lloydtown 

Elections, Spin, and Memories

Tim Cavanaugh tries to avoid both the triumphalist camp and the "closing our eyes and covering our ears" camp that is somehow disappointed at a victory that Bush can take credit for. He acknowledges that the Bushies have done a great job of controlling spin. There's always a clear story line--with a focus on what is coming next. There is going to be an election (two years later) and behold, there is one, and it's quite successful. There are about 50 killings on election day--but it can truthfully be said that this is not bad by (the new) Iraq standards. Similarly if Qaddafi kidnaps only one Saudi prince, or the Turks round up only 50 Kurds, or Musharraf makes Pakistan more of a nuclear power while making noises about supporting Bush, these will all be signs that they are getting Bush's message.

Cavanaugh points out a bit wistfully that foreign countries come into brief and limited attention, and then are forgotten. Bosnia and Kosovo went quite well, on the whole (although that's not what Zakaria has said)--but they are forgotten. Haiti got an election, at American insistence, and it is a nightmare.

Maybe a political scientist could at least offer a study of countries where elections were held for the first time in decades, or the first time ever, and the results were not very good. Somalia may be another example. This would not be to provide a commentary on Iraq or its neighbours, you understand--and certainly not any kind of prediction--it would just be political science, which has wisely been described as an oxymoron.

Chalabi: Man of the Hour

Once again Chalabi is in the news. He's not threatened with extradition to Jordan, where he would immediately be imprisoned for fraud; he's not saying a few words of farewell before he climbs into the trunk of his car and heads for Iran; he's not even comparing the money he or his friends made from "oil for food" to the money Kofi Annan's kid made. Instead he is apparently a candidate for a high position in the new government of Iraq.

Once again, he may have achieved his goals better than anyone else in the entire Iraq situation. Bush can hardly claim a big victory on the basis of Iraq alone. Oil from Iraq has still not achieved pre-war levels, and whatever strategic gains result simply from replacing Saddam with a friendly democracy, a very high price has been paid. To say it's all about freedom, and that's really all that mattered from the beginning, is probably not true. (I don't think it's churlish to say that 99% of the people in the world who are not free are not going to be freed anytime soon; the Spartans are almost always not, in fact, coming). There may of course be further strategic gains, as Arab states fall--in a good way--like dominoes. But that still remains largely speculative, as does the further price that would have to be paid in each country.

Chalabi, on the other hand, has now got practically everything he wanted for the past twenty years. He wanted to get rid of Saddam. Check. He wanted a government in which he could take a leading role. (Probably) Check. He probably wanted a democracy, as the best means of moderating the factions in the country, and as a sign that a new government is truly supported by the people. Check (for now).

Chalabi was right about his own country--and Bush's critics were probably wrong. But are there lessons of Iraq that can be applied to other countries? In other words, was Bush as correct or prophetic as Chalabi over the past three years? I was going to say: would anyone now claim that Vietnam would have gone a lot better if only Johnson or Nixon had held a real election?

Well, well. What has set Hitchens off (see previous post) is the re-discovery that there was in fact an election in Vietnam, while it was under U.S. occupation, and it occasioned quite a bit of euphoria.

[blockquote]WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 [1967]-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.[/blockquote]

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

Hitchens: Iraq and Vietnam (erp!)

Hitchens just sits there, like a drunk at a bar:

Whatever the monstrosities of Asian communism may have been, Ho Chi Minh based his declaration of Vietnamese independence on a direct emulation of the words of Thomas Jefferson and was able to attract many non-Marxist nationalists to his camp. He had, moreover, been an ally of the West in the war against Japan. Nothing under this heading can be said of the Iraqi Baathists or jihadists, who are descended from those who angrily took the other side in the war against the Axis, and who opposed elections on principle. If today's Iraqi "insurgents" have any analogue at all in Southeast Asia it would be the Khmer Rouge.

Vietnam as a state had not invaded any neighbor (even if it did infringe the neutrality of Cambodia) and did not do so until after the withdrawal of the United States when, with at least some claim to self-defense, it overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Contrast this, even briefly, to the record of Saddam Hussein in relation to Iran and Kuwait.

