marbury

iraq inquiry: explosives not found

As John Rentoul has been consistently pointing out, the coverage of the Iraq war inquiry has involved much prejudice, myth and redundancy dressed up as news. For instance, the glee with which reporters jumped all over Sir Christopher Meyer's evidence might have given you the impression that he hadn't said all this before, when of course, by his own admission, it was all in his memoir. Members of the inquiry could have saved a few hours by reading it. In fact they might have bought a few more books and saved themselves an inquiry.

One prominent characteristic of the coverage is selective amnesia: anything happening that might be construed to fit the anti-war, anti-Blair narrative is leaped upon, any fact from recent history that doesn't is forgotten. Here's an example from the Observer today:

Ricketts, a former chairman of Britain's powerful joint intelligence committee, has already given explosive evidence to the inquiry alleging that officials in London knew even before Bush came to office in 2001 that there were "voices'' in Washington calling for Saddam to be removed from power.

How explosive! I'm surprised this isn't bigger news around the world. Then again, maybe I'm not.

(Ps that excitable intensifier has been sheepishly deleted on the online version of the report.)

pop goes the empire

(From Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.)

France just explodes in 1962, doesn't it?

friends of friends

The gatecrashers meet the president.

The Secret Service issues what Ambinder calls a "fairly extraordinary" apology.

Remarkably, and admirably, the above photo (published after the story broke) is from the White House's own  photostream.

(Photo: Samantha Appleton/White House)

when poetry becomes prose

George Packer keeps hearing from people - especially young people - who are disappointed in Obama and deflated by the reality of his presidency. He tries to understand why:

They spent their entire adult lives under the worst President of our lifetime, they loved Obama because he was new and inspiring, and they felt that replacing the former with the latter would be a national deliverance. They weren’t wrong about that, but the ebbing of grassroots energy once the Obama campaign turned to governing suggests that some of his most enthusiastic backers saw the election as an end in itself. The Obama movement was unlike other social movements because it began and ended with a person, not an issue.

Perhaps there's a broader, more historic reason too: the 2008 election and its aftermath exposed the inherent tension between the American system and the American character.

Americans tend to bigger extremes of collective emotion than the Europeans, certainly than the Brits. Powerful gusts of feeling blow across that great land every few years, from bright-eyed optimism to roiling anger, Great Awakenings to witchhunts. It's part of what makes it an invigorating and occasionally scary country. The Founding Fathers, being clever chaps, knew this of course, and designed a system of governance that offered several layers of protection against the destabilising currents of emotion. In short, they made it bloody difficult to change anything quickly.

Presidential campaigns, by their nature, are huge promises that cannot be kept. Everyone's hopes and fears become invested in one person (and I think it's pretty much always a person, rather than an issue). Then it turns out, once they cross the threshold of the White House, that this person can't effect that much, not quickly anyway. So nearly all presidents take a plunge in popularity after they take office. Interestingly the exception is George Bush Snr., presumably because no-one expected much from him anyway.

The 2008 election created the conditions for maximum uplift, at least amongst half the population. An incredibly unpopular president was succeeded by a highly attractive candidate at a time of national crisis. A perfect emotional storm, comparable only to 1960 in recent times (the shape of JFK's approval ratings is instructive, by the way).

Post-inauguration, everyone relearnt what they'd briefly forgotten. Capitol Hill is still Capitol Hill; Democrats are still Democrats and Republicans are still Republicans (in fact, more so). Change turns out to mean, not a dream-like feeling of everyone coming together and loving everyone again but a 2000-word healthcare bill that nobody is thrilled about.

That's deflating. But it's not worth getting too upset over. After all, this is America.

confabulators

Jonah Lehrer quotes from a case report of a 48-year-old man who, after suffering brain damage, became a "confabulator": someone who constantly, compulsively makes up stories:

SB would claim, first thing in the morning, to have fictitious business appointments, when in fact he was attending a day centre, and would frequently dress for dinner in the evening in the mistaken belief that guests were coming. He would also attempt to take cups of tea outside, saying that these were for his foreman, who had discontinued employment with him several years earlier. During the interview, his memory was confabulatory even for events an hour earlier and he would sometimes claim to have been engaged in imaginary business appointments when in fact he had been undergoing psychological tests... His confabulations were not limited to his former business life, for when questioned about holidays or outings over the previous few days, he would again report events that bore no relationship to actual happenings.

