OxBlog

2009-07-12T22:53:00.001-04:00

OBAMA IN AFRICA! (SOMETHING ABOUT BUSH): The Sunday Times ran a front-page story with the headline Obama Delivers A Call For Change To A Rapt Africa. The lengthy article describes how Obama "symbolize[s] a new political era." But perhaps Africa wants continuity more than it does change? If you read all the way to the end of the NYT story, this is what you'll learn:

[Mr. Obama's] approach follows that of Mr. Bush, who was widely credited with doing more for Africa than any previous president. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush tried to frame policy by rewarding good governance and building institutions through programs like the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an antipoverty effort that gave Ghana $547 million in 2006.

Even Mr. Obama, who typically talks about the problems his administration inherited, said he was “building on the strong efforts of President Bush” in Africa.

I think Bush also tried to do something about the AIDS crisis, but I guess I'll have to wait for Obama's next trip to Africa to read about it.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-12T21:35:00.001-04:00

NYT VS. WaPo: THE CHENEY ANGLE. Like Dorian and Kathy, I'm fascinated by the story of a secret counterror program hidden from Congress by the CIA. When the NYT first reported the story, a big part of the splash was the suggestion that Dick Cheney gave "direct orders" to hide the program from Congress. Yet the WaPo has clearly chosen to downplay that aspect of the story. The article in the Post doesn't mention Cheney until its fifth paragraph, which reports,

The New York Times, on its Web site, reported yesterday that Panetta has told the committees that Vice President Richard B. Cheney gave the order to keep the information from Congress. The newspaper cited unnamed sources.

To be more precise, the Times quoted "two people with direct knowledge of the matter."

What's very interesting about these two people is that they let the Times know there was a secret program, that Congress was not informed, and that Cheney had something to do with it. Yet not a word about the nature of the program. Why? If you're already going to tell journalists half the story about top secret programs, why hold back the other half? My spider-sense is tingling. My instinct is similar to John McCain's (see here): “If I know Washington, this is the beginning of a pretty involved and detailed story."

As Dorian noted in his second post, the WaPo added a key piece to the puzzle, when it quoted a "senior intelligence official" who "said the program remained in the planning stages and never crossed the agency’s threshold for reporting to the administration and congressional overseers." If that's correct, there may not be so much air in this story's tires. This comment also seems to jibe with the NYT's reporting that the program "never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year."

I think this story's momentum will really depend on what the nature of this secret program actually was. If it isn't something controversial, something that really gets passions going on both sides, then this will become a bureaucratic story about what precisely crosses the CIA threshold for Congressional reporting.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-12T20:30:00.000-04:00

CAN WE DIVIDE THE TALIBAN? The experts' views are diametrically opposed. As far as I can tell, there is no partisan element to this disagreement. In Foreign Affairs [subscription only], Fotini Christia and Michael Semple write:

The idea that large groups of armed men bent on killing Americans and other Westerners can be persuaded to change sides may seem fanciful at first. But it is not -- at least not in Afghanistan. After continuing uninterrupted for more than 30 years, war in Afghanistan has developed its own peculiar rules, style, and logic. One of these rules is side with the winner. Afghan commanders are not cogs in a military machine but the guardians of specific interests -- the interests of the fighters pledged to them and of the tribal, religious, or political groups from which these men are recruited...Thus in Afghanistan, battles have often been decided less by fighting than by defections. Changing sides, realigning, flipping -- whatever one wants to call it -- is the Afghan way of war.

In contrast, Gilles Dorronsoro of the Carnegie Endowment insists,

While it is true that the
Taliban have multiple commanders, some with “star” quality that may suggest internal rivalry, this does not mean that the Taliban are inchoate or divisible. The Taliban’s structure is resilient: centralized enough to be efficient, but flexible and diverse enough to adapt to local contexts...

The Taliban are not confused or in conflict over who is in charge in a particular district or province. Foreign observers recalling Iraq may wishfully imagine exploiting competition or infighting among Taliban commanders, but the fissures are not there.

