Obsidian Wings

Repeal the Military Commissions Act

by Katherine

I don't usually go in for online petitions, particularly those sponsored by presidential campaigns, but I make an exception for this one:

http://www.restore-habeas.org/

The presidential candidate is Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who along with Senators Feingold, Leahy, and Menendez is sponsoring a bill to amend or repeal the worst provisions of the Military Commissions Act. It's been endorsed by Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Open Society Institute, Human Rights First, and the Center for Victims of Torture.

In 1945-6, when Dodd was a toddler, his father, Thomas, was the second ranking U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials. He wrote his wife over 400 letters from Nuremburg, including this one:

"I feel badly about you (being alone with the children) But do keep your chin up...I am doing the right thing and I feel sure we will not regret it. Some day it will be a great landmark in the struggle of mankind for peace. I will never do anything as worthwhile . Someday, the boys will point to it, I hope, and be proud and inspired by it. Perhaps they will be at the bar themselves and perhaps they will invoke this precedent and call upon the law we make here."

His son has invoked the precedent many times (for example, he was one of the first four Senators to sponsor a bill outlawing rendition).  He did it again this Tuesday:

In times of peril, throwing away due process has been a constant temptation--but that is why we honor so highly those who resisted it. At Nuremberg, America rejected the certainty of execution for the uncertainty of a trial, and gave birth to a half-century of moral authority. Today I am asking my colleagues to reclaim that tradition,  to put the principles of the Constitution above the passion of the moment. That reclamation can begin today--if we remedy President Bush's  repugnant law. We can do it--and keep America Secure at the same time.

Freedom from torture. The right to counsel. Habeas corpus. To be honest, it still amazes me that we have to come to the floor of the Senate to debate these protections at all. What would James Madison have said if you told him that someday in the future, a Senator from Connecticut would be forced to publicly defend habeas corpus, the defendant's right to a day in court, the foundation of Our legal system  dating back to the 13 century? What have we come to that such long- settled, long-honored rights have been called into question?

But here we are. And now it is upon us to renew them.

Please sign the petition, bug your Senators to support the bill (especially if they're also running for President), and pass the word along.

UPDATE: I should note, it's possible that signing the petition puts you on some sort of Dodd campaign email list, though I did yesterday & I've not gotten any emails yet. In any case calling your Senators about the bill is much more important. The bill # is S.576 and its name is the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007. (ht: Nell).

Read It And Weep

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"When Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his top officers gathered in August 2002 to review an invasion plan for Iraq, it reflected a decidedly upbeat vision of what the country would look like four years after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power.

A broadly representative Iraqi government would be in place. The Iraqi Army would be working to keep the peace. And the United States would have as few as 5,000 troops in the country.

Military slides obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act outline the command’s PowerPoint projection of the stable, pro-American and democratic Iraq that was to be"

You can read the slides for yourselves, though you'll probably need this handy list of acronyms (pdf) to make them comprehensible. Here are a few:

D-Day, as you might imagine, is the day we invade. How the Department of State was supposed to promote the creation of a broad-based, credible provisional government by then when Rumsfeld kept excluding all their experts from planning meetings is a bit of a mystery.

I also note, for the benefit of those of you who have wondered whether or not we believed that Iraq had WMD, that in this slide that's one of our assumptions.

Moving right along:

Cool! We've finished stabilization within 2-3 months of the end of major hostilities, recovery (which I think includes the reconstruction of the entire country) within the next two years, and by four years after the invasion -- which is to say, a month from now -- we're all done! And look how few troops we have in Iraq:

Only five thousand! As far as these PowerPoint slides are concerned, things are going swimmingly, and there's no need to talk about things like timetables for withdrawal, surges, counterinsurgency strategy. After all, Iraq was stabilized within a few months, and the broad-based, credible provisional government has things well in hand, so why bother?

There are, in these slides, various contingency plans. What will we do if we don't get to fly over various countries? How will we respond to a Predator being shot down, to the Iraqis using WMD against us, to a major attack on the Kurds? It's a pity we didn't plan for other contingencies, like an insurgency or a civil war.

