"What would I do if I were NSA?" Edition part I.

I.
WHAT IS AN NSA?

A few days ago, the oldman kvetched jokingly that Bush was an evil tyrant intent on taking over the world. Part of that musing included the "The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord" a light hearted look at some suggestions for how to deal with the job of being a cinematic-esque evil genius intent on world domination, and how to avoid common pitfalls to such a career path.

Since that post, a great deal of criticism of Dr. Condoleeza Rice the National Security Adviser (BBC) has emerged especially regarding her testifying before the 911 commission (MSNBC). Despite assurances otherwise, this is undoubtedly a precedent setting event. This is not entirely a bad thing however. As the article notes:

***
Part of the problem, he notes, is that the role of the national security adviser has expanded over time - especially since the Nixon administration, when Henry Kissinger held the position - and become much more public, complicating the rationale that originally supported the adviser's immunity from testimony...

"They are in the foreground, they are issuing orders, making decisions - and giving public statements all the time. And so for the executive branch to take the position that this person can't open his or her mouth without violating executive privilege just seems less and less plausible."
***

If National Security Advisers are out front, giving press briefings, going on talk shows, advocating policies, then they are acting as political officials of the executive branch and deserve a certain degree of public scrutiny. This is not exactly an separation of powers issue since the commission is not an arm of Congress (hat tip to Talking Points Memo).

II.
"IT'S ALIVE!" OR WHO'S TO BLAME,

To put the critcisim of Dr. Rice in perspective, here is a Salon piece from 2000 referring to "Condi" Rice as "Bush's secret weapon". More recently, as Daniel Drezner discusses the National Security Council has fallen into disrepute with blame falling variously to Cheney taking it over, Condi being too weak a NSA to deal with headstrong principals, Bush being asleep at the wheel, etc.

The oldman's reponse to which reason is at fault is "Yes,".

Ultimately the POTUS is responsible as the primary elected executive official. If he's not willing or able for whatever reason to run the national security and foreign policy shop, then it's up to him to select and support an individual who will speak and act on his behalf. Since right now, the division of labor is one part Condeleeza Rice babysitting the Prez and one part Cheney running amok by stepping into the power vacuum then the blame for that falls squarely on GW's shoulders.

For those apologists who suggest a Kerry ticket would be worse as an unknown than another four years of Bush-Cheney, just imagine what things will be like when Rice steps down as she says she wants to, and Colin Powell leaves as he had indicated he probably will in private. Before betting on another four years of Bush, we should ask who is he going to get to replace these two and what the NSC would look like with Cheney and Rumsfeld left unchecked.

If Bush were to either tell Dick to step down on medical grounds "to spend more time with his family," or to stop coming to meetings and play more golf, and replace Rice with someone expected to do the NSA's job, and a moderate like Armitage to replace Powell then I would strongly consider voting for Bush. A few more changes, and that would clinch it for me - especially if he replaced Cheney with somebody like Guiliani as Kelli suggested on Drezner's blog. Even more so if he dumped Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith. Pick Barry McCaffery or even Shinseki for Sec. Def for crying out loud. Somebody. Anybody but a neo-con! (the only exceptions I might take is Robert Kagan or Bill Kristol,).

I am a Republican at heart afterall, but I regard the liklihood of such a last minute Pauline conversion as low. Given how unlikely such a change of heart would be ("I've seen the light! And will be a Pragmatic Republican hence forth, not dividing the nation but appointing competent officials to increase its security and prosperity!") and with the cabinet constructed as it is now, I'd have to say that a Democrat I immensely dislike is better than a Republican likely to run the country into the ground. And truly, I have no love for Kerry.

III.
SO WHAT WOULD YOU DO BETTER?

While we're on the subject of fantasizing about a pragmatic Republican leadership and cabinet, let's continue in this vein and ask just what would the oldman do if he were NSA? Well the first thing would be to hire somebody else to babysit Bush and instead do the NSA's job. What is the NSA's job you ask? To Advise The President On National Security And Foreign Policy, And Carry Out The President's Directives Through Leading The National Security Council. Note, no babysitting in that discussion. The President does not need a friend. The President does not need somebody to "hang with". He can appoint a friend if he feels the need for a buddy. The National Security Adviser's job is forming and executing policies furthering the National Security Interests of the United States of America. That clear enough? Great, let's get to some details now.

Swopa at Needlenose blog has argued that the structure of the Interim government is botched. Additionally, Talking Points Memo among many sources has documented how we have appointed corrupt ineffective schemers to run Iraq, furthermore Iraqis regard the appointed IGC members as useless and corrupt puppets.

So besides putting a lot more time in on the escalating Taiwanese Crisis (Oldman1787), getting more money to Russian nukes (GAO) to get them off the market, focusing on directly targeting Alqueda and bin Ladin, the oldman would do the following regarding the Interim Authority in Iraq:

IV.
The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became NSA #2

Let's first assume we really picked just the wrong guys. My notion is to pick a representative "Senate" or "house of lords" with 100 members from all native parts of Iraqi society - the tribes, a few clerics, high standing women, that's roughly proportional to the demographics of Iraqs (a few Turkmen, etc.).

Their job would be to act as a legislature. Then they set up a series of elections to elect a "house of reps" or "house of commons". The house of commons picks a Prime minister and forms a government by coalition - let's say 60% required.

Veto power would reside in a separate President, with 2/3rd majority in both parts of the bicameral legislature to overcome it. Initially, the appointed head of the US occupation would stand in for the President temporarily.

After the house of commons becomes elected, then they devise an electoral system for the upper house. Then the upper house elects by 2/3rds majority the President.

Then the US head of occupation steps aside.

In the meantime, the US head and eventually PM would propose legislation that would govern Iraq. It's probably the most stable and fair way to do things. It's the elections in the upper house that would be tricky, how to keep it representative. Perhaps like the house of lords, it could remain by fiat or appointment for some time as a hedge against demogogery.

The house of commons would be entirely responsible for writing the constitution, and passing most long term laws. The ruling coalition (60% say) would form the government, and run the bueracracy.

This proposal draws from features in our own government, the British system, and democracies around the world. It includes direct election of representatives, probably on a provincial basis, and the formation of the bureaucratic heads of government based on a coalition system. Party affiliation would not be necessary however, so it wouldn't be how the house of commons was elected. Perhaps a national party electoral system for the upper house or Senate would be appropriate since this would guarantee eventual proportional representation.

The Prime Minister as the head executive figure would be powerful and capable of introducing legislation, but he would be constrained by the formal head of state the President whom the 2/3rds consensus figure in the Senate would guarentee that he would be a moderating force. With the veto requiring two thirds majority in both houses to overcome, this would put the scotch to a Shia theocratic state as long as the minorities stuck together. Indeed, playing the the moderates versus the hardliners among the Shias, the Kurds and Sunnis could get their agendas passed.

The rest of the parlimentarian and legislature rules, as well as sticky questions about Federalism and localism can probably be hashed out through the "House of Commons" and then ratified by 2/3rd majority in the "Senate" or "House of Lords". Hence a Constitution could be formed by the people, for the people, and with the people of Iraq so that it should not perish from this earth. This would be better than the unrepresentative botched job piece of drek that has no popular legitimacy that we currently call the "basic law" or interim Constution (via Needlenose) currently in place.

So that's the first thing (technically second since the first thing I'd do is get someone else to be Bush's buddy) I'd do if I were NSA!

This goes against the grain, since the old Imperial saying goes "Never ask for a job; never refuse one." but heh, this isn't Britain, this is America and certainly the oldman could do a better job than the one Rice has done so far as NSA so Bush White House, consider this the first page of the oldman's application / petittion for the job!

Fire Rice! (and retire Cheney) and hire the Oldman instead!

Do you think that's so farfetched? This is the Bush Admin's idea: Pick a PM but without the support apparatus and using the botched Constitution. Whatever their degrees and credentials, the Bush people haven't delivered the goods.

As for the IGC, we put these fools on the IGC in power, and we need negotiate nothing with them. Better to dissolve them and institute a new body with some genuine representativeness and a phased handover of sovereignty than put into place measures that will produce a corrupt ineffective body of stooges whose inevitable crimes we will be blamed for!!!

The Bush Administration truly has no better ideas, so I figure if we're gonna have any chance at surviving this at all, I volunteer myself to either be NSA or be put in charge of fixing Iraq.

John Kerry getting no love on WoT

Akim on Empty Days blog conveniently hosts one of the oldman's posts about the Democratic lack of credibility on the WoT. Elsewhere on Needlenose blog, in the midst of the Clarke controversy the oldman predicted that Kerry was still behind. Stirling Newberry has more on the reversal of Kerry's fortunes.

The USA Today story about Bush's most recent poll numbers confirm that indeed, just as the oldman predicted, that while Bush's credibility numbers are down he's actually pulled ahead of Kerry among registered voters.The gap is even bigger among likely voters.

***
The Bush administration did not do all it could to prevent the attacks, 54% say, and 53% say the White House is covering up something about its handling of intelligence before Sept. 11.

Still, 67% say the administration should not have been expected to prevent the tragedy.

But Americans' doubts have not meant greater reluctance to return Bush to office.

In a two-way matchup, Bush leads Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, 51%-47%, which is a 7 percentage-point gain in three weeks for Bush and a 5-point drop for Kerry. Three weeks ago, when Kerry was coming off a string of primary victories, Bush trailed him by 6 points.

If independent Ralph Nader is included, he gets 4%, Bush 49% and Kerry 45%.

The poll suggests that Bush campaign ads charging Kerry with a flip-flopping record in the Senate are taking a toll. Before they began, 60% rated Kerry favorably and 26% unfavorably. Now, 53% view him favorably and 36% unfavorably.

"Bush seems to be having some success in selling the idea that Kerry's voting record in the Senate is all over the place," says Maurice Carroll, polling director at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. [emphasis added]
***

This as the oldman predicted over at the Blogging of the President 2004 means that:

***
That's what Dem's don't get. It's not enough to portray Bush as ineffective, selfish, and abusive of power. Those will only help him get relected.

We're talking essentially about a challenge situation. Kerry has to show himself able to challenge Bush in basic ruthlessness, cunning, and decisiveness. Only then if he's nicer will he get the electoral nod.

I've tried explaining this before and have been told that the jobs situation and Iraq will defeat Bush, not Kerry. I think this is idealistic, but dead wrong. Think about Dukakis. Think about Dole falling off the podium. People won't vote in a weak President. They will vote in a corrupt or lying one. But not a weak one, or one percieved as weak, especially not when they're concerned about security.

They'd rather have the big mean ineffectual corrupt alpha male than the well intentioned but not so nasty nice guy. That's the key to this whole thing.
***

Unless Democrats realize what is going on and get some credibility in the WoT, the election is over for all intents and purposes. It is not enough to just engage President Bush on the issues. Without a credible forward engagement plan on Iraq, terrorism, Alqueda, that assures the President that the Democrats and specifically John Kerry "get's it" about how serious the problem is, then the election might as well be conceded barring unusual and unexpected future revelations.

In retrospect, taking a vacation in Idaho for a week was a castatrophic error that has put the Kerry campaign on a backfoot. Despite the Democratic advantage in that most of their policies are ones that the public prefers, they're getting killed by political gamesmanship (MSNBC) and the Bush PR blitz. Kerry can recover from this setback, but he won't until he not only "get's it" about how serious this race is but he begins to show it. He's got to be "hungry" for it, or voters won't respond. Sking in Idaho sent the wrong message to the public, that Kerry couldn't care less. Now he's got to start from scratch again.

Taiwan situation escalating politically,

The BBC reports that the Taiwan election controversy is going to court, with the opposition leader Lien Chan demanding a recount that has been agreed to in principle by the incumbent and tenative victor Chen.

However, the Washington Post reports that Chen is claiming a mandate for his independence initiatives despite a dead heat statistical tie in the election results.

***
Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, speaking in his first interview since a failed attempt on his life and a narrow election victory that his opponents are contesting, declared Monday he had won a mandate from voters to press ahead with an agenda to develop Taiwan as an "independent, sovereign country" despite the risk of war with China.

Chen vowed to go forward with plans to write a new constitution for Taiwan within two years, a move China has said could amount to a declaration of independence and compel it to seize the island by force...

The United States is committed to helping Taiwan defend itself against a Chinese attack, but officials have expressed concern that Chen's plan to draft a new constitution might draw U.S. forces into an unnecessary military confrontation with China. The Chinese government claims sovereignty over Taiwan and threatens to seize it by force if it formally declares independence...

"The fundamental reason I won this presidential election . . . is because there is a rising Taiwan identity and it has been solidified," Chen said. "I think the Beijing authorities should take heed of this fact and accept the reality."

"I think we have reached an internal consensus that insists on Taiwan being an independent, sovereign country," [emphasis added]
***

Read the transcript of his interview yourself:

"I think the key issue is not that I personally refuse to accept the "one China" principle. It's the 23 million people of Taiwan who cannot accept the so-called "one China" principle."

This represents a major escalation of the political stakes, because Chen is rejecting the "One China" Principle that China's leaders have declared that they are willing to go to war over.

While Chen has stated that he opposes the "One China" principle previously, he had left himself some wiggle room on his position with sufficient rhetorical ambiguity to stand short of commiting himself to an open break.

***
"We cannot possibly accept the 'one country, two systems' formula and become a local government of the People's Republic of China."
...
"Who knows if these two separate countries (Taiwan and China) might become one over time? We do not exclude any possibilities for the future."
***

This therefore his remarks now can be construed as a significant break with previous ambiguity regarding the situation.

This has blown up to the extent that the moviestar Jackie Chan has condemned the Taiwanese election results even as the Taiwanese themselves struggle to deal with the aftemath of the election (BBC). The Washington Post has a internet chat briefing given by a senior policy fellow at the the Brookings Institute regarding the internal politics of Taiwan.

Despite the oldman's fondness forJackie Chan, in recent times the stunt-crazy film star has become marginalized in the Asian film industry because of personal scandal. His films also have had varying degrees of pro-Chinese propaganda slants.

This is a troublesome situation since the The New Republic Online discusses how the military doubts we could fight another war right now besides Iraq!

As one Army official puts it, "The [Pentagon's civilian] policy folks say that our military is large enough to carry out Operation Iraqi Freedom while simultaneously dealing with North Korea. But, if you put that question to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they would be pulling their hair out."

Woah! Is this guy nuts? He's bearding China at the very same time that we're tied down in Iraq, and now he's gambling we'll back him as he provokes a war with China (FAM)!!!

Unfortunately, Taiwan is unable to credibly deter or deflect a Chinese attack (especially a rapid strike) at present, despite greatly increased levels of U.S. assistance. Indeed, it appears that many Taiwanese political and military leaders incorrectly believe that the island does not need to acquire such capabilities and can rely on the United States entirely.

Sounds like ... a man with nothing to hide: Clarke calls for declassification

I.
A MAN WITH NOTHING TO HIDE,

MSNBC reports that on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning Clarke calls for declassifying his own testimony:

***
Richard Clarke, the former chief counterterrorism adviser at the White House, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that he “would welcome” the attempt by leading Republicans to declassify his two-year-old testimony before Congress.

