Well, it would have been easier to negotiate with these guys earlier. Before we went into Iraq. We assumed they hated Saddam so much that they would revolt at the first opportunity. According to Newsday,

"Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim has sent instructions to his supporters and secret cells in Basra, Najaf, Karbala and other southern Iraqi cities not to start an uprising or support the American-led coalition in any way, according to two of his top advisers. Al-Hakim also issued a "message to the Iraqi people" last week urging them not to side either with the United States or the Iraqi regime."

Well, possibly if we had privately made it clear at the same time we were seeking security council approval for the Iraqi invasion that we would not invade unless we had a deal he would be playing a different tune. I don't really believe the problem is that we didn't support the last Shi'a uprising with troops - alliances tend to be fluid in Iraq. It's partly that he wants to make the Iranians happy, and has nothing to lose since we're already shedding our blood whether his people shed theirs or not. He still needs to earn the support of the Iranians, but ours is already committed. Part of it is, let's face it, sheer genuine hate. He seems to hang out with the hard line Iranian clerics. Also, of course, nobody has even supported occupation of their country by a foreign power when they had any other choice.

Do we still have any negotiating leverage at all? It's worth thinking about, since this guy may be a major force behind the non-Shia revolt. He seems to spend a lot of time in Iran. If we had some other credible Shia leaders who wanted to deal with us it would at least give us a lever to start talking. Our most recent plan seems to have been to keep the Sunni government in place with some new Americans near the very top, at least for now. There seem to be problems with that too.

Al-Hakim further antagonized the United States last month after he dispatched 1,000 fighters to set up a military camp in northern Iraq, an area outside Iraqi control and administered by Kurds. The Bush administration is worried the Badr forces will serve as an Iranian proxy and further complicate the situation in northern Iraq. The area is controlled by two competing Kurdish factions, and Turkey has threatened to send troops in if the Kurds try to expand their territory.

Since we don't seem to be going according to the original government plan, it's possible some serious negotiations could convince some Shia leader that they had a stake in the new government - especially one who would be excluded from Al-Hakim's plan. It would be pretty tough to give away enough power to make some Iraqi's feel part of the new government, while keeping enough to actually build a stable government, but I'm not sure it would be harder then the way we're headed now. Of course, that wasn't how we did it in Germany and Japan. Via Not a Fish, here's IRAQI HISTORY VS. AMERICAN IDEALISM*, by Ofra Bengio and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, from the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, with some reasons that model may be difficult to implement.

Or am I just grasping at straws? We've stated we are willing to shed a lot of American blood in the course of this invasion. Realistically, we have to admit we're willing to shed a lot of Iraqi blood too. Of course we did rebuild countries after shedding a lot of blood. Read the article I linked to in the preceeding paragraph if you haven't already. It mostly talks about the Iraqi history of resisting occupation, it doesn't really get into the fact that all factions will still have supporters outside the country - or that we are already indebted to the Kurds.

The second section of my sidebar will be great political linkers. At the moment it seems to be biased towards the right in some ways. Many right wing blogs link to English language pages of newspapers published for middle eastern consumption. I admire this. Newspapers from other nations are one key way to get around the (often synchronized across the left and right, and even across national boundries) assumptions of the mainstream media. Occasionally some of the articles seem merely to give a reader a thrilling hot surge of anger and confirm preconceptions, but I still think this linking outside the Anglosphere is a great thing. The fact that I've seen conservative bloggers do this more than liberal ones at the present time is thought provoking.

The blog section of Untold Millions is mainly a list of links, usually with little or no commentary. The link itself is a sentence or two long. Many of these links are to the New York Post or other mainstream American media, but some others are to Arab News or other English language periodicals from the middle east. To arrive at the page where the author writes his editorial essays (including an occasional ongoing dialog with me about the many things we differ on), first you have to press the home link, then the The Scatterbrained Syncretist link, ending up here.

Before adding a few of my own words suggesting what The Memory Hole is about, I'll cut and paste a short bit from them which is pretty descriptive.

