Flotsam and Jetsom

At various times over the last year or so, I have started new posts on different topics, but never got around to finishing them. Most of these are now pretty dated, so I did not bother. But there were three I thought might be worth saving:

The Boumediene Decision (June 12, 2008)

So, the Gitomo "detainees" have a right to federal court review of their detentions and "trials" notwithstanding the fact that Congress passed and the President signed a law depriving the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear such petitions. Thus spake Justice Kennedy (with the concurrence of Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg, of course), despite the oppostion of the President, Congress and 4/9ths of the Supreme Court.

I like the outcome, of course. Gitmo is an embarrassment and the sooner it gets closed, the better. But I must confess to misgivings about the decision on a number of fronts. For one thing, eight of the Supreme Court Justices are so solidly aligned in two blocs (Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg on one side and Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alioto on the other) that the Court has become a tribunal of one. For all practical purposes, Justice Kenedy IS the Supreme Court, and there seems little likelihood that this will change until someone dies or retires. It can't possibly be good to place so much unreviewable power in the hands of one man.

For another, while I like the idea of giving the detainees the rights we give even our confessed mass murderers and most depraved child molesters -- indeed the rights we gave the masterminds of the Third Reich and the holocaust. But for all that, I am troubled by the precedent. Are all prisoners of war (or at least those held in the US) entitled to challenge their detention in federla court. Srely not, but how do we draw the lines?

Lastly, and perhaps most broadly, I struggle -- as the justices themselves do -- with (a) what to call this conflict we are in (is it a war or a police action or something else) and (b) what the role of the Courts is in determining the fates of those caught up in whatever it is we are fighting.

The Future Of Iraq (September 12, 2007)

I have watched with some intereste but little surprise the testimony of Petreaus and Crocker on the "progress" in Iraq. Bottom line: There is some on the military side, although no one is sure that will outlast the American presence; there is none on the politiccal side, and no one is sure that will ever change; and for us to leave now would almost certainly cause a descent onto violence and warlordism similar to that which presaged the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. All that seemed to confirm my own sense of the situation: As much as we would like to, we are not getting out of Iraq any time soon.

But for how long?

According to the NPR story linked above, the following exchange (or something close to it) occurred yesterday between Petreaus and Biden:

Biden: "If the political situation is exactly the same in a year as it is today, would you recommend that we keep shedding the blood of our troops and spending our resources in an effort to help the Iraqis?"

Petreaus: "Well, Senator, I think that is a pretty large speculation . . . "

Biden: "I don't think it's speculation at all."

Petreaus: ". . . but if the situation in a year is exactly what it is tioday, then I think it would be hard to recommend that we keep trying."

According to the NY Times, though, the Iraqis (or at least some of them) think the American "occupiers" will need to stay a lot longer than a year:

Iraqis found themselves in a difficult position on Tuesday as they reflected on the report to Congress by Gen.David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. Although they say there is nothing they want more than to have American soldiers leave Iraq, they also say there is nothing they can afford less. . . .

In interviews four months ago, many Iraqis refused to say how long American troops should stay. Now, however, some say they want them here for a minimum of three years, and maybe even five years. Ms. Zubaidi said she thought five years would be the minimum, adding that the police and army needed to be remade to root out sectarianism.

How do we decide when to leave? The reason to stay is a fear that, if we leave Iraq will fall apart completely, degenerating into warlordism a la Somalia and pre-Taliban Iraq. That would be a ctastrophe from every perspective. But if there is no way to prevent that outcome except by staying for years and years, and perhaps not even then, what sense does in make to stay?

[Ed. Note: Fortunately, today, a year later, it looks now like we might actually be able to leave within a year or two without the consequences that looked so inevitable even a year ago. We'll never know until it happens, but at least there is hope].

Re-Remembering Kennan (July 31, 2007)

Apparently, George Kennan was not the father of the containment strategy pursued by the US throughout the Cold War. Yes, he did write the so-called "long telegram," which ultimately became the most famous of all Foreign Affairs articles, and yes that article did propose a containment strategy, but if Nicholas Thompson's Op-Ed piece in the NYT today is true, the containment policy that the US ultimately pursued was not at all the one Kennan recommended:

The article’s influence was grounded in a misunderstanding. Kennan didn’t make clear whether he intended containment to be primarily a political or military strategy. Despite the article’s ambiguity, everyone assumed the latter. The most important columnist of the time, Walter Lippmann, wrote a series of consecutive critical essays about the X article — later collected in a book that coined a phrase with its title, “The Cold War” — declaring that containment was a military doctrine and a bad one at that.

