Donald Rumsfeld has died at 88

The Washington Post reports:

Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose roles overseeing the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and efforts to transform the U.S. military made him one of history’s most consequential as well as controversial Pentagon leaders, died June 29 at his home in Taos, N.M. He was 88. …

His greatest notoriety and national effect came during a six-year reign as defense secretary under President George W. Bush. Hailed initially for leading the U.S. military to war in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq War eventually led to his downfall. Widely criticized for poorly planning the invasion’s aftermath, he was slow to recognize the development of an insurgency, draft an effective strategy for countering it and set clear policy for the treatment of prisoners.

Dogged for months by mounting calls for Mr. Rumsfeld’s removal, Bush finally let him go in late 2006 — 3 1/2 years into the Iraq War and just after an election in which the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress. Mr. Rumsfeld’s forced exit under clouds of blame and disapproval cast a dark shadow over his previously illustrious career.

None of his predecessors had come into the Pentagon’s top job with as much relevant experience. Having served as defense secretary once before under Ford, Mr. Rumsfeld was the only person ever to get a second shot at the position. He held the record as the youngest Pentagon leader — and early in his tenure under Bush, he became the oldest. …

Rumsfeld was the subject of an Errol Morris documentary, The Unknown Known (2013):

The Onion's take:

Weapon Of Mass Destruction Found Dead At 88

How you can be against both police brutality and riots

Saying the rioting and looting that's been going on in multiple cities is "about" the police killing George Floyd on May 25, 2020 is like saying the Iraq War is "about" terrorists killing 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. Excusing the rioting on the basis that the rioters are supposedly driven by good intentions and opposition to racism, and that they're rightly angry about police brutality, is like excusing Bush by saying he was supposedly driven by good intentions and opposition to tyranny, and he was rightly angry about terrorism. (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that all the rioters are truly concerned about police brutality; for instance, I'm not addressing reports that white supremacists are suspected of getting into the act.)

Don't believe what people say about their justifications for violence. Don't accept a framing that glorifies violence and presents it as deeply expressive. That's just asking to be fooled into accepting violence that isn't really justified.

Note: I haven't said that rioting can never lead to a good outcome, just as I wouldn't deny that some wars are justified. We could go on and on about this: maybe these riots will turn out to be worth it because they'll stop police brutality, and maybe invading Afghanistan was worth it because it stopped al Qaeda, and maybe World War II was worth it because it stopped Hitler, etc., etc. But we should at least be highly skeptical of claims that riots or wars are justified, because most of them aren't. The mistake is in readily endorsing or excusing mass violence whenever it feels like it's resonating with your political values. I'm not saying never excuse violence; I'm saying don't do it easily, glibly, without looking closely and in detail at the real suffering it's causing. I don't mean just skimming a news article or reading some statistics, but watching and listening to specific individuals talking about how their lives have been harmed. Do it only reluctantly and after sober reflection.

When I posted the above on Facebook, Ann Althouse (my mom) said:

Portraying The Other as instinctively propelled toward violence is racist. Please be more cautious in your efforts at appearing to be one of the good white people.

Yes, when I see people who have young kids and are supporting the rioters, I want to ask them: would you accept this from your own children? Would you accept your kids trying to burn down your house, and using the excuse that he or she is mad about bullies who hurt someone else at school? People are having lower standards for rioting adults than they’d have for young children.

Trump on the Kurds: "They didn't help us in the second World War"

President Donald Trump said that yesterday, even though more than 10,000 Kurds have died helping us fight ISIS.

It used to be that presidents and presidential candidates would argue for their policies by pointing out that "the Cold War is over" (for instance, George W. Bush and Obama have both said those exact words). Now, Trump doesn't want to admit that World War II is over.

Veteran remembers D-Day in emotional interview

From an interview with a 95-year-old veteran on Fox News:

Cpl. John McHugh on D-Day: It's hell. It's just hell on earth. . . . I don't think anybody can really describe it. . . . I had my pistol, but look, you're not gonna shoot, you can't see 'em. I just kept crawlin' up, see how far we could go. . . . You just keep going up, gotta keep moving. But there were a lot of dead bodies. . . .

Shepard Smith: When you found out we're going to invade, did you think about the big picture — the fighting for freedom — or was it a matter of, well I have to do this, or . . . ?

McHugh: None of those thoughts about freedom! I was in the Army, and they told me to go that way, and I went that way. It was all automatic. Not a lot of thought. A lot of thought about gettin' killed!

