I’ll be in Atlanta from Sun – Thurs next week.

Any Atlanta-area bloggers want to connect? Drop me an email.

Via TAPPED, a seriously great comment from Howard Dean.

In a column available at Cagle Cartoons (??), Gov. Dean says:

Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally when Iraq posed no danger to the United States, but we were right to demand accountability from Saddam. We are also right to demand accountability in Sudan. Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. Every day that goes by without action to stop the Sudan genocide is a day that the anti-Iraq war position so widely held in the rest of the world appears to be based less on principle and more on politics. And every day that goes by is a day in which George Bush’s contempt for the international community, which I have denounced every day for two years, becomes more difficult to criticize.

Right on, as we used to say.

I’m one of those who abandoned respect for the U.N. quite a while ago, and so have a hard time with those – Kerry included – who call for the U.S. to align it’s foreign policy with U.N. mandates. The appalling track record of the U.N. continues, and weakens the claims of those who look to it as the world’s moral arbiter.

Gov. Dean deserves applause for taking this stand, and for acknowledging – atypically for a politician – how it connects to his past views.

TG and I have been watching Traffik, the British miniseries (rented from Netflix, who rock) that the movie Traffic was taken from. We’re about halfway through it.

Wow. It’s so much better than the movie.

Not only because the added time allows it to be more expansive, but in almost every way. It’s not only a great document on the drug trade, but one that shows very real people in almost every frame.

Rent it, and set some time aside – once you start, you’ll be addicted.

The Washington Post uses FOIA and pulls records that challenge (one) of the Swift Boat Veterans’ multiple claims about John Kerry’s Vietnam service.

I’ve stayed out of this and will continue to do so – because, as noted, while I do think that Kerry gamed his service (as did Bush), it is an issue of less importance to me than his potential competence and policies that will determine our future. And because lots of other people are spending time weighing in on the issue.

Having said that, I’ll go back to my earlier charge that the Kerry campaign’s reaction to this is stunningly inept.

Why is the Post using FOIA to dig these documents out? Why wasn’t a package with these, and all other relevant documents already researched by Kerry’s campaign and ready to be handed to the general media out two hours after the initial claims were made?

What kind of bozo, low-rent campaign is this, anyway? And, more tellingly, what does it say about the Administration that it would morph into if Kerry wins?

I don’t agree with John Quiggin or Matthew Yglesias about the standoff in Najaf and on whether continued military pressure is the correct policy to deal with al-Sadr.

I’ll suggest that today’s news that al-Sadr has apparently agreed to Allawi’s demands, and may leave the shrine of Imam Ali bears out the validity of the course of action, which was to make it clear that the cental Iraqi government – with U.S. military support – would not accept Sadr’s militia as a ‘second force’ within the country.

First and foremost, let’s not count our chickens just yet.But as I see it, the criticisms of the Alliance forces attacks on al-Sadr come down to three things:

# It probably won’t work, because al-Sadr will not surrender and his capture or death will stir up a Shi-ite uprising;

# It is a waste of our strategic assets (including credibility and moral standing) because al-Sadr isn’t so bad and Allawi is just another thug;

# It is immoral, because if 1) and 2) are true, we are killing Iraqis and risking our own and our allies’ troops for nothing.

I disagree on all three counts, and believe that today’s events support this case. Does anyone believe that he would have negotiated as he did if the Iraqi government had not made a credible threat to remove him and his men from the shrine?

It all started with a post by John Quiggin, over at Crooked Timber.

In it, he attacked the military operations aimed at the Sadr Army, and at the person of al-Sadr. A careful read of his post suggests that the core justification is straightforward: that al-Sadr is not a particular threat to the U.S. or to stability in Iraq. He is, instead just a (fairly) bad guy among bad guys.

These people weren’t Al Qaeda or Baathists, they were (apart from the inevitable innocent bystanders) young Iraqi men who objected to foreign occupation. Sadr’s militia is one of a dozen or so similar outfits in Iraq, and there are hundreds more around the world, quite a few of which have received US support despite having a worse record than Sadr’s. Moreover, there was no cause at stake that justified a war – the first started when Bremer shut down Sadr’s newspaper and the Sadrists retaliated by taking control of some police stations and mosques.

In his first post, Quiggin argues that the moral burden – the blood debt that we will owe for killing these ‘young men’ is simply not one that we can or should afford.

In his second post, Quiggin amplifies the points in the first post, and adds to it the certainty that violently suppressing al-Sadr and his militia will fracture the fragile Shi’ite/Sunni entente that exists today.

In the short term, his death would make it just about impossible for any Shi’ite leader to give support to the Allawi government1. Already, Ayatollah Sistani who has no love for Sadr and would have been happy to see him pushed out of Najaf2, has called for a ceasefire.