Of all the bizarre and irrational things about the administration's prosecution of the war, the nearly total lack of planning for the occupation is the strangest of all. If I try very hard, I can wrap my mind around the idea that people who were supposed to know what they were doing thought invading Iraq was a good idea. But there is no point of view from which the failure to plan for the occupation makes any sense at all.

Preventive War

by Katherine

The single question I'd most like to ask the various democratic presidential candidates (and potential candidates) is their position is on the Bush doctrine of "preventive war"--the idea that it's justified  for the United States to invade another country in "self defense" in the absence of an imminent threat.  Does anyone know if any of them, and particular Hilary, Obama, or Edwards has taken a position on this?

Here are some relevant quotations from former presidents and candidates:

Al Gore, September 2002:

President Bush now asserts that we will take pre-emptive action even if we take the threat we perceive is not imminent. If other nations assert the same right then the rule of law will quickly be replaced by the reign of fear – any nation that perceives circumstances that could eventually lead to an imminent threat would be justified under this approach in taking military action against another nation. An unspoken part of this new doctrine appears to be that we claim this right for ourselves – and only for ourselves....

What this doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.

(continued)

When Keeping It Credible Goes Wrong

by publius

I’ve enjoyed the back and forth on the Iran litmus test. I think Hilzoy and Von have covered a lot of good ground, but I want to add a couple of important points.

First, everyone should be using the word “Publosonian,” as Von did. If you’re not, start. Do it now. Publosonian.

Second, and somewhat more importantly, a common assumption in the Iran debate shared across the political spectrum is that our ongoing threat of military force against Iran is necessary to keep the country honest. This assumption is essentially the “credible threat” theory that plays such a prominent role in game theory. Von expresses it well:

The possibility of attack is significant. It creates a bit of doubt -- we don't think they'll attack, we don't think they possibly can attack, but what if they do? Anyone who has been involved in negotiations (or litigation, for that matter) knows the value of doubt. Doubt of radical action is a sure way to keep folks honest and on point.

This is an example of an idea that is generally accurate in most situations, but inaccurate as applied to Iran. In fact, I would even argue that continuing to “credibly threaten” Iran militarily is the source of — not the solution to — many of our current problems. Frankly, the credible threat of military force is creating the conditions under which military force will become more likely.

I can’t take credit for this idea – I heard it at a policy lunch a few weeks ago. The speaker there noted several specific ways in which our ongoing military threat against Iran is actually undermining our interests, and I tend to agree to them.

An Historic Agreement?

by Charles

From today's Washington Post:

In a landmark international accord, North Korea promised Tuesday to close down and seal its main nuclear reactor within 60 days in return for 50,000 tons of fuel oil as a first step in abandoning all nuclear weapons and research programs.

North Korea also reaffirmed a commitment to disable the reactor in an undefined next phase of denuclearization and to discuss with the United States and other nations its plutonium fuel reserves and other nuclear programs that "would be abandoned" as part of the process. In return for taking those further steps, the accord said, North Korea would receive additional "economic, energy and humanitarian assistance up to the equivalent of 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil.

The pledges -- in an agreement reached here by North and South Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the United States -- marked North Korea's first concrete commitment to carry out an agreement in principle, dating from September 2005, to relinquish its entire nuclear program. In the view of U.S. and allied diplomats, they also amounted to a down-payment on establishment of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and a new set of relations among the countries of Northeast Asia.

As Reagan said, "trust but verify".  The strength of the agreement will lie in how well the five parties can gain access and check on the Hermit Kingdom's activities, and whether the Group of Six can reach the next phase:  dismantling North Korea's nuclear bomb-making capabilities.  Even with the agreement, it still comes down to China since it is the one country that has real leverage over Kim and his regime.  I remember after North Korea's nuclear test last summer, Kim made some belligerent comments, but after a Chinese diplomat or two made some disapproving statements, Kim backed down and expressed regret.  To me, that looked like a possible turning point because China publicly stepped up and confronted the dictator.  Still, skepticism should reign since Kim has been known to change his mind or welsh on an agreement or two.

The Invisible Man

by hilzoy

Of all the things people have said recently on the subject of Barack Obama's negritude, the stupidest comes from a predictable source: CNN's Beck, on his radio show:

"BECK: Yeah, I -- you know, I was driving in today, and I was seeing -- because I saw this piece with him on 60 Minutes -- and I thought to myself, he is -- he's very white in many ways.

