Obsidian Wings

Idiots. Idiots.

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.

But now, American intelligence officials are publicly softening their position, admitting to doubts about how much progress the uranium enrichment program has actually made. The result has been new questions about the Bush administration’s decision to confront North Korea in 2002.

“The question now is whether we would be in the position of having to get the North Koreans to give up a sizeable arsenal if this had been handled differently,” a senior administration official said this week. (...)

The public revelation of the intelligence agencies’ doubts, which have been brewing for some time, came almost by happenstance. In a little-noticed exchange on Tuesday at a hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Joseph DeTrani, a longtime intelligence official, told Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island that “we still have confidence that the program is in existence — at the mid-confidence level.” Under the intelligence agencies’ own definitions, that level “means the information is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative views” or it is not fully corroborated.

“The administration appears to have made a very costly decision that has resulted in a fourfold increase in the nuclear weapons of North Korea,” Senator Reed said in an interview on Wednesday. “If that was based in part on mixing up North Korea’s ambitions with their accomplishments, it’s important.”"

Let's be very clear about what this means. We used to have a deal, the Agreed Framework, that kept North Korea from getting plutonium. We supposedly discovered that they were cheating on that deal by enriching uranium. Personally, I did not think that was a good reason to scrap the Agreed Framework -- making a uranium bomb takes a lot longer than making a plutonium bomb, and I didn't see why the discovery that North Korea had embarked on a slow, cumbersome process of developing nuclear weapons, one that wouldn't actually produce any weapons for years, was a reason to say: well, go ahead and develop nuclear weapons much more quickly, then!

All this time, though, I was assuming that the North Koreans actually had a uranium enrichment program, and that they actually were cheating on the Agreed Framework. That's what this article calls into question.

If they didn't have a uranium program, then we scrapped the Agreed Framework, and let North Korea access its plutonium and build nuclear weapons, FOR NOTHING.

You might ask: why would North Korea admit to having a uranium program if it didn't actually have one? In this case, there's an obvious answer. Namely: North Korea has a long history of trying to get our attention. In any previous administration, this would have gotten it. (Bear in mind that the Clinton administration nearly went to war with North Korea for things that the G. W. Bush administration has barely reacted to at all.) Claiming that they had a uranium enrichment program when they didn't would be completely in character. (So would trying to develop one. I'm not trying to say that this is evidence that they did not have such a program; just that if they didn't have one, it would not be out of character for them to pretend that they did.)

The NYT tells us what evidence the administration drew on in coming to the conclusion that North Korea did have a uranium program. Here it is:

"The strongest evidence for the original assessment was Pakistan’s sale to North Korea of upwards of 20 centrifuges, machines that spin fast to convert uranium gas into highly enriched uranium, a main fuel for atom bombs. Officials feared that the North Koreans would use those centrifuges as models to build a vast enrichment complex. But in interviews this week, experts inside and outside the government said that since then, little or no evidence of Korean procurements had emerged to back up those fears. (...)

But David A. Kay, a nuclear expert and former official who in 2003 and 2004 led the American hunt for unconventional arms in Iraq, said he had found the administration’s claims about the North Korean uranium program unpersuasive. “They were driving it way further than the evidence indicated it should go,” he said in an interview. The leap of logic, Dr. Kay added, turned evidence of equipment purchases into “a significant production capability.”

But the doubts were on full display on Wednesday, when Christopher Hill, the chief American negotiator with North Korea, testified on Capitol Hill. “If we determine that there is a program, it’s got to go,” Mr. Hill said, words that were far more tentative than American policy makers have used about the program in the past. Expressing his resolve to get to the bottom of the mystery, he added, “We cannot have a situation where we — you know, they pretend to disarm and we pretend to believe them. We need to run this into the ground,” he said, noting that while there was no doubt that North Korea bought centrifuges from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani engineer, there is doubt about “how far they’ve gotten.”

