More on Central Asia ... Earlier this month, I posted a speculative piece about how the U.S. would respond to the calls by a central Asian bloc -- specifically, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose membership also includes Russia and China -- that the Pentagon set a definite timetable for American withdrawal from air bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

So when Rumsfeld visited the base in Kyrgyzstan last week -- and essentially made an all-out effort to secure its use indefinitely -- I started to write a follow-up piece. But I scrapped it. Try as I might, I couldn't really figure out what was going on -- a personal visit by the Secretary of Defense seemed like a bit of an overreaction for a base that, on its own, is not vital.

Today, however, Rumsfeld's trip makes a lot more sense. Late Friday night, the U.S. covertly airlifted about 450 Uzbeki refugees, who had fled Uzbekistan following the Andijon massacre in May, to Romania. When Uzbekistan found out about the airlift yesterday, they were, predictably, displeased -- so much so that they evicted the U.S. from its base.

This sequence of events doesn't just suggest that Rumsfeld was aware of both the impending airlift and what the Uzbeki response would be. It suggests that the airlift wouldn't have happened had we not secured use of the Kyrgyz base first, and thereby made the base in Uzbekistan expendable.

Now, I don't know whether Rumsfeld was acting on his own here or in accordance with a Bush -- or perhaps Rice? -- mandate. But whoever is responsible for the airlift ought to get due credit. This is one of the few times during Bush's presidency that his administration has compromised a strategic military asset for explicitly humanitarian reasons. For that they should receive appropriate recognition, if not outright praise.

Politics and entertainment ... I'm not sure how to link to this, but one of the main advertisers for TPMCafe right now is Variety.com, the website for Hollywood's most influential trade newspaper.

All pros and cons aside, the fact that Variety now views an expressly political audience as a potential market surely says as much about the present correspondence between political marketing and celebrity management as any Frank Rich column ever could.

Executing Minors ... As yesterday's post should make clear, I'm generally too suspicious of absolute convictions to adopt beliefs which are at all immoderate or extremist.

When it comes to capital punishment, however, that truism no longer holds. I do not understand, in any way, how a society that expressly grants its citizens individual rights (all in the name of governmental fallibility, mind you) could nonetheless reserve for the government the right to terminate its citizens' lives.

So when it comes to capital punishment as applied to minors, let's just say there isn't a single issue less amenable to my own temperament or point of view.

Which brings me, however belatedly, to today's Times article on HRW's denouncement of two recent executions in Iran:

TEHRAN, July 28 - Human rights advocates have condemned the execution last week of two young men convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy, calling it a violation of international law.

Mahmoud Asgari, left, and Ayaz Marhoni were prepared for execution on July 19 in Mashad after being convicted of sexually assaulting a boy.

The ages of the two men were not announced by Iranian officials at the time of the execution, which took place on July 19 in Mashad in northeast Iran. But Human Rights Watch said they were 18 and 19, and the younger man was a juvenile when the assault took place.

"Death is an inhumane punishment, particularly for someone under 18 at the time of his crimes," Hadi Ghaemi, an Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement issued Wednesday. "All but a handful of countries forbid such executions. Iran should as well."

What's missing here is the context. Typically the Times will, in reporting on a declaration by one particular organization, provide a history of past instances in which the organization has made similar declarations. But here they refrain -- ie, there's no mention of the fact that HRW has also denounced the U.S. for being among the "handful of countries" in question.

I'm aware that this is something of a trivial point to be making, especially in comparison to the awfulness of the executions themselves. And I can also appreciate that the Times adjusted its editorial process in order to abstain from moral equivocation. But it still troubles me that the periphery of this story is deliberately missing.

If you need a reminder of why it shouldn't be, just look at the picture above. Does the nationality of the two children at all change the morality of what is about to happen?

Ich bin einer Berliner ... In preparation for a piece I'll be putting up on the Huffington Post soon, I've been re-reading some Isaiah Berlin. In the process, I came across a passage that articulates well the sum of my own political thought:

...Sometimes a demand turns into its opposite: claims to participatory democracy turn into oppression of minorities, measures to establish social equality crush self-determination and stifle individual genius. Side by with these collisions of values there persists an age-old dream: there is, there must be -- and it can be found -- the final solution to all human ills; it can be achieved; by revolution or peaceful means it will surely come; and then all, or the vast majority, of men will be virtuous and happy, wise and good and free; if such a position can be attained, and once attained will last forever, what sane man could wish to return to the miseries of men's wanderings in the desert? If this is possible, then surely no price is too heavy to pay for it; no amount of oppression, cruelty, repression, coercion will be too high, if this, and this alone, is the price for ultimate salvation of all men? This conviction gives a wide license to inflict suffering on other men, provided it is done for pure, disinterested motives. But if one believes this doctrine to be an illusion, if only because some ultimate values may be incompatible with one another, and the very notion of an ideal world in which they are reconciled to be a conceptual (and not merely practical) impossibility, then, perhaps, the best that one can do is to try to promote some kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable, between the different aspirations of differing groups of human beings -- at the very least to prevent them from attempting to exterminate each other, and, so far as possible, to prevent them from hurting each other -- and to promote the maximum practicable degree of sympathy and understanding, never likely to be complete, between them. But this is not, prima facie, a wildly exciting programme: a liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats. Yet if it were adopted, it might yet prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world. Immanuel Kant, a man very remote from irrationalism, once observed that 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.' And for that reason no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

Now, there's a ton I have to say about this passage -- and hopefully at some point soon I'll be able to air most of those thoughts.

But for the moment my main question is this: is the position that Berlin espouses here necessarily an a posteriori one? -- ie, can you rely upon rational discourse alone to arrive at the conclusions he draws, or do you first have to experience, directly or indirectly, the catastrophic suffering to which 'final solutions' inevitably lead?

