Hiatus

The Hollow Horn is on temporary hiatus while I finish settling into my new place. I’ll be back before long.

Jordan and the Lack of an Iraq

Over at Slate, Shmuel Rosner points to one of the often-ignored side effects of the Iraq debacle: its effects on neighboring Jordan. To wit:

It was the powerful Iraq that provided the threat then [in 1991], and the weakened, chaotic Iraq that is threatening now. Jordan has a permanent “stability issue,” as one U.S. official describes it. In the past, it was intimidated by its two powerful neighbors, Israel and Iraq; now it is troubled by the weakest of the weak, the Palestinian Authority and Iraq.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this problem. Jordan, despite its ambivalent attitudes toward democracy and civil rights, remains a fairly modern, fairly stable ally in a region where they are hard to come by. Jordan already suffers from instability caused by its large, more radically Islamic Palestinian community. (A former professor of mine, an expert on Jordan, claimed to know which American political scientist the monarchy hired to gerrymander districts several years ago).

However, to date, they have managed to contain the internal dissidents, more or less, with only very occasional attacks in recent years. However, if, as the article claims, 750,000 Iraqi refugees, some doubtless radicalized, have now entered the country, it may prove more than the secular monarchy can contain. That would not be a good thing.

The Rundown

• Steven Stark at RCP argues that Obama and Edwards are their own worst enemies in the debate format. I don’t disagree.
• Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta has some advice for the Bush Administration on how to avoid lame-duckery. I’d bet good money Podesta is wasting his time here.
• Don Rumsfeld actually resigned the day before the election. How about that.
• The Democrats really should make a point of passing the South Korea – US free trade pact. They won’t, but they should.
• Especially not if this is any indication. Please, Democrats, please stop doing this. I want to vote for you. I really do.

Rudy Scares Me

Wow. I never was a big Giuliani fan, but I am less of one every day. Apparently, the problem with George Bush’s foreign policy is that it hasn’t gone far enough. As Yglesias says:

Rudy, though, has another problem. He’s got a kinda unconservative record on God, guns, and gays, to say nothing of the baby-killing or his past stances on immigration. Can he really afford wiggle room? Maybe not. That kind of political calculation combined with a gut-level love of confrontation and years of association with the strange faction that is New York City-based conservative intellectual life has produced a striking decision to double down on neoconservative foreign policy.

Wow. Heaven help us all if we elect this man.

UPDATE: Slate’s Fred Kaplan discusses the piece. I blow a fuse in my brain every time I try to think hard enough about it to write anything, but he does a better job than I would have anyway.

Michael Totten on Iraq

I found this lengthy dispatch from independent journalist Michael J Totten on RCP today. Totten’s credentials definitely lean to the right; his publications list reveals articles for Pajamas Media, Reason, and WSJ’s Opinion Journal. Nonetheless, I think his assessment is pretty level-headed overall. There’s so much interesting stuff in there I don’t really know how to quote it, I’d recommend you read it all.

The main point I think to take away from Totten is that things are both terrible and great, improving and declining, and that it’s easy to read the tea leaves however you like. He seems to think we shouldn’t change our strategy much for the time being, but I read what he’s saying and draw a different conclusion. And so it goes.

Ross Douthat’s comments today on the war are pretty good as well. He takes a Max Boot piece in Commentary to task for making the lazy argument in favor of the surge. And indeed,  such lazy arguments in favor of the surge seem to be dominating these days.

The Rundown

• Two big names have recently proposed reforming the farm subsidy system. One wants to retarget subsidies to family farms. The other wants to do away with subsidies altogether. The two people are John Stossel and John Edwards. Guess who proposed what.
• Could Superfund survive a cost-benefit analysis? Almost definitely not. I am not sure what we should do about it.
• Big media is out to screw the little guy. I know, that’s not really news, but on the other hand, it is.
• Fred Kaplan weighs in on the draft at Slate.
• Robert Samuelson calls for more clear-headed reporting on global warming, and makes the alarming and probably true assertion that we really don’t know how to solve this one. We probably shouldn’t do nothing though. Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias critiques Michael Gerson’s global warming hand-wringing.

Christopher Hitchens is an Unpleasant Man

I dislike Christopher Hitchens. Really, I do. It’s hard for me to decide whether he was more wrong as a Trotskyite or as a bitter liberal-bashing hawk. I’m going to call it a tie. Anyway, his new Slate piece, “Foolish Myths about Al-Qaida in Iraq,” is a doozy. This should give you the gist:

The facts as we have them are not at all friendly to this view of the situation, whether it be the “hard” view that al-Qaida terrorism is a “resistance” to Western imperialism or the “soft” view that we have only created the monster in Iraq by intervening there.

I hate to point by point a guy like Hitchens, but here I go.

