In a somewhat bizarre post, Cato’s Michael Cannon complains that “Anyone who thinks that Democrats might be prepared to work in a bipartisan manner to reform Social Security should be quickly disabused by their disgraceful treatment of Andrew Biggs.” Follow the link and you’ll find:

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare called on incoming Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to block President Bush’s nomination of Andrew Biggs to become the next deputy administrator of the Social Security Administration should he renew the nomination in January, charging that his advocacy for the privatization of the popular entitlement and hostility toward other New Deal-era programs makes him a politically polarizing figure.

In other words, the Democrats have done . . . absolutely nothing to Biggs.

Needless to say, though, I think this would be a great issue on which to pick a confirmation battle. Tanner refers to the “swift boating” of Biggs, but the difference of course is that it’s entirely true that Biggs favors privatization of the popular entitlement program and is hostile to other New Deal programs. The Republican Party, however, is usually quite successful at obscuring from public view the fact that a desire to dismantle Social Security (and, indeed, Medicare) is conventional wisdom in their political party. Hearings on Biggs’ nomination would be a good place to clarify that (a) the Bush administration wants to destroy Social Security, (b) the overwhelming majority of Republican members of congress want to destroy Social Security, and (c) the only thing keeping Social Security in its existence is the Democratic Party and its elected officials.

What’s more, Democrats should be implacably opposed to “reforming” Social Security in a bipartisan manner. Or, for that matter, a partisan one. Privateer interest in handling this in a bipartisan manner is telling; what they want to do is political poison and they’re looking for cover. Instead, they should be made to drink their own brew and suffer the consequences.

Long and frightening Seymore Hersh article argues that the Rumsfeld/Gates switch doesn’t necessarily indicate an administration-wide change of approach to national security. Cheney is still Cheney and still wants to start a war with Iran and Bush just might do it.

Meanwhile, I have to say I sort of hope Baker-Hamilton doesn’t recommend negotiations with Syria and Iran. The official hawk line on why we shouldn’t do this is that it won’t accomplish anything. Meanwhile, it would be the easiest thing in the world for an administration that doesn’t want to negotiate with Syria and Iran to “agree” to negotiate, do so in bad faith, walk away having achieved nothing, further poison the diplomatic atmosphere, and thereby “prove” that such negotiations are useless. In fact, they’re vital, but to do any good they need to be done in good faith. That means either a genuine change of heart by the president (unlikely) or else a new administration in 2009.

I think Peter Beinart’s column on the relatively successful UN Peacekeeping mission in the Congo is incredibly important. I would just add the observation that not only does the record show that UN sponsored “nation-building” ventures are much more successful than quasi-imperial American ones, but that one of the things that distinguishes these kind of operations from, say, Iraq is that they’re at least largely consensual. You have a war-torn country. You have parties prepared to stop the fighting. You have a peace deal brokered with the assistance of international mediation. And you have, as part of the deal, an agreement to deploy third-party forces to the country to help restore order and build confidence between the parties.

The record of missions of this sort is decidedly mixed, but it’s also decidedly more positive than the record of unilateral endeavors and of preponderantly coercive ones. What’s more, a lot of the mixed results are determined by the fact that rich countries (especially the USA) tend to be reluctant to pony up the forces that are being asked for. People both inclined to believe that “American power should be used to advance our values” and that the sort of sentiment encapsulated by that phrase seems to have led to a giant disaster in Iraq (people like me, in other words) would be well-advised to try and focus future efforts on getting the United States (and other countries, too) to pitch in more on these kind of missions.