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Now here's some exciting news:
"The Bush administration has launched an ambitious bid to promote democracy in the 'greater Middle East' that will adapt a model used to press for freedoms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe."
Yes, it's back to the Helsinki Accord, signed by Gerald Ford in 1975. Lots of statesmanship and diplomacy involved: the U.S. will work with NATO and the European Community, and then "hopes to win commitments of action from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries."
Really, a lot of diplomacy: "Unlike Helsinki, however, the administration's 'Greater Middle East Initiative' seeks to avoid creating committees and structures to strictly monitor progress and issue report cards, U.S. officials say. It also seeks to avoid appearing to dictate to the Islamic world."
Now: was this Bush's plan all along--it sounds like a very good one--or is it the back up to which he has been forced by problems in both Afghanistan and Iraq?
Link via Matthew Yglesias, who has some fun at the expense of David Brooks. Did Carter refuse to insist on effective morality in foreign policy, so that it was necessary for Reagan to come along like a white knight and fix everything? Or did a series of presidents, of both parties, do a good job of carrying out the Truman Doctrine, with the Helsinki Accord tightening the noose on the commies in a precise way?
According to this simplified history: "Although [Ford] claimed credit for the Helsinki Accord in which the Soviet Union renounced its right to keep its satellite states in line by military intervention, the true effect was to recognize at last Soviet domination of the eastern bloc nations. Possibly, however, the Helsinki Accord helped restrain the Soviet Union from intervening when citizens in communist countries overthrew their governments in 1989."
A much more positive view here:
"This engaging book argues that human rights norms mattered more than geopolitical power or economics in ending the Cold War. Conventional views stress the Soviets' inability to keep up with American military might and reverse economic decline. In contrast, Thomas contends that communism's weakness resulted from the opposition activity triggered by the Soviet signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. Although the European Community was a prime mover in putting human rights on the East-West agenda (through the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), the Soviet ratification of the Helsinki accord was instrumental. Contrary to American neoconservatives who charged that the Helsinki accord was an empty bargain, Thomas argues the Soviets were in fact trapped by it -- because they desperately needed it to bolster their international legitimacy. Relations with the West were subtly transformed and a platform was created for social groups to mobilize in both the East and the West and commit their nations to implementing the Helsinki principles. The author's historical analysis nicely illuminates the catalytic role of these norms in undermining communist rule."
Carter is given credit for putting teeth in the human rights provisions here.
UPDATE: It might just be that the U.S. is no longer able to attempt military intervention anywhere, so diplomacy is the only alternative.
Timothy Noah says U.S. forces and dollars (along with credibility) are stretched to the limit: "Here, then, is the silver lining for Democrats who fear that John Kerry will lose to George W. Bush: Kerry may be less inclined to take the nation into war, but Bush will be even less able to."
This in turn may provide some background to the fact that France, not the U.S., may be about to intervene in a worsening situation in Haiti. Josh Marshall and Tacitus both point out the potential Monroe Doctrine issue here.
Could it be that the U.S., mostly because of the commitment in Iraq, is now unable to intervene militarily anywhere at all, even close to home?
Kevin Drum has kindly clarified that New York Times links dissolve in ten days or so, unless one uses this link:
Right click on the link below and add it to your Favorites:
ny times link generator
When you're reading a Times article on the web, just click on the link. It will automatically generate a permanent URL. (This method doesn't work 100% of the time, but it does seem to work most of the time.)
[I just tried it, and it doesn't work. If I get it working, I'll go back and fix old links to NY Times articles].
Paul Martin says he knew nothing about the fraudulent part of the "sponsorship" program.
Briefly: In 1995 Quebec held their second referendum on whether to separate from Canada, or negotiate the terms of separation, or something. It became clear from polling that the "yes" side was ahead. Federalists including Prime Minister Jean Chretien made a last-minute push, and the "No" side barely won. Not only was it close, but it was clear that a majority of Quebec francophones had voted "yes"; it was the anglophone minority that had made the difference. Premier Jacques Parizeau hinted that separatists were done in by "money and the ethnic vote."
There was widespread criticism of Chretien for letting this vote get so close. He was perceived to have taken his Quebec roots for granted, and to have played far too passive a role. In fact, he was less popular in Quebec than in some Anglo provinces, and he knew that. He may have thought his presence in the campaign would hurt the "no" side. In any case, after the close vote, he decided to pour money into Canadian nation-building inside Quebec. Hence the sponsorship program.
