The Free Thinker

Quagmire

The war in Afghanistan (The Economist)

General Stanley McChrystal, the overall American commander, said his force may soon assault Marja, a well defended stronghold of the Taliban and drug smugglers. The Taliban said their own response, Operation Foladi Jal (Iron Net), would avoid frontal battles but would teach the marines “a lesson” through roadside bombs and ambushes.

Thrust of the Sword is the first big move since President Barack Obama’s decision to shift forces from Iraq to Afghanistan. Oddly, perhaps, the assault is taking place before the marines are at full strength in Helmand, and before the recently appointed General McChrystal has completed his review of operations.

Theorists of counter-insurgency say that fighting guerrillas requires time and patience (and even more foreign and local soldiers than are available in Afghanistan). But General McChrystal is a man in a hurry. He needs to enable as many people as possible to vote in Afghanistan’s presidential election next month, and he needs to show he is turning the tide of war before America’s mid-term elections next year. So at the moment, he is using the plan devised by his abruptly sacked predecessor, General David McKiernan, who was criticised in the Pentagon for being, among other things, too cautious and unimaginative.

The biggest change under General McChrystal is the instruction to reduce civilian casualties. A “tactical directive”, issued at the start of Thrust of the Sword, says that winning the support of the Afghans overrides all else. “We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories—but suffering strategic defeats—by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people,” he says. This may increase the danger to troops; but the greater risk is to push Afghans into the arms of the Taliban...

Much damage has already been done by inconclusive operations. British forces often fought their way into insurgent areas, only to withdraw and let the Taliban return, exposing residents to retribution. British commanders now think this was worse than leaving the Taliban in control. “Before the British came, everyone was happy they were coming to bring security and reconstruction,” says Haji Mahboob Khan, a senator from Garmser district. “But all the British brought was chaos.”

Nad Ali illustrates much of what has gone wrong. The district had been one of the few loyal to the government. But the Afghan police there, as elsewhere, are corrupt, often predatory and driven by local tribal interests. The force is dominated by the Noorzai tribe which controls the lucrative drugs trade. Attempts to reform the force by giving it a crash course in policing and installing Western mentors have produced few improvements. Worse, the eradication of poppy fields in Nad Ali pushed the population into supporting the Taliban. Such errors explain why America wants to change the focus of counter-narcotics from eradication of farmers’ fields to targeting middlemen.

General Nicholson says NATO will change its ways: “Where we go, we will stay; and where we stay we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces.” The problem for the marines, as for other NATO forces, is that there are nowhere near enough Afghans. Thrust of the Sword involved just 650 Afghan soldiers alongside 4,000 marines. General Nicholson wants as many Afghans as Americans.

Moreover, America needs not just Afghan soldiers but Afghan government—and Afghanistan has little in the way of working government institutions. Without them, the marines are operating in a vacuum. “The Helmand people just want peace; not reconstruction even, just peace,” says Haji Mahboob Khan. “But if NATO sent another 100,000 troops to Helmand, without a good government that is free of all these thieves, they won’t be able to bring security.”

Does this sound like a promising situation?

Iraq had a degree of literacy and urbanization that made stable democracy with plausible party competition a plausible, if sanguine, outcome of US intervention. The totalitarian regime preceding the US intervention made Iraq a parallel case to Germany and Japan after WWII, where imposing democracy worked. To change the regime and establish democracy there was ambitious, but not impossible.

Afghanistan is much poorer, much less literate, much more tribal, much less accessible. It's hard to see how democracy is even possible under such circumstances. We might succeed in establishing it; but the odds are surely far worse than even. Suppose McChrystal can protect the population; who will rule the country? Will elections lead to some tribal confederation or what's the idea? You need to know what your objective is in order to make consistent decisions. If your goal is to establish democracy, that in a way leaves the key question-- who will rule the country?-- unanswered ex ante, but there are still a lot of definite criteria of success in terms of constitutional arrangements and political processes. I don't think we have that kind of template in Afghanistan, and we can't: there isn't a political model we believe in that is applicable there. 

