March 09, 2005

My five minutes of fame

Posted by John Quiggin

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.

March 08, 2005

The chains of debt

Posted by John Quiggin

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 ?

March 05, 2005

Long march to freedom

Posted by John Quiggin

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

February 25, 2005

Iran

Posted by Ted

I recently wrote about seeing Ray Takeyh, Senior Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations, speak about the nuclear threat from Iran. At the time, he mentioned that he would be publishing a piece with Ken Pollack on the subject. I see, via Belgravia Dispatch, that it’s out.

The authors argue that the West cannot force Iran to stop their weapons program; they rule out a full-scale invasion, targeted bombing, or wishful thinking about a coup. But a combination of incentives and sanctions that provide Iran with significant economic benefits for nuclear compliance can make butter more appealing than guns. It’s a serious and detailed piece, well worth printing out and reading.

How likely is it that the Bush administration will pursue this path? I doubt that anyone has any better ideas, but after their pointed rejection of the comparable North Korean framework, it’d cause a bit of whiplash.

February 07, 2005

Airmiles

Posted by Belle Waring
Could anything be more “Airmiles” than the suggestion that we start an essay competition to foil Bin Laden?
What I would do with the $75 million we have budgeted as rewards for bin Laden and Zarqawi is use it instead to sponsor an essay contest for high school students in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria and Egypt. The contest entry form would say the following: “In 2,000 words, write an essay on one of these two topics: 1. Why do you believe the Arab-Muslim world is fully capable of achieving democratic, representative government and how do you envisage it coming about through peaceful changes inside your country, without any American or other outside help. 2. Write an essay about the lives of any of the great medieval Arab or Muslim mathematicians, scientists or philosophers and how their innovations helped to shape our world today.”
You know what else we should ask? Turn-ons and turn-offs. Then they could be like, “I’m Miss September from Egypt. Turn-ons: democratic government, long walks on the beach; turn-offs: rude guys!”

February 05, 2005

Mysterious denunciation

Posted by Chris

I’m one of the objects of denunciation in an article by Louis Proyect on marxmail . Proyect is disgusted with various former editors of the New Left Review who have supported “humanitarian intervention” here and there. It is certainly true that I did (and still do) support the intervention in Kosovo, but Proyect has much more specific allegations:

In October 2000, the NLR asked Bertram to write an article on the anti-Milosevic revolt. However, editor Susan Watkins nixed the article since it implied political support for the forced absorption of Yugoslavia into Western European economic and political institutions.

The NLR never asked me to write such an article, I’ve never written such an article (asked or not), and so Susan Watkins couldn’t have “nixed” it. In fact, I’ve had no contact whatsoever with NLR since 1993. I don’t know whether the facts adduced by Proyect against other people in his piece are accurate ….

(Thanks to Henry for drawing my attention to this.)

[UPDATE: Proyect has now edited the piece so that Marko Attila Hoare is referred to as the author of the rejected NLR piece. I hope that’s correct]

January 20, 2005

Meanwhile, just across the border

Posted by John Quiggin
Iranians are stocking up on candy and flowers with which to bestrew invading US troops, according to Thomas Friedman who says “many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.”. His evidence for this proposition is the following
n Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were “loving anything their government hates,” such as Mr. Bush, “and hating anything their government loves.” Tehran is festooned in “Down With America” graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt. Iran, he said, is the ultimate “red state.”
Oddly enough, when I last visited America, I met plenty of people who “love anything their government hates,” and assured me that the kind of thing I saw on Fox was not really the way most Americans felt. They didn’t feel able to confess to me that they were longing for the arrival of a Franco-German liberation army, but no doubt if I’d had the benefit of an Oxford education, I would have been able to detect their eagerness for an invasion, civil war and so on.

January 13, 2005

The Iraqi Resistance and the Noble Cause

Posted by Daniel

The Iraqis will be going to the elections at the end of the month, so it is unsurprising that the insurgents have stepped up their campaign of blowing up tanks and chopping off heads. The is an awful lot of rubbish talked about the Iraqi insurgents; a simple look at the geographical distribution of their attacks shows that they unlikely to all be Sunnis or Ba’athists, and they are not targeting civilians in much greater proportion to military targets than we are. Whatever Christopher Hitchens thinks, they are the direct moral equivalent of the Viet Cong; they represent much of what is worst about the human condition, and any future in which they gained power would most likely be outright disastrous, but for all that, to take up arms against an occupying foreign army is not an ignoble thing to do, and I can quite understand why lots of people on the left have been sympathetic to them.

But history has passed them by. Iraq is not Vietnam (or more specifically, Iran is not China) and they have no hope of victory. All they can really do is prolong the occupation and therefore the misery. The time has well past by which anyone with brains in their head could reasonably hope for anything other than swift and reasonably democratic elections, a declaration of victory and for the coalition troops to jump in the tanks, start the engines and stop driving when they see the first McDonalds. Whatever happens, this war will have been a collossal waste of money and life; tens of thousands of excess deaths to create a puppet state. (By the way, as part of their debt relief deal, the Iraqis are currently negotiating a program with the IMF which will involve removing the market-distorting provision of subsidised food to the poor. I do hope that the Lancet will do a study into the effects of that, and that war crimes trials will result). But this is by the by as far as supporting the Iraqi resistance is concerned. Below the fold, I’ve posted a poem by Robert Burns that sums it up better than I ever could.

Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear, give an ear,
Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear,
Ye Jacobites by name,
Your fautes I will proclaim,
Your doctrines I maun blame, you shall hear.

What is Right, and What is Wrang, by the law, by
the law?
What is Right and what is Wrang by the law?
What is Right, and what is Wrang?
A short sword, and a lang,
A weak arm and a strang, for to draw.

What makes heroic strife, famed afar, famed afar?
What makes heroic strife famed afar?
What makes heroic strife?
To whet th’ assassin’s knife,
Or hunt a Parent’s life, wi’ bluidy war?

Then let your schemes alone, in the state, in the state,
Then let your schemes alone in the state.
Then let your schemes alone,
Adore the rising sun,
And leave a man undone, to his fate.

Adore the rising sun, indeed. There is a quite wonderful sung version of this on Eddie Reader’s album of songs by Burns.

December 22, 2004

Person of the year

Posted by Henry

Spotted in Toronto, where I spent part of last weekend - while George Bush is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, Time Canada’s “Newsmaker of the Year” is Maher Arar. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition.

December 19, 2004

More on hate speech and incitement

Posted by Chris

We all got worked up about the British governmen’t proposed law on incitement to religious hatred. But it isn’t the only thing going on in the world of free speech and censorship. Last night hundreds of Sikhs in Birmingham protested outside a theatre (and a few tried to storm the building) that was staging a play depicting scened of sexual abuse inside a Sikh temple. And the United States has added Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV station to its list of terrorist organizations on the grounds that its broadcasts incite violence. Al-Manar has also been taken off the air in France. Reports of the French decision give some detail both of Al-Manar’s offensive content and of the grounds of French action:

A guest on a live discussion programme said there were Zionist attempts to spread Aids and other diseases to Arabs. On December 2, the station accused Israel of “an unprecedented campaign” to stop it revealing to European viewers “the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel”.

The French broadcasting authority, CSA, said in a letter to al-Manar that Israel had never been held responsible for crimes against humanity by an international judicial body. Al-Manar’s words, it said, could constitute an incitement to hatred or violence on grounds of religion or nationality.

[Note: I’m leaving comments open, but discussion should focus on how these cases bear on principles governing hate speech. I’ll delete any comments which veer off into generalised comment on Israel-Palestine etc.]

December 04, 2004

What will they think of next?

Posted by Eszter

Amidst all the election news of the past month from all over, I have had little energy to compile a post about a referendum taking place tomorrow in Hungary: extending Hungarian citizenship to Hungarians living outside of Hungary’s borders. (Pick any country around Hungary and you’ll find relevant populations from Slovakia to Romania, from Serbia to Ukraine). When a nationalist party becomes desperate in securing votes, it comes up with interesting ideas. Why not extend voting rights to all Hungarians across the globe? Those who left in 1956 or who live as frustrated minorities in other countries may be the perfect targets for their nationalistic message. Give those people voting rights and the party may be able to secure quite a bit of popularity in the future.

Apparently there are no details about what it would take for people to prove their Hungarian “origins” (seems like opening a can of worms to be asking that kind of a question in this area of the world). That may be one aspect that would allow the current government (made up of parties that are not backing this initiative) to temper the effects of a majority yes vote.

One facet of all this of additional interest to me is how the country would proceed with the voting rights of those living abroad. The only way those of us abroad can currently cast our votes is to go to the Hungarian embassy in the country in which we reside. Obviously, this leads to few votes from those not residing in Hungary. For the initiative to be really effective, they would have to tweak this part of the system as well.

The outcome of the referendum tomorrow will only count if at least a quarter of those eligible to vote – so about two million people – plus one vote for the same outcome.

UPDATE (Sunday, Dec. 5, 2:30pm CST): The referendum did not get the requisite number of votes with the same outcome to count. Out of 8 million 24 thousand eligible voters, at least 2 million 6 thousand plus one would have had to vote yes. With 95 percent of votes counted (36.8 percent participation), 1.39 million voted yes to expanding citizenship to Hungarians beyond the country’s borders, 1.32 voted no. Let’s not even think about how much this whole fiasco cost the country…

December 02, 2004

Anne Applebaum can't tell left from right

Posted by John Quiggin

Columns in the Guardian by Jonathan Steele and John Laughland, asserting that demonstrations against the rigging of the Ukraine election were a Western-funded plot, have been the subject of a lot of criticism here and on other blogs. As far as Laughland is concerned, Chris gave us a good rundown on his views and assocations (which could broadly be described as lunar right) some months ago, and there’s more, in the Guardian itself, from David Aaronovitch.

Now we get this column from Anne Applebaum claiming that Steele and Laughland are part of a leftwing plot
The larger point, though, is that the “it’s-all-an-American-plot” arguments circulating in cyberspace again demonstrate something that the writer Christopher Hitchens, himself a former Trotskyite, has been talking about for a long time: At least a part of the Western left — or rather the Western far left — is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States.

Applebaum is generally well-informed and, while she does not name either Steele or Laughland, she says “Neither author was a fringe journalist”, which implies some familiarity with their positions. In any case, she presumably reads The Guardian. Why then doesn’t she acknowledge that the views they put forward draw the (minuscule) support they have attracted from the right as well as the left ?

UpdateOver at my blog, commenter Alex points out that Applebaum used to work for The Spectator which has published Laughland fairly regularly.

December 01, 2004

More from Tarik Amar on the Ukraine election

Posted by John Quiggin

The Ukraine crisis is dragging on, and could still collapse into violence, but I’ll restate my view that the likely outcome is a new runoff election, which Yushchenko will win. He almost certainly had a majority to begin with, and has generally behaved in a statesmanlike manner after the election, while Yanukovich has floundered, and generally looked like the thug he apparently is.

I’m appending another eyewitness report from Tarik Amar, forwarded by Dan Hardie

KYIV, UKRAINE, NOV 29:Sitting in an Internet Café on Kyiv’s central Independence Square among plenty of foreign correspondents who seem to know neither Ukrainian nor Russian well – the exception being the Poles – I have begun to wonder about what we, the West, get to know about the current revolution in Ukraine. Making my way through the permanent orange crowd that is holding the capital city’s center for opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, I went to the hard core of thE vast tent city set up on election night when the long-expected Kuchma-Yanukovych’s regime’s attempt to steal the election became reality.
The tents’ inhabitants spend most of their time standing around the perimeter of the slushiest camping ground I have ever seen, defying a freezing drizzle to talk to the crowds around them. Explaining that I am a historian and write about Ukraine, I am invited to climb across a rather symbolic fence improvised from park benches and let into the tent city itself.
There nobody hesitates for a second to answer my questions and have them taped. Many insist on having their real names recorded. For two hours I walked around in the early winter dusk squeezing through between low and tightly packed tents, some fires where shashlyk is being grilled, and a big screen constantly showing the independent, hence pro-opposition Fifth Channel.
While most tent dwellers are of student age or younger, there is a fair number of the middle-aged as well as a very old lady, huddling on a wet tent tarpaulin, covering her head with a make-shift cap made from Yushchenko-orange plastic. I asked one of the chief organizers when he began to feel that a rebellion was necessary. He explained to me that he was a lawyer trained in Ukraine and abroad. Having taken part in what he calls “the revolution of 1991”, when Ukraine was released into independence by a crumbling Soviet empire, he tells me he was disillusioned afterwards. Still, after the first round of the elections, marked already by ostentatious fraud and threats, he and others started to organize for the showdown they saw coming. At the same time, he did not expect so may people to join them. This, he tells me, is the first time that “Ukraine has stood up.”
Asked what disillusioned him most during Kuchma’s rule, his answer is quick: The killing of opposition journalist Hrihori Gongadze, and the very strong evidence that President Kuchma ordered it . Although the organiser was enjoying rapid promotion as a government lawyer, this murder convinced him that “the regime has gone so far that we cannot change it by purely legalistic means.” Civil resistance became inevitable. Once there Yuschenko becomes President, the lawyer wants all the murky affairs of the Kuchma regime to be unraveled by truly independent courts.
He also thinks that for most Ukrainians, the final straw were the “elections” in the town of Mukachevo earlier this year. It was then that the current regime staged a virtual dress rehearsal for its attempt a coup during the Presidential elections.



