I just got off the phone from an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Of course, you’ll all be agog to read my views on bankruptcy reform, social security, the trade deficit, the impending crisis of capitalism, and so on. You’ll have to wait a little while, however. The topic of the interview was bunnies vs bilbies.
I’ve been sitting on this great post about reforms to US bankruptcy laws and how they fit into the general pattern of risk being shifted from business to workers and to ordinary people in general. But I waited too long and Paul Krugman’s already written it. So go and read his piece, and then, if you want, you can look at the things I was going to write that Krugman hasn’t said already.
First, if you’re looking for reading on this general topic, let me recommend “When All Else Fails : Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager, ” (David A. Moss), which I reviewed here Moss shows how both bankruptcy and limited liability were (correctly) viewed as significant departures from laissez-faire when they were introduced in the 19th century. Of course, there’s no hint that the sacred status of limited liability is going to be challenged any time soon.
Second, given the rising trend in bankruptcy, this is going to affect a lot of people, quite possibly most people, at some time. Currently, more people go bankrupt than get divorced every year and, although the number has declined marginally with the economic recovery, the underlying trend is clearly upward. The proposed reforms are unlikely to change this. Although the bill will make bankruptcy a less attractive option for people who are already in difficulty, this demand side effect will be more than offset by the increased willingness of credit card companies and other lenders to lend to people with precarious repayment capacity.
Finally, while Krugman is probably right in describing the target of the reformers as a system of debt peonage, my long exposure to Dickens (and more recently to Patrick O’Brien) leads me to think that the large and powerful incarceration lobby might get in on the act here - anyone for debtors’ prison ?
As mentioned here, there has been a general increase in repression in Iran in recent years, and several bloggers have been arrested and imprisoned Similar repression is taking place in Bahrain. You can keep up with developments and suggested actions with The Committee to Protect Bloggers.
This is worth thinking about in relation to the current euphoria about positive developments in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine (and some positive gestures in Egypt and Saudi Arabia), and attempts to tie all this to US policy in Iraq.
In the long run, freedom is on the march, and has been ever since its most determined enemies were defeated in World War II. Democracy has stood the test of time, while those who thought they could do better with armed force (generals impatient with squabbling politicians and communists impatient with incremental reform) have failed.
The Islamic world has lagged behind in all this: until recently there were no Islamic majority states that could be described as fully democratic. On this score, developments in Turkey and Indonesia have been more significant than those in the Middle East1. Probably the most significant development in the Middle East is not the recent political stirrings but the rise of independent media, most notably Al-Jazeera, but also blogs and other websites. Hence the importance of protecting these media from those (including Allawi and Khamenei) who would suppress them.
Within the long-run trend to greater democracy around the world, there have been frequent reversals, and the (apparently) successful suppression of democratic reform in Iran is one of the most notable and depressing. It’s hard to imagine that the current rulers can stay on top forever, given that it is now obvious to everyone in Iran and outside that they lack any real popular support, but they don’t look like giving up power in a hurry.
It would be easy enough to make a case that the Iranian regime is being strengthened by the threat of US military intervention, since the normal effect of external threats is to discourage domestic dissent. But, as I argued a year ago, there’s little evidence to support this. The trend towards repression was under way well before the invasion of Iraq, and even before Bush’s election.
The same is true of most of the positive developments that have been putatively linked to the invasion of Iraq. Libya began creeping in from the cold when in turned in the Lockerbie bombers in 1999. The recent progress in the Palestine-Israel dispute owes much more to the fortuitous passing of Yasser Arafat than to anything else. And while it would take a real expert to properly explain events in Lebanon beginning with the recent assassination, it seems safe to conclude that the main factors are Lebanese rather than external.
The places where the stance of the US has played a role have been Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Undoubtedly, rhetoric about letting freedom ring translates into pressure for (at least symbolic) steps away from repression by prominent US allies/clients. But even here the Iraq invasion has been ambiguous. It’s nearly four years since S11 and the pressure for liberalisation exerted on states like Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia has been very modest in that time. The fact that these states have served as convenient locations for torture2, basing and resupply in the war on Terrorism/Iraq undoubtedly helps to explain this.
In this context, pressure on Syria for a complete withdrawal from Lebanon is all very well. The US is in a much stronger position to insist on fully democratic elections in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and should either do so, regardless of the short-term consequences, or get out of the Middle East altogether.
1 Of course, Turkey is partly in the Middle East, but the positive developments there are clearly related to Europe: events in Iraq, particularly the prospect of an autonomous/independent Kurdish state represent a test of Turkish democracy rather than a stimulus to democratic reform.
2 Egypt and Pakistan have been the preferred locations. But, as the Maher Arar case showed, even Syria will serve if it is mutually convenient
Let me join the left-wing commentator chorus by saying that recent developments in Lebanon and Egypt make me hopeful, and also redound to the credit of Bush and his foreign policy team. (damn, I never thought I’d be writing that.) In the former case, events have been pretty much autochtonous, and out of Bush’s control. But who can doubt that the sight of Iraqis voting, even in their odd and anonymous election, has had an impact on Lebanese public opinion? (And yes, I concede that Bush jumped on the Iraq election bandwagon only after it lumbered past him, led by Sistani. Still, he jumped on.)
In the case of Egypt, there is every reason to be skeptical that Mubarak is cooking up some Algerian-style charade in the hopes of installing Gamal, and is only making these concessions to please the US. (See Abu Aarvark’s helpful round-up of Arab press responses to the move.) Even so, that means that the US has put enough actual pressure on him that he feels he needs to do some window-dressing, and that in itself is a huge step forward. I was always one who liked the sound of the Bush democracy-promotion speeches, but was convinced he wouldn’t back them up with any real pressure on US-friendly autocrats. I thought, “wow, he’s got a good speechwriter”, not “wow, I guess we’ll be giving that Niyazov guy any amount of trouble now.” So, count me happy to be somewhat wrong.
More correspondence, this time from a soldier stationed in Iraq who saw my recent post about the terrible shooting in Tal Afar. I reproduce the post below the fold. I should say that I can’t verify the identify of my correspondent, but I have no reason to doubt what he says about himself.
Before I even start to explain my motives for writing I must say that I am very left leaning, and completely opposed to the war in Iraq. However I am a member of the United States Army, a signal soldier. I did not join because of my extremist national pride, nor because of the fervor surrounding our post 9-11 nation. I am now an enlisted soldier because after High School I was denied scholarships due to the fact that my family’s income wasn’t in a low enough tax bracket and my father wanted me to appreciate the struggle involved in supporting one’s own education. That ought to be a sufficient background for you.At present time I am stationed in Iraq, this is my second tour, I was here for the ground war. As I said before I don’t agree with this, but I must fulfill my obligations in order to eschew incarceration and enjoy the full benefits of a decent education. It is without a doubt a horrific thing when children are torn from their parents and siblings due to war, and it is absolutely unjust if this occurs due to a twitchy trigger finger. However, as the front gunner (the soldier manning the front .50 caliber machine gun on the front of all convoys), I realize that at times we must do what we abhore (or is it sans “e”) the most. At every chance I get I wave people off the rode at wait till the last minute to even fire a warning shot (although I must admit this happens quite often), and unless it is under the most dire circumstances will I fire upon another human being (which I have not yet done). It is my belief that the s oldiers in Tal Afar were doing what was right. If in fact the soldiers in Tel Afar properly escalated their use of force, from hand signals, to pointing their weapon, then firing warning shots, and the car still continued, then the final step was to engage and kill the driver of the vehicle. As terrible as that sounds, the car could have been a VBIED (Vehicle Born Improvised Explosive Device) instead of a family, and that would have led to several dead and wounded soldiers. From my point of view when it comes down to the wire, regardless of all my political and moral standards I feel it necessary to respond in a manner that will protect the lives of those around me as well as my own.
This is not a justification for war, nor a seal of approval for all actions taking place in Iraq. It is merely meant to shed some light upon the actions taken by the soldiers in Tal Afar, if in fact the story we have been given is correct and unadultered. As a soldier, working along side soldiers, I felt it my responsibility to share my opinion with you. Not all of us are morally or ethically unsound, nor without hearts, some of us here are just trying to make it out alive.
As I said in reply, I posted about this because it was such a terrible accident, not because I wanted to single those particular soldiers out for blame. I certainly don’t want to condemn the soldiers serving in Iraq in general. Events like this happen in war zones even when everybody follows the rules —- which is one of the reasons, I think, why the present administration should be condemned for committing its forces to Iraq under the circumstances they did.
Michael Totten recounts his night out with Christopher Hitchens and a couple of Iraqis that they talked to. Some of the latter weren’t too happy. Totten reflects:
Maybe there was no way to avoid the tension wrought by invasion and occupation, and the air just had to be cleared. Perhaps our Iraqi guests … really didn’t (and don’t) completely understand how we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past.
He goes on to say that “Friendly Arabs are the easiest people to bond with I’ve ever met.” It’s the unfriendly ones that cause everyone such problems. And, he continues,
I respected them more, too, because they stood up to me and Christopher Hitchens. They are not servile people. They will never, ever, be anyone’s puppets.
They’ve got spirit, the little buggers. Me ‘n’ Hitch are quite the team, but when you’re trying your best to tell them the way things are, they will be interrupting and getting annoyed and saying unreasonable things like “Who are you to tell us what to do!?” What’s that phrase again? “The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard.” But dissent is the lifeblood of democracy. Of course, we can’t permit them to pick the wrong government for themselves. “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power” (Hitchens). The invasion force would consist of “the US and Britain … along with — hopefully — everyone here at this table” (Totten). Or, as Tom Lehrer put it more succinctly some years ago, “They’ve got to be protected / All their rights respected / Till somebody we like can be elected.”
Read the whole thing if you like. It’s full of small moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is. Like Hitchens’ schoolboy-debater habit of calling people “Sir” as he talks down at them (as in “So you’re saying, sir, that you can be bought”). Or Totten’s heartfelt comment that “Something I said must have got through to him, and thank God for that. He and I — truly — were on the same side. I knew it, and I’m pretty certain he knew it too.” Or Hitchens saying that he has to leave because “I have to get up in the morning and continue the fight on CNN.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, mate.
(Via Jim Henley.)
Somehow I missed this appalling sequence of photographs of a shooting in Iraq a few days ago, probably because they were running in newspapers outside the U.S. on inauguration day. I want to know whether any of them — especially this one — ran anywhere in the U.S. media?
Look, I know I’m asking for trouble. I don’t want the comments to degenerate into angry whataboutery. All kinds of terrible things happen — purposely and by accident — in war zones. These photos are just awful. That’s all.
