Brad DeLong “links approvingly”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/05/thomas_pm_barne.html to Thomas Barnett’s “attack”:http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2007/05/an_overwrought_ideologically_m.html on James Mann and other China ‘fearmongers.’ Insofar as I can read through Barnett’s self-created jargon of “the Gap” etc, I don’t find this critique to be insightful, compelling, or indeed particularly accurate. [click to continue…]
From the category archives:
World Politics
18 months ago, it was decision day for the EU’s General Affairs and External Relations Council to decide on banning Uzbek government officials from entering Europe. A travel ban was put in place after the Uzbek government shot dead about 200 protesters in Andijan in May, 2005. The US also protested the massacre and was kicked out of its air base in Afghanistan’s neighbour (despite having poured $1 billion of aid into the country since 1992, not to mention the odd extraordinary rendition). In October 2005, the EU issued a strongly worded protest and banned Karimov and about a dozen of his cronies from entering the Europe. Today, it’s d-day again, as the Council decides whether to continue banning 12 named officials from entering Europe.
Normally, this bread and butter issue should have been decided last week in discussions between government officials. Most member states wanted the ban continued for 12 named people, but Germany wanted only 8. Using its presidency of the EU to throw its weight around, Germany refused point blank to negotiate at the working level, and pushed the issue up to the EU’s foreign ministers for their meeting today. All over Brussels, diplomats are scratching their heads at how far Germany is willing to stick its brass neck out for this nasty little dictatorship and asking themselves; wtf? [click to continue…]
Mission accomplished or not, it’s time after four years to call a halt. Only after the governments of the Coalition countries admit that military power has failed, and that nothing good will be achieved by persevering can we make a serious assessment of what can be salvaged from this disaster.
The most important thing that can be done now is to help the millions of refugees who have fled the awful combination of invasion, insurgency and civil war the Coalition governments have unleashed upon them (noted blogger Riverbend just announced that she and her family would be joining the exodus, long after Allawi, Pachachi and others held out in the past as hopes of the nation). But clearly nothing will be done as long as policy is ruled by the delusion that victory is just a surge away.
There are plenty of other obstacles. Many of the refugees are in Syria, and any suggestion of co-operation with Syria is anathema. Even more importantly, any serious proposal to do something about refugees would involve a massive increase in the intake by members of the coalition countries, and (as I’ve found from previous discussions on my blog) the chickenhawks who pushed this war are utterly terrified by the risks this would involve, given that many of these refugees have little reason to love us. Even suggestions that we are obligated to rescue those who risked their own lives working for the Coalition are much too scary for these fighting keyboardists.
There’s a useful blog covering l’affaire Wolfowitz “here”:http://www.worldbankpresident.org/ . So far as I can see the Wall Street Journal is almost alone in spinning a pro-W line (what a surprise!).
It’s a standard move in global warming denial rhetoric to say, “if they were really serious about CO2 production, those crazy hippies would support the construction of nuclear power plants. Bwa ha ha ha, in your face, Al Gore!” Now, I never see anyone actually go on to advocate new nuclear power plants. But guess what? If, after the implementation of a reasonable, revenue-neutral carbon tax, nuclear power would be competitive without subsidies, then I would be happy to support nuclear power. If government subsidies would still be required, I think we would be better off subsidising something like wind or solar power, because nuclear power plants do have a wee negative externality problem, what with all the extra security needed, and that whole “radioactive” issue. Oh, now that I’m here, I might as well just offer up a few other responses to various right-wing Morrisette-ironic talking points.
Last night’s edition of BBC’s flagship programme Newsnight contained fictionalized scenarios from the future of Iraq prepared by a pessimist (Toby Dodge of QMC) and an “optimist” — Brendan O’Leary of the University of Pennsylvania. Brendan is an old friend of mine, but, as an adviser to the Kurdistan regional government, he’s been a keen promoter of something like the “decent left” agenda. His “optimistic” scenario has Iraq descending even further into the mire of sectarian killing, US withdrawal and Iranian and Saudi invasion … but then the character who utters his script tell us: “we were at the brink, and then, for some reason — a miracle — we stepped back”. (Oh, and Kurdistan ends up with the Winter Olympics.) I’m all for looking on the bright side. But miracles? Watch the whole thing “here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6332717.stm (today only). The “miracle” remark is at about 12.01.