I wish General McChrystal luck. But it seems to me we're hopelessly confused about our objectives and our mission and there's little hope of anything good coming out of it. Is there some honorable way to just exit that theater of war?

Moderately Popular

"Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll":

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 30% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-seven percent (37%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of –7 (see trends).

The Rasmussen Consumer Index shows that consumer confidence is down again on Friday. That’s the sixth straight daily decline and confidence is now at the lowest level since mid-March. Just 8% rate the economy as good or excellent while 62% say it’s in poor shape.

For the second straight month, voters are more likely to trust Republicans than Democrats on the economy. A Rasmussen video report notes that most Americans say the efforts of the G-8 leaders are not likely to help the economy. And, 59% reject the Pope’s call for more international regulation of the economy.

Later today, Rasmussen Reports will release new polling data on campaign finance reform. Premium Members can get an advance look at the results along with Scott Rasmussen’s Daily Briefing.

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates also available on Twitter.

Overall, 51% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. Forty-eight percent (48%) disapprove. The pattern of overall approval leaning in the President’s direction but the number with strong opinions leaning the other way is also reflected in public reaction to health care reform and climate change legislation.

It's funny, the media has kept talking about Obama's extraordinary popularity, but it isn't there in the polls. Obama's more popular than not, though at this point only just, but his numbers are nowhere close to where Bush's were at the peak.  Of course, being a popular president and being a good president are not at all the same thing.  If anything, I think a really great statesman must be willing to make himself quite unpopular for the greater good.  Churchill was unpopular in the 1930s precisely because he was right when Britain didn't want to face the truth.

The Economist:

An opportunity lost

The end of the cold war in 1989 brought a sense of relief and satisfaction to America. As Jack Matlock, America’s ambassador in Moscow, described it in his memoirs, “The way we looked at it at the time, and the way Gorbachev looked at it, was that we all won the cold war. We ended it.” When the Soviet Union crumbled two years later, America was caught unprepared and scrambling for a policy. Its biggest concern was removing nuclear rockets from former Soviet republics. Yegor Gaidar, Russia’s former prime minister in charge of economic reform, says this was one of the most successful operations Russia and America have mounted together.

America’s policy towards Russia was not triumphalist. But nor did the West offer Russia a Marshall Plan to stave off a catastrophic collapse in living standards. As Mr Gaidar says, it was more concerned about recovering the Soviet debts which Russia had inherited than with stabilising its financial system. Poland’s debt was written off, but Russia’s was not. By 1993, when Bill Clinton took office and actively engaged with Boris Yeltsin, the crucial window of opportunity had closed. The funds Mr Clinton managed to accumulate for Russia were too little, too late.

For most of the 1990s, the thrust of Russia’s relationship with the West was about Russia’s transition to a normal, civilised country. But that clashed with NATO enlargement, which presupposed that Russia was a threat. For the West, enlargement was about bolstering security in Europe. In Moscow it was seen as a sign of mistrust and neglect of Russia’s aspirations. A new security structure could have been built to include a democratic Russia, but never was. Instead, NATO enlargement was coated in soothing language about Russia’s co-operation with the alliance inside the Russia-NATO council.

There is nothing legitimate about Russia's objections to NATO expansion and never has been.  The "mistrust" that motivated NATO expansion was perfectly understandable in light of 20th-century history and was proven wise by Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008.  "Russia's aspirations" which we were "neglecting" were aspirations to dominate its neighbors; if they were anything else, NATO would not have been a threat.  The root problem is that Russia has not repudiated and repented of the Soviet episode the way Germany has of the Nazi episode, or the way America has for slavery and segregation.  Only when Russians reject the Soviet legacy, and to some extent the tsarist legacy too, will they deserve the world's trust.  And they should accept, without resentment, that it may be a decade or two or three before the justified mistrust and contempt of their western neighbors for them fades.  By suggesting that "an opportunity" was "lost" through Western mistakes, The Economist is making very unwarranted concessions that can only encourage Russians in their unjustified sense of grievance.

