Kevin Drum calls into question the idea that assassins usually fail to achieve their objectives, arguing, among other things:

John Wilkes Booth may not have saved the Confederacy, but in the longer term he was probably pretty effective — though I suppose you can always make the argument that things would eventually have turned out the same regardless of whether or not Lincoln had served out his second term. But that’s cheating: if you take that view of history, then assassins are ineffective by definition and the game is over before it begins.

For one thing, I think you need to take the Confederates’ goals here a little more seriously. It’s true that the Jim Crow system that replaced slavery was grossly inadequate from the standpoint of social justice, but it really was a step up from chattel slavery. If the rebels had wanted white supremacy without slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Indeed, if they’d been willing to accept so much as a prohibition on the further expansion of slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Confederates wanted the Confederacy, and Booth didn’t achieve it.

What’s more, though, it’s not only “in the long run” that the assassination didn’t make a difference, it didn’t make much of a difference in the short-run either. Lincoln’s death brought Andrew Johnson to power, and he was committed to white supremacy, but by 1869 Ulysses Grant and other Republicans committed to reconstruction were back in office. “Redemption” didn’t happen until the 1870s and 1880s and the main Jim Crow laws were put in place in the 1890s. The Supreme Court overturned civil rights legislation in 1883 and Plessy v. Ferguson happened in 1896. The key political battles, in other words, happened after Lincoln would have been out of power anywhere.

That said, Henry Farrell has recently pointed to two papers on the assassination question that I ought to look at. First, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken (2007), “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War”:

Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination’s effects. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history.

Next, Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn (forthcoming), “The Political Consequences of Assassination”:

The assassination of a political leader is among the highest-profile acts of political violence, and conventional wisdom holds that such events often have substantial political, social, and economic effects on states. We investigate the extent to which the assassination of a head of state affects political stability, through an analysis of all assassinations of heads of state between 1952 and 1997. We examine the political consequences of assassination by assessing the levels of political unrest, instability, and civil war in states that experience the assassination of their head of state. Our findings support the existence of an interactive relationship among assassination, leadership succession, and political turmoil: in particular, we find that assassinations’ effects on political instability are greatest in systems in which the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated.

So with that, happy Veterans Day: heck of a job Princip.

Two weeks ago, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on CNN that an attack on Iran would “lead absolutely to disaster.” He added that there is no evidence of a “concrete, active nuclear weapon program” going on inside Iran.

Today on CNN’s Late Edition, neconservative warhawk John Bolton responded by smearing ElBaradei as “an apologist for Iran” and said the United States is “paying the price” for not opposing him more vociferously.

When host Wolf Blitzer reminded Bolton that ElBaradei correctly warned prior the Iraq war that there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program, Bolton derisively dismissed his warnings by claiming “even a stopped clock is right twice a day”:

BLITZER: But, you know, in fairness to Mohamed ElBaradei, before the war in Iraq, when Condoleezza Rice and the president were speaking about mushroom clouds of Saddam Hussein and a revived nuclear weapons program that he may be undertaking, he was saying there was absolutely no such evidence. He was poo-pooing it, saying the Bush administration was overly alarming and there was no nuclear weapons program that Hussein had revived. He was right on that one.

BOLTON: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Watch it:

Bolton insisted that “there was never any real disagreement” between the IAEA and the Bush administration on Saddam’s “physical capacity for a nuclear weapon.”

In fact, in February 2002, ElBaradei insisted that there was “no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear related activities in Iraq.” Meanwhile, Bush asserted that Saddam was meeting with his “nuclear mujahedeen” and that the United States could not wait “for the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Digg It!

Transcript: Read more

More calumnies from the left, with wild-eyed nutjob Paul Krugman arguing that Ronald Reagan’s opposition to creating a federal holiday for Martin Luther King and his efforts to prevent Bob Jones University from losing its tax-exempt status for failure to desegregate might have had something to do with an effort to court the white supremacist vote.

Hilariously, for some reason Krugman and David Brooks need to carry out this argument without referring to each other by name or even acknowledging that the other one exists. I think this is a very dumb policy the Times has, as it might be easier to have a productive argument if the participants in the debate could talk to each other properly.

The Bush administration is reportedly “losing patience with Gordon Brown over Iran, with senior American diplomats frustrated by his reluctance to declare bluntly that the Islamic state must never be allowed nuclear weapons.” A State Department official says: “It would be helpful if he took a tougher line in public. … We need Iran, and the rest of the world, to realise that this is not just a bunch of crazy Americans on the one side and flaky Europeans on the other – that we are united on this one.”

At the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys conference in Miami this weekend, former Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins, who was fired to make way for Karl Rove protege Tim Griffn, offered some advice to incoming Attorney General Michael Mukasey, saying he should fire Justice Department communications director Brian Roehrkasse. “This guy, frankly, intentionally misled and deceived the press and the public on a number of occasions, and just told outright lies,” Cummins said.

UPDATE: TPMmuckraker has a rundown of Roehrkasses’s lies here.