Yesterday, I was listening to the radio, (transcript and recording) and heard Gen. David Petraeus (who's acting as the President's mouthpiece, not the Army's) defending how well we're doing in Iraq. There were a few interesting changes in the official administration line:

• The main source of our problems isn't sectarian violence, it's al Qaeda. News to me, and apparently news to US forces too; CIA director Michael Hayden recently listed them as the fifth biggest issue, behind the local insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, and general anarchy. (Good CSM article here)


• He said that it's far too soon to be asking for benchmarks about the "surge," and that benchmarks aren't that meaningful anyway, because the surge has only had one month to operate in so far. That's odd; I recall the surge first being ordered this January, and the 30,000 additional troops were deployed in February. (Detailed order of battle; the new units were the 2nd BDE 82nd Airborne, 1st BDE 34th Infantry, 4th BDE 1st Infantry; they were followed by 3rd BDE 3rd Infantry in March, 4th Stryker BDE 2nd Infantry in April, 2nd BDE 3rd Infantry in May, as well as extension of deployments for various Marine units (including the 15th MEU), and deploying the USS Stennis group) So how exactly does that translate as only having had a month to prove it? (Answer: Because we said so. This administration has a disturbing tendency to make public statements that directly contradict their previous statements, and state that what they say now has always been their policy.)


• And in related amusement, Lt. Gen. Odierno gave an interesting briefing where he gave as evidence for how good things are in Baghdad that he walked a thousand meters there.
  
  Just to get this straight: Several months after we deploy 30,000 additional troops and move troops from all of Iraq into Baghdad (and thus cede control of more land back to civil war and insurgency), a 3-star general visits (with all of the attendant security precautions), and with a full armed escort, can walk a full thousand meters on foot through the defended area without being shot. This constitutes a significant improvement in the conditions in Iraq and evidence that our strategy is working.
  
  Working at what, exactly, I'm not sure, but it's apparently working.

I think I need to start playing a game with the news reports. I call it, "Kafka or Orwell?"

Edit: Here, let's play.

(I know I should be writing about politics now, but that's going to be an extremely involved post)

1. Traffic drives on the right-hand side of the road, with certain exceptions noted below.


2. Lane markings, if present, are purely advisory. Cars should drive wherever there is not already another car.


3. Turn signals and hazard lights don't convey any information, so don't use them. The horn works instead.


4. Parking occurs wherever one manages to stop the car, typically as far right as the car can get. Depending on the circumstance, this means either on the sidewalk, in the parking lane, in the rightmost traffic lane, or in some other lane of traffic.


5. Two-wheeled motorized vehicles (motorcycles, Vespas, etc) travel wherever they can get away with. This is one of the exceptions to the rule about right-hand driving.


6. Getting ahead is very important. If two lanes are about to merge (or rather, if the road is narrowing so that merging is pretty much necessary) head right and accelerate; see if you can pass the person in front of you before it's too narrow.


7. Do not let anyone get in or pass you. The repeated Prisoner's Dilemma with many players and no repeat interactions has only one stable equilibrium, and Tel Aviv is in it. If you let someone in, not only will several people force their way in, but other people will pass you from the left and the right simultaneously to get into the gap.

This post is going to be short on newsy links, because I'm a bit swamped for time right now. But just a general FYI... things are heating up in the Middle East in several important ways. So here are a bunch of disjointed snippets that may be of interest.

• In the region of Israel, there's a ramp-up to the real war for which the earlier Lebanon war was a dress rehearsal. But it's a bit less clear what form this war will take.
  
  • The internal fighting between Hamas and Fatah for control of the Palestinian territories has heated up, but I don't see any clear evidence of heavy outside involvement in it; this could be a bona fide internal matter. It does ensure that Fatah is pretty irrelevant to the outside world for the near future, although Hamas has enough capacity to continue firing a steady barrage of rockets into Israel. Israel's patience is wearing thin once again, which is why it started actually counterattacking a few days ago, and Olmert warned that nobody is immune. This is a not-subtle reference to saying that even Hamas members of the Palestinian Parliament are legitimate targets if they're actively involved in making war against Israel, which you would think would be an obvious sort of statement. Nonetheless, certain media outlets (notably Al-Jazeera and Le Monde) portray this as a horribly inflammatory act by Israel. (Odd little tidbit: The news story about Olmert's announcement kept getting revised in the English edition of Al-Jazeera, so that as the day went by the phrasing sounded more and more gentle.)
  
