DEMS UNITED ON THE WAR?....From the Washington Post today:

Twelve Democratic leaders of the House and Senate have urged President Bush in a strongly worded letter to begin withdrawing the 130,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by year's end, a sign that Democrats may be uniting on a key election-year issue that has divided the party.

Really? Here's what the letter said:

We believe that a phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq should begin before the end of 2006. U.S. forces in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces, and force protection of U.S. personnel.

At first glance, that sounded like news to me too, especially since it was signed by folks like Joe Biden, Harry Reid, and Jane Harman. But I wasn't sure, so I called Reid's office and talked to Jim Manley, one of his press guys. Here's the conversation:

Q: Is this a change in direction?

A: No, it's the same wording that was in the Reed-Levin amendment last month, which was supported by Senate Democrats 38-6.

Now, it was a strongly-worded letter, and it's good to see congressional Democrats reiterating their support for redeployment. But I'm not sure there's really much new here.

UPDATE: Several commenters have made a good point: Who cares if this is new? What matters is that the media reported it, and did so in a positive, "Dems united" kind of way. That's news all by itself.

"BAPTIZING POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS"....I can't quite tell whether he approves or disapproves, but in any case Andrew Sullivan drew my attention today to an interview with Mike Gerson, formerly George Bush's chief speechwriter, in the current issue of Christianity Today. Here are a couple of excerpts:

What challenges do you see for evangelicals who want to broaden the movement's social agenda?
It's probably a long-term mistake for evangelicals to be too closely associated with any ideology or political party. The Christian teaching on social justice stands in judgment of every party and every movement. It has to be an authentic and independent witness....

Where specifically do you think the Religious Right has gone off track?
Some of it is what I would call baptizing policy recommendations, as if there were a Christian view on tax policy or missile defense. These are questions of prudence and judgment on which reasonable people disagree.

Now, it's not as if Gerson has suddenly become a social liberal or anything, but it's still slightly stunning to see a major player in the Bush administration advise evangelicals not to become "too closely associated" with any political party. Karl Rove must be spinning in his casket.

LEBANON UPDATE....Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has been a moderating force in Iraqi politics for the past three years, has issued a statement demanding an end to hostilities in Lebanon:

"Islamic nations will not forgive the entities that hinder a cease-fire," al-Sistani said in a clear reference to the United States.

"It is not possible to stand helpless in front of this Israeli aggression on Lebanon," he added. "If an immediate cease-fire in this Israeli aggression is not imposed, dire consequences will befall the region."

Juan Cole has a good post explaining some of the politics behind this, including a desire on Sistani's part not to be outflanked by his fiery rival Muqtada al-Sadr, a rejection of Iranian-style governance, and an informal alliance with Lebanon's moderate Amal party and its leader, Nabih Berri. Then he adds this:

What could he do if he were ignored? Sistani could call massive anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations. Given Iraq's profound political instability, this development could be extremely dangerous. US troops in Baghdad and elsewhere are planning offensives against Shiite paramilitary groups, so tensions are likely to rise in the Shiite areas anyway. But big demonstrations could easily boil over into actual attacks on US and British troops. Both depend heavily on fuel that is transported through the Shiite south. Were the Shiites actively to turn on the US for its wholehearted support of continued Israeli air raids, the US military could be cut off from fuel and supplies. The British only have around 8,000 troops in Iraq, and they would be in profound danger if Iraq's Shiites became militantly anti-occupation.

Stay tuned. There is, essentially, no one left in the entire world that supports our position on Lebanon. Things could get even uglier than they already are very quickly.

CHECKLIST LIBERALISM AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY....Mark Schmitt hopes that the Lieberman-Lamont race spells the beginning of the end of "checklist liberalism":

For the enviros, it’s ANWR (the most trivial of victories, but the one that raises the money). For the minorities, affirmative action. (Likewise, of minor relevance to the actual structure of economic opportunity for most African-Americans and Latinos.) For women, it’s all about “preserve abortion rights.” There are a couple others, but those are the basic buttons you press to be credentialed as a good liberal Democrat. After you press them, you can do whatever you want.

Mark says that Lieberman has been pushing all the right buttons but he's losing anyway. And that's a good thing: "What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice — what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?"

Henry Farrell offers a different, but complementary observation:

Where netroots bloggers are playing an unique role is changing the way that this is being framed in the national political debate. They’ve made the Lamont insurgency into an attack on the shibboleth of bipartisanism....The fact that guys like David Broder and Morton Kondracke view this as an attack on the tradition of cosy bipartisanship (and their source of authority in the punditocracy) isn’t an accidental outcome, nor is it something that would likely have happened if there hadn’t been blogs pushing this message (and getting read by reporters and editorialists) over a considerable period of time.

