December 14, 2007
Back Talk IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 PM EST Fred Smoler proposes some good explanations for why confronting the media can backfire. “My first and perhaps unthinking response,” he writes, “is that nowadays the press often sticks together and holds grudges, while very sustained attacks on some politicians can go unchallenged by what would once have been the faction of the press nominally favoring their own side.” I think this is definitely part of the reason why press-bashing can hurt candidates. In my previous post, I described the way Hillary Clinton’s evasiveness has recently begun to undermine her campaign. Her tendency toward obfuscation was bound to cause some self-inflicted damage at some point, but I doubt the damage would have been quite so severe if her campaign hadn’t treated the media with such unremitting hostility. After months of getting stonewalled, misled, and insulted, reporters finally saw Clinton bleeding, and they jumped all over the story. I’d offer another partial explanation, though, for why candidates harm themselves by attacking the press. Sometimes, as in Ronald Reagan’s case, candidates go at their journalistic interrogators because they are getting treated badly. But in other cases, candidates knock the media because they don’t want to give honest answers to fair questions (again, see: Clinton, Hillary). When this happens, the public is often smart enough to see what’s really going on. When a candidate acts slippery or mean, voters can tell—even without the help of a grudge-holding press. Voters can distinguish between fair treatment and unfair treatment, and when candidates respond resentfully to reasonable questions, they don’t like it. I’ll add that candidates can respond to unfair treatment in more than one way, and the best way to swat away a nasty question isn’t always to get nasty back. For evidence of this, I offer this clip of Christopher Dodd speaking in yesterday’s Democratic debate. Dodd was asked, bizarrely, whether his run for president was motivated by a desire to clear his family name, which the moderator said was tarnished by his father’s 1967 censure in the Senate. This was a totally unfair question, based on cheap armchair psychoanalysis of the candidate. Dodd’s response, however, was graceful and direct, and it garnered the applause of the audience and his fellow candidates. If Dodd had trashed the moderator, he would have been justified in doing so, but he would not have demonstrated the same kind of maturity and decency he showed yesterday.
December 13, 2007
Back Talk II Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:20 PM EST A footnote to John Steele Gordon’s post this morning is that in 1980, when Ronald Reagan attracted national attention by snapping at a moderator, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!,” the future President was paraphrasing Spencer Tracy. In the 1948 film State of the Union, Spencer Tracy plays an idealistic presidential candidate whose less scrupulous backers try to co-opt his campaign. In a climactic moment, as someone tries to interrupt one of his speeches, Tracy exclaims, “Don’t you shut me off. I am paying for this broadcast!” There’s an MSNBC clip noting the similarity between the two moments here. My guess is that Fred Thompson’s performance yesterday was intended to inspire comparisons with Reagan. I don’t think Thompson pulled it off as well as Reagan did. I think Mr. Gordon is right that confronting the media can work in candidates’ favor. But in reply to his query about why candidates don’t do it more often, I’d answer that it’s also a risky business. If it’s done in an excessively self-righteous way, or by a candidate who’s not a particularly deft performer, it can come off as obnoxious or evasive. Consider Alan Keyes’s performance in yesterday’s debate. He rants about how the media wants to silence him but doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that the American people don’t want to hear him either. Keyes ends up looking (appropriately) like an egomaniac without an actual policy agenda. A less obviously botched media showdown took place in July, when Hillary Clinton faced off with Chris Matthews at a forum with organized labor. Matthews asked Clinton whether she would approve of a presidential pardon for Scooter Libby. Clinton, recognizing this as an attempt to draw her into a dispute about her husband’s presidential pardons, replied by demanding that Matthews ask “a question that’s really about the people in this audience, and not what goes on inside Washington.” Matthews snarked back: “Okay, so we’ll leave that as a non-answer.” It was a sloppy exchange on both sides, as you can see here. Initially, many believed that Clinton won the point against Matthews. The audience, at least, fell for her performance. Looking beyond how it played with a group of Clinton’s natural supporters, though, this exchange might very well have reinforced concerns in the general public about Clinton’s trustworthiness. A dispassionate observer, harboring no special affection for Clinton, might (appropriately) conclude from the exchange that the New York senator has something to hide. What’s more, you can only dodge questions for so long, as Clinton found out here. In answering a tricky question about illegal immigration, she flip-flipped and accused the moderator of “playing gotcha.” But she looked ridiculous, and she exposed herself to scorn from a distrustful public and attack from an insulted press. Confronting the media works well sometimes, but when the tactic fails, it can fail very, very badly.
December 11, 2007
Cleverness from PBS Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:55 AM EST There’s a funny video making the rounds online. It’s taken from a PBS series, Vote for Me: Politics in America, and it’s a send-up of political advertising, past and present. The authors take some of the attack lines Federalists used against Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and combine them with old film footage to turn them into a twenty-first-century negative commercial. “Female chastity violated. Children writhing on the pike and halberd,” a narrator intones. “It happened in France, but it could happen right here in America if Thomas Jefferson is elected President.” See the video here on YouTube. The ad is an effective satire partly because it so closely resembles real attack ads and partly because the attacks it repeats seem so ludicrous in retrospect. But in 1800 the Federalists really did level these charges and more against Jefferson. “God—and a Religious President” versus “Jefferson—and no God” was the choice John Adams’s supporters gave America. Americans chose Jefferson despite these slurs. It is unclear what divine consequences this choice had. As funny as it is, the PBS clip is also a little depressing, since it’s a good reminder that negative, personal elections are probably here to stay. It would be nice, though, if videos like this one had the effect of reminding us just how silly and transient so many electoral controversies are. If we look back on the election of 1800 and see that it was ridiculous to charge Jefferson with fomenting Jacobinism, just imagine what Americans in 2100 will think of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. Actually, for a send-up of that crowd, we don’t need to wait for 2100. Just see here and here. If you liked the PBS video, these are worth your time.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College V Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:45 PM EST I am hesitant to reply to Mr. Gordon’s latest post, as I don’t want to belabor this issue too much. I also don’t particularly want to respond to sarcasm. But there are a couple issues that I feel are worth clarifying. Mr. Gordon says that my last post was “taking advantage of [his] careless choice of states, which is good for scoring college debate team points but not so good for finding the truth. Idaho and Vermont are both solidly in one camp. . . . But there are plenty of small states that tend to move back and forth between parties: New Mexico, Nevada, Delaware etc.” Mr. Gordon might find this hard to believe, but my last post was not just intended to highlight his carelessness; I actually made a broader assertion than he suggests, and it’s one that happens to be backed up by data. I wrote: “Presidential elections are fought in big, politically divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida. The practical impact of the Electoral College isn’t to favor small states; it’s to favor certain kinds of big states.” Delaware, Nevada, and New Mexico clearly do benefit, to at least some small degree, from having the Electoral College in place, and I never said otherwise. But the big winners from the Electoral College are the large states that happen to be politically divided. Allow me to offer some factual evidence (this tends to be a good strategy for college debaters and courageous truth-seekers alike). Between April 1 and September 30, 2004, $333.4 million was spent on presidential campaign advertising. The top five states where that money was spent were Ohio (17.9 percent), Florida (17.1), Pennsylvania (12.3), Michigan (6.7), and Wisconsin (5.8). That totals 59.8 percent of presidential campaign advertising during the period, to a set of states that contain something like 20 percent of the country’s population. If television advertising is a reliable indicator of where a campaign is sending its resources, and I believe it is, then clearly large, competitive states benefit from our system of subdividing the national electorate far more than the great majority of small states. Now, it may be that Mr. Gordon and I have an irreconcilable difference of opinion (surprise!). He would rather have our current system, which somewhat favors small states, strongly advantages big, politically divided states, and disadvantages ideologically homogeneous states