What Would Likely Be the Result of an Iranian Bomb

In the wake of the revelation of the Qom reactor, it seem likely that Iranians are building their warheads, not for more than just power. Hawks report, ominously, that Iran is 3-5 years from reaching a nuclear weapon. People have been estimating that Iran is 3 to 5 years from building a bomb for the last two decades, but no matter. The conventional wisdom here in American that Iran is obviously going to build a bomb. Whether this conventional wisdom is true is unclear, it is at least as likely that Iran will halt on the brink of weaponization such that, in a pinch, nuclear weapons could be manufactured quickly.

The arguments that Iran ought not to be allowed to build a bomb are of several sorts, a similar to those which were applied to Saddam Hussein prior to the invasion. First there's the standard line that proliferation of any kind is to be avoided. A second argument is that Iran possessing a nuclear weapon would allow a "nuclear umbrella" and would galvanize anti-western forces throughout the region. This strikes me as overblown. It seems unlikely to the extreme that Iran's nuclear umbrella would ever extend to proxy forces, nor does it seem to me that a nuclear weapon would put Iran in any particular good place from a strategic point of view. Most countries in the region either are under US protection or possess their own arsenals. The only gain Iran might have from their weapons would be deterrence, which doesn't seem much of an issue unless we are contemplating the invasion of Iran.

Stephen Walt has a lengthy post wherein he considers the possible effects of an Iranian bomb.

The key point to remember is that a decision to build a bomb involves some complex cost-benefit calculations, and Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon would not necessarily lead any of its neighbors to decide that their best course is to follow suit. One reason they might hold back is simply the recognition that getting a bomb would not enhance Iran's influence as much as is sometimes claimed. China did not suddenly become a more influential power when it tested a bomb in 1964; its rise to true great power status came when it began to modernize its economy in the l980s. Getting a bomb may have reinforced Israel's "existential security" (which is why Ben Gurion wanted one), but having a couple of hundred nuclear weapons doesn’t enable them to blackmail the Palestinians or the other Arab states into doing whatever Jerusalem wants. Similarly, North Korea has hardly any influence in world affairs despite its recent entry into the nuclear club; the only thing that that Pyongyang can do with its weapon is discourage others from putting too much pressure on them. Americans really should understand this: we have several thousand nuclear weapons and we have a tough enough time getting other states -- even rather weak ones -- to do what we want. The same would be true for a nuclear Iran: it could not blackmail anyone because the threat would not be credible, and even nearby states might find it easier to adjust to than we sometimes think .

This strikes me as pretty sound. Iranian nuclear weapons would obviously not have a positive effect on the security in the region, but there negative effects are clearly massively over-hyped.

The final case is that a nuclear bomb represents a sort of final solution. This school of though points out the the USSR and Maoist China were fundamentally rational adversaries, whereas sees Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the ruling ayatollahs (the difference between the two is often brushed over) are motivated by Millenarian beliefs and therefore fundamentally irrational. Under this theory, as soon as Iran achieves weaponization, they will destroy the state of Israel.

On its face, this seems completely reasonable, but in fact it seems very overblown. If Iran is so irrational, one would probably see it manifested in their actions, yet this doesn't seem to me to be the case. Iran is happy to increase its influence by selling weapons and political support to anti-Israeli terrorist militias, but they haven't had Revolutionary Guards fighting on the the front lines against Israel. A fundamentally irrational regime is generally manifests some way in its actions. Idi Amin and the Pol Pot both led fundamentally irrational regimes, but it was easy to tell how insane there regimes were, and because of their irrational actions, these regimes were removed from power. The case that Iran is irrational is based on no action in particular, rather it is based on speculation and key misreading of statements by the Iranian president. Though proponents of the irrationality view tend to contrast this with the USSR and Red China, they conveniently forget that when we faced these countries, they were considered just as irrational as we now say Iran is. Later we'll be contrasting rational Iran with the suppoed irrationality of whatever future adversary we face.

No power would welcome an Iranian bomb, and no one is arguing that Iranian nuclearization is a positive development. I would say, though, that overheated predictions of apocalyptic scenarios is no help to the dialogue.

