From Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/...oks_confederacy.

"Class dismissed."

Texas textbooks and the truth about the Confederacy
Texas is right: We should teach kids about Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. But let's tell the whole story

By Michael Lind


The Texas State Board of Education, the most astringently reactionary body since the Spartan Ephorate, has decreed that textbooks for the schoolchildren of Texas are to include Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address along with the first inaugural of Abraham Lincoln.

This controversy holds particular interest for me. I am a fifth-generation native of Texas. One ancestor of mine had his farm in Georgia incinerated by Gen. Sherman. Another came to Texas in the federal army of occupation of Gen. Custer. One of the last things that my late grandfather said to me was: "Sam Houston was a traitor to the South!" The Civil War ended in 1865, but clearly its meaning is still contested in the 21st century.

By all means, let schoolchildren in Texas read Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. But there should be more material from the Confederate side of the conflict than that. For generations, apologists for the Confederacy have claimed that secession was really about the tariff, or states’ rights, or something else -- anything other than preserving the right of some human beings to own, buy and sell other human beings.

That being the case, the education of schoolchildren in my state should include a reading of the Cornerstone Speech made by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, on March 21, 1861. With remarkable candor, Stephens pointed out that whereas the United States was founded on the idea, enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal," the new Confederacy was founded on the opposite conception:

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically ... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.



Let the children of Texas compare what Stephens had to say about natural rights and human equality with Lincoln’s views on the subject, and contrast the ideals of the American and Confederate Foundings. That should make for interesting classroom discussions.

Let Texas schoolchildren, as well, read the Confederate Constitution. It is surely the most bizarre constitution ever adopted. It is a copy of the U.S. Constitution, rewritten to cripple the central government. The Confederate Constitution bans the government of the new federation from spending money on infrastructure, with a few exceptions like harbors and lighthouses, and prevents the new government of the South from fostering industry.

With a central government that was deliberately weakened at its formation, how did the Confederacy expect to prevail in a war against the forces of the Union? The answer is that the rich oligarchy of slave lords who ruled the South hoped that the British empire would intervene to secure their region’s independence, just as France had intervened in the American Revolution to help the United States win its independence from Britain.

When the British declined the offer, the geniuses in charge of the Confederacy realized that they would have to win their independence with their own resources. This was no easy thing to do in a wannabe country that prided itself on its absence of factories and banks. But they tried anyway. They threw libertarianism overboard and mobilized for war. They instituted a draft. They passed an income tax and inflated the currency to push citizens into higher brackets. Lacking a native Southern capitalist class, they put generals and colonels in charge of government-owned factories and munitions plants.

But conscription, taxation and state socialism were not enough. Too many Southern men were avoiding the draft or deserting, to say nothing of slaves who ran away to freedom or to join the U.S. Army. And there was the resistance. In the semi-mythical "free state of Jones" in Mississippi, in the Big Thicket in East Texas, in the Texas German Hill Country, rebels fought the rebellion, in the name of the United States or their own rights. The tradition of anti-Confederate resistance survived in the South after the war, to inspire Radical Republican "scalawags," populists, socialists and New Deal Democrats. The Southern right and the Northern left have erased the resisters from history. But not all of us have forgotten them.

Toward the end of the war, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis came up with a plan. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, they proposed to save the Confederacy by freeing and arming slaves. In "Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War," Bruce Levine quotes some typical responses. Brig. Gen. Clement H. Stevens: "If slavery is to be abolished then I take no more interest in our fight." Gov. Zebulon Vance of North Carolina: "Our independence is chiefly desirable for the preservation of our political institutions, the principal of which is slavery." Once it became clear that the only way to save slavery and anti-statism in the South was to abolish slavery and adopt statism, the malfunctioning Confederate Mind short-circuited completely.

That is what my fellow Texans of younger generations should learn about the Lost Cause. Under British protection, the CSA might have evolved into a squalid banana republic run by landlords for the benefit of investors and industrialists in Britain. Without British protection, the CSA might have survived as a proto-fascist regime, with an economy of permanent war socialism and a government run by colonels. In either case, the victory of the Confederacy would have been far worse for most white and black Southerners than its well-deserved defeat. For ensuring that I would be born in the United States of America instead of a broken-down failed state that combined the least attractive features of apartheid-era South Africa and death squad-era Honduras, I say: Thank you, President Lincoln, and thank you, Gen.Grant.

So let the students of Texas read the inaugural address of Jefferson Davis, and the Cornerstone Speech of Alexander Stephens, and the Confederate Constitution. And let the readings conclude with the speech that Texas Gov. Sam Houston gave on Sept. 22, 1860, in my home town of Austin, the state capital. Houston had led the successful Texan revolt against Mexico in 1836 and had served as president of the Republic of Texas, then as a United States senator after Texas was admitted to the Union. His final campaign, before he was deposed from office by the Confederates, was his failed attempt to prevent the secession of Texas from the United States.

In front of that audience in Austin, the haggard old soldier mocked the claim that the rights of the Southern states were threatened in any way by the North:

Our forefathers saw the danger to which freedom would be subjected, from the helpless condition of disunited States; and, to "form a more perfect Union," they established this Government. They saw the effect of foreign influence on rival States, the effect of dissensions at home, and to strengthen all and perpetuate all, to bind all together, yet leave all free, they gave us the Constitution and the Union. Where are the evidences that their patriotic labor was in vain? Have we not emerged from an infant’s to a giant’s strength? Have not empires been added to our domain, and States been created? All the blessings which they promised their posterity have been vouchsafed; and millions now enjoy them, who without this Union would to-day be oppressed and down-trodden in far-off foreign lands!