of all sizes. In contrast, I’d prefer a system that leaves some small states behind—Delaware, most likely, with its special Delaware issues—but puts places like Oklahoma, Georgia, and Massachusetts back on the table. I’m obviously quite convinced of my position, and Mr. Gordon of his, and unless he’s surprisingly convinced by the data above, I expect things will stay that way. I have two other, less lengthy clarifications to conclude with. First, Mr. Gordon says that the Electoral College results in 1876 and 2000 were “clear enough” that Al Gore and Samuel Tilden didn’t have any objective reason to complain. Actually, the 1876 election saw an enormous controversy about the Electoral College after three Southern states sent multiple slates of electors to Congress. The resulting imbroglio makes the resolution of the 2000 election look brief and civil by comparison, and the election fight only ended when a special commission decided, by an 8–7 vote, to give the contested electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes. Despite Tilden’s three-point margin in the popular vote, this Electoral College fiasco denied him the Presidency. As for the 2000 election, we all know that history. If you think the Electoral College provided useful clarity in these circumstances, I have a profession to suggest to you. Finally, Mr. Gordon asks how I can be so certain that the outcome of the 2000 election would have been a clear victory for Gore if we had just been going by the popular vote. “A mere 544,683 votes, a little over 10,000 per state, separated Al Gore and George Bush, out of 101,463,105 cast,” he writes. “I imagine the Republicans would have fought just as ferociously and screamed fraud just as loudly over the country as the Democrats did in Florida.” I find this an implausible scenario. Finding an extra 10,000 votes per state would have been a totally impossible feat—the typical difference after a recount is no more than a few dozen, or at most a few hundred votes. In 2000, the Democrats were fighting for some 500 votes in Florida. That’s a close margin by any standard. But imagine if we hadn’t had the Electoral College, and George Bush had gone on television in November 2000 to declare, “If authorities miscounted 10,000 votes per state it would have changed the outcome.” He might as well have told America that if his grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle. It would have been hugely embarrassing for Republicans. The congressional GOP would probably have made President Gore’s life miserable, but I very much doubt they would have tolerated a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. I’m not a fan of counterfactuals, but this seems like a pretty open-and-shut case.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College III Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:10 AM EST John Steele Gordon raises a reasonable objection to my argument in favor of ditching the Electoral College: “In a race determined only be the national popular vote, much of ‘fly-over country,’ as coastal elites call it, would be ignored, and the race would be fought in the great media centers . . . and the major cities. That would not be a good thing. The Electoral College forces candidates to consider each of the 50 states and to spend time and resources in those that seem possible to win, no matter how small. Without it, they would ignore the Vermonts and the Idahos.” There are a few problems with this statement. First of all, on the level of broad principles, I’m not sure why the United States is necessarily better off with an electoral system that theoretically favors small, rural states over big, urban centers. There are arguments for promoting such a system, but it doesn’t strike me as an absolute political good. Second, and more important, the system we currently have doesn’t actually favor small states very much in practice. Mr. Gordon’s statement that abolishing the Electoral College would lead to candidates’ ignoring “the Vermonts and the Idahos” would be a good point—except for the fact that candidates already ignore Vermont and Idaho. Presidential elections are fought in big, politically divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida. The practical impact of the Electoral College isn’t to favor small states; it’s to favor certain kinds of big states. I’ve never actually heard a “coastal elite” use the term “flyover country,” but if some do, the Electoral College isn’t doing much to discourage them. Mr. Gordon makes an additional point that the Electoral College tends to establish more decisive winners than the popular vote, and suggests that this is a good thing because “clear winners are always better than unclear ones, and the great virtue of the Electoral College is that it always produces clear winners.” I’m not sure that Al Gore or Samuel Tilden would agree about the consistent clarity of the Electoral College, but I actually think there’s an argument to be made that the apparent clarity of Electoral College results is a bad thing. In 1992 Bill Clinton won by a clear Electoral College vote but took office with less than 50 percent support from the public. He proceeded to try and ram health-care reform through Congress as though he’d won an overwhelming mandate. A similar thing happened with George Bush and Social Security reform after the 2004 election. Both Presidents overestimated the public’s support for their administration, and both suffered gravely as a result. I doubt this kind of hubris would occur so easily if we didn’t have an Electoral College to disguise and distort the results of close elections. Finally, Mr. Gordon suggests a counterfactual: “Imagine a squeaker election . . . without the Electoral College. In 2000, because of the college, the messy, divisive legal battle was fought only in Florida, and it still took over a month to sort out. But without the college it would have been fought in all 50 states, because each and every vote would have been precious.” On this last point, I’ll note that the idea that each and every vote is precious is sort of the point of a democracy. As for Mr. Gordon’s larger thought experiment, to paraphrase The Princess Bride, I do not think it means what he thinks it means. If the 2000 election had been settled without the Electoral College, there would not have been a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. In fact, there would not have been a “messy, divisive legal battle” at all. The outcome would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.
November 26, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:05 PM EST I see that I’m a latecomer to the discussion about the Electoral College. Thanksgiving has a way of keeping one busy (or asleep). I enjoyed Julie Fenster’s post last week about Abraham Lincoln’s scheme to undermine the Electoral College. It does seem similar to the law Maryland has already passed, which would effectively form a coalition of states that pledge to give their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, although the Maryland effort strikes me as rather less partisan. There are other sly ways that states have tried to make the Electoral College more representative of the popular vote; both Maine and Nebraska currently award two of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins a majority of votes in the state, and then apportion the rest of their electoral votes by congressional district. If a Democratic presidential candidate wins Maine overall by running up huge margins downstate, but a Republican ekes out a win in the rural second congressional district, the state’s electoral vote gets split 3–1 in the Democrat’s favor. Fred Smoler and John Steele Gordon both ponder the consequences of eliminating the Electoral College. The basic argument against doing so, as Mr. Smoler relates it, is that “people who detest all barriers to immediate majoritarian politics should think hard about precisely what they are wishing for.” Perhaps. But the Electoral College is not much of a check on the majority; there have been only three instances when the electoral vote has overridden the popular vote. What the Electoral College practically accomplishes, in the present day, is to take the vast majority of states off the radar of presidential candidates. Our current system makes it insane for a Democratic presidential candidate to waste his time campaigning in Texas, or for a Republican to blow a weekend in California (except for fundraising). It just isn’t cost-effective to take your message to your adversary’s home turf. You’re never going to convince enough Mississippians to vote Democratic to get their electoral votes, so why try to convince any of them at all? When you can focus on snagging Ohio’s electoral votes, why would you spend money elsewhere? This isn’t fair—not to any party in particular, and especially to the great majority of American voters. Mr. Gordon doubts liberals “would be so up in arms about the Electoral College these days had George Bush won the popular vote and Al Gore the College in 2000.” My complaint with the College, though, isn’t the complaint of a Democrat (the 2004 campaign showed that Democrats can benefit from the Electoral College, too, as John Kerry came within 60,000 votes of winning Ohio and the Presidency but lost the popular vote by a much larger margin). Mine is the complaint of a New Yorker. If we elected the President directly, it would make sense for Democrats to visit Texas (or parts, anyway) and for Republicans to visit California (Orange County, anyone?). Democrats could actually benefit from visiting rural Oklahoma, and Republicans could pick up useful votes in Queens. I suspect the electoral majorities that would result from such a system would probably look a lot more like America, and less like Ohio. Given the political polarization of recent years, geographically broader, more inclusive presidential campaigns might be just what the doctor ordered.
