In my post below criticizing the “netroots” (see also Jason Zengerle at The Plank here and here, as well as Kevin Drum’s response) I made the point that one thing that the Democratic Party ought to do to win was

1) Figure out a strategy for dealing with Islamism that doesn’t involve a) super-ninja warriors who will, undetected, identify and mysteriously kill bad guys without disturbing anyone else or b) NUKE THE BIYATCHES;

Whereupon commenters Chris and Davebo went ballistic.

Davebo:

Let’s review the “solutions”.

Figure out a strategy for dealing with Islamism that doesn’t involve a) super-ninja warriors who will, undetected, identify and mysteriously kill bad guys without disturbing anyone else or b) NUKE THE BIYATCHES;

Yep, I believe it was Hillary who suggested method A and Howard Dean who went with the NUKE THE BIYATCES (YeeHa!)
Oh wait, never mind. Those are the two proposals that the Armed Agnostic believes have been suggested.
Well, at least he’s got his finger on the pulse of the DNC right?

Today, the core principles of the (mainstream) D foreign policy are: build better defenses; back out of Iraq as quickly as we can with any grace; possibly say mean things to the Saudis while buying their oil and taking their political and foundation cash (note that the GOP is even better at doing that).

Nope, scratch that.

Um, as politely as possible, bullshit.

Here’s the core issue; there are relatively serious terrorists throughout the world many of whom are in places who wouldn’t look kindly on US troops or proxies invading their territory and killing people.

And the standard line from many serious thinkers close to the beating heart of the Democratic Party is that “we’ll go find the terrorists wherever they are and go kill them!” (the variant being that sometimes we’ll do it in concert with our allies).

You don’t agree? Let’s go to the record.

Here’s the best quote, from TNR’s endorsement of Kerry in 2004:

It is conceivable that, in the coming years, the United States might need to launch military action against another Muslim regime (though, given how greatly Bush has overextended the military, it is hard to see how we would do so). But the war on terrorism is far more likely to require military action within states, to secure lawless areas that terrorists have exploited.

The Bush administration’s misguided tendency to see Al Qaeda as the instrument of rogue governments made it more willing to use force against Iraq but less willing to use force in Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. Kerry, by contrast, seems inclined to use American power where it could genuinely damage Al Qaeda. Even during the Democratic primaries, he attacked the Bush administration for not sending U.S. troops into Tora Bora to destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in the waning days of the Afghan war. He has proposed doubling U.S. Special Forces for operations just like that. And he has proposed strengthening America’s capacity to act–including even militarily–to prevent nuclear proliferation, an issue on which the Bush administration has proved astonishingly passive.

Kerry’s apparent willingness to act within states is particularly important because the U.N.’s obsession with sovereignty renders it impotent in such circumstances.
[emphasis added]

Right then. We’ll go do military-type things within sovereign states and call that a policy designed not to piss off the rest of the world (much less get them to potentially declare war on us, since those actions themselves, whether done by Special Forces operators or Predators would be an act of war). And the UN’s “obsession” with soverignty won’t stand in the way. Riiiight, that’s going to play out well in the intrenational arena.

I’ll skip over the question of whether they really mean it or not (I have a hard time believing liberals would support a covert war of assasination), and grant them that they mean what they say. This is a step-away-from-the-crack-pipe set of policy solutions.

Let me repeat; we’re talking about taking unilateral (or semi-unilateral, with a “Band of brothers” type alliance) military action that results in killing or capturing people on foreign soil, using the people and resources of our military. And we’re not going to do this as the exception, but as the root policy? Are they kidding?

TNR was far from misinformed is taking this stand; here’s Kerry and Edwards in their own words.

John Kerry, Seattle May 27 2004:

“As commander in chief, I will bring the full force of our nation’s power to bear on finding and crushing [terrorist] networks,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a speech here. “We will use every resource of our power to destroy.”

At JohnKerry.com:

Launch and Lead A New Era Of Alliances.

The threat of terrorism demands alliances on a global scale – to utilize every available resource to get the terrorists before they can strike us. Kerry-Edwards will lead a coalition of the able – because no force on earth is more able than the United States and its Allies.