[Click the link to watch the video — I removed the embed from this post because it was starting automatically when people went to my blog.]

When he talks about seeing all the dead bodies around him, it's like something from a movie. I was thinking he could have been played by Jimmy Stewart (another WWII veteran).

50 years of "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes"

50 years ago today, on May 29, 1969, Crosby, Stills & Nash released their self-titled debut album, which includes one of the gems of '60s music, "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." Stephen Stills wrote that 7-and-a-half-minute song near the end of his 2-year relationship with another great singer, Judy Collins. She said this in 2000:

[Stills] came to where I was singing one night on the West Coast and brought his guitar to the hotel and he sang . . . the whole song. And of course it has lines in it that referred to my therapy. And so he wove that all together in this magnificent creation. So the legacy of our relationship is certainly in that song.

While that's easily the standout track, my second-favorite song from the album is the anti-war epic "Wooden Ships":

What's worse, Trump not reporting civilians we kill with drones, or Obama lying about them?

"President Donald Trump has overturned an Obama-era requirement for intelligence officials to publish an annual report on air strikes in places like Yemen, Libya and Pakistan — a document that experts called the main means for publishing official information about CIA drone strikes."

This sounds like Trump is making Obama’s drone program even worse. But Obama’s policy was more dishonest. The Obama administration assumed that every adult male killed by drones was a “combatant,” not a civilian, unless that was disproven by specific evidence. In effect, Barack Obama profiled Central Asian or Middle Eastern men by presuming them guilty. At least Donald Trump is going to openly not care about the civilians we kill, which, while callous, is less misleading than Obama’s statistics on civilian deaths that were artificially lowered based on gender and nationality bias.

25 years ago today: "Kuwait is liberated."

On February 27, 1991, President George H.W. Bush announced the end of the Gulf War.

"If elected, Clinton will be another 'war president' at a time when America desperately needs peace."

So says the Nation, endorsing Bernie Sanders — only the third presidential endorsement the magazine has made in 150 years. Excerpt:

Hillary Clinton is a candidate who combines unmatched experience with intelligence, grit, and strength. She has responded to the populist temper of the times: questioning the sort of free-trade deals that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have championed; calling for reforms on Wall Street and tax increases on the wealthy; courageously defending Planned Parenthood; challenging the National Rifle Association; and supporting trade unions. If nominated, she would be far more preferable to any of the extremists running for the GOP nomination (and so would former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley). We understand that keeping the presidency out of the hands of right-wing Republicans is crucial, especially when the next president will reshape the Supreme Court. And there is no denying that if she were elected, Clinton would shatter the thickest glass ceiling and champion women’s rights in a way that no other president has.

But the limits of a Clinton presidency are clear. Her talk of seeking common ground with Republicans and making deals to “get things done” in Washington will not bring the change that is so desperately needed. Clinton is open to raising the Social Security retirement age, and her plan falls short of increasing benefits for all. She rejects single-payer healthcare and refuses to consider breaking up the big banks. We also fear that she might accept a budgetary “grand bargain” with the Republicans that would lock in austerity for decades to come.

On foreign policy, Clinton is certainly seasoned, but her experience hasn’t prevented her from getting things wrong. Clinton now says that her 2002 vote to authorize George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake, but she apparently learned little from it. Clinton was a leading advocate for overthrowing Moammar El-Gadhafi in Libya, leaving behind a failed state that provides ISIS with an alternative base. She supported calls for the United States to help oust Bashar al-Assad in Syria, an approach that has added fuel to a horrific civil war. She now advocates a confrontation with Russia in Syria by calling for a no-fly zone. Her support for President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran was marred by an explicit rejection of better relations with that country and bellicose pledges to provide Israel with more arms. If elected, Clinton will be another “war president” at a time when America desperately needs peace.

Sanders’s approach is different and better. The senator hasn’t talked as much as we would like about global challenges and opportunities, and we urge him to focus more on foreign policy. But what he has said (and done) inspires confidence. An opponent of the Iraq War from the start, he criticizes the notion of “regime change” and the presumption that America alone must police the world. He rejects a new Cold War with Russia. He supports the nuclear-weapons agreement with Iran, and he would devote new energy to dismantling nuclear arsenals and pursuing nonproliferation. He has long been an advocate for normalizing relations with Cuba and for reviving a good-neighbor policy in the hemisphere. Sanders’s foreign policy would also create conditions for rebuilding a broadly shared prosperity at home. He would lead an international effort to end the crippling austerity that threatens to create another global recession, and he would champion a green New Deal to combat climate change. And as a leader of the opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he would undo the corporate-defined trade regime that has devastated America’s middle class.