Clarke, who has criticized the Bush administration’s preparedness for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, also said Rice’s private testimony before the commission should be declassified, as well as e-mails, memos and all other correspondence between Rice and Clarke.

“Let’s declassify all of it,” Clarke said to NBC's Tim Russert, moderator of the program, “ ... because the victims' families have no idea what Dr. Rice has said. There weren't in those closed hearings where she testified before the 9-11 Commission. They want to know.” [emphasis added]
***

II.
LIES, DAMNED LIES

To the oldman, it sounds like Clarke is a man with nothing to hide. Clarke isn't exactly objective, but as Kevin Drum points out he had good reason to be bitter. The White House on the other hand, can't seem to get it's story straight. As the NYT reports, the WH admits that Bush pressed aide over Alqueda link to Iraq early after 911:

***
The White House acknowledged Sunday that on the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush asked his top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, to find out whether Iraq was involved.

Mr. Bush wanted to know "did Iraq have anything to do with this? Were they complicit in it?" Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, recounted in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes."

Mr. Bush was not trying to intimidate anyone to "produce information," she said. Rather, given the United States' "actively hostile relationship" with Iraq at the time, he was asking Mr. Clarke "a perfectly logical question," Ms. Rice said.

The conversation — which the White House suggested last week had never taken place — centers on perhaps the most volatile charge Mr. Clarke has made public in recent days: that the Bush White House became fixated on Iraq and Saddam Hussein at the expense of focusing on Al Qaeda. [emphasis added]
***

III.
WORSE THAN A CRIME, SHADES OF TALLEYRAND

So after initially denying the story, and then finding out that there are on the record witnesses to that discussion, the WH has to retract its denial. In addition, Talking Points Memo discusses how Condi Rice continues to refuse testifying under oath even as the WH accusation about perjury seems to have been a bluff that has been called.

***
The White House can be a very isolated and isolating environment -- especially on the downward side of the mountain. And I think this is a large part of what we're seeing. Many of the challenges they've faced over the last two or three months are ones they might easily have weathered as recently as eight or nine months ago. And they keep reacting as though they have little grasp of how much the ground has moved beneath their feet during those intervening months.

One other point. We certainly don't know yet. But I think the early signs are that this perjury attack on Clarke was a major, major blunder. I don't think the perpetrators of this ugly stunt even thought they'd ever get into a courtroom. That wasn't the point: this was watercooler ammo. Something you get on to the news so that when Mr. X asks Mr. Y over the watercooler what he makes of Clarke's testimony, Mr. Y responds, "Hell, that guy? He's probably gonna indicted for perjury. You can't believe anything that guy says." ...

This was a very high stakes bluff, not least because it looked like the worst sort of Nixonian tactic, using the coercive machinery of the state to bludgeon political opponents. But if they were going to play hardball at this level, they should have been certain they had him dead to rights. And it seems like they didn't. Now even a number of partisan Republicans I know feel like this looked ugly and wrong. To use they Napoleonic aphorism again: this was worse than a crime. It was a mistake. [emphasis added]
***

The saying that a mistake is worse than a crime is attributed to: a statement that Napoleon's foreign minister Talleyrand made after Napoleon ordered the execution of a young duke of the Bourbon family: "Sire, it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake."

According to the source cited, in March 1804, Napoleon, after having heard erroneous reports that Bourbon Duke Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Cande was part of a plot to overthrow him, had the duke summarily executed. Napoleon received much criticism at home and abroad for having executed an innocent man.

The Enemies of Allah, so much for moderate Islam

MSNBC reports that Hamas has declared America to be the enemy of God.

U.S. President George W. Bush is the enemy of God and Islam, the new Hamas chief in Gaza said Sunday, declaring that God's war against the United States and Israel was ongoing.

In a speech at Gaza's Islamic University, Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi said he was not surprised that the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel's assassination last Monday of Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin.

"We knew that Bush is the enemy of God, the enemy of Islam and Muslims. America declared war against God. Sharon declared war against God and God declared war against America, Bush and Sharon," Rantisi said. "The holy man (Sheik Yassin), he said the war of God continues against them and I can see the victory coming up from the land of Palestine by the hand of Hamas."

Immediately after the Israeli missile strike that killed Yassin, Rantisi and other Hamas leaders threatened to retaliate against the United States, Israel's staunchest ally. However, a few days later, Rantisi backed down from the threat, saying Hamas would only be active in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel.

Juan Cole notes that Arab elite Hassan once considered a potential claimant to the "throne" of Iraq has warned that further escalation of tensions might trigger WWIII.

Baghdad Blues ... conservative update on Mesopotamian conundrum

I.
INTRODUCTION

The oldman has been maintaining for quite some time - as of early last fall really and prior - that the fundamental problem that would afflict the success of the Iraqi venture would be political, and not primarily military or economic.

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard summarizes his trip to Iraq in these excerpts calling it "The Bumpy road to democracy":

HERE'S WHAT YOU LEARN QUICKLY IN IRAQ: The transformation of the country into a peaceful, free market democracy is a bigger, more demanding, and far more difficult project than you ever dreamed. Nonetheless, a year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Operation Iraqi Freedom has gained impressive momentum. Iraq has traffic jams, street life, drinkable water, reasonably reliable electricity, and is about to experience an extraordinary economic boom, thanks to the $18.4 billion in reconstruction funds soon to begin arriving. Though terrorist attacks continue, they don't halt progress and are likely to be gradually beaten back.

But don't assume a growing economy and declining terrorism spell success. There's a serious obstacle remaining--the attitude of many Iraqis.

The oldman would argue with Barnes' premise that terrorism is declining in Iraq. It seems it's shifting from anti-US attacks to more sectarian strife and struggle. This danger was amply warned of in a previous CIA assessment of potential civil war.

Fred Barnes goes on to elaborate:

"Kurds, educated exiles who've returned ..., and a good number of other Iraqis have embraced ... the "new Iraq." But many Iraqis haven't. They don't want Saddam back, but ... Like the French, they may never forgive America for having liberated them."
...
"Iraqis want help. Indeed, they demand it and are angry and frustrated when they don't get it instantly. But they appear to hate being helped. Their expectation was an America capable of supplanting Saddam in less than three weeks would improve everything overnight. When that didn't happen, they grew frustrated. Now they're conflicted between lashing out at the American occupation and trying to get the full benefit of it. For success to be achieved, they need to buy into the program fully--democracy, free markets, rule of law, property rights, political compromise, and patience. They need an attitude adjustment.

Americans I talked to in 10 days here agree Iraqis are difficult to deal with. They're sullen and suspicious and conspiracy-minded. Maybe it's not their fault."
...
But perhaps the problem is more basic. Seventy years ago, Iraq's first king, Faisal I, described Iraqis this way: "There is still--and I say this with a heart full of sorrow--no Iraqi people, but an unimaginable mass of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever."
...
"The most encouraging trend in Iraq is solid economic growth, sure to be followed by torrid growth... and joblessness has dipped below 30 percent, according to Bill Block, a Princeton-educated economist for the Treasury Department now working for the CPA...

This summer the Iraqi economy will be on the receiving end of the biggest stimulus in history."

The oldman managed to catch a preliminary briefing from Fred Barnes on FOX_news, and Fred Barnes quite honestly reported that he had left for Iraq feeling quite optimistic about the prospects for success but that once he had gotten there that his assessment and revised opinion was "sobering" regarding the obstacles to success.

II.
OTHER NEWS FROM IRAQ

The news outlet KR-Wa reports that Iraqi translators are getting killed for collaborating with the United States.

Linguists are caught in the crossfire, ... Many have been unheralded casualties of the shadowy year-old war. The latest was an Iraqi translator for Time Magazine, who died Friday ... when he was ambushed Wednesday as he drove to work. Another Iraqi interpreter, working with the U.S. Army, was killed Sunday when someone triggered a remote-control bomb, then opened up with automatic gunfire on an Army patrol. An American soldier also was killed.

Furthermore much of the money being spent on the Iraqi reconstruction also as is being mispent in Pentagon contracts (KR-Wa):

In awarding the first contracts in Iraq, the Pentagon "cut corners," couldn't show that it got "fair and reasonable" prices and didn't follow up to see if the work was done properly, a new Defense Department inspector general's report says.

Experts on contracting said Wednesday that the Pentagon report shows a disturbing, but not surprising, institutional problem with spending in Iraq that's probably far worse than the Department of Defense indicates.

Furthermore, the rights enshrined on paper in the Iraqi Basic Law are both being rejected by Shiite leaders threatening mass civil disobedience (Needlenose blog) while on the ground there is encroaching intimidation characteristic of a social theocratic power grab by the Shiites:

Shiite Muslim religious extremists, backed by armed militias, are waging a campaign of intimidation to enforce a strict Islamic code of conduct in Iraq's second largest city. Neither the Iraqi police nor the British military forces that occupy Basra seem willing or able to stop it...

But the effectiveness of the campaign by religious extremists raises questions about whether freedoms of expression and religion - newly enshrined in Iraq's interim constitution - will survive in the Shiite-dominated south after the coalition returns authority to Iraqis this summer.

Even the recent "good news" about the support that Iraqis have for the American occupation seems shaky when you read the fine print (Needlenose blog). Meanwhile, basic practices of the occupation like indefinite detention of suspected insurgents (CSM), house to house searches (via Needlenose), and the failure of the new "soft touch" tactics of the Marine units to restore amity to Fallujah (Guardian_UK) seem to be sparking a wave of violence across Iraq:

Rebel rockets slammed into a government building in the northern city of Mosul on Saturday, killing two civilians and wounding 14 others. An explosion rocked central Baghdad in a roadside bomb attack on a convoy, wounding five Iraqis.

The Mosul attack brought to 21 the number of people killed in two days of explosions and shootings across the country.

This seems consistent with background reports that Iraqis are escalating sectarian strife (via Needlenose) informally while formally making empty gestures of disarming and demobilizing their militias (via Dan Drezner).

As the oldman noted, according to the very same article cited:

"Many militiamen will likely be absorbed into existing security organizations such as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, where their loyalties will continue to be divided between their Baghdad paymasters and local or sectarian affiliations," Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote last week in a paper on Iraq's militias.

In other words, they're not going to get disarmed and "dissolved". They will get new uniforms, their paychecks will come from Baghdad, and they will probably keep the same commanders and command structure only nominally under the control of the "central" government.

III.
EXPLOSION IN IRAQ ... AND TAIWAN?

If the CPA and Bremer assume that al-Sistani will back down over the constitution and he doesn't, then an explosive confrontation could be set off. This is going on, while the Taiwan election situation remains unstable with China openly threatening to intervene if the situation becomes unstable (BBC):

China, which regards Taiwan as part of its own territory, says it will not stand by if Taiwan descends into chaos.

Taiwan has told China not to interfere.

A spokesman for US President George W Bush, Scott McClellan, urged Beijing and Taipei to pursue dialogue and refrain from unilateral steps that would alter Taiwan's status. He said the US would continue to maintain close ties with Taipei.

Later, Beijing denounced as a "mistake" a US message congratulating Mr Chen after his narrow re-election was formally confirmed on Friday.

The Foreign Affairs Magazine has a great new article "Trouble in Taiwan" that discusses why somehow managing to perpetuate the status quo of de facto autonomy with de jure sovereignty limbo is in the best interests of both Taiwan and the United States.

***
China very much wants to avoid conflict over Taiwan. But this does not mean that it would be unprepared to go to war over the island. For China's leaders, the Taiwan issue is inextricably related to national self-respect and regime survival... Beijing regards the eventual reunification of China and Taiwan as essential to China's recovery from a century of national weakness, vulnerability, and humiliation, and to its emergence as a respected great power.

Today, however, China's main objective is not to assert direct territorial rule over Taiwan but to avoid the island's permanent loss. Losing Taiwan against Beijing's will would deal a severe blow to Chinese prestige and self-confidence: Chinese leaders believe that their government would likely collapse in such a scenario. Taiwanese independence would also establish a dangerous precedent for other potentially secession-minded areas of the country, ...

China's leaders are under few illusions about the detrimental effects a coercive strategy would have on Beijing's ties with the United States. But China would almost certainly sacrifice good relations with the West (and the economic benefits that accrue from those relations) in order to avoid losing Taiwan. The damage to China's political and social stability in being seen to lose territory, in other words, would be even greater than the diplomatic and economic damage resulting from a conflict with the United States.

The Chinese leadership would thus almost certainly fight to avoid the loss of Taiwan if it concluded that no other alternative existed, even if its chances of prevailing in such a conflict were low. Exactly how much blood and treasure China would be willing to expend over the issue is unclear, but it might be considerably more than the United States would be prepared to shoulder. Indeed, many Chinese believe that, in the final analysis, Taiwan matters far more to China than it does to the United States. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that the Chinese government can be persuaded or coerced to alter its calculus regarding Taiwan, especially not by a U.S. government that appears to be supporting Taiwan's independence. This notion directly contradicts a key assumption held by critics of the status quo.
***

Certainly if a crisis occured in either Tawian or Iraq, we would be in "difficult straits". If it happened in both places, then Greenboy's speculation of a draft may well come true.

Pondering on a November with contemplations most queasy,

Bush taking a hit from Clarke controversy (MSNBC):

Richard Clarke’s charge that George W. Bush largely ignored the Al Qaeda threat before the September 11 attacks has dealt a sharp blow to the president’s ratings on a crucial issue. According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, the percentage of voters who say they approve of the way the president has handled terrorism and homeland security has slid to 57 percent, down from a high of 70 percent two months ago. The survey was conducted after Clarke, a former counterterrorism chief in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, testified to the 9/11 commission on Wednesday. Still, the president’s overall approval rating remains steady at 49 percent and Bush remains neck and neck with presumptive Democratic Party nominee Senator John Kerry

Max Speaks has an interesting comment, while Dan Drezner blogs the issue to death, then Joe Katzman provides a critical viewpoint on Clarke, so Talking Points Memo blasts the Bush Administration contradictions along with Brad Delong, and Stirling Newberry does a round up on right wing blog responses .

Bob Graham has stood up for Clarke's previous testimony. IMO there are minor inconsistencies in Clarke's accounts from venue to venue. However, the inconsistencies are small compared to the inconsistencies of the Bush Admin. If we were to impute a proportional amount of bad faith to Bush officials as they do to Clarke's missteps, we'd being having impeachment hearings already.

Clarke's accounting has had a strong impact, dropping Bush in the polls noticeably. It is a body blow however, and not a death blow. Even though Bush and Kerry are still close, we saw how that turned out in 2000. The electoral math and the organizational and money aspects of the campaigning dynamics still heavily favor Bush.

If Clarke hadn't come out when he did, Kerry would be slipping badly. He may resume doing that in a few weeks. The smear campaign seems to have been working against Clarke, reducing his credibility as an honest broker and credible witness. This character assassination cum damage control has been moderately successful as a WH line of attack.

There's no doubt that Bush's positive momentum is halted however. The matter of the fact is, that this Administration has demonstrated tremendous staying power despite massive unpopularity of various issues and the criticisms of many former insiders. This is not to say that the gaffes or missteps like the joke in poor taste about missing WMD have not gone unnoticed, but the impact has not been a KO.

