February 24, 2005

Ukraine blogging

Posted by Maria

Better late than never - Via euro-correspondent, I’ve only just come across Veronica Kokhlova’s wonderful blog Neeka’s Backlog. I only wish I’d had the wit to have found it back in November, if not long before that. Kokhlova’s blog from Ukraine is (to my mind) well informed, sharp, warm and passionate.

Illustrating the superficiality of most westerners’ knowledge of politics in Ukraine, Kokhlova draws attention to a piece in the NYT earlier this week, noting;

“the paragraph, in which Yushchenko’s name was spelled as “Yushenchenko,” is now gone completely, together with any mention of Ukraine.

The way that paragraph described our election saga was awesome, too: “Mr. Putin also actively opposed the pro-Western candidacy of the Ukrainian presidential candidate, Viktor A. Yushenchenko [sic], who was ultimately sworn into office.”

It reminded me of Putin’s famous answer to Larry King’s question about what happened to the Kursk submarine: “It sank,” he said.”

A related site has hundreds of beautiful and informative photographs taken by Kokhlova in Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere.

February 22, 2005

UN Dispatch

Posted by Henry

As Dan Drezner and I noted in our Foreign Policy article, the blogosphere is surprisingly bad at providing information on politics outside the US. Ethan Zuckerman’s research provides evidence that the blogosphere’s interests track those of traditional media, and that in some ways it does a worse job than traditional media in covering world politics. Some argue that right wing blogs do a better job than left wing ones in taking account of international politics - I doubt that it’s true. With a few prominent exceptions (such as Greg Djerejian’s Belgravia Dispatch), right wing blogs, like most of their left wing equivalents, tend to focus almost exclusively on prominent stories that support their domestic political preferences.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that blogs like the newly created UN Dispatch can fill an unmet need, giving us a take on the UN that isn’t limited to cheap gotchas about corruption and sex scandals. It’s being run by Peter Daou, whose Daou report has just moved to Salon, and it looks to be a very interesting and useful resource. UN Dispatch is run out of Ted Turner’s UN Foundation, so it can be expected to take a broadly pro-UN line - but on first glance, it appears to be rather stronger on actual factual information about the strengths and weaknesses of the UN than any of the other blogs opining on UN-related issues. One that I’ll be reading.

February 18, 2005

Why Does Porter Goss Hate America?

Posted by Belle Waring

From the Washington Post, “Blinding Flash of the Obvious” Department:

The insurgency in Iraq continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress yesterday.

“Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists,” CIA Director Porter J. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism,” he said. “They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries.”

On a day when the top half-dozen U.S. national security and intelligence officials went to Capitol Hill to talk about the continued determination of terrorists to strike the United States, their statements underscored the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq.

“The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists,” Goss said in his first public testimony since taking over the CIA. Goss said Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who has joined al Qaeda since the U.S. invasion, “hopes to establish a safe haven in Iraq” from which he could operate against Western nations and moderate Muslim governments.

“Our policies in the Middle East fuel Islamic resentment,” Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate panel. “Overwhelming majorities in Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia believe the U.S. has a negative policy toward the Arab world.”

How long before our doughty friends at Power Line realize that Porter Goss and Vice Admiral Jacoby are…ON THE OTHER SIDE!!!!

February 16, 2005

Debating Grand Strategy

Posted by Henry

The Boston Review has a fascinating debate on the future of American foreign policy, with a long lead essay by Stephen Walt, and responses from Richard Falk, Joseph Nye, Ivo Daalder, Mary Kaldor and Ann-Marie Slaughter among others. The Walt piece is on-line; the others are only available in the print edition at the moment (but if you enjoy CT, you should subscribe to the Review; you’ll almost certainly like it, and it’s a cheap read). I suspect that he’s going to get most flak for his bald statement that it is not in the national interest of the US to offer unconditional support to Israel, but the most interesting bit of the essay, to my mind, was his discussion of non-proliferation policy. Walt is a realist - perhaps one of the three or four most prominent IR realists out there - and he’s calling for the US to give up most of its nuclear weapons in order better to encourage other states to sign up to a revamped version of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

If the United States is serious about reducing the dangers of nuclear terrorism (and it should be), then it must offer the rest of the world a “grand bargain.” In exchange for a more reliable nonproliferation regime (accompanied by an aggressive effort to secure existing stockpiles of loose nuclear materials) and the verifiable abandonment of nuclear ambitions by countries like Iran and North Korea, the United States would simultaneously agree to 1) abandon current plans to build a new generation of nuclear weapons, 2) significantly reduce its own nuclear arsenal (while retaining a few hundred warheads as a deterrent against direct attacks on the United States), and 3) take concrete steps to reduce the threat that it presents to so-called rogue states, including a willingness to sign some sort of nonaggression agreement with them.

This seems to me to be a thoroughly sensible set of arguments - but I’m rather surprised to find a realist advocating them. I’m even more surprised to find that I agree more with Walt’s essay than with the replies of some of his more ‘liberal’ critics such as Slaughter and Daalder (but then Walt, unlike Slaughter and Daalder, got it right on Iraq). Anyway, it’s a fascinating essay - anyone who’s interested in these debates should definitely give it a read.

NB - as per my usual policy, comments relating to Israel or Palestine will be expunged, to prevent the comment section degenerating into a flame-fest.

February 01, 2005

When it was neither profitable nor popular

Posted by John Quiggin

As noted in previous posts, there has been a lot of triumphalism among pro-war bloggers about the success of the elections in Iraq and, even allowing for a low turnout in Sunni areas and the difficulties that lie ahead, it’s certainly the best news we’ve had for some time. But I’d be interested to know how many of these bloggers supported democratic elections a year ago, when Bremer was pushing a bizarre system of regional caucuses? A limited Google search found sympathy for Bremer’s plan from Belgravia Dispatch , den Beste and Winds of Change, but I couldn’t locate any premature democrats in the pro-war blogosphere. However, the collaborative power of blogreaders is better than Google, so I invite links. Ideally, I’d like examples of prowar bloggers rejecting Bremer’s plan and supporting Sistani’s call for elections. I’m happy to concede that anyone in this class is entitled to a bit of triumph today.

Update A better Google search “bremer sistani elections support blog” finds this from The Brothers Judd and this from Norm Geras. I’m not surprised to find Geras, whose support for the war has been based on more defensible arguments than most. I don’t know much about the Brothers Judd but they go up in my estimation for this. Still the general pattern is pretty clear. Most of those who are now crowing about the elections backed Bremer’s attempts to block them, while those who supported elections all along are mostly found among opponents of the war.

January 30, 2005

Some unsolicited advice for the United Iraqi Alliance

Posted by John Quiggin

The Iraqi elections seem to have been about as successful as could have been hoped, and may represent the last real chance to prevent a full-scale civil war. The pre-election analysis suggests that the United Iraqi Alliance, the main Shiite coalition, will get the biggest share of the votes, but probably not an absolute majority. If so, their leaders will face two immediate choices.

The first is what to do about forming a government. The obvious choice is a coalition with Allawi. Given the power of incumbency and the fact that there was no real campaign in many areas, his group is bound to get a fair number of votes, even though it’s clearly unpopular. There’s even talk that he could re-emerge as PM

The second choice is what to do about the Americans1. Until a couple of days ago, the UAI platform called for a timetable for US withdrawal, but this was apparently changed at the last minute Meanwhile the Pentagon has been talking about continuing full-scale occupation for at least two years. In view of the security situation and the obvious pressure from the Bush administration, the obvious course of action is to defer any talk of withdrawal to the indefinite future.

In my view, the obvious choices would be disastrous in both cases, and for much the same reason. Holding elections is great, but the point of democracy is that they should make a difference and that governments should act in accordance with the wishes of voters. If the election leaves Allawi in office (even as a coalition partner) and the Americans in charge, it will be soon come to be seen as a pointless farce. And unless the government makes early US withdrawal a central demand, it will inevitably end up being seen, at best as a client and at worst a creature, of the Americans. The Sunnis won’t be slow to point this out, and neither will the Sadrists, who have played a cautious game that has given them some representation in the new assembly while maintaining a public boycott of the election.

Of course, there are good reasons to be fearful about the consequences of a US withdrawal. But this is the same kind of reasoning that led to the elections being delayed until now, when they could have been held under far more favorable conditions a year ago. What reason is there to believe that another two years of occupation will leave Iraq more capable of managing its own security? And if the Iraqi government doesn’t grasp the nettle itself, there’s always the risk that the Americans will make a unilateral decision to cut and run at the worst possible moment.

1 Officially of course, it’s the multinational coalition. But with Poland and the Ukraine about to withdraw, and Blair talking about an indicative timetable for withdrawal, there’s not much left of this figleaf.

January 23, 2005

The centrality of coffee

Posted by John Quiggin

Tony Judt illustrating the centrality of coffee as a metaphor (or maybe synecdoche) for civilisation. (thanks to Glenn Condell for the link)

January 19, 2005

Opposing Baathist murder

Posted by Chris

Juan Cole is arguing that the Iraqi “resistance” is mainly composed of Baathist forces and that they have

been systematically killing members of the new political class. This is visible at the provincial level. The governors of Diyala and Baghdad provinces have recently been killed. The killing and kidnapping of members of the provincial governing councils go virtually unremarked in the US press but are legion. A female member of the Salahuddin GC was kidnapped and killed recently. The police chiefs of many cities have been killed or kidnapped, or members of their family have, such that many more have just resigned, often along with dozens of their men. The US is powerless to stop this campaign of assassination.

This campaign also targets Iraqi trade unionists, and that’s why I’ve signed the open letter circulated by Labour Friends of Iraq to protest against the silence of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition in the face of events like the torture and murder of Hadi Saleh, International Officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions on January 4. If you would also like to sign the open letter, contact info@labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk.

December 14, 2004

Asia by blog

Posted by Chris

A commenter to one of John Q’s posts suggested Asia by Blog, which provides a twice-weekly digest of links to asian blogs. And the same friend who drew that to my attention also recommended Life in China , a stunning collection of photographs without commentary.

November 22, 2004

Child malnutrition in Iraq

Posted by Chris

One of the points made most insistently by critics of the Lancet study was that they disbelieved the claim that infant mortality had increased since the war. Heiko, a contributor to one of Dsquared’s threads , wrote: “I do believe infant mortality may have dropped (though maybe not halved as yet), because a lot of things are available now that weren’t before the war.” The Washington Post has now published an article suggesting that there has been a dramatic rise in child malnutrition since the war:

Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq’s Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway’s Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from “wasting,” a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

The article makes grim reading for anyone concerned about winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people:

“Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen” with the fall of Hussein and the start of the U.S.-led occupation, said an administrator at Baghdad’s Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics. “So we’re surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice,” the official said.

Paper tigers ?

Posted by John Quiggin

The other day, I went to see Cry of the Snow Lion, about the Tibetan independence struggle. The film was interesting and well worth seeing, and jogged me to start on a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time on the question: How long can the current Chinese government survive?

It struck me, after watching the film, that the closest parallel is with the last days of the Suharto period in Indonesia. Among the themes suggested to me were

  • the decay of Communist ideology, and its replacement by a vague (ethnic Han) nationalism, bolstered by, and dependent on, rapid economic growth
  • the rise of faceless nonentities like Hu Jintao to replace monstrous giants like Mao
  • the role of the People’s Liberation Army in a range of business ventures
  • transmigration programs of Han Chinese into Tibet and other minority areas

Just like Golkar in its latter days, the Communist Party has no real class base, no compelling ideological claim to power, and a rapidly depreciating “mandate of heaven” derived from the revolutionary period. Its 60 million members are now, for the most part, mere card-carriers. And although the party and army leaders have their fingers in plenty of business pies, they don’t constitute an effective management committee of the ruling class. Rather they are a backward and parasitic component of that class.

All of this, it seems to me, is symptomatic of a regime that appears immovable, but may collapse like a house of cards given the appropriate push, which may come either from an economic crisis or from a succession crisis, if Hu runs into some trouble or other. The results of this may not be pretty, and could be extremely dangerous for world peace, but I conjecture that they will eventually include Tibetan independence.

I’d be interested if anyone can point me to an analysis that would tend either to confirm or refute the one I’ve proposed above.

November 04, 2004

Would Gephardt have won ?

Posted by John Quiggin

Most of the post-election discussion I’ve seen has focused on the impact of religion, and quite a few commentators have suggested that the Democrats need to shift their policies to appeal more to religiously-motivated voters. This approach would entail some fairly substantial compromises in the search for marginal votes.

If we’re the mood for pragmatic populism, there’s a policy option that might well have delivered the Democrats the election, without the risk of fracturing the Democratic base as an appeal to the religious right would have done. That option is protectionism, of the kind espoused during the campaign by Gephardt1. Gephardt had his electoral problems, but I think he could have carried Ohio and his home state of Missouri, as well as having a good chance in West Virginia and even Indiana. He might have lost some coastal states but overall he would have had a better chance of a majority in both the popular vote and the electoral college.

I don’t think protectionist policies are beneficial or even particularly effective, but I don’t share the quasi-religious abhorrence of tariffs and other trade restrictions many economists have had drilled into them from their earliest youth. In the current environment, the big threat to the world economy isn’t the possibility of a trade war, but the danger that the imbalances created by the US trade and budget deficits will bring the whole system crashing down2. Unlike Kerry, Gephardt favored the complete repeal of the Bush tax cuts, the crucial first step towards a resolution of the imbalances. This position would have been bitterly attacked by the Republicans, but those attacks would have shifted the ground to the economy, the issue where Bush was weakest.

There are good arguments against going in this direction. It would certainly have cost the Democrats a lot of support among the policy elite, who backed Kerry almost uniformly, for what that was worth. But this is a good time to take a clear-eyed look at all the options, rather than focusing exclusively on the first one that catches our attention. If it’s necessary to compromise in order to win, religiously-motivated voters aren’t the only fish in the sea.

1 Kerry tilted in this direction, but not enough to have much of an impact, favorable or otherwise.

2 Even in the Great Depression, the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 was only a secondary factor, at most. Competitive devaluations in other countries had much the same effect. The central cause was the failure of the financial system.

November 03, 2004

The next four years: realistic version

Posted by John Quiggin

While I’ve tried to be open to more optimistic possibilities, it’s far more likely that the second Bush Administration will be more of the same, and worse. The problem for the winners is that the consequences of the Administration’s policies, still debatable in 2004, will be grimly evident by 2008, and there will be no one but Republicans to take the blame. In purely partisan terms, as I argued several times before the election, this was a good one to lose.

It’s impossible to predict in detail how things will turn out in Iraq, or on foreign policy more generally. But Bush’s first term made one thing clear. If there’s a way to stuff things up, these guys will find it. I expect there will be some initial talk on both sides about rapprochement with Europe, but it won’t last long: if the assault on Fallujah turns out as bloody as appears likely, that could easily be enough to any such process to an end.

Things are much clearer on the economic front. As I mentioned in my previous post, Reagan’s first term saw the implementation of crackpot “supply-side” theories in which tax cuts would produce long-run budget surpluses, but when they produced huge deficits instead, the orthodox Republicans took control and raised taxes, among other measures to bring the deficit under control. In the Bush administration, by contrast, not only have the crackpots become the orthodoxy, but they don’t even bother (much) with Laffer-curve theories about an eventual return to surplus. The current view is that sustained deficits are entirely harmless. It’s virtually certain that the first-term tax cuts will be made permanent, and probable that there will be some additional cuts, as well as relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax. On the spending side, I expect there will be some severe cuts in non-defence discretionary spending, but there’s not a lot to cut, especially if you exclude areas like agriculture, that have strong Republican protection, and the policy initiatives of the last Congress, like the prescription drug policy.

An even bigger problem, not mentioned at all in the campaign as far as I know1 is the trade deficit. The deficit has grown steadily, exceeding 5 per cent of GDP in recent months. Although it’s a mistake to view the trade and budget deficits as twins, the combination of a budget deficit and minimal household savings implies the need for a balancing deficit on the current account, if any net investment is to be financed. Without a rapid reversal, sustained high trade deficits will translate into exploding current account deficits, as compound interest works its magic. This implies the need for a further large depreciation of the dollar, and an increase in interest rates or both. For the moment, interest rates have been held down by the willingness of Asian central banks to buy Treasury notes. But this can’t last.

In the absence of a serious attempt to bring the trade and budget deficits under control, a substantial increase in interest rates is inevitable, and that will almost certainly imply a slowdown or recession.

1 Except maybe in relation to outsourcing

The poisoned chalice and a tiny ray of hope

Posted by John Quiggin

If Kerry does win after all, it will be under the worst possible circumstances. A minority of the popular vote, a hostile Congress and the need to prevail in a vicious legal dogfight in Ohio. The Republicans will be out for impeachment from Inauguration Day, if not before that. At this stage, a Kerry victory would produce the worst of all possible worlds - responsibility without power.

All things considered, I’d prefer a Bush victory at this point. That said, I think a second Bush Administration will be a disaster in all respects, economically, socially and internationally. To those who supported and voted for him, I’ll say “be careful what you wish for”.

The future looks awful, but I thought I’d sketch out the optimistic scenario, which is, roughly speaking, a repeat of Reagan’s second term.

In his first term, Reagan was, in many respects, worse than Bush has been. His buildup of nuclear weapons, undertaken with the support of advisers such as Perle, ran a severe risk of destroying the entire world. In economic policy, he discarded the mainstream Republican economic advisers and went for what George Bush senior called “voodoo economics”, massive tax cuts undertaken on the basis of the supply-side economic theories of people like Arthur Laffer and Jude Wanniski. This produced a peak deficit equal to 6.2 per cent of GDP in 1984, considerably higher than the peak under Bush so far.

In his second term, Reagan ignored his foreign policy advisers and signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Gorbachev. Whereas Perle and others saw Reagan’s rhetoric about bargaining from a position of strength as mere words, covering the creation of a nuclear capacity that could fight and win the inevitable showdown with Russia, Reagan actually believed it, and when he found a suitable partner in Gorbachev he put it into practice. START I, initiated by Reagan and Gorbachev, followed in 1991.

Meanwhile, on economic policy, Reagan listened to his mainstream advisers and took steps to wind back the deficit. He left the US with a big increase in public debt, partially unwound under Clinton, but the outcome was far better than it would have been if he hadn’t changed course.

At about the same time, the Plaza Accords produced a concerted policy of depreciating the overvalued US dollar and reducing the trade deficit.

What are the chances that we’ll see something similar from Bush? In foreign policy, this would entail a shift towards bilateral or multilateral peacemaking, and in domestic policy, a serious attempt to balance the budget and the trade account. In my judgement, the likelihood is close to zero. But I’d be interested to hear what others have to say.

November 02, 2004

Eight per cent swing to Kerry!

Posted by John Quiggin

The results for Dixville Notch are in !. Bush 19, Kerry 7. In 2000, Bush got 21 to Gore’s 5. There was a similar swing in Hart’s Location. Repeated nationwide, this swing would give Kerry a thumping victory1.

1 As bases for spurious predictions go, I’d rank this one somewhere between the Washington Redskins home games and Ray Fair’s econometric model.

Police and peacekeepers

Posted by John Quiggin
Chris’ post made a point that’s central to a post I’ve been planning for some time, so I may as well jump in and complete it. Talking about US airstrikes in Iraq, he writes
The risk of the operation is transferred by deliberate and systematic policy from soldiers to bystanders. Such a policy runs contrary to traditional views about who should bear the risk of operations: we can’t insulate civilians completely but where there’s a choice soldiers both in virtue of the role they occupy and the fact (here) that they are volunteers should take on more exposure in order to protect civilians. It is hard to escape the thought that were co-nationals of the people dropping the bombs the ones in the bystander position, different methods would be used.
An obvious comparison is with the police force. If any of us were involved in a confrontation between police officers and armed criminals, we would expect the police to risk their lives to save us1. A police force that viewed protecting the safety of its own members as the primary priority would not be very effective. A police force that was prepared to pursue criminals with deadly force, and treat deaths among the general public as “collateral damage” would be worse than useless. But that is, in essence, what has been given to the Iraqi people.

This raises, I think, a fairly general point in relation to the kind of liberal/humanitarian interventionism exemplified by Bosnia and Kosovo, and (from the viewpoint of some of its backers, particularly on the left) in Iraq. Unless the intervening powers have the willingness and capacity to provide peacekeepers who will operate as a police force, with the associated attitude that protection of the civilian population is the top priority, then intervention is bound to produce bad outcomes.

The Iraq war failed this test for two reasons. The first, which has been aired at length, is that there weren’t enough troops to make this kind of occupation feasible. Gen Shinseki’s estimate of 400 000 troops, based on extrapolation from Bosnia/Kosovo looks pretty accurate now.

The second point is that the spurious WMD rationale for the war meant that the Coalition never treated the war as a humanitarian intervention2. Instead, they regarded themselves as the victors in a (pre-emptively) defensive war and Iraq as a defeated enemy state, which they could reconstruct (or not) as they wished. Resistance to the occupation, violent or otherwise, was inherently illegitimate. Hence, firing on demonstrators, banning newspapers and so on was OK. As US casualties have risen, this attitude has only hardened.

The continued presence of US troops, under current policies, is doing more harm than good.

1 A point that’s always worth thinking about before criticising the police, though it shouldn’t make them immune from criticism.

2 Of course, this theme was played along with many others. But all the Coalition leaders said before the war that overthrowing Saddam wasn’t a sufficient reason for war. Their subsequent actions have been consistent with this view.

November 01, 2004

Tomorrow's race

Posted by John Quiggin

As usual before the first Tuesday in November, Australians are closely studying the papers, trying to predict the winner in tomorrow’s race, and planning the well-lubricated parties that are essential as we wait for the results. A critical question here, and one that has been the subject of vigorous debate, is whether betting markets are efficient predictors. While some have argued strongly in favor of the markets recently, long-standing Australian tradition holds that they are utterly unreliable. There’s also a lot of debate about whether the whole turnout may be affected by the weather, and if so, in whose favour.

The level of interest is so high that the event is almost impossible to avoid. Even those who are completely apathetic have found it easier to pick an allegiance at random than to admit to not caring one way or the other.

Work will stop around the nation as we try to digest the results, and the champagne. Victorians, who take all matters of this kind more seriously than other Australians, will take the entire day off.

Update 2/11 A triumph for the betting markets, as the favorite Makybe Diva came home on the inside, the first mare to win two successive Cups. I managed a successful arbitrage on the office Calcutta buying the favorite for $25 in a pool of over $150, as opposed to market odds of 5/1 or less.

Loot

Posted by John Quiggin
With the recent emergence of stories about the looting of high explosives and pre-1991 chemical weapons from UN-secured sites, I’d like to remind everyon that this was not simply the result of negligence or inadequate numbers of troops. The Coalition forces explicitly encouraged looting. While the war was still continuing, I noted a report in The Times (4 April 2003), saying that the British were encouraging looters. The report said
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 Hussains 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.
My London Times link is broken, but the report is reproduced, with attribution in the Daily TImes of Pakistan . As far as I know, there was no denial of this report at the time. Although the US forces aren’t mentioned in this report, it’s clear they were equally supportive of looting, if not more so.

As the various UN officials quoted in the story observe, once you’ve started encouraging looting, it’s going to be difficult to stop, especially in a situation where neither the troops nor their commanders had any idea about what was where. The one crucial site that was secured immediately was, of course, the Oil Ministry.

October 30, 2004

A revelation about the EU

Posted by John Quiggin
When I used to read the eschatological works of Hal Lindsey and others, one of the favorite themes was numerological analysis of Revelation, in which the EU figured prominently.
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
At the time the then EEC had six members, so an expansion to seven or ten (which seemed likely) would fulfil the prophecy and signal the impending arrival of the end times. The Whore of Babylon also fitted in, but I can’t remember how. The EU did have ten members between 1981 and 1986, and I remember speculating that Reagan might be the Antichrist - surviving an assassination attempt was supposed to be a crucial sign (Revelation 13:1-2). But the world did not end after all.
Now, thanks to the Economist, I discover that Lindsey was right, except for a reversal of alignment. Arsene Heitz, the designer of the EU Flag advises that it was inspired by Revelation 12:1
A great sign was seen in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
normally taken to refer to the Virgin Mary. I’d be fascinated to see an apocalyptic Protestant response to this revelation.

October 29, 2004

Deaths in Iraq

Posted by Chris

The Guardian has a story today about some research led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore which claims 100,000 excess Iraqi deaths, many of which it attributes to bombing by coalition forces. Juan Cole has some comment on this (and more links).

I should state plainly that I have no way of judging the accuracy of this figure. It may be way off. Nevertheless I can predict with certainty that there will be numerous posts on weblogs supporting the war attacking the study. However much they criticize such exercises, though, there is some fact of the matter about how many excess Iraqi deaths there have been as a result of the war. My faith in human reason and evidence is such that I must believe that there is some figure which, if verified, would lead the enthusiasts for this war to conclude that it was a mistake. But perhaps I’m wrong about that: perhaps they think that the case for some war to displace Saddam Hussein was just so strong that no facts about the actual war have any bearing on the correctness of the decision to fight?

October 27, 2004

Barroso blinks

Posted by John Quiggin

In the dispute over Rocco Buttiglionie the head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso has blinked, deferring a vote which would have seen his entire panel of 25 commissioners rejected by the European Parliament. Barring extraordinary dexterity, it looks as if he will have to either secure Buttiglionie’s withdrawal or shunt him to a less controversial job.

This is, I think, a win for Henry’s side of the dispute with Dan Drezner. The EU Parliamentary majority has acted exactly as you would expect an ordinary parliamentary majority to act, without any apparent deference to the national governments of the countries whose citizens they represent. The attitudes of the British MEPs were particularly interesting. Not only did Labour MPs disregard any pressure from Blair (famously cosy with Berlusconi, and by implication with his nominee, Buttiglioni) but some Tories suggested they might vote No out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

The other point of interest is that the ‘nuclear option’ aspect of the issue turned out to be a paper tiger as usual. Much was made of the fact that the Parliament could not reject individual nominations, but only the entire proposal. This is like the restriction, found in many bicameral systems, where the Upper House cannot amend some bills, but can only accept or reject them. In practice, though, there’s always the option of rejecting the bill then stating “but we would pass an amended bill of the following form”. The limitation to accept or reject is effective only if acceptance or rejection is final. Conversely, suppose the Parliament had the power of voting on the candidates individually, accepting some and rejecting others. The head of the Commission could get around this by nominating the controversial candidates first, and making it clear that acceptance was all or nothing. In the end, all systems of this kind produce a bargained outcome.

That was the good news

Posted by John Quiggin

Amid all the dreadful news from Iraq, Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff has made it his mission to report the good news. A lot of the time this consists of impossibly cute kitten stories, and those repainted schools we’re always hearing about. But there is some real good news.

And, then, there’s this report on conditions for participation in the Iraqi election, linked by Chrenkoff from Iraq the model

To take part in the elections any group of people or an individual can make an application to the commission to be registered as a political entity, and with the application the individual who wants to be registered as a political entity should pay the sum of 2.5 million Iraqi Dinars while a group of individuals that want to be registered as a political entity should pay 7.5 million Iraqi Dinars. Any bills that result from violations made by the entity will be deducted from the sum. The money will be returned once the election ends if the political entity or a coalition of entities get 50% of the required votes to win a seat. If an entity fails to achieve that the sum will be taken to the treasury. The requirements for candidates and registering political parties are:
1-A list of members qualified for voting that contains no less than 500 individual.
2-An internal regulations document that lists the rules that governs the party’s activities.
3-Should have no connection with a militia or an active armed group.
4-Should not receive funds from any militia or active armed group.
5-The political entity should not provoke, take part or encourage terrorist or any criminal activities and violence.
6-The name of the party should not incite hatred or violence and the logo of the party should not contain any religious or military symbols.
The most striking feature is the registration fee. If I have the exchange rate correct, it’s about $US 2500, for an individual candidate, a year’s income for a middle-class Iraqi and an unattainable sum for the average person. This is far higher than in Western countries, and the number of votes required to avoid forfeiting the deposit is also large. (Australia requires $A350 or about $US250, and you only need 4 per cent of the votes to get your money back).

These rules make it almost impossible for an independent individual to run, and provide a huge headstart for the established parties that make up the interim government. And there’s ample room for the incumbents or the occupying forces (it’s not clear who’s in control here) to disqualify anyone they don’t like.

All of this suggests the possibility that the election will be a Soviet-style plebiscite, consisting, for all practical purposes, of a Yes-No vote on a slate of candidates drawn up in a backroom deal among the parties making up the interim assembly. This is how the interim assembly itself was set up[1], much to the disgust of independent delegates. An outcome where the incumbents ran on a unity ticket and won would be even worse than not holding the election at all.

That concludes the good news for this week.

1 It appears that Allawi gives a weekly address to this assembly, but I’m not aware that it’s done anything other than serve as an audience. Does anyone have any info on this ?

October 26, 2004

The Leg question

Posted by Daniel

Apparently, we are bombing the town of Fallujah. Apparently, we are doing this because the residents refuse to co-operate with our wishes by not “handing over” the notorious terrorist Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. Apparently, we will continue to bomb them until they do so.

I am, as a result haunted by a nightmare in which I am flying in a helicopter gunship above the town of Fallujah, looking down on the wrecked buildings and bodies below. I find myself having a conversation, through a megaphone, with one of the residents:

Me: Just hand over Zarqawi and we’ll let you live!
Resident: OK! OK! We’re having a bit of trouble finding him!
Me: A likely story! Bomb them again, Lurch!
Resident: Could you just give us a hand? Like maybe tell us where in Fallujah he’s staying?
Me: I don’t know. But we have excellent intelligence that tells us that you’re harbouring him! Bomb that coffee shop, Lurch, it looks like an ammo dump!
Resident: Well, what does he look like?
Me: Everyone knows what Zarqawi looks like! You’re just playing for time! Bomb him again!
Resident: Well, how many legs does he have? Give us something to work with here!

And at that point I wake up, screaming.

It strikes me that if your level of information about someone is not sufficient to answer the question “how many legs does he have?”, it would be a good idea to not express any strong opinions on the subject of that person. It also strikes me that if we’re reforming the intelligence process, then we might profitably include a question about “number of legs” on any checklist we propose to use to sift good intelligence from bad.

Why not Zarqawi ?

Posted by John Quiggin

The Bush Administration has finally conceded, on the record, that it decided, for political reasons, not to go after leading terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the leadup to the Iraq war. The question remains, which political reasons were decisive?

We can, I think, dismiss the idea that an attack on Zarqawi would have led the UN not to pass resolution 1441 demanding that Saddam admit weapons inspectors. As Ted points out here the US was bombing Iraq throughout the leadup to the war and had conducted many similar attacks on terrorists (notably including Clinton’s failed attempt on bin Laden). In any case, the final proposal for an attack on Zarqawi was rejected when the inspections were already under way. There was no way that the UN Secretariat could have withdrawn the inspectors without authorization from the UNSC where the US and UK could have vetoed it, in the unlikely event it was proposed.

I think two considerations were decisive. First, an effective attack would probably have required co-operation with Kurdish ground forces. But, right up to March 2003, the Administration was trying to get Turkish participation, or at least basing rights to allow an attack on Iraq from north as well as south. Strong hints were given that if the Turks came on board, the US would keep Kurdish demands for autonomy in check. Obviously, a joint operation with the Kurds would have wrecked the negotiations. As it turned out, the Turkish Parliament rejected the deal, but not until the war machine was already rolling.

The second point relates to intelligence. Defenders of the Administration’s position have made much of the fact that they didn’t know for sure whether Zarqawi was there1, but this hasn’t stopped previous attacks on terrorist leaders, some of which have been successful and others not. A more difficult point for the Administration was that they had made propaganda points out of the claim that Zarqawi’s Al-Ansar group was manufacturing ricin, a poison used in assassinations. By a rhetorical sleight of hand, this could be equated to “WMDs in Iraq”. But, by late 2002, and certainly by early 2003, it must have been pretty obvious to the hardheads in the Administration that all their intelligence on WMDs was worthless - the failure to secure al-Tuwaitha after the war was indicative of this. Regardless of whether Zarqawi was caught, an attack on the Kirma camp would have come up blank on WMDs, and this would have undermined the broader case being mounted by Bush and Powell3.

So, an attack on Zarqawi would have weakened the case for war, if only modestly. Going after Saddam was much more important to Bush than going after Zarqawi. It’s that simple.

Update After posting this, I got around to reading Hitchens’ latest piece in Slate. His column, following Orwell, is named “In Front of Your Nose”, but apparently the WSJ hasn’t passed in front of Hitchens’ nose. He has a long and confused analysis of Zarqawi, vaguely mentioning the point that his operations were “directed at the Kurdish leadership in that part of northern Iraq that was outside Saddam Hussein’s immediate control” but not the fact that this part of northern Iraq was under the immediate control of his new hero George Bush. I gave up expecting anything worthwhile from Hitchens some time ago, but this marks a new low for him, I think. It’s Orwellian all right, but not in a good way.

1 As an aside, despite not being able to find Zarqawi’s operatives when they are preparing attacks in downtown Baghdad, the Administration is still claiming to have incredibly precise intelligence about what is going on inside Fallujah to the extent, that it can locate the Zarqawi group in particular houses and restaurants for bombing raids on an almost nightly basis. If you don’t accept this claim, the obvious alternative is that the attacks are designed to terrify the inhabitants of Fallujah and thereby reduce their support for the insurgents. There is only one reasonable description for people who set off bombs in civilian areas to terrify their enemies.

2 I’m sure the Administration expected that something would turn up, once they had a free run in Iraq, access to the records and officials and so on. But (with the possible exception of Powell) I’m sure they also knew the intelligence they were peddling was worthless.

October 21, 2004

The Power of Nightmares

Posted by Chris

I watched the first part of Adam Curtis’s new documentary, The Power of Nightmares , last night. The hype around the series has been that it claims that Al Qaida is a myth. Anyway, I thought it might be useful to use David Aaronovitch’s reaction as a template for my own. Here’s Aaronovitch:

I admire Curtis greatly, but this time his argument is as subtle as a house-brick. It is, essentially, that everything in American politics in the past 25 years from Reaganism, through Christian fundamentalism and anti-Clintonism, to the war on terror, has been got up by Dick Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and others that the programme identifies as conspiring neocons. They have created a “dark illusion” about Islamist terrorism, just as they earlier created one about that tin-pot, ramshackle, essentially harmless old flea-bitten bear, the Soviet Union. Curtis’s is a one-stop conspiracy theory to stand alongside those fingering the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group and (vide the Da Vinci Code) Opus Dei.

To which my reaction is: not really. I did find the organising trope of the first episode somewhat irritating: a supposed parallelism between Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss. But there was a good deal of highly suggestive and illuminating material amid the polemic. The efforts by “Team B”, for example, systematically to exagerrate both the offensive capability and the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. These included the assertion, based on no evidence whatsoever that the Soviets had developed a non-acoustic submarine detection system, the reasoning being that since they didn’t have a working acoustic version they must have had a secret ultra-modern technology that the US didn’t know about! And then there was the bizarre demand that the CIA provide the evidence to back up a claim that the Soviets were behind a single, interlinked global terror network (IRA + Baader Meinhof + etc). This fell down because the CIA operatives knew that what was being cited as “evidence” was, in fact, black propaganda that they themselves had concocted and planted in European newspapers! (Today, of course, such “evidence” would be endlessly recycled around the blogosphere by credulous dupes.) Does Curtis exaggerate the influence of the neocons? Almost certainly.

For example, next week’s episode is supposed to be about the neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists joining forces to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, as if this was a project dreamed up in the neocons’ heads. But the idea of drawing them into a war in Afghanistan was conceived not by the neocons but by Zbigniew Brzezinski under the Carter administration. In the latest LRB, Chalmers Johnson has Brzezinki saying:

“CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.”

Asked whether he in any way regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied: ‘Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”’

It is hard to know exactly where Curtis will go next, but I expect him to argue that whilst Islamic terrorist groups certainly exist (who could deny that!) they don’t constitute a co-ordinated international network (AQ+ Hamas + Hezbollah, etc etc) of the kind that is often suggested. He’ll probably suggest that such “links” as are claimed are largely an artefact of similar propaganda to that behind the last “international terror network”. Anyone who has followed the pathetic attempts by figures like the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin to demonstrate a Saddam-AQ link will probably suspect he has a point.

[One further thought, on Brzezinski’s lack of regret. On a view of moral responsibility that one frequently finds deployed in parts of the blogosphere, Brzezinski and other proponents of the Afghan “trap” bear no responsibility for the millions of dead in Afghanistan — and elsewhere — since. It isn’t a view I can share.]

October 20, 2004

Time management tips

Posted by John Quiggin

If you’re reading this, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’re in need of time-management tips1. On the other hand, the idea of a blogger giving time management tips is problematic, to say the least. Undaunted by this contradiction, I’m going to offer a few. The details reflect my main activity, which is academic research but may be more or less adaptable to other kinds of jobs.

First, the best way to avoid a piled-up in tray is to deal with jobs immediately, either by doing them, or by deciding never to do them. This won’t work for every kind of job, but the more types of jobs you can handle in this way, the better. So to implement this tip you need a way of classifying jobs. One way is by the time they are likely to take (see tip #2). IF you take this approach you can decide to do all 5-minute jobs immediately, or not at all. I prefer to focus on discretionary jobs where an immediate decision not to take the job is feasible. For an academic, refereeing for journals is like this. I try to deal with requests for referee reports in the same week I get them. If I have free time, and the job looks straightforward on a first reading, I try to do it within two days. Editors who are used to waiting for months really love a quick turnaround like this, and I live in hope that it will build up good karma for my own submissions. If I can’t manage a report within a week then, unless the paper looks to be very important, or I am obligated to the journal in question, I reply immediately that I’m not available. Editors usually don’t mind this, especially if I can suggest someone else.

My second tip is that the average 5-minute job takes about half an hour. This is an example of asymmetric risk. If all goes well, I might do a five-minute job in three minutes, saving a bit of time. But when things go badly, a job that should have taken five minutes cascades into a series of tasks that chew up an hour or more. The person you had to call doesn’t work there any more and when you eventually find their replacement it turns out that you’re missing some crucial piece of documentation, and while you’re searching for it the computer crashes and so it goes on. So, if I’ve accumulated 8-10 jobs that ought to take 5 minutes each, I find that setting aside an entire morning is usually realistic.

My third tip is particularly relevant for people prone to distraction, which obviously includes all of us here. My core business is producing academic journal articles (and the occasional book). In this business, it’s easy to drift along, reading lots of interesting stuff, making notes, and imagining you are making progress, but not actually getting anywhere. So in homage to Taylor and Stakhanov, I discipline myself by setting word targets. I try to write 500 to 750 words of new material every day. 500 words a day might not sound much, but if you can manage it 5 days a week for 40 weeks a year, you’ve got 100 000 words, which is enough for half a dozen journal articles and a small book. So, that’s my target. If I haven’t written enough one day, I try to catch it up the next day and so on. Blog posts don’t count, of course, though occasionally I can get myself an easy day by reworking blog material into academic output. This may sound crass, and it’s not appropriate if you’re a creative genius, but it works pretty well for me, and I think would work well for others in similar circumstances.

1 The obvious one is “Get back to work!”, but that wouldn’t do much for our pageview counts.

October 14, 2004

Anybody but Zarqawi

Posted by John Quiggin

For once, there has been a little bit of encouraging news coming out of Iraq. I’ve also been encouraged by some of the reactions I’ve seen.

First, there was the announcement of a deal between the occupation forces/interim government and al-Sadr under which Sadr’s Mehdi army would surrender its heavy weapons and join the election process in return for cash handouts and reconstruction money, release of imprisoned leaders and other concessions. It’s a safe bet that the terms of this compromise won’t be fully observed by either side. Like Sinn Fein, I’m sure the Sadrists intend to keep a “pike in the thatch”, and the Americans have routinely failed to deliver on their promises in Iraq (reconstruction, precision targeting etc). Still, this is the kind of messy process that you’d expect in drawing a group like the Sadrists (part political militia, part street gang) into a political process with no track record and little legitimacy.

Even better is the news, discussed by Belle that nationalist insurgents in Fallujah, such as the First Army of Mohammad are getting tired of the foreign fighters who have been attracted to the city since it became a no-go zone. Although it may well turn out that not all members of these groups are actually foreigners, this label provides a convenient way of distinguishing between Islamic Iraqi nationalists and the jihadi groups led (or at least symbolised) by Zarqawi. It is the latter who appear to be responsible for most of the really horrific stuff that is going on at the moment - kidnappings, beheadings, suicide bombings and so forth, all seen as part of the general worldwide jihad1 against the infidels. By contrast, the people of Fallujah in general had no enmity against the Americans until they came to Iraq, and would not wish to pursue them if they left.