Critics of Bernie Sanders dismiss him as an idealist (he is!) on a quixotic crusade. Meanwhile, the corporate media has paid shamefully little attention to his campaign’s achievements, instead lavishing attention on the latest outrageous pronouncements by Donald Trump and the Republican candidates struggling to compete with him. Nonetheless, polls show that Sanders—even as he still introduces himself to many voters—is well poised to take on the eventual GOP nominee, frequently doing better than Clinton in these matchups. Moreover, in contrast to the modest audiences at Clinton’s campaign stops, the huge crowds at Sanders’s grassroots rallies indicate that he’ll be able to boost turnout in November.

What to do about ISIL after the attacks on Paris

Roger Cohen writes in the New York Times:

The Paris slaughter claimed by the Islamic State constitutes, as President François Hollande of France declared, an “act of war.” As such, it demands of all NATO states a collective response under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. This says that, “An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” . . .

The only adequate measure, after the killing of at least 129 people in Paris, is military, and the only objective commensurate with the ongoing threat is the crushing of ISIS and the elimination of its stronghold in Syria and Iraq. The barbaric terrorists exulting on social media at the blood they have spilled cannot be allowed any longer to control territory on which they are able to organize, finance, direct and plan their savagery.

Hollande left no doubt that that [sic] the attacks were “prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside.” ISIS, or one of its affiliates, has also claimed responsibility for the recent downing of a Russian passenger jet, with the loss of 224 lives. The United States and Britain believe these claims are credible.

It was wrong to dismiss ISIS as a regional threat. Its threat is global. Enough is enough. A certain quality of evil cannot be allowed physical terrain on which to breed. Pope Francis declared the Paris attacks “not human.” In a sense he is right. But history teaches that human beings are capable of fathomless evil. Unmet, it grows.

To defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq will require NATO forces on the ground. After the protracted and inconclusive Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is reasonable to ask if this would not be folly. It is also reasonable to demand – and many will – whether military action will only have the effect of winning more recruits for ISIS as more lives and treasure are squandered. Terrorism, the old nostrum has it, can never be completely defeated.

Such arguments are seductive but must be resisted. An air war against ISIS will not get the job done; the Paris attacks occurred well into an unpersuasive bombing campaign. Major powers, including Russia and China, have vigorously condemned the Paris attacks. They should not stand in the way of a United Nations resolution authorizing military action to defeat and eliminate ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Regional powers, especially Saudi Arabia, have an interest in defeating the monster they helped create whose imagined Caliphate would destroy them. . . .

It is not enough to say, as the Obama Administration has up to now, that ISIS will be defeated. These words lack meaning without a corresponding plan. There is time pressure because time is being used precisely to plan new atrocities.

With each one, the possibility of a spiral of religious and sectarian violence in strained European societies increases. Hatred of Muslims seems to be on the rise. The Bataclan, the club targeted in the Paris attacks, has, as the French magazine Le Point pointed out, been a frequent meeting-place for Jewish organizations.

The killings occurred as hundreds of thousands of desperate Muslim refugees from Syria are streaming into Europe. This is not the time to turn on them, but to help them, even if extreme vigilance is needed. They, too, in their vast majority, are fleeing ISIS, as well as the indiscriminate violence of President Bashar al-Assad. Nonintervention in Syria has proved a policy fraught with bloodshed and danger, now seeping into Europe.

The battle will be long. . . . Crushing ISIS in Syria and Iraq will not eliminate the jihadi terrorist threat. But the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Passivity is a recipe for certain failure. It is time, in the name of humanity, to act with conviction and power against the scourge of the Islamic State. Disunity and distraction undermined past military efforts to defeat the jihadis. Unity is now attainable and with it victory.

How did Europe come to dominate the world by 1914?

In two words, war and taxes:

Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe, establishing colonies and spreading their influence across every inhabited continent. This was not inevitable. In fact, for decades, historians, social scientists, and biologists have wondered: Why and how did Europe rise to the top, even when societies in Asia and the Middle East were far more advanced?

So far, satisfactory answers have been elusive. But this question is of the utmost importance given that Europe’s power determined everything from who ran the slave trade to who grew rich or remained mired in poverty. . . .

