Islam's Worshippers of Death

Alan Dershowitz, over at the Wall Street Journal, provides a powerful contrast between the cultures of Islam and the West on life, death, and conventional warfare:

Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."

Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren. Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led off to battle -- even a just battle -- has been a constant and powerful image.

Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women -- some married with infant children -- are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:

"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death," said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: "[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah." Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

Yes, that is a big difference between Islam and the West.

That's why is so frustrating sometimes to hear spokemen for the antiwar left denounce the administration and war backers as "hyping" the terrorist threat, or to see the anti-Bush hordes descend to cultural relativism when confronted with Islamic totalitarianism in the form of 12 year-old Taliban boys beheading hostages.

There's a lot of talk about "reaching out to moderate Muslims" in our ongoing policy debates on how best to respond to radical Islam.

I think that's an important component to our overall anti-terror policies in an age of fanatical violence.

But Dershowitz is less for reaching out than he is for eradicating the scourge of Islam's death worship:

The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable -- as the terrorists well understand.

We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the son of Zahra Maladan -- and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others like her -- decide to follow his mother's demand. We must stop them before they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores.

I would also remind readers that Islam's doctrinally a "religion of victory," and if one interprets Islamic theology strictly, the Muslim faith sees itself as being ultimately victorious in the world's (often unspoken) battle for divine supremacy. As Malise Ruthven has written:

In the majority Sunni tradition this sense of supremacy was sanctified as much by history as by theology. In the first instance, the truth of Islam was vindicated on the field of battle. As Hans Küng acknowledges in Islam: Past, Present and Future—his 767-page overview of the Islamic faith and history, seen from the perspective of a liberal Christian theologian—Islam is above all a "religion of victory." Muslims of many persuasions—not just the self-styled jihadists—defend the truth claims of their religion by resorting to what might be called the argument from manifest success.

According to this argument, the Prophet Muhammad overcame the enemies of truth by divinely assisted battles as well as by preaching. Building on his victories and faith in his divine mission, his successors, the early caliphs, conquered most of western Asia and North Africa as well as Spain. In this view the truth of Islam was vindicated by actual events, through Islam's historical achievement in creating what would become a great world civilization.

The argument from manifest success is consonant with the theological doctrine according to which Islam supersedes the previous revelations of Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians are in error because they deviated from the straight path revealed to Abraham, ancestral patriarch of all three faiths. Islam "restores" the true religion of Abraham while superseding Judeo-Christianity as the "final" revelation. The past and the future belong to Islam even if the present makes for difficulties.

Hmm, food for thought for those who argue that Iraq's been a diversion from the war on terror.

Ad Campaign: Democrats Weaken Terrorist Surveillance

Newsweek reports that Defense for Democracies, a conservative national security group, plans a barrage of ads attacking Barack Obama and congressional Democrats heading into the fall election.

Here's one of the ads, "Terrorist Surveillance" (via YouTube):

Here's the Newsweek story:

A new series of TV commercials featuring sinister photos of Osama bin Laden may signal what's to come this fall: a wave of secretly financed political attack ads. The spots, by a group called Defense of Democracies, which was just created by former Republican National Committee spokesman Cliff May, target 15 House Democrats for their failure to support a White House-backed electronic-spying bill. May told NEWSWEEK he plans to spend $2 million on the ads, but declined to identify who is financing the effort, saying he set up the group as a tax-exempt nonprofit—known in the federal tax code as a "501(c)(4)"—thereby permitting it to engage in political advocacy without disclosing donors.

The ads spotlight what some experts say is a gaping loophole in the campaign-finance laws. On Dec. 26, 2007, the Federal Election Commission quietly issued new rules in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last June that give more latitude for 501(c)(4) groups to run political "electioneering" ads without disclosing contributors. That helped blow open the floodgates. In 2004, the chief conduit for such ads were so-called 527 groups, among them the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But 527s had to identify donors. Now, said one GOP consultant who asked not to be identified talking strategy, "everybody is doing 501(c)(4)s because you don't have to disclose anything."

The rush to take advantage is underway. A consortium of liberal groups led by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta announced plans last week for a $20 million campaign attacking John McCain for his Iraq War support. The ads are part of a $200 million "independent" effort that will aim to "define" McCain on a host of fronts, including his "temperament," said one participant who asked not to be identified discussing the consortium's plans. Freedom's Watch, a conservative 501(c)(4) whose board includes Las Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, is planning to spend up to $250 million attacking the eventual Democratic presidential nominee for being soft on Iraq. Meanwhile, veteran "oppo" researcher Dave Bossie says his longstanding Citizens United 501(c)(4) has begun work on a $10 million effort that will include a feature film about Barack Obama. Among the issues "on the table," Bossie told NEWSWEEK, are Obama's ties to indicted developer Tony Rezko and former Weather Underground radical William Ayers. (Innocuous in both cases, Obama says.) "What we are trying to do is educate and inform voters," Bossie says. They might never find out, though, who's paying for their education.

As one can see from the article, it's going to be a bipartisan wave of attacks.

Hillary's "Who do you want answering the phone?" ad is just the tip of the subliminally nasty iceberg, even if Obama wins the Democractic nomination (an increasingly likely prospect):

• Hillary's Bleak Outlook - John Heilemann
• Why Hillary Will Lose - Dick Morris
• The End of BillaryLand Is On Its Way. Rejoice! - The New Republic
• "If she loses either Texas or Ohio, this thing is done." - James Carville
• The Tipping Point - Campaign Standard
• Why Is Clinton’s Back Against Wall? Nobody Prepared - New York Observer
• Clinton Plays Election Roulette - The Politico
• Losing, Hillary Style - The Politico

It ain't over 'till it's over, of course, so let's see what happens in Texas and Ohio on Tuesday.

Immigration Comeback: Border Issues to Reemerge After Election

Immigration's off to the back-burner of the policy agenda, right?

The major advocates of comprehensive reform got scorched in 2007, when the anti-open borders movement flexed its power in a fit of hardened interest group outrage. So logically were not likely to see another major reform attempt for some time, especially anything that smacks of amnesty.

Perhaps not, according to this New York Times report:

Immigration has a fantastically complicated political history in the United States. It has produced enough populist anger to elect Know Nothing mayors of Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and San Francisco, all in the 1850s and, more recently, to help Lou Dobbs reinvent his television career and become a best-selling author. But when national politicians have tried to seize on such anger, they have usually failed — and failed quickly. “While immigration has always roiled large sections of the electorate,” said Eric Rauchway, a historian at the University of California, Davis, “it has never been the basis for a national election, one way or the other.”

That appears to be truer than ever in 2008. Mr. McCain will all but clinch the Republican nomination on Tuesday with victories in the Ohio and Texas primaries. In the Texas campaign, except for a couple of obligatory questions about a border fence during a Democratic debate, immigration has been the dog that didn’t bark. The candidates who would have made an issue of it exited the race long ago.

There is, however, one more historical parallel to consider: as a political matter, immigration probably won’t go away on its own. The anti-immigration movements of the past may not have created presidents, but they did change the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act helped cut the immigration rate by more than 40 percent at the close of the 19th century. The Nativist movement of the 1910s and 1920s had even more success passing laws to reduce the flow.

Unlike those earlier immigration waves, the current one includes a large number of illegal immigrants, which creates its own political dynamic. The subject also plays into the economic anxiety of today that stems from decades of slow wage growth and is now aggravated by the possibility of a recession. Perhaps most important, this immigration wave could turn out to be the biggest of them all. Last month, the Pew Research Center reported that the percentage of Americans born overseas would break a century-old record sometime before 2025, if current trends continued.

