Obsidian Wings

Tentative Best Album of 2008

by publius

The Kills - Midnight Boom (Pitchfork review here). I've heard No Wow is good too - so that's on deck in Rhapsody today.

Let the Golden Age End

by publius

If I were the plaintiffs in the Heller Second Amendment case, I would file an amicus brief with nothing but the HBO John Adams mini-series attached. Looking back to 18th century Boston, it’s much easier to see how guns and militias provided important checks on government overreach. The problem, though, is that the colonial era has passed. The expansive gun rights of that era would have far different effects in post-industrial urban society.

And that leads to one of my broader criticisms of American conservatism -- from the Progressive era on through to today. Certain strands of American conservative thought have never quite come to terms with the realities of modern life -- and more specifically, with the shift to industrialization and urbanization. The failure to look at modernity squarely in the face is particularly evident in law, but extends to non-legal contexts as well. I’ll start with the law though.

To repeat, the broader point is that several strands of conservative jurisprudence seem to assume a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Specifically, they assume a world where urbanization and industrialization hasn’t happened.

The Heller gun case provides a perfect example. Personally, I think the Second Amendment is textually indeterminate – i.e., the text could plausibly support either a collective or individual-based right. For that reason, parsing commas in this context is rather pointless. If there are two equally plausible textual readings, then the question should shift to policy – what should we do? What are the consequences of selecting one reading over the other?

The answer, I think, turns on the type of place you live in. If your world is 18th century Massachusetts, then broad gun rights make a lot of sense. If your world is a densely-populated housing project in the Bronx, then broad gun rights make much less sense. Indeed, they create very dangerous environments. And if your world is rural Montana, then the policy rationale shifts back the other way. Given these variations, it seems like the obvious answer is to defer to legislatures (which requires a more collective view). The elected leaders of Montana can do what they want, while DC can do what it wants. And long as Congress doesn't ban militias, we're all good.

The broader point, though, is that the analysis should acknowledge changing conditions. Extreme gun rights advocates like to pretend we all live in John Adams’ world. In that world, millions of complete strangers don’t live right on top of each. There, militias actually do further liberty. In our world, however, things are different. Millions of strangers are in fact clustered together. In our world, nuclear-powered industrialized armies have far more formidable weapons than muskets and cannons.

To be clear, I’m not saying we should ban guns. I’m just saying the Second Amendment is an artifact from a different era, and that its artifact-ness should influence our reading of it. More specifically, the fact that it’s a relic of the musket era should, at the least, allow modern legislatures some leeway in interpreting it.

Quick Links (Obama Edition)

by hilzoy

Some interesting pieces:

(1) Spencer Ackerman has a very good piece on Obama's foreign policy team:

"They also share a formative experience with each other and with Obama. Each opposed the Iraq War at a time when doing so was derided by their colleagues, by journalists, and by the foreign-policy establishment. Each did so because they understood that the invasion and occupation ran counter to the goal of destroying al-Qaeda. And each bore the frustration of endless lectures on their lack of so-called seriousness from those who suffered from strategic myopia.

"There is a popular notion that Democrats have to try to appear like Republicans to pass some test on national security. The fact that that's still the case after Iraq is absurd," says one of Obama's closest advisers. "So you break from that orthodoxy and say 'I don't care if the Republicans attack me because I'm willing to meet with the leadership in Iran. We haven't for 25 years, and it's not gotten us anywhere.'" (...)

The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid."

(2) Barron YoungSmith has written a piece about Obama's proposals for intelligence reform. I'm not competent to address those proposals, but they are interesting:

"One of Obama's most important attempts to roll back the Bush administration's foreign policy is also among the least understood. It is his proposal for intelligence reform. Obama's rebuke to conservative orthodoxy on this issue can be found buried in a Q&A and complementary article published earlier this month in the Washington Post: "Obama repeated his pledge to end the Bush administration's 'politicization of intelligence' and said he would give the director of national intelligence--who currently serves at the pleasure of the president--a fixed term, similar to that of the Federal Reserve chairman."

