AN “ATTRACTIVE” DEMOCRAT for 2008.

BAD NEWS at Iraq the Model.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON HAS MORE on the New York Times shareholder revolt.

YEAH, BLOGGING’S BEEN LIGHT TODAY — I’ve been busy with family and work stuff. Sorry.

AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (free link), a debate on whether bloggers can make money.

THE MAN WHO WAS MISTAKEN FOR A VAGINA: Sounds like an Oliver Sacks book, but no.

RUMSFELD-O-RAMA: Max Boot writes:

As it happens, I agree with their advice. As I first said on this page two years ago, I too think that Rumsfeld should go. But I am nevertheless troubled by the Revolt of the Generals, which calls into question civilian control of the armed forces. In our system, defense secretaries are supposed to fire generals, not vice versa.

The retired generals, who claim to speak for their active-duty brethren, premise their uprising on two complaints. First, many (though not all) say we should not have gone into Iraq in the first place. Former Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold calls it “the unnecessary war,” and former Gen. Anthony Zinni claims that “containment worked remarkably well.”

That is a highly questionable judgment, and one that is not for generals to make. They are experts in how to wage war, not when to wage it. If we had listened to their advice, we would not have gone into Kuwait or Bosnia or Kosovo.

Read the whole thing, which is not very encouraging for reasons that have little to do with Rumsfeld or the generals. Ralph Peters, on the other hand, is defending the generals: “If serving officers can’t criticize public figures, neither should they offer endorsements. Secretary Rumsfeld notoriously cracks down on internal dissent, but he hasn’t chided Gen. Pace for his on-camera flattery. If you’re looking for the politicization of the officer corps, look no further.” There’s much more.

Richard Brookhiser, meanwhile, is defending Rumsfeld:

In the soft days before 9/11, Mr. Rumsfeld came to the Pentagon intent on transformation—making the military more high-tech, breaking down the barriers to inter-service cooperation. This is an old fight, for the Pentagon, like any corporation, must evolve to live; if it doesn’t, it becomes General Motors. Tail-kickers like Mr. Rumsfeld naturally acquire enemies, for reasons bad (people don’t like rocking the boat) and good (maybe the boat sails well as it is).

The transformed military toppled the Taliban government in quick time, using Special Forces on horseback and pilotless drones. Point to Mr. Rumsfeld. In Iraq, Baghdad fell in three weeks, but the war against the insurgency has lasted three years. Point to his critics? Mr. Rumsfeld’s great failing, in their eyes, was not sending in enough troops. If we had had more boots on the ground, so the indictment runs, the insurgency either would not have blossomed or could have been crushed. But this too is an issue with two sides. More boots can mean more firepower. But they can also mean more targets. More boots would also have meant a draft, which would mean more neophyte troops.

Our goal was always not to add Iraq to the American Raj, but to turn the country over to a stable, non-monstrous government. This required, first, forming such a government, and second, seeing that it could defend itself.

Read the whole thing here, too.

UPDATE: A reader sends this defense of Rumsfeld:

The only thing that matters to me is that the generals–be they retired or active, Iraq veterans or not–claiming that more troops in Iraq would solve all the problems are dead wrong. Rumsfeld is right. More troops would have inflamed Islamic passions, created a disincentive among the Iraqi Security Forces to improve, cost the U.S. much more money, and–most importantly–cost us many more casualties.

Rumsfeld knew this, and he knew it by studying the last time a great western power fought a protracted Islamic insurgency, which was the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962).

The French had 500,000 troops in Algeria, which at that time had a population of 9 million. If you scale the troop-to-citizen ratio up to match Iraq’s population, that would mean we’d need 1.5 million troops in Iraq. We currently have 138,000.

The French lost 18,000 troops killed over an eight-year period, or 2250 a year. Again, if you scale it up to Iraq ratios, it would be 6750 a year. We’re losing about 700 a year, and that figure is falling.

Between 350,000 and 1.5 million Algerians were killed. To scale those figures up to Iraq, multiply them by three. So far in Iraq, about 32,000 have died, including terrorists.

The French used a policy of collective punishment in Algeria: If a village harbored insurgents, the village was bombed from the air or hit with artillery strikes. The French also tortured suspects to death, rounded people up by the thousands and shot them without trial, and put about 2 million in concentration camps. And they still lost the war.

With less than 10% of the troops (proportionally) that France had in Algeria, and with a policy not of conquest but of partnership, look what we’ve accomplished. More importantly, look at the slaughter we’ve avoided.

Something to thank Rumsfeld–not the generals–for.

I’ve been skeptical of the “more boots on the ground” argument myself, but I’m a law professor, not a general. Or a Secretary of Defense.

