It is plainly embarrassing to see how most journalists are reporting the relationship of GWB and Gerhard Schroeder in an “oh-my-God-George-W-Bush-still-does-not-love-
his-prodigal-son” kind of way.
Archiv der Kategorie: US Politics
Heavy Sea.
Tony Blair is going to face more criticism than the American administration in light of recent “revelations” regarding the “real” reasons for war in Iraq. The Guardian has some of it. Clare Short’s critical activism is certainly understandale given her performance in recent months but it’s hard to believe that she believes that Blair is part of a conspiracy against the British government.
I can very well imagine that Blair secretly agreed with Bush to go to war – but if so, I think that he did so precisely because he believed the British would be needed as a constraint of US power. Ah, the old Churchillian “Jr. Partner”-fallacy… happens again and again.
Strange, but interesting.
Brad DeLong ponders about the difficulties of a humanitarian military intervention in Congo and sparks a lively debate about the principles humanitarian (remember: operation Iraqi Freedom”?!) foreign policy. Here’s a great quote from Abiola Lapite:
“Funny how a discussion about mass murder in the Congo manages to drift off into arguments about “neocons”, Israel and anti-semitism. If one were cynical, one might surmise that for most western commentators, what goes on in Africa isn’t really of any interest unless it can be tied in to their political agendas in some way …”
“Vanity, definitely my favorite sin.”
Now if *that* couldn’t become a conspiracy theory of truly Faustian dimensions… instaed of simply forging evidence and continue lying about the real reasons for the war in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the brains of Washington’s neo-conservative foreign policy gang, has taken the high road of telling the truth for once – what else should one expect in a “Vanity Fair” interview. Here’s how Deutsche Welle reports it (my highlights):
“US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has admitted that the decision to wage war on Iraq was not based on the regime’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Wolfowitz, an outspoken hawk in the Bush administration and a key architect of the Iraq campaign, said in a magazine interview that the weapons issue was agreed on simply for “bureaucratic reasons”. He told “Vanity Fair” that it was something everyone in the administration could agree upon. Wolfowitz indicated that the real reason was that a toppled Iraqi regime would allow the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia thus removing them as terrorist targets.”
Well, the “real reason” of the day is probably as questionable as the “real reason” chosen for “bureaucratic reasons”… But that’s not important. What’s important right now is to understand why Wolfowitz chose to tell the world about this now.
“Vanity Fair” makes one think of, well, vanity – possibly not just Al Pacino’s favorite sin. And hubris, pure and simple – “look people, if you all had my brains I would have told you – but haven’t – that’s why you have me.” Plus the added joy of explaining once more that the US can do whatever it wants even when it is lying straight to the world’s face.
All this is certainly possible. But I am not convinced. Why now? Why play in the hands of the former opponents and weaken Bush’s position on the eve of the St. Petersburg/Evian G8 reconciliation meeting?
More research is clearly necessary…
Conspiracy theories in the FT?
Quite to the contrary argues Paul Krugman in today’s NY Times oped piece – the FT is just waking up to the cold and scary truth of how America is being turned into a “Banana Republic” by a semi-feudalist governmental gang –
“The Financial Times suggests this is deliberate (and I agree): ‘For them,’ it says of those extreme Republicans, ‘undermining the multilateral international order is not enough; long-held views on income distribution also require radical revision.’
How can this be happening? Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They don’t realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and they don’t read what the ideologues write. They imagine that the Bush administration, like the Reagan administration, will modify our system only at the edges, that it won’t destroy the social safety net built up over the past 70 years.
But the people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need. The Financial Times, it seems, now understands what’s going on, but when will the public wake up?”
It is difficult to assess the level of truth in his claims. But his interpretation certainly fits my perception of what’s going on. And if “those extreme Republicans” believe John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira that demographic trends, especially increasing ethnic diversity among the American electorate, would inevitably lead to an Emerging Democratic Majority it would explain the hurry with which they are trying to grab for their constituency whatever they can get hold of as long as they are in power.
In a way, this is a long-run version of my initial interpretation of the Bush economic stimulus programme as bottom-up redistribution that signalled insecurity about the political consequences of the looming conflict in the Middle East and the prospects for a second GWB presidency (can’t access my archives for the link – I wonder when Blogger is going to be working normally again… the service has really been unreliable lately…).
