Okay, as per the promissory note below, I flipped through our office copy of Esquire and lo!, it was very cheerful indeed. Benjamin Wallace-Wells may think female boxing is brutal and hopeless, but his fashion counterparts in New York have some very good things to say about female wrestling from the 1950's: "They made almost no money, lived as vagabonds, performed dangerous stunts, and often faced bizarre sexual manipulation." Okay, maybe not. Moving on... this one bit, part of a mock retrospective of the 21st century, rung true:

By early 2005, every American had a blog. These blogs evolved into an incendiary form of 'new journalism' that aggressively covered previously unreported issues. The issues included the growth of the blogosphere, the future of blogging, blogging's relationship to other media, what blogging reflected about society, the unblogged lifestyles of certain blogging celebrities, why the mainstream media refused to recognize blogging as a legitimate news source, and potential cast changes on The O.C. It was an exhilarating time for anyone who knew how to type.

Nyuk nyuk. And then it's a few short flips through "The New Laws of Fashion" (e.g. "18. Be suspicious of the guy in the State U. sweatshirt." Too true!) and we're all done! Oh, okay, one more fashion tip that can't be understated: "25. Short socks are for Englishmen and Italian bus drivers—you are neither." Thank you.

As they say, there comes a time in every young boy's life when he has to hock—and hock shamelessly—the magazine for which he works. So on with it! Most of the March/April issue of Mother Jones is behind a subscriber firewall, alas, but two quite good articles are available online and play on themes oft-mentioned 'round these parts. The first, by Josh Hammer, looks into the whole "bases in Iraq" issue and dredges up considerable evidence that, um, yes, we're actually building them:

Take, for example, Camp Victory North, a sprawling base near Baghdad International Airport, which the U.S. military seized just before the ouster of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. Over the past year, KBR contractors have built a small American city where about 14,000 troops are living, many hunkered down inside sturdy, wooden, air-conditioned bungalows called SEA (for Southeast Asia) huts, replicas of those used by troops in Vietnam. There's a Burger King, a gym, the country's biggest PX—and, of course, a separate compound for KBR workers, who handle both construction and logistical support. Although Camp Victory North remains a work in progress today, when complete, the complex will be twice the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo—currently one of the largest overseas posts built since the Vietnam War.

Such a heavy footprint seems counterproductive, given the growing antipathy felt by most Iraqis toward the U.S. military occupation. Yet Camp Victory North appears to be a harbinger of America's future in Iraq. Over the past year, the Pentagon has reportedly been building up to 14 "enduring" bases across the country—long-term encampments that could house as many as 100,000 troops indefinitely. John Pike, a military analyst who runs the research group GlobalSecurity.org, has identified a dozen of these bases, including three large facilities in and around Baghdad: the Green Zone, Camp Victory North, and Camp al-Rasheed, the site of Iraq’s former military airport. Also listed are Camp Cook, just north of Baghdad, a former Republican Guard "military city" that has been converted into a giant U.S. camp; Balad Airbase, north of Baghdad; Camp Anaconda, a 15-square-mile facility near Balad that housed 17,000 soldiers as of May 2004 and was being expanded for an additional 3,000; and Camp Marez, next to Mosul Airport, where, in December, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the base's dining tent, killing 13 U.S. troops and four KBR contractors eating lunch alongside the soldiers.

At these bases, KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary that works in cooperation with the Army Corps of Engineers, has been extending runways, improving security perimeters, and installing a variety of structures ranging from rigid-wall huts to aircraft hangars. Although the Pentagon considers most of the construction to be "temporary"—designed to last up to three years—similar facilities have remained in place for much longer at other "enduring" American bases, including Kosovo's Camp Bondsteel, which opened in 1999, and Eagle Base in Tuzla, Bosnia, in place since the mid-1990s.

Needless to say, it's fairly difficult to convince Iraqis that we're leaving someday in the face of all this. Maybe the "reasonable" hawks out there think this is all a bunch of conspiracy-mongering, but conspiracies have a lot of currency around the region in question. Also, on the Social Security front, Barbara Dreyfus' profile of Jose Pinera—the Chilean labor minister who privatized the country's pension system—deserves a quick read. It's pure ad hominem, alas, but still, you have to love this: "He saw as his biggest obstacle the 'tenacious belief that Social Security could and should be an effective vehicle for the redistribution of wealth.'" Ah yes, now we're getting to the heart of the matter.

Anyway, that's as far as I've waded into it, but I'm sure there's other good stuff. Needless to say, Emily Bazelon's feature story on new evidence of torture 'migrating' needs to be read—it's next on the list! Then I'll go read something cheerful for a change.

Since Rick Perlstein's book on Barry Goldwater seems to be such a hot topic these days, it's probably worth pointing out this long Perlstein essay on what he thinks the Democrats should do to win in the long-term. Rather unsurprisingly, he thinks they need a Goldwater moment of their own, built around economic populism. Ho hum, yeah, but some of the responses and critiques he got were a bit more provocative.

Not being a student of the period—and not having read the book!—I don't have a whole lot to add, except to lament the fact that LBJ had to get bogged down in the Vietnam War. The Democrats had crushed—crushed!—the conservative movement after 1964, and presumably they could have gone on for ages. People like to note that Richard Nixon proved to be a pretty liberal fellow, but his appointments to the Court (Burger, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist) certainly set back the growing liberal consensus on guaranteeing economic rights. Humphrey or a second-term LBJ or even Robert F. Kennedy would have pushed much further, and odds are the Goldwater movement would have had to wander around in the wilderness for a lot longer. So even their 16-year "exile" from American politics (from Goldwater's defeat to Reagan's election), during which America became a lot more progressive, was less progressive than it might have been. They were lucky, and the Democrats unlucky for imploding, but the price of exile could have been much, much worse.

By the way, John Kenneth Galbraith seems to think that JFK would have pulled the U.S. out of the Vietnam. Oh how fun alternate history might have looked.

Sickening. If there's some sort of bright lining here, it's that this could turn into a "Luxor Hotel" moment, where Iraqis get so turned off by all the bloodshed that they withdraw all support for the insurgency. Except that, near as anyone can tell, most Iraqis are already sickened by the violence, don't support the insurgency, and just want it all to end. So I'm afraid the end result will just be to scare away new recruits from the National Guard. By the way, it's awfully hard to kill 100-plus people with a car bomb, unless you have a really, really big bomb. So it seems like there could be an al-Qaqaa connection here, though it probably doesn't do much good to revisit that debate at this point.

Well we've classified the Islamists already, so we may as well classify the feminists too. On the question of what, exactly, "Third Wave feminism" is, here's an interesting interview piece on the subject from long ago by Tamara Straus. The Big Question: "Can a Third Wave that tries to push forward urgent feminist issues -- such as national heath care and child care as well as the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment -- also champion girlie power with its penchant for adolescent role playing?" That's not what I thought Third Wave feminism was about, but I guess I was wrong.

So the Sunday before last, I decided to expand on this old "Sorry, But No" post (and this) and write a short article for Mother Jones on, among other things, why Democrats shouldn't compromise on Social Security. It's up now, but sadly, in the interim Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall hammered home the point far better and far more eloquently than I did. Oh well. Must... adjust... to blinding pace of blogosphere. Or start writing about things the bigger bumblebees aren't swarming around.

A few extra points, though, on this topic. Even if the GOP finally decides to abandon its idea of financing private accounts through payroll taxes, it still seems like a bad idea for the Democrats to compromise on add-on private accounts, at least for now. For one, this sort of thing can very easily get mangled in the legislative process, as the Medicare bill did. Even if it didn't, though, the privatizers certainly aren't going away, and as long as there's a massive budget deficit, Social Security is in grave, grave danger down the road. If we did get add-on private accounts for retirement, they likely would be financed at best in a revenue-neutral way. Fine, but there are still the deficits. Just five years down the road, things look even more desperate—those CBO ten-year budget projections start showing what happens when we need to dip into the Trust Fund to pay our retirees. Suddenly the deficits look more and more like an unsustainable burden, and Republicans start calling for Social Security benefits to be cut (or for payroll taxes to be diverted into the now-existing private accounts). Likely we'd hear cries of, "We already have personal retirement accounts, so why not expand those and slash SS benefits?" And in the face of massive budget deficits, those calls might sound more reasonable than they do now. So insisting on the reality of the Trust Fund, I think, is the major priority here, and judging from the polls, I'm not sure Democrats have yet won that battle. Happily, at least, Joe Biden has the cannon pointing in the right direction.

The rather humdrum point, I guess, is that the Social Security fight could turn into a decade-long chess match, and a win against privatization now doesn't mean a win forever. Reclaiming one of the branches of government would obviously help things, but it's not likely that that will happen for at least another four years. Sad but true.

The other danger, I think, occurred to me while reading this Washington Post article, where Harold Ickes says that "he is fearful that a compromise plan may yet allow the president to turn Social Security from a program identified with Democrats to one identified with Republicans." That's a real potential problem. Privatizers have a massive coalition that will hammer on this issue for the next twenty years or more. All the defenders have, really, is the fact that Democrats take pride in Social Security as the party's strongest and most popular program. As such, I really do think that helps them stay united and defend the issue with such vigor—it's not just the principle of social insurance at stake, it's a matter of partisan pride and honor. In the long term, it seems, it's best if that pride and honor stays with the party that also happens to be committed to the idea of social insurance.

The Weekly Standard takes on the Iran issue, effectively saying, "It seems unlikely negotiations will work, so why bother even trying?" The silliness here should be apparent. Look, I've seen lots of conservatives argue that negotiations will probably fail—and they might be onto something—but no one has yet made a convincing case for why we shouldn't try. Hawks in the White House seems to have two arguments for not trying. One, that it would somehow "legitimate" the Iranian regime. This baffles me. Is there anyone on earth that holds both that the Iranian regime is illegitimate and that it would somehow magically become more legitimate if the U.S. negotiated with it? Are the protestors and demonstrators going to somehow give up all hope of reform if the U.S. enters talks with Tehran? Maybe in the short term, but as we've seen with Egypt, it's a lot easier for the U.S. to give support to the opposition in allied regimes than it is to give support to protestors in enemy regimes. An Iran that agreed to a "grand bargain" with the U.S.—if such a bargain happened—would be far more likely to undertake political reform down the road.

The other rationale, apparently, is that negotiating with Tehran—offering incentives for the regime to disarm—would somehow "reward" the mullahs for bad behavior. Really, of course, it would be rewarding the mullahs for good behavior that preceded bad behavior. But that's hardly unheard of. Prior to 1979, Egypt was more or less committed to the destruction of Israel. After the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, the U.S. started sending Cairo various forms of aid, in part as a reward, and in part to ensure that the treaty lasted. In a sense, yes, we were rewarding Egypt for its original bad behavior, i.e. committing to the destruction of Israel in the first place, but that doesn't seem like a terribly big deal.

UPDATE: Ah, it appears that now the White House will try after all... partial kudos to them! But they're still not willing to enter talks directly. Why?

I don't have much of a nose for political strategy, much less for What The Democrats Should Do To Win Lots and Lots of Elections, but Ed Kilgore's explanation of "values voters" in the south seemed interesting:

My own (and generally, the DLC's) definition of "values voters" is quite different. They are people who: (a) don't [much] trust politicians, and want to know they care about something larger than themselves, their party, and the interest groups that support them; (b) don't much trust government, and instinctively gravitate towards candidates who seem to care about the role that civic and religious institutions can play in public life; (c) don't much trust elites, whom they suspect do not and cannot commit themselves to any particular set of moral absolutes; (d) don't much like the general direction of contemporary culture (even if they are attracted to it as consumers), and want to know public officials treat that concern with respect and a limited agenda to do something about it; (e) are exquisitely sensitive about respect for particular values like patriotism, parenting and work; and (f) have a communitarian bent when it comes to cultural issues, and dislike those who view them strictly through the prism of the irresistable march towards absolute and universal individual rights without regard to social implications.

This certainly doesn't jibe with my experience of "values voters"—most of whom I would say are fairly out of reach of the Democratic Party—but having met only a small subset of the population of the entire United States of America, I guess I could be wrong. More interestingly, though, you know what this sounds like? A call for the Democrats to start adopting communitarian stances on things. Down to the letter. As it happens, I have a never-been-opened copy of Amitai Etizioni's The Communitarian Reader on my bookshelf, so let's crack it open and see what they have to say about all this.

Ah... A quick glance at the TOC reveals a nifty essay on how New Urbanism strengthens communities, a piece on "Boston's Ten Point Coalition: A Faith-Based Approach to Fighting Crime in the Inner City", and uh, hmm… a call for "Peer Marriage." Well, apart from the last (tentatively), much of this seems like stuff the Democrats shouldn't have to reach very far to promote—New Urbanism is undeniably cool, after all. As an added bonus, many of the leading liberal movements nowadays (even the online ones) seem built around a semi-communitarian ethic anyway, so if Kilgore's right, there's not a huge gap in sensibility here. It just hasn't quite been articulated yet. Still, guess I'll check out this communitarianism stuff a bit more; it sort of gives me the creeps at times, but maybe it's the wave of the future.

In the New York Times today, Daniel Altman suggests one way to decrease medical costs: let old people die off earlier. No, really:

For the last few decades, the share of Medicare costs incurred by patients in their last year of life has stayed at about 28 percent, said Dr. Gail R. Wilensky, a senior fellow at Project HOPE who previously ran Medicare and Medicaid. Thus end-of-life care hasn't contributed unduly of late to Medicare's problems. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of the solution. "If you take the assumption that you want to go where the money is, it's a reasonable place to look," Dr. Wilensky said.

End-of-life care may also be a useful focus because, in some cases, efforts to prolong life may end up only prolonging suffering. In such cases, reducing pain may be a better use of resources than heroic attempts to save lives.

Rationing health care is, of course, hardly a new idea, but this particular debate never gets much attention. One of the concepts implicit here—though not mentioned in Altman's piece—is the notion of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), a metric that help us compare the cost-effectiveness of certain treatments. Some treatments obviously are very cost-effective at adding QALYs, like vaccinations. Others—like the sort of expensive "Hail Mary" treatments used on seniors at their lifes' end—may cost more and yield fewer QALYs. Thanks to shiny new medical technology, we can extend people's lives longer and longer, but you don't get quite as many QALYs for your buck. You can think of it—and I saw this graphed out somewhere in Health Affairs once—as a supply curve. The U.S. is very high up on the curve, higher than any other country, and pays a lot more for each additional QALY, but in the end doesn't get very many more QALYs for its buck.

In a sense, this is just a technical way of saying what Altman's describing: The U.S. spends much more on expensive end-of-life treatments that buys maybe a few more months (or whatever) of not-very-high-quality life.

So there's a simple economics question here that has a lot—a lot—of moral significance: How far up the QALY curve do we want to go? Britain, as I recall, caps public funding at some price X per QALY. Say it's $30,000 ( I really don't remember). So if you go in for expensive surgery that's expected to cost, say, $300,000 but is expected to extend your life by 10 quality-adjusted life years, that's fine. On the other hand, if some procedure costs $20,000 and is only expected to extend your life by a month, then the government won't pay for it. No one else has gone this route, I think, but at some point we may need to consider it. Private companies, too, may need to start considering it. The other question—at least for publicly-funded programs like Medicare—is whether wealthy people will be allowed to pay out-of-pocket for treatments that go over the cap (they can in Britain).

Remind me to put on the swopadamus hat more often. Last week I suggested—speculated, really—that some of the Southern Shi'ite provinces in Iraq could ask for autonomy or quasi-independence if they thought the new central government wasn't delivering the goods on matters concerning religious governance. (Southern Iraq is very conservative, and though not theocratic per se, the most popular political groups down there—SCIRI and Al-Sadr Movement—have theocratic leanings.)

Anyway, score one for speculation: the New York Times' James Glanz reports today that the South—especially Basra—may indeed try to pursue greater autonomy. Not the sort of place I'd want to live, but there you go. Two concerns, though. Will the South agree to share its considerable oil wealth? If the Kurds are gobbling up the oil in Kirkuk and other northern sites, and the radical Shi'ites take the southern fields, the slice of oil pie for the Sunnis and "mainstream" Shi'ites gets smaller and smaller.

Second concern: A few days ago Hannah Allam reported that renegade Shi'ite militias are hunting down and assassinating ex-Baathists in the south. Most of these vigilantes hail from the Badr Brigades, SCIRI's armed wing. The Baathists, meanwhile, are starting to strike back with hits on prominent Shi'ites. Now this sounds like small-time gangster stuff, and partly it is, but what happens if/when SCIRI starts running southern Iraq (they've already won a number of key provincial elections)? Suddenly the gangster stuff looks more and more like state-sanctioned target killings—the sort of thing likely to trigger larger war.

A few weeks ago, Richard Posner thought about health insurance and decided that we ought to a) abolish Medicare and b) require everyone—no matter how healthy, how sick, how rich, how poor—to buy health insurance. (Presumably subsidies would be available.) Let's leave aside a) for now. Some of his commenters focused on b) and argued that mandatory insurance would be untenable, but judging from Posner's response, I don't think they quite got to the core of the problem.

First, some commenters pointed out that you can't compare mandatory health insurance with, say, mandatory auto insurance, because the former's harder to enforce. You can always take away someone's driver's license. But can you take away someone's right to hospital care? This is a real problem that Posner doesn't seem to think through—are you going to slap financial penalties down on someone who doesn't buy insurance and then suddenly needs to get (very expensive) health care? No, that's ridiculous. It's not at all like "punish[ing] people for not paying taxes," as Posner says.

Second, it was as easy to enforce as auto insurance. That doesn't solve the problem: Around 12-14 percent of drivers are uninsured, according to the Insurance Research Council. Even New Jersey, which has particularly severe penalties for driving without insurance, has around 10 percent of its drivers uninsured—which partly explains why NJ's rates are so damn high for the law-abiding crowd.

The other problem is this. Let's say you require everyone to buy insurance, and they actually do. Now how do you get insurance companies to offer affordable rates to everyone? Posner says: "[R]equire each insurance company to insure, at premiums only moderately above the market level." Ah yes, ye olde magic wand. Sure, the government could force the industry to compress the rates like this—so that insurance companies offer similar prices for people with a wide variety of risk factors (from the very healthy to the very sick)—but in response, insurance companies then tend to increase their average rates or reduce benefits. The former means that very healthy people are more likely to skip out on health insurance .The latter just plain sucks. New York, New Jersey, and I think Vermont have all suffered these problems. (To avoid this, the federal government could always subsidize the costs for catastrophic care, but if Posner thought this was a smart idea he would've voted for John Kerry!)

Alternatively, you can give everyone a different subsidy to purchase insurance, where the size of one's subsidy would depend on one's risk factors—so people more likely to get sick get a bigger tax credit or whatnot to buy insurance, since their insurance is going to be more expensive. But it's awfully hard to use risk adjustment instruments on a single individual. (It's a lot easier to do it with large groups of people.) The other hassle here is that different companies and markets treat and price different risk factors differently, so people will start hopping about from plan to plan, especially healthy people who are trying to find the lowest rates. This tends to destabilize the risk pool and creates inequalities in rates across different markets. Daniel Davies explained it all some time ago in his timeless classic, "Blame it on Fatty." Now if you wanted to force people to stay in certain markets, you could stop the carousel from spinning, but that would mean death to the open market.

Now I'm tired and it's very late, so I'm not going to go on and on, but happily this fable has a moral: it's very, very difficult to regulate the private insurance industry. It would be great if Posner's scheme could work, but it's going to involve a byzantine regulatory structure that would make any libertarian balk. So start balking!

A new variation on Pascal's Wager: "The basic premise is that God is good and benevolent. He does not harm you if you are a good person who does no evil. On the other hand, the Devil, who defied even God, may do just that. So, it makes sense to constantly show respect to him to avoid his wrath."

(via LAT)

Whoa. Egyptian President Husni Mubarak just declared that he was going to hold multi-candidate presidential elections—very good news indeed! (Previously, only one candidate was selected by parliament and then the public got to vote 'yay' or 'nay'.)

The key, of course, will be to see whether he lets everyone run, or whether parliament can still screen candidates they don't like. The Muslim Brotherhood, the massive and massively popular mainstream Islamist group, is still banned from politics. I'd expect that to be the key debate in the coming months—and here's an old and rather anguished post on why, even though it might be terrible, Mubarak should let the Islamists run.

Two things to add though. First, I still don't believe Mubarak has genuine reform in mind: it looks an awful lot like he's planning to hold semi-free elections merely to appease the opposition and get their minds off rebellion. One of the things learned from Iraq is that even imperfect elections can deflate a lot of anger—at least in the short term. So the Bush administration, which can take credit for this if they'd like, ought to keep up the pressure for more reform. Second thing to add, both Issandr el-Amrani and Jonathan Edelstein think Mubarak would win even in a completely free and fair election, since "the incumbent president, even if unpopular, nearly always wins the first multi-party election due to logistical and administrative advantages." So in that case...

MORE: In a related vein, see Amr Hamzawy's briefing on Egypt: "Government reform policies stop short of introducing substantial changes into the political power structure and the restrictive patterns of political participation prevailing in the country. Government officials have a good command of democracy-based rhetoric and know how to celebrate cosmetic changes as if they were major events on the road to democratization."

This recently-leaked Congressional Research Service briefing on madrassahs (the Islamic religious schools that help spread extremism) gives a good overview of a somewhat misunderstood subject. One issue though: some people express concern that the "rote memorization" techniques used in the schools don't prepare students for the "modern workforce". Probably true, but sometimes I think I'd have a better memory if I had to learn more things by rote as a child (we had to learn some things—it was a Catholic school after all—but not that much). The Chinese memory palace also seems eternally useful for the modern workforce; let's bring it back.

UPDATE: Non-PDF version of the report found here, at the excellent TerrorWiki.

So here's a bit of grossness. After sleeping only about ten hours over the past three days, coupled with some, ah, poor lifestyle choices during nights out, my epiglottis has swollen to the point that it's hanging way down and actually resting on my tongue. Just sitting there, happy as can be. Some day this blog will acquire a digital camera and we can check these things out firsthand, but for now, take my word for it—it's creepy.

