Monthly Archive for February, 2010

This Thursday, February 11, marks the 31st anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution. It will no doubt prove to be another major inflection point in the ongoing and often-violent confrontation between the regime and the Green opposition movement. Since June’s fradulent presidential election, the opposition has skillfully co-opted all official holidays and religious commemorations to highlight the regime’s brutality and its abandonment of even the pretense of democratic legitimacy. On Thursday it’s expected that up to 3 million people will take to the streets in Tehran to continue anti-government protests. The regime will be prepared, “deploying about 12,000 baton-wielding Basiji militiamen from outside the capital and legions of supporters bused in from around the country.” A Tehran police spokesman said that the holiday “will mark the burial of sedition.”

Rather predictably, Iran has decided that this is a fine time to at least up the appearance of impropriety regarding their nuclear program. They just announced plans to build ten new civilian nuclear plants this year, and to further enrich their low-grade uranium, though to a level far below what’s needed for a weapon.

Juan Cole at Informed Comment argues that this conspicuous public disclosure of increased low-enrichment activity is not a particularly alarming development, and he notes that when Iran really wants to hide something bad from us, ironically, we’ll know it:

“It is not dangerous for Iran to produce low enriched uranium… It would be dangerous if Iran determined to enrich to 95% to make a bomb. In order to do so, it would have to evade all US electronic surveillance, withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and throw out the UN inspectors…The US National Security Agency can hear a walkie-talkie conversation in the jungles of Guatemala, and for Iran to hide a decision to make a bomb would be very difficult….

Iran is already producing low enriched uranium for reactor fuel. That it has decided to produce a higher grade of it for its medical infrastructure is neither surprising nor a cause for panic. You’ll know if Iran decides to build a bomb. It will throw out the inspectors or refuse them access, including to places the US detects a huge electromagnetic signature but which Iran declines to declare as facilities. None of that has happened. Until then, the world should relax.”

I agree. The Iranian theocracy would love nothing more than to begin a fresh round of belligerent public invective with the West over its nuclear program; anything to deflect attention away from Thursday’s historic protests and the regime’s plans for bloody suppression of its citizens’ human rights.

Surely leading politicians in the U.S. wouldn’t fall for such nonsense, and allow the teetering mullahs the opportunity to once again make a common enemy of the Great Satan. Right?

Wrong. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the presumptive front-runner for the 2012 Republican nomination for president (Via Andrew Sullivan):

CHRIS WALLACE: How hard do you think President Obama would be to defeat in 2012?

SARAH PALIN: It depends on a few things, say he played — I got this from Buchanan — say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decide to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel–which I would like him to do. That changes the dynamics of what we can assume will happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were today, Obama would not be elected.

WALLACE: You’re not suggesting that Obama would cynically play the war card?

PALIN: I’m not suggesting that, I’m saying if he did, things would dramatically change if he decided to toughen up and do all that he can to secure our nation and secure our allies. I think people would shift their thinking a bit.

Thank you Dr. Strangelove. Like all of Palin’s extemporaneous utterances, this is a little difficult to parse. But I think it’s clear she thinks that Obama should “toughen up” by going to war with Iran, both because it’s good politics and because it’s good policy. Nothing says solidarity with fragile democratic forces like bombing the hell out of their country.

The U.S. Congress certainly seems to agree with Palin that more bellicosity toward Iran is good politics. The Senate just passed S.2799, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009, which would severely curtail Iran’s ability to import fuel for cars and heating. NIAC notes that the bill “is composed of several outdated ideas conceived well before the tectonic shift in Iran that followed stolen June elections.” They also remind us that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi is strongly opposed to any new sanctions; Mousavi noted that sanctions “will impose agonies on a nation who suffers enough from miserable statesmen.”

Once again this will show the phrase “targeted sanctions” to be an oxymoron. The Supreme Leader’s home will continue to be heated just fine, thanks. Ahmadinejad will have plenty of petrol for his motorcade. The people will suffer; they always do.

The administration has played this right from the beginning, realizing it has precious little capacity to help the Green movement. And immense capacity to do it harm. Yet the Republican opposition and the U.S. Congress seem intent on finding creative ways to bring this about. They really need to stop doing that.

Yesterday a Russian think tank with close ties to President Dmitri Medvedev issued a report recommending sweeping political reforms, which they say are essential if Russia is to modernize and avoid serious internal instability in the years to come. The reforms include “restoration of elections for governors, an end to censorship of the news media, Russian membership in NATO, and dissolution of the Federal Security Service, successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B.” The think tank is liberal-leaning, and the recommendations are expected to be completely ignored, but it got me thinking.