GRAND ROUNDS is up! So is the Carnival of the Feminists and the Carnival of Education. More carnivals at BlogCarnival.com.

HEART DISEASE: More common in women, and more often misdiagnosed, than most people realize according to this report in the New York Times.

We had a podcast on this a while back.

AN ANTI-TERRORISM VICTORY for the Justice Department:

Seven Los Angeles area residents indicted on accusations of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for a terror organization lost a federal court challenge in a bid to prove their innocence.

The seven wanted to challenge a determination by the State Department that a group they funded was a terror organization.

The seven allegedly provided money to the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which “participated in various terrorist activities against the Iranian regime” and “carried out terrorist activities with the support of Saddam Hussein’s regime,” according to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The San Francisco-based appeals court in 2004 first ruled against the seven and on Monday let the decision stand without a rehearing.

I’d be interested in seeing a list of U.S. terror convictions since 9/11. I haven’t seen anything like that lately.

BAD TIMING for Michael Wolff. Wolff’s splashy anti-McClellan piece is now kind of obsolete, as McClellan steps down.

People are already suggesting replacements.

LAWPROF ALAN HIRSCH has a website on false confessions. These happen more often than you might think, especially where the defendants are young or not very bright.

WHEN HU JINTAO COMES TO AMERICA, I hope that various media folks covering the visit will pay a little attention to the plight of imprisoned Chinese blogger Hao Wu.

MY TCS DAILY COLUMN IS UP: “Bionic humanity is coming, not with the bang of a huge, secret government program of the Steve Austin variety, but on the little cat-feet of a collection of new developments.”

IT WAS INEVITABLE, I GUESS: U.S. Generals Call For Resignation of Media Leaders.

UPDATE: Related post here.

WHAT WOULD ROBERT HEINLEIN DO? Cory Doctorow reviews John Varley’s Red Lightning and calls it “The book Robert Heinlein would have written about GW Bush’s America.”

Tensor, on the other hand, looks at Heinlein’s actual wartime correspondence and thinks Doctorow is wrong: “I’m not sure whether the law Heinlein wrote about is still on the books (I hope not), and my purpose is not to accuse Doctorow of somehow damaging the morale of active-duty military personnel. I mean only to point out that Heinlein circa 1942 seemed perfectly comfortable with a law ‘specifically intended…to restrict the freedom of speech of civilians in wartime,’ a law far more directly restrictive of civil liberties than any part of the Patriot Act. What’s more, Heinlein apparently supported this law strongly enough to admonish a friend in private correspondence not to break it.”

He concludes: “Trying to posthumously enlist Heinlein (or any dead author for that matter) in some modern political cause strikes me as a dubious enterprise.”

I think that’s right, though it’s often an almost irresistibly tempting one. At any rate, I’ve read Red Lightning, and regardless of the Bush point (which is strained, but at least somewhat plausible) it is an excellent Heinlein-style junior novel, the sort of “entry-level science fiction” that John Scalzi is always calling for more of.

MR. HU, TEAR DOWN THIS FIREWALL:

The visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to the United States this week is an ideal moment for a message to be delivered to the Chinese leadership class – that if the Chinese nation wishes to take its place in the international community, it must allow the Chinese people to participate in the global internet community. Currently the Chinese government is trying to operate a national intranet, monitoring and filtering the links between China and the rest of the world with what has been dubbed the “Great Firewall of China”, and also monitoring internal content with a force of 30,000 thought-police.

Excellent point.

CARTOON JIHAD, meet cash flow jihad.

MERYL YOURISH on Palestinian bombs:

Shrapnel is what killed Phillip Balhasan, who stayed alive long enough to realize his children had survived, and to hug them tightly before he collapsed.

But even this is not enough for the terrorists. They also soak the shrapnel in rat poison, because it causes hemorrhaging — victims may bleed to death before they can get to the hospital.

Remember all of this, when you hear the world tell Israel to “use restraint” in responding to this attack. Remember all of this, when you read about the innocent metal shop owners who insist their shops were only making nails and screws for construction purposes.

Remember all of this, when Israel is the nation that is demonized by the blind, hateful people who wear checked kaffiyehs at anti-war protests, and call Israel an “apartheid state” for building a separation barrier — to keep out the monsters who would use bombs like I have just described.

Remember this, when you look at the pictures of the results of the bombing, and notice the thousands of dents in the metal surrounding the bombing area — the mark of the ball-bearings and other metal shrapnel.

And remember that these are the people that Sami Al-Arian has admitted supporting.

UPDATE: There’s a discussion in the comments as to whether the rat poison claim is true. This Slate article says it’s not.

WHEN MINDLESS SNARK SUBSTITUTES FOR THOUGHT: Jesse Walker quotes something I wrote in 1999 about how “wars initiated essentially on presidential whim” would have horrified the Framers, and it’s supposed, I guess, to indicate some change in my views.

