June 21, 2004
Drezner on staffing the CPA
Some time ago, Daniel Drezner commented on the "bipartisan piss-offedness" among people who actually know something about foreign and security policy at the sheer amateurishness of the Bush Administration in (among other things) the occupation of Iraq. Yesterday Dan followed up on one of his own earlier posts about the politicization of the hiring process at the Coalition Provisional Authority, which led to the staffing of that crucial agency with people who held the approved views about, e.g., abortion, but didn't, e.g., speak Arabic or know anything technically relevant to the jobs they were hired to do.
Read Dan's piece, follow the links, and reflect on the high cost of "strategery," Mayberry-Machiavelli style. Even when it comes to things we absolutely positively can't afford to blow, the Bushites will always choose loyalty (to the President, not the country) over competence. (Recall, for example, that the White House version of the Homeland Security operation was staffed the same way; I haven't seen any follow-up on patronage hiring within DHS.)
Dan Drezner is the sort of person who (once he gets tenure) might easily be considered for senior foreign-policy jobs in Republican administrations. He must know his frankness isn't doing him any good in career terms. He deserves enormous credit for his courage in saying what others are thinking.
Slander by photograph?
A newspaper photograph of a political figure is less an image of the politician than it is of the editor's political prejudices.
That said, the picture below is a truly alarming one. (Yes, that maniacal face actually belongs to the Commander in Chief; I had to check the caption to make sure.) Either someone at AP really and truly hates the President, or GWB has really and truly started to lose it.
Or, of course, both.
(Hat tip: William Blaze at American Dynamics.)
Two kinds of suicide
Gregg Easterbrook makes an argument about suicide and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs -- the class of antidepressants including Prozac and Zoloft) that seems plausible, though I'm not qualified to judge the underlying factual claims:
1. The use of SSRIs precipitates suicide in a small but non-trivial number of patients.
2. But widespread SSRI use has coincided with a decline in the overall suicide rate.
3. Untreated depression is a major cause of suicide.
4. Therefore, SSRIs probably prevent many more suicides than they cause.
5. Therefore, scaring people into no using them, or scaring manufacturers into not making them, with a combination of publicity and lawsuits would result in more suicides, not fewer.
Again, I'm not sure that's right, but it might well be right, and it shows how poorly adapted our existing journalistic and legal mechanisms are to making policy about health care.
But Easterbrook segues from that sensible argument to what seems to me a not-very-sensible assertion:
Suicide should be viewed in public-health terms--as a disease with symptoms and treatment, requiring programs, awareness campaigns, and public outreach.
That assumes that suicide is one bad thing; in fact, it's at least two things, only one of them bad. (See Update below.)
The bad suicide -- the part of suicide that can reasonably be conceived of as a public-health problem -- is the impulsive suicide, committed by a person who didn't want to kill himself last week and who won't want to kill himself next week if his current attempt is prevented or fails. Victims of that sort of suicide tend to be younger and to be suffering from various diagnosable mental health conditions, especially depression and anxiety. This class of cases ought to be managed with suicide prevention combined with treatment for the underlying disorders. (In addition, there are impulsive suicides stemming from sudden disasters; for these, prevention is still in order but there may be no underlying disorder to treat.)
But some suicides don't look like that at all. They're committed by people who, due to intense and prolonged misery, have decided that their lives would be happier if they ended now rather than later. The subjects -- I see no reason to call them "victims" -- of such acts of voluntary termination tend to be older, have more physical and social problems, and to have fewer psychiatric problems than those who submit to a transient impulse to kill themselves.
These suicides -- call them "considered," in contrast with the bad "impulsive" suicides -- don't look to me like a public health problem, or indeed a problem of any other kind. Suicide is indeed forbidden by most of the world's religious traditions, but that doesn't make it a medical problem. (Hume makes what seems to me a convincing case that the arguments offered in support of a supposed divine ordinance against suicide don't hold water.)
That's not to say that suicide may not point to real problems. If chronic pain victims commit suicide at high rates, which they do, that's a convincing critique of our existing mechanisms of pain treatment. But when someone decides, after reflection, that his or her life is more trouble than it's worth, it shouldn't be the job of the public health community or the state to overrule that decision.
There are reasons to worry that a relaxation of the suicide taboo and of the laws that support it -- in particular the "Kevorkian" laws that criminalize even the provision of the means by which someone else can kill himself -- might over time create social pressure for those whose illness and debility make them a burden on others to do away with themselves. The existence of such social pressure would constitute a problem, and one worth attending to through public policy.
