Obsidian Wings

Seeing Oil Spots

by Charles

The latest by Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. is worth a whole read, so I'm only excerpting the summary:

Because they lack a coherent strategy, U.S. forces in Iraq have failed to defeat the insurgency or improve security. Winning will require a new approach to counterinsurgency, one that focuses on providing security to Iraqis rather than hunting down insurgents. And it will take at least a decade.

The history and strategy for stabilizing Iraq is there for the taking.  Bush spoke indirectly about the oil-spot strategy (noted here), but as with many other aspects of this war, it's been poorly executed and communicated.  Krepinevich spoke of the winning "hearts and minds" in three key areas.  No less important is an effective campaign for ratifying a fairly decent constitution this coming October (Mark Steyn touches on it here).  When Donald Rumsfeld appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the second thing Senator John Warner should ask the Defense Secretary is what steps our armed forces are taking to implement this time-tested military/political strategy (it even worked in Vietnam, until it was abandoned).  The first thing Warner should ask is for Rumsfeld's resignation.

This is a public service announcement...

With guitar!

Ok, scratch the guitar part.  I've contacted Typepad about the timetag issue, and they've recommended that I (or the blogowner) republish the whole flippin' blog.  I'm attempting to do that today, and I have no idea whether having other users log in as Moe will interrupt the process, so please...don't.  I got as far as 2000 or so pages on republish this morning, and then it died.  I'm going to try once more and if it doesn't work, I'll try it again tonight, when maybe things aren't so busy.

UPDATE:  Well, THAT didn't work.  Appealing to the MT Gods, me.

UPDATE, Update:  I've exhausted everything I know to try, and I've got the Typepad folks working on it.  If it's got both them and me stymied thus far, no amount of complaining on your part is going to fix it.  Thanks for your patience and/or restraint.  If you've got some some suggestions as to what to do that perhaps we haven't already tried, please do offer them in comments.  Pointing out that this is yet another place where timestamps would be useful is not, in point of fact, helpful.  Typepad's replies to the trouble ticket I submitted seem to indicate we're not the only weblog bothered by this problem, so it may very well be a problem with Typepad itself.

In other news, an issue near and dear to my heart (and probably none of yours) is nearing fruition:

Katrina: Disaster

by hilzoy

I didn't watch the news today until 10pm, and so didn't know how much worse things had gotten (though I can now see that I would have if I had checked Gary's comments instead of writing a new post. And no, Gary, this is not the first time...) Yesterday I was relieved that New Orleans had dodged a bullet; today I see that the bullet just turned itself right around and came back. And the devastation from Mississippi and Alabama is awful.

No one seems to have any idea how New Orleans will cope. Well over ten thousand people in the Super Dome with no electricity, no AC, and no working sewage system. Looters running through the street. And, last I heard, another levee about to give way.

Here's the url for the Red Cross. They need our help.

*** Update: From the NYT:

"On the day after Hurricane Katrina was declared to be not as bad as originally feared, it became clear that the effects of the storm had been, after all, beyond devastation. Homeowners in Biloxi, Miss., staggered through wrecked neighborhoods looking for their loved ones. In New Orleans, the mayor reported that rescue boats had begun pushing past dead bodies to look for the stranded living. Gas leaks began erupting into flames, and looking at the city, now at least 80 percent under water, it was hard not to think of last year's tsunami, or even ancient Pompeii. (...)

People who think of that graceful city and the rest of the Mississippi Delta as tourist destinations must have been reminded, watching the rescue operations, that the real residents of this area are in the main poor and black. The only resources most of them will have to fall back on will need to come from the federal government.

Those of us in New York watch the dire pictures from Louisiana with keen memories of the time after Sept. 11, when the rest of the nation made it clear that our city was their city, and that everyone was part of the battle to restore it. New Orleans, too, is one of the places that belongs to every American's heart - even for people who have never been there.

