Egregious Moderation

Mark Kleiman: Piety, Virtue, and Folly

The Reality-Based Community: Isn't it fun watching various conservative politicians and commentators suddenly backing away from Christian-ism now that it appears — in the person of Mike Huckabee — detached from economic royalism? I'm hoping that the current round of religious warfare within the GOP coalition will have lasting impacts, both driving the money-cons away from voting for theo-con candidates (while also helping to legitimize attacks by liberals on religious extremism) and driving a wedge between the GOP and its theo-con voting base by reminding the "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it" crowd of the profound contempt in which they are held by their allies.

Even Rick Santorum has suddenly decided that he ought to defend us unbelievers from the charge that our skepticism makes us incapable of ethical action. But in doing so he falls into a widely-shared error:

For most, virtue is derived from religion, but that hardly means a man without religion cannot reason his way to virtue. Witness the ancient Greeks.

Put aside for now the question whether "the ancient Greeks" generically were models of upright action, and focus on Santorum's implication that they were, generically, unbelievers who derived their moral principles from "reason" rather than religion. Yes, some of the classical philosophers made bold attempts to substitute material causation for divine management as the primary explanation for natural phenomena. But classical Greek society would have measured at least as high on religiosity as, for example, the contemporary United States.

Irreligion wasn't even characteristic of the philosophic enterprise as such, though then as now the ignorant suspected their intellectual betters of being deficient in piety. Socrates was accused of atheism, but the charge was transparently false: according to Plato, his last words were a reminder to one of his students to make an animal sacrifice on his behalf. ("I owe a cock to Aesclepius." [the traditional offering for one who has recovered from a dangerous illness] "Don't forget to pay.")

Our contemporaries are, I think, inclined to credit Greek thinkers with atheism simply because they can't imagine any thoughtful person believing in what is still taught in schools as "Greek mythology," as if it Greek beliefs and observances were different in kind from more recent religious beliefs and observances.

The logic seems to go about as follows:

1. If Socrates really believed that the goddess of love cuckolded her husband the god of technology by having an illicit liaison with the god of war, and that the technology-god retaliated by rigging a mechanical net to capture them and display them entwined together, then Socrates must have been an idiot.

2. But Socrates was not an idiot.

3. Therefore, Socrates didn't believe in the Olympian gods as described by Homer.

4. Therefore, Socrates was an atheist, and his moral sense must have come from reason rather than religion.

But of course the whole point of the early Platonic dialogues is that it doesn't really make sense to ask whether someone "believes" a proposition or a definition expressed as a verbal formula, because any such formula is likely to have some interpretations that are trivial, absurd, or vicious, and other interpretations that are significant, valuable, and (to some limited extent, because no formula can accurately express reality) true. "That which alone is wise and good," says Heraclitus, "does and does not allow itself to be called 'Zeus.' "

Perhaps, if I had some time, I might even persuade someone like Rick Santorum that it was possible to be a pious pagan without being a fool. Persuading someone like Christopher Hitchens or P.Z. Myers that it is possible to be a pious Christian and not a fool would be harder.

Steve Randy Waldmann: When a rose is not a rose: TAF is not "just" the discount window

Interfluidity :: When a rose is not a rose: TAF is not "just" the discount window: When a rose is not a rose: TAF is not "just" the discount window

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism and Accrued Interest have both taken very measured views of the Fed's new Term Auction Facility, which gets its big start on Monday. As Smith puts it, TAF is the "discount window with no stigma and another pricing mechanism". He also notes that the Fed's novel device looks just like the same old auctions the ECB has been using as a monetary policy tool for years, and observes pessimistically that "the gap between non-dollar Libor and the ECB's target rate is higher than the spread between Libor and Fed funds. Not a good sign." (Bloomberg reports that Friday's markets shared Smith's skepticism.) Accrued Interest, responding to my ravings, suggests that TAF is no more a "bail-out" than any other lending at the discount window.

Yves Smith and Accrued Interest are two of the finest financial bloggers out there. If you are dallying here without having read every word they've written, your priorities are out of whack. Nevertheless, both are missing a forest of difference among trees of similarity. To call TAF the discount window without the stigma is like calling a person a corpse that is not dead.

In theory, TAF and the discount window are quite similar. In practice, it never mattered what the discount window was, because it was so little used. TAF is the discount window remastered. It is designed to be used, in quantities heretofore inconceivable. James Hamiltion, in an excellent discussion of the facility, shows a graph of historical direct lending by the Fed. Thanks to TAF, the graph through December 2007 will show a spike so tall you'd need a screen three times as tall as a typical monitor just to accommodate. Prior to TAF, the Fed had no effective tool for getting funds to banks in trouble, since loans at the Federal Funds rate are only available to banks that other banks trust, and borrowing at the discount window is expensive, financially and reputationally. With TAF, the Fed can lend directly to the sketchiest banks, and on very generous terms, without spooking depositors....

[I]n the words of the maestro (Eric Clapton), "It's in the way that you use it." In order to reduce interbank spreads, central banks have to (1) auction money in quantities sufficient to ensure that the "market price" is quite close to the interbank rate policymakers view as healthy; (2) accept a wide variety of bank assets as collateral, and place high valuations on those assets relative to the market bid; and (3) credibly signal that it is willing and able to continue these policies in perpetuity, or until the crisis is abated, whichever comes first.

Point (1) immediately drops the cost of borrowing by troubled banks to "ordinary" levels. However, this alone will not immediately reduce spreads on loans are still made between banks. Private banks will still fear counterparty defaults even if the central bank is blasé. Interbank spreads might even widen, as lenders view failure to anticipate and secure adequate funding at auction as a sign of trouble.

Point (2), over time, will remedy this. Easy lending against a broad panoply of assets helps ensure that banks have the capacity to bid for all the funding they need. At the same time (as Yves Smith was quick to point out), the price at which assets are accepted as collateral suggests a floor for accounting valuations, helping to assure counterparties that borrowers won't be thrown into crisis by a sudden write-down. Again, the effect here won't be immediate — as long as collateral values and market bids are divergent, there will be valuation uncertainty.

But that's where point (3) comes into play. There's an arbitrage between exchange value and long-maturity collateral value. If the traders view collateral values as stable, eventually market bids will rise to approach the central-bank set asset prices.

This medicine will take time to work. Central banks will have to establish credible expectations of continued support. Don't expect "forward looking markets" to reprice spreads until central bankers establish a track record. The ECB is not auctioning enough money yet, but it will. I suspect that, despite Europe's institutional head start, it will be Bernanke's radical Fed that shows the way.

Many commentators view TAF as an odd, desperate attempt by the Fed to do something, or to seem to do something, in a desperate situation. That is not my view. I think the Fed is acting quite deliberately here, that it is working out of a playbook that the Chairman developed and described years ago. I am optimistic that the Fed's approach, if pursued tenaciously, can succeed in undoing the widespread perception of risk and instability in the banking system.

Of course, "optimistic" is not quite the right word here, because I oppose the whole enterprise. All the talk about moral hazard and burning houses misses the point. The financial sector has underwritten gargantuan misallocations of real resources in the United States, and profited handsomely from doing so. The cost of these errors is not just a matter of homes foreclosed, or a period of commercial turbulence and unemployment. We face the prospect of a serious decline in living standards, increased danger of conflict between large powers (which hopefully, but not certainly, will be confined to the economic sphere), and the possibility of social instability of a kind we've not witnessed for decades. There are actors in this drama who "deserve" to be punished, under a nineteenth century view of moral hazard. But that is not why we should endure rather than resist a painful restructuring of the financial sector. If we could let bygones be bygones and move on, that'd be great. But the reason for institutional accountability in any setting is not to shame and punish, but to create the conditions under which future actors will not misbehave. Contra Nouriel Roubini, the real economy cannot be "bailed out". It must be built and repaired via the wise application of present scarce goods and services, rather than salved with promises of future goods and services. We require a financial sector capable of aggregating widely dispersed information into wise choices regarding the use of present resources. We absolutely do not have such a financial sector right now. Which is why the very expensive financial sector that we do have should be let go.

Existing players, including the Fed, won't see it this way. The Fed will lend to support collateral values at levels higher than conventional valuations would merit. They will work with financial institutions to roll over loans as necessary, even against decaying collateral, rebundling assets to maintain some veneer of plausibility when underlying cash flows develop poorly over time. The proud titans of Wall Street can and probably will be bailed out. The rest of us are not so lucky.

Rick Perlstein: The Lives They Lived - Harry Dent

a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/magazine/30DENT-t.html?adxnnl=1&ref=magazine&adxnnlx=1198948133-DsWwPA2DF4pHFad4h73gMQ&pagewanted=print">The Lives They Lived - Harry Dent - Politics - New York Times: The Southern Strategist: In the small Southern town that produced Harry Dent, the future Nixon White House political aide, Dent’s great-uncle John (The Baptist) Prickett edited the newspaper. One day, an outraged reader called Prickett a “Republican S.O.B.” Prickett, who like everyone else in South Carolina was a Democrat, laid him flat with a punch. The baffled reader, upon recovering, asked what was the matter with calling him an S.O.B. “But you called me a Republican S.O.B.,” Prickett answered — and thereby hangs the tale of why Harry Shuler Dent is such an important figure in American history. He was the behind-the-scenes player who did the most to turn the South from a region that despised Republicans into a Republican bastion.

