So. The German election is tomorrow. God, I hope the Christian Democrat wins.
Not because I particularly care about German politics. Even my German friends tend to fall asleep while discussing it. But because Schroeder has done irreparable damage to American/German relations. Damage that can't be fixed unless his opponent wins.
We are in the middle of a transition in foriegn policy. There's no point in whining about it. The multilateralist model is dead, at least in its current implementation; the UN's sole agenda these days seems to be whining about the US and Israel. Which is not surprising, given that it has the same structure as our Senate -- if two thirds of our senators were appointed by one or the other sort of non-representative government. And a large majority of the senators came from tiny states filled with illiterate subsitence farmers dying like flies. How anyone ever thought that this was going to be the basis for world government is beyond me.
I'm not a unilateralist, and I'm not a fan of empire. But the Europeans have spent 50 years basking in our military protection, and they've gotten increasingly belligerent. They've forgotten that you need a quid to get some pro quo. It looks like Germany is about to nominate herself to be the wake up call for Europe.
If the American voters decide that Germany aren't our friends any more -- and they're pretty mad right now -- then our troops are leaving. And that would devastate the German economy. Not just from the large amount of money we pump into various localities through our bases, but because they don't have an actual defense system that would, like, stop anyone from invading. They're supposed to serve as backup for Uncle Sam. And since they're a little behind on the military spending, they're going to have to ramp up in a big way -- 5% of GDP, say. As compared to the 1% they spend now. Which is 1% more than they can afford, with their economy on the Fritz. (Ha! Ha! Sometimes, I just crack myself up.)
Initially I thought Schroeder had some kind of make-whole-later deal with the Administration, but the buzz is that no, he's flipping us the bird, and the Administration is livid. He's just a desperate guy who's willing to completely jack over his country in order to get elected. Now, of course, he's having some help from the German voters. Who I do not fault. The US presence on their soil is a fact of nature to them, it's been around so long; just like we take for granted the fact that Canada will still be there when we wake up tomorrow. Also, they undoubtedly have many good arguments for why they are so important to the world that America would never dare abandon them. Having been both the proponent and recipient of similar arguments ("They can't lay me off. Without me, the entire computer network would come to a screeching halt in two hours"), I know how easy it is for a like minded circle of people to talk themselves up with what are usually quite good arguments, without considering how the actual decision makers will be making their decisions. In this case, the American people, who do not read much German media -- probably because it is all written in German, though we do enjoy the pictures -- are not going to consider all the no-doubt sterling arguments about Germany's strategic importance. They are going to consider the fact that the leadership of their new government just told us to go piss up a rope, and return the favor.
And though I have, on occasion, ranted about Europe, I am not saying this triumphantly, or hopefully. I am afraid of what's coming. We are undergoing a tectonic shift in the world order, and I am not at all sanguine that I will like what emerges from it. But I also understand that America cannot go on indefinitely in alliances where all the support runs one way. And that just as Schroeder is hostage to his uncontrollable voters, we are going to be hostage to ours.
I'm not going to respond to Den Beste's post, because I haven't thought it all through yet. But I wanted to talk about Doug's analysis, which I think is thoughtful, cogent, but flawed.
Doug basically argues that if you accept Den Beste's premise -- that what he calls "Arab Traditionalism", and I would probably call "Saladin Syndrome", is fundamentally dangerous and cannot be fixed other than by stripping away many of the practices and institutions that allow it to flourish -- then you have to choose what his opponents term "Genocide", because the alternative is WMD attacks on America. Turnbull, however, rejects the idea that there is no other way to achieve it. He thinks that cultural imperialism -- the exporting of our culture via books, TV, etc. -- will work. In effect, Steven Den Beste is arguing that the culture produces murderous thugs, and therefore has to change; his left-wing opponents are arguing that that's untrue; and Doug seems to be arguing that it may be true, but they can be changed if we can just pipe Baywatch into every house.
Mmm, maybe. But that's by no means a foregone conclusion.
For one thing, you have to look at the time frame. If it works in 50 years, that doesn't do us much good. We need it to work before a terrorist group blows up more stuff here.
Second of all, our books don't get into Saudi Arabia, Iran, et al. Some of our television does, but it isn't necessarily improving their image of us. Imagine your Victorian great-grandmother getting an episode of "Friends" -- would it make her think, "Wow, those are people I want to emulate" or "Gee, those immoral monsters must be stopped!" (I'll give you a hint: my quite Victorian grandmother's church was nearly torn apart in her youth by the issue of -- I am not making this us -- square dancing.) It is a common fallacy in the West to assume that our sexual license makes our culture attractive to foreign people, because hey, we like it that way. I don't think it works that way. Most people are not so constituted as to tear off the entire mantle of their culture, throw the morality they were raised in to the wind, and party like rock stars. People like what they're raised with -- it's comfortable. That's why feminist aid workers are so often angry and hurt to find out that the majority of women in places like Afghanistan do not want to throw off the veil and turn into Gloria Steinem. It would mean abandonning the entire matrix of customs and beliefs in which they are operating comfortably, for an unknown future.
