Alex Jacobson 3.0

Sammier observes that many people believe the Initiative Hypothesis: “The rate of both technological and material progress within a society inevitably increases with increasing freedom.” He makes 2 interesting arguments:

1. low tech civilizations make softer/more-attractive targets than higher tech ones. viz. once the US shifted to a war footing, Al Queada et al decided it was easier to attack soft targets in Muslim countries rather than local US military or distant US civilians.

2. Small sates may be easier to police than larger states.

I would add that this would cause the local population to find extremist groups risky and might cause them to preemptively stop/kill them before they can become a danger to those around them. Notably, this option is probably only available to democracies that can afford to have citizens free enough to take this sort of initiative and very well run dictatorships with police states effective enough to catch all conspiracies.

Multiple friends sent me links to this hit-piece by Ron Susskind in the New York Times Magazine. It made them feel like they were fact-based people but that the crazy regligious guy who runs our country doesn’t. Unfortunately, they do not appear to recognize that it is they are who the victims here.

After reading the first page and realizing that it was simply a hit-piece, I decided to skip randomly around to look for any actual facts, evidence, etc. I started in the middle of page 6 and found:

Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually every leading military analyst seems to believe that rather than using Afghan proxies, we should have used more American troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora.

Of course, anyone who actually pays attention to these things knows that Suskind basically reprising Kerry’s lies from the debate. Here is Gen. Tommy Franks on the issue:

On more than one occasion, Senator Kerry has referred to the fight at Tora Bora in Afghanistan during late 2001 as a missed opportunity for America. He claims that our forces had Osama bin Laden cornered and allowed him to escape. How did it happen? According to Mr. Kerry, we “outsourced” the job to Afghan warlords. As commander of the allied forces in the Middle East, I was responsible for the operation at Tora Bora, and I can tell you that the senator’s understanding of events doesn’t square with reality.

Follow the link to read his reasoning or you can read comments from others e.g. here or here. But, of course, (via JustOneMinute, Kerry was “for the Tora Bora plan before he was against it.. From CNN:

CALLER: Hello. Yes, I would like to ask the panel why they don’t use napalm or flamethrowers on those tunnels and caves up there in Afghanistan?

KING: Senator Kerry?

…KERRY: Well, I think it depends on where you are tactically. They may well be doing that at some point in time. But for the moment, what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way.

But having given this response to my friends demonstrating that the article itself was not a piece of fact-based analysis and implicitly charactertizing their belief in its conclusions as faith-based, I got a “It’s unfortunate that you didn’t feel it worthwhile to review the core points. It’s not an attack ad – it outlines a personal operating style and thinking methodology.” So, I decided to plunge back in for another random sample and found this one:

One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

”I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,” Bush said. ”They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.”

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ”Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.” Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ”No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.”

So here we are to believe that the President is an idiot because he can’t tell the difference between Sweden and Switzerland… Except here is what the CIA World Factbook has to say about Sweden:

A military power during the 17th century, Sweden has not participated in any war in almost two centuries. An armed neutrality was preserved in both World Wars.
[...]
Military expenditure: $4.395B
Military as % GDP: 2.1%

And here is Switzerland:

Switzerland’s independence and neutrality have long been honored by the major European powers, and Switzerland was not involved in either of the two World Wars
[...]
Military expenditure: $2.548B
Military as % GDP: 1%

So, it turns out they are BOTH neutral and neither has a substantial military capability (both spend less than 0.25% of what the US spends on its military). Certainly Kerry supporters lack the standing to claim that Bush was wrong here. After all, tiny Poland turns out to have a comparable military, but Kerry does not consider it substantial enough to be worthy of the alliance on Iraq:

M ilitary expenditures: $3.5B
Military as % GDP: 1.71%

And it turns out that, not only is Bush’s grip on the facts turns out to be pretty good, but he does his homework. The article itself notes:

A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ”You were right,” he said, with bonhomie. ”Sweden does have an army.”

Of course, in denying that Suskind’s article is really a hit piece, my friends failed to note the paragraph that immediately follows:

This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that December day, Joe Biden.