Berlin struggles to assert that we can reason our way to his conclusions, but frankly, in this one regard I don't find him convincing. For instance, I have a hard time believing Berlin himself could have written that passage had he not witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution as a child or, in his early 30s, lived through the second World War. Even more, I know I would not agree with his position had I not lived in South Africa for a year soon after apartheid, or even in Austria -- with its dim, if resonant, echo of the Holocaust -- this past year.

Meanwhile, the reason I place so much emphasis on the question of historical experience has to do with the nature of American politics. In a country like ours, where our wars are typically fought abroad and the most afflictive consequences of our policies are rarely felt by Americans themselves, do Berlin's conclusions ever stand a chance of significantly informing American political life?

Responses to terrorism ... After the second wave of bombings in London, a friend of mine there asked how I thought we should be responding to terrorism.

It's taken a few days, but here are my thoughts so far. (The first two are fairly obvious, the latter two perhaps less so.)

1. Distinguish between arbitrary and deliberate targets. The World Trade Center or Pentagon are deliberate targets. The #30 bus is not. Nor is anything in Cody, Wyoming. As a result, fortify strategic locations, but don't waste resources on buses, trains, or minor urban areas. The local county sheriff does not need any cool new toys to defend himself against Osama bin Laden.

2. Distinguish between arbitrary and deliberate means. Knapsacks and briefcases are an arbitrary means. Planes are deliberate. Consequently, pass legislation to make it harder for terrorists to gain control of an aircraft, but do not mandate random searches of backpacks. The latter will no doubt lead the police to more dime bags and illicit ritalin, but it will not produce any explosives.

3. Recognize and address our (neuro-)psychology, not theirs. Here's what happens when you open your eyes: First, the visual data of everything you see is scanned through any number of visual centers in your brain. Second, once one of those visual centers recognizes a specific shape, pattern, or image, that image then gets scanned through an emotional center, which matches it with the appropriate instinctive response. (This is why children smile upon seeing their mother, but flinch upon seeing a snake.) Third, if the emotive response is strong enough (but not so strong it dominates our response) we deliberate the image consciously. So the trouble with terrorism is the way it cuts straight to the second step of that process. When the only images of Muslim men that we see are violent ones, we become wired to treat Muslim men either defensively or aggressively. Since this is not a deliberative response, it's incredibly difficult to address. But it's not impossible: the more Muslims we encounter peacefully, both in person or on television, the weaker that instinctive response of fear will become.

4. Have perspective. As counter-intuitive as this may seem, terrorism is not an issue of state security or ideology. Muslim terrorists in particular are not trying to win territorial sovereignty over the states they attack. Nor are they trying to persuade them to adopt their own model of social organization. What they are trying to do is influence the foreign policy of those states. Consequently, terrorism as a threat differs greatly from our past struggles against fascism and communism, each of which sought to extend its sovereignty and its ideology over foreign countries. However we respond to terrorism, we should always bear in mind, then, that this is a fight over the margins of our civilization rather than its core.

Big Pharma and the Chocolate Factory ... For twenty years now, my family has doubted me, my friends have doubted me, the whole world has conspired against me. 'Chris,' they would say, 'you're crazy. Your sweet tooth has gone to your brain. Chocolate may be tastey, but it's certainly not good for you!' 'Au contraire,' I would reply, and then, for utter lack of empirical evidence, mutter something unintelligible before popping back a few more M&Ms.

Now, however, I have, at long last, finally been vindicated:

Mars Inc. said yesterday it is holding "serious discussions with large pharmaceutical companies" about the development of a line of cocoa-based prescription drugs that could help treat diabetes, some forms of dementia and other ailments.

The McLean candy and food conglomerate for more than a decade has pursued research on the possible health benefits of cocoa flavanols, compounds contained in one of the basic ingredients of chocolate.

As about 20 Mars-funded researchers gathered in Lucerne, Switzerland, to discuss their latest findings, the company announced that it foresees a possible line of pharmaceuticals growing out of the work and that it was being pursued by drug companies interested in the medical applications of cocoa.

Many thanks to reader SM for the tip to this. I've long dreamed this day would come, but never thought it would actually happen.

Paging Dr. Strangelove ... Over at Defense Tech, Jeffrey Lewis has a wonderfully digressive post that starts with Cheney's request that the Pentagon draw up plans to attack Iran and ends with a discussion of how "organizations abstract reality in order to manage it" -- in this case, the reality in question being the statistical failure rates of nuclear warheads.

The redundancy that those rates lead to is shocking. For instance, when General Lee Butler did a review of SIOP in the early 1990s, he found that "one [target] was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons." Why 69? Because for an underground bunker, a warhead has a kill probability of only 4%. Consequently, for the kill probability on the target itself to be 94%, you had to nuke it 69 times.

Hopefully whatever plans the Pentagon has drawn up for Iran will not incorporate that level of redundancy. But I doubt it: we may have more efficient weapons now for targeting bunkers, but there are also many more bunkers in Iran, some of which lie near densely populated areas like Tehran.

Suffice it to say, then, that if Iran really does sponsor a terrorist attack against us, and if we really do strike its bunkers in response with nuclear weapons, we will have forfeited whatever moral authority we had to the dry and altogether base precision of statistical certainty.

Objectification internalized ... In general I'm very much a feminist. Women should be no less free to vote, work, marry, etc than men are. Further, these freedoms shouldn't be negative liberties: in areas where women continue to face cultural barriers, such as science or politics, we should be actively fostering their involvement. (Likewise, we should also be fostering male involvement in industries such as nursing and child care.)

That said, I still struggle with the notion that the "objectification" of women is somehow the result of a "dominant patriarchy." Men certainly indulge a few too many admiring glances, let alone lurid glares. But to an extraordinary degree women also objectivize themselves. As Mahalanobis notes, look at a rack of recent magazines, and you can no longer hold men alone accountable:

What I always find striking is that men's magazines tend to have covers with pictures of male athletes, or the new Dell servers, or beautiful women, while women's magazines tend to have covers with ... beautiful women. So I don't think it's a male conspiracy. Beauty and money are useful in obtaining the respect and admiration of others, especially the opposite sex (the latter more for men, the former more for women). We do not have as much control over these attributes as we would like, but that's life. I'm not sure the unfairness of life for plain looking women is any worse than for earnest young men who can't dance and drive used Ford Tauruses.

