Stromata Blog

A Year-End Counterfactual

Twelve months ago, the idea that America could do anything to improve conditions in Iraq was controversial, to say the least. The Left had settled on a “narrative”: We were standing between the combatants in a civil war. Without our presence, Iraq might become a huge humanitarian disaster, but it was bound to be a disaster in any event. All that we did by staying there was expose our troops to needless risk and inflame Moslem opinion against us.

Obviously, circumstances in Iraq have changed markedly for the better since then. Between that improvement and President Bush’s decision to wage war more vigorously, instead of accepting the “realistic” counsel to cut back and leave Iraq’s fate in other hands, there may be a bit of a connection. The theory of coincidence hasn’t gained a great deal of traction, though I’m sure that it’s clung to in a few desperate corners of the Angry Left. The preferred course hasn’t been to fashion a new Iraq narrative that accounts for the phenomena but simply to ignore (or strive to find a dark side to) everything that has happened and stick to the old policy prescriptions. Thus “Santa Hillary” places “Bring the Troops Home” under the national Christmas tree. All the facts may have changed, but the conclusion remains the same.

Suppose that the President had heeded the advice of Senator Clinton, the Iraq Study Group and the elite media. How would the war against the mufsidun stand today?

There were three sides to what one might call the “Non-Bush Consensus Strategy” as formulated in early 2007. The first priority was reducing American troop strength in Iraq and redirecting the remaining forces to training and support roles. That step was not, however, supposed to be tantamount to giving up on either Iraq in particular or the War on Terror in general. Replacing our military presence in Iraq would be “engagement” with the country’s neighbors, who would be encouraged to mediate among the rival factions. Meanwhile, American troops would pour into Afghanistan to quell the much feared Taliban/al-Qa’eda comeback there.

No one can know what might have been, but don’t the following seem highly likely?

• Iraq’s politically significant neighbors are Turkey, Iran, Saudi-controlled Arabia and Syria – not an harmonious quartet. The ISG and Foggy Bottom may imagine that they can be brought together to pursue a happier future for Iraq, but isn’t it more probable that, with American influence waning, each would have pursued its own national interests? For Turkey, that means hot pursuit of Kurdish terrorists (only U.S. pressure has limited Turkish incursions so far); for Iran and its semi-puppet Syria, greater power in the hands of pro-Iranian Shi’ite leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr (recently cowed by the “surge” into ordering his followers to observe a cease fire); for the Saudis, minimizing the danger of a revival of Saddam Hussein’s drive to the south.

  Had these parties been able to reach a grand deal, it could hardly have made the situation better from the West’s point of view. The lowest common denominator would be a central government controlled by the mullarchy’s friends, a rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh guaranteeing the safety of the Saudi oligarchs, bribes to al-Qa’eda in return for taking its battle elsewhere, and a free hand for Turkey in northern Iraq: that is, an anti-Western regime in Baghdad, the expansion of Iranian hegemony into Mesopotamia and Arabia, greater resources for the mufsidun, and a war between hitherto pro-Western Turkey and Kurdistan.

  The alternative to a settlement on those unappealing lines would be an unambiguous civil war, pitting Iranian-backed Shi’ites against Saudi-backed Sunnis (including al-Qa’eda, the strongest Sunni force as of the beginning of 2007). The Turko-Kurdish conflict is part of both scenarios. In neither would there be any force within Iraq possessing the power and the will to keep the PKK in check. Only the U.S. has a hope of persuading the Kurdish authorities that it is in their own best interests to avoid giving aid and comfort to terrorists of their own nationality and discouraging Turkey from engaging in violent self-help.

• A bigger American force in Afghanistan would doubtless have limited enemy gains, but that war will grind on endlessly so long as al-Qa’eda and the Taliban have sanctuaries in Pakistan. The ideal solution would be a joint Paki-NATO campaign to clear the mufsidun from Waziristan. That would be a tougher, bloodier prospect than the “surge” in Iraq. Amateurs like Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee may casually recommend it, but it’s scarcely conceivable. Would a shaky Pakistani government sanction what would be labeled a “Christian invasion” of its territory? If it did, would Democrats and liberals retain their enthusiasm as the casualties mounted? Would they be willing to help police the Pakistani frontier for years to come? On the other hand, if we carefully confined our power to one side of the border, how long would it take for the Afghan campaign to become as frustrating and unpopular as the Iraqi one was at the end of 2006?

  Some on the Left have been straining to link our presence in Iraq to the assassination of Benzair Bhutto. Suppose that we had a many more troops in Afghanistan. It would then be a cinch to argue that the murder, and the popularity of the mufsidun with the Pakistani public, was an angry reaction to our inflammatory proximity to their country’s borders. The Clinton-Obama-Edwards-Kossack talking points practically write themselves. They wouldn’t be true – Pakistan’s plight arises from decades of governmental failure – but the elite media would fall for them, and the American Left would by now be following its Canadian cousins in demanding that Kabul be thrown away like Baghdad. “Bring the troops home” would still be Hillary’s Christmas promise.

• What about the broader War on Terror? Our counterfactual hands al-Qa’eda two huge propaganda points: that they “forced” America out of Iraq and are fighting it bravely in Afghanistan. In the real universe, Osama bin-Laden and his lieutenants have been placed on the rhetorical defensive, imploring the mufsiun not to give up on Iraq and issuing increasingly strident and non-credible threats against a growing cohort of enemies.

  If you were an angry young Moslem, which scenario would more strongly move you to take up arms and risk your life, rather than safely grumble - the one in which your side is humiliating the giaours or the one in which it is being humiliated?

There are no controlled experiments in history, but the year 2007 comes close.

Further reading: Michael Barone, “Surge 101”
The Daily Telegraph, “General Petraeus: Man with a Message of Hope”
William Kristol, “General David Petraeus: Man of the Year”
Victor Davis Hanson, “A Long War in a Nutshell”

Faith Healing in the Technological Era

Over the next couple of weeks, posts here will be either scanty or super-abundant. I’m off to England, Scotland and Sarkozist France, meaning that I’ll either be too busy for blogging or will fill idle minutes with it. In the latter case, I promise not to post (i) photos of places that are the subject of 10,000 postcards, (ii) trite observations of the differences between America and Europe, or (iii) complaints about the inconveniences of travel. If UAL loses my luggage, the blogosphere will not hear about it.

Having said that, I already have one travel story worth relating: I’ll be in a party with two friends, one of whom got a new laptop last month. He is also a devout atheist. Last week, he broke the laptop screen. Best Buy said that it could be repaired, but screens for his model are in short supply and the estimated date of completion was well into January.

