Mad Social Scientist

AP Toll Says 1, 361 Iraqis Killed in April

Censorship of US war deaths

I'm often in favor of using foreign policy as a tool to do good in the world. I hate tyranny and oppression, and think powerful nations should do what they can to halt the abuse of human rights around the world. Sometimes, that means removing governments from power through invasion. But taking such a step carries great responsibility, and cannot be taken lightly. It takes honest goodwill, some degree of altruism, and a heap of competence. The US showed these when it intervened in the Balkans in the last decade, and failed to show them in Rwanda. Usually, our failures are failures of will. But the Bush administration has failed in all three categories. It will bring us all grief in the end, and these pictures are just one part of the process that will drag us, Iraq, and the Muslim world into years of conflict, hate, and mistrust. Your tax dollars at work (remember when it was "your money"?)

The next time you hear the Bush administration questioning the compassion, patriotism, or national security sensibilities of a war critic, remember that we critics have always been among the first to stand up for human rights, but declined to get on board the war bus because we knew that the Bushies wouldn't bring a new era to Iraq, but a sad, US-funded rerun of an old one.

Barry Schwartz has been arguing that satisficers are happier than maximizers in a world of many options. He has a nice application here to parenting.

Satisficing is something I have to learn to do better. I tend to be a maximizer on most things, and I think that's right for the things you care most about. But you have to draw the line where you slip into satisficing somewhere, and I think I probably draw it too low down on the scale of priorities...

George Orwell is alive and well and living in the USA:

Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act

In the late 1990s, the Republicans would rather talk about the President's blowjobs than policy. Republican Congresses dithered away years that could have been put to productive use. Who knows, maybe those years could have been spent thinking about terrorism, or at least something that mattered. But now, as the Bushies never fail to remind us, everything has changed. So what do Republicans want to talk about? John Kerry's medals. Never mind that Kerry fought bravely, volunteered for dangerous missions, was wounded three times, and kept going. As Wesley Clark argues, Kerry earned the right to come back and criticize the war. So what exactly bugs the GOPers? They can't contest that Kerry served his country well, far better than President "Failed to Report to his Unit". Surely they wouldn't suggest openly that the Vietnam War was one the US should have fought. No, they want to argue about which medals and/or ribbons Kerry threw away as part of a protest. Who is dumb enough to think that's the real issue? Apparently, the GOP thinks its own constituents are.

Same old gutter discourse; no "tone" changed here.

A photo mosaic made a snapshots of American soldiers who have died in Iraq.

A sovereign government that can't pass laws or run its own internal security. What is that, exactly? A temp agency? (from AP)

John Negroponte, nominated to be ambassador to Baghdad, said at his Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that Iraqis will have ``a lot more sovereignty than they have right now'' after the June 30 handover, but the United States will still have a key role in providing and overseeing security, and the caretaker government won't be able to make laws.

Negroponte said the focus of the transitional government would be to organize elections, and the cabinet ministries will carry out the government's day-to-day operations.

My friend Rob has been harping on this one, and I don't blame him. You'd think the news that Bush misappropriated $700 million to pave the way for the Iraq invasion would be big news, the kind that brings down administrations. If Bush were running against a Democratic president who has done such a thing, he would talk about how it was the government "stealing your money". The actual Bush defense (it wasn't that much money) should really piss off economic conservatives.

When it comes to action, Bush et al have apparently been out to lunch on terrorism. Too busy with Iraq to hunt down Osama din Laden or secure Afghanistan.

But when it comes to public relations, they pretend terrorism is the only issue. Even when that leads to outright ludicrous interviews like this one:

BLITZER: Elaine Quijano reporting from a very noisy Washington Mall, where demonstrations are under way.

Thanks, Elaine, very much.

President Bush is surrounded by several strong women, his wife Laura, his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and joining us now from Los Angeles, the author of a new book, a best-seller, "Ten Minutes From Normal," the president's long-time friend and adviser, Karen Hughes. Karen, thanks very much for joining us.

I want to get to the book, want to get to Iraq, other issues in just a moment, but what do you make of this demonstration on the Washington Mall today? Does the president have a problem with American women, when it comes to abortion rights?

KAREN HUGHES, PRESIDENT BUSH'S ADVISER: Well, Wolf, actually, I think the president gets far too little credit for what he has done for American women. Look at the fact that he has more senior women in his administration than any administration in the history of our country. And I was very proud of that fact. I went to senior staff meetings at the White House where eight of the 18 people present were women. I was one of the three people who helped run his presidential campaign. The other two were men. He paid us all equally. He treated us all equally. So I think this president has a very strong record for women.

