Jonathan Rauch has yet another outstanding piece (05/09/2003)
in response to the familiar claim that Bush squandered the U.S.' post-9/11 popularity:

Bush's supporters retort that post-9/11 sympathy was ephemeral. At the end of the day, they argue, a strong America will attract more support than a weak one. In any case, France and Russia were determined to play the spoiler; it was the world that squandered America's goodwill, more than the other way around.
Probably, possibly, and maybe. It's all very complicated. But those arguments miss the larger point. The talk of squandering is fundamentally misconceived. Bush did not squander the world's goodwill. He spent it, which is not at all the same thing.
...Perhaps the most awkward and obnoxious of America's Cold War alignments were in the Arab world. Washington supported tyrannies and monarchies that wrecked their economies and stunted their politics. The Arab regimes wallowed in corruption and incompetence. They entrenched poverty and blocked middle-class aspirations. They jailed liberal dissidents and political moderates. They fertilized the soil for militant Islamists who provided the only outlet for dissent. They then attempted to neutralize Islamism by diverting its energies to hating liberalism, Americans, and Jews.
In both Iran and Iraq, Washington supported or tolerated corrupt and brutal regimes, with disastrous results in both places. Saudi Arabia has been a different kind of disaster, propagating anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism all over the world. Syria and Libya are disasters. Lebanon is between disasters. Egypt is a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe Jordan is, too.
In short, the United States has been on the wrong side of Arab history for almost five decades, and it is not doing much better than the Soviets. The old policy had no future, only a past. It was a dead policy walking. September 11 was merely the death certificate.
Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue -- not shared by most sophisticates -- of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. So he gathered up the world's goodwill and his own political capital, spent the whole bundle on dynamite, and blew the old policy to bits. However things come out in Iraq, the war's larger importance is to leave little choice, going forward, but to put America on the side of Arab reform.
...This is a breathtakingly bold undertaking. The difficulties are staggering. Everything might go wrong. But the crucial point to remember is that everything had already gone wrong. No available policy could justify optimism in the Arab world, but the new policy at least offers hope. It offers a path ahead, a future where there had been only a past. It is not dead. It puts America on the right side of history and on the right side of America.
Much of Europe is alarmed by the change, but then, it would be. American troops in Saudi Arabia guaranteed the flow of oil while turning the United States (along with Israel) into the scapegoat of choice for millions of angry Muslims, some of whom live in Europe. From Paris's or Amsterdam's or Bremen's point of view, what's not to like about that deal? Why must Washington go and stir everything up?

Read the whole thing.

I've always been a huge Dante fan:

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to Purgatory!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	Low
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno Test

I'm not sure this is 100% accurate from a Jewish viewpoint, but take it for what it's worth...

Many people love to view George W. Bush’s actions through the prism of his father’s experiences. Many also argue that the Bush administration’s actions are primarily motivated by the desire to do the opposite of the Clinton administration on any given topic. What if there was a neat theorem which combined both theses, in a way which (to my knowledge) nobody in the mainstream media has noted? I think one exists, and it's one which should work for both Bush supporters and opponents.
Here’s my proposed Grand Unified Theory of the George W. Bush Administration:™
“Our opponents aren’t going to support us, whatever we do. Screw ‘em – there’s no point in meeting them halfway.”
I – Lessons from the Father
George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and a massively revamped and expanded Clean Air Act. He wooed reporters as if he actually enjoyed it. Most notably, he warmed the hearts of every Democratic member of Congress and raised taxes, publicly breaking his vow to the contrary.
And it didn’t do him any good, politically speaking. The Democrats lost no opportunity to bash him even in those areas where he had shown the most accommodation. He was called a disaster for the environment, a claim flagrantly at issue with his administration’s record. Despite his capitulation to the Democrats’ demands for higher taxes, he was consistently blamed for not doing more to resuscitate the economy. (And as an aside, I haven’t seen too many Democrats who credit Clinton’s tax increases for lowering the deficit and creating the lower interest rates that fueled the ‘90s boom give any credit for those outcomes to George H.W. Bush’s larger tax increases.) While one could not reasonably have expected the Democrats to go easy on an incumbent in an election year, the mainstream press largely went along with those claims and added their own spin: that he was too out of touch with the country. His schmoozing of reporters was for naught.
People have wondered why George W. Bush is content to push his agenda through Congress with barely an attempt to convince opposing legislators, especially since his practice as governor of Texas was so different. Some have also wondered why the Bush administration campaigned mercilessly against Democrats who supported parts of his agenda. Perhaps the experience of 1992 can provide an answer to those questions; unlike Texas, where Democratic legislators might support the re-election of a conciliatory Republican Governor, Washington Democrats could be expected to offer little succor at election time, regardless of how conciliatory their opposing number in the executive branch had been.
II – Lessons from the Bill
Many have noted that one of Bill Clinton’s signature traits was his belief that everyone could be convinced to support him, if he could only talk to and debate them long enough.
It seems clear that George W. Bush, due to his religious beliefs / habits resulting from giving up drinking, has a more militantly modest outlook: he is a clear believer in the recognizing the difference between what he can change and what he cannot. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bush sees Clinton’s inability to concede that some people are beyond his persuasive powers as a moral failing, as much as the more obvious foibles.
Bush’s viewpoint is probably reinforced by the fact that the results of Clinton’s indiscriminate attempts at persuasion were, obviously, mixed – especially in international relations. As pointed out by a charter member of the “neoconservative cabal,” Robert Kagan:

