Bad Day at Cloudcroft

Today was a bad day. We have two cats, Carrie and Ginny, who both find going to the vets very traumatic. Over the years we've learned that it's less traumatic for the humans if we take both cats on the same day. Of course, our cats have learned as well (if they couldn't learn, they couldn't train us so well). So when Carrie sees the two carriers out, and both her people bustling around, and feels the tension in the air she heads for cover, i.e., under the biggest bed she can find. And when Ginny sees Carrie being grabbed, she heads for cover too.

In the car, Carrie carries on with an unending series of meows, ranging from yeowels to just the emphatic MMeeoowWW in her robust mezzo soprano voice. Ginny adds high notes, meoow, judiciously interspersed in her smaller soprano.

Carrie usually totally disgraces herself at the vets, with discharges from all orifices, drooling and the rest. Today was better though--drooling from both sides of her mouth was all she did.

Both cats have gained weight over the last year, after being reasonably steady for several years. I guess that says something about their humans, as does the guilt we feel at inflicting the suffering and humiliation on them. It also says something about humans, and cats, to reflect that while they learn and feel and suffer, they show no signs of bearing grudges, unlike humans.

Applebaum on "Winning"

For those who disagree with Howard Dean and think we can win the "war", Anne Applebaum has a good column, It's Not Whether You 'Win' or 'Lose' . . . in today's Post:

"But what if all of this vocabulary -- winning, losing, victory, defeat -- is simply misplaced? There are, after all, wars that are not actually won or lost. There are wars that achieve some of their goals, that result only in partial solutions and that leave much business unfinished. There are wars that do not end with helicopters evacuating Americans from the embassy roof but that do not produce a victorious march into Berlin, either. There are wars that end ambivalently -- wars, for example, such as the one we fought in Korea."

She points out that war results in both bad and good, using Korea as a parallel. I'd quibble some.
I put "war" in quotes, because it's not clear that we're in a war, or at least what war we're fighting. Apparently the Pentagon isn't sure who we're fighting in Iraq--is it Rummy's "bitter-enders", or "foreign terrorists", the Sunnis, or anyone who uses terror to advance their cause? Is Iraq the "whole war", or just a front in a bigger war? Was the British Army in a "war" with IRA terrorists in Northern Ireland from 1968 on? Did they "win" it? I don't think so. They didn't lose and the parties (at least most of them) finally got exhausted enough at the violence that they were willing to negotiate. It's sort of like a parent-child conflict--neither one wins but time changes the terms. So too in Iraq. Whether the parties will exhaust themselves and work out their future better and faster if we stay than if we go is anyone's guess, and that's about all it is--a guess.

Dreams and Reality--The Fate of Restaurants

Every day I run I go past the Ariake restaurant.

I've seen the progress of the renovations of what used to be a McDonalds, before that a Popeyes, before that something else. The site seems like it should be ideal for a restaurant of some sort. It's across from the entrance to the Hunter's Woods Plaza (strip shopping), located on and near main Reston roads. But the site's never been overwhelmingly successful, as witness the changes over the years. It sat vacant for maybe 2-3 years before new owners got it, and started their changes.

My guess is that they are novices. Why--because work started on the building, then was halted for a long while. When it resumed, building permits for renovations were posted on the windows, so I'm guessing they started work without getting all the bureaucratic permits. From the outside (never been inside), they've done a good job. Merrifield Gardens redid the grounds to provide a water feature and plantings that feel Japanese; they put down slate tiles outside for the outside seating area. The inside was redone as well.

As the review says, they opened in the spring. Googling them, they've had a couple reviews and a couple of organizations meeting there. But I'd fault their outreach. The Chinese restaurant in Fox Mill regularly mails their menu out to the homes in the area, including a buy one, get one free offer. The Ariake hasn't done that; they don't even post a menu in the window. Neither my wife nor I are that familiar with Japanese cuisine, so we need a little impetus to cross the threshold. It's too bad, because if the food matches the care taken with the building it's good.

But many restaurants start and fail for each one that succeeds in becoming a neighborhood fixture.

Jesse Helms the Best Friend of the UN?

Ruth Wedgwood, a conservative foreign policy expert, opines in today's Times about the failure of the UN to reform. This is the most recent news on the issue, following up on the Volker report, the impending removal of the UN's expert on running elections, and the reinstatement of one of the people who screwed up the oil for food program because of bureaucratic process. (If I were a good blogger, I'd have links for each of these, but I don't--you'll just have to trust me.)

Question: remember Jesse Helms, the antediluvian chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee? Madeline Albright and Richard Holbrooke spent much effort seducing him into paying our UN dues, at least in part. But maybe he was the best friend the UN had.

