May 24, 2004
A Word On Sistani
One stable of "Iraq's all good, man" commentary has been to note that Muqtada al-Sadr is very anti-American while Ayatollah Sistani is not a fan of al-Sadr. Since Sistani is a very influential figure, this could be good news indeed. Good news, that is, if the fact that Sistani is a Sadr opponent implied that he was a fan of the American occupation. But it doesn't and, in fact, he isn't. So we're screwed either way. Less screwed, admittedly, under a scenario where we undercut Sadr military and Sistani undercuts him politically than we would be under the alternative, but still screwed.
Weddings, Etc.
I keep reading conflicting reports about this wedding business, but isn't it possible that there were insurgents and foreign fighters at a wedding party? Nazis had weddings, Communists had weddings, so why shouldn't insurgents and so forth have weddings, too. I'm not sure which way that possibility cuts.
Goalpost Shmoalpost
Sometimes you have to reproduce the whole InstaThing:
MOVING THE GOALPOSTS: Reader T.J. Lynn notes this passage from an article in the New York Times: "No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found since the invasion."This is actually very simple. The goalpost for whether it not it was "all" a "lie" is whether or not all of the things the president said about Saddam Hussein turn out to have been deceptive. Clearly, it was not all a lie. Saddam Hussein was, as the president stated on many occassions, a bad brutal man who gassed his own people. It also now appears that somewhere in Iraq there was one (or maybe two) shells of sarin gas. So it wasn't all a lie.(Emphasis added.) So that's the new standard, I guess -- and a tacit admission that WMD have been found. But unless Bush can produce "stockpiles" now, it'll have all been a lie, you see. . . .
Then you have the question of whether or not the president lied about Iraq. The standard here is reversed -- to absolve yourself of the charge of having lied about Iraq it's not okay to have sometimes not lied, you need to have constantly not lied. We know that the president's statements regarding Iraq's links to terrorism were uniformly calculated to mislead. Similarly with most if not all of the claims about the Iraqi nuclear program. I've yet to see any hint of a verification of the claims that were made about a bioweapons program. And the president's case for war most certainly was not "there is at least one and possibly as many as ten old shells with sarin gas in them still lurking in Iraq." On the contrary, the chemical weapons situation is not what the president said it would be.
If you're looking for honesty, I believe the president got things right, technically speaking, regarding Saddam's missile program. He has often spoken of this program in a way calculated to imply that Saddam's illegal long-range missiles could have hit the United States, which isn't the case. In general, Bush's efforts to imply that Saddam's (nonexistent) WMD arsenal could be deployed directly against the USA were entirely bullshit through and through.
So, yes, he lied. He is a liar. Most of them time when he's not lying, he's trying to mislead people anyway. But sometimes Bush says things that are true. If you want to say that this is the standard of honesty you expect from politicians then it is you, not I, who's playing games with the goalposts.
Success How?
Kieran Healy writes about a new book arguing that Soviet economic performance up to the 1970s or so has been underrated. Sounds interesting. Soviet economic management, obviously, flew in the face of everything we currently believe about the efficacy of command-and-control systems and historians are always able to point to dozens and dozens of specific examples of some scheme or another being utterly wrecked by the party-state-economy fusion.
On the other hand, Russia in 1917 was a totally undeveloped country. Their performance since then has been dismal compared to real success stories like South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, but looks pretty good compared during the relevant period to places like Mexico, India, and Brazil, to say nothing of Argentina which actually managed to move backwards. This is to say that for all the decrepitude I witnessed in Nizhny Novgorod in 1998, I was clearly in what was at least a reasonable approximation of a "modern," urban, industrial society. Unlike in Costa Rica or the Bahamas, you didn't have people living in shacks, eking out subsistence living. Part of the story is that autarky produced some very weird results, where you had widespread ownership of incredibly low-quality versions of normal western consumer goods. The planned economy has also produced a public transportation system of astoundingly high quality compared to what we've got in, say, the United States. On the other hand, the extremely cramped housing in what is, objectively, a nearly empty country seemed totally absurd. And of course millions of people got themselves killed in Stalin's various schemes.
