I see that Daniel Drezner really, really likes Sebastian Mallaby's book about the World Bank and its head, James Wolfensohn. I just started it last night, and so far it's as good as Drezner says. As is my wont, I'd like to share a brief passage from it that relates to the current Colemanian brouhaha over Kofi Annan and the UN (btw, I'm willing to admit that I could well be wrong on the politics and/or the merits, especially given McCain's position).

Here's Mallaby:

We veer between contempts for international bodies--the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and likewise the World Bank--and unrealistic pronouncements on what they ought to do: forge peace, banish financial instability, lift every person out of poverty. It has become commonplace to say that our global institutions are not up to the challenge of our unprecedented global interdependence. But the reason for this mismatch lies partly in our shizophrenia. Sometimes we pour scorn on the Bank and other international bodies, and starve them of resources. Sometimes we talk as though they must have superhuman strengthm and we lumber them with impossible objectives.

That graf could have been written by our own inimitable Ms. Nadezhda, no? More concretely:

When President George W. Bush took office, it was the contempt that seemed most threatening. In 2001 and 2002, the Bush Treasury assailed the Bank with a mixture of aggression and plain ignorance, as this book will describe later [Note: I haven't gotten there yet. -p]. In early 2003, the Bank was left out of the planning for Iraqi reconstruction by the Pentagon, even though it had valuable experience from other nation-building exercises. The Pentagon's attitude did not prevent the Treasury from attacking the Bank for doing too little in Iraq; days after Jim Wolfensohn visited Baghdad in the summer of 2003, and days before a World Bank expert was killed by Iraqi insurgents, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial broadside about the Bank's lack of involvement in the country. Throughout this period, the very idea of the international system was called into question; some parts of the administration believed we lived in a unipolar world--that the United States was the international system. The unipolar fantasy is a trap, for it is only in military matters that American power is overwhelming. In the economic realm, the United States is the leading power, but it is not the only power; it depends on foreigners to open up trade, to prime the pump of global growth, and to provide savings that pay for the federal government's spending habits.

Idiots. Thomas Barnett would probably agree that you can't, er, connect "the Gap" to "the Core" unless you, um, actually try to connect them to the Core. Argh.

I'll likely never take the time to offer a comprehensive review once I finish the book, so treasure this brief snippet accordingly.

And now a question for our knowledgeable readers: do the regional combatant commands (e.g. CENTCOM) have liaisons to major international bodies like the World Bank, does the State Department handle those things on the ambassadorial level, are there interagency coordination groups back in Washington, do they employ their own development specialists, etc.? To make this more concrete, how (if at all) would someone in charge of World Bank development projects for Nigeria coordinate with United States European Command, who runs training projects for the Nigerian military (but doesn't talk about it on its website)? I bring this up in light of my growing concern about the militarization of American foreign policy. I thought this passage from Dana Priest's The Mission was particulary illuminating:

Operation Focus Relief said a lot about the times. For decades, the federal government and Washington's inside-the-Beltway brain trust had poured money into studying the Third World and Africa. Even so, no one had gotten very good at mapping out, and then executing, long-term strategies to solve Africa's massive problems. Funds and programs came and went with each new administration and each new majority in Congress. As a result, sixty U.S. soldiers might walk through hip-deep bushy fields with a battalion of underfed Nigerian soldiers, showing them how to conduct an ambush, but no cadre of U.S. economists flew there to train officials in the country's economic ministry. No legion of agronomists camped out in the middle of nowhere to help improve farming techniques. Battalions of teachers did not deploy to repair the educational system. The Peace Corps was marginalized and outdated.

Using the American military to address global problems had become almost a reflex in Washington. But even the best U.S. troops could deal only with the symptoms, not the causes, of incipient problems. Military programs did little to help political systems move from dictatorship to democracy, or economies from government control to the free market.

I echoed my concern in comments to Steve Clemmons, and a smart commenter responded:

Praktike, don't blame the CinCs (sorry, I mean "combatant commanders"); as Congress gutted our foreign service, the task of diplomacy didn't go away, it just devolved to the military. The CinCs are very cognizant of the importance of diplomacy, and they'd like a heck of a lot more civilian support in what they're doing. Our elected officials, Republican and Democrat, have basically abdicated much of their responsibility and forced unwanted responsibilities upon military leaders. (Shades of "The Origins of the Military Coup of 2012.")

