by John Q on August 21, 2007
In the course of a controversy with Glenn Greenwald, Dan Drezner offers the following rewording of Greenwald’s critical summary of the orthodoxy of the US “Foreign Policy Community”
The number one rule of the bi-partisan foreign policy community is that America can invade and attack other countries when vital American interests are threatened. Paying homage to that orthodoxy is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to maintaining good standing within the foreign policy community.
and states:
I suspect that anyone who accepts the concept of a “national interest” in the first place would accept that phrasing. As a paid-up member of the Foreign Policy Community (FPC), I certainly would.
Unless “vital national interest” is construed so narrowly as to be equivalent to “self-defence”, this is a direct repudiation of the central founding principle of international law, prohibiting aggressive war as a crime against peace, indeed, the supreme international crime. It’s more extreme than the avowed position of any recent US Administration – even the invasion of Iraq was purportedly justified on the basis of UN resolutions, rather than US self-interest. Yet, reading this and other debates, it seems pretty clear that Drezner’s position is not only generally held in the Foreign Policy Community but is regarded, as he says, as a precondition for serious participation in foreign policy debates in the US.
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by John Q on August 19, 2007
A bunch of rightwing blogs are getting excited yet again about Scott Beauchamp. For those who haven’t followed the story, Beauchamp is a US soldier in Iraq who wrote some pieces for The New Republic which, among other things, described bad behaviour by US troops, such as deliberately running over stray dogs and taunting a woman disfigured by burns. The pro-war lobby has worn out dozens of keyboards seeking to discredit Beauchamp, his story and the very possibility of running over dogs in an armoured vehicle. Now it appears the US Army has denied Beauchamp’s claims. (To reiterate, I don’t care about or intend to debate, or even to link to, the details of this case).
Some might suggest that the truth or falsity of these stories doesn’t matter much in the light of this. or this or this or this, to list just a few of the disasters have taken place while the wingnutosphere has been defending the US Army’s commitment to animal welfare.
But that would miss the point. What matters, in the world of rightwing postmodernism, is not reality but the way the media reports it. One bogus memo is enough to turn George W. Bush from a scrimshank who used his family connections to line up a cushy billet to avoid war service, and then shirked even that, into a war hero.
So, lets stick to media criticism. Not long after Beauchamp’s piece ran in a single magazine of modest circulation, all the major MSM outlets ran a story by well known critics of the war, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack whose intrepid journey through recently pacified parts of Iraq had convinced them that the surge was working. Here, for example, is their piece in the NY Times.
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by John Q on August 18, 2007
by John Q on August 17, 2007
With stock markets down 10-15 per cent in the last few weeks, it’s a good time to ask whether this will have real effects beyond the value of our superannuation. The immediate starting point of the current disruptions was evidence that defaults on US mortgage markets were worse than expected. An obvious question is whether this underlying shock is large enough to have substantial effects in itself, or whether the problem is mainly one of liquidity and confidence.
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by John Q on August 9, 2007
I got an email today from Phillip Coticelli at Africa Fighting Malaria pointing to a study by Donald Roberts (PDF), showing that DDT has a repellent effect in addition to its toxicity. The key finding is that that three out of five DDT-resistant Aedes aegypti mosquitoes avoid huts sprayed with DDT. Roberts argues that this is a reason for preferring DDT to alternative pesticides such as dieldrin. A few points about this are worth making
* First, it’s good to see AFM acknowledging the fact of pesticide resistance, which primarily accounts for the abandonment of large-scale attempts to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes with pesticides. The libel put out by people like Steven Milloy and AFM founder Roger Bate[1], in which it is suggested that the failure of the eradication program was due to a mythical ban on DDT imposed at the behest of environmentalists, who callously caused millions of deaths, depends critically on ignoring resistance.
* Second, although the study is new, the claim is not. Roberts has been arguing the importance of repellent and irritant effects for a long time. And while the reporting of this study suggests that these benefits are unique to DDT, other work by Roberts has found that permethrin and deltamethrin are just as effective in this respect.
How does this relate to the general debate over the use of hut spraying as a strategy to fight malaria?