"The Smell of War at Breakfast" (Moscow Times)

Will Russia launch a war against Georgia? That is the most important question that should have been decided during U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Moscow — or, to be more precise, during Obama’s breakfast meeting on Tuesday with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Everything else was of secondary importance. Compared with the Russia-Georgia conflict, what difference does it make what kind of agreement they reach to reduce strategic nuclear arms? After all, Russia and the United States will never use these weapons against each other anyway.

The pleasantries shared between President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama during their news conference and photo ops were just as meaningless. In the end, Medvedev and Putin will always support regimes that are antagonistic to Washington for one simple reason: to increase international tensions, drive up oil prices and give the Kremlin another chance to bask in its inflated self-image as a global energy superpower.

It was very important that Obama’s visit coincided with Russia’s large-scale military exercises “Caucasus 2009,” which were most likely held in preparation for a new war in the region. And whether or not Russia’s troops will be given the green light does not depend on military considerations, but on whether Putin, after meeting with Obama, believes that he can start a war without incurring repercussions from the West.

The only good reason to talk to the Russians is to order them to get out of Georgia.  Having no principles and no strategic vision, Obama has no idea what matters in world affairs.  Meanwhile:

"The Bush Doctrine is Still Working" (American Spectator)

A central theme of President Bush's administration was to promote democracy in the Middle East. He argued that establishing a full fledged democracy in Iraq in the heart of the Middle East would have transforming effects throughout the Muslim World. Even though the promotion of human rights and democracy had been a central theme of liberal foreign policy for decades, the Left ridiculed Bush's policy as hopelessly naïve. Even some on the right echoed this criticism.

But recent trends throughout the Middle East show that this policy is now producing a growing, very powerful effect in countering Islamic extremism and terrorism, just as Bush originally envisioned. The most recent example of this is the elections in Lebanon, where the pro-Western coalition in power there was reelected last month with a slightly increased majority over the Islamic extremist Hezbollah coalition, despite Iranian funding estimated in the billions for Hezbollah.

When the pro-Western coalition was first elected in Lebanon in 2005, it soon chased the Syrian army out of the country, ending the occupation started over 20 years ago during the Lebanese civil war. That was a huge victory for America and the West for which Bush received no credit.

Another recent example comes from Kuwait, where the public mostly voted for secular parties, rejecting the Islamic extremists in even electing women to the legislature for the first time, contrary to extremist strictures. Elections in Pakistan have probably been the most important of all, with the public overwhelmingly choosing secular parties over Islamic extremists. In the 2002 election, the extremists were revealed as a fringe element with only about 11% of the vote. In the more recent election in 2008, they got only 2%, winning only 6 out of 270 seats. This was another big victory, revealing the lack of appeal by the Taliban and Al Qaeda in that critical country.

In Iraq itself, we have seen the same results. The public votes for secular parties, not Islamic extremists. Indeed, despite all the talk from the Left about how Bush only alienated the Islamic street, we don't see anti-American candidates in Iraq even running let alone winning.

Another big turning point came in Morocco in 2007. The Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) was projected to win the parliamentary elections. But when the votes were counted, PJD had won only 14% of the vote, and a conservative party aligned with the traditional King had won. In municipal elections this past April, the PJD sunk to 7% of the vote. In Jordan in 2007, the Islamic Action Front won just 6 of the 22 seats it contested, down from 17 seats in the previous parliament.

Absent democracy, the roughly 10% of the public in Middle Eastern, Islamic countries willing to shoot their way into power in the name of Allah seems dominant. Actual elections reveal them to be fringe, extremist groups, greatly diminishing their power in favor of reasonable, secular leaders. As a result, the Bush doctrine of advancing democracy and human rights is now increasingly successful in combating terrorism and Islamic extremism.

Now we are seeing these same results in Iran. Where did the people of Iran get the idea that they were entitled to an honest election? They haven't had an honest election there in over 50 years. Maybe it comes from watching their Shiite brothers voting in honest, free elections in neighboring Iraq. And maybe it comes as well from watching the same in neighboring Afghanistan, which had formerly been seen as hopelessly backward for centuries.