Joe Wilson is going to trot out his book in a few months, but barring amazing revelations in the Plame case I don't think it'll have as much affect as the Clarke evidence and testimony.

In about two weeks, this too will have passed from the news cycle and Bush and co. will regroup. Come end of April, Bush and co. will again clearly have the upper hand over Kerry unless he learns to campaign better than he has so far.

I've heard many Democrats say that it will be the issues that bring down Bush, like many others citing that it is the "incumbent's to lose". Swopa argues along those lines on Needlenose blog. I'm not so sure. Kerry should have gotten more traction out of Clarke. That he hasn't is a reflection of his not so great message machine and credibility with the electorate.

This election will probably be atypical. In a heightened security alert environment, the usual rule about the strength of the incumbent being the primary factor doesn't seem to be holding true. Bush must be stumbling AND Kerry seen as strong I believe before a Democratic victory can be grasped in November.

Democrats here should remember that. You've still got a ways to go, and Kerry is still behind.

It's official ... Bush attempting to take over world

In a speech on Friday President Bush calls for government subsidized internet access (CNN):

"We ought to have universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007," Bush said in a speech focusing mostly on homeownership. "And then we ought to make sure that as soon as possible thereafter consumers have plenty of choices..."

...There is already a fund that subsidizes telephone service in rural areas and for those who cannot afford it. Policymakers have debated whether the Universal Service Fund should also subsidize Internet access to American homes.

So much for the free market.

However, this is the sure sign that Bush is trying to take over the world. Clearly, he's read the Top 100 things I'd do if I became an Evil Overlord suggestion list. Item #100 clearly states:

100. Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access.

Perhaps beneficially for the rest of us, he doesn't seem to have gotten the hang of the rest of the "suggestions" such as:

61. If my advisors ask "Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?", I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.

Frankly, the oldman considers this conclusive evidence. If that weren't enough however, read here at CNN how Bush is pissing off China over Taiwan.

The terse statement was issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry after the White House commended the "successful conclusion" of Taiwan's election while acknowledging that legal challenges to President Chen Shui-bian's tumultuous win remain...

Chen is disliked by the Beijing government because he refuses to work toward a union between the two sides. His victory Saturday was largely ignored by the mainland, which dismissed it as an election for a "Taiwan area leader."

The ministry's statement, read during state television's noon newscast, condemned Washington's gesture as a diplomatic betrayal of sorts.

And about how the neo-con's are still pushing for "Baghdad and Beyond" featured in FPIF and IRC a program that is working toward:

Two months prior to the Iraq invasion, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, an early associate of PNAC and a former AEI vice president, traveled to Jerusalem to meet with Ariel Sharon. Bolton promised Sharon that the Iraq offensive would be just the first of the disarmament wars, declaring that “it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran, and North Korea afterwards.”

...With their front groups in place for regime change in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, and having secured bipartisan support for their democratization resolutions, the neocons are leading the nation down the same path that has led to quagmire in Iraq.

Not to mention how the oldman has reported the neo-cons still haven't ended their ambitions for regime change in North Korea at all costs at the very same time that America's position has been weakened.

Sounds like a play for world conquest to the oldman. So it's official. It's no longer President Bush, it's Evil Overlord Bush. :-)

Compassionate Conservatism meets Warmongering .. who wins?

According to the CSM President Bush has a good track record of increasing foreign development aid:

One of the great surprises of the Bush presidency has been the push for more aid. After all, many conservative Republicans call it a waste - pouring money down the drain.

But the new fear of terror and the spread of AIDS has changed all that. The administration now calculates that by making the foreign-aid system more effective, it can reduce world poverty and thereby boost US security. The effort breathes new life into a program that's lost credibility - and has become Bush's boldest foray into liberal territory. [emphasis added]

This is correct. Endemic poverty weakens states. Failed states become havens for terrorism. Percieved injustice as well as actual injustice detracts from American credibility and moral authority. This becomes justification for promoting popular support for anti-US movements and international terrorism.

In one sense, that $23 billion in the latest Bush budget exaggerates the aid increase. That's because it includes $7 billion for Iraq's reconstruction. Even ignoring Iraq, however, aid has risen under Bush, after declining since the 1980s.

"Foreign assistance funding has gone through the roof under this president," says a Republican congressional staffer.

US official development assistance amounted to $11.4 billion in 2001 and $13.2 billion in 2002, as measured by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based club of mostly rich nations. And if Congress provides all the money sought by Bush for his Millennium Challenge Accounts (MCA), his HIV/AIDs initiative, and other smaller programs, the total could about double by 2008. [emphasis added]

The problem with that is that the PEW Research Center has found that the war in Iraq has undermined US support abroad:

A year after the war in Iraq, discontent with America and its policies has intensified rather than diminished. Opinion of the United States in France and Germany is at least as negative now as at the war’s conclusion, and British views are decidedly more critical. Perceptions of American unilateralism remain widespread in European and Muslim nations, and the war in Iraq has undermined America’s credibility abroad. Doubts about the motives behind the U.S.-led war on terrorism abound, and a growing percentage of Europeans want foreign policy and security arrangements independent from the United States. Across Europe, there is considerable support for the European Union to become as powerful as the United States.

In the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed, anger toward the United States remains pervasive, although the level of hatred has eased somewhat and support for the war on terrorism has inched up. Osama bin Laden, however, is viewed favorably by large percentages in Pakistan (65%), Jordan (55%) and Morocco (45%). Even in Turkey, where bin Laden is highly unpopular, as many as 31% say that suicide attacks against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable. Majorities in all four Muslim nations surveyed doubt the sincerity of the war on terrorism. Instead, most say it is an effort to control Mideast oil and to dominate the world. [emphasis added]

So the net result of our occupation of Iraq and our support of Ariel Sharon (Juan Cole's Blog) has been to undermine our position in Iraq, undermine American credibility and moral authority, and to promote the popularity of suicide bombing as a "justified" tactic in terrorism.

Gee, that's so ... yeah.

The foreign aid thing is a good idea. However, it's been more than compensated for by the setbacks in American interests regarding the war of ideas in the middle-east:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in an interview last week with The Washington Times that the United States is not doing enough to counter extremist ideas, and polls have shown that public support for America has declined sharply in the Middle East since 2000.

"We are in a war of ideas, as well as a global war on terror," Mr. Rumsfeld said, noting that "ideas are important, and they need to be marshaled, and they need to be communicated in ways that are persuasive to the listeners."

Dude, where's my ... Presidency, WMD, Al_Zawahiri?

Hello all,

Just a light-hearted review of where we stand. While reading at JM Marshall blog about how Richard Clarke is being attacked by the President's men in order to discredit his tough charges of White House delusions and missteps in the WoT, I noticed something on the left hand side of the screen. It was a rather lighthearted logo entitled "Dude where's my weapons?". While this is obviously a satire of Bush, I thought it created actually warm fuzzy feelings in myself about GW.

This is because the oldman rather liked the Fox movie "Dude, where's my car?" starring the kid who later took up Demi Moore.

So the warm fuzzies regarding the bumbling and fumbled mistake of the century in US Foreign Policy created a little cognitive dissonance:

"A disconfirmation of a predicted event should presumably lead one to abandon the beliefs that produced the prediction. But cognitive dissonance theory says otherwise. By abandoning the beliefs ... the person who had once held this belief would have to accept a painful dissonance between her present skepticism and her past beliefs and actions. Her prior faith would now appear extemely foolish. Some members ... had gone to such lengths as giving up their jobs or spending their savings; such acts would lose all meaning in retrospect without the belief... Under the new circumstances, the dissonance was intolerable. It was reduced by a belief in the new message which bolstered the original belief. Since other members ... their conviction was stengthened all the more. They could now think of themselves, not as fools, but as loyal, steadfast members ..."

Incidentally, the quote is culled from a citation regarding a group that had to confront a failure in their belief that aliens were threatening the earth.

Ahem.

The oldman guesses if people can talk themselves into not being wrong about UFO's, they can talk themselves into not thinking of themselves as wrong about WMD.

Maybe it was the Teletubbies that tricked Bush into going into war in Iraq. The oldman has always surmised that these otherwise cute little BBC puppets were actually aliens in disguise out to use mind control to take over the earth ... maybe we can launch premptive strikes against their Martian homeland before they get us!

The teletubbies air on the BBC, and that news source reports that there has been an agreement to a recount in Taiwan over the disputed Presidential election. Hopefully this should defuse the potential geopolitical conflict that could arise from a schism.

Speaking of WMD, aliens from "another planet", and fouled counter-terrorism efforts by the Bush Administration we have the news that the "#2" guy or intellectual leader of Alqueda the infamous Al_Zawahiri has announced that the terrorist group has obtained a nuclear weapon. These "suitcase nukes" are small but deadly, capable of yeilding a small nuclear blast packed in ... you guessed it a suitcase.

One terrorism expert dismissed the notion that Alqueda might have obtained a suitcase nuke with the reasoning that:

"My instinct is if they have one we would first find out when they used it," said Joseph Cirincione, a non-proliferation expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "What's the point of (boasting)?"

Hmmm ... that would seem a reasonable point ... except that Alqueda has a history of preannouncing their attacks and bragging about them like Bin Ladin referring to "creating a 911 in the United States" BEFORE the September 11th 2001 attacks.

Gee, so maybe they're boasting they have it because they're smug bastards who have a history of telegraphing their intention to strike beforehand. Hmmm ... what doya think? Maybe a supposed EXPERT should have noticed that little fact don't you think? Sometimes the folly of experts is palpably idiotic on a scale of incredible ridiculousness. As for the ridiculous objection that if they'd had one they would have used it already, it could have required repairs not completed until recently or they simply could have refrained because they needed to put together an operation to get it into a sensitive area in the States to set it off first or they could have delayed because of another of their bizarre numerology system - 911, 311 being 911 days from the original 911 except for the leapyear day, maybe next is 3 911's or three years after the initial bombing.

No the real question is not whether or not Alqueda has obtained a suitcase nuke, but whether or not any such WMD they obtained was in working order.

For the record, the Bush Administration could have done much more in the past three years to try to take these things off the black market or press Russia about how many were in fact missing and whether they could be accounted for.

Btw AL_Zawahiri is the guy that they recently didn't get in Pakistan. This is exactly what the oldman predicted on Drezner's website while other sources were still hyping the connection.

Using the oldman's uncanny powers of guessing, where would Alqueda strike if it had a chance? Well how about the decommissioned Zion Nuclear Power Plant located in Zion, Illinois right by downtown Chicago, Illinios. It's decommissioned, but that means that security will probably be lighter and a "suitcase nuke" even though it would "only" have a nominal yeild of 3-5 kilotons would ignite and disperse the nuclear waste externally stored there and conveniently cause radioactive fallout all over Chicago. The oldman has actually driven through the place, and the locals refer to Zion I and Zion II the two nuclear plants there as the "twin towers". Hmmm ... where has that Alqueda strike motiff come up before? Dunno, maybe Sept 11, 2001 when Alqueda struck and destroyed the twin World Trade towers?

Wonder if that would could make a tempting target for Alqueda do ya think maybe? Of course, the experts probably won't think about this until after it happens - like usual. Oh well. It's not the oldman's job to hammer in sense into fools that reject good advice.

Dude, where's my al-Zawahiri? Dude, where's my suitcase nuke?

Woof! Woof! Dude, where's my bed? Nightie night time for the oldman. :-)

Evolutionary Psychology - or Why are "all" our leaders Old White Guys?

P.S. Yes I know there are reports that Al-Zawahiri has claimed Alqueda has a suitcase bomb. However, it should be noted that Alqueda has made if not completely false claims then occassionally stated grandiose aims with a hyperbolic sense of their achievement. The real question is was the tritium detonator charged and if it wasn't, then does Alqueda have the expertise and resources to recharge it? If it is, it's probably too late to stop their plans by now. If it isn't, then we've just dodged a bullet - no thanks to an Administration that hasn't paid serious attention to getting these damned things off the black market.

I.
The Hidden Order of Political Power

Of course, there are always the exceptions. These exceptions exist to demonstrate that the elites of any given society are not completely excluding others from political power. They also exist because the elite of any society need some genuine talent to run things, and merit is not necessarily correlated with being part of the "in crowd" that is covertly and implicitly preferred by sociocultural status promotion. In these latter days of America, the term token minority has taken on especially derisive terms in the post Civil Rights Movement era. On the other hand, sufficiently "excellent" individuals have always been to some extent co-opted into the traditional power structure - both to obtain their services and to subvert outside challenges. Social mobility into the "hidden order of status" and its attendent rewards has always been as crucial a factor as wealth distribution between elites and commoners in maintaining social stability.

However it cannot be denied that there is an "invisible hand" that is just as powerful or perhaps more powerful than the market, or sometimes collusionary and reinforcement, in creating implicit sociocultural status promotion preferences. For anyone who argues differently, it must be reminded that Slavery and Apartheid exist as extreme examples of this process. A more ordinary observation, is why are the overwhelming majority of American leaders still older white men?

There is a hidden order to social status, that usually can be observed phenomenologically but is implicit and perniciously resistant to external manipulation of the formal hierarchy. This is usually framed in terms of "subtle" discrimination, but the oldman believes this actively misses the real truth. The underlying assumption of the concept of discrimination is that except for historical and or cultural factors, there would be an even playing field that if only prejudicial attitudes and behaviors were removed would result in an equal opportunity and proportional representation for all members of a society. The problem is that in searching for these prejudicial factors, one is forced to resort to ever more invocations of subtle and unconscious bias and/or discrimination.

This underlying assumption is false the oldman believes, and the very nature of a society is to create a preferential status hierarchy and to generate rules that while ostensibly standardized are in fact by nature of focusing on some features rather than others by their nature intrinsically judgemental and exclusionary.

II.
Heirs to the successes and fears of our Ancestors: Evolutionary Psychology

This may seem like a radical thesis, so to support it the oldman invokes evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology essentially is the idea that our minds are shaped by brains that are shaped by biological changes shaped by adaptations to the environment that took place over a long period of time. Not all evolutionary traits are deterministic, most merely create predispositions that react with environment. Others create features or faculties that can be used for a variety of purposes. Hands for instance can be used to play with beachballs or to build houses. Men have a tendency to want to have sex with women since this increases the chances of reproduction, but this is not to argue that evolutionary psychology mandates that men should only have sex with women. A good example is other species, in whom the mating urge takes vastly different forms. Many species mate only once a year - or once in their lives! We should not try to take evolution as an argument that any particular arrangement (monogamy, polygamy, hetrosexuality, homosexuality, etc. ) is "natural" or "unnatural". Evolution makes no judgement, it merely creates the capacity or tendency. Indeed, often evolution results in diversity of adaptations and this diversity has the function of being a sort of "adaptive insurance" so that by creating a variety of results in any given situation it is more likely that at least some will survive and succeed even if other forms perish. To quote:

"Natural selection does not work "for the good of the species", as many people think."

