Quote of the Day

It's always the rug you've been sweeping things under that gets pulled out from under you.
   - Anonymous

Quote of the Day

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.
   - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Quote of the Day

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
   - Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

Quote of the Day

I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.
   - George S. Patton (1885-1945)

Quote of the Day

The greatest things ever done on earth have been done little by little.
   - Thomas Guthrie

Quote of the Day

Putting off an easy thing makes it hard. Putting off a hard thing makes it impossible.
   - George Lorimer

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When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
   - Thomas Jefferson

Quote of the Day

To have ideas is to gather flowers; to think is to weave them into garlands.
   - Anne-Sophie Swetchine (1782-1857)

Quote of the Day

One of the sources of pride in being a human being is the ability to bear present frustrations in the interests of longer purposes.
   - Helen Merrell Lynd (1896-1982)

Quote of the Day

Once a person has acquiesced to something they do not believe, and which everyone knows they do not believe, they become complicit in their own oppression.
   - Matt Steinglass

Quote of the Day

The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention.
   - Duguet

Greeting The Liberators

Now that the first deadline to eventually give Iraq back to the Iraqis, here's what's on the AP wire this afternoon.

Fireworks over Baghdad as Iraqis take over cities

BAGHDAD – Iraqi forces assume formal control of Baghdad and other cities on Tuesday after American troops hand over security in urban areas in a defining step toward ending the U.S. combat role in the country.

Fireworks, not bombings, colored the Baghdad skyline late Monday, and thousands attended a party in a park where singers performed patriotic songs. Loudspeakers at police stations and military checkpoints played recordings of similar tunes throughout the day, as Iraqi military vehicles decorated with flowers and national flags patrolled the capital.

"All of us are happy — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds on this day," Waleed al-Bahadili said as he celebrated at the park. "The Americans harmed and insulted us too much."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared a public holiday and proclaimed June 30 as "National Sovereignty Day."

This could have been done within a month after first toppling the Saddam government. Instead, well over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed as have more than 4,300 Americans. Significant segments of the Iraqi population have been displaced, both within and without of the country. And the U.S. Treasury has been looted for more than $1 trillion. This is the legacy of the self-proclaimed war president, George W. Bush.

Russia And The Neocons

From time to time, Andrew Sullivan publishes content (what in traditional print media would be called "Letters to the Editor") that readers send him. While most are too topical to be published without the context of what inspired the response, the following analysis is some of the best, most concise commentary on both Russia and the neocon ideology we've read in some time.

What surpises me most about your Russia coverage is how terribly biased it is. Although your coverage of the Middle East, for example, is quite evenhanded and features voices from left, right, center, and everywhere in between (i.e. those such as Glen Greenwald that elude easy categorization) your coverage of Russia consists almost solely of thinly researched and highly emotive missives from the wack-job right. Leon Aron is a proud and unapologetic member of an intellectual school (i.e. neoconservatism) which has been disastrously wrong about pretty much everything over the past decade. After getting Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel so horrifically wrong, why would you expect the that the neocons would get Russia right?

In fact, the neocons Russia "analysis" has many of the same flaws which marred their analysis of the Middle East and led to the ongoing disaster in Iraq. These flaws include:

1) a pervasive discounting of structural factors (all of the post-Soviet countries are in a really rough economic state right now, Latvia's GDP is on pace to shrink by 20% this year and Ukraine is inches away from bankrupcy! Listening to the neocons, you'd think Russia is having a uniquely hard time. In fact, if you look at the data it's coping pretty well for the region)

2) a corresponding overemphasis of personal factors (the idea that Putin is the problem, and that, somehow, Nemtsov would have solved everything had Yeltsin made him kleptocrat-in-chief. Russia is still deeply deformed from the Soviet disaster, and virtually any serious scholar (and, given his embarassingly sycophantic biography of Yeltsin, Aron is not a serious scholar) recognizes that Putin is significantly more progressive, particularly on economics, than the median Russian)

3) a tendency to glorify totally obscure and extremely unpopular pro-Western "liberals" and paint them as saviors of the country (i.e. the absurd campaign to make Garry Kasparov the next Lech Walesa. Kasparov is such a fringe figure that him becoming president of Russia would be something like Gary Busey becoming the next president of the United States, it simply isn't going to happen)

4) flat-out-lies, such as the idea that Russia started the war in Georgia (this point isn't even debatable, whether Georgia was goaded into starting the war is a different matter)

5) an unwillingness to recognize the distinctness of a region's cultural, literary, and religious heritage (Russians, for better or worse are not "just like us." They're not aliens, but they come from a very different background. Neocons refuse to believe this, and insist on seeing Russia as an America-like country that has had some tough luck)

You can probably see that these all have clear parallels in the neocon view of the Middle East, with Saddam filling in for 2, Chalabi for number 3, and the mystical Al-Qaeda-Iraq connection for 4.

This is not to make Putin out to be some poor misunderstood "victim," for he is anything but that. However most of your writing seems to be suffused with an understanding that, in any given country, radical change is almost never possible and that, when it is possible, it is almost never desirable. Russia has had a deeply dysfunctional and resource-dependent economy for as long as anyone can remember, and its current extreme over reliance on oil and gas goes back to at least the 1960's. Why would you expect this to change in the span of 8 years? Could more have been done during the "unique" (though considering how quickly oil prices have rebounded to over $70 a barrel it remains to be seen whether the high energy prices of 2007-2008 were really all that unique) period of the 2000's? Perhaps.

But look at "pro-Western" and "democratic" Ukraine. What did they base their economic growth on? Computers? Electronics? Consumer durables? No, steel. Why did they do this? Because they are nefarious and evil? No, they did it for the same banal reasons that the Russians have focused on oil, gas, and metals: because they had a lot of Soviet-built excess capacity that could quickly and cheaply be brought back online if the prevailing market conditions made it profitable to do so. It's actually quite odd to see a cheerleader for capitalism such as Leon Aron suggest that Russian companies avoid doing what they are good at in order to suceed in what they "should" be good at.

Look, I'm not a Putin acolyte, but the neocons have tried to write Russia out of history before only to be very rudely surprised. Russia is, in may ways, still a rather nasty country, but I would think that conseratives such as yourself would recognize the very real differences between a performance-based dictatorship such as Putin's (a type of regime which we have had no qualms about supporting back in the day) and the ideology-based totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Russia today has to worry about all sorts of thigns (stock indices, exchange rates, interest rates, capital flows) that the Soviet Union simply didn't. If you siphon out the rhetoric, the Russian leadership has behaved extremely rationally and conseratively. In viewing the Russian leadership's banal and predictable pursuit of self-interest as evidence of ideologically-induced madness, the neocons are making the same mistake with Russia that they do with virtually every other country.

Again we ask, why does anyone give neocons so much as the time of day? Is it because their contribution to the political analysis of any given situation is to describe at least one scenario that we can be certain has no chance whatsoever of coming to pass?

Quote of the Day

Hard work is the yeast that raises the dough.
   - Anonymous

Quote of the Day

Commonsense and good nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.
   - W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

Quote of the Day

Anybody who gets away with something will come back to get away with a little bit more.
   - Harold Schonberg (1915-2003)