Stay or Leave Part II: The ISG Recommendations

I haven't read the Iraq Study Group Report, but I feel like I have, since it is just about all you hear and read about in the news. The report is getting lots of plaudits from opponents of the Bush Administration for the bleak picture it paints of the situation and for the none-to-subtle indictment its "realist" authors make of the neoconservative perpetrators of this mess. But that was not really the point of the ISG, was it? The point was not to dwell on the failures of the past, failures that have already been massively documented and that even Bush, Rumsfeld and most of the neo-cons now acknowledge. The point was to identify -- in the report's own slogan --"The Way Forward;" to make recommendations as to what to do now. On this score, I can find no one who has anything good to say about the report.

Since the report recommendations (as well as its recriminations) line up so well with the positions being articulated by most of the the Democratic Party leadership and the New York Times editorial page, I would have expected the New York Times' op-ed page to reflect whatever sense of optimism there may be out there. If that expectation is reasonable, then today's op-ed offerings indicate there is nearly universal disappointment in the ISG recommendations and a growing sense that there really is no middle road between "Go Big" and "Go Home".

The Sunday Times has two full pages of op-ed pieces. Today, most of that space was devoted, in one way or another, to the ISG report. The longest of these pieces, "79 Steps To Victory in Iraq," is a collection of a dozen short opinion pieces on the recommendations. Not a single one of them had anything remotely hopeful to say about them. They range between damning with faint praise and damning altogether with no praise at all. Several did agree that success in implementing some of the recommendations is essential if there is to be any hope, but one gets no sense even from these voices that success is actually achievable. The others are contemptuous of the recommendations for exactly that reason: the recommendations are seen as either being banal or as being so removed from reality as to be almost delusional. In total, the sense one gets from reading this dozen reviews is that, even if Bush accepted and attempted to implement, the recommendations, it would change nothing.

Frank Rich's "The Sunshine Boys Can't Save Iraq" makes this point explicitly and goes on to argue that we cannot let the ISG recommendations delude us into thinking there is still hope of achieving even the much watered-down goal of an Iraq "that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself." He compares the ISG to a similar group of "wise men" convened by Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. . . . Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training for South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men . . . was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement."

Johnson did initiate peace talks, but it took another seven years, another 30,000 American deaths, and one of the worst domestic social upheavals since the Civil War before Johnson's successor's successor (Ford) finally threw in the towel and just left. Rich's closing comment on this parallel, and on the ISG itself, bears consideration:

The lesson in [the Vietnam analogy] is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.

The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.

The third and bleakest column is David Brooks' "After The Fall". Despite being the Times' most conservative columnist, Brooks seems as ready as Rich to admit defeat, and he is focused instead on the consequences. Via the conceit of looking back on the present from the future, Brooks predicts that the ISG recommendations will be followed and American combat troops will be withdrawn in 2008; that this will result in a region-wide "30-Years War" during which political power and organization will be re-distributed on the basis of "family, tribe and faith" rather than existing states; and that this war will claim as victims all of the governments east of Egypt, south of Turkey and west Iran. Brooks acknowledges that this will be "a terrible era [with] horrific turmoil and the emergence of sociopolitical organizations whose likes the world ha[s] never seen." But with that he stops. There is no call to try to avert this outcome. He makes it sound as if he believes it is inevitable:

The Middle East's weak national ties were ripped apart by the rising forces of the 21st century: religious fundamentalism, global terrorism, economic globalization, and transnational communication networks. Efforts to do nation-building without security faced long odds. Efforts to exhort Iraqi and other leaders to behave "responsibly" -- as defined by Western nationalist categories -- were doomed to failure. The American defeat sealed the deal."

(It may be that Brooks believes all of this will occur only if we follow the recommendation to leave by 2008, but if that is his point, he doesn't make it).

So where does all of this leave me? Not much further than I was when I wrote this in response to Billy Bob's question, "Stay or Leave?" I admit to being disappointed that the ISG recommendations seem to be either banal or impractical. What did I expect? Not much really. But I did so want to find some reason to hope that I had allowed myself to begin to look forward to the release of those recommendations. When they came out, though, my first thought was the same one I had 4 years ago when Colin Powell made his pitch to the UN on why Iraq was dangerous: "Is THAT all you could come up with?"

So, I am right back where I started from: unable to join Frank Rich and John Murtagh in abandoning entirely any hope of avoiding the kind of future Brooks sees, but yet seeing no reason to believe that there is any way to succeed in doing so.

I can see only three courses that we might pursue at this point: Go Big and Long, Go Small and Long, or Go Home. The first of these is the preference of the right, and a long term occupation of Iraq may well be the course that has the best chance of avoiding a total collapse into chaos (although even that approach didn't work well for the Russians in Afghanistan). But there are neither enough troops nor enough electoral stomach to "go big," so this option is not any more realistic than hoping Iran and Syria will play nice. The "go home" option is the obvious choice if you have abandoned hope or if you believe that the Iraqis and their neighbors will learn to get along once we leave. I am not yet quite ready to do the former; nor am I willing to engage in the self-delusion required for the latter. This leaves the "go small and long" option, which is pretty much what the ISG recommended. So, as lame as those recommendations are, I guess that, for now, I am prepared to give them a try. However, I recognize that if the denoument in five years (or more) years is not any different than it would have been if we left now, the additional thousands of US casualities will lay heavy on my conscience. (I ignore the Iraqi caualities not out of indifference but out of a belief that they will occur regardless of what we do).

Note to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle: May you rot in hell for putting us in this situation. Better yet, may you be sent to spend the rest of your miserable lives in Baghdad. And then go to hell.

Let The Culture Wars Begin (Again)

Oh dear. Mary Cheney is pregnant.

Who cares?

Well, appaently, lots of people. From the NYT article linked above:

Family Pride, a gay rights group, noted that Ms. Cheney’s home state of Virginia does not recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions to same-sex couples.

"The news of Mary Cheney’s pregnancy exemplifies, once again, how the best interests of children are denied when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens are treated unfairly and accorded different and unequal rights and responsibilities than other parents," the group’s executive director, Jennifer Chrisler, said in a statement.

Focus on the Family, an influential Christian group that has provided crucial political support to President Bush, released a statement that criticized child rearing by same-sex couples.

"Mary Cheney’s pregnancy raises the question of what’s best for children," the group’s director of issues analysis, Carrie Gordon Earll, said in a statement. "Just because it’s possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn’t mean it’s the best for the child. Love can’t replace a mom or a dad."

As if the welfare of children had anything to do with this. On either side.

The End Of An Era

There is a club in downtown Toledo (aptly named The Toledo Club) that was founded well over a century ago by the glass barons and other industrialists and luminaries that served as Toledo's founding fathers: Edward Drummond Libbey and Michael J Ownes (Libbey Glass, Libbey Owens Ford and Owens Illinois), John North Willys (Willys Overland), Morrison R Waite (7th Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), and David Ross Locke (newspaper publisher and abolitionist essayist). As with clubs like this in other cities, The Toledo Club was, for most of its existence, an exclusive bastion of old, rich, mostly white, men. Today, women are allowed to become members, and a few intrepid souls have done so, but for the most part the Club remains what it has always been: a place for men to get together in comfortable surroundings and do what men love to do -- talk, tell stories, share gossip, make contacts and deals, and indulge their taste for fine cigars and good liquor, all in an milieu free from the constraints (whether real or perceived) imposed on such activities by the "fairer sex."

Over the years, the Club has not escaped the campaign against second-hand smoke, and large portions of the Club are off-limits to smoking now. But there is one room -- The Oak Room -- where smoking continues to be allowed and where a simpatico bartender pours "three-fingers-in-a-rain-barrel" drinks of fine Scotch, Gin, Vodka, Bourbon or whatever else might suit the a man's fancy. Because of this, the Oak Room has become, for many, both the avatar and conservator of a great tradition.

The Toledo Club is not unique in all of this, of course, even in Toledo. The Country Clubs, originally founded by the same types of people who founded the Toledo Club for essentially the same kinds of purposes, have been through similar transitions. Yet there remains in each of these an "inner-sanctum" where the traditions are observed and defended from the seeming relentless forces of temperance.