Martin was Minister of Finance until about a year ago. He admits he was aware of an audit of the program, but the audit revealed only administrative problems, not the outright fraud and theft that the Auditor General has now revealed.
Rick Mercer was on the CBC tonight, venting pure contempt for Martin. Martin's company, which was supposedly held in a blind trust while he was Finance Minister, made a fair bit of money off the government, and also enjoyed tax benefits. He says he knew nothing about that. Now we find out the government was defrauded of $100 million through the sponsorship program, and he says he knew nothing about that. Mercer says: I seem to see the first signs of senility. Ouch.
Matthew Wall has a nice piece on Slate describing various past episodes of "faulty intelligence." He steers away from the big ones, like the end of the Soviet Union, perhaps to maintain the Monty Python quality.
My favourite:
Grenada 1983 (ostensibly to rescue medical students--although I also remember Reagan talking about Cubans building a big runway for airplanes):
"The students were probably more in danger of flunking their midterms [than of being harmed because of a civil war]. The Grenadian government denied any hostage-taking intentions and dispatched police to protect the students during the coup. Since the medical school was Grenada's primary source of steady foreign income, the government had no real motivation to take its students hostage. British intelligence categorically rejected the possibility.
"The further failures of intelligence in Grenada would be comical were it not for the 23 U.S. combat deaths and the hundreds of Cubans and Grenadians who were killed. The CIA had no agents on the island, and the U.S. Army was reduced to using tourist maps. Detailed intelligence on Cuban and Grenadian troop deployments from the government of Barbados was forwarded to Washington, filed, and forgotten. The National Military Intelligence Center reported the medical students were all on one campus, when they were scattered at multiple locations. Consulting the medical school's catalog would have corrected this erroneous assumption; and while the phone lines continued to operate for the duration of the three-day invasion, no one in Washington thought to call the students (or any other Grenadian phone number) to find out what was happening."
This brings back the great scene in Dr. Strangelove where Peter Sellers, as a visiting British officer, is trying to get a coin to use a pay phone to say World War III is breaking out.
A nice piece by Michael Lind on the Nation site. (Link via Hit and Run).
Lind opens by somewhat jokingly answering the semi-serious suggestion that there is no such thing as the neo-conservatives, and anyone who says there is, is an anti-Semite. He makes it clear it still makes sense to speak of a small number of people--related to a remarkable extent by work experiences, and even marriage--who are the leading neo-cons. They might differ from each other in private, even on some fairly major issues, but they do a good job of maintaining a united front so as to maximize their effectiveness.
Lind has worked closely with them. He says matter-of-factly that Rumsfeld and Cheney are neo-conservatives, so there is no need to come up with a special term for non-Jewish neo-cons. (He later says there is an ethnic and regional mix that roughly goes back to the New Deal).
Quite possibly I am wrong about that. I just keep thinking about the magazine article about dull young Rumsfeld, and dull Cheney, and Cheney's 10 years as Congressman for Wyoming, and the fact that the president who really elevated these two was Gerald Ford, the dullest of the dull.
Lind has worked for Irving Kristol, still apparently the "godfather" of them all. (Lind describes Kristol at one point as "the former publisher of a magazine called The National Interest, of which I was executive editor from 1991 to 1994.") He says he left the movement when it became friendly with Christian fundamentalism. He objects to:
"the ever-deepening alliance of the neocons with the Likud's major supporters in the American electorate, the Protestant ayatollahs of the Bible Belt, which inspired Irving Kristol, William Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to open their magazines to religious-right tirades against abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and--my personal favorite--'Darwinism.' This apertura to Southern Christian fundamentalism--the opposite of everything that neoconservatism defined as 'paleoliberalism' once stood for--led to my departure and that of several other former neoconservatives. We thought we had joined an antitotalitarian liberal movement, not an alliance of American Likudniks and born-again Baptist creationists brought together to support the colonization of 'Samaria' and 'Judea' by right-wing Jewish settlers."