Turning into a western society would involve ripping out everything they do, and embracing an untried, and in many ways inferior, way of life. To take just one example, many Arab/Muslim cultures, social lives revolve almost entirely around the extended family, especially for women, who in many countries rarely socialize with anyone but their own families, and their husband's families when they are married. This is not compatible with the sexual license and serial monogamy of modern American society. You're asking women to give up their family and friends so that they can wear lipstick. Of course, we, who are comfortable in this way of life, consider it superior. And perhaps it is. But for someone whose lifestyle is so different, the idea of embracing it is terrifying, not liberating.
(Incidentally, I'm talking about countries like Saudi Arabia and areas of Pakistan, not countries like Lebanon, which were considerably Westernized for decades before the current trouble)
Maybe you don't buy that. Maybe you think in a couple decades all that will change, as indeed it did for your Victorian grandmother. Here's the other problem: the institutions have to be there to support it. Islam is undergoing a fundamentalist revival right now. People are getting more religious, not less. Some of that is a cultural response to hard times in their country; some of that is active government policy, or at least work by part of the government. But I think there are a large number of things that can't be fixed unless the government lets them.
The government can prevent that cultural imperialism, by controlling internet access, blocking unauthorized satellite channels, and banning books. It's not a perfect solution, but it worked pretty damn well for the Soviet Union.
The government can keep people miserable by its short-sighted, statist policies. There are basically two kinds of Middle Eastern nations: those that have oil, and those that don't. The ones that have oil keep most of their population out of the labor force, except for government jobs, and use oil to import foreign labor to do all the work. When oil revenues fall, or the population rises, they get into trouble. They have taught their young men to disdain work, and their government regulation keeps the private economy stagnant, so the result is a lot of over-educated young men with time on their hands and a declining standard of living.
The ones without oil also have a burgeoning population, which is even more miserable. They also have a complex network of horrible regulations that strangle the private sector, accompanied by massive official corruption.
Everyone agrees that economic improvement in these countries would help the situation; people getting rich are too busy to blow things up. Problem: you can't make people get rich. You can't improve their lot by trade if their high tariffs hinder trade flows (on net, countries can't export more than they import). You can't improve their lot by investment if officials steal half of it and regulate away the rest. You can't improve their lot by aid if the aid money flows into Swiss bank accounts or monumental boondoggle infrastructure projects. That's why I'm so derisive when neo-libs write nice articles saying that the real solution is trade or economic liberalization or what have you. Well, thanks, genius, now how do we bell the cat?
The government can also discourage liberalism through repression, beating people who step out of line. These aren't democracies, folks; they're not going to vote out the House of Saud if they've decided they want to wear Guess jeans and hang out at the mall. There might be a revolt. But my reading of history does not bear out the idea that people will riot for sexual freedom. Except students, but I don't recall their successfully staging a coup anywhere. Any overthrowing is likely to go in the other direction; fundamentalists who can convince their followers that God is on their side.
The government can encourage fundamentalism by giving fundamentalists money and a state media platform.
In other words, I'm not sure how cultural imperialism works without stripping away the government that prevents it. Maybe I'm wrong; I'm sure I'll get some arguments on this one. But I don't think so. The Soviet Union didn't fall because of Pepsi; it fell because it ran out of cash. Which Saudi Arabia isn't going to do any time soon.
A judge in New York has just certified a class action against the big tobacco companies, who now learn, to their peril, that when you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
From the Wall Street Journal's report (subscription only):
Judy Hong, an analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York, said Judge Weinstein "envisioned this case as a vehicle for trying to craft a national settlement of tobacco litigation."
Which is what your humble correspondant thought the tobacco settlement was supposed to be. Fortunately, no one thinks it will survive the appeals court. Of course, no one thought you'd be able to sue McDonalds for making you fat, either.
Also, while you're wandering away, you shouldn't miss Mindles H. Dreck's post on equilibrium, where he makes the obvious-yet-little-known observation that "anything that persists for a long time is an equilibrium".
Others weigh in David Garver has a really superb post in the Fray on our foreign policy. I'll be chewing on this, and weighing in, in a little while.
Paul Wright, who everyone and their cousin has already linked, but better late than never and all that, has a question we need to answer: what are we prepared to do when they find Saddaam's nasties?
And NZ Bear points out that the Israelis have been trying to find Palestinian munitions for years, with mixed success.
I know some of you get sick of it when I go on these long streams on one subject. But this is how I think -- I spend a lot of time thinking about one subject, then I finish with it, decide what I really think, and move on. I'm still deciding on Iraq. You guys are bearing the brunt; I apologize. But remember, the Blogger Bash is tomorrow, so at least on Saturday there will be pictures to break the monotony. And elections are coming up fast. Just bear with me.