I have a great deal of respect for Iran analyst Ray Takeyh. He's extremely smart, keeps up-to-date on just about everything going on in Iran, and he's always been helpful whenever I've called to ask for his expertise on this or that. But that aside, it's hard to deny that he's a good deal more sanguine about some of Iran's hardline leadership than most people. So I'd take some of the analysis in his big new Foreign Affairs piece, coauthored with Ken Pollack, with a tiny grain of salt. Are there really as many Iranian pragmatist willing to cut a deal with the U.S. as the authors think?

For instance, they quote defense minister Ali Shamkhani as saying that "nuclear weapons will turn us [i.e. Iran] into a threat to others that could be exploited in a dangerous way to harm our relations with the countries of the region." Fine, he sounds wonderful, but he also seems like something of a bit player here—many analysts think deputy defense minister Ahmad Vahidi, the former Qods force commander with links to al Qaeda, really has the ear of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei. And hey, let's say Shamkhani's not as irrelevant as rumored; you can find just as many quotes in which he's playing the part of bellicose warmonger, like the time he threatened to launch a pre-emptive strike on U.S. forces in Iraq. There's so much posturing and charade among Iranian leaders, they say so many different things, that it's easy to cherry-pick quotes and come up with the narrative you want. As I say, I think Takeyh does great work, and he certainly could be right, but Iranian politics are so complex and rife with ambiguity, and it's easy simply to see what you want to see.

Personally I'm a lot more skeptical about the influence of the "pragmatists" in Tehran—though I can't read Persian and I've never been to Iran, so take this with massive salt truck dumps. But the really crucial point is this: Even if you're like me and think Iran is dominated by hardliners and are skeptical that engagement will work, the Pollack/Takeyh engagement approach still seems like precisely the best option. What does it hurt to try? Why wouldn't you try? At best, it succeeds, Iran disarms its nuclear program and starts focusing on economic development, and we've bribed off some evil dudes but also achieved our goals. Happy days. At worst, we find out for sure that negotiating won't work. But there's no downside to engagement—that the White House seems to be rejecting this path purely for moral reasons is actually crazy. I don't know any other way of putting it.

MORE: Greg Djerejian thinks Bush grasps all this. Eh, I'll believe it when I see any deviation from the do-nothing policy of the last two years. Also, from an economic standpoint, I wonder how appealing the carrot of U.S. foreign investment in Iran really is. If I'm reading Brad Setser correctly, most of this investment would be financed by Chinese and East Asian central banks. But China could just as easily start saving less and investing directly in Iran (say, in its oil infrastructure). Who needs the U.S.?

Just a quick jump into the Wal-Mart fray. Kevin Drum thinks that the era of big box retailers is here to stay, and if that means that we no longer get the variety of a bunch of little "mom and pop" stores down the street, well, too bad. Max Sawicky isn't too happy with this state of affairs, but he still says, "In economics the trade-off between cost and uniformity on the one side, and variety on the other, is basic."

But does Wal-Mart kill variety? Most of the "mom and pop" stores I know just sell basic junk that isn't any more exciting than what you find in Wal-Mart (often it's less exciting). The interesting stores, meanwhile, don't really compete with Wal-Mart—stores selling antiques, or "local history" stuff, or prints, or offbeat clothing. When the dust settles, I would imagine Wal-Mart adds variety, by forcing its small competitors to specialize or die. Assuming, of course, that some specialize. Perhaps Wal-Mart even helps some of its small competitors by giving consumers more time and money to do "specialty" shopping. (Location might help too: people do their basic shopping at Wal-Mart, head out to the car, spot some other small store in the plaza that looks interesting, and pop in for a look.) On the other hand, you might see this effect more in cities than in suburban areas. There's also the internet to compensate for, say, the dingy used music place shutting down—though we'll certainly all miss the record store girl!

UPDATE: To be clear, obviously this isn't the biggest Wal-Mart issue around, but Nathan Newman, et. al. have already covered the (vastly) more important wage/unionization/workplace regulation angles. No disagreement there. Just thought I'd add another 1/2-cent point.

A word of caution. This is going to be one of those posts that tries to put forward some reasonable, above-the-fray skepticism about Iraq. The problem is that I'm of course a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, my party preferences are no secret, and I have no credibility with regards to staying above the fray. So this post is going to sound like pure partisan hackery. Sigh. Oh well, let's get on with the dirty work…

The other day, David Ignatius wrote a column about Lebanon that included this quote, jumped on by war supporters all across the internet:

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change [in Lebanon] has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains [anti-Syrian leader Walid] Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

That sounds wonderful, and it certainly makes it seem like the Iraq invasion had all sorts of nice second-order "spillover" effects around the Middle East. I'd love for that to be true. But here's the thing: Jumblatt is neither a historian nor a political scientist. He could easily be dead wrong about this. People get historical causes wrong all the time—more often, it seems, than they get them right—and sometimes even purposefully so. (Mightn't Jumblatt have "invented" this sort of narrative to serve other purposes? I don't know, but it's not unheard of.) In the world of punditry it's fine to take a quote like this and then proclaim that the Iraq war was necessary and/or sufficient and/or the best way to spark democratic movements in places like Lebanon, but a bit more is needed to figure out what's really happening here.

On a related note, as I noted over the weekend, the wave of post-Iraq democratic reforms in the Middle East don't seem to be any more earth-shattering than some of the reforms that predated even 9/11, so it's not obvious to me how big a role Iraq or even Bush are playing here. (On the bright side for Iraq-hawks, this could also mean that even if Iraq imploded, it wouldn't necessarily "set back" whatever reformist wave exists elsewhere.)

Praktike has a great post on the vagueness around the term "Islamist". Historically, I think Chanad's right in that the term was originally coined by French scholars to denote movements born "out of modernity (not as a reaction to it) … specifically concerned with taking control over the State, rather than perceived social piety." But alas, a term like "Islamist" will always fall prey to ambiguity—that's the nature of one-word terms with broad root words—so while it would be great if everyone could get on the same page and use the term in the same way, that probably won't happen. It's time, I think, to start using compound terms that will help us get our concepts straight. (This is true in general—as soon as a term starts getting fuzzy, it's time to go compound.)

For starters, let's say there are "Radical Islamists". This group includes al-Qaeda, many Wahhabists, Hamas, the now-nearly-defunct Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya in Egypt, and a whole slew of other terrorist groups and jihadists. These movements have largely revolutionary political aims, seeking to take total control of the State usually by working outside the existing political process—as you'd expect, violence is the preferred option. The new political order will be governed by religious authorities and institute strict sharia. No exceptions. No happy protections for minorities or non-Muslims. No wearing suits and ties. No. No. No. Needless to say, these folks are mostly by-the-letter fundamentalists when it comes to the Qur'an, though some of the interpretations of jihad are rather, er, interesting. See Mark Gould for more on this.

"Political Islamists" or even "Mainstream Islamists" are usually willing to work within the existing political process to achieve its ends. As Chanad says, they're born of nationalism and modernity, rather than strict reactions to both. Hamas is starting to move into this category, as is Hizbullah, and political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan definitely belong here. These folks are also fundamentalists, and would like to see a strict sharia state set up, but a few exceptions can pop up here and there. Democratic institutions can be allowed—you don't have to have direct rule by religious authorities, but rulers should certainly consult those authorities, and they better not deviate too far from Islamic law. There's some question on whether mainstream Islamists would allow some human rights—would, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood force sharia on Egypt's 4.5 million Coptic Christians? Jamaat-e-Islami, from what briefly I know, seems to take more progressive stances on a few things out of necessity—they need those female votes!—but religion usually bends to political necessity sooner or later.

Let's see. Then you have "Islamic Conservatives," who don't qualify as "Islamists" mainly because they seem to care more about implementing the social/cultural values of Islam rather than building a thoroughly Islamic political order. Many of the Shi'ites in Iraq seem to fall under this category—Ibrahim Jaaferi, maybe even Ayatollah Sistani—although many Shi'ite leaders are mainstream Islamists, and it's not always clear what's what. You can draw a close analogy to the Christian Right here in the United States. And much like the Christian Right, they're not strict fundamentalists, they do a lot of picking and choosing, and it's not the biggest deal in the world if they don't get a strict Islamic state. The government should, however, seek to promote Islamic values at all times and consult with religious authorities, and Islam should be a major guiding force in writing laws. Conservatives are usually willing to compromise on human rights and the rule of law, though mileage varies—whether the Iraqi Shiites will allow, say, a Christian to testify against a Muslim in court is an open question.

Note: If you took a poll of all the Muslims around the Middle East, I'd bet that the vast majority are Islamic Conservatives. In fact, I think the various orders of Sufism practiced in northern Iraq by the Kurds tend to fall under this heading, and Kurdish "secularism" tends to get overrated. (Though it's true that the Kurdish educated and ruling classes appear to be largely secular.) Anyway, the point here is that it's hard to predict how Islamic Conservative voters will vote, because they have a variety of concerns beyond implementing strict sharia. Sometimes they'll vote on "moral values", but sometimes they'll vote on economics, or national security. You can see where I'm going with this....

On the lighter side are the "Islamic Modernists," similar to the "freestyle evangelicals" here in the United States. They're less fundamentalist, tend to believe that the Qur'an implicitly supports women's rights and a variety of other minority protections, and aren't big on imposing sharia or rule by anything other than the good ol' Lockean social contract. I can't think of anyone in Iraq who falls under this category, but you see this around the Middle East in groups like Al-Wasat, which was a breakaway group from the Muslim Brotherhood. These groups are pretty rare though.

By the way, plenty of secular leaders can be devout Muslims in private. You could compare these folks to American politicians like Bill Clinton, but they seem even more remarkable to me since Islam puts a much greater emphasis on the public sphere than does Christianity.

Anyway, that's my broad classification, and it seems to work for me, though with the understanding that lines get blurry. I don't know a whole lot about movements outside of the Middle East, so there could be exceptions here. In particular, some sects of the Deobandi trend, particularly in India, have very puritanical interpretations of Islam but actively avoid politics. Weird. Though obviously other Deobandi groups—like, I dunno, the Taliban?—see things differently.

One of the downsides to not having a campaign season any more is that certain issues no longer get talked about—nuclear proliferation, for instance. One of the upsides, though, is that we can start talking about other issues in a sane and rational manner. Afghanistan, for instance. It always seemed bizarre to me that any criticism of the current state of Afghanistan would be hailed and met with variations of this reply: "Well, they're doing better than under the Taliban, it's a 'Stone Age' country to begin with, and you have unrealistic standards of progress!" That's not right. I could toss a few crackers at the homeless guy hanging around the BART station, and he'd certainly be better off, but that's no way to evaluate my homelessness policy.

So the questions are "How much better off do we think is ideal?" and "How much do we want to spend?" On the first question, no one seems to have a good answer for Afghanistan—"better off" roughly means "no longer a threat to the United States". On that front, a cursory glance at the news suggests that, yes, the Taliban is rapidly fading out of existence—except, perhaps, in the Pakistan border regions, though that seems to be more of a Pakistan problem than an Afghanistan problem, if these sorts of distinctions mean anything. On the other hand, Pankaj Mishra makes the case that the still-not-disarmed militias and warlords in Afghanistan pose a very large long-term threat to the country's stability, as does the much-discussed poppy trade. The upcoming parliamentary elections could, potentially, make this problem worse: The major warlords are the only ones with the resources to organize actually parties, so they'll likely win a lot of seats, and hence legitimize their rather corrupt and brutal reigns. There's also the possibility of intra-party bickering over election results—this wasn't a problem during the presidential election because Hamid Karzai was the undisputed front-runner, but that won't be the case now.

The point, though, is that we don't know what this all means. No one—no intelligence agency—seems to have connected the dots and said, "Raging militias will eventually lead to X which will lead to Y which could well lead to bombs blowing up in the United States of America." So on the face it just doesn't seem like a huge problem that we're devoting relatively scant resources to Afghanistan. Liberals can hue and cry all day over whether, for instance, aerial poppy eradication raids will lead to an Afghan farmers' revolt, but it's hard to convince anyone that this is a real problem for the United States. Yet we ought to be figuring out if it's a real problem for the United States, and do it in a way that the main question is not "How wonderful does the progress in Afghanistan make President Bush look?" but rather "What's the best policy for Afghanistan?" The whole "better than the Taliban line" obviously works wonders for the former, but not the latter.

"I believe the earth is flat. Also, elves live under my bed. But listen bub, what does any of this have to do with my very interesting theories about Michael Moore? Little punk... don't you have a country to go betray or something? Yeah, that's what I thought."

Anne Appelbaum pooh-poohs the Summers critics who think sexism is a problem:

Outside of a handful of institutions, the evidence of unthinking discrimination is slim too. It is true, of course, that men continue to earn more than women -- approximately $1 for every 75 cents that women make. But economists such as June O'Neill or Harvard's Claudia Goldin, who have accounted for different job choices, hours worked and time taken off for raising children, have concluded that it is these factors, not discrimination, that account for most of the difference.

Maybe someone who knows more about economics can help me out here, but this doesn't seem to be Goldin's position at all! She's argued that gender 'as such' is declining in significance when it comes to the workplace, true. She's also noted—in her "pollution theory of discrimination"—that discrimination against women isn't driven so much by a desire not to interact with women (as is the case with racial discrimination), but rather a fear that women could reduce the prestige of a male-dominated occupation. To wit: "Men are averse to having women enter their occupation when women's productivity is not observable and verifiable to all."

In sum, discrimination does exist, and the best way to erase its lingering and historically-based effects is to issue credentials for various occupations (so that women can "prove" that their productivity is up to snuff). At any rate, I can't find anything Goldin's written on the university—I'm not sure her work can "prove" that the evidence of unthinking discrimination is slim.

Moreover, plenty of other researchers have found that motherhood and hours worked can't account for the entire gender wage gap. So "slim" evidence? It's not like this is something people just make up for the fun of it.

I haven't heard anyone ask what's wrong with the Democrats in a good three or four hours, so I'm glad I chanced upon Harold Meyerson's column explaining that Dems need to, of all things, win back the white working-class vote. Shocking:

Democrats win when they deliver prosperity and security for working Americans, and in today's capitalism, those have become increasingly unattainable goals. Which is why, as they only now gear up their think tanks, Democrats need to promote alternatives to the kind of shareholder-driven capitalism into which our system has descended, to the detriment of millions of underpaid, insecure workers. They need to side with Main Street over Wall Street. Like the conservatives 40 years ago, the Democrats need to offend their own elites to build an America that reflects their best values, and in which working people can and do count on them for support.

As an arch-organizational philosophy, I could stomach this. But no one ever seems to be able to explain what "sid[ing] with Main Street over Wall Street" would actually look like. Does it mean bundling together a bunch of obscure and somewhat wonky rules and regulations to check corporate excess—governance reform, energy regulation, etc. Color me skeptical on the politics of this. Who gets excited over Sarbanes-Oxley?

Or, do Dems take one particularly poignant issue, like predatory lending, and beat on it till the cows stop mooing? Again, how exciting is this? I'm all in favor of bringing back usury laws and having federally mandated lending rates—on the merits, that would help reduce a good deal of bankruptcy and debt in this country—but it's not the sort of thing I'm going to jump up on stage with and rally the working class crowds.

Or do Dems take "sid[ing] with Main Street" literally, taking a knee-jerk and rather strident stance against all corporations, even if they don't really mean it? Bash the insurance companies providing overly high malpractice premiums! String up Choice Point and other credit-rating clearinghouses! Kill, kill, kill! Hm, I like it, but there's this: one of the key polling points I've seen of late is that most Americans don't believe Democrats favor pro-growth policies for America. That seems like a real problem to me—and maybe there's a long-term battle to be fought wherein Dems convince everyone that economic growth isn't all its cracked up to be, but hey, even I would need convincing—and snarling at corporations would only fuel that perception.

Hm, what else? I'm not saying Meyerson's vision is unworkable—coming up with this stuff is hard work!—just trying to think through the possibilities. Personally, I'm against "economic populism" as a political strategy. I prefer something along the lines of Eliot Spitzer's outlook on things: use regulation to correct market failures and get the capitalist system working more efficiently. That's a cumbersome message, but speechwriters can have at it. Also, I'd prefer a set of policies that reduced "economic risk" while promoting more of the sort of risk-taking that makes capitalism so marvelously vibrant. For instance, universal health care would help cushion your family against a job loss, but it would also encourage you to move jobs, relocate, seek a bold new career for which you might be more suited, without being chained down by the fear that comes with switching jobs and possibly losing your coverage. The end result, in theory, is a more dynamic economic world. What's more: It's populist, but it doesn't sound populist.

Continue reading "Populism Revisited"

Reading Paul Samuelson's op-ed in the Post reminds me that much of the hand-wringing over escalating health care costs is rather silly. Health care costs, of course, aren't rising because of some insidious inflation mechanism that's making all our favorite treatments magically become more expensive. Nor are they really rising because we're aging as a population—that's a part of it, but only a small part. No, health care costs are rising primarily because new and new treatments are coming to the market, and people are choosing to spend a lot of money on them.

The way things are going, in the future people are going to be choosing to spend X percent of their income on health care. X will get larger and larger over time, by choice. So let's say X is 40 percent. From one standpoint, it really doesn't make a difference whether you pay 40 percent of your income for private health care, or 40 percent of your income in taxes that then go to government-administered health care. I mean, yes, in one sense it makes a difference: If you think the free market is a better way of delivering health care, you'll endorse option 1; otherwise, you'll endorse option 2. But in the end, you're still paying 40 percent of your income. We're in no sense "controlling health care costs" by slashing programs like Medicare and letting people pay out-of-pocket.

Now you could say that this is an imperfect point, and it is. I could argue that I shouldn't, for instance, have to pay 40 percent of my income for some retiree's health care now, when I'm still a healthy young buck, even though I would willingly pay 40 percent of my income later on for my own personal health care—be it via Medicare or private insurance. Fine. Then the appropriate thing to do is start pre-funding a health care system for our retirement. Still, there are lot of ways in which it's disingenuous to say, "Oh no! America's doomed! We're going to have to raise taxes massively in the future in order to afford things we'd be spending a good chunk of our income on anyway!"

CRIMINY: Yes, Yes, I meant Robert Samuelson, newspaper columnist and noted conflator of Social Security and Medicare crises. Not Paul Samuelson, Nobel laureate. Special thanks to the self-correcting power of the blogosphere.

Since this is something I should know more about, let's talk about Supreme Court Justices. Orin Kerr lists the four likely replacements for the soon-to-be-retired William Rehnquist:

1) Michael W. McConnell of the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, 2) John G. Roberts of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, 3) J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and 4) J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Mentioned as "[a]nother possible candidate" is Samuel A. Alito of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Let's take this below the fold...

To start, here's a dossier on some of the nominees by Jeffrey Rosen in the New Republic. Rosen's approaching this from a rather peculiar stance—namely, that liberals shouldn't get too hung up on whether a Bush nominee likes Roe v. Wade or not. Some of these conservatives, after all, may be pro-life yet still have a deep respect for precedent. Plus, there are all sorts of other views to consider: whether a judge wants to limit Congressional regulation of interstate commerce, for instance, and roll back the entire New Deal. Some of the relevant statutes here—minimum wage laws, workplace safety regulations, discrimination laws, environmental protections—are at least as important as Roe, and certainly more important (I think) than the question of whether prayer should be allowed in school or whether vouchers can be used for religious schools. Anyway, the nominees...

First, McConnell [all blockquotes are from Rosen]:

Michael McConnell, 49. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. McConnell is the most respected conservative legal scholar of his generation, and liberals and moderates throughout the legal academy would enthusiastically support his nomination. Liberal interest groups, unfortunately, would aggressively oppose it because he is personally pro-life and is also a vocal and effective critic of Roe. As usual, though, a single-minded focus on Roe would be misguided: McConnell has a deep respect for precedent. More than anyone else in the country, McConnell is responsible for persuading the Supreme Court to abandon the rigid church-state separationism that prevailed during the 1970s, arguing instead that the state should be neutral toward religion. As a result, he supports school vouchers, but, unlike Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist, he argued that graduation prayers in public schools were unconstitutional even before the Court struck them down in 1992. On federalism, McConnell's record is especially encouraging. More than the other candidates on Bush's short list, McConnell believes that judges should defer to Congress's power to define illegal discrimination. His definitive studies of the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment have convinced him that its framers intended Congress, not the Court, to define and enforce protection of civil rights. As a result, McConnell has criticized conservative justices for holding that Congress may not define discrimination more expansively than the Court. In questions of economic rights, McConnell seems similarly concerned about judicial restraint: In a 1987 article titled "federalism: evaluating the founders design," he strongly criticized a leader of the Constitution in Exile movement, arguing that, whatever the initial intention of the interstate commerce clause, the dream of resurrecting long-forgotten limits on federal power is unrealistic: The "vision that the Supreme Court, having been informed of the founders' intentions now has in its power to restore the original constitutional scheme, is fanciful, and would not necessarily be desirable even if it were less so." For those who care about deference to Congress, McConnell's nomination would be especially welcome.

As a counterpoint to all this gushing, Shakespeare's Sister thinks McConnell has shown "disregard, and in fact contempt, for key civil rights principles," though I'm not convinced here. We're not getting a liberal judge, remember—any Bush nominee is going to be repugnant in some way—and McConnell seems (tentatively) like an okay pick here.