On CNN:

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-NC), VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I’ll add one thing to that, because John and I have talked about this specifically. If he has reliable information that he’s confident of, that a terrorist cell is about to strike the United States and they are somewhere else, he will go get them, before they get us. And we need to be absolutely clear.

Here’s Howard Dean, in a speech to The Pacific Council on International Policy, Los Angeles, California on December 15, 2003

We and our partners must commit ourselves to using every relevant capability, relationship, and organization to identify terrorist cells, seize terrorist funds, apprehend terrorist suspects, destroy terrorist camps, and prevent terrorist attacks. We must do even more to share intelligence, strengthen law enforcement cooperation, bolster efforts to squeeze terror financing, and enhance our capacity for joint military operations all so we can stop the terrorists before they strike at the US.

Here’s The Prospect again:

The Liberal Uses of Power
Clarity in dealing with terrorism, yes; and also in living up to our highest ideals.
By Paul Starr, Michael Tomasky and Robert Kuttner
Issue Date: 03.05.05

When facing a substantial, immediate, and provable threat, the United States has both the right and the obligation to strike preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally against terrorists or states that support them.

…

That alternative can embrace, in our view, both a commitment to building an international structure of cooperation and a recognition that, where terrorism is concerned, preemptive, unilateral, and decisive force may be legitimate.

The right of preemption, however, is not the same as a blanket entitlement to preventive war to overthrow hostile regimes that pose no immediate threat, particularly where other countermeasures, international in scope, may be sufficient to achieve the purpose.

So we can go kill people in foreign lands, but we can’t actually – you know the way it’s historically been done since Westphalia – go to war with the state supporting or housing them.

Somehow I’m reminded of The Merchant of venice.

I’m not going to go down the “was Iraq supporting or housing terrorists” line here; it’s a separate debate well worth having. I’m talking prospectively what our policy tomorrow will be and what the leading Democrats in the country are saying it should be (I’ll discount Lieberman and Gephardt because, after all, the netroots will have defeated them soon and they won’t be a factor – joking!)

I’ve talked about why I think entirely covert wars are a horrible idea in the past, and criticized those who think that they are the solution as well.

Hit Squads And “Pacifists

Another Problem With The “Law Enforcement” Model of Fighting Terrorism

So let me suggest that one powerful step that Democratic thinkers could take is to wake up and deal with the issues that face us in ways that make sense; after all those of us who trust the American voters believe they will know it when they see it.

If you’re a subscriber to The Atlantic (and you ought to be) go check out Robert Kaplan’s latest “The Coming Normalcy” – an account of his recent trip to Iraq [PDF version free at Michael Yon’s].

I’ve updated and extended this post, and here are three quotes to get you started:

But by the time 1-25 left Mosul, a year later, mortar attacks alone had fallen from 300 a month to fewer than ten. Other forms of insurgent activity dropped to the point where international journalists no longer considered Mosul an important part of the ongoing Iraq story—a fact evidenced by their thin presence in the city. Meanwhile, the local police force was now back up to 9,000, and the number of police stations had expanded from five to twenty-four. More important, the number of intelligence tips called in by the local population had risen from essentially zero to some 400 per month.

The kind of chaos that 1-25 had alleviated in Mosul has been an abiding interest of mine. Twelve years ago in this magazine, I published an article, “The Coming Anarchy,” about the institutional collapse of Third World countries owing to ethnic and sectarian rivalries, demographic and environmental stresses, and the growing interrelationship between war and crime. Was it possible that Iraq, of all places, might offer some new ideas about how situations of widespread anarchy can be combated? It certainly was the case that, despite a continuing plague of suicide bombings, significant sections of the country were slowly recovering from large-scale violence, as well as from the effects of decades of brutal dictatorship. The very U.S. military that had helped to bring about the anarchy in Iraq was now worth studying as a way to end it, both here and elsewhere in the Third World.

You’ll note that – in opposition to the bleak view of his earlier piece (which was itself largely informed by the battle of Mogadishu) – Kaplan sees a path to success.He’s not completely happy, however.