Although transatlantic tensions are now widely assumed to have begun with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001, they were already evident during the Clinton administration and may even be traced back to the administration of George H.W. Bush. By 1992, mutual recriminations were rife over Bosnia, where the United States refused to act and Europe could not act. It was during the Clinton years that Europeans began complaining about being lectured by the “hectoring hegemon.” This was also the period in which Védrine coined the term hyperpuissance to describe an American behemoth too worryingly powerful to be designated merely a superpower. (Perhaps he was responding to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s insistence that the United States was the world’s “indispensable nation.”) It was also during the 1990s that the transatlantic disagreement over American plans for missile defense emerged and many Europeans began grumbling about the American propensity to choose force and punishment over diplomacy and persuasion.
The Clinton administration, meanwhile, though relatively timid and restrained itself, grew angry and impatient with European timidity, especially the unwillingness to confront Saddam Hussein. The split in the alliance over Iraq didn’t begin with the 2000 election but in 1997, when the Clinton administration tried to increase the pressure on Baghdad and found itself at odds with France and (to a lesser extent) Great Britain in the United Nations Security Council. Even the war in Kosovo was marked by nervousness among some allies — especially Italy, Greece, and Germany — that the United States was too uncompromisingly militaristic in its approach. And while Europeans and Americans ultimately stood together in the confrontation with Belgrade, the Kosovo war produced in Europe less satisfaction at the successful prosecution of the war than unease at America’s apparent omnipotence. That apprehension would only increase in the wake of American military action after September 11, 2001.

Combine the deep fault-lines in interests exposed by the Clinton administration with the popular image of George W. Bush as a gun-toting provincial Christian fundamentalist (which pre-dated his inauguration, much less anything he actually did in office), and it is easy to see how Bush concluded that he never stood a chance with much of Europe.
It is also entirely possible that Bush noticed how in the previous decade, America had gone to war three times to protect Muslims and pushed Israel to the negotiating table with, and to make concessions to, the Palestinians (at Madrid in 1992, at Wye in 1998 and at Camp David in 2000) – events which bought America approximately 2.5 seconds’ worth of goodwill in much of the Arab and Muslim world. Is it any wonder that the Bush administration has been appropriately skeptical of European and Arab claims that particular policy changes (signing Kyoto, pushing Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians, etc.) would suddenly solve all problems between those countries and the U.S.?

Like all good cynical beliefs, the Grand Unified Theory has a lot of truth to it: it is not as if too many congressional Democrats would support Bush’s re-election regardless of what he did between now and then, and it seems clear that France would have been obstreperous on Iraq even if Bush had given his September 12th speech to the UN in French.
This theory is so obvious to me that I’m surprised more people in the mainstream media haven’t put it this way yet. I think media-types may not see it because it potentially implicates the their treatment of George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election cycle (and, by implication, how they’ll treat his son in 2004). What do you think?