John E. McLaughlin, a former director of central intelligence and the deputy C.I.A. director in 2002, defended the initial North Korean findings as accurate. “At the time we reported this, we had confidence that they were acquiring materials that could give them the capability to do this down the road,” he said in an interview. But no one, he added, “said they had anything up and running. We also made clear that we did not have a confident understanding of how far along they were.”"

So: our negotiator with North Korea is saying things like: "If we determine that there is a program ..." And the ex-DCI tells us that they never said North Korea had anything "up and running". Now they tell us.

Whether North Korea does have a uranium program or not, this is nothing like enough evidence to warrant scrapping the Agreed Framework.

Every time I think that nothing this administration can do could possibly surprise me, I turn out to be wrong.

Heads Should Roll

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post, a followup on the Post's earlier story about appalling conditions for outpatients at Walter Reed:

"Top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including the Army's surgeon general, have heard complaints about outpatient neglect from family members, veterans groups and members of Congress for more than three years.

A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.

Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, said he ran into Kiley in the foyer of the command headquarters at Walter Reed shortly after the Iraq war began and told him that "there are people in the barracks who are drinking themselves to death and people who are sharing drugs and people not getting the care they need."

"I met guys who weren't going to appointments because the hospital didn't even know they were there," Robinson said. Kiley told him to speak to a sergeant major, a top enlisted officer."

I had assumed that the problems the original article described existed because no one who knew about them was in a position to do anything. Somehow, I assumed, the people who had actually seen the moldy, mice-infested rooms, or informed families that their loved ones had drunk themselves to death without anyone noticing, must not have gotten through to their superiors. Maybe they had been confused about who to talk to, or inarticulate in describing the problems; or maybe the whole thing just fell through some gigantic bureaucratic crack, never to be heard from again.

But no. The article has a whole list of people who told senior officials at Walter Reed about the problems outpatients there faced. Senior officials like the people who commanded Walter Reed.

They knew about the problems. They could have done something about them. Why didn't the thought of people who were willing to risk their lives for our country, and who had come back badly wounded, living in rodent-infested rooms, isolated and lost, move them to action? Why didn't the thought: it could be my daughter drinking herself to death, or my son calling and calling and calling to try to find out who he was supposed to see and what he was supposed to do, make them do something to fix it?

And consider this sentence: "These people knew about it," Wilson said. "The bottom line is, people knew about it but the culture of the Army didn't allow it to be addressed." What's that about? I had always heard that the culture of the army involved taking care of your people, never leaving them behind. I wouldn't have thought it meant leaving them in squalor when they had sacrificed their limbs or their brains or their sanity for their country.

Actually, though, I don't really need to know the answers to these questions. However it happened, if people in positions of authority knew about these conditions and did not do everything in their power to change them, then they should lose their jobs. To me, it's as simple as that.

Commendable Commending

by von

LET ME COMMEND this L.A. Times article, which shows that evidence supporting the proposition that we're a poor, crime-ridden people because of immigration is, well, mixed at best.  Or maybe completely made up by an unholy syndicate of crypto-nativists and union activists.  In any event, since the article fits my prejudices and preferences, well, I'd be a damn fool not to pass it along and claim that it proves me right.  Vive comprehensive reform!

(H/T Kevin Drum.)

We Can Do Better Than This

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died."

The story is long, complicated, and tragic. But a couple of things stand out for me, apart from the fact that this should not happen in one of the richest nations on earth.

First, one of the factors involved is that the family's Medicaid lapsed, possibly because the paperwork was mailed to the wrong address. One of the main advantages of a single-insurer model of health care -- a sort of Medicare for everyone -- is that if everyone were covered, there would be no need for families to prove that they were covered, and thus no need for paperwork that might get lost when a family becomes homeless, or simply moves. A huge set of pointless hoops that people have to jump through before they can get medical care -- hoops that don't provide any health benefit at all -- would simply be removed.