Vietnam had never attempted, in whole or in part, to commit genocide, as was the case with the documented "Anfal" campaign waged by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds.

In Vietnam the deep-rooted Communist Party was against the partition of the country and against the American intervention. It called for a boycott of any election that was not an all-Vietnam affair. In Iraq, the deep-rooted Communist Party is in favor of the regime change and has been an enthusiastic participant in the elections as well as an opponent of any attempt to divide the country on ethnic or confessional lines.

Medical Care ca. 1900

I'm back on the life of Rockefeller: Titan, by Ron Chernow.

I should probably post on a number of things, but for now this caught my eye.

Frederick T. Gates was the man Rockefeller counted on both to manage his investments outside Standard Oil, and to launch and manage large scale philanthropic donations.

[blockquote]On summer vacation with his family in the Catskill Mountains in 1897, Gates tackled a book of door-stopping length: Principles and Practice of Medicine, a thousand-page tome by William Osler of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, the most renowned contemporary physician. [Pause for some near-local colour: Osler was born and raised at Bond Head, not far from here, a little north on old Highway 27 from, er, Lloydtown]. [snip] Gates was appalled at the backward state of medicine unintentionally disclosed by Osler's book: While the author delineated the symptoms of many diseases, he seldom identified the responsible germs and presented cures for only four or five diseases. How could one respect medicine that was so strong on anecdote and description but so weak on diagnosis and treatment?...His timing was faultless, for major strides were being made in bacteriology. For the first time, specific microorganisms were being isolated as the causes of disease, removing medicine forever from the realm of patent-medicine vendors such as Doc Rockefeller [John D's father].[/blockquote]

[snip]

At the time, the concept of a medical-research institute was still alien in America. The country's medical schools were mostly commercial operations, taught by practicing doctors who picked up spare money by lecturing on the side. Standards were so abysmal that many schools did not even require a college degree for entry. Since these medical mills had no incentive to undertake serious research, medicine hovered in a twilight area between science and guesswork.

Later on, when he became a physician of distinction and president of the College of Medicine and Surgery in Chicago, Charles Johnston feared legal repercussions for his earlier gypsy wanderings with Bill and sought to portray him as a genuine folk healer instead of as a bald-faced quack.

Congratulations to Iraqis

Indeed Iraqis deserve a lot of credit for successfully conducting an election in such difficult circumstances. It seems the turnout and (relative) peace are beyond what almost anyone expected; some Bush critics are probably grumpy about that, since they'd rather he didn't get the credit, but I think the giddiness of Bush defenders also indicates their relief and sense of a pleasant surprise.

How big is this? Someone on the Corner has said the biggest thing since the fall of the Berlin Wall--I guess because it could send shock waves through an entire region, making that region less hostile to the West, more open to progress as we recognize it. Even if Iran, Syria and Egypt have more or less real elections in the next few years, is that of the same "world historical" importance as the fall of the Iron Curtain? I don't know, but I doubt it.

Yikes! On the Berlin wall: That was KJL quoting...Geraldo! Who also brings up 1776. So is it the insurgents who are being compared to the British, or Saddam?

American Con Law: Criminal Justice

I don't know about the class, but I really enjoyed our two classes on criminal justice: one mostly on search and seizure, the second mostly right to counsel (freedom from self-incrimination), and the death penalty.

On search and seizure, I drew a kind of crude continuum: at one (left) extreme, courts are trying to prevent police from taking too many liberties; one's home is pretty well safe from a warrantless search, exlusionary rule applies, etc. But as you move to the right, there are exceptions: your car much less protected than your home; a "container" such as a purse much less protected in a car than it is elsewhere; searches can be done as part of an arrest, and even on the basis of a suspicion; arrests can be made even for a ticket-only misdemeanour. And finally, the piece de resistance, high school students who take part in extra-curricular activies can be searched without their consent on a regular basis--specifically, they can be forced to take drug tests.

The first "right-wing" case on high school teams concerned a football team. We didn't read this case, but there are plent of references to it in Bd of Education v. Earls, which we did read. The football team in Vernonia was in a school with a particularly bad drug problem; there was reasonable evidence or suspicion that some football players were in the middle of the drug scene; and athletes on a team have substantially given up their privacy, above all by agreeing to "communal undress."