Iran's recent sham election fiasco is the biggest victory of all for America and the West, again courtesy of the Bush doctrine of promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East. All of a sudden, the Islamic theocracy in Iran has been discredited and exposed as illegitimate. Now that the ruling mullahs have had to turn to shooting their own people in the streets to stay in power, it is only a matter of time until their theocracy falls, and the popular will regains power. That result will be enormously beneficial for America, because Iran's theocratic regime is the central power in the Middle East supporting and spreading Islamic radicalism, terrorism, and continued war against Israel and the West. Once Iran's theocracy falls, and is replaced by a secular government, peace between Israel and the Palestinians will be possible and increasingly likely over time.

But these achievements will be lost if we let the Russians usher in a new age of aggression.  So far, the lesson of August 2008 is "crime pays."  If we don't reverse that lesson, we can expect to see more crime.

Nomination: IMF for World's Federal Reserve

"Chinese officials call for displacing dollar, in time" (Reuters)

BEIJING (Reuters) - The financial crisis has laid bare defects in the dollar-led global economy and the world should look to displace the U.S. currency, even if that will take many years, Chinese officials said in comments published on Monday.

The push for fundamental, if gradual, reform of the international financial system comes just before the Group of Eight summit in Italy, where China's willingness to question the dollar's role could fuel debate.

The Special Drawing Right (SDR), a unit of account used by the International Monetary Fund, presents a viable alternative to the dollar as a global reserve currency, said Li Ruogu, chairman of the Export-Import Bank of China, a major state-run bank.

"It is a feasible plan to reform the present SDR and make it into a real settlement currency, a universally accepted 'currency basket' that would replace the dollar at the heart of the monetary system," Li was cited as saying in Financial News, a newspaper published by the central bank.

I'm for it.  The success of the euro suggests that transnational monetary experiments.  (The euro hasn't overcome Eurosclerosis in Germany and France, but it has held together pretty well so far, and Ireland, Spain, and Greece have been thriving until last year.  Overall it seems like a success.)  I don't think it does the United States any good to have the world's reserve currency.  It just encourages politicians to overspend, because Congress's ability, at the end of the day, to commandeer the Fed and print money to pay our debts persuades foreigners that the US won't default, and therefore gives the government unlimited access to foreign capital, which they waste, crowding out more productive private sector economic activity.  And anyway, it does seem more fitting somehow for the provider of the world's reserve currency to have a worldwide mandate.

Polygyny and the Meta-Ethics of "Flourishing"

How should one evaluate the ethics of polygyny (men having more than one wife) from the perspective of an Aristotelian, a Kantian, and a utilitarian ethos?

Kantian.  There are two reasons that a Kantian might regard polygyny as immoral.  First, if we restrict our attention on men as moral agents, it is largely and in most cases inconsistent to will that "Marry multiple women," be a universal maxim, because there aren't enough women for all men to marry more than one.  Strictly speaking, this is not universally true.  If population growth rates are fast enough and men marry much younger women, universal polygyny could be possible.  Also, in the wake of large wars male populations are sometimes sufficiently depleted that the remaining men could practice generalized polygyny.  Still, where populations are stable and/or spouses are roughly the same age, and where there have been no demography-altering calamities, if some men have two wives, others will have to go without. 