It's common for Democrats to promise an end to Bush-style politicization of intelligence. But the way that Obama frames the issue--likening the DNI to the independent, technocratic Chairman of the Federal Reserve--indicates that his view of the intelligence process is ontologically opposed to the way conservatives see it. (...) In saying the DNI should be like the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, (rather than, say, the Secretary of Defense, who always serves at the pleasure of the President), the candidate is throwing his weight behind the idea that the intelligence community (IC) should be an independent assessor of empirically-verifiable facts; that intelligence assessment is a non-ideological exercise in finding out what's true and what's not."

(3) Every so often I criticize various media outlets for not doing their job. I am thrilled, for once, to be able to say: thank you, Roland Martin of CNN, for posting audio of Rev. Wright's 9/11 sermon and the sermon in which he said "God Damn America," along with extensive excerpts and summaries. (I have listened to the second of the two, and the summary is accurate, though it does give short shrift to the beginning, which is completely non-political. Brief version: you all remember the verse, 'Jesus Wept'. In that verse, he was weeping because Lazarus had died. This is a purely personal pain. By contrast, in the verse under discussion (Luke 19:37-44), he is weeping because His people are blind to "the things that make for peace." -- The CNN summary more or less starts with the discussion of this blindness, omitting the part about Jesus and Lazarus. I assume this is because this part has no conceivable political importance. The rest is accurate and detailed.)

It's worth reading the summaries, whatever your view on the sermons, just to get a sense of what, exactly, is under discussion. Good for CNN for making them available.

"Seriously Misguided"

by hilzoy

Some people have wondered: in all those retrospectives on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, why were there so few people who actually opposed the war from the outset? Megan McArdle thinks that that's "seriously misguided":

"We learn by gambling on what we think the best answer is, and seeing how it turns out. Most of us know that we have learned more about the world, and ourselves, from failing than from success. Success can be accidental; failure is definite. Failure tells us exactly what doesn't work.

Failure tells us more than success because success is usually a matter of a whole system. And as development economists have proven over and over and over again, those complex webs of interactions are impossible to tease apart into one or two concrete actions. Things can fail, on the other hand, at a single point. And even when they fail in multiple ways, those ways are usually more obvious than the emergent interactions that produced a success. (...)

The people who were right can (and will) rewrite their memories of what they believed to show themselves in the most attractive light; they will come to honestly believe that they were more prescient than they were. (...) The people who failed will also do this. But unlike the people who were right, there is a central fact stopping them from flattering themselves too much: things are blowing up in Iraq and people are dying. Thus they will have to look for some coherent explanation."

There's something right about what McArdle says, and something wrong. To start with the first: most of us sometimes get things right, and sometimes get things wrong. Suppose God grants you the chance to question someone about an important decision, and gives you the choice: would you rather question that person after she has screwed up, or after she has gotten something right? Other things being equal, I think I'd rather question the person after she screws up, for more or less the reasons McArdle suggests. Notice, though, that in this case, we have to choose whether or not to question one and the same person after a success or a failure. The identity of that person, and with it, her good or bad judgment, her wisdom or naivete, and so forth, is held constant; and this is essential to the example.

The question McArdle claims to be asking is a different one: given a particular decision, would you rather question the people who got it right or those who got it wrong? Here what we hold constant is not the people we question, but the decision itself. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Different people have different track records. On foreign policy, George Kennan had a very good track record: he got a lot of things right, including some very difficult ones. That is in large part due to the fact that he knew a lot and had exceptionally good judgment. Jonah Goldberg, by contrast, has a terrible track record: he gets things wrong all the time, and when he gets them right, it seems to be more or less by coincidence. That is because he knows almost nothing and has terrible judgment. Their respective track records mean that on any given decision, people with good judgment, like George Kennan, are much more likely to have gotten it right than to have gotten it wrong, while the opposite is true of people with bad judgment, like Jonah Goldberg.*

If I ask myself whether I would rather hear from the people who got a given question right or wrong, I can assume that the people with good judgment on questions of that type will be overrepresented among those who got it right, and underrepresented among those who got it wrong; and that the opposite will hold true of the people with bad judgment. So one way to think about the question: who would I rather hear from? is that it is a question about whether I would rather hear from people likely to have good judgment, like George Kennan, or people who are likely to have bad judgment, like Jonah Goldberg. This is, frankly, not a hard call to make at all.