It’s equally encouraging that most of the supporters of the war I’ve read seem to agree that this as good news. Only a couple of months ago many of them were demanding that Sadr be killed, and his movement crushed. As for the Army of Mohammad, it was the prospect of letting the Fallujans off that led the Americans to veto Allawi’s proposed amnesty just after the handover. Now, suddenly, it looks as if they are all going to become official good guys, just like the Baathists before them.

All of this is good news, in my view. At this point, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the most we can hope for from Iraq is that it does not become a terrorist base like Afghanistan under the Taliban, and that it doesn’t revert to a full-scale dictatorship like that of Saddam. Apart from that, I hope the Americans realise that, by now, it’s too late to pick and choose. If elections can be held, and produce a sustainable government, whether it’s dominated by Sistani, Sadr, Allawi or even the Army of Mohammed, that’s a lot better than any feasible alternative. And if the new government demands an immediate withdrawal, the US ought not to wait for them to change their minds.

Of course, even if the insurgents could be persuaded to join, or at least tolerate, the political process, the fundamental divisions (Shia, Sunni, Kurd; tribal/urban, and so on) that make Iraqi democracy such a problematic prospect would still be there. If Bush was looking for a road to democracy in the Middle East, he would, like the traveller in the story, have been well advised to start somewhere else. But it’s too late to worry about that.

1 Or crusade, if you prefer it in English

October 12, 2004

Predictable Instapundit

Posted by John Quiggin

I didn’t do much for my reputation (never a great one) as an election tipster with my assessment of the Australian election. I thought Labor had a good chance (a week or so before the election, I thought a very good chance). In fact, the Howard government won easily1

But I was just about spot-on in my pre-election prediction that,
Whatever the outcome, I expect it will be treated in the international press as something of a referendum on the Iraq war
whereas, in reality, the issue barely came up.

On cue, here’s Glenn Reynolds complaining of inadequate coverage of
an Australian election that was run in no small part as a referendum on the war
Can I sue for copyright violation here?

Admittedly, Reynolds isn’t “the international press”, and, as he complains, a lot of papers got the story right rather than printing the fantasy he would prefer. But his words are so close to my prediction that I feel entitled to a bit of a gloat. Heaven knows, we haven’t got much to gloat about in Australia this week.

Anyone with any knowledge of Australia, or even with the capacity to read Australian papers on the Internet, would know that Iraq was barely mentioned either during the election campaign or in the subsequent analysis.

More on this from Tim Lambert .

1 As pointed out in the comments thread, this is a win for the efficient markets hypothesis

October 08, 2004

Small election in Australia, not many hurt

Posted by John Quiggin

After a campaign that’s been long by local (but not US) standards, Australia will hold its Federal election tomorrow. The polls are close but generally favour the incumbent conservative government.

Whatever the outcome, I expect it will be treated in the international press as something of a referendum on the Iraq war - Australia was the third country to join the Coalition of the Willing, after the US and UK, while the Labor opposition has consistently opposed the war. I can’t complain too much about this, since I predicted at the start of the campaign that the war, and also the Free Trade Agreement with the US, would be major issues. In fact, the FTA has been ignored completely, and the war has played only a minor role in the campaign. The election has been fought almost entirely on domestic policy, with both sides promising lots of increases in public expenditure.

The obvious explanation for the absence of the war, and the FTA, from the campaign debate, is that both sides have vulnerabilities that prevent them from raising the issues.

On Iraq, Opposition leader Latham had the best of the argument when it came up during his debate with John Howard, but defence policy is never likely to be a winner for Labor. The obvious failure of the war, and the lies that led up to it, have given Howard obvious reasons to keep quiet on the specific issues and hope that a more general appeal not to change horses in midstream will produce the right outcome. On the other hand, no Australian soldiers were killed in the war, and most were withdrawn about the time of “Mission Accomplished”. In these circumstances, Labor’s policy of withdrawing remaining forces by Christmas is vulnerable to attacks on the theme of “cutting and running”.

As regards the FTA, the battle over amendments to the implementing legislation, designed to protect our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, ended in a draw, and neither side seems eager for a rematch. In the absence of a clear winning line for either side, the whole issue is too eyeglazingly complicated for an election campaign. A pity, since it’s going to raise big problems almost immediately after the election is over.

Neither government has certified that the legislation passed in the other country actually implements the agreement, and the US side has floated the possibility of rejection. My guess is that, if the government gets back in, the Americans will demand an exchange of letters, designed to nullify the PBS amendments. On the other hand, if Latham gets up, I wouldn’t be surprised (or unhappy) to see the Americans pull the plug altogehter. There was some talk about the possibility of an “October surprise”, with the American side springing a rejection just before polling today, but it’s too late for this now.

October 01, 2004

A distorting mirror

Posted by John Quiggin
We’ve all heard about the US embassy in Baghdad, with its thousands of employees, advisers in every department, and capacity to instantly countermand any decision made by the Allawi government. But until now, I’d never given much thought to its opposite number, the Iraqi embassy in Washington. It turns out to be a kind of funhouse mirror image, as indicated in this story in the Washington Post which discusses Allawi’s tour and the ghostwriting of his speech
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and British Foreign Service officials also helped Allawi with the text and delivery of his remarks, said administration officials who were involved. The State Department and officials elsewhere in the government took the lead in booking Allawi’s interviews. Administration officials said that the Iraqi Embassy in Washington consists of just a few officials and has only a dial-up Internet connection, so was incapable of preparing for the high-profile tour.
One might think that with the IMF and World Bank located in Washington, not to mention the US Congress, the Iraqi government might feel the need for a more substantial presence, and that a few million of the billions of dollars supposedly allocated to reconstruction might have been used to establish it, if only for PR purposes. But obviously these institutions negotiate directly with the US Administration. Why talk to the monkey when the organ-grinder is right next door?

More on the speech from Mark Kleiman

September 21, 2004

Why?

Posted by Daniel

Two more hostages murdered by Ansar-al-Islam, and a third (the Briton) likely to die tomorrow … all one can do in these circumstances is to express the deepest sympathy for the families and repeat everything John said at the time of the Nick Berg murder. We had the chance to take out Zarqawi before the war; why the hell didn’t we take it?

(Update) By which I mean two things: 1) can it really be true that it wasn’t done in order to avoid undermining the case for war; has anyone denied or shot down this theory yet? and 2) are there any other good reasons why it might not have been done, or at least attempted?

No more years? (Andrew Sullivan edition)

Posted by John Quiggin
The idea that the forthcoming US election would be a good one to lose keeps on spreading. Here’s Andrew Sullivan
if Bush wins and heads into a real, live second Vietnam in Iraq, his party will split, the country will become even more bitterly polarized than now (especially if he’s re-elected because he’s not Kerry) and he’ll become another end-of-career Lyndon Johnson.
In my view, any rational supporter of the Republican party should hope for Bush’s defeat, since a victory will be disastrous for all concerned. A Kerry victory would be better for the United States and the world, but not necessarily for the long-term interests of the Democratic party.

Some updates over the fold

A couple more thoughts on this:

First, I’ll say again that the consequences of Bush winning again are so bad that we have to hope for his defeat, whatever the difficulties the Democrats will face in office.

Second, as I said in my first post on this, this kind of view is one that, in practice can only be taken by an outsider. The only Republican defeatists I’ve seen are Brits. As for me, the same argument can be applied, though with less force, in Australia. We’re at the end of an unsustainable housing bubble, and if Labor wins the election, it will have to clean up the mess. A dispassionate outsider might conclude that another term in opposition wouldn’t be so bad. But I really want Howard to lose. It follows, of course, that this kind of argument is irrelevant in practical terms.

But the most important point is the implication for how Kerry should be campaigning. He should be pointing out now, at every opportunity, how bad things are on both Iraq and the fiscal and trade balances. That way the public will be prepared for some decisive action if he gets in. It’s only in the last couple of days that he’s said anything serious about Iraq. As for the budget deficit, it got one line in his convention speech and hasn’t been heard of since.

September 20, 2004

Redistricting

Posted by Brian

Kevin and Matt are talking redistricting, with Matt favouring proportional representation on the grounds that it would introduce intraparty competition into American politics. This is rather odd - it’s only been a few months since the Presidential primaries, which are the most vigorously and open contested intraparty political fights in the world outside of the New South Wales Labor Party. And any experience with internal Labor (or Labour) Party fights does not immediately make one think it would make the world a better place to expand that kind of fighting.

But I didn’t want to make a substantive proposal, just ask a procedural question. To the best of my knowledge there are only two classes of country where the electoral system, from drawing boundaries to determining ballot order to deciding whether there will be recounts and so on, is run by partisan appointees.

Class One: China, Cuba, etc., i.e. countries where it is known in advance how the results will turn out.
Class Two: The United States of America (with the honourable exception of Iowa).

Are there any other countries in Class Two, or is America unique in being a democracy where one of the prizes of victory is getting to be the umpire next time the game is played?

Sadr sharia courts - information request

Posted by Daniel

We’ve posted on this one before, but I’m a believer in the vital importance of audit. And it is troubling me somewhat that in carrying out my audit, I cannot find any news reports about atrocities committed by the Sadrists during their period of control of Najaf, which are dated later than 28 August, the day after the siege ended. Reports filed during the course of fast-moving events are often unreliable, and it strikes me as odd that there has been no follow-through at all on this story. Could anyone steer me in the direction of any more information, or is there some obvious reason I’m missing?

Vendetta against Venezuela

Posted by John Quiggin

For those trying to work out whether the Bush Administration’s stated commitment to democracy in the Middle East reflects Wilsonian idealism or just a tactical choice, reflecting the fact that the Administration’s enemies in the region are mostly not democrats, Venezuela provides a useful data point.

September 16, 2004

Civil War in Iraq

Posted by Daniel

An article over at Harry’s Place gives what I think is probably the most eloquent version of the pro-(that)-war-(then) Left’s take on current events in Iraq. My main point of disagreement would be that I don’t think we’re making matters better by staying there (I also think that it’s probably a mistake to regard the anti-US forces as monolithic and undifferentiated “terrorists”). But it makes a number of good points which need to be taken seriously.

September 15, 2004

Democracy promotion as Realpolitik

Posted by Henry

Matt Yglesias says that there’s “no content to the Bush democracy agenda,” and that it’s “just a rhetorical flourish.” I don’t think that this is quite accurate - the real problem is that the Bush democracy agenda wasn’t intended to promote the worldwide spread of democracy as an end-goal; democracy was supposed to be an intermediate means towards a fix for America’s security problems in the Middle East. As Josh Marshall pointed out last year, the rationale was that democracy in Iraq would lead to the eventual creation of “a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam.” In short, this was democracy promotion as Realpolitik by other means. Thus, there’s no real inconsistency in principle with the toleration and indeed occasional encouragement of human rights abuses and autocracy in those parts of the world where US security interests wouldn’t be furthered by democratic reform. The problem, it seems to me, wasn’t so much the incoherence of the objectives (which were coherent, if wrong-headed) as the lack of any fundamental commitment to democracy as such, the unwillingness to use means of democracy promotion that might have had increased international legitimacy because they limited US power, and, of course, the profound and near-total incompetence with which the US pursued its goals.

September 14, 2004

A republic, if you can keep it

Posted by Ted
Under Mr. Putin’s proposals, which he said required only legislative approval and not constitutional amendments, the governors or leaders of the country’s 89 regions would no longer be elected by popular vote but rather by local legislatures - and only after the president’s nomination. Seats in the lower house of the federal Parliament, or Duma, would be elected entirely on national party slates, eliminating district races across the country that now decide half of Parliament’s composition. In elections last December, those races accounted for all of the independents and liberals now serving in the Duma.

The Moderate Voice has a long roundup of comments and analysis about Putin’s power grab in the wake of the Chechen terrorist attack on the school in Southern Russia. (Link via Obsidian Wings). I find myself agreeing with Ogged that this may be turn out to be the most serious story of the year.

There are any number of reasons why this story is horrible news. I find it historically unlikely that central, unchecked power will improve the lives of the people of Russia. I’m concerned about the precedent, in which a major power declares that security and democracy are incompatable. He’s going to get away with it, and he won’t be the last. I’m concerned about the muscular claims that Putin is making about the right of Russian forces to fight terror (defined solely by Putin) wherever he wants. Cold War II, anyone?

More than anything, I’m concerned about Russian nukes. I’m flabbergasted at the fact that we haven’t done more to take Russian weapons out of commission, (here, too) but at least we’ve had the benefit of Russian cooperation so far in our efforts. I’m very concerned that Putin is about to say to the West, “Thanks, but we’ll handle it from here.” Russia still has the materials to make tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. What in the world could we do?

September 13, 2004

Election notes from Oz

Posted by John Quiggin

After a week or so of largely phoney campaigning1 and a pause following the Jakarta bomb atrocity, the Australian election campaign kicked off in earnest on Sunday night with a debate between Liberal (=conservative) PM John Howard and Labor Opposition Leader Mark Latham. The conventional wisdom was that the bomb attack had just about finished Labor’s chances and that Latham’s only chance was to avoid the issue and stick to Labor’s strong suits, health and education.

Instead, Latham pushed a strong line against Australian involvement in the Iraq war, arguing that it had diverted resources and attention from the real dangers in our own region. Howard had been undermined earlier in the day by his own deputy, John Anderson, who conceded the fairly obvious fact that our involvement in the Iraq war might have increased, rather than reduced, the risk of terrorist attacks on Australia.

But Howard also gave a lot of ground. Although he briefly pushed the line that opposition to the war implied support for Saddam, most of the time he implicitly conceded that opponents of the war had been right after all, arguing that even if you opposed the war, it was now necessary to “see it through” rather than “cut and run”. With the latest awful news from both Iraq and Indonesia, however, it’s increasingly unclear what good can be done by keeping Australian troops in Iraq.

All of this is an echo of World War II, when Liberal PM Menzies sent troops to the Middle East, despite the danger posed by the Japanese. After his fall from office and a short interregnum under another conservative, he was replaced by Labor PM John Curtin , who withdrew the Australian 6th and 7th divisions of the AIF from the Middle East overriding an attempt by Churchill to divert the 7th division to the defence of Burma en route.

It remains to be seen whether the debate will affect the opinion polls, where Labor has been marginally behind on balance. Howard is generally regarded as a poor debater but a clever campaigner, and there are still four weeks to go. Still, it seems clear that the national security issue is not the easy winner for him that many pundits supposed.

1 In Australia, as in the UK, the Prime Minister has almost complete freedom in choosing the election date. But Howard delayed to the point that it was a political embarrassment to wait any longer. He called the election shortly after the end of the Olympics and then ran into a further sporting obstacle. He’d planned for a short campaign but the earliest available date coincided with football grand finals and was therefore unthinkable. That meant, in effect, that the campaign started a week or so early. The extra time was largely devoted to a series of extraordinarily vitriolic attacks on the Greens, who have been increasing their share of their vote, but are still peripheral in terms of the outcome.

September 11, 2004

Creative accountants?

Posted by John Quiggin

Today’s NYT runs an archetypal David Brooks piece. The obligatory lame conceit is that the elite is divided into spreadsheet people (notably accountants) who vote Republican and paragraph people (notably academics) who vote Democrat.

Unusually though, Brooks seems to have some actual numbers to back his story, and they give pause for thought. The most striking is that:
Back in the early 1990’s, accountants gave mostly to Democrats, but now they give twice as much to the party of Lincoln.
If this is true, considering the state of US national finances under Bush, it speaks volumes about what has happened to the accounting profession in the last decade. Do the accountants supporting Bush really believe that he has a plan to cut the deficit in half or do they just think that accounts should show whatever the client wants them to show? I guess we learned the answer to that with Enron, but it’s useful to know that nothing has changed.

September 10, 2004

Gross!

Posted by John Quiggin

The Cheney-eBay controversy is a welcome break from all the terrible things happening just at the moment (like most moments, I guess) and gives me a chance to reprise my favorite economic aphorism.

Gross Domestic Product is a lousy measure of how well a country is doing, because it’s Gross, Domestic and a Product.

As I explained a while back:
It’s Gross because depreciation is not subtracted. If we are concerned with measuring economic welfare, even from a narrowly materialist viewpoint, the net measure is relevant and the gross measure is not.

It’s Domestic because it measures the amount produced in the country, including that which accrues to foreign owners of capital and is paid out as interest or dividends. National Product which is the output accruing to a country’s land, capital and labour is more relevant.

Finally, it’s Product, that is, a measure of marketed output that takes no account of inputs. If we increase our product by working harder or longer hours (in the market), or by consuming more natural resources, we are not necessarily better off. What matters in the end is productivity, not product.

Why then do economists pay so much attention to GDP? The answer is that it’s useful primarily as a measure of economic activity, for short-run macroeconomic management. If GDP is declining, this is a good indication that the economy is in recession and that macro policy needs to be more stimulative. Taking account of things like depreciation, international income transfers, household work and work intensity would reduce the precision of estimates of short-run growth because all things are hard to measure, and would make GDP less useful for its primary purpose. (Of course, this is a Keynesian view - national account statistics like GDP are essentially a product of the Keynesian revolution).
Applying this to eBay, we can see that the value of second-hand goods sold on eBay shouldn’t count in GDP, whether they’ve depreciated (the usual case) or appreciated (antiques and so on). On the other hand, the retail services supplied by eBay should count and do. If, as Cheney asserts, people are running businesses selling stuff on eBay, then they are (self)employed and their earnings are part of GDP2. The time spent by household members shopping (including returning goods they don’t want) is not part of GDP. Garage sales and their on-line equivalents are more like returning unwanted goods than like retail business.

1 All of this rests (as Kieran implies) on the assumption that there’s a sharp division between household and market sectors. National Income is the value of what households sell to the market. As the division between household and market blurs, national income statistics become less useful.

2 To make sense of Cheney’s claim, you have to assume that eBay sellers are illegally concealing their activities, which is quite likely. But a big part of the standard free-market case for tax cuts, and a source of supposed behavioral responses, is the idea that tax cuts will shift people out of the informal/illegal sector into the legal, taxable economy. Cheney appears to be saying that the informal sector is growing under this Administration.

Genocide and the UN

Posted by Henry

I don’t have much time for Colin Powell, as a rule, but it’s only fair to note that his willingness to describe what’s happening in Sudan as genocide contrasts very favourably with the appalling behaviour of the Clinton administration over Rwanda. The New York Times says that the term ‘genocide’ “was used by the Clinton administration to describe atrocities in Yugoslavia and Rwanda” - I don’t know that this is true. My very strong recollection is that Madeline Albright bent over backwards to avoid describing the murders in Rwanda as genocide, for fear that the UN Genocide Convention would be invoked. It was a quite disgusting episode in US foreign policy. As Philip Gourevitch describes it

The desertion of Rwanda by the U.N. force … can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in U.N. peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire’s call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call “language” urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda. Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a “daughter of Munich,” a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.

September 09, 2004

Jakarta bombing and Islamism

Posted by Daniel

It appears that the bomb outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta (which killed 20 (Update: latest figure is more like 8) people and injured about 170, almost all of them locals and therefore presumably Muslims) was set by Jemaah Islamia, the Al-Quaeda offshoot that was responsible for the Bali nightclub bombing. This is yet another outrage in what is turning out to be a very grim month. What this the precise nature of this outrage tell us about Islamism?

The reason I’m writing about this is that weblog obsessives may know that I personally don’t think “Islamism” is a useful analytic category, and that lots of people who read CT violently disagree with me1.

Between hearing about the bomb and hearing about the JI claim of responsbility, I put together a mental checklist of what the latest piece of information meant for my theory:

1: If the bomb was planted by Al-Quaeda, then whatever the stated reason for planting it, this does not change my views. Al-Quaeda are fighting a global war against their concept of “the West” and calculate their attacks and statements to attempt to drive a wedge between the allied forces fighting them.

2: If the bomb was planted by non-Al Quaeda Indonesian forces and is claimed to be aimed at furthering a local Indonesian cause, then this would make me slightly more confident that “Islamism” is not a useful way to think about things. Fundamentalist Muslims have a lot of grievances, mainly because fundamentalist Muslims don’t have very much power over the way the world is run and thank God for that, but if they are fighting for those grievances one by one, then we can fight them one by one. As I understand them, theorists of “Islamism” believe that violent fundamentalist Muslim groups all share each other’s grievances and fight for them on a global basis, which would be a hell of a lot more worrying.

3: If, on the other hand, the bomb was planted by non-Al Quaeda Indonesian forces and was claimed by them to be related to the war in Iraq, the French headscarf rule, Palestine or any other non-Indonesian (at a pinch, non SE Asian) grievance, then that would be evidence that couldn’t fit into my theory, and it would be time to think once again about whether Islamism wasn’t actually something worth thinking about.

As it turned out, this appears to me to be somewhere between 1 and 2; the bomb was planted by a local group, but one linked to Al-Quaeda, and was claimed to be planted in furtherance of partly local (“punishing” Australia for helping East Timor, which is frankly not the way I remembered it) and partly Al-Quaedaist (Iraq) goals. So I am for the moment, of my opinion still.

The author will not be entering into correspondence on the precise phrasing of this post, or on whether the perpetrators or victims have been referred to in someone’s idea of the correct language, by the way. I haven’t checked whether I remembered to refer to Al-Quaeda of Jemaah Islamia as “terrorists” and suspect that I didn’t.

Footnote:
1By the way, if anyone is planning on calling this a “thesis” about Islamism, could they please call it “Daniel Davies’ Stupid Evil Islamism Thesis” rather than “Crooked Timber’s Stupid etc etc etc”, because that would be more accurate.

September 07, 2004

Islamism and terrorism

Posted by John Quiggin
I posted this piece on my own blog this morning, in response to some challenges to set out my own views on the relationship between radical Islamism and terrorism, but was in two minds about putting it up on CT, since I didn’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said better by others. But it now appears that such diffidence is interpreted as adherence to a
Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question.
This is all a bit highbrow for me, but I assume it means not talking about Islamism for fear of inciting anti-Islamic feeling. So, for what it’s worth, here are my thoughts.

I’ll begin with the observation that most discussion of this issue is worse than useless.

First, there are a lot of people who start with the observation (more or less accurate) that, as of today, Muslims are the main religious group involved to a substantial degree in terrorism, then go on to explain this in terms of observations about Islam going back to the 7th century, to show that Islam is uniquely prone to violence. This is silly. The dominance of Islamism as a source of terrorism is a recent and probably temporary phenomenon, so any explanation that relies on characteristics of Islam has to invoke some recent change in the character of Islam.

On the other side of the coin, there have been fairly recent terrorist outrages involving most of the major religions (for this purpose, I’ll count nationalism and revolutionary Marxism as religions, since they share most of the relevant characteristics). To give a partial list suitable for Googling, there’s Omagh, Oklahoma City, Baruch Goldstein, Colombo (many times), Gandhi assassination (twice), Bogota, Vukovar and so on. You only have to go back sixty years to the Holocaust, which was largely (though not wholly) the product of Christian anti-semitism. Of course, most of these involved national disputes as well, but the same is true of most of the violent conflicts currently involving Muslims.

My short view is that most Muslim terrorism is explicable in the same general terms as I’ve used previously, and involves national disputes with religion as an added source of hatred and motivation to sacrifice. If the national disputes were resolved, terrorism would, in most cases, die away (though it’s much easier to release this genie than to put it back in the bottle - there will always be diehard rejectionists who see any compromise as betrayal). Examples include Israel-Palestine, Iraq since the war, and Kashmir.

However, both radical Islamists and their Western counterparts1 seek to wrap these various struggles into a global clash of civilisations. Al Qaeda is the Islamist manifestation of this. Although Al Qaeda draws most of its support from the specific disputes I’ve listed above, it doesn’t have any concrete set of demands, and effectively pursues terror for its own sake1.

In some respects, the appeal of radical Islamism is similar to that held by revolutionary Marxism, in that it purports to wrap lots of separate struggles into a single encompassing global struggle in which victory is pre-ordained.

A notable relatively new feature is the prominence of suicide bombings, and the relative ease with which volunteers can be found for this. Although it’s been most notably exploited by radical Islamists, the first group to use it on a substantial scale was, I think, the Tamil Tigers. On the other hand, despite offering substantial incentives, Saddam Hussein was only able to elicit a handful of volunteeers. I don’t have a good explanation for all this.

A couple of reactions to Islamist terror are worth pointing to. First, there is always a supply of young men (and, to a lesser extent) young women willing to attach themselves to a cause calling for fanaticism. They frequently come from fairly well-off backgrounds, haven’t experienced much direct oppression themselves, and tend to favor the most extreme possible positions.

Second, the average Muslim (and particularly the average Arab Muslim) is bound to take an ambivalent view. On the one hand, few support terrorism or want to get involved in it. On the other hand, they are hostile, with good reasons to the policies the Western Powers (including, in this context, Israel) have pursued in the Middle East for the last 100 years or so, and frustrated that the imbalance of military power is such that they can’t fight back by conventional means. So they support guerilla warfare and are naturally inclined to shade the boundaries between guerilla fighting with purely military opponents, guerilla attacks involving “collateral” civilian deaths and outright terrorism. Hence, the frequently evasive nature of responses, with indefensible terrorist attacks being implausibly claimed to be setups by Mossad or the CIA.

To see the other side of this coin, look at those who have sought to excuse brutality and murder in the “war against terrorism”, for example that committed by Yeltsin and Putin (of course, there are examples closer to home).

In terms of a response, the worst possible is the “clash of civilisations”. What’s needed is to isolate, as far as possible, the extreme Islamists committed to an endless crusade3 against the West. There is no response to them except to kill them before they kill us and try to avoid doing anything that will help their recruiting.

Meanwhile, we should deal with the various national grievances as best we can, trying to avoid making them part of a battlefront between Islam and the West. In my view, this means, among other things, a Palestinian state with something close to the 1967 borders, elections followed by an early withdrawal from Iraq and a Kashmir settlement that hands over some majority-Muslim areas from India to Pakistan.

Of all of these, the Palestinian issue is the most important.

1 That is, those who see Islam as a monolithic anti-Western bloc and the fight against Al Qaeda as a struggle between Christendom and Islam.

2 I suppose Al Qaeda would claim that they are pursuing some objective such as new Caliphate, but the use of terror in pursuit of goals that are either unachievable or meaningless is, for practical purposes, the pursuit of terror

3 Of course, they would reject this term in favor of “jihad”. But except for the difference of religion, the two words are almost perfect synonyms.

September 04, 2004

Putin's speech

Posted by Chris

I just read the transcript of Putin’s speech following the murders in Beslan. In it, Putin expresses nostalgia for the old USSR. Obviously it is intended for a domestic audience and plays to their concerns and expectations. What should we make of the following passage? And who are the “they” of the penultimate paragraph below?

Today we are living in conditions which have emerged following the break-up of a vast great state, a state which unfortunately turned out to be unable to survive in the context of a rapidly changing world. But despite all the difficulties, we have managed to preserve the core of the colossus which was the Soviet Union.

And we called the new country the Russian Federation. We all expected changes, changes for the better. But we have turned out to be absolutely unprepared for much that has changed in our lives…

On the whole, we have to admit that we have failed to recognise the complexity and dangerous nature of the processes taking place in our own country and the world in general. In any case, we have failed to respond to them appropriately.

We showed weakness, and the weak are trampled upon. Some want to cut off a juicy morsel from us while others are helping them.

They are helping because they believe that, as one of the world’s major nuclear powers, Russia is still posing a threat to someone, and therefore this threat must be removed.

And terrorism is, of course, only a tool for achieving these goals. But as I have already said many times, we have faced crises, mutinies and acts of terror more than once.

September 03, 2004

Horror in southern Russia

Posted by Chris

I tried to write something earlier about the horrifying developments in Russia where it seems that perhaps up to 300 people may have been murdered. I couldn’t find the words then and I can’t now after watching the scenes on TV. Parents especially will have experienced a rush of sympathy for the poor people desperate to learn whether their children had survived. There have been some bad days since September 11th, but this is one of the worst. Terrible.

August 31, 2004

Real WMDs

Posted by Henry

While we’re on the subject of slurs from Republican hack politicians, you all may remember Tom DeLay’s claim a couple of months ago that John Kerry did indeed have the support of foreign leaders - such as Kim Jong-Il. NKZone, your one and only one-stop-shop for North Korea related news, begs to differ. Apparently, a North Korean spokesman has recently done an interview warning that Kerry’s call for CVID,1 and pressures from Democrats for military action mean that a Kerry administration would lead to heightened military tensions. He suggests that North Korea would respond to increased pressure from Kerry by test-firing ICBMs into the high seas close to prominent American cities, and test-detonating a H-Bomb. I’m not a qualified North-Korea tea-leaf reader by any stretch of the imagination, so I don’t want to speculate too much on the source and meaning of this. Still, on its face, it certainly appears to give the lie to Republican claims that North Korea would prefer a Democratic administration.

1 i.e. Complete, Verifiable Irreversible Dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

Why do they hate America ?

Posted by John Quiggin

What kind of limpwristed surrender monkey would deride one of his own country’s most important military honours as being a bogus scheme cooked up for political purposes? Morton Blackwell, Republican of Virginia (and dozens of other delegates to the RNC). (hat tip, commenter Peter Murphy)

Personally, I blame Kieran. He was obviously the one who gave them the idea.

Update Just looking around, I haven’t found anyone on the Republican side of the aisle who is at all upset by this. The fact that it might not play well politically has obviously sunk in with the convention organisers, who’ve tried to call a halt, but there’s no-one denouncing this guy in the way that, say, Ted Rall copped it from lots of people on the left, including CT. Perhaps commenters would like to point me to those I’ve missed. (Please don’t bother with arguments that Rall is worse than Morton. I agree that he is. OTOH, Rall is a cartoonist and Morton, along with dozens of likeminded people, is a senior figure in a major political party).

August 29, 2004

A test of the efficient markets hypothesis

Posted by John Quiggin

Australian PM John Howard has called an election for 9 October. I’ve discussed the political issues here, but CT readers will also be interested in the implications for the efficient markets hypothesis. Centrebet , which didn’t do brilliantly last time, has the (conservative) Coalition at $1.55 and Labor at $2.30. If I’ve done my arithmetic properly, and allowing for the bookies’ margin, I get the implied probabilities as 0.60 for the Coalition and 0.40 for Labor. The polls have Labor ahead, but looking at all the discussion, I’d say that the consensus view is that the election is a 50-50 proposition, and that’s also my subjective probability.

How good a test of the efficient markets hypothesis will this be? Bayesian decision theory provides an answer1. If our initial belief is that the EMH is equally likely to be true or false, and the Coalition wins, we should revise our probability for the EMH up to 0.55. If Labor wins, we should revise it down to 0.45.

1 The workings are easy for those who know Bayes’ theorem and accept the modern subjectivist interpretation , but they won’t make much sense to those who don’t.

August 28, 2004

Sadr's sharia courts

Posted by Daniel

Bad news from some newspapers; there are suggestions coming through that Sadr was whiling away the time in Najaf by running a sharia court, complete with executions and mutilations.

The specific allegations about the 20 bodies in Najaf are not what I would call established fact - the bodies might simply be casualties of the fighting, and the fact that the allegations are being made by the Iraqi government undercuts their credibility somewhat given the number of fibs they’ve told about Najaf over the last few weeks - but the general historical sweep is likely to be accurate. When and if Sadr and Sistani are brought into the political process, it is very likely indeed that one of their main priorities will be to introduce sharia courts, and sharia courts execute and mutilate people.

I merely emphasise this for two reasons. First, despite what a few right-wing trolls in our comments section think, precisely none of the case made on CT for a political solution in Najaf has depended on our believing that Sadr is a wonderful person, father of his nation or in any way a progressive force. Second, since we’ve covered the issue for weeks rather than keeping gob shut until the opportunity presented itself to say “look, they’re savages”, we’ve perhaps built up a little bit of credibility in the bank which could profitably be used on a discussion of what place sharia courts have in the future of Iraq.

Any such discussion is going to have to take place, however, on the basis of facts rather than hopes. Even after all the damage done over the last eighteen months by believing that wanting something to be true is almost the same as knowing it to be true, there are still people, in government and wih weblogs, who think that Sistani and Sadr are marginal figures. They’re not. It’s visibly the case that Sadr can raise a militia1 capable of fighting a substantial foreign military presence to a standstill, while Sistani can raise thousands of people to march for him within 24 hours. It’s not a question of whether they should or shouldn’t be in the political process; fundamentalist, Iran-facing Shia is there, it’s very big in terms of sheer numbers and even bigger in terms of numbers willing to act, so it’s politically important. The only question is how it gets brought into the political process; do we try to bring Sadr and Sistani2 into negotiations, into government and, as John suggested two weeks ago, hope that, as in SouthEast Asia, involvement in government will mellow them? Or do we decide that the price of compromise is too high if it involves sharia courts?3 And if we decide on the second option, do we expect that Sadr and Sistani will sit on their hands?

Footnote:
1Given that military hardware appears to be almost as easy to get hold of in Iraq as it is in Manchester, one can only caution against making the assumption that Sadr’s militia will ever be “disarmed”.
2It seems to me very important indeed to get some informed analysis of the relationship between Sadr and Sistani, and the extent to which they can be regarded as a unit.
3Or perhaps more accurately, “if it involves state-sponsored sharia courts”. We know from Nigeria and Pakistan that it is entirely possible for liberal-democratic official institutions to exist alongside stonings and sharia.

August 27, 2004

Silence on Najaf

Posted by Chris

“Four posts on al-Sadr: it’s getting to be an obsession isn’t it?” writes a commenter on John Quiggin’s post below . Not really, one might think, since the continuing events in Najaf look to be of enormous significance for the future of Iraq and for the nature of whatver regime emerges. I’ve just done a tour of the various British blogs that supported the war from of liberal/lefty pov, and I find, amazingly, that they haven’t been discussing Najaf at all. Not a mention! (I’m sure commenters will dig up exceptions.) Perhaps events have deviated too far from the script? Data does not compute! What I do find is generic comment on the war or on the “war on terror”, derogatory comment on opponents of the war, occasional mention of “good news” from Iraq, and links to unreliable sources suggesting Iranian or Syrian nefariousness. The American pro-war blogs seem to have dropped everything in favour of endless comment on the Kerry/SBV affair. Those interested in the detail of what is actually happening in Iraq will, of course, continue to consult Juan Cole .

Ignoble Lies

Posted by Henry

Over the last couple of months, Brad de Long has been documenting how difficult it is to find independent academic economists who are prepared to defend Bush administration policy. I haven’t seen anyone else saying this, but the same is true of international relations scholars. For a long while, the consensus among right-leaning realists, as well as liberal and lefties, has been that the invasion of Iraq was a disaster. I don’t know of any serious IR scholars who are prepared to defend Bush’s foreign policy (I’m not counting policy wonks in AEI etc, who face what we may politely describe as a different incentive structure). There have to be some out there – but as best as I can tell, they’re keeping very quiet.

Which is all by way of context for John Mearsheimer’s paper on “Lying in International Politics,” to be presented at the forthcoming APSA meeting in Chicago (thanks to Martin Weiss for bringing it to my attention).

Mearsheimer is on the right - he’s one of the heavyweights of IR theory, and a trenchant critic of liberal multilateralism. Despite all this, the paper is less an exercise in high theory than a very thinly veiled attack on the recent policy of the Bush administration. Mearsheimer notes that the Bush administration probably believed that it was acting in the national interest in its “lies about WMD and Saddam’s links to al-Qaeda,” but doesn’t pull his punches. While he is not opposed to lying in international relations per se, he suggests that the type of “fear-mongering” employed by Bush is fundamentally anti-democratic, and liable to “backfire and lead to a foreign policy disaster.”.

This kind of lying is based on a certain amount of contempt for the public and for democratic processes. Elites, according to the logic, cannot trust the wider public to support the correct foreign policy if it is given a straightforward assessment of the threat environment … The problem here is that the elite’s contempt for the public is likely to spill over into the domestic realm as well. Once a state’s leaders conclude that the people do not understand important foreign policy issues and thus need to be manipulated, it is not much of a leap to employ the same line of thinking to domestic issues.

Mearsheimer also draws the obvious link between fear-mongering and policy – policy debates in which elites are lying to the mass public are unlikely to lead to happy outcomes.

It is … possible – maybe even likely — … that the reason the elites are having difficulty making their case in the face of public doubts is that they are pushing a wrongheaded policy. If they had sound arguments, they would be able to defend them in the marketplace of ideas and not have to deceive the public. In such circumstances, the government’s policy is likely to have bad consequences.

This is strong language for an academic paper. I’ve thought for a while that the Iraq war and its lead-up are likely to replace the Bay of Pigs as the standard IR case-study of a foreign policy screw-up. Mearsheimer goes one step further - he seems to be saying that the administration’s foreign policy is not only disastrous in itself, but is having a more general corrupting effect on US politics. I’m not sure if I altogether buy the underlying causal argument – the administration’s penchant for lies didn’t begin with Iraq – but he’s surely onto something.

Update - proper link to Mearsheimer’s paper added thanks to “mdp” in comments.

August 25, 2004

Tariq Ramadan denied US visa

Posted by Chris

According to Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros , Tariq Ramadan (recently interviewed by OpenDemocracy) who had been appointed to a visiting position at Notre Dame, has been denied a US visa under sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act that were amended by the Patriot Act. Scott comments:

Whether one agrees with Ramadan or not, it is difficult to image an Islamic intellectual figure who is likely to be more acceptable as the other side in an American dialogue with Islam. Thus, the refusal to allow him to enter the US suggests that someone in Homeland Security agrees with the Daniel Pipes standard: Any Muslim who fails to condemn Islam, from its founding to the present and in all its manifestations, must be a fanatic and a threat to the West. …. This is an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to show that at the very least they are capable of exercising better judgement than the Bush administration.

August 21, 2004

Notes from (Down) Under Ground

Posted by John Quiggin

General elections are probably1 imminent in Australia. Both the campaign and the outcome will be tied more closely to events in the United States than is usual, for two reasons. First, the current Australian government has been easily the most reliable supporter of the Bush Administration anywhere in the developed world (and probably anywhere in the world), even if no-one much outside Australia has noticed. It’s one of the few governments not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and John Howard was the first to answer Bush and Blair in the call for troops in Iraq. With election campaigns likely to run in parallel, what’s good (bad) for Bush is good (bad) for Howard, and, to a much lesser extent, vice versa. If Howard waits until November and Bush loses, his whole foreign policy will lose its rationale. If Howard were to lose office in October, the parallel with Spain would be obvious, and damaging for Bush, though no doubt it would be no more than one day’s bad headlines.

The other potentially big issue involving the US is the so-called Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US.

After just about every economist in the country said that the trade aspects of the deal were trivial, and just about everyone who looked at the Intellectual Property issues (including extension of the term of copyright and a more favourable deal for pharmaceutical companies supplying our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) said it would be a disaster, the opposition Labor Party still decided to support the deal, but demanded what appeared to be a couple of face-saving amendments to the implementing legislation2. One, regarding cultural protection for film and TV was accepted, but the other, trying to restrict misuse of drug patents through ‘evergreening’ caused a violent controversy. After initially objecting, the government accepted the amendments and the legislation implementing the Agreement was passed a couple of weeks ago.

That seemed to be that, but now the Americans are saying they might not ‘certify’ the legislation (that is, accepted that it implements the FTA). Given that the trade aspects of the deal are massively loaded in favor of the US (Australia removes all its restrictions, but gets no extra access to the US sugar markets, and not much for other ag products), the only possible reason for this is that the pharmaceutical sections of the deal are absolutely critical to the US side. Until the issue blew up, however, the Australian government was telling everyone that this part of the deal was a meaningless procedural concession designed to placate the Americans without giving up anything of substance. Obviously this is not the case.

Because of the Olympics and the children overboard scandal (see below) the issue has yet to return to the headlines. When it does, everyone will be faced with interesting choices. The longer the Americans hold off certification, the higher-profile the issue will become. If they hold off, but certify before the election, this will be seen as a (relatively minor) win for Labor. If they don’t certify [a decision is due in late October] it will be double or nothing. The government will say that Labor has wrecked this marvellous deal, and, presumably, propose to remove the amendments. Labor will have little choice but to demand renegotiation of the entire agreement, hopefully with a Kerry Administration. I suppose the whole thing will be too eyeglazingly complex for a US audience as yet almost entirely unaware of the existence of the FTA (and, in many cases, of the existence of Australia), but the Democrats ought to be able to make something of the role of Big Pharma in all this.

