vinemaple

2005-09-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

Bush Takes Responsibility for Failures in Storm Response

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 13 - President Bush, who is scheduled to make his first address to the nation about the Hurricane Katrina disaster on Thursday, said today that he accepted responsibility for the extent to which the federal government fell short of its share in relief efforts.

I predict that before the week is through Scott McClellan will contradict the President. This admitting failure thing won't last.

Winning in Iraq

2005-08-27T22:49:00.000-07:00

David Brooks shares his strategy on Iraq:

Krepinevich's proposal is hardly new. He's merely describing a classic counterinsurgency strategy, which was used, among other places, in Malaya by the British in the 1950's. The same approach was pushed by Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt in a Washington Post essay back on Oct. 26, 2003; by Kenneth Pollack in Senate testimony this July 18; and by dozens of midlevel Army and Marine Corps officers in Iraq.

Krepinevich calls the approach the oil-spot strategy. The core insight is that you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions trying to kill insurgents. There are always more enemy fighters waiting. You end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents just pop up after you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids.

Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.

Two and a half years into this and now we're supposed to decide what our strategy is? Sheesh. Oh, and the strategy calls for many more soldiers. Where are they supposed to come from? We're out of reservists and regular military recruiting is down. This new strategy also requires a President who can admit mistakes. Short of an impeachment, that's not going to happen for another three and a half years.

Here's a hint: Britain didn't establish permanent bases in Malaysia. They made it clear they were on the way out. That's what this war is really about -- whether or not the U.S. has permanent bases in Iraq. That's why Bush always refuses to say under what conditions American soldiers can leave Iraq.

executive note

2005-02-04T22:22:00.000-08:00

Though all recent contributions have been by Ed, this is not a single-person blog.

John Scopes is Dead

2005-02-01T16:06:00.000-08:00

I'm a little reluctant to wade into the debate over teaching Evolution in American schools, not because I don't have any opinion on the matter, but because I don't think there's much point in getting worked up about it. As far as serious science is concerned, the debate over the validity of the basic principles is over. In political terms, the issue is also a closed book: teaching evolution in American schools is legal, and that's never going to change.

The people driving this "debate" are the same ones who feel the need to ban various books, and to prohibit dancing or representational painting, and to excommunicate astronomers, and to build great pyres to dispose of rock and roll records or pornographic magazines or witches or widows. Such people have been around, and possessed of some modicum of power, for the entirety of recorded human history, and it ought to be clear to all at this late date that getting all worked up and blatting on about it in one's internet diary isn't going to make a damned bit of difference.

With that said, I turn your attention to an article in The New York Times. Don't bother wading through it now if you're in the habit of following the news— most of it is the sort of boilerplate that any media junkie has seen countless times; Americans surveyed, alarmingly large numbers found to believe in creationism, distressingly paltry numbers to believe in evolution, quotes from concerned parties, handwringing over The Children. The twist in this piece is the finding that lots of public school Science teachers are dropping education from their curricula, not because teaching Evolution is illegal, or because they think it's bad science, but because they're a bunch of chickens.

Yes, I'm talking to you, American Public School Science Teachers. You're chicken.

I understand there are communities out there with an alarming number of would-be William Jennings Bryans champing at the bit to howl and spit about teachers who teach what's on the syllabus, but you know what? Those screeching parents aren't allowed to use pitchforks and torches to make their cases anymore. So stop pissing yourself every time you imagine a conversation in which you feel compelled to explain your job to your students' parents.

I also realize that Clarence Darrow's brand of agnostic zealotry isn't for everyone, but you don't have to choose between zealotry and cowardice, here, Science Teachers. You just need to have the courage of your convictions. In fact, it's not just Science Teachers who believe in evolution, but are afraid to teach it, who need to understand this. This also goes for those who don't teach evolution because they don't believe in it, and it goes for teachers and administrators who believe in evolution, and want to bar creationism from the classroom. Time for a reality check:

Is there anyone reading this who didn't learn about Creationism in school? Hmm?

I know I did. I was taught Creationism over and over again, in fact, in lots of different classes. I'm not done with my references to the Scopes trial yet, but if you've understood those allusions so far, then odds are you learned about Creationism in school, too, most likely in one (or more) of your History courses. You might not have been taught it in a Science class, but I know I was. Many times over. Maybe you had some sort of marvelously modern education where the History of Science wasn't discussed in your Science classes, and where old theories weren't presented as contrast and background to the new ones in your Science textbooks, but I find that hard to imagine. My Biology and Geology and General Science and Physics textbooks all had Creationism in them. And this was in plain old public schools, not Catholic schools or madrassas.

Now, whatever your beliefs may be, you really shouldn't have anything to fear from the teaching of other, opposing ideas in schools, provided you have the courage of your convictions. For teachers, this applies regardless of personal beliefs. If you're secure in those beliefs, then you can teach opposing views to your students alongside your own view, and trust your students to come to their own conclusions. This goes for science teachers with either creationist or evolutionist leanings, and even for those who aren't entirely secure in their own beliefs, for that matter.

There is one belief, however, that I feel we do have to hold teachers to, and that is a belief in teaching. Teachers who are so scared of parents that they choose to teach nothing, that is, to not teach, in place of teaching a potentially difficult topic, deserve only pity. They don't deserve to have bleating nobodies berating them on the internet, I suppose, but they certainly don't deserve anyone's respect, either.

You may gather from all this that I favor the teaching of "Intelligent Design" in schools, and you'd be right. I'd favor teaching it in Philosophy classes over Science classes, but it wasn't long ago that the sciences generally and Biology in particular were referred to as "Natural Philosophy," and, on a more practical note, there aren't many grade schools or even High Schools in America with Philosophy departments. So sure, let's teach Intelligent Design in Science classes.

Wait. I'm not done yet.

The people promoting Intelligent Design, from what I gather, are not really upset that Creationism isn't being taught in schools, because Creationism most certainly is being taught in schools. What upsets the Intelligent Design promoters is that Creationism is not being taught as a modern or scientific idea. It's being taught as a historical relic. That's why they need "Intelligent Design," of course, but I believe they're opening up a door to a lot more fun than they suppose, with this newer, more science-like terminology.

If I were teaching a High School Biology class, I would devote one day to "alternate theories to evolution." They would include:

Christian Creationism: 6 remarkably productive days about 10,000 years ago, and all that.

Non-Christian Creationism: There are other religions in the world, and what's more, many people actually believe in them! Some of these heathen mud-people have their own crazy ideas about how man and beast and dinosaur bones came to be.

Intelligent Design: Someone or something intelligent created the universe. Apart from historical baggage, is this the same thing as Christian Creationism, or is Christian Creationism only one version of this idea? Could an Intelligent Designer have designed the processes we call "Evolution?"