Volodymyr is a retired miner from western Ukraine, and insists that he has nothing against Russians or any other nationalities. In fact, he tells me without a hint of irony, he had a multinational upbringing. After World War Two, the Soviet authorities deported both his parents to Central Asia and he was born there. He played and went to school with Russians, Germans, and Kazakhs, and other nationalities. Yet, he is also clear about the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no right to intervene in Ukrainian elections. Referring to news – by now confirmed by the very serious Russian newspaper “Komersant” – that plain-clothes Russian special forces are protecting Kuchma’s Presidential Administration, Volodymyr says they must go. He will remain peaceful, but he wants it to be known that he is not a push-over and if Ukraine’s sovereignty is attacked, he will not run but fight.



Mykola, a young history student, says that for him breaking point was reached when he looked through archival propaganda of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, and found it frighteningly reminiscent of that used by Kuchma and Yanukovych. He, too, has no trouble with Russians or the Russian language but Putin’s policy during the Ukrainian elections was “not honest.” Mykola does not want to be bribed with Putin’s transparent offers of double citizenship and 90-day residence permits (most Russians cannot get those) in Moscow: “And what right does he have in general to intervene in our domestic policy?”



For Yury, too, the “very crude, very ugly” election propaganda of the Yanukovych camp was a turn-off. He points out to me that not only the voters of Yushchenko were subjected to attempts at deception and vote stealing by the regime. Again, without any sarcasm, he explains that those who were for Yanukovych were also deceived because the rigged election results made them think that they were a majority. Now they are disappointed at finding out how few of them there really are.



Yury’s girl-friend, Elena, is a young psychologist working for an advertisement agency. I want to know what she expects from life after a Yushchenko victory. What she wants most is the guarantee that she can live without politics. Being among the most visibly mobilized Ukrainians in a richly mobilized country, she insists that she does not believe that politics will stop being about power struggles and money, too. She has no difficulty believing that Yushchenko will stick to the law and respect the people. Under such a government she will be able to leave everyday politics to politicians who will keep within bounds. One thing all agree on is
put most pithily by Mykola: “the faster into the EU, the better.” Significantly,
I have not found anyone who dreamed
of EU cash raining down. Rather some were worried that integration into the EU economy might be very hard for Ukrainian companies. Yet, several also told me that what is more important is that the EU will keep demanding high standards of legality and good governance.



In general, nearly everybody I randomly picked to talk to told me about the regime’s heavy-handed methods backfiring. Where Yury and Mykola were put off beyond endurance by propaganda of Soviet crudeness, Roman, a highschool student tells me that for him everything was clear when the corrupt Central Electoral Commission announced an alleged Yanukovych victory within 24 hours, while it had taken ten days to count votes after the first round. Ira, standing next to him, tells me that her limit was passed when she went as election observer to a small village during round two. There she found that some people believed the thoroughly mendacious regime propaganda depicting Yushchenko as a “fascist.”
I don’t tell her that these stories are believed in not only by remote Ukranian villagers, cut off from all sources of information but regime media, but also by Westernjournalists who lack basic language skills and information as well as ethics. I have been emailed more than one link to some depressingly dishonest ‘opinion pieces’ in the Western press.
(Some names have been changed at the interviewees’ request.)

International AIDS day

Posted by Chris

I’ve been looking through the headlines on international AIDS day. The BBC discusses the disproportionate impact on women in Africa . India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV , and nobody really knows how many victims there are in China (CNN). “HIV and Aids are expected to kill 16 million farm workers in Southern Africa by 2010” reports the South African Independent Online . In Britain the Guardian tells us that a fifth of respondents to a poll blame the victims. In Lebanon , only a quarter of victims receive any kind of treatment. In Uganda a government minister warns the UN not to give advice to gays on safe sex because homosexuality is illegal. Please add more links in comments throughout the day.

November 29, 2004

Spreading democracy in practice

Posted by Henry

The OSCE must be doing something right, given the loud yelps of dismay from Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov in the FT today (warning: hidden behind paywall). Lavrov complains that the OSCE “has deviated from its original objectives” and that “some countries’ approach to the OSCE’s work is increasingly based on obvious double standards.” Dire warnings in diplomatic speak (“the very survival of the OSCE will depend on its ability to capitalise on its comparative advantages”) follow on demands that the OSCE revert to consensus-based decision-making and show a greater sensitivity to national and cultural differences. All of which amounts to a barely-stifled howl of complaint at the OSCE’s role in monitoring electoral behaviour in Ukraine, and blowing the whistle on some of the dodgy goings-on associated therewith. Since the early 1990’s, the OSCE has pioneered a very effective form of limited intervention that has helped prevent or mitigate ethnic conflict in a variety of trouble spots, as well as promoting democracy through election monitoring and norm diffusion. It’s clearly working well enough to discomfit the Russians. The final outcome in Ukraine is still up in the air (although it looks increasingly hopeful), but the process is very interesting indeed. It suggests yet again that outside actors can help promote democracy through monitoring, information diffusion and censure of bad behavior when the internal conditions are right. If Ukraine does indeed become a democracy over the next several years (I still wouldn’t lay hard money on this outcome) it will demonstrate that soft power, preventive diplomacy and constructive intervention can work, even in the teeth of vigorous opposition from the regional hegemon. Indeed, it will stand as an important counterexample of successful democracy-building to the mess in Iraq. Too early to say, of course, but worth keeping an eye on.

November 27, 2004

The case for war

Posted by John Quiggin
Norman Geras presents a central part of the argument for war, arguing that war can be justified even when it is predictable in advance that it will do more harm than good, and that even aggressors aren’t fully responsible for the consequences of the wars they start. Here’s the crucial bit
in sum, those in the anti-war camp often argue as if there wasn’t actually a war going on - the real conflict on the ground being displaced in their minds by the argument between themselves and supporters of the war. Everything is the fault of those who took the US and its allies into that war and, secondarily, those who supported or justified this. Except it isn’t. As I said in the earlier post, the war has two sides. One counter-argument here is likely to be that those who initiate an unjust war are responsible for everything they unleash. But first, this begs the question. Much of the case for the war’s being unjust was that it would have bad consequences. Yet, many of those bad consequences are the responsibility of forces prosecuting a manifestly unjust war - in both its objectives and its methods - on the other side. Secondly, it’s simple casuistry in assessing the responsibilities of two sides in a military conflict to load everything on to one of the sides - even where the blame for having begun an unjust and aggressive war is uncontroversial. Were the Japanese themselves responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Adolf Hitler was responsible for many terrible crimes during the Second World War. But the fire bombing of Dresden? This is all-or-nothing thinking.
To respond, I’ll begin by asking a question. Suppose those of us on the Left who opposed the Iraq war had prevailed. To what extent, if any, would we have been responsible for the crimes that Saddam would undoubtedly have committed while he remained in power?

Based on the above argument1, Geras’ answer would have to be “not at all”. Opponents of the war did not (with a handful of exceptions) support Saddam’s regime or assist it in committing its various crimes. And it’s clear here that Geras requires absolute and direct complicity. When Hitler fire-bombed London, it was obvious that, if the British ever got the chance they would in Churchill’s memorable phrase “give it all back, in good measure, pressed down and running over”, as of course they did. But since the bombing of Dresden was an unjust action, Hitler was not, in Geras’ view, morally responsible for it.

There’s a sense in which this is right, but it’s not the relevant one in asking the question “Should we have opposed the war”. In deciding to oppose the war, it was necessary to take account of all the consequences2 of the decision insofar as they could be foreseen3. Those consequences included Saddam’s continuation in power, which would have cost thousands of lives and caused a lot of misery. The alternative was the war which has cost tens of thousands of lives and caused even more misery, something which should have been predictable in advance and was in fact predicted. If you accept this assessment, leaving Saddam in power was the lesser of two evils.

Since there are a lot of unknowns here, reasonable people differed about the best course of action before the war. Some believed that the war would be short that the transition to democracy would be rapid, and therefore that the war should be supported. Some believed the Administration’s claims about WMDs and Saddam’s to al Qaeda, which implied that leaving Saddam alone would be very dangerous. Most people who reasoned in this way have conceded that, at least ex post they were mistaken. Belle’s post on this was one of the best. Here’s another from Michael Ignatieff. Some people are still trying to argue that the good consequences of the war will eventually outweigh the bad, but this is becoming less and less plausible.

If you accept Geras’ argument, though, there’s no need to abandon support for this or any just war, even if its consequences are more evil than good. The bad consequences in Iraq are due to the insurgents who are unjustly resisting the Americans. And more generally, it’s hard to imagine any war that can’t be justified, on both sides, by this kind of argument. If your cause is just (in your own eyes), and the rules by which you fight it are justified (in your own eyes), then the death and carnage of war is all due to the manifestly unjust actions of the other side.

Given this analysis, it’s not surprising while supporters of the war have quibbled with recent estimates of civilian casualties, infant mortality and so on, few have given any indication that there is some level at which their support for the war would be withdrawn. The argument now isn’t about support or opposition to this war but about support for or opposition to war in general.

1 I haven’t checked, but I don’t think Geras has been entirely consistent in this respect.

2 This argument may be made either with regard to a case-by-case assessment of particular decisions, or to the formulation of general rules.

3 In making a judgement of this kind, it’s worth remembering that, most of the time, wars have been far more bloody and brutal than was expected on either side at the start. It’s more or less self-evident that at least one side in war has underestimated the costs and overestimated the benefits, but more common that both sides have done so.

Murder in Baghdad

Posted by Chris

Not only is child malnutrion soaring in Iraq, but so are deaths from crime. The Times reports that in Baghdad alone more that 700 people are killed every month:

Shot, stabbed, blown up,burnt: the bodies of Iraqis killed in Baghdad lie piled in overcrowded refrigerators at the city’s central mortuary, their ever-increasing number overwhelming both staff and storage space in a wave that marks the city’s descent into a Hobbesian world of crime and brutality.

“Our morgue was designed to cope with between five and ten bodies a day,” explained Kais Hassan, the harrassed statistician whose job it is to record the capital’s suspicious deaths. He gestured into the open door of a refrigeration unit at the stomach-turning sight of tangled corpses inside, male and female, shaded with the brown and green hues of death. “Now we’re getting 20 to 30 in here a day. It’s a disaster.”

To be fair, the article also reports that the hospital staff cannot agree on whether on not the situation is worse than under Saddam, since they remember the Baathists dumping large numbers of unclaimed bodies at the morgue. No doubt there’ll be blog commentary to the effect that (a) the crime-related death figures are invented by anti-war ideologues and (b) the Coalition can in no way be held responsible for deaths from crime. (via Juan Cole )

November 26, 2004

Tarik Amar on the Ukraine election/coup

Posted by John Quiggin

One of the nice things about blogging is the occasional contributions from people who have more sense than to start a blog of their own, but are well-informed and passionate about particular subjects of current interest. Over at my blog, I’ve had not one but two such contributions on events in Ukraine.

Following up the post from Tom Oates last week, reader Dan Hardie sent me another (long) piece, by Tarik Amar, who is doing a PhD on Soviet history speaks Ukranian, German and Russian, among other languages, and knows the place very well. Lacking all these qualifications, I pass it on to you with a recommendation to read it.

From what I’ve read, including Tarik’s piece, this all seems very similar to Marcos in the Phillipines and Milosevic in Serbia, and hopefully will be resolved in a similar fashion.