I really believe, Wolf, the biggest issue for women this year is the safety and security of our families. And clearly, President Bush is leading the way to making the world safer and more peaceful. And that's the utmost important issue I think for women all across the country this year.

BLITZER: There is a clear difference when it comes to abortion rights between the president and his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. In your opinion, Karen, how big of an issue will this abortion rights issue be in this campaign?

HUGHES: Well, Wolf, it's always an issue. And I frankly think it's changing somewhat. I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life.

And President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions.

And I think those are the kind of policies that the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own.

No matter what your views on either abortion or the Bush admin's effectiveness in "fighting terra", you have to wince when you hear that abortion and 9/11 are inextricably linking in the public mind. It's news to me, and probably everyone who studies public opinion on either topic.

Once again, the Bush admin blatantly uses a government agency to fund its political advertizing.

An important article on the growing upper-class accent of higher education. Keep on building that bridge to the gilded age...

I was in Chicago for a few days for the Midwest Political Science Assoc meeting. Nice conference. And nice to not be watching the news for a few days. Then I got a cold, which I've just recovered from. So it's been a while since my last update.

*****

Thoughts on what I learned at Midwest panels: Comparative political economists like to study interactive models---e.g., models where the effect of some variable on an outcome depends on the context---but we have yet to fully come to grips with how to discriminate among interactive models. I am a big user of these techniques, and I include myself in this complaint. For any problem we wish to study, there are lots of possible model specifications (each considering a different style of interaction, or conjuctual causation), and it's often hard to choose on theoretical or empirical grounds which, if any, is right. If we had enough data---that is, enough countries and time periods that are comparable in all respects but the interactive variables in question---we could probably get somewhere by assessing relative goodness of fit. But with the dozens of countries to hand, this isn't usually persuasive. And it is hard to definitely theorize about these relationships. So what can we do? I see two broad possibilities:

1. Go micro
2. Emphasis cross-validation

The "go micro" option means testing the causal links in the chain, empirically grounding theoretical models so that we are more confident of our specifications when we turn to macro questions. This is hard, but probably the best option. Option 2, cross-validation, is something we can do more easily: show that our models work on "reserved" cases, essentially an exercise in prediction.

We can do either or both, or other things I haven't listed. But we'll have to do more if we want to convince outsiders of our findings. (FYI, going linear additive is not on the list: if we have good reason to think context matters, but we're not sure how, pretending it doesn't just gives answers we know are probably wrong.)

*****

Other thoughts on the news from the last two weeks:

Since I've been away, the meat-grinder that is Iraq ground on, Bush sided with Israel and Sharon on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and Bush finally started making noises to the UN. Plus, Colin Powell appears to be aching to get his tell-all (or, "it wasn't my fault") book off his chest, and seems to be going to Bob Woodward to leak it out. But he tells us nothing we didn't know already: Bush wanted war with Iraq, started planning after 9/11, Powell opposed it internally but played along for the audience, and essentially sold us all out. And now he wants to look foresighted? Good luck.


Tom Friedman has a great all-purpose line from Paul Romer, the Stanford economist: "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." It would be nice to think we had the kind of informed, clever, thoughful leadership that could seize such moments---but I think this bunch of know-nothings needs to first learn the first law of holes (when you're in one, stop digging). How they handle the Falluja stand-off may be the key test.

On the other hand, I am pleased Bush is finally going to the UN for help, and I am crossing my fingers that rumors Chalabi is headed for the chop are true. It may be too late to salvage the situation, but we have no choice but to try. On the other hand, I can't help but sympathize with anyone---from Halliburton's employees to the Spanish military---that wants to get out of the trap Bush set for them.

Indefinite detention without trial

Scientists censored on global warning

This administration is going to bring freedom and liberty to Iraq?

from Fareed Zakaria. Of course, many critics have been saying all this since before the war started. Bush, Cheney, Rummy: isn't it time you listened to some of those critics, now that they have been vindicated and you have been proven comprehensively wrong? After all, many critics share your stated aims of a peaceful stable democratic Iraq. They don't just want to cut and run, which is the slander you've applied in blanket fashion to those who disagree. Use their expertise to save your skins---its a time-honored strategy used by smart politicians. You know, the kind that win elections.

A nice working paper by Mayling Birney and Ian Shapiro, political scientists at Yale, on how the estate tax repeal was passed. It's a very puzzling event for political scientists, because it seems obvious to us that a huge majority of Americans would oppose a plan to benefit the very rich only, at the expense of general revenues.