Purpose > The Memory Hole exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known. This includes:

• Government files
• Corporate memos
• Court documents (incl. lawsuits and transcripts)
• Police reports and eyewitness statements
• Congressional testimony
• Reports (governmental and non-governmental)
• Maps, patents, Web pages
• Photographs, video, and sound recordings
• News articles
• Books (and portions of books)

The emphasis is on material that exposes things that we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget).

They publish many things, but tend to lean left. Sometimes they link to mainsteam media, but in the main that is not what the site is about.

I'm tempted to introduce Instapundit as the blog that needs no introduction, and unless you're very new to blog reading you must have encountered them already. In case you were initially turned off for political reasons, I should mention that this is a great linking blog. Glenn Reynolds seems to look at most of the blogs on his huge sidebar pretty regularly, and if anything is happening in the blogosphere, there is a good chance he will find out about and link to it. He updates very frequently on a regular basis. He writes from a neocon perspective, liberal on sexuality (and I imagine religion, havent seen it come up yet) but conservative on most other issues. This is also the blog with the most viewers and incoming links of the blogosphere.

Matthew Yglesias is a liberal, but he doesn't always run with the herd. He's written some good essays, but I'm including him here for his links. Some of them are to the Washington Post, but many of them are to essays by other bloggers I would have missed if it weren't for him.

Little Green Footballs is another conservative blog which often links to articles from Arab and other newspapers which may not be considered that unusual by their primary audience, but will make many Americans angry. The Rittenhouse Review has implied they are a pit of anti-Arab sentiment, but in my opinion a segment of the mainstream media is on a par. As I said before, in the long term I think we need more linking outside the mainstream Anglosphere media, and this blog has it, even if their sentiments about Islam do seem mostly one sided. They also have one of the most active comment section discussions on the internet. I don't have the link right now, but I also recall a discussion on this blog with someone from the Saudi embassy posting.

Carraig Daire Weblog links to both Arabian peninsula and Indian and Pakistanian news sources, among others. This blog is also pro Iraqi invasion. Kieran Lyons hasn't been posting political posts quite as much as he used to, but this blog has a great sidebar including many news sources to help you get started, and is well worth keeping an eye on.

Here's a quote from a recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution I googled:

Bush's proposed budget would give the CDC $6.5 billion. While the request is a 1 percent increase over the proposal he offered last year, it is about $700 million less than what Congress actually approved, and Bush signed into law, for the current year.

Some of the proposed cuts are sizable. Next year's budget calls for a 26 percent cut for improvements at local public health centers. It also would cut funding for environmental health programs by 18 percent and reduce money for occupational safety and health by 10 percent.

Let's hope for two things. One, this particular disease is cured quickly with the resources the CDC and the WHO already have at their disposal. Two, the issue doesn't go away, and people keep asking what we are doing to prepare for next time.

It was very recently, only a couple of generations ago, that it was common to have more children then you really wanted because you didn't know how many would die of disease. It may have happened to the poor slightly more often than the middle class, but death was indeed the great leveler. When the WHO wiped out smallpox, it was a major triumph for humanity and for America, which played a huge role. This was the height of the war against contageous disease, when it really seemed humanity would hand one obnoxious horseman of the apocalypse his head. Victories in the war did not always come easily or cheaply, but we knew the price and we paid it. Newt Gingrich liked to talk about the values of our parent's generation, but those who paid for the Marshall plan and the eradication of smallpox would have spat on him.

The United States did not help pay for this glorious triumph merely out of philantropy. We knew that smallpox anywhere in the world would come back to us in time - and we wanted it gone. Disease breeds on the margins, but in time affects the heart. Some of the worst places for breeding resistance to HIV therapies are where people may get help enough to start using the drugs, but poor enough that they cannot continue forever. The viruses which survived the drug will increase their numbers, and perhaps this parially resistant strain will be passed on to someone else who will repeat the process.