Random Design: Stuff just kind of crashed around willy-nilly until it accidentally became mankind. Is this what the theory of Evolution proposes?

No Design: The materials and mechanisms of the universe arose from natural processes, without any initial design or designer, and these processes eventually produced mankind. Is this the same as "random design?" Is this the same as Evolution? Could Evolution be part of a "no design" theory?

Stupid Design: The universe, man, and the lower animals were created by a very powerful but utterly incompetent entity, who screwed everything up. Problem of Evil solved.

Preliminary Design: The world we live in, the beasts of the field, and all of mankind are just a prototype. Don't get too worked up about things, The Creator might pull the plug any minute now. Could Evolution be a component of a "Preliminary Design" theory, even though it posits a Creator?

Infernal Design: Also known as "Satanism" (useful more as something with which to bludgeon school boards considering "Intelligent Design" proposals than as a pedagogical tool)

Accidental Design: The Universe has a creator, but he or she or it made the thing by mistake. The Creator may or may not have noticed The Universe yet, let alone decided to do anything in particular about it. Could Evolution be a component of an "Accidental Design" theory?

Exercise:Make up your own explanation for the origins of man and beast. Your theory must either account for fossils and emergence of drug-resistant germs and all that stuff, or provide some reason for ignoring it.

Anyway. This just shows that I'd prefer to play the role of H.L. Menken, given the available cast of characters in the trial, and I suspect I'm no different from every other leftish no-name internet diarist, in that regard.

Incidentally, do you know who John Scopes was, and what he did to get that Monkey Trial going in the first place?

Hint #1: He did, in fact, break a law, but he didn't do anything that isn't legal in all 50 of the United States today.

Hint #2: If you're one of those Science teachers who have been skipping over evolution in your classes, and you don't know or remember how the Scopes trial started, then I hope you'll have the decency to feel ashamed of yourself once you've looked it up and reflected on it.

2005-01-30T19:27:00.000-08:00

Shorter Gregg Easterbrook:

I didn't understand the part in Guns, germs, and Steel where Jared Diamond explains how China's gentle topography and extensive navigable river systems made it easy to administer as a very large centralized state at a comparatively early date in history.

We can safely dismiss Diamond's concerns about our present society's use of limited resources, because if things do get tight, we can just use moon-fuel to move into our brand-new moon-cities.

2005-01-18T17:39:00.000-08:00

Public Speaking tips #001: Death Income

This sentence contains my final use of the word "inheritance." The problem with the old term is that it might lead one to think that death income is a good thing, what with the old word's cloying connotations of devotion to kith and kin, but as this questionable perspective is only truly available to people who are already dead, it seems wrong to me to use the term in otherwise reasonable fiscal argument.

In the debate over death income, there are a couple of points to keep in mind about proper usage of the terminology.

1. Most importantly, death income, like other no-work income, is not "earned," it is collected. Don't use the term "unearned"-- it's unweildy, it has the incorrect "earned" in it, and it's already taken (my accountant friend tells me it means something difficult in the tax code).

2. Keep in mind that as bad as death income sounds to people like you and me, who live proper lives supporting ourselves with normal (that is, work) income, death income is even more objectionable when it is high or very high death income. Apply extra adjectives as appropriate.

So, to review:

Old way: "I think people recieving in-------ces should have them taxed as income, though maybe it could be amortized over several years, or..." (etc etc, blah blah, endless cringing, waffling, and appeasement).

New way: "I think people collecting high death income should be taxed at least as much as workers earning normal income.

2005-01-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

No, my friend. George W. Bush was not too stingy in his response to the tsunami.

More accurately, he wasn't any stingier than you were. No, I don't mean to imply that world leaders ought to be held to the same standards as normal people, and I'm not saying you were a cheapskate, either. What I'm saying is that you don't understand how the President Bush responded to the tragedy.

One important difference between your response and Mr. Bush's is that he was on vacation. Now, I realize the guy takes an awful lot of time off, and that it might be nice if he'd left the brush harvest to The Help just this once, and returned to the office early to shake his head and mumble dejected amazedments in the kitchenette along with the rest of us, but that's just not how this man works. He takes his vacation seriously, and vacation, my friend, means getting away from all the headaches you have to deal with at the office.

If your job description is "be the President," then it's really, really hard to get away from it all. In fact, it's impossible, so the poor guy has to set aside an hour or two out of each and every vacation day to check in with the office and make sure everything's OK. The rest of the day, however, is for strictly non-work vacation-type stuff, and if you're in the presidenting industry, then "non-work" means no TV, no newspapers, no unexpected phone calls from the office allowed, and no internet, not even blog-reading.

Other men in the trade might be a little loose about the formal requirements of presidential vacationing, but not George W. Bush. He's a man of discipline, a man who sticks to a strict schedule, a man who doesn't just wander off in the middle of a brush harvest without finishing the job. This is a man who takes his vacationing every bit as seriously as he takes his work, because he loves his family and his land and he cherishes his time with them. Probably more than you do.

So it was that on December 26th, George W. Bush, during his daily check-in with the office, heard about the tsunami, or "big wave." Now, the President's schedule is, for good reason, a matter of national security, so I don't personally know what time of day it was when he heard the news. But I'm guessing it was in the early afternoon, after a leisurely morning, because a meeting in the neighborhood of one-o'clock would provide the perfect catalyst for a mid-afternoon nap, after which one might awake refreshed and ready for the remaining hours of daylight, full of brush harvesting, rugged mountain bicycling, or other manly pursuits (evenings, of course, must cleave to the American Traditional, filled agreeably with Family Time and Televised Sporting Events).

It is possible, I suppose, that having consumed too much in the way of improbable movies or television fantasies about imaginary Presidents, you may have very different notions of what a presidential vacation ought to look like, but you must rid yourself of such nonsensical rubbish. Actors playing presidents may very well have nameless well-dressed persons wearing ear-pieces rushing in willy-nilly to brief the imaginary president on diseased oats crops in the Mongo-Bongo Delta, but real Presidents do not have to put up with this crap. In fact, the only people I can think of whose jobs really do involve constant interruptions from panic-stricken aides equipped with earpieces are... directors of movies and television programs.

No, President Bush doesn't let his staff get in the way of Core Values like Family and God and Paid Executive Vacation. If you'd just take a moment to imagine the President and First Lady sitting together on the day after Christmas, holding hands and beaming at the twins, both girls completely absorbed with brushing and petting and otherwise fussing over their brand-new and elaborately beribboned twin thoroughbred ponies, you'd realize that it would take a lesser man, a man without the full measure of love for his wife and children, to allow interruption of this happy scene by a scowling, jittery, and possibly sweating person bearing ill tidings from some hopeless corner of the world where people don't even have proper toilets.