Visiting the Creation "Museum"

Last friday, 300 atheists descended on the notorious creation museum. The trip was in conjunction with a Secular Students Alliance conference in Columbus, Ohio. I was one of those 300 atheists.















above: the lobby of the creation museum
Why did I see the museum? Mainly because I was curious, not just of the creation museum itself, though that too, but also the trend it represented. The creation museum has become the symbol of the know-nothingism in American society. It seems likely that the creationist will not succeed in imposing their bizarre version of reality on the school-children of America, but the balkanization of reality and a disregard for objective facts exemplified by the creationists has already so permeated out discourse it has become almost impossible to have a reasonable political dialogue in this country. Elect a new president? We're told he's not born in this country, and secretly a Muslim anyhow. Want to reform healthcare? People scream that the new plan will euthanize old people. The creationists are symbolic of this irrationality.
It used to be people were welcome to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Today our discourse allows two sides their own facts as well. As Paul Krugman put it, if a small group of people began claiming the Earth is flat, the newspaper headline would be "Shape of the Earth: Views Differ". Stephen Colbert famously labels this phenomenon "truthiness".
One of the earliest exhibits in the creation museum perfectly illustrates this point. It shows two scientists on an paleontological dig. One scientist says the bones are roughly 100 million years old. The sees the same thing, but says the bones are about 4400 years old (just the idea of a creationist on a dig like this should raise some eyebrows). What is happening here is not two "interpretations" as the museum claims. Instead, the latter scientist has hocked back the facts provided by the find, and made up his own. Basically the museum is saying "age of the Earth: views differ."















The museum is at least consistent . It "teaches the controversy", the thing that the evolution deniers been encouraging rural school-boards to do since time immemorial. A whole section compares the alternate interpretations of "Human Reason" and "God's Word". I note some inconsistency here, a lot of this museum seems to be arguing that the precepts of creation are more reasonable than those of evolution, a feat requiring considerable twisting of the facts.















In a series of displays, we are shown both the fundamentalist interpretation on one hand and on the other hand, the scientific world-view is displayed. The creationists, despite what you may think, do in fact believe in evolution, indeed, they believe in evolution several factors of magnitude faster than anything any true scholar of the subject would ever propose. To the creationists, every animal evolved from several base types over a period of several thousand years since the great flood. This fact allowed Noah to only take on board the basic "types" and thus fit all the animals on the Ark (I was unable to maintain a straight face typing that last sentence). Via PZ Myers, (for soem reason, I did not photograph this) a picture of the genetic divergence of both the "monkey" and the human types. See if you can spot the difference.


















Of course, the creationists can't just leave us with the appearance that both ideas might simply be equal so, we are then led in to what might be called atheistland, a representation of our dystopian present. Believers, you see, think of evolution as a sort of Pandora's Box, and when you open it, you never know what will jump out at you. Abortion, euthanasia, acceptance of gays; all these are horrible results of evolutionary theory. We walk through a what could be a recreation of a seedy New York City back ally, replete with newspaper clippings emphasizing these various hot-button issues. The next part of atheistland portrays the spirtual vacuum of a modern suburban home and a wrecking ball destroying a church.
This may be the real reason creationists insist on their cockamamie theories. They are convinced that in a world determined by evolution, people will grow wicked, so it is better that we don't question God's word, even in the slightest. This is highly idiosyncratic. There certainly are ills in our world, but it's very difficult to attribute any of these to evolutionary theory. What's more, our world is superior in a whole host of ways to the pre-enlightenment world, including in being less violent (see previous post). The creationists also ignore the fact that one could just as easily point to horrible things as resulting from christianity. For example, the museum draws a clear link between evolution and "scientific" racism, yet they are clear in embracing the Hammite descent of Africans, the most common justification used for slavery.

There's more material in the creation museum, but this post is getting long, so I will try to cover more in another post.

Is War/ Violence Becoming Less Common?

An interesting article by John Horgan in Slate seems to illustrate pretty clearly that war is indeed becoming a less common phenomenon, especially wars between states. Perhaps this is democratic peace theory at work.

