Month: May 2009

The New Map

Bob Kaplan reasserts the importance of geography with regard to foreign policy:

The wisdom of geographical determinism endures across the chasm of a century because it recognizes that the most profound struggles of humanity are not about ideas but about control over territory, specifically the heartland and rimlands of Eurasia. Of course, ideas matter, and they span geography. And yet there is a certain geographic logic to where certain ideas take hold. Communist Eastern Europe, Mongolia, China, and North Korea were all contiguous to the great land power of the Soviet Union. Classic fascism was a predominantly European affair. And liberalism nurtured its deepest roots in the United States and Great Britain, essentially island nations and sea powers both. Such determinism is easy to hate but hard to dismiss.

I'm not sure how the U.S. is "essentially" an island nation, but the overall point is worth considering. I remember being struck by how many classic texts of political philosophy discuss climate and geography – and theology, for that matter. And yet we gloss over those parts. We shouldn't. The Greeks were wiser than many of us moderns. Montesquieu was no fool either.

Running From And Towards Death

Reihan Salam reviews Mark Kleiman's new book on crime:

46,000 Americans die every year on the highways. In contrast, 17,000 die from criminal violence….In some sense, the decision to avoid crime by fleeing cities in favor of auto-dependent suburbs is irrational: The move actually increases your chances of dying prematurely. That crude calculation ignores the angst and anxiety…No one wants to live in fear. And for any number of reasons, the fear of an impersonal auto collision can't match the fear of the indignity of being mugged, or for that matter being stabbed or shot dead. The millions of middle -class Americans who fled inner cities were fleeing this psychic turmoil, and it's hard not to sympathize with them. This fear also led to an explosion in the ownership of personal firearms and a climate of political and cultural polarization that is still with us.

Just Because

Scott Adams marvels at "The Power of Ridiculous Reasons":

The human mind is wired to accept ridiculous reasons as if they are legitimate. Studies have shown that people are more likely to agree to a favor if the word "because" is used in the request. It doesn't seem to matter what follows that word. As long as the sentence is in the form of a reason, people accept it as though some actual reason is present.

The Un-Karzai

Packer talks to Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s finance minister from 2002 to 2004, and Hamid Karzai's newest challenger for the presidency of Aghanistan:

Ghani is a slight, balding man with a gentle voice and a keen mind; his background is in social sciences (he has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia) and the World Bank. He’s the technocratic alternative to the politics of warlordism and corruption, and he’s deeply fluent in the language of international development: words like “stakeholder” and “governance sector” come easily to his tongue. Ghani’s account of what’s gone wrong in Afghanistan is relatively simple, and it overlaps on several counts with the views of the Obama Administration: the Taliban was in retreat until the Bush Administration took its eye off of Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. Since then, Karzai has been held to Iraq’s low standard of security and competence, by which he’s been wrongly judged to have done relatively well. Ghani resigned as finance minister at the end of 2004 because he saw that Karzai was unwilling to take on power brokers that were the sources of corruption and government failure. Since then, the Taliban has made a spectacular comeback, largely due to these failures, and only a change of government will reverse the deterioration.

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish we took another long look at accusations that the British tortured prisoners during World War II. But the big story of the day was Souter's retirement, if anything David Souter does can be regarded as news, and a delayed flare-up from the Matthew Shepard case, which we covered here and here. Republicans have already launched a campaign against Specter, just as Independents are on the rise. On torture today, Krauthammer wrote a chilling column, which Greenwald and Froomkin tackled with ease. Horton took on Condi and Henry Farell piled on Crook. Ta-Nehisi just shook his head at Byron York.

Our Cheney in the Movies contest concluded here and here. We also watched rabbits swarm Manhattan and superheroes save Cincinnati. In home news, the Dish is on a roll.

The Charges Are Dropped

That AIPAC case gets tossed and Goldblog applauds. Jamie Kirchick wants me to apologize. Since I merely reported the fact that Rosen was facing a trial, I see no reason to. I tend to agree with Ackerman and Greenwald that this was an ugly legal precedent, whatever one might think of AIPAC. But that doesn't make Rosen a savory character or his obsessive attacks on diversity of opinion in American government to be helpful to the republic.

The Krauthammer Slope

A reader writes:

First they tortured in ticking time bomb cases but I didn't mind because it was a clear and imminent danger.

Second they tortured "slow-fuse" high value detainees and I didn't mind, because you never know what might happen.

Third they tortured Iraqi and Afghan prisoners who weren't high value, but who might have had useful information, and I didn't mind, because they were acting in good faith.

Fourth they tortured prisoners to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, and I didn't mind, because surely there must have been such a connection.

Finally, they came to torture me, and nobody cared, because if I was being tortured, I obviously deserved to be tortured, and, as Peggy Noonan says, some things are just mysterious and it's best to just keep on walking.

A Majority Wants A Torture Probe

That's the bottom line from the Research 2000 poll, with 31 percent wanting an independent panel, 21 percent wanting a criminal probe and 22 percent wanting neither. Independents seem notably in favor of further investigation. The notion that maintaining the ban on torture – a key feature of Reagan Republicanism – is now a function of being on the hard left is merely an indication of how far to the authoritarian right the GOP has now gone. I remember when the first association with the right was freedom and limited government. Ha!

An Era’s Drug Of Choice, Ctd.

Jonah Lehrer discusses how cognitive enhancers dampen creativity:

It makes perfect sense that such a cognitive trade-off would exist. Paying attention to a particular task – like churning out run-on sentences about a road trip, or cramming for an organic chemistry test, or crunching numbers – requires the brain to ignore all sorts of seemingly unrelated thoughts and stimuli bubbling up from below. (The unconscious brain is full of potential distractions.) However, the same thoughts that can be such annoying interruptions are also the engine of creativity, since they allow us to come up with new connections between previously unrelated ideas. (This might be why schizotypal subjects score higher on tests of creativity. They are less able to ignore those distracting thoughts, which largely arise from the right hemisphere.)