For most of the post-Civil-War era, the Grand Old Party survived in the Southern popular imagination as the Yankee enemy, eager to conspire with newly enfranchised slaves to overturn the entire “Southern way of life.” In 1957, Republican congressmen were instrumental in passing the first federal civil rights law in almost a century. The idea of a Southern state delivering its electoral votes to “the party of Lincoln” would have seemed outrageous before the 1960s — before, that is, the national Democratic Party made a commitment to the enforcement of civil rights for blacks.

By then, Harry Dent was a top political aide to Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Thurmond ran for president as a third-party “Dixiecrat” in 1948 after the Democratic convention passed a civil rights plank. Shortly before the 1964 presidential election, a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, passed the most sweeping civil rights law in United States history. This time, Thurmond didn’t form a third party. The Republican presidential nominee, the conservative Barry Goldwater, opposed the civil rights law, which was political heresy at the time, as the conventional wisdom was that Republicans could not win the presidency without courting the black vote. Dent, a Southerner through and through — he was a lay preacher and established the Senate’s breakfast prayer group — persuaded his boss to drop out of the Democratic Party for good, join the Republicans and campaign for Goldwater. Goldwater lost in a landslide, winning just six states, five of them in Dixie. The “solid Democratic South” had been breached. American politics would never be the same.

Dent’s ascent to the upper echelons of the White House began in 1966. Following Goldwater’s lead, Richard Nixon laid the groundwork for his presidential nomination by building his political base in the 11 states of the Old Confederacy. To succeed, he would need the blessing of the South’s most trusted Republican: Strom Thurmond. To get to Thurmond, he knew he’d need the loyalty of the man Thurmond trusted most: Harry Dent. It happened via one of those colorful stories of which Southern political lore is made. The Dent family dog had just been run over by a car, and Nixon, thinking quickly, sent Dent’s stricken children a new one. A grateful Dent, who had a gift for soothing the egos of powerful men — on the Nixon Oval Office tapes you can hear him agreeing with whatever the president says almost before he’s through saying it — explained to Nixon how to win Thurmond’s heart, advice Nixon followed. Nixon announced: “Strom is no racist. Strom is a man of courage and integrity.”

But by 1968 Nixon was still not guaranteed the loyalty of Southern Republicans. Thurmond had installed Dent as chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, and Dent had organized his fellow Southern chairmen in a scheme to vote their delegations as a block at the convention. But first they would play hard to get, making the three top contenders — Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller — come down South and beg for their hand. According to legend, Rockefeller, despised by them anyway as a civil rights liberal, nearly disqualified himself by trying to pour sugar on his grits. Reagan, the sentimental favorite, ruled himself out by refusing to say whether he was officially running. Nixon met the state chairmen on May 31, 1968, in Atlanta, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was interred six weeks earlier. He walked off with the prize after pledging to appoint “strict constructionist” Supreme Court justices and choose a running mate “acceptable to all sections of the party” — in other words, one signed off on by Thurmond. The South was now not just a player in Republican politics. It was calling the tune.

“Four years ago it would never have occurred to Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller to go politicking in the South,” Richard Dougherty of The Los Angeles Times wrote, marveling at the accomplishment of South Carolina’s “conservative and articulate” state chairman. That one word — “articulate” — spoke volumes. Dent claimed his truest passion was healing the South’s wounded regional pride: the shame at being condescended to by Yankees. At the 1968 Republican National Convention, Dent deployed his mastery of wounded Southern pride to keep restless Dixie convention delegates united behind Nixon instead of Reagan. Then, in the general election, he ran the “Thurmond Speaks for Nixon-Agnew” committee, which was ostensibly “independent” of the official campaign, lest Nixon be excoriated by pundits for campaigning in the South, as one internal memo put it, “in regional code words.” President Nixon rewarded Dent with a White House job as his keeper of those same regional code words, the man in charge of demonstrating to the South that the White House would not be working to enforce federal civil rights laws, while appearing publicly to endorse them. That move would soon be enshrined in the press as the “Southern Strategy.”

Most of Dent’s days were spent working the back channels, assuring Southerners that the administration would stonewall federal court desegregation decisions. After Nixon’s first Supreme Court nominee, South Carolina’s Clement Haynsworth, withdrew under a cloud of corruption allegations, the president ordered Dent to “find a good federal judge further South and further to the right.” Dent obliged him with G. Harrold Carswell, who once campaigned for the Georgia State Legislature with the credo, “I believe that segregation of the races is proper and the ONLY practical and correct way of life in our states.” Nixon, following Dent’s example, argued that the opposition to Carswell’s nomination was mere regional bigotry against the South. Liberals, not without reason, regarded Dent, Time reported, as “a Southern-fried Rasputin in the Nixon administration.”

The lay preacher in Dent suffered from a guilty conscience. In his 1978 memoir, “The Prodigal South Returns to Power,” Dent wrote that his politics were never racist. “The aim of the Southern strategy,” he claimed, was merely “to have the South treated just like any other section of the U.S.A.” Three years later, when he retired from law to preach the Gospel full time, he came clean. Yes, he admitted, of course he had exploited race to aggrandize Southern power. “When I look back,” he said, “my biggest regret now is anything I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people.”

Michael Tomasky: They'd Rather Be Right

They'd Rather Be Right - The New York Review of Books: David Frum, the conservative analyst who formerly wrote speeches for Bush, proposes something along these lines (although he prefers calling it conservatism updated for the twenty-first century rather than centrism) in Comeback. To help the GOP recover from its present shabby state, for example, Frum preaches a "Green Conservatism" in which the GOP fights the Democrats for the allegiance of environmentally minded voters, going so far as to endorse a carbon tax. He also advocates a conservatism for the middle class that actually wants to do something about the problem of uninsured middle-class Americans. He even calls for a conservatism that respects the rights of prisoners, including "conjugal visits" and "enjoyable food." He combines these with newfangled defenses of traditional conservative positions—for example, a softer opposition to abortion that emphasizes "education and persuasion rather than coercion, changes in attitudes and beliefs rather than changes in law and public policy." More than once while reading Comeback, I nodded, thinking that the GOP could do worse than to listen to him. In urging a new course, he joins other conservative writers like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who argued in The Weekly Standard in 2005 for a "Sam's Club Conservatism" that makes economic appeals to working-class voters.

Whatever Frum may hope for, however, we have to deal with actually existing Republicanism, as it is being played out in the current race. And that Republicanism is quite the opposite: on nearly every issue, the major candidates have run hard to the right, exceptions (John McCain on immigration) being vastly outnumbered by the rule. All of the major candidates agree, among other things, on policy toward Iraq and Iran, on judicial appointments, and on low taxes for the well-off.

Conventional wisdom would assert that they have done so simply to pander to Republican primary voters, and that the nominee will move toward the center for the general election.... But the important question is not how the nominee will position himself next fall. Think, after all, about Bush's talk of "compassionate conservatism" in 2000 and about how the national press fell for it. The important question is how he will govern should he win.... Despite Bush's failures and the discrediting of conservative governance, there is every chance that the next Republican president, should the party's nominee prevail next year, will be just as conservative as Bush has been—perhaps even more so.

How could this be? The explanation is fairly simple. It has little to do with the out-of-touch politicians and conservative voters Ponnuru and Lowry cite and reflects instead the central hard truth about the components of the Republican Party today... neoconservatives; theo-conservatives... and radical anti-taxers.... Each of these groups dominates party policy in its area of interest-—the neocons in foreign policy, the theocons in social policy, and the anti-taxers on fiscal and regulatory issues. Each has led the Bush administration to undertake a high-profile failure: the theocons orchestrated the disastrous Terri Schiavo crusade, which put off many moderate Americans; the radical anti-taxers pushed for the failed Social Security privatization initiative; and the neocons, of course, wanted to invade Iraq. Three failures, and there are more like them. And yet, so far as the internal dynamics of the Republican Party are concerned, they have been failures without serious consequence, because there are no strong countervailing Republican forces to present an opposite view or argue a different set of policies and principles....

(We may lately add a fourth offshoot, the nativist anti-immigrant tendency, which embarrassed Bush last spring when it blocked the reasonable and comprehensive immigration bill the President supported.) Those branches, which of course overlap, are not sharply at odds with one another over fundamental questions.... There are a handful of vestigial Republican moderates; but they have no national power at all.... The disarray following a loss next year might well embolden the moderate forces to stage a comeback. But suppose the Republican nominee wins next November.... [T]here is no credible reason to believe that the neocons, theocons, and anti-taxers will hold any less power in the new administration than they have in Bush's....

The extent to which the major Republican candidates, with the partial exception of Mike Huckabee, have backed the neocon worldview is striking.... [T]he theoconservatives are thought to be on the defensive this election cycle.... [But the] candidates' pledges about judges highlight an important point. Lack of enthusiasm is not the same thing as lack of power, and the religious right still has power.... The third leg of the conservative movement is in many ways the most important and comprehensive: all conservatives agree on less government, lower taxes, and less regulation. And all the candidates have pledged to support these goals. Frum reminds us that in the real world, the salience of tax-cutting as an issue has been steadily eroding in recent years:

When Republicans speak of "tax cuts," they mean "income tax cuts." Yet after almost three decades of income-tax cutting, most Americans no longer pay very much income tax. In fact, four out of five taxpayers now pay more in payroll taxes than federal income taxes. Some 29 million income-earning American households pay no income tax at all. By contrast, the notorious top 1 percent of taxpayers pay well over one-third of all U.S. income taxes. The top 1 percent may make a disproportionate amount of money. But they still cast only 1 percent of the votes.