I suppose I should have expected the likes of Michelle Malkin to treat the Iraqi elections as an opportunity to take a pot shot at “the Left.” As you know, we on The LeftTM are all for for more death and suffering in Iraq because it improves our case for universal health care and better prescription drug coverage. Like an excited kid on Christmas morning, Malkin wasn’t able to wait all day. She restrained herself till lunchtime (U.S. east coast time) on Sunday before indicting us along with a few other blogs: “Left goes into Hibernation”, “Crooked Timber is Silent on the Iraqi Elections”. Silent, silent, silent. You can practically hear the wind whistling through the trees around here. An excerpt from our non-existent commentary on the election appears on the Op-Ed page of Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News1, presumably as a big ole chunk of white space. I suppose we were hibernating, really, as long as you think “Hibernation” means “Doing some other things on Sunday (in our own time zones) before catching up on the news.”
1 Irritatingly detailed registration required. Try bugmenot.
The Iraqi elections have gone off successfully, in the sense that the turnout was good and the violence relatively contained. That’s very good news. Now comes the hard business of establishing a real government. I’m sympathetic with John’s view that it might not be such a bad thing if the U.S. took a “Declare Victory and Go Home” attitude, even though that’s one of the scenarios people were most worried by before the invasion. Getting out would leave the government in a position to at least try to run its own country, instead of inevitably playing second-fiddle to the U.S. occupying forces. I’m not sure any more that this is likely to happen, though.
The best possible outcome of the weekend’s election is a successful completion of the present government’s term followed by another real election. It’s often said that the key moment in the growth of a democracy is not its first election but its second, because — as Adam Przeworski says somewhere — a democracy is a system where governments lose elections. The question planners need to be asking is what are the chances that Iraq will be able to do this again in four or five years without the presence of U.S. troops and with the expectation that whoever wins will get to take power. This partly depends on whether some functioning government can really be established within the country, and partly on whether the U.S. wants a working democracy in Iraq (with the risks that implies) or just a friendly puppet state.
To take a weak comparison, the Irish State’s independent existence began with the the election of 1922, when William Cosgrave’s government took power. But the leading opposition party — Eamon De Valera’s Sinn Fein — refused to recognize the results of the election and did not take their seats in the Dáil. Much against the odds, Cosgrave’s government successfully instituted a system of local government, established a civil police force, began a program of electrification and dealt with an army mutiny, all the while facing the problem that the main opposition party did not recognize the legitimacy of the state. (Contempt for election results is one of the defining features of Irish Republicanism, incidentally.) By 1926, things were clearly stabilizing and De Valera began to cop on to the fact that the state wasn’t going to fail. So he walked away from Sinn Fein, founded Fianna Fáil and took his seats in parliament (under legal pressure from the electoral amendment act). In 1932 Fianna Fáil won a majority in the election and Cosgrave handed over power to De Valera. That was a remarkable moment, seeing as the front benches of both parties were made up of families who’d been trying to kill each other a decade earlier. None of this would have happened if the British Army had continued to be a real presence in the day-to-day life of the country.
Unlike thousands of desk-jockey warbloggers, I don’t have any expertise in Iraqi politics. But it seems to me that if Iraq is going to succeed as a democracy then it has to consolidate itself in something like this way. A continued heavy military presence by the U.S. won’t help this goal, because it won’t do anything to legitimate the government as an independent entity. Withdrawal risks civil war, but this is essentially what’s going on already, just with the lid barely kept on. The current prospects are not good at all, especially with respect to the continuous attacks on the new police force and the efforts to systematically eliminate the nascent political class. The fact that Iraq has a lot of oil and was formerly a brutal dictatorship doesn’t help much either. Ireland, fortunately, had neither of these features. Instead, it was an agrarian backwater no-one cared about, and had been administered as a colony by Britain, which did things like build railways and run a civil service. The new government inherited the state apparatus and didn’t have to worry about its geopolitical position. Cases of successful transitions in resource-rich nations are few: Botswana springs to mind, I suppose. Though there the consensus is that “three honest men” (the first three heads of state) were what got them through without a coup or a descent into anarchy. This is a depressingly un-sociological conclusion. It’d be much better if it all depended on something reliable, like the proportion of the population over 30, or the percentage of homes with running water or something. Honest men are thin on the ground.
As commenters and my last post, and others, have pointed out, there’s a logical gap in my argument that, given imperfect knowledge and the recognition that we tend to overestimate our own capabilities, we should adopt a rule-based version of consequentialism which would include rules against pre-emptive or preventive wars1. The problem of imperfect knowledge also applies to the consequences of deciding not to start a pre-emptive war. As I’ll argue though, the symmetry is only apparent and the case for caution is strong.
I’ve addressed the underlying issue at length in aEstimates of project outcomes derived from formal models of choice under uncertainty are inherently incomplete. Incomplete estimates will generally be over-optimistic. The errors will be greater, the less well-understood is the problem in question.
The last sentence is crucial. In the context of an argument for pre-emptive war, the relevant alternative is “wait and see”. Whereas the consequences of going to war are highly unpredictable, the consequences of wait and see, over a period of, say, a few months, aren’t hard to describe. Either the putative threat will get worse, or it will fade. The cost of the wait and see approach is the possibility of having too fight later, with a less favorable balance of forces than could have been had with the pre-emptive strike. But advocates of the pre-emptive strike tend to overstate these costs and underestimate the uncertainty surrounding their preferred option.
Iraq provides a good illustration. At the time Bush and Blair decided on war, the alternative was to wait for Blix’s inspections to be completed. The reasons given for going to war in March 2003 rather than waiting until later seem absurdly trivial in retrospect. It was argued that the invasion couldn’t take place in summer and that waiting until after summer would keep forces tied up too long on standby in Kuwait. As things turned out, I’m sure Coalition forces would have far preferred summer in Kuwait to summer in Baghdad.
If Bush and Blair were actually concerned about the threat posed by Saddam, the decision to go to war in March, rather than waiting looks entirely unreasonable, except on the assumption that nothing could possibly go wrong2. Tim Dunlop has more on this, with specific reference to Rumsfeld’s latest observation that “you go to war with the army you have”.
As this example shows, the precautionary principle is not, as it might seem, symmetrical. In a situation where the consequences of one option are poorly understood, it provides grounds for avoiding, or, if possible, deferring a decision to choose that option even when a naive analysis would suggest that it should produce a better outcome. War is the paradigmatic example of an activity where “the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happens to them all”. All of this leads to something close to the Powell doctrine. If war is to be an instrument of policy, it should only be used under conditions of overwhelming superiority in all phases (including occupation), for clear and feasible objectives3, and with a clearly formulated exit strategy.
1 Except where the threat is so clear and imminent that standard self-defence arguments can be invoked.
2 An alternative, plausible in the light of the very lackadaisical attitude to weapons exhibited after the invasion is that they knew the WMD case was bogus, and needed to start the war before it collapsed altogether.
3 These objectives need to be justifiable in terms of the interests of the people of the world in general, and not of the national interest of one country or the personal interests of its rulers. A nation or group that pursues self-interest through military force is an enemy to all and will ultimately attract retaliation.
Now that, thanks to Kieran and the Medium Lobster, we’ve all had our fun with Richard Posner’s case for pre-emptive war, complete with toy numerical example, it’s time for me to play straight man.
Posner’s starting assumption is consequentialism: that we should evaluate an action based on whether its probable consequences are, on balance, good or bad. I broadly agree with this, so I’ll try to explain why it shouldn’t lead to conclusions like those derived by Posner.
I’ll ignore a range of more complex objections and come straight to the first distinction learned by beginning students of the subject. Should we evaluate the consequences of general rules such as “don’t engage in pre-emptive wars” (rule-consequentialism) or should we evaluate each action on a case by case basis (act-consequentialism)
For perfectly rational decision makers, following the rules of Bayesian decision theory, the answer is easy and, in fact, trivial. It’s best to make the optimal decision on a case by case basis, and an optimal set of rules would be so detailed and precise as to yield the optimal decision in every case. Posner routinely assumes this kind of perfect rationality, which is why he doesn’t see any big problems with toy examples, or with claiming that this kind of reasoning can usefully be applied to improbable catastrophes with incalculable consequences.
There are two objections that can be made here
The first point is well known, and has been demonstrated by the work of economists like Allais, and psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky (yes, we’ve got Nobel prizes on our side of the argument as well!).
But it’s the second point that’s really critical. Posner’s one-sided discussion of pre-emptive war, with no consideration of the opponent’s motives, is broadly equivalent to the Medium Lobster’s assumption that the other side of the proposed war consists of malign Moonmen (Anglais Casse has more on this). In this respect, and in his failure to consider the possibility that the pre-emptive war might end in defeat, Posner illustrates two characteristic biases of human beings on this subject.
So, in relation to war, the case for adhering to rules that would discourage resort to war, even when a Posnerian calculation suggests that it looks like a good idea, is particularly strong.
In particular, experience suggests that the case against pre-emptive war is remarkably strong. Lots of pre-emptive wars have been planned, and many commenced. In many cases where pre-emptive war was suggested but not undertaken, the danger has resolved itself peacefully. In many cases where a pre-emptive strike has been planned, the intended quick knockout has turned into a long grinding war, often ending in defeat.
The example almost invariably cited here by supporters of pre-emptive war, and chosen by Posner, is that of Hitler. Posner suggests that a pre-emptive war to overthrow Hitler would have been an appropriate response to the reoccupation of the Rhineland. For the reasons put forward by many of the commenters on Posner’s blog, I don’t think this is clear even with the benefit of hindsight, and it certainly couldn’t have been justified on the basis of what was known about Hitler in 1936. An invasion of Germany, based on a violation of a treaty regarded by all Germans and many others as grossly unfair, would have been a highly dangerous undertaking and could easily have failed. Much the same would be true of an invasion in response to the annexation of Austria.
Certainly, the British and French governments should have learned more than they did from these events, and should have taken a stand at Munich. But the resulting war would have been one of collective self-defence like the actual one, though with a better starting point.
1 Minus the game theory, this point was made by Geoffrey Blainey in “The Causes of War” , and I got it from him.
2 Of course, Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups are indeed both irrational and malign. But such groups rarely control the kind of state against which a pre-emptive war can be undertaken. Afghanistan was an instance, but a rare one.
As the American ruler of Iraq, Paul Bremer had the amazing knack of being able to pick the worst possible decision on every occasion1. From the dissolution of the Iraqi army to his refusal to hold elections in 2003, when there was some chance they could have worked, he did everything wrong he possibly could. Now he’s gone, and most of his policies have been abandoned, but he’s left one last gift, which may turn out to be the most poisonous of the lot.
When Bremer set up the electoral system for the elections that are supposed to be held in January, he went for a single nationwide electorate, rather than having representatives of provinces or individual constituencies2.