While on the subject, Tocqueville had this to say about inheritance laws and democracy:

I am surprised that ancient and modern writers have not attributed greater importance to the laws of inheritance and their effect on the progress of human affairs. They are, it is true, civil laws, but they should head the list of all political institutions, for they have an unbelievable influence on the social state of peoples, and political laws are no more than the expression of that state. Moreover, their way of influencing society is both sure and uniform; in some sense they lay hands on each generation before it is born. By their means man is armed with almost supernatural power over the future of his fellows. When the lawgiver has once fixed the law of inheritance, he can rest for centuries; once the impulse has been given to his handiwork, he can take his hand away; the mechanism works by its own power and apparently spontaneously aims at the goal indicated beforehand. If it has been drafted in a certain way, it assembles, concentrates, and piles up property, and soon power too, in the hands of one man; in a sense it makes an aristocracy leap forth from the ground. Guided by other principals and directed toward other goals, its effect is even quicker; it divides, shares, and spreads property and power; then sometimes people get frightened at the speed of its progress; despairing of stopping its motion; men seek at least to put obstacles in its way; there is an attempt to balance its actions by measures of opposite tendency. But all in vain! It grinds up or smashes everything that stands in its way; with the continual rise and fall of its hammer strokes, everything is reduced to a fine, impalpable dust, and that dust is the foundation for democracy.

from chapter 3, Democracy in America

I can only just manage to read his comments afterwards without my blood boiling and head exploding. And here's why:

One thing is for certain, though, about me, and the world has learned this: When I say something, I mean it. And the credibility of the United States is incredibly important for keeping world peace and freedom.

This from the least credible president in living memory. He doesn't seem to understand the meaning of the word, as Saletan points out in a frustrated column.

I'm usually the guy who says people go overboard on the credibility issue (it's not worth pursuing an obviously failed policy to "maintain your credibility", nor is credibility really something possessed by a state, so much as individual actors in that state). But this is just too much for me to bear, way too much. President Vacation, ask Condi what credibility means. And try to listen past the first sentence.

Here is a petition, sponsored by MoveOn.org, to put the UN in charge in Iraq.

Real professional job we're doing in Iraq. I hope the Marines get to the bottom of this.

If this is real, that corporal should know he's endangering his fellow soldier's lives.

Well, at least our troops aren't living off airlifts. Yet. But this is looking more like war and less like rounding up a few miscreants.

The Bush generals can't seem to decide whether they want to kill (martyr) Sadr or negotiate. Today it's kill or capture. I hope they come to their senses. This is not about one man, and if our decision makers can't even see that, we're screwed. Bush's cowboy Manichean worldview isn't moral clarity: it's insanity.

Oh, and remember the weapons of mass destruction? Well, there is one country run by a madman who has nuclear weapons. One guess who it is. Here's a hint: the Bush administration has been mostly ignoring them, and they have supplied with technology by one of our key anti-terror allies.

From time to time, I'll post mad social science ideas on this site. I'm not endorsing these ideas, just thinking way, way out of the asylum.

Today's idea is to let Condi Rice do some of that big power bargaining she'd rather do than fight terror networks. We try to solve three problems at once. Iraq would be easy to deal with if the Kurds were out of the picture (okay, it would still be a mess, but at least not a three way fight). Give the Kurds their own state. Who won't like this? Turkey. So give Turkey a fast-track to EU membership in exchange for reaching a settlement with the Kurds (maybe even trying to set a decent permanent border to Kurdistan). Of course, the US can't speak to the EU. We'd need to give something big to the EU. So wrap up a list of gifts: sign Kyoto, regulate genetically modified food, heck, we could even provide some military hardware to help get that European Defense Force off the drawing board. Finally (and this helps everyone) we could let the Europeans into running Iraq in a big way.

Would this work? Nah. The Turks would never give up land, and as long as there are Kurds in Turkey, and an independent Kurdistan next door, they'd be antsy. The EU may not be persuadable on Turkey---there's a lot of racism and anti-Islamic feeling in the way. And the Bush admin would never give up any control of Iraq to France et al.

Still hoping these are isolated incidents. Because if coarse, brutal behavior is widespread among our occupying forces, the Iraqi mission will doubtless end in bloodshed and failure:

The 56-year-old shopkeeper was too scared to give his name. Among his bolts of cloth and bottles of detergent, he talked about how this time last year his family's hopes were so high, but now they feared that things would just get worse.

The son of a Shiite father and a Sunni mother, he spoke of his two brothers who Saddam had executed as political prisoners, and then he gave his verdict on the occupation: "The invasion was a bad idea. Saddam was bad and Bush is bad - but we'd have Saddam back any day."

Sadeer, my driver in Baghdad, is leaning the same way.

When he arrived at the Palestine Hotel yesterday he was limping; the leg of his jeans was soaked in blood. The cut was small and we were able to bandage it, but George Bush had lost another Iraqi friend.

