I've already noted that the extraordinarily successful are a poor choice of model for those who would understand how to achieve more mundane varieties of success in life. Now, along comes Malcolm Gladwell to devote an entire book to this poor choice, studying a few off-the-charts-successful cases such as Mozart and Bill Gates in order to try to understand how people in general manage to succeed. And his conclusion, apparently, is that the most successful people may well have all been extraordinarily talented, but they have also all been extraordinarily lucky. Gladwell draws the standard luck egalitarian conclusions from this supposed insight.

Much discussion has ensued in the blogosphere, all of it completely missing the point. Of course the most extremely successful people have all been extremely lucky--just as they've all been extremely talented, and extremely hardworking. That's precisely why they've succeeded far beyond the ranks of competitors who only excelled in two or fewer of these three respects.

The far more interesting question is what proportions of luck, talent and work typically contribute to the kind of moderate success that sensible, realistic people aspire to achieve. In those cases, I strongly suspect, talent and dedication weigh far more heavily than luck. Then again, that's probably not the kind of study that would help make Malcolm Gladwell the spectacularly successful writer that he's become.

Yossi Klein Halevi and Matthew Wagner have both written lately about the remarkable relationship between Chabad/Lubavitch and secular Israelis. Unlike other ultra-Orthodox sects, which all coldly reject both the state of Israel and secular Israelis as betrayers of Jewish law and observance, Chabad considers itself a kind of internal missionary organization, winning over secular Jews to piety through good works and generosity.

Unfortunately, Chabad's missionary service is rooted in essentially the same messianism as Christian missionaries': they believe that winning Jews back to observance hastens the coming of the Messiah. Ultimately, that motive can't sustain a generic service ethic, because it inevitably draws the missionaries towards more susceptible recruitment targets, such as the poor and the distressed. (Christian missionaries, for example, certainly follow this pattern.)

It's possible, though, that Chabad (or perhaps an offshoot, or a rival sect) could gradually evolve its beliefs in a way capable of sustaining its passion for serving fellow Jews in general. All it would require is a subtle shift away from believing in the need to convert all Jews to its brand of piety, and towards believing in its members' need to maintain its own brand of piety--including its practice of helping all Jews--as an end in itself.

I believe that such a shift would be of enormous benefit to the Jewish people. For the truth is that the fanatically observant, the fanatically secular, and the broad spectrum in between are all parts of a far stronger whole than any single one of those groups would be on its own. Other religions have discovered this, and typically maintain a pious class--priests, monks, monastics, and so on--that is respected for its dedication and service to its correligionists, but understood to coexist with a more worldly majority, rather than rejecting it.

Already, ultra-Orthodox Jews in general act as a kind of priestly class among Jews, devoting themselves entirely to study and piety at the cost of living on charity, and typically in poverty. They also perform a number of purely religious services to the community, such as recovering bodies for ritual burial (most famously after terrorist attacks). Unfortunately, rather than consider themselves a kind of spiritual elite serving a larger Jewish nation, they tend to view other Jews as apostates doomed to drift away from Judaism towards paganism of one kind or another. And of course, they denounce the state of Israel as a secular travesty.

That's strange, because the Jewish religion itself provides an admirable model for a "spiritual elite", rejecting both militant proselytizing and cultish insularity in favor of the role of duty-bound "light unto the nations". If only the ultra-Orthodox were to embrace that role themselves, they could become as valuable a resource for the Jewish people as the Jewish people have proven, time and again, to be for the entire world.

Say you've just been elected President of the United States after campaigning on the themes of "hope" and "change". Your opponent, an aged former military pilot, had campaigned as an experienced statesman whose decisiveness contributed to a major military achievement in Iraq. But a sharp economic downturn shortly before the election made his foreign policy expertise seem somewhat irrelevant, and his Vice-Presidential choice became a national laughingstock. Meanwhile, your moderate, optimistic proposals to cut taxes for the middle class while making the rich pay their fair share, improve health care coverage, and create national service programs for young people, were attractive enough to voters to allay their doubts about your alleged radical past. (Fawning press coverage didn't hurt, either.) Now you have a solid electoral victory under your belt, as well as clear Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. What do you do next?

Well, the future is always difficult to predict, of course. But experience suggests a few do's and don'ts:

• DON'T expect the free ride from the media to continue. Given their irrationally stratospheric expectations, attack-dog mentality (possibly exacerbated by guilt over their previous obsequiousness) and lack of a suitable alternative powerful figure to tear down, your every scandal, misfortune or embarrassing incident, no matter how big or small, will be jumped on.
• DON'T pander to your base with appointments and executive orders that alienate moderates and inflame conservatives. You'll only end up backing down under pressure to save your administration's tattered reputation.
• DON'T attempt to create any grand, elaborate new social programs of breathtaking scope and complexity. You may think you have a mandate to do such things, but you don't.
• DO go ahead and raise taxes at the high end of the income scale. If the economy hasn't recovered in a couple of years, your presidency is doomed anyway, and if it has, then the resulting improved fiscal condition of the government will more than compensate for the slight drag on spending, laying the foundation for a robust economic recovery.
• DON'T get lured into expanding ill-defined foreign military missions. Your crisis manager and commander-in-chief cred is shaky enough already.
• DO support free trade. Again, good economic fundamentals will come in handy once the current economic storm passes--and if it doesn't, then having pandered to unions years before won't do you much good.
• DON'T expect your first midterm election to be a happy one.

If any of you readers happen to be in this situation, I hope this list has been helpful...

In the aftermath of the Republican electoral wipeout, conservative intellectuals will no doubt continue to busily plug their thoughtful treatises on how to resuscitate the conservative movement. That's understandable--after all, if your stock in trade is formulating and marketing partisan ideas, then it's natural to believe that the cure for what ails your party is more and better ideas.

Unfortunately for these thought-peddlers, that's simply not the way politics works. Newt Gingrich, for example, will no doubt insist that it was the collection of policy ideas known as the "Contract for America" that led to his greatest political victory, the Republican congressional sweep of 1994. Anybody remember what was in the "Contract for America"? Which parts were actually enacted into law and which never made it? Which ones actually had their intended effect?

In fact, the 1994 Republican victory had nothing to do with the particular policy details of that year's Republican platform. Rather, after four decades in power, the Democrats' flaws and political missteps--corruption, arrogance, captivity to "special interests", and so on--were immediately conspicuous, whereas the party out of power had been away long enough for their roughly comparable flaws to be forgotten.

Needless to say, after twelve years of Congressional dominance and eight years in the presidency, the roles are at least somewhat reversed. Barack Obama and the Democrats aren't now ascending to power with an exciting agenda of new, innovative and popular ideas that the Republicans were somehow too hidebound or ideologically blindered to embrace. Rather, they have been elected to avoid repeating, and where possible to reverse, the political and policy blunders committed by their predecessors--and that is agenda enough for any party.

Of course, once they begin governing, they will accumulate their own set of missteps and unpopular actions. And astute Republicans will notice them, and add their reversal to the list of goals of the new Republican agenda. That--not the combined chin-tugging of a bunch of conservative policy wonks--is what will eventually rejuvenate the conservative movement.

Crooked Timberite and global warming zealot John Quiggin inadvertently asks a very important question: "I don’t see how AGW [anthropogenic global warming] differs [from] other examples like mainstream medicine v homeopathy and AIDS reappraisal, evolution vs creation." In other words, what is the difference between bucking the scientific consensus regarding global warming and, say, doubting that HIV causes AIDS?

The answer is quite simple, really, and has to do with the concept of parsimony in scientific theories. Pace Quiggin, what makes the HIV theory of AIDS compelling is not the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community--which is routinely wrong about all sorts of things, after all--but rather the difficulty of coming up with an alternative theory that explains the documented spectacular correlation between HIV infection and AIDS symptoms, as well as all the other evidence amassed in favor of the HIV theory. Similarly, the problem with homeopathy is not that mainstream medical opinion discounts it, but rather that accepting it requires reconciling its effectiveness with the entire body of physical, chemical and biological evidence which argues for its uselessness. (Creationism actually has the reverse problem: it's so parsimonious that it would easily "explain" anything--that is, absolutely any set of phenomena that might be observed--and therefore explains nothing.)

Now, I'm no expert on climatological research, but my impression is that the consensus predictions of global warming rely on elaborate computer models that incorporate and combine all sorts of influences on climate, whose likely effect and interaction are estimated using elaborate statistical methods applied to past data. Given the complexity of these models, I would be absolutely astonished if it weren't possible to introduce extra factors, or alter the behavior of existing ones, in a way that radically changes the predicted outcomes without creating any significant inconsistencies with the known inputs. In other words, the exceedingly complex theories embodied in the current models don't offer much parsimony, and hence one can likely embrace alternative models with significantly different outcomes that are very nearly as parsimonious as the widely accepted ones.

