Democratic Activists Will Push Obama Toward Trade Protection

Support for free trade has been declining among partisans of both parties this election season.

Yet as this morning's Wall Street Journal reports, the Democratic Party in the last couple of decades has become the party of trade protection, and intense pressure from the party's restrictionist wing will likely prevent Barack Obama from adopting international economic openness should he take the White House next January:

Since at least John F. Kennedy, presidential candidates have campaigned as tough on trade and then governed as free traders. Some business leaders are expecting the same if Barack Obama makes it to the White House.

Don't count on it.

Sen. Obama, the Democratic party frontrunner, and his rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, have expressed some support for trade liberalization during their careers, as public opinion and congressional politics have shifted markedly against free trade. A coalition of anti-free trade activists and labor unions also has used the long primary season to wring commitments from the two candidates on an astonishingly detailed list of trade issues, making it hard for them to reverse course.

The two Democrats are on record saying they would rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico -- if not pull out of the deal -- remake Nafta arbitration panels, oppose trade pacts that President Bush wants to push through Congress, designate China as a currency manipulator and examine whether World Trade Organization commitments impinge on issues as diverse as local-content rules and subsidies for colleges.

While only Sen. Clinton has said she would take a formal "time-out" on new trade deals, a President Obama would likely do the same thing, given the commitments he has made.

Sen. Obama "wants the right kinds of trade policies," says his chief international economic adviser, Daniel Tarullo, a former Clinton White House economic aide. "We need to address shortcomings of past trade agreements and the international environment," especially Chinese foreign-exchange policy, he says.

The Illinois lawmaker stresses that any trade deal must include provisions to protect unions' rights to organize and bargain collectively. Violations could be enforced through trade sanctions.

That's significantly different from current practice. Few trade deals cover labor; Nafta does, but the chances of assessing damages under the accord are remote.

The provisions "can help put pressure on countries to keep improving worker conditions," Sen. Obama argued in his book, "The Audacity of Hope," a view he repeats regularly on the campaign trail. But his stump speeches don't include the doubts he expressed in his book. The changes "won't eliminate the enormous gap in hourly wages between U.S. workers and workers in Honduras, Indonesia, Mozambique or Bangladesh," he wrote.

Rising protectionism is a worldwide phenemenon, but it's been boosted as a political issue by hard-left anti-globalization activists, many of whom have hammered the Democrats on import competition and labor standards.

Of all the principles of economics, there are few that have been more powerfully demonstrated than the notion of comparative advantage. In the post-World War II period, the trends in the U.S.-led international economy have been toward increasing prosperity, and those nations with the most liberalized trade regimes have been best at expanding GDP growth and reducing poverty.

Trade protection has become a knee-jerk issue among those freaked out by growing transnational interdependence, but the benefits are real, and a shift to protectionism today would curtail American export success and harm job growth in highly integrated U.S. job sectors. Note, further, what former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills has said about the patterns of trade expansion in the postwar era:

The U.S. experience since World War II proves that increased economic interdependence boosts economic growth and encourages political stability. For more than 50 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States has led the world in opening markets. To that end, the United States worked to establish a series of international organizations, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO)....

The results to date have been spectacular. World trade has exploded and standards of living have soared at home and abroad. Economist Gary Hufbauer, in a comprehensive study published this year by the Institute of International Economics, calculates that 50 years of globalization has made the United States richer by $1 trillion per year (measured in 2003 dollars), or about $9,000 added wealth per year for the average U.S. household. Developing countries have also gained from globalization. On average, poor countries that have opened their markets to trade and investment have grown five times faster than those that kept their markets closed. Studies conducted by World Bank economist David Dollar show that globalization has raised 375 million people out of extreme poverty over the past 20 years.

And the benefits have not been only economic. As governments liberalize their trade regimes, they often liberalize their political regimes. Adherence to a set of trade rules encourages transparency, the rule of law, and a respect for property that contribute to increased stability. Without U.S. leadership...the world would look very different today.

In today's political environment, in which just 10 percent of Americans say the ecomomy's getting better, the case for expanding free trade may be a hard sell.

The challenge for the candidates will be to convince their constituencies of the continued benefits of trade openness.

For more on the dangers of growing protection, and trends in labor market dynamics, see Purple Nation, "Frank Gets it Wrong Again," which offers a powerful criticism of Thomas Frank's recent article, "Our Great Economic U-Turn."

Nazi Germany's Years of Extermination, 1939-1945

I imagine it's just a coincidence, but I picked up Saul Freidlander's new book, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, just a couple of day prior to President Bush's recent statements on appeasement, delivered during his visit to Israel.

I commented on the controversy in an earlier entry, "Bush's Knesset Address: Revisiting the Lessons of Appeasement."

The Years of Extermination's a massive tome, roughly 700 pages, not counting another 100 pagers of footnotes on documentary sources.

I'm not going to rush though it, in any case. I've got a couple of books going currently, although I've commited to reading Friedlander in his entirety.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a passage from the introduction, on the nature of German anti-Semitism in the 1930s. We talk so much about racism and oppression in all the current debates over political correctness, foreign policy, the abomination of the American project, etc., but what people don't often do is bear themselves straight up, and pay respect to historical memory.

Here's Friedlander:

The peculiar aspects of the National Socialist anti-Jewish course derived from Hitler's own brand of anti-Semitism, from the bond between Hitler and all levels of German society, mainly after the mid-thirties, from the political-institutional instrumentalization of anti-Semitism by the Nazi regime and, of course, after September 1939, from the evolving war situation. In The Years of Persecution, I defined Hitler's brand of anti-Jewish hatred as "redemptive anti-Semitism"; in other words, beyond the immediate ideological confrontation with liberalism and communism, which in the Nazi leader's eyes were worldviews invented by Jews and for Jewish interests, Hitler perceived his mission as a kind of crusade to redeem the world by eliminating Jews. The Nazi leader saw "the Jew" as the principle evil in Western history and society. Without a victorious redeeming struggle, the Jew would ultimately dominate the world. This overall metahistorical axiom let to Hitler's more concrete ideological-political corollaries.

On a biological, political, and cultural level, the Jew strove to destroy the nations by spreading racial pollution, undermining the structures of the state, and, more generally, by heading the main ideological scourges of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Bolshevism, plutocracy, democracy, internationalism, pacifism, and sundry other dangers. By using this vast array of means and methods, the Jew aimed at achieving the disintegration of the vital core of all nations in which he lived - and particularly that of the German Volk - in order to accede to world domination. Since the establishment of the National Socialist regime in Germany, the Jew, aware of the danger represented by the awakening Reich, was ready to unleash a new world war to destroy this challenge to his own progress toward his ultimate aim.