What is there that is free that we have not got? Are our rights invaded and no government ready to protect us? No! Are our institutions wrested from us and other foreign to our taste forced upon us? No! Is the right of free speech, a free press, or free sufferage taken from us?

Has our property been taken from us and the government failed to interpose?

No, none of these! The rights of the States and the rights of individuals are still maintained. We have yet the Constitution, we have yet a judiciary, which has never been appealed to in vain -- we have yet just laws and officers to administer them; and an army and navy, ready to maintain any and every constitutional right of the citizen. Whence then this clamor about disunion? Whence this cry of protection to property or disunion, when even the very loudest in the cry, declared under their Senatorial oaths, but a few months since, that no protection was necessary? Are we to sell reality for a phantom?

Class dismissed.



Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of "What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President."

I share Kelly Dancer's skepticism about man-made climate change, but I think he's wrong to conclude it's best to do little or nothing to get off carbon-based energy. There are stronger arguments than climate change for making the switch, and Au Courant has listed some of them.

It's a win-win-win-win deal. If we come up with cheap, renewable energy, the jihadists and tyrants and everyone else in the miserable Middle East become irrelevant. No more coddling dictators. No more chasing bearded idiots into caves. No more hand-holding Palestinian and Israeli lunatics who want to live out their biblical fantasies. They won't matter anymore.

Alternative energy offers a stupendous return on investment. It will liberate billions of people from ignorance and poverty, clean our filthy water and air, make our economies more robust and efficient. Our race could start concentrating on far more rewarding quality of life issues. We're stupid not to do it.

And it's not hard, as Tom Friedman of the NYT reports below. If we can just get past the tired, ridiculous nostrum that all community effort is immoral and doomed to failure, we could accomplish such great things...

December 23, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Copenhagen That Matters
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copenhagen

As I listened to Denmark’s minister of economic and business affairs describe how her country used higher energy taxes to stimulate innovation in green power and then recycled the tax revenues back to Danish industry and consumers to make it easier for them to make and buy the new clean technologies, it all sounded so, well, intelligent. It sounded as if the Danes looked at themselves after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, found that they were totally dependent on Middle East oil and put in place a long-term strategy to make Denmark energy-secure and start a new industry at the same time.

The more I listened to the Danish minister, Lene Espersen, the more I thought of my own country, where I’ve been told time and again by U.S. politicians that proposing even a 10-cent-a-gallon increase in gasoline taxes to make America more energy independent and to stimulate fuel efficiency is “off the table,” an act of sure political suicide.

Not in Denmark. So I asked the Danish minister: “Tell me, what planet are you people from?”

Espersen laughed. But I didn’t. How long are we Americans going to go on thinking that we can thrive in the 21st century when doing the optimal things — whether for energy, health care, education or the deficit — are “off the table.” They’ve been banished by an ad hoc coalition of lobbyists loaded with money, loud-mouth talk-show hosts who will flame anyone who crosses them, political consultants who warn that asking Americans to do anything important but hard makes one unelectable and a citizenry that doesn’t even ask for optimal anymore because it believes that optimal is impossible.

Sorry, but there are no good ideas proven to work in other democratic/capitalist societies that we can afford to shove off our table — not when we need to build a knowledge economy with good jobs and everyone else is trying to do the same.

“Already the green taxes here are quite high,” said Espersen. “And even though we know this is not popular with business and industry, it has made all the difference for us. It forced our businesses to become more energy efficient and innovative, and this meant that, suddenly, we were inventing things nobody else was inventing because our businesses needed to be competitive.”

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a nonpartisan research center, and the Embassy of Denmark recently held a briefing on how Denmark is working to become a low-carbon economy. Here are some highlights:

Although it still generates the majority of its electricity from coal, “since 1990, Denmark has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent. Over the same time frame, Danish energy consumption has stayed constant and Denmark’s gross domestic product has grown by more than 40 percent. Denmark is the most energy efficient country in the E.U.; due to carbon pricing, through energy taxes, carbon taxes, the ‘cap and trade’ system, strict building codes and energy labeling programs. Renewable resources currently supply almost 30 percent of Denmark’s electricity. Wind power is the largest source of renewable electricity, followed by biomass. ... Today, Copenhagen puts only 3 percent of its waste into landfills and incinerates 39 percent to generate electricity for thousands of households.”

The Danish government funnels energy tax revenue “back to industry, earmarking much of it to subsidize environmental innovation,” wrote Monica Prasad, a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, in a March 25, 2008, essay in this newspaper. Therefore, “Danish firms are pushed away from carbon and pulled into environmental innovation, and the country’s economy isn’t put at a competitive disadvantage.”

It’s why Denmark, with only five million people, boasts some of the leading wind, biofuel and heating, cooling and efficiency companies in the world. Energy technologies are now 11 percent of Denmark’s exports. Oil exports and energy taxes also subsidize mass transit and energy efficiency, keeping bills low for Danish consumers.

Where do Danish politicians get the courage to do the right things — even if painful?

“We don’t have a lot of resources,” said Ida Auken, a spokeswoman for the Danish green/socialist party, S.F. “We have a welfare state that we have to keep up, so we have to think forward all the time and not get stuck in the past. That is where we get the courage. And we have seen it work for 30 years. It is good business. Danish contractors are begging for strict standards on buildings because they know that if they can become efficient and meet them here, they can compete anywhere in the whole world.”

My fellow Americans, the fact that the recent Copenhagen climate summit was a bust in terms of solving our energy/climate problems doesn’t mean that we can ignore those problems — or that we can ignore how individual countries, like Denmark, have effectively addressed them. With unemployment in Denmark at about 4 percent, compared with our 10 percent, maybe we should at least consider putting a few of its ideas on our table.