GIORDANO: Uh-huh.

BECK: And I thought to myself: Gee, can I even say that? Can I even say that without somebody else starting a campaign saying, "What does he mean, 'He's very white?' " He is. He's very white."

[Ed.: No, Beck, you can't say that. The problem is not that the PC thought police disapprove; it's that it's just plain stupid. Also, we know what 'white' means in this context. It means 'articulate.' Just don't go there.]

Beck goes on, now talking to his baffled producer:

"BECK: He is -- he's very -- he is -- he's colorless. He is colorless.

STU: So he's clear?

BECK: When he says -- yes. When he said, you don't notice his color, as a white guy -- and I don't know if African-Americans feel the same way -- but for whites, I think he's colorless. You don't notice that he is black. So he might as well be white, you know what I mean? You see him -- listen to me, listen to me.

STU: I'm trying.

BECK: You see him colorless --

STU: Yeah.

BECK: -- OK, until he starts talking about race issues and he says things, like on this 60 Minutes piece last night, he said, "When I hail a cab." And I thought, "What?" And then all of a sudden, I noticed his color."

Ah. Colorless. Back in the day, a friend of mine and I used to refer to ourselves as pigmentationally challenged, but apparently we've got nothing on Barack Obama: he literally has no color at all. That explains why he always wears a hat and dark glasses, and has those bandages on his face:

The wonderful thing about Obama's having no color is that it prevents people like Beck from being able to tell that he's black -- until he mentions hailing a cab, at which point his actual features briefly become visible, before fading away again.

This explains a lot.

Pretty Party

by von

InstaPundit:

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc.

Yglesias' response:

I mean, how is this going to work? We're talking, presumably, about the clandestine branches of the same intelligence agencies who can't decide what the state of the Iranian nuclear program is, don't know where Iran's nuclear facilities are, and are unsure who, if anyone, in the Iranian government is responsible for Iranian weapons winding up in Iraq. Nevertheless, Reynolds believes they have an off-the-shelf plan for placing assasins in close proximity to key Iranian nuclear scientists. But not only for doing this, but for doing it quietly! American agents are infiltrating Iran killing Iranian scientists and religious leaders and none of them get caught. How? Are there really dozens of Farsi-speaking ninjas working for the CIA? I was going to compare this to a fun-but-stupid movie like The Bourne Identity but the point of that movie (and its sequal) is actually that if you somehow did build a hyper-competent utterly secret government agency it would likely become a cesspool of corruption and abuses of power."

Well said.  A few further comments:

1.  I have no idea what "high-profile diplomacy" means.  Perhaps Reynolds means that he does not endorse high-level diplomacy, wherein actual decisionmakers meet.  I continue to be befuddled by this reaction, which is common to certain post-9/11 "everything changed" bloggers (as well as portions of the Bush Administration).  There certainly are situations in which nothing can be gained by high-level diplomacy, and thus it shouldn't occur.  The assumption that high-level diplomacy is generally a sign of weakness, however, is simply wrong -- unless you view Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan as generally weak presidents.

2.  Assume that the government would like to do all the things that Reynolds would like to do -- viz., "killing radical mullahs [charitably assuming he means those who threaten the US or its interests; I don't endorse just going around and killing radicals] and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business."  The question is not what it (or we) would like, but what can be done given the finite resources available, the competence of government, and the risks created by a (multi) adversarial game -- as well as how we do it. 

3.  Also glaringly absent from the Reynoldian utopia is any notion of what would happen in the wake of these things that we would like to happen.  Or, frankly, any demonstrated education relevant to, or history of, his or Mr. Hewitt's abilities to make such predictions. 

We're in the "I want a pony" realm of foreign policy, wherein the US can do anything and it's free too. Given that the last round of I-want-a-pony (a round that I supported, incidentally) resulted in a not-so-good outcome in Iraq, I'm hesitant to buck history again and support Reynolds' pony-wanting on Iran.

