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Is global warming caused by the sun? (via the Corner)
Apparently, human action is still likely to be causing part of the warming--the most dramatic warming doesn't necessarily coincide neatly with the greatest increase in sun activity.
On the other hand: besides the direct effects of the sun, there are the indirect effects, which might take more time to have an impact, and hence be out of synch with the most direct effects.
Water vapour may be a more important greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. How come nobody's talking about that? Maybe because it doesn't fit so neatly into computer models?
And by the way: isn't there a school of thought that says methane is worse than CO2? And these corporate honchos who are now saying we have to act on global warming, meaning on CO2: isn't at least one of them the head of a natural gas company? So his company will profit from a switch from coal or oil to gas, such as Ontario is committed to for its electricity plants? Burning more methane?
Somehow Swift foresaw that a certain kind of modern intellectual would spend a lot of time fearing that the world was going to end because of the operations of the sun:
"These people are under continual Disquietudes, never enjoying a Minute's Peace of Mind...that the Earth by the continual Approaches of the Sun towards it, must in Course of Time be absorbed or swallowed up...."
Glenn Reynolds, like me, suspects (or jokes) it is only global warming that is delaying another ice age.
Just asking.
Weirdly, the Brits now say the source they can't reveal on the one story about Saddam seeking uranium in Africa that might actually be true (several others having been proved fraudulent) is not really their source after all.
They heard it all from France. (This piece comes with some Clintonisms. Short version: the CIA may have gotten some things wrong, but the wildest stories the Bushies believed, or fell for, came from somewhere else).
As Laura Rozen asks: Who was the Wizard of Oz--a funny, shrivelled up little person who somehow makes everything happen?
My spider sense is tingling: Could it be ... Ahmed Chalabi?
As Holden says (filling in for Atrios), the White House has never disavowed its admission that the sixteen words in the SOTU were flat-out wrong. The CIA never supported the sixteen words, and worked hard to get similar words out of a speech a few months earlier.
400,000, as we have been told many times? 100,000? 50,000?
Er, no: 5,000.
As Kevin Drum says, this is only one among several ... misstatements.
Prime Minister Allawi joins in the game, inflating smoothly from 300,000 or so dead under Saddam to ... 1 million. Sure, why not?
This weird story on the web about 14 Syrians acting suspiciously on a U.S. domestic flight--you know, milling around, meeting in groups, spending a lot of time in the lavatory. The big question: were they extremely stupid terrorists, or musicians?
My guess?: Musicians.
Josh Marshall links to an interesting piece by Jim Hoagland, usually a defender of the Bush administration.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is clearly working hard to reassure the American public that things are going well in Iraq--whether this is true or not.
"Allawi -- and therefore Bush -- also benefits from the honeymoon effect granted to a new Baghdad administration, and from the genuine confusion over who is actually running what is partly sovereign Iraq. The visible failures of the occupation led by Paul Bremer now take place behind a more nebulous smoke screen."
All of this seems to be working. U.S. voters seem to think the "transfer of sovereignty"--or whatever took place--has been a success. It is time once again to praise the Bushies--if only as a political operation. If the original goal of the invasion was to build a substantial U.S. military presence in Iraq--regardless of whether this is desired by a lot of Iraqis (although of course continued instability will make some people grateful for the presence of U.S. troops) and regardless of whether things in general are better than they were under Saddam--then this has been altogether a success.
Why is Hoagland worried? Things might not, er, actually be going that well in Iraq. Even then, it may be not so much the Iraqis he worries about....
"Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.
"Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq's insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.
"The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency's exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington's version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies."
Bush's defenders have long since admitted that the 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union were mistaken--not supported by reliable evidence. "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The Bush people admitted that the words shouldn't have been uttered, and they persuaded George Tenet to take the fall for their inclusion, on behalf of the CIA.
Now, having made someone take the blame for the words being incorrect, they are apparently going to try to take the credit for the words being correct. Now that is a neat trick.
The Butler report in Britain apparently sticks to the story that there was some sort of inquiry by people working for Saddam about acquiring uranium in Africa. The Brits refuse to reveal the documents supporting this claim, however. After what we have seen, it is difficult to believe this is anything more than another bit of Chalabi's crap, but who knows?
Josh Marshall has taken a lot of ridicule because he went out on a limb and suggested that whereas Bush generally cannot be trusted, Joe Wilson generally can. It is now pretty clear that Wilson has tended to make categorical statements that his wife was not involved in his selection for the job of going to Africa, whereas in fact she did what she could to get him that job.