The Tom Harkin plan for a sliding requirement for cloture makes a lot of sense. From the NYT:

December 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
A Dangerous Dysfunction
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward.

It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.

After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?

Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Some conservatives argue that the Senate’s rules didn’t stop former President George W. Bush from getting things done. But this is misleading, on two levels.

First, Bush-era Democrats weren’t nearly as determined to frustrate the majority party, at any cost, as Obama-era Republicans. Certainly, Democrats never did anything like what Republicans did last week: G.O.P. senators held up spending for the Defense Department — which was on the verge of running out of money — in an attempt to delay action on health care.

More important, however, Mr. Bush was a buy-now-pay-later president. He pushed through big tax cuts, but never tried to pass spending cuts to make up for the revenue loss. He rushed the nation into war, but never asked Congress to pay for it. He added an expensive drug benefit to Medicare, but left it completely unfunded. Yes, he had legislative victories; but he didn’t show that Congress can make hard choices and act responsibly, because he never asked it to.

So now that hard choices must be made, how can we reform the Senate to make such choices possible?

Back in the mid-1990s two senators — Tom Harkin and, believe it or not, Joe Lieberman — introduced a bill to reform Senate procedures. (Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.) Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.

But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster — which it almost surely would be — reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority — not supermajority — rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen — for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

Back atcha, aC. You bring more to this party than anyone!

Here's a nice take from the NYT's new, young conservative columnist. What a step up he is from Bill Kristol, the ideological hack he replaced...


December 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Heaven and Nature
By ROSS DOUTHAT

It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

Paging George Santayana...George Santayana!


From the NYT:

December 14, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Disaster and Denial
By PAUL KRUGMAN

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Let’s hope so. For one thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it.

Results of Slate's "Write Like Sarah Palin" contest -- hilarious!


http://www.slate.com/id/2237261?obref=obinsite

I have to disagree. I've seen the Hollywood Greats, Rock Icons, Comic Legend and John & Yoko collections, and I can't name another interviewer who would have done a better job with those guests. Yes, Cavett's narcissism occasionally intrudes, but it's a small price to pay for his thoughtful, informed questions and his mastery of a skill that is lost on so many modern successors – the ability to STFU and let the guest develop a point or a story. Cavett was just as conversant with a politician or a scientist as he was with a movie star. Only Jack Paar (who also has some fine collections out there) was in his league. (A pleasant surprise: Merv Griffin, the master of fluff, also was capable of excellent and serious conversational interviews when he wanted to be, as his collection demonstrates.) The sad truth, revealed in the extras section of the ABC collections, is that the contemporary Cavett is much diminished. Whether the problem is booze or medication for his bi-polar disorder, he's a flaccid shell of his former self. I haven't seen the 92Y series, and I wouldn't care to, given this sad development.This is a matter of taste, I suppose, but I enjoyed his monologues, which were far more clever than the muggings of the even-more narcissistic Johnny Carson. Yes. This was Cavett at his best. No monologue, no band, no ratings pressures, just excellent conversation with a host of fascinating guests. I recall the time he had director Joseph Mankiewicz on for one show and ended up keeping him for the week. THAT was the shit, and Cavett should make it his life's work to compile these programs in a boxed set. For reasons that are now obvious, I never bothered to read that book, though I'm a huge Cavett fan.That segment was indeed awful, awkward, embarrassing for everyone on the stage. That Cavett saw fit to include it among the interviews with Hepburn, Groucho et al demonstrates how far around the bend he actually is.I remember a hilarious send-up by Rick Moranis, whose impression had Cavett asking his guests a series of trivia questions about himself. My best recollection of one example: "What was I drinking when I heard Reagan was shot?…No, the correct answer is Campari and soda, which I was sharing poolside with Betty Bacall…"

All of this is true and sad, but I choose not to let it diminish my enjoyment of the scores of excellent interviews he was able to conduct despite his demons. I also give him credit for being painfully honest, even if the decision to do so was vanity-driven. It is good to keep in mind how much private agony his emotional ailments have caused him through the years. I guess this is one of the advantages of my jaded view of the world, if I may go all narcissismo for a minute. So many of my heroes, including those in my own family, have exhibited clay feet that these sad revelations no longer spoil my enjoyment of them. I don't demand perfection in my icons, only sublime excellence in the areas in which they excel. In an ocean of human grinds, that's more than enough.


Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go enjoy an A-Hole trifecta. It's time to put on a Sinatra CD, cue up a Tiger Woods video and read Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother."

Actually, the last section of that story is relevant here. The narrator is reflecting on his dreary brother Lawrence, who sees the dark cloud behind every silver lining...


"They left for the mainland the next morning, taking the six-o'clock boat. Mother got up to say goodbye, but she was the only one, and it is a harsh and an easy scene to imagine – the matriarch and the changeling, looking at each other with a dismay that would seem like the powers of love reversed. I heard the children's voices and the car go down the drive, and I got up and went to the window, and what a morning that was! Jesus, what a morning! The wind was northerly. The air was clear. In the early heat, the roses in the garden smelled like strawberry jam. While I was dressing, I heard the boat whistle, first the warning signal and then the double blast, and I could see the good people on the top deck drinking coffee out of fragile paper cups, and Lawrence at the bow, saying to the sea, "Thalassa, thalassa," while his timid and unhappy children watched the creation from the encirclement of their mother's arms. The buoys would toll mournfully for Lawrence, and while the grace of the light would make it an exertion not to throw out your arms and swear exultantly, Lawrence's eyes would trace the black sea as if fell astern; he would think of the bottom, dark and strange, where full fathom five our father lies.



"Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming – Diana and Helen – and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea."

