Month: March 2010

Greg Scoblete comments on my debate with Tom Ricks. He thinks that "that Ricks' argument is going to win the day, not because it's terribly persuasive on the merits, but because it operates within the conventional wisdom about how the U.S. should interface in the Middle East":

The trouble with Ricks' argument, and the course Washington appears to be on, is that it is predicated on best-case scenarios. It is, fundamentally, a gamble that nothing major will go wrong inside Iraq that 50,000 U.S. troops cannot contain. If we bet wrong, there is absolutely no rationale for not sending in even more American troops. A commitment of 50,000 troops is essentially a commitment of 150,000, to be stationed in the country indefinitely.

In a response to Dowd, Goldblog acknowledges:

It is undeniably true that Jewish fundamentalists wield disproportionate power in Israeli decision-making; it is true that a small minority — fundamentalist settlers — has kept Israel entangled in the lives of the Palestinians on the West Bank; it is true that, because of the power of the Orthodox rabbinate, it is easier in some ways to be Jewish in America than in the Jewish state (Just ask women who try to pray at the Western Wall.) All this is not to say that Israel isn't still the most enlightened democracy in the Middle East, but there's not much of a competition. And it should be cause for deep worry when the Saudis — not especially known for their liberalism — have a point about illiberal Israel.

What I found telling was MoDo's more recent column in which she came up with the following brilliant formulation that reflects on the pro-Israel voices so over-represented in the MSM punditariat:

Obama created an obstacle for himself by demanding that Israel stop expanding settlements when it was not going to do so — even though it should — and when that wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs.

Got that? Now I have no idea what Maureen means when she says that a settlement freeze "wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs." Much that I've read seemed to suggest that the various Sunni Arab regimes were looking for precisely a freezing of further Israeli colonization of the West Bank as proof that Obama really was going to break from the whatever-Israel-wants policy of the previous eight years.

But notice that it is Obama's fault for asking an alleged ally merely to freeze – not reverse – construction settlement as a good faith gesture to the peace process and as a favor to the US in trying to recapture the role of an honest broker in the region. It is not Israel's fault – even though Maureen thinks Israel should have done it. 

Nothing illustrates better the total bizarreness of the US-Israel relationship. No one in Washington – apart from a few Likudniks and Palinite end-timers – actually supports more settlements or any settlements i the West Bank. At the same time, Washington exercizes a UN veto to protect Israel from international law, funnels a vast amount of foreign and military aid to the country, helped finance the pulverization of Gaza last year, provides absurd international cover for Israel's 150 nukes, has worked tirelessly to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capacity, and on and on.

In return? Fuck you, Obama. To which the overwhelming response in Washington is: Obama screwed up. 

There is something completely awry here and it has rarely been more evident than in the last twelve months.

Bruce Bartlett:

Some Pollyannas, like my friend Larry Kudlow, think we can just grow our way out of the debt by cutting taxes. But this is not really possible given the magnitude of our problem. First, increasing real growth doesn't have as much effect on the debt as one might imagine. According to OMB, raising the rate of productivity, the basic component of real GDP growth, by 0.5% per year over the next 75 years only reduces the long-run fiscal gap by 17%.

Moreover, raising productivity even that much would be hard; over the last five years the productivity growth rate has averaged 1.8% per year, so we would have to raise it by one-fourth just to reduce the projected debt by 17%.

He also explains why the debt can't be inflated away.

Peter Beinart asks whether this will be Iraq's last national election:

My guess is that [Tom] Ricks’ view [that withdrawal from Iraq should be slowed] will prevail. The military has invested epic quantities of money and blood in Iraq, and U.S. commanders don’t want it to be in vain.

Plus, an Iraqi civil war that sucked in its neighbors—as civil wars often do—would be horrendous. Although the Democratic base wants out of Iraq, the lesson of Afghanistan is that the military’s view matters more. “When push comes to shove,” notes Biddle, the Obama administration will “vote for not losing a war.”