Somehow, Justice Thomas in Earls persuades a majority to permit drug-testing once again, even though the high school in question is not known to have a particular problem, there are no specific students who are known as problem cases, and it is hard to argue that the chess club or the choir ever agreed to communal undress.

I read quite a bit of this in class, and got some laughs. I'm not inclined to say Thomas is crazy--I like his opinions on affirmative action, charter schools and free speech. But here he does seem absolutely crazy. Given the controversy about his confirmation--which still seems able to put him on the boil at any time--is he the right person to keep referring to the "communal undress" of a high-school choir, presumably mostly female? Thomas even describes in great detail the procedure to make the kids urinate, in order to confirm that it is not "intrusive". (The kid can have the privacy of a cubicle--even a male! that's more than we said before, says Thomas--but the adult monitor must be able to hear the tinkle. Didn't that Irish track star manage to hand over a urine sample that had whisky in it? Pouring whisky might make a tinkle, I guess).

Ginsburg for the minority has great fun with this, and rightly so. Dahlia Lithwick also wrote about it at the time.

UPDATE: Another difference between the football team and the marching band: football players who are high are more of a risk for injury, including serious injury, both to themselves and others. As Ginsburg says, there are no reports of flying tubas.

On the death penalty, I would say most of these nice Canadian people in my class are against it. I gave some examples of wrongful conviction--mostly Canadian--in order to support the arguments for right to counsel, etc. But I also talked about some of the true monsters who are convicted of serial murders and such. What do we do with them, if we don't execute them? I had them read Scott Turow's piece from the New Yorker about his experience on the Illinois commission that looked at the death penalty. I think he is wise and even-handed: even if there are no cases where an innocent person is executed, there is too much variation in the outcome for cases that appear very similar, even within one state or local jurisdiction.

Does anyone know of an innocent person being executed in the U.S. since the death penalty was restored in 1976? Someone said Aileen Wornos claimed before she was executed that she had falsely confessed just to end the whole thing. This brought up the fact that some convicted people do eventually say "stop all appeals," possibly because they want to assert some control over the process. It could be argued that it is exactly at the moment where they demonstrate they are mentally ill, or at least very troubled, that the state agrees to kill them. As one student said: if some people (probably liberals) object to that, what do they think of the right to die--which often applies to people in extreme mental and emotional distress? I like that: libera

ls and conservatives may be on opposite sides, each trying to maintain a contradiction.

Is Democracy Always Best?

Any commentary like this is likely to seem a cheap shot at best to Bush supporters right now. Once committed to an election in Iraq, they had to stick to it no matter what, they believed, or an admittedly "dynamic" situation would have grown even worse. That might be true.

Nevertheless, some thoughts: the Toronto Star today:

The U.S. forced an election in Somalia in the 90s; that didn't work out very well. There are many countries today where "Democracy is flourishing, liberty is not," as Fareed Zakaria is quoted as saying in his 2003 book The Future of Freedom. Zakaria "noted Paddy Ashdown's assessment of the Bosnia example: 'We thought that democracy was the highest priority, and we measured it by the number of elections we could organize. The result even years later is that the people of Bosnia have grown weary of voting ... The focus on elections slowed our efforts to tackle organized crime and corruption, which have jeopardized quality of life and scared off foreign investment.'"

Security first, democracy second, seems to be the advice here:

"I think democracy tends to perpetuate security but it doesn't create it," says Dobbins, now the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center, a think-tank in Arlington, Va. "If you can create a secure environment, democracy is probably the best way of ensuring that it's sustained. It creates a more predictable, less arbitrary form of governance."

But no law of nature says a democracy is incapable of supporting terrorism, so even if every Islamic capital were to become a kind of Westminster with curlicues, the objective of suppressing terrorism might still find its death in the inadequacy of the premise. Even if all the Islamic states became democracies, the kind of democracies they might become might not be the kind of democracies wrongly presumed to be incapable of supporting terrorism. And if Iraq were to become the kind of democracy that is the kind wrongly presumed (and for more than a short period), there is no evidence whatsoever that other Arab or Islamic states, without benefit of occupying armies, would follow.

