Some very interesting walk-back from some of the more maximalist interpretations of yesterday. The war-aim does seem to be focused more minimally on al Qaeda (I suspect Obama would love to capture bin Laden) but with maximalist means - civilian, military, diplomatic, regional, Afghan, American. This is either a brilliant compromise or it will fall between two stools. Still, since I failed to predict the success of the surge, I don't really have much standing to warn of failure. The strategy also seems somewhat front-loaded. The Obamaites are going to join the battle this summer using somewhat different tactics and tools, see how they fare and regroup as winter approaches. Obama does have some off-ramps. My skepticism remains; but a chance to see if a smarter strategy - and a Pakistan-inclusive approach - works is not crazy. It would be great if we could avoid a resurgence of Islamist power there. My fear is that resisting it effectively may require a far deeper commitment than we can afford or that's consonant with wider national interest.
Peter Bergen also has an almost-moving piece defending intervention's possibilities in the NYT today. Peter knows what he's talking about, was opposed to the Iraq war, and deserves a real hearing. I ws, however, not that thriled to discover that Afghanistan has too been successfully occupied:
Since Alexander the Great, plenty of conquerors have subdued Afghanistan. In the early 13th century, Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes ravaged the country’s two major cities. And in 1504, Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, easily took the throne in Kabul. Even the humiliation of 1842 did not last. Three and a half decades later, the British initiated a punitive invasion and ultimately won the second Anglo-Afghan war, which gave them the right to determine Afghanistan’s foreign policy.
So we either act like Genghis Kahn (don't give Cheney any ideas) or we're there for decades of budget-draining occupation in order to "determine Afghanistan's foreign policy". Not exactly encouraging, Peter.
"With a president who is about as American as your average UN delegate from some bankrupt island country you've never heard of, it's hard to say how it works out," - Dan Riehl.
"When you bring a case like this you can't stop to make political judgments as to how it might affect bilateral relations between countries," he told the AP." It's too important for that."
Boye noted that the case was brought not against interrogators who might have committed crimes but by the lawyers and other high-placed officials who gave cover for their actions.
"Our case is a denunciation of lawyers, by lawyers, because we don't believe our profession should be used to help commit such barbarities," he said.
Another lawyer with detailed knowledge of the case told the AP that Garzon's decision to consider the charges was "a significant first step." The lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The case may well be strengthened by the DOJ's own internal review of the Yoo and Bybee and Bradbury "legal" opinions, which were transparently abuses of the law to allow Cheney to get on with torturing. Britain is also investigating allegations of torture against Binyam Mohammed, as Greenwald explains here. The Brits seem to have some kind of idea that the West is governned by something called the rule of law - a state of affairs suspended for seven years under Bush and Cheney. The US can hardly complain. Washington invoked the same right to prosecute foreign leaders for torture last year:
This year for the first time, the United States used a law that allows for the prosecution in the United States of torture in other countries. On Jan. 10, a Miami court sentenced Chuckie Taylor, the son of the former Liberian president, to 97 years in a federal prison for torture, even though the crimes were committed in Liberia.
Last October, when the Miami court handed down the conviction, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey applauded the ruling and said: “This is the first case in the United States to charge an individual with criminal torture. I hope this case will serve as a model to future prosecutions of this type.”
The question is, at what point do symbolic gestures metamophosize into real action? At what point does ad hoc justice take shape and become real justice? When will this gain momentum? These investigations and proceedings should be happening in the United States. Maybe someday they will be.
The lawyers are the beginning. Bush and Cheney are - and must be - the ultimate targets. They belong in jail. And there are no statutes of limitations on war crimes.
Matt Hoyle has some beautiful pictures of circus folk. He explains:
The project is about a fictitious town in 1940’s Florida inhabited by sideshow performers of all shapes and sizes. It’s inspired by the real life town of Gibsonton Florida which used to be an active vacation town for wintering circus folk. I was lucky enough to shoot many known sideshow performers who are in the last remaining sideshows in America, Coney Island Sideshow and 999 Eyes Freakshow from Austin Texas.
...fights over what can and cannot be said in public schools about sex obscure a troubling reality: when it comes to taking sex education seriously, most kids are getting left behind. Only one state in the country requires schools to spend any specific amount of time teaching students about sex, one-third don't require any sex education at all, and the rest leave it up to schools--and sometimes individual teachers--to determine whether "sex ed" means an hour-long assembly kids attend once during their school career or an established curriculum that extends over years and helps them figure out how to develop healthy relationships and make decisions about sex.