If both these guys are right (and only time will tell if they are), it basically suggests an explicit turn to a European parliamentary model of party governance without the formal structure of an actual parliamentary system. Democrats take on the role of a social democratic party with a broader agenda than just pleasing a small core of interest groups, but the flip side is that loyalty to that agenda is more-or-less absolute. The idea that you sometimes cross party lines to work with the opposition goes from being a sign of grace to being literally unthinkable.

Is this good or bad? I haven't made up my mind. But we're about 90% of the way there anyway, and it may be that the final 10% isn't really that big a deal. And if Mark is right that a broader concern for social democratic policies is one outcome of this, it would be well worth it.

I'm not quite sure that will be the case, though. But I hope he's right.

PROGRESSIVE REALISM, TAKE 2....Last week I wrote a short post about Robert Wright's New York Times op-ed in which he proposed a new foreign policy paradigm for liberals that he called "progressive realism." I basically thought Wright was correct on substance, but even so I was sort of breezily dismissive of the piece because I didn't entirely understand his reasoning, especially as it related to non-state terrorism. This response probably didn't reflect too well on me, but it turns out that breezy dismissal paid off in this case, because Wright followed up via email with a restated version of his thesis that I actually found more persuasive. With his permission, it's posted below.

For a longer essay that covers much of the same ground but in far more detail, check out "A Real War on Terrorism," a 9-part series that Wright published in Slate back in 2002.

Progressive Realism, Take 2 Robert Wright

Let me restate the argument in a way that I hope will make progressive realism's considerable relevance to the problem of non-state terrorist groups clearer.

Various technological trends suggest that, as the decades roll by, hatred of America abroad will translate into the death of Americans (via terrorism) with increasing efficiency. This "growing lethality of hatred" implies a couple of things:

1. Hatred of America will be increasingly inimical to America's security, so we should act in ways that minimize it — e.g., avoid adventures like Iraq, be a good and generous global citizen, respecting international law and norms, and working hard to comprehend and accomodate the perspectives of all peoples. In short, be roughly the opposite of George Bush and the neocons.

2. So severe is this "growing lethality of hatred" that, even if we succeed in thus minimizing hatred of America, half a century from now America's security will still require an unprecedented level of intrusive arms control encompassing all nations on the planet. Further, America's security will best be served if all nations are by then free-market democracies, because (a) such nations have considerable "natural" transparency (regarding biotech facilities with munitions potential, for example) and (b) the entanglement of such nations in the global economy strengthens their incentive to preserve world order and their inclination toward international cooperation — including, crucially, highly intrusive arms control.
   

Of course, wanting to bring democracy to the whole world sounds neoconish, but there's a difference. Progressive realism holds that:

1. Making free-market democracy pervasive is only crucial to America's interest in the long run, over decades. Hence: no need to rush into, say, the Iraq war (which, as your reader Detroit Dan noted, I opposed unequivocally).

2. Progressive realists (unlike neocons) believe that economic liberty strongly encourages political liberty. So (a) America should economically engage, rather than isolate, countries like Iran and North Korea, and (b) more generally, economic engagement offers a path to peacefully fostering the free-market democracy that neocons are inclined to implant via invasion.
   

In sum: Progressive realism puts great emphasis on dealing with the threat of terrorism, whether or not my NYT piece successfully conveyed this. The basic game plan is: (a) monitor and restrict with increasing severity the kinds of weapons with which terrorists can do the most damage; (b) cut off their lifeblood (hatred of us); (c) give them no place to hide — i.e., create a world of naturally transparent societies that are economically interdependent and (by virtue of this interdependence) can be readily tied together via extensive global governance (which would go well beyond arms control, as my NYT piece notes).

Now, if your complaint is that I don’t vow to go kill terrorists wherever I find them, well: Killing terrorists is nice when you can do it cleanly (i.e., when the value of killing them outweighs the blowback). But, as I noted in my op-ed, I reject the "premise common in Democratic policy circles lately: that the key to a winning foreign policy is to recalibrate the party’s manhood — just take boilerplate liberal foreign policy and add a testosterone patch." The problem is more subtle than that, and Democrats aren’t doing America a service when they fuel a Democratic-Republican arms race on the macho front.

