Political MoJo

Don't Forget Failed States...

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| Tue Jul. 19, 2005 2:07 PM PDT

Seems that our counterterrorism operations in Somalia are causing a bit of a problem. This from the abstract of a new International Crisis Group report:

Since 2003, Somalia has witnessed the rise of a new, ruthless, independent jihadi network with links to al-Qaeda. Based in lawless Mogadishu and led by a young militia leader trained in Afghanistan, the group announced its existence by murdering four foreign aid workers in the relatively secure territory of Somaliland between October 2003 and April 2004. Western governments, led by the U.S., responded to the threat of terrorism in and from Somalia by building up Somali counter-terrorist networks headed by faction leaders and former military or police officers, and by cooperating with the security services in Somaliland and neighbouring Puntland. The strategy has netted at least one key al-Qaeda figure, and as many as a dozen members of the new jihadi group are either dead or behind bars.

Despite these successes, counter-terrorism efforts are producing growing unease within the broader public. Few Somalis believe there are terrorists in their country, and many regard the American-led war on terrorism as an assault on Islam. Unidentified surveillance flights, the abduction of innocent people for weeks at a time on suspicion of terrorist links, and cooperation with unpopular faction leaders all add to public cynicism and resentment. Without public support, even the most sophisticated counter-terrorism effort is doomed to failure.

As Stygius reminds us, the battle against al-Qaeda, such as it is, won't succeed so long as the Bush administration worries more about "rogue" states than it does "failed" states. Obviously it can do both, but the focus over the past four years has very clearly been on the behavior of state actors like Iraq, Syria and Iran. In Somalia, meanwhile, some counterterrorism operations are being conducted, but nothing connected to a larger project that transforms the country from a place where terrorists and other militants might gather into a stable and functioning government. Without that, it's hard to see any sort of long-term success here, as ICG notes. Thinking beyond al-Qaeda, you get people like Thomas Barnett who argues that the United States can either deal properly with these failed states now, or wait until they burst into some major conflict down the road. Handling a country—and that term's used loosely—like Somalia quite obviously isn't all strawberries and cream; all the same, as Susan Rice pointed out two years ago, the administration doesn't even seem to have a strategy for dealing with failed states.

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Welcome to Syria

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| Tue Jul. 19, 2005 1:37 PM PDT

The Jamestown Foundation stumbled across something interesting here: a Syrian website puts out a call for mujahideen to come to Iraq through Syria. It starts off by noting, "the situation of the mujahideen in Iraq is entirely stable, and that they are not suffering at all from any shortfall in mujahideen," and says they don't need any more inexperienced fighters. Apparently they've got all the rubes they need for suicide bombings. But it also warns fighters to be wary of the Bashar regime in Syria.

Obviously who knows how reliable this is, but it's one small piece of evidence that: a) the foreign fighters in Iraq feel confident about their strength (though they could well be bluffing), and b) the Syrian regime doesn't appear to be aiding and abetting the foreign component of the insurgency. (I believe there's still some question as to whether Syria is harboring some of the ex-Baathist leaders running the native Iraq bit.)

Justice Clement?

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| Tue Jul. 19, 2005 11:32 AM PDT

Rumors have it that Judge Edith Clement-Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans will be Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court after he announces tonight. Bush v. Choice is not pleased with her record on abortion, although she has stated that the Supreme Court "has clearly held that the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution includes the right to have an abortion." (Then again, Roe v. Wade isn't at stake with this pick, and there's no telling how she'll vote on various restrictions.) And it seems that conservatives are getting the secret hand signal letting them know that Clement is okay.

Beyond abortion, though, her record is a bit of a mystery. Jeffrey Rosen has pointed out that she seems likely to support the conservative "federalist revolution"—which, taken to the extreme, could limit the ability of Congress to do things like lay down environmental protections or issue workplace regulations—and is probably more of an activist, one who would cut through established precedent, than a "principled conservative." I think Jack Balkin is probably right that Bush may be making a shrewd move by picking someone who, nominally, supports abortion rights but is, in fact, ready to roll back a slew of lesser-known protections. Then again, she might not even be the pick, so I guess there's no sense in going overboard just yet.

"Debunking" the Minimum Wage

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| Tue Jul. 19, 2005 11:04 AM PDT

Every now and again the distortions about raising the minimum wage pop up again. A few months ago, Power Line—everyone's favorite "Blog of the Year"—was trying to take on David Card and Alan Krueger, two respected economists, by citing data peddled by a fast-food industry-funded think tank a few years back. Uh-huh. Alas, a Blog walks everyone through this debate once more today. The sad part is, this comes up every few months, and right-wingers will probably bring it up from now until time immemorial. There are good arguments against raising the minimum wage, but few of them are clear-cut, and most evidence shows that the policy simply doesn't have a horrendous effect on employment. The Economic Policy Institute—which is hardly an unbiased source, granted—looked at state-by-state evidence, and found that raising the minimum wage has hardly been a disaster anywhere you looked.

