NYT reports from Baghdad that “the Green Zone attacks Sunday were, symbolically at least, a sign that forces hostile to the United States are still able to strike at the heart of the American nerve center and seat of government power in the capital of Iraq.” It seems to me that they were a pretty literal sign — the Mahdi Army wasn’t shooting metaphors.

Now on the merits of the issue of course it would be good for the Iraqi government to demobilize and disarm militias. But it seems plain as day that what the government is trying to do is disarm Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia while keeping other, rival militias like the Badr Organization as well-armed as they please. Practically and politically speaking, that doesn’t give the Sadrists any reason to comply. And there don’t seem to me to be any genuinely good reasons of national interest or cosmic justice for the United States to be serving as backup muscle in this operation.

I have to say that I found this article about the stresses of being a full-time blogger a bit bizarre. Yes, it’s true that I sometimes feel run a bit ragged by my job (and I’ve gone a few years without ever having a post-less day), but basically everyone feels that way about their job sometimes. And to me the most draining times are really those times when I’ve undertaken substantial work on top of the blog.

Most of all, to me having flexibility in my schedule is a great blessing compared to the conditions most people have to work under. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a pretty good job and I consider myself pretty lucky.

Normally you can find me ranting against the environmental and public health ills of over-reliance on cars, but Tyler Cowen offers this quote from Peter Moskos’ Cop in the Hood which reminds us that it’s also had a devastating impact on police work:

Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol — the cornerstone of urban policing — has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, “The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime.”

The big rise in crime rates over the course of the 1960s and 70s rapidly became more grist for the mill of America’s ideological battles, but a lot of what we can do to reduce crime seems to involve basically un-ideological management tweaks. Unfortunately, cities have been very slow to respond to research with actual shifts in policy. But there’s tons of evidence to suggest that cops doing patrol work need to spend less time responding to calls and much less time in their cars. Beyond the factors noted above, when you’re driving a car you need to be watching the road or you’re cause an accident. But to do effect patrol you need to be watching what’s happening in the neighborhood, not just breezing past it.

As Ilan Goldenberg says it’s wrongheaded to give John McCain credit for professing a desire to improve relations with allies and rejoin the international community. It would be perverse to think that George W. Bush actually wanted the United States to become so isolated. The point is that Bush wanted to pursue policies of rogue state rollback and unilateral preventive war that are incompatible with the United States having a strong relationship with its actual and potential allies around the world. And John McCain wants to pursue those exact same policies; indeed, he was making the case for them before Bush was.

What matters isn’t what McCain says he wants to accomplish (an enduring peace based on freedom!); we need to be asking what would the actual consequences of his policies be.

Oftentimes as a dictatorial regime enters its waning days you face a choice as to whether or not to offer the leaders guarantees if they agree to give up power. The downside is that this seems to create bad incentives — the bad actors get away scott-free when it would be better for evil to be punished. The upside is that with guarantees they may actually give up power, whereas regime leaders who know that if they give up power they’ll be treated harshly will probably hold on to power with the utmost brutality. Timothy Burke, thinking of Zimbabwe, says this kind of thinking is bunk:

So even if we understand people like Mugabe and his inner circle as calculating, incentive-evaluating, rational deciders, I think there is every reason for them to laugh behind closed doors at the hubris of the experts and activists, whatever the latest policy nostrum on tribunals, interventions, sanctions, golden parachutes or so on might be. Because what anyone outside of the rarified settings where generic 12-point plans for peacemaking and incentivizing prosecutions for genocide are composed knows is that every such action is and will be sui generis. The sand castles that the experts build today around one case will be washed away by the tides of history in short order. What happened in the end to Charles Taylor or Auguste Pinochet or Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic has little implication for tomorrow’s dictator and mass murderer. Because the people who play with constructing the machinery of incentive aspire to a kind of reliable managerial authority that they will never have, they are writing blank checks that no one will ever cash. Whether or not someone like Robert Mugabe dies peacefully in his bed, lives out his last years far from his home country, ends up in a pleasant prison while the United Nations dithers for a decade over his fate, is shot by an up-and-coming rival, or ends up torn to shreds by a mob is a matter of particular circumstance. That’s probably something most authoritarians know already, having ridden the vissitudes of history as far as they have.

I guess that seems plausible enough, though I find it pretty unsatisfying as a conclusion and though perhaps it’s just technocratic hubris, I’d like to try to see some data.

There’s something a bit absurd about this Washington Post headline: “Bush Listens Closely To His Man in Iraq: In White House Deliberations on War, Gen. Petraeus Has a Privileged Voice.”

This makes it seem as if Bush suddenly arrived in the White House in media res sometime in 2007 and starting trying to figure things out. The surge was already underway, different advisors had different takes, and Bush came to rely on General Petraeus who now has a “privileged voice” in deliberations. But that’s not how it went at all. Bush has, from the beginning, always listened to people who tell him what he wants to hear — starting a war with Iraq is a great idea, continuing a war with Iraq is a great idea. If Petraeus told Bush tomorrow that he should admit failure and open up a regional dialogue on how best to manage an American withdrawal from Iraq, suddenly his privileged position would be gone. The stature of various advice-givers is baked into the cake of the content of their advice and it’s not at all hard to tell what Bush wants people to tell him.

Photo by Staff Sgt. Lorie Jewell, U.S. Army