Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Kathy G is no fan of Megan McArdle. And although I don’t like to see two writers who I enjoy and respect descend into clear personal animosity, I think that a lot of G’s criticisms of McArdle have merit. But those criticisms are always best when they stick to what the peer-reviewed economic literature says, and don’t don’t descend into gratuitous character attacks.

Like in her most recent post, in which G laments that McArdle is the only female Atlantic blogger (a regrettable state of affairs). G claims that McArdle isn’t “especially feminist.” Now, maybe I don’t know what “especially feminist” means, but it’s harbd to watch this bloggingheads episode, or read this post, or this post and think “wow, she just isn’t very feminist.” Sure, she’s a libertarian too, which puts something of a heterodox spin on her feminism, but it doesn’t seem like enough to declare that she’s been kicked out of the club.

Sure, I’d love to see more mainstream, liberal woman blogging for the Atlantic too (especially to balance out Caitlin Flanagan) and think that many of G’s suggestions (Goldstein, Traister, Pollitt…I’d add Michelle Goldberg, Debra Dickerson, Emily Bazelon or Dahlia Lithwick too) would improve Atlantic blogoworld Voices. I just don’t see why questionable and personal criticism of McArdle is necessary to make that point.

Joel Kotkin, in an otherwise rather anodyne article about the Democratization of urban areas, has a bizarre charge against Obama:

In recent months, the city-centered media such as CNN, The New York Times and National Public Radio have jumped on the urbanist bandwagon. They have promoted urban chauvinists’ contention that high gas prices and legislation to limit global warming would end the era of dispersion. This return to a more urbanized demography, some Democratic bloggers suggest, would assure a new liberal ascendancy.

Whatever Obama may believe personally, he would be well-advised to distance himself from such sentiments. For one thing, identifying with people who celebrate the demise of other geographies may offend the majority of Americans who prefer to live in “retro,” lower-density environments. Suburb- and countryside-bashing may turn on editors and readers of The New York Times, but it hardly constitutes good politics.

In terms of political strategy, Obama would be far better off stressing the commonalities between people in differing geographies. His time on the campaign trail should tell him that laid-off paper industry workers in central Wisconsin, hard-pressed suburban homeowners in San Bernardino, Calif., and struggling inner city residents in Brooklyn have ample cause to reject an extension of Republican rule. Why repeat the Bush tactic of dividing people from each other, this time based on where they choose to live, when the economic misery is so well-distributed?

By displaying genuine empathy for Americans living in suburbs and small towns as well as in cities, Obama could achieve more than a small tactical victory, à la Karl Rove. With a strong showing in the other geographies as well as his inevitable landslide in cities, he could instead realize a historic triumph closer to Rooseveltian proportions.

Wait, let me see. Kotkin is arguing that because Obama is getting a lion share of his support from urban areas and that many news outlets have written (totally true) stories about the advantages of urban life, that Obama has to “stress the commonalities between people in differing geographies.” This would be all well and good, if Kotkin could find a single example of Obama displaying urban triumphalism, marginalizing the concerns of people who live in suburbs or trying to divide the electorate on an urban-suburban fault line “a la Karl Rove.” Otherwise, Kotkin is just being an annoying, dishonest concern troll.

If a cop asks to search your car, are you going to say no? Well, for everyone that isn’t a card carrying ACLU member, the answer is yes.

Steve Chapman has a wonderful column about the scandal that are “consent searches.” Although the Illinois turns up something illegal in only 4 percent of searches (I imagine the rate is similar nationwide), the Supreme Court has refused to rule that there’s a complicit impulsion whenever a police officer asks a citizen to do something – especially something that imperils his rights to privacy.

Although Texas police admitted that the searches were pointless, the fact that consent searches are still allowed – even when there’s no articulable reason for them – just goes to show how screwed up our presumptions are when it comes to police activity. It would be nice if we had a presumption of liberty, not a presumption of police officers doing whatever they want because they feel rules shouldn’t apply to them.

For those of you that are avid Page 2 readers, the Jeremy Zeitlin who submitted a mock Oklahoma City jersey to Uni Watch is not my brother, and to the best of my knowledge, he isn’t related to me. His jersey, however, is pretty good.

I didn’t want to say anything at the time, but Douthat has this one dead on:

If your candidate is going to stage enormous rallies in front of tens of thousands of chanting Germans (with monuments to Prussian military might in the background) in the middle of his Presidential campaign, it isn’t the GOP’s fault if the footage comes out looking a little like Hitler at Nuremberg.

