6:47 PM
New Strategy in Gay marriage Standoff
In a novel approach to contesting gay marriage bans, Reverend Michael Ray and St. Thomas's Episcopal Church in New Haven, CT announced yesterday that they will perform no marriage ceremonies at all. Even though no gay couples have asked to be married there, Ray sent a letter to the 115 families of the church informing them of the new strategy to combat discrimination. Ray noted that he could recommend other churches but also asked couples "to postpone their marriage and stand in solidarity with same-sex couples so they understand what it's like not to have that privilege."
With the fight over gay marriage bans sweeping the nation, most recently in Arizona and Virginia, this issue will continue to dominate domestic debates in future elections and ballot initiatives. Although St. Thomas Church actions are unlikely to change the Episcopal Church's gay marriage ban or significantly impact the overall debate, the increase of solidarity does come at an important time for gay rights activists and their supporters. This week over twenty gay rights groups -- including the Log Cabin Republicans and Stonewall Democrats -- issued a statement that they work together in 2005 toward common goals and collective action. In the statement they put forth a broad call for support and emphasized the importance of solidarity efforts like Reverend Ray's in the fight for equal rights:
"Even the most vibrant, vital community can, over time, settle into a status quo. A movement cannot. And the success of our movement is measured not only in the hearts and minds we change, the allies we engage and the civil rights we secure, but in the strength of our collective commitment to the pursuit of enduring social, political and legal change that moves us ever closer to true equality."
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4:38 PM
The sad state of human rights
On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released its 15th annual report on the state of global human rights. Quite rightly, the reports leads off with the genocide in Darfur and the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, both of which writer Kenneth Roth views as credibility failures by the Bush administration:
No one would equate the two, yet each, in its own way, has had an insidious effect. One involves indifference in the face of the worst imaginable atrocities, the other is emblematic of a powerful government flouting a most basic prohibition. One presents a crisis that threatens many lives, the other a case of exceptionalism that threatens the most fundamental rules. The vitality of the global defense of human rights depends on a firm response to each – on stopping the Sudanese government’s slaughter in Darfur and on changing the policy decisions behind the U.S. government’s torture and mistreatment of detainees.
The full 540-page report is available online, and includes sections on rights abuses by region. For the U.S., it highlights the holding of prisoners without charges at Guantanamo Bay, holding prisoners in the U.S. on secret evidence, deportation of immigrants, resistance to sentencing reform, and the continued use of the death penalty. Altogether, the report paints the picture of a world and a United States with great distance left to cover when it comes to human rights. Give it a read-through.
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3:11 PM
Think-tank roundup
Because there's more out there than Social Security reform (really!), let's look at what the think tanks have been doing this week…
Brookings: Okay we lied, there might not be more out there than Social Security reform! Still, do check out this transcript of a Brookings panel on the topic. At one point, finance professor Jeff Brown calls those who claim there is no crisis a bunch of "ostrich[es]". Sorry, but even if we do nothing, when the Trust Fund finally goes broke in 2053 or later, the program will still be able to pay out benefits 20 percent higher than they are today. Obviously you want to smooth out the transition so that the cuts don't come all at once, but that's not a bad deal. And it's certainly better than any phase-out scheme the president comes up with. Also: Peter Singer has an important op-ed on the use of child soldiers around the world.
CEPR: Dean Baker has a new paper explaining why homeownership is not always appropriate or desirable for low-income families. (Something this site covered just a short month ago.) Bush, of course, sees things otherwise, which is why he is now slashing the Department of Housing and Urban Development's budget in favor of a bigger, bolder homeownership agenda.
CFR: Iran experts debate what is to be done about Iran's nuclear program. Also, Laurie Garrett has some constructive suggestions on how nations can avoid the worst excesses of natural disasters.
PPI: Edward Gresser comes out swinging against the U.S. tariff system, noting that while they are "ineffective at protecting U.S. jobs, they are very good at complicating the life of single mothers." Too true. If anyone can explain why we still have 48 percent tariffs on sneakers, I haven't heard it.
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1:01 PM
You call this a battle?
Hey where's the Democratic war room? Nowhere, according to this Washington Post piece about how the Bush administration is going to go all out to sell Social Security privatization. The president will tap into his campaign network and use his "campaign-honed techniques of mass repetition, never deviating from the script and using the politics of fear to build support." Okay. That's about what we'd expect, but then we find this paragraph further down the piece:
Democrats, scrambling to organize in the face of a multimillion-dollar juggernaut, have yet to settle on any particular counterargument but said they believe Bush's rollout of the idea has been rocky and new details will give them more ammunition.
Oh, for the love… Get thee to your talking points! There's a very simple counterargument here. Social Security is not in a crisis and we have bigger problems to deal with—like a general fund that's running huge deficits right now. Social Security is a healthy and successful program that needs to be strengthened, not gutted. Even if the Democrats still need to hone their general message somewhat—and by all accounts, they do—they should get out there banging the "no crisis" drum, day in and day out, starting right this instant. Because if they cede the factual high-ground to Bush, everything else is lost. Meanwhile, let's see those liberal 527s start kicking it into high gear again...
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12:23 PM
Gordon Brown's "Marshall Plan"
Last week, MotherJones.com noted the efforts of UK Chancellor Gordon Brown to suspend debt payments for countries hit by the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean. By getting the G7 nations to agree with a suspension plan, Brown scored an early victory in his quest to create a "new Marshall Plan" to help developing nations rebuild.
This week, Brown’s taken his debt-relief mission to Africa. In Tanzania, the chancellor signed an agreement under which Britain will pay roughly 10 percent of Tanzania’s debt to creditors like the World Bank. On Friday, he traveled to Mozambique, where he promised:
"The United Kingdom is going to take the lead in getting further debt relief for Mozambique in order to release more resources for strategic sectors such as education and health, particularly the fight against HIV/Aids."
Britain holds the rotating chairmanship for the G8 this year, and will host its summit in Scotland this summer. Brown (generally considered Labor’s best alternative to his rival Tony Blair) plans to use Britain’s chairmanship to focus on debt relief:
"Our wish is to have 100 percent debt relief and we hope that America, Japan, France and other European countries will follow Great Britain in this effort. We hope that we are in a position to get all other countries to sign up to a new a package of debt relief."
Meanwhile, the U.S. has yet to make good on the relief it promised back when Bill Clinton was still in office.
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11:40 AM
And it's not just Iowa...
Jeff raises some good questions below about Peter Beinart's attack on Iowa voters. To pile on just a bit more, the first thing that struck me about the piece was this paragraph:
Most Democrats recognize that they have a problem on national security -- a problem exemplified by November exit polls showing President Bush with an astounding 72-point lead among voters who cited "terrorism" as their overriding issue. What most Democrats don't recognize is that the Iowa caucuses are a critical part of that problem. For starters, Iowa Democrats are dovish even by Democratic standards. Historically, the "peace churches" -- Quakers, Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren -- have thrived in the state. Few states receive as few defense dollars as Iowa, and few have as great a skepticism toward military force.
