Matt Zeitlin

I don’t know how else to describe Bryan Caplan’s declaration that “politicians almost never make me angry. I expect them to be atrocious, and I’m rarely disappointed.”  I understand, and am sometimes quite sympathetic, to the Caplanite critique of politics, but that doesn’t let you opt out from trying to oppose, or at least condemn, politicians who are especially malicious.  I mean, aren’t economists supposed to care about differences on the margin?

My almost-unconditional opposition to the death penalty is based on a few simple facts and axioms.  The first is that the government needs a very good reason to kill defenseless people.  This isn’t to say that government killing is always wrong, in fact, in many cases, the government really ought to kill people.  You don’t have to be a blood thirsty Hobbesian to say that there are definitely situations where the government should be a violent actor.   So, why should we execute criminals?  Some say that it is simply a matter of justice – that people who kill have voided their claim to life and protection of the laws.  This argument is terribly insufficient, however.  For one, a very small proportion of murders are charged as capital crimes and most importantly, the purpose of the justice system is not to institute Italian-mob style tick-for-tack killings.  If someone’s father, the son doesn’t get to charge the defendant with a crime, the state does.  And the state need not seek revenge, because, as an agent, it can’t really be offended against.  So it comes down to deterrence.  And my own reading of the evidence on deterrence, especially Justin Wolfer’s meta-analysis, has pretty well convinced me that the deterrent effect is minimal, if it exists it all.  So basically we’re killing for no reason.

The other fact of the justice system that cements my opposition to the death penalty in nearly ever imaginable case is the extreme rarity of escape.  Seeing that we’ve managed to actually neutralize murderers (though there is the problem of killings in prisons), the death penalty is especially pointless.  It’s easy to imagine how sensible the quick, effective application of death would be if murderers escaped from prison and went on to kill regularly, but seeing how that doesn’t happen very much (arguably killing innocent people is more likely than for people to escape and kill again), it’s not really something to be concerned with.

Oh yeah, and the racial and class disparities in how its applied sure don’ help.  If you’re wondering what prompted this discussion, it was this op-ed by an innocent prisoner who was sentenced to life without parole.  Had the circumstances been slightly different, he could very well had been killed.  And that should have been treated as the rough equivalent of murder.

I’m sorry Vanessa Valenti, but despite the clumsy use of the “mommy daddy” vs “daddy party” schema to describe Democrats and Republicans, Larry Sabato is not some horrible sexist, or a “douchebag.” Instead, he’s one of the foremost political scientists in the country, and is a real asset in discussions of how to reform our political institutions to make them more progressive. And if you really think that using the “mommy vs daddy” party dicotomy is sexist, go after everyone who uses the term “nanny state.” And if you really want to go after someone for using gendered language to describe the parties, then call George Lakoff a douchebag.

And I’ll be honest, the “mommy party” descriptor isn’t the best one out there, but can you really say it’s so awful when Nancy Pelosi called up all those little children to the Speaker’s podium when she opened this most recent Congressional session by saying it was “for the children”?

First Clinton meets with the man who dedicated the 90s to proving that she and her husband killed Vince Foster, and now her campaign staff is pimping an article from the American Spectator* smearing an Obama foreign policy adviser as a drunk anti-semite.  What’s next, leaking stuff to Drudge?

Despite Obama’s promises to meet with America’s enemies, it’s Clinton meeting with her enemies, and before she’s even elected!  Who’s “naive and irresponsible” now?

Like how to write pitch perfect guides to 91% of conservative writing on higher education.

In the wake of Clinton blatantly lying about Bosnia and James Carville comparing Richardson to Judas, we’ve forgotten some past Clinton campaign silliness, namely her suggestion that Obama would be a good vice-presidential candidate with her. This was all despite the fact that Obama is leading in popular votes and pledged delegates AND despite Clinton suggesting that Obama wasn’t quite qualified to be commander in chief.

So what is the proper response to such silliness? Finding a good analogy in rap songs! So, my own first suggestion is that Obama being Hillary’s Veep pick would be like “Make It Rain.” When I first heard the chorus, I was really juiced for yet another great Lil Wayne track – and not any Lil Wayne track, but one featuring the best catchphrase of 2007. And then it turned out that Fat Joe had all the verses. I guess other examples would be Dilated Peoples and Kanye West in “This Way” or Dr. Dre and Eminem in “Forgot About Dre“(though in all fairness to Dre, his production is about half of what makes that song tight, Eminem’s contribution is the other half. It’s just that Dre isn’t a very good rapper)

It’s unfortunate that in many circles, the ethics of large scale civilian bombing in World War II is off limits. Sure, AC Grayling wrote a book about it, but for many, it’s just assumed that because we won the war and because the Nazis winning was an unthinkable prospect, everything we did was basically OK. But it clearly wasn’t. As Robert Pape argued in, strategic air bombing as a means of coercion, distinct from a means of destroying military equipment of capability, isn’t all that effective. The Nazis, after all, didn’t really care much about the lives of their people and the people actually being bombed, whether they’re German, Japanese or Vietnamese, rarely blame their home country’s government for the massive death tolls. They blame those actually killing them. So, in the most moral war ever, there were hundreds of thousands pointless civilian deaths.

