Month: January 2003

Another interesting DoD briefing yesterday, this one on the all-volunteer armed forces. Obviously, this was prompted by Rangel’s draft proposal. Worth reading, for some interesting statistics.

The most interesting point is that black Americans join the military in a proportion roughly equivalent to the proportion of blacks in society as a whole; the 30% number we’ve heard a lot about is due to the fact that blacks tend to remain in the military at a higher rate than do other ethnicities. Seems to me that the question to ask, therefore, is not “why are there so many black people in the military” but “why is the military such a superior alternative to the rest of society in so many cases?” Maybe it’s something the military is doing; maybe the rest of society just sucks harder. Probably a combination of both. I’d like to see more investigation of this, in any case; I bet there’s something to be learned there.

Also of interest: “Now, college graduate or higher, 22 percent of our enlisted recruits — this goes directly to some of the issues Mr. Rangel is raising, have a father who has a college degree or more, versus 30 percent of the recruit age population. And I’m quite confident once we add the officers in, you’ll see those numbers — that gap between those numbers close. Bottom line, look at this classic measure of socioeconomic status, and enlisted recruits alone, before we even add the officers in, don’t look all that different from the recruit-age population at large.” Actually, a 25% difference does look pretty different to me.

“Now, in terms of median income, for whites — now again, this is enlisted versus – and this is against the entire civilian population, so it’s not quite the right comparison. But for whites, the median total gross household income in 1999 for our enlisted population was about $33,500, versus $44,400 for the civilian population.” Again, pretty substantial difference. This is without the officers included in the figures, though, which as he mentions is important for this comparison. Hopefully they’ll get those figures out soon.

The Instapundit comes out in favor of racial internments: “The wrongfulness in the World War Two internments, after all, wasn’t that they happened, but that they were unjustified. Had significant numbers of American citizens of Japanese descent actually been working for the enemy, the internments would have been a regrettable necessity rather than an outrageous injustice.” He also quotes reader email, which includes the sentence, “The citizen/alien line—so crucial to the wrongfulness of the Japanese American internment—has now been breached.”

Two things. First off, said reader email also includes the comment “And we often hear that there was not a single documented incident of pro-Axis subversive activity by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry during the war. (As it happens, this is not quite true, but it’s very close to true.)” But then he goes on to claim that a single incident of pro-Al Qaeda subversive activity by an American citizen of Arab ancestry would —

Well, let’s face it. He’s saying that this breaches a line which is crucial to wrongfulness of mass Arab American internment. Is it the only line, in his mind? I dunno, he doesn’t clarify. I would certainly like to know.

So, OK. But it still doesn’t scan. We’ve got one documented example of subversive Arab American activity. He acknowledges that there were few (but at least one) incident of subversive Japanese American activity during WW II, but those incidents did not justify the internments. Why does this one cross the line, while those did not?

Second, and I must acknowledge the reader for making this clear, it’s still bogus. The email makes this clear; Professor Reynolds skips past that in his response. We’re Americans, damn it. We do not sign away the freedoms of some of our citizens in order to gain greater safety for the remainder. Is this somehow unclear? It’s not about being safe. It’s about maintaining our basic values.

Would you meekly submit to internment, knowing you were not a criminal, and also knowing that some small subset of American citizens sharing your ancestry were? If not, why would you expect anyone else to do so?

Addendum to the below: the direct trigger point was in fact a US diplomat pushing the issue; we called North Korea on their nuclear program. OK, that’s fair.

I think that the essential conclusion is the same, though. I’m honestly not sure why Bush isn’t standing up and saying “This happened because we pushed them, and it’s a perfectly acceptable price.” At this point I think that’s a reasonable stance.

Instead, we’ve got what appears to be some pretty messy back and forth, going from refusal to talk to Bush-sanctioned negotations.

Also, you gotta wonder whether we’re better off with North Korea possessing but not actively building nukes, which is a stable situation that can always be addressed when we’re not about to invade Iraq, or with North Korea actively gearing up to build nukes while we’re engaged in preparations for war in the Middle East. There’s middle ground between aggressively pursuing every problem in the world at once and letting things slide forever.

I did some research this morning on the context of the North Korean issue. (Or, if you like, crisis.) First off, here’s the Agreed Framework from 1994. This is the basic agreement, brokered by Jimmy Carter and signed by Bill Clinton. It’s got three elements: North Korea agrees to stop producing plutonium, the US agrees to help them build a light-water reactor by 2003, and the US agrees to make sure North Korea has alternative energy in the form of fuel oil until the LWR gets built.