I wonder if that is the same Senator Joe Biden who happens to bea Kerry campaign supporter/official. Hmm.

But here is Suskind’s spin about this story:

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value.

To me, this is one key feature of the articles anti-Bush spin. Failing to research facts and failing to understand the political context in which the discussions it cherry-picks are taking place. Would it have been appropriate for Bush, in that conversation, to have launched into a discussion on the merits about international peacekeepers? I don’t know, but I see no reason not to give the participants in the conversation the benefit of the doubt. The facts are not really even at issue here — no one appears to have had them or theyare a judgement call about available military
capabilities in country with military spending less than 0.3% of ours. But, Suskind didn’t bother to do the 5 minutes of
homework I just did to find that out.

Faith based reporting. Feh.

Update: One friend who had previously sent me a Suskind link, then decided he changed his mind on hearing Al Gore’s speech on what truly motivates this administration. For interested people, I recommend this.

From Mark Steyn

And here’s where I have some sympathy with Sandy Berger and his overloaded pants. By his own words, he’s guilty of acts that any other American would go to jail for. He “inadvertently” shoved 30-page classified documents down his pants and then “inadvertently” lost them at home and then “inadvertently” returned to the National Archives to “inadvertently” take another draft of the same 30-page document and “inadvertently” lost that, too. He “inadvertently” made forbidden cell phone calls from the room with the classified documents, and he “inadvertently” took more suspicious bathroom breaks while in the Archives than that Syrian band took on that L.A. flight that was in the news last week. If the former national security adviser has an incontinence problem, that at least explains where he was during the ’90s when Osama bin Laden was growing bolder and bolder on his watch.
[...]
in fairness to Clinton, most of the American people were happy to string along on an eight-year holiday from history. There’s nothing Sandy Berger can pack down his gusset that can change that, and all the rest is details.
[...]
What matters is where we’re headed, not where we were. And, in that respect, John Kerry is still looking through the rear window. Not so much because of his remarkably poor choice of advisers — Joe Wilson (the Politics Of Truth fraud), Max Cleland (with his schoolyard cries of “Liar, liar!”) and Sandy Berger (with his pants on fire) — but because Kerry’s prescriptions (the U.N., the French) are so Sept. 10. A holiday from history is one thing. The Democrats are now embarked on a holiday from reality.

Talking on the telephone yesterday with a friend who thought it would be a lot of fun to attend the Republican National Convention, we both noted that we couldn’t make it because we were going to be at BurningMan and agreed that it would be safer to be there than at the Convention. We both noted how insane this thought is given that BurningMan is a giant art festival in the middle of the desert where people endanger themselves in all sorts of ways (but surprisingly few injuries/deaths actualy result).

Amongs my friends, it looks like people on the right are much more concerned about a major terrorist attack this fall than people on the left. My friend above argues that political philosophy should be predictive. So we will soon have a test of the relative predictive power of left-right politics in the US. To eliminate ambiguity, a major attack has to kill more people than fit on a single plane.

FYI, the band that worried people in this post, has been identified. Its not clear that they could not also be terrorists but they don’t appear to be right now. On the other hand, the Washington Times reports other incidents of terrorists scouting jetliners for new attacks.

Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.
At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called “stereotypical” behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane.

“No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack,” an air marshal said.
[...]

But if you read the actual contents of the article, it feels a but paranoid. The obvious problem is that it is really tough objectively to distinguish between innocent and criminal behavior until action occurs and then it is too late. I think that if we don’t take out Iran and Syria now (and suffer the casualties of an intervening war) we will see much greater demand measures against domestic men of Arab descent that will make the Japanese internment camps look PC.

When will someone over there admit that something is seriously rotten in the Democratic Party these days if its leading foreign policy luminaries are all turning out to be liars and cheaters. What ever happened to 16 words? What was Sandy Berger covering up and did Kerry know? Assuming Kerry didn’t know what does that say about his judgement?