However, as McArdle notes, a given person who has just gotten something very wrong is more likely to have something interesting to say about it than she would be had she just gotten it right. If the differences between people with good judgment and people with bad judgment were very small, or the additional insight conferred by confronting one's own errors were very large, then the effects of having just made a mistake might be big enough to swamp the effect of having good judgment overall. In that case, even though the people who got something wrong would be likely to have had worse judgment initially than the people who got it right, the fact that they had just gotten something wrong might make them suddenly become more interesting and better to talk to, on the whole, than the group who got things right.

Obviously, though, this isn't the way it works. First, the difference between George Kennan and Jonah Goldberg is very, very large. Second, the fact that Jonah Goldberg has terrible judgment doesn't just lead him to screw up foreign policy; it also makes him far less likely to learn from his mistakes than George Kennan would. Someone who is thoughtful, perceptive, and insightful, and who had gotten the Iraq war wrong, might find his or her judgment changed forever, in very interesting ways. (Then again, George Kennan would be almost as likely to learn something really interesting from observing other people's errors. He would be interesting to talk to either way.) Jonah Goldberg, by contrast, seems to have learned nothing whatsoever from his mistakes. And this doesn't seem to be entirely unrelated to the defects that made him get Iraq wrong at the outset. He was a shallow, thoughtless idiot then, and he is a shallow, thoughtless idiot now.

And this is what's so wrong about what Megan McArdle says. She is making an argument whose natural application is to the question: given one person, would you be likely to learn more from her after she had gotten something right or after she had gotten something wrong? And she is extrapolating it to the quite different question: would you rather talk to the people who got a given decision right or wrong? It would be fine to extrapolate in this way if the fact that someone got that question right or wrong showed nothing whatsoever about their wisdom or judgment; if the George Kennans and Jonah Goldbergs of this world were tossed at random into either category.

But that's not the way things work. Decisions reveal things about those who make them. People who get them right are, on average, more likely to have wisdom and judgment and insight than those who get them wrong. This means that they are both more likely to be worth talking to in general, and more likely to profit from any mistakes they make, than people who get them wrong.

This is what McArdle missed. It's an interesting omission for someone who, by her own account, got Iraq wrong.

In her post, McArdle suggests that people who get a decision right are likely to revise their memories "to show themselves in the most attractive light", and that this kind of self-deception is more difficult for those who got it wrong. Her own post, with its implicit assumption that major errors do not reflect anything about the judgment of those who make them, suggests that people who get things wrong are just as prone to self-deception as the rest of us.

(See also: Richard "we were right to be wrong" Cohen.)

Bad News

by hilzoy

This could be very, very bad news:

"Serious fighting broke out Tuesday in Basra and Baghdad, Iraq’s largest cities, between restive members of Iraq’s biggest Shiite militia and Iraqi Army forces backed by American troops.

The scale and intensity of the clashes kept many residents home in Baghdad. Barrages of what appeared to be rockets hit the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days. In Basra, Iraq’s most important oil-exporting center, thousands of Iraqi government soldiers and police officers moved to drive out Shiite militia members who have taken over big swaths of that city.

The Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, had been observing a cease-fire that began in August and has been partly credited, along with the influx of thousands of extra American troops, with improved security in the country. But Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who leads the Mahdi Army, called Monday for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in response to what his followers characterized as unwarranted crackdowns on them.

The violence raised fears across Iraq that the cease-fire was in danger of collapsing, erasing the security gains of the past six months."

The Guardian:

"The radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr today called for "civil revolt" after a crackdown on Shia factions in Basra killed 22 people. (...)

"We call upon all Iraqis to stage sit-ins all over Iraq as a first step," Sadr said in a statement. "And if the people's demands are not respected by the Iraqi government, the second step will be to declare civil revolt in Baghdad and all other provinces.""

IraqSlogger reports that heavy fighting has broken out in eastern Baghdad, and that many government checkpoints there have been deserted in anticipation of attacks against them. The WSJ adds:

"Residents in two Shiite-controlled neighborhoods here said armed militias have taken over rooms in several schools and stocked them with rockets, in a sign they could be gearing up for more attacks against the U.S.-backed government."

