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The Ethics of Social Security

Maybe this is a stupid question, but it seems to me like the big lament from the left about SS privatization is that a relatively small number of people could make remarkably dumb decisions about how to invest their money, and that it is unethical for a liberal society to let them do so.

But I wonder, how do the same people feel about clinical trials in medicine?  In that case, it's likely that the knowledge the person has about the procedure is way less than the knowledge they have about a given mutual fund, and it seems to me the risks, while controlled, are much higher.  Like, you know, untimely death and disease and all.  Is it ethical to let people take a small risk for a short-term payoff even though the outcome could be completely catastrophic?

I can't seem to find much data on the web about this, but even NIH's website (see #11) seems to admit that there are risks, however unlikely they may be.

On a related note, NPR is noting that Germany's do-nothing approach to its pension system is leading to a rapidly increasing proportion of elderly people resorting to petty crime because they're poor and their pensions have been frozen.  We're not there yet, but it sure puts a dent in the "do nothing" case.

Or maybe it's just that taxes in Germany aren't high enough yet...

Our Man in Uzbekistan

Demonstrating that strategery isn't their only weakness, Steven Schwartz shows that neocons can be just as immoral as realists:

As I write, on December 29, the results of the Uzbek vote are both incomplete and controversial. The allocation of seats to the various parties, including the ruling National Democratic Party of President Islom Karimov, has yet to be announced, and functionaries of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), have declared the balloting insufficiently democratic. But the OSCE inspires little confidence in such matters. For myself, I have witnessed several years of OSCE meddling and mismanagement of the promised transitions to democracy in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo, and do not perceive the OSCE as possessing moral standing to issue such criticisms.

At the same time, while observing the Uzbek elections, I was reminded of earlier chapters in the history of post-Communist democratization. Whether the OSCE was satisfied or not, ordinary Uzbeks lined up enthusiastically to cast their votes on a multipage paper ballot. Meanwhile, the Uzbek authorities made extensive preparations to accommodate foreign journalists, who did not show up in substantial numbers.

Now, wait a minute, who's the bad guy here?  Well, the OSCE, of course.  Schwartz is right to criticize the OSCE and its observer missions, but they deserve to be criticized for being too soft on despotic regimes, not too tough! Their previous and numerous failures to stand up to Russian chicanery in places like Moldova are indeed regrettable, though the institution is showing signs of healing. But Schwartz, for his part, paints Karimov as the good guy, who is regrettably being shoved around by those bastards from the OSCE.  Schwartz, who I'm not sure speaks one word of either Uzbek or Russian, might want to apply for a job as a CIS election observer.  Or maybe he can find himself a foreign patron to fund these little propaganda missions of his.

Meanwhile, Muhammad Salih, reporting from exile in Europe, gives the real scoop on the elections:

Uzbek voters knew absolutely nothing. They did not know who to vote for because they did not have any information about the candidates running for parliament. Everything was shrouded in mystery, except the fact that all parties in the race had been founded by state authorities.

Another curious aspect of the Dec. 26 elections was that they were held under an artificial state of emergency. Particular attention was paid to the Ferghana Valley, Bukhara and Samarkand. Ten days before the elections, troops from the Interior Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the National Security Service began regular patrols of these regions. Security forces took full control of all city mosques and public places, supposed potential sites for terrorist attacks. Operations to detain "extremist elements" also took place. So-called suspicious persons were brought into local police stations and booked, or were simply arrested on the spot. These included political activists calling for a boycott of the elections. Arrests occurred across Uzbekistan, and human rights activists and opposition party members were followed, put under house arrest and not allowed to register at the polls, even though the main opposition parties, Erk and Birlik, had been excluded from the race.

There was one person, however, who seemed happy with the elections, namely Vladimir Rushailo, who led the observer mission from the Commonwealth of Independent States. He was so pleased with things that he flew off to Kiev before the polls had even closed. For once, everything went off just as Russia had hoped.

Check out what the evildoers at the OSCE had to report, and Karimov's attempt to spin it here.

Settle, Boy, Settle!