November 10, 2007
The Politics of National Security II Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:40 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for linking to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s speech “The Politics of National Security.” I’m not really sure where to begin responding to it, except to say it is a good example of why I find Lieberman a very sad public figure. There have always been aspects of Lieberman’s politics that I’ve found problematic, but I used to be a fan of his. I considered him a decent man and, even when I disagreed with him, an unusually honest politician. But as the centrist Democrat Ed Kilgore writes, the Connecticut senator’s latest speech “seemed designed to validate everything [Lieberman’s] Democratic critics have said about him over the last few years, and to humiliate Democrats who have defended him.” I do not think I can critique Lieberman’s address more effectively than Kilgore already has, so forgive me for quoting liberally. The heart of Kilgore’s argument is that Lieberman’s speech “provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were ‘good’ from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be ‘bad.’ Democrats were ‘bad’ from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were ‘good’”—and so on. Kilgore continues: “These judgments appear to be based on an interpretation of the ‘muscular’ Democratic foreign policy tradition that’s all about the willingness to use military force, and a rhetorical commitment to democracy-promotion and tyranny-denouncing. You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law—all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support.” To Kilgore’s observations I’ll only add that Lieberman’s speech totally misses the present political reality in the United States. In Lieberman’s view, the source of antiwar opinion in this country is the “politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base.” According to a brand-new poll, 68 percent of Americans oppose our continuing commitment in Iraq. That is a new high. If Joe Lieberman still supports the war that’s his right, but someone should disabuse him of the notion that he’s the voice of a beleaguered and sensible quiet majority.
November 6, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:25 PM EST As one proponent of the line-item veto might have said: “Here we go again.” Mr. Gordon responds in several parts to my thoughts on the line-item veto. First, he takes issue with my use of the word “patently” to describe the unconstitutionality of the line-item veto. “The fact that three justices thought it constitutional makes the word ‘patently’ inappropriate here,” he writes. “Yesterday’s Supreme Court dissent has very often become tomorrow’s majority opinion, as Mr. Burns knows full well.” Indeed I do know this. However, if you look at the justices who dissented—Breyer, O’Connor, and Scalia, with the latter only dissenting in part—it seems likely that the anti–line item veto majority on the Court has actually gotten stronger over time. O’Connor has retired and was replaced by Justice Samuel Alito. Along with Chief Justice Roberts, the other new member of the Court, Alito does not strike me as a likely prospect for recruitment to Justice Breyer’s minority view. A 7 to 2 vote against the line-item veto is not what I would call a close-run thing, especially when you consider that Justice Scalia’s dissent was not exactly ringing. As for Mr. Gordon’s suggestion that President Bush and the Republican Senate leadership might not understand the Constitution—well, to paraphrase Francis Urquhart, you might very well think that, but I could not possibly comment. Second, Mr. Gordon speculates that Rudy Giuliani, who is a good prospect to lead the GOP ticket next year, actually opposed the line-item veto in his capacity as New York mayor, but not as a matter of personal conviction. This is demonstrably incorrect: Giuliani has continued to argue that the line-item veto is unconstitutional long after leaving the office of the mayor. But don’t take my word for it, just ask this guy. Third, Mr. Gordon proposes an alternative means by which the President could cut down on pork: by reviving the power of impoundment. I don’t know enough about this matter to judge whether it’s a good idea, so I’ll stick to the question of the line-item veto as such. I imagine, though I do not know, that all the concerns I raised earlier about expanded presidential power would likely apply. I’m still interested to hear Mr. Gordon’s thoughts on that subject. Finally, Mr. Gordon clarifies that when he “referred to a new contract with America, [he] did not mean simply the line-item veto but a whole panoply of reforms, most of them congressional rules, not laws.” He also argues that this “hasn’t been tried yet,” and “invite[s me] to take a look at the ridicule heaped on the first contract with America in 1994 by the mainstream media, on precisely the grounds that the voters didn’t care, before the election of that year. The ridicule stopped on Election Day.” I’m not sure what media scorn Mr. Gordon is referring to—this New York Times article, for example, seems perfectly respectful—but I would actually challenge the premise of Mr. Gordon’s argument here. Not only would I submit that a latter-day contract with America is unlikely to gain many votes next year, but I’d observe that it’s not really clear how many votes the original contract actually won for the GOP. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll right before the 1994 election, just 31 percent of voters even knew of Newt Gingrich’s magnum opus. There was indeed a “political tsunami” that year, but whether earmarks and pork had anything to do with it is hardly a settled question. To end on a high note, it seems Mr. Gordon and I agree about at least one thing: I should have directly cited the blog post I was quoting when I mentioned a previous comment of his. Some might very well think of this as a minor, even frivolous correction, but I generally try to set high standards for conduct in blogging and I regret my error.