To be clear: I don't blame the CinCs (most of whom "get it" and are trapped by the system). I blame Congress. Development alone won't solve the terrorism problem (and as Mallaby says, the World Bank can't exactly wave a magic wand), but boosting failed or failing states is part of a long-term solution. States that work and can find hope for their people are states that will fight terrorism. But we're eating soup with a knife on a global scale here, or using hammers on what look like nails but are actually screws, or whatever. I'm sure there's some cliche that sums it all up.

In any case, this has to change, because we're trying to solve problems too late, with too few resources, and sometimes with the wrong resources. Maybe we have to get more creative about boosting the non-military capabilites of the regional commands, or at a minimum, improve our coordination with, say, the World Bank, which employs thousands of brilliant technocrats. It benefits from having a board that, unlike the United Nations Security Council, isn't set up in such a way that politics routinely interfere with doing good; unlike the UN, it's well-funded and highly driven. Still thinking out loud here ... maybe the State Department should be reorganized to match the regional commands. Why, for instance, do State's geographic divisions not match the Pentagon's? Why doesn't "jointness" extend beyond the military?

Now ... tell me why none of these inchoate thoughts are realistic. Imagine that George Bush is not the current president if that helps my case.

Note: good thinkin', Matt, but the U.S. is not about to give up its veto.

This isn't a life and death matter, but it does illustrate the absurd traps our legislation or regulations often set for our foreign policy when we try to address one issue and end up producing other problems. Somewhere there ought to be an administrative proceeding for the State Department or other agencies to administer exemptions from blanket prohibitions. The problem has received increasing attention in the area of visas and foreign students, where our more stringent recent policies are being applied in a fashion that undermines all too frequently the strong economic, political and cultural interests America has in openness.

For a society that prides itself especially on openness to ideas and freedom of speech, this episode is postively perverse. It was described originally in the Christian Science Monitor by Farzaneh Milani, a native of Iranian who is director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia.

Shirin Ebadi - a human rights lawyer and one of Iran's first women judges - is however, forbidden to publish her memoirs in the United States because of a trade embargo against three countries: Sudan, Cuba and Iran. Coming from a land that has no exact equivalent for the term "to sue," the 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate is suing the American government. Challenging the regulations imposed by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, Ebadi calls the ban "a critical missed opportunity both for Americans to learn more about my country and its people from a variety of Iranian voices, and for a better understanding to be achieved between our two countries."

Ebadi has a point. Only a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of new titles made available to the American reading public every year are translated works. Furthermore, with no official relations with the Iranian government, with new prohibitions on direct access to the people, with travel and tourism virtually stopped, it is hard for Americans to see Iran beyond the headlines. Misunderstandings and misperceptions are rampant.

In spite of its long history of cooperation and friendship with the U.S., which was interrupted by the 1979 revolution, especially the hostage crisis, Iran is represented as an intractable enemy. Its dominant image now is that of a country-turned-jailer; a country taking Americans, no less diplomats and emissaries, hostage.
[...]
For well over a century, women have been a moderating, modernizing force in Iran with Shirin Ebadi as one of its most articulate and successful representatives. Her voice, like Sheherazade's, is a beacon of hope and temperance. It should not be silenced. It ought to be heard.

Our friend the Brooding Persian would agree with the importance of women to Iran's ancient past and future, with a somewhat different take in his recent post "Warrior Woman."

And the past generally helps put present in perspective. I mean, who can really be surprised by the existence of warrior women knowing what woman in Iran have done and continue to do every day. It must be in the genes!

As I have said before,... Iranian women are poised to take the helm of this nation in a dazzling sort of way. They are the one consistently belligerent group incessantly challenging boundaries and refusing to be cowered.

The Persian's post is full of great links to materials about Iranian women both past and present. I was especially taken by his recommendation of the author of a forthcoming book dealing with gender and modernity in Iran, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards : Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, by Afsaneh Najmabadi.

The issue of identity and modernity, and the gender dimension of identity , is a recurring theme in a number of publications about Iran. Another book to be published early in 2005 is reviewed in Beirut's Daily Star. Portrait Photographs from Isfahan : Faces in Transition, 1920-1950 is a collection of several hundred photographs from the period, assembled by Iranian artist, academic and activist Parisa Damandan.

