Not that it’s going to make him president, but Chris Dodd is making sense:

For more than forty-six years, the United States has maintained an isolationist policy toward Cuba, which I believe has not achieved its intended objectives, namely to hasten a peaceful and democratic transition on the Island of Cuba. Rather, it has solidified the authoritarian control of Fidel Castro, and has adversely affected the already miserable living conditions of 11 million innocent men, women, and children on the Island.

I think Democrats due themselves a disservice when they pander to the absurd views of the Cuban exile lobby rather than saying these words that everyone knows to be true. Among other things, it makes it difficult for Democrats to argue for engagement with Iran or Syria or wherever when they can’t point to the most clear-cut and famous example of the failure of isolation strategies.

From the “claim that’s sufficiently appealing that I haven’t read the underlying paper” file, here’s Charles Kenny:

Is Anywhere Stuck in a Malthusian Trap? is an unpublished short paper. The key features of the Malthusian model are that (i) income determines population growth, with rising wages increasing survival rates and (ii) there is a vital factor of production (land) which is fixed, implying decreased returns to scale for all other factors. The equilibrium state in such a model is a population living on subsistence incomes. The analysis in this paper suggests that (i) the link between income and population growth is (almost) everywhere broken and (ii) there is little evidence of declining returns to scale because of constraints imposed by land carrying capacity at the macro level anywhere. Population dynamics are being driven by non-income factors in a manner that is reducing population growth rates everywhere. At the same time, output is increasing everywhere, in a manner inconsistent with significantly declining returns to scale based on land being a vital factor of production.

Good news! If true, of course. Here’s his blog. This comes via Tyler Cowen.

I think Andrew Sullivan made an effort to popularize that term at one point, and I liked it. Take, for example, Steve Hayes latest bout of enthusiasm for Dick Cheney who, he says, “has not moved on. He still awakens each day asking the same questions he asked on Sept. 12, 2001.”

I mean, is that really supposed to be a good thing. I don’t remember my mental state on 9/12/01 in perfect detail, but a broad-brush outline would be that I was freaking out. Nobody knew how many people had died the previous day, but the total was assumed to be way higher than the 3,000 or so it turned out to be. People (except for Dick Cheney, The Weekly Standard, and The New Republic) mostly assumed it was al-Qaeda, but nobody really knew and nobody really knew anything about al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, I was really, really, really scared that we’d just witnessed the first wave of some sustained assault on the United States. Like emergency workers were going to be deployed to New York, only to find skyscrapers in the cities they’d left tumbling down. Or maybe a masked man would just start opening fire in a crowded shopping mall and gun people down. Going to a college that doubles as a tourist attraction suddenly went from neat-but-annoying to terrifying.

It simply put, wasn’t the best day to be making decisions. Obviously, the country’s top leaders need to make decisions in crises. At the same time, they’re bound to be fallible like everyone else. And, like everyone else, eventually they need to calm down, step back, and evaluate what’s happening. But Cheney and his hagiographer see it as a virtue that he continues to make decisions based on the panicky and inaccurate vision of events we had on 9/12.

One of Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy advisors is Martin Kramer (about which more later), who has a blog called “the Sandbox” from which he propounds his view that the problem with US Middle East policy is that it’s unduly influenced by people who are knowledgeable about the Middle East, and insufficiently under the thumb of people like Kramer who recognize that the only thing these brutes understand is force. At any rate, from Kramer’s sidebar I followed a link to Eli Lake’s New York Sun article in which Giuliani criticizes Bush’s foreign policy for being too favorable to the Palestinians.

This is, perhaps, not entirely unexpected from a man whose entire foreign policy resume consists of having been rude to Yasser Arafat once, but still: It’s inane.

Maybe Michael O’Hanlon’s continued prominence in the media is more useful than I’d realized. Here’s Michael Crowley:

But this evening I heard an NPR program (audio here) on which O’Hanlon was a guest, and I was struck by how self-defeatingly thin his argument for a continued occupation was. O’Hanlon readily conceded that he can’t construct a “convincing theory” for how political reconciliation might be achieved–and moreover that his argument for patience amounts to “a gut level… theory of hope” that somehow things will get better. I’m very torn but persuadable that sticking around might be better than various gruesome alternatives. But less so if advocates for that position–particularly nonideological ones like O’Hanlon–concede that their argument amounts to wishing upon a star.

Perhaps having more anti-war voices in the press would convince nobody — after all, they’re not “nonideological” like O’Hanlon — and what we need are more lame pro-war arguments in hopes that the overwhelming lameness will bring people around.

Michael Cohen catches something I missed about the decision to start calling the IRGC terrorists. According to the Post, one of the motives for this action was Condoleezza Rice’s desire “to pacify, for a while, administration hawks who are pushing for possible military action.”

I think one good way to tell that your country’s gone ’round the bend is that this sort of thing starts showing up in your morning paper.

In yesterday’s post on the silence of the think tanks I was relying on an account I read in a book, which can sometimes be a problem since books tend not to be fact-checked especially rigorously. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for example, turns out not to have been as silent on this issue as the post implied. Here, for example, is Jessica Matthews advocating “coercive inspections” as an alternative to “the very real possibility that a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, even if successful in doing so, could subtract more from U.S. security and long-term political interests than it adds. In this case an alternative does exist.”

In case you were wondering if it’s really true that “war on terror” is a pernicious concept, here comes the Bush administration’s decision to relabel Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “specially designated global terrorist” organization. It’s taken a few years, but we’ve managed to move now from a situation in the winter 2001-2002 where the US and Iran were cooperating against our mutual deadly foe — al-Qaeda — to one where Iran is officially one of the enemies in an open-ended struggle against God knows whom.