But in a letter to Lippmann that Kennan never mailed (most likely because his boss, Secretary of State George Marshall, had chastened him for causing a ruckus), Kennan explained that he didn’t mean containment with guns. He didn’t want American armed forces to intervene in countries where the Soviets were mucking around but hadn’t gained control, like Greece, Iran and Turkey.

The Soviets are making “first and foremost a political attack,” Kennan wrote. “Their spearheads are the local communists. And the counter-weapon that can beat them is the vigor and soundness of political life in the victim countries.”

Thompson goes on to argue, rightly I think, that "Kennan’s desired but never executed policy from 60 years ago offers profound wisdom for today:"

Kennan’s insight was that a long-term, complex struggle wasn’t best judged in terms of winning or losing. Communism wasn’t something we could immediately conquer. The same holds true for Al Qaeda, a movement that, like Soviet communism, offers its subjects oppression and poverty. Time is on our side — particularly if we act in a way that doesn’t inflame our enemies’ pride and anger and win them new recruits.

Kennan’s insistence on a political strategy, rather than a military one, makes more sense now than it did when he published his essay. Applied today, that advice would entail spending more time and money building up our Muslim allies. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that only about $900 million of the $10 billion we’ve given Pakistan since 2002 has gone to health, education and democracy promotion. Most of the rest has gone to the military. The Bush administration has recently taken steps to change this ratio. But Kennan, one of the authors of the Marshall Plan, would have wanted the numbers to be closer to the reverse.

A 21st-century rendering of X’s vision of containment would involve the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, an unambiguous renunciation of torture and an abandonment of the notion that our legal and moral norms don’t apply to the current struggle. Kennan believed we gave our opponents a propaganda victory each time we acted in a manner unfitting of our ideals.

“To avoid destruction,” Kennan concluded the X article, “the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”

The Elections: 1932 or 1976?

The potential for a realignment in American politics is getting a lot of press. The lead editorial in The Economist last week asks "Is America Turning Left?," and the lead story on the US, Under The Weather," concludes that the Karl Rovian vision of a permanent Republican majority, forged out of a combination of libertarians, business interests and evangelicals is, if not dead, then in intensive care.

Given its politics, it is not all that surprising that The Economist takes solace in the truism that "[t]he Democrats' good fortune is much more the result of a Republican collapse than a Democratic revival," and it concludes that the ascendancy of the Left is most likely to be temporary: more akin to the post-Watergate election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 than the post-Depression election FDR in 1932.

Ross Douthat of The Atlantic is not so sure. He begins an article entitled " Blue Period" with what is probably his wildest dream:

The last enduring Democratic majority began with a midterm sweep. After being routed by Herbert Hoover’s Republicans in the 1928 election, the Democrats stormed back to pick up 56 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, leaving both chambers roughly split between the two parties when the 72nd Congress convened in December 1931. The victory, coming on the heels of the 1929 stock-market crash, set the stage for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s triumph in 1932, which ultimately left the Democrats with 60 seats in the Senate and 313 in the House, and established Roosevelt’s party as the dominant political force in American life for a generation.

He briefly comes back to earth and denies that "even the most optimistic Democratic strategist dares to dream that the Democrats’ midterm sweep in ’06 will presage a Roosevelt-style landslide in ’08. " Yet he then spends the rest of the article citing reasons why he thinks "Democrats . . . suddenly and unexpectedly have the makings of a durable majority of their own within their grasp."

Perhaps my own politics are showing when I say that I think the Economist has the better of this argument, but there it is. Douthat's reasons for hope strike me as grasping at straws. In the near term, he sees the differences within the Left resolving themselves. Really? It's hard for me to see the likes of Dennis Kucinich and MoveOn.org agreeing to compromise with the centrists that brought us NAFTA and acknowledged that "the era of big government is over." But it is when he moves beyond the near-term prospects and explains why the tide of history is on the Democrats' side that wishful thinking edges into something close to delusion:

[I]n the long term, a new-model populism’s prospects look brighter still. The Republicans are to a large extent the party of married couples with children, while the Democrats are the party of unmarried voters, who tend to be more sensitive to economic risk, and thus more supportive of welfare spending, than members of intact nuclear families. But the nuclear family has been in steady decline for years, pushed along by falling marriage rates and rising out-of-wedlock births, trends that are likely to create an ever-larger base for a left-populist majority.