The whole issue has been briefly overshadowed by a scandal left over from the 2001 election. Howard looked like losing until he succeeded in manufacturing a crisis over refugees arriving in northern Australia by boat. In the course of the debate he claimed that refugees on one ship had thrown their children overboard, with the objective of forcing the Australian Navy to rescue them. It came out not long after the election that this wasn’t true, but (as with Iraqi WMD) Howard claimed not to have been told. It’s now been proved, pretty conclusively, that he was told, and it seems likely that he had a good idea of the truth within a couple of days of the original statement, weeks before the election.

The scandal has energised both the people who were horrified by the whole episode, and the racists who were enthused by Howard. The people in the middle, who bought the law-and-order panic about border protection at the time have mostly changed their minds and would like to forget the whole thing ever happened. But being exposed as a liar on this count can’t help Howard if he has to sell a complex and implausible story about the FTA.

Interesting times ahead

1 The timing is decided by the incumbent Prime Minister, subject to a maximum parliamentary term of three years. Since the last election was in November 2001, convention requires that the election be held sometime this year. Because the parliament elected in 2001 did not sit until 2002, it would technically be possible to hold off until 2005, but that would generally be viewed as a sign of desperation. Leaders who have stretched their term in this way have almost invariably lost.

2 Not changes in the Agreement itself.

August 20, 2004

Year zero

Posted by John Quiggin

Now that Brian has started the hare running on gender-neutral pronouns, I thought I’d weigh in on the old chestnut “When did the 21st century start?” (I saw this raised in a recent comments thread, but can’t locate it now). The commonsense view is that it began on 1 January 2000, and I think the commonsense view is right. Against this we get a bunch of pedants arguing, that, since there was no year zero, the 1st century (of the current era) began in 1CE, and therefore included 100CE. Granting this, the 21st century began on 1 January 2001.

The problem I have with all this is the claim that “there was no year zero”. It seems to imply that, on the first Christmas1, the Jerusalem Post came out with a headline something like “Jesus Christ Born: Wise Men Announce New Dating System”. Since zero hadn’t been invented yet, there obviously wouldn’t have been a year 0, but on this assumption, there would have been a year 1. But of course, there wasn’t a year 1 either. In the hegemonic dating system of the time, this was 754 Ab Urbe Condita. No one would refer to dates Anno Domini for hundreds of years to come.

It’s true of course, that when our current system of dating was first proposed, by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, zero still hadn’t been invented (or at least the concept hadn’t reached Christendom) and so, when, years were retrospectively dated, there still wasn’t a year zero in the system proposed then. But why should we be bound by the ignorance of a 6th century monk? If it suits us to have a year zero, why shouldn’t we have one? It’s obvious that there would be some overlap, in that 0 CE would be the same year as 1BCE, but I don’t see any problem with this. We can use the 0 CE to get the centuries right and 1BCE on the rare occasions we need to refer to historical discussion of events in this year that uses the traditional system.

When we want a really sensible system, we can follow the astronomers who not only use 0CE but employ negative numbers for earlier dates.

Note Although I’ve never seen anyone else put this argument, once I’d worked it out, I had enough to Google on, and found this piece by Steven Dutch of the University of Wisconsin

1 There’s an obvious problem to do with the day on which years are supposed to start, which I’ll skip over.

August 19, 2004

The Iraqi National CongressConference - a mixed bag

Posted by John Quiggin

The meeting of the Iraqi National Conference has wound up in Baghdad, leaving, from the limited reports available, a very mixed record. Given the series of disasters we’ve seen in the last eighteen months or so, a mixed record is certainly better than the par outcome of total failure.

It was certainly good that the gathering was held at all, and appears to have encompassed a much broader and more representative sample of Iraqi opinion than anything of the kind held since the overthrow of Saddam (or, of course, while Saddam and his Baathist predecessors were in power). This report on the televised proceedings,at Healing Iraq gives an idea of what it was like.

On the other hand, the supposed purpose of the Conference, to elect an advisory council of 100 members to oversee the Allawi government, degenerated into farce. It appears that the Conference was presented with a slate of 81 members agreed by the big parties and a US-imposed decision that 19 members of the old IGC (originally 20, but Chalabhi was excluded after falling from grace). In the absence of any alternative, this slate was accepted by default.

But the biggest success (still not a sure thing, but promising) was the intervention of the Conference in the Najaf crisis, demanding that the assault by the US and the interim government cease and that Sadr withdraw from Najaf, disband his militia and enter the political process. Clearly, if it were not for the Conference, there would have been little chance of a peaceful outcome here, and the potential consequences were disastrous. Sadr has stated acceptance of the Conference’s demands, though it remains to be seen what that means.

I think there’s a reasonably good chance that Sadr will carry through a withdrawal from Najaf and that the government/US will accept this without trying (for example) to demand the surrender of weapons. That would resolve the immediate crisis and would certainly be a good thing for the people of Najaf and Iraq in general, as well as for the rest of us. The bloodletting of the last week, and of the April campaign, has achieved nothing, except to strengthen Sadr.

After that, everything is fairly ambiguous. Although it’s called an Army, Sadr’s militia is not the kind of force to which terms like ‘disband’ and ‘disarm’ are really applicable, certainly not in a country where weapons of all kinds are ubiquitous. Its members can take off their black clothes, and put their guns away, but they will still, in most cases, be unemployed and angry and ready to turn out in arms at short notice. Most likely, we will see a return to the situation before April, with Sadr in effective control of Sadr City in Baghdad and with his (now much more numerous) groups of supporters in other Shiite cities keeping a lower profile, but still ready for another round of armed conflict if it occurs.

There’s similar ambiguity surrounding Sadr’s proposed entry into the political process. The advisory council has been neatly stitched up, and unless this process is reopened, Sadr will be an outsider until (and if) elections are held. There’s no doubt that Sadr’s status has been greatly enhanced by what most Iraqis (Sunni as well as Shiite) see as his successful defiance of the US, so this may be better for him than a minor share in an interim administration with dubious standing.

It seems pretty clear that, if free elections are held, and Sadr runs, he, or his supporters, will do very well. By contrast, a year ago, he was a relatively minor figure. If early elections had been held as Garner had proposed, it seems likely that a moderate Islamist government, heavily influenced by Sistani, would have emerged. That prospect seems much more attractive than any of the alternatives currently on offer.

August 16, 2004

Leave or we'll shoot you

Posted by Chris

My post the other day about the Allawi government’s attack on press freedom attracted criticism from some pro-war bloggers. From Stephen Farrell’s report in today’s London Times :

“YOU’VE got two hours to leave or we are going to open fire at you. It’s just our orders,” said a policeman guarding the headquarters of the Najaf Governor, Adnan al-Zurfi, when myself and other journalists arrived at his office yesterday.

(…)

Police threatened to arrest or shoot journalists if they did not leave the city and shots were fired into the hotel housing Western and Arab reporters, which lies within a government-controlled area. The threat came even as Mr Allawi spoke at the country’s long-awaited National Conference in Baghdad, calling it “the first step on the way to democracy”.

August 12, 2004

Venezuela through the looking glass?

Posted by Daniel

What the bloody hell is this all on about??? My Spanish is a bit ropey, but I have at least established to my own satisfaction that vheadline.com is correctly reporting a Venezuelan national press story, and VENPRES was reporting a story which El Mundo of Madrid did in fact carry (but isn’t available without paying). In this story, El Mundo is apparently reporting (and, btw, I’ve usually found the Spanish press pretty reliable on the few occasions I’ve had to rely on them) … the following assertions:

Update: thank heaven somebody bothered to check this one out

  • The CIA undersecretary for southern hemisphere affairs, William Spencer, has convened a conference for CIA country heads in Santiago to discuss what they are going to do about Hugo Chavez
  • The CIA apparently regards it as a foregone conclusion that Chavez will win his recall referendum on Sunday (note: I think it’s actually pretty close)
  • The CIA believe that if Chavez wins, he will overthrow the governments of Bolivia and Colombia, then use the multiple corruption scadals in Peru as an excuse to invade and remove the current government
  • The CIA believe that Chavez’ ultimate plan is to use Venezuela and Peru as twin centres of a revolution to create a Latin American socialist superstate.
  • In order to forestall this “domino effect”, the CIA is seriously thinking about using “military and financial pressure” to remove Chavez

I’d be grateful if any CT readers could confirm to me that El Mundo has the wrong end of the stick, because the alternative of believing that the intelligence service of our only superpower has a view of the world rather less realistic than that of David Icke, while not exactly without precedent, is pretty frightening when it applies to one of the world’s biggest petroleum exporters. In any case, if a plot to assassinate Chavez shows up between now and Sunday, you read it here first, unless you subscribe to El Mundo, VENPRES, vheadline.com or any one of a number of mailing lists.

August 11, 2004

Curiouser and curiouser

Posted by Chris

A very odd column by Christopher Hitchens about Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA, and so forth. It finishes by hinting at a more critical position toward the Allawi government than some of Hitchens’s admirers have hitherto managed:

As I write, the Allawi government in Baghdad is trying, with American support, a version of an “iron fist” policy in the Shiite cities of the south. (“Like all weak governments,” as Disraeli once said in another connection, “it resorts to strong measures.”) Chalabi, who has spent much of this year in Najaf, thinks that this is extremely unwise. We shall be testing all these propositions, and more, as the months go by.

August 10, 2004

Lumpencommentariat

Posted by Henry

Both Dan and Matt Yglesias provide us with empirical evidence that the number of insurgents in Iraq is snowballing. It’s a far cry from the ridiculous predictions of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds that jihadists from across the Arab world would get sucked into Iraq, leaving the US safer. Indeed, if the Brookings people are right, the number of foreign insurgents has grown only slightly since December, while the number of domestic insurgents has grown fourfold. Flypaper, my ass. This whole nonsensical theory was never more than ex post wishful thinking masquerading as foreign policy analysis - as I argued last year, it seemed to be based on the fallacious notion that there was a limited “lump of terrorism” floating around in the international system that could be absorbed by a conflict in Iraq. Instead, entirely predictably, we’re seeing what seems to be an enormous increase in recruitment to anti-American forces - an eightfold increase over the last fifteen months. The dynamic effects are swamping the constant ones. I don’t see how this can be anything but bad news.

Update: I’d forgotten that Ted too posted on this eleven months ago.

I’m going to make a prediction that I feel pretty good about: a year from now, no one will be very proud of the flypaper theory.

And I reckon that Robert Schwartz owes him $100 …

August 09, 2004

Competing narratives

Posted by Chris

I assume that everyone reads Juan Cole , but if not, they should. Belle linked the other day to his coverage of the burned double agent story. But, of course, he is best know for his continuing coverage of Iraq. One popular narrative has the current Iraqi government as the harbingers of peace and democracy, impeded in their efforts by ex-Baathists, Al Qaida, the Mehdi Army, the Iranians, etc, and therefore fully justified in using all the force at their disposal to establish order. If I read Cole correctly there is another, competing story, the credibility of which is bolstered by the arrest warrants against the Chalabis (including the one in charge of Saddam’s trial). Namely that Allawi and his allies are using their position, and their access to US and allied firepower, to crush their competitors for political power. The distinction between these narratives is somewhat blurred, of course, by the fact that the current objects of repressive or judicial action are or include very many people who are indeed rogues, gangsters, fanatics, etc. Still, I wouldn’t bet my house on the first version, in which Allawi and co will turn out to have been the good guys, there will be genuinely competitive elections, the righteous will flourish and the unjust will be punished, and so on.

August 08, 2004

Al Jazeera

Posted by Chris

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” So said George Orwell, in a quote adopted by British blog Harry’s Place . It is a quote worth recalling in the light of the decision of the Iraqi government to close down Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices for a month. The new Iraqi foreign minister justified the closure in these terms:

Hoshyar Zibari accused Aljazeera, along with other Arabic language satellite channels, of “incitement” and hiding behind media freedoms.

Zibari said the channel’s coverage of Iraq was “one-sided” and “distorted”.

He made the comments in an interview with an Aljazeera correspondent during an offcial visit to Moscow on Sunday.

“They [Aljazeera and other Arabic channels] have all become incitement channels which are against the interests of security, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people,” Zibari said.

He added “the new Iraqi government will not tolerate these kinds of intentional breaches and violations”.

Looks like the new Iraqi government doesn’t think people should have the right to tell them what they don’t want to hear.

UPDATE: This piece on Al-Jazeera by David Usborne in the Independent is worth reading.

August 02, 2004

All about oil?

Posted by Chris

There’s an article in today’s Guardian by John Laughland , warning us that the Tony Blair’s humanitarian concern about Darfur is just a cloak to mask his desire to launch another oil-resource grabbing war. Of course, the facts should speak for themselves, but I’m not above a bit of ad hominem , especially when it comes to wondering where the Guardian gets its op-ed contributors from these days. Thanks to Google, it is possible to read an earlier Guardian article denouncing the Spectator as bonkers , partly on the grounds of a John Laughland interview with Jean-Marie Le Pen, that same, highly sympathetic interview , a review by the Virtual Stoa’s Chris Brooke of a book by Laughland (“read the whole thing”), and Laughland’s views on Zimbabwe , Slobodan Milosevic (one representative piece, google for more if you like), John Kerry (more of a warmonger than Bush), Blair and the Euro , and Cyprus . Readers may find that Laughland’s views on this issue or that coincide with their own, but, taken in the round, a certain picture emerges. (UPDATE: This Laughland article , about recent events in Georgia, is a particularly fine example of his work. Scroll down for his speculations about why Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić remain at liberty!)

July 23, 2004

Why does the efficient markets hypothesis matter ?

Posted by John Quiggin

Reading the discussion of earlier posts about the efficient markets hypothesis, it seems that the significance of the issue is still under-appreciated. In this post, Daniel pointed out the importance of EMH as a source of pressure on less-developed countries to liberalise capital flows, which contributed to a series of crises from the mid-1990s onwards, with huge human costs. This is also an issue for developed countries, as I’ll observe, though the consequences are nowhere near as severe. The discussion also raised the California energy farce, which, as I’ll argue is also largely attributable to excessive faith in EMH. Finally, and coming a bit closer to the stock market, I’ll look at the equity premium puzzle and its implications for the mixed economy.

To recap, the efficient markets hypothesis says that the prices generated by capital markets represent the best possible estimate of the values of the underlying assets. So, for example, the price of a share in Microsoft is the best possible estimate of the present value of Microsoft’s future earnings, appropriately discounted for time and risk.

The EMH comes in three forms. The weak version (which stands up pretty well, though not perfectly, to empirical testing) says that it’s impossible to predict future movements in asset prices on the basis of past movements, in the manner supposedly done by sharemarket chartists, Elliot wave theorists and so forth. The strong version, which almost no-one believes says that asset prices represent the best possible estimate taking account of all information both public and private. For policy purposes, the important issue is the “semi-strong” version which says that asset prices are at least as good as any estimate that can be made on the basis of publicly available information. There’s a heap of evidence to show that the semi-strong EMH is false, but the most dramatic, as I pointed out recently, is that of the dotcom boom, when obviously hopeless businesses like Pets.com were valued at billions of dollars. I’ve discussed this a bit more here

An apparent, but not real, moderation of the semi-strong EMH is the formulation offered by James Surowiecki that “whether or not markets are perfectly efficient, they’re better than any other capital allocation method that you can think of.” It’s clear that, if capital markets are always the best possible way of allocating capital then they must produce the best possible estimates of asset values, given available information, and this is just a restatement of semi-strong EMH.

A much more defensible position is that, even if capital markets are not perfect, neither is any alternative, and it is therefore an empirical question whether unregulated capital markets or some alternative, such as regulation or public investment, will yield better outcomes in any particular case. This formulation leads straight to the basic economic framework of social democracy, the mixed economy, leaving, of course, plenty of room to argue about the optimal mix.

Now let’s look at some specific cases where the EMH gives a simple and misleading answer, and where a more careful analysis leads to mixed-economy conclusions.

First, there’s the question of foreign exchange markets. As Daniel observed, the EMH implies that the optimal policy is to allow exchange rates to be determined by unregulated capital markets, in what is called a ‘clean float’. The experience of the Asian crises, and also of Chile and China, suggests that developing countries may do better with controls that limit short-term capital flows. But even among developed countries, belief in the desirability of a clean float has faded. The volatility of exchange rates since the collapse of the fixed exchange rate regime in the mid-1970s has been much greater than expected, and much more than can be explained by any sensible model of rational markets. Most central banks have come to adopt a policy of ‘leaning against the wind’, that is, buying their own currency when the exchange rate is well below the long-run average (sometimes called Purchasing Power Parity, though this isnt quite accurate) and selling when it is well-above. On average, this has been a profitable long-term strategy. A lot of economists, starting with the late James Tobin, would go further and tax foreign exchange transactions in the hope of reducing volatility. The lesson here is that neither rigidly fixed exchange rates nor a perfectly free float is likely to be optimal. You can read some more on this here

Second, there’s energy, and particularly electricity. Until the 1990s, electricity was supplied either by public enterprises (most places except the US) or regulated monopolies. These did not do a perfect job in making investment decisions. Roughly speaking, when engineers were in charge, there was “gold-plating”, notably in the form of excessive reserve capacity. By contrast when accountants or Treasury departments were in charge, capital was rationed tightly, and investment decisions were determined largely on the basis of attempts to get around the resulting artificial constraints.

The EMH implied that private capital markets would do a far better job. This in turn led to the creation of spot markets for electricity which otherwise made little sense, since, in the absence of highly sophisticated metering, most users could not respond to market signals in the required fashion (the big consumers, who could respond, typically had contracts specifying if and how much their supply could be cut in the event of a shortage). In practice, this produced huge reallocations of wealth while failing to produce either sensible signals to consumers or rational investment. Instead, the pattern in investment was one of boom and bust. As a result, there’s been a steady movement away from spot markets and towards the reassertion of more co-ordination and planning of investment. I’ve had a bit more to say about this here

Finally, there’s the equity premium puzzle, that is, the fact that average returns to equity are far higher than can be accounted for by any sensible model incorporating both reasonable risk attitudes and the efficient markets hypothesis. If you reject the efficient markets hypothesis, it’s natural to conclude that the true social cost of capital is close to the real bond rate. This in turn allows us to evaluate privatisation by comparing the profits forgone with the interest saving that arises when sale proceeds are used to repay debt. For Australia and the UK, such an analysis produces the conclusion that most privatisations have reduced welfare. Some of the evidence is in this paper (PDF file), and there’s a more rigorous analysis here (PDF). Responding to this argument, Brad DeLong observes, with customary acuteness that my argument implies that “the natural solution to all this is the S-Word:Socialism:public ownership of the means of production”.

Actually, however, while this aspect of the argument, taken in isolation, would imply that public ownership always outperforms private, there are plenty of factors going in the other direction, such as the principal-agent problems associated with the absence of an owner-manager or a threat of takeover. So, the correct conclusion, as foreshadowed above, is that the optimal arrangement will be a mixed economy.

Determining the optimal mix is a difficult task, requiring lots of case-by-case analysis, but I’ll offer the view that the optimal public share of production and consumption is unlikely to be below 25 per cent, and is typically close to 50 per cent. For a contrasting view, I’ll point to my distinguished predecessor at the University of Queensland, Colin Clark, who thought 25 per cent was an upper bound. I’ll need another big post to spell out my claims here, and this will take some work. In the meantime, feel free to pitch in with your own views.

July 22, 2004

Scandal

Posted by John Quiggin

As far as I can see, the Right seems to be winning the scandal wars just at the moment. I didn’t follow the Plame-Wilson scandal the first time around, so I can’t really tell how damaging or otherwise the latest claims from US and British intelligence may be to Wilson’s credibility. Similarly, although it seems clear that Sandy Berger has made a fool of himself , I have no idea what this means for anything that might possibly matter. Finally, it appears that last Thanksgiving in Iraq, Bush posed not with a fake turkey, but with a display turkey, never intended for carving but to adorn the buffet line. I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

All this confirms me in the view that the kind of “smoking gun” or “what did X know and when did s/he know it” scandal that has dominated politics since Watergate is a waste of everybody’s time. The real scandals are those that are, for the most part, on the public record.

Looking specifically at Iraq, I’m amazed at the continuing focus on intelligence reports about WMDs. It seems to me as if people on both sides of the debate have excised from their memories everything that happened between December 2002 and the outbreak of the war, with the exception of some speeches given by Bush, Blair and Powell. In particular, it seems as if judgements about the threat posed by Saddam’s regime depended primarily on intelligence reports from places like Niger.

To remind anyone who might have forgotten, from December 2002 onwards, anyone who watched the news could acquire all the evidence they needed to conclude that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons and was not close to getting them, and that he probably didn’t have a germ warfare program either. This is because UN inspectors had (with trivial exceptions) unhindered access to any site that US or British intelligence reports indicated might be suspicious. In particular, they were able to visit old nuclear sites like Tuweitha where both Blair and Bush claimed that suspicious rebuilding activity had gone on. They found nothing, for the very good reason that nothing was happening. A more thorough search would have been needed to rule out the possibility of a stockpile of poison gas, but we now know it would have come to the same conclusion.

Of course, this was not enough to convince those who were bent on war in any case. But even for these people, the intelligence reports should have been irrelevant once the inspections commenced. At this point it became clear that whatever was in the intelligence reports, it was not information that could be given to the inspectors to say go and look at place X, take up the floor and you’ll find the evidence you need. I saw various more or less desperate explanations of why this might be the case during the leadup to the war, but I find it hard to believe that anyone actually relied on intelligence reports, as opposed to longheld beliefs, in concluding that Saddam must have WMDs.

Either way, it doesn’t matter much whether and how the intelligence reports were cooked, over-egged, sexed up or whatever. The main question is how, with the world having agreed on a UN resolution that required either inspections or war, we ended up with both1.

1 I can’t stop people posting absurd legal quibbles about the meaning of “active compliance” and so on, but I won’t respond to them.

July 20, 2004

The virus of error

Posted by John Quiggin
In the most recent London Review of Books, Hugh Pennington has a generally excellent article on measles and erroneous (to put it charitably) research linking the combined MMR vaccine to autism. It's a pity therefore that, on a peripheral issue, he perpetuates an equally glaring error, saying
'Most people have an intuitive appreciation that the best vaccine programme, from an individual's point of view, is one where almost everyone else is vaccinated while they are not, so that they are indirectly protected without incurring any of the risks or inconvenience associated with direct protection.' If too many people act in this way, the infection becomes commoner in the population as a whole, and returns as a real and significant threat to the unimmunised. This is a modern version of the 'Tragedy of the Commons' described by Garrett Hardin in his influential 1968 essay: 16th-century English peasants had free grazing on commons; their need to supplement food supplies and income was very great; the resulting overgrazing wrecked the commons for everyone.
As I've pointed out previously Hardin's story was, in historical terms, a load of tripe. It's interesting to note that, in repeating Hardin's story, Pennington adds the spurious specificity of "16th century England", whereas Hardin's account was not specific regarding dates and places, and therefore harder to refute. This is characteristic of the way in which factoids are propagated.

Ken Lay is Innocent OK

Posted by Daniel

Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow will all shortly be going on trial for their liberty over the Enron bankruptcy fiasco. I have to say that it seems to me that it would be a little bit unfair if any of them were to go to jail in the current political climate.

I don’t know how this table will come out, I suspect not well ….
Who? Lay/Skilling/Fastow Bush/Blair/Howard
Why are people angry? They believe themselves to have lent money to a company based on misleading statements They believe themselves to have lent their support to a war based on misleading statements.
How much money did it cost? US$16bn US$ 84bn and rising
How many people died? 1 (J Clifford Baxter, vice-president, committed suicide) (to date): 896 American military, 61 British military, 60 other military , 112 contractors, upwards of 10,000 civilians.
What were the statements made that might be considered objectionable? “In 2000, Enron entered into transactions with the Related Party to hedge certain merchant investments and other assets. As part of the transactions, Enron […] transferred to the Entities assets valued at approximately $309 million, including a $50 million note payable and an investment in an entity that indirectly holds warrants convertible into common stock of an Enron equity method investee [….] Cash in these Entities of $172.6 million is invested in Enron demand notes” (Enron 2000 Report & Accounts) “Iraq’s military forces are able to use chemical and biological weapons, with command, control and logistical arrangements in place. The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within forty five minutes of a decision to do so” (Blair)

, “the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.” (Bush),

“Well I would have to accept that if Iraq had genuinely disarmed, I couldn’t justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I’ve never advocated that. Much in all as I despise the regime” (Howard)

What later turned out to be the case? … under generally accepted accounting principles, the note receivable should have been presented as a reduction to shareholders’ equity (similar to a shareholder loan). This treatment would have resulted in no net change to shareholders’ equity. The net effect of this initial accounting entry was to overstate both notes receivable and shareholders’ equity by approximately $172 million (Restatement of 1997-2000 accounts) “”Anyone out there holding - as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said - the prospect that, in fact, the Iraq Survey Group is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction, are really delusional, […] There is nothing there. There is a programme there. There was an intention of Saddam Hussein at some point to reconstitute it. […] There were clearly illegal activities, clear violations of UN Security Council resolutions. We have accumulated that evidence and really have accumulated that evidence to a considerable degree four months ago. […]There are not actual stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction.” (David Kay, BBC interview),

“Up to the middle of January 2003, my gut feeling was, “Yes, they have WMD.” But by then we were performing inspections at sites that had been given to us by intelligence [agencies]. In no case did we find any WMD—for the simple reason that there weren’t any, as it turns out. I’m not against intelligence, but it requires critical thinking. Take the much-talked-about British dossier of September 2002. I must say that when I saw the claim [that Iraqi WMD could be activated on 45 minutes’ notice], I thought, “Hey, isn’t this overselling it a bit?” If you are dealing with a question of going to war over this or not, and thousands of people will be killed, then my view as a citizen is that I would like our leaders to be a little less in advertising and a little more in reality. (Hans Blix, Newsweek interview)

What was the excuse for this discrepancy? “I can tell you in the — in the board of directors meeting that Arthur Andersen — it was represented that Arthur Andersen and the lawyers had looked at it, and Arthur Andersen and the lawyers thought that the structure of those partnerships was entirely appropriate” (Jeffrey Skilling, Larry King Live, Feb 2004) “”I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services,” (Bush,

“The chief of defence staff and other people were saying well, we think we might have potential WMD finds here or there. Now these things didn’t actually come to anything in the end - but I don’t know is the answer.” Blair,

“History may, in the fullness of time, it might be demonstrated that the advice was inaccurate” (Howard)

So who’s responsible? “I take full responsibility for what happened at Enron,” said Mr. Lay, 62. “But saying that, I know in my mind that I did nothing criminal.”(Kenneth Lay, New York Times interview) “I don’t want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I’m confident I have.” (Bush)

“I accept full personal responsibility for the way the issue was presented and therefore any errors made.” (Blair)

And so on. I don’t wan to labour the point (the Sherron Watkins/Andrew Wilkie row has already been removed), but the point I want to make is pretty clear; in most other spheres of life, it is not considered acceptable to chop and change and decide which of your past statements were the “real reasons” you were offering. And in most walks of life, “taking responsibility” means carrying the can when things go wrong, rather than pushing blame off on your advisers. And in almost every walk of life except government, “good faith” is not a defence that will save you from criminal indictment.

Ken Lay must be looking at the Hutton and Butler reports and just weeping …

July 19, 2004

Rational manias

Posted by John Quiggin

There’s a cottage industry within economics involving the production of historical arguments giving rational1 explanations of seemingly irrational historical episodes, of which the most famous is probably the Dutch tulip boom/mania. This Slate article refers to the most recent example, a complex argument regarding changes in contract rules which seems plausible, but directly contradicts other explanations I’ve seen.

Once opened, questions like this are rarely closed. Still, articles of this kind seem a lot less interesting in 2004 than they did in, say, 1994. In 1994, the efficient markets hypothesis (the belief that asset markets invariably produce the best possible estimate of asset value based on all available information) was an open question, and the standard account of the Dutch tulip mania was evidence against it. In 2004, the falsity of the efficient markets hypothesis is clear to anyone open to being convinced by empirical evidence.

We have seen billion-dollar valuations placed on companies that proposed to home-deliver dogfood at prices lower than those charged in discount stores. We’ve seen unimportant subdivisions of profitable companies valued at more than the companies themselves. We’ve seen a dozen different companies simultaneously priced at levels that made sense only if they were each going to monopolise the industry in which they were competing. And don’t even get me started on the US dollar bubble (now burst) or the bond bubble (still inflating).

In summary, is contradicted by our own recent experience far more thoroughly than by anything that might or might not have happened in Amsterdam in the 1630s. Everybody who cared to look at the numbers coming out of markets in the late 1990s knew they were crazy, but it didn’t matter. Those who bet on an early return to sanity (George Soros for example) lost their money. The only sensible course was to withdraw to the sidelines and wait the madness out.

It’s true that dramatic episodes like the dotcom mania don’t happen all the time. But even one such episode, occurring in a well-developed and sophisticated financial market like that of the US in the late 1990s is sufficient to undermine the assumption that asset markets ever yield the best possible estimate of asset values, except by chance.

1 That is, explanations consistent with individual rationality as defined by economists

July 16, 2004

The new Iraq

Posted by John Quiggin

Although there’s plenty of news coverage of inquiries into the “intelligence” that justified the Iraq war, coverage of events in Iraq itself seems to have declined sharply since the formal handover of sovereignty and the shutdown of the Coalition Provisional Administration. There seems to be a general media consensus that things have gone quiet, with the result that, when the usual news of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations is reported, it’s always prefaced with something like Suicide Blast Shatters a Calm (NYT 15 July) or after a week of relative calm (Seattle Times 7 July).

Regardless of the calmness or otherwise of the situation, the installation of Allawi as PM has certainly produced a new dynamic. Allawi has moved quickly to establish himself as a strongman, resolving by default the questions left unanswered in the “handover”. His announcements of emergency powers and the establishment of a security service/secret police have been criticised, but they amount to little more than the assumption of powers previously exercised by the CPA with no legal basis of any kind. The big question before the handover was whether any new military operations would be under the control of the interim government or of the American military. Allawi has moved pretty quickly to ensure that he will give the orders here, putting the onus on the American military to come to his aid if his forces run into serious resistance.

Allawi has also moved to split the insurgency, distinguishing between “legitimate” resistance forces (essentially those whose attacks were directed at the occupying forces) and terrorists (Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda offshoot, and the remaining supporters of Saddam). The big beneficiary of this is Moktada al-Sadr whom Bremer tried to suppress in his last weeks, but who is now more popular and powerful than ever1. In a fairly standard move in situations of this kind, Sadr has switched from overt resistance activities to vigilante work, directed both at the Al Qaeda, Wahhabist and Saddamist insurgents and at “prostitutes, pimps, pornography sellers, gamblers - and those who sell alcohol.”2 Naturally enough, other Shiite leaders are alarmed at this and are trying to find a way to isolate al-Sadr (as always, Juan Cole has the story covered). But, having fought the Americans and lived to tell the tale, al-Sadr is pretty much untouchable now.

At this stage, there are three plausible outcomes for Iraq over the next year or so. The first is that Allawi will succeed in crushing the insurgency where Bremer failed, and will also manage to divide and rule the Shiite majority. The likely outcome in this case is a strongman government, comparable to the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and broadly sympathetic to the US. The second is that elections will produce a Shi-ite majority government, including al_Sadr. Such a government would be overtly hostile to the US, and would almost certainly demand early withdrawal of the occupying forces. The third is that the insurgents will succeed in reducing the country to chaos. My money is on the second. It seems clear now that it would have been far better to have held elections in 2003, when the dominant Shiite voice was the relatively quietist Sistani and before disasters like those in Fallujah and Najaf.

Update Commenting on the version of this piece at my blog, reader Jack Strocchi points to this Sydney Morning Herald piece, which includes allegations that Iraqi PM Allawi personally executed prisoners at a Baghdad police station. The killings supposedly took place a week or so before the handover of sovereignty. Allawi has denied the allegations , and, although the SMH has statements from purported eyewitnesses, it seems implausible that Allawi would take such a risk for no reason, especially with the handover only a week away.

The more important point that comes out of the article is that the spread of such rumours is, on the whole, good for Allawi’s popularity in Iraq. I compared him to Mubarak, but, as Jack (channeling Steve Sailer) points out, Putin provides a better analogy in many ways. It’s not hard to imagine a situation where, with even partial success against the insurgency, Allawi could get control of most of the levers of power and secure majority support/acquiescence through some sort of plebiscite.

1 Amazingly, the US military is touting the campaign against al-Sadr as a textbook success in counterinsurgency

2 Very similar things are being done in Sunni “no-go zones” like Fallujah. The days of “Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy” are a long way behind us now.

July 15, 2004

State power and torture

Posted by Henry

From an editorial in the Washington Post today.

According to the International Red Cross, a number of people apparently in U.S. custody are unaccounted for. Most are believed to be held by the CIA in secret facilities outside the United States. Contrary to the Geneva Conventions, the detainees have never been visited by the Red Cross; contrary to U.S. and international law, some reportedly have been subjected to interrogation techniques that most legal authorities regard as torture.

What is known, mostly through leaks to the media, is that several of the CIA’s detainees probably have been tortured — and that a controversial Justice Department opinion defending such abuse was written after the fact to justify the activity. According to reports in The Post, pain medication for Abu Zubaida, who suffered from a gunshot wound in the groin, was manipulated to obtain his cooperation, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to “water boarding,” which causes the sensation of drowning. Notwithstanding the Justice Department opinion, parts of which recently were repudiated by the White House, U.S. personnel responsible for such treatment may be guilty of violating the international Convention Against Torture and U.S. laws related to it.

Nor has the CIA’s illegal behavior been limited to senior al Qaeda militants. The agency has been responsible for interrogating suspects in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is believed to have held a number in secret detention facilities. According to official reports, the identities of several in Iraq were deliberately concealed from the Red Cross, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. At least two detainees have died while being interrogated by CIA personnel. One CIA contractor has been charged with assault by the Justice Department in the case of one of the deaths, and at least two other cases are reportedly under investigation. But no higher-ranking CIA officials have been held accountable for the abuses or the decisions that led to them, even though it is now known that former CIA director George J. Tenet was directly involved in the “ghost detainee” cases in Iraq.

The Pentagon and Congress are investigating the Army’s handling of foreign detainees; though they are slow and inadequate, these probes contrast with the almost complete absence of scrutiny of the CIA’s activity.

I’m not especially keen on self-righteous denunciations of the “people of political position x are lying hypocrites unless they immediately denounce y” variety. Still, like Kieran, I have enormous difficulty in understanding why sincere, committed US libertarians (with some exceptions ) aren’t up in arms about this sort of thing. It seems to me to be an open-and-shut case of the kinds of state tyranny that libertarians should rightly be concerned about. Why is state-organized torture a less topical issue than state-imposed limits on political free speech, or individual ownership of firearms? If someone has a consistently argued libertarian argument for why the state should be allowed to torture individuals, I’d like to hear it. If someone has a libertarian argument, or indeed any argument at all, for why the state should be allowed to do this with no public scrutiny or accountability, I’d like to hear that even more.

July 10, 2004

Selective Amnesia

Posted by Henry

Ted says

There ought to be a word for these kinds of arguments, in which one simultaneously displays and condemns hypocrisy. They happen a lot.

There should be a word too for the kind of self-deconstructing display of bad faith that Charles Krauthammer treats us to in his latest piece of hackwork, entitled “Blixful Amnesia.” If someone other than Krauthammer were involved, you might imagine that a post thus entitled would be an apology for repeated assertions that Hans Blix was a craven, incompetent fool for not finding WMDs in Iraq. Instead it’s yet another incoherent harangue; this time against a recent talk given by Blix in Vienna. Blix’s speech begins with an aside - that hundreds of millions of people are more directly threatened by hunger than by weapons of mass destruction - and then launches into a detailed and lengthy discussion of non-proliferation, Krauthammer, who doesn’t appear to have read beyond the opening paragraphs, sees this as telling evidence of the failure of the “decadent European left” to face up to the problems of proliferation of nuclear weapons. In fact, Blix offers a series of proposals for addressing proliferation - starting with a real commitment by the existing nuclear powers to stop producing nuclear weapons material.

There’s something rather odd about Krauthammer’s continued obsession with Blix. My suspicion is that it’s because Blix’s credibility (at least with regard to the most recent round of weapons inspections) has increased over time, while Krauthammer’s has evaporated. In Krauthammer’s own words fifteen months ago.

Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Indeed. It’s high time that the Washington Post took him at his word, and dealt with his continuing “credibility problem” by suggesting that he seek employment elsewhere.

July 05, 2004

Promoting untruths

Posted by Chris

I posted the other day about Paul Krugman’s correct observation that many of the right-wing pundits who get exercised about Michael Moore apply lower standards to the spin coming out of the Bush administration. As I said in comments at the time, that comparative judgement is compatible with thinking Farenheit 9/11 is a pretty bad movie. Elsewhere in Krugman’s piece he gives qualified approval to Moore as providing an essential public service and writes that this is despite the fact that Farenheit 9/11 is tendentious, promotes unproven conspiracy theories and that viewers may come away from the film “believing some things that probably aren’t true.” This has somewhat upset Norm , who compares Krugman’s defence of Moore to the line some took on behalf of Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, who published faked photographs of British solidiers mistreating Iraqi detainees.

As it happens, I don’t think the parallel is a particularly good one. Krugman writes that the movie has yet to be caught out in any “major factual errors” (though opinions will no doubt differ about which errors are “major”). Piers Morgan, by contrast, allowed faked evidence to be published in a major national newspaper. Be that as it may, the other Krugman point about consistency of standards remains.

Norm writes that he thinks it wrong, as he claims Krugman does not,

to promote untruths, unproven conspiracy theories, other tendentious stuff, in the service of partisan political judgements.

Fair enough. But why then is Norm so tolerant of such promotion when it appears in papers such as the Daily Telegraph? Back in December, Norm excerpted a piece claiming Mohammed Atta—Abu Nidal links and tying Atta to the Iraqi Intelligence Service. And today, Norm has a post about Syria , linking to various articles that are full of accusations of nefarious activity attributed variously to “Western and Arab officials”, “critics”, “investigators”, “senior Iraqi officials”, etc. I’m at one with Norm in his scepticism when Michael Moore explains US policy with reference to the Afghan oil pipeline and similar. But Moore is hardly the only person in the world promoting half-baked conspiracy theories, untruths, etc. in the interest of a political cause. The main such promoters — as we saw when the case for war with Iraq was being built — are unattributed “intelligence sources”, “government officials”, “senior figures” and their friends in the media.

When you recycle such stuff on a blog, as Norm has done, that recycling arguably amounts to just the kind of promotion of untruths (etc.) in pursuit of a political agenda, that Norm deplores in Moore and attacks Krugman for excusing and tolerating. Just linking to such material doesn’t necessarily imply endorsement, of course. And it may be that Norm is more critical of it than appears. If so, I wish he’d tell us.

UPDATE: See also Chris Young on this (hat tip CB.)

June 25, 2004

Root causes of terrorism

Posted by Henry

Do you agree with the proposition that people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope? Do you disagree? Discuss, with reference to recent developments in current affairs. (Hat tip to Chris).

Bush and Europe

Posted by Henry

George W. Bush gave an interview to Irish television’s Prime Time that’s worth watching (the interview starts about 15 minutes into the clip). It’s the first time that I’ve seen him subjected to a hostile (if not extraordinarily competent) interviewer, and he clearly didn’t like it - in particular, he got very tetchy whenever he was interrupted. In the course of the interview Bush claims that he had most of Europe’s backing for the war in Iraq.

Most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq: really what you’re talking about is France isn’t it. They didn’t agree with my decision. … Most European countries are very supportive and are participating in the reconstruction of Iraq.

This is misleading in a way in which John Kerry’s much-ballyhooed statement that many foreign leaders preferred him as a potential president to Bush is not. Kerry was undoubtedly correct, even if he wasn’t able to provide public evidence to back up his claim. Everybody knows that most Western European countries (perhaps even including Britain) would prefer a Kerry administration to another round of Bush. Bush, in contrast, does apparently have evidence to back him up - he could point to the various resolutions signed by Western and Eastern European countries on Iraq. However, these statements are for the most part, rhetoric. Most of the Eastern European countries that signed on were less interested in resolving problems in the Middle East than in avoiding punishment by the hegemon, and reaping the political and financial rewards of a friendly relationship with the US. Remarkably few of the so-called “coalition of the willing” were prepared to put their money where their mouth was, by committing substantial numbers of troops to Iraq.