A friend was just telling me how he recently had to peruse the Russian Constitution for work, and he was very surprised to find in it a pretty exhaustive list of guaranteed individual freedoms, rights of privacy, expression, association, etc.

Indeed, it seems strange that anyone would have to call for an end to censorship of news media in Russia, because Article 29, Section 5 of the constitution is perfectly clear on the matter: “The freedom of the mass media shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be prohibited.” So imagine my surprise when I found that the International Federation of Journalists has an online database that documents over 300 deaths and disappearances of Russian journalists since 1993, the year the new Russian Constitution was written. Hmm.

Likewise, there should really be no need to worry about overreach by the Russian security services, because the constitution says, “Arrest, detention and keeping in custody shall be allowed only by an order of a court of law.”  And: “No one may be subjected to torture, violence or any other harsh or humiliating treatment or punishment.”  So no problems there. Well, except for the laundry list of reports over at Amnesty International detailing severe Russian human rights abuses, illegal detention and disappearances, torture, and political repression.

Russia is certainly not alone among authoritarian or dictatorial regimes in their supposed fealty to lofty Jeffersonian principles and their codification of expansive rights and freedoms. Even North Korea has a constitution that appears to guarantee all sorts of rights pertaining to speech, publication, assembly, demonstration, and association. (Read Christopher Hitchens’ piece in Slate this week to learn all you need to know about what a miserable farce those “freedoms” are.)

And the institutional forms and practices of liberal democracy are absolutely dominant in most every corner of the world. People know what a government is supposed to look like, and most regimes by now have been forced into at least providing the proper visual. Everyone has a parliament and an austere parliamentary building, hollow though it may be behind the facade. Everyone allows its citizens to queue up from time to time and put ballots into ballot boxes, even if election outcomes are never in doubt. Everyone has a nominally independent judiciary, even if in practice it is a mere puppet of the executive. Everyone has language that inhibits the behavior of police and security forces, though in practice capricious law prevails.

Arab dictators have become particularly adept at this brand of “illiberal democracy”, or “liberalized autocracy” if you like, regularly announcing and handing out meaningless and toothless “reforms” to appease their Western sponsors and to be able to say that they are adhering to their own professed democratic values and those of their country’s constitution.

This approach spells real long-term danger for these regimes. Once dictators start undermining their own legitimacy by professing and codifying democratic principles, human rights reformers and opposition and resistance leaders have half their work done for them. All they need do is demand the regime live up to the laws, codes, and constitutional guarantees already in place. Obviously regimes are able to deny such claims for decades or more. But once even the pretense of legitimacy is gone, the clock starts ticking. (Go read about the 1975 Helsinki Accords, in which the Soviet Union signed on to what they thought of as a meaningless set of international human rights principles and fundamental freedoms; a few throwaway lines to appease the other signatories. It is widely believed that this act of signing their names to clear democratic principles so galvanized the dissidents and laid the foundation for the demise of empire 14 years later).

Autocratic regimes generally have one overriding goal in mind: survival. So they tend to lurch from crisis to crisis and engage in an unstable cycle of repression, revolt, reform, repeat; finely tuning their responses depending on how much threat their leaders perceive. Again, such strategies can succeed for a very long time, paired as they always are with extremely brutal internal security capabilities. Nonetheless, it is a cause for overwhelming optimism when despots and tyrants are forced to perpeptuate their power by resorting to the language and ideals and principles of liberal democracy. The real thing must someday follow.

Research 2000 just released a big poll commissioned by Daily Kos, asking self-identified Republicans nationwide all sorts of loopy questions and getting, predictably, all sorts of loopy answers. The full poll is pretty entertaining reading, but here’s a little table summary of the highlights, from Bruce Bartlett, whom you all should be reading:

Andrew Sullivan has a very thoughtful post on the origin of the virulent reactionarism that today defines the Republican party:

What you begin to realize is that on a whole host of issues, the GOP is going backward in areas of social tolerance, as they marinate in their own paranoia and purge every non-ideologue from their ranks….There is a profound insecurity and dysfunction in these subcultures which cannot make the transition to modern life and thereby surrender more totally to the ancient past and to hatred of those who succeed.”

Bruce is rather more direct, concluding that “between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid.”

