Sadr's sharia courts

Bad news from some newspapers; there are suggestions coming through that Sadr was whiling away the time in Najaf by running a sharia court, complete with executions and mutilations.

The specific allegations about the 20 bodies in Najaf are not what I would call established fact - the bodies might simply be casualties of the fighting, and the fact that the allegations are being made by the Iraqi government undercuts their credibility somewhat given the number of fibs they’ve told about Najaf over the last few weeks - but the general historical sweep is likely to be accurate. When and if Sadr and Sistani are brought into the political process, it is very likely indeed that one of their main priorities will be to introduce sharia courts, and sharia courts execute and mutilate people.

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Liar

Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t bother to read Pentagon reports, even the ones he commissions himself. Or Donald Rumsfeld is a liar.

The reports, one by a panel Mr. Rumsfeld had appointed and one by three Army generals, made clear that some abuses occurred during interrogations, that others were intended to soften up prisoners who were to be questioned, and that many intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations were implicated in the abuses. The reports were issued Tuesday and Wednesday.

But on Thursday, in an interview with a radio station in Phoenix, Mr. Rumsfeld, who was traveling outside Washington this week, said, “I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes.”

A transcript of the interview was posted on the Pentagon’s Web site on Friday. Mr. Rumsfeld repeated the assertion a few hours later at a news conference in Phoenix, adding that “all of the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abuse that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated.” After an aide slipped him a note during the news conference, however, Mr. Rumsfeld corrected himself, noting that an inquiry by three Army generals had, in fact, found “two or three” cases of abuse during interrogations or the interrogations process.

[Sir, there seems to be smoke coming out of your trousers…]

In fact, however, the Army inquiry found that 13 of 44 instances of abuse involved interrogations or the interrogation process, an Army spokeswoman said. The report itself explicitly describes the extent to which each abuse involved interrogations….

Mr. Rumsfeld also misstated an important finding of an independent panel he appointed and is led by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, saying in the interview with KTAR radio, “The interesting thing about the Schlesinger panel is their conclusion that, in fact, the abuses seem not to have anything to do with interrogation at all.”

But the first paragraph of the Schlesinger panel report says, “We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere.”

.

What his excuse? “That The New York Times would find the secretary’s misstatement and the subsequent effort to set the record straight is of interest is a shameless example of news that is sought during the dog days of August in Washington,”…Pentagon spokesman, Eric Ruff said.

Misstatements. My people call them “lies”.

Altruism as an Organizational Problem

The University of Arizona’s news service has done a little press release covering a recent paper of mine about the social organization of cadaveric organ procurement in the United States. One way to think about the paper is in relation to ongoing debates about offering commercial incentives to donor families. These debates are conducted in individual-level terms — they are about appealing people’s to selfish rather than their altruistic impulses — and they rely on a straightforward contrast between giving and selling. By doing so these arguments (both for and against markets) miss the role of organizational infrastructure and logistical effort in donor procurement, and the wide range of variation in procurement rates associated with it.

Light a single candle

A point that’s possibly worth reiterating:

The Islamic world has ample reasons for legitimate criticism. Anti-Semitism, sexism, lack of democracy, lack of opportunity, nurturing of terrorism… these are sad realities, not the hallucinations of right-wingers. Anger and criticism are appropriate, but our approach has to start with the assumption that Muslims are not going away. Short of deliberate genocide, there’s no way forward in the long run except for “hearts and minds.”

There is much, much more to say about this. Luckily, an organization called Americans for Informed Democracy is taking a few steps in this direction. They’re putting on a series of thirty events in September and October on the subject of US-Islamic world relations.

The series will finish on October 12 with six “Face to Face” videoconference dialogues between young leaders at six universities in the U.S. and six in the Muslim world, including in Egypt, Indonesia, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey. The series is intended to commemorate the three-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks with a call to action out of the ashes of tragedy. As you know, the recently released report by the 9/11 Commission stressed that the U.S. must “act aggressively to define itself in the Islamic world” and to share America’s “vision of opportunity and hope.” We hope that our efforts can help to build understanding between non-Muslims and Muslims in the U.S. and then to extend that understanding to the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

No one initiative like this will change history. But what other option is there, really?

Debating comprehensives

Our very own Harry Brighouse — who is away from the internet at the moment — features in the latest Times Educational Supplement . Harry is engaged there in a debate with … his dad. But since Tim Brighouse is commissioner for London schools and Harry has written extensively on justice in education, that’s just as it should be. The subject of the debate: for and against the comprehensive ideal in Britain’s schools. (To read the whole thing, you’ll need to buy the paper version.)

