Left Flank

Continue the interview with Part 2.

I want to believe the trends are good, and Reihan Salam is right.

But Maliki did something unexpected: He fired those who refused to fight and pressed on with the offensive, in Basra and also in Sadr City, where a second front opened up. A tenuous ceasefire took hold in Basra, and ISF forces have cleared the streets of the militias, using tactics drawn from the surge. This was done with a strikingly small number of American and British troops, though coalition assistance proved crucial. And now, as The New York Times reported yesterday, something resembling normal life is taking hold. In particular, the vigilantes who use violence to enforce their allegedly Islamic ethical code have been driven out, and you can once again hear music playing in the streets.

Though these gains may be temporary, there has also been a more lasting change: The Sadrists have been marginalized. Even the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has been reluctant to make political interventions in recent years, pointedly condemned Sadr for refusing to disarm. Leading Sunni faction have also returned to the fold. The Kurds, who have their own problems with Sadr, are also on board. Maliki, suprisingly enough, increasingly looks like the leader of all Iraqis.

So what does this mean for our debate over Iraq? Advocates of withdrawal will insist that Maliki's forces are just as penetrated by the Iranians as the Sadrist militias. But as noted above, this reflects a simple misunderstanding of Iranian influence. The fighting in Basra and Sadr City hasn't simply pitted one set of Iranian-backed militas (one in ISF uniforms) against another, and it's clear that the forces that controlled Basra weren't popular at all: The city really was, as Maliki argued, in the grip of criminal gangs who terrorized the population.

Alternatively, proponents of withdrawal will argue that Maliki's Charge of the Knights would have failed without substantial American assistance, which is true -- but it's also true that the ISF has become an increasingly effective fighting force. Moreover, the successes of the last month demonstrate that Maliki's government isn't the Vichy government the most strident anti-war voices have suggested. Rather, it is a government that actually represents the interests of Iraq's vast majority.

The smartest case for withdrawal would acknowledge this new reality, and claim that it demonstrates that coalition forces are superfluous and can thus be safely withdrawn. It's true that Maliki's government now has momentum, and would have a fighting chance to survive if U.S. forces are rapidly withdrawn. But the government's chances would be far stronger with a continued American presence backing its efforts up. Unfortunately, few Americans understand what Maliki has accomplished, and how much international assistance he needs to beat back foreign elements that aim to undermine Iraq's fragile democracy -- which is, as far as neighboring governments are concerned (particularly those that begin with an "I" and end with an "n"), a profoundly subversive influence.

But, in no way will I accept any Bush administration official telling me this was the plan all along. Getting it right, by doing the right thing, the first time is the only way to go.

Robert Farley says it more succinctly, but invading Myanmar to help it "...a terrible idea." Mark Leon Goldberg concurs, calling intervention "...a distraction and counterproductive to first imperative of helping those in danger." The comments section on the first blog is excellent, too, and I won't waste time pasting my comments on both here.

Some color commentary:

There's no excuse for the behavior of Burma's leaders, but history offers an explanation that goes beyond sheer autocratic barbarism. As friendly as the Burmese can be to Western tourists, they have reason to be suspicious about their neighbors and outside powers -- they have been sandwiched between empires in India and China; subjugated and exploited by Great Britain; devastated by Japan (and the Allies) during World War II; and vulnerable in the second half of the 20th century to meddling by Thailand, rogue Chinese nationalists, and other factions and interests. Hand in hand with that xenophobia goes a fierce pride: For much of their history they've been not just survivors, but builders of a Burmese empire that, at its zenith in the mid-11th century, controlled a large chunk of mainland Southeast Asia.

Finally, I don't know what to make of Robert D, Kaplan's NYT op-ed. After plugging intervention, he seems to undermine his case at the end.

It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.

I didn't think we (is that the imperial pronoun?) were trying to fix Myanmar, just help it. Are we so deluded that we believe we can just use force with a smile?

Is it any wonder pundits are sidetracked by this notion of forcing aid on states when aid NGO specialists make arguments like Marines (via Matthew Yglesias, "Aid From Above"):

The plane swoops in low and its cargo bay slowly opens to reveal a landscape devastated by flood, war or drought. Men in jumpsuits pull levers sending massive pallets of emergency food supplies trundling out and down to the desperate masses below. The plane pulls up and away and the job is done. Aid has been delivered to the needy.

This is the telegenic aid fantasy that has hooked some politicians and appealed to some columnists as a viable option in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. Dropping pallets of aid from the sky seems a straightforward, elegant and technological solution to the difficult political problem of the Burmese government's refusal to allow enough humanitarian workers into the country to deal with the disaster.

Except air drops are not the aid equivalent of smart bombs. Running a humanitarian effort from the skies, like running a purely airborne war, is fraught with problems.

For a start it requires excellent intelligence. Yet no one knows exactly where the worst affected areas are, or how many people are suffering in each place. We don't know if people are on the move, or what diseases are starting to appear, or exactly what state their homes and infrastructure are in.