Well I’m a little partial toward that explanation myself these days, but couldn’t you say that about the members of most every political party across all times?  So 63% of Republicans think Obama is a socialist. In 2006 I bet a giant chunk of self-described Democrats would have answered affirmatively to the question, “Do you believe George W. Bush is a fascist?”  Or following Katrina, how many would have said yes to, “Do you believe George W. Bush is a racist who hates black people?”  And the number who thought George W. Bush should be impeached was probably off the charts.

The rest of the poll shows the GOP to be pretty solidly anti-union, anti-immigrant, and pro-Jesus. No real shocker there. Just as a poll of Democrats during some particular apex of resentment against Bush would show them to be pretty solidly pro-union, pro-immigrant, and more mixed-bag about Jesus.

But, the rabid homophobia, the birtherism, the cranks who think they want to secede from the Union: it’s very disturbing stuff, to be sure; but I also notice the very high percentage of “not sure” responses. I don’t think these are the typical cynical “not sures” of politicians (ie., “do you think your opponent is a Martian Nazi ManBearPig?” “Well I’m not sure, you’ll have to ask him that.”). I think the 55% of people who weren’t sure if ACORN stole the 2008 election have no bloody idea what the hell ACORN is.

Also, most people just don’t follow these things at all closely, and I think we really overestimate the degree to which folks spend time wondering whether the president of the United States actually wants the terrorists to win, or weighing the pros and cons of their state seceding from the Union.

Fox News certainly encourages such narratives, but contrary to perception, nobody really watches Fox News. The top Fox shows, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, only get around 3 milion viewers a night. By contrast, American Idol gets 30 million viewers; Two and a Half Men gets 17 million (seriously?); Repeats of “House” get 8 million viewers.

Finally, this poll was of self-identified Republicans, and a WaPo/ABC poll from 3 months ago found only 20% of Americans self-identify as Republicans. We’re talking about a fringe of a fringe here. Or as Lindsey Graham says, not a party, but a club. A crazy racist homophobic Jesus club, but a club nonetheless.

Matt Yglesias makes an interesting point about how Americans are asked to vote for too many offices, thus diluting our ability to monitor and be well-informed about our elected officials:

If you live in Toronto, you vote for a member of the Toronto City Council, you vote for a member of the Ontario Parliament, and you vote for a member of the Canadian Parliament. That’s one large Anglophone city in North America.

What happens in New York City? Well, you’ve got a city council member, a borough president, a mayor, a public advocate, a comptroller, and a district attorney. You’ve also got a state assembly member, a state senator, an attorney-general, a state comptroller, and a governor. Then at the federal level, there’s a member of congress, two senators, and the president. That’s sixteen legislative and elected officials rather than Toronto’s three. New Yorkers don’t have three times as much time in their day to monitor the performance of elected officials. Instead, New York elected officials simply aren’t monitored as closely. That creates more scope for corruption.

This seems intuitively right, but there’s something Matt’s missing. Even though Torontoans vote for just three people, it’s not like they only have three things to worry about, while New Yorkers have sixteen things to worry about. It’s not as if those other thirteen layers of governing don’t get done in Toronto; they just get done by appointed officials rather than elected ones.

But as Matt says, we all have the same amount of time in the day to monitor our government. So presumably Torontoans are just as ignorant about their dozens of appointed officials as New Yorkers are about their dozens of elected officials. Neither are in much of a position to knowledgably hold them accountable, either by voting against them directly or voting against their appointer.

But if some of us miraculously do find more time to do some extra monitoring, isn’t it easier to monitor elected officials than it is to monitor appointed ones?

For instance, if I didn’t have a clue who my elected comptroller was, there’d probably be plenty of ways for me to find out. He’d have a website, a newsletter, probably a blog, an office with obsequious staffers eager to address my concerns; there’d also be a slew of laws that tightly regulate his professional behavior and force him to disclose all kinds of information about his financial and political dealings.

Maybe appointed officials have some of these things as well. But the point is, no one knows who their comptroller is or what he’s been up to, regardless of whether he’s elected or appointed by a mayor. But if these unknowable figures must campaign to keep their office, shake some hands and run some tv ads, we’d at least have more of an opportunity to learn their name and accomplishments, as it would be very much in their self-interest for us to know such things. And perhaps an official whose name lots of people know would attract more media scrutiny, thus limiting the scope for corruption.

It’s certainly easier and more convenient to have to vote for fewer people, but I don’t see why it would necessarily lead to better and more honest officeholders. Torontoans and Americans are equally ignorant of marginally-important officials; Americans, forced to confront an endless list of names on a ballot, are in a position to be better aware of depth of our ignorance, which ain’t nothing.