It all sounds very sensible, until you remember that the United States is nearly bankrupt. Defense spending, which has grown 9 percent per year over the last decade, now comprises well over 50 percent of U.S. discretionary spending. Unless some president reins that in, there’s no real chance of getting U.S. debt under control…

Cohn defends the health care bill once more.

Encouragingly, an entire swathe of Republican lawyers and former officials – from Kenneth Starr to Ted Olson, Phillip Zelikow and John Belllinger – have responded firmly and eloquently to the recent low-point of Cheney-Kristol McCarthyism. The statement, composed by Ben Wittes, is so eloquent I reproduce it here in full:

The past several days have seen a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantanamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy. As attorneys, former officials, and policy specialists who have worked on detention issues, we consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications.

The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams’s representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre.

People come to serve in the Justice Department with a diverse array of prior private clients; that is one of the department’s strengths. The War on Terror raised any number of novel legal questions, which collectively created a significant role in judicial, executive and legislative forums alike for honorable advocacy on behalf of detainees. In several key cases, detainee advocates prevailed before the Supreme Court. To suggest that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people who have taken honorable positions on contested questions and demands a uniformity of background and view in government service from which no administration would benefit.

Such attacks also undermine the Justice system more broadly. In terrorism detentions and trials alike, defense lawyers are playing, and will continue to play, a key role. Whether one believes in trial by military commission or in federal court, detainees will have access to counsel. Guantanamo detainees likewise have access to lawyers for purposes of habeas review, and the reach of that habeas corpus could eventually extend beyond this population. Good defense counsel is thus key to ensuring that military commissions, federal juries, and federal judges have access to the best arguments and most rigorous factual presentations before making crucial decisions that affect both national security and paramount liberty interests. To delegitimize the role detainee counsel play is to demand adjudications and policymaking stripped of a full record. Whatever systems America develops to handle difficult detention questions will rely, at least some of the time, on an aggressive defense bar; those who take up that function do a service to the system.

Benjamin Wittes

Robert Chesney

Matthew Waxman

David Rivkin

Lee Casey

Philip Bobbitt

Peter Keisler

Bradford Berenson

Kenneth Anderson

John Bellinger III

Philip Zelikow

Kenneth W. Starr

Larry Thompson

Charles "Cully" D. Stimson

Chuck Rosenberg

Harvey Rishikoff

Orin Kerr

Daniel Dell’Orto

(Illustration: John Trumbull's painting, Declaration of Independence, depicting the five-man drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress.)

Another depressing sign of intolerance:

Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, in Boulder, has refused to readmit a preschooler because the child has two moms. Her parents are lesbians. "God and Jesus would not allow discrimination in that way," said Joellen Raderstorf, one of about two dozen demonstrators who turned out at Sunday's church service. Most of the protesters stood silently, across the street, holding signs. One read "God loves all people."

“I was excited about Palin; I’m more excited about Liz. The same sort of excitement you get when you hear her father, except she’s this petite blonde with five kids … You have a little crush on her. It’s hard not to," – Michael Goldfarb.

How the Middle Eastern press is reporting Iraq's elections:

Nations that have adversarial relationships with the United States, namely Syria and Iran, viewed the vote largely through the prism of the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Likewise, the Iranian state-run Press TV covered Moktada al-Sadr’s address in Tehran in which he urged his Shiite followers to use their votes to help end the occupation.

Syria, still overwhelmed with Iraqi refugees, is likely to view internal instability in Iraq as a threat to its own security and to its expectation of finally having the U.S. out of the region. And while Tehran may prefer a strong, centralized Iraqi government as its ally, the possibility could further alienate Saudi Arabia, which fears a powerful Iraq aligned with Iran. Ali Yunis, an analyst who appeared on Al Arabiya television on Saturday, warned that “if the new government is a nationalistic Iraqi government, not allied with Iran, in America’s terms, the Americans will act differently,” meaning an earlier troop withdrawal.