But it’s hard to talk about such moral complexity, because no one wants to seem “objectively pro-fascist” or “soft on fascism” even 60 years later. So that’s why I applaud Nicholson Baker’s new work, Human Smoke, which makes the case that not only were the massive civilian bombings wrong, but the allied involvement in the War itself was immoral. He is making the pacifist case. I don’t agree with Baker’s conclusion, but his work should at least expand the playing field along which we think about the morality of civilian death in wartime. If we can talk about the needless loss of civilian life in World War II, then the needless loss of life in, say, Iraq becomes all the more pertinent.

But the title of this post isn’t “Why We Need to Listen to AC Grayling and Nicholson Baker more.” What’s so interesting about the case of civilian causalities in war is that the strongest argument against deliberate area bombing is utilitarian – classic, greatest good for the greatest number, aggregate preference utilitarian. Pure bean-counting would easily show that the Allied area bombing, or the bombing of North Vietnam, was pointless, immoral and stupid. “But greatest good for the greatest number means we kill more people to win the war” says the just war theorist or the squeamish. Well that’s true, but only if you don’t count everyone. The beautiful thing about utilitarianism, you see, is that you ought to count everyone’s interests equally. There’s no reason that we should be counting an Iraqi civilian more than an American one, so some utilitarians would say. So, with the case of area bombing in World War II, we killed all these German for no reason. It didn’t make the war end sooner, it didn’t break their morale, it didn’t ultimately save more lives.

But World War II is over, as is US military policy of bombing civilian areas with the intent purpose of killing civilians. So the question becomes, what ethical guidelines are best now? And to me, pure aggregate utilitarianism provides the best rough guide to our actions. Glenn Greenwald, looking back the Iraq war, thinks that this line of argument is insufficient, and that it will always justify more wars, because people can always exaggerate the possible risks of not intervening while understating the costs of war itself:

But virtually every line of rationale is purely utilitarian in its reasoning. The most unadorned admissions of error amount to little more than a concession that they simply assessed the costs and benefits inaccurately. And even with that extremely narrow concession, none of them — either in Slate or elsewhere — even reference in passing the fact that the war they cheered on ended the lives of hundreds of thousands (at least) of innocent Iraqi citizens and caused the internal and external displacement of millions more. That just doesn’t exist in the calculus.

More strikingly, not a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not — and has no right to — invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven’t attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: “Wars that aren’t directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn’t be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason.” Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

Greenwald is making two arguments here: one which fully fits into a utilitarian framework and the other which rejects it. Those “hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens” could easily just be included into some sort of utilitarian calculus. If you approached war this way – where you roughly count innocent civilians lives equally, then surely we’d see much less war. But Greenwald goes further than just expanding the utilitarian calculus to including non-Americans, but to make a more deontological claim – that war that isn’t in response to the homeland being attacked or threatened is not just stupid and destructive, but wrong. Although Greenwald and I are probably similarly dovish, it’s hard to see how his admirable calculative generosity towards the lives and interests of Iraqis (and other Others) is consistent with this hard principle of limited/non-intervention. Greenwald’s main pragmatic point is that war is always awful, and that we systematically underrate the costs of war, so we should have very, very stringent requirements for engaging in it. And this point is fair, I really don’t trust the American public and the Republican party, especially after a terrorist attack, to show enough nuance when deciding whether or not the costs and benefits of military action work out.

But just because our politics are imperfect doesn’t make Greenwald’s Jeffersonian position the correct one. That’s because the reason he endorses it is that war leads to excess civilian death. And that’s it! So, can you imagine a situation where the US ought to engage in some sort of military conflict, despite not being “attacked or even threatened”? Sure, plenty of us can. Gulf War I, Bosnia, Kosovo, cases of genocide etc etc. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be prudent about intervention – in Darfur, for example, there are good reasons why a military intervention is a bad idea and we did kill an awful lot of Iraqis in Gulf War I, but to stipulate that we limit our military to this impossibly narrow criteria really ties our hands down unnecessarily.

