Anyone reading blogs over the last few years know how obsessive the wingnut element can get over faked, altered and “faked” photographs. Sometimes there’s a case to answer; sometimes there’s a picture that contradicts their narrative and they’re shrilly convinced that “it isn’t trooo!” We saw instances of both in the recent Lebanon war. Now the great-granddaddy of such controversies “looks set for reinvestigation”:http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Robert_Capa_photo_investigators_defend_war_picture_news_252312.html : did Robert Capa stage his most famous picture, the “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War? The International Center of Photography in New York has acquired a suitcase discovered in Mexico last year containing Capa negatives abandoned when he fled from Paris in 1939.
From the category archives:
War
I have a post up at the Guardian blog noting that with no activity on its weblog on the last six weeks, the manifesto itself closed to new signatures and nobody so much as remarking its second anniversary, the Euston Manifesto appears to have gone the way of all flesh and most leftwing political tendencies. I suggest, perhaps a little uncharitably, that the cause of death (which I suppose I might be premature in announcing, but really, it doesn’t seem to have much life in it) was the Manifesto Group’s consistent refusal to ever move on from their platforms and slogans to having any concrete program at all[1] (and that this was in its turn probably due to the need to keep together a coalition which, in as much as it extended beyond a very small clique of pro-war ex-Trots, had very little to hold it together other than a personal dislike of George Galloway). If I had the piece to write again, I suspect I might have given more airtime to the other big psychological impetus behind the Paul Berman/Euston/”Decent” tendency, which was genuine trauma at the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks. But I certainly wouldn’t walk away from my assessment of the central motivation – a desire on the part of people who had been wrong for decades during the Cold War to be on the right side of history for once.
In terms of their contribution to British political debate, my epitaph for the Euston Manifesto is basically Byron’s on Castlereagh. For whatever reasons, as a political movement it was never able to get over the personality issues involved, and chose to promote its views by the same tactics of condemnation, excommunication and inflated rhetoric which had served it so badly during its past on the left[2]. But the current of political thought that Euston represented in the UK was not entirely bad or even entirely wrong. What would their legacy be?
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Jeremy Waldron has a great piece in the latest LRB reviewing a recent book by Cass Sunstein. He has a nice discussion of the Cheney doctrine that even a one-percent probability of a catastrophic event should be treated as a certainty for policy purposes, where the class of catastrophic events is limited to those with a military, security or terrorist dimension. Reasoning like this interacts neatly with “ticking-bomb” scenarios: now a 1 per cent chance that the there’s a ticking bomb the terrorist knows about is sufficient in to justify waterboarding or worse. Of course other potentially catastrophic developments — such as climate change — haven’t generated a “treat as if certain” policy response from the US government, even thought even the most determined denialists must evaluate the probability that anthropogenic global warming is happening at greater than one in a hundred.
Waldron is also pretty acid about Sunstein’s treatment of global warming and distributive justice, noting some of the shortcomings of the idea that poor people’s lives should be valued according to what they’re prepared to pay to avoid the risk of death. But read the whole thing, as they say.
“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/04/this-garment-st.html writes:
My first reaction is that I should write to Professor William Drummond, Chair of the Berkeley Division of the University of California Senate, stating that in my opinion it is time for him to convene a committee to examine whether John Yoo’s appointment to the University of California faculty should be revoked for moral turpitude.
But I find myself frozen, unable to decide whether I should or should not write to William Drummond. I find myself frozen because I am confronted by the ghost of medieval scholar Ernst Kantorowicz. Ernst Kantorowicz–right-wing authoritarian anti-Democratic anti-communist German nationalist–was asked as a condition of his appointment to the University of California faculty to swear this oath:
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My assessment of the battle for Basra has changed significantly. I still think that, in the subjunctive conditional tense, it was a reasonable piece of analysis – al-Maliki needed to do something[1] to start to establish his monopoly on violence within Iraq and I put material weight on his own seeming subjective assessment that he was politically and militarily strong enough to pull it off. But in the actual present tense, things are going the other way. (A disclaimer should certainly be appended at this point that this is all rather toward the punditry end of the spectrum rather than analysis so if that winds you up then skip it, but having picked that ball up I’m sort of committed to running with it).
