Month: August 2007

In case you missed it

John Quiggin18 Comments

A website run by the neocon thinktank the Center for Security Policy (members include Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle and Doug Feith) has published (then removed) a piece calling for Bush to use his military powers to “the first permanent president of America” and “ruler of the world”. Along the way he suggests that the population of Iraq should have been wiped out. The website Family Security Matters also runs pieces by Newt Gingrich, Judy Miller and other luminaries.

The full piece is preserved here at Watching the Watchers. I found it via Wikipedia.

As someone would say (though maybe not in this case) “read the whole thing”. It’s impossible to tell if this is satire by someone who has cleverly infiltrated FSM over a lengthy period (quite a few other pieces by the same author, Philip Atkinson were also removed), a sudden outbreak of insanity, or the actual views of CSP/CFM, accidentally revealed and clumsily concealed.

As things stand, there’s a presumption in favor of the last of these views. The piece was published by CSP/FSM and constitutes, at present, their last word on the subject. If they repudiate Atkinson’s views they should say so openly, and live with the embarrassment of having published him.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin8 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

Sensible federalism vs aspirational nationalism

John Quiggin26 Comments

I’ve been thoroughly underwhelmed by the undeclared election campaign over the last couple of months. Labor has been moving towards the kind of small target strategy that performed so well in 2001. Meanwhile, Howard’s complete conversion to pork-barrel politics has now acquired the label “aspirational nationalism”, which is appropriate enough given that the term “aspirational” appears to mean “a shallow person with no ethical values who splashes money about without any clear sense of priorities”.

So I’m pleased to see Rudd taking a step back towards sensible policy with his proposal for a complete Federal takeover of the public hospital sector to be implemented if co-operative Federalism fails to produce an agreed national reform plan. Unlike Howard’s various ad hoc grabs for power, this would actually lead to a more sensible alignment of political power and responsibilty.

Should the sheriff be above the law?

John Quiggin6 Comments

Daniel Drezner (supported by Megan McArdle and Glenn Reynolds, but not by Brad DeLong) has responded to my criticism of his claim that the US should be able to invade foreign countries whenever its “vital national interests” are threatened. Drezner narrows the gap between us a bit, saying that most members of the FPC are more skeptical about the effectiveness of military force than they used to be (though of course, plenty of members in good standing are pushing for a war with Iran that’s even more certain to fail than the war with Iraq), and saying

there is a big difference between not taking force off the table as a policy option and advocating its use in a particular situation. As Quiggin observes, force is a really messy option and carries horrendous costs.

Drezner dismisses concerns about international law, quoting James Joyner’s observation that the UN Charter prohibiting war has mostly been observed in the breach. Joyner only mentions the US, but Drezner goes on to claim that

This applies to every other state in the international system as well. Quiggin wants international law to be a powerfully binding constraint on state action. That’s nice, but what Quiggin wants and what actually happens are two very different animals.

A couple of questions arise here. First, is Drezner’s claim that the international law prohibiting aggressive war is a dead letter factually correct? Second, would the US (more precisely, the people of the US) be better off if the option of unilateral resort to (non-defensive) war was taken off the table or at least put further out of reach?
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A perpetual declaration of war

John Quiggin22 Comments

In the course of a controversy with Glenn Greenwald, Dan Drezner offers the following rewording of Greenwald’s critical summary of the orthodoxy of the US “Foreign Policy Community”

The number one rule of the bi-partisan foreign policy community is that America can invade and attack other countries when vital American interests are threatened. Paying homage to that orthodoxy is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to maintaining good standing within the foreign policy community.

and states:

I suspect that anyone who accepts the concept of a “national interest” in the first place would accept that phrasing. As a paid-up member of the Foreign Policy Community (FPC), I certainly would.

Unless “vital national interest” is construed so narrowly as to be equivalent to “self-defence”, this is a direct repudiation of the central founding principle of international law, prohibiting aggressive war as a crime against peace, indeed, the supreme international crime. It’s more extreme than the avowed position of any recent US Administration – even the invasion of Iraq was purportedly justified on the basis of UN resolutions, rather than US self-interest. Yet, reading this and other debates, it seems pretty clear that Drezner’s position is not only generally held in the Foreign Policy Community but is regarded, as he says, as a precondition for serious participation in foreign policy debates in the US.
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A Sterner Review from RFF

John Quiggin2 Comments

Via Joe Romm at Climate Progress this report by Thomas Sterner and Martin Persson from the leading US environmental thinktank, Resources for the Future*, endorsing the key conclusions of the Stern Review. (Given the apt surname of the first author, it’s called “An Even Sterner Review”).

As in my own assessment, Sterner and Persson argue that Stern underestimates nonmarket damages from climate change.

For a related comment on a piece by Ron Bailey, with lots of useful links, including an earlier version of this paper, here’s Tokyo Tom