Two interesting points from Dean Baker's Economic Reporting Review this week. First, about falling birthrates:

There is no plausible scenario in which lower birth rates will reduce human capital in any meaningful sense. At present only a minority of the U.S. population receives a college education and a very small minority gets a post-graduate education. The percentage of the world’s population that receives an advanced education is tiny. It will be easy to get as many skilled workers as necessary by providing higher education to a larger portion of the population, even if the population were to decline substantially from current levels.

Makes sense. I've never quite understood how our lives are supposed to suck in any meaningful sense if birth rates start declining. Assuming we can afford all the pension stuff, which it seems we probably can. Or how about a population decline, which is already expected in a number of countries (Russia, Japan, etc.)? Fewer people on a fixed amount of land means standards of living go up, no?

Well, that, plus all sorts of quality of life indicators go up too—my bus is less crowded in the morning, less congestion, less pollution, more living space. (Come to think of it, in the future, if the population ever did start declining, I would imagine you'd have an influx of people moving into the now-more-attractive cities, the reverse of what you see now, meaning that urban property prices would continue to rise). Plus, more importantly, the labor pool shrinks, so the capital/labor ratio rises, and productivity and wages go up. And crappy jobs go unfilled. Maybe there's something else I haven't thought of... The more serious question, at any rate, is what we can expect the macroeconomic effects of telepathy and flying cars will be. Pretty goddamn massive, I would imagine.

Rory Stewart's long essay in the London Review of Books is very much worth reading, if only for the following point. Everyone knows, or should know, that foreigners understand very little about how Iraq works—which is frustrating when we consider that much of the debate over whether to set a withdrawal date or not depends on what the Sunni "opinion on the street" really is. But, as Stewart points out, foreigners aren't the only ones who are ignorant:

Things are not much better when organisations rely on middle-class or English-speaking Iraqis for information. It is not only Ahmed Chalabi who proved to have little idea about the situation in Iraq. Saddam’s regime worked hard to fragment and isolate the population. Religious sheikhs in Karbala do not know how to assess the influence of a tribal sheikh; Baghdad intellectuals don’t understand the status of the mirjaiya, the most senior Shia clerics, such as Sistani. Giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to engineers and doctors in Basra to speak on behalf of Marsh Arabs is like hiring a London investment banker to represent the unemployed in Glasgow.

Useful bit of humility.

UPDATE: Also, count me in as thinking Stewart's grim assessment below is probably the most likely outcome for Iraq (which is what I sort of hinted at in this post):

But I am most sympathetic to Parenti’s account of street-level violence, one which implies that the outcome might not be a grand civil war between monolithic blocs of Shia, Sunni or Kurd, but anarchy at a localised level, with conflict between different armed factions, none of which wants visible or formal political power. The government may control the major cities, but rural areas will be marked by continual violence, disrupting people’s lives, enforcing traditional social codes, preventing the delivery of basic services. In other words, an Iraqi democracy could resemble democratic pre-Musharraf Pakistan, or the longest continuous democracy in Latin America: Colombia.

"Heh."

I was trying to write something about the Kofi Annan debate ("should he resign or no?"), but it's not coming out quite right, and I'm getting tangled up in a few IR theory things, or what we can call "naïve IR theory things," which is obviously the theme for this blog today. So, here they are, in jumbled order:

1. The usual liberal internationalist view is that well-designed international institutions make violent conflict among states less likely. This happens because all of the partners in the institution, among other things, develop shared norms, share information (which seems like it ought to prevent war), perhaps begin to share a common identity, and have more to lose by conflict (namely, the breakup of the institution). The problem is that it's hard to figure out which way the causal arrow points. You could just as plausibly argue that pre-existing congeniality among states leads those states to sign up for X institution. Also, two states will never join an institution if they think there's a chance of conflict with each other.

2. Economic, etc., interdependency means that states have a lot to lose from going to war with each other. It's easier and vastly more profitable nowadays for the U.S. to trade with Canada than to storm Ottawa, rape Canadian women and children, and force all able-bodied men to work in our coal mines. On the other hand, this fact is only likely to restrain the U.S. (or others) if the relevant businessmen actually have the ear of the war-makers. In the U.S., they obviously do, though that's not always the case. British and German businessmen in the 1910's were pretty clearly aware that Norman Angell was right and Great Power war would be an economic disaster. On the other hand, no one was listening to them. (It also wasn't the case for the U.S. in Iraq, or at least some business voices were overridden in favor of others.)

3. It seems to me that the ideal international organizations (sort of like the ideal liberal government, oddly enough) will be able to solve certain collective action problems around the world without becoming too centralized or concentrating governing power too heavily in any one place. Incidentally, the current tug-of-war over the UN and Kofi Annan seems mostly focused on deciding where that center of gravity should sit. But that seems like exactly the wrong way to look at it.

It's not enough that he's the president, no. George W. Bush can actually teach us how to make better small talk in our lives. Fascinating. Personally, I try to vary my greetings up now and again. Usually just sit down one otherwise boring night and hash out how I'm going to greet people that will add a little more pizzazz than "how are you?" So for a while now, it's been a genial "howdy." (Though the lilt's important here, it's more of a "how-dy.") Corny, yeah, but what can you do. But it's time for a change. I've always enjoyed the old days when castle guards would hail each other with a "well met!" but that seems hard to pull off 'round the office. Anyway...

This post is apropos of nothing, really, I'm just kicking around some naïve ideas about international relations (because, uh, I'm too lazy to actually read up on the subject). So here we go. In the 1930s, as they say, Japan started expanding aggressively around the Pacific, seizing territories and resources so that it could be self-sufficient. Why? So that it could capably fight the inevitable war against the United States, of course. But was there any particular reason to think that war with the U.S. was in fact inevitable? No, but it was just assumed that that's what powerful nations do—go to war. And sure enough, the prophecy came true: Japan's aggressive expansion did in fact trigger a war.

At any rate, it's commonplace today to say that the U.S. is dominant in the world. What I think doesn't get asked enough, though, is what all this dominance is actually for? Some policymakers (and maybe theorists) seem to look at American hegemony in the context of those inevitable wars among great powers, as Japan did. Eventually, the thinking goes, we're going to square off against China or Russia or whatnot, and when we do, we want to be ready. Or, better yet, we want to be so damn powerful that we deter that inevitable conflict from ever happening. This first reason for pursuing dominance, I think, is going to lead to a particular sort of dominance.

A second alternative is to say that the U.S. ought to maintain its prime position in the world because that's the most stable configuration of states. Even if we might not ever in fact go to war with China or Russia, or even need to worry about that, we still need to worry about their increased capacity for local action. If their share of world power increases from X percent to X+Y percent, they can cause instability, or exacerbate existing world problems. (As, say, China seems to be doing in Iran and Sudan.)

A third reason for the U.S. to maintain hegemony, which I think is the reason that people like Anne-Marie Slaughter like to focus on, is that it can be used to promote good. Only in a world dominated by the United States can we get international regimes like the WTO or the World Bank that solve collective action problems on economic matters. Only in a world dominated by the United States can we create structures that strengthen the ability of other states to build health, education, law enforcement institutions. Or whatever. The point is that hegemony is only a means to a larger, somewhat utopian end. If this is the reason you prefer, then you shouldn't mind if the U.S. creates or participates in the sort of multilateral institutions that restrain American action, so long as that decrease in freedom comes with an increase in X good.

So okay. It's always worth asking why one thinks the United States needs to maintain its prime position in the world, why it needs to dominate the globe. I've sketched out three possible reasons above, and obviously someone can believe a combination of all or some of them, though usually one will be emphasized. The Pentagon's recently-released National Defense Strategy, I think, emphasizes reason #2, which partly explains its hostility to "international fora". John Bolton probably hews closely to some mangled version of reason #1—i.e. the 1930s Japan theory—which is why he sounds so crazy to liberal internationalists, who mostly prefer to emphasize reason #3 (although they don't always acknowledge it).

Er, at least that's what I think about that for now. Friends often tell me that my IR "theories" are silly and horribly facile, so maybe it's worth studying this stuff in more depth before dithering on any further. But so it goes...

This new blog looks very, very cool.

Since I've still got a little partisan mania left over from the post down below, I thought I'd link to an excellent New York Post piece about how Chuck Schumer is kicking ass as DSCC chair. "When Schumer speaks to Democratic senators during their regular private lunches, his enthusiasm and determination to take the fight aggressively to Republicans in the 2006 elections has gone over well." Yes, just like that.

The debate over putting up pro-life candidates (like Bob Casey, Jr., in PA) is a tricky one, though. It's easy to look at the big picture and think that electing a bunch of popular anti-choice Democrats will at the very least create a Democratic majority to keep Roe v. Wade safe from the hands of activist judges. That's important, true, but there are also a good number of smaller, under-the-radar, issues here—like the fact that there are only a handful of nonmetropolitan abortion providers around nowadays—that really do depend on not electing more pro-life candidates.

I don't know a whole lot about Africa, and I certainly don't know a whole lot about stopping the spread of AIDS. But reading over Nick Kristof's column this morning on how the lack of decent condom policies in Africa has helped fuel the spread of AIDS, a quirky (and harsh) solution occurred to me. Why not make it illegal—punishable by jail time—for men to have sex without a condom, at least in their first encounter with a given partner?

Here in the U.S., I could see all sorts of problems with this sort of policy, not least in that it might make it harder for women to bring rape charges to court ("Yes, your honor, I was coerced into sex even though we, um, used a condom..." is a legitimate argument, but it might not carry water with everyone). But over in Africa, the problem seems so horrific that something drastic needs to happen. One prostitute told Kristof that "that truck drivers pay $1 for sex with a condom or $4 for sex without." Well, what if the price was upped to $4 plus a stint in prison? How many truck drivers would make that offer? Probably the sort of thing that would never pass into law, but still...

"Liberals To Target DeLay in Ads," the headline says. "Hooray!," thinks I, "they're finally going to go hard after this bullshit." But no, that's not what they're doing at all. See for yourself:

The Campaign for America's Future, backed by labor and other liberal leaders, plans to announce today that DeLay will be featured in television ads in at least four Republican House districts. The group said it is buying a 30-second ad in DeLay's suburban Houston district that shows a man wearing cuff links and a Rolex watch, and washing his hands.

"Tom DeLay: He'd like to wash his hands of corruption," the announcer says before recounting charges against the majority leader. "Tom DeLay can't wash his hands of corruption," the ad concludes. "But Congress can certainly wash its hands of Tom DeLay."

The group also plans ads designed to put pressure on Republican members to "stand with DeLay or decency."

I'm sorry, say again? Other Republicans will get a chance to "wash their hands" of DeLay? Ha ha! Cute, but no. Look, last year no one was offering Senate Democrats a chance to "wash their hands" of Tom Daschle. Quite the opposite—the phrase "Daschle Democrats" spread far and wide across the airwaves, during the big push to paint the entire minority party as one giant ball of pure, black-hearted obstructionism. It was dirty, it was lame, it was disgusting, but that's how the fucking game goes. *No one* gets out of here alive!

Seriously, it's useless, entirely useless trying to turn Tom DeLay into a big lightning rod for all the outrage against the House's excesses these days. If that's what happens, he'll be purged in a minute's notice and then absolutely nothing will change. The GOP will just find someone else to do what DeLay does. Roy Blunt can do what DeLay does. The K Street stovepipe will still pump along. The rule-bending and committee-abusing will still go on. House Democrats will still be cut out of the decision-making process. DeLay's just the symptom of a larger disease, and that's how he ought to be treated and portrayed. Hm? Please, please get this right so I don't have to spend all my time being a shrill partisan hack. Thanks.

Holy criminy am I behind on my news reading. Anyway, via some obscure little website known as the New York Times, I see that Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, has made the Americans an offer they really shouldn't refuse: He'll call off his Sunni attack dogs if the U.S. sets a withdrawal date. Splendid! Even if he has made this offer many times before… splendid! Though before we get too gushy, let's take a closer look.

First thing one does when someone makes an offer like this is scrunch the eyes and ask, "Uh, what does this fellow really want?" Here, it seems, al-Dhari might have a couple motives for extending the olive branch:

1. He, like many Muslims in Iraq, is genuinely offended by the U.S. presence there, and fears that we'll never leave. He wants a date and a promise. That's a pretty reasonable concern given that the U.S. is, you know, building a slew of permanent bases around the country. So this is the most charitable interpretation.
   
2. Al-Dhari wants to make himself the undisputed political leader of the Sunnis. As the Times notes, during Saddam Hussein's era, the Sunnis never coalesced into a single communal identity the way the Shiites and Kurds did. By positioning himself as "The man who forced the U.S. out," al-Dhari could gain a good deal of political power and unite his Arab co-religionists once and for all, "Return of the King"-style.
   
3. Al-Dhari wants more leverage if "his" Sunni peers ever do decide to take part in the negotiations over the future of Iraq. That is, if the U.S. were to plan a withdrawal and AMS and other rural/religious Sunnis were then to take part in writing the Iraqi constitution, al-Dhari could always threaten to kick the insurgency back into high gear if he didn't get his demands. Sort of like the Kurds can always threaten to take their 100,000 pesh fighters and secede from Iraq if they don't get their demands. But with the U.S. leaving, such threats from al-Dhari would carry a lot more force.
   
4. This is the first step in a slippery slope towards faster U.S. withdrawal. That is, say the U.S. strikes a deal with al-Dhari and declares that we'll withdraw in two years (say). Now imagine the insurgency doesn't actually let up over the next (say) three months. Al-Dhari can say that he's working in good faith to stem the insurgents, but the U.S. will just have to speed up the withdrawal if they want to see any progress...

None of these possibilities, though, are good reasons for the U.S. not to take al-Dhari up on his offer. Even if the Association of Muslim Scholars only represents or speaks for a fraction of the insurgency—and I think they do—it seems obvious that their participation in the new government will help turn a wide swath of Sunni sympathizers against the insurgents. Setting a withdrawal date could spark that change of heart.

On the other hand, I also wonder what al-Dhari's "offer" would really entail. One of the radical Sunni clerics in Baghdad interpreted it this way: "We do not insist that the Americans withdraw at once, as long as they stay in their bases and cease to marginalize our political life." Stay in their bases? That would be unacceptable to the U.S. Without the ability to go out and patrol around, the occupation forces would have no way of breaking up insurgent sanctuaries, which means the insurgents would grow considerably stronger. (Though the foreign jihadists probably couldn't build Afghanistan-style training camps; not so long as the U.S. Air Force can bomb anything that moves.)

Nor, for that matter, would the coalition forces have any way of slowing the ongoing crime wave, or deterring the hundreds of small militias, gangs, and tribal forces rampaging the streets. (Right now, it's these amateur thugs, and not the organized insurgency, that are doing the bulk of the damage in Iraq and undermining the legitimacy of the new government.) Iraq would very quickly start to look like Afghanistan, under the rule of gun—moreso than it is now. Look at how the British are "keeping order" down in Basra for a good example of this.

If there's any way of juggling all of these concerns, the U.S. should of course try to pursue the withdrawal option. But it doesn't look easy. Keep in mind, too, that according to some Iraqi experts on the Sunnis, like Rashid al-Khuyun, many of the al-Anbar tribesmen want nothing to do with a new unified Iraqi government. They despised Saddam Hussein (well, those aside from Saddam's own Al-bu Nasir tribe and its immediate allies) and it's likely that they will despise any Shi'ite-Kurdish government. Now, many observers expect that as soon as the "moderate" Sunnis like Harith al-Dhari come on board and join the government, then the only people left to fight against will be ex-Baathists and foreign jihadis. But that might not be true. The problem is no one really knows which Sunnis want what.

Quick request: Does anyone know of a good, pretty thorough introduction—i.e. book/article/series of articles—on game theory? Maybe this question is clumsy and imprecise, like asking if anyone knows a good introduction to "policy," but I have no idea because frankly I know jack crap about the topic. So a good intro, preferably with an economics focus? It can be math-intensive, I can take it, but also wouldn't mind something a bit, um, lighter. (The last two math classes I took were on... algebraic combinatorics and differential geometry, but that was well over a year ago and I'm quite rusty.)

Feel free to comment or my e-mail's listed over to the right. Thanks in advance!

Matthew Yglesias makes a very good point here:

Medicare policy is not only complicated, and difficult, but deadly boring. Devising a workable proposal that would control spiraling costs in a smart way would be very hard. In fact, it would be beyond the capacity of pretty much every pundit in town. Indeed, I doubt that 85 percent of the bloviators out there could even comprehend a reasonable proposal if it was put before them. 90 percent of the remainder are simply too lazy to do it.

Politicians fail to implement such reforms for a bunch of reasons, but one important reason among them is that it's genuinely hard to figure out what we should do. Rather than acknowledge any of this, however, the opinion elite prefers to simply call for "courage" and "pain."

Yes, yes, the next pundit who points out, without solutions, that politicians are too cowardly to fix Medicare ought to be strung up by his or her (well, usually his) thumbs. *Dusts off hands.* So that takes care of that. The next step, then, is even more important: Stop the op-ed gang from spilling more ink arguing that Medicare is some over-gorged monster entitlement that needs both drastic gutting and hacking into bits (just one won't do) lest it bloat out of control and suffocate the whole economy.

That's sad and, I think, misguided. If anything, Medicare should be the model of what's right with health care in America, and a basis for how to address broader health care issues (the two are connected issues, after all). And, yes, I'm serious. Consider: The program has controlled costs far better than the private sector over the past two decades. Its administrative overhead is tiny. Enrollees love it, even though they get relatively modest benefit packages. And so on. The big "criticisms" of Medicare in vogue among the Beltway—"oh no it doesn't encourage enough private competition!"—are sometimes vaguely interesting, but the best of them usually involve tweaks rather than a fundamental reworking of the system's structure. (Back in the late '90s, when pundits actually were coming up with interesting proposals for Medicare, Matt Miller wrote up a good proposal for introducing "premium support" into the program, though I think the way Medicare already employs the private sector (except for drug coverage) is the right place to start. More on that some other time.)

At any rate, the Medicare model needs a bit of polish, yes, but the basic model itself is sounder than people think. It's not broken. Of course its costs will rise over the next few decades—the country is aging, people want more health care, what does one expect?—but that's something we can certainly pay for if we so choose. A key part of the debate, then, should be over whether we do want to so choose or not.

Oh, and one other thing: A few months ago, Ted Kennedy proposed that we expand Medicare for all Americans. Like quite a few of Kennedy's ideas, this was actually a good one, but because it was Ted Kennedy, "moderate" opinion leaders assumed there was something scandalously wrong with the proposal and steered clear or recoiled in disgust. Too bad. Yale professor Jacob Hacker has put out a more modest version (pdf) of this idea, and his is very good too. But these things are never going to get discussed sensibly so long as wholesale "bashing" of Medicare (as antiquated, as out of control) remains cool.

Not going to get into the merits of the new "Future Combat Systems" proposal that the Pentagon's cooking up right now. That's a post for another day. For now, there are far, far more urgent matters to attend to, namely Kevin Drum's misguided praise for Donald Rumsfeld:

But whatever else you can say about Don Rumsfeld, one of his undoubted virtues is that he possesses the kind of bullheadedness it takes to force change on a recalcitrant military bureaucracy.

But no! He doesn't! He can't! Okay, deep breath. Recall back to 2001. Rumsfeld swept into the Pentagon expecting to usher in the newfangled "Revolution in Military Affairs." New weapons, new management priorities, new missions, all of these very cool things were supposed to help Rumsfeld and his gang restructure and revamp the Pentagon's budget and take the military in a bold new direction. New, new, new. And indeed, Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone and the rest ended up angering a lot of the top military personnel and marching all over various finely-polished boot toes, so naturally, the press assumed that the civilian leadership was actually carrying out all those sweeping changes.

Sadly, 'twas not to be. Last fall, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments took a look (PDF) at the FY2005 budget and found that "the administration's defense plan fairly closely resembles those of the previous years, and the plan it inherited from the Clinton administration." There was a heap more money for missile defense and a few other nifty high-tech gadgets, but that's about it, nothing else had really changed. Each of the services (Army, Navy, Air Force), it seems, managed quite nicely to resist the budget axe, halting the revolution in its tracks. Rumsfeld fought the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy won.

Since Blogger doesn't really work for me here at the office, here's some good afternoon reading...

From RAND: How Goes the "War on Drugs"? (Not very well, it seems.)

From Survival: Five Bad Options for Iraq

And on a non-war note, I forget who linked to it first, but this post on depression, motherhood, and the social construction of mental illness is easily the best thing I've read all day. So, enjoy!

UPDATE: Ah yes, clearing out the DocuTicker backlogs. In honor of M.G.M. vs. Grokster today, here's a grand one: "The Political, Social and Economic Benefits of Peer-to-Peer Communications Networks" (PDF). Long study, but the 7-page issue brief in front is worth reading... Right, then. I'm going to go log on Kazaa and, um, take a peek around.

Scandal! Julie Saltman admits to liking Starbucks. But secretly, I agree with her. Yay Starbucks! They pay their workers well, so we're not talking about the Wal-Mart of coffee beaneries, and I can allay my bleeding-heart guilt for a bit (just a bit). Plus, their regular run-of-the-mill coffee has far, far more caffeine than any of the competition, except for maybe the old days of McDonald's (from what I remember, McD's used to superheat their water to eke more caffeine out of the beans, but that ended when a lady burned her thighs and (rightly) filed suit). So for someone like me, who would inject caffeine directly if I could, ends up drinking 4-5 cups a day before 2pm, and has poor tastebuds, it's a fantastic deal!

Um, I guess in theory it's a bit ridiculous to see two of them across the street from each other, as was the case when I lived in Harlem a few years ago, but whatever, most of the independent cafes that Starbucks cluster-bombs into submission are small, cramped, and pay peas for wages. And yes, yes, those "inspirational" slogans creep me out and the music is often grating (I love Norah Jones too, but come on...) but sorry, the caffeine quotient wins me over every time.

Although, having second thoughts about the post below… I'm also a bit wary of Allawi running Interior, by way of making a more important point about Iraq.

Basically, there's an aspect of this great nation-building scheme in Iraq that no one pays attention to. At the moment, Iraq's Ministries of Defense and Interior are supposed to be neutral technocratic organizations. The reasons for this are pretty clear-cut: back in the old days, the ministries were all run by Baathist military officers handpicked by Saddam and friends, which created the nerve center for Iraq's old military state.

The alternative, today, is to fill the ministries with career civil service officers who are independent, professional civilians. Unfortunately, right now, the Ministry of Interior is a pretty corrupt place—Falah al-Naqib (right), an Allawi ally and ex-Baathist, has installed his cousins and brothers and former associates in high positions. From what I've heard, it's not a transparent, well-functioning place at all. No wonder the UIA Shiites are pissed and want to clear it out once they come to power. Of course, the Shiites might just make things worse; it's hard to say.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense is doing better (the Defense Minister isn't allowed to give his cronies plum positions)—though international expertise is still very much needed in training and structuring the ministry's civil service ranks. Again, you want the place run by civilians, with a clear chain of command from military leaders up to the civilian Defense Minister to the security cabinet. You want the security forces divided equally among different security ministers, so that there's no one all-powerful minister. You want to establish quite clearly the limits and checks on executive war power. I'm not sure all of this has been done; there's been scandalously little reporting on the matter. But it's probably even more important, as far as the future of Iraq is concerned, than getting those security forces trained.