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From the armchair general department … Back when the surge began, I suggested that one of the ways in which things could go wrong (and of course, there are loads of ways things can go wrong and only one way they can go right) would be:
d) Al-Sadr demonstrates his political nous once more, and calms down his operations, carrying out only enough hit-and-run attacks on US troops to keep his popularity up. Then he forms a nationalist bloc with one or more of the Sunni parties. Political collapse of the Maliki government.
Which was looking rather awfully close to how things were shaping up; while the level of violence was falling, the Maliki government was going nowhere fast politically and the anti-government forces were gathering strength. Furthermore, nobody seemed to really be doing much about this, apart from sitting round congratulating themselves that “the surge is working”.
Now, (and I would be very glad to be proved wrong on this one, as I have very little personal credibility at stake having been right on nearly every other important point about Iraq, and contrary to supposition I would very much like to see a world in which far fewer innocent people were in danger of horrible death on a daily basis), it’s all kicking off, apparently (via Chicken Yoghurt).
I have a post up at the Guardian blog on the general subject of it not being terribly practical to assume that if we all shout hard enough at the Chinese government, they will wave their Chinese magic wand and the Darfur crisis will go away. In the post, I unaccountably forgot to link to Alex Harrowell at Fistful of Euros, who inspired the post by reminding me that I held this view. I’m now correcting this (frankly the CT referral stream is probably a little less, shall we say, problematic[1] than the Comment is Free one). So let the circle-jerk be unbroken, etc. Sorry Alex.
In general, though, and I didn’t explore this enough because it would have looked like rambling, a lot of people seem to think that the Olympic Games is the most important thing in the world to China. How much do we think they really care about it going well? I mean, seriously, we are going to be hosting this thing in London soon, and if it really is true that major world governments regularly make massive shifts of geopolitical influence in order to avoid a few slightly embarrassing scenes at their opening ceremony, then I am rather worried about what the rest of the world might have planned for us.
[1] No, let’s say “insane”
Apparently I am on “mea culpa watch” from Tyler Cowen, Picture me at present pursing my lips and flapping my wrist in the international signal for “ooh! Get her!”. I have looked at the NEJM study, had a look at some of the online discussion of it, and I think that few of my friends and few of my enemies will be disappointed to learn that my response is not so much “mea culpa” as “pogue mahone”. In particular, see below the fold for a list of apologies not forthcoming, additional castigation, and new heretics who need to be squelched.
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A new study estimates violence-related mortality in Iraq between 2003 and 2006:
Background Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey). Results from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), which was conducted in 2006 and 2007, provide new evidence on mortality in Iraq.
Methods The IFHS is a nationally representative survey of 9345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001. We used multiple methods for estimating the level of underreporting and compared reported rates of death with those from other sources.
Results Interviewers visited 89.4% of 1086 household clusters during the study period; the household response rate was 96.2%. From January 2002 through June 2006, there were 1325 reported deaths. After adjustment for missing clusters, the overall rate of death per 1000 person-years was 5.31 (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.89 to 5.77); the estimated rate of violence-related death was 1.09 (95% CI, 0.81 to 1.50). When underreporting was taken into account, the rate of violence-related death was estimated to be 1.67 (95% uncertainty range, 1.24 to 2.30). This rate translates into an estimated number of violent deaths of 151,000 (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) from March 2003 through June 2006.
Conclusions Violence is a leading cause of death for Iraqi adults and was the main cause of death in men between the ages of 15 and 59 years during the first 3 years after the 2003 invasion. Although the estimated range is substantially lower than a recent survey-based estimate, it nonetheless points to a massive death toll, only one of the many health and human consequences of an ongoing humanitarian crisis.
150,000 violent deaths in three years is a lot. You’ll recall that the _Lancet_ study estimated about 655,000 excess deaths, which is a lot more. The two numbers aren’t directly comparable because excess deaths due to violence are only one component of all excess deaths (e.g., from preventable disease or other causes attributable to the war). Deaths due to violence rose from a very small 0.1 per 1000 person years in the pre-invasion period to about 1.1 per 1000py afterwards, or 1.67 adjusting for estimated underreporting. This is where the authors get their 151,000 number. The overall death rate rose from about 3.2 per 1000 person years to about 6, an increase of just over 2.8. Depending on whether you use the raw or adjusted estimated rate of violent death this would work out to an overall excess death total of just under 400,000 or just over 250,000. (But this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, as the overall death rate isn’t reported.)