Even with all these caveats however, Evolutionary Psychology is still a powerful tool for understanding "why things are the way they are" as long as we do not confuse it with the notion that this is only or best result of those shaping forces. Our lives are within our own hands to determine, but those lives are not blank slates - they come imprinted with certain freedoms, restrictions, and strongly emergent trends that we then shape into particular choices and results.

III.
The Mind of a Small Tribe Primate

What set off the oldman in this particular case was the writer John Bruce who has a slightly off-beat but sometimes highly interesting blogg called "In the Shadows of Hollywood". In it, John discusses in one particular case "The Theory of the Lead Narcissist". To quote briefly from John:

In trying to make some overall sense of what happened in the Bob Willis story, I re-read C.S.Lewis's essay "The Inner Ring", which I'm very happy to see is on line. Lewis begins by quoting a page from Tolstoy's War and Peace, in which a young lieutenant, Boris, sees to his initial puzzlement an old general who is acting deferential to a captain, putting up with the captain's discourtesy in interrupting him to talk to Boris. Lewis observes:

[T]he young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies... The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organized secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it...

I think the dual-hierarchy insight from Tolstoy and C.S.Lewis goes some way to explaining why this happened.

"Inner rings", according to Lewis, exist for two reasons; the one I'm most interested in here is to exempt the initiates from ordinary rigors of their disciplines or professions. Willis was tolerated, it would seem, until his self-exemptions threatened to become something his higher-ups could no longer brush off on their own -- for example, abusiveness toward female subordinates that could potentially bring in Human Resources, the company lawyers, and even outside authority. The situation, I think, is roughly as Lewis describes...

The actual factors that make someone eligible for high status in the "dual hierarchy" are inscrutable. Whatever they are, Willis had them. I think almost everyone who knew him would (at least in unguarded moments) describe him as unbalanced and corrupt -- I suspect there's a relationship.

What John suggests as a "perversion" a puzzling recurrence in various organizations and political structures, I would call an unfortunate permutation of a wholly endemic feature of homo sapiens that can be explained through using evolutionary psychology.

I think what it comes down to is that humans are a social animal, and that 'politics' is just not a formal battle for organizational positions - but there is an underlying emotional, social, and cultural negotiation and conflict resolution regarding who get's the top positions created in order to be filled by such persons?

Such a political order is not good or bad intrinsically, but when it is driven by dysfunctional values it can prove obstructionist since it exists to propagate itself rather than serve a utilitarian purpose.

There is always a dividing line between those who must live by the rules and those who make the rules.

This exists for a very good evolutionary reason I believe. All rules are context dependent. In order to create cooperative group behavior, leaders must at a very basic tribal primate level create rules of conduct and evaluation.

However since situations change, those rules must be ammended from time to time. Thus the one's who are allowed to break the rules, are the leaders. If the leaders or elites break the rules merely to benefit their own short term interests, the political structure becomes dysfunctional.

When they break them in order to advance necessary social change in adaptation to the environment and circumstances, then it serves the original purpose. This explains a lot of human behavior.

IV.
"I AM NOT AN APE!" No, you are more than an ape. Nonetheless, the basic archicture explains a great deal

The oldman does not mean to suggest that human beings are simply behaving like a small pack of primates. Humans are clearly much more complex, sophisticated, and if nothing else dangerous in their technology, art, language, culture, and self-awareness than simple or even higher primates. Whether the difference is in one of kind or degree, humans are far and away above the rest of the primate family in behavior and cognition. Some might call this an improvement, and some might argue that, but it's certainly different. I don't think that an "alien" xenobiologist coming upon a planet filled mostly with non-human primates would be able to except in a wildly "science fiction" fashion extrapolate far enough to predict the emergence of human beings in their full present homo sapiens glory.

Human beings clearly are impacted in their behavior by evolutionary psychology, and nowhere is this more evident than social dynamics of sexual reproduction. It should be noted that in primates there are a diversity of behaviors as discussed above, where evolution cannot be considered as a deterministic force in behavior however strongly shaping a force it is. The oldman has not been the first one to notice such a similarity between corporate structure and primate hierarchies (ABC-news).

While comparing the wealthy to the wild might seem a little harsh, author Richard Conniff says it makes perfect sense. In his book, The Natural History of the Rich, Conniff writes that executives climbing to the top of corporate ladders exhibit mannerisms that are quite similar to those displayed by silverback gorillas.
"It's chest-beating. It's glowering," Conniff told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "You know, that kind of quick, sharp stare."

While corporate types may not literally beat their chests in the middle of a meeting, they often perform the verbal equivalent.

"These people all dominate with shouting, tyrannizing people and by sheer physical presence," Conniff said. "And that's exactly what an alpha male does in a chimp troupe or among gorillas."

V.
So are we born to be ruled by jerks and losers?!?!?

As the oldman has maintained, evolution is a shaping force and not a determining one. One of the reasons is that there may be competing drives, trends, and instincts. Even as the "invisible hand" of the social preference hierarchy is at work, there is also a trend toward adaptive meritocracy:

Mr. Boehm argues that egalitarianism amounts to the overthrow of "alpha males" -- powerful, dominant men -- by rank-and-file members of a society who individually have little power but who, by cooperating with one another, can impose their collective will on the alphas.

As a group, the powerless members of the society foster egalitarianism by creating a taboo on the exercise of power by the alphas, Mr. Boehm concludes. The society must be ready to suppress upstart alphas who would seek to supplant the egalitarian arrangement, he says. As a modern example, Mr. Boehm cites the decline of former Rep. Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, from his heyday as Speaker of the House of Representatives. "As Gingrich began to wield some serious power, he exuded a certain air of dominance and his peers in Congress found ways to cut him down to size," Mr. Boehm writes.

"Egalitarian societies constitute a very special type of hierarchy, one in which the rank and file avoid being subordinated by vigilantly keeping alpha-type group members under their collective thumbs," he writes.

Here is a more technical review of Boehm's book. Here are some insightful but more accessible language musings on the topic.

However the most relevant aspect is the relationship between status and division of labor (PDF).

The main idea is that cooperative behavior requires an organizing principle, and that the dominant individuals or elites are produced through trait preference by the sociocultural promotion trends of the organizing principle. The elites then act both as the main beneficiaries, enforcers, and directors of the division of labor in the rest of society. The rest of society acquiesces to this in order to better produce the efficiencies of organized cooperation. However, the traits associated with such elite status may be superficial and misleading, while the human tendency in order to favor their offspring can lead to a sociolcultural promotion preference that selects for obsolete or neglicent traits.

As an example read here about some very bitter short people.

That may be amusing, and the oldman finds it so - but then again he's average height and above average height for his ethnic group. In a modern society, one would think that with technology that such differences would have been almost entirely negated. Indeed, there is an old saying that "It was God who made men, but it was Colt who made them equal." The idea being that a six-shooter revolver made one man essentially on a level playing ground as any other man. Indeed, in this age of keyboards, coding, satellites, and bombs fired incredible distances at incredible accuracy by the push of a button the old measures of strength and/or ability are mostly outdated.

However, try telling that to girls you're trying to date if you're a short guy! In other words, times may have changed but humans have inheirited an antiquated mental system to deal with it. This biologically and socially predisposed behavior does not have to be destiny. Indeed, some men develop outsize ego's whose accompanying confidence compensates for their physical shortness in the eyes of women - many women have cited to the oldman "confidence" as the number one feature attracting them.

However, this creates group dynamics which are sometimes hard to fathom. It is not of course old white men who dominate in all cultures. Sometimes is it is old asian men, or middle-aged indigenous men, and sometimes men are barred from certain otherwise prestigious or important activities or females granted certain advantages. Many a man has noted that a woman who is willing to shed tears and say she's sorry is forgiven a trespass sooner than a man who commits a similar deed. However the point is that there is an "invisible" preference structure that is implicitly built in, and in a given circumstance it discriminates certain people by emphasis on certain qualifying and/or identifying traits and that it directs those persons toward certain divisions of labor.

The most relevant one being certain older white men, since not all white men or old men qualify but only some, toward positions of authority and power from which they can both make rules governing others and be exempt from them. The purpose of their exemption being tied to their ability delegated by the group to make and/or change the rules for the collective. When this runs amok, as it often has, we call it the kind of narcissitic / despotic alpha type found by John Bruce in his example Mr. Willis and the unseen pecking order that showed him deference and assisted him to climb the heights of status and power.

VI.
So Are We Doomed To Be Victims Of Our Biology?

No. However, one cannot simply ignore it. Many a woman or minority has complained about the infamous "glass ceiling". This "glass ceiling" is created by rules and evaluation criteria that however objectively standardized are by subtle shifts in emphasis or implementation allow some progress but deter the advancement of many individuals lacking certain traits in order to achieve the highest levels of success. It is emphasized here that it is not a matter of actively discriminating against certain traits, which can happen, but it is sufficient to emphasize certain traits that indirectly exclude all others who do not fall into a very narrow range or category.

For instance, if it is necessary to work about 15 years day and night to make law partner starting about about the age of twenty then this requirement while seemingly "objective" will bar most women from becoming law partner. Indeed, this applies to many fields. It is arguable that some of this "discrimination" comes from unequal childrearing burdens among partners, or male partners being less supportive of their mate's career choices. That may be true, but it is also true that in the oldman's experience women tend to evaluate a man's career success as a strong determinant of his desirability as a mate. If men are going to be judged that way, perhaps it is understandable why some of them choose to protect their career - if they lose that then the woman may dump them anyway! Such an explanation also doesn't explain why minority males would be similarly excluded.

The point isn't to argue the correctness of gender or ethnic discrimination. Indeed, these miss the point. It is to argue how can we open up the invisible order and teach people to access it and be allowed in? Does that seem impossible? The oldman himself has made the transition somewhat and is probing so far succesfully for further success, despite having traits not necessarily in line with that kind of success. Then there is indomitable Margeret Thatcher. However, we must ask why aren't there more "Colin Powells"? Where is the "Democratic Colin Powell"?

This is the challenge posing itself to my mind. Is it possible to teach how to be a dominant and elite, and how to gain acceptance and success in the power structure of a society? And is it possible to teach that to talented people so that they can use that political ascendency to promote their own merit, rather than having the power structure associated with antiquated superficial traits or ingrained nepotism? If it is, then that may be a better route to reforming dysfunctional elite preference tendencies than to attempt to externally manipulate outcomes.

Something me and Bushie Agree on, STATEIGWBBIT

I.
THE SPEECH

Here we have a speech by Bush commemorating the beginning of last year's Iraqi Fish-Barrel Shootfest. It may surprise my readers, but there is much that I agree with our very "special" President. It simply comes down to a basic principle that may gall liberals all out of proportion to its simple logical truth: STATEIGWBBIT or namely that:

Some Things Are True Even If George W. Bush Believes In Them

Unfortunately, the actual estimated number of these facts happen to be rather small. All the more reason, the oldman says, in order to celebrate those few stray empirical facts that happen to escape the notice of GW's speechwriters and actually make it out of Bush's mouth. Of course, you could fall asleep waiting for these to appear so it's perhaps forgivable that people on either side of the party divide would miss the appearance of these rare utterances in between the usual out-pouring of mangled syntax, Bushisms, and less-than-empirical statements that are regularly given air-time.

... The people of Spain are burying their innocent dead. These men and women and children began their day in a great and peaceful city, yet lost their lives on a battlefield, murdered at random and without remorse. Americans saw the chaos and the grief and the vigils and the funerals, and we have shared in the sorrow of the Spanish people. Ambassador Ruperez, please accept our deepest sympathy for the great loss that your country has suffered. The murders in Madrid are a reminder that the civilized world is at war. And in this new kind of war, civilians find themselves suddenly on the front lines.

Yep, all true.

... In recent years, terrorists have struck from Spain to Russia, to Israel, to East Africa, to Morocco, to the Philippines and to America. They've targeted Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Yemen. They've attacked Muslims in Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. No nation or region is exempt from the terrorist campaign of violence. Each of these attacks on the innocent is a shock and a tragedy, and a test of our will. Each attack is designed to demoralize our people and divide us from one another. And each attack much be answered, not only with sorrow, but with greater determination, deeper resolve, and bolder action against the killers. It is the interest of every country and the duty of every government to fight and destroy this threat to our people.

Again, all true and well and good.

...There is a dividing line in our world, not between nations and not between religions or cultures, but a dividing line separating two visions of justice and the value of life. On a tape claiming responsibility for the atrocities in Madrid, a man is heard to say, We choose death while you choose life. We don't know if this is the voice of the actual killers, but we do know it expresses the creed of the enemy. It is a mindset that rejoices in suicide, incites murder and celebrates every death we mourn. And we who stand on the other side of the line must be equally clear and certain of our convictions. We do love life, the life given to us and to all. We believe in the values that uphold the dignity of life: tolerance and freedom and the right of conscience. And we know that this way of life is worth defending. There is no neutral ground -- no neutral ground -- in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death. The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation. The terrorists are offended not merely by our policies, they're offended by our existence as free nations. No concession will appease their hatred. No accommodation will satisfy their endless demands. Their ultimate ambitions are to control the peoples of the Middle East and to blackmail the rest of the world with weapons of mass terror.

Again, all true - especially that last bit except that it doesn't go far enough. The ultimate ambition of terrorists is to create a totalitarian Islamic world theocracy.

Unfortunately the rest is blather - senseless boosting of what is at best a lukewarm picture and at worst is a forward strategy that constitutes a "March of Folly" as put forth by Needlenose blogger Greenboy.

II.
PRIDE COMETH BEFORE A FALL

It's all self-congratulatory, as if we Americans should be appreciative of the meager results obtained since 911 turned the average American's world upside down. Given the dangers that we all should be able to agree that we face, why how can Bush pat himself on the back for a job ill done (Oldman1787)? GW Bush got to the Presidency of the United States of America through the power of lowered expectations. Challenge too tough? Lower the bar. Don't want to be seen lowering the bar? Fudge the results so that a hopping a one foot barrier is recorded as vaulting a twelve foot barrier. And disregard all those actual reports coming in from reality that the performance is having critical failure difficulties out were lies don't make bullets stop anymore than missing bullet proof vests and unarmored Humvees stop soldier killing shrapnel. The man has the gall to talk about no child left behind when he himself is a product of social promotion and affirmative action for the wastral scions of corrupt blue-blood families.

Is that too strong of a wording? Well the oldman has a little right to vent his spleen he thinks after Bush's idiotic policies have not only lost us Spain (Oldman1787) but in the aftermath of the Spanish election the Polish President charged that he had been misled on WMD intelligence and threatened to pull out the Polish troop deployment from Iraq unless there was a UN resolution after June 30th. President Bush then had to make a personal call on this one (MSNBC), at the same time that Bush called for "bolder" action. What is "bolder" action btw? Invading another country that doesn't have WMD?

All this hoopla in the Press, while on the ground a scandalous turn of events has taken place. Spain has shut us out of their bombing investigation (Newsweek):

Spanish authorities have ignored FBI efforts to assist the investigation into last week’s train bombing, creating new tensions between Washington and Madrid in the case.

