Syria speculations

1.  Me from Aug. 31, responding to William's request for my prescience on Syria:

I'm clearly not too prescient about civil insurrections, but I think the bad guys will win in Syria, at least for the short term. The military hasn't seemed divided there, which is the only way for the unarmed good guys to win.

So, wrong again, somewhat.  Maybe penalties assessed against me could be reduced by my "short term" qualifier.  The Libyan and Syrian civil uprisings started about the same time but the former started peeling off military units immediately while the latter only had random low-level deserters until recent months.

My guess based on other countries has been that people power uprisings have to win quickly, within weeks, or not at all.  I should modify that to say that successful people power uprisings win quickly or not at all, unless they become civil wars which follow a different kind of trajectory.  I still think Syria is unusual though in the length of time it lasted as civil demonstrations before either fading away or transitioning to what it's now become.

2.  Pretty obvious it's a civil war now, and despite the only-recent change in terminology by the Red Cross, it's been a civil war for months now.  Also obvious that Assad's finished, although I still disagree that it was obvious a year ago.  The US government seems to agree he's finished.

3.  As rebels are starting to take territory, although not necessarily hold it, the situation is becoming more like Libya, including a downside that rebels become more vulnerable to air power.  I stand by the argument I made in February that we should provide more direct military assistance to rebels, particularly in creating safe havens.  The tens of thousands of people that have fled to Turkey in just the last few days could still be in a Free Syria, starting to organize the transition.

4.  My argument in February relied on negotiations first, with military assistance as a backstop.  That's changed - unless there's a coup/assassination, negotiations are useless now.

5.  The key issue now is planning that prevents massacres of Alawite and Christian minorities.  Peeling off enough of them to assist the rebels would definitely help.

6.  Speaking of Syrian Christians, it's interesting that conservative American Christians are so aggressive over Syria when most of them were far more reticent to support change in Egypt.  The obvious difference is the attitude of the regimes toward Israel.  I'm guessing conservative American Christians aren't all that interested in the fate of Syrian Orthodox synods.

7.  The rebels in Syria seem even more like a black box than the ones in Libya.  OTOH, things seem to be going okay in Libya (no takers still on my Libya bet offer).

8.  Not sure of the value of my military predictions, but here's one:  Assad won't use chemical weapons.  I believe without evidence that Western nations have secretly communicated to him their guarantee that the gain to him from using them will be outweighed by the Western response.  He might still be tempted to use them in extremis but at that point, hopefully, anyone given the order will realize the personal best option is to disobey/take government succession planning into their own hands.

UPDATE:  forgot to reference the one-month rule that started working in Libya around May 2011 - from then on, setbacks to the rebels never lasted more than 30 days, and each month left them more powerful than the month before.  My guess is the same rule may have started applying in Syria a month or two ago, and a month or two more of the same will indicate the eventual result.

Onward to apartheid in Greater Israel

The surprise agreement bringing Israel's leading opposition party into the governing coalition will have uncertain impacts.  Andrew Sullivan has the rundown - I tend to think it makes a disastrous attack on Iran somewhat less likely.

I'm less optimistic about the effect on apartheid in Greater Israel, where there's some bad news:

• Israel bringing back collective punishment, destroying the family homes of terrorists.

• American Congressman Joe Walsh supports soft ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, with annexation, second-class citizenship for Palestinians and incentives to leave the country for Jordan.

That second proposal is only somewhat different from the present situation, where there's a longstanding, tacit agreement that a ruling majority will not rely on Arab parties to survive no confidence votes.  (Sorry I can't find a link referencing this, please leave one if you've got one in the comments.)

To The Point discusses Israel's decision to exclude visiting foreigners whose political viewpoints it dislikes (the US has also done this in the past, but I don't know of it happening recently for people not supporting violence).  The show discusses more extensively Peter Beinart's book, which seems to make a lot of sense about how Israel is betraying the democratic dream and what American Jews should do about it.

While I think partial democracies can last for a long time, they're not stable at a fixed level of partial democracy but instead change over time.  While it usually changes towards improvement, that's not always the case.  The pre-Civil War American South became more oppressive in some ways in the 1800s, criminalizing attempts to discuss abolition in the press.  Israel can become more democratic in some ways (gay rights) at the same time that it may double down on oppressing West Bank Arabs.  An oppressive policy creates its own tension - do you ease off on the policy, or double down to reinforce it?  We're seeing that in play in Israel.

And despite that fact, the room for political discussion on this is still wider in Israel than in the US.  A major Israeli politician can accurately call the situation apartheid, while a retired American president gets pilloried for doing the same. Whether either country will do anything to fix the problem is much less clear.

