Russian forces. The Russian human rights group Memorial documented 294 “disappearances” between January and November 2003, including forty-seven people whose corpses were later discovered in unmarked graves or dumped by the roadside. The group estimates that the real number of “disappearances” was three or four times higher.

According to one HRW analyst,

Five months of indiscriminate bombing and shelling in 1999 and early 2000 resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. Three massacres, which followed combat operations, took the lives of at least 130 people. By March 2000, Russia’s federal forces gained at least nominal control over most of Chechnya. They began a pattern of classic “dirty war” tactics and human rights abuses that continue to mark the conflict to this day. Russian forces arbitrarily detain those allegedly suspected of being, or collaborating with, rebel fighters and torture
them in custody to secure confessions or testimony. In some cases, the corpses of those last seen in Russian custody were subsequently found, bearing marks of torture and summary execution, in dumping grounds or unmarked graves.

Moral clarity in Chechnya means recognizing that this is a war of evil vs. evil that has taken the lives of thousands of innocent civilians on both sides. If so, is there anything that the United States can do other than wash it hands of the conflict?

Yes and no. There is no forceful action we can take, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we must tell our supposed allies in Moscow that their self-destructive war on terror has provided another base for the terrorists of Al Qaeda. The more that Russia abuses the Chechens and slaughters the legitimate Chechen opposition, the more room Al Qaeda has to operate. According to McFaul,

Some Chechen groups have allied with al Qaeda and joined the jihad against Western civilization. Many other Chechen opponents of Russia's military operation inside Chechnya, including most government officials in power before Russia's second invasion in 1999, have unequivocally denounced the Beslan attack. They understand that such actions do not serve the interests of the Chechen people. They are nationalists, ready to begin negotiations with
authorities in Moscow, and they do not exclude the possibility of some special arrangement about Chechen sovereignty even within the formal borders of the Russian Federation. They could become, over time, allies of Moscow in fighting the kind of terrorists who attacked Beslan's children. To date, however, Putin has refused to engage in a dialogue with anyone inside Chechnya except his handpicked puppets.

Negotiation may seem unthinkable once children have been murdered. Both Russians and Chechens have a right to feel that way. Yet victory on the battlefield is not a realistic option.

In contrast to the insurgents' demands in Afghanistan and Iraq, those of the moderate Chechens are entirely reasonable. Compromising with the Chechens is not appeasement, but justice. What the Chechens want is what the United States has already offered to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan: a chance to determine their own future.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has some trenchant thoughts of his own.
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# Posted 6:55 PM by David Adesnik  

YES, DISGRACEFUL: I'm going to disagree with Josh. Dick Cheney's remarks earlier this week were disgraceful. Even though Cheney's remarks are already old news -- and the Vice-President has offered a pseudo-apology -- I just want to go on the record saying that his remarks were offensive. Here's what Cheney said:

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again...that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war."

This is the lowest sort of scaremonging, the kind that lowers public standards of debate even in the midst of a divisive election like this one. Cheney's comments were totally devoid of substance. They were an attack on John Kerry's character, not his policies. They were a suggestion that the terrorists want Kerry to win.

After Cheney's impressive speech at the convention, I expected better from him (in spite of his hypocritical comments about Kerry wanting to fight a more "sensitive" war on terror). But it seems that the Vice-President really hasn't learned anything about civility during his time in office.

(Btw, John Edwards' description of Cheney's comments as "un-American" was over the top as well. But Cheney did come perilously close to attacking John Kerry's patriotism.)

On a related note, Tom Coburn, the GOP senate candidate in Oklahoma, declared that the choice between himself and Democratic candidate Brad Carson is a choice between "good and evil". One or two more comments like that and Coburn will be a full-fledged idiotarian.

In the meantime, Coburn may not become a full-fledged senator in spite of the fact that Bush is running 25 points ahead of Kerry in Oklahoma. I guess that the Sooner electorate knows the difference between moral clarity and being just being a schmuck.

UPDATE: Steve Sturm has given this post the honor of a thorough fisking. Steve says that Kerry and Dean have said things that were just as bad Cheney's remarks, but doesn't provide links or quotations.

Steve also says that Cheney's comments did have substance because they took issue with Kerry's "law enforcement" (i.e. non-war) approach to fighting terrorists. Yet Kerry has repeatedly said that we are at war. In Boston, he said that

We are a nation at war – a global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have ever known before.

So if Cheney is accusing Kerry of subscribing to a law enforcement mentality, then Cheney is lying.

Next, we come to Cheney's suggestion that the terrorists want Kerry to win. Steve responds:

Well, DUH. David: do you really believe the terrorists are ambivalent about the outcome of this election?...to speculate that they would prefer one or the other is not out of bounds.

Saying the terrorists want your opponent to win is pretty much saying that your opponent is so weak that he barely recognizes that the terrorists are our enemy.

In his pseudo-apology, Cheney tried to back away from this interpretation by saying that he was only criticizing Kerry's policies. But Cheney's original remarks didn't point to any substantive difference between Kerry and Bush. His remarks were nothing more than a malicious ad hominem attack.

