Monthly Archives: October 2006

Adding Up the Commas

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The new Johns Hopkins/Lancet study of deaths in Iraq caused rightie knees to jerk so fast I’ll bet a bunch of ’em are on crutches today.

David Brown of the Washington Post reports:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

Wow, that’s a lot of commas. Will Bunch points out,

If the Hopkins survey is right, it could be the case that the last three years of mayhem in Iraq has claimed twice as many lives as died violently during the odious, 23-year regime of Saddam Hussein. Most experts looking at the Saddam years say that lives lost by internal repression and genocide against Kurds and Shia probably killed about 300,000 people.

You can’t blame the righties for being skeptical, however, because I suspect much of the news reporting about the study is sloppy. I’m making some assumptions here because I haven’t seen the study itself, but if it’s similar to an earlier study from 2004 by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins, the study did not just add up Iraqi civilians known to have been killed by violence, and I doubt the researchers claim to have completely separated “civilian” deaths from “combatant” deaths — in the middle of an insurgency/civil war, that would be pretty much impossible.

Instead (and I’m relying mostly on the Washington Post’s account of this) as I understand it the study looks at mortality rates before and after the invasion and publishes the difference. The mortality rates include all Iraqis who died of anything, including malnutrition and disease. Historically disease has caused more deaths among both soldiers and civilians in war than battle itself, for a lot of reasons. That’s less true now than it used to be, for soldiers. But if war destroys infrastructure that delivers safe water to a population, or damages hospitals, or runs off the doctors, or cuts off supplies to medicines, then a lot of people die from war who might not have died otherwise. And that’s what the Johns Hopkins study counts — people who died who would not have died otherwise.

However, Johns Hopkins reports now that about 600,000 of the 655,000 deaths were from violence, which is startling.

Per Doug Ireland at CommonDreams, much of the rejection of Johns Hopkins’s earlier study came from people who assumed the study counted deaths from violence, or only counted civilians killed by coalition forces, without actually reading what the study said.

Guterman’s article dissects the U.S. mass media’s attempts to dismiss the study’s findings while European newspapers front-paged the story. The results of Guterman’s interviews with the “experts” American newspapers relied upon to discredit the Lancet study should cause red faces at some of our national dailies. For example, “The Washington Post, perhaps most damagingly to the study’s reputation, quoted Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, as saying, ‘These numbers seem to be inflated.’ “Mr. Garlasco says now that he had not read the paper at the time and calls his quote in the Post ‘really unfortunate.’He says he told the reporter, “I haven’t read it. I haven’t seen it. I don’t know anything about it, so I shouldn’t comment on it.’ But, Mr. Garlasco continues, ‘like any good journalist, he got me to.’

“Mr. Garlasco says he misunderstood the reporter’s description of the paper’s results. He did not understand that the paper’s estimate includes deaths caused not only directly by violence but also by its offshoots: chaos leading to lack of sanitation and medical care.”

The article cited in the quote above, by Lila Guterman, is here. Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Guterman documented that American news media blew off the earlier study because (1) they didn’t bother to read it and (2) they don’t understand how statistics and statistical sampling work. (I admit I am in the latter category myself, but then so is just about everybody else.) For example, Fred Kaplan of Slate — someone I link to from time to time — complained that the wide range in the study of possible deaths, 8,000 to 194,000, was not an estimate, but a “dartboard.” Guterman explained that the researchers

… acknowledged that the true number of deaths could fall anywhere within a range of 8,000 to 194,000, a function of the researchers’ having extrapolated their survey to a country of 25 million.

But the statistics do point to a number in the middle of that range. And the raw numbers upon which the researchers’ extrapolation was based are undeniable: Since the invasion, the No. 1 cause of death among households surveyed was violence. The risk of death due to violence had increased 58-fold since before the war. And more than half of the people who had died from violence and its aftermath since the invasion began were women and children.

Because the initial reporting of the 2004 report was riddled with errors, many people to this day believe it was “debunked” by “experts,” when in fact the real experts who read the study praised it. But the real experts didn’t get quoted in American media. Back to Guterman:

Public-health professionals have uniformly praised the paper for its correct methods and notable results.

“Les has used, and consistently uses, the best possible methodology,” says Bradley A. Woodruff, a medical epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Indeed, the United Nations and the State Department have cited mortality numbers compiled by Mr. Roberts on previous conflicts as fact — and have acted on those results. …

… Mr. Roberts’s first survey in Congo, in 2000, estimated that 1.7 million people had died over 22 months of armed conflict. The response was dramatic. Within a month, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that all foreign armies must leave Congo, and later that year, the United Nations called for $140-million in aid to that country, more than doubling its previous annual request. Later, citing the study, the State Department announced a pledge of an additional $10-million for emergency programs in Congo.

(I recall that the Columbia Journalism Review also published a post-mortem of reporting on the 2004 report and concluded journalists screwed the story because they don’t understand statistics. However, this article is not online and I’m not sure what issue it was in — probably early 2005, but I don’t have it handy.)

A big reason the 2004 report was bashed was that The Lancet rushed to publish it before the 2004 election. (Contrary to rumor, the article did go through peer review before publication.) The VRWC Media Machine used that fact to bash the study as “political” and get it discredited (by people who either didn’t understand statistics or who hadn’t read the report, or both). And now they’re gearing up to “debunk” the new study the same way.

