Sunday, February 11, 2007

Democracy as Panacea

I'm working on a visitor guide to the Oregon Dunes, so yesterday morning I was having breakfast in a Reedsport cafe. A number of Reedsport's senior citizens were enjoying breakfast at the same time and I couldn't help overhearing the conversation. It covered Iraq, and if Bush expects to hold the support of generally conservative old geezers, I think he may have trouble. They were not happy about Iraq.

Then the conversation turned to politics. "Did you hear that Obama announced that he's running for President?" "No, who's Obama." "He's this black guy. He's in Congress. I don't know if it's the Senate or the House, but he's there. Looks like he's figured out that the problem is graft and corruption. And he's only 35!"

Based the opinions of such people, we will run a primary process that determines two candidates, between whom the contest will be settled by who has the best media consultants and the most money to buy advertising. This is democracy. It's what we're trying to give the Iraqis. It's what the UN was trying to give a tribe of pygmies in the Congo, helping them vote for the next government, when the pygmies clearly did not understand either (a) what a government was or (b) what the Congo was.

Democracy is a concept that Americans are in love with. We think it's indispensable to an advanced society, although Singapore does rather well without one. I think it's more an inevitable condition, when enough people gain such a high opinion of themselves that they feel that they must be allowed to participate in decisions. In most advanced society, this works better than any alternatives. In places like Iraq and Congo, it's a dangerous fairytale.

Friday, February 09, 2007

Pre-War Iraq Intelligence

The current controversy over the quality, sources, and purposes of the pre-war "intelligence" that wrongly linked Iraq and al-Qaeda does nothing to change my original assessment. The United States spends thirty or forty billion dollars a year on spying. A portion of this is used to prevent criminal acts, and I consider it police work rather than espionage. It is the latter that I regard as useless.

Advances in research are made by professionals, mostly working in universities, due to the process of peer review and an insistence on replicability. This is the basis for quality assurance. A single piece of research is checked for such things as inappropriate research methods or simple errors in analysis, and all research is regarded as no more than a piece of the puzzle. The puzzle, whatever it is, is gradually solved to the satisfaction of the participants by an accumulation of evidence from assorted sources. Or not. Sometimes, as we so often see in medical studies, initial studies are refuted or at least modified by later ones.

The problems of espionage are the subject of congressional hearings, closed or open, and the consensus always is that there has been some structural flaw which can be fixed by a better structure. This is not and never has been true. The problem is that espionage relies explicitly on special knowledge, from sources that cannot be verified through processes that cannot be replicated. Its quality can therefore never be relied on.

That's the problem. Not whether on any particular day, the espionage turns out to be correct, but that a nation like the United States cannot have public debates about issues when the "facts" are private. I argued at the outset of the war that the rationale was wrong for reasons that the White House could have determined for perhaps $29,999,999,999 less by buying a copy of the International Herald Tribune and reading what William Pfaff was saying. They could save a dollar more than that now by going online and checking with Juan Cole, who gets most of the information by himself going online and checking Arab newspapers and blogs.

One of my favorite lines goes "... an oxymoron, like Catholic education or military intelligence." The latter is a play on the two meanings of intelligence. The United States puts faith in the definition I've been discussing, analysis drawn from secretly obtained information. The second meaning is the ability to draw from many sources, assimilate the data, and be smart about drawing conclusions. If the United States had shown more of the latter kind of intelligence, we wouldn't be in the quagmire that we now find ourselves in.

I was just checking Google to see if any of my earlier posts showed up, and I discovered that looking for "Charles Krauthammer" and "predictable" yielded my post of four days ago, along with with many more than I had anticipated. Predictable seems to be a word that people associate frequently with the man, and that he uses himself.

There was a particularly interesting article from Charles himself, discussing reparations for African-Americans. He proposed, not entirely seriously, to trade off a payment of $440 billion to African-American families for the terminaton of affirmative action. He commented that although a steep price, it represented only a thirteenth of the projected ten-year federal surplus.

That was in April, 2001, before W. had worked his magic on the federal budget. Less than six years, but it seems so long ago.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Charles Krauthammer was predictable

Early on, those of us who thought the rationale behind the war in Iraq was phony also thought that the promoters of the war would follow one or more predictable patterns when they were trying to avoid eventual responsibility. Among them would be the classic notion that by criticizing the war, we encouraged the opponents just enough that they hold on until we leave. They don't bother showing any examples of insurgencies against foreign troops that have died out from lack of motivation.

Another would be that we just needed a little more and victory would have been ours. It's always a little more than whatever we've committed. Just a little more money, more troops, more time. It's an impossible argument to completely counter, but I'm grateful that Bush asked for more troops and more time and seems to be getting them. There will be those who will argue that we need just a little more yet, but the argument will be more hollow.