The first thing to notice about [Zarqawi] is that he was in Iraq before we were. The second thing to notice is that he fled to Iraq only because he, and many others like him, had been driven out of Afghanistan. Thus, by the logic of those who say that Afghanistan is the “real” war, he would have been better left as he was. Without the overthrow of the Taliban, he and his collaborators would not have moved to take advantage of the next failed/rogue state. I hope you can spot the simple error of reasoning that is involved in this belief. It also involves the defeatist suggestion—which was very salient in the opposition to the intervention in Afghanistan—that it’s pointless to try to crush such people because “others will spring up in their place.”

There is a pretty obvious point I think Hitchens misses here. Namely, that Saddam-era Iraq was not really ever a good staging ground for major acts of terrorism. If Zarqawi had become too much of a threat to Hussein, he would have been dead. Period. Obviously, Hussein’s propensity for killing people is not really one of his big selling points, but it did have a n undeniable dampening effect on domestic terror.

To say that the attempt to Talibanize Iraq would not be happening at all if coalition forces were not present is to make two unsafe assumptions and one possibly suicidal one.

Maybe I am missing something, but is anyone actually saying that the insurgents would quit if the coalition weren’t there? I haven’t heard that argument in any venue I would consider to be remotely mainstream, and indeed Hitchens fails to cite any examples.

We can not only deny the clones of Bin Ladenism a military victory in Iraq, we can also discredit them in the process and in the eyes (and with the help) of a Muslim people who have seen them up close.

This is where Hitch really drops the ball. He fails to make an important distinction, the same one many prominent war supporters continue to fail to make: a military victory isn’t even half the battle.

We cannot literally kill every insurgent, and if the political process does not make enough progress to stabilize society, eventually the insurgents will come back, and the result will be chaos. We can’t stay forever, nor should we feel obligated to do so. Now, I am no supporter of rapid withdrawal, but on the other hand, I would like to be out of Iraq before say, my still-unborn children reach adulthood. I just don’t think there are any easy answers here, and “stay the course” sure sounds like an easy answer to me.

The Rundown

• Matthew Yglesias asks an important question — Would Rudy Giuliani Bomb Iran? (I’ll give you a hint: the answer is “yes.”)
• In other scary war news, there have been murmurs about the draft again in recent weeks. Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame makes a pretty persuasive argument against. Fortunately, the Pentagon’s official line is still that the draft is off the table.
• Via Brad DeLong, Abu Aardvark points out that a Petraeus/Crocker report might, due to the nature of their respective positions, be somewhat schizophrenic.
• Jesus Christ, why does Chuck Schumer want anything to do with copyrighting fashion designs?
• The Democratic Strategist thinks election reform is a good idea. So do I. I’d like something even more radically than what the author would like, but anything is better than what we have now.

Urban Nightmare

Stanley Crouch suggests in the New York Daily News that the presidential candidates are ignoring the plight of nation’s urban centers. Here’s a taste:

One Newark man interviewed by CBS seemed to speak for all of those living under the oppression of violent crime when he said that the neighborhood where the three young people were murdered is under siege. There seemed to be more robberies, burglaries and carjackings. But Newark Police Chaplain John McClain, who is the great uncle of one of the three victims, said that the killers should be thought of as what they are, terrorists.

A New Jersey resident asked a fundamental question, “Will these knuckleheads have to join the Ku Klux Klan before this country wakes up and faces the horror of what they are doing?” I think that question should be answered by every one of those running for President because the corpses will not have stopped piling up throughout our concrete killing fields when the next commander in chief is sworn in.

As a resident of Philadelphia, which is not only near Newark, but has problems of its own, this issue concerns me as well. Mayoral favorite Michael Nutter has a plan, once he wins the general, which he will. Which is something:

Unless the situation changes dramatically between now and then, he would work quickly as mayor to lay the groundwork for declaring crime emergencies in three to five city neighborhoods.

In those “targeted enforcement zones,” police would have the power to prohibit outdoor gatherings, limit the movement of vehicles, establish a curfew, and prohibit the possession of all weapons. Additional officers would be deployed, with orders to stop, question and frisk anyone they had to reason to believe was carrying a gun.

Frankly, the whole idea of searches on demand does make my inner civil libertarian a little bit ill, but ride the R5 through out past the North Broad, Fern Rock and Wayne Junction stations sometime, look out your window, and tell me he might not have a point. We are on pace to break 400 murders again by the end of the year. Something needs to be done, here and in a plethora of elsewheres, and I would like to hear presidential candidates discuss it.

The Rundown

• Rove resigns. What can I say that hasn’t already been said?
• RCP has a lengthy Foreign Affairs essay/conversation on the role of the generals in the Iraq debacle.
• This fantastic NYT recap of the War in Afghanistan to date from Sunday New York Times is a must-read. It does not paint a pretty picture.
• Greg Mankiw summarizes a summary of a current study of the realities of the work/leisure trade-off in modern America. Good stuff.