Next up, Roberts:

John Roberts, 49. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C., Circuit. Top of his class at Harvard Law School and a former law clerk for Rehnquist, Roberts is one of the most impressive appellate lawyers around today. Liberal groups object to the fact that, in 1990, as a deputy solicitor general, Roberts signed a brief in a case involving abortion-financing that called, in a footnote, for Roe v. Wade to be overturned. But it would be absurd to Bork him for this: Overturning Roe was the Bush administration's position at the time, and Roberts, as an advocate, also represented liberal positions, arguing in favor of affirmative action, against broad protections for property rights, and on behalf of prisoners' rights. In little more than a year on the bench, he has won the respect of his liberal and conservative colleagues but has not had enough cases to develop a clear record on questions involving the Constitution in Exile. On the positive side, Roberts joined Judge Merrick Garland's opinion allowing a former employee to sue the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for disability discrimination. He pointedly declined to join the unsettling dissent of Judge David Sentelle, a partisan of the Constitution in Exile, who argued that Congress had no power to condition the receipt of federal transportation funds on the Metro's willingness to waive its immunity from lawsuits. In another case, however, Roberts joined Sentelle in questioning whether the Endangered Species Act is constitutional under Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. The regulation in question prevented developers from building on private lands in order to protect a rare species of toad, and Roberts noted with deadpan wit that "the hapless toad ... for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California," and therefore could not affect interstate commerce. Nevertheless, Roberts appears willing to draw sensible lines: He said that he might be willing to sustain the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act on other grounds. All in all, an extremely able lawyer whose committed conservatism seems to be leavened by a judicious temperament.

Eh, seems untested. Could be more radical than he's let on thus far. Not my first choice.

Onward. Let's hear from J. Harvey Wilkinson III:

J. Harvie Wilkinson III, 60. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The former chief judge of the Fourth Circuit clerked for Justice Lewis Powell, and this courtly conservative intellectual has long demonstrated Powell's sensitivity to judicial overreach. When he joined his colleagues in striking down part of the Violence Against Women Act as impossible to justify under Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, he added a concurrence confessing his concerns about what he candidly called "conservative judicial activism": If the federalism revolution leads to the "wholesale invalidation of environmental, civil rights, and business regulation," he warned, then the new conservative judicial activists would be just as discredited as their liberal activist predecessors. The next year, Wilkinson showed his commitment to judicial restraint, upholding Congress's power to apply the Endangered Species Act to the protection of red wolves over Luttig's dissent. Wilkinson has written several important essays and scholarly articles trying to work out a principled conservative jurisprudence. In the most recent, he argues that the Court can best protect democracy by enforcing structural boundaries between Congress and the states and among the branches of the federal government, rather than by stringently upholding individual rights. Wilkinson also proved in the case of Yaser Hamdi, whom Bush designated an "enemy combatant," that he is willing to enforce judicial oversight of executive power--the central question in the war on terrorism. He has always insisted that the Court can bring the nation together by taking judicial restraint seriously, and his nomination could be a unifying gesture in a polarized time.

Well, he's 11 years older than the other two, which is a plus. All in all, seems like a sensible figure—though I'd like to know more about how firmly he adheres to precedent. On federalism: I may be in the liberal minority here, but striking down the Violence Against Women Act (in United States v. Morrison) isn't an unforgiveable thing per se. (I'll explain this some other time—but the standards the Court was trying to construct limits on what counted as "economic activity" (without making it merely a matter of degree) seemed reasonable enough, even if I don't agree with them.)

Onto Michael Luttig:

Michael Luttig, 50. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Conservatives view Luttig as a "conservative's conservative" because of his willingness to take federalism to its logical conclusion. In a closely watched case, he dissented from his colleague J. Harvie Wilkinson's decision to uphold the application of the Endangered Species Act to red wolves. (Luttig said that protecting red wolves isn't a commercial activity and therefore Congress has no power to regulate it; Wilkinson objected that Luttig's narrow vision of congressional power would "place in peril the entire federal regulatory scheme for wildlife and natural resource conservation.") Because of the red wolves case, liberals fear that Luttig would put the Constitution in Exile into overdrive. But Luttig's commitment to judicial principle is combined with a respect for judicial precedent: "At the end of the day, other than conscience, it is only analytical rigor, and the accountability that such renders possible, that can restrain a judiciary that serves for life and at the pleasure of no one," Luttig wrote in 2001. In 1998, for example, Luttig wrote an opinion faithfully applying the Supreme Court's reversal of a ban on partial-birth abortions, a decision with which he personally disagreed. Luttig has also shown an open-minded willingness to infer new constitutional rights from old precedents: Disagreeing again with conservative colleagues, he held that there is a constitutional right for people who have been convicted of serious crimes to have access to DNA evidence that might prove their innocence. As a Supreme Court justice, of course, Luttig would be free to rewrite precedents rather than be bound by them. But, if analytical rigor and precedent-based reasoning remain as touchstones of his jurisprudence, he might prove to be an independent and impressive justice.

Hm, kind of mixed on this, and I don't like Rosen's use of "might" at the end there. Shakespeare's Sister, who's also doing research, says that Luttig's one of the more aggressive conservatives out there. Barring further evidence, I'd say no to this one.

Both Rosen and the bard's sister, by the way, say that Kerr's fifth selection, Samuel Alito, Jr., is a Scalia clone willing to apply "the logic of the Constitution in Exile for all its worth." Thanks, but we like our New Deal state just fine. A big ol' thumbs down here.

So after the broad (and amateur-ish) overview, Harvey Wilkinson III and Michael W. McConnell seem acceptable to me—keeping in mind that we're not going to fall in love with any Bush nominee, period. Some people might say that, because the nominee will merely replace the conservative Rehnquist, it doesn't really matter how far to the right the new guy (or gal) is. Horsecrap, sez I. Democrats would do well to make a stand right away, even if the GOP whips itself into a frenzy over "unconstitutional" filibusters (oh, whatever). If the Dems let someone like Alito through the first time around, it seems entirely feasible that the president will only be emboldened to push through someone even more radical on the next round. Need to show unwavering resolve in a time of change!

"Continue reading "Who Replaces Rehnquist?"

Interesting passage from an old Washington Post article on U.S. plans to try to reduce the number of soldiers in Iraq during the upcoming troop rotation next month:

The last major U.S. troop rotation occurred a year ago, when commanders, as now, were feeling upbeat after a milestone event -- the capture of ousted president Saddam Hussein in December 2003. But within several months, U.S. forces were embroiled in simultaneous Shiite and Sunni uprisings and confronting a burgeoning insurgency.

U.S. military officers say there was a decline in the quality of U.S. intelligence on the insurgency last spring as a result of the turnover of forces. To prevent similar slippage this time, the 18th Airborne Corps' intelligence unit arranged for a longer handover period with its counterpart in the departing 3rd Corps. Additionally, more than 60 intelligence analysts from other military centers were brought in last summer and will help bridge this period.

We (by which I mean "we reading the newspapers") still don't know if intelligence on the insurgency is getting better or worse. They're still launching 50-60 attacks per day. James Glanz reported the other day that insurgents have been very smart about attacking key infrastructure spots in or around Baghdad—no doubt because many of the Baathists in the insurgency fighting still know how all of the pipes and grids connect. I also wouldn't be entirely surprised if there were insurgent "moles" currently working in some of the Iraqi ministries. Presumably this is the logic behind the Shi'ite scheme to purge the government of anyone who even smells like a Baathist. But without better intelligence there's no way to know where sound policy ends and paranoid "Baath-baiting" begins. Off course, there's also the possibility that this Newsweek report is right and Iranians, rather than ex-Baathists, are the ones planting moles.

It's not as memorable as "Have you, at last, no sense of decency left?", but Iyad Allawi recently told the AP that too much Baathification would "throw the country into problems, severe problems." Seems likely to me. In the Wall Street Journal recently, Greg Jaffe noted that one of the new "pop-up" militias—many of which are being used by the U.S. for security—is being run by General Adnan Thavit, the uncle of outgoing Interior Minister. For those keeping score, that minister is Falah al-Naqib, an ex-Baathist likely (I think?) to find himself on the business end of a Baathist purge by the new government. Gen. Thavit's militia may well follow him out, if it comes to that.

UPDATE: ...oh, wait, never mind. The Belmont Club says we're winning, and insurgents are big fat losers, so ignore all the foreboding evidence above. Indeed, it's time we ask ourselves: "Why bother reading newspapers when you can just read blogs?" Er, make that "blogs that link to newspapers." Oh whatever.

If, like me, you have little to no idea what would actually happen if the baht appreciated against the dollar ("baht?"), you probably find Brad Setser's blog mostly over your head. Still, from time to time he connects the financial markets and their funny ways to topics I do know a bit about, and the results are always illuminating. So I thought I'd highlight a couple of his recent posts that might be of wider interest.

First, we've all heard the conservative argument that financial markets won't mind if we borrow trillions to privatize Social Security, since we're just taking on a bit—well, okay, a lot—of short-term debt now in exchange for lowering our even more massive debt far, far in the future (i.e. our "implicit liabilities"). The markets, bless their hearts, will understand. Bogus, says Mr. Setser:

If the markets care about implicit liabilities, they sure are not showing it. The prescription drug benefit, as Paul Krugman and others (including many conservatives) have pointed out, created a larger "implicit liability" than the current "implicit liability" associated with the Social Security system... I don't think there is much evidence that the markets penalized the US government for the increase it the government's implicit liability.

On the other hand, this is what the markets can expect thanks to privatization: "If you hold a 10 year bond, or even a 30 year bond with a residual maturity of 25 years, the cash flows of the proposed reform are negative until after your bond matures, and the reform would involve a substantial increase in Treasury issuance and the overall stock of Treasuries in the market while the bond you hold is outstanding." Heh. In other words, a big "F— you."

Second, here's his interesting take on what the U.S. current account/trade deficits mean for the grand rivalry between America and China: "Will China want to finance the US government, through the purchases of Treasuries, as US seeks implement a strategy intended to contain China's regional, if not global, ambitions? Or will [China] prefer to step up its own direct investment in the production of the world's oil and other commodities, even if that means investing in places that the US labels pariahs?" It's a good counter to Thomas Barnett's view that more "economic connectivity" will make China and the U.S. cozy bedfellows from now until eternity. (And hey, as a budding realist on great power conflict, I'm obliged to find Setser's scenario "extremely plausible"!)

UPDATE: Slight-but-important edit.

I've always wondered how much the great Official Announcement Kabuki Dance really matters. That is, when administration officials say words like "no hostile intent," is that really all that different from saying "we do not intend to invade"? When China and the White House put out carefully-phrased—oh-so-carefully-phrased—statements on Taiwan, are they actually saying anything or just going through tedious formalities?

Ah, but now we find that it does makes a difference to North Korea, who apparently monitors this stuff full-time. Fascinating catch by the Post's Glenn Kessler. Note also that Powell and Rumsfeld were very, very specific about including or excluding particular phrases like "no hostile intent", though it doesn't appear that they're fully aware of how closely North Korea follows this stuff.

Michael Tomasky's point on how contemporary Democrats have no overriding philosophy is well-taken. As something of a side-issue, I'm reading Richard Parker's very thorough (and very interesting) new biography of J.K. Galbraith right now, and it sort of strikes me that there aren't very many Galbraith-type figures hanging around the Democratic party establishment these days. You've got very wonky, technocratic figures hanging around the think tanks, but must of these folks tend to stay above the partisan fray, and try to figure out specific solutions to specific problems rather than applying a larger worldview. Now maybe this is liberalism's strength, as Jon Chait puts it, but it also means that the Democrats fall prone to infighting when two solutions (and their advocates) clash—in a way that Republicans simply don't.

So where does Galbraith fit in? Well, I'm not very far in the biography (he's just falling under the spell of Keynes and Hitler hasn't even invaded Poland yet), so I'm not sure. But here you have someone who first thinks of very wonky solutions to specific problems (i.e. agricultural mishaps during the Depression), but also draws up a wider philosophy about—I think—the mechanics of power and the problems with economic inequality. And he laid it all out in layman's terms. Oh yeah, and he had a lot of influence over various Democratic administrations (Truman, Kennedy, Johnson).

Offhand I can't think of many thinkers fitting that role for the Democrats today. A number of liberal academics, perhaps, could fill that role—Jacob Hacker's thinking on economic risk should get far more attention than it appears to have received—but they tend to be marginalized in favor of people like Peter Diamond, Jason Furman, etc. Brilliant people, and they've both done invaluable work on Social Security, but as far as I know neither have the economic philosophy thing down pat. Maybe I have this wrong—I obviously don't hang out with Democratic insiders much—but that's how it appears from the outside. By the by, tremendous thinking on Democratic political philosophy gets done in the pages of my former employer, Boston Review. Everyone should be reading through its archives.

The real question is: What exactly do the Republicans have that creates conservative "philosophy"? And, more importantly, why does it lead to such terrible policy outcomes?

Hilarious old essay on the Kentucky Derby by Hunter S. Thompson. Dude knew how to throw a brick.

(via… er, now I don't remember who linked to this first. From one of the infinite tributes to the man, found here.)

Here's a fascinating glimpse into the fascinating world of fascinatingly high-powered internships that translate into money, fame, power, and the all-important payoff known only as "even more money, fame, and power." But alas, the glimpse is for subscribers of the Wall Street Journal only, so you get nothing. Instead, let me pooh-pooh all of this internship talk, and note that during my college career, I spent my off-terms variously as a CVS clerk, a Barnes and Noble clerk, a front-desk clerk at a hotel, a minimum-wage sailing teacher, a math/writing teacher for inner-city high school kids, and a data-monkey at a flood observatory. (Often two of those things in the same off-term. As Professor B says, 80 hour weeks suck.)

In fact, the only thing I ever did even remotely resembling a high-powered internship was working as a full-time fact-checker for the #1 Travel Book in the Country. (Really, check out the acknowledgments page and everything.) And now look at me! Stumbling back home from a Sunday night out, slightly drunk off cheap red wine, and… blogging!

Oh.

Right.

*sobs quietly into handkerchief...*

Via Dan Drezner, not only are the Iraqi insurgents beginning to negotiate with the Americans, they're talking about rolling out the welcome mat:

Insurgent representative Abu Mohammed says the nationalists would even tolerate U.S. bases on Iraqi soil. "We don't mind if the invader becomes a guest," he says, suggesting a situation akin to the U.S. military presence in Germany and Japan.

Heh. I dare anyone to tell me they saw that coming. Odds are, though, Abu Mohammed doesn't speak for most insurgents. Anyway, even the slightest prospect of negotiating is encouraging, though I'm still unconvinced that the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS)—the strident religious council now entering into talks with the Americans—has absolute sway over all of the nationalist Sunnis out there. In addition to the "hard-core Baathists" and the "hard-core Islamists" like Zarqawi who won't ever surrender, there may well be a sizeable number of "hard-core separatists" among many of the tribal-based insurgents out there, who refuse to join any sort of new government. Many of the more virulent Sunni clerics, too, may break with the AMS if they feel they're being "sold out". But I'm still working on this theory and trying to get in touch with scholars who can help me out (or swat me down).

But that, plus a quote from Dan, remind me of something. Dan says: "[I[f memory serves, the Sunnis made similar noises about participating in the political process after Hussein's capture." That's very true, and it's something that's slipped my mind for awhile. After Saddam got hoisted out of his spider-hole, a new Sunni group called the "State Council for the Sunnis" formed, made up of Sufis, Salafis, and some members of the Muslim Brotherhood. In other words, lots of Sunni fundamentalists who didn't necessarily want to take over Iraq or impose an Islamic state, but hated the occupation. The council wanted a say in goings-on within the interim government—and in April they tried to negotiate a truce in Fallujah but were rebuffed (by who?). Eventually the council started feuding with the more influential Association of Muslim Scholars and then just sort of vanished off the map.

But I don't know what this all means for the present situation. It's weird.

The Financial Times is reporting that Shi'ites and Kurds are now bickering over the provision in Iraq's interim constitution that effectively lets any three provinces veto the final constitution. Obviously the provision protects the Kurds (who control three provinces) from overt domination by the majority Shi'a, but it also kills the chance of any sort of centralized government—even a moderately effective centralized government—from forming in Baghdad. Now it's unlikely this impasse leads to civil war, but it's also hard to see how the Shi'ites can convince the Kurds to abandon the veto rule. The Kurds can always take their 100,000-strong peshmerga militia and just secede from Iraq, taking the oil-rich city of Kirkuk with them. Then there's a real mess on everyone's hands.

Here's another scenario: Let's say the veto rule stays. Now after a period of negotiating and deliberating, it becomes clear that the Shi'ite ruling coalition can't quite create the strong Islamic state that some of them would like. Too much caviling from the secular kids in the Shi'ite coalition, too many howls of protest from the Sunnis. So… a bunch of the more fundamentalist Shi'ites decide that what's good for the Kurds is good for them, and decide to cordon off some of the southern Iraqi provinces—Basra, Wasit, Maysam, etc.—to turn them into a mini, semi-autonomous theocracy.

It's not inconceivable that the Shiite secessionists would have popular support: both SCIRI and the Sadrists, the two major "theocratic" groups, recently won the local elections in a number of those provinces. In this case, Baghdad would have to grant them a good deal of autonomy, otherwise the secessionists could just veto the constitution. Plus, these folks would likely have sizeable militias to enforce their claims. (True, it would be odd for SCIRI's Badr Corps to link up with Sadr's Mahdi Army, but stranger things have happened…)

You can see where this is going. Once you grant autonomy to one part of the country, everyone wants in on the game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, except that the provinces don't divide up neatly along sectarian lines, so there's bound to be messy exoduses, fleeing refugees, and violence. Plus, they'll all be eyeing each other's oil fields...

Oy... what is wrong with our media? This Newsweek piece on Sen. Lindsey Graham's (R-SC) secret plan to privatize Social Security is horrible. First, there's this passage, on the merits of wage-indexing:

When the Social Security Administration figures out a new retiree’s initial benefit, it uses a formula based on the real (inflation-adjusted) growth in wages during that worker’s career. First implemented in 1977, this is called wage-indexing and it means that the benefits Social Security has promised to future retirees will be higher in real terms than those paid to today’s retirees — that is, they would be higher if the system could pay full benefits, which as of 2042, it won’t be able to, according to the Social Security Trustees.

Who vetted that last sentence? No. Just... no. Even if nothing is done to fix the system, nothing at all, the program can still afford to pay out benefits that are higher in real terms than they are today, in 2042 and in 2052 and in 2062 and... Price-indexing wouldn't just give us benefits smaller than what's "promised". It would give us all smaller benefits than what's payable. What was Newsweek thinking here? In fairness, the SSA Trustees' Report doesn't list payable benefits anywhere, but the Congressional Budget Office does, and people like Dean Baker have done the relevant calculations. on this. These numbers aren't unknowable.

Anyway, enough huffing and puffing. On to Lindsey Graham. Graham thinks he can pay for his privatization plan by lifting the cap on payroll taxes. Newsweek takes his word for it. But what he's saying is false, according to Furman/Greenstein. The Graham Plan is one of the more sensible privatization schemes out there, but it would still reduce total benefits for everyone, increase deficits through at least 2050, and would require trillions in General Fund transfers to Social Security, worsening the budget deficit. As the CBPP analysis has it, raising the cap on payroll taxes wouldn't "avoid the need for extensive borrowing" here. (And Graham isn't proposing to lift the cap completely, so he'd end up raising even less than the already too-meager amount assumed by the Furman/Greenstein paper.) Plus, Newsweek notes that Alan Greenspan suggested that Graham modify his plan by giving low-income people more in guaranteed benefits. A noble goal, to be sure, but it's going to make the plan more costly. Yum, more borrowing.

At any rate, this stuff is all very complex but the point is that there are people out there actually working through all the complexity. Newsweek's reporters ought to know about this, rather than just nodding dumbly when Graham smiles and tells them he "hasn't worked out exact numbers yet."

Tom… what the fuck:

Something really is going on with the proverbial "Arab street." The automatic assumption that the "Arab street" will always rally to the local king or dictator - if that king or dictator just waves around some bogus threat or insult from "America," "Israel" or "the West" - is no longer valid. Yes, the Iraq invasion probably brought more anti-American terrorists to the surface. But it also certainly brought more pro-democracy advocates to the surface.

What "automatic assumption"? People in the Middle East don't generally rally around Arab regimes because of bogus threats or insults. They support the regimes because if they don't, they get tossed in prison and tortured, or cracked over the heads by security forces financed by American petrodollars. That, by the way, hasn't changed much of late.

That said, I kind of share Friedman's optimism too. If the encouraging signs out of Gaza and the West Bank turn into a permanent peace, if Iraq survives without a civil war, and if Syria can be forced out of Lebanon (and Lebanon can survive without a civil war), well, the Middle East starts looking like a much nicer place. Of course, the ends will have to be pretty damn glorious to justify the means over the past four years.

Finally got around to reading Joseph Braude's essay on Egypt in the New Republic, arguing that it's much too soon to have free presidential elections because the Islamists would win, unseat Husni Mubarak, and then wreak a bunch of unspecified "havoc" all over Egypt. The alternative, Braude suggests, is to somehow magically strengthen the (weakly organized) liberal-democratic movement in Egypt and hope that they can come to power.

Well now. My first reaction is to shake my head—for a long time I've liked the idea, floated by "left-leaning" academics and, of all people, Reuel Marc Gerecht, that we should just uncork these regimes, hold elections, and let the Islamists take over. Let them busy themselves with governing rather than with hating the United States for propping up brutal dictators. Eventually the whole process will soften Islamic radicalism and all will be well. But that's just the theory; the trick is figuring out what would happen in actual, real-life countries. So, to Egypt we go. Ah Egypt...

The first thing we'll do, let's look at the institutions. Assume an Islamist group like the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power via constitutional means (i.e. wins the presidential election, lifts the ban on MB as a political party, wins significant seats in the legislature). Suddenly they have legal control of a country with a) a Constitution that can potentially enshrine shari'a (traditional Islamic law) as the law of the land, b) a non-independent judiciary (Anwar Sadat originally made it independent, but it's been subjugated over the years, and I believe Mubarak has given himself the power to create extra-legal courts, and c) a terrible legislative tradition—many of the 50,000 laws are patchwork items, utterly vague, and conflict with each other. There's little rule of law here. (For more background, read Yustina Saleh's study of Egypt's constitution.) Oh, and let's toss in d) as far as I can tell, an Islamist president would still have the power to declare a state of emergency.