The pressure of continued outsourcing may also increase the public’s appetite for a smart left populism, as even well-educated workers—in fields from financial services to health care—begin to face stiff competition from overseas. In this landscape, it’s easy to imagine the middle-class anxiety that the political scientist Jacob Hacker termed “office-park populism” defining the domestic debate over the next 20 years, and easy to imagine a Democratic majority that capitalizes on the opportunity.

But Dothout himself provides what I believe is the real reason 2008 will be much more like 1976 than 1932:

Long-term trends make new majorities possible, and traumatic events (such as 9/11 and the Iraq War) can help catalyze their formation, but without effective leadership, the opportunities are easily squandered, whether on the campaign trail or in the White House. Just ask Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

This is, I think, the Democrat's biggest problem. I see no one among the gaggle of Democratic presidential candidates who seems capable of leading the country anywhere because none has any unifying vision that can attract the allegiance of anything like a majority of the electorate. The plans and programs of each candidate are idiosyncrasies generated either by what the candidate came to believe in the 60's in college or by what the latest focus group tells him (or her) the electorate wants this week. It is a party of issues not principles. And, to the extent it does have unifying principles, those are not the principles that win elections today.

The problems with the available candidates is not confined to the Democrats, of course: can you imagine a party so completely devoid of talent that its leading candidate for President is Rudy Giuliani? But for all their faults and hubris, the Republicans have an articulable vision, both domestically and in foreign policy. And it is a vision that has the support of a very significant majority of the electorate. In 2008, the Republicans are going to pay the price, not for a failure of vision, but for a failure of execution. The neoconservative vision has much to recommend it, but Bush ran it aground in Iraq. The advocates of smaller government are so popular as to claim even Bill Clinton as a convert. Yet they were betrayed by the biggest increase in federal entitlements since the '60s -- not to mention the embarrassment of runaway "earmarks." Civil rights and liberties are part of the American political bedrock; yet Bush betrayed those principles with far more intrusive government, electronic surveillance, renditions, Guantanamo, and the greatest assault on civil rights and liberties since at least the Second World War, if not the Civil War. Tolerance and the separation of Church and State are two other great bedrock principles that were trashed by the Bush administration. By seeking to relentlessly pander to every constituency of his coalition, Bush ended up betraying all of them. The result is that, barring some kind of deus ex machina, the Republicans are going to get beat badly in 2008.

Yet, looking at their situation long term, I think the Republicans have a far, far better chance of staging a comeback than the Democrats do of sustaining the gains George has dropped in their laps. Why? Because they, unlike the Democrats, have a coherent political theory that underlies their rhetoric.

Again, I am probably projecting my own political desires on the country, but I tend to think that the country still wants what Bush promised: a compassionate conservatism. They want a conservatism that, first of all, cares about people but refuses to adopt them. Government should -- must -- help the needy. But it must do so without making them wards of the state or so far insulating them from risk that they cease to have any incentive to strive.

They want a government that leaves people alone, except as necessary to protect the weak from those who would prey upon them, the law-abiding from those who are not, and the different among us from those who hate difference.

They want a government that is more concerned about expanding the economic pie than it is in generating conflict over who has the biggest pieces.

And, most of all, they want a government that recognizes its own limitations; that realizes that it's efforts, however well intentioned, will frequently do at least as much harm as good; that sees itself as the provider of last resort tackling problems reluctantly and only after it becomes clear both that the problem is serious enough to preclude doing nothing and that there is a plan for addressing that problem that has some reasonable chance of producing near and long-term outcomes materially better than doing nothing.

At this point, the Republicans seem far more likely to be able to persuade people that they can deliver these things than the Democrats. Which leads me to believe that we are likely to elect a one-term Democrat in 2008: a Jimmy Carter rather than Franklin Roosevelt.

Democrats And The War

Notwithstanding my concerns about billy bob and my continuing skepticism that we are doing any good in Iraq, I was pleased that the "Senate Reject[ed] Democrats’ Call to Pull Troops" yesterday.

For one thing, I am very cynical about the Democrats' motives in this. They have always known there was no chance such a resolution would ever actually go into effect, since it has always been clear that there is not enough support to overcome a filibuster much less a veto. Moreover, even if by some chance it did become effective, it would spark a Constitutional crisis of historic proportions, for there is no question Bush would ignore it. So what is the point?