Looking back over the early history of the political blogosphere, I checked the site of one of the early European “warbloggers”, Bjørn Staerk, and found this newly published and very impressive reflective piece. Not many people have the courage to look unflinchingly at their own mistakes, but Staerk does so. A short extract
When I look around me at the world we got, the world we created after 2001, that’s the question I keep coming back to: What went wrong? The question nags me all the more because I was part of it, swept along with all the currents that took us from the ruins of the World Trace center through the shameful years that followed. Iraq, the war on terror, the new European culture war.
This mirror of “What Went Wrong” wouldn’t be a story on the same scale, but it has the main theme in common. It would be about Westerners who had their reality bubble pricked by people from an alien culture, and spent the next couple of years stumbling about like idiots, unable to deal rationally with this new reality that had forced itself on them. Egging each other on, they predicted, interpreted, and labelled – and legislated and invaded. They saw clearly, through beautiful ideas. And they were wrong.
Who were these people? They were us.
As someone else would say, read the whole thing.
One of the many useful services performed by Glenn Reynolds is his chronicling of the relentless decline of Moqtada al-Sadr. Some past instalments
The murders are the first sign of organised Iraqi opposition to Sadr’s presence a apr 29, 04
those who thought Sadr represented a mass movement among Iraqis were seriously mistaken. [May 5, 04]
ANOTHER BAD DAY for the increasingly irrelevant Sadr. [May 26, 04]
SADR’S DECLINE CONTINUES [Jun 17, 04]
And now:
I think it’s time for Glenn to let up on the guy. Hated, with no public support, isolated, irrelevant, outfoxed by the sophisticated Bush and now a lonely fugitive, surely by this time he’s too unimportant for a post.
Via “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_02_25_atrios_archive.html#117254677819500755, a quote from Laura Bush:
bq. Many parts of Iraq are stable now. But, uh, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everyone.
Would this also be the talking point if we had one Iraqi-style car bombing per day anywhere in the entire United States for a month or two? Or indeed a day or two? I’ve sometimes wondered about this question: What level of domestic terrorism woud it would take to send the United States to the point where its citizens would accept a highly repressive domestic government response in order to feel safe? The immediate public reaction after the September 11th attacks was very calm. Of course people were shocked and appalled, but there was virtually nothing in the way of random reprisals or what have you. But thanks to the rhetoric of the GWOT and associated scaremongering in the media, my fear is that the threshold is by now much lower. Substantial numbers of Americans really do seem to believe that Al Qaeda might bomb their local mall.
Ergo, an obvious strategy for any terrorists would be to go and do this a few times, in more or less random locations. Not terribly spectacular, but they’d probably get a hell of a payoff in terms of public hysteria. And shutting down open societies has always been part of Al Qaeda’s agenda. We’ve seen something like this (though not in a sustained fashion) with the bombings in Madrid and London. The fact that it hasn’t happened in the U.S. suggests either that there aren’t any Al Qaeda cells in the country, or that if they do exist they are fixated on doing something extremely big, and presumably extremely difficult. Perhaps they have bought into the “24 Mindset”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/10/takin-care-of-business/ too.
Via “Matt Yglesias”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/02/assassination_vacation/, a vintage “bit of Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/02/post_2501.php.
bq. I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc.
The whole “24 outlook on life”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/10/takin-care-of-business/ is really catching on. As I’ve been “saying”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/2005/12/19/spying-at-home/ for “years”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/2004/12/03/freedom-on-the-march/, secret state-sponsored assassination and torture programs are why I am a libertarian. Plus all the cool military hardware, obviously. Those guys had flat panel screens before anyone. And those little communicator watches, too. I bet they have iPhones already. _Exploding_ iPhones. On to Tehran!
Putin’s speech on the evils of US unipolarity has gotten a lot of chewing over in the press and blogosphere, but one “part of his argument”:http://www.kommersant.com/p741749/r_527/Munich_Speech_Vladimir_Putin/ hasn’t gotten much attention.
Finally the president turned his attention to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has always gotten a strong response from him. “They are trying to transform the OSCE into a vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries. And this task is also being accomplished by the OSCE’s bureaucratic apparatus, which is absolutely not connected with the state founders in any way. Decision-making procedures and the involvement of so-called nongovernmental organizations are tailored for this task. These organizations are formally independent but they are purposefully financed and therefore under control.”
