MI7.5?

Ed Felten of "Freedom to Tinker" notes that in a list of all-time "must read" books selected by a surveyed group of university presidents, science and technology are conspicuous by their absence. Commentators on his blog (and on Crooked Timber's offshoot posting), asked to supply the missing masterpieces of science, draw almost entirely from three categories: (1) works on the philosophy and foundations of science (Popper, Kuhn); (2) Pop-science digests of various interesting topics (Douglas Hofstadter, Jared Diamond); and (3) Books by and/or about the practices of computer geeks.

Why were all these suggested books (Origin of Species might be one exception) so far in stature from the books on the presidents' list (the Bible, Hamlet, the Odyssey, The Prince)? The obvious answer is that the Great Books of science--and they do exist: viz., Euclid's Elements, Newton's Principia--simply don't occupy the same place in the scientific world that the Great Books hold in the humanities and related disciplines. No half-decent undergraduate curriculum, for example, would allow its literature students to escape deep familiarity with Hamlet, its philosophy majors to avoid studying The Republic, its classicists to skimp on the Odyssey, its divinity students not to delve deeply into the Bible, or its budding political scientists to pass on The Prince.

But few geometers feel any need to familiarize themselves with geometry as Euclid explained it; nor do physicists feel incomplete without understanding Newton's original notation for his laws of motion. And I would much sooner encourage students to master a few basic college texts in math, sciences and engineering than push them to grapple with the same concepts by studying the original works that introduced them. The originals, after all, each represented one farsighted individual's brilliant-but-still-hazy insight, which has since been clarified and extended far beyond that first attempt at elucidation.

That's one of the key distinctions between the "two cultures": science seeks to separate its ideas from individual humans, and to place them in an abstract world where not only objectivity but also impersonality reigns. No serious student of literature would argue, like the hero of "Metropolitan", that reading critical essays about great literary works is better than reading the originals. The reason is that the ideas in literary works--or, for that matter, philosophical, historical or religious ones--are bound to the original thinker (and his or her original words) in a way that scientific ideas are not. Plato's Republic stands above any recapitulation of it--even one that many consider brilliant and original in its own right--because Plato's ideas come only from Plato, and understanding them requires as direct a link as possible to him.

I understand the scientist's temptation to line up great classics of science (or excellent popularizations) alongside the Great Books of other disciplines. But science simply differs from the arts in its relationship to its seminal works. And we science-minded folks would all do better to take note of that fact, and point our non-scientific colleagues--just as we would any starting student--at a good, readable, comprehensive textbook, rather than at an original document. After all, if a philosophy professor suggested that I wasn't up to studying his field the way his own students do, and recommended instead that I stick to my scientific ways by studying a "summary of philosophical ideas" textbook in place of the original Plato, I'd be rather offended.

The most disturbing thing about this story is that it's an approximate description of just about every lecture I've ever given.

Is the undeniable dominance of the left on today's college campuses a result of discrimination against political conservatives in academia? This question has been raised in response to Prof. Robert Brandon, chair of the philosophy department at Duke, and at least one other professor there, who apparently believe that the phenomenon has a different explanation: Conservatives are stupid.

Eugene Volokh, among others, had a good time making fun of this charge. But Andrew Sullivan chose to respond with an implicit countercharge, in the form of a long, familiar of series of anecdotes from the trenches, demonstrating what might be described as a "hostile environment" towards conservatives on campus. His argument was presumably that bright conservatives have been hounded off campus, rather than failing to make it there on their own merits. Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy offered the obvious rejoinder: that conservatives who generally don't accept anecdotal evidence and numerical disparities as proof of racial discrimination shouldn't be so quick to accept these signs as proof of ideological discrimination.

Both sides, however, have tacitly accepted a highly questionable premise: that there are intellectually coherent philosophies that can be described as "left" and "right", and that adherents of the former can therefore be said to be have dominated academia for some appreciable length of time. In fact, much of what would be described as leftist today--racial and sexual separatism, isolationist anti-militarism, protectionism, suspicion of presidential malfeasance and abuse of power, hostility to Israel, environmentalism, even opposition to tax cuts--would at some point in the last fifty years have been described as a right-wing position. A similar list, of course, could be compiled of "conservative" views that were, not so long ago, viewed as incorrigibly liberal.