Perhaps one could argue that even if the effort was obviously futile from the outset, it is important to make a statement as to one's beliefs. Well, maybe. But I am hard pressed to see why votes are required for this purpose. Coming on top of the non-binding resolution passed by House last month, one can't help but feel that the Democrats' real purpose has less to do with matters of conscience than it does with forcing the Republicans (as well as some Democrats) to again and again cast votes that the Democrats will be able to portray as "pro-war" two years from now.

These tactics no doubt serve to fire-up the bases on both sides. But elections are won and lost in the middle. And if I am any indication of how that middle feels about these antics, the Democrats are making a huge mistake playing politics with this war.

No one sensate is in favor of this war. The question is what to do about it. Like it or not, so long as Bush is President, the answer to that question is up to Bush. As an institution at least, Congress' choices come down to this: sit down shut up for the next two years and hope for the best or take responsibility and either cut off funding or impeach Bush.

Judge Friendly On Abortion

The WSJ's online "Opinion Journal" has a side-bar on it with links to other articles that bear (at least in the editors' minds) some relationship to the subject matter of the essay to which it is attached. In today's "Opinion Journal" was a review of two new books about the Supreme Court. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the sidebar contained, among others, a link to this: Before Roe v. Wade: Judge Friendly's Draft Abortion Opinion.

Judge Friendly is one of the two or three most famous American jurist never to sit on the Supreme Court and the idea that he had written an abortion decision prior to Roe v. Wade was both surprising and of considerable interest.

The article -- it reads more like a speech -- is by Judge Raymond Randolph who is now a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals but who, in 1970, was a clerk for Judge Friendly. Apparently, Judge Friendly was a member of a three judge panel that considered a challenge to the New York abortion law three years before Roe v. Wade. Judge Friendly wrote a draft opinion, but it was never published because the case was dismissed as moot when the New York legislature repealed the statute being challenged.

Judge Friendly concluded (at least in his draft opinion) that abortion was not a constitutional right, and Randolph uses this and Judge Friendly's reasoning, as a kick-off to a much longer argument of his own as to why much of the Supreme Cort's "privacy" decisions over the last 40 years have been fundamentally misguided.

Randolph gets carried away in the end, I think, but Friendly's opinion is a thoughtful -- and thought provoking -- essay on the respective roles of courts and legislatures and on the tensions between the interests of individuals in personal liberty/autonomy/freedom of action and the interests of the State in legislating against matters considered by the majority to be immoral.

This tension is a matter of considerable interest to me (witness THIS, and THIS, and THIS for example), and I want to eventually write more about it. But for the moment, I will leave you with Judge Friendly's thoughts:

[The heart of the plaintiffs' argument is]that a person has a constitutionally protected right to do as he pleases with his--in this instance, her--own body so long as no harm is done to others. . . . [This] principle would have a disturbing sweep. Seemingly it would invalidate a great variety of criminal statutes which existed generally when the 14th Amendment was adopted and the validity of which has long been assumed, whatever debate there has been about their wisdom. Examples are statutes against attempted suicide, homosexual conduct ..., bestiality, and drunkenness unaccompanied by threatened breach of the peace. Much legislation against the use of drugs might also come under the ban.

Plaintiffs' position is quite reminiscent of the famous statement of J. S. Mill. This has given rise to a spirited debate in England in recent years. We are not required to umpire that dispute, which concerns what a legislature should do--not what it may do." . . . [Y]ears ago, when courts with considerable freedom struck down statutes that they strongly disapproved, Mr. Justice Holmes declared in a celebrated dissent that the Fourteenth Amendment did not enact Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. No more did it enact J. S. Mill's views on the proper limits of law-making.