May 23, 2004
"Hard To Focus"
Dan Drezner writes that it's hard for him to focus on the issue of health care, and then sites a random data point about avoidable deaths in Canadian hospitals as "evidence" that single-payer health care is a bad idea. As you can tell from my brilliant "counterargument" of using scare-quotes, this is a terrible mode of argumentation. Health policy is exceedingly complicated and there's no reason whatsoever to think that single-payer systems lead to avoidable deaths in hospitals or even that the increased incidence of this kind of thing in Canada makes their system worse on the whole than the American system.
Continue reading ""Hard To Focus""Young Whippersnappers
Joshua Foer, brother of other media figures named Foer, has himself an op-ed in The New York Times. And he's younger than me! And a Yalie to boot. And graduating. And, I believe, coming to town to engage in a little punditry. And he'll be joined by suite-mate and former Talking Points Intern Zander Dryer, raising the possibility that I'll soon be rendered obsolete. But somehow, I'll crush them both....
UPDATE: I should note, however, that he repeats some oft-repeated (and always allegedly "underreported") statistics that don't support his conclusion:
On 9/11, we were barely a week into our sophomore year. Because the terrorist attacks were the first national trauma my generation experienced, I believe they had a more profound effect on our still malleable political psyches than they had on our parents and grandparents, who had lived through national traumas before.But look -- if the Iraq War was popular among the young at the exact same time it was generally popular (and by the exact same margin) and then declined in popularity at the same time its general popularity declined, doesn't that show that 9/11 didn't have a differential impact on different generations? The idea that the current crop of youngsters is/was more hawkish than our elders is based purely on a background assumption that college students ought to be disproportionately dovish. But there's no support for that background assumption -- it was a transient effect of conscription during the Vietnam War.What do I base this on? Consider this: One of the most under-reported statistics about the war in Iraq is my generation's overwhelming support for it -- not just in its early stages but well into last year. While the conventional wisdom holds that young Americans tend to be more liberal than older Americans, that wasn't the case this time. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken in October, a majority of 18- to 29-year-olds thought the war worthwhile, the same percentage as in the population at large. The same survey found that President Bush had a 9 percent higher approval rating among people under 30 than he did among older respondents.
The Liberal Stranglehold
It's been a while since we've had a good Canadian politics post here, but it's worth noting what a low bar the standard for drama is up north. Federal elections are on the way:
Canadians will be treated Sunday to a democratic delight denied them for over a decade after Paul Martin asks the governor general to dissolve Parliament: the first election in over a decade that won't be a foregone conclusion.Wow! The election's not a foregone conclusion. That means the Liberal Party may not control the government, right? Wrong:
A united Conservative party, a Bloc Quebecois rescusitated by outrage and an NDP revived by a media-savvy leader have used the fuel of the sponsorship scandal and fatigue with the Liberals to raise the real possibility of a minority government for the first time in 30 years.The election's not a foregone conclusion, meaning that the Liberals may control the government as a majority or they may control it as a plurality, that's an odd sort of suspense. This raises the question of what the functional difference between minority and majority government is in the Canadian context. Not much, or so it seems to me. Not only are the Liberals guaranteed a plurality, but it's all-but-certain to be a large enough plurality that the Liberals can combine for a majority with the votes of any one of the three other parties. Since the Liberals are conveniently positioned at the center of the various axes along which Canadian politics revolves, this means they'll essentially have complete freedom of action to implement whatever policies they desire, since a move in any direction will secure support from other parties.
Aflluent Suburbanites: The Enemy
If I may cast further aspersions on the motives of affluent suburbanites regarding education policy, let me make the following observation. If I could wave a magic health policy wand and provide good health care to all poor and working class Americans, that wouldn't be contrary to the interests of rich and middle class Americans, since by stipulation my magic health policy wand can achieve this without the need to raise tax levels or otherwise take resources away from the affluent. Similarly, with my magic child nutrition wand -- wave it and everyone wins.