Second, consider the costs this family will run up. Deamonte's care cost a quarter of a million dollars, and even then did not save his life. His brother has six abcessed teeth that have to be removed. All of this could have been prevented by normal routine dental care. Part of the reason they did not get that care is that their mother didn't move heaven and earth to make sure that they did. But part of the reason is also that Medicaid, which covered them for a while, doesn't reimburse dentists well enough, and as a result dentists who accept Medicaid patients are hard to find. I don't know the figures, but it's worth considering the possibility that better reimbursements to dentists might actually save more money than it costs, by keeping kids' teeth from reaching the point where they require dental surgery or hospitalization.

And that, of course, is just counting the dollars and cents, not the suffering of the kids, the time and energy that the parents spend trying to find someone to care for them, let alone the fact that in this case, a twelve year old died.

When you read about cuts to Medicaid, this is what it means. Eligibility goes down, and families like this one might find their access to care cut completely. Reimbursements to providers go down, more and more doctors and dentists ask, why bother?, and those families who are still covered have a harder and harder time finding someone who will care for their child.

This should not happen in our country.

Atom Heart Mother

by von

UNABLE TO REFUTE evidence of human influence on global warming, critics go after the humans themselves -- at least, that seems to be the takaway point from the recent charges of hypocrisy against Al Gore, Diane Feinstein, and others. 

I'm personally agnostic about how much influence people have on current warming trends, and I'll defer to the experts on whether those trends are significant (most say that they are).  And few enjoy watching Al Gore hoisted on his own petard more than I.  But, really:  Is the supposed hypocrisy of the global warmers really worth a sustained campaign by InstaPundit (and others)?  And to what end?  Does Professor Reynolds really want to dispense with market-based carbon set-offs, and impose the kinds of sudden, draconian limits that he believes is required by Al Gore's philosophy?  Here's, after all, what Professor Reynolds says:

But if things are as bad as he says, is carbon-neutrality enough? Shouldn't he be paying for all that tree-planting and cutting back on his energy usage? Why be carbon-neutral, if you can be carbon-negative? (And the whole carbon-offset business is kind of iffy anyway).

So, according to Professor Reynolds, if you buy that global warming is man-made, you can't favor carbon offsets because they don't address the problems.  Something else needs to be done -- and, one hopes, totally radical and eXtreme!

One senses an attempt to rope-a-dope by Reynolds -- to try to make the implications of Gore's views so extreme that Gore is forced to repudiate himself.  But before Reynolds tries to rope-a-dope, the question he needs to ask himself is, "am I Ali?"  Because the rope-a-dope strategy has some pretty famous disasters associated with it, not least of which was the disaster that befell the Athenian empire on Sicily.  Nicias, an Athenian general, strongly opposed an invasion of Sicily by Athens.  Thinking he could outsmart his opponents, he insisted on an invasion force so large that he was sure the Athenian democracy would reject it out of hand.  He was thus quite surprised when he got his requested invasion force, plus some, and was named as one of the leaders of the expedition.

It's true that carbon offsets aren't perfect, as Captain Ed explains.  But Professor Reynolds really should read what Captain Ed writes rather than just mindlessly linking it, because Captain Ed is also right that Reynolds' current obsession with Gore's heating bills has an excellent potential to bite Reynolds right back in the ass:

Okay, before we start really throwing the hypocrisy label at The Goracle of Global Warming, we should take care not to hit ourselves with it first. Most CQ readers are free-market thinkers. There's nothing wrong with Gore using that kind of energy if he's willing to pay for it. A mansion would use a lot more energy than a normal single-family dwelling; I'm sure that Bill Gates' electrical bills dwarf what Gore's paying for his Tennessee juice. My objection to his level of consumption would only be that he's driving prices up with his large demand.

(There's more.)