The murkier part of the Wilson story is whether his actual report, when he first got back from Africa, supported the "Iraq might be acquiring uranium" view or not. Some months after the SOTU, and more than a year after his trip, he indignantly claimed that Bush completely mistated his--Wilson's--report. The truth seems to be that there was controversy even as to how to interpret Wilson's report. The State Department tended to discount any recent attempt by Saddam to acquire uranium. The CIA was skeptical--but that was partly because they thought he had plenty of uranium. No one to speak of seems to have realized just how few weapons Saddam had. This might mean he was unlikely to try to acquire uranium, since there was actually nothing he could do with it with all of his nuclear weapons facilities dismantled; but again, who knows?
I think Marshall does a good job here on some of the main points of the story. The Senate Committee, while basically postponing the question whether the administration twisted evidence in order to go to war, says the CIA report warning about Iraq--and even including some warnings about Saddam seeking uranium in Africa--was reasonable "at the time it was written"--September 2002. The documents that were generally used to support the Africa stories, including those that had been circulated through Italy, were later proved to be forgeries, although not necessarily in time for the SOTU. The CIA was inclined to doubt the Africa story--including its British version--at the time of the SOTU, and the Bush people were advised of this fact. It wasn't until spring and summer of 2003, however, that definitive statements by intelligence agencies were made to the effect that documents indicating Saddam attempted to acquire uranium in Africa were forgeries, and there was no reliable evidence that such an attempt was made.
Bush went beyond, or contrary to, the prevailing view of American intelligence experts in the SOTU. That prevailing view turned even more strongly against the belief that Saddam had tried to get uranium in Africa in following months.
Here's David Corn in the Nation: "After coming back from Niger, Wilson's view--which he did not express publicly for nearly a year and a half--was different from that held by CIA analysts. Yet his conclusion--that the Niger allegation was probably bunk--was in line with the thinking of the State Department's lead analyst on this matter. And Wilson's reasoning came to prevail and to be shared by the intelligence community."
UPDATE: Fred Kaplan draws a nice analogy in Slate. If Eisenhower had made speeches in the late 50s and early 60s to the effect that there was a missile gap--and the Soviet Union was in the lead--he could truthfully have said there was some support for this proposition from official CIA reports. Unfortunately, the CIA had grossly over-estimated the alleged stockpile of Soviet missiles at one point, and even though reliable evidence such as aerial photos pointed to the presence of very few missiles, the CIA was very slow to ratchet their estimate downward. No doubt they were trying to save face, or avoid admitting that at least one high-profile document (the 1957 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)--the same kind of document Bush relied on in the fall of 2002) had been completely wrong--had over-estimated an enemy's strength by many times.
Fortunately, Eisenhower was always skeptical of the high estimates, and he took the newer and more solid evidence very seriously. (One detail on which an analogy to 2003 might break down is that Eisenhower had Krushchev's word that there were very few missiles; Eisenhower gave some weight to this claim--again, especially when the photos seemed to confirm it.)
At the bureaucratic level, the dispute continued to 1960--the year JFK was elected, partly on the issue of "the missile gap." The Air Force, which considered missiles its highest-profile program, was sticking with very high estimates of Soviet missiles; the Army and Navy, partly for obvious competitive reasons, expressed open skepticism for the first time; and the CIA was willing to go as low as 50 Soviet missiles, as opposed to 1000 within a year or two.
How many Soviet missiles were there in 1960? Four (4).
To some extent Eisenhower had to stand up to a lot of bureaucrats who, for various reasons, some of them good, kept saying "1000 Soviet missiles! Missile gap!" He could easily have made speeches repeating this nonsense for demagogic purposes of his own--and when the estimates were revised sharply downward, he could have made the head of the CIA eat shit. Eisenhower was simply too wise, and too good a leader to do any of this.
The contrast to Bush's behaviour is striking. Bush and his people consistently wanted to pick and choose the most scary possibilities in reams of intelligence reports, and use these fragments even when they were specifically warned that they had little credibility. They would edit a statement that had once been true so that even intelligent readers would believe the truth to be much more frightening that it was. All of this made them and their journalistic defenders suckers for Chalabi--but even beyond that, they may simply have made up their minds to invade Iraq, no matter what, years ago.
The timing of the 2002 NIE was dictated by the White House--and it was a rush job. There are lots of indications that the White House had made up its mind, and the NIE was simply going to be mined for supporting material. The NIE often does not point to one clear course of action--it is meant to contribute to an intelligent debate. The ensuing debate is obviously more intelligent in some cases than in others.