These different levels of anti-Jewish ideology could be formulated and summed up in the tersest way: The Jew was a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the Aryan race and to the German Volk. The emphasis is not only on "lethal" but also - and mainly - on "active." While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, "asocials" and homosexuals, "inferior" racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as Slavs, for example, were not led by Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and manuevered to subdue all of humanity.

This anti-Jewish frenzy at the top of the Nazi system was not hurled into a void. From the fall of 1941, Hitler often designated the Jew as the "world arsonist." In fact the flames that the Nazi leader set alight and fanned burned as widely and intensely as they did only because, throughout Europe and beyond, for the reasons previously mentioned, a dense underbrush of ideological and cultural elements was ready to catch fire. Without the arsonist the fire would not have started; without the underbrush it would not have spread as far as it did and destroyed the entire world. It is this constant interaction between Hitler and the system within which he ranted and acted that will be analyzed and interpreted, as it was in Years of Persecution. Here, however, the system is not limited to its German components but penetrates all the nooks and crannies of European space.

When I read Years of Persecution, I was particularly disturbed by the growing segregation of Jews in Germany, leading up to the breakthrough event, Kristallnacht. I've read numerous works on Nazi history, starting back years ago with William Shirer, and then through graduate training with scholars like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Ian Kershaw, and Michael Burleigh. Each interpretation, each different historiographical thesis ... this history, frankly, is among the most important developments of modern times, for it requires one to consider the ultimate nature of supreme evil, and how each one of us can realize a personal philosophy of personal justice and right.

I'll have more on Friedlander as I move along in the book.

In the meanwhile check out Richard Evans' review of Years of Extermination at the New York Times.

Photo Image: Auschwitz

Obama Draws Record Crowd in Portland

Barack Obama drew the largest crowd of his campaign today in Portland, Oregon, the New York Time reports:

Senator Barack Obama drew one of the largest crowds of his campaign so far on Sunday, addressing an estimated 75,000 people who had gathered here on the banks of the Willamette River.

“Wow! Wow! Wow!” were his first words as he surveyed the multitude, which included people in kayaks and small pleasure craft on the river on an unseasonably hot day in Oregon.

It is “fair to say this is the most spectacular setting for the most spectacular crowd” of his campaign, he told the audience. His wife and daughters, who have been with him most of the weekend, joined him on the stage at the beginning of the event but left as he was about to speak.

Mr. Obama has been campaigning extensively in Oregon, a state he hopes to win in Tuesday’s primary, as the Democratic presidential nominating race ticks down to its last handful of contests. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on a four-day swing through Kentucky, which also holds its primary on Tuesday and where she appears likely to draw the most votes.

Mr. Obama stopped earlier at an ice cream parlor, Lew’s Dari-Freeze and Drive In, in Milwaukie, a suburb of Portland. There, answering questions from reporters, he edged closer to declaring victory in the Democratic battle than has been his habit. He said he was returning to Iowa to await the results of the primaries on Tuesday night because “we thought it was a terrific way to bring things full circle.”

Portland has got to be ground zero of Obama support. Either that, or that river-side burg's emblematic of the Obama phenom in "progressive" cities nationwide.

Check out this video of the event, from the Huffington Post:

See also, the Portland Tribune, "Poll: Obama Trouncing Clinton in Oregon."

Also, don't miss my earlier entry, "Barack Obama's Cult of Personality."

George Bush, John McCain, and U.S. Foreign Policy

The New York Times has a big article up on John McCain's foreign policy, "The McCain Doctrines."

I'm going borrow from James Joyner's post, on Daniel Drezner's take on it:

Dan Drezner argues, persuasively, that John McCain’s foreign policy is not, as critics charge, simply a continuation of George W. Bush’s. Essentially, while McCain has strong neoconservative tendencies (i.e., he’s quite willing to intervene militarily based on morality alone even if there is no compelling U.S. security interest at stake) but that’s he’s much more aware than Bush that the need for the support of the American public.

He quotes extensively from a piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine from Matt Bai. The key [paragraphs]:

It’s clear, though, that on the continuum that separates realists from idealists, McCain sits much closer to the idealist perspective. McCain has long been chairman of the International Republican Institute, run by Craner, which exists to promote democratic reforms in closed societies. He makes a point of meeting with dissidents when he visits countries like Georgia and Uzbekistan and has championed the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned leader of the Burmese resistance. Most important, as he made clear in his preamble to our interview, McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain’s view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet.

McCain argues that his brand of idealism is actually more pragmatic in a post-9/11 world than the hard realism of the cold war. He rejects as outdated, for instance, a basic proposition of cold-war realists like Kissinger and Baker: that stability is always found in the relationship between states. Realists have long presumed that the country’s security is defined by the stability of its alliances with the governments of other countries, even if those governments are odious; by this thinking, your interests can sometimes be served by befriending leaders who share none of your democratic values. McCain, by contrast, maintains that in a world where oppressive governments can produce fertile ground for rogue groups like Al Qaeda to recruit and prosper, forging bonds with tyrannical regimes is often more likely to harm American interests than to help them.

Here's how Joyner concludes:

On this score, I think McCain is right. That he’s more aware of the limitations of American military power to shape the world than Bush, too, is a hopeful sign. I do wish, however, that he was more reluctant still.

Now, back to Drezner:

This strikes me as a spot-on assessment of McCain's foreign policy instincts -- a little less postmodern, "we create reality" than George W. Bush's, but nevertheless leaning quite heavily in the neocon direction.

It's this passage, however, where McCain mentions something I haven't heard from him before on foreign policy:

Most American politicians, of course, would immediately dismiss the idea of sending the military into Zimbabwe or Myanmar as tangential to American interests and therefore impossible to justify. McCain didn’t make this argument. He seemed to start from a default position that moral reasons alone could justify the use of American force, and from there he considered the reasons it might not be feasible to do so. In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, “Why intervene?” McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, “Why not?”

“I think we’ve learned some lessons,” McCain told me. “One is that the American people have to be willing to support it. But two, we need to work more in an international way to try to beneficially affect the situation. And you have to convince America and the world that every single avenue has been exhausted before we go in militarily. And we better think not a day later or a week later, but a year and 5 years and 10 years later. Because the attention span, unfortunately, of the American people, although pretty remarkable in some ways, is not inexhaustible.”....

McCain is relying on the same strategy to achieve success both in Iraq and in the November election. In each endeavor, McCain is staking everything on the notion that the public, having seen the success of a new military strategy, can be convinced that the war is, in fact, winnable and worth the continued sacrifice. Absent that national retrenching, McCain admits that this war, like the one in Vietnam, is probably doomed. Near the end of our conversation in Tampa, I asked him if he would be willing to change course on Iraq if the violence there started to rise again. “Oh, we’d have to,” he replied. “It’s not so much what McCain would do. American public opinion will not tolerate such a thing.”