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by John Q on August 8, 2007
Not so long ago, in a discussion on Iraq the question came up of what various people would have predicted at the outset of the US Civil War. It seemed to me that all with the possible exception of Sherman, would have grossly underestimated the length and bloodiness of the war, and that all would have predicted easy victory for their side. Of course, rather than speculate, I should have checked Wikipedia. Fortunately, William Tecumseh Sherman was the featured article yesterday, and includes Sherman’s judgement.
You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!
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by John Q on August 7, 2007
Autogoogling, as you do, you find out interesting things about namesakes around the world. My most prominent namesake is Canadian terrorism expert Tom Quiggin, who is a good source of information on quite a few topics. Now, Technorati tells me, he has a blog His opening posts seem very promising
Why Bush Has it Wrong
Intelligence and the Moral High Ground
by John Q on August 6, 2007
I’ve been following the Peak Oil debate with a mildly sceptical eye for some time, and it struck me a while ago that despite high prices, global oil output hadn’t grown much, but hadn’t declined either. I came up with the innovative description of our current position as “Plateau Oil“. If I had bothered with Google, I would have noticed that the International Energy Agency had offered the same description two weeks earlier. And if I’d thought about for more than a couple of seconds, I would have realised that the supply of topographical metaphors is so limited as to make this a forced move (Australians use “Tableland” to describe the same landform and there’s also “Mesa”, but Mesa Oil is taken, and “Tableland Oil” sounds silly)
Anyway, why are we (apparently) observing Plateau Oil and what does it mean?
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by John Q on July 29, 2007
The rightwing blogosphere, with assistance from the usual MSM types like Howard Kurtz has spent the last week or two trying to discredit a soldier, Scott Beauchamp, who wrote a “Baghdad Diary” for The New Republic, which included various examples of casually callous behavior on the part of US soldiers (nothing on the scale of Abu Ghraib or other proven cases).
For the wingers, this is a continuous pattern. Before this, there was a flap about a report that failures by contractors were resulting in troops in the field not getting adequate food. Before that, it was the Jamil Hussein case, a months-long brawl with AP arising from a report by a stringer about attacks on mosques. Before that, it was reports from Lebanon of ambulances being hit by Israeli fire. And so on.[fn1] There’s too much of this to try and give comprehensive coverage, and I’m not interested in debating the details, but a search on Instapundit will usually get you started.
The Beauchamp case fits the general pattern pretty well. First, the wingers claimed that the Diary was a fabrication and that “Scott Thomas” was the creation of a writer who’d never been near Iraq. Then, when it became evident he was a real person, they rolled out the slime machine to discredit him. Then they engaged in amateur forensics to discredit particular items in his account (acres of screen space have been devoted to the question of whether the driver of a Bradley fighting vehicle can run over a dog). Then they got to the central point – true or false, material like this is bad for the cause and shouldn’t be printed.
All of this, of course, is an attempt to replicate the one undoubted triumph of the blogospheric right, Rathergate. For those who somehow missed it, Dan Rather and CBS fooled by a bogus memo purportedly from Bush’s National Guard commander, and Rather eventually lost his job as a result.
As I said, I’m not interested in, and won’t debate, the details of these stories. The main question is: How anyone could imagine that this kind of exercise can have any value?
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by John Q on July 19, 2007
The question of disciplinary boundaries seems to be coming up a lot lately, and Brian’s post on Gott’s Copernican principle provides yet another instance. Gott, an astrophysicist, is interested in the question of whether you can infer the future duration of a process from its present age, and this issue seems to received some discussion in philosophy journals.
It may be beneath the notice of these lofty souls, but statisticians and social scientists have actually spent a fair bit of time worrying about this question of survival analysis (also called duration analysis). For example, my labour economist colleagues at ANU were very interested in the question of how to infer the length of unemployment spells, based on observations of how long currently unemployed people had actually been unemployed. The same question arises in all sorts of contexts (crime and recidivism, working life of equipment, individual life expectancy and so on). Often, the data available is a set of incomplete durations, and you need to work out the implied survival pattern.
Given a suitably large sample (for example, the set of observations of Broadway plays, claimed as a successful application of Gott’s principle) this is a tricky technical problem, and requires some assumptions about entry rates, but raises no fundamental logical difficulties. The problem is to find a distribution that fits the data reasonably well and estimate its parameters. I don’t imagine anyone doing serious work in this field would be much impressed by Gott’s apparent belief that imposing a uniform distribution for each observation is a good way to go.