Anyway, when Mr. Bush called the office on the 26th, they told him that there had been a tsunami, and that... 3,000 people were dead. My memory isn't what it used to be, but that's about where I remember the death toll standing in the early afternoon of the 26th. Maybe it was 5,000, I don't know. I'm pretty sure it didn't hit 10,000 until much later in the evening.

So Mr. Bush, being a fairly warm-hearted (if simple) fellow, was saddened by the tragedy, and wished to express his sorrow, so he told the office to go get a condolence card and have everyone sign it, and tuck a check for fifteen million dollars in the envelope, because he really did want to do something to help, and it actually seemed very, very generous at the time, seeing as how it looked like the big wave hadn't killed nearly as many people as it might have.

And he went out and worked on the brush harvest and had a nice quiet evening watching some DVDs with the family, and went to bed feeling like he'd done a very good deed. I'm pretty sure you didn't feel especially compelled to donate blood or send cookies that evening, either, even if you're in the dubious habit of checking the news right before bed.

Well, things didn't get better overnight.

Bush, to his credit, responded to the rising death toll with another check. I'll allow it looks like the new amount, which, as you may have heard, was thirty-five million dollars, wasn't directly proportional to the increase in reported casualties, which I dimly recall as being in the neighborhood of 30,000 dead by early afternoon of the 27th, but I can think of quite a few reasonable explanations for the apparent shortfall in funding.

Maybe the folks at the office figured they'd been really generous with the first check, so the second one didn't have to be as impressive. Maybe nobody in the conference call had looked at CNN or the internet in the past few hours. Maybe Mr. Bush had a quick peek at the morning paper, with the previous evening's death toll of 10,000 in it, and started right in at the meeting with what he'd read in the papers, and how he'd like to send another check, and then moved on to the next agenda item without discussing casualty figures. Or maybe nobody wanted to correct him, or question the magnitude of his generous offer, or maybe the most recent sad statistics just never got mentioned. You know how it is. It's crazy how meetings can go zipping right past you, and you never get a chance to talk about the key findings in the report you spent the whole morning working on. Or perhaps Mr. Bush had something particularly exciting planned that afternoon, maybe an experimental plot of extra-fancy high-grade brush had just reached the peak of ripeness, and the daily call to the office was moved to early morning, instead of early afternoon, and the body-count wasn't as far along, and everyone on the call was a little groggy and under-caffeinated, anyway.

Whatever the case, I'm absolutely certain that Mr. Bush had no reason on that second day to feel like he was being anything but an upright world citizen and a true friend to the poor people on the coasts of the far-off Indian Ocean. And what about you? If I remember it right, it was around the time Mr. Bush was making this second (and possibly misinformed) pledge that, we, the most righteous bloggers of blogland, our hearts swelling with sadness, were taking a long look at their Christmas presents, reaching for our wallets and keyboards, and pledging the entirety of our... Amazon Associates Program earnings.

Um, yes. That does seem somewhat crass, in hindsight.

The next day, President Bush added a zero to his official relief donation, as did we, the most righteous bloggers of blogland. The difference is that while he went from thirty-five million to three hundred fifty million, we went from two dollars and twenty-three cents to $22.50 (didn't you read the fine print? $2.50 handling charge to be applied to all online credit-card payments).

You may have gathered from my tone that I am not a whole-hearted supporter of Mr. Bush. Nonetheless, I think that the amounts of American taxpayers' money he has progressively pledged to help the victims of this disaster have been timely, compassionate, and appropriate (if not outstandingly generous) in light of a) Mr. Bush's vacation schedule, b) the fact that the death toll grew steadily, hour upon hour for three days, and shocked and horrified you and me and everyone else with its grim, ponderous denouement, and c) the fact that even though modern technology may allow you the somewhat grandiose delusion of perfect, as-it-happens access to every event everywhere in the world, it still takes hours or even days for the news to reach the audience— and that includes you, the blog audience.

And just in case you're still wondering, yes, the people who have been angrily shouting and typing about how Mr. Bush is such a miserly brown-person-hating monster-man are, in fact, using a terrible tragedy to score cheap political points, and ought to be ashamed of themselves.

You can criticize President Bush for a great many things, some of which touch peripherally on the issue of his specific response to this specific disaster. I, myself, for example, am not yet through with my critique of the curious relationship Mr. Bush has with brush, and I will be revisiting the topic, I'm afraid, at some length. You can criticize Mr. Bush for his vacationing schedule, yes. You can certainly criticize his funding, or lack thereof, for various efforts to develop, er, developing nations. You can continue to make all of these arguments and then some (And I'm quite certain you will), and what's more, you can make each and every one of them without concluding that Mr. Bush hates dead tsunami babies. I'd prefer it, really.

But if, despite my patient explanations and gentle exhortations, you're still absolutely determined to excoriate Mr. Bush for being too slow in offerring reasonable sums of money to the stricken, then I do hope you're prepared to criticize the survivors for being too damned slow in counting the corpses.

2003-10-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

OK, sometimes it helps to think about people instead of nations, but, well, sometimes it doesn't. I've thought about the various impacts on various people, and I'm still left with an unanswered question, albeit a more specific one: Are first-world agricultural subsidies bad for the developing world?

To answer that, I think I'm going to have to take apart the notion of a "farmer."

I shouldn't have to remind anyone that not all farms are "family farms;" you know, Maw, Paw, three chickens, a cow, forty acres, and, uh, seven children. There are big farms and small farms. Industrialized farms, and what we might call "developing" farms. Moreover, farm ownership isn't straightforward. There are sharecropped farms, and government-run farms, and farms whose rights are apportioned by village elders or established by lineage. I think the relevant question, here, is what kinds of farm workers would benefit from an end to first-world agricultural subsidies?

The answer, in the simplest terms, is that, barring corruption, people who work on the most efficient farms would benefit most. This is a bit of a tautology-- the most efficient farms are the ones that get the greatest yield per acre per dollar/euro/whatever spent, and in farming, as in so many other industries, the biggest cost is labor.

So which is better, a big farm in Somalia with tractors and manure spreaders and self-propelled sprinkler systems and 60 farm hands, or a big farm in Uganda with no machinery at all and 800 workers? If they both produce the same output, the former is likely to provide much better wages, while the latter will provide many more jobs.

If I had to work on a farm... hey, wait. I don't want to work on a farm! And I'm not alone, either. Farming is lousy work. The hours are long, it's hard physical labor, you smell like manure at the end of the day, and even if you're not too exhausted to wash up and go out, there's nowhere to go, becuase you live and work on a farm, damn it, and not in a city or town where there's stuff to do after work. People historically have tried to get away from farm work at the first opportunity. Why do we want third-world people to work on farms? Why on earth should we suppose they'll eventually be any better off than the migrant farm workers we've got in the US, for Pete's sake?