Tom Friedman's take in the NYT:

December 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
This I Believe
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Let me start with the bottom line and then tell you how I got there: I can’t agree with President Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan. I’d prefer a minimalist approach, working with tribal leaders the way we did to overthrow the Taliban regime in the first place. Given our need for nation-building at home right now, I am ready to live with a little less security and a little-less-perfect Afghanistan.

I recognize that there are legitimate arguments on the other side. At a lunch on Tuesday for opinion writers, the president lucidly argued that opting for a surge now to help Afghans rebuild their army and state into something decent — to win the allegiance of the Afghan people — offered the only hope of creating an “inflection point,” a game changer, to bring long-term stability to that region. May it be so. What makes me wary about this plan is how many moving parts there are — Afghans, Pakistanis and NATO allies all have to behave forever differently for this to work.

But here is the broader context in which I assess all this: My own foreign policy thinking since 9/11 has been based on four pillars:

1. The Warren Buffett principle: Everything I’ve ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids.

2. Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things. If we become weak and enfeebled by economic decline and debt, as we slowly are, America may not be able to play its historic stabilizing role in the world. If you didn’t like a world of too-strong-America, you will really not like a world of too-weak-America — where China, Russia and Iran set more of the rules.

3. The context within which people live their lives shapes everything — from their political outlook to their religious one. The reason there are so many frustrated and angry people in the Arab-Muslim world, lashing out first at their own governments and secondarily at us — and volunteering for “martyrdom” — is because of the context within which they live their lives. That was best summarized by the U.N.’s Arab Human Development reports as a context dominated by three deficits: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of education and a deficit of women’s empowerment. The reason India, with the world’s second-largest population of Muslims, has a thriving Muslim minority (albeit with grievances but with no prisoners in Guantánamo Bay) is because of the context of pluralism and democracy it has built at home.

4. One of the main reasons the Arab-Muslim world has been so resistant to internally driven political reform is because vast oil reserves allow its regimes to become permanently ensconced in power, by just capturing the oil tap, and then using the money to fund vast security and intelligence networks that quash any popular movement. Look at Iran.

Hence, post-9/11 I advocated that our politicians find sufficient courage to hike gasoline taxes and seriously commit ourselves to developing alternatives to oil. Economists agree that this would ultimately bring down the global price, and slowly deprive these regimes of the sole funding source that allows them to maintain their authoritarian societies. People do not change when we tell them they should; they change when their context tells them they must.

To me, the most important reason for the Iraq war was never W.M.D. It was to see if we could partner with Iraqis to help them build something that does not exist in the modern Arab world: a state, a context, where the constituent communities — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — write their own social contract for how to live together without an iron fist from above. Iraq has proved staggeringly expensive and hugely painful. The mistakes we made should humble anyone about nation-building in Afghanistan. It does me.

Still, the Iraq war may give birth to something important — if Iraqis can find that self-sustaining formula to live together. Alas, that is still in doubt. If they can, the model would have a huge impact on the Arab world. Baghdad is a great Arab capital. If Iraqis fail, it’s religious strife, economic decline and authoritarianism as far as the eye can see — the witch’s brew that spawns terrorists.

Iraq was about “the war on terrorism.” The Afghanistan invasion, for me, was about the “war on terrorists.” To me, it was about getting bin Laden and depriving Al Qaeda of a sanctuary — period. I never thought we could make Afghanistan into Norway — and even if we did, it would not resonate beyond its borders the way Iraq might.

To now make Afghanistan part of the “war on terrorism” — i.e., another nation-building project — is not crazy. It is just too expensive, when balanced against our needs for nation-building in America, so that we will have the strength to play our broader global role. Hence, my desire to keep our presence in Afghanistan limited. That is what I believe. That is why I believe it.

The transcript of President Obama's West Point speech on Afghanistan is here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_us_afghanistan_text/print


The video is here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/

Gallup reports 58 percent of Republicans think Palin is qualified for the presidency, but 65 percent say they would seriously consider voting for her. How do you deal with a political party like that?

I agree with Carol on Palin's qualifications, but not on the nature of the Newsweek cover:

But the Newsweek cover isn't about Palin's sexiness. It's about her silliness. Note the non sequitor artificiality of the two Blackberrys, the American flag and other props. See the faux casualness, the pixieness of the bent left knee, the unironic self-satisfaction she obviously feels. This is exactly how Carrie Prejean would have presented herself to the camera.

And the bikini hunter photo was no more degrading than thousands of similarly photo-shopped spoofs of public figures, male and female. It's satire, not sexism.

Hysterical PC over-reaction alert. My latest Newsweek is here, and I've not yet read the cover story on Sarah Palin. But I am proud of the mag for attempting to show this dangerous ditz for what she is. Here Salon's Joan Walsh, with whom I'm often in agreement, goes bat-shit over the supposed sexism of the cover photo. I highlight the silliest passages in boldface and underline Meacham's airtight defense, with reax by me.


How do you solve a problem like Jon Meacham?

Hell freezes over: I agree with Sarah Palin. Newsweek's out of context short-shorts cover was sexist

Joan Walsh

Nov. 18, 2009 |

I mentioned it in passing yesterday, but Newsweek's Jon Meacham gets America's Top Clueless Male award for taking a photo Sarah Palin shot for Runner's World, and using it on a serious news story about her role in the GOP. Palin denounced the photo selection as "sexist and degrading" on her Facebook page, and she's right.

Criticized by right and left -- even my friend Markos Moulitsas thinks Newsweek went too far; Media Matters has been blasting Newsweek all day -- Meacham told Politico: "We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard." (JM -- Bang on. This is of a piece with the famous "Fighting the Wimp Factor" cover that had Papa Bush stiving comically to look macho on his speed boat 20 years ago. It's no more inappropriate than the Dukakis tank shot or footage of Deputy Deke looking like a helmeted dork on his bikey.)