Mostly, it derived from the incentives that political leaders faced in Europe—incentives that drove them not just to make war, but also to spend huge sums on it. Yes, the European monarchs built palaces, but even the huge Chateau at Versailles cost King Louis XIV less than two percent of his tax revenue. The rest went to fighting wars. He and the other kings in Europe had been raised since childhood to pursue glory on the battlefield, yet they bore none of the costs involved—not even the risk of losing their thrones after a defeat. Leaders elsewhere faced radically different incentives, which kept many of them militarily weak. In China, for example, emperors were encouraged to keep taxes low and to attend to people’s livelihoods rather than to pursue the sort of military glory that obsessed European kings.

For this and a variety of other reasons, leaders outside of Europe could not match Europe’s innovations in warfare innovation. The huge sums of money showered on fighting in Europe gave military leaders the flexibility to buy new weapons and battleships and try out new tactics, fortifications, and methods of supply. In the process, they learned from their mistakes and improved their technologies. And because European countries were small and geographically close, they could easily learn from their rivals’ errors and copy their improvements. . . .

Europe’s ability to tax was no small achievement. China could not raise equivalent tax revenues, even in the nineteenth century. And countries in sub-Saharan Africa today still lack the basic capacity to tax, which keeps them from providing security and other basic public goods to their citizens.

Europe had yet another advantage as well: its entrepreneurs were free to use gunpowder technology to mount expeditions of conquest, colonization, and militarized trade. Although they usually needed official permission to launch a voyage, entrepreneurs were often encouraged by authorities eager to find riches abroad. And they had no trouble acquiring weapons or finding battle-hardened veterans to train military novices who joined their undertakings. By the seventeenth century, such private expeditions had spawned gigantic enterprises that raised huge sums on Europe’s burgeoning capital markets to finance ventures abroad, enterprises such as the Dutch East India Company, which was not only a private arm of Dutch foreign policy, but also the first business to issue tradable shares of stock.

A final difference between Europe and the rest of the world lies in political history. From 221 B.C. onward, China, more often than not, was unified in a large empire. The Chinese empire soon developed a centralized bureaucracy that drew local elites into government service and gave them a stake in the empire’s survival. The rewards of government service helped hold the empire together, and as long as the empire was strong and unified, other East Asian powers hesitated to attack it. This meant that China had little incentive to seek out new enemies or opportunities.

Western Europe, by contrast, experienced no such lasting unification after the collapse of the Roman Empire. What it endured instead were centuries of warfare by bands of warriors whose leaders resembled modern-day warlords. The incessant fighting groomed leaders who were victorious in war. The conflict also generated enduring enmities between leaders and their followers, enmities that eventually hardened into lasting political borders. It was such ill will—and not Europe’s physical geography—that kept any single leader from ever uniting Western Europe in the sort of durable empire that prevailed for centuries in China. In the long run, the winners in Western Europe were the military leaders who learned how to impose heavy taxes to fund their fighting, and as a result, Europe ended up with kings who spent pharaonic sums on warfare and who had, in the words of Machiavelli, “no object, thought, or profession but war.”

Without a single-minded focus on war and the extraordinary ability to tax, there may never have been any European empires. The wars and the taxes lavished on them gave the Europeans an enormous lead in military technology. This enabled their conquests, and allowed them to keep native populations under control without stationing large numbers of European troops abroad. Without such advantages, the Europeans might have grown rich anyway—and perhaps even industrialized early—but they would not have dominated the world in 1914.

Happy Columbus Day!

Surviving the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima 70 years ago

"There were the shadowy forms of people, some of whom looked like walking ghosts. Others moved as though in pain, like scarecrows, their arms held out from their bodies with forearms and hands dangling. These people puzzled me until I suddenly realized that they had been burned and were holding their arms out to prevent the painful friction of raw surfaces rubbing together."

Andrew Sullivan

You've probably seen that Andrew Sullivan plans to retire from blogging soon.

I can't tell you how proud I was when he linked to my post about him for the 10th anniversary of his blog, in 2010.

So many other writers were paying tribute to him that day, and many of them were being more complimentary than I was. He had solicited "toasts and roasts," but they seemed to be mostly the former.

My post lauded him for some things but was quite critical of him in other ways, and I even mentioned that I had stopped reading his blog.

I thought the fact that he would link to a post by an obscure person like me, and even quote the critical parts on his blog, when he had so many more positive posts to choose from that day, really said something about his character.