Almost immediately after last Thursday’s attacks, in which at least 200 people were killed, the Justice Department offered to assist the Spanish by dispatching a team of FBI and other U.S. law-enforcement agents to the scene.

But the Spanish government appears to have rejected the U.S. offer and has instead invited other European law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to help in the case—an apparent snub of the Bush administration that U.S. officials tell NEWSWEEK may be an ominous portent for the future.

As a result, U.S. officials say, they have effectively been frozen out of the biggest terrorist case in Europe since September 11, despite mounting evidence that the perpetrators were part of a much larger network of Islamic militants that may well have links to Al Qaeda.

Calpundit has an interesting debate on the Spainish situation and cites how the counter-terrorism Spainish forces rebelled against the PP's immoral mishandling of the case. But Bush is right about the threat poised against us, and unless the Dem's get considerably more credibility in the eyes of the American public as being tough on terror we're going to be saddled with four more years of this dunce congratulating himself while he runs the country into the ground. The story of GW Bush is the story of stated good intentions and mismanaged execution.

He said that he wanted to have a humble foreign policy and be a uniter, not a divider. What he did was piss other countries off so much they are no longer cooperating with us to hunt Alqueda. He said that he wanted to balance the budget and give the taxpayer's money back to the people. Instead he has indebted us for generations. He said that he wanted to reform Social Security. Well, we're waiting Mr. President for you to even start. He said that he would listen to good advisers about foreign policy. Instead he's appointed rogues, knaves, and charltans in order to conduct wars that have weakened the United States of America's national security posture.

Now we have a situation where as the Economist notes tartly that:

IF YOU carry out a well planned atrocity, killing more than 200 people and injuring more than a thousand, and three days later the government that supported an invasion to which you object is unexpectedly defeated in a general election, you are entitled to consider the venture to have been a success. So although Spain's high voting turnout on March 14th, and many Spaniards' apparent ire at the way José María Aznar's government had prematurely blamed Basque terrorists for the outrage, can be taken as healthily democratic signs (see article), there is no escaping the fact that the biggest triumph has been that of the terrorists.

I don't blame the Socialists though- I blame the inept and corrupt Aznar government that thought that using the terrorism card could bail them out of any act however dishonest.

III.
The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. (Yeats)

Yet he is on track to win in November. I have to blame this on the Dem's partly. I've been trying to help them this year, because I knew they needed it. Now, instead of "Bring it on!!!" we have the liberal commentator Eleanor Clift reporting that John Kerry is on vacation in Idaho in the desperately crucial period where as Clift comments accurately: "This is a critical stage in the campaign. The voters barely know Kerry, and the Bush campaign is racing to define him in a negative way before he can define himself... Kerry knew this was coming. “Bring it on,” he said so often it became his battle cry. Well, now they’ve brought it on, and what is Kerry doing? He’s going on vacation in Idaho, leaving behind the festering story of his unholy bond with foreign leaders."

WHAT THE HECK IS JOHN KERRY THINKING?

If Kerry wants to be POTUS he better stop that vacation and fly back right now! God Almighty! I thought you Democrats were serious about winning this year. What could be going through his head? Does he want to lose? While the President obstructs the truth and fills the airwaves with propaganda, where is Kerry in order to take up the Democratic standard, stand up, and call the President on his less than factual statements?

Dear God, I did not decide to help Democratic candidates to campaign this year and decide to go against my family in pulling the Donkey lever merely to see John Kerry lounging on an Idaho porch while GW Bush fills American TV sets with misdirection and deceptions!!! You hear me John Kerry? You get off your caboose and you get out there and you stand for something, damn your French hide! You do not get to be a cheese-eating surrender monkey on my watch! Your arse belong to the American people now, John Kerry, and you better hustle it out there and get it moving because the ship is leaving port and you're missing the boat!

You hear me John Kerry? If JFK could campaign while seized up with back-pain, and FDR could campaign while paralyzed by polio, then you John Forbes Kerry can drop your little vacation and get back here and fight for the people who believed enough in you to stake the future of our country on your will and determination! You better bring it on Kerry, because God help us if you wuss out and GW get's another term because of you to ransack this nation then you will deserve the contempt of every patriot in this nation!

Update on Taiwanese election, still teeteering on the edge

MSNBC reports that the Taiwanese President and Vice President leave the hospital:

TAIPEI, Taiwan - President Chen Shui-bian and his vice president survived an assassination attempt Friday while campaigning on the eve of a closely fought election focusing on the military threat from the Chinese mainland.

In a videotaped message hours after being grazed in the abdomen by a bullet, Chen looked stiff and tired but reassured viewers about his health and Taiwan’s security....

Police had no suspects in the shooting of Chen, 53, and Vice President Annette Lu, 59, who was hit in the right knee, as they rode in an open Jeep along a street jammed with Chen’s supporters in his hometown of Tainan.

At least two shots were fired, and there might have been more than one gunman, said Liu Shih-lin, deputy chief of the National Police.

The BBC has additional coverage, including a gruesome picture of the Taiwanese President's stomach wound:

Correspondents say it is the first such attack on a president in Taiwan and may well affect Saturday's voting in what had already been a close race.

Some experts predict Mr Chen could benefit from a sudden wave of public sympathy though his opponent, Lien Chan, said he did not think the shooting would be a factor for voters.

The BBC's Chris Hogg, in Taipei, says the outcome of a race that was already too close to call is now almost impossible to predict.

He adds that on policy, there is little to separate Mr Chen from his opponent, apart from their attitudes to China.

If you ask the oldman, showing pictures of the stomach wound of your President is a little bit too much information. However they seem to be less shy and retiring about the public modesty of all public figures in Asia and to a lesser extent Europe. In the United States the dignity of the office would prevent such dissemination of information. Personally, the oldman thought it was gauche when the dress of Monica Lewinksy with its "stains" was personally presented, much less an 11 cm (~5 inch) raw red wound presented (with accompanying middle-aged male belly bulge).

That's just the oldman's opinion however!

GEOPOLITICAL STAKES

This election is essentially a referendum on the future of Taiwan, and while there may or may not be a sympathy vote factor, this is the second recent election where we've had a last minute "surprise" to liven up things. For the record, the oldman thinks it's too close to call reliably, but forced to put his two bits down on one horse or another ... the oldman "predicts" by guessing that Chen the incumbent will win electoral victory. Read more here about the background of the situation through a Washingtonpost story via the MSNBC portal.

While this story has gotten little coverage other than streaming headlines in the States, it actually has greater implications for the national security of the United States of America than the probable non-capture of Al-Zawahiri in Pakistan. First of all, they're probably not going to get the guy and the reports aren't credible because they have no way to know that he's in the fighters they've cornered. Second of all, they're playing a very dangerous game over there and this could backfire. Third of all, even if Al-Zawahiri were captured they'd just promote a new bad guy to be head boogie man under UBL.

If Chen wins the elections, we could be staring into the teeth of a dillemma more dangerous to the United States of America since the Cuban Missile Crisis! (See this Game Theory discussion of the former crisis).

Teetering on the edge of an Abyss, Taiwan elections update

Fresh off the wires, Taiwan's president (Chen) reportedly shot (AP):

The Associated Press
Updated: 2:05 a.m. ET March 19, 2004TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwanese leader Chen Shui-bian was shot in the stomach Friday while campaigning on last day of the presidential election, a lawmaker traveling with the president said.

But CTI cable news quoted unidentified police officials as saying the 53-year-old president was injured by celebratory fireworks that are traditionally ignited as the president's motorcade passes by.

Lawmaker Wang Hsing-nan told TVBS cable news that he was certain the president was shot because he saw the wound in the hospital and it was serious.

"The president suffered a deep wound about three centimeters (1.2 inches) deep in the stomach," Wang told TVBS.

Wang said he was traveling in a car behind Chen's convertible four-wheel-drive vehicle.

The Presidential Office told The Associated Press that it did not have enough information to discuss the incident. Officials said that a news conference would be held shortly.

If this is true - wow! It was already a close election, and this could throw it. Chen was strongly opposed by mainstream China's government as promoting too much independence. Mainland China still insists on eventual Taiwanese reunification "at any cost".

Reuters news service claims that the wound wasn't fatal.

"It was a gunshot but he is not in critical condition," presidential spokesman James Huang told Reuters.

This could easily tip the election if it is seen as mainland China tampering with the Taiwanese election. They've only been having them since 1987. Take a look here at a timeline of Taiwanese history.

Reply to Reader, concerning Alqueda's strategy

Calmo writes,

" ... Could Al Queda be this stupid? Did they want to underline Mr. Bush's campaign as The War President? Did they want more money spent on 'The War Against Terror'? I have even read critics claiming that they (the terrorists) prefer Bush as president because he is so incompetent. That view is surely over the top. IMHO, AQ is not this stupid. Surely the 'honor' derived is less than the political thrust given to Bush here."

Dear Calmo,

Your speculations are interesting, and I'm sure that some members of Alqueda are undoubtedly thinking along these lines. However, let us look at things in perspective. Commentators have spoken about how the Istanbul and Saudi Arabia bombings were a sign of Alqueda desperation and inability to strike the West. I guess with Spain they were proven unequivocally wrong.

I feel that such claims however fail to encompass the true nature of Alqueda. They miss the point. Rationality and logic in the usual secular empirical form common in philosophical reasoning cannot be applied to Alqueda. Their fundamental driving paradigm is one of a religious and internal struggle. They are still fighting the Crusades and warring over the Caliphate. They do not in my estimation seek to focus their efforts to "gain sympathy" or "influence thinking" in a way that would be easily reducible to logical analysis.

I think that Alqueda is structurally very much like the mythical hydra. They are attempting to recruit members, jerk the chain of Western Intelligence Agencies, develop financial and wayhouse networks beneath the radar of governments, and acting as an openhouse for different local plotters and volunteers. The 911 attack also falls into this category because it seems that Mohammad Atta drove the attack from beginning to completion.

Alqueda is more or less taking targets of opportunity, and fitting them into the general pattern using their bizaare numerology. The focus on symbolic targets is very indicative of what is called in the psychological trades magical thinking. This is the same sort of thinking that believes that symbolic objects can be manipulated to obtain real consequences, and is characteristic of primitive animistic beliefs as well as extreme religious fervor. In other words, the true mental state of the Alqueda leaders and their "planning" may well cast them in a romanticized religious epic somewhere between "The Ten Commandments" and sticking pins in a Voodoo doll.

To put it the most basic terms possible, it is my belief that Alqueda is operating under essentially the same faith-based mantra that motivated Kevin Kostner's character in the film "Field of Dreams".

If one will recall, Kostner's character is directed to build a baseball field in a cornfield with the slightly creepy whispering voice only he can hear saying:

"If you build it, they will come."

I believe that Alqueda is building it's infrastructure as a loose distributed network, recruiting members, generating multiple plots all according to a general numerological pattern, and taking the targets of opportunity that coincide with those plots based upon a generally religious belief that their efforts will eventually cause a cascade of events that will produce the outcome they desire - an Islamic totalitarian world government. This would explain why they haven't taken multiple targets of opportunity - the Super Bowl, attempting to strike on 911's anniversary, etc.

They're not trying to create an organization or wage a war, they're trying to inspire a religious movement.

It is notable that multiple chatter spikes have gone without attack in the face of increased public threat level notifications. This undoubtedly serves three purposes. First it allows Alqueda to determine leaks in their organizational network. They can put out news on an "impending attack" on a few channels, and if the Administration announces a threat level increase then one of those channels is compromised. It is notable that the Madrid 11-M attacks were NOT preceded by a spike in chatter.

Secondly, it lulls the public into a sense of complacency. They are playing the "boy who cried wolf" against us by using false alarms to innure the public into a false confidence that makes the shattering psychological effect of an attack all the more sudden. Thirdly, it paints a "mirage" or decoy image for our intelligence agencies to follow. While we seek out their "top leaders" and focus on machine-obtainable intel, their human networks are operating mostly independently and without the direction of top leadership. They can always promote someone to be the head boogie man, but the guys on the ground divided into loose cells that can't betray each other because no one really knows everyone else are plotting to kill us.

So to answer your question, I believe that they don't have any expectation about how a strike against Bush will go politically. This is despite the message issued by an Alqueda proxy organization taunting Americans by saying that Bush is the leader they want in office, because he's incompetent and alienates Muslims where Kerry might talk sense into them. I think reading too much into this message is wrong. If there is a philosophy that animates the minds of the Alqueda leadership, it's one of a religious morality theatre production. They don't seem to have any true intention to "cause" political change at all.

To adopt an attitude of causation, cause & effect, would be to miss that their psychology seems predicated upon religiously and symbolically significant correlations. This does not mean that their actions are not predictable nor are they unfathomable, but the Western presumptions of rationality, cause and effect, empiricism, don't seem to hold true in their operational paradigm. These guys have more in common with David Koresh than they do with the strategically brilliant Saladin.

And like Koresh they like things that go bomb and are willing to die for their beliefs. That is what we face. So the question is not whether they want Bush in office or not, but how Bush fits into a role they've cast for him. Is Bush just an inept Western Leader, interchangable with Bill Clinton? Or is Bush some starring actor, fated in their mythic truths to be confronted and defeated? My guess is the former, and that would mean that the priority in striking the United States would not be based upon the liklihood of retaining Bush as a leader.

And that detachment from everything we call reason may well make them more dangerous than any opponent we've faced before, because they would do things like risk complete nuclear annihilation in order to further their beliefs.

The rain in Spain is not as sad as the blame in Spain,

I.
APPEASEMENT OR ACCOUNTABILITY? READING TEA LEAVES IN THE SPAINISH ELECTIONS,

At Daniel Drezner's blog there is much handwringing and woe-betide-us for the fall of Aznar's Popular Party to the Socialist. There is also much woe-is-us over the "possibility" that Alqueda may have successfully attempted to influence the Spanish elections.

Additionally, Brooks in the NYT writes in his column:

I am trying not to think harshly of the Spanish. They have suffered a grievous blow, and it was crazy to go ahead with an election a mere three days after the Madrid massacre. Nonetheless, here is what seems to have happened:

The Spanish government was conducting policies in Afghanistan and Iraq that Al Qaeda found objectionable. A group linked to Al Qaeda murdered 200 Spaniards, claiming that the bombing was punishment for those policies. Some significant percentage of the Spanish electorate was mobilized after the massacre to shift the course of the campaign, throw out the old government and replace it with one whose policies are more to Al Qaeda's liking.

What is the Spanish word for appeasement?

There are millions of Americans, in and out of government, who believe the swing Spanish voters are shamefully trying to seek a separate peace in the war on terror.

I'm resisting that conclusion, because I don't know what mix of issues swung the Spanish election during those final days. But I do know that reversing course in the wake of a terrorist attack is inexcusable. I don't care what the policy is. You do not give terrorists the chance to think that their methods work. You do not give them the chance to celebrate victories. When you do that, you make the world a more dangerous place, for others and probably for yourself.