Ilan Goldenberg, who has been burrowing around in casualty statistics, explains why this is such bad news:

"The drop in violence in Iraq has generally been attributed to four elements 1) More American forces and the change in tactics to counterinsurgency; 2) The Awakening movement; 3) The Sadr ceasfire; and 4) The ethnic cleansing and physical separation of the various sides.

It's hard to say for sure, which of these factors was the most important. The Bush Administration will tell you it's all about the troop levels. I've tended to believe it's more of a mix and was most inclined towards the Anbar Awakening and the sectarian cleansing as the important factors. But when you look at the data it really seems to indicate that the Sadr ceasefire may have been the key.

If you look at the graph that MNF-I has been using on civilian casualties it looks to tell a pretty clear story. The first major drop in violence came in early 2007 before the troop surge. It looks like it was mostly based on the fact that the worst of the sectarian cleansing in Baghdad had been completed (I outlined this argument more throughly a few months back).

The second drop in violence came in September. By that time the full surge had already been in effect for 2-3 months and the Awakening had been going on for a year. The Sadr ceasefire occured on August 28 and suddenly boom a big drop in violence. That could be a coincidence and it could be that all four factors came together. But the data seems to point to the fact that the Sadr Ceasefire more then anything else is what caused the drop in violence in the early fall.

If that is in fact the case, we really have to hope that this is only a temporary spat and that the ceasefire holds. If not, the situation could deteriorate very quickly."

And just to make things even worse, don't forget that some of the Sunni militias are on strike because, for some unfathomable reason, they are not getting paid. See also Abu Aardvark.

The surge has never achieved its stated purpose: namely, to enable political progress and reconciliation between Shi'a and Sunnis. Violence has gone down, which is a wonderful thing, but it has never been clear how much of that was due to the surge itself, and how much to the fact that we paid off the Sunnis, and Sadr declared his cease-fire. I hope we're not about to find out.

Getting Past the Past

by publius

At the Plank, one of Dayo Olopade’s commenters asks why exactly race is making older Democrats reluctant to vote for Obama. The simple answer would be that older Americans are more racist. But that’s not quite right. The real answer is more innocent – and more interesting – than that. It’s that older (white) Americans have a harder time believing that other people aren’t racist. This theory is largely anecodatal, so take it for what it’s worth. (ed. -- By “largely” do you mean “totally”? Yes.).

It’s been interesting to discuss the election with older Democrats from my home town in Kentucky. They’ve warmed to Obama somewhat, but remain skeptical largely because of his race. Some are purely racist, sure. But far more of them are non-racists who simply don’t think America is capable of looking past race. Their doubt, sadly, is a remnant of our sorry racial history.

Remember that these people came of age during Jim Crow. For instance, my parents’ generation grew up eating in segregated restaurants, attending segregated schools, and drinking from segregated fountains. Although many of them are 100% non-racist, that caste system left its mark.

While they may have shed the more grotesque prejudices of the era, it’s harder to shake the perception carved into their brains from a young age that the white community thinks of blacks as second class citizens. In other words, their firsthand experience with collective, systemic racism makes Obama seem far more risky.

Interestingly, this race-based skepticism was precisely why much of the black community initially hesitated to support Obama. In listening to black radio shows, it amazed me to hear just how deeply the callers had internalized the view that white America would never support a black candidate. They didn’t oppose Obama per se, they just didn’t think he was a realistic option.

One reason, then, that I’m supporting Obama is to purge these doubts once and for all. In fact, I’ll say it clearly enough for Mickey Kaus to hear – one reason I’m supporting Barack Obama is because he’s black. Fortunately, I was either non-existent or playing Atari (mostly Q-Bert) through much of the 70s and 80s. Thus, the term “identity politics” instills exactly zero-point-zero amount of fear in me. To be honest, I don’t even know what it means. Whatever it used to mean, today it seems to be little more than an incantation to automatically discredit any attempt to address racial or gender inequalities.

One last point – presidential elections don’t happen very often. Given the small sample sizes, it’s hard to make generalized observations about what causes electoral success. And so there’s an easy way to permanently discredit arguments that “Americans will never elect a black president.” Elect one.

Where's The Gratitude?

by hilzoy

I was just going to ignore Pat Buchanan's screed on the subject of Obama's speech -- in many ways, its title, "A Brief For Whitey", tells you everything you need to know about it. However, on reflection, I did want to highlight one bit:

"First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. (...)

