Matt Yglesias

Corruption in Iraq

The Nation’s David Corn has a copy of a secret government report saying there’s a lot of it. You know what I think a sensible response would be? Engineering the departure of American troops a return to power of discredited former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. There’s nothing like an ex-Baathist whose buddies have, in the past, stolen as much as a billion bucks to help resolve this kind of problem. I’m feeling surge-ilicious already.

The Dilemmas of Multiculturalism

Not that I have anything in particular to say about Belgium (took a trip to Brussels one time and found it delightful — I’m personally a huge fan of both Renée Magritte and mussels) but Ingrid Robeyns has an interesting teaser for projected future coverage of Belgian politics:

For those of you in countries where there hasn’t been any reporting – it’s day 82 after the federal elections, and the Flemish and Walloon parties are so bitterly opposed to each other’s demands, that commentators are talking aloud of “the end of Belgium” (which is not going to happen soon, since neither of them wants to give up Brussels – but there are signs that the crisis between the Dutch/Flemish-speaking and Francophone regions is deeper than it has been in decades).

And the more I thought about what I should write, the more it became clear that it’s a complicated issue to write about. One problem is that the interpretations of the political events differ dramatically between the Dutch-language and the Francophone Belgian press – truly as if they are from two different planets – so any (foreign) journalist/reader who masters only one of those two languages will almost inevitably get a distorted or one-sided pictured. Then there is the question whether, as a Flemish person, I can write sufficiently neutral about this.

Whenever I try to chart a course between the “Iraq would have been great if we’d just had smarter people in charge of the occupation” and the “Arabs can’t handle democracy” school of thought, I tend to come back to things like this — the great difficult Belgians have in creating a viable, legitimate binational democratic state. Or think of the Canadians. Or the endless problems in Spain with the Basques. It’s genuinely difficult to work these kinds of things out. And then there’s the former Czechoslovakia where it couldn’t be worked out, or else Northern Ireland where it also couldn’t be worked out but where there proved to be no adequate line of partition. None of these places are precisely like the others, of course, but the general point is just that there’s shouldn’t be anything surprising about the fact that it’s proven very difficult to come up with a vision for Iraq that’s appealing across sectarian and ethnic lines in Iraq.

The Economics of Airport Shopping

One of the things I like about talking (or, in this case, “talking”) to economists is that it often turns out that life’s little mysteries have answers. Maria Farrell, for example, had an eloquent post complaining about how airport shops don’t seem to offer the goods that one would actually want to buy in an airport. Tyler Cowen comes along with a plausible, yet convincing, account of why these things shake out the way they do.

Photo by Flickr user Hyogushi used under a Creative Commons license

A Surge of Huckabees

A long, long, long ways back I took a look at the Republican field and decided that Mike Huckabee was going to win. Neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney nor Rudy Giuliani seemed like plausible Republican nominees. Huckabee, by contrast, was a pro-life conservative Protestant governor — seemingly exactly the sort of person a committed Republican would vote for. His problem, I thought, was obviously a lack of name recognition, but he’d be a classic beneficiary of the somewhat goofy primary system. It’s easy enough to become well-known in Iowa, the voters there would like him, and his strong performance in Iowa would get him press as the plain-vanilla conservative Republican candidate.

And now, following his strong performance in the Iowa Straw Poll, it seems to be happening, with Huckabee’s numbers taking noticeable leaps in early primary voting. Mitt Romney’s been holding the edge in most of these states (Giuliani leads national polls and the further out states with the worse-informed voters) but one can imagine a vulnerability here. If you’re backing Romney on the grounds that he’s the real conservative, then you realize there’s a governor in the race who’s not a Mormon and wasn’t pro-choice until the day before yesterday, then Mighty Morphin’ Mitt starts looking less appealing.

But then again, I read Jon Chait’s book, The Big Con recently, so I have my doubts. Huckabee, as you can see from his recent endorsement by the Machinists Union, has sometimes dissented from conservative economic policy orthodox. He even raised taxes based on some kind of lunatic belief that the provision of public services requires revenue. And you just can’t have that. Which perhaps explains why when there was a perceived need for a candidate with more solid conservative credentials than McCain, Romney, or Giuliani can muster, people went out and recruitment Fred Thompson rather than getting behind the culturally conservative southerner who was already in the race.