Right now it looks as if rescuing New Orleans will be a task much more daunting than any city has faced since the San Francisco fire of 1906. It must be a mission for all of us."

Formative Experiences: Foreign Policy

by hilzoy

While thinking about Sebastian's thread, it occurred to me that my thinking about foreign policy crystallized around some very specific episodes, and that it would be interesting to know what everyone else's were. (It might also help us know where everyone else is coming from. On reflection, I found I could barely imagine what it would be like to have the reference points of someone, say, 15 years younger than me.) Here are mine. (Just foreign policy; adding domestic policy would take too long.)

When I was growing up, both the war in Vietnam and the Cold War were the backdrop to everything. My parents were, basically, liberal internationalists. They had met in Paris, in 1954 and therefore they had followed the French Indochina war, and therefore they knew a fair amount about Vietnam way before the US got seriously involved, and thought our getting involved was a bad idea from the outset. And this meant that they did not go through any sort of wrenching change of heart in 1965 or '66, and thus were at no risk of lurching from too far on one side to too far on the other. They just thought that we did not have significant national interests there, and that there was no real case for going to war to support one bad regime against another. I tended to agree. (And I read a lot about it later, not wanting to be stuck with a kid's understanding of it, and have never seen any reason to change my mind.)

The major lesson I took from the Vietnam war, as a kid, was this: it seemed to me that we had gotten into it without having fully thought it through. What if advisors weren't enough? Were we prepared to send troops? What if the troops we sent weren't enough? Etc. By the time I started being really aware of the war, around '67 or '68, it seemed to me to be a kind of situation I (as a kid) completely recognized from my own experience: the kind where you say something dumb without thinking, and then are made to follow up on it in some way, and then can't figure out how to backtrack, and end up having completely painted yourself into a corner with no way out. The obvious way to deal with these situations, thought 8 year old me, was not to get into them in the first place, and if you do, just apologize immediately and extricate yourself. (I did not, then or now, consistently act on this knowledge, more's the pity.) Likewise here: I thought you should never get into a war without being very clear about how you can get out again without damage to your credibility. Never, never, never. And never for some vague reasons like: this is communism, we should oppose communism, therefore we should intervene. Never, ever get into a war without knowing exactly what you're doing.

About the Cold War: it was just omnipresent, though in its later, 60s form. It's relevant, though, that my mother is Swedish (she moved to the US after marrying my Dad), and so half my relatives were (a) not from the US (which meant that I always knew what it was like to see the US from the outside), and (b) living disproof of the idea that all leftists were communists. (It's hard to disbelieve in the existence of people who are, in fact, your grandparents: proud and committed socialists (and democrats) who took it to be obvious that the US was a fundamentally admirable country and the USSR was not.)

It was also part of the backdrop of my childhood that the US government sometimes did the right thing and sometimes did not. The major political events of my parents and their friends were World War II and McCarthyism, which made either reflexive dislike of or reflexive cheering for the US and all its works just impossible. Our basic assumption, when I was growing up, was that the US was founded on admirable principles to which it sometimes lived up and sometimes did not, and that it was our job as citizens to help it to do the right thing more often.

What If They Both Have Headaches?

by Charles

For the life of me, I can't figure what's more unsettling:  an article about an Egyptian woman promoting the practice of polygamy in her country, or the fact that this was published in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Aim to the Middle

The current "Able Danger" story is interesting, but I have resisted commenting on it for the same reason I don't comment on reports that bin Laden has been captured--initial reports on sensational subjects may differ greatly from final reports (see also "we found WMD").  But I was reading this comment thread at crookedtimber and one of the comments really struck me--because it reflects a common complaint, and it crystalized for me why the complaint is often wrong. 

Henry,
As I posted over at Drum’s, the thing to think about is this: British counterintelligence was consistently punked throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s (and some fairly vital nuclear weapon secrets lost in the process) by consistently rejecting suspects/hypotheses because no matter what their preliminary investigations came up with everyone knew that people like Philby couldn’t be double agents. Too well-bred and all that. Except of course some of them were.