Sometimes people ask why I obsess about media slant. Here is one reason

A typical case of the media’s mendacity on Israel was the invented coverage of the Jenin “massacre” (not) by British news organisations, which were so anti-Israel that they popularised an event that they could not have witnessed, because it had not happened. They never apologised – because any Israeli “atrocity” is seen to illustrate a greater truth. Another example was the Israeli assassination of the man whom the BBC called Hamas’s “spiritual leader”: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was actually a terrorist boss, about as “spiritual” as Osama Bin Laden.

Yet, in the British media, every Israeli sin is amplified, while those of the Arab world are ignored. The million dead of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s 300,000 victims, thousands more massacred in Chechnya, the Arab militias killing black Sudanese, the torturing Middle Eastern tyrannies are ignored – but in Britain, every Palestinian death is reported like a sacred rite. Our media conceal the venom directed at Israel by Arab clerics, television and the internet, presenting Israeli complaints as propaganda. The Middle East commentator Tom Gross revealed in the National Review that when the “moderate” Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais visited Britain this month, the BBC hailed him as a brave worker for “community cohesion”. Yet his Friday sermons call for Jews – “scum of the human race, rats of the world” – to be “annihilated”.
[...]
The first head of the hydra-like monster of medieval anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was the implied parallel between Israeli treatment of Palestinians and Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. This is a de facto cousin of Holocaust denial, as it diminishes and trivialises what really happened then. Since the second intifada started, 2,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis have died – an appalling loss of life, but hardly a genocide.
[...]
In blaming Jewish-American neo-cons and in longing to appease the terrorists, the bien-pensants purveyors of these conspiracies will not heal Islamist grievances. For such grievances are about western power, modernity and freedom. Islamist terrorists visualise “Jews” as perhaps a weak link in our western civilisation, but an essential part of our society. Those who swallow conspiracy theories miss the point. For al-Qaeda maniacs, we are all Jews.

For Western liberals/leftists any crime/terrorism/genocide committed by others is not the responsibility of human actors but a tragic act of god angry at the hubris of holding to our own values and demanding sacrifice. Jews, as people who maintain their identity in the face of constant demand to assimilate and relinquish their cultural identity, fit the bill.

In an earlier post, I was trying to understand what Bat Y’eor was really saying about the dhimmitude of Europe. I just read this great article that clarifies:

There is something far deeper going on here. Beyond the anti-Americanism is an attempt to court the Muslim and Arab world. For its own safety and strategic gain, France is seeking a “third way” between America and its enemies. Chirac’s ultimate vision is a France that is mediator and bridge between America and Islam. During the cold war, Charles de Gaulle invented this idea of a third force, withdrawing France from the NATO military structure and courting Moscow as a counterweight to Washington. Chirac, declaring in Istanbul that “we are not servants” of America, has transposed this Gaullist policy to the struggle with radical Islam.

Explosive population growth in the Arab world coupled with Europe’s unprecedented baby bust presages a radical change in the balance of power in the Mediterranean world. Chirac perhaps sees a coming Muslim future or, at least, a coming Muslim resurgence. And he does not want to be on the wrong side of that history. The result is a classic policy of appeasement: stand up to the American presumption of dictating democratic futures to Afghanistan and Iraq; ingratiate yourself with the Arab world. Thus, for example, precisely at a time when the U.S. and many Western countries are shunning Yasser Arafat for supporting terrorism and obstructing peace, Chirac sends his Foreign Minister to the ruins of Arafat’s compound to shake Arafat’s hand for world cameras.

Apropos my last post about the left-liberal abandonment of America as an idea, I just read this review of Samuel Huntington’s new book.

Huntington’s challenge to the roster of leading intellectual superstars does not stop here. Many who do not share this basic antipathy to the nation nevertheless come under his critical scrutiny because they are too squeamish to take the elementary steps needed to promote the nation; they follow the weak path of willing the ends while denying the means. He cites, for example, Michael Walzer (“A radical program of Americanization would really be un-American”) and Dennis Wrong (“Nobody advocates ‘Americanizing’ new immigrants, as in the bad old ethnocentric past”). This opposition to Americanization, Huntington declares, “is a
new phenomenon in American intellectual and political history.”