Finally, Steve says Colin Powell agrees with Cheney. Not by a long shot. In the article Steve cites, Powell tries to pretend Cheney didn't mean what he said. Powell then adds that

"Both candidates, I'm sure, will do everything they can to defend the United States of America, whichever one becomes president."

If only Cheney were decent enough to say that himself.

UPDATE: Surprisingly enough, Matt Yglesias has decided to defend Dick Cheney from OxBlog's attacks.

Picking up where Matt left off, H-Bomb says that his post from three days ago refuted my criticism of Cheney even before I made it.

First, HB makes Steve's point that Kerry has sunk to the same level as Cheney, for example when he said that the Bush administration has "made America less safe than it should be in a dangerous world". I admit that that's not softball politics. But it's still a helluva lot different than saying that if you vote for the other guy, America will get attacked. Cheney's comments made it seem like it is Kerry, and not the terrorists, who are the biggest problem.

Next, HB points to Kerry's statement from January that

"The war on terror is less -- it is occasionally military...But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation."

Kerry is muddying the waters here, but he clearly says that we are at war with the terrorists and that war involves military action.

Finally, HB says that Cheney's controversial speech did make substantive distinctions between Bush and Kerry. Well, sort of. Cheney said that Kerry voted against the Reagan defense build-up, opposed the first Gulf War and flip-flopped on the second. But it's a very long way from there to saying that if you vote for Kerry, terrorists will attack.

In closing, I'd just like to thank Steve and HB for responding to my post. There is considerable merit to their arguments, even if I disagree with them.

I think that this post is a classic demonstration of how the blogosphere promotes well-informed debate. If I were in a bar with Steve and HB, we'd just have to agree to disagree and probably forget about our argument on the way home.

Instead, each of has done additional research and brought new sources to each others' attention. And anyone who reads through our posts can click through to those sources and judge for themselves which of us has made the best argument -- a perfect example of what the blogosphere offers that printed matter can't.
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# Posted 6:47 PM by David Adesnik  

NO COMMENT! NO COMMENT! From the WaPo:

John F. Kerry continues to be elusive to the media contingent traveling with him on his charter jet. Not that anyone is focused on this much, but regular reporters on the plane say that the Democratic presidential nominee has not had a formal news conference since Aug. 9. On Aug. 2, he took two questions from the media in Grand Rapids. On Aug. 14, during a flight from Portland, Ore., to Idaho, he came back to chat about windsurfing.

Since then -- nothing. Reporters who sit 20 feet from Kerry only see him with a cast of thousands at rallies.

On Wednesday, traveling journalists got excited when he walked up
to the assembled horde on the tarmac near Cincinnati. But after making a brief statement marking "the tragic milestone" of the 1,000 dead U.S. troops in Iraq, he walked off, ignoring shouted questions.

The campaign further raised reporters' ire Thursday by moving the news media back from Kerry as he bounded down the stairs from the plane -- symbolically and literally suggesting that Kerry was putting distance between himself and the news media.

"I think it's ridiculous," said Jodi Wilgoren, who covers the Kerry campaign for the New York Times. "There are a lot of things happening in the country and the world, and the public has legitimate questions they'd like to ask. I don't know what he's afraid of. He's criticized the president for not giving enough press conferences. And now we face daily arm-wrestling to ask a question."

Privately, campaign aides say the campaign is trying to keep Kerry "on message" and does not want to run the risk that he might make other news.

Does 'no message' count as 'on message'? Anyhow, Kerry's introversion is hardly surprising. At a forum I hosted at the Olin Institute earlier this year, Patrick Healy, the Globe's lead correspondent for the Kerry campaign, was already attacking the Democratic candidate for not being available to the press.

But who knows? Perhaps Kerry has a surprise in store for all of us.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste points out [via e-mail] that Kerry has broken his silence with an interview in Time. Steven also points out that Time provides its own harsh commentary in the interview, in which the author suggests that Kerry is an ostrich with his head in the sand.

The commentary's main point is that Kerry's tepid response to the Swift Vets' attacks has left voters with the impression that he is weak. I vigorously disagree. While Kerry's response could've been sharpter, the media did more than enough on its own to discredit the Swift Vets.

The real issue is that Kerry hasn't presented a clear alternative to Bush's foreign policy. In the interview, he talks about a "more effective" war on terror and how he "would not have taken the country into war [in Iraq] the way [Bush]did.

Not much of a rallying cry, is it? "I would've done the same thing slightly differently!"

We armchair pundits may know that Kerry can't be more forceful because he has to satisfy the anti-war Democratic base while also reaching out to more moderate swing voters. But if you want swing voters and independents to throw out an incumbent and take a risk on a new president, you have to present them with a clear alternative.

UPDATE: Gene Vilensky speculates about the relationship that a President Kerry might have with the media. At least in this one respect, Kerry is Reaganesque.
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