Monthly Archive for January, 2010

I found very welcome the news that Google would no longer remain complicit in the suppression and censorship of information in China. James Fallows sees the move as highly consequential for China’s relationship with the rest of the world, and calls this the beginning of China’s "Bush-Cheney Era":

"In a strange and striking way there is an inversion of recent Chinese and U.S. roles. In the switch from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, the U.S. went from a president much of the world saw as deliberately antagonizing them to a president whose Nobel Prize reflected (perhaps desperate) gratitude at his efforts at conciliation. China, by contrast, seems to be entering its Bush-Cheney era…its government is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world. To me, that is what Google’s decision signifies."

As Fallows notes, part of Google’s argument when it agreed to China’s censorship restrictions was that some access to information was better than none. Whatever merit there is to that point of view, to me 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. The biggest brand in the world has found its business model to be in unresolvable tension with the government of the People’s Republic. To me this is an astounding symbolic statement. 

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.

Slate had an article yesterday defending President Obama against the conservative critique that his policies are "weakening" the dollar. I’m not at all equipped to adjudicate an argument about the intracacies of currency valuation. But the article takes as its premise the idea that a "strong" dollar is good, and a "weak" dollar is bad. Ezra Klein wrote about this language problem a few months ago:

The easiest way to improve our economic policy would be to change the way we talk about the dollar. No more "strong" dollar and "weak" dollar. Instead, talk about "high" dollars and "low" dollars.

When people hear "weak" dollar, they think something bad is being done to the United States. It’s terribly hard for a politician to advocate a "weak dollar" policy. It sounds like you’re throwing Osama bin-Laden a birthday party.

In fact, a "weak" dollar is actually the one that builds America’s manufacturing economy, as it makes our exports more competitive. A "strong" dollar, conversely, builds the production base of other countries, as it encourages Americans to import goods. My hunch is that most people who think they want a "strong" dollar wouldn’t be too happy if they knew what a strong dollar meant. If we talked about a "high" and "low" dollars, the issue would be a bit less confused.

Presumably there are financial situations that would militate against adopting a cheap dollar policy, and situations that would call for the opposite. But the language of strength and weakness really has limited descriptive value here, and can lead financial dilettantes (such as myself) to develop a warped and highly tendentious view of what’s really going on. 

I’m really not going to make a habit of commenting on Maureen Dowd columns, promise. But her piece yesterday ties into my post last week on the growing (actually, fully-grown) detached, too-cool-Obama narrative. Dowd criticizes the president for his public aloofness in the immediate aftermath of the failed Christmas plane bombing. She seems to admire generally his emotional and mental equanimity, but “it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.”

“He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.”

Strong father? Oh boy. Matt Yglesias responds perfectly:

Reassuring children is a job for parents. Treating adults like they’re little children is, perhaps, a job for newspaper columnists.”

Exactly right.

My least favorite part of any presidental utterance on national security is when they invariably let it be known that, “My top priority and most solemn duty as president is to protect the American people.”  This is fatuous on a few different levels.

First, it’s not true. Say it with me now:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.“

Second, a Strong Father holding a shotgun at the top of the stairs probably will keep his house pretty secure from home invaders. But the problem with analogizing this to the presidency is that, as the Bush administration showed pathologically often, the president really can’t make good on his imaginary duty to protect the American people without abdicating his actual duty to defend the U.S. Constitution.

Also, wouldn’t there be something very awkward about a president displaying paternal resoluteness and bombast and reassurance following a complete breakdown in executive security and intelligence functions? And most important, as was the case in the Richard Reid shoe bombing, the Christmas plot was foiled not by Daddy Obama, but by the brave passengers themselves; the very people Dowd insists on infantilizing, along with the rest of us, as needful of paternal intervention and “reassurance”.

We have had quite enough of bravado and false assurance acting as a stand-in for an honest, adult assessment of the dangers and tradeoffs inherent in 21st century American life. Would that our pundits and media demand such an assessment from our leaders, rather than demand they coo us to sleep when we are afraid.

It’s always good sporting fun to make fun of Politico’s "Analysis" pieces, in which they take as their premise an abstract Republican trope about the president, stir in some tortured historical analogies and contradictory arguments, and then sprinkle on quotes from various "independent observers" to validate the whole thing. Viola, a new conventional pseudo-wisdom is born.

Today’s "Analysis" really hits all the spots. Allow me to fisk:

The premise: Did you know that President Obama is a "detached" leader, but is learning that he needs to be "more out front" and "engaged" now that his public support is waning? It’s true: "For the sixth time in 11 days, President Barack Obama was back before the cameras Thursday, talking about airline safety and anti-terrorism."

Now is there any alternative reason why the president should want to talk about airline safety this week? No, nothing? That’s because it can only be that he is trying to shed his detached image and appear more engaged in the issues.

Cue the independent observers: "Independent observers on the right see Obama’s detachment as a sign of drift." The independent observer in this case is a Republican pollster, who helpfully validates the premise with this: "He seems reluctant to take the reins and is not the strong leader that voters thought they were voting for."

Ok, "detached", too "cool", "drifting", "flat and distant", "not a strong leader". This sounds like a disaster of a first year, right?

"Indeed, something’s working for Obama, and at one level, his first year has been successful."  Hmm, counterintuitive. Turns out that his mere "one level" of success includes an economic stimulus package, historic universal health care bills that have passed the House and Senate, a major strategic change in Afghanistan, with financial regulation and climate change legislation in the pipeline. And on the engagement front: "More than most presidents, he has reached out dutifully to Congress with scores of meetings…."

So his detachment is hurting him badly, yet he seems to be fruitfully engaging with Congress and scoring major legislative accomplishments. How can this be? 