Bowling For Criticism
A Canadian article criticising Michael Moore’s film “Bowling For Columbine” has made to the top ranks of the MIT’s blogdex today. It’s easy to see why given the linking-power of anti-Moorians on the web. But they, like most of those getting at Moore miss a rather important point:
“Bowling For Columbine” isn’t a documentary. The film is essentially a sort-of fact based cinematographic, cleverly positioned, political pamphlet. It is a well done, important film – but it is hardly a documentary in the classic sense of that term. It is well worth ciriticising that Moore continually claims it is. But that’s about it.
Moore’s main points are important even if, as the Canadian newspaper Star reports among other points,
“[a]ctor Charlton Heston, the head of the National Rifle Association, did not callously go to Denver 10 days after the shootings simply to proclaim to cheering fellow NRA members that he was going to keep his gun until it is pried ‘from my cold, dead hands.'”
This simply doesn’t matter for the film’s fundamental messages.
Moore claims that there is a much higher (physical, not economic) risk aversion in the US than in Europe which is responsible for a lot of paranoid behavior. I have to say, the highly emotionalised American discourse regarding the dangers of rogue states post 9/11 probably underscores this claim – if you want to see it that way.
Moreover, Moore claims that this higher risk aversion is a consequence of what he claims is the central social cleavage in the US – an unresolved racial conflict based on ritualised and inherited slave owner vs. slave identities. A possible conclusion, which I really cannot really say a lot about. But his claim is – here in the realm of social policy – supported by important allies, as for example this paper by Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote indicates. To them, racial animosity is the principal answer to the question “Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have a European Style Welfare System?”. Charlton Heston somehow made the same point in the film – and, if I remember correctly, that section was not even cut in a particularly distorting manner.
“Bowling For Columbine” is not a scientific elaboration. It is an opinionated, scary, but also entertaining film that expressed some of the fundamental anxieties a non-negligeable part of Americans seems to have with regard to the society they live in as well as an attempt to explain some of the fears the rest of the world recently developed with respect to the former land of unlimited opportunities. And – being cleverly marketed by a director who increasingly presented himself as the bearer of truth in a time when people readily swallowed everything that would “verify” their gut felt opposition to the Texan way of life – the film was turned into a huge commercial success.
Again. It is an important film. It is film whose message deserves to be taken seriously. It is a non-fiction film. But is hardly a documentary in the classic sense. Moore deserves criticism for telling the world it is, but again – that’s about it.
Inabilty? Or Willful Wreckage?
So Colin Powell and the German chancellor tried to look forward, not to explain, and not to complain. And what does Geroge W. do? He behaves like a spoilt kid trying to get even by chatting for fifteen minutes with Roland Koch, the premier of the German state of Hessen, a leading figure of Germany’s main opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
No one would have believed the White House affirmations that the meeting happened “accidentally”, that Bush “just walked in” after a scheduled talk between Dick Cheney and Koch anyway, but in an interview with ZDF television’s afternoon programme “Mittagsmagazin”, Koch was pretty much unable not to smirk when the interviewer suggested that a German state premier hardly gets fifteen “accidental” minutes with the US president. GWB’s childish behavior is good news only for those in the US administration who want to strain transatlantic relations even further, and for Koch, who is said to have ambitions to become the next chancellor-candidate for the CDU instead of the current leader Angela Merkel. It is bad news for everyone else.
Was it inability, or willful wreckage? While some people might be tempted to give Bush the credit of inability, the Involvement of Cheney makes it a lot harder to come to this conclusion. So the chancellor is probably quite right to take this as a serious personal attack that he is unlikely to forgive soon. And he, as the German population, will certainly remember that the CDU has chosen to become a pawn in a game originating in the White House.
But Schröder is not the only who has been embarrassed by the latest Bushism. For Colin Powell and the US state department the Bush-Koch meeting conveys an even more serious message – it confirms again and very visibly to everyone abroad who is actually in control of US foreign policy – that Foggy Bottom doesn’t matter and that Powell’s role has apparently been reduced to that of chief messenger. I wonder how long he will go along.
The Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow wrote in October last year with respect to the transatlantic rift that
“… the [US] administration wants doormats, not allies.”
Today, Bush powerfully confirmed this. And while Schröder has repeatedly stated in the last few weeks that Germany does not wish to be forced to have to choose between its most important allies, the US and France, it looks like the American President is indeed waiting for an answer.
I highly doubt he will like it.
Veto Players On The Move.
Democracy is a tricky thing. That is true not only for the Middle East, where the current US government claims to be implementing it. That is apparently also true for the current US president’s home state of Texas, where the Parliamentary opposition, more than 50 Democratic politicians, has turned into extra-Parliamentarian opposition by fleeing the state before a crucial vote this week, thereby have bringing the state’s political system to a halt but also creating the profound impression that something is seriously rotten in the state of Texas.
