The Good Civilian - Rivka quotes a Freeper and amplifies:
"The little bit I have read about, it seems to me that it is being completely blown out of proportion," said Roger Krueger, who served in Vietnam and is the chapter's president. "When a person is in combat, they have to do whatever they have to do to stay alive."And sometimes, apparently, when a person is not even remotely close to combat, in order to stay alive they have to take unarmed, helpless, locked-up men, strip them naked at gunpoint, pose them as if they're having oral sex with each other, and take pictures.
More.
The Good Soldier, Cont. - Sgt. Stryker on Abu Ghraib:
He says that he and the others received no formal Geneva Convention training, which would've instructed them that stacking a bunch of naked men in a pyramid and posing for a trophy picture are inappropriate. I mean, until I was trained in LOAC, I thought I could just walk around shooting people at random if the whim caught me. Without that invaluable training, I'd have no idea that there indeed exist basic standards of human decency. Who knew?
Much more.
The Good Soldier - Ginmar's LiveJournal remains a great, and cleansing, read.
o "Rape prevention" classes - for women only
o The joy of mail, including care packages from her readers
o Prelude to explosion - a diary entry from April 5th, just now being published.
There will be plenty more where that came from, God Willing.
Find the Document and Tear it Up - Major Olmsted on Abu Ghraib:
So we're down here at Disney World, and we decided to swing by the Hall of Presidents. This exhibit includes a brief swing through American history, including the Lincoln-Douglas debates. At one point Lincoln, defending his opposition to slavery, tells the crowd that if the words 'all men are created equal' are not true, than they should find the document in which it is written and tear it up. "Who is bold enough to do it," he asks, and the crowd goes quiet, admitting they will under no circumstances tear up the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln nods and says that, if they won't tear it up, it must apply to all.
More.
The Rest of the Story - After Andrew Olmsted linked to "Late Night Thoughts of a Defeatist," Andrea Harris accused me, in his comments section, of inflating "one incident" - the probable drowning of Iraqi blogger Zeyad's cousin by American troops - into some kind of generalized pattern of abuse and mistreatment. This was surprising, since you would think Harris, whose grasp of prose style is as sure as her handle on geopolitics is shaky, had heard of synecdoche before.
The number of US brutality stories that appear far exceed the number that I link to. Sometimes I consider them poorly sourced. But some dead horses are just too painful to beat. I dislike running "Look! Our boys crossed the line again" items, to the point where one of my regular correspondents and fellow bloggers has accused me of being "soft on the military."
Everyone who reads the news knows there is a lot more than "one incident" out there. The latest is the Meet the new boss, same as the old boss report from Abu Ghraib prison. Here Saddam used to torture prisoners and here we've been doing it too. If it's not lunch time, you can see some of the pictures. (Link via Tacitus.)
This too is surely just "one incident" and "still under investigation," just like the rest of them. Mind you:
Gary Myers, the lawyer for one of the enlisted men charged, said in an interview that the military had treated the six soldiers as scapegoats and had failed to address adequately the responsibilities of senior commanders and intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations.
according to James Risen in the New York Times.
Of the pictures, Gary Farber writes
Horrific. Simply horrific. Enough to lead to Godwin's Law violation. Unbelievable. I SERIOUSLY warn you not to look at them unless you are prepared to have a reaction that is likely to include vomiting, bursting out in tears, and pounding your fist against the wall while cursing and screaming. I am not kidding. It's no different than looking at concentration camp pictures, except it's "us."
I would add something to that. Most of the Abu Ghraib photos don't have the look of "exposé pictures" - that is, furtively-snapped got to smuggle this out so people see what's going on shots. Many of these photos show American troops posing for the camera. Hamming it up. The soldiers shown aren't just indifferent to the abuse and indignity around them - they're grooving on it. To them, someone photographing the scene isn't "uh oh! evidence!" It's lessez les bontemps roulez!
Here's my own Godwin's Law violation: In Junior High, we had to watch films the Nazis shot of the concentration camps. One of the most disgusting viewing experiences you could ever endure, and should endure. But the thought I could never escape was: These people thought it was okay to film this. They weren't ashamed to have a record of themselves doing this.
Are we "as bad as Hitler?" No. Are we "as bad as Saddam Hussein?" No. Not So Far. That's not good enough!