So it's not obvious that something even remotely democratic would emerge from a change of presidents. Meanwhile, instituting sharia would offer poor protection for Egypt's sizeable Coptic Christian community. (And by sizeable I mean about 4.5 million people—more than the number of Kurds in Iraq.) Copts, for instance, would have no standing in court against Muslims. And yes, things would be a good deal worse than they are now—the current Supreme Court takes a moderately liberal view on protections for minorities and the implementation of sharia.

On the plus side, however, the U.S. has never cared much for human rights or democracy when it's convenient, and here it might be convenient: Islamist rule could turn Islamic rage away from the United States, at least for awhile. Perhaps moreso if the U.S. was the country that pressured Mubarak into holding the elections in the first place.

After a victory, it's doubtful that the Islamists would maintain their current wide base of support. At the moment, they gain a number of followers by offering a nice network of social services, and blaming all deprivation on the state, but obviously they can't afford to provide services for the entire nation. Plus, many Egyptians back the Islamists less for their positive agenda than for their opposition to Mubarak's ideologically bankrupt regime. (Nazih Ayubi's Political Islam has a lot on this.)

The other possibility is that the Islamists in power would learn to compromise like any good political group, seeking pragmatic solutions to governing rather than inflexibly theological ones. The Muslim Brotherhood has worked closely with liberals and nationalists over the years, and ever since eschewing violence for politics they've become quite flexible. Meanwhile, Mubarak's massive National Democratic Party would remain a large element of the political opposition, and assuming the new Islamist rulers didn't abuse what's left of the rule of law in Egypt—which is a big assumption, obviously—a healthy political rivalry could form.

As well, a hugely neglected issue could arise: The intra-Islamist debates. The Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, has long feuded with the militant salafists in Saudi Arabia, while moderate groups like Hizb al-Wasat—an offshoot of the Brotherhood that somewhat embraces rights for women and Copts—have their own version of Islamist rule. This sort of dialogue would be a grand thing, and frankly, I don't see any other way for it to come about.

So that's the happy view. The unhappy view is that, over time, some Egyptians could grow disillusioned with their new Islamic government—especially if it failed to implement sharia—and seek refuge in even more radical strains of Islam that eventually joined the jihad against the United States. If you read Gilles Kepel's Muslim Extremism in Egypt, it's clear that the radicals can always find ways to declare current rulers illegitimate.

A number of other "X-factors" also start to emerge. It's worth noting that animosity toward the West will be a major pillar in any radical Islamist government, as Joseph Braude argues. And it's not just because of our policies: Many of these folks blame the influence of "decadent" Western culture for the Islamic world's moral decline. I'm not sure how big of an effect this would have, but I don't think Arab resentment towards the U.S. would disappear overnight. At the same time, though, Islamist Egyptians may no longer feel as threatened by the U.S., given that they're no longer ruled by leaders who imitate those decadent and morally corrupt Westerners. (Then again, you have to wonder how much the U.S. could actually support an Islamist regime in Egypt, especially one that repressed the country's 4.5 million Coptic Christians.)

It's also possible that a new Islamist regime could just blame the U.S. for all of its economic woes, and possibly redirect popular frustration in that way. Denouncing the U.S. for its trade policies and economic influence seems like a fruitful avenue here. Who knows? One day you have people like Ayman al-Zawihiri blowing up the World Trade Center to protest America's support for the Mubarak regime. The next, though, you could have new Egyptian Islamists blowing stuff up to protest the "exploitation" of Egypt by the IMF, WTO, etc.

Indeed, one thing that worries me is that the potential belligerence of the Muslim Brotherhood remains very much unknown. In Egypt, the group has certainly tamped down its radical tone over the last decade, mostly trying to effect change via peaceful means like elections. At the same time, another branch of the MB evolved along similar lines in Sudan, but then took part in the 1989 military coup when it looked like they couldn't win the elections. We know how that turned out. Perhaps the comparison's unfair—military coups always produce crappy regimes—but it's hardly trivial.

Still, when all is said and done, what's the alternative here? The Islamists are the only viable political opposition group in Egypt. I'm not sure either the U.S. or Mubarak himself have the ability to help the liberals gain influence. Building up a liberal civil society is really hard work, and a slow, painstaking process. It's also unlikely that Mubarak will instill the rule of law in Egypt before gracefully holding elections and turning over his throne. It takes time to train legislators on how to write intelligent laws, create a working system of judicial review, resolve a lot of constitutional muddles, etc. etc. And meanwhile, thanks to U.S. policies in Israel and Iraq over the past four years, conditions for nurturing moderate Islam are at an absolute nadir. (Thanks President Bush!)

So it's either stay the current course or let the radical Islamists come to power. I say uncork the damn bottle—hold elections and see what happens. The current course does us no good. But it's going to be a nailbiter.

Continue reading "Taking Over Egypt"

David Horowitz' new Discover the Network, a database charting connections between leftist groups around the world, is now online and has a fun profile of Mother Jones:

Mother Jones incessant theme has always been: capitalism is evil, government control of business is good. Or globally: America & Israel are evil, Marxist regimes like Fidel Castro's Cuba are good. As Jean Pearce documented at FrontPageMagazine.com, Mother Jones routinely applies double standards and questionable or one-sided data to skew its articles to predictably-socialist conclusions. It sees the world through only the left eye.

They got our address wrong, though, so good luck sending hate mail!

Some of the new "Debate Club" discussions hosted by Legal Affairs are really quite illuminating. This one, though, on whether or not to keep the Senate filibuster, brings up some bizarre attacks on a time-honored tradition:

The filibuster exists because the Senate failed to include a motion on the previous question in its rules when those rules were codified for the first time in 1806. As far as we can tell, this was more of an accident than anything else. "Theories of the Senate," including Johnn C. Calhoun's concurrent majorities, arose over the course of the 19th century about why the Senate lacked a limit on debate, but all of this was a rationalization for a thoughtless act in 1806. With that move, the Senate did not have a rule to limit debate and waited until 1917 to get the cloture rule—Rule 22—in place. A majority of senators appear to have favored simple-majority cloture in 1917 and at other times, but obstructionists prevented a rule providing for a lower threshold from coming to a vote...

Reading high constitutional principle into the filibuster and Rule 22 is unwise. To be sure, principle is articulated by senators in its defense; a few senators actually believe it. But brass-knuckle politics, not Senate representation or separation of powers, explain it. And self-serving senatorial interests, not constitutional principle, will save it, if it is saved.

In other words, there's no principled reason the filibuster exists, and a majority of Senators back in 1917 (and a good number before then) wanted to get rid of it but they couldn't. It's there by an accident of history and an oversight by the Framers. Meanwhile, those Senators today who still want to keep it around are just "self-serving" slaves to "brass-knuckle politics." Sure, maybe, but what was so great about those Senators who wanted to ditch the filibuster way back in 1917 or 1806 or whatever? Were they somehow less self-interested than today's bunch? Probably not.

(Well, okay, in the 1800s the pro-filibuster crowd probably included a lot of pro-slavery politicians, but surely that wasn't all there was to it. I'm just disinclined to think that Senators of yore were gentle, high-minded folks concerned only with the greater good...)

That said, I'm a) glad to see my favorite statistic in the world get used in this debate (that the 45 Democratic Senators actually represent a majority of Americans) and b) willing to abolish the filibuster if we can also reduce the number of state-wide Senate races to one per state and fill the other 50 seats in the Senate with "at-large" representatives elected nationally via some sort of byzantine voting system (the Hare method, say). Bring it on!

Maybe this is old news, but it's kind of fascinating. While doing research for something else entirely this afternoon, I stumbled across an interesting paper by economists Steven Levitt and John Donohue, arguing that Roe v. Wade, more than any other factor, explains the sudden and very rapid nationwide decline in crime during the 1990s.

The argument makes intuitive sense, for sure: Abortion prevents unwanted births; unwanted births are more likely to become criminals; so the post-Roe abortion wave prevented these likely criminals from ever being born. The people in question, note, would have come of age in the early '90s—exactly when the national crime rate plummeted—and there are a few other correlations (states that legalized abortion earlier than 1973 saw their crime rates plummet earlier; states with high post-Roe abortion rates saw greater declines in crime rates) that do make this look like more than a funny coincidence. At any rate, it certainly seems stronger than any of the alternative explanations (increased incarceration, the aging society, better police tactics, more police, better economy, etc.)

Googling around, it looks like pro-life groups threw a fit about all this—I assume there was a lot of fanfare and I just didn't hear about it because I didn't follow the news at all in 2000—but of course nothing in the study justifies abortion. (If Donohue and Levitt are right, you could've gotten the same effect with better contraception methods.) By the way, here's a kooky parallel. Nicolas Ceausescu, former dictator of Rumania, outlawed abortion in 1966 and forced people to have pregnancies via tax policy. Just 23 years later, when Ceausescu's regime fell, all of those unwanted and forced pregnancies were entering their prime (i.e. peak potential criminal) years of life and perhaps helped spark the rather excessive chaos and disorder of that year. (Ceausescu and his wife were the only Communist leaders actually lynched and executed, after all.) Probably just a coincidence, though.

I see his point, I guess, but it's awfully odd for John Miller to declare Joseph Addison's Cato to be "America's Greatest Play." Influential or not, the thing was still written by a Brit, and produced long before America even existed. If we're going to play this game, we may as well call Montesquieu "America's Greatest Philosopher," but obviously we don't do that. (My pick for "America's greatest play", incidentally, is O'Neill's Desire Under The Elms. Ayup.)

Right, then. Elsewhere on NRO, Victor Davis Hanson babbles on about some force of history or other being unleashed. How totally exciting! Really, though, at this point the bullshit ratio in Hanson's weekly column is getting inexcusable. It would be one thing if he wrote on a wide range of topics and didn't have the time to go in-depth into each subject. But the dude writes the same exact thing every single week ("Freedom on the march! The Left hearts Islamo-fascism!"), and it would be so goddamn easy for him to just crack open a book on his off-days, learn some stuff, and tweak his output accordingly.

Oh, and while we're talking about freedom on the march. Leaving aside Iraq and Palestine—both of which are special cases and still obviously inconclusive—how strongly has freedom been marching across the Middle East lately? It's true, we've seen some marginally encouraging reforms since the September 11 attacks—Qatar's 2003 constitutional election, Saudi Arabia's recent municipal elections, Morocco's 2002 elections. But the region also saw equally significant moves toward democracy before September 11. Bahrain, for starters, started to "modernize" way back in 1999 with the accession of Hamid bin Isa. The Al Sabah regime in Kuwait brought back parliament after the First Gulf War, but it's more or less been backsliding since. You could argue that Qatar's big step towards quasi-democratic reform wasn't in 2003, but way back in 1999, when women were allowed to vote for the first time ('twas a big deal). And Saudi Arabia probably took a bigger reform step back in 1992, when it created the Shura Council, than when it staged those municipal elections last week.

So yeah, it's easy to cherry-pick the incremental reforms that have cropped up since 9/11 and chalk them up as victory points for Bush. But an alien peering down at the region from outer space all these years would be hard-pressed to say that reforms are now coming faster than they were before. Iraq and Palestine aside.

Oh P.S. I don't quite get Hanson's point on Palestine. Even if the U.S. had taken "Europe's advice" and engaged Arafat over the past four years, he still likely would've died when he died and we'd be seeing a situation similar to the current one, no? Hanson claims that the hawkish U.S./Israel stance against Palestinian terrorism made Arafat look "impotent" and hence when he died he wasn't "sanctified as a mythical strongman." Maybe, but wouldn't this have been the case no matter what? The young Palestinian movements were all sick of Arafat as far as I can tell, and it had less to do with his inability to stand up to Sharon and more to do with the fact that he and his cronies were running the Palestinian Authority into the ground. Dunno. "What ifs" of this sort are difficult to do, though Hanson's version seems stunningly reductive.

Let's leave aside Larry Summers' remarks about women at Harvard for now. (They deserve a good drubbing, but there are others better-equipped to do that sort of thing.) Instead, Lindsey Beyerstein dredged up something just as interesting: An infamous (though new-to-me) 1991 World Bank memo in which Summers (who was the Bank's chief economist at the time) notes that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable." Oh no! Not again!

Er, except that if you read the actual memo, his logic is impeccable. There really are possible trade-offs between pollution and growth (or, if you prefer, between social goods and economic goods), and some developing countries may well choose a little black lung in exchange for higher wages. This is basic stuff. The only way to refute Summers here would be to convincingly show that such trade-offs don't actually exist, which seems like a tall order. Barring that, this is bang-on: "The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity." Presumably, though, the World Bank doesn't think this way or Summers wouldn't have had to write the memo. And it's awfully odd that the World Bank doesn't think this way.

Fascinating stuff: Tony of Across the Bay, with a brief assist from Josh Landis, seems to think that Bashar Assad has total (or near-total) control of the goings-on in Syria, that it would be nearly impossible for him not to have known about Rafiq Hariri's assassination beforehand, and that Bashar is a "mediocre strategist" interested only in maintaining "wealth and status" for his cronies. Tony's been building this case for days and it sure looks convincing, though obviously I'm not in any position to dispute it.

Perhaps I'm not paraphrasing Nathan Newman correctly, but insofar as he's pointing out that there's really not a huge divide between liberal groups on trade issues, he's more or less right on. There simply aren't hordes of protectionist Democrats out there wanting to blockade our ports and revive the Hawley-Smoot Act. Sorry, no. As far as I can tell, the biggest fear among free traders is simply that when activists or labor unions call for higher labor standards 'round the globe, they're "really" asking for protectionism in disguise.

This is silly. It's especially silly to think that labor unions want to sneak in protectionism under the guise of "fair trade". Why would they do that? Organized labor largely works in relatively high-skilled export industries, rather than low-wage import industries, so in the aggregate they have more to gain from open trade than they do from protectionism. When labor groups think they really could benefit from a few tariffs here and there, they usually just come out and say so, as the steelworkers did in 2002 or textile unions are doing now. In fact, Newman's right in that there's a good deal more disingenuousness on the part of the free trade crowd, who pay lip service to easing the dislocation that comes with free trade, but then stay mum when President Bush actually starts gutting programs like the Trade Adjustment Assistance. That's no way to build trust.

Is there a third way in all this? Sure. You could believe, as I do, that trade really just doesn't matter all that much. Developing countries can have high labor standards or low labor standards, and thanks to the magic of free-floating exchange rates, neither option produces either economic collapse or a "race to the bottom". Let countries choose for themselves, it's not that big a deal. Now if we truly wanted to harness globalization to improve the lot of developing nations, let's look at things that actually do have a huge effect, like technology transfers or capital flows. It shouldn't be so hard to come up with a good Democratic consensus on this stuff ("Who among us does not love capital controls?"). Of course, then there's immigration, which perhaps has the biggest effect of all. That's a hornet's nest, for sure, but it's probably more divisive for Republicans than Democrats.

Every now and again the "New Dem Dispatch" appears in my inbox, courtesy of the good folks at the DLC. About a week ago they sent out a piece on Medicaid which I wanted to comment on but didn't because, frankly, I've got a million things I want to write about and no time to do it. But now, oh now there's time...

Right, then. The DLC's basic idea is that cutting Medicaid blindly is of course silly. Medicaid may not be a perfect program (what is?), but clearly it helps people, and clearly the cost of scalping the program and letting people fend for themselves is untenable. (All that happens is that these destitute folks go years without treatment, fall gravely ill, heave their battered bodies upon emergency rooms across America, leave without paying the check, and then raise costs for the rest of the insured. Quelle horreur!) But it occurred to me that, yes, lots of people know that Medicaid provides health insurance for poor people and that its costs are rising very, very rapidly, but most people don't really know why costs are rising so much or what aspects of Medicaid are so terribly inefficient.

Even more disturbing, I flicked my cursor to and fro across the vast internets, and the only think tank providing an easy-to-understand critical assessment of Medicaid was Heritage, which a) might be pure hackery and b) is probably committed to phasing the program out no matter what. Gah. It would be nice if some liberal site could provide comprehensive and easy-to-understand issue briefs on these sorts of wonky topics. (The Center for American Progress is fun, but sometimes not all that cerebral, and more obsessed with producing "talking points" than real insight/analysis.)

So, with that much-too-long preface out of the way, below the fold are a few (quite a few) key points on Medicaid—its strengths, weaknesses, etc. Perforce this is an amateur work in progress, but somebody's gotta do it.

Overview

First, the basics: If you're poor and meet certain eligibility requirements—children, pregnant women, elderly, people with disabilities, parents—you can enroll in Medicaid and get fully funded health care, paid for jointly by the federal government and states. The federal government matches state expenditures on Medicaid in varying amounts (it depends on how wealthy the state is). As of 2002, the program covered 25 million children (1 in 4 kids), 13 million adults, 5 million seniors, and 8 million people with disabilities.

The elderly and disabled gobble up the bulk of Medicaid funds, naturally—and 40 percent of spending pays for Medicare premiums for low-income seniors. Oh, and lest you start crying about "welfare for bums!", do note that two-thirds of all Medicaid enrollees are in working families.

Over the past couple of years, the economy sucked, people lost jobs and income, and more and more people qualified for Medicaid. In fact, as John Holahan and Arunabh Ghosh recently demonstrated, the 10.2 percent growth in Medicaid over the last four years was largely driven by this enrollment growth, rather than any inefficiencies in the system. Medicaid, in fact, grew more slowly than private insurance costs.

Myths

There are any number of myths about Medicaid: It provides crappy health care! Er, no, Medicaid recipients tend to be about as happy with their health care as those with private insurance. Or how about: The program is a bureaucratic nightmare! Not really. In 2002, administrative expenses were $12 billion for a $257.2 billion program. Now I've heard that this understates the administrative costs, but this argument mostly has to do with interest on the debt that funds these programs (i.e. not problems with Medicaid per se).

On the other hand, there's a fair bit of Medicaid fraud, on the part of both providers and states. Which brings us to…

Actual problems!

1) Health care spending is going up across the board, either because of new treatments, expensive and shiny new medical technologies, and the emergence of a labor-intensive health sector (nursing homes, for instance). But in theory, over the long run, Medicaid's costs should rise much more rapidly than those in the private sector. For starters, it covers the sickest of Americans—the poorest, the disabled, the elderly. An aging population is putting the strain on Medicaid, as are increasingly strict standards for nursing home care, which ups the cost. In general, though, given the uphill battle it has to fight, Medicaid is controlling costs pretty well.

2) A major problem, however, is that Medicaid doesn't cover everyone. Usually the father of a family won't get coverage, though his kids will, and his wife will if she's pregnant. Meanwhile, many of the eligibility rules are extremely complex, and because there are so many hoops you have to jump through to apply, many poor Americans don't even apply. We can't even lead the horse to water half the time. Many inner cities have centers set up to help people apply for Medicaid, and apparently it's quite shocking how many people are completely unaware that they qualify for coverage.

3) As most doctors know, Medicaid sets its own prices and pays much, much less for care than do private insurance plans. This doesn't mean doctors won't treat Medicaid patients at all—only about 10 percent of Medicaid patients don't receive treatment when needed, as compared to 1/3 of uninsured patients—but at the same time, many doctors limit the number of Medicaid patients they see. Some refuse to see any at all. And usually, this just means that people on Medicaid must rely more heavily to outpatient and emergency care, which is almost always more expensive.

4) Medicaid is, by design, a volatile program. Thanks to the wild income swings prevalent in America, individual families often go in and out of Medicaid coverage. This, of course, makes it hard to enroll in an HMO or other managed care company for an extended period of time, which means that beneficiaries often don't receive the sort of consistent primary/preventive care that reduces costs over the long term.

5) Ah, the fraud factor. The GAO has been tracking fraud in the Medicaid system for at least a decade—mostly in the form of overpayment to private providers—with estimates of the total cost sometimes ranging as high as 10 percent. I'm not going to get into this really—it's a problem, sure, but it can be addressed through IT improvements, various antifraud measures, identifying improper billing, etc.—because it doesn't seem, in itself, a reason to scrap the program.

On the other hand, there is a serious tug of war going on between the federal and state governments over what to cover, what should be reimbursed, etc. etc. States always want greater flexibility with their Medicaid funds; some federal governments like to make some of the eligibility standards consistent across states, and so on. Plus, some states use all sorts of loopholes to squeeze more out of the federal government. "Voluntary provider taxes" were a popular accounting trick for awhile, but this sort of stuff can easily be (and in fact was) cracked down on.

Of those, I'd say 2), 3), and 4) are the big problems. All of the Bush administration proposals—block grants or health savings accounts or what have you—are more or less designed to address problems 1) and 5). The problem is that Medicaid's costs aren't rising any faster than health care costs in general, so cutting Medicaid spending without addressing that deeper cost issue will simply swell the ranks of the uninsured. As for the fraud factor, eh, I'm not impressed. There are easier ways to manage that.

Anyway, by my clock I've been writing for about 40 minutes, which is way too long for a single blog post, so I'll stop here and get around to What Is To Be Done later on.

Continue Reading "What's So Bad About Medicaid?"

Heh, excellent point by Sam Rosenfeld:

Incidentally, my limited anecdotal experience in discussing this issue suggests that a shocking number of people -- including, say, your average radio talk show host -- continues to have major difficulty distinguishing between Medicare and Medicaid. This has always struck me as a nice ancillary boon to Medicaid's defenders, ensuring that a means-tested entitlement program for poor people can enjoy some spill-off support from one of the durable, universal middle-class entitlements.

That Lyndon B. Johnson fellow was one sneaky, sneaky bastard...

Hm, I'm not entirely sure it's a good thing that John Negroponte's leaving Iraq. Recall that during the first year of the occupation, one of the major problems was the constant feuding between the CPA and military leadership in Iraq—culminating in the ugly Sanchez-Blackwill spat in late 2003 over just how big a footprint U.S. forces should have in Iraq. It all would've made for a splendid little farce except for the fact that, you know, people were dying and the insurgency was growing. But anyway, from what I've heard Negroponte and Gen. George Casey have actually worked quite well together, figuring out how to better coordinate military action with various civil-political strategies (though the latter are still pitiful). They weren't perfect, obviously, but light-years beyond their predecessors.

Guess who's back... back again...