GLOBAL COUNTERINSURGENCY, PART 3....Glenn Reynolds responds here to my post on Saturday criticizing the "bomb 'em into the stone age" crowd, and says via email, "It's possible you might even agree with my suggestion." Let's find out!

But first, an aside: my comment about "casual genocide" wasn't aimed at a few random blog commenters, as Glenn suggests. I was responding primarily to John Podhoretz, who suggested pretty clearly in his New York Post column last week that we made a mistake in Iraq by not killing enough Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35; secondarily to the Ann Coulters and Michael Ledeens of the world, who regularly imply that our only path to victory is to pulverize ever more of the Middle East; and more generally to all the conservative hawks who think the main reason we're not doing better in Iraq is because we just haven't been willing to fight a tough enough war. So that's where that came from.

But on to the main topic. I believe that our fight against Islamic jihadism is analogous on a global scale to a counterinsurgency. To use the hoary phrase, we'll succeed by "winning hearts and minds," and conventional warfare just can't do that. In fact, it's mostly counterproductive: it won't succeed in killing the guerrillas and it will lose us the support of the local citizenry, which in turn will make the insurgency even more formidable. Lebanon is serving as a pretty good case study of this right now. Here is Glenn's general response:

It's not so much a question of more or less violence as it is a question of applying the proper amount of violence to the proper people....In the 1990s, we followed the "ignore it and maybe it'll go away" strategy. As I've noted before, I can't blame people for that — it was the strategy that I favored, too, based on what I knew at the time, as I thought that if we waited Islamic Jihadism would collapse under the weight of its own idiocy. But it clearly didn't work. I don't know whether the current strategy is correct or not, though it seems to me that so long as we give Syria and Iran (and for that matter, Saudi Arabia) a pass, we're never going to get much of a handle on this problem.

So do we agree? I can't tell for sure (what's the opposite of giving Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia "a pass"?), but I doubt it. We may agree in theory on the idea of conceiving the overall war against jihadism as something like a counterinsurgency, but in practice I think Glenn will support conventional war at every turn. Conversely, I believe that the evidence of the past half century clearly suggests that conventional war, no matter how brutally prosecuted, is ineffective against guerrillas. If we don't have the strength to face up to this and stop fighting conventional wars just because that's the kind of war we're comfortable with, the end result is likely be a nuclear bomb in downtown Manhattan.

So what's the alternative? I believe it's fundamentally nonmilitary and revolves around engagement: trade agreements, security pacts, genuine support for grassroots democracy, a willingness to practice the same international rules we preach, etc. The idea is to slowly but steadily promote democratic rule, liberal institutions, education of women, and international commerce. When military responses are necessary, they should be short, highly targeted, and designed to piss off the surrounding citizenry as little as possible. This will, needless to say, take a very long time and a lot of self restraint, but it won't succeed at all if every few years we set things back a decade with a conventional war.

And what if this doesn't work? What if we make progress among the great majority, but the committed jihadists retain enough support to become dangerous on a much broader scale than they are today? What if they nuke Manhattan anyway?

If that happens, then we really do have World War III on our hands. There are no guarantees of success, after all. But a series of conventional wars pretty much guarantees this outcome, whereas the counterinsurgency mindset at least has a chance of success. If we're serious about our future, it's the best option we have.

UPDATE: On second thought, I really should include this comment from Glenn's post too:

The real problem in the war on terror, I think, is a relatively small number of terror-backers in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Why aren't we waging unconventional warfare against them? They undoubtedly have toes we can step on in the form of business interests, overseas accounts, vacation homes, etc. Would we make more progress by targeting those sorts of things, rather than fighting their cannon fodder in the field?

If his suggestion that we stop "fighting their cannon fodder in the field" means that he agrees that conventional warfare isn't working, then maybe we agree more than I think. I'm not sure if that's his point, though.

EUPHEMISM WATCH....We need more euphemisms, and I really like this one: "portfolio diversification in your income."

Need an explanation? Here it is:

Middle-class city dwellers across the country are being squeezed....In New York, the supply of apartments considered affordable to households with incomes like those earned by starting firefighters or police officers plunged by a whopping 205,000 in just three years.

....Firefighters who want to live in high-priced cities can work two jobs, said W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “I think it’s great,” he said. “It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.”

Yep, it means working two jobs because housing costs are too high. Brilliant.

Via Hilzoy.

TAX CUT FOLLIES....I failed in my duty earlier this week to blog about Tuesday's Treasury report that studied the long-term effects of making Bush's tax cuts permanent. Why? Because it concluded — and you'd better sit down for this — that tax cuts don't pay for themselves. Imagine! However, since only idiots believe otherwise, I just ignored the whole thing.