The other, more speculative and nuanced reason why Greenwald’s criteria is bad is because, well, it would lead to the killing of more innocent civilians than my criteria of pure, body-count utilitarianism. Let’s say a country, or a country which harbors terrorists, does attack us. Is it always right to invade that country, kill civilians and endanger more American lives? Not necessarily. Just look at Israel. Surely they are justified in taking military action in the West Bank and Gaza strip, but it is in no way clear that any of these actions actually work at making Israel more secure. Or look at the war in Lebanon, both in the 1980s and the summer of 2006. These were surely “justified” interventions, in the case of Lebanon in 2006, there were forces within Lebanon lobbing rockets into Israeli civilian centers. And Israel intervened, killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians, littered cluster bombs across Southern Lebanon and then didn’t make their country much safer. It’s hard to say that from a third party, utilitarian, eye-of-god perspective, that the Summer War was a good one.

Greenwald can’t have it both ways. If he really wants every innocent civilian to count as “one” in his war-calculus, then adding on silly addenda about being “attacked” or “threatened to be attacked” is nonsensical. For it leaves some civilians, who by virtue of their birth are fated to be slaughtered by their own governments or neighboring nations, out to dry, while other civilians are perfectly justified in being killed because their governments or terrorists in their midst attacked some other country which lead to an overreaction. This principle is neither consistent nor prudent. All it has to recommend to itself is that it would have stipulated against the Iraq War. Beyond that, however, it’s not much.

Spencer Ackerman’s article on the “Obama Doctrine” is quite good at exploring what actually makes Obama different and gets at why I think Obama is a much better candidate than Clinton on the one area where the President has the most power to implement policy. But, and this may be the only time ever, I have to agree with Michael Goldfarb that Obama’s idea of “dignity promotion” and using development to drain the swamp for terrorism is a little shallow and misguided:

They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

I’m all for promoting “dignity” and economic development. I want more foreign aid, smarter spending on health care initiatives in the developing world and have us not deploy democracy promotion solely aginst regimes I don’t like. But the idea that addressing the issues of poverty and disease have much to do with terrorism is, sadly, just substituting the Bush Doctrine for the Obama Doctrine. Let me explain.

The connection between poverty – like, dire, one dollar a day, lethal poverty – and terrorism does not exist. Most anti-American terrorists come from middle class, professional, educated backgrounds. Hell, they are disproportionally engineers. Goldfarb is right to point out that if poverty was the root cause of terrorism, we’d see more terrorists from Burkino Faso and Congo. But no, we see them from Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world. The idea that Africa is the next breeding ground for terrorism and anti Americanism, while a well intentioned way to get us to pay attention to a place where millions die of poverty and preventable diseases, is misguided. All the operational problems that plague terrorists groups today – funding, logistics, evading detection, law enforcement at the borders – would be well magnified for any hypothetical African terrorists. But even as I’m writing this, I’m still a little shocked that I have to disprove that there are really any substantial national security threats emanating from Africa. Unless Obama sees China’s resource competition as anything worth orienting our foreign policy around, then I do not really know what Scott Gration is getting at when he says:

“Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I’m concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years.”

Sure, this will be a big problem for Africa, and since I’m a cosmopolitan utilitarian, I think the US should do something smart to help out, but to say that we ought to shift our foreign policy to deal with this challenge doesn’t make much sense. All the factors that brewed in the Middle East to create the threat of terrorism – history of imperialism, support for dictatorial regimes, frustrated opportunities for educated people, lots of money sloshing around, Salafi extremism – just aren’t present in Africa. To date, most of our military interventions there have just been failed attempts at extending the War on Terror to the Horn, just look at our boondoggle in Somalia.

But I’m not surprised that a team who wants to “end the mindset that brought us to war” is endorsing this type of development-cum-anti terrorism strategy. Because what I really think is that Obama ought to do is end the war on terror as some grand ideological/foreign policy project and pay attention to other pressing foreign policy issues – nonproliferation or public health in Africa. But we can’t do that in America, and much of our foreign policy apparatus is based around there being grand unifying themes for a presidency.

So when Obama wants to address these really substantial foreign policy issues, like disease and poverty in Africa, he can’t just say “we have to move because millions of people are dying,” instead, he has to say “these millions of poor people dying because they are poor is a threat to us.” It may well be true that the only way to mobilize around these types of issues is to “securitize” them and frame them in the context of a security/foreign policy, but there are worries that this could lead our military, diplomatic and foreign policy pros to not focus on issues in which they have real expertise, like nonproliferation, while at the same time confusing what should be humanitarianism with implementing the foreign policy goals of the US.

If Obama really wanted a paradigm shift in how we view foreign policy, he wouldn’t replace the Bush Doctrine with the Obama Doctrine, but instead question why we need to have such overarching foreign policy visions or doctrines in the first place. Good old liberal internationalism supplemented with an appreciation for counterinsurgency and humanitarianism would do just fine, thank you very much.

PS – This does not represent the entirety of my thought on the Obama foreign policy or this article. More is surely forthcoming as the election plays out.