Hugo Chavez: Democratically elected communist dictator and his continuing power grab

by Charles

A little over a year ago I wrote about Hugo Chavez's grasping quest for power in Venezuela and I thought it would be helpful to recap some of his "accomplishments" in the past twelve months.  I refer to him as a communist because, according to the Economist, he refers to himself as one.  As for him being a dictator, well, dictator is as does.  The mindset is there.  Considering the policies he is pursuing, it looks clear to me that there are strong similarities in the actions of Chavez and Mugabe and Castro.  The primary difference is that Venezuela is fortunate enough to be sitting on huge oil reserves, thus softening the damaging impacts felt from his bad decisions.  Mugabe and Castro don't have that geological luxury, and their tenures have been much longer, so there's been more time to see how their decisions have unfolded.  But before opining further, some examples of Chavez's moves.

Liberating Iraq

by hilzoy

Peter Beinart has a piece in TNR about why he supported the war:

"For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did. 

When I first saw Makiya--the Iraqi exile who has devoted his life to chronicling Saddam Hussein's crimes--I recognized the type: gentle, disheveled, distracted, obsessed. He reminded me of the South African exiles who occasionally wandered through my house as a kid. Once, many years ago, I asked one of them how the United States could aid the anti-apartheid struggle. Congress could impose sanctions, he responded. Sure, sure, I said impatiently. But what else? Well, he replied with a chuckle, if the United States were a different country, it would help the African National Congress liberate South Africa by force."

He also writes about why he got it wrong:

"I was willing to gamble, too--partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn't think I was gambling many of my countrymen's. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It's a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States. 

Some non-Americans did, too. "All the Iraqi democratic voices that still exist, all the leaders and potential leaders who still survive," wrote Salman Rushdie in November 2002, "are asking, even pleading for the proposed regime change. Will the American and European left make the mistake of being so eager to oppose Bush that they end up seeming to back Saddam Hussein?" 

I couldn't answer that then. It seemed irrefutable. But there was an answer, and it was the one I heard from that South African many years ago. It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can't be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That's why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force--because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it's why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time. That's not to say the United States can never intervene to stop aggression or genocide. It's not even to say that we can't, in favorable circumstances and with enormous effort, help build democracy once we're there. But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war--as they did in Vietnam and Iraq--because they think we're deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they're probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn't have trusted ourselves."

I admire Peter Beinart's willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he's right to say that we can't be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be -- a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force -- there's another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:

It's not just that we aren't the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it's that war is not the instrument he thought it was.

Things Fall Apart

by hilzoy

From the International Herald Tribune:

"It sounds like some incredibly dark Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Each night before the sun sets, thousands of children march in grim procession along dusty roads that take them from their rural villages to larger towns. The children are afraid to sleep in their beds, terrified that they will be abducted by a madman who will force them into a marauding guerrilla army that hunts down their friends, families, and loved ones.

The fleeing children sleep in churches, empty schools, makeshift shelters, and alleyways. And every morning at sunrise, the children walk home, free for another day."

These are the 'Night Commuters' of northern Uganda:

(photo copyright Bruno Stevens.)

For years, they have walked from their homes to the nearest large town each night to avoid being kidnapped by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, which uses children as soldiers, servants, and sex slaves. Normally, there are 30-40,000 night commuters; more when times are bad.

Times have not been so bad recently, but they are about to get worse.

Camp 6

by hilzoy

Here's an article (h/t someone, but I forget who) from the National Law Journal on Guantanamo's Camp 6. As the author notes, some of its inmates have been cleared for transfer to other countries, since they are not guilty, have no intelligence value, and pose no danger to us. This is where we keep them:

"The men imprisoned in Camp 6 are alone in cells with walls, floors and ceilings of solid metal 22 hours a day. There is no natural light or air and no windows except strips of glass next to the solid metal door that allow only a view of an interior corridor. During cell time, the men have no contact with any human beings other than guards.