Don't look at me. I don't know who's right.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-10T19:26:00.001-04:00

"A PRIME CANDIDATE FOR A VISIT FROM A PREDATOR": That's what Ibn Muqawama has to say about Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban. On a related note, Ibn Muqawama adds,

We really need to rethink our entire concept of airpower. I don't think it lies in F-22s, but in the persistent presence and low-observability offered by the next generation of unmanned and relatively inexpensive drones, operating from longer ranges with a wider variety of weaponry and strike capabilities. That's the real future, not our efforts to build a new generation of fighters that do the same thing but better and with a pointier nose.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-10T19:12:00.002-04:00

ABE LINCOLN WAS NO ABE LINCOLN (BUT BARACK OBAMA MIGHT BE): If you thought five books was a lot to review, try seven. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz takes on that challenge in a cover story for The New Republic.

Wilentz begins by recounting a crude remark about "mulatters" (i.e. mulattos) that Lincoln made while stumping for Gen. Winfield Scott, his party's presidential candidate in 1952. Wilentz explains,

My point in re-telling this story is not to try, yet again, to debunk Lincoln's reputation for probity and sagacity, and for perfect enlightenment on racial issues... My point is simpler and larger. It is that Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician.

It is a point that applies equally well to other hero-politicians such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and (in some quarters) Barack Obama. Wilentz continues:

In 1854, when Lincoln began shifting his loyalties to the anti-slavery Republican Party, the tone as well as the substance of his speeches became grander, and the casual racism receded...But it is important to understand that those later pronouncements of Lincoln's were no less political that his earlier ones...He was a shrewd and calculating creature of politics; and he achieved historical greatness in his later years because of, and not despite, his political skills. It was the only way that anyone could have completed the momentous tasks that history, as well as his personal ambition, had handed to him...

Yet many of Lincoln's latter-day admirers, the most effusive as well as the begrudging, prefer a fantasy Lincoln who experienced some sort of individual awakening or mystical conversion, who somehow transcended politics for a realm more pure.

Perhaps you can see where this is going. Regardless, you'll have to skip ahead almost 20,000 words to arrive at Wilentz's comments about Obama.

Our president is hardly the innocent that he tries to appear to be, but it is precisely his intensely political character, the political cunning that lies behind all his "transcendence" of politics, that makes him Lincolnian; and it comes as a great relief from the un-Lincolnian sanctimony that surrounds his image.

You can see why Wilentz was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton in the primaries. She clearly has the cunning of a Lincoln, whereas Obama's cunning was so great that even Wilentz apparently mistook him for the high-minded idealist he said he was. The article continues,

The Obama campaign, with its talk of repudiating politics as usual and creating a new post-partisan era in Washington, and with its liturgical incantations of "change" and "hope," aroused liberal anti-politics to a fever pitch. The above-politics talk also appears to have played a major role in winning Obama favor with the political press and the intellectuals, as well as with many more Americans (including not a few libertarian Republicans) for whom "politics" means "dirty politics."...

Although Obama's supporters at times likened him to the two Kennedys, and at times to FDR, the comparisons always came back to Lincoln--with the tall, skinny, well-spoken Great Emancipator from Illinois serving as the spiritual forebear of the tall, skinny, well-spoken great liberal hope from Illinois.

The danger with the comparison does not have too much to do with the real Barack Obama, whose reputation will stand or fall on whether he succeeds or fails in the White House. The danger is with how we understand our politics, and our political history, and Abraham Lincoln...In misunderstanding Abraham Lincoln, these writers misunderstand American democratic politics, in Lincoln's day as well as in our own.

If it is any comfort to Prof. Wilentz, I can assure him that many Republicans appreciate just how much of a politican President Obama truly is. We're just not so confident that he will deploy his political talents to the same noble ends as Abraham Lincoln.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-10T18:37:00.001-04:00

THE IRON LADY: John L. O'Sullivan reviews five (count'em, five) new books about Baroness Thatcher. O'Sullivan himself was an adviser to Thatcher and helped with her memoirs. This point jumped out at me:

Owen Harries theorized some years ago that Thatcher was seen by many people around the world, foes as well as friends, as being more important than Reagan in spreading the free market revolution, just as Reagan was more important in winning the Cold War. She had successfully transformed a far more socialist, and much weaker, economy. Her most distinctive contribution to the market revolution, namely privatization, was more widely imitated worldwide than any single element of Reaganomics. And she was a more intellectually persuasive advocate of market economics than Reagan because she had initially honed her arguments before a sophisticated and skeptical audience in her own country (and in her own party) in a political culture that greatly prizes debating. She had therefore become an international symbol of free market economics, "neoliberalism," and all the rest--and the system she symbolized ha[s] apparently just crashed.