I don't follow automobile racing, but I have heard that weight is at a premium and they have a saying. If something critical breaks, it must have been too lightly built and needs to be sturdier next time - whether anyone died or not. If it doesn't break, it must be at least a little heavier than necessary. Shave off a tiny bit of weight. I have also heard that NASA kept assuming that if they had gotten away with something last time it must be OK. So they kept taking the same risks, unless they accidently took a new one and won, in which case that could be added to the list of accepted practices.

For a long time, our resources to resist epidemics have been gradually hollowing out. There have been spikes, such as the discovery that tuberculosis was beoming more widespread, but our level of preparedness for something wildly new has been decreasing. In species from rats to humans, increasing population leads to increasing risk of epidemic disease. For rats, the situation has always ended with a massive populations crash, no matter how great the food supply. Then the cycle starts again. For a brief historical moment homo sapiens has interrupted the cycle. Do we have what it takes to break it?

This is from the United States CDC - center for disease control. May 29 update.

I'd like to first begin, though, with just a reflection on some sad news that CDC received this morning. Dr. Urbani, who is the WHO physician investigating the outbreak in Hanoi, died of SARS that he acquired during his investigation. He was a very close colleague of ours and someone that we had worked closely with in both Hanoi and Thailand through the past several years, and we are very sad and our condolences certainly go to his family and his colleagues as well as our colleagues in the area who've been working with him over the past few weeks on this investigation.

That's from near the beginning of the report. I guess it caught my eye because the people sent to investigate a contagious disease are presumably the most knowlegable about safety precautions.

Clearly panic mongering is counterproductive, but I begin to wonder if this is a war as pressing as the one in Iraq - and if not, when one will occur.

I've been worried more about the dangers of accidental empire than deliberate empire. The imperial faction of the Bush administration is coming under more and more scrutiny, and I don't think they'll get away with it by themselves. Unfortunately the course we have embarked upon is extraordinarily difficult. There will be times when even people who did not plan it all along will be tempted to say 'Well we tried, but the Iraqi's didn't cooperate'. For this reason, I thought it was time to talk about the perils of empire - no matter how high the original motives.

Via Matthew Yglesias, I discovered the blogosphere had beaten me to it. Timothy Burke of Easily Distracted knows much more than me about history, and will even after I finish the book on British history that I'm now two thirds of the way through.

The British Empire failed because not because it violated sovereignities, but because it was hypocritical in its mission to civilize. It killed and imprisoned and punished those who sought no more than to defend their legitimately different ways of life, using military force where dialogic suasion was the only moral strategy. It defined the parochial and local virtues of English society as the central values of civilization. Civilization is not tea and lawn bowling. The British Empire democratized at home and constructed new autocracies abroad. It promised the rule of law and respect for citizens and then made imperial subjects into permanent subjects denied legal recourse and forever condemned to servitude. It held forth the promise of rights and snatched them back the moment that men and women walked forward eagerly to claim them. It ruled without hope or interest in understanding its subjects, and dismissed the many genuine moments of connection that presented themselves as graspable possibilities.


We are already well down the road to similar failures. The United States Constitution wisely has as its first principle that the power of government must necessarily be constrained in order to secure the blessings of liberty. Where are the constraints now on American power abroad? There are none remaining. Is our judgement so unimpeachably correct, our government so godly, that we can be trusted with such a power? The Founding Fathers did not trust their own creation with that kind of untrammeled authority. The Declaration of Independence underscores that freedom comes from below, from the determination of a people, not as a grant or gift from an overlord—and it makes clear that all peoples everywhere have a right to be represented, that decisions should not be taken in their name without their willful assent.

Timothy Burke mentions that others have written comparisons between the current situation and the formation of the British empire, so I doubt I can add anything there. I hope someone with more historical knowledge will improve on this brief note, but I thought in the meantime I'd try and say a few words about how some ancient empires such as the Roman empire were profitable for many centuries, but modern empires are more apt to drain money and blood like the British empire.

