More "Now what" in the Middle East

This is in response to the comments on my previous "Now What" posting.


I agree with you that Israel's reaction was both wrong and counterproductive. I wish they hadn't done it, and I wish they would stop. If it were up to me I would stop.


I agree with you that Hezbollah is raising its profile and improving its stature in a large part of the Arab world by standing up to the Israelis. I think they are doing it by taking Lebanon hostage. I don't think that is right, and I think they should stop. I think they would reply that they have a bigger goal and that the means justify the end. I disagree both with their overall bigger goal and that the means justify the end in this case -- and probably in most cases.


I agree with you that in some sense Israel is probably more comfortable fighting what appears to be a real war than just having to respond to terrorist. It's a lot clearer where you are when fighting a war than when dealing with terrorists. I disagree that Israel is a nation of war. If Israel were assured of its future and were free from the fear of continued terrorist attacks, I'm convinced that it would live peacefully with its neighbors. I don't believe that Israel wants to be in a war or that it wants to fight its neighbors. The Israelis are creative and productive. They don't need handouts to survive.


I think this cuts two ways for Bush. On the one hand, it does distract the country from other things (as you said), and most Americans appear to support his position with respect to supporting Israel. In that sense it's almost a proxy for us being at war. Americans support the president when we are at war. On the other hand, it puts his entire reputation at risk. He came to power with relative peace in the Middle East. It's now a complete mess. It's his fault. He will have to answer for that.

Parental notification

From Slate.com

A friend

  

Bush wrong (what a surprise) about tax cuts

From Jason Furman of the

On July 25, the Treasury Department released a study entitled "A Dynamic Analysis of Permanent Extension of the President's Tax Relief." This study refutes many of the exaggerated claims about the tax cuts that have been made by the President and other senior Administration officials, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and various other tax-cut advocates. Contrary to the claim that the tax cuts will have huge impacts on the economy, the Treasury study finds that even under favorable assumptions, making the tax cuts permanent would have a barely perceptible impact on the economy. Under more realistic assumptions, the Treasury study finds that the tax cuts could even hurt the economy.

In addition, the study casts doubt on claims that the tax cuts are responsible for much of the recent growth in investment and jobs. It finds that making the tax cuts permanent would lead initially to lower levels of investment, and would result over the longer term in lower levels of employment (i.e., in fewer jobs).

The Treasury also study decisively refutes the President’s claim that “The economic growth fueled by tax relief has helped send our tax revenues soaring,” — in essence, that the tax cuts have more than paid for themselves. Instead, under the study’s more favorable scenario, the modest economic impact of the tax cuts would offset less than 10 percent of the cost of making the tax cuts permanent.

Finally, the conclusions in the Treasury study are based on the assumption that the tax cuts will be paid for by deep and unspecified cuts in government programs starting in 2017. The Treasury study is consistent with other research on dynamic scoring in finding that in the absence of such budget cuts — i.e., if the tax cuts continue to be deficit financed indefinitely — the tax cuts would end up weakening the economy over the long run.

Now what?

Yes, Hezbollah was wrong to cross Israel's border and kidnap an Israeli soldier. And Israel was wrong to overreact as it did. Now what?

For once I agree with Bush that it's not a good solution to return to the state as it was prior to these two acts. Israel withdrew from Lebanon, but Lebanon is still a source of terrorist acts against Israel. What would the world recommend any country do when terrorists attack it from across its border and the neighboring country is unable to stop them? What should we do if terrorists fired rockets into San Diego from Mexico and the Mexican government could do nothing to stop them? What should Mexico do if terrorists fired rockets into Mexico from San Diego and we did nothing to stop them?

It seems like the only reasonable solution, and one that all countries that wish to eliminate terrorism should support, is for an international peacekeeping force to occupy Lebanon and suppress the terrorism until Lebanon is strong enough to do it for itself. Of course if that guarantee is made, Israel must stop its campaign against Lebanon. The whole thing sounds nasty, but I don't know what else to suggest.

One of the basic premises of political theory is that the state has a monopoly on force. When that premise breaks down, it seems legitimate for an international agency to take over where the state failed. If that doesn't happen, then what? Everyone should stop fighting and live in peace with each other anyway. A cease fire. Is that going to happen? I doubt it.

