Tuesday, February 27, 2007
mission accomplished http://sev.prnewswire.com/magazines/20070225/CLSU00425022007-1.html#
After the Taliban's fall, Mullah Omar effectively vanished. Still, he did not quit the jihad. As his men regrouped, he gradually emerged from hiding and in 2004 began traveling from camp to camp in remote Taliban-held areas. Only a few trusted assistants know where the fugitive leader is now. But wherever he is hidden, he is closer than ever to many of his followers-not only to long- neglected fighters like Ghul Agha, but even to members of the Taliban's ruling council, the Shura, Newsweek reports. In the past, according to Mullah Rahman, the group's deputy commander in Zabul province, it could take six weeks for senior Taliban officials to send a message to the leader and get a reply. Now, thanks to the Taliban's military gains and growing network of messengers and mobile phones, the Shura can send Omar a question and get his answer within 24 hours.
It is worth remembering a speech by Al Gore on September 23rd, 2002, on the eve of war against Iraq:
To begin with - to put first things first - I believe we should focus our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized. I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than was predicted. Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism.
[...]
Two decades ago, the Soviet Union claimed the right to launch a preemptive war in Afghanistan, we properly encouraged and then supported the resistance movement, which a decade later succeeded in defeating the Soviet army's efforts. Unfortunately, however, when the Russians left, we abandoned the Afghans, and the lack of any coherent nation-building program led directly to the conditions which allowed the Taliban to take control and to bring in Al Qaeda and give them a home and a base for their worldwide terrorist operations. That's where they planned the attack on us a year ago September 11. Incredibly, in spite of that vivid lesson, after defeating the Taliban rather easily, and despite pledges from President Bush that we would never again abandon Afghanistan, we have done precisely that. And now the Taliban and Al Qaeda are quickly moving back in.
Read that whole speech and marvel at his prescience. And a complete excerpt from the Newswire is below the fold.
UPDATE: Losing the war in Afghanistan - the troops themselves speak out. Excerpt:
[T]he troops in Nuristan have also suffered from sheer isolation and the topography of the Hindu Kush. At Lybert (altitude 6,500 feet), the 3-71’s Charlie Company had gone 70 days without a hot shower or a hot meal. They have sustained deaths and injuries from hiking and falling. Soldiers who have served in both Iraq and Afghanistan before said their current living conditions are much worse. “Leadership doesn’t care about us,” said one officer, who requested that his name be withheld to avoid punishment for his comments. “We’ve gone on mission after mission after mission where we’ve gone black [run out] on food and water. They tell us, ‘Pack light, your mission will only be four days tops.’ But then we end up stuck on a mountaintop for two weeks. We didn’t have anything, not even tents. If you can’t get us off a mountain, don’t put us on there.”
Several soldiers and officers I spoke with told me they were unprepared for their mission in the north of Afghanistan. No one, it seems, told them they would have to fight a Vietnam-style war at high altitudes. One officer told me the 10th Mountain’s limited resources and poor planning frustrated him. (He also asked that his name be withheld for fear of retribution.) “Leadership has failed us,” he told me. “They don’t give a shit about us. We’ve been shorted everything we needed. Our training didn’t prepare us for this terrain or this mission. We’re doing the best we can but we’re not getting support.” He said the summer of 2006 had been filled with air-assault missions in which Chinooks delivered 20 to 30 troops to a ridgeline with little food or water, and no plan to pick them up.
[...] Adding to Charlie Company’s frustration, it cannot go on manned patrols in the villages below. Capt. Mike Schmidt, the commanding officer, told me the location of the base and size of his troop limited how much he could do. “We depend a lot on locals walking up from the neighboring villages to give us information,” he said. “We can’t leave the base and do patrols or visit the villages. We don’t have enough soldiers. We’d come back and there would be nothing left—the Afghans would steal everything and the insurgents could take the base.”
UPDATE again: Hey, the band is getting back together! Bin Laden is re-establishing training camps in Pakistan:
In the most definitive statement in years, America's top intelligence official said Tuesday Osama bin laden is in Pakistan actively re-establishing al Qaeda training camps.
The newly appointed Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell made the assertion about bin Laden and his No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Al-Qaeda Pakistan, Taliban Afghanistan... can we get Billy Joel to write a few more stanzas for We Didn't Start the Fire yet?
The Taliban's Supreme Leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has emerged from the shadows, his field officers say, and with his inspiration they're planning a military push against U.S.-led forces like never before, Newsweek reports in its March 5 issue (on newsstands Monday, February 26). "We respect him even more than we did five years ago," says one Taliban field commander, Ghul Agha Akhund, speaking to Newsweek by mobile phone from his redoubt in Afghanistan's Helmand province. "He refuses to give up, no matter what the odds."
Ghul Agha says he has received two communications from Omar this year- after not one word since the U.S.-led 2001 invasion. The most recent communication was a dark photocopy of a handwritten note congratulating the group's fighting forces on "getting even with infidel invaders" last year and urging them to launch "a more intensive jihad." "This message from our leader is like tonic medicine," Ghul Agha tells Newsweek. "It makes us stronger." The commander and his men are energetically preparing to launch an offensive as soon as the snow melts; he hopes this year they will cut off the provincial capital.
Newsweek has viewed a new recruiting video in which the Taliban's most notoriously cruel commander, the one-legged Mullah Dadullah Akhund, addresses an audience of some 400 men who are described as trained suicide bombers, ready to die on his order. "Our suicide bombers are countless," he says in a videotaped response to questions from Newsweek. "Hundreds have already registered their names, and hundreds more are on the waiting list." Those claims, while impossible to verify, can't be discounted, either. In an interview that aired on Al-Jazeera last week, Dadullah claimed to have more than 6,000 armed guerrillas in underground hideouts and other staging areas, awaiting the moment to strike. "The attack is imminent," he told the Arabic TV channel.
Western forces are certainly bracing for one, report Special Correspondent Sami Yousafzai and South Asia Correspondent Ron Moreau. Thousands of reinforcements have deployed to Afghanistan, bringing the Coalition's total armed strength to nearly 50,000, including 15,500 Americans in NATO's ranks and 11,000 others under direct U.S. command. NATO's chief spokes-man in Kabul, Col. Tom Collins, says his force intends to head off the militants' assault with pre-emptive attacks against Taliban strongholds and sanctuaries in Helmand and Uruzgan provinces.