Counting casualties is fraught with uncertainty; scholars' estimates vary according to how they define war and what sources they accept as reliable, among other factors. Nevertheless, a clear trend emerges from recent studies. Last year, 25,600 combatants and civilians were killed as a direct result of armed conflicts, according to the 2009 Yearbook of SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, to be released Aug. 17. Two thirds of these deaths took place in just three trouble spots: Sri Lanka (8,400), Afghanistan (4,600), and Iraq (4,000). In contrast, almost 500,000 people are killed each year in violent crimes and well over 1 million die in automobile accidents.

SIPRI's figure excludes deaths from "one-sided conflict," in which combatants deliberately kill unarmed civilians, and "indirect" deaths from war-related disease and famine. If these casualties are included, annual war-related deaths from 2004 to 2007 rise tenfold to 250,000 per year, according to "The Global Burden of Armed Violence," a 2008 report published by an international organization set up in the aftermath of the Geneva Declaration. Even this much higher number, the report states, is "remarkably low in comparison to historical figures."

For example, Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland's School for International and Security Studies has estimated that war and state-sponsored genocide in the first half of the 20th century killed as many as 190 million people, both directly and indirectly. That comes to an average of 3.8 million deaths per year. His analysis found that wars killed fewer than one-quarter of that total in the second half of the 20th century—40 million altogether, or 800,000 per year.

Even these staggering figures are low in comparison with prehistoric ones, if considered as a percentage of population. All the horrific wars and genocides of the 20th century accounted for less than 3 percent of all deaths worldwide, according to one estimate. That is much less than the probable rate of violent death among our early ancestors.

This seems to me both contrarian and convincing. Generally, we tend to ascribe violence in society to immutable human nature, and suppose we have some sort of natural tendency toward war and violence. This article explicitly argues the opposite.

Our prehistory seems to have grown more bellicose as time went on, however. According to anthropologist Brian Ferguson, there is little or no clear-cut evidence of lethal group aggression among any societies prior to 12,000 years ago. War emerged and rapidly spread (PDF) over the next few thousand years among hunter-gatherers and other groups, particularly in regions where people abandoned a nomadic lifestyle for a more sedentary one and populations grew. War arose, according to this perspective, because of changing environmental and cultural conditions rather than because of "human nature".

Steven Pinker also argues the same case, but expands it to all forms of violence, looking at homicide rates, harsh punishment and other forms of violence as well as war. He points out that cruelty was once considered high entertainment. The burning of cats to death was once considered very amusing for example. Another example is be bear-baiting, a sport involving a fight to the death between bears and trained dogs. This sport was a major form of entertainment in England until the 19th Century.

Since Pinker is known for, among other things, his blistering attack on those who deny the importance of genes in shaping human behavior, it is interesting that his argument is explicitly not that we have a genetic disposition toward violence, but rather that violence is rational. The logic of a the preemptive strike makes violence tempting option to both sides. If two armed groups exist because each side know that the other side could raid first, and therefore it seems wise to launch a first-strike. This dynamic can also be seen between nations. In 1967, the Egyptian army mobilized on bad information obtained from the Soviet Union about a looming Israeli attack on Syria. Israeli sources picked up the mobilization and the leader-ship decided, knowing the country to be vulnerable to a first-strike, and itself struck first. The result was the 6 Day War. Because they attacked, Israel was able to destroy the Egyptian air-force while it was still on the ground (it should be pointed out that, despite the fact that the war was a stunning success from an Israeli perspective, most of current the problems of the area grew out of the conflict).
John Quiggin of Broken Timber thinks thinks Pinker is confused and inconsistent as to the matter of violence.

I’ve seen this kind of confusion before. Rational egoist models like homo economicus, ’selfish gene’ models like evolutionary psychology, and ‘realist’ models of international relations (in which nation-states are viewed as unitary actors) use similar styles of argument and therefore appeal to the same sort of person, but they radically inconsistent with each other, because they each posit a single level at which everything can be explained, different in each case.