Estimation

I managed a mere 39 per cent on Chris Lightfoot’s estimation quiz I’m sorry to say. Instructive and entertaining it is though. (Hat-tip Dave Weeden ).

Silence on Najaf

“Four posts on al-Sadr: it’s getting to be an obsession isn’t it?” writes a commenter on John Quiggin’s post below . Not really, one might think, since the continuing events in Najaf look to be of enormous significance for the future of Iraq and for the nature of whatver regime emerges. I’ve just done a tour of the various British blogs that supported the war from of liberal/lefty pov, and I find, amazingly, that they haven’t been discussing Najaf at all. Not a mention! (I’m sure commenters will dig up exceptions.) Perhaps events have deviated too far from the script? Data does not compute! What I do find is generic comment on the war or on the “war on terror”, derogatory comment on opponents of the war, occasional mention of “good news” from Iraq, and links to unreliable sources suggesting Iranian or Syrian nefariousness. The American pro-war blogs seem to have dropped everything in favour of endless comment on the Kerry/SBV affair. Those interested in the detail of what is actually happening in Iraq will, of course, continue to consult Juan Cole .

The political economy case for Kerry

Brad de Long gives a rather unenthusiastic case for thinking Kerry will be a better economic manager than Bush. The first and most convincing of his proposed reasons is that

The Bush administration always does much worse than you anticipate, no matter how low your expectations are

The others are the quality of his team and the fact that he will restore proper processes.

The reason Brad doesn’t display more enthusiasm is that Kerry hasn’t given much ground for it. Kerry has a plan to cut the deficit in half, but then, so does Bush¹.

I’d like to offer an argument based on political business cycles to suggest that Kerry has to do better than Bush.

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Taking out the trash

A cleaner at Tate Britain has taken a work of art that takes the form of a bag of rubbish, and thrown it away.

Ignoble Lies

Over the last couple of months, Brad de Long has been documenting how difficult it is to find independent academic economists who are prepared to defend Bush administration policy. I haven’t seen anyone else saying this, but the same is true of international relations scholars. For a long while, the consensus among right-leaning realists, as well as liberal and lefties, has been that the invasion of Iraq was a disaster. I don’t know of any serious IR scholars who are prepared to defend Bush’s foreign policy (I’m not counting policy wonks in AEI etc, who face what we may politely describe as a different incentive structure). There have to be some out there – but as best as I can tell, they’re keeping very quiet.

Which is all by way of context for John Mearsheimer’s paper on “Lying in International Politics,” to be presented at the forthcoming APSA meeting in Chicago (thanks to Martin Weiss for bringing it to my attention).

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Any more for any more...

Final call for anyone who wishes to joing the Crooked Timberites fantasy football league (instructions here ). I’m off to Germany on Saturday, so anyone who doesn’t email me details before tomorrow evening will get added in the middle of next week. (You can always register a dummy team now, mail me your number and tinker with your selection until the Saturday deadline).

James Miller on Foucault and other things

I’ve always found Foucault pretty hard going, as I intimated in yesterday’s post, though I think he’s a more interesting figure than his epigones. As it happens, he is the subject of not one but two biographies. The first is David Macey’s The Lives of Michel Foucault which is scholarly and fact-filled. The other is James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault , and is a tremendous piece of writing which presents itself as a “narrative account of one man’s lifelong struggle to honor Nietzsche’s gnomic injunction, ‘to become what one is’.” I really can’t recommend Miller’s various books highly enough. As well as the Foucault volume he wrote a very readable study of Rousseau — Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy — and a highly entertaining history of rock music: Flowers in the Dustbin (also published as Almost Grown in the UK). Miller is currently editor of Daedalus .

Sistani rules, OK ?

As the pointless bloodbath in Najaf drags on, Ayatollah Sistani has finally returned from hospital treatment in London, and looks likely to be the only person to come out of this disaster with any credit¹. His march on Najaf will, it seems likely, allow Sadr and the American-Allawi forces to reach the kind of face-saving compromise that has been the only possible outcome all along, apart from the disastrous option of an assault on the shrine and the martyrdom of Sadr.

Update #1 27/8 I’ve come across a useful piece by a former Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Larry Diamond, linked, with some interesting comments by Gary Farber Gives an account of the Coalition’s dealings with Sadr and other militias (minor snipe: Diamond uses “prevaricating” when he means “vacillating” to describe this).

Update #2 27/8 Like most people not actually on the scene who seek to be well-informed about Iraq, I’m indebted to Juan Cole for his informed comment and information on the situation. He’s just put up a post assessing the winners and losers from the Najaf situation which matches, almost point for point, what I posted yesterday. Of course, it carries a lot more weight coming from him than from me.