So why do women purchase magazines filled with beautiful women?

The academic answer is that the "patriarchy" has now become so dominant that women themselves have internalized its principle behavior. Perhaps that's true to an extent, but my guess is that the truer answer lies either in evolutionary biology or neuroscience. Call it the "one part culture, two parts wiring" theory: women see a beautiful woman and objectivize her for much the same reason regular guys see an alpha male and cower -- because they're programmed to.

Reporters and politicos ... For those of you who look at the Rove leak and see only the latest sign of journalistic decay, click here to see why you're largely off on this one.

Journalism is much more transparent today than it used to be; that it appears less so is an ironic indication of just how far it has come.

Supremely judicious ... I've been away all day at a conference held by Americans for Informed Democracy. Rather than assess the conference now, though, I feel like it might be wiser to let the memories settle and then offer some reflections in a day or two.

In the meantime, it just occurred to me that I haven't mentioned anything about the Roberts nomination.

Frankly, I don't have much to say except this: Roberts is probably the best political decision Bush has made all year. He hasn't publicly defended torture. He hasn't fulminated against the very existence of the U.N. He hasn't threatened Social Security or compromised the intelligence community. In fact, Roberts is -- much to the contrary -- about as squeaky clean as it gets.

So my hat's off to Bush on this one. He's found that rarest of commodities: a Washington insider with uncompromised integrity.

Senator Reid et al would be wise to continue hanging back.

China unpegs the yuan ... The big economic news of the day: China, which has long pegged the yuan to the dollar, just floated the yuan against a range of currencies.

The yuan is still strictly controlled -- officials let it rise only 2% against the dollar -- but it's a significant move all the same. Among the possible repercussions:

• Long-term interest rates in the US could eventually rise since China is a major buyer of US Treasury securities. In the future, Beijing may not be buying as much US debt. This could increase the interest rates Americans pay for mortgages and slow down the US housing market.

• The US inflation rate might tick up if Chinese goods become more expensive. ...

• The rise in the value of the Chinese yuan as well as increases in other Asian currencies will give consumers in those countries more buying power. This could potentially mean more jobs for Americans if the US exports more goods.

I've gone into this quite extensively in the past, so I'll just reiterate my own take here: a rise in the yuan means the U.S. has to get serious about the fact that foreign credit has underwritten our current way of life.

Cheap mortgages and easy credit come with a cost. Unless we are honest with ourselves about the nature and consequences of that cost, foreign currency revaluations and fairer trade practices will never be enough.

The radical dream lives on ... Kevin Drum is taking a well-deserved break over at the Washington Monthly, but unfortunately he's left Lindsay Beyerstein in his place.

I say unfortunately because Beyerstein is the kind of radical academic that I don't have much patience for: brilliant but rarely practical, critical but never constructive.

To illustrate this, visit The unCapitalist Journal, a new site that Beyerstein spent a whole post shilling today. Beyerstein is a "team member" of the "uCJ", whose about page consists of the following:

About The UnCapitalist Journal

Cap•i•tal•ist 1. n. a supporter of capitalism || an investor of capital in business || a person of great wealth 2. adj. of or relating to capitalism || defending or engaging in capitalism

Un•Cap•i•tal•ist1. n. one who is suspicious of capitalism || one who critiques the excesses of capitalism and its forms of production || a person concerned about the subjugation of labor or other aspects of society by private capital or wealth 2. adj. of or relating to alternatives to unrestrained capitalism || critical or skeptical of capitalism

Now, I suppose I may be considered uncapitalist to the extent a) that I have my own reservations about unrestrained capitalism, and b) that I do not view capitalism as a utopic force.

But that is a far cry, I think, from what the uCJ folks are proposing. Although they take pains not to attack capitalism in general, that is exactly what they're doing: in arguing against both the organizational principles according to which capitalism operates and the understanding of human nature on which it rests, they are going after capitalism wholesale. And the trouble is, they have nothing to offer in its place: no effective social model of their own, no understanding of human nature that is reconciliable with reality.

Again, I have little to no patience for this kind of radical critique. For one, it provides ample fodder for radical conservative movements. For another, it implicates moderate liberals like myself as somehow ascribing to their viewpoint. Most of all, though, it neglects the fact that as imperfect as capitalism is, it is also -- after more than five millenia of human history -- the best we've come up with. If Beyerstein and her uCJ friends would dispute that, I suggest they dig into some historical monographs, starting with one on the century that just past.

Update: In general I try to refrain from invective, so in critiquing Beyerstein I hope I haven't crossed the line between criticism and vitriol. To the extent that I have, my apologies.

Superpower light ... Following Bush's recent recommendation that India, as a "responsible" nuclear country, should be able to buy nuclear fuel and parts for its reactors, Anand Giridharadas had this to say in the IHT:

Regardless of how soon uranium will flow to this fast-growing country of one billion, [Indian Prime Minister] Singh's visit [to Washington] may signify America's welcoming of a new type of superpower: militarily potent, economically dynamic, regionally assertive, independently minded, but still nonthreatening to the United States. Call it superpower light.

There's a lot you can read into this, but my own take is that this has as much to do with Iran and China as it does India. If you look at Bush's stance towards the few nuclear countries that have not ratified the major non-proliferation treaties, offering nuclear resources in exchange for open inspections is an extremely rare step; isolation tends to be their standard modus operandi.

The immediate reason they're making an exception here most likely has to do with Iran. For one, increasing India's nuclear energy would alleviate its economic dependence on Iranian oil and presumably diminish Iranian revenues. For another, the inspections we'd get in return would deter the kind of overt oil-for-reactors trade that has recently sprung up between Iran and Russia.

