This blog has at times been quite obsessed with the musings of Andrew Sullivan, mainly because if there is one thing which exasperates me it is seemingly smart, articulate people spouting absolute nonsense. Naomi Klein is his left-wing equivalent.This was the case with his defense of the ideas of Pim Fortuyn, another person to which this criticism applies. It was also the case with his early strong push for war with Iraq. But a person can only take so much, and I stopped reading his blog as it evolved into a shrill one-note take on the world. Being predictable is not a good thing for a blog to be. Why bother reading itEspecially if you do not allow comments, which goes against the concept of the blog as dialogue.?

Sullivan does have one feather in his cap. His single-minded pursuit of fellow Republican Trent Lott a few months ago for his on-the-record support for segregation resulted in Lott losing the cherished US Senate majority leadership position. Now, Sullivan has a new target in his sights: Senator Santorum, That name sounds so Star Wars-like. Palpatine, Santorum, Sebulba… Which of these is not like the other?who seems to be for legislating against gay sex. Sullivan, who is gay, may not win this latest round, but not for want of trying.

Which leads me to the original thought in this post (sorry to take so long): Sullivan may have finally solved that dilemma first formulated by Woody Allen all those years ago in his exordium to Annie Hall:

The-the other important joke for me is one that’s, uh, usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freud’s wit and its relation to the unconscious. And it goes like this-I’m paraphrasing: Uh … “I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.”

The recipe for happiness, then, is simple: Join a club that would rather not have you as a member. For good measure, Sullivan has joined two: The Catholic Church, which calls homosexuality a sin, and the Republican Party, which believes Santorum is an “inclusive” man, as the President opinedIt’s April 27, and it is snowing outside!.

There is something unusual about a gay person so determined to label himself as not just religious, not just Christian, but Catholic, of all things. The differences between denominations are doctrinal, and the intelligent religious person, surely, will see that these schisms are the work of Man, not God. So join a more tolerant faith, already! But not Sullivan: He has joined a group of people whose tenets are clearly homophobic, and now protests too loudly all the way to communion.

As for his Republicanism, it is even odder, in my mind. He is British, first off, cannot even vote, certainly can’t register to vote and hence has absolutely no use for labeling himself Republican. Why can’t he just be the sum of his beliefs? Is he under the impression that attaching a label to his thoughts confers some kind of prestige? Andrew Sullivan, label whoreLabel whore: “Someone who only wears brand name clothes, with the name of the brand usually placed somewhere for all to see. A walking advertisement for a clothing store or brand.” ?

I believe, despite protests to the contrary, that he truly enjoys his pained crises of conscience. They are entirely of his own making. But perhaps there are signs that enough is enough: This week he said that “it is beginning to make it simply impossible for gay people and their families – or any tolerant person – to vote for the president’s party.” Is he preparing us for a highly public defection?

Don’t count on it. But it may become necessary to read Sullivan again. Not for the quality of the discourse, but as a psychological drama.

It’s too early to decide with hindsight just how just this war on Iraq will have been, but events are certainly tilting in favour I’m in London for the long weekend for my sister’s wedding, so you will be getting English spellings for the duration of my stay.of the war party. The welcome given to US troops in Baghdad was undeniably moving, though not as pervasive as Fox News will have us believe.

Even CNN glossed over some points that were more accurately reported by non-US media. Unbridled gratitude towards the US was by no means the only emotion. Writing in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter, their correspondent noted that spontaneous discussions broke out among strangers on the streets, who, free for the first time to speak openly in over 20 years, berated the moronic marine who had to go drape an American flag upside down over the statue’s head. An upside down flag is an international distress signal, I was told by the helpful retired general on CNN; which leads me to wonder how the Japanese show distress. Perhaps they never do.She also pointed out that almost all of the celebrants were Shi’ite Muslims, persecuted by Saddam, whereas the more pokerfaced bystanders were Sunni.