Syrian safe havens, and R2P overreach in Libya

I supported and continue to support the vast majority of what international community did in Libya.  For those who continue to predict bad things in Libya's future, I'm going to put up a post soon to give them a chance to put their money where their mouths are, while I do the same.

Our governments did, however, go too far at the tail end of the war and I opposed it. There were earlier examples too were we twisted the international authorization of force under the Responsibility to Protect civilians doctrine and used it for the only-partially overlapping goal of regime change.

That's part of the problem in Syria today, that the military overreach in Libya makes it harder to apply R2P in Syria.  But that doesn't mean we should put all military options off the table.

I partially disagree with Marc Lynch and his analysis that no military options should be pursued.  Asad should be given a choice (in private communication), to either back off from rebel-held zones or face the establishment of safe havens along the Turkish border.  Safe havens wouldn't be the first choice but it would be the alternative.  There also should be some, only some, covert military assistance to the armed opposition - not an attempt to make them strong enough to win, but to help them be strong enough to protect the areas they control and retain the possibility of further fractures in Syria's military.

Marc is right that armed observers are useless absent Syrian authorization, which won't happen, and that a no fly zone is a bad idea (mostly).  Punitive air strikes are also useless in themselves, but not as a limited mechanism to protect safe havens.  If safe havens become necessary, Asad gets warned (privately) that any attack on a safe haven will face reprisal air strikes that will degrade his air defenses, making it incrementally easier to do still more punitive strikes or establish a no fly zone.  We don't need to do a no-fly zone, just make him fear one.

(More after the jump....)

Obama good, Obama ungood

The good news is decision that gay rights and human rights "are one and the same" in a speech by Hillary Clinton, one that states the Obama administration will work for this concept internationally, and put some money behind it.   They also acknowledge imperfections here in American, while being studiously silent on gay marriage.

The foreign policy realists would say this will cost us internationally, just as any other human rights effort will cost us.  They'd be correct in some areas, although other places like Europe it should actually help our image and soft power.  Long run is a different story though, as history kind of arcs somewhat toward justice.

How this gets reflected in domestic politics will be interesting, because people who are somewhat conservative on gay rights domestically, say hypothetically a political science professor who supports civil unions, would fall on the far left of the spectrum of the countries with the worst discrimination.  The natural Republican reflex of opposing everything Obama does will then start looking pretty awful in the context of horrible abuses overseas. Rick Perry lost no time decrying "special rights" promotion, but the actual Republican nominee will probably lose votes while irresolutely dodging the issue.  Score one for the good guys.

The ungood side is the decision to overrule FDA's authorization of selling the Plan B contraceptive as a standard over the counter item.  Double plus ungood not because of the politics but the false claim that the science gives any reason to do this.  To the FDA's credit, they more or less stated their disagreement and weren't suppressed from doing that.  This is standard, almost, Republican-style War on Science.  Chris Mooney's book on the subject noted the Democrats were guilty too of this offense, but just not nearly to the same extent.  One strike against the Obama Administration in this regard.

I don't want to end on that note, so I'll add another piece of good news.  Younger Americans are significantly more accepting of climate science than older ones.  Now consider that even some Republicans acknowledge their antipathy to gay rights is a dying cause.  The very few scientists who don't accept climate science are also aging out (page 12) and not being replaced by anyone except lawyers, so the younger generation is being educated the right way.  I'm not sure how many demographically-challenged positions the Republicans really want to take, but maybe they should reconsider.


UPDATE:  Chris Mooney on Plan B here.  Similar grasp of the obvious.

So why is a partitioned Libya worse than a Qaddafi-ruled one?

I'm not getting the argument behind the fear of a partitioned Libya. The alternative is more Qaddafi, more oil purchases from Qaddafi, and more weapons sales to him.

In a partition, the rebels will continue to assemble a government and maintain oil sales, while Qaddafi can't. Eventually they'll take care of him. Given that we've created a no-fly/no-armor/no-artillery zone, if the rebels can't fight off infantry at this point, then they don't have the support and drive to maintain a revolution.

As for Josh Marshall saying no genocide=no humanitarian reason to intervene, I think the rebuttal argument makes itself.

It's definitely a roll of the dice, but doing nothing isn't such a great play either. And while eastern Libya has been a hotbed of Al Qaeda recruitment in the past, a chance at a more democratic society could help there, and meanwhile we're destroying every weapon in Libya that can shoot down aircraft.