But by far the more pressing concern is China. In compromising with India on nuclear reactors -- and thus promoting the country as a "superpower light" -- Bush is acknowledging the fact that we now need India as much as they need us. Because we can no longer rely on the shared interests of South Korea, Japan, and Australia alone to act as a regional counterweight to China's power -- together they lack the demographic, if not economic strength -- we need India to be on the same page. Only if India perceives itself as sharing interests with those countries will the bloc have the collective resources necessary to contain China indefinitely over the coming decades.

I don't know if it's Rice or Rumsfeld or whoever, but someone in the Bush administration seems to be acutely aware of this. If not, I can't think of why else Bush would have caved on an issue he's been so loathe to compromise on in the past.

Update: Just came across the print version of today's Times. On page three there are two half-page stories: the top one is headlined "China Is Focusing on a Modern Military, Report Says"; the bottom is titled "U.S. Allies and Congress 'Positive' About India Nuclear Deal". One of life's minor coincidences, I guess.

... Also, check out Thomas Friedman's column today on U.S.-China relations. I'm not usually that impressed with his stuff, but this one is great.

Heroism in Iraq ... Via Andrew Sullivan, the Army Times had a great story a few days back on Pfc Stephen Tschiderer.

The short version: on June 2 Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by a sniper while patroling Baghdad. Presumably Tschiderer was wearing a vest, because he then "popped right back up, took cover and located the enemy’s position." Once the sniper had been secured, Tschiderer then treated the sniper's own wounds.

Clearly, Tschiderer's actions here stand on their own regardless of context. At a minimum, he acted in a remarkably professional manner; at most, his actions were merciful and heroic.

That said, I also can't help noticing the way context informs our understanding of what heroism is. For instance, in the second world war, when our enemy was just as capable as we were -- and when the outcome was very much in doubt -- our celebrations of heroism often involved surpassing bravery or lethality. Watch any of the specials on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, or Iwo Jima, and you'll see what I mean. Yet in Iraq, where we are clearly stronger than our enemy, the heroism we celebrate often centers -- as with Tschiderer -- on magnanimity.

I don't say that to implicate one of the two as being better than the other. I just find it a curious difference worth pointing out.

Depressive Economics ... After spending much of the past year in central Europe, one of the things that's surprised me upon returning home is how similar the economic pessimism here is to that of the euro zone, despite a significant disparity in both growth (roughly 3.5% to .5%) and unemployment (roughly 5% to 10%). Given the comparative health of our economy, it's hard to imagine what the mood would be if we were ever mired in a recession comparable to the one Germany is enduring now.

Yet the scary thing about our trade deficit today is that it makes us increasingly vulnerable to just such a recession. The Times op-ed page is currently running two columns to that effect. The more substantial of the two, by William Greider, is probably the best piece I've read to date on America's precarious role in the new globalized economy. The second, by Paul Krugman, conveys his typical exasperation with more mainstream economic forecasters. But it also contains a jarring coda:

...it's hard to see where further expansion will come from. We've already had four years of extremely loose fiscal and monetary policy. Tax cuts have pushed the federal budget deep into the red. Low interest rates have helped generate a housing bubble that has lifted real estate prices to ludicrous heights in major parts of the country.

If all that wasn't enough to give us a full economic recovery, what will?

The key point here is not that America's foreign debt and high trade deficits are necessarily a prelude to disaster. There is a scenario in which the "managed interests" Greider references will lead to continued global growth and development, concurrent with a gradual decrease in American debt.

Rather, the key point is that there's no longer any margin for error. All it would now take to spark an American recession is an unexpected shock in the global oil supply or a rash monetary decision on China's part. If either of those or any number of other plausible scenarios occur, then there's nothing else the Bush administration could do to stimulate the economy upwards.

Crucially, this does not mean that we should join with central Europe in bemoaning our fate -- I'd much rather have our structural problems than theirs. But it does mean that if we're not duly cautious -- and worse, possibly even if we are -- we may have reason to join them soon.

Good history ... A while back David Greenberg had a column in Slate on academic versus popular history. His point was that the two needn't be antagonistic, and the main work with which he illustrated this was Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

To that point Wood was someone I'd long heard about but never encountered directly (except of course for the brief passage Matt Damon recites in Good Will Hunting). So with Greenberg's praise in mind I figured I'd finally give him a go.

Now that I've finished Radicalism, I have to say that Wood certainly doesn't disappoint. He may be too exhaustive at points, but other than that the book is remarkable for how coherent and accessible it remains even as it makes its most abstruse arguments. Further, it also expands the idea of history itself: although Wood relies upon a preponderance of factual evidence, he goes well beyond providing a factual record to create a kind of ethnography of late colonial and post-Independence Americans. In that sense, Wood owes as much to the sociology of Hannah Arendt as he does to the primary documents of the time.

So for the history fans among you, if you're bothered by the topical surfeits of popular histories like 1776, be sure to check out Radicalism if you haven't already. As I mentioned, it won't disappoint.

Wedding Crashers ... Just saw it tonight with my sis. The title pretty much sums it up, so I won't spoil the movie with a review.

But I will say this: I pretty much didn't stop laughing from the opening credits on. Definitely check it out if you get the chance.

Foreign jihadists ... Anyone who has even remotely followed the Iraqi insurgency is aware that it contains a small but significant foreign constituency.

Perhaps I've been out of touch, but I never realized just how significant it was until I came across this report today:

The suicide bombings brought out another point about the evolving insurgency: that foreign infiltrators are thought to be inflicting a high proportion of the casualties.

American military intelligence estimates of the number of insurgents have varied widely in the course of the war, but most put the total at no more than 20,000, of which foreign Arabs - including Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, Sudanese and Syrians - are a tiny minority. But American commanders say they know of no instance in the past year in which a suicide bomber has been an Iraqi, although they acknowledge that the evidence they have for this, given the fact that most of the bombers are obliterated by the blasts, is sketchy.