The Boston Globe reports that the violence in Iraq has lately been revolving less and less around the Sunni insurgency we've all come to know and love, and more and more around ethnic/sectarian violence: Sunnis v. Shiites and Kurds. Sunni sheikhs are calling for inter-Iraqi war. Shiite death squads are doing what death squads do. And then there's Kirkuk... Fuck. And yes, these are the critical signs to watch, even more than headlines saying "Americans kill X insurgents" or "Guerillas blow up Y Marines."

Also wonder if it might not be best for Iyad Allawi to have his way and keep running Iraq's security forces, rather than handing the Ministry of Interior over to the Shiites, who would probably get those Shiite militias more heavily involved in counterinsurgency. Y'know, on the assumption that internecine death-squadding is not a good thing.

Right then, a late night Easter Sunday post... Sadly, Rich Lowry is mostly correct in his riff on why today's Democrats are still struggling with the religion issue:

Dean, who used to be famously uncomfortable talking about religion, is trying his best. But the effort behind his trying shows, which gives his religious references an off-key feel. A few weeks ago Dean compared Republicans to the rules-obsessed Pharisees and the Sadducees, pretty deep biblical allusions for someone who not too long ago thought the Book of Job was in the New Testament. You can imagine the briefing for Dean prior to this statement: "Mr. Chairman, it's pronounced — now repeat after me — 'sad'ue-seez, sad'-ue-seez.' Got it?"

That's wince-inducing, because it's right on target. Look, friends, there's very much an open question as to whether Democrats actually need to expand their outreach towards religious voters (who already, note, make up some 80 percent of the Democratic electorate)—many think yes, many think no. Nevertheless, the Democrats seem to have settled on "yes" lately, in which case they may as well go about this the right way. It's not the case that the Democrats need to "get religion," in the sense that largely secular politicians like Dean need to start talking about it more and making the "right" allusions and looking comfortable doing it. It's that the Democrats need to find candidates and public figures who actually are religious people, in the sense that they have political worldviews informed by faith.

Here's what I mean. In 2004, as we all know, John Kerry ran for president. It was clear that he had policies and ideas and a sense of how to govern. (Hold the guffaws, please.) It was also clear, at least to those not warped by Kerry-hatred, that he was a man of strong faith. What wasn't clear, though, even to me, was whether or not his faith actually informed his policies and ideas and sense of how to govern. In truth, probably not. During one of the debates, when Kerry quoted James 2 and said, "What does it mean, my brother, to say you have faith if there are no deeds?," he was obviously trying to put the fight against poverty in religious terms, and that's noble enough. But people aren't dumb: it looked to many like he was tacking a biblical quote on to a worldview he had arrived at long ago. (That's what I assumed.) There's a big difference.

Now it's easy to retort here by saying: "Well, Bush fakes his faith too!" Maybe he does, I don't know. But even if he's faking it, he's obviously convinced a lot of people. The answer isn't for Democrats to try to "fake it" better, but to get the real thing. Obviously, here on the largely secular internet, that scares a lot of people—many of the DailyKos posts offer a legion of tips on how to "fake it"—but genuine liberal faith has existed in the past. Look no further than Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement.

The other retort here is that we don't want religious Democrats—i.e. Dems whose politics are sincerely informed by religion—because those folks would be scary theocrats. That's wrong, though, and I'll give an example. Around this fine internet community, I almost always start off my blog-reading days by clicking on over to Body and Soul, and I know of no more powerful expression of liberal faith than on that site. I actually have no idea what religion Jeanne follows (if any), or how frequently she attends church or whatever, but that just doesn't matter. The point is that it's obvious that her compassion and moral sensitivity—for lack, unfortunately, of a better term—genuinely comes from something larger than individual preferences or party ideology or some abstract philosophy. And, I think, that makes much of her writing inspiring even to someone like me, who hasn't gone to church in years and may well never go back and certainly doesn't think you need faith to have morality. Still, I find her writing quite inspiring. And I know more than a few people in real life, liberal people, who have a similar outlook.

In the end, though, the politics here are murky to me. Maybe some of the quite-obviously-strained religious positioning by Dean and other Democrats will work. Maybe not. It would be helpful to know whom exactly, the Democrats are trying to reach that they can't reach in any other way. Moderate Catholics and evangelicals, presumably. Okay, but I can't imagine there's any subset of these voters that won't vote Democrat until they hear Howard Dean make a few more biblical allusions. Most people are bright enough to see whether a politician's worldview is sincerely informed by faith or not; faking this stuff is hard.

It's right to think that moderate religious voters don't vote solely on "religious issues" (which tends nowadays to mean abortion, gay marriage, etc.), but it's also right to think these voters might want to see a politician guided by a faith larger than him/herself. Dean, Kerry, Edwards—these folks just couldn't do that. Maybe Bill Clinton could, I don't remember. But let's please, please stop using Clinton as the model everyone should follow. Dude was a supremely gifted speaker campaigning in a uniquely peaceful era who happened to win two bizarre three-way elections. Look to the present, please.

Oh! P.S. Speaking personally, no, I actually don't think the Democrats need to get more faith-savvy to win elections, at least not in the short term. There are many paths to victory, other swing voters to capture, etc. In the long-term, though, and as a matter of building a broad-based coalition of Americans for various progressive reforms, they might, especially as the stigma against voting Republican gradually fades away among Hispanics and African-Americans. But that's another post entirely.

Fun headline from yesterday's Washington Post: "Conservatives Split on Debate Over Curbing Illegal Immigration." Well fun headline if you like watching GOP infighting. Or if you're interested in immigration. Or if you think "curbing" is a bizarre word. Otherwise, maybe not all that fun. Moving on, though, there seems to be some real confusion about immigration from some of my fellow Californians:

House Rules Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) got a jolt during his 2004 reelection campaign, when radio hosts in his outer Los Angeles district decided to make him a "political human sacrifice" for his immigration views, Dreier said, accusing him, among other things, of advocating Social Security benefits for illegal immigrants.

"I said to myself, nobody's going to believe I want to give Social Security checks to people who are here illegally," Dreier recalls.

Let's clear this up. Most immigrants—and because it's California, "immigrants" means "Mexican/Central American immigrants", mostly—don't receive Social Security, of course. How's that? Because most of them end up moving back to Mexico (or Central America) before they retire. Now, it's true that immigrants from Europe, etc., can work here a number of years, pay payroll taxes, and when they retire receive some contribution from the United States in the form of a pension check, even if they move back home. Not Mexico or Central America, though, because we've never signed totalization agreements with those countries.

So, many Mexican/Central American immigrants who work here shell out taxes for Social Security, but never get a single cent back. (The U.S. Treasury has no way of keeping track of the actual figures here, but it's a lot of money.) Same goes for those much-maligned illegal immigrants who happen to pay payroll taxes (though many don't, since they're for obvious reasons kept off payroll). Spelled out real slow for the kids in Dreier's hood: Border-hopping immigrants strengthen the system, not weaken it. That's why boosting immigration, which is great for many other reasons, improves Social Security's long-term balance.

Now there's an interesting question as to how this will all change if privatization ever passes. Presumably, the instant you start putting money into a private account, that money is yours. Entonces, most Mexican immigrants will actually start receiving something from Social Security—namely, the amount they accumulate in their private accounts—even if they never receive retirement benefits.

Alas, the White House is still too Cowardly Lion-ish to put forward an actual plan on Social Security, so I can't figure out how the actual mechanisms would work here, but it seems that under privatization, immigrants put a bigger drain on the system than they do now, get more out of it, and there's a very real possibility that illegal immigrants could get private accounts as well (with false documents, say). Those aren't reasons the why I oppose privatization, obviously, but I dunno, maybe folks in Dreier's district might like to hear about all this.

American military leaders in Iraq are, understandably enough, trying to play up the successes of Iyad Allawi's security forces against that dastardly Sunni insurgency. But Swopa notices some interesting ulterior motives to all of this: If and when the Shiite majority finally forms a government and comes to power, they're probably going to start purging elements of the current Allawi regime. U.S. leaders would rather this didn't happen, since he's our buddy and all, so they're trying to convince Iraqis that Allawi's security forces are entirely crucial for victory against the baddies. More to the point, the U.S. is worried that the Shiites will sweep in and put in place their own militias as the backbone of Iraq's new security service. Which could mean sectarian violence, etc. etc. So it's hype for Allawi's crew!

That all seems plausible. On a related note, last week I wrote up a quick article for MoJo on why we really ought to have better metrics on Iraqi troop training. That's still very true, but nevertheless, it seems there could be a number of political reasons for the U.S. not to put out that sort of hard data. Perhaps, for instance, the Pentagon wants to have the final say over when the U.S. stays or leaves, and if there was concrete statistical proof that Iraq was actually stabilizing, the Pentagon would lose control over when to leave. Or, alternatively, the U.S. is trying to navigate inter-Iraqi politics, as per Swopa, and good, hard facts would only interfere with our propaganda abilities. Very tricky.

Aha! So it looks like the Bush administration is trying to reach out to the political opposition in Syria, perhaps preparing for the possibility that Bashar Assad's regime might, ahem, topple one of these days. Or, also likely, if the hawkish Syria reports streaming out of neo-con think tanks like WINEP are any indication, perhaps the Bush administration is trying to figure out ways to promote a nifty little coup in Damascus. Oy. But okay, let's do this...

In an ideal world, there's little I'd like more than to see Bashar's regime fall. It's corrupt, it's ruthless, it sucks. Sadly, though, we don't live in an ideal world, and the collapse of the Alawite ruling party would, at least right now, very likely bring violence among various sectarian groups, infighting among the security services, revenge against the former regime, blood and guts on the streets, etc. etc. (In 1983, when former president Hafiz al-Assad fell gravely ill, militias took to the street ready to go to war over who would succeed him. Luckily Hafiz recovered and averted a crisis, but that's your foreshadowing...) Not only that, but the U.S. knows next nothing about the internal workings of Syria; its politics, social dynamics, ethnic rivalries, the popularity of Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. To put things in perspective, recall how wonderfully little the U.S. knew about the inner structure of Iraq; and even there we at least had exile groups like the INC and INA, not to mention our Kurdish pals, giving us some information. In Syria, nothing.

Basically, a coup would be a disaster, and it's not at all clear that the Syria Reform Party, which is the group we're reaching out to, could rise from the ashes here and lead Syria into a bold new era of pro-American democratic nirvana. More likely, the Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood—whose Syrian branch is far more radicalized than the Egyptian version (and, quite honestly, poorer and less well-educated)—would take power, though before that happens, the possibility of civil war or serious interconfessional violence seems like a safe bet. Unless we can get actual intelligence telling us otherwise, it's a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea. You know?

Right then. So how does one go about promoting reform in Damascus? Wish I knew. But a few thoughts...

It's worth noting, I think, that the Bush administration shouldn't treat Syria as at all analogous to Jordan or Egypt or Bahrain, etc. The latter countries, note, have all liberalized their economies to some extent, but more importantly, they've all provided at least some venues for a political opposition. True, the political opposition is managed, mostly impotent, and channeled off into harmless holding pens, but the opposition exists. It gets to bitch. And eventually, in theory, that opposition could come to power by fairly peaceful means. Syria, by contrast, is far more authoritarian, and the ruling 'Alawi sect hasn't shared power with any other ethnic or political group (except for parts of the minority Christian community, but even then, not really).

Suffice to say that the largely Sunni opposition in Syria is mighty pissed off. Effective political reform, then, won't simply be a matter of legalizing political parties and holding freer elections, as it more or less is in, say, Bahrain and Qatar. Nor will it be a more incremental matter of building civil society, legalizing political parties, and revamping the constitution, as is probably the case in Jordan and Egypt. No, Syria's even further back on the progress scale, and over the last four years Bashar has proven that he doesn't know how to open the door to reform without the Sunni opposition storming the streets and demanding that he open the flood-gates. He doesn't know how to gently co-opt the opposition as Egypt and Jordan have, to some extent, done. (Obviously the regimes Egypt and Jordan don't wear kid gloves here, and both have cracked down ruthlessly on their own Islamists and opponents; but there's a real difference here.)

So the alternatives to political reform are all-out bloody revolution, or, perhaps, China-style economic liberalization without political change. On the latter front, though, Bashar has had a difficult time carrying out the economic changes he promised in 2000 (and again last year), either because of inter-government power struggles, or because of corruption, or because Bashar is ineffective, or because the ruling Alawites genuinely fear giving other ethnic/sectarian groups a slice of the economic pie, or some or all of those things. Meanwhile, privatizing Syria's economy will lead to, quite understandably, a lot of domestic turmoil. It's very possible that right now, with Syrians of all stripes rallying around Bashar and against the United States, the Syrian president might have more leeway to undertake reforms, but I wonder.

If you ask me, it seems that economic liberalization could happen if Syria and the U.S. worked together—just as the U.S. and China have worked together over the past twenty years to moderately good effect. Maybe that's the way to go. There's no real reason why Syria and the U.S. should be foes. But getting friendly with Bashar is not going to happen, of course. Not with this White House. So instead it seems we'll get more U.S. saber-rattling, which may do nothing but push Bashar to tighten his grip even further on Syria. Josh Landis, a Syria expert who's doing some grand reporting from Damascus, seems to think that Bashar is quite strong and going about the grand game of consolidating his power very nicely, thank you. So the muddled "regime change" strategy the White House is no doubt tossing on the grill right now could end up being the same failed sort of thing we've tried before—see e.g. North Korea, Iran, Libya. (Yes, yes, so we disarmed Libya. Political reforms, though? Nope.) There's not a clear answer here, though, not in the slightest.

UPDATE: Sources? Do I have any? Do I use any? Do I just talk out of my ass? Well, yes. But for a bunch of good scholarly references on Syria, see this page. A bit of a slog, most of it, but quality stuff.

Continue reading "Regime Change, Syria Edition"

Of course it's bad for a kid to grow up in a single-parent family, right? Er, no. "[T]he great majority of children brought up in single-parent families do well. In particular, differences in well-being between children from divorced and those from intact families, tend, on average, to be moderate to small." This and more fascinating research from Trish Wilson here.

I'm not planning on posting too much today—at least that's the plan—because I have to sack through the new three-gazillion page biography of John Kenneth Galbraith so that I can review it, get that over with, and never have to worry about it again. As they say in Richard III, "Cursed be the heart that had the heart to do it!" Or something. Anyway, back on task... I have a short attention span, so I was clicking around the New Yorker's site a few minutes ago, and found a fun article by Ken Auletta on the decline of advertising. Do read.

But I wonder… at least within some industries, like the pharmaceutical industry, critics have blamed the lack of any real drug innovation on the rise of advertising. Something like, of the 78 drugs the FDA approved in 2002, only a handful had new active ingredients, and only a smaller handful were real improvements over older drugs. The rest were just variations on existing themes. But of course, it doesn't matter so long as the big drug companies can market the shit out of their "me-too" drugs. Profits will still rise, even without innovation, so what do they care?

But let's say Auletta's right and eventually advertising will reach a point of seriously diminishing returns. It's just too hard for a company to distinguish itself these days, what with billions of TV channels, media over-saturation, the ability of consumers to enjoy media without commercials (TiVo, .mp3 pirating, etc.) (There's a question of whether advertisers will be able to track consumers' internet habits and win them over that way, but Auletta quotes Yahoo's chief of sales dashing this hope a bit. Besides, eventually you'd still get over-saturation.)

Anyway, if that's all true, perhaps a day will come when real innovation is clearly the best way to capture the market and make profits—since you can only fight to parity, at best, on the marketing front—and hence R&D spending will rise once more. Happy thought! Alternatively, though, it could be the case that companies will continue to delude themselves into thinking that they can win the great advertising rat race, and so they all pour even more money into ads, even though that's not money well spent (i.e. they would be better off allocating resources to R&D). The answer, then, is that firms are irrational in some respects and hence, more government R&D spending is necessary. Bah. There are probably clever economic models that get at all this, but I don't know where to get them, or how to use them. Back to Galbraith...

Aha! Josh Marshall finds potential hypocrisy among the GOP:

Grover Norquist, quoted in the Post: "Advocates of using federal power to keep this woman [i.e. who do you think?] alive need to seriously study the polling data that's come out on this. I think that a lot of conservative leaders assumed there was broader support for saying that they wanted to have the federal government save this woman's life."

If this is really about 'sav[ing] this woman's life' why look at the polling data?

Except this isn't true hypocrisy, because it's Grover Norquist, and Grover Norquist just doesn't care. Sex, divorce, pulling plugs on vegetative patients, whatever, Norquist has always been fine with it! The issues concern him only insofar as they encroach on his ability to assemble a GOP majority that can cut lots and lots of taxes. And right now, it seems, he's worried that the Terry Schiavo case is encroaching—which... is interesting.

From what I remember of Gang of Five, Nina Easton's book about the conservative movement, Norquist's view has always been that the vast majority of the country basically agrees with various Republican views, and the key to victory is holding together enough constituencies to get to 51 percent on election day. And so, the reasoning goes, the GOP shouldn't try to do anything, like try to shove a feeding tube down Terry Schiavo's throat, that might upset other constituents in that majority (like small government conservatives). Basically, polling data and coalition-juggling are everything.

Meanwhile, other Republican leaders—Easton used Bill Kristol as an example here, though I think it applies better to others today—believe that conservative views don't have any sort of majority in this country. So they need to convince and persuade a lot of people to come to their side, which is of course a long-term project. And sometimes, it seems, that strategy involves taking a hugely unpopular stand, if only to reinforce the view that the GOP stands up for what it believes in, no matter the cost. Even if most voters don't share that perception now, eventually they'll forget about this whole Schiavo incident, but remember that Republicans stood firm. At least that's the theory. (In other words, I don't think it's merely the case that the GOP leadership got dragged haplessly this fray by a bunch of extra-frothy religious conservatives, as the big Post story today suggests; to some extent they know what they're doing, or think they know.)

Just a quick thought while I try to shuffle off this mortal coil of work this afternoon. Ezra Klein recently read The System—David Broder's classic account of the failure of health care reform in 1993—and concluded that the system is, in fact, not conducive to large-scale reform. That certainly wasn't the impression I got when I read the book a while back; it mostly just seemed that the Clintons flubbed a major policy debate, and Ira Magaziner utterly screwed the pooch in his efforts to craft reform legislation. Likewise, looking at the phase-out debate today, there's no systematic reason why the privatizers should be flailing. They could have gone about this project all differently and be in a strong position right now to phase out Social Security as desired. But they didn't, so they're not. In the interests of hackdom, I won't say what those alternative steps that they could've taken are, at least not until the Republicans are firmly entrenched in minority status come 2007.

But here's what I'd like to know. Back in 1993, of course, a few Republicans did have their own alternative plans for health care, but slowly retracted them once they decided that it was in their best interest to obstruct at all costs, a position that hardened around January '94. Bob Dole even decided to vote against his own health care proposal (the one co-sponsored with Chaffee pere) to this end. But did the media ever put pressure on them to offer a serious alternative plan? In '94, Dole and the GOP started chanting over and over that there was no health care crisis in America, even though most Americans disagreed. Did the TV talking heads ever accuse Bob Dole of sticking his head in the sand, carping and carping without any real ideas of his own?

Looking through Nexis, I can't find much. There's Howard Kurtz slamming the attack dogs for offering "no alternative" on 2/13/94. Interestingly, on 2/2/94 William Schneider got on CNN to say that if the Republicans kept digging their heels in the dirt, they'd run the danger of looking like "obstructionists." (Quoth Schneider: "So they're in a bind.") But the GOP, of course, didn't suffer any backlash for being obstructionists—which offers a sound example for any Democrat today thinking about offering a compromise on Social Security for political reasons.

Anyway, I'll have to go through this in more detail later (or, if someone wants to beat me to the punch, go for it) and hopefully write something up for MoJo, but I'd like to know a) if the media was urging the GOP in 1994 to compromise as heavily as they're urging the Democrats to compromise today, and b) if there was a similarly heavy urging, how did the GOP manage to beat the obstructionist rap in '94?

UPDATE: Heh. From US News & World Report, 2/7/94:

Yet Clinton himself enjoys some significant political advantages as the battle begins. As he demonstrated last week, the president can command public attention in ways that no opponent can begin to match. And his sympathy for the fears of ordinary Americans connects with voters and echoes their own concerns. For that reason, many Republican strategists are aghast at the new line of some GOP leaders that there is ''no crisis" in the health care system. That argument, says Vin Weber, a former GOP congressman, ''just reinforces the image of flint-hearted Republicans," the same image that helped cost George Bush the 1992 election. Celinda Lake agrees: ''I hope we get every Republican candidate saying there is no crisis -- on tape."

Julie Saltman notices that, in certain legal circles, it's still cool to claim that some women are "just asking" for rape. Important issue, so go read. Also of related interest (not directly related, though it was prompted by one of Julie's links) might be a post I wrote at MoJo this morning, expressing a bit of unease over the emerging Democratic "compromise" on abortion. Was planning to do a longer post on this, but will settle on the short version for now.

Okay, thanks to Roxanne (whose blog has a freaky new logo), let's all do the map fun:




Growing up in Asia obviously helps out a lot here, though if I count countries I've actually lived in for a decent amount of time, I can only claim Japan (14 years), New Zealand (one month) and Ireland (three months). Well, plus the motherland. Also, I really ought to get more Southern Hemisphere action.

On the other hand, I'll refrain from doing a similar map with the United States, since I really haven't visited a lot of places here. Plus, I'm always uncertain whether the fact that I've driven through Nebraska (and maybe stopped at a local diner for some mashed potato-oriented dinner) really counts as "visiting". Certainly I was trying to speed through the state as quickly as possible.

Someone forget to send me my special issue blogger tea leaves for Kyrgyzstan, so, you know, I have no way of predicting what's going to happen there now that the revolution's come to town. Robert Mayer has some interesting things to say, though, both a bit of optimism as well as evidence that the opposition leaders—interim PM Kurmanbek Bakiyev and Felix Kulov—may turn out to be no less hardline than the outgoing guy. But so it goes.

By the by, this longer World Affairs essay on "Democratic prospects in Central Asia," might be of interest (short summary: they're bleak, those prospects), though annoyingly the author doesn't get into specifics about each country.

Admittedly, I don't write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a whole lot, not for lack of interest or even for fear of inviting a shitstorm. It's just that trying to make predictions or analyze what's going to happen next, or whatever else pundits are supposed to do, really requires following Israeli (and Palestinian) politics fairly obsessively. And there's no time for that, at least in these quarters. So the only other option is: "Well, they've been fighting for so long, you know, and these latest developments sure look promising but gosh, who knows..." and I'd rather not run that sort of blog.