Lehrer:

This was SB's perpetual tragedy: he told lies without knowing that he was lying. Although his mind had mostly recovered - his memory problems and "inappropriate actions" had largely disappeared* - he would always be left with this terrible symptom, spinning fictions but thinking they were facts. It's not that he wanted to deceive - he just couldn't help it.

Sounds like someone we know.

dad, do turkeys have souls?

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Love the gravity of Malia's expression.

Alex Massie writes eloquently on why Thanksgiving is the best of American holidays.

To our American friends, enjoy your Thanksgiving parties. Watch out for gatecrashers.

if you're name's not on the list, just act the part

Obama's first state dinner (in honour of the Indian Prime Minister) was gatecrashed by this charming couple...

hot vs cool

The Washington Post headlines this story on Obama's decision-making process "Obama goes with head, not with gut". This is fine as a headline, but of course it's not either/or. A better way to put it might be that the way to Obama's gut is via his head. He's the kind of person who has to think everything through before really feeling it. As I say, that doesn't mean his conviction isn't as strong as George Bush or anyone else; it just means he gets there by a different route.

WaPo quotes Allan Lichtman, a "progressive historian":

"I think the Obama we've seen as president is a very different Obama than we saw during the campaign. He doesn't seem to be connected, he doesn't seem to have the passion, he doesn't seem to be conveying the grand and inspiring vision".

Perhaps Mr Lichtman watched a different campaign to me. For most of it, Obama was in cerebral, cool mode; he would only ramp up into inspirational for big speeches, or at certain critical stretches of the campaign. Indeed he was constantly attracting the same kind of criticism Lichtman makes now, particularly in the weeks before his Jefferson-Jackson speech in Iowa, and during the dog days of his long battle with Clinton in the winter and spring of 2008.

Andrew Sullivan is excellent on the strengths (and political vulnerability) of Obama's temperament:

In today's populist, emotional climate, coolness is a virtue in getting things right. Especially when it has been rarely more important to get things right - from Afghanistan to climate change to health insurance reform.The paradox is: in today's populist, emotional climate, coolness can be eclipsed in the political drama, and thereby rendered moot. In many ways, Palin is the extreme counter-example. She plays a short game of around ten minutes in duration. She deploys no substantive policy content and no interest whatever in actual government. But she channels pure emotion, identity and rage very effectively.

the bubbledome of your dreams

Evidence of how bad the economy is in the industrial midwest: this is the Silverdome, an 80,000 seat enclosed arena in Detroit, Michigan (picture of inside here), built for $55.7m in 1975, just sold for $583,000.

Might make a rather striking loft apartment.

(via MR)

did blair lie over iraq?

Or, to use a more decorous phrase, act in bad faith?

To my mind the answer is clearly no, however you phrase it. He was guilty of bad judgement: disastrous judgement in fact. That ought to be enough to condemn him, if condemning him is what you wish to do. But the persistent allegations, or implications of dishonesty are absurd. You don't even have to believe in Blair's essential decency to see this. As Daniel Finkelstein patiently explains, for Blair to lie about WMD would have indicated an instinct for political self-destruction not previously apparent:

You see, if he didn't believe there were WMD he would have been proposing going to war knowing that it was extremely likely that none would be found. He would be proposing a course of action he thought likely to lead to political disaster for him. Why would he do that?

obama's next move

(Photo: Pete Souza/White House)

Clive Crook highlights a recent remark of Henry Kissinger's, on the president's progress:

"He reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games," Kissinger said. "But he hasn't completed a single game and I'd like to see him finish one."

Now, putting to one side my ambivalence about the character and record of Mr K and notwithstanding my defence of Obama from those who prematurely complain that he hasn't achieved anything, I have to admit: that's pretty good.

Tuesday will see Obama, if not finish a game, then at least make a very bold move. We know that he will announce a big troop increase in Afghanistan, in the context of a comprehensive strategy. We're told he will talk about "finishing the job" which may sound a little Bush-like (MoDo will be pleased) but is probably a necessary framing of a war about which many Americans, not to mention Britons, are deeply uncertain.

Leaving aside the really important - and to me at least, fairly unknowable - questions, of whether this strategy will work, and if so how long it will take to work, let's stick to the shallow stuff: how will this play out politically in the short term? My feeling is that is that it will provide Obama with quite a significant boost, one that's perhaps underestimated right now. Here are three reasons why.