But adding considered and impulsive suicides together to make a suicide problem comparable to the problem of automobile accidents seems to me a mistake. So does using the fact that some people kill themselves with guns as an argument in favor of restricting gun ownership, without first deciding how many of those gun suicides were impulsive rather than considered.
Keeping people from doing away with themselves on impulse or under social pressure is a valid goal for public health and public policy. Meddling in people's considered decisions not to go on living isn't; there, the role of the state ought to be to get out of the way. The distinction between the two classes of cases probably isn't a sharp one even conceptually, and it's certainly hard to draw empirically. But that doesn't give the public health folks a license to treat decisions as diseases.
Update A reader points out that the distinction between considered and impulsive acts is at least partly misleading, since someone in the grip of depression or anxiety disorder may plan a suicide carefully over a long period. A suicide committed not on impulse, but with impaired decision-making capacity, can be just as tragic and just as preventable as an impulsive act. So the right distinction is between "well-considered" acts, planned over time with relatively unimpaired mental faculties, and "poorly-considered" acts done either rashly or under the burden of mental illness.
Ideally, those judgments would be made looking only at the form of the decision rather than its content. In fact our judgment about whether a suicide is well-considered or not will have to depend to some extent on the substance of the reasons assigned for it.
The same reader suggests that anti-suicide policies are largely harmless, because those truly intent on taking their own lives will likely succeed. I strongly doubt it. Loss of strength and motor control, loss of mobility, and confinement to a nursing facility all make successful suicide much more difficult.
June 17, 2004
Analogies
Michael Barone notes that if McClellan had defeated Lincoln, the South would have won the Civil War, and uses this as an argument against replacing Bush in the middle of the war for Iraq. (I guess this is the official acknowledgement that "Mission Accomplished" is no longer the operative spin.)
But of course McClellan was running on a platform which virtually committed him to accepting defeat; this year's Democratic Platform, it is safe to say, will make no such commitment.
Barone doesn't attend to what seems to me a more compelling analogy. If Hitler had been killed or overthrown anytime between the fall of France in June of 1940 and the invasion of Russia a year later -- leaving the conduct of the German side of World War II and its associated diplomacy to the highly competent professionals of the German armed forces and diplomatic corps -- Germany would very probably have won.
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What would the Sheriff of Mayberry
think of the Mayberry Machiavellis?
Lean Left has some sobering reflections on the changing meaning of "conservative."
Hat tip to Body and Soul.
Concurring in part, dissenting in part
Everyone from Kevin Drum to Pejman Yousefzadeh seems to believe that the announcement that Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his militiamen to go home is good news.
Now good news has been pretty scarce of late, and I don't enjoy raining on my friends' parade, so I'll agree that this is good news.
Just one thing, though: I sorta doubt it's good news for our side.
The subtext seems to be that we're going to let the murder charge slide and allow Sadr to set up a political party. Since our own polling shows him to have picked up enormous popular support by running a guerrilla war against us, and has him currently the second-most-popular figure in (non-Kurdish) Iraq, running only slightly behind Ali al-Sistani, this looks like a pretty terrific outcome from al-Sadr's viewpoint. And he remains our bitter enemy.
Now maybe we're about to double-cross al-Sadr and toss him in the clink as soon as his troops disband. And maybe we could get away with it. But right now this looks to me like a second Fallujah.
So if this is the best you've got to offer as good news, do me a favor: don't show me the bad news.
Update Glenn Reynolds is cheerful, too, even while linking to this Reuters story noting the administration's climb-down from the position that al-Sadr was a thug to be imprisoned to the position that he's welcome to participate in the politics of the new Iraq.
The way I learned my Clausewitz, winning on the battlefield but not achieving the aim for which you were fighting doesn't count as winning.
We sought a confrontation with al-Sadr. We were fighting to take him off the table as a political figure. Now the fighting is over, and he's apparently a more popular and potent political figure than ever. Maybe my eyes are getting tired, but from where I sit it looks as if he just won and we just lost.
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June 16, 2004
Rumsfeld ordered prisoner held off the books
I'm going to have to get either my tinfoil hat or my dosage of antipsychotics adjusted.
After all, thinking that the United States Secretary of Defense might find himself the defendant at a war-crimes trial meets DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for "stark, staring bonkers." And yet I don't see any other way to read this story.
Update Oh, you wanted substance instead of snark? Michael Froomkin at Discourse.net has it.
Michael notes that, having identifed XXX as a detainee of such stratospheric intelligence value it was worth breaking treaties to keep him away from the IIRC, DoD and the CIA then promptly lost track of him.