Battle of the TNR Gen Y Stars

Brad Plumer sets Jamie Kirchick straight over the latter’s evidence-free assertion that American unions don’t care about their Iraqi counterparts.

Today’s Recommended Links

I think I may start doing one of these posts every day:

• Steve Clemons on playing good cop, bad cop, and crazy cop with the Iranians.
• John Judis forecasts big wins for Democrats in the Senate.
• Jonathan Cohn tries to look more closely at whether getting hitched really makes the household division of labor more unequal.
• Jessica Valenti reads The LA Times on Black Best Friends in movies and television.
• James Wimberley on Texan Green Socialism.

Also, Team USA crushes Argentina. Maybe someday we’ll even learn how to beat their starters.

NFL Season Just Around the Corner

Less than a week ’till the Saints-Colts matchup that kicks of the NFL season, and already the former Soviet republic of Georgia is getting into the mood by having their Republican Party rip off the Houston Texans’ logo. Not knowing anything about Georgian political parties, I can say that I don’t care for this one’s name. Industry Will Save Georgia seems like a cool name for a party.

Stuck in the Middle With Illinois

Brian Beutler hails John Edwards’ new line on electability:

I think most journalists would agree that I’m the most progressive, Senator Obama next, and Senator Clinton closest to the center. But I’d be willing to bet that if you ask most Americans the same question, they’d reverse it.” That’s not only, he says, because “she’s a woman and he’s an African American and Ah talk lahk thee-is. It’s simple geography. Ask Middle Americans: You’ve got three Democratic candidates. One’s from New York, one’s from Chicago and one’s from rural North Carolina. Who do you think is most like you?

I think we all can see what Edwards is driving at here, but in the real world Hillary Clinton grew up in the suburban midwest before moving to Arkansas. Barack Obama was born in Kansas and Chicago is actually in the middle of the country, whereas North Carolina is on the coasts. Maybe a better way of putting it is that Clinton and Obama both kind of sound like people who went to really, really, really good law schools where they learned to make arguments designed to sound good to other lawyers, whereas Edwards went to a less-good law school where they teach you to make arguments designed to sound good to juries.

Crashing the Gates

Atlantic subscribers can read this entire tour of the magazine’s coverage of media debates over the past 130 years, and you really should subscribe, but let me just break you off one paragraph of F. B. Sandborn defending the newspaper business against its detractors and sounding an awful lot like a blogger:

Journalism in America is something, has been nothing, and aspires to be everything. There are no limits, in the ambitions of enterprising editors, to the future power of the American newspaper. It is not only to make and unmake presidents and parties, institutions and reputations; but it must regulate the minutest details of our daily lives, and be school-master, preacher, lawgiver, judge, jury, executioner, and policeman in one grand combination.

Of course, newspapers back in the day were in many ways closer to blogs than are contemporary newspapers. They operated in highly competitive markets, were full of a feisty spirit of partisanship, weren’t particularly professionalized, etc.

Realisticats

I’m with Ann Friedman on this — the cat madness needs to stop. Let’s all hear it for the realisticats and their unsentimental take on the feline menace.

Fuzzy Casualty Math

Here’s Ilan Goldenberg’s chart of the Pentagon’s changing story about civilian casualties in Iraq:

Hat tip to Brian Katulis at CAP who clued me on to this issue and Spencer Ackerman has already got a great post on this.

Basically there are more serious questions about the violence numbers that are being reported out of Iraq. The Pentagon is congressionally mandated to produce a quarterly progress report to Congress measuring stability in Iraq. Each of these reports has a graphic measuring sectarian violence. The last four reports were August, 29 2006 (pg 35), November 30, 2006 (pg 24), March 2, 2007 (pg 17) and June 7, 2007 (pg 17).

I graphed the levels of sectarian violence from these various reports and found some confusing trends. The abnormalities have been labeled A, B and C. (There is no difference between the November report and the March report and thus they overlap).

It’d be nice to not need to hyper-scrutinize every random bit of official government data this way, but the idea that the Bush administration has no credibility on Iraq isn’t just a cliché — based on his record, one has no choice but to inquire and to be very suspicious.

Codels

Via Ilan Goldenberg, a good Jonathan Weisman article in The Washington Post on the truth about congressional delegations to Iraq: “Brief, choreographed and carefully controlled, the codels (short for congressional delegations) often have showed only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration have wanted the lawmakers to see.”

