In two excellent articles, here and here,Thomas Friedman gets to the heart of the problem facing US Middle Eastern policy. To summarise, both Israelis and Palestinians are stuck with leaders who have repeatedly failed them, and led them into a cycle of attacks and reprisals. While the cycle goes on, neither side is prepared to gratify the other by dumping their failed leader and electing one who will make peace. By backing Sharon, the US ensures that it is hated by all those who support the Palestinians, which means virtually everybody in the region outside Israel. This in turn means that the idea of a democratic revolution in Iraq is doomed from Day One. Any democratically-elected government would be more fundamentally anti-American than Saddam (an American ally who merely miscalculated what he could get away with in Kuwait).

I’ll add my own analysis to this. What this means is that the Administration got its policy in the wrong order. It should first have leant hard on both sides until they agreed on peace terms essentially on the lines of the Clinton plan (though the paternity would obviously have to be denied). Once people in the rest of the region saw Israeli settlements actually being dismantled, Bush would have had a free pass as regards Iraq, and democratic reconstruction would actually have been possible.

It might still be possible to resurrect this strategy, by dragging out inspections and keeping the pressure on Saddam as long as possible. If the Israeli elections produce some swing to the left, and the US starts applying pressure, it might be possible for the Palestinian leadership to curb terror attacks long enough to reach an agreement. Then we might see a Palestinian state with democratic elections – Arafat might win the first of these, but not the second. And as I’ve said, success on this front would give Bush plenty of political capital to use in justifying an attack on Saddam.,

That’s a lot of ‘mights’ and ‘ifs’ but I think this offers a better chance than occupying Baghdad and then working out what to do next.

In today’s Age, Thomas Frank writes:

One of the most tenacious myths of the “culture wars” that have been going on in America for more than 30 years is that youth counterculture possesses some sort of innate transgressive power – that the eternal battle between hippie and hard-hat, disco-dweller and churchgoer or individualist and conformist is every bit as important as the struggle between classes used to be.

In a review of Frank’s last book, One Market Under God, I wrote

The most interesting part of Frank’s story relates to the way in which the entrepreneurs of the Internet boom appropriated the rhetoric of the Vietnam-era left, to the extent that venture capitalists refer to themselves as VC and the employees of Internet firms call themselves ‘dotcommunists’. Simultaneously claiming victory in the cold war, they denounced both governments and Old Economy corporations as little better than Soviet commissars. In this story, the entrepreneurs stand for the liberation, not of the workers, but of ‘new money’.

A cameo appearance is made by the postmodernists, whose alleged drive to destroy Western civilisation formed the basis of numerous denunciations of ‘political correctness’ in the 1990s. The postmodernist beliefs that all truth is relative, and that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ find their natural 1990s expression in work for the burgeoning advertising industry. The tools of critical theory and radical anthropology are pressed into service in the creation of a mythical reality for, say, a brand of toothpaste. The ultimate outcome of this radical theorising is the view that, not only nations, but individuals are, ultimately, brands, and that most are in dire need or rebranding.

I did another version of this review here. The para I quoted above is from Frank’s latest The Conquest of Cool, which sounds great.

Steven Den Beste sets out his scenario for a unilateral US invasion of Iraq

The way that war will begin is that President Bush will pick up his telephone, call General Franks, and say, “OK, Tommie, go for it.” And then American (and British) jets will begin major bombing, and shortly thereafter American (and British) troops will move into Iraq from multiple directions. The war will be brief, and we’ll win.

The fatal flaw in this scenario is in the parentheses. President Bush can’t pick up his phone and order British troops to invade Iraq. Any British participation will require, at a minimum, a Cabinet decision, which in turn will certainly produce demands for a public debate, which will result in a demand for a UNSC resolution. Blair knows this, as does the US Department of State, which explains the recent backing away from Jan 27 as a deadline.

And at this point, the whole thing starts to unravel. In email, Den Beste argues that British participation is an optional extra (which would justify the parentheses). Even in strategic terms, this is unclear – some of the things the British are providing, such as in-flight refuelling, are apparently indispensable in the short run. And in tactical and political terms it’s silly. The British and Americans are co-operating closely on the premise of a joint invasion. A call from Bush saying that American forces only should invade would produce chaos. More importantly it would trash the alliance between the US and Britain which, from the British side, is entirely premised on the idea of a ‘special relationship’ which gives the British government leverage over American policy in return for fairly reliable, and tangible, support.

Admittedly, there’s an element of ‘peace by timetable’ about this argument, but I don’t have a problem with this – war and peace are not symmetric in this respect.

