Shoutingatmytv.com

Waxman-Markey Energy Bill

Remember School House Rock's cartoon about how a bill becomes a law? Here's the updated version (a little depressing for those of us who would prefer to save our children from unprecedented climate disruption)...

Nationalism and US International Policy

Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh resigned in protest from the State Department in September, saying he had lost confidence in the policy he was helping to implement in Afghanistan, according to an article by Karen DeYoung in this morning's Washington Post (read the article, it's very good work).

Hoh, a former Marine who served in Iraq as part of a reconstruction team, has a personnel file that's full of glowing reports, and the article includes comments from several of his colleagues in Afghanistan that indicate that they hold him in the highest regard. Indeed, when he first sent his letter of resignation, they were so interested in not losing him that both the US ambassador to Afghanistan and Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke tried to talk him out of resigning. They offered him a promotion to senior embassy staffer, a job which he initially accepted, and then declined a few days later, as he realized that he wouldn't be able to support the mission in which he no longer believed.

Two things about this turn of events are significant. The first is that when someone of this caliber sacrifices his career and submits a principled resignation, we owe it to them and ourselves to pay close attention to what they're protesting with their resignation. In 2003, a diplomat named John Brady Kiesling resigned from the foreign service over our developing  jingoistic fervor about Iraq. Had anyone that resignation the attention it deserved, we might have saved ourselves the loss of tragic amounts of blood, treasure, influence, and national prestige. Unfortunately, Kiesling worked in Athens, not Iraq, and his resignation went unnoticed by the public at the time. At least he did better than Scott Ritter, the UN weapons inspector who protested publicly that there were no significant WMD in Iraq, and was savaged for his trouble by the Bush administration and accused of treason by its Greek chorus in the press.

That the Obama administration isn't attempting any similar slander of Mr. Hoh is encouraging, and I hope they give his protest and its reasons their full attention. (As a side note, if Dick Cheney should decide to unburden himself of any opinion concerning Mr. Hoh that isn't laden with a huge measure of respect for a man who was willing to make sacrifices that Cheney's own "other priorities" prevented him from considering, someone should horsewhip him back to whatever rock he's currently living under.)

The more important aspect of Hoh's resignation, though, is the reason behind it. He's become convinced that the Afghan people have turned against the US troops in their country out of national pride, and that our continued presence there is only inflaming a nationalist resistance that we'll never overcome. His analysis draws on having spent most of this year doing what his superiors recognize as great work at winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, after doing a good deal of the same thing as a Marine in Iraq.

Hoh's resignation letter alludes to the non-existence of any central authority to support in Afghanistan. The largest coherent political unit in much of the country is the local valley's tribe, and in each of these valleys, that tribe's interest in working with NATO troops is losing out to its interest in driving foreign invaders from its territory. Winning them over would be a valley by valley proposition, and Hoh considers it impossible. Apparently it was the failure of the Afghan election that was the straw that broke the camel's back, but even if we had a central government that we could trust, the NATO support that government relies on would deprive it of legitimacy in the eyes of its people.

It's become cliche to say so, but we've seen this movie before. We confused what was essentially a nationalist revolt in Vietnam with a communist conspiracy to overthrow the French colonial government there, and involved ourselves in 15 years of supporting a corrupt government which had no credibility with its people, at the end of which we'd lost over 50,000 lives and gained nothing except our first military defeat as a country. We got into that war in exactly the same way we're getting into this one - slowly, a little bit at a time. If Matthew Hoh's resignation prevents us from repeating that mistake, he will have augmented an already impressive career with a service to his country that few can provide.

If there's any justice, though, this should not be the end of his career in government. I understand he is due to meet with VP Biden's advisers on Afghanistan today, and it would be both just and a wise use of human resources if Hoh were retained as one of those advisers by Biden or some other part of the administration's policy apparatus. John Brady Kiesling's bravery and Scott Ritter's were "rewarded" by wrecking their careers. It would be a great change if we didn't lose Hoh's services as a result of his principled objection to a dangerous policy.

Rethink Afghanistan

Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films has produced a documentary about the Afghan war that makes a strong case for disengagement. This is the first of six parts, all available online at Brave New Films' site, RethinkAfghanistan.com.