Whatever, so you probably won't guess: it's Russia, according to this rather fascinating Daily Star piece. Putin, it seems, is putting Russia's energy assets to good use—expanding his influence throughout the Middle East and cozying up to Iran and Syria, much to America's discomfort. And naturally enough: "The crisis has revealed a new source of friction ahead of a Bratislava summit between Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush." Oh really. Because that wasn't at all predictable when we set up our official Russia policy three years ago. You know, the one that goes: George W. Bush peers into Putin's soul and likes what he sees. Bush assumes the two countries' interests will always and magically converge of their own accord. And oh, how I wish I were joking...

More fascinating stuff on Islamic economics, from Mufti Taqi Usmani:

Moreover, when a company is financed on the basis of interest, its funds employed in the business are impure. Similarly, when the company receives interest on its deposits an impure element is necessarily included in its income which will be distributed to the share-holders through dividends.

However, a large number of the present day scholars do not endorse this view. They argue that a joint stock company is basically different from a simple partnership period. In partnership, all the policy decisions are taken by the consensus of all the partners, and each one of them has a veto power with regard to the policy of business. Therefore, all the actions of a partnership are rightfully attributed to each partner. Conversely, the policy decisions in a joint stock company are taken by the majority. Being composed of a large number of share-holders, a company cannot give a veto power to each share-holder. The opinions of individual share-holders can be overruled by a majority decision. Therefore, each and every action taken by the company cannot be attributed to every share-holder in his individual capacity. If a share-holder raises an objection against a particular transaction in an annual general meeting, but his objection is overruled by the majority, it will not be fair to conclude that he has given his consent to the transaction in his individual capacity, specially when he intends to withdraw from the income attributable to that transaction.

Therefore, if a company is engaged in a halal business, however, it keeps its surplus money in an interest-bearing account, wherefrom a small incidental income of interest is received, it does not render all the business of the company unlawful. Now, if a person acquires the shares of such a company with clear intention that he will oppose the incidental transaction also, and will not use that proportion of the dividend for his own benefit, how can it be said that he has approved the transaction of interest and how can that transaction be attributed to him? ...

Moreover, according to the principals of Islamic jurisprudence borrowing on interest is a grave sinful act for which the borrower is responsible in the Hereafter; however, this sinful act does not render the whole business of the borrower as haram impermissible. The borrowed amount being recognized as owned by the borrower, anything purchased in exchange of that money is not unlawful. Therefore, the responsibility of committing a sinful act of borrowing on interest rests with the person who willfully indulged in a transaction of interest, but this fact does not render the whole business of a company as un-lawful.

My quick take is that the anti-usury prescriptions in the Qu'ran are really, really difficult to get around, but modern-day scholars are doing their best to find loopholes, as Sistani does with foreign banks, and as Usmani seems to here.

"The… state possesses the sole right of ownership of natural resources. Consequently, it has absolute control of all aspects of economic activities." Now who would go ahead and say a thing like that? Karl Marx? Mao Zedong? John Kerry? Ah no, friends, no. That's taken from Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr's (former Shi'ite bigwig and now-dead father uncle [UPDATE: oops... well, I got it right over at Mojo] of Moqtada Sadr) interesting reflections on political economy in Islamic states. So maybe Naomi Klein can breathe easy—if such a state does crop up in Iraq, it's not likely to be very friendly to private investment (or exploitation, whatever) from abroad, I think. Or at least it won't be until growth sags, birth rates and unemployment swell, and they get a finance minister who decides that maybe it's alright to have a little bit of privatization and whatnot.

But for now it seems like Sadr's views may carry the day. It seems that Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shi'ite representing SCIRI, was pushed out of contention for the prime minister spot because he liked privatizing stuff. Shame, shame. Juan Cole thinks the current front-runner for prime minister, Ibrahim Jaaferi, is a bit more keen on Islamic economics. Seems reasonable—Jaaferi hails from al-Daawa, and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr was the spiritual leader of Daawa... so we may see Baghdad continue to control of the means of production. Hmm.

I'd also be interested to know more about Ayatollah Ali Sistani's views on ecomomics—he did study it for a number of years, after all. And nosing around the man's website, his views on banking are quite perplexing.

As we know, Social Security phase-out advocates have been saying that low growth over the next 75 years will doom Social Security. But they've also been saying that we'll continue to get outrageously high stock returns, and that's why we should do private accounts. That sort of acrobatic logic caused Dean Baker to issue his "No Economist Left Behind" Test, daring people to explain just how we'll get such high returns if we have such crappy growth.

Now Tom Maguire has been saying it's perfectly possible to have low growth and high stock returns. But he's been smacked down for offering up a theory that's only "possible" and not "likely". (His theory, if I understand it, is essentially possibility #2 that Brad DeLong looked at here.) That critique seems a bit unfair, though. Given a decade or more of GOP rule in the U.S. Maguire's solution seems very plausible to me, depending as it does on increasingly high shares of corporate revenue going towards profits; real wages dropping as labor protections are gutted; and taxes on savings continue to be rolled back. In other words, exactly what we've seen over the past four years. George W. Bush, note, is creating a world in which the Tom Maguire theory looks not only possible, but increasingly likely.

Now the key point here is that I certainly don't want to live in a world with stagnant wages and obscenely high profit shares. Neither do most people, I assume, and eventually the gutting of American labor may well produce a real political backlash that will bring the whole project crashing down. More labor protections. More corporate regulations. More wage regulations. Etcetera. But then we're right back in a world where equities aren't likely to do as well as they have in the past, and private accounts become a worse deal all around.

Well this seems marvelous: the U.S. is finally pursuing an actual policy on North Korea! We did not, by the way, have one before—unless you count those "six-party talks" in which everyone would get in a room and watch the NK and U.S. envoys sit in their separate corners and refuse to talk to each other. Funny, the same thing used to happen quite a bit back in the fifth grade, but no one pretended we were disarming a nuclear power in the process. But now we're getting serious and plan to shut off Kim Jong-Il's funding:

The new strategies would intensify and coordinate efforts to track and freeze financial transactions that officials say enable the government of Kim Jong Il to profit from counterfeiting, drug trafficking and the sale of missile and other weapons technology.

Some officials describe the steps as building blocks for what could turn into a broader quarantine if American allies in Asia - particularly China and South Korea - can be convinced that Mr. Kim's declaration on nuclear weapons last week means he must finally be forced to choose between disarmament and even deeper isolation. China and South Korea have been reluctant to impose penalties on the North.

This seems in step with the hopes and dreams of White House hardliners—shut off North Korea's funding base and watch the regime collapse. Indeed, influential hawkish academics like Nick Eberstadt have been arguing (plausibly, I think) that all the aid we've been funneling to Pyongyang over the years has only helped prop up the regime. Fair enough, but I'm not convinced that the other countries in the region actually want to see North Korea collapse. Certainly it would be fantastic from a human rights perspective, but in the immediate aftermath, South Korea and China would receive a flood of refugees, and the inevitable downturn in SK's economy following "unification" could hit other Asian countries—especially Japan—quite hard. Which explains, I think, why SK and Japan have been quietly tossing buckets of money at Kim Jong Il's regime—it's not appeasement or an attempt to ward off aggression per se; it's an attempt to avert an economic disaster.

It's telling, I think, that Japan's current threats of "sanctions lite" against NK aren't meant to be all-encompassing or actually threaten the survival of the Pyongyang regime, but merely to put pressure on some of the elites to get back in talks. And Japanese PM Koizumi seems to be pursuing sanctions mainly because of popular pressure—I doubt Japanese political and business elites really want to see North Korea squeezed. I don't know if all this is right, but if it is, we could well see South Korea and Japan soon at odds with the United States over just how far to go in isolating Pyongyang.

UPDATE: See? South Korea's already backtracking on the hard-line, stating that NK's having a nuclear weapon "does not make it a nuclear weapons state."

I'm still trying to figure out what the voting results for the Iraqi government will portend. The unified Shi'ite list didn't do as well as expected, and they either got a bare majority or just under (it depends on how the proportions of votes translates into actual seats). So not bad: anything that forces the Sistani juggernaut to compromise with the other political coalitions could be a good thing, depending on how it shakes out.

But before we start speculating about What This All Means, let's not ignore the potential elephant honking around the room here—allegations of voter fraud. Here's a tidbit buried in tomorrow's Washington Post story:

Given the backing of Sistani, whose writ carries the force of law among many devout Shiites, leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance had expected to win as much as 60 percent of the vote. Under a complicated formula for the allotment of seats, the alliance may still command a slim majority in parliament, but some of its officials said they were disappointed with their strong plurality. Some privately suggested that they suspected foul play and planned to question the commission on the specific results Monday.

Um, "disappointed"? Do elaborate. And I worry only because there weren't many election monitors watching over the voting, and fierce allegations could cause quite the ruckus. But, as in last year's U.S. election, it's also unlikely that they'll find enough discrepancies to alter the results in any significant way. So maybe it's not a big deal. Note that now it should also be much harder for Sistani and the fundamentalist Shi'ites ever to reject the U.S.-imposed interim constitution as "illegitimate" after not even winning a majority (and the Kurds love the TAL since it gives them disproportionate power). Good news, I think—though one can also be worried about utter gridlock in the constitutional process, which could create its own problems.

Jim Hoagland makes a good point in his Post column today: We have no fucking clue just who the Iraqi insurgents really are, and until we do, designing an exit strategy is going to be awfully difficult.

It seems the CIA thinks that the insurgency is mostly made up of Sunni nationalists who hate the United States and would mostly lay down their arms if we left. The military, it seems, puts a greater emphasis on the "well-organized, well-financed sabotage campaign by Baathists [and foreign fighters]." They of course won't put down their arms if we leave, and could do a lot more damage in the absence of an American military presence—civil war, coups, etc. Obviously the insurgency's a composition of the two, but the proportions are crucial, and this is more than an academic dispute.

One X factor, though, is the question of whether or not many of the tribal Sunnis in Anbar, Diyalah, etc. are merely anti-American nationalists, or actual rejectionists who will fight against any centralized Iraqi state, whether the Americans stay or go. I understand that one Iraqi scholar, Rashid al-Khuyun, has recently put forward this view, and if correct would augur for a withdrawal later rather than sooner. The other X factor is that we've been hearing a lot of promising noises from the Association of Muslim Scholars about cooperating with the new government. But no one seems to know how influential AMS really is, or how monolithic the "religious Sunni" demographic will turn out to be. True, AMS is an umbrella group encompassing some 3,000 mosques, but these guys hardly have firm Sistani-like sway over the community, and if a large number of Salafist mosques flatly reject any Shiite-led government, then a handful of conciliatory Sunni leaders won't change their mind. Schisms happen all the time!

The Washington Post today looks at the vast sums of money being plunked down by business groups into the various GOP fights on tort reform, Social Security, Medicare, etc. Quite strikingly, in many cases most of these corporations don't stand to benefit at all from some of these particular fights—what, for instance, does the National Association of Manufacturers care about phasing out Social Security? Insofar as the Bush phase-out plan slashes benefits over the long term, it will only put pressure on them to provide more generous pensions.

Unless, of course, they can work with the GOP majority later on to dismantle labor unions. Ah, so now the strategy makes sense! Even more likely, though, the vast K Street lobbyists network Republicans have built up over the years simply means that businesses will blindly support Republican Plan X, no matter what it is, in exchange for various forms of corporate pork and tax deductions later on.

None of that is quite surprising, and much of it fits in with the tendency of American businesses to think very short term—responding to stockholder pressure rather than the health of the business 40, 50 years out. As Matt Miller writes in the Times today, it would be nice if businesses could take the long view and realize that they would actually benefit from some sort of single-payer health care system—surely they're not idiots enough to believe that Bush's "Health Savings Accounts" will get them off the hook. The trouble, as Miller notes, is that they're only worried about tomorrow: "chief executives are interested mostly in shifting costs to workers to solve their problems - rather than helping to lead efforts to re-engineer America's radically inefficient health sector in ways that would solve everyone's." Until this attitude changes—and I don't see how it will—there's little likelihood businesses will ever be swayed by arguments that some welfare state components will only help them.

As an extra cautionary note concerning reforms in Saudi Arabia, here's a brief bit that Khalid Al-Dakhil, a sociology professor in Riyadh, wrote last year after the municipal elections were first announced:

Clearly, the year 2003 saw new political dynamics taking shape in Saudi society. Although demands for reform were voiced in the early 1990s, the government did not respond positively until after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and the May and November 2003 terrorist attacks in the Kingdom. The rise of terrorism seems the most influential factor in forcing the new reaction. It is too early to tell if these new dynamics signify the beginning of a new political pattern, or merely a momentary impulse forced by the ramifications of these events. What is expected now is for the government to fill the new reform context with real substance.

Five factors are important with regard to substance and implementation. First, although the government has committed itself to reform, it has not yet laid out a vision for reform, the goals it will achieve, or how it will be implemented. Second, despite the fact that the petitions presented to the government concern political reform, most of the literature published in the Saudi press on reform was carefully steered away from the political. Third, those who stand for reform are mostly intellectuals and academics, the weakest political forces in society. The business community, although verbally supportive of reform, is not willing to get involved in the reform movement, largely because it is dependent on the government. Fourth, although the reform movement recognizes the legitimacy of the system, it has not managed to win the trust of the government. This is one reason for the government's hesitant position on reform. Fifth and most significant, the Saudi leadership is apparently split over the question of reform.

That's a little different from the analysis I wrote below—especially his fifth caveat—but it seems just as plausible. On the more optimistic side, meanwhile, praktike lays out reasons to think democratic reform will be more likely in a monarchy than in a "liberalized autocracy" like Egypt. Much of this seems to come down to what the Saudi royal family wants, and alas, the House of Saud is frustratingly opaque.

Er… I'm not sure Matt Yglesias' skepticism over the recent elections in Saudi Arabia is quite on target (though it's close):

To make a long story short, Abdullah did everything possible to ensure that Islamists would win the election. He also managed to ensure that no matter what the result, he wouldn't lose any real power. Upshot -- articles in the western press calling him "reform-minded" and that build the case for him not to engage in further democratization since, as we just saw, Abdullah's earnest efforts at reform are counterproductive since they just bring Islamists to power.

It's everything an absolute monarch could dream of in an election. He keeps absolute power, gets credit for being a reformer, and gets off the hook in terms of pressure to reform. Meanwhile the American media will continue to assist the House of Saud in its campaign to get al-Jazeera of the air so that it can be 100 percent insulated from criticism in the Arab media, too. Abdullah is a very clever man.

Nit-picking for a second, no one would consider Prince Abdallah an "absolute monarch"—at the very least he's on the same level as his half-brother Prince Nayef, who controls most of the security services and has somewhat closer ties with radical Islamists. I'm not in any position to say whether there's really a rivalry between the "Islamist" Nayef and the "reformist" Abdallah—Michael Doran tried to peddle this theory in Foreign Affairs two years ago and Prince Nayef, I think, had to get on Saudi TV and scoff at it—but this seems like the wrong way of looking at things.

More likely, all or most of the key royals in the House of Saud are deeply afraid of the rising militant Salafist movement in the kingdom, and they all have their own ideas about how to turn the tide. Prince Nayef, it seems, would prefer to lean on his secret police to crack down on excessive militarism, as he did in late 2003—in fact, I would wager that the renewed counterterrorism efforts within the kingdom are largely his doing (in conjunction with pressure from other, more pro-Western royals)—whereas Abdallah prefers the political route.

That's where things get interesting. Even "reformers" like Abdallah and Prince Sultan Abdulaziz appear flatly uninterested in calls from both liberals and moderate Islamists for restraints on the ruling family, more transparency, allowing real political parties, etc. On the other hand, some of the more conservative Salafists don't seem to much care about institutional reform—they just seem to like democracy because it helps them expand their influence over the country's social climate. By winning municipal elections, they can leverage their newfound power to knock down all those crazy "liberal" ideas about expanding women's rights or censoring radical textbooks.

Now I don't think Abdallah has any problem with that, especially—and here's the key—if steering the conservatives into government helps channel off some of their frustration and helps fragment the Islamist opposition. As I said the other day, not only does this "incremental reform" charade get the U.S. off your back, but it also keeps your domestic opposition busy playing politics, too occupied to start blowing shit up. As a side note, it also drives a wedge between those political Islamists who want to "play the game," and hard-liners like Ayman al-Zawihiri who has declared that anyone who compromises even a tiny bit with the infidels through the political system is himself an infidel.

So to make my long story short, Prince Abdallah and co. are indeed very clever folks. But the Saudi royals are undertaking these reforms primarily to deal with domestic problems and not merely to put on a kabuki show for the Bush administration. Quite frankly, I doubt President Bush's hollow calls for reform mean much of anything to them, though that's a possibility.

Sometimes you just have to hand things off to the pros. Via Brad DeLong, here's Peter Orszag's House testimony (PDF) utterly demolishing the Bush privatization plan on all fronts. The man is truly a weapon of mass destruction. There's one subtle point, however, that's worth highlighting.

At a basic level, the Bush plan works by providing workers with a loan at a 3 percent real interest rate, which then gets paid back on retirement. The White House has quibbled with this characterization, but for accounting purposes, that's how it works. Now notice—at every single point in time, from now until eternity, the federal government will have a number of outstanding loans to workers who haven't retired. So the program will always be running deficits. As Orszag says, "the Administration’s account proposal would raise public debt by more than 30 percent of GDP over the very long term."

By contrast, under the current system, the Trust Fund will run out in 2042 or 2052 or whenever, and after that, barring any other changes, we will have to cut benefits slightly in order to make the system's expenditures match revenue. Benefits will still be very generous, and much higher in real terms than they are today (people my age can expect a median of $19,000 in annual benefits), and more importantly, Social Security will never run deficits again. So by the time I'm 60, we would no longer have to worry about Social Security's solvency.

Under the Bush plan, by contrast, there will always be outstanding loans, and the government will need to continue borrowing money long after I've reached 60. My grand-kids and great-grand-kids will get saddled with eternal debt. The only way the system can stop running deficits is by eliminating guaranteed benefits altogether. The program no longer splashes red ink across the budget when (and only when) full privatization is achieved.

Orszag also notes four important scenarios in which the "loan" to workers will not ever be repaid back to the federal government, thereby further weakening the system. First, if a worker dies before retirement. Normally a worker contributes payroll taxes to the system, and if he or she dies before retiring, those revenues are used to pay other retirees. But under the Bush plan, those revenues would be diverted from the system by being passed on in the form of a bequest, to a family member, say. Now that's an appealing feature of the plan except for two things: 1) the current system already provides for survivors of workers who die before retirement, and 2) If this was really something we wanted to do, it would be much, much cheaper for the government simply to buy life insurance for everyone. But doing it the Bush way means there's less money to pay current retirees—and since one-seventh of workers die before retirement, this creates a huge hole.

As well, the Bush plan will create bigger-than-expected deficits if: a) someone works, say, ten years, receives the loan for his private account, but then never has t to pay it back in the form of a reduced benefit because he didn't work long enough to receive a SS benefit in the first place; b) lots of seniors are left in poverty by the Bush plan and Congress needs to manually increase the guaranteed benefit to alleviate this; or c) real interest rates on T-bills go above 3 percent. Note how c) works—the government assumes it can borrow money at 3 percent interest, so that it can then loan the money to workers at a fixed 3 percent interest. But if interest rates go above 3 percent—a likely scenario with the massive deficits Republicans have created—then the government loses money on the whole venture. (Obviously if real interest rates on gov't bonds go below 3 percent, the opposite happens. So which is more likely?)

Looks like those ever-intrepid keyboard warriors on the right nailed another scalp to the wall. Hooray for Bloggy McBlog! Except that now I suppose CNN will just, um, hire another news executive and life will go on as usual.

Ho hum. Time to go see what's in the fridge...

In the midst of a confused and deeply misleading piece on Social Security, Peter Ferrera—the godfather of CATO's "Leninist" strategy to phase-out the program—says 'nyet' on price-indexing:

Adding overwhelmingly unpopular ideas like price indexing to the reform is only going to undermine the popularity of personal accounts, give the Democrats a real basis of opposition, and probably kill the whole reform effort. Those who support price indexing simply don't understand the personal accounts.

Well, good for Ferrera. But this reminded me of something I've meant to bring up: not only is price-indexing a bad idea that would leave millions of seniors toiling in poverty, but it's absolutely nonsensical in theory. First, the more familiar "bad idea" argument. As we know, under the current system Social Security benefits for new retirees more or less keep pace with wage growth over time. As general standards of living rise, the seniors of each succeeding generation get richer. "Price-indexing," on the other hand, would more or less freeze initial benefits at current 2005 levels, growing only with inflation. The problem is that, as wages rise faster than prices, workers of the future will get richer and richer in real terms, only to then suffer an increasingly large income drop-off at retirement when they receive benefits suitable for living standards in 2005. (In practice, it's even worse than that: since medical costs inevitably rise faster than prices, and seniors spend a lot on medical care, retirees will actually get poorer in real terms over time.) Or, to put it another way, their Social Security checks would replace a smaller and smaller percentage of their pre-retirement income over time. So they'll be increasingly less and less able to pay for the things that all the other Americans have and own to enjoy a decent life. (Refer to Figure 1.1 above for more details.)

So that's the unfair part. Here's the nonsensical part. The Social Security Trustees' Report assumes that we'll have long-term wage growth of 4.1 percent per year and inflation of 3 percent, for an average 1.1 percent real wage differential for the next 75 years. But if wage growth is even higher than that (or inflation lower), then payroll tax receipts will go up, Social Security will become more solvent, and its long-term finances improve. Less crisis for everyone! But here's the catch: if we had price-indexing in place, then the higher wage growth we had, the steeper the drop-off from pre-retirement wages to retirement benefits will be. In other words, the benefit reductions will automatically get more and more severe whenever Social Security's solvency improves! That sort of thing, my friends, would make Samuel Beckett blush with envy.