All of the people who frequent such places have long shared one belief: that, having been driven so far underground, they were safe; that the smoking abolitionists would simply not be able to stamp out these last few islands of freedom. After all, we are talking about a single room in a private club! Surely they can't reach there without making smoking illegal per se!

Alas, how wrong they were.

Tomorrow, December 7, what is probably the most comprehensive smoking ban ever enacted goes into effect, state-wide, in Ohio. Passed by citizen initiative in the November elections, the ban technically extends only to places to which the public has access (bars and bowling alleys included). Private clubs are nominally exempted. However, there's a catch: to be a "private club,"you can have no employees.

There are creative lawyers (some in my own firm) working diligently on behalf of paying clients to find loopholes in this prohibition. They may do so, although I think it will be hard to find any that are likely to withstand scrutiny. But in reality the war is over. The abolitionists have breached the wall between the public and the private. Efforts to preserve that distinction will continue for some time, I think, but those will simply be the final skirmishes in a war that has already been lost. There is no place the smoking nazis cannot reach.

The tactical stroke of genius that made this possible was a shift of focus from patrons to employees. As long as the battle was being fought to protect "patrons" of establishments, there was considerable force to the argument that no person had an absolute right to enter privately owned places. If a person objected to or was concerned about the second-hand smoke, he or she could go to places that didn't allow it. In the end, the market would sort things out, with each business having to decide whether it would be better off with or without smoking. But, when the focus turned to employees, who have far less of an ability to choose where they work, that argument lost much, maybe all of its force. It is a common-place that business owners have a duty to protect their workers from work-place injury, and imposing an obligation to protect them from second hand smoke is a small step from the existing obligation to protect them from repetitive motion injury or other workplace ills.

Yes, I am a smoker, but that is not really the reason I find this sort of thing repugnant. I am always looking for a reason to quit, and now I have another one. My wife won't let me smoke in my house (indeed, even I don't like the smell) and my state will not let me smoke indoors anywhere else. So, maybe, finally, the lack of places to do it will make me quit. And, if it does, I will feel a twinge of gratitude.

But there is something inestimably sad about the outlawing of places like the Oak Room. (The same is no doubt true about the corner bar; I just don't go there too often). It is a reduction in the diversity of our society; another step in its homogenization. Hell, we do LOTS of things that are bad for our health. Driving being the poster child. But in our terror of "adverse health effects" and our insistence that the "majority rules" not just in most places but in all places, we are gradually eliminating the variation that makes life interesting.

Or so it seems to me.

Shame On Us, Each of Us

This picture from the New York Times greeted me as I opened my e-mail this mnorning:




It was not a good way to start the day.

In case you didn't see this or another article on the same subject, that is Jose Padillla on his way to to the dentist for a root canal. For some reason not entirely clear, Padilla's jailors chose to videotape Padilla's transfer to the dental offices. Here's a description of the overall process used:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

But worse was yet to come, becuase as the article progressed to tell the story of Padilla's "detainment" one could almost imagine Padilla being grateful for the break the dental appointment provided in the relentess tedium and humiliation (and probably terror) that has been his life for the last three-and-a-half years.

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, "as part of an interrogation plan." . . . .

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of "truth serums."

Such treament is (thank God) apparently without precedent

Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, "There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement."

Let that last bit register for a minute: "especially considering that this was pretrial confinement."

Padilla, an American citizen "detained" on American soil, was originally thought to be plotting to blow up a "dirty bomb." But, just as it appeared that the issue of his detainment by the military, without charges or hearing, was about to get to the Supreme Court, the governement changed its theory (thereby lettiong the "favorable" Court of Appeals decision stand) and classified Padilla as a criminal defendant, turning him over to civil authorities for trial.

Mr. Padilla’s status was abruptly changed to criminal defendant from enemy combatant last fall. At the time, the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention — and thus the issue of the president’s authority to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him indefinitely without charges — when the Bush administration pre-empted its decision by filing criminal charges against Mr. Padilla.

Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.

Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a "North American terror support cell" that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad” in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas 'to participate in violent jihad" and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan.

In citing this article, I do not intend to try, again, to excoriate Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the other architects of the US policies on detainees. Those folks are well beyond redemption or understanding on this issue. What I really wonder about now are the hundreds of "little people" -- soldiers, jailors, and lawyers -- who actually implement this system. What are they thinking? How do they sleep at night? Is the Nuremberg Defense -- "just following orders" -- enough to allow them to look themslves in the mirror?

In reading this article, I was reminded, again, of Hannah Arendt's famous book on Eichman: "The Banality of Evil."

Coconuts

As if the world didn't have enough on its plate already, it sounds like there has been a coup in Fiji. That by itself would not be particularly noteworthy. After all, this is the 4th Fijian coup in 20 years (about as often as we have elections) and, after all, how does a coup in Fiji really impact American interests (or anyone else's, for that matter).

But one thing about the BBC reporting on this cuaght my ear on the way home from work tonight. Apparently, one of the main reasons for the coup is that the commander of the army is angry that the government is proposing to grant amnesty to . . . ready for this? . . . the last group who had staged a coup.

Talk about glass houses and stones and so forth. How goofy a reason for a coup can there be?

The SEC (Seriously Effusive Crybabies) Gets What It Wants

Well, Florida and it's coach Urban Meyer whined their way into the national championship game on the theory that the SEC is by far the toughest conference in the country. That is just the silliest claim I've ever heard. These guys are simply incestuous. They play no one but themselves. The only teams in the SEC with a winning record were Florida, Auburn, LSU, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The non-conference games these team played were:

Florida, the SEC East Champion: So. Miss (8-4 in Conference USA), Central Fla (4-8 in Conference USA), W. Caorlina (2-9 in Southern Conf -- Div 1-AA BTW) and Fla St (6-6 in the ACC).

Arkansas, the SEC West champion: Utah St (1-11 in the WAC), SE Missouri St (4-7 in the Ohio Valley - IAA again), and la. Monroe (6-6 in the Sun Belt). Oh yes, they also played USC -- and got thumped, 50-14!

LSU (now ranked # 5 in the nation): La. Lafayette (6-6 in the Sun Belt), Arizona (6-6 in the Pac 10), Tulane (4-8 in Conf USA), and Fresno St (4-8 in the WAC).

Auburn (supposedly the best starting out): Wash St (6-6 in the PAC 10), Buffalo (2-10 in the Mid-Am), Tulane (4-8 in Conf USA) and Ark. St (6-6 in the Sun Belt).

And then there is Tennessee, the team Urban Meyer is so proud of having beaten at Tennessee: Cal(9-3 in the Pac 10, which lost to USC which thumped Arkansas which thumped Arkansas BTW), Air Force (winning by 1 point against a team that was 4-8 in the Mountain West), Marshall (5-7 in Conf USA), and Memphis (2-10 in Conf USA).

The only teams in the SEC top five who beat a non-conference team with a winning record were Tennessee, who beat Cal, and Florida, who beat So. Mississippi. The idea that the SEC is the toughest conference in the country is simply a myth.

But, for all of that, I am glad Michigan didn't get into the national championship game. It will play USC in the Rose Bowl. So that is no big loss for the Big Ten. But the really sweet part of it is that the Big Ten will get a chance to thump the top two teams in the SEC: OSU vs Florida and Wisconsin vs. Arkansas. Moreover, if Notre Dame can beat LSU and Wake Forest can beat Louisville, then Big Ten Teams shouild end the season 1, 2 and 3: OSU, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Maybe THAT will finally shut up America's great conferenence of crybabies: the SEC.

Oh, and as an added delicacy: Penn State beats Tennessee?

The Isreali/Palestinian Cease-Fire: Grasping At Straws?

What are we to make of the recent "cease-fire" between Israel and various Palestinian factions operating in the Gaza strip? Is it, as Amos Oz, an Israeli novelist hopes, "the first flicker of light at the edge of the darkness". Or is it, as the Jerusalem Post suggests, "the military and diplomatic triumph of Hamas". If you take the leaders of the Palestinian groups at their word, the cease-fire is simply a "chance to reload" that changes nothing:

"The ceasefire offers a period of calm for our fighters to recover and prepare for our final goal of evacuating Palestine," said Abu Abir, spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, a Hamas-allied terror organization in the Gaza Strip responsible for many of the recent rocket attacks against Israeli communities.
"We will keep fighting (Israel), but for the moment we will postpone certain parts of the military struggle," Abu Abir said.