First, the answer Obama and his team have arrived at will be applauded not only by his supporters but by the right, for the most part, albeit softly (as short-term politics, this is actually the easier option). The brickbats will come from Obama's left. So this announcement will position Obama squarely in the centre ground, which is where voters generally like to see their presidents.

Second, we'll see the benefits of all that "dithering". Unlike Bush's wartime speeches, usually vague and full of generalities, Obama's address and associated communications will be coherent, detailed, and closely argued. Obama will seem entirely in command of this frighteningly complex issue. That's reassuring (doesn't mean he'll be right, but as I say that's for another day).

Third, I suspect we will see the "conviction" that everyone's been asking for shining through. Those who argue that Obama is too cerebral to be certain of anything have got it wrong. You have to be capable of some serious conviction to run for president after 18 months in the Senate. No, Obama can do certainty, he can do vision - it's just that he only does that stuff after careful, exhaustive deliberation. Just because he uses his brain doesn't mean he can't make up his mind.

So I think this announcement will give Obama some real political momentum. Suddenly, all the anxieties about the length of time taken over this decision will disappear. The president will be taking the game to his opponents.

smoking guns and wild geese

As John Rentoul says, the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war is - entirely predictably but entirely misleadingly - being reported by the British press as a search for a "smoking gun" (the cliche du jour). As if, after all the previous inquiries, FOI requests and torrid memoirs, this inquiry will turn up a hitherto unknown memo or conversation which finally proves that Tony Blair hypnotised the intelligence services and took the country to war because of his lust for blood and oil.

Rarely can a war have been debated so openly and thoroughly before, during and after. Yet the media persist in suggesting that there's some giant secret that "explains" everything. They're only setting up themselves up for disappointment, the little darlings.

the beatles' best album tracks

So many of The Beatles' best songs were never singles. On behalf of Intelligent Life (the Economist's cultured-up sister) Laura Barton valiantly attempts an impossible task:

Choosing favourite Beatles tracks is a bit like deciding which members of your family to rescue from a sinking ship; every one seems to gaze imploringly at you. I’ve plumped for songs that are not too well-worn, that can still surprise, that are inventive, impulsive and downright irresistible...

It's an excellent selection, evocatively annotated. Myself, I would have had She Came In Through the Bathroom Window in there. You?

category error

Matthew Dowd, the former Bush adviser, argues that Sarah Palin has a realistic shot at the presidency in 2012. Now, to be fair to Dowd, he's no mindless Palinista: he was one of the few Republicans to criticise McCain's choice of running mate during the campaign and he's attempting to make an objective case here, albeit a contrarian one. But even so, it's a deeply silly piece.

Dowd says that Paln's favourability ratings are the "mirror image" of  Obama's, which is very misleading (he neglects to mention, for instance, that the Republican base is smaller than the Democratic base). But such statistical sophistry is besides the point anyway. The point is this: look at her! LIsten to her! This is not a person who is going to make any serious, sustained effort to turn herself into a viable candidate, even if she could! Yet Dowd - in dishing out advice to Palin - talks about her as if she's a professional, dedicated politician who acts on the advice of people like him. Here he is - bless his heart - imagining that Palin will somehow drag herself away from the celebrity whirligig and transform herself into Henry Kissinger:

You don't need to "tweet" quite so much. You don't need to be at countless rallies and photo ops. Instead, seek out substantive platforms where you can relate to people in a thoughtful, measured way. Appear on Sunday shows every now and then, sit down with Charlie Rose and editorial boards, and give serious speeches on your approach to the world in the 21st century

First reaction: I'd love to see that, just for the immense comedy value it promises. Second reaction: Not. Going. To Happen.

inside the mind of an actor

The Guardian reports on a neuroscientist's attempt to find out whether and how the brains of actors work differently from those of the rest of us. The grande dame Fiona Shaw was wired up to a scanner and asked to recite some lines from TS Eliot. The results were revelatory:

But what really excites Scott is the parts of the brain Shaw was using for the poetry. "In addition to all the parts of the brain associated with motor skills, like moving the tongue or lips, she used a part of the brain associated with analysing or doing a complex transformation of a visual image. If I told you to imagine the figure 8, turn it through 90 degrees, and then think of it as a pair of glasses – that's the extra part Fiona was using when she was performing the text."

