Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Today in the NYT Gail Collins touches on a lot of the points I made, or tried to make, in yesterday’s post on the decision of politicians to embrace, and then denounce, holding the 9/11 trials in downtown Manhattan. I took issue with those who worried that having Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in NYC would make the city more of a terrorist target. I found hypocrisy and cowardice in many’s preference for the trial to be moved elsewhere, which by their logic would simply displace the terrorist threat to another area.

Gail focuses on the other main objection; that a high-profile terror trial would just bring too much inconvenience and disruption to the people of Lower Manhattan. I had some sympathy for the inconvenience argument, but Gail changed my mind.

She’s disappointed in New Yorkers who initially said "bring it on" when it was decided to host KSM and his psychopath cohort so close to the scene of their crime. New Yorkers were happy to rally to stand up to terrorism in this way. But then, as Gail says, "[b]usinesses and residents hadn’t appreciated what a huge, life-disrupting inconvenience standing up to terror could be."

Well put. When we send hundreds of thousands of troops abroad to "stand up to terror" in various ways, it is, by any possible definition, "a huge, life-disrupting inconvenience" for both the troops and their friends and families. It is also fantastically expensive. Yet when it comes time to stand up to terror by actually trying terrorists and throwing them in jail, all of a sudden the cost and inconvenience is just too much for us to bear. This is shameful. It is shameful that politicians seem proud of their ability to continually insulate us from any hint of shared sacrifice. And it is shameful that we relish, nay, demand, the insulation, and bleat like zoo animals when it is threatened.

I saw Massoud Barzani, the President of Iraqi Kurdistan, speak at Brookings yesterday. Ken Pollack moderated the discussion, and to give a sense of Barzani’s place in Kurdish history and politics, Pollack said it’s very much like the relationship between Paris and the rest of France: all roads lead to him.

Barzani didn’t make much news, as it’s basically his profession to avoid saying impolitic or controversial things in public. There’s really only one thing you need to know about Kurdistan and its current relationship with Baghdad, and it’s what Barzani spent much of his time talking about directly and obliquely: that’s the importance of Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution.

Article 140 discusses the final status of Kirkuk and other disputed territories. Here’s a map of Kurdistan. 
 

Kirkuk and a handful of other towns near the border have majority Kurdish populations, and the Kurds want those areas officially incorporated into the Kurdistan region. Article 140 says that there is to be an official census taken, then a simple referendum in all the disputed territories, in which the people will vote whether they want to join Kurdistan or not. The Kurds have been demanding for four years that Article 140 be implemented. Referendum votes have been scheduled, delayed, and cancelled more times that I can count in the past few years.

Why do they want these areas so badly, and why is there such resistance to it from Baghdad? 

Well first, territorial expansion is awesome, and territorial dismemberment sucks. That explains a lot. But Kirkuk is the real prize here. The Kurds see Kirkuk as an ancestral homeland of sorts, and returning it to Kurdistan is a deeply symbolic issue for many.

But more important, it holds up to 40% of Iraq’s oil reserves. Now, all oil revenue is shared between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq according to a defined ratio based on population (it’s 17-83%). But if the Kurds were to even THINK about forming an independent state someday, they would need to have Kirkuk’s oil for themselves for a chance at economic viability. Everyone knows this, though no one talks about it, and that’s why the Arabs really, really don’t want the Kurds to have Kirkuk.

So during the Brookings talk, Barzani spoke forcefully about the issue. It is a historical, geographical, and political fact that Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan, he said. There is no better alternative than Article 140 in determining its final status. It must eventually go to the will of the people, he said. Anything else would be evading a clear constitutional mandate, which has been agreed to by all parties.

For Barzani, every issue leads to Article 140. Asked who the Kurdish bloc might join in a coalition government after countrywide parliamentary elections in March, Barzani said that any coalition with Kurds is dependent on a committment to the Iraqi Constitution (which is his code for the implementation of Article 140). Likewise, Barzani said that Kurdistan is committed to remaining within territorial Iraq in a federal system, so long as the Iraqi Constitution is followed. Again, this is Article 140 talking.