Whew is Jonah Goldberg in a huff because a Marine who served in OIF had the gall to run a comparison of Iraq and Vietnam!  Rants Goldberg:

can we please just drop the Vietnam analogies? It was a jungle war. It was a proxy conflict in the Cold War. It was a war in a country with a wildly different culture. We had a different politics. We had a draft and draftee army. The Civil Rights movement was in full flower. The domestic Left was more powerful, more radicalized and more listened to. Al Jazeera did not exist. Our media was controlled by a monopoly symbolized by Walter Cronkite's "the war is unwinnable" statememt. We had different weapons in Vietnam. Nor did satellite television and 24 hour cable news. Islam wasn't an issue. We didn't occupy the whole country. Some of these factors could easily be argued against our presence in Iraq. That's not the point. The point is that Vietnam is different. Our experience there illuminates, at best dimly, and often not at all what is happening today. Get over it.

Whuff!  Seems like somebody touched a nerve!  But let's run down the problems with Jonah's response, shall we?

1) "It was a jungle war."

What the hell difference does that make?  Clearly operating in the jungle conferred some tactical advantages to the Viet Cong in 'Nam, just as urban warfare, suicide bombings, and IEDs are conferring some tactical advantages on the insurgency in Iraq.  Does climate really make so much of a difference?

2) "It was a proxy conflict in the Cold War."

Well Jesus H. Christ, isn't what all you neocons have been blathering about for the past three years?  You know, Iraq, the democratic domino theory, the proxy war between the West and totalitarian Islam?  Do you not buy that anymore?  How come?

3) It was a war in a country with a wildly different culture.

Wildly different from whom?  Can wars only be compared if they're against the same country?  Why?

4) We had a different politics.

Can wars only be compared if the politics of the invading country are the same?  Why?

5) We had a draft and draftee army.

Agreed, but irrelevant to the questions authors raised in the Slate article, which were about the risks of being an infantry troop in both 'nam and Iraq.

6) The Civil Rights movement was in full flower.

Gay marriage!  Gay marriage!

7) The domestic Left was more powerful, more radicalized and more listened to.

True, what about MoveOn.org, and true.  But again largely irrelevant as to the nature of the fight on the ground.

8) Al Jazeera did not exist.

Also true, but underestimates the impact of some of the propaganda campaigns run by the North Vietnamese.  See here, for example.

9) Our media was controlled by a monopoly symbolized by Walter Cronkite's "the war is unwinnable" statememt.

Umm, have you read National Review lately?

10) We had different weapons in Vietnam.

Umm...

11) Nor did satellite television and 24 hour cable news.

No, but the "monopoly symbolized by Walter Cronkite's 'the war is unwinnable' statement" did a pretty good job of pouring cold water on the war, no?

12) Islam wasn't an issue.

No, but international Communism supposedly was.  See #2.

13) We didn't occupy the whole country.

We may officially occupy all of Iraq, in a traditional military sense, but I invite you to take a mosey around Sadr City or Samarra one of these days.  Occupy?

Then we get this dreck:

What also drives me nuts about the Vietnam analogies is that there are obviously better examples in one sense or another from our own military history (the Phillipines perhaps?) and certainly from the British experience (everywhere). But either because the authors of op-eds don't want to do that sort of homework or because editors think Vietnam moves copy for the historically illiterate like stories about dogs and Britney Spears do for everone else, they don't want to run that stuff.

Umm, you wanna use the Phillipines as an example?  That old conflict where "the war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about 120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. Resentment lingered a century later during Bush's visit."  That Phillipines?  You sure you don't want a Mulligan on that one?

And dude, if you're gonna be all haughty about who's "historically illiterate," at least get your facts straight first.  Hm?

The Raico Reversal

Via the antiwar.com blog, I see that Ralph Raico has provided a rhetorical reversal to the Fallacy of '39:

I hereby propose a test to judge whether a future designated enemy of the Washington power elite is or is not a real Hitler.