The Bush administration's fundamental mistake was to believe that a generation-long project could somehow be pursued without the need for consensus by anyone outside the executive branch. McCain seems to get that.

After researching what the American people think about foreign military interventions, I'm pretty sure that the American people don't want us in Iraq regardless of how well the surge works (Bai makes this point later on in the article). I'm not sure, however, whether this will be the deciding factor in how they vote in November.

The paradox: for McCain to be a more prudent foreign policy president, he needs to have a hostile public constraining him. Of course, if that's the case, then it's entirely possible he won't be elected president in the first place.

This is all very interesting, although note something about Drezner's conclusion: The research he's talking about is his thesis that Americans are "realist" in their basic orientation to American forward power internationally (which is, surprisingly, the opposite of the major "internationalist" strand posited by scholarship on U.S. public opinion on foreign policy).

In other words, the public views foreign commitments in terms of crude national interests (cost-benefit analysis), and thus if Americans "don't want us in Iraq," we can expect pressure to force a withdrawal from the war early next year.

I don't read public opinion that way, as I've noted many times (the war's unpopular, but the public's not demanding a precipitous surrender).

Thus Drezner's reading of McCain and public opinion misses something.

As Thomas Powers has suggested at the New York Review of Books, it's not so much that McCain "gets" the intense public resistance to costly foreign adventurism. If public opinion's as bad as it is, then the skills we need in the next president are the courage to admit we've lost the war and the political leadership to guide the political system to extract our forces from the supposed fiasco.

McCain won't do any such thing, of course. But I think Powers is wrong anyway, because I have a different take on public opinion: Success is contagious. If we continue to make gains thoughout the post-surge period of the deployment, the public will ride out the storm. (And we are continuining to make progress: See, for example, Captain Ed, "Guess Who Realized the Surge is Working?", on Nancy's Pelosi's acknowledgment of progress in Iraq.)

As expensive as the war is, Americans don't want to lose. The election campaign will allow McCain to clarify these issues, and with his experience, he'll most likely be a better salesman than President Bush on the vital need for a continuing commitment to the Iraqi people.

Barack Obama's Cult of Personality

I've been chronicling Barack Obama's embrace by the progressive/radical left for some time now. Thus it's no surprise to me that Obama supporters have turned to artistic iconography to build a cult of personality around the Illinois Senator.

As the Washington Post indicates, Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer pictured above, has created the Democratic primary's "equivalent of the Che poster," an agitprop pop-art image for the Bolshevik-constructivist set.

The Obama cult is the topic of this week's cover story at the Weekly Standard, "Let a Thousand Posters Bloom":

More than any other politician in recent memory, Barack Obama has been the subject of iconography. His campaign's official posters often portray Obama in a beatific light--clad in a white shirt and silver tie, eyes squinting and looking into some middle distance above the camera, a nimbus of wispy clouds illuminating his sacred head. But even away from the Obama mother ship, graphic designers and pop artists have adopted the candidate as their own, producing a raft of posters and prints in support of his campaign.

Last summer, an Obama poster began appearing in downtown Chicago, plastered randomly in public spaces. Drawn in mustardy yellows, Obama appeared from the shoulders up, staring straight at viewers, with a sunburst exploding behind his head. Below the image, in large block letters, the poster proclaimed "The Dream." At the time, the artist was identified only as "CRO," but, as the posters spread, CRO was revealed to be Ray Noland, a 35-year-old graphic artist....

To get a sense of Noland's politics, you need only look at the details. In one print, a crowd of Obama supporters is waving tiny placards, some of which read "Surge of Diplomacy" and "Peace Is Patriotic." Another poster, titled "No! From the Go," bears the slogan "U.S. out of Iraq."

Noland's designs attracted a huge amount of attention in the art community, and even some interest from the Obama campaign. At first, campaign officials asked him to donate his images, according to the New York Post. He declined. But the campaign finally did purchase a poster, which was used as part of the official promotion for a September 2007 rally in New York City.

Shepard Fairey was the next to step forward. He is best known for his early 1990s underground "Andre the Giant has a posse" campaign, a cultural phenomenon designed around a small, easily reproducible likeness of the wrestler. Fairey distributed thousands of stickers and posters bearing the image, which eventually took on a life of its own, turning up in cities and towns across the globe--the image itself becoming part of the popular culture. Fairey specializes in this sort of epiphenomenon, which he calls "propaganda engineering." As his website proudly proclaims, he's been "manufacturing quality dissent since 1989."

Fairey is not new to politics. As he told Creativity-Online.com, "I've been paying attention to politics since the mid-'90s." In 2000, he created an anti-Bush poster. In 2004, even though he "wasn't really that impressed" with John Kerry, he mounted what he calls a "pretty aggressive anti-Bush poster campaign" called "Be the Revolution" in support of Kerry. It wasn't until Obama appeared on the scene that Fairey really fell for a candidate. He would later explain that he admired Obama's "radical cachet." "I have made art opposing the Iraq war for several years, and making art of Obama, who opposed the war from the start, is like making art for peace."

In January, he unveiled two posters in support of Obama. Done in blood red and grays, the prints depicted a large, iconic Obama, head thoughtfully cocked. One version of the poster proclaims "HOPE," the other, "PROGRESS." As Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum noted, the Fairey motif was something like "Bolshevik constructivism meets skate-punk graffiti art," all of which suggests that the subject might be "a Third World dictator." But the American Thinker's Peggy Shapiro grasped the poster's more proximate ancestor: Fairey was using "the graphic style of totalitarian Soviet propaganda .  .  . [recalling] the idealized portraits and personality cult of the 'Beloved Leader' such as Stalin and Lenin."

Fairey's posters have become huge hits--you often see them at Obama rallies adorning either T-shirts or signs and plastering urban places such as bus kiosks....

Artists keep flocking to the Obama campaign, designing posters, sometimes selling them, and often giving them away for free....

Designer Jean Aw, trying to explain the attraction, told the Huffington Post that "By placing such an emphasis on building a visually appealing brand, Obama is validating the importance of design in communication. This in turn builds support from the design community, who might feel that a design-conscious candidate best represents their personal beliefs."

Of course it is equally possible that artists are responding instead to an ideological kinship with Obama. The Upper Playground is an artist collective in San Francisco, which the San Francisco Chronicle helpfully describes as a "multiplatform international lifestyle brand encompassing artist-centered clothing and housewares." In February they endorsed Obama, writing, "For too long we have been plagued by mediocrity and incompetence at the Executive level. As an international company, we feel that it is time to support a candidate that truly embodies the American spirit in both his campaign and his ideologies. We believe that Barack Obama is that candidate."