Check out this fascinating piece in today's NYT about a search in Iraq:

In one huge room in the flooded basement of the building, American soldiers from MET Alpha, the "mobile exploitation team" that has been searching for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Iraq for the past three months, found maps featuring terrorist strikes against Israel dating to 1991. Another map of Israel highlighted what the Iraqis thought were the locations at which their Scud missiles had struck in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. The strikes were designated by yellow-and-red paper flowers placed atop the pinpointed Israeli neighborhoods.
Team members floated out of the room a perfect mock-up of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, as well as mock-ups of downtown Jerusalem and official Israeli buildings in very fine detail. They also collected a satellite picture of Dimona, Israel's nuclear complex, and a female mannequin dressed in an Israeli Air Force uniform, standing in front of a list of Israeli officers' ranks and insignia.
Of even greater interest to MET Alpha was a "top secret" intelligence memo found in a room on another floor. Written in Arabic and dated May 20, 2001, the memo from the Iraqi intelligence station chief in an African country described an offer by a "holy warrior" to sell uranium and other nuclear material. The bid was rejected, the memo states, because of the United Nations "sanctions situation." But the station chief wrote that the source was eager to provide similar help at a more convenient time.

As Best of the Web points out, this would seem to further disprove commonly-heard claims that Saddam was unlikely to cooperate with Islamic fundamentalists (or that such cooperation would only come about due to the Bush Administration's threats of war; note the May 2001 date). But why were they searching this building in the first place?

What began today as a hunt for an ancient Jewish text at secret police headquarters here wound up unearthing a trove of Iraqi intelligence documents and maps relating to Israel as well as offers of sales of uranium and other nuclear materials to Iraq.
...The search began this morning when 16 soldiers from MET Alpha teamed up with members of the Iraqi National Congress, a leading opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, to search for what an intelligence source had described as one of the most ancient copies of the Talmud in existence, dating from the seventh century. The Talmud is a book of oral law, with rabbinical commentaries and interpretations.
A former senior official of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police, had told the opposition group a few days earlier that he had hidden the ancient Jewish book in the basement of his headquarters. The building had been badly damaged by coalition bombing, said the man, who is now working for the Iraqi National Congress, but he was still willing to take a group there to recover it. MET Alpha hesitated. Its mission was hunting for proof of unconventional weapons in Iraq, not saving cultural and religious treasures. But Col. Richard R. McPhee, its commander, decided that the historic Talmud was too valuable to leave behind.

Can't you see the narrative taking hold? First, the story was that the U.S. military guarded the oil wells while neglecting the National Museum, thus encouraging looting and the loss of Iraqi cultural treasures. Add to that the story that while doing those things, the U.S. was also searching for an ancient copy of the Talmud. (That crazed Jewish neoconservative cabal is at it again...)Somewhere, Noam Chomsky is writing his next book.
(Yes, the links in the previous paragraph will take you to debunkings of those Baghdad-style urban legends, not to the initial peddling of those stories. Think of it as the next generation of Fisking. And as always, technicalities of factual and temporal discrepancies will be easily surmounted in formulating the narrative.)

Joshua Muravchik criticizes the road map on grounds similar to the ones I used in my earlier post - only much more eloquently than I did, which is to be expected (after all, the man does this for a living):

...Postmortems of Oslo, notably by the chief U.S. negotiator, Dennis Ross, have focused on America's failure to insist on full compliance with the terms of the agreement, especially on the part of the Palestinians, a failure that was driven by the pressure to meet predetermined timetables. Precisely to avoid repetition of this mistake, the Bush administration has characterized the road map as "performance driven." But that is scarcely compatible with a breakneck dash around the map's multiple clover leaves.
...The still deeper flaw in the road map's premises is the presumption that with the terms of settlement fairly apparent, all that is needed is a guide for getting there. In the final analysis, however, the missing ingredient for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a blueprint of the destination, nor is it the route. The missing ingredient is a decision by the Palestinians and the other Arabs to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst and to live in permanent peace with it. Despite all the Palestinians have suffered these two and a half years, public opinion polls show that a clear majority of them support continuing the intifada and suicide bombing and that about half say that the goal should be the "total liberation of Palestine," in other words, the elimination of Israel. The other half of the Palestinians say they want a two-state solution. When that half grows and becomes dominant, then and only then, will real peace be possible.
...The simple reality is that the moment the Palestinians make a wholehearted turn toward peace, no road map will be necessary.

During my hiatus, I received a request for an e-mail interview, asking me to expand on certain issues raised in my big Bill James post from a while ago.
I could be nice and respond to the inteviewer directly. But why do that when I can share my answers with the rest of the world? Here are the questions and my answers.

When did you first start reading Bill James?
When I was about 13, with the 1986 Baseball Abstract and the first version of the Historical Baseball Abstract.

How would you say that you have applied his ideas in your life?
Mostly in a generic attempt to apply modes of critical thinking to whatever I do. I was a history major in college, and took every opportunity to trumpet my belief that with respect to "it was better in my day" jeremiads, 9 out of 10 of such laments are utterly bogus, and the 10th example is usually overstated. Bill James' books are an inexhaustible source of good examples for that point.