The documentary includes interiews with a large number of experts in the mechanics of the region, and considering the decisions facing us about getting further mired in this conflict, this is a point of view that we need to see:

"No God But God"

Just finished Reza Aslan’s “No God But God”, a history of Islam told in light of the recent clashes between Muslim extremists and western societies. The book is a thoughtful and thorough description of Islamic history, and traces the development of the various sects in Islam from their foundational events through their modern expressions.

The book is eminently readable and extremely useful to westerners who are unfamiliar with the nuances of Islamic history and its effects on the divisions within modern Islam, and those nuances are essential to any useful appreciation of what has been going on between Islam and the west over the last thirty years, and particularly over the last eight.

That is so because the central premise of the book is that the attacks on various western targets in the last decade have really not been about the west per se, that the lives that have been lost in the west have essentially been collateral damage in a long overdue reformation within Islam itself, one that parallels quite closely the bloody reformation that occurred within Christianity just about 600 years ago. (In that sense, it may be wrong to call this reformation in Islam “long overdue”, in that it’s happening almost exactly as far into Islam’s history as the aforementioned bloody Christian reformation did into Christianity’s.)

In outlining the development of the forces at work in this reformation, Aslan adds to a body of work that attempts to explain the motivations of Islamist terrorists by paying strict attention to what they say themselves, rather than to what western pundits have had to say about them. Not a bad idea, that, and the historical perspective is invaluable too.

Principle vs. Pragmatism at Justice

There has been a steady tension in the executive branch since Barack Obama took office between the principle of prosecuting what have become obvious crimes committed by the previous administration and the pragmatic political effects of such a prosecution on the president's agenda. It's an unfortunate reality of polarized Washington that a prosecution will be played by Republicans as a blatantly political act, and in an administration that is still seeking to work with Republicans on Capitol Hill, that act would likely poison the waters and finish off any semblance of cooperation.

So far, it seems that the pragmatic imperatives of passing the ambitious and incredibly important agenda that Obama has set forth (attempting to deal with health care, energy policy, education, and the economy all at once would be no mean feat even if the Republican party hadn't decided its narrow political interests would be best served by doing everything they could to wreck his plans). At several turns, the administration has come down on the side of at least deferring, if not completely ignoring the crimes they should by rights be at least investigating, and probably eventually prosecuting.

This has been a source of considerable frustration for those of Obama's supporters who wanted the president to add one more task to his plate, that of moving the USA back toward being a constitutional democracy which holds the bill of rights as a sacred document.

I'm one of those supporters, and I realize that this post's assumption of the prior administration's guilt sounds a little like the old western movie line about how "we're going to give you a fair trial, followed by a fist class hangin'", but it really isn't. At several points, officials of the previous administration have admitted openly that they committed acts which by any fair reading are violations of both US and international law. They assert (on the basis of very little evidence) that the national security interests of the country were served by doing so, and that they were empowered to break US law by their constitutional mandate, but most constitutional scholars have dismissed that as a wholly specious claim.

What remains is to see if that claim carries any more weight in court than it does in the academy, and to establish who was involved in making the decisions to carry out such acts as torturing people, detaining them indefinitely without a hearing, invading the privacy of American citizens without any restrictions, misinforming Congress about all of the above, and a variety of other crimes and misdemeanors. So far, the administration has been moving very slowly to investigate those matters and act on what they find, and the frustration about that pace that's welling up among those who hold the Constitution dear isn't because we don't understand that there may be a cost to pressing forward with investigations, it's because we think that cost will be worth paying to preserve what we hold dear about our country.

For some of us (myself included), it's also a matter of practical political calculation. If Democrats don't stand up for principle in this case, Republican policymakers will have no reason to respect either the law or their opposition, and the voters who have to choose from among them will have no reason to respect Democrats' spines either. If the voters don't believe Democrats will stand up for principle, they won't trust them to make policy, and the sacrifice of principle for pragmatic political considerations will have been wasted.

All of which is why I was very heartened to read this Newsweek piece by Daniel Klaidman, which describes the dilemma being wrestled with by Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder too is mindful of what the effort to investigate might cost, and is suitably worried about endangering all that the Obama administration needs to accomplish. Fortunately, he has apparently also been as aware of the damage the previous administration did to the rule of law, and has enough respect for that rule to find it unpalatable to let that damage go unremarked.