Al Jazeera coverage was deflated; they could not bring themselves to show the scenes of celebration at the demise of a Saddam statue for the hour I watched them last night, noting (correctly) that there were relatively few people out on the streets, the bulk of Baghdad remaining at home. But the jubilation was infectious. When their correspondent was asked the leading question as to why the Americans needed to gloat by tearing down a statue of Saddam, he corrected the anchor, saying that it was the Iraqis who wanted the statue toppled, but that they couldn’t manage it by themselves, that they enlisted the help of the Americans; he even suggested that this was somehow symbolic of the entire conflict. On Al Jazeera!

This positive reception in Baghdad will take the sting out of the argument that the coalition is leading a war of aggression against Arabs. But it is important to remember that, much like the killing of Iraqi civilians in coalition bombings was collateral damage, giving Iraqis an open society is a collateral benefit of a war justified by the US on an unrelated legal case.

Giving Iraqis the gift of democracy is not worth $100 billion and 150 coalition lives. That level of sacrifice on the part of the US, UK and Australia could be expended to much greater effect elsewhere, if the aim were to improve the quality of the greatest number of lives. Instead, The US made the case before the Security Council that it knew Iraq to be in possession of prohibited chemical and biological weapons, putting it in material breach of its ceasefire obligations. This accusation needs to be proven true for the war to have any legal standing whatsoever; Colin Powell also insinuated before the Security Council that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, mainly to bolster the claim that such a breach also constitutes an imminent threat. if no such proof is forthcoming, the war will still end up a fiasco.

I think it’s fair to suggest that Blair and Bush know this. They are waging a pre-emptive war on the understanding that its justification will be furnished retroactively. In the coming weeks, the pressure will grow on them to deliver on this essential promise. I can easily see Rumsfeld and Bush brushing off such concerns, however. Look at the happy Iraqis, they will, say, that is reward enough, and the proscribed weapons, should they not be found, could have been smuggled to Syria, or Iran. Indeed, such notions are already being floated by the more enterprising commentators on Fox News.

For hardcore Neo-cons, like our erstwhile dean Wolfowitz, Iraq is only the beginning. Combining Iraq’s intransigence vis-á-vis the U.N. with a lowered tolerance for outlaw regimes after 9/11 into a viable casus belli required the squaring of some legal circles, and the evident strain resulted in the balking at such an endeavour by many traditional allies. But making the case for invading Iraq may prove to have been relatively easy. Doing the same thing to Syria or Iran would result in much stronger resistance. For me, the worst case scenario would be that this easy victory over Saddam emboldens the Neo-cons to go remake some more Arab countries, ones that do not have tentative cease-fire agreements with the U.N. Best case scenario: Blair gets his way with Bush and they decide to remake Palestine. It should have been at the top of the list in the first place.

It’s April, so I must be reading another Bernard Lewis Book. The first Lewis Book I read—The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 years—had proven essential background reading on my first trip to Israel and Jordan in 2000; it was anything but brief, but Bernard Lewis was one for wry understatement, I reckoned. Then came What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, What Went Wrong? still smells of an especially mellifluous SPF 50+ cream.which I read in Jamaica last year. This year, he has just come out with The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; I picked it up instinctively at Hedengrens Hedengrens is one of the best bookstores I know; how many New York bookstores carry the entire range of the Penguin Classics?
 
Unlike the Republican Guard, winter is making a surprising last stand, with snow and freezing temperatures after a week of near-room temperatures.and have just read it this past weekend in a cabin on the Stockholm Archipelago.

These three books form something of a progression, and as such they deserve some comment. Each successive book is a Cliffs Notes of the preceding, it turns out. Each is about the same physical size, but the font size keeps on growing, and so they get less substantive. His latest book is positively slight, and I finished it in a matter of hours. The footnotes are shorter than those of many a SAIS paper that I wrote (and that is saying something), but I’ve come to suspect that this book is aimed at people who don’t look up footnotes in the first place.