On top of the oil issue, Kirkuk is a demographic tinderbox. Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen all have sizeable populations there, and the ethnic minorities are wary—to say the least—about the prospect of being under Kurdistan’s jurisdiction. Turkey also has an interest in the rights of the Turkmen in northern Iraq, and any dispensation of Kirkuk that Turkey deems unjust will lead to much instability.

Kirkuk has been the impetus behind most of the wars between the Kurds and the successive regimes in Baghdad. My guess is that it will be cause of more wars to come.

By the time of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in September 1980, Mustafa Barzani’s son, Massoud Barzani, had taken his father’s place as the leader of the Kurdish movement in Iraq. In the last years of the Iran-Iraq war, the Kurds were united in open revolt against Saddam’s forces.

Following the war, Saddam’s revenge against the Kurds was swift, and world-historically awful. In his genocidal Anfal campaign of 1987-1989, Saddam directed the slaughter of up to 180,000 Kurdish civilians, including mass summary executions and chemical weapon attacks, the disappearance of tens of thousands into concentration camps, and the wholesale destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages.

The Gulf War:

In February of 1991, during the air campaign phase of the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush called upon the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrown Saddam Hussein, pledging U.S. support. When the Kurds in the north, and the Shia Arabs in the south did exactly that, the U.S. government was caught off guard. It feared the unpredictability of a mass rebellion, and thus, as Saddam’s army moved to quell the uprisings, President Bush decided to ignore the Shia and Kurds’ desperate pleas for help.

Saddam massacred around 300,000 Shia in the six months following the uprising as a result of Washington’s betrayal. And as Iraqi forces advanced toward Kurdistan, two million Kurds—mindful of what Saddam’s idea of vengeance looked like—fled virtually overnight to the Iraqi-Turkish border. Turkey refused to grant entrance and asylum to the refugees, and left them to fend for themselves in the mountainous border region. The resulting international spotlight on Kurdish suffering at the border led the U.S. to create a safe-haven and no-fly zone in Iraqi Kurdistan. 

Saddam withdrew all military and administrative personnel from Kurdish provinces, and initiated a full economic blockade of the Kurdistan region. Coupled with the UN sanctions on Iraq as a whole, the Kurds found themselves economically, politically, and geographically isolated, resulting in a profound humanitarian crisis.

Despite the privation, the Kurds underwent a crash-course in self-government. They quickly moved to create a parliamentary legislative body and a presidential-style executive, borrowing structure and language from liberal democracies around the world. They held their first elections in May 1992; it was the first free and fair parliamentary election in the history of Iraq.

The Other Iraq:

The 2003 Anglo-American intervention, removing Saddam Hussein and the Baath party from power, finally ended the Kurds’ isolation, and made their nascent democratic and economic progress inexorable. The Iraqi Consititution now grants the Kurdistan Regional Government expansive legal rights of self-rule, and provides the Kurds with political power and revenue-sharing with Baghdad proportional with its share of Iraq’s population. Kurdistan is oil-rich, and blessed with large fertile valleys. Since 2003 there have been billions of dollars of foreign investment flowing into Kurdistan, leading to a proliferation of large infrastructure projects and a steady rise in the standard of living. The region now has seven universities, two international airports, and all the cultural opportunity of a young, thriving, growing democracy. 

An increasing number of Kurds do not remember the historic betrayals of the British or of Kissinger, nor the murderous reign of Saddam Hussein. They have spent most of their lives in a safe, democratic, and pluralist territory of their own. They would not recognize the lament of Kurdish poet and nationalist Ahmad-e Khani, who in 1694 wrote, “Why have the Kurds been deprived, why have they all been subjugated?” While the Kurdish experience has been defined by such laments for centuries, the next generation of poets will have different stories to tell.

There are approximately 25 million Kurds worldwide; they are one of the largest nationalities in the world to not have a state of their own. The redrawing of the map of the Middle East following WWI scattered the majority of Kurds into what has today become a cluster of modern “little Kurdistans” within Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq.