So, eight months after the Senate’s immigration bill collapsed, immigration has managed to fade into the background without really becoming less important. The next president isn’t likely to be elected on immigration, but he or she is going to have to reckon with it.

That's putting it mildly. In just the last few days the Los Angeles Times has had a couple of big reports covering trends in illegal immigation.

One piece focused on the Border Control's shift to a tougher enforcement policy of "catch-and-return" (which deports illegals rather than releasing them back into the general population after arraignment).

Also, today's paper examines the increasingly clever tactics of human traffickers, who are now using ATVs to mingle in with recreational enthusiasts as they smuggle illegals over the Southwest border of the United States (see the photo essay here).

I've written a lot on this, and I'm certainly hoping immigration reform returns to the front of the agenda next year.

See also Peggy Noonan, "What Grandma Would Say: We don't need to solve the immigration problem forever. We need to solve it now."

Iraq Success to Resonate Through International System

Robert Kaplan, at American Interest, makes the case that success in Iraq will resonate to the benefit of U.S. foreign policy and international security:

The Iraq war has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and the death of close to 4,000 American troops, plus many more seriously wounded. This is not to mention the death of perhaps 100,000 or more Iraqis (estimates vary wildly). Thus, it is hard to imagine any future circumstance that will make the cost of invading Iraq seem worthwhile—and I say this as a supporter of the war years back. Moreover, I am leery of assuming that we may win this war merely because of the demonstrable improvement in conditions on the ground throughout the course of 2007. That is because we will not know how sustainable that improvement really is until we start withdrawing troops in significant numbers. Still, improvements on the ground certainly raise the possibilities of a better rather than a worse outcome.

My definition of a “better” outcome would be a continued, gradual decline in American and Iraqi deaths coupled with a gradual return to normal living conditions. No one could credibly declare victory, and Iraq would continue to drop out of the news. Iraq has already gone from a page-one to a page-two story in the course of the last year; if it drops to page three or four, say, by the end of 2008, that would qualify as a better outcome, if not a “win.”

What might be the repercussions of such a better outcome? Inside Iraq, it would result in a residual number of American troops, say about 80,000, with semi-permanent bases in the country. In other words, in historical and strategic terms, a key result of the war will have been to replace U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia with new ones in Iraq. No Iraqi government will ever admit to this, but that will be the practical result of the continued need for American troops into the future.

These American bases would exist alongside an Iranian sphere of influence in Shi‘a-dominated southern Iraq, a Sunni tribal chieftaincy in the center, and an autonomous Kurdistan in the north. The country would remain formally united, but in the loosest of ways. It would be a weak state where the Iranians, through their high-handed meddling, might wear out their welcome mat faster than we would by our troop presence. Meanwhile, suspicion and corruption would reign as a legacy of the Ba‘athi regime, something that will take decades to assuage. A balance of fear would limit violence to largely criminal elements.

This is, of course, a best-case scenario. The better Iraq does, the better I believe will be our relationship with the Iranians. There is a saying about Iranians: They don’t give in to pressure, only to a lot of pressure. The stabilization of conditions on the ground in Iraq, coupled with the emerging reality of a continued American troop presence, would constitute the centerpiece of that pressure. If the United States and Iran are destined one day to negotiate at high diplomatic levels, that centerpiece will underwrite the U.S. position in those negotiations.

Because everything is interlocked in the Middle East, a better outcome in Iraq will affect many other issues positively, as well. With more leverage on account of Iraq, the United States will be in a stronger position to, in effect, dictate—yes, dictate—terms to Palestinians and Israelis, once they inevitably encounter one impasse after another in their negotiations. More leverage both in Iraq and in the peace talks will, in turn, lead to more leverage for the United States throughout the Sunni Arab world, especially with respect to Saudi Arabia. Expect, therefore, the Saudis to become progressively more helpful in intelligence sharing and many other related matters concerning the war on terror.

The better we do in Iraq, the more helpful the Syrians may prove to be in Lebanon and in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Had we still been bleeding in Iraq late in 2007, as we were before the surge, the Annapolis peace conference might not have convened, and certainly the Syrians would not have participated. In other words, Annapolis presaged the results of a better outcome, and indeed, there is already a well-established pattern of how events in Iraq affect our regional prospects. Consider the years 2003 through the beginning of 2005, in the wake of our invasion and up through the first Iraqi election, which went off so smoothly: Think of what happened in the region during that period of relatively positive news from Iraq. The Libyans gave up their nuclear program, the Iranians, we now (think we) know, suspended their attempts at nuclear weaponization, and in Lebanon came the Cedar Revolution. Now imagine for a moment what could transpire if we recover that positive momentum in Mesopotamia. To wit, expect to see nascent democracy movements pick up steam throughout the Arab world, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt.

Kaplan suggests American leaders approach the international ramifications of Iraq with humility. We should reach out Muslims leaders and put all issues on the table, he argues, and that includes Iran.

I wouldn't go so far. Just this week President Ahmadinejad proclaimed Iran the "world's greatest superpower," obviously a slap at the American preponderance and the U.S.-backed nuclear non-proliferation agenda directed at Tehran.

Still, Kaplan's essay's a penetrating rejoinder to those who argue we need to restore American power and prestige in the world. Nothing succeeds like success, a point both friends and enemies can't miss.

See also my earlier entry from the American Interest Iraq series, "Winning in Iraq? Ask a Neoconservative."

The End of Democracy Promotion?

The Atlantic's polled a group of policy makers, political scientists, and pundits on the prospects for democracy promotion worldwide.

Obviously, the Bush administration's made things tough for would be neo-Wilsonians, although the findings - certainly pessimistic on the future of global democratic consolidation and expansion - aren't all that bad.

Here's one of the key question items:

"Is the U.S. capable of meaningfully affecting the prospects for democracy in most nondemocratic states?"

68% YES

“The Bush administration has given democracy a bad name. The U.S. can’t impose democracy or insist on democracy; it can only carefully support indigenous democrats (sometimes by staying far away) and the aspiration of human beings to live a better life. Most important in supporting the democratic impulse, the United States must ensure that it stays true to that impulse in its own deeds, not just its words.”

33% NO

“The U.S. can nudge nondemocratic states to head in a democratic direction by providing political and economic incentives. But the U.S. has little direct leverage over the domestic developments that decisively determine the character of a state’s government.”

The article doesn't say, but I imagine these are selected quotes from some of the respondents.

Check out the whole thing, in any case. When asked, "Do you believe the proliferation of democratic government is inevitable in the long run?" one respondent indicated:

“Despite the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, people who are free to choose (as Mrs. Thatcher said) do choose to be free. And the information revolution enables more people to see lives in free countries.”

Don't forget to check the "List of Participants," which did include a couple of neoconservatives.

Unfortunately, I think the findings reflect considerable Bush-fatigue, and perhaps even a little BDS.

After Bush has long left the White House, similar surveys will be more positive on the possibility of democracy promotion.

Note too, that even now the administration doesn't get enough credit for U.S. democracy promotion efforts outside of Iraq, as the New York Times points out, "In Kenya, U.S. Added Action to Talk of Democracy":

For more information, see Larry Diamond, "The Democratic Rollback: The Resurgence of the Predatory State."