• If I were in charge of the Israeli government, I would stop the bombing. It's terrible. Besides, the only real solution without an imposed force is economic prosperity. This isn't getting there.
  
• If I were in charge of Hezbollah, I would stop attacking Israel and devote my considerable efforts to helping Lebanon build a successful state and society. Isn't that what my constituents really want? This isn't getting there.
  

Both Israel and the majority of the Lebanese people want a peaceful and successful Lebanon. Sounds so simple. Why aren't we all working toward that end? Since I'm not in charge of either Israel or Hezbollah, I can't make it happen. So now what?

The Enemy of My Enemy Is Still My Enemy

From Bernard Haykel's op-ed piece in the New York Times

Several of Al Qaeda's ideologues have issued official statements explaining Hezbollah's actions and telling followers how to respond to them. The gist of their argument is that the Shiites are conspiring to destroy Islam and to resuscitate Persian imperial rule over the Middle East and ultimately the world. The ideologues label this effort the "Sassanian-Safavid conspiracy," in reference to the Sassanians, a pre-Islamic Iranian dynasty, and to the Safavids, a Shiite dynasty that ruled Iran and parts of Iraq from 1501 till 1736.

They go on to argue that thanks to the United States (the leader of the Zionist-Crusader conspiracy), Iraq has been handed over to the Shiites, who are now wantonly massacring the country's Sunnis. Syria is already led by a Shiite heretic, President Bashar al-Assad, whose policies harm the country's Sunni majority.

Hezbollah, according to these analyses, seeks to dupe ordinary Muslims into believing that the Shiites are defending Islam's holiest cause, Palestine, in order to cover for the wholesale Shiite alliance with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ultimately, this theory goes, the Shiites will fail in their efforts because the Israelis and Americans will destroy them once their role in the broader Zionist-Crusader conspiracy is accomplished. And then God will assure the success of the Sunni Muslims and the defeat of the Zionists and Crusaders.

In the meantime, no Muslim should be fooled by Hezbollah, whose members have never fought the infidel on any of the real battlefronts, like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya or Kashmir. The proper attitude for Muslims to adopt is to dissociate themselves completely from the Shiites.

This analysis — conspiratorial, bizarre and uncompelling, except to the most diehard radicals — signals an important defeat for Al Qaeda’s public relations campaign. The truth is that Al Qaeda has met a formidable challenge in Hezbollah and its charismatic leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who have made canny choices that appeal to Al Qaeda’s Sunni followers. Al Qaeda’s improbable conspiracy theory does little to counter these advantages.

First, although Sheik Nasrallah wears the black turban and carries the title of “sayyid,” both of which identify him as a Shiite descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, he preaches a nonsectarian ideology and does not highlight his group’s Shiite identity. Hezbollah has even established an effective alliance with Hamas, a Sunni and Muslim Brotherhood organization.

Second, Hezbollah’s statements focus on the politics of resistance to occupation and invoke shared Islamic principles about the right to self-defense. Sheik Nasrallah is extremely careful to hew closely to the dictates of Islamic law in his military attacks. These include such principles as advance notice, discrimination in selecting targets and proportionality.

Finally, only Hezbollah has effectively defeated Israel (in Lebanon in 2000) and is now taking it on again, hitting Haifa and other places with large numbers of rockets — a feat that no Arab or Muslim power has accomplished since Israel’s founding in 1948.

These are already serious selling points. And Hezbollah will score a major propaganda victory in the Muslim world if it simply remains standing in Lebanon after the present bout of warfare is over and maintains the relationships it is forging with Hamas and other Sunni Islamist organizations.

What will such a victory mean? Perhaps Hezbollah’s ascendancy among Sunnis will make it possible for Shiites and Sunnis to stop the bloodletting in Iraq — and to focus instead on their “real” enemies, namely the United States and Israel. Rumblings against Israeli actions in Lebanon from both Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq already suggest such an outcome.

That may be good news for Iraqis, but it marks a dangerous turn for the West. And there are darker implications still. Al Qaeda, after all, is unlikely to take a loss of status lying down. Indeed, the rise of Hezbollah makes it all the more likely that Al Qaeda will soon seek to reassert itself through increased attacks on Shiites in Iraq and on Westerners all over the world — whatever it needs to do in order to regain the title of true defender of Islam.