In any case, what this means is that, to the extent that fighting depresses the turnout in Sunni areas, Sunnis get less seats. Being a minority, they’re bound to lose most of the power they’ve traditionally held in any case, but under Bremer’s rules, they could be excluded almost completely. By contrast, under a constituency system, provided some sort of ballot could be held, Sunni candidates would be elected from Sunni areas.
To address this problem, Juan Cole is suggesting an emergency intervention, setting aside 25 per cent of the seats for Sunni candidates. It’s probably about the best that can be done in the circumstances, but the outlook is not that good.
Meanwhile, the onset of civil war has been announced, not by leftist opponents of the war, but by arch-hawk Charles Krauthammer who complains (haven’t we heard this before) about the unreliability of our native alliesPeople keep warning about the danger of civil war. This is absurd. There already is a civil war. It is raging before our eyes. Problem is, only one side is fighting it. The other side, the Shiites and the Kurds, are largely watching as their part of the fight is borne primarily by the United States.I don’t recall Krauthammer mentioning civil war as part of the plan in 2003. But maybe this is one of those four-war things.
1 I don’t think this was simple stupidity. His orders were, as far as I can see, to establish a secular free-market democracy that would be a reliable ally of the US and Israel. Any halfway realistic policy would have required him to abandon these objectives, and settle for a moderately theocratic, semi-socialist and imperfectly democratic state, on the “Iran-lite” model, because that’s what a majority of Iraqis want. Instead, he followed the dream.
2 My guess is that his motive was to allow votes for Iraqi exiles who could be presumed to be more favorable to the occupation than the people who were actually experiencing it.
As Eszter notes, the Becker/Posner Blog has solved whatever collective action problems it was having earlier in the week and now the first two substantive posts are up, both on the topic of preventive war, one from Becker and one from Posner. Right now, my working theory is that the blog is an elaborate hoax. How else to explain stuff like this:
Should imminence be an absolute condition of going to war, and preventive war thus be deemed always and everywhere wrong? Analytically, the answer is no. A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms) to the nation. … Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified. A historical example that illustrates this analysis is the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland area of Germany in 1936 …
The real Richard Posner is one of the preeminent legal minds of our time, so he can hardly be responsible for this. For one thing, parody of this quality is pretty difficult to write and I don’t think he has the time to devote to the task. Notice how the eminently reasonable introduction by “Posner” (as we shall call him) leads the reader to expect some sort of informed analysis — “a comparison of costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms).” But once this hook has been swallowed, within a paragraph we are in a fantasy world — “the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), … can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further …” Suppose further! Quite brilliant stuff. The sudden non-sequitur about the Nazi occupation of the Rhine caps the piece with Godwinesque cheek. After the lead-in sentence, “Posner” is careful not to mention again the war being prosecuted in Iraq. This is a nice move, reminiscent of the best UseNet trolls. When angry bloggers complain that neither the cost-benefit thing nor the analogy to Hitler make any contact with present reality whatsoever, or suggest that the post sounds like it was written in the Autumn of 2002 — or maybe the Winter of 1990 — they’ll have unwittingly set themselves up for a fall: after all, “Posner” was only considering the justifiability of preventive war sub specie aeternitas, not the actual costs and benefits of any particular war the U.S. might or might not be engaged in at present.
Speaking of which, “Posner’s” strategy neatly avoids the sticky business of having to work out a real cost-benefit calculation using available numbers — ones like, e.g., the cost of war to date in real dollars, N Combat Fatalities to date, skill-adjusted dollar value of Generic U.S. service person, QALY adjustment for each of N Injuries sustained by U.S. service people, Expected Number of Fatalities in an Iraqi-sponsored WMD attack on the U.S. Mainland, productivity losses to an Iraqi WMD attack, probability that Saddam Hussein had WMDs of any sort, likelihood that they could have been delivered to the U.S., etc, etc. Those last two quantities are now known with a high degree of confidence to approximately equal zero, by the way. This might make it easier to calculate the right-hand side of the equation after the fact. (If you worry that having this calculation before the fact would have been more useful, but think it would have been extremely difficult to do in any precise but still sensible way, congratulations on your perspicuity.)
Elsewhere on the blog, the absurd suck-up comments from law students are a further indication that the reader is being gamed. Take this one from “Charles”, for instance:
Dear Justice Posner, I am a 2L at DePaul and I just wanted to say that I think all of your legal decisions are brilliant. I think that you and Dr. Thomas Sowell are the most insightful economic minds in the world today.
Part letter to Santa, part backhanded swipe at Gary Becker — guess you’re the second string econ guy, Gary! — I’m surprised he didn’t mention he’d been a good boy all year and go on to ask for a Train Set and a copy of Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. But that might have been painting the lily. All in all, I look forward to future entries, which may provide further clues as to who the deadpan genius behind this blog really is. The Medium Lobster perhaps? The PoorMan maybe? I await further developments with interest.
Update: Sentence edited for clarity about probabilities.
Brian Gifford of Pub Sociology has an Op-Ed piece in todays Washington Post arguing that the pressure on the U.S. military in Iraq is much greater than simple comparison to casualty rates in previous wars would suggest:
To better understand the difficulty of the fighting in Iraq, consider not just the current body count but the combat intensity of previous wars. During World War II, the United States lost an average of 300 military personnel per day. The daily figure in Vietnam was about 15. Compared with two per day so far in Iraq, the daily grinds of those earlier conflicts were worse than what our forces are currently experiencing.On the other hand, improved body armor, field medical procedures and medevac capabilities are allowing wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars. In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war.
Moreover, we fought those wars with much larger militaries than we currently field. The United States had 12 million active-duty personnel at the end of World War II and 3.5 million at the height of the Vietnam War, compared with just 1.4 million today. Adjusted for the size of the armed forces, the average daily number of killed and wounded was 4.8 times as many in World War II than in Iraq, but it was only 0.25 times greater in Vietnam — or one-fourth more.
These figures suggest that our forces in Iraq face a far more serious threat than the public, the media and the political establishment typically acknowledge or understand. Man for man, a soldier or Marine in Iraq faces a mission nearly as difficult as that in Vietnam a generation earlier. This is in spite of the fact that his contemporary enemies do not field heavy armored vehicles or aircraft and do not enjoy the support and patronage of a superpower such as the Soviet Union. …
The focus on how “light” casualties have been so far rather than on what those casualties signify serves to rationalize the continued conduct of the war and prevents us as a nation from confronting the realities of conditions in Iraq. Even more troubling, daily casualties have almost tripled since before the first attack on Fallujah in April. Conditions are getting worse, not improving. To be sure, American forces are winning the body count. That the insurgency is nonetheless growing more effective in the face of heavier losses makes it difficult to imagine an exit strategy that any reasonable person would recognize as a “victory.”
There is a tension in warblogger rhetoric between the wish to emphasize the great sacrifices that soldiers are making in Iraq and the desire to deride those who worry about the casualties. The former leads them to emphasize the hellish nature of battling guerilla forces in urban settings, but the latter demands they argue that fatality rates are trivial compared to Vietnam or other much larger wars. Brian treats the fact that the U.S. military is the best-equipped, best-trained and best-supported ground fighting force in the world as more than just rhetoric. As he argues, this should force us to see the casualty numbers in a new light.
MEMRI makes an inept attempt to intimidate Juan Cole.
Dear Professor Cole,
I write in response to your article “Osama Threatening Red States?” published on November 3, 2004 on antiwar.com. The article included several statements about MEMRI which go beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and which in fact qualify as slander and libel. … As such, we demand that you retract the false statements you have made about MEMRI. If you will not do so, we will be forced to pursue legal action against you personally and against the University of Michigan, which the article identifies you as an employee of.
MEMRI’s threat is strongly reminiscent of Donald Luskin’s threat of legal action against Atrios a while back. It seems to me (though I note that I’m not a lawyer) that the purported complaint is completely, utterly and entirely bogus. But like Luskin’s supposed complaint, the threat isn’t so much in the possibility of a successful action, as in outcomes related to that action. In Atrios’ case, the real threat was that his identity would be revealed, possibly landing him in difficulty with the university that employed him. Similarly, MEMRI’s threat seems to me to be more about trying to create difficulties for Cole with the University of Michigan than the nugatory possibility of an adverse judgement in court against him. There’s no remotely plausible theory under which the University of Michigan can be held responsible for Cole’s private activities or statements, even if they were libellous. However, a state-funded university would presumably prefer, all things considered, not to be embroiled in an action of this sort, however frivolous. Thus, the inclusion of University of Michigan in the complaint seems to me to be an inept class of an indirect threat to embarrass the university and thus perhaps put Cole in a tricky position. I’m glad to see that he’s treating it with the contempt that it deserves. Cole urges
all readers to send messages of protest to memri@memri.org. Please be polite, and simply urge MEMRI, which has a major Web presence, to withdraw the lawsuit threat and to respect the spirit of the free sharing of ideas that makes the internet possible.
Now that Arafat is dead, it’s at least possible that Israel and the Palestinians will recommence negotiations. One important question is how the US can best try to encourage peace. During the election campaign, both Kerry and Bush tried to make clear their unconditional support for Israel. However, on one reasonable reading of the situation in the Middle East, promises of unconditional support may not be in Israel’s best interests.
It’s quite clear that there is profound distrust between Israel and the Palestinian Authority - neither is prepared to believe promises that the other makes, given their previous behaviour, and clearly conflicting interests. While there is a deal out there in which both sides would be better off than in the status quo, both Israel and the Palestinians would prefer maximalist solutions in which, respectively, Israel won completely, or the Palestinians won completely. In political science jargon, this means that the two sides have enormous difficulty in making credible commitments to each other. It’s hard for one side to make promises that the other side will believe, given their clashing interests over how the problem should be settled.
However, according to basic economic theory an actor which has difficulty in making credible commitments can solve this dilemma by delegating authority to another actor, which doesn’t have the same interests.1 In other words, problems of distrust can be overcome if there is a genuine honest broker, who can either take the key decisions itself, or else act to punish the other actors if they don’t behave honestly. If the Israel-Palestine problem is a problem of this sort (and this surely is at the least, part of it), then US signals of unconditional support for Israel may actually not be in Israel’s best interests. Israel would be better able to make a bargaining offer that would be accepted if the US was credibly prepared to sanction it for breaking any future commitments. That way, the Palestinians could put their trust in whatever commitments the Israeli government made, helping facilitate a deal. Of course, this would only solve half the problem - the Palestinians don’t have any obvious equivalent to the US (an actor who is potentially able to underpin their commitments). Nor is it likely that the US will be willing or able to play this role credibly anytime soon. Still, it should give some pause for thought to those who think that unequivocal US support for Israel’s position regarding the Palestinians (regardless of whether that position actually makes sense or not) is necessarily a good thing for Israel.
