Brad DeLong says he’s not sure “if this is a very good or very bad end-of-lecture sentence”:

Next time, I’ll talk about Adolf Hitler, whose big problem–besides being a bloodthirsty persuasive paranoid genocidal psychopath, that is–is that he pays to much attention to (a) Malthus, (b) social darwinists, and (c) cowboy novels.

Seems good to me. The answer, I think, is (a). Hitler suffered from, among other things, a Malthus-esque belief that “the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man” for sharply limited and that the acquisition of land — lebensraum — was crucial to national prosperity. Thus, he decided to invest a massive proportion of the German economy in a fruitless effort to greatly expand Germany’s land area. But instead of a larger land area, Hitler’s policies wound up making Germany smaller. And in destroying a huge proportion of Germany’s capital infrastructure. And in subjecting a substantial portion of Germany to decades of Communist rule. And at the end of the process, Germany does, indeed, have a higher population density than Italy or France or Spain.

And yet: Germany is a really rich country in the scheme of things, especially the Western part. Because Hitler was wrong. German prosperity doesn’t depend on acquiring more land and never did.

Given that progressive bloggers have thus far mostly failed to inject the “residual forces” issue into the Democratic primary campaign, I’m not sure why Bill Richardson thinks putting netroots activists in his ad attempting to raise the issue will help him, but I’m glad he’s raising the issue:

One fears that Richardson may have committed too many gaffes at this point to gain traction, but I hope this ad helps him and forces the other candidates to start addressing this issue.

Via Ilan Goldenberg, Karen DeYoung reports that “Civil war has been averted in Iraq and Iranian intervention there has ‘ceased to exist,’ Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said yesterday.”

One hesitates to call this yet another data point to suggest that it doesn’t really make sense for our young men and women to be risking their lives in order that the US government might be able to continue spending vast sums of money to build up the armed forces under Maliki’s control. After all, that conclusion might simply bolster the idea that it does make sense for our young men and women to be risking their lives in order that the US government might be able to continue spending vast sums of money to build up the armed forces under the control of rebels trying to overthrow Maliki’s government. Since Bush now has us on both sides of the conflict, after all, Maliki looking unimpressive just cuts both ways — just another awesome aspect of our endless war.

Speaking at the UN, George W. Bush says:

Better education unleashes the talent and potential of its citizens, and adds to the prosperity of all of us. Better education promotes better health and greater independence. Better education increases the strength of democracy, and weakens the appeal of violent ideologies. So the United States is joining with nations around the world to help them provide a better education for their people.

Unfortunately, as Kay Steiger points out, “it’s been pretty well documented that the most effective terrorists are the highly educated ones.” Indeed, while there are lots of good reasons to want to improve school around the world, preventing people from becoming terrorists isn’t a good one at all. Check out Peter Bergen and Michael Lind on what actually motivates terrorists, or the 2005 op-ed on “The Madrassa Myth” that he co-wrote with Swati Pandey taking on a variant of the education story which holds that terrorists come from madrassas and that madrassas could be crowded out with better schools.

Throughout history, really, there’s no reason to think that education weakens the appeal of violent ideologies. Pol Pot went to EFR in Paris and Lenin went to Kazan State University. When Marc Sageman looked at al-Qaeda biographies he found that “Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion.”

Matt Stoller does an interview:

Matt Stoller: Can we handle a nuclear Iran? Can we live with that?

Wes Clark: I don’t think so. The reason is, there are three reasons. Number one is that I think a nuclear armed Iran would use its clear deterrent to promote conventional or unconventional aggression against other states in the region and believe it could sit back with its nuclear power and not be threatened in return. I think the second reason is you never know how these nuclear capabilities might be smuggled abroad or used in some way. Maybe the way we saw the Israelis strike at this nuclear depot in Syria is an indication of that and apparently that came from North Korea. And the third reason is that once Iran gets a nuclear weapon lots of other countries will want them and the more countries that have them the greater chance a nuke will be used and kill hundreds of thousands of people and so no I don’t think you can tolerate a nuclear armed Iran. But I think the right course of dealing with it is to directly engage Iran in dialogue.

The weird thing here is that I totally agree with Clark’s analysis of what would be problematic about an Iranian nuclear weapon. This just seems like a strange conception of something we can’t live with. The prospect of the Red Army overrunning Western Europe was something we couldn’t live with. We formed NATO, provided explicit defense guarantees to our allies in the region, stationed troops in Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Britain and were prepared to wage warfare on a truly massive scale — just as we had during World War II — to prevent the domination of Europe by a hostile totalitarian power.

Iran having a nuclear weapon would be bad, for the reasons Clark adduces, and it’s worth trying to prevent in just the way he suggests. But one shouldn’t suggest that it’s some kind of intolerable threat to American security or that we’d have no way to cope with the consequences of an Iranian nuclear weapon. It’s just a scenario we’d prefer to avoid.

When I said that further examination seems to reveal a lack of nefariousness in General Petraeus’ non-inclusion of actual numbers alongside his graphical representation of the numbers, I didn’t mean to imply that there’s nothing nefarious at all about his presentation. As numbers-maestro Ilan Goldenberg points out one major source of difference between the Petraeus numbers and the Pentagon numbers is that Petraeus has taken the US casualty data that, according to Petraeus, is the best available and blended it with Iraqi data that everyone regards as unreliable.

Why would you want to do that? Well, because it helps bolster the argument Petraeus is trying to make.

I may not have been thrilled by the Bollinger/Ahmadenijad debate, but Columbia’s president seems to have won over The New York Sun, which is interesting.

The Washington Post has a decent rundown of controversies of casualty statistics in Iraq, that includes this nugget:

The charts are difficult to compare: Petraeus used monthly figures on a line graph, while the Pentagon computed “Average Daily Casualties” on a bar chart, and neither included actual numbers. But the numerical differences are still stark, and the reasons offered can be hard to parse. The Pentagon, in a written clarification, said that “Gen. Petraeus reported civilian deaths based on incidents reported by Coalition forces plus Iraqi government data. The [Pentagon] report only includes incidents reported by Coalition forces for civilian causality data.”

I noticed this absence of actual numbers, too, and all I can say is . . . what’s the deal? When I saw Petraeus not including the numbers, I suspected something nefarious. But the Pentagon numbers that contradict Petraeus don’t show them either, so it probably isn’t nefarious. But it is damned odd.