From my post on his 10th bloggiversary:

Self-righteousness and dogmatism are generally not a perfect fit with foreign policy. Sullivan's style is what it is. It isn't perfect, as even he admits. But he has done far more good than most cheerleaders for the Iraq war by exposing and analyzing his own shortcomings in thinking about war.

But when I think of Sullivan's political voice, I won't think first about foreign policy. I'll think about the issue he showed me how to think about.

His opening remarks about same-sex marriage in that video (back in 1997, before he was a blogger) are dated. He thought Hawaii was soon to be the first state in the US with same-sex marriage; the first such state was Massachusetts in 2004, and Hawaii still doesn't have it. [That was true when I wrote this in 2010; the law recognizing same-sex marriage in Hawaii was signed in 2013. — JAC] He didn't do a great job at predicting the future, but his message still has great resonance today.

I was going to find some choice moment of this video, transcribe it, and quote it here to draw your attention to it. But I would have felt like just transcribing the whole thing. So please, watch the whole thing. To say this is Sullivan at his best would be an understatement.

I love how he starts by giving definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality that seem so uncontroversial as to be hardly worth explaining — and then leverages those definitions into his case for same-sex marriage (both as something that should happen and as the most important front in the gay rights movement).

Though he's often criticized as overly emotional about political issues, he took the political issue he feels the most strongly about in his life and made his case with lucid logic. He did it when it was a lot less popular than it is now, and he did it over and over.

Thank you, Andrew Sullivan. You have made a difference.

(Photo of Andrew Sullivan by Trey Ratcliff.)

Why it matters that drones haven't been debated in this presidential race

Ramesh Ponnuru explains:

Neither side wants to look softer than the other on terrorists. Hence the bipartisan support for the strikes. Liberal groups that might be inclined to protest the policy have been quiet because Obama put it in place. The lack of debate about our reliance on drones is a shame, because there are both practical and moral objections to it.

A few conservatives have raised one practical concern: Killing terrorists is justified, they say, but we need to kill fewer and capture more to gain intelligence. You don’t have to support waterboarding, as some of these critics do, to agree with that point.

Another concern, raised by a few liberals, is that the strikes have increased anti-Americanism abroad. . . . The Pew Research Center has found strong opposition to drone strikes in almost every country.

But the morality of the policy is what most deserves scrutiny. . . . In January, Obama said, “I want to make sure that people understand actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.” A report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found hundreds of civilian casualties in Pakistan, including 176 children.

In May, the New York Times reported one possible explanation for the discrepancy in estimates: Obama “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” In other words, Obama has not found much evidence of civilian casualties because he’s not looking for any. . . .

The president’s aides told the Times that he is a “student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas” and can be trusted to make the right judgments. His practical definition of combatants as anyone we happened to kill suggests otherwise, although too much of the program is secret to say for sure. The fact that we have barely debated this issue makes it hard to believe that our political system is getting it right, either.

Read the whole article for more thoughts on how just-war theory applies to Obama's drone war.

Previously: What is President Obama's drone war in Pakistan doing?

What is President Obama's drone war in Pakistan doing?

Here's an important new study on our drone war based on 130 interviews, including with Pakistani victims and witnesses of drone attacks. (PDF of the complete report.) The study says:

In public statements, the US states that there have been “no” or “single digit” civilian casualties.” It is difficult to obtain data on strike casualties because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability, compounded by the obstacles to independent investigation of strikes in North Waziristan. The best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes are provided by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization. TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562-3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474-881 were civilians, including 176 children. TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228-1,362 individuals. Where media accounts do report civilian casualties, rarely is any information provided about the victims or the communities they leave behind.

But the problem goes far beyond "civilian casualties":

Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals. In addition, families who lost loved ones or their homes in drone strikes now struggle to support themselves. . . .

The report points out that the government considers any Pakistani man who's killed in a drone strike to be a "militant," and the media seems to blindly go along with this:

Journalists and media outlets should cease the common practice of referring simply to “militant” deaths, without further explanation. All reporting of government accounts of “militant” deaths should include acknowledgment that the US government counts all adult males killed by strikes as “militants,” absent exonerating evidence. Media accounts relying on anonymous government sources should also highlight the fact of their single-source information and of the past record of false government reports. . . .

What's President Obama's role in all this?

When President Bush left office in January 2009, the US had carried out at least 45 drone strikes according to the New America Foundation, or 52 according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), inside Pakistan. Since then, President Obama has reportedly carried out more than five times that number: 292 strikes in just over three and a half years. This dramatic escalation in the US use of drones to carry out targeted killings has brought with it escalating tensions between the US and Pakistan, as well as continued questions about the efficacy and accuracy of such strikes.