1 Thus, for example, if you are a government trying credibly to commit to financial markets that you won’t have high inflation despite your incentive to prime the pumps in order to get re-elected, it makes sense to delegate decision making authority to an independent central bank with relatively straightforward monetary targets.
One of the things that I find most depressing about discussions on Crooked Timber and elsewhere is that it seems to be absolutely impossible to have a civil argument about Israel and the Palestinians. I’m now very reluctant to post on Israeli or Palestinian politics, as, I suspect, are my co-bloggers (and very probably bloggers elsewhere). For some reason, it seems to be difficult for supporters and critics of Israel’s policy to argue reasonably with each other - or at the least, the unreasonable voices very quickly swamp the reasonable ones. Why? And why do arguments on this issue become so much more heated more quickly than on other issues, given there is at least some potential for agreement (barring the crazies on both sides, most people seem to be prepared to accept some kind of two state solution)?
NB - lest this post become an example of what it’s seeking to criticize, I’m going to be especially ruthless in deleting comments that I think are unhelpful or that lay the blame all on one side in an overheated way.
Update: to be clear about my deletion policy for this post - if all you have to say is that (a) the treatment of Palestinians is part and parcel of the plot to oppress brown-skinned peoples everywhere, or (b) that Palestinians are inherently untrustworthy and all bent on destroying Israel, or anything even vaguely along these lines then please take your comments as already stipulated - whatever their intrinsic merits, they’re part of the dialogue of the deaf that I’m complaining about, and will be deleted.
The provisional Iraqi government has declared a 60-day state of emergency in the run-up to an all-out assault on Falluja (pop. 300,000) by US Marines.
Heavy explosions were heard in Baghdad as government spokesman Thair Hassan al-Naqeeb announced the state of emergency over the entire country except Kurdish areas in the north.“It is going to be a curfew. It is going to be so many things, but tomorrow the prime minister will mention it,” he said. Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi will give more details Monday, he said.
Al-Naqeeb declined to say whether the announcement signaled an imminent attack on the insurgent stronghold Fallujah, saying, “We have seen the situation is worsening in this area. Any obstacle will be removed.”
“So many things.” I can hardly wait to hear more. For some reason this reminds me of the quote from Arafat when asked why he had to have eight different security services: he looked surprised and answered, “Why, Hosni Mubarak has 12.” Middle Eastern politics are so reassuring. Here’s to hoping the state of emergency lasts only 60 days.
I’m very glad that Daniel has taken on the job of addressing the statistical arguments around the Lancet study because, quite honestly, I’m not up to it (though I did spend part of yesterday trying to get impromptu tutorials from friends on concepts like “confidence interval”). Reading the text of the Lancet piece, I was struck by three points especially. First, they let us know exactly what they did, so that critics can address their claims. Yes, there’s a highly controversial headline figure which the Guardian and others seize upon, but what the study actually says is that they asked such-and -such questions of such-and-such people, and extrapolation of the responses would generate such-and-such a number. Second, they notice a big difference between the numbers of people apparently shot by US troops (hardly any) and the numbers killed by aerial bombardments (lots). Third, they remark on the fact that the coalition forces have an obligation to find out for themselves how many civilians have been killed but have shown hardly any interest in doing so.
I’l like to say a little more on the second and third of these points. The use of air strikes in civilian areas forseeably results in increased civilian deaths. Going into a built-up area with troops to raid a (possibly booby-trapped) house used by insurgents exposes soldiers to greatly increased risk of death or serious injury; calling in an airstrike doesn’t. But we know from other theatres that such strikes often kill numbers of bystanders. 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. Is the current policy illegal under the laws of war? Hard to say: its defenders are prone to invoke a tendentious and self-serving interpretation of double effect. Whether the policy constitutes a war crime or not, if it doesn’t then so much the worse for the laws of war (which ought to be changed).
The other issue the Lancet study draws attention to is how little interest the Coalition has shown in gathering accurate data. If the study is flawed, one would think that critics would show some humility and reflect on the fact that the researchers risked their lives to get the information. Unfortunately, the Coalition’s lack of interest in discovering the facts is shared by bloggers and other commentators who otherwise loudly proclaim their solidarity with the Iraqi people and write about “liberation” and the moral failings of the war’s critics.
It is worth quoting the final paragraph of the Lancet report:
US General Tommy Franks is widely quoted as saying “we don’t do body counts”. The Geneva Conventions have clear guidance about the responsibilities of occupying armies to the civilian population they control. The fact that more than half the deaths reportedly caused by the occupying forces were women and
children is cause for concern. In particular, Convention IV, Article 27 states that protected persons “. . . shall be at all times humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against acts of violence . . .”. It seems difficult to understand how a military force could monitor the extent to which civilians are protected against violence without systematically doing body counts or at least
looking at the kinds of casualties they induce. This survey shows that with modest funds, 4 weeks, and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained. There seems to be little excuse for occupying forces to not be able to provide more precise tallies. In view of the political importance of this conflict, these results should be confirmed by an independent body such as the ICRC, Epicentre, or WHO. In the interim, civility and enlightened self-interest demand a re-evaluation of the consequences of weaponry now used by coalition forces in populated areas.
I’d gone along with the popular wisdom that Bin Laden had only recently expressed interest in the Palestinian cause in order to broaden his appeal - Juan Cole tells us that this conventional view is flat-out wrong.
Bin Laden has repeatedly said that one of the reasons he hit the US was over the Israeli attacks on the Palestinians. Bin Laden has cared deeply about Palestine since his youth. His partner in Peshawar at the Office of Services for 6 years when he was funding the Mujahidin was Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist. When he came back to Jiddah from Pakistan after the Soviets withdrew, Bin Laden gave a guest sermon at the local mosque in which he bitterly criticized Israeli actions during the first Intifadah. He declared war on the Zionists and the Crusaders, and has constantly complained about the Occupation of the Three Holy Cities, which are Mecca, Medinah and Jerusalem. Because he did not use traditional Palestianian nationalist language, it has been possible for some to miss his commitment to the Palestine issue.
NB - threads on CT and elsewhere that even mention Palestine or Israel in passing tend to descend swiftly into a repugnant back-and-forth of slurs against Israelis and Palestinians - I’ll be ruthless in deleting comments to this post that even hint at going down that path.
Gene at Harry’s Place writes :
I know I’m expecting too much, but I really hope the “we can’t be choosy” Western supporters of the Iraqi “resistance” will find a way to blame the murder of dozens of Iraqi children— at a ceremony in Baghdad to mark the opening of a new sewage plant— on those who actually perpetrated it, without in some way implicating the US government.
I’m no supporter of the Iraqi “resistance”, but I still guess it would be expecting too much to hope that the contributors to Harry’s Place desist from making this kind of heavy-handed point every time something nasty happens in Iraq. In any case, the presupposition of Gene’s point — which he may or may not endorse when it is brought to the surface — is that if one gives the bombers the blame they deserve one must thereby absolve the US government. Not so, and for two reasons. First, if a government’s policies bring a situation into being in which crazy fanatics take the opportunity to slaughter innocents, a situation that would not otherwise have obtained, then that government is sure as hell implicated. Compare: if the British government gave an amnesty to all Britain’s sex offenders, it would in no way be exculpatory of the rapists to hold the government to account for the increase in rapes. Second, if you invade a country, destroy or disband the existing state apparatus, and assume responsibility for the peace and security of its citizens, then it is hardly unreasonable to hold you responsible when that peace and security fails to obtain. None of which, of course, settles the question of whether there should have been a war or not. But it does settle the question “Is it possible to blame to fanatics appropriately and still implicate the occupiers.” The answer to that question is “yes”.
I finally went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. I won’t give a review as I don’t have much to add to what lots of others have already said. What struck me about the film is how much worse things have become, and how much more has come out, in the time since the film was made (I haven’t checked but the film seemed to end around the time of the Fallujah atrocities and the subsequent abortive assault).
The scene of a Christmas Eve raid by US troops on a Baghdad house, with a young student being arrested while his mother and sister screamed in terror was made even more horrifying by knowing that he would almost certainly have been taken to Abu Ghraib.
There was one scene of Japanese hostages who were subsequently freed and of Thomas Hamill, the truckdriver who escaped from his kidnappers, but this part of the film would have been a thousand times worse if it had been made today, with terrorist atrocities now occurring continuously.
And while the scenes of bombing raids and the subsequent reactions were awful, these were confined to the invasion itself. Who would have thought, even in April this year, that US bombing raids on Iraqi cities would become a daily occurrence, and that any pretence of worrying about civilian casualties would have been abandoned.
And things are only going to get worse. The second assault on Fallujah, promised for November, will finally bring into reality the worst fears that I and others held about the original invasion, with large scale street fighting and civilian casualties on a massive scale1.
The best hope is to hold whatever elections can be held, and announce in advance that occupation forces will be withdrawn rapidly thereafter, come what may. But it’s not much of a hope.
1 Read this post on the Haifa street killings last week, from Barista
Extracts from Mark Danner’s article on Abu Ghraib in the NYRB.
More important, the reports suggest how procedures that “violated established interrogation procedures and applicable laws” in fact had their genesis not in Iraq but in interrogation rooms in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and ultimately in decisions made by high officials in Washington. … the Americans arrested thousands of Iraqis—or, as Schlesinger puts it, “they reverted to rounding up any and all suspicious-looking persons —all too often including women and children. The flood of incoming detainees contrasted sharply with the trickle of released individuals.” … having filled Abu Ghraib largely with Iraqis of “no intelligence value”—whose families in most cases had no way to confirm where they were—the overwhelmed American command could not devise a way to get them out again, especially when faced with the strong opposition of those who had arrested them in the first place:
Combat Commanders desired that no security detainee be released for fear that any and all detainees could be threats to co-alition forces…. The [chief of intelligence, Fourth Infantry Division] informed [Major General] Fast that the Division Commander did not concur with the release of any detainees for fear that a bad one may be released along with the good ones.