I’m sure he’d hate it if I suggested that at the age of 86, he’s not up to something really fresh. Perhaps he’d hate it even more if I mused that he’s just doing it for the money. More kindly, he probably just relented after incessant hounding from his publishers to write something explicitly in response to September 11. The problem is, Bernard Lewis is the world’s pre-eminent authority on Middle Eastern Studies; he is so good that he already wrote the definitive book on the root causes of 9/11 before 9/11 happened: What Went Wrong was in page proof on September 11, 2001. What’s more, Lewis turned out to be right about a great many things that he predicted way back in 1990 in a seminal series of articles in The Atlantic Monthly.

In an afterword to Crisis, Lewis writes:

The nucleus of this book was an article published in The New Yorker in November 2001. In bringing it up to date and developing it from a long article to a short book, I have adapted a few passages from previous publications, especially some articles published in Foreign Affairs and The Atlantic Monthly. The rest is new.

The internet is a blessed thing: you can read both The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly articles for free—only the Foreign Affairs articles you’d have to pay for, if you didn’t already photocopy them in your local library. So how much is new?

Skimming the online offerings, I immediately recognized great chunks of what I had just read. Just one example: on page 53 of Crisis:

In 1593 an Ottoman official who also served as a chronicler of current events, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English Ambassador. He does not appear to have been much interested in the ambassador, but he was struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled: “A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul,” he wrote. “It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”

The 1997 Foreign Affairs article:

In 1593 an Ottoman historian, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English ambassador. He was not very interested in the ambassador, but he was much struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled. “A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul,” he wrote. “It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”

There is a lot more like this. Virtually every chapter starts verbatim from a previously published article. And where it does not, he distills notions that were covered amply in his more expansive books. Crisis is basically a cut-and-paste job.

This much is new, however: A rundown of quality-of-life numbers extracted from World Bank documents that seem straight out of a research assistant’s to-do list. The eagerness to prove the point (that Muslim countries are poor) builds up to a bizzare comparison:

The comparative figures on the performance of Muslim countries, as reflected in these statistics, are devastating. In the listing of economies by gross domestic product, the highest ranking Muslim majority country is Turkey, with 64 million inhabitants, in twenty-third place, between Austria and and Denmark, with about 5 million each. [. . .] In a listing of industrial output, the highest ranking Muslim country is Saudi Arabia, number twenty-one, followed by Indonesia, tied with Austria and Belgium in twenty-second place, and Turkey, tied with Norway in twenty-seventh place. [. . .] In a listing by life expectancy, the first Arab state is Kuwait, in thirty-second place, following Denmark and followed by Cuba.

Leave aside for a moment that Austria has a population of over 8 million. 8,169,929 in July, 2002, according to the CIA’s World Factbook “estimate”.How exactly is a life expectancy similar to that of Denmark “devastating”? Surely not because Denmark is a small country? Placing 32nd out of over 180 countries One assumes 180 countries. Data is sourced only to “indicators from the United Nations, the World Bank, and other authorities.”still means sitting well into the the top 20th percentile of the world.

Muslim countries may be badly off, but we know at least this much from reading Lewis’s latest: Kuwaiti life expectancy is doing just fine.

So avoid Crisis. Read What Went Wrong? instead—it’s a true scholarly work that focuses on the problem at hand without insulting your intelligence.

I can’t let this subject go, however, without first lamenting the truly horrid subtitles being brandished by books these days. How does Holy War and Unholy Terror exactly elucidate anything, beside apprising us of some editor’s unholy capacity for alliteration? Tellingly, the original subtitle for What Went Wrong? did not survive the transition from hardcover to paperback: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response became The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. Peddling clashes, are we? How about What Went Wrong? The Clash between Clarity and Sales in Publishing.

Predictably, both pro- and anti-war opinion mongers have found much in the war to date to bolster their respective moral high grounds. But that which is predictable is also boring. More interesting is to wonder what it would take to engender a change of heart on either side. Any conviction worth having should be falsifiable. Popper’s theory of epistemology turned conventional wisdom on its head in its contribution to the scientific method: Theories are only useful to the extent they are falsifiable, i.e. can be disproved through empirical tests.Beliefs that can never be tested against empirical evidence are merely dogmatic.