One of the most obvious consequences of supporting an unpopular dictator prone to coups and jailing Supreme Court justices is that when he is out of power, the new leaders are not going to be very receptive to the United States.  This is a particularly unfortunate dynamic in Pakistan, where it turns out that we have rather compelling interests and don’t want a cold shoulder from the government.  But according to the Times, that’s just what we are getting.

Mr. Sharif and Mr. Zardari have both said that in order to stop the spate of suicide bombings in recent months, they intend to negotiate with the militants who are battling the Pakistan Army. Reports of American concerns over such overtures, as well as the Bush administration’s continued backing of Mr. Musharraf, despite the overwhelming rejection of his party by voters, have fueled a new level of Pakistani frustration with the United States.

The News, one of the country’s leading daily newspapers, published an editorial on Tuesday titled “Hands off please, Uncle Sam,” urging American leaders to “realize the need to give the democratic government in Pakistan time and space” to put in place a “thoughtful plan of action,” free of “any effort to intervene in their working or curtailing their right to independently decide what is best for Pakistan and its people.”

Now, Sharif and Zardari may be very well correct that our current anti-terror strategy in Pakistan isn’t working all that well for the Pakistani people, and so a relationship with this new government could still be productive.  But it’s worrying that all the bad stuff Musharraf did, with or without the encouragement or explicit sanction of the US, is now associated with us.

Smoke a little pot, go to jail.  Infect unwitting strangers with measles because you’re too twee to get your kids vaccinations? No punishment.

As usual, Megan gets it right:

I just think that people who are unvaccinated, unless they have a legitimate medical reason for same, should not be allowed to use public roads, public sidewalks, or public services. They have a right not to vaccinate their children. But they do not have a right to risk my health.Update I chose the word “sociopath” quite deliberately. I think parents who leave their children unvaccinated are the moral equivalent of people who drive drunk. I imagine the person in my comments who contracted measles at 15 months from an unvaccinated child, and ended up with permanent corneal scarring, feels even less kindly than I do.

What would happen if a major American newspaper ran an Op-Ed promoting a more dovish line in the war on terror in which the first and last paragraphs were a discussion of Foucault’s thoughts about “disciplines”?

Call me a fuddy-duddy American university humanities student (one day, maybe!) but I think the entire blogosphere kerfuffle about the “Foreign Policy Community” could have been illuminated if people used some basic Foucaldian terminiology and ideas.  Just a thought…

And oh yeah, everything Jonah Goldberg said in Liberal Fascism, Foucault wrote more than 30 years ago.  But more on that later…

The Raiders are hardly known for their front-office competence, but this trade for DeAngelo Hall is just horrible.  Let me count the ways.  For one, we really don’t need two pro bowl defensive backs.  Sure, it’s nice to have a good secondary, but absent a competent defensive line, it’s not really an area you need to focus on.  Especially considering that the Raiders have already put the franchise tag on Asomugha, Hall is just superfluous.  What’s even more worrying is that the signed Hall to a seven-year, 70 million dollar deal, which on a per-year basis, means they’re paying Hall more than Asomugha.  This is especially insulting considering that Asomugha  only guaranteed to be on the team for another year, at 9.5 million dollars.  So, in all likelyhood, they’ve screwed their chances of keeping Asomugha past 2008.  So what do we get for essentially swapping defensive backs?  Oh yeah, we’ve lost another early round (2nd) draft pick.

What the Raiders front office and Al Davis need to realize is that we don’t have anything resembling a real football team, meaning that one-off free agent signings of skill players isn’t going to do us much good.  Instead, we should be trying our best to get good linemen (the signing of Kwame Harris and Cornell Green helped)  and stocking up on draft picks so that we can build around some good young players.  Instead, the Raiders now only have the 4th overall pick in the first three rounds of the draft.   Great way to rebuild the team.

One area where people primarily concerned with Israeli human rights abuses in the Territories and those skeptical Zionists like me can hopefully unite is in condemning certain Israeli military policies that are arguably violations of human rights, and more importantly for the Zionist crowd, don’t actually reduce anti-Israeli terrorism.  A great example of this is the now-abandoned policy of home destruction.  For a while, it was Israeli policy to destroy the homes of suicide bombers.  It did not matter if the families themselves encouraged or supported their child mudering Israelis, it was thought that collective punishment would encourage Palestinians to do some self-policing.  There are, of course, moral and human rights qualms with collective punishment.  The most obvious question is whether or not it’s right to punish people for an action they did commit.  The other problem with collective punishment in the context of Israel-Palestine is that it is often, as Haim Weitzman writes about his experiences serving in the IDF during the first intifada, not really a policy designed to reduce terrorism, but more to “to get back at the Palestinians for daring to oppose us, and to give the high army command something to report to the political leadership.”