But it's fair and semi-banal to say that the key question over the next few months, as the peace process supposedly unfolds, will be: What does Ariel Sharon want? (Indeed, even though far more profiles of Mahmoud Abbas have been written lately, he seems like the less enigmatic figure here.) Some say Sharon has no interest in giving the Palestinians any more than 50 percent of the West Bank, and that his unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was an obvious ploy toward this end. Others think he's a pragmatist who isn't all that keen on the big Zionist dream. And still others think he's just a flunkey for George W. Bush and will do whatever the U.S. wants him to do, really. All of these theories sound plausible to me, just like a lot of theories about George Bush might sound plausible to a German who doesn't really pick through the Washington Post each and every day, but, um, who knows...

Anyway, that was all a longer-than-necessary preface for linking to this new MERIP essay on Israel-Palestine by Gary Sussman that's worth a peek. Sussman thinks Sharon is trying to get to stage two of the "road map"—creating a provisional Palestinian state that includes up to 80 percent of the West Bank—but will then try to avoid going any further. The devious hope here is that reaching step two will essentially reduce the conflict to a humdrum dispute over borders (there are, after all, dozens of such disputes all over the world) rather than the national liberation issue it is today. So, Sharon wins. Okay, we've heard this before, but then Sussman goes the extra step, suggesting that Sharon is also actively trying to create a situation wherein Palestine merges with Jordan. My understanding is that Sharon's vision on this isn't entirely implausible, especially if Jordan ever hops on the Bush-doctrine bandwagon, and opens the gates of democracy to its Palestinian majority. Then we'll see what's up.

Er, so read the piece.

Reading Lawrence Kaplan on Iraq reminded me of an odd grammar puzzle. Sez Kaplan:

The question, then… is, when and if things turn out well in Iraq, will journalists even be able to recognize it?

Why do people say "if and when"? (Or, in Kaplan's case, "when and if".) "If..." and "when..." are two entirely different logical/grammatical constructs, and the whole point of saying "if" is that there might not be a "when." Clearly both won't always pertain, so it should be "if or when." But people don't say that. Why?

UPDATE: Good cases for and against in comments. For the record, that lord of usage, H.W. Fowler, said back in 1908: "This formula has enjoyed more popularity than it deserves," and then dissects it. Splendid! Meanwhile, the olumbia Guide to Standard English says that charges of "faulty parallelism" against the phrase are "unwarranted". (But why?) You could also argue that it's a redundant way of speaking. My solution: Use "in the event that..."

Tony Blair's taking some heat over in Britain. And let this be a lesson to politicians everywhere to never, ever appear on daytime TV:

Marion Baxter, a nurse, asked [Tony Blair], point blank, if he would be prepared to clean patients' backsides for $9 an hour. On another issue, Maria Hutchings, a homemaker, advanced on him across the studio, proclaiming, "That's rubbish, Tony." Debra Kroll, a midwife, told him, "We asked you not to go to war," and demanded an apology for invading Iraq. (He did not give one.)

Cheers to Debra and Maria! But I think Marion here is being a tad unfair. All things being equal, one would prefer Tony Blair not to be prepared to clean patients' backsides, since he ought to have his mind focused on the task at hand, i.e. running the country. Meanwhile, I do a lot of editing here in the office during the day, and right now I'm not at all prepared to teach a classroom full of 4th graders—even though I've done that sort of thing before—but that doesn't mean I don't care about teachers, or that I can't write and think about education. Nor does it mean I can't relate to teachers. Basically, it means nothing at all.

Anyway, this whole notion that leaders must be regular folks or have the common touch seems a bit overrated. Certainly policymakers shouldn't be just regular folks, at least to the extent that they're thinking about policy and balancing a whole bunch of competing demands and abstract concerns. A prime minister or president, on the other hand, maybe needs to convince voters and/or the daytime TV crowd that he/she has their best interests at heart, and maybe saying "Yes, I'm ready to wipe some asses!" is the best way to do that, but really, it's an odd way to prove you care.

Okay, okay, so I've finished reading through the CAP's "Plan for a Healthy America." See my preliminary comments in the two posts below. Basically, this is a Frankenstein approach—trying to patch together Medicaid, employer-based coverage, and expand the FEHB—that has a lot of serious flaws. That said, the system we have right now has a lot of serious flaws. Worse flaws, in fact. So if the CAP's plan passed into law, and if it could be implemented for a mere $100-$160 billion a year, then the United States would have a much, much better health care system than the one we currently have. Monumentally better. Astronomically better. Et cetera. (And for those gulping hard at the costs, don't be delusional: any plan that involves covering America's 50 million uninsured is going to cost at least $100 billion, minimum. There's no way around that, no matter what the president has told you.)

Now, that may seem like a good thing. Who doesn't love better health care than what we have now? And indeed, the CAP's plan is more likely to pass than any single-payer proposal, since it's less radical. So, the argument might go, even if the single-payer approach might be better overall—just assume this for the sake of argument—liberals should prefer to get something enacted than to dream big and get nothing, right? Well, maybe. On the other hand, if the CAP plan ever passed, that would effectively kill any hope of ever enacting a truly radical and comprehensive health care reform plan. From here on out, the U.S. health care system would be based on Medicaid, Medicare, employer-based coverage, and individual tax credits. In other words, a mess. So it might be better to "dream big" rather than "go realistic." But if you wait for perfection, in the meantime 50 million people suffer without health insurance. 50 million...

Then there are the politics of simply proposing this sort of thing. Should the Democrats start touting this approach as "their" plan for health care? Can they win elections this way? Better yet, are they more likely to win elections by flogging the CAP plan, or by flogging a big, starry-eyed truly radical reform? That I can't answer, though I'd love to hear someone try.

Yes, I'm acting like a nerdy health care wonk. I am a nerdy health care wonk, though. Anyhow, now that that's out of the way, there was one part of the CAP's big health care plan, namely, the part discussing how to entice health providers to place a greater emphasis on preventive care, that was very, very, interesting:

The U.S. health insurance system now focuses on treating diseases instead of reducing their incidence in the first place. With no guarantee that enrollees will remain in their plans, insurers have little incentive to invest in keeping enrollees healthy over time.

We propose a new model for preventive care and health promotion. Coverage for preventive services would be carved out of private health insurance and financed through a new nationwide preventive benefit. A process for determining and updating the core preventive services would be established, based on recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.... Physicians and other providers would continue to deliver both preventive and other medical services as they do today, but they would be reimbursed for preventive services by the new benefit.

Would this work? Actually, I'm having a hard time figuring out what, exactly, is being proposed here. Are they suggesting that most medical services would be paid for via insurance purchased on the private market, but preventive services would be paid for by the government, financed via taxes? In other words, everyone gets coverage that's half single-payer and half "market-based"? Maybe I misunderstand. (Hey, I never said I was a smart health care wonk!) If so, that's awfully novel, and oh-so intriguing. By the by, read Philip Longman's old essay on why the private market cannot provide good preventive care (though CAP gave the gist of the argument in that first paragraph quoted above).

The Center for American Progress has just put out a spanking new proposal for a new national health care system. Kudos to them on getting this out there. But looking it over, it's the sort of mostly-modest thing I once believed in—i.e. rejigger the current system by expanding Medicaid and offering tax credits to individuals, who can then purchase private insurance under an imposed community rating system (here, the FEHB).

Unfortunately, the CAP wants to keep employer-based coverage as well. If we're really going to think big about health care, then employer-based coverage should probably just be nuked, since a) it isn't all that portable and b) the tax subsidies required to finance employer-based insurance are breathtakingly regressive. Now I suspect that, over time, the CAP system would just induce employers to scale back their coverage for workers, and let their employees get tax credits to pay for health insurance on their own. That seems fine in theory, though in practice the transition will get very messy. (CAP proposes reinsurance to cover the cost of the transition; for instance if all the healthy people left IBM's plan, leaving the company holding the bag for the sick and decrepit.)

Anyway, as I said, I once believed in this sort of "save the private insurance market" type of system. But a month ago, in a long broadside against Richard Posner for suggesting a (somewhat) similarly-structured proposal, I kind of changed my mind. My newer stance was that I don't think you can realistically get private insurance companies to compress their rates and make the premiums "fair" to everyone. Even more crucially, I don't think the government can possibly require everyone to purchase insurance—the youngest and healthiest are always going to try their damndest to weasel out of the whole thing, and as is the case with auto insurance, a large number of them will probably succeed, thus screwing over everyone else.

So I'm not convinced that you can control costs by letting individuals buy health insurance in the open market, no matter how you approach it. More to the point, I'm not sure it's a good idea even to try to ratchet down health care costs. (If Americans want better care, why not pay for it?) As David Cutler has tried to convince us, "paying for performance" may well be the better way to go, though I'm not sure Cutler has exactly the right approach here. In the end, though, more and more I'm thinking that single-payer is the only way to do this. My socialist urgings get the better of me. "Third way" solutions are nice, and there are some benefits of a private insurance market that might be worth preserving if we can, but it doesn't look like we can. Anyway, I'm sort of rambling. I'll look over the proposal in more depth and try to get some more coherent thoughts down on paper.

UPDATE: Criticisms aside, I'm very pleased that CAP notices that here in America we have three distinct "big problems" as far as health care goes: covering the uninsured, managing health care costs, and improving the quality of our care. (See here for an earlier post on this point.) Most proposals out there just take a stab at controlling costs, or just aim to cover the uninsured, but in reality you have to run around all the bases or it's not a homerun.

New article up by me, over at Mother Jones, on why we need better statistics if we're ever going to craft a decent exit strategy for Iraq. So take a break from SS madness and go read! Sadly, I haven't been able to reach anyone at the Pentagon who can explain to me why the Iraq Weekly Status Reports have been so fucked up, or why they constantly change their troop categories from month to month. It's a bit ridiculous, though.

Hm. I'm taking a look at the new Trustees' Report over at MoJo, but check out this very important graph below:



Notice anything? Look at the blue line! The long-term balance of the program has actually improved from last year to this year. Indeed, as the Trustees' report itself says, "After 2030, however, the annual balances [for Social Security] in this year's report are larger." Now the media will focus on the fact that the Trust Fund expiration date has moved from 2042 to 2041, but that's a meaningless number. No, the graph above says it all. Even with a bit of assumption-fiddling from the Trustees, and a shake of doom-'n'-glooming, Social Security has actually gotten healthier from last year to this year.

Max and Matt say get the wonk knives ready! The 2005 Trustees' report on Social Security is due out tomorrow, and liberal number-crunchers everywhere will be poring over the data tables, looking for signs that the books have been unduly cooked so as to make the program's long-term health look really, really dire. Dire projections, of course, favor the privatizers and their "crisis"-mongering. The main reason for suspicion: five of the six current Trustees are pro-privatization hacks.

But okay, are there any grounds for concern that these folks would actually cook the books? Well, maybe. Earlier today, I stumbled across this site by Bruce Webb, suggesting that book-cooking has perhaps gone on for some time. His numbers are a bit confusing, but they seem perfectly sound, and the basic story is this: ever since the Bush administration came to office in 2001, the Social Security Trustees' have been projecting lower and lower future growth each year, even though actual economic growth has recently been increasing at a faster-than-expected clip. In other words, the Trustees' "intermediate cost" predictions—i.e. the ones everyone uses—are proven too pessimistic each year by actual facts on the ground, but nevertheless the reports continue to be even more pessimistic about future growth.

To offer another example, in 2003 the Trustees "intermediate projections"—i.e. the ones in which the program goes slightly out of balance in 2042—projected 2.1 percent growth in 2005. Okay, seems a bit low, but whatever. But the next year, the Trustees' revised that prediction downward to 1.8 percent growth for 2005, even though the economy had obviously been humming along quite nicely.

So there seems to be some funny business, though I'll be happy to hear a plausible explanation for all of this.

Here's a little conundrum I've been wondering about lately. The conventional wisdom on Iraq—or at least the CW we Bush-bashers find, ahem, rather convenient—is that Paul Bremer's rapid "de-Baathification" was a big fat mistake. The U.S. purged too many high-level and mid-level Baathists, disbanded the Army much too quickly, and basically filled the ranks of the insurgency with pissed-off former management. Right? Right.

Okay, but now consider an institution like the International Criminal Court, which is also rather convenient for us Bush-bashers to love. But look, if the ICC was the primary and most commonly-used structure for trying former war criminals, its rigid rules probably would have led to a similar purge of a huge number of high- and mid-level Baathists, along with prosecution of hordes of Iraqi army officers (which would have led to the same utter lack of competent Iraqi Security Forces we see today.) Perhaps.

Or heck, take a better example: After Japan surrendered in 1945, the American occupation under MacArthur decided it didn't really want to prosecute that many high-level Japanese officials—only a select few truly rotten apples—because all those dastardly politicians and military officers and planners were actually needed to run Japan. So the U.S. and ten other nations set up a very ad hoc tribunal, held the Tokyo trials for a scant 28 Japanese war criminals, and dispatched a swift victor's justice. And they didn't really go much further. (Look at how many bad guys they let off scot free!) Looking at the ICC's charter, you could argue that the overseers of the Tokyo trials were indeed "unwilling or unable to genuinely carry out the investigation or prosecution," at which point the ICC would have had to step in. But the Tokyo trials worked because the U.S. was unwilling to go all the way.

My point, I guess, is that oftentimes there are sound pragmatic reasons not to punish defeated states too thoroughly and to forgive violations of international law, and when that happens, the crude practice of "victor's justice" and ad hoc tribunals can get the job done pretty well. Strict rules for war crimes prosecution, on the other hand, can be somewhat inflexible, ill-suited to the realities of war and peace. Again, I think. Note that this isn't the usual criticism of the ICC, that it would restrain American might (I don't think it would), but rather than it would hinder the ability for post-conflict reconciliation. Sometimes forgiveness is the way to go.

Admittedly, I've glossed over a lot of details about the ICC and war crimes tribunals, mainly because I'm somewhat ignorant, so this could all be quite wrong. But it's still, worth thinking about. My vague, vague, vague sense is that it's hard to make a principled case for the ICC that would actually reflect the reality of international relations. Nevertheless, it seems a fully-functioning ICC would provide for a nice tool to adjudicate certain conflicts, and the court would sit alongside a lot of other, more haphazard and ad hoc tools that would also be used just as frequently. But it's still a good tool! One of the benefits of the ICC, for instance, is that it would have an already-established infrastructure, so it would cost less to do your run-of-the-mill prosecutions (don't need to set up a brand new court each time). But more flexibility seems necessary, unless I'm misinterpreting something, which is possible.

(Also, there's a strong counter-argument here. If leaders of the future knew that they were more likely to be prosecuted under a strict and inflexible ICC regime, they would be less likely to violate international law in the first place. So you swap the benefit of forgiveness for the benefit of deterrence. Something tells me we had a similar debate to this a few weeks ago, over bankruptcy laws… Personally, I think deterrence is overrated—and also, the strict threat of prosecution may make many war criminals more reluctant to surrender, as was the case with Serbia, no?)

My genuine, heartfelt sympathies go out to Jay Mathews, who proposes today in the Washington Post that we lure "intelligent design" into the classroom so as to crush it by the awesome force of reason and logic. Heh heh heh. Ho ho ho! Ah, I remember the time, not too long ago, that I was a young neophyte guest-blogging for the Washington Monthly, putting forward a very similar "clever" idea. Rest assured, the abuse I got for even suggesting such a thing—much of it from scientists far, far smarter than I, and much of it wholly, painfully correct—was swift and merciless. So I don't envy Mathews one bit.

(And yes, yes, I've seen the light, no ID for the classroom. It's all well and good to suggest that teachers could just weigh evolution against ID in a reasoned and thoroughgoing way and thus show the latter to be wholly deficient; in practice, though, this is unlikely to happen. Reason prevails less often than we'd like to imagine. Et cetera. Oh, and go visit Panda's Thumb!)

Given a choice between dishonest hacks and dirty lobbyists, I guess I'll side with the former, but only barely. Look, I'm glad David Brooks finally flared his nostrils and took a whiff of the ol' stench o' corruption wafting out of the Republican-controlled House. But his much-beloved op-ed today is an utter hack job, chalking all that GOP sleaze up to a small "cadre of daring and original thinkers": Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist.

Uh-huh. No doubt Brooks is now scratching his head wondering how a few "bad apples" could possibly have hijacked a party that, left to its own devices, would otherwise be pursuing noble aims like the "ownership society" and "national greatness." No doubt Brooks is already casting an agon in his head that pits the above-the-fray White House against the rogue "cadre" of money-grubbing lobbyists who—say it ain't so!—sullied the conservative movement. And no doubt, a few years hence—long after DeLay has been ousted and Abramoff sacked—we'll see Brooks once more writing the exact same damn column, wondering how a party so obsessed with making sweet love to big business keeps finding itself steeped in scandal and corruption. Yeah, I wonder.

Oh man, did I call it or what? Yeah, yeah, so it wasn't the most out-on-a-limb prediction ever, but still. (Hey, most of my "analyses" and predictions fall apart within minutes, so I need a little confidence boost here...)

Um, yeah. For those wondering what the deuce I'm talking about, read my long-ish weekend post on North Korea, which, if I do say so myself, was a pretty sturdy overview/appraisal of the whole situation, especially now that the New York Times seems to be confirming some of the gritty details.

Ugh, very much not interested in reading about the Schiavo case right now. It's "important", I know, and it's the big news of the moment, but… holy fuck. This crap is completely debilitating, and at least now I know that when the apocalypse comes, via GOP diktat, I'll be here, slumped helplessly on my couch, rubbing my eyes in sheer defeat, unable to think of a single goddamn thing to say. Fortunately, though, Dahlia Lithwick has a lot to say, and explains why it's not a good idea to let Congress overrule any state court decision they feel like overruling:

The reason we have courts, the reason we traditionally assign these brutal fact-finding responsibilities to those courts, is that intimate legal custody and life-or-death decisions should not be determined based on popular referenda. They need to be rooted, as much as possible, in rock-solid legal rules.

This is not a slippery-slope case, where it's a short hop from "executing" those in persistent vegetative conditions to killing anyone with a disability. This is a case in which an established right-to-refuse-treatment claim, litigated for years up and down through the appeals courts, is being thwarted by parents with no custodial claim to their child. By stepping in merely to sow doubt as to whom Terri Schiavo's proper custodian might be, rather than creating some new constitutional right to a "culture of life," Congress has simply called the existing legal regime into doubt without establishing a new one. This new law offers no clarity about what the new federal claims might be. It just forum-shops for a more tractable judge.

You can put aside the doctrine of federalism for Terri Schiavo, and the principles of separation of powers, and comity, and of deference to finality and the rule of law. But you'd want to be certain, on the day you do so, that what you're sacrificing them for some concrete legal value that matters a whole lot more. Subordinating a centuries-old culture of law to an amorphous, legally meaningless "culture of life," is not a decision to be taken over a weekend.

Word. (And Dahlia Lithwick is a rock star!) At any rate, I was going to write a whole slew of killer posts on teen sex, gay sex, maybe gay teen sex, abortion, the joys of partisanship (not what you think), and a structural analysis of liberalized autocracies in North Africa. But they'll all have to wait while I go vomit for a few hours.

White House Chief of Staff Andy Card describes Dina Powell (right), the new diplomacy czar at State: "She is extremely attractive, very competent, well spoken, young, she's got quiet confidence and she is task-oriented. In other words, she gets the job done." Uh-huh.

And here's OMB director Josh Bolten: "You can see people really taken by surprise when this young, attractive, really well-spoken person in both English and Arabic makes a presentation on behalf of the president. That sends a really strong message."

Cold showers, boys! Criminy. In seriousness, though, Dina Powell seems like a great choice for the role—speaks Arabic, wildly popular in Egypt (and no doubt her looks have a lot to do with that)—though it's still true that the best way to address our unpopularity in the Middle East is with, get this, better policies, not better public relations. But oh well. At least Andy Card's happy.

Ah, Michael Barone spots a new trend: the "trustfunder left"

Who are the trustfunders? People with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard. People who can live more or less wherever they want. The "nomadic affluent," as demographic analyst Joel Kotkin calls them.

These people tend to be very liberal politically. Aware that they have done nothing to earn their money, they feel a certain sense of guilt. At the elite private or public high schools they attend, and even more at their colleges and universities, they are propagandized about the evils of capitalism and globalization, and the virtues of environmentalism and pacifism. Patriotism is equated with Hiterlism.

That sounds horrible! But then he cites Kotkin to say: "The heaviest concentration is in the San Francisco Bay area, which, Kotkin says, has the largest percentage of trustfunders of any major metro area in the country." Now I see a lot of people working hard here in this city, so I wonder if this is really true. A quick click over to Kotkin's site reveals what he means by the "nomadic affluent":

[W]ealthy people whose primary residence may be elsewhere but who live downtown to be close to business; or of people 25 to 32 years old who live downtown because of its perceived hipness. These people tend to be affluent, but the trouble is they don't stay around long.

Okay, so he's just talking about hipsters, and more precisely, hipsters who tend to be affluent (so presumably not all of them are). Sure, we have a lot of them here, and they're sort of annoying. But you know, it's possible to be a well-off hipster with a nifty Mission studio and still work hard. (Many do.) Conversely, it's possible to be a hipster without all that much money, as Kotkin seems to allow. But Barone's talking about "trustfunders," which seems to be a somewhat different set of people entirely, and as far as I can tell, he just made up his little category out of thin air. There's also a question, which maybe Kotkin answers somewhere, of how influential these people actually are in the city's electoral numbers. 70 percent of the Bay Area voted for Kerry. Take out all the lazy wealthy people who were brainwashed at Bard and Dartmouth, etc., and you still get a Democratic landslide, trustfunders or no.

Given that I grew up in Japan and all, occasionally I feel like I should know more about the place. Also, given that I work at Mother Jones and all, occasionally I feel like I should link to its site more. Happily, I can do both by pointing out this piece by Chalmers Johnson on the rise of China and the increasing militarism of Japan. Some of his views are plainly wrong—the North Korea crisis would almost certainly not be solved if the U.S. simply issued a "no hostile intent" pledge—and for some reason he thinks that China will magically become the world's first benevolent hegemon. That said, it's a good overview of goings-on in the Pacific and Johnson's warning that great wars tend to occur when existing great powers fail to adjust to a new great power is well-taken.

Quick quiz: Whenever you find yourself trying to defuse a nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula, do you find it most helpful to a) gain the trust of all parties involved, or b) lie to your allies? As a bonus, guess which one the Bush administration would prefer! Today in the Post, Dafna Linzer catches the White House squarely in the act of lying: "In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. . . But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction." Morons, all of them. But there's a more pressing question here: what does all this mean for the future of North Korea?

Cheryl Rofer has the backstory here, but basically, over the last few months South Korea and China have found the "six-party talks" with North Korea useless (which they are), and instead wanted to continue their engagement policy with Kim Jong Il. The White House freaked out and concocted a little tale about NK crossing the ultimate "rogue state" red line and selling nuke material to Libya, so as to get SK and China back into the talks with renewed vigor. As it turns out, though, our little ally Pakistan was peddling the nuclear material, not North Korea. (No one of course is talking about regime change in Pakistan, and with good reason!)