From Jesse Walker, "Ten Reasons to Fire George W. Bush":
"2. Abu Ghraib. And by "Abu Ghraib" I mean all the places where Americans have tortured detainees, not just the prison that gave the scandal its name. While there are still people who claim that this was merely a matter of seven poorly supervised soldiers "abusing" (not torturing!) some terrorists, it's clear now that the abuse was much more widespread; that it included rape, beatings, and killings; that the prison population consisted overwhelmingly of innocents and petty crooks, not terrorists; and that the torture very likely emerged not from the unsupervised behavior of some low-level soldiers, but from policies set at the top levels of the Bush administration. Along the way, we discovered that the administration's lawyers believe the president has the power to unilaterally suspend the nation's laws--a policy that, if taken seriously, would roll back the central principle of the Glorious Revolution.
Two years ago, when Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was running for governor of Maryland, I noted her poor oversight of a boot camp program for drug offenders where the juvenile charges had been beaten and abused. 'It's bad enough,' I wrote, 'to let something like institutionalized torture slip by on your watch. It's worse still to put your political career ahead of your job, and to brag about the program that's employing the torturers instead of giving it the oversight that might have uncovered their crimes earlier. There are mistakes that should simply disqualify a politician from future positions of authority.' Every word of that applies at least as strongly to Donald Rumsfeld and to the man who has not seen fit to rebuke him publicly for the torture scandal, George Bush.
3. Indefinite detentions. Since 9/11, the U.S. government has imprisoned over a thousand people for minor violations of immigration law and held them indefinitely, sometimes without allowing them to consult a lawyer, even after concluding that they have no connections to terrorist activities. (Sirak Gebremichael of Ethiopia, to give a recently infamous example, was arrested for overstaying his visa???and then jailed for three years while awaiting deportation.) It has also claimed the right to detain anyone designated an 'enemy combatant' in a legal no-man's land for as long as it pleases. Last month the Supreme Court finally put some restrictions on the latter practice, but that shouldn't stop us from remembering that the administration argued strenuously for keeping it."
If Bush is re-elected, and the Democrats do well in Congress, doesn't it seem likely that Bush could be impeached for some or all of the things Walker lists? Impeachment requires only a simply majority of the House of Representatives; "conviction," and a penalty such as removal from office, requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate--presumably more difficult to achieve.
Matthew Yglesias has a nice example of the Bush method: not quite lying, and not telling an intelligence professional what to say, but ... not exactly being honest (if he understood what he was saying).
There was an intelligence report that said if Saddam's Iraq had enough "weapons-grade fissile material" (uranium) for a bomb, then a year later they could have an actual nuclear bomb. In October 2002, Bush rendered it this way: "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year...."
So far, so good. What is missing is the fact that the intelligence report emphasized that Saddam had no enriched uranium at all, and would have difficulty getting any. Even with help, it would take five to seven years--before the commencement of the one-year countdown.
The intelligence report was wrong; it exaggerated the danger posed by Saddam, who was probably more than seven or eight years from having a working nuclear bomb. Saddam had demolished WMDs, and moved in the direction of having none at all--quite likely he had actually arrived at that destination. He wasn't in the process of accumulating such weapons.
Bush went much farther, however, and gave the impression to a hearer--even a fairly careful hearer--that Saddam could have a bomb in one year, rather than seven or eight. The effect of Bush's remarks wasn't simply to go to the scarier extreme in a range of possibilities, in order to be sure not to trust Saddam, or leave things to chance; Bush created a fantasy world in which Saddam supposedly posed a threat (OK, OK, an almost-imminent threat) to the United States which, in reality, he didn't pose at all.
Kevin Drum recounts how the UN inspectors were quite active in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. They didn't choose sites to inspect at random; they concentrated on sites suggested by the Americans, who were obviously hoping for great photo ops from showing the extent of Saddam's nefarious plans. Site after site, again after again, nothing was found.
"George Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 not because he was convinced Iraq had WMD, but because he was becoming scared that Iraq didn't have WMD and that further inspections would prove it beyond any doubt. Facts on the ground have never been allowed to interfere with George Bush's worldview, and he wasn't about to take the chance that they might interfere with his war."
As for the Brits, who are in the news again: I have simply never understood the idea that if the Americans can't get information on some obscure part of the world, the Brits can help out. The Brits? What do they know about anything? When they are brought up now in support of the Niger story (where's our Evelyn Waugh to give this the treatment it deserves?), this is literally one of the last gasps of Chalabi's influence. (Brought to you by the U.S. taxpayer). Instead of a story simply being repeated by the same person, it comes from an apparently independent source, who got it from...er, the same person.
