Month: December 2009

Radley Balko says we played right into bin Laden's hands:

He wanted a holy war. We gave him two. We’ve compromised our values, rolled back civil liberties, and let our politicians generally scare the crap out of us whenever they want new powers. Oh, and we’ve let the bastard live to gloat about it all. […] And our war in Afghanistan is looking more and more like the Soviet war bin Laden was hoping to emulate. We’re now well into our ninth year in Afghanistan. The Soviets pulled out after 10. With Obama’s surge, we’ll be close to 100,000 U.S. troops in the country next year. That’s about the number the Soviets had deployed at the height of their own war. About the only difference between the two wars is that technology has shifted more of our war casualties from the killed column to the maimed. I guess that’s something.

Some kind of over-reaction was in many ways understandable (although I should have kept my wits about me). But to sustain the over-reaction, to double-down on it, for years after it was obvious we had walked bang into a trap: this is not so understandable.

But look: Obama is pledged to remove most troops from Iraq in the next two years and to begin to remove most of the surge troops from Afghanistan in 2011. If you think of surging as a form of face-saving before extricating ourselves, then the prospects are not so bleak. But the acid moment will be when and if Iraq and Afghanistan implode after US withdrawal. The key then will be to keep out.

Ted Belman joins the chorus for Palin's support for Israeli territorial expansion:

Israel; Build, baby, build. She supports the right of Jews to build in Judea and Samaria. She rejects Obama’s racist policy of telling the Jews where they cannot live. She is a harsh critic of Ahmedinejad and his government and faults Obama for not supporting the opposition.

A reader sums it up nicely:

I think pretty much everyone is missing the point:  no one knows what ‘victory’ in Afghanistan would look like or how to achieve it.  It is foolish on so many levels to make an open-ended commitment, so Obama—unusual in my view—has made the right call:  escalate, hopefully inflict substantial casualties on the Taliban and AQ, possibly snag OBL in the process, and then get out on our terms rather than departing in a fashion that looks, to the Muslim world, like retreat.  It is pretty much all we can do and I am glad he is doing it. If there is an off-chance the surge will actually make a difference, that is a bonus.

The moral question is simply whether it is right to send young men and women to die for a couple more years to make an exit less dangerous and more face-saving than simply quitting now.

By giving the military a chance to inflict maximal damage on the Taliban and the CIA lee-way to do the same to al Qaeda within Pakistan, Obama means to achieve maximal weakening of foes before a strategic withdrawal.

Any withdrawal will be met with Romney-Palin-style accusations of weakness, treason, irresolution. But a withdrawal after a big surge is less likely to be successfully targeted in that manner. And after ten years, will Americans really want to keep 100,000 troops in a lunar landscape run by a kleptocracy because that’s where al Qaeda used to hang out? The more I think about this, the smarter it is – both militarily and politically.

But that tends to happen with Obama decisions, doesn’t it?

The Iranian junta appears to have pulled a Putin:

[P]rosecutors say 26-year-old Dr. Ramin Pourandarjani, a doctor at the  Kahrizak detention facility in Iran, died of an overdose of Propranolol, a drug used to treat hypertension, found in his salad through forensic tests.

The suspicious circumstances surrounding Pourandarjani’s death prompted further investigation and calls to action by human rights groups, amid speculation by opposition groups that he was killed because of his knowledge of torture and abuses in the Kahrizak prison, which was closed in July.

He had testified before a parliamentary committee and reportedly said that “one young protestor he treated died from heavy torture.”

"The time is never right for civil rights. The economy, wars. The troubles we've had here in the senate. It's never ever the right time. But the paradox is, it's always the time to be on the right side of history," – New York state Senator Tom Duane.

A powerful, pathos-filled speech by Senator Diane Savino (D-Staten Island) before the failed vote yesterday:

The best account of the impact of yesterday's decisive defeat for civil rights is here. What strikes me is how many of the nay votes didn't speak at all. And how many who had privately pledged support voted no anyway. The work done with New York's GOP was particularly impressive. But one suspects that the winds blowing in the GOP today, in which any inclusion of gay people – let alone civil equality – is anathema, were primarily responsible.

It's demoralizing and dispiriting. But it is my deepest belief that every time this question is thoroughly debated, and each time we put ourselves, our dignity and our families on the line, we win even if we lose.

This is about changing people's consciousness, deep down, the prerequisite of changing the law. And sometimes simply witnessing a majority strike down a minority so emphatically makes the point more powerfully than anything else.

Civil rights movements always move forward by occasionally moving backward. And at each moment in the struggle, those unpersuaded watch us, how we respond, who we are. Anger and sadness are more than legitimate responses. But so are calm and confidence.

From Haaretz, the latest in a series of steps to claim all of Jerusalem for the Jewish state:

Last year set an all-time record for the number of Arab residents of East Jerusalem who were stripped of residency rights by the Interior Ministry. Altogether, the ministry revoked the residency of 4,577 East Jerusalemites in 2008 – 21 times the average of the previous 40 years.

In the first 40 years of Israeli rule over East Jerusalem combined, from 1967 to 2007, the ministry deprived only 8,558 Arabs of their residency rights – less than double the number who lost their permits last year alone. Thus of all the East Jerusalem Arabs who have lost their residency rights since 1967, about 35 percent did so in 2008.

Many of these individuals – including 99 children – had not lived in those residences for a long time or lived abroad for more than seven years, and, as such, had no right to return home, if you pardon the expression. But this law only applies to Arabs and not Jews, and the upshot is another provocation – handing over more Palestinian homes to new Jewish residents. But provocation is what Netanyahu lives and breathes.

Yglesias notices a sleight of hand:

[W]hen it comes to military operations you can’t just bracket the question of feasibility. If the administration’s plan is fatally flawed and simply leads to several more years of fighting followed by inevitable withdrawal and Taliban takeover, then we’re not actually helping anyone. This is why things like Richard Just’s insistence on trying to understand everything through a lens of “realism” versus “idealism” are so annoying. If the administration has a workable plan to bring stability to Afghanistan, then implementing that plan will have humanitarian benefits. But if the plan’s not workable, then it’s not workable, and it doesn’t matter how idealistic or ambitious you try to make it.

McArdle modifies the war tax proposal:

Contractionary fiscal policy is not a sound plan when unemployment is up over 10%, and looks set to grow even further.  So if you're going to do a war surtax, you want to delay it a little.  Make it take effect in 2011, and sunset a year after the last troops are withdrawn.  (Or fall below some reference level; we don't want to keep a "war tax" because we've got 20 military advisers still in country.)

Popular Mechanics has a good review of the Climategate scandal:

What does it mean to be a scientific skeptic? If you say you are "sure" (as in the phrase "settled science") typical scientists are suspicious. Certainly, scientists know that some ideas have been tested over and over again, and are 99.999999 percent sure to be accurate. So, for example, we can be pretty sure that a satellite launched to orbit the Earth will go to the right place and do as we predict. And, we do accept scientific results that individually we don't fully understand. Thus, I am not fully conversant with the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, but I use electron microscopes that take advantage of the wave-like character of matter, and I have seen that those microscopes work really well in just the way predicted by quantum mechanical theory.

The final page sums up what we know about global warming.

(Image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center: ISS007-E-10807)