Liberals like me automatically support anything that someone like Helms opposes. So his opposition to the UN over the recent past insulated the UN from criticism from the left. Now that he's gone, I'm thinking there's something to the conservatives' case against the UN. I know there's problems in our own bureaucracy, which is subject to controls by political forces. When Bush I's FEMA screws up in Florida, Clinton comes in and fixes the problem. Bush II screws it up again, but at least we had an effective agency for a while. As far as I can see there's nothing similar in the UN--it's all "who you know", mutual backscratching and logrolling, and quota system. There are times and institutions where expertise and selection from within can work well. But those cases are relatively few.

Liberals believe in multinational institutions and are skeptical of nationalism. But we need to be sure the multinationals are effective.

Murtha and Duke

In the past week or so, two Vietnam vets have made the headlines: Rep. Murtha of PA has come out against Bush's strategy in Iraq and Rep. Cunningham of CA has pled guilty to felonies.

Cunningham was a conservative Republican, Murtha is a Democrat of the old-line socially conservative, economically liberal kind. Meanwhile anti-war liberals have been busily tweaking Republicans like Cheney for being "chicken hawks" just as conservatives have been trying to tar liberals for being soft on terrorism.

Speaking as a draftee who despised officers, it would be nice to forget such approaches. Experience in war gives no warranty for views; truth is independent of the background of the speaker. Hitler was a decorated WWI veteran, Lincoln had a couple weeks in the militia, and Christ, as far as we know, never served in the Roman legions. It may be emotionally satisfying to contrast Cheney's hawkish views with his Clinton-like background, but nothing more.

Arguments on all sides have to be confronted on their merits (if any), not through emotion based on military experience, or lack thereof.

Religion as Accident

Paul Bloom in the December Atlantic argues that the religious impulse results mostly accidentally from the way that human minds work. We have separate systems for understanding physical objects and social objects, with the one being subject to Newton's laws, the other subject to interpretation, purpose, intention. It's interesting, but I'm not convinced. I'd be more tempted to argue that people are naturally interested in good stories and that's what religion is--stories that make sense of the universe.

Where Are the Secretaries/PA's?

The NYTimes has an interesting graphic on the subject: "Who Spoke to Woodward"? Don't know if the link will work without a subscription. While it's a good guessing game, it also shows the pervasive bias of DC, and perhaps the emotional reality of working in a bureaucracy.

Take a look at the graphic: it lists only "principals", no personal secretaries as they used to be called (remember Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary?) or personal assistants/executive assistants as seems to be the modern nomenclature. I'd wager that the majority of these people have one or more people who knew about Ms Plame. But people never see these people when they discuss bureaucracy. I'd love to know if Woodward shares this vision problem. When he was hanging around the White House and ran into Mark Felt, was he really chatting up the secretary?

It's possible the answer is "no". The emotional reality seems to be that most PA's are so loyal to their boss (think Woods and Fawn Hall, Ollie North's secretary) that they're more discreet than their boss. (And sometimes more capable, though that's a topic for another day.)

Gains from "Comforting the Enemy"?

Daniel Drezner posts an excerpt from an Economist article arguing that Al Qaeda/Zarqawi have antagonized the "Arab street" and draws attention to a comment:

[Economist]" Now, or so it seems, it is the cooling of the Palestinian intifada, a slight lowering of the volume of imagery featuring ugly Americans in Iraq, and a general weariness with jihadist hysteria that have allowed attention to refocus on the costs, rather than the hoped-for rewards, of “resistance”. At the same time, the rising tide of American domestic opposition to the war has begun to reassure deeply sceptical Arabs that the superpower may not, after all, be keen to linger on Arab soil for ever. (emphasis added)

[Drezner]
The administration has consistently crticized the domestic opposition to the Iraq war effort because it ostensible undercuts troop morale. However, the suggestion that this same opposition helps to vitiate Arab claims of U.S. imperialism is an intriguing one."

This seems reasonable to me. After all, one of the premises of liberalism, I think voiced by J.S.Mill, is that open discussion is the corrective to dogmatism. I remember the 50's, when in the words of Whitaker Chambers--democracy/the West seemed to be the losing side. Communist totalitarian society seemed to have the advantage in allocating resources, as shown by big gains in GDP, culminating in Nikita's boast that they would "bury" us. (He claimed to have meant in economic terms.) Then, too, liberals had to trust to the idea that efficiency directed to a goal was not the end all and be all. While Cheney and his running dog Bush (while I'm stuck in the 50's I might as well revive some rhetoric from that era) believe that a single-minded, focused effort is needed to defeat terrorism, liberals must believe that the virtues of the society/culture will prevail, even when dissent undermines the morale of the Pentagon troopers.