Commuting around town earlier this evening, I finally got around to cracking open Gilles Kepel's The War For Muslim Minds and happened upon an interesting (and new-to-me) tidbit on the genesis of suicide bombings in the early 1980s. Here 'tis—and it's the second paragraph, not the first, that made me go "huh!":

[During the Iran-Iraq war] Iran relied on unconventional arms, including the mass suicide of young sans-culotte Shia, the bassidji, who marched off to blow themselves up in Iraqi minefields, their heads swathed in martyrs' bands proclaiming "Allahu akbar." The Islamic Republic opened a second front in the region by taking Western hostages in Lebanon through the manipulation of local Shiite radical organizations. These actions went hand and hand with suicide bombings [including Beirut and Tyre in 1983].

Such "martyrdom operations" had been exceptional, if not entirely unknown, in the political culture of even the most extremist Sunni movements, where the deliberate cultivation of death was commendable only as a last resort. Sunnis considered suicide an abomination against the Creator, who alone gives life and alone may decide when to take it from his creaturs. But revolutionary Shiites—who considered the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, "the prince of martyrs," as exemplary—had fewer scruples in this regard. The tactics inaugurated by revolutionary Iran were exported by to the Arab world via extremist Lebanese Shiite organizations, inspired by the imam Khomeini. These human "weapons" conveniently made up the deficit in conventional arms in the Arab camp.

As a side note, last night I watched a 1988 Almodovar film—Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios—in which a band of "Shiite terrorists" play a rather prominent role. But it seemed awfully odd that everyone—from the local news channels to the TV repairman—knew enough to refer to them specifically as "Shiites", especially since most Americans circa 2002 just called bin Laden and co. "Arabs" or "Islamists" rather than "Qutbists" or "Salafists" or even "Sunnis." Obviously now we're all aware of the sectarian differences because of Iraq, but the movie took place back in 1988! I don't know, maybe Europeans have just always known more about this.

Oh, Kepel's book also nicely describes just how politically shrewd bin Laden's mentor/right-hand-man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, really is, which makes me wonder whether Joseph Braude's right when he says that the guy's latest al-Qaeda video was a political disaster. But I'll have to look at it more closely—the Congressional Research Service just put out an analysis (PDF) of al-Q's "statements and evolving ideology", which should be fun bathroom material.

Since I'm feeling the urge to build lots of stuff tonight, let's also build more… medical schools. Seriously. We only have 125 in the whole country, which seems outrageously restrictive, and the country could easily lower health care costs by simply flooding the market with more doctors. And don't worry about quality—if we can just stop those pre-meds from tearing the pages out of review books in the library to get ahead of their classmates, I'm sure there will be enough talent to go around.

Building beyond the current med-school quota would also, in theory, make medical school a lot cheaper, letting bright-eyed young doctors stay idealistic, unburdened by intolerable debt loads. No joke: I was listening to a few soon-to-be-doctors the other night strongly consider giving up their dreams of working in understaffed rural communities, or working as family pediatricians, in favor of becoming an dermatologist, because that was the only way of paying off their ungodly student loans. Don't get me wrong, bad acne's a scourge of the earth, but that seems like an f'ed up incentive structure. No?

Sam Heldman has a careful break-down of the new Senate bill that kicks a bunch of class-action lawsuits up to the federal courts. If I understand the consensus take here, the main problem isn't that the federal courts are less sympathetic to these sorts of cases, but rather that the federal courts will be swamped by the vast swarm of new cases and will end up dismissing a bunch on technicalities.

But then—and not to sound naïve here—why not just build more federal courts? Isn't that something we should be thinking about anyway? If a relatively small subset of new lawsuits is really going to "severely swamp" the federal courts, as people fear, then they were probably close to overburdened in the first place, no? And then we've got population and immigration growth to consider—we all know how those shifty immigrants cause nothing but legal trouble!—so let's start expanding stuff. Speaking of which, and looking far into the future, I would assume there comes a time when the population of the United States will reach a point at which there are too many constitutional cases for the Supreme Court to possibly consider in a reasonable amount of time. What then? Do we build Supreme Court II to share the load? Or can we still get away with one court to rule them all.

UPDATE: Oh. James Joyner discovers an even more fatal flaw in the new class-action bill: it "tak[es] taking away the ability to sue at all" in some cases. Wonderful!

SUPER UPDATE: Reading Sam Heldman's post more carefully, it sounds like you'd have to build a lot more courts to fix the problem, since "class actions take about five times as much judicial work as regular civil cases." He also reads the badly-written bill carefully and argues that most cases will get kicked up to the federal courts, rather than only a small subset. Read his post, it's important.

Bob McGrew wants to know why no one wants to turn Social Security into a means-tested program—by reducing benefits for the well-to-do and shoring up benefits for the poor. Huh, well, the semi-disingenuous answer from this liberal is that, however much financial sense means-testing might make, it would kill off a lot of political support for the program. This is because, I suspect, that in the vague haze that is the American Collective Outlook, people view Social Security as an earned right rather than as a dirty government redistribution program.

This is largely, I think because the system rewards higher income (or "Rewards work!" if you prefer) and has a regressive tax base—much like all of those widely popular social programs in Europe. Everyone's part of the system, so everyone loves it. An important side-story comes when we remember that attitudes towards welfare in American often have an ugly racial component—the president may be ever-so-thrilled with early-dying black people now, but we all know how this game is played, and if Social Security was a means-tested system-for-the-poor, we'd be hearing about ghettos rife with "Social Security queens" blowing their checks on pedicures and a three-car garage. I'll pass, thanks.

There are all sorts of more subtle arguments against means-testing, but I won't pretend they're anything but secondary. For one, if the system gave you less in benefits the more savings you had upon retirement, you'd probably be inclined to spend a chunk of that savings right before you hit 67. (I understand Britain has this problem.) Employers, too, might start seeing the company pension plan as a zero-sum game—i.e. "Why should we chip in all these extra dollars for your retirement when all we're doing is reducing your Social Security check"—and hence reduce their own contributions. You'd also probably see fewer people buying annuities before they retire (since doing so would raise their income and hence lower their Social Security benefit), and instead just keeping the money in a bank and possibly blowing it all before they die. I imagine that when it all shakes out, people are saving less and probably end up poorer, but that's a rough guess.

Surreal North Korea fact of the day:

Japanese anger with North Korea rose sharply last month after Pyongyang delivered to visiting Japanese diplomats two boxes of half-cremated remains, said to be of a Japanese woman kidnapped from Japan by North Korean agents in the 1970's. DNA analysis showed that the remains were not of the missing Japanese woman, but of two unidentified people. It is unclear if North Korea, which tightly controls information from the outside world, was aware of DNA technology.

I hate to rain on the parade, but this whole debate about the constitutional issues surrounding the Trust Fund seems to be entirely moot.

As we know, over the past twenty years Social Security has taken in more than taxes than its paid out in benefits, a surplus that has been forked over to the federal government in exchange for a bunch of government bonds. Around 2018, the program will start owing more in benefits than it takes in payroll taxes, so it will need to start redeeming some of those bonds. This, of course, is not a "mere IOU", and the government is legally obligated under the 14th amendment to repay the Trust Fund money it has borrowed. In other words, all claims that Social Security has on government debt must be repaid. No "ifs" or "buts."

It is, however, perfectly legal for Congress simply to adjust or eliminate those claims. If tomorrow the government declared that total benefits must be equivalent to total tax receipts from now until eternity—thereby slashing future promised benefits by a staggering amount—Social Security would never need to tap into the Trust Fund to meet its obligations. Note that this amounts to the same thing as defaulting on the Trust Fund, from a practical standpoint, but it's a perfectly legal way of doing it.

Think of it this way—if I deposit $2000 in a bank, and then ask for it back, the bank is legally obligated to repay me. But if, somehow, I personally decide to cancel that debt, the bank obviously never has to pay me back, even though this amounts to the same thing as a default.

So sadly enough, Donald Luskin of all people is perfectly correct when he says:

Because the Treasury bonds in the trust fund are an asset of the Social Security program but a liability of the federal government overall, their value cancels out on the balance sheet of public finance. That's not to say they don't symbolize claims on future benefits -- but those claims can be invalidated anytime congress wishes to pass a law to that effect.

In fact Democratic congresses passed laws invalidating some of those claims in the 1970s (when they switched from price indexing of the primary insurance amount to wage indexing, back when prices were growing faster than wages) and the 1980s (when they raised the retirement age). So shall we round up Tip O'Neill and try him for high crimes and misdemeanors?

Of course, that's not the only issue here. The real issue, as explained before, is that Ronald Reagan's Trust Fund has been paid for primarily by payroll taxes on hardworking coal-miners, waitresses, and bus drivers. That surplus, in turn, has been spent by the federal government, a state of affairs that has enabled the country to enjoy lower income taxes over the past twenty years than would otherwise have been the case. So annulling the Trust Fund debt would effectively use payroll taxes on low- and middle-earners to pay for a hefty income tax cut that largely benefits high-earners. Dean Baker has described in gruesome detail the sheer size of this wealth transfer from poor to rich. Such a swindle would be, of course, deeply immoral.

Then there's the political angle. When President Bush says that the Trust Fund contains "mere IOUs", he really means that Congress can always slash benefits by enough so that the Trust Fund never needs to be repaid. So he's not really insisting that the federal government will actually default on its debt. But he is proposing the sort of titanic benefit cut that could ensure a permanent GOP minority for generations to come. I don't know how big, though, and oddly I can't find hard numbers on this anywhere. So it would be helpful if someone figured out exactly how big a benefit reduction would be necessary to eliminate all future claims on the Trust Fund, so that we can gauge just how firmly the president has gripped the Third Rail.

Hmmm, Kevin Drum tries to settle the Trust Fund issue once and for all. For sheer poetic joy, I much prefer my "Little Nell Goes To College" fable to explain the various fairness issues at work here, but I suppose Kevin's explanation is more concise. Blah blah blah. (I kid, I kid...)

But with that argument neatly dispatched, it's high time to move on to yet another important-yet-arcane Social Security issue: disability insurance. As we all know, Social Security provides disability insurance (SSDI) to those who cannot work due to injury, sickness, etc. Unfortunately, SSDI isn't nearly as generous as it could be. For starters, benefits are only available to those workers whose condition will either result in death or last at least twelve months. So if a heart condition knocked a worker out for a mere eight months, it's no disability for you, even though one can obviously lose a lot of salary in eight months—enough to earn you a date with the bankruptcy courts. Heck, most people with cancer aren't able to get disability insurance.

Furthermore, a worker can qualify for insurance only if he or she is completely unable to work. A carpenter, for instance, who develops arthritis but can still work as a (low-paying) cashier would not qualify. Some of these carpenter-types used to "accidentally" receive SSDI checks, but the Social Security Administration recently implemented a new computer system to eliminate these sorts of mistakes. But the larger point is that disability insurance ought to be, if anything, expanded. The benefits are considerable: Elizabeth Warren once estimated somewhere that better disability insurance could avert something like 150,000 bankruptcies per year. That aside, it seems intrinsically worthwhile to do even minor things that insulate workers against rapid swings in income due to bad luck.

Anyway, since we President Bush hasn't put forward an actual privatization plan, we don't know how disability will actually fare in this brave new ownership world we're fast approaching. Judging from the president's recent visit to Tampa, his phase-out plan will slash disability insurance (if I'm reading his unintelligible mumbling correctly). Meanwhile, an old GAO report looked at various privatization plans and concluded that disabled beneficiaries would receive much lower benefits than they would under current law. Presumably, under Bush's labyrinthine "clawback" proposal, everyone would have to pay premiums for their own private disability insurance, since there won't be any general revenues left to help the crippled, ill, and infirm. And since we all know how well the private insurance market works, well... too bad for us. Just try not to develop carpal tunnel or cancer or whatnot. And stay away from heavy machinery! That should do the trick.

Josh Landis gets the inside dirt on developments in Syria from Ibrahim al-Hamidi, Al-Hayat's bureau chief in Damascus. Really interesting stuff. By the by, I've never heard anyone seriously dispute the general view peddled by Hamidi—that although Syrian President Bashar Assad would love to cooperate with the U.S. and crack down on the aid to the Iraqi insurgency coming out of his country, he's having a tough time actually pulling it off because of the vagaries of Syrian bureaucracy.

Of course, I've also heard that Bashar is sort of incompetent—George W. Bush without a Karl Rove to guide him—though this seems dubious. Or that he's completely wild-eyed and not nearly as afraid of the U.S. as he should be. So it's heartening, I guess, to hear Hamidi thinks that Bashar is really quite rational, albeit constrained by various structural forces.

UPDATE: A picture worth... here's a mugshot of the man himself. Judge from the face: raving lunatic, serial bumbler, or calculating mastermind? Where's Paul Ekman when you truly need him?

Hm, looking through the USA Today poll on Social Security, a couple notable points jumped out at me:

65 percent of those making $75,000 or more thought it was a good idea to limit Social Security benefits for the wealthy

60 percent of those making over $75,000 support lifting the wage cap so that all income is subject to payroll tax, rather than just the first $90,000. (On the other hand, I'd like to see this subdivided between those making between $75k-$90k a year, and those for whom this law would actually make a difference, although obviously those making $75k now can realistically expect to get over $90k at some point.)

Only 49 percent of those making over $75k support private accounts.

Now the USA Today write-up doesn't phrase those numbers in quite the same way I do—they suggest that low- and middle-income people are much more likely to support higher taxes—but really, when it comes down to it a very high proportion of affluent Americans want to fix Social Security the responsible way. A very high proportion.

Anyway, I've debated back and forth as to whether the Democrats should ever publicly propose to raise the wage cap. On the plus side, it's a clear and popular way to shore up the program that Bush couldn't co-opt. With this idea of add-on private accounts, I'm afraid the GOP could tentatively agree to the issue, and then sneak in some horrendous provisions to phase-out Social Security when this "bipartisan idea" snakes its way through Congress. The other "pro" of suggesting that we lift the wage cap is that Democrats could reintroduce the idea that raising taxes isn't the end of the fucking world. In fact, since the president has committed us both to big government and bogus entitlement "reform" costing a $1.2 trillion, raising taxes is the only way out of this deficit hole. Kneejerk opposition to the idea needs to be combatted at some point very soon. So let's start with a simple tax hike, one that enjoys wide popularity, and the most painless way to keep Social Security solvent for all eternity.

(Bear in mind, if Democrats were in any position to propose a policy that had an actual chance of passing, I'd prefer the Diamond/Orszag combination of taxes and benefit cuts. Actually, no, I'd prefer my pet reform suggestions. But all of this is fantasy anyway, so the Dems may as well propose a clear and easy-to-understand solution that a) would demonstrably bring Social Security into long-run balance, b) avoids the political backlash from proposing benefit cuts, and c) tries to cut into the "no new taxes" taboo.)

**Extra-wonky footnote: There are two ways to lift the wage cap for payroll taxes. The first would subject all income to payroll taxes, but also raise benefits for high-income earners (since all of their lifetime average salary would be used to calculate payouts, rather than merely the first $90k). That approach is somewhat "fairer," but it only fixes about 88 percent of the projected 75-year Social Security deficit. The alternative is to lift the cap but still calculate benefits using only the first $90k of salary. That method fixes Social Security completely, but does broach some fairness issues. [UPDATE: All numbers taken from this 2002 SSA Report, page 26.]

So I'm seeing more and more posts around the crazy ol' blogosphere comparing and contrasting The New Iraq under Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the United Iraqi Alliance with Iran under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The most forceful point, made first by Ezra Klein, is that Iran didn't start out as a theocracy either; but gradually grew that way as the new government started to crackdown the MEK and dealt with domestic threats. There's a lot to this picture here, but let me say that Ezra's account isn't exactly complete, and fleshing it out a bit may prove useful.

First, some context. When we say Iran is ruled by clerics, let's not kid ourselves, this doesn't mean that a few middling clerics are placed in powerful positions and have access to key security forces. There's that, sure, but the government really is explicitly set up as a clerical-run affair from start to finish. Originally the Supreme Leader was to be a high-ranking cleric, but Khomeini downgraded this requirement when he could find no acceptable successor save for the poorly-qualified Ali Khamene'i, who is currently Supreme Leader. But it's clerics everywhere else.

A brief overview of Iran's government: First, we have the 290-seat parliament (the Majlis), elected by popular vote. Next, there's the twelve-person Council of Guardians, which reviews all parliamentary laws to make sure they conform to the Islamic Constitution, is comprised of six clerics—including the head of the council, currently Ahmad Jannati, a fairly prominent ayatollah and a presidential candidate, and I think four or five other ayatollahs—all picked by the Supreme Leader, as well as six Islamic lawyers vetted by the head of the judiciary (who in turn is picked by the Supreme Leader). The Guardian Council also gets to vet all presidential candidates. Meanwhile, the Expediency Discernment Council, which was set up in 1988 to resolve disputes between the Council and Parliament, has a few ayatollahs and several hojjatoleslams (ie. the rank below ayatollah). Then there's the Assembly of Experts, which supervises the Supreme Leader and picks a new one. The eighty-six clerics on the assembly are all elected by popular vote, but they must be vetted by the Guardian Council. Some relatively prominent ayatollahs here. Meanwhile, each province must have a clerical representative. So while Khamene'i himself may be a lightweight on credentials, there are other heavy-hitters lurking around.

Oh, one exception to all this: Parliament used to be dominated by mullahs, though thanks to the decline in clerical prestige (more on this in a bit), they now make up a very tiny minority.

Now the key question: How did Iran get to this point? One of the key things to note, I think, is that the original 1979 Iranian Constitution was extremely poorly designed. Ken Pollack doesn't really mention this much in The Persian Puzzle, but it deserves closer attention. Under the original constitution, all officials had to answer to the Supreme Leader (i.e. Khomeini), and there was no way to settle disputes between Parliament and the Council of Guardians. So responsibility all sort of fell on Khomeini by default. You can see the potential pitfalls for Iraq here, and it's why I tried to point out over at MoJo earlier today that the devil really is in the details—how clerical involvement actually gets implemented. Iran wasn't simply a non-theocracy that happened to get usurped by a talented and ruthless cleric; there was that, but post-1979 Iran was also a fucked-up constitutional order just waiting to be usurped. Blaming the MEK revolt or the Iran-Iraq war for Khomeini's radical rule sort of misses the deeper structural cause.

Now it's worth noting that Khomeini never really wanted democracy, though he was forced to compromise with many of the more moderate clerics at the time, many of whom frowned on his wild theories. (As Pollack does point out, Khomeni's "guardianship of the jurisprudence" owes very little to the Qu'ran, quite a lot to Plato, and is especially antithetical to the main tenets of Shi'ism.) So he didn't have much incentive to oversee a rigorously democratic constitution. Daniel Brumberg's recent book on Khomeini, Reinventing Khomeini, really laid this all out nicely.

One also shouldn't underestimate, as I pointed out at MoJo, the massive role anti-Americanism played in all this. Even Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who we all now know as the nice guy who was originally next-in-line for Supreme Leader but was excoriated and denounced by Khomeini in 1989 for his too-moderate stances, even that Montazeri way back in 1979 was denouncing the U.S. at every turn, and cheerfully helped write a constitution explicitly designed to oppose Western principles. The constitution's system of checks and balances wasn't just heavily tilted in favor of clerical interference; it was completely and utterly messed up because Montazeri, Khomeini, and other drafters went out of their way to make it look wholly dissimilar from Western constitutions. It's hard to imagine Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who reportedly devours books on Western democracy, to oversee such a flawed structure for Iraq. You'd either have to hate "Western-style democracy" blindly and fiercely (as did Khomeini, Montazeri, and friends) or be a complete moron to design a constitution like Iran's.

So I don't think Iraq under Sistani will go the way of 1979 Iran. Certainly, in the event of an Iraqi civil war, the more radical elements of SCIRI would gain an upper hand—since they control the militias and have connections with the lunatics in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard—but absent that, I have a fair bit of faith in Sistani. That's not to say I'm without skepticism. As I said, how Sistani proposes that Shi'ite clerics oversee the courts in Iraq will be a huge deal. And Iraq has never had to deal with the tensions between the government ministries and an actual legislature. (The interim government had no significant legislature, just an executive branch.) So hopefully the Shi'ites adopt a sensible model for the interplay between the two centers of power rather than the Iranian non-solution. But like Kenan Makiya, I'm not entirely convinced that the Shi'ites know why democratic rights are important in and of themselves.

But I do think Sistani and the other Iraqi clerics at Najaf have genuinely learned a lesson from the Iranian experience. With Iran, it's important to remember that clerical rule hasn't just run the country into the ground; it's also completely devalued the once-hollowed clerical school in Qom. Several Iranians have told me that most clerics are afraid to show themselves in public. Too many Iranians no longer respect the ayatollahs—even the quietists who stay out of the mud Iranian politics. Obviously the grand ayatollahs in Qom still pull in millions per year in donations, but their prestige has sunk considerably along with the antics of Khamene'i, Rafsanjani, the crazy young "neoconservative" (though I think we should dub them paleoconservative) clerics of the Islamic Developers Party, and other politician-mullahs. My unfounded and baseless suspicion is that Sistani fears this more than he values democracy as a form of good government.

Anyway, I hope this rather amateur overview helps clarify things. I've hardly said the last word on the issue, and obviously the picture of what the new Iraq will actually look like is still slowly emerging and extremely uncertain at this point. But the Iran-Iraq comparison deserves a little fleshing out. I wish Juan Cole would spend more time on this stuff and less time cat-fighting with Jonah Goldberg (whose idea of betting on civil war was entirely revolting), but what can you do.

Praktike shoots slings and arrows at my doubts about the spellbinding power of globalization. I'll try for a better answer later on, though I should say I'm hardly of one mind on this. At times I've thought very seriously that the best solution to Iran would be to integrate them tightly into the global economy, regardless of whether they go nuclear or not. But that brings up a very wide difference between economic interdependence and economic integration. The latter would probably achieve all the rosy Tom Friedman-esque peaceful effects of globalization; but the former is what we've had for some time and will continue to get, and which, I think, does not necessarily prevent chaos or resentment. For every anecdote about global communication bringing the world together, there's another about rather passionate nationalism reacting strongly against it. It's a big debate; I just don't know, so I'll dutifully read the books suggested. And I should get on reading that RAND book. So much for my little promissory note of late!