Yeah. That’s just the truth. Politics is rough.*

*”Politics is rough” does not excuse blatant lying about Obama’s visit to the troops in Germany.

Wow, Kevin Drum really needs to brush up on his conspiracy theories:

But down at #10, we get this: “The world is run by dinosaur-like reptiles.” What the hell kind of conspiracy theory is that? Dick Cheney doesn’t look anything like a dinosaur.

For some reason, my years in policy debate meant I became very well acquainted with the world of conspiracy theories. For all the 2007-2008 debate season, my partner and I said that the US government invented AIDS to target black and homosexual populations and that “to increase public health assistance to sub-saharan Africa” the government should distribute the cure, Tetrasil. But it didn’t stop there, we would also argue that the other team was being controlled by the ELF god through cell phone towers and that they should have specified in their plan text (the short description of the government policy the affirmative team advocates) that they buy orgone blasters to “nullify the ELF harassment and the other mind control weapons and tactics emitting from these towers.”

We also won a round on the basic flat earth argument. The affirmative team wanted to send provide more people to a satellite wing of the DOD, and we argued that because the earth was flat, it meant that there was no “space” and thus no satellite. No satellites, no affirmative plan, negative wins.

The repitilians were another conspiracy theory we threw in on occasion. To give some background, famed conspiracy theorist David Icke has propagated the theory that “repitilian humanoids” – cross bread hyrbids of humans and aliens from the constellation Draco – had infiltrated earth and that most political leaders were nothing more than Reptilians themselves, or slaves to the Reptilians. And if an affirmative plan was in fact being implemented by malovalonet half-breed robots, would it ever work? I don’t think so. This argument was especially deadly on the topic which mandated that the US “increase its support of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations.” Not only were there great articles claiming that the UN was a Reptilian ploy, there was this fantastic picture:

Enough said.

PS – I should note that David Icke is also an anti-semtic nutjob. Just putting that out there.

Ta-Nihisi Coates does some thinking on the question:

Also, Vogeli gets at the essential problem of conservatives and black voters–the dodginess of the “limited government” defense. To oppose Affirmative Action and hate crime legislation from the perspective of limited government is an honest position that probably could be explained to the African-American voter. But it can’t be explained when the people who hold that position support other massive intrusions of government–like the drug war,and the expansion of prisons. Unfortunately, that leads to my critique of the article–I didn’t see anything on what a conservative pitch to African-Americans would look like. I’ve said this before–if conservatives want the black vote, it’s not enough to outline what your against, you have to say what you’re for. I didn’t get that from the piece. I still have no idea why any African-American should ultimately support a Republican.

One other thing. For those who wonder why I’m so into this subject, I say the following. I’m a liberal, no doubt. But as a black person–and I guess as a liberal–I’ve never thought it was a good thing that nine out of ten black people think that basically half the American electorate would like to see them back in chains. I’d much rather that nine out of ten blacks vote Democrat out of a serious committment to liberalism, not because they basically don’t have a choice. That sense, that there really is only one electoral option, is not good for black folks, and it’s not good for the country at large.

I happen to agree with Coates about the large point that it isn’t ideal for a large racial minority to be voting 9-1 for one party. It means that their votes get taken for granted by one party, and that the other party simply doesn’t care about them. But, unlike Coates, I think there are plenty of “good” reasons (i.e. similiar to the reasons most other people vote Republican) for some Black people to vote for Republicans. After all, if you’re a middle class black person, or especially a wealthy one, then Republicans being tough on crime won’t really affect you, it’s not your children that are making up the horrifically high numbers of black men in prison. Obviously historical and cultural considerations come in to play, and that’s why Blacks vote in such high margins for Democrats, but it’s not like the Republican message is especially off-putting for all Blacks.

I should add that another weird racial-political distortion we have is Voting Rights Act mandated districting. David Epstein explained in a TAP article from 2006 that guaranteed minority-majority districts aren’t necessarily the best vehicle for repersenting minority political concerns:

The fact is, the voting arrangements that elect the most minorities as possible to office are not the same as those that do the most to promote the policy goals supported by minority voters. This wasn’t always the case; it used to be that the best way to get pro-minority legislation was to construct districts that were sure to elect minority-supported representatives. But with the decrease in polarized voting in the South, and increased polarization between the parties in Congress, this equation no longer holds. Indeed, research I have conducted with Sharyn O’Halloran shows that with the rise of the Republican Party’s fortunes in the South, the “hazard rate” in that region is now 2 to 1: for every extra majority-minority district created, that is, two extra Republicans get elected from surrounding districts. This means that, on average, each additional majority-minority district results in the loss of one vote for minority-supported legislation.