As this passage also suggests, Lind also objects to the neo-ons' doctrinaire support of a pro-Likud, even pro-Sharon view on Israel and the Palestinians. But he insists the neo-cons are not defined primarily by their view of Israel. They want to spread a "national greatness" view of American patriotism all over the world, using military invasion as one of the key tools, if not the most important tool, to do so. Lind claims this is where the Trotsky influence is most apparent: patriotism is really just a vehicle to spread a universal revolutionary ideology by means of force.
The neo-cons' support for one particular "pro-Israel" view is in fact a contradiction of their view of the United States. The United States offers a nationality for all the nationalities, a country of immigrants. The Likud view of Israel is that it should be united by blood as well as soil--the very view that is most likely to be regarded as hostile, in fact as a declaration of war, by people of Arab ancestry in Israel and the surrounding territories. An alternative view is that Israel should accept representation by population.
Clarity of terms: as a rule (but not in every case), neo-cons started somewhere on the left, and have moved right.
"Neoconservatism--the term was Michael Harrington's--originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ('Scoop') Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals.' While there was a pro-Israel wing, the movement's focus was on confrontation with the Soviet bloc abroad and on the defense of New Deal liberalism and color-blind liberal integrationism against rivals on the left at home. With the end of the cold war and the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Council, many 'paleoliberals' drifted back to the Democratic center. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once spoken of as a possible neoconservative presidential candidate, broke with the movement in the 1980s over its growing contempt for international law and its exaggeration of the Soviet threat. Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition."
In short, neo-cons were liberals who, at least in their own eyes, remained liberal and anti-Communist while their fellow Democrats moved somewhere to the left. Then, when the Democratic centre shifted back closer to the real centre, paleoliberals became outspoken Democrats again, but neo-cons didn't.
The view was that far too many people who should have known better were far too much like Chamberlain in 1939. It was up to the neo-cons to be like Churchill: vigilant, willing if not eager to go to war, and inclined to stress the strength and bad motives of powerful enemies, even at the risk of repeating exaggerations. The U.S. experience in Vietnam was unacceptable primarily, if not solely, because it ended in defeat. Otherwise it was, in Reagan's memorable words, "a noble cause."
The end of the Cold War revealed, among other things, how weak the major Communist states had been, and how far off official CIA and other estimates had been (and how even farther off the neo-con "Plan B" estimates had been). It might have revealed that democracy might come about more or less spontaneously within countries that had not known it before. The U.S. deserves full credit for maintaining the Truman Doctrine for decades, not conceding any territory easily, and setting an example of avoiding radical politics of the left or the right. The actual end of Communism in many countries, however, came not from American intervention, certainly not from invasion and occupation, but from something more like national self-determination.
One senses that the neo-cons were disappointed at this outcome. In a way they were hoping there was a dragon to slay, and they would get to slay it (or send a lot of noble youths to do so). They wanted to be not only leaders, but heroes. I venture to say: they were a bit sick of hearing about the greatest generation, and they wondered why they couldn't be the greatest instead.
"Neocon hostility to the UN, too often explained solely in terms of UN condemnations of Israel, is a relic of the 1970s and '80s, when the General Assembly was dominated by an anti-American alliance of the Soviet bloc and Third World autocracies. The claim that we are waging 'World War IV'--made by Elliot Cohen, James Woolsey and Norman Podhoretz--is a reflex of superannuated cold warriors, as are parallels between militant Islam and secular totalitarianism and the attempt to inflate China or post-Communist Russia into threats comparable to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany."
Some of the most tantalizing passages here for me concern the argument that middle-class morality, including a kind of ritual if not heart-felt churchgoing, was part of the strength of the British Empire at its peak, and needs to be reproduced in the U.S. if it is to achieve its own greatness. One of my favourite jokes about the neo-cons, which may go back to Anne Roche Muggeridge, is something like this: "Somebody had better start going to church, and soon. But it's not going to be me." Some would say that's the Leo Strauss influence on the neo-cons: pious morality is for the weak many, not for the strong few.
The extent of the neo-cons' original contribution to domestic policy is to say that the decadence of the socially liberal elites is at least as much of a threat as the cynicism and defeatism of the realists and isolationists.
Much of the work on Victorian morality and virtue had been done by Gertrude Himmelfarb. I can't help wondering if another influence on the neo-cons, perhaps by way of Leo Strauss, is Tocqueville. When I heard Mansfield recently, some of the discussion repeated Tocqueville's suggestions that Americans are likely to be pedestrian, their noses to the grindstone, with very little truly lofty aspiration or achievement. No Pascal, and no Descartes.