November 24, 2004

Ukraine

Posted by Chris

There’s some commenter unrest in a thread below about our lack of coverage of recent events in Ukraine. Lacking the resources of the BBC or the NY Times, I’m afraid that we assorted academics and oddballs at CT can’t aspire to comprehensive news coverage and usually (well sometimes!) restrict ourselves to writing about stuff we know something about. Fortunately, when we are ourselves in a shocking state of ignorance, we can sometimes point to people who are not. And such is Nick Barlow, over at Fistful of Euros , who has multiple posts on the topic.

November 18, 2004

The inevitability of corruption (repost)

Posted by John Quiggin

Scandals surrounding the Oil-for-Food program and postwar reconstruction in supply contracts, particularly with respect to Halliburton just keep on going. So I thought I’d repost this piece from six months ago, pointing out that it’s silly to try and score political points out of either of these.

Over the course of the Iraq war, a lot of opponents of the war have made a big noise about corruption among US contractors, the most common target being Halliburton. More recently, the pro-war blogosphere has been in an uproar over the ‘discovery’ that Saddam bribed a range of officials, including some in the UN, so that he could get kickbacks from the sale of oil, which was supposed to be used solely for the purchase of food and other essential imports. There has been a sense of baffled rage that no-one is much interested in pursuing these ‘discoveries’.

The scare quotes around ‘discovery’ reflect the fact that everyone who was paying any attention knew about this all along, and, indeed could deduce it from first principles. For example, in a piece on financing the reconstruction of Iraq written in May 2003, I observed
A return to normal output would yield gross income of around $US 20 billion per year at current prices, but most of this money was already being spent under the Food-for-oil program and most of it be needed for the same purpose in future. About 25 per cent of the money was taken to pay interest on debts associated with reparations for the 1991 War. If these were forgiven, some additional money would become available. In addition, it appears that Saddam managed to cream off $1 billion to $2 billion per year. If this were returned to the Iraqi people in general, it would make a small but positive contribution.
I didn’t bother to point it out, but it was obvious that Saddam could only get his cut by bribing those on the other side of the deal, that is, employees of the UN, the oil companies and the governments involved.

In the same piece, I made the point that the US contractors doing the work in Iraq were bound to charge a lot and deliver little, so that the cost of reconstruction would be far beyond the minuscule amounts that had then been budgeted. The appropriate response was not to complain about corruption but to accept reality and the need to spend a lot more money.

Iin both cases, it was, or ought to have been, obvious that the policy in question would produce corruption. That was why the US and UK initially tried to keep sanctions much tighter, with the result that thousands of Iraqi children died of starvation or inadequate medical treatment. Those who supported the Oil-for-Food program, knew, or ought to have known, that Saddam would take a large cut, and supported it anyway. Those who supported large-scale expenditure on reconstruction after the war knew, or ought to have known, that unscrupulous contractors would make a fortune, and supported it anywar. I’m happy to admit to supporting both policies, and to accepting corruption as one of the inevitable costs.

Having said all that, corruption is a crime and those guilty of it should be punished. But, unless you favor starving Iraqi children or doing nothing about reconstruction, trying to use either Halliburton or ‘UNSCAM’ to score points regarding the desirability or otherwise of the war is just silly.

November 16, 2004

Inside Fallujah

Posted by Chris

The LA Times reports on an Iraqi doctor’s experiences inside Fallujah. (via Brian Leiter )

November 14, 2004

Iraq: A War of Liberation

Posted by John Quiggin

Supporters of both sides in the war in Iraq, and particularly those who are or were associated with the left, have described it as a “war of liberation”. Here, for example, is John Pilger and here is Norman Geras. Presumably Geras and Pilger each think the other is wrong.

The obvious position for an opponent of the war is that both are wrong. On reflection though, I think that Geras and Pilger are both right.

If you look at the many wars that have been justified as wars of liberation, it’s clear enough that the overthrow of a brutal dictator and the struggle against authoritarian Islamism in all its forms fit the general picture. Equally, so does the expulsion of a foreign invader responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and a wide range of other criminal and oppressive actions.

The problem, rather, is with the whole idea of a “war of liberation”. Just as with the Christian doctrine of “just war”, the doctrine is so loose that it can easily be claimed by both sides in the same war. Most wars of liberation, like most wars of all kinds, have done more harm than good.

This is obviously true of the failures, which have been many. But even the (usually temporary) successes have rarely been worth the cost. Are the people of Indochina better off, for example, than they would have been if the French had ruled there for another thirty years? For that matter, did the wars of liberation extended throughout Europe by the French after 1793 achieve anything to justify the hundreds of thousands of deaths they entailed?

Another important observation, particularly relevant in the case of Iraq, is that, even if you conceive of a war as one of liberation, it is almost always necessary to ally yourself with people who have less noble aspirations. Nationalist Iraqis, seeking only the withdrawal of the occupying forces, have inevitably co-operated to some extent (how much is not clear) with terrorist jihadis, who want to use Iraq as a base for their own global operations. Supporters of the American war effort find themselves in coalition with all sorts of unsavory parties, from thugs like Allawi and (until a few months ago) crooks like Chalabhi, to anti-Muslim crusaders in the West. As a rule, the least scrupulous members of a coalition are the most successful in pursuing their goals.

I’m not advocating a dogmatic position of nonviolence, or of opposition to revolution. The classic pattern of revolution is one in which a rotten regime collapses in the face of a relatively modest show of popular force, and we have seen plenty of examples of this in our own time. But the decision to embark on a the path of war is one that can only be justified by the most dire of necessities, and, preferably by the assurance of a rapid and relatively bloodless victory. This is particularly true of wars of liberation, which are inevitably fought without any of the constraints that (at least some of the time) mitigate the worst effects of wars between states.

November 11, 2004

Allawi the thug

Posted by Chris

With so many of the usual suspects showering opprobrium on the still-warm Arafat, it is perhaps worth raising the issue of consistency. If Arafat’s past included some of the items on Iyad Allawi’s curriculum vitae then those acts would certainly have been added to the bills of indictment that feature on so many blogs. [1] Andrew Gilligan (formerly of the Today Programme, Hutton Report etc.) has an article on Allawi in the latest Spectator. A snippet

With a friend, Adel Abdul Mahdi, he arranged to kidnap the dean of the university to publicise the Baath cause. ‘We took Iraq’s first hostages,’ recalls Mr Abdul Mahdi, now Iraq’s finance minister, nostalgically. The two men did time for the offence, until a Baathist coup got them back out again.

And later ….

The INA’s most controversial operation during this period was a campaign of what can only be termed terrorism against civilians. In 1994 and 1995 a series of bombings at cinemas, mosques and other public places in Baghdad claimed up to 100 civilian lives. The leading British Iraq expert, Patrick Cockburn, obtained a videotape of one of the bombers, Abu Amneh al-Khadami, speaking from his place of refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming that the attacks had been ordered and orchestrated by Adnan Nuri, the INA’s Kurdistan director of operations — an account that has not been seriously disputed.

He may be a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard?

1 Of course Arafat’s biography does include many disreputable actions.

The greatest of crimes

Posted by John Quiggin

November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.

The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions1.

And yet this catastrophe was brought about under the leadership of politicians remarkable for their ordinariness. Nothing about Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Bethmann Holllweg or the other leaders on both sides marks them out for the company of Attila or Tamerlane or Stalin. How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them? In retrospect, it is surely clear that both sides would have been better if peace had been made on the basis of any of the proposals put up in 1917 on the general basis of of “no annexations or indemnities”. The same was true, in reality, at any time from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the final collapse of the Central Powers, and even then the terms of 1917 would have been better for all than those of Versailles. We should think about this every time we are called to war with sweet-sounding slogans.

War is among the greatest of crimes. It may be the lesser evil on rare occasions, but it is always a crime. On Remembrance Day and always, this is what we should remember.

1 It’s not clear whether the War exacerbated the pandemic, for example through massive movements of people and widespread privation. But it seems right to consider them together when we remember the War.

The greatest of crimes

Posted by John Quiggin

November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.

The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions1.

And yet this catastrophe was brought about under the leadership of politicians remarkable for their ordinariness. Nothing about Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Bethmann Holllweg or the other leaders on both sides marks them out for the company of Attila or Tamerlane or Stalin. How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them? In retrospect, it is surely clear that both sides would have been better if peace had been made on the basis of any of the proposals put up in 1917 on the general basis of of “no annexations or indemnities”. The same was true, in reality, at any time from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the final collapse of the Central Powers, and even then the terms of 1917 would have been better for all than those of Versailles. We should think about this every time we are called to war with sweet-sounding slogans.

War is among the greatest of crimes. It may be the lesser evil on rare occasions, but it is always a crime. On Remembrance Day and always, this is what we should remember.

1 It’s not clear whether the War exacerbated the pandemic, for example through massive movements of people and widespread privation. But it seems right to consider them together when we remember the War.

November 09, 2004

Legitimate spammers

Posted by John Quiggin

It’s not the death penalty as demanded by Stephen Landsburg for hackers, but the nine-year sentence handed down to megaspammer Jeremy Jaynes should mark the beginning of the end for spammers physically located in the US. But that’s small comfort, since spam can be sent from anywhere. A less mobile target can be found in the businesses that ultimately sell stuff through spam. These include some very large firms indeed.

I was struck, a few months ago, by an article in the Kansas City Star (free subscrption required, reprinted from the Chicago Tribune), which details the activity of a spammer, Ryan Pitylak, selling various kinds of insurance. The money quote (literally) is
Completed forms, in turn, are sold to agents of legitimate companies, such as IndyMac Bank, ADT Security and MEGA Life and Health Insurance. The agents say they pay $3 to $7 for each referral. (emphasis added)
I can’t see anything legitimate about a company that employs criminal methods in its business, while pretending to be at arms length from the whole thing. It seems pretty clear that the way to make this kind of spam uneconomical is to make the employers of spammers liable for civil action. Estimates of $2000/employee, mentioned in the story,may be a bit on the high side, but the economic damage done by spammers is immense - more than enough to put firms like those mentioned out of business if they were forced to bear their share of the bill.

I thought perhaps these firms might be unaware of how Pitylak was getting his referrals, so I emailed them with links to the story1. Of course, I got no reply.

It strikes me that John Edwards has a bit of free time on his hands and that, if there’s one thing that could make plaintiff lawyers universally popular, it would be a class action lawsuit against the employers of spammers. Put me down for $2000, please, John.

Of course, this wouldn’t work so well against the purveyors of generic viagra, penis enlargement and so on, where the businesses are just as fly-by-night as the spammers. But every little helps.

1 BTW, it’s surprisingly hard to locate corporate email addresses for the purpose of making complaints like this. Perhaps they’re afraid of being spammed.

November 08, 2004

A Soviet-style election ?

Posted by John Quiggin

With Fallujah being pounded to bits, jihadi and insurgent attacks everywhere and a state of emergency, this may seem like a bad time to discuss the Iraqi elections, but there’s no reason to suppose that there’s going to be a better one.

In the Washington Post, Marina Ottaway develops concerns I’ve expressed previously about the possibility that the Iraqi election will degenerate into a Yes-No vote on a unified slate of candidates with a predetermined sharing of the spoils (thanks to Jack Strocchi for the link). Apparently the US Embassy/shadow government is backing this idea. It seems unbelievable that anyone on the US side could see this as a good idea (of course, it makes great sense for Allawi who would be wiped out in a competitive election), but this kind of thing has been the pattern at every previous stage of the occupation.

October 20, 2004

Iaora Tahiti

Posted by Maria

Pop quiz: name a wily old political operator who relies on the French Right to keep him out of jail and in power indefinitely while he out-manoeuvres the opposition and bamboozles the tax-payer.

No, not Jacques Chirac. His buddy Gaston Flosse, aka Papa Flosse, the president-in-waiting of French Polynesia. Chirac’s unbending desire to keep Flosse in power has thrown French Polynesia into a political and institutional crisis, sparking the biggest protests ever seen in Tahiti, and accusations by the French Left of a legal coup d’etat.

French Polynesia is a collection of about 120 islands in the South Pacific, best known for hosting France’s nuclear testing programme till the mid-1990s, Gauguin’s creepy island girl period, and a very popular brand of shower gel. It’s a hybrid ex-colony of France, enjoying subsidies for social and other government programmes and leaving final say on policing and foreign policy to Paris. It’s also ideally placed in the South Pacific, forming a key part of France’s global surveillance network and doubling as an ideal holiday destination for the February school holidays. What it lacks by way of a functioning economy and autonomous political institutions, French Polynesia makes up in strategic importance and days of sunshine.