Other than just the idea of critical thinking, what would you say are the most
important things James has written about that are applicable to areas outside of
baseball?
As noted above, I think his scrutiny of the historical record is remarkably relevant for those who would draw lessons from history - i.e., most of us.

Do you feel that James' ideas are expressed more by conservative writers, or equally by writers across the conservative [I assume my interviewer means "political" - Dr. M] spectrum. If you feel the ideas have
been more embraced by conservatives, why do you feel this is so?
Dan McLaughlin has written on certain similarities between conservative political media and sabermetric analysts. I see his points, and I'd add another: I do think there is a strong revolutionary undercurrent to James' work, and for many of us who grew up in major metropolitan areas and attended elite universities in the "blue" states, the conventional wisdom that attracted our scorn was primarily liberal.
That being said, I'd be surprised if there was a strong political tilt to James' fans. The skepticism that one picks up from James' work is equally applicable to conservative conventional wisdom as to the liberal variety. Even if there are more conservative Bill James fans among bloggers than liberals, that may simply be a function of sample size or a function of what factors drive people to start blogs, of which I have my own theories that I hope to expand into a post later.
I'd prefer to look on the bright side; sabermetrics, and good baseball writing in general, provides fans with areas for debate and potential agreement that have little to do with one's political leanings. You get situations like Eric Alterman (justifiably) rhapsodizing over George Will's baseball writing.

In what other areas do you feel James has had influence, besides baseball and political journalism?
Not systematically, but there are people in every field who would cite James as an influence. Critical thinking skills are pretty transferable.

Is there another influential writer you would compare Bill James to?
It's become a cliche, but Dan McLaughlin nails it: the George Orwell comparison works to an extent.

Do you know of other writers you would recommend that I speak to regarding this article?

Check out the commenters to my earlier post. Given the theme of this interview, I'd particularly recommend Dwight Meredith (he can give a political liberal's perspective) and Derek Lowe (he's a chemist who cites James as an influence in his work). I'd also contact Matt Welch and Doug Pappas, neither of whom is a political conservative.

There is plenty of speculation that the recently unveiled “road map” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents a cynical attempt to curry international favor and/or paper over the conflict, rather than a serious attempt to solve it.
I certainly hope so; that would be the most positive spin on the “road map.” It would be much more disturbing if the administration actually believed that the approach embodied in the road map actually represented the best options for peace.
The last two decades of Arab-Israeli peacemaking has provided policymakers with many examples of what works and does not work. The road map seems like a perfect distillation of what doesn’t work, “uncontaminated” by what does.
One of the biggest pitfalls of the Oslo-based peace process was the prevalence of those two words: the belief that peace can be produced via a negotiating process. Under that view, the two words were conflated: the perfection of the process was viewed as synonymous with the attainment of peace, and the continuation of the process was regarded as the sine qua non of any peace-seeking effort. The process thus became and end in and of itself. Thus, continued Palestinian terrorism, anti-Jewish propagandizing, arming of innumerable “security forces” and other violations of the Oslo accords were minimized so as to keep the process on track. The core issues – Jerusalem, the “right of return,” even settlements – were kicked down the road, lest they intrude on the process before they were ripe for resolution. And when President Bush essentially disavowed the entire Oslo-based approach in his June 24 speech, he was attacked for not putting forth a peace plan – after all, his speech didn’t come with an attached negotiating framework.
The problem was that the Palestinians’ fundamental rejection of Israel’s legitimacy did not vanish due to the negotiating experiences of the 1990s. The problem was that the Oslo-based process did not succeed in removing the incentives for the Palestinians to conduct terrorism, or for the Israelis to fight terrorism. And the proposed “road map,” on its face, does not solve these problems either. More technically, those problems are linked to the parties’ most fundamental strategic decisions, which are beyond the scope of any negotiating process to affect. While the road map is ostensibly “performance-based,” the map itself gives no indication that 3 out of the “quartet’s” 4 members would require stricter performance from the Palestinians than they did throughout the 1990s. Indeed, at certain points the map strains credulity in its insistence on symmetry:

At the outset of Phase I:

Israeli leadership issues unequivocal statement affirming its commitments to the two-state vision of an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside Israel, as expressed by President Bush, and calling for an immediate end to violence against Palestinians everywhere. All official Israeli institutions end incitement against Palestinians.