Second, if we extend our attention to women as moral agents, a universal maxim to "Marry multiple people," making marriage exclusive on neither side, would clearly destroy the character of marriage altogether.  However, to apply the same sexual morality to men and women is not unproblematic.  Men have a biological reason to desire exclusive devotion from their mates that does not apply to women, namely that unless their mates are faithful, men will not know the paternity of any children they bear.  More generally, women may have different sexual needs and desires than men do, such that ethical maxims appropriate for men could not be validly cross-applied.  "Don't initiate romances; let the initiative come from the other side" might be a tenable, perhaps even wise maxim for women, but would hardly produce good results if practiced by both sexes, while "In situations of danger to yourself and your mate, value the other's safety above your own to the extent of sacrificing your life if necessary," might be a correct maxim for men, but would create oddities if applied to both sexes alike.  I think the false application of universalizability to sex is one reason why the case for free love can seem so overwhelming to logical young males: since promiscuous sex appeals to the untrained masculine nature, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," combined with an assumption of gender equality, seems to be a formula for free love.  But this overemphasizes the body at the expense of the mind.  If marriage is to be a connection of minds as well as of bodies, it does make sense to demand that maxims about marriage be universalizable to women as well as men, and to condemn polygyny on the grounds that polygynous husbands don't want their wives to practice polyandry, too.

Utilitarian.  Presumably, as a rule, a man gets more (marginal) pleasure from his first wife than his second, and less still from his third.  If so, to distribute women equally among men, in pairs of one husband, one wife, would yield more happiness to men than polygynous arrangements in which some men get several wives, others none.  Polygyny can fuel social conflict, as some men are left frustrated and with "nothing to lose."  Also, although the torments of jealousy suffered by women in polygynous arrangements may (at least "selfish gene" logic gives reason to think so) be less than those suffered by lovers of unfaithful women, the tug-of-war of wives for the attentions of one husband are surely painful.  The Chinese film Raise the Red Lantern poignantly portrays the rivalries among the wives of a polygynous Chinese gentleman.  So there are, it seems, pretty strong reasons to presume that monogamy serves the "greatest good of the greatest number."  A survey of the world's monogamous and polygynous societies suggests that the former are more peaceful, dynamic and creative, as well as a possible reason: when men can have multiple wives, men's efforts may be devoted to competing for a scarce resource, what is called a "zero-sum game," whereas if they are strictly limited to one, sexual competition is greatly reduced, and competitive energies are directed more into positive-sum games like commerce, art, and scholarship.

Aristotelian.  I don't know, but I expect Aristotle disapproved of polygyny, which was not practiced in Greece, as this article observes:

To a modern western audience, the fact that ancient Greeks and Romans were not supposed to be married to more than one person at any given time, nor even to cohabit with others alongside legal spouses, must seem perfectly ‘normal’. This may explain why this practice has received hardly any attention from historians of the classical world. Yet from a global, cross-cultural perspective, there is nothing ‘normal’ or unremarkable about this. Instead, until very recently, polygynous arrangements of marriage or cohabitation were the norm in world history, and strict monogamy remained an exception. Barely one in six of the 1,195 societies surveyed in the largest anthropological dataset have been classified as ‘monogamous’, while polygyny was frequently considered the preferred choice even if it failed to be common in practice (Gray (1998) 89-90, with Clark (1998)). Smaller samples of better documented societies convey a similar picture, and while ‘monogamy’ is observed in a small proportion of all cases (16-20% in samples of 348 and 862 systems: Murdock (1967); Burton et al. (1996)), due to their failure to distinguish between rare instances of polygamy and its formal prohibition these surveys tend to overestimate the actual incidence of strictly monogamous rules. In fact, although the nature of the evidence does not allow us to rule out the existence of strictly monogamous systems prior to the first millennium BCE, the earliest unequivocal documentation originates from the archaic Greek and early Roman periods. Thus, even though Greeks and Romans need not have been the first cultures to prescribe monogamy, these are the earliest securely attested cases and, moreover, established a paradigm for subsequent periods that eventually attained global dominance. In this sense, Greco-Roman monogamy may well be the single most important phenomenon of ancient history that has remained widely unrecognized. What is more, the global positive correlation between patricentric kinship systems and polygyny (Burton et al. (1996) 93-4) renders the emergence of prescriptive monogamy in the patricentric societies of Greece and Rome even more remarkable.