This legacy of flip-flops supports my long-standing contention that terms such as "left", "right", "liberal" and "conservative" represent coalitions of groups sharing common interests, rather than consistent collections of ideas. The persistent collective allegiance of a particular group, such as academics, to such a coalition is much less mysterious than its adherence to a specific ideology. After all, a group with a particular stable socioeconomic position is more likely to maintain common interests with a more-or-less fixed constellation of allied groups, over time, than it is to maintain a common set of political beliefs.

And it is hardly surprising that academics, as members of the educated, professional white-collar middle class, have over the years allied themselves with other members of that class, even as their actual positions on all sorts of issues have changed radically. (Members of, say, the modestly educated, blue-collar working class, or the property-owning investor class, show a similar consistency of affiliation and volatility of concrete political position.) No accusations of stupidity or discrimination are necessary--the simplest explanation is that professors are liberal because liberalism is defined, to a large extent, by the views and preferences of professors and people somewhat like them.

Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell supports an, er, interesting proposal for helping to democratize the Middle East. The plan, apparently being peddled by the US State Department, is modeled on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the organization that oversaw the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union, and later helped encourage democratic movements in former East Bloc nations. Of course, there are differences between Eastern Europe and the Middle East. For example, the main alternatives to the latter region's ruling autocracies are not pro-democratic dissident movements, but rather Islamic fundamentalist theocrats. But Farrell suggests what he considers a suitable "trial run": Israel.

For all its flaws, Israel is the one country in the region that approximates a real democracy. However, its internal tensions have demonstrably had a destabilizing effect on the region and helped corrupt autocrats elsewhere to shore up their rule....A genuinely multilateral initiative to help solve the Israel-Palestine problem could help push both the Israelis and Palestinians into making some real concessions, while providing an external framework to help ensure that any agreement stuck, thus alleviating the fundamental problem of distrust between the two sides.

Now, the Crooked Timber folks, while unabashedly of the left, are fairly thoughtful academic types, so this kind of truly stunning nonsensicality requires a bit of explanation. How does the CSCE, which ratified the Soviet Union's colonial domination of Eastern Europe before volunteering its friendly advice to Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel et al., become a model for democratizing benighted Arab despotisms--after first resolving the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict? How can anyone sane calmly compare the conquered-but-restive nations of the Warsaw Pact with the tribal tyrannies of the Middle East--or with a functioning parliamentary democracy like Israel--and then prescribe the same political process for all of them?

The answer lies in Farrell's remarkable--and instructive--recasting of the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980's.

The CSCE helped to secure the democratic transition in Western Europe in two important ways. First, it created a normative framework that enabled democratic activists in Warsaw Pact countries to have their protests heard.....As time went on, the Helsinki commitments proved to be a potent weapon for democratic activists within Eastern bloc countries; they could now use their governments' failure to live up to international commitments as a tool to embarrass them in public. The US and other democratic states provided a sympathetic audience.

Second, the CSCE created a set of instruments designed to allow a limited form of collective intervention within CSCE participating states in order to shore up democracy. It's usually difficult to get states to agree to allow outsiders to intervene in their internal affairs. However, the states participating in the CSCE had previously made an internationally binding commitment to democracy. Furthermore, many of them were interested in joining the EU at some stage and wanted to show their willingness to reform. This meant that many CSCE states were prepared to allow the CSCE to become involved in internal disputes as a sort of honest broker, representing the collective interests of other states in ensuring a secure neighborhood.

The idea that the Soviet Union collapsed after decades of cynical casuistry (not to mention far-reaching conquest, brutal oppression and mass slaughter) because it couldn't take the embarrassment of failing to live up to the Helsinki accords is simply absurd. As for the notion that Western European diplomats made the difference between democracy and dictatorship in Poland, Hungary and Estonia (while failing in Serbia, Belarus and Bulgaria, and being entirely irrelevant and unnecessary elsewhere)--well, perhaps the sunrise, as well, depends on European diplomatic encouragement. But given that numerous factors--active local dissident movements, economic development, even northerly latitude--ended up correlating much better with post-Soviet democratization than CSCE involvement, the case for the latter's importance is pretty weak.