The Long View

by von

Hilzoy, below, responds to my post criticizing Publius's litmus test for Iraq:

Any Democrat who supports military action against Iran gets a primary challenger. Any presidential candidate who supports military action against Iran loses primary support. Period. No exceptions. 

I called this litmus test "profoundly unwise."  Hilzoy partially disagrees.  In hopes of finding some kind of common ground, I'll respond to her points.

First, Hilzoy questions my claim (in comments) that "Iran lacks a way to respond directly to a US (or an US/Israeli) attack."  (Emphasis in original.)  Quoting another part of the same comment, Hilzoy argues that Iran can do a lot more to meddle in post-war Iraq by sending sophisticated weapons to insurgents. 

Of course it can -- that is precisely why I disfavor military action against Iran at the moment.  As Hilzoy notes, there are well-established links between the Iranian government and elements of the Shia insurgency.  There is also evidence that elements of the Iranian government are already supplying sophisticated anti-tank and anti-personnel weapons to parts of the insurgency, as well as financial and other aid.  In the aftermath of a US attack on Iran, it could get much worse. 

But, as I noted in the same comment, there are reasons why Iran will think twice (or limit) its involvement in Iraq -- even in the wake of a US attack.  Foremost among them is the substantial opposition that it will face from the Gulf States -- states already wary of Iran's expansionism.  Turkey and Syria also have reasons to discourage further Iranian involvment in Iraq.  (Remember that the Syrian-Iranian alliance is purely one of convenience.) Moreover, without a nuclear deterrent, a significant escalation by Iran in Iraq risks further counterstrikes from the US.  This is why I wrote that "The Iranian leadership knows that it cannot prevent airstrikes, and also that it has no good options if they occur." 

That's not the same thing as saying that Iran has no options in Iraq or that an attack on Iran by the US will be essentially costless -- arguments that Hilzoy seems intent on rebutting, despite the fact that I actually agree with her on those points.  Nor is ackowledging that Iran can cause havoc in Iran through its proxies the same as stating that Iran can "directly" attack US forces.  In an effort to paint as dire a picture as possible regarding military action on Iran, Hilzoy avoids the point that Iran cannot directly respond to US airstrikes and that the indirect responses that are available to Iran are not ideal to Iranian goals. The dire portrait is a convenient fiction -- although, judging by our commentators, one that will be eagerly embraced.  There are very good reasons to oppose military action on Iran, but it does no one any good to overstate them.

Second, Hilzoy writes that "speculation about war with Iran generally involves not a US strike out of the blue, but a pattern of provocation by the US that ultimately leads to some Iranian retaliation, which in turn allows us to attack Iran."  This is wholly irrelevant to Publius' proposed litmus test, and an attempt at misdirection.  Publius proposes restraining the hand of any Congressperson or Presidential aspirant -- regardless of the Bush Administration's alleged motivations or the available evidence.  If you're interested in a litmus test that says that Congresspeople and Presidential aspirants should fairly judge the evidence themselves, avoid engaging in deceptions, and act with prudence -- a litmus test that Hilzoy's argument would support -- I'll wholeheartedly agree to it.  But that isn't what Publius has proposed.

Third, Hilzoy makes a series of arguments that these are unusual times and/or that the litmus test isn't such a big deal anyways because it will be subject to all sorts of unspoken caveats and, anyway, no one will really pay attention to it.  Regarding the latter, arguing that the litmus test is effectively irrelevant is hardly reason to support it.  Regarding the former, we are always living in unusual times.  I'm not all that old, but I remember the unusual times of the '80s, when, allegedly, everything changed as a result of the Reagan revolution, the yuppies, Star Wars, the upcoming nuclear holocaust, etc.  I remember the unusual times of the 80s-90s, when the Berlin Wall fell.  I remember the unusual times of the 90s, when the words ".com" somehow became a product and a new economy ruled. 

There always are unique circumstances, a President who seems certifiably insane to 50% of the electorate, and new challenges.  Rather than panic in response, we need to take the long view regarding such matters.  A litmus test on Iran is a mistake:  There are other ways to argue against a strike on Iran.  Publius' call should be rejected.