USA (heart) Tahrir

About twice a decade, I actually get off my duff, pick up a sign, and exercise my right to peacefully assemble for redress of grievances. It seems to take young people dying in foreign countries, but in the case of Burma last time and Egypt now, I finally made a tiny effort and joined the demonstration in San Francisco last Saturday. People loved the sign, btw, and a dozen strangers took photographs of my wife and myself holding it. Maybe it will help in some little way to make up for the fact that the US government hasn't exactly come out swinging to demand Mubarak get the heck out.

My Egyptian neighbor pointed out that only if Mubarak is out of power can they have a chance of following Tunisia's example and dissolve the corrupt ruling party and chase down the billions of stolen funds. This transition period we're working on will instead give the bad guys lots of time to hide their money and make sure it benefits the economies of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands instead of Egypt.

Let's just hope it works out.

(And an interesting factoid: Egypt has had the most news coverage of any international news story since tracking began four years ago, and the fourth highest of any news story at all in that period. Maybe people are paying attention. While the role of Twitter and Facebook may be overplayed within Egypt, the new social media might be helping with international attention.)

UPDATE: and following the good news today (Feb 11), the Swiss have frozen Mubarak's assets. My neighbor was right.

Conservative incoherence on Egypt

I don't have anything innovative to say about Egypt, except wishing Obama would push a little harder. I've found the conservative incoherence about Egypt pretty interesting though - the movement can't make up its mind. They would call it vigorous debate, I suppose, but since no one denies the possibility for an anti-American future polity, what it really comes down to is whether that possibility outweighs a present and possible future democracy. I don't consider that a particularly hard one to call. Some conservatives, even particularly unimpressive ones, agree with me, but others are letting their nationalistic and anti-Islamic bias triumph over everything else.

One thing the US can do is get ahead of the curve for other Arab countries. Things in Jordan and Yemen are heating up, so maybe some external influence on those governments could have a modest impact.

UPDATE: I don't know enough about international human rights violations to decide if this legal argument works, but if the US and Europe made the argument ASAP that thugs attacking demonstrators will be subject to arrest worldwide, that might have a slight deterrent effect.

Cutting down protesters and forests in Madagascar

NY Times outlines how the situation in Madagascar has deteriorated:  a shaky government more interested in corrupt personal enrichment than in law enforcement is letting the country's forests be decimated and sent to China.  Meanwhile, my parents tell me that their church, which supports a tree planting-program in Madagascar, has learned that a Malagasy pastor associated with their program was killed when he attended a demonstration in the capital.


I don't have a well-defined opinion about the current government and president.  He unceremoniously deposed the prior president, but the prior president's democratic credentials were shaky at best, and many people joined the protests that drove him out.  So while that's unclear to me, it is clear that the government shouldn't be shooting protesters.  And obviously it should be preserving the last bits of Madagascar's irreplaceable nature instead of taking bribes to destroy it.  I can't forget the incredible lemurs we saw there, and how few Malagasy ever see them.  It would  be tragic to lose them. 


The church members are asking people to contact the State Department and Congress and asking them to pressure the Madagascar government.  I think that's a good idea, and I'll suggest one other:  modify the Kerry-Lieberman bill so that countries facing tariffs for their failure to act on climate will face additional tariffs if they're buying illegal wood and aiding climate-harming deforestation.  Those monies could then be used to help fix the problem 

Whether to join "Offend Every Religion and Non-Religion Day"

Today is "Offend Islam Day" or "Everybody Draw Mohammed" Day according to the intent of the people involved in either creating or viewing the blog posts. I'm sure most of the rightwingers involved will claim there's no intent on their part to offend most Muslims, but simply to protest the censorship and physical violence directed against people who have drawn Mohammed. I think it's pretty difficult to unpack the two, especially when the only religion these rightwingers are willing to offend, conveniently enough for them, is one they're hostile to.

Still, I wish I could do something to support free speech while not purposefully seeking offense, especially against any one religion. So here's my drawing:

.O
/|\
/ \

Those who seek to take offense by seeing it as Mohammed can do so, but I hope the vast majority of Muslims who would never violently attack a cartoonist choose not to see it that way. The same for a Christian or Jew that would choose to view it as a Gay Jesus or Gay Moses. Replace the torso of the stick figure with ( ) and an oversensitive Buddhist could choose to view an insultingly corpulent Buddha.

As for offending the non-religious who choose to go out of their way to be offended, it's a little tougher. For atheists, simply claiming that 100% confirmed atheism is an expression of faith just like religion is generally enough to arouse great offense among such atheists.