However, I doubt whether an Aristotelian meta-ethics really lends itself to the rejection of polygyny.  Aristotle's measure of ethics was the realization of a man's telos, which was conceived as parallel to the "flourishing" of biological organisms.  Clearly, for a male of any species to "flourish" in the biological sense involves polygyny.  The reasoning of Darwin, or Dawkins, makes this especially clear, but the fact that polygyny for the wealthy and successful of human societies has been the general practice is evidence enough.  Thus King David and the prophet Muhammad were polygynous, as is Osama bin Laden; the Bible treats King David's polygyny unproblematically as evidence of his success and glory.  Even today, the polygynous impulse is not dead among the successful.  US presidents can't be polygamous by law but many of them-- Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton-- have been in practice.  If we see a picture of a Hollywood star with a beautiful woman on each arm, it's a symbol of success.  I once saw a crude wrestling type sport in which the contestants each came with a girl, and the victor in each match appropriated his opponent's girl, so that the winner ended up with four of them clustered around him.

I'm sure Aristotelian ethicists can find ways to argue that polygyny is not ("really") the height of human flourishing, and I'd probably agree, in a way, with the arguments they would make.  And yet it seems clear to me that the real reasons polygyny is wrong are the Kantian and utilitarian ones, namely, that to practice polygyny is inegalitarian and causes unhappiness in others.  Of course, I would also agree that man does not flourish, in the most important sense, by being polygynous: his soul does not flourish.  But that is because the flourishing of a man's soul depends on his doing what is right, and Kant and the utilitarians can tell us why polygyny is not right, and therefore, why it is harmful to the soul.  "Natural man," so to speak, flourishes by being polygynous; but man is not only a natural, but also a supernatural being.  Supernatural man flourishes better when monogamous or celibate; polygyny is a burden to him; but this is only an illustration of the more general point that the flourishing of supernatural man has hardly anything to do with the flourishing of natural man and is often opposed to it.  Man's soul may attain its utmost health just as his body is being ripped aparts by lions in the arena.

Book Review: Three Empires on the Nile

Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, by Dominic Green, is a very exciting book, yet I'm not sure I recommend it, because it's not edifying.  It describes the history of Egypt and the Sudan from the completion of the Suez Canal to the Fashoda affair and General Kitchener's victory of the Mahdist troops at Omdurman.  Major characters include Charles Gordon, the brave but gloomy "martyr" of the British Empire at Khartoum, Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, power-behind-the-throne in Egypt after 1882, Khedive Isma'il Pasha, the greedy and spendthrift hereditary monarch of Egypt (nominally subject to the sultan and turned into an instrument of the British and French), Ahmed Urabi, an army officer who led a sort of abortive revolution and was a forerunner of Nasser, British prime ministers Gladstone, Rosebury and Salisbury, Queen Victoria, Muhammad Ahmed "the Mahdi," his successor Khalifa Abdullahi, Arabophile British aristocrat Wilfrid Blunt, and General Kitchener.  Winston Churchill appears briefly near the end.  All these historical figures come to live in Green's book.  But none of them are represented as very wise or admirable.

One of these figures, Charles Gordon, was greatly admired by contemporaries, but his reputation was damaged by Lytton Strachey's biography of him and other heroes of the Victorian era, Eminent Victorians, and opinion has generally followed Strachey in disdaining Gordon ever since.  I found myself sympathizing with Gordon and the other Englishmen, especially Baring, who seems to have gotten the Egyptian economy on a sound footing after the depredations of the extravagant Khedive Isma'il.  Gordon was a little neurotic, and his conduct in failling to evacuate Khartoum as his superiors in London demanded was rank insurbordination-- a bit like MacArthur's in the Korean War.  Yet he was brave, holding out in besieged Khartoum for 300 days in his determination not to abandon its inhabitants to the barbarous religious fanatics of "the Mahdi," and finally dying in hand-to-hand combat with Mahdist troops defending the city he had tried to save.  Whatever his illusions and errors of judgments and oddities of character, he was disinterested, disdaining his own comfort and sacrificing his life for the sake of what he believed was his duty.  Baring/Cromer, Kitchener, Gladstone, Salisbury, Woolsley (another military man), Wilfrid Blunt, and most of the other English characters in the story exhibit a similar disinterestedness.  Sometimes they are thinking of their own careers, looking for praise and honor; rarely if ever of material gain; and never of the harems and slaves that seem to motivate Khedive Isma'il.  When Gladstone leaves Gordon to die at Khartoum, both of them seem somewhat devious and dishonorable, yet they are both acting in the service of high ideals at great risk and unpleasantness to themselves.  Gladstone, a fervent if inconsistent anti-imperialist, endures a storm of abuse and risks the destruction of his political career to avoid being drawn into an adventure in the Sudan, while Gordon's motives, though harder to read, seem to include opposition to the slave trade and a belief that the Mahdi's victory would be a humanitarian catastrophe for the Sudan, a belief which later events fully justified. 

