In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
Question: have Michael Ledeen and Philip K. Dick ever been seen in the same room together?

Not suggesting anything. Just asking.
posted by Noah at 10:56 AM

 
This seems to be Steve Sailer week at Gideon's Blog. Anyhow, I never got around to commenting on that infamous academic paper denouncing the Israel lobby. Sailer, of course, has spent considerable ink defending the legitimacy of the paper (though not necessarily every claim contained in it). He's got another post on the topic here. From where I sit, I think Sailer - and Richard Cohen - are spot-in.

I thought the paper was not especially well-written or researched, a pretty shoddy piece of work all around. I also thought it was ludicrous to call it anti-Semitic, and that its central claim - that the Israel lobby has broad reach, enormous clout, uses charges of anti-Semitism to insulate itself from criticism, and has a demonstrable impact on American foreign policy - is unarguable. The biggest problem with the paper is not what it says but what it doesn't say, namely: that the Israel lobby, while one of the most significant foreign policy lobbies, is far from unique; the oil industry is one lobby that can go toe-to-toe with AIPAC, and the Saudis, while far less public in their propaganda efforts and (consequently) less broad in their reach, are not exactly absent from the corridors of power in Washington. The Cuban lobby unquestionably exerts more influence over America's policy toward Cuba than the Israel lobby does towards our policy in the Middle East, even though the Israel lobby is unquestionably more powerful, for the simple reason that the Middle East matters a whole lot more than Cuba does and, consequently, there are lots of lobbying groups in Washington acting to counter AIPAC (not explicitly, but in practical effect) where there is virtually no counter-balancing lobby on the question of the Cuban embargo.

The biggest problem with the Israel lobby is not that it is wrong (I generally agree with it, and note that AIPAC was *not* the major cheerleader for the Iraq War), nor that it has undue influence (it has a lot of influence, but I don't see why it's undue), but that it tries, with some success, to suppress open debate. This is bad for democracy and deserves the condemnation that Richard Cohen and Steve Sailer are directing its way.

I want to point out a couple of other things Sailer said, though, that I also agree with strongly.

First, Sailer is right that the more involved America gets in the Middle East, the less indulgent it can be towards Israel. The two low points for US-Israel relations were the Eisenhower and Carter Administrations. (I think the first Bush Administration was far more friendly to Israel than is generally supposed.) Eisenhower tilted away from Israel basically because the Arab world - Egypt especially - appeared to be up for grabs between the US and the Soviets, and the US had a strong interest in trying to win that particular proxy battle in the Cold War. For that reason, Eisenhower not only tilted against Israel but against Britain in France over Suez, with lasting negative impact on Franco-American relations. It didn't do any good of course; Nasser tilted towards the Soviets anyhow. Once the Cold War battle lines firmed up, America's relationship with Israel warmed up again.

The situation under Carter was similar in that Sadat had kicked out the Soviets and tilted towards the Americans. America again had a strong incentive to tilt away from Israel in the hopes of cementing a stronger position in the Arab world vis-a-vis the Soviets, and Carter leaned heavily on the Begin government in Israel both during Camp David and thereafter. Peace with Egypt was massively in Israel's interest, as even Begin could see. Whether an opportunity was missed by Israel to "solve" the Palestinian problem after Camp David is an open question. I'm inclined to think not because the PLO had to be decisively defeated as a precondition to pursuing either a two-state solution or (far better for Israel and for American interests) the "Jordan option." But what is clear is that Begin wasn't interested in looking for a solution. Israel had not yet realized that holding onto Judea, Samaria and Gaza was not in its interests, any more than France realized in 1945 that holding onto Algeria was not in its interests. So if an opportunity actually existed, which may be questioned, it was missed. In any event, it wasn't just Carter's combination of incompetence and nastiness that soured US-Israel relations during his Presidency; it was also the result of volatility within the Arab world that made it look like there was an opportunity for the United States to gain more influence there. Again, by the time Reagan took office the lines had hardened and US-Israel relations strengthened again.

I'm far too much of a Hamiltonian in foreign policy to agree with Sailer's implicit Jeffersonianism when he says, "the American Republic could afford favoring Israel, but the American Empire cannot." But I agree with the substance of the point anyhow: when American interests require more attention to Arab sensitivities, Israel suffers, and the Iraq War unquestionably increased the degree to which American interests require more attention to Arab sensitivities. Tony Blair certainly understood this, which is why he said, before the war, that "the road to Baghdad goes through Jerusalem."

The second point of Sailer's I wanted to agree with is psychological: that many of the most ferocious neo-cons are "Israeli-wannabes" rather than more prosaically friends of Israel. That rings very, very true, and there's a good novel to be written by a thirty-something Philip Roth wannabe about right-wing baby boomer generation Jews and their psychological relationship with the Jewish State. (Heck, if I had any get-up-and go with my writing, I'd be that thirty-something Philip Roth wannabe.) To the general baby-boomer inferiority complex (remember Bush's "will we grow up before we grow old" from his 2000 convention acceptance speech) about not having been around to fight Franco, or Hitler, or Bull Connor, for some (more right-wing) American Jews one can add the inferiority complex of knowing that one had missed out on being a part of building the State of Israel, the great Jewish romantic calling of the 20th century. From personal experience, I suspect this is a not-insignificant psychological factor in the neo-con mind. Israel, as a psychological factor rather than an actual foreign country, is an elephant in the room with respect to the Iraq War. Sailer understands this nuance. He shouldn't be pilloried for that, but praised.

I want to be clear about something. I haven't changed at all in my enthusiastic support for the Jewish State and my belief that it is right and proper for America to be a great friend to Israel. But I have also changed less than might be apparent to the casual observer in my beliefs about what being a great friend entails. Being a great friend means standing by Israel when she needs us. It does not mean solving her problems for her (which we can't do) nor does it mean confusing our interests with hers (which will only get us more problems, and tempt us to solve those problems by punishing Israel). To prove that I haven't changed as much as it might seem, I'm going to quote from something I wrote (pre-blog) to friends and family (all Democrats) explaining why I was voting for Bush in 2000. (Since this was pre-blog, I can't prove I wrote it five and a half years ago, so you'll just have to trust me.)