If Bush sincerely believes that the difficult transatlantic relationship is all about France’s posturing, he’s in trouble. Even those governments which nominally signed on last time would have extreme difficulty in doing so again - their voters wouldn’t stand for it. Bush is electoral poison; Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern will not have been pleased at Bush’s expression of gratitude to him for his help on Iraq. It’s almost certainly a vote-loser. The conventional wisdom among foreign policy wonks is that European leaders will not get much more satisfaction from a Kerry administration than they would from a second round of Bush. I don’t think this is true. Bush has managed to create such distrust among the voting public in Europe that it’s going to be politically impossible for European leaders to sign onto any major new transatlantic foreign policy initiative. Given the important threats (such as proliferation of nuclear weapons) that require decisive multilateral action, this is a very dangerous development indeed.

June 09, 2004

Picking up the gauntlet

Posted by Daniel

I can never resist a challenge. So when Normblog passed on the folowing put-up-or-shut-up from John Keegan:

If those who show themselves so eager to denounce the American President and the British Prime Minister feel strongly enough on the issue, please will they explain their reasons for wishing that Saddam Hussein should still be in power in Baghdad.

I couldn’t resist putting up, even at the cost of perhaps repeating myself

(ahem)

I wish Saddam Hussein was still in power in Baghdad because if this were the case, then about 3,000 Iraqis would have been murdered by his regime and would be dead, the roughly 10,000 Iraqis we killed ourselves would still be alive, and we would most likely be well on our way to formulating a credible, sensible, properly resourced plan for getting rid of him and handling the aftermath.

In other words, this was not a “humanitarian intervention”, in the sense which Human Rights Watch uses the term, and it is entirely defensible to maintain principled opposition to the war without having to be painted as an apologist for mass graves. Norm has his own, somewhat more inclusive standard for what constitutes a humanitarian intervention, which I intend to write something about soon. But I simply don’t believe that this issue is anything like as cut and dried as the Keegan quote suggests; if one is using a standard which makes Saddamites of Human Rights Watch, then one is using a wrong standard.

Eve Garrard responds

Posted by Chris

Eve Garrard has responded to my post suggesting that she had misunderstood some recent statements by Amnesty International. I should like to note, for the record, that my post didn’t amount to an endorsement of the claim that I took Amnesty to be making, namely, that the current attack on principles of human rights is the worst for the last fifty years. Nevertheless, I have some bones to pick with Eve’s latest. The scope of the claim that Eve attributes to Amnesty varies somewhat through her piece. Sometimes Eve seems to be suggesting that Amnesty is restricting blame to America or to the liberal democracies. There may indeed by statements by Amnesty officials with this character, but the most relevant report does refer explicitly to “governments around the world” and explicitly mentions a number of countries not best described as “liberal democracies” (Russia, China, Yemen, to name but three). Additionally, Eve singles out the Patriot Act as being at the centre of any charge that human rights principles are being undermined. No doubt it forms part of any such case, but I’d have thought that such matters as the legal limbo of Guantanamo, the export of a detainee for torture by Syria, and the recent legal advice on the admissibility of torture and the (non) applicability of the Geneva conventions, make up a significant part of the picture. Finally — and I’m picking nits now — Eve writes that “the idea that the force of an argument should be materially altered by an (allegedly) misplaced comma is … delightful and charming.” It may be, but my complaint focused not on the force of the argument but on its meaning , and it is pretty commonplace that commas can and do alter the meaning of sentences: Eats, Shoots & Leaves .

June 08, 2004

Bremer's last trick

Posted by John Quiggin
Juan Cole is spot-on, as usual

The Guardian reports that US civil administrator Paul Bremer signed an order Monday banning Muqtada al-Sadr and his lieutenants from running for elective office for 3 years because of their membership in an illegal militia. Muqtada and his lieutenants rejected this decree and said that the CPA and the caretaker government had no right to make such decisions.

Bremer’s action in excluding the Sadrists from parliament is one final piece of stupidity to cap all the other moronic things he has done in Iraq. The whole beauty of parliamentary governance is that it can hope to draw off the energies of groups like the Sadrists. Look at how parliamentary bargaining moderated the Shiite AMAL party in Lebanon, which had a phase as a terrorist group in the 1980s but gradually outgrew it. AMAL is now a pillar of the Lebanese establishment and a big supporter of a separation of religion and state. The only hope for dealing with the Sadrists nonviolently was to entice them into civil politics, as well. Now that they have been excluded from the political process and made outlaws in the near to medium term, we may expect them to act like outlaws and to be spoilers in the new Iraq. (emphasis added)
I can only agree

Risk and Reagan

Posted by John Quiggin

Since the obituaries and eulogies for Ronald Reagan have now been read, I think it’s reasonable to take a critical look at his historical contribution. It’s often argued that Reagan accelerated the end of the Cold War by raising US military expenditure, thereby forcing the Soviet Union to increase its own military expenditure and crippling its economy. I think this argument has some plausibility in relation to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, though not in relation to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe1.

So granting that this analysis is correct, should Reagan be praised? For the argument to work, the buildup must have raised the probability of nuclear war, unless you suppose (improbably) that the Russians were absolutely convinced of the peaceful intentions of the West and responded to Reagan purely to build up their own offensive capability2. Let’s suppose that the annual risk of war was raised by one percentage point. Then over the eight years Reagan was in office, there was a cumulative 8 per cent chance of a war that would certainly have produced tens of millions of deaths, probably billions and possibly the extinction of the human race. Against this, the early collapse of the Soviet Union produced benefits (mixed, but still positive on balance) for people in the Soviet Union, and perhaps also a reduction in the likelihood of an accidental nuclear war in the period since 1990. These benefits are small in relation to the potential cost.

As I’ve argued previously, if you think that a good policy is one which, in expectation, has good consequences, Reagan’s policy fails this test. On the other hand, standard accounts of consequentialism say that a good policy is one that has good actual consequences. If you accept this, and the assessment of the facts given above, Reagan’s historical record looks pretty good.

1 It had been obvious for many years that these governments were sustained only by the threat of Soviet military intervention. Gorbachev still had the military capacity to intervene in 1989 (in fact, on the argument presented above, the Russians had a bigger military than they would have had if Reagan had not been elected), but he chose not to do so. As soon as this became evident, the Communist bloc governments collapsed.

2 As an aside, in debate at the time, it was widely asserted that the Soviet government was actively planning an attack on the West, to be undertaken if Western defences could be weakened sufficiently. Has the collapse of Communism produced any archival or similar evidence on this? I would have thought that the Warsaw Pact countries would have had to have had a fair degree of involvement, and, since they are now in NATO, there would be no reason to keep any secrets.

June 06, 2004

A question on the cost of nuclear power

Posted by John Quiggin

If you take the problem of climate change at all seriously, it’s obviously necessary to consider what, if any, role nuclear (fission) energy should play in a response. I discussed this on my blog not long ago and concluded that “it may well be that, at least for an interim period, expansion of nuclear fission is the best way to go.” However, on the basis of my rather limited survey of the evidence, I suggested that, as a source of electricity, nuclear energy is about twice as expensive as coal or gas. If so, conservation is the first choice, and we should only move to alternative sources of electricity when the easy conservation options are exhausted.

By contrast, Mark Kleiman says that “Nukes, if run right, are fully competitive with coal, and a hell of a lot cleaner”, Brad DeLong says “He’s 100% completely correct”, and Matt Yglesias takes a similar view.

Kleiman cites the example of France, which I don’t find entirely convincing, since the French have always given substantial subsidies to nuclear energy. He argues that the US made a mess of nuclear energy for regulatory reasons, but doesn’t say anything about the British experience, which didn’t have the same problems and was still an economic disaster. I’ve looked briefly at Canada’s CANDU program, where experience appears to be mixed at best.

Can anyone point me to a reliable source of comparative information on this? Is there general agreement, or a partisan divide between pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear advocates ? I’d also be interested in comments on the general question raised in my opening sentence.

June 04, 2004

Copenhagen Interpretation

Posted by John Quiggin

How would you rank the following priorities for making the planet a better place?

  • A major improvement in health in poor countries, saving millions of lives each year
  • Substantial progress in reducing the rate of climate change, preventing large-scale species extinctions and other environmental damage
  • New and improved advertisements for consumer goods

You don’t have to be Bjorn Lomborg to agree that, given the choice, improvements in health should get top priority. And you don’t have to be Vance Packard to think that the benefits of advertising, if they are positive at all, are trivial in relation to the first two choices.

In fact, however, countries in the developed world currently allocate about 1 per cent of its income to the advertising industry (this excludes the cost of the TV programs and so on financed out of advertising revenue), far more than to either development aid or climate change. The US, for example, spends about 0.1 per cent of GDP in development aid, and almost nothing on programs to mitigate climate change. If we were all prepared to watch the same old ads, instead of getting new ones every year, we would have enough money to finance either the proposals of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health or a climate change mitigation program substantially more ambitious than the Kyoto protocol.

The fact that we don’t raises a couple of issues. First, our priorities are seriously screwed. We should all be making more noise, more of the time, about the need to increase development aid, as well as personally giving more than we do to aid organisations. I don’t claim to be much better than anyone else in this respect, though I do try from time to time.

Second, comparisons of this kind are clearly tricky. Even if we all agree that too much is spent on advertising, there is no easy way, in a market or even mixed economy, of stopping firms spending money to promote their products, let alone of redirecting any savings to socially desirable ends. Similarly, and contrary to Lomborg’s implicit premise, there’s no easy way of making a trade-off in which we decide to do nothing about climate change and instead to spend the money on improving the health of the poor.

Third, given that high-priority needs are going unmet, it’s hard to reason properly about social costs and benefits. The Copenhagen Consensus exercise illustrates this. It’s quite reasonable to say that, given the choice, clean drinking water for the world’s poor should rank ahead of mitigating climate change. But is this the appropriate comparison? If Kyoto goes ahead, it won’t be financed out of aid budgets. In fact, to the extent that emissions trading is involved, poor countries will actually benefit. So the appropriate comparison is between mitigating climate change and maintaining higher levels of consumption (including the advertising that is part of that consumption) in the rich countries.

Assessing the cost-benefit issues here isn’t easy, and I doubt that the members of the Copenhagen panel have managed, in the course of five days looking at a whole range of issues, to come up with better answers than those that have been found so far. There’s no easy way of putting a monetary value on species extinctions, the loss of coral reefs and so on, and there are also tricky conceptual issues about discounting. I can only say that I would happily accept an income cut of 1 per cent if even half of the damage projected by the IPCC could be avoided (some warming is, of course, inevitable).

It would, of course, be reasonable for Lomborg, and others who’ve participated in the Copenhagen Consensus exercise to say that climate change is a second-order issue and that it is far more important to devote attention to AIDS and other health issues. Lomborg could start at home if he wanted to. Denmark has been one of the few countries in the world that gives 1 per cent of its income in development aid. But the same government that appointed Lomborg to run its Environmental Assessment Institute has also cut foreign aid repeatedly. Lomborg is a figure with a world profile who could certainly bring some pressure to bear to have this decision reversed. If I does so, I’ll be the first to cheer him on.

June 03, 2004

Copenhagen Consensus

Posted by John Quiggin
The results of the Copenhagen Consensus are out, and as predicted, that is, with climate change at the bottom of the list. I’ll give a more detailed response later on, but I thought I’d respond to this point in the Economist
The bottom of the list, however, aroused more in the way of hostile comment. Rated “bad”, meaning that costs were thought to exceed benefits, were all three of the schemes put before the panel for mitigating climate change, including the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions. (The panel rated only one other policy bad: guest-worker programmes to promote immigration, which were frowned upon because they make it harder for migrants to assimilate.) This gave rise to suspicion in some quarters that the whole exercise had been rigged. Mr Lomborg is well-known, and widely reviled, for his opposition to Kyoto. These suspicions are in fact unfounded, as your correspondent (who sat in on the otherwise private discussions) can confirm. A less biddable group would be difficult to imagine.
On the contrary, as I suggested at the outset, a panel that included, say, Joe Stiglitz and Amartya Sen would have been considerably less biddable1, as well as being better qualified to look at the issues in question.

The panel did avoid some of the criticisms made here and elsewhere by excluding from the ranking issues like financial stability, civil conflicts and (with one trivial exception) governance. They compensated by subdividing the three health-related issues (diseases, malnutrition and sanitation) in the list into ten. (The other items ranked were trade liberalisation which, not surprisingly, they all liked, and migration which got mixed grades).

But the result, in a sense, only makes the process more transparent. The great majority of the approved items are now health initiatives. So, the outcome may be summarised as saying that health care in developing countries is more important than addressing climate change, which is, of course, the strongly stated view of the organiser, (The panel also agreed with Lomborg that the costs of doing anything about climate change exceed the benefits.) I’ll respond to the substantive findings in a later post, and when I’ve had time to look at any publication arising from the process.

However, the exercise could still be worthwhile. If Lomborg and the other panel members take the results to mean that they should personally campaign for action on the high-priority issues they mention, they could certainly do a lot of good. I’ll wait with interest to see if this happens.

1 To be boringly clear, I’m not suggesting that the panel was “biddable” in the sense of taking orders from Lomborg. Rather they were selected to be a likeminded group which would come up with the desired consensus.

Re-form

Posted by John Quiggin

Robert Samelson argues that we should stop using the word ‘reform’. I’ve grappled with this question for a long term, having been generally critical of the neoliberal policies generally referred to as “microeconomic reform”. I’ve tried all sorts of devices, such as the use of scare quotes and phrases like “so-called reform”, before concluding that the best thing is just to use the word in ways that make it obvious that I am not attaching positive connotations to it.

Over the fold is an old post on the subject, from my blog (I needed to repost to fix broken links).

As Raymond Williams points out in his excellent little book Keywords, from which I got the idea for this series, reform originally meant ‘restore the original form’ of something. In particular the Reformation was supposed to sweep away the abuses of the Papacy and restore the church to its original purity. As this example indicates, the worldview associated with this usage was one of decline rather than progress. The best one could hope for was to get back to things as they were in the good old days. This view was dominant in Western thinking from Plato to the 17th century.

From the 18th century onwards, reform underwent something of a reversal, since it now typically implied forming something new. But since the associated worldview was now one of progress, the assumption remained that reform entailed change for the better.

From the 18th century to the 1970s, the term reform was typically used to describe policies favored by the moderate left, in opposition to advocates of revolutionary change on one side and of conservatism and reaction on the other. From the 1970s to the end of the 20th century, though, the direction of policy change was reversed, with the rise of neoliberalism. However, the term reform continued to be used, even when the policies it described consisted of the dismantling of earlier reforms.

As a result, critics of neoliberal policies have frequently resorted to the use of “scare quotes”, as in my recent reference to ‘workplace reform’, or to similar alerts like “so-called”. While the automatic assumption prevails that the term reform applies only to desirable changes, such devices are necessary.

Where it’s feasible though, the best approach is to define reform as “any program of systematic change in policies or institutions” and make it clear that there is no implication of approval or disapproval.

May 31, 2004

Paradoxes and infinity

Posted by John Quiggin
Following up my three-way classification of paradoxes,1 I want to argue that paradoxes involving infinity are always of type-3, that is, the result of ill-posed problems or inappropriate ways of taking limits. (Much the same position is defended in the comments thread by Bill Carone). In fact, I’d argue for the following general principle, applicable to all models relevant to human decisionmakers.
Whenever a result, true for all finite n, is strictly2 reversed for the infinite case, the problem in question has been posed incorrectly

To defend this, I rely on the premise that we are finite creatures in a finite universe. If a mathematical representation of a decision problem involves an infinite set, such as the integers or the real line, it is only because this is more convenient than employing finite, but very large bounds, such as those derived from the number of particles in the universe. Any property that depends inherently on infinite sets and limits, such as the continuity of a function, can never be verified or falsified by empirical data. Since we are finite, any result that is true for all finite n is true for us.

It’s not surprising then that paradoxes frequently introduce beings who can be assumed infinite - God, angels, demons and so on. There is, of course, a long theological tradition of asking what God can and cannot do - for example, make a logically contradictory statement true. It certainly appears from the various paradoxes that, if God is capable of handing out infinite rewards and punishments (which is, I think, generally supposed by believers), it’s not valid to say that, if a given course of action is better than another in every possible case (for some partition of the possible cases), then it is definitely the best choice.

It’s hard to imagine decision theory without this premise, so it’s reasonable to conclude that good theists should not be good decisionmakers, and vice versa - a conclusion supported by consideration of Pascal’s wager. Similarly, to suggest that the Almighty can’t generate a probability distribution giving equal weight to every positive integer seems tantamount to denying Omnipotence altogether, but allowing for this possibility creates all sorts of problems and paradoxes, leading once again to the acceptance of strictly dominated choices.

This leads me on to this paper by Arntzenius, Elga, and Hawthorne, pointed out by Brian. As in the Peter Wakker piece I cited earlier, Arntzenius, Elga, and Hawthorne observe the crucial role of (the absence of) countable additivity in generating a number of paradoxes. But rather than adopting a type-3 solution like Wakker’s (in such circumstances always use a sigma-algebra and not just an algebra), Arntzenius, Elga, and Hawthorne seem to want to derive a type-1 solution, in which this result is supposed to have practical implications, such as that “when infinitely many decisions are involved, the difference between making the decisions simultaneously and making them sequentially can be the difference between riches and ruin”. Except in relation to dealings with supernatural beings, I think this conclusion is profoundly mistaken.

1 Insert obligatory joke about the world being divided into three sorts of people

2 To clarify the relevance of “strictly”, consider a sequence xn approaching y from below. It’s true for all finite n, but not in the limit, that xn is less than y. A strict reversal would arise if in the case where for infinite n, we had x strictly greater than y.

May 30, 2004

What would de Tocqueville think ?

Posted by John Quiggin

Tim Lambert has more details on yet another Astroturf operation, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, recently in the news for attacking open source software and also a shill for the tobacco industry.

A point of interest for me is that I don’t think you really need detailed evidence in cases like this (though of course, its handy to have the kind of chapter and verse Tim provides). Unless it’s devoted to the life and works of de Tocqueville, an outfit with a name like the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is bound to be bogus.

Australia has a string of such setups, all run by Ray Evans of the Western Mining Corporation. The most egregious is the Lavoisier Group, an organisation for climate change contrarians (about as plausible as creationists calling themselves the Mendel society) . If you move along to the (anti-Aboriginal rights) Bennelong Society you’ll find an almost identical website with the same postal address, shared with the (anti-union) HR Nicholls Society . The (monarchist) Samuel Griffiths society is from the same production line, though not quite as brazenly so.

So what is it about names like these that screams “Astroturf”? Most named institutes are either named in honour of the founder, or are explicitly partisan institutions whose name indicates their affiliation, as with the Evatt (Labor) and Menzies (Liberal) foundations. It’s not clear that those named would always agree with what is published in their names, but there’s some reasonable basis for presuming that this might be the case.

By contrast, to choose a long-dead person with whom almost everyone has positive associations, then to put forward controversial positions in the name of that person is to be dishonest from the outset.

May 28, 2004

Peace with Sadr

Posted by John Quiggin

Now that the inevitable peace deal between the American forces and Sadr’s Mahdi army appears to have been reached, amounting to restoration of the status quo ante , can anybody provide a coherent rationale for Bremer’s decision to drive Sadr into revolt in the first place, by closing his newspaper and arresting his supporters? The assault on Fallujah was bound to be a disaster, but it’s not surprising that the Americans felt impelled to take some drastic action in response to the killing and mutilation of US contractors there. But the attack on Sadr seemed gratuitiously stupid, even more so than the disbanding of the army and the banning of the Baath party.

Tacitus, still taking the view that “failure is not an option in Iraq”, is naturally furious about the deal . But any realistic analysis of the planned election must recognise that Sadr has enough support to make him a powerful force. He may not be a particularly attractive character, but he’s no worse than dozens of other world leaders with whom we deal for want of any better alternative. The notion that a military option with a June 30 deadline could take him and his movement out of the picture was never more than a delusion.

Whether you think, like Tacitus, that the attack on Sadr should been pushed through to its bloody conclusion, or like me that it should never have started, this is another appalling stuffup on Bremer’s part. Even at this late stage he ought to take responsibility and resign or, failing that, be sacked.

May 27, 2004

How Democracies Lose Small Wars

Posted by John Quiggin

Below the fold is a draft review of Gil Merom’s How Democracies Lose Small Wars. Comments and criticism much appreciated.

This is an interesting, important and problematic book. In important respects, Gil Merom undermines central claims of the “realist” theory of international relations, in which issues such as war and peace are treated as the outcomes of interactions between nation-states, conceived as self-interested individual actors operating in a Hobbesian state of nature. In other respects, he has failed to escape from the assumptions implicit in the realist framework.

The analysis begins with the standard realist idea of the state as embodiment of the nation and takes it as more-or-less self-evident that the state will seek to act in the manner assumed in realist theories, including the use of war as a normal instrument of national policy. Merom then introduces ‘society’ as a counterweight, assumed to be motivated by a mixture of idealist and utilitarian/rational concerns, which typically incline towards pacifism. For convenience, I’ll use the term ‘polity’ to describe the state and society, taken together.

The state is constrained by its instrumental dependence on society, which takes two main forms. The first is the need for society to produce the resources such as material wealth and soldiers that a state needs to pursue its ends. The second is the capacity of society to change its rulers, which casts doubt on the idea of the state as a primary and independent actor.

On the first point, prosecuting a war requires the state to call on social resources, and this is difficult if society is indifferent or actively hostile to the war effort. This has been a problem, to greater or lesser degrees, in all kinds of polities, and the resulting conflicts are a common cause of regime change. For example, it was the demand for “ship money”, a contribution levied to support naval defence, that set in train the events leading to the English Civil War and the downfall of Charles I.

In liberal democratic polities, instrumental dependence becomes more problematic for the state because the processes of democracy require open debate. The kind of coercion required to mobilise resources, the most important form of which is military conscription, is difficult to practice when a war is faced with strong opposition, even from a relatively small minority of the population.

Note though, that Merom does not focus closely on representative democracy as a check on the war-making capacity of states. Rather, the problem is that, in liberal democracies, it is difficult to achieve the suppression of dissent required if a war effort is to be maintained.

Before going on the Merom’s main point, it is worth noting that, although Merom does not explicitly define a “small war”, his analysis and examples imply both an upper and a lower bound for this category. A typical small war will consume between 0.5 and 3 per cent of GDP and will require a commitment of forces equal to a similar proportion of the population.

The reason for the upper bound is obvious enough. A war on a larger scale than this requires a major national war effort. In a democratic society, this will only happen in response to a direct threat to the survival of the society, and therefore the issues are different from those considered by Merom. (Arguably World War I provides a counterexample, since countries that were not directly threatened committed their full force to the war and since the war was maintained long after it should have been obvious that all sides would be better off with the status quo ante. But although it was not ‘The War to end all Wars’, the Great War permanently shifted public opinion in the democratic world to the point where a similar effort could never again be sustained.)

The lower bound follows from a point raised by Merom. Very small wars and “police operations”, such as the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 can be undertaken by the state using spare capacity in the professional armed forces, and funded without the need for any special authorisation. Moreover, these operations can generally be brought to a successful conclusion fairly rapidly, before opposition has time to develop and solidify. Thus, for very small wars there is little of the instrumental dependence central to Merom’s argument.

The key analytical point made by Merom can be developed in the light of this argument. The reason that states in democratic polities lose small wars is that the military resistance of the other side is sufficient to require either a commitment of resources larger than society is willing to sustain or the use of methods, such as torture and attacks on civilian targets, that society is unwilling to accept.

To establish this thesis, it’s necessary to show that, when society does not resist the demands of the state, victory in war generally goes to the stronger party. Merom presents a number of examples including the Athenian destruction of Melos, Cromwell’s war in Ireland, the Roman suppression of the Jewish revolt, German operations in SW Africa, Saddam’s crushing the Kurds and Shiites after the First GulfWar, China and Tibet, Indonesia and East Timor and the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Merom argues that, in all these cases, unscrupulous brutality proved successful.

Yet in nearly every case cited by Merom, a long-term view yields the opposite outcome. The Athenians lost the war and their hegemonic power, as of course did the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Ireland, East Timor and Israel are independent states, identifying in each case with the side described by Merom as the losers. Tibet is not yet independent, but it seems safe to predict that it will become so not long after the Communist Party loses power in China. And then, of course, there’s Saddam.

No doubt better examples could be found, but these examples illustrate the falsity of the claim that is fundamental to the realist theory of international relations, namely, that military power can be used effectively to promote national interests. Even when force appears to work in the short run, it often fails in the long run.

The classic refutation of international realism was put forward in Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion. Angell argued that in a globalised free-market economic system no economic benefit could be generated even by successful wars of conquest. Writing for a British audience, Angell’s basic point was that, even if Germany succeeded in establishing political mastery in Europe, workers in the newly subjected countries would still have to be paid, goods would have to be purchased at market prices and so on. Hence, individual Germans would gain nothing from being part of a larger country.

Angell’s argument works even better for social democracies, where territorial expansion or even extension of hegemony produces an unpalatable choice. If the benefits and obligations that go with citizenship welfare state are extended to those under the control of the expanded state, existing citizens will almost certainly be worse off. On the other hand, any attempt to maintain a distinction between citizens and noncitizens is bound to be highly problematic.

Angell’s argument showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that war and territorial expansion are not, in general sensible policies.. However, seeking to counteract the rising pressure for war, he argued that Germans would correctly perceive their own self-interest and would therefore not support an aggressive war. He was rapidly proved false on this point, by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Nevertheless, the War confirmed his view that attempts to gain economic advantage through military power had become obsolete. Both sides suffered catastrophic losses. The attempt by the victors to recoup some of their losses through the reparations imposed in the Treaty of Versailles proved both fruitless and economically disastrous. Angell was right about the futility of war, but wrong in predicting that it wouldn’t happen. Unfortunately, he is more remembered for being wrong than for being right.

If arguments like those of Angell are accepted, it can be seen that Merom’s thesis, and his title, need some adjustment. Rather than showing How Democracies Lose Small Wars his book could more appropriately be entitled How Democracies get out of Bad Wars.

This can be seen by looking at Merom’s two illustrative examples. The first is that of the French in Algeria. As the discussion shows, the French colonial position illustrates Angell’s arguments perfectly. In theory, Algeria was an inherent part of France, and this was certainly the view held by the million of so pieds-noirs, the French colonists who lived there. But if this claim were to be taken seriously, ten million Algerians would have had to be admitted to the full benefits of French citizenship, something that was simply not economically feasible.

As Merom observes, the limited group of businessmen and intellectuals who looked at colonial enterprise in economic terms drew the obvious conclusion that colonialism was, at best a “costly philanthropy”. Merom argues that this ‘utilitarian-rational’ position did not have much impact on French political debate, and in one sense this is probably true. On the other hand, if there had been substantial net economic benefits from colonialism, they would have made themselves felt one way or another.

The key issue that led to the collapse of the French war effort was the army’s routine reliance on torture to break the guerilla resistance of their opponents, the moujahadine of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), who were themselves guilty of routine, and arguably even worse, atrocities. Protests against the brutal prosecution of the war were met with domestic repression that soon came to be seen as a threat to democracy itself, a process that was mirrored in the US a decade or so later during the Vietnam war.

Once it became clear that the French were going to pull out regardless, the FLN was able to demand a more or less unconditional acquiescence in its demands. Almost certainly, a better deal, with much more protection for the interests of the pieds noirs could have been obtained if the French government had been willing to negotiate independence before going to war. More generally, the longer the war went on, and the greater the costs to France, the worse the ultimate conclusion was bound to be.

Hence, while the outcome of the Algerian war was certainly a defeat for the French state, leading as it did to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, it can scarcely be seen as a defeat for France, considered as a democratic polity. The only sensible policy was withdrawal and pressure from society ultimately forced the state to recognise this.

The other case Merom considers in detail is that of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1983, ordered by then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. Whereas Israel’s previous wars had all been defensive (Israel attacked first in 1956 and 1967, but in both cases there was a threat of imminent invasion, perceived as real by nearly all Israelis), the invasion of Lebanon was a strategic move aimed at depriving the PLO of its base and installing, by force, a friendly government that would suppress guerilla attacks on Israel. The first objective was achieved, at least in the short run, with the PLO being forced to flee to Tunis, though the organisation was probably strengthened in the long run. The second objective, never a realistic possibility, was rapidly rendered irrelevant by the assassination of the Israeli’s preferred leader, Bashir Gemayel.

Because of the nature of the war, Israeli society was unlikely to tolerate heavy casualties as it would have done in a defensive war. This led Sharon to rely on proxies, the Phalangist militias who were the armed representatives of the Maronite Christians. When these forces, encouraged by Sharon to raid Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila, committed brutal massacres, public opinion in Israel and around the world was outraged. The protests were not confined to activist groups such as Peace Now, but extended widely through Israeli society. The occupation was clearly doomed within weeks of the massacres, but it dragged on for another three years until the withdrawal to the South Lebanon buffer zone, which was not finally abandoned until 2000.

As with the French in Algeria, it is hard to see the withdrawal as a defeat for Israel as a democracy, though it was undoubtedly a defeat for the Israeli state. As Merom recognises, precisely the same analysis applies to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. As Merom says “the Palestinians are all but certain to lose military encounters with Israel, but are nevertheless likely to realize most of their political goals. Specifically, they will have an independent Palestinian state, most Jewish settlements in the territories will be dismantled, and the settlers will be repatriated. At the same time, Palestinian goals that concern Israel’s core sovereignty, particularly the demand for an Israeli recognition of the “right of return”, will not be realized.”

Merom’s analysis is obviously relevant to the current situation in Iraq, particularly as more gruesome evidence emerges from Saddam’s former prisons, now operated by the American occupiers. As in the other cases discussed above, the American public is unwilling to supply the resources that would be needed to establish effective control or to accept the casualty rates that would arise if, given current numbers, US troops attempted to operate like a police force, with direct contact with the Iraqi public, and rules of engagement that focused on minimising casualties among possibly-innocent Iraqi civilians.

The inevitable results are reliance on heavy weaponry with the associated civilian casualties, and the use of detention without trial, abusive interrogation sliding into torture, the taking of hostages and so on. The exposure of these methods inevitably eats away at domestic support for the war. Although it is still possible that the outcome in Iraq will be an improvement on what went before, the vision of a stable, democratic, pro-American Iraq has long since vanished.

Under the Bush Administration, the state has gone to immense lengths to insulate itself from social pressure. But the necessity of facing the electorate remains. It seems unlikely that, by November, American society will be convinced that this was a war worth winning.

May 26, 2004

The point of paradox

Posted by John Quiggin

Suppose you have encountered Zeno’s Achilles paradoxfor the first time. Zeno offers a rigorous (looking) proof that, having once given the tortoise a head start, Achilles can never overtake it. Would you regard this as1

  1. A startling new discovery in athletics;
  2. A demonstration of the transcendent capacity of the human spirit - although the laws of logic forbid it, Achilles does in fact catch and overtake the tortoise; or
  3. A warning about how not to take limits?

In this case, I assume nearly all readers will go for option 3. But things aren’t always so easy. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox was supposed to be a type-3 paradox demonstrating the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. But on most modern views, it is really a type-1 paradox, predicting various highly counter-intuitive consequences of quantum mechanics that nonetheless turn out to be be empirically valid.

Although I don’t accept that there are any good examples of type-2 paradoxes, plenty of others would offer this solution in relation to both Godel’s theorem and Schrodinger’s cat.

With these three possibilities in mind, how should we think about paradoxes involving probability measures over infinite sets that are finitely, but not countably additive? The two-envelopes problem we’ve been discussing here falls into this class and so, with a little bit of tweaking, do St Petersburg and related paradoxes. I’ll leave this question hanging and offer my own answer in a later post.

1 This is an expanded version of a point made by my friend and occasional co-author, Peter Wakker.

May 25, 2004

Kto kogo ?

Posted by John Quiggin

When you want the most succinct statement possible statement of the power politics view of the world, VI Lenin is your only man1. A lot of free-market advocates of revealed preference theory, and supporters of exit over voice, would be surprised to learn who they are quoting when they refer to people voting with their feet.

In relation to the proposed “handover” of power in Iraq on June 30, the only question that really matters is the one posed by Lenin “Kto kogo ?”, that is, “Who can do what to whom?”.

In particular, will the Iraqi government be able to issue orders to Casey (the new US military commander) or vice versa. The idea that there can be some sort of harmonious division of responsibilities in which this question does not arise is not worth taking seriously. Just consider the following cases, all arising within the past month, which would certainly have implied conflict between the US forces and any Iraqi government worthy of the name

  • The original assault on Fallujah and the subsequent decision to hand the city over to a Sunni militia
  • The decision to press charges against Sadr and the subsequent assaults in Najaf and elsewhere
  • The raid on the offices of Chalabi, an IGC member

If the “multinational force” has to seek permission from UN-installed Iraqi politicians every time it wants to do something like this, there’s bound to be a lot of angst among the US military. But there’s no alternative. A supposedly sovereign government that countenanced such actions without demanding direct operational control would be discredited in a matter of weeks rather than months.

It’s a positive sign that everyone, including Bush, has now effectively abandoned Clause 59 of the US-imposed interim constitution, which guaranteed the right of US forces to stay in Iraq more or less indefinitely. But I still can’t see the US accepting real Iraqi sovereignty, before or after elections, unless of course the US elections intervene.

1 As I argue here, it’s possible to get into a position when the power politics view is the only one that matters, and, when this happens, Lenin is the most reliable guide available. But the history of Russia shows that this is not the position you want to start from, wherever it is that you want to end up.

Update Blair has answered the question, in the way I had hoped. It remains to be seen if Bush and the Pentagon go along with this.

Intelligence?

Posted by John Quiggin

From an NYT story on "ghost" prisoners in Abu Ghraib

The memorandum criticizing the practice of keeping prisoners off the roster was signed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and a James Bond, who is identified as "SOS, Agent in Charge." Military and intelligence officials said that they did not know of a Mr. Bond who had been assigned to Abu Ghraib, and that it was possible that the name was an alias.

Some good news

Posted by John Quiggin

Abu Ghraib prison is to be demolished. Obviously, I welcome this news and hope that this symbolic measure will be accompanied by the substantive changes it should represent, including the abandonment of the policy of detention without trial.

May 21, 2004

More on Darfur

Posted by Chris

The Scotsman has a cluster of reports on Darfur, starting here , which also contains many links to other reports including the one from Human Rights Watch .

“The aim is to kill as many people as possible and drive the remainder from their lands, destroying the fabric of rural society,” reports the specialist journal Africa Confidential. “Proxy militias torch villages and exterminate villagers, slaughtering livestock and poisoning wells with corpses to prevent residents returning. Gang rape of women (often branded afterwards) and children reinforces the terror and helps to produce an ‘Arab’ next generation. Abduction is widespread in Darfur, with groups of women flown away by helicopter.”

The corrosiveness of war

Posted by Chris

Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia is facing a court martial for refusing to go back to Iraq. His case is described in Bob Herbert’s column in the NYT . His testimony about the morally corrosive circumstances in which soldiers find themselves in wars of this kind is eloquent. The situation is underdescribed, but it sounds as if his friend was legally justified in shooting the child he shot. That doesn’t seem to have made things any easier.

“Imagine being in the infantry in Ramadi, like we were,” he said, “where you get shot at every day and you get mortared where you live, [and attacked] with R.P.G.’s [rocket-propelled grenades], and people are dying and getting wounded and maimed every day. A lot of horrible things become acceptable.”

He spoke about a friend of his, a sniper, who he said had shot a child about 10 years old who was carrying an automatic weapon. “He realized it was a kid,” said Sergeant Mejia. “The kid tried to get up. He shot him again.”

The child died.

All you really want to do in such an environment, said Sergeant Mejia, is “get out of there alive.” So soldiers will do things under that kind of extreme stress that they wouldn’t do otherwise.

“You just sort of try to block out the fact that they’re human beings and see them as enemies,” he said. “You call them hajis, you know? You do all the things that make it easier to deal with killing them and mistreating them.”

When there is time later to reflect on what has happened, said Sergeant Mejia, “you come face to face with your emotions and your feelings and you try to tell yourself that you did it for a good reason. And if you don’t find it, if you don’t believe you did it for a good reason, then, you know, it becomes pretty tough to accept it — to willingly be a part of the war.”

May 20, 2004

Darfur

Posted by Chris

In today’s Financial Times William Shawcross and Emma Bonino have a worthwhile piece on the murders, rapes and village-burnings being committed in Darfur by the Sudanese government.

The sound of silence

Posted by Chris

I’ve just finished reading the Haaretz coverage of yesterday’s incident in Gaza , when the Israeli army fired tank shells into a demonstration. Nor is this an unprecedented event, as some of the commentary elsewhere in Haaretz recalling the Qana massacre reminds us. It is a common trope in the “blogosphere” to write of symptomatic silences, to accuse people of indifference or lack of balance for failing to mention some event or incident. I’ve read endless outrage in the blogosphere condemning the BBC or whoever for putting the work “terrorist” in inverted commas. Stupid comments by Jenny Tonge or whoever excusing suicide bombers generate thousands of words of commentary. (And lest there be any doubt, I have always and will always condemn actions such as suicide bombing which target civilians.) I’ve looked at a lot of blogs this morning — the usual suspects, the leftie warbloggers, the boy-wonder journalists, the distinguished lawyers, economists and political scientists, and so on. Of events in Rafa, not a mention.

[Update: not total silence. Jonathan Edelstein , as so often, is worth reading on this.]

May 19, 2004

Comparisons to Vietnam, ye gods

Posted by Daniel
I don’t really want to make this look like a Hitchens pile-on, but one cannot allow things like this to pass without comment. Via Roger Ailes, we have Christopher Hitchens making the following claim:
I think my quarrel with the media would be different from yours. I think what isn‘t conveyed enough is the sheer evil and ruthlessness and indeed brilliant organization of the enemy. The media cliche about the war is that it‘s like Vietnam. The Vietnamese were a very civilized foe and if they had had weapons of mass destruction, for example, wouldn‘t have used them and didn‘t target civilians, did use women as fighters and organizers, were not torturers and mass murderers and so forth.
Shall we say that this is quite radically at odds with most mainstream histories of Vietnam? Hitchens may here being confusing the North Vietnames Army and the Communist Party of Viet Nam with some other force which fought a purely heroic war of liberation in a gentlemanly manner and had no links to totalitarianism. Perhaps he was thinking of the Hobbits, or somebody. It makes you wonder why several hundred thousand boat people decided to take their chances on the open seas rather than live under such a “civilised” regime.

Meanwhile, if it’s comparisons with Vietnam you’re after, this historic document (Col. Robert Heinl’s Armed Forces Journal article on the collapse of morale) is pretty good on the long-term consequences of being stuck with no hope of exit in a war nobody really wants to fight. It is profoundly to be hoped that things won’t be allowed to get this bad again; it took years to rebuild the US Army as an organisation.

May 17, 2004

Responsibility

Posted by John Quiggin

It’s striking to observe that the Daily Mirror has more stringent standards of personal responsibility than the Blair government (or, for that matter, any government in the Coalition of the Willing).

To spell this out, Mirror Editor Piers Morgan was sacked after he published photos, purporting to show torture of Iraqis by British troops, that turned out to be fakes. There’s no suggestion, as far as I know, that Morgan was complicit in the fraud, but obviously his decision to accept them was influenced by his anti-war stand.

In other words, Morgan’s position is exactly the same as that of Blair and Hoon in relation to the various “dodgy dossiers”, of Powell and Bush in relation to Powell’s UN speech and of Howard and Downer in Australia. As far as I know, no-one in any country has resigned or been sacked over this, and no-one senior has resigned or been sacked over Abu Ghraib.

The earlier resignation of BBC Director General Greg Dyke reflects a standard of responsibility unimaginable for politicians nowadays, though entirely consistent with the alleged conventions of the Westminster system and “the buck stops here”. Dyke resigned because one of his employees had made a misjudgement, and he took responsibility.

May 15, 2004

Reinventing the wheel in social network theory

Posted by John Quiggin

I was thinking idly about Erdos numbers, and it suddenly struck me that I could easily prove the necessity of a couple of ‘stylised facts’1 about the associated networks. It’s well-known that the collaboration network for mathematicians contains one big component, traditionally derived by starting with Pal Erdos. The same is true of the network generated by sexual relationships. Although there is no generally agreed starting point here, it is a sobering thought that a relatively short chain would almost certainly connect most of us with both George Bush and Saddam Hussein.