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:40 AM EST Mr. Gordon addresses a major political subject, wasteful spending, in his post this morning, and suggests that the President of the United States ought to have a line-item veto to use on spending bills. He argues that a line-item veto would curb pork-barrel congressional appropriations, and that any party “willing to seize the issue . . . would do very well next November.” To quote Mr. Gordon, “There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional.” His post does not go very far into the history of the line-item veto, but we’ve actually seen this movie before and we know how it ends. In 1996 Congress granted the White House a line-item veto, only to see it struck down by a district court, and then, in June of 1998, by the Supreme Court in Clinton v. City of New York. As John Paul Stevens observed in his decision, the Constitution explains how bills become law and how the President can veto them, and it’s quite obvious that the line-item veto isn’t part of the plan. Any politician who wants to enact a line-item veto, therefore, must be prepared to amend the Constitution, not just pass a bill. Constitutional obstacles aside, is the line-item veto a good idea? I have serious doubts. Despite Mr. Gordon’s faith in the President as “the only [official] without parochial interests,” and his rather strange assertion that the President is “the only one who looks at the budget . . . as a whole,” I am not so sure that this enhancement of presidential power would not alter the political process in an adverse way. Right now, the President’s more limited veto is an essential mechanism of our balanced government. On the one hand, under this system, Congress must consider the President’s preferences before passing legislation in order to avoid provoking a veto. On the other hand, legislators can also force the President to compromise with their priorities. Members of Congress can effectively override the President’s preferences by passing bills that combine initiatives he dislikes with initiatives he judges essential. If the President wants to get his, he has to make sure Congress gets theirs. It is clear that there are problems with this system, and Mr. Gordon outlines some of them, but it is equally clear that amending it with a line-item veto would rather dramatically enhance the President’s power in relation to that of Congress. Mr. Gordon is pretty comfortable labeling congressional spending “corruption,” but the overwhelming majority of legislative appropriations are perfectly legal, if often undesirable. Perhaps these appropriations are so out-of-control that it would be worth expanding the Presidency in order to restrict them. But I would be uneasy about the unintended consequences of such an act. One last note: As I quoted above, Mr. Gordon suggests that the line-item veto could be a powerful element of a reformist political platform, and that any party that supports it could reap benefits at the polls. Consider, though, that President Bush asked Congress to enact the line-item veto in his 2006 State of the Union Address, and Senators Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell moved to comply. But their party got wiped out in the midterm elections that year. Right now, the leading Republican candidate for President, Rudy Giuliani, is also the man who initiated the lawsuit that ultimately stripped Bill Clinton of his line-item veto. If this is an issue that voters currently care about, I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it yet.
November 3, 2007
Paul Tibbets II Posted by Alexander Burns at 07:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon notes the passing of Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., the commander on the mission to bomb Hiroshima. Tibbets’s obituary reminds me of this article by Robert Kaplan, in the September Atlantic, about the B-2 bomber, “The Plane That Would Bomb Iran.” The piece is behind a subscription wall, but it’s also posted, perhaps illegally, here. One of the featured characters in Kaplan’s narrative is Paul W. Tibbets IV, a B-2 pilot who is the grandson of the Enola Gay officer. For those familiar with Kaplan’s writing, the article is predictable. But it contains a poignant sketch of the Tibbets family, including Paul Tibbets, Jr., whom his grandson calls “the ultimate warrior . . . the mission was everything, which meant his family suffered.” A brief thought on Tibbets’s most famous mission. It seems to me that there is a growing consensus that using the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing for Harry Truman to do. I’m not necessarily in disagreement with this consensus, but I’m also not totally comfortable with this position as Mr. Gordon presents it. “Truman really had no political choice,” he writes. “I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative.” Truman’s decision was excruciating, and I envy no leader faced with a similar choice. But part of the reason why the President’s call was so difficult was because he did have choices, both politically and morally. It’s easy to frame the debate over Hiroshima in binary terms—should Truman have used nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or left them unused altogether? These, however, were not the only options available to the man in the Oval Office. He could have chosen other targets, or issued a warning first, or not dropped the second bomb, or taken any number of alternative courses. I’m not saying America, or the world, would be better off today if Truman had done so. But if one wants to make an effective assessment of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it makes sense to consider the full range of Truman’s options, and the painful degree of freedom he actually had.
November 2, 2007
Waterboarding, Then and Now Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:00 AM EST About 10 days ago, Fred Smoler and I had an exchange about torture and the moral rectitude of the American government. I argued that the executive branch’s current endorsement of what is effectively torture indicates “some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government.” Mr. Smoler took issue with this characterization, suggesting that torture “isn’t, and cannot be [the only issue] if we are assessing moral compasses in wartime.” Mr. Smoler also observed that Americans used torture as a counterinsurgency tactic in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. Readers who followed this exchange with any degree of interest might direct their attention to this article from Politico.com. The self-described “amateur historian” Daniel A. Rezneck details an event from the U.S. effort in the Philippines, in which Theodore Roosevelt overrode the decision of a court-martial and dismissed a general accused of permitting torture. President Roosevelt declared at the time: “Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army.” Rezneck cites Edmund Morris’s description of the episode as one that garnered Roosevelt “‘universal praise’ from Democrats . . . and from Republicans, who said that he had ‘upheld the national honor.’” In order to avoid reopening a blog debate that’s gone cold, I won’t claim that TR’s example highlights a certain, shall we say, ethical degeneracy on the part of the present-day American state. Rezneck’s article does make me wonder, though, if we’ll ever again be a society where the President can win bipartisan plaudits for forcefully opposing torture.
October 28, 2007
Our Wellsian Future Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:05 PM EST There’s a new report from the London School of Economics that might give half of everyone’s descendants cause for alarm. According to Oliver Curry, an evolutionary theorist, “Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time. . . . The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the ‘underclass’ humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.” Those curious to know more about the “genetic upper class” can read, in this BBC article, that “men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices, and bigger penises. Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, [and] glossy hair.” Leaving aside the question of what Pantene and Victoria’s Secret would do in such a future, not to mention all the “male enhancement” spammers, this prediction is just flat-out ridiculous. As the BBC points out, it’s really just a rehash of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, except with the London School of Economics behind it. But Wells’s book wasn’t supposed to be a scientific prediction, and in any case we now know enough to resist taking such projections too seriously. Curry’s underlying assumption, that “sexual selection . . . was likely to create more and more genetic inequality,” runs contrary to most everything we know about evolution. Sexual selection leads to the development or exaggeration of specific animal features—the male mandrill’s colorful face, for example—but if there’s been any instance of a species electively dividing itself through sexual choice, I’m certainly not aware of it. Even if there were, it seems pretty dicey for Curry to assume that humans 100,000 years in the future will favor the same physical characteristics our pop culture glorifies today. If there is anything of intellectual interest in Curry’s theories, it is probably his emphatic assertion that humans are still subject to evolutionary pressures. One of the major debates in evolutionary science is over the question of whether humans still face natural selection, or whether technology and culture have moved us beyond that point. Curry—who, incidentally, is not trained as a scientist—seems to have made up his mind on this question. Indeed, he apparently thinks technology will serve as an evolutionary force of its own. This is an intriguing notion, but I’ll wait for someone else to articulate it before taking it seriously.
October 26, 2007
Expiration Dates Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:05 PM EST James Watson lost his job yesterday. The Nobel Prize–winning biologist resigned as the chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he has worked on and administered genetic research for decades. The impetus for his resignation was the uproar over comments he made last week about genetics and racial differences. Speaking with London’s Sunday Times, Watson had commented, “All our social policies are based on the fact that [Africans’] intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” Going further, Watson announced that racial equality is a sham: “People who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” A few people have suggested that the resulting outrage over Watson’s comments was an inappropriate response to the man’s free speech. It seems obvious, though, that the scientist’s comments were not the stuff of which intellectual debate is made. Watson himself has professed surprise at having made such remarks. One hesitates to question the mental capacity of an eminent scientist, but Watson’s comments, and his subsequent retraction of them, look like a pretty good case study in public senility. It’s probably inevitable that our society is going to fixate on the words of famous, accomplished people like Watson, no matter how old they are. But this latest affair makes me wonder whether we wouldn’t be better off imposing a kind of expiration date on public figures. A consensus agreement, perhaps, that 25 years after someone’s career-making accomplishment, we can stop assuming that he remains an impressive person. This sounds a little cruel, but in the long run I think people like Watson would benefit from it. If they stayed lucid in their old age, they would keep making headlines. If they acted like cranks, society would sigh and move on. Biographers might find their ramblings useful, but the rest of us could focus on more important news. Of course, there’s also reason to doubt whether anyone should ever have valued Watson’s opinion as highly as some do. I once had a biology teacher who said Watson’s main gift wasn’t for genetics but for self-promotion. Given how skillfully Watson’s evaded allegations of academic dishonesty, I think that assessment might be merited. I’d say we were fortunate to have him out of the public eye for good, but I doubt we’ll be that lucky.