He grumbled to his Internet buddies, one of whom, as devout a Christian as my friend is a nonbeliever, said that he would pray for the laptop. Maybe he was engaged in friendly goat-getting, but –

Best Buy called the next day to say that a replacement screen had turned up at a nearby store. The repaired machine was ready for pickup on Christmas Eve.

Modern medicine can take care of so many physical ills that Lourdes is becoming obsolete. Now it’s high-tech gizmos that need the power of prayer.

More Global Warming “Anecdotes”

So why wasn’t Al Gore Time’s Man Person of the Year? It’s not that the mag has swung suddenly to the Right: A couple of days ago, it dropped its only two conservative columnists, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol. (Of course, a publication with any attachment to reality would have followed Kristol in giving the annual accolade to General David Petraeus.) I also dismiss out of hand any insinuation that Europe’s richest man offered incentives to secure the honor for himself.

No, my theory is that someone among the editors felt a chill of fear: Mr. Gore’s claim to eminence is his role as a prophet. What if his prophecies turn out to be false? Won’t Time look quite ridiculous if, a decade from now, the Goracle is remembered chiefly as a mountebank who almost persuaded world leaders to shut down half the global economy? It would be as if Major C. H. Douglas had been picked in the 1920’s.

What could have given rise to doubt? The U.N.’s recent Bali conference on climate change made it clear that debate on anthropogenic Global Warming is beyond the pale. Oddly, though, according to David Whitehouse, writing in the left-of-center New Statesman,

With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 — there has been no warming over the 12 months.

But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming — the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly. . . .

Looking at the global temperatures as used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK’s Met Office and the IPCC (and indeed Al Gore) it’s apparent that there has been a sharp rise since about 1980.

The period 1980-98 was one of rapid warming – a temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340ppm to 370ppm). But since then the global temperature has been flat (whilst the CO2 has relentlessly risen from 370ppm to 380ppm). This means that the global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued.

For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

Seven years of fairly stable temperatures is, needless to say, just another anecdote (as several of Mr. Whitehouse’s commenters stridently point out), not real evidence. Here are more anecdotes, courtesy of geophysicist David Deming:

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency. . . .

Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered. . . .

In April, a killing freeze destroyed 95 percent of South Carolina’s peach crop, and 90 percent of North Carolina’s apple harvest. At Charlotte, N.C., a record low temperature of 21 degrees Fahrenheit on April 8 was the coldest ever recorded for April, breaking a record set in 1923. On June 8, Denver recorded a new low of 31 degrees Fahrenheit. . . .

But –

If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you’re hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming.

Just as facts are allowed to point only one way, so are scientists. Here is a story carried by Fox News and, so far as I can tell from a Nexis search, by practically nobody else. (It was distributed on the UPI wire but apparently picked up by not a single newspaper in the Nexis database.)

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate “models” — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth’s surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.

“Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no,” said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester. [The on-line Science Daily has a somewhat more detailed report.]

The models questioned by Prof. Douglass and his colleagues are the basis for alarmism about the Earth’s climatic future. If they are wrong, that doesn’t mean that the climate won’t change — it assuredly will, just as it has been changing ever since life began — but it does mean that the Warmenists’ policy prescriptions may be based on faulty premises. Given how drastic their prescriptions are, it would be a real pity to adopt them, suffer the consequent worldwide impoverishment, and still be whacked by Gaia.

As Fox also reports, the Douglass study’s co-authors “are noted global-warming skeptics”, which may explain why their paper aroused no interest. It is taken for granted among the bien-pensants that skepticism about Global Warming can derive only from sinister motives, not from fidelity to the observed data.

Is it possible, nonetheless, that Time got unwarm feet?

Trees with Maps, and Other Frivolities

“Ancient Trees Found Using 200 Year Old Maps”, says yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. Okay, it figures that elderly trees might not have replaced the maps they used in their younger days, but what I don’t understand is, Why does a tree need a map? It isn’t going anywhere.

Or is this evidence that Ents still lurk in the English forests? I rather hope so.

Also in the Telegraph is a report on a scientific inquiry, published in the British Medical Journal, into the genetic basis of wizardry.

Based on an analysis of the Harry Potter novels, Sreeram Ramagopalan, Dr Marian Knight, Prof George Ebers, and Dr Julian Knight of Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, conclude that “magic shows strong evidence of heritability.”

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows provides a lot of valuable information about magical families that strongly suggests a role for genetic factors,” says Dr Knight, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow.

“For example, magic exists in at least seven generations of the Black family and at least three generations in others. We also see twins – the Patil and Weasley twins – with the same magical abilities.”

The new analysis is considerably more sophisticated than a predecessor’s simplistic model:

[I]n the journal Nature, Dr Jeffrey Craig, Dr Renee Dow and Dr MaryAnne Aitken claimed magical abilities depend on a recessive version of a gene: all wizards and witches thus have two copies of the wizard “W” gene, distinguishing it from the ordinary M, or Muggle, version.

Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom and Draco Malfoy are pure-blood wizards - with WW ancestors over many generations. Hermione Granger is a muggle-born witch (WW, with WM parents). . . .

But the team shocked Potter lovers by claiming it had uncovered evidence of “questionable paternity” in the case of Filch the caretaker, who is a “squib”, someone who has been born into a wizarding family but lacks full blooded magical powers.

If Filch had been the offspring of a witch and a wizard, he would have had to be a wizard himself, for the same reason that two blue-eyed parents can’t produce a brown-eyed child. Only lack of marital fidelity can explain his lack of magical talent.

An unpleasant corollary of this theory is that wizardly bigots are not irrational to stress purity of blood as a desideratum. Widespread intermarriage with muggles would lead to a steady diminution of the wizard population and ultimately make a separate wizard society impossible to maintain, thus leaving mankind open to the depredations of dementors, basilisks and other malign magical creatures.

Data from the latest Rowling opus convinced the Oxford scientists that the single-gene hypothesis was “simplistic”.

Rather than being all down to one gene, they believe enchanted skills can vary across a spectrum of strength, depending on the combined influence of a dominant gene for magic, which is turned on or off depending on epigenetic effects, and modified by the influence of a number of genes, along with the environment.

There appear to be three magical skills that are conferred by specific genes. “One of these is the capability to speak to snakes (parseltongue), known to be only a feature of those who are direct descendants of Slytherin.

Another is to be a seer; Sybill Trelawney, although not perfect, has this ability, and her great-great-grandmother was also extremely gifted in this respect.