It was surreal. The stability of Iraq will likely determine history’s judgment on President George W. Bush. And yet even in a newly secured area like this one, the administration has provided little money for the one factor essential to that stability: jobs. On a landscape flattened by anarchy in 2004, the American military has constructed a house of cards. Fortifying this fragile structure with wood and cement now will require more aid—in massive amounts, and of a type that even America’s increasingly civil affairs–oriented military cannot provide. This house of cards, flimsy as it is, constitutes a substantial achievement. But because Washington’s deeds do not match its rhetoric, even this fragile achievement might go for naught.

and, finally

A final impression of Iraq: one day I had gone with a group of American soldiers to the sprawling ruins of Hatra, a city that was founded after the fall of Nineveh, at the end of the seventh century B.C., and reached its peak in the second and third centuries A.D. Hatra lay in the desert southwest of Mosul, empty of other visitors, without even a guardrail or derelict ticket stand, as though awaiting rediscovery by some Victorian-era explorers. Indeed, the only sign of the twentieth century were the initials of Saddam Hussein, carved into bricks throughout the complex and looking like the marks of just one more tyrant from antiquity.

Hatra had flourished as a Silk Road nexus of trade and ideas; its mix of Assyrian, Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman styles set the stage for early Islamic architecture. The ruins encouraged me to think that Iraq’s best available future was as a similar east-west crossroads, in a Middle East of weak, decentralized states—states that would replace the tyrannical perversions of the modern nation-state that now exist, and are crumbling. In decades ahead, cities like Mosul and Aleppo would be oriented, as they were in the past, as much toward each other and toward cities in Turkey and Iran as toward their respective capitals of Baghdad and Damascus. Borders would obviously matter less, as old caravan routes flourished in different form. Something comparable has already begun in the Balkans, a far more developed part of the Ottoman Empire than Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, this transition would be longer, costlier, and messier. We are in for a very long haul. Except for the collapse of Turkey’s empire, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Iranian revolution, nothing and nobody in a century has so jolted the Middle East as has George W. Bush.

Normalcy can be taken in a number of ways; Iraq will move away from chaos and become normal because of our efforts; or else what we are doing in Iraq will become normal as we struggle against chaos elsewhere in the world. An interesting question to think about…but the simple fact of it is that what we are about will take time and persistence. The Iraqis think so, in Kaplan’s piece:

The offer of safety was backed up with the muscle of the dominant Jabouri tribe, which had decided to go with the Americans against the insurgents—but only after the American military had, month after month, demonstrated its resolve.

And the American troops say so as well:

“The media says there’s no strategy to win this war,” Turner observed. “There is; we’re doing it. But it’s slow, and it doesn’t make headlines like Abu Ghraib.”

Let’s go to the key point; the troops on the ground are doing what they are supposed to, and fairly well. The Administration is failing them because it can’t get reconstruction aid out – even in modest amounts – fast enough and over a wide enough territory to tip the political balance. WTF, President Bush? There is no excuse for this except complacency or cowardice; either they don’t really care what happens in Iraq or the Administration is so craven politically that it cannot stand up and demand what is needed to win.

Wretchard, at the Belmont Club comments on the article and says that we face a Manichean struggle between order and civilization and chaos:

Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states. Occasionally some force of exceptional virulence would escape or be set loose to ravage the outside world: destroy a temple in India, athletes in Munich or a subway in Paris. Through the 80s and 90s the rest of the world toted up its losses at each outbreak, mended its fences and hoped it would never happen again. But after September 11 the problem grew too big to ignore, yet the question of how to destroy anarchy, already by definition in a shambles, remained.

Anarchy is self-defending, as the failed United Nations relief mission to Somalia in 1990 discovered to its cost. It will appropriate relief supplies, money and aid workers themselves as gang property, the economic basis of its system. Anarchy absorbs violence just as it absorbs relief and even gains strength from it when weapons, designed to disrupt ordered societies, are unleashed on it. Countries like Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Iran are defended less by frontier fortifications than by the sheer toxicity of their societies. Not for nothing did Saddam release tens of thousands of hardened criminals from jail immediately before the invasion of Iraq. They were his wolves upon the frozen steppes.