  
  • The internal fighting in Lebanon is heating up as well. This appears to be a fight between the official Lebanese Army (relatively speaking, good guys; they represent in some way the general Lebanese population) fighting against Sunni forces inside the refugee camps. These Sunni forces are apparently being backed by al-Qaeda, which is a bit odd because since when does al-Qaeda give a rat's ass about the Lebanese field? Something odd is up here and I haven't quite figured it out. Meanwhile, Hezbollah (which is a Shi'ite force in Lebanon, maintaining its own 20,000-strong army mostly under the control of Iran) is trying to rearm as fast as possible, with significant arms purchases from Russia in the past few months. (These are technically being sold to Syria, which means that both Syria and Hezbollah are likely to end up with them.) This includes significant quantities (100's of units) of C-802 shore-to-ship missiles.
  
  
  • Note that Syria is arming up in that story. Bashar al-Assad seems to have gotten his domestic issues sorted out reasonably well, so if war flares up he may try to take advantage of the situation by getting involved. Jordan probably won't, which means that Syria is going to try to up its creds with the Islamist world and weaken Jordan's by comparison. That would give a huge bonus to Islamist groups that have been trying to recruit in rural Jordan, at the expense of making those groups more openly opposed to the Jordanian government, and if King Abdullah isn't careful that could end up with a coup. Let's see if he knows how to handle this hot potato. (I'm guessing it won't be by fighting with Israel; his best move is probably to do some combination of cracking down on militants and providing better economics to the countryside. Which is going to be hard, so if we can arrange for financial support to Jordan for peace in the near future there's likely to be a good dividend in it. Their countryside is already one of al-Q's prime recruiting grounds)
  
  
  • Meanwhile in Israel, there's going to be a runoff for the Labor party leadership, but it looks like Ehud Barak is the favorite to win. And thank God -- he's one of the few people there whom I trust to both know how to use force and to know how to make peace. If he wins the Labor party, that means there's a good chance of forcing elections reasonably soon, or otherwise jiggering things so that he ends up as PM again. Which would be good for regional stability in all ways. (Other countries are a lot less likely to invade if they know he's in charge. Olmert as PM and that idiot Amir Peretz as Defense Minister was practically an invitation to come cause trouble)
  
  
• Meanwhile, further East...
  • The US had high-level talks with Iran about Iraq. So here's the back story: Iran has offered the US a deal, which basically amounts to the US giving Iran free rein in Iraq (approval over high-level government appointments, their military can "help maintain peace," etc), as well as not putting up any serious opposition to the Iranian nuclear program (I'm assuming that public loud statements are fine, so long as there's no actual action), in exchange for Iran making sure that the US withdrawal from Iraq goes reasonably smoothly and the country doesn't descend into chaos. Now, I don't know exactly what the US said back to this, but I did notice a few important things: First, we had high-level talks with them, which is really the biggest thing they wanted -- to be treated as a top-level regional power. Second, from the announcement it seems that we're implicitly accepting the Iraq portion of the deal, although the public phrasing of it makes it sound very nice and like both sides can claim victory. (It isn't; pay attention to what the US and Iran are actually getting out of the deal they're announcing, and you'll notice a certain asymmetry. Well, that's what happens when you get into wars you can't win.) Third, the official line is that we only discussed Iraq and not the nuke program, but I don't quite buy that -- from what I've heard of the Iranian proposal, it tied the two together, and I can't imagine any reason why Iran wouldn't want to do so. The lack of discussion may mean that the nuke issue was simply tacitly accepted by the US, or that they just really don't want to talk about the fact that they're talking in public. Which is understandable.
  
  
  • This suggests that we'll start a significant troop drawdown in Iraq in a few months, and modulo various diplomatic niceties Iran will basically start increasing its diplomatic and military presence there. This means that Iran will end up with solid control over Iraq, Syria and (through Hezbollah) Lebanon, as well as a completely ineffectualized Afghanistan, thus giving them a complete arc of control across the entire Middle East. They won't be playing a direct part in the coming war, but they're sure going to be pulling the strings behind it.
  