Finally, there's the approach of blaming the Iraqis. The ingrates! We gave them freedom and they chose civil war. No fault of America! We abolished their army, their police, their civil service, and much of their economy. Things didn't work out. Time for us to home.

Krauthammer is taking this approach. For him to do so, after being one of the flag wavers for this splendid little war, is morally repugnant.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

The Backwardness that dares not speak its name

Dinesh D'Souza is at it again. Ten years ago, I thought he made some intelligent points about the excesses of political correctness, but as so often happens, he ran out of bright ideas but kept talking. His editorial in the Eugene newspaper today is a case in point.

It seems that some time ago, D'Souza wrote a book identifying American liberals as one of the causes of the hatred that Muslim extremists feel towards this country. He argued that they pushed for an extension of relaxed American views towards such topics as abortion and homosexuality and that conservative Muslims interpret this as an attack on their religion.

This overlooks the tiny fact that America's official government policies on these issues are almost as "conservative" as the supposedly offended Muslims and that Europeans are far more tolerant than we are. However, none of this addresses his notion that if a country has "conservative" values, they should be respected.

He is from India, and noted that he enjoys far more freedom in America than he would had he remained at home. A telling point. When the British arrived, it was the "conservative" practice in India to burn widows on their husband's funeral pyre. It is still the "conservative" practice in parts of the Muslim world to mutilate the genitals of young girls to prevent their ever enjoying sex.

Such practices have endured for centuries and would have continued, and in some cases do continue, without pressure from the "liberals" in the West. Evidently, Mr. D'Souza feels that our obligations to the rest of the world do not extend beyond our commercial interests. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are grateful that he is incorrect.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Is Obama Black?

The question was posed by a newspaper columnist that I read online this morning. Then again, is Tiger Woods black? Is Mayor Nagin of New Orleans black? If the question is, do they trace 100% of their ancestry to black Africans, then no. If more than 50%, the answer is no for Osama and Tiger, and I have no idea about Nagin.

But on the more important question, would they be perceived as black in America, then the question is yes across the board. Next question, was Senator Biden off-base by saying Obama is the first clean and articulate black candidate? The columnist offered Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson and, remarkably, Al Sharpton as precedents.

Let's leave Shirley and Jesse alone, but Sharpton? Does no one now remember the Tawana Brawley hoax, which Al Sharpton largely orchestrated and exploited? Clean is a term that applies to more than personal hygiene.

More to the point, none of those three had any credentials for office apart from being black. Would Jesse Jackson be taken seriously if he represented farmers from Minnesota? Be serious. Obama, on the other hand, might be a candidate regardless of his color. He is articulate and thoughtful at a level with any other candidate I've seen the Democrats offer.

With Jesse Jackson, the question for any progressive minded individual was whether it was worth ignoring his shortcomings to express solidarity with the aspirations of black Americans. The answer was always no. With Obama, it's possible to consider him without any mental affirmative action fudge factor. I think that's what Biden was trying to say and it's a correct statement.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Global Warming Insurance

On the question of global warming, or "global heating" as the new politically correct phrase would have it, I'm ambivalent. On the one hand, we seem to be warming. It's perhaps due to humans. Maybe even probably due to humans. I'm still puzzled why in the first 25 years after CO2 starting rising (corresponding to the onset of World War II), there was a global cooling trend. I've never heard a good explanation of that which also blames CO2 for current warming.

I'm also wondering why there isn't more evidence out here on the Oregon Coast of the rising oceans we were told to expect. Why aren't the waves lapping over the jetties at the mouth of the Siuslaw River? Why hasn't the Columbia River started to back up and flood Astoria. Why isn't there anyone in the Pacific Northwest who has an actual problem, 20 years after the alarm was first sounded?

That said, I support a lot of conservation and research. Three reasons. One is that oil will run out sometime and we need to be ready. Another is that we get our oil from people I don't really like. It's worth something not to depend on crude oil from crude people. Finally, it's like life insurance. You don't expect to die young, but you get life insurance anyway. I'm not expecting catastrophic effects from global warming, but if we invested as much in at least slowing it down dramatically as we do in ipods and big screen TVs, we could reduce what may be a small likelihood of disaster. Seems worthwhile to me.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Neahkahnie Mountain

Neahkahnie Mountain has generated a lot of stories that you could tell your grandchildren. According to one of them, an 18th century Spanish ship wrecked near here and the survivors buried their treasure somewhere. Treasure hunters have been looking for it ever since without any luck. It may be there, but nobody has found it. A better bet is the treasure of the view from one of the turnouts in Oswald West State Park along Highway 101. Built during the Depression, they're pretty cool by themselves and the view down the Oregon Coast towards Rockaway Beach is spectacular. Manzanita is right at the bottom of the mountain. Consider Manzanita vacation rentals as a good way to spend a vacation on the Oregon Coast.