Of course, it sounds like you’re forcing black voters to the back of the bus by saying that the Democrats will be able to pass their preferred legislation, but that they won’t have any black representatives. After all, other identity groups don’t have to pass some sort of litmus test to have their representation recognized as legitimate. But still, reforming the Voting Rights Act seems like a conversation worth having. It’s not at all clear if these districts designed for black representation have actually improved the lot of African Americans, or if the basic structure of African American politics (vote Democratic! Get government jobs!) has really worked out for anyone besides those politicians.

Because if you’ve taken AP Statistics , you’ll know that “statistically insignificant” doesn’t just mean “small.” Mark Kleiman explains.

One way to look at the contours in conservative foreign policy thinking over the years is “what foreign policy ideas would lead to the most wars, the highest level of defense spending and the most marginalization of international institutions.” In some cases, it’s really explicit, like PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which basically argues that we need to ramp up defense spending because the US needs to pursue an incredibly ambitious foreign policy. Other conservative foreign policy tomes, like Robert Kagan and William Kristol’s “Toward’s A Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” also argue for an aggressive, ambitious foreign policy, despite the lack of a real rival to deter just ignores whether we could secure the benefits of hegemony (a stable economic system) in a more multilateral way. In fact, they just try to ignore the “where is the threat” question by simply saying it doesn’t matter:

In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible. To achieve this goal, the United States needs a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence

Of course, maintaining hegemony is incredibly expensive and also invites wars and conflict, because just about any country that isn’t supplicant to the US can be viewed as a mortal threat. But it’s hard to ramp up defense spending and support for militarist hegemony without a real, identifiable threat threat. And so Kristol realized that they should find one, and it was China. This was despite China A. not being a threat to US security (and a relatively poor country with military resources that don’t come close to parity with the US) and B. The long-term inability of the United States to prevent China from taking a more assertive role in its near periphery. So it never made sense to paint China as some potential peer competitor. But the entire point of conservative foreign policy writing is to find some country or group or ideology that could be a threat, and then start ramping up defense spending and rattling sabers. Francis Fukuyama, himself a former member of PNAC, admitted as much: “There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well.”

After 9/11, of course, calling China the enemy wouldn’t work anymore. But simply going all out on counter terrorism wouldn’t work either. After all, the consensus among terrorism experts, going back to the 1970s, was that law enforcement, targeted intelligence and eventually some sort of political settlement were the only way to actually reduce and prevent terrorism. But this isn’t really what conservative foreign policy types want to hear. After all, this approach would mean empowering the CIA to do intelligence (which conservative always oppose), and taking resources away from useless military instruments that did nothing to reduce terrorism (fighter jets, submarines, tanks). So what did they do? Well, they eventually just decided to invade a country, but before that, they tried to define Islamic terrorism as distinct from all previous forms of terrorism. For them, it was like the Soviet Union, a basely evil, nihilistic death cult that would never stop trying to destroy The West until we were all dead. As David Frum and Richard Perle put it in An End To Evil, it was “victory or holocaust.” And so it was pointless to come to any settlement, look into root causes (like US forces in the Middle East) or pursue an incremental law enforcement strategy.

Iraq was supposed to be the vindication of this strategy, and it was a great example of America’s military might. Our tank columns and airplanes shocked and awe the Iraqis into defeat and compliance. The triumphalism on display looks stupid and noxious now, but it made some sense in wake of a rather impressive three week victory over the weak, sclerotic Iraqi military. But we soon realized that just shooting up Iraq wasn’t accomplishing much. There was an insurgency and US forces, despite their overwhelming conventional advantages, weren’t accomplishing much. And so the right needed to latch on to counterinsurgency, which emphasizes population protection, deemphasizes kinetic force, and generally endorses a more holistic way of looking at military conflict resolution. But the logical end of counter insurgency doctrine is that we probably shouldn’t be getting ourselves in insurgencies in the first place, and that if we’re going to be fighting counter insurgencies in the long term, that F-35s, tanks, submarines and all that crap aren’t helpful. But this left conservatives in the same quandary they were in after 9/11. Because of their desire to be the military party, they had to adopt the en vogue military approaches (counterterrorism and then counter insurgency) but try to twist them into their overall goal: massive defense spending to secure endless American hegemony.