Really, Jon Meacham? Did you really want to say that? OK, then, let's deconstruct the cover entirely. The photo of the lovely, bare-legged Palin is paired with the headline: "How do you solve a problem like Sarah?" For those too young to recognize the reference, it's from a "Sound of Music" song, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" about a young novice who is too cute and flighty to be a nun ("she's a flibbertyjibbit, a will o' the wisp, a clown!"). That's a great way to describe our first GOP vice-presidential nominee. Not sexist at all. (JM --Exactly. Not sexist at all. Making fun of an idiot who happens to be female is not sexist. NOT making fun of her would be sexist.) (The "how do you solve a problem like" cliché is typically applied to women, although I'm proud of once asking "How do you solve a problem like Joe Lieberman?" who is certainly a clown.) (JM -- Thanks, Joan, for demonstrating that the line isn't necessarily sexist. By your standard, isn't calling one of our few Jewish senators a clown anti-Semitic?) Oh yes, Jon Meacham, your answer is proof-positive that there was no sexism to your imagery. Fail. (JM -- Impressive argument! Is it sexist, Joan, to point out that hysteria is no substitute for proof?)

A few liberals are trying to suggest that Palin has nothing to whine about since she willingly posed for the picture, but that's silly: What she wore to a Runners' World shoot is different from what she'd wear for Newsweek. I've heard people defend the photo because Palin uses her sexuality as part of her political appeal, and I think that's also unfair. She didn't campaign in daisy dukes and crop-tops; she's a good-looking woman who wore flattering but professional jackets and skirts. Of course her looks are part of her appeal -- I don't think the gulf between men and women who "approve" of Palin (yup, she's more popular with men, go figure!) is about her policy ideas -- but attractive women are damned whatever they do with their looks. And let's be clear -- this wasn't an article about Palin's sex appeal, or the role of her gender in the campaign -- this was an article about her political assets and flaws. The out-of-context photo was, in fact, "sexist and degrading," as Palin says. (JM -- Hooey. The point of the article is that she's a doofus, and the picture conveys that, just as the Dukakis clip -- also out of context -- demonstrated he was not a commanding leader.)

That's about all the time I have to spend feeling sympathy for Sarah Palin: I detest her political ideas and her divisive approach to politics. But I call out sexism when I see it. (JM -- Even where it doesn't exist!) Jon Meacham used a nice pair of women's legs to sell his political magazine this week, reducing a powerful, ambitious woman to her shapely body parts, and that's sexism. (JM -- No, that's appropriate commentary. The slur on Meacham's motives is beneath a fellow editor.) (On Twitter, the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel linked to this alleged video of a Newsweek editorial meeting.) It's nice to see a lot of men and women on the right and left agree about something for a change. (JM -- This ignores that they're coming from very different places. On the right, any criticism of Palin is illegitimate, and their cries of sexism, given their stances on other feminist issues, is hollow. On the left, this is political correctness run amok, plain and simple.) Maybe we can agree to get rid of the Stupak amendment! Nah, I didn't think so.

Two excellent points. The GGs deserve much blame for making the BBs a bunch of spoiled, whining babies. QR is on to something about GG vanity and selfishness; many of them indulged their kids as a way of demonstrating to the Joneses that they were rich, richer than their Depression-battered parents. And the BBs do deserve credit for rejecting so many of their parents' Luddite attitudes on race, religion, sexuality, tolerance, individual freedom and so on.

The economic expansion model is not perfect, but I can't imagine another one that could have brought as many billions out of poverty, starvation and ignorance over the past 50 years. Well-off Americans have the luxury -- no, the duty -- to make do with less. But for almost a third of humanity, that's a cruel prescription.

I must be missing something, because QR strikes me as wise. But I am less enraptured than (s)he with the nobility of hundreds of millions of illiterate peasants living on a cup of rice every day. And I laud the Chinese for going green. They'll probably end up showing us the way out of many of our messes. If we can come up with cheap, clean energy and sustainable nutrition supplies, we'll deserve to party like it's 1999.

Hmmm. It's time for another GOP hypocrisy alert. I remember when the party's official position was that filibustering judicial nominations was an abomination.

Remember that Fox's viewership, even in prime time, is smaller than the circulation of a single major metropolitan newspaper. Rush and the other radio hate jocks spread their venom among the same few million converted soreheads every day. In a country where 130 million vote for president, the right-wing media numbers are very, very small potatoes.

From Salon:

I have Palin fatigue already

Her rehab tour is about Sarah Palin Inc. not 2012, but her appeal reflects an anti-elite anger Dems can't ignore

Joan Walsh

Nov. 16, 2009 |

I've gotten e-mail and Twitter messages begging me to ignore Sarah Palin's return to the national conversation, from her Oprah appearance to her book debut to the icky, Sarah-in-shorts Newsweek cover (I sure am glad Jon Meacham decided to make his mag the classy one, all about ideas!) and everything in between. I can't make Salon a Palin-free zone (nor do I want to). All I can do is promise to ban the term "Palinpalooza" from the pages of Salon. Done.

Now that her Oprah appearance is over – and boy, did Oprah let the liberals in her audience down; what a waste! – let me confess to my own Palin fatigue. I just can't take seriously the idea that she'll ever be president, even after her moderately successful softball game with Oprah. Palin sealed that fate when she quit being governor (although maybe she can run with Lou Dobbs on the All Quitters ticket in 2012). She'll never obtain the record or the reliability she needs to run credibly for president now that she gave up the modestly challenging job of running Alaska. I don't see her ever having the self-discipline or the humility to admit how very much she'd need to learn to be remotely qualified.