But I confess that my brief scan of the news accounts left me with one question. The report suggested that under a certain set of improbable circumstances, the tax cuts would increase economic growth by 0.7%, and I wondered what that meant. 0.7% per year? 0.7 percentage points? Or what?

The CBPP has the answer: it means that in about 20 years the economy would be 0.7% bigger than it otherwise would be. In other words, instead of a GDP of $20 trillion in a couple of decades, our GDP would be about $20.1 trillion. Yippee!

Now, you know that the Treasury guys were doing their level best to make the boss's tax cuts look good. And yet, this was the best they could come up with. What's more, they even admit that this is an absolutely best case scenario that assumes massive spending cuts starting in a few years, something that's plainly not going to happen. Under more reasonable assumptions, the tax cuts would almost certainly have either no effect or a negative effect, so the report doesn't bother with those.

Once again: at the level of taxation we have in America today, tax cuts have virtually no effect on economic growth. They do allow the super-rich to keep more of their money, though. Eyes on the prize, gang, eyes on the prize.

CHURCH AND STATE....The New York Times reports that at least a few evangelical preachers are starting to figure out the danger of being co-opted by the Republican Party:

“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.

“Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’ ”

Preach it, brother. Evangelicals should keep in mind that the separation of church and state wasn't intended to protect the state, it was intended to protect the church. In the long run, becoming a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary of Karl Rove Inc. comes at a steep price.

More here from Steve Waldman in the April issue of the Monthly.

GLOBAL COUNTERINSURGENCY, TAKE 2....By coincidence, Taylor Owen has a piece today about exactly the subject of the previous post: the relative value of force vs. restraint when fighting a local or regional insurgency. He's part of a team combing though previously unreleased data on the Vietnam War, and notes that Henry Kissinger warned Richard Nixon that the mass bombing of Cambodia was like "poking a beehive with a stick." Taylor continues:

While the munitions [used today] are radically different, Kissinger may still be right about the use of airpower against a heterogeneous insurgency. Further, I think the question of the strategic costs of civilian casualties in this context is under studied. Much of the debate is, I believe, wrongly centred on the morality of the deaths and whether they are ‘justified’ in international law.

This is an important question, undoubtedly, but one that is devoid of the potential strategic costs of the casualties. I would argue that a very small number of civilian casualties, regardless of the ‘justice’ of the attack or the efforts to limit collateral damgage, can have a grossly disproportionate strategic cost when fighting an insurgency. Those whose families are killed will rarely be convinced by our rationalizations, nuances, claims of moral difference etc. More likely they will become, at the least, tacit supporters of the insurgency being fought. When fighting a group that requires this very civilian support, this becomes a serious strategic concern.

This is fairly obvious stuff, but it's hard to say it too many times. Careful use of military force is plainly one component of our current fight against jihadism, but "shock and awe" is the fastest way to lose a war against an insurgency that has even modest popular support. One of these days we'll figure this out and get serious about winning.

A GLOBAL COUNTERINSURGENCY....Apparently the latest chatter from our friends on the hawkish right revolves around the idea that the United States might be too squeamish to win any of the various wars we're fighting at the moment. Perhaps a bit of casual genocide is in order?

Since it would appear that mere appeals to human decency aren't going to carry much weight with this crowd, how about a practical objection instead? Here's a reminder of how the Soviet Union fought its war in Afghanistan during the 1980s:

Although initially, Soviet operations were directed primarily against the mujahidin, once the Soviets realized the popular support for the resistance movement, they deliberately turned to a terrorist strategy of "migratory genocide" and "rubblization."....Fighter-bombers and medium bombers hit targets deep inside guerrilla territory, seeking to destroy the village infrastructure supporting the mujahidin.

"Free-fire" zones were created along the main roads and extended back to the hills behind them, and the villages within these zones were "virtually obliterated." In addition, field crops, food storage facilities, and the irrigation systems so vital to Afghan agriculture were bombed in the attempt to drive the people off the land. Soviet aircraft also deliberately attacked civilian caravans coming into or leaving the country, thus causing many casualties among women and children. Small bombs shaped as toys or other attractive objects were used with the intent to maim children, and these caused many livestock casualties as well.

....Since the war began, probably more than 200,000 Afghans have been killed and more than one-third of the population has been forced to flee to Pakistan, Iran, or the Afghan cities....There has been enormous slaughter of livestock....and the famine in places has been compared to that in Ethiopia.