The "right wing" critique of the sort of interventionism that has led to the current state of the Iraq war was always simply that it is incompatible with republican virtue. That case has been well and truly proved by events. We ship people to foreign countries to be tortured based on evidence extracted by torture in the first place. We torture foreigners in their own land, then carefully circumscribe the attribution of responsibility. We lock American citizens detained in the US away without counsel and maintain they should have no right to appeal or review. We excuse ourselves by saying we're not as bad as some departed despot.
We used to have more pride than that, and it was justified. I want it back.
(See Farber and Tacitus for more thoughts and links.)
Bargain Wins - Kelly Jane Torrance considers remainders, and links to Terry Teachout describing his emotions on learning of the remaindering of a recent book of his own. "He seems much more philosophical about it than I imagine I would be," she writes.
Harlan Ellison always said he couldn't wait until his books went out of print. He inserted a clause in every contract giving him the right of first refusal to purchase his own remainders from his publisher at the prevailing market rate. He then sold them directly at readings and conventions. The practical effect is to go from making around $3 on a $25 book to making $22 on the same sale. Of course, you have to be pretty darn sure that you can sell them or you've got a basement full of mildew farms and a sinking feeling. But a writer with a reputation and a following - like Teachout - can do pretty well on his publisher's dead stock.
Poets face a minor-league version (of course) of the same economies. Poets like to buy stock directly from their publishers at 40% off to sell at readings. All but the most famous poets will sell most of their books themselves, and make a much better margin on their direct sales than off royalties on such sales as they get from stores.
Helpful Pointer - You know how, sometimes, Flit is kind of quiet? Not today, boy. What've we got in the way of indispensible bloggery for you from our military correspondent north of the border? Let's see.
Item. You know the big Iraqi flag controversy this week? Here's a twist for you:
The new flag is the work of an Iraqi artist resident in London called Rifat Chadirji whose design was the best of those considered. He is also the brother of Nassir al-Chaderchi, the chairman of the IGC committee charged with choosing a new flag for Iraq.
Found via Flit.
Item. A pointer to much better military analysis than we get from the cheerleader blogs. (The casualty-ratio analysis that Flit excerpts is the best part. Some of the rest seems iffy.)
Item. A pithy summation of the stakes of the Maher Arar case:
Obviously, if names of random acquaintances screamed on the rack count as evidence of terrorism by a Canadian citizen, all of us who know or work with a Muslim are potentially suspect to similar persecution passing through the States; last I looked, that's just about everybody.
But really, I'm sure you don't have to be Canadian to get that deal. We're eligible too.
Item. Just about as much time as the Insight Magazine "expose" on how we really did find Saddam's weapons of . . . you know, is worth.
Item. And, mirabile dictu! a readable Mark Steyn column. And how would we know, if Flit didn't tell us?
Even Homer Nods Dept. - The normally excellent Andrew David Chamberlain tries to get all counterintuitive on us regarding taxi medallions, as libertarians and economists are wont to do. I hesitate to quarrel with my betters in these matters, but I think he makes some errors.
His goal is to leave aside the justice of the government monopoly for a minute and simply calculate whether a medallion is "worth" $300,000. His plan is to calculate the present value of the medallion based on future income, and his method the time-honored economist's procedure of pulling numbers out of his ass. I want to stress that this last is not, in itself, a bad thing. Enrico Fermi was famous for such maneuvers. We have to get our numbers from somewhere, and if, at the end, we're able to tie our results back to a known fact in the world, we'll decide our ass was a pretty good place to start.
Maybe I'm not telling this right.
Anyway, assuming a five percent ROI on whatever else the medallion purchaser could do with his money, and a twenty-year useful life for the medallion, Andrew calculates that the owner's future revenue from the medallion would have to be $28,300/year. Then he goes looking for a real world number to relate that too and discovers that the typical New York cabbie makes . . . $30,000!
Voila! Except. I don't think so.
Here are the things I think Andrew isn't taking into account. First, undervaluing the opportunity costs for the individual cabbie buying his own medallion. If I put $300K into real estate or mutual funds, I sit back and let the money roll in (my - roughly - five percent). I imagine my readers who actually invest in real estate are laughing bitterly right now. Okay, scratch real estate. Stick with a truly passive investment. If I put $300,000 into my own taxi medallion, I am in the freaking cab 12 hours a day, six days a week for those twenty years. I can't use my time to earn an income unrelated to my investment. This means I'm "spending" a whole lot more to get my $30,000 a year, and my "portfolio" - capital plus labor - is less diversified. Everything I do is tied up in that goddam cab. If my mutual fund tanks, I still have my day job. If my cab breaks down, I am any income until it's repaired. Be clear: by regulation, if you buy an individual medallion, you must drive your own cab. It's not transferrable the way the more expensive corporate medallion is.