The system was self-defeating and, not surprisingly, “interrogation operations in Abu Ghraib suffered from the effects of a broken detention operations system.” Indeed, these reports are full of “broken systems” and “under-resourced” commands, from Abu Ghraib itself, a besieged, sweltering, stinking hell-hole under daily mortar attack that lacked interpreters, interrogators, guards, detainee uniforms, and just about everything else, including edible food, and that, at its height, was staggering under an impossible prisoner-to-guard ratio of seventy-five to one, all the way up to the command staff of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, which lacked, among other vital resources, two thirds of its assigned officers. … And though they don’t say so explicitly, it is clear that the writers of these reports put much of the blame for this not on the commanders on the ground but on the political leadership in Washington, who, rather than pay the political cost of admitting the need for more troops—admitting, that is, that they had made mistakes in planning for the war and in selling it to the public—decided to “tough it out,” at the expense of the men and women in the field and, ultimately, the Iraqis they had been sent to “liberate.” …
In mid-August, a captain in military intelligence (MI) sent his colleagues an e-mail—recently shown to me—in which, clearly responding to an earlier request from interrogators, he sought to define “unlawful combatants,” distinguishing them from “lawful combatants [who] receive protections of the Geneva Convention and gain combat immunity for their warlike acts.” After promising to provide “an ROE“— rules of engagement—“that addresses the treatment of enemy combatants, specifically, unprivileged belligerents,” the captain asks the interrogators for “input…concerning what their special interrogation knowledge base is and more importantly, what techniques would they feel would be effective techniques.” Then, reminding the intelligence people to “provide Interrogation techniques ‘wish list’ by 17 AUG 03,” the captain signs off this way:
The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks. I thank you for your hard work and your dedication.
MI ALWAYS OUT FRONT!
… As early as October 2001, after the capture of John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan, a Navy admiral told the intelligence officer interrogating Lindh that “the secretary of defense’s counsel has authorized him to ‘take the gloves off’ and ask whatever he wanted.” …
During a period of about two months, military police beat the detainee savagely into unconsciousness, ripped his ear, urinated on him, “high-cuffed” him to the bars of his cell for hours so that the skin of his hand split and oozed pus, and sodomized him with a police baton—to give only a brief summary of what, in the detainee’s statement, is an exhaustive and exhausting catalog of imaginative and extremely disgusting tortures carried out over many days. Now during this time, as General Fay meticulously confirms, military intelligence soldiers interrogated Detainee-07 on at least six occasions, as befits a prisoner judged of “potentially high value.” General Fay, however, finds here only a “circumstantial connection to MI,” concluding that the intelligence officers “should have been aware of what was being done to this detainee.”
The problem here is that it is quite obvious from the report that military intelligence officers were “aware of what was being done to the detainee” —indeed, that they ordered it. Throughout the general’s patient recounting of his forty-four “serious incidents”— his careful sifting of them into categories (“Nudity/Humiliation,” “Assault,” “Sexual Assault,” “Use of Dogs,” “The ‘Hole,’” and “Other”), his determination to classify them according to responsibility (“MI,” “MP,” “MI/MP,” or “UNK,” for unknown), and his dogged effort to separate what he calls “violent/sexual abuse incidents” (which is to say those, generally speaking, committed by military police, which were not a matter of policy) from “misinterpretation/confusion incidents” (those committed by military intelligence soldiers, who, however, were “confused” about what was permitted at Abu Ghraib as a matter of policy)—throughout all this runs a tone of faintly hysterical absurdity. Throughout we see distinctions that are not distinctions at all, and that recall nothing so much as the darkest passages of Catch-22 …
With no fear of a full, top-to-bottom investigation from a Congress that is firmly in Republican hands, administration officials, and particularly those at the Department of Defense, have managed to orchestrate a slowly unfolding series of inquiries, almost all of them carried out within the military by officers who by definition can only direct their gaze down the chain of command, not up it, and who are each empowered to examine only a limited and precisely defined number of links in the chain that connects the highest levels of the government to what happened on the ground in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in the war on terror. …
The delicate bureaucratic construction now holding the Abu Ghraib scandal firmly in check rests ultimately on President Bush’s controversial decision, on February 7, 2002, to withhold protection of the Geneva Convention both from al-Qaeda and from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The decision rested on the argument, in the words of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” in fact, a “new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions….” In a prefiguring of later bureaucratic wars, lawyers in the State Department and many in the military services fought against this decision, arguing, prophetically, that it “would undermine the United States military culture, which is based on a strict adherence to the law of war.”
For torture, this decision was Original Sin: it made legally possible the adoption of the various “enhanced interrogation techniques” that have been used at CIA secret prisons and at the US military’s prison at Guantánamo Bay. As it turns out, however, for the administration, Bush’s decision was also Amazing Grace, because, by implying that the US military must adhere to wholly different rules when interrogating, say, Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo, who do not enjoy Geneva Convention protection, and Iraqi insurgents at Abu Ghraib, who do, it makes it possible to argue that American interrogators, when applying the same techniques at Abu Ghraib that they had earlier used in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo, were in fact taking part not in “violent/sexual abuse incidents,” like their sadistic military police colleagues, but instead in “misinterpretation/confusion incidents.” …
General Miller’s report, which remains secret but was made available to me, recommends, among other things, that those in charge of Abu Ghraib should “dedicate and train a detention guard force subordinate to [the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center] that sets conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees. This action,” he adds, “is now in progress.” The MPs, in other words, should be working for the interrogators and spending significant time “softening up” prisoners, by keeping them awake, “making sure this one has a bad night,” etc.—doing, that is, precisely what the accused military police, no doubt self-servingly, claimed they were doing in at least some of those dreadful photographs. …
This confusion over doctrine supposedly allowed some of the more gruesome practices that are so patiently set out in General Fay’s report, including sensory deprivation, routine nudity and humiliation, “exploiting the Arab fear of dogs,” and prolonged isolation of a particularly revolting kind:
DETAINEE-14 was detained in a totally darkened cell measuring about 2 meters long and less than a meter across, devoid of any window, latrine or water tap, or bedding. On the door the [Red Cross] delegates noticed the inscription “the Gollum,” and a picture of the said character from the film trilogy “Lord of the Rings.”
Detainee-14 was one of eight detainees to whom General Sanchez denied the Red Cross access. …
There simply was no clear dividing line, no point where sadistic abuses became instances of “misinterpretation/confusion”—where, that is, an interrogator simply erred in applying a technique that while permitted in Afghanistan or Guantánamo, constituted a violation in Iraq of the Geneva Conventions. How isolated could the so-called “Animal House on the night shift” abuses of the military police have been from military intelligence when, as we learn in the Fay report, one of the most notorious images, that of “several naked detainees stacked in a ‘pyramid,’” served as a “screen saver” on one of the computers in the military intelligence office?
via Backword Dave
Another entry in my occasional role as co-ordinator of the Campaign For Real Body Counts; grateful for any comments that might help me make sense of these numbers:
As recently as the April uprising, the Sadrite Al-Mahdi militia was estimated by Iraqi experts to be between 3,000 and 10,000 strong, with the Pentagon suggesting that the hard core of fighters could be as small as 1,000.
In the May offensive against Sadr in Najaf and Karbala, it was once more credibly estimated that 1,500 of the Al-Mahdi Army were killed (note that this reference suggests that, as of the beginning of May, only 1,000-2,000 of the militia were located in or around the city of Najaf).
In the more recent episodes of fighting, official sources have told us that the Najaf branch of Sadr’s forces have taken a further 300 casualties, and lost a further 1200 men captured or surrendered.
So to recap … a force which was meant to have only 1,000 serious fighters, has had 1,800 of them killed and continues to fight on. Sadr had about 2,000 fighters in Najaf, has lost 3,000 of them and continues to fight1. Something doesn’t add up (or to put it another way, nothing does add up). Either:To be honest, each of these three possibilities looks as bad to me as each of the others. Someone wake me up when it finally becomes acceptable to make comparisons to Vietnam.
Footnote:
1 Even allowing for the likelihood that the Najaf militia would have been reinforced after May from Sadrite forces elsewhere in the country, I still can’t get this one to pass the laugh test. I’d also note that the 1,500 figure refers to Sadrite casualties in the whole of Iraq and probably shouldn’t be conflated with the Najaf figure of 300, but the qualitative conclusion is unlikely to be affected.
I have it on excellent authority that small kittens have done literally dozens of impossibly cute things in Iraq, yesterday alone. But are we going to read about that in the so-called paper of record? No, it’s all “there was this coordinated attack on Christian churches”, and “militants kill Turkish hostage; trucking group withdraws from Iraq over safety concerns.” As Tacitus blogger Bird Dog rightly asks, “Which is actually more newsworthy, something we hear about every day (terrorist bombings) or previously unheard of signs that Iraqis are stepping forth and taking steps to restore their country?” Signs like that one time in Mosul, when the kitten pretended to stalk and pounce on that dented beer cap, like it was a mouse or something, and everybody laughed. Remember that? Right before the mortar attack, remember?
I’m a great admirer of Karma Nabulsi’s book Traditions of War . But her piece in the Guardian today is an exercise in wishfully projecting ideals onto real-world people without any critical examination of their claim either to represent those ideals or their chances of realizing them. She makes one point which seems right, namely, that sovereignty rests with the Iraqi people rather than with whoever happens to be exercising de facto authority at any time. But she then makes the astonishing leap to claim that the bearers of popular sovereignty in Palestine and in Iraq are the armed resistance groups there.
The young men who defended Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank and Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, and who recently won back the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Najaf from the occupying power, are not the terrorists - or the enemies of democracy. They are our own past torchbearers, the founding citizens of popular sovereignty and democratic practice, the very tradition that freed Europe and that we honoured on D-day.
Are they? Do they see themselves that way? All of them or some of them? Don’t some of them favour theocracy rather than democracy?
Even someone taking a fairly rose-tinted view of such groups ought to have hesitated to write such words the day after the beheading of a South Korean hostage. The anointing of the Iraqi resistance as the heirs of Mazzini is as wrong-headed as the view that some leftists took that the Iran of 1979 was a return to revolution’s classical forms, with all that Islamic talk just being surface ideological froth. Since Nabulsi’s concern is with democracy, it seems reasonable to ask whether the Iraqi people’s best chance of actually implementing self-government is via the progressive taking of power by the existing governing council and its successors and through eventual free elections, or via the triumph of armed resistance groups. And it really doesn’t help in deciding that question to see anyone as being the incarnation of the ideal of popular sovereignty. The worry with the governing council is, of course, that they remain puppets of the US forever ; the hope is that they gradually become more resistant to outside influence. But the armed resistance groups are likely to bring about not democracy but bloodletting and revenge followed one form of brutal dictatorship or another (religious or secular).
John Howard’s government gets sucked further in to the Iraqi torture scandal. The Defence Department is found to have been aware of the Red Cross’s documenting of torture much earlier than previously believed. Howard insists that he only learned about the abuses in April and claims to have been misinformed by the defence department. Senior civil servants at the Defence department seems to be taking the flak. Tim Dunlop has more.
So does Howard bear any responsibility or is it just that no-one tells him anything? Though they wouldn’t like to admit it, in many respects Australians have a self-image very similar to that of Americans — they take the same pride in being down-to-earth, straight-talking types. It’s the legacy of a frontier country. A No-BS image is prone to its own distinctive kind of bullshit, but Australian politics does have more of a social-democratic conscience than America and less religiously-inspired self-righteousness. So we’ll see whether they put up with this.