I don't see the inconsistency in the position. The logic Pinker is using is similar to logic used by those who espouse homo economicus and "realist" theories of international relations. "Homo economicus" and "realist" international theory are both suspect for different reasons, the former because it assumes the human being to be rational, the latter because it makes similar assumptions about states, when in reality foreign policy is generally the result of special interest infighting and politicians trying to maintain their power, not "great powers" attempting to maximize their power and influence. However, the argument Pinker makes about preemptive attacks doesn't rely on either of these (or even, in this case, on selfish genes). The level that this takes place in dispute, this effect clearly happens at the level of human organization, whether they are tribes, clans, mafia families or nation-states, as the 6 Day War illustrates.

Birthers

One story that has been getting a lot of play is the large group of people who don't believe that the president was born in this country. Obviously, those subscribing to this ridiculous belief simply don't want to admit Obama is a president, and the belief has racial overtones, clearly a stalking horse of those who don't want to accept a black president with a Arab sounding name. Disgusting.
The godmother of the birther movement, lawyer/ real-estate broker/ dentist Orly Taitz was on the Colbert Report. Apparently, Colbert wanted a chance to show just how crazy these people are. She didn't disappoint (also, where the hell did she get the idea that both your parents must be citizens for you to be president?)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Womb Raiders - Orly Taitz
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

On the other hand, is this really any crazier than the many people who think that George Bush had a role in the destruction of the twin towers? No. Both are stupid conspiracy theories. The difference how widespread the theory is, and who believes it. Only about 20% of southern whites gave the factually correct answer to the question of where Obama was born.














The Republican leadership seems to kowtow to this group of lunatics. If a substantial number of Democratic officeholders had refused to say whether they though George Bush had destroyed the World Trade Center, people would comment.

Show-trials in Tehran

The spirit of Stalin is alive and well. The New York Times:

The Iranian authorities opened an extraordinary mass trial against more than 100 opposition figures on Saturday, accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers to stage a revolution through terrorism, subversion, and a media campaign to discredit last month’s presidential election.

The Tehran Trials seem echo strongly of the Moscow Trials. In the Moscow Trials, Joseph Stalin liquidated all of the "Old Bolsheviks", as well as the entire Politburo, and the purge eventually spread to the general populace, and the secret police were given quotas of people who had to be tried. The (initial) logic of the show trials was to liquidate anyone who could possibly challenge the Stalin's authority.
The Iranian show-trials target reformist Iranian politicians. The even have the classic "confessions".These confessions were clearly obtained under torture. The radio program This American Life recently had a program in which a liberal Iranian journalist describes how he was tortured until he signed a wrote a confession admitting to be a agent of the United States attempting to foment a "color revolution". The segment points out that there have been forced confessions of reformists and journalist being aired on Iranian TV for a decade. The process of torture and eventual confession to bizarre conspiracies is almost identical to the practices of the Soviet government.
The program notes that confessions all have a sameness. Each one was written by the elements of the Revolutionary Guards. The have a preponderant worry about foreign governments, such as the United States and Britain, and with the CIA. The confessions also almost always talk about fomenting a "velvet revolution". These obsessions are easily enough explained, about hlf a century ago, the CIA did indeed over-throw the government of Iran, and the fact that the Revolutionary Guards are so concerned with a "Velvet Revolution" is because they know the regime is vulnerable to such an uprising. To get some idea of the strange paranoia of the Iranian Revolutionary of the conservative Iranian establishment, watch this video.

The End of the F-22

The president and congress went eyeball to eyeball on the F-22 Raptor, and it looks like congress blinked. The Hill:

The Senate’s decisive vote this week to cut off the F-22 program is resonating in the House, where leading appropriators on Wednesday said they would back away from an effort to continue production of the radar-evading fighter.

“When the Senate said 58 to 40, I think that ended the debate,” said Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee. “We have to be realistic about this.”

The vote on whether to extend money to the F-22 emerged as a crucial test for President Obama, who personally vowed to veto any defense bill that contained money to extend the fighter program. The Obama administration wants to cap the fleet at 187 planes.

Murtha last week included $369 million in the 2010 defense appropriations bill for advance parts for 12 more F-22s after 2010.