But the intellectual game is up. It’s now obvious to just about everyone that the military approach to terrorism doesn’t work. The RAND Corporation released a study arguing that the military approach hasn’t worked, isn’t working and will never work. It’s law enforcement, intelligence and political settlements that will actually reduce the threat of terrorism. The American public now seems to agree – we’re probably not going to see massive support for another war-on-terror inspired war. So what are conservatives to do? As usual, it’s good to look to Robert Kagan. His most recent book The Return of History and the End of Dreams, which is well summarized in his TNR article, is an explicit a return to the type of hegemony-based power politics that he and Kristol were peddling in the 1990s. The two primary threats he identifies are Russia and China. Russia, in particular, is one that he thinks need especially close attention

Putin has created a guiding national philosophy out of the correlation between power abroad and autocracy at home. He calls Russia a “sovereign democracy,” a term that neatly encapsulates the nation’s return to greatness, its escape from the impositions of the West, and its adoption of an “eastern” model of democracy. In Putin’s view, only a great and powerful Russia is strong enough to defend and advance its interests, and also strong enough to resist foreign demands for western political reforms that Russia neither needs nor wants. In the 1990s, Russia wielded little influence on the world stage but opened itself wide to the intrusions of foreign businessmen and foreign governments. Putin wants Russia to have great influence over others around the world while shielding itself from the influence of unwelcome global forces.

Although I think we can agree that we’d rather see Russia be more liberal and less expansionist, can we really be surprised that Russia is becoming more assertive on the international stage? And can we do anything about it? It’s not like Putin is some sort of aberration for Russia or for the world. Russia is a huge country with nuclear weapons, natural resources and a history of empire. Why wouldn’t they be trying to expand – at least into their “near periphery” – especially considering the humiliation they went through in the 1990s? But Kagan doesn’t accept that what Russia is doing is fairly normal; he instead posits that Russia and China are going to plunge us into a 21st century long battle between autocrats and democrats. Kagan thinks that Russia’s hostility towards NATO is a result of its autocracy, not any intrinsic security interests. But wouldn’t any Russia, especially one that is experiencing great economic growth, be a bit ticked off about NATO expanding into countries that were in the former Soviet Union, making noises about expanding into Ukraine and being friendly with Georgia? This is just a country looking after its own geographic interests, it’s hard to see how it being autocratic has much to do with that.

I don’t want to get too far in the weeds dealing with Kagan’s thoughts on the source of Chinese and Russian foreign policy moves recently. Instead, we should look at where his thoughts about the 21st century being a struggle between autocracy and democracy lead us in terms of the direction of US foreign policy. They seem to imply that we need to amp up our military and foreign policy tools so to challenge the rise of autocracy. After all, if we are embarking on another ideological battle we’re going to have to devote major resources, right?

Part of this, as I’ve mentioned before, is downplaying the threat of terrorism. He argues that “The Islamists could not take their societies back 1,400 years even if the rest of the world would let them” Although Kagan is right – no one is going back to 600 – the threat of Islamic terrorism isn’t that they “take their societies back 1,400 years,” but that there could be a nuclear terrorist attack. But once you see Kagan’s lack of concern in light of Robert Gates wanting to reorient the Pentagon towards counter terrorism, it all makes sense. Gates also wants us to cooperate with Russia and China, which Kagan would view as pointless, impossible and dangerous. There’s also the implicit message that a lot of military spending (namely Air Force boondoggles like the F-35) should be eliminated. The only possible justification for buying those planes is if we’re competing with real peer competitors, like Kagan imagines Russia and China to be.

So expect conservatives, at some elite level over the long term, to deemphasize terrorism as the primary threat. It no longer fulfills their desire to see the world as a struggle between strong poles, where the US could lose and it no longer provides justification for massive military spending and expansionism. So now we will hear that cooperation with rising powers is pointless, that they are now a united front for autocracy all over the world and that this is our defining struggle. John McCain, though certainly still pressing the threat of terrorism, has picked up on this shift. Just look at this talk of kicking Russia out of the G8 and his support for a league of democracies, which would essentially be a declaration that Russia and China have no legitimate security interests (not too mention a Trojan horse against the UN – another consistent conservative goal). Thankfully, liberals are getting out ahead on this fight. Fareed Zakaria’s The Post- American World is a stinging refutation of Kagan’s vision of the 21^st century, and hopefully Zakaria’s vision will win out.