Meghan Daum at the Los Angeles Times, in commenting on Fairey's agitprop fame, offers the best summary of Obama's idolatry:

The Obama poster has spread Fairey's fame, but is the image good for the candidate? Like the photograph-turned-icon of Che Guevara -- which graces the T-shirts of countless hipsters who barely know who the guy is -- Fairey's Obama poster is rooted in the graphic style of agitprop. There's an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image, a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; (b) a controversial American figure who's been assassinated; or (c) one of those people from a Warhol silk-screen that you don't recognize but assume to be important in an abstruse way.

This cannot be the Obama campaign's idea of good public relations...

Well, the Obama folks apparently think so.

Totalitarian chic is popular, and as this is widely considered the "change" election, voters have only themselves to blame if, God forbid, they eventually succumb to the cult of Obama in November.

Equal Footing? Same-Sex Marriage and the Civil Rights Legacy

I discussed California's same-sex marriage ruling in an earlier entry, "The Presidential Politics of Same-Sex Marriage."

The question of whether gays should be legally permitted to marry is far from resolved, and the California Supreme Court has done the country a service by placing a (really) hot-button social issue back on the political agenda.

I don't get too fired up about gay rights issues (gays should be able to serve openly in the armed services, for example). However, I do have a problem placing the quest for homosexual rights on an equal plane as the historic black American freedom struggle.

It turns out that California Chief Justice Ronald George is saying he was influenced in his legal thinking by Jim Crow segregation from the post-bellum South, via the Los Angeles Times:

In the days leading up to the California Supreme Court's historic same-sex marriage ruling Thursday, the decision "weighed most heavily" on Chief Justice Ronald M. George -- more so, he said, than any previous case in his nearly 17 years on the court.

The court was poised 4 to 3 not only to legalize same-sex marriage but also to extend to sexual orientation the same broad protections against bias previously saved for race, gender and religion. The decision went further than any other state high court's and would stun legal scholars, who have long characterized George and his court as cautious and middle of the road.

But as he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

"I think," he concluded, "there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe."

So, does "doing the right thing" mean that gay rights is the new social justice issue of the 2000s? Are gays that oppressed?

Here's this from the Weekly Standard in 2006:

THE MOVEMENT TO REDEFINE MARRIAGE to include same-sex unions has packaged its demands in the rhetoric and images of the civil rights movement. This strategy, though cynical, has enormous strategic utility. For what reasonable, fair-minded American could object to a movement that conjures up images of Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellows campaigners for racial justice facing down dogs and fire hoses? Who is prepared to risk being labeled a bigot for opposing same-sex marriage?

As an exercise in marketing and merchandising, this strategy is the most brilliant playing of the race card in recent memory. Not since the "poverty pimps" of 35 years ago, who leveraged the guilt and sense of fair play of the American public to hustle affirmative action set-asides, have we witnessed so brazen a misuse of African-American history for partisan purposes.

But the partisans of homosexual marriage have a problem. There is no evidence in the history and literature of the civil rights movement, or in its genesis in the struggle against slavery, to support the claim that the "gay rights" movement is in the tradition of the African-American struggle for civil rights. As the eminent historian Eugene D. Genovese observed more than 30 years ago, the black American experience as a function of slavery is unique and without analogue in the history of the United States. While other ethnic and social groups have experienced discrimination and hardship, none of their experiences compare with the physical and cultural brutality of slavery. It was in the crucible of the unique experience of slavery that the civil rights movement was born.

The extraordinary history of the United States as a slaveholding republic included the kidnapping and brutal transport of blacks from African shores, and the stripping of their language, identity, and culture in order to subjugate and exploit them. It also included the constitutional enshrining of these evils in the form of a Supreme Court decision--Dred Scott v. Sandford--denying to blacks any rights that whites must respect, and the establishment of Jim Crow and de jure racial discrimination after Dred Scott was overturned by a civil war and three historic constitutional amendments.

It is these basic facts that embarrass efforts to exploit the rhetoric of civil rights to advance the goals of generally privileged groups, however much they wish to depict themselves as victims. Whatever wrongs individuals have suffered because some Americans fail in the basic moral obligation to love the sinner, even while hating the sin, there has never been an effort to create a subordinate class subject to exploitation based on "sexual orientation."

It is precisely the indiscriminate promotion of various social groups' desires and preferences as "rights" that has drained the moral authority from the civil rights industry. Let us consider the question of rights. What makes a gay activist's aspiration to overturn thousands of years of universally recognized morality and practice a "right"? Why should an institution designed for the reproduction of civil society and the rearing of children in a moral environment in which their interests are given pride of place be refashioned to accommodate relationships integrated around intrinsically non-marital sexual conduct?

One must, in the current discussion, address directly the assertion of discrimination. The claim that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman constitutes discrimination is based on a false analogy with statutory prohibitions on interracial marriages in many states through much of the 20th century. This alleged analogy collapses when one considers that skin pigmentation is utterly irrelevant to the procreative and unitive functions of marriage. Racial differences do not interfere with the ability of sexually complementary spouses to become "one-flesh," as the Book of Genesis puts it, by sexual intercourse that fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation. As the law of marital consummation makes clear, and always has made clear, it is this bodily union that serves as the foundation of the profound sharing of life at every level--biological, emotional, dispositional, rational, and spiritual--that marriage is. This explains not only why marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but also why marriages cannot be between more than two people--despite the desire of "polyamorists" to have their sexual preferences and practices legally recognized and blessed.

Moreover, the analogy of same-sex marriage to interracial marriage disregards the whole point of those prohibitions, which was to maintain and advance a system of racial subordination and exploitation. It was to maintain a caste system in which one race was relegated to conditions of social and economic inferiority. The definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not establish a sexual caste system or relegate one sex to conditions of social and economic inferiority. It does, to be sure, deny the recognition as lawful "marriages" to some forms of sexual combining--including polygyny, polyandry, polyamory, and same-sex relationships. But there is nothing invidious or discriminatory about laws that decline to treat all sexual wants or proclivities as equal.

People are equal in worth and dignity, but sexual choices and lifestyles are not. That is why the law's refusal to license polygamous, polyamorous, and homosexual unions is entirely right and proper. In recognizing, favoring, and promoting traditional, monogamous marriage, the law does not violate the "rights" of people whose "lifestyle preferences" are denied the stamp of legal approval. Rather, it furthers and fosters the common good of civil society, and makes proper provision for the physical and moral protection and nurturing of children.

Well-intentioned liberals shudder upon hearing the word "discrimination." Its simple enunciation instills guilt and dulls their critical faculties. But once malcontented members of any group--however privileged--can simply invoke the term and launch their own personalized civil rights industry, the word has been emptied of its normative and historical content.

I doubt that's a message the major gay rights organizations are ready to embrace.

See more on this, at Memeorandum.

Will McCain Talk to Terrorists?

Did you see Jamie Rubin's piece over at the Huffington Post, "Talking with Our Enemies: McCain Should Admit The Truth and Stop Attacking the Messenger"?

