Mush.

Browsing the Brookings site, I clicked on "A Skeptic's Case for the Surge" and reminded myself why reading "centrist" commentary about Iraq is so depressing. It's just so much mush:

Finally, President Bush is rightly telegraphing to Iraqi leaders that they must reach compromises with each other -- on sharing oil revenue, on reining in militias, on allowing those former Baathists without blood on their hands to regain their opportunities to hold jobs in Iraq. He correctly argues that without progress on such matters, there will be no success in the mission and the American people will continue to lose faith in the effort. This stands in contrast to incorrect comments he made as recently as November, during his trip to Vietnam, when he argued that we could fail in Iraq only if we Americans lose our resolve.

In fact, we need a viable Iraqi partner with broad support across sectarian lines, and American policy must strive to help create that partner.


Vague condemnations of Bush rhetoric, quickly followed by truisms, and above all the implicit assumption that what America "telegraphs" to what remains of the Iraqi government means anything at all. I don't mean to be hard on Micheal O'Hanlon -- my point isn't that his piece is especially bad or uninformed or that his arguments are wrong, just that they're depressingly typical of the genre. His piece convinces me of nothing -- neither that the surge is a good idea or a bad one. Regardless of the merits of the arguments (and, conditional on my limited understanding, I'm torn), those arguing for a withdrawal of troops have an inate rhetorical advantage -- they're demanding something that is both concrete and actually within the U.S.'s power to control.

On the other hand, it's not true that Brookings-type liberal-hawk Iraqi commentators never have anything powerful to say. But, with a few important exceptions I can think of, mainly, reading them reinforces my theory that, when it comes to war, what matters is the initial choice to commit. Once that's over -- especially if the war is being conducted by elements on the political spectrum who don't care what liberals think -- what's left is just the handwaving and the impotence and the farce. And good Lord there's a lot of it.

And now for something totally trivial...

I got a huge procrastination-fuelled kick out of Blender's 50-worst-songs-ever list, mainly because it's actually fairly surprising. And because my personal choice for Worst Song Ever came in at #28, which is always gratifying.

Decent conservatives.

In the course of an otherwise delicious trashing of Dinesh D’Souza's new book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, Alan Wolfe writes:

I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Unfortunately, they have:

The humorlessness (“There is no humor in Islam,” said the Ayatollah Khomeini) and joylessness of Islam manifests the phoniness of its “morality,” a morality that is phony because it is merely the outward face of hidden decadence. Does Dinesh D’Souze not know that Saudi Arabia, where “morality” on the street is a function of the mutawwa, the Saudi version of religious enforcers for which there are analogues in other Muslim countries with rigorously faith-based legal systems, the real behavior of any Saudi who can get away with it is far more decadent than anything that could be dreamed up by the most decadent Westerners? Has he no idea how Saudis and other rich Arabs behave in the capitals of the West? Does he not know what they all do behind their palace walls in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E.? What does he think goes on? And aside from the sexual behavior, what does he make of the camel-racing in which four and five year old boys, Pakistanis for the most part, are tied to the camels, and frequently are severely wounded or killed, and are treated as expendable beings, as are so many non-Arabs all over those horrific countries?

...And so on and so forth. No, I'm not defending camel-racing or suggesting the Middle East isn't screwed up, but D’Souza's book is actually the perfect foil for hatin' on the A-raabs while earning mod points for trashing a nutball of the right.


By the way, wondering where D'Souza's mind has been wandering in the meantime? Porn. (Purely condemnatory of course! And careful of the link; it's got one of those hidden pop-up ad things.)

Understatement.

Michael Currie Schaffer's point that "the jarring thing about the Iraqi executions wasn't that they were so different from ours; it was that they were so familiar" is well taken. Except one could go further and argue that both Iraqi executions actually went well by recent American standards. Sure, Saddam had a bunch of Shia goons chanting the name of the son of an old political enemy at him, but there was no physical abuse, and the actual execution (somebody who watched it backs me up) was technically perfect; Saddam died when the rope snapped his neck. Half-brother Ibrahim's hanging was messier, but it too was instant. (Not to be macabre, but it would have been far, far worse if the rope hadn't been long enough.)