One can quibble that Frum's math is probably slightly off since higher-income citizens are more likely to vote than poor people. But he is correct that for most Americans there simply isn't much more income tax to cut, and that poll respondents repeatedly prefer either deficit reduction or particular types of public investment, such as health care. But the major Republican candidates give no sign that it may be time to shift to a different set of priorities. They all emphasize tax-cutting and deregulation as the centerpieces of their economic policies....

The Republican nominee, once he is named next spring, will undoubtedly tack toward the center during the general election campaign. But again, the important question is how he would govern. Presidents respond to the constituencies that put them in office, and a Republican president elected in 2008 will have been put in office by the factions that control his party. There is no reason to expect that he will defy those factions. Let us hope that in the long run, the Republicans outside them will decide to challenge their power.

Eric Rauchway: About forty-five years ago. When did you start?

About forty-five years ago. When did you start? « The Edge of the American West: About forty-five years ago. When did you start? December 26, 2007 in history and current events by eric

[Updated, 12/28/2007: Welcome, Matthew Yglesias readers (and Matthew Yglesias, who evidently is a Matthew Yglesias reader). Also, if you’re looking here too, welcome Bruce Bartlett. Please, y’all, feel free to look around and comment.]

Possibly if you are not crazy, or ignorant, you know this, but: The Democratic Party was the party first of slavery, and then of white supremacy. You see, the Republican Party was created to oppose the spread of slavery, and the election of Abraham Lincoln — without a single southern state’s support — occasioned the secession ultimately of eleven southern states.

And then beginning in around 1889-90, partly to keep down the Populist, or People’s, Party, Democrats in the South promoted the disfranchisement of African Americans. And racist southerners hewed to the Democratic Party so long as — and only so long as — the Democratic Party remained the party of white supremacy.

The Republicans, unsurprisingly, knew this, and for decades portrayed the Democrats as the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion — because the Democrats were also the party not so keen on temperance, and not so hateful of the Catholic immigrants, as well as the party identified with the secession of the South.

The Democrats couldn’t actually afford to be too much the party of Rum or Romanism. If they were, as when they nominated Al Smith for President in 1928 — they lost southern votes to the Republican Party.

At the same time, they couldn’t take even a baby step away from Rebellion — as they did in 1948, after Harry Truman asked what it would take “To Secure these Rights” — lest they lose southern votes to splitter Dixiecrats.

Then, in the 1960s, under Kennedy and Johnson, the Democratic Party began to repudiate this past, ultimately passing Civil Rights legislation. The splitter segregationist candidate George Wallace sundered the southern Democratic Party and ultimately delivered the white South to the Republican Party. Where it remains, because Republicans have taken over care and feeding of the Confederate heritage.

I only mention this because, for some reason, Bruce Bartlett appears to think this history should make you prefer the modern Republican Party to the modern Democratic Party. I do not understand this reasoning. Let’s concede this story puts the Democratic Party in something of the position of a man who actually has to give a precise answer to the question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” Perhaps you would not trust such a man around women. But would you trust him more or less than a man who has decided to start?

Possibly Bartlett is writing for the crazy, or the ignorant. He must be, if he thinks he can describe the modern association between Republicans and neo-Confederates as embracing “a single mention of states’ rights 27 years ago.”

The inexplicably more charitable Brad DeLong writes on the same subject here.

Alisa Rubin and Damien Cave: In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict

In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict - New York Times: BAGHDAD — The thin teenage boy rushed up to the patrol of American soldiers walking through Dora, a shrapnel-scarred neighborhood of the capital, and lifted his shirt to show them a mass of red welts across his back.

He said he was a member of a local Sunni “Awakening” group, paid by the American military to patrol the district, but he said it was another Awakening group that beat him. “They took me while I was working,” he said, “and broke my badge and said, ‘You are from Al Qaeda.’”

The soldiers were unsure of what to do. The Awakening groups in just their area of southern Baghdad could not seem to get along: they fought over turf and, it turned out in this case, one group had warned the other that its members should not pay rent to Shiite “dogs.”

The Awakening movement, a predominantly Sunni Arab force recruited to fight Sunni Islamic extremists like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, has become a great success story after its spread from Sunni tribes in Anbar Province to become an ad-hoc armed force of 65,000 to 80,000 across the country in less than a year. A linchpin of the American strategy to pacify Iraq, the movement has been widely credited with turning around the violence-scarred areas where the Sunni insurgency has been based.

But the beating that day was a stark example of how rivalries and sectarianism are still undermining the Americans’ plans. And in particular, the Awakening’s rapid expansion — the Americans say the force could reach 100,000 — is creating new concerns.

How, when thousands are joining each month, can spies and extremists be reliably weeded out? How can the men’s loyalty be maintained, given their tribal and sectarian ties, and in many cases their insurgent pasts? And crucially, how can the movement be sustained once the Americans turn over control to a Shiite-dominated government that has been wary, and sometimes hostile, toward the groups?

Despite the successes of the movement, including the members’ ability to provide valuable intelligence and give rebuilding efforts a new chance in war-shattered communities, the American military acknowledges that it is also a high-risk proposition. It is an experiment in counterinsurgency warfare that could contain the seeds of a civil war — in which, if the worst fears come true, the United States would have helped organize some of the Sunni forces arrayed against the central government on which so many American lives and dollars have been spent.

In interviews with Awakening groups in 10 locations — four interviewed during a week in Anbar, and six groups in and around Baghdad interviewed over several days — it was evident that the groups were improving security in their areas. But it is also clear that there is little loyalty, in either direction, between the Sunni groups and the Shiites who run the government.

The Americans are haunted by the possibility that Iraq could go the way of Afghanistan, where Americans initially bought the loyalty of tribal leaders only to have some of them gravitate back to the Taliban when the money stopped.

Col. Martin Stanton, chief of reconciliation and engagement for the Multinational Corps-Iraq, said the military had no illusions about the Awakening members’ former lives or the reasons for what appeared to be their change of heart.

“These weren’t people who were struck by a lightning bolt or saw a burning bush and came over to this side of the Lord,” Colonel Stanton said. “These were people who last year were being hammered from two different directions: by Al Qaeda and by us. It was probably a distasteful choice to make back then because, after all, they viewed us as invaders, and they probably still do, but it was a survival choice and they made it.”

Though the Americans obtain biometric data on every Awakening group member to try to screen out known insurgents, the government and many Shiite citizens say they fear that the movement has spread so quickly that it is impossible to keep track of who has signed up for it. And while government officials are somewhat willing to accept the tribal character of the Awakening groups in Anbar Province, they are leery of the new ones in and around Baghdad, which have more Baathists from the era of Saddam Hussein in their leadership and are active in more mixed neighborhoods.

“Many people believe this will end with tens of thousands of armed people, primarily Sunnis, and this will excite the Shiite militias to grow and in the end it will grow into a civil war,” said Safa Hussein, the deputy national security adviser and a point man on the Awakening program for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Still, the government has made only the most halting steps toward rapprochement with the Awakening groups, even those who have been fighting insurgents for months in their neighborhoods.

And for the Americans who helped create and nurture the movement, the initial excitement has been tempered by the challenge of managing a huge, and growing, force where many of the men have shadowy pasts.

“It’s the case with any franchise organization,” said Maj. Gen. John R. Allen, the deputy commander in Anbar Province. “Sooner or later you lose control over the standards.”

Anbar Province

In the summer of 2005, the Abu Mahals needed help. A tribe of notorious smugglers by the Syrian border, they were being pushed out of their own area by a competing tribe that had struck a deal with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown extremist group that American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners.

Some of the tribe’s men had been insurgents, killers of American marines, but the border was an out-of-control no man’s land. So when the tribe proposed an alliance, the Americans decided to give it a try. Weapons and training flowed to the tribe, the extremists were pushed back on their heels — and the Awakening was born.

Nearly two years later, after several important tribes around Ramadi joined, the Awakening movement in Anbar has grown to adolescence, acting at once capable and delinquent.

New offices are opening all over the province, marking their presence with yellow satin flags, armed guards and sheiks aiming to start a national political party.

Legitimacy has come with formal employment. Sheiks who signed up early on gave the Americans names of people they wanted hired as police officers, and the provincial force now numbers 24,000, up from 5,200 in June 2006. That is still short of the Marines’ demand for 30,000, but the government has also agreed to a jobs program for 6,000 civil servants.

Attacks in the province, meanwhile, are at roughly a tenth of what they were last year, according to military figures. And in cities like Ramadi that were once largely beyond American control, construction clatter and the slosh of wet concrete has replaced the snap of gunfire.

But as the movement has spread east through Anbar, two responses have emerged: an intense pride in the hard-fought peace, and a sometimes violent scramble for rewards, credit and power.

The fall brought a major setback. In September, a suicide bomber killed Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, also known as Abu Risha, the Awakening’s charismatic leader, only days after he had met with President Bush. And while his brother Ahmed has stepped forward, American commanders say he has yet to unify the groups under a nationalist banner.

With Abu Risha gone, “it’s not quite as clear it’s a patriotic movement,” General Allen said.

The Americans, meanwhile, are handing out hundreds of million of dollars in aid and reconstruction funds — $223 million to Ramadi and its surrounding areas alone since February. As a result, a dizzying number of sheiks have stepped forward in recent months claiming to be important leaders who fought Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and now deserve money, water plants, new schools and hundreds of jobs for their relatives.

Just to keep track, many American company commanders now travel with thick packets of pictures identifying what one marine described as Anbar’s competing teams: “fake sheiks, little sheiks and big sheiks.”

The Americans, having embraced tribalism to pacify the area, are now having to deal with its consequences. The tribes of Anbar are ancient and secular — many predate Islam — but old rivalries and suspicions have not been erased by steady salaries.