Photo Credit: Atlantic Monthly

The Frustrating Flap Over Women for Obama

I've been seeing a crisis among feminists over the changing shape of the Demcratic race. Should they vote for their "sister," Hillary Rodham Clinton, or for the dynamic, gender-sensitive candidacy of Barack Obama?

Solomon never had it so tough!

Robin Abcarian's got a bit on the "feminist flap" that's brewing over women's support for Obama:

Darlene Ewing is a Democratic activist, longtime feminist and very frustrated Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter.

Like many who have dreamed of seeing a woman in the Oval Office, Ewing doesn't understand why women are drifting in ever-greater numbers away from Clinton toward her rival, Barack Obama. This trend, which has imperiled the candidacy of the woman once considered a shoo-in for her party's nomination, infuriates the frank-talking Texan.

"They're running to the rock star, to the momentum, to the excitement," said Ewing, a family law attorney who chairs the Dallas County Democratic Party. "And I am worried that if Hillary doesn't get elected, I am never going to see a woman president in my lifetime. I do think her chances are slipping away, and it [ticks] me off."

This sentiment is being expressed around the country -- in testy dinner-party conversations, around the water cooler, and in the public forum. As Clinton's shot at the nomination boils down to two contests Tuesday -- in the delegate-rich states of Texas and Ohio, where she is running neck and neck with Obama -- many women who support the New York senator are angered and saddened by their sisters' desertion to the other side.

Old-school feminists have lined up against each other. Some chapters of the National Organization for Women are supporting Clinton; others are for Obama. There have been arguments about which candidate is more pro-choice. For some women, the rise of Obama rips open a persistent wound: an older, more experienced woman is pushed aside for a younger male colleague.

One of the most impassioned cris de coeur came from feminist poet and novelist Robin Morgan, 67 in an essay that became something of a cyberspace sensation after she posted it last month on the Women's Media Center website (and it was forwarded by many people, including Chelsea Clinton).

Morgan decried the casual acceptance of sexism on the campaign trail this season -- from the two young men who shouted "Iron my shirt!" at Clinton to the Hillary-themed nutcrackers available in airport gift shops.

But Morgan reserved her greatest ire for women who decline to support Clinton "while wringing their hands because Hillary isn't as likable as they've been warned they must be. . . . Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms. Perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement. She's running to be president of the United States."

Recent polls support the suspicion of many women that theirs is a gender divided. Last week's Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found Clinton's solid support from women to be dwindling. Women are now evenly divided between the two Democratic candidates, though Clinton still enjoys a sizable advantage among women 65 and older, who prefer her three-to-one over Obama.

Read the whole thing.

Abcarian cites Gloria Steinem's recent New York Times essay, "Women Are Never Front-Runners," where Steinem argues, "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House."

Wow!

See also Rebecca Walker's post, "Feminist Infighting," which offers a little perspective on this feminist battle royal.

Also, check my earlier post, "Hillary Clinton Strains to Build Sisterhood Solidarity," which showed why many upwardly mobile women professionals resent Clinton's piggybacking her way to the top.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

McCain Gets it Right on Iraq

Jonathan Last argues that John John McCain's right on Iraq:

Barack Obama frequently chastises people for contributing "more heat than light" to the public debate. An admirable sentiment. I wish he would adhere to it more regularly himself.
A Democratic line is emerging about Sen. John McCain that is voiced daily by Sen. Obama (and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton) in the presidential campaign.

"Senator McCain said the other day that we might be mired for 100 years in Iraq," Obama says, "which is reason enough not to give him four years in the White House." Or more directly, as Obama told a Houston audience, McCain "says that he is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq."

Obama's claims are, at best, deliberately misleading. At worst, they are the type of politics-as-usual distortion that the Illinois senator usually decries. No one, in politics or the media, who voices the "100 years" canard is being fair-minded. So let's put it to rest now, once and for all:

On Jan. 3 in Derry, N.H., a voter prefaced a question to McCain by saying, "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years . . ." Here, McCain cut him off, interjecting, "Make it a hundred."

The voter tried to continue his question, but McCain pressed on: "We've been in . . . Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. It's fine with me, I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaeda is training, equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day."

McCain's analysis is, objectively speaking, exactly correct. Throughout history, U.S. troops have remained in the field long after the conclusion of successful wars....

The key to McCain's "100 years" comment is his qualifier: "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." It is this crucial component that distinguishes military successes from failures.

A commitment to Iraq in which U.S. forces are being harmed for 100 years (or even 20 or 10) is not sustainable; such a situation would indicate the United States was not able to midwife a viable political environment. Iraq would then be a failure. John McCain knows that.

But if the Iraqi political infrastructure continues to coalesce, if the violence continues to trend downward, if the Iraqi military and police continue to assume larger and larger roles in their country's affairs, then a presence of U.S. troops in Iraq for a long duration is an exceptionally good outcome. It would signal that, despite all of the Bush administration's many failures, the Iraq project was not for naught.

McCain's "100 years" is not a commitment to "100 years of war," as Obama claims. It is simply another sign of McCain's seriousness and understanding of the realities of foreign affairs in general and Iraq in particular.

Obama's distortion of this remark, however, is the first sign that he may not be a serious-minded candidate.

See also my earlier post, "100 Years in Iraq? The Left Takes Aim at McCain."

The Politics of Law and Order

A big story going around this last week was the report that 1 in 100 adult Americans is in prison, which is apparently a higher ratio than found in China's authoritarian regime.

I just don't see statistics like this as controversial.

The last few decaces have seen the country law-and-order political movement develop and mature - with state legislatures cracking down with tough sentencing laws - and the numbers are showing the substantial rates of incarceration while crime rates have stabilized.

But I though about the politics of crime a bit more last night, as I was reading Jeffrey Rosen's New York Times commentary, "A Card-Carrying Civil Libertarian." Rosen argues that a Barack Obama presidency would be historic in its commitment to the protection of civil liberties. It turns out that Obama's got a strong record on liberties based on his days as an Illinois state legislature.

Don't get me wrong. There's tremendous criminal injustice in the country, a fact that has historically hit African Americans, so it's good to sort out the legal issues so that all citizens are afforded due process.

But Rosen's piece attacks the tough-on-crime movement simply because more minorities get caught in the dragnet. He picks on Hillary Clinton, suggesting she would be a carbon-copy of her husband, who backed stiffer enforcement during his administration:

The real concern about Hillary Clinton’s record on civil liberties is that her administration would look like that of her husband. Bill Clinton’s presidency had many virtues, but a devotion to civil liberties was not one of them. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the Clinton administration proposed many of the expansions of police power that would end up in the Patriot Act. (They were opposed at the time by the same coalition of civil-libertarian liberals and libertarian conservatives that Mr. Obama has supported.) The Clinton administration’s tough-on-crime policies also contributed to the rising prison population, and to the fact that the United States has a higher incarceration rate than any other country.

Hillary Clinton’s conduct during the Clinton impeachment does not inspire confidence in her respect for privacy. Kathleen Willey, one of the women who accused President Clinton of unwanted advances, charges in a new book that Mrs. Clinton participated in the smear campaigns against her. A federal judge found that the Clinton White House had “committed a criminal violation” of Ms. Willey’s privacy rights by releasing her private letters. (An appellate court later criticized the judge’s “sweeping pronouncements.”)

Whether Hillary Clinton’s administration would, in fact, look like Bill Clinton’s on civil liberties is hard to judge. In many areas, she has demonstrated an impressive commitment. She proposed a privacy bill of rights that would require consumers to “opt in” before their commercial data is shared and would allow them to sue companies for the misuse of data. She has called for the resurrection of a federal “privacy czar” who would balance the privacy costs and benefits of regulations.