But, notwithstanding, Olmert sees this as an opportunity of historic proportions:

The past cannot be changed, and the victims of the conflict, from both sides of the border, cannot be returned.

Dictates are futile and mutual accusations are nothing but useless word games. Historic scores cannot be settled and scars cannot be obliterated.

All we can do today is prevent further tragedies and bequeath to the younger generation a bright horizon and hope for a new life. Let us convert animosity and the "honing of our swords" to mutual recognition, respect and direct dialogue.

The cynic in me yells that this is just one more false hope. That, in the end, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will make the sacrifices and compromises necessary to end the conflict.

But, for all of that, I can't resist hoping that "maybe this time it will be different."

Human Hubris: From the Simply Silly To The Manifestly Absurd

One of the more depressing upshots of the Democratic victory in the Congressional elections is that the new Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is one of the most ardent opponents of disposing nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain Nevada. Here's a quote from Mr. Reid's Web page:

The proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump is never going to open. Since I was elected to Congress in 1982, I have been fighting against Yucca Mountain because it threatens the health and safety of Nevadans and people across the United States. The science is incomplete, unsound, yet clearly demonstrates that Yucca Mountain is not a safe site for isolating nuclear waste. The tide is turning on Yucca Mountain, and it is time we look at viable alternatives and realistic approaches to long term nuclear waste storage. My highest priority is to ensure the health and safety of Nevadans and I will continue to fight against bringing spent nuclear fuel to Nevada.

I am far from conversant with the pros and cons of Yucca Mountain, but one aspect of the deabte recently caught my attention: whether, in designing the repository, DOE should be required to demonstrate that it will protect people for 10,000 years or for a million or more.

Some background (mostly taken from the opinion of the DC Circuit in the case linked below):

In 1992, following years of fierce debate (and litigation) over what to do with nuclear wastes, Congress stepped in and picked Yucca Mountain as the best (i.e. least worse) option. At the same time, Congress directed EPA to promulgate "public health and safety standards for protection of the public from releases of radioactive materials stored or disposed of in the repository at Yucca Mountain." These standards were to be "based upon and consistent with the findings and recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences."

Ten years later (approximately nine years late), EPA finally got around to adopting these standards. It promulgated three standards, but one of them is sufficient to illustrate the issue:

The DOE must demonstrate,using performance assessment,that there is a reasonable expectation that, for 10,000 years after disposal, [no individual is reasonably likely to receive a specified does of radiation per year].

The State of Nevada (and others) challenged the standards arguing that 10,000 years was too short. The Court of Appeals agreed, holding that EPA needed to establish standards that would require DOE to demonstrate that the "acceptable dose" would not be exceeded for a million years or more. (The decision is 100 pages long, but if you want to read the key part, see pages 20-32. The rest is stuff no one could love and only a lawyer could even tolerate).

This is a patently silly outcome, but before you go off on the evils of "activist" courts, the key to the decision was the statutory requirement that the standards be "based upon and consistent with the findings and recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences." The National Academy of Sciences determined (quite sensibly) that there was "no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual-risk standard to 10,000 years or any other value." According to the Academy, radiation exposures were likely to change only "on the time scale of the long term stability of the fundamental geologic regime -- a time scale that is on the order of [a million] years at Yucca Mountain." Thus, NAS concluded that human populations might not experience peak exposures "until tens to hundreds of thousands of years 'or even further into the future.' " As a result, NAS recommended that the exposure evaluation "be conducted for the time when the greatest risk occurs, within the limits imposed by the long-term stability of the geologic environment."

Personally, I find this recommendation to be impenetrable. Are they saying that the period EPA must consider is dictated by "the long-term stability of the geologic environment" and that because Yucca Mountain is so geologically stable, the projection has to go out a million or more years? If the geology were less stable, would the time for consideration be shorter? If that is the point, then we have a case of "no good deed goes unpunished:" the very aspect that makes Yucca Mountain appealing -- it's geologic stability -- would appear to make the period that must be covered in the risk assessment longer. What would seem sensible would to start by making the policy-based, risk management decision on a period of time over which unacceptable exposures must be prevented and then assessing whether the geologic stability of Yucca Mountain (together with other design aspect of the repository) were sufficient to prevent such an exposure from occurring within that time frame.

But the legal niceties of all of this are beside the more fundamental point: We can't reliably say anything about human society even 10,000 years from now, much less 1,000,000 years from now. Even attempting to do a "risk assessment" over thousands (to say nothing of millions) of years is just plain silly.

From Wikipedia, here are some of the major innovations to occur ten thousand years ago, i.e. in 8,000 BC:

Agriculture in Mesopotamia.

Domestication of the pig in China and Turkey.

Domestication of sheep and goats in the Middle East.

Domestication of dogs from wolves in China.

Ancient flint tools from north and central Arabia belong to hunter-gatherer societies.

Clay vessels and modeled human and animal terracotta figurines are produced at Ganj Dareh in western Iran.

Exchange of goods may represent the earliest pseudo-writing technology.

People of Jericho started to mold bricks out of clay, then hardened them in the sun.

Even if the rate of change were constant, which it is not, can you imagine a human society that is as different from today's as today's is from that which existed in 8,000 BC? Now, extrapolate that out 100 times.

Congress, NAS, EPA and the Court all share some of the blame for an outcome that results in EPA mandating an entirely pointless (and manifestly silly) "million year risk assessment". But, I think something important underlies this silliness: despite the evidence of history, human beings simply cannot internalize how little the current state of the world has to tell us about the state of the world even hundreds of years from now, much less tens of thousands or millions of years from now. The risks that concern us today are no more relevant to the risks we will confront even 500 years from now than the risks that concerned 16th Century Europe are relevant in today's world. And, that is only 500 years. It is pointless to even try to imagine what human society will look like in 1,000 years, much less 10,000 or 1,000,000 year from now. For all we know, radioactive waste generated in the 20th Century and stored at Yucca Mountain will be a critical source of energy for people (assuming any exist) even 500 years from now. 10,000 year from now, humans will have either disappeared entirely or colonized the universe. In either event, the fate of nuclear waste deposited at Yucca Mountain will not be relevant.

In terms of the age of the earth, to say nothing of the age of the universe, the whole of human history is not even a blink of an eye. We exist in an incredibly narrow environmental envelope that by itself is almost freakishly improbable. Given the forces at work in the universe, it is improbable to suppose that we will last even another 10,000 years, much less another million. But if we do, one thing can be said with certainty: whatever we are worried about today will seem as quint to our progeny as the worries of the Sumerians seems to us today.

Simple humility, if nothing else, requires us to recognize that fact. Yes, we need to be concerned with the future, but a hundred or so years is probably the limit of meaningful speculation. Anything beyond that is outside the range of our influence and, if we are to assume humanity is to survive at all, we have to trust that they will be able to deal with the issues we leave behind.

Mirages From The Quicksand

I always read Maureen Dowd's column, but it is mostly for laughs. She does have a way with words, but for the last two years she has done little with those talents other than to lob invective bombs at Bush, Rumsfeld and most especially Cheney. Not that they don't deserve it, and not that her rants don't make you smile, but mostly it is cheap humor, and, as with all such humor, it generates, along with a laugh, a twinge of sympathy for the targets and a rueful reconition that the vituperation and ridicule are little more than a sophisticated version of playground name-calling.

Today was a bit different, though. In a column entitled "Lost in the Desert" (subscription required), she writes with what comes close to anguish about the lack of options in Iraq. As she can do so well sometimes, she sums it all up in a single sentence:

It’s hard to remember when America has been so stuck. We can’t win and we can’t leave.

She can't entirely eschew ridicule of Cheney, of course. (Note to Rob re your comment on this earlier post -- I think her predicition about Dick is closer to the truth):

Dick Cheney and his wormy aides, of course, are still babbling about total victory and completing the mission by raising the stakes and knocking off the mullahs in Tehran. His tombstone will probably say, "Here lies Dick Cheney, still winning."

But apart from that, she does a good job of capturing the sense of sadness that I think so many of us share about the mess we are in. For those of you who don't have a "Times Select" subscription, here's an excerpt:

The good news is that the election finished what Katrina started. It dismantled the president’s fake reality about Iraq, causing opinions to come gushing forth from all quarters about where to go from here.