But do not worry, my capitalist friends. O'Sullivan is confident that the Baroness' reputation will weather this storm.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-09T20:29:00.002-04:00

LOW-HANGING FRUIT: Chris Brose responds to criticism of his question,

How good should we feel about a U.S.-Russia relationship where we can make progress on many issues of questionable importance while we disagree over most of the important stuff?

The "issues of questionable importance" to which Chris refers are the extension of the START regime for nuclear arms reduction and the opening of a Russian air corridor for supplies to Afghanistan.

In his criticism of Chris' initial post, Patrick Barry insisted that "START is the most significant arms-reduction agreement in the last 20 years." I pretty much agree -- but I'm still on Chris' side on this one. Why? Negotiating an extension to START is not a major accomplishment. It's low-hanging fruit. Since the end of the Cold War, US and Russian interests have coincided very closely when it comes to the reduction of our once massive nuclear arsenals.

The real shock would've been if Obama failed to negotiate an extension of START. There is a strong enough consensus on the fundamentals of the treaty that John McCain also expected to renew and strengthen the agreement. Last May he said,

We should be prepared to enter into a new arms control agreement with Russia reflecting the nuclear reductions I will seek. Further, we should be able to agree with Russia on binding verification measures based on those currently in effect under the START Agreement, to enhance confidence and transparency.

Now what about the tough issues we have to work on with Russia, such as Iran? As Chris says,

Color me skeptical that Russian interests will ever lead it to be an effective partner in pressuring Iran on its nuclear weapons ambitions.

Chris' co-blogger Will Inboden mines an even deeper strain of pessimism, asking whether George Kennan's memorable analysis of Russian impulses in 1947 remains just as relevant today. At minimum, Kennan's analysis may tell us a lot about Vladimir Putin.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-09T19:46:00.000-04:00

WORLD WAR I -- NOT WORTH WINNING: Dismayed realist Andrew Bacevich starts his column in the LA Times by arguing the British should've accepted a compromise with Kaiser Wilhelm instead of fighting to win. Their reward for victory was opening the door to Hitler, Stalin and World War II. Or as Bacevich puts it, "seeds of totalitarianism had been planted, producing in their maturity an even more horrendous war."

With that kind of logic, you can pretty much argue that the British should've let the Germans take over Europe in 1914, since they should've known that an even worse bunch of Germans would take over Europe in 1939 and 1940.

Ibn Muqawama is also unhappy with Bacevich's column, especially his pious call for

no more wars of choice; henceforth only wars of necessity. The United States will use force only as a last resort and even then only when genuinely vital interests are at stake

Ibn Muqawama shrewdly asks,

how do you tell a "war of choice" from a "war of necessity?" That's entirely dependent on your definition of "last resort" and "genuinely vital interests," and I think there's a legitimate debate to be had on both. Let's not forget that most Americans probably would have called the Afghan war a "necessity" not long ago, even though we might have continued to try negotiating for the Taliban to hand over bin Laden...Go further back to the 1991 Gulf War, which is commonly thought of now as a clear-cut war of necessity (Richard Haass has just written an entire book about this), and you'll find that many people considered it a bad war of choice at the time, arguing that we needed to give sanctions and diplomacy more time to work.

In other words, even in hindsight, the distinction between wars of choice and wars of necessity is fairly blurry. As a matter of fact, some people still argue that it wasn't worth fighting World War I...

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-09T19:19:00.001-04:00

THUMBING ITS NOSE AT EUROPE: Yesterday, the WSJ ran a column co-authored by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy. I'm guessing that neither 10 Downing St. nor the Elysee was terribly glad to discover that the Journal buried their column at the bottom of a page, without even including one of those charming pencil portraits of either the French president or the British prime minister.