She made an eloquent speech in the Senate opposing the suspension of habeas corpus. And she has emphasized the importance of Congressional oversight of executive power, promising as president that she would consider surrendering some of the authority that President Bush unilaterally seized. Clearly, she would be immeasurably better on civil liberties than George W. Bush.

But Mrs. Clinton’s approach to the subject is that of a top-down progressive. Her speeches about privacy suggest that she has boundless faith in the power of experts, judges and ultimately herself to strike the correct balance between privacy and security.
Moreover, the core constituency that cares intensely about civil liberties is a distinct minority — some polls estimate it as around 20 percent of the electorate. A polarizing president, who played primarily to the Democratic base and refused to reach out to conservative libertarians, would have no hope of striking a sensible balance between privacy and security.

This is a standard attack on tough enforcement, not just in the domestic crime arena, but in the war on terror as well, where the Bush administration is alleged to have precipitated the worst crisis in liberties in history.

It's not true, of course (remember the crises of liberties during the Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt administrations), although the left-wing surrender types aren't going to report the full picture.

Housing Woes: Borrowers Abandoning Mortgages Amid Falling Market

I don't often comment on the housing market (instead, I write more commonly on general economic instability), but there's been a few interesting - even juicy - stories out this week worth a quick post.

First, Mortimer Zuckerman at U.S. News has a nifty background on the credit crunch:

We are having a bad hangover from easy money. Very easy. Thanks to low interest rates and an expanding money supply, people and companies borrowed more than they could reasonably pay back....

Banks were willing to lend more and more to purchasers who bid more and more for a house, causing home prices to rise and giving the banks and other buyers even more confidence that prices would increase, justifying even more lending. So, too, with other asset prices. Banks set up off-balance sheet subsidiaries that piled up debt; leveraged-buyout groups borrowed many billions to take companies private; hedge funds borrowed to invest in assets—and the beat went on....

With all this money available, credit cards, auto loans, and other consumer debt were extended to almost everyone who could walk, resulting these days in a dramatic increase in loan delinquencies and defaults. And this is coming even before the unemployment rate has increased cyclically and before a formal recession has struck. American Express has responded by raising its provisions for loan losses by 70 percent to $1.5 billion. Goldman Sachs predicts credit card losses will reach $100 billion out of the roughly $1 trillion in the revolving balances of all U.S. credit cards. Lending standards are being tightened on nearly all types of consumer credit, and this may lead to the first full-scale contraction of consumer credit in over 15 years. The concern is that consumers may be pushed to the breaking point, reflecting not only the shutdown of the their buying spigot but a fundamental shift in their optimism and confidence in the economy.

Well, we pretty much seem to be at the breaking point now. I mean, the market could fall even further, but many struggling homeowners aren't waiting for that.

As the New York Times reported yesterday, more and more stressed borrowers are bailing out of their home loans, aided by a new style of business start-up for hard times: the mortgage walk-out assistance firm (the article mentions a company called "You Walk Away," which takes care of all the legal and financial arrangements for walking out and leaving the keys behind).

It turns out today's Wall Street Journal also has a report on the phenomenon, "Borrowers Abandon Mortgages as Prices Drop":

As home prices plummet, growing numbers of borrowers are winding up owing more on their homes than the homes are worth, raising concerns that a new group of homeowners -- those who can afford to pay their mortgages but have decided not to -- are starting to walk away from their homes.

Typically borrowers who turn in their keys are those who have run into financial trouble or need to relocate but can't sell their homes. But mortgage-industry executives and consumer counselors say they are starting to see people who aren't in dire financial straits defaulting on their mortgages because they don't want to pay for properties that have negative equity.

Many are speculators who had planned to quickly flip the home, but others appear to be homeowners who had second thoughts about their purchase....

Some borrowers feel they have no good alternative. A tight credit market has made it tough for would-be sellers to find buyers or for borrowers looking to lower their mortgage costs to refinance.

Other borrowers are walking away in frustration because they can't arrange a workout with their lenders, says D.J. Enga, director of outreach services for Auriton Solutions, which counsels homeowners nationwide. Mr. Enga expects that 10% to 15% of the roughly 4,000 callers counseled this month by Auriton, of St. Paul, Minn., will walk away from their mortgages.

One of the reasons I don't blog on the housing market is that, frankly, I don't like to think about it. Oh, I'm not in any danger, but we live in a new neighborhood in Orange County, a hotbed of the Southern California housing boom, so I see a lot of the volatility.

It's obviously tight all around the country, but crunches are strange here, which had a county-level unemployment rate of just 1.9 percent at the height of economic boom in the 1990s. I'm seeing big changes now, though: There's less of the robust tract construction, open houses are few and far between, and "bank owned" signs are cropping up at foreclosed properties on nearby streets.

This morning, as I was driving down to my eye doctor's (just to pick up some new glasses), I noticed a "going-out-of-business" banner across the top of a brand-new Wickes furniture store off the 405 Freeway (the business had just recently moved into its new location, a spiffy big-box retailing center).

To me, those "store closing" signs are way more significant than all the market blather about how the Fed's going to lower rates or the recent collapses of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

When entire local shopping centers are riddled with idle storefronts (as was true back in 1991-92 in many communities), there's certainly economic change afoot.

Thankfully, my zip-code's seen housing appreciation in recent months, at least that's what all the realtors' ads on my doorknob are saying.

I frankly don't look at Sunday's real estate section all that much any more. I'm just riding it our, like many, I guess, hoping for markets to stabilize once again.

On the Matter of Candidate Experience (Does it Matter?)

Does experience matter in voter decision-making on presidential choice? It doesn't seem to be the biggest deal at the moment, with all the rage over Barack Obama.

Time 's cover story this week asks: "Does Experience Matter in a President?"

A story is often told at times like this — times when American voters are choosing among candidates richly seasoned with political experience and those who are less experienced but perhaps more exciting alternatives. Once upon a time, the torch was passed to a new generation of Americans, and a charismatic young President, gifted as a speechmaker but little tested as an executive, was finding his way through his first 100 days. On Day 85, he stumbled, and the result for John F. Kennedy was the disastrous Bay of Pigs.

For scholars of the presidency, Kennedy's failure to scuttle or fix the ill-conceived invasion of Cuba is a classic case of the insufficiency of charisma alone. No quips, grins or flights of rhetoric would do. Kennedy needed on-the-job training, as he later admitted to a friend: "Presumably, I was going to learn these lessons sometime, and maybe better sooner than later." Unfortunately, when a President gets an education, we all pay the tuition.

Barack Obama basks in comparisons to J.F.K., but this is one he'd rather avoid. In the run-up to what could be the decisive contests for the Democratic nomination, Obama's relatively light political résumé — eight years as an Illinois legislator and three years in the U.S. Senate — continues to be the focus of his rivals' attacks. Hillary Clinton advertises her seven years in the Senate and two terms as First Lady, saying "I am ready to lead on Day One." And the message has gotten through: by clear margins, voters rate her as the more experienced of the two candidates. The fact that this hasn't stopped Obama's momentum doesn't mean he's heard the last of it — not with John McCain, who has spent 26 years on Capitol Hill, the likely Republican nominee. "I'm not the youngest candidate. But I am the most experienced," says McCain. "I know how the world works."

That's seems like a pretty good introduction to the matter.