The Coalition, with its enormous superiority in firepower, sees no way the Taliban can capture and hold any significant target. "They may hold a small place for days," Collins allows, "but they'll get run out at a high cost." An estimated 3,000 Taliban fighters died in last year's engagements alone. But replacing those losses has been easy-thanks largely to the 47-year-old Mullah Omar.
After the Taliban's fall, Mullah Omar effectively vanished. Still, he did not quit the jihad. As his men regrouped, he gradually emerged from hiding and in 2004 began traveling from camp to camp in remote Taliban-held areas. Only a few trusted assistants know where the fugitive leader is now. But wherever he is hidden, he is closer than ever to many of his followers-not only to long- neglected fighters like Ghul Agha, but even to members of the Taliban's ruling council, the Shura, Newsweek reports. In the past, according to Mullah Rahman, the group's deputy commander in Zabul province, it could take six weeks for senior Taliban officials to send a message to the leader and get a reply. Now, thanks to the Taliban's military gains and growing network of messengers and mobile phones, the Shura can send Omar a question and get his answer within 24 hours.
Labels: Afghanistan, Taliban
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Gore rules out bid for US White House in 2008 http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070216/ts_alt_afp/usvote2008democrat_070216193307;_ylt=AptJB2K2FVzESmWWcElWHShh24cA
"I have no intention to run for president," Gore said in an interview conducted in Los Angeles and broadcast Thursday by the BBC.
"I can't imagine in any circumstance to run for office again," said the former Democratic vice president under then-president Bill Clinton.
What is there to really say about this? It's a direct quote, with as clear phrasing as you might imagine.
I think the Draft Gore fundraising by ActBlue is still worth keeping, though, seeing as the funds go to the DNC (and Howard Dean's 50-state strategy) if Gore doesn't run.
Gore for Senate?
UPDATE:
So close! Drat that music!!!
Personal attacks on Clinton: deja vu http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/17/213744/100
Kos argues,
I don't want her to apologize. I want her to say, "I made a mistake." Edwards did it. Just about every other Democrat who idiotically trusted this president and supported the war has done it. Had Hillary done this last year, the issue would be moot.
And does she really want to argue that her vote wasn't wrong?
The thing is, that by insisting that her vote was wrong, Kos is the one who is legitimizing the war, not Hillary.
Clinton's position - that she stands by her vote, but in retrospect realizes she was misled by the Administration - is reasonable. The context of the AUMF was that the Administration would try diplomacy, would consult with allies, would allow the inspectors to do their job, etc. That was the case that the Administration made to the Congress, using Colin Powell as their straight man.
In hindsight all that was bogus and Bush took the AUMF and ran. And we are supposed to blame Clinton for that?
I feel like the insistence that Clinton say her vote was wrong is in essence buying into the GOP frame that the AUMF was an immediate authorization for military aggression. It wasn't. Demand that Clinton apologize and you are essentially giving Bush political cover, and legitimizing the war!
Clinton's argument is essentially that the war was illegitimate because it was sold under false pretenses. We should be embracing her for it.
I should note that I do not support Clinton for the nomination, for other reasons, but on this matter, she's within her rights and Kos is out of line. There are far better critiques of substance to be made.
UPDATE: As Ron notes, what use is political capital if you don't spend it on matters of principle?
UPDATE 2: I find it rather disingenuous to suggest that Hillary is somehow back-tracking or being a hypocrite for calling for troop withdrawals now, given that she explains her vote for AUMF as being misled. In fact its perfectly consistent - and the same principled stand - to call for the war to end now that she knows she was misled. Too much backbone for your taste, Don?
Labels: 2008, AUMF, Hillary, Iraq
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Richardson: A New Realism http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020801199.html
Labels: 2008, Richardson
Withdrawal is victory? http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0703.dreyfuss.html
But one of my assumptions has been that however bad things are, they could be worse - and would indeed be worse should US forces leave. Which is why I've been against outright withdrawal. I do unequivocally reject the argument that opposing a "surge" in troops amounts to endorsing failure, an argument that the Administration's water carriers have been making with ferocity. If you can't acknowledge that liberals debating the war do so out of the same desire a solution that results in less threat to the United States, and instead bleat about "victory" without thought to what form it must take as constrained by events on the ground, then we can't and shouldn't debate it. We are on different planets. Best of luck to you.
But surges aside, withdrawal is really the important issue, and on that one I've bought into the standard argument that chaos will ensue. But will it? To be honest I have never evaluated that assumption critically. Shouldn't there be some discussion on that?
Yes. Robert Dreyfuss provides it. In an article at WM he argues essentially that the presence of US forces at present does nothing to materially impede ethnic violence anyway:
First, the United States is doing little, if anything, to restrain ethnic cleansing, either in Baghdad neighborhoods or Sunni and Shiite enclaves surrounding the capital. Indeed, under its current policy, the United States is arming and training one side in a civil war by bolstering the Shiite-controlled army and police.
In theory, Baghdad is roughly divided into Shiite east Baghdad on one side of the Tigris River, and Sunni west Baghdad on the other side. But in isolated neighborhoods such as Adhamiya, a Sunni part of east Baghdad, and Kadhimiya, a Shiite enclave in west Baghdad, ugly ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The same is true along a necklace of Sunni towns south of the capital, in an area that is predominantly Shiite; in mixed Sunni-Shiite towns such as Samarra, the largest city of predominantly Sunni Salahuddin Province, north of Baghdad; and in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad. In these areas, it is facile to assert that U.S. troops are restraining the death squads and religiously inspired killers on both sides. And it would be impossible for us to do so even with a much greater increase in American troops than the president has called for.