To my mind that is astonishing. We do not know of a single Iraqi suicide bomber. And while the evidence is indeed difficult to come by, we need only look at Hamas or Hezbollah to realize that physical evidence wouldn't be needed. The appeal of suicide bombing rests in large part on the honor you receive for it from within your community, so if Iraqis themselves were committing these bombings then presumably we would be hearing about it from the communities themselves.

So the main difference between Iraqi and foreign insurgents is that the Iraqis apparently want to survive long enough to view their triumph. They want to fight but also to live. And that is encouraging: they're fighting with a political agenda in mind, and as such are an enemy that can be engaged.

Not so, however, for the foreign jihadists. They are fighting -- and in many cases, deliberately dying -- not for a political ideal but against what they perceive as an assault on Sunni Islam. A large part of that perception, clearly, derives from the American invasion and occupation. However -- and this is a key point -- an American withdrawal is not their primary goal. If every American troop left tomorrow, they'd still keep coming, because they would still view Iraqi Sunnis as a persecuted constituency.

So the main focus on our part should be getting the Sunnis better representation and political influence in the Iraqi congress. If that happens -- and if Sunnis are no longer seen as the shameful losers of this whole affair -- then and only then will the wind start to be taken out of the foreign insurgents' sails.

A few will still keep coming, on the idea that any compromise constitutes a loss of honor. But in general it will be viewed as far less acceptable to sacrifice other Muslims to the cause.

Focused within ... John Vinocur has yet another great column on France this week. I won't give it away in full, but it's essentially about how myopic and out of touch Chirac and his leadership are.

For now, though, what interests me is this paragraph:

The issue is not the people, at home in a country that truly remains exceptional in its beauty, style and ingenuity. Rather, the issue is large parts of a leadership caste, so tuned only to itself, so played out, so fearful of saying we've got to change our act, that it approaches autism.

Now, to be sure, France and the U.S. are two vastly different beasts. But when you read this White House briefing with Scott McClellan or this story on our Secretary of State's response to South Korea's surprise energy offer, you can't help but wondering which country Vinocur is describing.

Unlike France, America's political insularity may be oriented towards the future rather than the past, and it may draw its authority from the greatness of our economy rather than our culture. But it is nonetheless insular. And at moments of global conservatism such as this --and especially for a country with as much global influence as ours -- such a circumscribed focus is regrettable at best and dangerous at worst.

Capital punishment ... Bob Herbert has a column today on Larry Griffin, who was convicted and executed for a murder we now know he almost certainly didn't commit.

Herbert didn't address this, but Griffin's case highlights an important question: what is the number at which the amount of innocent convicts who have been executed is no longer acceptable?

I ask the question not to those like myself, who oppose the death penalty on moral grounds. Nor do I ask it to those whose favor the death penalty insofar as it constitutes retributive justice.

Rather, I intend the question for those who support capital punishment for pragmatic reasons -- ie, the economists and social scientists who follow Isaah Ehrlich to argue that every number of executions x deters x + n number of homicides.

It is to Ehrlich's disciples that I address my question because it is only they who are bound to answer it. For once there is evidence that innocent convicts have been executed, they must redo the math: what is the ratio of innocent to guilty executions at which capital punishment no longer serves as a deterrant? Or, put differently, how exactly do you include the execution of innocent convicts as a variable within the the penal calculus that determines the efficacy of capital punishment overall?

As base or contemptible as the question may seem, it's one that pragmatic proponents of capital punishment need to answer. If they're willing to do the grisly math necessary to determine its "value," they must also do it when an execution vitiates their claim.

Foreign military aid ... When it comes to foreign affairs, there's no more difficult question to answer than whether it is better to grant military aid to non-democratic regimes in the hope that such aid will promote reform or refrain from such aid in the fear that it will be used illicitly.

I used to think that we should always refrain. After all, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden each received arms from the U.S. Further, you can trace the largest and most destructive conflict of the last decade -- the war in Congo, which has claimed around 2 million lives -- to militias funded by the American military.

In the past year or two though, I've started to come around on this issue. In no circumstance should we be granting aid carte blanche to whoever seeks it. But the question should be framed, I believe, with a regime's regional context in mind.

Just look at Uzbekistan. As the Times noted in a great piece on today, on the one hand U.S. mililtary training and aid did help secure a peaceful revolution in nearby Georgia. Even more, the U.S. would be wise to counter regional pressure being exerted on the country by both Russia and China. However, the Uzbeki government isn't exactly deserving of our assistance: it recently authorized its troops to open fire on -- and indeed massacre -- anti-government protestors.

My own guess is that Uzbekistan may be a battle we have already lost. In the next year or two, they'll likely begin insisting that we close our base there. And since we won't have the resources to counter Russian and Chinese pressure, we'll likely yield.

But the ethical complexity of dealing with the Uzbeki regime underscores the need, in my view, for a foreign policy based on what might be termed negative exceptionalism: the belief that America ought to extend its influence not because it is morally right, but because not doing so would be morally wrong.

Or as Michael Ignatieff wrote recently, if you think the American military is contemptible, just imagine what the world would be like without it.

Man on the moon ... God knows I love a good conspiracy theory. JFK? A total mob hit. Aliens in the desert? Duh, of course they landed there.

NASA, however, doesn't seem to think they're all that amusing. From DefenseTech:

If you believe they put a man on the Moon . . .

. . . or even (especially?) if you don't, this one's for you.

In 2008, NASA says it will send a "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter" into low orbit around the Moon. While it's primary mission will be to scout for the next manned lunar mission (ostensibly planned for around 2020), it also will do something to defeat those wacky conspiracy theories about how and why the United Stats allegedly faked its Moon missions.

It's going to photograph what astronauts left on the Moon, "providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972," NASA says.

There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon's surface, but even the Hubble telescope can't photograph them.

Apparently, NASA says, the fact that they haven't been photographed since the Nixon administration adds fuel to the conspiracy theory fires.

Good lord. I guess I can see where NASA is coming from -- if you spent your life working on this stuff, all the conspiracy theories probably would get under your skin.

But still. So long as the proof is coming from NASA, can't it just be discredited with the same arguments that the landings themselves were?