Has the nonprofit sector conveniently assumed the worst, and avoided the deeper question of how to alleviate the need for intervention? But, there's no national legislature to woo with inflated budgets and dire prophecies. As a donor, please don't tell me I have to give indefinitely. Death and taxes, maybe, but NGOs don't last forever!

As a registered centrist Democrat, the notion of Barack Obama running with Senator Jim Webb resonates. But, returning to earth, I have to accept Justin K.'s argument, too:

I like Webb, but I've been lukewarm to the Webb-for-VP idea. If we want to pass as much progressive legislation as possible we need as big a margin in the Senate as possible, and his seat would be tough to keep if he stepped down.

That said, really putting VA in play and winning over Scotch-Irish voters in Ohio and PA (most of those other states won't really be in play) is tempting.

Still, on balance, I think Webb needs to stay in the Senate. Obama has other swing state and white working class options for VP (Ted Strickland, Ed Rendell, John Edwards, Tim Kaine maybe? etc); he's probably gonna win no matter what, given the climate this year; and Webb's a little too big and loud for the Number 2 spot.

It still has to be a female, centrist governor.

The reason why I'm lately obsessed with disasters, like the earthquake in PRC and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, is rewarded by Ross Douthat's post questioning liberal international hawks...

...offering a long-term agenda as a response to a question - how, when where and why the U.S. and our allies should intervene abroad - that tends to manifest itself as a series of discrete and very immediate challenges. It's all very well to say that the United States should be trying to build a world order in which great powers like Russia and China are willing to sign on whatever sort of Burmese intervention might theoretically be sanctioned under the "Responsibility to Protect" umbrella, but even if you're optimistic that such a world order is attainable - which Matt is, and I'm not - it's still far enough off that we can expect many more Burma-style (or Darfur-style, or Kosovo-style, or Rwanda-style) quandaries in the meantime. And answering the "what is to be done?" question that invariably accompanies these crises by saying that "American officials ...should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world" amounts to answering it by saying "in the short term, nothing."

I have two problems.

Firstly, interventionism, as manifest in R2P, is the flip side of gunboat diplomacy, which to work requires a substantive military threat lurking over the horizon. Many more states would be willing to call America's bluff here, and so, the risk of appearing weak increases.

Secondly, the emphasis is wrong. It's not, in these two cases, that the CCP or SPDC are despotic, or even completely incompetent. According to Art Lerner-Lam in Foreign Policy, "[t]he Chinese have a very sophisticated system of response, even relative to global standards. They rely heavily on their military, and they have a large civilian component of engineers and scientists who assist. The problem is not with the system, but with the particulars of this event." The problem, then, is, that a disaster occurred. The international community needs to ask, why did a disaster occur? The answer is not primarily military, but is extremely political.

FP: There have been a number of natural disasters in East and Southeast Asia in recent months. Is this region particularly susceptible to disasters compared with others, and will it become increasingly so in the years to come?

(Art Lerner-Lam) ALL: To answer your first question, yes. East, South, and Southeast Asia are all highly susceptible and have what we call a multi-hazard risk profile. They are subjected to typhoons, cyclones, flooding, earthquakes, landslides, and in the case of Indonesia, volcanoes. From a geographic perspective, [these regions] are very susceptible to a whole range of hazards.

Whether the risk is increasing depends on two factors. One, are the hazards themselves increasing in frequency or severity? And two, are people becoming increasingly vulnerable in terms of population density and infrastructure? In the first case, you have to be a bit careful. We are not seeing increases in geological disasters such as earthquakes; you wouldn't expect that. Those are geological processes, so the rate of occurrence should be somewhat consistent over time. But with sea-level rise, which we accrue to global warming, there is some potential for there to be an increase in cyclones.

But the changes in the natural frequency and severity of hazards are dwarfed by the changes in urbanization and construction practices. The key issues in vulnerability are related to social, economic, and political factors more than they are to the geographic factors: building cities near coastlines, improper construction, having institutions that are incapable of understanding the magnitude of a disaster and putting together a response—Myanmar being a case in point. You can attribute most of the increase in disaster losses to changes in the patterns of development.

In other words, the SPDC's human rights record and its development record are two separate issues. ANY government that allows urbanization and hyper-density in high risks areas is in a sense irresponsible, These problems are geological and climatological. The UN, or the US or France, can condemn Yangon for slaughtering Karen. But, until any government devises a way to avoid setting poorer humans atop a veritable time bomb of questionable terrestrial real estate, it needs to stop wagging fingers. There are thornier issues involved here than gunboat diplomacy. There is no way to compare PRC's response to the American response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, because no one has done well addressing the fundamental issue of why so many people would want to live in areas no sane animal would want to squat on.

Again, one can question how Beijing treats Tibetans, or the SPDC treats most of its population. But, it's convenient hypocrisy to pass moral judgment on any government whose territory includes dirt of marginal, or even, dangerous, quality, when no one is brave enough to question why unfortunate people just have to live in hëll, and on top it, have to endure a spectacle of fortunate, so-called educated people yelling over their struggling heads ignoring them.

