This just in
Bush Keeps Revising War Justification (Tom Raum, AP):

President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now.

Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader's weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

Experts like the Brookings Institute's Michael O'Hanlon say that "[e]xcept for the weapons of mass destruction argument, there is some validity in each of Bush's shifting rationales." Pretty big exception! But Hanlon doesn't "have any big problems with any of them, analytically." He goes on to say

The problem is they can't change the realities on the ground in Iraq, which is that we're in the process of beginning to lose.

Yes, that's a really bad problem, too. But surely O'Hanlon shouldn't need too many more seconds of thought to see an "analytical" problem -- both for the military and for the American people -- with a president stating multiple and shifting rationales for a war?

Elsewhere, I read that Bush's use of the word "unacceptable" is climbing year by year:

They number 37 so far this year, as opposed to five in 2003, 18 in 2002 and 14 in 2001.

I'm way ahead of him. posted by Thomas Nephew at 3:12:00 PM -- |    

 
The South turns against the war in Iraq
Chris Kromm, the director of the Institute for Southern Studies, reports that a survey commissioned by his organization finds opposition to the Iraq war growing in the South:

The survey reveals that Southerners, after showing disproportionate support for the war early on, now doubt U.S. policy in Iraq just as strongly as people in other regions of the country, and in some cases more so. Among the findings:

*** 57% of Southerners believe the U.S. 'should have stayed out of Iraq,' compared to 44% who think the U.S. 'did the right thing' by taking military action. Nationally, 58% of the public believes the U.S. should have stayed out and 43% now agree with military action.

Prior Institute reports have noted how deeply embedded the military is in the region,* but also that the South has been hit hardest by Iraq military deaths, no doubt part of why Southern rejection of future casualties is only slightly less pronounced than in the country as a whole:

The poll also looked at the public’s willingness to accept the future human and material costs of the ongoing counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq. When asked to provide "an acceptable number of U.S. military deaths" in Iraq, 63% of respondents in Southern states and 68% in other regions said "zero."

Emphasis in original; other selected results can be seen here. In particular, Southerners are actually more likely than other Americans to recommend complete withdrawal from Iraq. Also, 62% of Southerners felt "very sad" about the war, versus 58% of all Americans; like other Americans, only 9% were "very proud" about it.


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* The "South" was defined as the thirteen states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia, and the survey oversampled these states. Results have a margin of error of +/- 2.7% posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:09:00 PM -- |    

 
655,000
And counting.

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

As reported by David Brown in the Washington Post yesterday, the study found that over 90% of the excess deaths over the March 2003-August 2006 time period were violent deaths, for a rate of about 500 more violent deaths per day over what had been the case before the invasion, and that the death rate is climbing. The Johns Hopkins/Mustansiriya University study -- published in the Lancet as "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey" (free reg. req.) -- uses what is described in the report by a CDC expert as a "tried and true" methodology for war-torn areas:

The survey was conducted between May 20 and July 10 by eight Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

Brown reports that the method yielded about the same pre-invasion death rates estimated by the CIA and the CDC, which are presumably based on other methods. A Johns Hopkins School of Public Health press release notes that this study estimates close to the same post-invasion death rate for the March, 2003-August 2004 time period that was estimated by a previous Johns Hopkins study.

Laila Lalami points out that the 655,000 figure is in the ballpark of the number of Iraqis estimated to have died because of Saddam Hussein, when counting Iraqi dead from the war he started with Iran and Kurds and Shia killed in genocidal campaigns within Iraq. (Overall, the Johns Hopkins study estimates that about 31% of the excess deaths were directly attributable to coalition forces, but of course the remaining number wouldn't have happened either had there been no invasion.)

Nothing else to say. Except that, as Jonathan Schwarz points out, this deserved more than a mention on page 12 of the Post yesterday -- especially given what made page 1. And that any of us who (like me) ever supported this war have our share of these deaths to answer for, and little to show for it but grief like this, repeated thousands of times.