By the by, every time the debate over the minimum wage comes up, some conservative will ask, as Powerline does, "Well if you think the hourly minimum needs to be raised to $7, why not $14, or $140?" As if this is some sort of refutation. Conversely, we could ask, if you think a $400 billion deficit is okay, why not $800 billion, or $4 trillion? If you think 15 years is an acceptable prison sentence for manslaughter, why not 50, or the death penalty? If you think 60 Senators are enough to filibuster a law, why not 70, or 100? We could play this game all day and it won't get any less dumb. For instance, an interesting 1999 survey by the Levy Institute found that over three-fourths of employers wouldn't change their employment decisions if the federal minimum was raised to $6, but found small effects if it was raised to $7.25. So there are trade-offs here, as always. That's why most liberals nowadays think a combination of a modest minimum wage hike and a boost in the Earned-Income Tax Credit is the way to go.

What Does Welfare Do?

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| Tue Jul. 19, 2005 10:31 AM PDT

As the New York Times goes after New York's Medicaid program for fraud, waste, and abuse, it's worth taking the time to read this new report by the Center on Budget Policy Priorities documenting the positive side of social welfare programs. The safety net in the United States, meager as it is, has nonetheless managed to cut the number of Americans living in poverty in half, has reduced the severity of poverty for those who are poor (raising their incomes from 29 percent of the poverty line to 57 percent), and providing health insurance to tens of millions of individuals—many of those children. The report, I guess, is a bit of cheerleading, but sometimes this cheerleading gets lost when all the headlines are screaming about waste, fraud, and abuse.

As far as Medicaid goes, there's another sort of waste, fraud, and abuse that goes on and, sadly, won't garner a two-part investigative feature: namely, the lengths towards which states will actively try to deter people from getting on the Medicaid roles. This can be done through a complex registration process, or making it harder for people to figure out whether they're eligible or not, or what have you. This sort of abuse augurs for expanding, not contracting, Medicaid. (Ideally, of course, we'd revamp the entire health care system, but in the absence of that, Medicaid ought to be expanded.) There's absolutely no reason to cut the program—as George Pataki and the Republicans in Albany have been doing for the past decade—just because unscrupulous dentists are making a killing by gaming the system. Police it better. Offer stiffer penalties for this sort of white-collar crime—after all, serious jail time is more likely to deter white-collar criminals than, say, murderers. But don't gut it; as CBPP shows here, it's working far too well and is far too important for far too many people.

Privatization Sinks Further

—By

| Tue Jul. 19, 2005 9:25 AM PDT

Yikes, it seems that Bush's new topic economic advisor, Ben Bernanke just put a spike in the House Republican plan to privatize Social Security. That plan had abandoned all pretense that the program was in "crisis," and decided instead to just borrow billions and billions of dollars to fund "temporary" private accounts. Candy for everyone, it was, and an outright disaster too. But now, barring a House revolt against the White House—and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) did respond to Bernanke by saying, "I don't think the White House is drawing any lines in the sand, these comments notwithstanding"—that plan is dead.

Anyway, it's certainly very responsible of Bernanke not to squander his professional reputation over a crazy House plan, although he still seems to be committed to Bush's privatization idea—namely, steep benefit cuts, bigger deficits, and exposing pensions to increased risk. At the same time, that's also the plan least likely to pass: so long as White House officials pretend that the program is in crisis, and so long as they maintain that that crisis actually needs to be fixed, and so long as they refuse to raise taxes, then benefit cuts will become very necessary, which, as we've seen, are the most unpopular part of this whole fiasco. Meanwhile, it seems the Senate can't get anything moving on this either.

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New Badge

Mon Jul. 18, 2005 3:59 PM PDT

The Army recently announced the Combat Action Badge, a new award intended for any soldier who comes under fire in a combat zone. A similar badge has long been available to infantry and medical team members, but the military found it necessary to create an award for the large numbers of MP's, supply line soldiers, and base crews being injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a recognition that these soldiers are now being called upon to do the job that once was the province of infantry.

Soldiers can receive the badge multiple times, but only once for each "qualifying period." The award is available retroactively from September 16, 2001. The inaugural qualifying period will close, as the authorizing document delicately puts it, at a "date to be determined.

Turning Off Gays

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| Mon Jul. 18, 2005 3:09 PM PDT

Salon's feature on Christian groups peddling "reparative" therapy for gay men and women—to cure them, you see, and help them live a normal and happy and healthy lifestyle—is truly horrifying. See, for instance:

Reparative, or "conversion," therapy, as described by its practitioners, resembles something like Freudian psychoanalysis mixed with a dose of Christian theology. The basic theory is that a young boy's futile search for love and affection from an emotionally unavailable father gets contorted into sexual desire for men. "What we are seeing, almost without exception, is the classic triadic family pattern," says Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality). "That is, a distant, detached, critical father, an overinvolved, intrusive, domineering mother, and a temperamentally sensitive, introverted artistic son." As for women, "We see an early breach between the mother and the daughter at an early age."

