Month: March 2010

Fox News “Realism”

by Alex Massie

Roger Ailes redefines realism:

I see myself between the Hudson River and the Sierra Madres. I do not see myself at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel or Le Cirque here in New York. Those are people who aspire to different things. They’re the chattering class. They’re the people who think Ahmadinejad wants to have a chat with us and that we haven’t been reaching out to him enough. No, actually, Ahmadinejad wants to cut our heads off and blow us up with nuclear weapons. He’s made that clear. There is something about those people that makes them think, “Oh, he’s just kidding.” No, he’s not kidding. He wants to kill us. 

I tend to be a realist about things.

Emphasis added. The Iranian regime is many things, most of them severely unpleasant, but it hardly poses an existential threat to the United States. The principal beneficiaries of any pretense that it does are actually Ahmadinejad and his cronies who are flattered by a frothing silliness that is almost hysterically unrealistic.

You Will Forget This “Issue”

by Jonathan Bernstein

Greg Sargent asks:

Is reconciliation really going to be an issue in the 2010 elections? It seems awfully arcane, but Republicans are signaling they think it’s a political winner.

This is an easy one: while I suppose it's vaguely possible that Republicans could raise reconciliation as an issue in the fall, it's about as certain as anything could be that it won't affect any votes.  First of all, no one knows what reconciliation is; I mean, shockingly few people know what a filibuster is, really, so it's pretty clear that no one knows what reconciliation is.  Be sure to read this great anecdote from Chris Bowers (and a related one from Matt Yglesias).  But beyond that, no one cares.  Really. 

Indeed, there's a good post and discussion thread right now over at the Monkey Cage asking a much more basic question: whether it matters in November whether health care reform passes at all.  What we know is that it's unlikely to have a major effect.  Most people vote based on their party identification.  Beyond that, the economy, the president's popularity, and voter's impressions of the candidates might affect Congressional vote. 

Now, normally, most people don't know or pay a lot of attention to individual House and Senate votes, and those who do pay a lot of attention to politics are the very people most likely to already have strong partisan loyalties, so most of the time it's safe to assume that the risks are low in any particular vote.  However, this has been a very visible issue for over a year.  It's possible that a health care vote might be so high-visibility that it could directly have a (small) effect on some Congressional races.  It's also possible that success or failure on health care could affect general perceptions of Barack Obama, either directly or through elite opinions of the president as a success or failure filtering down to voters.  (I tend to believe the latter is true, and that therefore the best political choice for House and Senate Democrats is to pass the bill).

OK, I hope I was relatively clear there.  The bottom line is that it's pretty complicated to predict whether even a major thing like the success or failure of the president's chief legislative initiative will have a positive, negative, or no effect on November voting.  And if that's hard to determine, then it follows that more obscure things, such as the way the bill was passed, will be forgotten by almost everyone within days of the bill's passage.

Moving To The Center

by Patrick Appel

Clive Crook writes that should the Democrats in Congress get beaten badly in November, Obama "would have to be a centrist president or an outright failure." Brendan Nyhan counters:

Bill Clinton's much-vaunted move to the center may have helped boost his margin in 1996, but improvements in the state of the economy surely played a more important role in the outcome. The "best hope for the Obama presidency" isn't a "drubbing for Democrats in November"; it's a period of sustained economic growth that will boost Obama's approval numbers and increase the likelihood that he'll be re-elected in 2012.

Iran, Iraq, And Rhetoric

by Patrick Appel

Greg Scoblete joins the Leverett debate:

So let's pretend you're the Leveretts and here is Crowley angling for some expression of disgust with the Iranian regime. Yes, it's childish, but being veterans of Washington, you understand that the fastest way your (already unpopular) line of analysis can be discredited is if it is shown that you harbor real sympathies for the current crop of Iranian rulers, and not just an unsentimental view of engagement or a hyper-skeptical view of the Green Movement.

Do you play the game or not? Does it really cost you or your views of engagement anything to say you find the regime's anti-Semitic rhetoric vile and insulting?

Larison responds by comparing the Iran debate to the Iraq war debate: 

Before the invasion of Iraq, most opponents of the invasion felt compelled to hedge their statements with endless qualifications, they had to accept the reality of a non-existent WMD threat simply to participate in the conversation, and they often had to go out of their way to state their loathing and disgust for Saddam Hussein. As I have said many times before, this had the effect of undermining antiwar arguments from the very beginning. Having conceded that Hussein was a monster whose downfall they would happily welcome, and having accepted the key claim of the pro-war side that Iraq possessed WMDs and posed a grave threat to us all, many opponents of the war lost the debate before they had even stated their correct case that the war would be a strategic disaster and a terrible mistake. They allowed themselves to be psyched out by the cheap moralizing and shoddy reasoning of war supporters. These war opponents were desperately trying to avoid the smears that were already being used, but all they achieved was to deprive their arguments of whatever moral and rhetorical force they might have had.