Plus, the violence is resource-limited and can't sustain itself:
Neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites have much in the way of armor or heavy weapons—tanks, major artillery, helicopters, and the like. Without heavy weaponry, neither side can take the war deep into the other’s territory. “They’re not good on offense,” says Warren Marik, a retired CIA officer who worked in Iraq in the 1990s. “They can’t assault positions.” Shiites may have numbers on their side. But because the Sunnis have most of Iraq’s former army officers, and their resistance militia boasts thousands of highly trained soldiers, they’re unlikely
to be overrun by the Shiite majority. Equally, the minority Sunnis won’t be able to seize Shiite parts of Baghdad or major Shiite cities in the south. Presuming neither side gets its hands on heavy weapons, once you take U.S. forces out of the equation the Sunnis and Shiites would ultimately reach an impasse.
Further, the imminent issue of Kirkuk also owes much to the American presence:
in the event of an American withdrawal, the Kurds would find it exceedingly difficult either to take Kirkuk or to declare independence. An independent Kurdistan would be landlocked, surrounded by hostile nations, and would possess a weak paramilitary army incapable of matching Iran, Arab Iraq, or Turkey. If Kurdistan were to secede without gaining Kirkuk’s oil, it would not be an economically viable nation. Even with the oil, the Kurds would have to depend on pipelines through Iraq and Turkey to export any significant amount. Nor would Turkey, with its large Kurdish minority, stand for a breakaway Kurdish state, and the Kurds know that the Turkish armed forces would overwhelm them.
Conversely, under the U.S. occupation—or, perhaps, because of it—the Kurds apparently feel emboldened to press their advantage in Kirkuk, despite the dire consequences. And if the United States were to adopt the idea floated by some in Washington of building permanent bases in Kurdistan, it would embolden the Kurds further. (The threat of a Turkish invasion is the chief deterrent to any move by the Kurds against Kirkuk, but as long as the United States maintains a presence in Kurdistan, the Turks will be reluctant to check the Kurds, for fear of running into U.S. troops.) Thus, by staying or by creating bases in Kurdistan, the United States is more likely to foster a Kurdish-Arab civil war in Iraq.
And finally, let's not dismiss the forces of unity that Do exist within Iraq and which can serve as the basis for reconciliation:
Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, Iraq is not a make-believe state cobbled together after World War I, but a nation united by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, just as the Nile unites Egypt. Historically, the vast majority of Iraqis have not primarily identified themselves according to their sect, as Sunnis or Shiites. Of course, as the civil war escalates, more Iraqis are identifying by sect, and tensions are worsening. But it is not too late to resurrect some of the comity that once existed. The current war is not a conflict between all Sunnis and all Shiites, but a violent clash of extremist paramilitary armies. Most Iraqis do not support the extremists on either side. According to a poll conducted in June 2006 by the International Republican Institute, “seventy-eight per cent of Iraqis, including a majority of Shiites, opposed the division of Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines.”
In addition, the country’s vast oil reserves, conceivably the world’s largest, could help hold Iraq together. Iraqi politicians are currently devising a law that would ratify the central government’s control of all of the country’s oil wealth. Even the corruption that now cripples Iraq tethers Iraqi political leaders to the central government and to the idea of Iraq as a nation-state. “None of the big players really want civil war,” says an Iraqi military official closely affiliated with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. “None of them want to give up the regular flow of funds that they get now from corruption.”
What most Iraqis do seem to want, according to numerous polls, is for American forces to leave.
Dreyfuss does mention President Bush's main argument that Al Qaeda will set up shop in Iraq, and rightly dismisses it. Abu Aardvark has been making the same argument numerous times that the threat of an Al-Qaedastan is simply not credible. Al-Qaeda benefits immensely from US forces' presence in Iraq and withdrawal WILL deal Al-Q a blow; that point simply cannot be denied.
There's a lot more in Dreyfus' article that really should be read in full; most people simply make the assumption that withdrawal is equivalent to failure. But if withdrawal does remove obstacles to Iraqi stability and security, then withdrawal really means victory. It's a question that the intellectually honest amongst us must grapple with to justify our assumptions of doom.
UPDATE: Note that I still will not even consider total withdrawal from Iraq, even though that and staying the course are the binary options presented by "victory" partisans. Is there an argument for partial withdrawal? Indeed. Here are important pieces that describe alternative pathways to victory that allow for significant troop reductions but also keep significant forces in theater, only with a true change in strategy.
Abandon the superfortresses by Phil Carter (also this related piece)
more recent piece about Four separate wars in Iraq by Phil Carter
Rep Hank Johnson's proposal
Fareed Zakaria's proposal
John Edwards' plan
Labels: Iraq
Israel's surge of despair http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/15/israel_despair/
Ultimately, Israel needs security for its democracy to flourish. Utterly dependent upon American patronage, and wedded to its western identity as it is, Israel is therefore far more at the mercy of decisions and shifts in power within Washington, not Tel Aviv. The key to Israel's peace is to wean itself from the western umbrella and establish itself as a regional power, not a satellite of the West.
This starts with a sensible outline for a workable peace plan - based on the Taba accords and the Abdullah proposal. Appointing Bill Clinton as a peace envoy would be a dramatic sign of commitment by the US to be an honest broker and assure both sides of our commitment.
But it also means that Israel must become a citizen of its region as well. Broadcasts of Israeli state television and radio should also be done in the Arabic language; forge stronger economic links with its neighbors; participate in trans-national projects. In other words, become a neighbor, not remain aloof. Just as children must leave the nest to make their own way, Israel needs to accept that it is a nation in the middle east, not Europe, and begin to adjust its formulation of self-interest accordingly.
I have some selected quotes from the article below the fold.
In light of Israel's close strategic ties with the United States, and particularly with the Bush administration, it has been all but taboo in the past for Israeli officials to openly criticize U.S. policy. But some officials I spoke with also voiced rising fears -- and disapproval -- over the Bush administration's handling of Iraq and Iran. Those officials include octogenarian Rafi Eitan, currently an Israeli cabinet minister, who told me that in the wake of Israel's failed efforts to crush Hezbollah, and with the deepening crisis in Iraq, Israel is in one of the most precarious situations he has ever seen in his seven decades of military and government service. Regarding President Bush's handing of Iraq, Eitan said, "Unless the policy changes, it is hopeless."