The bad news is that no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here. The White House and the Pentagon are ready to shift to Plan B. But Plan B is their empty term for miraculous salvation. . . .

Kofi Annan, who thought the war was crazy, now says that the United States is “trapped in Iraq” and can’t leave until the Iraqis can create a “secure environment” — even though the Iraqis evince not the slightest interest in a secure environment. (The death squads even assassinated a popular comedian this week.)

The retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who thought Mr. Bush’s crusade to depose Saddam was foolish and did not want to send in any troops, now thinks we may have to send in more troops so we can eventually get out.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, whose soldiers pulled Saddam out of his spider hole and who is returning to Iraq to take charge of the day-to-day fight, has given up talking about a Jeffersonian democracy and now wishes only for a government in Iraq that’s viewed as legitimate. He has gone from “can do” to “don’t know.” He talked to The Times’s Thom Shanker about his curtailed goals of reducing sectarian violence and restoring civil authority, acknowledging: “Will we attain those? I don’t know.”

At a Senate hearing last week, Gen. John Abizaid sounded like Goldilocks meets Guernica, asserting two propositions about the war that are logically at war with each other. He said we can’t have fewer troops because the Iraqis need us, but we can’t have more because we don’t want the Iraqis to become dependent on us.

He contended that increasing the number of our troops would make the Iraqi government mad, but also asserted that decreasing the number would intensify sectarian violence.

This a poor menu of options.

While I think Maureen is right that no one knows what to do, there remains no shortage of people who talk like they do. Today's column by David Ignatius in the Washington Post is a case in point, and the real impetus to this post:

What will contain the Iraqi civil war, in the end, is that none of the regional powers can tolerate a shattered Iraq -- not Iran, not Syria, not Saudi Arabia, not Jordan, not Turkey. Nor do most Iraqis want a dissolution of their unitary state. The Iraqis will restabilize their nation when the "nationalist forces" -- including ones we don't like, such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Sunni insurgency -- make common cause under a regional mandate.

Only the United States can broker the regional conference that will allow a political transition in Iraq. That's our leverage now -- diplomatic clout, more than military power. If the neighboring powers can help apply a tourniquet to stop the bleeding in Iraq, America can begin to step away.

There are so many things I think are wrong with this that I don't know where to start. To begin with, Ignatius largely assumes away the core problem by characterizing forces like the Mahdi Army and the Sunni insurgency as being "nationalist." If that were the case, there wouldn't be much of a problem. But it is not. The warring factions in Iraq are not fighting for a nation, they are fighting for sectarian domination. They are in favor of a "nation" if, but only if, their sect or tribe gets to run it. As such, "common cause" between them is possible only if they are willing and able to become nationalists; i.e to sublimate their sectarian hatreds to the common cause of creating a nation. Does anyone see that as even being remotely likely in anything like the near term?

Then there is the idea that the regional powers -- Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey -- are the ones who can bring the warring factions together. There are (at least) two problems with this assertion. First, for the "regional powers" to play any role at all, they would have at least to agree on a desired end state. But these powers are not really all that much different than the factions warring within Iraq itself. Iran is militantly Shite, Saudi Arabia is militantly Sunni, Jordan and Turkey are largely secular, and the Assad regime is concerned only with preserving its own power. Contrary to Ignatius' assertion, there is an outcome that each of these powers fears more worse than a fragmented Iraq: a united Iraq dominated by one or the other (or, in the case ot Turkey and Jordan, either) of the religious sects currently at war. Getting these countries even to agree on an acceptable outcome does not seems much more likely than getting such agreement between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni insurgency. Ignatius makes the mistake so common to Americans: he takes as his premise that everyone else wants what we do. It just ain't so.

But, even if it were, even if we could hope that the regional powers could come to agreement on an end state to be pursued jointly, what in the world makes Ignatius or anyone else think they could achieve it? What are they going to do that the Americans are not? Is it just that they are Muslims and are therefore presumed to have greater influence over other Muslims? In some cases (e.g. Israel/Palestine), that idea may have some force. But in the case of Iraq, at least, it founders again on the sectarian/tribal nature of the conflict. This is not (at least not primarily) a war between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is a war between Shites and Sunnis. Being Muslim alone is not enough to give the regional powers influence any more than being "Christian" was enough to give the Pope influence over Heny the VIII.

But the part of Ignatius' "solution" that really appears to be preposterous is this: "Only the United States can broker the regional conference that will allow a political transition in Iraq." If there is any power in the world that is thoroughly discredited in the Islamic Middle East it is the US. We can't even get our allies to help us. What sort of delusion is it that allows one to suppse that the US has the ability to forge effective alliances between, say, Iran and Saudi Arabia? This sort of thinking is just more of the neoconservative nonsense -- the sense that America is all powerful -- that got us into Iraq in the first place. Despite 25 years of trying, we have not even been able to broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians, despite the fact that we do have real influence over at least one of the parties to that conflict. How in the world are we to broker a peace between two parties both of which hate us and neither of which is dependent on us? Most of all, how do we persuade a charter member of the "axis of evil" -- a country against whom we are even now contemplating going to war -- to help us in that effort?

Evangelical Atheism

This article from the science section of today's New York Times -- A Free-for-All on Science and Religion -- got me thinking, again, about the role of religion in the world. The article reports on a conference of scientists debating (ostensibly) the relationship between science and religion. But, if the article is at all representative, the conference turned into a debate among non-believers about the merits of what might be called "evangelical atheism." As the author of the article characterized it:

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

So far as the article indicates, there were no believers involved in the debate. Rather, the conflict was between those who, while themselves non-believers, nonetheless had at least a paternalisitic tolerance for the role religion played in some peoples lives ("People need to find meaning and purpose in life. I don’t think we want to take that away from them. ") and those who consider religion to be a positive evil that needs to be confronted and, if possible, stamped out ("The world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief" and "Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization." ).

Perhaps the most strident of the latter group was Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusiuon":

"I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion," he said. "Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence."

What struck me most about the article (and, to the extent the article is a fair representation, the conference) was exactly what apprently struck Dr. Melvin Konner, an anthropologist: how indistingishable people like Dawkins and Sam Harris (author of "The End of Faith," about which I had much to say late last year) are from the very people they most despise:

I think that you [Sam Harris] and Richard [Dawkins] are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side, and that you generate more fear and hatred of science."

Just as their counterparts on the other side generate more fear and hatred of religion.

Somehow related to this was a "This American Life" story on NPR this weekend about the Rev Carlton Pearson, a pentecostal preacher from Tulsa, who woke up one day and decided that hell didn't exist and that everyone was going to heaven. He was declared a heretic by his church and most of his congregation deserted him. He had argued (preached) that the Pentecostal God was worse than Hilter. After all, he said, Hitler had killed only 6 million. The Pentecostal God was slated to kill a thousand times more than that, at least. The response of his church and those of his congregants who bothered to engage him was simply this: "Who the heck are you are? We don't like the thought of billions of people consigned to burn in hell either, but we didn't make the rules. That's what the Bible says will happen and that's just the way it is."

This kind of stuff (along with jihadis flying planes into buildings and otherwise seeing glory and martyrdom in suicide bombings) is what gives Harris' and Dawkins' antipathy some appeal. How can people believe such stuff? Indeed, how can otherwise perfectly sensible people believe in God at all?

But for all of my incredulity at such beliefs, I can not take the step Harris and Dawkins take. I cannot bring myself to condemn such belief or to campaign against it. I know too many sensible people (from my wife to C. S. Lewis) who hold such beliefs and for whom those beliefs are a positive influence in theirs lives and in their relations with others. Thus, I tend to see religious belief much as I do divining rods: I think it is silly to suppose that a Y-shaped stick held in both hands is any better at finding water than random digging. But I see no point in telling people who do believe that it is better that they are stupid or ignorant or superstitious or irrational for doing so.

In thinking about all of this, I came to the conclusion that it is not the belief or faith to which I object, it is the proselytizing. I am prepared to let anyone believe whatever he wants, just so long as that belief does not include a compulsion to convert me or to condemn me or my actions becuase they are contrary to those beliefs. I will tolerate his inanity (as I see it) so long as he tolerates my decadence (as he sees it).