[The book] focuses on a tight but tumultuous time frame, when Iran was undergoing rapid social, political and economic transformation. Damandan, who was born in Isfahan and remembers her own early experiments with having her picture taken by a professional photographer, returned to her hometown to find evidence of the old studios and commercial practices that once flourished in the ancient city.

The book resulting from her research reveals as much about how photographers worked in the first half of the 20th century as it does about how people in those times saw themselves, how they constructed their identities before the camera and, in turn, how the identity of a nation took shape, fell apart and reformed against a backdrop of industrialization, modernity, political change and looming revolution and upheaval.
[...]
[In addition to telling the story of individual photographers] Damandan adds the story of a city, a country and a people. The book is full of surprises - cross-dressing women, Isfahan's community of Russian prostitutes and the flood of Polish refugees who took up temporary residence in Iran during World War II. And it captures telling evidence of changing times - women casting off and taking up the veil, the significance of gymnasiums as a social space in men's lives, family configurations, gender roles at social events and the growth of industry (textile factories, workers on strike) that is evident both on the landscape and in the photographs themselves.

In addition to Damandan's narrative, "Portrait Photographs from Isfahan" includes essays by Iranian writer Reza Sheikh (who looks at the relationship between portraiture and democracy) and Dutch writer Josephine van Bennekom (who explores the differences between and encounters among Iranian and European portraiture).
[...]

As an interesting aside, the Persian has also been concerned about the problem of Iranian writings being blocked from publication in the US. In this case, the focus was on poetry.

One of the common complaints of liberals is that the United States has become increasingly reliant on its military; this is becoming especially relevant as Al Qaeda shifts from being an identifiable group to becoming a lodestar for an ideological movement. It's rare that you find someone elaborating on this point beyond the obvious case of Iraq, however, so I thought I'd give it a try by way of an example.

First, a bit of explanation. Most Americans think that foreign policy is made in Washington by the White House, Congress, and the executive branch. This is only partly the case. In practice, many regional problems tend to get addressed by the powerful "unit combatant commanders" (formerly and still coloquially known as the CinCs) or not at all, because they're the ones with the resources and the on-the-ground knowledge.

Did you know that Southern Command, which administers Latin America and basically runs the drug war, has more staff resources (about 1,100 people) devoted to the region than the State Department, Treasury, Commerece, Agriculture, the Pentagon's Joint Staff, and the OSD combined? With little guidance or oversight from Washington, the combatant commanders are often are forced to resort to freelancing.

They do a good job filling in the gaps where they can, but at the end of the day they have a natural bias toward military-to-miltary relationships at a time when America ought to also be expanding links with and building the capacity of civilian governments. At the same time, civilians back in Washington--and the press that covers them--often don't have a clue what's really going on in the world.

A book all thinking Americans (and especially liberals) should read is Dana Priest of the Washington Post's The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military. It's a fascinating, balanced, in-depth look at the people and organizations who really run American foreign policy: the CinCs, special operating forces, and the military generally. The following passage on U.S. efforts to train the Nigerian army illuminates the problem quite succinctly, I think:   more »

I know metafilter discovered the thing a year-and-a-half ago, but I found it today and it clearly needs rediscovery because it is beyond clever.

Using the "people-who-bought-this-are interested-in-that" feature of amazon.com, the Amazing Baconizer takes you through the steps of separation from any one item (book, CD or movie) on amazon.com to another. You can set up the start and end yourself, or you can do random walks. Some are hysterically funny, others uncover some interesting gems on the path from one personal favorite to another, apparently totally unrelated, personal favorite.

Beyond the simple fun of a "six degrees of separation game," the Baconizer actually has some fairly neat implications for social networks -- including why smokers are critical to successfully navigating bureaucracies. But enough of theory, it's his centrality charts that are quite entertaining.   more »

I generally enjoy the prose stylings of Atrios, James Wolcott, Kevin Drum, and even Steve Gilliard on occasion.

But, like Matthew Yglesias, I think they really ought to keep their opinions to themselves until they've actually read The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Betweeen Iran and America. Having just finished the book, I think it's wrong to suggest that Pollack has simply gone through The Threatening Storm replacing q's with n's. If anything, the book is meant to forestall a foolish course of action such as a military invasion (he's got a section aptly named "The Case Against Invading Iran") or a covert regime destabilization campaign (there's another section called "The Ghost of Kim Roosevelt").