October 26, 2007
Contingency and Political History Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:25 PM EST A few months back I made a post on what would have been President Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday. It struck me as a fitting occasion to consider the role that chance events play in history. This week, the anniversary of another event—a death, not a birth—seems perhaps an even more appropriate time for such reflections. It was five years ago yesterday that Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, along with his wife, Sheila, daughter Marcia, and aides Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic, and Mary McEvoy. Locked in a competitive reelection campaign, Wellstone was on his way to a funeral at the time he died. Though his opponent, St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, was giving Wellstone a run for his money, the most recent polls had shown the incumbent pulling away from his challenger. One of the reasons was a controversial vote Wellstone cast in the middle of October, against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. At the time of the vote, Wellstone feared he had doomed his reelection bid. Just weeks later it seemed that Minnesotans were rewarding his risky stance. If Wellstone had not died on that day in October 2002, I think there’s a pretty strong chance he’d be neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton in a fight for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Wellstone, who considered a run for the White House in 2000, might even have entered the 2004 race to face George W. Bush. We never would have heard of Howard Dean if the 2004 nominating contest had also featured a popular, charismatic, experienced Democratic senator who had voted against the war. Whether Wellstone would have captured the nomination in 2004, or subsequently won the White House, is something we can never know. But three years after that election, and five years after the Iraq War began, it seems clear that Wellstone’s credibility with today’s Democratic primary electorate would be extraordinary. Wellstone’s was not the only political career to get snuffed out in such a tragic way. The list of political figures who have been downed in plane crashes is actually quite astonishing. Democratic Rep. Jerry Litton died in a crash in 1976, in the middle of a Senate campaign. He would have likely defeated his Republican opponent, John Danforth, who instead went on to a long and influential career in Congress. In 1978, Virginia politician Richard Obenshain went down with a plane; he was replaced on the ballot by former Navy Secretary John Warner, who is today the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In 1991, Republican Sen. John Heinz and former Sen. John Tower both died in the space of 48 hours in separate plane crashes. Tower was certainly at the end of his career, but Heinz’s future was still bright. Believe it or not, the list goes on. Of these men, Wellstone seems the most compelling example of political history gone awry through vehicular disaster. But in a country that celebrates its open, safe political process, these random accidents have exerted an uncomfortably significant influence in shaping the present. There’s not really a way around this, but it’s chilling all the same.
October 22, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:30 AM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for his thoughtful response to my post on torture. Mr. Smoler presents his point as though we have some serious disagreement, but I’m not sure that we actually disagree about much. We do, however, appear to be talking past each other a little bit. Mr. Smoler writes, in response to my suggestion that institutionalized torture shows “some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government”: “The Bush administration’s insistence on loosening the definition of torture has shocked and disgusted many Americans, but I am no means certain that we nowadays wage war with much less tenderness and restraint than the World War II generation did.” That’s a fine and reasonable point, and one that I partially agree with, but I didn’t argue that our military apparatus has undergone a process of total moral degradation. My suggestion, as I quoted above, was that our greatly increased willingness to torture shows a loss of certain moral values. Mr. Smoler describes a few instances of World War II–era torture and torture-like behavior. I will note, though, that in all these examples, soldiers were acting on their own, in the field, under the stress of combat, without any evident institutional endorsement of their behavior. Are our soldiers today less ethical people than their grandparents were? I doubt it. But I think it’s obvious that the government they work for permits and encourages practices that would have been unacceptable six decades ago. A Dutch interrogator’s rough treatment of a 17-year-old German boy is distasteful, if arguably necessary. There’s a giant moral gap between his actions and those of a state that systematically tortures its prisoners. This week our President’s nominee for attorney general declined to say whether he believed waterboarding, one of the Khmer Rouge’s choice interrogation methods, constitutes torture. Last spring, a Republican candidate for President, Tom Tancredo, was asked what methods he would use to extract information about imminent terror attacks on American soil. His answer, delivered to thunderous applause, was, “I’m looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you.” Tancredo is a bit of a nut, to put it mildly, but he is not the only Jack Bauer groupie in government; Justice Scalia has also cited 24 as an inspiration for his thinking about counterterrorism law. For readers who are not 24 watchers, I’ll note that Mr. Bauer’s interrogation methods have included cutting off a diplomat’s fingers, shooting an innocent bystander in the leg, and suffocating his own brother with a plastic bag. My argument here is not that 24 is a pretty gross show. My point is that a significant and powerful portion of the American government believes the best way to question a prisoner is to assume that at any given second there may an atomic bomb counting down to detonation. This strikes me as a basically insane approach to the ethics of interrogation. In 1944 our government didn’t think every interrogation had the Battle of the Bulge riding on it. That would have been a recipe for random and pointless cruelty. Does our government’s altered reasoning constitute moral decay? I guess readers can decide for themselves. My answer is, unreservedly, yes.
October 18, 2007
Stuart Taylor, Legal Reporting, and Torture Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:45 PM EST I want to thank John Steele Gordon, belatedly, for directing my attention to Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent. I have not yet had the opportunity to take a glance at this book, but I look forward to doing so – even if it was reviewed well in (cue music) The New York Times. I am generally a fan of Mr. Taylor’s work, and though I know little about Professor Johnson’s, I am sure their collaboration was a fruitful one. One subject where I think Taylor’s writing has been particularly strong has been that of counterterrorism policy. While plenty of people have weighed in on topics like torture, detainment, and extraordinary rendition, Taylor is one of comparatively few who have done so in a legally-minded, evidence-based way. National Journal, where Taylor is a columnist, has perhaps the tallest, widest, most expensive subscription wall ever created for a publication, so forgive me for not linking. But in a January 2005 piece titled “Distorting the Law and Facts in the Torture Debate,” Taylor called for officials to cut through the “fog of confusion” over interrogation policy, and detailed the various ways in which the Bush administration and, to a lesser extent, their critics, simply weren’t addressing the real legal issues surrounding detainee treatment. More recently, in May 2007 Taylor urged Congress and the White House to stop improvising and enact meaningful guidelines for dealing with “a noncitizen suspected of being an Islamist terrorist.” Sometimes Taylor engages in a kind of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, let’s-split-the-difference reasoning that I find unpersuasive. All the same, though, he’s stayed on these tricky, important legal issues when many other opinion leaders have given them only fleeting attention. That’s admirable. I was reminded of Mr. Taylor’s work last weekend, even before Mr. Gordon’s post, by this Washington Post article on a group of World War II veterans who interrogated Nazi POWs at Fort Hunt. “Back then,” Petula Dvorak writes, “they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.” Said one former interrogator: “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.” This struck me as an incredibly sad illustration of yet another way in which the World War II generation is passing away. Comparing the interrogations at Fort Hunt with those at Guantanamo Bay, it’s hard not to wonder if the 60 years since the Second World War haven’t brought about some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government. It’s a good thing that there are lawyers and legal reporters wrestling with the subject of torture. But there’s something tragic about the fact that they even have to.