Any road, I came across this comment on Brink Lindsey's site, which I thought was interesting:
"I've always thought that the best argument for Saddam's fundamental irrationality is at the core of Brian's comment. If Saddam were a rational actor, and his goal was to get nuclear weapons, he would have allowed full, unfettered inspections and waited for the sanctions to be lifted. He would have then had many billions of dollars with which to buy WMDs or buy the means to develop them after the inspectors left."
This raises the question: why is Saddaam stonewalling? The commentator is completely right; it would have been smarter to bury the stuff.
I get two answers, neither of which I like: either Saddaam is close, or thinks he's close, to something very nasty -- something he thinks will force us to capitulate.
Or Saddaam's power calculus, whatever it is, is not going to allow full-bore inspections.
Lileks has another list of reasons that he doesn't think inspections will work.
Now, I know that I am going to be accused of simply not wanting inspections; after all, I've been hawkish on Iraq for months. But the honest truth is that I didn't think inspections were on the table until recently. Initially, when I thought that they were, I was enthusiastic. Now I'm less enthusiastic, but not, thank you very much, because I think it would be fun to invade Iraq.
I just have a lot of questions that I haven't seen answered. The enthusiastically pro-inspections crowd seems to me to be proceeding on the assumption that there is some combination of inspections and sanctions that will meet what we all seem to agree is now the goal, which is preventing Saddaam from having WMD in violation of the numerous UN security resolutions saying he's not allowed to do same.
This is not, however, some law of nature that has to be so. The fact that we want inspections to work doesn't mean that they will if we just get the right regime, any more than the fact that we want markets to work means that they will provide us every last thing we hope and dream for.
Which is not to say that inspections can't work. But I have some serious concerns that I haven't seen anyone attempt to answer:
1) How will we find the stuff? Saddaam has had over three years to hide it.
2) How do we prevent shell games? The answer is massive simultaneous inspections, as far as I can tell. So massive that they would constitute a de-facto invasion. Otherwise, Saddaam will just move the stuff from place to place, as he did under the earlier regime. We would also, I think, have to helicopter marines and inspectors around in massive force just to keep Saddaam from knowing where we were going -- as Butler said, anything more than an hour outside Baghdad was a joke, because they were waiting for them
3) How do we get key people to talk to us when if they tell us anything, Saddaam will shoot them?
4) What are we prepared to do about the low level stunts that, in aggregate, degrade our capability? "I can't find the key" "The guy who knows that is not here today" "That paperwork is not ready yet" -- this was what Saddaam used to delay previous inspectors, very successfully. Are we committed to blowing up key infrastructure pieces if we can't inspect immediately?
5) How do we get around the problem of "Yes, sahib, no sahib, I don't know, sahib." Which is to say, Iraqis playing dumb and deliberately wasting our time on stupid things? Lileks gives the example of "What is that iron plate in the floor?" which, after five days of screwing around with it, turns out to be an old oil pit from a garage. We could spend a lot of time defusing toasters and such, if the Iraqis had a mind to make us. Possibly this would be against their interest. But not if it gives them time to hide other stuff. Which brings us back to my original point, which is that any really serious regime is going to look a whole lot like an invasion.
6) How long will support last after we kick down the door of the first mosque? Or the first hospital gets detonated because of Iraq's delaying tactics?
7) What is our exit strategy? The answer is, we don't have one. Inspections will have to continue until Iraq has a democracy, or at least someone less nutty at the helm. The problem is, no sanctions regime can stay robust for that amount of time.
It goes back to Brink Lindsey's point, which I think is true: Iraq does not want to prove to us that it has gotten rid of WMD. Iraq's goal, almost everyone but the wing nuts can agree, is to keep us from finding their WMD, yet still having the WMD. On a related note, my personal opinion is that Saddaam believes -- IMHO correctly -- that if we find out what he's doing, it will take away all his international support.
Yes, they want not to be invaded. But that does not mean that they will not play games if they think they can get away with it. And preventing them from getting away with it would, in my estimation, require at the very least tens of thousands of American soldiers to be stationed there indefinitely.
Let's remove the PC elements. Let's pretend that Iraq is Texas. And that the governor of Texas (who is of course a Democrat), does not want us to find his hidden oil reserves. Let's also pretend that everyone in the state either supports him, or is deadly afraid of the consequences to themselves and their families if they assist inspectors in any way. Finally, let's pretend that there is no documentation on file for the last four years, and very spotty, deliberately screwed up, documentation from before that.
You're the inspector. How do you find the oil reserves? How many men would it take you to find all the oil? Every last drop? With the entire state trying to help the governor hide it? Just picture the logistics. You, and say, 300 guys, chasing oil trucks across Texas, plumbing underground reserves, with every redneck in Texas playing dumb and saying "Well, I don't know, I can't remember as we had that cave on the property last year or not."