The level of gloom inside the Israeli government is accompanied by a creeping sense of paralysis -- one that could be dangerous not just for Israel, but for U.S. interests in the region, and for the Middle East as a whole. A recent conversation with a senior member of Israel's diplomatic corps -- someone with extensive experience in Israel's foreign policy establishment -- left me stunned by the degree of negativity. I have known him personally for several years and have never seen him so down on the country's prospects. "We lost the war," he told me, regarding last summer's conflict. "We all know that," he continued, adding that the failure against Hezbollah is the "core reason" for the deepening pessimism inside the government. This contrasts sharply, of course, with the official government line. As recently as Feb. 1, speaking to an Israeli commission investigating the war effort, Prime Minister Olmert, according to his aides, insisted once again that "Israel won the war."
The senior Israeli diplomat in part blamed Olmert's politics. "Do you know why we lost? Because soldiers don't want to die for these leaders. Who wants to die for Amir Peretz?" he said, referring to the Israeli defense minister, whose qualifications for the job have been called into question. Peretz, the leader of the Labor Party, but who had no real security or defense credentials, was appointed by Olmert last year to ensure the Labor Party's involvement in Olmert's coalition government.
The senior Israeli diplomat's grievances went beyond the Defense Ministry. He lamented the wave of cronyism, corruption and sexual harassment scandals that have plagued the government in recent times. "We live in a corrupt society, where those with merit don't get anywhere," he said. "It's a very sad time for the Jewish state."
Every year, an influential assessment of the security situation in the Middle East is published by Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center, one of Israel's premier think tanks. This year's assessment, published in January, was not only bleak, but also openly critical of U.S. policy. "The threats to Middle East security and stability worsened in 2006," the assessment announced, because "the American failure in Iraq has hurt the standing of the U.S. in the Middle East." It went on to state essentially that American actions in the Middle East over the past few years have harmed Israeli security. It also argued that the United States should withdraw from Iraq in the near term, rather than add more troops, as Bush's surge plan is now doing. As one of its authors, Mark A. Heller, explained after the report was published, "There is no Israeli interest being served by a continued American presence in Iraq."
These sobering conclusions might provide a jolt to those in the United States -- whether American Jews or conservative evangelicals -- who have supported the Bush administration's policies in part because they were supposedly intended to help Israel.
While the U.S. and Israel clearly are united in the goal of stopping Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, some Israeli leaders have lost confidence in Bush's leadership when it comes to that crucial concern. In the aftermath of the release of the assessment, Uzi Arad, the former director of intelligence at the Mossad, added, "With American attention so much focused on Iraq, it comes at the expense of its ability to blunt the slow Iranian progression toward nuclear capability." Last week, I raised these assessments with Eitan, himself a former spymaster who led the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, and who was the handler of the infamous spy Jonathan Pollard in the 1980s. "Sooner or later, a year or two, America will go out from Iraq," Eitan said. "Iran will unite with the Shiites of Iraq -- with or without force -- and then with the Shiites of Syria. Is this good for Israel? No, it is bad for Israel."
Several Israeli journalists have written articles recently discussing how Ariel Sharon -- who was plunged into his coma just over a year ago, at a much more optimistic time in the country's history -- would react if he were to awaken today. "We cannot bring ourselves to admit that we are lost without him," wrote Bradley Burston, a left-leaning columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz. "But, for a year now, we have proven just that ... we have lost the ability to avoid wars, just as we have lost the ability to win them."
Indeed, Sharon would have been aghast to observe the current state of affairs: no substantive progress on a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Gaza in the grips of a Hamas government; Sharon's personal choice for army chief having resigned in dishonor after leading a disastrous war; a still-powerful Hezbollah bragging about victory in Lebanon; a demoralized Israeli military -- and, perhaps worst of all, a powerful and emboldened Iran on the rise.
For several years earlier this decade, many in Israeli society and government were avid fans of the Bush administration (to the dismay and even embarrassment of some on the Israeli left). Because of Bush's hard-line Middle East policies and staunch support for Israel's own often hard-line policies under Sharon, approval ratings for the president were often much higher in Israel than anywhere else in the world -- even the United States itself. Recently, though, as the recognition that the last six years may have actually made the situation in the Middle East considerably more unstable and dangerous for Israel, reverence for Bush is quickly diminishing in many quarters.
It might only add to the sense of pessimism and paralysis, then, that there may be little Israel's leaders can do to influence Bush -- who hasn't been swayed on Middle East policy even by many in the U.S. Congress. My former supervisor in the prime minister's office, Ra'anan Gissin, who was Prime Minister Sharon's longtime advisor, used to tell a story that illustrates this current predicament. In the days leading up to the Iraq war, Ra'anan sat in on a meeting between Prime Minister Sharon and President Bush. As always, Ra'anan explained, Prime Minister Sharon was very careful not to directly counsel any particular action to President Bush -- because of the rightful fear that it would be unwise for Israel to be seen in any way as pushing U.S. policy.
Sharon did, however, make one of his beliefs very clear. Whatever the United States did or didn't do in the Middle East, he said, it would eventually leave -- and Israel would be left behind, forced to deal with the consequences.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Edwards as urban populist? http://mydd.com/story/2007/2/11/14512/9547
One comment I have is that FDR, presiding over the Depression, was probably both types of poopulists because poverty transcended so many boundaries. The poverty of the inner city and the poverty of rural America are very different in scope today - after all, no matter how poor you are you can get emergency care in an urban environment, to name but one example. In FDR's time however the urban poor resembled the rural poor far more. I don't think that the distinction makes as much sense.
Still, urban poverty is a porblem that deserves scrutiny. I don't think it would be a betrayal of any kind for Edwards to attempt to address the concerns of the urban poor, because it's not zero-sum with the rural poor. However, we have to acknowledge that the urban poor will benefit more directly from general improvements in our economy, by education, etc. whereas the rural poor are more insulated from the impacts of these kinds of "raise the tide" approaches. In a nutshell, urban poverty is a more transient phenomenon and you can escape it more readily, because of proximity to the resources that slosh around the system in far more concentrated form in teh urban areas. The rural areas, in contrast, are resource deserts.
But all that aside, Edwards' own record seems to be pretty persuasively rural in its focus. Elizabeth Edwards herself responds to NP's piece, with a pretty moving characterization:
The problem with analyzing rhetoric -- and remember, when I was in English graduate school, that is what I expected to spend a lifetime doing -- is that it is rhetoric.