The irony here is that if an investigation is to go forward (and it should), the best practice will be for it to proceed as speedily and independently as it can; to quote Lady Macbeth, "If t'were done, t'were best done quickly." (another irony may be quoting Lady Macbeth in a post about the excesses of state power, but I digress...) The more the administration is seen to be agonizing over this decision, rather than letting the law take it's course, the easier it is to paint the whole thing as a political exercise, something the Republicans will attempt to do regardless.

In addition, it has become clear that the Republican leadership is committed to a course of obstructionism that makes it a fool's errand to keep going hat in hand to the minority to try to develop a governing consensus. They're just not that into you (or governing, something that should come as no surprise to anyone who has lived through the last eight years). The good news is that their posture, in it's current form, looks to be wholly self-destructive, and is being carried out by a cavalcade of clowns that make the hapless Washington Generals seem like the Harlem Globetrotters the Generals made a living by losing to in embarrassing fashion. These guys aren't just the gang that can't shoot straight, they are shooting themselves and each other at a furious pace.

Principle's cost is declining daily as the revelations get worse, and it looks like AG Holder may be ready to pull the trigger on doing his job. It can't happen soon enough, and if it's explained as a matter of letting the law take it's course, I don't think the cost will be as high as leaving the crimes uninvestigated. I hear that, like Obama, Holder likes a game of basketball. Time for a full court press, General.

Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons

This incredible article was published as a paper and delivered as a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Pacific regional meeting in June of 1968. Since then, it has become the most widely quoted piece of peer-reviewed scholarship in history, and it deserves it. Read it if  you haven't. Reread it if you have.

Epochal Change

It's been too long since I posted here - for the few of you who have actually been stopping by to read, thanks for your patience and please accept my apologies.

The reasons for my silence have been mostly personal - lots going on in meat life lately, including a good deal of work, the beginning of summer, preparations for a major trip next month, and a great house concert last weekend by my friend and onetime classmate Stevie Coyle (thanks Steve!). Time has been short.

The other reason has been a bewildering series of events over the last several weeks, which seem so significant that I'm not sure what to make of them yet. I feel a little like the proverbial blind man trying to describe the elephant by feel - it's a certainty that the description is flawed, but without a lot more groping around, it's not even possible to guess what the flaws are.

There have been several of these changes over the last few weeks, but two have been standing out for me over the last couple of days. They are completely unrelated to one another, except insofar as they seem to have the potential to portend really big changes in the sweep of history. Both are immediately dangerous, and both will cause a great deal of suffering (albeit of different kinds), but both contain the possibility of reversing developments that occurred decades ago that I believe were disastrous for our country, and indeed for human civilization as a whole.

That's big stuff, and may be overdrawn, but bear with me:

California is bankrupt. There is no money in the state treasury, and there is a $24 billion state budget deficit that nobody has any idea how to pay for. The citizens of the state have declined to vote for any tax increase to cover the costs of the services that they're using, and the federal government has (rightly, in my view) declined to step in to bail out those citizens in the absence of any real effort to preserve those services for themselves.

The governator has said that this means that numbers of critical government programs must be terminated, because there is no way to pay for them. The speaker of the state senate is working on a bill that attempts to preserve those programs' structures, but seems to effectively eviscerate their funding, such that they will be mere shadows of their former selves untril further funding can be secured. Neither seems likely to succeed entirely, but both will parbably get some of what they're after, and the state will see drastic reductions in fairly essential services until it begins to sink in with the voters that they need to find some way to pay for the programs they want.

There has been a great deal of chat about the whys and wherefores of this bankruptcy (national recession, California being the epicenter of the mortgage collapse, and various political posturings on the part of one side or the other), but the one thing I haven't heard mentioned yet in the national coverage I've seen of the problem is something that happened thirty years ago. That something was the passage of the ballot initiative known as Proposition 13, the "Jarvis-Gann" property tax initiative, which amended the state constitiution to limit the state property taxes to 1% of assessed value and prevented any increase in that assessment greater than 2%/year, unless the property changed hands.

The measure immediately cut property tax revenues in half for the state, leading to budget nightmares that have persisted ever since. It also was the first shot fired in a national tax revolt that ushered in thirty years of conservative dominance of national politics, along with the cavalcade of economic fantasies about the value of cutting taxes which that dominance has spawned.

Unlike the federal government, California can't print money, so it has long been a bellweather of the impact of making political hay by cutting taxes without reducing spending - school budgets and other state services have been pared to the bone for decades, which has turned the state's world-class public education system into an distant echo of what it once was (and an led to explosion of private schools in the state that exacerbates the difference in the quality of education recieved by rich and poor).