Sadeer, a 28-year-old Shiite, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Americans and he takes his life in his hands by working for me. Iraqis are being executed just for being in the company of Westerners.

But his encounter with a bullying US soldier, who roughed him up as he came through the security cordon around the hotel, has pushed him into the nationalist Iraqi camp.

When the GI challenged him, Sadeer tried to explain in his limited English that he entered the hotel routinely. But he was barked at, shoved away and then belted on the foot with a rifle. He used to slow in traffic to greet the US troops. Now he has turned: "Americans bad for Iraq - too many problems."

Leaving the hotel on foot, we had to go through the same streets to get to his car. I tried to explain our movements to the officer in charge of a US tank unit, but we were greeted with a stream of invective.

As I thanked the officer for his civility and moved on, one of his men fell in beside me, mumbling. Asked to repeat himself, he exploded: "Don't you f---in' eyeball me."

Nodding to his officer and raising his weapon, he shrieked: "He has rank to lose. I don't. I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherf---er!"

Remember how the Iraqi army "melted away"?

By some estimates, as many as 25 per cent of the new Iraqi security forces, on which the US is depending to impose law and order after June 30, has quit or simply melted away.

Some real mad science. Now, we just need to hook up the brain implants to the rat remote control, and presto! A rat you can control with your own mind! And they said I was mad....

What news is escaping from Iraq these days is mostly coming through blogs. Not mine, of course, but those of Iraqis on the scene, or others with exclusive quotes from coalition soldiers and other foreign nationals on the scene. They paint a horrifying picture that simply makes me feel like we're in over our heads.

A few days ago, a friend of mine named Ryan posted a comment to the board, which any readers I have surely missed (since it is, after all, the only comment on the whole board). Here's a juicy bit:

consider Europe largely at fault for the way things are going now. If the Europeans had taken the Tony Blair (God bless him) strategy of "we can't stop Bush, so we might as well deflect him," they could have co-opted the war. Then it would have been all about liberation, and with European and hence UN support, things would be going vastly better. With European and UN support, Islamic and Arab support would have followed--Fallujah might be occupied by Indonesian troops right now, and cries of "jihad" by xenophobic Islamic fundamentalists would fall on deaf ears.

But the European left would rather see our idiot cowboy president embarrassed than think about what's good for the world beyond their borders. A failure in Iraq is very bad for Iraqis and rather bad for America, while a success is bad for no one but the unfortunate casualties (that no American, even the Bushies, relish), and Saddam's inner circle, for whom I shed zero tears.

How dare anyone put the goal of embarrassing the US above the future of men like Muhammad, the author of "The first candle"? And is there no sympathy for the ordinary American soldier in Europe? He's the one who takes more bullets for Bush's sake. All of Europe should be insisting on UN-ifying the occupation (how could Bush say no?), but instead it's a race to the bottom, to see which nation can remain quietest and least involved in order to get to the bottom of the terrorists' target list.

I have wondered, would a strong, militarily unified EU be the beacon of liberty that we liberals have wanted the US to be? Or would they be just as selfish in outlook as America is, and more concerned with one-upping the US than improving the world? The Iraq war suggests the latter, and that is deeply disappointing.

I think Ryan is spot on in assessing Blair's motives (he went to war on the assumption that Bush would fight the war alone if he had too, and that someone should keep tabs on Bush so he didn't do anything really crazy). And we will see over the next few weeks whether Blair has gotten anything for his gamble; I suspect he has gotten very little leverage.

But I find myself doubting whether it would have helped at all if other powers had followed suit. First, unless they were contributing a lot of troops, it is hard to see if they would have any leverage at all. Second, at the time, France, Germany, et al had the example of Afghanistan, where their offers of military aid and alliance on the ground were rudely rebuffed. During the 2002-3 debate over the Iraq war, I suspected (and I think these governments suspected as well) that Bush wanted permission slips, not partners. He wanted to be able to say to war critics that everyone in the world supported the war. But neither he nor Rummy wanted a bunch of foreign generals involved. And he wasn't willing to pay much for permission, so the amount of leverage it would buy seems ex ante very small.

I think Ryan and I agree that it would be great if we had a broad coalition, including Arab forces, on the ground in Iraq. Where we disagree is whether the DoD would have allow this no matter what Europe said or did in 2002-3.

Here is the latest.

This is a good site on US/UK/coaltion casualties.

This is an attempt at counting Iraqi civilian casualties.