Now, perhaps I'm wrong, and the models are constructed so generally as to rule out any such alternatives. If so, though, then I would expect the claims for the models' predictions to be much stronger than I have seen--something along the lines of, "the predictions are scientifically irrefutable", or some such. More likely, they are nothing more than "best current guesses"--valuable, of course, but hardly conclusive. And skeptics of their predictions should certainly not be lumped together with doubters of various more established, more parsimony-generating scientific theories.

The Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, in typical sky-is-falling ultra-hawk fashion, has declared that defense minister Ehud Barak's enthusiasm for Israel's recent truce with Hamas has

two possible explanations. Either Barak is risking the lives of Israeli soldiers and civilians to pander to the most radical elements of Israeli society while seeking to win sympathy points from Cairo in a general election campaign, or he is gullible enough to believe that Israel's radical left and the Egyptian regime are moved by facts rather than interests.

There is in fact a third, far more plausible explanation, confirmed by the subsequent deal between Labor and Kadima: Barak knows full well that an Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip is necessary and inevitable, but prefers for personal political reasons to delay it until after PM Ehud Olmert has been ousted. More than anything else, Barak wants to return to the prime ministership, and this ordering of events maximizes his chances of doing so.

Consider the consequences for Barak of an immediate assault on Hamas: if the operation is a success, then Olmert will have repaired, to a large extent, one of the biggest stains on his reputation: his disastrous mismanagement of the Lebanon war in 2006, and its implications for his capacity as PM to command the nation's defenses. His credentials thus restored, he might well succeed in retaining his leadership of Kadima, and thus the prime ministership, until the next election, at which point voters favoring the current government are more likely to vote for his party than for a Labor party that has subordinated itself to his rule.

Of course, the Gaza operation could also go badly, whether as a result of Olmert's meddling, Barak's errors or IDF blunders. In that case, Barak will be at least as badly tarnished by the failure as Olmert. Indeed, the latter has already proven his skill at deflecting blame for military failures onto his subordinates, and Barak would be an ideal target. Either way, then, Barak's chances of succeeding Olmert as prime minister are poor.

Now consider his chances under the two new deals: after a summer of relative calm--probably punctuated by attacks from Gaza that inflame the public even more against the Olmert government--Kadima casts Olmert aside and replaces him with a relative novice, most probably Tzipi Livni. The newcomer will have to ensure the continued support of Kadima's coalition partners, of which Labor is the most important, and Barak can use this leverage to guarantee not only a Gaza invasion soon afterwards, but also plenty of freedom of action for both the IDF's military campaign and his own political campaign. If the military campaign goes well, he should be able to claim the lion's share of the credit--and if it goes badly, he's far better placed to scapegoat Olmert's more junior, less experienced successor than the wily Olmert himself.

Glick is of course quite correct in one respect: Barak appears to be willing to sacrifice the lives and safety of Israeli soldiers and civilians for the sake of politics. however, his political calculations are neither naive nor deluded. They're quite subtle and deep--and if all goes according to plan, I give him tolerably good odds of succeeding.

For some reason local Starbucks outlets are peddling copies of this novel, which is narrated by an unusually deep, insightful dog. (The advertising slogan is, "Narrator. Philosopher. Dog.") Without having read a single word, I can already write a summary review (or perhaps just a review headline): "Jonathan Livingston Beagle".

The subprime mortgage crisis (useful primer here) has provoked the usual partisan reactions, with the left griping about "corporate governance" and "transparency", and the right telling everyone to just "suck it up". I fear that both sides are underestimating the severe and fundamental nature of the problem.

First, some history: in the 1970s, Western economies all seemed to be going haywire simultaneously. Inflation was running rampant, governments were running huge deficits, unemployment was skyrocketing, and the world's major economies were lurching from crisis to crisis. In retrospect (most modern economists will tell you), the problem was that the old Keynsian approach to government intervention in the economy had reached its limits. Further government spending only seemed to exacerbate inflation and deficits, without providing much of a stimulus to the economy. The problem was fixed (again, most modern economists will tell you) by governments shifting to monetarism as the new, better way to guide the economy to prosperity.

What this story doesn't explain, however, is why Keynsianism, which had fueled two and a half decades of postwar prosperity, suddenly stopped working. Some economists will say that it was always too imprecise a tool, and its wielders were bound to lose control eventually. Others will say that it was "abused" by governments eager to keep the good times rolling. Like an antibiotic, the latter would explain, Keynsian pump-priming loses its effectiveness when overused unnecessarily during prosperous times, rendering it incapable of mitigating the inevitable downturn.

But economies aren't bacteria. How do they become immune to economic stimuli? Why wouldn't "overuse" of Keynsian stimulus, whatever its side effects, at least succeed in its basic purpose of warding off recessions?

The answer can be summed up in one word: expectations. Once enough people start assuming that the government's response to any economic slowdown will be more government borrowing and spending, they can place financial bets on that assumption. For example, they can bet that the government will ensure that lots of money remains available in the economy, and that they can therefore raise prices accordingly, or demand higher wages. As these bets pile up, they dampen the effect of the intervention they anticipate, forcing the government into an even more extreme intervention to achieve the same result--further heightening expectations for future interventions. Eventually, expectations match the government's maximum feasible effort, and all interventions fail. Only a completely new, unanticipated form of intervention can hope to work.

Let us return now to the subprime crisis. In 1987, Alan Greenspan massively expanded government credit and cut federal interest rates in response to a stock market crash. He was to do this multiple times over the course of his career--in 1998, and again in 2001--in response to similar economic crises. This maneuver--which came to be known as the "Greenspan put"--was remarkably effective at mitigating the effects of economic shocks. However, it has also been blamed for the stock bubble of the late 1999s and the real estate bubble of the early 2000s.

The connection between these bubbles, the policies that preceded them, and the lethal effect of expectations is nicely illustrated by the investor behavior that led to the subprime crisis. Why did so many sterling financial firms pour money into highly questionable investments based on mortgages of dubious quality? Were they fools or maniacs, caught up in some kind of frenzy? More likely, they were sensible people making a very reasonable bet: that when the bubble burst, the Federal Reserve would come to the rescue with a massive interest rate cut, and most if not all of their bubble profits would be preserved. And indeed, plenty of subprime mortgage investors, Bear Stearns notwithstanding, have ended up netting a hefty profit from this bet.

Unfortunately, the bet only increased the magnitude of the crisis, while dampening the government's capacity to resolve it. The subprime-driven real estate bubble was not only far bigger than previous bubbles, thus requiring a much bigger liquidity infusion than previous ones--it also juiced the economy enough to nudge inflation upward, limiting the government's leeway to cut interest rates without triggering an inflation spiral. As in the 1970s, the reigning paradigm for government management of the economic cycle has become too predictable, and has thus lost its curative power.

I don't know what the next paradigm will be, but it had better be pretty darn complicated. Financial firms have enormous analytical resources at their disposal these days, and are much better at predicting government policies than they used to be. It'll take an even more inscrutable policymaker than the famously Buddha-like Greenspan to keep them from catching on to the government's methods very quickly--and promptly undermining them.

The widely praised recent film Juno, which bills itself as an edgy comedy, would be more accurately described as a disturbing psychodrama. The story is ostensibly straightforward: a sixteen-year-old high school student gets pregnant, and decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption. The film simply tracks her relationship with her parents, the adopting couple, and the baby's father during her pregnancy.

The problem is that taken at face value, the interactions in the film make no sense. The girl is impossibly self-assured, clinically detached and jaded. She treats the adults around her as equals, if not as inferiors, and the adults, likewise, respond to her as they would a poised, assertive adult--which is what she seems to be, in all respects but her actual age. Moreover, these adults scarcely exist apart from her--their lives seem to revolve around her, as if populating her life were their only purpose. This solipsistic unrealism is quite reminiscent of the film Peggy Sue Got Married, in which a middle-aged woman suddenly wakes up (or perhaps falls into a dream) to find herself back in high school, taking advantage of her knowledge and experience to recognize and correct her youthful mistakes in dealing with various people.

In the latter film, though, the title character eventually reconciles herself to the life she embarked on as a naive youth. Juno, however, hints at a much darker reality: the girl's jaded detachment, as well as several plot elements I'll refrain from revealing, suggest a sexually traumatized twentysomething fantasizing about re-experiencing her vulnerable teen years with the protection afforded by her adult knowledge. And indeed, the film's screenwriter, who goes by the pen-name Diablo Cody, turns out to be (as I suspected while watching the film) a twentysomething woman with what one might describe as sexual "issues"--her major previous work was a diary recounting the aftermath of her decision, on a whim, to give up her secretarial job and become a stripper and peep-show performer.