Quiggin’s solution in both cases is simple:

The only remotely feasible option is to make a place for Sadr and his supporters in the political process, and to hope that he is moderated by the attractions of office, as has happened in many cases before. There were some tentative steps in this direction in the period between the April insurrection and the current fighting.

My original disagreement with Quiggin’s point was simply that I disagreed with his calculus; that, simply, if the measure was the deaths that would be directly caused by a decision we’d never do anything – invading Normandy would have been an impossible decision if this is the formula that ruled the Allies’ thinking.

To a certain extent, this remains the core of my disagreement – which is to say that it is less on the subject of a detailed analysis and projection of the current political/military struggles in Iraq, and more on a challenge to the style and form of analysis that Quiggin is using.

But I have issues with his analysis, as well.

al-Sadr is an Islamist thug; he intends to push Iraq to set up a mullah-led theocracy like Iran’s, and closely allied with Iran. While I don’t share Trent’s beliefs that Abrams should and will be rolling down the streets of Tehran this fall, it’s clear to me that the current leadership in Iran does represent a key part of the Islamist forces that are arrayed against us, and that acceding to the expansion of those forces isn’t something that makes a lot of sense.

It is in that light – that of tipping the balance of power within Iraq toward those who we believe would steer Iraq toward a more effective civil society – the attacks on Sadr’s forces make sense, and seem worth the cost.

Yglesias disagrees:

This is a mission, then, that has an extremely low probability of success. In all likelihood it will either end with an exhausted America deciding to give up the game (in which case we’d best do it sooner rather than later) or else with a triumphant America having successfully set Iyad Allawi up as dictator of Iraq. He’ll go, naturally enough, by the title “president” or “prime minister” but that’s what he’ll be. This is not, I think, a goal of such overwhelming moral vitality that it’s worth expending significant quantities of American blood and treasure to achieve at a time when we face real, direct threats from other quarters. The point of suggesting that Allawi’s fans form a Lincoln Brigade in support of their hero is not to call them “chickenhawks” but is recognition of the fact that Allawi is not the bad guy here per se. Someone who chooses to fight for Allawi’s dictatorship over Muqtada’s could have some very good reasons for preferring the former to the latter, and should be welcome to take up arms on his behalf if that’s what he wants to do. But the lowish probability that the US Army and Marine Corps can successfully establish an Allawi dictatorship (and the vanishingly small probability that they can create a democracy) is not a reasonable objective of national policy at this point.

The core of his disagreement, as I see it, is that since Allawi will be a less-than-perfect democrat (note the small ‘d’), it’s not worth spending our national credibility and blood to prop him up – but if I and the others who support a more-free Iraq want to raise a private army to do it, that would be OK with him. I think that’s still a poor position to take, because we do have a vital national interest in picking apart the Islamist problem, and that keeping them out of power in Iraq would seem to be a valid step in that direction.

And that, I believe is the core of my policy disagreement with Quiggin and Yglesias: That we have a vital interest in keeping the Islamists from gaining more power; that defeating the Sadr Army is a necessary step in doing this; that allowing him to hold hostage the holy sites Najaf strengthens him since it allows him to paint himself as the custodian of those sites; and finally, that it will be possible to defeat him and his forces without the ‘explosion of the Arab street’ that has been much threatened and seldom seen.

In a sense, what they are suggesting is that we should have given Monster Kody a seat on the LA City Council because he represented a largte armed forced in South Central Los Angeles. Now in some cases, gangs do transmute into political organizations (I can’t think of a specific example offhand, but I’ll grant that it’s happened). But that key transition – from force of arms to politics – is the key step that has to be taken, and that al-Sadr must take before it can be decided that he gets a seat at the table of power.

What also strikes me most of all is the tone of resignation and hopelessness in both Quiggin’s and Yglesias’ posts.

On one hand, it’s clear that they both strongly oppose both the current administration and the war which this Administration chose. And I imagine that no small part of their tone comes from the discomfort they feel at seeing death, injury, and destruction in the service of a cause they believe to be fundamentally immoral – much as we see the death of someone killed by a criminal in the course of a robbery as fundamentally different than the death of someone killed, say, in the course of trying to save a life in a fire.

I also wonder if it doesn’t come from trying to overthink things. History is fundamentally irrational; it is messy, contingent, and resistant to planning.

Check this out!!

Iraqi bloggers Ali and Mohammed of Iraq The Model are announcing their candidacy for the Iraqi National Assembly.

English and Arabic Press Releases.

(hat tip to DownEast Blog)

The tree in the back yard apparently took out our DSL Monday, meaning I had to go to (one of the three) Starbucks half a mile from home to get email, which meant that blog reading and writing was light. I also had some other writing to do that I couldn’t because of lack of connectivity, so I’m starting the week behinder than ususal.