I'm not going to push too hard on his twenty-year career guesstimate even though what little I know of contemporary cabbies suggests that estimate is high.
I see the New York Post says that drivers "can earn about $49,000 a year," which is more than $30,000, though "can" has the whiff of a pitch about it - it's a word you expect to see on telephone pole flyers about making money with your computer.
For comparison purposes, the average corporate medallion went for $689,655 in a separate auction (per the NYPost). The income calculation is straightforward - it's just the daily rental times 365. Google is not giving up a current rental figure easily. It's upward of $115 a day. Call it $125. That's an income of $45,625. Interestingly, Andrew's downloadable Excel decision model (see his item link above) tells me to stay the hell away from corporate taxi medallions once they go over $480k.
Complicating all of the above is the resale value. You can sell a medallion and realize capital gains, though that is true for the investments you might make instead.
Anyway, while it was outside of the scope of Andrew's item, remember: government-mandated scarcity, backed by force, is bad. Bad bad bad. Bad!
Big City Rackets - The "best" ones are run by the governments. See Radley Balko on New York's scandalous taxi medallion auction - a government-mandated cab scarcity program that benefits large (campaign-contributing) companies and penalizes both riders and would-be independent operators. Commenter Peter has some great info about just how the existing policy punishes the poor immigrants who drive for the major companies. (Scroll way down.)
One reader raises the curious objection that you couldn't completely deregulate big city cab service because "there is no efficient way for a consumer to price shop. Nor is there a way to prevent them from getting gouged." This makes little sense.
First, "gouged" is one of those inherently problematic terms. "Gouging" is what the City of New York is doing to would-be cabbies now, with the medallion system. It requires not just a monopoly of service provision but a monopoly of force. The NYC government can get away with their gouging because they allow taxi operators no exit from their system. That's gouging. A cabbie who has your luggage locked in the trunk and demands $10 more than you agreed to pay when you got in his vehicle is "gouging" - actually he's perpetrating fraud and blackmail. The guy who will only take you to the airport for $20 more than you feel like paying isn't obviously "gouging" you - your own expectations may simply be unreasonable.
There would still be ways to "price shop" in an unregulated cab market. Possibilities - probabilities, really - range from large companies with advertised rates to solo operators with prices painted on the outside of their cars to consumer guides in newspapers and websites to word of mouth. "Efficient?" The thing to keep in mind is that, in some circumstances, "price shopping" is itself both inefficient and immaterial. If I'm Here and I want to go There, and you stop and offer to convey me for, say, $10, it is either worth $10 to me at that moment or it's not. I may, in fact, be more interested in the possibility of saving $2 by waiting for another offer than I am in getting underway, Right Now. I may place a premium on speed. If the latter, my willingness to get in your cab rather than explore whether someone else might do it cheaper expresses itself in the difference between the $10 and the $8 or $7 I might have learned I could get away with paying if I waited.
In that case, it's more "efficient" to pay an amount I'm willing to part with right now than to spend extra time "price shopping." All kinds of factors influence my decision, from how much of a hurry I'm in and how tired I am to whether I'm getting reimbursed by someone.
This is no more mysterious or invidious than the fact that some people buy TV's for more than the lowest discounter sells them, or gas from a station that is more expensive than the one down the road.
At some point either the savings or just the comfort level of price shopping exceed the convenience of flying blind. People who take a lot of cabs will have an incentive to learn the most they can about price ranges and alternatives. It will be worth it to them to become knowledgeable shoppers and good bargainers.
Poetry Corner - Aaron Haspel tackles the problematic distinction between poetry and prose, with an eye toward figuring out which free verse counts as poetry and which doesn't. An interesting exercise, and worth it for the scansion he gives for a W.C. Williams effort. BUT, I think he's hung up on the wrong oppositionals. "Poetry" is an inherently problematic word - used sloppily it doesn't just describe, it enjoins. ("If I feel the top of my head has been taken off etc. Poetry in motion and like that.) The distinction one can make is between prose and verse, which is just writing in lines. Prose is what goes all the way to the end of the page.