My Aunt Fanny, you could. To find the reserves, you'd have use massive manpower to cordon off the state, moving inward, sweeping every single building you came to. Meanwhile, people start dying because the trucks you thought were oil were actually water or bleach for the hospital wards or whatever. You'd have to be prepared for people who shot back when they sensed they were about to get caught. In other words, it would be an invasion. It might cost fewer American lives; it might also cause huge casualty figures when we detonated a gas munitions dump. Either way, it is not the prim group of clever agents swashbuckling about Iraq with white gloves on, uncovering Saddaam's weapons programs through a combination of savoire faire and sheer pluck, that the "Inspection, not war" crowd seems to be envisioning. I mean, I don't know that this is what they're thinking. They may have a comprehensive roadmap, full of practical details rather than nice sounding buzzwords, as to how this would all actually work, and be effective. I just haven't seen it.
Meanwhile, I don't think inspections will work. And I think that if we can find a regime that would actually be effective, Saddaam will turn it down. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Incidentally, I don't care what any of you say; I think "Shrub" is funny. See, that's the kind of gentle political humor this country needs more of. I'm all about unity, folks. Can't we all just get along?
Andrew Sullivan takes Lawrence Wright's amazing piece on Al-Quaeda as a savage indictment of Clinton's foreign policy. Which it is. Don't get me wrong; I think Clinton's foreign policy was disastrous for the country. But I also think we have to take a lot of the blame ourselves.
Most of us wanted to think that we didn't need the military any more. We voted for Isolationsim Lite. Clinton was the ultimate poll driven president -- if we'd wanted a strong foreign policy, we could have had it. All we had to do was ask. But the only people who cared about stuff like that were mostly the same people who wouldn't have voted for Clinton if Jesus Christ Himself had walked across the Potomac and endorsed him. The rest of us were too busy totting up our peace dividend and trying to figure out if it would stretch to cover a new stereo and a DVD player.
Two weeks before 9/11 I was having dinner with 3 people who loudly assured me that we should cut military spending to the bone in order to pay for more social programs, because now that the Cold War was over we didn't need all that useless stuff.
But defense spending is like your immune system, I argued. It sucks up a lot of resources and doesn't do anything -- until you really need it, when you want it to still be strong enough to defend you.
They were having none of it.
[I don't want to imply in any way that I was some sort of prescient commentator who knew what was coming. I didn't. I didn't expect any threat any time soon -- I just thought it would be nice to have the military around if we needed them. Plus, I love Fleet Week.]
They were America in the 90's. We were too busy buying Pets.com to worry about what those crazy foreigners were up to. And we wanted to believe that every conflict could be solved if both sides would just sit down and talk it out. If you want someone to blame -- well, I'm sure we all have a mirror handy.
Of course, after 9/11, I didn't say I told you so. I had better things to worry about. And so do we, now. Let's learn from Clinton's mistakes, instead of wasting energy placing blame.
Update: On a similar vein, I'm seeing Bill O'Reilly is trying to get an investigation of whether Clinton was outright bribed to pardon Marc Rich. Can we please move the [expletive deleted] on, folks? What are you going to do, impeach him again? I'm not sure whether it's actually even a crime to sell pardons, since the pardon is supposedly inviolate. (Lawyers who want to weigh in on an interesting academic question, rather than Clinton-bashing, I'd be interested to know the answer to that one). All this does is stir up partisan bickering at the time when we least need it. So righties -- stop poking Clinton with a stick, and maybe he'll leave you alone.
Last post on Iraq, I hope. Did Bush get caught flatfooted by Iraq's letter to the UN?
I don't think so.
Regular readers know I think he's politically pretty smart. But even if you don't, you can't genuinely believe he's that dumb.
When you put an ultimatum to someone, there are few people in the foreign policy establishment so thoroughly dimwitted as to never consider the possibility that they will agree to your demands. Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are not among the dimwits.
So why did they sound surprised? Well, I think ol' Kofi was angry as hell that Bush put him on the spot. So I think he thought it would be cute to release the letter to the media before he gave it to Bush. Which is understandable, though I think it displays that Kofi is not really bright enough to realize that he does not hold many cards here.
I've been thinking about Brink Lindsay's essay on inspections, and I'm concerned that he may be right. In economics, such incentive disaligned systems are known to break down -- can you say Arthur Anderson? And as my co-worker said "Sure, he'll agree. He has eight weeks to hide everything".
Regardless, at this juncture, I think the reaction to agreeing to inspections should be the same as the reaction to disagreeing -- massive military buildup in the region. If he agrees, it'll keep him honest. And if he doesnt -- welcome to Baghdad, GI Joe.
Now, brace yourself for the inevitable comparison between Saddaam and Hitler.
Not because I'm trying to gin up support for the "Axis of Evil", but because I think it illuminates a point I was trying to make: that you have to look closely at the alternatives before you assume that you can predict what someone's "rational response" will be.