I'm not sure I can add much here. There was a period when Saddam actually had WMDs--especially the 80s. No one really doubts that he had them at that time. And, it seems, he only used them as part of the war with Iran (there were probably chemical attacks on both sides, following the example of the savages in the trenches in World War I). The example we've been told of a million times--when he supposedly gassed the Kurds in 1988--was probably the work of the Iranians--and Rumsfeld, in particular, probably knows that very well. There is no indication that Saddam offered weapons or sold them to any terrorist group, used them or threatened to use them on any Americans, or anyone in the West, or any innocent civilians outside the war zone.
So Bush's defenders are now forced to argue that at a later time when Saddam had no WMDs at all--or almost none--he was desperately trying to strike some deal to use ... some weapons, from somewhere, against the U.S., or cooperate with terrorists in doing so, or something. (Thanks to Matthew Yglesias). He apparently had no nuclear weapons, nor any facilities to make them, nor any contracts to acquire them; yet he supposedly opened some negotiation in Niger to acquire uranium for military purposes.
Douglas Feith saw CIA briefings on a possible Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, and decided they were too skeptical--they tended too much away from a recommendation to go to war. So he changed them. He changed a professional, competent briefing, which turns out to have been correct, into an amateur, incompetent one, which turns out to have been incorrect. Then his briefing became part of the mix which Rumsfeld wanted to put together until a "new consensus" emerged to be considered at the highest levels.
How stupid would CIA people have to be not to give up on messages that were met with scorn and anger, and switch to messages that made them one of the gang with the higher-ups?
Laura Rozen lays it out very carefully. Many intelligence professionals have been quoted off the record as saying they were subject to what can only be called pressure to toe the line. This doesn't mean to lie, and one strategy of Bush defenders is to say that as long as Bush and others were consistent with the "new consensus" produced by Rumsfeld, Feith, and others, they not only weren't lying--they were agreeing with the (final, revised) documents by intelligence professionals.
Nevertheless, clear off-the-record descriptions of pressure seem to contradict Senator Roberts' statements that many officers were asked if they were subject to pressure, and they said no. As Rozen says, they may have had very reasonable fears for their careers.
Instapundit links to Dan Darling, who apparently did some research on the Senate report for Michael Ledeen:
"Everything Powell said at the UN regarding Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda (which is pretty much the same as what President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and others said going into the war) appears to have reflected the consensus of the broader intelligence community."
Laura Rozen: "In early February 2003 Colin Powell was putting the finishing touches on his speech to the United Nations spelling out the case for war in Iraq. Across the Potomac River, a Pentagon intelligence analyst going over the facts in the speech was alarmed at how shaky that case was. Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed 'Curve Ball' inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant---except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source."
The mobile labs apparently never existed.
Darling points out that a state such as Saddam's Iraq may have close ties to organizations such as Al Qaeda without the organizations having actual storefront operations on busy streets. True. Darling claims to have brought out of the Senate report a few meetings--no matter how brief or inconclusive--that have not been reported on before. At least he's given up on the Prague meeting, which was very important to Feith's "improvements" on CIA briefings. On the other hand, he thinks Laurie Mylroie may get some partial vindication, somehow.
It seems hard to believe that anything like a full appreciation of the facts would have justified invading Iraq in March 2003. Maybe we need to hear from Bill Buckley again. He founded National Review, and in some ways launched the conservative movement that led to the election of Ronald Reagan, because Eishenhower refused to help the Hungarian rebels fight the Soviets in 1956. Now that would have been liberation.
James Fallows' new article (link may disappear soon) in the Atlantic brings out one of the more interesting puzzles in the Bush phenomenon. (Originally brought to my attention in Slate, "In Other Magazines").
"This spring I watched dozens of hours' worth of old videos of John Kerry and George W. Bush in action. But it was the hour in which Bush faced Ann Richards that I had to watch several times. The Bush on this tape was almost unrecognizable--and not just because he looked different from the figure we are accustomed to in the White House. He was younger, thinner, with much darker hair and a more eager yet less swaggering carriage than he has now. But the real difference was the way he sounded.
"This Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two ('million' when he clearly meant 'billion'; 'stole' when he meant 'sold'), but fewer than most people would in an hour's debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. 'To lay out my juvenile-justice plan in a minute and a half is a hard task, but I will try to do so,' he said fluidly and with a smile midway through the debate, before beginning to list his principles."