In particular because of the current situation there [Note: this was written shortly before the new intifadeh, or Oslo War, erupted], I’m especially focused on the two candidates’ likely impact on American policy towards Israel. The Clinton Administration’s approach, I believe, has been a total disaster for the Israeli people and for the Palestinians. A real peace with the Palestinians can only come about when the Israelis and Palestinians come to agree that peace, on specific proposed terms, is in both sides’ interest. They will only come to this conclusion if they get there on their own. This does not mean that America or any other power, friendly or hostile, cannot influence the situation. But no outsider can deliver peace to the region, or secure it once signed. . . .

[Clinton's] approach to the peace negotiations in the Middle East has been to embrace Israel warmly (once it was led by someone with whom he agreed) and cajole Israel to make concessions in the interests of getting a deal on paper. He implied that Israel could securely make these concessions because they have the United States as a friend. Clinton has used the same approach on the Palestinians, but less effectively.

The result has been a dangerous psychological dependency on the United States in Israel’s Labor leadership. Too many Israeli leaders already half wished they lived in the U.S., and allowed this wish to delude themselves into believing that they lived in the U.S. But Clinton has made the problem much worse by encouraging these leaders to behave as if they were mere extensions of the U.S. This may have led them to take unwise risks because they felt that there was little downside to failure: the United States would always back them up.

But the United States can do nothing to back up Israel now, because the threat it faces is not a foreign army but potential civil war. Israel’s own army will be of little use against stone-throwing teenagers. What good is the United States going to do? The biggest threats to Israel now are the combination of its own inflated expectations, which are leading to a kind of despair as the promised peace unravels, and the threat that the conflict will be internationalized. Clinton’s embrace has contributed to the expectations, and therefore to the despair. Clinton has also contributed to the risk of internationalizing the conflict. His support for a strong world court of justice raises the risk that Israel will be officially charged with war crimes – I think this is now likely, and I have no idea how the U.S. will be able to ignore such a finding. Clinton has also actively supported the idea of some kind of UN presence in Jerusalem, which would be a disaster. His pressure to get a final peace settlement has led to the Islamization of the conflict, because Jerusalem and its mosques are now front-and-center.

It has also led to a dangerous rise in expectations among the Palestinians, a conviction that America is "in-play." Clinton’s warm embrace led some Palestinians to believe that he was going to go to bat for them against Israel in negotiations. When he didn’t, many Palestinians returned to their former conviction that America was not an "honest broker" but was biased towards the Israelis. As many Palestinians already believed this, Clinton has weakened Arafat’s own position internally by pushing him hard towards coming to Camp David, which is now seen as an act of selling out on Arafat’s part, particularly as Israel moves towards unilateral actions to protect their security in the wake of Palestinian violence.

In sum, I think Clinton has been a disaster. But Clinton is not running. Al Gore has a lengthy pro-Israel record. His VP choice is an Orthodox Jew who has been a consistent hawk on foreign policy, the leading Senate Democrat to support the Gulf War. By contrast, George Bush is an oil man from an oil state. He has actively courted Arab American votes. And his father’s administration was not known for being filled with Israel-lovers. The obvious choice on the issue is Gore.

Well, it isn’t quite as obvious as it seems. First of all, I think President Bush deserves a re-evaluation. As Vice President, he was the leader in efforts to help Jews escape from Ethiopia. He also led the effort to get the UN to rescind the Zionism-is-racism declaration. He built a U.S.-led coalition of European and Arab armies that defeated an Arab Nationalist leader on the battlefield. One can certainly quibble with how we got into the mess in the first place and to whether the war should have continued to Baghdad. But the management of the alliance and the war itself were an unarguable triumph. And the result was to significantly improve Israel’s strategic position. To the extent that peace with the Palestinians seemed genuinely possible in the early 1990s, President Bush had a lot to do with making that possible. . . .

Second, after the experience with Clinton, I seriously question whether having a "friend" of Israel in the White House is the best thing for Israel. . . .

What we know about Bush is that he’s a consensus-building kind of guy with a strong foreign policy team. He has plenty of neo-conservative advisors who are generally pro-Israel. . . . My hopeful side says that because of his pedigree and his outreach to American Arabs, Bush could work better with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to make sure that the renewed intifadah does not spiral out of control into a regional conflict. My fearful side worries that Bush will be more influenced by these countries than inclined to influence them, and that American policy will tilt against Israel, subtly shifting the balance of power in the region and leaving Israel with no choice but to make concessions she does not think it wise to make.

In the end, I don’t think Israel needs to worry that Bush will be a threat to her existence. All those threats are internal, and America can do little about them. And I think it would do Israel a lot of good to have someone in the White House who isn’t going to hold their hands – and it would do the Palestinians a lot of good as well; Clinton raised expectations there as much as he did in Israel. . . . The most important signal to send to Arafat is that the Jews aren’t going anywhere; if he wants another round of violence, the Jews can wait him out. But Israel cannot forget that the Palestinians aren’t going anywhere either; Israel cannot elect its own adversary. An American Administration that remembered Israel’s importance but didn’t try to solve its problems for it might have a valuable sobering effect in both Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Sorry for such a long quote. I quoted at length to point out that one can be a cheerleader for a strong US-Israel relationship without falling into the trap of thinking our interests are identical or even that it serves Israel's interests for America to behave as if our situation is similar to Israel's. And to point out that I understood this in 2000, back when I was a McCainiac, a regular subscriber to The Weekly Standard, and someone who had kind (and ignorant) words for Ahmad Chalabi.
posted by Noah at 9:39 AM

 
Actually, am I totally hopeless as a pundit? How'm I doing on my predictions from the beginning of the year?

1. McCain to dramatically mend fences with the Christian Right, fence mending to be reciprocated. Giuliani not to run for President. Tancredo to threaten a third-party candidacy if McCain is the nominee. I'm going to claim victory for the first part given McCain's upcoming speech at Falwell U., and we'll see how the reciprocation goes. I'm standing by my Giuliani and Tancredo predictions.

