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I’ve never understood the hype behind hybrid cars: sure, they look funky, and they have slightly higher mileage numbers than their conventionally-fueled counterparts, but they just never made any sense. An extra $5k for a car that saves a few gallons of fuel won’t ever be recouped over the probable lifetime of ownership… which is one reason why I found the South Park episode “Smug Alert” so damned funny—the people who drive them do so for their own sake, not economics or the environment.

Of course, if we were really interested in high-efficiency vehicles, we’d all be driving diesels. Diesels are so efficient, a BMW 520d, which is neither small nor sedate, gets better mileage than a Toyota Prius (the poster child of hybrids).

The same holds true for many other diesels. Compared to the Prius’ 45mpg, the Volkwagen Jetta TDI gets over 50 mpg, and rumors have it the Rabbit TDI gets upwards of 69 mpg. While VW has kept the diesel flame alive in the U.S. for many years, the 2009 Honda Accord Diesel will get a reported 52 mpg—well above last year’s more expensive Accord Hybrid. Indeed, there is an entire swath of ultra-high mpg vehicles sold in Europe that are simply not available here for a variety of reasons. Hybrids are not an economic way to save fuel costs and reduce airborne pollution; diesels, on the other hand, are. Like many truly amazing cars sold in Europe but unavailable here—like the Ford Mondeo (driven by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale), we either have to make due without, or wait many more years. Which is too bad.

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Five years past the invasion of Iraq, every body has been posting their own recollections—with a surprisingly small number of mea culpas. Over at Cynic’s Party, “Blogenfreude” summarized the roundup on Slate quite ably:

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I believed the groupthink and contributed to it,” by Jacob Weisberg.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I seriously misjudged Bush’s sense of morality,” by Andrew Sullivan.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn’t realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be,” by Jeffrey Goldberg.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? Rather than bore you with the answer, here are lessons from the experience,” by Lord William Saletan.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region, and—I admit it—I wanted to strike back,” by Richard Cohen.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn’t,” by Christopher Hitchens.

Ignoring Hitchens’ grating arrogance, the Jeffrey Goldberg case is an interesting one. Spencer Ackerman looked back on how Bush was hyping the Saddam-AQ connection (”The danger… is that Al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam’s madness,” sayeth the Dubya), and the ways Goldberg and Steven Hayes of the Weekly Standard played into it. It is a devastating case study of how the many journalists who are consistently, provably, wrong and deceitful continue to fail upwards:

Goldberg, in The New Yorker, wrote two pieces — one in March 2002 and the other on the eve of the invasion — backing the Saddam/Al Qaeda claim… Hayes, in the Standard, has made a career out of pretending Saddam and Al Qaeda were in league to attack the United States. He published a book — tellingly wafer-thin and with large type in its hardcover edition — called “The Connection.” One infamous piece even suggested that Saddam might have aided the 9/11 attack….

By contrast, Goldberg and Hayes have seen their careers flourish. Goldberg traded his New Yorker post for a lucrative spot at The Atlantic. Hayes wrote a lengthy hagiography of Cheney for major New York publisher, HarperCollins. Publicity for the book got him a special spot on “Meet The Press,” befitting his status as a high-profile television pundit who is never treated as the conspiracy theorist he is.

Other high profile journalists with long records of failure about the Iraq War include William Kristol, now comfortably ensconced at the New York Times editorial page.

But what of our leaders, those we have elected to defend and protect our interests?

(Read on …)

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Not even a electro-reggae cover of John Denver’s “Country Roads”

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I’m sure you’ve noticed my blogging here has reduced itself significantly in recent months. This is several-fold: my new job eats up a bunch of my time, I’m actually being social and spending time with people (and one in particular), and I’m blogging elsewhere at A Secondhand Conjecture and Registan.net.

I still cross post some things, and I will keep this around for a long while as it contains years of writing I still reference. But things, obviously, have chilled a great deal from when I was posting daily news updates. Sorry.

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Tibet seems to be ill at ease with the Chinese again. With good reason—the last five decades can be called nothing short of cultural rape. Some of this was partially sparked by an ill-timed outburst from Björk, of all people, who called for Tibetan freedom at a concert she performed in Shanghai.

