Month: November 2010

A reader writes:

Does she not realize that Wikileaks isn't hosted in the United States, and Julian Assange isn't an American citizen? It's hard to see how the "treasonous" label applies. The leakers may have violated the law in turning things over to Wikileaks in the first place, and there's room for criticizing the publication, but publishing them wasn't "treason." Unless that word now simply means "something we really don't like."

Just wait for a Palin presidency. All critics will be traitors then.

Letters of Note reprints a stirring letter from Captain Robert Falcon Scott to his widow and 9-month-old son.

A reader writes:

Underneath the cheesy pop tune, terrible lyrics (“Marconi plays the mamba”), and perhaps the worst video in history – complete with a coked out Grace Slick and lip-syncing Abe Lincoln – lies a message about corporate power and greed. Despite whatever sympathies one might have for the message, we’re supposed to follow Starship (nee, Jefferson Starship; nee Jefferson Airplane) on a socialist revolution? Please.

Another writes:

The epitome of anti-corporatist corporate rock.

A must-read Fallows post. There is an understandable tendency for some of the sane right to keep pretending that there really is an equivalence in cynicism and partisanship between both Republicans and Democrats. But in truth, it's the GOP that is now overwhelmingly the most hypocritical, inconsistent and unprincipled. Fallows notes:

Charles Krauthammer is the classic example: forthrightly defending torture as, in limited circumstances, a necessary tool against terrorism, yet now outraged about "touching my junk" as a symbol of the intrusive state.

The same could be said for these once lauding Arab democracy who now tout the views of Arab autocrats as wisdom.

One of the relieving aspects of the Wikileaks docu-dump is that Jeffrey Goldberg no longer has to muddy his newly-discovered support for war against Iran. He is now eagerly touting the views of the Arab dictators he still says he opposes (especially when they oppose the Israeli government), just as he is constantly finding excuses for Israel's continued colonization of the West Bank, which he also says he opposes. I leave it to him to think through this maze, but he is wrong to say that my view has been that

it is a group of warmongering Jews — alone — who seek to ignite World War III.

Not all neoconservatives are Jewish, and I have never claimed as such. Does Jeffrey think I don't know that Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, for example, desperately want war with Iran? And, as you can readily see in the posts I have cited, I have long known and written about Sunni Arab autocrats' desire for Israel and the US to launch World War III against Iran for them. Jeffrey and I were at the same meeting two years ago when I directly challenged the King of Jordan on this very question. I was as passionate in defense of what I believe is in the interests of the West when debating a Sunni autocrat as when tackling the noble lies of the neocons. But that fact, which Jeffrey knows all too well, would muddy the smear that my position is some version of anti-Semitism. That same old lie. Always the same old lie.

The fact is that Jeffrey is simultaneously arguing that these Arab dictators need to be pushed to emancipate their oppressed populaces, while also arguing that the US should take their advice on launching a war against Iran (which they disguise from their people because their oppressed populaces loathe the US and Israel even more than they fear Iran). I just don't see how you can both want to expose the autocrats in the Arab world and use their cynicism and self-serving advice to guide US foreign policy. One or the other, please.

More sigificantly, look at what Jeffrey's war would actually mean. It would mean that the US would be allied with both Israel and the Sunni Arab dictators – against the mass of oppressed people in the Arab and Muslim world and against the Green Movement in Iran. Now try and square that with the neoconservative vision (circa 2001) that they key to defeating Jihadism is to win over the people of the Arab and Muslim world with democracy, and thereby help Iranians shuck off their disgusting dictatorship as well.

Their position now is almost 180 degrees from their position then, which is why I am so mad at myself for taking their arguments at face value then. They want the US to ally with the most repressive forces in the region against the Muslim and Arab and Persian masses. And they think that this will somehow serve the interests of the US. This is why my frustration with the neocons is so deep. None of it makes sense – unless it is about the short-term shoring up of Israel's power and nuclear monopoly, without Israel even offering the minimal concession necessary to construct a Palestinian state.

Mark Kleiman urges drug legalizers to examine costs and benefits:

[A]nyone offering a simple “solution” to the drug abuse problem, in the form of maximum controls to produce a “drug-free society” or eliminating prohibitions in favor of “taxation and reguation” or “prevention and treatment” is peddling snake-oil. The costs of drug abuse, and the costs of drug abuse control measures, are both real and inevitable, and the grown-up approach requires facing the tradeoffs squarely rather than pretending they don’t exist.