But the army stopped demolishing the homes of suicide bombers in 2005.  Why?  Because it simply did nothing to actually reduce terrorism against Israel.  If human rights groups could make their critique of Israeli actions in the Territories more along those lines, they would probably get wider support because many Zionists and Israelis instinctively come to Israel’s defense because of the horrible violence against civilians that Israelis have to deal with, and they often shudder at any attempt of “equivocation.”  But with house demolitions, we see a policy that is clearly objectionable on both human rights and military grounds, and it would be nice if we could have a gotten a kumbayah moment where everyone except extremist settlers and arab haters could have renounced this immoral, ineffective policy.

The one part of Barack Obama’s speech that worried me a little was his insistent that all races could be unified against the threat of evil CEOs outsourcing jobs.  Never mind the irony in saying that the best way to heal over divisions is to collectively scapegoat foreigners – not to mention that outsourcing and trade are only a small part of job loss – it seemed as if Obama’s political imagination was limited to the possibility that a ethnically homogeneous society could only unite around another foreign other.

Well, in comes Rahm Emanuel with a WSJ op-ed arguing for a “new social contract with America’s workers” that would put to rest anxiety about trade.  This is the language that I’d like to hear Obama use.  For many on the left-wing of the party, as well as for rust belt Democrats, trade is said to play a disproportionate role in the economic evils afflicting the middle class.  This is despite the middle class squeeze – the cost of health care and education rising while median incomes stagnate and shrink – accelerating during the Bush administration, with no huge break through trade agreements or large increases in foreign trade.  It’s just economic nonsense to say that free trade agreements have played a proximate, or even a noticeable role – especially compared to other factors – in the economic malaise that many Americans find themselves in.

Another bad thing about focusing on trade is that it drains political energy for actually thinking about real policy solutions to alleviate inequality and stagnating middle class incomes.  If you’re obsessed with NAFTA, that’s less energy spent on health care, education, universal savings, green jobs or any policy that will actually help improve the prospects of the middle class. Not to mention the fact that trade benefits everyone and also has salutary geopolitcal effects.

The problem is that many free trade advocates are Republicans who don’t really care for large scale programs to improve  economic security and oppurtunity.  But there are plenty of Democrats out there who really want to make the comprehensive free trade case.  What’s nice about Emanuel’s piece is that it puts the cooled trade rhetoric and “new social contract” rhetoric literally side-by-side.  It’s this type of synthesis, where we don’t blame trade or foreigners for our problems and instead collaborate on policy solutions that Obama (and Clinton for that matter) ought to be using.

Fouad Ajami is quite dependable to play “Native Informer” for American audiences who will feel more assured that the Bush Doctrine is the right idea because, hey, that guy has an Arab-sounding name.  His WSJ editorial evaluating the Iraq War is one of the more embarrassing kiss-ups to Bush and his imperial adventures I’ve ever seen.  Like so many war supporters, Ajami had to jettison the “Saddam Will Kill Us All” justification and quickly pivot to democracy promotion.  But since democracy promotion in the Arab world has been an inconsistent focus for the administration, you get embarassing quotes like this:

Mr. Bush made freedom in Arab-Islamic lands his cause. He rejected laments that Arabs do not possess a freedom gene, and that they are fated to tyranny. “The liberty we value is not ours alone,” he told this Nashville convention. “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to all humanity.”

One could certainly debate whether Iraq is meaningfully freer today than five years ago, but to say that Bush has consistently supported democracy in the “arab-Islamic” world is just false.  He has been downright subservient to Saudi Arabia, the most repressive and least democratic state in the country, and has been every cautious with promoting democracy for a another stalwart ally, Egypt.  If one’s democracy agenda consists entirely of hectoring some countries to democratize while allowing your allies to maintain their autocracies, then it’s hard to say that Bush has “made freedom in Arab-Islamic lands his cause.”

Ajami continues his contortions to defend the war by putting aside all the evidence that Hussein had little to do with any terrorism that greatly threatened the US, and make one the more baffling claims I’ve seen from him:

But those looking for that smoking gun did not understand that the distinction between secular and religious terror in that Arab landscape was a distinction without a difference. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad was a correct one. Radical Arabs attacked America on 9/11, and a war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism.

Baghdad was the proper return address, as a notice was served on the purveyors of terror that a price would be paid by those who aid and abet it. It was Saddam Hussein’s choice — and fate — that he would not duck and stay out of harm’s way in the aftermath of 9/11. We have not fully repaired the ways of the radicals in the intervening years. But the spectacle of the dictator’s defeat, and the sight of him being sent to the gallows, have worked wonders on the temper of the Arab street.