Liberal hawks vs. neocons vs. realists...old quarrel! The relic of a pampered elite in a golden age. Move on!

Alvaro Vargas Llosa runs down a list of what is wrong with how Myanmar's junta is abusing its authority.

Myanmar has given us one of the most admirable women alive, Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and the world's most repugnant regime. Until May 2, the military government led by army chief Than Shwe was competing for that title with Zimbabwe's racist tyrant, North Korea's lunatic autocrat and Cuba's bumbling Castro brothers. But then Cyclone Nargis happened--and the junta seized the opportunity to edge ahead of its rivals.

It is hard to say what was worse: concealing the magnitude of the cyclone that was about to hit the Irrawaddy Delta region from the population and making no preparations, even though the meteorological system had given the government 48 hours advance notice; grossly lying about the number of victims once the tidal rise swept a vast swath of the southern part of the country; denying foreign relief agencies access to the country and shunning help from other governments for days; forbidding civilians to distribute what little aid was available because that responsibility was solely in the hands of the soldiers. Or going ahead with the referendum designed to ratify a constitution that took 14 years to write, all of whose articles can be summed up in four words: We will rule forever.

Many people, including Myanmar's generals, have alluded to the incompetence of the U.S. government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 by way of comparison. But there is no real comparison. The Katrina disaster was the unintentional product of bureaucratic government. The Myanmar catastrophe is the result of a political mind-set--that is, of cold-blooded decisions aimed at protecting the military government from the threat of instability. The same thinking drove decisions in 1988 and in 2007 that resulted in the massacre of unarmed civilians, including Buddhist monks, because they wanted free elections.

And, Reason's Kerry Howley lets us see how the junta has bungled its own propaganda (don't fall asleep watching the Burmese news reports!). Relief agencies accuse the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) of hoarding premium rice and distributing rotten and poorer-quality grain. Myanmar-not even as competent as the North Koreans!

Brad DeLong pits Megan McArdle against Greg Clark on the odds, that food prices will cut global economic growth. DeLong backed Clark's optimism about "...the race between technological improvement and growing demand...". Still, the price of rice continues to rise.

It seems DeLong was right. Technological improvement might save the day.

As far as I can tell it hasn't hit the English-speaking media yet, but researchers in Chile announced this week (warning: links in Spanish) the discovery of a new genetically engineered variety of rice that can be cooked with 1/4 the amount of water needed for normal rice.

Here's the official University of Santiago release, reviewing the new strain of rice and also the crush of press interest since the first reports on Monday. The project was cosponsored by Chile's governmental Foundation for Agricultural Innovation, which is sponsoring a number of other projects to help increase Chile's agricultural output.

In the context of the ongoing global food crisis, the discovery won't provide more rice, even if widely adapted. But it could reduce the costs of cooking rice in terms of both water and fuel used to heat the water, giving poor consumers a partial break. In Chile alone, economists have estimated the jump in food prices could raise the poverty rate at least 2%.

This isn't the same sort of innovation as dwarf wheat, so what Gary Gardner argues, still goes: "What's needed is a new model of prosperity that meets people's needs within the boundaries set by nature. It's what we call sustainable development. Embrace it and we can bury Malthus for good. Ignore it and we'll find that Malthus was simply ahead of his time."

The post-mortems on Hillary Clinton are starting to appear in print (ironically, the MSM resuscitates her, and then tramples all over her). The Nation's Ari Berman wants to gloat that Senator Clinton's demise in 2008 resulted from her vote authorizing the Iraq War and the Kyl-Lieberman resolution on Iran. That's the angle that will help put Senator McCain in the White House. More plausibly and soberly, Time's Karen Tumulty doesn't rely on one explanation, but five. I would add: Clinton couldn't adapt nimbly enough.

Clinton's stodginess appears mostly in her inability to recover from the January 29 debacle in Florida and Michigan. After not advocating a strategy to correct for the two states' Democratic parties' embarrassing bids to join the early primary season's scrum, she got what she deserves: a delegate count just lower than the number she should have received and the loss of momentum had both states been in play. She didn't show leadership then, and now she does not deserve to be the nominee now. Senator Obama did no better, even if he's trying to tempt Florida back into his statistical column. But, then, he didn't run as the "experience" candidate!

But, really, as Euler offered, it is time for a third party:

True, Mrs Clinton seems more popular among white working- and middle-class Americans. That puts Mr Obama at something of a disadvantage against John McCain, the Republican nominee. But arguments about Mr Obama's allure to white voters boil down rather too often to a coded argument about race: would America elect a black man? The United States still has big problems with race (read The Big Remaining Question), but its effect in the general election may be exaggerated.

Mr Obama's main problem with white voters may have more to do with class than race. To the white working man and woman, he has been seen too often as an aloof elitist, who can't drink whisky, displays a suspicious familiarity with the price of an arugula salad and memorably bowled a deplorable 37 in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Toffishness doomed John Kerry; but with Mr Obama, a child of a single mother who sometimes used food stamps, that picture is surely reversible.

Meanwhile, Mr Obama attracts other vo