Are We Too Powerful?

What is wrong with our foreign policy? Is it that our military is too big? Review of "The Power Problem", by Christopher Preble.

What is power? A simple and evocative word, but a complicated concept that we Americans seem naive about. We have the most nuclear bombs of anyone on the planet. But would we ever use them? Obviously not. So they do not really increase our power in many, most, and possibly any practical ways. The only setting where nuclear bombs are useful is the precise opposite of the one we occupy- a case like North Korea, which with only a handful deliverable bombs, and the madness to use one, can effectively deter us from ever attempting to overthrow their system. It represents power in only the most existential extremity, and none at all in the usual hurly burly of diplomacy, conflict, terrorism, and small wars.

Similar considerations apply to other levels of military power. We can precision-bomb anyone, anywhere, but does that make us powerful? Not if power really means getting other people to do what you want. Over the last couple of decades, terrorists have shown that they have the power to make us to what they want- start wars, drop bombs all over the place, aggravate a lot of friends, create ungoverned spaces, and make air travel miserable for millions. But have we had the power to make them do what we want? Precious little, other than the extremely blunt method of killing them piecemeal in a game of whackamole which is reaching a dispiriting state of functional surrender in Afghanistan, and stalemate elsewhere.

For people will do what they want, and military methods are never a good or efficient way to make them do otherwise. Rome ran a very militaristic and terroristic system, which is the way things have to be if others are going to bent to one's will by military means. This is the problem of international relations, and particularly our problem having taken on the role of the world's policeman, and gotten embroiled in numerous conflicts ranging from bitterly disappointing (Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan) to catastrophic (Iraq).

Preble is writing out of the Cato Institute, (and in the realist tradition I have reviewed recently), and adopts a nuanced libertarian stance- that we should not do so much, should allow others to do more, that standing down a little bit would benefit everyone, especially ourselves. The record of the last few decades speaks for itself- that we have made several very bad blunders, mostly by rushing to the "military option" with too little thought. Preble puts a lot of focus on the military- how expensive it is, how intrusive into the rest of society, how wasteful, and how its very size and capability encourage policy makers to use it, like the proverbial hammer. He is an exponent of the Powell doctrine, which sought to hedge our enthusiasm by asking some critical questions, principally whether a particular military action really addresses a national security interest of the United States. Preble is of the opinion that our true interests are quite narrow- simply defense of the continental territory, and that everything else about our world-wide hegemony is not a core interest and could be de-emphasized, if not jettisoned.

Exhibit A is our Middle East policy. The word "inane" comes up in Preble's discussion, and it is hard to disagree. Despite our alarm over the Arab oil embargos of the 1970s, oil has generally found a way to market whatever we do. When we have tried to block exports from countries such as Iraq and Iran, their oil has found markets anyhow, if in reduced amounts, for the simple reason that they have little else to live from. Not even the richest petrostates can refrain from exports for very long. So our decades of support for some of the most retrograde governments imaginable, including garrisons in Saudi Arabia (now shuttered), Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Gulf, to "keep the shipping lanes open" and "maintain the flow of oil" have been mostly a waste of time and resources- a deep strategic error. Our only policy should be to deny broad control over the oil centers to strategic enemies such as Russia, or now China. But ISIS? How are they so different from the Saudis? Each sells oil as enthusiastically as it can.

This points to the real problem of US power, which is not so much the seductions of military Rambo activities, but the plain stupidity that they enable and amplify. We have a foreign policy run by amateurs, by definition. The president is rarely elected for foreign policy credentials, and then builds a team (see Hillary Clinton) hardly any more knowledgeable or judicious. Our ambassadorial ranks are filled with political donors and flaks. The congress has given up any hope of retrieving its war powers.  And our professionals, in the State Department and wider intelligence community, have numerous problems as well. How can we make this system work better?

I don't think that trimming our ambitions and letting the world go to the dogs, which is to say, to whichever other powers such as China and Russia have the ambition to take our place, is the only solution. We have good intentions (at least outside of the current administration) and have been generally justfied in our post-World War 2 Pax Americana, despite numerous costly blunders. We have also been served by those good intentions, which generate acquiescence, if not enthusiasm, on the part of our many allies and friends towards our dominant role, which in turn brings us benefits in economic and strategic terms. Not enough to offset the cost, perhaps, but having a stable world is difficult to value, really. Having and keeping many friends is the surest way to proceed to a peaceful world, which is our ultimate goal. In this sense, our competition with China should be on the basis of who can be friendlier and more supportive of an orderly state of affairs among the many other countries of the world.

The question is how to continue our relatively benevolent services without winding up in grievous error because we want to "fix" some problems a bit too enthusiastically. Preble raises the question of alliances, pointing out their inherent danger. If we promise mutual protection with a vast number of frontier countries, from South Korea to Ukraine, we should not be surprised to be drawn into conflicts not of our choosing, which may be unwise. Allied countries naturally feel a bit more free to provoke their neighbors given such protection, and we only need to think of World War 1 to understand the danger of such interlocking, tripwire alliances. So one approach is to make our relations with other countries more contingent, dependent on continuing good relations rather than legalistic (which is ultimately fictitious anyhow) in character. We should have friendship treaties with many, but alliances with few. But that is a minor point, since most of our rushes into action have been justified in other ways.

The deeper problem is not in having a military that is too strong, or alliances that are too promiscuous, but in having a policy-making apparatus that lacks intelligence. For all our NSA, CIA, and other capabilities, we blundered into Iraq for reasons that involved personal psychology (Bush, Cheney), intelligence failures (CIA), failures of integrity (Rumsfeld, the military, CIA), failures of institutional balance (State vs military and CIA), and further failures of intelligence- in lacking knowledge not only of the state of Saddam's power structure and capabilities, but of the culture we would be faced with were we to succeed in removing him. It was portrayed as the liberation of Paris all over again, plus lots of oil. The absurdity of this vision comes down to the insularity of everyone in power and the weakness of countervailing institutions (i.e. the State Department) that might have had a better grasp of the matter.

