Month: July 2008

By Patrick Appel

Andrew’s column this week focuses on a foreign policy and how the candidates "seem to be agreeing with one another, while adamantly refusing to admit it." The last few paragraphs:

So what are Obama and McCain now fighting over? They’re still fighting over the past, with Obama refusing to believe that the Iraq war has been anything but a massive strategic blunder, and McCain and Bush seeking retroactive justification for the whole adventure. On this, Obama has an edge – a heavy majority of Americans believe the Iraq war was a mistake, even though they are understandably divided about the next best step.

So we’re left at a deeper level with the question of presidential temperament. There is little doubt that a President McCain would have more hawkish instincts, would be quicker on the trigger than the cool, conciliatory Obama. However, Obama’s readiness to use military force in Pakistan and commitment to the Afghan war does not bespeak a Jimmy Carter-style liberalism either.

In fact, if you had to pick the most recent analogies for the style of foreign policy each man might manifest, McCain would be closer to Ronald Reagan and Obama closer to the first President Bush, whose diplomacy Obama regularly praises. And by Reagan, I don’t merely mean first-term Reagan. I mean the Reagan able to make a deal with long-time foes when he thought it could work; the Reagan able to remove forces from the battlefield if he felt they were being counterproductive.

This is not a seismic distinction. And the reason is not just that McCain and Obama represent some of the saner parts of their respective parties. It is that a mix of factors – both internal Iraqi shifts and Petraeus’s counterinsurgency tactics – have made Iraq less a question of catastrophe or quagmire and more a pragmatic question of how to withdraw as prudently as possible.

It’s amazing what a little bit of success can do for a war and a polity, isn’t it? Not “victory”, mind you, which at this point is a meaningless concept in a war whose justification was undermined within weeks of its start, but success and the pragmatic – rather than ideological – conundrums it presents.

The rest is here.

By Patrick Appel
Chait is outraged by the press coverage of Maliki’s remarks:

…the paucity of coverage of these remarks is inexplicable. The big newspapers have given this story a paragraph at most. Unbelievably, The Page gave this headline to Maliki’s walkback: "Maliki Clarifies Seemingly Pro-Obama Remarks."

Seemingly? It was a direct endorsement of the idea. And, for that matter, Clarifies? There was no attempt to clarify, only to muddy the waters to minimize the embarassment to President Bush and his allies…The Page’s credulousness about the walkback is an embarrassment.

Josh Marshall notes that editorials are usually banked before the weekend. Also, surprise, surprise, it appears that Maliki was leaned on by US officials to issue a clarification.

by hilzoy I’ve been thinking about the Maliki statement and its implications. Here’s my take. McCain’s entire rationale, as a candidate, turns on Iraq and related issues, like terrorism and (to a lesser extent) Iran. What else is he going to run on? His grasp of the economy? His health care proposals? The widespread popularity of the Republican brand? He can’t even run on the rest of foreign policy: McCain’s approach to foreign policy has always lacked any kind of integrative vision; he treats problems in isolation from one another. This means two things: first, McCain really doesn’t have an overarching foreign policy vision, and second, for him, Iraq has always been The Big Thing, and as a result, everything else got slighted. (Minor factoid: the Issues page on McCain’s website doesn’t have an entry for foreign policy. An Iraq page, yes; likewise, pages on the Space Program and Second Amendment Rights. But foreign policy? Nothing.) On Iraq, McCain begins with a huge disadvantage: he advocated the invasion of Iraq, which most Americans feel was a mistake. (He’s always urging voters to look back and consider who showed good judgment on the surge, but he doesn’t want them to look too far back, lest they find themselves thinking about who showed good judgment on the invasion.) He therefore has to argue something like this: now that we’re in this mess, we need someone we can trust, someone who will be able to manage this catastrophe as well as possible. McCain is solid. Obama is untested, inexperienced, risky. There was always a problem with this story: namely, it involves saying that we should trust McCain, who made the wrong call on invasion, over Obama, who got it right. But sowing doubts is pretty much all McCain has.

This got a lot harder last week, before Maliki’s comments.

First the Bush administration started appeasing negotiating with Iran, as Obama had suggested; then McCain essentially adopted Obama’s position on Afghanistan; then the Bush administration agreed to what they called a "general time horizon"for withdrawing troops. (Wait: now it’s "Joint aspirational time horizons"!) McCain and Bush seemed to be adopting Obama’s positions all over the place. For a risky, inexperienced novice, Obama seemed to have gotten a lot of things right. And for an experienced, serious old hand with a command of foreign policy, McCain seemed to be spending a lot of time playing catch-up. And every time Obama gets to say, in effect, ‘Hi, John! What took you so long?’, McCain’s only winning message gets that much weaker.

(McCain was also starting to undercut his own message. Both his budget plan and his Afghanistan plan relied on troops being withdrawn from Iraq. A lot of troops. McCain was already counting on people not noticing this.)