No Way Out

I appreciate Kevin’s point that progressives shouldn’t underestimate the objective political difficulty of taking some of the stands we’d like to see people take. The other side of this, though, is that nervous Democrats seem to me to consistently overrate the political advantages of caving in. Matt Stoller has a great example here in Jason Altmire. He’s a freshman Democrat in a district that leans slightly Republican — a promising pickup opportunity for the GOP. So Altmire wants to be cautious. He went to Iraq, saw the propaganda show there, and returned proclaiming “The president has made the decision to continue the mission at its current level, and I am never going to vote to withhold funding to our brave men and women when they are out in the field of battle serving in harm’s way.”

Has this led the Pennsylvania GOP to laud Altmire as a hero of the Terrorists’ War on Us? Of course not. He’s a freshman Democrat in a vulnerable district, so here he is being fiercely attacked as a an advocate of “surrender,” a proponent of “retreat and defeat,” and of backing a “slow-bleed strategy to choke-off funding for the troops in harm’s way.”

Given the nature of the situation, if Altmire’s position was to the left of where it is, he would have to weather these potentially damaging attacks. But he could also punch back against his attackers as proposing to give a blank check to an incompetent and unpopular president. He could defend the case for withdrawal on the merits, and complaining about wasting the lives of America’s young men and the vast resources of our country on the president’s ego trip. Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn’t work. But the line Altmire’s taken hasn’t spared him from the attacks he’s worried about. Instead, it’s only made it harder for him to fight back against the attacks he got.

And that’s the way it goes. If a guy like Joe Lieberman whose seat the GOP couldn’t possibly take wants to shift right then, sure, the Republicans will hail him. But it’s the people with vulnerable seats who are most inclined to do this stuff but it doesn’t convince the Republicans to lay off — they’re not idiots, they go for the low-hanging fruit, not the politicians with the most objectively un-conservative voting record (Democrats unclear on this concept can probably ask Jim Leach for a primer since he’s got spare time on his hands these days).

Foster Commuted

I wrote yesterday about Kenneth Foster who seemed likely to be executed unjustly, and now it seems (via Dana Goldstein) that he’s going to get his sentence commuted to life in prison.

Chart of the Day

I found this at Ezra’s place and it shows that we’re getting more liberal. It’s interesting how reliably this tracks the prevailing course of domestic policy. During the Eisenhower years, support for liberalism gradually rose. Then it fairly steadily fell throughout the 60s and 70s as the domestic policy climate kept moving to the left. Naturally, with support for liberalism incredibly low around 1980, Ronald Reagan was able to sweep into office. His conservative tendencies rebuilt support for liberalism, which then didn’t change very much during the 1988-2000 period when most all big proposals died of gridlock, and the Bush years have led to a massive increase in public support for liberalism.

Of course, to make any sense of this chart you have to understand it as measuring a relative quantity. It’s clearly not the case that voters were “more conservative” in 1984 than in 1964 in the sense that 1984 voters wanted to return to the 1964 policy status quo of no Medicare, no Medicaid, no EPA, no Voting Rights Act, no federal funding of education, etc.

Of course, maybe the methodology’s all wrong. The chart’s put together by Professor James Stimson at UNC and I haven’t actually gone back and checked his data or his methods, so caveat emptor.

Good Questions

I think Bill Richardson is asking good questions:

In the most recent debate, he asked the other major candidates a clear question: how many troops would you leave behind and for how long? We have yet to hear an answer.

All the major Democratic candidates say they are eager to end this war, and they all say they don’t believe there is a military solution in Iraq. Why, then, do they maintain that we must leave an indefinite number of troops behind for an indeterminate amount of time to work hopelessly towards a military solution everyone says doesn’t exist?

Richardson, as he points out, stands for a complete withdrawal from Iraq — the only policy that can reasonably follow from the premises that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all joined him in endorsing and the only one that lives up to the promises all three have made to end the war. I’m not sure many liberals have really grasped how absurd it is that we seem destined to witness a 2008 campaign in which both major party nominees support continuing the war. Nor do the Clinton/Obama/Edwards camps seem to have given serious consideration to the fact that their general election adversary will probably find it relatively easy to ridicule this “end the war, but keep fighting it” stance the Democrats have all adopted.