So while Preble is dubious about expanding the State Department, "its aim is to relate to foreign nations, not to run them", that is exactly where we need to go to gain a more intelligent foreign policy. But in a very specific way. We need more knowledge of local cultures that is useful to us. Right now, the customary tour is for a two or three years. This is enough time to get a feel for local conditions and make lots of high-level contacts. But it is no way to gather deep knowledge of the wellsprings of local sentiment, and the wheels that make everything work in that culture. It is that knowledge that we were missing in Iraq, and in Vietnam, and in the Balkans, and many of our other misadventures. We should keep the short tour officers- they are less likely to be captured by the local culture, and keep their service-to-America discipline. But we should add a cadre of officers that are a sort of cross between Peace Corps and Foreign Service, who specialize in learning about one other place for the long haul, and are not under threat or obligation to move elsewhere, unless they wish to do so. A sort of Lawrence of Arabia model, who might make themselves useful by writing books about the local culture, reports for the local embassy, etc. They would necessarily be more loosely tied to the US government bureaucracy, and their knowledge would come with some caveats. We probably cultivate a variety of locals currently who provide such key knowledge, but it seems that it does not always make a sufficient impression to affect our policy, due to failures in translation.

Knowledge is power. Some white privilege and great cinematography doesn't hurt either.

The next question is how to slow the rush to war, and weigh expertise more heavily in our foreign policy councils, such that all this deep knowledge and intelligence from the field gets used to actually make decisions, rather than brushed aside by an incurious or incautious executive. The current structures of departments and the interdepartmental process through the NSC, are effective in shaping rational policy. But again, there are a lot of amateurs at this table. Every one at the top level is a political appointee, other than the President herself. While the Secretary of State should be speaking for the arm of the government that is deeply knowledgeable in foreign affairs, and for its expert employees, that is hardly a given. The NSC needs at least one representative from the professional ranks of the State Department, and also needs at least one representative from Congress, to exercise its oversight and constitutionally balancing role. In compensation, the council could probably do without the drug policy advisor, Energy Secretary, and White House Chief of Staff. This would make our core foreign policy-making institution more professional, accountable, and responsive to knowledge from the field. It needs also to take its long-term policy role more seriously, and spend less energy on micromanagement.

Turning back to our over-militarized stance in the world, using force less requires not so much that our military be made smaller. We have prowling through all the oceans shockingly powerful submarines to which no one pays much attention or wishes to use. No, the problem is one of strategic conception- that we fail to realize how limited the effective role of military action is, compared with the vast scope for friendly and constructive engagement with other nations.

Military power is simply the power to kill people, not to make them do or think what you want. As we learn in the old Westerns, coercion is the least effective, least humane, and least durable way to run a society. The model of global policing (if that is what we are doing) needs to be one of community policing, not of SWAT teams dropped from Apache helicopters. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we routinely killed the wrong people because we did not know true local conditions and got our "intelligence" from bad sources. That is what you get with the SWAT team model. Our own civil war can serve as another touchstone here. What if some other country had barged in and told us what was right, and had started an occupation? That would not have gone over well. The opportunities for insurgency and simmering ongoing warfare would have been quite a bit higher, though there was plenty of that in the postwar South as it was. The point is that our blithe talk about "the military option" routinely fails the most elementary test of foresight- to put ourselves in the other party's shoes.

• Our total debacle in Syria. But warning.. propaganda is likely here.
• Smart is sexy.
• Factory farming- not a pretty sight. 
• Some charter schools are frauds.
• Who could be less qualified than Herman Cain to serve on the Fed?
• Yes, it looks very bad.
• Brain injury is common, and dangerous.
• In Australia, a war on cats.

Iran and Saudi Arabia

Modern propaganda and ancient hate.

Frontline has an excellent three-hour series on the conflict between Iran and Saudi-Arabia. They come off like minuature versions of the US and the Soviet Union- superpowers of the Muslim world enmeshed in an ideological and tribal battle that is fought through proxy forces throughout the Middle East, making a hash of smaller countries and making strange bedfellows with the likes of Israel.

The Shia-Sunni split was always an undercurrent in the Islamic world, but was sharpened by the advent of modern fundamentalism. While the Saudis have always been fundamentalist in theory and corrupt in fact, Iran plunged into total fundamentalism with the revolution of 1979. The documentary discusses how sharply this changed the dynamics in the Muslim world, with Iran suddenly vaulted into the vanguard of the fundamentalist movement. This perennial "back-to-basics" feature of religion became a deeply ideological and psychological response to the muddled end of colonialism and the general failure of modernity in the Muslim world. We hear mostly of its Sunni / Salafist incarnation, as ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. But for the Shia, it had an extra edge of tribal revolt against Sunni oppression.

Shia make up roughly 1/3 of Muslims in the Middle East, with populations in each country. They are a majority in Bahrain, though they have no role in the government. That was the situation in Iraq as well until recently. Iran's fundmentalism is sectarian, not pan-Muslim. Thus, despite ethnic divisions, it has been an instrument to unite Shia populations across the region, such as the Hezbolla party in Lebanon and the now-ruling parties in Iraq. Iran's reach is obviously limited by this sectarian character, but they have been willing to arm their friends to the hilt and send their minions into battle for the most dubious causes, especially the Assad government in Syria, which is composed of another Shia sect.

Saudi Arabia is petrified by all this, partly because they have their own Shia population, but more because their own power projection has been so bungled in comparison. They have assiduously funded fundamentalist madrassas and terrorists, and what do they have to show for it? Hatred from the West, yes, but also quite a lot of hatred from their own spawn, such as Osama Bin Laden, whose disgust with the top-heavy, spoiled, corrupt Saudi institutions was emblematic. Their best friend, the US, conquered Iraq and not only botched the whole project disastrously, but left the country in Shia hands. And in Pakistan, one of their most successful test beds of miseducation, does all the fundamentalism add up to a strong state or a good friend? No, it has led to chaos, double-dealing, and misery.

One of the themes going through this story is propaganda. No one in Iran gets Lebanese Hezbolla fighters to die in Syria for Assad without a very heavy dose of propaganda. A bunch of Saudis do not fly into the World Trade Center without lengthy indoctrination. Fundamentalism in general is the triumph of poorly thought-through ideals and archetypal images over reason and basic decency. The Palestinian cause, now in its twilight, was one long piece of performance art- of grievance and rage as policy and, occasionally, power. And the long Saudi / Wahhabi campaign of Jesuit-style fundamentalist eduction has only furthered the weakness and backwardness of the Muslim world in general, not to mention its violence, particularly against women. The record is appalling, but the mechanism teaches universal lessons- that people can be led in disastrous directions by well-crafted propaganda, based on supposedly profound fantasies.