My own group, agnostics, might be the hardest to offend, except that all the other groups, religious and atheist alike, are offended at our very existence. The religious tell us to make up our mind so we can be either drawn into their religious debates, or become an atheist so the religious can accuse us of having a faith in the non-existence of God. The atheists think we don't have the guts to go all the way proclaim atheism, and accuse us of being less-brave versions of themselves. Maybe its my own blind spot that keeps me from seeing the best way to be ambiguously offensive to oversensitive agnostics, but maybe someone else can figure that one out.

Well, so much for this exercise. Not sure I'll bother repeating it when the same day rolls around next year.

I had no idea about the extent of slavery in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century

I'm not sure I even realized that Eastern Europe had slavery that was distinguishable from serfdom, with people that could be bought and sold. Right now I'm reading the book Bury Me Standing, about the modern Roma (Gypsy) people in Eastern Europe after the Cold War. The parallels between the Roma underclass in Europe and African-American underclass in the US were striking to me even before the book started discussing the extent of slavery in Romania and how it lasted until the mid-1850s.

I had to go to wiki to confirm it, and it's all true. At least in America, the vast majority of people with IQs above the plant life level acknowledge slavery as one of our two Original Sins, while Europeans seem pretty happy to sweep their version under a rug.

Not that we don't still have plenty of recent wishful ignorance about the cause of the Civil War - the one upside of that is learning how clearly the Southern Secessionists told the world that they seceded because of slavery. Some good history learning is possible.

Google and China

Not the usual stuff I write about, but I've been following it.  Hard to avoid when their headquarters are two miles from me.

One possible outcome of Google's rebuff to Chinese censorship is that Google would actively join efforts to defeat the Great Firewall.  It's already possible for determined Chinese citizens to beat the Firewall, but a massive and innovative corporation joining those efforts could make it a lot easier.  I suspect that this is one piece of leverage Google retains while China figures out how hard to push against the company.  OTOH, no one else is talking about it, so maybe it's not that important or likely.

James Fallows posted an interesting reader email.  The reader argues that China can't let Google dominate the search market, because China needs the information about domestic society that it can only get from closely monitoring searches.  What's interesting is that it isn't solely a "need" in the typical evil dictatorship way (although it's that too), but a need to understand its own people that it can't get because of the lack of free speech and free elections.

The mostly-negative business community commentary about Google says more about the commenters than Google.  I think they're showing a combination of ressentiment and wanna-be schadenfreude against a successful corporation that they'd like to see taken off its high horse.  Also mixed in is apprehension over anyone taking corporate social responsibility beyond the minimum common denonimator.

I have no idea how it'll play out.  From the sidelines it would be far more interesting to me to see Google really take on Chinese censorship, but I'm not the one who's already walked away from a third of the share of the Chinese search market and still wants to rescue the rest of its business.  Anyone who says Google is just leaving to say face, doesn't have much business sense in my opinion.  I think Google has shown a willingness to take a hit in order to keep some reality in its business motto.

Yoo and Bybee escape from justice isn't entirely complete

I've been reading various reactions to the overruling by the Department of Justice of the recommendation to refer pro-torture Professor John Yoo and Appellate Judge Jay Bybee to bar association disciplinary committees (the hundreds of pages of info can be found here, and the first two links at that cite are the most important).  Basically the argument is that the failure to provide objective and reasonable advice is insufficient grounds for sanctions.  DOJ concludes that the legal arguments for torture are nonsense, but Yoo actually believed it, and Bybee didn't bother to look at it very closely and some other folks told him it was okay.  Balkin explains that reasoning in all its glory.

Three points:

1.  I've only skimmed the DOJ memo, but what I've seen fails to focus on the duty to respond to arguments contrary to the attorney's conclusion.  This is the key issue in my opinion.  It doesn't matter whether Yoo thinks he's right - he failed to discuss precedent that limits the power of the president, even in wartime.  Even if he thinks that precedent isn't controlling, any lawyer worthy of practicing has to respond to the best contrary arguments.  As for Bybee, he's either in charge or he isn't.  A lawyer of all people has to know the consequences of signing something.

2.  As for the "you're all forgetting the atmosphere of 9-11" issue, you can forget that argument.  The memos were from August 2002, eleven months later.  There's enough time for people to think clearly again after a year, plenty of reasons by then to know that America hadn't been brought to its knees, and to know that we clearly weren't facing a threat as significant as we had several times before in conventional wars against great industrial powers.