I agree. I don't believe an end to Prohibition will have no trade-offs, which is why starting with marijuana seems a pragmatic idea to me. We can observe that experience to learn for future legalization, if necessary. Pete Guither counters:

For prohibition to be even an option in a policy that in a grown-up way compares trade-offs in harms to society and individuals, the unknown and unsupported “increase” in drug abuse harm, minus the harm reduction values of regulation to all drug abuse, must be greater than the very well known and established harms of prohibition.

Dodd Harris is unimpressed by the Chevy Volt's EPA ratings:

The woefully limited 35-mile range on battery and mere 37 MPG on gas leaves one wondering what all that hype was really about.

Drum rebuts:

No car is designed to appeal to every single person, and the Volt is no exception. It's designed mostly to appeal to a specific kind of driver: someone who does the great bulk of their driving around town, maybe 20 or 30 miles a day at most, but occasionally needs to drive further and doesn't want to buy a second car just for those occasions. There are lots of people like that, and for them the Volt is great. They'll spend 98% of their time running solely on battery power and recharging at night when rates are low, and 2% of their time getting 37 mpg — which is actually pretty damn good.

Or if they don't have kids, they could get a, you know, bike. In DC, we're currently experiencing a boom in cycling. Low carbon, high exercize, greater mobility in many instances than a car: what's not to like?

Beinart yawns while reading Wikileaks’ latest. A surprising number of writers have been taking this position:

When journalists gather information that genuinely changes the way we see some aspect of American foreign policy, or exposes government folly or abuse, they should move heaven and earth to make sure it sees the light of day. But that’s a far cry from publishing documents that sabotage American foreign policy without adding much, if anything, to the public debate. The latest WikiLeaks dump is to American foreign policy what the Starr Report was to presidential politics—fun, in a voyeuristic sort of way, revealing, but not about important things, and ultimately, more trouble than it is worth.

I have not yet plumbed the depths of all these documents, but I agree with Peter that we have learned nothing new in terms of generalities here, merely in terms of specifics. I guess to the member of the American public who has better things to do than analyze foreign policy, it may indeed seem news that Saudi Arabia wants war. But to anyone else: meh. I favor greater public scrutiny of government actions. But it also seems quite clear that it is impossible to conduct international relations in total transparency. The world does not operate that way – from corporate or office decision-making to statecraft. There will have to be times in which certain views and policies will need to remain secret, and the ability of foreign ambassadors and analysts to give candid, clear advice to policy-makers without having them published in the global media, is vital to a successful foreign policy. The Wikileaks model is therefore a step backwards in many practical respects. But there may be very little we can do about it. The simple technological ease with which masses of data can now be downloaded and disseminated is a fact of modern life.

The Starr Report is an interesting precedent for Peter to cite because it was the first time I remember ever actually downloading a document before reading about it in the next day’s paper. Now, of course, this is routine. Keeping things secret is therefore simply going to be much harder as technology facilitates this kind of global dispersion. Note that the risks are shared among several global papers, meaning that no individual government can truly prevent dissemination by pressuring its own press. Note that it appears that all of this was made possible by one lone government worker. Secrecy was hard when preventing transmission or release of discrete paper documents to a single source. Now? A running and losing battle.

I doubt that this means a new era of perpetual peace and harmony in a newly transparent world, as Julian Assange apparently believes in his more utopian moments. It may make governing as we have known it close to impossible. At the same time, I think it’s useful for Americans to see more clearly the hypocrisy and lies and manipulation and deception and flattery and embarrassment that are required by any great power trying to run the world. Why? Because it will perhaps reveal more clearly that America cannot both be the liberal, honest city on a hill while also running a de facto global empire. Grappling with that truth, as America’s global over-reach has brought the hegemon to bankruptcy, is not a fruitless endeavor.

His American, Muslim father. Just as the Muslim father of the undie-bomber did as well. What would we do without Muslim tips on fighting the war on Jihadism? That's a question I doubt we'll be seeing raised any time soon on Fox News.