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?"

I'm not going to focus on the idiocy of going on about how grateful blacks should be to whites without so much as mentioning the two centuries of slavery, the century of peonage and terrorism, and the fact that when blacks finally won civil rights, it was hardly due to a spontaneous surge of generosity on the part of whites. I take it that's all too obvious to be worth saying. What I do want to focus on is the peculiar idea that things like "welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs" constitute things whites did for blacks. Because that's just false. Ta-Nehisi Coates:

"There is a lot wrong here, but one central thread of errant logic undergirds it all. Buchanan, like most racists, doesn't actually believe that African-Americans are Americans. This isn't an interpretation, Buchanan's argument that white Americans, in the form of social programs, have done more for black people than any group (including presumably the entire Civil Rights Movement!) assumes that black people have never paid any taxes for those programs. He quite literally doesn't categorize black people as Americans, but useless layabouts who've never contributed anything to the country."

Taking Buchanan's errors one by one:

McCain On Taxes

by hilzoy

Robert Gordon and James Kvaal have done us all a service by examining McCain's proposals on taxes. According to his website, McCain wants to do the following:

(a) Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. The AMT was designed to keep the very rich from using loopholes to avoid paying any taxes. Unfortunately, the cutoff at which it kicks in was not indexed to inflation, and as a result, more and more people who don't count as 'very rich' by any stretch of the imagination are subject to it every year. Thus far, Congress has passed a series of one-year patches that have kept it from hitting middle-class taxpayers. The obvious permanent solution would be to set a new cutoff an index it to inflation. No one has done this because, under current budgeting rules, it would count as a huge tax cut, and while our representatives can manage to pay for it each year, paying for a permanent solution would cost a whole lot more. But that wouldn't cost not nearly as much as repealing it altogether, as McCain proposes. The difference, of course, would be that indexing the cap to inflation would still make the rich pay the AMT rather than using loopholes to get out of paying taxes, while repealing the AMT entirely would not.

(b) "John McCain will fight the Democrats' crippling plans for a tax increase in 2011." That "tax increase" is what is more commonly known as "letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule." Here McCain is proposing to make them permanent.

(c) "Cut The Corporate Tax Rate From 35 To 25 Percent."

(d) "Allow First-Year Deduction, Or “Expensing”, Of Equipment And Technology Investments." From the Gordon/Kvaal report:

"Under current law, corporations must generally deduct the cost of an investment over that investment’s useful lifetime, a tax and accounting practice known as depreciation. McCain’s proposal will allow corporations to depreciate the entire cost of investments in the first year of the purchase, a practice known as expensing. This would create extra incentives for business investment by letting corporations claim these tax breaks immediately."

There are a few other tax proposals, none of which would do anything to offset the cost of these.

The Gordon/Kvaal report estimates the cost of these changes at $2.17 trillion dollars over ten years. They think their estimates are conservative: for instance, they do not count increased spending on debt service. The Wall Street Journal, everyone's favorite bastion of radical leftism, writes: "In all, his tax-cutting proposals could cost about $400 billion a year, according to estimates of the impact of different tax cuts by CBO and the McCain campaign." That would make the cost over ten years $4 trillion.

Moreover, these tax cuts would be even more skewed towards the wealthy than the Bush tax were, which is quite an achievement. Here's a table from the report:

Think about that for a moment: 58% of the benefits of these tax cuts would go to the top 1% of Americans. Not the top ten percent, not the vaguely defined "rich", but the top 1%. That's just extraordinary.

And it's not as though McCain has proposals that would even begin to pay for this. The WSJ again:

"To show he can control spending, Sen. McCain cites his long record as a spending hawk, who battles sweetheart deals between the Pentagon and defense contractors, as well as projects that lawmakers of both parties cram into appropriations bills -- "earmarks," in budget lingo.

Congressional earmarks total $18 billion a year, according to the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C., research group -- and each has a member of Congress who will ferociously fight to keep that spending going. Mr. Holtz-Eakin, the McCain adviser, says that earmarks actually cost $60 billion a year, counting programs that started in earlier years and get funded year after year.