Now Murtha said he will seek to use the $369 million for spare parts and engines for existing F-22s and not as a down payment of sorts on any additional jets.

Matt Yglesias has an interesting piece dealing with the wider implications of the fight over the F-22

Once upon a time, it was generally agreed that spending on defense, like spending on roads or health care, counted as the expenditure of money. Perhaps a good idea, perhaps a bad idea -- it was, at any rate, spending. Spending that had to be judged relative to alternative expenditures of funds or the possibility of lower taxes. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as an advocate of small government, was actually an advocate for restraint in U.S. defense spending. He thought that we could rely on our nuclear deterrent to secure ourselves and our allies from Soviet aggression. By contrast, big government Democrat John F. Kennedy argued in favor of more spending, both at home and on military forces. The particular merits of these debates aside, the point is that defense spending was generally acknowledged to be a form of spending as such.

Things changed when the modern-day version of the conservative movement came to power in the person of Ronald Reagan. Taxes were slashed. We were told that "government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem." Consequently, spending would be cut in line with taxes, and the size of government would shrink. But in reality, total federal spending was essentially flat in the Reagan years and the country witnessed its first peacetime debt explosion. The reason? Despite the drastic reductions in federal revenues, defense spending skyrocketed.

Under George W. Bush, the same pattern repeated itself. Taxes were cut massively, creating a situation in which we were told we "couldn't afford" various kinds of domestic social outlay. But military spending -- including the "regular" Pentagon budget outside the various war supplementals -- just kept going up. Alleged small-government conservatives enthusiastically support this agenda, and Blue Dog Democrats and other self-proclaimed "deficit hawks" in Congress did not raise a peep of opposition. Indeed, within the GOP caucus, opposition to the federal government having any money is strongly correlated with support for spending tons on defense. And within the Democratic caucus, proclivity to bleating about deficits is, again, correlated with support for massive defense expenditures.

To some liberals, any defense budget fight that doesn't actually reduce expenditures isn't a defense budget fight worth engaging in. But the first step to a serious debate about the necessary level of defense spending is to change the political context so that we're no longer doing fantasyland budgeting for which politicians pretend the Pentagon's bills are paid with Monopoly money.

One of the oddest things about the debate over military spending is those ostensibly against the inefficient use of government funds are those most dedicated to bloated, inefficient military programs. Saxby Chambliss, for example, excoriated Barack Obama's budget as spending to much money, yet fought tooth and nail to preserve the F-22. Unsurprisingly, Lockheed-Martin, the F-22's maker, is a big employer in Georgia, Chambliss's home state. This wider trend of conservatives supporting massive defense spending was true of George W Bush and Ronald Reagan, both of whom ran up massive debts in there time in part due to increasing defense spending.
It is interesting to think that once Republicans were suspicious of military spending. Dwight Eisenhower once warned in a speech in 1961:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Whether Eisenhower had the right answer (a force more reliant on the threat of nuclear weapons) is dubious, but he was completely right to warn of the creeping influence of the complex.
The junking of the F-22 Raptor is a loss for the military-industrial complex, but a minor one. Despite the way it has been portrayed in the media, Obama's budget in fact increases military spending from the Bush years. Leaving out the expenditures on Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama budget is $534 billion, the Bush budget was $513 billion. Though the Obama budget has tried to shift toward more relevant program, my guess is there's still plenty of useless projects in that budget as well. Still, it is hopeful that the president and defense secretary have signaled they are at least ready to take on these issues at all.

F-22 Raptor and other Oddities

The effects of the military-industrial complex upon our politics only becomes most obvious when an attempt is made to cut a program. A fight has broken out between the White House and congress over the F-22 program. The problem with the F-22 is it's a program looking for a justification and the very definition of a boondoggle. The Raptor is not of use to any of the current strategic issue for the United States. I heard one caller on the radio put it "the president and the Secretary of Defense want to prepare to fight terrorist, congress wants to prepare to fight aliens" One would think, with the President, the Defense Secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff supporting the decision to cut the program, congress would go along. Alas.