There are a lot of things I like – the Golden State Warriors, video games, comfortable beds – but one of my favorites is good, in-depth writing about social policy. I don’t why, but I’ve grown to prefer articles like Emily Bazelon’s school integration piece or Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic article about Section 8 to my old favorite long magazine piece: crazy shit by Robert Kaplan. In that vein, everyone should read Dana Goldstein’s quick interview with Douglas McGray about the Bush administration’s sucess in reducing homelessness. Apparently, the administration let their homelessnes czar, Phillip Mangano, just do his job without any political interference. And since he was a smart, dedicated guy who applied empirical and tested techniques to reducing homelessness, he seems to have done a good job. You should also check out McGray’s Atlantic profile of Mangano.

Also, if you want budding commentary on social policy, you can read my posts at Pushback about school integration and marriage.

UPDATE: Might as well pimp my stuff on Pushback a bit more. I have posts on why TI concerts won’t increase the youth vote and how eliminating agricultural subsides won’t affect the eating habits of Americans in a meaningful way. I know I’m not the best judge, but I’d say these posts are better than what you’re seeing here. Maybe that’s cause I won’t to uphold the sterling reputation of the Center For American Progress, or something like that…

It’s now been confirmed by the Justice Department itself that essentially every hiring there in the past eight years is suspect. They explicitly screen candidates for their political views, put a hack in charge of doing it, fired good USAs because they weren’t following their politically minded prosecution goals and then lied about it. So the question comes, what are we supposed to do about it? Sure, trying to debar Monica Goodling and put more legal heat on Alberto Gonzalez is a good idea, but it doesn’t address the central question: how to get the rot out of the Justice Department so it can actually function as an effective branch of government?

But when Obama tries to do this, just about every lame mainstream columnist will say he’s being overly vindicative and divisive. Also, he could piss off Republicans even more so that they will put up a stronger fight against his fairly ambitious first term agenda (global warming, health care, withdrawing from Iraq). I don’t think he’ll want to take a lot of heat for what can be portrayed as a petty bureaucratic manner.

This does, however, leave a huge opening for John McCain. If he were to promise to make one of his priorities the “professionalism and honor” government, and then make signals that this means going after the Bush justice department, he would be able to separate himself from Bush, not particularly anger the Base (they’ve abandoned Fredo) and get him back on his reformist/mavericky tread, where he’s clearly more comfortable.

And even if the above scenario is rather unlikely, it helps show that a real McCain administration could interact pretty oddly with a Democratic congress. When you look at the last time this happened (Clinton after 1994), they were able to pass the stuff they agreed on (relatively conservative budgets, welfare reform, DOMA, NAFTA). And in the case of NAFTA, it was a few Democrats plus most Republicans. So what are those issues with McCain? I think cap-and-trade would be one of them, and maybe some sort of health care reform (perhaps covering catastrophic health care costs?). What’s weird is that this is the only way a McCain administration could possibly govern. But his campaign, and much of the punditry surrounding it (including mine) is totally ignoring the only feasible reality for actual McCain governance. And although I think it’s important document how awful McCain’s fiscal policy is, but there’s also no chance that it will get passed.

So maybe we should only talk about McCain’s foreign policy, where the president has the most influence, and where he, specifically, will be able to most easily overwhelm the preferences of a Democratic Congress.

Tom Slee v Will Wilkinson.

As far as I can tell, these are both people who are outsiders to economics, and have both looked into the discipline and found a solid basis for their chosen political-economic worldview. Specifically, Wilkinson seems to have basically accepted much of the behavioralist revolution, and is generally willing to look skeptically at standard, rational-actor models. He already did an episode with Dan Ariely, but something tells one with Slee would be even better.

For more on Slee, check out his amazon page, Alex Tabarrok’s rave review of No Makes You Shop At Wal Mart and his blog.

As a reward for cleaning out my bookshelf, my parents are buying me some books. Recommendations? Books I shouldn’t buy? Gimme what you got.

Don’t worry – Nixonland is number one on the list (hell, I just knocked off Anna Karenina, so the 800 pages is cool).