And besides, isn't it kind of fun having the conspiracy theorists around? Doesn't the lunacy of their arguments just belie what an extraordinary accomplishment the landings were?

So I'm with the conspiracy guys on this one ... I mean, if NASA is trying to disprove the conspiracy, then it clearly takes the conspiracy claims seriously ... which means maybe it has something to hide ...

Srebrenica victims interred ... Once you visit a recent genocide site, you never really view the world the same way again. Absolute convictions seem either quaint or suspicious; morality seems delicately human; life becomes at once far cheaper and much more precious.

And, too, you can't help but emphasize with the places you have not been, the sites you have not seen. I may have visited several locations in Rwanda, but I feel no less concerned with places like the one in Srebrenica pictured at the right.

Just look at the three figures in the foreground: is the woman shoveling a grieved mother, a widow, or both? Is the child staring at her hands -- who is too young to have known whoever she is there to help bury -- a belated sister, or perhaps even daughter? Is the woman clenching her fist against her pate exhausted from digging or overwhelmed by anguish?

Whatever the specific contexts and exigencies of genocide, these are the questions that they inevitably give rise to.

With the situation in Darfur still unresolved and Iraq (especially with a U.S. withdrawal) threatening to implode, hopefully the agony underlying them will provide sufficient impetus for us to do all we can to ensure that they'll never be asked again.

Chinese censorship ... A friend of mine is currently in China. The following is the bulk of an email she sent out:

Was watching CNN on the treadmill today and during a "CNN Celebrates it's 25th anniversary" commercial, important scenes in recent world history were shown (in clips). Naturally, Tiananmen was included (the theme was "where were you when?") and as the commercial started to show the (in)famous tank stopped by the lone man in Tiananmen, the broadcast cut ENTIRELY to black and then came on like 10 seconds later. I literally laughed out loud.

The funny thing about this place is that on the surface there is this very open and dynamic commercial sector that is striving to place China on the world stage. And yet, to an obviously English-speaking and very specific/educated audience (eg. the people watching CNN in China which are only foreigners or those rich enough to afford satellite TV and/or visit a foreign hotel), they need to censor something that happened over 15 years ago. What, may I ask, are they
so afraid of?

The worst part of this is that after I asked permission to post the email, she asked me not to use her name for fear of being identified by Chinese immigration. I hadn't planned on doing so anyway -- unless specifically told otherwise I don't use anything other than initials -- but the fact that she took the threat of deportation sufficiently seriously is chilling.

The Globalist does it again ... For my money, Roger Cohen's "Globalist" column in the IHT is the best commentary out there today.

Here's his take on the social transformations at the heart of the global terror movement:

Behind the wars of the first half of the 20th century lay many factors, not least the instability engendered as European empires imploded and nation-states emerged. But perhaps the greatest catalyst was the social upheaval provoked by a rapid industrialization that redefined working conditions and politics in ways that proved uncontrollable. Communism and Fascism were two of the results.

An upheaval of similar scope is now under way. It is not entirely visible to us because we are part of it. But its outlines are clear enough.

This revolution is being driven by new technologies, usually identified with the United States, that are eliminating distance, destroying barriers, prizing open closed systems and rendering visible everything that was once remote or inaccessible. The unknown is merely mysterious, but what is seen may be envied or hated.

The great global opening and acceleration represented by American-driven information technologies and the Internet have created opportunities on a scale as great as the invention of electricity. But these irreversible developments have also stirred resentments that, in their most extreme form, ignite the extremism that kills.

...

Information and images are liberating. They are also destabilizing. We have embarked on a century that will make a diverse world more unified, prosperous and free than ever before. But the battles of that transformation have just begun.

To be sure, each instance of terrorism occurs within a specific context and derives in large measure from specific concerns. But what Cohen's column does is lay out, again, the social transformation that links those concerns in a generalized way.

God knows that this been done before, but it typically emphasizes religious fanaticism over the sociological effects of our recent technological and economic growth.

In my view, there hasn't been nearly enough commentary that comes at the issue the other way around. Thomas Friedman has often tried, but the vocabulary he employs is typically too redundant to be useful.

Yet until we learn to publicly address the sociological roots of that reality, we'll never come up with a strategy with which to avert the destruction that is bound to continue. You cannot speak to religious exremism, but as both Live 8 and the G-8 summit have demonstrated, you can speak to social change.

Judicial Nominations ... From the CSMonitor:

The ads are up, the grass-roots have been activated, and money is flooding pressure-group coffers. Talk radio and cable TV are alive with sound and fury at a turning point in American history.

In many ways, the battle over who will replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court has the look and feel of an election campaign - and, to further the analogy, right now it's the primaries. But there's a big difference: the audience. Ultimately, voters have no direct say in whom President Bush nominates or whether the Senate will confirm him or her.

Perhaps I'll change my mind when Bush actually does nominate someone. But for now it's hard for me to look at the activism on this as anything other than a marketing tool for Political Action Committees. What, exactly, is MoveOn or Focus on the Family or any other interested party going to do with the funds they raise for this? Blow it all on lobbyists who can target the fifteen moderate Senators who are actually going to matter?

For once, I think Bush is actually on the right track by telling everyone to calm down. This isn't a matter for us. We had a say last November and, prior to that, during the previous two senatorial elections. So feel free to write a letter to your Senator or call his office to let him know what you think. But that is all you can do. Get over it and move on. And where the PACs are concerned, have the integrity to raise funds only when you know you can put them to use.

The other final comment: this is not a problem of the left's creation. Seven of the nine justices, I believe, were appointed by Republican presidents. That is where the vast majority of the fury and activism is coming from -- the extraordinary frustration that comes with winning politically but still losing judicially. To the extent that this activism is an internecine dispute the left would be wise to steer clear of it.

London Terrorism ... Here's the close of an email I just received from London:

I will keep you posted if I hear anything more. Everyone is pretty shaken and unhappy, particularly about the timing. Yesterday there was so much excitement about the 2012 Olympics, and the effect that Live 8 might have on the G8 Summit.

love,
J

How poignant, and how awful.