I think he’s partly right, but largely wrong.

The part that’s right is where the ungovernable chaos is either manipulated by greater powers (the Palestinians) or fueled by a rentier economy. Would Hugo Chavez matter if he didn’t have oil money to keep his economy awash and fund his adventures? Would Osama Bin Laden?

It’s the connection points between the anarchy and order that need to be managed, and those are few enough and identifiable enough that we can, in fact, manage them. We’re doing it in Iraq; we’re buying the time with our soldier’s sweat and blood to make change.

The question is – will we use the time? Or waste it?

One issue I’ve blogged about pretty extensively is my concern about the ‘suicidal lemming’ wing of the Democratic Party and what it’s going to do for the forces of true progressivism in this country.

It’s the wing that positive, just positive, that masses of voters will come out and support them if only they are firm enough in their positions – positions near and dear to the hearts of coastal elites, but pretty distance from those living paycheck to paycheck in exurbia and flyover country.

Molly Ivens cuts loose:

As usual, the Democrats have forty good issues on their side and want to run on thirty-nine of them. Here are three they should stick to:

1) Iraq is making terrorism worse; it’s a breeding ground. We need to extricate ourselves as soon as possible. We are not helping the Iraqis by staying.

2) Full public financing of campaigns so as to drive the moneylenders from the halls of Washington.

3) Single-payer health insurance.

Every Democrat I talk to is appalled at the sheer gutlessness and spinelessness of the Democratic performance. The party is still cringing at the thought of being called, ooh-ooh, “unpatriotic” by a bunch of rightwingers.

Molly needs to get out more. She’s talking to all the people Pauline Kael was talking to back in 1968. Now each of those issues has a constituency. And it’s not a small one. But it’s not enough to win national elections, or even to win Congressional ones outside of the deep-blue pockets.

Today we have evidence of that, as the netroots dumped cash, electrons and credibility onto House candidate Ciro Rodriguez in Texas-28; he got beat by Henry Cuellar, who famously hugged Bush at the SOTU.

This brings the netroots record to 0-and something.

At what point do the leaders of the netroots look at the evidence, and consider modifying their course?

Here are the people I’d really, really like to avoid bombing:

A group of about 130 women’s rights activists who gathered in Deneshjoo Park in central Tehran to celebrate International Women’s Day were brutally beaten by the police. As soon as the program started with distributing some brochures and chanting Iran’s women’s movement song, the police informed the attendants that their gathering is illegal and they should leave the premises. Then the police started beating men and women present in Daneshjoo Park and the program was ended. Simin Behbahani, the Iranian elderly famous poet was among the people who have been beaten.

Go see more photos at Arash Ashoorinia’s site. (h/t – Global Voices)

I’m just wrapping up a day at L.A. BarCamp, kind of a low-key Demo Day for Web 2.0 geekitude.

Mack Reed, over at L.A. Voice is blogging the whole thing.

But I had to blog one…a significant Web guy, who I’m sworn not to name, just publicly – in front of an audience including almost a dozen Yahoo! staffers – called bulls**t on Yahoo for turning in journalist/blogger Yahoo users to the Chinese government to be jailed.

To quote: “Why haven’t you quit your jobs? How do you sleep at night?”

Absolutely right.

Tim Oren points me at a well-written comment over at the Belmont Club that ties – indirectly – to Chester’s excellent post of the other day. On wretchard’s great post on Blowback, commenter Wanda says:

Going back to Geraghty’s comments and Wretchard’s followup, I think that if this shift in Western opinion is happening (and I think it is) much more than just the ports deal is dead. President Bush is in imminent danger of finding himself left behind by the American people, and he doesn’t seem to realize it. He could soon be in the same position as the leaders and spokesmen of the EU – a font of noble-sounding platitudes and maxims that nobody pays attention to anymore.