  
  • The US wasn't entirely stupid in these negotiations, though. As they were starting, the Fifth Fleet sent two carrier groups (the Stennis and the Nimitz) into the Persian Gulf for war games, just as a hint to Iran: We still have the military power. You're getting away with this, but that does not mean you're getting away with whatever you want.
  
  
  • Thoughts: We don't really want to fight a land war against Iran right now. Nobody's up to the challenge, and Russia will definitely be giving them equipment backing etc.; Putin has been aching for some opportunities to flex Russian power against the US. (He's been doing it a good deal against Europe with fuel supplies etc...) None of the post-Cold-War presidents have done a good job of making Russia feel that it's getting proper respect as a world power, and we're paying the price in that Russia is now determined to earn its creds by showing how much power it actually has.
    That said, we can still screw with Iran in various ways if push comes to shove. They can hide their nuclear installations, for example, but their oil installations are pretty visible. If it comes time for a military operation, one could always bomb the living hell out of those. (Drive the price of gas up, sure, but that may not be an entirely bad thing anyway.)
  
  
• On the subject of terrorism, there are a lot of vague rumors but nothing concrete. This summer would definitely be a time that various groups would be very happy to pull off some major attacks, but it's not clear if they're logistically prepped for it. Various foreign-involved or oil-related facilities in Saudi Arabia are major targets and will probably be attacked, but they can also defend themselves better than most targets. There may be attempts in Europe or even the US, but my crystal ball doesn't have enough information to say anything useful about that. So I'll keep a weather eye open and see what transpires.

So that's it for now. Lots of vague noise, little concrete. I think we're in a sort of final stage of back-room negotiation and planning before things start to really go off visibly. Late summer (July / August / September) will likely heat up considerably. For now, there are just the quiet rumblings of a large herd of heavily-armed political elephants in the distance...

Lots of interesting tidbits about the Lebanon war.

First of all, a very well-researched article by Marvin Kalb about how Hezbollah manipulated the media during the Lebanon war. It gets the key point: Israel is running an open society, and so the media could hear all about disputes, problems, etc. Hezbollah is a secret society; the journalists only got to see what Hezbollah wanted them to see. And that was a bunch of peaceful Lebanese getting bombed by the Israelis. They painted an almost entirely false picture of what was going on, but because journalists had no real opportunity to investigate further, they got to completely control media presentation of the war worldwide. Link from sy4, who has some more good discussion. (This article is an excellent read for anyone interested in media manipulation in general - highly recommended!)

However, media manipulation or not, Olmert (Israel's PM) is in trouble. He commissioned a blue-ribbon panel to analyze Israel's handling of the war. Their results basically say that the civilian and senior military staff fucked up severely, endangering national security, by doing things like entering a war without a clear strategy, letting Hezbollah get away with all sorts of things, exhibiting insufficient creativity in military operations, etc. It's very damning, and the Israeli public generally agrees with it: there was a rally tonight in Tel Aviv with 100,000 protesters calling on Olmert to resign.

My prediction: Olmert will make a lot of noise saying how he shouldn't resign. In a few days, his defense minister will resign (and about time, too -- I still have no idea why that half-wit got the minstry of defense). Unless that magically satisfies everyone (it probably won't) Olmert will have to resign, since if he doesn't there's going to be a vote of no confidence, new elections, and his party is going to get creamed. If he does resign, the foreign minister Tzipi Livni will become PM, and she'll have a few months to desperately try to restore confidence in this government. I'd put her odds of success around 1 in 3. If it fails, there will be elections a few months afterwards, which Likud and Israel Beiteinu are going to do very well in. That probably means that Netanyahu will come back as PM -- unless, gods forbid, Israel Beiteinu does really well, and Avigdor Lieberman becomes PM instead.

In all my years, I never thought I would miss Ariel Sharon this much. Where are the old lions when we need them?