Granted, I don't know exactly what demons drove Ms. Cody to choose to spend years as a sex-industry worker. But I'd guess that for most audiences, a dramatized depiction of her battle with those demons won't be quite as bracingly comic as Juno's trailer implicitly promises.

A quick you-read-it-here-first observation about the "Super Tuesday" results: Hillary Clinton's primary victories are concentrated largely in "blue" states (those that tend to vote Democratic), while Obama's are concentrated largely in "red" states (those that tend to vote Republican).

Off-the-top-of-my-head explanation: As the establishment candidate, Clinton wins over Democrats in states where being a Democrat means identifying with the establishment. As the insurgent outsider, Obama wins over Democrats in states where being a Democrat means thinking of oneself as a rebel outsider.

Quick prediction: Within a couple of days, this observation will be widely noticed, often talked about, and probed for deep meaning. But you read it here first!

But did they find Jake Gyllenhaal's shirt in his closet?

Time for ICBW's annual predictions...First, a review of last year's...

• Any "surge" by US troops in Iraq, if it occurs at all, will be perfunctory and ineffectual. Likewise, any diplomatic initiative aimed at Iran or Syria will be half-hearted and come to nothing. Instead, Bush will rely on congressional pressure to force his hand, allowing him to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq while protesting that the mission would have succeeded if not for the meddling of lily-livered Democrats. More generally, the administration's popularity will improve now that it has a Democratic congress as its foil, although Iraq, and foreign policy generally, will not be the main arena of confrontation (see below).

My clunker of the year--it would have been hard to have been more wrong on every count, I guess. Who knew that the US military, having bungled Iraq for several years, could suddenly conceive and implement an effective counterinsurgency strategy there?

• The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel will not flare up again this year, as Hezbollah will be preoccupied with consolidating and increasing its power in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Israel will be preoccupied with the continuing chaos in Gaza, which will spill over into the West Bank as well. The low-level civil war between Fatah and Hamas will continue, with numerous outside interests lining up on one side or the other. Rocket launchings and other attacks from Gaza into Israel will continue, and Israel's response will be sporadically violent, and sufficient to reduce but not eliminate them.

This one was just about spot-on, although arguably pretty easy to nail. The only possible criticisms are that the West Bank is still relatively calm, and that I didn't actually predict Hamas' takeover of Gaza. Both are, I think, minor quibbles.

• Attention in the US will turn away from foreign policy and towards the economy, as (1) the economy slows and (2) economic policy becomes the focus of the Democratic congressional agenda--and of conflicts between Congress and the administration. Trade, taxes, fiscal policy, entitlements and regulation of business will be key flashpoints, against a backdrop of slower growth, a weakening dollar, a continuing real estate slump, and a retrenching stock market. Oil prices will drop slightly, though, and interest rates will decline slightly--although not enough to juice the economy, owing to lingering inflation worries.

Pretty good, I think, although Congressional Democrats haven't exactly grabbed the economic non-bull by the horns. Also, the stock markets are actually up modestly on the year, thanks to big gains early on, and of course oil prices have skyrocketed instead of falling. It's easy to forget, though, just how little attention the economy was receiving a year ago, and how optimistic most forecasts were back then.

• In addition to the usual suspects all making it through the year (barring accident or illness), Ehud Olmert will surprise many by remaining in power as prime minister of Israel. (Navigating Israel's byzantine political ecosystem is the one thing he's serious about and competent at.)

My big winner for the year--few prognosticators would have given a plug nickel for Olmert's survival chances back when I called this one.

• Neither of the two current frontrunners for the Democratic party presidential nomination (Clinton and Obama) will be considered a frontrunner by the end of the year. On the other hand, at least one of the two current frontrunners for the Republican nomination (Giuliani and McCain) will be considered a frontrunner at the end of the year.

Badly off-base both in substance (with respect to the Democrats) and in spirit (with respect to the overall tone of both primary races). This cycle, the parties appear to have adopted each other's traditional roles, with the Democrats rather stodgily anointing a consensus heir-apparent and the Republicans flailing around looking for a candidate with sufficient national stature.

• (This one contributed by someone I know) A scandal will tarnish the sterling, upscale image of Whole Foods.

As promised...

Now for this year's predictions...

• Hillary Clinton will be elected president in November, by a solid margin, in an election with relatively light turnout by recent standards. The Democrats will retain control of both houses of Congress.


• The US counterinsurgency effort in Iraq will suffer significant setbacks in Iraq this year, but the political reconciliation process there will in fact make progress. Iran's nuclear program will last another year without either a military strike or a successful nuclear test. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan will grind on without resolution, aided by safe havens in Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf will continue to rule, in one guise or another, replicating his neighbor's stalemate with its Islamists.


• Ehud Olmert will survive another year in office. The Winograd report will criticize him harshly for being too recklessly aggressive during the Lebanon war, thus providing him with cover against his more hawkish main rivals. He will also authorize at least one fairly large-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip, which will achieve little but will further shield him against charges of dovish, indecisive softness. Meanwhile, Hezbollah's position as the largest single power in Lebanon will be consolidated and officially enshrined in the country's political power structure.


• The US economy will narrowly avoid recession this year, but will experience very sluggish growth. Inflation will stubbornly refuse to fall, preventing the Fed from easing enough to really boost the economy. The stock market will have a down year, and oil prices will fall modestly. The housing market will not recover, but the US dollar will, somewhat, from its recent plunge.


• "Product placement"--advertising embedded into content such as music, films and television shows--will become more widespread and conspicuous, to the point where it becomes a subject of pop-culture irony.

As always, my predictions are not for everyone. Consult your doctor if you experience sensations of plausibility while reading them.

Congratulate yourselves, readers--according to this site, you must all be geniuses (or, rather, genii). And I now have the perfect excuse for there being so few of you.

Of course, I could put in a lot of extra time (if I had any) and effort into making my blog more readable. But given that most of my postings contain roughly a book chapter's worth of ideas, it's not clear that that strategy would actually gain me readers. And in the end, I suppose I'd rather be brilliantly right than widely-read.

Then again, since you're all such scintillating intellects yourselves, perhaps I can benefit from your collective wisdom. Here's the challenge: take one of my postings (I'm assuming that mine, not LTEC's, are the problem), and explain how it could be rewritten so as to be much more accessible, without altering its content. The winner (in the unlikely event that there are multiple entries) will be posted as a kind of blog "'after' picture".

The other day, I found myself driving behind a large white pickup truck bearing two bumper stickers. One bore the slogan, "Powered by Biodiesel--No Wars Necessary", and the other advertised a local "progressive talk" AM radio station.

My immediate thought was, "there goes a real greenneck..."

I've written at length many times before about how many supposed foreign affairs "experts" exhibit complete historical ignorance and astonishingly poor understanding of basic international relations. Dan Senor's analysis of the Iranian threat in the Wall Street Journal is a case in point.

"Iran is not the Soviet Union," he writes, "and the post-9/11 struggle is not the Cold War. The deterrence camp is willing to stand by as Iran develops nuclear weapons, presumably on the model that Iran will eventually collapse as the Soviet Union did. But the Argentinean case [Iran's terrorist bombings of Jewish and Israeli targets in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994] demonstrates what Tehran was willing and able to do when it had no nuclear umbrella."

Senor seems to be under the impression that the Soviet Union never sponsored terrorism against its Western adversaries, the way Iran has. In fact, the Soviets provided ample support, in the form of arms, training and sanctuary, to various international terrorist groups during the 1970s and 1980s. It was also, lest we forget, willing to supply nuclear weapons (under its own control, we assume) to its ally Cuba. In its ruthless ambition for world domination, Communist ideology was second to none--including Islamism.

The lessons of the Cold War, properly understood, actually apply very well to the Iranian situation. The Cold War demonstrated that nuclear deterrence works--in the absence of proliferation. The Cuban missile crisis and centralization-obsessed Soviet dogma ensured that Soviet-made nuclear weapons would not be used except on the orders of the Soviet Politburo--and the American nuclear deterrent ensured that the Soviet Politburo could never afford such a risk. The Iranian government is almost certain to be similarly deterred from launching a direct nuclear attack, should it acquire the means to do so. Whether it will be as careful as the Soviet Union about husbanding its nuclear capacity is a more difficult and worrisome question.