More importantly, the Journal also chose to run the Sarkozy-Brown column under the headline "Oil Prices Need Government Supervision," which I found to be rather misleading. It sounds like Sarkozy and Brown are calling for a government takeover of yet another market. But here's the closest they came to saying anything like that:

The Expert Group of the International Energy Forum should take the lead in establishing a common long-term view on what price range would be consistent with the fundamentals.

These experts should also consider any measures that could be put in place to reduce volatility. And they should look again at whether trading activity is amplifying erratic price movements.

Pretty vague, huh? If the Journal wants to editorialize about energy policy in UK and France, it should publish an editorial, not hijack a column.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-07T11:16:00.001-04:00

ROBERT MCNAMARA: To have been a business supremo, Pentagon chief and President of the World Bank is to have lived to some purpose.

But Robert McNamara, who died yesterday, spent his final years trying to work out what that purpose was, where it all went wrong, and seeking a kind of armistice with the American public.

He might be remembered as the architect of escalation and disaster in the Vietnam war. His arithmetically elaborate, mechanistic approach to war planning and strategy turned out to be folly. Business acumen and organisational genius were no substitutes for sound strategic judgment. The fragility of America's client state in Saigon, the boundless political will of the communists, and the sheer difficulty of running a manpower-intensive war of divisive military occupation - these problems wrecked his war.

Decades later, he wrote a retrospective mea culpa of sorts, diagnosing where the US erred and measuring his own guilt. This was unlikely to please many - unflinching supporters of the war found him to be changing course with the winds of opinion, whereas opponents and alienated veterans found it all too late. A later film, The Fog of War, found McNamara repeating Sherman's words 'War is Cruel, M'aam', part seeking forgiveness but part seeking justification.

Large-scale military involvement in Vietnam was in many ways a disaster for the US in terms of lives lost, money spent, legitimacy squandered, millions of Vietnamese dead, a generation divided and ultimate failure to prevent the country being unified under a communist regime. Slightly more controversially, the carpet-bombing of Cambodia may not have created Pol Pot-ism, but it helped to midwife it into being by radicalising the Cambodian revolution. To a certain extent, by trying aggressively to stop a domino falling, America helped to knock one or two over.

However, I've always been uneasy with the many, glib judgments that still linger over the mythologised war.

There may not have been a straightforward 'domino effect' in the way McNamara believed and then renounced. But the fall of countries to communist rule could inspire other revolutions and make allies waver. America was possibly right to worry about its credibility as an ally. This didn't mean that the US had to intervene in mass wherever communism appeared, but it also meant that there was a trans-national dynamic of revolutionary momentum and cumulative strength that was hard to ignore. America could hardly hope to stop enemy expansion everywhere, but it could try to make it expensive and difficult. How to do so was the issue that plagued policymakers right the way through.

Ho Chi Minh may not have been a mouthpiece or puppet of a monolithic Red conspiracy around the world. But he was an avowed Stalinist as much as he was a Vietnamese anticolonial nationalist - just ask those fellow Vietnamese nationalists who didn't share his Stalinism.

And his regime certainly went beyond mere nationalism. Former Vietcong General Pham Xuan An looked back, at 'All that talk about "liberation" twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists.'

To find in Vietnam a front of the global anticommunist effort was not necessarily to indulge in McCarthyite hysteria. The Vietnamese communists depended very much on the external patronage of the Soviet Union and China at different points. And the very fact that President Johnson was reluctant to escalate the war fully to the north was due to the problem that it might spread the war catastrophically beyond Vietnam.

At the same time, the pursuit of 'symmetrical containment', as John Lewis Gaddis calls it, was not always the prudent course nor 'worth it.' There were other, often dark, ways to contain local communisms. Local proxies, covert funding or 'indigenised' forces, for example. And by intervening as they did, the vital cause of anti-communism was entangled with colonialism, and all the poison that brought with it.

This, of course, is to judge with 20/20 hindsite. Some kind of involvement in Vietnam was widely accepted as a policy in Washington orthodoxy in the early 60's. But as MacNamara discovered and had to endure, historical judgments are made this way, they can be harsh indeed, and not even a lifetime and later career of altruism afterwards can deliver forgiveness.