“Rec time” consists of a transfer in shackles to a “pod” of five pens separated by chain-link fences. Each detainee is placed alone in a 12- by 9-foot pen for two hours and allowed to communicate with others should there be men in adjacent pens. The two-story-high concrete walls of the pod are covered by barbed wire, allowing a glimpse of the sky but no view of the horizon. Though this outdoor time is offered each 24-hour period, it is sometimes offered very late at night. Other than heavily censored letters to family and from family, the imprisoned men are completely cut off from information about the outside world. Though the prison was built with common areas, such as those where U.S. maximum-security prison inmates are permitted to spend their time during the day, the prisoners of Camp 6 are not permitted access to these areas. Indeed, in U.S. maximum security prisons where we send the “worst of the worst” (after a whole lot of process, none of which occurs in Guantánamo), it is common for inmates to have jobs, to eat communally, to receive visits from family and friends and to have social contact with other inmates. (...)

There are about 400 men imprisoned at Guantánamo. Only 10 of them were charged under the president's first military commission system that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and none has been charged under the new military commission system passed by Congress last year. The government claims it intends to charge and try 60 to 80 men; with approximately 100 men languishing, but cleared for transfer, this leaves more than 200 men already imprisoned or at risk of being imprisoned under conditions that are worse than the harshest prisons in our federal system-without due process and with no end in sight. The situation at Guantánamo is worsening, desperate and critical. Many minds have already been lost and their bodies will soon follow."

Canada did the right thing. Why can't we?

Snowy Sunday Open Thread

by hilzoy

Snow, snow, snow. The world looks gorgeous out my study window, and if I weren't still getting over the shock of my last gas bill, I'd be completely delighted. Mr. Nils is nothing like so pleased: he wants to go outside, but as soon as I open the door, he gets this appalled look on his face, and begins shaking his paws as if they had snow on them, in anticipation. Then he sadly turns around and walks slowly upstairs and lies down on the couch, looking for all the world as though his heart had broken.

Cats being cats, though, ten minutes later he has forgotten all about it, and is crying to go outside again.

Some random thoughts:

(1) I do not understand Japanese culture. I was reminded of this when I saw this picture of Prince Pickles, Japan's new army mascot, on FP Passport:

The symbol of the Japanese army is a cuddly anime figure with great big eyes, named Prince Pickles? That's as odd as the football team where I used to work, which was named the Sagehens (think: great big football players in great big shoulder pads etc., and the fans all yelling: Go Hens!!)

(2) Here's an interesting paper for you lawyers (h/t: Warren Report, which has interesting comments.) It argues that State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, a case about the Constitutional limits on punitive damages, implies that credit card late fees should be legally unenforceable. I have no idea whether or not she's right -- I know nothing about contract law, and while I can think of objections to her position (e.g., that a lot of the due process objections in State Farm have no obvious analog in the case of late fees), I have no idea whether any of them hold water -- but it's an interesting argument. If any of the actual lawyers here feel like opining on it, I'd be interested.

(3) This article by Seymour Hersh is very, very interesting, and not in a good way. There are all sorts of interesting bits, like the claim that one factor in John Negroponte's decision to resign as DNI was that he was uncomfortable with "the echoes of Iran-Contra", and in particular with the reliance on extralegal covert operations. But the smash-head-against-wall-and-scream award has to go to this sentence:

"But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound — and unintended — strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran."

Anyone who did not anticipate that invading Iraq would lead to the empowerment of Iran should be banned from working on American foreign policy, just as anyone who fails to anticipate that running people over with a Mack truck will cause them serious injury should be banned from driving, and anyone who fails to anticipate that holding someone's head underwater for ten minutes will kill her should be barred from working as a lifeguard.

(4) "Marble Boy". Heh.

(5) One more reason not to support Duncan Hunter: he appoints campaign co-chairs who say things like: “Screw the Buddhists and kill the Muslims. And put that in the minutes.” Not to mention: "I mean you've got to be stupid to believe in evolution".

(6) Finally: a plea to CNN and MSNBC:

NO MORE NEWS ABOUT ANNA NICOLE SMITH!!!

There was too much coverage of her death on the day she died. That it's still going on now is just incomprehensible. Please stop now. Back away from the blonde. Put down your camera until you can find something of some genuine interest.

Thanks.