2. Kadima, led by Sharon, to win a resounding victory, but to still have trouble building a coalition. Well, Sharon is permanently incapacitated, Kadima won a less-than-resounding victory, and for all my post-election pessimism, Olmert seems to have put together a workable coalition. What do I know.

3. Canada votes for Harper, Italy for Prodi. Both right!

4. Mubarak to be hospitalized, triggering panic in capitals the world over until he recovers, which he does. Still time for this one.

5. Lopez Obrador to win in Mexico, with negative but not catastrophic consequences for the U.S. Polls are moving the other way, actually, but I stand by this one.

6. Oscar predictions more wrong than right.

7. No nuke test by either North Korea or Iran, nor any war with either, nor regime change in either country. I stand by this one.

8. Major terrorist incident in Russia followed by the completion of the reestablishment of autocracy in that country. Russia's been kind of out of the news lately. Still seems pretty likely to me, though.

9. Strong year for stocks led by tech. Dollar weakens, housing market softens. Inflation rises but no panic. These are all looking good from where I sit.

10. Delay will lose his House seat - correct! Santorum will lose his Senate seat - still betting that way. Ford will win a Senate seat in Tennessee - less likely, but I'll stand by it. GOP to hold both houses - I would not bet that way at this point.

11. Rumsfeld to resign. I must have been smoking something. John Snow to resign. Of course.

12. No meaningful troop reductions in Iraq. Standing by this one, of course. No spectacularly good or bad news to force a change in direction. Standing by this one as well.

13. GM to fire its CEO. Bankruptcy anticipated in 2007. A Chinese company to bid to buy GM's brands after bankruptcy. Looking a lot less likely now.

14. John Derbyshire to read and like a Philip Pullman novel. Hasn't happened yet to my knowledge, but maybe he's just afraid to tell Katherine.

15. Al Gore to begin preparations to run for President. Hasn't happened yet and probably won't.

16. I drink Gobi desert wine. Not gonna happen, I fear.

17. Serious crisis in the Philippines. Gosh, I hope not.

18. One of the following countries to hold a referendum on whether to split up into multiple states: Belgium, Canada, Italy, Bosnia, Iraq, Spain. Mind you, I don't predict whether the referendum passes. Too soon, I'd say, but Quebec will have another vote one of these years, and that would count if it happened in 2006.

19. German Party of Democratic Socialism to take a sharp turn to the right, and do well at the polls in consequence. I was pretty roundly mocked for this prediction. Still makes sense to me, though.

20. Japan's economic recovery to accelerate. Pretty clearly happening. Pro-natal policies to bear fruit. No evidence of this yet. Increasing nationalism and talk about changing the constitution - bits and pieces of evidence of this yet, but not yet a big news story. I stand by this one.

21. Alito to be confirmed with between 65 and 75 votes. Confirmed, yes, but not with that many votes. Other predictions for 2006 - no new retirements or deaths and no overturning of Roe - remain to be seen.

22. Spitzer to be elected Governor of New York, Westly Governor of California, Strickland Governor of Ohio. I stand by all of these. Everyone is focused on Democrats trying to take control of the House and Senate. This is the big news of 2006: after the election, a significant majority of Americans, from sea to shining sea, will be living under Democratic Governors. Dems are certain to take New York, likely to take Massachusetts, Ohio, Arkansas, could well take California, Colorado, Maryland, and could just possibly take Florida. I cannot think of a single state in the Union where a Democrat currently governs and the GOP is likely to take the state away in 2006. It's possible the GOP could pick of Pennsylvania, but I wouldn't bet that way. The Democratic bench could be looking really, really strong in a few years, and the GOP bench really regional and really weak.

23. Carbs good again; caffeine bad. I stand by this one.

24. Ratner gets what he wants, Silverstein doesn't. Don't understand the WTC deal just agreed to well enough to know whether to claim partial victory.

25. I write a book. Not yet.
posted by Noah at 12:01 AM

 
Good old Derb, meanwhile, had a lovely appreciation for an author I had no idea he appreciated: Samuel Beckett. It was published during my hiatus, on the occasion of Beckett's centenary. I'm glad to see there's at least one Irish writer we both admire.

My only comment, addressed more to Derb himself than to anyone else, is that there's noble precedent to follow if one would be a man of firm faith without denying one's own dread of annihiliation. So if it is morbid contemplation that has banked the fires of Derb's faith, he should take comfort that a greater hero of his than Beckett has been there, and did not lose faith in consequence.
posted by Noah at 11:39 PM

 
I want to talk some more about Iran, but first I suppose I should chime in on energy policy, another topic in the news.

(Actually, what I should do is stop blogging and finish that novel I abandoned eight years ago. It would be both more productive and more personally rewarding, and I obviously am completely useless as a pundit; whatever I say today, I hedge tomorrow, and when I actually make a prediction it more often than not proves inaccurate within hours, as when I predicted no action on Sudan two days ago only to read in the next morning's paper that the U.N. had approved some sanctions against individual malefactors in Sudan.)

In any event: energy policy.

If you believe in the "peak oil" graphs that show global petroleum production declining inevitably from its current peak, then you should view the massive political instability in oil producing countries that is the real cause of current high oil prices as a godsend. There is no way any government policy of any kind could create the kind of incentives to develop alternatives to petroleum that are being created right now by sky-high oil prices. And because political instability is limiting the actual amount of oil that gets pumped out of the ground in places like Iraq and Venezuela, we're buying time until the real crunch comes.

There are good reasons to disbelieve the "peak oil" graphs, including: that they don't include vast nontraditional sources of petroleum like Alberta's oil sands; that they don't allow for the possibility of a technological breakthrough that would enable us to pump more than 35% of the oil in a field out of the ground (roughly the current limit); and that they extrapolate to the globe from the situation in the United States, where companies have been free since the 19th century to explore for oil pretty much anywhere using the latest technology and excellent infrastructure, where much of the oil outside the Persian Gulf (in Central Asia, for example, or in West Africa) has been much more difficult to exploit for political and economic, not geological reasons, and continues to be so. If, in fact, the point of inexorable decline is some decades off, then current high prices are no longer a godsend. But neither are they the proper topic of energy policy; they are the proper topic of foreign policy.

