Nation-Building

My friend Gregory Cochran has a nice piece about Iran in the most recent issue of The American Conservative . Being a physicist Greg knows a decent amount about nuclear weapons, and, he knows more military history than anyone else I've ever discussed issues with.

Over at Bloggingheads.tv the thuggish Jim Pinkerton throws some reality in the gracious Ann Althouse' face. Ann is a big-hearted person, and I can't help but feel for her idealistic Wilsonian vision in the face of Pinkerton's cold realist calculus. But Pinkerton is right on many points , and importantly, he seems to place less emphasis on what should be done, as opposed to the facts we have to work with in making our decisions. Similarly, today Matthew Yglesias rubs it in the face of a commenter who declares that the Sky is Falling! On that foundation does not a sound foreign policy rest.

Some have suggested that if the Democrats take power in November, they will move to cut off funding for the war. The basic argument is that Charlie Rangel will take over the House Ways and Means Committee and then turn off the spigot for war appropriations. For example, RedState quotes Rangel via Bloomberg : [H]e "cannot think of one" of President George W. Bush's first-term tax cuts that merit renewal. He also said no discussion would be possible on overhauling Social Security until Bush dropped a plan to create individual accounts funded by payroll taxes. "If they want to get that on the agenda, they better take privatization off the table," Rangel, 76, an 18-term New York lawmaker, said in an interview. "Trade will be easy to work out some agreement, and we can probably do some minor things with the tax code." In other words, Rangel will seek to repeal the Bush tax cuts - increasing funding to the federal government, so that we can actually spend ...

Transcription courtesy of Tim at Balloon Juice. United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations; however, we judge that al-Qa’ida will continue to pose the greatest threat to the Homeland and US interests abroad by a single terrorist organization. We also assess that the global jihadist movement—which includes al-Qa’ida, affiliated and independent terrorist groups, and emerging networks and cells—is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts. Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion. If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide. Greater pluralism and more responsive poli...

John Cole, remarking on the thesis (advocated by Glenn, Austin Bay, and others) that teh media is actively supporting the terrorists' goals, pretty much sums up my view . it seems Glenn’s real complaint is that the media refuses to be spun by the ‘good guys,’ but is somehow buying the ‘spin’ of the bad guys. I don’t see that. I see them trying to report what they know at the time, and I don’t think what the jihadists and terrorists said was or is ‘spin.’ I think they really do want to do what they are saying, and I don’t have a problem with the media reporting that. That isn’t being spun- that is accurately reporting what they want to do, and I support them reporting it much like I support allowing the KKK to march down the streets of Skokie – I want to see what the crazy bastards are up to rather than having them fester underground. At any rate, I simply do not buy the argument that the media being cautious when dealing with an administration and military establishment that routin...

As Abu Aardvark puts it , when OBL truly dies (even of illness), then does anyone doubt that al-Qaeda's media arm al-Sahab will be ready with a massive propaganda blitz to capitalize on his martyrdom ?

Kevin points out that we need to either send more troops to Iraq to butress the force there for victory, or withdraw, but instead we do neither . That's the politically safest and most craven course. Disagree or not with Democrats who favor withdrawal, at least they are standing by their convictions. "stay the course" isn't a plan, its the lack of one. But even beyond Iraq, it's clear that we do need to have a military capability - in terms of boots on the ground - that can handle Iraq-level stress without falling apart. Maybe more. The world is full of Darfurs and Lebanons and the United States can best play a role by commiting the best resources we have - trained, expert troops. We need more troops overall, not just for Iraq but for the entire century ahead. And the truth is that we don't need a draft. How quickly we liberals seem to forget the GI Bill's legacy - the vehicle by which millions of households were lifted into the middle class. "Growing...

Charles Krauthammer says : Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days . The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age . Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini's ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map. 1) The irony. The bolded part could be transposed into screeds put out by Left-wing idelogues when it comes to the Bush administration. 2) The italicized part, here is the calculus compared to the Soviet Union: Scary = (Soviets have thousands of nuclear weapons) X (Soviet probability of use) Scarier = (Iranians have dozens of nuclear weapons in the near...