Church and State ... A few years back, a friend asked me who the smartest person I'd ever met was. I paused for a minute and then blurted, "Noah Feldman."

Not surprisingly, my friend had no idea who he was. So I explained that Feldman graduated summa from Harvard, had a J.D. from Yale Law, had a doctorate from Oxford, had clerked on the Supreme Court, and, most impressively of all, had been a "Junior Fellow" at Harvard. (The Junior Fellow program is little known, but trust me when I say it's the most difficult position for a young scholar to get.) All of this, and Feldman was barely in his late twenties.

Since then identifying Feldman has become easier and easier. For one he's now a professor at NYU Law, and for another he's begun appearing on political talk shows.

Most recently, though, he authored the latest Times Magazine cover story, in which he modestly proposes "A Church-State Solution:"

Put simply, [my solution] is this: offer greater latitude for religious speech and symbols in public debate, but also impose a stricter ban on state financing of religious institutions and activities. This approach ... is drawn from the framers' vision and the historical experience of separating church and state in America. The framers might well have been mystified by courthouse statues depicting the Ten Commandments, but they would not have objected unless the monuments were built with public money. Having made a revolution over unfair taxation, they thought of government support in terms of dollars spent, not abstract symbols.

Clearly, there's a lot to unpack there. Feldman's proposal has direct implications for everything from school vouchers to congressional prayer. Meanwhile, there's probably not a single governmental function that it wouldn't indirectly effect.

Although Jack Balkin has criticized Feldman for not articulating those implications in full, I'm not convinced that, as Feldman himself put it in a response, a "full jurisprudence" is necessary.

The reason is that Feldman's solution isn't oriented towards the law so much as society. That is, he's not providing a new legal position on an old constitutional problem so much as attempting to persuade a democratic populus to resolve, politically, an intractable social dispute. And at the core of his attempt lies the novel suggestion that a) we consider the intersection of religion and government in terms of symbolic and monetary moments, and b) that we allow the former but not the latter.

Whether you agree with that secondary point, I think we'd do well to take his advice and look at the issue in terms of public funding and public expression. As Balkin notes the two can be blurred at times, but in general the two are vastly different beasts, and we should be discussing them as such.

______
Update: After a quick proofread I fear I may have lent the impression that I know Noah better than I do. When I was an undergrad and he was a Junior Fellow, we played basketball together on an intramural team. Aside from a brief discussion about an article he was writing then -- on Islamic law, I believe -- our conversations pretty much held to the sprightlier topics of jump shots and reverse dribbles.

London Olympics ... Chirac, it seems, just can't catch a break. The IOC announced this morning that following Beijing in 2008, London will host the summer Olympics in 2012.

So much for all the 'gagnons les jeux!' slogans around Paris. On the up side, at least effete Parisiens will no longer have to complain about the 'monstrous' neon lights that have been tacked up all over the city.

Backlash in Central Asia ... It's long been supposed that the Bush administration has viewed the war on terror as a fortuitous circumstance. If you go back and read the many position papers and speeches Bush's cabinet members gave before the fall of 2001, you get the sense that they wouldn't have minded much if the U.S. had a permanent military presence in Central Asia. Not only would such a presence have enabled us to keep an eye on Russia, but even more, it would have been a backdoor way to check the regional influence of China. (Remember the fuss about China in the spring of 2001?)

Small wonder, then, that when the war on terror began, the administration seized on the legitimate target of Afghanistan to open military installations in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Now, though, China and Russia have convinced the two countries to press back:

ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) -- An alliance of Russia, China and central Asian nations called for the U.S. and coalition members in Afghanistan to set a date for withdrawing from member states, reflecting growing unease over America's regional military presence.

...

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, at a summit in the Kazakh capital, said in a declaration that a withdrawal date should be set in light of what it said was a decline of active fighting in Afghanistan.

''We support and will support the international coalition which is carrying out an anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan, and we have taken note of the progress made in the effort to stabilize the situation,'' the declaration said.

''As the active military phase in the anti-terror operation in Afghanistan is nearing completion, the SCO would like the coalition's members to decide on the deadline for the use of the temporary infrastructure and for their military contingents' presence in those countries,'' the declaration continues.

It'll be interesting to see how the Bush administration handles this. My guess is that they will in fact cede the Uzbeki and Kyrgyzi bases, but that they'll take their sweet time doing so -- not because they don't respect the sovereignty of those countries, but because they don't want China and Russia to get the sense that it was their pressure that led us to leave.

On the other hand, knowing Bush he may well come out on the offensive. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have effectively come out and said that they don't think the U.S. will exert a regional influence over the long haul. It's hard to imagine Bush ever yielding to that kind of gambit, even though -- given how thinly stretched the Pentagon currently is -- he will pretty much have to.

Either way, like I said, it should be interesting to see how Bush reacts.

Whitman's Democratic Vista ... Outside of the occasional English professor, until quite recently few people probably realized that today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Since the book launched American literature, the anniversary more than merits the celebration it's receiving. As Verlyn Klinkenborg has noted, when it comes to Whitman's perception, "There is no catching up with him. He is always ahead of us."

So with public attention currently focused (however marginally) on Whitman's writing, I figure now's about as good a time as any to mention that the title of this site owes to Whitman's great essay on American culture, Democratic Vistas. The essay is all but impossible to summarize briefly, but suffice it to say that Vistas accomplishes in prose form all that Leaves of Grass achieves in its poetry: namely, it articulates with exuberant lucidity the countless triumphs and challenges and contradictions of American life.

I'm a little surprised -- and ashamed -- that I haven't gotten around to explaining 'Democratic Vista' until now, but there you have it.

Have a great Independence Day, everyone. And be sure to check out some Whitman, should you get the chance.

Photo credits and the Public Editor ... If you're looking for a particular instance of how the internet is changing the news media, you'd do well to consider today's column by Byron Calame, the public editor of the New York Times.