So I have constructed a set of tests that I offer up for consideration by both sides of the debate. For example, if you are for the war, you should agree now to admit it was a mistake if most of the following scenarios take place:

Conversely, if you are against the war, you should agree now to admit you were mistaken if most of the following scenarios take place:

Feel free to suggest your own criteria. It is of course possible for scenarios from both sides to play out, but the litmus test, I think, will be the reception of US and UK troops as they enter Baghdad.

As far as military objectives are concerned, I think the war is going well for the US, even after today. Anybody who assumed the US and UK would suffer at most the odd flesh wound is placing unrealistic expectations on the coalition. Television coverage is riveting, and worth a post all to its own. Here in Sweden, CNN is on all the time, but another channel achieves balanced coverage by alternating between hours of Fox News and Al Jazeera. Both are blatantly partial, and bizarrely compelling.

But Iraq has the potential of turning into another Vietnam, with a nightmare scenario wherein the civilians are liberated against their will, and good intentions pave a path to hell. Gulf War One is widely considered to have been the war where the US decisively overcame its Vietnam War syndrome. But one hopes that the US military did not forget the lessons of Vietnam. Afghanistan is not a good comparison for the challenges facing the US and UK in Iraq: There are much larger population centers in Iraq, there is a trained, patriotic army defending them, and they have the morale boost of defending their homeland against foreign invaders. The coalition operates with the handicap of an unwillingness to inflict civilian casualties, yet with a likelihood of such casualties occurring and with the success of their mission depending to a large extent on their reception by this civilian population.

Confidence based on expectations of inviolability is the most brittle kind. And the morale of soldiers who are not absolutely convinced they must fight to save their families is the most vulnerable. For coalition troops, the coming days will test both their confidence and their morale.

There is something that bugs me about articulate people who get things profoundly wrong. Perhaps it is because I normally associate the ability to say something well with having something to say.

Naomi Klein bugs me for this reason. But her transgressions are all the more apparent for her newly minted status as The Nation‘s replacement columnist for Christopher Hitchens. Hitch famously fled for more rational pages, so perhaps it is telling to see Klein at The Nation now.

In her inaugural column, Klein invites comparison to her predecessor by opening with an anti-Clinton screed. This, of course, is a game perfected by Hitchens, but he never broached the topic without first having a point and a purpose. Klein has neither. In three short paragraphs an off-the-cuff remark by Hillary Clinton blooms into premeditated fear mongering in the cause of an aggressive regionalist trade stance. You’d be forgiven for thinking Hillary herself fabricated the hoax she referred to.

None of this has anything to do with the main thrust of her article, which is that regional trade agreements (or Preferred Trade Agreements, PTAs) are bad. She happens to be right, but only on this narrow point and for reasons opposite to those she argues. Regionalism, whether expressed through NAFTA or EFTA or Mercosur, is a sub-par trading strategy. In their current form, these trade agreements lead mainly to trade diversion, which amounts to protectionism for larger regions. PTAs are only useful insofar that they are building blocks to true multilateralism — where there are no trade barriers whatsoever.

Klein, however, dislikes regionalism because it is not protectionist enough. Not that she would ever tell you outright — the closest she comes to admitting this sentiment is in her rendition of a conspiracy the rest of us are either too stupid to notice or else part of:

“First you expand the perimeter [of a trading bloc]. Then you lock down.”

Our differences are this: I have a problem with locking down. But Klein has a problem with expanding the perimeter in the first place.

Klein’s argument falters at the very beginning, when she lumps “free-market economists” in with military strategists and politicians as the bugbears of “Fortress NAFTA”. I can’t speak for the latter two groups, but if by “free-market economists” she means the ones that work at the World Bank, IMF and WTO, and such notable ones as Jagdish Bhagwati, then she is being dishonest. For this group is among the most aware of the shortcomings of PTAs.