Coercion is Key

Scott Lemieux on dog fighting versus factory farming:

There are, I think, some colorable substantive distinctions; in particular, Vick’s actions (not just the dogfighting but the additional torture-killing of the dogs) represents a sadism for its own sake that factory farming doesn’t, and hence it’s reasonable for the law to treat them differently. But is this distinction enough to justify significant federal jail time for Vick in a country where factory farming is not only legal but subsidized? Seems like a hard case to make. Can eaters of mass-produced meat (or, even more so, people who see nothing wrong with mass-produced meat) justify intense outrage at Vick? It’s hard to rationally justify, I think. A little humility is on order for those of us with bad faith eating practices.

But let’s try this enough way. Speaking as liberals, as Scott and I are, we can (and, I think, should) simply embrace some hypocrisy on this front. It seems to me that I should probably only eat “cruelty free” meat. And it’s actually the case that I eat more of such meat than I would were I totally indifferent to this issue. But I’m far, far, far away from actually living in compliance with this idea. But this is actually a common liberal phenomenon. I believe the country should adopt policies related to health care that would almost certainly represent a net transfer of resources away from a person like me toward others in greater need. I don’t, however, personally transfer any resources in this direction.

Which is just to say that Michael Vick has violated some laws against animal cruelty. To observe that other kinds of cruel treatment of animals related to the industrial food process should be subjected to more stringent regulation isn’t a reason for Vick to be let off the hook. That in the absence of such regulation, a lot of people who think there should be stricter ones find it difficult to live up to our own ethical ideas arguably just strengthens the case for regulation. I’m not, in general, a big believer in the idea that not living in accordance with hypothetical regulatory frameworks while still believing such frameworks should be constructed (supporting a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme while still having a large carbon footprint, for example) constitutes hypocrisy in a meaningful way.

Random Links

Here’s some stuff I agree with and don’t have anything to add to:

• ONE Campaign poll of Iowa caucus goers shows that people think we should be doing more to fight developing world poverty.
• The National Security Network rounds up the considerable evidence that the alleged drop in violence in Iraq isn’t actually happening.
• Sam Boyd is appropriate skeptical of designer accessory makers’ claims that buying counterfeit bags and wallets is causing terrorism.
• Brad DeLong on late 19th century shipping trends.
• Moira Whelan is puzzled as Iyad Allawi picks up the endorsement of the exiled leadership of the Iraqi Baath Party.

Have fun!

Thursday Pronoun Blogging

It appears that some ambiguous phrasing on my part has sparked some outrage about my ill-informed views from Jonah Goldberg and Yuval Levin and led to a bunch more interesting posts on the subject of farm subsidies. At issue was a post I wrote a couple of days ago, referring to the 2002 Farm Bill where I said “he was all for it” back then. I’d intended “he” to refer to President Bush, but the NRO crew has taken me to have been referring to Levin who, in fact, like most conservative intellectuals and policy types has been consistently and rightly against farm subsidies forever and ever.

What the subject of farm subsidies mostly shows, however, is that at the end of the day nobody in politics really seems to care what intellectuals and policy people think. If some big ideas or serious policy research or principled ideological stance can help advance important priorities of key interest groups, then suddenly ideology and policy analysis begin to appear very important. But when all the interest group pressure is for farm subsidies, it doesn’t matter that all the policy analysis is on the other side.

New IAEA Report

It looks like the Iranian nuclear program is only advancing sluggishly and that some Iranian elites are wondering if it really makes sense to continue down this path. Of course, one way to convince them to do so would be to start bombing their country. But I guess since they’re “already at war with us” we have no choice, right?

Fresh Talking Points

Via Josh Marshall, state of the art Iraq talking points:

The Nevada Republican, who returned Tuesday from his fourth trip to Iraq, met with U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Iraqi Deputy President Tariq al-Hashimi and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh.

“To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave,” Porter said Wednesday in a phone interview from Las Vegas.

Josh focused on the oddity of Petraeus and Crocker suddenly becoming commodity market analysts, but one really has to wonder how Iran and al-Qaeda are supposed to simultaneously seize control of Iraq.