This time, however, the Washington Post is a little more careful about the experts it quotes. From today’s story by David Brown:

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method “tried and true,” and added that “this is the best estimate of mortality we have.”

This viewed was echoed by Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human Rights Watch in New York, who said, “We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy” of the survey.

“I expect that people will be surprised by these figures,” she said. “I think it is very important that, rather than questioning them, people realize there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq.”

Of those deaths, Brown reports,

A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old.

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

The percentage of Iraqis killed by coalition forces is declining, because Iraqis have stepped up and are killing each other at more robust rates.

Juan Cole comments (emphasis added):

This study is going to have a hard ride. In part it is because many of us in the information business are not statistically literate enough to judge the sampling techniques. Many will tend to dismiss the findings as implausible without a full appreciation of how low the margin of error is this time. Second, it is a projection, and all projections are subject to possible error, and journalists, being hardnosed people, are wary of them.

The New York Times report has already made a serious error, saying that deaths in the Saddam period were covered up. The families interviewed knew whether their loved ones were disappearing in 2001 and 2002 and had no reason to cover it up if they were. The survey established the baseline with a contemporary questionnaire. It wasn’t depending on Iraqi government statistics.

Another reason for the hard ride is that the Republican Party and a significant fraction of the business elite in this country is very invested in the Iraq War, and they will try to discredit the study. Can you imagine the profits being made by the military-industrial complex on all this? Do they really want the US public to know the truth about what the weapons they produce have done to Iraqis? When you see someone waxing cynical about the study, ask yourself: Does this person know what a chi square is? And, who does this person work for, really?

Then Anthony Cordesmann told AP that the timing and content of the study were political. But is he saying that 18,000 households from all over Iraq conspired to lie to Johns Hopkins University researchers for the purpose of defeating Republicans in US elections this November? Does that make any sense? And, if Cordesmann has evidence that the authors and editor set their timetable for completion and publication according to the US political calendar, he should provide it. If he cannot, he should retract.

Ironically enough, the same journalists who will question this study will accept without query the estimates for deaths in Darfur, e.g., which are generated by exactly the same techniques, and which are almost certainly not as solid.

Awhile back I was production editor of some scholarly scientific and sociology journals, and the damn things were ridden with chi squares and p-values and all manner of Greek letters, and I never did understand any of the statistical stuff. So, full disclosure, I’m not one to criticize ignorance of chi squares. But the people who do understand chi squares are saying the Johns Hopkins methodology is sound. Don’t let the righties tell you otherwise.

Update: Glenn Greenwald checks out some rightie sites and notes (sarcasm alert) that “Bush followers have become overnight expert statisticians.” But as Glenn explains in an update, these and other righties who dismiss the study out of hand “do not actually understand what the study is examining.”

They (and other of the above-linked Bush followers) seem to be laboring under the misunderstanding that the 650,000 death toll is the number of Iraqis who have died violent deaths since our invasion. That is not what the study is purporting to measure. The study is comparing the mortality rate of Iraqis during the time of our occupation (including deaths by any cause, such as disease, famine, or anything else) to the mortality rate prior to the occupation, and based on the post-invasion increased mortality rate (13.1 deaths per 1,000 persons post-invasion versus the pre-war 5.5 figure), calculates that more than 650,000 Iraqis have died during the occupation than would have died during the same time frame in the absence of the invasion.

Update update: Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED links to two posts by Daniel Davies that support the methodology.

Lunacy: Theirs and Ours

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Someone in the Middle East got hold of a photo of the Manhattan Apple Store entrance, while it was under construction, and concluded the building is a deliberate insult to Islam because (while under construction) it resembled the Ka’ba. Note that the structure doesn’t resemble the Ka’ba at all with the shrouding off.

This is a pretty good example of some flaming idiot grasping any excuse to whip up hysteria. The crew at Little Green Footballs (to which I do not link) is having a high time making fun of the hysterics (i.e., “what doesn’t offend these dickheads?!?! geez”).

Righties aren’t that crazy … oh, wait …

Here’s Michelle Malkin whipping up hysteria over the Flight 93 Memorial because she thinks the memorial is an Islamic crescent. Here’s the Flopping Ace whipping up hysteria over the Arizona 9/11 memorial because he thinks the memorial is an Islamic crescent. (He has political issues with the memorial as well, since it doesn’t reflect rightie historical revisionism.)

Here’s the Liberal Avenger on wingnut hysteria over the Flight 93 memorial. A fun read.

Our loonies and their loonies look more and more like mirror images of each other every day.

Amusing

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If Jeff Goldstein is a liberal, I’m Marie Antoinette.

Update, January 22, 2007: Now that this post is more than three months old, Jeff Goldstein is complaining that I didn’t notice the post was by a guest. However, the post had no byline; the clue that it was by someone else than Jeff was in tiny, tiny type at the end of the post. This is rather sloppy presentation on Goldstein’s part, I would say. And you’d think he has more important things to complain about.

We all miss these little details sometimes and people USUALLY correct each other’s innocent mistakes POLITELY. If he had asked me to correct the post POLITELY, I would have been happy to do so. However, since Goldstein’s behavior suggests he is l a horse’s ass, I think not.

The Natives Are Restless

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John Tierney doesn’t understand voters.

You may have heard that American voters are disappointed. They are disappointed with Dennis Hastert and the rest of Congress. They are very disappointed with the war in Iraq. They are very, very disappointed with President Bush.

