Month: July 2010

Douthat answers Millman's query:

The point of a counterinsurgency campaign… isn’t to crush the Taliban once and for all. It’s to create an environment in which they feel like they could be crushed, and to turn those security gains to political ends. Whereas so long as the Taliban’s leaders and fellow travelers are convinced that they’ve all but won the war, any “orderly entry” into government that they negotiate is likely to end in disaster — for our interests, and for Afghanistan.

(Cartoon via Joyner)

While urging "strategic patience" in the Middle East, Ryan Crocker writes that "disengagement from Pakistan and Afghanistan after the Soviet retreat in 1989 ultimately gave al-Qaeda the space to plan the 9/11 attacks." Greg Scoblete begs to differ:

Can Crocker, or anyone – offer a remotely plausible scenario which sees the U.S. "engaged" in Afghanistan in the 1980s that prevents the rise of al Qaeda internationally? Bin Laden wasn't even in Afghanistan until 1996. As we're learning now, the problem in Afghanistan isn't American engagement or lack thereof, it's Pakistan's regional interests. Maybe there was a magical formula available to the U.S. in the 1980s that changes Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan so that it didn't use the country as a dumping ground for the ISI's fundamentalists. But I doubt it.

Because targeting marijuana gives police departments access to federal anti-drug money. Mike Meno sighs:

As we’ve stated many times before, marijuana eradication programs are not only horribly ineffective at reducing the supply of marijuana, but even worse, they force law enforcement to commit massive amounts of resources and manpower to marijuana offenses at the expense of much more serious crimes. That’s why it’s so insane for the federal government to encourage and reward this type of misallocation. As the Journal article points out, California police departments are expected to lose $100 million in state funding this year, presumably leading even more departments to take up the eradication cause.

Today on the Dish, Andrew sided with Steele against Obama's war in Afghanistan and spotlighted the extremely small number of enemies there. The president was already beating Bush on the budget and his healthcare bill was growing in popularity. Cameron stood tall against torture and the mayor of London stood up for marriage equality. A gay man was slaughtered in Uganda.

In economic coverage, Hale Stewart showed how the recession has been good to business owners, Brad DeLong pushed for another stimulus, Adam Ozimek weighed the pros and cons, and Howard Gleckman took a turn at the question of unemployment benefits and laziness. Josh Green explained how pot propositions help Democrats on the ballot. Thiessen posed as a tea-partier, Larison voted nay on a Palin nomination, and NRO nominated her for RNC chair. Another big dose of Trig talk here.

Looking abroad, the American public continued to diverge with Israelis over the flotilla, Beinart went to bat for Karl Eikenberry and gave a pep talk to Obama on Israeli discontent, settlers tightened the screws on Bibi, Andrew highlighted how US taxpayers fund the settlements, and the IDF got down to Ke$ha.

In media coverage, new details emerged over Weigel-gate, Chris Beam profiled a humble David Brooks, Chait offered his take, Greenwald defended Nazi comparisons, Howard Kurtz outed personal emails again, and Prince proclaimed the end of the Internet. Readers wondered whether to pray for an atheist and sounded off on the evolutionary case against monogamy. Hilarious tech video here and a funny video on "faggots" here.  MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

— C.B.

Jennifer Senior's NyMag article has revived the never-ending debate about children and happiness. KJ Dell'Antonia, mother of four, adds her two cents:

Tom Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell famous for a study showing that people regret things they haven't done more than things they have, asks "Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he doesn't know the answer, but maybe the question is the answer. If you can keep a sense of the way you'll feel about the comically difficult moments as you go about the truly crazy days—the nights when multiple children are sick in their beds or the moment when you look over your Fourth of July and realize that one of your children has literally eaten nothing but candy from morning until night—then those times of epic lunacy hold the seeds of their own pleasure. If parenting is hard in part because we make it hard, then we can make it easier. We can let some things go, and we can look at other things differently, and we can hold on to one bittersweet thought: someday we'll look back on all of this and laugh.

Noah Millman asks Yglesias to square his economic views with his environmental positions.

This would be funny if it weren't so sad:

Iran has unveiled haircuts that according to officials are in line with Iranian and Islamic principles. The new haircut models approved by Iran's Culture Ministry are aimed at preventing haircuts deemed "Western" among Iranian youth.

Ezra Klein searches for a weak spot in Manzi's latest argument against a carbon tax:

Even if Manzi is right that the costs [from global warming] are manageable into 2100 — a century, after all, is a long time for a human, but not for the atmosphere — what does that do to our descendants who have to deal with a scorching planet between 2100 and 2200? And then into 2300, and then 2400?

I think Manzi's answer is that technology will save us by then. And maybe he's right. But maybe he's not. And if he's not, then we've let the problem become unimaginably bad for our descendants. If you bet on technology and you're wrong, it's not like we've got another of these planets waiting in the back somewhere.