Agitating for Tibetan freedom is one of those causes that bother me, but not for the reasons you might think. Sure, it sounds nice—and the Han Chinese brutality against the Tibetans is unquestioned, and absolutely immoral—but it also smacks of empty self-righteousness: most of the protesters we see in the media, in general, are white people holding signs in English. It does nothing to address the concerns of values of the Han themselves, the vast majority of whom truly believe they have the right to conquer Tibetan lands. That many couch this in terms of a moral equivalence with our own Manifest Destiny is immaterial: that, too, was a brutal act of cultural genocide, and were it happening today, I hope I would be man enough to resist that as well.

Moving beyond that, the actual question of to whom Tibet belongs also lends itself to obfuscation. True, over the past thousand years “ownership” has passed back and forth between the Han and the Lamas… with one crucial difference: all the previous Han attempts at suzerainty were executed under the banner of a common religion. Tibet existed as a separate land before the Mongol conquest of 700 AD. When the Mongolian Empire fell apart in the 14th century, Tibet again became an independent country, but was conquered by the Manchu Empire in 1720, only again becoming independent during the Republican Revolution in 1912. All of these transfers of sovereignty, however, existed under the common banner of Buddhism, and the deification of the Lamas was accepted in Beijing as much as in Lampo. The modern day Han Chinese government soundly rejects Buddhism, and especially the special status accorded the Lamas (the childhood abduction of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the supposed next Panchen Lama, which happened thirteen years ago next month, is a particularly grievous abuse, and his continued detention is one of the many reasons I was stunned and dismayed the State Department removed China from its list of human rights abusers this year).

(Read on …)

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There are many reasons to speculate about Adm. Fallon’s resignation at CENTCOM: a probable policy dispute over how best to handle Iran (despite the self-serving claims by military officials there was none, it was clear Fallon is at odds with the Iran hawks), a rumored severe personality clash with friend-of-the-President David Petraeus, and so on. Debating these are perfectly reasonable, though in the end Fallon’s resignation can only be seen as the honorable action of a man whose many conflicts simply made his continued employment untenable.

Unless you’re Max Boot.

To see why Tuesday’s “retirement” of Navy Adm. William “Fox” Fallon as head of U.S. Central Command is good news, all you have to do is look at the Esquire profile that brought about his downfall… [a discussion of Thomas Barnett’s profile of Fallon, the fallout of which Barnett refuses to comment on beyond his “duty as a journalist” or something, follows]

What Fallon (and Barnett) don’t seem to understand is that Fallon’s very public assurances that America has no plans to use force against Iran embolden the mullahs to continue developing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorist groups that are killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is highly improbable that, as the profile implies, the president had any secret plans to bomb Iran that Fallon put a stop to. But there is no doubt that the president wants to maintain pressure on Iran, and that’s what Fallon has been undermining.

By irresponsibly taking the option of force off the table, Fallon makes it more likely, not less, that there will ultimately be an armed confrontation with Iran.

Notice the cop out: the President has no plans to bomb Iran, but by Fallon saying bombing Iran would be counterproductive, he is undermining the President’s policy. By this logic, then, advocating for peaceful resolution of conflict leads to war, while suggesting armed conflict (I don’t believe “agitating” applies yet) for resolving disputes leads to peace. In other words, Boot does not believe in a negotiated settlement of compromises, merely coercion with the implied threat of force. Not exactly somebody I trust to tell me who “got it wrong.” Boot continues:

Not only was Fallon “quietly opposed to a long-term surge in Iraq,” as Barnett notes, but he doesn’t seem to have changed his mind in the past year. He has tried to undermine the surge by pushing for faster troop drawdowns than Petraeus thought prudent. (”He wants troop levels in Iraq down now.”) The president wisely deferred to the man on the spot — Petraeus — thus no doubt leaving Fallon simmering with the sort of anger that came through all too clearly in Esquire.

Like a lot of smart guys (or, at any rate, guys who think they’re smart), Fallon seems to have outsmarted himself. He thinks the war in Iraq is a distraction from formulating “a comprehensive strategy for the Middle East,” according to the profile. The reality is that the only strategy worth a dinar is to win the war in Iraq. If we fail there, all other objectives in the region will be much harder to attain; if we succeed, they will be much easier.

That’s something that Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno — the architects of the surge — understood, but that Fallon never seemed to get.