Gaston Flosse is the leader of French Polynesia’s rightist party, Tahoeraa Huiraatira , which is formally tied to Chirac’s UMP. In June this year, Flosse surprised himself and the opposition by losing a general election by 45% to 55% after almost 20 years in power. He immediately declared the result a fraud, and appealed it to France’s Council of State. Meanwhile, the opposition – who’d won the same number of seats, 27, but formed a coalition with three remaining representatives – elected Oscar Temaru as president.

Temaru is an ‘independantiste’, i.e. he wishes to see an autonomous and independent French Polynesia, but is no extremist – he expects the process to take up to twenty years. He might have been allowed to try his hand at governing the islands, until he announced he would pursue an inquiry into public spending under Flosse over the last five years and publicise the findings.

But Flosse has learnt a trick or two from Chirac during their long association. Liberation, the left-wing newspaper, claims to have a document that shows 50 people with imaginary jobs on the government payroll, from mayors to union leaders, clergymen to sports stars, newspaper hacks to fomer Miss Tahitis. The bill for Flosse’s largesse comes to 1.6 million euros a year, and it all sounds alarmingly redolent of Paris when Chirac was mayor. In 1997, Flosse received a boon from his friend Jacques; the power to dole out subsidies from the French state to Polynesia’s local government bodies. Since then, Flosse has been able to use French taxpayers’ money to reward the faithful and deprive his opponents. And how.

Flosse has been under investigation for corruption several times, but a quiet word in the right ear has generally served to have the inquiries dropped. When he was convicted of accepting bribes in 1999, Flosse appealed, notwithstanding public protest marches calling for his resignation. But Temaru’s investigation threatened to use the power of the state to follow the money all the way to the top. Who knows who might have been implicated?

Last week, after a marathon two-day debate, Flosse won a coalition deputy over to his side to pass a motion of censure against the Temaru’s government and effectively overturn it. Allegations of bribery are being openly bandied about in France, in newspaper headlines and in radio interviews with the Parti Socialiste. And 15,000 Tahitians took to the streets to peacefully protest the over-turning of June’s election result. The Polynesian and French opposition are calling for the state to dissolve parliament and have a new election.

But the Flosse posse are pressing blithely on. Yesterday, their attempt to elect Flosse president was temporarily thwarted when the opposition boycotted parliament, making it impossible to reach quorum. Now Flosse’s party say the vote will take place on Friday when quorum will no longer be needed. Meanwhile, newspapers carrying a critical interview with Temaru were seized and destroyed at Tahiti’s airport, and two companies of CRS riot police have flown in to handle any trouble.

And where is Paris amidst all this? Parotting the government defense of last resort: questioning the government is destructive and disloyal to the state. The minister responsible for the territories, Brigitte Girardin, gave a spirited answer* yesterday in the Assemblee Nationale when asked if the French government would stand by and let the democratic will of the Polynesians be ignored. She said a vote of censure need not trigger an election, and objectors were engaging in ‘illegal manoeuvres’. In a masterful mix of legal reductionism, cheap shots and grandstanding, Girardin managed to blame it all on the socialists who’d written the law in question, and demand that critics cease their shameful attacks on the French state. The upshot of it all is that the Socialists won’t get the inquiry they asked for, and the Polynesians won’t get their election.

Chirac et al seem set to bluster through, hoping the natives don’t insist too strongly on the democracy they were promised. Meanwhile, Flosse will declare himself president, pay off his supporters, declare business as usual, and get set for another few years on the gravy train. Now aged 73, he’ll probably never have to account for the gaping holes in Polynesia’s public finances that the French will continue to pay for.

So was it really worth it? Chirac has risked a civil and political meltdown in one of France’s territories, handed his own opposition a juicy target that recalls the previous failures of the right in Guadeloupe and New Caledonia, and written a blank cheque to an aged and corrupt ruler 10,000 miles from Paris. That’s the price of friendship, I suppose.

  • Girardin’s bullish defense of the indefensible reminded me of Harriet Harman’s performance regarding internment of suspect asylum seekers on Question Time last week. Watching clever and sympathetic politicians front for appalling government policies is sickly compelling…

October 07, 2004

"Hungarian" Nobel Prize winners

Posted by Eszter

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been announced for 2004. I started compiling a post about it, but found myself sending emails to my father for clarification. He is an expert on the topic of Nobel Prizes (having written a book about it based on interviews with over 70 Nobel Laureates) so I decided to invite him to write a little blurb here for us. Given his expertise in the topic and the Hungarian connection of one of this year’s laureates, he has spent the last day and a half giving interviews to various media outlets in Hungary. I have edited his post ­ with his permission ­ by shifting some of the science information into a footnote to focus the attention on another component of his note. My father is Professor of Chemistry at the Budapest University of Technology.

Some experiences beyond chemistry of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry by István Hargittai

On October 6 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2004 was announced. The citation was, “for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.” The recipients were Aaron Ciechanover (b. 1947 in Israel), a professor of medical sciences at the Technion - the Israel Institute of Technology, Avram Hershko (b. Herskó Ferenc 1937 in Hungary), also a professor of medical sciences at the Technion, and Irwin Rose (b. 1926), an American professor, formerly at the Fox Chase Cancer Research Center in Philadelphia.1

There is an interesting side issue with Avram Hershko in that he was born in Karcag, Hungary, and then emigrated with his family in 1950 to Israel. He is one of several scientists of Hungarian origin who became famous and much recognized abroad. There are various counts of Hungarian Nobel laureates, but here is what the Prime Minister of Hungary allegedly said on the day of the chemistry prize announcement: He welcomed the news by referring to Hershko as the fourteenth Hungarian Nobel laureate and stressed that Hershko has kept his Hungarian name and language.

Recently, it has been generally recognized that most of those who used to be counted as Hungarian Nobel laureates should be more subtly labelled as Nobel laureates of Hungarian origin. Of all those who might be considered, only two actually travelled from Budapest to Stockholm to receive the award. In 1937, Albert Szent-Györgyi travelled from Budapest to Stockholm to receive his medical Nobel Prize (for Vitamin C, etc.) and in 2002, the writer Imre Kertész travelled from Budapest to Stockholm to receive the prize in literature for his book, Fateless, which was based on his experience in the Holocaust. All other laureates had long before their prize left Hungary, either they were forced out of the country or they realized that there was no future for them in Hungary.

Ironically, when Kertész was awarded, a vocal part of the population complained about his Jewishness, and expressed severe doubts whether his Nobel Prize could be considered a Hungarian Nobel Prize. With this it was demonstrated - if there was any doubt - that Jewish scientists and authors might have been justified to leave.

An objective and non-Jewish author who looked into the origins of what are considered Hungarian Nobel laureates determined that roughly about two thirds of them were of Jewish origin. This is a much higher proportion than the otherwise also considerable Jewish share of the Nobel laureates in toto, which is about one fifth.

Before continuing, I would like to stress that I do not see much value in trying to treat these categories rigorously, but they are of interest in showing some trends. The point I am trying to make is that Hungary much appreciates its Nobel laureates after they become Nobel laureates. What I find disturbing is that in such cases people attempt to paint the past rosier than it was. For example I have now, having been interviewed several times in the past day and a half, personally experienced how editors try to edit out details from Hershko’s past that refer to the less-than-glorious treatment of the Hershko family during the Fascist and Nazi times. If it were up to official Hungary of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hershko and his family should have perished in Auschwitz. His father was sent to a so-called forced labor camp and he survived because early on he was captured by the Russians and, after another forced labor stint, he could return to Hungary in 1947. The rest of the Hershko family, Hershko’s mother and his brother and himself were taken to a ghetto first in their home town in Karcag, then to a larger concentration in Szolnok, in central Hungary. Most of these people were then put into cattle carriages under the most inhuman conditions and sent to Auschwitz. A few trainloads, however, ended up in Austria as a result of a deal between the Germans and a group of Hungarian Jewish leaders (behind the back of the Hungarian authorities). The Hershko family was among the lucky ones and were sent to a distribution camp of Strasshof near Vienna. [Eszter’s note: this is the same story of how my family survived, my father and the rest of my family who were still alive then were in this same situation.] About eighteen thousand Jews were thus “put on ice” in Austria and used as slave laborers until the end of the war while hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews perished in Auschwitz and elsewhere. It was a miracle that Hershko and his family could return to Karcag. When they did, they found their former home empty, whatever could be taken from their home had been taken by their fellow citizens of Karcag, and nothing was returned to them voluntarily when they came back. These are details that editors edit out from descriptions of Hershko’s life in Hungary. His father used to teach in the Jewish school of Karcag. After the war, there were hardly people to teach there; they soon moved to Budapest, and in 1950 to Israel. Hershko changed his first name in Israel and he never used his Hungarian language again except for communicating with his parents. He did not visit Hungary until after the political changes in 1990 and when he did, he was taken aback by the return of many external features of pre-war Hungary which in his thoughts were associated with unpleasant things to remember.

Hershko does not like Hungary but does not hate Hungary either. He was pleased when Hungary’s Prime Minister called and congratulated him. He does not follow all what is being printed about him in the Hungarian media so he cannot be upset by the attempts of editors re-writing the past which Hungary still has not been able to face with honor.

Who wrote this?

I am Eszter’s father and this is based on my conversations with Avram Hershko and what I have experienced during the past one and half days in Budapest. Concerning the deportations of Jews from Hungary, their return (that of the few lucky survivors), and about present-day anti-Semitism in Hungary, see my book I. Hargittai, Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004.

1 Ubiqitin is a relatively small protein, which is instrumental in protein degradation. Our organism consists to a large extent of proteins. However, when some proteins are no longer needed, they have to be destroyed. There are illnesses that produce unwanted proteins and they have to be destroyed as well. This implies the potentials of medical applications of the discovery of these scientists, who understood the mechanism of action of ubiquitin. The breakthrough happened in 1979 and was communicated in a paper published in 1980. Hershko had started the work almost a decade before; Ciechanover was initially his doctoral student; Rose was a recognized researcher of enzymes when he and Hershko met and Hersho and Ciechanover spent some time in Rose’s laboratory in Philadelphia. Although most of the work then and since has been carried out at the Technion, the culmination of their research at that time happened in Rose’s laboratory with Rose’s participation.

September 26, 2004

The over-optimism of Fahrenheit 911

Posted by John Quiggin

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

September 22, 2004

Better than the Great Depression

Posted by John Quiggin

Daniel Akst contributes yet another in a seemingly endless series of articles reminding American workers that they should “stop whining”, since they are far better off than were their forebears during the Great Depression.

What is striking about this genre is that the choice of the Depression is not an accident. You have to go back that far to get a comparison that gives a clear-cut, unqualified and substantial improvement in the pay and conditions of US workers across the board. Real hourly wages for men with high school education are now around the levels prevailing in the 1950s1. Since it’s difficult to make comparisons with the war decade of the 1940s, it’s necessary to go back to the 1930s to get a clear-cut improvement.

Correction and apology I got so annoyed by the appearance of the Depression comparison, that I failed to read the entire article properly. Akst ends by pointing out
It is noteworthy that in news media coverage of job stress, the emphasis is usually on educated middle-class professionals who, in fact, have many choices - including a lower-pressure job or simply working less. All this hand-wringing over the suffering of the relatively fortunate only distracts us from the plight of Americans whose work lives are really stressful: those who are paid $7 or $8 an hour, don’t have health insurance and lack the skills or education to better their lot. Life for these workers is a tightrope act without a net, so the least that we lucky ones can do is stop whining. Better yet, we can honor their labor by adopting social policies, like national health insurance, a higher minimum wage and tougher limits on unskilled immigration, that will ease their struggle. It will cost us something, of course. But for the working poor, yoga won’t cut it.
which makes a lot of the points I would have wanted. I withdraw my criticism of Akst and apologise for misreading him. Thanks to commenter Steve Carr for pointing this out. (As there has been plenty of discussion, I’ll leave the rest of the post unchanged for the record) end correction

Of course, given enough space, there are all sorts of arguments that can be made to say that a comparison of real hourly wages for men is not the right one. Benefits such as health insurance have generally risen by more than wages. Women’s wages have risen a lot. The consumer price index doesn’t give any weight to increased product variety and arguably doesn’t make a big enough adjustment for quality. And so on.