I picked this description pretty much at random. You can find similar ones in dozens of places. I think three points are germane here:

1. At the time, the United States was horrified by the Soviet brutality and genocide in Afghanistan. Remember?

2. It didn't work. The Soviets were defeated and left Afghanistan in 1989.

3. The Soviet campaign led fairly directly to the creation of al-Qaeda and the international jihadist movement. It's fashionable these days to suggest that the United States itself is to blame for the founding of al-Qaeda because we're the ones who armed the mujahidin, but that's far too facile. We may have helped things along, but it was the unimaginably brutal Soviet campaign that radicalized Afghanistan and rallied the jihadist community in the first place.
   

The fight against Islamic jihadism is essentially a vast, global counterinsurgency, something that the United States is lousy at. But we'd better get good at it fast, and the first step is to discard the fatuous notion that more violence is the obvious answer when the current amount of violence isn't doing the job. History suggests very strongly that the truth is exactly the opposite.

RAGS TO RICHES....The latest from the GOP:

Republican leaders are willing to allow the first minimum wage increase in a decade but only if it's coupled with a cut in inheritance taxes on multimillion-dollar estates, congressional aides said Friday.

Clearly, the Republican Party is the party of common sense. After all, if you give a few hundred dollars a month to the poorest of the working poor, it's only fair that you also give several million dollars to the richest of the idle rich.

Right?

NO EXIT....Think Progress has posted an excerpt of an interview that Richard Armitage did with NPR today. Armitage, who served in the Pentagon during the Reagan administration and was Colin Powell's #2 in the State Department until he left in 2005, talks here about Israel's last intervention in Lebanon, which began in 1982 and lasted not the promised few weeks, but 18 years:

Well, I remember with stunning clarity one of our Israeli interlocutors sitting in my office, telling me that, "Don't worry about this peace in Galilee operation. We understand our neighbors very well. We understand them better than anyone. We know all the dynamics of the situation in Lebanon." And that turned out not quite to be the case.

I suspect that people in government now are also hearing that from Israel. Don't get me wrong — if I thought that this air campaign would work, and would eliminate Nasrullah and the leadership of Hezbollah, I think it would all be fine. But I fear that you can't do this from the sky, and that you're going to end up empowering Hezbollah, and perhaps introducing a dynamic into the body politic in Lebanon that will take some great period of time to recover from.

I suspect that this is correct, and I confess that I find it inexplicable. The fact that George Bush, for example, miscalculated the war in Iraq is understandable: he had no relevant experience to guide him and wasn't the kind of person to listen to those who did, like Colin Powell and Eric Shinseki. Likewise, the fact that the U.S. military initially showed no interest in fighting a counterinsurgency in Iraq is also understandable: it's not the kind of war they're set up to fight and it's not the kind of war they're very interested in learning to fight. Neither case is excusable, but they're both understandable.

But if there's any country in the world that should understand the nature of war against a guerrilla organization, it's Israel. Wanting to give an enemy a bloody nose is one thing, but they can't possibly have believed that an air campaign would do lasting damage to a broadly-supported indigenous guerrilla group like Hezbollah. Nor could they have seriously entertained the notion that they could bomb Beirut around the clock and create free-fire zones in southern Lebanon and still retain the sympathy of any substantial bloc of the Lebanese citizenry. Nor, having been the proximate cause of the rise of Hezbollah in the first place, could they have had any illusions about what effect a major war would ultimately have if it failed to utterly destroy its target.

But apparently they did. And now they don't know how to get out.

STRAIGHT TALKIN' JOHN....In the past, campaign finance reform has been spearheaded by four men: John McCain, Russ Feingold, Martin Meehan, and Christopher Shays. Suddenly, one of them is missing in action:

On Wednesday, [Feingold, Meehan, and Shays] introduced a bill to revive the crumbling system for public financing of presidential campaigns. The bill is largely identical to a measure all four men introduced in 2003, but this time around Mr. McCain is not on board.

A spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, Eileen McMenamin, did not return calls seeking comment for this article, but several people involved in discussions about the legislation said the senator's absence was related to his widely expected bid for the presidency in 2008.

Can we start keeping score on the number of positions that Mr. Straight Talk has abandoned now that he thinks he has a serious shot at the presidency? First there was his pandering to Jerry Falwell, then his cave-in on torture (see here and here), and now this. And the election is still two years away. Which position do you think he'll throw overboard next?