This is deeply disingenuous (and ironic, given the first sentence of that middle ‘graf). Not only was Odierno very slow in realizing the need for reinvigorated counterinsurgency, but there is a grander debate in play. Noting that a full-on exploration of the topic is beyond the scope of this post, there is a very real conflict within the Army about the actual efficacy of the Surge, lead by LTC Gian Gentile. Fallon is not out on a limb in being skeptical of Petraeus’ ability to achieve a long-term “success” in Iraq—however that is defined (a topic with varying “benchmarks” Boot routinely ignores in his writings on that conflict).

Alas, Boot’s complaints against Fallon do not concern the very real reasons his resignation was probably a good idea—most of which relate to his disagreement over current military policy—but for his dissention from the reigning ideology of GEN Petraeus as a mythical god-like figure, and for recognizing the possibility of unachievable “victory” in Iraq. Which is too bad: Boot probably could have bothered to explain how Fallon’s very public dissent placed strain on the civilian-military relationship… but he apparently had other axes to grind.

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This is catchy.

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Something has been bugging me a lot lately, but it’s been tough to put my fingers to it. I have been a faithful subscriber to Foreign Affairs for many years; since college I have deeply appreciated the insight and perspective those essays gave on the world. For much of that same span of time, I had somewhat discounted Foreign Policy as a flashier, showier, watered-down version of the same thing—a Time for those who don’t like 5,000 word essays.

That has changed in recent months, however. Perhaps it could be the slow, dawning realization that the elites in society don’t know about the world any more than we do; perhaps my thinking has taken on a much more critical stance; perhaps I just happen to be better at sifting through reams of extraneous data; but Foreign Affairs is boring. It reminds me of nothing so much as a bi-monthly review of the Davos crowd, offering decent thought that is entirely conventional and not very surprising. Vladimir Putin has been bad for Russia. Venezuela is not thriving under Chavez. Panic and demagoguery are not the appropriate answers to terrorism. And so on.

That isn’t to say anything they publish is wrong—certainly it might be so, but the quality of writing is high, and the scholarship is generally solid. It is just… expected. In contrast, Foreign Policy hasn’t been nearly as conventional. The most recent issues of each reveals how.

(Read on …)

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A poll conducted by Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security (which just hired the almost-retired LTC John Nagl, one of the coauthors, along with GEN Petraeus, of FM 3-24) asked what worries 3,400 active and retired military officers ranked O4 and above.

88% think Iraq has stretched the armed forces “dangerously thin” (but only 42% think it is “broken”). 60% think the military is weaker as a result. Nearly 45% do not trust the President to make sound decisions (and 16% registered zero confidence). The DoD fared 1% better, and the State Department, CIA, and even VA scored very low confidence. Nearly 80% think the civilian leadership—which has had a tenuous connection to the military nor two administrations now—sets unreasonable goals for the military.

Disappointingly, only 22% seemed to think letting gays and lesbians serve openly was a good idea. But here I’d want to look at selection bias—by only surveying higher-grade officers, who have likely been in the service for 15 or more years, you’d be facing a generation gap in expectations and values. Think of the split between boomers, Gen-Xers, and whatever the hell you call the rest of us, over gay rights.

So what does the military need? In stark contrast to most of the cilivian pundits I read talking about “the next war,” the military seems to want better and more intelligence, and bigger ground forces. With the exception of the Air Force, of course, which seems to think the next big deployment can best be served by $150 million dogfighters.

I could be completely historically ignorant, but the growing disconnect between the military and the administration seems like a development worth watching further. At least in the popular narratives, even during the darkest depths of Vietnam the military and Administration seemed to be on the same page (I know there are exceptions, I’m just going off perceptions from someone who never lived through it). Five years ago, my military friends would either only say something good about the administration, or they would keep quiet. Now, however, even in places where it can get them into trouble, there is openly-expressed anger at what the wars have done to their services.

What all of this means in the long run I can’t say. But the growing discontent is certainly worth watching further.

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Think I’m joking? At the risk of raising the ire of those I consider friends, here is Anthony Cordesman’s briefing from the battlefield, which describes what remains to be done in Iraq:

• Consolidate gains against Al Qa’ida in Mesopotamia.
• Move towards stable accommodation: Change de-Baathification law, provincial powers act and elections, oil law, etc.
• Keep Shi’ite militias (Sadr forces) under control, and prevent more sectarian and ethnic cleansing in greater Baghdad area.
• Consolidate creation of tribal militias, ensure they get proper central government support, and that central government recognizes importance of Sunni Sheiks.
• Stabilize provinces that still have serious conflict - Ninewa, Salah ad Din, Diyala - and prevent Al Qa’ida in Mesopotamia forces from moving north.
• Avoid major intra-Shi’ite power struggles and conflicts in south. Limit turmoil and Iranian influence in Basra and south.
• Limit Kurd, Arab, minority fighting in North.
• Resolve the “federalism” issue through peaceful referendums.
• Develop truly capable Iraqi Army and regular forces to phase US role down to overwatch.
• Find solution to failure to develop effective approach to police force, and to dealing with local security forces, militias, and Facilities Protection Force.
• Establish effective local criminal justice system and local, provincial and national government presence.