I'm not sure we can get to a definition of "poetry," distinct from verse, that is not normative at bottom. Certainly the distinctions Aaron draws between his Williams example and the one he picks on by Frank O'Hara is normative - Aaron doesn't just find O'Hara "not poetic," he finds the unpoetical quality blameworthy.
If there is a distinction we can draw, the key probably lies in the etymologies - the root of "poet" is "maker," the root of prose is "straightforward." A poem is a made thing in some way that a passage of prose is not. Of course, prose is made, too, so we're looking for qualities of artifice that something we'll call poetry has and something we'll call prose doesn't. The issue has gone unsettled for a long time now, of course. But for most of that time we didn't have blogs!
Hey, What's Out of that Bottle? - Oh. The genie:
The increase in the estimate would underscore the strides North Korea has made in the past year as the Bush administration struggled to respond diplomatically while waging a war against Iraq in an unsuccessful effort to search for such weapons there.
Via Kevin Drum. Kevin makes an anti-Bush point, which is sort of fair. But the real point is, as I've said all along, nuclear non-proliferation is a fantasy. Any strategist worthy of the name needs to be spending less time thinking about how to stop nuclear proliferation and more time figuring out how to live with it.
The Rhythm of the Week - Blah blah blah gaming night tomorrow, blah blah blah, usual midweek slowdown, blah blah blah. I ain't saying there will be no blogging until Thursday - there will be. Just nothing heavy, most likely.
I apologize to people whose e-mail I'm sitting on. I'm getting through it as well as a dilettante can.
Leonard Dickens points out that I scanted the likely major role for South Korean troops in a post-invasion DPRK. He says, "Think Germany after 1989." True. I should have laid more stress on that. It works best if South Korea approves an invasion in the first place. They seem to have their own ideas on how to proceed - the "Sunshine policy" the US has done its best to quash. Since they're the ones with all the artillery tubes pointing at them, and the ones who will have to clean up any mess, if they want to pursue detente and gradual reform, we should let them.
Josh Buermann points me to the Nautilus Institute's DPRK Briefing Book. I haven't had the chance to dig into it yet, but I pass it along.
As I Was Saying - It's not like they can actually give him a medal or anything, but Bradley Burston in Haaretz says what I've maintained for years: wittingly or not, Mordechai Vanunu benefitted Israeli security by blowing the lid on its nuclear weapons program. If I were of a conspiratorial mindset, I'd want to see this solitary confinement cell he was in. But since I got over the Myth of the Omnicompetent Mossad years ago, I figure the Israeli government just got lucky.
Oddly amusing part of the article:
The restrictions include a ban on leaving Israel for a full year, a prohibition against speaking to foreign nationals unless granted prior permission, restrictions on where Vanunu can sleep and reside and an order barring him from Internet chats.
"And no internet chats, Vanunu."
"What's that?"
The man's been in prison since 1986, right? What does he know about the internet?
As a reminder, though it supposedly makes me a bad peacenik and a bad right wing isolationist, I think Israel should have nukes. I've said that before too.
(Link via -mail from Hiatal Moon.)
TANSTAAFL Alert - I hope I've conveyed a certain skepticism about the wisdom and propriety of our decision to take over Mesopotamia by force. I try to be clear. Still, I shake my head at the latest from Massoud Barzani, momentary president of the Iraqi Governing Council, who complains in the Herald:
MASSOUD Barzani, Iraq's governing council president, said yesterday that the US has only itself to blame for the military deadlock at Najaf and Falluja because it allowed "an army of liberation" to turn into "an army of occupation".Barzani warned that the United States must not act softly in the besieged cities and give insurgents "the impression that they have the upper hand" but also must make sure that civilians are not harmed if military force is used.
We've actually heard a fair number of statements from both ordinary and prominent Iraqis, going back to the invasion phase of the war itself, that We'll be grateful to be liberated, but if you turn it into an occupation we'll hate you.
People. Really. Do you think anyone does this kind of thing for free? You think anybody goes all that way purely for the sake of what you want? People who are that naive ought to be given their own warblog - we can pay their Typepad fees out of the reconstruction money.
In addition to the gratitude, there's Mr. Barzani's shrewd advice for handling the uprisings in the West and South - "must not act softly" and "must make sure civilians are not harmed." This is like Dungeons and Dragons players telling the GM they intend to "move quickly and quietly down the corridor." Sure you do, fellas. Actually, it's like some kibitzer passing through the common room advising the D&D players: Hey guys! Tell the GM you're moving quickly and quietly! That way you get there fast but nobody hears you!
