[posted by charles dodgson at 10:45 AM]:

Well, looky here. According to the New York Times,

An austere home in a dusty alleyway here has become a center of power rivaling the American occupation headquarters in Baghdad -- and the scene of fierce inner struggles for one man's ear.

They are referring to the austere home of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. And they're a bit late covering the story -- people who have been reading Juan Cole's blog have known of the Ayatollah Sistani, the most prominent "Object of Emulation" for Iraq's Shiites, as a critical figure in the governance of Iraq for months. But because he has wanted to deal with the CPA by quiet negotiation and, where possible, accomodation (at least until the recent mass demonstrations which appeared and then vanished at his word), there has (up till those demonstrations) been no concrete demonstration that he has actual power -- and so the American press, in ignoring him, seems to have been simply pretending that he doesn't. And, to some extent, they still are -- this story in today's paper seems to imply that Sistani's demands for elections (which he's been making for months) only became an issue when he gained adherents on the IGC. One hopes that the CPA itself hasn't been making the same mistake.

But it seems, at long last, as if the CPA, or at least some factions within it, want to be a little flexible. Indeed, in discussions with the UN, US representatives have said only one thing is nonnegotiable -- we must be out by June 30th. And so Dubya's crew continues to show the same rock-ribbed devotion to principle and judicious sense of priorities which have marked all their dealings in Iraq, and in fact their conduct of the whole "war on terror"...

[posted by charles dodgson at 2:44 PM]:

Don't you hate it when good-for-nothing social parasites sponge off the welfare state? Stefanie Murray does. Though she has a different idea of who those people are than some of the other folks who usually make that kind of argument:

And as long as we’re discussing entities who take advantage of government largesse, let’s point our fingers in the right place: [the penniless Caroline] Payne is living in state-subsidized housing and getting health care through Medicaid while she is working as a cashier. That means that taxpayer money is going to subsidize the substandard wages of that bloody store, which otherwise would have to pay its employees enough to pay rent, have health care, and buy food. We are not subsidizing Ms. Payne, we are subsidizing Wal-Mart.

[posted by charles dodgson at 2:37 PM]:

Point:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft yesterday urged nations that rallied against terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, to unite again to fight corruption, which is costing the world economy more than $2 trillion every year.

In a speech to the World Economic Forum, Ashcroft attacked government officials who pocket payoffs and deprive their people of money for better roads, cleaner water, and more modern schools.

Counterpoint:

Oil services company Halliburton Co has told the Pentagon that two employees took up to $6 million in kickbacks for awarding a Kuwaiti-based company with work supplying U.S. troops in Iraq, the Wall Street Journal said on Friday.

But of course, that isn't depriving the Iraqis, or Kuwaitis, of anything. Since Halliburton's activities are funded by cost-plus contracts from the US government, they're ripping off us.

[posted by charles dodgson at 11:26 PM]:

Bob Novak, in 2001:

Three and half-years ago, I reported that a veteran FBI agent resigned and retired after refusing a demand by Attorney General Janet Reno to give the Justice Department the names of top secret sources in China. My primary source was FBI agent Robert Hanssen.

Disclosing confidential sources is unthinkable for a reporter seeking to probe behind the scenes in official Washington, but the circumstances here are obviously extraordinary. The same traitor who delivered American spies into the Kremlin's hands was expressing concern about the fate of intelligence assets in China. ...

...why break a reporter's responsibility to keep his sources secret? I wrestled with this question for months and finally decided that my experience with Hanssen contributes to the portrait of this most contradictory of all spies. Furthermore, to be honest to my readers, I must reveal it.

Bob Novak, this week, when asked whether Senate Republicans had been feeding him confidential memos electronically pilfered from the Democrats:

Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.

"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."

Some people look at this juxtaposition, and see only naked partisanship. But I discern adherence to a single, consistent principle. The consistent principle is this: Novak will never burn a source, no matter how criminal or egregious the conduct of that source, not even if (as in the Valerie Plame case) tipping off Novak was itself a transparently criminal act -- so long as that source stays in a position to feed him more illicit dirt down the line...

The point, of course, has also been made elsewhere...

[posted by charles dodgson at 11:24 PM]:

After a long hiatus, Isabella is blogging again, featuring among her new entries a meditation on solo flying at dusk, and a reminisce on how hard it can be to tell which goodbye is really the last. She's so far more coy about her day-to-day situation than she's been in the past -- which, given the family situation she describes, would surely be all to the good. ("Things are different now and so I must act differently"). But no matter how much of her writing you choose to believe, she certainly does it well. It's very good to have her back.