Ajami couldn’t be more wrong.   What, exactly, is “arab radicalism.”  While all the 19 hijackers were indeed Arab, I’m pretty sure that they weren’t Maronite Christians or Iraqi Shiites, instead they were Sunni radicals.  The term “Arab radicalism” is one of the more useless phrases I’ve ever seen a purported scholar throw around in the context of Islamic terrorism.  That’s because it’s not a real scholarly term at all – for Ajami – it instead is a way to put the square peg of Saddam’s secular regime in the  round hole of Islamic terrorism.  Because even Ajami admits there was no real connection to the group that actually threatens US interests – Al Qaeda – he needed to concoct some “deeper” connection between terrorism and Iraq. Of course, if there was a “proper return address” for “arab radicalism” it was Riyadh, but Ajami doesn’t seem to be concerned with repressive states that breed terrorism as long as they are erstwhile American allies.  The fact that this guy is considered a scholar never ceases to astound me.

PS – Another really unfortunate thing about Ajami’s “arab radicalism” is that it was a real phrase in the academic literature.   For instance,Uriel Dann’s King Hussein and the Challenge of Arab Radicalism looks at King Hussein of Jordan’s challenge in dealing with the radical pan Arabism sweeping the Middle East when he came to power.  Dann, unlike Ajami, is referring to a real phenomenon.

Alissa Quart’s New York Times Magazine feature on the challenges facing transmen and genderqueers in women’s colleges is exceptional for mainstream journalism about the gender nonconforming community.  For one, Quart is clearly familiar with the community itself as well as with the theory that goes behind these identities.  Also, Quart is sympathetic with the people she’s writing about and presents their stories and opinions in a highly non-judgmental manner.  But the heart of the article – the story of a female-to-male Barnard student named Rey – raises some incredibly interesting questions about the place of transgendered people in educational environments and the purpose of women’s colleges.  It’s both odd that gender nonconformists and women’s colleges seem to mesh so well together, and also perfectly natural. 

On one hand, the women’s college is a conservative, gender essentialist institution.  Many women’s colleges – Barnard, Smith, Wellesley – were originally started as something approximating finishing schools, but also educated the most accomplished and progressive women because paucity of elite, coed higher education opportunities.   Today, however, they appear to be increasingly outdated.  After all, in the undergraduate environment, women outperform men in nearly all metrics, both in admission and in academic performance. And so these colleges are in a weird place.  Some, like Vassar and Goucher, just abandoned single sex education entirely. 

But they’ve also become destinations for people who grow up as female and then slide into gender nonconformity.  That’s because they’re safehavens from male sexual and emotional violence.  But there’s an obvious conflict here.  How are schools whose core identity and value is exclusively derived from their adherence to essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman supposed to deal with students who have very little interest in those basic definitions?  For Rey, at least, it wasn’t easy:

But as a transmale student in a sea of women at Barnard, he felt alone. He longed to be with his girlfriend, Melissa, and with transmale friends, some of whom, like Rey, were attending women’s colleges. Even as he sought to adopt a more conventionally male appearance, he wanted to maintain his ties with his former self. “I am all for not rubbing out my past as female,” he told me.

…

In the first week of September, he found out that his roommates had complained to the college’s freshman housing director about being asked to share their rooms with a man. They wanted Rey to find somewhere else to live. According to Dorothy Denburg, the dean who spoke to Rey about the situation, these young women were disturbed when Rey told them on the first day “that he was a transboy and wanted to be referred to by male pronouns.” Rey’s roommates had, after all, chosen to attend a women’s college in order to live and be educated in the company of other women.

Rey ultimately transferred to Columbia proper, but the questions his experience raises are difficult.  Should women’s colleges be expected to greet with open arms those students who don’t want to be “female?”  And is Rey right to criticize Barnard students for not accepting him fully when he clearly didn’t want to buy into the most basic principle the school is based around?

It’s certainly a tough issue, because gender and sexuality are fluid, continuous phenomena.  You’d hardly want a women’s college to not be accepting of a students who don’t present in a stereotypically feminine way, but there seems to be a difference when those who wholeheartedly reject the biological, cultural and social place of womanhood want a place in a woman’s institution.  You can’t help but smell a whiff of opportunism, as Phoebe Maltz put it, “Rey… want[s] approval, to count as …female…when it suits him, while simultaneously declaring those who believe that rules restrict who can call themselves female to be parochial, backward-minded rubes.”

So I think that the onus rests on co-ed universities to make themselves safe, welcome environments to those who have little interest in conforming to gender roles or identities.  Because otherwise, we’re in this weird situation where people want to join institutions (women’s colleges) that derive their unique value from a basic essentialism and exclusion, and yet also criticize those same institutions for not being open to people who reject what makes these places distinct.