Anyway, the conventional take on all this is that such lies will hurt U.S. credibility on future intelligence issues. That's an issue, I think, though it's slightly overblown. The claims about nuke sales to Libya were suspect from the start—lots of experts could see that, the IAEA could see that, and China and South Korea could both see that—and none of the doubts depended on how credible they considered the White House to be.

Very rarely, it seems, does any country simply "trust" another country's intelligence. On the campaign trail, John Kerry told that story about how John F. Kennedy's word alone was good enough to convince De Gaulle that Cuba was harboring missiles. But the story is mostly bullshit. If De Gaulle had actually had serious reservations about responding to Cuba, of course he would've needed to see pictures and proof that the missiles existed. But he didn't care, so it was all moot. Conversely, if the U.S. ever truly has credible evidence that X danger exists, it shouldn't be difficult to share that evidence and whip people into action. For better or worse, the U.S. can still get a lot accomplished with shoddy credibility.

But that's not the main point. At least as far as North Korea's concerned, it's now increasingly clear to everyone involved that the U.S. has no interest in pursuing engagement, regardless of the facts. Now there are reasons to think neither China nor South Korea want to confront North Korea if they don't have to—that is, so long as NK's not doing anything particularly flagrant like selling nuclear material to other countries. Mainly, this is because neither China nor South Korea wants NK to collapse all of a sudden—the resulting economic mess would be disastrous. To avert that scenario, then, both countries have tried to promote economic development and the joys of capitalism in North Korea. The Kaesong Industrial Zone looks like an early success, and Kim Jong Il has more or less approved of its construction, though the U.S. hates it for rather weird and baseless reasons.

Now, my original guess was that U.S. policy towards North Korea in Bush's second term was going to run along the following lines: The White House would continue to pursue those largely useless six-party talks, rattle the saber at North Korea from time to time, offer some half-baked incentives, and generally just get everyone semi-riled-up over Kim Jong Il. But it would essentially be a weak half-measure. The real action would take place elsewhere—with bills like the North Korea Human Rights Act (which many suspect to be a shell game for regime change), by aiding groups working to destabilize North Korea from within, by funding dissidents, and generally just working to keep South Korea and China away from engaging economically with Kim Jong Il.

All of the sudden, however, that may have all changed. In the past, so long as China and South Korea could believe that the U.S. was committed to defusing the North Korea crisis through negotiations, they would all sit down for the six-party talk charade and jabber away uselessly, exactly as the Bush administration wanted. But as it's now clear that the U.S. isn't at all serious about engaging North Korea, and is just pursuing a policy of "Please for the love of god don't help Kim Jong Il carry out economic reforms!", well, it's difficult to see why South Korea and China should take the talks seriously. Indeed, Chinese President Hu Jintao's comments on the subject today were virtually meaningless. (I could be wrong about this, but the safe bet's on more foot-dragging.)

So that means more engagement from the Asian neighbors and less U.S. involvement is likely in the future, it seems. I haven't decided whether that's an improvement over the current policy or not—it all depends no how malignant you think North Korea truly is. I guess we'll see.

Continue reading "What Next for North Korea?"

Julie Saltman and Vanessa of feministing flag a new ACLU report detailing how "America's war on drugs is inflicting deep and disproportionate harm on women - most of them mothers." Some of the findings:

Many women are ensnared in drug investigations despite peripheral involvement, sometimes solely because they failed to turn in their partners to police. Sentencing laws fail to consider factors such as physical abuse or economic dependence that may draw women into drug abuse or deter them from notifying authorities of a partner's drug activity.

Treatment programs, to the extent they exist, often are tailored for men and prove relatively ineffective for women.

Black and Hispanic women are imprisoned for drug offenses at higher rates than white women even though their rates of illegal drug use are comparable. Factors include prosecutors' decisions, policing tactics and selective testing of pregnant minority women for drug use.

Most imprisoned women, and relatively few imprisoned men, leave behind children for whom they were the sole primary caretaker. The separation can be shattering for mothers, who may lose parental rights, and for children, thousands of whom are placed in foster care at state expense.

It's fucked up, and all of these deserve outrage, scrutiny, correction, the works, and kudos to the ACLU for putting this together, but it's worth talking a little bit more about the second item there, the inadequate drug treatment for women. It's true that treatment programs are pretty skimpy in general, and hard to come across for men or women, but women have suffered special discrimination in this regard. It wasn't until very late in the day—the 1970s, if I recall—that medical literature even began addressing the issue of drug addiction among women. And no, it's not the same thing: More often than not, drug use among women is related either to spousal abuse, or some situation involving caring for children, or whatnot, and the more effective treatment programs try to address this wide-ranging and exceedingly complex nexus of issues. But most programs don't.

In 1985, however, female drug use did start to get a good deal of attention—but not in a positive way. A researcher published a widely-publicized paper on the hideous effects of cocaine use among pregnant mothers on their babies. As it turned out, the study was badly flawed (lots of things cause birth defects, but cocaine doesn't seem to be a big one), but this was the era of "crack babies" and "welfare queens," so naturally the study sparked a media frenzy. State legislatures cracked down severely on drug use among pregnant women—drug users would be shut off from welfare, or have their children taken away, or get thrown in jail. So mothers-to-be, quite predictably, shied away from getting treatment or counseling, or would get abortions when they didn't need to. It was all quite horrendous.

Today, things are getting better. A handful of states have changed their laws on drug use among pregnant women. Still, the focus seems to be more on keeping children away from these reckless mothers than in actually steering women towards effective treatment programs. Not only is this wasteful—the ACLU report notes that "imprisoning a mother and placing a child in foster care is seven times the cost of an intensive one-year drug treatment program"—but most of the time it's bad policy, driven more by residual outrage from the Reagan years than any real attempt at fixing the actual problem.

Yesterday the New York Times reported on signs that the insurgency in Iraq might be fading:

The top Marine officer in Iraq said Friday that the number of attacks against American troops in Sunni-dominated western Iraq and death tolls had dropped sharply over the last four months, a development that he called evidence that the insurgency was weakening in one of the most violent areas of the country.

Good news, it would appear, and it led to some criticism that the Times didn't blare this information on page A1. That's not something I care much about (are the people who glance only at the front page for info really going to control the Iraq debate?), but for what it's worth, we've heard countless stories about the insurgency growing or sinking in the past, and the truth of the matter seems to be that no one has a very good idea of what's going on, not Marine Generals, not analysts in Washington, and certainly not bloggers sitting and watching from the comfort of their own couches. (Whatever; my room was too small for a desk and I found this bad boy on the side of the road…)

One thing to note, though, is that the Times there are still "40 to 50 attacks a day," roughly the same number as a year ago. So we've progressed from "completely out of control" to "very, very bad." Trends are important, of course, but insurgencies seem to wane and wax over time, and at best a short-term decline in fatalities is inconclusive.

One positive spin to put on all this, though, is that it's hard to foresee anything in the immediate future that will worsen the Sunni-led insurgency. The ongoing stalemate between Shiites and Kurds over forming a new government is bad, of course, but it's not something likely to piss off Sunnis who already feel left out. By which I mean it's not something likely to piss them off even more. Meanwhile, the United States, in theory, has slowly started to decrease its Godzilla-size footprint in Iraq, which should at the very least leave some room for the new Iraqi forces to swoop in and maintain order.

Ah, but that's the rub. One of the most striking parts of Gunner Palace was the scene in which U.S. troops were trying to train the Iraqi security forces. Most of the grunts looked overweight, middle-aged, and badly out of shape. Few seemed committed to fighting—hardly surprising in a country where signing up for the National Guard is something you do to get a paycheck and avoid eating garbage, rather than something you do because you're temperamentally inclined to kick ass and keep order. Compare with the insurgents, who are quite emphatically not overweight, middle-aged, and badly out of shape. Obviously the movie only showed a small, small subsection of the Army, and I have no doubt that a vast number of Iraqi recruits are brave, committed, and competent at what they do. The problem is that there aren't enough of them.

It's hard to find hard numbers on how quickly the troops are being trained, and when we do get them, it's hard to put them in context. A good rule to remember, though, is that simply training more troops doesn't count as absolute progress. The insurgency is getting bigger, the crime epidemic in Iraq is getting worse, and as that happens, the need for more troops increases. And it seems to be increasing faster than the U.S. can train those troops. Carnegie's Jeffrey Miller recently crunched some numbers and concluded that "the gap between the total number of Iraqi security forces and the total required is now almost twice the size of the gap reported fourteen months ago."

One of my biggest pet peeves about all the reporting on Iraq—and one of Anthony Cordesman's pet peeves, and now apparently one of Jeffrey Miller's—is that we have very few metrics to measure progress. It's nice that the top Marine officer in Iraq can throw out a few numbers to the Times and make us think that the insurgency is declining, but as Miller notes, there are so many other important numbers and facts that no one seems to have any sort of handle on:

The graphs reveal that Congress and the public need urgent answers to a number of questions. Just how difficult and expensive is this task going to be? Why has it gone so poorly? What needs to be done differently? How many years will it really take to reach the required numbers? Why has spending on this priority task been so slow? Are the "trained" forces trained in any real sense of the word? Or are men being put on the streets who are likely to desert with their new equipment at the first sign of serious threat? What are the desertion rates from each force and the infiltration rates by antigovernment insurgents?

Indeed. Now the problem is that when and how the U.S. eventually withdraws from Iraq will depend entirely on these sorts of metrics for success, and whether or not the coalition forces (and Iraqis) are meeting them. Ideally, the American public will have some input into the debate over withdrawal—given that we're a democracy and all—so we need these metrics too. But more to the point, lawmakers need these metrics, and it doesn't seem like they're getting them. At best, everyone gets random stories in the New York Times to inform the debate, which is really quite dangerous.

Continue reading "That's No Way To Measure Success..."

Stephen Dubner's profile of Harvard economist Roland Fryer is really worth reading, though I particularly liked the part about Fryer's idea to pay poor students for doing well in school:

Fryer recently ran a pilot experiment with third graders at P.S. 70 in the Bronx. If a child achieved a certain score on her reading test or improved by a certain percentage, she got a small prize. In some classrooms, every student competed for herself; in others, each kid was assigned to a group of five. Fryer is trying to find out whether the individual or group incentives work better. He suspects the latter – "because no stigma of being the smartest kid applies.'' But the P.S. 70 data was inconclusive.

At a dinner party held by Larry Summers, Fryer met Joel Klein, the chancellor of New York's public schools, and explained his project to him. Klein asked Fryer if he might be interested in expanding his incentive experiment into 15 or so low-achieving schools. At P.S. 70, the rewards had been pizza parties or field trips. This time around, Fryer planned to give cash -- $10 per good test for third graders and $20 for seventh graders. Now it was time to sell the idea to the principals of those 15 schools.

Very interesting! There's nothing morally wrong with rewarding students for high test scores, of course—plenty of middle- and upper-class families do the exact same thing, only in the privacy of their own homes. And "learning for its own sake" is a nice goal and all, but at least in my experience it's mostly an ideal held by those who were pushed to succeed as children and gradually came to enjoy being dorks later on—and, at that point, they pretend they felt that way all along. Besides, test scores are so dire (two, three, four grades behind) in some schools that the moral problems with paying off students become more or less moot.

At the same time, knowing what I know about the fun task of classroom management (admittedly not a whole lot), doling out cash to a few lucky duckies can certainly breed a good deal of resentment. Back in the day, as a "smart kid" at a public middle school, I would have rather done poorly on an exam than earned a high score plus 20 bucks plus the wholly unwanted attention from all the, um, bigger kids that would come with it. So like Fryer, I suspect group incentives would work better too, but I guess we'll have to see how the pilot program does. I'm a bit skeptical—it's not like teachers have never tried to reward high-achieving students before—but it sounds promising enough.

Riverbend finds something all Iraqis can agree upon.

I was trying to read up a bit on Iraq earlier today, since it's sort of dropped off my radar of late, and there are a lot of fascinating things going on there that don't all have to do with the current parliamentary gridlock going on. More on that tomorrow, but first, a bit of an arcane musing below the fold.

One of the big expectations for the rise of the Shiites in Iraq is that their grand seminary in Najaf, led by Ayatollah Ali Sistani, will offer a kinder, gentler alternative to the influence of the seminary in Qom, Iran. The Qom school, of course, is the big clearing-house for Khomeini's old brand of Shiism, which advocates messianic revolution and clerical involvement in politics, somewhat nasty stuff. So a democratic Shiite Iraq would possibly be a force for good and moderation in Iran. That theory's always sounded plausible to me, even though I think some of the not-overly-clerical leaders in Iran—like Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i, whose scholarly credentials are kind of thin—would actually love to see Qom take a beating. But whatever.

Anyway, couldn't something similar happen with Lebanon? I don't know a lot about the Lebanese Shiites, but Sheikh Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah is the top dog over there, and the spiritual leader of Hizbullah, and quite the little radical, advocating jihad against Americans in Iraq among other fun activities. Now at one time Fadlallah took marching orders from Khomeini in Iran, but after the death of the latter, Fadlallah sort of thumbed his nose at the upstart Khamene'i and decided to get more involved in his own country's politics. Still, from what I've read, his big dream has always been to make Lebanon the center of his own radical brand of Arab Shi'ism.

But Fadlallah's big dream might not be so feasible anymore. Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq has a fair bit of sway among Lebanon's Shi'ites, who make up maybe 35-45 percent of the country, and rumor had it that pro-Sistani Lebanese were taking part in the anti-Syrian protests, rather than siding with the Hizbullah rallies. Sistani, I think, isn't too fond of Hizbullah and has warned them to keep their filthy hands out of Iraq, so there might be some tension there, I don't know.

Anyway, this is all minutiae, sorry. But the rise of "quietest" Shiism in Iraq will be something to watch if—and let's italicize that if—if Iraq comes out of this "drafting a constitution" thing in one piece. And, judging from recent bombings and the like, if Lebanon survives its own elections. I hope so.

Continue reading "Sistani Goes To Lebanon"

This is a bit of a link and run, but do read Mona Eltahawy's Friday Post op-ed about Amina Wadud, a female professor of Islamic studies who yesterday became the first-ever woman to lead a Friday prayer service. I'm hardly an expert, but Eltahawy doesn't seem to be entirely right in saying "nothing in Islam... bars a woman from giving Friday sermon." Here's Sheikh Muhammad Nur Abdullah's reasoning on the subject, hinging mostly on one of the sayings of the Prophet: "Pray as you see me praying." But on the other hand, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, one of Egypt's most respected scholars, recently said that there was no consensus on the matter and that each case should be left up to the individual congregation. (In the past Gomaa has spoken out against abortion and caused an uproar when he suggested that women cannot be head of state.)

UPDATE: Ah, as I suspected, the suspiciously quick praktike beat me to this earlier today. Well, hmph. In a related vein, Joseph Braude has a decent-but-kinda-thin TNR essay on how the U.S. could really be doing a lot more to promote women's rights throughout the Middle East. Also take a look at this semi-contrarian take by Marina Ottaway, noting that "[t]he battle for women's rights and the battle for democracy are both important and must both be fought, but they are not the same battle." Worth remembering. And yes, okay, this wasn't really a link-and-run post after all.

A couple of fun facts about Utah:

Bars can only sell beer with 3.2 percent alcohol, as opposed to the usual 6 percent.

Utah leads the nation in ice cream consumption.

Until fairly recently, public schools celebrated "Missionary Week" once a year, where Mormon students would come to school dressed as missionaries.

For a while, the state had a "porn czar," a 41-year-old Mormon virgin named Paula Houston, whose job it was each week to watch piles of sex flicks and surf the net looking for anything that violated Utah's obscenity laws. Sadly, the czar fell victim to state budget woes in 2003.

The Church of Latter-Day Saints, apparently, "has also established a security apparatus worthy of the Kremlin. It has infiltrated and spied on gay Mormon groups, rival polygamist clans, as well as historical associations seeking a less censored study of Mormon history.

The usual life-cycle for a young Mormon lad is thus: graduate from high school, serve two years as a missionary, and then get married immediately upon return and begin having children shortly thereafter.

The usual life-cycle for a young Mormon gal is thus: go one's whole life without sex (or masturbating), get married at a very early age for obvious reasons, get pregnant, drop out of college, have lots of children.

All this and much, much more from a fascinating old essay by Stephanie Mencimer. Anyway, Mormons come in for a lot of abuse, so no need to pile on, though I do wonder if the fact that the state's teetering on the brink of theocracy has ever produced any sort of backlash among actual Mormons. By which I mean: Someone somewhere once quipped that if we ever made school prayer mandatory, within a decade we'd have a nation full of atheists. That's funny, and it actually seems to have happened in places like Iran, but a lot Mormons seem to like their force-fed religion just fine. It's hard to find much in the way of rebellion, or even a good old-fashioned Mormon punk subculture. Good news, I suppose, for those who dislike the Establishment Clause.

UPDATE: New slogan! "Utah: Come for the ice cream, stay for the planetary ownership." No?

UPDATE II: Matt Singer tracks down the elusive Mormon subculture. An underground Fight Club at Brigham Young? Bizarre...

The other day Matt Yglesias had a funny aside about modern conservatives: "What passes for a conservative intelligentsia in this country has made a decision to become obsessed with ressentiment and trivia—the cover story on The Weekly Standard is Matt Labash making fun of Canada." Tsk, tsk! But his post reminded me of a short passage from Nina Easton's Gang of Five, courtesy of Amazon's easily-abused "Search Inside" feature:

Until the early 1980s, conservative youth politics mostly had been a pretty straitlaced business. Morton Blackwell, middle-aged dean of youth training for the Republicans, shuddered at the thought of protests and demonstrations. There was too much potential for chaos, for arrests, for injuries… In the early 1970s, Blackwell had run an outfit called the Committee for Responsible Youth Politics.

Much as they would borrow from Blackwell's playbook in training their own generation of activists, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed had no interest in pursuing "responsible youth politics." They were part of the Question Authority generation, weaned on a pop culture of irreverence, eager to shock and provoke. Barbed humor was their weapon. Though they didn't always take what they dished out: Impersonations of Reagan on Saturday Night Live prompted Abramoff to consider launching a boycott of the show. They preferred to set their own terms of humor for their generation (147).

So it was ever thus! And it wasn't just Grover and Ralph:

The Weekly Standard's coverage of Washington politics was imbued with a knowing, smart-alecky tone that often turned off older conservatives. Kristol's writers and editors were very much a product of the Question Authority culture-Mad Magazine and Spy, Saturday Night Live and MTV-of their youths (257).

So don't blame the conservatives themselves, blame their upbringing. Blame mass media, and TV, and pop culture. The truly unfortunate part, though, is that these folks all forgot to grow up after, uh, taking over the country and whatnot.

Not going to get much into the "women and blogging" debate, mainly because I don't read a lot of blogs, so it stands to reason that I don't read a lot of female blogs, and really, I have no fucking clue what's out there on the vast internet. Many days, when I'm pressed for time, I just settle back on the few core blogs I know best, and of those only about three are women (Jeanne D'Arc, nadezhda, and Laura Rozen… though I wish I could get email alerts whenever Elizabeth Anderson writes something new). So it's pitiful. Meanwhile, at work I spend a good deal of time trying to work with MoJo's up-and-coming women writers, and while I probably don't do a great job of it, I think—I hope—this has more to do with me being a stumbling-novice editor than actual sexism, but who knows.

Anyway, that wasn't the point of this post! The point was that thanks to the big discussion about women and blogging last week, I've found a number of cool new blogs to read, most of which are written by women, apart from the ones already on my sidebar there. Yep, yep. So the list...

WhirledView
Helena Cobban
Echidne of the Snakes
Al-Muhajabah
11D
Feministe
Stone Court
Feministing
Trish Wilson
Utopian Hell

Really interesting stuff on all of them. There's more out there, I'm sure, and feel free to leave suggestions in comments, but the days are too short. I read too slowly. Egad, egad.

Owen Harries has a thoughtful essay in Britain's Prospect Magazine this month, on the uses of morality in foreign policy. The conclusion sounds a bit humdrum (obviously you have to read the whole essay to get more detail), but I don't think it would hurt anyone to ponder it over for awhile:

The characteristic fault of realism is that it believes the application of a morality to foreign policy to be negligible, if not entirely irrelevant. The characteristic fault of liberalism is that it considers the application of morality to foreign policy to be easy. In fact it is both necessary and difficult. And as the balance shifts between a world vertically divided into sovereign states and a world horizontally connected by interdependence, it is likely to become even more necessary and more difficult.

And Harries channels Isaiah Berlin nicely: "There is no contradiction involved in, on the one hand, holding firm beliefs concerning what constitutes the good and, on the other, believing that promoting what is good may require patience and compromise in dealing with those who have different views." Exactly. And most people, I think, get this. it would be good to note that the big foreign policy debates going on in the United States today really take place on a somewhat narrow spectrum, not between pure "realists" and pure "idealists" (though there's some of that), but over empirical claims about where and when patience and compromise is necessary.

Sadly the latter gets lost in all the pomp and rhetoric, so we see a lot of ink wasted over "grand visions for the Middle East" and whatnot when we're really just arguing about, and we may as well be talking about, the structure of civil society in Egypt, or how readily the Revolutionary Guard will defend the regime in Tehran from student protestors, or how benignly America can exercise its military might, both now and in the future, and what sort of backlash we might cause. In an ideal, rational country that would be the more productive debate to have. Ah, but that's the rub...

A quick reminder of how the vague Social Security privatization proposal put forward by the White House is supposed to work. First, everyone's Social Security benefits get cut by 40 percent to bring the program into actuarial balance (this actually cuts benefits by too much, but the White House will need the extra money, as we'll see). Second, the U.S. lets workers divert their payroll taxes into private accounts, and borrows extra cash—$4.5 trillion over the next 20 years—to pay current retirees. Third, the U.S. reduced guaranteed benefits for younger workers even further when they retire, based on how much money those workers put into their private accounts. If your investments get better than a 3 percent return, then you'll earn enough to offset that second benefit cut upon retirement. If they do worse than 3 percent, then you lose.

Note what's involved here: benefit cut #1, a tax hike, and benefit cut #2.** That's important.

Anyway, the White House doesn't want these accounts to be too risky, so they've proposed that the government will handle all your money, and put them in relatively safe "life-cycle" accounts. But now Yale economist Robert Shiller is arguing that the vast majority of "life-cycle" portfolios are unlikely to do better than the necessary 3 percent:

According to U.S. historical rates of return, the life-cycle portfolio fell short of the 3 percent threshold 32 percent of the time, meaning nearly a third of personal account holders would have been better off sticking with the traditional Social Security system. The median rate of return was 3.4 percent....

But [Shiller] also adjusted for what he expects to be lower future rates of investment return by using historic rates of return from international stock and bond markets....The results were not encouraging: The life-cycle portfolio under these adjusted returns lost money compared with the traditional system 71 percent of the time, with a median rate of return of just 2.6 percent.

