This is truly outrageous. You
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This is truly outrageous. You can die for our liberties, but Congress is going to restrict your liberty over your body.
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I have to wonder where
I have to wonder where all the whining about the UN comes from. The General Assembly has all sorts of problems, and I don’t want to excuse those. Financially, we should get them to clean the mess up and we’ve taken a lot of steps to do that.
However, when it comes to the Security Council, the UN is largely a tool of US power. Of the five member we almost always have one vote locked up, one for sale (Russia), and one that bellyaches and then is up for sale as an abstention so they don’t veto a plan, and well, then the real problem France. Admittedly, France is useless and only got the seat because of postwar politics. The Security Council is deigned to hold power in those few hands and the US with decent leadership accomplishes a great deal with it.
The Council doesn’t have deal with every small country in the world and it is empowered to act easier than any other body. Even more important, any UN Military action can be vetoed by us, thus giving us a lot of control over multilateral actions when we aren’t involved.
We’ve got it pretty good. A little massaging and we do extremely well with the Security Council except on issues relating to China or Russia. Well, that and when the French get a bug up their ass. It isn’t perfect, but it provides the US an important institutional mechanism to get world support, with very little actual support from the other nations.
The Trib did right. And
The Trib did right. And I think this is the key point:
“I simply don’t think that a newspaper can sanction that kind of behavior,” said Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statesman. “It’s a conflict of interest when you have a close personal relationship with the subject of an article. It’s the same as if you were to have a financial relationship with the subject of a story or some other close relationship.”
The Howlers will hate this
The Howlers will hate this one–the Wall Street Journal (story not available to non-subscribers) did a piece on the California Electric Market and Krugman picks up on it. I haven’t read the original story yet, but the problem has been obvious for some time. The deregulatory scheme used in California was horribly designed. The Dick Cheney complaints about price caps were nothing but a distraction from the real problem. Too much leverage was given to a small group of companies, long-term contracts were banned or heavily discouraged, and regulators forced the separation of utility branches all lead to a situation rife for problems. Price caps didn’t have a chance to create a problem.
The more important point is this is what happens in Crony Capitalism. I’m a huge fan of deregulation of energy markets. I believe that strategy is the most likely strategy to improve the use of renewable sources. Of course, ‘the reforms” by Gray the Blowhard reduce those incentives. Sidenote: Republicans–what was wrong with Riordan again? Oh, that is right he was reasonable. But Pete Wilson sold the regulatory process to the industry and they got exactly what they wanted. Crony Capitalism of the type we see with Cheney and White harnesses all the power of the market for the few at the expense of the many. Capitalism should be a liberating mechanism, but if the game is fixed, it loses its power.
Josh Marshall has a great article on the lack of competence in the administration. Either one is a genius and knows how to run a business and is fully knowledgeable of rebuilding Iraq’s oil fields and plundering Californial, or one is a boob hired for political connections. You can’t have it both ways.
When you need a laugh
When you need a laugh during the day, go here.
The fruitcakes are amazing…
Why is Saddam different from
Why is Saddam different from the Soviets during the Cold War? I think this is a good question and essentially it is what Hesiod is asking here.
The argument is that deterrence worked during the Cold War, why won’t it work now. In some sense this is a good analogy, but it fails to grasp a key difference between Saddam’s rule and that of the Soviet Union.
First though, Hesiod is absolutely correct about the invasion of Kuwait. It was a perfectly rational act based on the information he had. The mistake was the US sounded like it would appease him. Our mistake and the signal was vital to his decision-making.
The difference is great between the two countries and how they are governed. The Soviet Union was a bureaucratically run country after Stalin. This meant, while it was totalitarian, that power was dispersed widely. No single leader was in control and the aims of furthering the regime were held by more than a small group of leaders with one cult of personality at the top. Towards the end of the Soviet Union, political science really caught up with this and started to model the bureaucratic decision-making process and these models continue to be used in China.
Iraq is a very different case though. Saddam, though originally a part of a party apparatus, has shed that baggage by killing off any competitors. The Baathist Party in Iraq is Saddam and his family. In the Soviet Union there were norms to follow and diffuse power that kept any single person after Stalin from becoming a cult of personality. That is an important check.
More importantly, Mark Bowden points out what Saddam’s ultimate goal is. He wants to be a Nassarite figure that stands for and unites Arabs in a nationalist state. In this regard he is like Hitler, though the military comparisons are silly. As long as he or his sons can survive, deterrence will work. However, if he is threatened by a neighbor, the US or most likely a domestic competitor, what is his calculus?
If his goal is to further his legacy, the use of a nuclear weapon is not irrational in attempting to achieve his goal of a Nassar like legacy. His goal isn’t the survival of a state as a bureaucratic organization would see it, it is the survival of his legacy.
Perhaps this is too much psychobabble, but I think his view of his place in the world is well documented. And at that point, one must decide how the institutional differences between the Iraqi state of 2002 and the Soviets during the Cold War are similar or different. I take them as very different creatures and those difference provide a criticial difference in how successful deterrence would be.
As President Clinton pointed out the other night, this creates a huge problem for an attack. How do we ensure that Saddam doesn’t unleash his stockpile of biological agents on the world?
Interestingly, this also provides some insights on who else we may or may not take on in the future, ahem “war on nouns.” Syria, which is a highly relevant threat isn’t run by a cult of personality. It isn’t that Assad isn’t the most powerful member of the Syrian Baathist Party, but the Party is a bureaucratic body that is more than one person. North Korea’s position is debatable, but I would see Kim Jong-Il as a cult of personality–one looking to cut a deal as today’s story concerning the abductions of Japenese Nationals seems to indicate.
This is Karl Rove on
This is Karl Rove on drugs. Perhaps he’ll send Bush to the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner.
The Native American Trust ordeal
The Native American Trust ordeal continues.
I had hope. This dashed
I had hope. This dashed it. This is shorter than his average blog entry and it appears from reading the entire article he is criticizing, that Mary McGrory is primarily guilty of poor writing. She seems to be referring to domestic oppression, but without any transitions from one part of the article to the other the distinction is blurred.
This is a waste of bandwidth. Sullivan has great things to say on some subjects such as diversity and the Catholic Church.
Rural vote arguments again. Why
Rural vote arguments again. Why would a party want to tie its future to a declining portion of the population? Bueller, Bueller,…