Mark Lynch has a very thoughtful and thorough look at the political consequences for the major factions in Iraq – green zone politicians, Sunni insurgents, Sadrites and Shiites and Al Qaeda.  There’s not a whole lot to add, except to note his strong opinion that what the Surge has accomplished – the weakening of the central government and the further factionalization of Iraq – does not make the prospects for withdrawal any rosier:

The single most important question shaping the possibility of US withdrawal is whether it takes place in the context of a relatively strong, competent and effectively sovereign Iraqi state.  US strategy should be oriented towards producing that core condition. The strategic failure of the “surge” has been that it has eroded the capacity and sovereignty of the Iraqi state by building up mutually hostile armed groups outside national institutions.  The US must work to strengthen state institutions, and to force the integration of the Awakening Councils into the national army and police in advance of its withdrawal in order to avoid sectarian warfare.  Despite the current American fashion in favor of decentralization, Iraqi support for a centralized Iraqi state remains strong: in last month’s BBC survey, 66% of Iraqis preferred a unified Iraq with a strong central government, while only 23% favored the federation of strong regional governments.

A withdrawal will be more likely to produce positive effects if it is preceded by building Iraqi national institutions and mobilizing regional support.  The  most vulnerable remaining populations should be protected as long as possible. Intra-communal power struggles will likely be increasingly significant flashpoints with or without a US withdrawal, but will likely intensify in anticipation of a withdrawal which would likely significantly weaken the current ruling elite.   I do not expect a withdrawal to proceed smoothly, given the legacy of five years of wrong paths, mismanagement, and sectarian violence.  But it is also not impossible, especially if steps are taken now to improve the odds, and it is made more likely by a  credible commitment to withdrawal.

This brings up the real question for a Democratic administration.  Are we too far down the road of a degraded Iraqi state and set of political institutions to hope that a change in US policy could every actually get us to a place where we our withdrawal would have fewer negative effects than it would now?  And, would it be worth the strategic oppurtunity costs and the loss of American life and treasure to try and reach this point?

While Lynch is hopeful that we could push towards centralization because large numbers of Iraqis support a strong centralized state, it’s worth noting that 34% don’t – much higher numbers than you’ll find in any well-ordered country. Also, Lynch’s conditions for a strong state that we could properly withdraw from with minimal negative consequences may be slightly fantastical.  For instance, he says that we have to “force the integration of the Awakening Councils into the national army and police in advance of its withdrawal in order to avoid sectarian warfare.”  At the moment, there seems to be little reason that the Shiites who largely dominate the police and army would want to accept the Sunni Awakening Councils or why the Councils would want to lose their autonomy and support by entering into an Army that is staffed by their enemies.  If this really is the “lynchpin” (haha) for achieving a “successful” withdrawal, then I think we should just withdraw now.  Our policies have gone too far in encouraging the dissolution of any sucessful Iraqi state and the only large enough shock to the system would actually be a credible plan for withdrawal, as Lynch himself says:

No Iraqi actor would scream more loudly or offer more dire warnings of impending doom than the current Green Zone elite – and, not coincidentally, these are the voices most often heard in Washington and by politicians on short visits to Baghdad.   But their warnings should be understood at least in part as expressions of their own political self-interest.   No Iraqi actor is more likely to quickly readjust its behavior and calculations should such a withdrawal be announced.  With the US set to depart, the whole range of national reconciliation initiatives which are currently seen as at best luxuries and at worst mortal threats would suddenly become a much more intense matter of self-interest.  The integration of the Sunni Awakenings, for instance, would move from a challenge to Shia hegemony over the security forces into the best possible way to pre-empt their military challenge.  The credible commitment to withdrawal would give the US much-needed leverage over the Green Zone leadership.

From reading this paragraph, it looks like planning for, and then executing, a withdrawal would hit two birds with one stone. For one, it would probably be the only move extreme enough to reverse the poor strategy of the surge and supporting the Anbar Awakening at the expense of centralization, and it would also get us out of Iraq.  This may seem tautalogical, but I think it’s still useful:  only a withdrawal can create the conditions that would allow for withdrawal.

What I think The Speech showed more than anything about Obama is that he’s a very smart man who isn’t really content to make tacky, soundbyte points and really thinks about issues in a cerebral, intellectual fashion.  He was also extremely human, especially in this passage, where he analogizes Reverend Wright to his white grandmother.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

It was unfortunate that Obama had to address having a fiery, angry black minister.  It would be highly unlikely for any black politician not to come from a background  like this, and much of the reaction to Wright, as Chris Hayes said, is a feigned shock that  “America’s black friend has a black friend.”  But he was able to give a very subtle, complex speech about the roots of racism and its present reality today. There’s been a ton of commentary all over the political blogosphere, so I don’t really have much to add…

Michael Young’s most recent Reason column celebrates Samantha Power’s fall from grace, because apparently she’s a hypocrite for writing about America’s silence in the face of genocide and yet still advocating a withdrawal from Iraq:

Power’s sin was to be frank, as the debate over Iraq continues to be distorted by falsehood. What none of the Democratic candidates will admit to, even as they deftly contradict themselves to later justify an about-face, is that there is little prospect of the U.S. leaving Iraq without sectarian conflict ensuing. Allowing this outcome would indeed be the betrayal Obama warned against in Boston, before betraying his rejection of such a betrayal by issuing his promise of a timed pullout that he is again likely to betray.