Another source of spending cuts eyed by the McCain campaign is a White House hit list of underperforming or redundant programs. But again, the numbers are relatively small -- $18 billion annually -- compared to the cost of Sen. McCain's tax plans, and the programs include housing loans, education grants, and water projects popular with Congress."

Let's pretend that McCain's advisor is right, and earmarks really do cost $60 billion a year. And let's ignore the fact that some of those underperforming programs might actually be useful programs that should be reformed, not eliminated. The problem is: that still leaves $130 billion a year to make up, if you accept the Gordon/Kvaal report's figures, or about $320 billion a year, if you accept the WSJ's.

And that's without taking into account the costs of paying for that hundred year war McCain keeps talking about, rebuilding the army, paying for veterans' health care, or anything else we might take it into our heads to do.

We are heading into a very serious recession. It's worth pointing out that one of our major candidates for President is proposing to drastically increase our deficit without being able to pay for it, in ways that are hugely tilted towards the rich, and will, as a result, not provide the kind of stimulus to demand that we need.

4000

by hilzoy

Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

I Know It's Not News That Our Government Is Nuts. But Still.

by hilzoy

From the Department of Sometimes Our Government Is So Stupid It Just Makes Me Want To Scream:

"During his nearly four years as a translator for U.S. forces in Iraq, Saman Kareem Ahmad was known for his bravery and hard work. "Sam put his life on the line with, and for, Coalition Forces on a daily basis," wrote Marine Capt. Trent A. Gibson.

Gibson's letter was part of a thick file of support -- including commendations from the secretary of the Navy and from then-Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus -- that helped Ahmad migrate to the United States in 2006, among an initial group of 50 Iraqi and Afghan translators admitted under a special visa program.

Last month, however, the U.S. government turned down Ahmad's application for permanent residence, known as a green card. His offense: Ahmad had once been part of the Kurdish Democratic Party, which U.S. immigration officials deemed an "undesignated terrorist organization" for having sought to overthrow former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Ahmad, a Kurd, once served in the KDP's military force, which is part of the new Iraqi army. A U.S. ally, the KDP is now part of the elected government of the Kurdish region and holds seats in the Iraqi parliament. After consulting public Web sites, however, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services determined that KDP forces "conducted full-scale armed attacks and helped incite rebellions against Hussein's regime, most notably during the Iran-Iraq war, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Ahmad's association with a group that had attempted to overthrow a government -- even as an ally in U.S.-led wars against Hussein -- rendered him "inadmissible," the agency concluded in a three-page letter dated Feb. 26."

I cannot for the life of me imagine in what possible world being a member of the KDP ought to be disqualifying. I just can't imagine it. I mean, we supported them. Moreover, they were not some random bunch of marauding thugs; they were the de facto government of part of an enclave that we established and maintained, and a significant part of their resistance was keeping Saddam's troops from reestablishing control over their part of the Kurdish region. Do we wish they hadn't done that? And does doing it make them terrorists?

We also discouraged the Kurds from trying to break away from Iraq entirely. Had they done so, members of the KDP might be members of a regular Kurdish army, as they are now members of the regular Iraqi army. Does the fact that they did not break away, partly because we exerted pretty heavy pressure on them not to, mean that everyone in the army of the de facto Kurdish government counts as a terrorist rather than a soldier?

Honestly: this is just completely crazy.

But here's the kicker:

"The second youngest of five children, Ahmad was away at college when Saddam Hussein, striking at rebellious Kurds, launched a chemical gas attack against Ahmad's home town, Halabja, in 1988. The infamous assault, in which more than 5,000 died, was often cited by the Bush administration as part of its justification for invading Iraq. It left Ahmad without a single living relative, as he has recounted to Americans many times over the past six years."

So I guess that someone in another part of the world doesn't get to engage in armed resistance to a regime that has killed his entire family with poison gas, by joining an organization that the US completely supports, without being labelled a terrorist. We, apparently, get to support that organization, invade and occupy that country, and kill any number of its inhabitants, all to overthrow a regime we don't like. But someone in that country, someone whose entire family has been wiped out in a horrific and wildly illegal attack, do not get to take up arms against it. And if they do, then no amount of service to us can overcome that original sin.

This is in every respect the opposite of the way things ought to be. It just makes me furious.