I share their unhappiness, but I must confess to one further regret. I am disappointed with the voters — or at least the ones who show up in public-opinion polls. They keep complaining that Washington doesn’t understand what they want, but who on earth could?

Since “voters” are hardly a monolithic group, you might assume that “voters” want many diverse and conflicting things. But if you keep reading Tierney’s column, you’ll notice that Tierney has a maddening tendency to confuse soft majorities for solid mandates and to discount the influence of reality.

For example:

Early in the Iraq war, Americans told pollsters they favored it and considered it a major part of the war on terrorism. Then they decided the war was a mistake and didn’t reduce the risk of terrorism. Yet as they got angrier and angrier at Republicans for making a mess of Iraq, they kept telling pollsters that they didn’t trust the Democrats to do a better job of dealing with terrorism.

Early in the Iraq war, Americans were beaten over the head with a steady barrage of propaganda from government and media that if they didn’t support the Iraq war they supported terrorists. Pollingreports shows us some polling taken before the invasion, and I postulate that the majorities simply reflect the messages coming out of Washington and media at the time. Before the war, there was no meaningful national debate on all sides of the issue. Pro-war claims — about Iraq’s alleged nuclear capabilities, for example — went unchallenged. And since most of the public only heard one side of the issue, it’s not a big surprise the public supported that side.

In March 2003, 79% of adults nationwide polled by ABC News said Iraq posed a threat to the United States. This reflects the hysterical shrieking coming from Washington and the VRWC about the diabolical Saddam Hussein and his mushroom clouds. The same poll showed 65% favoring military action against Iraq. One suspects the first result had something to do with the second.

Today, three years later, 53% say that invading Iraq was a mistake (Newsweek poll, October 5-6).

Tierney wants you to believe this change in opinion shows that voters are fickle. That claims about Iraq being a dire threat turned out to be false, and that the war turned out to be one of the biggest blunders in American history, are not meaningful factors in Tierney World.

In March 2003, 55% said the Iraq war would last “a few weeks” or “several months.” Another 16% thought it would drag on as long as a year. Could it be the fact that the war is now more than three years old, with no end in sight, had something to do with changing peoples’ minds? Might the fact that the situation in Iraq has been deteriorating for some time — the phrase “hell in a handbasket” comes to mind — also be a factor?

A close look at the polls from 2003 shows some ambivalence. The ABC poll simply dated March 2003 shows 56% of respondents believing support from the United Nations Security Council was “desirable, but not necessary” before launching an invasion. But a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll taken February 24-26, 2003, said that only 38% of respondents thought the U.S. should act without UN approval. A majority, 40%, though UN approval was necessary, and 19% said the U.S. should not send ground troops at all. I’m no expert, but this suggests to me that public opinion was both soft and volatile; opinions were not strongly held and could be swayed by subsequent events. Which they were.

Tierney stumbles ahead, complaining that voters “can’t break their old prejudices” while exhibiting plenty of old prejudices of his own. For example:

On the domestic front, voters still trust Democrats to deal with issues like education and Social Security even though the Democrats have run out of ideas. Their basic educational strategy is to spend more money and keep teachers’ unions happy. They have no plan to keep Social Security solvent, except “taxing the rich,” which won’t do the trick.

Tierney manages to pack so much bias and misinformation into three sentences that just thinking about flushing it all out makes me tired. Briefly: We hear once again that Dems have “no ideas,” while no one notices the Republicans haven’t had a new idea in at least 40 years (and those ideas have mostly been bad ideas). In these and other sentences in the column Tierney assumes that teachers’ unions have a deleterious effect on public education, and he seems to believe that busting teachers’ unions would all by itself improve public education. But he doesn’t explain why he believes this. And in fact many people who understand numbers better than I do say that raising the Social Security cap would go a long way toward keeping the system solvent. Certainly that would be a better solution than President Bush’s insane privatization scheme, and most voters were smart enough to figure that out in spite of the barrage of propaganda.

I love this part:

Republicans fought to improve schools at the local level by giving more choices and power to students, parents and principals. These reforms (like vouchers and charter schools) were popular in places where Republicans overcame the resistance of Democrats and teachers’ unions, but in national polls, voters preferred Democrats to deal with education.

So President Bush abandoned the party’s principles and made a deal with Ted Kennedy to enact the No Child Left Behind law, a centralized Democratic-style plan that gave the Republicans a brief boost in the polls. Like previous Democratic plans for reviving education with regulations from Washington, it was an expensive flop, but voters still tell pollsters they trust the Democrats to fix the schools.

Get that? “No Child Left Behind” is an expensive Democratic flop. It’s Ted Kennedy’s fault, because he allowed himself to be suckered into a demonstration of bipartisanship to support President Bush’s initiative. Wow.

Tierney continues to believe that voters “overwhelmingly trust Republicans on Iraq, terrorism and other foreign policy issues,” even though most current polls say otherwise. Keep up, dude.

But the biggest flaw in Tierney’s thinking is not that he has replaced his cerebral cortex with a Republican talking points microchip, or that he discounts the influence of empiricism on voter opinion. I think his biggest problem is that he misunderstands what polls are for. He assumes that polls are taken to see how voters think. Not so; polls are taken to understand how the propaganda is working — how “the message” is sinking in. They are taken to give the propagandists some feedback so they can better fine tune the message. They are taken as part of the propaganda campaign — if a poll can be skewed to show that a majority favors X, then proponents of X can use that poll to create a bandwagon effect for X (everybody else likes X; why don’t you?). Polls can also be used to reinforce messages that have taken hold. For example, if news consumers are perpetually being told that polls say people don’t trust Democrats on national security, it reinforces the propaganda that Democrats can’t be trusted on national security.