(Emphasis added.)
I’m not familiar with any Palestinian-leaning equivalent of MEMRI that provides constant examples of anti-Palestinian hatred in Israeli politics, media and schools. So on its face, either the a) such Israeli rare, non-official examples are deemed equivalent to the massively prevalent Palestinian ones, or, more likely, b) the whole thing is a crock, which does not bode well for the allegedly important judging of “performance.” (After all, it’s so unfair to hold the parties to different standards…) Now, I understand that it’s not recommended for diplomats to make a habit of trumpeting the moral superiority of one side in a negotiation. But at the same time, it would seem advisable for a plan supposedly based on performance benchmarks to avoid requirements that are utterly divorced from reality.
And even more fundamentally, the most contentious issues are left for Phase III, in the apparent assumption that they will be easier to solve at that point – in total contravention of the available evidence. If the Palestinians decide to give up terror and reach a genuine peace with Israel, any one of the peace plans on the State Department’s shelves will work – even the road map. If that decision is not made, no peace plan will work, no matter how perfect the negotiating process.
Now, it’s important to note that many of the choices made by international diplomats throughout the 1990s were defensible at the time. They didn’t have the benefit of the hindsight we now possess. But there is no defending a tenacious refusal to learn from mistakes. For the record, I supported the Oslo accords through the Camp David negotiations and until the Palestinian campaign began in October 2000. But I was – along with an awful lot of people who are smarter than I was or am - mistaken about a number of fundamental assumptions that underlay the enterprise. One of the best arguments for the peace process in the 1990s was encapsulated by Franklin Roosevelt’s supposed advice to Raymond Mobley:

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Even if that advice was apocryphal, I’m pretty confident that Roosevelt’s advice was not: “Try something, and if it doesn’t work, keep trying the same damn thing over and over again.”
The infamous “neoconservatives” are often attacked for promulgating grand theories about the Middle East regardless of the empirical evidence. It is remarkable how perfectly that criticism fits many champions of the Arab-Israeli “peace process.” As Colin Powell recently said after a recent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv:

We can't let these sorts of incidents immediately contaminate the road map or contaminate the process that we are now involved in.

As seen from that quote and from the “incitement” point above, it seems that the champions of the “road map” have certain differences with reality. Rather than negotiate those differences, though, they seem to single-mindedly press ahead, sure that the other party will bend to their designs and regardless of the costs…

The preliminary indications for the Quartet's insistence on performance is not encouraging. Ha'aretz recently reported:

With the swearing-in of the new Palestinian cabinet on Wednesday came a presidential order from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat for the establishment of a national security council to oversee all the PA's security mechanisms, including the counter-security apparatus, the uniformed police and the civil guard.
In keeping with the definition of powers of the Palestinian government, these security mechanisms are supposed to fall under the authority of PA Interior Minister Mohammed Dahlan. The move violates one of the clauses of the U.S.-backed 'road map' for Middle East peace, which calls for "all Palestinian security organizations [to be] consolidated into three services reporting to an empowered Interior Minister."

As a colleague of Eugene Volokh commented:

The road map has been public for less than 48 hours, and Arafat has already broken it.
...If the Bush Administration does not respond swiftly and firmly to this direct flouting of the road map, the entire process is dead. US policy should be clear: it will withdraw the road map and refuse to engage in any negotiations unless the Council is immediately terminated. The US should also immediately send a new military and civilian aid package to Israel. Criminologists have long argued that it is the certainty and swiftness of punishment, not its severity, that count. Here's a chance to test the theory with Arafat, the Palestinian arch criminal. Anything less essentially condemns the region to more violence.
The interesting question at this point is not whether Arafat will do all that he can to subvert the road map (and thus subvert Abu Mazen). It is, rather this: is there anything that Arafat can do that will convince his European backers that he isn't interested in peace and is committed to terror? Or is it just that they don't care?

There is an obvious temptation not to scuttle a promising initiative based on a disagreement over the structure of the Plestinian bureaucracy. But the lessons of the last decade are clear: failing to do exactly that will only lead to further violations and further violence, and the initiative will be destroyed anyway.
The answer to the question of Volokh's correspondent is far more important than the structure of any negotiating framework. Naturally, the parties would rather not discuss it.

P.S. I've read an awful lot of pieces on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and here are my picks for the best of the lot: this overview of the real underlying issues by David Brooks, this assessment of the Camp David and Taba negotiations by David Malkovsky and this evisceration of the "peace process" worldview by Jonathan Rauch.