Lastly, being a metamorphmagus (the ability to change one’s physical appearance) is an ability that Nymphadora Tonks passed on to her son,” says the BMJ paper.

There are even some candidate genes: given their reported association with speech and language, further mutations at the FOXP2 gene, already linked with Muggle language skills, could account for the rare magical ability to speak parseltongue while variants in a gene linked with hair colour, the MC1R gene, may explain Tonks’ hair-changing abilities.

All of these conclusions are necessarily tentative. If only England had the U.S. Congress, an earmark might even now be embedded in the budget bill to support further research.

Finally among these lighter items, I must call your attention to the best parody ad of the campaign season. The really amusing part is that Bill Clinton’s life-partner doesn’t realize it’s a parody.

Faith, Reason and Michael Huckabee

Mike Huckabee has proven himself a brilliant campaigner. He is also obviously a bright fellow, and his ability to lose 110 pounds and not gain it back indicates greater self-discipline than the last governor of Arkansas to run for President. Still, he hasn’t impressed what he calls the “Wall Street-to-Washington Axis”. In fact, not many would-be nominees have been lambasted so roundly by so many factions of their own party. On the Today Show this morning, he offered this analysis of his critics’ mentalité:

There's a sense in which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the Republican Party. They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day one of us actually runs, and they say, Oh, my gosh. Now they’re serious. They don’t want to just show up and vote. They actually would want to be a part of the discussion, and really talk about issues that include hunger and poverty and things that ought to be really a concern to every American, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.

To some extent, it is arguable that the Republican “establishment” wants evangelical Christians “to just show up and vote”. In 12 years of GOP control, during six of which the party also held the White House, not a lot was done to impede abortion or same-sex marriage or to address many other matters that especially concern evangelicals (without, of course, being at all exclusive to them). If Governor Huckabee were the fire-breathing standard bearer for the Human Life and Federal Marriage Amendments, he could rationally argue that his segment of the Reagan Coalition has been slighted.

But such is not the essence of the Huckabee campaign. The issues that he says he wants to “really talk about” don’t include the traditional “social issues”. Instead, he aligns himself with the rhetoric of Sojourners and other spokesmen for the Religious Left, who rely on governmental programs to solve “hunger and poverty”. To those evils he adds, as ripe for federal intervention, the menaces of smoking, overeating and other unhealthy personal habits. That approach isn’t notably “evangelical”, even if a few megachurch pastors have embraced it. If Governor Huckabee can’t sell it to National Review, the Wall Street Journal or the Weekly Standard, that isn’t evidence of their unwillingness to let evangelicals be “part of the discussion”. It merely shows that they don’t want a standard bearer who is 60 percent indistinguishable from Barack Obama.

In a year when all of the major GOP candidates have obvious weak spots, an entrant as attractive as Mike Huckabee wouldn’t be ruled out by his background as a Baptist preacher – if he were now preaching unrelenting prosecution of the War on Terror, tax cuts, an end to earmarks, Social Security and Medicare reform, opposition to economy-crippling environmentalism and the confirmation of law-abiding judges. On that sort of platform, he would genuinely fill the niche that Fred Thompson for some reason hasn’t and would probably be far out in front of the field. Is it any surprise, though, that he draws dispraise from Republican stalwarts who don’t like the federal government’s dictating what we eat, drink or even smoke, don’t think that the Bush Administration suffers from “an arrogant bunker mentality”, have no interest in sweet talking the Iranian mullarchy, want to see a realistic tax reduction plan rather than a pie-in-the-sky scheme that promises only to shift the tax burden around, favor free trade agreements, and think that official clemency should temper mercy with justice.

While Governor Huckabee has suffered a few unwarranted attacks, such as deconstructions of his good-hearted Christmas commercial, the notion that criticism of his candidacy stems from anti-evangelical animus is at best silly and at worst a form of pernicious “identity politics”. One might as well say that the “Wall Street-to-Washington Axis” rejected Jimmy Carter because he was a Southern Baptist.

What truly wrong foots the governor with so many conservatives is this: He may have right-of-center instincts, but he shows no sign of having thought a lot about most national issues. His campaign book, for instance, is a collection of self-help bromides, not a set of thoughtful reflections on foreign, domestic or any other policy. (Vide Andrew Ferguson’s review.) It may be a bit unfair to judge the depth of his thinking by such faux pas as likening a national sales tax to “waving a magic wand, releasing us from pain and unfairness”, setting a goal “that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade”, trying to meld the foreign policy thinking of woozy ecofreak Thomas Friedman and hard-line neoconservative Frank Gaffney, or spectacularly flip-flopping on immigration (from supporting in-state tuition for children of illegal aliens to boasting an endorsement from the head of the Minutemen), but how much other material do we have on which to base a judgement? The problem here isn’t the governor’s Faith; it’s his Reason.

The Computer I Want for Christmas, and Other Thoughts

Although David Frum is, according to himself, “not a reader who craves sci-fi, period”, he recently posted an informal review of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which prompted a reader to apprise him of the existence of steampunk. The reader included a link to the marvelously Victorian rendition of a computer pictured opposite (click to enlarge). If Wells or Rudyard Kipling or G. A. Henty had owned a computer, isn’t that exactly what it would have looked like? A large percentage of the past century’s cultural upheaval can be intuitively grasped by comparing it to a modern desktop machine.

On a more serious question, I’m afraid that David, through lack of acquaintance with “sci-fi”, goes astray. He writes,

Striking too is the weird role of technology in this classic work of science fiction. The Eloi and Morlocks are decayed species, living amidst the ruins of a higher civilization. Yet when Wells imagined the achievements of this high civilization, so far in the future, he imagined it still using paper backs (the Time Traveler comes across the ruins of a library), and displaying its museum collections in glass cases, and manufacturing its necessities with huge machinery built of iron and belching exhaust. . . .

Wells is clearly much more impressed by the pace of the social changes of his time than the technical changes. He could envision a total transformation of humanity, but not of humanity’s tools. And I don’t think this is just a matter of artistic imperative, although surely that is at work. In 1895, it may have been more natural to think of the advent of industrialism as a one-time event, a shift from one phase of humanity’s existence to another, like the shift from the Classical to the Medieval, rather than as a permanent state of unceasing and accelerating change.

He then quotes a passage from John Maynard Keynes, who did apparently believe, in David’s summation,

that the swift changes of the previous half-century [before 1919] were an aberration – that mankind was now bound to settle again into a stationary state, albeit one in which motorcars, radios, and transcontinental cables would be fixtures as, say, artillery, clocks, and navigational equipment had been fixtures in the steady-state economy of the 18th century.