I’m struggling with a response to Quiggin – as usual, I’m loading too much into it and need to cut it back, which I’m working on now.

And I picked up Tim Power’s book, Declare, and didn’t get much else done – I’m blaming Powers for my lack of productivity.Verizon customer service was good enough to have me wondering if this is the same company that I used to hate, and eighteen hours after I first called them, we have connectivity again.

So I connect, get a trackback from Laughing Wolf, and see that he thinks I’m Hillary Clinton. He’s wrong.

He’s actually wrong on two counts; first in assuming that I’m surprised when people as individuals do the right thing without the guidance of Big Brother. Almost everything I’ve written on the subject (and it’s getting to be a lot, so I don’t blame him for not having read it, but here’s an example) says otherwise. He’s also wrong in denigrating the role of government, however.

It’s a fairly common error in certain conservatives and libertarians, who assume that government is, at best, a parasite – it’s actually a symbiote.

Looking back on U.S. (and to an extent, Western) history, very little would have been accomplished without either government or individual intelligence and energy. As Sondheim says, “It Takes Two”. The issue is finding and maintaining a balance between these.

But that’s another story, as the Witch says. We’ll talk about that later; there’s work to do now.

Just scanning the blogs and news (note that it’s interesting that in the last year, I’ve reversed the order), and noticed an interesting thing that no one else seems to have picked up on yet.

In the well-blogged NY Times interview with econometrician Ray Fair, reporter Deborah Soloman makes the following statement:

But in the process you are shaping opinion. Predictions can be self-confirming, because wishy-washy voters might go with the candidate who is perceived to be more successful.

Which pretty much sums up my problem with the less-than open journalism that we’re seeing these days.
To be sure, to partisans on each side, it feels like their ox is the one gored. But to me, as someone with a basically Democratic bent but who hasn’t yet drunk the Kool-Aid and signed on, it sure looks like they’re shaping opinion right and left, and doing it in the interest of the Kerry/Edwards campaign.

Doing this, not only are they doing no favors for the polity we’re all a part of, but they’re doing Kerry and the Democrats no favors either.

Slate’s search engine sucks, and so I can’t find the stories in Kaus’ archives about the overconfident Gray Davis and the way that the partisan, opinion-shaping coverage (led by the L.A. Times) of the recall election hung him out like a Chinatown duck.

If I’m correct, the media aren’t doing Kerry any favors either.

I’ve been working on a reasoned response to John Quiggin’s arguments on al-Sadr, but I’ve been distracted by the latest bit of spooge from Yglesias. Quiggin most recently makes the claim that

…the bloody campaign to destroy Sadr was both morally indefensible (as well as being politically stupid). I restate the point I made when the fighting was at its peak.

Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.

As I’ve noted, I think he’s wrong both in his political and moral analysis but I certainly owe some kind of an argument to support that claim.It’s in the works.

Then I read Matt Yglesias weighing in on the same subject.

To put this another way: Who wants to die for Iyad Allawi? Certainly I don’t. If people do, they should consider forming a new Abraham Lincoln Brigade and shipping out.

Now personally, I don’t argue that those who care more than Matt or I do about, say – genocide in Darfur, or the Hutu/Tutsi conflict – ought to saddle up and head out to personally do something about it. I accept that they’re a legitimate part of our polity, and that these are issues we need to decide on together, and costs that we will bear together. Matt thinks that the only way one gets to play is to be willing to go fight.

Does this mean we can simply turn this election over to the troops? I’m willing to if he is…

But I’m getting effing tired of giving any moral authority at all to people who think that’s a clever argument.

[Update: I edited out a sentance I wrote out of bad temper; Yglesias doesn’t deserve to be called names, and I’m embarassed to have been the kind of person who did. Sorry to all concerned.]

Via BuzzMachine, the story of a media sting that went very bad (or actually, very good). Two Middle Eastern men tried to charter a helicopter in St. Louis. They acted suspiciously, the FBO operator called the cops, the FBI showed up and cuffed the men – and then

…the FBI verified that the two men were employed by NBC New York and were on assignment to get a story of how easy it is to charter a helicopter for a terrorist attack.

Actually, it appears that it isn’t.

I strongly believe that we – the alert citizens – are the first line of defense (as opposed to offense, which let’s leave to the military, OK?) against terrorist attacks. Points to the alert charter staff, and points to the police and FBI who responded quickly.

Others are less sanguine about our ability to stop attacks. But an alert, informed, and un-panicked citizenry – with responsive police on the other end of the phone – seems to me like the most effective tool we could have. And this story shows how it ought to work.

Be interesting to see if NBC makes a story out of it…