Bill Clinton's administration - staffed by what many saw as aloof, unbuttoned-down recent college grads - could also have used a good dose of experience early on, which might have helped the Clinton White House avoid monumental political battles over issues such as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the health reform initative's "Harry and Louise" episode.

But check out Daniel Drezner 's piece, "Expecting the Unexpected as President":

As Barack Obama surges ahead in delegates and pubic-opinion polls, Hillary Clinton stresses her 35 years of experience as having prepared her to be the commander-in-chief from day one. This raises an interesting question: What is the best experience to become the leader of the Free World?

The answer is hazy. Some people believe the executive branch should be run like a business. George W. Bush's MBA, however, does not appear to have imbued him with superior management skills. Businessmen like Mitt Romney, Steve Forbes and Ross Perot all excelled in the private sector. But all of them spent great sums of money in their presidential campaigns, with little to show for it.

Senator Clinton seems to suggest that decades of experience in the capital represents the best training for the presidency. Well, maybe -- Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush were the modern presidents with the longest Washington resumes. Each had their moments, but none of them left the Oval Office gracefully. Washington insiders often rack up accomplishments, but at the same time they possess massive blind spots that cripple their presidencies.

Pundits suggest that managing a successful presidential campaign is the best preparation for the Oval Office. This idea is a seductive but tautological. In 2004, experts said Howard Dean was running a brilliant campaign -- until he started losing. Politics is too capricious a business to assume that candidates can control their destiny through superior planning.

As a management question, the problem with being the president is that one cannot anticipate what important issues will arise in the future. No one thought terrorism would be the paramount foreign policy problem during the 2000 campaign. I guarantee you there are issues that will not be talked about during this election year, but will dominate the presidency in 2009 and beyond.

Perhaps the best experience to be president, then, is the ability to successfully cope with the uncertain and the unknown. Of course, some managerial experts would not call that "experience." They would call it "judgment."

Well said.

But back to Time's article. While there are plenty of examples of inexperienced presidents making poor decisions or initiating policies they'd like to take back, there are also examples of great presidents who've blundered.

Certainly crisis decision-making calls for sound judgment and judicious action, like, well, Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Frankly, I would add that in political science and presidential studies there's something known as "the force of circumstance," which means that sometimes presidents are successful when decisions are made in the context of a special set of environmental factors - like an overwhelming problem that gives added weight to presidential leadership, or a decisive election victory that provides the political-institutional momentum for presidential success on some fundamental question of national concern.

Of course, much of this debate centers on leadership in times of danger, and, utlimately, few people have genuinely been challenged in a true trial by fire. Thus, when we recognize great presidential leadership, it's generally when an incumbent has met the test of judgment and leadership at a moment involving the highest stakes of politics and history.

Winning in Iraq? Ask a Neoconservative

The new American Interest has a symposium on victory in Iraq: "What if We Win? Here's the blurb:

Thanks to a fragile but real improvement in the security situation in Iraq, it has become possible to imagine the United States and its allies achieving what could plausibly be described as a win. But a win how defined, and with what implications? We asked a diverse group of observers to ponder these questions.

It is a diverse group, and I'm still reading through the responses, but since the war's routinely denounced as a neoconservative fiasco, it's not inappropriate to give a neocon the first crack.

Here's one of the greatest dark neocon princes of all, Richard Perle: "We Won Years Ago":

For those who never considered that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed any threat to the United States, the idea that we might “win” is, by definition, inconceivable. For those who worried that Saddam’s regime might one day provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, the end of his regime was a “win” the day Baghdad fell. For that small and much-maligned group who regarded the invasion of Iraqi as an act of risk management, weighing the costs of war against the risk of leaving Saddam in place and hoping for the best, the notion of victory has been swamped by a debate over its cost.

And the cost has been high—far higher than I believe was necessary. That cost was driven by colossal mismanagement, chronic indecision about strategy, tactics and even goals, confusion about whom to trust among Iraqis and allies alike, a failure to deal effectively with Iranian and Syrian involvement in the conflict, and a shocking level of incompetence within the Bush Administration....

Contrary to the view of many critics of the war, we did not go into Iraq mainly to impose democracy by force in some grand, ambitious (and naive) scheme to transform Iraq and then the region as a whole into a collection of happy democracies. It is notable that the critics who charge that this was our core objective never cite evidence to support their claim....

Without military action we could not have decisively managed the threat from Iraq. It is now managed: Saddam will not be sharing WMD with anyone. Judged against that measure, we have already won in Iraq, despite all the failures of policy and implementation that followed the destruction of his regime. To be sure, that victory has come at a terrible price, and whether it can be sustained remains to be seen. After all, we once “won” against the Soviets in Afghanistan, only to see the Taliban regime, aligned as it was with Osama bin Laden, emerge to threaten us directly in a way Afghanistan never did under Soviet occupation. But in the larger picture, driving the Soviets from Afghanistan, even if the means were crude and even if we suffered later from unintended consequences, was an important factor in our victory in the Cold War, which was the larger picture.

There is a larger picture with respect to Iraq, as well, and there is reason to hope that it will vindicate what we have done there. We have demonstrated in Iraq that we will act to protect ourselves. We have shown that we will fight terrorists where we find them, even when the cost is high. We, and now much of the world, have begun to take terrorism seriously. This is in good measure because we have been willing, in Iraq and Afghanistan, to go beyond the instruments of law enforcement and plaintive pleas to ineffective international institutions on which we once relied. We have, as the always wise Fouad Ajami put it, created, “from Egypt to Kuwait and Bahrain, a Pax Americana [that] anchors the order of the region. In Iraq, the Pax Americana, hitherto based in Sunni Arab lands, has acquired a new footing in a Shiite-led country.”

Such success as we have achieved in Iraq, like the strategic and tactical failures there that went before, is due largely to the (bewilderingly episodic) leadership of President Bush. He found the courage to offer the surge when he was under immense pressure to withdraw. He understood that the advice coming from his Secretary of State amounted to accepting a thinly masked defeat while the advice from Congress amounted to defeat, period.

The gains could be reversed, of course, and if some of the candidates for president have their way, they will be. But it is already significant that Iraq has faded as a partisan political issue, not because there is a shortage of Democrats—the implacable “leadership”, Pelosi and Reid come to mind—who want us out whatever the consequences, but because the turnaround has dimmed the star of withdrawal, retreat and isolation.

After the ordeal that Iraq and the belated but absolutely necessary mobilization against Muslim extremism have imposed on us, it would be the final, tragic irony if what has been achieved were squandered by a new administration more concerned with honoring a foolish, irresponsible commitment to the antiwar sentiment of left-wing Democrats and isolationist Republicans than to the safety of the nation.

The Democrats are definitely "dug in" on retreat, so Pearle concludes appropriately.

But note something important: Pearle's been a "fair-weather" neocon, denouncing the administration and the war in no uncertain terms before the troop surge of 2007, which has made the war look like less of a fiasco after all (more on that here).

With this piece (and perhaps a possible forthcoming and more forthright reverse mea culpa) it seems Perle's returning to his original "dark prince" identity.

Clinton's "NIG": Revolting Outrage or Shocking Incompetence?

There's peripheral controversy over Hillary Clinton's "Who do you want answering the phone?" campaign ad.

The letters "NIG" appear on the child's pajamas in the ad, and there's speculation of a deliberate subliminal message being sent.