On the other hand, although Farrell claims his view "wasn't popular" when he proposed it several years ago, I believe he understates its appeal. Certainly the use of the Helsinki process as a rallying point by Soviet dissidents during the 1980's caused many Western analysts to credit it with an important role in the downfall of the Soviet regime. The current plan's supporters in the State Department apparently also endorse that interpretation of history.

This conclusion may have been somewhat less implausible in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the sudden dissolution of a powerful empire seemed so mysterious that pundits were grasping for any explanation they could find. In retrospect, though, it's clear that the Soviet Communist Party was in such a state of political decay by the late 1980's that it couldn't resist the obviously fatal Gorbachev-Yeltsin "reforms" until the coup of 1991, when it was too late. The diplomatic embarrassment associated with the Helsinki Accords was a minor symptom--and certainly not a significant cause--of Soviet decay.

But if you want to find the source of European diplomats' (and some US State Department officials') ludicrous faith in "soft power"--diplomacy, economic measures, "embarrassment"--to solve everything from Iraqi democratization to the Arab-Israeli dispute, you need look no further than the primal mirage of "soft power" as an effective tool: the fall of the Soviet Union. If earnest committees of chattering Western European bureaucrats can bring a superpower to its knees, after all, then there's no telling what else they might accomplish. And why would an earnest, chattering Western European want to think otherwise?

The Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein invokes a standard argument for America's superiority over her Canadian and European allies: the direction of emigration is primarily towards America from these other countries, rather than vice versa. For all I know, the numbers may back him up, but his reasoning is faulty.

Consider, for example, cemeteries. By Bernstein's reasoning, they are truly magnificent places--after all, people move into them at a prodigious rate, but the number exiting is negligible. Obviously then, the people therein must be content, while those elsewhere pine for its comforts.

A similar bias infects Bernstein's argument about countries. America is famous as a "land of opportunity"--a place where the ambitious can go and improve their lot through hard work. Other countries promise instead a safe, stable, comfortable life, with fewer demands and smaller maximal rewards. The result? The ambitious from all over the world--restless by nature--flock to America in search of opportunity, while the more easily contented, by definition, stay where they are--whether they are in America or elsewhere (and whether they would be happier elsewhere or not). The result: a net influx into the US, which Bernstein mistakenly takes for a proof of America's preferability.

For those who care about such things, I've just enabled RSS for my blog--the link is on the left.

For those who don't--well, frankly, neither do I.

I've just finished reading the extraordinary memoirs (available online) of Henry Morgenthau, American ambassador to the Ottoman empire from 1913 to 1916. Originally published in 1918, this account of his time in Constantinople is a rare example of a fascinating historical document that's also wonderfully entertaining to read. Morgenthau presents colorful sketches of the major personalities with which he interacted as part of his job--particularly Turkish leaders Dalaat Pasha and Enver Pasha, and German ambassador von Wangenheim--and clearly explains the strategic military and diplomatic issues of the day.

His most valuable contribution, however, is to give telling insight into what might be described as inchoate German and Muslim fascism. From his conversations (as a neutral party) with German military and diplomatic representatives in the lead-up to World War I, for example, he becomes convinced that the German leadership had been planning on war for years; that they expected to win, and to impose harsh terms on the countries they anticipated defeating; and that if they lost, they would simply study their mistakes, correct them, and start another war in a decade or two. His portrayal of Germany as a confident, aggressive, ruthless nation, with absolutely no principles beyond victory at all costs, no fear of defeat, let alone war, and no compunction about planning for victory in the next war--in 1918!--is frankly stunning to read in hindsight.

His portrayal of Turkey is comparably evocative. Run jointly by a triumvirate of former democratic idealists ("Young Turks") turned ruthless dictators, his host country is, like its German ally, full of aggressive, ruthless confidence--but without any of the economic or military prowess to back it up. As a result it throws itself into grandiose political and military campaigns that lead only to slaughter and disaster. Its victories--repulsing the Entente navy at the Dardanelles, and the British Empire's forces at Gallipoli--are a result of massive German assistance. Its other endeavors are bloody, feckless disasters, in which large numbers of innocents are slaughtered, Turkish troops are soundly defeated, nothing is accomplished, or all three of these results come to pass. All the while, though, official pronouncements remain faithful to a kind of "Baghdad Bob"-style mirror reality, in which Turkey is always noble and blameless, its enemies evil and corrupt, and its inevitable success assured. A more vivid picture of a modern Middle Eastern Muslim nation would be hard to draw even today, let alone in 1918.