Some day, the hydrogen economy will be a reality, but probably not for several decades. I don't think it's unreasonable for the government to do some planning towards that day, but that planning should, I think, be limited to three areas: funding basic research (which I pretty much always favor anyhow); studying what the major transition costs will be and whether there is a public role to play in offsetting some of these; and eliminating unnecessary regulatory barriers to the development of new electric power generation capacity (especially nuclear power, which is for all practical purposes infinite), because hydrogen is not a fuel source but a way of storing energy, and so the hydrogen economy will require much greater electric power generation than our petroleum economy does.

Apart from that, the government should do what it can to ensure that we are not militarily vulnerable to a sudden oil shock, something I think we already do. The private economy provides plenty of hedging mechanisms for individual firms to protect themselves from sudden price spikes.

There is, needless to say, no need to go to war for oil. We did go to war with Saddam in 1991 in part because we were worried about him dominating the oil fields of the Gulf. But we worried about that not because we needed to "lock up" control of Middle Eastern oil in our own hands, but because we worried what Saddam Hussein would do with all the additional power that would accrue from such an acquisition. And, more to the point, we went to war because of how he achieved that acquisition: by forcible invasion and incorporation of a neighboring country.

There are those who worry about China "locking up" access to Sudanese, Iranian or Venezuelan oil. But this is, again, not legitimately a worry about our ability to obtain oil to fuel our economy. It's about the limits of our ability to achieve our foreign policy aims in these countries in part because they own a resource that is of great value generally and of particularly great value to China, which means it is the basis for an anti-American friendship between these rogue states and China. Again, it's not an energy policy question but a foreign policy question, not a question of will there be oil for us to burn but of whether we have the practical ability to bring rogue states to heel. We aren't worried so much about our dependence on the Middle East as about one Middle Eastern tyrant's ability to become independent of *us*.

What everyone should be most encouraged by is that oil has gone from close to $10 per barrel to over $75 per barrel, and our economy keeps chugging along nicely. The oil "card" has already been played and it turns out not to be trump. High gas prices are causing pain down at the bottom of the income scale in America, but this is something that could be addressed any number of ways that do not involve either economically illiterate market interventions or frightening foreign interventions.

Or, I guess I could have put this more simply: Ronald Bailey is mostly right and John Judis is mostly wrong.
posted by Noah at 10:46 PM

 
Another reason I read Steve Sailer: for posts like this, which are just too dog-goned funny.

On the subject of names: my stepmother has four sisters and three brothers. For their sons, her parents chose relatively straightforward names. But for the daughters, they decided to recombine the syllables of their own names to make the kids names. The results were (I'm not sure I'm going to spell these all correctly):

Felella
Ellafe
Estralisa

and the most unfortunate of the lot,

Lisitril

which really should be the name of a pharmaceutical, not a person.

Of course, since my stepmother is from the Philippines, none of the girls actually got called by these names, but rather by their nicknames. Which, of course, following Philippine custom, had nothing recognizably to do with their given names. Which of the girls do you imagine was nicknamed Ping-ping? Ling-ling? Day-day? See what I mean?

I love names. I can spend hours playing with the site like this one.

This business of giving imaginative names to girls has a long pedigree - Job, for example, after God restores him at the end of the book, has new children and, in a departure from typical custom, we are told the names of the daughters but not the names of the sons. The daughters are named: Jemimah ("little dove"), Keziah ("sweet spice"), and Keren-Happuch ("horn of eyeshadow"). I have always thought that the whimsy of these names is related to the point of the Book of Job, to Job's appreciation of the abundance of life as the most adequate answer that can be made to the problem of apparently unjust suffering or "natural evil" in the world.

Incidentally, did you know that the Masons have a girls affiliate named Job's Daughters? Me neither. Isn't the internet cool?
posted by Noah at 9:30 AM

 
Tonight and tomorrow are Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. I've never much liked this particular "holiday" - if "liked" is even the word I am looking for. Jewish tradition has ascribed all the terrible things that happened to our people - the destruction of the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem, the massacre of the Jews of Mainz during the Crusades, the Expulsions from Spain, etc. - to one day of the year: Tisha B'Av, the Ninth of Av. There are other fast days to commemorate tragedies that befell Israel, but I believe they are all related to Tisha B'Av in that they are all part of a cycle of fasts commemorating the sequence of events that led to the destruction of the First Temple. Yom HaShoah, unlike these other tragedies, gets its own day. Now, admittedly, the Holocaust was just about the worst thing ever to happen to the Jewish people, and among the greatest crimes of history. But was it worse than the destruction of the First or Second Temple? No, it wasn't. (And by this I don't mean that the destruction of the Temple was worse than the murder of millions; mass-murder on a proportionally comparable scale accompanied both destructions.) By refusing to integrate Yom HaShoah into the preexisting Jewish calendar, the innovators of this memorial day did some violence to that calendar. Worse, by suggesting that the Holocaust was importantly different in kind from prior catastrophes, they built into the Jewish calendar a kind of skepticism about the utility of prior Jewish history. In that way they have contributed to the Holocaust cult, a false god that I steadfastly refuse to worship.

(I'm not against innovation as such, mind you. I don't think Yom HaAtzma'ut, Israel's Independence Day, is any more of a violation of the preexisting order of the Jewish calendar than is LaG Ba'Omer, which also falls between Pesach and Shavuot.)

Nonetheless, since it's on the calendar, I've been thinking about the Holocaust, and its only partly acknowledged impact on Jewish thinking about the world. So let me take a look at three current policy debates and how they are subtly impacted by our memory of the Holocaust, and whether that memory has made us more or less sensible and moral in thinking about them.

Darfur. There's a big protest against the ongoing genocide in Darfur scheduled for this coming Sunday. The ongoing, brutal ethnic cleansing of this region of Sudan is appalling, and calling it "genocide" doesn't seem wrong to me. I am puzzled only by two things: how did Darfur specifically become the cause celebre of the moment, and what are we supposed to do about it?