Are public schools even the right place to be teaching kids about sex? Maybe not. But parents aren't really stepping up--surveys of parents and teens continue to show a significant gap between the percentage of parents who say they've talked to their kids about sex and the percentage of kids who report their parents have done so.
Imagine that we find the Holy Grail of neurobiology, the patterns of neural activation that correlate perfectly with different events in our mental lives. We would still never understand or make sense of why those correlations exist. There is no intrinsic relationship between the experience and the neural substrates of the experience. We always need to look at what factors bring the two together. The environment, other people, our needs and desires -- all these things exist outside the brain and have to be seen as essential parts of our selves and consciousness. So we aren't just our brains, we're not locked inside our craniums; we extend beyond our skulls, beyond our skin, into the world we occupy.
When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.
Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.
I'm an infectious disease specialist. Today I saw a patient with a horrible foot ulcer from diabetes. She likely has infection in her bone, will need weeks of treatment, and may lose her foot. She cried with guilt, regret, and disbelief at her condition. She had been an excellent patient. She saw her doctor, managed the complicated treatment of her diabetes, saw her foot specialist.
Until her husband lost his job and insurance. She couldn't afford her insulin pump supplies, started stretching her doctor visits. Paid cash when she could. And ignored...pushed away her pain. Tried to hide the smell coming from her foot. For 4 months. Now it may be too late.
Another writes:
I am a pediatric emergency room physician in a small southern city, and I regret to tell you, business is booming.
In a very serious development in the attempt to bring former Bush officials to justice for committing war crimes, we find this out today:
Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público
reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal
probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent
into torture at the prison in Guantánamo. The criminal complaint can be
examined here. Público
identifies the targets as University of California law professor John
Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II
(now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential
chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee,
now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.
More ominous for Yoo and Addington et al is that the judge involved is the one who nailed Pinochet. That dude doesn't mess around. Spain's action means these war criminals are vulnerable in 24 European countries for arrest and prosecution for enabling torture. It's a start.
Thomas Bartlett reports on students outsourcing their work:
In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you'll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work...
The writers for essay mills are anonymous and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week, hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to $40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose. Others have no college degree and limited English skills.
While I share some of your skepticism (but not your despair), I reject your description of the Afghan and Pakistani people, their institutions, culture and religion as "utterly alien." I have spent time in Afghanistan myself and met many people who share the same basic values as most Americans and Europeans and Arabs and Africans and Chinese, etc. They want to live in peace, security and prosperity. They are proud of their faith, heritage and history. They want their children to have a better future. They dislike foreign intrusions, but deeply desire normal relations with the other peoples of the world.
Sure, there is the bizarre death cult of Al-Qaeda and the benighted hardcore Taliban, and pretty much everything about them is alien to modern existence. But you seem to be painting the whole region and culture of Central Asia as utterly unknowable, incomprehensible, and sinister. Of course we cannot turn the whole region into a network of Jeffersonian democracies, and I don’t see anywhere in the new plan that this is our objective.
Just a quick heads up on the RCP article from Peter Glover you linked related to the religious defamation resolution that passed the UN Human Rights Council today:
He keeps referring to the resolution as "binding," but even in the UN Watch article he repeatedly refers to, the resolution is described as NONbinding. Every other news article on its passage today (including Reuters) says the same. I dislike the idea of this resolution as much as the next amateur agnostic satirist, but it's piss-poor to miss that kind of detail, and I do not think you are in the business of linking (without correction) to the opinions of the (at best) lazy and (at worst) woefully uninformed pundits in our midst. I may be wrong, but it looks like this is his first submission for RCP, and he's not off to a good start...
If the enjoyment of spectator sports is so mystifying, why is it that people who impugn the intelligence of those who enjoy them are so short of intelligent arguments against their doing so? Why may David Barash, or anybody, enjoy watching ballet or go to the theatre without having dumb questions like the ones he asks piped in his direction? Why is going for a walk something I must do instead of, rather than as well as, going to Old Trafford? What's so great about smelling a flower? I've got nothing against it, but I wouldn't like to do it for the length of time I would like to, and do, watch England playing Australia at cricket.
Megan praises this new piece by Simon Johnson and is especially impressed by this list:
In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.