By contrast, the two main Muslim characters in the drama, Khedive Isma'il and the Mahdi, while they have some ideals-- Khedive Isma'il wants to modernize Egypt, while the Mahdi wants to overthrow an Egyptian tyranny and restore Islamic justice-- are not above any cruelty or lust.  Khedive Isma'il is  incorrigibly extravagant and deceitful and ultimately accepts an Anglo-French bribe to go into exile.  He has a large harem, and while he passes laws against the slave trade to appease the English humanitarian lobby, his agents continue to practice it.  The Mahdi is a "holy man" who claims to be appointed by the Prophet Muhammad in a vision, and seems to believe it; and in his youth he practiced a certain renunciation of the sinful ways of the world for which one might feel a limited admiration.  But he too practices polygamy, first taking four wives as a means to various political alliances, later, after sacking Khartoum, taking hordes of concubines (and leaving women not taken as concubines by him and his warriors to starve), and gorging himself on sweets and meats, becoming fat.  In a sense, Khedive Isma'il and the Mahdi are easier to understand: when they get power, they use it to get the things their stomachs and their selfish genes make them want.  The Britons, with their clashing ideals and altruism, are more mysterious. 

Both similarities and differences between a Victorian foreign-policy crisis and a contemporary American one are striking.  On the one hand, modern human rights lobbies are direct heirs of the Victorian humanitarian lobby.  Then as now, humanitarianism could impel imperialism, as military intervention might be the only plausible way to stop horrors.  Then as now, the sovereign debt of an under-developed country was a major issue.  The fictional sovereignty of Egypt after 1882, in which the khedive, a nominal vassal of the Ottoman sultan, became a pawn of Anglo-French and then of British interests as a result of a debt default, is reminiscent of modern episodes in which the World Bank, the IMF, or other international agencies take charge of the policy of a country-- though never, I think, to quite the extent that Victorian Britain controlled Egypt.

One thing that is totally different, though, is that the Victorians seemed to see war as glorious and enjoy it.  The British public seems to have been enthusiastic for imperialism, and young men flocked to join the expedition of Kitchener, with Churchill's mother using all her social ties to get him a place in it.  Journalists and memoirists milked the imperial campaigns for bestsellers.  A certain attitude to war has, I think, been lost forever.  American elites today largely shun the military, while the public respects soldiers but regards them, if anything, as victims.  I think this is a response to World War I, which robbed war of its romance, for better or worse. 

There are important ways in which we definitely ought not to be like the Victorians.  In particular, they seem weirdly indifferent to the need to define states and political institutions in a manner that allows for liberty and self-government for the various peoples (e.g., Egyptian, Sudanese) whose destinies they came to dominate.  But I don't know that it would be a bad thing if American, Western European, and Japanese elites had a little more courage and love of adventure, and perhaps even of glory, provided it were mingled with a desire to help less fortunate peoples.

Public esteem for economists really ought to fall when they read this from Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman:

When it comes to domestic policy, there are two Barack Obamas.

On one side there’s Barack the Policy Wonk, whose command of the issues — and ability to explain those issues in plain English — is a joy to behold.

But on the other side there’s Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak.

Both Baracks were on display in the president’s press conference earlier this week. First, Mr. Obama offered a crystal-clear explanation of the case for health care reform, and especially of the case for a public option competing with private insurers. “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal,” he asked, “then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.”