Very interesting. So if I were to point out that I know gay men who don't have emotionally unavailable fathers, would— Ah, ah, right. It's just being repressed. Okay. And if I know gay women who don't "see an early breach between…" oh, right. Again, repressed. How clever. Luckily, though, the correctional camps are here to help:

This summer, the ministries' controversial methods flared up in public. Gay rights protesters hounded Love in Action after the parents of a 16-year-old boy, "Zach," sent their son to Refuge, an intensive Love in Action therapy program -- apparently against his will -- after he told them he was gay. Just before going into the eight-week program, Zach wrote in his blog, "I can't help it, no, I'm not going to commit suicide, all I can think about is killing my mother and myself. It's so horrible," he wrote.

According to Love in Action's rules, posted on Zach's blog, clients must report sexual fantasies to the staff. The program specifies the exact length of haircuts and how many times men must shave each week (seven). Love in Action bars jewelry and clothing by Abercrombie and Fitch. The rules prohibit "campy gay/lesbian behavior and talk." New clients are not allowed to talk to or make eye contact with anyone for the first three days. Clients have to wear pajamas to bed and if they get too cozy they "must always have exactly one person between them." Clients cannot keep a diary, and all their belongings are searched every morning by the "Chain of Command." All secular media, including music and movies, are forbidden. Also, during counseling -- no "disgusting" faces.

Naïve as I am, I had no clue that Abercrombie and Fitch—what with all those stores plastered with posters of near-naked women—was actually making men gay. More seriously, though, this is all extremely disturbing stuff. One of the more interesting poll findings that has emerged of late is that the "Christian Right" is really quite popular in America. I have two theories about this. One, that the prominence of a few token wackos on the radio and TV—like Jerry Falwell, who claimed that 9/11 was caused by gay people—makes the James Dobson crowd, the folks running the "correctional" camps and whatnot seem moderate by comparison. Second, for the most part the far Christian Right has been able to couch its attack on gay people in terms that others can, to some extent, sympathize with—like the long decline of marriage as an institution or the corrupting influence of popular culture. But read the Salon story: there's no way to hide what's really going on here. I do wonder how popular Dobson and his ilk would be if this sort of thing was publicized more widely.

Fiddling with Iraq's Elections

—By

| Mon Jul. 18, 2005 1:54 PM PDT

Seymour Hersh's New Yorker story on how the United States may have manipulated the Iraqi elections is now online, and it's an important one, though there's still one unanswered question here: Is manipulating elections ever a good idea? In the case of Iraq, if it was the case that some underhanded tweaking by the United States did, in fact, boost Allawi's moderate Shiite group in the polls, at the expensive of the Sistani-backed United Iraqi Alliance, then that might have turned out better than the alternative scenario. After all, the current Shiite majority, which turned out to be smaller than expected, has actually had to compromise with the Kurds on a variety of issues, and the Shiites in charge have taken a far more conciliatory stance towards the Sunnis—although it's still not all that conciliatory—than they might otherwise have done. You know things aren't going well when tampering with elections is the least bad option around, but occasionally it really might be the least bad option.

On the other hand, this little insight into the mind of the Bush administration is, if true, disturbing:

The focus on Allawi, Campbell said, blinded the White House to some of the realities on the ground. "The Administration was backing the wrong parties in Iraq," he said. "We told them, 'The parties you like are going to get creamed.' They didn't believe it."

Um, an administration obsessed with Iran as a major threat to world peace simply couldn't see that a bunch of Iranian-backed parties were about to win handily in the Iraqi elections? Now as it happens, this "Iranian-backed" stuff tends to get a bit overblown. Yes, as Hersh points out, Iraq has moved closer to Iran over the past few months, signing treaties and arranging for Iran to train Iraqi security forces. But so what? That's the way countries that border each other should be acting. Better connectivity and all. Yes, true, perhaps deep in the bowels of Tehran some mullahs are plotting to take over Baghdad, covertly and sinisterly, but I don't see how an anti-Iranian government in Baghdad—which former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was certainly heading up—would have helped matters any. But back to the passage above, that sort of sheer blindness to the realities on the ground described by Hersh are, perhaps, even more of a worry than excessive "hawkishness" towards Iran.

Bomb Mecca?

—By

| Mon Jul. 18, 2005 11:58 AM PDT

It's more than a little tiresome when conservative pundits go off, find some fringe college professor or anonymous poster at Democratic Underground or George Galloway (in Britain!) making some irresponsible or stupid remark, and then hold the statement up as "proof" that American liberals—and Democrats in particular—are all a bunch of raving lunatics. Especially when we can find sitting members of the United States Congress saying stuff like this:

U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo's [R-CO] office on Sunday tried to clarify remarks the congressman made on a radio show that the U.S. could threaten to "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalists were to attack the country with nuclear weapons.

Tancredo's rumored to be running for president in 2008, by the way. Anyway, here's the clarification: "I do not advocate this. Much more thought would need to be given to the potential ramifications of such a horrific response." Yeah, just a bit more. Anyway, back to hearing about how the BBC edited out the "terrorist." Those decadent leftists…

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