Since the lack of state tax revenue forced local communities to make up the shortfalls in sevices left by dwindling state budgets, it also contributed to a widening gap between rich and poor communities (indeed, it was the redistribution of revenues from richer to poorer communities that prompted the initiative in the first place).

California was an incredibly wealthy state at the beginning of the process, though, so it has taken a long time for the state's finances to arrive at the complete collapse that they find themselves in today. At this point, the state's ability to convince creditors that it can make good its debts is gone, so it seems likely that we may see the real consequences of Prop 13 played out over the next few weeks. Once the state's citizens see those consequences in real time, we may well see a movement grow to overturn Prop 13 or otherwise free the state from its inability tro fund itself. That could generate another political sea change in California and add to the similar change which we can only hope is underway in the country at large.

I'm watching a chorus of folks decrying the refusal of the federal government to save "the eighth largest economy in the world" from its troubles, but in none of those comments have I seen any mention of the fact that the eighth largest economy in the world has just finished declining to fund its own government. speaking as a resident of a state with a smaller economy, I can think of no good reason to fund the continuation of that sort of irresponsibility with money my state's having its own trouble raising.

At almost the same time that California was sabotaging its own finances and inspiring the nation at large to follow suit, there was a revolution in Iran that replaced the repressive, US-backed regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi with the theocratic and also repressive regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, and led to the taking of the US embassy staff hostage for over a year by "students" obviously acting at the behest of the regime.

That act brought to a critical head an antagonism between the US and Iran which has stayed impenetrably hostile for thirty years and has contributed to several of the spectacular missteps made by the US government in the middle east over that time (including the invasion of Iraq, which in turn did a great deal to empower the hard-line theocrats in Iran and undermine any movement toward reform within Iran).

Whether President Obama's inspiring and ingratiating speech to the Muslim world in Cairo last month was a factor or not, the internal troubles within Iran have opened fissures within that country's politics that have come to a head over the last couple of days. The putative reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced by the country's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei, only to have the obvious fraud in that announcement overwhelmingly rejected by hundreds of thousands of Iranians, in protests that have continued (and even expanded) to this day.

Three things are impressive about this development. One is that it has been about the same thirty years since the revolution in Iran to the apparent beginnings of the disintegration of that theocracy that we're seeing in the current protests, and if it continues in this vein, it may well be that another sea change moment is upon us. The revolution in Iran and the attendant enmity for the US that attnded it had a great deal to do with the consequences of interventionist US foreign policy during the cold war (in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran by the CIA in 1953), and that memory has remained strong for the intervening thirty years. This evening, I've watched Reza Aslan on CNN reporting that there has been a call for a meeting of the Assembly of Experts that empower the Supreme Leader (the only body in Iran that has the power to actually change the direction of the government by changing or giving direction to that officer), so it's possible that we're finally seeing the consequences of that intervention wane and leave us.

The second notable aspect of this unrest is that the administration has been admirably wise about staying the hell out of the business of avidly supporting the protestors in Iran, since the predictable effect of such support will be to empower the reactionaries to crush the uprising as the product of US meddling in internal Iranian politics. Unfortunately, much of what's left of the Republican party has been predictably stupid about the same decision, with Congressmen Mike Pence and Eric Cantor proposing a resolution voicing support for the protestors, John McCain demanding that the administration condemn the elections as a fraud and the repression that has followed as unacceptable, and of course, Joe Lieberman continuing to wax hysterical about what a threat Iran is and what we must do to protest against that threat, regardless of the consequences of such protests.

Finally, the restrictions placed by the government on foreign press coverage of the uprising have been very troubling, but they have also spurred an incredible blossoming of citizen journalism from within Iran, and there has been a steady stream of reports via Twitter and Facebook that have described the trouble in gripping detail. Nico Pitney's live blogging of the uprising on Huffington Post has been incredible, and the video footage has been dramatic and moving. There has been a demonstrative proof that journalism is not dead, and I defy anyone to find me a professionally produced news package more dramatic, moving, or informative than this:

Head Scratcher du Jour

Hmmmm...