Compare that to the state of U.S. capital punishment. There was the recent botched execution of Angel Diaz in Florida (one of 53 U.S. executions this year) in which the victim took half an hour to die of potassium chloride circulating to the heart. And a District Court's contemporaneous decision that California's system of lethal injection is "broken". And however circus-like Saddam's trial was, his guilt in the global sense was never in doubt. Unlike various U.S. cases. All of which, as Currie points out, makes the official indignation and handwringing over the Iraqi executions look both clueless and cynical.

Good fucking God (reprise)...

Martin Peretz, riffing on his blog:

Who knows what animates Gorbachev? Maybe he hopes just to be remembered. He won't be. Certainly not by the Russian people. A passing figure. Not even one on whom American colleges will bestow honorary degrees.


That's just too wacky. Here's the first hit on Google for "Gorbachev Honorary degree". And that he won't be remembered by the Russian people? Maybe not fondly, but my guess is he'll be remembered. And the Europeans like him. Of course to Marty, that's probably a big minus...

Health in the Third World.

My favourite coffee shop is a place called THINK because it serves tasty tuna-artichoke sandwiches, chocolate-flavoured herbal tea, and often plays music I own on its soundsystem. (I'm one of those sad sacks who gets a huge kick out of hearing music I own played in public.) They also subscribe to Foreign Affairs which is how I found this fascinating article by Laurie Garrett on the health crisis in the Third World.

Garrett argues that the global focus on AIDS is having adverse effects on health infrastructure-building and primary care in the Third World. For instance, in Haiti, "the past several years have witnessed the successful provision of antiretroviral treatment to more than 5,000 needy Haitians, and between 2002 and 2006, the prevalence of HIV in the country plummeted from six percent to three percent. But during the same period, Haiti actually went backward on every other health indicator."

In part, this is because the influx of foreign money into AIDS clinics and the like discourages governments from integrating these specialty clinics into their public health system, creating a sort of two-tiered health system for people with and without HIV. Another problem is the effect on health personnel:

Compounding the problem are the recruitment activities of Western NGOs and OECD-supported programs inside poor countries, which poach local talent...PEPFAR-funded programs, UN agencies, other rich-country government agencies, and NGOs routinely augment the base salaries of local staff with benefits such as housing and education subsidies, frequently bringing their employees' effective wages to a hundred times what they could earn at government-run clinics.


A concrete example of why "stovepiping" can be a problem comes from West Africa:

There is also an intimate relationship between HIV and malaria, particularly for pregnant women: being infected with one exacerbates cases of the other. Physicians administering ARVs in West Africa have noticed a resurgence of clinical leprosy and hepatitis C, as latent infections paradoxically surge in patients whose HIV is controlled by medicine. HIV-positive children face a greater risk of dying from vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, polio, and typhoid fever, if they have not been immunized than do those nonimmunized children without HIV. But if financial constraints force health-care workers to reuse syringes for a mass vaccination campaign in a community with a Vulindlela-like HIV prevalence, they will almost certainly spread HIV among the patients they vaccinate.


This seems to complement a bit something Brad Plumer wrote a couple of weeks ago, commenting on another recent article about AIDS in Africa:

Oster discovered that the difference between HIV infections rates in the United States and Africa can be largely explained by a greater prevalence of other STDs, especially herpes, in Africa. Because many STDs cause open sores, HIV transmission is four to five times more likely for each sexual encounter in Africa. If Oster's right, that means that one of the most effective HIV-prevention program might actually be to just treat those other STDs. The good news is that herpes, say, can be treated for as little as $3.50 a year, as opposed to the $300 a year it costs to treat AIDS. And it could save more lives. Although it's not clear that donors would get as enthused about opening their checkbook to pay for herpes treatment.


Garrett writes some stuff about encouraging health profit-centers and working to make the Third World self-sufficient in health that didn't strike me as particularly realistic, considering that African countries have doubled and in some cases quadrupled their own health spending over the past decade without yet much affecting outcomes. But the points on the dangers of stovepiping, and the potential benefits of redirecting resources toward a broader health picture, are well-taken.