Dan quotes Ed N. Luttwak in the NYT as writing:

Even those who view the Iraq war as a strategic error for the United States — and I'm one of them — cannot take seriously the Zapateros of Europe, who seem bent on validating the crudest caricatures of "old European" cowardly decadence. It was an act of colossal irresponsibility for the Socialists and the Spanish news media to excoriate the Aznar government for asserting that ETA, the Basque separatist movement, was probably behind the attacks.

Were the Socialists certain Al Qaeda was involved? No, but saying so made it easier to convince voters that the bombs had been placed by Muslims angry that Spain had sided with the United States in the war — and that the only way to make things right would be to get out of Iraq.

II.
DID THE SPAINARDS BLINK?

First of all the oldman rejects the idea that the Spainish media had it in for Aznar's government. As the oldman's last point on the subject cited sources showing, immediately after the Madrid 311 (11-M) bombings the Spainish newspapers blamed ETA. Indeed, interviews with people on the street (polls were not being taken during the mourning period) showed that most people thought that the ETA was involved. This wasn't a mere guess in the dark. The compressed dynamite and remote triggered explosions were signatures that pointed toward ETA.

However, as MSNBC reports Aznar's government tried to politicize the bombings fearing (rightly) that their political opponents would try to capitalize upon it to blame Aznar's government for the bombing:

MADRID, March 16 - In the first frantic hours after coordinated bomb blasts ripped through several packed commuter trains Thursday morning, the government of outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar undertook an intense campaign to convince the Spanish public and world opinion-makers that the Basque separatist group ETA had carried out the attacks, which killed 201 people and wounded more than 1,500.

Beginning immediately after the blasts, Aznar and other officials telephoned journalists, stressing ETA's responsibility and dismissing speculation that Islamic extremists might be involved. Spanish diplomats pushed a hastily drafted resolution blaming ETA through the U.N. Security Council. At an afternoon news conference, when a reporter suggested the possibility of an al Qaeda connection, the interior minister, Angel Acebes, angrily denounced it as "a miserable attempt to disrupt information and confuse people."

"There is no doubt that ETA is responsible," Acebes said.

Within days, that assertion was in tatters, and with it the reputation and fortunes of the ruling party. Suspicion that the government manipulated information -- blaming ETA in order to divert any possible link between the bombings and Aznar's unpopular support for the war in Iraq -- helped fuel the upset victory of the Socialist Workers' Party in Sunday's elections. By then, Islamic extremists linked to al Qaeda had become the focus of the investigation.

III.
WHAT IS THE LESSON?

Make no mistake, the Spainish victory of the Socialist party cannot help but be construed as a victory for Alqeuda. However, the blame does not fall upon the Socialist party. Aznar's government had been already weakened on several issues. They had been forced into admitting mishandling the worst environmental disaster in modern Spainish history, an oil tanker running aground off the shore of Spain. Aznar had also gambled away his credibility asserting that there were indeed WMD in Iraq. The subsequent failure to find any WMD heavily damaged his reputation with his public.

Aznar had successfully conducted a counter-terrorism campaign cracking down on ETA. However, he then over-extended in Iraq with more than 90% of the population not supporting the Spainish support of the US military action there. With his credibility already riddled with holes and having lost the trust of the public, when the perception of an attempt to politically manipulate the Spainish electorate arose at the last minute before the elections the Popular Party was NOT given the benefit of the doubt by the voters. With an unusually high turn-out at 77% versus roughly 55% for the last election and the fact that before 11-M the Popular Party was comfortably ahead of the Socialist Party in the polls, the only reasonable conclusion is that Spainish voters clearly had decided that they no longer trusted or wanted Aznar, his successor, and his Popular Party in order to run the country.

So Aznar did it to himself. The lesson is that governments cannot lie to their voters, and then invoke the boogie man of "handing a victory to terrorists" in order to persuade the voters to not hold them accountable. Personally, the oldman thought Aznar's choice to support the United States was brave, but as a Spainish Aznar supporter and pro-Iraq-War poster named brios suggested on Dan's blog, Aznar should have simply stated that it was a realpolitick decision to side with the United States rather than a conviction about WMD intelligence. So the lesson is that governments cannot abuse the trust of their voters, and then count on the specter of giving aid or comfort to terrorist causes in order to bail them out at the voting booth.

As MSNBC reports on the European reaction:

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen an actual terrorist attack specifically timed for an election in another country and dictate a nation’s foreign policy,” says Steven Emerson, a noted terrorism specialist and author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us.“It’s an incredible feat for al-Qaida or whatever group carried it out.”

The devastation wrought by the bombings -- the worst act of terrorism in European history –- helped topple a Spanish government that had been seen as a certain victor in the March 14 general elections. Instead, the Popular Party, which had ruled for eight years, lost in a landslide to the Socialist Party, which stood fervently against the Iraq war and has since promised to pull out Spain’s 1,300-strong contingent unless the United Nations is put in charge by June.

Eventually the lies become too much and the voters rebel. One thing we know for sure is that there was nothing stopping Aznar from coming clean before the elections. Nothing was stopping Aznar from leveling with his public, either in the run up to the War in Iraq or later. He failed to do this and lost the trust of his public. Transparency, public trust, and credibility still matter at the voting booth, and terrorism does not trump all other issues. This is a lesson that the neo-Republicans who have captured control of the Republican party here in the States should take to heart.

As this MSNBC article reports on the post-11-M scene in Spain:

MADRID, March 15 - The hand-lettered sign at the sidewalk memorial for the 200 victims of last week's deadly train bombings starkly summed up a sentiment of many who came to pay respects Monday afternoon. It read: "They Died to Support Bush."

Sunday's stunning electoral defeat for the ruling party of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, one of President Bush's closest European allies, reflected a late surge of public anger over the government's support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq triggered both by the attacks and by the sense the government had sought to exploit the bombings for political gain, according to political analysts and voters.

Several added that it also reflected a sense of alarm and despair that seems to cut across the political spectrum over the way the United States is wielding power in the world.

Trust & Transparency trumps terrorism. If no one can trust you, then you are of no use to anyone no matter your other qualifications.

UPDATE: This NYT article summarizes the Aznar government attempt to suppress discussion of the responsibility for the 11-M bombings:

But interviews with scores of Spaniards of both parties indicated that a number of things happened after the attacks that shifted the balance to the Socialists. Voters flooded the polls on Sunday in record numbers, especially young people who had not planned to vote. In interviews, they said they did so not so much out of fear of terror as out of anger against a government they saw as increasingly authoritarian, arrogant and stubborn. The government, they said, mishandled the crisis in the emotional days after the attacks.

Voters said they were enraged not only by the government's insistence that the Basque separatist group ETA was responsible, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, but they also resented its clumsy attempts to quell antigovernment sentiment.

Why NOT the rush to judgement on Alqueda's role in Madrid bombings?

I.
TRAGEDY IN MADRID 3/11

In the aftermath of 911 the French Newspaper Lemonde ("The World") put out a front page saying: "We are all Americans." It was and is a touching statement that reflected a world that grieved with America. Now with the tragedy in Madrid (BBC) the sentiment the oldman would like to espouse is the same as that which was written on a Spanish marcher's banner: "We were all on that train.".

Initial evidence is coming out, that while preliminary is painting a fairly clear picture of what was going on. On one hand, despite ETA's formal denials, there is significant evidence indicating ETA involvement. ETA is the political and military arm of the Basque homeland seccessionist movement that seeks to liberate the minority Basques from general Spanish society. They have been terrorists of local note, seeking through a nationalist-aspiration movement to gain greater voice for their people.

On the other hand, there is ample evidence that Alqueda operatives were involved (MSNBC). As Daniel Drezner blogs about, there is a likley Alqueda franchise connection. Alqueda also has formally claimed responsibility, and there are many additional signs that point to Alqueda (MSNBC) as well. In addition, the attacks on 3/11 are reported to have occurred exactly 911 days after the New York City September 11th attacks, and a Spanish minister announced that a van filled with detonators and an tape in the Arabic language was found near one of the train origination centers. Juan Cole has some comments about how Alqueda is emerging as a major suspect in the bombings.

Unfortunately, as the NYT reports this investigation is already being politicized:
"The center-right government continued to assert that the armed Basque separatist group ETA and not Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization, was probably responsible for the attack, although the evidence is confusing and nothing has been ruled out.

The political stakes in uncovering the identity of the terrorists are high. Spain's voters will elect a new government on Sunday. Mariano Rajoy, the handpicked successor of Prime Minister José María Aznar and the candidate of the governing Popular Party, is in the lead. He has pledged to continue the policies of Mr. Aznar, including Spain's full participation in the Bush administration's antiterror and Iraq policies...

"Certain opposition parties are trying to use Al Qaeda because of the Iraq war simply to win an election," Gustavo de Arístegui, the foreign affairs spokesman for the Popular Party, said in a telephone interview. "I think it's repulsive."

This is apparently happening on both sides, with a great deal of internal pressure to blame the ETA solely despite formal and unusual disavowals from the ETA leadership. As the CSM reports this has triggered a political fight over who to blame for the bombing:

"Spanish papers were quick to pin the blame on Spain's homegrown terrorist group, ETA. ETA which stands for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the Basque words for "Basque country and Freedom," is a Marxist-Leninist group that was founded in 1959. The group turned to terrorism in 1968 and over the years has killed a total of 850 people in Spain...

But key Basque politicians almost immediately denied ETA was involved. The Independent reports that Thursday Arnaldo Otegi, leader of ETA's now banned political wing, insisted that ETA had nothing to do with the attack. This is significant, because Basque leaders have not issued such statements with previous ETA attacks...

The Toronto Star reports Friday that despite the lack of hard evidence, intelligence experts in the United States have quickly moved toward the consensus that the attack was sponsored or carried out by Al Qaeda."

II.
SO WHO IS TO BLAME?

The first thing to note that to frame the question of it being solely Alqueda or ETA is a false dichotomy. Indeed, the evidence is perfectly consistent with the notion that Alqueda may be operating a "franchise" and "venture capitalist" for terrorism operations. Alqueda lends expertise, operatives, and money to local groups that provide local knowledge, local grudges, and distribution networks to smuggle people and weapons into place. That the ETA leadership may have issued denials and be appalled at this attack is not contradictory to their involvement.

TIME magazine has a good article summarizing the political whodunnit aspect:

" That Basque terrorists would top the list of the Spanish authorities' suspects in Thursday's devastating is hardly surprising: The terror group ETA has grown desperate as it finds itself increasingly marginalized even in Basque politics, and hounded by a sustained police crackdown both in Spain and France that has reduced its active ranks to an estimated 250. Two alleged ETA operatives were arrested in a failed attempt to bomb Spanish trains just last Christmas; it had promised an "action" to coincide with Spain's general election this coming Sunday; and its four decades in the profession, during which time it has killed more than 800 people, have quite simply made ETA the default suspect in Spanish terror attacks. Some of the forensics amplify the case for making the Basque group the prime suspect: The explosive used in Thursday's multiple train bombings was of a type previously used in ETA operations, and the fact that they were remotely triggered using cell phones — rather than by suicide bombers — reinforces the suspicion...

The government's rush to blame ETA slowed late on Thursday with the discovery of a stolen van containing seven detonators and tapes of Koranic verse in the town from which two of the trains departed and through which a third had passed. And a London-based Arab newspaper reported Friday that it had received an emailed statement from the "Abu Hafs al-Masri" brigade, an al-Qaeda offshoot, claiming responsibility (although this group has previously claimed responsibility for attacks subsequently attributed to others). Spanish authorities announced that they had opened a "second line of inquiry" and were not precluding the possibility that al-Qaeda was to blame...

But to the extent that it blames al-Qaeda, the political equation is more difficult to read — the overwhelming majority of Spanish voters opposed Aznar's support for the Iraq invasion, and if these attacks are perceived as a consequence of that support, it could cost the ruling party."

In 2002 the ETA party was banned and there was a security crackdown on the Basque separatist movement. The result of this was a breaking up of the centralized control of the terrorism network. It's entirely possible and very probable that parts of that network, embittered about the harsh security tactics, would have reached out to Alqueda operatives to offer cooperation, comfort, and sanctuary in return for delivering a spectacular blow against Aznar's Popular Party in the run up to the elections. Alqueda would regain its reputation as a heavy hitter to be taken seriously despite some Western commentator's foolish recent comments about the weakening of the network. This could have happened without upper level ETA party involvement, with so-called "rogue operatives" choosing a course of action without the knowledge of their superiors.

The sad thing is that respect for the honored dead seems to be disappating in the run-up to the election. In the aftermath of 911, the oldman was fairly sure that Alqeuda had been responsible. However, he was fairly disturbed at the lack of questioning over the fairly thin evidence that the Administration publicly presented. This time around the evidence compared to the same period after 911 is overwhelming that Alqeuda was involved, and if we'd had this much public evidence available back then Alqeuda would have been burning in effigy and a military invasion already underway.

On one hand, the Popular Party would like it seems to solely blame the ETA and cherry pick evidence to support their notion. There must be tremendous internal pressure to cook this investigation. This is because for Alqueda to be involved would be construed as a major criticism of Aznar's support for Bush in his WoT and specifically the Iraq invasion. To vanish any doubt about that, the Alqueda tape directly refers to Spanish involvement in the invasion of the middle-east as a motivation of the bombing. On the other hand, the anti-war and leftist elements in the Spanish political spectrum apparently seems to be playing up this angle as a direct criticism of Aznar's policies regarding Iraq. So from both sides, this issue is being politicized as an electorally divisive issue.

The proper trans-Atlantic tone is struck by this Weekly Standard article by Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors:

" At this writing, it is unclear whether the bombing was perpetrated by al Qaeda ... or by the Basque terrorist group ETA... or by some combination of the two. But the meaning of the attack does not depend on the identity--that is, the particular psychopathology--of the killers behind it. It is the civilized world that will provide the meanings here.

Having been attacked in al Qaeda communiqués as both a "crusader" country and an "apostate" former Islamic land, Spain will not delude itself that making nice--by, for instance, distancing itself from the U.S.-led war on terror--will ransom it from al Qaeda's wrath. Nor will the United States abandon Spain to its domestic terrorists on the equally false grounds that they are no concern of ours. If, for instance, terrorists with previously local grievances are learning logistical lessons from al Qaeda's large-scale simultaneous bombings, that is our problem, too."

III.
THE OLDMAN'S OPINION:

Now I am highly disturbed that given the relatively large amount of evidence pointing toward Alqueda that for political reasons this is being pushed toward ETA. Note too that while most Western intelligence analysts think that this is Alqueda's work, the Bush Administration isn't saying anything about it. This is because it would be politically more convenient if it was blamed on ETA instead. If it was felt that siding with the United States made one the target of terrorism, then this would be a boost for Alqueda's divide and conquer tactics and another black-eye for an Administration otherwise eager to alienate foreign countries.

Frankly, I think it is Alqueda's fault with some local collusion -including parts of the ETA network- and that it strengthen's Aznar's choice to support Bush in my eyes at least. However, this is not the way it's being spun over there ... and by the deafening official silence over here. It's clear that Alqueda's participation has been completely politicized, hyped when convenient and downplayed when expedient. If we were to apply the same standards now as after 911, Alqueda would have already been burning in effigy soon to be followed by military invasion. However, that would be inconvenient for the political powers that be.