Conservatives, Multiculturalism, and U.S. Reality

The conservatives at Power Line take out after multiculturalism today, citing a piece from Britain discussing supposed British policy:

"As an ideology, multiculturlism [sic] is a corrupted form of Marxism in which race and nationality replace class. Like Marxism itself, it is an ideology that must be opposed if we are to preserve a country founded on the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights.

I don't know enough to judge whether France is in better shape than Great Britain with respect to the corruptions of multiculturalism. Moreover, it seems to me that elites in the United States -- the 'leaders' whom John wrote about yesterday -- have similarly elevated multiculturalism into an operative principle, if not a principle of governance. We have our own multicultural problems with with which to contend. McKinstry's article outlines the looming perils that confront us as well as the Brits and the French."

Americans have often been suspicious of "multiculturalism" (which I define as the presence and recognition of different cultures on U.S. soil). After all, the land has seen a congeries of peoples presumably ever since the first immigrants crossed the Bering Sea. I'd like to think that conservatives have been especially suspicious, but it's true of liberals as well. The irony for conservatives is that they tend to be libertarians, wanting the maximum of autonomy for individuals. But when the individuals share a culture, it becomes a threat.

When you think about the range of cultures within our borders, everything from California valley girls (am I showing my age) to the Amish, from the hasidic Jews to the Mormons, from the Lakota to the Appalachian country, from all the recent immigrants from around the world to the descendants of Virginia's First Families and the Winthrops and Kerrys from New England; we've a big spectrum. And mostly we accept all the cultures--we'll grant the right of the Amish to be Americans, even though their culture is very "un-American". Where conservatives (and others of us) object is when a group tends to deny the hegemony of the dominant culture. As long as a group goes quietly around their business, whatever their oddities, we can accept it as part of the American quilt. But when a group becomes vocal and insistent, then it becomes a threat.

Ironically, it's often when a group well into the process of melting that it becomes vocal. Witness the "black power" movement of the late 60's and early 70's; the emphasis on the great famine among Irish Americans; the Ku Klux Klan among white rednecks, and so forth. Conservatives should have more confidence in the power of the market system to bring cultures into at least loose coordination. You have only to look at the restaurants in the DC area (see Tyler Cowan's site) to see the power and attraction of multiculturalism.

The Road to Baghdad

Since Veteran's Day many have talked about the road to war. The President has attacked his critics for selective memory, forgetting that they supported the war resolution and thought Saddam had WMD. Milbanks and Pincus in the Post have quibbled with his statements, pointing out the administration had more complete information than Congress and noting there's been no investigation of how the intelligence was used.

I don't remember blogging very much on this issue. I'd classify myself with Bill Keller and Kenneth Pollack as a reluctant hawk. That is, doubting that Iraq had any connection with Al Qaeda, believing that Saddam was a bad man who ought to be removed, impressed by the quick collapse of the Taliban that maybe Rummy was on to something, etc. (I think the latter is a point often forgotten. The course of events in Afghanistan seemed to discredit many of those who feared a quagmire, who thought the US was following the USSR into an unholy mess. When the Taliban collapsed, it raised Rummy and GWB's creditability significantly. It lowered the effectiveness of the opposition to taking on Saddam, which seemed to rest on the quagmire argument. The only thing left was asking for international support, as in 1991.) I also remember the Clinton administration. At some point, Sec. Cohen went on TV with a bag of sugar as a prop in expounding the dangers of WMD. And Albright and Cohen went to a university as part of a campaign to act against Saddam and were rather ineffective in making it.

That being said, it seems obvious to me that the administration made up its mind to go after Saddam very early after 9/11, that they used everything they could and bypassed the bureaucracies to get some more to make their case, and had a closed mind. The latter is the sticking point: in September 2002 under pressure from Scowcroft, Lugar, Blair, et.al., the administration agreed to go through the UN and did its "war" resolution accordingly. The problem is that it was a forced change of course. Neither Bush nor Cheney had his heart in the course they were following. Of course, I suspect many Democrats thought it was the best deal they could get at the time: maybe going to the UN for international support would cause the administration to reconsider, if not, they'd done their best.

The implication of the current criticism is that an administration should have kept an open mind all the way up to the time the bombs fell. If the casus belli was solely WMD, that would be rational. You get the UN inspectors back into Iraq, they can't find anything even though they've got the best leads you can give them, you should go back to the drawing board and consider whether your intelligence assessments were really sound. But when you decided to take out Saddam on 9/12 and your problem was simply assembling the case and the public support, there's nothing to reconsider.

The decision to go to war is not a decision like choosing a college, though many on both sides talk as if it were.