Mindboggling. The first debate of the election and there’s no way I can find to watch or listen to it live. There’s not even an Internet feed. If I lived in South Carolina I’d have gone and bootlegged a feed somehow.
Category: Politics
So, what’s up in the world this fine morning? Stratfor kindly converted my US/Iraq war subscription into a general subscription, so I have a wealth of material to speak of.
India and Russia are conducting joint naval exercises, which are pretty much symbolic — they want to remind the world that they’re allies. It’s a good thing to remember, considering that India fully intends to become a world power over the next twenty years. Bruce Sterling wrote a great article about the India/China space race, which echoed this Guardian article from January. It might be somewhat disturbing to consider the fact that China, India, and Russia are all cheesed off about Gulf War II. Or not, if you think we’ve reached the end of history and no other nation will ever rise in prominence.
On a more cheerful note, India and Pakistan have resumed diplomatic relations. Breathe a sigh of relief.
Meanwhile, in Turkey, the military just observed that the secular nature of Turkey’s government should be “carefully protected.” Erdogan is not someone the Turkish military wants to see in power, and his party is the direct descendant of the government which fell in 1997. By “fell,” I mean “was pressured to step down by the military.” We could see another coup in the relatively near future; certainly tensions are high.
Also of note: Kurds in Turkey are protesting violently in the aftermath of the recent quake. More Kurdish/Turkish friction can’t be good.
Not terribly surprisingly, some Democrats are more than willing to jump on the terror bandwagon. Want to push your domestic agenda? Bring up the war on terror! Bah. The proposals, not unlike much of what Bush has been pushing, assume that terrorists are inept idiots. In this case, you’d have to assume terrorists are incapable of stockpiling weapons. Seems an unlikely assumption to me.
Via Light of Reason, and while you’re there read Silber’s quietly painful memories of growing up gay in the 60s.
The SF Chronicle has an interesting article, which claims the most watched station in post-war Iraq is Iranian national television. The New York Times backs this up. I’m a wee bit skeptical, considering how long Iran and Iraq were at war, but even if I discount the reports by 50% it’s still more reason to think that the Shia, Iran-influenced majority will be fairly hostile to American influence.
I was listening to NPR the other night and some guy called in to bitch about the ingratitude of the Iraqis. He’d paid thousands of dollars in taxes to help free ‘em and they weren’t properly grateful. All I can say is that the ingratitude was predicted — but I guess since it was the left predicting it, he figured it was just more meaningless fiskable noise.
“President Bush will tell Americans on Thursday evening that the major fighting in Iraq is over and the threat to the United States has ended, a Bush administration spokesman said.”
No, really, that’s what he said. The threat is gone.
What threat was that again? Cause as so elegantly espoused here, we didn’t find any threat. We found no weapons of mass destruction. No evidence that Saddam had a viable nuclear program. Saddam didn’t use the hypothetical weapons of mass destruction as a last gasp. We didn’t find any of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the terrorist base in Northern Iraq.
If Saddam by some miracle smuggled all the chemical warheads into Syria before the war ended, well, then the threat is pretty much not gone — just moved. So that must not be an ongoing hypothesis, which is good, because it was pretty damned unlikely.
We took apart Saddam’s army in under a month; that wasn’t very threatening.
What exactly was Saddam going to do that posed such a big threat to the US? Answers may not postulate chemical weapons until we actually find some.
Not surprising but rather important: the US military presence in Saudi Arabia is ending. This had been coming for a while — the Saudis didn’t let us use those bases for Gulf War II, for example. It’s also a smart move, since those troops have been the source of a lot of tension. Bin Laden will tout it as a victory, which is a minor PR coup for him, but without them there some of his support will also fade.
The interesting question is what happens now. In the short term, we can expect to see something around 100,000 troops in Iraq. Rumsfeld claims there won’t be any permanent bases. I think that the question of a permanent presence in Iraq probably doesn’t need to be made right now, from the administration’s point of view. It’ll be a few years before we can pull out of Iraq, given our stated goals.
(For that matter, even as an anti-war advocate, I couldn’t support pulling out right now. We’d leave the country in worse shape than it was in under Saddam and you could bet on Kurdish/Arab civil war within six months.)
Anyhow, I’d bet that Rumsfeld and Powell are planning on making a decision about permanent bases in Iraq after 2004, if they’re still around, since nobody can really be sure what the Middle East will look like in a few years. Maybe the Palestinian peace process will work. Maybe there’ll be a revolution in Iran. Maybe Syria will display nuclear capacity. No point, from Bush’s point of view, in making the decision until we know more.