Since the dawn of the Mass Media Age — sometime in the 1950s — the people at the top of the power pyramid have been using mass media to tell voters what to think. This has been doubly true since the 1980s, after the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated, and after the packaging of news as entertainment rather than, you know, news, became standard practice. And most of all, since the Right Wing media infrascruture came to dominate everything we hear and everything we read about politics and government. The Big Shots tell us what they want us to think, and they take polls to be sure that’s what we’re thinking. That’s how the system works.

If in spite of the system most Americans can, eventually, figure out when they’re being baboozled, then there’s hope for us all .

Getting back to Tierney’s original question — what do voters want? — polls essentially are a reflection of what Washington insiders expect and desire voters to want. Outside the Web, voters are rarely able to articulate what they might, truly, deep down, want. And they’re restless, Tierney, not fickle.

Update: On the other hand …

Update update: See also Greg Sargent.

More Bombs

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Following up the last post, which is long enough already — here’s something I didn’t know. Selig S. Harrison writes for Newswseek:

On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to “abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations.”

Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country’s access to the international banking system, branding it a “criminal state” guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence.

Frankly, as incompetent as the Bushies are, you can’t rule that out. But Michael Hirsch says,

Bush administration officials will not concede this publicly, but hardliners in Washington have long been pushing for a policy of regime change against Pyongyang. President Bush himself subtly underlined that threat when, at a Monday morning news conference, he said “the oppressed and impoverished people of North Korea deserve” a “brighter future.” Hence, only days after China orchestrated a framework agreement in September 2005 that promised the North it would be rewarded if it abandoned its nuclear program, including with a civilian nuclear reactor, the Bush administration imposed sanctions on the Macao-based Banco Delta Asia that effectively froze the accounts of Kim and other North Korean elites. The action is believed to have so riled Kim that he refused to return to the talks.

Let’s go back to Harrison for a moment:

Whatever the truth, I found on a recent trip to Pyongyang that North Korean leaders view the financial sanctions as the cutting edge of a calculated effort by dominant elements in the administration to undercut the Sept. 19 accord, squeeze the Kim Jong Il regime and eventually force its collapse. My conversations made clear that North Korea’s missile tests in July and its threat last week to conduct a nuclear test explosion at an unspecified date “in the future” were directly provoked by the U.S. sanctions. In North Korean eyes, pressure must be met with pressure to maintain national honor and, hopefully, to jump-start new bilateral negotiations with Washington that could ease the financial squeeze. When I warned against a nuclear test, saying that it would only strengthen opponents of negotiations in Washington, several top officials replied that “soft” tactics had not worked and they had nothing to lose.

If you know the history of the Bushies and North Korea, you understand that last sentence is a joke.

It was no secret to journalists covering the September 2005 negotiations, or to the North Koreans, that the agreement was bitterly controversial within the administration and represented a victory for State Department advocates of a conciliatory approach to North Korea over proponents of “regime change” in Pyongyang. The chief U.S. negotiator, Christopher Hill, faced strong opposition from key members of his own delegation at every step of the way.

You get the picture, I’m sure.

Back to Michael Hirsch:

Indeed by late last week, when U.S. officials grew increasingly certain that North Korea would detonate a nuclear device, there was a sense of resignation in Washington—almost a feeling of relief that, at long last, strategic clarity had arrived. “At least there would be a unified front against North Korea” if Pyongyang tested, one senior official told NEWSWEEK on Friday. “And it would light a fire under some parties.” He was referring to China. For the last year Washington had effectively subcontracted nuclear negotiations to Beijing, which was given the lead in the “six-party” talks that pitted Pyongyang against the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. China was key because, as Pyongyang’s longtime ally, it held the strongest hand against North Korea, controlling more than 70 percent of its energy supplies.

China has not been particularly tough with North Korea in the past. However,

The hope in Washington is now that Chinese President Hu Jintao will decide he’s finally had enough of his out-of-control former junior partner. With Sunday’s test Kim has now twice rebuffed Hu’s pleas for restraint. The last time was July, when Kim ignored the Chinese leader’s request not to test missiles. This time Kim insulted Hu the day after an important Sino-Japanese summit with Tokyo’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe—a nationalist who will no doubt be probing China’s strategic determination—and on the eve of a big communist party plenary session at which Hu’s reputation will be on the line.

For Washington, almost everything is riding on this hope.

In other words, President George W. “lone cowboy” Bush is hoping China will save his ass.

U.S. officials are talking tough about beefing up their Proliferation Security Initiative, which mainly involves interdicting suspect shipments on the high seas.

Remember the So San affair?

But last week they quickly walked back any speculation that Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill’s stark rhetoric from last week—“North Korea can have a future or it can have these weapons. It can’t have both,” Hill said—meant a threat of war. The Pentagon is extremely leery of any military options, with the heavily-populated South Korean capital of Seoul lying vulnerable to missile attack just across the North Korean border. What Hill’s comment meant instead, several U.S. officials said, was that the U.N. Security Council would move to impose sanctions, and key countries such as China, Japan and South Korea would join in, ensuring that the Pyongyang regime remains utterly friendless.