Before I went to graduate school I worked for a year at an oil refinery — Ireland’s only refinery, in fact — in East Cork. Reading reports about the hostage crisis in Khobar, I wonder why the terrorists went after the oil workers rather than the refineries they work at. After all, if you’re prepared to plan and execute a heavily-armed attack like this, you could do a lot more damage if you just broke into the plant. Oil refinery hardware is just lots of open-plan exposed pipes, tanks and towers filled with flammable liquids. Popping a few RPGs in the direction of a kero tank or butane sphere could have spectacular consequences. In the fractionation towers the crude has helpfully been vaporized for you in advance. Instead, though, these guys hole up with 50 oil workers in a residential compound and basically wait to get themselves killed. Why? Hostage situations haven’t been reliably successful for hostage-takers since the 1980s. The CNN reports cite the terrorists as saying they are out to get “Zionists and crusaders” who are in Khobar to “steal our oil and resources.” Maybe they hate the workers but love the refineries? Who, exactly, are they trying to send a message to here? Do they think that killing foreigners will garner support whereas the destruction of a refinery would turn Saudi opinion against them?
Update: Just as I was finishing this post, I discovered that inquiring minds like Billmon want to know the answer to this question as well.
We need to rebalance our policy. We still have a chance to do in Iraq the only thing that was always the only thing possible — tilt it in a better direction — so over a generation Iraqis can transform and liberate themselves, if they want. What might an Iraq tilted in the right direction look like? It would be more religious than Turkey, more secular than Iran, more federal than Syria, more democratic than Saudi Arabia and more stable than Afghanistan.
More federal than Syria? Frickin’ awesome! This reminds me of a joke of my grandmother’s on the difference between hell and heaven. In heaven, the cooks are French, the lovers Italian, the cops English, and the bankers Swiss. In hell, the cooks are English, the lovers Swiss, the cops French, and the bankers Italian. Airmiles’ list seems infernal: more democratic than Saudi Arabia? Less theocratic than Iran? Gosh, is such a country even concievable?
And what’s up with the only thing that was always already the only thing possible? To wit, a US-friendly, “democracy-minded strongman”, one imagines? (Now with 50% more mindfulness.) I tell you what: when I go around spending blood and treasure like water, I like a bit more value for money.
As I write this, Nightline just flashed, together, the photographs of the two dead in Iraq whom I knew from younger days: Kim Hampton and Eric Paliwoda. I didn’t realize they were killed sequentially. They fell in the line of duty, on the field of battle, and there is honor in their lives and deaths. What remains is for us to impart honor to the cause in which they served. I speak not of the defense of the United States: this is forever honorable, and right. I speak of the creation of a just Iraq. This would be an Iraq in which jihadis do not walk free, in which Ba’athist generals no longer rule, and in which civil war is not the near-inevitable future. That this Iraq does not exist, and will not exist because of our choices, means we have profoundly dishonored our dead there. They deserve better: something right, and lasting. It is hard to see those faces, those young faces, among the roll call of the dead. I look at them, and it strikes me that in walking away from Fallujah, we are walking away from their graves; leaving their light and memory to the cruel care of those who killed them. It is the worst of all worlds, for there is comfort in a parent’s asking, “Why did my child die?” and finding the answer, “For liberty, for justice, for America.” Now, in this defeat, as we slowly take the abdication of our duties to its inexorable end, that answer changes into something awful; something that should be a reproach to our halfhearted leaders to the ends of their days: “For nothing.”
I recommed you go read both linked posts in thier entirety. Tacitus has always been a fairly eloquent fellow (if, like his namesake, inclined to morose skepticism about human affairs), and white-hot searing rage and disappointment have spurred him to new heights.
(And read this post for title quote from my and John’s favorite Melville, The Confidence Man.)
The things you think of when you can’t sleep; my younger sister Nelly spent a good part of the wee hours this morning thinking about the relative merits and weight-bearing facilities of stiletto versus wedge heels.
The other night, I actually woke myself up with the conviction that the jealous threesome of Bush, Blair and Sharon is mirrored by the parable of the prodigal son. Apart from the fact that Bush makes a singularly uncompelling father figure, it fits.
Sharon is the wayward but adored son. It doesn’t matter how much of his father’s wealth/political capital he squanders, how many irresponsible gestures he makes, how much self-harm he inflicts. A light tap on the wrist and the fattened calf (flame-roasted Texan style) will be the paternal response. (The main difference, of course, being that the original prodigal son apologised for his folly before Dad threw the steaks on the barbie.)
Blair, on the other hand, is the ‘good son’ who has spent years toiling away within the system, doing as he’s told, taking all his father’s guff while being refused even a goat to feast on with his friends (or the occasional UN resolution/Guantanamo inmate).
Nothing new here of course. For all of Thatcher’s famous closeness to Reagan, she barely got a head’s up when the US invaded Britain’s former colony, Grenada.
The good son’s lot seems rather harsh and thankless, though it’s implied he will ultimately inherit the remaining property. But for our purposes, I don’t think the parable’s application can be stretched that far. And anyway, they do say virtue is its own reward.
I’ve put off this promised update because up until today, it seemed as if there was nothing to add. The Human Rights Watch/US State Department figures of 300,000 murders in the period 1988-2003, the majority of which occurred during 1988-91, seems to be settled. However, Johann Hari has published an article in today’s Independent which seems to be working on a much higher figure for the other crucial number I was looking for; the likely number of deaths in 2003 if the war had not taken place. Sourced to the Human Rights Centre in Kadhimaya, via the Iraqi Prospects Organisation (a UK-based Iraqi exiles organisation), the claim is that analysis of the Ba’ath Party archives reveals that there would have been 70,000 killings if the war had not taken place.
Update, below fold
My instinct is that I don’t believe this number, and I’d certainly like to see something closer to a primary source. I don’t see how the kind of work that the Kadhimaya HRC has been carrying out (mainly providing Iraqis with the bad news about what happened to relatives of theirs who had been disappeared) could have provided this sort of information.
Also, the number 70,000 is too big. It would be substantially more than the number of killings in the Shia revolt of 1991, and equal to almost a quarter of the entire 1988-2003 death toll. As recently as January (in an article entitled “War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention : I reiterate my remarks of last year about “squatters on the moral high ground”), Human Rights Watch reiterated their view that there was no “ongoing or imminent” mass slaughter in Iraq; they certainly would have regarded 70,000 killings as a mass slaughter. So if this 70,000 number is on the level, it’s brand new information, and it’s very important indeed.
Once more, I’d be very grateful for any help from readers on this one; in particular, the Kadhimaya HRC doesn’t have a website and the Iraqi Prospects Organisation has a Flash interface which my computer doesn’t like, so I haven’t been able to chase up primary sources as efficiently as I’d like.
Update Thanks very much to a reader who I’ll name as soon as he confirms it’s OK for me to do so. With his help and some correspondence of my own with the IPO, I’ve established to my own satisfaction that a) the HRC is a credible organisation using sound methodology and b) that their work is at a very preliminary stage indeed (to be honest, I have no idea why I happily assumed that a skeleton staff had managed to computerise ten million records in a year). I agreed with IPO that the sensible thing to do is not to publicise (and hence risk politicising) the HRC’s work in this area at this early stage. So for the time being, I’ll be sticking with the 300K Human Rights Watch number, but remaining aware that a much higher number is out there.
I didn’t think George W. Bush had the capacity to shock me. But he has with his capitulation to the Israeli right.
I’ve been reading Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation , his account of the fate of Lebanon in the late twentieth century. Fisk has been the target of so much blogospherical opprobrium in the last three years, that I almost feel an obligation to explain myself. But whatever Fisk’s recent misjudgements (and there have been a few) Pity the Nation is a truly great book: wonderfully written, fair, balanced and not seeking to disguise the crimes and failings of any of the protagonists.
Fisk’s book starts, though, not in Lebanon, but with ordinary Palestinian families, displaced in 1948, still guarding the Ottoman or British title-deeds to their properties, still keeping the rusting keys to their houses (often long-since demolished), still longing for their orange orchards and olive groves.
When they fled, to Lebanon or Jordan or wherever, they made trouble. They were not liked by their hosts, their own leaders were corrupt, their ineffective attempts to get back at Israel often provoked retaliation. We all know all this. We also know that Palestinian Arabs weren’t just innocent victims in 1948, but did some bloodletting of their own (and since). There is endless material available for partisans of either side to claim vindication, justification, excuse. And they do. And every comments thread on Israel-Palestine fills with the litanies of Arafat’s corruption, of Black September, of Sabra and Chatila, of whether Barak’s offer to Arafat was good or bad. And so on.
But behind all of that, and behind any Palestinian leader seeking to negotiate a settlement with Israel, are those families still dreaming of their orange trees and clutching their title deeds. And that is what the “right of return” is all about. It is about justice for those people and their descendants, and about recognition of the wrongs that were done to them, wrongs which it has recently been claimed, were essential to the foundation of the state of Israel . And subsequently, there have been other families dispossessed, and, even today, more of this is happening as olive groves are uprooted to make way for Israel’s security fence and more Palestinian Arabs are separated from their land.
Israel exists, and it is right that it continue to do so. But any settlement has to give due recognition to those people. They have, as a matter of morality, a right to return, and if subsequent history — and the conflicting right of today’s citizens of Israel — means that that right cannot or should not be enforced, then they should be appropriately compensated.
All of this requires, of course, negotiation. The purpose of negotiation has to be a settlement, a just settlement, and the reconciliation of all parties to the way the world must be from now on. Not everyone will be reconciled, that’s never the way things work, but reconciliation needs for enough people, and certainly enough reasonable people, to allow feelings of searing injustice and bitter resentment to subside, to calm passions sufficiently that people put aside their hatred (even if they still feel it) sufficiently to get on with the things that human beings otherwise do (working, farming, making money, losing money). Otherwise, yet more generations of young Palestinians will fall prey to ideologies of hatred and yet more young Israelis will go through the brutalizing process of policing them.
I don’t want this screed to get too long-winded and sanctimonious. Where it is going should be clear. George W. Bush, by setting out as a matter of policy that the right of return to lands inside Israel will not be recognized, and that “new realities on the ground” should trump claims of justice, and that many settlements illegally established by Israel on the West Bank since 1967, has
probably permanently undermined any prospect of the reconciliation I just wrote about. He may even have done this for short-term electoral advantage. So the nation that all parties relied upon to broker a compromise has come out as a partisan not just of one side, but of extremist elements on that side.
The BBC sets things out thus :
no US president has pre-empted the negotiations in this way before.
What Mr Bush has done is to pull the rug from under any future Palestinian negotiators by denying their demands before they have even begun talking.
What concessions could a Palestinian negotiator now hope to get in return for renouncing the right of return, for example, when he knows Washington is already committed to opposing that principle?