The main lesson of Morgenthau's portrait of these two countries, it seems, is that nations that are dangerous--to their neighbors, their despised minorities, and to the world--share certain identifiable characteristics. By now this list should be familiar: a large, dense population, a history of vigorous, chauvinistic, somewhat race-tinged nationalism (perhaps masking deep internal disunity), a strong military tradition, a national inferiority complex encouraging a sense of slighted belligerency, confidence inspired by a recent spurt of political or economic vigor, and, of course, a ruthless, thoroughly undemocratic government with an ambitious ideology. Perhaps now my prediction about the rise of China as a major source of world conflict in 2004 makes more sense....

French Education Minister Luc Ferry, fresh from his proposal to ban headscarves and other religious accessories from schools, has now suggested that beards, too, might be banned.

Frankly, not only is he a lousy education minister, but I never really liked him on "90210", either.

If you want to understand the effect of the American military campaign in Iraq on international diplomacy, look no further than former National Security Council staffer Flynt Leverett's op-ed in the New York Times. "The idea....that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's apparent decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction was a largely a result [sic] of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein....misrepresents the real lesson of the Libyan case," writes Leverett. Rather, he attributes Libya's cooperation to several years of gentle diplomacy, during which "an explicit quid pro quo was offered: American officials indicated that a verifiable dismantling of Libya's weapons projects would lead the removal our own sanctions [sic]." The lesson we should draw from this success, according to Leverett, is that "we must not only apply pressure but also make clear the potential benefits of cooperation....Until the president is willing to employ carrots as well as sticks, he will make little headway" in disarming rogue nations.

In fact, Leverett's own words completely undermine his claim that the toppling of Saddam Hussein hasn't radically strengthened America's diplomatic position. After all, who in the world, two years ago, would have characterized America's imposition of harsh economic sanctions against a target nation, to be lifted only if that nation complied wholeheartedly with US demands, as a balanced, "carrots as well as sticks" approach to diplomacy?

A (second) update to the previous post: at first, I was puzzled as to why the Brooks column caused so many people to blow a gasket. I'm embarrassed to admit that it took Matthew Yglesias to explain it to me. (Certainly Mark Kleiman's posting should have tipped me off.) In fact, the controversy is not at all about neocon conspiracy theories in general, or about anti-Semitism, or silencing debate--it's about Gen. Wesley Clark. Brooks mentions Clark in his article, in a way that might imply that he considers Clark one of the wacky conspiracy theorists who believe in a super-powerful cabal of neoconservatives running American foreign policy. And that's gotten Clark supporters (perhaps Democrats in general) hopping mad.

Now, I have no idea what Clark's current position is on the "neocon conspiracy" issue, but I do know that he is on record as saying,

As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan....I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned.

Of course, much has been said, since then, about this quotation and its implications about Clark's beliefs. Similarly, his claim that "[t]here was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein....it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House," has been analyzed to death by supporters and opponents. I'm prepared to accept that fairly benign interpretations of these remarks are plausible, and even that reasonable people might consider Brooks' characterization of Clark as a conspiracy theorist to be unfair. But under the circumstances, I'm a bit surprised that Brooks' offhand partisan shot at Clark, buried in an op-ed column (Oxblog's Josh Chafetz seems to have missed it, too), has managed to provoke such a fuss. Methinks the bloggers doth protest too much....

It appears that David Brooks has touched a few raw nerves in the blogosphere, with his column bemoaning "all these articles....about how Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bill Kristol and a bunch of 'neoconservatives'....had taken over U.S. foreign policy." Joshua Micah Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, and Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies have all responded with righteous fury, claiming that Brooks is attempting to silence critics of neocons by dismissing them as conspiracy theorists, and worse, anti-Semites ("con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish'," writes Brooks). Marshall and Davies then go even further, vaguely intimating that there is, in a sense, a neocon conspiracy to take over U.S. foreign policy, and that Brooks is attempting to deflect legitimate criticism of their efforts.