A key feature of the Obama administration’s use of drones has been a reported expansion in the use of “signature” strikes. Between 2002 and 2007, the Bush administration reportedly focused targeted killings on “personality” strikes targeting named, allegedly high-value leaders of armed, non-state groups like Salim Sinan al Harethi and Nek Mohammad. Under Obama, the program expanded to include far more “profile” or so-called “signature” strikes based on a “pattern of life” analysis. According to US authorities, these strikes target “groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren’t known.” Just what those “defining characteristics” are has never been made public. In 2012, the New York Times paraphrased a view shared by several officials that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.” The Times also reported that some in the Obama administration joke that when the CIA sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” they think it is a terrorist training camp. . . .

[T]he President acts as the final decision maker, at least with respect to the decision to carry out “personality strikes” targeting named individuals. . . .

The administration claims to have a thorough vetting process by which names are chosen. It is unclear what, if any, process is in place for [these] decisions.

War — what is it good for?

Being absolutely adorable.

The War on Everything

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012)

The New York Times obituary describes Fischer-Dieskau's experience as a German in World War II:

[I]n 1943, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to care for army horses on the Russian front. He kept a diary there, calling it his “attempt at preserving an inner life in chaotic surroundings.” . . .

“Lots of cold, lots of slush, and even more storms,” read [one entry]. “Every day horses die for lack of food.”

It was in Russia that he heard that his mother had been forced to send his brother to an institution outside Berlin. “Soon,” he wrote later, “the Nazis did to him what they always did with cases like his: they starved him to death as quickly as possible.”

And then his mother’s apartment in Lichterfelde was bombed. Granted home leave to help her, he found that all that remained of their possessions could be moved to a friend’s apartment in a handcart. But as early as his second day home, he and his mother began seeking out “theater, concerts, a lot of other music — defying the irrational world.”

Instead of returning to the disastrous campaign in Russia, he was diverted to Italy along with thousands of other German soldiers. There, on May 5, 1945, just three days before the Allies accepted the German surrender, he was captured and imprisoned. It turned out to be musical opportunity: soon the Americans were sending him around to entertain other P.O.W.’s from the back of a truck. The problem was, they were so pleased with this arrangement that they kept him until June 1947. He was among the last Germans to be repatriated.

Here's Fischer-Dieskau singing "Gute Nacht," from Schubert's Winterreise (with Murray Perahia on piano):



Many of the comments on that YouTube video were posted today, echoing the song title:

Gute Nacht, meine freund ;(

(The third movement from A German Requiem by Brahms.)

Live-blogging Rick Perry's first 2012 Republican presidential debate

My mom, Ann Althouse, is live-blogging too. So is TalkingPointsMemo, in 4 parts: 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Added later: Here's the complete transcript of the debate, on the New York Times' website. But I don't know how accurate that transcript is; it refers to Brian Williams as being with Politico, when he's the anchor of NBC Nightly News. Here's the full video:]



Feel free to post any reactions to the debate in the comments.

8:03 - Rick Perry says Brian Williams is wrong to say most jobs that have been created in Texas are "low-wage jobs," because 95% of them were above the minimum wage. Spot the fallacy!

8:06 - Mitt Romney touts his "experience succeeding [and] failing." I'm sure some people would like to use his positive spin on "failing" against him, but it makes sense.

8:07 - Perry reveals his strategy against Romney: concede that he did well in the private sector, and contrast this with his work as governor.

8:08 - Perry has a zinger against Romney: Michael Dukakis created jobs three times as fast as Romney did in Massachusetts. Without missing a beat, Romney retorts that Perry created jobs more slowly than George Bush did (presumably this refers to Bush as Governor of Texas, not President). Brian Williams: "Nice to see that everyone came prepared."

[Added later: here's a video of the most attention-getting squabble between Romney and Perry.]



8:11 - Herman Cain has a "9/9/9" plan for the economy. Maybe he was listening to the Beatles' "Revolution 9."

8:15 - In response to a jobs question, Michele Bachmann puts the emphasis on kids and racial minorities.

8:16 - Ron Paul "doesn't believe in" any federal safety regulations. He believes only in the "regulations" of the free market.

[Added: I was writing down these quotes on the fly based on trying to pay attention to the debate while making soup for dinner. I believe my quotes are reasonably accurate, but they might not be verbatim.]