What Young, and he’s hardly alone, gets wrong is his notion that sectarian conflict will just magically spring up as the US leaves. The problem with Iraq is that despite increased troop levels, all the ingredients for a bloody civil war are still there. Even as we’ve put in more troops, gotten Sadr to declare a ceasefire and bribed the Sunnis to turn against Al Qaeda, we have a weaker central government, more distrust between Sunnis and Shiites, no effective national army and generally, no steps towards political reconciliation. What this means is that when a troop draw down happens, as it inevitably will, a huge blow up is all but inevitable. There have already been hints that the (relative) respite in violence may be ending, like the car bomb that killed more than 40 people in Karbala. So it’s wrong for Young and his ilk to say that withdrawing from Iraq will inevitably lead to ethnic conflict and then just assuming that there’s anything current or any propose US policy can do to stop it. If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that the US presence hasn’t done much to resolve the root causes of violence in Iraq, if anything, it has and will continually exasperate it.

What makes Young’s lame game of gotcha even less convincing is this quote he dregs up from Obama, which apparently proves that the “truth” of the War is that no one actually supports a quick withdrawal:

And that was nothing compared to what Obama said in 2004, the day after his keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Boston. Speaking at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, he had declared: “The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died…It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.”

Young assumes that the exact same analysis could be made today. And, superficially, he’s correct. But notice one major difference. In 2004, there were 900-plus American war dead, today, there are over 4,000. What Obama has come to realize – and what Young hasn’t – is that our strategy there is futile. If another 3,000 dead has gotten us nowhere close to eventually being able to leave behind a stable Iraq, why are we to assume that the next 3000 dead will be able to accomplish anything more? What we’ve seen since 2004 is continual assurances from people like Young that the situation in Iraq is improving and that there will be horrible violence if we withdraw. What instead has happened is that the violence has remained and the underlying causes of the sectarian violence remain. To call Power and Obama hypocrites for trying to resolve our greatest strategic failure in generations is just galling. The hypocrites are those who, after five years of futile war and brutal occupation, think that the only answer is more war.

Ilan Goldenberg is very right to say that despite the symbolic gains from appointing a Chuck Hagel or Dick Lugar as Defense Secretary in an Obama administration, it’s necessary for their to be a Democratic SecDef, because putting a Republican in would just reenforce the perception that Democrats can’t be trusted to handle military policy:

If they win in November, Democrats will finally have an opportunity to turn this dynamic around. The 2006 elections represented a major milestone, as Democrats were able to take back the House and the Senate, based in large part on their opposition to the Iraq War. But this victory spoke more to the public’s loss of confidence in the Republicans’ ability to lead on foreign policy than it did to the public’s inherent confidence in the Democrats’ ability to lead. The question facing Democrats today is: Was 2006 a blip in the continued Republican domination of the national security issue, or will it represent a turning point?

Appointing a Republican as Secretary of Defense could send a message that Democrats are still too uncomfortable with the military to take on the responsibility of defending our country by themselves. Moreover, there’s no reason not to appoint a Democrat. The party has a deep defense bench that includes military and defense advisors for the Obama and Clinton campaigns–many of whom have served in the Pentagon in previous administrations. Some of Chuck Hagel’s congressional colleagues such as Senators Jim Webb or Jack Reed are just as qualified to be Secretary of Defense, and have the added benefit of being Democrats.

Goldenberg goes on to say that perhaps Hagel or Lugar could be the Director of National Intelligence or some sort of Special Envoy.  I don’t want to dispute that either of them – especially Lugar – would be a valuable asset in any Democratic administration on foreign policy issues, but they would probably be more valuable remaining in the Senate.  Lugar especially is really the only Senator (besides Obama) to distinctively put his considerable experience and prestige behind a very important, yet under appreciated issue – nuclear nonproliferation.  Sure, he could work on proliferation in an Obama administration, but he would be depriving the Senate of its key leader on the issue.  But even more importantly, if either Lugar or Hagel were to leave the Senate, it is very likely that a normal Republican would replace them.  This would mean that Obama would probably lose two Congressional allies – or at least people willing to deal with him – on foreign policy.  There are plenty of centrist and Republican foreign policy types Obama can put in his cabinet if he wants to put on a show of bipartisanship, but Hagel and Lugar are particularly useful where they are.