Pollack's nuanced case is duly replete with qualifiers and caveats, but the bottom line is that, as "our least bad option," he favors a "Triple Track" approach consisting of the following elements:

• Hold Open the Prospect of the Grand Bargain
  
• A True Carrot-and-Stick Approach
  
• Preparing for a New Containment Regime
  

He says on p. 385:

[J]ust because the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons does not quite justify the extraordinary price of an invasion does not mean that it is not a threat or that it would not justify other actions by the United States that might not be as costly as an invasion but could still require considerable sacrifices. Foreign policy is rarely an all-or-nothing activity--that either a threat is great enough to justify paying any price, including invasion or nuclear strikes, or else it is not a threat at all and therefore does not justify paying any price. Most foreign policy problems fall somewhere in between, and the Iranian nuclear threat still falls toward the higher end of the spectrum.

Failing to succeed would meaning learning to live with a nuclear Iran, which would be pretty bad but not the end of the world.

I should warn potential readers that the book is quite sloppy in parts, probably the result of a headlong rush to publication. Pollack often appears to directly contradict himself within the same paragraph.

For instance, on p. 16, amid a discussion of 19th century Iranian history:

Entire Iranian industries were thus wiped out by foreign competition, impoverishing Persia's middle class and artisanry. At various points, European creditors pressed the shah to sell off Crown lands to repay debts, increasing the power of the landlords at the expense of the central government and further diminishing royal revenues in the future. Moreover, these new duties brought the shahs increasingly into competition with Iran's rising middle class, composed largely of merchants and business (called bazaaris because their place of business was the bazaar, meaning "market" in Persian) who were being penalized for the government's financial mistakes. (my bolding)

Try making sense of that.

That's only a minor example of Pollack's discombobulating prose-- the big picture is equally muddled. Iran has been mostly helpful in Iran and Iraq, he says, but Iran has reverted to its bad old ways from the 1990s. Khatami has lost his mojo and the hardliners from that time period are back in charge, but the current regime "does not have a history of reckless behavior." It's been nearly impossible to get the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese to go along with punishing Iran for its bad behavior, but it will be possible to get the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese to go along with a multilateral sanctions regime. Strangely, there's no mention of Iranian support for Muqtada Sadr or most of the other predations described in US News, although Pollack does cite one November 2003 attack by Iranian guerillas on a Fallujah police station as an example of bad behavior. Sadr's name doesn't even appear in the index. If Pollack believes the swirling accusations about Iran's involvement in the insurgency to be false, he should have made some effort to debunk them rather than letting them stand. I was also troubled by Pollack's use of Wikipedia as a source on the 1973 Oil Crisis (aren't there books on that subject?), and I imagine I could find other problems if I cared to look. Not to mention the fact that Pollack has never been to Iran, and doesn't speak any Farsi.

My bottom line: I can't recommend this book unless you know little about Iran, don't follow the news, and can't bother to read the James Fallows piece or Pollack's burgeoning list of editorials on the subject. But don't believe the knee-jerk reactions from left blogistan, either. Pollack should have done a better job, but this isn't Threatening Storm II.

[UPDATE] This essay is one of three on the recommended reading list of the "Grand Strategic Choices Working Group" of the Princeton Project on National Security (Woodrow Wilson School). The group is one of seven organized for the academic year 2004-05. John Ikenberry is co-chair of this working group along with Francis Fukuyama. The other two recommended essays are Fukuyama's article from the Summer 2004 issue of National Interest, "The Neoconservative Moment," (sub reqd) and "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World" by Charles Krauthammer (Speech to American Enterprise Institute, February 12, 2004) .

See praktike's Democratic Realism is a Joke, which discusses this debate.

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John Ikenberry's piece from Britain's Prospect magazine, written prior to the election, sets out the case for liberal hegemony. It is a vision in sharp distinction to the conservative hegemony that the Bush Administration has been pursuing, especially since 9/11, and which Ikenberry explains will lead to tears. The shape of his overall argument, reflected in the excerpts selected below, is of more interest than his descriptions of the familiar set of actions and attitudes of the Bush Admin that he uses to illustrate and reinforce his analysis. We

Let's start with his conclusion, also the title of the piece.

A traditional realist strategy of reconstructing a Westphalian balance of power order that reaffirms state sovereignty is quite unrealistic, particularly given unipolarity and the character of the new security threats. There is no going back.