Darfur, after all, is not the only place on earth where inconvenient people are being attacked by militias with government approval. It's not the only place in Africa. Heck, it's not the only place in the Sudan! The Sudanese government has waged a 20-year civil war against the predominantly Christian and animist population of the south of the country. Something like 2 million people died in that war. Why Darfur?

The best answer is, "why not" - that is to say: good for the protesters that they are appalled by the appalling; consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. But I still think it's an interesting question. I suspect the answer is that Darfur is a genocide that pits an odious Islamist regime against poorer, blacker Muslims, and so opposing the genocide in Darfur means taking the side of good Muslims against bad Muslims.

In any event, the tougher question is: what are we supposed to do about it? I am very skeptical that international pressure will be brought to bear or that, if it is, anything will come of it. Sudan depends principally on oil exports to survive, but I somehow can't see China signing up for a boycott in order to punish a regime for oppressing a domestic minority. Just can't see it. And if they can sell oil, the regime will survive. America is not going to intervene militarily; we wouldn't even if we had the troops to spare, and we don't. I would be thrilled to hand this one over to the French, but Sudan is a former British colony, so that won't happen.

The motivation for the support for "action" (unspecified) in Darfur is the mantra: "never again." But if "never again" means "never again will a state set out to destroy a people" then, I hate to say it, "never" has happened again and again, and will continue to happen until all the world has civilized government. Genocide is the problem from hell, but it is not as unique as Elie Wiesel seems to think it is. That's part of why it's a problem from hell; if it almost never happened, it would be easier to stop.

But "never again" can be parsed in other ways.

Iran. "Never again" might mean "never again will we (Jews) let ourselves be slaughtered without a fight." Or, more subtly, it might mean "never again will we (Jews) hope for the best when someone promises to deliver the worst." Both of these senses are relevant to the current debate about Iran, another problem from hell.

Iran is, in part, a problem from hell because Iranian-American enmity - and, for that matter, Iranian-Israeli enmity - is so patently unnecessary. American and Iran have no interests in conflict, and neither do Israel and Iran. In both cases, in fact, we have common enemies; you might have noticed that America just in the last few years eliminated two regimes that border Iran and that have historically threatened that country (well, Afghanistan wasn't much of a threat, but the Taliban certainly hated Shiites). Before that, America was Iran's main guarantee of independence from Soviet encroachment or outright invasion. Edward Luttwak's persuasive argument against taking military action against Iran returns over and over to the argument that of course we shouldn't be fighting Iran because, well, in a rational world we'd be allies with Iran.

Of course, in a rational world we wouldn't have fought Germany in World War II either. Soviet Communism was a much greater ideological threat than Nazism, and America didn't have much of a dog in the fight to preserve the British Empire. The only problem is that Germany wasn't ruled by a rational leader with limited war aims. Germany was run by a madman bent on world conquest. No one could quite believe that this was true, except for Churchill, the stopped clock who was right this one time, but boy that one time was a doozy.

So: is this man the new Hitler?

That's what the debate about Iran is all about. The notion that a rational Iran would hand nuclear weapons to terrorists is ridiculous. So is the notional that a rational Iran would simply launch a nuclear strike against Israel. If Iran plans to use nuclear weapons as a shield behind which to dominate the region, I have news for it: just as an Iranian bomb would push Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to consider nuclearization, so it would also push them to consider a closer relationship with America for their defense. A nuclear Iran could be contained very effectively, if that were our objective.

The big nuclear terrorism risk was always that a terrorist group would either be able to purchase nuclear weapons (the North Korean scenario) or that they would "capture" a nuclear state (the Pakistani scenario). We worry about these scenarios because a terrorist group might genuinely not care about retaliation against the territory they had temporarily captured. We've scene that kind of behavior time and again from terrorists. Al Qaeda didn't seem fased by the American attack on Afghanistan; they expected that kind of retaliation, and expected it to earn them dividends (which never came) when the Muslim street would rise up and overthrow other regimes (Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) that had been friendly to America. If Ahmadinejad and the mullahs behind him genuinely don't care about the fate of Iran, if they welcome the apocalypse, then an Iranian bomb is not merely another factor in the balance of power; it is a world-historical catastrophe.

It is not true that all regimes behave rationally given their understanding of the situation. Imperial Japan's military leaders were fully prepared to sacrifice the entire Japanese nation rather than surrender. Hitler diverted vital men and supplies away from the front in order to pursue his aim of murdering the Jews of Europe (which, I suppose, was the only war aim he could "rationally" still expect to achieve). Fidel Castro encouraged Krushchev to wage nuclear war over the missiles in Cuba rather than back down. Would the Iranian regime behave similarly? Or would it behave more like a rational madman, like Stalin or Mao?

That's the question. "Never again" plays in by avoiding the need to answer it. Because if our mantra is "never again" then under no circumstances can we risk finding out the answer. We have to assume the worst.

That, it seems to me, is not a viable way to approach the world. But that's what lurks in the background in all the discussion about the possible need for war with Iran.

Immigration. I wrote a long post below about Steve Sailer's question: why are Jews so supportive of immigration? I don't think it's such a puzzle, and I gave my reasons. But in my answer, I neglected to say that I think Sailer, and Matt Yglesias, whom he was agreeing with, are right that Jewish memories of the Holocaust, and America's indifference thereto, are relevant to Jewish attitudes towards immigration. I don't think this is a matter of fighting the last war nor of trying to make sure that America always keeps the door open for Jews should a terrible catastrophe happen in Israel. Rather, I think it's a matter of emotional identification - we know what it was like to have the door slammed in our face, we think, and we wouldn't do that to anyone else.

Except that this is not a rational response to the real world. The people coming to the United States from Mexico, China, El Salvador, the Philippines and points further afield are overwhelmingly *not* fleeing oppression, and certainly not genocidal enemies. One can, in good standing, favor a generous asylum policy and still want that policy to be limited to those fleeing particularly awful political regimes.