Since the end of WWI there have been a handful of opportunities for Kurdish territorial autonomy and self-rule. However, until the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Kurdish national struggle had been perennially derailed by ineffectual leadership, disunity and violent conflict among Kurdish factions, and a cycle of manipulation and betrayal by outside powers. Two brief triumphs of Kurdish nationalism occurred with the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, and the 1970 Autonomy Agreement between the Kurds and Iraq’s ruling Baath government.

The ill-fated Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 outlined the carving up the Ottoman Empire among the various Allied powers. The treaty provided the Kurds with a pathway for a full independent state carved out of southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. However, by 1923 the treaty was abandoned, with Turkey, behind Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, claiming all Ottoman land inhabited by a “Turkish-Muslim majority” as the homeland of the new Turkish nation. It’s no coincidence that Turkey began referring to the Kurds as “mountain Turks” in order to claim their land comprised a “Turkish-Muslim majority”. This would be the beginning of decades of Turkish denial and repression of Kurdish political and cultural rights.

As for the Kurds of northern Iraq, the League of Nations awarded the territory to Iraq proper, subject to granting the Kurds expansive political and cultural rights. However, when Iraq acquired independence from Britain in 1931, there were no such provisions for Kurdish rights.

By the end of WWI, the dream of an independent greater Kurdistan was gone, and with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the Kurds found themselves separated and absorbed into various neighboring states, abandoned as distrusted minorities and beholden to the mercy of hostile governments. It would be fifty years before they had another viable shot at self-rule, this time under the Baath regime in Iraq…

Up Next:  The Kurds vs. Saddam; The Kurds vs. Kissinger;  The Kurds vs. Themselves

I saw video yesterday of Scott Brown taking questions as he arrived on Capitol Hill. He has settled on a narrative to explain his opposition to national health care reform. He doesn’t really take issue with any of the bill’s provisions as a matter of ideology or conscience or principle. Indeed, he loves the individual mandate/subsidies/regulations model of Massachusetts. Voted for it, in fact.

That’s the problem. He loves it all so much, that he doesn’t want to help anyone else get it.

He has said, and said again today, that he likes a lot of the provisions in the health bill, but his first responsibility is to the people of Massachusetts, and the people of Massachusetts already have health insurance. Tough luck for states who haven’t done the same. "Why would we subsidize and why would we pay more for something we already have. It makes no sense," he told Fox last week.

It’s an interesting argument. But it’s an argument that if taken to its logical conclusion would destroy the entire foundation of American liberal democracy.

Clearly lawmakers sometimes have local interests and sometimes have national interests. We don’t expect a senator from Kansas to say, "Well Kansas is not really a terrorist target, so I’m voting against Kansans having to pay to help keep New Yorkers safe."  At the same time, while we grumble when some small-state senator brings home an earmark windfall for his people, really we just expect our own senator to do the same.

It obviously depends on what you define as a national problem. We seem to easily drum up the visceral solidarity necessary to help our fellow Americans on issues of public safety, food, basic housing. The humanitarian reasons suffice, of course, but are there non-humanitarian benefits to this sort of solidarity?

Well perhaps I don’t live in lower Manhattan, but maybe I want to go there, or I have family nearby, or I make a connection between terrorism and economic anxiety and decline, which affects my wallet. And maybe I realize that homelessness and abject poverty undermines social cohesion and destroys economic and social capital, creates fissures both within communities and between government and governed, and tends to correlate with more crime and drug and alcohol abuse. And we might recognize all these problems as symptomatic of deeper policy failings in education, family planning, economic and urban development, which affects us all. The Scott Brown defense—’It’s Not Our Problem, We’re Fine’—doesn’t work on us here.

Indeed, Scott Brown doesn’t mind that his state, Massachusetts, only gets back about $0.80 for every $1.00 it sends in taxes to the federal government. American federalism is extremely redistributive, and people only tend to get agitated over it during political campaigns. (Of course, a huge portion of that federal redistribution is for Medicare, which Scott Brown and fellow Republicans adamantly defend. This means the only thing they hate more than federal redistribution for health care is the idea of cutting federal redistribution for health care.)

Yet Scott Brown’s argument seems to resonate for health reform. Why?