This part of the brain has the funtime name infra parietal sulkus. "Interestingly, it's not the part used by non-professionals when they try to produce a voice," Scott says. "Actors do it in a very different way from you or me. When I started doing this research I came from a phonetics background where you break speech down, analyse it and build it up again. But professionals don't. They're doing something much more visceral and bodily."

map vision

Cartocacoethes is the compulsion to see maps everywhere. Strange Maps collects accidental maps - in puddles, plates, paint splashes and more.

the everlasting telephone

The novel has been deceased for an awfully long time. Here's the novelist F. Marion Crawford, writing in 1896:

The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?...A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course—published every morning for the whole world....

This might be a better name for the internet than "the internet".

(via Kottke)

how to flush out global warming "sceptics"

In the Times today, David Aaronovitch takes on climate change sceptics like Lord Lawson (the former chancellor), zeroing in on something fundamentally disingenuous about their rhetoric:

People such as Lord Lawson are not sceptical, for if one major peer-reviewed piece of scientific research were ever to be published casting doubt on climate change theory, you just know they’d have it up in neon at Piccadilly Circus. They are only sceptical about what they don’t want to be true... They suggest that they are open-minded, but their foundations and articles are designed to reassure the witless that their attachment to their Porsche Cayenne Turbos and their hatred of recycling are somehow acts of non-conformist courage.

By happy coincidence Nate Silver not only makes the same point but proposes a solution to it (and a few other problems): climate change futures markets, in which everyone with an interest - in both sense of the word - would stake money on their predictive powers:

The markets would help to clarify exactly the extent to which there is in fact a consensus about climate change. There is, I believe, an abnormally high degree of disingenuousness within the global warming debate, most of it coming from one side. We would very quickly find out if the skeptics -- and for that matter the believers -- were willing to put their money where their mouths were.

the long game

Andrew Sullivan harps on the same theme as me today. Obama is working to a longer timetable than most of his critics, just as he did during the campaign. Though you wouldn't guess it from the polls or most of the commentary, politically speaking - as John McCain might say - the fundamentals are good. Here's Sullivan:

I think Obama's handling of the economic crisis has been about as good as it reasonably gets; I think his handling of Iran is equally adroit; I find his relentless emphasis on reality in Afghanistan a good sign; I suspect the only way to get health insurance reform is the way he has attempted; I think the stimulus was necessary and sufficient; and I think unemployment will be coming down when he runs for re-election. On those issues I differ with him on - accountability for war crimes and civil rights - I can see the cool and cunning logic of his moves so far. The depth and complexity of the problems he faces remain immense. Perhaps he will prove incapable of surmounting them. But his persistence matters here. And we are not yet a year in. He is strategy; his opponents are tacticians.

Despite the turbulent political weather, I am somewhere around 80% confident that we're looking at a two-term president.

the advantages of unpopularity

Interesting piece by the NYT's Adam Nagourney on the significance of Obama's falling approval ratings. It includes the intriguing suggestion that the White House may actually make political capital out of the president's current unpopularity:

Mr. Axelrod did not dispute the notion that the fate of some Democratic incumbents could rest on how popular Mr. Obama is next summer. In fact, that is precisely the argument White House officials are making to nervous Democrats in urging them to rally around the health care bill, rather than risk having Mr. Obama suffer a debilitating defeat that could turn Americans against him.

In a strange way, then, sub-50 ratings for Obama in the next couple of months may help him as he tries to shore up support amongst Dems for healthcare. And if healthcare passes, his ratings are likely to go up in time for the midterms.

what obama can learn from palin (or not)

Unemployment rises with no end in sight, his approval ratings are dropping below 50% (even in the state that launched his presidency) and his tour of Asia was panned in the American press. But you know things aren't going well for Obama when Maureen Dowd writes a critical column suggesting he should be more like Sarah Palin:

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read: Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference. It’s time for the president to reinvent this formula and convey a more three-dimensional person. Palin can be stupefyingly simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static. She nurtures her grass roots while he neglects his. He struggles to transcend identity politics while she wallows in them. As he builds an emotional moat around himself, she exuberantly pushes whatever she has, warts and all — the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names. Just like the disastrous and anti-intellectual W., this Visceral One never doubts herself. The Cerebral One welcomes doubt.

I'm not sure Dowd knows where she's going here, and I'm not sure she's sure either. Is she suggesting Obama needs to abolish doubt and deliberation, go with his gut (or pretend to) and pander to his base? Not quite, but she doesn't really try and resolve the difference between these two ideas of leadership, and comes off sounding confused.