Calame's column has to do with a photograph that accompanied the June 12 "Interrogating Ourselves" cover story in the Times Magazine. Across from the title page of the article, Calame notes, the Magazine ran

a color photograph with a mid-torso view from the rear of a person with wrists handcuffed. Below the plastic handcuffs, a red stain ran down from one wrist across the soiled palm onto the fingers. The credit at the bottom of the facing page: "Photographs by Andres Serrano."

But there wasn't any explanation that the photograph had been staged. There was no caption. Four pages later, the same was true for the full-page staged photograph of water torture. The cover picture of a person with a sandbag hood also was identified only as a photograph by Mr. Serrano. [emphasis added]

When Calame aired his concern internally, the response, evidently, was that

top editors seem confident that readers can sort out - and allow for - differences in journalistic tone and practice from one section to another. Readers have long understood the difference between the news columns and the editorial pages, these editors reason, and the Magazine and Book Review are just other distinct parts of the package.

Yet on the website, the various sections within the Times are not separated with the same distinctiveness. Although rubrics like "Week in Review" or "Times Magazine" always appear above the online versions of articles, the placard is typically faded and, moreover, easy for the casual reader to either miss completely or dismiss as irrelevant. The result is that when photographs are published online without due specificity, the editors can no longer assume that the reader can distinguish staged photographs from real ones simply by which section they appear in.

What's so unique about Calame's column -- and the reason I bring it up -- is that his concern already seems to have prompted a reaction. This week the Magazine has credited its photographs in far more detail; it lists everyone from the photographers themselves to those responsible for "digital manipulation".

Would such a swift and noticeable response have occurred if the Magazine's editors were concerned only with its print version? I don't think so. If Calame hadn't alerted the editors to the perils of web publishing, there's no reason to believe that they wouldn't have relied, as before, on the tired assumption that "the reader" can understand the difference between what's staged and what's real, and that, therefore, no one will hold them accountable to make distinctions between depictions of natural and artificial reality.

In this instance, then, the unprecedented openness of the web has produced greater accountability, not less. And since the conventional wisdom holds that the opposite is true, this is no small accomplishment for Calame -- especially considering it's still his first month on the job.

Salutations & Gonzales ... As those of you who read this site regularly are aware, I spent the last few days at my brother's wedding. So let me start off with a hearty congrats to Jeremy and Kim, who ought to be enjoying the St. Lucia nightlife as we speak. (That said, if either of you are reading this, I take back everything I said about how wonderful your marriage is going to be.)

Further, I'd like to thank my friend Addison -- who was busy last week on an ACLU project -- for taking the time to post yesterday.

Now back to the world at-large. Clearly, the biggest news of late has been the surprise retirement of Justice O'Connor. I don't have much to say about her specifically, except to reiterate that her career was extraordinarily unique and that replacing her will prove all but impossible.

But the speculation about her successor brings me to the current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales.

For those still unfamiliar with him, Gonzales's career has been intertwined with Bush's ever since Bush was a Texas governor. Back then Gonzales was Bush's state attorney general. Thereafter, he was tapped to serve as lead council during Bush's first term and as Attorney General during Bush's second. Since the two have worked together so closely for so long, it's been widely supposed that Bush would nominate Gonzales for any Supreme Court vacancy.

The trouble is, as good a move as that would be in theory -- not only is Mr. Gonzales Hispanic, but his personal life is as impeccable as it is praiseworthy -- the political math simply doesn't add up.

I say that because for the Republican Party, the Supreme Court is of political importance for one clearly identifiable reason: abortion. Having a pro-life platform is the glue that weds the "guns" people with the "God" people. Gonzales, however, is far more a guns guy than a God one. Yet Democrats will oppose him no less vigorously than if Bush nominates an adamant pro-lifer: Gonzales wrote the famed White House memo that declared as "obsolete" the prohibition against torture within the Geneva conventions. Senate Democrats bruised him badly for this during his AG confirmation hearing, and there's no reason to suspect they wouldn't press just as hard during a Supreme Court confirmation.

So Gonzales has the same downside as a far right pro-lifer, but much less of the upside. Consequently his nomination just wouldn't make sense. It's not that he isn't conservative enough, as the the Times has implied, but because he's too conservative, if only in a different way.

Today's announcement by Justice O'Connor that she is retiring after 24 terms on the Supreme Court will enable President Bush to fill the Court's first vacancy in 11 years. Speculation had abounded that Chief Justice Rehnquist would be stepping down this week (a decision that may still be forthcoming). As a dependable conservative vote, Rehnquist's retirement would not have shifted the delicate balance that has existed on issues ranging from affirmative action to the separation of church and state. With O'Connor's retirement, however, the Court loses its crucial swing vote on these issues whose bearing on the nature of our democracy can hardly be overstated (though, notably, Roe v. Wade still enjoys a 5-4 majority with Kennedy now holding the decisive vote).

Peter Rubin, writing for the American Constitutional Blog (http://www.acsblog.org/), offers a brief sketch of the forthcoming changes in constitutional jurisprudence:

Justice O’Connor’s retirement from the Supreme Court represents a seismic event in American law and the life of our country. Her replacement by a conservative in the mold favored by President Bush would likely mean, among other things, the end of affirmative action in higher education in the United States (it was held constitutionally permissible by a 5-4 vote in her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger); a lowering of the wall of separation between church and state – something that has served both religion and government so well in this nation – so that public display of religious symbols by government even with a primarily religious purpose would be permitted (hers was the fifth vote this Monday in McReary County v. ACLU which invalidated, 5-4, the posting of the Ten Commandments in a Kentucky courthouse); and that, at the very least, many, many more restrictions on women’s right to abortion would be upheld (Justice O’Connor was the fifth vote in the Court’s most recent abortion case, Stenberg v. Carhart, invalidating by a 5-4 vote a law that would have prohibited one method of performing abortions and that contained no exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman).

[Guest blogger, Addison Thompson, submitted this post].