That all seemed a bit suspicious ("peace churches," eh?), so it was worth checking out the exit polls from the 2004 primaries. It turns out that only 24 percent of Iowa caucus-goers approved of the war in Iraq—which isn't a great measure of "dovishness" but it's the only one available. Now that was a bit less than the percentage supporting the war in New Hampshire (30 percent) or Missouri (34 percent), but Iowa caucus-goers were actually more hawkish than primary voters in both Virginia (21 percent) and South Carolina (23 percent)—two states that moderate Democrats think we need to target.
So if there is in fact a "dovish primary" problem, it extends to all states, not just Iowa. And why wouldn't it? Primary voters tend to be very liberal, no matter what state they're in. The system tends to exclude independents or "curious" Republicans. As Mark Schmitt has argued, if you want the primaries to exercise a more moderating influence, then the correct thing to do is open them up to all voters. Simply switching up the primary schedule won't necessarily solve the relevant problems.
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11:19 AM
Decision-making in Iowa
As previously noted, one of the Democratic Party’s post-election tasks is to get cracking on a nominating schedule for 2008. And like a lot of post-election decisions, it gives the Democrats lots of chances to bicker over why they lost in November.
In Friday’s Washington Post, Peter Beinart lays some of the blame on the Iowa caucuses, which he claims give liberal voters who are "dovish even by Democratic standards" a disproportionate voice in choosing the nominees.
However, the history of the caucuses doesn’t bear that out. Even assuming voters are making a choice based on national-security issues (and in many elections, the majority don’t), the more liberal or dovish candidates haven’t performed all that well. Beinart points to the rise of Howard Dean in pre-caucus polls these year as a sign, but Dean was rising nationwide, and Iowa voters ultimately went with John Kerry. The reason most often cited in Iowa was not any anti-war rhetoric from Kerry, but his "electability" (hey, it seemed plausible at the time).
In 2000, frontrunner Al Gore won nearly two-thirds of the Iowa vote against former Sen. Bill Bradley, despite Gore taking a more conservative stance on nearly every issue (ditto 1980, when an embattled Jimmy Carter got 59 percent against 31 percent for Ted Kennedy). Iowa voters went with favorite-son Tom Harkin in 1992 (that race’s main dove, Jerry Brown, got only 1.6 percent despite being competitive nationally), Dick Gephardt in 1988, Walter Mondale in 1984, Carter in 1976 and Edward Muskie in 1972 -- a who’s who of "electable," safe choices). As Beinart notes, the anti-war candidacy of George McGovern finished second in ’72, but McGovern ran more than 10 points behind Muskie and the most-dovish candidate, Eugene McCarthy, barely registered. He’s right that "the caucuses proved disastrous for hawkish Washington state Sen. Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, who finished last there in both 1972 and 1976," but so did most primaries. Jackson was always a long-shot candidate, and no match for Muskie or Carter as a campaigner. Iowa also hurt liberals like Mo Udall, McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey and Sargent Shriver with similar numbers.
There are some legitimate questions about the Iowa caucus system. Beinart correctly notes that it creates low turnout by establishing multiple barriers to participation and the lack of secret ballot leads to vote-switching. But blaming it for soft-on-security candidates just doesn’t wash.
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10:24 AM
Freedom, Opportunity, Social Security
We knew the Social Security debate would never truly get down and dirty until Vice-President Dick Cheney got involved. And his speech yesterday was vintage stuff—misstatements, distortions, confusions. He also seems not to understand that private accounts don't make Social Security solvent—for that you need to start slashing benefits, raising taxes, or changing the retirement age. But no matter. What really deserves attention is his positive case for privatization:
One of the great goals of our administration is to help more Americans find the opportunity to own a home, a small business, a health care plan, or a retirement plan. In all of these areas, ownership is a path to greater opportunity, more freedom, and more control over your own life.
Ah freedom. We all love it. What could be better? Except for the fact that it's not wholly obvious that privatization will make us more free, or offer greater opportunity, or give us greater control over our lives. On that, I'll defer to the National Review's John Derbyshire—an honest-to-life conservative and a mathematician to boot—on the hassles of ownership:
(a) [Social Security privatization] will make my life even more complicated, at an age when I'd be looking to simplify it. More of my life, of the national life, will be in the hands of lawyers and accountants, for a net loss of self-reliance…. only one person in a thousand is smart enough to do portfolio management even half competently. Sosec reform is a nuclear strike against the left side of the Bell Curve, and the middle too.
(b) Gov[ernment] will end up being involved MORE in my affairs, not less. The current system is simple, straightforward, and needs about 8 bureaucrats to run it. With the political necessities of privatized [Social Security] (i.e. you can't let people invest any fool way they please), there will be govt bureaucrats crawling all over the mutual-fund business -- yeah, yeah, but even more than there already are. It will end with some crisis and a complete govt takeover of the securities markets -- "To protect your investments..."
Be sure also to read this post where a portfolio manager emails in to say that "Americans are woefully unprepared to make appropriate investment decisions." Now that's not a good political argument—no voter wants to be told that he or she is a sucker, but it's a hard fact to skirt around. Confusion is not freedom.
There's another way to look at this, too. As political scientist Jacob Hacker has often written, people are incredibly risk-averse, and if we want to promote dynamic economic growth, ideally we'd figure out some way to get them to take more risks (switching jobs, for instance, or saving and investing) while shielding them from some of the costs of that risky behavior. But under Bush's privatization scheme, people are in fact likely to take fewer risks, especially if their entire retirement depends on it. Social Security, meanwhile, is the sort of program Hacker is talking about—it's a guaranteed minimum pension, which allows you to live freely, taking risks and seizing opportunities, in the knowledge that you won't end up poor and destitute when you hit the age of 67. In any meaningful sense of the term, that's "freedom-enhancing".
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4:58 PM
WMDs, before and after
Now that Charles Duelfer has officially completed his inspections and Bush administration officials reluctantly admit that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs or "actual stockpiles," the AP recently compiled the select quotes made before and after the invasion. Bush defends himself on Barbara Walters tomorrow night, stating that he "absolutely" would still invade Iraq if he knew that there were no WMDs.
The question to ask Bush is not whether he would have still attacked Iraq, but how he would have convinced the American people to do so without the erroneous threat of non-existent weapons. Looking at the statements made by the Bush administration, before and after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and it's clear they would have found some way to spin it:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002.--"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." -- National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Sept. 8, 2002.
"After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002.
"Saddam Hussein is a man who told the world he wouldn't have weapons of mass destruction, but he's got them." -- Bush, Nov. 3, 2002.