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NOTE: Lalami ("MoorishGirl") via Bill Day ("A Web Undone 2").

UPDATE, 10/13: I was remiss in not noting the 95% confidence interval for the estimate: 392,979–942,636. A 95% confidence interval is a range of values that would encompass the true number of deaths 95% of the time when the sampling process is repeated. Put differently, the odds are 19 to 1 that this particular interval contains the true number of excess deaths. Obviously, this particular confidence interval contains a wide range of possible values; just as obviously, even the lower bound would be a shocking result.

UPDATE, 10/13: Daniel Davies (of " Crooked Timber") writing on a Guardian blog site that The numbers do add up:

If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.

See also Juan Cole. Davies via Ezra Klein, Juan Cole via Aziz Poonawalla. Klein also points to Jane Galt, who thinks the numbers are too big compared to other wartime death tolls, e.g., Germany's wartime losses. (See also subsequent posts there.)
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
5 things, 5 weird things
Jens Scholz asked me to answer a few questions; here goes:

• 5 things I don't have that I'd like to have: Democratic majority in the Senate and House, ability to run a mile without a break at a good clip, a good writing project, a finished family room, and a multiregion DVD player. (These don't have to be consistent with eachother, right?)
• 5 things I have that I wish I didn't have: a messy office room, several dozen pounds of weight, a tendency to dwell on bad or embarrassing memories, my president, my vice president.
• 5 things I don't have that I don't want to have: a bad relationship with my family, chronic health problems, depression, unemployment, experience of war.
• 5 things I have that I wouldn't want to part with: my neighborhood, my parents and brother, my wife, and my daughter, the best little girl in the whole wide world.

I hereby tag only two people (instead of the usual five) to continue this tradition of painful self-examination. Let's see... Brett Marston! R. Neal! You're it!

This reminds me I owe eRobin five examples of how weird I am:

• See above: I tend to remember embarrassing or otherwise painful episodes more often and more clearly than good ones.
  
• I hate, hate, hate being in stores with lots of little protuding hangers for things. It makes my eye sockets hurt just to think about it.
  
• Got choked up reading the last chapter of The Lord of The Rings to Maddie last night, even though I knew how it would end, and even though it's actually a pretty happy ending. Guess Maddie takes after me, she was choked up too.
• I like to swing kids I know upside down by their heels. They like it, too, but then they tell me I'm weird, so here you go.
  
• I write all this random stuff on a "blog," yet no one pays me to do it. How weird is that?

Jens Scholz, as your just reward for tagging me in the 5 things thing as well as simply for not checking in for so long, you must now also provide five examples of how weird you are. WorldWideWeber, you too. And Nell still owes us one from a while back.


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UPDATE, 11/21 (yes, very belated): WWW appears to refuse, the blackguard; Jens makes up for that with an entertaining video answer. Nell has been very busy saving the United States and is excused. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:34:00 PM -- |    

 
No true Montanan
Click the image for a great, hard-hitting, issue-based ad by Jon Tester, who is now challenging Conrad Burns (R-MT) for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The spot begins "Nearly all of Montana's legislators, including fifty-one Republicans, want to replace the Patriot Act." And it builds from there.

Perhaps the most interesting angle (and the most challenging to me) is the part saying, "because it lets federal government agents search... even our gun sales, for whatever reason."

I say most challenging to me because (a) I've long supported gun regulation I consider reasonable -- although not, I'd claim, warrantless searches of gun records, and (b) I don't know the specific provisions of the Patriot Act on this score. And (c) it has seemed to me over the past several years that the libertarian/second -half -of -the -Second -Amendment crowd -- in the existing aggregate, not at its honorable margins -- was generally going to line up on the opposite side of privacy/torture/executive power debates from myself.

So what's heartening and challenging to me is that that's not where Tester's ad is coming from. It's more the original ideal: practical don't-tread-on-me-ism. The ad closes with questions for Senator Burns:

Why do you think we're the enemy?
Where's Osama Bin Laden?
And when did you get so out of touch with Montana?