But as the Cold War also taught us, nuclear and non-nuclear conflict are eminently separable. Nuclear deterrents, whether American, Soviet, Israeli or Iranian, are effective primarily against existential threats, of the kind that nobody is likely to mount against Iran in any event. But they do not prevent an adversary such as the Soviet Union or Iran from engaging in all manner of attritive combat, from proxy wars to terrorism, and even direct limited-theater military attack.

What the Cold War taught us about such conflicts is that they can and should be answered in kind. During the late 1970s, when the US was in full retreat, Soviet proxies, including aggressive allied nations, insurgent groups and terrorist organizations, attacked the Western world and its allies virtually unopposed. The Reagan doctrine--that Communist victories can be not only resisted, but actually reversed--changed all that, forcing the Soviets to expend their resources on defense as well as offense (in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and many other places), and thus reversing all the political momentum the Soviets had built up following Vietnam. Whether or not it was the primary reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union, as I've speculated, it was most likely an expediting factor.

The Iranian nuclear program can plausibly be compared with the Cuban missile crisis, in that an American enemy threatens to cross an important nuclear proliferation threshold. But the Cold War didn't end with the Cuban missile crisis, nor will the conflict between the US and Iranian-led radical Islamism end with the final success or failure of Iran's nuclear ambitions. If the Cold War is any guide, the outcome of that conflict will likely depend more on what the US does to confront and counter Islamists' global exercise of power, than on how it manages the nuclear stalemate that will ultimately exist regardless of whether Iran manages to build atomic bombs. America's lethargic response so far to aggressive Iranian operations in Iraq suggests that the current administration has yet to learn this lesson.

Should the US attack Iran? If so, how, where, and on what scale? Obviously, I have no idea, since I'm not privy to the kind of information that would allow someone to assess the likely outcomes of different types of attack with any accuracy. Those with the requisite intelligence data are presumably working through various scenarios as we speak, figuring out the worst-case, best-case and most probable outcomes, and trying to decide if they're worthwhile.

But there's one consideration that I fervently hope they aren't taking into account: the effect of such an attack on Iranian public support for the current government. Mark Kleiman, for example, points indirectly to a report that Iranian president Ahmadinejad is believed to be gearing up for a military confrontation with the US, hoping thereby to reverse the damage he's done to his own popularity by destroying the economy and generally behaving buffoonishly. Kleiman concludes that if such a military confrontation is in Ahmadinejad's interest, then it must clearly also be against American interests.

But that doesn't follow at all. It's true that if Ahmadinejad's successor were likely to be more pro-American, then there might be some justification for avoiding actions that could shore up his support. But under the Iranian system, in which candidates for president must be approved by "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei--the guy who approved Ahmadinejad's candidacy in the first place, lest we forget--the next president is highly unlikely to be significantly less anti-American than Ahmadinejad. He is, however, quite likely to be more competent. Hence, shoring up Ahmadinejad's popularity might well be a positive side effect of US military action against Iran.

Most partisan political debates are at least somewhat dishonest, with both sides concealing somewhat unsavory motives behind grand, idealistic rhetoric. The current immigration debate, however, may be setting new standards for bipartisan hypocrisy.

Supporters of the bill--primarily Democrats--claim to be saving millions of poor, oppressed illegal immigrants by granting them legal status (so-called "amnesty"). Of course, amnesty will do nothing of the sort: if the newly-legalized immigrants take advantage of their new status to escape their ill-paid, backbreaking labor, then employers will simply shun them in favor of fresh illegal arrivals, creating not one, but two underclasses--unemployed legal immigrants and their illegal replacements.

That's supposedly why Republicans want any amnesty tied to vigorous "enforcement"--meaning sealing of the US-Mexican border. The premise, presumably, is that once the amnesty is declared, the millions of new illegal immigrants who will rush to take their place must be stopped at the border. In practice, though, border interdiction can at best slow, not halt, the flow of illegal immigrants. (Think of how effective it is at interdicting drug trafficking, for instance.) Eventually, the supply of illegals will have been fully replenished, and "enforcement" will have come to naught.

There is, mind you, a highly effective way of massively reducing the number of illegal immigrants, with or without amnesty. It's no mystery--it's known as "employer sanctions", and it was supposed to be a part of the 1986 amnesty, but was never seriously implemented. The principle is simple: illegal immigrants come to the US because even the awful under-the-table jobs available to illegals are better than their prospects back home. However, if employers are harshly penalized for employing illegal immigrants, then the illegals will no longer be in demand, and therefore no longer have an incentive to come--or even to stay, if they've already arrived by now.

Employer sanctions would require a fair bit of work, of course--establishing a database of citizens, an effective identification system, and an inspection system to catch scofflaw employers. But given that these things have been built for cars and guns, it shouldn't be impossible to do the same for people. And the system needn't be perfect, because employers--unlike, say, gun owners--tend to be affluent and respected enough to want to avoid the risks associated with breaking the law.

One could raise some legitimate, though minor, concerns about this regime, such as whether the database jeopardizes personal privacy, or whether legal job applicants of the wrong ethnicities would come under undue suspicion of being illegals masquerading as legal. Employer sanctions also face opposition from politicians who see partisan benefit in the perpetuation of the illegal immigration problem: Democrats who see the illegals as potential Democratic-voting future citizens, and Republicans who see their employers as potential Republican-donating business tycoons.

But the real reason why serious employer sanctions aren't part of the current immigration bill--and barely figure in the debate at all--is that the perpetuation of the illegal immigration problem benefits many more Americans than just the aforementioned political operatives. In fact, virtually every American pays lower prices for goods and services provided by a host of industries whose millions of illegal workers would have to be replaced by legal workers--at a much higher cost--if employer sanctions were put into place. Indeed, nobody knows where those legal workers might come from, how much they'd cost, or whether customers would be willing to pay the bill. In other words, the exploitation of millions of Mexican workers with no alternative is a massive and crucial portion of the American consumer economy, one that few Americans want to give up.

Of course even fewer Americans want to admit that they depend on the illegal worker system for their low-priced goods and (especially) services. They'd rather engage in pointless arguments about amnesty and border control instead.

It's a year before the presidential election. The president, a backslapping Texan doggedly pursuing a costly and unpopular war, will not be running again. His party's activist base is rumbling with dissatisfaction at the collection of establishment centrists who are contending to replace him, and itching for a more ideologically pure candidate to enter the fray. The opposing party, meanwhile, is haunted by its own candidate from the presidential election seven years before, a sitting vice-president who lost in a controversial photo finish. He has since rejuvenated his tarnished reputation by reinventing himself completely and winning over his party's angry grassroots. And so we must ask the year's burning political question: is Nixon the one?

No, I don't predict a repeat of 1968, with Al Gore storming to victory, only to resign in disgrace six years later. Nor, however, do I consider the parallels merely superficial. Like the Democrats in '68, the Republican party of 2008 has created enough of a moderate, responsible establishment to alienate its purist ideologues, the latter egged on by a full range of newly-mature, ideologically conservative institutions: think tanks such as AEI, Heritage, Cato, Hudson, Hoover and Manhattan, as well as media outlets such as Fox, and even a large portion of the Supreme Court. The party is thus ripe for the kind of radical takeover that eventually decimated the New Deal Democratic coalition and opened the door for the conservative resurgence of the 1980s.

Meanwhile, today's Democrats are in a position similar to that of the 1968 Republicans: their establishment core is moribund, focused on declining institutions and long-outdated ideology. Its young guard is blessed with (environmentalist) religious fervor and unburdened by the old (race-and-class) political orthodoxies, but has yet to form a coherent coalition based on what it's for, not just what it's angrily against.

History doesn't always repeat itself, of course. The Republicans could avoid a radical takeover, or the Gore and "netroots" Democratic factions could fail to coalesce into a coherent reformist movement. (Or both.) But I would be surprised if the institutional right wing of the conservative movement didn't at least try to flex its muscles over perhaps the next decade or so, seeking to consolidate and even extend the right's recent political gains. And to the extent that it succeeds, it will certainly provide a useful focus for a re-invigorated left, as it evolves from a ragtag coterie of angry outsiders into the next mass political movement.

Michael O'Hare's May Day tribute to several generations of American Communists--including, he makes clear, thousands of loyal Stalinists--is a fascinating study in partisanship. "They were misled by their leadership more than once", he writes, "and there's a lot they didn't understand about how societies and people really work, but they were brave and their hearts were in the right place."

The usual partisan retort to such an encomium is to declare it equivalent to--that is, as unthinkably obscene as--a celebration of, say, American Nazis. But as a committed non-partisan, I find it much more interesting to compare it with an equally unthinkable (for Prof. O'Hare), but rather less obscene, hypothetical: a tribute to supporters of the current American president.