October 15, 2007
On the Norwegian Nobel Committee Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:00 PM EST For readers interested in this weekend’s exchange about the Nobel Peace Prize, I recommend this article from yesterday’s New York Times for further reading. It provides a good snapshot of Nobel Committee members wrestling with the question of what, exactly, “peace” is supposed to mean, and also with the political consequences of awarding such a prize. On the latter question, the key comment seems to be from Francis Sejersted, the former chairman of the committee, who tells the Times: “Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.” On the former question—the changing meaning of “peace”—the Times cites Ole Danbolt Mjos, who chaired the committee that awarded Wangari Maathai in 2004. Mjos said the prize is really “about how we live together, share resources, preserving the earth.” I find this a compelling, if not 100 percent satisfying, explanation of what the committee now looks for in a laureate. Check out the article and see what you think.
October 14, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:25 PM EST Mr. Gordon makes a new argument in his latest post. He writes that Al Gore is different from other Nobel recipients, like Norman Borlaug and Muhammad Yunus, who have won without literally working toward peace because his most important potential contributions are, at this point, largely unrealized. This strikes me as a fairly reasonable point: If we’re going to have what is, essentially, a Nobel Humanitarian Prize, perhaps it makes sense to recognize the individuals who have made the greatest concrete progress toward achieving their humanitarian goals. From this perspective, Borlaug and Yunus are clearly worthier honorees than Gore. From another perspective, though, the Nobel has frequently been given to people whose most significant contributions are, on a basic level, still just potential contributions. Frank Kellogg won the Nobel Peace Prize the year after the Kellogg-Briand Pact, banning war, was signed. Nicholas Murray Butler was a joint recipient of the prize two years later (with Jane Addams) for his work promoting the pact. So, in three years you had two men honored for the same treaty, which had not yet had any demonstrable impact in discouraging war. As we all know, the world erupted in bloodshed a few years later. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho won the prize in 1973 (the latter declined it) for the Paris Peace Accords. Fortunately, in this case, the Nobel Committee was rather more farsighted than it was in its optimistic assessment of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Just look at the lasting, two-state solution that endures in Vietnam. Oh, wait . . . My point here is not to berate the Nobel Committee for a few judgments that seem silly in retrospect. My point is to say that Al Gore’s “paper profit” is at least as significant as those of numerous other Nobel honorees. For what it’s worth, I’d say he’s much more likely to end up a metaphorically wealthy man than Frank Kellogg or Henry Kissinger did. I have no interest in debating Mr. Gordon on the issue of climate change, or responding, by proxy, to the criticisms of a marginally significant British judge. (Although I will, incidentally, note the irony of many conservatives’ appealing to the jurisprudence of a—gasp!—foreign legal authority. Imagine if a liberal used such an argumentative tactic on a subject like the death penalty.) On the subject of climate change, the science is in. The planet’s getting warmer, and a leading cause is manmade carbon emissions. Estimates can disagree over whether climate change will raise sea levels by one foot or twenty. But sea levels are only one metric by which to gauge the impact of climate change, and flooding is only one of the many negative consequences humanity would face if it decided to ignore this problem. On this particular subject, we might want to try and see the forest for the drunken trees. As to the question of whether the Norwegian Parliament or the Norwegian Nobel Commitee awards the Peace Prize, Mr. Gordon suggests that this is “a distinction without a whole lot of difference.” I’d argue otherwise. Legislative bodies, such as the U.S. Congress and the Norwegian Parliament, are driven by electoral concerns. Bodies they appoint, like the 9/11 Commission, or help appoint, like the Supreme Court, are much less susceptible to such motivations. For people who wish to devalue the Nobel Peace Prize, or to cast aspersions on the worthiness of its recipients, the notion that craven Scandinavian socialist politicos decide who wins it is a useful misconception to spread. I’m certainly not saying that Mr. Gordon intended to do anything like this, but I do think this was an important mistake to correct.
October 12, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize II Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:30 PM EST I was a little disappointed to see that John Steele Gordon tackled the subject of the Nobel Peace Prize before I could get to it today—although not that disappointed. Predictably, Mr. Gordon’s thoughts are rather different from the ones I’ve been mulling over. There is plenty in Mr. Gordon’s post that I find ill-reasoned and problematic, but rather than setting our views in direct and artificial opposition, I thought I’d offer the alternative observations that occurred to me this morning. The Nobel Peace Prize has an interesting history. As Mr. Gordon helpfully detailed, many winners of the prize have been people who worked on peacemaking in a formal, legalistic sort of way. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Ralph Bunche are good examples of this kind of Peace Prize recipient. The majority of Nobel honorees, not just the American winners, have been of this variety. Consider the examples of Oscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica who was awarded the prize in 1987 for his efforts to end civil strife in Central America, and John Hume and David Trimble, who won in 1998 after they worked to forge a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. An increasing number of honorees, however, have been coming from outside the sphere of government and have been winning as a result of accomplishments outside the field of legal peacemaking. Historically, plenty of Nobel Prizes have gone to activists, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Lech Walesa, and Desmond Tutu, whose political contributions improved the condition of humanity but didn’t directly deal with preventing war. Now, two years in a row, the Peace Prize has gone to a private-sector actor whose accomplishments seem even more tenuously tied to literal concerns of war and peace. Last year’s recipient, Muhammad Yunus, is a pioneer of microfinancing, which aims at promoting popular entrepreneurship and business growth in impoverished countries. This year’s winner, Al Gore, has worked to build international consensus around the need to act on the issue of climate change. Neither of these men, or the organizations with which they shared the Peace Prize, has dealt with ending an armed conflict or anything like it. Yet they have both won the highest award a peacemaker can receive. It seems, then, that the Nobel Commitee (not, as Mr. Gordon stated, the Norwegian parliament) is judging Peace Prize nominees by a slightly different understanding of “peace” than it used to. Their principal interest seems to be in honoring individuals whose work has advanced humanitarian, internationalist ideals, rather than in picking out the best peace negotiators. Yunus may not have stopped a war, but he has contributed a remarkable economic innovation in the form of microcredit. This invention may, in the long run, help far more people than the Treaty of Locarno ever did. I think that outcome is pretty likely. Similarly, if Gore’s activism continues to spur international action on the environment, it will help reverse the deleterious effects of climate change and avert famines, epidemics, and disastrous flooding. It seems to me there’s a pretty good case to be made that this achievement would be equivalent to Norman Borlaug’s or Linus Pauling’s. In Akira Iriye’s Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World, the author argues that the Nobel Committee’s decision in 1999 to award the prize to Doctors Without Borders signaled a recognition that international NGOs had begun to rival governments in their ability to shape the common path of humanity. Now it seems the Nobel Committee has come to understand that our world is one in which private individuals, like Gore and Yunus, can effect similar changes in the global social landscape by interacting primarily with other private individuals. This morning Gore sent out an e-mail to his supporters calling the climate crisis “our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.” I find it amazing, and moving, to think that the “global consciousness” he’s referring to is grounded not only in compacts between states but also in an actual community of countless, disparate, concerned individuals. Whether or not you want to call them “peacemakers,” the men and women who have helped build this community are blessed indeed.