I can testify that my eyes 'went' at exactly the time I began on-screen working in earnest. Now, some 20 years later, when I reach the end of a week crouched over the computer screen, my eyes can barely focus, I am fighting off headaches and feeling a very specific kind of exhaustion which is quite distinguishable from other forms of tiredness. It may be that screens are doing us more harm than we know...
For some reason, I've never had any problem reading screens and no carpal tunnel stuff from constant blogging and barely any back problems.
One of the most powerful lessons of history was certainly played out in the 43 year period between the end of Word War II and 1988. By the end of that time, it was completely obvious that people living under communism were not doing as well as most people living under some form of capitalism (at least in Europe). This became well known to the folks living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and contributed greatly to the downfall of communism, among other factors.
Packer tries to understand why the GOP fringe is more powerful than the Democratic fringe:
The views of right-wing commentators in the grip of the paranoid style (Obama is a stealth radical, the Democrats are imposing socialism) are much closer to mainstream conservative and Republican belief than the views of their counterparts on the left (the levees in New Orleans were blown up by the government, the White House had something to do with 9/11) are to mainstream liberal and Democratic belief. The reasons are complex, but I would list these: the evangelical and occasionally messianic fervor that animates a part of the Republican base; the atmosphere of siege and the self-identification of conservatives as insurgents even when they monopolized political power; the influence of ideology over movement conservatives, and their deep hostility to compromise; the fact that modern conservatism has been a movement, which modern liberalism has not.
Larison is right about decriminalized marijuana. And you are right about decriminalized marijuana. The argument "duuuude, I want to get wasted all the time" is written off by most people. The argument "I would never touch the stuff but we can save money sick people libertarianism blah blah blah" is cold.
We need credible people to stand up and say "I contribute to society, I work hard, I love my family, and I smoke pot. This is the only way I break the law. The law is wrong." And we need a lot of them.
There are a lot of people that could make this argument. Unfortunately, society being what it is, a lot of people, myself included, are (excuse the metaphor) in the closet.
"Listning Prez on FOX anounce his Afhgan stategy Now it bcomes Obama War Not Bush war any longer," - Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley, on Twitter.
There seem to be an awful lot of GOP officials on twitter these days. Did they learn the wrong lesson from defeat?
The first 100 days of the Obama administration will be and have been consumed with the economy and the budget; the second 100 days will feature, among other things, a significant and detailed negotiation with Congress on health care reform. To start the process, the White House has two major options. Either they could push for a significant expansion of government-run programs, or they could ask Congress to use money from the health care reserve fund to pay for the premiums of Americans who don't currently have insurance. The former would represent a departure from the employer-based system; the latter, which would include significant new restrictions on the insurance industry, would preserve, for the time being, the system's status quo. Politically, the target is moderate Democrats and independents. Legislatively, the goal is to get insurance companies and business lobbies on board, early.
Ireland's economy shrank 7.5 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, capping the worst full-year performance in at least a quarter century... The economy may shrink as much as 6.5 percent this year as companies from Dell Inc. to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc cut jobs in Ireland, the government forecasts.
Peter Glover describes explains how a "powerful bloc of 57 Islamic states is again pushing for the UN to make it a criminal offense to criticise or 'defame' Islam." He writes:
The resolution deems offending Islamic sensitivities a "serious affront to human dignity" which could lead to "social disharmony", "violations of human rights" and "incitement to religious hatred in general and against Islam in particular". If passed, the resulting binding resolution would find its way into various UN documents all of which would require that UN member states at "local, national and international levels" start restricting the free speech of citizens to prevent public criticism of religious beliefs, particularly Islamic belief.
Nobody can be obliged to respect a belief or set of beliefs, and once they are so obliged their freedom of thought has been severely compromised and thereby one of their fundamental human rights.
What to do about the opium flowing out of Afghanistan has always been a knotty element of US policy regarding Afghanistan. How much of a priority should it be? (Simply put, if you attack the the opium trade, warlords and locals get pissed off and join or support the other side.) Asked about the priority of drug fighting in the Afghanistan review, Holbrooke, as he was leaving the briefing, said "We're going to have to rethink the drug problem." That was interesting. He went on: "a complete rethink." He noted that the policymakers who had worked on the Afghanistan review "didn't come to a firm, final conclusion" on the opium question. "It's just so damn complicated," Holbrooke explained. Did that mean that the opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan should be canned? "You can't eliminate the whole eradication program," he exclaimed. But that remark did make it seem that he backed an easing up of some sort. "You have to put more emphasis on the agricultural sector," he added.
