Philadelphia, PA (cc photo by cptspock)

I liked this bit near the end of Christopher Hitchens’ review of Matt Continett’s Sarah Palin book:

The United States has to stand or fall by being the preeminent nation of science, modernity, technology, and higher education. Some of these needful phenomena, for historical reasons, will just happen to concentrate in big cities and in secular institutions and even—yes—on the dreaded East Coast.

Quite so. Cultural/political tensions between metropolitan types and provincial types are a perennial feature of politics. But actually one of the nice things about the United States is that it’s very big and spread out and we don’t have an overweening “main city” in the manner of Paris. But as a nation we’re long past the point when our prosperity depended primarily on the productivity of our agriculture and the vast extent of our rural land. The research universities and major business enterprises that our the foundation of our way of life are, overwhelmingly, in major metropolitan areas. Not because there’s anything wrong with the people of rural Alaska, but because that’s how the world works. The idea of making dislike of metropolitan American (or perhaps all of metropolitan America except Houston) the basis of your approach to governing is pretty nuts.

Alongside the various nonsensical efforts to convince people that KSM is too scary to be put in trial, the right objects to bringing him to justice on the grounds that this represents a problematic “law enforcement” approach to terrorism. I think it’s pretty clear that international terrorism has some dimensions that go well-beyond ordinary law enforcement, but if you have to put the whole thing in either the “crime” box or the “war” box, there’s a pretty strong case for erring on the side of crime.

In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder. It’s true that if al-Qaeda were something like the “blowing up train stations” arm of a major country with which we were otherwise at war, it might make the most sense to think of al-Qaeda as fitting in with spies and saboteurs; criminal adjuncts to a warrior enterprise.

After all, do we really want to send the message to the world that a self-starting spree killer like Nidal Malik Hasan is actually engaged in some kind of act of holy war? It seems to me that we don’t. A lot of people in the world are interested in glory, and willing to take serious risks with their lives for its sake. Insofar as possible, we want to drain anti-American violence of the aura of glory. And that means by-and-large treating its perpetrators like criminals.

I can see the case for banning gambling. And I can see the case for permitting gambling. But what on earth is the case for Maryland-style allowing electronic games but not table games? Table games provide more in the way of real employment for people.

The underlying idea that lowering Afghanistan’s fertility rate would help it develop economically makes a lot of sense. Especially in an overwhelmingly rural country, the tendency is for a rapid increase in population to lead to falling living standards.

That said, the specific method of trying to do this by talking to male religious leaders about birth control seems to me to be at odds with most of what we know about this subject. As a recent Economist story on fertility trends emphasized, women in the developing world generally have more children than they want to. When we see falling fertility rates, it’s normally a result of women being empowered to make more decisions about their own lives:

A surprising amount is known about how many children parents want, thanks to a series of surveys by the Demographic and Health Surveys programme. The picture it paints is of huge numbers of unplanned pregnancies. In Brazil, for example, the wanted fertility rate in 1996 (the most recent year available) was 1.8; the actual fertility rate then was 2.5. In India the wanted rate in 2006 was 1.9, the actual one, 2.7. In Ghana the figures for 2003 were 3.7 and 4.4. The rule seems to be that women want one child fewer than they are having (except in some rich countries, where they say they want more). [...]

That points to another big reason why fertility is falling: the spread of female education. Go back to the countries where fertility has fallen fastest and you will find remarkable literacy programmes. As early as 1962, for example, 80% of young women in Mauritius could read and write. In Iran in 1976, only 10% of rural women aged 20 to 24 were literate. Now that share is 91%, and Iran not only has one of the best-educated populations in the Middle East but the one in which men and women have the most equal educational chances. Iranian girls aged 15-19 have roughly the same number of years of schooling as boys do. Educated women are more likely to go out to work, more likely to demand contraception and less likely to want large families.

Of course, the case of China and the one-child policy does show that massive coercion works as well. But the problem in Afghanistan is almost certainly the view that how many children a woman should have is a decision that should be made by men. Just talking to men about making that decision in a different way is unlikely to address the issue. Of course, sending girls to school is a controversial issue in Afghanistan, but if the Islamic Republic of Iran was capable of overseeing a massive increase in women’s educational opportunities, then such things can’t be inconsistent with culturally conservative Islamism in any particularly straightforward sense.

I’m in a bit of a hungover haze at the moment, but as I understand it the two big new attacks on the President are that he (a) bows at formal meetings with Japanese people and (b) wants to see terrorists tried for their crimes. Is that right? Really? Strange times.