In Roman times, to sack a city was a profitable enterprise. The troops were happy even if paid cheaply - at least those who managed to grab a share. Landless colonists who received land in exchange for manning an outpost were pleased indeed. This apparently destructive behavior did not prevent occupying the territory and collecting tribute. There wasn't any industry to be trashed to speak of, and agriculture wasn't that capital intensive, so the lack of former cash and valuables didn't hinder that much. Odder still, this apparently unpleasant behavior didn't hinder a successful long term occupation. It happened all the time. After Rome conquered everyone in your neighborhood, the Pax Romana had serious benefits to trade, and they wouldn't let their own provinces arm for war against each other. Saves you money when you can't build an offensive army and neither can your neighbors. The Roman atrocities might often be forgotten after a few generations - these things happened.

The British empire was another story. Even then, the main 'wealth of nations' was in the ability to exploit natural resources and manufacture goods rather than take gold and silver by force, as Adam Smith pointed out. The British had no expectation of paying for their empire by having their army grab stuff and go - this would have radically decreased the income potential of the captured and colonized territories. Rather, they wanted sources of raw materials (including natives to mine and even sell them to the British) and buyers of manufactured goods. As Timothy Burke points out, the British also had moral scruples (partially hypocritical, as are all of ours) which made the ultimate Roman expedient of slaughtering the civilian population of an intractible possesion an empty bluff - and the subjects came to know it.

In outline, this plan of using the resources of a controlled country to pay for the occupation has been tried in recent history - it was called the British empire. It didn't work. The odd thing was, many countries did benefit economically from their British rulers. They didn't appreciate it - and neither would we. And Pax Americana doesn't happen unless we conquer the whole neighborhood. Are we going to take the other countries before or after building an Iraqi democracy? Either would have problems.

Sun Tsu believed in conquering your neighbors for profit and prestige. He does suggest conquering the nearer ones while remaining at peace with the ones farther away. I guess shorter supply lines are part of the reason. I'm sure many in the Bush administration sincerely intend to build a democracy, but it is a milk and water intention not built of serious meditation on the costs. There will come a point where autonomy proposals seeming reasonable to us will be responded to with violence by our non subjects (wards?), and then we will be tempted to decide we have done our best and must rule with a heavier hand for awhile, all with the intention of educating people so that they are capable of a democracy.

I do not know for certain if Timothy Burke's concept of empire is workable in the modern world, but I'm pretty certain the one we are sliding thoughtlessly towards is not.

The first section of my new reorganized sidebar is going to be for deep political thinkers. This is for those bloggers who think about the future implications of events which are being discussed by other bloggers and news media. If the political blogosphere were really a global brain, they might be the cerebral cortex. I believe people who read a few of these will on the average talk and vote more intelligently.

In theory I favor independents over either liberals or conservatives. A reliably partisan blog might occasionally find new arguments for their chosen side, but most often will at best paraphrase arguments frequently made very well. In practice, one of my top political thinker blogs is very conservative and one is very liberal.

Steven Den Beste'sUSS Clueless is in one respect a standard neoconservative blog. Neocon is what you get if you subtract the religious and paleoconservative right from the Bush administration. If it is possible to find a logical explanation for any apparently self defeating Bush administration attempts at foreign policy, he will find it. The main difference between him and the legions of 'ordinary' neocon blogs is that he thinks seriously towards both the past and the future. While the other neoconservative are telling each other how horrible the cheese eating surrender monkeys are, he tries methodically to deduce what possible explanation there can be for what he and others consider absurdly obstructive behavior. After writing an essay examing every possible cause and thoroughly discussing the pro's and con's of each, he writes another one considering what ramifications their new foreign policy will have for ours ten or twenty years in the future, and how we should respond. Even if you reject his premises, this kind of thinking is what the blogosphere needs more of to become a venue for serious thought.

Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo is perhaps as far to the left as Steven Den Beste is to the right. I'm a tiny bit more in sympathy with Joshua, but that isn't why I give him a place of honor in the thinkers section. While many other people with reservations about the Bush administration were discussing the conduct of the war, he was writing an article for the Washington monthly about people in the Bush administration who may well have dangerous plans involving Iraq and Syria, and what the dangers of those plans are. I've also seen him publish correction to errors made by mainstream media - noteworthy not only because it takes a deep knowledge base to detect these errors, but also because it's hard for working journalists to get on the bad side of people they may have to work with some day - or who might even notice an error of theirs.