NPR had an interesting piece on Tom Kean , Republican candidate for Senate in New Jersey, this morning. The piece made the point that Kean is running as a stealth Republican - focusing exclusively on local issues and distancing himself from the President and the party. On the campaign trail, he studiously avoids the issue of Iraq, but when pressed on it, unhesitatingly says that the Administration made huge mistakes and that the Defense Department needs new leadership (veiled reference to firing Rumsfeld). His campaign literature omits any mention of his party and when Cheney dropped by to raise money for him, he got "stuck in traffic" rather than be caught in a photo op with the veep. What's also interesting is the attitude towards the race from the activists on both sides. Dailykos hasn't had much front-page mention of Kean, though there has been some limited discussion at myDD . The worst that anyone's said about Kean there is that he benefits from some identit...

Five years ago today, 19 guys with box cutters flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. They killed themselves in the process, along with a little under 3,000 other people. It's hard, at least for me, to understand exactly why they did this, and what, if anything, they thought they would accomplish. I don't know if I'll ever understand it, actually, or if I really want to put myself into whatever frame of mine is necessary to do so. In any case, they did it. Five years ago today, a young mother sat on a plane next to her two year old daughter, knowing that both of their lives would end in a few short minutes. A man stayed behind in one of the towers with a coworker who was wheelchair bound, knowing that it would probably mean his life. Faced with a choice of incineration or jumping to their deaths, numbers leapt from the top of the towers. Some held hands as they did so. Some were on fire as they did so. Hundreds o...

The much-heralded August drop off in deaths, as reported by the Baghdad morgue, was used to paint the results of Operation Forward Together as a success. The numbers were just revised upward by the Ministry of Health, however - tripled .   It turns out the official toll of violent deaths in August was just revised upwards to 1535 from 550, tripling the total. [...] Violent deaths now appear roughly in line with the earlier trend: 1855 in July and 1595 in June. Officials at the Baghdad morgue have no good explanation for the dramatically revised number. We'll see what the U.S. military has to say. more detail from IHT . Baghdad recorded more than 1,500 violent deaths in August, according to final figures released this week by the Health Ministry. The final count was roughly the same as the figure the ministry released for July, before the U.S.-led security crackdown began in the Baghdad area. The final figure was also nearly three times the preliminary count released by the same mi...

My position can best be summarized as follows, when it comes to a scientific debate with political overtones. 1. look at what the scientists are saying 2. look at what the critics are saying 3. see which side is using the peer review system and which is playing to the media. if point 3 is false, and both sides are using peer review and there is no real consensus, then thats great! I refuse to have an opinion. Unless its my field and I am qualified. otherwise, i'm with the peer review side. I trust the experts in a field to be the experts. Because I do on the whole have a faith in the scientific process - flawed as all human endeavours are - to be the best of all possible systems.

In response to my previous post about adopting the pirate standard for international terrorists, Dean Esmay raises the point that it might well be used to justify the view that accused pirates or sympathizers have no civil rights and therefore do not enjoy any right to due process or protection under the Geneva Conventions: But there is a danger to this view of terrorism. My own gut says this is a proposal with much merit, but it amounts to declaring that pirates and terrorists enjoy no civil rights protections to speak of. Anyone declared a pirate or terrorist may be killed on sight or, if captured, hung by the neck until dead, dead, dead by a fairly quick military tribunal--what some might call a "kangaroo court." Under such a view of terrorism, for example, many of the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay would simply be dead now, summarily executed after a quick military tribunal. This is not necessarily correct however. For one thing, the Geneva Convention does define combata...

Legal Affairs argues that we should treat terrorists as pirates , legally speaking: TO UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL OF DEFINING TERRORISM as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili's De jure belli: "Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked with impunity by all, because they are without the pale of the law. They are scorners of the law of nations; hence they find no protection in that law." Gentili, and many people who came after him, recognized piracy as a threat, not merely to the state but to the idea of statehood itself. All states were equally obligated to stamp out this menace, whether or not they had been a victim of piracy. This was codified explicitly in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, and it has been reiterated as a guiding principle of piracy law ever since. Ironically, it is the very effectiveness of this criminalization that has marginalized piracy and made it seem an arcane and almost romantic offense. Pirates n...