Here's Lind: "The idea that the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois 'new class' was developed by thinkers in the Trotskyist tradition like James Burnham and Max Schachtman, who influenced an older generation of neocons." Tocqueville said modern democrats, living in peace, are likely to be isolated from each other, and obsessed with small differences in material well-being. They will be drawn to religion, but it is likely to be of a transparently nutty kind.
I can't help thinking the view lurking among the neo-cons is that a good war--perhaps a never-ending war--will toughen us up, and instill some virtue in us. Granted, there will be casualties, but especially now that there is only one mega-power, there may be very little lasting cost, in military or economic terms, to invading one country after another.
9/11 made it seem to some that Americans should think and feel exactly like Israelis: constantly subject to violent, random, murderous attacks from a weak but elusive enemy. "They" hate us; there is no point in negotiating with "them"; if we humanize them, as Glenn Reynolds' wife (Dr. Helen Smith) has written, that may soften and weaken us, so let's not do that. I can't help thinking even the Lord of the Rings plays into this thinking. Here are some beings who seem vaguely human. But no, they're not! They're monsters! Let's be sure to hate them and kill them!
And the intellectuals may be thinking to themselves: well, it's not strictly true that they deserve to be hated, and the war will make them suffer, but it is almost certain to be good for the moral fibre of our people.
1. Letter (apparently authentic) from an Al Qaeda operative (not an Iraqi) inside Iraq. He is seeking help from headquarters--the mountains straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan--in stirring up trouble in Iraq. If he gets help in attacking the Shiite majority, this could "rally the Sunni Arabs to the religious extremists." Sectarian violence is the best hope of ensuring the U.S. occupation fails. (Link via Instapundit; also on Drudge).
This individual needs help, and soon, because in fact the U.S. occupation is going fairly well (from the U.S. point of view). Once there is an all-Iraqi police and security force, and elections, the new order will be stable and popular, and there will be little opportunity for Al Qaeda action.
Glenn Reynolds says: "Short version: 'Al Qaeda is losing in Iraq.' Yes. And Bush defenders have been correct that some of violence in Iraq comes not from Iraqis, resisting the occupation like freedom fighters, but from international terrorists. This individual, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says he has personally directed 25 suicide bombings, and he speaks of having some associates who have presumably carried out more.
On the other hand: This document also raises questions about what the Bush administration has said and done. NY Times: "The document would also constitute the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and Al Qaeda. But it does not speak to the debate about whether there was a Qaeda presence in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era, nor is there any mention of a collaboration with Hussein loyalists."
The Al Qaeda group in Iraq seems small and weak. Where is there a strong, effective Al Qaeda force? Back in Afghanistan, where the U.S. stopped fighting, except on a very small scale, some time ago. The key to public opinion in Iraq, according to this letter, is to have an all-Iraqi police and security force. Family relationships and friendships will gather a lot of public support around such a force. One of the first acts of the U.S. occupation was to disperse such a force.
So: Al Qaeda is being stopped in Iraq by a combination of U.S. determination and Iraqi public opinion. These suicide bombers may fail in their efforts, and they may be stopped. But one headline, somewhere, might read: "U.S. action created opportunity for (at least) 25 suicide bombings in Iraq."
2. Al Qaeda may have nuclear weapons--acquired from Ukraine.
3. There are still signs of independent terrorist movements in many different countries.
One of Lincoln's better lines was something like this: "My friends are people who will defend me when I'm wrong. Anybody will defend me when I'm right."
A rich and subtle joke, but also a reminder of the importance of loyalty, and keeping in mind who will be on the right side in the end.
Now Rumsfeld reminds us that if there is a war between the U.S. and Saddam Hussein, sane people should all side with the U.S.: "He then turned the question back on the audience. 'There were prominent people from representative countries in this room that opined that they really didn't think it made a hell of a lot of difference who won,' Rumsfeld said, nearly shouting. 'Shocking. Absolutely shocking.'"
Well, if such statements made any sense at all, it would only be because some people, normally pro-American, doubted that the U.S. would take the same concern to assure stability, let alone liberalism or democracy, in Iraq that they do at home. It was at least possible that they would make war, de-stabilize the situation, and then leave. Such things have been known to happen. If it did happen, it would not necessarily be clear that things were better for Iraqi civilians, or the region, or indeed the U.S.