Instead of analyzing the language of emails or snippets from selected speeches, it might be useful to think about the man himself, his career, his 2004 primary policies, his activities since 2004, and his 2008 policies.
He comes from the rural South. I remember the first time I went to Robbins. Actually it was with a boyfriend I had before I ever met John. (Improbably, his name is John Kennedy.) We parked in front of a small old theatre named, of course, the Dixie Theatre. There were two by fours across the door and a faded sign that said "Closed." Years later, John told me that the theatre closed after someone threw a soda bottle through the screen and the theatre didn't make enough profit to buy a new one, so they closed. The mobile home plant where he had his first job - closed. The chicken processing plant that was the largest employer - closed. The textile mill in which John's father worked - closed. As tobacco has struggled, so have the farms in the whole state. It is impossible, iterally impossible for a thinking person not to have these circumstances inform your adult beliefs. And they informed John. His career before work was representing, for the most part, families in the worst times of their lives -- often fighting for care and nedical treatment for their children. Where were they? Oh, some were in Charlotte -- maybe a couple over 20 years --, but most were in small towns with aging hospitals an hour's drive away or starving for doctors. A choice of doctors was almost unheard of. The most up to date equipment out of the question. And he was informed again about the hardships faced in rural America. In 2004, during the primaries, John was the ONLY candidate with a rural agenda. A fleshed out, thoughtful agenda. He had an urban poverty agenda too -- it was called Cities Rising, if memory serves me. And then he spent two years working on poverty issues, some of it under the auspices of the new Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at UNC. What he found is that poverty and hardship don't have a single home address -- rural or urban. There is no single solution to the obstacles to success and security, although some of the solutions we know work cross these demographic boundaries. Life and life's problem, it turns out, do not care much about rhetoric.
And as for distinctions made above, I think I (as opposed to John, whose opinion on this I do not know) disagree with the way you have framed it, which may be a reflection of the time in which the rhetorical examples are drawn -- the 1890's and 1930's. The rhetoric (if backed by action) that rural America wants in 2007 is complex - a combination of what you suggest, an intervening government, and what you don't suggest, a less invasive government. And the urban example you gave is less "urban" than it is personal. You could say those words or words like them -- and I suspect John has -- anywhere in this country.
And I need to say how strongly I disagree with one of the quotations that is used to explain the divide. John does not agree, I do not agree that not all work is honorable. All work is honorable. (How we treat some workers or permit them to be treated is not always honorable.) And work by those who can work is a responsibility that each of has in a society where we depend on those who can to be in a position to help those who can't. Will you find academicians who suggest that there should not be a personal responsibility piece in the answer to poverty? Yes, of course you will, but you will not be able to say that that means they are more concerned with urban poverty versus rural poverty.
And finally, John will, again, have a rural agenda - not because he thinks that wins elections (inside campaigns some feel there are not enough votes there) but because that is what is inside him. The forgotten America. There is no danger, none whatsoever, of his forgetting it. It would be like forgetting his own name.
Elizabeth Edwards
I'd say that we don't have to worry about Edwards forgetting the rural poor. But neither should we be alarmed if he does make noise in the direction of the urban poor, either - there's plenty of uplift needed in both locales.
Labels: 2008, Edwards, poverty
Saturday, February 10, 2007
My Barack Obama (.com) http://my.barackobama.com
It's worth noting that former Dean Nation alumnus Joe Rospars is the New Media Director for the Obama campaign. Congratulations, Joe!
BTW here is my first post at MBO, here's the link to the community diaries. Let's see how things develop, thouhg I am usually not optimistic about the quality of user-generated content on a campaign blog.
UPDATE: the blog functions permit user ratings on individual posts, that's cool. However given the high volume of posts there it should be possible to rate individual posts from the main aggregate page and not have to be viewing an individual post alone to do so.
Also, their o-blog really needs to integrate Technorati or Google trackback linking.
UPDATE: I sent Obama a personal message through the network. Text of my pm below the fold.
Hello Senator Obama,
My name is Aziz Poonawalla. I am a native Chicagoan, presently in texas, and am a sincere admirer of yours. I am the founder of the original Dean Nation weblog which was a central organizing nexus for Dean's netroots support back then (and was recognized and praised by Trippi himself many times, not least for our feat of raising $40k for Dean online). Today, Dean Nation has been relaunched as "Nation Building" because the scope has grown to beyond a single campaign, but my overall theme of Purple Politics is one that resonates with your own political history and rhetoric, and so I feel a genuine kinship.
I have to make a confession that thus far I have been somewhat critical of your candidacy, not because I don't think you can or should win, but because I believe that your candidacy must be a transformational one regardless of outcomes, much like Dean's was. You can find a listing of blog posts I have made about your candidacy using my Obama tag on blogger.
Good luck to you, Senator. I hope that this new website is the seed for genuine interaction with the netroots community, and that through dialouge we strengthen our collective case for 2008.
Regards,
Aziz Poonawalla
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Rep Hank Johnson's Iraq Resolution (and Zakaria's proposal) http://goodwillhinton.com/congressman_hank_johnson_to_propose_new_iraq_resolution
I have introduced a resolution that officially recommends the Administration effectively take the targets off of the backs of our brave troops and pull them off of street patrol duty. Over four years into this war, this should be the sole function of those Iraqi troops ready to take on the task. Even if they are not fully ready, a credible argument can be and has been made that the violence will be significantly reduced with the reduction of U.S. troop presence. These troops should, in turn, be used to fortify the Iraqi government, allowing it to function more efficiently and provide the country with the strong central government it needs.
Maybe more importantly, we need to pay a debt we owe to innocent Iraqi civilians. We owe them what they have yet to receive since the beginning of American intervention – the ability to purchase food at the local market for their families without the fear of being blown up. Any unbiased observer of the Iraq situation would be hard pressed to legitimately argue that our current plan is truly making the streets of Iraq safer.
Will has the draft text of the resolution. I think this goes well in principle and concept with Fareed Zakaria's proposal earlier (see below the fold for excerpt)
So what should the United States do? First of all, Washington has to make clear to the Iraqi leaders that its continued presence in the country at current troop levels is not sustainable without some significant moves on their part.