What happened – and what is not going to happen. According to the BBC online –
“The lawmakers left the city of Austin just before a scheduled debate on a controversial rezoning plan for voting districts, which Democrats say will unfairly tip the balance in the state in the Republicans favour. They arrived in Oklahoma, but when Texas sent state troopers to ask them to return, they refused to come back. The Democratic boycott means that the Texas House of Representatives does not have the minimum of 100 members needed for a vote to be held.”
Ah, good old gerrymandering.
As old as the American Democracy, and probably a neglected factor in the last, problematic, presidential election in the US. But it’s tough to say something about the electoral consequences of current or redefined state-constituencies without detailed knowledge of the demographic composition and clear evidence whether these group characteristics actually are a proxy for electoral results. In cases where demographic composition is a politically correct term for ethnic or class voting, gerrymandering can have severe consequences, as, say, the creation of Northern Ireland amply demonstrates. But as cross-voting increases, the consequences vary a lot more, and politicians suffer from an illusion of control when trying to design their constituencies. Again, it’s hard to speculate about the consequences without a detailed analysis.
However, if, as the BBC explains,
[t]he Republicans had gained control of the Texas House in November for the first time since just after the US Civil War in the 1860s.”
It seems quite understandable to me that they are trying to change that long-time history of losing by rezoning electoral districts to their benefit. Likewise, taking job-security from Democratic deputies is not likely to make them happy.
While their trip to Oklahoma increases the impression of the US being a Banana Republic in terms of democratic procedures, it is actually a smart move to do so – and just another proof of the unintended consequences of designing institutions. I am pretty sure that collective absence from the state by the minority faction was not something those drafting the Texas House Rules were ever even contemplating. But by taking advantage of that omission, the minority faction has indeed become a veto player, something their presence in the Parliament would not have allowed.
So when the Republican leader in the US House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, states that
“Representatives are elected and paid for by the people with the expectation that they show up to work do the people’s business and have the courage to cast tough votes, I have never turned tail and run and shirked my responsibility”
His anger seems to have blurred his political instincts, for by taking that leave, the Representatives are actually living up to their responsibility. If the Parliamentary rules de facto accord the minority faction a veto right, they would be negligent not to exercise it if necessary.
Whatever the eventual outcome in this redistricting battle, redrafting the Parliamentary rules will likely be up next. So, who knows, maybe this procedural quarrel turns out to become a travel industry stimulus package…
Paul Krugman Agrees With Me
that increased scrutiny of media control issues is one of the major policy lessons of the Iraq war [see my recent post]. In addition, his current NYTimes column, “The China Syndrome“, adds an interesting analysis of corporate regulative bargaining with governments. Whatever your opinion regarding the “biased BBC” – or for that matter, biased German tv – discussion, there is only one possible stand concerning the biased “Fox News” debate. And that alone is quite telling in my book.
The issue is of utmost general importance, but today’s Krugman column has been triggered by yesterday’s presentation by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission of a US bill to relax regulations on media ownership –
“… that will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people…”.
So if Krugman is indeed right in his assessment that
“[w]e don’t have censorship in [the USA]; it’s still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.”
Well, if Krugman is right here, and if it weren’t for the Internet, I guess Gleichschaltung could become a concept more and more people might not just identify with partisan news reporting in the Third Reich.
Seems like the “Land Of The Free” could need some more brave publicists these days when even a Larry Flynt is wasting his time chasing an obscure skin-flick allegedly featuring Barbara Bush (the daughter – not the mother…).
Criticising the Critics.
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Chait has written an article critizising liberals for the fact that they are allegedly blinded by Bush-hatred –
“Perhaps the most disheartening development of the war — at home, anyway — is the number of liberals who have allowed Bush-hatred to take the place of thinking. Speaking with otherwise perceptive people, I have seen the same intellectual tics come up time and time again: If Bush is for it, I’m against it. If Bush says it, it must be a lie.”
But that’s not the interesting bit about his article, which is being published in a newspaper that – just a few weeks ago – told those of its readers who disagreed with the hawkish oped-line to shut up. The interesting bit is the following –
“[i]t’s entirely appropriate to question the honesty of Bush’s stated rationale for fighting. After all, the arguments he uses to justify his domestic agenda are shot through with deceit. (Consider his shifting, implausible and contradictory justifications for cutting taxes.) And it’s also true that a few elements of the administration’s evidence against Iraq have turned out to be overstatements or outright hoaxes. So Bush’s claims should never be taken at face value.”
How is that different from the above – “If Bush says it, it must be a lie”? Anyone?