This is partly why I sneer at the sentiment that somehow that the present alignment of political interests is "tough on terror". They're all too willing to invoke the boogie man when it suits them, but they won't do what it takes to go after them and they're all too willing to cloak their own interests in the WoT and finally they're all too eager to overlook real threats / risks of terrorism when it no longer suits them.

This whole thing is being gamed. It's despicable, utterly despicable. Three thousand Americans died in the burning and collapsing World Trade Towers. The voices of the dead in Turkey and the slain in Madrid cry out for justice. They and their memory deserve better than this, and all the rest of us do too.

Now they realize it might have not been such a good idea ...

Daniel Drezner ponders the merits of 'Is "Islamic liberal democracy" an unholy trinity?'.

This is not news to those of us who have been paying attention to history. Phoney democracies subverted by oligarchies, neo-fascist nationalists, socialists, etc. exist the world over. Chavez / Venezula anyone? Indeed, even genuine liberal democracies can possibly have very differing and antagonistic values and imperatives than us.

If democracy sweeps the Middle-east world look for an expansion of seeking nuclear weapons, increased oil prices (You can imagine the politicians promising higher oil export prices as an economic quick fix now), greater state-sponsored and allied nationalist movement terrorism, rises in anti-Western sentiment, and increased economic and military pressure on Isreal. Apparently the bright lights in the Admin actually sent away all the experts (Salon.com / daypass advertisement required for viewing) ahead of time so that their ideology could be unecumbered by little things like facts. Then they have the chutzpah to claim that they couldn't know or forsee how the consequences of their actions would unfold. Truth to tell, many warned them honestly and credibly but they just didn't want to listen.

We could also expect well as increased defection of other countries such as the EU, Russia, and China as they realize they can leverage anti-American sentiment into influence and access in the oil fields.

Robert Kagan, recently wrote in The New York Times that the net result of U.S. policy since 9/11 has been that "America, for the first time since World War II, is suffering a crisis of international legitimacy. Americans will find that they cannot ignore this problem."

Robert Kagan is one of the editors of the Weekly Standard and was once considered an influential neo-conservative.

Nor is he alone. Henry Kissinger was recently quoted by the BBC as worrying about "This, he feared, was leading to a decline in America's legitimacy."

It's not a question of confronting terrorism and rogue states and WMD. Indeed I wish we would do that - in countries proven to be proliferating like Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea. I wish we would do it intelligently, forcefully, and with real Machiavellian realpolitk. What we have inadvertantly done now is woken a sleeping demon, spent our credibility fruitlessly, and have precipitiously driven our enemies to unify while at the same time alienating those who might help us.

This is especially galling since as the oldman has written, except for the naivete of foriegn policy neophytes and ideologes, that the dangers of phoney democracy have long been known. Additionally the oldman has written about how we have neglected our own security measures.

And unless we correct our course it is going to be a significant problem in our future. Indeed we may create as self-fullfilling nightmares the very WMD-terrorism connections we have sought to destroy.

Can Kerry carry the weight of the Presidency?

Bush falls flat on foreign policy

Despite my long time criticisms of President Bush, this does not mean by any means that the oldman has complete confidence in the Democrats. On one hand, President Bush may have substantially worsened the American national security posture after 911 by over-reaching. Clearly this is a man who can't manage a lemonade stand much less a superpower. The oldman's evidence? When he was owner of the Rangers baseball team, Bush traded Sammy Sosa for Harold Baines. Who is Harold Baines one asks? That one has to ask is the whole point. Now that's he's running the most powerful nation in the recorded history of mankind, Bush has brought his less than brilliant managerial style to overstretching the American military (MSNBC).

"No matter who wins, the same reality will confront the next president in 2005 -- that we are severely overstretched and have to make a number of choices: whether to stop taking on new commitments, and if necessary discard some, or to increase the size of military forces and dramatically increase the defense budget," said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member during the Reagan administration who is now at the Nixon Center.

"This sort of notion that we are omnipotent and at a unipolar moment that allows us to knock off regimes we don't like, it's an idea whose time has passed," Kemp said.


Then Kerry trips up and falls on top of him...

On the other hand perhaps it's reading too many Mickey Kaus reports on Slate ranting about how contradictory Kerry's policies are or how Kerry K.O.'ed Dean, but Kerry doesn't exactly have my confidence either though I doubt he would engage in such a forward invasion posture. Then again Kerry did say that he would have chosen as President to send in troops to prop up Aristide in Haiti (NYT).

"I would have been prepared to send troops immediately, period," Mr. Kerry said on Friday, expressing astonishment that President Bush, who talks of supporting democratically elected leaders, withheld any aid and then helped spirit Mr. Aristide into exile after saying the United States could not protect him.

"Look, Aristide was no picnic, and did a lot of things wrong," Mr. Kerry said. But Washington "had understandings in the region about the right of a democratic regime to ask for help. And we contravened all of that. I think it's a terrible message to the region, democracies, and it's shortsighted."

Saying that Aristide of Haiti is an elected leader is like saying Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is an elected leader. Mugabe did win the last election. However, the election was probably fixed. These sorts of phony democracies are common in nations where democracies are introduced without prior enabling socioeconomic development (Oldman1787).

Propping up Aristide would have been the absolutely wrong thing to do. Powell made this mistake by trying to broker an agreement with the Aristide opposition where Aristide stayed in power. They refused flatly, and the United States and Powell lost (even more) precious credibity. Of course, the way that the Bush43 Administration mismanaged and fumbled the issue after that isn't confidence building either.

“The Americans are only here to protect those who helped oust Aristide,” said Ednar Ducoste, 23, an Aristide supporter. “If we had guns, we would be fighting against them right now.”

On Sunday Aristide released a statement through government officials in the Central African Republic, where he is in exile, saying he was “well looked-after” by his hosts and would personally address reporters at an unspecified time. Aristide has said the United States forced him from power, something U.S. officials deny.

COMMENT

It's amazing how the Bush Administration is capable of creating anti-American sentiment around the world. This time however, they cooperated with France in order to do so. So what should they have done? It's a matter of too hot and too cold. Sufficient coordination with allies is needed along with sufficient application of force. It's this chewing bubble gum and walking at the same time thing that the Bush Administration doesn't have down yet. If they did force Aristide from power, they should get him to shut the hell up and tell his followers to stand down. If they didn't force him from power, they should get him to shut the hell up and tell his followers to stand down. A precondition of most exile agreements is that the fleeing politician stop meddling in affairs of his original country. The United States could easily pressure Aristide with a threat to his sanctuary status to help calm things down.

Apparently this hasn't occurred to the bright lights up there at State and the National Security Council. This thing has been mishandled from the start. Aristide's time was done. Without any international or American encouragement, the opposing forces would have edged him out. Kerry's idea of propping him up was bunk. However, the Bush Administration should have been riding herd on the opposition and brokered a transition to a new intermediate regime which would have restored peace and stability rather than leaving pro and anti-Aristide militias running about with American Marines caught in between.

Aristide should have been forced to bless this arrangement and swallow the bitter pill as a precondition of his exile. A Haitian high judge has been sworn in as a nominal leader, but the rebel forces are undisciplined and haven't had the law laid down for them. They should have been told under threat of force and international sanction that they will only be transitional figures underneath the political direction of the Aristide opposition coalition and the transitional government, conducted under international supervision.

Powell and Rice really let this get away from them. Sometimes it is necessary to knock heads together and force people to be reasonable and play nice. Sometimes people just won't agree to be reasonable and play by the rules unless it is forcibly impressed upon them that pulling stunts will not be tolerated. The rule however is that force is to be used as a diplomacy and strategy amplifier. The coercive threat of force, the so-called iron fist within the velvet glove, is what makes the soft touch of negotiations firm enough to take hold. Naked force arouses resentment and used too often expends precious resources. Diplomacy without coercive economic and security measures as a stick to balance the carrot breeds anarchy and contempt for law and order. One could argue that Democrats and Republicans represent two incompetent extremes in the capacity to use force deftly in conjunction with cooperation in order to achieve useful ends. If this is the best that either can offer, then a pox on both their houses!

Homeland security update ... not very homey or secure ...

Michael Crowley of The New Republic (hat tip to Josh Levin) writes that the Dept. of Homeland Security is a mess:

Last December, I called the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) main line. "Thank you for your interest in the Department of Homeland Security," a recorded voice responded. "Due to the high level of interest in the department all lines are currently busy. ... We encourage you to call back soon." A beep was followed by a click. It was a good thing I wasn't calling to report an anthrax attack, because I'd been disconnected. As advised, I tried calling back "soon"--and got the same recording. Just a bad week, perhaps? Apparently not. A few weeks later, a Roll Call reporter had the same experience.

Unanswered phones are a small but telling example of how DHS is faring one year after the department opened its doors last March. Far from being greater than the sum of its parts, DHS is a bureaucratic Frankenstein, with clumsily stitched-together limbs and an inadequate, misfiring brain. No one says merging 170,000 employees from 22 different agencies should have been easy. But, even allowing for inevitable transition problems, DHS has been a disaster: underfunded, undermanned, disorganized, and unforgivably slow-moving.

And, yet, George W. Bush can't stop praising it. His January State of the Union address hailed "the men and women of our new Homeland Security Department [who] are patrolling our coasts and borders," whose "vigilance is protecting America." In a September 11 anniversary address at Quantico, Virginia, Bush mentioned DHS no less than twelve times, saying, "Secretary [Tom] Ridge and his team have done a fine job in getting the difficult work of organizing the department [sic]." And, at an event celebrating the department's one-year anniversary this week, Bush declared that the department had "accomplished an historic task," and that Ridge has done a "fantastic job" of making the United States safer.

That's nonsense. DHS has failed to address some of our most serious vulnerabilities, from centralizing intelligence to protecting critical infrastructure to organizing against bioterror. Many a policy wonk who has evaluated the department has come away despondent. Zoe Lofgren, a senior Democrat on two House committees that oversee DHS, puts it this way: "We are arguably in worse shape than we were before [the creation of the department]. ... If the American people knew how little has been done, they would be outraged."

Meanwhile in Iraq, an Alqueda bad guy named Zarqawi becomes the scape-goat for American security troubles there as reported by Tony Karon in Time Magazine:

What do you do when you've rolled up most of your 52-card deck of Iraqi bad guys but the bad stuff keeps on happening? Why, mint a 53rd card, of course. The Coalition Provisional Authority announced last week that it was doing just that, adding a "wild card" bearing the visage of a Jordanian terrorist who goes by the name of Musab al-Zarqawi to its deck of former regime figures. The decision is hardly surprising: Most of the original deck are now dead or in U.S. custody; only seven are still at large. Yet, the insurgency continues to kill Americans and Iraqis every day, and shows no sign of abating. Perhaps because of a deeply ingrained Hollywood convention, Americans need to put a face on the enemy. Finding the "evil one" ends the game, at least in the movies.

MSNBC has a story examining the Zarqawi hype that supports Karon's analysis. Shouldn't we take the Admnistration's claims to have supporting documentation of Zarqawi's dangerousness seriously however? Zarqawi may indeed be a dangerous and prominent figure in the terrorist underworld, however it is highly unlikely that he is responsible for most of Iraq's insurgency which seems to be mostly propelled by indigenous nationalist concerns rather than religious jihad. The cynicism of the Bush Administration on this topic can be seen by their voluntary choice not to kill Zarqawi as reported by Jim Miklaszewski of MSNBC. If Zarqawi had been considered such an important figure in Alqueda and a serious danger to American national security interests, then why would it be true that "... NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger."

How many times did this happen? Not once. Not twice. Three times the Pentagon drew up a strike plan and three times the National Security Council killed it. Eventually, an attack plan was conducted but by Administration admission Zarqawi had gotten clean away by that time in order to pose the threat they now claim he represents in post-war Iraq today. Blaming him now for Iraq's security debacle is the height of cynicism.

COMMENT

Well, that just supports the gloomy news that the oldman has written about, regarding the selling out of the financial war on terrorism. Otherwise, Alqueda remains the "bogey-man" used to scare Americans into supporting political action even while the inept Intelligence Agencies and paralyzed Administration fumble about. We've destroyed most of the high-profile first generation Alqueda leadership, but they've successfully gone underground and are operating right now almost completely underneath our radar.

Unfortunately, people in the United States have lost focus again. Will it take another disaster for people to wake up to the truth? One of the fundamental principles of reasoning that one can almost always count on is that "Bureaucracy only responds to crisis". I'm afraid that shocking as it may seem, 911 wasn't a sufficient crisis to motivate true change. This is going on while in a completely cynical fashion the President is using 911 footage in his election ads (WaPo).

However, people get the leaders they deserve and not the ones they need. If we all stand by and let something like this pass, what can we expect but further bait&switch shennanigans?

Meanwhile the BBC reports that bin Ladin may have slipped through our fingers again ... despite the efforts of the US inter-service Special Ops Task Force 121. For a human interest perspective, read Newsweek's account about the leader of Task Force 121, McRaven, a former Navy Seal.

Jobs report out tomorrow...

I. Introduction

Despite the oldman's arguments that the job's picture is indeed much less robust than the 5.6% unemployment rate betokens, the fact is that the economy is on a slow path of recovery. This recovery could be killed in its tanks, as the oldman has written because of the unstable nature of its asset inflation due to the excessive stimulation being applied by the Federal Reserve. This comment has been backed up by none other than the august Economist magazine, that writes of America's phoney recovery.

WHEN The Economist sounded the alarm about America's bubble economy in the late 1990s, what concerned us most was that share prices were no longer just a mirror that reflected the underlying economy, they had become its major driving force: soaring share prices encouraged a borrowing and spending binge. Although the stockmarket is lower today, in some respects the “economic bubble” has still not burst. The value of households' total wealth (in financial assets and homes) is well above its level before share prices started to slide in early 2000—and the American economy is more dependent than ever on asset appreciation.

This economic instability is exacerbated by the speculation on the bond markets by banks. The critical problem would occur if a destabilization of the dollar-hegemony were to rear its ugly head. Dollar-hegemony basically means that dollars are a world currency, that can and are used to buy anything and everything at anywhere and everywhere you can imagine. As the Economist notes in it's article 'Heading for a fall, by fiat?' that:

IS THE problem with the dollar only that it is falling? It has certainly been doing that. This month, it fell to $1.29 against the euro. This is its lowest-ever rate against the euro, and represents a decline of 19% since the beginning of 2003. In trade-weighted terms, the dollar has fallen less over the same period (15%), but mainly because Asian central banks have been intervening heavily to stem their currencies' rise against it. Of late, it has been wobbling around unconvincingly: America needs a weaker dollar to correct its current-account deficit. But given the dollar's role as a currency of last resort, some wonder if its decline heralds not just an economic adjustment by the United States, but a crisis of sorts in the value of paper money itself.

Well, with those cheery thoughts, let's turn to examining the jobs picture. According to MSNBC's chief economic correspondent, Martin Wolk, there is a range of estimates coming in for the expected employment report tomorrow:

On average, according to Thomson Financial, forecasters expect the unemployment rate to remain unchanged at 5.6 percent for February as the economy shows an increase of 128,000 payroll jobs. That would be the best result in more than three years but still below the level typically needed to keep up with growth in the labor force.