[posted by charles dodgson at 5:21 PM]:

I find I have nothing at all to say about the State of the Union address which isn't already being said better elsewhere. (Well, not quite -- what was a quarterback with a game to prepare for doing there, exactly? And is he to blame for that bit about steroids? -- but nothing interesting). So here, instead, are a couple of quotes instead that I've been meaning to cite for a while now. Here's one:

Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

-- Israeli historian Benny Morris, justifying the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli land.

And here's another:

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

-- Adolf Hitler, justifying his projected extermination of the Poles.

By and large, I support the State of Israel. But, as someone recently said on another topic entirely, if this isn't over the line, then there is no line.

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:51 AM]:

So, the surprise winner in Iowa is Diana's fave rave, my junior Senator. Which makes this as good a time as any to say once again why (well, beyond what Patrick said) Kerry won't be getting my primary vote.

First off, unlike Clark, he actually has waffled on the Iraq war. In fact, his confusion goes back before the war, when he "explained" his vote for giving Dubya unconditional authority for use of force by trying to pretend there were conditions attached. This is no small thing.

Beyond that, he is, unquestionably, an East Coast Establishment Washington Insider, of precisely the type that Karl Rove loves to run against. You can point out all you like that he has taken courageous stands in the Senate during Reagan years, and before that in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (which makes his latter-day wishy-washiness all that much more of a disappointment), but none of that changes the facts that he is from the East Coast Establishment, nor that he is a Washington Insider.

Bill Belichick's Patriots don't win football games by playing into the other team's strengths...

Late edit: Added the word "primary" in the first graf. Any of the Democrats running would be a better President than Bush at this point, once we get to the general election...

[posted by charles dodgson at 9:10 AM]:

Speaking of modern labor standards (as we were)...

One of the tragedies that made American labor unions respectable was the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in which 146 women died because factory management had locked them into their factory to reduce pilferage, and they were unable to force the locks when the building caught fire.

Well, it looks like someone at WalMart likes the idea of going back to the good old days. There have already been several incidents where workers locked into buildings on the night shift have had to wait for hours to get out because no one around had a key.

In response, not so much to an outcry from the employees as to the bad publicity which it has engendered, the company now says it is instituting a policy that when workers are locked in, there should always be a manger on site with a key. I guess they had formerly thought that making managers work the night shift would be inhumane...

And for more back-to-the-future stuff, check out Jeanne D'Arc on how Dubya honored Martin Luther King's birthday....

[posted by charles dodgson at 3:09 PM]:

A few days ago, Nick Kristof posted a column in the Times arguing once again, as he has in the past, the evils of

flirting with anti-trade positions by putting the emphasis on labor, environmental and human rights standards in international agreements.

because, he says, if Cambodians can't get jobs in sweatshops, they wind up trying to make a living picking trash out of garbage dumps, under conditions which are even worse.

As a defense of the economic system which gives rise to those sweatshops, this has always struck me as uncomfortably close to the arguments of ante-bellum Southerners who defended their own peculiar instutition by pointing out that slaves were better off than some tribesmen you could find in diseased conditions in Africa. The salient question, to me, about the sweatshops isn't whether the Cambodians could do worse, but rather, whether we could do better -- and given that Nike was, not too long ago, paying more money per shoe for endorsement deals than for the labor in the shoe itself, it seems likely that we can.

But if you'd like to read someone taking on the argument on its own terms, you could do worse than peruse Daniel Davies take on the column in Crooked Timber, which among other things, dings Kristof for predicting new hardship for Cambodians if Cambodia were forced to honor labor standards which it already meets. In this post, Davies also inaugurates a new scoring scheme for this sort of pro-WTO propaganda. Eight Globollocks points!

Note as well Kristof's weird assertion that discussion of "labor, environmental and human rights standards" in the context of any trade arrangement whatever is somehow "anti-trade" -- that is, opposed to international trade per se. I gather that there are circles in which this is conventional wisdom -- a recent public appearance here by Robert Rubin featured similar comments, for which Rubin gave no evidence whatever. But to me, at least, this seems an odd enough proposition to deserve some kind of a supporting argument...

[posted by charles dodgson at 2:41 PM]:

Paul Krugman has a posse...

[posted by charles dodgson at 12:41 PM]:

A bit of fan appreciation from Ad Frank on stage at T.T.'s yesterday:

I'd like to thank you all for coming out to a rock and roll show on a night that is cold as fuck. I wouldn't have done it.

Review of the set here, for those who have an interest in the Boston music scene...

