Generals and politics.

I have a couple of comments to add to Dave's take on the article by Paul Yingling in Armed Forces Journal blasting the state of U.S. generalship.

Without calling anybody out (e.g. Tommy Franks) Yingling argues that the failure of the U.S. generalship to plan for and to adequately advise civilian leadership on the risks and difficulties of invading Iraq and managing the aftermath. And, under the heading "The Generals We Need" he says the problem is institutional: the U.S. procedure for promoting generals is broken:

Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America's general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer's potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer's advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.


Yingling says the responsibility for fixing the way generals are selected, promoted, protected and held accountable goes to Congress. He thinks Congress should force the armed services to focus more on the view of subordinates and peers, rather than just superiors, in evaluating and promoting generals; that the Senate in their confirmation process and evaluation should pay more attention to their academic and non-military credentials in subjects like languages and humanities; and (of course), both Houses should force the generals to speak more candidly in hearings about the costs and complexities of war. Maybe more interesting, he suggests that Congress burnish more liberally its already existent right to strip or demote rank from retiring three- or four-star generals whose performance was obviously poor or scandalous.

The bit about generals and the Executive, though, made me think about Lawrence Kaplan's article from three years ago on the politicization of the office corps:

...If the pattern of senior officers retiring and endorsing candidates becomes the norm, it won't be long before generals find themselves promoted on the basis of political affiliation rather than expertise. What president, after all, would want advice from an officer who, a year from now, might be denouncing him on the Today show? (The Clinton team didn't; in at least one instance, it asked a candidate for promotion what party he belonged to.) Politicization, then, creates the danger that presidents will end up with yes-men rather than military professionals, a phenomenon whose downsides became famously apparent when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor surrendered his critical faculties during the run-up to the war in Vietnam.

The politicization also may have a longer-term pernicious effect. There is a reason--beyond the Constitution--that political neutrality and military professionalism go hand in hand: As the nonpartisan ethos of the Armed Forces weakens, so, too, can traditional measures of military effectiveness. "Politicization erodes the cohesion, morale, and professional dedication of the officer corps," says Kohn, who points to a hemorrhage of officers during the Clinton era as evidence of what follows when the military adopts partisan views and expectations. And it has: According to a survey taken by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies before the 2000 election, 64 percent of officers identify with the Republican Party, twice the percentage who did two decades before, and only 8 percent list themselves as Democrats. Given recent history, this may stand to reason. But, now more than ever, the Armed Forces need to be able to retain officers, maintain morale, and operate effectively, regardless of the party in the White House.


A couple of things. First, that 64-8 ratio had likely changed considerably by the 2004 election and certainly by the advent of the post-Rumsfeld era. Second, Kaplan (a neocon) traces the seeking of partisan help within the military mainly to the past fifteen years and the Clinton Administration's need to create at least some allies in the officer corps, which doesn't jibe entirely with Yingling's argument that the failures in Iraq more or less perfectly shadow those in Vietnam. Third, the generals in question are retired -- though the ability to become a political player in retirement can still be a pretty big incentive in a general's life.

Still, the scenario makes sense. The hawkishness of the two parties is currently more or less the inverse of what it was in the mid 60s (with one moderately hawkish and one very hawkish party), but partisanship in America, at least in terms of the unlikelihood of voting against party ID or switching votes in consecutive presidential elections, is higher than ever. America really is two cultural/political blocs, though the blocs themselves are pretty diverse. So the notion of Republican generals afraid or disinclined to speak against a Republican president who they identify as representing and respecting their, and their institution's best interests, is pretty credible. And scary. Bush might be a "bad apple", but he still represents the "good barrel" for generals. If there's any chance you might be proved wrong by events and held accountable by future Republican administrations or campaigns, you don't speak against him or his plans publicly. (Or, like Tony McPeak or John Shalikashvili in 2004, you break entirely and line up with the opposition, like going through a messy divorce.) The Bushies are bad enough at lining up hacks and yes-men; they, and their successors, hardly need the yes-man incentive built into the military structures from which they draw.

