Things are looking bad right now for the GOP in the Mississippi special election, says Terence Samuel. And if the Republicans are having trouble in Mississippi, you can easily imagine, he adds, how anxious they're beginning to feel about their chances in November.
Jonathan Chait mavels at Hillary Clinton's recent recourse to conservative populism.
You'll see that Mr. Chait nicely characterizes conservative populism as "a way of exploiting the grievances it identifies without redressing them." Hence the constant, mostly futile culture wars.
From time to time I've blogged the work of Andrew Bacevich, a former soldier who is now a professor at Boston University. I become aware of him when he published The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. I highly recommend this book.
Prof. Bacevich recently published an article that contains several trenchant paragraphs on the surge in Iraq. It's true, he says, that there has been some reduction in the violence, but the desired political reconciliation hasn't come to pass:
Unfortunately, partial success in reducing the level of violence has not translated into any substantial political gains. Recall that the purpose of the surge was not to win the war in a military sense. Gen. David Petraeus never promised victory. He and any number of other senior officers have assessed the war as militarily unwinnable. On this point, the architects of the surge were quite clear: the object of the exercise was not to impose our will on the enemy but to facilitate political reconciliation among Iraqis.A year later, signs of genuine reconciliation are few. In an interview with the Washington Post less than a month ago, General Petraeus said that "no one" in the U.S. government "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation." While it may be nice that the Kurds have begun to display the Iraqi flag alongside their own, to depict such grudging concessions as evidence of an emerging national identity is surely to grasp at straws.
So although the level of violence has subsided somewhat, the war remains essentially stalemated. Iraq today qualifies only nominally as a sovereign nation-state. It has become a dependency of the United States, unable to manage its own affairs or to provide for the well-being of its own people. As recent events in Basra have affirmed, the Iraqi army, a black hole into which the Pentagon has poured some $22 billion in aid and assistance, still cannot hold its own against armed militias.
What are the costs of our continuing involvement? What are the benefits?
The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation.What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.
Measured in those terms, the war has long since failed. Rather than showcasing our ability to transform the Greater Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom has demonstrated just the opposite. Using military power as an instrument for imprinting liberal values in this part of the world has produced a failed state while fostering widespread antipathy toward the United States.
Rather than demonstrating our ability to eliminate emerging threats swiftly, decisively, and economically—Saddam Hussein’s removal providing an object lesson to other tyrants tempted to contest our presence in the Middle East—the Iraq War has revealed the limits of U.S. power and called into question American competence. The Bush Doctrine hasn't worked. Saddam is long gone, but we're stuck. Rather than delivering decisive victory, preventive war has landed us in a quagmire.
The abject failure of the Freedom Agenda and the Bush Doctrine has robbed the Iraq War of any strategic rationale. The war continues in large part because of our refusal to acknowledge and confront this loss of strategic purpose.
Well, according to Prof. Bacevich, there are, it seems, no benefits to our current policy.
If you look at this slightly older article, you'll find him arguing cogently that our foreign policy is no longer buttressed by a coherent set of principles for the use of military force.
At the very end of the article about the surge, you'll see that Prof. Bacevich is about to publish a new book entitled The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. I moused around a bit but couldn't find a publisher's webpage for the book. So, for the time being, you'll have to make do with the Amazon page. Presumably, Prof. Bacevich's new book will address the question of the principles that should guide our use of military force.
By now you must have heard of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned and raped his daughter Elisabeth for twenty-four years. If you haven't, the Wikipedia page will give you the details.
I figured that if I rolled through my bookmarks for Theodore Dalrymple's favorite haunts, I would find his commentary on the case. After all, how could he resist? My diligence was rewarded when I found this article in the New English Review. Dalrymple sensibly concludes that we shouldn't expect ourselves to be able to understand why someone does such terrible things.
Take a look at this article by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post. President Bush has become so irrelevant that the various media outlets are hardly bothering to cover events at the White House.
According to Mike Musgrove of The Washingon Post, spam was created on May 3, 1978, when Gary Thuerk sent the first unsolicited commercial email. Ah, yes, another date which will live in infamy.