All I can say about this is, once again, to quote Michael Walzer: There is neither profit nor glory in doing evil badly.
A Discourse.net commenter points to this Newsday story about hostage-taking: holding some Iraqis as an inducement for their relatives to give themselves up. This isn't a new tactic for the Coalition Forces; see this post from last August concerning a similar incident. Newsday reports that its use is widespread.
[Paperwight notes that, in addition to war crimes, Mr. Rumsfeld probably committed perjury when he told the Senate in May that everyone captured in Iraq was being treated under the Geneva Conventions.]
Another Discourse.net commenter asks whether Mr. XXX, if he was in fact a high official of Ansar al-Islam, could possibly be a POW. Answer: Yes. The Bush Administration has announced that everyone captured in Iraq (unlike the al-Qaeda and Taliban folks captured in Afghanistan) will be treated under the Geneva Conventions. And The applicable convention requires a hearing in order to deny someone captured in a war zone of POW status. (See Article 5 of the 1949 Convention.)
So even if, as seems plausible, Mr. XXX could properly have been deprived of POW status, the mere fact of his being a terrorist doesn't do so automatically, and we never bothered to touch second base.
Ogged at Unfogged got it right: George W. Bush's defining characteristic is his refusal to play by the rules, along with his bland assurance that the rules don't really apply to him.
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"The problems of Almighty God"
So how did this howler slip into a Supreme Court decision?
Eugene Volokh reports:
At page ten of his opinion, the Chief Justice purports to quote President George Washington's first Thanksgiving proclamation as follows:
"Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the problems of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor. . . ."
The use of the word "problems" in that quotation is, of course, an error. The word that President Washington actually used is "providence."
My bet: spellcheck did it, with a rushed or sleepy typist clicking "Change" rather than "Ignore" or "Learn." Mistyping seems possible, but less likely.
WTF? Fox News likes F9/11?
I hate it when people try to monkey with my prejudices. Unlike the White Queen, I'm not capable of believing more than one impossible thing before breakfast. (And I have breakfast pretty darned late.)
According to two of my most dearly-held prejudices, Michael Moore is incapable of doing anything that isn't dishonest and meretricious, and Fox News is merely an arm of the RNC.
I fully intended not to see Fahrenheit 9/11, even though I criticized Disney for refusing to distribute it and gleefully anticipated all the 30-second spots to be spun off from the trailer, especially the golfing scene at the end). I assumed that the Palme d'Or at Cannes mostly reflected the jury's political views rather than its cinematic judgment. No doubt the MPAA was acting on some mixture of poor judgment and pure political cowardice in giving the film an R rating, but that belief doesn't make me want to sit through the thing myself.
So I'm completely at a loss when a reviewer for Fox calls Farenheit 9-11
"a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail ... a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty — and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice."
bzzzzzzt ... Does not compute ... does not compute ... does not compute ... bzzzzzzt
Hey! I've got it! Maybe the review is a fake, and someone hacked the Fox website to put it up.
Okay, that's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Otherwise I might have to change my mind and actually see the damned thing.
June 15, 2004
The velocity of money
Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons has found the perfect motto for the Bush Maladministration:
The buck doesn't even pause to catch its breath here.
Jane Galt and Glenn Reynolds on torture
Jane Galt notes, in response to my argument about the actual risks of terrorism directed at the United States and whether those risks actually justify extreme measures such as torture, that people don't in fact respond to risks of mass murder for political ends as they respond to risks of ordinary murder, nor to the risks of ordinary murder to risks of inintentional injury.
That's right, and they're right to respond differently. "Even a dog," said Justice Holmes, "knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked." But I think that leaves my initial point standing: We're not dealing with the sort of truly society-threatening risk that might justify, or at least profoundly tempt, a violation of the rule "Do not torture."
Glenn Reynolds makes a point of central importance, one that is well illustrated by the revelations now coming out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo:
I find it hard to respond to these things in terms of cost-benefit. My law school mentor Charles Black once said that of course you can come up with scenarios -- the classic ticking-nuclear-bomb example -- where torture might be justified. And you can be sure that, in those cases, if people think it'll work they'll use it no matter what the rules are. But there's a real value to pretending that there's an absolute rule against it even if we know people will break it in extraordinary circumstances, because it ensures that people won't mistake an ordinary remedy for an extraordinary one.
The White House, DoJ, and DoD torture memos are all designed to do precisely the reverse.
So now we have a choice, as voters: Are we going to ratify the decision to make torture (described in various weaselly ways) part of the policy of the United States, or are we going to reject it by replacing those responsible?
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