So 71 percent of private account holders will lose! Although, in truth, nearly everyone loses, and this 71 percent just happens to lose more than others. Refer to my description of the Bush plan above. Shiller's just pointing out that private accounts won't make up the losses from benefit cut #2 described above. But workers will also still suffer from benefit cut #1, and they'll also have to pay off higher taxes thanks to all the borrowing involved in the transition to privatization. So when you factor in all three components of the Bush plan, workers are getting not a 3.4 percent return or a 2.6 percent return, but much, much less.

Of course, the White House could ditch the whole "life-cycle" portfolio idea and let people invest in whatever they want. Then some people will get a high enough return to offset benefit cut #2. Though they'd have to do very, very well to also recoup losses from benefit cut #1 and the tax hike. And, of course, other people would do poorly and end up eating garbage.

**note that benefit cut #1 is bigger than what would be necessary if we did nothing to Social Security and merely cut benefits by enough to remain in long-term actuarial balance. The tax hike ($4.5 trillion over 25 years) is bigger than the tax hike necessary to repay the Trust Fund. How can this be? Well, privatization shifts the costs of generations far in the future onto current workers. To some extent, we're swapping debt tomorrow for debt today, and it all evens out. But that's not much consolation to the workers today who actually have to, you know, pay off that debt.

Continue reading "Many Unhappy Returns"

Ah, Mark Kleiman drills into Volokh's arguments for cruel and unusual punishment and finds them... untenable in practice. It's not the case against barbarism that I'd prefer to make, but apparently we all need to discuss these things "sensibly," lest we be thought shrill or abusive. Anyway, Kleiman's argument boils down thusly: going cruel and unusual would bias juror selection for "torture cases," since any juror willing to sign off on an extra-grisly punishment would be much more likely to bring a guilty verdict. Second, the torture option would change the way we think about public officials, since, after all, anyone unwilling to sign a "flog 'em and hang 'em with piano wire" death warrant would be excluded from running for governor.

So it's a no go. And lo, Volokh says he sees the light and has now changed his mind. Though it's more of an "Egad, I'd still really like to torture some bad guys, but it doesn't look like it would work" sort of change of mind. Kind of depressing, but there you have it...

Via Susan Madrak, a new study on how the media reports the war in Iraq:

Many media outlets self-censored their reporting on the Iraq invasion because of concerns about public reaction to graphic images and content, according to a survey of more than 200 journalists by American University's School of Communications.

Stomping around here is, of course, the grand question of whether the media should get to censor what we see. Or whether the media should hold the hands of their viewers and decide that they alone—ABC, CBS, the New York Times—knows what is and is not appropriate for human consumption. Admittedly, that debate's not very interesting to me; I don't think "taste over truth" is ever the way to go, and when possible, I'd prefer not to have the media decide what I should and should not be privy to (though some filtering is always going to happen). I've heard it said that too many graphic images would take away our ability to think about the war in a calm, considered way—as if war was a calm, considered thing.

But there's a better and simpler reason for media openness, I think, and a reason for showing the most gruesome of images: namely, that these pictures are already flashing and blaring all over the Middle East. There are exceptions—al-Jazeerah toned down the guts and gore during the November assault on Fallujah—but guts and gore tend to be the rule, and they quite obviously shape perceptions about the United States. So I'm not sure how American voters are supposed to understand what's going on in the Middle East, in the minds of Middle Easterners—and more to the point, elect leaders who can respond appropriately and "win hearts and minds"—if we don't even get to see what they see? It's impossible. Anyone who thinks we can perform good public diplomacy by just getting al-Hurra (the U.S.-friendly station) to tape a few more school paintings is delusional. Show it all.

So I've read over Eugene Volokh's long response to his critics—the one in which he defends his desire for brutal, Iran-style punishments for truly heinous criminals here in the U.S.—and he's not entirely unreasonable, but this quoted passage here seems to be the crux of the matter, and the one that causes (me at least) so much discomfort:

People, it seems to me, have a natural desire to inflict pain on moral monsters.

Well if that's true—if people are just savages at heart and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it—then okay, perhaps we should have flog 'n' torture rituals for the worst of the worst. Let those natural feelings flow and channel our surplus aggression towards "productive" ends. Good healthy release for the id and all that.

Except, of course, there's plenty of reason to think people don't need to be savages at heart, and that there is quite a lot we can do to promote that. In the good old days, men had a "natural desire" to beat their wives, put them in their place, and since this seemed like the inevitable order of things, the practice was largely defended. But then the women's movement sprouted up—aided by men who weren't satisfied with the prevailing state of nature either—and worked to change norms, draft the appropriate laws, and crack down on those "natural" wife-beating desires.

And the thing of it is: It worked, sort of. Today many men still beat their wives a good deal, but over the past 20 years domestic violence appears to be declining, and the winds are shifting. The male character, it seems, is shifting, even if only glacially. And yes, it's cool in certain New York newspapers to make fun of the rise of the hyper-sensitive emo boy, and maybe men today are much too "wussified," as they say, but it's hard to deny that change has occurred, that further change is possible, and that human character is much less "natural" than Volokh assumes. Alternatively, you could notice how we've cracked down on the "natural desire to inflict pain" on our neighbors via mace or battleaxe for stealing our potatoes or looking at our milkmaids with a leery eye.

So it's reasonable to assume that a more forgiving justice system would, over time, quench some of that ol' fashioned bloodlust. Society becoming more enlightened and all that. It's awfully hard to prove this, and there's good reason to think that genuine shifts in attitudes toward violence are very difficult to achieve—the death penalty, after all, is still very popular in Europe even though it's been banned for some 30 years now—but that, I think, is no reason not to try, especially if you think excessive bloodlust is something worth quenching. In other words, Ogged has it right: "[A] society's attitude toward violence is bound up with lots of its other characteristics, and those play themselves out, until some new configuration comes along. We hang on, and try to do a bit of good in whatever very limited way that we can."

P.S. Also not sure about this from Volokh: "Nor have I seen evidence that harsh punishment generally makes society more brutal." Er, medieval Europe? Or heck, modern Iraq? There were/are other factors at play in both places, yah, but surely harsh punishment played some role here.

George Kennan has died. The obituaries will focus, quite rightly, on his famous "X" article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which rolled out on the table a blueprint for "containment" against the Soviet Union. The idea seems obvious enough in retrospect, but back then the character and intentions of Stalin's regime were really quite murky, and Kennan lifted up a big fat lantern to the whole thing. It was impressive, and I'd recommend reading his essay again, even if you already have—it's surprisingly good. And, enjoyably, Kennan was a lovely writer and a marvelous stylist, as in passages like this one:

Thus the future of Soviet power may not be by any means secure as Russian capacity for self-delusion would make it appear to the men of the Kremlin. That they can keep power themselves, they have demonstrated. That they can quietly and easily turn it over to others remains to be proved. Meanwhile, the hardships of their rule and the vicissitudes of international life have taken a heavy toll of the strength and hopes of the great people on whom their power rests.

It is curious to note that the ideological power of Soviet authority is strongest today in areas beyond the frontiers of Russia, beyond the reach of its police power. The phenomenon brings to mind a comparison used by Thomas Mann in his greatest novel Buddenbrooks. Observing that human institutions often show the greatest outward brilliance at a moment when inner decay is in reality farthest advanced, he compared the Buddenbrook family, in the days of its greatest glamour, to one of those stars whose light shines most brightly on this world when in reality it has long since ceased to exist. And who can say with assurance that the strong light still cast by the Kremlin on the dissatisfied peoples of the Western world in not the powerful afterglow of a constellation which is in actuality on the wane.

This cannot be proved. And it cannot be disproved. But the possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.

Yeah, it's stuffy and a bit old-fashioned ("in the opinion of this writer," blah blah), and yeah, Buddenbrooks isn't actually Thomas Mann's greatest novel, but whatever, that's grand stuff. And that was in Foreign Affairs! Nowadays, of course, Foreign Affairs articles are mostly pedestrian in tone, even though they don't need to be, since they still discuss the same sweeping themes Kennan discussed, and use the same detail-free abstractions Kennan used. So what ever happened to stylized writing on big foreign policy topics? The really good stylists these days (Hertzberg, Didion, etc.) mostly do quaint "political observations," while all the big foreign policy visionaries (Pollack, Slaughter, etc.) write in that dull and plodding manner. Kennan managed to do both, and while it's not the biggest deal in the world, that sort of thing will be missed.

UPDATE: Dan Drezner has a more substantive obit on Kennan.

Ah, just got back from going to see Gunner Palace. Really good movie, and I'm glad people are getting a glimpse of what soldiers go through in Iraq—and not just what they go through, but who they are, as people, kids, or the odd guitar-playing dude who was Yossarian, period. Though about halfway through the movie I thought for a brief second, "Man, this is kind of dull... just patrols and raids, patrols and raids—whoops! mortar shell—patrols and raids. Where's the action?" Then I got disgusted with myself, since, y'know, "action" means people dying, but I couldn't help it. And I'm probably not the only one who ever feels this way—recall back when "shock and awe" was the big popcorn event—but unlike David Brooks I'm not going to go write a column about how big-budget action movies are making American Society Today callous and immature about war. Even though they probably are. Anyway, enough of that, see the movie.

At last, a real scandal! Er, maybe. It seems that two years ago, the Pew Foundation gave a bit of money—oh okay, a lot of money—to a bunch of other groups so that they would all advocate campaign finance reform. Dirty funding to promote a clean-funding idea! Ha ha! Sounds like hypocrisy, right? Well, no. Campaign finance reform, of course, has always been about ending the influence of money on policymaking and, more precisely, on politician-making. Not ending the influence of money on opinion-making. Pew was doing the latter, not the former. Still, there's obviously a sordid quality to all of this, in that liberals advocating "money out of politics" would quite clearly not be very happy if a bunch of conservative groups shelled out multimillions to spread certain views among the general public. By which, of course, I mean those liberals aren't very happy when that sort of thing happens right now.

So... it's icky. But none of this changes the arguments about the merits of campaign finance reform. To use a favorite analogy, Social Security phase-out would still be a bad idea even if all the mutual fund managers on earth were against it. But whatever. And for what it's worth, I think McCain-Feingold was a bad idea anyway; I'd much prefer more and better public financing for otherwise marginalized candidates and views. Or give all voters $100 or so to spend on whatever candidate they please. Boost the supply side, as they say. And, you know, if Pew had bothered to consult me in the first place, then they could've spent all the money they wanted promoting these views and obviously wouldn't be looking like big hypocrites right now. Oh well, lesson learned.

UPDATE: Okay, okay. One of the problems with not being a very good writer (and trying to write very quickly while running out the door late for a movie) is that you end up not being clear. This post was meant to have a bit of that tongue-in-cheek quality we all know and love (i.e. "At last, a real scandal!") but looking over it, I sounded a lot more outraged than I really am. As Nathan Newman says, the money here just isn't that significant compared to the dollars sloshing around right-wing causes (horrors! Pew paid the American Prospect a whopping $132,000 to write about the issue!). Pew could've been more upfront about who it was funding, I think, if only because transparency seems like a good thing on principle, but other than that, yeah...

It's an arcane subject, I know, but everyone should go read Max Sawicky's new paper on what the Bush budget means for our future. Too good to summarize. The headline-grabbing bit is that budget choices today are putting Social Security and Medicare benefits for all workers, including those over 55, in grave danger. Very true. The paper's most important point, though, is that "excessive deficit spending over the next 10 years" is our biggest long-term problem (apart from rising health care costs), and it's the main reason why our debt-to-GDP ratio is set to explode over the next half-century, making the whole boondoggle oh-so unsustainable. Best advice: Don't have kids. They'll only suffer needlessly.

UPDATE: How nice. I see Republicans have shot down new "pay-as-you-go" rules in the Senate today. Heh. Indeed.

UPDATE II: By the way, good liberals, let's not delude ourselves. The much fawned-over tax reform plan from the Center for American Progress is cute, but not nearly enough. The CAP goodie bag would bring in 17.2 percent of GDP in annual revenues by 2015, by their own estimates. But outlays plus net interest in 2015 will still be 19.4 percent. In fact, the CAP plan would leave a bigger deficit that year than the one under Max's scenario, in which net interest keeps compounding on, debt grows faster than GDP, and we have a debt-ratio of 240 percent in 70 years. Armageddon! So good work on yanking the budget away from Bush's spinning chainsaw, but it doesn't staunch the bleeding, much less heal anything.

UPDATE III: Hm, Matt Yglesias says I'm wrong and the point of the CAP plan is to discuss what type of tax reform the country should have before we discuss actual levels of taxation. Very clever argument, but I'm not sure the two debates can be so cleanly separated. I like the CAP plan a lot, and I think it presents a smart vision for progressive taxation, and I would love to have a debate over the structure of tax reform. But... much of the CAP plan's glossy appeal comes from the fact that it a) keeps the higest marginal rate at Clinton-era levels, and b) cuts taxes for people making under $120,000. In short, that it's *relatively* painless. And yet it would be impossible to maintain both of those cool features, and bring the deficit under control, and cover the uninsured (barring an overhaul in health care, figure that will cost $100 billion a year, no matter how we do it). I mean, whatever. If proposing cookies for everyone is the way to win the tax debate, I'll go along, but still.

Fred Kaplan's essay on Paul Wolfowitz' move to the World Bank is pretty good. Yes, it seems likely that Wolfowitz was nominated because President Bush and Condoleeza Rice are trying to purge—*ahem*, gently nudge out—all the neoconservatives from the administration. And yes, I'm willing to believe that Wolfowitz is an idealist who genuinely wants to improve the world, even if, like so many academics, his preferred means of getting there are woefully misguided.

But sadly, Kaplan doesn't talk much about what the World Bank actually does, and I've seen little on what sort of effect Wolfowitz would actually have at the place, besides the usual platitudes. (Fair enough; economic development is boring, and doesn't effect us much here in America.) So let's talk. Wolfowitz is no an economist, true, but that's somewhat irrelevant. And, when it comes down to it, I think talk of his idealism and his grand vision are sort of beside the point here.

I got a little snarky this morning on the subject, but here's my slightly more-considered take on the World Bank. It seems that over the past decade or so, especially under Jon Wolfensohn, one of the biggest problems with the Bank is that it's suffered from a good deal of "mission creep," trying to focus on everything at once—imparting advice and knowledge to developing countries, helping with governance reform, improving public and private institutions, lowering crime, reducing poverty, promoting environmental sustainability, promoting good health, etc. etc. Hell, the Bank was even asked, more or less, to help Russia transition to a capitalist system during the '90s, something it was quite clearly not equipped to do. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of weird political restrictions on the Bank; it's supposed to advocate public-sector reform, for instance, but it's certainly not "allowed" to press for, say, income redistribution or welfare state measures. In essence, the U.S. asks the World Bank to save the world, but please, good sirs, try not to rock the boat.

So where does Paul Wolfowitz fit into all this? Early news reports suggest that the Bush administration wants to scale back the overly-wide scope of the bank and return to the good old days of funding large infrastructure projects. Okay, but many of these projects were a disaster. And there's one simple reason for that—the Bank, it seems to me, has very little in the way of accountability. From what I've seen, heard, and read, the institution hasn't really learned from its mistakes over the years so much as just shifted strategies with the changing political winds. In the '60s, that decade of flower power and big liberalism, the Bank was directly funding education, agriculture, small business, etc. In the '80s, in the age of Reagan and Thatcher, it was all about structural adjustment lending and freeing markets. Then Wolfensohn had his own approach. Now Wolfowitz will have his. But none of it really relates to outcomes. No one's asking whether this or that approach is actually getting results.

Thinking it through, in the end I'd like to see the Bank do one thing, and one thing only: lend money. In other words, just be a damn bank. It could outsource all those other functions to a number of outside institutions who could do research on the best projects to funnel money into, provide technical advice to developing countries, evaluate progress, etc. etc. But let outside experts handle it, rather than the monolithic bloc that does everything now, and let those outside experts compete with their crazy and nifty ideas. It's decentralization at its finest! The hope is that the Bank would consult a wide range of outside ideas about development, and put them to the test, jettisoning the ones that failed and keeping the ones that worked. And the Bank itself would stick with its comparative advantage: financing the whole thing.

So yeah, I don't think the problem with the World Bank is that it needs a new visionary or new overarching theme, which means I don't really care if Wolfowitz' heart is in the right place or if he's brilliant or anything else. It seems to me the Bank needs a whole new structure, one that essentially creates a market for thinking and practice on development. For that, though, you need a stellar administrator, a CEO or some other organizationally-brilliant executive to shake up the institution. Wolfowitz isn't that, so all in all we're just going to get more of the same—a brand new "master vision" for economic development that will dominate the Bank for a few years, and then disappear at the dawn of the next American presidency. Ho hum.

Continue reading "But Does He Do Banks?"

"Ah, what, you are all leaving? But I just got—" Alas, it's true, I'm late to the party again. This time, by party, I mean the discussion over the burgeoning "investor class" that John Zogby claims to have found via his secret and awesome polling methods. The investor class, you see, votes Republican (by which we mean, leans that way by a few measly percentage points, and never mind the millions of investors who do otherwise). More investors, therefore, means more Republicans. And look! Privatizing Social Security will create more investors, so that means… Etcetra.

Now this is all, in fact, very silly. In the age of ultra-refined polling and whatnot, the two big political parties are always going to hover around the 48-52 percent mark as far as levels of support go. No reform or demographic trend will ever create a Permanent Republican Majority or a Permanent Democratic Majority—the median voter theorem simply won't allow it. Parties, hyper-conscious of their poll numbers, will simply shift stances or triangulate or fine-tune their message and pick off increasingly thin voter "blocs" in order to maintain parity. Such is life.

Nevertheless, there's a theory out there that Republicans believe that they can win themselves a permanent "investor class"-based majority by privatizing Social Security, and that's why they're so maniacally pursuing phase-out, even when it looks like political hari-kiri, and even when public opinion is stacked against them. Well, maybe that theory's right, though I don't think that's the main political motivation here. The "well-connected Republican lobbyist" who talked to Elizabeth Drew had, I think, the correct take: "What [privatizers] want to do is break the hold of the Democrats on Social Security." The new Republicans, you see, don't want the Democrats to be able to stand for anything. So they've co-opted democracy-promotion abroad, they've co-opted Medicare, and now they want to co-opt Social Security. We liberals like to complain about how the Democrats are wet noodles that don't take a stand on anything, but it truly seems that the modern-day GOP is actively trying to enforce this state of affairs.

That said, however, I think Social Security privatization—and the expansion of the "investor class" that will come with it—would have real effects, effects rather amenable to certain, shall we say, "core" GOP constituents. (And I'm not talking about evangelicals, who as usual get nothing out of voting Republican.) To understand what I'm getting at, we need to hark back to 2001, when conservatives managed to pass some of the most mind-bogglingly inequitable tax cuts in history. They even managed to slash the estate tax! Say what you want about the estate tax, but there's no rational reason why a tax that affects less than 2 percent of the population should ever have been repealed, especially with broad bipartisan support. And yet it was, and the public went along with it—something like 70 percent of voters though the tax was unfair. It was breathtaking. Same thing went for the dividend tax cuts of 2003; the act benefited very few people, yet it got broad bipartisan and popular support.

Both of these tax disasters went through, in part, because of accidents of history. Congress never would have touched the estate tax had not the roaring '90s plus Clinton's fiscal rectitude created massive budget surplus projections. Meanwhile, the 2003 dividend tax cut depended largely on Bush's wartime popularity, an unusually deep recession that could be blamed on 9/11, and of course, GOP control of all branches of government. Fun times, but economic right-wingers can hardly expect those happy coincidences to help them out all the time.

But what conservatives no doubt have noticed, and what Zogby shows-without-realizing-it in his polling data, is that the rise of the "investor class" correlates very well with public willingness to support tax cuts on wealth. An estate tax repeal would have been unthinkable back in the Reagan era, when only 20 percent of voters were investors. It was unthinkable. So was a whopping dividend tax cut. But today, only two short decades later, both are realities. So, I'll get to the point: If the ultimate goal of the economic right-wing is, in fact, to eliminate all taxation of wealth—and that looks like a fair bet—then wealth needs to be something everyone has, in however small an amount, so that the great bamboozling can continue.

One important, half-sketched corollary. Obviously it's a good thing for people to have wealth. It's also a good thing to get everyone investing, so long as they have a safety net to fall back on. But it is the brutal reality, it seems, that more investors will lead to a public more willing to stomach tax cuts on wealth, even if 95 percent of the population doesn't really benefit from those cuts, or are hurt by the cuts. In the long run, liberals and anyone else who cares about either a) fiscal sanity or b) progressive taxation will need to figure out some way to counter this trend. A philosophical case for taxing wealth seems in order, for one. A friend reminded me the other day that, in 2001, Democrats tried to attack this or that minor aspect of the estate tax repeal, quite willy-nilly, and they tried in vain to appeal to various constituencies on the subject, but they never outlined the overarching case for why they thought progressive taxation was a good thing, or why repealing the estate tax would undermine that. More on this later.

Short question: What are the arguments against allowing illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses? Here in California, thanks to Davis and Arnie, you can get a license simply by showing your crumpled Mexican documents. Fair enough, and it makes life easier for the people plucking my Safeway-brand tomatoes—actually, a lot easier judging from what I've heard about LA's bus system. But what's the big uproar about? That it lets the terrorists get licenses more easily? Really, now. Any terrorist that can't arrange his own transportation probably isn't a big threat in the first place. I'm being flip, but still. Is that the only concern?

Awesome! Jerome Corsi, last seen giving us the inside dirt on John Kerry's service in Vietnam... Hold on, scratch that intro. Try: Jerome Corsi, last seen posting stuff like "RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters" on obscure discussion boards, is soon coming out with a new book offering advice on what U.S. policy towards Iran should be. Can't wait! Maybe next he can tackle Medicare...?

(Yes, we have the book here in the office. If anyone's truly curious, I'll crack it open and take a sneak peek.)

This looks like quite the interesting read. Er, if you're into that sort of thing.

Oh, and apologies for lack of posts; am swamped trying to catch up with work after the last few days of blogging madness. Will have a few longer things up later this evening on Social Security, taxes, and hm, maybe even on this thought-provoking post by praktike. On the last, if I recall correctly, during the Cold War the AFL generally worked to undermine the labor movement in Eastern Europe—mainly by working to set up alternatives to the pro-communist labor unions in France, Italy, Germany, etc. So you could see a similar model working in the Middle East. The only point, I guess, is that the "labor movement" has a variety of faces, and they often conflict with each other. Which just means that praktike's scrutiny toward the subject is really quite important, and Beinart's "broad brush" approach sadly unhelpful.

Paul Wolfowitz for the World Bank, eh? That's nice. That should shake the Bank away from its oh-so-quaint recent focus on climate change and poverty real quick... Seriously, though, leave the "Europe'll be pissed" stuff aside. When the main criticisms of the Bank over the past 50 have been that it pursues outlandish, grandiose projects with stubborn single-mindedness and little to no regard for local expertise, cultural complexities, or any facts on the ground, really, and at a time when the Bank has only just started to change its ways, why oh why would you put Paul Wolfowitz back in the mix?