To his credit, MacNamara did not indulge in the kind of blatant genre of self-exoneration that we see all too often around other wars. But his attempt at a more complex dialogue with the public didn't dissipate the enduring anger. As a memory, Vietnam was simply too painful.

Cross-Posted at Kings of War

2009-07-05T01:59:00.001-04:00

I'VE GOT NOTHING TO ADD ABOUT SARAH PALIN: But I'll recommend one thing - before digging in to the avalanche of commentary, read all of Palin's own explanation of why she's stepping down.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-05T01:19:00.002-04:00

GAYS IN THE MILITARY, PART TWO: (Part one is here.) Michael Goldfarb has an interesting suggestion: Why not allow gay servicemembers to serve openly in roles that wouldn't threaten unit cohesion? After all, women are allowed to serve in some roles but not in others. Why not extend that logic to gays and lesbians? Michael writes:

It's madness for the service to discharge gay translators and the like. But the military leadership still seems to believe that the core of the policy must be preserved in order to maintain the effectiveness of combat units -- politicians from both parties are unlikely to question that assessment.

Forgive the double entendre, but I wonder if the threat to unit cohesion is any different on the front lines than it is in the rear. The scenario often brought up with regard to gays in the military is "What if he's looking at me in the shower?" No one I know asks, "What if he's looking at me instead of firing back at those insurgents over there?" In that regard, the analogy to women doesn't hold; there is a physical reason that women are restricted from serving in combat units (although when you're fighting an insurgency, any unit can find itself in combat).

Leaving aside the logic, I'd be more than glad to support a repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" for non-combat units, if there's a consensus behind that approach in the military. If gays can serve openly in non-combat units, I'm fairly confident that their service will earn them the right, in the not too distant future, to serve in combat units as well.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-05T00:55:00.002-04:00

LOTS OF DOUBLE STANDARDS: Courtesy of The Weekly Standard:

The MSM has one standard for covering captured American journalists and another for captured American soliders.

The New York Times has one standard for covering the current president's town-hall meetings and another standard for his predecessor's "town hall" meetings.

But what you really wanted to know is that Gwyneth Paltrow has one standard for loving America and another for loving Europe.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-02T23:57:00.003-04:00

HONDURAS -- SET THE BAR HIGH FOR DEMOCRACY IN THE AMERICAS: With US support, the Organization of American States has threatened to expel Honduras. The Pentagon has cut off military ties. Our Secretary of State wants the actions of the Honduran government to be "condemned by all".

Kathy describes this situation as one of regional democracy at work. Personally, I am more inclined to James Kirchick's view that it is extremely strange for real democratic governments to be lining up so passionately behind Manuel Zelaya, a disciple of Hugo Chavez and friend of Fidel Castro -- all in the name of democracy.

As I noted earlier this week, I think that the real democrats in Honduras could've dealt with Zelaya in a less confrontational and destabilizing manner. Regardless, it wouldn't have been hard for the US and the OAS to take a more balanced approach to the crisis in Tegucigalpa.

But there may be a silver lining to this cloud. With US support, the OAS is setting the bar very high for democracy. It is demonstrating that it will enforce the rules relentlessly even when pro-American, pro-democracy governments break them. So the next time that one of Chavez's disciples tries to establish a dictatorship in democratic clothing, the same high standard will apply.

Of course, this all assumes that diplomacy at the OAS is driven by a good measure of high principle...

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-02T23:19:00.001-04:00

GAYS IN THE MILITARY NOW! This week, both the editorial columns in both the New Republic and the New Yorker are demanding that Barack Obama demonstrate his commitment to gay rights by revoking "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" so that gay men and women can serve openly in the US military.

The editors at both publications seem to have forgotten the conventional wisdom of just a few months ago: Don't make the same mistake that Clinton did in his first hundred days; Don't define yourself by taking sides with liberal activists against the military, especially not when we still have two wars to fight.

Full of indignant demands for the President, neither editorial even seems to consider whether an aggressive effort to get rid of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" would threaten the success of so many other liberal initiatives supported by the New Republic and the New Yorker.

As a Republican, I just don't get where these editorials are coming from. Are you guys trying to do us a favor?