Anyway, the thought struck me that, given a simple two-parameter model, I could prove (at least in a probabilistic sense) not only the existence of a large component but its uniqueness. One parameter would characterise the distribution of the number of connections made by each person, and the other would characterise the bias in favor of endogamy or exogamy. Provided, in an appropriate sense, that these parameters multiplied to a number greater than 1 for some large segment of the population, a network with a starting point in that segment would expand until it contained a substantial portion of the whole population.

It’s easy to see then, that there can’t be two large components (where large means, say, more than 100 members and more than 10 per cent of the relevant population), because the probability that at least one of the possible connections (more than 10 000, by assumption) will be made approaches 1.

I’m recording this not because I think it’s a new discovery, but to raise a general point about research strategy in theoretical problems. The recommended strategy in most fields is to acquaint yourself thoroughly with the literature, then work out what new contribution you might be able to make. My preferred strategy is to begin with only a cursory knowledge of the field in question, work out how I would answer a question of interest and only then consult the literature.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you spend a lot of time reinventing wheels, since most questions of interest have already been answered in one way or another. The advantages, though, are substantial. First, it’s easier to understand something you’ve worked out for yourself than something you’ve read by somebody else. Second, in most research topics, the literature bears the marks of its history. What this means is that the substantive theoretical insights are inextricably mixed with accidental effects. If Professor A, the author of the first big paper in the field, thought that axiom X was crucial and axiom Y was uncontroversial, it’s likely that axiom X will continue to get a lot of attention, whether or not its justified, and that anyone who questions axiom Y will be regarded as ill-informed. If you come to the problem afresh, you may see it differently (not necessarily a good thing if you want to publish lots of articles in journals edited by the students of Professor A, but if you already have tenure this isn’t such a problem).

1 This is economist jargon for things we think are true but for which we have no solid evidence

Anyway, I’d welcome anyone pointing me to where my results have been anticipated, as well as any thoughts on research strategy.

May 14, 2004

Zarqawi again

Posted by John Quiggin

The report that abu Musab al-Zarqawi personally committed the brutal murder of Nicholas Berg raises a number of thoughts for me. The murder and the knowledge of its videotape were bad enough (I’ve seen the still photos published in the papers, but have not looked for the video or for photos showing the actual murder). Giving the murderer a name seems to make things even worse, though it’s hard to say why this should be. There are, though, some important issues that need to be raised.

First, the claim that this crime was committed in retaliation for the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib is a hypocritical lie. Zarqawi is a long-standing terrorist who is happy to commit murder on any pretext or none. He’s the main suspect for the Karbala atrocity in March, and even if this isn’t proven, he’s certainly committed many other crimes. Although Zarqawi wasn’t personally responsible, the al Qaeda murder of Daniel Pearl in 2002 was almost identical to this case, and had no particular “justification” beyond the fact that Pearl, like Berg, was a Jew1. More generally, claims of this kind are usually a pretext for, or retrospective justification of, crimes that would have been committed anyway. Those who’ve used Zarqawi’s crimes as a justification for torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere are little better than he is in this respect.

Second, and despite the first point, Zarqawi’s claim will come to be accepted as the truth unless the West as a whole makes a decisive break in the downward spiral we are now watching. This means taking real responsibility for the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Rumsfeld is not the only one who should lose his job over this. Lt General Ricardo Sanchez was personally responsible for authorising the use of dogs in interrogation sessions, something that could not possibly be construed as anything other than torture or the threat of it. And of course the Abu Ghraib prison itself should be evacuated and demolished. Sadly, I can’t see any of this happening. We will all pay dearly for this disaster in the future.

Third, this crime only heightens the need for an inquiry into the scandalous decision to leave Zarqawi’s terrorist outfit in peace, even though they were operating on US-controlled territory for two years before the Iraq war. Zarqawi could have been caught or killed at a tiny fraction of the economic, military and political/diplomatic cost of the decision to go after Saddam, but Bush chose not to do it. We should be told why. More on this point here

1 I shouldn’t have to point out that this “justification” only makes the crime worse, but I will point it out anyway.

May 13, 2004

India speaks

Posted by Chris

Amid all the bad news, we should celebrate the fact that in the world’s largest democracy the forces of secularism have triumphed and those of communalism have been defeated. Congress is far from perfect, but it is a great deal better than the alternative. Sonia Gandhi may well become the world’s best Italian prime minister as a result (not that the competition in that field is all that stiff).

May 12, 2004

Meanwhile, in the Hague ...

Posted by Daniel

Given the current revelations from Abu Ghraib, it is worth remembering that a major reason for the USA’s attempts to undermine the International Criminal Court was that making American troops accountable would impede them in the War on Terror. I personally don’t have much time for the Hague tribunal; I think that the US opposition to it on grounds of national sovereignty were valid and I don’t like unaccountable international institutions. But hell … isn’t it just a bit ironic that the US Army managed to achieve what nobody thought was possible (a successful war with minimal civilian casualties) and then fouled up on the kind of “war crimes” that nobody ever so much as imagined that the US Army would commit?

The ticking bomb problem

Posted by John Quiggin
In response to the exposure of widespread torture prisoners in Iraq (on all sides) and elsewhere, it’s inevitable that the “ticking bomb” problem should be raised.
‘You hold a terrorist who knows the location of a defusable bomb which, if exploded, will kill x million people. Do you have the right to torture him/her to find the bomb?’
Various answers to this question have been offered, none of which seem entirely satisfactory.

Instead of offering an answer to this question, I’m going to look at a question that follows immediately, but doesn’t seem to have been asked. Suppose that someone has used torture to extract information from a prisoner in the belief (factually correct or not and morally sustainable or not) that doing so was justified by a “ticking bomb” situation. What should they do next?

My answer is that the torturer should immediately turn themselves in, and plead guilty to the relevant criminal charges. I think this answer can be defended from a wide variety of perspectives, but the intuition is simple. If the situation is grave enough to warrant resort to torture, it’s certainly grave enough to oblige someone to take actions that will result in losing their job and going to jail.

In consequentialist terms, it’s desirable in general that laws against torture should be obeyed. Since few people will want to follow such an example except in similarly extreme circumstances, immediate confession will undermine the law less than committing torture and getting away with it1. Other theories will, I think, give the same answer.

Turning from individual ethics to law and public policy what this means is that laws against torture should be enforced in all cases. A plea in mitigation might be considered in cases like the one described above - a proven urgent and immediate danger, followed by a voluntary confession - but even so, the torturer should be removed from their job and spend some time in prison. In any case where a confession is not made, no claims about mitigating circumstances should be admitted.

The frequency with which incidents of torture are isolated responses to extreme emergencies, followed by an immediate confession, is vanishingly small. So if you accept the answer I’ve given to the question posed above, the ticking bomb problem has no practical relevance.

Whether or not torture can be justified as a matter of individual morality in some extreme cases, it should be punished in all cases, and severely punished in nearly all cases, as a matter of public policy.

1 The hypothesis that one can get away with torture without anyone else knowing about it can be dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration. For a start, the suspect who has been tortured will know, unless they are silenced.

May 11, 2004

Interesting?

Posted by John Quiggin

I’ve been meaning for a long time to collect my thoughts about US interest rates, and where they are and should be going. As is often the case, I’m largely in agreement with Paul Krugman, at least as far as long-term rates are concerned. On the other hand, I’m a bit more hawkish in relation to short-term rates than Brad DeLong, with whom I agree on a lot of things.

I’m planning on reworking this piece as I have new thoughts, and in response to comments. so please treat it as a work in progress.

Warning: long and boring (but maybe scary) post over the fold.

Interest rates

Much of the discussion has the same confused character as debates about the desirability of budget deficits. The essential problems are similar. In the short run, both interest rates and budget deficits can be controlled by governments (central banks count as part of government for this purpose). Other things being equal, low interest rates and budget deficits tend to stimulate economic activity, and are therefore appropriate when the economy is in recession1.

In the long run, however, government budgets must balance2. Similarly, interest rates must be determined by the intertemporal consumption plans of consumers and the available opportunities for investment. The problem is that the long run can be a very long time coming and no-one knows when it begins. Even the 10-year bond rate is clearly affected by judgements about the policy stance of the central bank.

The link between short-term rates and long-term rates can be seen by considering arbitrage or, as it’s sometimes called, the ‘carry trade’. If a central bank is committed to keeping short-term rates at, say 1 per cent, but market forces dictate a long-term rate of 5 per cent, speculators can make as much money as they want by borrowing short and lending long.

Another way to look at is to note ten years is just (about) 40 terms of 90 days. So, on average, the annualised rate of interest on 90-day loans has to be about the same as the 10-year bond rate, sometimes higher and sometimes lower. Because of transactions costs and risk premiums, arbitrage isn’t costless, so there isn’t an exact equality. In general, short term rates are a bit lower than long-term rates, but a large gap can’t be sustained indefinitely.

The interest rate problem is therefore really two problems. First, what is a reasonable value for the rate of interest in the long run. Second, given that the short-term rate is currently below the long-term rate, how soon should it be increased.

The first question itself is in two parts. The face-value or nominal interest rate is in part a compensation for future inflation, and in part a real interest rate, reflecting the existence of profitable investment opportunities, and the impatience of consumers. The real interest rate has generally been somewhere between 2 and 4 per cent. Given that savings rates are exceptionally low at present in the US and elsewhere (denoting high levels of impatience) the rate ought to be at the high end of the range, especially if you believe that technological progress has opened up lots of investment opportunities.

As regards inflation, the combination of low short-term rates and exploding budget deficits is bound to produce an acceleration if it persists long enough. Given that there’s a significant chance of a rapid acceleration, and that the bogey of deflation has now largely disappeared, it seems reasonable to pick an average rate of around 3 per cent.

Combining the two suggests that the long-term nominal rate of interest for the US ought to be between 6 and 7 per cent. The ten-year bond rate currently just below 5 per cent and has been below 4 per cent until quite recently, reflecting the influence of very low short-term rates. But the same reasoning implies that, at some point, the ten-year bond rate is likely to overshoot the equilibrium range.

Coming to the short-term rate, there is a trade-off between the need for stimulus now and the inevitable price of higher rates in the future. There’s been a big dispute between those, like The Economist who want to put rates up immediately and those like Brad de Long who want to keep them low while employment remains depressed (one reason may be disagreement about how far the economy is from its ‘natural’ equilibrium).

What would be the consequences of an increase in short-term and long-term interest rates. Higher short-term rates would depress consumption, particularly things like purchases of new cars. This could be problematic for Ford and GM, which are essentially finance companies with a manufacturing arm these days.

But the real puzzle relates to long-term rates and mortgages. Most US homeowners are in the enviable position of having fixed-rate loans which they are free to refinance if they wish. This is an amazingly generous one-way bet, but it’s not clear who is on the other side of it. The securitization and hedging of mortgages has become so complex that no-one knows who really holds them. Some mortgages are even more favorable than this, being assumable (that is, they can be passed on to a new buyer).

If interest rates rose a lot, refinancing would stop pretty quickly, though there may be a last-minute flurry as people try to lock in rates in anticipation of an increase. Moreover, homeowners with non-assumable mortgages would be forced to stay put, since moving would entail taking on a new mortgage at a much higher rate. The big problems, though, would be on the other side of the market, where the mortgagees would have assets that, on standard analysis might have halved in value. I discuss this a bit more here.

There are a lot of other scary possibilities relating to derivatives markets. These haven’t been seriously tested since the big expansion of the 1990s. Most people seem to think everything will be OK, but no one can be sure.

1 Some economists (for example, supporters of the new classical model) dispute this, but I don’t intend to debate this point here.

2 Under standard accounting conventions, governments can run deficits forever, but in economic terms, either the budget must balance, or public debt will follow an explosive path leading inevitably to repudiation. Roughly speaking, the appropriate economic definition of a balanced budget is one consistent with a stable ratio of public debt (net of income-earning assets) to national income.

May 10, 2004

Time to repeal Godwin's Law ?

Posted by John Quiggin
What kind of America-hating lefty would seize on an isolated incident like this?
Three weeks ago in Highland Park, Texas, Mrs Dolly Kelton was arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay a traffic ticket after her car was stopped for having an expired registration. I doubt that Mrs Kelton was a threat to the safety of the arresting officer. She is 97 years old.
then follow up with this ?
We handcuff her… because some Western societies, and America in particular, use these procedures as a way of softening up the accused by humiliation and to underline the power of the authorities.
What kind of slippery-slope argument do you think is going to follow?

The answer is not what (I hope) you thought.

The quotes are from Barbara Amiel in the Telegraph and the lesson she draws that since it’s acceptable to terrify and humiliate old ladies accused of minor traffic offences1, it must be even more acceptable to inflict any kind of torture on Iraqis accused of being “murderous guerillas”, (or perhaps of knowing, or being related to, or being inhabitants of the same country as, such guerillas).

Faced with this kind of viewpoint being put forward in a major newspaper, it’s hard to see how Godwin’s Law can stay in place for long. Certainly I can’t think of any analysis of Amiel’s argument that would not lead rapidly to a violation.

1 Note the implicit assumption that, if it’s done by American law authorities, it must be acceptable.

May 09, 2004

The social desirability of social democracy

Posted by John Quiggin

Recent opinion polls in Australia have shown overwhelming majorities in favour of devoting any additional resources to improvements in public services, particularly health and education, rather than to tax cuts. Discussing these results, Andrew Norton notes that some people may be “giving the socially acceptable answer, rather than what they really want” (see also here)1. I think he’s probably right, and I certainly hope so.

The reason I think Norton is probably right is that the majorities are so overwhelming (75-22 in this Nielsen poll and even more in others) that a fair number of people in the majority (people on above-average incomes with below-average needs for services) would almost certainly be worse off in a narrow personal sense. While some of these may be consistently altruistic, others may want to appear altruistic in a poll but might actually prefer the cash. Taking account of these responses would produce a less lopsided majority for services, but still a majority, as is shown by Labor’s electoral dominance at the state level.

The reason I hope he’s right is that it means that social democracy has won the public debate, at least for the moment. After all, if everyone believed that tax cuts would benefit, not merely a subset of high-income earners but the entire community, then the socially acceptable answer would be to support tax cuts. That certainly seemed to be the way things worked during the tax revolt of the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, opposing tax cuts was socially unacceptable. Well into the 1990s, anyone who advocate higher taxes was treated as a heretic (I should know!). Obviously, this has changed, though the political parties have been slower to catch up than the commentariat.

1 There are some other issues to do with “status quo bias”. People are more willing to express preferences for change in relation to the allocation of “extra” money than to support a change in the status quo, such as an increase in taxes to fund new services, or a reduction in services to fund tax cuts. But in the terminology of Kahneman and Tversky, this is essentially a quesiton of “framing”.

May 07, 2004

Are high oil prices here to stay ?

Posted by John Quiggin

Paul Krugman has a piece on oil. This is as good a time as any to put up a long post I’ve been working on about oil and whether it’s finally going to run short, points on which I broadly agree with Krugman.

Will the oil run out ?

Oil is the paradigm example of an exhaustible resource (there’s a charming, but apparently false, belief that oil comes from decayed dinosaurs) Whenever the price of oil rises sharply then, it is natural to ask whether this is a mere market fluctuation or an indication of the impending exhaustion of the resource.

A couple of points of clarification are necessary before we come on to the main issues. First, the price of oil is typically quoted in $US/barrel, for some specific grade of oil such as West Texas light sweet crude. This need not be an accurate indicator of the cost of oil in general, because of variations in the purchasing power of the US dollar and because the relative prices of different types of oil fluctuate. The current upsurge in prices is due in part to the devaluation of the dollar against other major currencies and also in part to a particular shortage of the light grades of oil most suitable for producing petrol.

Second, oil will never simply ‘run out’. As the supply of any commodity declines, prices increase and, for relatively low-value uses, the costs exceed the benefits. Where they are available, low-cost substitutes become more attractive. Before the 1973 increase in prices, oil was commonly used as fuel in electricity generation and home heating. Following the increase in prices, most oil-fired power stations were converted to gas or coal. Where natural gas was readily available, the same was true of home heating. The relevant question then, is not whether oil will run out, but whether it will become so scarce as to be uneconomic in its main uses, the most important of which is as fuel for motor vehicles.

Jevons and Hubbert

Critics of predictions of resource exhaustion have plenty of history on their side. In the 19th century, the eminent economist W.S. Jevons predicted the imminent exhaustion of reserves of coal. He was wrong, as were a series of subsequent prophets of resource exhaustion, most notably Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the 1970s. Time after time, scarcity has been met by new discoveries and by improvements in resource technologies that have made it economic to extract resources from sources that were once considered valueless. In the case of oil, the estimate of ‘proven’ reserves in 1973 was 577 billion barrels. The Club of Rome pointed out that given projections of growing use, reserves would be exhausted by the 1990s. The economic slowdown from the 1970s onwards meant that the actual rate of growth was slower. Nevertheless, between 1973 and 1996, total usage was around 500 billion barrels. Yet at the end of the period, estimated reserves had actually grown to over 1000 billion barrels.

This is a pattern that has been repeated for many other commodities, and should give pause to any advocate of the exhaustion hypothesis. Nearly all the additional reserves came from upward revisions of estimates of reserves in existing fields. (This is seen by optimists as reflecting technological gains, allowing more secondary extraction, and by pessimists as reflecting a shift from conservatism to (excessive?) optimism in estimation procedures).

Believers in the exhaustion of oil reserves have some history on their side too. Their key exhibit is the Hubbert curve which is supposed to show that oil output from a field should peak about 25 years after discovery. If you buy this story, oil output should have passed its peak a year to two ago. The big success for the Hubbert curve was Hubbert’s 1956 prediction of the peak in US oil output around 1970.

The current period of high prices and short supply gives some support to advocates of the Hubbert Curve. The really striking events however, have been those relating to reserves. For the first time, downward revisions to estimated reserves have become commonplace. The Shell company has been the most notably affected so far, being forced to announce a series of downward revisions in estimated reserves, apparently because of problems with Nigerian fields. But there have also been suggestions of similar problems many other oil-producing countries, either because reserves have been overstated for political reasons, or because fields have been mismanaged.

Of course, some fields are still expanding. For example, new leases are being issued for deep water prospects in the Gulf of Mexico. But the very fact that such marginal prospects are being explored is an indicator that oil companies expect high prices to persist.

On balance, I think that current high prices are likely to persist and to rise over time.

What does it matter?

Oil looms large in many geopolitical discussions. While claims that the Iraq war was ‘all about oil’ are unduly conspiratorial, it seems clear that, if it were not for the presence of oil, the Middle East would not be a central focus of US foreign policy. The 1973 OPEC ‘oil shock’ (an embargo imposed in protest against US support for Israel, followed by a quadrupling of prices) was widely blamed for the stagflationary recession of the 1970s, and was seen as indicating the strategic vulnerability of the West to attacks on its supply of oil.

Most of this is and was an illusion. In reality, the oil shock was a consequence rather than a cause of the collapse of the postwar economic order based on the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. A central element of that system, the convertibility of the $US into gold at the fixed price of $3835/oz had been rendered unsustainable by inflation, and had been abandoned in the early 1970s, beginning with the Smithsonian agreement of 1971. Increases in the price of other commodities, including oil, were an inevitable consequence. The price of wool, for example, had doubled before anyone outside the oil industry heard of OPEC.

Similar points apply to the supposed vulnerability of the West to the cutting off of oil supplies. An embargo similar to that imposed by OPEC in 1973 might necessitate some form of rationing, but this is scarcely the ‘moral equivalent of war’. It makes no sense to maintain military preparations for a possibility that could be dealt with by reducing consumption.

Still the fact that such things make no sense doesn’t mean they won’t happen. Permanently high gasoline prices will be a big psychological shock for US consumers and could produce some irrational responses, such as a desire to invade Middle Eastern countries.

May 06, 2004

Fallacy of the Commons

Posted by John Quiggin

Like Jon Mandle, I was repulsed by Garrett Hardin’s 1974 article Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor. The idea that large sections of humanity were doomed and should be abandoned forthwith was quite popular at the time. The Paddock brothers prominently advocated a policy of “triage”, cutting off aid immediately to countries like India which were, they argued, doomed to starvation in any case. Judging by this 1996 interview, Hardin (who died last year) didn’t change his views much over time.

Having reacted against this piece by Hardin, I was glad to discover that his more famous contribution to the environment debate, the Tragedy of the Commons was, in historical terms, a load of tripe.

The most famous paragraph in Hardin’s piece is his summary of an 1833 article by a British clergyman, William Lloyd
Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability be comes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
I vividly remember Partha Dasgupta saying (I quote from memory),
There can be few passages in the literature on the environment so brief and well-known that contain as many errors as this one
. He has a more measured statement of the case here.

Prior to hearing this, I’d written a Masters thesis in which, among other things, I’d trawled through the historical literature on how common property systems actually worked, showing that they were never “open to all”, and that all members of the group of common owners had tightly-specifed (and, in a feudal system, highly unequal) rights1. As soon as grazing pressure built up, common grazing land was “stinted” (numbers of cattle were limited) a practice that was almost universal by the late Middle Ages. Common property systems were neither the anarchy pictured by Hardin nor the utopia imagined by some romantic socialists (the Diggers were a rare example of a group who tried to put a utopian vision of common property into practice).

One point I was particularly pleased with in my thesis was that the observation that Lloyd could only write what he did in 1833 because, by that time, nearly all actual commons had been destroyed by enclosure. On the other hand, of course, the events were too recent for Lloyd to have access to the kind of historical work I found in my own research. No such excuse can be made for Hardin.

1 I wasn’t, of course, the first to do this. A good analysis, from a Chicago-school viewpoint, is Carl J. Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution (Cambridge, 1980)

May 03, 2004

The Shadow of the Torturer

Posted by Henry

Those who still maintain that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were an isolated and atypical incident should consider this paragraph from a Washington Post article of December 26, 2002.

According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often “softened up” by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner’s resistance. … Bush administration appointees and career national security officials acknowledged that, as one of them put it, “our guys may kick them around a little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath.” Another said U.S. personnel are scrupulous in providing medical care to captives, adding in a deadpan voice, that “pain control [in wounded patients] is a very subjective thing.”

It sounds as though the kinds of ‘cooperation’ between soldiers and interrogators that were discovered at Abu Ghraib have been going on for a long time, and have received some sanction from either administration appointees or senior security officials, or both. It may - or may not - be that the soldiers in Abu Ghraib went further than they were supposed to in using specifically sexual forms of humiliation. But the pattern of using non-specialized army personnel to ‘soften up’ people for interrogation through physical abuse and terror seems to have been established a long, long time before Abu Ghraib.

May 02, 2004

Apologias and apologies

Posted by Henry

Jacob Levy has a very good column in TNR, about politics and responsibility. Levy refers to Clinton’s persistent habit of making apologies that weren’t really apologies, because they weren’t accompanied by any real consequences for the people involved (as Jacob notes, this is preferable to not making apologies at all). There’s something similar going on in the current breastbeating over Abu Ghraib. Many of the condemnations, including George W. Bush’s statement, seem to me to be either complete disclaimers of responsibility, or non-apology apologies. By implying or stating that these are the actions of a small group of individuals, who will be duly punished, they’re saying that there isn’t any wider problem, nor any need for those who weren’t directly involved, or supervising those directly involved to take responsibility. They’re not so much apologies as apologias - speeches for the defence.

The problem is, that the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib do indeed seem to be symptomatic of a more general problem. The individuals who are involved are claiming that the problem extends high up the chain of command. They too are very likely trying to pass the buck - but there’s good evidence to suggest that they’re telling the truth. The US has unquestionably and undeniably loosened its strictures on the use of torture post-September 11. Usually, however, it has subcontracted out the nasty bits. As described by the (pro-war, pro-war on terror) Economist

officials are quoted as saying that many prisoners have been transferred to the intelligence services of other countries—Jordan, Egypt and Morocco are named—well-known for using brutal methods of interrogation. Sometimes these transferred prisoners (“extraordinary renditions” in the euphemism), are sent with lists of specific questions that American interrogators want answered. Other transfers are made on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis, with American officials taking no part in directing or overseeing subsequent interrogations, but happy to receive any information gleaned from them.

This isn’t as likely to attract television news reporters as the Abu Ghraib abuses - there aren’t any lurid photographs that can be shown on national television. But there’s little doubt that US military investigators are willing to gather evidence through torture (including forms of torture that are very likely far more savage than those used in Abu Ghraib), as long as the direct responsibility for this torture can be passed on to someone else. I’d like to see the condemnation of what happened at Abu Ghraib leading to a proper investigation, for example, of the Maher Arar case, or of the many others who apparently have been subject to ‘extraordinary renditions’ to regimes where they can be tortured for information. But I’m not holding my breath, and to the extent that these other cases suggest that there’s a more general administration policy of turning a blind eye to torture, it isn’t only the reservists at Abu Ghraib who should be under indictment.

Demolish Abu Ghraib

Posted by John Quiggin

It is hard to overestimate the damage that has been done, not only to the US occupation of Iraq but to the cause of democracy and civilisation as a whole by the exposure of torture and sexual humilation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, formerly used for the same purposes, though of course on a much more brutal and extensive scale, by Saddam Hussein1. If these pictures had been staged by the Al Qaeda propaganda department they could scarcely have been better selected to inflame Arab and Muslim opinion against the West, combining as they do the standard images of torture with scenes specially designed to show the determination of the West to humiliate Muslim men in every way possible.

Update 05/04. There is more on this, and on the symbolism of US occupiers living in Saddam’s palace over at Whiskey Bar, where Billmon notes a similar proposal by Hisham Melhem, a Lebanese journalist. See also Eccentricity

It goes without saying that those directly involved, or who knew what was going on and failed to act, should be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law. In addition, those in the chain of command whose lapses contributed to the commission of these crimes should be dismissed out of hand. It seems clear that this latter class must include nearly all those involved in organising the policy of detention without trial, and particularly those involved in the interrogation of prisoners - scenes like these could not occur if the general practices of the prison were not already violent and degrading2. But these steps, necessary as they are, will do little more than to prevent the further aggravation of the damage that would be done if these crimes were seen to be condoned in any way, or if those prosecuted are seen as merely disposable scapegoats (a view those in the immediate firing line are already pushing hard)

Only a response on a dramatic scale has any hope of significantly reducing the damage. My suggestion3 is that the Administration should immediately evacuate and demolish this awful place, and should announce that, before June 30, all those detained by the CPA will either be released or charged with a criminal offence, and, further, that anyone detained after that date will be brought before an Iraqi court. It might be useful to propose a memorial for those who died there and in similar places, though the design and construction should be left to an Iraqi governent.

Of course, this will mean releasing many people who are either insurgents themselves or have given aid and comfort to the insurgents. And, of course, the Iraqi court system is far from satisfactory. But the policy of detention has created far more insurgents than it has captured, as have the raids and searches associated with it. And if Iraqi judges are good enough to produce an arrest warrant for Muqtada al-Sadr, they’re good enough to deal with ordinary Iraqis caught up in military raids,

1 I say “of course”, but even the most charitably disposed commentators in the Arab/Muslim world are unlikely to concede so much. The most favorable view that Arabs and other Muslims are likely to hear is that the Americans are no different from Saddam, neither better nor worse.

2 Just after writing this, I came across this NYT report which seems to confirm it.

3 Not mine alone, I’m happy to say. As pointed out in the comments thread, Scorpio at Eccentricity made the same suggestion, a couple of days before me. Let’s hope this idea has also occurred to someone with the will and capacity to implement it.

May 01, 2004

Mayday

Posted by John Quiggin

It’s already 1 May in Australia, so I get to make what will no doubt be the first of many posts on the significance of the day.

First, and still the most important in the long historical view is the holiday (a public holiday here in Queensland) celebrating the achievements of the labour movement.

Second, there’s the admission of ten new members to the EU. As far as the historical significance of this event goes, I’m waiting to see whether Turkey is admitted to accession negotiations later in the year.

Thirdly, and of most immediate interest, the anniversary of Bush declaration of victory looks as good a time as any to date what seems increasingly certain to be a defeat [at least for the policies pursued for the past year, and for the objective of a stable, pro-American Iraq]. Of course, this judgement may turn out to be as premature as was Bush’s statement a year ago, but the decline in the US position has been almost as rapid as the collapse of Saddam’s regime, and the events of the last few days have seen the process accelerating.

Among a range of events the most important have included:

The Administration seems to be inching towards the position I’ve been advocating for some time - dumping the policies of Bremer and Chalabi (though not, unfortunately Bremer and Chalabi themselves), and handing over real military power to Iraqis. If the interim (still inchoate) government has substantial real power, manages to hold early elections and can get enough support to permit a rapid US withdrawal, the outcome might not be too bad. But there’s very little time left, and this scenario assumes exceptionally skilful management of the situation from now on.

1 Predictably enough, there have been quibbles about this word. But mock-executions such as the one shown here are among the worst forms of torture - from my reading of survivor accounts, they are mentioned with more horror than beatings. And of course what we are seeing is only what the guards chose to photograph for their own amusement.

April 30, 2004

Googling the capital markets

Posted by John Quiggin

The Google IPO has now been announced, and there are some more figures to analyze. In addition, I wanted to talk a bit about the option, suggested by one of the commenters on Kevin Drum’s blog of arbitraging by short-selling overpriced dotcoms and buying those with more reasonable valuations. Finally, I wanted to look at what all this means for capital markets and therefore for capitalism.

Looking at this NYT report, that doesn’t seem likely to be an option.
In 2003, Google reported an operating profit of $340 million on sales of $960 million. But the 2003 figure appears to understate the company’s cash profit margin, since it includes very high expenses related to stock options that will probably decline in future years. On a cash basis, Google had an operating profit of $570 million in 2003, and an operating margin of 62 percent. Given those figures, Google will easily command a market valuation of at least $30 billion, and perhaps much more. EBay, which had an operating profit of $660 million on sales of $2.2 billion last year, is valued at $54 billion; Yahoo, with sales of $1.6 billion and operating cash flow $428 million, is valued at $36 billion.
I’m not an accountant, but I think the “operating profit” referred to here is EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation): in any case, it’s more than the profit accruing to owners of equity. So it appears that all of these well-established businesses are valued at more than 100 times annual earnings.

As I recall, the ratio for profitable companies during the hyperbubble was around 400, so some progress has been made. But these values still look bubbly to me. To match an investment in 10-year bonds, without allowing for any risk premium or for the inevitable increase in long-term interest rates, all these companies need to more than quadruple their earnings, then maintain those earnings for at least 20 years. Maybe Google can do this, and maybe Yahoo can do it, but it’s most unlikely that both of them can.

At one time, I would have tried hard to think of an explanation consistent with some notion of aggregate market rationality, in which capital markets allocate capital to its most productive us. In the light of the evidence of the last ten years - the dotcom bubble, the US dollar bubble, the (still continuing) bond bubble - I no longer bother. Capital markets are driven by fashion (in this case, the continuing desire to be part of the Internet happening, in the face of mounting evidence that it provides almost exclusively public goods), fear and greed. On average, capital markets do a better job than Soviet central planners, but I think they do less well than the mixed economy that was dominant during the postwar Golden Age.

Eventually, no doubt, reality will prevail. If I knew that was going to happen within the next twelve months, I’d be shorting the remnants of the dotcom sector for all I was worth. But, as Keynes apparently didn’t say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

April 28, 2004

Brooks makes sense

Posted by John Quiggin
Like nearly everyone else, I’ve been deeply disappointed by David Brooks’ Op-ed columns in the NYT. But it’s not only out of a sense of fairness that I’m giving a favorable link to his latest - it’s not only good relative to the other stuff he’s written but better than most other commentary1. Referring to the debates over the Clarke and Woodward books, occurring at a time when Iraq looks like sliding into chaos, he says
This is like pausing during the second day of Gettysburg to debate the wisdom of the Missouri Compromise.
Right though this is, it’s obviously helpful to the Republicans, as is the observation that
many Americans have decided that it’s time to persevere and win.
But his final para raises the real issue
Over the next weeks, U.S. forces are going to jump from the fires of unilateralism to the frying pan of multilateralism. What’s going to happen when our generals want to take on some insurgents but Brahimi and the sovereign Iraqi appointees say no?   
Brooks might want to ponder the point that the Bush Administration appears to have no answer to the question he has posed here. They have set up rules that let them ignore the supposedly sovereign government they plan to establish, but it’s obvious that any such action will bring the whole structure crashing around their ears.

Update 29/4 Well, no-one at all in the comments thread agreed with me, but I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on the central point. Of course, the he said-she said stuff reported by Woodward and Clarke will be relevant to the election in November, but the “handover” in Iraq is due to take place at the end of June, and the crucial issues seem to me to have received no discussion at all in the (mainstream) media.

Can any readers point me to any prominent old-media commentator who has addressed the issue raised in Brooks’ final paragraph, and quoted by me? And if the whole thing falls in a heap, as looks increasingly likely, will anyone really care about the precise alignment within the Administration that got us to this point ?

1 Obligatory blogplugging: That’s old-media commentary, of course. This whole post is a subtle reminder that blogs, including this one, have already moved on from point-scoring and asked the questions that are now being raised by Brooks.

April 24, 2004

The Interregnum

Posted by John Quiggin

I’m looking ahead to the June 30 “handover” of power in Iraq with increasing trepidation. As this NYT story indicates, the handover is shaping up to be a complete sham (more on this from Nathan Brown, guest commentator for Juan Cole). Anybody silly or corrupt enough to join the new “government” will be in the same position as the Iraq governments of the British Mandate/Treaty period, taking responsibility for policies dictated by a foreign occupying force, while having no effective power over anything that matters.

It’s worth recalling how we got to this point, since it gives an indication of likely future developments. When the June 30 date was announced, the US (most notably Bremer) wanted to install a puppet government through a set of tightly-controlled “caucuses”. The Iraqis (most notably Sistani) wanted early elections with ration books being used to draw up a provisional electoral roll. Both had an effective veto. Sistani could stop the caucuses going ahead with the threat of boycotts (and the background threat of the Shiite militias). Bremer could prevent elections simply by doing nothing to make them possible (Garner, the first US Administrator was sacked largely because he had wanted early elections).

Sistani’s plan is looking better and better every day, and there are clearly quite a few people in Washington who now wish it had been followed. Nevertheless, there are powerful forces in the US Administration (most obviously the Chalabi lobby) determined to hold off any real handover of power until they can be sure of controlling the resulting government.

Any attempt to hold on to control past the end of 2004 is, I think, doomed to disaster. Given that Bush is unlikely to reintroduce the draft before November, it’s clear that the number of Coalition troops in Iraq can’t be increased, and is in fact bound to decline in effective terms as more of the allies and the for-profit private armies pull out. But if it’s impossible to hold on into 2005, it’s probably also impossible to manage the proposed interregnum.

There are no easy ways of avoiding the slow motion train wreck going on in front of us. The best chance is for the UN to refuse to countenance the current US proposals and to pass no resolution unless it puts the interim Iraqi government in charge of its own country, scrapping the deplorable Article 59 of the interim constitution imposed by the US. If the US was willing to put a large army under ultimate Iraqi command, it might finally be in a position to deliver on the promises made when the country was invaded.

I can’t see the Bush Administration agreeing to this, and I don’t suppose the other UN members will insist on it, so we’ll probably get an outcome in which the UN effectively washes its hands of the entire business and leaves the Americans to sink or swim as best they can. Assuming this analysis is accurate, which will become apparent in the next ten weeks or so, I think it’s time for other members of the Coalition, including Australia and the UK, to cut and run.

1 While I’m on Iraq I’ll link to what is claimed to be an internal CPA memo predicting civil war. (hat tip to reader Robin Green). I’ve seen, but can’t currently locate, claims that the memo is bogus. Whether or not it really comes from the CPA, the generally pessimistic statement of the facts seems pretty accurate.

April 21, 2004

Vanunu

Posted by Chris

There’s been surprisingly little blog comment on the release of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli atom whistle-blower. He’s been released subject to outrageous restrictions on his freedom of association and movement. Jonathan Edelstein has a fairly balanced and moderate post on the subject, Gene at Harry’s place has a somewhat sneering one . But despite Edelstein’s reasonable tone, I can’t agree with him when he writes

Vanunu betrayed his country and chose illegal rather than lawful means to pursue his political agenda; it was his choice to go to a foreign newspaper with classified information rather than addressing his concerns to left-wing Israeli lawmakers.

The “betrayal of country” accusation strikes me as somewhat dubious. There have been plenty of whistleblowers in Britain — such a Clive Ponting, Sarah Tisdall and, most recently, Katharine Gun — who have gone to the press with details of possibly illegal and certainly immoral behaviour by Britain’s governments and defence establishment. But no-one has called them traitors. As far as I can see his crime was not to weaken Israel’s security by revealing genuine secrets, but to bring into the light of day facts about Israel’s nuclear programme that everyone knew but which couldn’t be admitted openly for political and diplomatic reasons. Do such revelations a traitor make? As for the accusation of using illegal means, that’s pretty laughable given that Vanunu was illegally kidnapped in Italy! Or is illegality ok for states but and not for their citizens?

68 dead in Basra blasts

Posted by Ted

Unforgivably horrible.

Iraqi police recruits, children on a school bus and many others were killed today in a series of bomb attacks in the British-controlled city of Basra that claimed at least 68 lives…

The explosions sowed panic across Basra, which had been relatively peaceful during this month’s upsurge of violence in other parts of central and southern Iraq.

US officials believe al-Qaida linked Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the Irbil, Baghdad and Kerbala attacks. They claim an intercepted letter revealed a strategy to foment civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims to make the country ungovernable.

Basra’s governor also blamed Osama bin Laden.

April 18, 2004

For the record

Posted by John Quiggin
Ahmed Chalabi, being interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission,, and urging that Australian troops remain in Iraq, had this to say (emphasis added).
I think that we wasted a year now. The security plan for Iraq that was put forward by the Coalition has collapsed. We must face this fact and we must involve Iraqis right away in the training and the recruitment of the police. I believe that a year to 18 months of hard work on the right track will be sufficient to train an important and significant security force.
Obviously, this assessment suited Chalabi’s argument on the day, but it’s closer to the truth than anything anyone else associated with the Administration has been willing to say.

So last millennium

Posted by John Quiggin

Following up on Brian’s post, I looked at this much-linked piece by Camille Paglia, and was struck by its dated references to television and the 60s1. She goes on to talk about computers, but apparently sees the computer as nothing more than a turbocharged TV set. This impelled me to dig out a piece I wrote nearly ten years ago, making the point that far from privileging visual media, the computer, and particularly the Internet are contributing to a new golden age of text. Blogs weren’t thought of when I wrote this piece, but the argument anticipates them, I think.

1 Oddly enough, although the main argument is a restatement of positions that were familiar 50 years ago, the piece is full of references to the young, as though the current generation of young adults has been, in some way, more saturated in TV than were the baby booomers.

The Coming Golden Age of Text

The recent explosion of interest in the ‘information superhighway’ has spawned renewed predictions of the demise of text-based culture. Some prophets of the multimedia future such as Nicholas Negroponte, welcome this development, though expressing regret that literate people over thirty will effectively be disenfranchised from the new culture. Others, like Dale Spender express alarm that women, having finally gained broadly equal access to text-based culture, will be excluded from the new computer-based centres of power and influence. But at no time since the heyday of Marshall McLuhan has there been such a consensus that text is on the way out.

In reality, the explosive growth of the Internet, and particularly its most recent manifestation, the World Wide Web, holds out the promise of a new golden age of text. The very vocabulary of the Web tells the story. The starting point for Web exploration is a Home Page, from which you use a program, called a browser, to explore other pages. Bookmarks are used to keep track of your favorite pages. Everywhere, metaphors from the world of text abound.

Many of these pages contain graphics. The best of them can resemble a medieval manuscript, the worst a hastily flung together ‘coffee-table’ book. But in the vast majority of cases the text is primary. The graphical capacities of the computer network have the potential to liberate text from the grey conventions of industrial-era printing, and make reading a sensuously appealing experience. But it is still text.

There are basic economic reasons for this. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in computer terms it takes up the same space as a hundred thousand. The cost difference is even more dramatic with video. A few minutes of talking head video, with perhaps two hundred words of information content, can take up the same space (and require the same transmission time) as an entire book. Over time, the steady reduction in the cost of computing and communications will erode the importance of this factor. But for some years to come, the time-lag associated with downloading images will discourage msot Internet users from visiting pages consisting primarily of pictures.

Differences in the cost of producing material will be more durable. A single minute of an average Hollywood movie costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. Even with the cost reductions offered by computer technology, the production of video at anything above home movie standard requires lots of time, technical skill and expensive equipment. For the past forty years or so, the high cost of producing video has been offset by the availability of cheap and instantaneous distribution through broadcast and cable TV networks. There is already more channel capacity than there is worthwhile content to fill it. The advent of the information superhighway will not change this. Its most alluring promise, as far as video is concerned, appears to be the capacity to dial up our favorite episodes of Leave it to Beaver or Gilligan’s Island whenever we choose.