Ann Althouse queries, "Why are the letters 'NIG' on the child's pajamas?":

You can see the commercial at the link, and the pajamas in question are on display during seconds 11 and 12. On pausing, staring, and thinking, I believe these are pajamas that say "good night" all over them, but the letters "NIG" are set apart by a fold in the fabric.

Is the campaign responsible for sending out a subliminal message to stimulate racist thoughts in the unsuspecting viewer? It is either deliberate or terribly incompetent. There is no other writing on screen until the very end of the commercial, and if letters appear in anyplace in a commercial, they should be carefully selected letters. Certainly, each image is artfully composed and shot and intended to deliver an emotional impact. Could this be a mere lapse?

In 2000, there was a much-discussed commercial for George W. Bush that displayed the letters "RATS":

The announcer starts by lauding George W. Bush's proposal for dealing with prescription drugs, and criticizes the plan being offered by Vice President Al Gore. Fragments of the phrase ''bureaucrats decide'' -- deriding Mr. Gore's proposal -- then dance around the screen....

The intense scrutiny of the "RATS" ad heightens the assumption that presidential candidates these days pay close attention to any incidental lettering that appears in their ads. "RATS" as part of the word "bureaucrats" in an ad criticizing Gore's prescription plan is nothing compared to "NIG" isolated on a sleeping child's shoulder in an ad intended to create doubts about a black man's ability to take an urgent phone call at 3 a.m., an ad authorized by a candidate who has already heard accusations that her campaign is slipping racial material into its attacks on her opponent.

This is either a revolting outrage or shocking incompetence.

Or Clintonian Machiavellianism.

I'm not shocked in the least, although I would say that "NIG" is not normally used as an abbreviation for the n-word.

NIG's probably just as Althouse surmises: a partial glimpse of letters in a "good night" pattern on the kid's bedtime garment. Makes for excellent political outrage, in any case!

Pakistan as Indictment of U.S. Anti-Terror Policy

With her penetrating style, Caroline Glick examines recent Pakistani politics, indicating how U.S. failure in backing the Musharraf regime indicate deep flaws in U.S. anti-terror policies:

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, America's overarching policy towards the Islamic world has been clear enough. The US sought to empower forces opposed to the jihad, and to fight with them against the jihadists. The policy itself is correct. But it has been poorly implemented.

In Pakistan, the US placed all of its eggs in Musharraf's basket after September 11 and expected that faced with an outraged superpower, he would share America's interest in destroying the Taliban. But this is not what happened.

Musharraf's policies were always determined by his interest in retaining his grip on power. And while the US never made a credible threat to his grip on power, the jihadists and the non-Islamist political forces opposed to his military dictatorship did. And so, rather than combat the jihadists, he sought to appease them. And rather than work with democrats, he repressed them.

In his bid to accommodate the jihadists, Musharraf rejected US requests to interrogate Khan about his nuclear proliferation activities. So, too, Musharraf rejected repeated US requests to deploy its forces inside of Pakistan. He rejected US offers to train Pakistani counterterror units. He refused to purge jihadists from the ranks of the Pakistani army or the Inter-Service Intelligence organization that itself is the founder of al-Qaida and the Taliban. Rather than defeat the Taliban, Musharraf allowed the Pakistani military to be humiliated and signed "peace accords" with the Taliban in North and South Waziristan effectively ceding sovereignty over the areas to the jihadist group. With no competent counter-insurgency plan in place in the areas, the local populations under Taliban rule largely maintained their traditional, tribal support for the group.

Although Pakistan's nuclear arsenal no doubt informed much of the US's decision to handle Musharraf with kid gloves, the fact is that the US's inability to properly identify and support social forces and individuals in Pakistan that share its desire to defeat the jihadists has been the rule rather than the exception in its post-September 11 treatment of the Islamic world in general. The US's dealings with the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia are clear examples of the same misguided American embrace of leaders who do not oppose the jihadists.

THE MOST striking example of this post-September 11 American penchant for choosing its allies unwisely is the Bush administration's embrace of Fatah in the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinian example stands out because while the US may have strategic interests in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that as in Pakistan make it leery of muddying the political waters with liberalism too aggressively, no such interests exist in the PA. The Palestinians do not have oil, a large, US-trained army, or nuclear bombs to threaten US interests with. And in Israel, the US has a strong, loyal, democratic ally with the means to combat Palestinian jihadists. And yet, rather than turn its back on Fatah, the US has lavishly supported it politically and financially, and has trained Fatah militias while opposing any Israeli military plan to defeat Fatah on the military or political battlefields. And like the US's support for Musharraf, the US's support for Fatah has come back to haunt it and will continue to haunt it in the future.

Just as the Clinton administration upheld Yasser Arafat even as he built his terror armies while negotiating with Israel, so the Bush administration upholds Fatah leader and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as he follows in Arafat's footsteps. Like Arafat, Abbas is a master of double-speak. While waxing poetic about his yearning for peace in his talks with Israelis and Americans, inside the PA he supports terrorists, and in addresses to Arab audiences he explains that he shares the terrorists' strategic goal of destroying Israel.

On Thursday, Jordan's Al-Dustur daily ran an interview with Abbas. There the supposedly moderate Palestinian leader and US ally in the war on terror made clear his support for jihadists and their goal of destroying Israel. Abbas boasted about his refusal at the Annapolis conference last November to accept Israel's Jewish identity. He argued that the only difference he has with Hamas - which he hopes will join Fatah in a unity government - is that he thinks that the use of violence against Israel is counterproductive today. As he put it, "At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different."

Glick concludes:

THE SITUATION in Pakistan is grave. And its implications are clear. As the leader of the fight against the forces of global jihad, the US must redouble its efforts to seek out and cultivate the anti-jihadist forces in the Islamic world. Until it does so, rather than win the war, it will continue to stymied by the Musharrafs, Zardawis, Sharifs, Mubarak's and Abbases of the world who promote jihad while speaking of moderation, stability and democracy.

Sounds good to me.

Common Sense at the United Nations

The United Nations is a classic case of good intentions gone horribly awry. Founded in 1945 to provide a multilateral basis for the institutionalization of world peace, the organization's devolved into a rank Third World talking shop of anti-Western demonization.

Does that sound a little rough? Well, check out today's Wall Street Journal for a bit on this:

When it comes to the U.N. Human Rights Council, is there anything left to say? Well, yes. In a break with precedent, this product of former Secretary General Kofi Annan's "reforms" has found a country other than Israel to criticize. The United States.

This week, two Council "experts" -- an American lawyer and an Indian architect -- accused the Department of Housing and Urban Development of denying the "internationally recognized human rights" of New Orleans residents whose former homes in public housing complexes are scheduled for demolition. The demolitions, say the experts, "could effectively deny thousands of African-American residents their right to return to housing from which they were displaced by the hurricane."

The public housing in question includes the notorious 1930s-era St. Bernard complex, which was already in a bad state before Katrina hit and an even worse state after it. The local housing authority intends to replace the complex with mixed-income housing developments, and in the meantime is granting housing vouchers to former tenants. But some of the new housing will be offered at -- horrors! -- a "market rate," to which the U.N. naturally objects. We don't remember the U.N.'s human-rights czars being quite so vocal when Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe evicted 200,000 people from their homes in 2005.

Meanwhile, the Council will soon release a 25-page report by South African "investigator" John Dugard that is its most comprehensive defense yet of Palestinian terrorism. "Common sense," Mr. Dugard writes, "dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al Qaeda, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation." Mr. Dugard goes on to lament the "Judaization" of Jerusalem, which if nothing else is a revealing use of language.