Iraqi leaders must above all decide whether they want America there. Perhaps the most urgent need is for them to help build political support for the continued deployment of U.S. forces. Right now the massive U.S. presence is allowing Iraq's leaders a free ride. With the exception of the Kurds, many of them play a nasty game. They publicly denounce the actions of U.S. soldiers to win popularity, and then, more quietly, assent to America's continued involvement. As a result, the proportion of Iraqis who now support attacks on U.S. troops has risen to a breathtaking 61 percent. The Iraqi people's frustration with the occupation is largely the result of its ineffectiveness, the lack of security and jobs, and abuses like Abu Ghraib. But those past errors cannot be undone. Iraqis must also realize that we are where we are, and that they can have either a country with U.S. troops or greater chaos without.
Iraq's Parliament should thus publicly ask American troops to stay. Its leaders should explain to their constituents why the country needs U.S. forces. Without such a public affirmation, the American presence will become politically untenable in both Iraq and the United States.
Next, Iraqis must forge a national compact. The government needs to make swift and high-profile efforts to bring the sectarian tensions to a close and defang the militias, particularly the Mahdi Army. The longer Iraqi leaders wait, the more difficult it will be for all sides to compromise. There are many paths to help Iraq return to normalcy; jobs need to be created, electricity supplied regularly, more oil produced and exported. But none of that is possible without a secure environment, which in turn cannot be achieved without a political solution to Iraq's sectarian strife.
There is one shift that the United States itself needs to make: we must talk to Iraq's neighbors about their common interest in security and stability in Iraq. None of these countries—not even Syria and Iran—would benefit from the breakup of Iraq, which could produce a flood of refugees and stir up their own restive minority populations. Our regional gambit might well lead to nothing. But not trying it, in the face of so few options, reflects a bizarrely insular and ideological obstinacy.
overall, this is a more constructive and responsible type of approach than either "withdrawal" or "staying the course" or a "surge".
Labels: Iraq
I'll Always Want My Country Back
I want my country back! We want our country back! I'm tired of being divided! I don't want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers any more! I want an America that looks like America, where we're all included, hand in hand, walking down, we have a dream, we can only reach the dream if we're all together, black and white, gay and straight, man and woman, America, the Democratic Party, we're going to win in 2004, thank you very very much, thank you very very much, stand up to America, stand up to America, stand up to America!
-- Howard Dean, March 15, 2003, Sacramento, California
If you have a fast enough connection, listen to the last minute or so of this video. (Hat-tip Renee in Ohio, who keeps the faith.) I found it while trying to explain to Strandsofpearl what was so moving about Dean's speeches; she had never seen one, and I, incredibly enough, had never before seen this one, though I had heard it was Dean's greatest. Since I first watched it, I have watched it over and over without ceasing, tears streaming down my cheeks. Even now, the clarion call of "I want my country back!" blared from those magnificent pipes, awakes in me the cascade of emotion that made me a blogger, a sentiment that I can barely express in words. This essay is an attempt to do just that.
I believe that all human beings, in some sense or other, hunger for the collective rush of an inspirational leader drawing hope and faith and dreams out of a unified group of people. Certainly, most will tell you if you ask them that this is far from the case; but I deem those people so cynical, or else so naive, that they cannot recognize the signs within themselves. Whatever the case, the reaction when such a leader arrives on the scene is astonishing, the multitudes that flock to his guidance enormous.
There was such a Biblical prophet in mid-nineteenth-century America. They called him "the Sage of Concord," not because that was the end goal of his philosophy, though it was, but because that was where he lived, in Concord, Massachusetts. His name was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson was America's first truly original philosopher. His essays are still read today with all the wonder they inspired when they were written. But perhaps his boldest step was to delineate the outline of a new religion, Transcendentalism.
Emerson first came upon the idea of Transcendentalism by observing the effect the natural world had upon his own emotions. In his 1836 essay Nature, commonly considered the initial explication of Transcendentalism, he discussed this process in more depth:Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough , and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both.
Having at once experienced and defined this "delight" at being one with nature, Emerson sought to draw moral lessons from the natural world. From the same essay:The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every event. From the child's successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he saith, "Thy will be done!" he is learning the secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another, his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will, -- the double of the man.
Yes, Weeping, this was written before Nietzsche. As I said, Emerson was an original thinker.
Continuing:Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source.
This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in values and wants, in corn and meat.
It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, -- it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!
Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature, -- the unity in variety, -- which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.
In his own verbose manner, you can hear Emerson zeroing in on the central principle of Transcendentalism. With his discussion of "unity in variety," he was hinting at an idea that he would make explicit six years later, in his eponymous essay -- the concept of the Oversoul.The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other;that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith.
To Emerson, the Oversoul, the collective consciousness of the whole people, was in itself the essence of divinity. But leaving aside the notion of the divine, it is indisputable that this collective consciousness is experienced at some time or another by virtually everyone. The feeling of good will that encircles our culture like a halo during the Christmas holidays; the unity of perception that is a mosh pit at a hard-rock concert; the mutuality of love and sorrow that graced our country after 9/11 -- all these are shadows of the collective experience that became the Oversoul in Emerson's thought. Such experiences, while seemingly fleeting, can make or break the emotional health of a culture. And when they are out of balance, thus threatening the continued existence of that culture, they can be manipulated back into their proper order with an intentional infusion of inspiration.
The art of causing a multitude of hearts to fill with simultaneous and identical emotions is perhaps the most powerful known to man. It is practiced with varying degrees of success by artists, writers, composers, motivational speakers, ministers, and politicians. Of these, only the last have the potential to appeal to the whole of the people with a universal call to action and hope. The artist's brush is ultimately stymied by the divergent artistic tastes of those who experience his creation; the minister's voice is silent to those who do not share his creed. Only the politician, who speaks for the entirety of his people as their elected leader, can hope to create a moment of cultural unity broad and deep enough to penetrate and change a culture's social balance.
At its best, then, a political moment can be a sort of religious vision, a revelation of the Oversoul by one who seeks to occupy a place at its head. Transformational leaders in this view are preachers to the Oversoul, great bullhorns whose end goal is nothing less than the reorientation of society with an uplifting vision of renewal.