On top of everything else, she seems like a vindictive, spiteful person, judging from her reputation in Alaska politics, her open warfare with the McCain campaign and her juvenile tit-for-tat with her 19-year-old grandbaby-daddy Levi Johnston. If she can't brush off Levi's provocations, how would she handle Ahmadinejad? Or Joe Lieberman? I'll even allow that there's some sexism in the equation: Women suffer more from being perceived as vindictive and spiteful than men do. (It clearly didn't stop George W. Bush or John McCain.) Not fair; still true. But to be completely fair, McCain and even Bush accomplished more than Palin in the same life span, which maybe made their vindictiveness a little bit less defining than hers.

The main reason not to fear a President Palin can be seen in recent polling among independents and moderates. In a the most current ABC News/Washington Post poll, Greg Sargent drilled down to find that: only 37 percent of independents and 30 percent of self-described moderates think she’s qualified for the presidency, and 58 percent of moderates view her unfavorably. Even more intriguing (but not surprising): Palin's approval rating with men is higher than with women, 48 percent to 39 percent, and just a third of women believe she'd be qualified to be our first female president. (So much for Palin's appeal to Hillary Clinton fans!)

So I think the Sarah Palin rehab tour is more about Sarah Palin Inc. than Sarah Palin 2012. She'll rack up the speaking fees, raise some money for red-state, red-meat Republicans, further polarize the party and live the high life she thinks she deserves. Still, even as I dismiss Palin as a serious GOP threat, increasingly I believe that the faux-populism of the right is something to worry about. It may be fun to mock Sarah Palin, but Democrats shouldn't laugh at many of the people who admire her – who see a folksy, new kind of self-made mom trying to fight the bad old Eastern elites.

Two great blog posts last week made me worry: Timothy Egan's "The Betrayal," and my friend Digby's "What if they don't," about how liberals are too complacent that moderate Republicans and the rest of the country will laugh off the likes of Palin, Dobbs, Tom Tancredo and all the silly nutjobs who listen to them.

Egan intensified my growing fear that Democrats may be unable to ride the rising tide of populist rage, given their ties to Wall Street and K Street. "If health care reform gives people a choice, and doesn’t just fatten the rolls of insurance companies, it will be something to run on," Egan wrote. "If the recovery helps millions of people who don’t have a well-staffed lobby in Washington, it too will be a plus." But Egan made a good case that the party increasingly identified with Goldman Sachs may well pay at the polls nationwide in 2010, as Jon Corzine did in New Jersey this month.

So while I'm not worried about President Palin, I remain worried about President Obama. I'm particularly concerned that his increasingly triangulating, anti-deficit administration will do the wrong thing, morally and politically, and move to the right, without understanding that some right-wing rage could be rechanneled by acknowledging its roots: That the economic system seems rigged for the have-a-lots v. the have-a-littles, and despite their promises, the Democrats haven't done enough to change that. Palin can't change any of that, but Obama can. There's still time for him to do so, but the clock is ticking.



Find embedded links at:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_wal...alin/print.html

We baby boomers had the world handed to us on a platter. Our parents braved machine gun fire to scale Pointe du Hoc. We responded with disco, George W. Bush, boundless debt, stupid wars, lassitude, self-righteous avarice and crumbling schools.

Baby boomers suck. Let's hope the first post-boomer president can save our unworthy butts. From the NYT:

November 17, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Nation of Futurity
By DAVID BROOKS

When European settlers first came to North America, they saw flocks of geese so big that it took them 30 minutes to all take flight and forests that seemed to stretch to infinity. They came to two conclusions: that God's plans for humanity could be completed here, and that they could get really rich in the process.

This moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their energy and workaholism: for moving around, switching jobs, marrying and divorcing, creating new products and going off on righteous crusades.

It may seem like an ephemeral thing, but this eschatological faith in the future has motivated generations of Americans, just as religious faith motivates a missionary. Pioneers and immigrants endured hardship in the present because of their confidence in future plenty. Entrepreneurs start up companies with an exaggerated sense of their chances of success. The faith is the molten core of the country's dynamism.

There are also periodic crises of faith. Today, the rise of China is producing such a crisis. It is not only China's economic growth rate that produces this anxiety. The deeper issue is spiritual. The Chinese, though members of a famously old civilization, seem to possess some of the vigor that once defined the U.S. The Chinese are now an astonishingly optimistic people. Eighty-six percent of Chinese believe their country is headed in the right direction, compared with 37 percent of Americans.

The Chinese now have lavish faith in their scientific and technological potential. Newsweek and Intel just reported the results of their Global Innovation Survey. Only 22 percent of the Chinese believe their country is an innovation leader now, but 63 percent are confident that their country will be the global technology leader within 30 years. The majority of the Chinese believe that China will produce the next society-changing innovation, while only a third of Americans believe the next breakthrough will happen here, according to the survey.

The Cultural Revolution seems to have produced among the Chinese the same sort of manic drive that the pioneer and immigrant experiences produced among the Americans. The people who endured Mao's horror have seen the worst life has to offer and are now driven to build some secure footing. At the same time, they and their children seem inflamed by the experience of living through so much progress so quickly.

"Do you understand?" one party official in Shanxi Province told James Fallows of The Atlantic, "If it had not been for Deng Xiaoping, I would be behind an ox in a field right now. ... Do you understand how different this is? My mother has bound feet!"

The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we're supposed to have. It's not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It's the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It's the faith in the future, which is actually more important.

China, where President Obama is visiting, invites a certain sort of reverie. It is natural, looking over the construction cranes, to think about the flow of history over decades, not just day to day. And it becomes obvious by comparison just how far the U.S. has drifted from its normal future-centered orientation and how much this rankles.

The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.

Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That's no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control.