Which brings me back to the NYT article that started all of this. I detest evangelicism, and it makes no difference whether the "God" in whose name the evangelicism is perpetrated is the God of Abraham, the God of Revelations, the God of the Koran or the God of scientific rationalism.

An Advertisement For "The Economist"

I have been subscribing to "The Economist" for the last few months, and I would strongly encourage anyone who is interested in good journalism to start reading it as well. It is fairly conservative on economic issues, but for all of that it is by far the best weekly news magazine I know of. It is what Time used to be before it decided to become a cross between People and USA Today.

Idealism Is Dangerous

This article from the Washington Post is fascinating. It documents the collapse of "neo-conservatism," and in doing so provides yet another case study (as if we needed another) of how dangerous idealism is when untempered by realism.

As an aside (only), I have to note Richard Perle's ridiculously self-serving effort to avoid taking part of the blame, which WaPo does a decent enough job of skewering that I can simply quote it without comment:

In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. [Huh? How exactly would you have done that?!] "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."

Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."

That is simply laughable, Richard, you spineless weasel. I haven't heard so much exculpatory hair-splitting since Bill Clinton was talking about Monica Lewinski.

It is almost too easy to make fun of Perle. Or Wolfowitz. Or Rumsfeld. Or Feith. Or any of those other "neo-conservatives" who were so convinced that America was on a mission from God (metaphorically in some cases; literally in others). But the quote that really captured my attention is from Ken Adelman, another one of the self-confessed intellectual architects of this war:

"The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."

"Disproven" vs. "discredited." Now THERE's a distinction even a lawyer couldn't love. One cannot "disprove" ideas; one can only "discredit" them. But that is not the real point. It should not be necessary to "disprove" or "discredit" the idea that foreign policy should be driven by "values" rather than self-interest. The idealism that underlies Adelman's neo-conservatism not much different from that which underlay the Utopians or even the hippies. It is, for all its seeming ferocity, almost childlike in its naivete.

International relations is about self-interest and nothing else. If our self-interest aligns with our ideals, so much the better. But if our ideals and our self-interest diverge, only a fool would pursue the ideals.

The Iraq war was sold on the basis of realism and self-interest. In 2003, there was no talk about spreading freedom and democracy. It was all about getting rid of a government that was portrayed (and perhaps even perceived) as posing a clear and present danger to our security. But, as Adelman effectively admits, that was not really the true rationale of the people who orchestrated the selling of the war. Their true motivation was, as Adelman confesses, a "philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based." Adelman is right that the fiasco in Iraq thoroughly discredits such an idea, and one can only hope it will stay discredited for another hundred years. But what is amazing to me is that these guys believed it in the first place. How do such men get to positions in which they control the levers of US power?

Who Will Play Ohio State?

Let the arguments begin!

In a great game, OSU beat Michigan by 3 points at home despite giving up 10 points on three trunovers. If you believe the talking heads on the sports shows, everyone agrees that these are the two best teams in the country, so by that standard, Michigan should shjow up as no. 2 in the BCS on Monday, which would essentially assure them a spot in the National Championship game. (They probably will stay at number 2 in the computer polls, since Michigan was rated no. 1 in 4 of the 5 computer rankings last week and nothing about the games today will cuase them to drop to no. 3 there). But my guess is that the "people polls" will probably drop Michigan to at least 4th behind USC & Florida and maybe even to 5th behind Notre Dame despite the fact that Michigan beat Notre Dame handily early in the season.

Oh, and Rutgers lost to Cincinnati, so that nightmare is over.

The Bucs are in, and there are only 4 teams that have any chance of joining them: USC, Florida, Notre Dame, and Arkansas. But, USC plays ND and Arkansas plays Florida. Oh, and Michigan beat ND handily.

So (assuming there are no more significant upsets) ,OSU's opponent will be:

• USC, unless it loses to ND; or
• If USC loses ro ND, then the winner of the Florida-Arkansas game, unless LSU beats Arkansas and Arkansas beats Florida; or
• Michigan

But who knows. The OSU-ND match-up is so attractive (Smith v Qiuinn; ND fan base v Big 10 fan base, etc.) that ND could get the nod over Michigan so long a ND beats USC.

This is fun!

Update (Monday Morning): Well, the BCS came out with Michigan still at no. 2 a hair ahead of of USC. If USC beats Notre Dame next week and UCLA the week after, my guess is that it will edge into second place and play OSU in the National Championship game. But, if Notre Dame beats USC, it's anyone's guess. It will be very hard for the polls to put ND ahead of Michigan given that Michigan thumped them. So, if ND beats USC, it will come down to a choice between Michigan and the winner of the Florida and Arkansas game (assuming Florida beats Flarida State and Arkansas beats LSU). Ironically, Arkansas probably has a better chance than Florida of jumping over Michigan in the polls becuase for it to win out it has to beat two top tean teams.

As a Big Ten fan, my dream scenario is this: ND beats USC, LSU beats Arkansas, Arkansas beats Florida, and Rutgers beats West Virginia. If all of that happens there would be Big Ten teams ranked 1, 2 and 4 at the end of the season becuase Wisconsin would move up to no. 4.

I can't quite believe I am so deep into the details of all of this. I'm getting goofy in my old age.

Stay or Leave: Billy Bob on Iraq

Below is a portion of a long e-mail I got from billy bob about a week and a half ago that I have only today gotten a chance to actually read (It's been a rough ten days work-wise):

Stay or leave?

Clearly things are not that simple. We’re not staying forever and we’re not leaving tomorrow. My greatest frustration here in Iraq has been the continued and ritualistic rants about the spineless ones on the left who don’t want to see this thing through. The problem is, no one has honestly asked us to see this thing though. Americans have faced the bi or tri-monthly declarations that, “history will show that this month marks the turning point and the beginning of the end of the insurgency.” A few hundred deaths and a couple months later things look the same, but after a small victory on one of the infinite fronts of this effort, the declaration of change returns. Thus the choice we’ve been presented with is reduced to ‘trust us, we’ll be right one of these times and things will get better – the details of what’s happening are not important’ or ‘pull out because we don’t know how things are going or when they’ll get better and we aren’t willing to commit the lives of Americans to an effort you’re not willing to honestly assess.’

There is a wealth of counter-insurgency experience in the world and its libraries. Unfortunately for many freedom-fries loving “patriots,” much of that experience comes from the French and their experience in Algeria. Oh well. Time to swallow the pride and start absorbing the wisdom of others. While swallowing that bitter pill, we might as well admit that a lot of smart people were ostracized from the Iraq effort from the outset due to their less-than-rosy forecasts of outcomes that didn’t center on flowers falling from the sky. We need to bring these people together and ask them to give us options. Things will change, of course, but the fragility of every plan is no reason not to have one. We need smart people, who the past few years of history have shown to be insightful, to develop several courses of action with associated markers to track our progress toward an end-state. (I use the term ‘markers’ because I have come to despise ‘measures of effectiveness – MOEs’ which are focal points of the effects based planning we operate under. MOEs are often ends unto themselves and have little connection to the efforts we can influence.)

End state. What a concept. In the Army we can hardly walk to lunch without a predetermined end state, yet this war seems to be conspicuously lacking a goal. Iraq will not be a democracy resembling Ohio in our lifetimes, so let’s set a reasonable goal. It’s clear an insurgency will linger far longer than our American attention spans, but we do have a responsibility to enable a government that can, for the most part, protect the vast majority of Iraqis who want to live, work, and raise their families in peace. There will still be violence and an ugly situation, but it was an ugly situation when we arrived.

So we have some smart people working on plans to reach a reasonable end state with progress markers along the way. Let them do their job, give them more than the 30-60 days Jay Garner was afforded to plan a coalition provisional authority, then pitch their plans to Americans. Present 1, 3, 5, 10, 25, and maybe even 50-year options with associated costs in lives (both American and Iraqi), dollars, and American international credibility. Let us know what Iraq will look like along the way and when we leave. Even after 50 years there will be disillusioned individuals prone to violence, so I don’t buy the argument that timelines enable our enemies. Let America decide what we are willing to commit to.