Well, OK, if I had to work on a farm, then I'd rather work on the mechanized farm than a non-mechanized one. But that kills jobs! What are we going to do with all the unemployed former farmhands, when those third-world farms make a profit in the glorious new subsidy-free world market, and use those profits to buy combine harvesters and crop dusters?

And if the third world does modernize its farms, won't that flood the market with cheap agricultural products? Thereby screwing the third-world farmers who don't buy milking machines? In the free market, wouldn't large-scale mechanized farming win out over mom-n-pop farming?

Well, all that cheap imported third-world-produced food might one day mess things up for the small farmer, but it will be damned good news for all the people who used to work on the plantations, but had to move into the shantytowns surrounding the cities when the owners started buying machinery.

It's all very well and good to point to the transformation of European farming in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, but can you really compare those economies to what we see in the world today? Europe progressed in large part because they were inventing the new technology as they went, and benefitting from it; in the developing world today, the machines already exist.

I guess part of what I'm getting at, here, is that I believe the distinction between "agriculture" and "industry" is a poor one. I think a lot of people, especially people on the left in the West, tend to think of Farming in semi-magical terms, as if it's supposed to live up to some gauzy pastoral ideal, and as a consequence, a lot of the conclusions they reach about it are based more on (often outdated) cultural values than on any rational understanding of modern agriculture.
(other examples would include the GM food debate, the "organic food" movement, and perhaps the radical vegan/vegetarian fringe, too)

No, I don't think first world agricultural subsidies are bad for "the third world." I don't have any answers to the pressing quesion of how to turn the "developing" world into the "developing at a more gratifying pace" world, but it looks to me like "end agricultural subsidies" is an empty promise, in that it would likely result in no discernable improvement, and might in fact make things worse.

There are good reasons to oppose subsidies, of course, but I don't think brandishing the plight of the poor, heavily mythologized third-world farmer is one of them.

Update, 10/27: Found an excellent article about irrational attitudes toward organic and GM crops.

2003-10-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

Why are agricultural subsidies bad? Good question! Sometimes it helps to think of people instead of countries. If you're a food consumer in a rich country (if?), subsidies in rich countries are bad because you pay more in high taxes than you get in cheaper food (I've seen estimates of around $200 per person per year for Germans). If you're a farmer in a poor country, they're bad because they lower the price you get for your crops, which makes you poorer. And since farmers in poor countries make, oh, $2/day or so, that really, really hurts.

If you're a (probably urban) food consumer in a poor country, agricultural subsidies make food cheaper, which is good. And if you're a farmer in a rich country, they make you a lot richer (technically, it makes whoever owns farmland richer, but that's another story).

But this leads to another question: what are people in poor countries supposed to do? How do poor countries become less poor? I heard Paul Krugman on the radio a couple days ago talking about how in the 1970s development economics was an especially depressing (he should have said dismal) field, because the most recent success story was Japan, in the late 1800s!

I think generally countries in Europe became wealthier when agricultural productivity increased (the Dark Ages saw the invention of crop rotation, water wheels, etc) and not everybody had to be a farmer to eat. People could be craftsmen, merchants, teachers, etc.

Maybe poor agricultural countries need that stage? Is it like setting the minimum wage too high, and telling the workers priced out of the market that they're better off not working anyway?

Farmers in poor countries often suffer under price controls. Farmers are required to sell their crops to the government below the market price, and the government (the corrupt dictator and his tribe) sells at the international price, pocketing the difference. Ending rich country agricultural subsidies might just make only dictators richer in some poor countries.

Since the 1970s countries like South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have done pretty well with what's called export-led growth (countries that tried import substitution, like India, have had poor, and in some cases zero economic growth since the end of the colonial period).

So yeah, if people in Senegal got out of the farming business, and started making all the cheap plastic stuff that's made in China, they'd be all set. What's stopping them? Probably corrupt governments and a lack of entrepreneurs, but I don't really know.

2003-10-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

Why are agricultural subsidies bad?

I've been nosing around trying to figure out what the heck happened in the Cancun round of WTO talks. Everyone seems to agree that things didn't work out, but no-one seems to be able to figure out why. The anti-WTO brigade says that the breakdown proves they were right all along, in that the WTO isn't really working to promote free trade, but rather to promote the interests of "the corporations" or "rich nations" or "Bush's cronies." Needless to say, I don't find these explanations particularly compelling; the WTO hasn't lived up to its ideals yet, but that doesn't mean it's part of a grand conspiracy of plutocrats.

Daniel Davies says Cancun was torpedoed by a dispute over a set of proposed international investment rules collectively referred to as "Singapore Issues." There's a conspiracy-theory edge to the idea (the EU deliberately used Singapore Issues to derail the talks! Alack! Alarum!), and I initially had a bit of trouble understanding why it would be a bad thing to have some rules making it easier for foreigners to invest in developing nations. How would more money be a bad thing? It seems, though, that there's some question of national autonomy at stake; the rules in question would make it difficult for nations to put government money into local businesses for things like research or health care or other things that governments like to promote. Brad Delong, lovable "neoliberal" (Am I missing something, or does that term mean "libertarian, except sort of leftish?") takes Davies to task for preferring governments to markets (and takes a gratuitous slap at Bush in the process). Delong's readers in turn take him to task for preferring markets to governments, and I'm left not knowing quite what to think.

So, while I was scratching my head and trying to figure out whether or not these Singapore Issues rules were good or bad, I read a comment somewhere that asked a much better question, one that nobody has answered to my satisfaction. The question is the one at the top of this ramble, and I think it relates to the foreign investment muddle. Why are agricultural subsidies bad? In particular, why on earth are lower food prices bad for the developing world? I understand the idea that lower prices make it harder for developing nations to export agricultural goods, but don't they also make it easier for those same nations to eat? Shouldn't those low food prices make it easier for a poor nation to take the step from subsistence agriculture to a more diverse economy?

Why is it wrong for the US and France and their ilk to use government money in a way that makes it easier for other nations to buy food? The only arguments I can think of invoke principles of self-sufficiency or national autonomy-- principles that have no place in the sort of economic models that demonstrate the virtues of open markets, or in political outlooks that embrace those models. And it seems to me these same sorts of principles are at stake in those Singapore Issues that have me so confused.

2003-10-01T22:55:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove:

Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted.

That was written in January 2003! Novak! Rove!

2003-09-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

I'll admit it, seeing the Mariners choke makes me sad.