UPDATE:  I've spent some time re-reading the comments, as well as Hilzoy's responsive post.  I think everyone would benefit if you would look at the words of Publius' litmus test -- reprinted above -- and defend that test, not some hypothetical test that involves caveats or Administrative deception. 

Supporting Our Troops

by hilzoy

Two items. First (h/t Atrios):

"Iraq War veteran Christopher Carbone said he wouldn't mind a decrease in his medical benefits if it meant that additional federal dollars would be used for armored Humvees on the battlefield.

But Carbone, a survivor of an improvised explosive device attack in Iraq in October 2005, couldn't help being a little jarred when he learned the Bush administration planned to cut funding for veterans' health care by 2 percent in 2009 in order to balance the federal budget by 2012.

"It's kind of surprising," Carbone, 28, of North Haledon, said Monday. "It's one of those things that you always expect to be taken care of after everything you do." (...)

After a $4 billion increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head, even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly -- by more than 10 percent in many years. White House budget documents assume that the veterans' medical services budget -- up 83 percent since Bush took office and winning a big increase in Bush's proposed 2008 budget -- can absorb a 2 percent cut the following year and remain essentially frozen for three years in a row after that.

The proposed cuts are unrealistic in light of recent VA budget trends, sowing suspicion that the White House is simply making them up to make its long-term deficit figures look better, critics say.

"Either the administration is willingly proposing massive cuts in VA health care," said Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas, chairman of the panel overseeing the VA's budget, "or its promise of a balanced budget by 2012 is based on completely unrealistic assumptions.""

Second, one of those stories I hoped I'd never read, but knew I would:

" It took two years of hell to convince him, but finally Jonathan Schulze was ready.

On the morning of Jan. 11, Jonathan, an Iraq war veteran with two Purple Hearts, neatly packed his US Marine Corps duffel bag with his sharply creased clothes, a framed photo of his new baby girl, and a leather-bound Bible and headed out from the family farm for a 75-mile drive to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minn.

Family and friends had convinced him at last that the devastating mental wounds he brought home from war, wounds that triggered severe depression, violent outbursts, and eventually an uncontrollable desire to kill himself, could not be drowned in alcohol or treated with the array of antianxiety drugs he'd been prescribed.

And so, with his father and stepmother at his side, he confessed to an intake counselor that he was suicidal. He wanted to be admitted to a psychiatric ward.

But, instead, he was told that the clinician who prescreened cases like his was unavailable. Go home and wait for a phone call tomorrow, the counselor said, as Marianne Schulze, his stepmother, describes it.

When a clinical social worker called the next day, Jonathan, 25, told again of his suicidal thoughts and other symptoms. And then, with his stepmother listening in, he learned that he was 26th on the waiting list for one of the 12 beds in the center's ward for post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers.

Four days later, on Jan. 16, he wrapped a household extension cord around his neck, tied it to a beam in the basement, and hanged himself. (...)

Dead flowers from the funeral and a small American flag that marked the grave were disappearing beneath the drifting snow.

"This never should have happened," said James, tears welling behind a pair of sunglasses.

"This country should have taken better care of one of its sons. They owed that to Jon.""

Yes, they do.

Iran And Litmus Tests

by hilzoy

About Iran: three main points, two of which involve disagreeing with von. That's unfortunate, since I prefer agreeing with him, but them's the breaks.

First, von wrotes in a comment that "Iran also lacks the capability to inflict significant harm on our assets in theater", and uses this as (part of?) an argument that "to pretend that we couldn't inflict substantial damage on Iran while escape immediate repercussions is to engage in fiction -- one not useful to this debate." Since I buy into the "fiction" that we cannot inflict substantial damage on Iran without immediate repercussions, at least if we're talking about inflicting damage militarily, I should explain.

As I see it, our decision to invade Iraq was disastrous on a number of levels, one of which was that we gave Iran considerable leverage over us by ensuring that our army would be, for the foreseeable future, occupied with important tasks in Iraq, during which time it would be an extremely convenient target for Iran. Had we not invaded Iraq, we would not only have our army intact and only preoccupied with one war; we would not have left them scattered about a neighboring country like so many hostages. As it is, however, there they are; and while it would be nice to pretend we do not have to take this into account, that would be, in von's terms, a fiction.