Love story.

Ezra, singing the praises of Prince Charles, links to this great, great two-year-old article by Michael Kinsley about Charles and Camilla. I love it so much I just have to link it without comment (or at least without much comment on how I generally find the whole notion of British royalty boring and discomfiting, and how a little genuine eccentricity can save just about anything).

Annoy the media...

Paul Waldman is right: Roger Simon's (no "L")'s fond rememberance of the Dukakis-Bush 1988 debate is gag-inducing, especially Shaw's sanctimonious view of himself as some sort of dragon-slayer.

Shaw, of course, famously asked Dukakis about whether he would reverse his stance on the death penalty if his wife Kitty was violently murdered. Dukakis foolishly failed to realize he was in fact at an audition for the high school play rather than a policy debate and was destroyed in the press for his lack of virility.

But the real kicker in Simon's account is what Shaw was apparently planning on asking Bush:

Shaw was in Washington and had gotten the call at 1:45 p.m. on a Tuesday that he was going to be the moderator for the Thursday night debate. So as he rushed out the door to catch a limo to Dulles Airport for the flight to Los Angeles, he grabbed a book on the Constitution.

On the ride to Dulles, he flipped through it and came upon the 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, which declared that on Inauguration Day, if "the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become president."

That would be his question to Bush: If he were elected and died before Inauguration Day, how would he feel about Dan Quayle's becoming president?


With apologies to Bob Somerby, it's hard to imagine anything dumber -- or, frankly, easier for the candidate to answer. What was Bush going to do other than trot out the standard "I have complete confidence..." line he'd almost certainly spewed 1000 times by the time of the second debate? Meanwhile, the question itself was simply a straight-up "liberal-media" giveaway to the right (remember "Annoy the Media: Vote Bush" from four years later?). Quayle had been brought on to represent the social conservative old-fashioned-GOP-values wing of the party in contrast to the moderate "quiet man who hears the quiet people" Bush. Insulting his intelligence was (frankly, with some justification, given the mental midgetry of the people doing the insulting) tantamount in conservative ideology to blowing off the values he was on the ticket to represent.

Waldman says:

There's an unbroken line between Shaw, and Kit Seelye and Ceci Connolly making up lies Al Gore never told, and Jodi Wilgoren musing on John Kerry's windsurfing, and Maureen Dowd< writing about John Edwards' haircut, and on and on and on into this campaign and the next and the next. It's not about substance, and it isn't even about "character." It's about finding what reporters think is the worst thing about a candidate, and picking and picking at it until their evident belief that it should disqualify him from the presidency becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's nothing to be proud of, and if Bernard Shaw thinks there's some parallel between his brand of questioning and what Edward R. Murrow did, he's truly deluded.


Amen.

It never ends.

The conservative faux-patriotic outrage I mean. For context, Mark Levin thinks Harry Reid is far more deserving of professional termination that Alberto Gonzales:

Far more relevant, consequential and disturbing is the behavior of the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, who by word and action is actively undermining our fighting men and women in Iraq. His legislative efforts to starve our armed forces in the middle of a war are as contemptible as anything I’ve witnessed in my 25 years in Washington. And yesterday he made a statement that was so disgraceful and brazen that it could have been uttered by Tokyo Rose during World War II or Jane Fonda during the Vietnam War. The difference, of course, is that Reid is the highest ranking Democrat in the United States Senate.

For those who are so pre-occupied with Gonzales that they may not have heard it, this is what Reid said yesterday: "I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week."


This seems like a good time to link again to Digby's old post about Tokyo Rose. The real difference is that Reid, unlike Iva Tokuri, isn't engaging in propoganda under any sort of duress. He's engaging in uncoerced political debate of the type National Review conservatives can't fucking stand.

Education and knowledge.