Shortly after I started reading Daniel W. Drezner, he wrote a post comparing in detail the defense plans of all the Democratic candidates for president. He gave one an A- for a plan with specifics. I was surprised to discover later he was a Republican - just nobody's lap dog. He does some seriously nuanced thinking on the long term effects the way America is handling Iraq may have on the international balance of power. Much of his best work might come under political linking rather than political thinking, but finding the cream of the cream so reliably requires fine judgement indeed.

There is much to like about OxBlog. The three intelligent politically aware bloggers who co-write this blog don't always have the exact same point of view. It's harder to misrepresent someone's argument when they share the same blog with you. I saw one of the openest corrections I've seen anywhere on this blog. There's a lot of great discussion, but somehow this criticism of the press that is neither a frantic accusation of left or right bias sums it up.

If one were to sum up the nature of such questions, one could do it in two words: confrontational and predictable. In principle, confrontation is good. Challenges from the press force elected officials to justify controversial decisions and account for notable failures. While somewhat of a turn-off, the snide and condescending tone of most of the question asked demonstrates that even in times of war, Americans' support for the First Amendment is so strong that journalists have the right to grill the President as if he were the defendent in a murder trial.

Unfortunately, the predictable nature of today's questions render their confrontational stance worthless. These are questions that Bush and Blair have answered dozens of times before. This sort of repetition demonstrates a disturbing lack of creativity on the journalists' part.

Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo has done a lot of amazing writing about the longer range implications of day to day events in the war - deep well thought out concerns that would be easy to miss.

"I was watching a British military briefing this morning when a reporter asked one of the British generals what he thought of the fact that the running of the port of Umm Qasr has apparently already been raffled off to some American company. The look on his face was priceless. Sort of the Blair tragedy writ small."

So are we going to give a share of the pork to Britain or not? And how much say is the democratic government we are so excited about building going to have about this?

That same Talkiing Points Memo post has other juicy bits towards the end. I sure hope there's enough oil to pay for Qualcomm AND the occupation AND rebuilding Iraq. It might be enough, assuming we don't load on too much more. And we may be sending Franklin Graham to help with the relief efforts. According to Josh Marshall he's repeatedly called Islam a wicked religion. Josh also quotes him directly. "God will always give us opportunities to tell others about his Son... We are there to reach out to love them and to save them, and as a Christian I do this in the name of Jesus Christ."

It seems I have an RSS feed. I didn't even know it until I happened on Janes' Blogosphere. I can't tell you how it looks until I start using a news aggregator. Meanwhile, here it is:

My RSS feed

While we've been worried about war, could one of the other horsemen of the apocalypse have been sneaking up behind us? This has the potential to become a more imminent danger than terrorism combining with nuclear proliferation to end civilization. This is also a war we are perhaps less prepared to fight then we were a few decades ago, unlike Iraq. It is only recently that a middle class family in a prosperous progressive country need not expect to lose any children to disease. With the recent discussion of biological warfare, humanity's (especially America's and a few others') glorious triumph over smallpox is imperiled. Are the huge triumphs we have made over disease only temporary, unless we drastically increase our vigilance? This may be a triumph of the greatest generation we do not have the stamina to maintain - and many who talk about the Greatest Generation and are more concerned about decreasing taxes than strengthening society are most guilty.

What worries me about this story is that we seem to be going backwards. A day or so ago it sounded like the cause was pretty much isolated.

The disease could be caused by a combination of typically benign viruses, producing a virulent double impact on the human immune system.

Or, more puzzlingly, none of the viruses found so far is to blame -- that these microbes may be so common that their presence in patient tissue specimens is simply a coincidence.

I'm trying to get the hang of the blogger post linking problem. The link below my most recent entry actually takes me to an older one. I'm hoping it turns out this only happens to the most recent entry on a blogger blog, and linking to older individual entries causes no problem.

Update: That didn't work. Maybe if I republish using the publish button below the 'edit this post' window.