[The evidence in the case dealt with] the hardship to a woman who is carrying and ultimately bearing an unwanted child ... [,] the plight of the unmarried mother, the problems of poverty, fear of abnormality of the child, the horror of conception resulting from incest or rape. These and other factors may transform a hardship into austere tragedy. Yet, even if we were to take plaintiffs' legal position that the legislature cannot constitutionally interfere with a woman's right to do as she will with her own body so long as no harm is done to others, the argument does not support the conclusion plaintiffs would have us draw from it. For we cannot say the New York legislature lacked a rational basis for considering that abortion causes such harm. Even if we should put aside the interests of the father, negligible indeed in the many cases when he has abandoned the prospective mother but not in all, the legislature could permissibly consider the fetus itself to deserve protection. Historically such concern may have rested on theological grounds, and there was much discussion concerning when 'animation' occurred. We shall not take part in that debate or attempt to determine just when a fetus becomes a 'human being.' It is enough that the legislature was not required to accept plaintiffs' demeaning characterizations of it. Modern biology instructs that the genetic code that will dictate the entire future of the fetus is formed as early as the--day after conception; the fetus is thus something more than inert matter. The rules of property and of tort have come increasingly to recognize its rights. While we are a long way from saying that such decisions compel the legislature to extend to the fetus the same protection against destruction that it does after birth, it would be incongruous ... for us to hold that a legislature went beyond constitutional bounds in protecting the fetus, as New York has done, save when its continued existence endangered the life of the mother. . . .

We would not wish our refusal to declare New York's abortion law unconstitutional as in any way approving or 'legitimating' it. The arguments for repeal are strong; those for substantial modification are stronger still.... But the decision what to do about abortion is for the elected representatives of the people, not for three, or even nine, appointed judges.

An undertone of plaintiffs' argument is that legislative reform is hopeless, because of the determined opposition of one of the country's great religious faiths. Experience elsewhere, notably Hawaii's recent repeal of its abortion law, [30] would argue otherwise. But even if plaintiffs' premise were correct, the conclusion would not follow. The contest on this, as on other issues where there is determined opposition, must be fought out through the democratic process, not by utilizing the courts as a way of overcoming the opposition[,] ... clearing the decks, [and] thereby enabl[ing] legislators to evade their proper responsibilities. Judicial assumption of any such role, however popular at the moment with many high-minded people, would ultimately bring the courts into the deserved disfavor to which they came dangerously near in the 1920's and 1930's. However we might feel as legislators, we simply cannot find in the vague contours of the Fourteenth Amendment anything to prohibit New York from doing what it has done here."

In a note to his clerk attached to the draft opinion, Judge Friendly suggested, presciently, that the arguments supporting a constitutional right to abortion would if accepted make it difficult to deny a right as well to assisted suicide:

If a woman has an absolute right to the destruction of a fetus, incapable of making a decision for itself it would be hard to see why a man or woman does not have an absolute right to have his body destroyed. The discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth are surely not [more] than what often attends years of invalidism without hope of cure. The economic burden of an added child--readily avoidable if the parents wish--are not of the same order or magnitude as the costs of many 'terminal' illnesses, which may consume or exceed the savings of a lifetime and entail misery for a surviving spouse.

The irony in all of this, of course, is that Friendly's rejection of Spencer and Mill is gratuitous. As Judge Friendly himself noted, in abortion cases there is "another" that is being harmed, thus providing a basis for distinguishing abortion from all of the other examples Friendly cites. And therein lies my greatest frustration with this body of law: Of all the awful things that have flowed from the abortion decision, one of the worst is that it has given libertarianism a bad name.

An Embarassment in Congress

What is this farce that is going on in the House of Representatives? 2,175 minutes of debate on a non-binding resolution that says little and means less? What is it's point? Who does it benefit? Why are they doing it? Is there anyone other than the most pathological Bush hater that is not thoroughly chagrined by this cheap piece of political theater?

I find it not just embarrassing, though. I find it offensive. Pelosi came to power on a wave of genuine anguish about a war that seemed to be going nowhere and to have no foreseeable end. Actually grappling with that issue is difficult, though. So they decided to use the power given them to embarrass Bush. The charade now going on in the House has no other purpose. But, like all such empty and obvious political hatchet jobs, the result is to embarrass the Congress and, to a degree at least, rehabilitate Bush.

If I am any indicator, the Democrats are doing themselves enormous damage by trivializing the public's anguish over this war.

Snow Day!

We had our first real snowfall of the winter over the last 36 hours -- about 8 inches or so -- and the City has taken the opportunity to declare a holiday. All the schools are closed of course, afraid as they must be at this point that they will end up holding the bag on their snow days for the year. And the County declared a Level 3 snow emergency, which provides everyone with a nearly ironclad excuse not to go to work. Technically, a Level 3 Emergency" means "all roadways are closed to non-emergency personnel," and "anyone caught driving during a Level 3 without a good reason might be subject to arrest."

My Minnesota relatives (to say nothing of the poor sods in the Redfield, NY) would doubtless find such a reaction to less than a foot of snow to be both preposterous and an occasion for ridicule, but I suspect they are just jealous. Be that as it may, though, the citizens of Lucas County are a law abiding bunch, and never more so than when the Sheriff tells them to take the day off.