Here's hoping Tester wins, and that he gets substantial crossover support from gun owners, hunters, and others traditionally associated with libertarian/conservative positions. But that would still leave the institutional support for Bush in 2004 and derision of concerns about torture by the most practically powerful libertarian group of all -- the NRA. Not to mention explaining the likes of torture apologists or minimizers like Glenn Reynolds, Eugene Volokh and their legions of avowedly libertarian readers.

Of course the NRA is focused on one issue to the near exclusion of all others, and you don't see, say, Nature Conservancy or Friends of the Wilderness talking much about torture, either. Yet what I can dig up about rank-and-file gun owner and small-l "libertarian" opinions also suggests I'm not too far off.

Suggestive, though not dispositive, survey results (.PDF) are provided by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. A political typology they've developed locates gun owners concentrated among its so-called "Enterpriser" population group (59% own guns, vs. 23% of "Liberals"). "Enterprisers" are identified by responses to key identification questions that I'd characterize as libertarian, at least when it comes to questions of property rights, corporate power, and government efficacy. And "yet":

• 63% of "Enterprisers" think torture can be justifiable, 22% say it never is, versus 21% and 77%, respectively, of "Liberals" (the Pew-defined group I appear to be in).
• Similarly, 73% of "Enterprisers" think the Patriot Act is a necessary tool to catch terrorists, while 12% say it goes too far; the corresponding figures among "Liberals" are near mirror opposites (15% and 71% respectively).*
  

Like any typology, the Pew "Enterpriser"/"Liberal"/etc. system winds up throwing people into the same categories who might be better distinguished in some other way, so that the equation "Enterprisers are libertarians" might be only roughly true at best.

But anecdotally, my general impressions of gun afficionado bloggers I've followed over the years lead me to suspect that while gun owners who talk the libertarian talk are foursquare for expansive gun rights, on average they're fairly unconcerned -- at best -- about other human rights, more particularly the human rights of other people, and most particularly the human rights of people from different races and ethnic backgrounds.

I assume they believe their own non-gun rights will either not come under pressure, or that they'll be able to defend them by force. For my part, I think that the language of human rights, fealty to the Constitution (all of it), and distrust of the Big Brother State ought to carry over to more than just guns, and where it doesn't I reckon those arguments to be more than a little dishonest.

Thus my prejudice that the insistence on the untrammeled access to guns is not some Jeffersonian impulse to most or even many of its advocates. It has always seemed more like a lizard brain impulse to me -- "peace through superior firepower," "cold dead fingers," etcetera. It would be interesting to see libertarians discuss (or dispute) the blind spots of the gun rights mass movement they have when it comes to torture, habeas and surveillance issues -- and without resorting to "no true Scotsman" explanations about their ideology.**

But thus also my pleasant surprise at this Tester ad. Many lessons have been learned and many attitudes have been in flux over the last few years -- my own included, and not just on Iraq. I guess we'll find out what true Montanans -- at least the voting ones -- have concluded in November.


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* The 2005 Political Typology, 5/10/2005, pp. 49-50 (torture, Patriot Act), pp. 53, 58 (gun ownership). There were about 1000 respondents, and the MOE for most questions was +/- 3.5%.
** Particularly when they address their complaints about the excesses of the Bush years to liberals, such as when the estimable libertarian Jim Henley asks, "And what I want to know is, how do you like your blue-eyed boy, government power, Mr. Managerial Liberalism?" The question is posed in the context of Bush and Cheney hoping to whip up support for themselves among a superpower's mean-spirited majority by proposing draconian habeas and torture policies. Henley (who's voting for Cardin(D) this year to redivide government) argues that since great damage can be done by "the electorate we have," their opportunity to derail the republic should be limited by keeping that republic's government as small as possible. I politely disagree; holding that risk of failure against liberalism or the federal government it built is a little like holding a 747 airplane hijacking against Boeing.