If this pans out, it's a big deal. But the trouble with giving Holbrooke this kind of mission is that the last thing he'd ever do is recognize it's insoluble. His ego couldn't tolerate it.
"What has happened in Afghanistan is nothing short of a miracle. Who is responsible for it? The New York Times gives the major credit to ``the Afghan people'' with their ``courage and commitment.'' Courage and commitment there was, but that courage and commitment was curiously imperceptible until this administration conceived a radical war plan, executed it brilliantly, liberated the country and created from scratch the structures of democracy ... Against all expectations,
Afghanistan is the first graduate of the Bush Doctrine of spreading
democracy in rather hostile places. We should take a moment to
celebrate a remarkable success that had long seemed so improbable," - Charles Krauthammer, December 10, 2004.
Larison thinks proponents of marijuana legalization are being counterproductive:
...the standard “I’m in favor of legalization, and I’m the farthest thing in the world from a pot smoker!” argument ends up making the argument for legalization less compelling. This is because this kind of argument unintentionally reproduces the stigma against the drug and effectively endorses one of the key claims that supporters of criminalization make.
But anyone who does not fit the stereotype - and I have nothing but regard for stoners myself - is rendered invisible by the criminalization.
Tom Ricks finds a website that posts translations from Urdu and Pashtu media. He asks:
One thing that strikes me reading it is how predictable Taliban rhetoric is. I've always found the same with al Qaeda's commentary -- just poorly written, and I've read enough so that I don't think it can be blamed entirely on the translators. Can readers of Arabic tell me if al Qaeda sounds as bad in the original?
Michael Crowley examines the many lacunae in the Obama Af-Pak plan. Among them:
Obama promised to accelerate training to
create an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 by 2011.
But, he added, "[I]ncreases in Afghan forces may very well be needed as
our plans to turn over security responsibility to the Afghans go
forward." In fact, there's little doubt that a country of 32 million
people will require much more. Just ask Holbrooke, Obama's State
Deparment point man for the region. Speaking in Brussels last week
about the target police force size, which had previously been reported,
Holbrooke said
that "[e]veryone we talked to without exception -- Afghans, insurgency
experts, the government, American military -- agreed that was not
sufficient." So, what number would be sufficient? And how close to that
number will Obama feel obligated to get before he's ready to exit? That
remains unclear.
The more I read the more depressed I get. I simply do not believe that we will be able to rid the region of Islamist terrorists by military force, diplomatic genius or civilian outreach. And I suspect that our very intervention has spawned more of these terrorists than might have existed otherwise. The only reason we are there is because Osama bin Laden used the place as a base for the 19 unarmed men who perpetrated 9/11. The question we have to ask is: How is our current policy going to prevent another 19 unarmed men from wreaking havoc in the same way?
Family Tree is a series of portraits of immediate family members i.e. Father/Son, Mother/Daughter and even Father/Daughter, Mother/Son. Families are photographed individually and then sized and printed at the same proportions. The two photographs are manually torn and glued together to make one portrait investigating the visual DNA passed from generation.
Nattavudh Powdthavee tries to reconcile studies that suggest children don't make parents happier on balance with our shared belief that they do:
...we tend to believe that the rare but meaningful experiences – such as seeing our children smile for the first time or graduating from university or getting married – would give us massive increases in our happiness. And indeed they do, but these boosts in well-being, often to our surprise, tend not to last for very long.
The President's words were disappointing. He talked about our goal to reach a force level of 134,000 Afghan soldiers and 82,000 police by 2011. This is not even in the neighborhood of being enough. Further, the increase of 21,000 U.S. troops is likely just a bucket of water on the growing bonfire. One can only expect that sometime in 2010, the President will again be forced to announce another increase in U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
If there were not people like Gates and Petraeus up there, my gut would say to pull out. It is only my faith in the military, and what I saw them accomplish against heavy odds in Iraq, that gives me hope.
The fact that Obama is instituting Iraq-honed practices in Afghanistan refutes the assertion that the Iraq War was a fatal distraction from the war in Afghanistan. Vindicated, on the other hand, is Christopher Hitchens, who has repeatedly made the case that the Iraq War would provide invaluable instruction in fighting jihadists going forward.
These are just some of the deaths associated with marijuana raids (all summarized, with sources, here). Then there is the domestic black market violence that comes with marijuana prohibition. And the unnecessary deaths of sick people (like Peter McWilliams) who might have lived if they’d had access to medical marijuana.