By contrast, the Internet makes a huge difference to the distribution of text, by liberating it from the confines of print. Already, bulky, inaccessible and often out-of-date reference volumes have been replaced by instant on-line access to databases. An academic journal process that took a couple of years to publish articles is being supplanted by a preprint distribution network that takes seconds. This process is now extending to popular culture. Instead of waiting a week for Time magazine to appear in print, you can now browse through its pages on a daily basis. The gains for Australians who face a lag of weeks or months in getting access to most publications from Europe or North America, are even greater.

More fundamentally, text, unlike video, is an inherently nonlinear medium. A book or a newspaper can be skimmed or browsed, read in many different orders. But the nonlinearity of text has been constrained by the limitations of print. The academic article, with its array of footnotes, cross-references and citations is an elaborate attempt to surmount these problems. The World Wide Web and other innovations offer the potential of ‘hypertext’ (the term is due to computer visionary Ted Nelson, and the basic technology of the Web is called Hypertext Markup Language). While reading a page on, say, Nelson Mandela, you can jump to a description of the main tribal groupings in South Africa or on cultural changes in the townships. Then, if you are sufficiently disciplined you can return to the original page. Alternatively, you can wander off into pages on world music or anthropology (with sound and maybe video clips, but still organised around text).

Nothing like this is feasible with video. A string of loosely connected video clips makes, at best, a music video or an art film and, at worst, a mess. Admittedly, the best multimedia artworks can give the viewer a feeling of free movement while maintaining some degree of coherence. But the effort involved in constructing such works is immense, and the freedom of movement is illusory compared to that of hypertext.

Will all of this be for boys only, as Dale Spender fears ? I doubt it. The male orientation of computer culture, particularly at school level, reflects partly male values of mastery over complex technology and partly the computer-as-video-game syndrome.

But the need for technical prowess in using a computer has virtually disappeared. Since the advent of the Macintosh, and its more popular imitation, Windows, we no longer see the articles (mostly by women) on the theme ‘I bought this PC but I can’t make it work’ that abounded in newspapers and magazines a few years ago. The Internet, long the playground of arcane Unix wizards, has taken a little longer to open up, but the World Wide Web is now accessible to all.

Boys will undoubtedly continue to dominate the computer game scene. But skill at blasting aliens in Doom does not translate into much of value in the wider world. Indeed, the lack of fit between the male culture typified by video games and an increasingly text-based and information-based society is part of the reason why boys are doing so much worse than girls at school. When it comes to actually using computers to do something useful, the male advantage is eroding fast.

April 15, 2004

Blair bereft

Posted by John Quiggin

The day before Tony Blair turns up in Washington to give yet another demonstration of support for the mess Bush is making of Iraq, we have the spectacle of Bush and Sharon tearing up the “roadmap for peace”, one of the key elements on which Blair sold the Iraq war to the British Labour Party, and Bush endorsing Sharon’s plans to annex most of the West Bank. It’s hard to imagine that Blair could stand for such a gratuitous insult, but equally hard to imagine him doing anything about it.

Instead, I imagine Blair’s spin doctors will produce some rationalisation along the lines that, since everyone knew that the Palestinian “right of return” was no more than a bargaining chip that would have to be dealt away in a final settlement, and everyone also knew that the Israelis would get to retain some West Bank settlements, nothing fundamental has changed. Better still, we’re finally getting an actual withdrawal from (most of) Gaza.

Like all good spin, this isn’t so implausible that it can be dismissed out of hand. After all, the withdrawal from Gaza is a bird in the hand, while the fact that Sharon’s plans have the endorsement of a US President with a year of his term left to run doesn’t make those plans a final settlement. No-one outside the US will recognise it. Even Bush may be forced, in the end, to exploit the ambiguities noted above and to say that he only meant the handful of settlements envisaged in the Clinton or Geneva plans. It’s perfectly possible that having withdrawn from Gaza, Sharon will find, in six months or so, that he hasn’t really gained anything of lasting value.

But, right now, six months is an awfully long time. This deal, following on the assassination of Yassin, could scarcely have been better calculated to promote the interests of the Coalition’s enemies in Iraq or Blair’s critics at home.

And after the verbal tricks both Bush and Blair have played for the past few years, there’s no reason for anyone, anywhere, to give them the benefit of the doubt on something like this. If it looks like annexation, and quacks like annexation, it probably is annexation. Certainly, it’s annexation and not the Clinton plan that Sharon is selling to Likud.

I could be wrong. Perhaps Blair will denounce the whole deal, and make his denunciation stick, for example, by threatening to pull British troops out of Iraq. If so, I’ll be the first to cheer for him. But if, as I expect, we get nothing more than mealy-mouthed expressions of regret (if that!), it will be time for the Labour Party to elect a new leader.

Update: When I wrote this, I hadn’t seen Blair’s statement, which is even more mealy-mouthed than I expected.

April 14, 2004

Breaking the circuit

Posted by John Quiggin

Since the situation in Iraq seems to have stabilised momentarily, this might be a good time to think about measures that could prevent a renewed downward spiral. An essential starting point, and a relatively easy measure, would be to dump both Bremer and Chalabhi. Every major decision Bremer has made has been a disaster, from the dissolution of the Iraqi army to the failed attempt at rigged elections based on “caucuses” to the decision to pick a fight with Sadr. The cumulative result is that the Coalition is stuck with a promise to hand over power on June 30 and no-one remotely credible to hand it to.

The other party in all of this is Chalabhi, who is still apparently Bremer’s preferred candidate, despite the fact that he has zero credibility in Iraq or, for that matter, anywhere outside the Pentagon. It might not be feasible to remove him from the Governing Council, but he should be dumped from any administrative position he holds, and particularly from his role in the disastrous de-Baathification campaign.

My suggestion for the next step would be to send Powell to Baghdad to take personal charge of the proposed transition. Although he’s been compromised like everyone else in the Administration, he’s by far the most credible person they have.

A direct approach from Powell and (UN advisor) Brahimi might induce Sistani and other Shia religious figures to shift from the sidelines into support for a sustaniable outcome. The crucial elements would have to be
* Pushing for elections as soon as possible. Since this would produce a government with a clear Shia majority, this would provide an incentive for Shia militias to comply with calls to abandon armed resistance to the occupying forces
* Abandoning the most objectionable provision of the Interim Constitution, namely those endorsing the US claim to continued military control. Instead, the US needs to accept that, as of June 30, it will have to put its troops under the ultimate command of some combination of an interim Iraqi government and an international successor to the CPA (either the UN or NATO).
* Dropping the “three-province” provision that gives the Kurds an effective veto of the new constitution, while making it clear that the existing autonomy of the Kurdish areas was non-negotiable

At the same time, Powell would need to make more serious attempts to reconcile the Sunnis. An obvious starting point would be to repeal Bremer’s dissolution of the army, and offer former soldiers either re-enlistment or a cash payment on discharge.

As I’ve said before, I’m not confident that this approach would work. In any case, judging by the inane rhetoric from Bush about “staying the course”, there is no willingness in Washington to admit that the whole Iraq enterprise is in serious danger of failure. Moreover, many in the Pentagon would rather lose than put their forces under the command of foreigners. So I think we’ll see a continuation of policy based on neocon dreams. Perhaps the rush for the doors evident among the members of the “Coalition of the Willing” may be what it needs to wake them up.

April 06, 2004

The Sistani option

Posted by John Quiggin

I’m going to try hard from now on to avoid debating whether the war with Iraq was a mistake, and to focus on the question of what should be done from here onwards.

I’ve argued for some months that the most plausible option for a stable allocation of power in Iraq is a de facto two-state solution in which the Kurds get effective autonomy and a share of the oil and the rest of Iraq gets a government which will be dominated by the Shiites. With luck, they won’t try and settle too many scores and will recognise the need to keep much of the Sunni professional elite on side. The government would be Islamist, but not a direct theocracy like Iran.

The key to all this, almost certainly, is Ayatollah Sistani. He’s not the person I’d want running my country (or more precisely acting as the eminence grise for its day-to-day rulers), but he seems like the only plausible choice who wouldn’t be an absolute disaster.

Thus far, the occupation government has done its best to preclude the emergence of a government dominated by followers of Sistani, most obviously by trying to put off elections as long as possible. The assumption has been that, given time, a secular pro-American government will emerge (Chalabhi being the favoured leader). This approach is not absolutely hopeless1. Still it’s a long shot at this stage, and policy in matters of life and death shouldn’t be based on long shots.

More importantly, with the apparent blowback of Bremer’s decision to take on Sadr (the latest in a series of disastrous misjudgements on his part), there’s now a big danger that Sistani will either be outflanked by Shi’ite radicals unwilling to accept his quietist position or will feel compelled to advocate overt resistance to the Americans and particularly to the “government” to be installed on June 30, which, on current indications, will lack both legitimacy (being nominated by the Americans) and effective power (since the Americans have announced that they will maintain military control indefinitely). Something needs to be done soon to prevent this.

The urgent requirement is to dump both Bremer and Chalabi and try to find a path that can shift Sistani’s position from passive resistance to active support. This almost certainly entails a commitment to direct elections as soon as possible and an agreement that once an elected government has taken power it should have actual sovereignty, including control over its own military and the right decide what foreign forces if any, are wanted in Iraq. Ideally, the US should bind itself to this course by subordinating its command to the UN (or, failing that, some other international body such as NATO) as soon as the June 30 deadline is reached

Since I can’t see the US Administration following a course of action remotely like this except under extreme pressure, I think it’s appropriate for allied governments to drop the “we broke it, we own it” line and announce that they will not continue to support the occupation beyond June 30 in the absence of a change of policy.

I should say that I’m not claiming that this strategy is guaranteed to work at all, let alone to work well. But I can’t see a better alternative. And, of course, I didn’t support the policies that got us (the world and the Iraqis) here in the first place.

1 As is suggested by this report, which notes the success of secular candidates while also making it clear that a reasonably democratic interim government could have been elected using the approach proposed by Sistani and rejected by Bremer, based on using ration books for voter ID.

April 05, 2004

Further confirmation?

Posted by Chris

Following Fallujah, I see that liberal and leftie bloggers who are pro-war (such as Oliver Kamm , SIAW and Norman Geras ) have been linking to a WSJ piece by Christopher Hitchens which argues that the disgusting behaviour of the Fallujah mob vindicates the decision to go to war. (If we hadn’t acted now, the whole of Iraq would have become like this, in time ….) I have to say that my reaction to their reaction is somewhat sceptical. If the people of Iraq are happy and peaceable (as claimed by some opinion pollsters) then this is supposed to vindicate the war; if they are rioting and murderous, then this also vindicates the war! One has to wonder whether there is any development in Iraq that Hitchens wouldn’t use as confirming evidence for his worldview and which wouldn’t then be cited in this way by pro-war bloggers! Perhaps the news of increased antagonism from a section of the Shia will make new demands on Hitchens’s ingenuity?

[Lest this post be taken as more hostile to the pro-war bloggers than intended, I’d add that it seems appropriate to ask of everyone who seems certain of the rightness of their position on the war, whether there are any developments that would lead them to say, “OK, I was wrong.” For instance, if there is a functioning and independent Iraqi democracy within two years, which lasts for at least a further five, then I think that ought to shake the convictions of hardened opponents. But I don’t think that’s likely.]

March 28, 2004

The Zarqawi scandal

Posted by John Quiggin

As Richard Clarke’s unsurprising revelations continue to receive blanket coverage around the blogosphere and elsewhere, I’ve been increasingly puzzled by the failure of the Zarqawi scandal to make a bigger stir. As far as I can determine, the following facts are undisputed

  • Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of the group Ansar al-Islam is one of the most dangerous Islamist terrorists currently active. He is the prime suspect for both the Karbala and Madrid atrocities and the alleged author of a letter setting out al Qaeda’s strategy for jihad in Iraq. Although he has become increasingly prominent in the past year, he has been well-known as a terrorist for many years
  • For some years, until March 2003, Ansar al-Islam was based primarily at Kirma in Northern Iraq, in part of the region of Iraq generally controlled by the Kurds and included in the no-fly zone enforced by the US and UK. In other words, the group was an easy target for either a US air attack, a land attack by some special forces and/or Kurdish militia or a combination of the two
  • Nothing was done until the invasion of Iraq proper, by which time the group had fled

These facts alone would indicate a failure comparable in every way to the missed opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden before S11. But the reality appears to be far worse.

According to the MSNBC report that broke the story, three plans were drawn up for attacks on Zarqawi and all were killed by the National Security Council
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

There are various hypotheses about the precise grounds, all highly discreditable, but the most plausible is that a watertight plan would have required co-operation between US air forces, and Kurdish ground forces. This would have been most unpalatable to the Turkish government, which was being courted, up to the last minute, as a partner for the Iraq war. So nothing was done, and by the time the camp was attacked at the beginning of the war, Zarqawi and most of his followers were gone.

An alternative, equally discreditable, explanation is that the Administration wanted to keep Zarqawi’s group in existence as a count in the indictment of Saddam, relying on the claim that Zarqawi had received treatment in a Baghdad hospital as ‘proof’ of Saddam’s links to terrorism, a claim that was unlikely to stand up to the kind of close examination that would follow an attack on the group.

Although it’s a peripheral point, there were also credible reports that Ansar al-Islam was engaged in the manufacture of ricin, a poison used in assassination. Ricin is scarcely a weapon of mass destruction but, if the Administration had applied the same criteria to Zarqawi as to Saddam, it would certainly have provided sufficient justification for a pre-emptive strike. It is, however, a peripheral point. The justification for attempting to kill Zarqawi and eliminate his group is and was the fact that he is a terrorist, not a legalistic quibble about his choice of killing technology. Similar attacks have been made in a number of countries under both Bush and Clinton, most notably including Clinton’s attempt on Osama.

When the story first broke about a month ago1, it was widely covered by critics of the war, at least some of whom pointed out the seriousness of the implications. Brad de Long, for example, argued that it constituted grounds for impeachment of Bush and other members of the Administration. (There was some dispute about the legal feasibility of this, but none about the morality).

On the other hand, the warbloggers have been almost uniformly silent. The few who have mentioned the issue have mostly made the ludicrous claim that Zarqawi’s activities, undertaken in an effectively US-controlled part of Iraq, constituted proof that ‘Iraq really did have WMD’s’. I have found the single honorable exception of Andrew Sullivan, and I expect there are some others, but not many.

And there it rests. As far as I can tell, there’s been no follow-up story and no action on the political front. A failure that would appear to be, at best, a disastrous blunder and, at worst, a deliberate betrayal of the struggle against terrorism has simply been ignored while Washington plays the familiar game of “He Said, She Said”.

1 Even before the war, Dan Drezner wondered why the group had not been attacked.

March 23, 2004

"Removal"

Posted by Kieran

Where I come from, a “Removal” is when the body of a recently deceased person is transported from their house or the Funeral Home to the Church, where it awaits the funeral ceremony. I believe the phrase “The Viewing” is roughly equivalent in the United States. Which is why Patrick Belton’s words threw me off for a few moments:

Haaretz has a number of good pieces about the removal this morning of Sheikh Yassin: … Dichter argued against Yassin’s removal … while Europeans considered Yassin’s removal (to my mind, dubiously - has anyone seen a fleshed-out argument?) as a violation of international law …

Now, Patrick also quotes a news report that uses the correct word in this context — i.e., “assassination” — so I’m wondering why he avoids it himself. I can’t think of any good argument to prefer a euphemism like “removal” to “assassination,” or even to “killing.” Is it well-established in this context? Is the unarticulated implication here that actions of this sort cannot count as assassinations because they are carried out by the State? This seems obviously wrong. Better to just come out and say that you thought they were right to kill him, I think, than let a euphemism do the work for you. If not, then should I expect to read about “removal attempts” in future? And what does this new usage imply about companies who carry out furniture removals?

March 17, 2004

Influencing Al Qaeda

Posted by John Quiggin
Much of the value of a blog like Crooked Timber is in the comments threads, but the signal to noise ratio is inevitably low, especially when flame wars erupt. I thought this point by Donald Johnson responding to Chris’ post on the Spanish election (and disregarded in subsequent comments) was valuable enough to justify more prominence.
If al Qaeda has the capability to plant bombs and kill hundreds of people, they’re going to do it however they interpret the Spanish election. They might plant their bombs before elections if they think they can influence them, or they might plant their bombs where there are large crowds on some special date, or they might choose some big symbolic target again, like the Pentagon or the WTC. The point is to stop them, not to worry about how they might read election results except to the extent that understanding what they think might give clues on what their next target is going to be.
Exactly right. The idea, that by doing what al Qaeda (supposedly) wants1 we are sending a message that will influence them to do more of the same directly contradicts the overwhelming evidence that al Qaeda is unconditionally committed to terroristic war against us, and cannot be dissuaded from it (evidence that has been stressed more on the right of the blogosphere than anywhere else). They cannot be influenced, only incapacitated.

1 This applies equally to the Spanish election result and to Bush’s decision to pull US troops out of Saudi Arabia.

March 15, 2004

Wars against evil

Posted by Henry

There’s good reason to be wary of applying historical analogies to current events - comparing the Iraq war and Vietnam is usually as loaded and unhelpful as, say, comparing the Iraq war and World War II. However, there’s one way in which the US debate about Iraq is starting to look like the debate about Vietnam. It’s becoming ever less focused on Iraq as an actual place (to the extent that it ever was) and ever more concerned with Iraq as a battlefield in a vague and ill-defined war against the forces of evil, in which any setback gives succour to the enemy.

Even after the conduct of the Vietnam war became indefensible, many argued against pulling out because they said that a US defeat would embolden the forces of international Communism. Similarly, there’s a lot of talk today among the war blogs about Spanish “appeasement” and how a Spanish withdrawal from Iraq will strengthen and encourage al Qaeda. As John has already said, this interpretation does some violence to the actual motives of Spanish voters. Nor are the Socialists wimps on terrorism - the main reason that they lost power in 1996 was because of their vicious and illegal tactics in the ‘dirty war’ against ETA (torture, kidnapping, murder etc). If this is a victory for al Qaeda, it’s not a victory because the Spanish are seeking to appease terrorism. It’s a victory because it will be perceived by the current US administration and its supporters as being a defeat.

Update: see also Jim Henley.

Update 2: Also Jacob Levy, a supporter of the Iraq war, who’s written the most sensible and judicious post on Spain and ‘appeasement’ that I’ve read so far.

A couple of points

Posted by John Quiggin

The warblogosphere has gone into a predictably frenzy over the Spanish election results. In my previous post, I argued, from an antiwar position, that it was a mistake to interpret the result as punishment for Aznar taking a prominent stance in the struggle against terrorism. Now, following Micah’s advice I’ll present a couple of points that might be more convincing to those on the other side of the fence from me (or at least the subset who are open to argument of any kind).

First, it seems to be universally agreed, and was certainly believed by the PP government, that it would have electorally beneficial had it turned out that the bomb was planted by ETA. But the Aznar government was notable for its hardline stance against ETA. If the Spanish people were the cowards painted by their erstwhile admirers, this would make no sense.

Second (as far as I know), there has been no suggestion from the Socialists that Spanish troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan1. If the Spanish people are terrified of bin Laden and want to appease him, it seems strange to show this through continued backing of attempts to capture or kill him and prevent the restoration of the only government that’s ever openly embraced him.

1 Of course, the same point applies to most opponents of the war in Iraq. The great majority supported the overthrow of the Taliban. Of the minority who opposed the Afghanistan war, most did not do so on prudential grounds but from a position of routine opposition to US foreign policy (eg Chomsky).

March 06, 2004

Binding Gulliver

Posted by Henry

The Economist has an article this week on John Kerry’s popularity with Europeans. The argument is twofold - Europeans are rooting for Kerry to win, but they’re likely to end up disappointed if he does.

whoever is in the White House, tensions between European and American approaches to the world seem sure to persist. The heyday of Atlanticism came to a close with the end of the cold war. … Indeed, in some areas, such as trade, the quarrels between the sides could get worse … Mr Kerry might explain American views more tactfully than Mr Bush. He might even do it in French. But transatlantic tensions would endure.

As a piece of international relations analysis, it’s an odd mixture of the obvious and the wrongheaded. Of course, transatlantic disputes aren’t going to go away if Kerry becomes President. But they’re likely to be transformed - much of the sting will go out of them.

The basic error is a misunderstanding of the issues at stake for the Europeans. These have less to do with substantive differences over policy (although these exist) than with the perception that the current administration is unwilling to take its allies’ interests into account. Elizabeth Pond captures this very well in her recent book, Friendly Fire, which purports to be a neutral analysis of recent transatlantic disputes, but is really a well argued presentation of the European (and most particularly the German) perspective on recent controversies. As Pond says, the real problem for Europeans has been the unwillingness of the US to accept that its allies should have any real role in decision-making; while the US accepts (and expects) their support, it’s supposed to be unconditional. This is a far cry from the post-war security dispensation, which was built on multilateral institutions, in which the US deliberately sacrificed some of its freedom of action by setting up a variety of multilateral institutions which allowed some role in decision making for the allies, even if the US always remained primus inter pares. The current administration has downgraded these structures in favour of ad-hoc coalitions in which allies have little to no real decision making clout; what Pond describes as “hierarchical hegemony,” as opposed to the previously existing “participatory hegemony.”

Here, Kerry offers a clear alternative to the current administration. When he says that he’ll reopen discussions on Kyoto, and will “replace the Bush years of isolation with a new era of alliances,” he’s signalling that he’s willing to play ball with the allies, and to accept that the US can be constrained by international institutions as well as using them to constrain others. Indeed, he points to the need to create new multilateral institutions to deal with emerging international problems. There’s good reason to believe that the Europeans will be prepared to sign on to this agenda; it’s in everyone’s interest to tackle nuclear proliferation and other, nastier problems coming down the pipeline. What they’re looking for is less to dethrone the US (except, perhaps the French elite in its less disciplined daydreams) than to get a US administration that they can work with, which will listen as well as give orders. We’d likely see transatlantic tensions ceasing to be an angst-ridden crisis-in-motion over whether there’s a real set of common transatlantic interests at all. Instead, they’d return to their more usual state of institutionalized grumpiness over anti-dumping measures, burden-sharing and the like (perhaps with the odd missile crisis thrown in for savour).

March 05, 2004

Cutting the Gordian Knot

Posted by Maria

Wow. Here I am trying to figure out how to give a good kick in the arse to my humdrum mid-level policy career, and there Gordon Brown is, trying to decide whether to be Prime Minister of the U.K. or Director of the I.M.F.

These people at the top step in and out like they’re at Lannigan’s ball. Mary Robinson has never been forgiven for ditching the Irish presidency early to become U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. And Horst Kohler just left the I.M.F. on a day’s notice to pursue his presidential ambitions in Germany. Even when I was temping at Railtrack, I never left a job before finishing out the week.

Finding a replacement for Horst will be trickier than phoning in a starving grad student who can type 90 wpm (yes, 90, in warm weather. and I make quite decent coffee. offers?). By tradition it has to be a European, but one the White House can stomach. The Germans have had their turn and the French are on an extended visit to Coventry (though Haiti may change that.). Neither would be keen on having a Brit in the job (dogs in the manger), so we’ll probably end up with a dreary technocrat just like the last one.

Meanwhile, the musical chairs dance of top European jobs is getting into a whirl. The current cabinet of EU commissioners retires this summer and the accession countries will have their coming out ball in the autumn. Cue some blushing debutantes and plenty of Becky Sharps.

The outgoing commissioners have full dance cards too. Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, Anna Diamantoupoulou, chucked in her job last month to get stuck into an election campaign in Greece. Margot Wallstrom, Commissioner for the Environment. took over Diamantoupoulou’s job on top of her own, and instantly left on a winter holiday. Erkki Likaanen of DG Info Soc is plunging back into Finnish politics and hoping for the top job. Chris Patten is double- jobbing as head of DG External Relations and Chancellor of Oxford, and his Brussels appearances are increasingly few and far between. And then you have the true blue Type As, like Frits Bolkestein who’s desperate to move up from D.G. Internal Market to the uber-ministry D.G. Competition.

And there’s the original unknown quantity, David Byrne, who’s achieved far more in Consumer Affairs than most of the talking heads in the Cabinet. Byrne was Ireland’s second or third choice (after others had been disqualified ), and was nominated so late that the high profile D.G.s were already taken. But he has been such an effective commissioner that the world really is his oxter, and the Commission has almost forgiven us for Padraig Flynn.

Figuring out what to do after a term as a commissioner is still quite delicate. The ambitious majority struggle to reinsert themselves into national politics, often being pushed several rungs down the ladder by the stay-at-home politicians who sent them away in the first place. A generation or two of decent Tories (‘Well, if you like Europe so much, why don’t you just go/stay there?’) have struggled with this one.

But anyway, back to Gordon Brown. I imagine he’s only letting the story of the I.M.F’s interest be known to remind TB how difficult Brown would be to replace. Today’s Guardian seems to think that Patricia Hewitt is favourite to succeed the man with a brain the size of a planet. Putting Hewitt - who has a magpie’s eye for bright new initiatives but can hardly shock and awe the intellectual heavyweights - into the Treasury would just be cruel. Remember how downtrodden and despised by his own civil servants poor Nigel Lawson was?

But if he is seriously thinking about changing jobs, Brown may be at one of those crossroads that life can seem to lead inexorably towards; one where each choice represents a competing set of self-image and ambition.

Brown at the IMF could be that rare thing; a visionary with the clout to get things done. Think what he could do to re-structure developing country debt. This is a man who stays up at night thinking precisely how to use the levers of government policy to increase social justice. This is a man who can put a hopeful glint in the eye of an economist. His global impact could be phenomenal, and do the most to help the people who need it the most. But it would also be diffuse.

Whereas Brown at No. 10 could finally run the show. Although his micro-managing Treasury already has unprecedented control over policy minutiae in almost every other ministry, Prime Minister Brown would run foreign policy as well. And it’s now or never.

Either way, of course, he’ll still have to kowtow to the White House.

Anyway, putting aside the perks and the power, all these people are struggling with how and where to make the most contribution (and further their careers); in national or international politics. Nationally, you can have a more immediate impact and much more contact with the people you’re actually serving. At the EU or further afield, there may be more overall influence, but it’s diluted and deflected through more layers of implementation.

That’s globalisation for you. And the high-flyers aren’t the only ones trying to decide…

March 03, 2004

The Borda voting system is fatally defective

Posted by John Quiggin

Before I argue that the Borda voting system is fatally defective, it may be worth considering what kinds of weaknesses could justify such a verdict. We know from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that any nontrivial voting system will encourage strategic/insincere voting in some circumstances and will not always elect the right candidate (unless ‘right’ is defined to coincide with the outcome of the voting system in question). So a fatal defect must be a lot worse than this. I claim that the Borda voting system is so vulnerable to strategic manipulation that it would be completely unworkable, provided only that there are no restrictions on candidacy.

Note: I did a Google before writing this and couldn’t find anything similar, but of course, when I checked again after doing the work, I found this almost perfect anticipation of my counter-example. But having done the work, I thought I’d post it anyway.

My argument can be illustrated with a simple example. Suppose that an election is to be held to fill an office, and that the population is divided into two groups, say Blue and Red. All Blue voters would prefer, of all possible candidates, that B1 fills the job, and all Red voters would prefer, of all possible candidates, that R1 fills the job. There are 60 Red voters and 40 Blue voters. In most systems of voting, R1 is guaranteed to win, no matter what other candidates run and whether or not voters act strategically.

Now consider Borda, and suppose that in addition to R1 and B1, the Blues advance a second candidate, B21, who is a little less attractive to all voters than B1. Assuming sincere voting, the Blues will all vote B1, B2, R1 and the Reds will all vote R1,B1, B2. The result will be that B1 gets 240 Borda votes, B2 gets 140 and R1 gets 220, so that B1 is elected.

Even with strategic voting, the Blues still benefit from this strategy provided they can either formally or informally caucus. The Reds’ best strategy is to split their preferences between the two Blue candidates. The Blues’ best response is a mixed strategy, in which, with 50 per cent probability they all vote for B1 and with 50 per cent probability they all vote for B2. With an initial 60-40 split, R1 beats the top Blue candidate 220 to 210. But if the initial split is a bit closer, say 54-46, the Blues win.

The only effective way for the Reds to respond is to run a second candidate of their own, restoring the initial balance in their favor. But then the Blues can put up a third candidate and the process goes on indefinitely. Hence the only way to get a workable election is to restrict the right of candidacy, in which case the restriction procedure effectively amounts to a first round of voting.

1 Note for Australian readers. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

March 01, 2004

Condorcet rules?

Posted by John Quiggin
The comments thread on my last post led me to this site (hat-tip: novalis), advocating Condorcet voting and presenting a critique of the instant runoff/single transferable vote , the core of which is
IRV has serious problems. It allows a sufficiently small minority of voters to safely register “protest” votes for minor-party candidates—but only as long as their candidate is sure to lose. As soon as their candidate threatens to actually win, they risk hurting their own cause by ranking their favorite first, just as they do under our current plurality system. IRV is therefore unlikely to be any more successful than plurality at solving the classic “lesser of two evils” problem.
It’s straightforward to show, however, that this problem can only arise if your preferred candidate would be the loser in a Condorcet system. Hence, voting strategically yields the preferred Condorcet outcome.

To see how the argument works consider three candidates A,B,C and suppose that A’s supporters rank ABC, C’s supporters rank CBA, and that no candidate has an absolute majority. Then (regardless of the preferences of B’s supporters), B is the Condorcet winner. If B has the most or second-best supporters, then a (weakly) dominant strategy is for everyone to vote in line with their preferences, leading to B’s election. Suppose however that B has the smallest number of first-preference supporters and that A would win over C in a pairwise contest. Then, as stated in the critique above, the optimal choice for C’s supporters is to vote strategically for B, so that B finishes the first round ahead of C. The distribution of preferences then ensures that B is the winner. So, in this case, strategic voting does not produce the “lesser evil” as far as the majority of the electorate is concerned.

Things can tricker when there are n (greater than 3) candidates with a serious chance of winning. But the problems for Condorcet are even worse, since the method requires n(n-1) pairwise comparisons.

Taking this a bit further it seems likely that, whatever rule is chosen for resolving cycles, an implementable Condorcet system would be vulnerable to exploitation by strategic choices to run (or not run) particular candidates whose function would be to tip the balance in favor of some other candidate.

Does Australia exist?

Posted by John Quiggin

Eric Maskin and Partha Dasgupta are smart guys, and its hard to believe they are totally ignorant of what happens in the Southern Hemisphere. So how can they justify writing a piece promoting a system of rank-order voting as superior to the existing American (plurality) and French (top-two runoff) systems, without mentioning that Australia has had this system (in a range of variants) for many decades.1

A minor side point is that, in addition to having the world’s most complicated voting systems, Australia also has compulsory voting.2 Typically more than 95 per cent of votes are formal, that is, list all candidates in order of preference, with no missing numbers or repetitions. In Dennis Mueller’s generally excellent book on Public Choice, he discusses the single transferable vote and suggests that, while attractive in theory, it’s too complicated to work in practice. Either Australians are a lot smarter than everybody else, or public choice theorists aren’t as smart as they think they are.

1 To be precise, Maskin and Dasgupta advocate the Borda weighted vote, whereas Australia has the single transferable vote (called preferential voting in Australia), but nothing in their argument distingushes the two.

2 More precisely, compulsory registration and attendance at the polling station - there’s nothing to stop you casting a blank ballot.

February 27, 2004

Milosevic guilty of genocide?

Posted by Daniel

It’s a right old week for collapsing cases … although Slobodan Milosevic is almost certain to be found guilty of crimes against peace and war crimes, the central charge of genocide is apparently a lot more doubtful. The prosecution in the Hague are moving to rest their case a couple of days early, admitting as they do so that they’ve not really found any smoking gun linking Milosevic to the actions of Radovan Karadzic, the real butcher of Bosnia. Not sure what to make of this myself, and it’s probably best not to comment further in the absence of real evidence; I know that CT’s Chris B is of the opinion that Milosevic was guilty as sin and the NATO intervention in Kosovo was a paradigm example of a good war, but my good mate Chris DeLiso, who hasn’t posted on the subject yet but will probably do so soon, thinks different.

All in all, I think the most important lesson to learn here is a negative one, for anyone on the left who ever thought that the Hague international tribunal was ever going to be more useful than a chocolate teapot.

February 26, 2004

Fahrenheit 451

Posted by Henry

John Q. talks about Britain’s addiction to Official Secrets. This reminds me of a bit from Margaret Levi’s Consent, Dissent and Patriotism, where she discusses the politics of military archives.

More arcane is the account of a small fire that destroyed relevant materials from World Wars I and II in the Australian War Memorial. The representatives of the British government operate under strict rules of secrecy concerning a very large amount of military-related material, and they uphold those rules rigorously. The Australian government operates with a greater openness. The problem arose because in the Australian War Memorial were records that the British deemed secret and the Australians did not. The problem was resolved by the British, or so my reliable source tells me, by planting a mole archivist in the War Memorial. This mole lit a small fire in the relevant stacks and then disappeared.

On a more personal note, John also namechecks the novelist and politician Erskine Childers, who was executed under dubious circumstances in 1922 by the Irish Free State government, with only my and Maria’s great-grandfather, Eoin MacNeill, dissenting from the decision. Today seems to be the day for office-holding ancestors on CT.

Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail

Posted by John Quiggin

The news that British spies bugged the office of Kofi Annan during the Iraq debate has a number of implications. First, for me, this is the point at which Tony Blair should go. The whole idea of going to the UN for authority to invade Iraq was his, not Bush’s, and now it’s clear that it was corrupt from the beginning. I won’t argue this in detail - no doubt a lot of people already thought he should go, and others still won’t be convinced.

The main point I want to make is that it’s time for Britain to get out of the spy game. More than any other democratic country, Britain is addicted to spies and their natural counterpart, Official Secrets.1 From Burgess and McLean to the present day, the spies have been a constant cause of embarrassment and worse. On the other hand, there’s no evidence that they’ve ever found out anything that was both useful and sufficiently reliable to act on2.

This isn’t a matter of bad luck, or even incompetence. Standard game-theoretic reasoning shows that, outside the zero-sum case of war, there’s unlikely to be a net benefit from actions like bugging offices. The problem is simple. If I bug your office and you don’t suspect me, I can gain potentially valuable information that you don’t want me to have. But if you suspect me, and I don’t suspect that you suspect, you can use my bugs to mislead me. As with all game theoretic reasoning, you can iterate this as many times as you like, but the end result is that the net value of information derived from bugging is zero. On the other hand, the costs of the activity are substantial. In an environment where bugging is routine, everyone learns to communicate in various forms of code, and decoding is costly and prone to error.

He’s often been dismissed as hopelessly naive, but US Secretary of State Henry Stimson was right when he shut down the State Department’s cryptanalytic office saying “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.”

1 This is a case where life imitates art. The spy novels of Erskine Childers and John Buchan were written before the rise of espionage as a significant government activity and before the passage of the first effective Official Secrets Act (1911)

2 In this context, I’m excluding wartime codebreaking, which is always useful since, at a minimum, it disrupts enemy communications.

Notes

I’ve treated Clare Short’s allegation as fact, since Blair hasn’t denied it. His claim that he can neither confirm nor deny it for security reasons doesn’t hold up. Short made the specific claim that she had seen transcripts of Annan’s conversations. Blair could refute this claim without reference to whether or not such transcripts existed.

The argument about the uselessness of spies is developed at much greater length in this piece I wrote for the Australian Financia Review The conclusion:
The spy myth clearly served the interests of intelligence agencies, which prospered during the 20th century more than any set of spies before them. The real beneficiaries, however, were the counterintelligence agencies or, to dispense with euphemisms, the secret police, of both Western and Communist countries. The powers granted to them for their struggle against armies of spies were used primarily against domestic dissidents. Terms such as ‘agent of influence’ were used to stigmatise anyone whose activities, however open and above-board, could be represented as helpful to the other side.

The supposed role of the secret police, to keep secrets from opposing governments, was, as we have seen, futile. Secret police, and the associated panoply of security laws, Official Secrets Acts and so forth, were much more successful in protecting their governments’ secrets from potentially embarrassing public scrutiny in their own countries.

As spies and the associated fears have faded in their public mind, their place has been taken by terrorists. In many ways, this is a reversion to the 19th century, when the bomb-throwing anarchist was a focus of popular fears and the subject of novels by such writers as Chesterton and Conrad.

As the attacks of September 11 showed us, the threat posed by terrorists is real. Nevertheless, even if terrorists were to mount attacks ten times as deadly in the future, they would still present the citizens of the Western World with less danger than we accept from our fellow-citizens every time we step into our cars.

If the century of the spy has taught us anything, it is that we need to assess the dangers posed by terrorists coolly and calmly rather than giving way to panic.

February 09, 2004

Piecing together Middle East peace

Posted by Henry

The Washington Post says today that the Bush administration is proposing a new multilateral plan for the Middle East, which would link progress on democracy and human rights in Middle East countries to concessions on trade, aid and security from the advanced industrial democracies. It’s not clear to me that this represents a real policy shift yet; the Post’s major sources seem to come from the State department, which is naturally more sympathetic to multilateralism than other parts of the administration. However, if the Post is correct in suggesting that Cheney has signed on, this could be interesting - it’s certainly a far cry from the intoxicated proposals to remake the Middle East by force that were floating around among neo-cons last year.

Could this plan work? According to the Post, these proposals are modeled on the Helsinki accords, which led to the creation of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE ). A few years ago, Greg Flynn and I wrote a piece for International Organization arguing that Helsinki and the CSCE had played a key role in securing the democratic transition in Europe.1 It wasn’t a popular argument at the time, so it’s nice to see that others are now making the same claim. Academic self-justification aside, I’m not at all sure that the new proposal has legs, even if you disregard the differences between Cold War Europe and the Middle East today. The factors that allowed the CSCE to transform Warsaw Pact countries aren’t likely to work in the same way.

The CSCE helped to secure the democratic transition in Western Europe in two important ways. First, it created a normative framework that enabled democratic activists in Warsaw Pact countries to have their protests heard. When the Soviet Union and its satellite states signed up to the Helsinki accords, they thought that they were getting the West to recognize the division of Europe into different spheres of influence, in exchange for meaningless concessions on human rights. Many in the West thought that the Soviet negotiators were right, including Henry Kissinger who tried to block the accords (although he puts a different spin on this in a more than usually mendacious section of his autobiography). As time went on, the Helsinki commitments proved to be a potent weapon for democratic activists within Eastern bloc countries; they could now use their governments’ failure to live up to international commitments as a tool to embarrass them in public. The US and other democratic states provided a sympathetic audience.

Second, the CSCE created a set of instruments designed to allow a limited form of collective intervention within CSCE participating states in order to shore up democracy. It’s usually difficult to get states to agree to allow outsiders to intervene in their internal affairs. However, the states participating in the CSCE had previously made an internationally binding commitment to democracy. Furthermore, many of them were interested in joining the EU at some stage and wanted to show their willingness to reform. This meant that many CSCE states were prepared to allow the CSCE to become involved in internal disputes as a sort of honest broker, representing the collective interests of other states in ensuring a secure neighborhood. Preventive diplomacy, practiced through the CSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities, was instrumental in preventing a crisis in the Baltic states over ethnic relations that could very easily have led to renewed confrontation between Russia and the West.

It seems to me that neither of these effects will be strong in the Middle East, even if there’s a Helsinki-type arrangement in place. First, it’s going to be far harder for democracy activists to use a Helsinki-style institutional framework as a means of leverage. Pro-democracy groups are in a structurally weaker position; while they want reform, they’re aware that there are other elements (fundamentalist Islamists) who would very happily take advantage of a weakened state to try and create their own non-democratic form of social order. Democratic activists are going to be highly cautious in trying to weaken their own government through international pressure; the alternative could be much worse (as witness Iran).

Furthermore, the kinds of multilateral intervention that allowed the CSCE to smooth the transition of many states in Eastern Europe to democracy are going to be tough to pull off in the Middle East. There isn’t the same inter-state consensus on democratic norms as there was in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This means that it’s highly unlikely that states in the region are really going to permit outside intervention to help solve internal problems - they haven’t signed up to it, nor are they going to do so unless they have very good reason.