Bush affirms his "strong backing and support" for Gonzales. Let us hope this is the latest equivalent of the "heckuva job" kiss of death. (For those who haven't been following the news: Congress is investigating the firing of 8 US attorneys, apparently as part of a scheme to force prosecutors to actively investigate charges against Democrats, especially ones in the midst of reelection campaigns, and ignore charges against Republicans. The White House's explanations of this have shifted on a day-to-day basis, but at this point it's become clear based on internal memos that Rove and Gonzales were both intimately involved in the process, and the process was very explicitly based on the attorneys not being "loyal Bushies." (The words of a memo) Gonzales' chief of staff has already resigned, and the cover-up alone is likely to bring various charges of perjury)

Interesting editorial by Nicholas Kristof on Cheney and Iran (requires real subscription) The gist is that Cheney's actions as VP have been so systematically towards Iran's benefit (deposing the governments of all of Iran's chief enemies, dismantling the Ba'ath party and installing a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad, etc) that it brings up questions about his loyalties. Brad Hicks has an editorial suggesting much the same about our President, titled "George Bush: #2 in al Qaeda?," which requires no special login and frankly is somewhat better written than Kristof's.

Now, both of these editorials are using the allegation as a rhetorical device, saying at the end that they don't really believe that either of these men are traitors. But when the number and scale of derelictions of duty and malfeasances of power (such as, say, the deliberate use of federal prosecutors to manipulate elections by investigating only political enemies and shielding friends) exceeds a certain threshold, at what point does intent become irrelevant? Is there a notion of "willful blindness" in betrayal?

From the news today: In response to a mounting scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors for failing to prosecute enough Democratic candidates and political targets, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said that "mistakes were made," presumably by space aliens or some other third party.

Halliburton, the contractor formerly run by now-VP Dick Cheney, and recipient of over $25B in no-bid Iraq contracts (several of which are under investigation for things like fraudulent cost overruns) has announced that it plans to move its corporate headquarters to Dubai. Predictably, people are not amused.

And Israel recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and wearing nothing but bondage gear and a ball gag in the embassy complex. (You know, Israeli politics is just fascinating some days...)

Check out Israel's entry to this year's Eurovision, Push the Button. It's disturbingly catchy. Lyrics (in a combination of English, French and Hebrew) are here. The runner-up, Salaam Salami, is also pretty... um... extraordinary.

(For those of you who have never seen the Eurovision song contest before, yes, pretty much all of the music is that bad. But of course, there's controversy -- the contest organizers want to ban Israel's entry because of "inappropriate political content." This link also has translated lyrics)

Since nobody seems to have translated Salaam Salami, ( here"s a go at itCollapse )

Yes, it's political. And yes, it's about sausage. We live in a strange world.

You may have heard rumors that the US and Israel are planning a joint strike against Iran. I don't have time to read through all the sources now and check on the rumors, but we're definitely building up military strength in the Persian Gulf. Short summary of possibilities:

• This is just some saber-rattling to point out to Iran that it should, in fact, be thinking more seriously about negotiation. If so we're in luck, because that would be a not entirely stupid move. Of course, it's no good if you're not willing to follow through, but that's a legitimate negotiation tactic.


• These forces are actually going to be used in Iraq. That could go well with option 1.


• We're planning some limited sort of operation, or to act in support of an Israeli operation. Possibilities include bombing selected targets or even doing highly targeted ground operations against them. I would have to spend a lot more time analyzing data, and for that matter analyze highly classified data, to get a sense of whether this is workable or not. It's very risky.


• Our President has decided to make the First Classic Blunder for a third time in a row, and has no understanding of the relative military strengths of the force he just put in the Gulf and the Iranian military, nor of the consequences of turning Iran into another Iraq. Normally I would rule this out under "even he isn't that stupid," but the past few years have taught me the folly of betting on that.

Anyway, keep your eyes open. If I have time I'll sniff more.

(And thanks to autumnflames for pointing me at the recent changes -- I've not been paying proper attention to political news lately)

A friend recently brought up an interesting point in a thread: the recent Congressional non-binding protest vote against the war in Iraq was a pretty half-assed (in fact, kind of cowardly) measure; it doesn't actually require anyone to do anything. But there's an alternative.