"The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world." -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5, 2003.
"Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. ... We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder." -- Bush, July 12, 2004.
"We got it wrong. We have seen nothing to suggest that he had actual stockpiles." -- Powell, Oct. 1, 2004.
"We were all unhappy that the intelligence was not as good as we had thought that it was. But the essential judgment was absolutely right. Saddam Hussein was a threat." -- Rice, Oct. 3, 2004.
"It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction. Why the intelligence proved wrong I'm not in a position to say, but the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail." -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Oct. 4, 2004.
"He retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and he could have passed that knowledge on to our terrorist enemies." -- Bush, Oct. 7, 2004.
"Based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action because this is about protecting the American people." -- White House press secretary Scott McClellan, on Wednesday.
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4:21 PM
A new twist in Oil-for-Food
Ah, this is interesting. Everyone will recall the UN's ongoing Oil-For-Food scandal, in which investigators are trying to determine exactly how the United Nations allowed Saddam Hussein to skim some $30 billion off the humanitarian aid program during the 1990s. The Financial Times has been digging into this story, and came across an interesting tidbit:
[A] joint investigation by the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian business daily, shows that the single largest and boldest smuggling operation in the oil-for-food programme was conducted with the knowledge of the US government.
"Although the financial beneficiaries were Iraqis and Jordanians, the fact remains that the US government participated in a major conspiracy that violated sanctions and enriched Saddam's cronies," a former UN official said. "That is exactly what many in the US are now accusing other countries of having done. I think it's pretty ironic."
Overall, the operation involved 14 tankers engaged by a Jordanian entity to load at least 7m barrels of oil for a total of no less than $150m of illegal profits. About another $50m went to Mr Hussein's cronies.
This little incident, by the by, occurred in February of 2003, right as the war effort was preparing to get underway. According to FT, "Oil traders were told informally that the US let the tankers go because [Jordan] needed oil to build up its strategic reserves in expectation of the Iraq war."
In universe of Oil-for-Food kickbacks, $200 million is pretty tiny, but that money could have easily gone off to finance the insurgency. And it dredges up questions about the State Department's role in examining all those oil contracts during the 1990s. Where they just as lackadaisical back then?
Speaking of Oil-for-Food, The Nation's Ian Williams has a good piece on how the Republicans are using the scandal as a pretext to launch a long-awaited attack on the United Nations. Crucially, Williams notes (as we did two months ago) that many of the accusations flying about are still based on documents produced by the Ahmed Chalabi-connected Iraqi Oil Ministry. That's the same Chalabi who conned the New York Times' Judith Miller on WMDs, the same Chalabi whose "oil documents" falsely accused British MP George Galloway of getting bribes from Saddam, and the same Chalabi who passed along American intelligence secrets to Iran earlier this year. So it's not clear that we know much of anything just yet, and probably won't until Paul Volcker releases the results of his independent investigation into the matter later this year.
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3:35 PM
Investigating Armstrong Williams
The ball’s starting to roll on the Armstrong Williams payola scandal. While there’s been lots of well-placed indignation aimed at Williams for accepting what amounts to a $240,000 bribe from the Department of Education, both Williams and the Department deserve to be investigated for this arrangement.
On Thursday, Sens. Arlen Specter and Tom Harkin wrote to outgoing Sec. Rod Paige, requesting a list of any other uses of public money for p.r. arrangements like the odious deal with Williams. One of the FCC’s commissioners, Jonathan Adelstein, is also calling for an investigation of whether Armstrong broke the law by not disclosing his payoff.
In a Monday column, The Nation’s David Corn recounted a hallway conversation in which Williams tried defending himself by implying such payoffs are not unusual:
"’This happens all the time,’ he told me. ‘There are others.’ Really? I said. Other conservative commentators accept money from the Bush administration? I asked Williams for names. ‘I'm not going to defend myself that way,’ he said. The issue right now, he explained, was his own mistake. Well, I said, what if I call you up in a few weeks, after this blows over, and then ask you? No, he said."Does Williams really know something about other right-wing pundits? Or was he only trying to minimize his own screw-up with a momentary embrace of a trumped-up everybody-does-it defense? I could not tell. But if the IG at the Department of Education or any other official questions Williams, I suggest he or she ask what Williams meant by this comment. And if Williams is really sorry for this act of ‘bad judgment’ and for besmirching the profession of right-wing punditry, shouldn't he do what he can to guarantee that those who watch pundits on the cable news networks and read political columnists receive conservative views that are independent and untainted by payoffs from the Bush administration or other political outfits?"
As Harkin and Specter noted in their letter, the federal government has laws against propaganda, and paying a pundit to espouse the administration’s line (albeit one already wedded to the administration’s line) just might qualify. There's no question that the arrangement was horribly inappropriate, not to mention a misuse of taxpayer money. The question is how common such practices have become; the matter certainly deserves an investigation.
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1:39 PM
Using FDR against his legacy
Historically, 527 groups formed around a particular election tend to fold up their tents afterward, but not Progress for America. The largest of the pro-Bush (or, officially, anti-Democratic) 527s is still around, pushing the president’s Social Security privatization scheme with ads like this one that opens with an image of Franklin Roosevelt signing Social Security into law.
The ad compares the courage of FDR creating the new system during the Depression (a fair adjective) to the courage of George Bush’s "reform" package (which is courageous in the same sense as going over Niagara Falls or putting your life savings on the craps table in Vegas). There are other problems with the ad (like Bush, it keeps calling mandatory risk "voluntary"), but the invoking of the program’s founder in a campaign to gradually kill it has already generated a response from FDR’s kin:
"My grandfather would surely oppose the ideas now being promoted by this administration and your organization," James Roosevelt Jr., wrote in a letter to Progress for America. "On behalf of my family, I would ask that you cease using my grandfather's image in your advertising campaign."
This isn’t a new tactic on the right, of course (remember the argument that Martin Luther King -- who originated the phrase and concept "affirmative action" -- would somehow oppose it?). Since Bush backers have no trouble appropriating him for political purposes, it’s only fair to let FDR respond:
"Organizations promoting fantastic schemes have aroused hopes which cannot possibly be fulfilled. Through their activities they have increased the difficulties of getting sound legislation; but I hope that in time we may be able to provide security for the aged -- a sound and a uniform system which will provide true security."
The president said that back in 1934. He could just as easily be talking about today.
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12:11 PM
Wal-Mart's image problem
The myriad campaigns to tackle Wal-Mart's global retail dominance, exploitative labor conditions, and discriminatory hiring practices seem to be working. The company launched a national advertising campaign today -- running full-page ads in more than a hundred newspapers as well as starting a website -- touting itself as the model corporate citizen. Although Jay Allen, Wal-Mart's senior vice president of corporate affairs, told Reuters that the campaign is not a response to "specific charges" from opponents, he conceded that "it has just become evident to us that it is time for us to be more aggressive in defining ourselves rather than letting others do that."