It is something we are learning in the US as well, to our peril. Does free speech mean that private broadcast networks can spew the most pleasing, and scurrilous, falsehoods? Just how much bilge can the internet contain, and not blow up? Conflicts like the one above, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, are made possible by propaganda, which moves people to extraordinary emotion and effort. World War 2 remains a textbook example, with Germany and Italy transformed by deeply emotional, false, and effective, propaganda. We are in the US at a tipping point, with half the population feeling themselves part of the Republican team, whose life support comes from propaganda that seems, at least to this biassed observer, unworthy of any political discourse or intellectual respect, headed by a President who lies so casually and habitually that we now take it as absolutely normal. How can reason and empathy penetrate this jungle of mean self-righteousness?

Returning to the topic, the current administration's support for Saudi Arabia and hatred for Iran is not easy to understand, on the face of it. Saudi Arabia is at least as destabilizing a force in the world and in the Middle East. Both are explicitly fundamentalist, and both seek to export their ideologies abroad. Both are sources of oil, though the Saudis have far more and play the lead role in world oil prices. We do not care that much on our own behalf anymore, but have strong interests in keeping the oil infrastructure (political, military, and physical) of the Middle East intact on behalf of the developed world, for much of which (Europe, Japan) we have explicit defense responsibilities. So sure, we want to be friendly with Saudi Arabia and continue to have military bases in the area. But we have interest in friendship with Iran as well, which has far greater human and intellectual potential. Both countries have a fraught relationship with Israel, though Saudi Arabia has of late been much more accommodating, in its cynical and conservative/authoritarian way. But Iran's problems with Israel seem similarly superficial, just a way to gain credibility with the Palestinians and other disaffected Muslims. And our own difficult history with Iran, and their vitriolic propagada against us, is hardly reason to fall in line with Saudi Arabia's sectarian program. It would be better to turn the other cheek, as the Obama administration started to do.

If the struggle for supremacy in the Middle East were prompting a flowering of cultural, scholarly, and scientific advances, that would be one thing. But the reality is far more tawdry, where the Saudis just buy more arms from the US to dump on Yemen, and Iran coopts and arms Shia communities in the neighborhood, destroying Lebanon in the process, and bidding to do the same in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The collision of irrational ideologies, served by up-to-the-minute propaganda methods, run by governing structures ranging from dysfunctional to medieval, is a toxic brew not likely to enhance the culture or living conditions of those in the region any time soon.

• The next level for propaganda.
• What happens when police don't care.

Americans, Plain and Simple

How about doing away with the term "African-American"?

It has taken me a while to realize that African Americans are far, far more American than I am. I am a naturalized citizen and immigrant. Yet the Protestant, white, suburban Boy-Scout culture fit like a glove- I was assimilated into 60's-70's America with plenty of personal and family issues, but no larger political or cultural issues.

How different that is from the black experience, where whole political parties remain dedicated to keeping black Americans down! A small part of that social antagonism and "othering" is furthered by the distinct names that have been applied to the black community. While the term "African American" is about as neutral as can be, in strict analogy to the many other ethnic terms like Irish-American, Jewish-American, German-American, Chinese-American, etc., there have in practice been some distinctions.

First, "Irish-American" is not frequently used. Most ethnic groups, especially those of such long vintage, have simply melted in to the pot of generic Americans- have assimilated or had America assimilate to them. So the continued intensive use of the term "African American" does not flow from a lack of assimilation, at least not from an African originating culture, but something quite different. Second, why is "African" lumped together so promiscuously, as if a continent as large as three Europes contained only one culture? "Latino" suffers from the same syndrome, hiding vast differences and diversity for the convenience of the dominant culture. It is a natural problem with naming and grouping of any kind, but is another sign that the "African" in "African American" doesn't really refer to Africa.

What all this does signify is continued segregation in all sorts of dimensions- social, physical, economic- based on a long cultural history of fear, disgust, hate, and social and economic oppression/powerlessness. Pride in an African heritage is admirable, but that seems so distant as to be mostly contrived; there is very little such heritage afoot in contemporary America, in any way that is distinct to one community, beyond genetics. (Though Wakanda may change all that!) A more accurate designation might be "formerly enslaved Americans", though that hardly trips off the tongue either. There have been many attempts at labels, more or less successful, (Negro, colored, minority, Urban, Afro-American, ghetto, racialized people, diverse, people of color). I would suggest the preferred usage just be "Americans" when and where possible, without further ado or elaboration.

A word-cloud of my own creation, text drawn from Wikipedia and other history sites focusing on the back experience. This  appears to militate against the thesis presented, showing "African" with high usage, and as perhaps the primary locus of identity. But the corpus was a very backward-looking, perhaps not reflective of the current cultural setting.

Obviously, from the very nature of this very article, some term is needed to refer to Americans descended from those were formerly under bondage and even more formerly kidnapped from West Equatorial Africa. "Black" seems to fit that best, if still very uncomfortably. Despite all the etymological / symbological freight, simplification, and label-i-fication, it is simple and widely used. It is also part of a deeply unifying symbology. The Ying/Yang symbol is an example, showing light and dark as part of all things, and all cycles and processes. Ebony, Jet, Black power, Black is beautiful... all have been ways to rectify the dominant-culture valence of this term.

• Another view of police.
• Worse than collusion.
• Why do we have a new nobility & feudal system?
• UBI is a symptom, not a cure.
• A network of deranged people.
• Social conformity is (partly) genetic.
• Consumer protection? Not us!
• Watch Bill Mitchell in lecture.

Obama's Greatest Error

Syria can be laid at his doorstep.

I have generally given Barack Obama very good marks. He has been a steady hand in the middle of political crazy the defies historical comparison. A compassionate and intelligent leader at home and abroad, while faced with endless vitriol whose source lies uncomfortably deep in the body politic, somewhere. His method has been the classic boxer's rope-a-dope, feinting when the Republicans punch, letting them hang themselves with fatuous House bills and hateful rhetoric from organs like FOX news and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

The idea is that the more the Republicans show their true colors, the more the real players in the game, the observant American people, will wake up and recognize who is serving their true interests. But it hasn't worked out that way, really. The right wing-o-sphere has been so hermetic, so well-funded and so well-gerrymandered that it has not had to face the music of its own madness. Not until now. The advent of Donald Trump has brought the full mariachi out of the basement and into plain view, and it hasn't been pretty, on either the policy or the personal levels. Yet Trump will still carry some states, which, after all we have seen and heard, is unfathomable and disgusting.

But Obama's policy is tinged with weakness. He is playing a long game, dependent on his own imperviousness to scandal and superior sanity. He is not attacking his opponents directly. This is laudible and perhaps effective in domestic policy, but has its limits in international policy. Waiting for international opinion to catch up with bad actors like ISIS or Russia is waiting for Godot, especially when that opinion often sways to strength rather than to goodness.