Dowd's confusion is shared by most of the American media, including Obama's natural supporters. They can't quite understand why Obama doesn't strike more poses: why, instead of carefully making decisions, he doesn't strive to simply appear "decisive", or inflate his quiet confidence into signals of "strength", or hug a few more people on camera to telegraph his "caring". In short, they can't quite understand why he isn't playing their game. Dowd does actually put her finger on it, briefly, when she says:

As with the debates, he seems resistant to the idea that perception, as well as substance, matters.

This overstates it. But I do think he believes the balance has shifted too far in the direction of the former - and he's determined to recalibrate it. Obama's style of governing doesn't lend itself to the emotional rushes of the campaign; but it does represent Change.

natural beauty

This is from Christoph Niemann's brilliant visual blog at the NYT: go and check it out.

how the beatles made that sound

This is porn for Beatles nerds: three of their greatest songs, broken down into their constituent recorded parts - including elements that were ultimately discarded - and put back together. Absolutely amazing.

(It's from a BBC Radio 6 show from earlier this year, and I can't believe it wasn't bigger news at the time).

(via Finkelstein)

the one-woman economic stimulus

The Daily Beast's Duff McDonald does the math and estimates that the Palin brand has generated media revenues of $26.5m in one week.

(Photo: Adam Bird/AP)

megrahi hasn't gone away yet

As the Guardian reports, it's now over three months since his release...

taking occam's razor to obama's approval ratings

The hyper-analytic media environment Obama's presidency exists in means that there are plenty of theories about his falling approval ratings. A popular one is that voters are in ideological revolt at a perceived shift to the left (an over-reaching government, etc). I've never bought this. As I said in response to Clive Crook's elaboration on this theme, the best explanation is the simplest. The economy is in a mess, and - fairly or unfairly - it's now Obama's mess rather than his predecessor's. This chart - via 538 - supports my analysis:

Nate Silver puts it like this:

The economy, I suppose, is sort of boring to talk about: it's a slow-moving sort of thing, and one over which the President has only a certain modicum of control. And so you'll have pundits attributing Obama's slide to all various and sundry sorts of things -- Health Care! Henry Louis Gates! Torture Trials! -- when really it's just been very much about the number of people who have come to blame Obama about the economy has tended to accelerate faster than perceptions of the economy itself.

As he goes on to say, the Democrats' best hope of avoiding a rout in 2010 is to be seen to have taken effective action on unemployment.

the iraq war: saddam's story

In Britain we're still trying to understand precisely why and how our government joined the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the true mystery lies on the other side: what convinced Saddam Hussein to opt for such a suicidal strategy? He didn't have WMDs, or an advanced WMD programme. Yet he managed to convince everyone - including Western intelligence, his neighbours, and much of his own government - that he did. He never backed down from this bluff, even when it was clear to everyone else that Bush was serious about removing him, and even though he had no serious military defence in place. This master of self-preservation simply walked into the fire.

It looks like we will soon know much more about the workings of Saddam's mind, and of his regime. Apparently, he had the Nixonian habit of taping his own conversations, and many of those tapes have found their way into the hands of Kevin Woods and his colleagues at the Institute for Defence Analyses. Woods has also interviewed key members of Saddam's regime, like Tariq Aziz and Chemical Ali, and was given access to documents from government offices and Saddam's palaces. I greatly look forward to whatever Woods publishes on the subject. In the meantime we can thank the Cheap Talk blog for a fascinating account of a recent talk given by Woods at MIT.

What's clear is that the West badly misread Saddam's psychology and perspective on the world. Saddam saw himself, unequivocally, as the victor of the first Gulf war. This gave him a huge amount of (over-)confidence. It's also apparent that our intelligence services were deceived because the Iraqi government worked like a hall of mirrors, in which nobody was sure what was real and what wasn't:

A key player, the head of research into WMDs, was asked: Is it possible that there was a WMD program and you did not know about it?  He said it was quite possible.

(The same man said he assumed that if Bush invaded and found none, he would plant them. Whilst so many here are appalled at the dishonesty of our leaders, Iraqis must have shocked at their lack of guile.)

must have been that other guy

Rupert Murdoch angrily denies suggesting that Obama made a racist remark. He needs to do something about the man going around TV studios doing a very good impersonation of him. Or better, make a graceful retreat from public life.