These caveats stated, I suspect that the proposal would have a far better shot at success if it had a successful trial run in the one place where US policymakers are loath to go - Israel. For all its flaws, Israel is the one country in the region that approximates a real democracy. However, its internal tensions have demonstrably had a destabilizing effect on the region and helped corrupt autocrats elsewhere to shore up their rule. The US hasn’t had much success in intervening from outside, in large part because it isn’t a neutral actor in the conflict. A genuinely multilateral initiative to help solve the Israel-Palestine problem could help push both the Israelis and Palestinians into making some real concessions, while providing an external framework to help ensure that any agreement stuck, thus alleviating the fundamental problem of distrust between the two sides. I admit that I’m blue-skying here - but something along these lines seems more likely to succeed than either unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the bits that it doesn’t want, or a peace process supported by a US administration that is demonstrably better disposed towards the one side than the other.

1 Health warning - this article contains some heavygoing international relations jargon - unless you’re truly interested in turgid theoretical debates, you can skip large chunks of it.

February 06, 2004

No comment

Posted by John Quiggin

In the middle of a generally reasonable Newsweek article about the failure to find WMDs, I came across the following para

But if Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, why didn't he come clean? After all, he could have given U.N. inspectors free rein; he could have allowed them to interview all of his scientists in private—even outside the country—and let them rummage through his palaces. Faced with war, wasn't that the sensible option?
But, but ...(lapses into stunned silence)

Who are the Left?

Posted by John Quiggin

A number of posts in various places lately have raised the question "Who are the Left?". The ambiguity on this point goes all the way back to the origin of the term, when the Jacobins and their allies were seated to the left of the chair in the National Assembly while the conservatives sat on the right. From this beginning the term "Left" has been used to refer both to the more radical half of any political spectrum (arguably the natural interpretation, if the symmetry between left and right is to taken seriously) and to the conscious or unconscious heirs of Jacobinism, that is to revolutionary vanguard groups.

Update and concessionReading the comments, it's evident that I have not been as clear as I should have been about the way in which the term "Left" is used in the US, and that, even with clarification, there are problems with my argument. Rather than focusing on the Democratic Party, I should have looked at the term "liberal" which roughly encompasses the left side of the political spectrum in the US. My claim would then be that there is a sharp divide between liberals and the vanguard/Jacobin Left in the US which does not exist in other countries. I've certainly seen plenty of examples of this [try Googling "liberals and the left" to find some], but the comments thread shows lots of people treating the two as being part of the same spectrum, which contradicts my claim. So, to clarify, my comments suggesting that the US Left was characterized by reflexive opposition to US foreign policy were not meant to apply to anyone who would regard themselves as "liberal", with or without qualifications such as "left" Now read on

Outside the US, this hasn't usually created fundamental problems. Typically, the left half of the political spectrum has been represented in the political system by a nominally socialist party, coexisting with a range of more-or-less Jacobin groups which have mostly been excluded from political power. A whole string of qualifiers such as "moderate", "radical" and "extreme" have been used to distinguish different points on the spectrum.

If anything, the problems with the term "Left" have diminished in the last decade or so. Marxist-Leninist parties on the far left have largely disappeared or transformed themselves into social democrats. The idea of a "Third Way", which seemed to pose a radical challenge from the right wing of social democracy has largely fizzled - the crucial moment was the admission of the Blair-Brown government that taxes would have to go up to pay for better health care. Greens, for the most part, are mainstream leftists who choose to put more stress on the environment than others, and dislike the authoritarian structure of the larger left parties. Daniel's recent quip about Crooked Timber applies pretty accurately to the (non-US) left as a whole these days - opinion runs the gamut from social democrat to democratic socialist.

In the US, it's a completely different story. Obviously the left half of political opinion is represented by the Democratic Party, but neither their history nor their current views qualify the Democrats as "Left" in the sense in which the term is understood elsewhere. From the 1850s to the 1950s, and to some extent beyond, the Democrats were the defenders of slavery and segregation. Even disregarding this aspect of its history, the party is essentially an amalgam of the liberal, radical [in the 19th century sense] and populist parties that were overtaken, everywhere else, by the rise of the socialist/social democratic left. The usual fate of such parties was to split, with the resulting fragments being absorbed by the conservatives on one side and the socialists on the other.

In the US, the term "Left" therefore refers exclusively to groups and individuals whose approach is modelled on that of the Jacobins. Since the Democrats have the support of the organized working class locked up, the support base of the Left is almost exclusively petit-bourgeois, as was the case with the Jacobins, and the political approach is that of a group that has no realistic prospect of exercising power at any level, barring a catastrophic collapse of the existing order. This isn't entirely bad, since power inevitably involves sordid compromises and corrupt bargains, but on the whole the costs exceed the benefits.

Not everyone who has adopted this style of leftism is an American. Until his recent conversion (discussed below), Christopher Hitchens fitted tne mould pretty well and so, in a slightly different way, does Tariq Ali.

In domestic policy terms, there is little these days to distinguish the Jacobin Left except for a residual attachment to provocative rhetoric. Hardly anyone is seriously committed to the traditional central plank of Marxism-Leninism, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in the developed countries, or even to 1960s New Left visions of radical separatism for women, blacks and other oppressed groups. Particularly among the former New Left, postmodernism has played an important role in popularising the (always appealing) idea that a purely semantic radicalism is both necessary and sufficient for the maintenance of Left credentials. As far as defending traditionally socialist causes like public ownership and the welfare state is concerned, social democrats have been far more active than the Jacobin left.

The crucial distinctions arise in international policy. The central position of the US Left is opposition to US foreign policy whatever that may be. By contrast, the broad non-US left is generally aligned, as regards US foreign policy, with the left wing of the Democrats, such as it is. So most of the US Left was opposed to all of the recent uses of military force, from Kosovo to Liberia, with Iraq being seen as simply one more example of the inherent aggression of the US state. By contrast, most of the non-US left supported all of these interventions, with varying degrees of reluctance, until the war with Iraq came along. Both by its nature, and because it was a war of choice being pushed by the Bush Administration, most leftists opposed the Iraq war.

The pattern can even be seen in the choices of those who supported the Iraq war. The archetypal example of a Jacobin who broke with the Left to support the war is Christopher Hitchens. As the debate has proceeded he's moved more and more firmly into the Bush camp, pushing the party line on WMDs and pretty much silent these days about the Palestinians, whose cause he once embraced. Meanwhile, the general tendency on the broad left has been for those who on balance, supported the war to back away in the light of the predictable mess that Bush has made of things, while those who opposed it have generally sought to find some way of getting out without abandoning Iraq to chaos or a new dictatorship.

February 02, 2004

Blowing up pipelines

Posted by John Quiggin

This piece by William Safire alleges that the CIA was engaged in terrorist activity in Russia in the early 1980s, sabotaging a gas pipeline funded by Britain and Germany, and allegedly leading to its explosion.

Of course, Safire doesn’t use the word terrorism and regards the whole thing as a major victory in the Cold War, but we don’t need to use our imagination to see how the US would regard the same thing done in reverse - blowing up pipelines is one of the main terrorist activities of the Iraqi insurgents.

The sabotage was allegedly done by supplying defective computer chips of a type that were under embargo because of their supposed military use. I get the impression Safire thinks that this makes the deal OK and that it’s different from blowing up the pipeline with dynamite (but I can’t be sure of this).

Finally, I should add that the story sounds phony to me.

February 01, 2004

Unchangeable minds

Posted by John Quiggin

Among the famous quotes attributed to JM Keynes, one that stands out is

When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir
I am reminded of this whenever I read discussions of what was in the minds of those who pushed us into the Iraq war. It's regularly stated that the behavior of Saddam Hussein in obstructing weapons inspections led analysts to assume he had something to hide. I shared this view until late 2002, and was reinforced in this by the behavior of Bush and Blair, including the various dossiers they published and the push for UN Resolution 1441 - they acted like police who had their suspect dead to rights, and only needed a search warrant.

In November and December 2002, however, the facts changed. First Saddam announced that he would readmit UN inspectors, without restrictions on the sites to be inspected and that he would declare all his weapons. Then he proceeded to do just that, claiming to have no weapons at all. Meanwhile Bush and Blair suddenly started hedging about the nature of the knowledge they had declared. The same pattern proceeded right up to the outbreak of war. Time after time, some condition would be declared crucial by Bush and Blair (overflights, interviews with Iraqi scientists, out-of-country interviews with Iraqi scientists), the Iraqi government would agree after a brief delay and then new condition would be raised. As quite a few observers noted, the behavior was the same as that of the Austro-Hungarian government with respect to Serbia in 1914.

Given the change in facts, any unbiased observer would have concluded, correctly that the balance of probabilities favored the hypotheses Bush and Blair were bluffing and that there were no weapons of mass destruction in usable form. I drew precisely this conclusion at the time, though with the mistaken corollary that Blair would stick to his word and refuse to go to war once Saddam called their bluff.

If those facts weren't enough, it was obvious that, if Saddam did have weapons he would use them in the early days of war, preferably before Coalition troops had entered the country. Thus, it was apparent by the first days of the war that (with probability close to 1), there were no usable weapons. The fact that the contrary belief prevailed for so long is testament to the power of faith in the face of experience.

January 23, 2004

Conspiranoia

Posted by Daniel

Not often I admit this, but this Spectator article makes a lot of the points I’ve been trying to make myself on this issue rather better than I did. I’m not sure myself about whether or not the military-industrial complex is a red herring (I think that the defence procurement industry is too small to be as important as most conspiracy researchers think it is), but the rest is dead on. Thanks to the chaps at Slugger O’Toole for the link.

By the way, while we’re on the subject of defence procurement, why is it that every Army surplus shop in the world appears to have rack after rack of German army surplus shirts? Is this the result of a monumental purchasing error by the German Army or something?

January 15, 2004

Yet again Maher Arar

Posted by Henry

The Arar case has rightly attracted a lot of attention; Brian has already linked to Katherine’s great series on the subject at Obsidian Wings. Still, it seems to me that there’s one angle that hasn’t received enough attention in the US debate. The Bush administration aren’t the only bad guys in this story. It appears that elements in Canada’s RCMP leaked erroneous information to US authorities, which caused them to take a particular interest in Arar’s travel plans and activities. This points to a more serious underlying problem - the creation of more or less unaccountable networks involving and intelligence and law enforcement officials across different states. Indeed, without networks of this sort, the US wouldn’t have sent Arar to Syria to be tortured in the first place; US intelligence officials wouldn’t have had access to any information that he might have revealed.

Transgovernmental networks have been around for a while in various policy areas; a few years ago, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a highly relevant paper on the problems that they pose for democratic legitimacy. They’ve grown vastly more important - and more troubling in their implications - since then. Accountability disappears into a maze of shadowy relations between states - it becomes impossible to figure out who is to blame for any particular decision, and whom to hold responsible. Certainly, it has made it very difficult for Paul Martin to criticize the US; his officials seem to be engaged in a cover-up.

January 14, 2004

An important distinction

Posted by Chris

I quoted from the now notorious Benny Morris interview yesterday. Norman Geras has now posted some of his thoughts on the matters raised by the interview.

Perle and Frum

Posted by Chris

The Christian Science Monitor has a helpful summary of the main propositions advanced by Richard Perle and David Frum in a new book:

  1. France is really more an enemy than an ally of the US and that European nations must be forced to choose between Paris and Washington
  2. Muslims living in the US must be given special scrutiny by US law enforcement and other Americans
  3. The US must overthrow the regimes in Iran and Syria, and impose a blockade on North Korea
  4. Palestinians must not be allowed to have a state
  5. All Americans must carry a government issued identity card
  6. The US must explicitly reject the jurisdiction of the United Nations Charter.

It is reassuring to know that such lunatics could never achieve positions of power and influence.

Making an example out of them

Posted by Chris

Slate has a round-table entitled Liberal Hawks Reconsider the War with Jacob Weisberg, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria. It is definitely worth a look, though some of them are clearly smarter or more honest than others. Some of the reasons they advance for war are also better than others (with the human rights argument the strongest of all — whether conclusive or not). Thomas Friedman’s reasons, though, are indefensible, indeed criminal:

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the “terrorism bubble,” which had built up during the 1990s. This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as “martyrs,” and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it’s not very diplomatic—it’s not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

If I read that paragraph correctly, Friedman is advocating that a state kill people (including innocent people) for demonstrative purposes. He thereby shows complete disregard for the humanity and individuality of those who have died. It is a peculiar way to demonstrate the impermissibility of the very acts he deplores.

January 13, 2004

Germans in Afghanistan

Posted by Chris

A few months ago I had lunch with a US army officer who told me that the Germans were “basically running Afghanistan for us.” No doubt having the Germans in Afghanistan is somewhat useful when the US wants to get on with other projects. I was reminded of this when reading the latest egregious anti-European outpourings from the Victor Davis Hanson . The French come in for most of his venom, but the Germans get it too, and then this:

We are in a race for civilization like none other since World War II. And yet, due solely to the courage and skill of an amazing generation of American professional soldiers battling in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are winning — as this difficult war is beginning to resemble 1944 far more than 1939.

Such gratitude! No wonder Hanson Davis finishes by calling for

a much-needed honesty that will soon curtail both the deceitful rhetoric and hypocritical behavior that have insidiously warped us all in the West during the last 20 years.

Chris Brooke has another snippet on Hanson Davis .

Excusing or justifying genocide

Posted by Chris

I came across the following quote recently, the person uttering it is described by blogger Michael Totten as articulating a “moral dilemma” and the following words are uttered as part of the elaboration of that dilemma:

Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

Karl Marx expresses similar sentiments at the very end of his “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” (different Indians) but it isn’t him. And no, it isn’t Lenin or Stalin or Mao.

January 08, 2004

Rousseau in Palestine

Posted by Chris

Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian intellectual and former PLO representative — whose book Traditions of War reclaims a central place for Jean-Jacques Rousseau in thinking about the ethics and law of war and conflict — writes today in the Guardian about Rousseau, the Geneva accords and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Her piece points up a central problem in the politics of the Israeli—Palestinian conflict: for all the neoconservative rhetoric about the centrality of democracy to progress in the Middle East, the sort of Palestinian leaders with whom Bush and Sharon want to deal are very different from those who would emerge from democratized Palestinian institutions.

January 06, 2004

None Dare Call It Conspiracy

Posted by Daniel

It’s a common enough saying (and at least one of the CT collective, whose blushes I’ll spare, has endorsed it):

“If you have to choose between explaining something as a cock-up or a consipracy, choose cock-up every time”.

I’ve searched high and low for empirical evidence supporting this, but found rigorous studies to be surprisingly thin on the ground. Some people even go a bit further, suggesting that cock-up explanations rather than conspiracy explanations are correct 99 per cent of the time; I’ve found nothing to support this point estimate, still less any idea of what the confidence bounds on it are. What if the cock-up explanation was only right 75% of the time?

These thoughts and more were motivated by David Brooks’ recent column in the New York Times. I’m not going to link to it because I worry that the NYT editors might get the idea that Brooks is “wildly popular on the Net”, or “the columnist you love to hate - but can’t stop reading”, rather than a very mediocre pseud. In any case, I ended up concluding that I didn’t want to argue against him directly; anyone who thinks that

[..] Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day you read that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into Syria. Web sites appeared detailing neocon conspiracies; my favorite described a neocon outing organized by Dick Cheney to hunt for humans[1]. The Asian press had the most lurid stories; the European press the most thorough. Every day, it seemed, Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an exposé on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators.

The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles […]

is an honest or even a decent piece of political journalism, is unlikely to be convinced otherwise by anything I might have to say.

The heart of the issue is this; as Robert Anton Wilson noted, the English language is amply stocked with words to describe paranoia and irrational fear, but doesn’t have one single concise term to describe a rational fear of political persecution. Similarly, the journalistic lexicon is well stocked with phrases like “conspiracy theorist”, “moonbat” “tinfoil hat brigade” and so on, but if we were to want to turn our conversation toward discussion of the facts that people have political views, that people with similar political views tend to flock together, that groups of people with political views tend to want to influence the direction of policy, and that the process of influencing policy is usually most efficient if carried out in an organised manner … well then we would already find it powerfully difficult to describe our discussion to a third party without using terms which implied by their ordinary usage that we were in some way weird. If we then took the further step of noting that often people have political views which are unpopular enough with the general public that it is prudent for them not to publicly express those views, then we are certainly in the realm of consipracy theory.

Brooks appears to want to move the agenda further; he appears to believe that to explain organisational structures by drawing boxes and arrows is in some way a weird thing to do. I think he’s unlikely to recruit many people to the idea that good graphic design is a veiled form of anti-Semitism, but it is clear that he is right there with the general project of creating an environment in which it is impossible to express certain points of view without being undercut by the very words which you use to express them. Which, by the way, was the original point of Orwell’s NewSpeak, not the double-talking euphemism which people now use it to mean.

And so I offer a couple of suggestions as to how people of good will might help to avoid contributing to the hellward speed which of the handcart which appears to be carrying the English language as a tool of honest political debate:

a) First, let’s drop the lazy proverb about conspiracies and cock-ups. We have no idea how many political events are the result of consipracies and how many of cock-ups, and the definition of a conspiracy suggests that we don’t have any good way of finding out. I’d always invite anyone to consider how well this proverb would have performed in explaining the dataset “Changes of Government in African Countries, 1960-88”. Since the vast majority of these changes of government were coups d’etat, and a coup is by definition a conspiracy, it would seem on the face of it that a blanket estimate of 99% cock-ups is a poor choice of Bayesian prior.

b) Second, could I enlist the help of CT readers in rehabilitating the word “Tendency”? A “tendency” within a broader political group is like a conspiracy, but with less of an ontological commitment; if one says that there is a “Neoconservative Consipracy”, one is implicitly asserting the existence of an organisation, co-ordinated actions, a party line and intentional covertness. A “Neoconservative Tendency” within the apparatus of the US government might be a conspiracy, but might just be a group of people with similar beliefs, who appeared to be pushing things in the same direction. For analytical purposes at the level of political science, one can treat a tendency and a conspiracy in roughly similar ways, but asserting the existence of a tendency is a weaker claim (and usually all that it justified by the evidence anyway. It is perhaps ironic that the term was brought to fame by the “Militant Tendency” within the Labour Party in the 1980s, which was a conspiracy if anything was, but there ye go.

Remember, the history of the world is not the history of a small number of self-interested cliques, but it is often a useful analytical tool to treat it as if it were. Mind how you go.

[1] If you’re interested, the “Dick Cheney hunting humans” story almost certainly refers to David Icke’s website, to which I am also not going to link. Icke believes all sorts of things about Cheney, mainly because Icke is in the habit of assuming that everything he reads in print is true.

December 29, 2003

Hitchensian drift

Posted by Chris

History News Network has a discussion of whether Christopher Hitchens has sought to misrepresent his own reaction to 9/11 in the light of his subsequent political evolution (via Au Currant ). When the Guardian article Sean Wilenz descibes as “particularly sickening” (available here ) is re-read, I don’t think Hitchens has anything to be ashamed of or that there’s great inconsistency between what he said then and the positions he has adopted since. What has changed appreciably is Hitchens’s attitude to both the Bush administration and the Iraq war. On my old blog Junius, I linked on March 2 2002 to a Hitchens article in the Daily Mirror (subtitle: “On the peril of America’s muddled, ignorant hawks”) in which he attacks the Bush administration’s “axis of evil” approach and refers to “an overconfident superpower whose leaders appear to be making up foreign policy as they go along.” Hitchens has every right to change his mind about the issues of the day. What some of us find unsettling is the ease with which he is today able to denounce as lacking in moral intelligence people who agree with positions he himself spouted as recently as the spring of 2002.

December 19, 2003

Le Club De Paris

Posted by Daniel

Via Brad, I notice that what appears to have happened is that Iraq’s debt, so far from being forgiven by the French and Germans (shame really, just when I was looking forward to chastising American rightwingers for not giving credit where it was due), has been chucked into the Paris Club process. The what? Time for a mug’s guide, I think.

The Paris Club, as well as possessing a URL that a nightclub operator would kill for, is the informal body which deals with the restructuring of defaulted government-to-government debts. This is as opposed to the London Club, which doesn’t have a website at all, but is the informal body which deals with the restructuring of defaulted bank loans to governments. There is no informal body at all to deal with the restructuring of defaulted government debts in the form of bonds, although this is not for the wanting of wanting on the part of the official sector (the original reference on this, and still the best, is “Crisis? What Crisis?” by Richard Portes and I’m not just saying that because I was a research asssistant on it. Here’s an outline of Portes’ views and here’s a G10 report on the same subject which practically defines the phrase “dull but worthy”. Oh and another good Portes piece. There).

Anyway, the defining characteristic of Paris Club workouts is that they are slooooow. There are a number of reasons for this; the chief one is obviously that there is no urgency on the part of the creditors because it isn’t their crisis, but there are also institutional constraints. To understand the institutional constraints, it’s worth taking a look at the Paris Club principles

There’s five of them:

1) Debts are dealt with on a case-by-case basis, dependent on the individual circumstances of each debtor
2) The Paris Club works by consensus; no decision is taken unless there is unanimous agreement
3) Debts are only rescheduled given sufficient conditionality on domestic policy to ensure that the restructuring actually improves the prospects of the debtor. This usually means an IMF program.
4) Sounds obvious but isn’t; there is a principle of solidarity which ensures that members agree to actually implement the decisions of their Club representatives.
5) The Paris club has a comparable treatment principle; it only works on the basis that the debtor will not give any creditors a better deal than it agreed with the Paris Club. This is in order to ensure that the money put in by government creditors doesn’t just go straight out the door to some other class of creditor.

There are lots of other rules and conventions but these are the important ones. Of these, number 1 is a good thing; there are no hard and fast rules to get things stuck on a technicality, and it is considered bad form to make decisions based on possible precedent-setting. Number 4 is a good thing because its practical impact is that the people round the table in Paris actually have the power to get things done; there’s no dicky ratification process back home (democracy shmemocracy). Number 3 is a real pain in the arse because a) it ties countries into IMF programs which are often really badly designed for their purpose and b) it gives the IMF more negotiating leverage, because the IMF can hold out the prospect of scuppering the Paris Club talks in order to get a bit more cooperation.

Numbers 2 and 5 are the main reason that things take forever. The permanent members of the Paris Club are Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finaland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia[1], Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Brits and the USA. Try getting unanimous agreement out of that little lot in a hurry. Furthermore, the debtor for its own part has a dicey game in negotiating because it knows that principle 5 means that the Paris Club agreement sets the tone for the whole debt workout; if you get the Paris Club terms wrong in either direction, it means that you’re going to end up with an unworkable debt reduction proposal and go back to square one.

Principle 5 also makes the specific case of Iraq more complicated because it’s not just a matter of James Baker going round the world saying come on you stingy bastards and Chirac saying oh go on then. Now that the debt’s entered the Paris Club process, it’s no longer really an option for France or Germany to unilaterally forgive a chunk of debt (that’s presumably why they did it). The Paris Club is a good process for making sure that the eventual restructuring is a genuinely workable plan, and for minimising free-riding by creditors, but it’s more or less completely incompatible with the piecemeal, quick-win style approach which Baker appears to be taking.

Matters are complicated by the fact that any credible debt restructuring for Iraq has to include the Kuwaiti war reparations and the Saudi Arabian loans. That means that these two countries will probably need to be invited to come along as ad hoc members of the Club, adding yet another political unknown to the business. Principle 5 means that it doesn’t matter so much whether they’re in or out as anything the Paris Club agrees will have to be a deal that would also be acceptable to Kuwait and Saudi, but the fact is that they’re in, and everything the Kuwaitis in particular have indicated suggests that they are really quite averse to the idea of generous debt forgiveness.

It looks to me as if Iraqi debt forgiveness is going to be a really slow and difficult process if it continues along the Paris Club lines. I must say I’d really prefer it not to have gone the Paris Club route, because any damage done to the Paris Club in the political fallout from the Iraqi restructuring will tend to hurt poor nations in future. I don’t know who to blame for this latest development (I suspect Chirac), but I really wish they hadn’t done it.

[1] Russia a creditor country? WTF? Yeh, it’s basically to do with old Comecon debts.

December 15, 2003

Can't get no satisfaction

Posted by Maria

I hope we all savoured yesterday’s sweet taste of success. Because as far as Saddam is concerned, it may be the only satisfaction we get.

Saddam quickly followed his craven capitulation with an unleashing of the barely lucid, self-aggrandising rhetoric we’ve come to expect of him and his ilk. Defiant words and cowardly acts – nothing new there. But Saddam being captured alive means that now that the party is over, the U.S. has to figure out what to do with him. Tricky.

It seems obvious that the next steps are to question Saddam for intelligence purposes and then submit him to a tribunal where he will be made accountable for his deeds. President Bush signalled as much when he said that Saddam would “face the justice he denied to millions.” But the conduct of the war on terror, which blends law enforcement and intelligence gathering in a way that undermines due process, will make forcing Saddam to take responsibility for his actions more difficult than one might expect.

First, let’s look at intelligence gathering. There is unanimous agreement that good intelligence gathering and analysis, focusing on human intelligence rather than signals intelligence, were primarily responsible for the capture of Saddam. Now that he is in custody, the U.S. will rightly want to squeeze Saddam dry of every last scrap of information. WMD information would be nice, but what’s really needed are the goods on the resistance movement. Cutting off the figurehead is a very good start, but the capture or defeat of the resistance leaders is an essential condition for the success of state-building in Iraq.

But intelligence is not just about what you know, but who knows it, and who you know knows it. (Or, as Rumsfeld might say, it’s about limiting the ‘unknown knowns’.) That’s why the internees at Guantanamo Bay are languishing without due process or even the hope of it (as I’ve blogged before). You can’t squeeze your subject dry of information and then let them go and tell others what they’ve told you. Or at least, you hang on to them for a very, very long time, until they can do you and your intelligence operatives and sources no harm. The last thing you want to do, while a military campaign is still going, is give your prime intelligence source a soap box to the world in the form of an international tribunal.

Now let’s look at what a tribunal might involve. It requires first and foremost the collection of evidence and reliable witnesses. Evidence is not the same as intelligence. Much damning intelligence may have to be concealed, because it would be too damaging or risky to reveal. Evidence also requires a pedigree or audit trail; it can’t be vouch-safed on a tip-off from Saddam’s third cousin once removed. What is good enough intelligence to find someone hiding down a spy hole, or order the policing of a no-fly zone, will not necessarily stand up as evidence to convict a genocidal maniac. (Which is not at all to say that it can’t be done – it’s just a lot trickier and more time-consuming than we might think.) Hopefully, Saddam’s capture will encourage many potential witnesses to come forward, but again, the sifting and weighing of their testimony will be difficult and will take time. Some may be better used as intelligence sources than trotted out in public to convict Saddam.

The needs of a successful intelligence-gathering operation and those of due process are contradictory. Justice is rules-governed – process and procedure are everything. Intelligence operations are purely outcome-oriented. Different people, different rules. I don’t at all envy the people who have to decide just how long to question Saddam for, and when and how to conduct a tribunal. How to satisfy the righteous anger of the Iraqi people with the administration’s imperatives in current and future operations?

Then there’s the shape of the tribunal itself. Iraq’s judicial institutions are clearly not yet up to the job, and its neighbours won’t be much help either. Sending Saddam to the Hague would be politically unpalatable in the U.S. and would deny the Iraqi people their chance to see justice be done. But a purely U.S.-led initiative would be a disaster in terms of credibility, and let rip a million conspiracy theories throughout the Arab world. Given the split in the UN Security Council, and the U.S.’s unwillingness to share the spoils of war with its un-supportive allies, it will find it hard to involve the UN. Yet somehow, under some institutional aegis, an international tribunal will be cobbled together.

What of the admissible subject matter for such a tribunal? The neo-cons would love to use the process to expose France and Russia’s commercial involvement with Saddam’s regime. But back when Saddam was gassing the Shi’ites and the Kurds, the country was full of Americans doing business, not all of it clean. Dig too deep in Iraq, and the resulting oil gush will smear everyone.

But let’s say that a tribunal of sorts is set up in Iraq, and the show goes on. What do we think we can really get from Saddam? Some humiliation? An apology? A death sentence maybe.

But the planet is crawling with unrepentant mass-murders. Just ask the Cambodians. (Or the Chileans, or the Burmese, or the Chechens, or the Kurds in just about every country they’ve ever lived in.) All we will get out of Saddam is the same, chilling madman’s logic that put him where he is today. Beneath the pan-Arab nationalism, the quasi-socialist rhetoric, and the Ba-athist ideology, there’s nothing more than a motiveless malignity.* There’s no satisfaction to be had, because there’s no ‘there’ there.

But yes, I do hope the U.S. garners intelligence from Saddam that helps to eliminate the resistance attacks. And I do hope the tribunal somehow manages to get it right, and that its conduct and outcome help the Iraqi people through the process of building a functioning, democratic state.

After the party comes the hangover. The world is arguably safer today than it was two days ago, but none too cheery for that.

  • For more Shakespearian comparisons, read John Holbo.

Implications

Posted by John Quiggin

Saddam’s capture has all sorts of implications.

The biggest is that it will greatly accelerate the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. This is obvious enough if the resistance fades away and large numbers of troops aren’t needed. But suppose this doesn’t happen. It’s hard to see the US public putting up with a continued stream of casualties when the main objectives on which they were sold the war have either been achieved (get Saddam) or proved illusory (WMDs). The instant reaction Good. Can we go home now, is going to be fairly widely shared as time goes on.

On the Iraqi side, as Juan Cole points out, this will only strengthen the Shia demand for proper elections and a US withdrawal. Now that the fear of Saddam’s return is gone, the dependence of a future Iraqi government on the US is significantly reduced. Shias might well judge that they could do a better (because more ruthless) job of suppressing the insurgency on their own.

Next, there’s the trial. The big issue is not so much whether Saddam will get a ‘fair’ trial as whether he will want to, and be permitted to, bring evidence of Western (particularly US) complicity in his worst crimes, committed during the 1980s.

Next, there’s the question of the extent to which Saddam’s capture justifies the war. Obviously, it’s a better outcome than Saddam remaining at large. And it makes it easier to argue that despite the (uncounted) thousands of Iraqi deaths in the war and its aftermath, Iraqis are, on balance better off. But the huge amounts of money, military power and political capital expended on this war, and the breaches of international law it required, need more justification than that. If the same resources had been allocated to implementing, say, the proposals of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, millions of lives could have been saved. Even spent on improvements to health in the US, the war budget could have saved around 10 000 lives. From a less utopian viewpoint, if more military and economic resources had been allocated to Afghanistan, and more political capital to North Korea, everyone in the West would be significantly safer at the end of 2003 than at the beginning. Instead, the threat from North Korea is substantially worse. If Al Qaeda is less of a threat than before, this is due to its own criminal folly in attacking fellow-Muslims and not to the Iraq war or to wise handling of postwar Afghanistan.

Finally, there’s the political implications, particularly for the US election. Obviously these favor Bush, but the time when Iraq could have been a winner on its own has already passed. I don’t think Saddam’s capture gives the Democrats a good reason to switch from Dean. The crucial issue in 2004 won’t be a retrospective judgement on Iraq but the problem of preventing complete fiscal collapse. By taking a firm stand on Iraq, Dean has heightened the credibility of his pledge to fully repeal the Bush tax cuts, which is the minimal basis for a policy that will have any chance of success. The only other major candidate to pledge full repeal is Gephardt, who has vacillated on the war, and therefore seems likely to do so again when his tax policy comes under pressure.

Ozymandias

Posted by John Quiggin

From almost any viewpoint, including that of opponents of the war such as myself, the capture of Saddam Hussein, represents good news, made better by the ignominy of his surrender. When the Iraq war and its justifications , spurious and otherwise, are forgotten, the image of the great dictator being dug out of the hole in which he had hidden will remain, along with the inglorious ends of Mussolini, Hitler, Ceausescu, and others, as a warning to those who might plan to follow the same path.

December 14, 2003

Captured dictators

Posted by Henry

Atrios has further thoughts on Hussein’s capture - as he says, the capture of Hussein doesn’t change the fact that this was a war of choice, and was a mistake. But he then says

it isn’t clear he’s any worse of a guy than some of the folks who are a part of our “Coalition of the Willing.”

which I find quite unconvincing. Even as squalid dictators go, Hussein was quite spectacularly nasty. I don’t know how many other rulers in recent history have deployed poison gas against their civilian population. Hussein’s capture is cause for unalloyed good cheer.

Iraq, Saddam and 9/11

Posted by Chris

Great news that mass-murdering dictator Saddam Hussein has been captured in Tikrit . With any luck the Iraqi people will get to try him for his crimes against them over so many years. One thing he won’t be charged with, tried for, or convicted of is involvement with 9/11, despite some reports in today’s Sunday Telegraph from the if-you-believe-that-you’ll -believe-anything department. As one of the two pieces says:

For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.

Leaving out the “appears almost”, I’d agree with that. And it gets better …

In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta “displayed extraordinary effort” and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be “responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy”.

The second part of the memo, which is headed “Niger Shipment”, contains a report about an unspecified shipment - believed to be uranium - that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.

In next week’s episode Instapundit excitedly links to an article alleging the discovery of a Post-it apparently connecting Jacques Chirac, Noam Chomsky and Stavro Blofeld to a Cuban bioweapons project….

[UPDATE: This should really have been two separate posts - I had started writing on the absurd Torygraph story when the news of Saddam’s capture came through and ended up adding to the beginning. But the effect on some readers of my combining the two things may be to suggest that I’m somewhat grudging in my reaction to the tyrant’s arrest. I’m not — it really is great news.]

December 10, 2003

The Anti This War Now Left

Posted by Daniel

I’ve put up a post on my other weblog on the general subject of anti-war leftishness. I’ve put it over there rather than on CT because it’s fair to say that there are a number of different schools of thought among CT contributors on the general subject of war, and it seems unfair to use the CT brand for views that not everyone might stand behind. Cheers.

Update: And now I’m going to hang it on the reasonably topical peg of this Christopher Hitchens interview.

December 08, 2003

Worth reading

Posted by Henry

Ken MacLeod’s long essay on the pro- and anti-war left. (via Norman Geras).

December 06, 2003

Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy

Posted by Henry

Extracts from a piece in today’s NYT

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in. …

“If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” coaxed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.” The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side, an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger. “I see no difference between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.” …

Underlying the new strategy, the Americans say, is the conviction that only a tougher approach will quell the insurgency and that the new strategy must punish not only the guerrillas but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating. “You have to understand the Arab mind,” Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. “The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.” …

“With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them,” Colonel Sassaman said.

Preferential Voting

Posted by Brian

I know this makes sense given the way votes are counted in Australia, but it’s still a very odd paragraph.

In a fascinating glimpse of the immediate reaction to Mr Latham as Opposition Leader, voters elevated Labor to pole position with 42 per cent of the primary vote, compared to 45 per cent for the Liberals. (Sun-Herald 7 December.)

I’m not so upbeat about the poll though. Latham’s entire campaign strategy seems to involve focussing on western Sydney and hoping the rest of the country doesn’t mind being relatively ignored. If he still can’t win the primary vote in western Sydney, the results in, say, regional Victoria could be brutal.

December 03, 2003

What's NATO there for

Posted by Henry

It’s my impression that the warbloggers have gone rather quiet in recent weeks, which I suppose is the best available alternative to admitting that they were wrong on the facts of the matter. Iraq is at best going to be a mess, and at worst a complete disaster. Democracy, whiskey, sexy how are ya. But the damage that has been done to international security institutions is just as bad. The UN’s crisis of legitimacy has gotten most attention, but NATO has suffered very nearly as much. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost. The Post has a piece today on Rumsfeld’s reaction to a plan for a separate European Union defence planning structure; he suggests it’s a threat to NATO. He’s right - but his own administration has done far more more fundamental damage to NATO, by sidelining it after September 11. NATO no longer has any political purpose for the allies; it’s no wonder that the Europeans are gradually extricating themselves.

What was NATO good for in the first place? The best account of NATO’s origins that I know of is John Ikenberry’s book, After Victory. Ikenberry argues that NATO and the other post-WWII institutions had the purpose of underpinning credible commitments between the US and its allies. The US had an incentive to create a post-war order that would lock in its interests, but had to persuade a fractious bunch of allies, which were fearful of US power, to sign up. The best way to do this was to create institutions such as NATO, which would credibly commit the US to pay some attention to its allies’ wants and needs, rather than riding roughshod over them. And NATO worked - it provided a basic security guarantee that underpinned the transatlantic relationship for half a century.

The Bush administration has effectively trashed this relationship. When NATO invoked Article 5 (the mutual defence clause) after September 11, for the first time in NATO’s history, the US politely thanked its allies, and went on to make its plans without them. It had decided that ad-hoc coalitions were more flexible and useful than operations planned through NATO. This may have made logistic sense, but it notably excluded the allies from any real role in the decision-making process. Which was indeed the point; the US saw them as being more of an encumbrance than a help. NATO has been relegated to dishwasher-in-chief; managing peacekeeping operations, ensuring the interoperability of military equipment and the like. The Bush administration has only been interested in NATO’s political dimension when it could be used to constrain its allies, for example, by forcing them to shore up Turkey in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It certainly hasn’t shown any willingness to be constrained by NATO itself. NATO’s most important political mission - maintaining trust between the US and its allies, through a US commitment to take heed of its allies’ interests - is moribund.

Thus, it’s no surprise that the Europeans have started to create their own structures - or that Britain has been dragged along with the rest of the EU. As matters stand, there’s precious little advantage, and many disadvantages for the Europeans in NATO. The current administration sees NATO as a useful way of disciplining its allies, but is notably unwilling to submit to any discipline itself. This is why the Europeans are balking, and France has been able to get its way in creating the nucleus of a separate European defence structure. Rumsfeld and his mates are finding out that a-la-carte alliance-building has its costs for US power. But they’re finding out too late - and there’s not much that they can do about it.

Update: Fareed Zakaria’s op-ed speaks eloquently to the broader problem of US policy towards its allies.

What is most dismaying about this state of affairs is that for the past 50 years the United States has skillfully merged its own agenda with the agendas of others, creating a sense of shared interests and values. When Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy waged the Cold War, they also presented the world with a constructive agenda dealing with trade, poverty and health. They fought communism with one hand and offered hope with the other. We have fallen far from that model if the head of the Chinese Communist Party is seen as presenting the world with a more progressive agenda than the president of the world’s leading democracy.

This is not about leftwing criticism of US foreign policy or the Bush administration (although heaven knows, there’s room for that too). This is about US policy materially damaging long-term US interests.

November 21, 2003

Bleating nonsense

Posted by Henry

I was going to blog on James Lilek’s disgusting response to Salam Pax. But Dan Drezner has beaten me to it.

Yesterday's bombings

Posted by Chris

Assuming that Al Quaida or one of their sub-franchises were behind the recent bombings in Turkey, I’m amazed at some of the writing on the subject in today’s Guardian: especially the leader and Polly Toynbee.

The leader :

The use of force in Iraq, now enshrined as a governing principle by Mr Bush, invited a highly aggressive response. That response is in progress. The whirlwind is being reaped.

Toynbee :

These bombs made yesterday one of the darkest days of Tony Blair’s prime ministership. As if that horror were not enough, too many other disparate pigeons came fluttering home to roost at once. Whichever way he turned, things looked black. They were no mere accidents, for everything that happened came as a direct result of his own decisions, all of them taken against the better instincts of most of his party.

The “war or terror” may have been prosecuted in a stupid way. The Iraq war — nothing to do with the war on terror — may have stoked up Arab resentment against the West. These are reasonable subjects for serious argument. But these writers help themselves quickly, easily and cheaply to the claim that the bombings are a direct consequence of US and British policy since September 11th. To which there are two obvious ripostes. First (an argument too often deployed for rhetorical effect but, I think, applicable here) the bombers set out to do what they did deliberately and intentionally and were not forced to kill and maim many innocent people by Bush or Blair. Second, Al Quaida’s bombing campaign long pre-dates the current US and British governments — remember those East African embassies — and would plausibly have continued with or without the “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq.

November 20, 2003

Istanbul

Posted by Chris

Terrible, terrible news from Turkey (for the second time in a few days).

November 17, 2003

Terror and civil liberties

Posted by Chris

The Constitutions, Democracy and the Rule of Law symposium is online at Columbia. I’ve only listened to some of the October 17th proceedings: specifically Jerry Cohen’s “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Blame the Terrorists?” which argues that those who put terrorists in the position that they can only use morally unacceptable means thereby disqualify themselves from complaining about the the morally unacceptable acts terrorists then perform. (Thanks to Lwandile Sisilana for email about this.)

