Month: February 2010

Crowley profiles the Leveretts, the most well known skeptics of the opposition movement in Iran:

Perhaps the Leveretts were transformed by what they saw as Bush’s blown opportunity to deal with Iran. Hillary says her dealings with Iranian diplomats as a Bush White House aide at the start of the Afghanistan war made her understand Tehran’s willingness to engage. “It seems that the Leveretts are almost frozen in time circa 2003 on this,” says Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner.

The Leveretts have also come to accept the realist critique that Israel occupies too great a role in America’s foreign policy calculus; Flynt clashed with fellow Bush officials about what peace-process concessions Israel should be asked to make, for instance. “For a lot of pro-Israel groups, these [views of Iran] are non-starters,” he says.

Or perhaps, on some level, they have actually grown to admire Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In our meeting, I pressed them to say just how they feel about the Iranian leader. Geopolitics aside, did they consider him a despicable human being? “I think he’s actually a quite intelligent man,” Flynt replied. “I think he also has really extraordinary political skills.” “[T]he idea that he’s stupid or doesn’t understand retail politics is also pretty divorced from reality,” Hillary added. But that wasn’t the question.

Tom Ricks replies to my criticism of his NYT article. I wrote:

When will this madness end? Do we really have to go completely bankrupt and be forced to withdraw from these anachronistic pretensions? Are seven years not enough?

Ricks jabs back:

Good questions! I wish you had posed them before you supported the invasion, Andrew. The decision to attack Iraq may was one of the biggest blunders in American history, and is going to cost a lot more. This thing is far from over, and I am surprised that you think you can just walk away from it now. You are an interesting moral thinker — how can you justify that?

Because I do not believe there will ever be a time when the US can leave without a serious risk of another sectarian implosion followed by a dictatorship. And so the longer we stay the more expensive it gets. I totally respect Ricks's case. But if the criterion for leaving is political stability, we might as well admit we are in a neo-imperial situation. And when we soon have to slash Medicare or means-test social security or face a run on the dollar, we will have no choice anyway.

But, look, I'm just venting here.

The US is there for our lifetimes. Ditto Afghanistan. Seven years ago, we were told we'd be out in a matter of months. The American people voted for us to get out. The current president would not be president if he had not made that pledge. But none of it matters because the military and the State Department and the Republicans will insist on staying there for ever. And because Iraq is Iraq and Afghanistan is Afghanistan.

We had one chance to really get out and we had the surge which was a way to ensure we never left. I hope I'm proven wrong. I hope the Iraqis kick us out. I hope we can restore some proportion between US resources and US imperial reach. But when Tom Ricks tells us to hang on some more, you kinda know it's useless to hope for any such thing.

Jonathan Rauch looks at the state of the GOP. He's not trying to call contemporary Republicans racist by connecting them to Wallace:

[L]ike Wallace and his supporters 40 years ago, today's conservative populists are long on anger and short on coherence. For Wallace, small-government rhetoric was a trope, not a workable agenda. The same is true of his Republican heirs today, who insist that spending cuts alone, without tax increases, will restore fiscal balance but who have not proposed anywhere near enough spending cuts, primarily because they can't.

The meat of his article:

I am saying three things.

First, with the important exception of race, not one of Wallace's central themes, from his bristling nationalism and his court-bashing to his anti-intellectualism and his aggressive provincialism, would seem out of place at any major Republican gathering today.

Second, and again leaving race aside, any Republican politician who publicly renounced the Wallace playbook would be finished as a national leader.

Third, by becoming George Wallace's party, the GOP is abandoning rather than embracing conservatism, and it is thereby mortgaging both its integrity and its political future. Wallaceism was not sufficiently mainstream or coherent to sustain a national party in 1968, and the same is true today.

Conservatism is wary of extremism and rage and anti-intellectualism, of demagoguery and incoherent revolutionary rhetoric. Wallace was a right-wing populist, not a conservative. The rise of his brand of pseudo-conservatism in Republican circles should alarm anyone who cares about the genuine article.