But, clearly, the increased scrutiny of Wal-Mart's performance -- from labor, community, low-income, health-care, consumer, and other watchdog groups -- has forced to company to attempt a 2005 makeover. In a statement released in conjunction with the ad blitz, Wal-Mart chief executive Lee Scott argued: "For too long, others have had free rein to say things about our company that just aren't true. We've decided it's time to draw our own line in the sand." The big question then is whether or not organized labor and other critics of Wal-Mart are prepared to draw their own "line in the sand" against the company. With Wal-Mart now pressed to buy some semblance of a pretty public face, it's an opportune time to challenge the goliath when it's down.
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11:29 AM
Belated reform in Ohio
So now he’s happy to take on voting reform…
Ohio’s now-famous secretary of state, Ken Blackwell has announced he will offer counties a uniform, statewide voting system using optical-scan machines:
"Precinct count optical scan voting devices will allow more citizens to vote in an expedited manner while providing accurate, dependable, and paper auditable results. We have a tight election reform deployment schedule, too few allocated federal and state dollars and not one electronic voting device certified under Ohio’s standards and rules. Precinct count technology just makes sense considering the flexibility it provides to financially constrained counties."
In his press release announcing the change, Blackwell talks mainly about the financial benefits of optical-scan machines, though the release does note "the actual paper ballot is then available for auditing and recount purposes." Of course, having such a system in place, say, three months ago would have eliminated some of the myriad voting problems that made Ohio the new Florida and prompted protests in Congress. An optical-scan system still has its own headaches to resolve (including Ohio’s byzantine ballot-order rules), but Blackwell’s announcement is a step in the right direction. Too bad he wasn’t making this push before the election.
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10:57 AM
About those Iraqi elections...
In the New York Times today, Tom Friedman argues against postponing Iraqi elections. As it happens, I don't think we even can postpone elections—the January election date is legally enshrined in both Iraq's interim constitution and the UN resolution 1546, and so long as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wants January elections, that's when they'll take place. So I won't quarrel with Friedman's conclusion. But his reasoning deserves a lot of criticism:
I totally disagree with those who argue that the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections should be postponed. Their main argument is that an Iraqi election that ensconces the Shiite majority in power, without any participation of the Sunni minority, will sow the seeds of civil war.
That is probably true - but we are already in a civil war in Iraq. That civil war was started by the Sunni Baathists, and their Islamist fascist allies from around the region, the minute the U.S. toppled Saddam. And they started that war not because they felt the Iraqi elections were going to be rigged, but because they knew they weren't going to be rigged.
We've heard this "already in a civil war" talk before, notably from Charles Krauthammer, but it's just not true. The Sunni insurgency still fights like a real insurgency—picking the proper times and places for violence, assassinating high-level Iraqi leaders, trying to bleed the Americans to death ever so slowly. The goal, quite obviously, is to erode American support for the war and get us out. Once that happens, phase two kicks in: real civil war. By many estimates, the Sunni insurgency is as big as the Iraqi armed forces, and arguably much better trained. There's no reason to think they couldn't stage a Taliban-style takeover of Iraq in the absence of U.S. troops—or, as Juan Cole suggests, a neo-Baathist military coup.
Now to avoid all this, we want the Sunnis to participate in government. Not all Sunnis would want to—some of the Baathist dead-enders, for instance, or the religious lunatics now affiliated with al-Qaeda—but a lot of them would, under the right circumstances. More importantly, we want the Sunnis to feel like they're getting a decent deal out of this democracy thing. But if elections go off as predicted, they won't. Even a decent 32 percent Sunni voter turnout would give them about 6 percent of seats in the new legislature, meaning that they would have no veto power, very little say over amendments to the constitution, and very little ability to jockey for oil resources. Sunnis know what it's like to be marginalized—they've seen how it's done firsthand. So it's easy to call them all "fascist insurgents," as Friedman does, but these are rational worries.
That doesn't mean there's an easy way out. Some very smart people have come up with possible solutions. Spencer Ackerman, for instance, has suggested that the US could entice Sunni groups like the Association of Muslim Scholars into the new government by offering the lure of negotiated withdrawal. There may be intractable trust issues here, but it's worth exploring. Alternatively, we could convince the new Shiite government to give Sunnis disproportionate representation in the constitutional drafting committee, or create a second legislative chamber like the Senate that offers protection for minorities. All could possibly lure the Sunnis in. But to dismiss their concerns outright, as Friedman does, is a bit childish, and doesn't really help anything. Try to remember: The point isn't to figure out what the Sunnis "deserve," morally. The point is to figure out what will stop people from getting killed.
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10:05 AM
Judgment Day coming for redistricting?
Last month, MotherJones.com noted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s promising plan to take redistricting out of the hands of the state legislature and turn the process over to a bipartisan panel of retired judges. As pointed out, some Democrats are leery of the idea (since they control the legislature), but the current system is basically a rubber stamp for incumbents (none was defeated this year, and only the Gary Condit scandal created a competitive one in 2002).
Now that Schwarzenegger has promoted his plan during a "state of the state" address, Peter Beinart comes onboard with the idea in today’s New Republic:
California Democrats are rightly skeptical of Schwarzenegger's demand for a second redistricting this decade. But they should enthusiastically agree to implement his proposed change after the next census, in 2011. Given that Democrats will likely still control California's state legislature then, the switch could still cost them seats. But that's a price worth paying to try to build momentum for a national change in the way redistricting is done.And the response shouldn't be limited to the Golden State. Democrats across the country should jump on the Schwarzenegger bandwagon, demanding that their states also take redistricting away from the state legislatures that deny voters a real choice over who represents them. In a state like Florida, where the GOP has absurdly gerrymandered to ensure a mass of safe Republican seats, such a change could bring real Democratic gains and perhaps even help put control of the House back in play. More importantly, it would reinvigorate American democracy. Nothing would make our politics more responsive, more dynamic, and more fun than hundreds of contested congressional elections, all over the country.
In the aftermath of the Texas redistricting, the issue is as close to the public eye as it’s been since the peak of the civil-rights movement. If people want to create a system that gives challengers a chance and prevents DeLay-style partisan gerrymandering, now’s the time to get started.
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3:17 PM
How to lose friends and alienate teachers
Andrew Rotherham has an important take on the Armstrong Williams scandal in today's New York Times. It's not just that the Bush administration paid a pundit $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind act. That's bad enough. But what's worse is that the White House is continually undermining all potential support for the program:
Meanwhile, liberal Democratic stalwarts like Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative George Miller gamely resist efforts by groups like the teachers union to gut the law's accountability requirements. The stream of almost entirely avoidable problems and Department of Education gaffes makes it even harder for Democratic supporters of the law to resist the pressure.