Casualties in Iraq: My Bad

I'm such an avid reader of Slate, I pretty much bought an article that claimed to critique some statistical analysis, but was itself misinformed.

(Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber; link via Jesse Walker, Hit and Run.)

Summary: the figure of 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths caused directly or indirectly by the American invasion is probably accurate, or on the low side. Davies starts with the Fred Kaplan piece that impressed me:

The confidence interval describes a range of values which are "consistent" with the model. But it doesn't mean that all values within the confidence interval are equally likely, so you can just pick one. In particular, the most likely values are the ones in the centre of a symmetrical confidence interval. The single most likely value is, in fact, the central estimate of 98,000 excess deaths. Furthermore, as I pointed out in my original CT post, the truly shocking thing is that, wide as the confidence interval is, it does not include zero. You would expect to get a sample like this fewer than 2.5 times out of a hundred if the true number of excess deaths was less than zero (that is, if the war had made things better rather than worse).

Technical Difficulties Solved (Firefox)

I've taken the advice of the Support folks and switched to Firefox.

Voila.

Bush and Woodrow Wilson

I haven't really done any checking on this, but for what it's worth:

My recent reading on the foreign policy of Victorian Britain has reminded me of the whole argument about whether the old European monarchies/empires were good or bad. Britain was kind of the leader among the victors after the Napoleonic wars, and therefore saw itself enforcing the Treaty of Vienna. Salisbury, as a young essayist, kept on defending this treaty, arguing that rebuilding and maintaining the old empires was a ticket to stability and peace. Of course you don't have to be terribly cynical to argue that Britain wanted to "balance" the continental forces so that it could have the rest of the world to itself.

The growth of Prussia was contrary to Britain's plans, and Britain did get involved in some actual wars, But basically there was peace until World War I. Wilson inherited the view that once again those antideluvian, or at least pre-modern monarchies had led a lot of countries into a needless war. He wanted to break up the old empires, and allow self-contained nationalities to have their freedom.

Some of his policies, which were certainly not his alone, led directly to the rise of Bolshevism and Nazism, the greatest nightmares of the twentieth century. Yet he thought he was making the world safe for democracy, and indeed spreading democracy in order to keep the world (the U.S?) safe. He may have believed at least as much as Bush that liberty could not be secure anywhere unless it spread everywhere.

Wilson waited until he was inaugurated for the second time--in March 1917--before declaring war with one of his pronouncements about democracy. Literally as soon as he did so, the German and Austrian generals who had taken over from the Kaiser arranged to get Lenin into Russia as quickly as possible. They probably intended simply to weaken the Tsar with a civil war, and force him out of the world war; it's pretty certain that Wilson didn't foresee or intend the rise of Bolshevism. Nevertheless, after a long and bloody war in Russia, Bolshevism it was. Germany lost despite the cleverness of its generals, and the victorious allies got on with the thrilling democratic work of breaking up Germany and Austria. Arguably, this had two main results. A vaccuum was created in central Europe, so that there was noone there to resist the rise of Bolshevik Russia. Secondly, the "humiliation" of Germany was one of the main sore points Hitler worked on. Wasn't there something to be said for putting the Kaiser's family back on the German throne, and leaving an Austrian throne in place as well? Possibly, er, undemocratic institutions instead of bloodbaths worse than anything that had been seen before?

At any rate, I guess that's what some of Bush's defenders on the Corner have in mind when they say they are uneasy about similarities between Bush and Wilson.

UPDATE March 6: I think it was Jonah Goldberg who said on The Corner (I can't find it now) that it might have been better if the Germans had won World War I--that is, I presume, if they had conquered France yet again.

In the Atlantic Monthly for March, David M. Kennedy argues that every president since Woodrow Wilson has acted on Wilson's principles. Quoting Walter Russell Mead, the principles are: "self-determination, democratic government, collective security, international law, and a league of nations...." Bush 43 seems to be saying that if you are serious about the first two, and focussed on your own national security, you may have to sacrifice the last two. Kennedy: "In the end, of course, Wilson failed to wean his country from its propensity to isolation." Wasn't there a somewhat more complete failure than that on Wilson's part--a failure to understand Europe, and the actual movements that were in play there?