Rubin argues that McCain's open to political dialog with terrorists, and the Arizona Senator's backing of President Bush language of appeasement, offered in his Knesset speech, was political opportunism.

Here's Rubin:

There is a war going on in Iraq. This fall's election will be a virtual referendum on the war. That is a real issue. Instead of debating that, President Bush and Senator McCain are determined to attack the character of their political opponents. As a Democrat, I am tired of having our patriotism attacked. Yesterday, the Democratic Party leaders were unified in denouncing these kinds of attacks. Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Joe Biden and the Majority Leader Harry Reid all spoke in unison to defend Senator Obama.

So I say to the McCain campaign, just admit the truth, either he made a mistake or he changed his mind, then let us return to debating the issues as Americans.

That sounds pretty tough.

But there's a problem. Rubin also said this, earlier in the entry:

The question and answer I released yesterday was a full question and a full answer. Nothing was left out of the question or the answer. Nothing is taken out of context....

I have dug out what I believe to be all of the discussion on Hamas during our interview....

As you can see, there is no conditionality in any of his answers. Nowhere does he say what Senator Clinton and Senator Obama say: that is, Hamas has to renounce terrorism, recognize Israel and accept the previous agreements of the Palestinian authority before we could deal with them. Instead, Senator McCain is talking about engagement with Hamas and how it could come about.

Nothing was taken out of context? No conditionality?

Jonathan Martin has the video from the interview (also cited by Rubin):

So what's the problem here? How do we interpret this passage on McCain's position on Hamas?

I think the United States should take a step back, see what they do when they form their government, see what their policies are, and see the ways that we can engage with them, and if there aren’t any, there may be a hiatus," McCain said. "But I think part of the relationship is going to be dictated by how Hamas acts, not how the United States acts.

McCain clearly says let's "see what their policies are..." In other words, don't enter into relations until we see if Hamas renounces killing and terror.

That sounds like a precondition to me.

See also, Gateway Pundit, "Obama Repeats Jamie Rubin's Lie On McCain (Video)."

Hell Freezes Over: McCain Now GOP Savior

Back in January and February, the big question on the GOP side was whether base conservatives would rally to John McCain's banner after he secured the nomination.

We still have quite a few folks out there suffering from McCain Derangement Syndrome, but I just have to get a chuckle out of today's piece over at the Politico, "GOP Turns to McCain to Reinvent Party":

In a delicious piece of irony, many dispirited Republicans, devastated by Tuesday’s special election loss in Mississippi, now believe their savior to be John McCain — a not-so-constant conservative many of them also have long intensely disliked.

The logic: McCain, the vaunted maverick, can move the party away from President Bush and reinvent a Republican brand that, at the moment, is in tatters.

“The public is prepared to believe that McCain is a different kind of Republican,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Donatelli, McCain’s point man at the committee. “This is not some political idea that was cooked up.”

But for all the talk and expectation that McCain will run from Bush like a scalded dog, the reality is different; so far, he hasn’t drawn many stark contrasts at all. Since winning the nomination, his policy proposals and high-profile speeches have included more conventional conservative dogma than nonconformist deviation.

To be sure, there are areas where McCain has walled himself off from the White House. A more aggressive response to global warming is one, and McCain spent two days in the environmentally conscious Pacific Northwest pressing the topic this week.
But on such central issues as the economy, health care, the judiciary and national security, McCain hasn’t wavered far from the right’s prized principles: tax cuts and less spending, market solutions and tax incentives, judges who will strictly interpret the law, and a stay-the-course approach on Iraq.

I noticed many times earlier this year - when Coulter, Limbaugh, Malkin, and all the big right wing bloggers were hammering McCain -that the very qualites for which the Arizona Senator was being attacked (bipartisan compromise, especially) would be the issues that made him the most attractive to independents and moderates in an election expected to be all about "change."

McCain's going to be fine this fall. All the lefties think they've got a shoo-in of an election this year, but the Maverick's holding his own so far, and once Obama finally wraps things up, the conservative 527s are going to lay into him like Cuban pinata.

See also, "Obama, McCain Highly Competitive for Independent Vote."

Che Guevara Totalitarian Chic

Remember seeing those "I'm With Stupid" t-shirts, with an arrow pointing one way or another?

Well, the latest version of these the are iconic Che Guevara shirts, which seem to be more ubiquitious all the time.

I've got a couple of students this semester who wear Che gear to class every day. I want to bonk them on the head: "Hey, this guy was Cuba's executioner. Don't you know this? Why do you wear the image of a man who's also infamous as a 'cold-blooded killing machine.'"

You don't need an arrow with these shirts: They just announce, "Hey, everybody, I'm stupid."

I've written about this problem before, which to me indicates the anti-intellectualism of America's youth, and especially the brain-washing by many in the education profession.

But yesterday while out shopping at the mall with my oldest boy, I noticed an attractive, shapely young woman with an eye-turning, body-clinging t-shirt. Naturally I checked out the woman's figure first, but then I said s#!t to myself when I saw Che's image atop her chest!

Anyway, I thought I'd just vent here a bit. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, I guess.

See some other sources as well:

"The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand."

"Che Guevara: Totalitarian Diaries"

"A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini."

Image Source: Those Shirts

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UPDATE: Black Five has an awesome post up on this, "Don't be a DouChe'":

...Dear angry, hate-filled lefties welcome to Blackfive. We aggravate more hippies by 9 am than most people ever do...

Last Resort Colleges: The Basement of the Ivory Tower

I'm not exactly sure what the Atlantic editors were hoping to accomplish with their story from the June edition, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower."

The story's about students at "small private" and community colleges, where most of those in attendance are of the second chance variety - and the third, fourth, and beyond. I was expecting some shocking expose, seeing as the article's written by "Professor X," an instructor who apparently wants to speak out about the "dark side" of college instruction without placing her teaching position at risk. But this piece is not only tame in its expository promise, it's a retread of a well-told story.

Here's a little from the article:

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home....

The goal of English 101 is to instruct students in the sort of expository writing that theoretically will be required across the curriculum....

Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.

These passages are probable the most important in the essay, but the notion that students are barely able to write is no surprise to teachers at community college, where I teach, and certainly around most schools everywhere else in the United States.

Recall the other day I wrote about Professor Steven Aird at Norfolk State University, who was fired for failing too many students. The university would not comment on his case (see the article, from Inside Higher Ed), but the spokeswoman did say this:

Something is wrong when you cannot impart your knowledge onto students. We are a university of opportunity, so we take students who are underprepared, but we have a history of whipping them into shape.

Norfolk State University's a "historically black college," and it turns out that just 20 percent of the student body is capable of performing university-level academic work.