Er, except that war on Al Qaeda, and the invasion of Iraq, were explicitly authorized by Congress, in declarations of war and everything. After, you know, an actual attack on the United States.

A pretty lame effort on Jesse’s part — really, a cheap shot — but typical of what passes for antiwar analysis, even among libertarians today, I’m afraid. As are the comments that follow. Jeez.

UPDATE: Kjell Hagen emails:

I understand the Kosovo military action in 1999 was not so popular in the US, I don´t know what you thought about it. However, those 35 days of bombing from the air saved a people, the Kosovo Albanians. Kosovo would have been Darfur or Rwanda without this military action. Although it is a UN-chaos today, it is a lot better than the alternative. USA and NATO did the right thing, and the Kosovo Albanians are very grateful for it.

And I supported that bombing, though I had doubts as to whether it would work. (It was Wesley Clark, not me, who called it illegal.) I did — and do — favor getting Congressional declarations of war whenever possible, though one reason I have done so, that it would discourage sniping later in the conflict by forcing people to go on the record, has been only imperfectly borne out by recent events.

I love the term “UN-chaos,” too, as its meaning is, alas, immediately clear. Meanwhile, reader B. de Galvez emails:

Speaking of old quotes, it never hurts to be reminded of the railing about Clinton’s “genocide”, claiming sanctions killed 1.5 million Iraqis (500,000 to 700,000 of them little tykes).

Indymedia produced this video at the time of the 2000 Democratic Convention. The Iraq section starts at about 36:36.

Link

As so many repeatedly have asked, why aren’t these people rejoicing over the countless lives that have been spared by Saddam’s involuntary retirement?

The video wouldn’t play for me, but the point certainly holds.

MORE: Walker responds that I have so changed my views. Er, no. He also says that the Congressional declarations were not declarations of war. Actually, they were. But even if one were to accept what I think is his argument — that they were authorizations to use military force against a named enemy, but not technically declarations of war — they surely undercut any claim that we went to war on President Bush’s “whim.”

I’m not really sure what point Walker was trying to make in his post anyway. That — as some of his commenters libellously suggest — I’m on the White House payroll? (Er, no again). That I hated Clinton back then, but love Bush now? No, in fact I co-wrote a book generally regarded as a Clinton defense, though I was pretty disappointed in him by the end. But I didn’t let my disappointment with Clinton turn into a hatred of all his policies, the way that some people seem to have let their dislike of Bush turn into a belief that all of Bush’s policies — and anyone who defends any of them — have become evil. Indeed, regular readers of InstaPundit will see that my references to Bush and the Republicans are not exactly uniformly positive. (And I have managed to praise Clinton when I thought he deserved it, too.) One would think that libertarians, as Walker claims to be, would be less anxious to divide the world up into teams, but that seems not to be the case, alas.

And, yes, rather than responding to this I probably should have read the post below again, and taken it to heart. . . .

MORE STILL: A reader emails that the Iraq and Al Qaeda declarations were “informal” rather than “formal” declarations of war. This distinction, which has to do with the (fictional) notion that we don’t go to war since the U.N. Charter was adopted, isn’t really relevant for U.S. constitutional law. If you have an identified enemy, a casus belli, and an authorization for the President to go after them with the military, you’ve got a declaration of war. The Hamdan opinion responds to the claim of no formal declaration in essentially these terms. (And, lest I be accused of changing my views on this topic, I remember having this very discussion with John Hart Ely back when we were both visiting professors at U.Va, over ten years ago. As I recall, he agreed.)

Since people seem interested, click “read more” for an excerpt from an article by Ely with which I was, and am, in substantial agreement. It’s “KUWAIT, THE CONSTITUTION, AND THE COURTS: TWO CHEERS FOR JUDGE GREENE,” 8 Constitutional Commentary 1, 1991. But here’s the gist:

Judge Harold Greene’s decision in Dellums et al. v. Bush was plainly right in its central proposition, that (except in the event of a “sudden attack” upon the United States) the Constitution places unambiguously in Congress the authority to decide whether the nation goes to war. (Once war is congressionally authorized–note that there has never been a requirement that such authorization actually be labeled a “declaration of war,” only that it be clear–authority to manage it then passes to the President in his role as “Commander in Chief.”)

(emphasis added) Click “read more” for a couple of other bits, but it should be clear that Walker is without basis saying that the notion that the Iraq and Al Qaeda resolutions were declarations of war is bizarre. (Downside to my position: I agree with Joe Biden — upside, I agree not only with Ely but with Eugene Volokh. I hope Walker’s writings on pirate radio are better researched.)

Some comments here and here.