It seems obvious, accustomed as we are to partisanship, that O'Hare would never dream of including contemporary Republicans in such a misty-eyed paean. But in fact he almost certainly has more in common with them, politically speaking, than with at least the most extreme of those he actually chose to celebrate. And this relative affinity goes well beyond the paramount fact that both he (I assume) and today's Bush Republicans prefer democratic politics over, say, a totalitarian revolutionary vanguard's violent seizure of absolute dictatorial power. Indeed, "on the issues", as they say, today's compassionate conservative probably occupies the mushy middle ground between O'Hare and his beloved Marxist predecessors. Let's consider a list:

• The environment: Pure bourgeois frivolity. The industrialization of the Soviet Union--achieved at a horrific environmental cost--was uniformly celebrated by Communists of pretty much every stripe. In those days, conservationism was the preserve (so to speak) of wealthy brahmins with plenty of free time for birdwatching and the like, and little concern for maximizing industrial production.
• Immigration: Surely I don't have to review Communist doctrine regarding control of movement of people across borders. The mere idea of allowing wealthy American capitalists to import millions of foreign laborers to underbid local workers would have given any self-respecting Red apoplexy.
• Welfare: In the Soviet Union, those who refused to work were declared "parasites" and prosecuted.
• Civil liberties: 'Nuff said.
• Iraq: This is the only (slightly) tricky one--certainly, 20th-century leftists were generally in favor of deposing fascist dictators by military force, but on occasion (say, when the Soviet Union had entered into a non-aggression pact with one), the most orthodox among them were inclined to waver. Still, it's safe to say that absent a direct Soviet interest, invading a country to replace a fascist dictatorship in which Communists had no hope of seizing power with a democracy in which they were free to organize would have met with the approval of most Communists.

Given this list of sharp disagreements, what could O'Hare possibly have meant when he declared that those old Stalinists "had their hearts in the right place"? He gives a hint in his comparison of his historical heroes to his current enemies:

As the United States slides further and further toward the kind of outrageously unjust income distribution my parents and grandparents fought against, and every day's news has another injustice by the strong against the weak, what's worth remembering is the generations of people who paid some real dues trying to make a better world.

Is this really the root of O'Hare's identification? Shared preference for a more progressive tax policy? Delusion that a self-professed "revolutionary vanguard" seeking absolute power really only wanted to defend "the weak"? Well, sort of. In practice, these shared symbolic ideals are a kind of coded signal, indicating to others that their holders' hearts, as O'Hare would say, are in the right place--that is, that they're "the right sort of people". In this particular case, "the right sort of people" are relatively educated folks of plebeian origin who think of themselves as clear-thinking, truth-seeing intellectuals, and embrace the values such people could be expected to embrace: erudition, rationality, articulateness, intellectual discipline. In their utopia, what counts are these qualities, not wealth or social class or talent or hard work--traits that could elevate people other than themselves to positions of wealth and power (over them).

Other forms of political partisanship are, at heart, similarly constructed out of tribal fraternities of the like-spirited. The nerdy libertarian pines for a world where impersonal markets govern everything, and physical strength and social skills are powerless against (his own self-attributed) raw talent and brilliance. The working-class heartland conservative imagines a country where "values" and "tradition" (that is to say, his values and tradition, since they are, he believes, the dominant version) shape policy more than wealth, social status or education. The self-identified minority group member dreams of a world where his minority is privileged and superior where possible, and otherwise no less favored than the majority. The ambitious, hard-working ladder-climber envisions a world where hard work and ambition are all it takes to get ahead, and lazy bums, busybodies, do-gooders and pointy-heads (that is, people unlike him) can't interfere. And so on.

As I've pointed out before, ideology has always been, for the most part, a cover for the alliance of constituencies with common interests. That today's middle-class intellectuals would imagine themselves in solidarity with a previous generation of middle-class intellectuals--despite disagreeing with them on virtually every concrete particular of public policy--shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, that's what partisanship is all about.

I remarked some time ago that those who are ardently committed to one side in a political conflict rarely simply change their minds when faced with the moral or empirical unsupportability of their position, but rather tend to become more and more vehement in their partisanship, until they reach a "breaking point" at which they can no longer tolerate their own stance. The classic example, of course, is the process by which many devoted Soviet Communists eventually broke with their ideology--often swallowing numerous hard-to-reconcile outrages (the show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Hungarian and Czech invasions) before their cumulative effect, or perhaps a final straw, caused them to recognize their error. I suggested at the time that the continued eliminationist radicalism of Palestinian terrorist movements in the face of Israeli concessions during the Oslo peace process was having a similar polarizing effect, causing many to abandon their pro-Palestinian leanings, while others maintained their continued allegiance by redoubling their hatred for Israel.

Since then, as the fanaticism and barbarity at the core of the various Palestinian factions (and their anti-Israel allies such as Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran) have become even more conspicuous in the West, the Palestinians' Western base of support has been both eroded and radicalized, to the point where it now openly and frankly echoes Palestinian/Hezbollah/Iranian calls for the complete elimination of the state of Israel. Increasingly, though, the latter have incorporated blatant expressions of crude anti-Semitism, in the form of Holocaust denial, invocations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and ugly ethnic slurs. How, then, will Western eliminationists reconcile themselves with this unsightly aspect of their allies' public image?

Why, the same way as they reconcile themselves to Palestinian terrorism, of course: by excusing it as a natural reaction to "Israeli oppression". I first sighted this tactic recently among the comments to this Crooked Timber posting. Note that not one peep of protest is uttered when one commenter offers, and another echoes, the "Israel made him do it" justification for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's anti-Semitic tirades.

The readership of Crooked Timber itself appears to have radicalized somewhat in the three-and-a-half years since I noted their unwillingness to condone Palestinian terrorism. (Compare, for example, this more recent discussion, in which the defenders of Palestinian terrorism are much more forthright and aggressive, and its critics much more timid and equivocal, than in the previous case.) It may therefore no longer be representative of current liberal thinking on the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, it does provide a useful window into the current thinking of the remaining rump of diehard leftist enemies of Israel, among whom I predict that the defense of virulent Middle Eastern anti-Semitism as an understandable reaction to Israeli depredations will before long be a routine rationalization.

The wide availability of video editing software has spawned a number of new art forms, one of which is the imaginatively reinvented movie trailer (the "recut"). Three of my favorites are for Jaws, When Harry Met Sally, and Taxi Driver.

A startling new research result is rocking the worlds of sociology and psychology. Apparently, when provided with certain artificial stimuli, under controlled conditions, a group of experimental subjects were found to be capable of reliably inducing in themselves an intense, satisfying sexual experience--one that they described afterwards as among the most powerful of their entire lives. These experiences had no apparent ill effects, and may even have improved the subjects' overall well-being, as later reported by themselves and others. Some researchers are speculating that the results of this experiment may radically alter our view of sex--possibly ending sex as we know it.

Not exactly astounded by the news that people can enjoy getting themselves off? Well, I lied a bit--the experiment, as reported by Mark Kleiman (full paper here), actually deals with the artificial induction of religious experiences, using the hallucinogen psilocybin (the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms"). Either way, though, a breathless, apocalyptic tone is quite unnecessary.

Artificially generating intense feelings outside the context which naturally produces them can certainly be useful at times--imagine being able to feel comfortably satiated without actually having to eat a large meal. But religious feelings, like sexual ones (or appetitive ones, for that matter), perform an important role within their normal context--a role that doesn't disappear just because the same feelings are also available on demand. Most people, for example, still need intimacy, trust and partnership in life, and continue to reinforce those things using intense sexual feelings even in this era of technologically advanced sex toys. Likewise, many people need a moral, metaphysical and communal framework into which they can fit their lives, and from which they can draw inspiration and comfort. They will no doubt continue to seek that inspiration and comfort from religion even when artificial varieties of mystical experience are readily available. Magic mushrooms may be good for an occasional religious thrill, after all, but that doesn't mean the age-old story of boy-meets-God is going to go out of fashion anytime soon.

It's time for ICBW's annual prediction review and predictions...first, a look at last year's predictions:

• The focus in Iraq will turn to the corruption and ineffectuality of the newly elected government. The US will reduce its troop presence in the country, claiming as its justification the improving order-keeping capability of the Iraqi armed forces and police. But the insurgency will continue, public safety will be roughly as poor as it is today, the economy will weaken, and dissatisfaction with the squabbling, dealmaking and embezzlement of their elected politicians will sour the Iraqi public on democracy. Iraq will likely be in for a few more years of the same before eventually finding a Saddam-lite/Vladimir Putin-equivalent to de-democratize and restore order.