Via Ezra, interesting results from a new Pew Poll:

Distinct patterns emerge when these results are analyzed by key demographic groups. Education proves to be the single best predictor of knowledge. Holding all other factors equal, levels of knowledge rise with each additional year of formal schooling. At the extremes, these educational differences are dramatic: People with postgraduate degrees answer, on average, about 17 of the 23 questions correctly, while those who did not finish high school average only about eight correct answers.


But an increasingly educated American population isn't translating into a more informed public, because the level current-events knowledge is falling across all education groups:

But a deeper analysis of the five identical questions asked in both 1989 and 2007 reveals a surprising pattern: Americans didn't do as well in 2007 compared with how similarly-educated Americans performed in 1989. Across the board, scores declined significantly among college graduates, those with some college as well as for those with a high school education or less.

...What keeps the overall knowledge scores from declining is that college grads still know more than less well-educated Americans - even if they know less in absolute terms than college grads in the past - and there are proportionally more of them now than there were 18 years ago. Currently about 27% of the public are college graduates, compared with 17% in 1989. At the same time, there are fewer people who have only a high school education (50% now compared with 60% in 1989). Education still leads to increased knowledge about prominent people and events in the news - but it does not confer as much of an advantage now as it did in 1989.




Granted, it's a comparison across only five questions, which is problematic given that the distribution across types of question has been changing. (People seem to know more about issues and are less good at name recognition than in the prior survey.) Still, it raises pretty interesting questions. Despite Pew's language, the relative increase in knowledge across the the three education categories appears to have increased slightly between 1989 and 2006. Individuals with a college degree are 44% instead of 39% more likely than somebody with high school or less to answer four or five questions correctly. A simple explanation would be that as Americans get more education on average, more marginal people, in terms of being informed about and involved in society, are entering each education category, pulling down the category averages while the individual effect of education on knowledge of the world remains unchanged. Or maybe there's something more complicated at work.

Dumont and the Constitution

I didn't expect to read this.

What about Bill?

Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber writes about Freaks and Geeks, which he claims (maybe correctly) was "the best thing on American TV in the past 20 years or so". It's at least an arguable position, and the more blog posts that keep the flame alive, the better.

Anyway, to add to add to Jake Kasdan and Harry's comments about whether the geeks "win one" when Sam gets to date Cindy, I think Harry is right that we come out feeling happy for Sam discovering that being a geek isn't so bad. But unfortunately I thought the transformation of the clueless but genuinely un-snobbish Cindy into the shallow bitch Reaganite girlfriend who deigns to date a "nice guy" was the most inconsistent part of the show. The point wasn't that Sam should have been contemptuous of her; he was just wrong to want her as a girlfriend. In a way, they both made the same mistake. She erred by dumping her own (actually pretty nice) basketball-playing boyfriend and he erred by wanting to run with a crowd whose values and activities he wasn't comfortable with. Isn't that the real lesson of achieving maturity -- that social constructs become less important at defining us and everything we do (freaks, geeks, cool kids, losers) but that we still choose to be around the people who make us happiest?

Anyway, the better part of the show to me was that the real "winner" among the geeks -- the guy who doesn't screw up like Sam and Neil -- is Bill. Bill "wins" in the conventional sense -- he gets to make out with Vicky, who turns out to like it. And he prevails against the bully, Alan, in the coolest/sweetest scene I've ever seen on TV. But Bill, unlike Sam, does it by knowing his place and liking it. He is a geek, and while he doesn't think he deserves to be bullied or looked down on for it, he doesn't think the solution is to be something other than he is, but to convince others to understand and care for him. That's maybe better than life usually is like, but it's sure the sort of smart, empowering message you rarely get from TV.

Lost marbles.

Via The Plank, John Derbyshire blames the humiliating death-free outcome of the British sailers incident on rampant multiculturalism:

How on earth can Britons behave like that? A previous generation would not have done so. I knew the women of my mother’s generation pretty well (Mum was born in 1912), and I am certain that any one of them, given that headscarf and told to put it on, would have said: “You can hang me with it if you like, but I’ll be damned if I’ll wear the filthy thing.” The men likewise. What on earth has happened to the British?