This has all come to a head in the case of Syria. While Obama has been pursuing low-level campaigns on many military fronts, against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Libya, Pakistan, Iran, etc., he is unwilling to go to greater lengths where it seems most pressing: Syria.

Syria has been a multi-dimensional cataclysm, brought on by a collision between hope and entrenched, ruthless power, sectarianism, millenarian Islam, and other currents. Obama originally spoke eloquently about freedom for the next generation in the Islamic world, about the horror of the Syrian reaction, and his wish for the reign of Assad to end. But what of it? He has had plenty of reasons to not get involved. The example of Iraq, for one. The example of Libya, for another. Our interventions seem to always go wrong, especially in the Islamic world where our intellectual understanding and moral capital is so low. Iraq has been especially disastrous, going from abhorrent stability to US-sponsored anarchy, and now to Shia-led sectarianism, incompetence and corruption. What's a decent and powerful country to do?

The lesson is, as usual, that every case is different, and while being cognizant of our weaknesses and of the bitter lessons of history, we should also not lose hope of influencing world events for the better. In Syria, there was, and remains, a compelling case for a no-fly zone to prevent the bad actors who have air power- Assad and Russia- from maintaining their bombing campaigns on civilians and rebels. Doing so now would be extremely difficult, with Russia already in the air. But doing so at the start, when Assad was alone and dumping chemical weapons of various sorts on rebel areas, would have been far more possible, in practical and political respects.

We could have directly forestalled tens of thousands of casualties, swung the balance of the war significantly, and most importantly, kept Russia out of it, all while maintaining our campaign against ISIS to whatever extent we wished. I think there was at the time a clear humanitarian as well as strategic rationale that should have swayed Obama to take such action. The drawback, as we saw in Libya, is that even if successful against Assad and/or ISIS, we had little or no influence over the ultimate outcome, which could just as well have empowered some other ISIS variant or Iranian client as well as whatever democratic opposition might exist. That would have been an opportunity to shape events politically, making the case internationally for some reasonable coalition of Syrian parties. But we haven't wanted to do that work either.

The Arab spring was a gift. Like the Ukrainian, Russian, and most other color revolutions, it ended in tears mostly due to overwhelming cultural inertia and the entrenched power, both military and cultural, of the traditional autocrats. But we didn't help much either, with our mixed signals and dithering. The tragedy of Bengazi was not that we lost an ambassador and other personnel in horrific circumstances, but that we had so few resources there in the first place for the nation-building effort. For that is what Libya so clearly needed. Such things as a model for governance, disarmament of the various militias, basic bureaucracy, technology and utility management, etc. There is a long list where we and the Europeans could have been far more involved and helpful in the transition from anarchy to organization. granted, our credentials based on our occupation of Iraq were not sterling. But have we learned absolutely nothing, either?

The Egyptian case is likewise very painful, and shows Obama in a particularly poor light. Here, as later with Assad, he pronounced Mubarak to be illigitimate, but unlike the case of Assad, someone believed him, and the Egyptians took it as a green light to remove Mubarak from power. So far so good. But did we follow up to help broker relations between the military, which has long been far too strong in Egyptian society, and the new Muslim Brotherhood government? Did we help guide the new Morsi government in its constitutional predicaments? No. Cultural inertia, particularly of the military and bureaucracy, was the main problem here, as well as a total political disconnect between Morsi and the rest of the country. The US kept its hands off, listened to the nay-sayers from the Israeli right, and the result was that Egypt under its new military regime is in even worse shape than it was under Mubarak- more repressive and in greater economic distress ... even if it is now more pro-Israel than ever.

These cases are hard to second-guess, because our influence was truly small, partly due to our principled stand of non-interference, and partly due to our political capital in the Muslim world being so low. The Obama administration's continued, if grudging, support for Israel and its military occupation of Palestine is perhaps the leading reason for this, and another failure to lead the world to a better future. We should be cutting aid, not increasing it. And this lack of leadership had a direct connection to our bad relations Egypt in general and Egypt in the period of the revolution in particular.

So there is a pattern of doing just enough to keep the status quo going, attempting modest positive change, and not entangling ourselves in new quagmires. Which has its good points, certainly. But look at Russia. Russia is not in a quagmire in Syria. Quite the opposite. They are in it to win, and have brought the Assad regime back from the dead with a relentless and ruthless military compaign. Russia is gaining international power by applying its power strategically, supporting its friends in an effective fashion. And now the Phillippines wants to be their friend too. Power gains more power, if it is intelligently used, while leading from behind eventually turns into not leading at all.

• Left, against a no-fly zone.
• Britain can do infrastructure... why can't we?
• Stiglitz on Trump- the economic pain is real, even if the candidate isn't.
• Some notes on Bernie.
• Some notes on Republicans.
• Hillary is doing OK.
• Despite the relentless right-ward frame of the last debate.
• Where are our forests going?
• Economics vs morality.
• Economic comparisons of well-being.
• Skills? The real skill is having luck.
• Hope for the world, on piano.
• A woman in science.
• Reflections on Afghanistan. A land called hope, but a neighbor called Pakistan.

We Just Found the Outrage

The GOP reaches a new low in incivility and untruthfulness.

The recent Republican debate struck a new low for our body politic. Not much remarked, but striking to anyone suffering through it, was a new tone of empty vitriol directed especially at President Obama. The Republicans have been consumed with hate since he was elected, but I have never seen decorum drop to quite such a low level.

"America has been betrayed. We've been betrayed by the leadership that Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have provided to this country over the last number of years." - Governor Chris Christie.

"This is why -- this is what I said at the beginning that this administration, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton through their foreign policy, have betrayed the American people, because the weakness they've displayed has led to Putin's incursions in the Middle East and in eastern Europe, and has led -- has led to significant problems in the Middle East as well, and the death and murder of lots of folks." - Governor Chris Christie

"As far as other people like in the migration, where they're going, tens of thousands of people having cell phones with ISIS flags on them? I don't think so, Wolf. They're not coming to this country. And if I'm president and if Obama has brought some to this country, they are leaving. They're going. They're gone." - Donald Trump

"One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating them here at home, is bring back the warrior class -- Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn't want to hear." - Carly Fiorina

"This president and this is what the focus ought to be, it's not the differences between us, it's Barack Obama does not believe America's leadership in the world is a force for good. He does not believe that our strength is a place where security can take place." - Former Governor Jeb Bush

"And let us remember one other thing. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are responsible for the growth of ISIS because they precipitously withdrew from Iraq in 2011 against the advice of every single general and for political expediency. It's not these people up here. It's Hillary Clinton." - Carly Fiorina

"Well, Wolf, I'll tell you what reckless is. What reckless is is calling Assad a reformer. What reckless is allowing Russia to come into Crimea and Ukraine. What reckless is is inviting Russia into Syria to team with Iran. That is reckless. And the reckless people are the folks in the White House right now. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the reckless people." - Governor Chris Christie

"Barack Obama has said he doesn't believe in American leadership or America winning -- he is wrong." - Senator Ted Cruz

• The word "kill" came up 26 times in the debate

"I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody. I sure as hell don't want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our Internet. Yes, sir, I am." - Donald Trump

• Then there was the bizarre over-inflation of ISIS as a threat.