I apparently overestimated the Bush administration's PR skills. I assumed that they'd adopt the sensible strategy of pretending that everything was going according to plan--regardless of actual conditions on the ground--and simply declaring order more or less restored, to set the stage for subsequent troop withdrawals. Perhaps if they had followed this path, another of my failed predictions below would have been more accurate....

• There will be neither a military strike at Iran's nuclear facilities (recent reports notwithstanding), nor a test of an Iranian nuclear weapon. By the end of 2006, things will be as they are today--Iran apparently barrelling towards nuclear capability, and the West hemming and hawing over what to do about it.

Spot on, although I concede that this was an easy one.

• Some kind of joint Hamas-Fatah government will be established in the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. It will be about as effective as the current government--that is to say, not at all--at battling the chaos that reigns there. A small-but-steady stream of rockets and mortars will rain down on the areas of Israel bordering on Gaza. Israel will respond with regular incursions. Terrorists will continue to attempt to infiltrate into Israel, and will occasionally succeed. Further Israeli withdrawals, if they occur, will have as little effect as the Gaza withdrawal.

Another spot-on prediction. I failed to predict the whole Lebanon fiasco, of course, but my assessment of the Gaza situation was pretty accurate, if I may say so myself.

• President Bush's popularity will continue to strengthen during the first part of the year, but will nose-dive thereafter in response to the scandal referred to in my aforementioned prediction for 2005. The Republicans will lose ground, though not control, in both houses of Congress in the November elections.

Well, the strengthening was pretty much a blip of a month or so, and the decline was more of a bouncing-along-the-bottom than a real nose-dive. The "scandal" turned out to be something that started in 2003--the Iraq war--not 2005, and the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress. So this one was pretty much dead wrong. In keeping with the zeitgeist--and my other prediction above--I blame it all on the Bush administration's incompetence.

• Interest rates will rise a little, then decline as economic growth slows. The US dollar will resume its descent after its 2005 rally. The housing market will continue to cool. Oil prices will be down slightly, and inflation will remain under control. The major stock market indices will end the year down modestly from their current levels.

This price chart showing treasury bond prices (the inverse of interest rates) fits my prediction nicely. The dollar has indeed descended, and the housing market has indeed cooled. Oil prices were up for most of the year, but are now only slightly above their starting price. Similarly, inflation rose earlier in the year, but now seems to be in a comfortable range. My only real economic oopsie this year was failing to predict a second-half stock market surge--but I fully expect it to be transient (see below).

• The Conservatives will form the next Canadian government.

Getting this one right wasn't too surprising, but neither was it entirely certain back when the prediction was made.

• The usual suspects--Chavez, Khamenei and Kim--will remain in power, barring natural or accidental death.

Another easy one--although some might have predicted trouble for Chavez, who was up for re-election.

• Kofi Annan will remain UN Secretary-General until his term expires at the end of 2006. And despite signs of trouble, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad will also remain in power through the coming year.

Slightly harder than the previous ones--yet still correct.

• The controversial surprise popular culture hit of the year will be a fictional work (film, television broadcast, play, novel, song, or perhaps some other form) that dares to vividly depict Islamist terrorists of Middle Eastern origin as evil villains.

I had high hopes that this movie would bail me out, but it fizzled at the box office. This docudrama made a bit of a splash, but more because of the controversy it generated than because of its ratings--and it's unclear whether the villains were the terrorists or the bungling politicians who failed to stop them. I guess my finger just isn't quite perfectly aligned atop the pulse of popular culture.

Now for this year's predictions:

• Any "surge" by US troops in Iraq, if it occurs at all, will be perfunctory and ineffectual. Likewise, any diplomatic initiative aimed at Iran or Syria will be half-hearted and come to nothing. Instead, Bush will rely on congressional pressure to force his hand, allowing him to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq while protesting that the mission would have succeeded if not for the meddling of lily-livered Democrats. More generally, the administration's popularity will improve now that it has a Democratic congress as its foil, although Iraq, and foreign policy generally, will not be the main arena of confrontation (see below).
• The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel will not flare up again this year, as Hezbollah will be preoccupied with consolidating and increasing its power in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Israel will be preoccupied with the continuing chaos in Gaza, which will spill over into the West Bank as well. The low-level civil war between Fatah and Hamas will continue, with numerous outside interests lining up on one side or the other. Rocket launchings and other attacks from Gaza into Israel will continue, and Israel's response will be sporadically violent, and sufficient to reduce but not eliminate them.
• Attention in the US will turn away from foreign policy and towards the economy, as (1) the economy slows and (2) economic policy becomes the focus of the Democratic congressional agenda--and of conflicts between Congress and the administration. Trade, taxes, fiscal policy, entitlements and regulation of business will be key flashpoints, against a backdrop of slower growth, a weakening dollar, a continuing real estate slump, and a retrenching stock market. Oil prices will drop slightly, though, and interest rates will decline slightly--although not enough to juice the economy, owing to lingering inflation worries.
• In addition to the usual suspects all making it through the year (barring accident or illness), Ehud Olmert will surprise many by remaining in power as prime minister of Israel. (Navigating Israel's byzantine political ecosystem is the one thing he's serious about and competent at.)
• Neither of the two current frontrunners for the Democratic party presidential nomination (Clinton and Obama) will be considered a frontrunner by the end of the year. On the other hand, at least one of the two current frontrunners for the Republican nomination (Giuliani and McCain) will be considered a frontrunner at the end of the year.
• (This one contributed by someone I know) A scandal will tarnish the sterling, upscale image of Whole Foods.

Over the years, of course, my prediction record has been pretty awful. But as the mutual funds say, past performance is no guarantee of future results....

Our blog has been selected to be part of a survey of political bloggers and their readers. If you'd like to participate, you are invitd to do so here.

The now-famous video of Michael Richards' racist tirade at some black hecklers has provoked a lot of shock, disgust and disappointment from people who wonder how such an entertaining comedian could express such ugly hatred. My reaction is very different: I'm not only not shocked--I'm not even convinced Richards has demonstrated himself to be a racist. Rather, his rant struck me as a totally normal explosion of the seething rage that exists inside many, perhaps most, stand-up comics.

A large fraction of comedians are deeply damaged people, filled with obsessive, solipsistic self-loathing (as one female comic explained it, "I'm a piece of crap that the world revolves around") and incapable of normal social interaction, let alone emotional intimacy. As a result, they find themselves so desperately lonely that they will gladly accept the humiliation of making fools of themselves in front of a large audience of strangers--just so long as those strangers are willing to listen to them. In a way, their comedy is a form of payment to the audience, with which they buy the attention and acceptance they crave, and cannot get otherwise.

Of course, such an intense need inevitably stokes equally intense bitterness and resentment towards that same audience, further fueled by a searing sense of rejection when their acts occasionally (or, at the beginning, frequently) bomb. So when a small group of hecklers, by talking during Richards' act, reminded him just how much he needed them to listen to him, and how little his need was reciprocated, they caused him more pain than they could possibly have imagined, and he naturally lashed out in the most vicious, hurtful way he could think of.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if Richards bears no hostility against blacks in general. (In the past, apparently, he's resorted to anti-Semitic slurs, as well, when heckled. Is he really likely to hate all the Jews involved with Seinfeld?) But for those particular blacks who on that one night exposed his greatest weakness and most shameful pathological need, his hatred knew no bounds, and no insult would have been too harsh.

Although I've made fun of international relations theorists in the past, there is one IR concept which, when properly applied, has its uses: the realist doctrine of "equilibrium", which can be interpreted in the Machiavellian sense of, "help my weaker enemy against my stronger enemy". This tactic can have several outcomes, all net positive: the stronger enemy could defeat the weaker enemy, but at a greater cost than had the weaker enemy not been helped; the weaker enemy could make use of the help to defeat the stronger enemy, effectively knocking the stronger enemy further down on the "enemies list"; or the conflict could drag on, preoccupying both enemies and thus reducing their opportunities to make trouble elsewhere. The most famous modern example of this strategy in action is the assistance that the US and Britain gave the Soviet Union once it was attacked by Nazi Germany in 1941. Needless to say, that strategy worked brilliantly.

Of course, if the weaker enemy defeats the stronger one, then the weaker enemy can become a problem in itself, and it can seem superficially, in retrospect, as though the strategy has backfired. These days, the most commonly cited example of this "blowback" phenomenon is the assistance that the US provided to Islamic fundamentalists--including, apparently, one Osama bin Laden--in fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. (For some reason, the Cold War is never described as blowback from "lend-lease".) Now, neocon Michael Rubin is describing Iraq's 1991 invasion of Kuwait as blowback from American aid to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.