8:21 - When asked about his health-care reform in Massachusetts (as he always is in these debates), Romney not only gives his usual vow to give waivers from Obamacare to all states on day 1 and eventually repeal it. He also defends his decision in Massachusetts based on the fact that the status quo ante was unacceptable because people were incentivized to rely on emergency rooms for all health care, the costs of which were passed on to the people.

8:27 - Newt Gingrich continues his tactic from the last debate of attacking the moderators: "I'm not interested in your attempt to get Republicans fighting each other. . . . Let's not puff this up into some giant thing."

8:31 - I agree with Rick Santorum about welfare reform.

8:33 - Perry paraphrases John F. Kennedy, who "said that the most powerful welfare program is a job." I believe this is the first time in the last three debates that a candidate has referenced a Democrat in a positive way.

8:35 - Romney on President Obama: "He keeps talking about green jobs. Where are they?" Good question.

8:37 - Ron Paul calls out the moderators for only asking Romney about his health-care plan and not asking Perry about supporting Hillary Clinton's health-care plan. (Perry denies this.)

8:39 - Perry takes a gratuitous swipe at Ron Paul for quibbling with then-President Reagan. This is a transparent gambit on Perry's part to give more time to Paul and take time away from the stronger candidates.

8:49 - Perry says anyone who promotes Social Security as we know it is perpetrating "a monstrous lie" to young people. He does not exclude Karl Rove or Dick Cheney from this.

8:51 - Romney clearly places himself as the moderate candidate — who wants to save Social Security — against Perry, the extreme candidate — who wants to abolish Social Security. He seems to have read this article in The New Republic:

You must persuade the decisive portion of your party that Rick Perry is too extreme to be elected president.

Here’s your theme: Rick Perry wants to repeal the 20th century. I don’t. And neither do the American people.

[I've added this video, and commentary from TalkingPointsMemo:]

The exchange marks a crucial moment in the campaign: this is the first time Romney has deliberately staked out a centrist position in order to attack Perry explicitly from the left. This is a dynamic that’s going to have a huge impact on the character of the race from this point on, assuming Romney holds his ground.

8:58 - Romney is notably gracious in not going along with Paul and Bachmann in attacking Perry over his widely reviled HPV vaccination law.

9:01 - Paul says the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened because Americans didn't have enough guns.

9:04 - Jon Huntsman says the Department of Homeland Security has "a fortress security mentality that is not American."

9:08 - Gingrich praises Obama for showing "some courage" on education policy. I believe that's the first time any candidate has praised anything about Obama.

9:13 - Santorum makes a good argument on immigration, which I've never heard before: "It's a very good thing for the first thing you do when you come to this country to be a legal act, not an illegal act."

9:20 - A commenter on my mom's blog says:

Perry is a disappointment - not ready for prime time. His simplistic sloganeering makes Sarah Palin sound like Thomas Jefferson.

9:23 - Romney dodges the question whether he's a member of the Tea Party: "I don't think you carry cards in the Tea Party." (This sounded a little odd, since the moderator didn't use the phrase "card-carrying member.") He qualifies his answer that "I'm for the Tea Party" by saying this is true "if the Tea Party is for" smaller government and so on. In other words, he agrees with them as long as they agree with his opinions. That's a weak answer. Why not say unequivocally that he supports the Tea Party because they are for those things?

9:25 - A Facebook friend, Alex Knepper (who gave me permission to identify him and link to his Facebook), says:

REAGAN is not a synonym for GOOD, people!

9:29 - Perry blatantly dodges the question whether Bush was too quick to go to war without thinking through the risks. He blithely says he's against "adventurism" but doesn't clarify how he would apply this to any of Bush's foreign-policy decisions.

9:29 - Perry, of his own accord (not in response to any question), gives emphatic praise to Obama for prosecuting the war on terrorism.

9:33 - Bachmann firmly states that it was "wrong" for the United States to go to war with Libya.

9:36 - Huntsman: "We can't run from science." He says other (unspecified) candidates have made "comments that don't reflect the reality of the situation" including denying what 98% of scientists say on climate change and denying evolution.

9:45 - Perry slowly, dramatically lists capital crimes and says if you come to Texas and do them, "you will be executed."

9:49 - Paul has the last word, saying he rejects the idea that if he's against federal government benefits, he lacks compassion. It's compassionate to understand that the most effective way to care for children is through the free market.