Perverse Incentives

I stopped checking the traffic stats on my independent blog a couple of years ago, and the Prospect looks at Tapped posts more in terms of generating “impact” that can be pitched as important to donors than to traffic as such. Now that I’m working for a genuine for-profit business corporation, however, I’m more aware of traffic spikes and so forth. Yesterday, for example, my post about David Petraeus’ dull dissertation got an Instapundit link. It also prompted James Fallows to do a post defending Petraeus from charges of unusual banality. And that post got an Instalink as well.

Advantage: Yglesias, valuable and productive employee. Except, of course, the incentives here seem terrible since the premise of all this traffic is that I was being dumb.

Allow me, however, to engage in some post hoc defense of my dumbness. The point was that I had my hands on a copy of Petraeus’ dissertation. It seemed like a document worth checking out. Maybe it would say something staggeringly stupid, and I could write “aha! this is dumb! we shouldn’t listen to this guy!” Alternatively, like the COIN Field Manual it might say smart things that, being smart, could be used jujitsu-style as arguments against the surge. In truth, though, the dissertation just turned out to be really, really boring. Given that all that happened, it seems like I might as well report my findings to the world: the dude’s dissertation doesn’t say anything interesting. I know that traditional journalism doesn’t work this way, but maybe it should. We know that publication bias (basically, journals only publishing interesting results, rather than “failed” experiments) is a real problem in academic research and it probably is in journalism as well.

Executing the Innocent

Dana Goldstein notes that the State of Texas is planning to execute Kenneth Foster today even though everyone agrees that he didn’t kill anyone: “Kenneth Foster was driving the getaway car during a teenage robbery spree, and watched his companion kill a man 90 feet away from the car where he sat. All the men involved — including the killer — have said murder was not a premeditated part of their evening.” In Texas, though, it seems that this is good enough to get you the death penalty. If, that is, you don’t have a good lawyer. That the defendant in question is black probably didn’t help his case either.

Counterinsurgency and Dictatorship

Kyle Teamey, writing in The Washington Post, laments the existence of political democracy in the United States:

While debate over a war’s merits — and whether to withdraw — is a sign of a healthy democracy, Iraq unfortunately highlights many of the difficulties a democracy faces in a long-term counterinsurgency or nation-building campaign. Such debate can be detrimental to the battle for perceptions.

Well, maybe he doesn’t lament its existence, but he does think it has some regrettable downsides. But is this really true? It seems to me that the truth of the matter is that counterinsurgency is very hard. Democracies have wages successful counterinsurgency campaigns (the British in Malaya is the classic examples) and dictatorships have lost counterinsurgency campaigns. Indeed, the story of modern losing counterinsurgency starts with Napoleonic France fighting and losing in Spain. One could also consider Portugal (then a semi-fascist dictatorship) losing control of its African colonies. Or, of course, the Soviet Union losing in Afghanistan. There is, overall, very little evidence I can see in favor of tyranny as a counterinsurgency strategy.

The main thing is that it helps to not be an alien occupier fighting a native resistance movement. You see some arguably successful counterinsurgencies in Latin America where there wasn’t a difference in nationality between the parties, and you see the British succeeding in rallying the mostly Malay population of Malaya against the mostly Chinese insurgents. Now, arguably, genocide works as a counter-insurgency strategy. Even here, though, a very liberal approach to killing people didn’t ultimately preserve Hutu Power in Rwanda. The big success stories of genocide-as-counterinsurgency were conducted by democracies — the United States and Australia against the native inhabitants of those countries (needless to say, conducting genocidal warfare against the population of Iraq would be immoral and I strongly oppose such policies). Either way, the idea that tyranny is a useful counterinsurgency tool seems to be mostly pernicious myth.

This all via Ezra Klein who aptly characterizes one of Teamey’s subsidiary points (”the appearance of strength or weakness is often much more important than actual strength or weakness”) as arguing that hope is a plan after all.

Love and Housework

Jessica Valenti reads USA Today’s writeup of a study concluding that married women do more housework than do cohabiting women, and concludes that she may have to stay single.

I’m not so sure that the study is really showing a causal connection here. It seems very plausible that the cohabiting sample going to contain people who are less tradition-minded than does the married sample. Married people are also probably more likely to have children than are are cohabiters and one can much more easily understand why the presence or absence of children might cause a shift in the housework burden (which isn’t to say that one should endorse this dynamic) than why marriage, as such, should cause a shift.

Photo by Flickr user Rick Takagi used under a Creative Commons license