It would be an interesting project to try to date the moment at which the idea that technological change was not going to stop really took hold in the western consciousness. 1950 maybe?

For “western consciousness” as a whole, I think the real answer is that it hasn’t yet, but for science fiction the year was much earlier, at least as early as Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. As many, many readers have observed, SF’s spotty record of forecasting the technological future is absolutely Delphic compared to its nearly unanimous failure to foresee social revolutions that occurred within a few decades. That a Heinlein character is nicknamed “slipstick” for his proficiency with the slide rule is a minor lapse of imagination in a future of moving highways, extraterrestrial colonies, asteroid mining, interstellar travel, near-immortality and other technological marvels. That the social, political and economic background of the master’s fiction was recognizably 20th Century, following rather than leading trends, is more strikingly non-prophetic. Heinlein was among the SF writers most attentive to the impact of scientific progress on society, yet his imagination proved far more timid than reality. I attribute that fact to a presumption that only strong blows will overcome social inertia, a view that had the experience of millennia to give it credibility. The greatest surprise of the past hundred years is how fluid society became as soon as it grew wealthy enough to shrug off the ancient necessities.

Today, of course, the presumption has shifted, at least in the science fiction community. That the next few centuries will see the complete obsolescence of traditional relationships, religion and morality is now taken as a given. The change of perspective is interesting. One might say that there are four combinations that fiction can explore:

1. Slow technological change and slow social change (the mainstream, as well as the reality of most of human history);

2. Fast technological change and slow social change (classic SF and, to a large extent, the period during which it was written);

3. Fast technological change and fast social change (contemporary SF and the contemporary world); and

4. Slow technological change and fast social change (the covert premise of much utopian and dystopian fiction and the unhappy experience of a few moments in history).

As noted, we are currently whirling about in Combination no. 3. How long that will last, I have no idea, but the one sure lesson of history is that it, too, will pass away, and our descendants will wonder how anybody could have been fool enough to imagine that turbulence was a constant. As another of David’s readers puts it, science fiction –

not only speculates about the future, but — as time passes and the work becomes dated — it illuminates the past, setting the hopes, dreams, and nightmares of our forefathers into stark relief, as memorable for what it gets wrong as for what it gets right.

Taxes: The Angry Party vs. Fiscal Reality

At the Democratic version of the Des Moines Register’s farcical debates – would that the candidates would have turned their backs on the insufferable moderator and argued among themselves – there was unanimity on one issue: “Democratic presidential hopefuls called for higher taxes on the highest-paid Americans and on big corporations Thursday and agreed in an unusually cordial debate that any thought of balancing the federal budget would have to wait.” Mrs. Clinton openly declared that her ideal is to sweep away the entirety of the Bush tax cuts and return to the good old days of her husband’s tax regime. As President, she would be able to reach that goal with the backing of one-third-plus-one of one house of Congress. Most of EGTRRA will expire after 2010, and extensions can be vetoed.

Only a day later, we learned that wholesale and retail prices had climbed in November at their fastest pace in years. A comparable surge in “core CPI” (admittedly an arbitrary construct) hadn’t been seen since the Ford Administration. One month’s data are no reason for panic, but they do emphasize a fact that has been becoming increasingly obvious: If economic growth is to continue, monetary policy cannot be its driver. The Fed’s long-time policy of liberal monetary creation is reaching its limits, particularly now that its first mission must be to restabilize the credit markets. The assistance of fiscal policy is past due.

There is no rational school of economic analysis that doesn’t, at this stage of the business cycle, find virtue in tax reduction. If Democrats were still Keynesians, they would be looking for fiscal stimulus. Their tax cut preferences might be different from conservatives’, and they would probably wanting “pump-priming” expenditures too, but they would not be demanding higher federal revenues. Alas, the Dems aren’t Keynesians, and they aren’t monetarists, and they aren’t supply-siders. They are victims of their own hatreds, who apparently want to raise taxes just because George W. Bush cut them, and whatever the Bushitler does must be evil.

It will be difficult to persuade the Angry Party to respond to fiscal necessity. Nothing, however, prevents the White House and the bevy of GOP Presidential campaigners from making an issue of it. At a minimum, uncertainty about the future should be mitigated by making EGTRRA permanent. To go with that, I have two suggestions: First, reduce the top marginal individual and corporate income tax rates to 30 percent. Second, equalize Social Security taxes with outlays, eliminating the fictional Social Security trust fund and giving Americans at all income levels a lower marginal tax rate. The latter step will have the subsidiary virtue of removing some of the gauze that obscures Social Security’s financial trajectory. It might then be possible to debate rationally whether the system can continue indefinitely without fundamental reform.

The overriding issue in the 2008 elections ought to be the War on Terror, not “the economy, stupid”. But, if half the political parties and four-fifths of the media wish to pretend that America is an island, let’s do what we can to see that the island is well-tended.

Global Cooling Anecdote

Yes, I know: Every hot spell is evidence of Global Warming, and every cold spell is just an anecdote. Nonetheless, while the politicians and bureaucrats ruminating in Bali deny that any debate is possible about climatic issues, here’s an anecdote from my home town:

The first half of December has been a rough one for Chicago, with frequent bouts of freezing precipitation repeatedly glazing the area. A major snowstorm on Dec. 4-5 brought up to 8" of snow to northern portions of the metropolitan area.

Not only has this December been snowy and icy, it has also been cold, averaging nearly 5 degrees below normal. So far, there has been only one day this month with a high in the 40s, and the city recorded its earliest 0 degree reading in three decades on Dec. 6. More cold weather is on tap for tonight. As skies clear, the fresh snow cover will act as a cold-weather factory allowing readings to plunge into the single-digits with the coldest interior spots headed to near or even below zero.

I did my bit to feed warmth-inducing carbon to Gaia by flying out of town for the weekend – far from the contribution of the thousands of aircraft that converged on, and are now leaving, Bali, but we all must do what we can.

Whispers from SMOFCon

This year I missed SMOFCon (held last weekend in Boston), but, assisted by Kevin Standlee’s LiveJournal (whose permalinks are a nuisance to find; look at the posts from December 7th through 10th) and my confidential informants, I can nonetheless note whispers and rumors emanating thence.

This year’s Fannish Inquisition turned into a Denvention Pre-Gripe Session, to the point where the con’s ordinarily unflappable chairman was seen pulsating his wings once or twice. So far as I can tell, his committee as done at least as much in its first year as Chicon’s did – er, except that we had two years left after our first.