ADDED: That was a solid, substantive, lively debate. The moderators did a good job of keeping the candidates reined in without cutting them off so soon that they struggled to make their points. There was a good mix of gotcha questions and broader "What do you think about this issue?" questions. The MSNBC debate led by Brian Williams far outdid the debate back in June hosted by CNN and led by John King. Between tonight's debate and the previous FoxNews debate, CNN has a high standard to meet when it hosts the next debate, on Monday, September 12.

As for the candidates, I'm not going to claim to be impartial — I'm rooting for Romney. I was hoping that finally appearing on stage next to everyone else would remove some of Perry's luster. I don't know if that happened or not. The conventional wisdom seems to be that Romney "won" the debate, but Jon Chait says Romney lost to Perry by being too reasonable:

The media seems to consider Romney the winner. Pardon the condescension, but they’re not thinking like Republican base voters. Romney approaches every question as if he is in an actual debate, trying to provide the most intellectually compelling answer available, within the bounds of political expediency. Perry treats questions as interruptions. What scientists do you trust on climate change? I don’t want to risk the economy. Are you taking a radical position on social security? We can have reasons or we can have results. His total liberation from the constraints of reason give Perry a chance to represent the Republican id in a way Romney simply cannot match.

In this way Perry eerily apes the style of George W. Bush, who was also mocked for his intellectually vapid debating style, but who succeeded in rallying Republicans behind him. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I suspect the Bush-Perry debating style broadcasts a subliminal message of strong leadership. Romney feels compelled to bind himself to the parameters of the question before him. Perry ignores them. It is, in a sense, an alpha male move. I am not going to lower myself to your premise about scientists. I am going to declare my principles.

In my view, Perry established his alpha male style, and that impression will matter more than any position or statement he’s made.

Is rape during war undercounted or overcounted?

Both.

What have we accomplished in Libya?

Much more than we're able to see, argues Tom Malinowski in The New Republic:

In Libya, many people (we don’t yet know how many) were arrested, forcibly disappeared and possibly executed as the Qaddafi government consolidated its control over Tripoli and rebel-held enclaves, like Zawiyah, in the country’s west. But the Obama administration and its international allies did act soon enough to prevent the much larger-scale atrocities that would likely have followed Qaddafi’s reconquest of eastern Libya and especially the city of Benghazi. Indeed, though this intervention must have felt painfully slow to the people of Benghazi as Qaddafi’s army bore down upon them, it was, by any objective standard, the most rapid multinational military response to an impending human rights crisis in history, with broader international support than any of the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s.

But precisely because the international community acted in time—before Qaddafi retook Benghazi—we never saw what might have happened had they not acted. Today in eastern Libya, there are no columns of refugees marching home to reclaim their lives; no mass graves testifying to the gravity of the crisis; no moment that symbolizes a passing from horror to hope. The sacking of Benghazi was the proverbial dog that didn’t bark. And so, just days into the military operation, commentators have moved on to a new set of questions—some serious (Is the mission to protect civilians or to remove Qaddafi? Will NATO be stuck patrolling a divided country?), and some trivial (Should Obama have gone to Brazil when the bombing started? Did the interventionist “girls” in his administration out-argue the cautious boys?)

But before the debate moves on, as it must, we should acknowledge what could be happening in eastern Libya right now had Qaddafi’s forces continued their march. The dozens of burned out tanks, rocket launchers, and missiles bombed at the eleventh hour on the road to Benghazi would have devastated the rebel stronghold if Qaddafi’s forces had been able to unleash them indiscriminately, as they did in other, smaller rebel-held towns, like Zawiyah, Misrata, and Adjabiya. Qaddafi’s long track-record of arresting, torturing, disappearing, and killing his political opponents to maintain control suggests that had he recaptured the east, a similar fate would have awaited those who supported the opposition there. Over a hundred thousand Libyans already fled to Egypt fearing Qaddafi’s assault; hundreds of thousands more could have followed if the east had fallen. The remaining population, and those living in refugee camps abroad, would have felt betrayed by the West, which groups like Al Qaeda would undoubtedly have tried to exploit. Finally, Qaddafi’s victory—alongside Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s fall—would have signaled to other authoritarian governments from Syria to Saudi Arabia to China that if you negotiate with protesters you lose, but if you kill them you win.

And the United States would still have been embroiled in Libya—enforcing sanctions, evacuating opposition supporters, assisting refugees, dealing with an unpredictable and angry Qaddafi. But it would have been embroiled in a tragedy rather than a situation that now has a chance to end well.