Get a little less free.

Scott Morgan flags this video:

Spice is designed to produce profoundly similar effects to herbal cannabis, so it makes sense that patients are finding it helpful. There’s still a lot we don’t know about it, but cannabinoid research is generally associated with a number of promising medical applications and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the drug has something to offer.

Elizabeth Pisani is taking unfair heat for arguing that HIV treatment is not the same as prevention:

No-one who has seen friends die because they live in a place where they couldn’t get treatment could possibly be anti-treatment. We should be expanding treatment for its own sake. We don’t need to build computer models based on entirely unrealistic assumptions in order to justify the need for more treatment. We DO, however, need to face the fact that until now, more treatment has been associated with more new infections. So as we expand treatment, we need to expand other forms of effective prevention, too.

Sure. But that "associated with" is a pretty gaping loophole, don't you think? It's not even correlation, let alone causation we're talking about here. And there's a huge amount of noise in this study. Read it carefully.

It does not say that someone with undetectable viral load is just as likely to infect another man as someone with a high viral load. It simply says that in the aggregate the average risk of getting infected in a sample of the general population doesn't seem to have shifted since the early 1990s in another part of the world. None of the members of the study, so far as I can tell, was actually tested for viral load. All this is merely inferred from outside the group being studied, as in:

Rates of HIV testing among gay men in Australia are "very high," the researchers note, while 70 percent of HIV-positive men are receiving treatment with powerful AIDS drugs. And three quarters of these men have no detectable virus in their blood.

Questions: What does "very high" mean? What percentage of Aussie gays are positive? At best we can say that 50 percent or so of HIV-positive aussie gays have zero viral loads. But what percentage of the population as a whole is in this category? Or even in this sample?

What we are more likely seeing, I'd guess, is that the drugs that allow people like me to live long, healthy and productive lives have greatly lowered the sense of danger and risk many other younger man feel about sex without rubbers. And that is completely predictable behavior. When you shift the cost-benefit ratio of anything so drastically, behavior tends to change. There was much much more fear in the early 1990s for totally understandable reasons. Your poz friends were dropping like flies; now all your poz friends have huge muscles. So the rate of tested and untested gay men having unsafe sex may well have gone up dramatically. And this is not surprising.

Say you somehow managed to produce a burger which tasted much better and if you took a pill would not make you fat or add to your cholesterol. What do you think would happen to burger sales? And sex is a lot more irresistible for most young men than burgers. Like Elizabeth, I'm not arguing against treatment. I'd like to find effective ways to thwart human nature so that fewer men get infected. But nothing works better than fear; and the fear has lifted. We have to deal with that.

A reader writes:

I think this was a cheap shot. "Welfare" to me implies a long-term program of handing out cash with no end in sight (regardless of color). "Aid to the poor" suggests short-term aid to help someone get back on their feet (regardless of color). The Welfare recipient in one's mind is someone who would rather take cash from the government than go out and find a job. To think it is race-based means you watch too many movies.

Damon Linker demolishes Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru's article on Obama and American exceptionalism:

Lowry and Ponnuru are right about one thing: liberal love for the United States is complicated by criticism. And that appears to be something the right simply cannot abide, or perhaps even understand. How else to explain the bizarre passage of their essay in which Lowry and Ponnuru slam President Obama for failing to “defend the country’s honor” when a foreign critic “brought up the Bay of Pigs” during an overseas trip?

Apparently “acknowledging that America has been a force for good” in the world, as Obama did, is not enough. The man who leads the nation that is by almost any measure indisputably the most powerful on earth must go further—to make a fool of himself and the country by defending an escapade from half-a-century ago that nearly everyone acknowledges was an embarrassing blunder. But that’s not all. According to Lowry and Ponnuru, he must also robustly defend American exceptionalism—and thus American moral superiority—before foreign audiences, evidently because it’s the president’s duty to provoke anger and resentment, and thus opposition to our global leadership, around the world.