What the world needs is an order where the US continues to underwrite global security but does so within a framework of rules and bargains that render the resulting system legitimate and sustainable. We need to move beyond balance of power and empire towards an international order that combines American unipolar power with widely agreed upon rules and institutions. The world needs a liberal leviathan.

His conclusion is not surprising -- it reflects the basic premises of those who set the grand strategy for the US, and therefore defined the key structures of the liberal international system in the West, during and after WWII. With the interim Cold War brought to an end, there is a return to the logic of the system that was installed by the Western allies and elaborated through building regional and international institutions and arrangements.

As such, his analysis is part of the overall "empire" debates that have sprung up, especially post 9-11. Falling in the camp of "in a unipolar system the world needs a hegemon" he takes the argument further beyond debates that view the world through the US perspective -- type of empire, whether empire is the right term, whether managing an empire is consistent with other key features of the American character or system -- and instead discusses the US role within the context of a new and challenging international system.

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Enough of the gloom and doom already. Being of a juvenile bent, I can only take it for so long, at which point I require something altogether stupid and goofy. This works for me. I particularly recommend a visit to The Gallery of Regrettable Food, which is contained in the Institute of Official Cheer. I may be a latecomer to Lileks, but I nearly made myself a mischief (any Brits out there will catch my drift) looking through this.   more »

I'm surprised that neither of these are getting big play.

1. Tonight's vote in the Knesset on Sharon's pullout plan. Haaretz thinks he's going to win. It seems that Sharon has given the speech of his lifetime, a deeply emotional appeal from a longtime backer of the settler movement. ThisisRumorControl explains Israeli politics for the uninitiated.

2. Musharraf's diplomatic initiative on Kashmir. Al Jazeera says it was "welcomed" in Kashmir, but the boys over at Acorn think it's a nonstarter.

What are you folks watching?

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[UPDATE 10-26-04 3:00PM] by nadezhda

JC has a comment that points us to Eminem's just-released GOTV video of his new anti-Bush song. Salon's got some remarks here.

[UPDATE 2 10-27-04 11:30PM] by nadezhda

"Mosh" is now No. 1 video on MTV.

There are political seasons when certain phrases seem to latch themselves to the brain, repeating themselves over and over, like a song's refrain. This year there have been two for me. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (even though the remark was occasioned by a Depression-era inaugural, not the war that began on the day that still lives in infamy). And "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I came to Walt Kelly and Pogo late in Kelly's career, when even his strongest admirers would admit he was well past his most creative years, and when the characters had been running for decades and the strips assumed a knowledge of their past adventures not evident from the later tales. Like devoted fans before me, I was captivated by the humor of a funny sketch between a couple of foolish characters, or some over-the-top word play, or Kelly's unique manner of penciling in words in the background or margins of frames: familiar signs, topical quotes, brand-names, mangled literary allusions or sayings. Although I had the impression Kelly began more as a journalist/writer than cartoonist, I knew little about him, and never had the benefit of the long history of Pogo before I became an occasional reader.

Imagine then my pleasure, when Henry at Crooked Timber found a lengthy review/appreciation of a major part of the opus of Walt Kelley that's currently available in a series of eleven volumes of Pogo (1948-60). The essay is by John Crowley in the Boston Review. Of topical interest this political season, Crowley doesn't neglect Kelly as social and political satirist. He gives a flavor of how the McCarthy era, in particular, played out in the characters and storylines of Pogo.
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It only recently came out, so I hadn't been able to order a copy with the rest of my recent book orders, but Stephen Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan was one of the books recommended to me by Professor Haqqani at the start of my Islam in South Asia course. Seeing that Pervez Hoodbhoy has a major review of it in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (which I have just inadvertently found out I can read for free online when connecting through the university network.. sweet!) I've got hopes that I can successfully order a copy now and place it somewhere on my pile.

Ominous declarations of imminent chaos in Pakistan abound in the United States. Cohen aims both to raise warnings and to soothe fears. Although he acknowledges that profound problems plague both the idea and the reality of Pakistan, he distances himself from apocalyptic "failed state" scenarios. Catastrophic failure of this nuclear-armed state is surely a possibility. But Pakistan's fate will ultimately depend on whether its leaders can find an answer to the fundamental question that has plagued their fellow citizens for more than half a century: "How can we make the idea of Pakistan actually work?"

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