In California community colleges, the overwhelming majority of students need remedial education, but with open enrollment many of the most demanding classes in history, political science, psychology, and so forth, are open for all to enroll. I'm often pleased to have students who would be just fine at Berkeley or UCLA, but the range of abilities is astounding, and it's not an understatement to say a great bulk of my charges just can't read, and thus they can't possibly do all the "higher order" thinking that's the rage with assessment-driven administrators and outside accreditation agencies.

In any case, as far as "Professor X" is concerned, perhaps the Atlantic editors are surrounded by so many Harvard graduates (like Ross Douthat and Matthew Yglesias) that they haven't really thought too much about the real trenches of education. Or if they do (Sandra Tsing Loh did write an awesome article for the magazine on California's public schools a couple of months back), it's all theoretical, removed from everyday experience. To offer feature stories on the "basement of the ivory tower" is to assuage the guilty sensibilities of their elite liberal readership (I'm left to wonder so much, at least).

All is not lost, though. The story's online version has some cool links to older Atlantic education articles, for example, James Byrant Conant's, "Education for a Classless Society," from May 1940!

That's pretty cool. There's a couple of other good ones as well.

But still, Allen Bundy, an emeritus professor of English from my college, has argued that community college instructors should not consider themselves professors at all (see "Basic Skills Problems at Community Colleges"). They're remedial coaches, for the most part, and the job of the two-year college faculty should be to teach basic skills instruction for the lumpen students who enroll in our classes.

Here's Bundy in another article, "California's Exit Exam: An "F" for Education":

Almost 47,000 California high school students will not receive diplomas this year because they failed an exit test designed in 2004 designed to measure standards that would insure graduates' diplomas had substance. Of that number almost 21,000 are non-native speakers and about 28,000 are poor.

Although the issue is incredibly complicated, what the test failure demonstrates is the magnitude of the problem in states like California that are faced with educating non-native and dialect English speakers....

Problems with language in our students is not a surprise for me As a community college English teacher in California, I have witnessed, over the past 35 years, changes in the speaking and writing skills of almost all high school graduates who came to me for "college" instruction.

In fact, one of the reasons I retired so soon (at fifty-eight-years-old after thirty-five years as a full-time instructor at the college) was that my students did not have the ability to read, write, or think at a level expected of a two-year college student, and I found that I could make only a limited contribution to their success.

It's not just community colleges, or "private" institutions.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece recently entitled, "America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree." The basic point? College education is has been devalued by the democratization of the halls of higher learning:

Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

So readers can see why I question the editorial judgment of the powers that be at the Atlantic.

But perhaps all is not lost.

Fareed Zakaria, in his recent piece, "The Future of American Power," praised higher education in the U.S. as "the country's best industry." He's right, in the aggregate, but his point about "deep regional, racial, and socioeconomic variation" across the nation's educational system is probably a more daunting problem than the those evincing elite-level optimism can possibly understand.

The Consequences of Defeat

Via Maggie's Farm, here's an excerpt from John McCain's address to the National Rifle Association yesterday:

Senator Obama has said, if elected, he will withdraw Americans from Iraq quickly no matter what the situation on the ground is and no matter what U.S. military commanders advise. But if we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq will survive, proclaim victory and continue to provoke sectarian tensions that, while they have been subdued by the success of the surge, still exist, and are ripe for provocation by al Qaeda. Civil war in Iraq could easily descend into genocide, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions. A reckless and premature withdrawal would be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values. Iran will view it as a victory, and the biggest state supporter of terrorists, a country with nuclear ambitions and a stated desire to destroy the Sta te of Israel, will see its influence in the Middle East grow significantly.

The consequences of our defeat would threaten us for years, and those who argue for premature withdrawal, as both Senators Obama and Clinton do, are arguing for a course that would eventually draw us into a wider and more difficult war that would entail far greater dangers and sacrifices than we have suffered to date. Thanks to the counterinsurgency instigated by General Petreaus, after four years of terribly costly mistakes, we have a realistic chance to succeed in helping the forces of political reconciliation prevail in Iraq, and the democratically elected Iraqi Government, with a professional and competent Iraqi army, impose its authority throughout the country and defend its borders. We have a realistic chance of denying al Qaeda any sanctuary in Iraq. We have a realistic chance of leaving behind in Iraq a force for stability and peace in the region, and not a cause for a wider and far more dangerous war. I do not argue against withdrawal because I am indifferent to war and the suffering it inflicts on too many American families. I hold my position because I hate war, and I know very well and very personally how grievous its wages are. But I know, too, that we must sometimes pay those wages to avoid paying even higher ones later. I want our soldiers home, too, just as quickly as we can bring them back without risking everything they suffered for, and burdening them with greater sacrifices in the years ahead. That I will not do. I have spent my life in service to my country, and I will never, never, never risk her security for the sake of my own ambitions. I will defend her, and all her freedoms, so help me God. And I ask you to help me in that good cause. Thank you, and God bless you.

This is why I've supported McCain, from the beginning.

See also, Classical Values, "We Owe It to Our Military."

Bush's Knesset Address: Revisiting the Lessons of Appeasement

With President George W. Bush's address to the Israeli Knesset yesterday, the world community received a pointed reminder of the dangers of caving diplomatically to revisionist powers whose demands are insatiable.

Bush decried appeasement, and along the campaign trail Democratic partisans attacked the president's implication that Barack Obama lacked the determination and vigor to resist America's implacable enemies. The controversy's now a full-blown partisan war over the direction of American foreign policy.

It's always a touchy thing wielding the appeasement cudgel. Throughout the postwar period, denouncing the weakness of political opponents as encouraging another "Munich" has been one of the most serious charges that can be leveled in debates on American foreign affairs.

Unfortunately, the Munich analogy's often overused (although I don't think so in this case, for reasons mentioned below), and the utility of appeasement as a useful tool of shrewd foreign policy statemanship has fallen forever out of favor.

I studied appeasement in some detail in graduate school. One article helpful to this debate is Robert Beck's, "Munich's Lessons Reconsidered," although unfortunately the full text isn't available online.

I did find a nice piece by defense scholar Jeffrey Record, "Appeasment Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s" (pdf). Here's the introduction to the paper:

No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War II U.S. use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Presidents have repeatedly cited the great lesson of the 1930s—namely, that force should be used early and decisively against rising security threats—to justify decisions for war and military intervention; some residents have compared enemy leaders to Hitler. The underlying assumption of the so-called Munich analogy is that the democracies could and should have stopped Hitler (thereby avoiding World War II and the Holocaust) by moving against him militarily before 1939. This assumption, however, is easy to make only in hindsight and ignores the political, military, economic, and psychological contexts of Anglo-French security choices during the 1930s. Among the myriad factors constraining those choices were memories of the horrors of World War I, failure to grasp the nature of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s strategic ambitions, France’s military inflexibility, Britain’s strategic overstretch, France’s strategic dependence on Britain, guilt over the Versailles Treaty of 1919, dread of strategic bombing and misjudgment of the Nazi air threat, American isolationism, and distrust of the Soviet Union and fear of Communism.