Remember however, last time the economists had a range of estimates that was generally too high. The economy only produced 112,000 jobs on the payroll survey. This was because they underestimated certain factors:

Employment industry executive John Challenger said he thinks strong and steady job growth of that magnitude is unlikely in the current business environment, where companies have improved their ability to hone productivity through automation and outsourcing.

“All that has led to a period of low job growth, and it doesn’t matter what you do — that’s the way it is,” Challenger said. “I think this is a period of time where real job creation at the scale we saw in the '90s is impossible.”

II. So what is the oldman's prediction?

From the oldman's feel of things, the economy has mixed signals. As Martin Wolk reports:

Zandi and other forecasters are skeptical the economy is on the verge of a sustained rebound in hiring, partly because employment signals have turned mixed in recent weeks.

This matches the oldman's expectations. He feels that the employment estimate of about 120,000 jobs on the payroll survey is about right, and might be slightly on the high side. The economy feels steadier than it did last month, but it doesn't certainly feel strong the way a 150,000 job addition might indicate. The word the oldman is looking for is steady but 'meandering'. So we have a slightly weaker than usual economy, despite the roughly 4% GDP growth. That's what it looks like.

Why is that?

Well as it turns out, Intel has lowered its revenue expectations toward the weak end of the target range (MSNBC). If we take Intel as a proxy (a crude one to be sure) for the high end US economy and capital investment streams in business expansion (that would also be correlated to hiring) then we could expect the general US economy and hiring to do the same.

Intel Corp. on Thursday narrowed the range of its quarterly revenue estimate toward the weaker end, saying its core microprocessor business was performing at the lower end of historical seasonal patterns.

Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker, said it expects first-quarter revenue to fall within a range of $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion versus its earlier range of $7.9 billion to $8.5 billion.

So if we expand this to the general economy, which feels about right, we have a payroll job's picture of 100,000-120,000 - which is positive but on the weak end of expectations.

In addition, no matter what anyone tries to sell you on inflation is NOT 1.1% or whatever ridiculous number they're touting. Part of it is structural, part of it is deviation from reality in the assumptions in the CPI statistics, and part of it is volatile food and energy prices like high gasoline prices as MSNBC reports:

The Bush administration is “extremely concerned” about soaring retail gasoline prices, which recently topped $1.70 per gallon nationwide and are likely to set a record high this month, according to energy officials

With higher real prices in the system, and greater production efficiencies - due no doubt partly to automation and partly from globalized capital flight to third world country labor pools - we can expect "Real GDP" to be at or near zero with the benefit of the doubt to economic contraction. The population is growing and even if the jobs estimate of 128,000 jobs were hit, it'd be subpar both on a historical basis and relative to the number of people being added to the economy. With that number of jobs, we'd still be in an employment contraction since more people would join the working force than find jobs.

This is consistent with MSNBC's report that:

“There is evidence that firing is abating. As yet there is no evidence that hiring has picked up to any significant degree,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Economy.com, a forecasting firm...

A study released Thursday by two labor-oriented groups show that long-term unemployment of six months or more has risen 300 percent among workers with college degrees over the past three years, compared with 156 percent for workers with no college education. Long-term unemployment also has risen by more than 300 percent for information technology workers and among management, business and financial professionals.

Altogether 22 percent of the nation’s unemployed had been out of work for six months or more by the end of last year, up from 11.4 percent at the end of 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The study was done by the National Employment Law Project and the Employment Policy Institute.

III. Conclusion

Even though as MSNBC reports that: "Manufacturers consistently have been saying in recent surveys that they intend to increase hiring, raising hopes that the hard-hit sector will begin adding jobs again after 40 straight months of losses." the hopes of individuals like Daniel Drezner that manufacturing will rebound are probably premature.

Manufacturing will probably stop contracting, but net job gains of any strength are probably not warrented - just fluctuations around absolute or trend zero. The last reports about Service sector jobs indicate that their hiring was stalled as well. The oldman feels that any slight growth in services will be more than compensated by the seasonal downturn of holiday hiring moving into the spring phase of the retail employment cycle. So there is no real reason to get the hopes up. The economy, barring severe economic shock from a stock market correction and heaven forbid a bond-market firesale and dollar-hegemony destabilization that forces the yield curve and interest rates up as well as monetary blowback flashflodd inflation, barring all of that is on the path for steady but not sub-par growth. It may remain stagnant this way the entire summer, or whenever the "top" in the present stock market decides to take a breather over there on Wall Street. Then we'd get a capital investment crunch and that would make a shallow double-dip recession take hold, which seems to be the path that the American economy is on. But that won't happen without an exogenous shock or an asset price collapse, so until then - subpar growth half-speed ahead!!!

Bithead strikes out ... again...

NOTE: Bithead strikes ... out ... again. This bithead is clearly a moron. He forgets to factor in population growth and to look at employment to population ratio when he makes his next boast. Yes there are more jobs than in Jan'01, there are also lots more people. A look at the actual number reveals that the percentage of people who can work as part of the population is down severely, to basically early 1994 levels. Weird. Is this the best that morons like this can come up? Notice his snooty attitude too ... now the oldman has attitude up the whazoo, but then again he doesn't make tyro mistakes like this either!

Mr Bithead,

You wrote:
"But I'm "arrogant". Right... got it.
(Snicker)

I've been waiting for this.

I'd like you to go back to the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site and click on the little check box marked “Civilian Employment (Seasonally Adjusted) - LNS12000000” then drop to the bottom of the page and click on the button marked “retrieve data.”

... you've apparently never bothered to see if your foundational argument is correct; that there has, in fact actually been a net emplyment loss.

There are 776,000 more jobs now than there were in the first month of George Bush’s administration. "

Which is all to say that this is why statistics in the hands of dummies like you is dangerous. Look Bithead, the population has grown since the first month of GW's tenure. The 776,000 number you quote is at best maybe 4-5 months of historically good growth.

If you want to look at these series why don't you look at not just absolute numbers, but at relative numbers? That's why I used the numbers I did before, they were normed to the population size at the time.

As a matter of fact, try this BLS page and run the time series, seasonally adjusted for participation rate, employed, and employment-population ratio. Then run them in graphs from 1992-2004.

Specifically:
LNS12300000
LNS15000000
LNS11300000
LNS13000000

If you compare your series
LNS12000000

with

LNS15000000

Which is the "not in labor force" you'll see the absolute number of people without a job has grown as well as the people who have jobs. This is your big rebuttal? This is what you've been waiting for? This is your big contradiction?

That the total number of jobs grew a small amount, while the total number of unemployed grew as well - all because you forgot to factor in population growth?

If you look at the LNS12300000 Employment to Population Ratio then you'll see that the number of employed to population has cratered to pre-1995 levels, basically to just above early 1994 levels.

If this is the best you can do bithead, I'm not surprised you call yourself a bithead ... because all the previous numbers are right ... and they included factoring in for changing population by using percentage population comparisons. As a matter of fact, while the absolute number of employed persons increased by 776,000 a look from Jan'01 to Jan'04 reveals that the not in labor force number grew by 5,197,000 in the LNS15000000 series.

So clearly, your 776,000 number is below trend compared to the even standard population growth!!!

You really take the cake with this one ... bithead ... whoever this sean is he really steered you wrong. In other words, if you use this method of analysis ... my numbers are not only reinforced, they come out better!

Taking down bithead ... an economic argument

NOTE: This posting originally went up at Dan Drezner's weblog where I defend the notion that during the 90's the composition of the unemployment numbers said a very different story from what they show today.

Mr. Bithead,

You wrote:
"Oldman:
You provide only one point on which to judge, a point which as presented, gives a slanted view with no possiblility of accurate comparison with previous administaton actions and I'm projecting narrow thinking?

I was making a quite similar point to what Stout makes.. in his words "...why does the media only pull numbers comparable to yours during Republican administrations and not during Democratic administrations?"

I happen to know they're not. You see, I've actually looked, instead of taking my numbers form the Democrats. (Even the raw numbers at their peak values, are worse, much less the calculated ones you're attempting to tar Mr. Bush with) Whence comes the questions that I asked."

I'd be curious to see the numbers that you have. You see if you look at the historical Household Survey data from the BLS some things become clear.

For instance, let me set you up a chart

Year__NIP___PE%__Diff__UEMP
1992___66.4___61.5___4.9__7.5%
1994___66.6___62.5___4.1__6.1%
2000___67.1___64.4___2.7__4.0%
2003___66.2___62.3___3.9__6.0%

Now if you 1992 to the present you can see that the difference between the non-institutional population and the Percent Employment in 2003 is closest in appearance to 1994.

Now if you look here at labor force particapation numbers you can see that the non-institutional pop numbers are almost identical to the labor force participation numbers for ages 16&up.

So what we're comparing is labor force participation against percent employment. If you do that, you can see that there has been a strong drop - the DIFF - column from peak.

Moreover, this drop is stronger if you compare the maximum labor force participation with the current employment percentage:
67.1% - 62.3% = 4.8%.

So from peak we can see that normalized to population there is a 4.8% gap in the people who could work and the people who have work.

That's significantly comparable only with 1992, which had a 4.9% DIFF.

Finally, we look at average and median time unemployed ... if you look here at this BLS time series request and ask for the average and median time unemployed ... you can see that the time from 1992 declined while the average and median time unemployed was still growing through the beginning of 2004.

So what does all this mean? Well it means that according to these statistics that normed to the population, that from 1992+ the unemployment rate dropped and that the gap between the percent of people who could work and had worked declined. Likewise, from 2000+ the gap between the people who had work and could work grew, and that the median and average time unemployed has been steadily growing even as the nominal unemployment rate has contracted.

If you ask on the BLS request page for the graph and for the time series to be set from 1992-2002 the results are striking. You can also play with the percent unemployed at 15+ weeks. It confirms that through the Clinton years, unemployment and time unemployed steadily declined while it's been steadily increasing 2000+ during the Bush years.

These are verifiable and presented facts. I don't know what the hell you were looking at, but your arrogant attitude is completely unsupported by actual numbers.

You might want to consider Bithead that the reason that the oldman argues so authoratatively is that he is right so often. Confidence comes from success time and time again. You might want to try instead of sounding off like a wanker. Or maybe you should stop getting your numbers from the RNC.

The Selling out of the War on Terrorism

The question we have to ask ourselves is that are we safer today than we were four years ago? Remember March of 2000? The whole Y2000 problem had been shown to be a Chicken-Little joke, and the sky or at least the world wide computerized systems of automation hadn't failed. We were gearing up for the fall 2000 elections, and bin-Ladin had been reported in poor health while President Clinton dropped in for a visit on Musharaf in Pakistan. For those whose memories are a little vague, here's a counter-terrorism summary for 1999-2000 of where America stood at the end of the millenium.

So that was then? Where is America now? Are we safer today than we were four years ago?

Well, late last year according to KR-Washington various experts testified that:

" A growing number of counter-terrorism experts are challenging President Bush's assertion that Iraq is a major battle in the war against terrorism and are questioning whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq has hurt rather than helped the global battle against al-Qaida and its affiliates."

Well that was a claim. Do we have any proof that the 'War on Terror' is being neglected by the Bush Administration? Or possibly that the focus on Iraq has detracted from the effectiveness of the 'War on Terror'?

As it turns out, Paul O'Neill has detailed some of his work against the financial networks of terrorism as the former Treasury Secretary. The actions taken to fight terrorism financing have been wide-ranging and intensive.

Paul O'Neill also has some interesting comments in the book "The Price of Loyalty" by Paul O'Neill (ABC-news) and Ron Suskind. In the book, O'Neill reveals some summaries about what the financial counter-terrorism efforts were and also reveals that Tenet director of the CIA proposed to the President a wide-ranging behind the scenes espionage and assassination to target terrorists around the world.

The oldman himself has argued that we need a robust and forward counter-terrorism program. This program would ideally combined the best of both State and CIA foreign intelligence operations, as well as top-notch talent from FBI-organized crime, DEA, and Treasury to attack the networks and infrastructure of terror. Essentially it would focus on putting pressure and infiltrating/turning low-level informants by the use of survellience, deep cover agents, and coercion by cooperative foreign governments in order to work up the food-chain of terrorism to the big-bosses. A model for this could be the hunt for Escobar (thanks to Joe Katzman for this ref.).

So what's to say that we aren't doing that already? Well the oldman has maintained from what he has heard, that besides the special forces task forces, that this effort has not made very much real progress. Does the oldman have any evidence for this?

Now Newsweek has published a story arguing that the 'War on Terror' as far as financial networks goes has stalled in its tracks.

" The faltering investigation of Youssef M. Nada, the notorious former head of a Swiss- and Bahamas-based Islamic financial network called Al-Taqwa, is the latest example of how the Bush administration’s much-publicized campaign to dismantle the financiers of international terrorism appears to be losing steam amid waning support from some foreign governments, the officials say."

furthermore an expert has testified that:

Victor Comras, a former U.S. government sanctions expert and a member of a recently expired United Nations task force on international terrorism, said the Nada case is symptomatic of the loopholes and weaknesses in international efforts to shut down terrorist financiers. He said foreign interest in the issue appears to be fading—as does United States leadership in pushing for more vigorous action. “This is an issue which requires constant nagging,” said Comras, and “nobody’s nagging.”

So apparently, the strong drive to tackle the war on terror has been eroded both from lack of interest and a distraction created by the war in Iraq. As the oldman has affirmed before, this is the United States of America - the most powerful and rich country in the recorded history of mankind - and to be leader of the free world it is not too much to ask to be able to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. Whatever Mssr's Bush, Cheney, and co. have done, they certainly have lost sight of the real goal and shortchanged the American people in their quest for both justice for what happened on September 11th 2001 and ongoing security in the future.

Can we truly believe that with terrorist financing moving beyond the grasp of the United States of America, that terrorism networks and organized cells will not spring up once more? Given the slackening of will and diminishment of focus, how long before another Mohammad Atta slips through our laughable visa and border security to begin building toward a new wave of attacks? Can we even be sure if Alqueda is as weakened as we think they have become, if we can't track the money? They could easily be operating underneath our radar, financed by monetary flows that we have no way of tracking.

It took years for Alqueda to build up between major attacks in the nineties, and the conspicuous absence of attacks on mainland America shouldn't be construed as a lessening of their desire to deliver such a devastating blow. America is more exposed and at risk than it ever was. So the answer is that no, we are not safer than we were four years ago!

Update: Credit where credit is due. Some relatively low-profile terrorism cases proceed in the Northwest. As reported by the CSM written by Brad Knickerbocker. Unfortunately, this kind of stuff is just nibbling around the edges. Not real progress.

UPDATE#2: The Administration sets up a new office to oversee financial terrorism. MSNBC reports that:

“The new office will not only focus on the financial war on terror, but protect the integrity of the financial system, fight financial crime, enforce economic sanctions against rogue nations and assist in the ongoing hunt for Iraqi assets,” a department statement said Monday.