Just an update with links to the discussions and articles that have struck me as most interesting. First up, Tariq Ali, who often spouts nonsense concerning geopolitics but is here writing about something he knows and cares about. In today’s Independent he deplores the dynastification of Pakistan with the naming of Bhutto fils as PPP leader . He also had an interesting piece in the Guardian which has been republished by International Viewpoint. Second, Jemima Khan, who comes across as well-informed and perceptive in the Telegraph . And finally, a whole raft of discussions at The Immanent Frame . Feel free to add more links in comments.
From the category archives:
World Politics
Terrible news from Pakistan , which, no doubt is the prelude to more appalling violence and loss of life. Whatever else can be said about Benazir Bhutto, it showed tremendous courage to return to Pakistan and to contest the elections when her assassination was always likely. It seems wrong to try to say much more than that at present.
The NY Times says that Iraq is the third most corrupt country in the word after the failed states of Somalia and Myanmar (Burma). The article gives plenty of examples at all levels, but is striking in the way it represents US forces as dismayed, but largely helpless, onlookers.
It’s time, obviously, to dive into the memory hole, and point out that the looting that started the downward spiral was a matter of deliberate Coalition policy. As this report in the London Times stated in April 2003
The British view is that the sight of local youths dismantling the offices and barracks of a regime they used to fear shows they have confidence that Saddam Hussain’s henchmen will not be returning to these towns in southern Iraq.One senior British officer said: “We believe this sends a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished.”
This report focuses on the British but the US and Australian governments were at least as culpable
The FT reports that the OSCE has withdrawn from monitoring elections in Russia.
Europe’s main election monitoring group said on Friday it was scrapping plans to deploy observers to Russia’s forthcoming parliamentary elections in a decision that could cast doubt on the integrity of the poll. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe claimed Moscow had imposed “unprecedented restrictions” on its activities. Russia had slashed the number of observers it would admit to the December 2 election and then repeatedly delayed issuing visas for OSCE monitors.
It may be that this is (as a quoted Russian deputy claims) the prelude to mass falsification of results, but my impression (as a non-Russia specialist) is that the government doesn’t need to do much falsifying of polls, if any, to win. They’ve already succeeded in stage-managing democracy so well that they won’t need to (admittedly, the more liberal parties in Russia haven’t done very much to help their own cause either). This is more likely a product of Russia’s general desire to revise the post-Cold War international order, and get rid of the bits (such as election monitoring) that it thinks limits its autonomy both at home, and in neighboring states (for background information, see this earlier post).
For me, there are two interesting questions going forward. First: are other countries (perhaps more importantly the EU than the US), going to take this quietly, or are they going to seek to embarrass the Russians in some way, claiming that there are problems with their democracy, and perhaps seeking to sideline Russia from complete participation in some of the clubs that it has joined since the demise of the USSR?
Second, how are autocrats in other states (e.g. those in Central Asia) going to respond? My best guess is that those countries that see benefits from closer integration with the West (e.g. Georgia, the Ukraine) will continue to invite external election monitors, while those that don’t will follow Russia’s lead. If this prediction bears out, we will see a little bit of Cold War politics beginning to seep back, with an increase in hostility between Russia and its satellites in Central Asia and elsewhere (anomalies such as Belarus and Moldova) on the one hand, and West and Central European democracies on the other, with both sides contending for influence over shaky democracies in between (such as Georgia and the Ukraine). All of which would intersect in complicated ways with energy politics in the region. This is only a best guess from a non-expert on the region (albeit someone who does know a fair amount about the OSCE) – agreements/disagreements welcome in comments.
Like Chris, I want to object to Andrew Sullivan’s post – but my objection is narrower. What does he mean by insinuating that “at last” we’re “honest about the true agenda of the left”?? We let slip our hidden agenda of creating “a tyranny where Crooked Timber and the benign left will call the shots and enforce their orthodoxy” years ago. Not only that, but our nefarious plans have previously received widespread public attention. Andrew’s dire prognostications were anticipated in their entirety in 2004 by “Mr. Nick Morgan Mr. Andy Duncan, commentator-at-large at catallarchy.net who not only pointed out that “What John Quiggin desires is Orwellian Newspeak, with Mr Quiggin and his friends at Crooked Timber being the Inner Party deciding the rules,” but sagaciously remarked that “Hell on Earth would be a World Government run by Crooked Timber.” You can’t say that you haven’t been warned. Repeatedly.