If you needed any proof that the IGC has no power, this is surely it.
Ironically, it also shows that the members of "the puppet council" are representative of ordinary Iraqis after all, and not just Iraqis. Barzani demands the same impossible combination of joys much of the rest of Iraq wants from an Uncle Sugar that gave them every impression that We are here to serve you. Heck, they are even representative of us. Don't occupy us! But don't leave! Cut our taxes! Pay for our prescriptions! And pie for dessert!
It's a dumb game nobody can win. The reason it sort of works here is that we can't escape the fact that we do it to ourselves. Our government isn't "us," it's our government. But the people who run it are, broadly speaking, from here, and we've established reliable procedures for seeing the backs of at least the most visible individual members. The Iraqis haven't the same sense of investment and the same salvaging sense of control. We're outsiders, we imposed ourselves on them and we intend to leave when we're good and ready
A surer formula for ingratitude has not been devised.
Adventures in Pictorial Biography - Kevin Michael Grace gives us the life of Mark Steyn.
Thinking Outside the Box - Hesiod suggests that we ought to be worried that Al Qaeda might assassinate Baby Sadr. It's actually a pretty good point.
Peninsula Woes - The Korea section of last week's Grand Strategy item, revisited. Note that I have already recanted my enthusiasm for promiscuously nuking the place.
Korea is hard.
In some ways it's not. On basic non-interventionist grounds, it's simple: leave the DPRK alone. Its mere existence threatens no US core interest. It poses the biggest threat to South Korea, a vastly richer and militarily more powerful country that, anyway, has been trying, with some success, to make nice with the North for a decade. It poses the next biggest threat to Japan. Three generations ago, it seemed wise to structure Japan so that it was incapable of defending itself. Surely that time has come to an end. And again, Japan clearly prefers the soft approach to Kim Jong-Il's squalid little gulag. There's a humanitarian case for "regime change" - I accept everything about that case except that the United States should do it.
Nor is the problem simply that North Korea is developing nuclear weapons. Desperately poor, tyrannical Communist regimes have had nukes before and we've had the last laugh on those bastards. The Soviet Union wilted like old lettuce and the PRC is busy exploring the frontiers of post-charismatic fascism - like Italy but nobody can give a speech. North Korea has supported terrorists, but so did the USSR. You could get into an argument whether North Korea is what international relations types call a status quo power or a "rogue state," however defined, but even that wouldn't settle the issue. The same theorists had long arguments about whether the USSR was a status quo power and, if so, just when it became one.
But even I worry about the DPRK. North Korea is a weapons proliferator, for sure, just like Pakistan. While most Stalinist and Maoist regimes have transitioned into their next phase peacefully, Crazy Kim just might be the guy to go out in the nuclear spasm we always feared - a smaller spasm, but a spasm nonetheless. But the big thing is that North Korea has already arguably tried to engage in nuclear blackmail and we've already essentially let him get away with it. Under Clinton, we pretty much paid the North not to pursue their nuke program. The exact sequence of events is in dispute, but at some point the DPRK had renewed their program and the US had slowed or stopped its agreed aid. The Bush Administration made a big show of ditching the Clinton-era plan, but quietly readopted an indistinguishable approach. All this, and, as Time Asia reported last summer:
Intelligence sources say North Korea is working its way up the ladder of nuclear sophistication by acquiring the ability to make not just crude, clumsy A-bombs but also warheads small enough to fit atop its missile arsena - and Pyongyang has already warned it would be willing to sell its expertise and nuclear material unless the U.S. delivers aid and security guarantees.
Now this last claim is surprisingly hard to pin down. I've been looking for a direct quote from a North Korean official that puts the threat baldly, but haven't found one. It's even outright disputed by David Wall in a Japan Times op-ed from May 2003, that pins it all on a willful misunderstanding by US Assistant Secretary of State Jack Kelly. The North later specifically disclaimed any "intention of transferring any means of that nuclear deterrence to other countries." And there's another reason to tentatively disconfirm the claim: StrategyPage treats it as fact.
Absent a clear attempt at blackmailing financial aid from the US by threatening to sell nuclear weapons if we don't pony up, my concerns about Korea diminish considerably. But if you accept the (here we go again!) "intelligence reports" on that score, then as a candidate for "preemptive self-defense," North Korea makes Saddam Hussein's Iraq look like Norway.
The only hard part is doing anything about it.