Meanwhile, he will have lost his ability to sway his own people’s hearts and minds, because he invested everything in the cause of winning the enemy’s hearts and minds. All the emphasis has been on persuading Muslims to change; how was it possible that nobody thought that WE might change too? That never entered into the calculations; it always seemed to be a given that the West would be eternally patient, open, and willing to woo the reluctant Muslim world. But while President Bush has been anxiously hovering over his delicate Islamic plant, watching for any promising little green shoot that might repay all his efforts, behind him his own garden has changed into a dangerous, bristling jungle. When he finally turns around, he won’t know where he is anymore.

Now, does this suggest that Tom, Trent, Charles Johnson and the LGF community are bellweathers for a future national majority? Can we expect antimuslim rants on Kos and MyDD?

Maybe not so soon.

Let me suggest a likely outcome, based on a humble metaphor. Food. Specifically, my favorite food, BBQ.Here in Los Angeles, we periodically get upscale BBQ restaurants in fashionable locations – The Pig on La Brea is an example – But I tend to look down on the food in places like that (because it usually sucks) and prefer places like Phillip’s, Woody’s, and The Pit.

I’ve got an eclectic group of friends, but one core group who live on the Westside (yes, they’re all far wealthier and more successful than I am but I love them anyway), and we wander around and do friend-type things that often involve food or culture. Many of them are stereotypical, LAWeekly-liberal in their politics; they have a kind of reflexive progressivism. On matters of race policy, they’re probably more progressive than even I am.

But none of them will come to South–Central with me to get BBQ.

And I can watch them go on alert like pointers when we’re walking in Santa Monica and they see a group of two or three fashionably-thugged out black kids.

Their kids go to private schools, rather than the racially mixed schools of Venice or Santa Monica.

So for them, progressive, egalitarian views are great – at arm’s length. Imagine if you would a Michael Moore who lives in an exclusive co-op, and sends his children to private school – wait a minute, he does.

This isn’t about dissing their views; because I don’t (another post on that soon), I understand them. But it is a model to consider as we talk about the notion that a sea-change in “the Western Street” could take place which involves a fundamental belief that we can’t deal with the Arab world, and that what we need to do is to disengage fast and hard.

In essence, it’d be a position that said “we’re washing our hands of you”, bulked up border and internal security, and made it a point never to drive through ‘those neighborhoods’ without locking the doors, and never, under any circumstances, to stop there. It solves that whole messy “war” thing, and makes sure that no one says bad things about us in our hearing. We’d be clean-handed liberals, and feel secure.

And it would be a disaster.

It would first and foremost be a moral disaster, because we’d be condemning billions of people to a battle with a homicidal tyranny that we had a hand in creating (indirectly, through our policies in the Middle east from the 1900’s onward). We’d be condemning Israel to become even more of a besieged outpost than it is today. We’d be condemning Europeans to a bitter struggle with an increasingly empowered minority.

And while we’d have told them all ‘not our problem’ – to quote Atrios:

Certainly an Iran-with-nukes could blow the hell out of a city or two, but an Iran that did such a thing would pretty much cease to exist. It isn’t mutually assured destruction, it’s you fuck with us a little bit and YOU NO LONGER LIVE BITCHES!

Not our problem, because we’d hide behind our wall of nukes.

And it’d be a practical disaster.

It’d be a practical disaster, because the war within the Muslim world would wind up being won by either brutal oligarchs or by homicidal fascists. If the oligarchs win, we’ll have trading partners, for a while, until they need an outside enemy to whip up their population against. If the fascists win, we’ll have a war right away.

Now Atrios may he happy with bombing the Arab world into oblivion. But I’d really like to avoid that if I can.

The last person to propose anything like this in detail was Jim Henley. My response to him pretty much sums up my response to this whole idea:

Maybe I’m just too tired right now; it’s been a heckuva week, on many fronts. But when I was pointed to Jim Henley’s Grand Plan, I just lost the capacity for reasonable thought; it was so dumb, such a dorm-room, bong-hit driven idea of how the world ought to be that I almost left it alone. Then I got a link to it from a non-blog person, and realized that I had to Go Back In There and wrestle with it.

Because for many of the folks on my team – the left – this is what foreign policy ought to look like, and in a big way my fear is that this could become something actually thinkable. And I’m not sure if I’m more scared that Trent’s vision of the world or this one will come to pass. Actually, it’s because I believe that this one leads, almost inevitably, to Trent’s.