Anyway, praktike's critique is interesting and well-learned, as usual. But the truly important question—and one which was the subject of a recent private dispute among unnamed bloggers—is this: Is his name pronounced "praktike" rhyming with "bike" or "praktike" rhyming with "beak." It's very mysterious.

Occasionally I wake up and think, "Hey, what do Steve Clemons and I have in common?" Then I remember that he's well-connected and apparently knows just about everyone in Washington, whereas I merely called up someone from Brookings once to get a few questions answered. So not a whole lot. Except now we learn that Steve Clemons happened to attend high school in Japan. As did I! My old school's home page appears to be malfunctioning, but I vaguely recall Clemons once talking about his military upbringing, in which case he possibly went to either Yokota or Yokosuka, both of which were mercilessly crushed by our swim team year after year. (Or he might not have lived in Tokyo at all—maybe Okinawa—which would make this whole exercise sadly useless.)

Anyway, maybe it's a bit unfair to expect teenagers growing up on military bases to be finely-tuned athletic machines. But during college, I couldn't help but notice that the Dartmouth crew team, on which I toiled rather vainly and flimsily for a year, would pretty handily beat the Navy boats time and time again. The navy! Boats! Beaten! You'd think those folks would have muscular exertion down to a science, but no. When I asked my brother (now a senior at Annapolis) about all this, he suggested that they all had actual responsibilities and whatnot—learning cool new chokeholds, for instance—and not enough time to practice. So there you go: blogs doing firsthand reporting on the vexing issues of our day. I, for one, plan to bring the mainstream media to its knees any day now.

And oh yes, who among us does not enjoy sumo? This guy was the big boss back when I was a young lad, but he's aged since then and eventually lost top billing to, I think, his younger brother. And while Takanohana's still obviously a large man, he's tiny in comparison to rather dour rival, Akebono. 6'8" and a quarter-ton! Yowza!

Two very, very quick observations on this Pew Poll about Muslim attitudes towards democracy. The first is the rather odd fact that so few Jordanians really want anything to do with democracy, when it comes down to it. Oh sure, 68 percent think democracy could work at home. But only 32 percent think its important to live in a country where "people can openly criticize the government," 28 percent value "honest, two-party elections," and a mere 35 percent value a free press. This seems to be an inverse of Russia, where citizens generally have an allergic reaction to the word "democracy," but when you start digging, you see that they place a good deal of importance on free elections, a relatively open press (albeit with Ralph Reed-style moral regulation), etc. But what's up with Jordan, anyway?

Second peculiarity, from the poll summary: "There is no evidence, however, that support for democracy will necessarily do much to diminish the extensive anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world." Indeed, in Pakistan, anti-Americanism runs highest among those who strongly favor democracy.

Time to nod and launch off on a bit of a pet theory. The big foreign policy idea right now, lauded especially by Thomas Barnett, is that "connectivity" will solve our security problems throughout the world. Turn a country into a democracy, bind it with trade agreements and multilateral institution memberships, wrap it tightly in a web of horizontal government networks, and voila! Dude's no longer a threat.

Ah, but at this point it's good to note that interdependency has not always proved so successful. The famous line shortly before World War I was that Europe was so economically interrelated that it would never go to war. Too much to lose! Ha, ha. Let's also stress another point here: The only truly global, supra-national part of globalization today are the money markets. And yet financial markets aren't that much more integrated today than they were in the 1900s! Sad to say, but Tom Friedman's grand vision of globalization may mostly be old fodder. (I'm hardly the first to say this, but hey, it's my blog, so what.)

All this means that the nation-state is still alive and well. And here I think it's appropriate, maybe, to declare that what matters might not be connectivity between states. What matters might be inequality between states—inequality of wealth and inequality of power. Let's face it, the U.S. and Western Europe use trade agreements and institutions for its own, essentially realpolitik, ends. Robert Zoellick was and is particularly egregious about all this. No one's under any illusions here. We may not always realize it, but millions if not billions around the world get exercised over our ridiculous agricultural subsidies. Inequality fosters resentment. Resentment fosters conflict. Or… terrorism. Whatever.

So yes, I think a Muslim democracy subservient to the Great Powers in certain ways, shapes, and forms—be it economically, or diplomatically, or even militarily—is going to continue churning out terrorists. Maybe at a faster rate than ever before. The observation that Islamic terrorists are mostly relatively wealthy and well-educated fits in here, perhaps. And perhaps this will continue until we find some international arrangement—and maybe this means restraining U.S. power abroad, I don't know—that eliminates the sort of disparity in state capabilities that produce resentment.

We take the benignity of democracies for granted only because it's worked out that way so far; but perhaps it's worked out that way only because of the Cold War—an anachronistic reason at best. After all, South Korea has certainly stoked the fires of resentment over recent years, to the point where it's aggressively pursuing its own economic interests (via engagement with North Korea) to the detriment of the Western World's broader security interests.

Anyway, I haven't really fleshed this out. The full argument would note that the world isn't really all that globalized, that as Franklin Foer says, crude nationalism is thriving, that economies remain mostly local, that states will continue to look after their own interests. Perhaps I've taken this neo-realist stuff way too far. But I think there's still reason to be very skeptical of the "awesome power" of liberalization—at least within the world order as currently structured. (That last clause is an important caveat.)

After reading this article, there's only one thing left to conclude: The human brain is a fundamentally flawed piece of machinery. I mean, come on.

Oh good, the Patriots won the Super Bowl! Actually, not so good. Around this time last year, as I recall, I had just moved to Boston, and while I tried to shut off the Super Bowl festivities on TV and read my suitably elitist book in peace (I think I was pawing through either Globalization and Discontents or Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), it turned out that the Patriots ended up winning or something and there were riots and screams and random acts of violence all about the streets. Moreover one BU girl, I think, died. So it was all very aggravating. Meanwhile, I have a very distinct memory of the landlord on the first floor talking into his phone, shouting in a very nasal voice, "Mom, the Patriots won the Super Bowl… again! The Patriots won the Super Bowl… [long pause] again!" Ad nauseum. I realize that's no reason to hate a team, but still.

Meanwhile, my sport of choice, hockey, seems to be mired in a complex labor dispute of some sort. As a member of organized labor (no, seriously: I'm now paying dues to the United Auto Workers) I suppose I should feel some solidarity with the players, but it's all awfully depressing. I've never really followed any other sport, and I follow the NHL pretty closely, so the strike pretty much shut down my entire sports intake. (For those who care, I'm a big fan of the Vancouver Canucks. Why? Well, I grew up in Japan, and didn't really have any geographic loyalties to speak of, but on the family NHL '94 computer game Vancouver's star player, Pavel Bure, was really fast and had a cool fake-out move that I'd use repeatedly to win games 15-2, so that was the team. My little brother started following the Philadelphia Flyers for similar reasons.)

Long story short: I'm suffering sports withdrawal, have no place to channel all this testosterone, so I may as well cheer for the Super Bowl winner, even if I happen to hate them for wholly trivial reasons.

Is Mickey Kaus onto something? He thinks Bush's strategy on Social Security amounts to one giant head fake. (I'm reprinting the whole post because Slate's permalinks freak me out):

If you were a Republican congressperson terrified of getting clobbered over Bush's "personal accounts" proposal for Social Security, what would be your biggest wish? Not that Bush fight for the idea, or that he not fight for the idea. Your wish would be that whatever Bush does, the fight be fought quickly, within a few months--leaving plenty of time to recover before the 2006 mid-term election.

That is why the reports that Bush is pushing for an ambitiously expedited consideration of his proposal aren't necessarily a sign of strength, or of a cunning high-pressure Rovian strategy for victory. They may be a strategy to lose quickly, with minimal harm done to the Republican majority. ... And maybe this get-it-over-with realism, not grandiose ambition, explains Bush's decision to pursue Social Security revision before tax revision.

On one level, the idea that Bush wants to "lose quickly, lose with honor" seems dubious. Right now is probably the last, best time for Republicans to phase out Social Security for a long while. New Trustees' reports are going to emerge fairly soon pushing the doomsday date outwards—thanks to high economic growth over the past few years. (To give just one example: The Trustee's "low-cost projections," in which the Trust Fund would stay stuffed until 2080 and beyond, predicted 2.8 percent productivity growth in '04. In fact we got a healthy 4.1, though it fell of late. Um, real wages actually fell in 2004, which is not good news, but, um, presumably that trend's not sustainable forever.)

But who knows. Maybe the White House will beat a retreat. In that case, maybe it would have been better off for the Democrats to dither around for awhile, let the Bush administration start proposing massive benefit cuts, and then attack and block the reform with a united front. Get Republicans on record for supporting benefit cuts, and then cudgel 'em to death in the midterms. I don't know. That's tricky. It's also risky. A sense of inevitability on Social Security phase-out, I think, would have gained a momentum of its own. So if Kaus is right—and I don't think he is—but if he is, it's sad that Democrats didn't spring the trap quite right, but at least they saved Social Security, learned how to put up a menacing opposition face, hopefully got a confidence boost, and can start whispering rumors that Bush is, in fact, a lame duck.

Now in order to prove the lame duck thesis, Democrats should start pushing for immigration reform, which will all but force the president to grow the necessary feathers and beak. The chance of lame-duckism, meanwhile, will build pressure for the White House to tap Dick Cheney as the presidential nominee in '08, which would be great on so many levels. Er, or something.

Here's a timely blast from the past: Go read Stephanie Mencimer's October, 2003, article on how doctors, along with the GOP, have fomented an insurgency campaign against trial lawyers in recent years. Alas, while everyone's been focused squarely on Social Security—and rightly so—malpractice "reform" has been quietly snuck up on legislatures across the country. The Georgia State House has just approved caps on malpractice awards. Illinois and Washington are also looking into the matter. And of course, President Bush.

The crux here is that many—not all, but many—of the doctors speaking out against malpractice awards are either wholly incompetent or dangerously reckless practitioners who mostly deserved to get sued. So always do a quick background check on those doctors leading the charge. Ideally, of course, insurance agencies would just target those 5 percent of doctors responsible for over half of all malpractice payouts. But insurance companies—and this I didn't know—actually make most of their money on stock investments, and not managing claims, so they tend to hike premiums across the board. Few insurers plan to lower malpractice premiums if these tort bills pass; the premium rates are dictated almost wholly by how well insurance companies are doing in the stock market.

So a better solution, as Mencimer suggests all-too briefly, would be to "reduce the number of malpractice lawsuits simply by reducing the number of medical injuries." Various ideas include a mandatory public error-reporting system, stricter licensing requirements, and better specialization among doctors. I'd add that state medical boards could stand to act more aggressively against wrongdoers, but that would require making the boards independent in some way. Doctors, of course, have no incentive to do this. And Republicans have no incentive to stop helping them. The way they figure, caps on awards will happily cripple the Democrat's large trial-lawyer fundraising base. Bully for them. Even more importantly, once malpractice reform is on the table, you can start fiddling with larger protections for businesses against lawsuits. In an age where we can no longer confiscate tobacco money gained through illegal activities, that seems to suit the GOP just fine.

Dale Franks post on this year's "Fashion Week" is very funny, but once the smirking stopped, I had to wonder what the point of these shows actually is. Like everyone else, I assume fashion designers exist for the sole (or greater) purpose of selling expensive outfits to obscenely rich celebrities going to awards ceremonies. So where do the fashion shows fit in? Does Cameron Diaz spot an, um, ensemble like the one below and think, "Wow, I bet that Giampiero Sposito fellow could make a marvelous floral wrap gown for me!" And just what about the wooden ribs would lead one to that conclusion? Or is this just all to show off. They're kind of cool, I guess.

I'm no expert on developing political messages—in fact, my suspicion is that I'd be very, very bad at it—but this New York Times passage describing the Social Security chatter in Montana seems to suggest something:

The anxiety and confusion were palpable in the crowd, which was composed mostly of retirees - the very group assured by Mr. Bush, again and again, that they would not be affected. Why change the program so fundamentally, several asked. Sylvia Stugelmeyer, a retired courthouse worker, declared: "I'm against the privatization of Social Security. It was put into a trust for us many years ago, and I hope to God it stays that way."

Doris Lundin, 77, demanded, "How much money has the government spent from Social Security and put in IOU's?" As the audience applauded, she added, "And why can't they pay it back?"

First, a bit of slightly-related context. One of the most amazing, and amazingly underreported, political trends over the past decade has been the decline in voters who distrust big government. If you look at this recent Pew poll, the number of Republicans who think government is "wasteful and inefficient" has dropped from 74 percent in 1994 to 49 percent today. So I don't think President Bush is going to get much traction out of the fact that Social Security is a massive government program. His whole "ownership" angle might catch on, though. But that seems very quickly neutralized if Democrats simply note that, by eroding or defaulting on the Trust Fund, the government is taking away something it "put into trust for us many years ago". So much for ownership. Even seniors in Montana seem to understand this concept. The debate here isn't big government vs. individualism, it's about a particular president who wants to use government to confiscate the Trust Fund.

Max Baucus also gets his message exactly right. It's not just that private accounts will hurt Social Security's finances in some general sense. It's that they'll chip away at the Trust Fund's finances, which will put in danger even those benefits for people over 55. No one is safe.

Ah, conservatives are puzzled as to why the major media is giving major coverage to a Marine general's remarks that "It's fun to shoot some people." Maybe it's because the media hates the military! Or… America. Who knows? Speaking for myself, though, the problem here seems to be much greater than the fact that General Mattis said something offensive and distasteful and politically incorrect. I don't care about that. But over the past six months or so, I've heard from a few military personnel either in or returned from Iraq (I don't believe I'm allowed to name any of them, and this is hardly an exhaustive sample, so if you want to call bullshit go for it) that the military has long had a "let's crack some heads!" approach to peacekeeping in Iraq. Perhaps overly so.

So it really matters what tone is set. The president, for instance, linked Iraq to 9/11, which gives the whole enterprise a "revenge!" rather than a "patient nation-building" flavor. The point is you really want to err on the side of restraint, and when it's clear or highly likely that military leaders aren't steering their troops that way, there's a potential problem, and it leads not just to a bad image, but horrible policy. In the early days of the war we got a little too zealous with killing Sunnis, didn't think it was worth our time to make the right connections and apologize profusely, and now we've made a lot of enemies and a lot of people have died.

If you don't think that's a big deal (and perhaps there's a valid argument on this front), then maybe you can excuse those remarks as a case of rhetorical indiscipline. Otherwise, this stuff is important. Gen. Mattis sounds like an effective leader, and obviously generals can't and shouldn't be meek and afraid of breaking china, but perhaps the scales need a bit of recalibrating. Media-types like me might not be the best people to weigh in authoritatively on the matter, but can we honestly say there's no issue whatsoever here? I have yet to hear that case.

By contrast, I don't see why Eason Jordan's remarks are nearly as important, or how they're indicative of a larger problem that may be getting people killed. If someone could explain it to me, I'd be happy to ask the New York Times to please criticize that moron some more. Otherwise, file this in the Ward Churchill dustbin.


Self-correcting mechanism! Oopsie, had the wrong Jordan.

Readers of this site will know that I've been interested for some time in the ways in which Middle Eastern tribal identities—especially those in Iraq—intersect with radical Islam. In general, it's neither very well known nor very well understood, which makes me glad that a recent RAND book, The Muslim World After 9/11, is broaching the topic:

Although the literature on the relationship between tribalism and radicalism is not yet well developed, interviews in the region and anecdotal evidence suggest that extremist tendencies seem to find fertile ground in areas with segmentary lineal tribal societies. Tribal conservatism—a cultural and not a religious feature—and religious extremism can be mutually reinforcing. In the absence of countervailing forces—for instance, a strong central authority—they produce a mix that, in the words of a Kuwaiti interlocutor, "leads to bin Laden."

I'm not sure about that "countervailing forces" bit. One should note that in Iraq, it was Saddam Hussein's 1999 al hamla al-imaniyah (Development of Islamic Faith) campaign that sought to mitigate tribal unrest by allowing them to channel their energies into Salafist Islamic practices. Radical Sunni clerics in Fallujah and Ramadi were allowed to preach their venom, so long as it wasn't directed at Saddam. So radical Islam was supposed to distract from more conventional nationalistic tendencies. Instead, they reinforced each other, as we're seeing in the present Sunni insurgency. Too bad Saddam didn't read this RAND book! Which is really quite good, by the way. I'll try to blog about more of the tribal stuff when it resurfaces. In light of the increasingly dangerous Baluch insurgency in Pakistan, this topic might have global importance.

The aptly-named "fubar" rounds up evidence that turnout in the Iraqi elections might have been far, far lower than we've been led to believe. But all the exit polls told us otherwise! Okay, so we'll just have to wean ourselves off those goddamn things. Really. This is the last time we get duped. Honest.

I'm not wholly upset that Islamic law is going to rule far and wide in Iraq. Well, okay, I am upset, because it's barbaric and makes life miserable for at least 50% of the country. (Um, so that's my nuanced take on the tension between multiculturalism and feminism.) At the same time, what else can be done about it? The U.S. can't very well go assassinate all the Shi'ite clerics—and besides, judging from Ayatollah Sistani's views on oral sex, he might be the least puritanical of them all—and the last time the U.S. tried to shoot down a constitutional provision enshrining Islamic family law, we ended up sparking a backlash and making the constitution even more Islamic. (Do note the striking parallels with the Intelligent Design debate.)

In retrospect, had we made Islam the end-all and be-all in the Transitional Administrative Law (the interim constitution that we helped Iraqis write), then Sistani probably never would have mobilized his election-day forces so heavily. Maybe the secular list would be in charge right now. But no turning back the clock now.

But I ramble. Two key issues here. First, will the Shi'ites and the Sunnis each have their own separate courts, since they obviously each have their own separate interpretation of Islamic law and Islamic family law? Probably. This was how it was done prior to 1959, and there's no reason to do otherwise, but that obviously gets very complicated. (Will other sects, like Christians and Jews, get their own courts?)

Second, how will Islamic family law (the stuff that screws over women on matters of divorce, inheritance, etc.) actually be implemented? If the religious Shi'ite slate has a 50% majority (final results are not yet in), then they can just pass a whole bunch of ordinary laws and get their way. Or they can try to enshrine it in the Constitution. But as numerous liberal pundits here in America will tell you, relying on the courts will only make the religious Shi'ites fat and lazy and complacent. But the Shi'ite fundamentalists also probably know that they won't have a legislative majority forever. Tricky stuff.

In all this, there's the question of execution. The Shi'ite fundamentalists say that Islamic law should guide the new laws. But who's going to say that a law passed by parliament actually hews to or contradicts Islamic law? Is there going to be some sort of constitutional committee made up of clerics and Islamic lawyers, ala the Council of Guardians in Iran? Or will there be judicial review by independent courts like here in America? Well in that case, will we need to replace the secular judiciary with some sort of religious judiciary? Will secular-trained judges need to consult with clerics on matters of interpretation? Whattup?

Messy, messy.

Phil Carter explains how military contractors manage to clamp down so firmly on the federal teat:

A major reason has to do with the way defense programs are typically constructed by the prime contractor. A smart prime contractor will assign subcontracts with an eye on politics, by spreading the wealth to as many subcontractors in as many Congressional districts as possible.

\This means that any cut to this program affects a large number of jobs in a large number of Congressional districts, and that any cut is likely to be received with a broad and vocal Congressional response. So while defense programs may be very easy to terminate in practical terms (every government contract carries a "termination for convenience" clause), they are extremely difficult to kill for political reasons.

Um, is there really any doubt that we'd have a more effective (and efficient) defense program if we just did away with Congressional districts? Oops, did I say that? My bad, need to protect "local interests" and all. On a related vein (artery, really), I was reading Andrew Moravcsik's Newsweek piece this morning about how no other countries want to adopt our system of government, and found myself just flabbergasted. Really, what's not to love about a lower legislative house in which, theoretically, one party could win a majority of votes nationwide and still get only 1 out of 435 Congressional seats? (If, say, the Republicans won every single race by one vote but lost San Francisco by 435 votes. We do love Nancy Pelosi, after all.)

No, nyet, nein, I can't imagine a single other country on earth that would find this appealing. Britain and Canada have single-member districts, true, but they have nothing like those monstrosities known as "the Senate" or the "electoral college". More realistically, nifty features like congressional districts and an upper house tilted towards regional minorities might make sense for a country like Iraq right now, but even then, they probably won't make sense for Iraq ten years from now. (Assuming no civil war/implosion/subsumption by Iran, etc.)

Better for a government to divide itself up along ideological and political lines than to entrench ethnic/sectarian/cultural divisions. Here in the U.S., we've all but enshrined white Southern conservatism as its own invincible entity, while the workings of the House/Senate have permanently screwed over racial and ideological minorities. ("Affirmative action" districting has made things worse, tamping down minority turnout and restricting minority candidates to but a few well-marked holding pens.) Whatever. This is a tepid rehash of old concerns. But I figure I may as well throw a few stones at the tank now and again. And here's the new slogan, "Proportional Representation! Do it for National Security." Thanks, Phil!

Ah, so it's finally the weekend and I get to catch up on all that blog reading I didn't have time to do this week. Let's hope that's not a regular habit! Anyhow, I missed this old post by Matthew Yglesias talking about IR theory in the context of Bush's State of the Union address. Were I not sort of a big geek, I would think this stuff very much pedantic. But as it just so happens...

Anyway, something that's frustrated me about political commentary over the past few years has been the tendency to bandy about terms like "idealist" or "realist" or "Wilsonian" to describe the foreign policy visions that various people hold. While it's a perfectly good way to slap a name on various bundles of beliefs, the terms are too often used more for rhetorical effect—ie. to show that "Bush the idealist" is moral in his foreign policy, or to show that "Kerry the realist" is more intellectual—than to produce any substantive analysis. As I've said before, we all have certain ideals and certain senses of limits on what's possible in foreign policy, and these mostly just vary on a spectrum. It's not the biggest deal.