Congress decided to end production of the costly F-22 Raptor fighter jet at 187 planes after a debate on the 2009 supplemental war budget last month. But the very next day, the House Armed Services Committee stripped $369 million for environmental cleanup from the fiscal 2010 budget to fund an additional 12 F-22s. The Senate Armed Services Committee went a step further, providing $1.75 billion for seven more F-22s without clearly identifying the source of funds.
The F-22 costs nearly $150 million per plane - twice what was projected at the outset of the program. Factoring in development costs, the price tag increases to about $350 million per plane for the current fleet of 187.

It may look as if the House Armed Services Committee has added "only" $369 million. But given that it would provide funds for 12 additional F-22s, each with a price tag of $150 million (excluding development costs), the real cost to American taxpayers would be about $2 billion.

The F-22 is the most capable air-to-air fighter in the Air Force inventory. Yet it has only limited air-to-ground attack capabilities, which makes it unsuitable for today's counter-insurgency operations. In fact, the F-22 has never been used in either Iraq or Afghanistan. It was designed to fight next-generation Soviet fighters that never materialized, and, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has noted, it is nearly useless for irregular warfare.

The fact that the project has a massive budget overrun is not an accident, when the project was first proposed its cost was purposely lowballed. Part of congress's reluctance is also due to the fact that pieces of Raptor program were purposely placed in a number of politically potent districts.

The Raptor, by the way, is vulnerable to rain.

The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show.

The aircraft's radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance troubles, with unexpected shortcomings -- such as vulnerability to rain and other abrasion -- challenging Air Force and contractor technicians since the mid-1990s, according to Pentagon officials, internal documents and a former engineer.

Climate Pessimism

I must confess, I'm very pessimistic about the idea of humankind turning around the effects of climate change before it's too late. This doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to try, but I can't help getting the feeling that it's not going to happen.
Take the bill that's making its way through congress.

Unlike Brad Lindsey, I am very worried about the idea that climate change could be an "apocalyptic problem", so the failure to deal with it is even more troubling to me, particularly the utter servitude of congress to agri-business, going so far as to muzzle the EPA on the matter of biofuels.
Yet worse is the failure of developed and undeveloped countries to reach an agreement on climate change at the G-8. Critics, such as the blogger I linked to, suggest that it's the patchy commitment of the United States to reducing greenhouse gasses that led China and India to reject the deal. My own opinion is that neither country is any more interested in reducing greenhouse gasses than the Bush administration was, and further, both nations feel it only just that they produce greenhouse gasses at the same rate western societies did when they industrialized. This is unfortunate, if, as seems likely, both nations pump out as much fossil fuel as they like as the become more developed, then there's no way of advert a possibly catastrophic change in the climate.
China and India have a point, most of the greenhouse gasses that exist were produced by the United States, and the "global north" nations never had to worry about cutting there emissions when they made the leap to prosperity. They are also foolish though. If climate changes drastically, it will be nations like China and India, much more than the United States and Europe, that will pay the price. There strategy should be one of clean development rather than refusing any climate agreement by (rightly) observing that the west lacks any moral high-ground on this issue.

RIP McNamara

I'm back. From this point on, I'm going to attempt to do a post a day again.
Though our media has been fixated and the death of Michael Jackson, to me, the death of Robert McNamara is far more interesting. Robert McNarmara played a profound tragedies of American life in recent times. Probably the most interesting commentary I read on McNamara's demise comes from Stephen Walt's blog.

Some commentators see McNamara as a tragic figure; a talented, driven, and dedicated public servant who mishandled a foolish war and spent the remainder of his life trying to atone for it. The obituary in today's New York Times takes this line, describing him as having "spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war's moral consequences," and as someone who "wore the expression of a haunted man."

I see his fate differently. Unlike the American soldiers who fought in Indochina, or the millions of Indochinese who died there, McNamara did not suffer significant hardship as a result of his decisions. He lived a long and comfortable life, and he remained a respected member of the foreign policy establishment. He had no trouble getting his ideas into print, or getting the media to pay attention to his pronouncements. Not much tragedy there.