There’s no sense in redebating the abstract virtues of the two-year lead time for Worldcons, and I won’t cite Denvention’s teething troubles as a reason to make another change to the too often altered site selection procedure. The moral to draw is that the World Science Fiction Convention is an appreciably more complicated enterprise than it was 20 years ago, requiring a full two years of steady labor to produce. The first one that I worked on at a moderately high level (Chicon IV, 1982) could afford to putter around for several months after being chosen. As a broad-brush indicator of relative levels of complexity, Chicon IV fit all of its functions into one hotel. Chicon 2000, 18 years later, used all of that space plus virtually all that was available in two more facilities. Regular conrunners haven’t noticed this scope creep. It crept, and it was never too difficult to add one more thing, because 36 months was indeed more than ample time. Now, the time has been cut by a third, but the expanded task list remains.

So what can we do? Go back to Chicon IV’s parsimonious programming (something like six tracks at its peak), rein in the technical ambitions of the Hugo Ceremony and Masquerade, drop innovations like the Concourse, and otherwise simplify the event? The alternative is for concomms to start work more promptly and intensively. To do that, they will need to have their senior positions filled within a month or so after site selection, which implies recruiting before the vote.

Pre-vote recruitment will be easier, of course, if no doubt exists as to who will win. And perhaps fandom is already evolving, without the prompting of Intelligent Design, to adapt to the new environment. After a period during which Worldcons were routinely decided in contested elections (seven of the first nine in the 21st Century), this year’s Inquisition heard from only one bidder each for 2010 (Melbourne), 2011 (Seattle) and 2012 (Chicago). According to Mayan cosmology, the world will end after the last of those, so there was no need for later bids. Well, okay, quickly and tentatively mentioned were somewhere-in-Texas in 2013 and San Diego in 2015. For 2014, which will be the 75th anniversary Worldcon, there was a small to-do about somewhere-in-Europe, including an effort to draft a site by throwing money at it (i. e., replicating the tactic that got the Australia in 2010 effort started), which apparently yielded nothing more than a big tip for the hotel staff.

Given that Melbourne is a shoo-in for 2010, a NASFiC bid, for Raleigh, appeared. It’s heartening that committees willing to take on the NASFiC can still be found, notwithstanding that trusmofs scorn their efforts and the lead time is a paltry 12 months.

Will contested Worldcon bids become rarae aves, arising only when an odd concatenation of circumstances makes a consensus choice impossible? That is, for rather different reasons, the SMOFCon paradigm. Until this year, the only contested election had been for 1996, when Seattle and Boston tied and the winner (it was Seattle) turned on a coin flip. The 2007 SMOFCon race was nearly as close. Columbus defeated Boulder by a margin of 61 to 59, aided by two strokes of fortune: A pro-Boulder voter left the room to take a phone call, and the Boulder presentation carelessly stated that the price of the shuttle between the Denver airport and its site was $46, without specifying that it was $46 round trip, not one-way. I’m told that the contest aroused a surprising degree of antagonism, presumably because (as the old joke about university faculty politics has it) so little was at stake.

Future SMOFCon “expressions of interest” (no one does anything so vulgar as “bid”) came from Austin in 2009 (a four-page flyer, so this one isn’t likely to be evanescent), San Jose in 2010, Maui in 2011 and Amsterdam in “2011 or later, but not much later”. There was also a Pittsburgh presentation for 2010, which a post-con e-mail to SMOFCon attendees amended to 2012.

Fair Weather Humanitarians

Assuming that the Washington Post’s story about how Nancy Pelosi and other liberals initially reacted to “waterboarding” isn’t seriously distorted, it deserves its dexterospheric buzz.

[L]ong before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

Waterboarding – “strapping a prisoner to a board or other flat surface, and then raising his feet above the level of his head[; a] cloth is then placed over [his]mouth and nose, and water is poured over his face to make [him] believe he is drowning” – is now regarded by anti-war Democrats as an especially heinous form of torture, so why the silence then? There are three possible explanations, none very creditable:

1. Rep. Pelosi et al. weren’t paying close attention to, or lacked the faculty to grasp, the briefings that they received.

2. Their nonreaction is an instance of Situation Ethics. They had no qualms about waterboarding when President Bush was popular and the War on Terror enjoyed broad public support. Under those circumstances, the end justified the means. Today, the President and the war have low approval ratings, so one may be fastidious.

3. They agreed that waterboarding, which is overpoweringly frightful but does no physical harm, was a proper tactic for urgent cases involving hardened enemies, but lacked the fortitude to maintain that view in the face of criticism from the Angry Left.

Far be it from me to attempt to probe minds for the true explanation: Stupidity, amorality and weakness are very different, but which one is at work in this instance doesn’t matter all that much.

An Historical Burden

Invoking “the judgement of history” is portentous but usually a bit silly. History fades. In a couple of millennia, the rights and wrongs of our current controversies will be as obscure as the merits of the Emperor Trajan’s invasion of Parthia, and whose advice was right or wrong will be just as little remembered.

Nonetheless, last week’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran could be a turning point in world history. By trumpeting the U.S. intelligence agencies’ “high confidence” that Tehran shut down its military nuclear weapons program four years ago, it ensured that meaningful international efforts to prevent the mullarchy from becoming a nuclear power will end. It is impossible to believe that the authors did not foresee and intend that outcome. If they naively supposed anything else, they are too incompetent to be issuing credible evaluations of anything.

The report’s effect was, it is important to note, almost entirely the product of presentation and editing. Suppose it had begun like this:

We judge with moderate confidence that Iran did not, as of mid-2007, have a military nuclear weapons program, although it did maintain declared civilian and uranium enrichment programs with military potential. We judge with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.

Those conclusions, too, are in the report and are clearly more salient than what may have happened in 2003. They might as well have been written in invisible ink. Time, to take a typical example from the MSM, declares on this week’s cover, “A new intelligence report says Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program.” Again, if the report’s authors didn’t foresee such headlines, they are incompetent.

Whether Iran acquires nuclear weapons now depends solely upon whether the mullahs want them. If they do, the “international community” won’t stymie them. The men most responsible for that state of affairs are, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, named Thomas Fingar, Vann Van Diepen and Kenneth C. Brill. Various dexterospherists claim that they are anti-Bush zealots. Whether that’s true isn’t very important. What matters is that they bear a momentous historical burden.

If Iran becomes a nuclear power in the near future, if – to look at a terrible but not implausible possibility – it incinerates Tel Aviv, Messrs. Fingar, Van Diepen and Brill will be remembered, for so long as History accurately remembers, as the facilitators of that avoidable disaster. If they meant only to poke George W. Bush in the eye when they constructed their misleading précis, their responsibility will be no less grand. If I were one of them, I would not sleep well.