My roommate introduced me a few years ago to Mystery Science Theater, a TV series that pokes fun at the worst movies ever made. The format is suprisingly engaging: two robot puppets and a human host sit in sillouette at the bottom right corner of the screen, heckling movies like Red Zone Cuba, The Pod People, or Manos: Hands of Fate. (Think of the jesters from the Muppet Show, but with a really broad array of pop cultural, political, and literary references.) The movies are undescribably bad. Much worse than that stinker you just saw at the theater. I don’t care if it was a romantic comedy starring Jim Varney, J. Lo., and Pee Wee Herman. Trust me.

There are almost two hundred MST episodes. A few dozen are available on DVD, and we’ve bought them all. The rest we’ve downloaded through file-sharing networks. The interesting thing is that if the market saw fit to provide these videos for sale, we’d have bought them. The other interesting thing is that the makers of MST themselves encourage redistribution of their work; a line in the credits urges fans to “Keep Circulating the Tapes’.

Before some of the briefer movies, MST shows short educational films from the 1950s and 1960s. These are very bad, and very funny. Many, like "Hired!", "A Case of Spring Fever", and "The Selling Wizard", were produced by an outfit called Jam Handy. Jam Handy made hundreds of shorts for schools and industry, and only a few made it to MST. Curious to find any lost classics, I sat down at Google one night to see what was on the Net. My roommate, a great believer in the power of Google and the Internet, swore that it would be years before Jam Handy episodes were available for download; that every other extant bit of video would be uploaded first; that Jam Handy’s inclusion would mark the completion of the electronic storehouse of mankind’s knowledge, if not the Apocalypse itself.

Within ten minutes, I had found hundreds of Jam Handy shorts and their ilk, in a choice of digital formats, and complete with summaries and previews, available for free download. My roommate, I suspect, would have been less disturbed by the four horsemen riding up to our door.

The source was the Prelinger Archive, an amazing resource I can only imagine is part of some insidious plot to destroy culture through the purveyance of bad movies. How I applaud them. If you dare, check out A Date with Your Family, a thinly veiled documentary of fascism, to see what I mean.

Prelinger and MST take a very different approach to intellectual property from the one the big media conglomerates use. These companies are terrified by open source anything (or at least profess to be), and they seldom see how it could actually help their sales. But as Prelinger argues, in a letter to today's NYT, that some degree of sharing might actually help sales:

While the Recording Industry Association of America pursues its heavy-handed offensive against music downloading and file sharing (Business Day, April 5), other owners of cultural content have found ways to live (and flourish) with emerging technologies.

I have operated a small family-owned historical film archives for 20 years. Several years ago, we digitized the most sought-after images in our collection and placed them online for free downloading and nearly unrestricted reuse.

Our experience may seem counterintuitive, but it has been overwhelmingly positive: the more we give away, the more we actually sell.

File sharing and free downloading have increased the ubiquity and prominence of our collection and have given it ample publicity at very little cost, resulting in increased income.

Might there be a lesson here for the music industry?

I can think of lots of ways this could be true. I often buy things I have first downloaded, because I like them enough to reward and support the artist (irrational as that may seem!), because I want a high bitrate master copy, or because I want ancillary materials (I liked a few tracks from the cd, so I want the whole thing; I liked the movie, so I want the DVD extras). And it turns out I'm not alone; a very clever and well-designed study of a natural experiment shows that music downloads don't detract from album sales (see a summary here). If people were going to buy it without the net, they'll still buy it. People may download things they are unwilling to buy---but banning that activity won't increase sales, though it will sacrifice the advertising these downloads provide.

I'm not an open source radical*. Intellectual property owners will have to fight to protect their rights; eventually, copying will be so easy that the status quo will give way to wholesale theft. And the status quo may also depend on the norm that it is wrong to steal music you would otherwise be willing to pay for (even if it's not wrong to steal music that strikes you as almost worthless). This norm could erode.

But the creative use of free information probably offers advantages to intellectual property holders over the bullheaded insistence on charging everyone the same high price for information. It also leads to much more creativity, especially as cultural capital recombines and mutates in new directions, unchained by rigid, unending enforcement of copyright.

Of course, the "price" for us, and our culture, may be that A Date with Your Family, the Chicken of Tomorrow, and Monster A-Go-Go are never more than a few clicks away. A sort of cinematic original sin, I suppose.

*Though I do think open source produces much better software than proprietary licenses, because hundreds of proud geeks slaving over free software is damn near impossible to beat.

This article says 600 in Falluja alone:

Last Monday, a new Iraqi battalion of several hundred soldiers refused to join American marines in the offensive in Falluja, as The Washington Post reported on Sunday and American commanders and officials later confirmed. Iraqi doctors said that about 600 Iraqis were killed in the push, which included the use of tanks and attack aircraft.