So yeah. I think “deadly serious” is about right, actually.
I separated from the military in 2005. As a gay man, I could no longer deal with the duplicity that was required of me as an officer. I won a partial scholarship to attend law school, made good grades, and interned at the office of the general counsel at the headquarters of a major federal department in DC. Graduating from law school was one of the proudest moments of my life. Though I had been living as a poor student, I was finally able to live as an openly gay man for the first time in my life.
Almost a year later, I still don't have a real job and have had only one job interview. I recently moved back in with my amazingly understanding and loving parents who live in an extremely fundamentalist rural town where I've been substitute teaching. After months of fruitless job hunting, I'm now in the process of losing weight so I can go back into the military full time.
The special charm of Sarah Palin's congenital lying habit lies in the triviality of the usual matters at hand. Yes, her life is a Judge Judy episode - except she's not as good a liar as most of the participants in that show. So long ago, she insisted that she had not fired a librarian as mayor, even as he had her termination letter in hand. Or she insisted that she asked her daughters for permission to run for vice-president, even though her own office put out an itinerary and press release that proved that didn't happen. And so she still claims she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, even though no sane person with access to Google believes her. And she kept saying she had provided medical records, when she never did. And on and on and on ... But the most amusing are the ones where the lies get really complicated really quickly, like a Ricky Gervais skit. So she said she wouldn't take all the federal stimulus money, then said she would, then said she'd never said she wouldn't. Still with me? So she scheduled a meeting with the legislature. Or did she? Let's break this one down, shall we? From the ADN:
[The issue] boiled over when Palin sent a statement to the press blaming the Legislature for the meeting falling apart. "Governor Sarah Palin was scheduled to participate telephonically in a
meeting with legislative leadership today when legislative leaders
cancelled the meeting to host their own press conference," it said.
The Senate president and House speaker said that is not true.
"Is this – as some would claim – a failure to trust God, who has promised faithfulness to what he has made? I think that to suggest that God might intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as unchristian and unbiblical as to suggest that he protects us from the results of our individual folly or sin. This is not a creation in which there are no real risks; our faith has always held that the inexhaustible love of God cannot compel justice or virtue; we are capable of doing immeasurable damage to ourselves as individuals, and it seems clear that we have the same terrible freedom as a human race." - Archbishop Rowan Williams, talking about global warming and environmentalism.
Michael Totten has a wonderfully detailed, powerfully honest account of the surreal nature of Baghdad today - still a wreck but not a total war zone, dark as a forest at night, in a lull whose future is unknowable. Money quote:
I stayed outside and talked to Sergeant Pennartz who stood watch on the porch.
“I sure hope this holds,” he said, “because we're going to pull out
soon. I think it's a mistake. This country is going to need help for
years. But at the same time I really really really don't want
to come back here. That's how a lot of us feel. We don't want to pull
out, but we also don't want to be here. I just hope the peace holds so
we don't have to come back and fight for the ground we already won and
abandoned. Again.” ...
“On the surface everyone will tell you Sunnis, Shias, we don't care, we're all Iraqis,” Sergeant Pennartz said. “But talk to them for a while and they'll tell you what they really think. Do you know what those Shias did? Et cetera. Some Sunnis say Shias were never in Iraq until the Iran-Iraq war. Some are totally ignorant and say they’ll never live next to Shias.”
We eventually climbed back in the Humvees and headed back toward the FOB.
On the way I saw orange trees covered in dust behind crumbling walls.
Wild dogs ran in the streets. Iraqi Police officers huddled around a
fire to keep warm like bums around a burning trash can in The Bronx.
“Sometimes,” Lieutenant Dimenna said, “during the worst of the rainy season, the sewage here gets up to ankle level.”
Yglesias isn't too worried about the Afghan ramp-up. He's right to welcome some clear benchmarks, and the potential for off-ramps if the whole thing deteriorates even further. But I think he's wrong to focus on numbers. 60,000 troops is not a lot of troops compared with our commitment to Iraq right now - but also a tiny number of troops in the vast expanse of Afghanistan. What matters is how they are deployed, and one can only hope that David Brooks is right that they've learned an awful lot since they got there. Then the regional question:
The other interesting point is that “officials said he planned to
recast the Afghan war as a regional issue involving not only Pakistan
but also India, Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia
and the Central Asian states.” This is exactly right.
March 22, 2009 - March 28, 2009
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