Of course, the statement made by Bush at Sharon’s behest talked
about justice. How much more honest were the Athenians before
Melos :
For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences- either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us- and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Can it really be the case that there are enough US troops in Iraq if wounded marines have to rely on those Blackwater…er…private operatives for rescue?
With their ammunition nearly gone, a wounded and badly bleeding Marine on the rooftop, and no reinforcement by the U.S. military in the immediate offing, the company sent in helicopters to drop ammunition and pick up the Marine.
This is really bad. No wounded Marine should ever be ducking under a hail of bullets with anything but supreme confidence in his heart that a bunch of other Marines are about to come save his butt, any second now. These soldiers-for-hire sound very competent, as they should be, since they are all former Navy S.E.A.L.s or whatever, but having to rely on them to rescue wounded troops is proof that things are going very, very badly wrong. Go read Juan Cole for more informative and terrible news (N.B. this post, “Incompetence or Double-Dealing in Colaition Management of Iraq?”) You can color this actual supporter of the invasion of Iraq (not the popular CT contributor position) depressed. Please, don’t say you told me so. I know you told me so. I have to talk to my mom every week and she is pushing the “I told you so” line with much more emotional oomph than any of you guys can muster, trust me on this.
The newest political scientist in the blogosphere, Daniel Geffen, brings up an important reason why Iraq is unlikely to become a democratic exemplar for the Middle East. Oil. Heavy oil exporters have a miserable democratic record, with the sole exception of Norway. There’s little reason to expect that Iraq will be any different.
Geffen refers to a recent New Republic article, which seems to be all about the difficulty of introducing democratic reforms in existing authoritarian regimes - as he says, this is a poor analogy for the current situation in Iraq. Still, there’s not much room for optimism. Terry Karl, whose book, The Paradox of Plenty is one of the classic treatments of the problem, talks about how oil-producing states are bedevilled by
an exceptionally close linkage between economic and political power, developing networks of complicity based on the classic exchange between the right to rule and the right to make money.
These problems are likely to be even worse when petroleum exploitation coincides with state-building. The state has a strong incentive to use petrodollars to buy off potentially troublesome social actors, creating unhealthy mutual dependencies and Olsonian economic and political stagnation. Institutions tend to be weak and poorly enforced: the state doesn’t need to make itself accountable to its citizens, because it doesn’t rely on them for its revenues.
From this perspective, the outlook for Iraqi democracy is very poor indeed. The provisional authority has taken some useful steps - the creation of an “Oil Trust Fund” will help counter the political problems of too much oil-money sloshing around in the economy. However, the administration doesn’t seem to have much interest in creating the kinds of effective, transparent institutions that might sustain democracy in the longer term. As Gayle Smith at the Center for American Progress says,
Very few countries have been able to manage excessive resource wealth successfully, and most have instead fallen victim to governance without transparency, rampant corruption, and significant income disparities. The United States has an opportunity to avoid this same problem in Iraq. But the administration is doing just the opposite – relying on oil revenues to fund both reconstruction costs and the operations of the Iraqi government instead of reforming the sector. Meanwhile, the U.S. approach to the Iraqi oil sector is clouded by the same lack of transparency that characterizes its reconstruction plan and budget, contracting operations, and overhaul of the Iraqi legal system.
Ahmed Chalabi, a kleptocrat-in-waiting if ever there was one, is already busy creating the kinds of corrupt linkages between business and politicians that have been the bane of oil producing states in other parts of the world. It doesn’t bode well for the future. Nor does the provisional authority’s decision to introduce a flat tax at the behest of the ideologues at home. This is likely further to increase the Iraqi state’s dependence on oil revenues rather than taxes (which tend, as noted, to go along with a greater level of state accountability). On current form, it’s hard to imagine Iraq becoming a successful and attractive democracy, even if you forget about the continuing violence. Domino theorists shouldn’t hold their breaths.
The announcement that Ralph Nader will again run for the Presidency raises the (almost) unaskable question -are there any circumstances under which we should hope for, promote, or even passively assist, the re-election of George W. Bush as against either of the remaining Democrat contenders? I feel nervous even raising this question, but I think it’s worth a hard and dispassionate look.
Regardless of their political persuasion, most people will agree, at least in retrospect, that it would have been better for their own side (defined either in ideological or in party terms) to have lost some of the elections they won. Most obviously, this was the case for the US Republican Party in 1928. Hoover’s victory, and his inability to cope with the Depression, paved the way for four successive victories for FDR and two generations of Democratic and liberal hegemony, which didn’t finally come to an end until the Reagan revolution in 1980. The same was true on the other side of poltiics in Australia and the UK, where Labour governments were elected just before the Depression, split over measures of retrenchment demanded by the maxims of orthodox finance and sat out the 1930s in Opposition, watching their own former leaders implement the disastrous policies they had rejected, but had been unable to counter.
So, is 2004 one of those occasions? The case that it is rests primarily on arguments about fiscal policy. Bush’s policies have set the United States on a path to national bankruptcy, a fact that is likely to become apparent some time between now and 2008. Assuming that actual or effective bankruptcy (repudiation of debt or deliberate resort to inflation) is unthinkable, this is going to entail some painful decisions for the next President and Congress, almost certainly involving both increases in taxation and cuts in expenditure. On the expenditure side, this will mean a lot more than the obvious targets of corporate welfare and FDW1. Either significant cuts in the big entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare) or deep cuts in everything else the government does will be needed, even with substantial increases in taxes (to see the nasty arithmetic read these CBO projections, and replace the baseline with the more realistic Policy Alternatives Not Included in CBO’s Baseline)
1 Fraud, Duplication and Waste
As far as I can see, the only way to avoid four years of grinding bargaining would be the Big Bang approach of repealing the Bush tax cuts en bloc while the electoral mandate was fresh. Gephardt and Dean proposed this (along with, I think, Kucinich, Braun and Sharpton), but Edwards and Kerry propose repealing only the cuts on incomes above $200 000 a year. Whichever of them wins the Democratic nomination, it seems likely that the pressures of the campaign will lead them to soft-pedal the bad news on tax and spending options, making it more difficult to push even partial repeal through a Congress that will probably have a Republican majority in at least one House.
Given that the deficit has yet to register as a major issue with many (most ?) voters, , it will be very hard to shift the blame back onto Bush and the Republicans if the problem is deferred until 2005 or 2006. It’s easy to imagine scenarios leading to an electoral catastrophe in 2008 and the election of a Republican even worse than Bush. Conversely, a re-elected Bush could be a second Herbert Hoover, discrediting the Republicans for decades to come.
Of course, similar arguments were made in 2000, notably on behalf of Nader, and they turned out to be totally wrong. More generally, the folk wisdom about birds in the hand and in the bush (sic) is applicable. And it’s always easier for an outside onlooker to advise taking the long-term view in cases of this kind, though in this case, we all have to live with the consequences.
Looking at the damage another four years of Bush would do in all areas of domestic and foreign policy, I can’t conclude that the putative long-term benefits of demonstrating the bankruptcy of his ideas are enough to balance the inevitable and immediate damage his re-election would cause. Still, I look forward to a Democratic victory with trepidation rather than the unalloyed enthusiasm I ought to feel.
I was a bit slow to respond to Kieran's post on the World City System, but let me say that my views on this system are pretty much a cross between Wired and William Cobbett. In a world where nearly all legitimate work of high-pay and status can be performed electronically and remotely, the most plausible explanation of 'global cities' is that they facilitate cronyism and corruption.
Updated with a little more evidence 25/2
On this point, Virginia Postrel has an interesting piece (abstract free, full piece payment required) on the work of Chicago economists Rajan and Zingales saving capitalism from the capitalists. Essentially, their claim is that where that where finance is allocated on the basis of personal relationships, it becomes a tool for creating and protecting monopoly. This is what they call "relationship capitalism". Others have used the more pejorative phrase "crony capitalism".
Postrel uses these ideas to attack the idealised, and largely mythical, small-town bankers of the past in favor of today's more impersonal system. It's certainly true for retail borrowers that relationships with bankers are no longer important. But she misses the irony that while distancing themselves from most of their customers, members of the financial sector have gathered together ever more closely in centres like New York and London.
Similarly, this Buttonwood column from the Economist deplores the fact that house prices in London are being bid up by City types who, he suggests, have enriched themselves at the expense of their customers (he's referring to the mutual funds scandals, but these are just the latest of many). He doesn't, however, ask the obvious question: Why do these City types crowd together in London (and New York). After all, the same City types are busy telling us about a globalised world, linked instantaneously by the Internet. And, as Warren Buffett has shown, they are right. You can get all the information you need to formulate market-beating investment strategies while sitting in Omaha, Nebraska.
The two halves of Buttonwood's observation are linked by the much older observation of Adam Smith (quoting from memory here)
Men of the same trade seldom gather together, even for innocent merriment, but the meeting ends in some conspiracy against the public.
The work that financial institutions are supposed to perform, trading assets and allocating risk in transparent markets, can be done anywhere on the planet. It's the stuff they want to do without any inconvenient records, and with the kind of trust that's needed for conspiracy that requires clustering in a central location where social bonds can be cemented by eating, drinking and sleeping together.
I should add (and at this point, readers might want to note that I am located in Brisbane, Australia, which may engender a somewhat jaundiced viewpoint) that most of what I've said above applies to academia. On balance, the clustering of high-status academics in places like Oxford, Harvard and Chicago has consequences that are more negative than positive. The merits of intensive collaboration and casual hallway discussions of academic topics are more than offset by the clubbishness and mutual backscratching produced by these concentrations.
Update 25 /2Another piece of evidence on this
Gains from Corporate Headquarters Relocations: Evidence from the Stock Market,” Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 38(3), November 1995, 291-311, Chinmoy Ghosh, Mauricio Rodriguez, and C. F. Sirmans. This paper provides empirical evidence on investors’ perceptions of the relative advantages and costs of spatial agglomeration. Specifically, we examine the stock price effects of headquarters relocations. The stock market reaction is significantly positive when relocation decisions are attributed to cost savings, indicating that cost savings available at less centralized locations outweigh any loss of enhancements associated with spatial clustering at urban centers. In contrast, decisions prompted by managerial self-interest and desire for luxurious offices elicit an adverse reaction from investors.(emphasis added)
You can download the paper here (2.8 MB Word doc).
My post on Cyprus raised some eyebrows with its reference to the relative insignificance, in geopolitical terms, of the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Looking back, I'm not surprised that this was controversial. After all, the idea that the war in Iraq is crucially important is a common background assumption in most of the debate, shared by both supporters and critics. Of course, geopolitics isn't the only criterion of importance - the costs and benefits in terms of lives lost and saved, human rights and so on need to be discussed, not to mention economic impacts. But still, I think it's fair to say that most people assumed that the presence in Iraq of more than 100 000 US troops, with a demonstrated capacity and willingness to overthrow governments, would make for big changes one way or another.