2003-09-11T23:42:00.000-07:00

It doesn't take an Al Franken to spot this. FOXNews says Solemn Day Doesn't Halt Attacks on Bush:

While he has insisted that he backs U.S. policy supporting Israel, statements made on Wednesday about Hamas raise new questions.

"There is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war," Dean said Wednesday.

Dean condemned terrorism but his description of Hamas — designated by the United States as a terrorist group — as "soldiers in a war" conflicts with U.S. policy. The European Union also approved last week the designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The part about "solemn day" in the headline doesn't jive with the word "Wednesday," unless something bad happened on September 10th that I don't know about. But that's a minor point.

Is Dean saying that Hamas, which is dedicated to destroying Israel (and has something against Rotary clubs), is morally equivalent to Israel? That is big news. Let's see what CNN has to say ... Dean defends Middle East remarks:

Asked if he would oppose the Israeli policy of selectively killing leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, Dean said, "I think no one likes to see violence of any kind."

But he also said that "there is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war, and, therefore, it seems to me that they are going to be casualties if they are going to make war."

Apparently Dean approves of Israel's current policy of going after Hamas's leadership. You wouldn't know that from FOXNews's story. Bad FOXNews, bad! Still, the only time Hamas members wear uniforms is during funerals for suicide bombers, so the word "soldier" doesn't apply. If Dean is going to talk about Israel, I'd like him to simply say, "and in Israel versus Hamas, I'm rooting for Israel."

2003-09-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

The New Radical Chic: Anne Applebaum sees signs that anti-globalization activists are wising up.

Yet the shift in fashion also reflects a shifting intellectual consensus. Listen hard to Third World activists these days -- Oxfam, say, or the Jubilee Network -- and it is not anti-globalization rhetoric you hear but anti-trade-barrier rhetoric. In the run-up to Cancun, at least a half-dozen people have told me that the average European cow receives $2.50 in daily agricultural subsidies, more money than at least 3 billion of the world's humans have to live on. These agricultural subsidies are, without question, one of the least-discussed, farthest-reaching of international scandals: Every year, the rich world spends many billions more on subsidies and agricultural tariffs than it does on aid to the countries that these subsidies and agricultural tariffs help impoverish. Despite its traditional help-the-poor rhetoric, even Sweden, Norberg points out, makes sugar from sugar beets instead of importing sugar at a fifth of the price from the sugar cane-producing South.
Although there will be anti-globalizers in Cancun, the cutting edge has shifted -- and not a moment too soon. In a perverse way, the movement has in recent years provided a cushion for those politicians -- European, American, Japanese and developing world alike -- who drag their feet about opening markets.

I hope she's right. Then my friends will think I was ahead of the curve instead of a meany who hated people in poor countries.

2003-09-07T23:48:00.000-07:00

The key to understanding McWhorter is that he's a nerd, and because he's a nerd, he can't be black. Nobody likes black nerds! The only black nerd in popular culture is Geordi LaForge, who, after Picard and Data, was the 3rd best character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and whose irreplaceable engineering saved the day in about half the episodes. And for that Levar Burton earned a Most Embarrassing Black Person Special Hall of Fame award in The Boondocks. Oh yeah, and Urkel. Look at all the trouble Sean Combs (attended Howard) and Tupac Shakur (went to an arts high school, like on Fame) got into to overcome their nerdiness and establish ghetto cred. Sure, there's the Malcolm X/Chuck D style nerd, but they get a pass because they only talk about being black. Everybody else gets to be a nerd. You can be a white nerd, you can easily be an Asian nerd (try not to), you can be a Hispanic nerd, but you can't be a black nerd.

Let's take another look at McWhorter's main point:

Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn't be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly "authentic" response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.

The thing is, in America, the only way to move up the economic ladder is to be a nerd. And rap music is the only art form in America that says otherwise. I mean, bluegrass doesn't condemn those who fail to keep it real. Now, I don't know if the lyrical content of rap is the way it is because it reflects the opinions of most young black Americans, or if it's because that's what the mostly non-black market is interested in buying. It doesn't matter. I think a positive step would be to stop pretending that popular gansta rap has serious or productive political content. It's not like the Irish, Jews, and Italians worked their way out of the ghetto because the pop music of the late 1800s told them to go to school, so we know that it's not necessary for gansta rap to be transformed into some kind of simpering self-affirmation life-coaching. Of course, the black middle class grew rapidly in the '90s. At the very best you can say rap's irrelevant. Anyway, it was the macho posturing at KFC that really bugged McWhorter, and it bugs me too. I don't like it from drunken frat guys or anybody else.

As for wiggers, I hate macho posturing from anybody. Is that what you're asking yourself, why do I give macho posturing from black kids a free pass? (Hank Hill once asked, "What the hell kind of country is this where I can only hate a man if he's white?") Or maybe it's just the desperate trying-to-be-ness of wiggers that bugs you.

2003-09-05T19:14:00.000-07:00

Can I hate wiggers without being a racist?

The short answer is "No." The long answer is "Yes, but it's going to be damned inconvenient having to explain yourself every time you grumble about the kids these days or make a snippy little crack about white suburban teenagers who buy Rap CDs." But I'm getting ahead of myself...

There is a twofold racism lurking in a certain variety of unexamined resentment of white suburban teens who embrace hip-hop. The resentment I'm thinking of is one that stems from the "liberal" notion that white people shouldn't "appropriate" black culture. The first problem with this is that it stereotypes blacks— anyone who lives in an area with a substantial black population can tell you that not all black teens dress in baggy pants, wear sideways baseball caps, listen to and recite rap all day long, "tag" everything in sight, and glorify drug use, firearms, and misogyny.

The stereotyping problem is damning enough on its own, but there's a second racist aspect to wigger-hating, that being the pernicious notion that white people shouldn't act like black people. I don't think there's any need to explain why this is a racist idea. I mention it only because it seems to have wormed its way into so much of what is thought of as "liberal" politics; all too often, the contemporary ideal of Multiculturalism seems to be no more than an artfully coded rephrasing of the doctrine of Separate but Equal.

This became particularly apparent to me when I listened to a Talk of the Nation segment with John McWhorter, in which he got a call (about 22 minutes into the segment) from a white woman who told him she thought he'd adopted the culture of the oppressor, and therefore didn't represent the "true" black perspective. In other, uglier words, she called him an Uncle Tom.

This does not mean, however, that the caller thought the uppity negro McWhorter ought to stay in his place and stop putting on airs, though she did seem to think he needed to spend more time in those squalid urban ghettos infested with drug-addled, violent darkies, neighborhoods that exist more vividly in the white liberal imagination than in the streets of any real American city.