"Regarding national security, we need to restore the defense cuts of Barack Obama to rebuild our military, to destroy ISIS before it destroys us." - Former Governor Jeb Bush

The "reckless" charge is particularly ironic in light of Barack Obama's predecessor, who sort of defines the term, including the "killing of lots of folks" part. At any rate, extreme competition among a very crowded field of mediocre candidates has lowered the level of rhetoric, to what I would regard as unconscionable levels. How do they expect to be treated in office, and how do they expect the office to maintain its value if they as public officials make of it such a pig-sty?

This is not even to delve into Mr. Trump's ugly past rhetoric. In this debate, he continued to expound on his "strength", as shown by his willingness to kill relatives of terrorists, and to prohibit Muslims from immigrating to the US. From a left perspective, the GOP is a motley circus, but that doesn't excuse us from paying some attention and noting that we all share in the national discussion and need to draw some lines of basic decency if our politics is not to descend to the level of farce, and worse.

• Some are uncomfortable with this language.
• A few more lies.
• Is ISIS going to kill us all?
• Which side are the Saudis on, really? What a change from the 60's, when a Muslim military alliance was forged against Israel. And how did that work out?
• And they don't just imprison political protesters, they behead them.
• A look back at the Arab spring. Note especially (and in connection with the new Saudi "coalition") how the social and economic dominance of the military in Muslim countries like Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan has no relationship to its effectiveness. It is empty, political, patriarchal machismo writ large.

"If Islamic fundamentalist forces managed to become dominant among the organized forces in those uprisings, with no exception, it is surely due, on the one hand, to the practical and/or political weakness of the Left, but, on the other hand, it is also and above all a product of decades of rule by the despotic regimes. No one should miss that. The Syrian regime was not a shield against Islamic fundamentalism, nor were Mubarak or Ben Ali, and nor are Assad and Sisi today." 

Islam as a religion and ideology, of course, seems to go unnoticed. Time and again in this discussion, it come up in passing as the most powerful regional ideology, by far. What does modern liberalism have to offer in its place?

"Add to this the very active involvement of the regional counterrevolutionary stronghold represented by the Gulf oil monarchies, which did their best to strengthen the Islamic fundamentalist component of the Syrian opposition at the expense of anything else. Because, a real democratic uprising is the major threat to them like it is for Assad. In a sense, they concurred with the Assad regime in promoting the Islamic fundamentalist component of the opposition at the detriment of the secular democratic."

• Upward redistribution is a thing.
• No, it can not go on indefinitely.

West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Who Cares?

So the oceans rise by nine feet ... we all will be long dead.

One hears occasionally about the West Antarctic ice sheet "collapse". That seems pretty far off and over-wrought. How can ice sheets collapse? That doesn't make much sense. If an ice sheet is already over the ocean, then its melting wouldn't affect the water level anyhow. So what is the deal?

In this case, the sheet is a large land-based glacier (not an ice shelf, like the Ross ice shelf) whose bottom lies far below sea level by nearly 4,000 feet, though its top rises up over sea level by another mile. This glacier holds about a half million cubic miles of water. Its collapse is going to take maybe 400 years: fast if you are a geologist, but pretty slow for most other people, so it is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps megamelt might be a better term.

Thwaites glacier forms most of the West Antarctic ice sheet that is shrinking and being undermined.

The problem is that most of the glacier is over land that is far below sea level. Over the last (cold) millennia, it has pushed all the sea water out and stabilized as an enormous glacier. But with climate heating, sea water has begun infiltrating under the glacier, and, with its salt, is going to undermine the whole glacier, melting it far more rapidly than the rest of Antarctica is going to melt in response to rising air temperatures. That is what the observers are talking about.

Cross section view showing how much of the glacier is under sea level and prone to  "collapse".

The researchers in a recent paper describing this situation do two things. They state that based on its recent flow and water loss, that this glacier has already begun collapsing / being undermined by sea water. Secondly, they put together some modelling of the melting process and estimate that even without more global warming, this glacier will unload all its water within 200 to 900 years, contributing on its own about 9 feet to higher global sea levels. Naturally, the rest of the glaciers in the world aren't sitting on their hands either, so it is just one more nail in the coffin of our lovely biosphere as it has been for the last few thousand years since the last ice age. And over the last

It is a classic slow-motion, far away, hidden-under-a-pile-of-ice process, particularly ill-suited to our communal forms of decision-making, i.e. politics. While in terms of geology and evolutionary biology, the melting is going at lighting speed, it is glacial in terms of our day-to-day public policy concerns and decision making. So Barack Obama's heroic regulations of vehicle emissions and power plant emissions are pushing against a vast conspiracy of apathy, inertia, greed, and myopia. They are far too little, far too late, though better than nothing. If CO2 were purple, we would naturally be much, much farther along by now.

Earth's CO2 history, inferred from various fossil and geologic data and models. Present time is on the far left. I have added a teal line at about 500 ppm CO2, which is where we will be in 2050, and which exceeds what Earth has seen for the last ~20 million years (the period marked "N" for Neogene).

And the response really has to be at the level of public policy, nationally and globally. Without a carbon tax or regulated cap, and without natural shortages of fossil fuels (which seem to be in much larger supply than the atmosphere can take), any CO2 that one virtuous tree-hugger spares the atmosphere simply reduces the price of fuels, helping some one else to use more. If renewable energy sources reach economic parity with essentially free fossil fuels, this situation may change. But for now, fossil fuels always win on pure, amoral, economics. Any effective solution has to be common across all users, to address this mounting tragedy of the commons.

And what does morality have to do with it? Why are tree-huggers regarded as virtuous? It is not out of sheer asceticism. It is pertinent to note that the most significant metric & consequence of global heating isn't geology, or climatology, or economics ... it is biology. The problem is not that rocks are getting warmer, or that ocean water is getting acidic. And the problem is not, (mostly), that humans will have to move a few miles inland or start growing crops in Siberia. All that can be accommodated, or has no moral consequence. The real problem is that climate heating is destroying our biosphere with increasing thoroughness, leaving only weeds and jellyfish behind.