It is the cherished notion deep in the heart of many people that you can always make a deal. Which is true in the sense that sheep can agree to be led to the slaughter instead of making things difficult for the knifeman. But false in terms of real-world dilemmas. You can usually make a deal. But not always.
And now -- negotiation buzzwords.
In negotiation, your goal is what you hope to get out of the negotiation. Your needs are what you, well, need to get. Your reserve price is the lowest offer you can accept, given your exogenous constraints. The BATNA is the Best Alternative To Negotated Agreement, otherwise known as What Will Happen If You Can't Make a Deal. And the ZOPA, the Zone Of Possible Agreement, is that heavenly range of options within which all parties to the agreement are, at minimum, meeting their basic needs.
There are many people in the ideological wings of both right and left who believe that there is always a ZOPA.
But let's look at Hitler. It is customary for the postwar intellectual to look at WWII's carnage and say "But it was all so unnecessary!" Well, it could probably have been avoided -- but the points at which it was likely to have been avoided were so far back int he past that the actors who could have made those decisions had no reasonable way of foreseeing their outcomes.
The German people were suffering enormously under the reparations that were forced on them in the Versailles Treaty. You've heard about the german hyperinflation, in which people needed to truck around wheelbarrows of cash with which to buy groceries. This was largely the result of the Treaty, in which the French not only occupied most of the industrial plant of Germany, but also required that any shred of hard cash Germany got its hands on be immediately shipped to France. The Weimar Republic literally had no choice but to wildly inflate their currency.
[Interesting side note: the Laffer Curve, bane of the Democrats, was initially drafted to describe, not income taxes, but inflation, which is of course just another form of taxation. The math works out beautifully on the german hyperinflation. But I digress.]
The German people, suffering miserably, were angry about this. The French basically sniffed and said, "Who cares?" The English needed their share to pay their war debt to us, which we wouldn't forgive, because, well, if they didn't want to pay us back, they shouldn't have borrowed the money in the first place.
The Germans felt that the only way to end their suffering was to break the Versailles Treaty. And they were right. But no one was offering to help them out. They were understandably mad about this, since it seemed to them that the war had been just as much the Allies' fault as theirs.
So they elected a guy who told them they were right to be angry about the foreigners, and promised to end their misery. Chap named Adolf Hitler.
But Hitler had promised the people that they weren't going to get shoved around by any more stupid old Allies. He had to do something to prove to them that he was powerful so they wouldn't rise up against him. Like, say, remilitarizing the Rhineland.
The French could have stopped him right there by going in and kicking his ass out. But keep in mind, it had been 18 years since the war. The French people were bored of hearing about it. They wanted to focus on other things, like the economy. (Sound familiar?) There was no domestic support for pushing him back. Nor were they confident that they could succeed. I can't be totally sure, but I think this may have been the first recorded media use of the word "quagmire" regarding a proposed military operation.
At any of the abovementioned points, we could have ended it. But there was no particular reason to think it was necessary. Hindsight is 20/20.
Having restored his power, Hitler set about regaining German might. But there were things Germany needed in order to rival Britain or America. Like ports for transportation. Coal to feed the steel mills. Oil. Other resources Germany lacked.
Theoretically he could have traded for these things. Realistically, he behaved like any power-mad CEO -- he attempted a series of risky yet self-aggrandizing mergers. Austria went off smoothly. The Allies said nothing. So here goes Czechoslovakia. Nothing. Then Poland, and the Allies woke up.
Leave Poland, they said, or we declare war.
Now, the rational response, in hindsight, was probably to leave Poland. (I realize that the power disparities make this substantially asimilar to Iraq. Bear with me; I'm getting there.)
He didn't leave.
Then he declared war on Russia, which was crazy. It certainly wasn't rational; he would have been much better off fighting only on one front.
Why'd he do it? Because he was a psychotic madman who didn't understand cause and effect? Don't be stupid. He was evil, but he was also bright enough to run a country for 12 years. That's the point I'm trying to make about rationality; Saddaam may be rational, but that doesn't mean he will take the course you think is rational.
Why did Hitler break the Soviet alliance? IMHO, because he'd promised the folks at home he would make them a big empire. And he'd promised them he'd fight communists, which was hard to do while allied with the USSR. The alliance with Russia was a threat to his domestic power base. It made him look weak. And it allowed Russia to occupy strategic parts of Poland that he needed for his master plan for world domination.
The point is, that in situations like this, you have to deal with the worst case scenario. It wasn't particularly likely that, say, Germany would turn into a dictatorial empire if we didn't forgive Britain's war debts, but in fact it did. It wasn't particularly likely that remilitarization of the Rhineland would lead directly to World War, but it was a possibility, and in the end, that's what happened.
By the time the threat is obvious enough to be seen by all, solutions are costly in materiel and lives.