Acknowledging reality, that Saddam had done unspeakable things, didn't doom the Iraq war opponents. Overly purple prose was a factor. Endorsing bad WMD reporting certainly didn't help. Still, overall, this is one of Larison's weaker posts. Perhaps we are talking past each other.  I am not asking the Leveretts to pound the table over human rights abuses in Iran. I am asking them wrestle with these tragedies and explain why they don't impact their analysis. Here's one of the Leverett's stronger arguments:

Andrew Sullivan and Scott Lucas criticized our comparison of the December 27 and December 30 crowds by discounting the larger numbers who turned out to support the Islamic Republic on December 30 on the grounds that some of the participants in the pro-Islamic Republic rallies were reportedly ordered to take part and received free transport, cake, and tea.  From a strategic perspective, the most important point here is the comparison between Iran today and in 1978-1979:  when protests started against the Shah, there was no level of state coercion or any amount of tea, cake, or free transportation that could bring significant numbers of people into the street to rally for the Pahlavi regime.  By contrast, the Islamic Republic retains an obvious and demonstrable capacity to elicit such manifestations of support—and that reinforces our argument that the Islamic Republic is not imploding.

This passage is effective because it acknowledges and explains inconvenient facts. Instead of undermining, this amplifies the "moral and rhetorical force" of the argument. Let's contrast the Leveretts with what I consider the single strongest article against the invasion of Iraq, Jim Fallows November 2002 tour de force:

I ended up thinking that the Nazi analogy paralyzes the debate about Iraq rather than clarifying it. Like any other episode in history, today's situation is both familiar and new. In the ruthlessness of the adversary it resembles dealing with Adolf Hitler. But Iraq, unlike Germany, has no industrial base and few military allies nearby. It is split by regional, religious, and ethnic differences that are much more complicated than Nazi Germany's simple mobilization of "Aryans" against Jews. Hitler's Germany constantly expanded, but Iraq has been bottled up, by international sanctions, for more than ten years. As in the early Cold War, America faces an international ideology bent on our destruction and a country trying to develop weapons to use against us. But then we were dealing with another superpower, capable of obliterating us. Now there is a huge imbalance between the two sides in scale and power.

If we had to choose a single analogy to govern our thinking about Iraq, my candidate would be World War I. The reason is not simply the one the historian David Fromkin advanced in his book A Peace to End All Peace: that the division of former Ottoman Empire territories after that war created many of the enduring problems of modern Iraq and the Middle East as a whole. The Great War is also relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination: specifically, imagination about the long-term consequences of war.

There is much more that I could excerpt, but what Fallows does so well is directly address the emotional core of the case for war and disarm it. The Leveretts usually fail in this regard. 

Larison and Kevin Sullivan have both responded to my last post. I'll put up a response as soon as I can.

Sour Greats

by Chris Bodenner

Time recalls eight examples of poor sportsmanship in Olympic history:

With seven gold medals under its belt, the 1972 U.S. Olympic men's basketball team probably expected an easy win over the Soviet Union in the Munich Olympics. Not so — the Americans trailed their Cold War rivals until very end when they inched ahead by a single point. With a second left in the game, a disputed Soviet time-out forced the refs to reset the clock. Time ran out and the U.S. won. But then the clock was reset again — for reasons still disputed by sports fans today. Essentially given three opportunities, the Soviets managed to score a basket and take the gold. "We couldn't believe that they were giving them all these chances," U.S. forward Mike Bantom said at the time. "It was like they were going to let them do it until they got it right." In protest, the American team refused the silver medal; their awards remain unclaimed in a Swiss vault.

This footage of Angel Matos kicking a ref in the face takes the prize.

The Decentralizing Power Of Rivers, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

As someone with a graduate degree in Russian history from Harvard, I took special interest in the post on "The Decentralizing Power of Rivers." It was fascinating, but not for the expected reasons.

Since the 10th century, the historical core of European Russia has been a vast network of interconnecting rivers spilling out in 4 directions: 1.The Don and Dniepr into the Black Sea. 2.The Volga into the Caspian (with a portage to the Don on the lower Volga, now bridged by the 100 kilometer Volga-Don canal) 3. The Western Dvina and the Neva into the Baltic. 4. The Northern Dvina into the Arctic.

The Siberian hinterland is not connected, but then it is to this day more a wilderness for raw materials than a land for settlement. In connecting the major Siberian rivers, the Trans-Siberian Railway created the backbone infrastructure. What is stunning is that Russia was able to rule Siberia without it.

The Russian Transiberian was a bit longer than the US Transcontinental railroad, but there were many less engineering problems passing through mountain ranges. The European Russian rail network seems no more extensive than the US network at its peak. I wonder if Goodrich and Zeihan were aware we had one.

And Russian road-building is absolutely dwarfed by the US road system.

No, this article was interesting because it was another specimen in my collections of "Curious Lies of Russophobes." Western Russophobes have been predicting the collapse of Russia since at least the seventeenth century. Sooner or later someone will be right, of course, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Russophobia is however interesting as a somehow necessary component of Western political culture, and as such, worthy of study indeed.

Centralization much more likely due to being confronted with invading and marauding enemies, first from the South (Turkic Pechenegs), then the East (Mongols and Tatars), then, starting in the 17th century, from the West (Poles, Swedes, French, Germans, USA), oh and the Turks (again in the 18th and 19th centuries).