The fact that people are so willing to support war is a puzzle that requires an explanation. After all, war is a negative-sum activity, so war between rational parties doesn’t make sense – there’s always a potential settlement that would leave both sides better off*. And empirically, it’s usually the case that both sides end up worse off relative to both the status quo ante or to a possible peace settlement they could have secured at a point well before the end of the war. Even the observation that rulers start wars and ordinary people bear the costs doesn’t help much – leaders who start losing wars usually lose their jobs and sometimes more, while winning a war is by no means a guarantee of continued political success (ask Bush I). All of this suggests that looking for rational explanations of war, as in the ‘realist’ tradition (scare quotes indicate that this self-ascribed title has little to with a reality-based focus on the real world) is not a good starting point.
So it makes sense to look at irrational sources of support for war. In this pice in Foreign Policy Daniel Kahneman (winner of the economics Nobel a couple of years back) and Jonathan Renshon start looking at some well-known cognitive biases and find that they tend systematically to favor hawkish rather than dovish behavior. The most important, in the context of today’s news is “double or nothing” bias, which is well-known in studies of choice under uncertainty as risk-seeking in the domain of losses (something first observed by Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their classic paper on prospect theory).
The basic point is that people tend to cast problems like whether to continue a war that is going badly in win-lose terms and to be prepared to accept a high probability of greater losses in return for a small probability of winning or breaking even (terms which are somewhat elastic in this context). So we get the Big Push, the Surge, the last throw of the dice and so on.
The idea that winning wars is a matter of willpower (what Matt Yglesias calls the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics) has been getting more and more attention as the situation in Iraq deteriorates.
At one level, the triumph of will theory is immune to meaningful empirical refutation. Whenever a nation loses a war, it can be argued that, with more willpower it would have prevailed. The one exception is where the nation is utterly destroyed, in which case, there will be no one interested in observing the failure of will.
There is, however, a specifically American version, which can be given some kind of empirical support. Until Vietnam, the United States had, at least according to the official accounts, never lost a war. The willpower theory holds that this loss was due to domestic weakness rather than defeat on the battlefield, and that subsequent failures of US forces in Lebanon, Somalia and elsewhere represent “Vietnam syndrome”.
Norman Geras pulls out one of the oldest moves in the Cold War playbook, saying
There are some clever people about who will tell you that responsibility isn’t zero sum: Bush and Blair bear responsibility for what’s now happening in Iraq even if others do too. They only fail to follow through on the ‘others do too’ part of this idea, reserving all their blame, all their ire, all their passion, for… Bush and Blair.
He’s aiming mostly at Chris, but since I’ve made exactly the same argument, and Geras is using the plural, I’ll respond.
Of course, I’ve never posted a condemnation of terror attacks, noted successes in the struggle against terrorism or matched condemnation of Bush and Blair with the observation that whatever evil has been done in our names, our terrorist enemies have shown that they can and will do worse. Well, only here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and so on.
But this is unlikely to worry Geras. As he would know from his days on the left (and from the parallel experiences of dissidents on the other side of the Iron Curtain), the point being made here is that, unless every criticism of our own government is matched by a ritualistic denunciation of our enemies, taking up at least as much space as the original criticism, it is obvious that you are on the wrong side.
And having made this point, it’s not necessary to examine your own support for policies that have brought death and disaster on hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Writing in the LA Daily News, in a piece full of harrowing stories of flight from Iraq, Pamela Hartman states
The United States has not liberalized its refugee policy in response to the worsening crisis in Iraq. More than 1 million Iraqi refugees of all religious backgrounds have poured into Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. In fiscal year 2006, just 202 Iraqi refugees were resettled in the United States.
The 1 million figure is broadly consistent with other estimates I’ve seen, but there’s no source for the amazingly low figure of 202 refugees (If anyone can point to a data source that would be great.) I assume this excludes people like many of Hartman’s clients who’ve found some other route such as a family relationship, but that can’t change the fact that the US is ducking a central responsibility here.
Of course, the same is true in spades for Australia. At the same time as promoting the disastrous Iraq venture, many of our local warmongers have enthusiastically backed the view that we have no obligations to the refugees it has created, or, in comments on my blog, only to the Christians among them.
There’s no real way to salvage the disaster we’ve created in Iraq. But we must at least accept the responsibility of providing a haven to those fleeing the carnage we have created.