David Margolick reviews Benny Morris's 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.
The American Prospect has published an excerpt from Rick Perlstein's forthcoming Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
L. Josh Bivens and John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute look at the feebleness of the economic expansion of 2001-2007.
Here are two eye-opening paragraphs from an article by Lawrence Mishel, Sylvia Allegretto, and Sean Corcoran:
We learned, in our recent analysis of pay scales for professionals, something that won’t surprise teachers, parents, school administrators, and, we would hope, education policy experts: Public school teachers earn considerably less than comparably educated and experienced people, and less than people in occupations with similar educational and skill requirements, such as accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, members of the clergy, and personnel officers.Compared with these professionals, teachers earn, on average, about $154 less a week — or 14.3 percent less — than people in these other learned, but not unusually lucrative, professions. This teacher pay penalty, in effect in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, ranges from more than 25 percent in 15 states (Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) to less than 10 percent in only five (Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming). Nowhere in this country, however, do teachers earn more than those comparably educated.
This is the sort of thing that anyone actually involved in education already knows. I don't mean the exact figures, of course, but rather the general discrepancy between salaries for comparable levels of education. The rest of the article contains more statistics worth pondering.
Louis Uchitelle looks at the decline of the $20-an-hour wage. This is ominous, he says, since such a decline is equivalent to a decline of the middle-class.
Leslie H. Gelb reviews Aram Roston's The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi.
More: This link will take you to a web site devoted to the book.
Here's an interesting suggestion from Gerard Baker concerning the never-ending struggle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:
There's a popular view among Democrats and the media establishment that the reason for the party's current disarray is that it just happens to have two most extraordinary candidates: talented, attractive, and in their gender and race, excitingly new. But there's an alternative explanation, which I suspect the voters have grasped rather better than their necromancers in the media. Both are losers.The longer the Democratic race goes on, the more obvious it appears that each is deeply, perhaps ineradicably flawed.
Mr. Baker's entire column can be found here.
It's the end of shopping, argues Robert J. Samuelson. That is, he says, consumer spending will no longer be the "reliable engine of growth" that it once was.
This AP article reports that a new genetic study indicates that the number of human beings may have shrunk to roughly 2,000 about 70,000 years ago. The culprit? Drought.
Historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler has renewed his calls for an annotated edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Since any historically important text, however despicable its contents, is worthy of serious study, this seems like a good idea to me.
Paul Waldman looks at the blue collar chic that is all the rage among the conservative media elite.
Barry Miles explains the origins of Paul McCartney's "Paperback Writer".
In two earlier posts — here and here — I took note of the publication of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes's The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.
In this interview Mr. Stiglitz talks not only about the cost of the war but also about other pressing economic matters.
Blake Hounshell explains why the surge doesn't matter.
Former German President Roman Herzog fears that Germany is becoming a pensioner democracy, in which the older generations plunder the younger ones.
The History News Network conducted an informal survey of historians, asking them to assess the Bush presidency. It seems that 61% of respondents rated the Bush presidency the worst in U.S. history.
The surge in Iraq has succeeded, says Matthew Yglesias — succeeded, that is, in handing off the problem of Iraq to Bush's successor.
Terry Teachout reviews Kenneth Hamilton's After the Golden Age: Romantic Painism and Modern Performance.
Ed Wallace argues that there is no gas shortage. The current high prices, he says, are primarily a consequence of speculation in the futures market.
Character-driven election coverage, argues Paul Waldman, comes from the fact that most campaign reporters are experts on politics, not experts on the issues.
If you live in select big cities and need a four-pawed friend for a while, you can always rent some canine companionship.
Economist Robert J. Samuelson argues that there's no need to panic — at least not right now.
Liana Fox of the Economic Policy Institute looks at how prison populations are straining state budgets.
Here's an eye-opening sentence from Ms. Fox's report: "In the past 20 years, total state spending on higher education has increased 21% (from $60.3 billion to $72.9 billion, in 2007 dollars), while corrections spending has more than doubled, increasing 127% (from $19.4 billion to $44.1 billion)."
Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism, explains why radical Islam won't be going away anytime soon.