These shortcomings are not the ones Klein lists, however. She objects to including Mexico into NAFTA and Eastern European countries into the EU on the grounds that they are being exploited:

But if a continent is serious about being a fortress, it also has to invite one or two poor countries within its walls, because somebody has to do the dirty work and heavy lifting.

And why would they agree to such a scheme? Apparently, these countries realize that it is better to be exploited than not:

For locked-out continents, even their cheap labor isn’t needed, and their countries are left to beg outside the gates for a half-decent price for wheat and bananas.

The shocking notion that perhaps, just perhaps, Mexico is exploiting the US, and Slovakia the EU, even just a little bit, does not seem to occur to Klein. But how could it not? The very foundation of trade theory is that all countries benefit from trade, even if the terms of trade are not equal. Counterintuitive at first blush, perhaps, but hardly controversial.

Who could possibly object, besides Klein? Trade alters opportunities for workers everywhere, but such change is not always welcomed by those who see their opportunities diminished — not the poor unskilled workers in the developing world, of course, but the rich unskilled workers in developed countries’ trade unions. And students with po-mo skills, unmarketable in any economy. These, then, are her partners in ideology. Some of them, I hesitate to note, ardent Clinton loyalists.

Klein’s other beef is with the notion of more secure borders. One would think that in her eagerness to protect poor would-be immigrants from landing low-paid jobs inside trade blocs, she’d applaud a secure border, so as to save them from their deluded selves. It would have been better to point out, as Bhagwati has done, that it is nigh impossible to stop economic migration, and that the best solution is to develop a coping strategy. Klein also glosses over a major problem with her “Fortress NAFTA,” described as “a continental security perimeter stretching from Mexico’s southern border to Canada’s northern one.” A security perimeter on Canada’s northern border? How exactly? NAFTA itself is in part a coping strategy for the flood of illegal Mexican labor into the US. If you can’t beat them, join them.

Klein’s moral outrage depends on a Marxian explanation for the emergence of PTAs — they are inevitable because of the dynamics of capitalism, whereby rich countries need to exploit poor countries. Her outing of the “social hierarchy” of the EU is quite galling:

Inside Fortress Europe, France and Germany are the nobility, and lesser powers like Spain and Portugal are the sentinels. Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic are the postmodern serfs, providing the low-wage factories where clothes, electronics and cars are produced for 20-25 percent of what it would cost to make them in Western Europe–the EU’s own maquiladoras.

But to make her point stick, Klein has to forget that most PTAs in existence are by developing countries, for developing countries: Mercosur, ECOWAS, SAPTA, CACM, LAFTA, CARICOM, ACS, ASEAN, GCC, SACU, CBI… and others. It would be quite the coincidence that PTAs only become exploitative when one or more members are rich.

In fact, in the case of the EU, Klein’s “nobility” are responsible for net cash injections into the economies of the “sentinels” and “serfs”. Some sentinel economies, such as Catalonia, are richer than the nobility, while the serfs have some of the fastest-growing economies in the world, with productivity growth to match. The only people complaining are Klein and French farmers, who fear for their livelihood now that Eastern European farmers are being exploited so.

The worst is that there is nothing that these European “social engineers” can do to please Klein. She admits to no empirical test that would determine the truth or otherwise of her assertions. For example, let us fast-forward to when the EU admits Turkey. Guess which version of events Klein will subscribe to: Is it proof that the EU is not a fortress after all but instead genuinely interested in the mutual benefits of free trade with more and more countries? Or, is Europe merely letting another poor country into the enclosure, to be exploited? I dare Klein to argue that the popularity of EU accession among Turks should not be misconstrued as an indication of who stands to gain.

If it was up to me, of course, there would be no tariffs, no quotas, and free movement of labor for all. It is a pipedream, somewhat, because the rich world fears the destabilizing effect of the coming surge of cheap and productive labor. Naomi, it’s not that the poor are exploited; it’s that the rich are overpaid.

Oh boy oh boy, do I get to do this every week?