So even before Maliki said a word, McCain was in a pretty tough position. Two weeks ago, he had some pretty sharp differences with Obama. McCain wanted to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and cast any idea of leaving as dishonorable, as a way of risking the gains of the surge in order to embrace defeat. Obama wanted to withdraw from Iraq and send more troops to Afghanistan. By two days ago, McCain was left with basically two messages: (a) timetables would be a disaster, and Obama’s embrace of them just shows how naive he is; and (b) McCain got the surge right and Obama got it wrong. It’s a pretty weak foundation for a candidacy.

It was against this backdrop that Maliki comes out in favor of Obama’s proposal to withdraw combat troops from Iraq in 16 months (though he is careful not to endorse Obama.) McCain has to call Obama naive on Iraq. But that is a lot harder to do if Maliki agrees with Obama. It’s hard to say that Maliki is insufficiently familiar with the facts on the ground. It’s hard to call him naive. And whatever you think of Maliki’s motives, it’s also a lot more complicated to make the case that he doesn’t know or care what’s best for his country. In Presidential elections, uncomplicated cases are key. "Obama has only been in the Senate for three years; he doesn’t have the experience to get Iraq right" is an uncomplicated case. There is no such uncomplicated explanation for Maliki’s being wrong.

***

Worse, lot of the more obvious ways of responding to Maliki’s statement are fraught with danger for McCain. Responding that Maliki either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or is somehow untrustworthy and bad directly undercuts our reasons for staying in Iraq. We are there in support of the Maliki government, which we are hoping will become capable of running the country without our presence. The more ignorant, untrustworthy, or otherwise bad Maliki is, the less likely it is that he will succeed, and the less clear it is why we should try to help him.

Saying, as McCain has, that Maliki only supports a timetable for political reasons is almost as bad, since it rather obviously implies that the Iraqi people really want us to leave. (As, in fact, they do.) Again, this raises the question: what on earth are we doing there? If the Iraqi people want us out, and their Prime Minister is asking for timetables, why not just take ‘yes’ for an answer?

If the Iraqi people want us out, we have two choices. First, we leave. As McCain said four years ago, "I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people." McCain does not seem to have seriously considered this option, which would deprive him of yet another distinction between himself and Obama.

Second, we continue to occupy Iraq whether the Iraqi people and their government want us to or not. We have not paid much attention to the wishes of the Iraqi people for some time now — in fact, I’m always struck, listening to Bush and McCain, by the way in which they consistently describe the question how long we stay in Iraq as one to be answered solely by them, in consultation with the commanders on the ground, as though Iraq’s government and its people had no say in the matter at all.

This has, of course, always been true. This administration has never cared much about what the Iraqi people think. But Maliki’s comments might make it clearer to the American people that it’s not enough to ask whether a candidate supports staying in Iraq; you need to ask whether he supports staying in Iraq even if the Iraqi government asks us to leave. Asking McCain that question would force him to chose between maintaining our presence in Iraq and maintaining the idea that that presence has something to do with helping the Iraqi people.

Moreover, explaining why it would be OK to override the wishes of the Iraqi government presents yet another problem for McCain. The obvious default position is that when a country’s government asks us to withdraw our troops, we should do so. To say that that’s not true in a given case, like Iraq, you need to provide some sort of explanation. Part of that explanation would normally be: the government is unrepresentative or dysfunctional or awful in some way, and so its wishes do not carry the weight they would in, say, Switzerland.

But saying something like that about the Iraqi government — that it doesn’t really speak for the Iraqi people, or isn’t capable of making its own decisions about Iraqi territorial integrity — would undercut McCain’s claims about progress in Iraq. Again, McCain would have to choose: does he say that Iraq’s government has made some real political progress, and is capable of making its own decisions? In that case, he should accept its wishes. Does he say that he can disregard its requests on matters of Iraqi sovereignty? In that case, he undercuts a lot of his claims that the surge has enabled real and lasting progress in Iraq.

As I see it, Maliki’s statement is all upside for Obama. It neither poses risks for him nor presents him with problems. But it’s a minefield for McCain. And this will, I think, become clearer as time goes on, when people begin to ask him these sorts of questions.

by Chris Bodenner
Der Tagesspeigel‘s DC bureau chief is frustrated over Obama’s shunning of foreign press:

[H]e has almost completely refused to answer questions from foreign journalists. … The Obama campaign has refused multiple requests from international reporters to travel with the candidate. … Since I followed the Obama campaign in its early stages and published a sympathetic (and widely read) book in German about the Illinois senator, I probably have more access than most. … Yet I can only dream of an interview with the candidate. To my knowledge, no foreign journalist has had one.
…
Perhaps Obama considers members of the foreign media a risk rather than an opportunity. His campaign learned the hard way how comments to foreigners can resonate at home — recall adviser Austan Goolsbee’s hints to a Canadian diplomat that Obama’s critique of NAFTA was just campaign rhetoric, or former aide Samantha Power’s aide "monster" remark about Hillary Clinton to the Scotsman. Or perhaps we’re witnessing the arrogance that comes from being so close to power. One of his campaign advisers told me recently: "Why should we take the time for foreign media, since there is Obamania around the world?"