The Reality and the Surreality of the NIE

For purposes of this post, I judge, with moderate confidence, that the National Intelligence Estimate – Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities represents the good faith conclusions of apolitical professionals. Your judgment may vary.

The most informative way to read this document is to arrange its “key judgments” in order of the intelligence community’s degree of confidence, to wit –

High Confidence

• “[I]n fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

• “[T]he halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.”

• “[T]he halt lasted at least several years.”

• “[U]ntil fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.”

• “[S]ince fall 2003, Iran has been conducting research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications—some of which would also be of limited use for nuclear weapons.”

• Iran has not yet “produce[d] sufficient amounts of fissile material indigenously” to “have nuclear weapons”.

• “Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.”

• “Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.”

Moderate-to-High Confidence

• “Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

• “Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon.”

• Iran “has not obtained enough [fissile material] for a nuclear weapon.”

Moderate Confidence

• “[T]he halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program.”

• “Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007.”

• “[T]he earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely.”

• “Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame.”

• Iran “still faces significant technical problems operating” its centrifuges.

• “[C]onvincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran’s key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons.

• “Iran probably would use covert facilities—rather than its declared nuclear sites—for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon.”

Low Confidence

• “Iran probably has imported at least some weapons-usable fissile material.”

Unable to Form a Judgment

• “[W]e do not know whether [Tehran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

• “We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program indefinitely while it weighs its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program.”

A sober, realistic reading of these bureaucratic bullet points suggests that the interruption of the mullarchy’s quest for nuclear weapons is only a respite, welcome but hardly a reason to doze off – especially in light of the fact that the NIE has only “moderate confidence” (“the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence”) that the program halted in 2003 is still halted.

But the reading now sweeping the bien-pensants is surreal. The Left has drawn the firm conclusion that concern about Iranian nuclear weapons was never justified. Two years ago, the NIE expressed “high confidence” that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure”. Paying heed to that highly confident judgment was neocon warmongering. This one, however, is beyond any doubt.

What’s more, since, according to the NIE, Iran halted its nuclear program “in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure”, the obvious next step is to reduce scrutiny and pressure; hence the outraged reaction to President Bush’s call for continuing both.

The Left isn’t even eager to express pleasure at a reduction in the dangers facing America and its allies. As James Taranto observes,

If one can have high confidence in the NIE findings, then those findings are good news for America. They mean that a regime that has repeatedly shown its hostility toward our country is less of a threat than we had reason to fear. If Iran had nuclear weapons, it could create a humanitarian catastrophe. Or it could use the threat to do so to do all sorts of mischief that would be destructive to U.S. interests in the region.

But we haven’t seen anyone celebrating the NIE as good news for America. The people who profess to believe it all seem to view it as a partisan document, a weapon to be used in their battle against the Bush administration. To the administration’s domestic foes, it doesn't seem to matter how much of a threat Iran poses; short-term political gain is more important than the interests of America.

The administration is vulnerable to the same criticism. By releasing the NIE now, it seems to be signaling that it has decided to throw in the towel on dealing with the Iranian threat, leaving it for the next administration. [Not a fair criticism, I judge with moderate-to-high confidence; if the document hadn’t been released, it surely would have been leaked, accompanied by malicious media spin.]

This column does not have high confidence that the NIE is right. But we certainly hope it is, because if it isn’t, its consequences could prove very dangerous.

The Iranian mullarchs have declared time and again that America is their principal enemy. Their arming and funding of the mufsidun in Iraq shows that this enmity is no mere theoretical hatred. As Michael Ledeen frequently points out, the Iranian regime has been at war, killing Americans, for the past 30 years. That fact is more significant than the wavering evaluations set forth in this season’s NIE. The threat may be diminished for now. If we pretend it isn’t there, it will return, more dangerous than before.

Addendum: Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal carries a somber editorial on “‘High Confidence’ Games”.

We wish we could be as sanguine, both about the quality of U.S. intelligence and its implications for U.S. diplomacy. For years, senior Administration officials, including Condoleezza Rice, have stressed to us how little the government knows about what goes on inside Iran. In 2005, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report underscored that “Across the board, the Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors.” And as our liberal friends used to remind us, you can never trust the CIA. (Only later did they figure out the agency was usually on their side.) . . .

In any case, the real issue is not Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but its nuclear program, period. As the NIE acknowledges, Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale – that is, build the capability to make the fuel for a potential bomb. And it is doing so in open defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. No less a source than the IAEA recently confirmed that Iran already has blueprints to cast uranium in the shape of an atomic bomb core.

The U.S. also knows that Iran has extensive technical information on how to fit a warhead atop a ballistic missile. And there is considerable evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps has been developing the detonation devices needed to set off a nuclear explosion at the weapons testing facility in Parchin. Even assuming that Iran is not seeking a bomb right now, it is hardly reassuring that they are developing technologies that could bring them within a screw’s twist of one. . . .

The larger worry here is how little we seem to have learned from our previous intelligence failures. Over the course of a decade, our intelligence services badly underestimated Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, then overestimated them. Now they have done a 180-degree turn on Iran, and in such a way that will contribute to a complacency that will make it easier for Iran to build a weapon. Our intelligence services are supposed to inform the policies of elected officials, but increasingly their judgments seem to be setting policy. This is dangerous.

Anti-Narnia on the Screen

Now that Philip Pullman’s imaginative, fascist-tinged Golden Compass is coming to theaters everywhere, I see that Tom Smith (the law professor, not the milblogger) has much the same view as I did a couple of years ago. In Professor Smith’s words,

The villains in the Golden Compass and sequels are the Catholic-Nazis – a fair characterization of the book’s point, since anytime you have villains running concentration camps with medical experiments, that is psychic charge you are invoking. But in fact, if you want to experience the flavor that contemporary fascism would have when translated into first rate children’s literature, you cannot, in my view, do better than Pullman’s series.

To be fair, I am not saying Pullman is some sort of neo-Nazi. I think his invocation of fascist themes and memes is probably unconscious. It is just that similar jobs tend to call forth similar tools. The European fascists generally and the Nazis in particular very much wanted to cut off the influence and ultimately destroy the Judeo-Christian God and the Church in particular. They had political reasons for wanting this, but also ideological and (weirdly) religious reasons. Not all of the Nazis were devotes of the occult, but many of them were, and the ones who were not very much understood the importance and power of building a fascist mythos which could motivate and inspire people. To put together their ideology, the Nazis pulled out of the great cesspool of European ideas a lot of nasty things that would have been much better left alone, but among them was the idea that Christianity, which they saw as nothing more than a kind of Judaism, severed people from their inner Nature spirit, their pagan, let’s run through the woods naked sort of thing. When Pullman has the Church taking children to camps to sever them from their daemons – their animal- embodied-soul-mates that every whole person in his alternative universe has – he is just parroting in kid lit form the old canard you could have picked up in a hundred disreputable places in Bavaria or Vienna in the 1930’s.