Via Atrios, the Big Dig is just about done:
bq. When the clock runs out on 2007, Boston will quietly mark the end of one of the most tumultuous eras in the city’s history: The Big Dig, the nation’s most complex and costliest highway project, will officially come to an end. Don’t expect any champagne toasts. After a history marked by engineering triumphs, tunnels leaks, epic traffic jams, last year’s death of a motorist crushed by falling concrete panels and a price tag that soared from $2.6 billion to a staggering $14.8 billion, there’s little appetite for celebration.
$14.8bn is an awful lot of money to spend on a road project to reconfigure the infrastructure of a large city by putting a chunk of the Interstate underground. As Duncan says, it’s slightly less than two months worth of U.S. government spending in Iraq.
Over the last few months, the volume of bad news from Iraq has diminished. For example, the number of US troops killed in November (about one per day) was the lowest in a couple of years. While it’s much harder to measure Iraqi casualties the number seems to be declining, at least in Baghdad. Of course it’s good that not so many people are dying. But what does this mean for the policy choices facing the US and its allies?
The short answer is ‘Not much’
Since it looks as though “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/11/a_political_sci.html has already announced it, I figure that I’m now allowed to publicize a new political science blog, “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/. It’s written by three of my colleagues at GWU, David Park, John Sides, and Lee Sigelman (who’s received previous mention at CT for his groundbreaking collaborative research on “Supreme Court Justice betting pools”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/29/dirty-pool/). One “interesting post”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2007/11/the_longterm_economic_cost_of_1.html#more on the costs of wars:
Recent days have brought a shower of media attention to the long-term economic cost of the war in Iraq. … According to Clayton, the pattern of long-term costs associated with American wars indicates that “the bulk of the money is spent long after the fighting stops” — and when Clayton said “long after,” he meant it. The primary reason: veterans benefits, which for the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War averaged 1.8 times the original cost of the wars themselves.
It would be interesting to know whether this is likely to hold for the Iraq war. Will veterans’ benefits be as costly for an all-volunteer army? Has the ratio of technology costs to manpower costs changed substantially since the earlier wars discussed? I know next to nothing about the minutiae of military budgets – any CT readers have leads??
If you haven’t read Malcolm Nance’s Small Wars Journal essay, “Waterboarding is Torture … Period” – well, you should. It is a clear, cogent, forceful statement of the anti-torture position. At the bottom of that page you also get a long list of links and trackbacks, and a comment box. Here, for example, is a helpful explanation of why all the anti-torture complaints about ticking time bomb scenarios miss the point:
One need not imagine a ticking nuclear bomb, by the way. One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter. In other words, the life of the innocent need not be in direct or immediate danger, nor must there be a high number of innocents in danger. A single innocent babe in danger of being subjected to such inhuman cruelty deserves to be protected by any means necessary, provided one is certain they have collared a member of the ring. I would never ever be able to forgive myself for allowing my daughter to be degraded in that way, and believe I would sleep well and without guilty conscious should I subject such a man to the minimum force possible to rescue her.
Jesus wept. Meanwhile, another commenter earnestly wonders whether the reason there is so much resistance to torture is that leftists have been watching too much TV.
Then you get Alan “for it even while I was against it” Dershowitz. And Blackfive, on ‘the virtues of waterboarding and secret prisons’: “The reason that character is so important in choosing a President is that the Commander in Chief powers are almost unchecked.”
Sigh.
I don’t have original ideas to contribute to the ‘debate’. I’m against torture. Maybe this would have some rhetorical effect: you can’t waterboard your way to winning hearts and minds. Giving up our country’s longstanding commitments against torture means giving up any hope of winning any War on Terror we might think we are fighting.
I hereby add my humble voice to the chorus of indignation at the sorry sight of the Mukasey confirmation. What follows are my stray, semi-formulated musings about how we got to hell in this handbasket [click to continue…]
Suppose there were an Iranian cult combining Islamism and Stalinism, with a history of terrorist attacks, that had enjoyed friendly relations with Saddam’s regime, back when.
Why, that’s something that the American right would fund a special TV network just to denounce 24-7, isn’t it?
Not so fast. Daniel Pipes and Max Boot think the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is just sadly misunderstood. Get the backstory at the Campaign for America’s Future.