(Andrew began to worry about Obama hubris a few weeks ago.)

by Chris Bodenner
The latest short by video artist PES:

(H/T SuperNaturale)

By Patrick Appel
Paul Zehr is writing a book on whether one could train to become Batman (the most human of superheros). Zehr recently sat down with Scientific American. His answer to a question about the length of Batman’s career:

Keep in mind that being Batman means never losing: If you look at consecutive events where professional fighters have to defend their titles—Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ultimate Fighters—the longest period you’re going to find is about two to three years. That dovetails nicely with the average career for NFL running backs. It’s about three years. (That’s the statistic I got from the NFL Players Association Web site.) The point is, it’s not very long. It’s really hard to become Batman in the first place, and it’s hard to maintain it when you get there.

On a related note, Dark Knight is having a big weekend.

Salon‘s McClelland revels in the delicious irony of Budweiser’s fall as "America’s beer" (it recently merged with Europe’s InBev) and the resurgence of local breweries. He writes:

But Budweiser’s position as America’s beer — the alcoholic version of McDonald’s, Disney World and Wal-Mart — has made it difficult to reach the modern drunk. Traditional-beer sales have been stagnant since the 1990s. The baby boomers graduated from their prime drinking years, and new local beers arose to replace the hometown lagers Bud had helped pour down the drain. In 1980, America had eight craft breweries. A quarter-century later, there are over 1,300. … Budweiser is seen as kind of like ‘The Man,’" says Eichelberger, a serious student of beer semiotics. … For the same reason, Pabst Blue Ribbon is the cheap beer of hipsters in the funky-but-not-quite-scary dive bars of our largest cities. (emphasis mine)

(Bless my mother for retiring in Portland, OR, which has more breweries and brewpubs per capita than any other U.S. city.)

I also found this historical note interesting:

Budweiser is especially popular in the South. Because of the Bible Belt temperance movement, a lack of German immigrants and a hot climate unsuited for brewing, the region developed few indigenous beers. It’s also close to [Budweiser’s home of] St. Louis. Shipping was easy and, until the Braves moved to Atlanta, the Cardinals were Dixie’s team.

by Chris Bodenner
Jon Chait eviscerates Naomi Klein’s newest screed, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism. The darling of anti-globalization left, Klein brandishes a "cookie cutter" of corporate conspiracy like a drunk baker.

The non-response to Hurricane Katrina?  An opportunity to advance school vouchers.  The bungling of the Iraq occupation?  A deliberate attempt by Bush to keep local democracy at bay and foreign capital on the march.  Israel abandoning peace with Palestinians after the 1993 accord?  A profit scheme by wealthy Israelis within the high-tech security sector to keep fighting "a continual, and continuously expanding, War on Terror."

Chait’s most devastating analysis centered on Klein’s complete ignorance of conservatism, which she sees as monolithic and, of course, always malevolent. Chait:

Klein’s relentless materialism is not the only thing driving her to see conservatives merely as corporate puppets. … Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence:

Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long associations–Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute–called itself "neoconservative," a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.

Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the 1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the 1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism. The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject the New Deal. … And their foreign policy often collides head-on with corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with neoconservatism. … And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.
…
It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative [Friedman] turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein’s mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism. Nor are the interests of corporations always, or even usually, served by war.

By Patrick Appel

I’ve was rifling through old articles on the art market,  and stumbled across this 1994 TNR article (doc) by Michael Lewis. It explains art’s belief structure as well as anything I’ve encountered. A choice paragraph:

The religion of art has been appropriated from artists by collectors and dealers. How and when I do not know; but at some point the idealist and the consumer began to walk hand in hand. The idea that works of art confer nobility upon those who trade them is simply an extension of the notion that works of art are a repository of terminal values. And the comical pretensions of the art market are simply a response to the idealists’ prejudice that things done for their own sake are more noble or "fine" than things done for a concrete purpose (say, money or prestige).

While the art world is decidedly secular (sometimes fiercely so), there are obvious parallels between art and religion. Forgotten artists, made famous after death, are esteemed in a manner similar to religious martyrs. The artworks themselves are often revered in the same way holy objects are revered; ostensibly worthless art, such as Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings, are made valuable by their connection to art history in much the same way communion wafers are made meaningful by their connection to scripture. Art’s belief structure is part of why Damien Hirst could sell a formaldehyded shark for a cool $12 million. While such a purchase might not make sense to ordinary person, to an art affectionado the price is affirmed by a belief in the nobility and near sacredness of art-making.

(Image by Flickr user Kecko)

By Patrick Appel

The Economist reviews Elizabeth Royte’s book Bottlemania:

It should be easy enough to pillory bottled water. It costs between 250 and 10,000 times more than tap water and in blind tastings people cannot usually separate the fancy beverage from the ordinary stuff. Then there is the environmental cost: according to one estimate, the total energy required to make and deliver each bottle of water is equivalent to filling them a quarter of the way with oil. While New Yorkers enjoy the services of water sommeliers, millions of people in developing countries lack access to any clean water at all.

But although Ms Royte displays all the usual prejudices—private enterprise bad, collective provision good—her book concludes that even in rich countries tap water sometimes contains small quantities of harmful chemicals. She also points out that in water shortages, local authorities may supply people with water reclaimed from sewage without telling them. Bottled water, therefore, “has its place”: a confused message, if an honest one.