Those of you who know me may notice this is a pretty substantial departure from my feelings before I deployed – I formerly would have been in the get-out-now camp. But I’ve realized this thing is too important to take the easy way out…whether the easy way out is to actually leave now or to stay indefinitely because we won’t be forced to admit any level of failure. This will not be the last time we face a foreign threat from terrorism, and while this war has taught us much about how not to react, we still need to improve the situation for Iraqis.

I’m fading so I need to wrap this up, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. I realize I’ve conveniently omitted road blocks such as an Iraqi democracy that turns to Iran for protection or elects a fundamentalist leader who, with plurality support, digresses to brutal rule in the name of security, but those are discussions for another day. What do you think? Can America step back, reevaluate our options, swallow a bit of pride, and choose an option based on the future more than the past?

I hope so.

What do I think?

One of the most surprising think about the aftermath of the election is how much it seems to have taken the wind out of the sails of the "leave now" crowd. The drubbing the Republicans took was a catharsis. It gave the electroate a chance to express their anger at the idiots who got us into this mess. And, having done that, they are now able to better focus on the question billy bob asks: "Where do we go from here?" The problem, though, is that no one seems to have a good answer.

How you feel about the "stay or leave" question is a function of whether you think there is any hope that we can reach an "end state" (sorry bb) that is at least tolerable. There is plenty of reason to be pessimistic about that and very little reason to be optomistic. And, when you consider that pursuing the "long shot" will cost hundreds and perhaps thousands of young Americam men and women their lives and limbs (and hundreds of billions of dollars), "staying" seems like betting your life on double zero.

But two things counterbalance that for many of us, including billy bob I gather. First, there is fear of what will happen if we leave. Second, there is a sense of responsibilty. It has become commonplace to refer to this sense of responsibilty as "the Pottery Barn rule," but that is both trite and demeaning. We are not talking about a broken lamp here. We are talking by what could be catastrophe of hstoric magnitude. Inside Iraq, it could well be worse than the Balkans in the late 90's. M aybe even owrse than The Sudan today. Maybe even worse than the Hutus and the Tutsis. But frankly, that is not even the worst part. A failed state in the midst of the Middle East on the border of a soon to be nuclear Iran is a truly scary proposition. And compounding this is the propaganda victory the Islamists would get. It is hard to imagine how bad that could get. When you are the ones who are responsible making all this possible, you can't give up on the effort to avoid it so long as there is the slightest glimmer of hope.

But what to do? The dream of a secular liberal democracy in Iraq was always delusional but is now manifestly dead. The "best" end state we can hope for is stability, and the best we can probably hope for is a new Tito. I'd settle for a new Saddam. But one cannot clearly see how to achieve even that.

One idea I have heard recently is to quit trying to be neutral and unleash the Shias. My first reaction was horror at the thought. But the more I think about it, the harder it becomes to rule out. We are in the midst of s civil war that remains "low-grade" (if at all) only becuase we are there damping it down. I don't think it is possible in a situation like this to make the opposing sides reach a stable accomodation. So, one side or the other is going to end up winning this battle. We can make that happen more quickly and probably less painfully in the long run by taking sides, much like we did in Afghanistan when we aligned with the warlords and much as we have done through much of the last 60 years aligning ourselves with the anti-communists regardless of how repressive they were. And, if you have to pick sides, the Shias have at least three things to recommend them: they are the majority; they are the ones who have been repressed; and they hate Al Queda. If we have to have a theocracy emerge in Iraq, I would much prefer it to me one that has the support of the majority and an antipathy to our main enemy. After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Big Ten Rules

The college football game of the year is coming up next weekend: OSU v Michigan. They are without question the two best teams in the nation this year. Neither one has even had a close game. The rest of the top ten keeps losing. Auburn lost. Louisville lost. Cal lost. Texas is getting killed. Florida managed to win by one point at home against a 4-5 S Carolina team, but did so only by blocking two field goals and an extra point. Who's left? Rutgers and Boise State??

Either Michigan or OSU will lose next weekend. But who could argue that there is another team that better desrves to play for the natioanl championship?

Whoever wins next weekend, viva the rematch!

UPDATE (Sunday Morning): Well, Texas did lose. Which means that 4 of the teams ranked 3-7 last week lost and the fifth's (Florida's) win at home against a 4-5 team was so narrow as to hardly count as a win. There is going to be a big shake-up in the rankings tomorrow. Pigskin Bill's predictions:

Given its solid win over a ranked Oregon, and the poor performance of those ahead of it, USC will jump to 3rd. Arkansas, whose only loss was it's opener to USC and who thumped Tennessee will move up to 5. Floridas will drop to 6, and Rutgers, Louisville, West Virginia and LSU will round out the rest of the top ten, with Rutgers higher that Loisuville, which it beat, and Louisville higher than West Virginia, which it beat. The only uncertainty is where in this mix LSU will fall. I tend to think it will bring up the rear, since alone out of these teams it has 2 losses. So, here is my projection for tomorrow's BCS rankings:

1. Ohio State
2. Michigan
3. USC
4. Notre Dame
5. Arkansas
6. Florida
7. Rutgers
8. Louisville
9. West Virginia
10. LSU

Now, the interesting thing is to try to figure out who will be the other team in the National Championship Game. I think it will come down to 4 teams: USC, Notre Dame, Rutgers and the loser of the OSU-Michigan Game. The other possibility of course is Florida, but it's hard to see how they could end up being ranked ahead of the loser of the OSU-Michigan game after their performenace at home against a 4-5 S Carolina team and with no ranked opponents remaining on their schedule. So, I rule out Florida.

Of the remianing 4 teams, USC has by far the toughest schedule, since it still has to play both Cal and Notre Dame. Thus, if USC wins out, it will probably get the nod. However, if USC loses to either Cal or Notre Dame, they will be out of it. Notre Dame must beat USC to have a chance, but even if it does, it would be hard to pick ND over Michigan, since Michigan beat them. I think Notre Dame needs two things to have a chance: a victory over USC and a victory by Michigan over OSU. Then there is Rutgers. If USC and Notre Dame both lose another game and Rutgers beats West Virginia and remains undefeated, it will be hard to deny Rutgers a shot. But if USC, Notre Dame and Rutgers all lose a game (or if USC and Rutgers lose a game and OSU beats Michigan), I can't see how a rematch between OSU and Michigan can be avoided, especially if the OSU-Michigan game is close.

Nez-Pas?

Ooops: Forgot about Arkansas. If USC and Notre Dame both lose another game, and Rutgers and Arkansas both win out, (with Rutgers beating W. Va. and Arkansas beating LSU), then the choice will between two one-loss Big Ten and SEC Teams (the loser of the OSU Michigan game and Arkansas) and an undefeated Big East Team (Rutgers). That will be a toughie.

Israel

Does anyone besides me think Israel is our single biggest foreign policy problem? Why do we keep supporting these nut cases?

The Dems Won. Why am I not Happy?

It was an intersting week: The Dems win both Houses. The first woman Speaker. Rummy fired. W admits he got "thumped" and hires another one of Daddy's friends. And the talk of bipartisanship is so thick you can cut it.

As to that last, I don't believe it for a moment. If Bush were interested in compromise he wouldn't be pushing Bolton and the domestic survellience bill. And the Dems are (as always) posturing. They can hardly wait to start the hearings. From today's NYT:

After meeting with Mr. Bush at the White House, Senator Harry Reid, the incoming Senate majority leader, said "the first order of business" when Democrats formally take over in January will be to reinvigorate Congressional scrutiny of the executive branch, with a focus on Iraq.

"Let’s find out what’s going on with the war in Iraq, the different large federal agencies that we have," said Mr. Reid, Democrat of Nevada. "There simply has been no oversight in recent years."

. . .

In Los Angeles, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is to lead the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, said in a speech that war profiteering could also be a likely subject for his committee.

Mr. Reid is also interested in completing the long-delayed second phase of an Intelligence Committee review into prewar intelligence and the administration’s handling of it, Mr. Manley said.

I agree with Rob's comment on this post that such public witch hunts are entirely counterproductive. But these people are genetically incapable of resisting the temptaion to try to score political points. One of the worst consequences of this election is that we will see lots of Henry Waxman on our TV screens for the next two years. It is going (I fear) to be a reprise of the last two years of the Clinton administration.