The other interesting thing that became clear in my email discussion with Steven Den Beste is that the rift between the US departments of State and Defense has re-opened. State, which is, as I’ve noted responding to the concerns of the British is trying to slow things down, while Defense is trying to stick to the timetable. Den Beste, who seems to be pretty well attuned to the thinking of the hawks within the US Administration, writes

What has become increasingly clear over the last year is that the State Department as a whole is in serious disrepute with the White House, in part because it’s coming to be seen not so much as America’s foreign policy agency towards the world, but rather as the world’s foreign policy agency toward the US.

Many now suspect that the career bureaucrats in State identify more strongly with the nations they’re assigned to study than with their own. In some cases it appears that they’ve actually been bought.

I think it’s useful to observe that, however much State and Colin Powell are distrusted by some, they won the debate in 2002 about the need to take the UN route and focus on weapons of mass destruction. I suspect they will win again in arguing for delay.

This report that, following the expansion in the use of GM-based ‘Roundup Ready’ crops, the widely used crop herbicide is losing weed resistance doesn’t have any obvious implications for the GM debate other than to remind us that biological systems are complex and hard to manage.

It’s a useful rule, though that, if a policy piece discussing the use of herbicides and pesticides doesn’t discuss or refer to the implications of resistance, it should be treated with caution. I’ll have more to say on this later.

Update As Jim Birch points out, the NYT headline should have read “Weeds are gaining resistance to widely used herbicides”. Embarrassing! This will teach me to rely on the “Blog This!’ default instead of writing in my own link!

The blogosphere prides itself on beating print pundits to the punch. But in today’s Age, Gerard Henderson has a piece bagging the Howard government’s proposed appointment of John Carroll to vet the National Museum. A few blog-eons (months) ago we were treated to a full-length fisking of this guy from Tim Blair for his bizarre book about September 11. I thought about blogging on this a week or so ago, but couldn’t really be bothered. Irony alert on: I’m surprised, though, that Tim missed a chance to put the boot into the government for such a crazy appointment. Irony alert off

While we’re on the subject of the National Museum, I’m surprised by the hostility it’s aroused. Having produced a fair bit of it, I think my antennae are pretty well-tuned to detect material that will infuriate the average Quadrant reader and I found very little of it at the Museum. In its general feel, it reminded me of nothing so much as the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics – celebrating ordinary Australians of all kinds. While not ignoring conflict, I don’t think the Museum plays it up, either. The fact that it’s always packed with apparently ordinary Australians supports my view. Of course, most of the hostile reviews had been written before opening day and the Quadrant crew, like the Bourbons, forgets nothing and learns nothing.

With the resignation of Steve Case as chairman of AOL Time Warner (soon to be just plain Time Warner again, it seems) we can pronounce the “New Economy” officially dead. When the biggest merger in history was announced almost exactly three years ago (it seems like a century), I wrote

If the accounting numbers are taken at face value, AOL Time Warner will have a price-earnings ratio of about 350 to 1, modest by Internet standards. When options are taken into account, the ratio is more like 1000 to 1. It is difficult to see how an economy in which investment decisions are based on numbers like these can avoid some sort of financial catastrophe.

So is AOL Time Warner a super-profitable monopolist in the making or a jerry-built piece of financial engineering ? It can scarcely be both. But in the miraculous world of the New Economy, anything is possible.

Of course, as the blogworld and other phenomena show, the death of the New Economy has had almost no impact on the development of the Internet. For that matter, neither did its rise. In economic terms, the Internet has provided a source of modest but significant productivity gains in the market sector. However, the trillion dollars or so dissipated in the bubble has probably negated the impact of several years worth of Internet productivity growth.

Coming back to blogs, the big impact of the Internet has been in non-market services, of which email has been the paradigm example, but for which blogs are an even better illustration. Apart from the commodity service of ISPs providing the connection, no-one has ever made any significant money out of these things and, probably, no-one ever will. That doesn’t mean that they don’t count towards economic welfare, but the New Economy was never about economics.

I’ve been receiving a lot of interesting material on both Lomborg and global warming, but this time I’m going to stick to my plan of putting aside, for a while, the academic scandals that have been dominating the blog lately. In the meantime, those who want more can visit Ken Parish for what looks like a mirror-image of the Bellesiles story, involving pro-gun economist John Lott.