(Summary courtesy of—I hold my nose—Andrew Sullivan)

Given recent history—even given the “patchwork quilt” of the Sunni Awakening—I don’t see how most of those objective don’t amount to wishing for flying ponies. Cordesman does us the courtesy of admitting we can’t draw down any more troops for the next five years to even hope to get some of this done, and he freely admits there is no guarantee and significant risk in “staying the course” and going for it.

Yet his report was meant to be a hopeful one. He looks at this and sees grand adventure, risk of the noblest kind, worth hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Angelina Jolie notwithstanding, that is a devil’s bargain if one ever existed. Moral arguments about our imperative to stay—the most compelling of which is to prevent even more ethnic cleansing than we have already abetted—is very soothing (and I don’t doubt her motives), but doesn’t really play into critical national interest concerns. She is right that the 4 million refugees we helped create but refuse to help pose nasty security concerns, but she seems to think Iraq can be made a peaceful and appropriate setting to absorb 4 million displaced people in a conceivable time frame.

She is working from Cordesman’s book, in other words. In Afghanistan, a country with far deeper sectarian divides, a far longer history of violent internal conflict, and a lesser problem with refugees (tribal and extended family ties have eased many stresses), has seen tremendous problems with repatriating refugees. In areas that have been occupied or destroyed, there is nothing to return to (and Iraq, like Afghanistan, and unlike, say, Kosovo, presents an unpleasant environment for forcibly evicting those who occupy abandoned houses). Being a refugee versus being an IDP doesn’t matter much for the refugee—regardless of which government has to be annoyed with her presence, her plight is dire (Jolie is absolutely right about that). But well-intentioned white people cannot force a solution here.

“Fabius Maximus” takes this even further—he sees two main problems with Cordesman’s analysis, which point toward an uncomfortable conclusion:

1. The US-centric perspective. Whatever happens happens because of us.
2. The almost-total focus on al-Qaeda as the enemy.

He explains:

The first is classic American thinking (this parochialism is one reason nation-building is not our forte), but limiting for a geopolitical analyst. The second is now the rule in American geopolitical thinking. This transformation occurred in late 2006 with almost no analysis, starting with the US government and quickly being adopted without comment by a wide range of analysts. It is psychologically comforting, since focusing on “fighting bad guys” eliminates cognitive dissonance between our actions in Iraq and our strategic needs. It also postpones discussion about the best structure for Iraq society, and who gets to decide that.

The reason this comes into being is twofold: the desire for permanent military bases, and the result of a successful propaganda war waged against Americans… by the Pentagon. Both arguments are a bit long and thus not amenable to simple citation, but in particular the second argument—that the Pentagon has mastered the war of ideas domestically—is what is so damaging.

See, the military industrial complex is very skilled at getting whatever it wants—expensive airplanes of dubious use, pre-broken ships, lavishly funded commands with no definable purpose, and so on. Thanks to a generation of guilt over how atrociously soldiers were treated during and after the Vietnam War, it is easy as pie to silence or discredit a political opponent through charges of troop-hating or sheer ignorance. Sometimes these charges have had merit, but the majority of the time—and in particular during the early phases of the war in Iraq—they have not. Opposing a war because you think its aims are impossible dreams of utopia is neither wishing for defeat nor ideologically hating soldiers; it is, however, coming to a reasoned conclusion about what, exactly, we as a country are capable of but even more importantly: what we are not.

A consistent thread through post-Cold War American foreign policy is a drastic miscalculation of national interests, redefined as utopian, unachievable goals with only short term domestic political payoff. Afghanistan is perhaps the shining example of this, but so are the Balkans (freshly thrown into another round of chaos because we chose to intervene in a long-running civil war in Kosovo), Iraq the first time around, Haiti in 1994, Sudan in 1998, almost anything we’ve done with regard to Russia (like aggressively expanding NATO into an explicitly anti-Russian military bloc), and many other examples (Mossadegh, anyone?).