But then, it’s easy to turn a lot of these things around. Low-wage workers are increasingly being excluded from employer-provided health benefits. There are plenty of services where quality has declined. Unions are weaker and employers more ruthless in firing unwanted workers than in the 1950s.

On balance, the decline in measured real wages for high-school educated workers probably overstates the welfare loss incurred by such workers. Hence, they are a bit better off now than similarly qualified workers in the 1950s. But the difference is far from clear-cut, which explains the continual resort to comparisons with the Depression.

But to conclude in the spirit offered by Akst, we should stop whining. If the trends of the past three decades resume, after the brief interrruption of the late 1990s, we’ll soon be reading about how much worse things were during the Industrial Revolution, or the Dark Ages, or the Paleolithic Era.

1 I couldn’t find a good series on hourly wages going back to the 1950s. But the Federal minimum wage is the relevant standard for millions of workers. It’s currently at the same real value as in the mid-1950s, and falling.

September 21, 2004

No more years? (Andrew Sullivan edition)

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

Some updates over the fold

A couple more thoughts on this:

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

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

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

September 20, 2004

Vendetta against Venezuela

Posted by John Quiggin

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

Death of the book ?

Posted by John Quiggin

The death of the book, like the paperless office, has been predicted so many times that people have given up paying attention. But, for me, at least, it came a big step closer today, at least in one sense, when I downloaded a PDF version of China Mieville’s Iron Council from Amazon.

This event was entirely unplanned. I went to Amazon planning a standard order and noticed that the PDF option was available. Since I didn’t want to pay for postage and wait weeks for delivery (and the PDF version was a bit cheaper anyway) I decided to try it out1. The download was pretty straightforward and the Digital Rights Management doesn’t seem too obtrusive - as I understand it I can use the file on as many computers as I want, with just a userid and password.

I’ve read about fifty pages so far2, and my feeling is that, with a large flat-screen monitor, reading a good-quality PDF is comparable to reading a medium-quality printed book. Given the limitations, particularly the need to sit in one spot, I can’t see this become my preferred mode for a while. Still, there are a lot of advantages to consider, and in many cases, these will outweigh the negatives for me.

First, it means instant cheap access to new books published overseas. This is important for Australians, and others outside the US and UK who often have to wait a long time for ‘colonial’ releases of books published in the metropolitan countries.

Second, there’s essentially no storage problem. Iron Council is 1.7 MB, so I could store about 20,000 similar volumes on an iPod. For someone whose home and office bookshelves are already groaning (and with no wall space remaining for more) this is a big issue.

Third, I can see big advantages for book reviewing of which I do a fair bit. I’ll easily be able to search for bits of text, cut and paste quotes3 and so on. And presumably we’ll eventually see the kind of added features that have made DVDs so popular.

So, is the death of the book imminent? Not, I think if we value books as texts rather than as physical objects. As I argued here, the idea, pushed by Camille Paglia and others, that the Internet is little more than a turbocharged TV set is the worst sort of pop McLuhanism. It may be that the medium is the message, but that doesn’t (or shouldn’t) refer to the distinction between paper and screens as delivery vehicles. A comic has more in common with a video clip than with a physics text, and a blog has more in common with a magazine than with a movie.

Far from spelling the end of the book, the advent of the Internet, and the expanded possibilities for digital delivery of text, represents the beginning of a new golden age.

1 I actually tried more than a decade ago, with a floppy-disk based version of Jurassic Park. It wasn’t unbearably bad, but not an experience I was keen to repeat.

2 As with Perdido Street Station, I’m finding it a bit slow going at the start. But I found Perdido Street Station really gripping by the end, so I’m not discouraged.

3 At least if Digital Rights Management doesn’t kill this option

September 19, 2004

Frank on positional goods

Posted by John Quiggin

Jon’s post on Big-time college sports draws on work by Robert Frank, who treats high performance in college sports as a positional good.

By an interesting coincidence, Frank gave a seminar here in Brisbane on Friday and stayed for a very interesting chat afterwards. He argued that the growth in inequality in the US has been positively harmful to the middle class, even though their income has been roughly stationary since the 1970s.

One argument is that expenditure on positional goods by the top quintile has negative externalities such as the need to buy larger cars to protect yourself against SUVs and the need to buy more expensive clothes to appear decently-dressed in various contexts, such as job interviews. . Another has to do with informational cascades creating higher aspirations for consumption. The one-line message is “relative income matters”. Frank sees this as a big factor in declining savings rates, increasing household indebtedness and (I would infer) growth in the current account deficit.

Although I agree with a lot of this, I think another version of relative income is more significant in the case of the US. Incomes rose rapidly and across the board in the postwar period, and this followed a lot of equalisation during WWII and the New Deal. By contrast, since 1970, they’ve been flat for middle income households and have actually declined for the bottom 20 per cent of households1. This means that when people compare their current consumption to their own past peak levels or to their parents’ they may well find that it has declined.

This is even more likely to be true at a disaggregated level. Lots of new goods like computers have come on the market since 1970. While more variety is welfare-improving, if budgets are fixed, expenditure on new items must be financed by a reduction in consumption of old items. If people aspire to avoid such reductions, they must increase consumption expenditure.

As Frank observed in discussion, there is nothing in this that would have seemed surprising to economists in the 1950s and 1960s when Duesenberry’s work on previous-peak consumption models was influential. But this model has been almost entirely displaced by Friedman’s permanent income model and its successor the life-cycle model, even though the empirical performance of these models is not as good as Duesenberry’s. Clearly there are strong ideological/methodological preferences at work here.

1 Gregg Easterbrook ran hard with the idea that the bottom 20 per cent is made up largely of recent immigrants, so that native-born households have had rising incomes. But as I recall this idea didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

September 16, 2004

Shorter US election

Posted by John Quiggin

Having been distracted by wonkish obsessions like current account deficits, fiscal bankruptcy and the situation in Iraq, Indonesia and other unimportant countries1, I haven’t been able to keep up with the US election campaign as closely as I would like. But, following a quick tour of the press and the blogosphere, I’ve come up with the following shorter2 (© D^2)version for others who may be in a similar position.

The crucial issue is to determine which candidate has the better record on Vietnam, and will therefore make the better president. As I understand it:

  • Kerry fought in Vietnam, but then came back and denounced the war
  • Bush didn’t fight, but supported the war
  • There are a lot of memos

That seems to be all I need to know3. Have I missed anything important?

1 Such as Australia, which is also holding an election.

2 Thanks to commenter Luis over at my blog for tech support on the copyright symbol. Now if I could just do a copyleft symbol! DD points out that it’s been released to the public domain, but I still like to acknowledge him.

3 Or would be, if I had a vote in the election that will actually determine Australian policy on most issues, rather than our local exercise in democracy.

Wolfowitz is right

Posted by John Quiggin

Since I don’t often agree with Paul Wolfowitz, it’s worth mentioning it when I do, particularly when he comments on an issue close to home. His opinion piece in todays NYT denounces the bringing of criminal defamation charges against the editor of leading Indonesian magazine Tempo for a piece criticising a powerful businessman1.

Here’s a story in the Australian which makes it clear that the businessman in question is of the class who would be described, here in Australia, as colourful.

Most Australians were disappointed when the Indonesian Supreme Court overturned the conviction of one of the Bali bombers on the grounds that the retrospective laws under which he was charged were invalid. (Hopefully, he can be retried and convicted under ordinary criminal law.) But cases like that of Tempo remind us that the rule of law is an invaluable social good and should not be tampered with even for worthy ends. I hope, as indicated in the Oz report, that the courts will throw this case in the dustbin where it belongs.

It also worth emphasising that, despite incidents like this, and the Jakarta bombing that the general trend of events in Indonesia is remarkably favorable. Elections are going smoothly the intercommunal religious strife that threatened to destroy the country a couple of years ago has pretty much ceased and the military is being eased out of politics (the likely winner of the presidential election is a former general, but the real military candidate, Wiranto, ran a poor third in the first round of voting).

1 Australian readers will remember similar charges being brought against Communist writer Frank Hardy for his thinly-disguised portrayal of John Wren in Power without Glory. The book was certainly defamatory and many of the claims in it undoubtedly false, but the prosecution failed and rightly so. This should have been a civil action.

September 15, 2004

The $4/gallon solution

Posted by John Quiggin

WIthout much fanfare, the US recorded its largest ever current account deficit in the June quarter, $166 billion. The NYT gave the story a fairly prominent run in the business pages , but the Washington Post ignored it altogether as far as I could see, and CBS Market Watch buried it in small print1.

At about 5.7 per cent of GDP, this CAD result is at the level at which economists (at least those who are given to worry about unsustainable current account deficits) start getting worried. But, as I’ve pointed out previously, even to stabilise the CAD at this level would require a fairly rapid reduction in the deficit on goods and services. Otherwise compound interest will come into play and the CAD will grow unsustainably. This pattern is already evident in the most recent figures, with a sharp decline in the balance on the income account, due to higher payments to foreign owners of capital2.

I’ve argued previously that, even with a depreciation of the US dollar, an autonomous smooth adjustment to trade balance is unlikely. The default adjustment path in circumstances of this kind is a currency crisis and recession. There’s also an alternative available to the US as the issuer of a reserve currency. A gradual return to, say, 10 per cent inflation would give the US the chance to wipe out most of its existing debts (at this rate, real values are halved every seven years) and start again with a clean slate. But sweating out 10 per cent inflation is a long and painful process.

So what’s the alternative? There’s one policy intervention that would, I think, have a pretty good chance of restoring balance. Introduce a tax on gasoline and petroleum consumption, and announce that it will rise gradually over time, say from now until 2010, to a level of $2 a gallon on gasoline or perhaps $30 a barrel on oil, domestic and imported (there’s a case, based on costs of road use, for taxing gasoline more heavily than other end uses).

In the long run, demand for oil is reasonably price elastic, and if users knew they faced steadily rising prices, it’s reasonable to expect that a doubling of prices would reduce demand by up to 50 per cent. In terms of motor vehicles, this would bring the US into line with Australia, a highly car-dependent country but one where the price (about $A1/litre) is close to $US4/gallon already about $US3/gallon. . That would bring US demand roughly into line with domestic production, and knock about $150 billion a year off the trade balance. Of course, there are second round general equilibrium effects to be considered, but it’s quite a big potential impact.

There are lots of other benefits. The revenue would help reduce the other deficit, that of the Federal government. The price of oil on the world market would be driven down, which would reduce the income flowing to all sorts of people who can be counted on to use it badly. And there would be some big benefits for the environment.

On the negative side, I can see one minor objection, and one major objection. The minor objection is that the incidence of the tax would be regressive, and offsetting changes in income and social security taxes would be needed.

The major objection is that the whole idea is utterly, totally politically unthinkable.

1 However, the story contained the great quote “Get out while there is still an ample supply of fools” from Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, who is urging clients to get out of the dollar as fast as possible.

2 Although the official figures show the US as a large net debtor, the income account is roughly in balance. Partly, I suspect, the value of US assets overseas, accumulated over a century or so, is understated. Partly, a lot of US obligations take the form of short-term debt at unsustainably low itnerest rates.

September 14, 2004

Horror Show

Posted by John Quiggin

The big news on Australian screens last night was the claim by a terrorist group calling itself the Horror Brigades of the Islamic Secret Army1 to have kidnapped two Australians near Mosul. As is more or less standard, the announcement said the hostages would be killed unless Australian troops were withdrawn from Iraq. It now appears likely that the claim was bogus, but it has certainly made Australians think about a situation that was previously only hypothetical. Coming only a few days after the Jakarta bombing, it ensures that the issue of whether the Iraq war has made us safer, and what we should do about it, is going to be central to the election campaign.

As the spate of terrorist kidnappings makes clear, the Iraq war hasn’t made Australians, or anyone else, any safer from terrorism. Two years ago, the only terrorists of any significance in Iraq were the al-Ansar group with which Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was closely associated. This group had a base conveniently located (from our point of view) in the Kurdish controlled section of Iraq. The Pentagon drew up plans to wipe them out, but these plans were vetoed by the Bush Administration apparently concerned they would undermine the political case for war with Saddam. By the time US forces arrived at the camp in the early days of the invasion, it was empty. Zarqawi was gone, but not for long. As I’ve said several times, this was the worst single betrayal of our interests in the leadup to war, far worse than dodgy dossiers and faked memos from Niger.