Whether for or against, people overwhelmingly are convinced that health reform will not benefit them personally, and are highly doubtful that the government can help usher in a system that is better than the one they experience today. This has always been a terribly ominous sign to those charged with selling the policy. Or rather, it should have been.

I admit I find the humanitarian case thoroughly dispositive. I also find that it is close to impossible to convince someone on pure humanitarian grounds if they’re not already sympathetic to it. But like poverty or hunger or terrorism, are there self-interested reasons to care?

For instance, did the administration make the case that medical bills contribute to 62% of bankruptcies in the U.S, with many more teetering somewhere just above solvency? And of those who declared bankrupcy, 78% had health insurance.

Or should we care that there is a staggering correlation between health care costs and wages:

And what does that health spending trend look like up close?

Are there other negative social and economic externalities—as there are with poverty and urban blight—in a future filled with stagnating wages, an aging population, increased medical-related bankruptcies, and skyrocketing health costs?

Now the argument could be, "I don’t see how the reforms offered will solve or mitigate any of these long-term problems."  Fair enough, and I await your better reform ideas. But to say, as Scott Brown does, that "it makes no sense" to address the problem at the national level evinces either a deep ignorance of the scope of the crisis, or a baffling inconsistency in one’s response to human suffering in differing contexts.

Everybody hates Congress. Its disapproval rating perpetually hovers around 70%. We hate the big money, the scandals, the political maneuvering and tactical manipulation, its inability and unwillingness to address the country’s big problems.

BUT, we Americans also happen to respond exceedingly well to political maneuvering and tactical manipulation, and we are also quite uninterested in addressing the country’s big problems. We much prefer to express dire concern about various serious issues, on the condition that the solutions demand no sacrifice from us whatsoever. With this, we simply beg to be pandered to. When we feel we’re not being pandered to earnestly enough, we kick some pols out and put some new ones in. But our foundational demand of government—Fix All Our Problems Now, and Painlessly; and If It’s Not Painless, Then Just Tell Us You’ll Fix Them, But Really Don’t—remains unwavering.

Health care reform is a fine example. Several polls (this one is CNN) show that the public overwhelmingly supports the specific provisions of the bill: expanding Medicaid to cover more poor people (75%); raising taxes on the wealthy to help pay for it (67%); subsidies for the middle class to buy private insurance (67%); banning rescission and denials for preexisting conditions (60%). But present a package that does all these things, and a plurality of Americans don’t want it.

The new junior senator from Massachusetts understands our love of doublethink. In this he truly is the people’s senator, or in the people’s seat, or whatever.  From his campaign website: "I support strengthening the existing private market system with policies that will drive down costs and make it easier for people to purchase affordable insurance." That is actually a really good summary of the health care legislation that is under consideration in Congress. Yet, "I am opposed to the health care legislation that is under consideration in Congress and will vote against it." Of course you are. So are we.

The deficit is the same. Man we hate the deficit. Government waste has to stop! And we Americans are ready to pretend that we’re ready to do something about it! When asked if the middle-class will have to make financial sacrifices to reduce the federal deficit, 88% said yes. Take that, skeptics! When our country faces a crisis, we are always ready, figuratively, to do what needs to be done to solve it, in the abstract.

So what sort of pain is the middle class prepared to take on to deal with the deficit? Tax increases? Only 26% said yes. Well that’s ok, because 70% think spending cuts are the better route to go. Fair enough. Go right after defense and entitlements probably. We Americans don’t like beating around the bush:

Defense: Only 18% want cuts in defense spending. 77% want to increase it or keep it the same.

Well we’ve always been a pugnacious bunch. Perhaps going after those pansy entitlements and social programs is more our style:

Cutting Medicare spending: Just 6% want that. 53% want more Medicare spending. Even when asked if we merely want to reduce the growth of entitlement spending, only 23% are OK with that.

Actually, we love ALL government services, not just entitlements:

Only 31 percent said they supported a cut in services to lower the deficit. In fact, a majority of Americans want increases in spending for health care, education, and veterans’ benefits; and large pluralities want to boost spending on the unemployed, crime prevention, and the environment. On no issue did more than 20% of Americans say they wanted to decrease spending levels.