There is, I believe, a legitimate debate about whether the continued presence of U.S. troops makes things better or worse. Does it support the Iraqi (or Interim) Governing Council, and is the IGC still the best hope of establishing a new legitimate constitution and government? Or does it primarily provoke, inspire, and assist the insurgents?
Still, I for one believe the U.S. is making a considerable effort to establish a constitution, liberalism and even democracy. (These three are not the same--another confusion encouraged by the Bush administration). Obviously Saddam would not have done that, any more than Castro is doing so. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that is even likely to go to such trouble. As the only mega-power, it is presumably the only one that would decide to try. There is obviously something noble about all this. We might all worry that the giant is building a castle somewhere in the sky. We might worry about the debris that might fall on us. But he is a giant, in various ways, and he is building a castle, even if it is in the sky.
Why is there a temptation to feel schadenfreude, to enjoy the discomfort and suffering of Americans in Iraq? (Not, I hasten to add, uniformed personnel themselves). By now there is surely an element of "Lucretian" pleasure. Countries that are not directly involved have good reason to be relieved that they are not involved. This is different from actively wishing bad things to the U.S., but one can understand Rumsfeld identifying the two.
Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette): 60 Minutes has issued a news release to both announce and explain that they are going to cover evangelical Christians in the U.S.
"Apparently, evangelicals believe in something called 'the Rapture' and have a lot of faith in 'Jesus Christ.' According to the release, evangelicals are 'major factor in American politics and culture' and 'have several prominent American leaders among their ranks.' Now, this is ridiculous. Everyone knows that evangelicals are just a crazy made-up story invented to scare the children of Upper West Siders when they've been naughty. Why, they're no more real than NASCAR or Wal-Mart!
"Next week on 60 minutes. . . Kansas: More than just the name of some shitty band?"
Ann Coulter(Feb. 4):
"Former front-runner Howard Dean sat out this week's primaries, but still managed to make news by ridiculing the FCC's plan to investigate MTV's halftime show at the Super Bowl. Dean pronounced the proposed investigation 'silly.' He explained that, as a doctor, a naked breast is 'not exactly an unusual phenomenon for me.'
"That's an interesting standard. Presumably a primetime exhibition of Janet Jackson having a full pelvic exam and pap smear would not be 'exactly an unusual phenomenon' for Dean either. Let's just be grateful Dean's not a proctologist."
This is Coulter at her best. Hard-hitting, funny, not really unfair to Dean (who blurted out something stupid), and it raises a big question (which I tried to raise in my Con Law class): should we allow broadcasters (sending out free, easily accessible signals) to broadcast whatever they want, subject only to commercial considerations (what will lose audience) and the criminal law? Coulter may not have an answer, but she clearly sympathizes with the social conservatives who are concerned about the question.
I can't believe the debate about this is still going on.
1. Did President Bush and/or senior officials in his Administration say in 2002 or early 2003 that Iraq posed an "imminent threat" to the U.S., and was this one of the main rationales, if not the main one, for going to war in March 2003?
Glenn Reynolds is still saying: Bush actually said "the opposite," i.e. Iraq was not an imminent threat, in the SOTU 2003.
Here's the actual quote (via Soundfury) from that speech:
"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?
"If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."
Bush didn't quite deny that Iraq was an imminent threat; that is, he didn't say "the opposite". He said: even if an attack is not (quite) imminent, let's attack anyway. The point was that the threat was either really and truly imminent, or close enough, and the argument to invade was the same either way.
If Bush did not believe Iraq was an imminent threat, this at least raises questions about the urgency of invading in March 2003. It also raises questions about "Just War" doctrine. Like all international law, this may very well be bogus. (See Ernest Fortin article cited in a long post here: one problem with any kind of international law may be that all borders of all countries are based in force and fraud). But it would be helpful if a Bush defender would say something intelligent about it.
2. Is it true that Google searches reveal no case where Bush or anyone senior in his administration made the "imminent threat" statement? There's a good chance the word "imminent" is not in the President's vocabulary. One senses that if he saw this word coming on a page or teleprompter, he would fear mixing up "m" and "n".