The War Powers Act requires that the Congress explicitly authorize any use of force, either by a declaration of war or other explicit statutory authorization; in the absence of such authorization, the President is required to report to the Congress every 60 days, and the Congress must explicitly (by passing a law) authorize a further 60 days of operations, or the President is legally required to withdraw forces. The Authorization for Use of Force in Iraq is such an explicit statutory authorization.

But what if the Congress were to pass a bill rescinding said authorization, and returning to the 60-day period required by the WPA? It's not clear from the text of the WPA that such a rescindment is possible, but nor is it clear that it isn't, and I think that given a clear Congressional intent to do so the courts would agree that it is within their power (and the spirit of the WPA) to do so. It could be drafted to restart the War Powers Act clock at the effective date of the bill, so that the President would be granted 60 days' authorization immediately, but would need to re-apply at the end of that.

This would give the Congress direct, non-financial control over the conduct of the war: they would have the power, by simple non-passage of a bill, to "terminate any use of United States armed forces." They would have a regular review authority, so they wouldn't be required to simply withdraw immediately or later; in fact, they could even negotiate directly with the President about terms such as when withdrawals would occur. (Hopefully they would have common sense in not trying to micromanage a war, but I suspect that Congress' innate avoidance of personal responsibility for controversial things will protect us from that)

What do people think about this? Should we start trying to prod our representatives to introduce such a measure?

Hi everyone, lots of significant news stories today. Top of the line: the new Int'l Panel on Climate Change report is out. Or at least, the Summary for Policymakers; their web site is such an utter mess that I can't find the actual report anywhere. Haven't read it yet, will post once I do. (Maybe to climatepapers) Here's pretty good news coverage from NYT. However, this report needs to be taken with a very serious grain of salt: Apparently they caved to political pressure and seriously damped the prediction about sea level rise, to basically assume that nothing bad ever happens to an ice sheet ever again. This is unfortunately total nonsense since ice sheets have been collapsing all over the place, and so it means that a lot of the predictions in this document are probably very off -- in the conservative direction.

Next story, more fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Palestinians fall deeper into civil unrest. Subtext of this: After Arafat died, there was no central strongman. Hamas has been thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian agents and is working on its own little agenda, which is part of why it started shelling Israel a while ago and kidnapping soldiers (they did it before Hezbollah, when the latest Lebanese war started! These groups work in sync now) without bothering to ask the Palestinians if that was a good idea. And Fatah, Yassir Arafat's old party, specializes mostly in corruption, despite what appear to be good intentions by its current leader Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah has the presidency and Hamas the parliament, and both have their own armed forces. So the two factions of Palestinian government are busily killing each other. If it weren't for the fact that this is wholly destructive of any remaining bits of functioning civil society and infrastructure in the Palestinian territories, and thus one of the few ways left to make life systematically worse for the average Palestinian, I would say that these batch of idiots shooting one another is the best thing they could do with their time.

And yet another report on Iraq indicating that the place is a mess and deteriorating rapidly. (Shocking!) On the same day, a suicide attack in southern Iraq killed 60 and wounded 150.

OK, for anyone who hasn't figured this out yet, something important to understand. Majority rule is not the defining feature of democracy; there have been plenty of dictatorships that had the support of the majority. The key feature is protection of the rights of the minority. This is the center of the "deal" in democracy: when group X loses an election, they relinquish power, because they trust that the group taking power will not use that power to, say, brutally kill group X, or take everything X owns, or change the laws so that X is never again allowed to be in power. Without that level of trust, any election is simply a sham. In Iraq, there has never been this basic level of trust, because the basic level of political alliance is to tribe (and sect, and so on). A Sunni would have to be out of his mind to vote for a Shi'ite candidate, or even to let a Shi'ite candidate take power, because they know that the Shi'ites would have no compunction at all about killing them if they had the instruments of power, and vice-versa. In a situation like this, hopping for democracy is utterly ridiculous; civil war is the only possibility, ended either by one group seizing power forcibly over the others or by stable partition.

Please, please, please, don't forget that. Having elections does not make you a democracy any more than going to a garage makes you a car.

OK, back to work for me.

(PS: Sorry, I'm just linking to the NYT stories today; these are being covered everywhere, check your favorite news outlet for details. Except for the climate report, which I couldn't find anywhere at all on Fox News' web site; what a shock)