So the miners build a statistical analysis model (something I greatly distrust) to find bad guys, and out pops the names of a few Undersecretaries in critical positions. What do they do? Discard those names, of course, because “everyone knows” that “those people” couldn’t be suspects. Right.

And I would be reasonably certain that if we went back and ran various federal agencies’ and investment banks’ securities fraud models against the WorldCom data from 1995-2000 that Ebbers’ name would pop out as needing further investigation. For all we know it did at the time. Do you think anyone investigated as a result? As another commentor at Drum’s said, only pee-ons are targets for data mining.

I have lots of libertarian-type concerns about governmental data-mining.  But the concern that some of the rich and powerful might get around it doesn't really bother me.  I'm not rich or powerful, and I don't really have a hope of being such.  But I take it as a given that the rich and powerful get around things all the time.  If it happens with too much frequency it should be minimized whenever possible, but the fact that it happens at all is not a particularly good critique of the system as a whole.  The fact that Kennedy wasn't charged with manslaughter for his youthful indiscretion at 37 in Chappaquiddick doesn't mean that prosecutorial discretion is necessarily a bad thing.  The fact that OJ got off for murder doesn't mean the jury system is all bad (it didn't shake my faith too much, though other cases since have made me want to rethink the jury system but I can't come up with something that is obviously better).  The liberal equivalent would be--the fact that some people game the welfare system doesn't mean the whole thing is bad if it is well balanced otherwise.  In short the fact that systems can be gamed to some extent is an expected fact in the real world.  Of course we should try to minimize that fact, but that isn't a good critique of a system that does well for most people most of the time.  So the question for data-mining shouldn't be "Will anyone ever be able to escape its net?" but rather "Is it useful enough for what we have to give up?"  It isn't clear to me what the answer is, but I'm certain that asking the right question is a good first step. 

Explanations and Terrorist Attacks

--Sebastian

I generally agree with Hilzoy's recent post on justification and explanation but something vaguely nags me about it.  So of course rather than talking about what I agree with I want to talk about what I don't agree with.  Unfortunately I can't quite put my finger on it, so this post is going to be a bit stream-of-conciousness with what I hope is an insightful question at the end.  I think the place that bugs me is:

Just because they're true, however, doesn't mean that there are not other grounds for criticizing me for saying them. I am heartless, more concerned with pointing out your failings than with saving your life, etc. (To amuse yourselves while hammering home the central point, just think of the many, many occasions on which it would be wrong to recite the multiplication tables, true though they be. In the middle of a fight with your spouse, for instance.) In all such cases, the appropriate criticism is not that the person saying these things is saying something false, but that the act of saying it reveals her motives for saying it, or her character more generally, to be in some way bad.

I think that some conservatives tend to make assumptions about liberals that lead them to hear claims about e.g. any possible American role in the genesis of al Qaeda as just this sort of utterly inapt statement. If my first response to the sight of you bleeding on the sidewalk should be to tend to your wounds, not to tell you how dumb you were, then by the same token my first response to 9/11 should have been to tend to, or (if I wasn't in a position to help directly) at least to mourn with, the dead and injured and those who loved them. It should not have been to point out America's role (if any) in the genesis of terrorist movements; and anyone whose first response to 9/11 was not horror but blaming America would, I think, have shown real moral ugliness.

I think that some conservatives make assumptions about liberals that lead them to think that liberals who try to explain such things do so for all the wrong reasons. (Liberals have stereotypes about conservatives too, of course, but they tend not to get tangled up with explanation and justification.) Rush Limbaugh, for instance, thinks that liberals always want to empathize with anyone they can see as 'downtrodden', however loathesome that person might be; that liberals despise America and think that America is responsible for all the world's evils; and that we think that no one from another culture is ever responsible for anything. If you think that liberals are like this, and you hear a liberal say that American policies in the Middle East contributed in some way to the development of al Qaeda or the motives of terrorists, you might well be inclined to think the worst of that person. But that would be because you assumed the worst to begin with.