We doubt Mr. Dugard's words provide much solace to the relatives of Israelis blown up on buses, in cafes and discotheques. But at least we now know what passes for "common sense" at the United Nations.

The U.N. embodies fundamental elements of international politics, as well as unfulfilled promise.

Maybe the next U.N. ambassador will get a chance to shake things up under a new presidential administration, even picking up where Ambassador Bolton left off?

The Truth on Voter Turnout?

Voter turnout this primary season is shattering records, right, especially among the youth cohort? No so fast says Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal:

Turnout has been high this primary season, particularly in Democratic races. Voting experts agree on that much. What’s fodder for debate is whether high turnout is surprising these days. Academics disagree on whether there really was a steady decline in turnout rates since 1972, when Americans aged 18, 19 and 20 first got the right to vote. That was the conventional wisdom until 2001, when a paper questioned the belief. But some turnout experts maintain that turnout fell between 1972 and 2000, with a sharp uptick in 2004 amid strong feelings among members of both major parties toward President Bush.

My print column this week examines the debate, which was spurred in part by a recognition that non-citizens are a growing portion of the population, and shouldn’t be included in turnout calculations because they aren’t eligible to vote. “The real thing to look at here is that the population of the country has a larger and larger proportion of people not eligible to vote because they are not citizens,” Ray Wolfinger, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. This has many political implications besides just turnout rates, of course. One of these is that voters in states with relatively high proportions of non-citizens — such as California, 16% non-citizens in 2000, compared with 7% nationwide — have disproportionate clout, because Congressional seats and presidential electors are apportioned by population regardless of citizenship.

The turnout debate is also spurred in part by uncertainty in these numbers. While the Census Bureau takes pains to ensure respondents are honest about their citizenship status, immigrants may remain wary of government questionnaires (I wrote about the fuzziness of immigration stats in 2006). Turnout rates also must be corrected for felons who have lost their right to vote, another group that I’ve written is hard to count. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau doesn’t count Americans who live abroad. Michael McDonald, a turnout researcher at George Mason University, has tried, using information from consulates and the military, but says federal data in the area has grown more sparse.

What do you think? Have turnout rates declined? Are there long-term trends at play, or merely unique features of each election? Will turnout increase or decrease in November, compared to 2004? Please let me know in the comments.

Further reading: Mr. McDonald publishes his turnout estimates here. Walter Dean Burnham, a pioneer in the field, published his electorate numbers in December in the Journal of the Historical Society, which has promised to share the numbers free on its Web site. Curtis Gans, another leading turnout expert, told me he has nearly completed his own archive of turnout figures.

Hmm, what do I think?

I think, for one thing, that states with high rates of illegal immigration are getting a boost in their congressional and Electoral College representation based on their disproportionate numbers of resident aliens, AND this should be a big topic in the immigration debate but it hasn't. It reminds me of the Three-Fifths Compromise at the Consitutional Convention, whereby blacks in slaveholding states would be counted in total population tallies at three-fifths their total number for purposes of representation in Congress. The practice was inherently undemocratic, and it took a Civil War to fully eliminate all aspect of that peculiar bargain.

Besides that, Bialik doesn't quite say it here, but how is voter turnout being measured? The proportion of the eligible electorate that votes on election day?

Bialik actually does address this in his print column:

Turnout rates are easy to define: You divide the number of people who voted into the number of people who could have voted. But they're hard to calculate in the U.S. The 50 states and the District of Columbia run the show, and they generally don't keep an accurate count of eligible voters.

In other words, turnout numbers are inherently unreliable because of the potential flaws and variability in state level counting.

Not only that, Bialik's got a full passage on the unrepresentativeness of Census Burueau counting methods:

Up through the 2000 elections, researchers generally divided total votes into the U.S. Census Bureau's count of the voting-age population. That number, however, excludes Americans living abroad, who can vote. And it includes those declared mentally incompetent and felons, who are not allowed to vote in some states. Most important, it also includes noncitizens, a nonvoting population that has grown much faster than the general population -- to 18.6 million. That's more than a fivefold increase from 1970, compared with an overall population growth of just 38%.

What this signifies, essentially, is that the numbers on turnout that political science professors are throwing out every semester to their students in American Government 101 are essentially meaningless, or at least, the data requires the accompanyment of a lot of methodological disclaimers.

As long as the same data counting methods are used from election to election, then we should have some comparability. If turnouts increased over the years, the numbers would have to be adjusted for the proportion of eligible voters, felons, and what not, but other than that, not bad. Right?

Wrong.

Things don't sound so good for voter turnout studies - we might as well be looking at crystal balls (it's not just illegals, who are today a larger share of the population than in the 1970s, which means we can't compare turnout rates over time withhout factoring out those who're ineligible; and don't even get going about those in prison, paroled, or what have you, who are 1 in 100 of the population, many of whom are disenfranchised).

This means that rather than using hard, rigorous statistics, professors will have to refer to all the Obamaniacs the Illinois Senator's managed to turnout out in the Iowa and Nevada caucuses.

Good grief, Charlie Brown!!

The Bush Administration, Neoconservatives, and the Iraq War

One of the most bothersome things about discussions of neoconservatism is how critics resort to uncritical conventional wisdom or inaccurate stereotypes to ridicule the Bush administration's war in Iraq. To hear these folks, the war's always a "disaster" or a "failed policy of idealist neo-imperial overreach." Rarely are events placed in historical context (World War II, for example, had its share of disasters, and was hardly a sure run thing until late in the conflict).

I'm seeing this trend more lately, as otherwise esteemed analysts and pundits make the same mistakes over and over again in reviewing recent journalistic histories of neoconservatives in the top ranks of power.

For example, David Greenberg, who writes very respectably on trends in conservatism, makes some simple, largely discredited or unsubstantiated remarks about the movement in his review of Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons:

Not long ago the term "neoconservative" seemed ripe for retirement. The label was originally applied in the 1960s and 1970s to the ex-liberals (themselves ex-socialists) who turned halfway to the right after becoming disenchanted with the Great Society, left-wing politics, and the Democrats' post-Vietnam isolationism. Under Ronald Reagan, however, the neocons kept moving right and joined in a broad right-wing consensus, and by the 1990s it became hard to tell them apart from other Republicans....

Despite some tensions that surfaced during George Bush Sr.'s presidency, Reagan's conservative coalition cohered, more or less, until midway through the current administration. Only with the failures of Bush II and the Iraq War has the concept of neoconservatism gained new life and new meaning, at least on foreign policy (on domestic issues the neocons now can hardly be distinguished from other Republicans). On one side, the neocons' zeal for the war has earned them seething hatred (occasionally tinged with anti-Semitism) from the anti-war left, as younger bloggers, indifferent to the label's precise meaning, sling it as an all-purpose epithet. On the other side, the Republican crack-up has resurrected old internecine splits on the right -- Wall Street versus Main Street, isolationist versus neo-imperialist, and paleocon versus neocon -- with the neocons often being blamed for the right's disarray.

There's the "failed war" meme right there!

To be fair, though, sure, the war did look increasingly, disastrously lost in the fall of 2006. But the point (attack) was made more often by enraged radical left bloggers (with little credibility) than evenhanded policy analysts.

I keep these thoughts in mind whenever I see some new essay on the Bush administration's Iraq policy or on the neoconservative movement.

So I was quite pleased to read Adam Garfinkle's review of three new books on the Bush adminstration over at Foreign Affairs, "Bye Bye Bush: What History Will Make of 43?"