I wonder how many of those deaths were "insurgents", how many were "bystanders". And how many deaths in other cities? Of course, the US military isn't keeping track of Iraq casualties, so we have to piece together what we can.

If that's not depressing enough---and it should be, since it will fan the flames of insurgency very well, thank you---Juan Cole has a post quoting a British officer who I hope is completely wrong. Because if he's right about American tactics and behavior in Iraq, America is in danger of losing the war, and much more than that.

Sigh.

He's the Pres-o-matic 2004! Now you can enjoy the rich creamy taste of smoldering Iraq anytime! On the go, in the office, or back at the ranch! Yes, no matter the crisis---an impending al-Qaeda attack, the hunt for bin Laden, or just another war of choice gone horribly, horribly wrong, President Vacation is on the job! (Agonist gets the credit for coining that one)

This will eventually come to pass, I think. And what a weird culture shock it will be.

If this is true, Rice is in big trouble:

WASHINGTON, April 9 — President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday.

The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford.

The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.

Glad they have her under oath. I won't share the fury I feel about this, since so many others have already done so (check out the Daily Kos, for something that just about captures it).

As for the situation in Iraq, I'm fairly dreading the next few weeks. Juan Cole thinks the governing council may disintegrate. We're still getting fairly little news out of Iraq; as during the war, blogs are the best source of up-to-date info. And now lots of people in Iraq have them, and those are really the most fascinating on the net.

The Iraqi people deserved much, much better than we have given them.

One of my students is developing a website on energy: topics include oil depletion, alternative energy, and conservation. It's worth a look.

1. Self-praise and damage control
2. Irrelevant character assasination of critics (just look at any of the top stories here)
3. Vacation
...
4. The nation's business (oh wait, that's a sickening page of photo-ops)

I haven't paid close attention to Rice's testimony, but from the first link above (and similar sources), I note that in her view, a President's Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States" wasn't worth acting on because it was "historical", dealing with "past" information on al-Qaeda. Uh, wasn't "historical" information, indeed very dated and dubious historical info, enough to "convince" Bush that we must immediately invade Iraq?

As Saletan and Fred Kaplan point out, to call the style of Condi's testimony "academic" is to insult academics. At bottom, she's saying that as National Security Advisor she needs to be given a briefing and recommendation before she ties her shoes. Isn't her job to take the lead in coordinating security agencies? To make sure the president's (excuse me, vice-president's) agenda is implemented by the bureaucracy?

She knows there are structural problems that hamper bureaucratic cooperation. But why pretend that's an excuse for inaction on her part? Surely knowledge of the problem comes with a greater burden to knock CIA and FBI heads together.

I guess she was too busy babysitting the prez.

he should make it his full time job. This is what the prez is doing while Iraq falls apart.

Admittedly, he's a lot better at this than his real job, and I bet he enjoys it more. We can do the nation and W a favor in November by clearing his schedule so he can stay in Crawford year-round.

Wonder what a second Bush term would be like? Here's the worst case scenario.

Some other noteworthy stories:

If you were a counter-terrorism expert, wouldn't working on the "War on Terror" be your dream job? Wouldn't you be excited by the chance to tackle your pet problem, to live in what the Chinese might call "interesting times"? You bet. So why are these experts leaving the government in droves?

Anyone else noticed how few details have come out of Iraq in the last few days? Could it be because they're all as bad as this soldier's account?

I love the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper, but I don't read it too often since it hits too close to home. I'm saving it for when I finish my PhD, and can read it without dread (I hope). But today's comic is too good to pass up. I've also linked the strip to the sidebar of fun websites.

While I'm plugging sites, I should note that many of the links I end up posting are forwarded to me by friends, especially Rob Fannion, whose online journal is also linked at right. His posts are considerably more thoughful and much better written than mine.

is how little effort the Bushies put into planning the aftermath. Beyond all the lies aimed at the American people, beyond the damage done to our security and the hunt for al-Qaeda, beyond the shredding of our alliances and the international order, this is the greatest tragedy.

For the Bushies have no justification for the war left, save that of bringing liberty, democracy, and prosperity to Iraq, and then (somehow) to the rest of the Middle East.

I am all for these goals, as are most war critics. Fact is, we on the left are usually the ones standing up for them! But that doesn't make invasion the best strategy for accomplishing them. Defenders of Bush often accuse critics of opposing freedom and democracy, as if these things were synonymous with invasion and occupation. I think pundits reading these talking points usually know this is a dastardly smear.