That’s a little exaggerated, but the Times is reporting that a court in Turkey has refused to ban the governing AKP party. Although this shouldn’t be surprising, considering Turkey’s history of the secular elite overthrowing Islamist leaning parties, it actually is. It’s also incredibly important. For a long time, among many secular elites, the Turkish model was thought to be the right one for the Islamic world. And for a long time, they seemed right. The Turks managed to keep Islamic political feeling under control, and be a dependable ally to the West. But other countries attempted this strategy, and it hasn’t worked as well. Egypt, for example, runs a similar (less democratic) model, and it bred the grandfather of Islamic terrorism largely because the government sough to exclude the Muslim Brotherhood from the process. Today, it’s not surprise the the Brotherhood is the largest and most effective democratic advocate in the country.

Turkey is more mature – the AKP, under the leadership of Tayiip Erdogan (who was imprisoned in 1998 for being part of the Islamist Welfare Party) has implemented all manners of reforms with the goal of joining the EU. But they’ve also made some symbolic moves that angered the secular elite – namely trying to allow the wearing of head scarves in schools. Overall, however, they’ve been a liberal party in the sense that they have been democratically elected (47 percent of the vote in a multi-party system) without the implicit support of the illiberal military.

The person who’s shaped my thinking most on Islamic democracy is Shadi Hamid. He had a great piece for Democracy looking at moderate Islamist movements and arguing that the US ought to engage with them. He also had a fantastic post at Democracy Arsenal lamenting the (now moot) possibility of AKP being banned. For people who care about the Middle East and about real democracy promotion, this is a huge deal.

Sorry for being a bit graphic, but that is the main result of one getting their wisdom teeth removed. The actual surgery was uneventful, except for the hour of laughing gas supplemented by the “Pure 80s” CD I picked out (trust me, it was the best one). Let me say, you haven’t lived until you’ve had a dentist hacking out your tooth while listening to Karma Chameleon, without a care in the world (thanks nitrous oxide!).

I think that, among experts of a certain tinge, we’re beginning to see a certain perspective on the conflict become predominant. At this point, the “it’s a genocide, intervene now!” viewpoint of Mia Farrow, Eric Reeves et. al. seems to finally be cracking under both factual and political objections. If you read the Social Science Research Council’s Making Sense of Darfur blog, you’ll see that most of the contributors are very skeptical of the recent ICC indictment of Bashir for genocide. Although they all acknowledge that he’s a bad, murderous dude, many of them are skeptical if such an indictment is really part of a path to peace in what is actually a long term civil conflict.

Alex de Waal, the writer I most trust on Sudanese issues, was seriously unimpressed that the ICC prosecutor managed to accuse the Sudanese president “of the crime for which he is not guilty” (genocide). That’s because despite Bashir’s odious 19 year reign, there is very little evidence that he intended to eliminate the whole of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people. After all, the murders peaked in 2003 and 2004 and, as MSF’s former head helpfully points out, “two million Darfuris have sought refuge around the principal army garrisons of their province…one million of them live in Khartoum.” If what’s going on in Darfur is truly a genocide, then one would imagine these Furs would be faring worse.

Also, de Waal points out that Campo’s indictment doesn’t do justice to what actually happened in Darfur – namely that,  in 2003 and 2004, the Janjaweed killed hundreds of thousands of Darfuri civilians as part of a counter insurgency. Since 2003, 35,000 Darfuris have been killed, and yet the prosecutor bizarrely insists that conditions have actually gotten worse since the international investigation into Darfur, which did not categorize the Sudanese government’s crimes as genocide. Although millions of Darfuris have been displaced since then, I highly doubt that the international community wants to make massive displacement on par with genocide. (Either the US is guilty of genocide in Iraq, or it becomes obvious that Ocampo’s watered down definition isn’t very useful).

But one has to sympathize with the ICC and Ocampo. Genocide isn’t really a neutral description of events, but instead just another way of saying “these guys are really bad!” But people have been fairly aware of the atrocities going down in Darfur since 2003, and at this point, Ocampo’s indictment seems more like a way for the international community to put a fig leaf on its inaction, rather than a manifestation of a neutral pursuit of justice. What’s worrying, however, is that because of it playing fast-and-loose with the term genocide, it will be easier for Bashir to dispute the facts of the indictment, and make justice (or a stop to the war) an even less likely prospect:

Moreno Ocampo’s political misjudgments have made life easier for Bashir and commensurately more difficult for the ICC. By presenting his case in such stark terms, the Prosecutor has made it easy for his critics to dismiss him as ill-informed and driven by a desire for publicity, and has made it harder for the advocates of justice in Darfur to pursue the challenge of calling to account those responsible for crimes no less heinous than genocide.