Both interpretations are sheer nonsense. Global Islamist terrorism is a serious threat, but it can't begin to compare to the threat previously posed by the Soviet Union. Assuming that American assistance to the Afghan rebels in the 1980s actually helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union--and its contribution seems in retrospect to have been substantial, if not decisive--the investment paid off spectacularly. In fact, had the Soviet Union not fallen, there's a good chance that Islamist terrorists would be an even greater threat to the US than they are today--thanks to the kind of assistance from the Soviet bloc that anti-Western terrorists received during the 1970s and 1980s.

Likewise, American support for Saddam Hussein during his long war with Iran was hardly a failure. On the contrary, it kept two deadly enemies of the US preoccupied for nearly a decade--a decade during which they made relatively little trouble for the rest of the world. Again, had the US withheld aid, and had Iran managed to defeat Iraq as a result, it would likely have been able to topple Saddam Hussein, and achieve political dominance over its neighbor. Its rebuilding of its military and financial resources--not to mention its nuclear program--would also have started sooner and taken less time. In short, had that assistance not been given to Iraq, Iran would likely be far richer, more powerful and more dangerous than it is today.

Of course, defenders of the first president Bush's decision not to help topple Saddam Hussein in 1991 use exactly the same logic: without Saddam Hussein as a counterweight, Iran would have had a freer hand than it did. The problem with this argument is that by 1991, Saddam Hussein had stopped being an effective counterweight to Iran. On the contrary, he was more of a burden to the US--which had to station tens of thousands of troops to guard the Saudi flank from him, while devoting a portion of its air force to protecting Iraqi Kurdistan--than a hindrance to Iran, which spent the 1990s building and arming Hezbollah, strengthening its ties with Syria, and revving up its nuclear program.

What does this history suggest about America's current situation in Iraq? Well, it would have been nice, of course, if Iraq could have been a peaceful, stable, pro-Western democracy, acting as a bulwark against the various anti-American radicalisms in the region. But given that that unrealistic goal has not been achieved, it seems unlikely that America's worst enemy in the world today is the collection of mutually antagonistic sectarian terrorist militias springing up there. On the contrary, since they all seem to have far more enthusiasm for slaughtering each other (or at least, each other's civilians) than for attacking American troops, it seems far more reasonable for the US to let them have at it than to try to stop them. As Daniel Pipes noted, civil war in Iraq "would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one". Indeed, it may provide interesting strategic opportunities: by supporting the more anti-Syrian/Iranian groups, the US might be able to draw those countries further into the conflict, forcing them to use more of their resources exerting their influence in Iraq than they would otherwise need to apply.

Now, it has been speculated lately that the Baker-Hamilton commission will recommend instead addressing the Iraq problem by attempting a rapprochement with Iran. Stupidity is never out of the question, of course, but I'm skeptical of that prediction. Whatever else may be said of James Baker--anti-Israel, Arabist, State Department-style schmoozer of dictators--his (and the State Department's) absolute number one favorite anti-Israel Arab dictator to schmooze has always been the reigning monarch of Saudi Arabia. And by siding with Israel, of all countries, against Hezbollah, the Saudis have made it crystal clear that their foremost concern these days is the threat of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis.

Assuming, then, that Baker stays true to his old loyalties, don't be surprised if American policy in Iraq, far from moving towards reconciliation with Iran, takes a sharp turn, as it were, towards the Sunni side of the street.

A recent study published in the British medical journal Lancet claims to have measured 650,000 "excess deaths" resulting from the US invasion of Iraq. (These include deaths indirectly attributed to the invasion, such as those resulting from the post-invasion weakness of Iraq's economy, basic services and infrastructure.) Opponents of the war are using this figure to bolster their argument that it was foolish and morally wrong; one commentator has even argued that America ought to pay reparations to Iraq in penance for invading.

Pro-US bloggers, most notably Megan McArdle, have been blasting the study's calculations, claiming that the final result is self-evidently grossly exaggerated. They may be right, but their quibbling over numbers, in my view, misses the point entirely. In fact, the number of "excess deaths" in Iraq since the invasion is probably quite high--presumably in the hundreds of thousands. But that that fact alone says very little about either the wisdom or the morality of the American action.

Consider the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The number of excess deaths it generated in Chechnya alone--to say nothing of the many other hotspots that have flared up within its erstwhile borders, the lethal effects of the economic catastrophe that befell the entire region once the command was removed from the command economy, and the associated surge in alcoholism, AIDS, and other health problems of the kind that invariably flourish when the social order breaks down--likely dwarfs the claimed total attributed to Iraq. And the prospects for democracy in Iraq today are arguably better than in the former Soviet Union, where most of the republics are currently experiencing a resurgence of Soviet-style government. Does it follow, then, that the end of the Soviet regime was a disaster, and that the countries of the West should have done their best to prop up, say, the 1991 coup plotters, to save the country from chaos?

Or consider post-Tito Yugoslavia. Again, Western countries had the choice of embracing Slovenian and Croatian independence, thus encouraging the breakup of the country, or of rejecting these secessions and encouraging the central government to exert its authority. They chose the former path--and hundreds of thousands died in the bitter, bloody civil war that followed. Can we conclude, then, that the West should instead have done what it could to shore up Yugoslavia as a unified state?

Now, one could in fact argue that the correct answer to the above questions is actually "yes"--that the fall of the Soviet and Yugoslavian regimes was a humanitarian disaster in the medium term, and should in retrospect have been impeded to the extent it was possible to do so. But to take such a position is to focus the blame for the post-collapse misery in a very strange direction. After all, the collapse itself may have made the misery more likely, but it's the assorted thugs, thieves, terrorists, apparatchiks, strongmen and so on who have made life miserable for their countrymen, instead of participating productively in the reconstruction of their respective nations, who have actually caused the misery. To blame those who permitted or assisted in the collapse of these nations' dictatorships for the subsequent chaos, rather than the perpetrators of the chaos themselves, is to assert in effect that that chaos was as direct a consequence of the disappearance of the previous dictatorship as of the actions of perpetrators--that is, that the peoples of those countries were doomed to fall into Hobbesian disarray when freed from the lash of an iron ruler.

Such assertions are not entirely unheard-of--especially out of the mouths of iron rulers themselves. (For example, it was the justification that General Jaruzelski used when declaring martial law in Poland in 1981: that it was necessary to stave off civil war. The then-Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau, infamously concurred.) But such confident determinism ignores history's long list of seemingly unprepared countries that nevertheless successfully managed the transition to democracy. It also implies a level of contempt for the nations in question that ought to give anyone pause. (Consider, for example, the assertion that the horrible decay of Zimbabwe following the end of white rule was inevitable, and should have been prevented by perpetuating the subjugation of blacks. How, exactly, is the corresponding statement about the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia--or Iraq, for that matter--less objectionable?)

Then again, let us even suppose that in some particular case it's actually true--that a particular country really is doomed to collapse into chaos if a given dictator is removed. (Some certainly made that claim about Iraq--and even I was none-too-optimistic about that country's prospects for the kind of democratic renaissance that the more starry-eyed supporters of the war had hoped for.) Suppose, furthermore, that the current dictator of the country in question is a run-of-the-mill absolute ruler--not a monster of the Saddam Hussein variety, but a grey Party stalwart in the Brezhnev-Tito mold. Might one argue that in that case, at least, the dictator is preferable to the post-dictatorship alternative?

The problem with that argument is that dictatorships never last forever. The eventual collapse of, say, the Soviet Union was inevitable, and if chaos was certain to be the aftermath of its collapse, then that, too, was inevitable. It follows that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 rather than, say, half a century later had no net effect other than sparing the population an extra fifty years of oppression under Soviet rule. The misery we are seeing today would have occcurred regardless, but by coming sooner, it hastened whatever improvement is likely to follow. If what follows is to any degree better than what preceded it, then the people will have benefited.

The catch in this line of reasoning, mind you, is that it assumes that what follows the current dilapidated state of the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia will be an improvement on the Soviet/Titoist era. That seems quite likely, but I'll concede that a cynic might predict Soviet-like rule for those countries for decades or even centuries to come. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that what follows the current strife-torn state of affairs in Iraq will not be an improvement on Saddam Hussein, one of the most brutal dictators in Middle Eastern history.

To be sure, there is ample room for criticism of American handling of Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein (not that we'll ever know whether implementing any particular different strategy would have saved lives, of course). But the mere fact that the post-Saddam era in Iraq has been disturbingly violent in no way refutes the claim that the war that overthrew Saddam Hussein was every bit as justified on moral grounds (putting aside the enormous strategic benefits) as the US-supported political maneuvers that broke up the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Indeed, given the unusual brutality of the Iraqi regime, the moral argument for overthrowing it is even stronger than the case for encouraging the collapse of the old Communist regimes. And even after acknowledging the ugly condition of some parts of the old Communist realm, who today seriously wishes that the Soviets and Titoists had never lost power?