The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it's not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined. Instead, Americans probably postponed gratification because they thought the future was a big rock-candy mountain, and if they were stealing from that, they were robbing themselves of something stupendous.

It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative. It would mean creating regional strategies, because innovation happens in geographic clusters, not at the national level. It would mean finding ways to tamp down consumption and reward production. The most pragmatic guide for that remains Michael Porter's essay in the Oct. 30, 2008, issue of Business Week.

As the financial crises ease, it would be nice if Americans would once again start looking to the horizon.

Worry not. Obama's numbers are still very high at what is surely the bottom of the recession and during a very tough health care fight. These soreheads are loud, but not very numerous. It'll be Obama, Take Two, in an even bigger landslide.

Next target: The 22nd Amendment!

Bravo! Even George Will has had it with the right's "The Surge Worked!" triumphalism. From the WaPo


One Way Or Another, Leaving Iraq

By George F. Will


Since U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq's cities, two months have passed, and so has the illusion that Iraq is smoothly transitioning to a normality free of sectarian violence. Recently, Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. troops there, "blanched" when asked if the war is "functionally over." According to The Post's Greg Jaffe, Odierno said:

"There are still civilians being killed in Iraq. We still have people that are attempting to attack the new Iraqi order and the move towards democracy and a more open economy. So we still have some work to do."

No, we don't, even if, as Jaffe reports, the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops "serves as a check on Iraqi military and political leaders' baser and more sectarian instincts." After almost 6 1/2 years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the U.S. military -- overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation -- to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites. If there is a worse use of the U.S. military than "nation-building," it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples' politicians.

More than 725 Iraqis have been killed by terrorism since the June 30 pullback of U.S. forces from the cities. All U.S. combat units are to be withdrawn from the country within a year. Up to 50,000 can remain as "advisers" to an Iraqi government that is ostentatious about its belief that the presence of U.S. forces is superfluous and obnoxious.

The advisers are to leave by the end of 2011, by which time the final two years of the U.S. military presence will have achieved . . . what? Already that presence is irrelevant to the rising chaos, which the Iraqi government can neither contain nor refrain from participating in: Security forces seem to have been involved in the recent robbery of a state-run bank in central Baghdad.

Post columnist David Ignatius correctly argues that "without the backstop of U.S. support," Iraq is "desperately vulnerable" to Iranian pressure. He also reports, however, that an Iraqi intelligence official says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's links with Iran are so close that he "uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel." Whenever U.S. forces leave, Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor.

Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, writing in the National Interest, notes that although rising Iraqi nationalism might help "heal the rifts between Sunni and Shia," it also might exacerbate relations with the Kurdish semi-state in northern Iraq, where control of much oil and the city of Kirkuk is being contested.

The militia parties that ruled Iraq from 2003 to 2007 remain, Pollack says, the major political parties, although mostly without militias. They "still bribe and extort," "assassinate and kidnap," "steal and vandalize" and try to prevent the emergence of new political parties that are "more secular, more democratic, more representative, less corrupt and less violent." If they succeed and "America is forced out," Pollack says, "the glimmers of democracy will fade and Iraq will be lost again." But if democracy is still just a glimmer that will be extinguished by the withdrawal of a protective U.S. presence, its extinction can perhaps be delayed for two more years but cannot be prevented.

The 2008 U.S.-Iraq security agreement must be submitted to a referendum by the Iraqi people. If they reject it, U.S. forces must leave the country in a year. Pollack believes that if Maliki pushes to hold the referendum in January, coinciding with the national elections, the agreement will become the campaign issue and will indicate that Maliki wants U.S. forces removed in order to enlarge his freedom of action. The United States should treat this as a Dirty Harry Moment: Make our day.

Many scholars believe, Pollack says, that nations that suffer civil wars as large as Iraq's between 2004 and 2006 have "a terrifyingly high rate of recidivism." Two more years of U.S. military presence cannot control whether that is in Iraq's future. Some people believe the war in Iraq was not only "won," but vindicated by the success of the 2007 U.S. troop surge. Yet as Iraqi violence is resurgent, the logic of triumphalism leads here:

If, in spite of contrary evidence, the U.S. surge permanently dampened sectarian violence, all U.S. forces can come home sooner than the end of 2011. If, however, the surge did not so succeed, U.S. forces must come home sooner.

georgewill@washpost.com

Fred Kaplan of Slate is still making lots of sense:

politics
Obama's Real Afghanistan Decision
It's not how many troops to send; it's what those troops will do.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009, at 4:30 PM ET

Eight months and eight national-security meetings after announcing a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan and sending the first wave of additional troops, President Barack Obama stands on the verge of deciding whether that strategy was right and how many, if any, more soldiers to send.

Why has he taken so long, and what did he and his advisers discuss in all those meetings that each went on for hours? Obama hinted at some of the answers in an interview this week with ABC News' Jake Tapper.

Tapper asked the president why he didn't simply accept the recommendation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to deploy 40,000 more troops.

Obama replied that he'd asked McChrystal, other commanders, and civilian specialists "a lot of questions" in order to avoid "a situation in which we resource something based on faulty premises." He added, "I wanted to make sure that we have tested all the assumptions that we're making before we send young men and women into harm's way."

The first of these assumptions, he said, is that sending more troops really would reduce al-Qaida's ability "to attack the U.S. homeland."

It is, of course, this assumption that makes Americans at all interested in the fate of Afghanistan. The main rationale for staying in the war has always been that if Kabul fell to the Taliban, al-Qaida terrorists would once again move in and use the country as a "sanctuary" or "safe haven" from which to plan attacks on the United States, as they did on Sept. 11, 2001.