Oh well. Back to building visionary "freedom dams" in India. Good god.

As many of you know, I mostly write for Mother Jones' blog during the week. If not, you should know that. Anyway, we've just changed addresses, so the URL is now:

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/

We also have comments, which is pretty undeniably nifty, so do stop by! I'll start posting there again tomorrow. Oooh, also, for all the Bloglines, etc., folks, the RSS feed can be found here.

In case there's anyone who doesn't read Kevin Drum's site but does read this site, I'm off guest-blogging at the Washington Monthly for a few days. Unless I have something really rambling and incoherent that I need to post, I'll probably let this place go to sleep until Tuesday or Wednesday, when I'm done there.

I meant to post this two days ago, but somehow it sat languishing around in a Word file. Anyway, those who check this site every two seconds—a horde, I know—will notice I wrote up a brief and churlish post about the Democrats' Slaughter report (PDF) on House Republican abuses, but then quickly deleted it. (Like taking a chess move back after lifting your finger.) This report is crucial, House Republicans really have made a mockery of good government, and Slaughter deserves more publicity for her efforts.

Anyway, the thrust of the report is stuff many people have noted before: the Republican-dominated House Rules Committee won't allow amendments on an increasingly large number of bills (essentially taking away the ability to debate and modify legislation); huge 1,000 page bills get thrust before Congress' eyes with a few hours to read before voting; the House spends more time debating points on traffic lights than serious matters; and the conference committees seriously abuse their power to modify bills in ways no one really wanted. (Read a non-PDF executive summary of the report here.) Outrage, outrage, outrage, but also old hat and somewhat obscure. (I mean, Sam Rosenfeld loves diving into this stuff, but my eyes usually just glaze over.)

Anyway, there's one larger problem raised by the report that may be of more general interest. Yes, this House rules weaseling isn't fair to Democrats who can get absolutely no hearing for their views or policies. But what's even more harmful to American democracy, I think, is the fact that the no-amendments-on-bills norm has essentially killed all accountability for Republicans in the House. Just ask Republican Rep. David Dreier, who railed against this stuff way back in 1993:

What does the ability to offer an amendment have to do with accountability? If a Member has the power to offer an amendment, he can no longer claim to support one thing, but then say he was blocked in his effort to make a change in the law. In addition, with more floor votes on more clear issues, Members will be forced to take clear positions with their votes.

Indeed. Basically, if you're a House Republican, you could vote for a horrendous bill—say, the Medicare prescription act—that's deeply unpopular with your constituents, many of whom are old people that don't like getting screwed over. But at all the town hall meetings and whatnot, you could protest that you tried to add this amendment or that, but were blocked by the leadership. Blame it on the leadership! Then you promise to do better next time around, insist that your intentions, like Brutus', are honorable, and cruise your way to re-election. It's quite the scam.

Meanwhile, Democrats can't introduce amendments that force you to take a stand. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (or whoever) wants to introduce an amendment allowing re-importation of drugs from Canada. Hugely popular, but Republicans hate it. So if this amendment comes to the floor, some poor House Republican will be forced to vote against it, and then have to go back home and explain to Granny Fran why he is so strongly in favor of her paying higher prices to treat arthritis. Not a fun way to spend an afternoon! So it's much easier to just block the amendment and have everyone pretend that they might, in fact, be okay with re-importation. Y'know. They'd have to think about it.

Now I'm not a Congressional reporter, but it would be fun to try to find instances of this actually happening. A House Republican or two (or fifty) going back to his district and saying he tried to modify X bill that he voted for, but the House Leadership wouldn't let him. Boo-hoo. Ah, time to fire up Nexis...

Clearly it's possible to go back and forth all day—or for weeks, or years—about whether the invasion of Iraq , and the elections thereafter, "caused" the pro-democratic movement in Lebanon. (Or let's say the "anti-Syrian movement".) I say, leave this stuff to the historians, or at least people who can gather lots and lots of info. Don't just talk to Walid Jumblatt and take his word for it. But, then again, this stuff is fun, so for what it's worth, Annia Ciezadlo is shooting down the "Iraq caused the Cedar Revolution" thesis in this week's New Republic:

The idea that the Lebanese were inspired by the Iraq war doesn't have much currency in Beirut. "I've never heard it from anybody except Walid Jumblatt," laughs Jamil Mroue, editor-in-chief of Beirut's Daily Star newspaper. "I've heard the Lebanese say, 'What the heck, are [the Syrians] going to take us back to the Stone Age?' They're saying 'Fuck it, we're not going back. And, if it means demonstrating in the streets, and if it means changing the government, then so be it.' But I don't think they thought, 'Oh, the Iraqis voted, so we can, too.'"

In actuality, some Lebanese have been struggling for reform for decades, hating their Syrian overlords. "Lebanon has been the only satellite state in the world since the end of the cold war, and no one lifted a finger," says Farid El-Khazen, a political science professor in Beirut. "It was business as usual until 9/11, and U.S.-Syria relations began to deteriorate. Internally, there was a movement all along that pushed for an end to the occupation. ... There is a linkage, if you like, with Iraq, in the sense that American policy has changed toward Syria due to their interference in Iraq. But [the Lebanese opposition] has been going on for a long time."

Indeed, Ciezadlo points out that the anti-Syrian opposition has been organizing protests in Beirut since the early '90s. So yes, this stuff can happen of its own accord. As I've been trying to point out, long before the Iraq war you had places like Bahrain with its own indigenous Shi'ite pro-reform protests in the mid-1990s, largely coming out of nowhere—er, unless you buy the Gulf monarchy line that Iran "provoked" them. You don't necessarily need some domino-toppling event, or as Thomas Barnett says, the "Big Bang." (Though domino-toppling events may do quite a bit of good—or bad.)

Also take note of the fact that Lebanese reformers had, for the last decade or so, created a very strong civil society on their own, without receiving much in the way of American funding. (A whopping $700,000 from the Bush administration in 2003.) It would be interesting to know if that's simply a function of Lebanon being a relatively advanced society, or if you could replicate these sorts of results elsewhere. A dry question, I know, but it's important to understand this stuff, lest we fall under the delusion that the U.S. can just sidle up to any Arab country and throw our weight behind the reformers, expecting a revolution out of thin air.

...and yes, yes, this assumes the Lebanon revolution will actually turn into, you know, a revolution, as opposed to merely a lot of people standing in the street with their curiously-attractive sisters waving flags. Etcetra.

My friend Chien Wen Kung suggests I weigh in on the elections for Dartmouth's Board of Trustees. Ah, but be careful what you wish for! As it happens, I'm descended from the New Hampshire governor who originally tried to destroy the college way back in the day. (Well, I assume I'm related; how many Plumers can there possibly be?) So you can see where I'm coming from on this—nationalize the means of pedagogy, etc.

At any rate, I'd be lying if I said I didn't care at all about the Trustees election, but I'd also be lying if I said I'm paying very close attention. Consider the issues. What to do about fraternities? Don't care. (Honestly, kids, if you want better social options, just do what I did all four years and spend Friday nights in the library...) Should we abolish the swim team? Don't care. Hire another dean of diversity? Don't care! Shocking I know...

In my alumni inbox, though, I notice that Volokh Conspiracy blogger Todd Zywicki is running for office and promising to make class sizes smaller, have adjunct professors teaching fewer classes, etc. etc. Now that sounds important, of course, but it's not like no one's ever thought of this before. Zywicki proposes a committee to "study" the matter, but we all know that that's the best way to punt on a difficult issue. A more serious take might go something like this: Colleges don't necessarily need fewer adjunct professors teaching. They need more of the good adjunct professors teaching, as well as the ability to pay those "good" adjunct professors their fair market value. As Daniel Davies once pointed out somewhere (I can't find the link), this isn't really a "teaching gets denigrated in favor of research" issue, it's a labor market issue, and one amenable, presumably, to some sort of market-based response.

So the cleverest solution to this problem gets my vote. And no fair saying we need to eliminate tenure and place a greater emphasis on student learning. As I said in the post below, there will be no wishing for everything and a pony today.

UPDATE: Interestingly, it seems that the "conservatives" at Dartmouth are much better organized due to their vast fraternity infrastructure. Why, it was just yesterday that I heard a political operative suggest that 4 million Gamma Delts stayed home on election day 2000...

Here's a modest proposal that's no doubt been proposed before, but whatever. During the debate over the bankruptcy bill, it seemed that at any given time, you had nearly enough Democrats to add sensible amendments (like protection for those who went bankrupt due to medical emergency; or protection for military families) or kill the bill altogether. But each time a few Democratic senators with parochial interests—like Joe Biden and his Delaware credit cartel—managed to block the action from happening.

Now obviously the Democratic leadership didn't enforce a lot of discipline on this front—Majority Leader Harry Reid probably supported the bill, after all—but the structural problem is somewhat clear. There will always be Democratic senators who need to grub for money in order to, you know, get re-elected, and those senators will inevitably find themselves among one of a handful of votes that scuttle some important amendment or allow some gruesome bill to pass, even if the other Democrats are united. Money in politics, etc. Campaign finance might help, as might a restructured Senate, but I'm not interested in wishing for a pony today.

So why not create a massive 527 that selectively fights against corporate-funded bills? Here's how it would work: Democratic senators that are voting for some horrendous piece of legislation or other because they "need" the relevant corporate money will be targeted, the senator will be convinced to vote the right and noble way, and the 527 will then pledge to raise (via the internet and other fun fundraising endeavors) however much campaign money that senator loses for voting against corporate interests.

I don't know if this would have very wide application: in theory it would mostly work for crappy bills, like the soon-to-be-passed bankruptcy bill, that are set to pass by a thin margin because of a few money-influenced votes. I don't know how common that situation is. And perhaps money is better spent on ventures that aren't quite so ad hoc, like lobbying to get real campaign finance passed. But that's my 527 idea—a sort of "My Fair Lady" for corporate whores, to give it a moderately offensive name (sorry!).

Matt Yglesias has a marvelous TAP column on democratization, though it seems like a few nitpicks are in order. First, he argues that the Iraq war had nothing to do with Palestinian elections:

I expect that at this point conservative readers are saying, “Maybe so, but what about the Iraq War? Wasn't it the necessary precursor to these positive developments?” Well, no. Bush first called for an elected leadership of the Palestinian Authority in 2002. We invaded Iraq in 2003. The election was not held until 2005. The difference-maker, obviously, was not the election but the death of Yasir Arafat, something that can in no way be attributed to the invasion of Iraq.

Hm, well true. But Saddam Hussein was a fairly big supporter of Palestinian terrorism, and it's far from certain that a "nice" Palestinian government could have popped up under Saddam's meddlesome presence. But I don't know. My argument's always been this: look, a lot of very promising democratic developments in the Middle East have popped up since we invaded Iraq. But a lot of equally promising developments popped up before the Iraq war, and even before 9/11, so it's hard to prove causation. On the other hand, I might need to revise that view. Many of those big developments pre-2003 also happened after a cataclysmic incident, namely, the Gulf War. (See, for example, the creation of the shura council in Saudi Arabia in 1992, which came about after widespread Nadji discontent over the presence of American troops in the holy land.) So big earth-shaking events like the war in Iraq do create ripples and seismic waves, and it's hard to untangle causal threads here.

Anyway, that's sort of a tedious point. No one likes to say "Leave this question for historians." The second (less nitpicky) point is about this passage, which claims that foreign policy success for Bush will be good for the Democrats:

All of which brings us to the second reason that liberals should be dissonance-free. To put things in the crassest partisan terms: Stunning foreign-policy success breeds domestic failure. Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior may have earned themselves a place in the history books for successfully managing the end of the Cold War. But in the realm of partisan politics, all they did was cost the Republican Party its best issue: anti-communism. The lack of the red menace took the issue off the table and enabled the Democrats to return to power on the strength of the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid."

Liberals still ought to address our decades-old inability to win national-security debates. But if the next three years go well enough, that may become unnecessary.

Okay, but here's the thing. Maybe Bush's democracy agenda will be so successful that foreign policy if off the table in 2008 or 2012. And Democrats can then swoop in with their unbeatable economic/cultural message. Fine. But the price of all that is that Republicans further enhance their long-standing image as the reliable foreign policy party. The fall of the Soviet Union did a good deal of enhancing in 1989; as did the liberation of Kuwait in 1991; as did, I think, some of Nixon's successes. These are all somewhat contingent events (i.e. Democrats could have accomplished similar things), but they helped build the Republican mystique. And eventually, foreign policy will come back to the fore in elections. It always has and it always will. But if Republicans and only Republicans can take credit for successes past (i.e. Bush's foreign policy, assuming it succeeds), they'll be instant winners at the polls once more. That's not to say that we shouldn't cheer Bush on—like Noam Scheiber, I think Democrats ought to co-opt the democratization agenda, mainly because it's my preferred agenda. But let's not pretend the Republicans can't reap a good deal of long-term partisan gain from success.

Nathan Brown continues his invaluable work with this Carnegie briefing on the role of Islam in post-Baathist Iraq. In particular, he explains very thoroughly something I've tried to suggest before but sort of fumbled: namely, that the enshrining sharia (traditional Islamic law) in the Constitution won't automatically turn Iraq into a sharia state. Sharia is complicated stuff, open to a wide variety of interpretations, and you can have a constitution that says "Islam law is the sole source of law in this country," yet still give executives and parliament wide leeway in deciding what that means when it comes to the gritty details of actual legislation. As Brown says, it all depends on how you set up the courts and judicial review:

For an Iraqi constitutional court to set a more exacting standard, it would have to be given several tools: access to the court would need to be relatively open, the court would need to have a fairly wide purview for examining legislation; and the body or bodies appointing judges to the court would need to be inclined to name some religious judges. Such matters are rarely spelled out in the constitution; generally most details of the structure and operation of a constitutional court are left for ordinary legislation.

So the constitution's not the most important thing in the world. On the other hand, Brown notes that if the constitution does enshrine sharia as the sole source of law, it will certainly be an indication that the religious conservatives have the upper hand politically. That, to be sure, could prove significant for a lot of future developments.

Brown also talks about personal status law—which unlike sharia is far more specific in determining codes of conduct, at least within various traditions of Islam. Here, Iraq can go several ways. Either it can let each sect create its own Islamic courts for the implementation of personal status law, something likely to be very bad for women, or it can do what the leftist Iraqi regime did in 1959 and create a unified personal status law dictated from on high. This would give less leeway to local judges, who would simply apply the code, not interpret it, and personal courts would have less autonomy. Moreover, this would mean that the central government could in theory bend personal status law to accommodate more liberal views on women's rights, etc.

Now, in the real world, the religious Shi'ites, including the two major parties, SCIRI and Dawa, seem to want to get rid of the 1959 law and go back to local courts conducted according to traditional Islamic jurisprudence. Or perhaps they just want to modify the 1959 law and let Sunnis and Shiites each do their own thing. At any rate, this sort of thing likely won't be a constitutional issue (the Kurds would never go for it), though the majority United Iraqi Alliance may try to pass these laws through the legislature. On the other hand, even though the UIA has 51 percent of the seats in the Assembly and can pass anything they feel like passing, it's not clear to me that all of the women in the UIA, or the Chalabi-supporters, will want to pass legislation that puts the 1959 law in the trashbin. But this is going to be a hugely important issue.

New article, by me, up at MoJo.com about America's dysfunctional prisoner parole system. It's based on a good book on the subject, with some extra research thrown in, and the wonk factor is pretty high, but hopefully it's of interest. Plus a punny title, for which I can take no credit. (Though I endorsed it, so I'll take the blame!)

What's intriguing about the "how to shrink prisons" debate going on across the country right now, I think, is that it's incredibly hard for good policy to prevail. There are all sorts of countervailing factors in favor of prison growth—unions, private prisons, rural development concerns, "tough on crime" sentiments—that have nothing whatsoever to do with actually keeping crime down. Then there's the legislative obstacle: no state legislator wants to tell her constituents that she's increasing spending on prisoner rehabilitation at a time when cuts are being made to health care and education, even if rehabilitation does save money in the long run. So you sort of have to sneak in sensible reforms. Fortunately it seems possible, in this case, to sneak sensible reforms past people.

Juan Cole's long rant on the causes of terrorism today has a lot to recommend it. Here's the key excerpt:

I don't believe that authoritarian governance produced most episodes of terrorism in the last 60 years in the region. Terrorism was a weapon of the weak wielded against what these radical Muslims saw as a menacing foreign occupation. To erase that fact is to commit a basic error in historical understanding. It is why the US military occupation of Iraq is actually a negative for any "war on terror." Nor do I believe that democratization, even if it is possible, is going to end terrorism in and of itself.

A few observations. I won't pretend to know the history of the Muslim world well enough to dispute Cole—so let's assume that in the past, imperialism has been the cause of terrorism, rather than authoritarianism. (Come to think of it, I don't think Cole's theory explains the rise of radical Muslim terrorism in Indonesia, which appears to have been fueled in large part by rising poverty in the late 1990s, or in Thailand or Malaysia or Burma.)

But even if Cole's theory has held true for the past, that doesn't mean it's still true today. [UPDATE: Bleh, I wrote this post way too quickly and it didn't come out very well. So I'm going to offer the short version of my theory here and tuck the longer, somewhat sloppy explanation below the fold.]

A better way of looking at the situation might be this: radical Muslim terrorism is the product of a large number of intersecting factors, including nationalist/historical/economic grievances, the presence of radical Islam via political marginalization, frustration with Arab regimes, frustration with the United States, and, I think of increasing importance today, the presence of a radical vanguard promoting a relatively unique and modern jihadist ideology. Of those various factors, authoritarianism in the Middle East plays a large part in promoting the spread of radical Islam as well as certain economic/political grievances. But those factors haven't always been, by themselves, sufficient conditions for terrorism.

To start off, I think we have to make a number of distinctions here.

First, let's distinguish, as I like to do, between radical Islamists (al-Qaeda, etc.) and mainstream Islamists (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, say). The former group, I think, has largely usurped its own Islamic character and become primarily a political group: primarily anti-imperialistic and with a distinct political agenda in the developing world. In the case of al-Qaeda, this trend will continue to become clear as the group "franchises" out to a wide variety of movements around the globe—and in so doing, it will dilute the salafist message it adheres to—and also as it forges alliances with predominantly local groups (Sunni and Chechen nationalists, for instance). More and more, this will become a global fight against an increasingly vague concept of imperialism around the world, losing much of its ideological purity.

In a sense, the radical Islamists are exporting an ideology. And the ideology very much resembles the Marxism of old. It's no surprise, as Olivier Roy observes, that many of the fiercest of contemporary Islamic ideologues are former leftists. More to the point, among the hard core radical Islamists who have made it their goal to attack the "far enemy" in the West, most of the terrorists are well-educated, relatively wealthy, and haven't been trained in madrassahs (the backwater extremist religious schools). According to Marc Sageman, most of these fighters were not very religious when they became jihadists—Islam was primarily a way (and a crucial way) to forge a group identity among the vanguard.

At any rate, the jihadists—the vanguard—have developed an ideology that very much adapts itself to local concerns. Their appeal stems, in large part, from the prestige won in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the anti-government jihad ideology seems to be propagated in large part by a core of Afghan veterans. (Wahhabism has been around for ages, and has a more complex genesis, and jihad to a large part intertwines with Wahhabism, but I think you can separate the two.) That ideology has caught on marvelously well down in the disaffected tribal areas in the southern province of Asir, which is considered a hick backwater by the rest of the country. Asiris, by the way, heavily populate the Saudi security services since that's one of their few means of advancement. The anti-regime ideology also caught on in Najd province, where many Najdis have long had a historical grudge against the royal Saudi family. (Westerners don't realize it, but the regional divides in Saudi Arabia are just as important, if not more so, as the religious divides.)

So in essence, it's as if you have local groups with historical or national grievances latching on to a radical jihadist ideology. The end result, as we've seen, is terrorism. (Half of the 9/11 hijackers, for instance, were from Asir, and Asiri involvement in some of the local Saudi attacks is often heavily rumored.)

Now here's the other thing. Conservative Islam, in itself, doesn't not produce terrorism. Indeed, there are many mainstream Islamist groups that don't resort to violence. But it is certainly a fertile ground for terrorism—Marc Gould's essay here really explains this quite well—and when you have the right mix of conservative Islam, nationalist or anti-imperialist grievances, and a vanguard of radical Islamists leading the charge, you get terrorism.

So that said, I think authoritarianism—by which I mean the presence of despotic and largely secular Arab regimes—does produce radical Islam. As Michael Hirsh writes here, drawing on the work of a number of Arabist academics, Islam has been misshapen by the presence of secular dictatorships around the Middle East, becoming a refuge for political frustration. Democracy—by which one means a democracy that integrates Islam back into the political mainstream—can somewhat change this dynamic. So it's important. But it's also only part of the story.

Anyway, this is far from the complete story—it's complicated!—and if I sound sure of myself, I'm not, it's just that it's hard to litter a blog post with constant qualifiers like "maybe" and "somewhat" and a bunch of "on the other hand" parentheticals. I've conflated and/or simplified a lot of events and concepts. Really, a closer country-by-country analysis would be fruitful. But it's a stab, I guess, at thinking about this topic seriously.

Continue reading "Who Created Terrorism?"

There's no news hook to this post, except for the fact that maybe sanctions will someday be levied against Iran and Syria. Or threatened to be levied. Or whatever. Still, sanctions are going to make some sort of appearance on the world stage, so I googled around and found this 1998 article by Dan Drezner, "Serious About Sanctions," that lays out the real dirt on sanctions. The main points, in bullet form (with some commentary in parentheses):

Sanctions do work, sometimes. A study of 116 "sanctions episodes" between 1914 and 1990 concluded that they succeeded a third of the time, failed a third of the time, and partially succeeded a third of the time.

Sanctions tend to work better against allies than adversaries, since adversaries prefer near-term economic costs to longer term political ones. (Which, of course, explains Iran's current behavior—the question is whether near-term economic costs resulting from sanctions will be so crippling as to be worth giving up a major strategic asset, i.e. nukes.)

There's no correlation between the effectiveness of sanctions and whether the targeted regime is democratic.

Multilateral sanctions are much more effective if done through an existing organization like the UN, since targeted regimes have less reason to think that there will be defections anytime soon. (Saddam Hussein, of course, undermined UN sanctions, but he had to go to spectacular lengths and even then, just didn't get very far. If anything, his example might make UN sanctions more credible in the future.)

Unilateral sanctions can work, since it's not always obvious that the sanctioned country can just find other countries to trade with. Especially nowadays, with the Soviet Union gone, restricting U.S. aid can be a powerful lever, as can freezing financial assets.

Most sanctions don't hurt U.S. firms, since they either don't impinge on bilateral trade (targeting aid instead) and besides, the U.S. can shift to other markets.

Sanctions can increase the chance of war. Obviously they can provoke war, as was the case with Japan in 1941, but they can also be prone to "mission creep." The U.S. may be pushed into more severe action when sanctions don't have the desired effect.