Now, criticism of neoconservative foreign policy is certainly not necessarily conspiracy-theory-mongering (although occasionally it is, as Brooks is right to point out). And the anti-Semitism charge is a particularly tricky one, because it can be taken (although it obviously shouldn't) as implying guilt by association. But it takes a special kind of chutzpah to deride Brooks for accusing neocon critics of being conspiracy theorists, while simultaneously lending encouragement to conspiracy theories about neocons. And the "silencing" charge is strictly projection, in the Freudian sense. The conspiracy theorists appear to have exactly the intention they attribute to Brooks himself: to silence their opponents through inflammatory labelling.

For the people they lump together as "neocons" are not some shadowy cabal of master manipulators at all. They write articles and give lectures, trying to explain their point of view; they participate in the political process, supporting candidates of their choice; and they work in a democratically elected government, helping to formulate and communicate that government's foreign policy. Like that other "right-wing conspiracy" of the '90's (though perhaps not as "vast"), they are a "conspiracy" chiefly in the eyes of their virulent opponents, who label them as such not because they are in any sense inordinately powerful or conspiratorial, but only to paint them as evil and illegitimate.

It would be easy to write an article to the effect that the particular group of prominent public figures known as "neocons" espouse foreign policy views that are profoundly mistaken. (In fact, I've criticized those foreign policy views myself. And Marshall once managed to write an article on the subject that mostly sticks to serious, thoughtful critique--despite its inflammatory title and occasional forays into conspiracy theorizing.) Many of the neocons' critics, though, suffer from such muddled, incoherent thinking about international affairs that a clear, convincing critical analysis is utterly beyond them. That, I believe, is why they resort to coy insinuations--ranging, at the far end, all the way into unhinged ranting--about evil neocon conspiracies.

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman joins the ranks of the rankled, complaining that Brooks unfairly impugns everyone who "thinks that the prophets of a new Amerian empire (1) have a collective screw loose and (2) have too much influence in the Bush II administraiton." [sic] Now, as I mentioned, Brooks never claimed that anyone criticizing neocon foreign policy is automatically "a kook and an anti-Semite" (Kleiman's words). Nevertheless, the complainers--including Kleiman--who have protested being lumped with the nutcases, haven't exactly been going out of their way to portray themselves as the very souls of moderation. I'm reminded of a Woody Allen character whose Jewish mother accuses him of dating a shiksa: "Mom, to you every girl who's not Jewish is a shiksa."

I really think somebody ought to have looked into this urban legend before introducing this product.

Well, it's time to review my predictions for the past year, and issue new ones for 2004. First, last year's record:

A year from now, Iraq will be where Afghanistan is today: a troubled but largely ignored backwater where things are much better than before the US invasion, and American troops help minimize the chaos, but there's still plenty of turmoil, and the long-term political structure of the country has yet to be fully sorted out.

Correct, apart from the "largely ignored" bit. I still expect, though, that once US troops are no longer in Iraq in large numbers, Iraq will be as prominent in the news as Afghanistan is today.

Another terrorist "mega-attack" will occur, this time somewhere in Western Europe.

Fortunately, some excellent police work in several European countries, uncovering a number of terrorist cells primed for action, ruined the accuracy of my prediction. Al Qaida has focused instead on Middle Eastern targets (although the generous might be willing to consider Turkey part of Europe).

Yasser Arafat, Kim Jong Il, Ayatollah Khamenei and Hugo Chavez will (barring death by natural causes) still be clinging to power in their respective political entities at the end of the year, although perhaps somewhat more precariously than at present. The "engagement" strategies pursued by the UN, EU, OAS and other multilateralist organizations with respect to these leaders will have absolutely no effect on their strength or belligerence levels. Their satrapies will suffer further declines in living conditions, but will otherwise (and, particularly, in political terms) remain largely unchanged.