But he provides a context/reason

Aiding this intellectual disaffection have been various effects stemming from economic trends of globalization that work to devalue the idea of the nation in general. The modern economy creates a class of transnational elites who identify more with the world than the nation: “The economic globalizers are fixated on the world as an economic unit . . . as the global market replaces the national community, the national citizen gives way to the global consumer.” At the head of this new class of transnationals are the “Davos” men and women, whose ranks include not just business executives but global bureaucrats and members of various internationally minded NGOs. These are the people whose hearts thrill at a ruling from The Hague, whose loyalty goes first to the United Nations, and who regard any expression of patriotism as an act equally as atavistic as attending religious services.

Note the lines here religion/patriotism vs atheism/internationalism. Its a strange mix because the history of the nation-state and America in particular is tied, among other things, to the assertion of an identity *independent* of ones religion. During the 1960’s the modern left came into existence, abandoning the notion of America as representing the pinnacle of liberal values to the notion that America isx the foremost oppressor of other people’s cultural authneticity.
Huntington gives voice to the difference between neo and paleo conservatism that George WIll identified

Huntington argues that America has two sources of identity. The first he calls “the Creed,” by which he means the basic principles of individual rights and government by consent of the governed as these are drawn from universal arguments, such as can be found “most notably in the Declaration of Independence.” The Creed claims to make its appeal to rational precept (to “nature”), which is in principle available to all people. (It is curious that Huntington selects the term “creed” to refer to this dimension, as the word evokes powerful connotations of acceptance on the basis of faith.)

THE SECOND ELEMENT of identity is Culture. Culture, as any social scientist knows, is a most useful concept until one is confronted with the task of having to say exactly what it means. Huntington does his best, defining it at one point as “a people’s language, religious beliefs, social and political values, assumptions as to what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to the objective institutions and behavioral patterns that reflect these subjective elements”–in brief, nearly everything. But Huntington boils the concept down, as he must, and culture comes to refer to language (English), to religion (sometimes “dissenting Protestantism,” sometimes, more broadly, “the Christian religion”), and to a few basic English ideas of liberty. America’s culture, in Huntington’s shorthand, is “Anglo-Protestantism.”

Huntington formulates the central paleo-argument:

The problem with Creedalism in this arena is its clear “imperial” implication. Huntington is a nationalist, but a moderate one who has little use for contemporary international Creedalists who believe that “people of other societies have basically the same values as Americans, or if they do not have them, they want to have them, or if they do not want to have them, they misjudge what is good for their society, and Americans have the responsibility to persuade them or to induce them to embrace the universal values that America espouses.”
[...]
Huntington ties the origin of the Creed to Anglo-Protestant culture, but he does not–or does not quite–equate origin with essence. He grants that the Creed can–indeed has–spread, albeit in an attenuated form, to nations that are not Anglo-Protestant. But there is no question that his argument moves in the direction of saying that spreading the Creed very far afield, given its chiefly cultural origins, is a delusion.
[...]
A great deal of what is most lovable about America, and perhaps also higher and more valuable, is contained in the Culture, not in the Creed. For Huntington, it is clearly not just a matter of convenience that Americans have one language, which happens to be English; rather, it is important that we speak English and find our roots in Shakespeare, not Cervantes. By the same token, it is not just a matter of convenience for Huntington that America is chiefly Christian, rather than Buddhist or Islamic. He wants it to be that way. More broadly, he argues that such preferences are justified, and they should be openly defended and preferred–not be made objects of shame, hidden from view. But Creedalism (at any rate, the zealous Creedalism that Huntington attacks) is not only indifferent to these cultural preferences, but it is almost antagonistic to them.

As I said before, the failure of the Paleo-conservatives is that they seem almost antagonistic to the advocacy tools available today.