Do you believe there is nothing more important than passing beneficial legislation, reorganizing ppartisan power, ending a cruel war, or restoring civility to political discourse? If you do, then you have never experienced a historical moment when the whole people seem to rise up with one magnificent voice and proclaim a new dawning of enlightened peace for the world. I have experienced such a moment, Dean's "I want my country back!" and I cannot but seek to replicate it, if it takes forever to do so.
We hear Dean's words, most of us, remember the passion they kindled, with a kind of nostalgia, as if they were already ancient history, missed but unimportant to the ongoing experience of our culture. But there are some moments in history that should not be allowed to rest, their journey over, content to remain in museums, a reminder of things past. These are the historical moments that need to be continually resurrected, reenacted with different, better endings -- the cries for justice, the visions of a brighter future, the experiences of collective rebirth. These are moments that transcend reason, that speak to Emerson's Oversoul, that collective human consciousness that comes near to attaining divinity. Like Dean's words in California, these moments are fleeting and rare, replaced all too quickly by the mundane world of everyday life.
I understand now why it is that people like Lisa spend their whole lives trying to discover the truth about why America was cruelly deprived of an entire generation of transformational leaders in the 1960's. In a sense, the experience of life is that of striving to regain in adulthood the harmony and oneness with the universe lost with the innocence of youth. Political leadership is the only truly universal method of reclaiming the Oversoul when we have lost it as a culture; and when our great political visionaries are cut down in their prime, our hope for cultural redemption dies with them.
But the hunger for the collective rebirth of the Oversoul does not die, but is carried undying from age to age, generation to generation. In every time the call to realize our collective promise is different. For Theodore Roosevelt's generation, it was "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord; for John Kennedy and Martin Luther King's generation, it was "Ask what your country can do for you" and "I have a dream today;" for my generatiion, born to political consciousness amid the depths of cultural depression, it was "I want my country back!" Embodied in that simple phrase, so stirringly delivered on the Ides of March four years ago, is much more than a political victory; it is a spiritual renewal, the uplifting of American culture, the rekindling of dreams and visions and hopes. It is inspiration writ large on the American consciousness. It is transformation fairly embodied in leadership so that the two are one.
I want my country back. I want my country back. I will always want my country back, until this sad and heartless world has learned, finally, to transcend its petty differences and embrace the beauty of its Oversoul, the final fulfillment of the promise of humankind. Or, as Howard Dean said,I want an America that looks like America, where we're all included, hand in hand, walking down, we have a dream, we can only reach the dream if we're all together, black and white, gay and straight, man and woman, America.
Someday, someday, that America Howard Dean dreamed of on that chilly day in California will truly be born. And on that day, we will speak in the words of Martin Luther King, and say of our dream, "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last!"
Richardson big speech today http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/7/203219/8451
1. Repairing international alliances by working with traditional allies and reengaging them in our foreign policy;
2. Renew the U.S. commitment to international law and treaties, including abiding by the Geneva Convention, shutting down Guantanamo, rejecting torture as a policy device;
3. A "wholesale assault" to reduce global warming, including going beyond the Kyoto protocols in establishing national benchmarks for enivronmental protection;
4. Engage our enemies by having direct talks with North Korea, Iran, and Syria;
5. Refocus on the "real international threats" including nuclear proliferation and the threat of nuclear terrorism;
6. Engage Latin America on a range of issues from immigration reform to economic, energy, and environmental cooperation;
7. Fight international poverty.
I'm not happy about #1 being so vague, and I would prefer that the scope of diplomacy be extended bbeyond our traditional allies. I don't mean our enemies as he argues in point 4, but rather key nations like India. Number 7 is equally vague; it might be better to fight illiberalism and promote freedom (not necessarily democracy) as underlying root causes to economic oppression. On the whole though it's pretty impressive and is thus far the only comprehensive vision that isn't Iraq-centric.
Labels: 2008, Richardson
the debate about debate about Iraq http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7260608
Listen to this great piece on NPR Morning Edition. Should clear a few things up.
Relatedly, see this post at TPMCafe about the Seven GOP Samurai (mentioned at the end of the NPR segment), this piece at the NYT, and this dissent from Pejman.
Labels: Iraq
Blogger joins Brownback campaign http://www.redstate.com/stories/elections/2008/why_im_working_for_sam_brownback
Whenever I talk to people about Brownback, the consensus response I get is, “I like him probably better than all the rest of the candidates, but he can’t win.” It’s sentiments like this that ignore the greatest, but often forgotten, reality of politics: the surest way to not win a general election is to pick a candidate based upon electability. Besides which, the number of people I hear this sentiment from indicates that Brownback may actually have a better shot than people believe, if people can be convinced to vote for the man they truly believe is right for the job.
Reminds me of a candidate I once supported named Howard...
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
opposition as an end, not a means http://www.redstate.com/stories/congress/lets_end_this_equivocating
Here is the text of my comment at RedState in response to Thomas's angry rant.
What is your policy alternative? Is the surge of 20,000 troops to Baghdad sufficient? Will the surge actually serve to reduce sectarian violence? If more troops are needed, why didn't we begin a massive expansion of the Army five years ago, with the goal of restoring the size of the force to cold war levels? If we need more troops now, why not call for a draft? Are we being too pansy-arse in our approach? What tactics should our troops be engaging in? How would you amend the rules of engagement? Should we explicitly call for Sadr's head? Threaten Maliki? Bribe Sistani? Is Iran really the root problem? Shall we attack Iran? In what timeframe? With what specific objective? What targets?
I mean, it's all well and good as the opposition to oppose, but the GOP had 5 years to make its case and prosecute the war the way it saw fit. The voters made a choice to try fresh blood. If you're going to fault them for that, the least you can do is be specific about what the choices really are.
If you want victory in Iraq, and equate withdrawal with failure, then you must define the parameters of that victory. Do your parameters ignore the monotonically increasing sectarian violence as a valid metric for evaluation?