On the other hand, there are IR theories that do describe distinct ways of looking at the world, and quite often policymakers really do see the world through the lens of one theory or the other, even if only unconsciously. Now I don't think that subscribing to a certain IR theory will lead you to any actual policy conclusions. During the Cold War, for instance, "realist" views were used to justify both engagement and containment. And realism alone could not explain (or predict) the fall of the Soviet Union. So this stuff is neither exhaustive nor determinative of action.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to look at the general theories of international relations under which various people are laboring, in order to see why they arrive at the policy prescriptions they do, what assumptions they're using, and what the blindspots are. Ideally, these blindspots could all be wiped away by a "gods-eye" empirical view of the situation, but since we obviously never have such a view, we have to resort to theory. Since I know a bit (a little bit) about IR, I've tried to do a long and somewhat clumsy analysis of Iran—a situation I know a fair bit about—with all this in mind. It's below the fold, so as not to bore anyone. (Keep in mind too that it's well after midnight here, and I'm so not expecting anything earth-shattering to come of this.)

Let's start with an observation: I've read a bunch of policy papers, op-eds, and blogs assessing the Iran situation and it seems that nearly all of them—liberal, moderate, conservative, whatever—are at least seeing the same basic picture. Nearly everyone situates Iran within a realist picture of the Middle East, at least as far as states are concerned (terrorism is a somewhat separate issue). Here I mean "realist" in the IR sense—we all agree that the region tends towards anarchy without a stabilizing influence, that sovereign states act relatively autonomously, that they pursue generally "national" interests, and that national power is an important tool towards that end. We can haggle over a few individual states (was Afghanistan under the Taliban really pursuing national interests?) but the general picture is clear, and almost everyone subscribes to the general realist view when describing Iran.

Now here's where things get tricky. Many Iran "doves"—by which I mean those who favor engagement more heavily—tend to hew closer to the realist line here, seeing Tehran's regime as primarily obsessed with maximizing its own security, secondarily concerned with establishing regional dominance, and only somewhat concerned with ideological issues (the destruction of Israel, the overthrow of Sunni states, preserving the dominance of Qom). Meanwhile, those who are more skeptical towards engagement, like Dan Darling and Michael Ledeen, tend to rank the ideological issues much higher. In other words, they simply have a different conception of national interest.

Those who advocate overthrowing Iran's regime generally fall into two main camps. The first are those who believe that the national interests pursued by Iran have a strong ideological component to them. In that case, the regime itself—and especially the now-dominant Abadgaran movement—is more or less the sole risk posed by Iran. Remove the lunatics, and suddenly you have a regime that values other interests (economic growth, regional stability) relatively more highly than, say, destroying Israel or flouting the United States for its own sake.

The second democracy-promotion camp believes that Iran primarily seeks state power as more commonly defined: deterrence through nuclear weapons, the ability to intimidate and even coerce its neighbors, the economic dominance that is perceived to come with military dominance. On this view, it would be better turning Iran into a democracy on the theory that democracies are simply less likely to go to war. Few people really know why this is, nor can explain why it's always likely to be true. One possibility is that when leaders of two states perceive each other to be similarly handcuffed (by democratic norms), they tend to converge on expectations about how to resolve conflicts. Note that this is old hat as far as realist theory is concerned: a number of scholars have argued that perceptions of other states' intentions is a key predictor of war or peace. I think the theory's a bit facile, but it also seems like the unspoken assumption behind the second democracy-promotion camp.

By the way, you can see who would and would not favor military strikes against Iran. The first camp probably doesn't much care if strikes piss off the Iranian leadership, since they are already wholly hostile to us. They might not favor strikes, though, if it can be shown that a U.S. attack would set back the democracy movement. Some hawks, like Reuel Marc Gerecht, think this is nonsense and the Iranian reformist movement would never rally 'round the mullahs. But it's odd that Gerecht assigns puts such a high emphasis on clerical ideology and such a low emphasis on nationalism. (Perhaps fatally so: Iranians did willingly die by the scores in a war against Iran, even when they disliked Khomeini's regime.) At any rate, it just shows that if you include a lot of intangibles like nationalism or ideology or general "emotions and intentions" in your assessment of a state, it's likely to be very highly colored by bias.

The second democracy-promoting camp, meanwhile, can rather straightforwardly add up the costs and benefits of a strike against Iran. Perhaps a strike will make Tehran feel even more threatened and the leaders will resort to terrorism in Iraq, etc., to increase its own security. Etc. Here we could get into rather complex notions of Offense-Defense Theory, but a) I don't understand it very well, and b) I think it's relatively easy to understand the costs and benefits of attacking Iran without a theory. Yes? No?

Okie doke. So the big question: what do you have to believe in order to favor engagement with Iran? Well, first you have to believe that Iran seeks a very conventional version of state power: deterrence, regional hegemony, etc. Second, you have to believe that the democratic revolution is not likely to happen before Iran goes nuclear, so we need to deal with the nuclear threat first. Note that that second belief depends almost entirely on empirical evidence. I've outlined reasons to believe that Iran will not experience a revolution anytime soon, mostly having to do with the unity of Tehran's security forces. But quibble if it makes you happy! So engagement it is.

Engagement is where we get into all sorts of talk about carrots and sticks. All very technical and tedious. I know nothing about realist theories of engagement, so I'll just endorse Ken Pollack's "Triple-Track Approach" to dealing with Iran.

One interesting thing I've found lately, though, is a tendency towards neo-realist assessments of Iran. George Perkovich kind of argues for something of this sort, essentially saying that a Western bloc (U.S.+Europe+Japan) vs. Iran is an unstable situation. On this view, the relationship needs the active intervention of the other Arab states, perhaps by having them create a regional security alliance, in order to become stable.

Now I've argued along these lines before, so you might say I'm in the neo-realist camp, but it seems to me that structural realism doesn't ever help us figure out what to do in certain foreign policy situations, so I'll pass on the labeling. Interestingly, Perkovich would prefer that the Middle East not balance itself out naturally, with arms races and whatnot, presumably because this will lead to a World War I type of situation. Instead, he'd prefer the US orchestrate a security agreement. He also factors Israel into the equation, noting that while it may be very irrational for Arab leaders to carp about Israel's nuclear arsenal, it's still a genuine obstacle to regional stability, so it needs to be dealt with. In that sense, he's not much of a neo-realist. Oh well.

Anyway, there are two other approaches to Iran not yet discussed. The first is that if we let Iran go nuclear, we can actually increase regional stability—the sort of thing neo-realists like Kenneth Waltz would propose. I've outlined a < a href='http://plumer.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_plumer_archive.html#110162828790670788' target='blank'>possible case for that approach here, but it's not convincing to me. The other is a very liberal view (again, in an IR sense), noting that the only long-term guarantee of reducing the threat from Iran is to make it more interdependent with the rest of the world. So that includes bringing it into the WTO, making it part of a network of security alliances, increasing trade with the United States, promoting the sort of horizontal governmental networks (meetings of int'l finance ministers, etc.) that make the Western world go round. In a sense, this is what Thomas Barnett talks about with his notion of "connectivity". Personally, I have some real problems with connectivity as a security solution, but I'll save that for another post.

Continue reading "The Uses and Abuses of Theory for Foreign Policy"

The entire issue of what portion of private accounts people will and won't be able to pass on to their grandchildren is still somewhat vague. But the New York Times' Dan Rosenbaum and Robin Toner offer two telling details:

When workers retired, most would be required to use at least part of their accounts to buy from the government lifetime annuities, financial instruments that provide a guaranteed monthly payment for life but that expire at death. Despite Mr. Bush's declaration that money in the accounts could be passed on to children and grandchildren, the principal of an annuity cannot be inherited.

Money left over after the annuities were purchased would belong to retirees to spend or invest as they wished and could be bequeathed.

"Most" would be required to purchase annuities? From the description, it seems that high-income people who have other savings for retirement could simply pass on their entire private account when they retire, without purchasing annuities. Lower-income people who rely on Social Security for their retirement income, however, would probably put their entire private account into annuities (especially now that the yearly benefits will be smaller than ever). So in other words, the rich get richer, &tc. Brilliant! Now in fairness, lower-income families will be able to bequest their private accounts if they die before retirement. (In other words, throw momma off the train before she retires!) Perhaps lower-income people are more likely to die before retirement, I don't know. So that's good. But if that's the main or only appeal of Bush's privatization plan, then I'm deferring to Andrew Samwick for wry comment:

The issue of bequests is completely unnecessary. Social Security exists to provide insurance against outliving one's means. Nothing prevents people from leaving bequests currently if they so desire. I am not aware of any failures in the life insurance market that need government attention.

By the way, Professor Samwick makes another great point: it's ridiculous to think that politicians will never be able to take the money in these accounts away. Of course they can. They can raise income taxes on seniors. They can tax the disbursement. They can tax the fund managers handling these accounts, who then raise administrative fees. They can raise the price of annuities. Americans will "own" their private accounts in exactly the same way a little kid "owns" a ball in a playground full of bigger kids.

This evening, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put out a helpful explanation of the Bush administration's confusing Social Security phase-out plan. Matt Yglesias breaks it down into even plainer language.

The key point is this. The CBPP notes that for people my age, median benefits will drop (on average) from a guaranteed $19,700 a year under the current system down to about $13,097 a year under Bush's likely plan. Some people will get lucky with their investments and do better than $13,097, some people will do worse. But that's the basic cut. We'd all have to make some pretty damn impressive investments to get retirement benefits equal to what the current system, which is supposedly in "crisis", can pay.

It's also worth noting, if I'm not mistaken (and I could be), that these numbers might even understate the size of the cut. First, some background. The CBPP calculates the "Bush plan" benefits by first assuming the president will switch from price-indexing to wage-indexing of benefits in order to make the program solvent in the long-term. So that accounts for the bulk of my cut above. After that, the government will slash my guaranteed benefits even further based on how well I do with my private accounts. So in all likelihood CBPP thinks I'll be left with something like $10,000 a year from my private account and $3,000 worth of guaranteed benefits still remaining. (I'm eyeballing it.)

But here's the thing -- in the estimates cited above, it looks like CBPP is doing the decent thing and assuming that the Social Security Trust Fund will be able to redeem all of the money its invested in government bonds over the past few decades. If, however, the federal government were to, uh, default on all that money it's borrowed from Social Security—and the president seems to imply that it might have to, in order to pay for upper-income tax cuts—then the program will suffer even deeper long-term shortfalls necessitating even deeper cuts. (Without the Trust Fund, even wage-indexing won't bring us to solvency.) This goes for young people too. I'll be retiring at a time when Social Security can likely still tap into the Trust Fund to pay benefits, according to the CBO. So more cuts for me! People in their 30s and 40s right now will really get screwed.

Oh, and not to mention the fact that defaulting on the Trust Fund—which was paid for with payroll taxes on low- and middle-earners—to pay for tax cuts that are largely for high-earners would be hideously immoral. But that goes without saying. Um, right? On the other hand, by tomorrow

Oy. So as expected, I've got a lot more to do in this new job—and I'm trying to work on on a few longer pieces right now—so blogging may tail off here and there intermittently, at least for the next few days.

But I do want to add something real quick onto this MoJo post about the rhetoric of democracy-promotion. I was really quite horrified to hear Bush mention Morocco and Jordan and Bahrain as constituting an "arc" of "hopeful reform". Here's why.

One of the things states have become very good at learning how to do in the last decade or so is embracing and channeling dissent into relatively harmless outlets. Marxists sometimes like to talk about how democracy is the most insidious form of political control by elites, precisely because those controlled believe they're actually free. Maybe this is hyperbole, but it's certainly true for many Middle Eastern countries. It's very easy to enact a wide range of reforms—expanding service NGOs, allowing free elections for the lower house, privatizing parts of the economy—that make people feel like they're invested in a civil society, but don't actually produce real change. In a sense, it siphons off frustration while keeping the autocratic system in place. So long as Arab despots allow free elections but continue to ban political parties, they can easily direct the opposition's energy off into fruitless ends. Democracy actually becomes less of a possibility.

Now insofar as frustration over the lack of freedom in the Middle East is the real root cause of terrorism, maybe this business of deluding people into thinking they're getting real reform will be good from a national security standpoint. But eventually people catch on and the frustration gets worse and the U.S. gets blamed for supporting rather hollow freedoms under the guise of "reform". And in the future, when American presidents call for reform, they have less and less credibility.

Anyway, the larger point, I think, is that calls for freedom and liberty are not only imprecise, but dangerously imprecise. They allow Arab regimes to pretend to reform things by, say, holding elections or expanding well-controlled areas of civil society. These semi-reforms, after all, really are expanding liberty and freedom, so in a sense the regimes in question are following Bush's prescription to the letter. Republicans can take credit and everyone's happy. But in the meantime, democracy stalls, and the "roots of Muslim rage" just get swept under the carpet rather than solved. If Bush is serious about reform, he has to stop using the word "reform" and really pinpoint what he means. Say "political parties must be established." Or "controls on the press must be loosened." Or "independent judicial branches must be established." If that's too radical, then please, shut up. Because promoting cosmetic reform might well be worse than doing nothing at all.

One more thing on post-election Iraq. Can anyone doubt that the Kurds have made out like bandits in all of this? For one, as I posted on MoJo earlier today, any governing coalition led by some subset of the Shi'ites will need to rely on Kurdish support, which means that their demands will get ample hearing. For two, the Kurdish leaders are all far more experienced at the process of political maneuvering than anyone else. Ahmed Chalabi may have the con man game down pat, but what does he know about logrolling? Ditto Abdul Aziz-Hakim, or Ghazi al-Yawer, or even Iyad Allawi.

So while the rest of the Iraqi government is skittering around trying to hash out simply procedural rules, and figuring out what to compromise on, the Kurds can present a rather united front. They know exactly what they want—autonomy with strong claims to Kirkuk—and they have the army to back themselves up. Plus, the Kurdish people want independence. Kurdish leaders are skittish about this, but the pressure at home will no doubt force them to demand as much as possible. Barzani and Talabani will make Tom DeLay look unfocused and aimless.

Insofar as the Kurds have been screwed for decades and will now get more than a fair shake, this is all a good thing. Insofar as overly strong Kurdish victories on Kirkuk and the question of autonomy will only fuel resentment and possibly provoke a civil war (or a larger Middle Eastern conflict with Turkey or Syria), this is a bad thing. Insofar as Kurdistan will now be governed by two corrupt and wholly despicable ruling parties that will only see their hands strengthened by national legislative victories, this is a terrible thing. Does that all balance out? I dunno.

The logical thing for me to do, really, would be to quit blogging and simply link to various papers from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. They really say it all! This latest, from Nathan Brown, outlines what we can expect in the coming months from the new Iraqi National Assembly. Interestingly, Brown makes two points I've always wondered about but never really had the chutzpah to assert outright, because what do I know. First, that the religious Shi'ites are disavowing Iranian-style "rule of the cleric" ideology only because they've made so much political headway simply by mobilizing their supporters. Ayatollah Sistani doesn't need to advocate Khomeini-style rule precisely because he can send out hundreds of thousands to the street with a snap of the finger. That brings up an interesting doomsday scenario—if Sistani were to die in the next few months (well he is old and frail of health...), his various successors might feel less secure about their "soft power" and try to enshrine a more robust role for Shi'ite clerics.

The second point of interest concerns the role of shari'a and Islamic personal status law. No one really doubts that Islamic law will be the law of the land. Ideally, the Sunni regions will be governed by their own laws and the Shi'ite regions their own, as was the case back in the pre-Ba'th era. But how these laws are actually implemented is the rather vexing issue. Do you have the courts and their secularly trained judges weigh in on Islamic law? Do these courts defer to religious authorities on legal matters? Do government officials draw up guiding principles in their legislation? Who do they consult on the matter? Suddenly the separation of church and state becomes rather fuzzy.

Anyway, I'll try to write up more on Brown's paper tomorrow at MoJo. For now, read it through so as to inform your comment! (Er…)


Oh, P.S. Brown is very much wrong about one thing: The entire TAL is very much amendable with a three-fourths majority. He seems to think there are a few procedural provisions that can't be changed short of outright repudiation, but oh no, there's a major loophole in the thing and it can all be changed, trust me. Now in practice, I can't see any governing coalition stringing together a three-fourths majority, unless vetos and filibusters and whatnot hold up the constitutional drafting process so much that a large number of Iraqis get sick of the delay. Maybe.

UPDATE: The "P.S." above was both cryptic and flippant -- never a good combo. All I meant was the odd fact that Rule 3A of the TAL, which restricts certain amendments, is itself amendable with a 3/4 majority. Weird loophole, as I say. But yes, this is very, very unlikely to happen.

Brad DeLong has a brilliant proposal to shore up Social Security, boost national savings, and give Congress some much-needed political cover if tough choices need to be made. The man knows his policy! I have only one tiny little nitpick. Prof. DeLong calls it a "potential deal". Sadly, this is not a potential deal.

If Democrat were ever to propose something like the DeLong Plan, first President Bush would oppose it, then he would relentlessly accuse the minority party of raising taxes on all small businesses, most middle-class families, and a few cute puppies. After a few months of good hard Dem-whacking, the plan would die an ignoble death, only to be reintroduced into the Senate by Rick "Up For Re-election" Santorum, with only a few minor and wholly offensive tweaks. It would then get picked up, reluctantly lauded by bruised moderates, photographed in public places with its arms around President Bush, feted by liberal pundits desperately seeking a "compromise" and an "end to The Most Divisive Era Ever," and would finally squeak through the Senate. Then it's off to conference we go, where key House Republicans, along with select Democratic turncoats, would amend the bill beyond recognition, turn it into a disaster, and then quickly send the 12,000 page non-amendable "compromise" bill back to each house for a quick up-or-down vote.

Thanks, but no thanks. We all know how this game plays out. Back when the Plumers first bought an electric radio fence for the family dog, it took poor Spikey about three hard zaps to the neck before figuring out where not to run. I would hope the Democrats have a somewhat shallower learning curve.

His reporting is a bit hard to follow, but Dexter Filkins really does an admirable job of trying to disentangle the various threads within Iraqi politics. The ballots won't be fully tallied up for another ten days, and already serious (and seriously complicated) speculation has begun about the makeup of the new National Assembly.

The consensus seems to be that, depending on how well Iyad Allawi's "Iraqi List" does relative to the Sistani-blessed "United Iraqi Alliance", we'll see one of two ruling coalitions form: A "religious Shiite + Kurdish" coalition, or a "secular Shiite + Kurdish + kinda secular Sunni coalition". Either strikes me as unlikely to stabilize the country. The first would seriously freak out the religious Sunnis, who have a lot of guns, while the second would piss off the religious Shiites, who also have a lot of guns.

In fact, the only people without a lot of guns are the secular Sunnis and Shiites, but they also have the best chance of unifying all the disparate groups, so they can't really be left out of power. So if the newly elected leaders have any sense, they'll choose option (C). I don't know what that is, exactly, but hopefully it's a good one that magically satisfies everyone. Unfortunately there's a lot of bad blood between Allawi and the religious Shiites, and there's a lot of bad blood between the ex-Baathists on the "Iraqi Independent Democrats" list and the religious Shiites. Most of this bad blood consists mainly of trumped-up personality clashes that shouldn't really be an issue, but as we've seen in America, deep partisan divides can spring up over fairly trivial matters.

Anyway, there's also that 800-pound elephant in the room (accept no substitutions!)—namely, that the Sunnis most gung-ho about the insurgency, including various Salafist movements and some of the large rural tribes, will have no significant representation at all. You could plop a secular, urbane Sunni like "elder statesman" Adnan Pachachi or Ghazi al-Yawer onto the Presidency Council, but, uh, that's not really going to convince the Albuaisa or Jumaila tribes that everything's okay and politics is really quite fun and fruitful. It would be a bit like getting Pat Leahy to represent Midland, Texas in a new government because, hey, we're all white Christians here.

Praktike calls attention to a very important Carnegie paper by Amy Hawthorne, asking whether civil society is the answer to the Middle East's various woes. As you'd guess, it depends. Much of existing U.S. aid tends to go towards "service NGOs," which do a lot of good economic work, but often operate solely under the auspices of the current regime, and aren't much of a force for change per se. In part, this weak-kneed approach to aid stems from a tradition started by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton—both presidents favored incremental change, believing that "microparticipation" in civil society groups would spur existing Arab regimes to reform from within. But as Hawthorne says, this belief was "unrealistic".

As yet, it's not clear that the Bush II administration is doing anything fundamentally different on this front. Nor is it clear that doing so would really shake things up. Hawthorne's most startling point is that "U.S. assistance at best can play a modest positive role." In part this is because, given the current state of U.S.-Arab relations, U.S. aid is often the kiss of death for civil society groups. In part, many of the civil society organizations are at odds with each other—liberals (who are pro-democratic) don't trust the Islamic groups (who actually have popular support). In part, as praktike nicely summarizes, the existing civil associations are simply inadequate to the task:

Labor unions and business associations are too dependent on the regimes. Islamist groups either aren't really pro-democracy, are unsure about it, are pro-democracy but not very large or influential, or are apolitical altogether. Service NGOs are fearful of running afoul of the regimes that have coopted them. The prodemocracy groups are courageous but small.

But in part, it's because "civil society activism alone" won't necessarily "create a democratic opening." Hawthorne believes that real political reform tends to happen only after "broader social, economic, or political change" occur. So even if the right sorts of civil society groups existed, and even if the Islamist groups became more pro-democratic, and even if we gave them aid, and even if they all cooperated, the U.S. would still need to press for more forceful political reforms to give these groups an opening. That means pressing for legalization of political opposition parties, holding of competitive elections, lifting of press restrictions. And even then, the moon and stars would have to align for something ground-breaking—ala late 1980s Eastern Europe—to take place.

So it's a long drawn-out affair, and the chance of either Congress or us pundits or the "Arab Street" actually seeing immediate and concrete progress is very slim. Meanwhile, the chance of pissing off our Arab allies is very high. You can see, then, why none of this actually gets done. It's "hard work"! But still...