Repealing a law passed with broad bipartisan support is usually an uphill struggle. In this case, however, the law's critics enjoy a powerful ally: the Department of Education. It is nearly impossible to buy the sort of bad publicity the department has lately been giving away. The new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, should focus on getting the policy right, and let the public relations take care of itself.
All told, I like NCLB, and there are quite a few liberals out there who would agree with me. The program's not perfect by any means—for starters, it badly needs better mechanisms for dealing with those schools that are failing—but it's a good first step on the way to preserving and strengthening the public school system. And yet… and yet the program will only work if teachers and teacher unions and education bureaucrats all commit to the program, all "become believers and see the positive side, rather than see it as a law that's out to get them," as civil rights leader William Taylor puts it. But so long as the administration is out there paying off journalists, cutting programs to "pay" for deficits, and toying around with the regulations, they're never going to earn that sort of trust and support.
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3:02 PM
Dan Rather vs. Saddam's WMDs
Here's a pretty thoroughgoing comparison. Not all scandals were created equal, it seems.
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1:24 PM
Social Security and race
On the subject of press coverage of Bush's Social Security remarks, I should mention that the Washington Post's story was quite good. Although this bit at the very end could have borne some more scrutiny:
Bush argued that his Social Security plan would be a boon to black men, whose life expectancy is about six years shorter than that of white men. Under his plan, people could pass the private accounts from one generation to the next. "African American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people," Bush said. "And that needs to be fixed."
Stop me if I'm off-base, but when I hear that black men have a life expectancy six years shorter than that of white men, my first instinct is to think that this very fact needs to be "fixed," and not Social Security. You know, by reducing income disparities between races, improving health care coverage among blacks, figuring out how to reduce the number of black men going to prison each year. That sort of thing. But no, apparently black life expectancies are only an issue when it can be used to demagogue on privatization. How compassionate.
At any rate, Bush is wrong. The system is not "inherently unfair" to blacks. If you look at this chart, there's almost no difference in benefits (per dollar of taxes paid) among different races. (Except for Hispanic women, who get a really good deal out of the whole thing, for some reason.) It's true that African-Americans have shorter life expectancies than whites, but they are also more likely to receive disability, they tend to have lower average wages (Social Security is a better deal for low-wage workers), and they have more surviving relatives. So it's about a wash. There's no reason to think privatization will be a better deal than the current system—indeed, it will be a worse deal if black life expectancies start rising.
Meanwhile, the claim that people could "pass the private accounts from one generation to the next" is a bit misleading. That's true if people die before retirement—they can pass on their accumulated savings. Once they retire, though, most people will likely convert their savings into annuity payouts, and there's no way to bequest from annuity.
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12:53 PM
A better way to fact-check
Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias are both rightly frustrated that the media let Bush get away with lying about Social Security yesterday. Indeed, whenever Bush says that the program will be "broke" or "bankrupt" by the time we young folks retire, he's lying, and coverage of any such statement should be headlined "Bush Exaggerates Social Security Problems". Period.
But wait! CBS' Marketwatch.com is running just that sort of piece. Check it out:
President exaggerates problems in retirement system
By Rex Nutting, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Bush: "As a matter of fact, by the time today's workers who are in their mid-20s begin to retire, the system will be bankrupt. So if you're 20 years old, in your mid-20s, and you're beginning to work, I want you to think about a Social Security system that will be flat bust, bankrupt, unless the United States Congress has got the willingness to act now."
The facts: The Social Security system cannot go "bankrupt," for it has no creditors. By law, the trustees will continue to pay reduced benefits even if the trust fund is exhausted. Payroll taxes will continue to come in and benefits will continue to be paid.
According to the trustees' intermediate economic forecast (neither doom nor boom), the trust fund will be able to pay about 73 percent of scheduled benefits in 2042 and about 68 percent of scheduled benefits in 2078.
That wasn't so hard, was it? Stylistically, it's a bit dry, but that could easily get reworked as a newspaper piece. Note that Rex Nutting writes primarily for investors, so there are real consequences when he gets things wrong. So he doesn't get it wrong. By contrast, this egregious Los Angeles Times story—which quotes Bush saying false things without correction—was written by two essentially political reporters. Ditto for Elizabeth Bumiller, who wrote a lazy write-up in the New York Times. They can get things wrong and people will still keep reading—after all, it's just politics as usual, right?
Well, except that Social Security privatization isn't just politics as usual. It's an economic plan that will affect millions of retirees and possibly the financial markets. Facts and figures matter. And most Americans really do want to hear all these gritty details. Now, I don't think we want an analyst like Rex Nutting writing all our Social Security stories. But if these political reporters either don't know how or don't care to get their facts straight, then it's time to find someone who does.
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12:35 PM
The destruction of Social Security: whatever!
Over at TNR, Noam Scheiber is unmoved by last week's Gallup finding that two-thirds of people under thirty don't think they'll receive Social Security benefits when they retire. Sure, it makes sense for privatization boosters to trumpet this finding in support of their case. But, really, so what?
What I don't understand is why, as a substantive proposition, this finding means anything. People under 30 tend to be incredibly cynical about the future. My hunch is that if you asked them whether any once-august but increasingly maligned institution will be around in 40 years--functional public schools, a reliable healthcare system, an objective media, sit-coms, music videos, the Brooklyn Dodgers (oh wait...)--a majority would probably tell you "no". It's just their natural reflex ....
Fair point: It's hard to see how the finding has any bearing on the substance of the debate. Still, as a matter of politics, it's worrisome. If the young'uns have already given up on Social Security, they have little motive to rise to its defense -- which makes it more likely their cynical predictions will come to pass.
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12:16 PM
Bush's secret plan to secure our retirement!
According to the Washington Times, President Bush is planning to use some of his famous "political capital" to pass immigration reform in the next year. Hey, here's a suggestion: Just get that immigration amnesty bill passed, and we can help fix Social Security!
After all, the bulk of those 8 million illegal immigrants don't contribute much in the way of payroll taxes right now. So any amnesty program would likely lead to a decent boost in payroll tax revenue. And since, historically, immigrants tend to return home before they retire, they usually don't collect any Social Security benefits from the United States. Amnesty would be a huge boost. (For the wonks out there, the U.S. has never signed a totalization agreement with Mexico, so we don't have to pay out any benefits to Mexican retirees who only work here for a bit.) Bush's plan also sets no limit on how many temporary workers could enter this country, so it would probably boost total immigration even further.