In the eighteen months since the invasion, Zarqawi has been implicated in a string of atrocities causing many hundreds of deaths. Meanwhile, the occupation has provided him with large numbers of recruits, as well as imitators like the Horror Brigades. So, having had the opportunity to destroy one of al-Qaeda’s main offshoots, the Bush Administration chose instead to protect and encourage it.

It’s clear that the presence of US-led troops is only making things worse, particularly given the continuing strategic incompetence manifested in Fallujah, Najaf, Haifa Street and other places. Every killing of civilians by US forces, whatever justification the official press release may offer, is another boost for Zarqawi and the Horror Brigades, and provides a plausible excuse for their own crimes. The impact of the latest episode, with an Arab TV reporter dying as he broadcast, can only be imagined.

The best we can hope for at this point is to hold elections in as much of the country as possible, hand over power to a more or less legitimate government, presumably dominated by followers of Sistani, and stage an orderly and rapid withdrawal. Whatever the risks, the alternative of staying on is doomed to failure.

From Australia’s point of view, this means that Latham’s policy of withdrawing most troops as soon as he takes office is the right one. It will extract our forces from the quagmire and put pressure on the Americans to set their own timetable for withdrawal.

One warning this episode gives us is that, once the withdrawal date is set, it’s necessary to go into lockdown mode, with all Australian nationals either evacuated or under heavy guard until the withdrawal is complete (and probably after that as well). Otherwise we’re almost certain to be hit with the same kind of demand as the Phillipines - with hostages being held against a demand for an accelerated withdrawal. I agree with John Howard in saying we shouldn’t give in to such demands. But we wouldn’t be facing them if we hadn’t invaded Iraq in the first place.

1 The name sounds like a bad joke, but the group is real enough, having been implicated in a series of previous kidnappings.

September 03, 2004

Al Quaeda in Beslan?

Posted by Daniel

As Chris notes below, the hideous events in Beslan are the property of the people who lived there; I don’t feel comfortable commenting on them, or in getting involved in the blame exercise of what happened and whether things could have been handled better. All we can do here is offer the profoundest sympathy, and weblogs are a particularly poor medium for doing that.

There is, however, one facet of this tragedy that non-Russians do need to think about however, and maybe we should start. According to the local police, there were ten bodies in the wreckage from Arab countries. It’s just possible that these were mercenaries, but much more likely that the longstanding rumours are correct that the Chechen independence movement has Al-Quaeda involvement.

The key question is, what the hell should be done about this? In particular:
1) Ought people with the power to do something abut Chechnya to take a different attitude to the question of Chechen independence because of this?
2) Should we expect, going forward, that all other conflicts involving Muslims on one side will be similarly compromised, and what should policy-makers do differently because of this?
3) What the hell has gone wrong with the particular strain of Islam which apparently tells people it’s OK to kill children, and what can be done about it?

Finally, Chris’s post appears to have already attracted a nasty case of trolls. All I can really say to the people who appear to think that the most important thing about the massacre at Beslan is what it says about Crooked Timber’s posting priorities is first, have a word with yourself, and second, if you think our posts on Tariq Ramadan’s visa and on the siege at Najaf don’t have anything to do with the questions outlined above, think again.

August 26, 2004

Sistani rules, OK ?

Posted by John Quiggin

As the pointless bloodbath in Najaf drags on, Ayatollah Sistani has finally returned from hospital treatment in London, and looks likely to be the only person to come out of this disaster with any credit1. His march on Najaf will, it seems likely, allow Sadr and the American-Allawi forces to reach the kind of face-saving compromise that has been the only possible outcome all along, apart from the disastrous option of an assault on the shrine and the martyrdom of Sadr.

Update #1 27/8 I’ve come across a useful piece by a former Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Larry Diamond, linked, with some interesting comments by Gary Farber Gives an account of the Coalition’s dealings with Sadr and other militias (minor snipe: Diamond uses “prevaricating” when he means “vacillating” to describe this).

Update #2 27/8 Like most people not actually on the scene who seek to be well-informed about Iraq, I’m indebted to Juan Cole for his informed comment and information on the situation. He’s just put up a post assessing the winners and losers from the Najaf situation which matches, almost point for point, what I posted yesterday. Of course, it carries a lot more weight coming from him than from me.

Of the other parties, the biggest losers have been the unfortunate people of Najaf. Dozens have been killed, hundreds wounded and thousands left homeless. From all the reports, they (correctly) place part of the blame of the blame for this on Sadr but even more on the American forces. There have also been hundreds more casualties in other towns where the fighting has spread. All of this because someone in the US command decided that this would be a good time to eliminate Sadr and his militia.

The other big losers are the Coalition forces and everyone (including most readers of this blog) represented, willingly or not, by those forces. The Shi’ite world has been outraged by the fighting, and large parts of Southern Iraq are now in the same ‘no-go zone’ state that already characterized the Sunni section of the country. If we avoid a Shiite version of Al-Qaeda, it will be by the good graces of people like Sadr, who continues to denounce terrorism as un-Islamic (while being happy to engage in common-or-garden political thuggery).

Meanwhile, Coalition forces are still boasting about the hundreds of Sadrists they have killed. Perhaps they haven’t noticed that the people they have killed (mostly unemployed young men who have gained nothing from the invasion) all have brothers and cousins, bound in honour to avenge them, not to mention friends eager to share in their glory.

The Allawi government has also lost a lot of ground. Domestically, the alternating bravado and backdowns of the past few week have eroded what support it began with. Meanwhile, its habit of dealing with journalists by rounding them up at gunpoint has guaranteed a hostile press. A straw in the wind is the refusal of the British Labour Party conference to countenance a visit by Allawi, pushed hard by Blair.

Moqtada Sadr has also lost ground on balance, and will lose more if Sistani is seen to be the successful peacemaker. Still he defied the Americans for weeks on end, and looks likely to live to tell the tale. Among his core constituency this will count as a win.

It’s increasingly obvious that the Coalition should have held interim elections at the earliest opportunity using ration books for an electoral roll. Almost certainly, Sistani’s supporters would have won. If the elections planned for January 2005 go ahead, the same outcome will probably be achieved, with a delay of more than a year, and a loss of thousands of lives.

A Sistani-dominated government would be Islamist, but not in the Khomeini theocratic mould. It wouldn’t be liberal in any sense, but it’s by far the best option that has any chance of coming to pass at this point. The alternatives include an authoritarian regimes headed by Allawi, Sadr or someone similar, or a descent into outright chaos.

1 There have been some suggestions that Sistani’s health was fine, and that the trip to London was based on inside information, and a desire to be away from Najaf when the balloon went up. If correct, these suggestions given Sistani fewer points for moral credit, but even more for political judgement than my analysis, based on the assumption that his health problems were genuine.

August 25, 2004

McKitrick mucks it up

Posted by John Quiggin

Late last year, the debate over climate change was stirred up when an environmental economist, Ross McKitrick and a mining executive, Steven McIntyre, published a piece claiming to refute climatological research crucial to the claim that the last few decades have seen unparalleled global warming (the ‘hockey-stick’ paper of Mann, Bradley and Hughes). According to McKitrick and McIntyre, the work of Mann et al was riddled with errors, The paper was loudly publicised by the American Enterprise Institute (home of John Lott) and, as you would expect, Flack Central Station. Mann et al produced an immediate rebuttal, and despite many promises of a rejoinder, McKitrick and McIntyre have never responded on the substantive issues1.

This would be par for the course, except that McKitrick somehow managed to attract the attention of Aussie computer scientist Tim Lambert, famous for his demolition of Lott’s shonky research, which purported to show that guns reduce crime. The result: McKitrick’s work is even shoddier than Lott’s.

Lambert has mainly focused not on the McKitrick and McIntyre paper but on a subsequent piece by McKitrick and Pat Michaels, which contains a regression purporting to show that it is GDP growth that causes (measured) climate change. McKitrick and Michaels take this as support for the generally-discredited ‘urban heat islands’ hypothesis, that measured warming is an artifact produced by weather stations in or near big cities.

In previous rounds of the debate, Lambert has shown that McKitrick messed up an analysis of the number of weather stations, showed he knew almost nothing about climate, flunked basic thermodynamics, couldn’t handle missing values correctly and invented his own temperature scale.

But Tim’s latest discovery really takes the cake. It’s well-known that the rate of warming varies with latitude, but McKitrick and Michaels find no such effect for their variable, which is the cosine of absolute latitude. Lambert checked and, amazingly enough, found that the data set used by McKitrick and Michaels had latitude in degrees, but the cosine function in the SHAZAM econometric package, they used expected input in radians (which is what any mathematically literate person would expect). If you apply this function to angles measured in degrees you get nonsense.

Once Lambert did the correct analysis, latitude was highly significant and the economic variables became much less important. The results reported by McKitrick and Michaels can be explained by an obvious confounding effect. Rich countries tend to be at high latitudes, and so GDP acts as a proxy for latitude.

Although Tim is almost invariably right in such matters, it was hard to believe that such a gross error could go undetected - it would show up immediately if you looked at descriptive stats on the variables, for example. So I checked myself. The descriptive statistics in the McKitrick and Michaels paper (available here) include the latitude, which is clearly in degrees, but not the cosine variable. The SHAZAM documentation, here, indicates that input to the sine function is in radians ( McKitrick and Michaels derive cosine using a transformation of this).

Bear in mind that McKitrick’s main claim to fame is his assertion to have done a painstakingly careful check of the work of others and to have found numerous errors. Looking at Lambert’s demolition of this paper, I’m reminded of what Julian Sanchez had to say about Lott - if he told you the time was 12 o’clock, you’d check your watch before you believed him2.

And Michaels was a reputable climate scientist before he sold out to the fossil fuel lobby. It looks as though, as long as he says what his employers want to hear, they don’t feel the need for quality control.

1 There was a secondary dispute about the provision and labelling of data, as a result of which Mann et al published a very short corrigendum in Nature, noting that they had incorrectly described some parts of the data set, but that this had no implications for the results.

2 Interestingly, Sanchez, like Michaels, has worked at the Cato Institute, which shows that it’s not safe to make generalizations about institutions based on a few, or even a lott, of bad apples. Even TCS publishes some work by reputable people, to add cachet to its real output of lobby-fodder.

The other deficit: Part II

Posted by John Quiggin

In my previous post on US trade, I argued that if the current account deficit is to be stabilised at a sustainable level, the balance of trade on goods and services must return to surplus in the next decade or so. In this post, I’m going to ruIe out a soft option and argue that, while a smooth market-driven adjustment is not inconceivable, it’s unlikely.

The soft option is the idea that central banks will keep on buying US dollars indefinitely in order to keep the world trading system indefinitely, and that the US can therefore consume as much as it wants, subject only to the capacity of the Treasury to keep printing dollars. This option is not a goer for both economic and geopolitical reasons. On the economic front, there comes a point when the risk of being left with a pile of worthless paper exceeds any benefits from being able to export goods.

On the geopolitical front, there’s no point in spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year becoming a military hyperpower if you’re going in to hock to your rivals/potential adversaries for a similar amount. On current trends, the Chinese central bank will hold the better part of a trillion dollars in US government bonds in a few years time. Should there be any minor unpleasantness on the foreign policy front, nothing would be more natural than for the Chinese to stop buying a bit and diversify some of their existing holdings, say a hundred billion dollars or so, into yen and euros. At this point, Wall Street and the Treasury would demand immediate capitulation.

There are also various private sector versions of the soft option, based on the idea that foreigners desperately want to hold US assets, but none of these will stand up to the pressure of chronic trade deficits. As other countries have found out, relying on hot money to finance chronic deficits guarantees a crisis of confidence sooner or later.

If the soft option is ruled out, we’re left to consider paths by which the US can return to trade surplus. Currently the US exports about half as much as it imports. The imbalance could be reduced in a number of ways

  • A (further) devaluation of the US dollar
  • Reductions in US wages relative to those overseas
  • Increases in US relative to foreign productivity (the relevant concept here is multifactor productivity, taking account of both capital and labour inputs)
  • Reductions in US consumption relative to foreign consumption

To get back to balance or surplus in a decade, and without a crisis, no one of these would be sufficient. For example, to get to balance by devaluation alone would require a devaluation of the order of 50 per cent, which would certainly entail both an upsurge in inflation and an increase in interest rates. A lot of emphasis is (rightly) put on productivity but even on the most optimistic accounts, the gap between the US and other countries is no more than one percentage point per year, which is nowhere near enough. About 40 per cent of the marginal dollar goes on imports, so the restoration of balance through increased household saving alone would require an increase in saving equal to something like 12 per cent of GDP, and this seems most implausible.