Because even the most generous asylum policy can't make room for everyone with a good reason to want to leave, say, Somalia, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or (to return to our first topic) Sudan. The International Rescue Committee, an organization devoted to helping refugees of war, oppression and natural disaster - founded, incidentally, by Albert Einstein to save Jews in Europe in the 1930s - makes a point of trying to resettle as large a percentage of refugees as possible in or near their home countries. Only a very small percentage are sent to Europe or America for resettlement. That is as it should be. How much more so for economic migrants.

There are many ways to be generous if one is feeling liberal. One way is to give to the IRC, which I do, annually. But there is a difference between liberality and irrationalism. And it is very difficult to have a rational conversation about this topic with someone for whom any discussion of ending illegal immigration conjures up the ghost of the SS St. Louis.

So: why is the Holocaust always with us?

I think there are a few reasons, some well-known, but others less discussed.

Some of the well-known reasons: because it was a *really bad thing* and, moreover, a really bad thing perpetrated by one of the most civilized countries in the world, and therefore made any rational person doubt the strength of the bonds of civilization. Because modern war is, to a horrifying extent, war against civilians (in World War I, 90% of casualties were military; in the wars since World War II, including civil wars, some have estimated that as many as 90% of casualties have been civilian) and, therefore, the Holocaust properly remains a kind of template for our understanding of man-made suffering. Because the Holocaust is still a relatively recent memory for Jews, and, while everyone thinks mostly about themselves, Jews think about themselves more loudly than other people. Because the Holocaust is not unique in Jewish history; as it says in the Passover haggadah, "not only one rose against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us."

Here's one of my favorite reasons: because the Holocaust left the Jewish people in America orphaned. Europe was the center of Jewish civilization, the place where both tradition and the rebellions against tradition were alive. America was the "treifa medina" - the unkosher realm, the place where Torah was forgotten and Yiddish was vulgarized. America was, to many immigrants from Eastern Europe, the antithesis of the old country, a place where, Gatzby-like, one could remake oneself as something other than a Jew.

And then it was all gone. In a few short years, Hitler destroyed Jewish civilization. The rebellious children in America were orphaned, never having had a chance to reconcile with their fathers and mothers in the Old Country.

Quite apart from any rational paranoia on the part of Jews conversant with Jewish history, this orphaning was bound to engender a certain measure of hysteria in the next generation. A certain fierceness of determination to do right by the memory of those lost who, honestly, you never really knew; who, honestly, you never even liked, were thrilled to have gotten away from, when you didn't know what their fate was to be.

I know this is arm-chair psychologizing, but I don't think I'm off-base. And I don't think it's a waste of time. It's a good thing, generally, for people to understand each other's thinking. If nothing else, it might dispel the more lurid fantasies that germinate when frustration meets incomprehension.
posted by Noah at 4:08 PM

 
I wanted to say something about Iran, something about McCain, something about America's alliance with Israel, something about Damon Linker, and probably a few other things . . . but I'm out of time. All I have time to do is apologize for not posting a book diary in March. But I have a good excuse: I didn't finish a single book in March. So April will have to be a 2-monther.

I'll leave you with an old piece of mine about counting the omer. I still like it and would love to get it published somewhere some day, if I could figure out where.
posted by Noah at 3:11 PM

 
BTW, apropos of both reading Steve Sailer and the Israeli elections, did anyone else notice this item?

What this reminded Sailer of was the general perfidity of Jonathan Pollard. I noticed something different. Eitan is claiming that he has *in his personal possession* key documents related to Pollard's spying. Anyone remember the bruhaha over Sandy Berger taking *copies* of classified material home in his socks? Can you imagine the uproar if an American official did something like what Eitan is supposed to have done - personally absconded with vital classified documents like that and held them as a political negotiating tool? But in Israel, profound disrespect for the state is a bi-partisan affair. The left conducts unauthorized negotiations with terrorists; the right builds unauthorized settlements on Arab-owned land. All parties in one way or another treat as their personal property. This is one of Israel's biggest problems, and is very much at the root of why they can't seem to extricate themselves from the territories, but it's not something people in America on any side of the political spectrum really understand.
posted by Noah at 3:05 PM

 
Next: you may have read a thing or two about the Israeli elections. I was very depressed by them initially because they illustrated yet again the fundamental un-seriousness of the Israeli electorate. The pensioners' party gets seven seats? For all that I recognize the economic pressures that have come down on recepients of state assistance, including the elderly, this really is taking interest-group politics in a proportional-rep system to a considerable extreme.

But on further reflection, I think the most important showing in the election was the performance registered by Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman's party. What started as a right-wing Russian party alternative to the more moderate Yisrael B'Aliyah (Sharansky's party) has evolved into a full-fledged right-wing party. And their most important contribution to Israel's current debate is also a very dangerous, albeit inevitable one. To white: Yisrael Beiteinu favors trading the triangle region of the Galil, which is inside the Green Line but overwhlemingly Arab, for the large settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria. As such, the proposal is a violation of international law; you can't just strip people of their citizenship. And it is a momentous Rubicon to cross to even suggest that pre-'67 Israel is up for negotiation. But the proposal is not going to go away, and I strongly suspect some version of the proposal will eventually come to pass. Israel's Arab minority, especially the Arabs of the triangle region, are increasingly alienated and increasingly involved in political Islam. There is a movement afoot among Israel's Arabs to press for recognition as a national minority and a high degree of communal autonomy. It is probably in Israel's interest to encourage a starker choice: either join whatever entity emerges on the Palestinian side of the separation fence, or more fully integrate into Israeli society by, among other things, serving in the IDF. One can imagine, in the abstract, some kind of referendum process being used to formalize this choice.