September 28, 2007
The Great (Board) Game Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:10 PM EST All the talk of “Great Powers” over the last few days has reminded me of one of my favorite board games of all time: Avalon Hill’s classic Diplomacy. It’s kind of like Risk, but without the dice. The game has up to seven players, each of them representing a major European power of the World War I era (the choices are Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, and Turkey). All the countries start with equally balanced military forces, and there is a limited amount of free territory to gobble up. I won’t go into the minute details of game play, except to say that the game’s crucial innovation is that it does not permit any power to build up hugely superior armed forces in any one geographical area. As a consequence, you can only defeat your opponents through negotiation and deception. If you want to invade Trieste, you must somehow persuade the player holding it that, in fact, those armies you’re shipping through the Adriatic are actually heading toward Italy. Then you catch him off his guard and you’re on your way to Belgrade. This might sound like players have a limited set of actions available to them, and that games should get predictable pretty quickly. I assure potential players that this is not the case. The range of possible actions and outcomes is restricted only by the creativity of the players involved. Because there is no element of totally random chance, as there is in Risk, you won’t end up having the game dissolve into a series of ridiculous, strategy-free battles and utterly unlikely outcomes. You just might need to patch up a few friendships after a winner is declared. A while back I was speaking to a friend about the dearth of new board games after the model of Risk or Diplomacy. We agreed that part of this had to do with the expanding comparative appeal of computer games. But he pointed out that it also probably stemmed from the fact that the world we live in today doesn’t lend itself so much to a Diplomacy-style board game. As John Steele Gordon observed a few days ago, warfare between heavily armed, developed nations is a far less likely prospect today than it was a century ago. Maybe that helps explain why a Diplomacy enthusiast like Henry Kissinger has become even less effective with age.
September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:05 AM EST John Steele Gordon poses an enticing question about how we assess the relative strengths of nations: “Do we have 5 Great Powers, based on nuclear weapons, or 12, based on GDP?” I don’t know if he means this as a rhetorical question or whether it’s intended to invite a response, but I’ll take a crack at it all the same. This query follows a more challenging, broader question: What defines a Great Power? To this second question, Mr. Gordon essentially offers four potential answers. First is the reply of his former international politics professor, who said a Great Power is “any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” Second is A. J. P. Taylor’s definition: “The test of a Great Power is the test of strength for war.” A third method is by asking whether a country has nuclear weapons. Fourth, and lastly, is by measuring a nation’s GDP. Taking each of these methods individually, I find them problematic. Mr. Gordon’s old professor’s definition probably works fairly well for defining the Great Powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in a world where nearly 200 countries interact with one another, is there any country other than the United States that must have its interests considered by every other one? Countries like Britain and France, which hold veto power on the United Nations Security Council, don’t necessarily meet this high bar. China might, but even if it does I think the list stops there. Maybe it should, or maybe this definition is flawed. I’m slightly more tempted by Taylor’s. This actually fits better with the example of Britain’s casual attitude toward Icelandic sovereignty in World War II. In that case, it seems that Britain was the greater power because it could act with impunity in military affairs, whereas Iceland could not even provide for a common defense. Yet in a world bound to an increasing degree by systems of international arbitration and law, range of military action doesn’t quite work as a definition of Great Power status, either. It’s much harder these days to disregard your neighbor’s sovereignty (ask Saddam Hussein, circa 1991). Even the United States, which remains, in military terms, the world’s most powerful country, lacks the unilateral ability to successfully invade a smaller nation and occupy it at will. In our time, when the international community has so many platforms from which to express outrage, and when every disgruntled ex-Baathist can find his way to a firearm, asymmetrical warfare just ain’t what it used to be. Counting Great Powers by their nuclear arsenals is a tempting third alternative, but it is also a limited one. Mr. Gordon says that five countries would qualify by this rubric, but that estimate is actually a little low. To the five nations that signed the original Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968, we have to add India and Pakistan, and probably North Korea and Israel. When you throw in those last two, this definition gets especially dicey. Kim Jong-Il can’t be totally ignored by other world leaders, but North Korea’s interests don’t carry nearly as much weight as those of nuke-free nations like Japan and Mexico. Nuclear arms empower a country to hold others hostage, or to trigger a global war, but they don’t necessarily increase the prestige or bargaining power of a nation’s government in general. The fourth option Mr. Gordon offers, GDP, is also an interesting measure to use, but the list of the top 12 nations, as judged by this statistic, leaves me with serious doubts. Some of the countries that come out on top, economically, are relatively insignificant by any other standard for national greatness. By any of the other suggested rubrics, countries like Canada, Italy, and Spain are decidedly less significant. I’m not sure that GDP alone can compensate for a comparatively weak military and diplomatic position. These are a lot of objections, so let me try my hand at a positive answer of my own. To some extent, I think you have to measure a nation’s power by a subjective mixture of these various standards. Is a nation economically robust? Is it heavily armed? Is it advanced enough to possess nuclear weapons? Is it empowered by international institutions to advance its interests? I think you have to answer all these questions to know if a country’s power is really extraordinary. On the other hand, though, we might just be dealing with an outdated set of vocabulary. The term “Great Power” comes from a time when the Western world was led by a set of competing nations with differing but matched capabilities. Today, no such set of countries exists. The United States and, to a lesser degree, China, far outpace their nearest competitors by most assessments of national power and potential. To pretend otherwise is to flatter countries like Britain, Germany, and Russia, but without good reason. Maybe it’s time to bury the term “Great Power” alongside the man who coined it.
September 26, 2007
Two Presidents in Action Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:05 AM EST Following this week’s exchange about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University, I encourage readers to see for themselves what kind of welcome the man received. Video of President Lee Bollinger’s introductory remarks is available here, and continued here. Ahmadinejad’s reaction to Bollinger can be viewed here, and clips of his extended remarks are elsewhere on YouTube. As I wrote earlier this week, I don’t know that I would have invited Ahmadinejad to speak, had I been in Lee Bollinger’s shoes. But if the Columbia president wanted to host him, this was the way to do it. Bollinger’s introductory remarks were, in my view, totally magnificent–beginning with a sophisticated argument about free speech and concluding with this blunt address to Ahmadinejad: “A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country, as at one of the meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.” One can see, from the video of Ahmadinejad taking the stage, that not everyone in the audience shared President Bollinger’s sentiments. But for the Iranian president, this event was a humiliation. He was publicly castigated by an American scholar and then laughed at by a room full of college students. I can think of few illustrations of American freedom more compelling than the image of 18- and 19-year-olds scoffing in the face of a despot.