We have already done a bang-up job of biological destruction, starting with the megafaunal extinctions of the Pleistocene (courtesy of human hunters). The last couple of centuries have seen a new mass extinction event gathering steam, as humans have commandeered the entire arable biosphere as well as rangelands, ocean productivity, and forests. Then we poisoned everything with DDT, radioactivity, and currently the neonicotinoid insecticides. Now we are placing the final nails, driving up temperatures beyond where they have been in millions of years, and shredding whole ecosystems by acidifying the ocean. It is going to be a doozy of an extinction event, up there with the greatest of all time. What seems to us slow motion is just an instant in the tapestry of life's history on earth- an incredibly destructive one.

When you see iconic species trotted out as examples of saving rare species, like pandas, condors, and tigers, you can be pretty sure that they are the walking dead. Their populations are so small and habitats so vestigal that they have lost genetic & ecological viability. Unless enormous amounts of healthy habitat are set aside, (and air conditioned!), they will go fully extinct sooner or later. One of the basic values of humanity has always been an appreciation for the beauty of nature and a recognition of the bonds we share, from its incredibly varied resources to its spiritual sustanance. We are animals, and we are dust, after all. Another basic value has been to provide for our children and the ensuing generations, which constitutes one the basic drives of life. But if we eat & heat their environment now, what will they have left? Even if we manage to keep our world on an even keel in social terms and refrain from incinerating ourselves in a nuclear war, we will, at the current pace, leave them a pale shadow of the nature that we inherited, and that is a deep and depressing shame.

• Global warming ... is politically global.
• National Review: To hell with planet Earth.
• The arctic? It's melting, too.
• Yes, the stupid party, and proud of it.
• Truth dawns in Saudi Arabia.
• Tyson and scientism.. we don't discover meaning, we construct it.
• Our electricity system needs a regulatory overhaul.
• As wealth concentrates upward, debt concentrates downward. The poorer you are, the more you need it, the worse the terms, and the more predatory the sharks.
• Anatomy of the financial crisis, in official narratives.
• The story behind the (lack of) cramdown, in 2008.
• Marx was sort of right.. capitalism could use another big war right about now. Or at least intelligent economic policy.
• About all those new jobs... they aren't very good.
• This week in the WSJ, Warmists = Hitler.

Hate and Hope

I look back on Obama's first year, and compare the hate and the hope afoot.

For Christmas I received a wonderful book by Lady Bird Johnson- her White house diary, full of politeness and fine observations from her special station in life. One observation that struck me was of Harry Truman, who accompanied her to Greece for the burial of its King in 1964. (As an aside, her utter boredom on meeting the various royals of Europe, employed, unemployed, and pretending, spoke volumes). Lady Bird was truly happy around Truman, and observed that his cheer and kindness to everyone he met impressed her deeply, especially after the vilification he had gone through in office. I thought- what does she mean? Truman is very well-regarded in historical hindsight- what ever was the matter?

Looking into it more closely, it appears that the Republicans were the matter. Joseph McCarthy started his ugly career during Truman's administration, and Truman's firing of Douglas McArthur also caused a hail of criticism and hatred. On both counts, Truman has been thoroughly vindicated by history. These form classic examples of the susceptibility of the body politic to the fear-mongering and authoritarianism of Republicans. Which grand tradition continued this year in full flower, as Republicans trotted out "coddling terrorists", federal insolvency, Obama's "socialism", "missing" birth certificate, and "death panels", among many others.

Democrats are not immune to a bit of fear-mongering, such as Kennedy's "missile gap", LBJ's "daisy" ad, and the more recent (and more justified) responses to Bush's plans against Social Security. But it seems part of the DNA of Republicans to match their hatred for government in general with distain for civility and, in an odd way, for their constituents, who tend to be divided between the very poor (and uneducated) and the very rich (who need no education to influence policy). Something unconscious is going on here- deeply temperamental differences between the parties that divide our political spectrum:

These political temperament maps come from politicalcompass.org. They even have a map of famous composers.

One would imagine that people who temperamentally favor authoritarianism would have a basic respect for the government, (i.e. authority), whatever its composition. But that turns out not to be true. Such lack of respect propelled fascists to power in the last century, by totally undermining nascent democracies in favor of new hybrid religio-cult-totalitarian systems. The reason is that democracy is fundamentally a problem for the authoritarian mind-set, not a solution. The whole transaction whereby citizens deliberate on what they want as common goods and who might best render those common goods is problematic for an authoritarian, who instead seeks a stable order with a strong social hierarchy featuring strong leaders, based not on rational (and thus dynamic) utilitarian grounds, but on deeper connections ("religo"), such as Volk, religion, nation, blood, "traditional values", commune, or other quasi-religious ideology. A sort of patriarchial family writ large.

The amazing durability of the idea of nobility and royalty is a testament to this mind-set, deeply seated in everyone, but more so in some than in others. Just when the rationale of royalty had expired in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French revolution, Napoleon got right back on that horse, making himself an emperor and authoring yet another royal house in a Europe already infested with them.

Another manifestation of the authoritarian mindset is a problematic relationship to reason and truthfulness itself. For if the social order is supposed to be fundamentally staked on properties other than reason and utility as realized in a Lockean social contract, and instead on emotional buy-in to strong social hierarchy such as an aristocracy or royalty, undergirded by theological or ideological support, then getting there hardly involves reason, does it? It involves deeply emotional arguments that speak to what advertisers would call our "reptilian" brain.

But back to the "death panels". Republicans, having fallen so suddenly out of power, have understandably seized on any tactic that comes to hand. As with the Gingrich "revolution" before them, they have grasped at ways to de-legitimate the administration, with false scandals (remember Vince Foster?) and endless inuendo. Trained in the notorious Young Republicans, they don't fight fair, since their whole attitude towards the institutions they are dealing with is one of distain rather than respect.

The point, as Grover Norquist and many others of the hard right portray it, is to gain power for the sake of strangling the institution, thus creating a new dispensation of freedom and traditional values in the land, maintained by .. well, it is difficult to say, but since the democratic state may be construed as inherently a liberal institution, other institutions more amenable to authoritarianism, such as corporations, churches, and the military are the typical power centers in this desired world. Some segments look forward to total anarchy, of course, where society (or those "left behind") retreats to the hardy frontier ethic of every clan for itself.