DEFENDING THE UMMA....This week's cover story in The New Republic, a profile of Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah written by Annia Ciezadlo, is genuinely interesting:

Revered by the Shia, respected by his enemies, he has already earned the distinction of being the only Arab leader to evict Israel from Arab land without having to sign a peace treaty. But he is also a religious warrior. Today, as he fights a lopsided military battle against the Jewish state, he is becoming an icon — not just in the Arab world, where he was already a hero, but in the umma, the world of Islam. Nasrallah's war is not just a war between Lebanon and Israel, or even between Iran and America's allies; it's a war of myths and images, a battle to transform the Arab and Islamic worlds. Whatever battlefield setbacks Hezbollah may suffer in Lebanon, on this larger stage, Nasrallah has already won.

It's well worth reading the whole thing.

STAGFLATION....The Washington Post reports that the latest economic news is grim:

The nation's gross domestic product, which measures the value of all goods and services produced, rose at a below-average 2.5 percent annual rate in the second quarter....Meanwhile, consumer prices shot up at a heated 4.1 percent annual pace.

The combination of slow growth and high inflation, of course, is "stagflation," and yesterday Brad DeLong linked to a Nouriel Roubini piece suggesting that the number of news reports mentioning stagflation (a "potential barometer" of recession) had been quite high recently.

But is that true? Is the number not just high, but higher than usual? Only a chart can tell us for sure! And here it is: the number of citations of the word "stagflation" from Nexis over the past year. (The July 2006 number is a projection.)

Sure enough, Roubini is right: mentions of stagflation spiked heavily starting last month. And given today's news, I'll bet they'll spike even higher in the coming months. If news cites really are a decent way of projecting economic performance, the news is not good.

DUAL LOYALTY WATCH....Today, Mona Charen suggests that American Jews are "downright stupid" for supporting Democrats even though George Bush is "indisputably the most pro-Israel president in the history of the United States." David Gelernter labels this same behavior "self-destructive nihilism."

U.S. supporters of Israel naturally take offense at charges of "dual loyalty," an ancient slur that American Jews care more about Israel than they do the United States. But as Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias point out, it's hard to take offense at this when you write pieces suggesting that American Jews ought to put aside other considerations and vote for whichever party displays a more dependable support for Israel. Conservatives should take care not to let their own agitprop come back to bite them.

LEBANON UPDATE....Let's check in with Lebanon, shall we? First up, the Guardian reports on the views of our closest ally:

Tony Blair will press George Bush today to support "as a matter of urgency" a ceasefire in Lebanon as part of a UN security council resolution next week, according to Downing Street sources.

At a White House meeting, the prime minister will express his concern that pro-western Arab governments are "getting squeezed" by the crisis and the longer it continues, the more squeezed they will be, giving militants a boost.

Is that true? Are Arab governments, dismayed by our stalling tactics, turning toward support for Hezbollah? The New York Times says yes:

At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war....Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.

So: Tony Blair fears that the war is giving militants a boost; Arab public opinion has turned the head of Hezbollah into a folk hero; and as we already know, al-Qaeda has now decided to join the battle as well. What's more, on a purely military basis, it looks like Hezbollah has only been moderately weakened by the whole thing.

This is working out well, isn't it?

BROOKSIAN MATH... In his column today (sub. req.), David Brooks argues that increases in federal college aid have had no effect on college graduation rates, and that therefore Hillary Clinton and the DLC are foolish for proposing a big new college aid program.

Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.

If, like me, you read that column and had that familiar, infuriating feeling that Brooks is playing fast and loose with the numbers, you're right. Kevin Carey over at The Quick and the Ed explains:

There are two basic challenges to increasing the percentage of people who earn college degrees: getting more students to go to college, and getting more students to graduate once they get there. Brooks mixes and muddles these issues throughout the column, but as it happens he's got his facts wrong no matter how you look at it.

According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Census Bureau, the percent of high school graduates who immediately enrolled in college the fall after graduation increased from 49% in 1972 to 67% in 2004.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who completed at least some college increased from 36% to 57%.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who earned a bachelor's degree increased from 19% to 29%.

All of those numbers can and should be better. But it's foolish to say that the federal student aid money spent during that time did no good.

Guess Brooks is wearing his hack hat today.

MINOR FAME....I saw Wordplay last night and I have to admit that it was pretty mind-boggling to watch those folks solve crossword puzzles. Two minutes! I think it would take me that long to fill in a crossword puzzle even if I were just transcribing the answer key.

Anyway, it got me to thinking that perhaps my next goal in life should be to get someone to make me one of the answers in a New York Times crossword puzzle. The clue could be "Pioneer cat blogger." This is the kind of minor fame I seek, since actual, serious, major-league fame would do nothing except cause me grief.