I’ll be interested to find out how the producers of the movie have handled the last few pages of The Golden Compass, where Lord Asriel, sounding as megalomaniacal as an intoxicated gauleiter, advances his cause by torturing a small boy to death. At that point, the reader doesn’t know whether Asriel is a hero or a villain. The movie audience is unlikely to be in the same state of doubt. How will kids react if the counterpart to Dumbledore, Gandalf and Aslan speaks and acts like the Asriel of the book? I doubt that the film makers want to find out. Will Hollywood’s talents for sugar-coating and watering-down be equal to the challenge?

The “Mormon Problem”

If Harry Reid were running for President, every font of Conventional Wisdom would lecture us that negative attitudes toward his religion were un-American bigotry. Time and Newsweek would already have run their “Can Evangelicals Learn Tolerance?” cover stories.

But Senator Reid is sticking to the important business of making the War on Terror as hard as possible (on the President, that is, not on the terrorists). The Mormon candidate is a Republican, so religious tests are nearly so unpopular with the elite media as they were in, say, 1960. Even the dreaded Religious Right has gotten a free pass. Polls indicating a high degree of anti-Mormon animus among conservative Christians are subjects for matter-of-fact reporting, not high-minded moralizing.

Governor Romney has evidently decided that he needs to address his “Mormon problem”. What he will say next Thursday is unknown, but his natural inclination, as a stereotypical CEO, is to take the “safe”, unimaginative course. That would involve reprising candidate Kennedy’s famous speech to an audience of Protestant clergymen. David Frum thinks that would be “a big and possibly disastrous error”. His reasoning seems to me irrefutable:

[Kennedy’s] answers resonated so powerfully because they directly and forthrightly responded to the actual questions that the Americans of 1960 were asking about the possibility of a Roman Catholic president:

a) Would a President Kennedy take political direction from the Roman Catholic hierarchy?

b) Would a President Kennedy undermine the separation of church and state and seek some kind of preferred position for the Roman Catholic church?

Those questions were, I’ll note (though David tries to justify them), founded on sheer prejudice: The Syllabus of Errors was a century in the past. For longer than that, Roman Catholics had held office in America at every level from dog catcher to governor, with no worse intrusions of Romanism into political life than serving fish at Friday fund raisers. Still, as David says, the ostensible objections to an RC President kept away from dogma.

Nobody expected Kennedy to defend the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, or the idea of intercession by saints, or the use of images in Catholic places of worship. He spoke in Houston as a politician, explaining his understanding of the boundaries between religion and politics.

For Mitt Romney, that won’t be good enough, because the ostensible objections have little to do with “the boundaries between religion and politics”. Jonah Goldberg posed a question to readers who “have everything from ‘reservations’ and ‘concerns’ to outright revulsion at the prospect of having a Mormon be the Republican nominee or the President of the United States”:

What I would like to know, however, is what exactly these people think a Mormon President might do that would be so unacceptable? Are there Mormon public policies I do not know of that would be implemented? Is there a Mormon faction in foreign policy?

He got plenty of replies, but not much of an answer:

Most of the responses I’ve received flatly admit that there is no problem with Mitt’s conservatism, it’s the Mormonism. And it’s not what he would do in office, but the simple fact that he would be in office, that vexes some — but by no means all — Christian conservative correspondents. In short, the majority view among readers is that a Mormon president would be ... too good for Mormonism. I should be very clear that quite a few evangelicals responded that they’d have no problem voting for Romney if he was their favorite and some said he was their favorite (and I’m sure more would have said so if I was taking a poll — I wasn’t, and I’m not). But pretty much no one made a serious case that Romney’s Mormonism would have a public policy impact that warrants voting against him, which I think is very revealing.

What makes this informal survey especially revealing is the fact that historical arguments like those used to question the separation-of-church-and-state bona fides of Roman Catholics could be deployed against Mormons. The Latter Day Saints originated as a kind of theocracy, and within living memory the LDS hierarchy played an active political role. Figures like Reed Smoot and Ezra Taft Benson were both major politicians and Mormon “apostles”.

Yet no one takes seriously the notion that a Romney Administration would have its strings pulled from Salt Lake City. Instead, the correspondents whom Jonah quotes are explicitly displeased by Mormon theology, e. g.,

I know quite a few evangelicals, myself included, concerned that a Romney presidency will create a platform for mainstreaming the Mormon faith. If you start with the belief that Mormonism gets essential Christian doctrine wrong (e.g. Christology), and if you believe that getting it that wrong has eternal consequences, it would be strange to ignore the religious implications of your vote.

Now, I’ll second any motion to declare Mormon Christology wrong, to say nothing of its teachings regarding pre-existence of souls, plurality of gods, post mortem baptism, etc. From a Christian perspective, the logia of Joseph Smith are quite bizarre.

But bizarre enough to disqualify their adherents from a secular office in a nonconfessional polity? Let’s get a little perspective here. Compared to historical Christian theology, Mormonism is bizarre. Compared to a host of other religions, past and present, it is sobriety instantiated. A Mahayana Buddhist would be embarrassed by the poverty of its imagination.

Joseph Smith was a religious autodidact whose “revelations” amount to a modest reshaping of “natural religion”. His followers, extending parts of that corpus and passing over others, fashioned what is, in essence, an intense cult of family life, in which divinity is revealed in married couples and their children. That isn’t my faith, but it certainly isn’t abhorrent.

What is at work here, I think, is a symbiosis between politically naive Christians and a left-wing commentariat that is delighted to foster religious prejudices for its own ends. Byron York calls attention to an NPR interviewer who determinedly quizzes Governor Romney about Biblical interpretation. Do you think that any Moslem would face similar questions about the precise quality of his belief in the Koran?

Quotes of the Day

Reviewing a stack of books “written” by current Presidential contenders, Andrew Ferguson reminds us of an inconvenient truth about the Tin Lady’s character:

If you’re like me, when you read books by politicians you get distracted by the question of who actually wrote them. Americans are far past the point where we expect our statesmen to sweat through an effort to discover and assemble and refine their thoughts by putting them into their own words. For this reason, and this reason only, I was happy to find in my stack a new copy of Hillary Clinton’s famous bestseller, It Takes a Village, revised, updated, and reissued in a special anniversary edition to coincide with her presidential campaign, by which she seeks to take over the whole village. . . .