I think the third paragraph has a bit of a back-door excluded middle argument.  It is almost certainly true that conservatives are making assumptions about liberal speakers and justification, but I don't think it is the assumptions identified.  I definitely think that many liberals tend toward exusing other cultures from responsibility, though I think this impulse was stronger in the 1980s and 1990s than it is now.  But I think that isn't what really worries conservatives.  I think that conservatives worry that the explanations are used to disguise a back-door pacifism or lack of will to fight against people who want to kill us.  The same thing shows up in the "is it a war or mere crime" debate.  It isn't that conservatives don't believe that law enforcement action is hugely important.  They just worry that liberals want to stop there.  They worry that liberals always want to try appeasement, and refuse to stand up to people that actually want to hurt us until it is far too late--and much uglier than if we stop things earlier.  And liberals pretty much play into those fears--Clinton and Carter on North Korea is a classic example.  However bad it would have been to try to deal with North Korea in 1994 and I have no illusion that it could have been awful, kicking it downstream until they actually had nuclear weapons made it far worse. 

Furthermore, liberals don't typically make a big deal to make the difference between justification and explanation very clear so those who are justifying can easily hide out with those who are explaining--we can't tell them apart.  The Sheehan example is demonstrative.  I'm pretty sure that somewhere there is a vocal mother of a dead soldier who isn't so much of an appeaser that she thinks Afghanistan was an unjust invasion.  But you take the easy route, Sheehan is available so hop on the media circus, and we can ignore the fact that almost all of her foreign policy issues are framed like those of a raving lunatic.  She clearly has all the tendencies conservatives fear are hiding in the liberal background, and she is embraced quite easily and very publically by almost the entire spectrum of the left.  Is this because the left agrees with her?  I strongly pressed, some will say no.  But only if really pushed. 

But back to the key question of justification/explanation.  In the 1980s and 1990s there was a strong and growing pseudo-Christian militia movement.  They felt mostly unreasonable and irrational greivances against the US government.  Eventually Timothy James McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building.  He was loosely tied to a number of militia-oriented groups and in interviews spoke to many of their talking points.  Some people used this as a chance to attack Clinton for being weak on security, and I'm sure that some try to use this to raise questions about overreaching government.  But on the whole lots of people didn't care why he did it.  Those who did typically analyzed it from a "he's crazy" point of view.  In other words they would explain things purely from the point of view of what he thought--not from the point of view of trying to analyze the thoughts as legitimate grievances.  And even though he was only loosely affiliated with milita groups, even the loose identification was enough to break the back of the militia movement in the United States. 

Their membership dropped off dramatically and they went from being seen as eccentric in some conservative circles to being much more likely to be seen as dangerous.  Some prominent leaders (such as  Lynn Van Huizen) have attempted to purge the more violent members from the militias.  (Yes I am aware that Neiwert worrys almost incessantly about the militia movement, but even he admits that it fell off dramatically in response to the bombing). 

So why was the reaction so different?  Where is the Guardian article which says: Terrorist action is of course reprehensible, but one must really understand that McVeigh is raising important issues about the interaction between governmental power and its citizenry?  Where is the Robert Fisk clone who get beaten up by the militia and says "if I had been oppressed by the atheist-loving US government for so long I would have done the same?"  Where is the George Monbiot essay written seven days later which says "If Timothy McVeigh did not exist, he would have to be invented?"  Even Patrick Buchanan--general high-profile wack-job conservative--didn't try to explain McVeigh.  There is a key difference in how we reacted to the Oklahoma bombings when compared to how many react to the 9/11 bombings.  Making a binary distinction between justification and explanation doesn't really capture that difference. 

I think that the distinction between justification and explanation as discussed so far fails to capture why so many of the 'explanations' used for Islamism make conservatives queasy.  I can't put my finger on it, but I think the difference in liberal treatment of McVeigh's crazed explanations and those of Islamists might shed some light on the issue. 