...What has happened is multiculturalism. The British no longer feel that contempt for other nations that sustained them for so many centuries. Or, if they feel it, they guiltily suppress that feeling, as being flagitiously “racist.”


The soldiers co-operated with the Iranians, put on headscarfs and Ahmadinejad suits, and appeared on Iranian television because they were afraid otherwise they'd be accused of being racists! Of course! But fear not, conservatives, Derbyshire's upper lip at least has never been stiffer.

A little foresight...

At the end of yesterday's devastating NYT article on John McCain's "market stroll" in Baghdad, Kirk Semple wrote:

Several merchants said Monday that the Americans’ visit might have only made the market a more inviting target for insurgents.

“Every time the government announces anything — that the electricity is good or the water supply is good — the insurgents come to attack it immediately,” said Abu Samer, 49, who would give only his nickname out of concern for his safety.


Sure enough, via a diarist named oznick at Daily Kos, the London Times is reporting that:

21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital. The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.


And just to make the whole thing extra special:

More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in the past week despite a US-Iraqi security plan to quell violence in the capital. Most of the killings have been the result of truck bombs outside Baghdad.

Mr McCain said that the situation was showing signs of improvement and blamed waning support in the United States for the war on the media, which were portraying an overly negative image of the crisis.


Sorry, but McCain has proved once and for all that he doesn't have either the sense or the decency to be president. If he really believes the media is making the situation worse by portraying everything in a negative light, why tempt them to do more of the same with a giant, expensive, obviously manufactured photo op? Most likely because McCain doesn't really believe his own evil-liberal-media rhetoric. He expected reporters to put their affinity for Straight Talk above their purported anti-Iraq War liberal bias and write up his Baghdad stunt straight. Nice how that works, when it works.

But more to the point, how didn't his campaign see the reprisals coming? Attacking the market workers who might have met McCain was an obvious response from insurgents out to give their atrocities the widest possible audience and get them on the U.S. news. McCain and his team were either too dumb -- not to mention out of touch with Iraqis -- to grasp this idea, or too callous to care, again just expecting the pro-McCain press to downplay any violence. Or maybe it was some of both. Either way, let's hope McCain is toast.

Up yours, Canada?

Benjamin Wittes in TNR (emphasis mine):

Of the names being floated publicly [to replace Gonzales], the one with the best shot of threading the needle is Comey's predecessor as deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson. Thompson, now general counsel of Pepsico, managed to emerge from Ashcroft's department with a reputation for good management and professionalism. The Bushies don't hate him, and his name doesn't rile Democrats either. He served as a U.S. attorney earlier in his career as well. Yet even Thompson would not be a worry-free pick. During his prior service in the Justice Department, he approved the deportation of a Syrian-Canadian named Maher Arar to Syria--where Arar claims he was tortured. The administration has tenaciously resisted accounting for this decision, and a Thompson nomination would provide a forum for uncomfortable pressure to do so.


Jeralyn at TalkLeft supports Thompson's nomination among the contenders, and the NYT has deemed Thompson a "moderate". And, given the confusion over what information the U.S. had from the RCMP when Thompson signed off, and the scumbaggedness of his colleagues, I'm even open to the idea that he doesn't deserve anything like the lion's share of the blame for what happened. (Though, frankly, it's pretty hard to see past the fact that he had final sign-off on a rendition of a Canadian citizen to Syria.)

But, but, but...

Arar's claims of torture have been fully accepted by the official Canadian inquiry (in which the U.S. refused to participate). The RCMP Commissioner resigned in disgrace over the case. The government has agreed to pay the Arar family 12.5 million dollars and have demanded the U.S. take Arar off their watch list -- and been rebuked. The entire affair has been a complete disgrace to Canada, and should be to the U.S. as well. Even beyond the very big questions of morality and process involved, wouldn't Thompson's appointment be a diplomatic disaster of epic proportions? Does it even matter?