[posted by charles dodgson at 10:20 AM]:

Some blog entries are quick. This one wasn't; I've been chewing it over for nearly a week now. But that said, it's as topical now as it was when I started, so what the heck.

I had the opportunity to hear a talk by Kanan Makiya at MIT last week. Makiya, as you may know, is the former Iraqi dissident who wrote Republic of Fear, a moving account of Saddam's atrocities, and is involved with current events there both as an advisor to the constitutional committee of the IGC, and as the organizer of the Iraq Memory Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of Saddam Hussein's atrocities.

It was a talk that featured, to me, a lot of weird contrasts. In fact, it started off with one -- Makiya described the mistrust of interim constitutions in many Iraqi circles, due to the use of interim constitutions by several military regimes, and ultimately, the Baath party under Saddam Hussein. For those reasons, he stressed the importance of proceeding directly to a stable, final constitution.

He then explained that due in part to exigent external pressures which he didn't describe in detail (presumably from Washington), there was going to be an interim constitution. To some, this might suggest an unwarranted haste -- one of several mistakes in the occupation which Makiya acknowledged.

For instance, he also cited the failure of the CPA to find Iraqi allies and collaborate effectively with them (including the Arabic-speaking archivists he has recruited for his own foundation, who are not being allowed to assist the US in the perusal of the archives for their own purposes), and how the use of American forces to maintain security was a situation fraught with peril, which he said that many in advance had advised them to avoid.

And yet, rather than blame, he had high praise for the officials in the American administration, and more precisely the neoconservative faction within it. (The alliance seems to spill over into personal connections; for what it's worth, he is in the stable of experts maintained by Benador Associates, which also includes Richard Perle, Laurie Mylroie, and the particularly bloody-minded Michael Ledeen).

When I pointed out in Q&A that all this had made some of us doubt the depth and sincerity of the administration's commitment to democracy in Iraq, his response was in part to cite the old cliché that it's better to be inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in. And while it's not clear what this means to people who will never be inside Dubya's tent, or Dick Cheney's, no matter what we do, he suggested that it would be good for those on the American left to demand that the administration hold true to its small-d democratic rhetoric -- even though the administration has shown no inclination to accomodate big-D Democratic demands of any kind whatever.

And in fact, there's something to his logic, at least as it applies to him. In politics, you can't always choose who you work with, and demanding that your allies agree with you in every particular leads you into the sins of Saint Ralph (viz. the comments here). In fact, it's not entirely out of the question that Makiya has private doubts about the quality of the administration which he is reluctant to air in any public or semipublic forum, for obvious reasons -- but nevertheless feels that by staying part of the process, he may be able to keep them away from errors they would otherwise slide into. (Though he certainly wouldn't, and didn't, hint at any such reservations to the likes of me).

But there is also a danger. The logic that "it would be worse without me" can justify collaboration with people a lot worse than Bill Clinton, or George Bush. Indeed, without equating those guys with the likes of Saddam, we can still suggest that at least a few of the people who collaborated with and enabled the Baath regime were following the same sort of reasoning. Conversely, a protest against the CPA's hamhandedness, its failure to find and engage with Iraqi allies on the ground, and so forth, would have a lot more impact from Kanan Makiya, than from the likes of me.

So, I imagine, for someone in Makiya's position, there must be indignities and reverses which must be endured to get anything done. You have to decide how much good you are actually doing by staying in volved in the process -- and how much toleration of hasty interim constitutions, corruption, pandering to theocrats, armed raids against civilians based on unsubstantiated rumors from informants (much as under the old regime), and so forth is worth that good.

But on the other hand, from the American history even in this region in the past, it seems to me, there would have to be indignities and reverses which are too deep to be ignored. One might think, for instance, of the United States's unquestioned betrayal of the Shiite rebellion after Gulf War I, or Kissinger's earlier stab in the back of the Kurds -- both preceded by solemn promises and invocations of high ideals from American politicians who, when pushed, did not live up to them. So the awful part is that when you're dealing with these people directly, you can't always know what they are up to, and how firmly they are committed to it. There are no sharp lines between firm commitment and looking for the quick fix, or between looking for the quick fix and betraying democratic ideals entirely.

And so, at any point, you just have to guess how close you are to the line -- and whether you're doing more good by sticking with your current collaborators, flawed though they be, or by publicly holding them personally to account for their flaws, knowing (from their record) that the doors to the closed chambers will be forever sealed to you after that.

But the road Makiya is traveling is unmarked. No sign, no border post, marks that line.

For now, Makiya doesn't seem to think he's anywhere close to the line. But for that, he has nothing to go on but his own judgment. I don't envy him one bit.