In Ramadi, the provincial capital, the American military set up the police stations to be run and staffed by members of the neighborhoods’ dominant tribe. Though unified against Islamic insurgents, two of the police stations were involved in a shootout with each other a few weeks ago. And loyalty to sheiks sometimes trumps loyalty to the law, allowing tribal leaders to commandeer members of the police or army to give them personal protection.

On one recent afternoon, Second Lt. Stephen Lind, a member of a Marine company patrolling south Ramadi, discovered a handful of armed Iraqi soldiers standing guard outside a sheik’s spacious home — defying a rule that bans the Iraqi Army from the city.

“What are you doing here?” Lieutenant Lind asked one of the men.

They had arrived a day after the sheik had an argument with the local police commander.

“The sheik told us to come,” the man said. As he spoke, a pickup truck filled with a half-dozen others drove out of the compound, and a glance inside showed several more, milling about, their red berets and weapons clearly visible.

Neither the Iraqis nor Lieutenant Lind expressed surprise. “He has a lot of power,” Lieutenant Lind said, walking back to a joint security station a few blocks away. “That’s how the city rolls right now.”

American commanders later sought to play down the significance of the sheik’s use of the army, noting that he was an assassination target, and that the troops stayed for only about 36 hours. Col. John Charlton, commander of the First Brigade Combat Team, Third Infantry Division, which oversees Ramadi and its surrounding area, also said there were plans to start moving policemen to new stations to dilute the tribal concentrations — a proposal that some local sheiks said they would be likely to resist.

The standoff, though, underscored the Awakening’s long-term challenge. The American military has empowered a group of unelected leaders and is now involved in the difficult task of integrating them into a democratic system new to them, to create bonds with a Shiite-led government they do not respect or acknowledge as legitimate.

The Marines have already begun to draw down troop numbers in the province. But with the clock ticking, it remains unclear what the Awakening will become and whether the tribes will stick together or segregate. Nor is it clear whether Iraq’s government will ever meet the tribes’ demands, which range from the simple (more electricity, water and jobs) to the extreme (a wildly disproportionate share of the seats in the Parliament).

In interviews with more than a dozen sheiks in the province, along with police officers, local leaders and imams, not one expressed any trust in the government of Prime Minister Maliki. “They are working only for the Shiites,” said Mahmoud Abed Shabeeb, who acknowledged that 130 members of his tribe were policemen, paid by the Shiite-led Interior Ministry in Baghdad. “Everyone knows that.”

Baghdad

Only a few months ago, the Sunni neighborhood of Fadhil was virtually a no man’s land, shelled relentlessly by Shiite militias, its walls gouged with shrapnel and its streets pooled with sewage because city workers were afraid to enter. Now the neighborhood seems to be waking after a long sleep. Several teahouses reopened in December after being shuttered for months, and old men sat outside on wooden boxes, apparently no longer afraid of neighborhood militants or attacks by outsiders.

The newfound confidence is attributable in large measure to the Fadhil Awakening Council, formed just four weeks ago. Wearing red-checked kaffiyehs and black leather jackets with guns jutting out underneath, the Awakening guards patrol the neighborhood with a casually menacing air.

They are led by Adel Mashadani, a burly former member of Saddam Hussein’s Special Republican Guard, unabashed about his former insurgent ties. He boasts that he turned the “National Iraqi Resistance Council of Iraq into the Fadhil Awakening Council.”

While Mr. Mashadani is ready to look past his former enmity to work with the Americans, he draws the line at any partnership with the central government. He characterizes Shiite officials as pawns of Iran and Shiite death squads, a common view among Sunni Arabs in both Baghdad and Anbar.

“We want to work for the Americans, not the government,” he said. “It is as clear as the sun: the Iranians have dominated the ministries, the whole government. These guys are a bunch of conspirators who belong to Iran.”

That mistrust is pervasive, and it clouds the future of the nascent Awakening movement in Baghdad and its surrounding province. It has grown like wildfire since June, with 43,000 guards in at least 17 neighborhoods as of Dec. 10, according to the American military. And interviews in four areas of Baghdad suggest that there is more deeply held antipathy there between the government and the Awakening groups than in Anbar.

The Baghdad groups are less bound by tribal affiliation than the Anbar groups, relying instead on neighborhood pride and trust born of shared disdain for the Iraqi government. Many of the Baghdad members were Baathists and served in the security forces under the Hussein government.

In turn, the Iraqi government worries that Shiites living in mixed neighborhoods could become victims if Awakening group members were to return to violence.

“Some have agendas beyond their neighborhoods and they try to use their positions in the Awakening to promote other agendas,” said Mr. Hussein, the deputy national security adviser.

American commanders say they believe they have been able to weed out most of those who were operatives for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and they discount the Iraqi government’s worries about a conspiracy among Awakening groups.

“They look at the aggregate number here, 65,000, and they say, ‘Oh, that’s the size of an army corps, that’s 65,000 armed Sunnis just ready to leap on us,’” Colonel Stanton said. But, he added, they do not all work together that closely.

Neighborhoods with hard-liners, like Fadhil, leave the Iraqi government with questions, though, not least of all because the leaders there freely say that they meet with other Awakening leaders to share ideas. Some leaders in Anbar also say they are actively encouraging growth across the capital.

In southern Baghdad, where the Awakening started several months earlier, American troops are pouring money and resources into neglected, battle-scarred Sunni neighborhoods like Dora.

The First Squadron of the Fourth Cavalry has been based in Dora since May, establishing Awakening groups — which are often called sahwas, after the Arabic word for awakening — and embarking on a frenzy of rebuilding. The squadron has spent $4.3 million during that time, much of it on electricity projects and trash removal, and it plans to spend $2.1 million more.

Lt. Col. James Crider, the squadron’s commander, helped organize the Awakening groups in eastern Dora, now employing 300 guards, the vast majority Sunnis. The Americans manage them closely, breaking them into three groups that monitor the area’s three subdivisions. The soldiers also run patrols 24 hours a day, to head off violence, oversee the rebuilding and monitor the Awakening groups.

It is clear that, for now at least, the American military has won the groups’ allegiance. American troop deaths in Baghdad Province have plummeted to 14 this November, from 59 last December, and have been occurring at an even lower rate this month.

In Dora, the squadron was last attacked on Sept. 9, when a soldier was killed by a grenade. (In the four and a half months before that, the squadron lost eight men.) The last killing of an Iraqi in the neighborhood was on Oct. 18.

A contractor hired by the American military is rebuilding sewage pipes on one of Dora’s main shopping streets, and young women roll strollers into a newly refurbished health clinic.

But it is far from clear whether that peace will last when the Americans begin transferring authority to the Iraqis. Clashes have already broken out in some places between the groups and Iraqi security forces, with two policemen killed last week near the northern city of Baiji.

Saleh Kashgul Saleh, a former colonel in Mr. Hussein’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence service and one of the leaders of the Awakening in Dora, suggested that some of the men in the movement would return to the insurgency if the government did not accept them into the security forces.

“We have a lot of unemployment, and anyone, if he doesn’t have a job, takes even a job where he does bad things to provide for his family,” Mr. Saleh said. “They need to hurry about this.”

The government also needs to demonstrate some interest in improving basic living conditions in Sunni-dominated areas, otherwise people will lose faith that the government cares about them, he said.

“We ask the government for help, for electricity, for any services, but they do not even meet with us,” he said. “The only government that has cleaned anything in our area is Captain Cook, he is our government.” He was referring to Capt. Nicholas Cook, the commander of the American cavalry troop that patrols his subdivision of Dora.

Colonel Crider said he had even had trouble getting Iraqi government officials to visit Dora to assess its needs.

Shiites, however, see the Awakening groups as wolves in sheep’s clothing. “It’s my personal belief that before they were ‘the Awakening’ they were Al Qaeda,” said Moad Muaed Qassim Mohammed, a young police captain for the national police unit that patrols Dora. The national police has been widely criticized for cruelty to Sunnis.

“I have pictures of some of them. They were wanted men,” he said. “I deal with Colonel Crider. I trust him and I don’t trust anyone else. I don’t think the Awakening men should join the Iraqi police. It would be no better than putting Al Qaeda informants into the police.”

Looking Ahead

The Iraqi government and the American military appear to be on different timetables. While government officials have agreed in principle to add thousands to the security forces, their opposition to the movement has recently grown more vocal. On Saturday, Iraq’s Defense and Interior Ministries held a joint news conference at which they declared that Iraq would not tolerate the groups’ becoming a “third force” alongside the army and the police.

Despite the government’s promises, hardly any Awakening members outside Anbar have actually been moved off the American payroll and into Iraqi government jobs.

Of the 43,000 new Awakening members in Baghdad Province, for example, only about 1,700, in the suburban community of Abu Ghraib, have gotten jobs in the Iraqi police.

Many of the rest have applied for police jobs but for now are financed entirely by the Americans. The Awakening members are paid about $300 a month — considerably less than the salaries of police officers or soldiers.

Meanwhile, the American military is planning to begin withdrawing units this summer.

“Once we get past the summer, we’re not going to have enough people on the ground to administer the contracts,” Colonel Stanton said. “So between the time we draw down and now, we have to find something else for these guys to do.”

That, he said, is where Iraq’s government must step in.

The military proposes that the government hire 20,000 to 25,000 to serve as police officers in their own neighborhoods. To help the rest of the Awakening members, the American military is considering creating a program modeled on the 1930s civilian job corps that employed people during the Depression, said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq. The members would help deliver basic services or make repairs locally.

But there are kinks to be worked out. “We don’t want to create a parallel government,” General Odierno said.