Ugly as this is to witness, I understand it as a psychological issue. The structure of our centrist, two-party system dictates that there will always be two roughly equal sides to the great debate- sometimes aligned along the libertarian-authoritarian axes of the diagrams shown, sometimes more along the communism-neoliberalism axes, which is to say, between egalitarianism and economic differentiation. The Republican party, taken to ideological extremes in the last twenty years, has briefly fallen out of its position of ~half the electorate, (partly due to the disgracing of its ideology by reality), and will only find its way back once it recaptures some middle ground in temperamental terms.

But another option for Republicans is to successfully activate latent authoritarianism in enough of the electorate, bringing them over to their side instead of compromising with the middle. Thus the campaign of fear and hate. It is commonly observed that wars help the incumbant by activating unifying feelings / ideologies. George W. Bush shamelessly used fear and terror for political gain, going so far as to raise the terror alert level at politically convenient times. Though this kind of politics is the sort of thing we rue at leisure, (and in the long lens of history), it can be shockingly effective in the short term.

Here's me!

Sorry about the rant, but this is partly why I am so impressed by Barack Obama's first year. He campaigned on, and is carrying out, a huge agenda. He has been harrassed in ways large and small by a revanchist opposition that is poisoning the body politic through its rhetoric, amplified through its house organs (Sarah Palin: "I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News. It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news,").

With all the compromises, and the bizarre masochism of the Senate and its "rules"*, Obama has accomplished heroic tasks, especially in saving the economic system from freefall, and in making solid progress on health reform and climate mitigation. While I carp constantly that there is much more to do and better ways to do it, a great deal has been done. Obama's ability to maintain his moral composure and progressive aims amidst the relentless pressures and drains of office is deeply impressive. I only hope he can keep it up. Lady Bird recorded how the office was slowly killing her husband- a willing sacrifice to the country they both loved, yet painful to see, especially in another Democratic president with high aims and great skills.