UPDATE: The response from RedState is, "it's not our problem". Incidentally, something relevant about forcing withdrawal from Greenwald:
When Bill Clinton was President, most of the country's leading Republicans did not seem to have any problem at all with Congressional "interference" in the President's decisions to deploy troops (really to maintain troop deployments, since President Bush 41 first deployed in Somalia). There wasn't any talk back then (at least from them) about the burden of "535 Commanders-in-Chief" or "Congressional incursions" into the President's constitutional warmaking authority. They debated restrictions that ought to be legislatively imposed on President Clinton's military deployments and then imposed them.
And Sen. McCain in particular made arguments in favor of Congressionally-mandated withdraw that are patently applicable to Iraq today. And he specifically argued with regard to forcible troop withdrawal that "responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States." The Constitution hasn't changed since 1993, so I wonder what has prompted such a fundamental shift in Republican views on the proper role of Congressional war powers.
Feingold, back in 93 and today, makes a pretty good case for the fact that Congress needn't resort to defunding a war to stop it.
Labels: Iraq, withdrawal
proposed: the TalkClimate FAQ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/wsj-editorial-board-head-still-buried-in-the-sand/
This is the usual way in which RC tries to correct the record; it's effective to a point, but the problem is that it simply doesn't scale well. After all, it's reactionary defense, not proactive prevention of the media perpetuating climate change denial in the first place. The reason that the WSJ can get away with this sort of thing is because there is no centralized resource for common factual, science-based rebuttals of the various tropes.
What's needed is something akin to the TalkOrigins FAQ, but for climate; I guess it would be named the TalkClimate FAQ. Obviously for effectiveness it would have to be run by experts in the field who are close to the science; The RealClimate team would be appropriate stewards, Al Gore would not. I imagine that if I didn't have a day job in an unrelated scientific field, I would have the time to create an initial FAQ on my own; the RealClimate archives would be easy to arrange into FAQ format (the FAQ need only list the questions and then link to the blog entries). However after that's done the FAQ would need to be continuously maintained with new questions added as time goes on and with links to more than just the RC crew's content. Ideally, direct links to abstracts of the relevant published papers would also be included.
Such a resource would serve as a valuable resource not just to laymen and bloggers but also to media journalists and elected officials who ultimately dictate policy.
UPDATE: I realize that there is an Index to the RC site, but it's organized by topic, not by trope. It is useful, but not enough.
Labels: global warming
Monday, February 05, 2007
An Inconvenient Truth http://www.climatecrisis.net/
I saw it this weekend, and must say, it was magnificent. My timing is certainly appropriate given the release of the IPCC report on Friday. To me the two things that stood out the most were the Greenland melting, and the emphatic point that reducing carbon emission is probably an opportunity for immense economic growth, not a burden. I guess I have more faith in Yankee ingenuity and the free market than the critics do; at any rate the counterargument by Gore using automobile standards in China vs the US (specifically California) was utterly devastating. Excellent additional reading is the Stern Review Report on the economics of climate change.
I'm going to buy this DVD; it's that good. And I'll chip in another ten bucks to the Draft Gore ActBlue page besides.
I'd appreciate any link to "response" pieces by critics, as long as they actually address the specific arguments and don't try to do an end-run by attempting to ad-hominem the scientific process itself.
UPDATE: just because it's so good, this comment about numerical simulations and climate models from Good Math Bad Math:
Even if we accept what [a partisan hack who claims to be a scientist] says at face value: that there are multiple variables in a simulation which need to be considered separately in terms of probability - he's quite deliberately ignoring the correct way of combining those probabilities. In fact, he's really just trying to play the inverse of a classic "big numbers" game - he wants to artificially combine things to make the probability look as untrustworthy as possible. The trick is in pretending that all 50 (or whatever) variables in the simulation are independent. In real climate simulations, the kinds of things that become variables are not independent. To give a couple of examples, real climatalogical simulations will include a parameter to describe the humidity of airmasses based on temperature; and simulation to describe the viscosity of airmasses based on temperature and humidity. Those are not independent - the viscosity of the airmass is determined in part by its humidity; the ability of the airmass to pick up more moisture while over the ocean is determined in part by its viscosity. The probabilities of these things being correct are not independent - if one is right, the other is almost certainly right; and if one is wrong, the other is almost certainly wrong - because each depends on the correctness of the other. Dependent variables get treated very differently in a probability calculation that independent variables - that's what Bayes theorem is all about.
But it's much worse than just making a misleading probability argument. He's very deliberately mischaracterizing how we model the accuracy of a simulation. The accuracy of simulation is based on its performance and the known accuracy of the fundamental model which it's based on. So, for example, most airplane manufacturers no longer use wind tunnels - computational fluid dynamics simulations generate better results than the wind tunnel (Do a websearch on "Boeing" and "Tranair"). The reliability of the simulation is based on two things. One is a long history of measuring things on instrumented aircraft, and comparing the measurements to the predictions from the simulations; the other is the known accuracy of the Navier Stokes equations, and the computational methods used to implement NS systems. On the basis of those two, we come up with results about how accurate we believe the models to be.
And further - we look at simulations based on multiple models. If 20 different models, generated in 20 different ways, all of which have strong track records for accuracy - if all 20 of them have been been implemented by simualations whose quality has been demonstrated - and all of them generate nearly the same result, and no system/model with a proven track record disagrees, then we consider the results of those simulations to be very strong evidence.
Labels: Al Gore, global warming
Delegitimizing government http://www.redstate.com/stories/archived/brain_drain
This is why this article at RedState has me rather bemused. Titled, "the brain drain", it bemoans the tainted perception that the American public has of government service:
Bright, ambitious people always leave college looking for the best way to make a big splash in the world. And dreams of making the world a better place are a staple of idealistic youth. It's always interesting and illustrative to observe the ways these folks choose to go about it.
And the pattern reported in the FT article linked above is telling you that government is no longer the place to make a difference.
That FT article quotes an administrator at Princeton as saying,
“The common perception is that if you go into the private sector, you’re an economic entrepreneur, if you go into the non-profit sector you’re a social entrepreneur, but if you go into government, you’re a bureaucrat.”
Here we see the fruits of the conservative doctrine. The alternative is supposed to be the private sector, but since when did profit have a moral component? The route to maximum profit usually lies in the opposite direction from the common good. Settling for, perhaps, 75% of maximum profit and achieving some real, lasting change, is for some reason considered unthinkable and a betrayal of some core value.