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.
From the category archives:
World Politics
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.
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.
Having been distracted by wonkish obsessions like current account deficits, fiscal bankruptcy and the situation in Iraq, Indonesia and other unimportant countries[1], 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 shorter[2] (© 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 know[3]. Have I missed anything important?
fn1. Such as Australia, which is also holding an election.
fn2. 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.
fn3. 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.
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 businessman[1].
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.
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 print[1].
The big news on Australian screens last night was the claim by a terrorist group calling itself the Horror Brigades of the Islamic Secret Army[1] 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 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.
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 credit[1]. 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.
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 issues[1].
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.
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.
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
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.)
fn1. 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.
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 currencies[1], 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 deficits[2], 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.
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 centralisation[1].
Chhibber and Kollman seem to be well-regarded political scientists. But their argument here is riddled with errors, or at least large logical gaps.