What other kinds of minor fame would be cool? To be the response to a Jeopardy question? To have your name mentioned in a favorite author's novel? What else?

POSTSCRIPT: Oh, and former Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent is a seriously weird dude. He makes Bob Graham's diary obsession look like a mere personality tic.

UN BOMBING UPDATE....Why did Kofi Annan accuse the Israelis of "apparently deliberate targeting" of a UN observation post in Lebanon on Tuesday? The BBC has the latest:

UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon contacted Israeli troops 10 times before an Israeli bomb killed four of them, an initial UN report says. The post was hit by a precision-guided missile after six hours of shelling, diplomats familiar with the probe say.

....The UN report says each time the UN contacted Israeli forces, they were assured the firing would stop.

A senior Irish soldier working for the UN forces had warned the Israelis six times that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff, Ireland's foreign ministry said.

Had Israel responded to the requests, "rather than deliberately ignoring them", the observers would still be alive, a diplomat familiar with the report said.

Whether the bombing was deliberate or not remains an open question, but at least it's a little clearer why Annan said what he said. As Eric Martin put it after reading the BBC report, "It becomes slightly more difficult to claim innocent mistake. 'Who knew?' kind of rings hollow."

AL-QAEDA JOINS IN....Juan Cole writes:

The Israeli occupation of Jerusalem has long been an al Qaeda bugbear. It sent Richard Reid to case El Al, Israeli airlines. It hit Israeli tourists in Mombasa and the Sinai. But Bin Laden always avoided investing in an area where there was already an active insurgency. He also could not join in with heretical Shiites like Hizbulah.

Today, al-Qaeda's #2 announced a change of course:

Ayman al-Zawahiri warned that al-Qaida would not stand "idly by, humiliated", as Israeli "shells burn our brothers".

....He said that the weapons being used by the Israelis were from the "crusader coalition" and added that "every participant will pay the price".

Zawahiri, wearing a grey robe and white turban, and speaking in front of a picture of the World Trade Centre on fire, said al-Qaida now saw "all the world as a battlefield open in front of us".

....A new audio or video message from Bin Laden about Lebanon and Gaza is expected to emerge in the coming days, according to IntelCenter, a US-based independent group that provides counterterrorism information to the US government and media.

Worse and worse.

CHRISTIAN ZIONISM....The Wall Street Journal writes today about John Hagee, the man who's brought "Christian Zionism" into the mainstream:

Last week, as Israel's armed forces pounded Lebanon and worries of a wider conflagration mounted, Mr. Hagee presided over what he called a "miracle of God": a gathering of 3,500 evangelical Christians packed into a Washington hotel to cheer Israel and its current military campaign.

....President Bush sent a message to the gathering praising Mr. Hagee and his supporters for "spreading the hope of God's love and the universal gift of freedom." The Israeli prime minister also sent words of thanks. Israel's ambassador, its former military chief and a host of U.S. political heavyweights, mostly Republican, attended.

....The following day, [Hagee] mobilized evangelicals representing all 50 states in a lobbying blitz through the Capitol. Armed with talking points scripted by Mr. Hagee and his staff, they peppered senators and congressmen with arguments for Israel and against its enemies, particularly Iran.

....When addressing Jewish audiences, Mr. Hagee generally avoids talking about Armageddon. But his books, whose titles include "Beginning of the End" and "From Daniel to Doomsday," are filled with death and mayhem. "The battlefield will cover the nation of Israel!" he writes in "Jerusalem Countdown," his recent work, describing a "sea of human blood drained from the veins of those who have followed Satan."

How charming.

IS ABORTION MURDER?....If fetuses are persons, then destroying a fetus is murder. The logical inference from this belief is that doctors who perform abortions or destroy blastocysts for their stem cells are murderers and ought to be locked up.

Needless to say, even people who are queasy about abortion and stem cell harvesting find this a bit much, which means that the smarter of the anti-abortion folks avoid making this argument because they don't want people to think they're loons. However, it's amusing sometimes to watch them contort themselves into rhetorical pretzels in an effort to justify such a plainly craven position. Here is Ramesh Ponnuru's effort:

Bush is right not to use the term "murder." There are two reasons I avoid it myself in this context. First, it is a legal concept with technical definitions, and these are not uniform across jurisdictions. Second, even in ordinary parlance, the term has no stable meaning. Plainly not all homicides are "murders" either as a technical legal matter or in ordinary parlance. To the (very limited) extent that the term has a core meaning in ordinary parlance, it connotes a malicious homicide. Even those of us who oppose certain forms of stem-cell research because they involve what we regard as the unjust taking of human life do not believe these unjust acts to be malicious in motivation.