It’s a fantasy that we can all move to a gated community and leave our troubles behind. If nothing else, what would we do for good BBQ?

Wonkette:

* ‘Armed Liberal’ to Middle East: “I can tie a knot in this cherry using just my supply curve.” [Winds of Change]

Which goes to show that you can get all the girls, as long as they have rational expectations. (Yes, I know Wonkette isn’t a girl any more…)

Every so often someone writes a post that makes me channel Jack Black and go “You bastard! That’s so good – that should have been mine… ” Seriously, there are very few blog posts I wish I’d written – and this is one of them.

So shout out to Chester, and click over and read this:

Is Islam compatible with a free society?

This is the key strategic question of our day.

…

Is Islam compatible with a free society? A ‘yes’ answer offers a far different set of strategic imperatives than a ‘no’ answer.

(ht – Instapundit…)

[Update: Looking back at this, and then at the post on MyDD, AmericaBlog, and the New York Times, I’m kinda outraged. I mean, the research for this post – looking up actual mine deaths – took me like five minutes. I spent longer making the graphs legible. How freaking wrong is it to do an article or post on mine safety, and not like look at, say, mine safety? Particularly if you’re the newspaper of record or an A-List blogger?]

Here’s a post that’s going to get me in trouble with my left blog friends. I wrote this a few weeks ago, and put it aside; it didn’t seem topical any more, and I’m getting tired of hammering mainstream Democratic issues. I wrote it hoping it might suggest some constructive paths, but knowing full well that we’re going to have to climb a tall wall of disbelief to get there.

Today, the New York Times and MyDD, among others, are leading with stories on mine safety and Administration policy.I’m a fan of regulation. My dad was in high-rise construction. On jobs he ran over a thirty-year career, maybe a dozen men were killed. He never felt it was a trade worth making, and safety was a primary focus of his attention as a boss. And for one of my first jobs I worked one summer as the guy who had to go up on the high iron and convince the steelworkers to use their newly-required safety equipment. The assumption was, I think, that as the boss’ son I wouldn’t get hung by my feet twenty-two stories in the air. They didn’t think they needed any equipment to be safe.

But now that they use it, heavy construction is far safer than it was in the 1960’s.

The air in Southern California when I grew up – in the sixties – was brown and stinging all summer long. There were 10.4 million registered vehicles in Los Angeles County & Orange County in 2004. There were probably about 4 million (based on the number statewide) in 1970. And the air quality is much better today.

Why?

It wasn’t the consumers pushing for it, or the enlightened manufacturers of cars (or factory owners) doing to be be crunchy. It was regulation.

Cars today are vastly safer than they were in 1970. Market forces?

Not so much, regulation.

So in the news recently are the mining tragedies that have killed 21 miners so far this year. And a lot of coverage has focused on the lower fines, and perceived lax enforcement by an industry-friendly Administration.

So I started a post on the importance of re-regulating the industry, and toughening regulation to save miner’s lives.

And I went to the Mine Safety & Health Administration to trend out the pattern of deaths.

And got the data that made up this somewhat surprising graph:

If I extend it through 2006, and annualize the 21 deaths reported through Frb 21, here’s the graph I get:

Will we see 240 deaths in mines this year? Not likely. But even if we do, go ahead and note the gold average line on both graphs. On the left, a Democratic MSHA. The right half? A Republican one.

Dammit. The facts just didn’t support my position. And they don’t support the New York Times’, or Scott Shields’.

What’s the deal?

I did some more digging, and found an interesting article on safety from the California:

The Division of Safety and Occupational Health (division), within the Department of Industrial Relations, is responsible for enforcing California’s health and safety standards. In the spring of 2004, approximately two years after Skyway construction started, it began an informal partnership with KFM allowing the division to conduct periodic compliance assistance inspections. These inspections represented additional access to the site beyond what the division normally would have under state law. To obtain this additional access, the division agreed that no citations would be issued if KFM promptly corrected unsafe conditions or procedures identified during these compliance assistance inspections.