From George Will

Pat Moynihan said: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
[...]
The issue is the second half of Moynihan’s formulation — our ability to wield political power to produce the requisite cultural change in a place such as Iraq. Time was, this question would have separated conservatives from liberals. Nowadays it separates conservatives from neoconservatives.

Although George Will is attacking neo-cons in his piece, I largely agree with his forumation. Though, I would phrase it with more nuance. Both conservatives and neo-cons believe that local culture needs to change. The difference is that Neo-cons hope that we can influence culture through politics/institution-building; that failure to do so will result in much less pleasant forms of cultural-change (memecide). My criticism of paleo-conservatives is that they have no program for cultural change. Perhaps they believe it is not possible, but I can imagine a program of propaganda, PR, advertising, branding etc that might be more effective than the troops doing liberating and holding local elections. The problem conservatives have is that they seem to believe that these are all left-liberal tools and have abaondened them to the left-liberal ad agencies in New York and Hollywood and the real paleo-cons at Al Jazeera.

Note: Neo-cons are typically policy geeks who baseline view cultural expression as noise. Positive expression of American values may be a casualty of America’s culture wars.

I had the following dialog (via email) recently with a very anti-Iraq-war friend with whom I’ve been debating for … years:

Him: no, i think you’re irretrievably blindsided on pretty much every political issue.

Me: It would help if you expressed some observable standard for judging ANY political issue aside from…faith.

Him: i give up. it’s not even worth it.

Me: Hmm. Thats an interesting way of putting it. What would make it worth it? What would you like to achieve?

Him: what would make it worth it? you shutting up about this. it’s a wasted effort to talk to you about this stuff. you’re so inherently wrong about so many of the issues that it is impossible. you want pointless, empty academic discourse? try [mutual friend]. i get mad.

Inherently wrong. I interpret him to mean that there is no possible way for my position to be correct on e.g. invading Iraq. That there is no fact, that, if proved true, would make my position correct. It sounds more like he is talking about
expressing religious faith than determining good policy.

I’ll fully admit that it is much more fulfilling to express heartfelt religious sentiment than it is to assess the relative merits of various policy choices. I’ll further admit that it is maddening when people say things that threaten such feelings of fulfillment. Although I tend to view policy through the lens of (social) science — where the goodness or badness of a policy is measured against an ability to achieve some goal, It is clear that many people are religiously attached to particular policy choices or the belief that all policy choices of some group are inherently right/wrong — where goodness or badness of a policy is measured against its acceptibilty to some social group.

The nice thing about the religious/political perspective is that it feels better and, in the end, one can hope that the has to arrive at a good policy (because it has to align with the actual interests of the group members). However, as Clay Shirky has brilliantly noted A Group is its Own Worst Enemy. Groups engage in behavior that preserves the integrity at a substantial cost to its members:

Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.

There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?
[...]
Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they’re entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.

The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, “A group met for pairing off.” And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of
members.
[...]
The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. [e.g. Bush is a dumb/evil liar conspiring to ... etc..] So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
[...]
He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.

The problem is that non-professional politicians lack any formal decision making structure to help them reach a good policy consensus. Instead they get hijaacked by the most motivated paranoid folks because they are the ones with the time to spare who make the group feel good. In 1970, Feminist activist Jo Freeman, wrote The Tyranny of Structurelessness, a brilliant article describing the impact of a lack of structure on the feminist movement.

Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren’t very good for getting things done. Unless their mode of operation changes, groups flounder at the point where people tire of ‘just talking’ and want to do something more. Because the larger movement in most cities is as unstructured as individual rap groups, it is not much more effective than the separate groups at specific tasks. The informal structure is rarely together enough or in touch enough with the people to be able to operate effectively. So the movement generates much emotion and few results. Unfortunately, the consequences of all this motion are not as innocuous as the results, and their victim is the movement itself.

If people were less enamoured of their group and more enamoured of either making policy judgements themselves or specfically deferring policy judgements to those whom they respect, they would be better off.

Note for those paying attention: Yes this contradicts my diatribe against the Enlightenment. There is probably a balance. I’m just not yet sure how to achieve it.