Speaker Nancy? Who knows, I guess. Maybe she will grow into the job. But her public pronouncements since becoming minority leader have struck me as nothing short of inane, distinguished only by partisan venom and buzzwords cahined together to make invective. More generally, I have absolutely no confidence in the Democrats. What kind of a party is it whose last nominee is as inept as John Kerry, whose current front runner is Hilary Cinton, and whose most attractive candidate (by a long shot) has been a Senator for two years and has never had a job in which he had to make decisions. Moreover, on social issues at least, the effect of the election was to make both parties more intolerant, with Republicans like Lincoln Chafee losing and Democrats like Brad Ellsworth winning. On a lot of issues, many of the new Democrats willl be voting with the Republicans.

On the Iraq "issue": The Dems campaigned for "change," but have no more of an idea as to what to do than Bush does. Moreover, the very idea that an institution as fractious as Congress could come up with a coherent policy for Iraq is simply nonsense. When it comes right down to it, the Dems are no more inclined to simply leave than are the Republicans. They too realize that if they get blamed for the mess that will almost certainly follow from withdrawal, they will end up getting clobbered in 2008. So, the policy changes, if any, will all be at the margins. The essential fact will remain: we will stay until the spinmeisters believe they can "declare victory."

This mess is so much like Viet Nam. It's just the parties that are reversed. In Viet Nam, the Dems got us in it and it cost them the Presidency in 1968. Yet, it took Nixon 5 more years to get us out, and even then the leaving was an unmitigated embarassment. Now its the Republicans that got us in, and I suspect that it will cost them the Presidency in 2008. Yet, I also suspect that the next President (Hillary, Osama, who?)will still be trying (probably unsuccessfully) to bring the conflcit to an "honorable" end when he/she runs for re-election four years later.

In the end, we will leave as ignominiously as the Russians left Afghanistan -- and will similar results.

This election was a referendum on the war. The war lost, much as it did in 1968. But telling a current administrattion that they are fuck ups doesn't really solve anything. As somebody once said, wars are much easier to get into than get out of.

Sigh.

Election Night Musings

I just got on line and they (CNN) projected that Lincoln Chafee lost. Why does that not make me happy? Of all the Republican Senators with whom I felt simpatico, Lincoln Chafee was the first. And before that, Joe Liberman apparently won. The one Democrat I would most have loved to see lose.

Sigh. For those of us who see this election as a referendum on George Bush, it is going to be a "be careful what you wish for" year. I voted Democratic across the board this year, the only time I have ever done that, for either party, in my lifetime. I think I will get my wish -- non-Republican control of Congress. Yet, before the next two years are over, my guess is that I will be kicking myself.

What strikes me most about these elections is how socially conservative and fiscally progressive the Congress is becoming. That is not me. Indeed, I am the opposite. I am socially progressive and fiscally conservative. Where oh where is MY party?

Responses to a couple comments:

What do I think of Kerry's "joke"? I think it is a testamenet to how pathetic the Democrats have become. Taken by itself, it was just silly. But then you realize that this is the guy the Democrats nominated for President. And then you think that his main opponent was Howard Dean. And you wonder what ever happened to the party of FDR, LBJ and JFK? The Democrats are a joke. But for the Iraq debacle, they would be a splinter party. And the only ones who could win would be the anti-abortion,anti-gay rights, anti-free trade, pro-taxes luddites like Sherrod Brown.

What do I think of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker? First off, I'm not at all sure she will win given the nature of the "new Democrats." But assuming she does, I think it will be a debacle. Has the woman ever been anything other than shrill? If the D's win tonight we are in for a two-year period of "investigation paralysis" that will make the last two years of the Clinton administration seem idyllic.

I can't remember when I have been more depressed for the future of my country.

Update (12:30 am ET): Well, it looks like Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker (shudder) and Dick Cheney will be the deciding vots in a 50-50 Senate (doule shudder). I can't think of much worse other than where we are today. But, I am going to bed, and we will see how things work out.

Starting Again

I had a call yesterday from one of the very few regular contributors to this site (Left Coast Rob) wondering what had happened to me. Had I quit writing and if so why? He said (kindly) that he missed the posts.

Yes, I have (or at least had) quit. I have written a couple of posts that are still saved as "drafts" in Blogger, but the last actual post was almost exactly 3 months ago.

There are a host of reasons for this. Partly, it is hard work trying to find something interesting or useful to say on a regular basis. Partly it is becuase, toward the end, I had been writing primarily for Billy Bob, but learned that he could no longer get accesss to the site. Partly is was that, for the most part, it all felt like I was talking to myself: mental masturbation performed in public, as it were. (To complete the metaphor, I have continued to "massage my mind for my own amusement" over the last few months, but have done so mostly in private ;-)).

Mainly, though, I quit writing becuase I kept finding I had nothing new to say. A year or so of blogging has brought home to me, in a forceful way, how little things change even over the course of a year, to say nothing of day-to-day or week-to-week, which is the time frame for a blog. There is always new news, of course. We are bombarded by it. But the underlying issues and the things people say about them are always the same. Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, the conflict with Islamo-facisim, social security, neo-conservatism, gay marriage/rights, stem cell reserach, religious fundamentalism,pollitics in general, etc. etc. I have written myself out on all of these issues. And, at least in the absence of dialogue, once you have said what you have to say on a given issue, what is the point of saying it again? After all, who wants to be as tiresomely repetitive as Maureen Dowd?

But recently, the urge to write has come upon me again, spurred in part by my wife who, though she hadn't been all that pleased with the amount of time I had been spending on the blog when I was doing it, has now concluded that it at least beats my spending the same amount of time (or more) playing spades on Yahoo or on-line poker -- which (in case anyone from NSA is checking)I am no longer playing by the way. So, the call from Rob caught me at a moment of weakeness, and I decided maybe I'd try again.

We'll see how it goes.

What Will They Remember?

I had an NPR "driveway moment" this afternoon. I can't find the link, but it was the last segment in "This Amercan Life" on Michigan Public Radio (the program entitled "Image Makers"). It was a truly touching account by a mother about the fading memories she and her young son have of the husband/father who died, and the problem of "keeping Dad alive" when all they have left are a few personal things (rings, watches, cufflinks, change in a jar, etc.) he kept close. It made me wonder: what will mine remember of me?

O Israel

I got an e-mail on the mess in Lebanon from ole Yuval, the self-styled "Truth Provider." It included the following paragraph:

Please support the IDF. Allow it to complete the task. Only full victory will do. For the sake of us all and our future generations, do not allow peacenicks and uppeasers [sic] to put obstacles on our road to full victory.

As if "full victory" were achieveable by force of arms. This war, like every one that has prededed it since 1967 will end in exactly the same way: by making absolutely no difference. Except of course to all the people killed or maimed in the process.

I am so frustrated by this whole situation I am simply beside myself. The situation between the Arabs and Israel is the greatest threat to American security in the world today. Yet, despite the lessons of nearly 40 years, no one seems to be able to see that bombs and bullets change nothing for the better. Where is our Nelson Mandela?

ARRRGH!

Billy Bob's Bulletins

As anyone who reads this can tell, I have pretty much quit doing this series of posts. It was started in response to Billy Bob's observation in an e-mail that news about Iraq was hard to come by in Iraq. So, I thought posting links that he could read (and if the spirit moved him comment on) more or less anonymously might serve a useful function. However, the longer I did this, the more uncomfortable I became. The news from all over the Middle East is just so consistently awful that I began to wonder if making it more accessible to someone fighting there was really the right thing to do.

However, the Washington Post today published the first two of what I gather will be a series of articles adapted from a new book by its lead reporter on military affairs, Thomas E. Ricks. The articles and the book (entitled "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq") are pretty critical of American strategy and of the tactics that flowed from that strategy. As such, my initial reaction was that this was still another example of the kind of stuff I shouldn't burden Billy Bob with. But two things led me to go ahead. First, the intro to the series comes with links to a whole series of articles Ricks has written over the last 4 years on the debates within the military and between the military and the Administration that reads like a history of the Iraq war. It is just fascinating to see how close we came to getting it right. Second, the criticisms are not just carping. Nor are they just the ruminations of some jounalist. The criticisms come from within the military establishment itself and they contain some insights that seem to me to be still worth learning. As such, I thought Billy Bob might find some of these insights useful in terms of his own mission.