Iran could do all sorts of things to make our lives more difficult in Iraq. It could urge its proxies to attack us more frequently; possibly, quite a lot more frequently. Matt Yglesias claims that Iran could send Iraqi militias a lot more sophisticated weaponry than they seem to have used so far, and even if the very worst of the Bush administration allegations about Iran supplying the militias is true, it's hard to think that Matt's wrong on this point. To quote two sources I trust on this point, here's Andrew:

"Whether or not they can reach these shores, as long as there are U.S. forces in Iraq they don't need to do much more than smuggle more and more sophisticated weapons systems to those we already fight in Iraq to hurt us. Imagine an insurgency armed with surface-to-air missiles and as many explosively formed penetrator IEDs they want. The losses we're taking in Iraq now would pale in comparison to those we would face if we went to war with Iran. Is striking at Iran worth that risk?"

And Wes Clark says that "this is a struggle that will be costly for all involved, will further isolate the region, and whose ultimate outcome is likely to be decided by future incumbencies. Leaders on both sides should recognize that war is the most unpredictable of human endeavors, and that unanticipated consequences almost always follow."

Moreover, there's always the truly awful possibility that Iran or its proxies might attack our supply lines. Here's Andrew again, on the likely results of a Shi'a uprising leading to attacks on supply lines:

"The results would be devastating. For those who think the Israeli actions in Lebanon have been horrid, the results of a U.S. fighting withdrawal from Iraq would be orders of magnitude worse. U.S. forces would, by and large, be able to get out of the country, but they would leave thousands if not tens of thousands of Iraqi dead behind.

This ought to make it quite clear that the U.S. cannot afford such an outcome. Whatever good U.S. forces have accomplished in Iraq over the past three years would be completely destroyed. Our enemies would have a massive victory they could use to rally more fighters to their cause. Iraq itself would not only devolve into chaos, but we would have an inordinate amount of blood on our hands. Whatever mistakes this administration has made thus far, they simply must find a way to avoid inciting the Shiites against the U.S. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate."

These look a lot like "serious repercussions" to me.

Second: speculation about war with Iran generally involves not a US strike out of the blue, but a pattern of provocation by the US that ultimately leads to some Iranian retaliation, which in turn allows us to attack Iran. Some analysts, like James Fallows, don't say explicitly that this might be intended by the US. Others do:

"At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs."

There are all sorts of reasons why this would be an incredibly bad thing to do. For one thing, it would be immoral; for another, it would be immensely damaging to our national interests. But one point that I haven't seen made often enough is that this is an incredibly reckless thing to do when we have troops in theater. It amounts to using the people in our armed forces to provoke Iran, or to tempt it into retaliation, as if they were bait in a trap. We should never, never forget that if the Bush administration is trying to provoke Iran, then what it is trying to provoke Iran to do is to attack our troops so seriously that we seem to have no choice but to retaliate; and moreover, that those same troops are likely to pay a very steep price if we do attack. (See point 1 above.)

We owe them better than that.

Third: In normal circumstances, I would agree with von's point about litmus tests. I think that they are, under normal circumstances, profoundly unwise, though I'd disagree with some of his points of emphasis. However, these are not, to my mind, normal times, and in this case I think that some sort of litmus test would be appropriate. (I'd assume that such a litmus test would be subject to the same sorts of unspoken exemptions as, say, most promises: I say I'll meet you for lunch, but you and I probably both know that there are some range of circumstances -- say, your spouse having to be taken to the hospital immediately -- in which you can legitimately fail to show up.)

There are, after all, a lot of things such that, if my Congressperson voted for them under almost any foreseeable circumstances, I would never vote for him or her again given any remotely credible alternate candidate. If, for instance, my Congressperson voted to invade Canada, or to launch nuclear weapons at the UK, or to legalize hunting criminals for sport to save on prison costs, or to cull the unemployed, then under almost any foreseeable circumstances, as far as I am concerned, that would be that.

Most of the time, we don't need to bother to make this explicit. Of course we're not going to invade Canada. Not invading Canada is, I suppose, a litmus test issue for me, but it's one I don't need to bother to inform my representatives about, since I assume that the occasion to use it as a litmus test will not arise.