Thanks to the Iraq adventure, we've pretty much shot our offensive bolt for the next couple or few years. Philip Carter explains why in Slate. We are tapped out. We are maximally deployed. While out pre-po stocks of materiel in Asia remain untouched (so far), and could theoretically supply an invasion of the North, we got no troops to use those stocks. Our force in Korea is a tripwire force, not a force that can take the offensive. Put simply, they are there to die, and their deaths to necessitate a US military response - nuclear, under Cold War doctrine - to an invasion of the South.
You want to draft troops for your humanitarian intervention or preventive self-defense mission. Fine. See you in five years. It will take that long to add the 300,000 bodies that will enable us to send 100,000 to Korea for an attack, to procure weapons for them and move them over there, and to train them. This is on top of the 500,000 we're being urged to draft to put an extra 200,000 troops in Iraq, since, you may have heard, we must not cut and run. How long will it take us to train up 800,000 draftees to the level of the current all-volunteer force? Answer: You will never train 800,000 draftees up to the level of the current all-volunteer force.
So, institute draft; start training; increase the defense budget to buy cool gear for all the extra soldiers; start shipping soldiers to hilly, wooded Korea. And if you're Kim Jong-Il, what are you doing while this happens, assuming you are close to attaining nuclear weapons or have them already?
Yeah, I would too.
But let's paint a rosy scenario. Maybe Kim will be as dumb as Saddam Hussein, convinced that we were only going to bomb for awhile, so he won't react. And maybe Korean Army morale is as low as Iraqi Army morale was. Maybe psy-ops and liberal amounts of cash will get the bulk of forces to lay down their arms. It worked in Afghanistan and it worked in Iraq. Crucially, maybe we can buy off the frontier artillery units that, at least on paper, could make Seoul look like the Dresden Museum. Maybe the change in terrain from lots of flat desert to lots of woods and mountains won't discommode the Army's doctrine of Land-Air Battle. Maybe South Korea lets us launch and the PRC is so sick of Kim Jong-Il that they don't mind American troops coming all the way to the, uh, Yalu River.
Let's assume all that is true, because it might be. It's an awful lot of "might be" and too little "surely must," but it could happen.
Now we own North Korea. Desperately poor, terribly unfree North Korea. Population 22 million (roughly the same as Iraq's). The good news is that North Korea really does have no history of ethnic strife as in the Balkans. Maybe Paul Wolfowitz got his notes mixed up. Here's what the CIA Factbook has to say:
North Korea, one of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and spare parts shortages. Industrial and power output have declined in parallel. The nation has suffered its tenth year of food shortages because of a lack of arable land; collective farming; weather-related problems, including major drought in 2000; and chronic shortages of fertilizer and fuel. Massive international food aid deliveries have allowed the regime to escape mass starvation since 1995-96, but the population remains the victim of prolonged malnutrition and deteriorating living conditions. Large-scale military spending eats up resources needed for investment and civilian consumption. Recently, the regime has placed emphasis on earning hard currency, developing information technology, addressing power shortages, and attracting foreign aid, but in no way at the expense of relinquishing central control over key national assets or undergoing widespread market-oriented reforms. In 2003, heightened political tensions with key donor countries and general donor fatigue have held down the flow of desperately needed food aid and have threatened fuel aid as well.
Do I have to draw you a diagram?
Well, what a fine thing it would be to free such a people, right? Leave aside the old argument about whether it's proper for the United States to spend its young people and fisc for anything but the defense of American lives - you know where I stand on that. Tell me when the North Koreans would be free. I wouldn't anticipate nearly the level of violent resistance to the postwar occupation that we've seen in Iraq. The nightmare scenario is pathological docility - a people so beaten down by six decades of the most unreconstructed Communism that they hardly know how to begin anything approaching self-rule and individual enterprise.
I suspect that, as little as we knew about what life was really like in Iraq, we know even less about life in North Korea. We know it's pretty awful. But we know less than nothing about what that awfulness looks like to the Koreans themselves. We suffer, in other words, the classic information deficit that bedevils central planning of all sorts, but turned up to 11.
We've surely learned to be less confident in the face of ignorance, right?
So. A non-nuclear conquest of North Korea is not currently an option. Preparing for it will be visible, and a nuclear power will know we are coming to get it. South Korea will know the North will have a strong incentive to either attack first or just threaten to incinerate Seoul if it allows fresh US troops on ROK soil. And if we win, we gain custody of 22 million serfs.