Hope I am not wrong on all of this.

Anyway, here is a link to Ricks' prior articles and here are links to the two new articles that appeared today:

In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam (an overall critique of the strategy), and

'It Looked Weird and Felt Wrong' (a more particularized critique of the 4th Infantry Division's implementation of that strategy).

Two quotes from the first of the new articles stick with me:

"When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, . . . eventually you'll get the tactics right [as well]," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. "If you get the strategy wrong . . ., you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war."

As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. In [fact], the people are the prize.

The Tribal Way Of War

In a post earlier today, I bemoaned, not for the first time, both the bankrptcy of our, the Israelis', indeed the West's, current "grand strategy" for winning its struggle with militant Islam and my own (indeed anyone's) inability to articulate an alternative. Not ten minutes after posting that, I came across a WSJ review of a book by Richard H. Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew entitled "Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias." I obviously haven't read the book (yet), but if the review is accurate, this book may articulate, if not an actual alternative, then at least a persepctive that may be helpful in trying to formulate one.

The review starts with a much more cogent statement of the problem than I have yet been able to muster:

While the U.S. spends billions of dollars on sophisticated defense systems, the dime-a-dozen kidnapper and suicide bomber have emerged as the most strategic weapons of war. While we tie ourselves in legal knots over war's acceptable parameters, international law has increasingly less bearing on those whom we fight. And while our commanders declare "force protection" as their highest priority, enemy commanders declare the need for more martyrs. It seems that the more advanced we become, the more at a disadvantage we are in the 21st-century battlefield.

The reviewer might well have added that, "the more we punish them, the stronger they become."

According to the review, Shultz and Dew make the case that the reason for these apparent paradoxes is that we and our adversaries have very different understandings of the purposes of war and the rules that apply to it. They argue that, if we are to prevail in these conflicts, we need, as Sun Tzu's advised 2,500 years ago, to "Know your enemy" and tailor our strategy appropriately:

Forget Karl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is a last resort and circumscribed by the methodical actions and requirements of a state and its army. Forget Hugo Grotius's notion that war should be circumscribed by a law of nations. As the authors remind us, paraphrasing the anthropologist Harry Turney-High: "Tribal and clan chieftains did not employ war as a cold-blooded and calculated policy instrument. . . . Rather, it was fought for a host of social-psychological purposes and desires, which included . . . honor, glory, revenge, vengeance, and vendetta." With such motives, torture and beheadings become part of the normal ritual of war."

The point of the book, I gather, is that is that, for our current adversaires, what is seen as an appropriate causus belli as well as the rules that govern war once initiated are products of tribal culture and history and bear little relation to what has evolved into the "western way of war." For instance:

The Somali way of war--so startling to U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu in 1993--emerged from Somalia's late-19th-century Dervish movement, on which the country's top warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, based his strategy. What the West viewed as fanaticism was merely the Somali proclivity for judging a man's character by his religious conviction and his physical ability to fight without limits. In the Somali worldview, our aversion to killing women and children was a weakness that could be exploited by using noncombatants as human shields.

"Cleary," the book admonishes, "the task of anticipating the enemy's tactics requires thinking that goes beyond Western moral categories."

I can't tell if the book actually proposes anything more concrete than the admonition to "know your enemy." However, even if not, that admonition coupled with some insight into particlur enemies, may be a starting point.

I have ordered the book.

"You'd Do The Same Thing. Probably Even Worse"

There has been a lot of criticism of Israel for what is characterized as its disproportionate responses to the cross-border incursions and kidnappings perpetrated by Hamas and then by Hezbollah. If you are interested, much of this criticism is catalogued in an article posted yesterday on the Zionist Organization Of America website, which, of course, considers such criticism to be evidence of the perfidy of Israel's so-called "friends."

Every one of these statements also blamed Hezbollah for starting things, condemned Iran and Syria for supporting Hezbollah and confirmed Israel's right to defend itself from such attacks. Even some of Israel's traditional enemies joined in criticizing Hezbollah as well as Israel.

Yet the opinion pieces from Israel's American supporters chose to largely ignore these facts and to portray the criticism as an attack on Israel's right to respond at all: Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal, Max Boot, James Taranto, Charles Krauthammer(again), etc.

But the disproportionality is so overwhelming that even the Israeli PR machine cannot keep it out of the news sections: Dozens more die as air strikes continue, Dazed Refugees Flood Beirut, Beirut: City Of Ruins, Large-Scale Evacuations From Lebanon Begin etc. Yes, Israelis are suffering and dying too, but some statistics reported in today's NY Times brings the relative suffering into perspective:

The asymmetry in the reported death tolls is marked and growing: some 230 Lebanese dead, most of them civilians, to 25 Israeli dead, 13 of them civilians. In Gaza, one Israel soldier has died from his own army's fire, and 103 Palestinians have been killed, 70 percent of them militants.

In addition, Israel has disabled the Lebanon's only commercial airport, blockaded its ports, and destroyed fuel tanks, power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads and innumerable homes and businesses in both Lebanon and Gaza. It has even bombed a Lebanese Army base -- the same army it insists should be disarming Hezbollah. Nothing even remotely similar to this is occurring in Israel.

With the disproportionality so blatant and undeniable, Israeli apologists have taken a new tack: they are defending it, arguing that other countries would do the same thing, probably even worse. As reported in the same NY Times article today:

Referring to complaints that Israel was using disproportionate force, Dan Gillerman, Israel's United Nations ambassador, said at a rally of supporters in New York this week, "You're damn right we are. If your cities were shelled the way ours were," he said, addressing critics, "you would use much more force than we are or we ever will."

In a USA Today op-ed piece, Newt Gingrich makes this argument as well:

Imagine that this morning 50 missiles were launched from Cuba and exploded in Miami. In addition to buildings and homes being destroyed, scores of Americans were being killed. Now imagine our allies responded by saying publicly that we must not be too aggressive in protecting our citizens and that America must use the utmost restraint.

Our history shows us that we, as Americans, would reject such bad advice. After all, we have never reacted to a direct attack on our soil with any restraint. Every time America has been attacked by an enemy, we set about defeating it and ending the threat.

There is considerable truth to this. One need not go back to World War II for an example; one need only consider our response to the 9/11 attacks. Far from showing restraint, we invaded and occupied two entire countries, bringing to each civilian casualties and destruction of property far in excees of what we ourselves suffered -- and far in excess of what the Israelis are inflicting on either Lebanon or Gaza.

But the analogy contains its own rebuttal: as we ourselves have proved, such disproportionality just . . . does . . . not . . . work in these types of struggles. Yes, it did work in WW II, the "lessons" of which continue to cloud our thinking about today's world. But with regard to the Muslim world, I know of no instance where the application of "overwhelming force" has produced anything other than more, and more barbaric, violence. To the contrary, the Russian experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya, our own experience in Afghanistan and Iraq and -- most of all -- Israel's experience in its 40 year struggle with the Palestinians, demonstrate, I think conclusively, that in these kinds of struggles overwhelming force is not just doomed to failure, it is like trying to douse a fire with gasoline.

The human suffering that Israel is inflciting on the Lebanese is offensive, but what makes it offensive has less to do with issues of proportionality than it does with the fact that it is gratuitous. We can accept disproportionate violence and casulaties and the suffering and deaths of innocents if (and so long as) we believe that something worthwhile will result in the end. We Americans still have some hope that our own acts of disproportional violence in Iraq and Afghanistan may yet prove to have been "worth it;" at least, we did not know in that our actions would only make matters worse. That cannot be said for the Israelis. After 40 years of fighting, nothing in their experience provides them with even the smallest inkling of belief that the suffering they are imposing on others will dampen the ardor or blunt the effectiveness of their enemies. As such, the violence is not really a calculated step taken reluctantly in the hope of a better future. It is simply an act of rage born of frustration.

So what is the alternative? I don't know. That's the problem. No one seems to know, so we and the Israelis and the Russians and everyone else caught up in the struggles with the Muslim world keep doing the same things over, and over and over again. With the same sorry results. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know this: We have to, we must, find some better way of dealing with these types of adversaries. "Overwhelming force" is not the answer.