And at the same time, the long-term prospects for the corps is in doubt, because most Iraqi ministries are already overstaffed. The Awakening is still growing, especially in northern areas of the country, where Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is regrouping. Colonel Stanton said the military aimed to keep the total number of Awakening members below 100,000, at the request of the Iraqi government.

Government officials said they planned to hire some Awakening members in the security forces. But, the officials added, they are worried that there are so many people seeking police jobs that the government will be unable to hire them all.

“We would have tens of thousands of people hired to do some security jobs,” said Mr. Hussein, the deputy national security adviser, referring to the men the Americans have hired. “And we do not have enough space in the security ministries to absorb them.”

“And after being paid for a period, it will create a security problem if we fire them all at once,” he added.

Hanging over everything is the government’s deep unease over the background of many Awakening members. Mr. Hussein said that the government believed that almost half of the 65,000 who were already on the American payroll were involved in the insurgency in some way. And he said that intelligence sources had reported contact between the leadership of some of the Awakening groups and the former Baathist insurgency outside the country.

“Will they go back to being insurgents?” he said. “Will they be dangerous? We don’t know yet.”

Stephen Farrell contributed reporting from Baghdad, Saab al-Bor and Iskandariya.

Ari: Ron Paul: Very Gradual Emancipationist

Ron Paul: Very Gradual Emancipationist « The Edge of the American West: December 23, 2007 in Uncategorized by ari

I don’t want to pick a fight with Ron Paul’s spambots supporters, which who seem to be among the most annoying passionate on the web. But I will say this: their guy is more than a little nuts. Seriously, on Meet the Press earlier today he suggested that Lincoln was wrong to go to war in 1861....

There are so many things wrong with this line of argument that I don’t even know where to start. Oh wait, yes I do. Let’s begin with: Lincoln didn’t go to war to “get rid of the original intent of the republic.” You have to know even less about history than Tim Russert — I wouldn’t have thought it possible — to say such a ridiculous thing. Or you have to be a bit too willing, eager even, to marry libertarian political ideology with neo-Confederate historical revisionism. Just to be clear: Lincoln went to war to preserve the Union. That’s it. End of story. Full stop.

Also: Lincoln didn’t start the Civil War. To clarify his position throughout the 1860 campaign and well into 1861, long after he was elected president without his name having appeared on a single Southern ballot, Lincoln said that slavery shoudn’t be allowed to expand into the West — a position that was part of the Republican Party (Paul’s party) platform.

Because of his incredibly bold lukewarm stance — again, not for emancipation and certainly not for immediate abolition but only against the further expansion of slavery — South Carolina seceded after the 1860 election results became clear. The rest of the Confederate States followed. This was still prior to Lincoln’s inauguration, mind you, and the president-elect needed to try to persuade the Border States to reject rebellion. So he kept promising, as he had throughout the electoral season, not to prune back the peculiar institution where it already had taken root, but only to insure that it would spread no further.

Which compromised position, by the way, wasn’t good enough for many loyal Republicans (the Ron Pauls of their era, I suppose), who asked that Lincoln forestall war by allowing slavery unfettered access to Western soil. Lincoln, to his credit, replied that such a move would have rendered the Republican Party and his administration a “mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.”

And then, to reitterate, South Carolina seceded. Still, the war didn’t actually start until Confederate artillery began bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861. Then and only then did Lincoln call for troops.

So, because Tim Russert is such an ignorant gassbag, here are my questions for Paul: given that Lincoln didn’t start the war, what should he have done? Allowed the Union to blow apart to avoid bloodshed? And for how much longer, Dr. Paul, you exquisite champion of freedom, would it have been okay to enslave African-Americans in the United States? Another generation? Two? More than that?

And what of denying African-Americans the rights guaranteed in the Constitution, which document, I’ve heard, you admire? (What do I mean, gentle reader? Well, it seems that Paul’s also no fan of the Civil Rights Act.)...

For anyone considering voting for Ron Paul, please think again. I know that you’re fed up with the war. So am I. I know that you distrust politicians. So do I. I know that you crave change. Me too. But Ron Paul is either a lunatic, a stone-cold racist (seemingly an in-the-hip-pocket-of-the-Slaveocracy racist, which, to be fair, isn’t very different from some other prominent Republicans — see Trent Lott and his recent defenders) or both. And, by the way, what happened to supporting the troops? Calling the Civil War “senseless”; what will that do to morale?

Update: Matthew Yglesias, as usual, beat me to punch. I’d say that I’m getting tired of this. But I’d better get used to it. I’m old and slow. He’s young and nimble.

Dana Goldstein on Ron Paul

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: RON PAUL ROUND 2: THE DEFINITIVE (I HOPE) TAKEDOWN.

Dear Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald,

I don't have a problem when people with whom I sometimes agree laud Ron Paul's original opposition to the Iraq War (a position he shares with Barack Obama, of course) or his long-running stance against American imperialism (Dennis Kucinich, too, has been there, done that). What does disturb me, though, is the rather uncritical idolatry of Paul that has flowered, even among self-described moderates and liberals. Andrew, your "endorsement" of Paul lends credibility to his entire agenda, not just those parts of it you highlighted in your post. And Glenn, I am not a pro-choice essentialist who believes no other issue, including the disastrous war in Iraq, should inform one's choice of a candidate. Rather, I situate Ron Paul's anti-choice extremism -- he believes a fetus has all the rights of an individual from the moment of conception -- within his illiberal, race-baiting, anti-gay, and corporatist history. I will document this characterization, but first, bear with me while I share a personal anecdote.

Earlier this fall, after I published an article on white male voters' decreasing significance within the Democratic electorate, I was hit with several weeks' worth of anti-Semitic email and comment-thread attacks from American white supremacist groups, who posted my photograph and contact information on several neo-Nazi websites, including Stormfront. The content of those attacks is far too disgusting to post here, but suffice to say, they featured the very crudest sort of racism and sexism, as well as physical threats against me. About a dozen of the hundred odd emails I received referenced support for Ron Paul, which at the time, I brushed off as a curiosity, a case of the white supremacists wrongly seeing an ally in Paul because of his wacky ideas about monetary policy and the threat of a North American Union. I still believe Paul's ideology departs significantly from that of his white supremacist supporters. But I no longer believe his record on race can be ignored.

Though Paul has long railed against the supposed "victim mentality" of American women and people of color, he's guilty himself of rank fear-mongering among white Americans, convincing them that they are the true "victims" of "the blacks." Check out Paul's analysis of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, from an old newsletter mailed out to his supporters. Paul has since claimed that a staffer wrote this report, but it's safe to assume the newsletters accurately reflect his own views at the time. "We now know that we are under assault from thugs and revolutionaries who hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for: private property, material success for those who earn it, and Christian morality," he writes. In the same 1992 newsletter, Paul outlined his ideas for a separate justice system for African American children:

We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.

And Paul isn't a changed man. This past October, he gave a speech to the Taft Club in Virginia, a group with close ties to the white nationalist movement. But wait, there's much more -- more history that shouldn't be ignored by any person concerned with the individual liberty of women or gay people.

In his 1988 book Freedom Under Seige (you can read the whole thing online), Paul railed against sexual harassment victims. He wrote, "Why don't they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser cannot be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem? Seeking protection under civil rights legislation is hardily acceptable." What if a victim needs to keep working because he or she feeds their children and pays their rent paycheck to paycheck? What if quitting just isn't a viable option? For Paul, the rights of the employer not to be sued simply trump the rights of the individual. Corporations are people, too!

And Paul was no less compassionate when it came to HIV/AIDS patients. He wrote in his book that insurance companies should be free to deny care to HIV-positive individuals since, "The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim -- frequently a victim of his own lifestyle -- but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care."

Andrew and Glenn, I hope you'll respond to this post. We can't let Paul's history on these important civil rights issues be papered over by his opposition to the Iraq war -- opposition that other presidential candidates offer as well.

Sincerely,

--Dana Goldstein

Nicholas Antongiavanni: Curtains for the Necktie?

Curtains for the Necktie? - WSJ.com: "[N]either shall there come upon thee a garment of two kinds of stuff mingled together." --Leviticus 19:19

Thus was born, somewhere in the Sinai desert over 3,000 years ago, the sumptuary law. Ironically, politics and clothing have mingled ever since.

Generally speaking, American politicians are the dullest dressers on the planet. But, three or four times a century, our presidential contests have a direct effect on the sartorial life of the nation. The last such occasion was when the rakish Ronald Reagan replaced the cloddish Jimmy Carter and helped usher in a new era of formality.

Another revolution is now upon us -- though of a decidedly different character. Barack Obama -- unquestionably the hippest candidate for the presidency since John F. Kennedy -- may do to the tie what Kennedy helped do to the hat. It's a myth that JFK killed the hat simply by not wearing one to his inauguration -- actually, that was the one instance when he did wear one. But by ostentatiously eschewing a hat everywhere else, at a time when the hat's place in the male wardrobe needed all the high-level support it could get, a very public "nay" vote from that suave, young, handsome patrician helped tip the balance against it.

Today, the tie is in similarly dire straits. Sales are way down. Its status as the sartorial signifier par excellence of business, seriousness and ceremony is in jeopardy. California abandoned it at about the same time, and for many of the same reasons, that the Golden State jettisoned Reaganism. The effete East held out longer, but when Wall Street and the law firms went "business casual" during the last boom, the necktie went on life-support.

There it lingers, kept breathing largely by the unwavering, if unthinking, allegiance of high-ranking politicians. But that too may soon pass away.