I’ll just offer the following thought. In the context of political debate, if a recently-reported scientific result seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Ken Parish attacks my “credulous applause” for the Danish finding that Bjorn Lomborg’s book The Sceptical Environmentalist was ‘scientifically dishonest’. To briefly reprise what I’ve stated so far:

(1) Lomborg’s summary of the literature is in fact selective and biased, and crucial arguments are dishonest
(2) This is typical of the advocacy literature on both sides of this debate, and Lomborg is ‘entitled to feel aggrieved’ that his book has been singled out
(3) The Danish committee erred in deciding that Lomborg’s book was a scientific work and should be assessed against the relevant standards. However, Lomborg contributed to the problem by ‘trying to have his cake and eat it’ regarding the scientific status of the book

There remains the question, raised by Ken and others, of whether the committee’s consideration of Lomborg’s book amounted to a ‘kangaroo court’. I can’t say I’m satisfied with the way the committee proceeded. Essentially they read the Scientific American critique and Lomborg’s response and concluded that Lomborg had violated scientific norms of discourse by taking a clearly one-sided position and by failing to respond to criticisms of this.

Having failed in the first instance to reach the conclusion that Lomborg’s book was not scientific research but ‘designed to provoke debate’, I think they should have done so on reading the interchange between Lomborg and his critics – several of whom were also clearly engaged in polemical debate. The Committee was overly deferential to the ‘expert’ status of the critics, and failed to make the obvious point that several had personal interests in the debate.

On the other hand, I think Ken’s critique is equally problematic and shows uncritical reliance on biased sources.

To begin with, Ken attacks Stephen Schneider on the basis of a 1989 quote that I’ve seen reproduced many times, and responded to nearly as many times. As in most instances, Ken’s version omits crucial sentences (without ellipses) in a way that makes Schneider appear deliberately dishonest. Schneider’s response is here. I’m not a huge fan of Schneider – I find him overly prone to alarmism, and even in the corrected version I think this comes through. But that doesn’t justify reproducing quotations from obviously hostile sources without the simple precaution of a Google check.

Second, I think Ken mischaracterizes the Committee’s decision not to seek additional expert advice, again omitting crucial sentences.

DCSD did consider whether a better basis for evaluating the cases under review would be obtained by itself forming ad hoc committees with accredited experts in the respective fields. A number of members voiced the view that sourcing new expert evaluations might possibly create scope to establish whether the defendant has not only-as the experts at Scientific American claim-used selective data, but whether he has done so wilfully in order to delude the public, and hence enable DCSD to ascertain the presence or absence of the subjective conditions required to uphold scientific dishonesty.
DCSD, however, has reached the conclusion that new experts would scarcely be able to add new dimensions to the case. In this process of deliberation, a crucial role has also been played by the fact that even on the existing basis there is agreement at DCSD in adjudging the defendant’s conduct to be contrary to good scientific practice, as expressed below.(sentences omitted by Ken in italics)

To summarise, the Committee formed its views based on Lomborg’s own conduct in the debate, which was not that of a scientist disinterestedly seeking truth in accordance with standard scientific norms of procedure but that of an advocate for a particular case. I think this should be evident to anyone who has read Lomborg’s book and other writings. Precisely for that reason, I think the correct conclusion was that the book should not have been assessed as a piece of scientific research or as a meta-analysis of the scientific literature, but as advocacy for a particular viewpoint.

Update The formatting of the Stephen Schneider piece in the link isn’t very clear. So here’s the relevant part of Schneider’s statement. The words omitted in the standard quote (originally by Julian Simon) are in italics

[to get action we have] to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both

Schneider argues that he is describing the problem of dealing with media who want snappy quotes and clear positions, not advocating giving them what they want.

Whatever you think of Schneider, I can’t see any charitable interpretation of Simon’s doctoring of the quote. The quote is too long and, apart from the multiple omissions, too accurate, to be from memory, and Schneider asserts that he advised Simon of the error. The original version published by Simon included a fabricated statement that ‘Scientists should consider stretching the truth’ but this was ultimately withdrawn and doesn’t appear in the standard blogosphere version. On the other hand, Simon’s quote included ellipses that have been dropped in the blogosphere version, and the sentence about media coverage has also been dropped.

It’s time again for one of the most popular features of this blog. Comment here on any topic you like (civilised discussion only and no coarse language please). Suggested starter topic “Is blogging a fad?”

Unless something new comes up, I think it’s time to wrap up the debate raised by Keith Windschuttle. I think historical truth is important and I don’t apologise for spending time on it, but I take Ken Parish’s point that the problems of today should take precedence. I plan a summary of the debate next week and then I’ll move on to my very inadequate ideas for an economic policy response to the problems of Aboriginal communities.

My last substantive point on Windschuttle is this. He makes great play of the Christian conscience of the British and claims that this justifies him in always imputing the best possible motives to the colonists. But whenever he comes across historical figures who actually display this Christian conscience, like the Rev Ernest Gribble, he dismisses them as ” emotionally disturbed” troublemakers, a description that could certainly be applied to the biblical Jesus. My impression is that Christianity sat pretty lightly on the average 19th century Australian or Englishman. I certainly see no evidence of it in Windschuttle and his friends at Quadrant.