Open Thread: Neither Fair Nor Balanced

by hilzoy

I think we are in need of an open thread. As I have nothing particularly interesting to say myself, I'll just cite some quotes that I love.

"Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? ...

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, and easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. ...

I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I'm missing the point -- perhaps while looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain. But they don't seem to care about who they are. Some of them have told me that the very point of searching for God is to forget about oneself, to lose oneself for ever. But it is not difficult to lose oneself, or is it the ego they are talking about, the hollow screaming cadaver that has no spirit within it?

I think that cadaver is only the ideal self run mad, and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need of God. After all, He has no need for us, being complete."

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

"Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"Our lifetimes have seen the opening of abysses before which the mind quails. But it seems to me there are a few things everyone can humbly try to hold onto: love and mercy (and humor) in day-to-day living; the quest for exact truth in language and affairs of the intellect; self-recollection or prayer; and the peace, the composed energy, of art."

Robert Fitzgerald"

"I am tired of innocence and its uselessness."

Adrienne Rich

And, lest this all get too lofty, one more:

Robert Conquest: When his history of Stalin's purges, The Great Terror, was republished after the fall of communism, his American publisher asked him to suggest a new title. He came up with "I told you so, you f*cking fools".

Katrina

by hilzoy

I've been out and about all weekend, doing things other than watching the news, so I only just realized that what was a minor hurricane the last time I checked now has all the makings of a major catastrophe. From the NOAA:

"DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED."

StormTrack puts it more concisely:

"I am going to make this very simple. If you are in Mississippi or Lousiana near or below sea level, GET OUT!!!"

*** Update: here's a link to donate to the Red Cross. (End Update; more or the original post below the fold.)

A Fact To Bear In Mind

by hilzoy

Things do not look good for the Iraqi Constitution:

"Amid conflicting reports about continuing negotiations, government spokesman Laith Kubba told al-Arabiya television that "consensus is almost impossible at this point."

"The draft should be put before the people," he said, referring to the nationwide referendum on the document that must be held by Oct. 15. Many Sunni Arab leaders have urged their followers to vote against the constitution, which can be rejected if two-thirds of the voters in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces oppose it."

It would be bad to have a Constitution that the Sunni Arabs do not support in any case. But the fact that they can block the Constitution if they can get 2/3 of the voters in three provinces to vote against it makes things a lot worse. This is not just because they might actually succeed in derailing the Constitution. The fact that they can credibly threaten to veto it probably made them less willing to compromise in the Constitutional negotiations themselves; and the fact that both supporters and opponents of the Constitution will have an incentive to try to keep people from voting in Sunni provinces will probably lead to a lot more violence there before the Constitutional referendum. And the Sunni Arab provinces need more violence like they need a hole in the head.

For these reasons, it's worth recalling exactly how the provision allowing 2/3 of the voters in any three provinces to block the Constitution made its way into the Transitional Administrative Law. Peter Galbraith:

"The ratification clause of the TAL creates a timed fuse that could blow Iraq apart, and as is true for so much else that has gone wrong, it is American arrogance and ignorance that are to blame. When Iraq's Governing Council was considering the TAL in February 2004, the Kurds came up with a simple proposal to protect their existing autonomy: the permanent constitution would come into effect if ratified by a majority of Iraqis, but would only be operative in Kurdistan if ratified by a majority of Kurdistan's voters. This simple formula, which involved no veto on the ratification on the constitution but only a geographic limitation on where it would apply, was largely acceptable to the Arab Iraqis. But it was not acceptable to the American administrator, L. Paul Bremer, who did not want to concede that Iraq's ethnic communities should be treated differently. He came up with the three-governorate formula, preparing the way for a future train wreck."

Just one more gift from Jerry Bremer to the Iraqi people. I'm sure they're all very grateful.