My most accurate prediction. Arafat had a bit of a scare, but came through with flying colors, while Chavez managed to postpone the reckoning till next year. Kim and Khamenei were never seriously in jeopardy, despite a few overstated rumblings in the blogosphere.

The major American market indices will experience yet another year of net decline, as will the US Dollar and real estate market. The American economy will have dipped back into recession by the end of the year, and the domestic American political debate will have largely shifted from international politics to economics. The president's popularity will suffer significantly as a result, although not as severely as his father's did.

Way off base, apart from the dollar. Of course, it's awfully tough to time the markets.

Japan will at last begin adopting some necessary financial reforms. Their short term effect on its economy will be markedly negative.

Some reforms have at last begun, but the American-led boom has so far cushioned Japan from the adverse consequences.

Now for some predictions:

George W. Bush will soundly defeat his Democratic opponent, Howard Dean, in November. The Republicans will maintain control of both houses of Congress, with roughly the same margins as today.

Paul Martin will not win a majority government in a Canadian federal election.

US troops will still be in Iraq in substantial (though somewhat reduced) numbers at year's end.

Of the four leaders I mentioned last year, all will remain in power by year's end (Chavez by falsifying or ignoring the results of the upcoming referendum), barring death by natural or accidental causes.

This year the overpriced major American markets will experience a net decline (and this time, I mean it!). The US dollar will also fall, relative to foreign currencies. Inflation and interest rates will tick upward, in reaction to the falling dollar--but not by that much. Economic growth will slow substantially, but will not tip into recession until after the election.

Conflicts between the US and Europe will be overshadowed by conflicts between the US and China (over trade, exchange rates, weapons proliferation, North Korea, and human rights).

And now for a few more daring predictions:

As with "Soviet chic" in the early 1990's, "Iraqi chic" will prompt trendy Americans to don accessories bearing the image of Saddam Hussein.

The Atkins diet will be found to work best when combined with calorie-rich desserts, thus proving Woody Allen eerily prescient.

To boost the 2004 Olympics' sagging television ratings, the IOC will allow athletes from around the world to vote each other out of the Olympic village, awarding medals to the last remaining competitors in each sport.

Rioting will break out at the Academy Awards ceremony when the newly installed electronic voting system reports that "Gigli" has won the "Best Picture" Oscar.

The Bush re-election campaign will start a blog, in response to Howard Dean's, only to give it up after the president repeatedly refers in public to his "blob".

A terrorist will detonate a powerful chemical weapon in a French airliner restroom towards the end of a long transatlantic flight; nobody will notice.

Ariel Sharon has proposed a new "disengagement plan" in his recent speech at a conference in Herzliya. The plan calls for Israeli forces to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank, behind a perimeter marked by the "security fence" currently under construction. (The fence mostly follows the 1948 Israeli-Jordanian border, but juts out in places well into the West Bank.) The plan also calls for some settlement outposts beyond this perimeter to be dismantled.

The plan has drawn mixed reviews. about 60% of Israelis support it, but many on the left doubt that it will actually be implemented. Meanwhile, the right complains that it represents a victory for terrorists, and a defeat for settlers.

I have a more mundane objection to the plan: it's doomed to fail. The standard argument for withdrawing behind a security fence is that it has succeeded in Gaza, since no suicide bombers have launched attacks on Israel from there. But it's also the case that from Gaza--where the IDF never launched a full-fledged invasion of all the cities, as it did in the West Bank--there has been a steady rain of crude rockets on adjacent Israeli lands, such as the Gaza settlements and the town of Sderot (inside pre-1967 Israel). If the IDF were to "disengage" from the West Bank, it might well be able to prevent suicide bombers from penetrating its security perimiter. But it would be incapable of preventing massive barrages of rockets on towns near the perimiter--including several major Israeli cities.

What would Israel do in such a situation? if it returned to the West Bank in force, it would be no better off than it is now--indeed, worse off, since it had afforded the terrorist organizations time and space to regroup and rejuvenate themselves. If it restrained itself from re-entering the West Bank, it would have to respond from a distance, using weapons, such as artillery and helicopters, that are much more likely to cause collateral civilian damage, and thus earn condemnation from world opinion. And it would run the risk of international "observers" or "peacekeepers" entering the territories in Israel's absence, and turning into de facto defenders of the terrorists' turf.