At the Guardian, Simon Tisdall explains there may not be much anyone can do about Korea.

A storm of predictable condemnation rained down on the heads of North Korea’s isolated regime in the wake of its first atomic weapons test today…. But the strong words did not disguise the weakness of the international community’s position now that North Korea has finally crossed the line and indisputably become what it has long claimed to be – a nuclear weapons state. In short, the big powers can huff and puff, but there is not a lot new in practical terms that they can do. This development was expected. They simply couldn’t stop it. …

… Sanctions are the obvious tool to which the US, Japan and other concerned spectators such as Britain will now resort. But such measures have been tried before and have failed to modify Pyongyang’s behaviour. In fact, they may have made it worse.

It is only a little more than a year since North Korea agreed in principle to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for US technology, aid and security guarantees. But US financial sanctions imposed on North Korean banks and businesses operating via Macau last winter appear to have caused serious pain in Pyongyang. Intentionally or not, they scuppered any chance of resurrecting the six-party process once it hit renewed difficulties. …

… The prospect that, like it or not, the international community will ultimately have to deal with North Korea on its own terms has significant implications elsewhere. Iran, whose suspect nuclear activities will soon be brought before the UN security council, may be encouraged in its defiance if no effective punitive action is taken against North Korea. Conversely, those in Washington who argue against direct talks with Iran, and against offering the sort of incentives proffered North Korea last year, may be persuaded by today’s events that dialogue is the only viable future option. Arguably, it was the Bush administration’s refusal to persist with former president Bill Clinton’s “framework agreement” with North Korea that has led to the present impasse.

Mr. Tisdall is an optimist. “Those in Washington” who helped bring the present impasse about are more likely to redouble their efforts to make matters worse.

Tim Grieve sums it up: The hard-liners in the White House were convinced from the beginning that a confrontational approach would bring North Korea to heel. Instead, the situation has deteriorated, and continues to deteriorate as the Bushies undermine their own diplomacy and throw away one opportunity after another to lower the temperature on a hot crisis.

Bombing

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Well, folks, North Korea claims it tested a nuclear weapon last night. Chalk up another achievement for the Bush foreign policy. David Sanger writes in the New York Times:

North Korea said Sunday night that it had set off its first nuclear test, becoming the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

Yesterday I dug up a four-year-old news story in which Condi Rice told Wolf Blitzer that the Bush Administration knew just how to handle Ki Jong Il; it was Saddam Hussein people should be worried about.

Rice said Iraq’s history shows the Baghdad regime is harder to contain than North Korea.

“These are not comparable situations,” she said. “They’re dangerous, both of them dangerous. But we believe that we have different methods that will work in North Korea that clearly have not and will not work in Iraq.”

Meanwhile —

The North Korean disclosure comes as the Bush administration faces a possible military confrontation with Iraq over its efforts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he considered North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and missile capability a bigger threat to the United States than Iraq.

Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the White House to rethink its priorities.

[Update: Please note that Senator Graham, who is now retired, said this in 2002, while the Bushies were busy whipping up hysteria over Saddam Hussein.]

So far, has the Bush foreign policy team gotten anything right? If they have, I don’t remember what it is.

I’ve already spent considerable blog time and bandwidth explaining why the current, um, challenge posed by North Korea is George W. Bush’s doing, and not Bill Clinton’s and/or Jimmy Carter’s, as righties would have you believe. See this post for the short explanation, and “Rolling Blunder” by Fred Kaplan and the Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes page from The Mahablog archives if you want more detail. I’m not going into all that again this morning, except to say that any troll who is dumb enough to repeat the “it’s Clinton’s fault” propaganda here without reading my long and carefully documented proof that it isn’t will be mercilessly ridiculed. Mercilessly, I say.

Here’s something I don’t believe I’ve said before, although others have — at Huffington Post, David Wallechinsky wrote,

The North Koreans and the Iranians looked around the world and saw that countries that had nuclear weapons, like Pakistan and China, were not in danger of being invaded by George Bush, while Saddam Hussein, who didn’t have a nuclear weapons program, was in prison and being tried for war crimes. If you were the leaders of North Korea or Iran, what would you do to ensure that your country would not be invaded by the United States? Easy call: you build nuclear weapons, which is exactly what both of them are doing. Nice going, Mister President.

From the Arms Control Association, in a review of At the Borderline of Armageddon: How American Presidents Managed the Atom Bomb by James E. Goodby.

In an excellent chapter on George W. Bush, Goodby characterizes the current president’s mindset as believing that “the time had finally come to scrap the old order.” To date, he has been quite successful in this objective. Goodby notes that other presidents helped build up the international nonproliferation and arms control regimes that they saw as supporting U.S. national security. Yet, Bush clearly believes that the United States, as the only remaining superpower, should be prepared to shape the international order unilaterally and has rejected treaties that would in any way restrict U.S. freedom of action. To this end, he withdrew from the ABM Treaty, despite strong Russian objections, and replaced the unratified START II with the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT). Also known as the Moscow Treaty, SORT lacks verification provisions, and its limits on future U.S. strategic forces are effectively toothless.