Creating democracy, liberty, prosperity is not a job for presidential diktat. It takes a complex brew of institutions to support these goals, the cooperation of many groups in a society, and basic social understandings of what democracy means, how fair play works, and how minority rights deserve protection even if that's unpopular. This set of conditions has evolved naturally in some countries, and even then has not always survived; it has seldom been successfully imposed from outside, and then only after the entire structure of the previous society has been wiped away. For a foreign invader to create democracy, liberty, and modern economic systems in a ethnically divided, economically underdeveloped, distant, hostile, and large nation, by force, without the figleaf of international support or the cooperation of neighboring states is folly on a grand scale. But the Bushies have gone further---they went in without any plan at all. No effort to build the Iraqi economy beyond Halliburton contracts. No effort to devise new institutions beyond a rubber-stamp council and an imposed constitution. And no pretense of real liberties---just try to run an independent newspaper in Iraq. And things are going to get much, much worse. Can the gang that thought democracy would be a snap prevent civil war? Can they do it without resorting to dictatorship?

The biggest irony is that conservatives in the US have been saying for decades that changing society through public policy is hard, and usually goes astray or has minimal impact. They aren't always right on this argument, but they have a point, and its the very best public policy argument made by conservatives in the last thirty years. If someone in the White House had read James Q. Wilson, Aaron Wildavsky, or, heaven help us, even Charles Murray, could they have really imagined that they could go remake Iraq before breakfast, then come back and party on an aircraft carrier?

The neo-cons are an embarrassment not just to the nation, but to anyone else who calls themselves conservatives. They have made a huge mess through reckless, radical policies, and it is clear they have no clue how to deal with it. All they know is how to blow stuff up and scare people. It's time to leave this childish bunch of foreign policy fools behind.

Another fascinating post from a blogger in Iraq. Once again it's clear that we went into Iraq with far too little human intelligence on the ground. And in this I include the lack of people speaking the language and understanding politics in Iraq and in general. The naive belief that we could march into flowers on the streets, the watch democracy bloom was so stupid it hardly needs exploding. Now the reality of internecine struggles among Shia clerics is America's problem.

Bush was briefed today by Bremer and Abizaid. That is good news by itself; it sounds like Bush hardly ever gets news except through Condi/Cheney/Rummy & co., and we all know what that's worth. I'm not excusing Bush, but I fear his poor decisionmaking skills all the more because of the cone of silence around him.

Joshua Marshall has a typically trenchant post on the looming disaster. I especially like this line:

From the White House's advocates we hear logic puzzles about appeasement in which the fall-out from the president's screw ups become the prime argument for continuing to support them.

I've never seen the stupidity of "credibility" arguments for failed policies so well described. Of course the irony of this admin claiming we need to maintain our credibility by staying the course is too much.

What can we do? It's too late to pull out---we blew up Iraw, and now we have to put it back together, as Moseley-Braun said. Otherwise it will be exactly the theat we were supposedly preventing. But Bush isn't up to this task.

This science is a bit mad even for me.

little time to post. But here are a few items:

1. Bush's popularity has taken a big hit from recent events (Clarke testimony, violence in Iraq, gas prices). This Pew poll has his approval at 43%, a new low. And he's getting killed in California---I think I'll be winning my bet that he runs no ads there.

2. Iraq is coming apart at the seams. Right now it's not clear how many US soldiers have been killed today (12? more?), or how many cities are seeing Shia uprisings (7?) or, for that matter, which are under rebel control (Najaf? others?). World opinion is that things are going to hell. If so, Joshua Marshall notes an inside tip that Bush & co have no clue what to do next (wouldn't that be a surprise).

3. "The king is just too busy to meet with the people's representatives. He's got funds to raise" This is sickening (from Juan Cole):

Biden and Lugar also made it clear that they are not being consulted by the White House on Iraq, and, indeed, it has been a year since they could even get an appointment to see Bush about it. Imagine how locked out the American public is!

Here's a website that shows you where donors to Bush and Kerry live, block by block, in major American cities. I'm going to show the NYC maps to my class this week. For Houston readers, check out the difference between the Heights, Montrose, and Southampton (Kerry country) and the rectangular block of rich Bush neighborhoods running from River Oaks to Memorial. Not many donors at all outside those elite environs.

Hmm. I've always thought that if I moved back to Houston, I'd live in one of the three neighborhoods giving to Kerry.

It sounds like all hell is breaking loose in Baghdad's Shia neighborhoods. Here's a first hand perspective from a Sunni in Baghdad. The blogger, Zeyad, started his webblog to counter the "negative spin" put on news from Iraq's reconstruction, so for him to say

I have to admit that until now I have never longed for the days of Saddam, but now I'm not so sure. If we need a person like Saddam to keep those rabid dogs at bay then be it. Put Saddam back in power and after he fills a couple hundred more mass graves with those criminals they can start wailing and crying again for liberation. What a laugh we will have then. Then they can shove their filthy Hawza and marji'iya up somewhere else. I am so dissapointed in Iraqis and I hate myself for thinking this way. We are not worth your trouble, take back your billions of dollars and give us Saddam again. We truly 'deserve' leaders like Saddam.

is very depressing indeed.