The other point is that you cannot count on knowing what calculations the other side is making. If you had put the choices Germany faced in front of almost any American citizen, they would probably have turned back at Poland. Certainly, they wouldn't have declared war on the USSR. Yet Hitler clearly didn't feel that way. Betting the farm on his "rationality" by, say, declaring war on Russia, would have crushed us.
So that's why I'm suspicious of upper-middle class professionals who say "Saddaam is rational, therefore he will choose to do X if we do Y". And you know this because of your extensive experience as an Iraqi dictator? His operating environment is different from yours. You do not know what he is thinking. So it is fundamentally dangerous to assume that you can predict how he will act.
I'm fascinated by my correspondents who tell me "We only care about Iraq because of the oil". But sweetie, the only reason that Iraq cares is the oil. He didn't invade Kuwait because they have better pita bread, or he didn't have enough unemployed young men sucking off his welfare system at home. In the oil rich nations of the Middle East, people are not an asset: they're more mouths to feed on the fixed stipend generated by oil production. Land is not an asset; most of it is not arable. And there's no capital plant to speak of. Wars in the Middle East are fought over two things: oil and water. Why is it okay for Saddaam to grab oil fields, but not for us to stop him?
(Yes, I've heard the "historical" argument that Kuwait is an artificial division. Umm, yes, that's true. So is Iraq, my sweet, and every other nation in the Middle East, and do we really want to make that an authorization to go starting wars with your neighbors to see how much you can grab?)
It's also not true that we only go to war over financial or strategic interest -- in whose strategic interest was Kosovo? Not anyone we care about. Yes, we stay out of Africa and Latin America, but I would actually argue that this is more do to the PC paternalism of the transnational progressivist types (we can't really expect the little brown people not to cut off their enemies hands and feet -- they don't know any better) than to our indifference.
Anyway, that's just a partial list of the amusing arguments I've heard about Iraq. Now I'm sure I'll get more. And please: Imperialist Running Dog should always be capitalized.
It is now time to answer the burning question which has occupied the every waking moment of my readers for days on end:
What does Jane think of the mess in Iraq?
Well, obviously, I am in favor of inspections over war. Inspections are nicer than war because fewer people get killed that way.
But.
(You knew there was a but coming, didn't you?)
My preference for inspections over war is dwarfed by my preference for getting rid of Iraq's WMD.
And on that point, I have several concerns.
The first is that, as Den Beste has pointed out, the Iraqis are already hedging. They're acting as if this is a negotiation. Luckily, we have precedent in Afghanistan to point to, and indeed, Bush is keeping to the same effective course: we are not negotiating. You accede to our demands, or we invade. The UN should be ashamed of itself for trying to negotiate on the terms of the inspections. (Other terms, I suspect, are negotiable. But I don't think that Saddaam really cares whether we demand Kuwaiti reparations or not; he wants his weapons.)
The second is that, as Brink Lindsay has argued extremely persuasively, it simply may not be possible to stage effective inspections as long as Iraq is committed to WMD. At minimum, the regime would have to be far, far different from the one imposed in the wake of the Gulf War:
Inspections must be swift; Saddaam must have no further time to continue developing we-know-not-what.
They must be comprehensive. There can be no shell games, this time; we need to flood the country with inspectors who go everywhere.
They must be backed up by instant military reprisal for failure to cooperate. Block access to a presidential palace for even a couple of hours, and we're bombing it to pieces. I don't care if Saddaam is in his skivvies with his hair up in curlers; when we knock, he'd better answer the door.
The problem is, I'm not sure that he can meet those demands.
Much of the discussion on deterrance has centered around the question of whether Saddaam is a rational actor. The problem is, the "Saddaam is rational" side has approached the analysis as if it were a schoolbook argument for rational markets in Macroeconomics 101. No one is trying to argue that Saddaam is a psychotic who does not understand the concept of cause and effect. And while he may blow things up for fun, no one serious thinks that he will blow things up for fun if he thinks that this will directly result in his own death.
This does not, however, mean that Saddaam will make the same decision that the "rational actor" proponents would if they happened to be the dictator of an oil-rich, yet thoroughly unstable, nation. Which is what many of them seem to be arguing.
That he will not willingly cause his own death does not mean that he will correctly perceive which actions will lead to this. There have been serious commentators from Bush I and Clinton administrations arguing that Saddaam does not yet seem to understand that he cannot play games with Shrub.
That he will not willingly cause his own death does not mean that he will not gamble on delaying tactics or deception giving him time to turn his busted flush into a straight. Nor does it guarantee that we will find the weapons. I was chatting with a friend last summer who pointed out that the location of the enormous Nazi secret weapons center was unknown to us until we stumbled upon it after WWII. And while people have argue that such things as power lines are hard to hide, this is only true if you care about protecting your citizens from horrible smells or explosions. If you stick them in the middle of a city and call it a tannery, it's not so hard.