Appeasement failed because Hitler was unappeasable. He sought not to adjust the European balance of power in Germany’s favor, but rather to overthrow it. He wanted a German-ruled Europe that would have eliminated France and Britain as European powers. But Hitler was also undeterrable; he embraced war because he knew he could not get what he wanted without it. There was thus little that the democracies could do to deter Hitler from war, though Hitler expected war later than 1939. There was going to be war as long as Hitler remained in power.

A reassessment of the history of appeasement in the 1930s yields the following conclusions: first, Hitler remains unequaled as a state threat. No post-1945 threat to the United States bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship. Second, Anglo-French security choices in the 1930s were neither simple nor obvious; they were shaped and constrained by factors ignored or misunderstood by those who retrospectively have boiled them down to a simple choice between good and evil. Third, hindsight is not 20/20 vision; it distorts. We view past events through the prism of what followed. Had Hitler dropped dead before 1939, there would have been no World War II or Holocaust, and therefore no transformation of the very term “appeasement” into a pejorative. Finally, invocations of the Munich analogy to justify the use of force are almost invariably misleading because security threats to the United States genuinely Hitlerian in scope and nature have not been replicated since 1945.

Record's introduction pretty much reflects the scholarly consensus on the use of the Munich analogy in international relations (some interesting research in this area is found in Yuen Foong khong's, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, And The Vietnam Decisions Of 1965).

It's certainly true that Hitler's Germany was a unique case in the history of 20th century international security. Thus the frequent references to war with Nazi Germany are sometimes overdone.

In the first Gulf War, for example, G.H.W. Bush's comparison of Hitler and Saddam Hussein struck me as strained, not so much in the sense of Saddam's revisionist intentions, but in the fact of the far lower degree of Iraqi economic and military capabilities relative to the United States. This is not to say the Iraqi threat was non-existent. Far from it. It's that if American policy-makers have to resort to elevating all national security issues to Nazi-level proportions, the importance of that historical precedent becomes diminished, watered-down in its power to generate public support for repelling significant threats to international order.

Having said that, there's always the need to take new challenges seriously, and as World War II was the "good war," it's natural to place contemporary challenges in the context of earlier times, especially when unified public backing for war is so crucial to the successful application of military power (which is why the Democratic Party's opposition to Iraq, starting only months after the Congress passed bipartisan legislation authorizing the deployment, is unprecedented in its degree of backstabbing, seeking to undermine a war launched with initial widespread support).

As for President Bush's comparison of today's Iranian threat to the 1930s, the regime in Tehran is by no means as powerful as Hitler's Germany of the interwar period, and Iran is not about to overthrow the world distribution of capabilities any time soon. Yet the Iranians, indeed, seriously threaten Israel and the regional security order in the Middle East, and the course of diplomacy over the last few years has not stopped the regime's efforts at procuring nuclear weapons capability. Iran's proxy armies arrayed around Israel's periphery today pose an existential threat to the Jewish state.

And this is why Barack Obama's pledge to open talks with Iran "without preconditions" should rightly be denounced as folly. President George W. Bush is right to invoke the lessons of Munich in this case, as we are dealing here in the realm of intentions. The security of Israel is of the greatest importance today. Ahmadinejad is not Adolph, but Tehran's designs to consolidate Iranian hegemony from the Persian Gulf to Russia's southern area of influence no doubt have the potential to do lasting damage to regional order. Appeasing Iran's leadership is not in the interest of the United States, Israel, or the international community.

For more on this see, Captain Ed, "Rookie Mistakes Again: Obama Owns Appeasement."

See also the text of the president's speech, "President Bush Addresses Members of the Knesset."

Myanmar Invasion: What Responsibility to Protect?

Since I've noted a couple of times how I've seen little advocacy on the left for regime change Myanmar, it's only fair that I note some attention to the issue.

Andrew Sullivan's got a post on George Packers's article at the New Yorker, "Should Burma Be Saved From Itself?"

Sullivan adds this:

A brief, decisive international effort to reach the starving and sick seems important to me. If it helps demystify this vile regime, great. But in its demonstration of humanity, it is also a great way for the US to enhance its soft power in the developing world. People remember who saved them. And sometimes, a bottle of water can mean a lifetime of gratitude. Bonus Burma blog here.

Sullivan's a shifty ideologue. He's something of a post-conservative Obama-backer, and here he sounds like a neocon!

But a look around the web sees little more of Sullivan's boosterism, at least among "liberal internationalists."

Here's Democracy Arsenal suggesting Burma can't be a case of the world community's "responsibility to protect":

Afraid I can't go along with Mark Goldberg on the Burma situation as a test of the Responsibility to Protect. I worry that a showdown over the principle of national sovereignty could undercut, rather than promote, the process by which R2P takes hold as an international norm. Which raises the question of how that process will work and where it stands. [I owe thanks to Stanley Foundation colleagues Keith Porter and (occasional DA guest) Michael Schiffer for forcing me to think about this.]

Actually, I look at this not as an opportunity to assert R2P, but rather as an indication of how far we still have to go. Ask yourself this: how do you rate the chances of getting into Burma via a Security Council showdown over intervening militarily without the junta's consent (Chapter VII) versus forms of pressure short of the assertion of an international responsibility to intervene? There has been a lot of important progress in chipping away at the sovereignty shield, but R2P doesn't enjoy nearly enough international support for us to simply insist that it be followed.

How far we still have to go? So much for liberal humanitarianism?

Notice the strained legalistic language in Democracy Arsenal's post, which can be translated into something like this:

Nope, no regime change Burma, not while President Bush is in power, as we're implacably opposed to this administration's regime change doctrine. Better to wait until the Democratic Party takes over the White House next year, then we can have Samantha Power - who rejoined Barack Obama's campaign in the fall - address the United Nations making the case for humanitarian intervention on the latest outbreak of ethnic cleansing in the Congo or Sudan, or on the next natural disaster in South Asia or the Pacific.

In other words, tens of thousands could die daily, around the world, while the "liberal internationalist" community twiddles its thumbs.

Yep, we can see the same tendency in Matthew Yglesias's recent post rebuking outside intervention in Burma:

At the end of the day, great power conflict ... will do immense humanitarian damage to the world and avoiding it should be a very high priority. Does that mean we should do nothing? No, it doesn't, it means American officials (and, indeed, civil society figures) should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world. But it has to be done in a reasonable consensual way that tries to stitch together America and its traditional allies with new emerging powers in various regions ...

Well, actually, it does mean doing nothing.

The leftist "internationalists" will sit around, waiting for some "global norm" to develop - apparently emerging magically out of some kind of ethereal "international legitimacy" - before the nations of the world mount some decisive effort to help the diseased and starving.

For more on this, see my post, "Liberal Internationalism and Regime Change Myanmar."