The security fence is clearly a necessary measure for the protection of Israelis. And the Israeli far right's complaints notwithstanding, there's nothing wrong with the removal of a few settlement outposts, if it improves Israel's security situation. But abandoning the West Bank to the mercy of Arafat's goons, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the rest is good neither for its inhabitants nor for their Israeli neighbors. Israeli politicians should stop treating this option as if it were a remotely viable one.

In early December, the New York Times published an ominous-sounding account of the harsh measures being taken by US troops to quell guerrilla forces still operating in occupied Iraq:

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in. …

“If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” coaxed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.” The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side, an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger. “I see no difference between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.”

Both Eric Rescorla and Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell noted the new American tactics with great consternation. I offered comments to each, based on my previous arguments, suggesting that their concern was misplaced.

Well, I didn't expect such quick vindication. According to the Washington Post,

At the heart of this tightly woven network is Auja, Hussein's birthplace, which U.S. commanders say is the intelligence and communications hub of the insurgency....U.S. commanders said they dealt the insurgents a major blow when they decided Oct. 30 to isolate Auja, surrounding it with fence and razor wire so the sole exit was past a U.S. military checkpoint. Russell said this move severed the insurgency's intelligence and communications hub from the outside campaign.

Of course, this latter account could be exaggerated, or even entirely misguided. But so far, at least, my analysis appears to be holding up pretty well.

If I were an advertising executive for Remington or Norelco, I'd rush to produce a last-minute holiday ad campaign based on this picture.

In a pre-dawn sweep, German police raided over 1,200 homes of suspected followers of a Turkish Islamic radical named Muhammed Metin Kaplan.

Thousands of confused German students took to the streets in protest, worried about losing access to their SAT prep courses.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can restrict "soft money" contributions to political parties and restrict purchases of political advocacy advertising in the period immediately preceding an election. Meanwhile, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has declared that contributions to terrorist organizations are constitutionally protected, unless it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the contributor knew of the recipient organization's terrorist activity.

The solution for campaign organizations is obvious: they should take their cue from foreign terrorist groups and establish a clandestine network of interlocking "charitable" and "political" organizations, with money being secretly funnelled from the former to the latter via elaborate money-laundering enterprises, preferably in foreign countries. A corporation can hardly be held responsible, after all, if its donation to the "World Regulation Relief Fund" results in an attack ad against a local congressman being purchased by a tangentially related foreign political organization--right?

I can think of no better way to clean up the financing of American campaigns. Thank goodness for the uncanny wisdom of the federal judiciary.

In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum mourns the lack of a "national debate" on the recently-passed Medicare reform bill. "[W]e as a nation have lost our appetite for grand domestic policy debates," she laments.

These sound like admirably democratic sentiments--until one considers who she meant by "we". Surely she didn't expect the average family to debate the finer points of Medicare reform over the Thanksgiving dinner table. Heck, the likes of Matthew Yglesias, Daniel Drezner and Oxblog's David Adesnik--none of them exactly strangers to policy wonkery--have all conceded that the subject of Medicare is one truly powerful snooze-inducer. Perhaps Anne Applebaum has a stronger stomach for it, but if so, she's in rare company.

In fact, the whole idea of "deliberative democracy" is rather dubious to begin with. After all, if the public ought to be ruminating on the minutiae of every issue, then what on earth is representative government for, anyway? Even if the public were competent to engage in such niggling discussion, they would have neither the time nor the inclination to do so, being far too preoccupied with their own lives to dwell, Applebaum-style, on such matters.

In practice, the system works quite well with much less public involvement. Voters get riled up over a few specific, fairly straightforward issues that they can grasp--Applebaum mentions two recent ones: telemarketing and spam--and happily leave the details of the rest to the political insiders, with the understanding that if they're handled sufficiently incompetently that they become visible problems, then politicians' heads will roll.

After all, that's how CEOs deal with underlings, or customers with merchants. All that they require is accountability, not micromanagement, and the threat to do business with someone else usually (eventually) suffices to produce competent results. If I trust the food I eat, the home I live in, and many other necessities of life to this system, then why not the laws that govern me, as well?