(more…)

WHY READING NASTY BLOG COMMENTS (and blogs) can be bad for you.

EUROPE AND TERRORISM: Victor Davis Hanson predicted that Europe would crack down quietly, and now it’s coming true:

Four and a half years after the Sept. 11 attacks, and after deadly bombings in Madrid and London since then, the troubled debate within Western democracies over how to weigh security against basic freedoms has only grown and spread, as the legal tools for dealing with terrorism suspects multiply.

The clashing of priorities has been clear in the United States, in the domestic debates preceding the renewal of the Patriot Act, and in the international uproar over prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

But many European governments, including some that had criticized the United States for its antiterrorism measures, have been extending their own surveillance and prosecution powers. Officials, lawyers and human rights experts say that Europe, too, is experiencing a slow erosion of civil liberties as governments increasingly put the prevention of possible terrorist actions ahead of concerns to protect the rights of people suspected, but not convicted, of a crime.

As I’ve suggested before, perhaps Bush should mollify his critics by promising to take a “more European” approach.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Blogger LawHawk offers a defense of Trent Lott’s railroad-to-nowhere project. I’m not sure I’m convinced, but given that I’ve just come to dislike Trent Lott in general, I feel that I should go out of my way to link suggestions that I’m wrong about this project.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Mark Hessey emails: “Hmm, before I clicked thru I was skeptical as well, but I came away thinking LawHawk makes a pretty good argument.” Reader Christian Lane thinks that LawHawk’s argument underscores Trent Lott’s problems:

I think what this shows is that Trent Lott has become an ineffective advocate for his constituents’ needs. The relocation of the railway may be a good idea or even necessary, but Mr. Lott’s support for it obscures the merits. If his first priority were serving the needs of the citizens of Mississippi, he would either (i) take a strong stand against pork, including specific pork for Mississippi, to (hopefully) demonstrate that he is against pork, but the railway project isn’t pork or (ii) step aside. I doubt that will happen and I think the failure to do so implies that Mr. Lott’s real motivations as a Senator are not necessarily in line with the needs of the citizens of Mississippi.

Ouch!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brent Ramsey emails:

Have to give you some input on the CSX railroad project supported by Senators Lott and Cochran. I lived in Long Beach, MS for 23 years. That project has been on the books at least that long and longer. The way that railway crosses the towns of Ocean Springs, Biloxi, Gulfport, Long Beach, and Pass Christian with literally dozens of road crossing many of which have no physical barriers, just a warning sign for a railroad crossing kills dozens of Mississipians each year. It is a worthwhile project to protect lives and to improve rail transportation across the MS gulf coast. I retired and left MS in 2002 and now live in western NC so I have no vested interest just an opinion that it is a worthwhile project and really is not correctly described as pork.

Hmm. Well, it may be worthwhile, though that still leaves open the question of whether federal taxpayers should pay for it. And, even if that’s true, a project that Mississippi has been trying to get for so long shouldn’t be funded as Katrina relief, much less snuck into a war appropriations bill. It should stand, or fall, on its own merits. One characteristic of “pork” is that it avoids the normal budgetary scrutiny. That seems to be what Lott has been trying to do here.

Mississippi reader Lisa (last name withheld on request) writes:

If I did not know the local history of this project, I might think differently than I do. I just think it stinks to use the worst disaster in American history to get funding for a local pet project, when so many people are still so devastated.

I live on the Ms. Gulf Coast . . . Gulfport has wanted a new east west corridor for decades and could not come up with the money to fund it.

Relocating the CSX railroad and using the right of way for a new road will not take all of the traffic off of Hwy 90, the casino’s are located there.

So Hwy 90 will still be a vital road, you are just adding another road to be rebuilt in case of another Katrina.

And I could mention that the railroad acted as a dam preventing the devastating storm surge from going even further inland.

The project has enough merit that Gulfport has been looking into it for years. They have just come up with a clever way for you (the federal taxpayers) to pay for it.

Sounds like pork to me.

Me too.

MICHAEL FUMENTO is blogging from Iraq.

A SHAREHOLDERS’ REVOLT at The New York Times:

That seems at least as much of a revolt as six retired generals calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation, no? Except that Morgan Stanley is still on active duty. It’s a mutiny! … P.S.: Morgan Stanley noted that “[D]espite significant underperformance, management’s total compensation is substantial and has increased considerably over this period.”

Heh.

UPDATE: Here’s much more on the subject from corporate-governance expert Professor Bainbridge, who observes in passing: “Sulzberger’s management has not been particularly beneficial for the company’s other shareholders.”

And another reader thinks it’s gutsy of Morgan Stanley to go public, since it’s at risk for negative coverage from the Times. Surely the NYT wouldn’t stoop to something like that.