Sanctions often have unintended consequences—creating black markets, for instance.

Obvious point, but "sanctions that serve particular interests are just another form of protectionism." Also, the wonky point that Congressional mandates for sanctions have all sorts of ill-effects and aren't as threatening as thought. Read the article for that.

Good stuff to know. And really interesting article.

Good for those conservatives who are opposing the awful bankruptcy bill now wending its way through Congress. At the same time, though, I wonder what a real conservative/free marketer/libertarian would propose to do about the credit-card industry. Lending abuses aren't new, and card companies certainly don't need congressional handouts to work their predatory magic. Companies like Citigroup, after all, make a good chunk of their profits off of loans with absurdly high rates to those least able to afford it (the poor or the debt-laden); this is the free market in action! Short of heavy regulation or a return to the old usury laws regulating interest rates (which I think just peachy), the lending industry will do what it does.

Alternatively, I guess, you could make it much easier for people to declare bankruptcy, which would certainly give credit-card companies pause before handing out cards with $10,000 limits and whopping fees to the cash-strapped. But most conservatives, I assume, would balk at all the moral hazards created here. So what's the answer?

A question on spellings, since I'm not sure of this. "Hizbullah" seems the correct way to spell it if you're transliterating from the Arabic, no? ("Hizb" = "party of," "allah" = "god"). Whereas "Hezbollah" seems to be the Farsi way of doing things. No? Yes? Well, whatever, the Lebanese militant group seems to be backing Syria now, which you would think puts a cramp on the Lebanese opposition, since Hizbullah has the guns and a good deal of support among Lebanese Shi'ites, who make up 40-50 percent or so of the country. (Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah (pictured), seems to be far, far more popular among Shi'ites than the other big Shi'ite leader, Nabi Berri of Amal. Mostly because he rather wisely took credit for Israel's unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000.)

But what the deuce is going on? It seems like the anti-Syrian opposition was talking with Hizbullah for a good long while, and it doesn't seem like the two groups had all that much to disagree on. As I wrote a while back, it seems like the Lebanese opposition could rather easily agree not to enforce UN Resolution 1559—which entails both Syrian withdrawal and the disarmament of Hizbullah—and strike a suitable side deal instead. So perhaps Nasrallah's done the calculations and thinks that Syria's going to come out on top here when all is said and done, mainly because the U.S. doesn't have all that much leverage over Damascus and Europe won't stand up to Syrian president Bashar As'ad. Or something.

By the by, I'm really not an expert on this, but these fears that Hizbullah would dominate in a free and fair "one man one vote" Lebanese election seem overblown. The group's powerful but it doesn't appear to be that powerful. (Not all Shi'ites would vote for Hizbullah, many would vote for Amal or someone else, though some Christians, etc. would (and do) vote for Hizbullah.) Nevertheless, the Shi'ites have a lot to gain by getting Syria out of the country and making Lebanon more democratic, so I do wonder what Nasrallah's thinking here. Why would he want to keep things the way they are? (Maybe Tehran ordered him to back Syria? Unlikely—it seems that most of Hizballah's funding these days comes from expatriate Lebanese, not Iran. But Iranian Supreme Leader Khamene'i still has a lot of sway.) From what I've read, Hizbullah has never had any special love for the Syrian presence in Lebanon, and has criticized the widespread corruption of the Damascus-backed government, though that's been tempered greatly over the last few years. I don't know why.

Anyway, that's my puny analysis. Per David Adesnik's gripes, sure, it would be nice if liberal bloggers wrote about Lebanon more, but crikey, it's the most complicated country ever, and there's no way I personally can devote my life to becoming an expert. Presumably others feel the same. So sparse commentary, little analysis, and very hedged predictions will be the name of the game. Needless to say, I genuinely hope Syria withdraws, Lebanon holds free elections, all the ethnic/sectarian groups learn to play nice and share, and then they all vote in a new government that favors universal health care (and living wages!). But for now, the only thing I can be absolutely sure of is that Lebanese protestors tend to be extremely good-looking. So there.

UPDATE: Ah, on a whim I decided to check out the conservative bloggers to see what rousing insights they're providing on Syria/Lebanon. This guy seems to be pretty sure of himself, so I'll assume he knows what he's talking about, but I guess that's often a dangerous assumption. Powerline pipes up with complaints about how Reuters won't label Hizballah a "terrorist" group. Also, they're shocked that politicians say ingenuous things! Okay... And Michael Totten compares Lebanon to "Hong Kong under Chinese authoritarian rule." Wha—? Also, a quick quibble, but I'm not sure I'd call Syria "totalitarian," as Totten does. Bashar's is one of the worst regimes on earth, but it does offer things like freedom of religion, etc. In general, most of Syria's abuses are aimed at the political opposition, rather than at trying to manage every aspect of its citizens' lives (as in, say, North Korea). So call it "authoritarian." I know, a nitpick, but we can't just let words mean whatever we feel like making them mean.

Here's a fun discussion. While doing research for a Mother Jones piece on prisons—which I'm frantically trying to revise at the moment (this explains why I'm blogging, by the way)—I came across some interesting material on the relationship between drugs and crime.

There are some very good statistics available at the National Institute of Justice's website, via a program called Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM). At a bunch of sites where data was collected during the 1990s, researchers found that between 50 to 75 percent of all arrestees had traces of drugs in their system, many with more than one drug. (Cocaine seems to be a major player here.) But that, of course, doesn't mean drugs cause crime, and it doesn't mean that they're either a necessary or sufficient condition for crime to occur.

Nosing around the White House's ONDCP data tables here, it appears that in 2002, 8.2 percent of full-time employees did drugs, 10.5 percent of part-time employees did, and 17.4 percent of the unemployed did drugs. That sounds bad—drug use must lead to unemployment!—until you realize that there are vastly more employed people than unemployed, so the vast majority of drug users have stable or semi-stable jobs. But we knew that.

Interestingly, it seems during the later years of the Clinton Administration, the ONDCP started paying closer attention to facts like these and urged policymakers to interpret the drug/crime relationship "cautiously." The Bush administration, meanwhile, emphasized the drug/crime link early on—its 2002 ONDCP report touted drug treatment as an effective way of reducing crime—but has since backed off. The administration's more recent ONDCP reports, notably, no longer claim to know whether crime can actually be reduced by lowering national drug use—an assumption that was once sacrosanct in past administrations.

In short, then, it's really hard to figure out how much anti-drug strategies reduce crime (indeed, it's hard to figure out how much any strategy reduces crime; statistics in the field are woefully inadequate). So in turn it's difficult to figure out whether drug control expenditures are actually worth the high price tag. We don't know whether drug enforcement units—which are found in police stations all across the country—do any good. We don't know whether mandatory minimum penalties reduce trafficking (many police chiefs think they don't). We don't even know if breaking up local drug markets—an approach which is very effort-intensive and requires constant sweeps and raids—decreases trafficking. The only thing that seems clear is that trying to attack the supply of drugs from abroad hasn't had much effect.

At any rate, I strayed from the original point. Congress—and various federal agencies—still tend to treat drug use primarily as a crime problem, when it makes more sense in many cases to separate the two issues. Over the years, a number of researchers and policy wonks have come up with some good ideas about what would constitute a more sensible national drug policy, but the paradigm shift here seems like the necessary first step.

UPDATED: To fix a few horrendous spelling/punctuation/grammatical errors.

Continue reading "Do Drugs Cause Crime?"

Ah, it's late, late afternoon and nothing yet accomplished today. But on the bright (very bright) side, it's so beautiful here in San Francisco. Moving on, Nathan Newman has an interesting immigration proposal: Sell green cards for $50,000 (money that can, obviously, be loaned to immigrants and paid back over time). Hm, I like it, though $50,000 seems fairly arbitrary and not the sort of price tag you want the government to set—governments aren't very good at this sort of thing. The key, I suppose, is to figure out how much naturalization is actually worth to an optimal number of illegal immigrants, and make that the price. But no doubt that optimal price fluctuates over time, depending on a variety of factors, and varies from region to region, so a market mechanism to set the "cost" of immigration would seem more efficient. How that could work I'll leave to the clever people of the world. Maybe we could sell "immigration futures" on the stock market. (What?)

My other fear is that companies looking for indentured servants would just agree to pay the $50,000 for, say, a Mexican immigrant to gain citizenship in exchange for, say, a twenty-year work contract at set wages, etc. The road to serfdom, indeed. But maybe you can regulate that.

But overall it's a worthy idea—not my (or Nathan's) preferred approach, but more politically realistic than some sort of widespread amnesty. And it's far better than the status quo. And it could raise over $200 billion in revenue! Somehow, though, I don't think the Republicans will ever go for the "green card for sale" plan. Think about the politics here: These newly minted citizens will all need to pay off heavy, heavy loans during their first few years in the U.S. They'll be working mostly low-wage jobs. So they're going to want better pay, free health care, unionization, etc. The goods, man, the goods. It's not hard to figure out which party they're going to start voting for—gay marriage and gun control won't weigh heavily on their minds, that's for sure.

Tamar Jacoby lays out the conservative case for Bush's immigration plan. Namely, that by granting illegal immigrants "temporary worker status" and bringing them back into the legal system, Bush's act would stamp out the rather widespread disrespect for the law that we're seeing now.

Okay, but this is the Weekly Standard crowd she's writing for, worshippers at the free market altar, and in that respect Bush's immigration proposal is terrible. As best I recall, under the Bush plan, companies would be able to offer spots to guest workers only after they can't find any Americans to fill the jobs in question. The guest workers, meanwhile, more or less have to stick with their original employer for the duration of their stay in the U.S. Plus lots of other rules and fun forms to sign. So you have all the makings of an insanely regulated labor market that discourages job mobility and flexibility. Ho ho! I realize conservatives aren't always free-marketers (and Republicans tend to be neither), but surely a few principled folks are bothered by this.

But it gets even better! Under Jacoby's criteria, the conservative case for Bush's immigration plan is actually the conservative case against it. Notice that Bush is proposing that the workers stay for five years (or whatever) and then it's back home they go. They don't get to apply for citizenship, or even a green card. Now a majority of Mexican illegals have said, in a recent poll, that they would happily return home after five years, but the tricky concept here is that they're all lying. (I certainly would.) As soon as the five-year mark approaches, many of these "guest workers" will quietly disappear, and continue to stay in the U.S. for many, many more years as illegals. (I'm told that guest workers pull this trick quite often in Germany.) So now we're right back at precisely the sort of lawless situation—complete with vast and shadowy illegal immigrant underground—that Jacoby wanted to avoid in the first place! Face it: unless you offer illegal immigrants real amnesty, and a path to citizenship (however arduous), they're going to keep trying their best to flout the law and stay anyway.

Oh, but right. We could never offer amnesty. That would only be rewarding people who break the law. Quelle outrage! But really, boo-fucking-hoo. Stop me if I'm wrong, but we have a cute little constitutional amendment—number 21, innit?—that rewarded an entire country for breaking the law! And yet, mysteriously, our moral fiber remained intact enough to fight World War II.

The White House, with crucial help from France, Saudi Arabia, and even Russia, is pressuring Syria to get out of Lebanon. So today Syrian president Bashar Assad proposes a half-ass "phased withdrawal" that ignores UN Resolution 1959 and does little about the real problem, namely Syrian intelligence services in Lebanon. In short, this is a big ol' middle finger aimed squarely at the West. With a smirk on his face, of course.

So what is the West going to do about it? Huh? Huh? The U.S. has already blasted Bashar for half-assing it, but Britain, Russia, and the EU all quietly praised the announcement. The only leverage Bush really has against Syria, remember, is the threat of European sanctions, and it's not clear that Europe is actually ready to go that far. Especially if, say, France thinks that it could get dragged by the U.S. into a more hard-line position against Syria than it prefers. So it's largely out of Bush's hands. Meanwhile, Josh Landis puts his ear to the ground in Damascus and thinks Bashar is steadily regaining control of the situation:

Most importantly, Bashar's government is much stronger than many think. There has been great speculation abroad -- and in Syria -- that the wheels are about to go flying off the regime, that the President is not really in charge, or even more darkly, that a shadowy subterranean power-struggle is taking place within the top ranks of the government, presaging a coup or possible collapse…. Nevertheless, the pressure has been much relieved in the last two days. Bashar is back at the helm, giving interviews and taking a positive line on Lebanon.

So now it's time to see how well this multilateralism thing works. It's worth noting that Bashar has managed to piss off every single one of his friends. Even Saudi Arabia! Few countries have ever isolated themselves as thoroughly as Syria has, and if the transatlantic alliance can't even knock down little ol' Bashar when he's quite obviously on his heels, then what good is the "international system" anyway?

UPDATE: See also this on why a Syrian withdrawal could mean the end of "Arab nationalism" as an ideology. Interesting... I do wonder what Bashar thinks his optimal position is now. It seems he wants to withdraw from Lebanon in a way that doesn't make him look "weak" and sparks protests at home. But if Landis is right, he seems to be on his way to succeeding on that front anyway.

From a recent and, yes, very dorky conversation on Medicaid policy:

Me: [Long rambling about how, in the absence of a drastic overhaul in health care, Medicaid needs to be expanded, not cut, and how one of the worst features of the program is the set of complex eligibility requirements that dissuade many otherwise eligible poor people from signing up.]

Person X: "So the best thing to do is to turn Medicaid into some kind of block grant program, and let states decide for themselves how they want to administer the program and what sorts of eligibility standards are best. That's the whole point of federalism!"

Me: "Argh, no, besides the fact that block grants almost always amount to cuts, basically, especially since most states aren't allowed to run deficits to pay for expanded welfare rolls during downturns, blah blah blah, states will also start pulling dirty tricks to lower their costs. Like offering only minimal insurance, or requiring high co-pays. And they'll do it because they're each competing with other states to offer crappier and crappier benefits so that no one gets stuck with a bunch of rent-seeking new immigrants. Federalism just means a race to the bottom."

X: "Oh, states don't do that."

Me: "Yes they do! Everyone knows..."

X: "No, I read a study on that back in college. Everyone thinks it's true but it's totally false."

And that argument sort of ended there, because who was I to argue with a study?" Luckily, back at home with the power of the internet, I can look this stuff up. The famous paper I was thinking of—but couldn't for the life of me recall—was "Welfare Magnets" by Paul Peterson and Mark Rom (1990) which suggested that between 1976 and 1989, neighboring states often lowered their benefits in competition with each other. Even more recently, though, Michael Bailey tweaked (pdf) that model—allowing for immigration between non-contiguous states and doing some other technical stuff—and concluded that the "race to the bottom" still held. States are pressured to discourage poor people from migrating by reducing benefits. Searching around some more, it's hard to find any countervailing studies, so I'd like to know what paper this fellow read (he's promised to try to find this fabled "paper").

Anyway: Medicaid block grants bad. And no, this isn't all I talk about in my spare time.

Dan Darling has one of the better essays I've seen on the Bush administration's still-very-much-in-its-infancy policy towards Iran. The key, I think, is that the White House doesn't want to take the blame if/when EU-Iranian negotiations falter, so it will probably put in an appearance, but it also doesn't trust Europe to follow through with sanctions and other punitive measures against Iran if/when talks do break down.

So the Bush administration's sudden willingness to negotiate may be nothing more than, as Dan put it, "a stalling tactic while we figure out our options."

Fair enough, and there are some very legitimate fears here. Let's say Iran signs a "grand bargain," and formally gives up its nukes and support for terrorism in exchange for economic goodies. The devils in the details of course—how can we verify all this?—but let's assume that's workable. Later on, then, say Iran violates the bargain and resumes nuclear production. Will European leaders of the future have the willpower to start levying additional sanctions, or will they be much too meek and afraid to rock the boat? I'd guess too meek and afraid, at least as things currently stand—if there's one thing we know about European leaders, they really prefer not to piss off those countries with whom they have plum business relations.

Then it's back to square one. At any rate, insta-pundits the world over have ripped through thousands of blank Word documents trying to figure out what Iran's incentives are in all of this, and how we can change them. But why don't people think about Europe's incentives? If European leaders really don't view Iran as "their problem"—which seems to be the overriding assumption here—why is that? Do they think that the U.S. will ultimately deal with Iran if things get really bad? If they do, why can't that change? Jacques Chirac, after all, seems to view Lebanon as largely his personal responsibility—partly because of his relationship with now-blown-to-bits PM Rafiq Hariri, and partly because of France's historical involvement in France, but maybe for other reasons too. Is there any way Europe can be enticed into viewing Iran the same way? I don't know.

One last thing. Here's a different and fairly radical policy option on Iran. First, punt on the nuclear issue. (Oh!) Then, make terrorism, human rights, and cooperation over Iraq the centerpiece of any "grand bargain" (or incremental bargaining) with Iran. Include security guarantees—maybe with Israel too—and tasty economic incentives, like WTO membership. And then see what happens. Several things here—I think that the United States will have much more leverage—and useful leverage—over the Tehran regime if we start in with the economic interdependence stuff now. The window is closing: Sooner or later China is going to start moving in with heavy investment and then Iran won't give two figs about whatever economic carrots we could dangle. That leverage, by the way, makes eventual regime change more probable. Second, I think a nuclear Iran would be highly unlikely to continue supporting al-Qaeda (Why would they? Once Iran goes nuclear, Al-Q isn't a useful security option any more, and Tehran runs the risk that the terrorists turn against their hosts).

But the counterarguments to this approach are long and quite serious.

Jon Chait is correct: Democrats are way too attached to interests in their own states to commit in any unified way to broader, national liberal goals. Hence we see Joe Biden, an otherwise decent guy, supporting that miserable bankruptcy bill solely because it included perks for Delaware. And so on.

But, then again, of course Chait's right! "Local interests" trump the national interest time and time again because... warning, here it comes... we have a system of government obsessed with local interests. Really, now. House districts. State Senators. The electoral college. It's sick. The answer isn't to pretend we can find better Democrats who somehow—magically—stop caring about their home states. (These people do need to get elected, please remember.) No, the answer is to make more national politicians that don't have to worry about local constituencies at all. To that end, I say blow up the Senate, and blow it up good. Get rid of half of the state-based senators and replace them with 50 new "at-large" senators who are elected on a national ballot, via either proportional representation or the Hare method. I prefer Hare. Others might not.

But when the dust settles, we still have 50 state-based senators, as per constitutional requirements, who can niggle away to their heart's content over very important issues like ethanol subsidies and white-tailed prairie dogs. It'll be fun watching them tussle. Meanwhile the 50 "at-large" blokes can get together and try to make actual, sensible economic policy that's good for the entire nation.

This is a very clever column by Dick Morris. I don't know if it's true or not, but the premise is this: The Republicans supposedly have more than enough votes to change Senate rules and stop Democrats from filibustering Bush's Supreme Court nominees. Nothing can stop them. Except, that is, the president himself—who clearly must be worried, according to Morris, about actually getting his far-right nominees confirmed. Because what happens then? The religious right no longer has anything to get frothed up about, so they stop coming to the polls. Meanwhile, the radical judges on the court turn the whole country against the Republican party—since it's all fun and games to rail on "liberal activist judges," but when the Supreme Court starts dictating when and where people can have sex, the people get mighty pissed off.

So yeah, clever. One other dimension: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, as the rumors go, is running for president in 2008. On Morris' theory, he probably doesn't want a liberal backlash or a complacent Christian Right four years from now, so he too would go along with this scheme. He pretends he wants to get rid of the filibuster, he makes a lot of noise about it on TV to dupe religious conservatives (who are easily duped), but he doesn't actually go through with it. And then blames Democrats for filibustering Bush's nominees.

That said, I think the theory's crap. If I'm the Republican leadership, and I had the votes, I'd get rid of the filibuster immediately and start flinging radical judges on the court. I wouldn't think twice. For one, Bush is probably only going to get two nominations to the Supreme Court. That's not enough to tip the balance and overturn Roe vs. Wade, so the religious right will still be frothing aplenty in 2008 and ready to mobilize for yet another Republican president who can complete the Great Uterus Takeover. (The religious right can also get frothed up no matter what—they'll always feel persecuted, or marginalized, or whatever it is they do for fun.) Where was I? Oh, meanwhile, the chance for Bush to appoint some serious "Constitution in Exile" judges—the sort who can strip away those pesky New Deal-era rulings, like wage protection or labor regulation or whatnot—is too good to pass up. If the new wave of judges can help destroy the labor movement, they can consign the Democrats to a permanent minority status. They'd do it if they could.

But they can't, apparently. So Frist doesn't have the votes. Bully for him.

In the inbox earlier today landed a new Democracy Corps poll (pdf) on Social Security suggesting that the Democrats might be in more trouble than they think. Hm. More on this tomorrow—including why, contra Noam Scheiber's smart commentary, offering a compromise on add-on private accounts might actually be a shrewd tactic. Oh, and various mathematical reasons to think that the GOP would never, ever take that compromise. But not now; it's wa-a-a-a-y past my bedtime.

When Senate Minority Leaders attack. Film at 11. Or… you can just read the Washington Post write-up for details:

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan generally gets accolades for his public pronouncements. Yesterday he got a brickbat from Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who blasted Greenspan as "one of the biggest political hacks we have here in Washington."

First thing I thought was, "What the devil's deuce is a brickbat?" Y'olde dictionary sayeth: "A piece, especially of brick, used as a weapon or missile." Ah. So the metaphor here is internally consistent (i.e. someone can be "blasted" with a "brickbat"). That's good. A bit of further investigative research, however, yielded this picture of a very different sort of "brickbat", from the videogame Half-Life 2. Seems to me it would be hard to keep the bricks on that thing; what are those, shoe-laces? Nevertheless, it would certainly make these Senate feuds more exhilarating.

Tim Dickinson, a former (as of, like, a few weeks ago) editor at Mother Jones, is kicking off his posh new Rolling Stone gig with a piece on MoveOn.org. Good stuff. Speaking of which, I know there are a lot of calls for mainstream Democrats to disavow and distance themselves from MoveOn, so as to prove their "centrist" bonafides. Or whatever. But this seems silly. Even if a politician—say, Hillary Clinton—did want to distance herself from MoveOn, clearly the best way to do it wouldn't be to insult them herself. That has a "the lady doth protest too much" air about it. No, the smart thing to do would be to (secretly) piss MoveOn off enough so that they distanced themselves from her. That would be more credible.

Same with Michael Moore. John Kerry could've taken the liberal hawk advice and bashed Moore for thinking that pre-Saddam Iraq was a peaceful place and for opposing the 2001 Afghanistan war. But that would've been lame and unconvincing. It would've been much better to get Michael Moore to bash John Kerry for a) thinking Saddam Hussein was a terrible person and b) supporting the invasion of Afghanistan. Rowrrrr! And instant street cred for Kerry.