Although Bush has given high priority to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons to perceived U.S. enemies, his actions have either been ineffectual or counterproductive. At the beginning of his term, he overruled the decision of Secretary of State Colin Powell to continue very promising negotiations that the Clinton administration had begun with North Korea, thus spurring Pyongyang to advance its nuclear weapons program. Disregarding the precedent followed by previous presidents, he initiated a preventive war against Iraq on the false grounds that it was illegally developing nuclear weapons. Most recently, he has agreed to negotiate a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India, despite long-standing U.S. and Nuclear Suppliers Group policy to deny such aid to Pakistan, India, and Israel because they have not signed the NPT and are known to have nuclear weapons.

Today, confronted with the difficult problem of Iran’s potential nuclear weapons ambitions, Bush has made clear that all options are on the table if Iran refuses to terminate its uranium-enrichment program. Because UN agreement on effective sanctions is unlikely, rumors abound that Bush is seriously considering military actions in another preventive war. Given the international hostility that his policies have created, it is clear that any such action would have to be carried out unilaterally, with disastrous results to long-range U.S. security.

I take it from the review that Goodby approved of policies by Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan (as well as Kennedy and Johnson), but he had a little disagreement with Carter and was downright ambivalent about Clinton. So you can’t say the guy dislikes Bush just because he’s partisan.

(Off topic, but I got a kick out of this bit about LBJ:

President Lyndon B. Johnson, despite his growing preoccupation with Vietnam, rejected out of hand the use of nuclear weapons there. His view of nuclear war was brought home to me by his reaction at the final meeting in 1965 on the military budget to an item listed as DUCCS. In response to his question as to what this was, he was told it stood for Deep Underground Command and Control Site, a facility that would be located several thousand feet underground, between the White House and the Pentagon, designed to survive a ground burst of a 20-megaton bomb and sustain the president and key advisers for several months until it would be safe to exit through tunnels emerging many miles outside Washington. After a brief puzzled expression, Johnson let loose with a string of Johnsonian expletives making clear he thought this was the stupidest idea he had ever heard and that he had no intention of hiding in an expensive hole while the rest of Washington and probably the United States were burned to a crisp. That was the last I ever heard of DUCCS.

What do you want to bet some version of DUCCS has been resurrected by the Bushies?)

Anthony Faiola, Glenn Kessler and Dafna Linzer write for the Washington Post:

The announcement [by North Korea] brought a hailstorm of swift international denunciations … South Korean officials said they detected a significant man-made explosion in the barren northeast of the peninsula, and were substantiating the Pyongyang government’s claim. The test would make the Stalinist state the world’s eighth proven nuclear power, as well as its most volatile.

Chinese authorities immediately condemned the test. North Korea “has ignored the widespread opposition of the international community and conducted a nuclear test brazenly on October 9,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its Web site. “The Chinese government is firmly opposed to this.”

Yet the reaction from the U.S. was more subdued.

The White House did not immediately confirm the test, but spokesman Tony Snow said in a statement: “U.S. and South Korean intelligence detected a seismic event Sunday at a suspected nuclear test site in North Korea. A North Korean nuclear test would constitute a provocative act, in defiance of the will of the international community and of our calls to refrain from actions that would aggravate tensions in northeast Asia. We expect the Security Council to take immediate actions to respond to this unprovoked act.”

Billmon predicted:

Tony Snow will step out tomorrow to tell us it’s really not such a big deal — the North Koreans and Kim Jong-il being ever so much nicer and more rational than those genocidal Iranians and their power-crazed dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This is followed by an update — a bit of transcript of Tony Snow tap dancing furiously to distract reporters from White House ineptitude. Pathetic and hilarious at once.

Via Memeorandum, a quickie survey of Right Blogosphere reactions indicates the Official VRWC Spin: It probably didn’t happen; if North Korea keeps testing, it will run out of weapons soon and we won’t have to worry about them; it’s Clinton’s and Carter’s fault.

I like this one:

I claim some credit for calling the timing just before the election [although I don’t claim to have predicted, one way or another, whether they’d go through with this]. I think this was an enormous miscalculation on North Korea’s part. The Republicans will be gleeful that no one will be talking about Mark Foley next week. The national conversation will be back to national security, and the Republicans will have the chance to do what they do best — act tough on such issues.

The operative word is, of course, act. But I’d be very surprised if North Korea’s test registers more than a blip in the national consciousness, and I’d be extremely surprised if it drives the Foley sex scandal off cable news. In the Nooz Biz, the operative word is, of course, sex.

President Bush will probably have no choice but to ignore the counsel of State Department doves who had nearly unopposed control of Bush’s North Korea policy until last August.

Yeah; until last August, he was doing a heck of a job.

Now, he’ll most likely use many of the options he didn’t use after North Korea’s July missile tests. I would expect some very severe sanctions and a move for a U.N. arms embargo.

He’s going to run to the UN for help? My, how the child has fallen.

I’m going to predict that in the next few days the Bush Administration will be taking a back seat to China and other world powers in dealing with North Korea. The Bushies might try some saber-rattling to impress the home folks (and distract reporters from Dennis Hastert), but the world knows Bush is running low on sabers to rattle. In truth, the only options Bush has, other than run to the UN, are embargos and sanctions, which is what Condi was talking about back in 2002. And embargos and sanctions just don’t have the sex appeal that war has.

For a more intelligent analysis of what Bush might do, see emptywheel.

Update: For a different view, see Bill Scher:

As LiberalOasis has noted several times in the last four years, the Bush Administration never was interested in a negotiated deal to prevent North Korea from getting nukes.

The neocons want regime change in North Korea, in an attempt to constrict the rise of China. And they see any deal as helping the North Korea dictator remain in power.