Meanwhile...

It's been a bad week for the conservative side of the blogosophere (so bad that Ward Churchill is right now making an emergency appearance on Pajamas Media's front page). Plus, Dave finds some comedy gold over at Power Line.

"Illiberal leftists and reactionary progressives."

Man, Joe Klein is really something else. Since he started posting at TIME's new group blog, he's managed to piss off the liberal blogosphere again (with this post, attacking Paul Krugman, which can always be dangerous). How bad was it? As Klein tells it, he attracted "24 mostly mingy comments about [his] Left Behind post, many of which seem to be steaming off a post by Greg Sargent, who writes a blog called The Horse's...Mouth." (my link, not Klein's).


Blogging is not for everyone -- and I sympathize. I used to go through days in a cold sweat after Kevin Drum or Ezra would link to me, afraid of what people were saying about LWC in their comment sections. But it's important for Klein to realize that the sort of rude, self-righteous, sanctimonious, underinformed screaming he attracted (I assume at least some of it was; I haven't read the comments) isn't a partisan issue. It's more a function of the blogging medium than any kind of stereotypical blogging message. Everybody gets yelled out in cyberspace and the centrists can be as snotty as the ideologues (though snot sounds a bit different when it's harfed from the mainstream).

The fact is, most of the big liberal bloggers take endless shit, from people on their left and people on their right. And they mostly ignore it, suck it up and -- toughest of all -- wade through the insults to search out the good stuff left for them. Really, first basic test of a blogger-commentator's mettle is realizing that the sample of rudeness in your comment section -- or even the occassional smack from another blog -- isn't necessarily representative of your readership or of blogospheric opinion about you. And whining about the abuse is not interesting because it' s the exact same abuse your colleagues take. Though whining is likely to generate more abuse.

Basically, if you start snapping back and referring to anyone who criticizes you as a horse's...ass or an illiberal lefty or whatever without some nice backup facts to explain why they're wrong on the merits (I think Jon Chait has the right take on the issue -- and look he also has 24 comments!) you've sort of revealed yourself as somebody who doesn't get or can't handle the blogging medium. But maybe Klein will toughen up, or, if he's really too delicate to be objective about his critics, get Swampfever's comment section removed.

Muqtada.

Nir Rosen has a very long and gloomy article in Boston Review about the devolution of Iraq into sectarianism over the course of the past three years -- highlighted most recently by the killing of Saddam on a Sunni religious holiday and by the exchange between Saddam and his Shia executioners about Muqtada al-Sadr (Rosen's spelling).

In his piece, Rosen argues that the gradual shift of Muqtada and his militia from implicit to explicit sectarianism in the vein of Zarqawi mirrors the falling apart of the idea of an Iraqi state and the progress toward Shia-Sunni (and interdenominational) civil war in the region. At the end, he suggests that even Muqtada is going to be eclipsed as the symbol of Shiite dominance:

In the summer of 2006 rumors began spreading through Baghdad of a shadowy killer known as Abu Dira, a nickname meaning “the armor bearer.”...All information about this man is based on rumor, but he is said to be in his 30s and called either Salim or Ismail. It is said that he lives in Sadr City but was born in the southern Shia town of Amara. Some say that he is a member of the Mahdi Army and commands hundreds of fighters, but others say that he is a renegade militiaman, out of Muqtada’s control. Some say he was a bodyguard in the former regime but later fled to Iran. Or that he was a guard and torturer in one of Saddam’s prisons. One Web site claims that he controlled the ministry of the interior’s Falcon Brigade, which kidnapped Sunnis from Baghdad’s Zafraniya district. Some say that every time there is an attack on Shias he counts the dead and kills an equal number of Sunnis. Others say he kills a greater number of Sunnis. He is said to kill dozens of Sunnis every day in a remote part of Sadr City by a dam, and he is said to have threatened to fill the craters left from car bombs in Sadr City with the bodies of Sunnis.

...Whether Abu Dira exists or not, the image of a raging, lone killer is prophetic at a time when Muqtada’s control over his militia is uncertain. But this much is clear: the Mahdi Army is the police. It holds all the force of state power.