The entire Kirchick-Alterman-Yglesias feud is weird: a few emails probably could have cleared everything up, but years of nasty posts, clear personal malice and an assortment of slights and insults probably make these three ever talking about Israel damn near impossible. All that being true, JK is being extremly slippery about whether or not – or really to what extent – he misrepresented Alterman and Yglesias’ views about Israel. To be clear, in his first post, he said that Alterman and Yglesias believed in “unconditional Israeli negotiations with Iran and Hamas, unconditional Israeli territorial concessions, the Palestinian “right of return.” Yglesias was pretty clear that he didn’t support negotiations with Iran, had never said anything about Hamas negotiations, didn’t support the right to return and pointed out that Ariel Sharon and much of the Israeli public supports “unconditional territorial concessions.” Alterman was pretty unconditional that he had “never taken a position” on negotiations with Iran or Hamas, nor had he publicly talked about Israeli territorial concessions. So, instead of actually finding quotes that show Yglesias and Alterman taking a stance on these issues, Kirchick offers this:

I ought to have been more precise with the first policy prescription, “Israeli negotiations with Iran.” To my knowledge, J Street, as an organization, has not advocated such negotiations, though it does support high-level American-Iranian negotiations without preconditions and falsely claims that a non-binding House resolution strengthening sanctions on Iran is actually a declaration of war. J Street’s fervent support of Israeli negotiations with Hamas — an Iranian proxy group — is a distinction without much difference.

Umm, negotiating with Iran and negotiating with Hamas are not really the same thing at all. Even if they are connected at the funding or logistical level, they are still different organizations in so much as they would have different things to talk about with Israel. Hamas is the governing party of a large region that borders Israel and that is in military conflict. Iran, on the other hand, doesn’t really have as much too discuss with Israel. So, no, negotiations with one isn’t really negotiations with the other at all. And then Kirchick just ignores the fact that Yglesias and Alterman never said they supported the right to return or “unconditional territorial concessions.” He can’t even manage to prove that J-Street supports Israeli-Iranian negotiations.

So looking at this as objectively as possible (it’s hard, I know), it seems that Kirchick offhandedly imputed certain views to Yglesias and Alterman, Yglesias and Alterman both said he was wrong, and then Kirchick put up a lame defense that doesn’t match up with his previous statements. And although Kirchick would claim that being a vocal supporter of an organization means you are assumed to hold their views, this still doesn’t cut it. But J-Street has never advocated direct Iran-Israel negotiations and hasn’t directly come out in favor of a full right of return. The best I can tell, J-Street supports “resolution of the refugee issue that focuses on resettlement in the new state of Palestine.” This, pretty explicitly, isn’t the “right to return.”
Kirchick would point to their “support” (it’s rather ambiguous) for the Arab Peace Initiative, and its support for Resolution 194, which adopted in 1948, calls for resettlement of refugees. But this isn’t good enough. J-Street supports a mutually agreed upon diplomatic settlement, and most people agree that the Palestinians would give up the right to return if they got a real state with East Jerusalem. It’s hard for an honest observer to look at J-Street’s stated and implicit positions and say that it adds up to a full right to return.

As a pretty adamant free trader who is all sorts of disappointed (but nor surprised) that the Doha talks have collapsed again, I find it weird that Jagdish Bhagwati isn’t discussed very much. American debates about trade are often described as economists v. populists. The economists are supposed to doggedly explain that the benefits from trade are widely distributed and that populists are just trying to protect narrow gains they’ve exploited out of the trade system. The problem is that our trade debate generally comes down to binary discussion over free trade agreements with individual countries. And so whether or not a presidential candidate is supportive of libearlizing trade is determined on what they think about reducing a few trade barriers and imposing American IP laws on relatively small countries (Jordan, Singapore, Columbia, the six countries in CAFTA).