As an advocate of equality, I also don't get where they're coming from. Why is it so important right now to get rid of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? It has real flaws, but it's lasted for 16 years. Wouldn't it be a heckuva lot smarter to take a gradual approach that first builds consensus within the military rather than imposing change from outside?

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-07-02T22:57:00.002-04:00

"WE WERE ALL AHMADINEJADS THEN": Hooman Majd in TNR:

One Mousavi campaign manager was asked about the brutality of [the regime], way back, when [Mousavi] was prime minister in the 1980s. The staffer answered, "We were all Ahmadinejads then." After 6/12, we Iranians are all Mousavis now, even those who voted for Ahmadinejad, whether they know it yet or not.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-06-30T00:13:00.001-04:00

THOSE GOP CONGRESSMEN ARE TRAITORS! TRAITORS! Andrew Stuttaford remembers the good old days when liberals defended the president's critics from accusations of deficient patriotism, or even treason. Normally, I wouldn't call out Paul Krugman twice in one day, but this exception is worth it. Krugman writes,

As I watched the deniers [who voted against the Waxman-Markey climate change bill] make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Surely the good Prof. Krugman doesn't mean that literally. His words must be a clever amalgam of sarcasm and irony. Then again, this is how his column ends:

Is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

In theory, bloggers are the ones who don't understand civil debate, whereas professional journalists are above name-calling. Yet this is nothing new for Krugman. Earlier this month, Krugman was telling us that mainstream Republicans are no different than black-helicopter conspiracy theorists.

I don't think the GOP will suffer any because of Krugman's distemper, but it would help those of us with a serious interest in climate change if prominent writers focused a little more on substance. There are certainly some facts in Krugman's column, but he seems far more interested in exposing alleged extremists than he is in talking about policy.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-06-29T23:42:00.001-04:00

READ MY LIPS, (ALMOST) NO NEW TAXES: This post is addressed only to those readers who earn less than $250,000 per year. George Stephanopoulos was doing his best yesterday morning to figure out if President Obama really meant it when he promised not to raise taxes on you. Steph put the question to David Axelrod:

STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to show our viewers something the president said during the campaign back in September.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: I can make a firm pledge: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase, not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Not any of your taxes, a firm pledge. Does that mean the president will veto any health care bill that includes a tax increase on people earning less than $250,000 a year?

AXELROD: Well, first of all, George, let's make a few points. The president has said whatever is done has to not add to the deficit. So that's one of the prerequisites for this bill...

[The President] has proposed a plan that would be in keeping with the promise that he made, to cap deductions for the wealthiest Americans on their taxes.

He still believes that's the way to go. And he has made a strong case to the House and the Senate on it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But he also said this week he was open to compromise on this. And as you know, the Senate is looking especially at this issue of capping the deductions for health care that employers and employees now get. That would get -- would be a tax increase for many families earning under $250,000.

But the president said he was open to it. So that means that the tax pledge he made back in September is no longer operative?

AXELROD: Well, George, first of all, there are a lot of different formulations of that plan. The president had said in the past that he doesn't believe taxing health care benefits at any level is necessarily the best way to go here. He still believes that...

We've gotten a long way down the road and we want to finish that journey.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But if you're open to tax increases for people under $250,000, that means that the pledge he made last September in Dover is no longer operative.

AXELROD: George, I think the president has made clear the way he feels this should be funded. And certainly is consistent with what he said during...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But he's not drawing a line in the sand.

AXELROD: ... the campaign.

STEPHANOPOULOS: He said that.

AXELROD: Well, you know what? The -- one of the problems we've had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don't get anything done. That's not the way the president approaches us.

Sort of funny, isn't it. Obama kept drawing that same line in the sand almost every day during the campaign. No taxes if you earn under $250,000! I guess when you want change something from a "pledge" into something more malleable, you call it a line in the sand.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-06-29T23:23:00.000-04:00

IRAN: ENGAGEMENT WILL GO FORWARD. Laura Rozen rounds-up the think-tank zeitgeist on Obama's intentions toward Iran. The conventional wisdom is that Tehran's brutal crackdown has just about terminated Obama's plans for engagement. Rozen's sources say Obama will hold off for a while because it would be unseemly to engage now, but engagement will go forward because Iran is weaker and may have to accept a non-proliferation. Color me curious but skeptical of whether the Supreme Leader is looking for a deal.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-06-29T23:11:00.001-04:00