Ah, but it’s not all sunshine and roses for the president. Politico’s about to explode all over the place. Here it comes: Despite this "one level" of success, Obama "pays a price for not doing more in his first year to restore the social compact needed to pull the country together."

If anyone has any idea what that means please let me know. 

Now the real head-spinning starts. Bizarre historical analogies that contradict the entire premise? Go:

"Even FDR waited until after his first two years to enact Social Security. Yet this administration rejected taking a more incremental approach toward health reform…." 

So the real problem with this detached, drifting, weak leader is that he isn’t incremental enough!  Because the way to be more "engaged" on health care reform would be to wait longer before engaging!

We’re only halfway through the article, but I’m done. I’m gonna go grab some advil.

In Hillary and Flynt Leverett’s op-ed, they demand that reform sympathizers answer three tough questions to justify their optimism: "First, what does this opposition want? Second, who leads it? Third, through what process will this opposition displace the government in Tehran?" These are indeed tough questions. The Leveretts argue that in the case of the 1979 Revolution, these questions had clear answers. I’m not so sure, particularly on the first.

The way I learned it, early on the revolution had many disparate strains, each agitating for different reforms, none of which were explicitly Islamic in nature. The bazaari class was angry over Shah-era tariff and nationalization policies; the students wanted rights of freedom of speech, assembly, and protest; the farmers wanted more state assistance; the clerics certainly wanted a larger role in politics but mostly just wanted the Shah to stop exiling them. Everyone wanted the SAVAK gone, and an end to rampant corruption, economic mismanagement, and political repression. The tactical alliance between these groups, particularly the bazaaris and the clergy, hardly represented a comprehensive movement with clear post-revolutionary goals. Demanding such clarity from the current Iranian opposition seems highly unfair. 

But anyway, in the L.A. Times, Robin Wright attempts to answer some of these questions. She summarizes the recently released demands of three main strains of the Green movement. One manifesto, penned by a group that includes exiled clerics, intellectuals, and journalists, goes far beyond incremental reform and the original grievance related to June’s fraudulent presidential election. Indeed, it represents a complete rejection of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution and its central tenet of "vilayet i faqih" —or guardianship by Islamic jurists. Among the demands are the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and protest; independence of the clergy from the establishment; accountability and term limits for all high-level officials; cancellation of special clergy courts and full independence of the judiciary; and the independence of universities including an exit of military forces from all campuses. Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s own statement falls short of questioning the legitimacy of the Islamic system, but shares the desire for full political and cultural freedom, and an end to state violence and corruption.

I did find interesting the overlap of demands between the 1979 revolutionaries and those of today’s opposition leaders. The political repression, the economic anxiety, the demands for accountability for government brutality and malfeasance, the call for the independence of the media and the judiciary. No, there is no uniting figure like Khomeini to return triumphantly from exile, and there does seem to be an incipient split in the opposition between those who want revolution and those who want reform within the current system. But I can’t see how anyone can look at the similarities in both the political climate and the nature of the popular grievances, and conclude so emphatically as the Leveretts have that "The Islamic Republic will continue to be Iran’s government." Rather than offering this as an unfortunate but clear-eyed prediction, they really do seem to be rooting for it to be the case. Why?

There’s not much more to add about the failed Christmas day bombing of Northwest flight 253. The first thing I thought when I heard that al-Qaeda "claimed credit" for the attack was, "How do you get to claim credit for a failed attack?" The guy miffed the explosive, burned himself badly, was caught, and is now by all accounts giving up valuable intelligence about the genesis of the plot. Yes, al-Qaeda managed to expose debilitating weaknesses in our security and intelligence apparatus, but that’s not exactly hard to do. It’s a frustrating dynamic indeed when our enemies win whether they succeed or fail. Paul Campos calls this unwinnable game "Terrorball":

The first two rules of Terrorball are:
(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

And now AQ gets in a residual dig every single time TSA plays grab-ass with citizens from 14 Muslim-majority countries.

Now the metrics of Terrorball are obviously awful for us, but we can still expect some reasonable level of competence from those tasked with keeping our planes safe. Maureen Dowd summed it up expertly last week:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

To be fair, also at work here is a sort of survivorship bias: we don’t know how many panty-wearing Arabic-speaking Nigerians DID make it onto the no-fly list, and were thus discouraged or otherwise thwarted from ever getting near a commercial airplane. As Nassim Taleb notes in The Black Swan, if some enterprising freshman congressman decided in August of 2001 to push through legislation that mandated all cockpit doors be fortified and locked, 9/11 would not have occurred. But we wouldn’t be saying, "Boy is that guy a hero for preventing 9/11!" He’d be the pain-in-the-ass who needlessly forced all the airlines to spend money fortifying their cockpit doors, probably resulting in higher ticket prices for everyone.

But the problem of unknown success doesn’t at all mitigate our intelligence services’ conspicuous strategic and tactical failures. David Ignatius ended his column today with this:

CIA Director Leon Panetta should use these searing events to foster a culture of initiative and accountability at a CIA that wants to do the job — but that needs leadership and reform."

He’s right, of course. But swap out the name "Leon Panetta" for "George Tenet" and it could have been published word for word in late 2001. As if it never occurred to Leon Panetta or any of his predecessors that presiding over a "culture of initiative and accountability" would be a very desirable thing. That it hasn’t come about yet perhaps tells us more about the nature of the institutions and less about the ‘fostering’ abilities of this or that leader.

I had a professor in grad school who was a career CIA analyst. Each semester he used to impress the headscratching undergrads with the CIA’s informal motto: "The secret of our success is the secret of our success."  Well with more success like this… 

Well let’s get going then…