* Obviously, the Senate at very least needs to reinstate the requirement for Senators to actually speak for the duration of a chosen filibuster, with cameras going.

~~~

My heart goes out to Haiti, whose suffering seems to know no end, despite a very high level of religious devotion. Haiti was also subject to a coup by the Bush administration in 2004. A News Hour report showed one woman lying on the street, babe in arms, with compound fractures in both of her lower legs- helpless, and likely hopeless as well.

• Podcast discussion about the Enlightenment and its authoritarian adversaries.
• Fascism and sociology, a somewhat dry view.
• A fellow puzzled pundit.
• A green view of Obama.
• A long view of economic rights and amelioration.

Childish things

A quick note about the inauguration.

After being so moved by the inauguration, a couple of thoughts. First, the benediction by Joseph Lowery was wonderful, far more positive, rooted, poetic, and appropriate to the moment than the mess presented by Rick Warren. If we need such things, (we need the poetry, not the theism), inclusive ecumenical expressions will beat exclusive, divisive ones every time. And it was better poetry than the official "poem" as well!

The line that encapsulates the inaugural address for me is "the time has come to set aside childish things". This is the tenor that Obama is bringing, after 20 years of food fights in Washington, brought to us by the power-at-all-costs bomb-throwing of Newt Gingrich and colleagues. In several ways and times Obama touched on this theme, in what is surely an attempt to extend his personal inclusiveness and judiciousness to the general tone in Washington which has been mired in so much stasis. A government which, as Obama pointed out, has put off so many important hard decisions while deranging our institutions and public morals in favor of a fearful security state.

Is Obama green?

After all the promises, will an Obama administration make progress on green issues?

Now that the long nightmare is over and Barack Obama is measuring the White House drapes (and ordering up a presidential dog house), it is time to ponder what the future will hold under his administration (For an intriguing framework to evaluate the election, see here). For those of us who view climate change, biodiversity, and sustainability as the defining issue of our time, we have to ask- what is in store?

Although John McCain stated his understanding of climate change and support of measures to mitigate it, it became clearer as the campaign progressed just how shallow that commitment was. When gas prices went up, he suggested a gas tax holiday. Not only would this have been ineffective in reducing gas prices, given a supply-constricted market, (effectively transferring money from the government to the oil industry), but insofar as it reduced gas prices at all, it would have been counterproductive to the central policy problem: reducing fossil fuel use.

The need to reduce fossil fuel use came up in the campaign in the guise of energy independence from foreign sources of oil and gas. In the absence of an actual debate on climate change and sustainability issues, that was welcome enough, but did not provide a direct contrast. The gas tax episode, McCain's choice of the retrograde Sarah Palin, the fact that his campaign was run by a bevy of lobbyists and former Bushies, its championing of off-shore drilling (remember "Drill, baby, drill!"?), its wildly opportunistic tenor as it drew into the station, and of course the fact that his administration would be staffed by Republicans and lobbyists, all indicated that a McCain administration might easily have been as environmentally paleolithic as the previous one, hard as that is to imagine.

The one decent policy that McCain pushed was permitting new nuclear power plants. Distasteful as they are from mining, proliferation, and waste perspectives, nuclear plants are carbon-neutral, and would provide temporary breathing room (!) while truly sustainable technologies travel down the price per unit energy curve. It is also conceivable that future forms of nuclear power may be highly efficient and proliferation-resistant. However, it is also quite possible that barring government subsidies (including the phenomenally expensive waste repository yet to be built), nuclear power is currently no cheaper than renewable power, so while nuclear might be part of a carbon-neutral mix and benefit from continuing research, it should compete on the level in a system where carbon emissions and other forms of pollution are properly priced.

###

The Obama campaign had a distinctly more climate-friendly set of policy proposals. It stressed tax credits for renewable energy research, including plugin hybrids, higher taxes for oil companies, and several mandates- for renewable electricity production, higher vehicle fuel efficiency and a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. It also proposed higher long-term goals for carbon emission reductions than did the Mc Cain campaign. These are all good policies, but they do not really bite the bullet, which must be to realign the incentives of the entire energy market in line with long-term sustainability to actually achieve those far-off goals.

Simply put, pollution, needs to be priced into the energy economy, raising the prices of fossil fuels in proportion to how dirty they are in all dimensions, including CO2 emission. The problem with renewable energy is not that there aren't enough government programs supporting research and development, but that its market prospects are unfavorable and uncertain, compared with oil and especially with coal. The oil market, though heading towards the crisis of peak oil (as is natural gas), is at the moment still at the mercy of Saudi Arabia, which can turn the spigot on at will and strangle the economics of high auto efficiency here in the US. In the absence of comprehensive pollution pricing, it would be minimally beneficial to set a floor price for oil at $100/barrel in the US (with the difference collected as tariffs by the government, if necessary), so that market participants have a consistent expectation of future prices around which to invest in conservation and alternative supplies.

Coal is even more abundant and cheap- the coal industry is able to externalize the costs of mind-boggling pollution from mining, landscape denudation, carbon emissions, mercury emissions, particulate emissions, etc., etc. Renewable power can never compete with coal, which is a virtually free source of energy, unless coal's external costs are priced in. The EPA has started to price / regulate a
few aspects of coal pollution, such as sulfur dioxide, particulate, and mercury emissions, but we have long way to go before coal's full impacts are accounted for (here in the US, let alone in China!).

Obama has consistently supported "clean coal", truly a black mark on his record and on his campaign. The only way to make coal clean from an emissions perspective (forgetting about its extraction impacts) would be to collect all emitted gasses, remove the witches brew of pollutants, and sequester all the CO2 elsewhere, such as underground. While sequestration is a matter of current research (large pilot plants have been promised, but none are working), my view is that this will never be a viable technology. CO2 takes a great deal of energy to isolate and pump back into the ground (40% extra required). Only a few types of geologic formations are amenable to this kind of sequestration. No one has any idea how well the idea will scale to the vast amounts of CO2 we would need to sequester. And to top it off, accidents could be truly catastrophic. If a CO2 field became uncapped or leaky, the heavier-than-air CO2 would be a deadly cloud, much like those naturally released from lakes in Africa, which killed 1,746 people in just one rural incident. CO2 sequestration (and "clean coal" generally), thus appears to be a high tech fake-out designed to give succor to a phenomenally dirty industry. (Another example is the hydrogen economy, especially the hydrogen-powered car, but that is a topic
for another day!).

Obama also promoted a "$1,000 Emergency Energy Rebate". Thankfully, this was not an energy voucher system that would counter the conservation incentives of high fuel prices, but was a broad per capita or per household payment simply labeled with an energy banner. So this ends up being neutral as far as sustainability issues go, and little was heard about it later in the campaign.

Lastly, Obama has time and again sworn that regular people's taxes will not go up ... not by one cent. This kind of read-my-lips pledge is dangerous, especially when the federal debt needs to be pared down and when the carbon trading, or pollution pricing, or whatever means chosen to fulfill the proposed mandates of carbon emissions reduction and energy independence will doubtless be construed as new taxes by the average person, not to mention the opposing party. There is no way we can do what needs to be done in reducing greenhouse gas emissions simply with tax credits, federal research, and encouragement. We also can not rely on fossil fuels becoming scarce enough (by way of peak oil, let alone shortages of coal) to create the price incentives that will be needed, within the short time frame that we have to forestall increasingly serious climate effects. Even now, Canada is busily tapping its vast tar sand deposits, using precious natural gas and water in one of the most wasteful fossil fuel extraction enterprises imaginable, but which is economical in the current energy pricing system.

Obama's record is one of legislative compromise and accommodation. That kind of leadership alone is not going to cut it to address climate change at the requisite scale, which goes against the short term interest of every single moneyed interest group, and indeed every single American. The lesson that Obama gave us in his campaign is that political change takes people power. He can only act with a political wind at his back, in the form of wide-spread support, developed through painstaking debate, education, and inspiration. So our role as citizens is to keep this issue on the front burner. And to continue to educate each other about the facts of the matter- to push for long term thinking over short term laizzes-faire, and to reinforce the moral imperative to forestall this ultimate tragedy of the commons.

Ideally, Obama would devote some of his time and energy to the green agenda, educating Americans to the seriousness of climate change and biosphere protection generally, its long-term implications, and the sacrifices needed to meet them. But the campaign spent little time on the topic, understandably enough (Al Gore was treated as a somewhat mad uncle). Thus it is not clear that the mandate of the new administration extends to the farther reaches of the public attention span, which is where environmental sustainability languishes. It was very promising that in his victory speech, Obama touched on "a planet in peril" as the second of his pending superhero tasks. Hopefully he will expand on that theme at the inauguration and thereafter. Endangered organisms great and small have no political voice- it is up to us to care about them and care for them.

Country first?

As the presidential debates get underway, it is worth looking beyond the headlines and scorecards to what was actually said. The first debate with Jim Lehrer as moderator was deemed a "tie" by the media, though anyone actually watching would have seen the distinct advantage Obama had in strategic vision, presence, knowledge, and compassion.

One passage was emblematic for me, and that was a response McCain gave to Lehrer's question about what of his spending plans the candidate would give up in light of the current debt market bailout plans, which are going to put a crimp in the next president's budget. McCain said "How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs?". On a practical level, as Obama pointed out, spending freezes are a blunt instrument, used when the "decider" has lost the will or capacity to make difficult decisions. Freezing our priorities in the past is no way to run a government, especially one that espouses "change".

But this proposal was far more telling than its surface impracticability. It evidently came right off the top of Mc Cain's head, with little prior thought. Note how it was phrased as a question- a plea tossed out to a hectoring questioner.. how about this? would that be OK? It almost reminded me of Bob Dole, and his famous use of "whatever" as his final policy refuge. McCain was not on solid ground, and he knew it. He may know about waste in the Pentagon, and that big government is "bad", but getting his head around the big picture of overall government spending and budgeting seems to be more of a challenge.

Secondly, the exceptions McCain provided are even more telling. Where does McCain get his income from? Social Security and the military as a veteran, as well as his senate salary. So the impulse to protect the programs he knows and loves come right out of his gut, and all his talk of new energy programs, more education funding, national service, etc. seems to be window-dressing. His strong bias here and in his convention speech has been on the care and feeding of the military, as if that equates with the country. Country first, indeed!

Better and more effective support for veterans gets support from across the political spectrum- they have been treated shabbily both in Iraq and when they get home. But exempting the military in general from a freeze when we spend more than the rest of the world combined? That is open to debate, to say the least. If our military is overstretched due to an unnecessary war and because we have been asking soldiers to perform nation-building that they are ill-suited for, the answer is not to "expand the military", but to practice a little abstinence. We need to be using military forces more appropriately, dividing forces into specialized segments like classic-military, special forces, and nation-building, and beefing up other entities that need to be more central to the fight, like the state department and aid agencies.

At any rate, this response showed one more time how John McCain shoots from the gut- (and a rather parochial one it is)- a quality that entertains the press corps and is relatively harmless in the Senate, but is not what we need in a president, especially after eight long and disastrous years of being governed from the gut of another Republican.