September 24, 2007
Protecting Homosexuals at Columbia from Discrimination II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon calls my latest post “utter nonsense.” “If discriminating against homosexuals is bad, hanging them is far, far worse,” he writes. Obviously, I agree. Mr. Gordon continues: “If gay students at Columbia need be “shielded” from having to face the presence on their campus of an organization that requires homosexuals to keep quiet about their sexual orientation, they surely should not have to face the presence on their campus of someone who hangs people for being gay, even if that person will not be hanging any homosexuals on Morningside Heights.” In my view, there is a difference between actively discriminating against someone and advocating for the subjugation of similar people. I’ve already attempted, twice, to outline this distinction, as I see it. Mr. Gordon evidently finds this distinction unconvincing, and that’s fair enough. He views this pair of moral problems and resolves them differently, and I find his reasoning interesting. It’s disappointing to me that Mr. Gordon would call mine “nonsense.” Given what a civil and respectful conversation this has been, such labeling seems rather cheap. But hey, I’ve been a Mets fan for 21 years and I can live with disappointment. I’ll add one correction. Mr. Gordon suggests that I do “not seem to understand what ROTC is.” I am actually quite familiar with what ROTC is, if not with the specifics of Columbia’s relationship with the organization. Harvard also bans ROTC, and ROTC-enrolled students here take their classes at MIT. I have good friends in the organization. I regret my careless wording, which may have inadvertently conflated the issues of allowing ROTC on campus and allowing military recruitment in general. The issues are, of course, related. For what it’s worth, I also know plenty of people who actively oppose bringing the military back to Harvard’s campus, for reasons totally unrelated to “anti-military posturing.” Their opposition has to do with the fact that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is an institution of tremendous intolerance. I do not doubt their sincerity.
September 23, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad V Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:50 PM EST I’m grateful to Fred Smoler for his discussion of the 2002 controversy concerning Tom Paulin’s invitation to speak at Harvard. I agree with him that the Crimson’s position, in favor of withdrawing Paulin’s invitation, was wrong. To kind of backhandedly defend the Crimson, their editorial page has to find reasons to express moral outrage five days a week, and the Paulin controversy gave them a more interesting pretext for righteous indignation than, say, Harvard’s changing the date by which one must declare a major. One imagines this opportunity was too good to pass up. Similar motives could, I think, be accurately ascribed to some of Paulin’s faculty backers as well. Lawrence Summers’s role in the whole affair seems a bit murky to me, but I hope the account Mr. Smoler heard is correct. That would certainly add a measure of irony to Summers’s recent flap with the University of California. Let me quickly address Mr. Gordon’s further thoughts on Columbia University. Mr. Gordon writes: “ROTC is banned from Columbia because that institution disagrees with the official policy of the United States government, a policy that discriminates against homosexuals in the military by requiring them to keep silent as to their orientation. But Columbia welcomes the president of Iran, although the official policy of the government of Iran that he heads—not just his personal opinion—is to execute homosexuals by hanging them.” This is a nicely symmetrical but oversimplified description of Columbia’s moral dilemma. The university does not ban ROTC recruiters solely as a means of protesting a policy it does not like. I can think of many government agencies that have policies to which the Columbia faculty and administration most likely object, but their recruiters are still allowed to visit the school. ROTC is singled out for special treatment because the process of military recruitment, as it would take place on campus, might violate the university’s nondiscrimination policies. If recruiters came to Columbia, they would be engaging in an activity that treats some students in a degrading and discriminatory way. Banning them from campus has a whiff of political protest to it, but at heart it is a pragmatic move designed to shield students from immediate and active discrimination. President Ahmadinejad’s visit is different. It is an absolute abomination that his government executes homosexuals. But he’s not going to be executing them at Columbia, and he’s not going to be recruiting for the Revolutionary Guard, either. His visit will be limited to a speech that cannot actually harm anyone, except insofar as it wastes 45 minutes of their lives. As I wrote earlier, I’m not saying that Columbia has resolved these two quandaries—whether to ban ROTC and whether to invite Ahmadinejad—correctly. If I had Lee Bollinger’s job, I don’t think I would have decided to welcome the Iranian president into the halls of my school. But both of these situations are complex and tough to resolve. By answering them differently, the university isn’t showing hypocrisy. It’s acknowledging the individual complexities of each situation and dealing with them independently. A final thought. Earlier today I was discussing this issue with a friend who had an interesting take on Bollinger’s invitation to Ahmadinejad. It’s not an example of moral hypocrisy, this friend said, but rather a case of applying certain moral principles very consistently, and perhaps too much so. Over the summer, Bollinger led an effort to reject a boycott, by some British academics, of Israeli scholars and their home institutions. Bollinger decried the measure, saying it “threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ideas.” In other words: You can’t keep someone out of your school just because you don’t like where he’s from or what he believes. I don’t know whether it’s totally appropriate to apply this principle to President Ahmadinejad. But if this is the reasoning behind Bollinger’s decision, then I’d say it’s at least a little respectable.
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad II Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:00 PM EST Following this comment in the discussion section of the site, I hesitate to respond to Mr. Gordon’s latest post, lest something tiresome should result. I’ll limit myself, therefore, to a few very brief comments. First, I agree with Mr. Gordon that the withdrawal of a speaking invitation to Lawrence Summers was an embarrassment for the University of California, for obvious reasons. Similarly, it was appalling to see the University of California, Irvine, offer and then rescind the deanship of Irvine’s new law program to the accomplished constitutional lawyer Erwin Chemerinsky, a famous liberal, for fear that he might be “polarizing.” There are certainly more liberals in academia than there are conservatives, but the politics of academic discourse is rather more complicated than Mr. Gordon’s barb—“No diversity of ideas at the University of California, please, we’re scholars”—suggests. I don’t really believe the Summers incident has anything to do with Columbia University’s extension of a speaking invitation to the President of Iran. It’s not really employing some kind of academic double standard for the University of California to do one thing while Columbia does another. Focusing on Columbia alone, though, Mr. Gordon suggests that it is hypocrisy for the university to allow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus while banning military recruiters. William Kristol recently made the same point. This seems a grotesque distortion—in the literal sense of grotesque as the yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. There is a difference between the beliefs of an individual, expressed publicly, and the policies of an organization, maintained by law. Ahmadinejad’s politics are repugnant to me, but if I listened to him speak on the campus of an American university I would be doing so with all the protections of an American citizen. The good president could say what he likes and then I could go on my way, without any fear that his rhetoric of prejudice and hate might subject me to immediate harm. In contrast, homosexuals who wish to enlist in the armed forces are subjected to immediate |