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Bristol blogger bash

I spent a very pleasant evening with other bloggers who live somewhere close to Britain’s M4 corridor at Bristol’s Severnshed last night. Pictured from left to right are myself, Dave Weeden (Backword ), Josephine Crawley Quinn (The Virtual Tophet ) and Chris Brooke (The Virtual Stoa ). Topics discussed included Equatorial Guinea, leading Welsh politicians, the excavations at Herculaneum, and, naturally, other bloggers. It was great to meet Dave and Josephine for the first time and Chris once again. A fine time was had by all.

Brutus is an honorable man

Maybe someone has already drawn the comparison, but the New York Times op-ed today had me reaching for Julius Caesar. “The noble Brutus.” To hear Scott McClellan call Kerry noble, you’d think it was an insult.

McKitrick mucks it up

Late last year, the debate over climate change was stirred up when an environmental economist, Ross McKitrick and a mining executive, Steven McIntyre, published a piece claiming to refute climatological research crucial to the claim that the last few decades have seen unparalleled global warming (the ‘hockey-stick’ paper of Mann, Bradley and Hughes). According to McKitrick and McIntyre, the work of Mann et al was riddled with errors, The paper was loudly publicised by the American Enterprise Institute (home of John Lott) and, as you would expect, Flack Central Station. Mann et al produced an immediate rebuttal, and despite many promises of a rejoinder, McKitrick and McIntyre have never responded on the substantive issues¹.

This would be par for the course, except that McKitrick somehow managed to attract the attention of Aussie computer scientist Tim Lambert, famous for his demolition of Lott’s shonky research, which purported to show that guns reduce crime. The result: McKitrick’s work is even shoddier than Lott’s.

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Foucault, theocracy, fascism

Surfing round the blogosphere, I find Oliver Kamm banging on about alliances between “the Left” and theocratic fascism. Kamm’s correspondent, the philosopher Jeff Ketland of the University of Edinburgh, offers the following as an example:

One can find examples in the postmodernist literature, and the most obvious example is Michel Foucault, once a member of the French communist party and main source of much recent postmodernist and social constructivist philosophy. Foucault visited Iran around the time of the revolution. He enthusiastically described the revolution as a new kind of “political spirituality”, and was very impressed with its characteristically anti-Enlightenment aspects.

This just doesn’t stack up, though as an instance of left-theocratic alliance. …

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Tariq Ramadan denied US visa

According to Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros , Tariq Ramadan (recently interviewed by OpenDemocracy) who had been appointed to a visiting position at Notre Dame, has been denied a US visa under sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act that were amended by the Patriot Act. Scott comments:

Whether one agrees with Ramadan or not, it is difficult to image an Islamic intellectual figure who is likely to be more acceptable as the other side in an American dialogue with Islam. Thus, the refusal to allow him to enter the US suggests that someone in Homeland Security agrees with the Daniel Pipes standard: Any Muslim who fails to condemn Islam, from its founding to the present and in all its manifestations, must be a fanatic and a threat to the West. …. This is an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to show that at the very least they are capable of exercising better judgement than the Bush administration.

The other deficit: Part II

In my previous post on US trade, I argued that if the current account deficit is to be stabilised at a sustainable level, the balance of trade on goods and services must return to surplus in the next decade or so. In this post, I’m going to ruIe out a soft option and argue that, while a smooth market-driven adjustment is not inconceivable, it’s unlikely.

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Back to School Week at the University of Arizona

First week of the Fall semester in sunny Tucson. New classes, new students — including the undersocialized ones who come into your office asking to use the phone — and an uptick of amusing activity in the Police Blotter. The Blotter is kind of a litany (“reports stated”) of the joys of being young, engaged in illegal activity, and perhaps a little slow off the mark:

A student was referred to the diversion program for possession of marijuana in the courtyard between Coronado and La Aldea, 822 E. Fifth St., Friday at 10:23 p.m., reports stated.

Police smelled burning marijuana coming from the area and saw the student who had red, bloodshot eyes and whose breath smelled of marijuana, reports stated.

Police asked the student if he had any marijuana on him and he said he had smoked earlier but didn’t have any on him and said, “You can check me,” reports stated.

At that point he put his hands in his pockets and said “Oh yeah, I have a little,” reports stated.

These are the people I have to interest in the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. As it turns out, it can be easier than you might think (when they’re not stoned). For instance, you can go a long way with a discussion of the division of labor that begins with the question “Why the hell are there nearly a million people living here in the desert?”