Stalin is supposed* to have said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Like much said by that father of lies, it is a half-truth. A million deaths is a statistic, but it’s also a million individual tragedies.
The death of David Pearce, the first Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan is a tragedy for him and his family. So were the deaths of Marany Awanees and Jeniva Jalal, shot by security guards from Unity Resources Group, an Australian-run security company in Baghdad last week. And so have been all of the deaths in Iraq (as many as a million since 2003) and Afghanistan in the wars and violence that have afflicted both countries for decades.
As someone who supported the war in Afghanistan, as a necessary act of self-defence and as an intervention that seemed likely to have positive effects, I have to accept some share of the responsibility for the deaths it has caused, including that of David Pearce. I can make the point in mitigation that, if the Afghanistan war had not been so shamefully mismanaged, most obviously the diversion of most of the required resources to the Iraq venture, it might well have reached a successful conclusion by now. But even after that mismanagement, I still, reluctantly, support the view that it is better to try and salvage the situation in Afghanistan by committing more resources, rather than pulling out and leaving the Afghans to sort it out themselves. I draw that conclusion because I think there would be even more bloodshed after a withdrawal, and that there’s a reasonable prospect that a democratic government and a largely free society can survive in Afghanistan with our help. And, even after all the mismanagement, I think most Afghans are better off now (or at least no worse off) than they would have been with a continuation of Taliban rule and civil war.
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A brawl has erupted over a statement in the stump speech of our favorite Republican candidate Fred Thompson, who asserts that the US has “shed more blood for other people’s liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world” As the WaPo points out, our Russian allies lost millions in WWII alone, as did Britain and France in WWI which (at least nominally) they entered ‘that small nations might be free’. In fact, US casualties in World War I (about 120 000 killed and 200 000 wounded) were comparable to those of Australia and New Zealand,which between them had about 5 per cent of the US population.
Unsurprisingly, various people have tried to quibble by saying that the other losses weren’t in defence of freedom, so that Thompson’s claim is true by default. But in that case, Thompson ought to have said something like “the US, alone among nations, fights for the freedom of others” which at least sounds like standard meaningless stump-speech rhetoric rather than a false factual claim.
Leaving motivations aside, the striking fact is that Thompson’s claim is pretty much the opposite of the truth. The US is notable among major nations in how little it has suffered in foreign wars, and this helps to explain why the war party is so strong there.
Now that everyone has finally agreed that Iraq is another Vietnam, we can move on to the next point which is that, having lost the war, the war party in the US is going to blame their domestic opponents, just like they did after Vietnam.[1] The only difference is that the war-peace divide now matches the partisan division between Republicans and Democrats.
In this setting, the idea of looking for a compromise is just silly. The Republicans have made it clear that they don’t want one. Even the dwindling group of alleged moderates aren’t going to vote for anything that would seriously constrain Bush. So, the Democrats can choose between acting to stop the war now, or inheriting it in 2009 [2] . There’s no possibility of pushing anything serious past the Senate filibuster, let alone override a veto.
The only real option, apart from continued acquiescence, is for Congress to fulfil its constitutional role and refuse to pay more for this endless war, starting with the $50 billion in supplementary funding Bush is asking for. There’s no need for any Republican votes, just for the Democrats to stick together and stand firm. That hasn’t been the Democratic way for a long time, but maybe its time now. Certainly, the majority of Americans want to get out of Iraq, just as, in the end, they wanted out of Vietnam.
1. In this context, it’s notable that despite the revisionism of the war party, there’s no evidence that Americans have changed their minds about Vietnam. The great majority still see it as a mistake, just as they did when the war ended
2, I suppose the counterargument is that, by doing what they were elected to do in 2006, the Democrats will wreck their presidential and congressional chances in 2008. If so, perhaps they should give up now.
Daniel Drezner (supported by Megan McArdle and Glenn Reynolds, but not by Brad DeLong) has responded to my criticism of his claim that the US should be able to invade foreign countries whenever its “vital national interests” are threatened. Drezner narrows the gap between us a bit, saying that most members of the FPC are more skeptical about the effectiveness of military force than they used to be (though of course, plenty of members in good standing are pushing for a war with Iran that’s even more certain to fail than the war with Iraq), and saying
there is a big difference between not taking force off the table as a policy option and advocating its use in a particular situation. As Quiggin observes, force is a really messy option and carries horrendous costs.