Too complicated for this poor cat. But it looks like they may compete with each other to see who can hurt us the most. Not good.

Iraqi PM Addresses Congress

but he (or his translator) used the "L" word — twice! From the Washington Post

Confronting and dealing with [terrorism] is the responsibility of every liberal democracy that values its freedom. …

The people of Iraq will not forget your continued support as we establish a secure, liberal democracy.

(Emphasis added in the preceding.)

I'm surprised he wasn't warned that liberal is a dirty word among those in power in Washington. I guess it's just one of those cultural mistakes. Americans make them all the time when we visit foreign countries. This is what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

The current state in Iraq?

Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador to Croatia, writes the following in an op-ed piece in the New York Times

In the south during the formal occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004, the American-led coalition allowed Shiite militias to mushroom and clerics to impose Islamic rule, in some places with a severity reminiscent of Afghanistan’s Taliban. … Shiite religious parties and clerics have created theocracies policed by militias that number well over 100,000 men. In Basra, three religious parties control — and sometimes fight over — the thousands of barrels of oil diverted each day from legal exports into smuggling. To the extent that the central government has authority in the south, it is because some of the same Shiite parties that dominate the government also control the south.

Kurdistan in the north is effectively independent. The Iraqi Army is barred from the region, the Iraqi flag prohibited, and central government ministries are not present. The Kurdish people voted nearly unanimously for independence in an informal referendum in January 2005.

And in the Sunni center of the nation and Baghdad, the government has virtually no control beyond the American-protected Green Zone. The Mahdi Army, a radical Shiite militia, controls the capital's Shiite neighborhoods, while Qaeda offshoots and former Baathists are increasingly taking over the Sunni districts. …

In the Sunni center, our current strategy involves handing off combat duties to the Iraqi Army. Mostly, it is Shiite battalions that fight in the Sunni Arab areas, as the Sunni units are not reliable. Thus what the Bush administration portrays as “Iraqi” security forces is seen by the local Sunni population as a hostile force loyal to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, installed by the American invaders and closely aligned with the traditional enemy, Iran. The more we “Iraqize” the fight in the Sunni heartland, the more we strengthen the insurgents.

Because it is Iraq’s most mixed city, Baghdad is the front line of Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite civil war. It is a tragedy for its people, most of whom do not share the sectarian hatred behind the killing. Iraqi forces cannot end the civil war because many of them are partisans of one side, and none are trusted by both communities.

For the United States to contain the civil war, we would have to deploy more troops and accept a casualty rate many times the current level as our forces changed their mission from a support role to intensive police duties. The American people would not support such an expanded mission, and the Bush administration has no desire to undertake it.

The administration, then, must match its goals in Iraq to the resources it is prepared to deploy. Since it cannot unify Iraq or stop the civil war, it should work with the regions that have emerged. Where no purpose is served by a continuing military presence — in the Shiite south and in Baghdad — America and its allies should withdraw.

As an alternative to using Shiite and American troops to fight the insurgency in Iraq’s Sunni center, the administration should encourage the formation of several provinces into a Sunni Arab region with its own army, as allowed by Iraq’s Constitution. Then the Pentagon should pull its troops from this Sunni territory and allow the new leaders to establish their authority without being seen as collaborators.

"He hit me first.” “But he hit me harder.”

In an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times Daniel Gilbert talks about the asymmetry between action and experience.

[B]ecause our senses point outward, we can observe other people's actions but not our own. [B]ecause mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people's reasons and other people's punches. …

[In an experiment in which two volunteers were asked to respond to touches from each other with equal force, here's what actually happened.] Although volunteers tried to respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind. …

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

A decades-long human subject experiment

From a New York Times mulutimedia presentation.

[Donny Johnson] lives in an 8-by-12-foot concrete cell. His meals are pushed through a slot in the door. Except for the odd visitor, with whom he talks through thick plexiglass, he interacts with no one. He has not touched another person in 17 years. [No cats either.]

He paints by using colors extracted from the shells of M&M's.