I got past the cover photo, with its army of youngsters and Mrs. Clinton’s mandible-cracking smile, to search through the actual text, in hopes of finding some mention of Barbara Feinman who, in addition to other professional accomplishments, wrote the book. A decade ago, when Village was first published, Feinman was much talked about for having gone unmentioned.

Shortly before the book came out, Mrs. Clinton boasted of having “written a 320-page book in longhand over the last six months.” This came as a surprise to her ghostwriter. Feinman had often worked late nights at the White House and even followed Mrs. Clinton on vacation in hope of picking up stray thoughts she could use to bulk up the manuscript, and she had been assured her role as ghost would be generously acknowledged. Yet when Village finally appeared there was no mention of Feinman either on the cover or in the Acknowledgments. News stories appeared detailing Feinman’s role, but White House spokesmen backed the first lady in her contention that the book was her work alone.

It became a minor controversy, stoked not only by Mrs. Clinton’s political adversaries but also by Feinman’s friends in the Washington press corps (she’s a former researcher for Bob Woodward). With Mrs. Clinton’s claims of sole authorship long ago disproved, I picked up this expanded edition of Village to see whether she had expanded it enough to make room for Barbara Feinman. Nope: Mrs. Clinton still believes that while it takes a village to raise a child, it takes nobody worth naming to write her book for her.

Also worth your attention are Mr. Ferguson’s takes on volumes by aspirants Biden, Edwards, Huckabee, Romney and Dodd. Campaign books are a much derided genre, but, in their own way, these specimens are revelatory.

Biden: “His legendary self-regard becomes more impressive when the reader sees it in typescript, undistracted by the smile and the hair plugs.”

Edwards: “Home serves as one politician’s warning to voters who might hope for a limit on his ambitions for ‘giving government back to the people.’ Lock your doors if you want, he seems to be saying; go ahead and draw those blinds, retreat to the bulwark if you dare. But the gates of Home will not prevail against my plans to make your life wonderful.

Huckabee: “His book is the work of a buttinski – a busybody in overdrive. There is no sphere of other people's lives that he doesn’t have elaborate theories about how to manage. Anyone who follows Governor Huckabee’s STOPs will find his energy, if not his income, sorely taxed.”

Romney: “Turnaround looks like a business book, reads like a business book, and is as boring as a business book . . . . Just as Huckabee would like to squeeze politics into the categories of pop therapy, Romney hopes to apply the principles of corporate management to politics: ‘At All Costs, Protect the Brand.’ ‘Never Underestimate the Value of Your Product.’ ‘Rivalry Breeds Interest.’ ‘Communicate the Vision.’ ‘Challenge the Team to Stretch.’ There are a dozen more. If they worked for Romney, they can work for you – and for America. It also helps if you look like Bob Barker.”

Dodd: “He’d waited for years, he writes in an introduction, for just the right time to publish his father's letters. That time happily coincided with his own decision to run for president. His father’s words, says the son, are suddenly urgent because they form a kind of anticipatory indictment of the current Republican administration in its fight against Islamic terrorists.”

Were I running for President, the prospect of having a reader like Andrew Ferguson would keep me safe from the temptation to write.

The Annapolis Follies Rationalized

The strangest event of the past several weeks – maybe of the past several years – was the “Middle Eastern peace conference” in Annapolis. What makes it strange is that nobody believes that the negotiations it launched will bring the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict a nanosecond nearer. Various Arab delegations displayed their desire for reconciliation by refusing to acknowledge the existence of Israel’s foreign minister (who, it must be said, did her country no honor by whining that no one would shake her hand or speak to her).

So what was the point? Legacy hunting by President Bush and Secretary Rice is a popular explanation, but neither of them is delusional enough to hunt for a legacy of fool’s gold. Presumably, they think contra mundum that Annapolis will accomplish what Camp David and Oslo didn’t. Maybe the idea is that Prime Minister Olmert and “President” Abbas are so weak that their only hopes of political survival lie in reaching an agreement and that America is so strong that it can both calm the fears of the Israeli Right and compel the acquiescence of the Islamofascist Left.

That view of the situation may sound implausible; it certainly does to me. It is the kind of maneuver that would be promising in the diplomatic equivalent of a wargame, where the players act rationally based on their and others’ strengths and weaknesses. In such an exercise, the Abbas stand-in reasons, “My military power is risible; terrorism can annoy the Israelis but not drive them from the land they occupy; my Arab ‘friends’ will do nothing concrete for my cause; my intransigence inflicts vastly more suffering on my own people than on my enemies; and if I strike a bargain right now, there is a good chance that the overwhelming might of the U.S. will help me crush Hamas.”

Similarly, the Israeli player thinks, “Abbas has no charisma, no following and no ability; any movement that he leads is no threat; by putting him in charge of a Palestinian statelet, we preempt more energetic and dangerous opponents.”

Then there is the American player, who may be a cynic rather than a dewy-eyed optimist: “These guys aren’t likely to make peace, but, as long as they are talking, the incompetent Abbas has a card to play against Hamas: He may be able to conjure up a Palestinian state, and they certainly can’t. By the time the talks fall apart, the Iraqi campaign will be an undeniable victory, and American prestige will be at a new high. Once that happens, the natural tendency to prefer the strong horse will favor us, and the Palestinian irreconcilables – Fatah and Hamas alike – will fade away.”

Looked at this way, the Administration’s strategy isn’t preposterous; in a game, it might work. Unfortunately, life is more complex than any game, and clever ploys generally wind up being too clever by half. Once a century, a Bismarck plays a Napoleon III like a pipe organ. More frequently, John F. Kennedys outmaneuver themselves in Vietnams. I wish I could be confident that any U.S. President is a Bismarck.

Further reading: Lee Smith, “The Price of Annapolis”
Herb London, “Syria and Annapolis”
Meyrav Wurmser, “Annapolis Animosity”
Bret Stephens, “Condi’s Road to Damascus”
Ralph Peters, “No Lasting Peace: The Illusions of Annapolis”
Andrew C. McCarthy, “Farce: Burying the Bush Doctrine in Annapolis”
Caroline Glick, “American Folly”
Caroline Glick (interview), “Give Annapolis a Chance?”
David Frum, “Paradox?”
John Podhoretz, “Eternal Nausea: Condi’s Futile Mideast Peace Parley”