If the adjustment were to begin almost immediately and everything went right, it could go smoothly. But the odds against this seem long. So it’s worth considering alternatives.

August 23, 2004

Starbucker

Posted by John Quiggin

I found this story of globalisation and soft power at charlotte street, via bertramonline. As bertram says, you can’t make this kind of thing up.

I had a look at related issues in this piece

August 22, 2004

Some light shed on crazy 9/11 rumors

Posted by Eszter

Kenneth Quinn has an interesting piece in WaPo about whether 9/11 was supposed to be 9/18 according to original plans. For me this is interesting because it sheds some light on the preposterous rumors that surfaced after the attacks about some Jewish conspiracy regarding the events. September 18, 2001 was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which means that many/most Jews would not have been at work that day and would have averted the attacks. The rumor that spread had to do with about 4,000 Jews being saved thanks to having been told ahead of time about the tragedy and having stayed home to avoid it.

One serious concern I have always had about people’s inclination to even come close to considering those rumors legitimate is the idea that Jews live such a completely isolated life (not to mention one without any moral obligations) that they have no non-Jewish friends or family, nor would they have any civic obligations to worry about were they to obtain any information concerning such an event ahead of time. After all, only in such a scenario would it make sense for anyone to think that these informed Jews would, without blinking an eye, just quietly stay away from such a tragedy without alerting anyone outside of their supposed super-isolated circles. (News flash: social networks don’t work that way.) The idea that there could be people this naïve and clueless about the world is seriously disturbing. But those rumors circulated quite far and wide even in non-fundamentalist circles, it seems. And that is scary.1 Of course, the idea that anyone would have a list of Jews to call up and warn in the first place is quite silly in and of itself.

Read Quinn’s piece to see how he came up with the 9/18 idea based on all sorts of info tidbits including this rumor and details from the 9/11 commision report. (Hat tip: Harry’s Place. Go to Bugmenot if you do not have a WaPo login.)

1 On occasion, emails show up in my inbox regarding conspiracies targeted at other groups such as Arabs or Muslims. Such messages are just as disturbing and naïve. I hope no one will see my outrage regarding this issue as an invitation to send me equally ill-informed messages about people grouped according to whatever one single demographic variable.

The other deficit

Posted by John Quiggin

I was looking at the latest US trade figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and thought, rather unoriginally, that this is an unsustainable trend. Despite the decline in the value of the US dollar against most major currencies1, the US balance of trade in goods and services hit a record deficit of $55 billion (annualised, this would be about 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product) in June. The deficit has grown fairly steadily, and this trend shows no obvious signs of reversal, at least unless oil prices fall sharply.

This naturally, and still rather unoriginally, led me to the aphorism, attributed to Herbert Stein “If a trend can’t be sustained forever it won’t be”. Sustained large deficits on goods and services eventually imply unbounded growth in indebtedness, and exploding current account deficits2, as compound interest works its magic. So, if the current account deficit is to be stabilised relative to GDP, trade in goods and services must sooner or later return to balance or (if the real interest rate is higher than the rate of economic growth) surplus

But forever is a long time. Before worrying about trends that can’t be sustained forever, it is worth thinking about how long they can be sustained, and what the adjustment process will be.

I set up a simple spreadsheet model and started with some reasonably optimistic numbers. Suppose the deficit on goods and services levels out at 5 per cent of GDP, stays at that level until 2007, and then declines steadily over the next decade years, with the balance stabilising at a surplus of 1.5 per cent of GDP. Over this period, net external obligations increase steadily, and so do the associated income payments. The equilibrium position has net obligations equal to around 80 per cent of GDP (about $8 trillion at current levels). Assuming an interest rate of around 7 per cent, the current account deficit stabilises at 4.5 per cent of GDP.

Would this be a sustainable outcome? Stephen Kirchner points to Australia to suggest that it is. After a big run of goods and services deficits in the 1980s, Australia’s position broadly stabilised in the 1990s, with net obligations around 60 per cent of GDP (still rising, but slowly), and a CAD of 4-5 per cent3.

There are several problems with Kirchner’s claim. First, it’s not clear that complacency about Australia is justified. We weren’t affected by financial panic during the Asian crisis, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that high debt levels will produce a panic sooner or later.

Second, as Peter Gallagher observes, the US is much bigger than Australia. It’s not clear that global capital markets can call forth enough savings to finance deficits on this scale, at least not without an increase in interest rates. Any significant increase in interest rates would create huge problems for debtor countries like Australia and the US.

But the biggest problem for me is that I can’t see how the stabilisation scenario I’ve described is going to be realised without some sort of crisis. Without radical changes in the US economy, a large deficit on oil imports can be taken as a given. And there are large classes of consumer goods for which domestic production has pretty much ceased. If balance is to be reached in a decade, there has to be a big turnaround in the pattern of trade somewhere, and it’s hard to see where. There is no sector in which the US is currently running a large surplus (there’s a small surplus on services, but even here, the trend is flat or negative). Even with the recent depreciation, and much-touted productivity growth, there’s no sign that US producers are gaining market share in any part of the traded goods sector. The big decline in manufacturing employment since the late 1990s is hard to square with the idea that short-term deficits are justified by long-term growth prospects.

Finally, the scenario requires a lot of faith on the part of foreign lenders, who face a big risk of expropriation through inflation or repudiation. At a minimum, you’d expect them to try to shift their lending to the US out of loans denominated in $US and into more secure currencies. (The $A-denominated share of Australian debt is 33 per cent and falling). This in turn would weaken the position of the US as a financial centre.

If a smooth, market-driven adjustment to a sustainable position is unlikely, what are the alternatives? Stay tuned for my next post, in which I will look at this question, and some of the proposals that have already been floated.

1 The exception is China. But Chinese inflation, which is accelerating, has the same real effect as a depreciation of the dollar against the Chinese yuan

2 The current account deficit is the sum of the deficit on goods and services (the trade deficit) and the deficit on income payments (the income deficit). At present, the US has a large trade deficit, but only a small income deficit.

3 Details in this report from the Parliamentary Library (PDF file). On the way to this balance, we went through a very nasty recession, largely driven by government policies aimed at bringing down the deficit. Although these policies were rightly criticised, and most economists now oppose using contractionary policy to target the CAD, it’s not clear that a market-driven adjustment would have been painless.

August 17, 2004

A syllabus of errors

Posted by John Quiggin
The WashPost runs an Op-Ed piece byPradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman, claiming that the failure of third parties to do well in the US is due, not to plurality voting or other institutional factors but to excessive political centralisation. The claim is that since third parties
once competed successfully in congressional elections, winning significant portions of the popular vote and often gaining seats in Congress. This was true for most of the 19th century and even the early part of the 20th
the cause of their subsequent failure must be something new - political centralisation1.

Chhibber and Kollman seem to be well-regarded political scientists. But their argument here is riddled with errors, or at least large logical gaps.

First, they present hardly any data, and don’t answer the obvious empirical objections. Their claim that third parties do less well now than in the past runs into some obvious problems. Two of the last three presidential elections have been decided (or at least greatly affected) by third-party candidates, Perot in 92 and Nader in 2000. The Reform party also elected a governor, Jesse Ventura in 1998, and there’s one socialist member in Congress. That’s not much of challenge to two-party dominance, but did the parties cited by Chhibber and Kollman (Prohibition, Socialist, Populist, Greenback, Farmer-Labor) do notably better? We’re not told, but I’m pretty sure the answer is “No”. There’s also no evidence (beyond the single data point of Canada) that centralism is favorable to two-party systems.

The logical problems are even more striking. Granting, for the sake of argument, that third parties have declined since the 1930s, and that centralisation has increased at the same time, haven’t these guys ever heard that “correlation does not imply causation”. Leaving aside the possibility of purely spurious correlation, there are plenty of possible “joint cause” arguments. For example, it might be that the rise of mass media has both reduced regional diversity (which implies less reason to oppose centralisation of political decisions) and also given advantages to large parties.

But, there’s still a more significant error. Let’s suppose we’re satisfied that third parties were once strong and that their decline was caused by political centralisation. It’s still obviously true that such parties are disadvantaged by plurality voting and other features of the electoral system. If you want to encourage third parties, you can either fundamentally change the relationship between Federal and State governments, reversing 100 years of history, or you can change the voting system. Changing voting systems isn’t easy, but it’s been done in many places, and can be done on a state-by-state basis .

1 Looking on the web, I found this book chapter by Chhibber and Kollman, which seems to date the rise of the current two-party system, more plausibly in my view, to 1860. It is certainly true that the Republican Party of that time, devoted as it was to the containment and ultimate destruction of a regional “peculiar institution”, did a great deal to enhance the power of the central government.

August 16, 2004

Chavez declares victory

Posted by Daniel

Apparently. Not yet got confirmation from the OAS and Carter Centre that the ballot met standards of honesty and probity, but it looks like Chavez has come in with a pretty thumping majority; 58% of the vote is really rather good on the massive turnout reported.

Of course there is now a fairly substantial Catch-22 situation. Part of the reason why Chavez was able to win was that in recent months he’s been throwing around money like water on social programs. He was able to do this because oil was up above $40 a barrel, generating vast profits for the state oil company. A lot of the reason why oil prices were so high was that … there was significant uncertainty about supply from Venezuela because of the impending referendum. Now that some of the uncertainty has been resolved, oil futures have already started tumbling, meaning that it’s going to be that little bit more dfficult to deliver on these promises; if I were a Venezuelan, I wouldn’t be assuming that we were out of the woods yet.

Update: Carter Centre and Organisation of American States just more or less endorsed the votes; they didn’t find evidence of serious fraud and the results more or less match what the independent observers were seeing.

August 15, 2004

Marty Weitzman on the equity premium

Posted by John Quiggin
Brad de Long points to a piece on the equity premium by Marty Weitzman and says,
Marty Weitzman is smarter than I am …This is brilliant. I should have seen this. I should have seen this sixteen years ago. I almost saw this sixteen years ago.
Weitzman’s idea1 is the replace the sample distributions of returns on equity and debt with reasonable Bayesian subjective distributions. These have much fatter tails, allowing for a higher risk premium, lower risk free rate and higher volatility, in the context of a socially optimal market outcome. Here are some of the reasons why this is important

My immediate reaction is the same as Brad’s. Something like this has occurred to me too, but I’ve never thought hard enough or cleverly enough about it how to work it out properly. This is a very impressive achievement, and Marty Weitzman is very, very smart (which we already knew).

My second reaction is a little more sceptical. Some previous attempts at resolving the equity premium have focused on the tails of the distribution, and the possibility of catastrophic loss. Tthe problem was that it was difficult to describe an outcome where the return on equity was large and negative, but bonds were still a safe asset. The various catastrophic examples cited, such as hyperinflation, revolution and nuclear war all failed in this respect.

Applying the same reasoning to Weitzman’s argument, we need to consider whether there is a reasonable model of a stable capitalist economy, with functional financial markets, that produces a negative long-run rate of growth in outptu per person. The only one I can imagine is based on resource exhaustion, and I can’t really see belief (positive probability weight) in such a model being widespread enough to generate the observed equity premium. With less confidence, I’d assert that there are pretty good technological reasons to rule out a sustained rate of productivity growth (embodied and disembodied) of more than 5 per cent, for countries that are already at the frontier. The maximum sustainable rate of growth of output per person cannot be much above this.

I haven’t been able to check the math, but I doubt that a complete Bayesian explanation of the equity premium puzzle can be obtained if the prior distribution on the long-run rate of growth is bounded in this way.

My third reaction is eclectic. My general view is that there is no one explanation of the equity premium, but a set of problems with the standard consumption-based model of asset pricing (CCAPM) that interact to produce results radically different from those of the model. Making expectations Bayesian rather than classical will amplify the effects of any other deviation in the model, and therefore fit neatly into this story.

1 The only version of the paper I’ve seen so far is a PDF file in which the maths has not come through. But I think I’ve got the basic idea.