But any such reform would be predicated on a more serious effort to de-sectorize Israeli society, and that in turn depends upon profound change in the political system. Israel badly needs a new constitution - not because it needs formal guarantees of individual rights (that's not what a constitution is for in the first place) but because it needs a more functional governmental structure. I'm currently reading a book about the Algerian war, and it keeps striking me as I read it that Israel really would benefit from a constitution more like the on de Gaul designed for France's Fifth Republic: a strong, directly-elected Presidency balanced by a Parliament with its own Prime Minister. Israel faces a host of existential questions that require a real mandate to resolve, and Israel's political system is structured to make such a mandate impossible to achieve. A directly-elected President that did not serve at the sufferance of Parliament (unlike the situation in the mid-1990s when the Prime Minister was directly elected, but Parliament could still bring down the government with a no-confidence vote) could receive such a mandate and act on it. If I ran the zoo, I would go further; Israel should have stronger regional governors as well, should take the education system out of the hands of the political parties, should formalize relations with bodies like the Jewish Agency and otherwise strengthen the rule of law, etc. But reform of the constitution is the beginning, the precondition to everything else. Purportedly Sharon wanted to tackle this question after the 2006 election. I have no idea what he planned, nor whether Olmert has ideas in this vein. If so, I hope he has the guts to take them forward, in spite of his (profound) political limitations.
posted by Noah at 2:45 PM

 
Having been absent for so long, there's just too long a list of things I have wanted to say something about. So the next few posts are going to be in kind of random order.

So here's a random start. I have readers (yes, amazingly enough) - no, seriously: I have readers who periodically ask me why I bother reading, much less linking to, Steve Sailer, either insinuating or asserting that he's an anti-Semite (or, at a minimum, has got "the Jew Thing"). My answer has always been that while Sailer seems willing to remain on friendly terms with people whom I would have to consider anti-Semites (and I've called him on this), I'm convinced that's not a fair characterization to apply to Sailer himself. Moreover, I think a primary function of journalism is to attempt to gore sacred cows. And I think it should be self-evident that there are Jewish-related sacred cows out there, and that a big chunk of the media isn't interested in goring them. When you set out to be deliberately politically-incorrect, as Sailer does, you're inevitably going to be offensive, and you may well be wrong a lot of the time to boot. That shouldn't detract from the fact that, as such, goring sacred cows (if practiced intelligently, of course) is a service to the collective intelligence of mankind. That's why I read, and occasionally link to, Steve Sailer. For those who aren't satisfied with this explanation, note that Matt Yglesias and Mickey Kaus, among others not generally associated with a paleocon sensibility (and both Jewish, I note) seem to read Sailer pretty regularly as well, and link to him occasionally too.

This is by way of prologue to a couple of comments I wanted to make on Sailer's by now somewhat stale cogitations about why Jews seem to be so pro-mass-immigration (as polls indicate they - we - are).

First, there's nothing weird about people's politics being driven by totemic issues rather than bottom-line questions. A rather lot of people died in 17th century Europe over the question of whether wine was blood and bread was flesh. Jonathan Swift found that mordantly funny in retrospect, but it was deadly serious to those engaged in the wars of religion. So I'm not sure why Jewish "nostalgia" on the subject of immigration should be a source of special puzzlement.

Second, I strongly doubt Jews - who, on average, have higher incomes that other American ethnic groups - are voting their pocketbooks by supporting high immigration levels. If that were true, then Jews would also vote consistently for lower upper-bracket income taxes. They in fact do the opposite (on average, of course).

Third, my impression is that immigration-restrictionist sentiment is strongest in areas that either have historically experienced little immigration or that border Mexico. With the exception of Los Angeles itself, my impression is that Jews do not tend to live in these places in large numbers. I bet Jews in Colorado have stronger sentiments against high immigration than do Jews in New York, and I bet white Christians in New York have much stronger sentiments in favor of high immigration than do white Christians in Colorado.

Fourth, I don't agree at all with Matt Yglesias that nationalism has been "bad for the Jews" or that Jews are, in general, post-nationalist in attitude. (I note in passing that this is a far greater slur on the Jewish character than anything I've ever read Sailer write about Jews; it is, in fact, the Old Right's primary anti-Semitic charge against the Jews.) But it is fair to say that many Jews, I would guess most Jews, instinctively believe that cultural diversity is "good for the Jews" because it is good for the Jews not to be a uniquely distinct minority. What this kind of thinking misses, of course, is that outside of the Northeast Corridor, "diversity" is precisely *not* how one would characterize our current age of mass immigration. Immigration anxiety, justified or not, is overwhlemingly centered on the mass immigration from neighboring Mexico. If the desire for diversity is a motivator for Jewish support for high immigration levels, then Jews should support not America's immigration policy, but Canada's (albeit with tougher restrictions on admitting terrorists).

Fifth, I was struck by this paragraph of Sailer's:

By laying the blame for the Holocaust on Congress in 1924 (a year that Hitler spent in jail), they can ignore the extraordinary lack of effort American Jewish leaders made during the 12 years of the Roosevelt Administration (which were coterminous with the Third Reich, 1933-1945) to get European Jews admitted as refugees. FDR was the most politically powerful President in American history and American Jews were, on the whole, wildly enthusiastic for FDR. Even though back then Jews comprised a much larger voting bloc, and one particularly well-situated in big electoral vote states to tip elections, they exerted little effective pressure on their hero to do anything for their co-ethnics. Rather than confront this history, it's so much more enjoyable today to blame it all on Congress in 1924 for not having the foresight to realize that a jailbird in Germany was going to perpetrate the worst crime in history two decades later.

Steve: has it not occurred to you that organizations like ADL and AIPAC, however much you might not like them, are precisely a response to the (partly accurate, I would say) perception of American Jews that the generation of the 1930s and 1940s, in spite of their numerical clout, were unable to save their brethren from the worst disaster in their history because they were unwilling to forcefully press their case, politically, in the media and elsewhere. You can't have it both ways, Steve.