The most obvious candidate for such effects is Iran1. It is number 2 country in the Axis of Evil (and everyone knows North Korea was only thrown in at the last moment for rhetorical balance). It has advanced weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program activities. And its current rulers are the same ones who humiliated the US in 1979 and who were, until Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, US Public Enemy Number 1 in the region.
On the positive side, we might have expected the invasion of Iraq to cow the Iranian mullahs and embolden their opponents. In particular, we might have expected to see a rapid move to scrap the nuclear program.
On the negative side, we might have expected the theocracy to play on nationalist and anti-American sentiment, wrapping themselves in the flag against a foreign invader. This would seem to be particularly appealing given the American backing for Iraq in the 1980s war. And this could have led to a speedup of attempts to build an atomic bomb.
In fact, as far as I can see, nothing at all has happened. With careful tweaking of the counterfactuals, it might be concluded that the Iraq war has made the Iranian government slightly more, or slightly less, co-operative in relation to its nuclear program. Domestically, Iranian politics seems to be stuck in the same quagmire it's been in ever since the election of Khatami, going backwards with the rigged elections now under way. On the optimistic side, it's clearer than ever that the mullahs have lost popular support, and it's arguable that Khatami's temporising has created space for the emergence of a civil society in which Khomeinism plays no role. But either way, the dynamics of this seem to be entirely Iranian.
One reason for the limited geopolitical impact of the Iraq war is that it's increasingly being recognised, not as the first stage in a new American empire, but as a one-off exercise. As Tim Noah points out, the military, financial and credibility costs of the Iraq war make another such exercise not more, but less likely in the foreseeable future.
1 Although, I don't have time to spell it out, I think very similar points apply to the Israel-Palestine conflict - if the Iraq war has had an impact, it's not easily perceptible.
I didn’t think this was going to be a difficult question to answer, but it’s stumped me, so I’m asking for help.
Is there any authoritative source (for fairly low standards of “authoritative”; as the title suggests, I’m looking for something no worse than the Black Book of Communism) telling us how many people Saddam Hussein killed and when?
Ought to be a simple question to answer, isn’t. It’s important for me, because as regular readers will know, my position on the war was what I called “Anti This War Now”. Thus, I was in favour of allowing Saddam to remain in power for a short period (waiting for a coalition of people I trusted to be assembled).
Clearly, therefore, my moral culpability (and thus the extent to which I am prepared to take crap from pro-war lefties) is very heavily dependent on what might have happened in Iraq during that period of six months to a year. Would the period 2003-5 under Saddam have looked like 1943-45 under Hitler (clearly very bad) or like 1993-95 under Suharto (not very bad at all)?
The issue is this; general Google searches seem to drag up a figure of 300,000 as roughly consensus (it would make Saddam only a bit less bad than Suharto under Indonesian estimates, about half as bad under credible non-Indonesian). But I have two problems with this number:
1) It isn’t used very precisely at all; sometimes it appears to only refer to the mass graves and obviously there were many more murders.
2) It’s much too small to bear the moral weight that’s put on it. The 300,000 number includes 200,000 Kurds killed in the 1988-91 uprisings and 50,000 Shia revolutionaries killed in 1991. I do not want for one minute to minimise the enormity of this crime, nor to suggest that these peoples’ deaths did not merit punishment, but it isn’t credible to regard events which happened in 1991 to be part of the rationale for a war in 2003.
Subtracting them from the total gives a figure of 50,000 Iraqis murdered, which averages out at just over 4,000 a year between 1991 and 2003; given that many of these murders would have been committed early in the period 1991-2003, the death toll could have been as low as 2,000 a year during the period in which war was being seriously discussed. Since we might have killed as many as 10,000 Iraqis by accident during the liberation process, the numbers don’t stack up. So there must be a lot of other deaths attributable to Saddam.
In which case, it’s pretty surprising that they haven’t been better publicised. Here and the US and UK government dossiers that I managed to find. Straight away, before anything else, I have to say that, even speaking as somebody who reads a lot of Amnesty International material, the FCO dossier in particular is an utterly vile record of an extremely evil regime. Not to minimise that at all. I apologise unreservedly to anyone who thinks my approach here is callous; to be honest I cut my teeth in these matters by arguing with people over the original Black Book, and can remember being worried at the time about how desensitised I was becoming.
But in terms of actual murders carried out by Saddam’s regime, the numbers in the FCO and State Department human rights dossiers seem to more or less agree with the residual estimate I made above; extra-judicial executions and disappearances in Saddam’s Iraq were in the region 2,000 a year.
While that’s horrible, it’s not horrible by the standards of a lot of the world, including a lot of countries with whom we have decent relations. I would very much like to be able to put some definite figures to this, because at the back of my mind is preying the suspicion that the case for the unique awfulness of Saddam, as opposed to the case for his awfulness which can be taken as read, seems to be based on the conflation of very large but old atrocities with more recent but much smaller ones, with the effect of making the moral case for immediate war appear much stronger at the time than it actually was. Pointers please in the comments below; I’ll post an update in a couple of weeks’ time.
(Footnote: Here’s the context for the Clinton/Suharto photo linked above. I hope the point isn’t lost on people; there was a very strong moral case indeed for military action against Suharto’s Indonesia in 1976-77, but not much of a moral case at all twenty years later. And it’s possible to say that without for one second diminishing the moral hatred which it is correct to feel against Suharto).
Tyler on the Volokh conspiracy links to a New York Times story and comments that “Deterrence doesn’t fully reassure me on the basis of this extract:
“”A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers. Mr. Hussein believed that a “casualty averse” White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagon’s most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border. “
Lads, lads, we’re not learning the lesson here are we? Testimony from captured military officers, defectors, and anyone else who thinks that they have something to gain by telling interesting stories (which inflate their own importance) is worthless. This is how we got into the whole WMD fiasco. I’ve no idea whether or not this is true as a description about Saddam’s state of mind or military tactics. But after reading this story, given its sourcing, I’ve still got no idea. Stick to the satellite photos, that’s my advice, they don’t lie. That’s how Scott Ritter, Andrew Wilkie and myself managed to get it right on the question of Iraqi nukes.
Norman Geras sees some overlap between a recent interview with Benny Morris (where Morris qualifies some of the arguments attributed to him previously), and a piece that Michael Walzer wrote for Dissent in 2002 on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Morris argues that the ‘war being waged against us’ [in Israel] needs to be seen in the context of three overlapping conflicts; Walzer argues that there are no less than four ‘Israeli-Palestinian wars’ now in progress. But apart from the basic organizing metaphor, there doesn’t seem to be much overlap at all - Morris and Walzer are making very different (and perhaps radically opposed) arguments, for very different purposes.
Let’s take Morris’s argument first. In the bit that Norm quotes, Morris says that:
The war being waged against us since September 2000 is three-dimensional: On one level, which is the one highlighted by Palestinian spokespersons, a struggle is being waged for liberation from Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; on the second level, the Palestinians - according to spokesmen for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants - are waging a war to eradicate the Zionist state and to restore their “rights” over all of Palestine; on the third level, the Palestinians’ struggle is part of the global struggle being waged by jihadist Islam against the “Western Satan,” with Israel being a vulnerable extension of Western culture in our region.
Here, Morris’s intention is plain. He’s arguing that the specific level of the conflict that the media has focused on is the Palestinian ‘liberation struggle.’ But in fact, this struggle is only one battleground in a greater war - between jihadist Islam and the West. For the jihadists:
Israel represents the embodiment of all the values it abhors - democracy and freedom, openness, tolerance and pluralism, individualism and secularism, criticality (including the value of expressing self-criticism, which is absent from their culture), women’s rights, liberalism and progress, sexual freedom - while the proponents of jihad aspire to return to the days in which the sword of Islam ruled from India to the Atlantic Ocean and minorities quaked under its shadow.
Israel is hated by the Palestinian jihadists precisely because it’s a bastion of Western civilized values.
Defending Israel is all about defending the West in a clash of civilizations.
Walzer adopts a very different style of analysis. He distinguishes between four wars:
The first is a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel. The second is a Palestinian war to create an independent state alongside Israel, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The third is an Israeli war for the security of Israel within the 1967 borders. The fourth is an Israeli war for Greater Israel, for the settlements and the occupied territories.
Walzer’s point is that the first and the fourth of these wars are mutually reinforcing. To the extent that Palestinians want to extirpate the state of Israel, they justify maximalist attempts by settlers and their political allies to create a Greater Israel. But the reverse is true as well.
the settler movement is the functional equivalent of the terrorist organizations. I hasten to add that it is not the moral equivalent. The settlers are not murderers, even if there are a small number of terrorists among them. But the message of settler activity to the Palestinians is very much like the message of terrorism to the Israelis: we want you to leave (some groups on the Israeli right, including groups represented in Sharon’s government, openly support a policy of “transfer”), or we want you to accept a radically subordinate position in your own country. The settlers’ aim is Greater Israel, and the achievement of that aim would mean that there could not be a Palestinian state. It is in this sense only that they are like the terrorists: they want the whole thing.
Walzer thus proposes that “the partisans of wars two and three must defeat the partisans of wars one and four.”
Now Morris’s and Walzer’s ultimate policy prescriptions aren’t entirely dissimilar from each other (Walzer goes a lot further than Morris in advocating unilateral Israeli overtures towards peace, but Morris is clearly interested in a two-state solution that would be fairer than that proposed by the current Israeli government). Still, their frameworks of analysis, while appearing superficially similar, are profoundly different - and Walzer’s is much more useful than Morris’s. What Morris wants to do with his three wars is to collapse them into one - to argue that the present-day intifada is a sort of symptom or manifestation of a wider conflict of values between Islam and the West. This is a popular line nowadays on the right, and in certain quarters of the left; it reduces the struggle between Israel and Palestine into a struggle between Good and Evil. This is no doubt morally satisfying, but it isn’t very helpful as a means of coming to terms with a complex set of political problems, and perhaps solving them. Walzer, in contrast uses the framework of different wars not to oversimplify, but to try to grapple with complexity; to show how the Israel-Palestine conflict involves a set of different struggles that are enmeshed with each other, and to try to disentangle them. If you want to get at the problem, it seems to me that Walzer’s style of analysis is much the better bet. More pertinently, it shows how talk of mass expulsions is not only odious but remarkably unhelpful - it’s likely to radicalize the Arab population within Israel, as well as stiffening the nerves of the rejectionists among the Palestinians.
Note: comments allowed - but any efforts to turn this into a Norman Geras slagfest will be ruthlessly expunged. While you may not agree with him, he’s been fighting the good fight for the last several decades, and deserves respect.
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