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by John Q on July 12, 2007
Under intense pressure from the rightwing commentariat (several members of which have been appointed to its board by the Howard government) the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented a shortened version of Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle last night. Our local climate science delusionists looked forward to this event with keen anticipation, but they were in for a nasty shock.
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by John Q on July 6, 2007
While looking back at whether Iraq was “all about oil“, I thought it might be a good idea to check on the US reconstruction program, and found the State Department report for April 2007. The lead items are electricity generating capacity and oil output, which used to be followed eagerly by those in the blogosphere arguing that the MSM were ignoring “Good News from Iraq”. As Tim Lambert and Jim Henley pointed out a couple of years ago, the same good news kept getting announced over and over again, but the prewar levels (average electricity output of 4300 MW, availability of 11 hours per day, oil output 2.5 million barrels per day (MBPD)) were never surpassed.
We don’t hear quite so much about good news from Iraq these days. The original good news blogger Arthur Chrenkoff shut up shop a while ago. Winds of Change picked up the baton, but seems to have given up. Google finds this site with three entries this year, none containing any actual good news, and this quasi-official site, apparently produced by the Defense Department, and mainly reproducing press releases. It’s not clear whether press releases containing bad news are excluded or whether no such releases are issued.
So, I’ll pick up the ball and summarise the news in the State Department’s report. At this stage, 99 per cent of the US money has been committed, and 87 per cent has been spent, so there’s no more where that came from. Adding “new”, “restored” and “maintained” generating capacity, we get a total of 4373MW, which, assuming 80 per cent uptime, would correspond to average output of around 3500MW. Oil shows a capacity of 2.7MBPD and output of 1.9MBPD. (Table is over the fold). Then there’s the usual schools and hospitals, but these days both schools and hospitals in Iraq are very dangerous places to attend.
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by John Q on July 3, 2007
The arrest of a doctor in at the Gold Coast Hospital near Brisbane, accused of being connected to the failed terror attacks in London and Glasgow, brings international terrorism a lot closer to home than it has ever been before for me. Of course, it’s front page news, and the fact that most of the (alleged) participants in these attacks were doctors is pretty disturbing. Not surprisingly, the hospital’s switchboard was jammed with calls.
Still, my impression is that most people here are taking it in their stride. The risk of being caught up in a terror attack is part of the background of modern life, along with other largely random risks like hit-and-run drivers and street thugs, to name just two. At a policy level (and arguably in terms of moral response, though I think they are all fairly similar cases) these problems are different, and require different responses. But as far as day to day life is concerned, it’s mainly a matter of getting on with it.
Update “Alleged” turns out to be the operative word. The case against the Brisbane doctor apparently turns on the fact that when police tried to interview him about his links to one of the British accused, they found him at the airport with a one-way ticket to India. But it appears he was going there to join his wife who had gone home a week or so earlier after having a baby.
by John Q on July 3, 2007
Glen Greenwald took a few bites out the latest NYTimes transcription, by White House stenographer Michael Gordon, of Administration/military talking points in the campaign for war against Iran, made by Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, now US military spokesman in Iraq and previously, (not reported) Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq. So somebody at the Gray Lady apparently decided that the piece might be improved by a mininal amount of actual reporting, such as the fact that the claims in question have been repeatedly denied by the Iranian government (with backing, although this is not mentioned, from a large number of independent analysts).
What’s interesting to me is that these changes are not noted. But if the journal of record had attributed the remarks to the wrong general or mis-stated the spokesman’s position, the error would surely have been noted with a correction. A blogger who made a change like this in response to justified criticism would get accused, rightly, of a stealth correction. Shouldn’t the New York Times be held to at least as high a standard?
by John Q on June 27, 2007
While there will doubtless be plenty of discussion of Blair’s contribution on his departure, it might be more useful to take a step further back and re-evaluate Thatcher. When Blair took office, he was generally seen as offering Thatcherism with a human face. Thatcher herself was generally seen,as a successful (counter-) revolutionary and aspirants to the Tory leadership were still competing for her mantle.
Ten years later, the picture is quite different, superficially at least. Brown seems much more Old Labour than Blair, and Cameron is eager to be seen as anything but Thatcherite.
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