And then there is the question of whether he would hand off WMD to terrorists. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't, but I'm not willing to bet on it. I think it's completely certain that if he gets a nuke, he'll invade his neighbors, and threaten to nuke Israel if we try to stop him. Talk about destabilizing the Middle East -- if you don't like America singling out Iraq now, what do you think the effect will be of forcing the US to choose between dead Israelis and dead Kuwaitis?
The biggest question I have, though, is whether we currently pose the biggest threat to him.
Saddaam, if he is largely rational, has several goals. The first is to continue breathing. The second is to stay in power. And the third is to increase that power if possible.
We are largely targeting goals two and three through invasion; though he might turn up dead in an invasion, he might get to live out his days in a not-terribly-uncomfortable jail cell.
But if his domestic enemies get him, he doesn't get to breathe any more, unless he can manage to do so through a hole in his head. And it is the immutable law of dictators that they don't live long once they are perceived to be losing power.
If we begin the inspections regime, the militarism which is holding Saddaam in power will be severely compromised. How long can he continue to live after that?
I think that probably Saddaam knows the answer to that question better than we do. But even if he doesn't, the really important question is whether Saddaam thinks he can hold onto power after serious inspections begin. Because if he doesn't, he may choose to go to war, even though that choice looks obviously insane to those of us who face our greatest daily danger when we get behind the wheel of our car to go to work.
We now know that the Taliban couldn't accede to our demands to turn over Al-Quaeda, even though it was obviously rationally insane to choose to go to war with the US rather than do so. I fear we may face something similar here.
If not, great. I'm all for inspections. But only if they achieve our goal, which is disarmament. They must not substitute for effective action.
What the hell is wrong with the art community? Okay, don't answer that -- I don't have the bandwith for a rant that long. But what has brought them to the point where pseudo-emotional voyeuristic swill like a statue of a naked women who has jumped off the WTC, posed at the moment her face hits the pavement, gets placed in Rockefeller Center?
Annals of innumeracy This is not, strictly speaking, a factoid that I'm debunking. But I thought it interesting to communicate, to my numerically challenged readers, the way that I try to think about statistics when I see them.
Today I was reading Heather McDonald's polemic, The Burden of Bad Ideas. Wherein I stumbled upon a factoid that made my jaw drop: 42% of people with HIV don't tell their partners that they are infected. And of those who do not tell their partners, 42% report that they do not regularly practice safe sex.
Let's put those numbers together: 17% of people with HIV are having unprotected sex without telling their partners that they are infected.
My first reaction: that can't be true.
Not that it is numerically impossible, as many of the examples I present here are. But it is so ethically problematic that the mind revolts at the thought that it could be true. I am 100% adamantly against people having even protected sex without telling their partners. But the idea that 1 in 6 people with HIV is having unprotected sex. . . I just can't believe it.
So what are the ways in which it could not be true?
The most obvious is that it just isn't true; that it's some wildly distorted factoid pulled out by conservative activists. This was, I confess, my first instinct, but it is not true; as it turns out, the fact comes from a study published in a peer reviewed medical journal.
Not only isn't it distorted; the journalist didn't even get the math wrong. The 40% is really 40% who didn't think that their partners needed to know.
When you're trying to establish a causal relationship, there are all sorts of ways in which you can invalidate the causal link, by bringing in outside causation, reverse causation, challenging the math -- but the authors didn't try to establish causation. They're just trying to establish that 40% of people with AIDS don't tell their partners.
So what's left to examine is the data source.
Now, first of all, this comes from a survey. Surveys are notoriously unreliable. People don't tell the truth. In this case, however, that is not a helpful critique. People almost always lie to make themselves look better. The bias should be in favor of underreporting the incidence of people who have sex without telling their partners they're infected.
Then there are the questions. Now, the way that this gets reported in the media is "40% of people with AIDS don't tell the people they have sex with that they're infected". In fact, the question is more detailed (they always are, in case you're wondering; the media glosses over fine distinctions to make a better story). In this case, what they actually said was that they'd had sex with someone in the last 6 months without telling them they were infected. So actually, what the media should have said is that "40% of people with AIDS don't tell some of the people they have sex with that they're infected". However, in this case, that doesn't really make me feel better.
And finally, there's the composition of the sample. This survey was done at two hospitals in New England. So again, the media has glossed over a major point: what the story should have said was "40% of the people with AIDS who are treated at these New England hospitals say they don't tell some of the people they have sex with that they're infected."
With a sample like this, what you always want to know is: how well does it match the population? The population, in this use, is a statistical term, meaning all the members of the group you are trying to gather information about. In this case, that would be all the HIV positive people in the country.