No, the white academic liberal does not want the negro to live in squalor. Nor, however, does that same liberal want blacks to assimilate into "white" America. They want to preserve "black" culture, as distinct from "white" culture, except they want to use all sorts of social programs and incentives and education and perhaps some reparations and so on to transform "black culture," to lift it up to the economic and power-structural level of the white middle class, and to keep it unambiguously black at the same time.

In other words, this well-meaning but not particularly thoughtful variety of liberal wants a Separate but Equal "black culture," instead of the oppressed one they see when they imagine the squalid ghetto. In short, their goal, at the end of the day, is a segregated America, albeit one in which the segregation is "only" social and cultural, instead of official and governmental.

White academic liberals are not the only source of pro-segregation sentiment, of course— in fact, some of it, noticeably, comes from blacks. Phrases like "stay black" and "keep it real," after all, tacitly proscribe any dabbling in behavior that's "too white," too far over the implicitly accepted racial boundary.

But it's time I got back to the wiggers. I still don't like them, you see, despite the clear racist implications, so I've still got a fair amount of explaining to do.

If there's anything that can be said of all wiggers, it's that they prefer hip-hop to other forms of music. Now, since John McWhorter says hip-hop is to blame for black misbehavior, it follows that hip-hop is what's turning white suburban teens into the sort of people that I'm inclined to dislike, right?

Well, no.

McWhorter's little essay, while amusing, doesn't amount to anything more than the "media causes violence" argument (and its ilk: "media causes greed," "media causes teen pregnancy," "media causes liberalism," "media stole the election," etc, etc.). Needless to say, I don't buy it.

Teenagers who want to act uncivilized don't need any encouragement other than a few peers with similar wishes. Teens were glorifying violence, indulging in misogynist fantasies, acting surly in the face of authority, and spitting in the paths of strangers long before Rap was invented. In fact, it ought to be pointed out that that's exactly how a lot of "the greatest generation" behaved, back in the days of WWII, though you'd never know it from the misty nostalgic pap they've been churning out in recent years.

Of course, Rap isn't quite what McWhorter says it is, either. There's plenty of hip-hop that runs counter to the violent, misogynist portrait McWhorter paints, and contrary to what he suggests, some of it sells well. There's also no shortage today of the sort of good-times "party music" that he waxes nostalgic about (while, conveniently, establishing his Old-School bona fides).

McWhorter's essay inveighs against Rap, but it's worth noting that it wasn't Rap that got him worked up in the first place— it was a particular incident in which he observed a group of rebellious, uncivilized teenagers. Getting pissed about a gaggle of rude teens is perfectly understandable, of course, and now we're finally getting to some firm ground on which I can stand when I proclaim my dislike of wiggers, to wit: a lot of them act like assholes.

Of course, not all of them do, so I can't honestly say I dislike the whole lot of them, either. But there is something particularly nasty about the ones who misbehave, something that lives in an unspoken accusation. The idea is this: that since these surly teens embrace "black culture," then if I have a problem with them, I must have a problem with blacks. In short, if I don't like it when one of them spits on the sidewalk in front of me, then I'm a racist. That's bullshit, of course, and it's bullshit no matter what color the sullen, spitting teen might be. This is also, thankfully, obvious, and I'm hardly the first person to say it. It's what Chris Rock is getting at in his standup, when he tells a black audience, "I hate niggers."

There's an additional unspoken accusation that one encounters, even when dealing with less objectionable wiggers: that non-wigger whites are square, that they don't understand "the black reality," that they're out of touch, that in not paying much attention to Rap, they're a little bit racist by omission. Wiggers who make that sort of assumption don't necessarily strike me as uncivilized, but they do strike me as smug, which irks me, as I've done a fair bit of reading on the subject of black culture, and black history.
When that sort of baseless, disapproving smugness reaches a certain point, it can turn a wigger into an insufferable asshole. It doesn't usually reach that point, of course, because wiggers, thankfully, don't stay teenagers forever.

And that's what I keep reminding myself every time I run across a teenage wigger I don't like— these are only kids. They're still trying to figure things out, things about themselves, and things about the world around them. They're bound to be a bit smug at times, and maybe even do a bit of spitting. I tell myself that they'll probably outgrow it.

Wiggers well past their teens, however, are a different story. Almost all of them seem to be either insufferably smug liberal types, or insufferably hostile, misogynist, asshole types. My reaction to these particular species of old-enough-to-know-better wiggers is a lot less complicated:

I hate 'em.

2003-09-03T23:48:00.000-07:00

Well, come on, of course taxes are regressive around here— Washingon is one of only nine states without an income tax, after all. Let's see, the two most populous are Florida and Texas— I seem to recall hearing those two states mentioned together, somewhere before...

Hasn't the Latte tax been in the ballot initiative pipeline for a long time now? There was an article about it in The Stranger over a year ago; is this still the same initiative? And speaking of The Stranger...

Hasn't Dan Savage gone a bit overboard?

I mean, come on. I've been involved in a few email flame wars in my time, but I've never resorted to an FOIA request before, you know? And Public Health of King County/Seattle can't exactly turn around and demand all of The Stranger's internal email to even the score, can they?

I'd just shrug and blame the late summer heat, if it weren't for the fact that Dan wears his personal politics on his sleeve. It looks to me like he's taking Public Health, a local government agency, to task for engaging in politics in order to get its ostensible job done. Oh, the scandal! The outrage! Gee, Dan, do you think you could be any more of a flaming Libertarian?

From what I've read, it does look like Lifelong AIDS Alliance and Gay City are both doing pretty crappy work, but Dan's "The Righteous vs. AIDS, Inc" portrait of the situation doesn't appeal to me any more than the whitewash job LLA and GC seem to be engaged in.

I'm sure Dan would agree that one thing that ought to be done is to spend a little of that public anti-HIV funding trying to figure out what sorts of prevention strategies actually work, but this notion gets scant mention in The Hunt For AIDS Evildoers.

I'm sure you notice the problem with the repeated assertion that AIDS in Seattle is being spread by a core of shadowy, amoral, irresponsible HIV terrorists. Not that it's judgemental— I'll agree with the notion that any HIV-positive person who knowingly engages in activity with a high risk of transmission without informing his or her partner is a despicable shithead. But do you see how many qualifiers it took to say that?

What if the infected person doesn't know he or she is infected? What constitutes "high risk behavior?" Are the partners allowed to determine acceptable levels of risk for themselves, or is that for the newspapers to decide? What if some of these scurrilous, amoral "core" HIV transmitters go so far as to—gasp—lie about their HIV status when they're trying to get laid?