My magic education policy wand, however, doesn't work like this. Wave it, and underperforming rural and inner-city schools magically produce outcomes every bit as good as those produced by the best suburban districts. Does everyone win? No. Here's what happens. Poor families, obviously, benefit. And affluent urban property-owners, the kind of people who, like my parents, raised a family in the city because they could afford to send their kids to good private schools, make out like bandits. If you think real estate is expensive in New York (or Washington, DC) now, just see what would happen when young professional couples face reduced financial pressure to move out to the 'burbs when they want to have kids. Conversely, however, suburban property owners are screwed, since a significant proportion of their home equity is tied up in the proposition that owning property in District X entitles your children to a superior education.
Now I rather doubt that anyone is consciously motivated to keep bad schools bad simply because doing so is in their economic self-interest. Nevertheless, people certainly are aware that property values and relative school quality are related. And self-interest has a way of creeping into people's behavior, consciously or otherwise.
Where's The Times?
Laura Rozen (whose blog is the must-read source for Chalabigate stuff) wonders where the New York Times reporting on this issue has gone off to. But of course the Times's failure to live up to the standard set by the Washington Post, the LA Times, Knight-Ridder, and even Newsday on the various Bush intelligence scandals is longstanding -- remember Valerie Plame? It seems to me that the problem here likely has something or other to do with the Judith Miller factor. The Times reporter most familiar with the situation and the players is part of the story, unable to report on it properly.
Intel Echo Chamber
Fascinating LA Times report into l'affaire Chalabi raises an important point:
Because even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their informants or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it has only in recent months become clear that Chalabi's group sent defectors with inaccurate or misleading information to Denmark, England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as to the United States, the officials said.This business about "foreign intelligence sources" is something we've heard before, although not necessarily with the INC angle. It raises the question, however, of to what extent this operated through bad-faith on the American side, exile manipulations notwithstanding. It's not exactly a secret, after all, that besides the US, UK, and France the other western democracies don't really operate robust national security establishments. Of the other countries, only Germany really has the kind of resource base that would make it even theoretically possible to run an independent military policy, and for historical reasons they don't do it.As a result, the officials said, U.S. intelligence analysts in some cases used information from now-discredited "foreign intelligence sources" to corroborate their own assessments of Hussein's suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Few of the CIA's prewar judgments have been proved accurate so far.
"We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming from the same pot," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were all INC guys. And none of them panned out."
A U.S. official confirmed that defectors from Chalabi's organization had provided suspect information to numerous Western intelligence agencies. "It's safe to say he tried to game the system," the official said.
The upshot is that except under unusual circumstances, there's no reason for the US Intelligence Community to take something they hear from, say, Denmark very seriously as being independent of the US-UK information stream. If you're talking about Finnish intelligence on the situation in Estonia that might be different (same language, historical ties, etc.) but it should have been clear that Sweden was not a legitimately independent confirming source. That it was regarded as such by some within the US government smacks of a willfull effort to portray information as more solid than it really was, rather than a serious attempt at inquiry.
Who Reads This Stuff?
Aha -- I've just gotten data from Henry Copeland (through the BlogAds reader survey) telling me a little bit about the demographics of Matthew Yglesias readership. The least surprising result is that virtually no one reads this site who doesn't also read TPM, Kevin Drum, Atrios, and Daily Kos. Somewhat more surprising is that a non-trivial number of readers don't read Tapped -- go read Tapped! Of the various choices offered as to what people like about this blog, "personality" was #1, but "honesty" was dead last, so apparently I'm read by people who, much like Bush voters, find lying to be an attractive personal quality.
I'm also told that an unusually small proportion of my readers are from California. As I've seen with other blogs, the readership is overwhelmingly (around 80 percent) male. The income distribution has two peaks, possibly because a lot of readers are students. The two biggest occupational categories by far are education and media, commensurate with the theory that blogging is a reasonably effective way to influence opinion leaders. But of course, I might be lying about all this.