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NOTE: Tester ad via Andrew Sullivan. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Well said
Matthew Yglesias ---

Bush says he'll continue the war in Iraq even if the only ones left supporting him are Laura and their dog. And, presumably, he means it. Loose talk of winning or losing the war is, at this point, irrelevant. The president has defined our war aims in Iraq purely in terms of continuing the war indefinitely. For him, keeping all of these troops over there and handing the whole shitpile off to his successor is success. Nobody else should find that very comforting.

Andrew Sullivan ---

The base of the GOP has been fed homophobia and gay-baiting for years now. It was partly how Rove won Ohio and the presidency. Gay-hating is integral to their machine. Now, the very homophobia these people stoked and used is suddenly turning back on them. Part of me is distressed that the GOP could lose not because of spending recklessness, corruption, torture, big government, pork, and a hideously botched war ... but because of a sex scandal which doesn't even have (so far as we know) any actual sex. But part of me also sees the karmic payback here. They rode this tiger; now it's turning on them. And it's dinner time.

Michael O'Hare ("The Reality-Based Community") ---

This gang happily sacrificed hundreds of our young people and the fiscal stability of the nation for years to come to a nutty idea that war could be really cheap, and thousands of them and tens of thousands of Iraqis to delaying an awkward confrontation between a soothing bromide and facts on the ground. It threw away the miserable of New Orleans and the desperate of Darfur and the wretched in the public schools and the breathers of the air around power plants and the grunts in the desert and everyone else - everyone - it had a duty to comfort or aid. And it has nothing to do with any real principle, conservative or otherwise: not the farm bill, not the trade bill, not the invasion of Iraq nor the fecklessness in Afghanistan, not the drug bill, not the earmarks: it's nothing but heartless abuse, in every single case, and without a hint of a suggestion of a moment of shame. These are thugs in shiny shoes who never saw a victim they wouldn't kick or steal from, and in the end, treating the pages like a candy bowl for casual snacking by one of their own is no different from any of the rest of it.

This meltdown is not ironic, it's just and proper and about time.

Can't remember where I read this point made first, but it's about "Should He Stay?", by Bob Woodward on the front page of the Post last Monday. From Woodward's account:

In private conversations with Bush, Cheney said Rumsfeld's departure, no matter how it might be spun, would be seen only as an expression of doubt and hesitation on the war. It would give the war critics great heart and momentum, he confided to an aide, and soon they would be after him and then the president. He virtually insisted that Rumsfeld stay.

I.e., nothing about the merits of removing an arrogant ideologue who has (with good reason) lost the confidence of the uniformed military -- just a warning that the critics would be heartened, and Cheney and Bush would be next. Given that Rumsfeld doesn't have any ideas that Cheney hasn't chewed first, this is understandable when viewed from an inside-the-Bush-bubble perspective. But it shouldn't give anyone outside it any confidence that the nation's interests come before the bubble's. Whenevery you hear Cheney say "us", know that he means just two people: Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

Jeffrey Lewis ("Armscontrolwonk.com") --- Regarding the surprisingly small underground explosion registered in North Korea yesterday, arms control expert Lewis speculates that North Korea may have tried to test a nuclear warhead small enough for their ICBM prototype, and it 'fizzled.' He then steps back to look at the big picture:

I close this discourse about operational confidence by noting that the United States has built a missile defense that does not work, to defend against a North Korean missile that does not work, that would carry a nuclear warhead that does not work.

This is all very postmodern.

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UPDATE, 10/10: Lewis quote added. Of course, even a 'fizzled' nuclear explosion would probably ruin my whole day. Still curious whether they'll actually be able to prove it was a nuclear test.
UPDATE, 10/17: Nuclear test confirmed by DNI on 10/16; it was a plutonium bomb, which puts the blame (other than on Kim Jong Il) pretty much squarely on the Bush administration; Clinton had stopped plutonium production and weaponization. More in the New York Times and at ArmsControlWonk.com, where 'jane' also notes speculation that a second test is on the way.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 4:05:00 PM -- |