But this time is different. This time, to my amazement and horror, there seems to be some possibility that we might do one of those disastrous things. Moreover, we have a President who is apparently willing and able to do completely disastrous things, no matter how many people oppose him. So I might as well say so.

Moreover: some of the reasons von gives for opposing litmus tests basically involve bad consequences. For instance: a litmus test on Iran would remove the possibility of attack, which would harm our negotiating position (if we were willing to negotiate; it seems odd to credit the Bush administration with having anything worthy of being called a 'negotiating position' with respect to Iran.) If an attack is called for, it might make people in Congress less willing to go along with it. And so forth.

Here I think it's important to estimate the risks and possible benefits of any litmus test correctly. Publius and me calling for a litmus test on Iran is not likely to "remove the threat of military action from the table." We are not that influential. Heck: even kos is not that influential. All we are likely to accomplish is to make it clear that when Congresspeople consider the use of force in Iran, they should be aware that there is a potential political downside to using it. That might, as von notes, make them unduly hesitant if an invasion were called for, though it would also prevent them from being unduly eager to support military action against Iran if it were not called for.

Question: which scenario is more likely? Personally, I think that it's very unlikely that we will find ourselves in circumstances in which it would make sense for us to invade Iran as things are, with our armed forces preoccupied, our army and marines sitting right next door with bulls-eyes painted on their backs, and our credibility in tatters. Since it would take something truly extreme to make military action a good idea, and since given anything extreme, Americans would probably support military action, I'm not terribly worried about that possibility. The possibility that Bush might get us into war with Iran, and that Congress would fail to oppose his action decisively enough, strikes me as a much more serious danger.

For that reason, even if Publius and I were somehow able to deprive the administration of the ability to make credible threats, I think I'd say: well, that's what comes of having a President who is too reckless and irresponsible to be trusted with the ability to make threats. One more reason to elect sane people to the Presidency. Given our actual power, however, I'm pretty comfortable with the costs and benefits.

About our Republic: I welcome correction by those among you who are Constitutional scholars, but: I have always thought that while we do elect representatives to exercise their own judgment, the point of having them elected at all is to ensure that they are to some extent constrained by public opinion. Normally, I would want those constraints not to be too tight: I want representatives to be free to do things that they take to be unpopular but right, and to wait until the next election before having to face a referendum on what they've done.

That said, however, I also think that the Constitution rightly does not give the power to declare war to any one person, but to the Congress as a whole. Moreover, the Framers of the Constitution seem to me to have envisaged a world in which wars were declared, in which the famous power of the purse was a tool that might actually be used, not an invitation to describe anyone who advocates using it as failing to support the troops, and, importantly, in which Presidents might face reelection, rather than being term-limited out. All of these things would increase the influence of public opinion on decisions to go to war.

We now face a situation that is, I think, quite troubling from a Constitutional point of view. All the tools by which Congress might affect the decision to go to war seem to have atrophied. Moreover, the military budget is complex enough that any attempt to cut out funding for some particular purpose, like, say, a particular war, might very well not succeed. We have a President who is in his second term, and who therefore cannot stand for reelection. Moreover, he is a person who seems to give precisely no thought to the political interests of others or public opinion; and while I do not really want to say that he gives no thought to the interests of the country, his grasp of those interests seems to be nonexistent.

I think that while it's a good idea, in general, not to try to constrain our representatives too closely, the biggest danger we face right now is not that they will be too responsive to our every whim, but that a President with no political stake in how things turn out and no grasp of the national interest might do immense damage to our country and our interests, not to mention Iran. Again: I think that this is the sort of thing that only ends up looking like a good idea when normal mechanisms break down: when we end up with leaders who seem not to give a damn what we think. Likewise, grounding your teenager is not a good idea in general, but when your teenager starts staying out until all hours on school nights, wrecking cars, knocking over convenience stores, and so forth, it might be the best option available to you, given the situation.

It would certainly be odd for someone who knew about your situation to complain that you had insufficient respect for the importance of teenagers' being free to make their own decisions, as though your decision to ground your teenager reflected not a situation that was spiraling out of control, but simply your general dictatorial tendencies.