August 13, 2004

Get well soon

Posted by John Quiggin

According to this AP report in the NY Times, Moqtada al-Sadr has been wounded by US shelling in Najaf. Sadr is an irresponsible demagogue, his political agenda is reactionary and authoritarian and his militia has been guilty of many acts of thuggery and violence. And we should all wish for his complete and speedy recovery from his wounds.

Update There is a ceasefire and negotiations have started for a truce. This is welcome news, and I hope the talks are successful. However, it only points up the fact that the bloody campaign to destroy Sadr was both morally indefensible (as well as being politically stupid). I restate the point I made when the fighting was at its peak.
Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.

Sadr would be far more dangerous dead than alive. As the grandson of an Iraqi prime minister and the son of a social activist, both of whom were murdered by Saddam Hussein, he would make the perfect martyr for a Shi’ite equivalent of Al Qaeda. If you wanted to supply the basis for a claim that Bush=Saddam, you could scarcely do better than martyring Sadr.

In the short term, his death would make it just about impossible for any Shi’ite leader to give support to the Allawi government1. Already, Ayatollah Sistani who has no love for Sadr, and would have been happy to see him pushed out of Najaf2, has called for a ceasefire. The attack was already criticised by Iraqi vice-president Jafari of the Dawa party, also a rival of Sadr, and there have been a number of resignations from less senior officials, not to mention widespread demonstrations. As always Juan Cole has details

The only remotely feasible option is to make a place for Sadr and his supporters in the political process, and to hope that he is moderated by the attractions of office, as has happened in many cases before. There were some tentative steps in this direction in the period between the April insurrection and the current fighting. But, as with everything else they have done, the Administration was too clever by half, offering the facade of democratic processes, while trying to rig them in favor of their preferred clients3. Sadr rejected the crumbs he was offered then. If he survives, his price will undoubtedly be higher now4.

1 Obviously, I’m talking about religious Shi’ites as opposed to secular politicians from a Shi’ite background like Allawi himself.

2 It’s widely rumored that his trip to London for heart surgery was timed to permit a push against Sadr. I can’t say I believe this rumor, but it’s indicative of relations between the two.

3 The prime example of being too clever by half was Bremer’s abortive and disastrous “caucuses” plan last year. If Sistani’s proposal for an election (using ration books as a temporary electoral roll) had been accepted, Iraq might by now have had a relatively moderate Islamist government and Sadr could have been kept on the margins. But it was obvious that Chalabi wouldn’t have had a chance in such an election so it wasn’t held. Less than a year later, Chalabi is on trial for corruption and cosying up to Sadr, but Iraq is still dealing with the consequences of Bremer’s bungling.

4 I’m not asserting that this approach would work. But it’s already clear that the attack on Sadr has been a disaster.

August 10, 2004

Only good news, please

Posted by John Quiggin

The Allawi government’s decision to ban Al-Jazeera has received a lot of attention. Rather less has been paid to a subsequent announcement of a wide range of rules to be applied by the new Higher Media Commission. Prominent among them is a prohibition of “unwarranted criticism” of Allawi himself. This was reported in Australia’s Financial Review and also in the Financial Times (both subscription only) and also in a number of Arab and antiwar papers, but not in any of the general mainstream press.

For those inclined to a “slippery slope” view of censorship, this is certainly a case study.

Here’s a protest letter from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

August 08, 2004

War crimes

Posted by John Quiggin

It’s been argued at length whether the Iraq war as a whole was morally justified. Given that many thousands of people died in the process of removing Saddam’s regime, I don’t think so. On the other hand, if you suppose that Saddam would otherwise have stayed in power for decades, and make some optimistic assumptions about future prospects, it’s possible to come to the opposite conclusion. But what possible moral justification can there be for the two bloody campaigns against Moqtada al-Sadr?

If the figures reported by the US military are true, nearly 2000 of Sadr’s supporters have been killed by US forces (1500 in the first campaign launched by Bremer just before his departure and another 300 in the last couple of days). This is comparable with plausible estimates of the number of people killed by Saddam’s police state annually in its final years.


These people weren’t Al Qaeda or Baathists, they were (apart from the inevitable innocent bystanders) young Iraqi men who objected to foreign occupation. Sadr’s militia is one of a dozen or so similar outfits in Iraq, and there are hundreds more around the world, quite a few of which have received US support despite having a worse record than Sadr’s. Moreover, there was no cause at stake that justified a war - the first started when Bremer shut down Sadr’s newspaper and the Sadrists retaliated by taking control of some police stations and mosques. The current fighting seems to have had even more trivial causes. It’s the willingness of the US government to send in the Marines that’s turned what would normally be noisy disturbances into bloodbaths.

Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.

June 26, 2004

Katharina Blum

Posted by Chris

Heavy rain in Bristol today, so I spent the afternoon watching Volker Schlondorff’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (based on the Heinrich Boll novel). For those who don’t know, the film is about what happens to a young woman after she spends the night with a man who turns out to be a terrorist suspect. She is alternately bullied by the police and villified by the gutter press. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events. (If you’ve not seen the film, don’t be put off by the sole IMDB commenter, who has also posted politically-motived negative reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence and Bloody Sunday.)

IRRITATED UPDATE: Why is a classic of the New German Cinema available on DVD in Region 1 but not in Region 2 (including the UK and Germany)?

June 11, 2004

Intelligence reports

Posted by Chris

I caught about five minutes of some retrospective on Reagan last night. One of the talking heads — a US protagonist whom I didn’t recognize — said something like the following:

Of course, we now know that the Soviet Union was incredibly weak, falling apart in fact, and that it probably wouldn’t have survived even without the pressure we were putting on. But you have to remember that, at the time , all the intelligence reports (and the media) stressed how strong the Soviets were. On the basis of the intelligence we were getting, we’d never have guessed the reality.

Deja vu?

June 03, 2004

Punctuation and human rights

Posted by Chris

Eve Garrard, who figured prominently in our comments last week on my posts discussing Amnesty International (here and here ) has written an impassioned criticism of AI over at Normblog. You should read what she says, although I happen to disagree with her claim — which I regard as obviously misguided — that the universal applicability of a principle entails that all who violate it are equally blameworthy for so doing (penultimate paragraph). The most serious criticism to be made of Garrard’s post, though, is that it seriously misrepresents what Amnesty said.

Here is Garrard’s take:

Irene Khan [the AI Secretary General] , has told us that … the attack on human rights conducted by those engaged in the ‘war against terror’ (her scare-quotes) is the biggest attack of all on human rights, principles and values.

Garrard quotes in extenso a letter from Khan to the Telegraph in which the phrase “human rights, principles and values” does, indeed, occur. The link to that letter no longer seems to work [update: this one does - click on “Misleading War”], though, so I’m forced to rely on two other sources. First, the Telegraph leader to which Khan’s letter is a response quotes AI as saying that

Not since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 has there been such a sustained attack on its values and principles.

And the AI report which Garrard cites in support of her interpretation of Khan reads:

The current framework of international law and multilateral action is undergoing the most sustained attack since its establishment half a century ago. International human rights and humanitarian law is being directly challenged as ineffective in responding to the security issues of the present and future. In the name of the “war on terror” governments are eroding human rights principles, standards and values.

Not, then, a claim about “human rights, principles and values”, but one about “human rights principles, … and values”. Khan is emphatically not saying that there are more violations of human rights than at any time in the last fifty years, she is saying that there is a sustained attack, in the name of the “war on terror”, on the very standards that ought to apply in judging whether human rights are violated in the first place. She’s also saying that that attack is the most serious such attack (where seriousness is presumably measured in terms of its potential to undermine general acceptance of the human rights principles that ought to obtain) in the past fifty years. Khan’s claim may, or may not, be justified, but it is significantly different from the one that Garrard attributes to her.

[Update: on reflection, I should have made clear that I’m sure that Eve’s misrepresentation of Khan’s view is inadvertent. I’d also bet that the misleading comma in the DT letter is the work of a sub-editor.]

May 29, 2004

De te fabular narratur

Posted by Chris

I just read a particularly egregious column from Jonah Goldberg in the London Times. The Times is only freely available to people within the UK, so I thought I’d surf over to the National Review Online to see if the content was also posted there. I didn’t find the Times piece, but I did happen upon Goldberg’s take on the Instapundit-Yglesias spat which concludes:

Yglesias would improve his arguments if he stopped his recent habit of increasingly asserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with.

Back to the Times, where Goldberg begins thusly a column aimed at critics of the administration’s Iraq policies in general and Anthony Zinni in particular:

HERE we go again. It is time to blame the Jews. That seems to be this month’s explanation for the Iraq war. Obviously, this is hardly a new idea on either side of the Atlantic, particularly for readers of, say, The Guardian or Le Monde. But in America, the emphasis on the theory has reached almost French proportions

“[A]sserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with” ?

May 28, 2004

A non-sequitur about Amnesty

Posted by Chris

My post the other day about Amnesty International generated some comments, as I expected. It also led to Jacob Levy over at the Volokh Conspiracy getting excited over the following statement by AI:

AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.

Now I happen to think that’s a reasonable thing for an organization like Amnesty to say. Libertarian Cain and Socialist Abel may disagree on a lot of things. Cain believes that socialized medicine is the first step on the road to serfdom and Abel believes that the capitalist system inevitably leads to exploitation and oppression. No matter. They can work together to protest against torture, extrajudical killing and so on — which they agree are bad things. An organization that insisted the everyone sign up to an analysis of underlying causes would be sectarian and ineffective. But because the smart thing for an organization like Amnesty to do is to stay out of the business of root causes, that doesn’t mean it is committed to the positive view that Jacob now attributes to it in a further post. To whit:

I emphasized the organization’s institutional stance that no system of government is preferable to any other, that human rights abuses just kind of happen rather than being matters of official policy in some cases and not in others. This requires a pose of believing in equivalence among liberal democracies, theocracies, military dictatorships, and so on.

No way is such “equivalence” entailed by the Amnesty statement of aims that Jacob quoted and it is lazy of him to suggest that it is.

(I should add that Jacob does have a point about the emphasis of some of Amnesty’s up-front press releases, but it is absurd to suggest as Frida Ghetis does in the TNR piece that Jacob approvingly links to that Amnesty “has decided to stop doing its job” — since it demonstrably continues to produce the many detailed country-by-country resports that are its staple.)

May 26, 2004

Passion of the present

Posted by Chris

Via Lance Knobel I see that Jim Moore has started a blog to encourage more coverage of the unfolding tragedy in the Sudan, The Passion of the Present .

Amnesty annual report

Posted by Chris

Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004 is now out. A sobering reminder of how bad things are out there. It is also a reminder of how bad things are in world of chatterers, op-ed columnists and bloggers that we can expect (a) a great deal of moaning about how Amnesty has failed to treat country X (of which the writer approves) with due understanding, context, perspective etc; and (b) much noise about how the activites of country Y (of which the writer disapproves) are demonstrably condemned by the same report. Human rights are indivisible, and in my view, the burden of proof is on those whom Amnesty condemns to show their innocence.

May 25, 2004

Protection racket?

Posted by Chris

From the Economist :

At the next official meeting of OPEC, in Beirut on June 3rd, Saudi Arabia will be asked to demonstrate solidarity with its co-conspirators in the cartel. The bargain that holds OPEC together—each member shows restraint in production, so that all can enjoy higher prices—is at stake, they will say. But it is widely assumed that Saudi Arabia must also keep its side of a more fundamental bargain. It must be conscious of American petrol prices, especially in an election year, and, in return, the world’s only superpower will continue to offer the desert kingdom its protection.

May 20, 2004

In other news...

Posted by Eszter

Some issues get a lot of play in the media while others go completely ignored. The UN has a site devoted to “10 Stories the world should hear more about”. Of course, one could probably compile an endless list of stories we shouldn’t be ignoring, but it’s certainly one place to start. You can read about child soldiers in Uganda, the role of women in negotiating piece and rebuilding societies (did you know that in Rwanda women hold 49% of seats in the legislature?), and the disappearance of some peoples and languages (did you know that there are languages out there spoken by less than 100 people?). These snapshots of stories are very short and the descriptions of the issues seem a bit simplistic at times, but it’s an interesting place to start for coverage of important topics that don’t seem to get much mass media attention. Alternatively, you can always head over to The Head Heeb who manages to cover a lot of issues from certain parts of the world that seem to go ignored by many. (Thanks to Neat New Stuff for the pointer to the UN site.)