[snip] "For years I had been told by people who knew Bush from business school or from Texas politics that he was keenly smart--though perhaps in a way that didn't come across in his public statements. Perhaps! The man on the debate platform looked and sounded smart and in control. If you had to guess which of the two candidates had won the debate scholarship to college and was about to win the governorship, you would choose Bush.
"I bored my friends by forcing them to watch the tape--but I could tell that I had not bored George Lakoff, a linguist from the University of California at Berkeley, who has written often of the importance of metaphor and emotional message in political communications. When I invited him to watch the Bush-Richards tape, Lakoff confirmed that everything about Bush's surface style was different. His choice of words, the pace of his speech, the length and completeness of his sentences, all made him sound like another person. Even his body language was surprising. When he was younger, Bush leaned toward the camera and did not fidget or shift his weight. He arched his eyebrows and positioned his mouth in a way that, according to Lakoff, signifies in all languages an intense, engaged form of speech.
"Lakoff also emphasized that what had changed in Bush's style was less important than what had remained the same. Bush's ways of appealing to his electoral base, of demonstrating resolve and strength, of deflecting rather than rebutting criticism, had all worked against Ann Richards. These have been constants in his rhetorical presentation of himself over the years, despite the striking decline in his sentence-by-sentence speaking skills, and they have been consistently and devastatingly effective."
[snip] "...in those days [as Governor of Texas] Bush was noted for his poise and ease in public appearances--including the informal Q&As he has tried to avoid as President. 'You never saw him in an awkward situation as governor,' she told me. 'You expected he'd know the right thing to say.'
"Obviously, Bush doesn't sound this way as President, and there is no one conclusive explanation for the change. I have read and listened to speculations that there must be some organic basis for the President's peculiar mode of speech--a learning disability, a reading problem, dyslexia or some other disorder that makes him so uncomfortable when speaking off the cuff. The main problem with these theories is that through his forties Bush was perfectly articulate. George Lakoff tried to convince me that the change was intentional. As a way of showing deep-down NASCAR-type manliness, according to Lakoff, Bush has deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne. Moreover, in Lakoff's view, the authenticity of this stance depends on Bush's consistency in presenting it. So even if he is still capable of speaking with easy eloquence, he can't afford to let the mask slip.
"I say: Maybe. Clearly Bush has been content to let his opponents, including the press, think him a numbskull. Even his unfortunate puzzled-chimp expression when trying to answer questions may be useful: his friends don't mind, and his enemies continue to underestimate him. But to me the more plausible overall explanation is the sheer change in scale from being governor of Texas to being President of the United States."
So one possibility is that there is a deliberate "Gomer Pyle" strategy being pursued by Bush and his staff: The bold, decisive leader is basically dumb but honest and patriotic; those sophisticated smart-alecks who are always jeering at him while sucking up to Teacher (or at least the teachers' unions) are morally dubious, and can't be counted on to help when the chips are down.
Fallows' preferred possibility is that there are more issues to master at the federal level; Bush knows he can't and won't master them in the way Clinton did; so he is better off sticking with clipped, high-level, simple messages, even if they sound stupid or gauche.
As I read over all this, I can't help thinking again of "organic" possibilities, i.e. diseases. Could it be that Bush has a neurological condition which is advancing as he ages? I hasten to add: this may have nothing to do with intelligence per se, or competence to hold high office. Bush, for all I know, understands very well exactly what he needs to understand, and makes decisions accordingly. I am interested in the problems he has expressing himself.
Of course, since I have no neurological training, that is about as far as I can go. I am a bit of an amateur who reads about neurological conditions--but to be honest, I am pretty much out of that habit. Like a lot of people, I have read some of Oliver Sacks' books.
Here are some standard definitions (from Jeeves):
anomia (syn: dysnomia) - General term for the inability to name objects. This can be limited to inability to name objects in semantic categories such as living things, inanimate things, fruits and vegetables, colors, animals, body parts, furniture, etc. Many of these limited conditions are given special names. (A related condition is a failure to comprehend syntactical structures, but this has no specific name.)
aphasia (syn: dysphasis) - This is the general term that literally means "no speech." It refers to any impairment of the ability to use and/or understand words and can be used to describe loss of one or more of the following abilities: ability to speak; ability to write; understand speech; understand written words. Major subcategories include: Broca's aphasia, in which one can comprehend speech, but not produce it; and, Wernicke's aphasia in which one can produce speech but not comprehend speech.
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