KFM’s reported injury rates for the Skyway were approximately one-fourth the average injury rate of prime contractors on other large Bay Area bridge projects and approximately one-fourth to slightly more than one-third the state and national rates for construction. However, the division does not have a process to verify the reasonable accuracy of employers’ annual injury reports from which injury rates are calculated, because according to the division’s acting chief, the division believes that with its finite resources it must focus on higher priorities. As of September 2005, KFM has recorded 23 injuries in its annual injury reports. Based on evidence available to us, there are indications of 15 alleged workplace injuries and an alleged illness that potentially meet recording criteria. Because there were conflicting positions presented to us by the sources we reviewed and because we are not the entity to make the determination of whether injuries or illnesses are recordable, we notified the division of our concerns and it informed us that it opened a formal investigation into the matter. KFM has a safety program that includes elements identified by safety experts as necessary to promote a safe worksite, but experts note that one element in its safety program—the use of financial or other incentives as rewards for a safe workplace—may lead to the underreporting of injuries.

So basically, instead of periodic or post-incident inspections, citing and fining the contractor when violations occur, the inspectors visit on their own schedule, identify problems, and if the contractor fixes them, no further action is taken.

Now if you credit the 15 possible injuries to the 23 reported ones, you still have an accident rate less than half the typical construction project.

I don’t know if the MHSA is doing anything like this (I assume they’d be publicizing it if they were, and I’ve looked). But I do know that people manage to their metrics, and if our metrics are high fines, we’ll get high fines. If they are low deaths…well, let’s just say that fines alone are not be the metric we ought to be looking at.

And there’s a good post-millenium Democratic issue – how do we take the regulations that got us from the polluted, deadly 50’s to today and make them smarter? How do we make them effective, not at fining or delaying or harassing industry, but at meeting the goals we set when we established the regulations in the first place?

Let’s track deaths and injuries and pollution instead of violations. And let’s fight for policies that lower them – rather than those that track revenue from violations.

If you’re not reading ‘Intel Dump’ regularly, you should. The J.D. Henderson article Joe cites below was great, and the post today by Kris Alexander is as well.

Shop and Awe

During 2003, I was an intelligence officer assigned to CENTCOM in support of Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. I worked hard to win, but the military machine of which I was a tiny part can only secure a partial victory. If U.S. trade policy were better adapted to the post 9/11 world, we might ultimately win by dropping more currency than cruise missiles. Call it “shop and awe”.

I spent the initial phases of Iraqi Freedom in Qatar. Right after, we had declared “mission accomplished”, CENTCOM lowered the force protection level enough for a few of us go exploring the in the souk, or market, in Doha, Qatar. Two of us wandered into a shop selling beautiful Persian silk rugs.

“You are American soldiers?” the proprietor asked in accented English. Damn, the haircut gives us away every time.

“Yes sir,” I replied. “Where are you from in the world?”

“Iran,” he stated glaring defiantly from under his turban–a challenge probably borne from watching too much “reality” TV on Al Jazzera.

…go over and read the rest. I’ll spoil the lazy by bringing across his conclusion so I can riff on it:

So, four years after 9/11, why did our government spend so much political energy promoting CAFTA while ignoring trade with the Greater Middle East? Is the economic development of Guatemala more important than Pakistan? And why aren’t we demanding that the Europeans open up to agriculture imports? Currently the Iraqi and Afghani economies are clawing their way back into life. When they re-enter the global economic stage, will they run aground on Western trade policy?

The countries where we are trying to spread democracy need concrete evidence of our commitment to their long-term well-being. Last summer, the Bush administration fumbled around with the idea that we are no longer in the Global War on Terror, or the GWOT. The new term was GSAVE, the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. It’s all empty semantics without real changes in our policy. Parts of the private sector are getting it right. Why can’t our government?

After 9/11, we were told to keep spending and traveling so the terrorists wouldn’t win. With some adjustments to our trade policies, we might have been on to something. So go buy a rug, and strike a blow for freedom. I know a guy in Doha who will give you a deal.

The most powerful things we have in America are not our military. The most powerful things we have are our markets, and the attraction that we have for the Sumis of the world.