This "core," it seems to me, must have some pretty blurry edges. If it didn't, after all, then how could the AIDS-causing "core" be infecting people outside the core? If the "core" is the only part of the population engaging in HIV-transmitting behavior, then shouldn't the incidence of AIDS be dropping as the members of the "core," who expose their dread virus only to other "core" members, inevitably succumb to the disease?

OK, I've misrepresented Dan's position, and wandered off on a tangent, but it's in the service of a point. It's not at all clear that Dan thinks any AIDS education should be undertaken at all— after all, he's said right there in the paper that he believes current efforts do more harm than good, and I didn't notice him calling for any replacement program.

To the extent that he actually favors any course of HIV prevention, it seems that what Dan really wants is to stigmatize (or, perhaps, re-stigmatize) unsafe behavior. But what does "unsafe behavior" mean? Is it just sex without condoms, or is there more to it than that? With the talk about "disclosure," is Dan saying that there ought to be a taboo against sex that is not preceded with medical discussion, and truthful medical discussion, at that? No sex with multiple partners, no "open" relationships? No sex without a note from the doctor? No one-night stands? No more Wild Oats or Youthful Indiscretions?

If he really wants to change the culture and behavior of gay men in the service of ending the spread of AIDS, then it looks to me like Dan might eventually find himself advocating Gay Abstinance until Gay Marriage.

P.S. Did you know that Jen, the co-owner of Victrola quoted in that article, lived across the hall from me for a semester, back in ye olde college dayes? She borrowed some truly crappy music from me at one point, if I remember correctly.

2003-09-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Proposed Tax Rouses an Already Jumpy City:

SEATTLE, Sept. 1 - In these lean times, cash-poor states and cities across the country have pondered and enacted a host of creative taxes and fees, raising the cost of snowmobiling in Montana, trout fishing in New Mexico and marrying in Massachusetts.

But now there is the proposed espresso tax in Seattle.

Seattle is the coffee capital of the nation, the birthplace of Starbucks, a caffeine-crazed city where espresso is available at gas stations, hospitals, roadside stands and drive-through windows. Seattle is so identified with the liquid produced by forcing steam through ground coffee beans that an espresso tax is like a tax on the city's very soul.

The formal name of the espresso tax, which would add 10 cents to the cost of every beverage served in Seattle containing a half-ounce or more of espresso -- but would not apply to regular drip coffee -- is Initiative 77. Sponsored by the Early Learning and Care Campaign, it will go before voters on Sept. 16.

Hey, that picture is of my local coffee shop, Victrola. They don't like the proposed tax:

"I think it is a bad public policy," said Jen Strongin, a co-owner of Victrola Coffee, adding that she would probably raise the price of espresso drinks by 10 cents if the tax were approved. "I think it sets a precedent for future taxation in the city that would be a bad idea: taxing specialty items like espresso or salmon, something that someone deems a luxury item."

(I'd like Victrola a whole lot more if they cut back on the live music. I think it's there to keep people from staying too long).

Anyway, is this tax progressive? The initiative's sponsor says yes:

Mr. Burbank said the tax was a fairer way to raise money at a time when the economy was weak because it would affect people with higher incomes more than it would affect the poor.

"Lower-income people drink less espresso than upper-middle-class people," he said. "I've already had two tall double lattes, and I'll probably get another today."

He added: "If you don't want to pay it, you can buy drip coffee or tea. But I believe people are more likely to want to consume espresso if their morning purchase doesn't just go to giving them a buzz but goes to children."

Or as Helen Lovejoy put it, "Won't somebody please think of the children?!"

On the whole, I would bet this tax is more regressive than progressive. Based solely on my experience as a Seattleite, a person making $20,000 is probably drinking up to 5 lattes/week, usually on the way to work. A person making $40,000 is probably having 10/week, one in the morning, and another in the afternoon. Not many people have more than that. So if you're making $100,000/year, you're paying the same in this tax as someone making $40,000. Granted, the richer person is probably getting a more expensive latte, but that doesn't matter, because the tax is fixed at 10 cents per drink. So at the extreme low end, say, for the homeless, they're paying nothing, but after that it's regressive.

According to research by the District of Columbia (page 27), Seattle's city and state tax burden is the 4th more regressive among the largest cities in the 50 states and DC, after Anchorage, Las Vegas, and Souix Falls. A family making $25,000/year in Seattle pays 7.5% of its income in various taxes, while a family making $150,000/year only pays 6.3%. For a city that fancies itself progressive, that ought to be a surprise.

As for me, since I don't like coffee, I'll pay no latte tax.

2003-08-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

OK, you've gone and bundled up two topics that will take seperate screeds to address: The question of what to make of Howard Dean, and the thorny issue of contemporary "liberal" racial politics. I've been thinking about the latter lately, thanks to that incendiary anti-hiphop article by the seemingly omnipresent John McWhorter, and because I'm presently in Chicago, and visiting this city always gets me thinking about race.

I'm going to sit for another day or two on the full-length exposition I've been mulling over, and instead go off on a tangent based on one of your quips: if I saw a particularly white NBA team, I wouldn't think "Hey, those guys are racist;" instead, I'd think "hey, those guys are the Dallas Mavericks."

Since the Mavericks had the best record in the NBA last season, I'm inclined to think there's more than racial bias at work, there. It's no secret that a great deal of the new talent in the NBA for the past few years has been coming from Europe. These French and German and Former Yugoslavian players might not be selling a whole lot of sneakers, but they're certainly winning games.

The distinction between making money and winning games, incidentally, is my problem with that Michael Lewis book, Moneyball. In a book that supposedly delves into the economics and particularly the management of professional baseball, I am baffled by the almost total absence of any analysis of the profits made by baseball teams.

There is a brief platitude in the opening chapters, along the lines of "winning teams draw more fans, and thus make more money," and from that point forward, Lewis operates under the assumption that the goal of a baseball franchise is not making money, but rather winning games. With that said, I did enjoy the book immensely, and found it to be an excellent summary of Bill James' ideas, but it certainly isn't what it's been billed as in the press; that is, it isn't a discussion of the business of baseball. I mean, he doesn't even mention "revenue sharing."

Has anyone written a book about what makes one sports "market" more lucrative than another? Or is it just a simple matter of population?

PS: Haven't the surviving memebers of NWA already been reunited? I mean, how else could a group that only put out three records have a catalog of some dozen titles?

2003-08-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

Graffiti Lands Dean in Hot Seat:

Dean takes a page from Sprite's playbook. Nothing says "African-Americans! Choose me!" like graffiti. Not everybody is happy, however.

Councilman James Oddo, a Staten Island Republican, says the backdrop is an insulting token of bygone 1970s New York.

"We have a pandering politician come in here and basically say to the country that what best symbolizes New York is graffiti and urban decay," Oddo said.