Sixth, and somewhat tangentially, I wanted to point out the following. Sailer has often pointed out that opposition to bi-lingualism and illegal immigration are winning issues for Republicans among most Americans, and that the Hispanic vote is a lot smaller than people think. Therefore, he argues, Pete Wilson's support of Proposition 187 did not, in fact, hurt Republicans in California; what hurt Republicans in California was the internal migration of Republican-leaning whites to neighboring, less-expensive states. That may all be true, but this leaves an important element out. The Hispanic vote may not be as big as is often estimated, and may not have swung decisively in reaction to perceptions of GOP "nativism." But the Asian-American population, while much smaller than the Hispanic population nationally and in California, has much higher percentage levels of voter participation, and did swing *decisively* against the GOP *precisely* because of perceived GOP "nativism." Asians used to be described as natural GOP voters: socially conservative, small-business owners, anti-Communist. All true, and they used to split roughly 50-50 between the parties based partly on historical party affiliation (Japanese tended to be Democrats, whereas Vietnamese tended to be Republicans) and partly on economic status (poorer Chinese tended to be Democrats while richer Chinese tended to be Republicans). By the late 1990s, in California especially, Asians were voting overwhelmingly for the Democrats, to the point where they are now almost comparable to Jews in their voting patterns. So just as Jews might be happy to live among more Asians, and hence wind up supporting Mexican immigration that has totally different characteristics, Republicans running against Mexican immigration have wound up driving Asians out of the GOP coalition, contributing to the collapse of the GOP in California. I'm quite sure that the people actually charged with winning elections for the GOP are aware of this.

Seventh, and even more tangentially, in his original post on the "Jerusalem Syndrome" Sailer spends a bit of time ranting about convicted traitor Jonathan Pollard. I think it would be appropriate, in the context of such ranting, to point out that, prominently but by no means exclusively among Jewish officials, Senator Joe Lieberman has been extremely firm in his conviction that Pollard deserves his sentence and should not receive clemency, nor should he be "traded" to Israel until, at a minimum, Israel reveals everything that Pollard stole and on to whom the Israeli government subsequently passed it. That's exactly the right conclusion, and it would be nice if the paleocon Right, who disagree with Lieberman about so much, gave him credit for it, especially when the subject comes up in its more usual context.

Finally, I thought I should mention my own views on immigration. All else being equal, immigration should be a net-positive transaction for the world as a whole, and also a net-positive transaction for the receiving country. The reasoning, in a nutshell, is as follows: one can presume that an immigrant will be more productive in his new country than in the country he left, and that the benefits of this jump in his productivity will be shared between himself and his new country. This is the basic economic argument for relatively open borders, and it is the reason why it is not correct to say that immigration is *purely* a matter of redistrbution (unlike trade, which produces win-win situations).

But this basic economic argument for immigration is not the whole story. Selection effects, positive and negative, can be extremely important in the distribution of gains and losses due to immigration. A country that deliberately exports criminals is clearly going to benefit itself to the detriment of the receiving country. A country that deliberately imports highly skilled workers is clearly going to benefit itself to the detriment of the country from whom those highly skilled workers come. Welfare policies can profoundly shape the incentives for immigration, with consequences that may invalidate the assumption that immigrants will be more productive in their new country than they were in the old.

Moreover, there are externalities associated with immigration, some unquestionably negative (the transaction costs of schooling children in a new language are collectively born) and some debatably negative (is cultural diversity a good or a bad thing? there are two sides to that particular coin). And, just as with free trade but to a far greater degree, both the positive and negative externalities will be unevenly distributed. A country that imports lots of low-wage workers will produce gains, in terms of higher profits and lower consumer prices, that accrue disproportionately to those with assets and disposable income, while the costs, in terms of depressed wages and higher housing costs, will be born disproportionately by those at the lower end of the income spectrum.

What's the bottom line? I think America would benefit from a far more selective immigration policy, one that provided generous asylum for truly politically oppressed people and, otherwise, focused on bringing in people with specific skills that the economy needs at a particular time. Anyone who has dealt with the immigration system in the United States knows that it makes it extraordinarily difficult for precisely the people you think we would want here, and I don't see how that serves anyone's interests.

By the same token, I don't think it is wise for the country to be importing a large class of unskilled laborers, precisely because today's economy, unlike that of the late 19th century, is not generating such enormous demand for these workers that wages are rising rapidly even as the supply of labor grows. I'm one of the people who benefits from this influx, but I don't think it serves the country's long-term interests.

I think it is quite problematic for any country not to have proper control over its borders. I think a guestworker program is simply a mirage if we retain birthright citizenship, and I think it would be wise for us to retain birthright citizenship. Unfortunately, I suspect that solving the illegal immigration problem will require a national ID of the sort that Americans have historically rejected, and that therefore significant illegal immigration will continue.

Commentators on the question of immigration, particularly on the restrictionist side, reflect surprisingly infrequently on the unique position of the United States, in that we are the only major rich nation with a long border with a vastly poorer nation whose population exploded over the past generation. This may have something to do with the fact that America uniquely has a big illegal immigration problem, and it may mean that the problem is a tougher one to solve than restrictionists let on.

Politically, I think immigration is not going to get any traction in the near term because of the contradictions within each party on the issue.
posted by Noah at 1:29 PM

 
Just reassuring everyone that I'm still alive, and haven't completely abandoned this blog. I was away on business in London, then away on vacation in Utah, then very busy at work, then preparing for Passover, then celebrating Passover. Want to see the seder menu?

Sephardi charoset
Long-cooked eggs with fresh radishes and cucumbers
Chicken soup with matzoh balls
Fried fish cakes with egg-lemon sauce
Lamb shanks braised with butternut squash, figs and fresh almonds
Chicken baked with artichokes
Cauliflower-leek kugel
Celery braised with walnuts
Roast asparagus and tomatoes
Chocolate-orange cake
Date-almond cake
Various cookies and fruit

Novelty item of the night was soft matzoh, made by certifiable lunatics in Israel (the box boasted that everyone and every implement involved in the process of making the stuff was inspected by the mashgiach every 18 minutes). Cost 50% more than the usual shmurah matzoh, which is itself ridiculously expensive and, per my own religious views, totally unnecessary, machine-made matzoh being perfectly adequate, but I buy it for the effect, and I bought this soft matzoh for the novelty of it. Wasn't worth it.

Discovery of the night was a kosher barolo from, I think, Rashi, an Italian Jewish label. Very nice wine. You'd never know they boiled it to protect it from non-kosher cooties.

And a good time was had by all.
posted by Noah at 11:03 PM