There’s also discussion of normalizing the diplomatic relationship between the two countries. Heh.

For the most part, the US lived up to its committment vis a vis energy. Let’s recognize that there have most certainly been gaps. Congress has, at times, been reluctant to approve funds for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), the multinational agency which is building the reactor. Both Clinton and Bush have used clauses which allow them to declare KEDO funding “vital to the national security interests of the United States” in order to ensure that money keeps flowing, however.

Another important fact is that the 2003 due date was out the window years ago. This is not the fault of the Bush administration; I don’t think it’s Clinton’s fault, either. It’s a big construction project with international politics layered on top; what do you expect? The key here is that this isn’t a surprise; you can’t blame North Korea’s actions on the late delivery of the LWR. That’s been a known problem for a long time.

All in all, it appears to me as though the US has not failed to live up to the spirit of the nuclear-related sections of the Agreed Framework. The US has failed to live up to the spirit of the Framework, but that is not a new development and spans two administrations.

The diplomatic recognition aspect seems important. In some senses, it’s just a technicality, but it appears to be one that matters to North Korea. Some argue that we need to take a hardline approach and that recognition would symbolize weakness. Some argue that it would symbolize respect. I somehow suspect the answer is somewhere in between. We ought to find a similarly symbolic concession for North Korea to make, and link them: that way both countries are making symbolic concessions and meeting in the middle. In any case, though, it was not been a hot button item in 2002.

There’s also been a lot of friction over the course of the last decade regarding missile capability. In theory, missiles and nukes aren’t related. In practice, the ability to deliver nuclear weapons over long ranges obviously magnifies the nuclear threat… but wait. That’s just not true any more. One of the lessons we should have learned from 9/11 is that missiles are only one possible delivery system. I’m as scared of smuggled nuclear devices as I am of missile launches.

There’s a parenthetical discussion waiting to happen here about the need to accept that countries with nukes and no missiles are as dangerous as countries with both, in both the US and elsewhere, but maybe later. For now, let’s recognize that there’s been some missile itchyness, but that, again, it wasn’t a hot button topic during the summer of 2002. In fact, Bush signed over $95 million to KEDO last April, which is a pretty decent indication that he wasn’t deeply concerned.

What this means is that we have to look elsewhere for the cause of North Korea’s recent belligerence.

I think there are two reasons this is happening right now. First off, there’s the “Axis of Evil” meme. If you get up there, and you say “North Korea is an evil country,” that inevitably throws doubt on your intentions towards that country. I’m not saying Bush is wrong. I’m not saying North Korea isn’t dangerous. I am saying that taking a hostile attitude towards North Korea was a primary cause of the current situation. There is a price for rhetoric; that doesn’t imply that the rhetoric wasn’t worth it, but it does imply that you should acknowledge the cause and effect.

The second cause is our involvement in Iraq. If you’re going to break a treaty with the US, now is an excellent time to break it. This is true even if the US can handle two serious wars at once. Even if there are enough troops and material to deal with North Korea while we’re busy in Iraq, as long as part of the US military is elsewhere, there’s that much you don’t have to worry about.

I’d love to see Bush stand up and say “You know, this is probably happening because I took a hardline approach towards North Korea. I think that was the right thing for me to do, for reasons I’m going to discuss next, and I knew that there would be repercussions when I said those things.” I suspect some of Bush’s supporters would love that too, actually. Let’s cut through all the underbrush and the pretense that Bush wasn’t following through with the Framework and the pretense that North Korea was going to be placid about this Axis of Evil stuff and the pretense that our involvement with Iraq has nothing to do with the timing, and get to the meat of the argument, already.

Leafnet (by way of Boing Boing) is a new approach to distributed politics. I really like it. The basic idea: check the site, print out a leaflet, post it in a bunch of places. It distributes the work of pamphletting across everyone who’s interested in the subject.

Very nice concept. Now he needs to tie it to an alert system. It’d also be more effective if it was oriented towards a specific set of political issues. If you expect people to pay attention to alerts asking ‘em to leaflet, they need to know what to expect, and that’s even more important if people have to go to the site to see what new campaigns there are.

Still, it’s an interesting direction. We’ll see if anyone picks up on it in the US.