3. Above all, there were lots of statements by Bush and many high-ranking officials (as well as Tony ("What are you going to do now, boss? Huh? Huh? What are you going to do now?") Blair to the effect that Saddam had lots of WMDs, they were either ready to deploy or could be made ready on very short notice, and this was a threat to the U.S. Probably thanks mostly to Cheney, in order to heighten a sense of urgency, there were significant, Vincent Price-style hints about nukes. Atrios supplies both the ultimate Google search (from Tom Tomorrow) on "We know Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," and a long list of quotes from Bush and others--assembled by the Center for American Progress.
Bush defenders don't exactly give the impression they are up at night trying to figure out how to tell the truth about all this.
Finally, it's not helpful to quote from Kay's interim report: lots of different WMD program related activities, dual use facilities, hidden facilities, facilities ready to get up and running again on short notice, precursors, and all that. Kay himself has quietly but clearly repudiated all the Phantom of the Opera material. See here on the "interim" report, with updates here, here and here.
Update: The classic exchange between President Bush and Diane Sawyer:
"DIANE SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still--
"PRESIDENT BUSH: So what's the difference?
"DIANE SAWYER: Well--
"PRESIDENT BUSH: The possibility that he could acquire weapons. If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger. That's, that's what I'm trying to explain to you. A gathering threat, after 9/11, is a threat that needed to be de--dealt with, and it was done after 12 long years of the world saying the man's a danger. And so we got rid of him and there's no doubt the world is a safer, freer place as a result of Saddam being gone."
What's the difference between actually having the weapons and being able to acquire them someday?
Great special on dogs on PBS this evening. (Nova; transcript to be available in a few weeks).
Lots of talk about how exactly dogs became domesticated, and they came to appear in so many different colours, sizes and shapes. The discussion confirmed some of my reading. It is probably not true that humans somehow domesticated wolves; rather, some wolves found it advantageous to be at least relatively tame, in order to get easy food.
A garbage dump is shown in order to visualize. All wolves would be attracted to the food. If a human appeared, the truly wild wolves would take off. A few tamer ones might stay, and discover their tame behaviour, since it is less threatening to the humans, causes them not to be treated like predators. Gradually, when the truly wild dogs try to come for a snack, they are chased off by the increasingly tame ones, who have made a home there.
There is evidence that tamer dogs have less adrenaline, and as soon as there was an advantage in being tame, dogs with less adrenaline would breed more of the same. (Lower adrenaline means less of a wild, snarly, fight-or-flight type of reaction). Remarkably, a lowering of adrenaline over generations has been shown to cause changes such as the raising of the tail, the lowering of the ears, and even the appearance of big, splotchy, black and tan type colours.
All domestic dogs are genetically the same. Yet some genes are switched on, and others are switched off, in each dog. A set of characteristics appears in a breed. The most long-standing breed types resulted from being used in a certain way, more than from careful breeding. Desert dwellers wanted dogs who could chase rabbits. They would reward/feed the fastest dogs in each generation, these would be the successful dogs who would breed, and the super-fast salukis would appear with certain colours, ears, tail, without any planning by humans. Herding, pointing, retrieving, all bring out only one or two steps in a wolf's hunting routine. It's only very recently that breeders would deliberately pick and choose a number of qualities, and deliberately breed for them. As one scientist said, this requires separation of animals in heat (these days, using a chain-link fence), and charts of family trees, etc.
Lots of great stuff, cute animation to make points, etc. Some cute, off-the-wall suggestions, such as that homo sapiens advanced over Neanderthals partly by using dogs, and indeed was first required to develop some language in order to communicate with dogs.
(Dogs may have lived closely with humans, sleeping close to them at night, for the last 10,000 years or so; yet they have been genetically distinct from wolves for 100,000 years. There must have been some pretty wild, testy dogs, only slightly domesticated, for a long time. 10,000 years ago, based on cave paintings and skeletons, there was probably very little differentiation of dogs by size or appearance; 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians show considerable differentation.)
Then the troubling part. The narrator (John Lithgow) states matter-of-factly that all the established breeds are inbred, and either have serious health problems already, or will have soon. One scientist says the whole breed standard business is madness for someone looking for a family dog, and there are too many unhealthy dogs being bred.
Then the silver lining to a cloud. When inbred dogs develop medical conditions that are rarer in dogs than in humans, such as narcolepsy, their being inbred makes it relatively easy to identify the gene that is affected. This will help with the treatment of human illness.
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