AMBASSADOR BIDEN? Peter Feaver ponders the news that the Vice President will now serve as America's unofficial point man in Iraq. With good reason, Peter asks exactly how this set-up will work and what Biden's relationship will be to our actual ambassador, Chris Hill, and our 'war czar', Lt. Gen. Lute.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-06-29T20:23:00.001-04:00

HONDURAS: CAN YOU HAVE A DEMOCRATIC COUP? I'd like to complicate the way that we're talking about what is democratic and what's a coup. So far, one side has been saying that if the Honduran military gets rid of the president, it's bad, it's undemocratic and it's a coup. The other says that if the military is acting to restore democracy, it isn't a coup.

Instead of seeing this as either/or, I'd prefer to think in terms of a spectrum of legitimacy that has a gray center in between the white pole of democracy and the black side of coups. In principle, there is some point at which any democratic military has an obligation to defend the constitutional order from illegal threats. The real question is whether Honduras reached that point, or whether the military acted prematurely.

Among American commentators (at least that I've read), there is a consensus that President Manuel Zelaya was openly threatening the constitutional order of Honduras by defying the supreme court and holding a referendum the court had declared illegal.

Yet I still find it very disturbing that the crisis had to be resolved by the Honduran military, even if it was acting on the orders of the court. The absence of other law enforcement bodies capable of upholding the orders of the court is deeply problematic.

The WSJ reports,

The Obama administration and members of the Organization of American States had worked for weeks to try to avert any moves to overthrow President Zelaya, said senior U.S. officials. Washington's ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, sought to facilitate a dialogue between the president's office, the Honduran parliament and the military.

That was certainly the right approach. It would have been better for everyone involved if this crisis were resolved without camouflage uniforms on the street.

The behavior of the military since its removal of Pres. Zelaya suggests that it is sincerely interested in upholding the democratic order. That does not necessarily justify the removal, however.

The behavior of Pres. Zelaya before his removal from power suggests that he has a deeply flawed view of democracy, one that is influenced by the authoritarian ways of Hugo Chavez and his allies in the hemisphere. That, however, does not justify the removal either.

Once the military has left the barracks, the potential exists for the situation to spin out of control, regardless of the good intentions of everyone involved. Without knowing more about Honduran politics, I cannot say whether the military demonstrated sufficient patience. My sense is that Pres. Zelaya's behavior represented an extremely serious threat to Honduran democracy, yet there may have been a safer way to remove him from power.

Moving forward, I hope that the US, the OAS and the new Honduran government work toward a resolution that is legal, democratic and acceptable to a strong majority of Honduran citizens.

Cross-posted here and here.

2009-06-29T18:32:00.001-04:00

WHAT SO MANY LIBERALS DON'T UNDERSTAND ABOUT ADULTERY: On ABC, Paul Krugman effectively summed up what many liberals are saying about Sanford-gate:

If a liberal sees somebody who talks about moral values and does something like this, and they call it hypocrisy. A conservative looks at it and says, well, but at least he stands up for moral values.

As Krugman's tone of voice made very clear, his comment about conservatives was meant to be derisive. Back when I was in college, I felt the same way. We all know politicians will sleep around. So in the end, talking about family values will achieve nothing except raising the hypocrisy quotient. Democrats seem to understand that.

But there's something deeply flawed about that kind of thinking. Culture matters in politics. Millions of voters want to elect leaders who set a certain standard for individual behavior. When individuals like Mark Sanford fail to live up to that standard, you shouldn't vote for them a second time. But there will be new candidates who live the values, and they will get elected. Although it's inevitable that some leaders will be exposed as hypocrites, that is no reason for other leaders to give up on the cause of promoting ethical behavior.

For many liberals (and libertarians), the idea that we should care about what a politician does in the bedroom is deeply problematic. Putting personal behavior -- and especially sex -- at the center of politics -- promotes intolerance and creates massive diversions, such as the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Why not be more like the Europeans, who understand that powerful men are simply going to have mistresses? Let's just get on with making better policy.