I myself have succumbed to the temptation. I didn't stay home; the wife shooed me out of the house. But I didn't get far. I'm at a coffee shop about a mile from my house that has free hi-speed wireless and free coffee refills.

Given that this is the information age and that I work in an information business, it is not the total day off it would have been even 10 years ago. Truth be told, I can do what I do anywhere that has cell phone coverage and hi-speed internet connection. So, I have spent a couple hours actually working. But the lure of the blog has been calling, so I intend to play a little hookie between e-mails.

There is certainly enough going on!

Update: After I posted this, I went back and read more of the article linked above about Redfield, NY. This is just mind-boggling: Redfiled has gotten 12 feet of snow over the last 10 days or so. That is 144+ inches. But this year is nowhere close to a record. In 1996-97, they got a total of 420 inches. That's 35 feet, which I am pretty sure is taller than the peak of my house.

Gene Patents? Can This Possibly Be Right?

Michael Crichton, the sci-fi author who brought you such science-gone-wild pot boilers as Coma and Jurassic Park had an op-ed piece in today's NYT entitled "Patenting Life. If the article is to be believed, it is possible for compnaies, universities, etc. to obtain patents on genes. In fact, not only is it possible, Crichton claims that some 20% of the genes in human DNA have already been patented.

The fact that it is Michael Crichton writing this makes me skeptical. But if he's right, I would really like to understand what possible bases there could be for granting patents on human genes.

"An Inconvenient Truth" About Al Gore's Movie

John Tierney is fast becoming one of my favorite journalists. He's the op-ed columnist for the NY Times who represents the non-ideological pragmatist point of view. He also periodically writes a sort of "myth-buster" column called "Findings" in the "Science Times" supplement each Tuesday.

Today he takes on "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's movie and book about global warming. The hook for the piece was the fact that Al Gore was sitting beside Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson when Branson announced that he is offering a $25 million dollar prize to anyone who can figure out how to remove a couple billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. Tierney uses the prize idea as bookends between which he contrasts the hysteria of Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" with the reality of the recently released findings of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change. Here is one example:

Whatever happens, you can stop fretting about the Gulf Stream scenario in Mr. Gore’s movie and that full-fledged Hollywood disaster film "The Day After Tomorrow." Mr. Gore’s companion book has a fold-out diagram of the Gulf Stream and warns that "some scientists are now seriously worried" about it shutting down and sending Europe into an ice age, but he must have been talking to the wrong scientists.

There wouldn’t be glaciers in the English shires even if the Gulf Stream did shut down. To understand why, you need to disregard not only the horror movies but also what you learned in grade school: that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping London so much warmer than New York even though England is farther north than Newfoundland.

This theory, originated by a 19th-century oceanographer, is “the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend,” in the words of Richard Seager, a climate modeler at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He and other researchers have calculated that the Gulf Stream’s influence typically raises land temperatures in the north by only five degrees Fahrenheit, hardly enough to explain England’s mild winters, much less its lack of glaciers.

Moreover, as the Gulf Stream meanders northward, it delivers just about as much heat to the eastern United States and Canada as to Europe, so it can’t account for the difference between New York and London. Dr. Seager gives the credit to the prevailing westerly winds — and the Rocky Mountains.

When these winds out of the west hit the Rockies, they’re diverted south, bringing air from the Arctic down on New York (as in last week’s cold spell). After their southern detour, the westerlies swing back north, carrying subtropical heat toward London. This Rocky Mountain detour accounts for about half the difference between New York and London weather, according to Dr. Seager.

The other half is caused by to the simple fact that London sits on the east side of an ocean — just like Seattle, which has a much milder climate than Siberia, the parallel land across the Pacific. Since ocean water doesn’t cool as quickly as land in winter, or heat up as much in summer, the westerly winds blowing over the ocean moderate the winter and summer temperatures in both Seattle and London.

So unless the westerlies reverse direction or the Rockies crumble, London and the rest of Western Europe will remain relatively mild.

Tierney is not a global warming denier. He accepts, or at least appears to accept, the findings of the IPCC. But what I find refreshing is that he recognizes the realities as well:

The I.P.C.C. considers options for reducing greenhouse emissions, but projects that even the most radical (and politically painful) policies wouldn’t make much difference the first two or three decades. To politicians worried about the next election, especially in poor countries, 2030 sounds like eternity.