However, this theory isn't as airtight as it may seem. Andrew Exum, a counterinsurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security—as well as a former special-operations officer and an ambivalent advocate of sending more troops to Afghanistan—doubts the whole concept of a "safe haven." Al-Qaida or other anti-American terrorists could organize attacks right now in Somalia, Sudan, the northwestern frontier of Pakistan—or, for that matter, in certain neighborhoods of Paris, London, or New York City—so, it's worth asking, does securing Afghanistan make us any safer?

Similarly, Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, who "only barely" supports escalating the war, argues that 9/11 is the weakest rationale for such a policy; that the real threat is the impact that a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan might have on the security of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

One could make a case that this concern alone justifies sending more troops, but it's a tough case to make politically. Could, or should, any president argue for escalating a war—spending hundreds of billions of dollars and losing possibly thousands of American lives—on a hunch about a hypothesis? (Even Biddle acknowledges that the causal link between Afghanistan falling and al-Qaida taking over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is far from direct or certain.)

But if Obama sends fewer troops than his commanders want, and if we're then attacked by terrorists again, he will be blamed—perhaps appropriately, perhaps not.

Another assumption Obama said he wanted to test is that sending more troops would enhance "the prospects of a functioning Afghan government" and that the Afghan military and police wind up "carrying the burden of their own security."

This test strikes at the core of counterinsurgency strategy, which Obama endorsed (sort of, in theory) last March and which McChrystal now says he needs 40,000 more troops to implement.

Counterinsurgency involves protecting the local population from insurgency groups, so that the national government is better able to provide basic services, thus winning popular support and undermining the insurgents' appeal. If the government is particularly corrupt or incompetent, it won't be able to build on the security wrought by a good counterinsurgency campaign, thus nullifying our success and sacrifice.

For this reason, Obama has expressed deep concerns over the fact that Afghan President Hamid Karzai's regime is riddled with corruption. So, to varying degrees, have Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as well as McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command.

In the past week, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, sent two classified cables to Obama, urging him not to send more troops until Karzai has cleaned up his act. Eikenberry's views were debated at this week's national security meeting and may have prodded Obama to demand that his commanders re- gauge their memo on military options to include estimates not only on how many troops and how much money each option would require but also on an exit strategy—how long it might take for the Afghan forces to provide security on their own.

It may be impossible to make such a prediction, but that might only heighten suspicions that counterinsurgency is futile from the get-go.

Some advocates of the strategy have cautioned that counterinsurgency campaigns take years, even decades, to bear fruit. In his interview with ABC's Tapper, Obama emphasized that he has no interest in buying into that sort of campaign. We are not looking "at an indefinite stay" or a "permanent protectorate," he said. "That, I think, would be unsustainable." And earlier in the interview he said that, "whatever investments we make," he's obligated to make sure that they are "sustainable."

In the meantime, Obama told Tapper that he and his advisers "are identifying not just a national government in Kabul but provincial government actors that have legitimacy in the right now."

This suggests that Obama is seeking ways to go around the central government—striking separate deals with provincial leaders or providing more or less intensive levels of support—if Karzai proves to be a feeble partner in our counterinsurgency campaign. Or it might suggest one way to exert leverage over Karzai—to make clear that we will empower regional players, and thus weaken his own standing, if he doesn't clean up his act, thus making his regime more legitimate in the eyes of his people and therefore better able to beat the Taliban in the competition for hearts and minds.

None of Obama's remarks foretell what he will decide. His aides insist that he hasn't yet made up his mind on the big questions about Afghanistan and that all news reports to the contrary are untrue.

The point, though, is that, contrary to the media's incessant focus on numbers, this has never been a decision primarily about troop levels. Last summer, retired Gen. Colin Powell advised Obama that the key question was not how many troops to send but what those troops should do—and that this was primarily his decision, not some general's. Obama seems to be following that advice.

The military commanders have reportedly put four options on the table. News stories have emphasized how many more troops each option entails, ranging from 10,000 to 40,000. (Some accounts have put the highest requests at 44,000 or even 80,000, though it's widely assumed that those numbers are way out of line and may, in fact, have been put there simply to make 40,000—McChrystal's real desire—seem like a middle course.)

But all these numbers merely reflect the real, underlying set of options, which concern, as Powell put it, what we should be doing in Afghanistan—what we can do, what we can't, what we should try, what we shouldn't bother trying, and the risks of doing or not doing each one.

That's what the drawn-out discussions have been about, that's (in part) why it's taken so much time. According to some officials, after each of the eight sessions, Obama has been dissatisfied with the answers at some level and has hammered them to bring back more detail the next time—on the state of the Afghan army, on the impact that various deployments would have on the state of the U.S. Army, on a province-by-province breakdown of Afghan politics and security. All these questions directly, even crucially, affect calculations of acceptable risk or clear futility—the chances of success or failure.

In his ABC interview, the president said he's now satisfied "there's not an important question out there that has not been asked and that we haven't answered to the best of our abilities," and, as a result of this process, he will feel "much more confident" about whatever orders he ends up issuing.

Obama may have inherited this war, but it's about to become his war and his alone. The least we can allow him is a sense of confidence in his first crucial judgment. Then, as he must know, the fight on all fronts begins.
Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2235362/

This is all consistent with Obama's openly described approach: Drop the belicosity, but tighten the economic sanctions in hopes Iran will become more compliant in negotiations on its nuke program.

Be sure to read all the alternate captions for this photo. Many of them, particulary the prurient, are hilarious.

Hang in there, C, and let's hope help is on the way...

My sister, who has worked for 35 years in the mental health field, makes an observation that might be relevant: Post-graduate psychology students are far more likely than the general population to suffer from emotional problems. Their immersion in the discipline is usually the result, not the cause, of their ailments.