It's one thing for a politician, in the thick of a campaign, to rally the faithful in all his shirtsleeved, open-necked, down-home glory. "I'm one of you" the look is supposed to say -- accurately or not. But there are, or used to be, occasions when the people don't want their leaders to look like one of them -- at least not what they look like when they are out washing the car.

Mr. Obama breaks tradition on both counts. He skips the tie at major indoor events, not just outdoor rallies and Rock the Vote concerts sponsored by MTV. He goes tieless not merely in his shirtsleeves, or even with a blazer. He carries the open-necked look into a realm it was never meant to go: with the two-piece, dark business suit.

This heresy earns the young senator praise from today's keepers of the style tablets. The Washington Post's Robin Givhan -- the acid-penned Madame Blackwell of the Beltway -- could hardly contain herself. "[Obama's] tieless suit," she gushed, "[is] a cross between the style of a 1950s home-from-the-office dad and a 1990s GQ man about town. It is warmly, safely, nostalgically . . . cool."

Others have noticed something else. Take the impeccably liberal Jeff Greenfield. "Ask yourself," he challenged his CNN audience, "is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of GQ to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable."

We can thank Mr. Greenfield for being reckless enough to say what many were thinking. But he mistakes Mr. Ahmadinejad's source. Mr. Obama may have gotten the idea from GQ, but the Iranian President got it from the Ayatollah Khomeini.

One of the lesser-known outcomes of the 1979 Iranian revolution was the stigmatization of the tie as a tool of Western Imperialism. The Ayatollah even denounced some of his perceived enemies as "tie-wearing cronies of the West." Today in much of the Islamist world, the tie is seen as not merely pro-Western but anti-Islamic, even though no prohibition of the garment can be found in Islamic law. There is a stricture against men wearing silk, but Muslim dandies can get around that by wearing cashmere or linen ties -- and many do.

It's hard to think of anything less hip -- or less intended to be hip -- than Islamist dogma on personal grooming. Yet despite traveling radically different routes along the way, Messrs. Obama and Ahmadinejad somehow manage to wind up in the same sartorial spot. Sort of like the way Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich share virtually identical foreign policies.

We should hope that the tie survives. It is too noble a garment to let go for light and transient, or dark and sinister, causes. The good news is that Mr. Obama's foray into tielessness does not stem from deeply held ideology. When it really counts, he does the right thing. No doubt, should he make it to the end, his neck will be covered on inauguration day. Just like JFK's head.

Nicholas Antongiavanni is the pen name of Michael Anton. He is author of The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men's Style (Collins, 2006).

Sir Charles: Hillary Rodham Clinton as the New, New Nixon?

Cogitamus: The new, new Nixon?: I think Bob Kerrey's record as a self-admitted war criminal would makes him an excellent candidate for Secretary of Defense in a Hillary Clinton cabinet.  After all, he should get some reward for his generous praise for Barack Obama.

As one of the commenters at Yglesias's site noted, it's nice to see that a women's touch in the campaign means the reemergence of the wonderful Nixonian concept of "ratfucking."   

The Clinton people are making a huge mistake with this tactic.  It's quickly heading into unforgivable territory and she's going to find herself on the wrong side of the electorate in the first three primaries.  And then, she's history (and not in the sense she'd like to be).

Kevin Drum: "They Will Get Overrun"

The Washington Monthly: "THEY WILL GET OVERRUN"....A couple of weeks ago I linked to a story about the initial troop drawdowns in Iraq and expressed surprised that they were taking place in Baghdad rather than in outlying provinces. Today, the LA Times reports that the military has had second thoughts about this too:

In a change of plans, American commanders in Iraq have decided to keep their forces concentrated in Baghdad when the buildup strategy ends next year, removing troops instead from outlying areas of the country.

....The shift in deployment strategy, described by senior U.S. military officials in Iraq and Washington, is based on concerns that despite recent improvements, the capital could again erupt into widespread violence without an imposing American military presence.

That's not especially good news. But if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is. We stay in Baghdad.

Later in the article, though, the local U.S. commanders provide a rationale for leaving the provinces that's surprising in its honesty:

The day-to-day commander in Iraq, Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, and his staff believe that the increasing competence of provincial security and political leaders will put pressure on the government in Baghdad that "will breed a better central government," said his chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson.

...."The grass-roots level will force change at the top because if they do not act on it, they will get overrun," said another senior military officer responsible for Iraq war planning.

In other words, our "bottoms up" strategy — which, you'll recall, was adopted out of necessity as a response to the Anbar Awakening — is creating competing power centers in the provinces that are becoming ever better equipped to successfully challenge the central government. And that's deliberate. Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen fessed up about this months ago in a little-noticed piece on the Small Wars Journal blog, and apparently U.S. commanders are now talking about it more openly too. The message to prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is: get your act together or else the Sunni sheikhs in Anbar and Diyala are going to get it together for you.

Kilcullen called the revitalized Sunni tribes "competing armed interest groups," and expressed the hope that their existence would create a stable "intra-communal balance of power." That was a pretty strained piece of spin from the start, and now even that thin curtain is being stripped away. Today, we're all but admitting that the more likely result of "competing armed interest groups" is civil war, and if the Maliki administration doesn't get this, "they will get overrun."

In fact, I imagine the Maliki government and its allies get this perfectly well — and they're undoubtedly preparing for it. Unfortunately, that preparation probably doesn't include making concessions to their Sunni adversaries. More likely, it means making sure they're the ones who get overrun.

Kevin Drum: Who Knew?

The Washington Monthly: WHO KNEW?....Over at Newsweek, the saga of the destroyed CIA interrogation video continues. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report that intelligence director John Negroponte provided direction about the tapes to CIA director Porter Goss in a 2005 memo...

...which records that Negroponte strongly advised against destroying the tapes, according to two people close to the investigation, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter. The memo is so far the only known documentation that a senior intel official warned that the tapes should not be destroyed.

Later in the piece, they report that Goss was "dismayed" to learn that the tapes had been destroyed, thus perpetuating the story that Jose Rodriguez Jr., then chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, destroyed them entirely on his own despite contrary advice from virtually every other person involved in this. And maybe that's true. But Rodriguez is sure looking more and more like a classic fall guy every day, isn't he?

Malcolm Gladwell: What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race

Books: None of the Above: Books: The New Yorker: One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better.

Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter.

Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.

or almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there have been I.Q. fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the early years of the past century, established the idea that intelligence could be measured along a single, linear scale. One of his particular contributions was to coin the word “moron.” “The people who are doing the drudgery are, as a rule, in their proper places,” he wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in the nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California children with the highest I.Q.s, and confidently predicted that they would sit at the top of every profession. In 1969, the psychometrician Arthur Jensen argued that programs like Head Start, which tried to boost the academic performance of minority children, were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily genetic; and in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation, “while the rest of America tries to go about its business.” To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.

This is what James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, meant when he told an English newspaper recently that he was “inherently gloomy” about the prospects for Africa. From the perspective of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the fact that Africans score lower than Europeans on I.Q. tests suggests an ineradicable cognitive disability. In the controversy that followed, Watson was defended by the journalist William Saletan, in a three-part series for the online magazine Slate. Drawing heavily on the work of J. Philippe Rushton—a psychologist who specializes in comparing the circumference of what he calls the Negroid brain with the length of the Negroid penis—Saletan took the fundamentalist position to its logical conclusion. To erase the difference between blacks and whites, Saletan wrote, would probably require vigorous interbreeding between the races, or some kind of corrective genetic engineering aimed at upgrading African stock. “Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern,” Saletan declared, claiming to have been “soaking [his] head in each side’s computations and arguments.” One argument that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was Flynn’s, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets the certainties upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is that I.Q. tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it can’t be all that immutable and it doesn’t look all that innate.

The very fact that average I.Q.s shift over time ought to create a “crisis of confidence,” Flynn writes in “What Is Intelligence?” (Cambridge; $22), his latest attempt to puzzle through the implications of his discovery. “How could such huge gains be intelligence gains? Either the children of today were far brighter than their parents or, at least in some circumstances, I.Q. tests were not good measures of intelligence.”

The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do basic arithmetic—have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as “similarities,” where you get questions such as “In what way are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike?” Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that “you use dogs to hunt rabbits.”

“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are. This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?

When I was growing up, my family would sometimes play Twenty Questions on long car trips. My father was one of those people who insist that the standard categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral be supplemented with a fourth category: “abstract.” Abstract could mean something like “whatever it was that was going through my mind when we drove past the water tower fifty miles back.” That abstract category sounds absurdly difficult, but it wasn’t: it merely required that we ask a slightly different set of questions and grasp a slightly different set of conventions, and, after two or three rounds of practice, guessing the contents of someone’s mind fifty miles ago becomes as easy as guessing Winston Churchill. (There is one exception. That was the trip on which my old roommate Tom Connell chose, as an abstraction, “the Unknown Soldier”—which allowed him legitimately and gleefully to answer “I have no idea” to almost every question. There were four of us playing. We gave up after an hour.) Flynn would say that my father was teaching his three sons how to put on scientific spectacles, and that extra practice probably bumped up all of our I.Q.s a few notches. But let’s be clear about what this means. There’s a world of difference between an I.Q. advantage that’s genetic and one that depends on extended car time with Graham Gladwell.

Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many others in the I.Q. debates, he resists grand philosophizing. He comes back again and again to the fact that I.Q. scores are generated by paper-and-pencil tests—and making sense of those scores, he tells us, is a messy and complicated business that requires something closer to the skills of an accountant than to those of a philosopher.