I heard a Memorial Day episode of Tom Ashbrook's NPR "On Point" program on Monday that had Andrew Bacevich on, discussing our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. For those who aren't familiar with Bacevich, let's just say that his scholarship and his experience demand our respect. He served in two wars, retired as a colonel, lost a son in Iraq, and has been a scholar of American military policy in several places, including West Point and now Boston University. His book, The Limits of Power, is an important piece of work that levels a withering criticism of US military policy over the last few years, the essence of which is contained in its subtitle (the End of American Exceptionalism).

Bacevich suggests that President Obama has made important changes to American policy, in reducing our commitment in Iraq, shutting down Guantanamo (assuming the chickenshits in the Senate will let him do that) and so forth, but he says that Obama's own policy suffers from a failure to conceive a strategy that is consistent with what we can achieve on the middle east and takes into account root causes of the enmity toward the US that we have seen explode in that region over the last decade or more.

He is careful to emphasize that he's not trying to suggest that we caused or should feel guilty for the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but that we should think carefully about where the anger that causes them comes from, and should take the sources of that anger into account as we form a strategic response that governs our middle east policy.

Bacevich rejects the strategic assumptions of the Bush administration as wildly unrealistic and anchored in flawed assessments of the real situation, but he does say that the anger we are seeing in the middle east is in significant measure a function of our intemperance in trying to make the rest of the world fit and acquiesce to our own thirst for oil and our insistence that the societies in the middle east function in ways that we approve of, regardless of whether those ways are satisfactory to those people in them who must live with the consequences of our choices for them (hint: they're not).

In that sense, depite his condemnation of Bush's policy, Bacevich's critique raises an interesting question. Bush was fond of saying (and every member of the right-wing Greek chorus that sang us into war was fond of echoing) that "they hate us for our freedom". It occurs to me that while taken as it was offered (i.e., that "those people" hate freedom per se), the assertion that they "hate us for our freedom" is nonsensical on its face, it may be closer to the truth than I have given it credit for in the past. If our "freedom" is freedom to consume absurd amounts of oil and monkey around with their societies with reckless abandon in order to continue that profligacy, then the people who have attacked us may indeed hate us for our freedom, because that freedom has direct and unhappy impacts on their lives. If that's true, then in an odd way, even though what he proposed to do about it was disastrous, Bush's base assertion was right.

Anatomy of a Misconception

Yesterday's NY Times ran this piece on an interview conducted by ABC's Brian Ross in December of 2007 that created the misperception that torture was both effective and relatively painless, because it was over so fast.

The article notes that the statement by the CIA operative, one John Kiriakou, was not verified at the time, but it has been steadily repeated ever since, despite having been questioned almost immediately as false, something the release of the memos last week proved without any doubt.

It's an interesting portrait of how bad information spreads quickly and persists in the face of counter-eveidence on the nation's TV sets (something it does in the nation's newspapers too, but perhaps less regularly).

Ross Douthat at the NYT

Ross Douthat published his first column as the new NYT conservative columnist, and it was certainly an improvement on Bill Kristol's maundering diatribes. Douthat wrote a what-if column, positing the results for American conservatism if Dick Cheney had run for president instead of Johnh McCain.

It's an interesting question, and Douthat's answer is a likely one. He observes that Conservatives have somehow managed to convince themselves that McCain lost because he wasn't conservative enough, and conservatism itself was betrayed by the Bush administration, which strayed from Cheney's ideological purity. He goes on to speculate that having Cheney get his ass handed to him in an election might have had the twofold effect of discrediting both that doctrinaire version of conservatism as an electoral strategy and Cheney himself, which might now be sparing us from having to watch Cheney lead the charge against the Obama administration with his anti-spending, pro-torture version of conservative critique, a critique that Douthat rightly observes is likely to keep conservatives and Republicans in the electoral wilderness for another several election cycles, if not destroy the party and the movement entirely.

That conclusion is very likely right, and it's certainly welcome to read a conservative who doesn't just leave me shaking my head at the stupidity of his argument. Despite the overall sense of his column, though, I am surprised at one aspect of Douthat's column. He notes the value of investigations into torture, and correctly notes that the only way to leave this disgraceful episode in our past is to investigate what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again. At the end of that assertion, though, he says that investigations shouldn't lead to prosecutions, "unless the Democratis party has taken leave of its senses". He doesn't explain this conclusion, and he should, because maintaining that war crimes should be investigated but not punished leaves a huge hole in an otherwise sensible column.