After initially suspending talks with North Korea, and unraveling the diplomatic progress made by the Clinton Administration, the Bushies then agreed to “six-party” talks.

But the move was not intended to make new diplomatic progress. It was intended to make the Bushies look like they tried diplomatic avenues, when in fact, they made no serious proposals.

We can now see the results of this so-called “hard-line” strategy. A nuclear North Korea. A greater risk of more nuclear proliferation. A more unstable world.

Also, Glenn Kessler’s analysis in the Washington Post is pretty good, although it doesn’t clarify the uranium versus plutonium issue.

Update update: Josh Marshall has a good analysis, too, but the permalink isn’t working. You’ll have to scroll down to “(October 09, 2006 — 02:00 AM EST // link)” to read it.

More updates in the next post.

Give ’em an inch …

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Diana Henriques writes in today’s New York Times:

At any moment, state inspectors can step uninvited into one of the three child care centers that Ethel White runs in Auburn, Ala., to make sure they meet state requirements intended to ensure that the children are safe. There must be continuing training for the staff. Her nurseries must have two sinks, one exclusively for food preparation. All cabinets must have safety locks. Medications for the children must be kept under lock and key, and refrigerated.

The Rev. Ray Fuson of the Harvest Temple Church of God in Montgomery, Ala., does not have to worry about unannounced state inspections at the day care center his church runs. Alabama exempts church day care programs from state licensing requirements, which were tightened after almost a dozen children died in licensed and unlicensed day care centers in the state in two years.

The differences do not end there. As an employer, Ms. White must comply with the civil rights laws; if employees feel mistreated, they can take the center to court. Religious organizations, including Pastor Fuson’s, are protected by the courts from almost all lawsuits filed by their ministers or other religious staff members, no matter how unfairly those employees think they have been treated.

And if you are curious about how Ms. White’s nonprofit center uses its public grants and donations, read the financial statements she is required to file each year with the Internal Revenue Service. There are no I.R.S. reports from Harvest Temple. Federal law does not require churches to file them.

And they whine about a “war on Christianity.”

Henriques writes that some of the exemptions from taxes and regulations have existed since the beginning of the republic, but many more have been added over the past 15 years — more than 200 “special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents” since 1989.

As a result of these special breaks, religious organizations of all faiths stand in a position that American businesses — and the thousands of nonprofit groups without that “religious” label — can only envy. And the new breaks come at a time when many religious organizations are expanding into activities — from day care centers to funeral homes, from ice cream parlors to fitness clubs, from bookstores to broadcasters — that compete with these same businesses and nonprofit organizations.

But it gets better. According to today’s Boston Globe, under the Bush Administration our government has begun to sponsor Christian missionary work on foreign soil.

For decades, US policy has sought to avoid intermingling government programs and religious proselytizing. The aim is both to abide by the Constitution’s prohibition against a state religion and to ensure that aid recipients don’t forgo assistance because they don’t share the religion of the provider.

Since medical programs are aimed at the most serious illnesses — AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis — the decision whether to seek treatment can determine life or death.

But many of those restrictions were removed by Bush in a little-noticed series of executive orders — a policy change that cleared the way for religious groups to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in additional government funding. It also helped change the message American aid workers bring to many corners of the world, from emphasizing religious neutrality to touting the healing powers of the Christian God.

Bush’s orders altered the longstanding practice that groups preach religion in one space and run government programs in another. The administration said religious organizations can conduct services in the same space as they hand out government aid, so long as the services don’t take place while the aid is being delivered. But the rule allows groups to schedule prayers immediately before or after dispensing taxpayer-funded aid.

Bush’s orders also reversed longstanding rules forbidding the use of government funds to pay for employees who are required to take an oath to one religion. In addition, the president’s orders allowed faith-based groups to keep religious symbols in places where they distribute taxpayer-funded aid.

And in implementing the president’s orders, the administration rejected efforts to require groups to inform beneficiaries that they don’t have to attend religious services to get the help they need. Instead of a requirement, groups are merely encouraged to make clear to recipients that they don’t have to participate in religious activities.

Bush made some of the changes by executive order only after failing to get Congress to approve them; the bill faltered in the Senate, where moderate Republicans joined Democrats in raising concerns about breaking down the barrier between government and religion.

Are we having fun yet?

… the faith-based initiative overseas is almost exclusively a Christian initiative: Only two Jewish development groups and two Muslim groups of any type got any grants or contracts between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2005, and Christians received 98.3 percent of all such funds to religious groups from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2005.

The prime beneficiaries have been large groups including Catholic Relief Services and evangelical organizations such as World Vision — the former employer of Bush’s longtime USAID director Andrew Natsios — and Samaritan’s Purse, which is led by evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, who guided Bush to his own religious rebirth.

Groups counted on to be GOP “values voters,” I believe. The Bushies are using bleeping foreign aid to funnel money to their constituents.

However, Howard Fineman reports in Newsweek that the faithful are restless.

A Pew Foundation survey found an 8-percentage-point drop in Republican preference among “frequent churchgoers.”