Garfinkle reviews, Fred Kaplan's, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, Heilbrunn's, They Knew They Were Right, and Jacob Weisberg's, The Bush Tragedy.

He does a great job. The review's analytical and fair, and Garfinkle's no neocon. But the most important section comes near the end of the piece, where he puts Bush's efforts in Iraq in analytical and counterfactual perspective:

Years from now, when historians work on advanced drafts of the Bush legacy, they may well conclude that the Iraq war, the failed "freedom agenda," and the White House's response to 9/11 compose its central contributions. But this is not certain. After all, judgments about historical epochs are, as the humorist S. J. Perelman once observed of the prospects for immortality, "subject to the caprice of the unborn." And even if these policies do turn out to be the main themes of the Bush presidency, they might look different a decade or so hence. For example, the conclusion of all three authors that the Iraq war and the collapsed freedom agenda make the Bush presidency a failure is premature. All three books were conceived before the surge in U.S. troop levels in Iraq improved security there. More broadly, who can possibly know now the long-term effects of current U.S. policy in the Middle East, any more than French observers in 1801 could accurately reckon the impact of Napoleon's botched adventures in Egypt? Yes, neoconservatives, flush with having been vindicated by the West's victory in the Cold War, lazily applied their creed to problems and places for which their experience was a poor guide. But who is to say that a third generation of neoconservatives, whose arrival Heilbrunn foresees, will not do better? Whatever they are called, and wherever they come from, there will be idealists in the United States' future.

Garfinkle argues that other Bush administration failures - such as the "retrograde" bureaucratic reforms following September 11 and the Katrina disaster of 2005 - will likely be way more important in forthcoming historical assessments of the Bush adminstration's legacy.

He may be right, but I must admit being surprised that his review wasn't one more canned denunciation of that "evil neocon cabal" who hijacked American foreign policy to implement the "greatest military blunder" in history.

We've seen plenty of such hack jobs in the past (Garfinkle himself has tended that way occasionally), and more are coming out all the time.

See some of my earlier posts on neoconservatism, here, here, here, here, and here.

Americans Credit Bush Administration with Keeping Country Safe

A new Pew Research survey finds continued improvements in public support for the Iraq war, and a majority credits the Bush administration with keeping the country safe from another terrorist attack:

Opinions about progress toward specific objectives, such as defeating the insurgents and reducing civilian casualties, also have become much more positive. In addition, the proportion saying the United States is making progress in preventing a civil war in Iraq has approximately doubled in the past year (from 18% to 35%), though a greater percentage (49%) still says the United States is losing ground in preventing civil war.

Despite the more positive outlook, the balance of opinion about the decision to take military action in Iraq is about the same now as it was a year ago. A majority (54%) says the war was the wrong decision, while 38% say it was the right decision. The balance of opinion on whether the war was right is nearly identical to what it was in February 2007 (54% wrong vs. 40% right).

Democrats hold a significant advantage as the party better able to handle Iraq, and have even larger leads on nearly every other issue. By 47%-37%, more people say the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party is better able to make wise decisions about Iraq. Notably, a majority (53%) also says the Democrats are better able to handle the economy, which has become the leading issue in the presidential campaign. Terrorism is the only issue on which the Republican Party holds even a modest lead (45% to 38%); however, its advantage on dealing with the terrorist threat was approximately twice as great during the 2004 campaign.

In this regard, the poll finds a majority of the public giving the Bush administration credit for preventing another terrorist attack on the U.S. in recent years. More than six-in-ten Americans say the policies and actions Bush has pursued have had a great deal (28%) or fair amount (34%) to do with keeping America safe.

It's noteworthy that while the public picks the Democrats in responding to generic questions about handling Iraq, in trial heat matchups for the general election, John McCain defeats both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (see "Public Favors McCain Over Democrats").

It's no slam dunk for the Democrats in '08.

Military Cautions Against New President's Policy Shift

Top military officials are raising flags concerning a possible precipitous withdrawal from Iraq under the next presidential administration.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Taking note of the debate over the Iraq war in the presidential race, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Pentagon officials in a town hall meeting Thursday that the military must be prepared to change policy and carry out the wishes of the next president.

But at a news conference afterward, Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen cautioned against policies that include a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, saying leaving too quickly would undermine recent security gains.

"I do worry about a rapid withdrawal," said Mullen, who serves as the top military advisor to the president.

Mullen would not specify what he considered too fast. "I am talking about a withdrawal that would be so fast that it would leave us in a chaotic situation, that the gains we have made would be lost," he said.

In the session with members of the Joint Staff, the primary planning organization in the Pentagon, Mullen said it was crucial for the military to remain apolitical. The uniformed military and the Joint Staff must be a "solid foundation" in the transition between the Bush administration and its successor, Mullen told them.

Both of the Democratic presidential candidates back accelerated troop withdrawals. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has said she would pull out up to two brigades a month. Sen. Barack Obama has supported a similar pace of reductions.

Military leaders have been more cautious. Mullen's predecessor, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, said the military could safely withdraw one brigade a month. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, is more cautious still.

Petraeus has been withdrawing brigades sent last year as part of the U.S. troop buildup, but the reductions have come slowly and he has proposed a pause in further withdrawals in July, when the troops sent as part of the buildup are gone. He will make formal recommendations on troop levels in April.

This is an interesting development.

Mullen did not speak out against GOP frontrunner John McCain. While there's much talk about our "broken" armed services (especially the army), it's obvious that a hasty retreat from Iraq is not in the nation's or the military's interest.

Antiwar Left Seeks to Recreate Protests of 1968

Some in the antiwar movement are hoping for a '08 reprise to the summer of '68 protests at the Democratic National Convention, which was held in Chicago that year. The Politico's got the report:

A coalition of anti-war groups is vowing to protest this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Denver under the rubric “Re-create ’68,” prompting criticism from some on the left who are loath to revisit what they see as a disastrous time for both the anti-war movement and the Democratic Party.

Capping a year that saw the assassinations of both the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention erupted in violence as thousands of Chicago police officers, supported by U.S. Army troops and National Guardsmen, battled in the streets with activists protesting the Vietnam War. Inside the convention hall, the Democrats chose as their presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose the general election to Richard Nixon.

Re-create ’68?

“What’s the political calculation that speaks to them of the wisdom of civil disobedience — which means a massive media spectacle — on the brink of a Democratic campaign that could plausibly put a Democrat in the White House who’s committed to withdrawal from Iraq?” asked Todd Gitlin, an anti-Vietnam War activist who was at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. “If the objective is to put a belligerent Republican in the White House, they should keep up the good work.”

The “belligerent Republican” of whom Gitlin speaks will almost certainly be Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who spent the summer of 1968 as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Organizers acknowledge that their “Re-create ’68” moniker has been met with skepticism as they’ve toured the country to gin up support among fellow activists. “A lot of people of course associate it with the DNC of ’68 and react negatively,” said organizer Mark Cohen. But the point, Cohen said, isn’t to reproduce the violence associated with the 1968 convention, just the strong sense of countercultural protest that coalesced against the Vietnam War. “We don’t call ourselves ‘Re-create Chicago ’68,’” Cohen offered.

If antiwar radicals want to showcase their extremist views to a national television audience, by all means, let it rip.

The more examples of hard-left extremist antics that are distributed, the better it will be to paint the Democrats as in the tank with the most nihilist forces on the fringe of left-wing popular culture.