Fighting Shifts to Western Baghdad as Sadr City Violence Falls

Via Thunder Run, here's Bill Roggio's report on recent military developments in Iraq:

With the cease-fire agreement between the Sadrist movement and the Iraqi government now in full effect after the four-day grace period that began on May 11, the fighting in Sadr City has decreased, but has not halted. The Mahdi Army continues to attack US and Iraqi troops as they work to complete the barrier along Qods Street in Sadr City, but the attack tempo has slowed, according to Multinational Forces Iraq. The US military believes the fighting has shifted to western Baghdad to deflect attention from Sadr City.

From March 25 until last weekend, US and Iraqi security forces were engaged in major battles in Sadr City. Mahdi Army fighters were killed at a rate of nearly 20 per day, during which it was not uncommon for 20 to 30 Mahdi Army fighters to be killed in a single engagement.

The major clashes have slowed, but the attacks continue as the US and Iraqi military nears completion of the wall. “The enemy still creeps up on the wall or fires at the wall, our Soldiers and the IA [Iraqi Army] soldiers," said Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover, the chief Public Affairs Officer for Multinational Division Baghdad, in an e-mail to The Long War Journal. “The wall is nearly complete. There are fewer attacks, but there is still a threat - however, there are no major engagements." Indirect fire attacks - rockets and mortars - are down significantly, Stover said, with only one mortar attack on May 15.

Attacks by US air weapons team, which have fired hundreds of Hellfire missiles at Mahdi Army sniper positions and roadside bomb teams, have tapered off. "We're still conducting AWT/UAV [air weapons teams/unmanned aerial vehicle] Hellfire strikes - when we see a SG [Special Group fighter] in the process of committing a violent act or about to," Stover said. "The last AWT Hellfire strike was last night, and it was outside of Sadr City, just north" of the Mahdi Army stronghold.

The Mahdi Army is still planting explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, the deadly armor-piercing roadside bombs manufactured in Iran. These weapons are placed along the wall in an effort to hit US and Iraqi engineers and route clearance patrols. "Shiite militias have been trying to blast gaps in the wall, firing at the American troops who are completing it and maneuvering to pick off the Iraqi soldiers who have been charged with keeping an eye on the partition," The New York Times reported.

An EFP attack occurred near Sadr City on May 15. Soldiers from the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division killed a Mahdi Army fighter and wounded another after an EFP and small arms attack in "eastern Baghdad." The attack probably occurred in New Baghdad, which is adjacent to Sadr City, as the 4-10 Mountain operates in this region.

But the Mahdi Army may be removing EFPs and other roadside bombs in Sadr City, according to eyewitness reports in Sadr City. "Gunmen removed bombs they had planted to prevent Iraqi and U.S. forces from plunging into the city," Voices of Iraq reported.

The US and Iraqi military has insisted the Special Groups - the Iranian-armed and trained factions of the Mahdi Army - and not the Mahdi Army itself, are behind the attacks in Sadr City. But the lifting of the weapons and the reduction in attacks in Sadr City suggests otherwise. The Special Groups appear to be abiding by Sadr's order for a cease-fire to some degree.

The Fighting Shifts Westward

The US military believes the Special Groups are shifting their attacks outside of Sadr City into areas of Western Baghdad in order to deflect attention from the Mahdi Army stronghold. "We're actually seeing more hostile action in western Baghdad, likely because the SG [Special Group] criminals are trying to pull the focus off of Sadr City and those penned up there," Stover said. "And also, because they lack their freedom of maneuver" in Sadr City.

Read the rest of the report here.

See also, "Iraq Without Ideological Blinders: Michael Yon's 'Moment of Truth'."

Iraq Without Ideological Blinders: Michael Yon's "Moment of Truth"

I've been picking up my book reading of late.

I've finished Matthew Yglesias' Heads in the Sand, which is practically a primer for Democratic Party soft-and-squishy foreign policy this year.

Readers know I have problems with Yglesias' project, which can be seen, for example, in my post from last night, "Liberal Internationalism and Regime Change Myanmar." I'll have more on Yglesias later, but see his hot-off-the-press article on Barack Obama's foreign policy at the Atlantic, "The Accidental Foreign Policy."

I'm also a couple of chapters into David Horowitz's, Party of Defeat, which is a must-read treatise on Democratic Party foreign policy appeasement since the Carter administration.

I've also picked up Andrew McCarthey's, Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad. McCarthy's been doing some great writing recently at National Review, so I'm looking to get into that one.

How soon remains to be seen, because I've committed myself to reading the second volume in Saul Friedlander's majesterial history of the Holocaust, The Years of Extermination Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. I read Friedlander's original volume in grad school (Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939).

Sometimes, amid all the politics and political polarization, it's essential to take a step back and read some deep history, which in Friedlander's case is unsurpassed in quality and scholarship.

Note too that I picked up a copy of Michael Yon's, Moment of Truth in Iraq, which is reviewed at City Journal by Micael Totten, who says:

Yon is a former Special Forces soldier, and his affection for the grunts in the field is palpable. He takes their honor, courage, duty, and sacrifice seriously in a way that most journalists don’t—and perhaps can’t. At heart, he is as much a soldier as a reporter, but he is neither a propagandist for the U.S. military nor a mouthpiece for its public affairs officers. He nearly got himself thrown out of Iraq for an article in The Weekly Standard challenging some top-level brass for trying to censor media coverage. And he calls out both officers in the field and pundits back home who refuse to admit that all has not always gone according to plan. “Combat soldiers have little patience for less than unvarnished truth,” he writes. “That’s why I spend so much time with infantry.” Nothing makes a mockery of party lines and spin from air-conditioned offices quite like facing snipers, ambushes, and improvised explosive devices in 135-degree heat. Reality is more real in Iraq than almost anywhere else.

And the reality is that the war's been a difficult, terrible conflict in many ways, but not a lost cause, nor an ignoble one.

Yon's message is not likely to sit well with the denialist, post-modern antiwar left, as Totten notes:

Yon convincingly argues that the U.S. is winning in Iraq, at least for the moment. “The enemy learned that our people and the Iraqi forces would close in and kill them if they dared stand their ground. This is important: an enemy forced to choose between dying or hiding inevitably loses legitimacy. Legitimacy is essential. Men who must always either run or die are no longer an army and are not going to found a caliphate.” The outcome, though, is still in doubt. If Petraeus’s surge strategy fails or is prematurely short-circuited by Congress, the American and Iraqi forces will almost certainly lose. “Maybe creating a powerful democracy in the Middle East was a foolish reason to go to war,” Yon concludes. “Maybe it was never the reason we went to war. But it is within our grasp now and nearly all the hardest work has been done.” Which makes the present moment the moment of truth in Iraq.

Well, I better get to reading, because I've got some great stuff on my plate!