3.  It's not over, entirely. Jonathan Zasloff points out that the Pennsylvania and Utah bar associations don't need a referral from DOJ - they can act independently, and they should given the information in front of them.  Similarly, UC Berkeley can independently use the information to determine whether someone acting this incompetently, crazily, or dishonestly meets the standard of a law professor.  I can't say I'm extremely hopeful of this happening, but the option exists.


UPDATE:  Kudos to Mike Potemra for fighting torture in the web pages of the National Review, of all places.  Posts like that help me believe that there's still hope.

News results for Guantanamo suicides and the IPCC glacier mistake

There's some extremely disturbing evidence that the three simultaneous "suicides" at Guantanamo actually died during a torture session and were subject to an ongoing coverup. Google News returns 367 hits for this subject. Nothing in the New York Times; Washington Post carried the AP news report.

A single paragraph in the 3,000 page International Panel on Climate Change report has been shown to be wrong, correctly stating that the Himalayan glaciers are melting but incorrectly stating that they will be gone by 2035. This claim was never highlighted or given much importance by the IPCC. Google News returns 1,789 hits on this mistake. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about the comparison of news report numbers.

Regarding the IPCC mistake, Tim Lambert, John Nielsen-Gannon, and William Connolley have written the most interesting stuff. I think Tim shows this was an unusual mistake that was almost caught in the draft review process - I find that somewhat reassuring as just a screwup instead of an accepted procedure. From William's comments though, the section of the IPCC dealing with impacts needs to improve its game.

My unsupported speculation is that the mistake is tied into some internal, office-politics conflict among Indian climate scientists, and that has something to do with the sloppy work in this particular instance.

TigerHawk's right - Obama should apologize to conservatives about the state secrets privilege

TigherHawk and Glenn Greenwald both call out Obama Administration's decision to assert that state secrets require dismissal of the Shubert case brought against the government for secret wiretapping. TigherHawk from the right says Obama should apologize to conservatives for criticizing the same behavior by the Bush Administration, while Greenwald does his usual thing.

I agree with TH, although I think Obama owes at least as much of an apology to us who supported him.

The state secret privilege should rarely be used, if used it should even be more rare to outright remove court consideration of a piece of evidence, and it should almost never be used to outright dismiss a case. And even in that one-in-a-million last category, there should be an administrative procedure established so the plaintiff has a chance at justice in a protected setting. I'll just refer back to Greenwald's outrage on this one.

Also Kevin Drum on a related case:

The CIA had invoked the state secrets privilege, insisting that the case against one of its agents be dropped because he was working covertly and his identity couldn't be revealed. And they keptinsisting that even after his cover had been lifted. When Lamberth found out, he was not a happy judge.

More here. This is yet another data point that restates the obvious: just because the government invokes the state secrets privilege doesn't mean there really are state secrets involved. Congress and the courts, who know this perfectly well, would be wise to demand a wee bit more judicial oversight in these cases instead of allowing the executive absolute discretion. Pat Leahy's State Secrets Protection Act would be a good place to start.

A repost from September 4, 2007

(Original here. Reposting seemed relevant to California's election on Tuesday.)

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

On a personal note...

I got married on Sunday. Everything seemed to go very well, and it was fantastic to see everyone.

In addition to registering for the usual selfish presents, we also registered for Kiva loans, a system that supports microfinance institutions by allowing donors to give no-interest loans to micro-entrepeneurs in developing countries. A number of people made loans, and I'll be very interested to see how it turns out.

And we registered for TerraPass for carbon offsets, something I need to do more of.

Final note: I often think the whole "personal is political" concept involves an overblown sense of self-importance, but the idea that my wife and I can participate in something so wonderful while a gay or lesbian couple cannot is simply beyond ridiculous. I know good-hearted people who disagree, and I just don't think they're reflecting on it hard enough.

And now - off travelling for a few days!

Little Rock and Rangoon

Amid the 50-year anniversary of desegregation in Little Rock (great article here about it), we have the real-time drama in Burma as Buddhist monks face off against the military dictatorship.

I spent two winters in the early 90's volunteering with the ethnic minority Karen opposition groups in eastern Burma, and several years afterwards assisting in efforts to stop financial support for the dictatorship. The media is accurately conveying how bad things are there, and the slim but real chance for improvement.

The best "what you can do with 30 seconds' time" action is to sign this online petition to the Chinese government. Petitioning Burma's dictators is useless, but the Chinese have to weigh how much their colonial enterprise in Burma is costing them as the 2008 Olympics come ever closer.

European Union citizens and others can also petition the EU President to support stronger actions, rather than get shown up by George Bush of all people on a genuine human rights issue.

The military is starting to take action now against the monks, so any outside pressure at all is sorely needed.