It is too easy to place this at Clinton’s feet—he practically ceded control of the military after losing domestic support for his staff’s haughty attitude (catalogued at the start of Dana Priest’s excellent book). Foreign Policy hubris is nothing new, neither is deferring to Generals when one feels out of his element. But this fundamental breakdown in the system is a big reason why everything is such a wretched mess today—from an unresponsive bureaucracy ignoring life-saving advancements to the worst bad hair day ever.

It is this broken system that should be a huge splash of cold water in the face for anyone who still labors under the impression we can remake the world in our image. We cannot. To pretend we can is the worst sort of hubris—especially in a world of enduring and intractable ethnic nationalism. To pretend Iraq is nothing but a laundry list to check off is delusional. And to pretend that a temporary influx of troops that has created a pocket of lowered violence against Western troops on its own has any long term implications for the rest of the country is… well, it’s a tough sell when you step back, take two really deep breaths, and think about it.

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Last week, a Pakistani ISP blocked YouTube in response to a video that apparently involved a cartoon pig defecating on the word “Allah.” Fine, whatever—there clearly is no appreciation of Trey Parker and Matt Stone in Islamabad. But the way they did it, which involved replicating a nasty redirect up the chain to several root-level domain name servers, had a cascading effect that overwhelmed their servers and brought the Internet to a crawl. Naturally, it makes more sense as a video:

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Frontline, which is consistently impressive in its programming, is running a big segment tonight on tribal militancy in Pakistan—especially the valley of Swat, which has transitioned over the past year from a tourist haven to a hotbed of violent extremists. Plus, to satisfy those of you who are yearning for more Slavic/Turkic-oriented coverage here, they’re also doing a segment on Russia in time for the Presidential election everyone knows will be won by Dmitri Medvedev.

Check PBS listings, or watch it online.

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Two shows on Nickelodeon are teaching Chinese values to the kids. The first, Ni Hao, Kai-lan is meant to teach pre-schoolers Mandarin Chinese and Chinese values. It sounds innocent enough (and certainly a welcome change to the insipid Dora the Explorer), even though those values include “being a good member of a group,” and the Confucian idea of obedience. Along the way, they learn how to speak pidgin Chinese, and sing folks songs (like Frère Jacques) with Chinese lyrics.

The other show is the highly entertaining Avatar: the Last Airbender. I’ve actually watched the first two seasons on DVD, and it’s more or less an American-made anime… with a strange eye toward geopolitics. The main character, Aang, is an “air bender,” so he controls the wind. His mentor, Gyatso, was murdered when the fire benders destroyed his people. Gyatso is a Tibetan name, so you can see where this is going… except the fire benders are clearly Japanese. The earth benders are clearly Chinese with Chinese names, and at the end of season two there is a very obvious parallel to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. The other two main characters, who are Intuit/water benders, don’t really do anything except help Aang.

So really I don’t know where any of this might go. But it is interesting to see how a very Chinese perspective on history, life, and social dynamics are being taught to American children. And no, I don’t view this with alarm, at least not yet. I’m okay with kids being taught patience, and learning from other cultural viewpoints (in Avatar there are more than a few amusing discussions of chi and the philosophical value of playing Go). But the ways this is pushing a distorted view of history—is certainly cause for further watching.

But it seems a bit daft to complain about kids learning from a foreign culture, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s what kids in every other country do when they watch American TV. It just doesn’t seem to deliberate, and maybe that’s what gives me pause.

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Far be it for me to carry water for a Presidential candidate, but some criticism just goes far over the top. Many months ago, Barrack Obama got a lot of heat from the right-o-sphere for pointing out that the high number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan was harming the war effort—a point I quite vigorously defended him on. Several right-ish blogs, including one at National Review Online and even the otherwise-respectable QandO, chimed in by quoting something Obama didn’t say and disproving a point he never made. It was kind of silly.

Something similar seems to have happened again: Barrack Obama made an important point—this time that Iraq has been siphoning people and resources away from Afghanistan—and the right-o-sphere jumped on him like a White House intern. Naturally, none of the criticism makes any sense (as Abu Muqawama notes, ABC’s Jake Trapper does us the courtesy of actually talking to the people involved instead of quoting anonymous sources like NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez).

But since when have facts stood in the way of partisan hackery?

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