That's a nice try, but is Ponnuru seriously trying to pretend that he thinks "murder" is a poor choice of words solely because its definition is too slippery? This doesn't even rise to the level of decent sophistry. He would dismiss it with the contempt it deserves if a non-fetus were involved.

The "malicious homicide" malarky is equally specious. "Malice" has several definitions, but the legal definition that applies to homicide is "the intention or desire to cause harm to another through an unlawful or wrongful act without justification or excuse." It's intent that's at issue here, not evil motives. And there's no question that doctors who perform abortions or harvest stem cells have intent aplenty.

If your position is that fetuses are persons and abortion should be outlawed, then intentionally destroying a fetus is murder and should be punished like murder. If your position is that fetuses aren't persons, then there's no compelling reason that destroying them should be a crime at all. Fish or cut bait.

KEEPING COOL....Michael O'Hare provides some advice for cooling off without running the air conditioner:

Keep the sun out! Windows facing south to west need shading. Exterior awnings, a wonderful old technology that comes in cheerful striped colors, are the best thing for this.

....Dump the hot air out of your house in the evening! This is done with a window fan installed in the top (preferably) of a window, in a room where you will mind the noise least, usually a guest room or the kitchen, running to blow out.

....Finally, put in compact fluorescent light bulbs wherever you can use them.

Marian and I did the flourescent bulb thing a couple of weeks ago and it makes a small but noticeable difference. The fact that they draw less power and save lots of money is an added bonus.

On the fan front, however, I can report that every store within five miles of my house is completely sold out. We already have plenty of box fans for the evening, but I'm too cheap to run the AC during the day and wanted to get a little table fan to blow a breeze in my face while I'm sitting here blogging. No luck, though. I guess some other part of the country must have gotten all our fan shipments by mistake.

THE UNDERCARD....Ed Kilgore writes today about the other primary on August 8: Cynthia McKinney vs. Hank Johnson for the championship of Dekalb County, Georgia.

Aside from money, McKinney has two big political problems. The first is that Georgia has no party registration, and her notoriety may tempt some of the district's small but significant Republican electorate to cross over....

But her bigger problem is her weakness among the district's large and growing African-American middle- and upper-middle-class population. They represent the political fulcrum of Dekalb County, and are much more likely to turn out for a runoff than the poorer black voters who have always served as McKinney's base.

....She has always been fast to play the race card....and there's no question she will allege a conspiracy to purge her from Congress. McKinney loves conspiracy theories the way a drunk loves a belt of Ten High before breakfast....But my guess is that McKinney has finally run out of luck.

Since Ed is originally from Dekalb County, he probably knows what he's talking about here. I have a feeling we're going to (once again) have a McKinney-free Congress when 2007 dawns.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES....Glenn Reynolds today:

"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while reaching for a stick." Condi is saying 'nice doggie.' Israel is the stick.

One may disapprove of this strategy, but complaints that Condi isn't accomplishing anything merely indicate that the complainer doesn't know what's going on.

Really? I think most of us complainers know precisely why Condi is so ostentatiously stalling. In fact, I think that pretty much everyone in the world over the age of ten has figured this out. It tells you a lot about George Bush's supporters that they so routinely mistake playground-level charades like this for shrewd and visionary geopolitical strategy.

THE ARAB STREET....Marc Lynch, who has been watching lots of Arab TV, says the mood in the Middle East has changed considerably over the past two weeks:

America is totally alone on this. And more than most Americans might realize, America is being blamed for Israel's actions. The shift in Arab public discourse over the last week has been palpable. For the first few days, [there was a] split between the Saudi media and the "al-Jazeera public" which I wrote about at the time. Then for a few days, horror at the humanitarian situation, fury with the Arab states for their impotence, speculation about the endgame, and full-throated condemnation of Israeli aggression. But for the last few days, the main trend has been unmistakable: an increasing focus on the United States as the villain of the piece. (That the Israeli bombing of Beirut stopped just long enough for Condoleezza Rice's photo op certainly didn't help.)

Marc thinks the U.S. missed a chance for a "Suez moment," though that obviously isn't something the Bush administration ever had in mind anyway. Read the whole thing to see how he thinks things might have worked out if America had played a stronger role.

UPDATE: See also Eric Martin, writing in a slightly different vein.