Now the downside to dragging MoveOn into all this is that I don't think MoveOn has particularly repugnant views on anything. They opposed Iraq but okay. There aren't going to be any more really divisive foreign policy issues of that nature for a while, and I bet MoveOn and, say, Joe Biden (or Peter Beinart) will agree on most substantial matters over the next four years. So what needs to happen? Here: Someone with millions or maybe billions of dollars needs to set up some lefty front group with obviously noxious views on national security that then spends money insulting the Democrats for not adopting those very same noxious views. Roll the ads: "John Kerry, hawk bastard that he is, supports increasing pay for our child-killing Marines." Or whatever. That's how the Democrats start getting tough!

Hey, cool, the new issue of Boston Review is finally on-line! It's easily the second-best bi-monthly magazine in the whole wide world, so go read it.

Ah, originally this space was to be filled with a "no comment" post that linked to Robert Kaplan's New York Times op-ed today. Or maybe a slight comment about how Kaplan's rightly uplifting, the military really does a lot of good in the world despite all the (justified) criticism it gets, and let's give them a hand. Or something. But Steve Clemons unsettled everything with a good post, saying: Just because Kaplan's right and the military is getting much better at carrying out humanitarian missions in places like Indonesia, that doesn't mean they should be carrying out such missions. The military shouldn't be a surrogate for the State Department.

Right. In a related vein, I know I've said this before, but now that certain highbrow opinion magazines are talking about bringing back the draft, it's time to say it again. Before we start expanding and retooling our military and all that fancy jazz, can we please, please, ask what our military is actually for? Do we want to continue the two-war doctrine? Do we want the capability to intervene in small hotspots of instability, ala Somalia and Haiti. Or do we just want to the capability to support such interventions? Do we want to deter countries from invading each other? Do we want to invade more countries? Do we want to prepare for a conflict with China? Do we want to continue using the military to conduct diplomacy? Really, what's this big military contraption for, anyway?

Many people wil say that's the point, we can't predict. Instead, we should worry that we might get caught in a situation where we have a military inadequate to the task, whatever the task might be. As the Boy Scouts say, be prepared. Okay, but I think the reverse is true too. The type of military we have can end up defining our foreign policy goals. If we actually had a military that was very good at peacekeeping, for instance, then it stands to reason that we would find ourselves embroiled in a lot more peacekeeping operations than we do now. Similarly, the mere fact that we have a high-tech army capable of quickly toppling Third World regimes no doubt led, in part, to the subtle shift in rhetoric in early 2002 from hunting down terrorists to tackling rogue states. You go to war with the Army you have, sure, but sometimes you go to war because of the Army you have.

Will Baude and David Fontana weigh in on the Supreme's Court using the "overwhelming weight of international opinion," as Justice Kennedy put it, to help decide the juvenile execution case. Both essays raise good points, but overlook an obvious blooper on Kennedy's part. International opinion, for the most part, is almost surely in favor of capital punishment. Canadians love executions almost as much as we do—around 70 percent roughly in favor. See similar results in Britain. And Italy. Even in Sweden and France the death penalty has close to majority support.

Admittedly, I don't think American institutions are very democratic. (Just ask me what I'd do to the House, Senate, presidency, and electoral college if I could get my grubby hands on the Constitution.) Still, they seem to have responded to popular opinion on the death penalty issue better than other countries. I imagine this is because we vote for candidates rather than parties: a candidate can always use the death penalty debate to say something about him/herself as a person, so he or she is more likely to demagogue on the subject. The downside is that the candidate-centric system also explains, in part, why we don't have universal health care (it's much easier for a centralized party to design, pass, and implement this sort of thing than it is a loose coalition of elected officials). You can also blame the idiotic nature of the Senate.

But whatever. That's not what I wanted to talk about. In the TNR essay linked above, David Fontana claims that the Supreme Court, by using international opinion, will increase America's standing and respect among the world. Of course, what he really meant is that it will increase America's standing and respect—it's "soft power," if you will—among world leaders. That's obviously important, since it makes it somewhat more likely that those leaders will adopt American norms, or trust American intentions, or whatever else. But trust among leaders isn't everything. Ideally we also want to increase our standing and respect among populations in other countries, since popular opinion constrains what those world leaders do. It's not clear that abolishing the death penalty for minors will win us many fans among the masses abroad.

To see the difference between the two types of soft power, look at how Americans interact with Europe. European leaders could in theory do a number of things over the next four years—like play a larger role in training Iraqi troops—that would endear them to officials in the Bush administration. Tony Blair has a good deal of soft power in White House circles, it seems, and there's no reason Chirac and Schroeder couldn't acquire the same. Nevertheless, even if they did so endear themselves, back in the U.S. it's still going to be popular among the cro-Magnon wing of the Republican party to bash Europe from time to time. This happens because enough Americans genuinely don't like Europe, so "Freedom Fries" and other shenanigans have a good deal of currency.

That fact, in itself, will continue to put strains on the transatlantic relationship. All things considered, I don't think Sen. Norm Coleman believes in his heart of hearts that the UN should be annihilated. Clearly, though, an important subset of his Minnesota constituents like the fact that he's poking his finger in the eye of Old Europe. Some of them—many of them—have internet connections and blogs. The only way for European leaders to stop this nonsense would be to do things that endear themselves to the American people—or at least the subset that thinks Europeans are all weenies. I don't know how they would do this (go on more hunting trips?) or if they'd even want to. The point is there's a distinction.

The new poll NYT/CBS poll has an interesting tidbit: only 44 percent of Americans approve of the president's foreign policy direction. One could conclude, as Matt does, that this means the Democrats can make sweet, sweet electoral headway on national security issues because Republicans are actually quite vulnerable here.

Fair enough, but a few points of skepticism. As a thought experiment, I wonder how, exactly, these poll numbers would be any different if John Kerry had been elected. Thinking about what substantive policy differences might have occurred between November 2 and now, let's assume that under Kerry, the U.S. probably wouldn't have invaded Fallujah. That might have made it harder to secure the Iraqi elections. (Perhaps.) An election-day debacle might have had bad spillover effects. More to the point, it might've made Kerry's foreign policy massively unpopular here at home, assuming voters didn't blame Bush for the mess. What else? It's reasonable to think that Lebanon would still play out the way it's now playing out now. So would Israel-Palestine. On the other hand, Kerry expressly indicated that he wouldn't be too concerned with democracy promotion in Egypt—a terrible mistake in my mind—so Mubarak might never have announced elections, but I don't think that would lower Kerry's ratings. After all, a whopping 59 percent of voters think the U.S. should "stay out" of other countries' businesses, with only 27 percent liking these newfound democracy-promotion efforts. So less fervor on regime change is, at best, a neutral advantage for Democrats (Bush has mostly stayed out of other countries, after all).

More to the point, it's difficult to see how any Democratic president would conduct a different foreign policy from Bush's that also wins over more voters at home. My hunch is that people don't much care about Iran/North Korea, and are willing to trust "their" party to handle the issue in some vague unspecified way. Meanwhile, Bush has high approval ratings (61 percent) on "terrorism" issues, which Democrats can at best try to neutralize. On the other hand, since NYT/CBS poll took place after the whole Europe trip, I suspect that many Americans are primarily none too happy about our less-than-warm transatlantic relations. A Democratic president like Kerry would've repaired some of the symbolic rift on this front, and that would increase his popularity because polls show that people place a high priority on transatlantic relations. Okay.

Sorry, this is mostly rambling. Let me get to the point and highlight the big fat paradox. There seems to be one main area in which Democrats could earn higher marks than President Bush on foreign policy—relations with Europe. But it's already widely known that Democrats would be better than Republicans at that, so it's hard to figure out where, exactly, Democrats can make headway in the electorate on national security issues.

Perhaps you could say that if Democrats could just pull even with the Republicans on vague "terrorism" issues in the polls, then they could use their Europhile advantage to win on the national security issue. Or maybe looking at this stuff issue-by-issue is the wrong way to go and what the Democrats really need is a more holistic "strong on national security" image/message/slogan/whatever.

Continue reading "National Security And The Polls"

I'm too young to remember the days when liberals the world over put Germany and Japan up on a pedestal and declared that all and sundry should emulate their greatness. Presumably it was back in the 1980s, when I was actually living in Japan and experiencing the greatness firsthand (it involved a lot of animated billboards, as I recall). Nevertheless, first Japan caught ill and now Germany, as Mr. Hindrocket reports.

Not knowing much about Germany, it seems true that many of the overly strict labor regulations—most especially the ones that effectively prevents businesses from firing many of their workers—bear a portion of the blame. As does East German reunification. But from talking to Great Germans I Know (i.e. Hans who works at the corner store plus an old high school friend), the bigger problem seems to be that Germans aren't actually suffering any of the effects of economic malaise. Cities and stores are still thriving. The unemployed still collect fat checks. People are happy. 21 percent unemployment over there is less physically painful than 6 percent unemployment here. Eventually, of course, the last slice of pie will be munched away, and macroeconomic problems will turn into everyday lack-of-grocery problems. When that happens, it will be interesting to see whether the government starts hacking away further at the welfare state or not—the usual lurch in times of great hardship is towards the left, no? We'll see. It doesn't seem that Germany's leaders have any incentive to change things otherwise.

The other fun question, too, is whether Germany is hampered by its place in the European Monetary Union. Back in 2002, when the recession first hit, Germany could have used a monetary shot in the arm, ala low interest rates. But the European Central Bank, as I recall, was too worried about overheating other countries, like Ireland and Sweden, so it kept rates high. Now that brings up a good question—we have the exact same situation in the United States. When the Fed starts raising rates because the economy's finally humming along, not all states will be at equal paths, and some will still need loose monetary policy. They'll be stuck in Germany's situation.

So what happens then? My guess is that workers start leaving the state in question, wages sink, and then firms start moving back to the state, reviving the local economy. Good theory, but it doesn't quite work for Germany, whose workers—I've noticed—all speak German, and can't just move elsewhere so easily. The one true solution for this impasse, of course, is simply to make everyone in Europe speak English.

Over at the Mother Jones' blog, it's anti-big business rhetoric from me with commentary on the bankruptcy bill. In truth, I don't usually go in for this sort of thing, but in the case of the lending industry, it seems that the myriad of problems (aggressive loan-pushing on borrowers already in debt, predatory lending, etc.) surrounding the lending industry really do call for drastic action. Personally, I'd go full-on socialist and endorse tight limits on interest rates (and, yes, we could tie rates to inflation to prevent another Savings and Loan debacle). No more wild "last resort" credit card offers. No more unaffordable mortgages. No more predatory practices ("balloon?" half-balloon?"). If you can afford to borrow money, you get to, otherwise not. Of course, doing so means that it will be harder for low-income families to gain access to credit, and that's a problem that needs to be thought through seriously. (Whether low-income borrowers would be worse off, though, seems wholly unlikely.) On the housing side, meanwhile, returning to a greater emphasis on rental assistance rather than "homeownership for the unready" seems entirely sensible, if a bit paternalistic.

Now advocating drastic action is enough to give me pause, so I should say that there's also a dissenting argument out there worth highlighting. Todd Zywicki's big paper (pdf) on the topic argues that the drastic rise in bankruptcy over the past 20 years can't be explained by the deteriorating financial condition of families. In fact, he says too-lax bankruptcy laws really are the problem. Since I haven't seen anything close to a refutation of the study, I'll put it out there, and hold off on the "doomsday solution" until I'm a bit more confident about all this.

Everything Yglesias writes here is quite right. For now, I'll refer people to my rough and ready guide to the problems with Medicaid (i.e. the public health care for low-income people), written a week or two ago. It's useful, I hope. And if you walk away with the rather perverse conclusion that the program ought to be expanded in many ways, not slashed, then you've read correctly.

It's also, I should say, a bit ingenuous to say that Medicaid is running at lower costs than the private insurance system, since it's certainly true that Medicaid leeches off the private system—mainly by contracting for its services at lower-than-market prices, thus forcing doctors and hospitals to cost shift onto private payers. But the president's preferred policy doesn't fix any of that.

So little time to blog today—heck, so little time to read the news—but scanning my trusty New York Times on the way home (yes, I'm *that* sort of lefty—even better, I was riding one of those newfangled zero-emissions buses!), a few short and mostly random things occurred to me:

1. Gridlock is my new big fear about Iraq right now. Yeah, I know, I've had so many, and only like 42 percent have come true. But looking over the interim constitution (esp. article 60), it seems that if the elected National Assembly can't agree on a Constitution by next February at the latest—or, heck, if they can't even agree on a cabinet by then—then the assembly is dissolved, and a new one is elected. Who governs Iraq then? Hard to say. Maybe the old interim government. Maybe power devolves onto provincial governments—which would suit the Kurds and the conservative Shia in Basra, etc., who don't much like centralized government.
   
   
2. What's going on with Iyad Allawi? I rounded up evidence over at MoJo yesterday that the U.S. and its surrogates were seriously pushing Allawi for the new PM spot. He won't win it, of course, and most likely Allawi's just angling for a plum new government job, and wants as much leverage as possible. But might the U.S. be trying actively to gum up the works and using Allawi to prevent any new government from forming? Probably not—the fact that Iraq does not, in fact, have an actual government yet will eventually be more embarrassing for the United States than anything else.
   
   
3. As freedom marches on throughout the Middle East, the Bush administration has shown itself very good (or at least "much better than before") at following through with its rhetoric about freedom from tyranny/oppression/despotism. That's an important step. But ideally, I'd also like to see the White House—Rice especially—pay more attention to the actual mechanisms of democracy. Insisting that Egyptian President Husni Mubarak ought to embrace freedom is one thing. And he's doing just that. But why not get more specific? The Egyptian state still needs very particular reforms—an independent judiciary, an end to the 24-year-old state of emergency, etc.—so why not draw up a laundry list and start hammering on the items? Implementation really is everything here, and obviously each country has its own needs, but still, democracy ought to start meaning a lot more than freedom and abstract "revolution". On the other hand, too-specific demands from the United States could make it seem like we're trying to dictate what form of government we want. So I don't know.
   
   
4. Also, here's an interesting article inside the Times about South America's leftward drift—first Argentina, now Brazil, and now Uruguay. One person quoted in the piece notes that these governments have instituted a "massive rejection" of the IMF's "Washington Consensus" over economic policies of the mid-to-late '90s. Fair enough, but if you read what these countries are all doing, it seems like Washington Consensus stuff to me—macroeconomic discipline, market economies, open trade. I think there's a confusion of terms. Most of the stuff the leftist movements truly hate—i.e. the shredding of the welfare state, low taxes, lifting of capital controls—were never part of any sort of consensus, I think.
   
   
5. Oh, and finally, after reading Michael Ledeen's rousing and heartfelt comparison of the current Middle Eastern "revolutions" to what happened the last time a "visionary" president (he means Reagan) clamored for freedom in Eastern Europe, it reminded me that it would be really, really useful to go back and study what actually happened in Eastern Europe in 1989. I mean, it's one thing to be facile about it and say Reagan caused the whole thing if all we're trying to do is celebrate the man's life and make ourselves a mythic hero. Botch history all you want at Reagan's funeral. But if we're trying to recreate (or even understand) an actual real-life revolution, it's a bit more important to understand the process and causal factors involved. Here's one good lecture on the fall of Communism in 1989, I'll try to dig around for something else.
   
   
6. Okay, a few more things. The ongoing Medicaid discussions are very confusing. But here's something to point out: The Bush administration is complaining that states are using tricks 'n' stuff to bilk more Medicaid money from Washington than they really need. I'm sure the states are doing that, since it's been going on for as long as the sun, moon, and rain have existed (or... since the 1960s), but in the past, Congress simply passed laws to eliminate some of the shadier state accounting tactics. (Remember "voluntary provider taxes"?) That fixed the problem without going overboard and slashing funds that were actually necessary for, you know, pregnant women and children. But needless to say, this administration has no interest in doing the sensible thing. Hmph. Well I'll try to write more about Medicaid when I get a spare moment.
   
   
7. And finally: now that Josh Marshall is on vacation, Paul Krugman had to come up with his own column material... and today he did! Mostly it's the "no compromise" stuff Matt Yglesias and Josh have already hammered on, but then see the fourth and third paragraphs from the end—Krugman makes very good points about why Democrats shouldn't even compromise on add-on private accounts, because anything that undermines the Trust Fund will hurt Social Security in the long term. Um— Hey! Wait! Didn't I make that very argument a few days ago? Well, yeah, but Krugman obviously doesn't read this blog, and even if he did, I think I've pilfered a few ideas from Krugman in my day (okay, many ideas), so, you know, it's all fun and games...

Hm, so after rattling all that off, I s'pose I could've split this up into six short blog items and then looked very prolific indeed. But I'm structurally incapable, it seems, of doing short posts. So it goes...

UPDATE: Also, I can't count. But the title was so irresistable!

Steven Cook has an interesting take on Syrian "support" for the Iraqi insurgency:

Q: A side question: If Syria so disliked Saddam Hussein, and Syria even went to war on the U.S. side in 1991, why have the Syrians been helping the insurgents in Iraq?

[Cook:] Well, that's a very, very interesting question, and it's one of the things that I'm not sure we have a real handle on. It doesn't make sense for the Syrians to be supporting a largely Sunni, Baathist-based insurgency in Iraq. And I'm not quite sure that the Syrian government is directly involved in supporting the insurgency. I think what's happening is that there's a certain amount of benign neglect. They are not policing their borders; they are allowing people who would join the insurgency to come across the borders. They're allowing money to come across the borders to help fund the insurgency, and along with the money, there are also weapons, explosives, and things along those lines--the payoffs. But there's no love lost between the Baathists of Iraq and the Baathists of Syria, that's clear.

Very interesting. Josh Landis had a post awhile back about how even if Bashar Assad wanted to crack down on the Iraqi Baathists inside Syria, he might not be able to due to corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, incompetence, etc. etc. Now it seems with the latest capture of a high-ranking Iraqi insurgent—one of Saddam's half-brothers—by Syrian intelligence, this might change. On the one hand, the dude was captured in Beirut, where Syrian intelligence seems really quite good, so it's no guarantee that the Damascus government can continue to crack down on Iraqis. And on the other other hand, perhaps this is all a shrewd move by Syria to get the U.S. off its back. ("We'll capture you some nice juicy Iraqi Baathists, you let us wander around in Lebanon for a bit longer, eh?") Hard to say.

While I'm still trying to catch up on all things Syria (yes, yes, expect "insta-expert" postings starting in a day or two, but for now I actually have to admit my ignorance and stuff), this Josh Landis post makes a lot of sense to me. The U.S. needs Europe to place sanctions on Syria in order to get any mileage—since most of Damascus' trade is with Europe—but Europe doesn't want to get caught in a permanent state of sanctions, from which the U.S. will never let them leave. And the Bush administration will never relent, presumably, until Bashar's regime collapses.

The Bashar regime, meanwhile, is trying to "add[] up local support." Seems they're really counting on Muslim loyalists from within Lebanon—Tony Badran sees some signs of that happening, but it's still very unclear whether the Sunnis will rally to the pro-Syrian government in Lebanon. So, as Josh says, "eyes are on the Shiites and Hizballah to help lead Syria out of its morass." And Iranian support. Hizbullah, I would imagine, is dead set against anyone enforcing UN resolution 1559, which gets Syria out of Lebanon, mainly because 1559 requires Hizbullah to disband. So the anti-Syrian opposition in Lebanon may try to negotiate some other form of Syrian withdrawal in order to get Hizbullah's support. I'm not sure what.

At any rate, it's hardly a sure thing that the Syrian regime will lose out here, from what I can tell. Perhaps Bashar's regime will suddenly and magically start finding more and more Iraqi Baathists within Syrian borders. In that case, the U.S. could strike a deal—after all, the Iraqi insurgency is a far greater threat to American interests than the Syrian occupation in Lebanon—but I don't know exactly how this would work. Maybe it won't be enough to appease the White House.

Meanwhile, there's the longstanding question of whether Lebanon will implode or not. This fellow says: "look for Syria to sow chaos, then make the standard claim that only they can keep Lebanon peaceful." Meanwhile, As'ad Abu Khalil has three posts suggesting that unrest in Lebanon will lead to chaos. Read all of his posts—he has a very dour tone, but he knows a hell of a lot. He says the Shi'ites—who perhaps comprise a majority in Lebanon—still support Syria, and that party includes Hizbullah. The Sunni opposition, meanwhile, is hardly united. And a revolt seems to be brewing within the Lebanese Army. If Syria leaves, says As'ad, "[the world] will soon discover that the divisions among the Lebanese are real and deep."

UPDATE: Ah, Matt Yglesias provides a pithier take, suitably skeptical. At the moment I can't say whether the Lebanon "revolution" is A Very Good Thing or A Very Bad Thing. I'm just trying to figure out what the f— is going on!

The Angry Bear gets very angry indeed over the continued lumping together of Social Security and Medicare. And why not? One of these things is healthy and successful; the other is on a collision course with fiscal doom. Together, sure, they're "unsustainable." If you want to play that game, then "Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Medicare are 'unsustainable' for the long term" too, as AB puts it. But there's another question here: Is Medicare really "unsustainable"?

I tried to answer this question the other day, noting that as a society we're choosing to pay more and more for health care, because we value rather vain things like living and breathing, and so health care costs are going up of our own choice. In that sense, it doesn't matter if we're paying more and more over time for programs like Medicare, especially if this is a good way to deliver health care. Alex Tabarrok slapped this idea down, and his point is an obvious-yet-stinging one, and I'm still stung, so we'll put this aside for now.

But here's another way to look at things. Health entitlements like Medicaid (health care for poor people) and Medicare (health care for old people) will eventually cost more and more as health care costs continue to rise. Nevertheless, we'll also get richer as a society. It's just a question of whether we get richer faster than health care costs rise. It seems like we aren't, since Medicare/Medicaid are scheduled to suck in an increasing share of GDP, so it seems like health will crowd out all those other nice things we'd like to purchase as a society. But consider this: "Health Care Projections Through 2013." In particular, look at "Exhibit 1" and get your calculators ready.

In 2002 the U.S. spent 14.9 percent of its GDP on health care (that's a whopping $1.5 trillion), and that figure will balloon to 18.4 percent of GDP in 2013 ($3.36 trillion!). Sounds bad, right? But in 2002 GDP was $10.9 trillion. In 2013 GDP will be $18.2 trillion. What does all this mean? It means that in 2002 we had $9.4 trillion to spend on things that didn't involve health care. Cars, candy, homes, education, designer jeans. But way down the line in 2013, we'll have an even-more-whopping $15 trillion to spend on non-health things. Woohoo! (In fact, even factoring in population growth—I won't bore with numbers—we'll still have more GDP per capita to spend on fun stuff that doesn't involve a doctor, hospital, syringe, alcohol swab.)

So that means a big ol' party in 2013. Better health and cooler cars. Will the trend last forever? Er, maybe not. I assume if the portion of GDP devoted to health grew fast enough, it would "crowd out" the portion of GDP not devoted to health. I'm not an economist, or even very good with numbers (trust me, all we math majors ever needed to know was a bit of set theory and Galois' theorem), so I can't answer the question of "how fast is too fast". But it seems like health spending could still rise as a scary percentage figure without forcing us to cut back on other non-health stuff. The key is to find that happy medium, without freaking out about rising health costs.