Note: some light copy-editing to this post done late... e.g., switched link from Juan Cole's discussion of the IGC's establishment of Sharia law to Riverbend's...

[posted by charles dodgson at 10:07 AM]:

Some folks are wondering whether Dubya's new space program is worth the money -- initially, at least, an extra $1 billion a year -- especially given the government's current financial straits. Tosh. He's simultaneously working on another "proposal, which would provide at least $1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain 'healthy marriages.'"

His political staff have been developing this over the past several months, in collaboration with several conservative groups. And given conservatives' general opposition to meddlesome government social spending, particularly when it interferes with peoples' private lives and private choices, you know the expense has to be quite minor not to be a sore point...

[posted by charles dodgson at 1:51 PM]:

Actual headline from today's New York Times:

Iowa's Dark Art of Caucusing Is Turning a Bit More Public

You got it right there, folks. The basic mechanisms of low-level American democracy described as a lost, dark art...

[posted by charles dodgson at 10:50 AM]:

On The American Street, Mark Kleiman quotes Phil Carter on the limits of torture, as applied to Candaian Maher Arar, who the US tortured by proxy, by shipping him off to Syria (where he was also a citizen, but hadn't been for years):

Carter explains how much could have been done to Arar while remaining within the letter of the promise not to "torture" him:

Locking someone in a small cell, denying him access to the outside world, etc. -- those are all "coercive" techniques, but they may or may not be torture. (See Mark Bowden's article in the Atlantic Monthly for where this line is drawn.) The importance of this distinction is that international law outlaws torture, but it does not outlaw coercion. Moreover, it does not tell a nation what it can do with its own nationals, because that would be an intrusion on state sovereignty.

Arar claims Syria went well over this line -- but forget that. Just consider that when hearing that in the jails in Baghdad at Guantanmo, in the cells full of prisoners that the US will not name, we are not using torture.

And then consider allegations (like those featured on the front of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, unfortunately not free on line) that we too have gone over that line...

[posted by charles dodgson at 12:39 AM]:

I haven't done one of these in a while, but...

Ad peeve du jour: the lite beer ad that uses "freedom of choice" by Devo as its background music, but in typical fashion, clips the lyrics. Imagine how much better it would be if it ended right:

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want

The lessons to be drawn from this for the average beer drinker are left as an exercise for the interested reader.

And as long as I'm on the subject, I'm actually looking forward to the Budweiser spots featuring "Leon" the football player with the, well, interesting sense of his role in the game ("Football is the ultimate team game, so I blame my teammates...") -- but how on earth does this sell beer?

[posted by charles dodgson at 12:34 AM]:

A brief note: I expect to be at Arisia for at least a day or so this weekend, attired in thematically appropriate headgear...

[posted by charles dodgson at 10:21 AM]:

A brief exchange on a policy initiative of recent note:

Me: So, what do you think of Dubya's new moonbase?

Other guy: It's a grand idea. We should send him there as soon as possible.

More seriously, it's interesting to note that the basic engineering and science planning was done by noted engineer and scientist Karl Rove, who thinks it's important enough that the current projects of the lesser intellectual lights at NASA should be shut down to pay for it. Gosh, it's nice to have the grownups in charge.

[posted by charles dodgson at 10:21 AM]:

A little news from New England:

Last night at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, late in the fourth quarter, on a night so cold that the fountain outside one Boston art gallery was encased in a shell of ice that had frozen around it, the Tennessee Titans were driving downfield against the New England Patriots. But after the two-minute warning, the drive fizzled, as two long penalties and a pass falling through the hands of receiver Drew Bennett gave the ball to New England, on their own 42-yard line, with one minute, 38 seconds left to play.

In past playoffs, this sort of thing has set the stage for late-game heroics by Patriot quarterback Tom Brady and his offense -- like the heart-stopping drive that won the Superbowl for them two years back. But this time, there was no need. The Pats were already leading, 17-14. Brady kneeled on the ball three times, and then ran a slow-developing pass play to run the last three seconds off the clock, securing victory, and advancement to next week's AFC championship game -- which will be played again in Foxborough, before many of the same hometown fans.

And as he kneeled, boos rained down upon the field.

In guaranteeing themselves mere victory, the Pats were making no attempt to cover the six-point Las Vegas spread.

Hey, folks. Gamble much?

[posted by charles dodgson at 3:04 PM]:

Some bloggers, particularly on the left, have responded to recent offerings from David Brooks and William Safire with mere casual mockery. But Andrew Northrup gives them the treatment that their status as conservative elders truly deserves...