Although I’m more sanguine about these deals (I think that, net-net, they don’t do much), it should be noted that Bhagwati – who wrote In Defense of Globalization - thinks they’re horrible. Here’s Martin Wolf’s blurb:

“The world’s foremost trade policy scholar explains why what he calls ‘preferential trade arrangements’ are not a path towards global free trade, but a dangerous step away from it. A long-standing and brave opponent of these arrangements and particularly of those between hegemonic powers and developing countries, Jagdish Bhagwati explains how they promote costly trade diversion, interfere with the efficient operation of global business, and allow great powers to extract unjustified concessions from weaker countries. This book underlines the abiding wisdom of nondiscrimination, the now almost completely forgotten founding principle of the world trading system, and concludes that the only way to return to sanity is by movement towards free market access for all.

I don’t want to let Obama and other Democrats totally off the hook – in American politics, support for FTAs generally correlates with enthusiasm for multilateral trade deals – but the fact that these deals are really drops in the bucket when it comes to creating a nondiscriminatory, open, liberalized trade environment should be considered when conservative pundits get apoplectic about Obama destroying American prosperity through protectionism. Many purported advocates for free trade seem to be in a state of constant conflict. For them, whether or not we sign this FTA immediately is what determines the fate of the world trading system. But trade barriers are at historic lows, and much of the liberalization that’s left is simply continuing with commitments we’ve already made to the WTO. Of course, we’re not actually doing this liberalization, but that’s hardly the fault of opportunistic Democrats who demagogue NAFTA and CAFTA.

I mean to blog about this earlier, and even though it isn’t hot off the presses, it’s still good for some snark.

Eli Lake reports that Bush is floating the idea of “merit pay” for the State Department. Apparently, this means that diplomats who are particularly good at promoting the Freedom Agenda could get “financial incentives for democracy promotion and human rights work.” So, I guess diplomats will no longer want to work closely with Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Ethiopia due to their abominable democracy and human rights records.

Part of the freedom agenda would be “instructing all senior U.S. officials serving in undemocratic countries to maintain regular contact with political dissidents and democracy activists.” Would democracy advocates. dissidents and political prisoners in Egypt or Uzbekistan count? What about in Jordan? Or just those in Iran, who are either murderous thugs or legitimate activists who don’t want to be tainted by American support.

I can’t really blame Bush for, on one hand, promoting the “freedom agenda” with a straight face, all the while picking and choosing which autocrats he likes and which autocrats he doesn’t. This, of course, is how any country with interests as extensive as the US’ will do its business. One way to avoid sounding (and acting) like such a hypocrite is to simply give up hegemonic aspirations, so that you don’t need to prop up secular autocrats to secure your imperial position in the Middle East for example. Considering that an undying belief in a rather expansive definition of American exceptionalism seems endemic among the political leadership, this mind-set shift is highly unlikely, we can hope for a second option. That’s building strong, expansive institutions that put the promotion of human rights at the center of their mission.

Although these institutions will be created by states who will attempt to gain some short term advantage through them, over time (as individual megastates become less powerful, like the US), they could turn into real, effective actors on the world stage. Until we can get there, however, we’re gonna be stuck with the US having to make nice with all sorts of sundry characters. Hopefully we’ll also have enlightened leadership that puts some effort in strengthening these types of institutions. And maybe then diplomats can earn their human rights based merit pay.

Maybe because I was still in Turkey when it air, but I don’t think there was enough blog discussion of the July 25th edition of Slate’s Poliitcal Gabfest. The weekly podcast is billed as a “weekly discussion of the news…[that] aim[s] to recreate the informal and irreverent discussions Washington journalists have over lunch.” And although I’ve never had lunch with Washington journalists, something tells me that this most recent episode was rather exceptional.

After they had finished the broadcast, a discussion of John Edwards’ alleged affair expanded beyond the three hosts (John Dickerson, Emily Bazelon and David Plotz) to include two of the show’s producers. Unbeknownst to them, however, it was all being recorded.  Despite the fact that that we can hear everything that’s said, It’s hard to discern exactly what happened, except that Emily Bazelon, the unnamed producer and even cool-as-a-cucumber David Plotz drops multiple f bombs, at one point implicitly calling an interlocutor “fucking stupid.” I don’t want to be shocked that a woman is getting angry and starts swearing, but if you’re a long time listener like me, it was rather surprising to see Bazelon rhetorically. I, for one, really enjoyed it.

If you want to listen, go to the Slate page or the iTunes store page and fast forward to around the 38 minute mark if you want to hear the three hosts and the producers mix it up?

Some choice quotes.

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