Not that he is right or anything like that; for one, he seems to harbor great distrust for Shias generally. And we've been here before: secular nationalist tyrant falls/dies, multiethnic state collapses into civil war---hello Yugoslavia. It doesn't mean that the only alternative for such societies is an iron fist, merely that transitions for divided societies are fraught with danger, and require a lot of thought, planning, effort, and cooperation to pull off. Whoops!

While I was in Houston, I talked with a friend who insisted that he thought Iraqis would be better off when the US leaves than they were under Saddam. I hope that's true, but I'm starting to worry.

Finally, some mad social science. This week, a magazine customizes it's cover---by putting each subscriber's house and name on their copy.

This may sound hard. But it's not really; just a bit more expensive. So what's next?

Lately, I've been reading Patrick O'Brien's series of novels following the careers of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in the Royal Navy. (You may be familiar with these characters from the movie Master and Commander). Both men are wonderfully drawn flawed heroes, and seem all the more real for it. That's the only way heroes come.

But it's always been hard for me to accept this, and so I have few heroes. I don't admire many presidents or Supreme Court Justices or Congressmen. But maybe my standards are just unreasonable.

In any case, today two of my real-life heroes were in the news. They are Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda who lead a rebellion/invasion against the genocide of 1994, then imposed a remarkably successful reconciliation government. But he is not without flaws. Two million Hutus responsible for the genocide fled to the Congo, where they refused to disarm and generally sowed chaos. Kagame's pursuit of these groups helped plunge Southern Africa into years of war. Nor has Kagame shown any eagerness to relinquish power. But Kagame didn't just save his people; he formed a multiethnic government and has worked to put the ethnic violence of Rwanda firmly in the past. Compare his actions to the cowardly refusal of the US to allow any UN peacekeepers to be sent to Rwanda to prevent the genocide. Fearing a repeat of Somalia, in which the killing and multilation of US soldiers embarrassed the Clinton admin, UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright made it clear no UN effort, with or without the US, would be allowed.

This brings up a second Rwandan hero, General Romeo Dallaire, a UN peacekeeper who begged for as few as 5000 men to prevent the massacres. Since the Rwandan genocide was carried about by gangs with machetes, Dallaire was confident even a small armed force could prevent it. Had he been heeded, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis would have been saved, and the Congo war likely prevented. Dallaire retired to Canada after his failure, and sank into depression. So I was pleased to see he returned to Rwanda to for the first time in ten years. Kagame admitted today that he considered attacking Dallaire's forces, ordered into inactivity, to acquire their weapons.

In a totally different area, I saw an acamedic hero, Paul Krugman, speak today on the politics of inequality. Nothing really new, but a few good lines. It's remarkably how much the events of the last few years have shifted the discussion of economic inequality from economic causes (skills-biased technological change, trade) to political ones (partisanship, alliances of the religious and economic right, tax policy, campaign contributions by the very rich, redistricting, etc). Where will it all end? Krugman fears a return to the "age of the Great Gatsby", or even the robber barons. What would stop it? Well, since the benefits of Bush tax policy accrue mostly to the top 1%, or even the top 0.1%, Krugman thinks we may eventually get the March of 100,000 Assistant Vice-Presidents...

It is a bit frightening that the real core constitutencies of the GOP, the ruling party, are CEOs and fundamentalist Christians who think the world is going to end. But it does explain why they are partying like there is no tomorrow....

I've been out of town the past week (hence the infrequent posting). Some interesting stories:

1. This article recaps a recent economics paper which finds virtually no effect of music file sharing on album sales. (The article uses a natural experiment to see whether an exogenous spike in downloads of popular albums is associated with contemporaneous declines in sales of that album). I've always figured the recording industry overhyped this effect; many alternative explanations to declining sales are possible. My favorite is that recently, most music (and certainly everything on Clear Channel stations) has sucked.

2. The big news earlier this week is that the job market finally started to turn around, producing 308k new jobs in March. That's almost as high as the admin estimate for every month this year. Let's hope that it keeps up.

3. And the big news today is that Iraq is exploding, with multiple Shia riots throughout Iraq, and at least nine coalition soldiers killed. The Bushies have always acted like they could invade Iraq and figure out how to secure and rebuild the country on the fly, at a leisurely pace. Now young men are dying every day for the neo-cons hubris and stupidity. When will there be some accountability on this? Why on earth are people like Wolfowitz still on the government payroll?