This is why I say the hawks don't have a lot to offer on the Korean problem. This is surely why, as the Contra Costa Times article that Michael Cardell found put it, "Bush, who once labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil," has not mentioned the country in public for weeks."
There is basically nothing to fall back on but deterrence. This is especially true because the three regional powers with the most to lose, the ROK, Japan and China, are currently dead set against stronger action. Whatever threat North Korea poses to us, it poses a bigger one to them (less to China). A US withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula underscores their responsibilities without harming our deterrent power. Our chances of gaining certain intelligence of Kim Jong-Il playing footsie with Islamist terrorists are surely as spotty as my various critics say. That's a problem for their own preferred approaches too, though. Having 30,000 troops in the DMZ probably isn't making our intelligence significantly better. And it's driving anti-American sentiment in the South. Since the South is surely our best source of human intelligence on the North, and since absence makes the heart grow fonder, we should go.
More on other sections throughout the week. No, that's not a threat. What do you mean?
A Fanboy's Ditto - Rather than write all kinds of stuff about the delight that is Superman:Secret Identity 4 of 4, I'll just point you to Johanna Draper Carlson's appreciation and urge you to buy it. And also note that the miniseries as a whole is a great example of the "literature of ethics." If you haven't read this - maybe you're not a regular comics reader - pick it up when it's collected.
Less, But Still Somewhat, Grand Strategies - Matthew Barganier weighs in with a UO-like program, which is not surprising. He wisely steers clear of saying anything about Korea.
Tonight I'll start in with responses to the reactions to specific topics of my original item. I figure on handling these largely piecemeal: Korea tonight and maybe Israel; NATO, "humiliation" and ancillary topics later in the week.
Weekly Fitness Blog Item. Weekly?? Weekly???? - Well, whatever. 168 pounds, up seven from my low of 161. (Or is it six from my low of 162? I don't remember.) Down 48 from my official high of 216. Anyway, I was pushing 170 a couple weeks ago so this is progress. The great thing about buying size 30 pants last fall is that they do not let you imagine that you aren't letting yourself go to hell again. They are the Jiminy Cricket of slacks.
This morning I did my first Heavyhands session since last fall. (I think.) How embarrassing will my report be? This embarrassing: I took the one-pound weights along. Considering that six months ago I was doing everything with five-pounders, that's pretty pathetic. But you gotta (re) start somewhere. I also walked a total of four miles this week, at lunchtime Monday and Tuesday.
Today's Heavyhands walk/run was the beginning of my marathon training in earnest. Your Talking Dog and I are in the Marine Corps Marathon lottery under the team name "Gym Set."
In other fitness blogs . . .
Oh Ye of (appropriately) Little Faith - Bruce Baugh so despaired of my ever taking these bulletins up again that he switched his own weekly reports from Saturdays to Mondays. Bruce is doing very well on a vegetarian Weight Watchers program. Since his current approach is so different from my own, I find his bulletins especially interesting.
Chicken Check - Johanna Draper Carlson ate at PF Chiang's the other night and had a crock pot chicken yesterday. I mean, presumably she didn't eat the whole crock pot chicken, but she prepared one. Not much exercise talk yet, but food coverage pretty much every day.
Speaking of not Updating - Michael Nielsen was doing very well as of February 8, but no reports since. Michael is following the "Give your weight in kilograms so it's smaller" plan. The big problem is that it increases your waist size at the same time. Michael's was up to 185.
That's what I got so far. I could swear these things used to be longer, but then, I'm really really tired. Been a big family-type Sunday with lots of errands and chores on top of that morning cardio session. I'm sneaking off to bed. More next we -elllllll, let's just see how it goes, shall we?
But What About the Truth? is Arthur Silber's question. A useful consideration of Richard Clarke's recent writing, and much more. Money quote from Clarke:
Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam - not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West - is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war. But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.
Cf. an excellent related item from Matthew Yglesias this morning. And we might as well throw in my item on "Muslim reconstruction" blogs from November 2002.
Oh the Irony - One of the knocks on the idea of partitioning Iraq is that the Kurds and Shiites get all the oil, leaving the Sunnis with nothing. This is not thought to be a recipe for regional harmony.
Of course, if 70%-Sunni Kuwait were "the 19th province of Iraq" and given over to the post-Iraq Sunni entity, then the Sunnis would have 10% of proven world reserves . . .
We've got to work on our timing. This running the world is tricky stuff.