Long before the Foley e-mails surfaced, the gears were grinding in the faith-based machine that Ronald Reagan inspired and Karl Rove perfected. It has been 30 years since evangelical, “Bible-believing” Christians flocked into politics. Figures such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Charles Colson of the Prison Fellowship have enormous clout within the GOP; Rove is a phone pal of both. But a younger crop of grass-roots activists views the elders of the cultural right as accommodationists who have failed to press a social agenda aggressively, and who now balk at calling for the ouster of Speaker Denny Hastert. “They need to wake up!” said Jamie Johnson, a religious broadcaster in Iowa. “Heads have to roll! The older generation is satisfied with a seat at the table. We want to build a whole new table.”

Interesting times.

If you missed it in the comments to an earlier post — here’s a good page on fundamentalism to bookmark for future reference.

Foley Frolics

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See if you can spot the flaw in Karen Tumulty’s otherwise spot-on article in Time magazine. It’s in this section:

If you think politicians clinging to power isn’t big news, then you may have forgotten the pure zeal of Gingrich’s original revolutionaries. They swept into Washington on the single promise that they would change Capitol Hill. And for a time, they did. Vowing to finish what Ronald Reagan had started, they stood firm on the three principles that defined conservatism: fiscal responsibility, national security and moral values. Reagan, who had a few scandals in his day, didn’t always follow his own rules. But his doctrine turned out to be a good set of talking points for winning elections in a closely divided country, and the takeover was completed with the inauguration of George W. Bush as President.

But after controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of Bush’s six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals.

Tumulty’s premise (illustrated by the graphic, which is inspired) assumes that Republicans started out as principled and reasonably pure but lost their way. However, if you assume that today’s Right is essentially the same critter Richard Hofstadter identified as pseudo-conservative back in the 1950s, then it follows that the “ideals” and “values” were always a sham.

Hofstadter wrote that pseudo-conservatism was “a kind of punitive reaction” to the New Deal era. Quoting Theodore W. Adorno, Hofstadter wrote in the essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” (1954):

I borrow the term [pseudo-conservative] from The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower administration. …

… From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere… The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

Later in the same essay:

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that is it constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.

Over the years the pseudo-conservatives have managed to erect a facade of political ideology to cover their social pathologies, and I believe at least some movement conservatives came to genuinely believe in that ideology. But in truth it has been their seething, inchoate resentment that has fueled the American Right lo these many years. The Bush cult of personality is just a new manifestation of a long-festering disease. Glenn Greenwald may have wondered at how easily righties could chuck their almighty ideology to stand with Bush, but for most of them it was never about the ideology. In George W. Bush they found the pure distillation of their resentment and ignorance. His smarmy insolence is the one-finger salute they have long desired to give to the world.

Please do read Tumulty’s piece in Time all the way through, as it very good. For now I just want to quote a bit from the end:

… the way the House has operated under Hastert has been anything but humble. He quickly came to be viewed as little more than a genial front for then majority leader Tom DeLay, whose nickname—the Hammer—pretty much summed up his leadership touch.

“There has been no institutional rule, means, norm or tradition that cannot be set aside to advance a partisan political goal,” says Brookings Institution political scientist Thomas Mann, co-author of the recently published book whose title describes Congress as The Broken Branch. In 2003, instead of fashioning a compromise that might woo a few Democrats, Hastert and DeLay held what was supposed to be a 15-min. vote open for three full hours as they squeezed the last Republican votes they needed to pass a bill to provide an expensive prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. Far more than in the past, they brought bills to the floor with no chance of amendment and allowed the normal appropriations process to be circumvented so that pet projects could be funded without scrutiny. When DeLay faced indictment by a Texas grand jury, Hastert changed the Republican rules so that DeLay could stay on as leader—though in the ensuing outcry, he had to reverse himself. Hastert was successful, however, in purging the ethics committee of its chairman and two Republican members who had reprimanded DeLay for misconduct. Stretching the limits of arcane House rules and shuffling committees around may not seem like earthshaking offenses, but they are the same type of procedural strangleholds and power plays that the G.O.P. had hoped to excise from the body politic 12 years ago.

The Dems were plagued by corruption in 1994, when the GOP took over the House, and the Dems had made use of “procedural strangleholds and power plays,” although I don’t know if they were as ruthless about it as is the current House leadership. The moral is not that one party is intrinsically superior to the other, but that all these politicians need OVERSIGHT. And no party should be able to manipulate Congress so that it can operate in the dark and shut out the opposition entirely. If the Dems do take back the House in November, I think we should lean on them heavily to make some reforms.

Another warning for the Dems comes from rightie blogger Rick Moran:

As it now seems likely that the GOP will be given the boot by voters on election day, America will turn toward the Democrats looking for leadership on budget issues, entitlements, the War on Terror, and other vital issues facing the country.

It says volumes that the American people will not find any new ideas or solutions from Democrats – only the promise that they will “drain the swamp.”

This assumes that Republicans have “new ideas and solutions.” The GOP has been dragging essentially the same mummified ideas around since Goldwater — hell, some of those ideas date back to Coolidge, if not McKinley — and the GOP had a clear shot at putting those ideas into practice. And (once again) they failed. But as I said here, if Dems get a shot they had better hustle to show voters that they can provide better government than the GOP, because otherwise the GOP will come roaring back in 2008. And Dems will have to deliver something tangible that voters can see with their own eyes, so that the mighty rightie media machine can’t spin it away.

At Orcinus, Sara Robinson thinks some right-wing voters have finally come to a moment of reckoning. On the other hand, Margaret Talev and Eric Black of McClatchy Newspapers write that “Polls show little national fallout from page scandal.” This is no time to be complacent.