It’s always possible that something will galvanize people around the world into taking short-term pain for long-term gain. But I suspect there’s a better chance of someone claiming that $25 million prize. Whether it’s carbon-dioxide-gobbling nanobots or something else, it’d be good to have a backup plan when 2030 rolls around.

Opposing The War But Supporting The Troops?

William Arkin, a national security/military affairs blogger for the Washington Post kicked of a regular firestorm with a January 31 column taking American soldiers to task for complaining about domestic opposition to the Iraq war. After quoting three soldiers who in various ways argued that you can not oppose the war and still claim to support the troops, Arkin unloaded:

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect.

Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order. . . .

So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?

That wasn't the worst part. The line that gained the most attention was this one:

[This complaining by the troops] is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

The response to this was swift and ugly and personal and overwhelming. After two more columns one attacking his critics and another defending himself and half apologizing, Arkin finally threw in the towel with an embarrassingly maudlin effort, in his words, "to make sense of the worldview of those who have responded."

There were well over 3,000 "comments" posted on the first three of these columns; yet this was just the tip of the iceberg of e-mail and blog reactions that the columns generated. The Post had finally had enough, as Arkin acknowledged in his final post:

On the advice of my editors, this is the last column I will post for awhile on this subject. My impulse would be to continue to fight back and answer the critics, but I see the wisdom in their observation that nothing new is being said here and the Internet frenzy is adding nothing to the debate or our understanding of our world. I also see that I cannot continue to write about humanity and difficult questions if indeed what I wish is to vanquish those who attack me.

But that was not quite enough. Yesterday, in a self-confessed effort to insulate the Post itself from the "Blast Damage" caused by Arkin, the Post's ombudsman published what amounted to a public rejection of its own columnist:

The fact that The Post and washingtonpost.com are interlocking yet separate is lost on most readers, who do not care that the two are miles apart physically and under different management. A great example is the recent firestorm over a column that never appeared in The Post -- but for which The Post was blamed. . . . Did one online column irreparably damage Post national security journalism? No. But it does show that an online column rubs off on the newspaper. . . .

What's the difference between opinion writing for the newspaper and for washingtonpost.com? The writing can be similar, but the editing is more intense at the newspaper. More experienced eyes see a story or a column before it goes into the paper; The Post has several levels of rigorous editing. There is "less of an editing process" for blogs at the more immediacy-oriented Web site, Brady said. . . .

Arkin's column did not meet Post standards, but then, newspaper editing isn't perfect, either. But "mercenary" surely is live ammo; such an incendiary word should have popped out in flames to Post editors.

I am not about to defend Arkin's language or the entirely unwarranted anger it seems to betray. But I do think there are a couple of important issues buried in all of this.

Is it possible to support the troops but oppose the mission? At one level, the answer is an obvious "yes." I can certainly oppose the war and yet have and manifest pride in our troops, their efforts, and how they go about the job they have been assigned. In fact, in some ways, the more important it is to me to support the troops, then the more urgently I need to oppose the war since it is the war that is killing them.

But at another level, I guess I can see what the "support the troops, support the mission" crowd means. These guys and girls have left family and friends, homes and jobs, comfort and safety and are over in a hell hole the scope of which we cannot even imagine, and they are fighting and in some cases dying. How can I say I "support" them if I also say that their sacrifices are meaningless if not reprehensible. I know if I were doing something that entailed that amount of risk and suffering I would have mixed emotions about people who claimed to be proud of me but who thought what I was doing was a crime or worse. If you want the troops to believe that you are proud of them, you almost have to tell them that what they are risking their lives for is worth it. I think it is worth it, for now at least, but that is a story for another time.

The other question Arkin raises is even more difficult and certainly more important. How does a democratic society relate to an all-volunteer army? Do soldiers who volunteered give up the right to bitch about how they are used? Do they give up the right to complain about those who don't cheer for them? Do they have any right to anything more than what they were promised as an inducement to sign up?

And, what do we civilians owe to such an army? Aren't they just the "the hired help?" Do we owe them any more (or less) respect, any greater pay, benefits and support, than we do policemen, or firemen, or any of the other people we have hired to protect us from what we see as dangerous? Do we owe these men and women the same type of support we gave the GIs in WWII?

I think the answer is no. But I'm not sure. And, if the answer is "no," I'm even less sure what the right answer is.

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?