Now I doubt this little tweak would make Social Security solvent forever. But it would certainly help, a lot. On the other hand, if privatization really moves forward, I wonder how private accounts will fit together with immigration. Will immigrants be able to keep the money accumulated in their private accounts? Even if they only work here for three years? Or would the government just snatch their payroll tax deposits away? How will this all go over with the anti-immigration wing of the GOP? Hmmm….
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10:34 AM
Will Sunnis get out the vote? Not likely.
Via Juan Cole: AFP summarizes an unreleased State Department study, done in December, of Iraqi attitudes toward the Jan 30 elections. No surprses here: Shiites are hot to trot; Sunnis plan to stay home in large numbers. Details below:
- 32 percent of Sunni Muslims are "very likely" to vote.
- Among Shiites, 87 percent said they are "very likely" to vote.
- 12 percent of Sunni Arabs consider the elections "legitimate."
- 12 percent of Sunni Arabs think the elections will be completely fair.
- 52 percent of Shiites think the elections will be completely fair.
- 61 percent of Sunni Arabs are very concerned about their family's safety.
- 24 percent of Shiites are very concerned about their family's safety.
- Among Shiites, 76 percent would boycott if a figure such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani told them to.
- 2 percent of Sunni Arabs said they would boycott simply because a religious figure asked them to.
- 88 percent of Sunnis would stay home if they felt voting would put them in danger.
- 38 percent of Shiites say they would stay home if their are threats of violence against polling stations.
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10:07 AM
Does anyone care about Homeland Security?
I was all set to think President Bush's new Homeland Security nominee, Michael Chertoff, was a bad, bad dude, until I came across this paragraph in the New York Times:
"He was an aggressive prosecutor, but he was never an ideologue," said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University who has been a frequent critic of the Justice Department and has debated Mr. Chertoff several times. "We've differed on many aspects of the war on terrorism, but I think he's a thoughtful and independent thinker on a lot of these issues, and not insensitive to civil liberties concerns."
David Cole's word is good enough for me. (Cole, by the way, hasn't just been a "frequent critic of the Justice Department"; since 9/11 he's been waging a one-man crusade for civil liberties.) Now it's true, Chertoff has done a lot of detestable things of dubious security value—like approving the detention of hundreds of Arab "material witnesses" in late 2001. And his 2003 Weekly Standard essay doesn't really "question[] the practice of holding enemy combatants indefinitely," as the Times claims. (Chertoff called the practice "controversial" but not "unjustified".) But realistically speaking, none of Bush's nominees are going to come in and reverse the administration's detention and immigration policies. So the position may as well go to someone who has shown at least a little bit integrity.
Fred Kaplan's concerns, meanwhile, seem far more salient: Chertoff is a lawyer, and has no experience running a large, unwieldy bureaucracy like that of Homeland Security. As Kaplan writes, "[B]y picking Chertoff, the president seems to be signaling that he views homeland security as an adjunct of the Justice Department." That may be true. Bush was originally opposed to the whole idea of a Homeland Security department, and in his first term the White House put far more emphasis on military tribunals, detentions, and prosecutions—which is essentially Justice Department stuff—than it did on port and border security, coordinating state and local responders, and other actual DHS activities. Meanwhile, the White House is forcing Washington D.C. to pay for its big inaugural party using the city's homeland security money. It might be that the president just doesn't care, and nominating Chertoff is his way of keeping the department irrelevant and ineffective.
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4:12 PM
More Social Security strategy...
Josh Marshall has dug up some old GOP strategy memos on Social Security from 2002, based on extensive polling by the Tarrance Group. Interestingly enough, the memo tells Republicans to take a hard-line against any sort of benefit cuts—something that the White House has already proposed. Not a good sign for the privatizers. The memo also notes, per my concerns below, that simply saying "The Democrats don't have a plan" won't work as an attack strategy. Fair enough.
But one of the most interesting findings, I think, was this:
Electorate's "attention span" on debate about SS is very deep. They will react to all information provided, and won't grow tired or tune out of the debate.
Now that's heartening. From listening to Rep. Sander Levin talk strategy earlier today, it sounds like the Democrats are going to place their bets on this one, letting "the facts speak for themselves" and hoping the voters listen.
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3:58 PM
Allawi admits the bitter truth
For the first time on Tuesday, Iyad Allawi publicly acknowledged the reality that violence in Iraq will make voting in the Jan. 30 election impossible for some areas. He also announced plans to expand Iraqi police and military forces from 100,000 to 150,000 ahead of the election, saying his government has put aside more than $2 billion from its budget for that purpose.
Money aside, however, it isn’t clear that there are 50,000 more willing troops out there. Particularly since attacks against the Iraqi security forces are still on the rise.
What, you might ask, is the Bush administration’s take on all this? Here’s Scott McClellan:
"This election, no one expects to be perfect, but we want to make it the best possible election, with the broadest possible participation."
Indeed, democracy is coming to Iraq, unless you live in certain parts of the country.
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1:10 PM
Those patriots at Halliburton
Leave it to Halliburton to exploit a loophole in United States sanctions. Sure, the U.S. restricts companies’ dealings with Iran for security reasons, but that won’t stop Halliburton from making a quick buck.
As CBS MarketWatch.com reports, the energy giant announced Tuesday that it’s ready to develop a natural-gas field in Iran, with the company serving as a subcontractor for Oriental Kish. As to how this gets around regulations:
Because of Iran's suspected links to terrorism, U.S. companies are severely restricted in their dealings with the country. The 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act limits companies to an investment of $20 million or less a year in Iran's oil and gas sectors, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.However, "separately incorporated foreign subsidiaries are not included in the definition of U.S. persons under the current Iranian executive order," a U.S. Treasury official said. "If a U.S. person is involved, that person may be in violation of the sanctions."
The Halliburton unit is registered in the Cayman Islands as Halliburton Products and Services.
Great corporate patriotism there. And guess which vice president pushed for lifting sanctions against Iran while with Halliburton.
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12:34 PM
The doctor is officially in
It’s now official. Former Gov. Howard Dean has announced he will run for chairman of the Democratic Party.
In a letter posted on the website of his PAC, Democracy for America, Dean echoed some of his favorite themes, including the need for Democrats to contest every election and for the party to avoid running as Republicans-lite:
"As important as organization is, it alone can no longer win us elections. Offering a new choice means making Democrats the party of reform—reforming America's financial situation, reforming our electoral process, reforming health care, reforming education and putting morality back in our foreign policy. The Democratic Party will not win elections or build a lasting majority solely by changing its rhetoric, nor will we win by adopting the other side's positions. We must say what we mean—and mean real change when we say it."But most of all, together, we have to rebuild the American community. We will never succeed by treating our nation as a collection of separate regions or separate groups. There are no red states or blues states, only American states. And we must talk to the people in all of these states as members of one community."
As during the presidential primary, Dean faces opposition from party centrists (some even want Terry McAuliffe to stay). But the idea of Dean as a far-left candidate was always just a straw man based primarily on his opposition to the war in Iraq (an issue on which he proved right, and John Kerry’s equivocal stance gave Bush fodder for the whole flip-flop charge). If party insiders think one of the other candidates (Martin Frost, Wellington Webb, Tim Roemer, Donnie Fowler and Simon Rosenberg) will be a more effective chairman, that’s one thing. But they should consider Dean on his actual merits instead of their since-discredited caricature.
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11:57 AM
Falluja revisited
Two months ago, just after the presidential election, the U.S. army launched a sustained and devastating attack on Falluja. The Bush administration was quick to declare the operation a wild success that killed 1,200 rebel fighters killed took out the city's insurgency.
Iraqi doctor, Ali Fadhil, recently traveled to Falluja and came away with a quite different impression. Check out his firsthand report from the chaotic and devastated city in today's Guardian. (See also this segment of a documentary Fadhil made about his visit, which airs tonight in London.) He paints a grim picture.
"A week after I arrived in London to make the film for Channel 4 News, the tape of the final interview arrived by Federal Express. It was the interview with Alzaim Abu, who had led the fighters in the Shuhada district of Falluja and fought the Americans in the early battles in the city centre. We had been trying to track him down for nearly three weeks. Then Tariq had got a call from him the night I had left for London saying that he would talk....But one thing stood out for me that explained the empty graveyard and the lack of bodies. He said that most of the fighters had been given orders to abandon the city by November 17, nine days after the assault began. 'The withdrawal of the fighters was carried out following an order by our senior leadership. We did not pull out because we did not want to fight. We needed to regroup; it was a tactical move. The fighters decided to redeploy to Amiriya and some went to Abu Ghraib,' he said.
The US military destroyed Falluja, but simply spread the fighters out around the country. They also increased the chance of civil war in Iraq by using their new national guard of Shias to suppress Sunnis. Once, when a foreign journalist, an Irish guy, asked me whether I was Shia or Sunni - the way the Irish do because they have that thing about the IRA - I said I was Sushi. My father is Sunni and my mother is Shia. I never cared about these things. Now, after Falluja, it matters."
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11:15 AM
Kick the can?
I just sat in on a massive conference call with Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI)—who just became the Democrats' point man on Social Security after Rep. Bob Matsui's death—along with a few others, talking about how to protect the program. All in all, I don't think anyone can fault Rep. Levin for wavering on the issue; he certainly has no intention of giving bipartisan cover to Bush's privatization scheme.
But I'm not sure Levin's overall message was entirely sharp. Several reporters badgered both him and former Rep. Barbara Kennelly about how they would respond to charges that their "do-nothing" approach just hands the problem off for future generations. The two Democrats insisted that the "facts would speak for themselves," and that there was simply no need to act so long as Social Security was running a surplus, which it will until 2018.
Now that's right on the merits, but it still leaves Democrats open to the charge that they're lazy on the issue and don't have the political will to fix a problem that needs fixing. One possible response, I think, would be to point out that it's entirely possible for Social Security to stay solvent indefinitely. We just don't know yet. The Social Security Trustees' report did predict a 2042 doomsday date, but that was just a guess. The report also included another, "low-cost," projection, under which the program would stay afloat forever thanks to better economic growth. In fact, even this "low-cost" projections assumes much lower growth over the next six years (an annual rate of 2.2 percent) than President Bush's own Council of Economic Advisers did in its most recent forecast (3.3 percent). So we may well grow our way out of the problem. There's no need to get bearish on America just yet.
Another possible response might be simply to change the subject and point out that we have far, far bigger long-term deficit problems created by President Bush's two major domestic initiatives—namely, the tax cuts and Medicare reform. That might work. Regardless, Democrats need to find some way to argue that they aren't just kicking the can down the road.
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9:38 AM
New Social Security poll
It looks like USA Today/CNN/Gallup has a new poll out, finding that most young voters would support private accounts even if it means benefit cuts. 55 percent of those under 30 call it a "good idea". Now that trend may have a lot to do with the fact that only 9 percent of these voters even believe they'll receive full benefits under the current system. Unfortunately, that's demonstrably wrong—an 18-year-old today would retire in 2053, when the program will still pay full benefits, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office analysis.
So there's a lot of educating to be done. Otherwise, Bush will have a much easier time pushing this thing through Congress, even if older voters hate it (63 percent of the over-50 crowd calls privatization a "bad idea".) Privatizers, after all, can simply promise to preserve benefits for older voters, slash benefits for the already-acquiescent younger generation, and no one gets hurt. Well, unless the dollar collapses from all the borrowing we'll need to do, or the stock market goes south at some point and future retirees are left holding the bag.
Other points of interest in the poll. Only 18 percent of non-retirees believe that Social Security will be their main source of income when they retire. But when you talk to actual retirees, about 44 percent of them do use the program as their main source of income. So part of the challenge in selling Social Security will be convincing people that they won't save nearly as much as they think they will. On the other hand—and this is more encouraging—48 percent of voters don't believe we need to change the program right this very second. That's exactly right. We have much bigger Medicare and general budget problems to deal with first. Borrowing $2 trillion to gut a perfectly healthy and successful program is utter nonsense.
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5:27 PM
A bad year for journalism
In case you missed it last week, Reporters sans Frontières (or Reporters Without Borders, for the boycott-France crowd) released its annual roundup of the state of journalism, and ranked 2004 as the most dangerous year for journalists in a decade:
In 2004, 53 journalists and 15 media assistants were killed, at least 907 journalists were arrested, 1,146 were attacked or threatened and at least 622 media censored…For the second year running, Iraq was the world's most dangerous country for journalists. Nineteen reporters and 12 media assistants were killed there during the year. Terrorist strikes and Iraqi guerrilla attacks were the main cause, but the US army was held responsible for the death of four of them. Ali al-Khatib and Ali Abdel Aziz, of the satellite TV station Al-Arabiya, were shot dead near a US checkpoint on 18 March. Ten days later, the US army admitted responsibility but said it was an accident. Assad Kadhim and Hussein Saleh, who worked for the TV station Al-Iraqiya, were killed on 19 April, also by US troops.
Elsewhere on its site, Reporters uses its Press Freedom Barometer to rate the state of press freedom worldwide (the United States is deemed a "satisfactory situation," but not a "good situation" like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and the Scandinavian countries).
At any rate, the annual report is worth a look, for a sobering examination of just how dangerous a year 2004 was for journalism.
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3:24 PM
More on death squads
Over at Whiskey Bar, Billmon has a short round-up of links and quotes on what the "El Salvador" option really means. Here's one such passage, from Raymond Bonner's groundbreaking account, Weakness and Deceit:
One [Salvadoran] death squad member, when asked about the types of tortures used, replied: "Uh, well, the same things you did in Vietnam. We learned from you. We learned from you the means, like blowtorches in the armpits, shots in the balls. But for the "toughest ones" — that is, those who resist these other tortures — "we have to pop their eyes out with a spoon. You have to film it to believe it, but boy, they sure sing."
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2:17 PM
Our exit strategy is what?
If you haven't seen it already, do read this Newsweek report about the Pentagon contemplating the use of Salvador-style "death squads" in Iraq. The idea, according to Iraq's intelligence director, Muhammad al-Shahwani, is to get the Sunni population to pay a price "for the support it is giving to the terrorists." Get it? And if that's not enough, here's the most disturbing part of the plan:
[O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions.
Leave aside the fact that allowing the Shia and Kurds to terrorize the Sunni population will only exacerbate ethnic and sectarian tensions. (It brings to mind stories from last April about how, after Kurdish pesh fought in Fallujah, Sunni Arabs started promising to "send my brothers north to kill the Kurds.") What I'm most concerned about here is the "Shiite militiamen."
Here's what I mean: I've argued in this spot before that, all else being equal, the new Shiite-dominated government will likely be pretty moderate, and not quite so theocratic as Iran. That's mainly because a number of secular and moderate Shiites will play a big part in the new government. The problem is that most of the Shiite militias are a good deal more radical, and many of them train with or receive funding from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. So any "death squad" scheme that gives those elements more power and authority to go on rampages through the countryside seems like a bad idea. There's real coup potential down the road.
That said, I'm inclined to agree that death squads might just be the most effective way to put down an insurgency. That doesn't make it right, however, and it knocks down any pretense that this is still a humanitarian war. But is there any other option? Over at The New Republic, Spencer Ackerman suggests that this mess could all be avoided if the Shiites can just convince the Sunnis to take part in the elections, in exchange for a promise to kick out American troops. In an early encouraging sign, the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a prominent Sunni religious group, has floated just such a proposal.
Now that's an ideal scenario, but I think it's a hard bargain to see through. The Shia would need assurances that the Sunni insurgents really will lay down their arms—otherwise they would be insane to ask America to withdraw and leave them undefended. I'm not sure AMS can offer those assurances—they certainly have no control of the ex-Baathists in the insurgency, or the groups aligned with al-Qaeda. I'm afraid we're likely to see a situation very similar to that in Israel: a workable peace deal in sight that keeps getting undermined by radical elements on all sides and an utter lack of trust. And that could mean years and years of death squads and rogue militias.
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1:08 PM
Could Harry Reid swing Mormons to the Dems?
That's the central question Amy Sullivan asks in an interesting article just posted over at The New Republic's website. Even though Mormons supported Bush almost nine to one in November, newly installed Senate minority leader is not only the highest-ranking Mormon ever in American politics but also the most powerful Democrat in Washington. As Sullivan argues, Reid serves an important example for the important yet largely overlooked process of bringing more Mormons into the Democratic fold, which could even sway future presidential elections:
"[W]ith Mormons dissenting from Bush administration positions on such basic issues as the faith-based initiative, stem-cell research, and even national security, the possibility of Mormon defections from the GOP fold isn't as far-fetched or delusional as you might think. Nor is the question of their political allegiance merely of academic interest: Although Mormon voters represent a small fraction of the overall electorate, they are highly concentrated in increasingly critical swing states, like Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado."
In a welcome departure from much of the reductive analysis arising from the November election, Sullivan forecasts the future fight in a region so closely divided -- each of these states went Republican by fewer than five percentage points in 2004 -- that Mormons could become the latest swing voters. With all the pre-DNC election talk about increasing the Party and getting more "people on the bus," it will be interesting to see Democrats court these voters while keeping the party faithful happy.
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1:01 PM
And you thought the election in Afghanistan was tough...
A quick look at the headlines from Iraq: Less than three weeks from the supposed election, and the country appears too chaotic for a police force, let alone a national vote. Just to give you an idea, this is what's happened so far this morning:
Gunmen killed Baghdad's deputy police chief and his son in the middle of rush hour traffic, the latest in a lengthy list of election-related assassinations.Two more U.S. soldiers were killed and four wounded when a roadside bomb exploded while they were on patrol. Their Bradley Fighting Vehicle was also destroyed, a further sign that those resisting the occupation have more explosive materials than previously known.
And, finally, the news today that the entire 13-member electoral commission in the volatile province of Anbar, west of Baghdad, resigned amid massive violence. Saad Abdul-Aziz Rawi, the head of the commission, stated that it was "impossible to hold elections" in the province, which includes the volatile cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
The big question is how the Bush administration, and appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, will possibly spin people into believing that this election should take place on January 30. Bush, as usual, has had little to say about the dire situation and massive resistance against the occupation and this election. His latest thoughts, made on Friday and parodied by Sunday, did little to assuage concerns: "And I look at the elections as a -- as a -- you know, as a -- as -- as a historical marker for our Iraq policy." That may well be true, and it's likely that history will not be kind to Bush or his Iraq policy. Allawi, on the other hand, keeps pumping out the rhetoric that his government is intensifying raids and there are "no safe havens" for insurgents. Not all is lost -- at least Allawi's got the administration's rhetoric down.
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12:06 PM
More shadiness from Monsanto
There’s a lot to dislike about GMO/agrochemical giant Monsanto and its bullying business tactics. The weekend news that Monsanto was fined $1.5 million for bribery is just the latest example.
The fine stems from Monsanto’s efforts to avoid environmental impact studies during attempts to open Indonesia to the firm’s genetically modified cotton. A senior Monsanto manager gave an Indonesian environmental official $50,000 to waive the required study (ironically, the official took the money but didn’t waive the study) -- and the company admitted to bribing an unspecified number of officials between 1997-2002.
As a result, the firm now has to pay $1 million to the Justice Department and $500,000 to the SEC. More importantly, it’s again demonstrated just how low it will stoop in its efforts to alter the world’s food supply.
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11:05 AM
Ukraine out, UK in
Rack up another defection from the "Coalition of the Willing."
On Monday, the Ukraine announced it will pull out of Iraq early this year. While incoming president Viktor Yushchenko had promised to withdraw, it was his predecessor Leonid Kuchma who made the call, making the move a bipartisan affair. And the Ukraine has quietly maintained one of the largest contingents in Iraq -- about 1,600 troops who serve under the (also withdrawing) Polish forces.
Meanwhile, Great Britain has agreed to send more troops for a "limited period" around the Jan. 30 election. According to the BBC, these forces will work in the southeastern part of Iraq already monitored by Britain.
Even with these British reinforcements, however, the coalition will be losing a high percentage of troops in the coming year, and the Defense Department still has no answer for who will supplement the already-stretched forces on the ground.
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10:25 AM