Hey! Why aren’t Democrats winning the culture wars? Because conservatives are supporting college Republicans like this while liberals support college Democrats like this. Note in particular the differences between the Conservative Student Conference schedule and the Young Democrats Association schedule. On the one hand, you have a reception and a tour to Niagara Falls. On the other hand, you have lessons (or, if you like, indoctrination) on criticizing “liberal textbook bias” and becoming “a more effective advocate for your beliefs.” Also, one’s in Buffalo and one is in Washington, DC. Which city is more apropos if you want to encourage new blood to participate in the political process?
Similarly, the progressive left is blowing the Democrats away as far as student organization goes. I suspect some Democrats are blithely assuming that this chunk of the left is breeding future Democratic thinkers. Nope; this is the progressive wing of the left and it’s doing an excellent job of creating future progressive thinkers. Think Green Party.
This post should not be taken as approval of any particular segment of the left, or, for that matter, of the right. It’s just an observation, cause I’ve seen a few Democrats talking about party problems lately. Time to stop bitching about Nader and start recognizing the successful tactics of both the radical left and the radical right.
(Hey, I know I have some readers from outside the US. I am deeply curious about the sort of student outreach that exists in Australia and the UK, if there’s any.)
So one frequent criticism of anti-war types is this: “You’re only against this war because Bush wants it.” Sometimes it’s phrased as “You wouldn’t be against this war if Clinton were fighting it,” which is nicely non-falsifiable. Either way, though, the appropriate answer is “No duh?”
It’s perfectly reasonable to be against a specific action because of the President who’s promulgating it. For example, if Bush said “I’m going to hold an overnight prayer meeting with the cast of Bend It Like Beckham,” I wouldn’t particularly think twice about it. If Clinton said the same thing I’d think it was a rather unwise move on his part.
Some people have genuine moral objections to the war that are rooted in the fact that they simply don’t trust Bush. It’s also reasonable to say “I don’t think this war is being fought for moral reasons.” That doesn’t preclude a moral outcome — deposing Saddam, for example — it just speaks to motivation. Some people think motivations matter. Some of those people would have trusted Clinton if he’d said the exact same things Bush had said. (And some wouldn’t.) That doesn’t make them inconsistent. It just means they don’t trust Bush, and they don’t think a war should be fought for immoral reasons.
This becomes particularly relevant as the US backs off predictions of WMD. As ABC reports, “Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam’s weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.”
Tacitus thinks that the above news vindicates nobody, but I think he’s wrong. It isn’t necessary for anti-war folks to have argued against the existence of WMD. The point is that the Bush administration used the existence of WMD to tip the scales in their arguments. “Sure, it’s true that this may cause a wave of anti-Americanism, but the threat is so damned high we have to go in.” Now we’re finding out they misled us regarding the nature of the threat, and where does that leave their argument? I have to believe that the burden of proof is on the people who want to declare war — I’m not a pacifist, but surely the default state should be peace.
Which brings us back to trust. Yes, many people objected to this war because they didn’t like Bush and more importantly, didn’t trust him. And it looks more and more as though their lack of trust has been proven accurate. It doesn’t matter so much for the country if Americans decide they don’t trust Bush, although you can bet Howard Dean is praying no WMD turns up. On the other hand, it’s gonna matter a lot to the rest of the world if Chirac and Schroder can say, a year from now, “Bush lied to you.”
This story is about how the Dixie Chicks posed nude, but that’s not what I care about. It contains the following claim: “Within days of the comment being published, Maines apologized, but many U.S. country music radio stations all but banished Dixie Chicks hits from the airwaves, some fans smashed their CDs and sales plummeted.”
The thing is, that’s not true. Immediately after the controversy broke, Amazon sales of all their albums increased. I just checked the Billboard Country Top 20 Chart, and Home is at #3 — down from #1 last week. Tickets are going for a couple hundred bucks each on EBay. If this is plummeting sales, there are plenty of musicians who’d want some of that humble pie.
Lotta discussion of incest lately, in the context of Senator Santorum’s unwise remarks. Two observations.
First off, there is a potential qualitative difference between incest and homosexuality, and it has to do with imbalanced power relationships. The chances that an incestuous relationship embodies an unhealthy dominant/submissive relationship of some kind seems to me to be fairly high. Even if we’re not talking parent/child, the chance of an unhealthy sibling relationship is still sizable. The inherent risk of a psychologically unhealthy incestuous relationship merits separate legal treatment.
(No offense meant to healthy incestuous relationships. And there goes my chances of holding office.)
Second, if “it’s hard to provide a good distinction between consensual adult homosexuality and consensual adult incest,” then one ought also to mention that “it’s hard to provide a good distinction between consensual adult heterosexuality and consensual adult incest.” That is, after all, an equally valid logical result of the argument Volokh is making. Oddly, nobody seems to want to phrase it that way — it’s easier to lump incest and homosexuality together. Which is the same implication Santorum made.