[Keep in mind: I don't have access to the study, only media accounts of it that I found, all of which were fairly superficial, and also, sympathetic to teh study]
The sample is smallish. The smaller a sample is, the less likely it is to represent the population well. For example, if I am trying to find out what MBA's think about invading Iraq, and I decide to ask three of my friends and then publish the result, there is a large likelihood that the results will be off. And not just because I hang out with the MBA world's hippie fringe. Even if I picked out four people at random, one person with whacko notions, like, say, "Let's invade Iraq, take Sadaam captive, and tickle him with feathers until he repents" is going to get reported as "25% of MBA's believe we should tickle Sadaam to death". This is not, needless to say, representative of the average opinion among the broad swathe of yuppie larvae at our nation's top schools of business.
But there are many other ways in which a sample can be off. It can be chosen mainly from certain populations. For example, we've all heard that 1 in 10 people is gay. Yet this contradicts the fact that far less than 1 in 10 of, say, our relatives, or the people we grew up with, are gay. The actual number seems to be closer to 2-3% for men, less for women.
So where did the stat come from? The Kinsley report. And where did the Kinsley report come from? A sample that was heavily over-weighted with men in prison. The question that turned into "1 in 10 people is gay" was "Have you had any sexual contact with someone of the same sex in the last 10 years" or some such. Which is not the same thing as being what we think of as "gay", which is to say, mainly or exclusively attracted to members of the same sex.
I can think of many ways in which this sample could be off.
It could be disproportionately drawn from drug users, who are presumably less responsible about their behavior than people who contracted the virus from sex or a blood transfusion.
It could be disproportionately poor. Poverty is correlated with irresponsible behavior; my left/right readers can argue about which way the causal link runs.
People in New England, or the area around the hospital, could be unusually selfish.
The people surveyed might be prostitutes, who have a financial incentive not to disclose.
Obviously, the first thing I would like to know is what populations the hospitals serve. And what the population surveyed looked like, and how closely it mirrors the population of the HIV positive: income/class/race/profession/method of infection/sex/education/etc.
The point being that when you see a factoid based on a survey, you have to carefully check what was actually asked, and who was asked it.
I'm watching one of the med students who were arrested in Florida basically accusing the waitress who called the threat in of being a bigot.
Now, I don't think that they deserved to lose their jobs; I hope people in Miami are putting some pressure on the hospital to rethink their position. But neither do I think that the waitress, who has been tenative, retiring, and otherwise utterly unlike the kind of people who phone these sorts of things in to get attention, was lying. Those kind of nuts tend to fit a profile, which includes phoning in those sorts of threats a lot, or being down as bigoted against the ethnic group in question long before the crank report, neither of which seems to be true in her case.
My best guess is that the students noticed everyone staring at them. And probably, they'd gotten that treatment all the way down the pike, especially in the south, which is less ethnically diverse than the big city. And probably they were sick of it all. And probably they made some smartass remarks.
They don't deserve to lose their jobs. But do I feel sorry for them getting stopped and questioned? Well, let me tell you a story.
When I was in college, I dated a guy whose older brother was one of those vaguely lost recovering druggies who spends a lot of time on the couch, eating pizza and watching late-night television. This particular specimen told me a perfectly hilarious story about his first day of college, when he'd taken insufficiently cut crystal methamphetamine which kept him awake for five days. It was so funny that when I met my roommate for a cheesesteak that afternoon, I tried to repeat it.
Due to some sort of blip on the vocal cords, my voice rose to high volume just on the words "Uncut crystal meth". Whereupon I saw the large number of Philadelphia cops, just off their shifts, who filled the steak joint. And they saw me. And they watched me. And followed me outside the restaurant. And began to follow me home until I stopped and told the story to the nearest cop.
He thought it was funny. Thank God. I could have ended up in the pokey for questioning.
The point is, even though it wasn't true, I can't fault the cops. When you hear someone talking about drugs, even white bread college girls, it is not unreasonable to attempt to find out whether they are selling them.
And that's how I feel about these kids. I think they played a little joke that bit them in the ass. I think it bit them harder than is just. But I don't feel all that bad about the hours they spend explaining themselves to the police.
More on Rand Well, there have been several good points made while I was away from my computer today. Arthur Silber makes a point that I think Rand's critics often overlook: she lived through the Russian Revolution. Having witnessed the horrors of communism first hand, she can be forgiven for reacting rather strongly to people she found advocating such a system in the land of the free.
Meanwhile, Norah Vincent weighs in with a typically erudite post arguing that philosophy and aesthetics cannot be reconciled -- rather, that they are diametrically opposed. Frankly, my brain is too sodden with fatigue to say anything intelligent, so I just urge you to go read it yourself.
I don't like it when intelligence assets start calling suitcase WMD the wild card in the invasion of Iraq. Maybe it's time to reconsider making my home in New York.
Those of you who believed that Hilary Clinton was telling the truth when she said she wasn't looking to run for president may now step over to your desks, get that lease you bought for the Brooklyn Bridge the last time you were in New York, and smack yourself in the head with it until your brain starts functioning again.