That position isn't intrinsically wrong, but it avoids addressing the role that culture does play in creating the social conditions that necessitate better policy. Poverty, public health and many related issues are affected by our collective standards for sexual behavior. Not unreasonably, a lot of voters want politicians to set an example that leads us in the right direction. Can you measure how much a good example contributes to addressing social issues? I doubt it. By the same token, it is both premature and self-destructive for Krugman and liberals who think like him to dismiss the family values agenda as nothing more than the hand-maiden of hypocrisy.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-06-26T18:19:00.000-04:00

HEY IRAQ, HOW'S THAT WITHDRAWAL GOING? Peter Feaver, formerly of the NSC, has some sharp analysis over at Shadow Government, including an improbable comparison of Hillary Clinton to Dick Cheney:

These [recent] attacks may simply be what Secretary Clinton has called "a signal that the rejectionists fear Iraq is going in the right direction." This sounds eerily like the much-derided claim by Vice President Cheney that similar attacks back in 2006 were a sign of "desperation" on the part of terrorists. It may have been a sign of desperation, but, at least in 2006, the terrorists were able to use them to seize the initiative.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-06-26T18:12:00.003-04:00

GLOBAL WARMING FOR AMATEURS: Amateurs like me. If you're not a scientist, how much can really you know? Even if you are a scientist, how much can you really know?

This week, the New Yorker has a profile of James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, written by Elizabeth Kolbert. When I saw, something rang a bell. Two weeks ago, the Weekly Standard ran a piece on Hansen called The Man Who Cried Doom, written by Michael Goldfarb.

Hansen has a penchant for absurdity, so it isn't too hard to argue he's an extremist. For example, he wants the CEOs of ExxonMobil and other energy firms tried for "high crimes against humanity and nature." (Ever the attorney, my wife was quite curious about what counts as a crime against nature.)

Hansen also testified on behalf of six Greenpeace activists who caused $60,000 of damage to a coal plant in England. Ever the pragmatist, Hansen wants to shut down every coal-fired energy plant in the world in the next 20 years.

All right, so how is the New Yorker going to convince me that Hansen is actually a hero instead of crank? To the credit of Elizabeth Kolbert, she actually begins the article by compiling many of the same absurdities that Goldfarb catalogued. But she also devotes a lot of space to lavish praise of Hansen's scientific work by many of his prominent colleagues. He may sound like Chicken Little, they say, but his warnings up until now have been prophetic.

Goldfarb covers some of the same terrain (although his word limit was much lower). His piece quotes two other NASA scientists, including one of Hansen's former supervisors, saying that Hansen's ideological commitments have warped his climate models.

So what's a layman to do when confronted by dueling scientists? In some cases, the scientists with better credentials are all on one side of the debate. You certainly get that impression from Kolbert's article, which does not include any substantive criticism of Hansen's climate science.

Then I came across an interesting column in this morning's WSJ. Kimberly Strassel writes that the number of top scientists critical of global warming predictions has grown significantly.

In spite of what you hoped, I'm not going to end this post with any sage advice about how a layman can have informed opinions about matters scientific. But as someone used to studying the radical uncertainty of foreign policymaking, it's very interesting to watch a debate in which both sides believe they know something like objective truth.

UPDATE: I see Tyrone also has a post about the WSJ column mentioned above. One of the comments points to a post at TNR which says that Sen. Inhofe's alleged list of 700 scientists skeptical of man-made warming, cited by the WSJ, is a farce.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

2009-06-24T17:19:00.000-04:00

DON'T CRY FOR HIM, ARGENTINA: I can't believe Joe didn't make that joke in his first post about Mark Sanford's extra-marital adventures. Nor did Patrick or any of the commenters. Has America lost its sense of humor?

In the blogosphere, it shouldn't be long before this becomes a story that is more about the media than it is about Sanford. There will be an avalanche of coverage and we'll have to ask whether the media should waste so much time on a sex scandal while Tehran is burning.

A bit of speculation: The first complaints about excessive media coverage will come from Republicans. Democrats will respond that Democratic governors also became instant sensations when caught with their pants down. Republicans will remind Democrats of their own complaints about excessive coverage and claim a double standard. Democrats will say the real double standard is all the GOP blather about family values, which clearly means nothing to elected officials. And so on.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly