Stone Court

As Mary mentioned, I was out of town, in Europe actually. Picked up from a newsstand the May 19 edition of Stern, sort of the German Time magazine. The cover has a shifty-eyed picture of Bush, along with 3 of the more famous Abu Ghraib pictures. The headline text: "George W. Bush[:] Moralisch bankrott".

Can you translate that?

Josh Marshall describes Bush's new take on Ahmed Chalabi, who has apparently been selling our secrets to the Iranians(!) (via Atrios), as "Ahmed Who?". Perhaps he should ask Donald Rumsfeld for a reminder:

In another sign of growing concern, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appealed directly to President Bush to install an Iraqi interim government immediately--made up of Iraqi opposition groups, including the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi. In two memos to the president last week, U.S. News learned, Rumsfeld called for the United States to "support those Iraqis who share the president's objectives for a free Iraq." The State Department and the CIA are very skeptical of the various opposition groups. "They will be viewed as part of the American occupation," says one U.S. intelligence official.

(Mark Mazzetti, et al., U.S. News & World Report, April 14, 2003 (link not available.)

Despite the protests of those who supported the war, the problems we are experiencing in Iraq were entirely foreseeable -- perhaps not the exact contours, but certainly the unjustifiable risks of compromising the war on al-Qaeda, exacerbating anti-Americanism and undermining arguments for American moral superiority, exposing American military limitations, plundering the treasury, and sending hundreds or thousands of patriotic young Americans to death or disfigurement. In a sense, then, opposing the war was easy. Whatever the moral arguments, it was clearly a matter of national self interest.

What to do now is a much harder question. As Liberal Oasis observes, there is a growing rift between those who, like Howard Dean, believe that now that we're there we have to stay the course and those who want to get out as soon as possible. I have always considered myself in the former camp. Indeed, a key reason for opposing the war was the recognition that, once we're there, we can't just leave when things go badly.

But, unlike opposing the war in the first place, this is not an easy call -- and blaming Bush for the disaster doesn't offer much solace. The so-call "cut-and-run" could create exactly the al-Qaeda base we have always feared -- Afghanistan on steroids. On the other hand, staying seems to be a recipe for years of paying "the political price and the price in blood and the price in treasure" with any potential benefit growing ever more remote. The idea to bring in the UN may provide part of the solution, but we all know it's impossible in a Bush administration, and even Kerry is likely to get less help than we would like, given how far underwater the operation is right now.

I'll admit that I'm not sure of the solution, but one thought that occurs is to follow through on our stated goal of democracy. Have real elections. Soon. Instead of struggling to find some puppet for a symbolic handover of power. It does involve a real risk that the United States will have to follow through on its promise to leave Iraq if asked. But, it would be a way to instantly regain international credibility and support. It would be a way to declare victory with one of our key stated goals (or at least rationales) accomplished.

And what would be the real risk? An elected government would be deeply invested in maintaining order, and might not ask us to leave. Even if it did, it would invest the people and the elites in their government in a way that might make the Talibanization of Iraq unlikely. Remember when we worried about return addresses? Does al-Qaeda really want a return address? Remember deterrence? It works.

There may be good objections to this proposal -- it's still in the formulation stage. They need a government infrastructure first (despite Powell's assertion that Iraq "is a country with bureaucracies, with institutions that I think we can build on"). They need economic development first. That may be true, but we need to get past the dichotomy between the unrealistic fiction that we can prevail by continuing to do what we've been doing and equally unrealistic hope that the UN will rescue us without a fundamental change in the mission.

I had the pleasure this weekend of receiving a "Dear Fellow Republican" invitation to join the RNC's Presidential Victory Team. I can't say when it was written, since it's dated "Monday Morning". Anyway, it gives an interesting view of what Bush is running on. The first sentence:

It has often been said that when the President of the United States asks for your assistance...it is virtually impossible for any patriotic American to say no.

Well, I guess we knew that was the approach -- no surprises there. What's more interesting is that abortion is nowhere to be found. Not just in the four page letter, but also in the "issue survey" they want me to send in along with my $180 check. The fourteen questions include gems such as, "Do you support tort reform to reign in out of control trial lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits costing American business and consumers millions of dollars and thousands of jobs?" and "Which do you believe is more important given the state of the world today? [] Winning United Nation's [sic] approval of U.S. foreign policy. [] Protecting our nation's interest and people from terrorists and rogue nations using whatever means we feel appropriate and effective." The last question asks me to rank 10 issues, so in total they ask about 23 issues, and none of them are about abortion -- not even their favorite, "partial birth abortion".

Is it possible their polling is telling them to stay away from this one? Or am I just on the "wrong" part of the RNC mailing list?

Atrios says what we've all been thinking. Make it so.

Ralph Nader accuses baseball commissioner Bud Selig of "great lengths of selfishness" for permitting advertisements on uniforms during two games in Japan. Nader may be right to complain that fans "go to a stadium paid for by the fans and taxpayers, yet almost every available space is filled with ads and named after some multinational corporation with no ties to the community". But if Nader really cared about selfishness, he wouldn't be running for President, satisfying his own ego and helping elect the man who made his fortune on a corrupt insider baseball deal.

Juan Non-Volokh deconstructs an article in today's Times, Court Rulings on Emissions Sharply Split Two Groups, accusing the author of "know[ing] very little" and being "misleading". In fact, the purported errors are vastly overstated:

Non-Volokh's claims that the article's central error is describing the Court's action yesterday as a "decision", when it was merely a refusal to hear the case on the merits (to grant certiorari). Non-Volokh is correct that the Court did not decide the case on the merits, and that the Court's action does not therefore have precedential value. However, that does not mean that it is not a decision -- the Court must decide whether to grant the petition. The Court itself refers to this choice as a "decision" from time to time. E.g., Rubin v. United States, 524 U.S. 1301 (1998) (Rehnquist, C.J.). In any case, the article goes on to explain that "the court refused to hear [the] appeal".

Beyond the semantics, the Court grants and denies certiorari for all kinds of reasons, including the ones suggested by Non-Volokh, but also including a view of the merits or a desire to preserve the outcome below.

Was this denial of certiorari motivated by hostility to environmental regulation? Who knows? But, contrary to what Non-Volokh claims, the Times article doesn't purport to have the answer either. It simply makes the point, in both the headline and the text, that environmentalists and industry groups are split about two recent decisions (shall we say "actions" and solve the problem). Yet Non-Volokh takes the article's reporting on environmental lawyers' charging that the Court's action "reflect[s] a certain hostility . . . toward aggressive steps intended to reduce air pollution" as if that assertion were "the article's underlying premise". That is not what the article says -- it is reporting on reaction to the decisions. Discussion of an environmentally friendly decision earlier this term, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation v. EPA, might have helpful and enlightening, but not, as Non-Volokh charges, "fatal to the article's underlying premise". (Also of interest might have been the fact that this was a 5-4 decision in which the votes lined up strictly along the Court's traditional ideological fault lines.)

Non-Volokh is correct that the phrase "for power plants" should have been omitted from the first sentence. However, this appears to be a case of the awkward construction that can occur when one discusses two things in the same sentence, since later on the author makes clear that last week's decision relates to "vehicle fleet operators", not power plants.

Since we are at the one-year anniversary of "mission accomplished" and David Brooks insists that current criticism of the administration is not "serious" and "child's play" accomplished through the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I thought it worth re-visiting my own letter on the eve of the Iraq war:

To the editor:

Re: "Cassandra Speaks," by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, March 18):

Kristof’s vivid reminder of the lessons of Homer’s "Iliad" reminds me of a similar lesson from later Greek history. In 415 BC, the Athenians, encouraged by a favorable truce in their longstanding war with Sparta, embarked on a war of conquest in Sicily. Like the debate Kristof describes, the Athenians in their assembly debated the benefits of conquest against the risks of fighting a second war abroad while a more pressing one was unfinished at home. The Athenians unwisely voted to proceed to Sicily and suffered an enormous and unexpected military defeat. The Spartans seized the opportunity to end the truce, encourage rebellion among Athens’ allies, and attack the weakened Athens, eventually winning the war and ending that golden era of Athenian democracy.

I fear that by embarking unwisely on this war against Iraq, we like the Athenians risk weakening ourselves in our unfinished war against Al Qaeda.

March 18, 2003

I am not an expert in diplomacy (a "salad-course solon" in Brooks' words), so it is fair to conclude that it is those who say that the problems we are now facing were not foreseeable who are not "serious".