For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize that I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and a specific test. When an I.Q. test is created, he reminds us, it is calibrated or “normed” so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile—those exactly at the median—are assigned a score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always rising, the only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to make the tests more difficult—to “renorm” them. The original WISC was normed in the late nineteen-forties. It was then renormed in the early nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third time in the late eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed again a few years ago, as the WISC IV—with each version just a little harder than its predecessor. The notion that anyone “has” an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless unless you know which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there’s a substantial difference between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and getting a 130 on the much easier WISC.

This is not a trivial issue. I.Q. tests are used to diagnose people as mentally retarded, with a score of 70 generally taken to be the cutoff. You can imagine how the Flynn effect plays havoc with that system. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, most states used the WISC-R to make their mental-retardation diagnoses. But since kids—even kids with disabilities—score a little higher every year, the number of children whose scores fell below 70 declined steadily through the end of the eighties. Then, in 1991, the WISC III was introduced, and suddenly the percentage of kids labelled retarded went up. The psychologists Tomoe Kanaya, Matthew Scullin, and Stephen Ceci estimated that, if every state had switched to the WISC III right away, the number of Americans labelled mentally retarded should have doubled.

That is an extraordinary number. The diagnosis of mental disability is one of the most stigmatizing of all educational and occupational classifications—and yet, apparently, the chances of being burdened with that label are in no small degree a function of the point, in the life cycle of the WISC, at which a child happens to sit for his evaluation. “As far as I can determine, no clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became more lenient over time,” Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. “Yet no one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental retardation.”

Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q., a possibility that has led to great excitement among I.Q. fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of European descent, for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom.

Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn’s accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn’s data, and realized that the comparison was skewed. Lynn was comparing American I.Q. estimates based on a representative sample of schoolchildren with Japanese estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106.6 but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese-American estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco’s Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test. But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.

The Asian-American success story had suddenly been turned on its head. The numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher I.Q.s. but despite their lower I.Q.s. Asians were overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis, Flynn then worked out just how great that overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans, that threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97.

There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else’s—coming in somewhere around 103. Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational scale, and taken note of how much the professions value abstract thinking, Asian-American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific spectacles. “Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high I.Q. rather than the reverse,” Flynn concludes, reminding us that in our discussions of the relationship between I.Q. and success we often confuse causes and effects. “It is not easy to view the history of their achievements without emotion,” he writes. That is exactly right. To ascribe Asian success to some abstract number is to trivialize it....

The black-white gap, [Flynn] pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.

That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children—and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that “kids who want to be above average don’t have to aim as high.” There were possibly adverse differences between black teen-age culture and white teen-age culture, and an enormous number of young black men are in jail—which is hardly the kind of environment in which someone would learn to put on scientific spectacles.

Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.” The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.

Mark Schmitt: The Spectre of Gingrichism

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: I wasn't wholly serious earlier with my plea to Newt Gingrich to enter the GOP race (and by my obsession with the Definer, I date myself), but watching the Des Moines debate, I was struck by how much the characteristic gesture of Gingrichism has taken hold in most the field. I would describe that gesture as a marriage of minimalist government, minimal or no taxes, with grand, grand gestures of public ambition and spending -- without even a moment's self-awareness of the contradiction. Thus, Gingrich could call for abolition of the Department of Education and in the next paragraph call for a federal initiative to give every schoolchild a laptop computer! (Back in 1995, when that was a big deal.)

Thus the candidates insist that no taxes will ever rise and there will be more large cuts, some would abolish the IRS; they promise that the deficit must be reduced, that programs of some sort can be cut, and then they turn around and make grand calls for Public Investment!! in climate-change technology, in education, and in defense. We'll all be winners!

That's music to my ears (except for defense), but it has no relationship to the rest of the Republican agenda. And while it might seem like the standard Republican hypocrisy, it's really not the language of Bush in 2000 or 2004, who neither proposed abolishing the IRS nor big public investments. "Compassionate Conservatism" promised moderation in both directions. Which was a lie, but a different lie from the one these guys are telling.

--Mark Schmitt

Kieran Healy: The Troubles: Kinds of Quagmires

Kieran Healy’s Weblog » Blog Archive » Kinds of Quagmires: In some quarters, using the word “quagmire” to describe the emerging position of the U.S. in Iraq provokes yells of rage, snarklets of glibness, or even reasoned objections. It’s fair to say that optimists like the OxBloggers have convincingly rebutted the main comparisons that have been made to Vietnam. The United States isn’t going to be losing about a hundred troops a week in an ongoing war of attrition against a dug-in enemy with strong local support. But there are other ways to get stuck in the mud.

John McCain’s recent piece in the Washington Post calls for an urgent injection of military and civil personnel devoted to rebuilding Iraq:

[Ambassador L. Paul Bremer’s] operation is nearly broke, and he admits Iraq will need “tens of billions” of dollars for reconstruction next year alone. … [C]ontrary to administration assurances, our military force levels are obviously inadequate. A visitor quickly learns in conversations with U.S. military personnel that we need to deploy at least another division. … as well as a significant increase in civilian experts in development and democracy-building.

More troops now, more money now, and nation-building for the long haul. This is the emerging consensus across much of the political spectrum, left and right. We’ve come a long way from the arguments used to justify the war, which had very little to say about long-term commitments of this sort. The new view, in essence, is that now we’ve invaded we need to follow through. There’s a lot to be said for this. Trying to clean up after yourself is clearly more responsible than installing a puppet government and bailing out as fast as you can. The domestic goal is to get the public used to the idea. McCain speaks freely of billions of dollars in the short term and a “generational commitment” for the long run, frankly acknowledging that the U.S. will be stuck in Iraq for years.

He justifies this commitment in two ways. First, he articulates the Domino Theory of Democratization, saying that

Iraq’s transformation into a progressive Arab state could set the region … on a new course in which democratic expression and economic prosperity, … define a modernity in the Muslim world that does not express itself in ways that threaten its people or other nations.

For this reason, “America’s mission in Iraq is too important to fail.” I find the new domino theory about as convincing as the old one. More important, any policy that is “too important to fail” risks becoming a self-justifying sinkhole, as Billmon recently argued:

In the end, policy mistakes—particularly big ones—tend to produce a kind of circular reasoning—in which those in charge try to justify the policy by citing the need to avoid, at all costs, the failure of the policy.

McCain’s second line of argument fits Billmon’s diagnosis. “Let there be no doubt,” he says,

Iraq remains the central battle in the war on terror. We must succeed in Iraq because every bad actor in the Middle East … has a stake in our failure. They know Iraq’s transformation would be a grave and perhaps fatal setback to them.

Now that the U.S. is entrenched in Iraq, it must stay because to withdraw would be to give a victory to “every bad actor in the Middle East.” Iraq is where the war on terror is being fought. But of course it’s being fought there because that’s where the U.S. has chosen to put its soldiers. Which is why it must stay. Around and around we go. That is the logic of a quagmire, and it makes the analogy to Vietnam clearer. There, it wasn’t the sheer number of casualties lost in the jungles or troops fragging their commanders or anti-draft protests at home that were at the root of problem. It was that the U.S.’s presence in the region was, by way of arguments about nation-building there and face-saving here, the very reason for further escalation.

The U.S.’s day-to-day problems in Iraq may end up resembling Northern Ireland rather than Vietnam: car bombings, political assassinations, a general effort by terrorists to violently undermine civil society and resist the occupying power. The cost in terms of soldiers’ lives would be much lower than in Vietnam, but if there’s no viable way to extricate yourself the feeling of the situation may be much the same. Putting the emphasis on the political logic of involvement in Iraq seems to me to be the most plausible way of making the “Quagmire Case.” Involvement there is self-justifying and there’s no clear way to get out of the loop.

The way to argue against it is to say there are predictable changes to Iraqi society that would trigger a withdrawal. Hence the appeals to post-WWII Europe. I’m not convinced by this comparison, but others are welcome to make the case for it. My questions to them are the same ones I was asking back in March: Since WWII, how many autocratic or totalitarian countries have been invaded by a democracy, had the bad guys deposed, and a stable democratic regime installed? And how does this number compare to the number of invasions or other interventions that resulted in puppet governments, friendly autocrats, messy long-term military occupations, or outright disasters?

There’s some irony—but maybe also some hope—in how the official position on Iraq has evolved. As it has moved away from dealing directly with Al-Qaeda and towards reconstructing the entire political economy of the Middle-East, the administration’s actions have inevitably begun to imply an analysis of terrorism focused on root-causes. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, any talk of root causes was dismissed as watery left-wing handwringing. Terrorists were simply evil and there was no point in thinking about their origins any further. Now the official view is that the way to eliminate terrorism is to turn countries that produce them into capitalist democracies. If there is a realistic exit strategy from Iraq, it may depend on having believable measures of terrorism’s root-causes. It’ll be interesting to see the people who sneered at the very idea of thinking in those terms eventually pointing to such measures as evidence of the success of their policies.

Rick Perlstein: Church of Bush

are some things that Christopher Nunneley, a conservative activist in Birmingham, Alabama, believes. That some time in June, apparently unnoticed by the world media, George Bush negotiated an end to the civil war in Sudan. That Bill Clinton is "lazy" and Teresa Heinz Kerry is an "African colonialist." That "we don't do torture," and that the School of the Americas manuals showing we do were "just ancient U.S. disinformation designed to make the Soviets think that we didn't know how to do real interrogations."

Chris Nunneley also believes something crazy: that George W. Bush is a nice guy.