[Since my purspose here is merely to link to an interesting item and not to comment myself or to start a debate on CT, I‘m going to disable comments — a policy I intend to use in similar link-only items on a selective basis.]

November 14, 2003

Mary Kaldor on Iraq

Posted by Chris

Mary Kaldor (an opponent of the war) has an interesting piece on Iraq on OpenDemocracy . One of her observations concerns the extent to which both the neo-cons and the Democrats are fixated on how it all plays “back home” :

When I was in the CPA offices in the palace, the Green Zone was hit by mortar fire and we were evacuated to the basement. There, some of the American officials were overheard discussing how ‘the Democrats’ would play it back home, with their eyes on the election not the current situation in Iraq.

and

Third, there is a presidential election coming up in America. Some people want America to fail in Iraq so that George W. Bush will lose the election. This kind of thinking prioritises domestic US concerns above the fate of Iraqis. It is as sick as the preoccupations of the Republicans in the CPA about ‘how will this play in the election?’ No one should support the military opposition to America. And there should be no immediate withdrawal of US troops until a framework for democracy is established.

The other, more signicant, part of the article concerns the opposite strategies that the Americans and the British are employing in their zones of control. For the Americans:

The neo-con aim is to impose an American model of ‘free-market democracy’ (to quote a CPA official). The Americans have a strategic plan for rapid implementation of this model, and want it achieved, with luck, before the 2004 Presidential election. They have specified the milestones to be achieved in this process – the ‘seven steps to good governance’. Their recipe, like many transition recipes, involves wiping the slate clean through the destruction of existing institutions – hence the dismantling of the army, the Bremer decree on de-Ba’athification which removed many qualified people from key positions, and plans for the rapid privatisation of state institutions.

The British approach on the other hand

… involves the handover of power either to the political parties dominated by exiles, or to tribal and religious leaders who became more important during the Saddam period. …..In many cases, the British have made deals with these groups. This may have narrowed the security vacuum and reduced the space for the remnants of the regime. But the risk is that they will transform these governorates into repressive fiefdoms, with a disregard for the rule of law and a high risk of tribal and religious violence as each tries to carve out territories.

November 07, 2003

Inside Iraq

Posted by Chris

Yahia Said’s account at OpenDemocracy of his return to Iraq is worth a look.

November 06, 2003

Incompetence in Iraq

Posted by Chris

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who was in a position to know the reality of what is happening inside Iraq. He painted a gloomy picture of poor preparation (or rather no preparation) for the period after the military defeat of the Iraqi army, of Iraqi attitudes ranging from entrepreneurial friendliness to outright hostility, and of a US army which may be good at warfighting but is utterly incompetent when it comes to peacekeeping. Max Hasting, veteran military correspondent and a man of decidely conservative political views has a piece in the Spectator which essentially corroborates this picture. Hastings reports that the British military are very angry indeed with the Bush administration.

Some of my friends were in favour of this war, and some were against it. Among those in favour there is a tendency to see all gloomy news from Iraq as simply anti-war propaganda. But that’s an absurd view if the gloomy news is an accurate reflection of what is going on. Rationally, those who favoured the war on humanitarian grounds should be all the more angry if its execution has been incompetent.

Here’s a couple of paragraphs from Hastings:

It is no good for British supporters of George Bush to accuse his critics of anti-Americanism. It is a plain statement of the facts that the allies are today in a dreadful mess in Iraq, as a direct consequent of culpable blunders by Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their friends, who understand everything about American military power and nothing about the human behaviour of societies other than their own.

They were told again and again, long before the war, that Iraqi celebration and gratitude for the fall of Saddam would last five minutes, to be followed by a huge requirement for troops to maintain security, and vociferous Iraqi demands to make the sewage system work. In 1945, the Germans and the Japanese did not show themselves penitent, but they knew that they were defeated, and abased themselves accordingly. The Iraqis, however, have been told that they are not enemies, but victims. In consequence, they are today behaving with the extravagant petulance of all other paid-up members of the compensation culture. They treat the allies as if they were political leaders who have failed to deliver on election promises.

November 03, 2003

Comment dites-vous "Boycott"?

Posted by Daniel

News in from Reuters that despite the French being Old Europeans, obstructionists, allies of Saddam Hussein and French, the American wine consumer has a touch more common sense than the American weblogger. According to the CIVB, the Conseil Interprofessionel du Vin de Bordeaux, there was a 77% increase in the value of Bordeaux wines sold to the USA in 2002-03. This is most likely because a) the dollar has fallen and CIVB measures in euros and b) the 2000 vintage has been released, and is by all accounts pretty sensational (christ knows it’s unlikely to be because of this cheesy marketing site), but even so, the Americans overtook the Germans this year as the biggest export market for the Bordelais.

Onivins, the state agency for the wine trade as a whole, confirms that this trend is being seen across the French wine industry. Although the volume of exports to the USA fell by 3%, the value increased by a healthy 35% in the first half of ‘03, better than anywhere in the world except Australia. I suppose that you could rescue hysterical predictions made earlier in the year by claiming that the traitorous upper-class liberal transnational progressivists had upped their purchases of Lafite and Petrus because they hate America, while Joe SixPack had boycotted the unearhtly EU-subsidised hellbroth that pours out of Languedoc. But it seems pretty straw-clutching.

(Big up to Sadly, no! for sterling work on this story, by the way.)

[EDIT]: Oh god you’ve just got to check out the CIVD marketing website. It’s hysterical.

November 01, 2003

Being occupied

Posted by Chris

I very much hope that the US (and British) occupation of Iraq is a success, that peace will soon prevail, that a stable civilian administration is soon installed, that democratic institutions take root and that the Iraqi people enjoy a prosperous and uneventful future. That said, I’ve long thought that when people in or supportive of the Bush administration point to the experience of postwar Germany as suggestive of what can be achieved, there is some rather desperate flailing around for historical parallels going on. Good then to see some reflections on this from someone with a degree of historical, political and sociological insight who actually experienced the allied occupation of Germany: namely, Ralf Dahrendorf .

October 28, 2003

War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength.

Posted by Kieran

Bush Says Attacks Are A Sign of U.S. Progress.

Criteria for identifying a lack of progress to follow. Presumably will not include “fewer attacks.” (Via Billmon.)

October 23, 2003

What's left of the Israeli left?

Posted by Chris

I heard an interesting paper last year from Yael Tamir which stressed what a good predictor class is of party allegiance in Israel. Things there are “the wrong way round”, though, with the workers voting for the right. So I was interested to read this Ian Buruma piece from the Guardian on the Israeli left, and what remains of it.

October 21, 2003

Krugman on Mahathir

Posted by Daniel

Presumably the Gentile AntiSemitism Police will be all over this latest from Krugman, in which (as Chris did yesterday), he takes time out from saying that Mahathir Mohammed is a Very Bad Person [1] to have a think about Islamic politics. To be honest, I think Krugman’s case is pretty weak; I don’t think that the US has offered “unconditional support” to Ariel Sharon [2] and I don’t believe that anti-Semitic rhetoric would be any less of a crowd-pleaser in Malaysia if they didn’t. Christ, Krugman’s to the left of me on this one; I feel all funny. But it’s interesting, not least because Krugman did a lot of consultancy work in Malaysia around the last time Mahathir was ranting about Jewish speculators [3] and knows whereof he speaks.

[1] Which he isn’t; he’s an authoritarian and a bigot for sure, but by the standards of the region, he’s pretty good.
[2] Also an authoritarian and a bigot, and probably a war criminal to boot, but probably once more a mistake to blame him personally for ethnic and economic forces which would still be there whoever was in charge.
[3] Although his actual support for Mahathir in 1998 was a lot more lukewarm than he implies; he floated the idea of capital controls and deserves credit for that, but was actually much more ambivalent about the specific Mahathir plan. Note from the article too that his analysis of “crony capitalism” is much more nuanced these days.

October 19, 2003

The Micropolitics of Melbourne Cafe Society

Posted by Kieran

We go into Trotters on Lygon St (highly recommended, by the way). It’s busy, there’s only one free table, and the middle-aged guy next to it has to tidy up the paper he’s annotating so we can sit down. I’m chatting away to my (American) other half, possibly about the talk she gave at Melbourne Uni yesterday. Messy paper guy gets slightly agitated. He takes a few more notes, rummages in his bag and produces a copy of Why Do People Hate America?, apparently on general principle. It doesn’t seem relevant to his note-taking. He leaves it on display on our side of the table. He doesn’t make eye-contact.

October 09, 2003

Dworkin on the "war on terror"

Posted by Chris

Via Larry Solum , I see Ronald Dworkin’s Rights and Terror (pdf). Dworkin provides both a useful catalogue of the Bush administration’s restrictions on the rights of both citizens and non-citizens of the US since September 11th. He concedes that many of those detained fail to fit into the models provided either by the traditional laws of war or the criminal law. It is incumbent on us, therefore, to think through what justice requires in this new situation. The Bush administration, though, has not done so.

The Bush administration and their supporters say that a new structure, which they call a new balance, is necessary. But they propose not a new structure but none at all: they assume the privileges of both models and the constraints of neither.

October 06, 2003

Guantanamo

Posted by Chris

I tuned into the BBC’s Panorama last night, which consisted of an investigation into Camp Delta at Guantanamo and also the conditions under which detainees are held in Afghanistan itself. Whilst Panorama can be a sensationalist programme with a definite agenda, the specific allegations made can’t easily be wished away or dismissed as biased or malicious. Many of these are familiar to people, but I was sufficiently engaged by the broadcast to want to rehearse them here. I’m going from my memory of the programme, so I may have missed some details. The points raised included:

That numbers of people have been detained in Guantanamo after being denounced by their enemies and business rivals as a means of settling petty scores. (When the baselessness of the charges against them became clear, they were simply dumped back in Afghanistan to pick up their lives as best they could.)

That people have been arrested and handed over to the US in other sovereign states (Pakistan, the Gambia, and Bosnia) and have been denied habeas corpus and other remedies available in the legal systems of those countries.

That those detained in Guantanamo have no clear legal status and are denied access to the legal remedies available either in international law or US law. This as a result of the fact that the US will not recognize them as POWs and uses the fact that Guantanamo is in Cuba (though wholly under US control) to deny them access to the US courts.

That the prospect of trials under US military procedure with right of appeal only to the President of the US (who has already publicly declared the detainees to be “bad people”) is a breach of the human rights of the detainees and of natural justice. (And some of the trials under these flawed procedures may issue in the death penalty.)

That conditions in Camp Delta, confined to cages, punished for talking to one another, subject to lights all night long, and without news or the prospect of have cases determined in the foreseeable future, places intolerable stresses on the inmates. This may amount to torture, legally speaking. There have been over 30 suicide attempts in Guantanamo.

Children as young as 13 are held in Guantanamo.

That if Camp Delta is bad, detention in Afghanistan is worse, that detainees there may not get access to the Red Cross at all, that there have been deaths certified as “homicide” by US military doctors and that those deaths do not appear to be being vigorously investigated.

Representatives of the US government who appeared on the programme defended these methods and procedures on the basis that the United States needs to defend itself against international terrorism. So it does. But it is manifestly obvious that the ways in which these detentions fall short of what is required by international law and by the human rights of the detainees cannot be justified by the right of self defence. For example, to give these people proper access to legal representation, to try them according to procedures that meet minimal standards or fairness and to give them the expectation that all of this would happen within a reasonable timescale would hardly threaten the national security of the US or of any other country involved in the Afghan coalition.

Both liberals and libertarians affirm a universality of basic rights: rights pertain to humans as such. Many of people who think of themselves as liberal or libertarian supported the war in Afghanistan partly in the name of that universalism. One of the consequences of that universalism has to be that we also champion the human rights of our enemies, and of those who seek to destroy us. That said, numbers of those in Guantanamo may not be our
enemies at all, just the victims of vengeful neighbours who coveted their shop, their house or their farm.

Israel Bombs Syria

Posted by Kieran

For the first time since 1973, Israel has attacked targets in Syria. The attacks were in response to the most recent suicide bomb attack in Haifa. According to CNN, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. described the attack as a “measured defensive operation” aimed at destroying a training camp run by Islamic Jihad. Syria denies the camp was a terrorist base. It was certainly inside Syria, though — about 14 miles from Damascus. I don’t have much to say about this, other than to ask whether better-informed people than me think this is going to escalate Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside of Israel and the Occupied Territories.

September 11, 2003

Two Septembers

Posted by Chris

I was not surprised that the newspaper which carried a column including the lines “A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully” in the aftermath of September 11th 2001, should head its comment page two years on with a reference to September 11th 1973. The message the Guardian thereby seeks to convey is that what happened in New York two years ago is nothing special, and has to be seen in the context of US responsibility for other crimes against humanity.

After September 11th 2001, I was, like many other people, disgusted by the various statements made in the Guardian, New Statesman, London Review of Books and elsewhere, to the effect that the victims somehow got what they deserved, shouldn’t really be considered innocent and so on. I said so at the time, and then later on my blog, Junius, and then in a paper I wrote on the war in Afghanistan. When, as liberal or a leftist, you make such points, you get a good deal of approbation from the conservative and libertarian parts of the blogosphere. The sentiment being “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.” It is nice to be praised, to be considered part of the “decent left” and a “non-idiotarian”. While I may flatter myself that I’m not especially susceptible to flattery, I know that I’m not exactly immune to it either.

I don’t want to take back one word of what I’ve written about September 11th 2001. I feel just as repelled by the Pilgers, Pinters and Alis today as I did then. Their world view is not mine. But I also, remembering September 11th 1973, feel somewhat dirtied by some of the praise I received from the right-hand-side of the blogosphere. I’ve read recently a certain amount of blogospheric comment on Chile, often highly critical of the Allende regime. I don’t have the knowledge or the expertise to evaluate Allende’s economic policies, and I’m sure that many of his political choices were wrong or unwise. But no explanation of the context, and not examination of the “root causes” of the Pinochet coup can justify or excuse the

3,197 cases of victims of ‘disappearances’, extrajudicial execution and death resulting from torture under military rule. [A] figure that does not include the thousands of victims of torture who survived their ordeal. (Amnesty)

There can be a “decent left”, that sees September 11th 2001 as the crime against humanity that it was, a crime that no amount of context or explanation can excuse or mitigate. But I’d rather not be told how decent I am by anyone disposed to excuse September 11th 1973 and its aftermath.

Dual Citizenship

Posted by Brian

Jacob Levy argues that one of the costs of dual citizenship is that it may give too much electoral power to overseas voters. This is only a serious problem if all non-resident citizens have voting rights, and that isn’t a universal feature of modern democracies. In Australia, if I’ve read the rules correctly, the only non-residents allowed to vote are those out of the country for under 6 years. (And the only non-residents who can enrol are those who have been away for less than 2 years and are away for work-related reasons.) I don’t know what the rules are for other countries (those rules aren’t quite as relevant to me, so I’ve never had need to learn them) but if they are at all similar Jacob’s quite reasonable concern is already being addressed.

UPDATE: Don’t get electoral law advice from me! As Alan from Southerly Bluster notes in the comments, an overseas Australian can keep voting after being out of the country for 6 years provided s/he keeps enrolling every year. And it looks like the law will be amended soon in order to remove even that constraint. Part of my initial point still remains. We can in principle allow dual citizenship without having the worry Jacob alludes to by having residency restrictions on voting. If that was the only reason for not wanting dual citizenship, there is a workaround. But the (only!) data point I drew on in arguing that was mistaken. Much thanks to Alan for pointing me to the relevant bit of the law here.

September 06, 2003

Meacher flips

Posted by Chris

There’s no real need to comment on Michael Meacher’s ravings about 9/11, but the BBC report (as currently displayed - I’m sure they’ll fix it) contains the following:

Mr Meacher told the Today programme he was a conspiracy theorist and said he was simply “in favour of giving people the facts”.

UPDATE: They’ve now inserted the “not”.

September 05, 2003

Why does the Bush administration hate the world's poor?

Posted by Chris

Glenn Reynolds asks

“WHY DOES THE EUROPEAN UNION hate the world’s poor so much?”

and links to a Guardian article about Franz Fischler’s rejection of demands from poor countries that the Common Agricultural Policy be reformed. Fair enough, it should be: Europe should abandon its protectionist policies that, as Glenn says, harm the poor. But a more thorough reading of the same article would have led him to this paragraph:

Washington and Brussels have tabled a joint proposal on agriculture that would involve far smaller cuts in protectionism than developing countries want. The proposal has been countered by a blueprint from leading developing countries that would involve far more aggressive reductions.

A joint proposal then? So it isn’t just those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys after all.

September 01, 2003

Kinds of Quagmires

Posted by Kieran

In some quarters, using the word “quagmire” to describe the emerging position of the U.S. in Iraq provokes yells of rage, snarklets of glibness, or even reasoned objections. It’s fair to say that optimists like the OxBloggers have convincingly rebutted the main comparisons that have been made to Vietnam. The United States isn’t going to be losing about a hundred troops a week in an ongoing war of attrition against a dug-in enemy with strong local support. But there are other ways to get stuck in the mud.

John McCain’s recent piece in the Washington Post calls for an urgent injection of military and civil personnel devoted to rebuilding Iraq:

[Ambassador L. Paul Bremer’s] operation is nearly broke, and he admits Iraq will need “tens of billions” of dollars for reconstruction next year alone. … [C]ontrary to administration assurances, our military force levels are obviously inadequate. A visitor quickly learns in conversations with U.S. military personnel that we need to deploy at least another division. … as well as a significant increase in civilian experts in development and democracy-building.

More troops now, more money now, and nation-building for the long haul. This is the emerging consensus across much of the political spectrum, left and right. We’ve come a long way from the arguments used to justify the war, which had very little to say about long-term commitments of this sort. The new view, in essence, is that now we’ve invaded we need to follow through. There’s a lot to be said for this. Trying to clean up after yourself is clearly more responsible than installing a puppet government and bailing out as fast as you can. The domestic goal is to get the public used to the idea. McCain speaks freely of billions of dollars in the short term and a “generational commitment” for the long run, frankly acknowledging that the U.S. will be stuck in Iraq for years.

He justifies this commitment in two ways. First, he articulates the Domino Theory of Democratization, saying that

Iraq’s transformation into a progressive Arab state could set the region … on a new course in which democratic expression and economic prosperity, … define a modernity in the Muslim world that does not express itself in ways that threaten its people or other nations.

For this reason, “America’s mission in Iraq is too important to fail.” I find the new domino theory about as convincing as the old one. More important, any policy that is “too important to fail” risks becoming a self-justifying sinkhole, as Billmon recently argued:

In the end, policy mistakes — particularly big ones — tend to produce a kind of circular reasoning — in which those in charge try to justify the policy by citing the need to avoid, at all costs, the failure of the policy.

McCain’s second line of argument fits Billmon’s diagnosis. “Let there be no doubt,” he says,

Iraq remains the central battle in the war on terror. We must succeed in Iraq because every bad actor in the Middle East … has a stake in our failure. They know Iraq’s transformation would be a grave and perhaps fatal setback to them.

Now that the U.S. is entrenched in Iraq, it must stay because to withdraw would be to give a victory to “every bad actor in the Middle East.” Iraq is where the war on terror is being fought. But of course it’s being fought there because that’s where the U.S. has chosen to put its soldiers. Which is why it must stay. Around and around we go. That is the logic of a quagmire, and it makes the analogy to Vietnam clearer. There, it wasn’t the sheer number of casualties lost in the jungles or troops fragging their commanders or anti-draft protests at home that were at the root of problem. It was that the U.S.’s presence in the region was, by way of arguments about nation-building there and face-saving here, the very reason for further escalation.

The U.S.’s day-to-day problems in Iraq may end up resembling Northern Ireland rather than Vietnam: car bombings, political assassinations, a general effort by terrorists to violently undermine civil society and resist the occupying power. The cost in terms of soldiers’ lives would be much lower than in Vietnam, but if there’s no viable way to extricate yourself the feeling of the situation may be much the same. Putting the emphasis on the political logic of involvement in Iraq seems to me to be the most plausible way of making the “Quagmire Case.” Involvement there is self-justifying and there’s no clear way to get out of the loop.

The way to argue against it is to say there are predictable changes to Iraqi society that would trigger a withdrawal. Hence the appeals to post-WWII Europe. I’m not convinced by this comparison, but others are welcome to make the case for it. My questions to them are the same ones I was asking back in March: Since WWII, how many autocratic or totalitarian countries have been invaded by a democracy, had the bad guys deposed, and a stable democratic regime installed? And how does this number compare to the number of invasions or other interventions that resulted in puppet governments, friendly autocrats, messy long-term military occupations, or outright disasters?

There’s some irony — but maybe also some hope — in how the official position on Iraq has evolved. As it has moved away from dealing directly with Al-Qaeda and towards reconstructing the entire political economy of the Middle-East, the administration’s actions have inevitably begun to imply an analysis of terrorism focused on root-causes. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, any talk of root causes was dismissed as watery left-wing handwringing. Terrorists were simply evil and there was no point in thinking about their origins any further. Now the official view is that the way to eliminate terrorism is to turn countries that produce them into capitalist democracies. If there is a realistic exit strategy from Iraq, it may depend on having believable measures of terrorism’s root-causes. It’ll be interesting to see the people who sneered at the very idea of thinking in those terms eventually pointing to such measures as evidence of the success of their policies.

August 30, 2003

Reasons for fighting the Iraq war

Posted by Chris

There were some good arguments for going to war in Iraq, especially those based around the need to remove from power that country’s murderous regime. Other reasons were not so good, and, as is now emerging, not based in particularly good evidence. Reasonable people can differ about which set of reasons were conclusive and also concerning whether it matters if the Bush adminstration’s reasons for fighting the war differ significantly from whatever the best case for fighting was. But the Bush adminstration’s reasons do matter to our evaluation of what is happening now. Is the adminstration’s purpose in invading and occupying to produce, inter alia, a democratic Iraq where human rights are respected, or not?

My hope that such is the outcome, whatever the intention, is somewhat diminished by reading conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell (in the FT) who thinks that “The president is now paying the price for being disingenuous about his real casus belli.”

What, according to Caldwell was that “real casus belli”. Addressing the issue of UN involvement he writes:

This is a dangerous moment for the Bush administration. More than it perhaps realises, it faces a choice between its war aims and its international standing. America’s best reason for invading Iraq was to transform a hostile country into a base from which it could plausibly threaten force against al-Qaeda and governments tempted to support and abet it, especially Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran. This sounds belligerent; but supporters of the invasion argued plausibly that marginalising al-Qaeda would reduce, rather than increase, instances of conflict. Might UN troops render the US less able, for example, to discipline Saudi Arabia for indoctrinating and exporting terrorists? If so, the US risks unravelling its rationale for invading Iraq in the first place, in return for momentary multilateral kudos.

Not, I think, a morally or legally justifiable reason for invading or occupying a country, nor a recipe for that country’s future flourishing.

August 28, 2003

Real and Unreal

Posted by Kieran

David Adesnik doesn’t believe there’s much in the way of Iraqi resistance outside the “Sunni Triangle.” Tacitus disagrees and gives a list of U.S. fatalities. David rebuts him, saying

Tacitus most definitely has a good eye for detail, but are ten or so fatalities supposed to persuade me that there is real resistance outside the Sunni Triangle?

Well, it’d probably convince the hell out of me if I’d been one of the soldiers killed. Except it wouldn’t matter, because I’d be dead.

This is kind of a cheap riposte from me, and the two may have already resolved their differences about the substantive issue. But it’s worth policing the armchair generalship if only because tossing around phrases like “Are ten or so fatalities supposed to persuade me” is not a good habit for a responsible Oxblogger to have. It’s a bit like that Economist article that Daniel picked on recently for casually making a distinction between hunger and “mere uncertainty about where the next meal was coming from.”

August 21, 2003

Suicide-bomber apologist in fit of indignation

Posted by Chris

I’ve blogged before on Junius about retired British philosopher Ted Honderich and his lamentable book After the Terror. It seems that Honderich is now involved in a fierce spat with his German publishers Suhrkamp Verlag who have withdrawn the book after charges that it is anti-semitic were levelled by Micha Brumlik (Director of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Study and Documentation Centre for the History of the Holocaust and Its Effects). Jurgen Habermas, who originally recommended the book to Suhrkamp, now agonises about and seeks to contextualise his recommendation. Honderich in turn, angrily rejects the charge of anti-semitism and calls for Brumlik to be dismissed from his post by the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

For what its worth, Brumlik’s charge of anti-semitism is, in my view, technically unwarranted. I doubt that Honderich bears any animosity towards Jews as such. But Brumlik is correct to state that Honderich “seeks to justify the murder of Jewish civilians in Israel.” In Honderich’s recent essay “Terrorism for Humanity” he gives a list of propositions including “Suicide bombings by the Palestinians are right.” He says of his list: ” These are some particular moral propositions that many people, probably a majority of humans who are half-informed or better, now at least find it difficult to deny.”

There’s probably some possible world where I’m moved by freedom of speech considerations to the thought that Suhrkamp shouldn’t have withdrawn Honderich’s book (though it hardly amounts to censorship, since they’ve relinquished the rights and he can presumably disseminate it himself). But I can’t summon up any indignation on behalf of someone with his odious views who also calls for his critics to be sacked from their academic posts.

(Honderich’s site has links to the text of Brumlik’s letter, Habermas’s thoughts, Honderich’s replies and “Terrorism for Humanity”.)

Sergio Vieira de Mello

Posted by Brian

If one just read the blogosphere, one might get the impression that few conservatives thought the UN or its senior officials ever did anything useful, and that some rather unbalanced souls on the right approve of murdering UN representatives. In the interests of being fair and balanced, I thought I’d point out that some conservatives don’t agree.

He [Sergio Vieria de Mello] served as the head of UNTAET—the United Nations Transitional Authority in East Timor—with great distinction. We dealt with him day in and day out, on the phone and personally and in all sorts of different of ways. He was always a good friend to Australia. He was a great friend to the people of East Timor. He had enormous emotion for the people of East Timor as time went on; he was quite an emotional person—I feel emotional talking about him. He captured the hearts of the people of East Timor. Many of the honourable members know that the East Timorese are very political people and they hold a lot of very different views. One thinks that this forum is political; it is nothing compared to East Timor. He managed to unite the people; he managed to win the hearts and minds of the people of East Timor extraordinarily well. I do not believe that the United Nations’ great success in East Timor would have been as easily done—perhaps not done all—if it had not been for Sergio de Mello. He helped us a lot. When we had some difficulties, he intervened and helped with those difficulties. For example, he was extremely helpful to both sides during some of the early discussions on the Timor Sea and the renegotiation of the Timor Sea Treaty. He will be enormously missed by us in Australia.

Unfortunately Sergio was not in Iraq when I was in Baghdad recently, but everybody I talked to spoke highly of the work that Sergio Vieira de Mello was doing there—everybody. As members know, there is a lot of controversy about the United Nations and what it can or cannot do in Iraq. But there was never any controversy about Sergio. Everybody believed that this was a man who could do the job. He built excellent relations with the Americans, with Jerry Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and with the Iraqis. He built excellent relationships with diplomats from other countries there. Again, as in East Timor, it was an extraordinary achievement. For terrorists to come and take his life like that was a wicked thing to do at such a fragile time. As the Prime Minister and others have said, it is very much to the detriment of the people of Iraq. This is a very sad day; a sad day for Australia, a sad day for the world.

That’s an extract from Alexander Downer’s speech on the motion condemning the bombing murders in Jerusalem and Baghdad. The debate on the motion starts on page 53, and this quote is from page 59.

Being prepared to go work in both East Timor and Iraq right after a war, as Sergio de Mello did, shows a lot more bravery than I, or most other bloggers, ever will. And if he was half as good a diplomat as speakers from that debate made him out to be, his contributions to Iraq’s recovery will be sorely missed.

August 20, 2003

Gilligan's own goal

Posted by Chris

I missed the beginning of the Hutton Inquiry and I’m only just beginning to catch up. The details of yesterday’s evidence have been pushed down the headlines by the bigger news from Iraq and Israel, but it seems to me at least that yesterday’s evidence marks a major shift in favour of the government and against the BBC. Campbell performed well, but the really important revelation was Andrew Gilligan’s email to an aide of Liberal Democrat MP David Chidgey (Original email here). Gilligan - himself an “unsatisfactory witness” to the same select committee - is revealed both to have planted (if that’s not too strong a word) some of the questions that put David Kelly under so much pressure, and (despite having huffed and puffed about the need for journalists to protect sources) effectively “outed” Kelly as the source for his colleague Susan Watts. No wonder the BBC’s support for Gilligan seems to be fading, with their reaction limited to an anodyne “We are looking at this e-mail and will deal with it in the context of the Hutton inquiry.”

We shouldn’t forget, of course, that the government deliberately focused on the narrow issue of Campbell’s role in their row with the BBC in order to deflect attention from the big issue of whether the WMD case for war was deliberately exaggerated. But as far as the immediate political battle goes, the BBC looks to be on the ropes.

August 14, 2003

There's no place like home.

Posted by Maria

Le Monde ran a story yesterday about the ‘Russians’ in Guantanamo who are begging NOT to be extradited. The Russian government is trying to have 8 prisoners - including Chechens and Tartars - sent to Russia to face trial on terrorism charges. Meanwhile, the mothers of two of them are begging the US not to send their sons to Russian prisons where they could face torture and death.

America has certainly fallen well below its own standards of justice and fair treatment in Guantanamo. But to a prisoner who’s already known jails in Chechnya, Russia and Afghanistan, the prison camp evidently measures up to the best of Russian sanatoriums.

Radio Free Europe ran a piece on this last week. The story was then picked up and a further corroborating interview added by a Russian tv station, and that seems to be where Le Monde’s reporter saw it.

August 04, 2003

Michael Walzer interview in Imprints

Posted by Chris

A puff for one of my other collaborative projects: Imprints. The latest issue is now out and contains much of interest. The online content this time is an interview with Michael Walzer which ranges over many issues: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the morality of humanitarian intervention, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism, memories of Rawls and Nozick, the permissibility of torture, blocked exchanges and commodification, the narcissism of Ralph Nader, and much more. Read the whole thing - it is both enlightening and provocative.

July 29, 2003

Tacit knowledge

Posted by Henry

There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a DARPA project which aims to predict terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups, through creating a futures market, in which traders can speculate on the possibility of attacks; the NYT picks up on it too. Most of the commentary is negative, but Josh Chafetz likes the idea, and invokes Hayek.

As I explained at length in a post on Hayek last year, complex systems function by finding ways to aggregate diffuse knowledge into simple indices, which then allow actors in the system to take advantage of knowledge that they don’t actually have (e.g., no one knows exactly what Americans’ breakfast cereal preference orderings are, but by watching the information-aggregating index that we call “price,” producers can generally ensure that, when you go to the supermarket, you’ll find the brand you want. Compare that to the shortages of some items and overproduction of others that centrally planned economies have produced). A futures market in terrorist attacks, while it sounds grisly, may help us to aggregate diffuse knowledge in a way that will prove superior to expert knowledge.

Seems to me though that Chafetz is wrong. As Chafetz suggests, Hayek makes some rather interesting arguments about the ability of markets to pick up on diffuse, tacit knowledge, and make it usable. And Hayek’s not the only one saying this; Michael Polanyi and GLS Shackle develop roughly similar ideas. But the key point is that Hayekian markets aggregate knowledge. They don’t create it. People tend to be tolerably well informed about their own tastes, and buying habits. Markets will do a good job of taking this diffuse knowledge and communicating it to producers. The general public is likely to be rather less well informed about the likelihood of coups, assassinations and general alarums, and thus the sum total of their tacit knowledge is likely to be an incoherent mess, or a product of shared cognitive biases, rather than a useful index of information. And indeed, DARPA’s “market” is aimed at the general public; it seems that random punters can sign up to participate on a first-come first-served basis. Whatever minimal amount of useful information is in there will almost certainly be drowned out by the noise.

This isn’t to say that information markets of this sort can’t be useful - but they need to involve people who have useful tacit knowledge to begin with. One of the problems with hierarchy is that valuable information sometimes doesn’t make it from the bottom of the organization to the top, because middle management blocks it, or because the boss doesn’t want to know. Anonymous information markets can potentially solve this problem. They might allow the people at the bottom of the ladder, who often have the best sense of what is actually going on, to share their information anonymously. Assuming that their decisions to buy and sell are kept confidential, management can’t punish them for not sticking to the corporate line. For example, one could create an information market that would allow anonymous CIA analysts to express their skepticism about Iraqi WMDs by shorting WMD “stocks” without fearing reprisal from on high. This would actually be a rather useful exercise. I wonder why DARPA isn’t funding it?

July 20, 2003

Protecting sources

Posted by Chris

The whole business of whether the “dodgy dossier” was “sexed up” by the British government and whether Andrew Gilligan’s report about it also went beyond what he was entitled to claim looks likely to damage all concerned in the wake of Dr David Kelly’s suicide. I’m trying to keep an open mind about the various possibilities, though things look much less good for the BBC today, in the light of their admission that Kelly was the source for Gilligan’s story. The BBC have also shown poor judgement in getting former Guardian editor Peter Preston to pontificate in their defence. Writing about journalists’ duty to protect their sources Preston observes:

if your source talked to you under conditions of anonymity, would you do everything in your power to protect him - including maintaining silence even after he’d identified himself to his bosses and talked, not entirely frankly, to the foreign affairs select committee?

Of course. No question of that either. Sources come in many shapes, forms and conditions of confidentiality. Once they place their faith in you, your faith and your room for manoeuvre belongs to them; and after their death, their family.

Can this be the same Peter Preston who, in the early 1980s, complied with a court order to reveal that civil servant Sarah Tisdall was the source of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian? Tisdall was subsequently sentenced to six months in prison.

July 18, 2003

Economists, sophists and calculators

Posted by Henry

The Economist gives us a rather longwinded editorial today, explaining why it was right to support the war, even if it turns out that George and Tony indeed were telling porkies. The piece makes some (apparently) good arguments. First, Saddam had repeatedly failed to comply with UN sanctions, and had lied about what he was up to. The UN needed to carry through if its threats were to be considered credible. Second, any delay in following through on the threat would possibly have led to divisions among the allies. Third, America and its allies are doing their best to make the country and the region more peaceful and less threatening.

So why is the Economist wrong? Let’s take each of their arguments in turn.

First, the credible threats claim. According to the Economist

Given that, by 2002, [Hussein] had flouted 16 binding UN resolutions, how best to persuade him to allow inspectors to return? By making a credible threat that the measure promised by such resolutions, the use of force, would be carried out if he didn’t. That required the stationing of troops on his border and the passing of a further UN resolution in November stating what he had to do to comply.

Sadly, this argument doesn’t work at all. You see, the thing about credible threats is that they have to be conditional if they’re going to be effective. In other words, you threaten to do something nasty to someone, unless that someone does whatever it is that you’re telling them to. Presumably, then, if your threatened punishment is severe enough, and is credible, the offending party does whatever it is that you wanted him to do. And if you’re a game theorist, you can describe this as a nice little subgame perfect equilibrium (the Nash equilibrium concept allows for incredible threats too, but that’s a different story).

But this isn’t what the US and its allies were up to at all. They weren’t using the threat of invasion in order to make Saddam cough up his WMD. Instead, they were making it quite clear that they were going to invade anyway, regardless or not of whether Saddam started to make nice. They didn’t go through the UN in order to enhance the UN’s credibility, but rather to daub a thin patina of legitimacy over the course of action that they had decided to take anyway. The threatened invasion of Iraq was not intended to deter Hussein, it was intended to depose him. Nor is US policy likely to deter other dictators from building up WMD; when they look at the lily-livered US attitude towards North Korea, they may reasonably draw the conclusion that going nuclear is the best way to stop Uncle Sam from sending in the troops. Ergo, the credible threat argument is bogus.

Second - the claim that the allies had to take action, as delays would lead to further divisions, and Hussein could emerge again after a couple of years. This is a slightly stronger argument, but still not a very good one. On the Economist’s side of the equation is the behaviour of the French, which certainly didn’t inspire much confidence that they were taking the problem of proliferation seriously. But taking action, as the US and Britain did, without the sanction of the UN, is arguably more damaging still. First of all, the Economist glides over the unfortunate fact that there is zero evidence ex post that Hussein posed a serious short term threat, as US and UK officials claimed, and that many of these officials’ arguments have been rather brutally falsified. But more damningly - does the Economist really think that the potential long term threat that it’s worried about - proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable or dangerous regimes - has been mitigated by the decision to go in at short notice, all guns blazing? If anything, it’s worsened - the US and UK are in the uncomfortable position of the boy who cried wolf. If they try to claim in future that they have evidence of proliferation happening in nasty regimes, they’re probably going to be laughed down. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious from the Iraq debacle that they can’t remake the world on their own.

Finally, the question of whether US and UK efforts in Iraq are increasing regional stability. Here, the Economist claims

What can be said, though, is that so far the picture is mixed but on balance moderately encouraging. President Bush has certainly begun a serious effort to persuade Israel and Palestine to make peace, and that process has inched edgily forwards. …In Iraq itself the Americans made an appallingly bad start. Their reasons for having had no post-war plan are almost as incomprehensible as Saddam’s reasons for having neither complied with the UN resolution nor deployed any banned weapons. They have also failed, so far, to beat back or deter the guerrilla tactics being used against them. There are, though, some encouraging signs too. Chief among them is the establishment during the past week of the new 25-member Iraqi Governing Council.

Notice that the Economist leads off with an irrelevancy, hardly a sign of confidence in their argument. US efforts to jump-start the Israel-Palestine peace process are laudable, if belated. However, they have almost nothing whatsoever to do with the merits or defects of the US invasion of Iraq. And as the Economist itself admits, the US record on the matter at hand, the reconstruction of Iraq, is far from impressive. “An appallingly bad start,” as the unnamed author of the editorial puts it, and while he does his best to puff up the Governing Council, he includes caveats all over the place. Among others: the lengthy delays in setting up any sort of Iraqi authority, which the Economist thinks were justified (I disagree), but which “sowed doubts about America’s intentions.” Doubts about America’s willingness to stick with it; “will America really remain committed, especially in the face of daily casualties?” The administration’s previous statebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, which have left the country in “far too vulnerable and disorderly a state.”

Towards the end, the piece reads to me like the beginnings of an effort to extricate the magazine from a rather sticky position. Clearly, the editors realize that they’ve been sold a pup; they’ve toned down their previous assertions that Saddam presented an imminent threat to world peace, without explicitly abandoning them. But they’re also setting themselves up to say “I told you so,” if the US occupation of Iraq goes awry. The final part of the article is all about what could go wrong if the US fouls it up by withdrawing too soon or not putting enough into reconstruction. It points to the risks of civil war with outside involvement by Iraq’s neighbors, and the possibility of a “huge stain on America’s reputation, not only for justice but also for effectiveness.” I suspect that the Economist is beginning to shift from unqualified support for the US case, to a class of an each-way bet, so that they can opinionate to their smug and magisterial heart’s content, no matter what happens.

July 17, 2003

Historical revisionism

Posted by Henry

Two strikingly similar mischaracterizations of opposition to the war today, from different sources. The NYT quotes an unnamed British official as saying of Iraq and Afghanistan:

There is this myth that these countries don’t want freedom, and that Saddam or the Taliban are popular, but then it becomes apparent that they were not at all popular after they fall.

And Instapundit quotes at length from a New York Post article that says:

This chorus [a mixture of Arab and Western newspapers, and Time magazine] wants us to believe that most Iraqis regret the ancien regime, and are ready to kill and die to expel their liberators. Sorry, guys, this is not the case. … ONE fact is that a visitor to Iraq these days never finds anyone who wants Saddam back.

Now I don’t know whether this is a flash in the pan, or a new talking-point in the making, but either way it’s bogus. It implies that opponents of the war believed that Iraqis were happy with Saddam, and that Afghans liked the Taliban - thus, their criticisms of what’s happening now can safely be ignored. The fact that no-one outside the lunatic fringe (and perhaps a couple of Arab newspapers) actually makes this claim is irrelevant. When your opponents have arguments that you can’t answer, you don’t try to answer them - instead you construct a straw man and start clobbering the bejesus out of that, in the hope of confusing innocent bystanders.

Critics aren’t arguing that the Iraqi people are begging Saddam to return, at least not the ones that I’m reading. They’re dissecting the deceptive claims that were made by Bush et al. in the run-up to the war. They’re looking closely at the lurching disaster that is post-war Iraq - a far cry from the smooth and easy transition to democracy that the administration seemed to be promising. They’re asking about the lasting damage that the US has done to its relationship with its allies. And I’m not hearing much in the way of a convincing response from the pro-war crowd.