McNamara may have been a gifted analyst and corporate executive, blessed with a lot of raw smarts, but he was also one of those people who could not imagine being wrong or resist the desire to tell the world what to do. Failure in Vietnam did not teach him humility; he ran the World Bank with same ego-driven sense of infallibility he had brought to the Pentagon (and with predictably mixed results). Yet this second experience with failure did not temper his love of the limelight or his desire to prescribe How Things Should Be Done. He spent the last decades of his life offering high-profile advice on various aspects of nuclear weapons policy -- with the same degree of self-assurance he had always displayed -- and he sought the spotlight once again with a belated memoir on his role in Vietnam. As always, however, it was filled with "lessons" for others; to the last, McNamara retained an unwarranted confidence in his own ideas as well as an inability to keep quiet.

Overall, McNamara's post-Vietnam behavior raises a broader question about the role of former officials who have led their country into major disasters. Ordinarily, we should respect the men and women who have devoted years of their lives to public service and listen carefully to the counsel of those who have the benefit of long experience. Moreover, someone who is no longer competing for a job in Washington may be more likely to give honest advice than someone who is still worrying about the questions she might face at a confirmation hearing.

But in some cases -- and a lot of former Bush administration officials come to mind here -- the failures are of sufficient gravity as to render all subsequent advice suspect. And when a government official's repeated errors have left thousands of their fellow citizens dead or grievously wounded, along with hundreds of thousands of other human beings, it would be more seemly for them to remain silent, in mute acknowledgement of their own mistakes. And if they persist in pontificating -- as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney are now doing -- a nation that understood the importance of accountability might have the good sense to pay them the attention and respect they deserve. Which is to say: none.

This seems to me slightly too harsh, but only just. McNamara, by his own account, was already convinced that the Vietnam war was futile well before he left office, yet he said nothing out of "loyalty to the president". Such loyalty is misplaced, McNamara should have first had loyalty to those who would die should the war continue, and only second to the United States president. McNamara also kept silent on Vietnam throughout the entirety of the Nixon years, a fact which can't be explained by loyalty to Lyndon Johnson. McNamara only brought his doubts forward in memoirs written 30 years later. Too little, much too late (This article from Foreign Affairs discusses the matter further).
Yet it's not fair too compare McNamara to the Bush neo-conservatives. Dick Cheney still aggressively defends the clearly criminal enterprises that he created in office. Neither he nor any of the other Bush administration show any contrition, or even seem to realize there is anything for the to feel contrition for. McNamara is at least seems genuinely tortured by what he did. It is not a coincidence that a man who could easily have been brought up on charges before a warcrimes tribunal has argued for international rules of war. McNamara realized he was wrong and regretted it. As weak a measure as that is, it's far more than I expect out of any of those responsible for war-crimes in the bush administration.

Berlusconi Chases Jailbait

It is generally the strict philosophy of this blog not to cover stories that I find overly trivial, I category that sexual scandals are emphatically falls under. While this rule is seldom broken, I am prepared to make my first exception since Eliot Spitzer.
Silvio Berlusconi's wife recently made known her desire to divorce the Prime Minister, of "consorting with minors". She further accused him of wanting to put up showgirls as candidates in his party.
The charges seem difficult to substantiate. They could just be a an embittered wife's attempt to sully her husband's reputation.
Since then, photos of a half nude party with young women (one 18) at a party with Berlusconi have appeared in al Pais.
The real issue of course is the use of public resources for private purposes. From the Guardian.

El País quoted the photographer, Antonello Zappadu, as saying that "virtually every weekend" Italian air force flights brought Berlusconi's friends, dancers and television hostesses to his 60-hectare weekend retreat. The paper said Zappadu had pixellated out the faces of his subjects to protect their identity.

Berlusconi has been accused of far more corrupt acts than this, and gotten around it by simply rewriting the law to prevent himself and his cronies from being prosecuted. No doubt he will avoid the law in this case as well.
The lesson of the Clinton impeachment is that sex scandals are bunk. Chasing jailbait does not make Berusconi unfit for governance, though it does make him a despicable human being. What makes Berlusconi unfit for office is that he is a corrupt, power-hungry charlatan.