It's a rather different conclusion than many liberals would make. When we think of Bush's character, we're likely to focus on the administration's proposed budget cuts for veterans, the children indefinitely detained at Abu Ghraib, maybe the story of how the young lad Bush loaded up live frogs with firecrackers in order to watch them explode.

Conservatives see it differently.

"He's very compassionate," says Chris, an intelligent man who's open-minded enough to make listening to liberals a sort of hobby. "If you look at the way he's bucked the far right: I mean, $15 billion for AIDS in Africa!" He speaks at the church services of blacks, and "you don't fake that. That's not just a photo op."

Of course, two years after Bush made his pledge, only 2 percent of the AIDS money has been distributed (in any event, it will mainly go to drug companies). And appearing earnest in the presence of African Americans has been a documented Bush strategy for wooing moderate voters since the beginning.

So what does a conservative say when such "nice guy" jazz is challenged? Say, when you ask whether a nice guy would invade a country at the cost of untold innocent lives on the shakiest of pretenses? Or, closer to home, whether he would (as Bush did in late 2000) go on a fishing trip while his daughter was undergoing surgery, and use the world's media to mockingly order her to clean her room while he was away? Doesn't signify with Chris. "If you're in one camp, the idea of being firm, 'tough love,' is very popular. If you're in another, you can say, 'Well, that's just mean!' On my side, well, I like the whole idea of 'tough love.' "

This is a journey among the "tough love" camp. The people who, even in the face of evidence of his casual cruelty, of his habitual and unchristian contempt for weakness, love George Bush unconditionally: love him when he is tender, love him when he is tough�but who never, ever are tough on him.

On July 15, the Bush-Cheney campaign organized 6,925 "Parties for the President" in supporters' homes nationwide. I chose to attend in Portland, Oregon. The right love to believe the whole world is against them. In a county where Ralph Nader got a quarter of the votes of George Bush and Al Gore well over double, the sense of martyrdom is especially fragrant: Portland's conservatives are like others anywhere, only more so. One leader told me that here, it's the conservatives who are oppressed by the gays.

They certainly love them some George Bush.

Twelve people gather on the houseboat of Bruce Broussard, a perennially failed candidate popular among local conservatives for, well, his race: He is African American. First the group hears Laura Bush on a conference call. ("All of us know what makes George a great president. He has the courage of his convictions, the willingness to make the tough decisions and stick with them.") Then, they get a bewilderingly disjointed address from their host (he hits some key points from his recent Senate platform: presidential terms of six years instead of four, a cabinet-level Department of Senior Citizens with himself as secretary). Finally, beef-and-cheese dip loading down a plateful of Mrs. Broussard's homemade tortilla chips, I open the floor to the question of why they personally revere George Bush.

Ponytailed Larry, who wears the stripes of a former marine gunnery sergeant on his floppy hat, bursts into laughter; it's too obvious to take seriously. "Honesty. Truth. Integrity," he says upon recovering. "I don't think there's any difference between the governor of Texas and the president of the United States."

Gingerly, I offer one difference: The governor ran for president on a platform of balanced budgets, then ran the federal budget straight into the red.

Responds Larry (of the first president since James Garfield with a Congress compliant enough never to issue a single veto): "Well, it's interesting that we blame the person who happens to be president for the deficit. As if he has any control over the legislature of the United States."

Larry's wife, Tami Mars, the Republican congressional nominee for Oregon's third district, proposes a Divine Right of Eight-Year Terms: "Let the man finish what he started. Instead of switching out his leadership�because that's what the terrorists are expecting."

Larry is asked what he thinks of Bush's budget cuts for troops in the field. He's not with Bush on everything: "I hope he reverses himself on that."

I note that he already has, due to Democratic pressure.

Faced with an existential impossibility�giving the Democrats credit for anything�he retreats into a retort I'll hear again and again tonight: Nobody's perfect. "I don't think we're going to find a situation in which we find a person with which we're 100 percent comfortable."

Then he reels off a litany of complaints about Bush. "Horrible underemployment situation . . . the big-business aspect of the Republican Party I have some issues with."

The next thing I hear is the last refuge of the cornered conservative: a non sequitur fulmination against the hippie Democrats.

"Having said that, what's your option? To have more bike trails?"

The vibe at my next stop is different. None of the people at Kitty and Tom Harmon's bungalow are stupid. Instead they are the kind of "well-informed" that comes from overlong exposure to conservative media: conservatives who construct towers of impressive intellectual complexity on toothpick-weak foundations. My hosts are Stepford-nice (Mom sports "Hello Kitty!" seat covers in her car and loads me down with shortbread for the flight home; Dad shows off the herb garden he'll use to season my eggs if I consent to stay the night). But everyone present shows a glint of steel when their man's character is challenged.

"One of the reasons I respect this president is that he is honest. I believe that after eight years, the dark years of the Clinton administration, we finally have a man in the White House who respects that office and who speaks honestly."

The speaker is Christina, an intense, articulate, and passionate publicist.

"Such a refreshing change for the country. People believe in the president."

I don't mention recent poll figures suggesting that more Americans believe John Kerry than Bush when it comes to terrorism.

After affirming "I still believe that there are weapons of mass destruction"�the commonplace is beyond challenge�Christina displays another facet of the conservative fantasy: Going into Iraq, she says, "is not the sort of thing one does if one wants to be popular. . . . He doesn't stick his finger in the wind." I don't challenge that point, either�though if I did I might ask why Bush scheduled the divisive debate over the intervention for the height of the 2002 campaign season, more certain of what Andrew Card called "new products" than his father, who held off deliberation on the first Iraq war until after the 1990 congressional elections.

Instead I challenge the grandmotherly lady sitting on the piano bench.

Says Delores: "There is an agenda�to get rid of God in our country."

Chirps the reporter: Certainly not on the part of John Kerry, who once entertained dreams of entering the priesthood.

I'm almost laughed out of the room.

I ask why Kerry goes to mass every week if he's trying to get rid of God. "Public relations!" a young man calls out from across the room. "Same reason he does everything else." Cue for Delores to repeat something a rabbi told her: "We have to stand together, because this is what happened in Europe. You know�once they start taking this right and that right. And you have the Islamic people . . . "

She trails off. I ask whether she's referring to the rise of fascism. "We're losing our rights as Christians: yes. And being persecuted again."

I ask why so many liberals believe the administration lies, if there might be anything to the suspicions. What about the report of the Los Angeles Times that morning, that the State Department dismissed 28 of the claims the White House demanded Colin Powell bring before the U.N. as without foundation in fact?

Delores: "You make mention of a paper in Los Angeles that made such and such a report; well, that doesn't mean it's accurate or complete or unbiased."

I respond that the report came from a memo reproduced in the recent report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican-dominated. I'm not sure whether she hasn't heard me or just has decided to change the subject. "John Kerry attended a party in which there was bad language, bad humor, being evidenced in all quarters!" she cries. Kitty chimes in: "And Kerry said it reflects American values!"

I ask Tom what role he sees in America for nonbelievers. "Well, if people are of an opinion that their God is supreme and are willing to burn your house down to prove it or dismantle your car to prove it or make all sorts of loud noises, disturbing the peace, and say that they have a right to do that in the name of God. . . ." he begins, in his best Mr. Rogers voice. Later I parse out what the hell he was talking about. I was asking about atheists. But Tom understood "nonbeliever" according to the premise that God is exclusively Judeo-Christian. It wasn't about whether you believe in anything, but whether you dared diverge from his belief.

Walking me to my car (he insisted), Tom, who works for a construction conglomerate, reaches for a favorite metaphor to describe George Bush: linoleum. "You know: Usually you get a microfilm of the color, and if you drop a plate on it you discover it's an ugly-looking floor. Then linoleum came out�the pattern goes through the entire one-eighth of material. You can drop a plate on it, and the color is true all the way down!"

His face glows. He gets a far-off look in his eyes. That's his Bush.

It's like a scene from a John Waters movie.

What all does it mean? The right-wing website Free Republic is infamous for galvanizing harassment campaigns against ideological enemies, but it also has a lighter side: a robust culture of George W. kitsch. "Freepers" display and study the famous photograph of Bush embracing Ashley Faulkner, whose mother perished on 9-11, a woeful, iconic look on his face ("The protective encirclement of her head by President Bush's arm and hand is the essence of fatherly compassion," Freeper luvbach1 writes); the ladies exchange snaps of the president in resolute pose, rendering up racy comments about his sexiness; they reference an image of Bush jogging alongside a soldier wounded in Iraq like it's a Xerox of his very soul. "He's the kind of guy who's going to remember to call a soldier who's lost a leg," one citizen of the Free Republic reflects, "and go jogging with him when he gets a replacement prosthetic." Revering Bush has become, for people like this, a defining component of conservative ideology.

Once I interviewed a Freeper who told me he first became a committed conservative after discovering the Federalist Papers. "I absolutely devoured them, recognizing, my God, these things were written hundreds of years ago and they still stand up as some of the most intense political philosophy ever written."

I happen to agree, so I asked him�after he insisted Bush couldn't have been lying when he claimed to have witnessed the first plane hit the World Trade Center live on TV, after he said the orders to torture in Iraq couldn't have possibly come from the top, all because George Bush is too fundamentally decent to lie�what he thinks of the Federalists' most famous message: that the genius of the Constitution they were defending was that you needn't base your faith in the country on the fundamental decency of an individual, because no one can be trusted to be fundamentally decent, which was why the Constitution established a government of laws, not personalities.

"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary . . . "

Conservatives see something angelic in George Bush. That's why they excuse, repress, and rationalize away so much.

And that is why conservatism is verging on becoming an un-American creed.