The Bush administration apparently wants to amend the War Crimes Act, so that

humiliations, degrading treatment and other acts specifically deemed as "outrages" by the international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia -- such as placing prisoners in "inappropriate conditions of confinement," forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and merely threatening prisoners with "physical, mental, or sexual violence" -- would not be among the listed U.S. crimes, officials said.

The usual suspects are up in arms, of course. But their fury aside, it occurs to me that by opposing the criminalization of “degrading treatment”, the administration is depriving itself of a golden opportunity to extricate itself from its Gitmo problem. After all, under the broader definition, the US government could simply set up a tribunal and try the Guantanamo detainees for war crimes related to their maltreatment of their guards.

After all, if it's a terrible crime when perpetrated by American guards against Al Qaeda terrorists, then surely it's at least as terrible a crime when perpetrated by Al Qaeda terrorists against American guards--right?

Apparently Charles Murray's new book talks up a fairly old idea: a universal guaranteed income. Supposedly, providing everyone with a government salary of a few thousand dollars a year would solve the problem of destitution (i.e., provide a "safety net"), while not giving people enough comfort to discourage them from improving their standard of living through hard work.

The underlying assumption--which seems to be almost universally taken for granted--is that guaranteed income programs only risk creating a dependent underclass when the guaranteed income is too generous. The American experience with AFDC ought to have put paid to that assumption. Contrary to popular belief, the American welfare system was never all that extravagant, and the American urban underclass during (especially) the 1980s lived very meagerly indeed.

It's true that AFDC also added an extra disincentive to work, in the form of reduced benefits for the legally employed. However, illicit, unreported employment was widely available during the welfare era, and most welfare recipients supplemented their incomes with it on a casual basis. The result was not a thriving underground economy of industrious low-wage workers--as we see today among illegal immigrants, for instance. Rather, welfare cultivated a pathology-rich urban underclass ridden with crime, violence, family breakdown, substance abuse and (of course) grinding, seemingly inescapable poverty. And the same type of social safety net, writes British doctor and social critic Theodore Dalrymple, has now generated an underclass with comparable pathologies in Great Britain.

How, though, could a miserly welfare program, with paltry benefits, have such a profound negative psychological effect on its recipients? I would argue that in fact, the key pernicious attribute of guaranteed income programs is not their generosity, but rather their stability. A guaranteed government income is even more stable than most jobs (which, after all, can disappear overnight). And for a not-insignificant fraction of the population, the stress of trying to hold down a job with a respectable salary is less attractive than the comfort of guaranteed work offering only a subsistence income--let alone a subsistence income that requires no work.

If I were to design a welfare program, I'd take it in exactly the opposite direction from Murray. I'd make it at least as generous as all current programs combined, and focus it exclusively on the needy. However, I would treat it as a government-operated charity program, rather than as an entitlement program. An all-encompassing "charity budget" would be set each year through legislation, and its funds would be doled out in the form of matching grants to registered charitable organizations helping the needy. The usual oversight would be necessary, of course, to ensure that the charitable funds are disbursed honestly. But no charity--and hence no recipient--could ever be sure of receiving as much money in any given month or year as in the previous month or year. A local natural disaster, for instance, might divert much charitable giving towards its victims, thus reducing the amount available for the chronically poor.

Such a system, I claim, would make welfare dependency much less attractive than an entitlement system would--even if it provides the same overall amount of money to the needy. Unlike the recipient of a guaranteed income, a "charity case" under this system would have to endure not only a lower income, but also more instability, than a gainfully employed citizen. This instability would be a powerful incentive to work even for those who are comfortably able to tolerate a financially constrained lifestyle.

As I've pointed out before, the whole concept of entitlement is based on a flawed conception of human need. We cannot hope to end human want--as entitlement programs implicitly aim to do--because human want is infinite and eternal. On the other hand, we are (I believe) morally compelled to contribute to the well-being of our fellow humans, through charitable giving. Government entitlement programs, by straying from the donor-centered ethos of charitable generosity, have managed to end up hurting both the donors and their beneficiaries. The solution, then, is to abandon the false hope of "entitlement", and return once again to the ideal of charity.

As Volokh Conspirator Ilya Somin notes, Author J,K. Rowling is apparently hinting lately that Harry Potter may die at the end of the seven-book series. Now, I haven't read any of the books, but after seeing the last movie, I concluded that the most natural ending for the series would be for Harry to sacrifice himself to save his child and kill Voldemort--just as his parents did before him. How else, after all, to tie up the plot threads of Harry's mysterious origins, his strange connection to Voldemort, the improbably great expectations placed on him by everyone around him, and his interminable tests and demonstrations of "character", implicitly defined as willingness to take great risks, face great challenges and make great sacrifices for the sake of those around him?

Some political scientists at the University of Toronto have started a letter-writing campaign on behalf of a former colleague, Ramin Jahanbegloo, who has been imprisoned by the government of Iran on trumped-up "espionage" charges. Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell points out (approvingly, mind you) a rather unusual feature of this campaign: the organizers

ask that you be careful to adopt a respectful tone and avoid political condemnation. Bear in mind that our purpose is to secure Ramin’s safe release, not to make statements of principle, however valid.

Now, imagine if, for example, the letter-writing campaign had instead been aimed at getting the US government to release the accused Taliban and Al Qaeda members imprisoned at its Guantanamo detention facility. Is it even conceivable that the organizers would have asked participants---let alone expected them to agree---to "adopt a respectful tone and avoid political condemnation" of George Bush, the Republican Party, US imperialism, and so on?

Worse still, Jahanbegloo himself was pretty clearly imprisoned for failing to "adopt a respectful tone and avoid political condemnation" of the Iranian government's actions. The campaign's organizers are thus effectively undercutting the case for their own hero's release. After all, if they're willing to forgo "statements of principle" about the Iranian government when expediency dictates, then why shouldn't the Iranian government expect the same of Jahanbegloo?

Of course, none of this really matters unless one believes people's political positions should exhibit some kind of principled consistency. For the vast majority of the population, however---and I include political scientists, such as the ones who organized this campaign---all politics is "identity politics". That is, one chooses one's political stances the way one chooses one's clothing styles---as a way of affiliating oneself with certain groups of people, and distancing oneself from others.

By this criterion, the decision to counsel restraint in addressing the Iranian government makes perfect sense. Who, after all, are the sort of people who launch into tirades about the evils of the Iranian government? Certainly not the sort one is likely to find at the Political Science Department of the University of Toronto. Happy though they may be to stand up for one of their erstwhile colleagues, they would never do so in a manner that might make them appear more like a frothing neocon, or a born-again redneck, or a white-shoed Bush Republican, than---well, than the sort of people they are. (And why do all those disparate groups of people---neocons, Christian fundamentalists, plutocrats, and the rest---so often sound exactly the same when talking about Iran? Why, to avoid sounding like University of Toronto political science academics and their like, of course....)

Unfortunately, wearing one's political views as a fashion statement doesn't necessarily lead one to exhibit rigorous intellectual consistency at all times. Ramin Jahanbegloo, a former University of Toronto academic, Harvard fellow, and admirer of Noam Chomsky's---Chomsky having coincidentally just completed a friendly visit with the Iranian mullahs' fanatical Lebanese proxies, Hezbollah---would no doubt understand completely.

I apologize for the lack of recent postings--since April 2nd, I've been preoccupied with a special project. Posting will resume when I have more time....

The differences between Sunni and Shiite Islam
Since it is looking more and more likely that the eagerly anticipated Iraq civil war may finally be upon us, a number of readers have written to me asking: "LTEC, can you explain the differences between Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam?"

I'd be glad to. Keep in mind, however, that this is a very complex issue. The answer is not simple, but if my readers will be patient and stick with me, I think they will find this explanation of the differences between the two major sects of one of the world's great religions to be both informative and illuminating. So here goes.

Sunni Islam split off from Shiite Islam (or maybe it was the other way around) a very long time ago, due to some event or other that no one in their right mind gives a rat's ass about today. Ever since then, Sunnis have wanted to kill Shiites for no particular reason, other than that there weren't enough worse infidels around; and Shiites have felt similarly about Sunnis. There are a few other, very minor differences, but they make even less sense.

I hope you've found this explanation useful. If it is well received, I plan to post other explanations about the world of religious thought. I am currently working on a post explaining the theological complexities of the disagreements between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.