That’s where the agreement ends, though. Drezner dismisses my concerns about international law, quoting James Joyner’s observation that the UN Charter prohibiting war has mostly been observed in the breach. Joyner only mentions the US, but Drezner goes on to claim that
This applies to every other state in the international system as well. Quiggin wants international law to be a powerfully binding constraint on state action. That’s nice, but what Quiggin wants and what actually happens are two very different animals.
A couple of questions arise here. First, is Drezner’s claim that the international law prohibiting aggressive war is a dead letter factually correct? Second, would the US (more precisely, the people of the US) be better off if the option of unilateral resort to (non-defensive) war was taken off the table or at least put further out of reach?
A bunch of rightwing blogs are getting excited yet again about Scott Beauchamp. For those who haven’t followed the story, Beauchamp is a US soldier in Iraq who wrote some pieces for The New Republic which, among other things, described bad behaviour by US troops, such as deliberately running over stray dogs and taunting a woman disfigured by burns. The pro-war lobby has worn out dozens of keyboards seeking to discredit Beauchamp, his story and the very possibility of running over dogs in an armoured vehicle. Now it appears the US Army has denied Beauchamp’s claims. (To reiterate, I don’t care about or intend to debate, or even to link to, the details of this case).
Some might suggest that the truth or falsity of these stories doesn’t matter much in the light of this. or this or this or this, to list just a few of the disasters have taken place while the wingnutosphere has been defending the US Army’s commitment to animal welfare.
But that would miss the point. What matters, in the world of rightwing postmodernism, is not reality but the way the media reports it. One bogus memo is enough to turn George W. Bush from a scrimshank who used his family connections to line up a cushy billet to avoid war service, and then shirked even that, into a war hero.
So, lets stick to media criticism. Not long after Beauchamp’s piece ran in a single magazine of modest circulation, all the major MSM outlets ran a story by well known critics of the war, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack whose intrepid journey through recently pacified parts of Iraq had convinced them that the surge was working. Here, for example, is their piece in the NY Times.
All this harshing on Michael Ignatieff for his ponderous, air-filled essay on Iraq reminded me of a characterization of him I’d read a few years ago. I couldn’t remember the source, only the phrase. But Google remembers:
The staff of BBC2’s late Late Show used to have a little joke about one of its presenters, Michael Ignatieff. Everyone knows what an idiot savant is: someone who appears to be an idiot but in fact is a wise man. Well, Ignatieff was a savant idiot.
Yes, I know that’s not really what an idiot savant is, but you get the point.
I pose a hermeneutic riddle of sorts. Consider the anecdote in the linked post:
At the end of his presentation, he allowed questions. The first supplicant approached the microphone and hopefully inquired, “Mr. Buckley, what do you think about Rush Limbaugh?” This was during the time when Rush was still something of a rising star. His rhetoric was bombastic, hard-edged, and wickedly funny. Members of the audience shifted forward in their seats expectantly as Buckley answered by telling the following story.There were two Spaniards sitting in a bar. One asked the other, “What do you think about General Franco?” Instead of answering, the man gestured for his friend to follow him outside. Once on the sidewalk, he motioned for the friend to follow him to his car. They got in the car and drove to a forest. Deep in the woods, he parked the car and beckoned the friend to hike with him down to a lake. At the edge of the lake, he pointed to a boat which they boarded. He grabbed the oars and rowed to the center of the lake. Finally, he sat still, looked his friend in the eyes and paused for a moment. “I like him.” Buckley told the story so brilliantly and created so much suspense, the denouement brought the house down amid gales of laughter and happy applause.
I have to admit it’s funny. But I don’t actually get it. Why does the Spaniard have to drag the guy all the way out into the lake? I guess it’s supposed to be a ‘the leftist made me do it’ thing. But the joke seems to be at pains to refute that reading. Since, after all, how could a leftist force you to like someone?
I just watched Pan’s Labyrinth. I liked it. Belle and I debated whether it had a happy or a sad ending. I think it had a happy ending. But I find it hard to believe that, if you asked someone whether it had a happy or sad ending, they would haul you out into the middle of a damn lake and tell you it had a sad ending because [PLOT SPOILER] [click to continue…]