OBVIOUSLY, the reason a "public option" might drive private insurers out of business is not because of its superior efficiency, but because a government-run health care system would get taxpayer subsidies. If it didn't, it's not even clear in what sense it could be a "public option." This is perfectly consistent with "the government not being able to run anything [well]." An incompetent health care program funded by other people's money might be preferable to a high-quality program you have to pay for yourself.

It's one thing for Barack Obama to make this mistake. Politicians are not known either for their ability to grasp economic principles or for their willingness to honestly articulate even what little they do understand. But for Krugman to give this elementary fallacy as an example of how "Obama's command of policy issues - and ability to explain those issues in plain English - is a joy to behold."

If you're an average college-educated reader and you think you see what's wrong with Krugman/Obama's argument, but you doubt whether you're competent to second-guess a Nobelist in economics... well, don't worry, in this case, you are. (Or maybe you should worry.)

I recently requested a credit report just to see if I've succeeded in keeping track of all my various bills and debts. I really wanted to know, and would have done so earlier, but I have heard that it actually hurts your credit score to request a report. This seems perverse-- shouldn't we want to encourage people to keep looking at their credit reports, so that they can plan their futures better, and recognize problems of personal financial irresponsibility early so they can try to mend their ways?

It might make sense, however, if a person asking for his credit report is a statistical predictor of credit problems, even if it's also a remedy for credit problems. That is, suppose there are two kinds of people, those who always pay their debts immediately, and those who are more forgetful and hand-to-mouth and sometimes leave bills and debts unpaid. The former never bother to think about their credit, knowing it's good, while the latter will sometimes check credit reports, either when they're planning to go into some more debt, or else in sporadic efforts at self-reform that sometimes help but rarely convert the shiftless entirely to responsibility. In that case, requesting a report may be an indicator of a higher likelihood of credit problems, before any other signs of these show up in the data.

So here's my question.  Suppose a law were passed which prohibits credit scoring agencies from penalizing a person's credit for requesting a report.  Would this law be inefficient?  On the one hand, the information effect of it would be negative: some creditworthy people would be pooled with some less-creditworthy people; there would be more non-payment of bills, and some good loan contracts would fail to be arranged because banks would be deprived of the positive credit information "this person never checks his credit score."  On the other hand, the incentive effect might be positive: people would check their credit reports more frequently, and would recognize their own financial irresponsibility more easily.

Hmm.  How would you model this?

Tax Employer Health Care Benefits!

"Barack Obama is a Big Fat Liar" (NRO):

Ever since Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president, it’s been easy — and great fun — to spotlight when his promises and statements come with “expiration dates.” The list is long: Public financing. Renegotiating NAFTA. His promise to support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. His inability to disown Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The release of detainee photos. Denouncing Turkey for genocide.

Flip-flops are nothing new in politics, but every once in a while, a president breaks a promise or an important pledge on such an epic level that it defines him, at least in part: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” “We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages — nor will we.” Even “I will never lie to you.”

Barack Obama’s sudden about-face on taxing employer-provided health insurance deserves to rank among these classics. Not because it’s as laughable as Bill Clinton’s, or as emphatic as George H. W. Bush’s, but because it takes a certain moral venality to casually adopt, as president, a position that was a dominant theme of your argument for why your opponent should not be president.

Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign spent $44 million on 16 different television ads hammering John McCain on this idea, according to research by Evan L. Tracey, founder and president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, a TNS Media Intelligence company.

“This message was a central theme and a significant percentage of the Obama campaign’s advertising in 2008,” Tracey said. His organization estimated last November that Obama’s campaign spent $250 million on television advertising, meaning that about 17 percent of all of Obama’s ads were denouncing McCain for this proposal.

Hey, I'm not complaining! The more McCain policies Obama picks up, the better. If Obama morphed into McCain on spending and deficit reduction, we might even get back to full employment and growth. Taxing employer health benefits, an attack on the third-party payer arrangements which are at the root of all the problems of American health care, would be an especially good McCain policy to adopt.