So, intractable problem that Americans want to solve AND want nothing to do with? Let the pandering begin:

Yesterday the White House and Congress announced the creation of a deficit commission. Good start. We Americans love ineffectual commissions to pseudo-tackle our non-problems. It’ll be an 18-member bipartisan panel. In order for the commission’s recommendations to go to Congress for a vote, 14 out of 18 have to agree on them. That would be a super-super-majority. Those are pretty easy to get, right? Yglesias sums up what the result to this disaster will likely be:

As best I can tell, the way this meeting will go is that the presidential appointees will say “let’s have a balanced package of tax hikes and spending cuts” then the ones appointed by congressional Republicans will say “no, no tax increases allowed.” Maybe one or two of the congressionally appointed Democrats will say Social Security should be off the table. And then we all go home.

Go home, where we will reward ourselves on our sober look at the issue, and our discerning judgement that something should be done about this, all the while exhibiting the mental acuity and courageous fecklessness necessary to say, over and over again, No, nothing, ever, ever, should be done about this.

China's Galloping Troika

The other day I wrote of Google’s decision to stop cooperating with China’s internet censorship policies. Allow myself to quote….myself:

“Google’s decision shows that there is a base incompatibility between China’s authoritarian free-market model, and the sort of open access to information necessary for such a free market to flourish long-term.

China’s ongoing grand experiment is to prove wrong the argument that political freedom is a necessary and ineluctable corollary to economic freedom. Google’s decision shows that the Chinese people truly have neither.”

Roger Cohen has a great column today seconding the sentiment. He writes that the Google-China showdown is a grand confrontaton between “the behemoth of global connectedness and the behemoth of global growth…Openness for China is a means to an end — prosperity and development — but not a value.” Cohen concludes by questioning the long-term viability of the China model: “I don’t think China can forever ride globalization, its development stallion, and deny its very essence: open systems.“

Cohen’s “development stallion” and the photo above made me think of Russia’s galloping troikas. This is from Gogol’s Dead Souls:

And you, Russia of mine–are not you also speeding like a troika which nought can overtake? Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear, and the spectators, struck with the portent, halting to wonder whether you be not a thunderbolt launched from heaven? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell? What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steeds?…Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes…

As Cohen says, China shall have to answer…

I’ve been trying to think of a way to write about Haiti in a way that isn’t boring or maudlin or cliched. Jonah Lehrer has a post today that might explain some of my difficulty. He writes that the deluge of grisly statistics coming out of Haiti are too abstract for us to process; paradoxically, as the scale of the tragedy grows, it has less power to trigger a moral-emotional response in us.

My good friend Stan sent me this WSJ article which illustrates the point pretty well. The article describes the impact on the Haitian economy of other recent natural disasters. The statistics presented are pure economic abstractions, yet what’s interesting is they’re cloaked in the emotional language usually reserved for real, actual human tragedy. Some quotes (emphasis mine):

“The earthquake in Haiti deals a devastating blow to a tiny economy…”

Haiti “has yet to recover from a spate of four hurricanes in 2008. The storms wiped out roughly 15% of the country’s gross domestic product…”

“Four years earlier, Hurricane Jeanne destroyed 7% of Haiti’s GDP.”

The writers are clearly using such words to try and reign in the abstraction and increase the emotional resonance. But the effect for me is exactly the opposite. How am I to process a hurricane “destroying” a certain percentage of a financial statistical tool? My friend said that the article made him think that Haitians are running around pleading, “Please help! Our GDP is dying!”

Tyler Cowen has been doing excellent blogging on Haiti. Today he talks about the geopolitical impact:

Hundreds of thousands of people have died, the U.N. Mission has collapsed, the government is not working (was it ever?), and hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people are living in the streets without reliable food or water supplies.  The hospitals and schools have collapsed.  The airport is shut down.  The port is very badly damaged.  The Haitian Penitentiary has collapsed and the inmates — tough guys most of them — are running free for the foreseeable future.  There is no viable police force or army.

In other words, it’s not just a matter of offering extra food aid for two or three years.

Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.

Apart from that last line which completely blows our mind, does this parade of specifics mitigate the abstraction problem or add to it?