Dean, the former Vermont governor and a native New Yorker who left the city in 1978, was simply making the point that he's in touch with inner-city youth, according to his people.

Empty gestures! I won't be satisfied until Dean does something substantive, such as reuniting the surviving members of NWA.

2003-08-29T16:59:00.000-07:00

Minorities await Dr. Dean's house call:

Howard Dean blitzed into Seattle the other day talking about how he was "a uniter not a divider" -- about how he believed in the pluralistic dream articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. 40 years ago this week.

An energizing message for the chanting, cheering throng of 10,000 in Westlake Center Sunday night? You bet.

Problem was Dean was preaching to a crowd of mostly white, mostly liberal, mostly converted voters from the People's Republic of the Emerald City.

The city's rainbow -- indeed our community's rich ethnic diversity -- was nowhere in sight, nowhere to hear this dreamer's message up close.

A scan of the crowd showed sprinkles of minorities, suggesting Dean and the Dems have their work cut out for them if they want to make inroads with crucial blocs of untapped voters, especially young blacks and Hispanics.

"I hear Dean is Chinese. Is he?" a young African American man asked me before Dean, a physician and former governor of Vermont, appeared on stage.

Talk about a disconnect.

There's not necessarily anything wrong with a crowd that's mostly white. Obviously, if you saw an NBA team with all white players, you would have to figure there was some racism behind that. On the other hand, you won't see many black people at an Oscar Peterson show, not because they're not welcome (Oscar Peterson is an elderly jazz musician, and black), but because his music hasn't appealed to black audiences for about forty years.

However, good liberals, myself included, would feel a whole lot better to see a bunch of racial minorities in the crowd, to prove that we're not racist. But what's Dean supposed to do about that? His positions are more in line with the average black American than white. Except for his support for gay rights, Dean's civil rights positions are pretty much what you would expect from the NAACP. He was against the war with Iraq, which blacks favored less than whites, he's for finding ways to cover the uninsured, which would help poorer people, he's for affirmative action, and would repeal the Bush tax cuts if elected. Short of advocating reparations for slavery, and not supporting gay rights, no further policy stances he could take would attract the attention of black voters.

What does Jamieson want Dean to do? The closest he comes to advice is to mock a Dean supporter:

One woman demanded: "For the barbecue, is there a vegetarian or vegan option? Or is it just carnivorous?"

Is Jamieson suggesting Dean should court black voters with meat?

2003-08-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

I don't know, I think replacing some US soldiers with Bulgarian soldiers is a fine idea. We might need our guys to fight North Korea!

I think we can always rely on the members of the Arab League to ... blame Israel. Besides, which country would send soldiers? Bahrain? Libya? I guess maybe Egypt, since we do pay them $2 billion per year. I don't think we're getting our money's worth.

No, the country that could really help is Indonesia. It's a great big Muslim country, terrific food, and that cool gamelan music. And they just stopped occupying East Timor, so we know they've got the men to do it. And if five years from now Iraq is a nice normal boring democracy like Belgium, I'd be happy to have the US share credit with Indonesia. Of course, it's not going to happen. Too bad.

2003-08-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

Why are we looking to the UN to stabilize Iraq?

Yes, we need to somehow turn the American military occupation into a reconstruction project, preferably one widely regarded as legitimate and just. That much I understand. What I don't understand is how more French, Russian, Norwegian or Japanese troops on the ground are supposed to accomplish this.

You're bright enough to spot the first problem here: the recent debate over increased "UN" involvement seems largely to be a proxy for increased European involvement; it's as if the US administration is only looking to the UN because NATO can't plausibly deploy troops outside of Europe, and the G8 isn't in the troop-deploying business.

This leads us to the second problem. With the American occupation becoming a magnet for jihad, drawing mercenaries from throughout the Muslim world, why on earth are we scrambling to put more infidel troops in there? Is the Bush administration's goal to transform a local ongoing battle between the US and radical Islam into a local ongoing battle between radical Islam and all of the West?

What Iraq could really use, it seems, are Muslim peacekeeping forces, preferably forces that are Muslim without being percieved as sectarian. There are, of course, Islamic states in the UN, but from what I've heard, recent "UN" negotiations are not aimed at soliciting the help of those states.

What has the Arab League been up to lately?

Their web site isn't all that helpful, at least as far as opinion on Iraq goes. Oh, yes, I realize bringing in Arab nations would be a diplomatic challenge, what with the Arab League's preoccupation with Israel, and its opposition to US involvement in Iraq from the start, but what diplomat worth his salt couldn't make the case for Arab military involvement in Iraq?

For all I know, of course, there might already be just such an effort underway, all quiet-like, and I'm quite sure there are diplomatic intricacies and complications involved that I'm utterly oblivious to, so I can't go and accuse the State Department of ignoring an opportunity.

I'm just not convinced that "UN" involvement in, or even control over, the Iraqi occupation will hasten the day when that occupation is no longer necessary. Changing the makeup of the forces in Iraq should be sought for better reasons than just sending home a few American troops, damn it.

2003-08-21T01:44:00.000-07:00

So what will happen if we capture or kill Saddam?

This question worries me. The easy, half-joking answer is, "well, if it happens in a certain timeframe, then George is definitely going to have a second term." But that's not the part that bothers me most. What worries me is how Saddam's death or capture might change Americans' perception of the ongoing military/humanitarian (militarian?) operation in Iraq.

See, I think the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction catfight is a red herring. I think most Americans believe we invaded Iraq in order to bring Saddam Hussein to justice. This begs the question, of course, but the phrase does neatly cover many of the reasons suggested, plausible or no— the WMD threat; ending Saddam's oppression of the Kurds and other Iraqis; resolving an unfinished "feud" from Poppy's day; preventing Saddam from aiding terrorists; taking down an Arab scapegoat; and so on, ad boredeum. The importance, plausibility, or prudence of any one of these encapsulated "Saddam-centric" reasons is no longer important, once the goal has been rephrased as bringing Saddam to justice.

The problem with this, of course, is that bringing Saddam to justice does not cover the reason dearest to the heart of liberals who, to one degree or another, supported the war; it does not include helping Iraqis create a better way of life.

I'm afraid that if Saddam is brought to justice, there might be a sea change in American public opinion; I am afraid that the chorus of "US out of Iraq / No Blood for Oil / Impeach Bush" coming from the, er, "angrier" parts of the Left will be drowned out by chants of "Bring Our Boys Home, the Job is Done" coming from various points Right and Center.

Bush isn't feeling any political pressure on the home front right now; capturing Saddam might change things significantly. And that, I fear, would be bad news for the people of Baghdad.

2003-08-19T19:07:00.000-07:00

Hello, Ed!