One thing should be evident to all--as apparently, judging from Hanson, it is. That is that the bombing Iran is very bad option, even if it happened to be the best of the lot.

Therefore one should be eager to find an alternative. The best alternative, the fattest carrot, has to include an ironclad guarantee on our part not to initiate the use of force against Iranian forces or territory.

In three quarters of America, no politician who desires continance in office would recommend this policy. It will therefore never be adopted.

But it should be, if one is concerned to all one reasonably can to prevent Iran's acquiring nuclear weapons.

We will instead adopt policies even less likely to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.  In a few years it will.

Then Iran will be secure against American or Israeli attacks on its territory. Whether it can and will use this security to undertake or sponsor provocative missions against American or Israeli targets will depend on whether those attacks can be countered by measures other than attacks on Iranian territory.

Posted at January 16, 2006 12:40 PM in response to Real Choices

Put it this way: there are two sorts of reasons, both compelling, for the U.S. to behave less arrogantly towards other nations. One is that we're not, as we tend to think we are, entirely virtuous and rightfully fearful. The other is that, assuming we are rightfully fearful--that all the exaggerated menaces our psyches conjure up really were there--still, the most effective way to counter them is to take into account the interests of other nations and work in concert with them.  

So a smart Democratic candidate will (at least in the general election) never deny that our enemies are numerous and eight feet tall, nor deny that they are entirely evil and we without moral blemish. But he or Hillary will stress that other nations can be of assistance to us and can act in ways, if they're pissed, that make us somewhat less secure.

The legitimacy of preemption and of unilateralism as principles should never be questioned.

What of democratization? The notion that an elected Egyptian or Saudi government would be better behaved than the regimes presently in charge is more than a little dubious. Yet it's also true that unfettered support of repressive regimes may do us more harm than good.

Probably we're in no case speaking of an issue that will sway many votes. But Democrats must be unswervingly nationalistic, and in that spirit they could perhaps attack a democratizing Republican from the right.

 

Posted at January 14, 2006 11:44 AM in response to Say Anything

Alas, even the bright spot you discern looks darker than you suggest, since Mr. Graham's latest amendment would shred the most fundamental of our freedoms, habeas corpus, and Mr. McCain voted for it.

Posted at November 24, 2005 12:37 PM in response to A Political Thanksgiving

A good basic question about gerrymandering: are the Republicans winning a majority of the seats in the House even though nation-wide they're getting less than a majority of the votes in the various districts? Answer--from a column Google brought up: no. Their margin in the country is about the same as in the House.

My source on this is pretty shaky. Anybody have better data? Any reason to suppose that the vote could go to say 52-48 or 53-47 Democratic nation-wide and still the Repubicans would retain  the majority of House seats? 

There are two issues lurking here: does the House reflect the willof the people? Do individual members most years have little to worry about in November, more from a primary challenge? The latter seems to be the main problem.

Posted at November 14, 2005 8:32 AM in response to Show Me The Money

"What he [Feith] saw was the threat posed by states rather than by non-state actors, including terrorist groups."

Fascinating that two reasonably reasonable, reasonably well-informed people (Feith (and HP) and me) could disagree on something as fundamental as this. (Happens all the time--also fascinating.)

Seems obvious to me that we had no way to know so much about Iraq as HP supposes we did. Did we KNOW the regime was sliding to embrace of sponsorship of terrorism, and sliding so fast we had to act fast?

What we did know in my view is that as between Iraq and Iran, it was Iran was actively sponsoring terrorism, and it hardly made sense for us to do its work in Iraq, to make Iraq vulnerable to its ministrations.

And we knew in my view that our power was much more than sufficient to deter any action by any state that amounted to an attack on an identifiably American target of any military significance.

So Feith and the administration and HP got or get it exactly wrong. A newly emergent danger, terroist NGOs, so to speak, is the great fear. But states, all other states, remain eminently deterrable when it comes to attacks on American targets. Our power is very great and very good at deterrence of attack coming from sources we can retalitate against.

But now it comes from sources we can't retalitate against--non-state actors.

And precipitate attacks against, let alone occupations of, states may prove highly counterproductive in making life difficult for the non-state actors we now have to fear.

Posted at October 28, 2005 8:41 PM in response to So Why Did Bush Go to War?

I wonder if the the parts of the report still suppressed cover this one: there are in this part of the world two hostile powers, Iraq and Iran. Of the two, the more dangerous (powerful and actively engaged in terrorist actions) is Iran. If you conquer Iraq, any new regime will likely have but a tenuous hold on power (unless it replicates the Saddam approach) and be susceptible to Iranian pressure. Hence the conquest of Iraq will aid Iran quite considerably--tilt the balance in its favor. That would not be in the interests of the United States.

Then there's also this one: does Saddam sponsor terrorist actions outside his borders? Would a conquered Iraq serve as a springboard for such actions?

Much of IR theory postulates the existence of rational actors. Recent American foreign policy calls this postulate into question.  

Posted at October 12, 2005 9:07 AM in response to Department of the Obvious

"most of the population doesn't regard professional competence as the highest of personal virtues."

 Maybe you're right, but this doesn't ring true to me. My sense is that working and lower-middle class kids feel very strongly that merit, the ability to deliver the goods coupled with hard work, are deserving of reward, and that mere ascriptive characteristics are not. Hence their strongly felt resentment of affirmative-action privilege. And I see the $30,000 a year crowd not as denying the importance and deserts of professional competence, but instead as putting themselves down for their failure (as they see it) to have been born with/to have worked their way into acquiring a comparable degree of competence.

Posted at October 7, 2005 12:22 PM in response to Meritocrats and Aristocrats

How ghastly to focus on aggregate outcomes. Well, perhaps not perfectly ghastly: if the state tries to nudge up the birthrate by providing more support to parents to better care for their children, no problem.

But the prime imperative is to look at our social arrangements from the standpoint of the child, the standpoint of caring and responsible parents, positioned to take to enable the child to thrive. Hence the need for abortion as a family value: so that a pregnant woman who knows she can't take proper care of the child is not forced to try and fail or to fob the job off on God knows who else.

But the focus should be on this micro-level issue, can the child be WELL CARED FOR. Not on the macro-level issue, the sheer number of babies born. Obviously, bringing ill-cared for babies into the world isn't good social policy, so there's not even a real tradeoff here. Doing what we can to ensure that whatever children are born are well cared for is of transcendent importance.

The gravest insult in banning abortion is not to the mother. It is to the child better unborn. The mother knows this to be true. 

Posted at October 1, 2005 9:17 AM in response to Abortion and the Birth Rate

What difference does it make that Bush's spokesman has denounced Bennett's remark?

Try this: Bush is a man in whom there is no truth, so his saying something means it's probably false (Matt is right).

But that's mistaken--there being no truth in Bush doesn't imply he doesn't utter true remarks when it's otherwise expedient to do so.

And we know that Bush is these days rather desperate and beleagured, more likely than ever to resort to falsehoods to salvage his presidency.

But still, since it's so hard to know whether Bush is making use of the truth for reasons of expediency or saying something he doesn't believe for the same reasons, it's best just to take what he says as not counting for nor against, as not counting as evidence, as unrelated to truth in any reliable way.  

Posted at September 30, 2005 11:06 AM in response to In Defense of Bill Bennett

Brad's right, Matt's wrong. Funny is beside the point. Not caring about what politics is all about is the point. Matt does, Brad does, and Michaels C. and I., Weston, and Michiko too often don't.

Posted at September 28, 2005 10:45 AM in response to Lighten Up...