He will rule over a population comparable to 80 million Germans. He will be able to conquer more of Europe than Napoleon, and even to set out, foolishly, fatally, on the conquest of Russia. Unless a future adversary more or less fits this description, the lying D.C. warmongers should just shut up about all their Hitlers popping up around the world. But don't hold your breath.

Hey MSM!

Can we get a little rundown on what the story is with this?

"I Don't Care, the War Was Still Justified!!!"

I got a big chuckle when the justification for going to war with Iraq was reduced to "the murder of Theo van Gogh is really f**ked up" or "but Saddam was cheating on the oil-for-food program!!!"

Now, it's all the funnier that Paul Volcker, the man in charge of the oil-for-food audit, has concluded that:

"the bulk of the money that is talked about is smuggling, not oil-for-food, strictly speaking."

[...]

There were, "without question, problems in the oil-for-food area," Volcker told Alhurra.

"But when you look at those $10 billion figures, or $20 billion figures, most of those numbers are so-called smuggling, much of which was known and taken note of by the Security Council, but not stopped. That is, in my mind, an entirely different category than what went on within the oil-for-food program itself," he said.

Will Fox News or the Wall Street Journal attack Volcker first?  My money's on the Journal.

We Seek a Wider War?

There's been a lot of rattling on in Central Asia lately about Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group that has not been tied to any terrorist attack, yet seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia.  Most recently they were banned in Uzbekistan as a terrorist group, and have been blamed by the Karimov regime for a series of terror attacks in Uzbekistan, including July attacks in Tashkent on the Israeli and U.S. embassies that it vigorously denied any involvement in.  More perplexing about the Karimov government's attempt to pin the attacks on HuT is the fact that an upstart group, Islamic Jihad of Uzbekistan claimed responsibility for the bombings.

Further muddying the waters is the fact that the HuT operates openly in several countries, such as GWOT ally Great Britain.  See, for example, this interview with Jalaluddin Patel, head of HuT in England.  Some samples of the exchange:

MA: Give a brief account of HT's activities in the UK.

JP: In the UK, HT works on 2 levels. Firstly with the Muslim community, explaining the duty to work for the Khilafah (Caliphate) state, living by Islam in the West without loosing our identity and projecting a positive image of Islam in Western society. Secondly with the wider community, by articulating the cause of the Muslim world, presenting a case for the Khilafah state as a valid model for the Muslim world and explaining Islam as a political and intellectual system. We have had numerous conferences, seminars and debates to achieve this, as well as opening up a line of dialogue with Western thinkers.

[...]

MA: Give an account of how HT assesses 9/11 and its consequences.

JP: As far as the events are concerned, in particular the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we said that such attacks are not condoned by the Shari'ah. We immediately declared that this is not the proper or even effective method of fighting Western imperialism. We do see Western imperialism as the key factor in the continuing decline of the Islamic world and we do impress upon Muslims that they have to confront this imperialism. However that confrontation should be well planned and should not involve actions that are not only against the Shari'ah but are in fact self-defeating. The correct method is to establish a strong, modern and viable Islamic state, i.e. the Khilafah state, and the manner by which we can achieve this is to remove the rulers of the Muslim world.

[…]

MA: You mentioned the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; how do you see the resistance in these countries? Is this resistance legitimate according to HT ideology?

JP: We say that such resistance is condoned by Islam. Islam permits Muslims to resist the occupation of their land. The American invasions of these 2 Muslim countries are no different than the Serbian war against the Muslims of Bosnia back in the 1990s.

[...]

MA: HT maintains that Jihad is only permissible if it is sanctioned by the Khalifah (Caliph). How does this square with violence undertaken in the name of Jihad in various Muslim countries, particularly those recently invaded and occupied by the Americans?

JP: I should elaborate more on the concept of Jihad. Jihad as a defensive enterprise can be undertaken with or without an Amir and with or without an Islamic state. This is because it is the duty of every Muslim to defend his land and property. Therefore the defensive Jihad requires no authority to sanction it.

MA: Are you making a distinction here between defensive and offensive Jihad?

JP: I am yes.

[...]

MA: Where does HT's doctrine of non-violence come from?

JP: HT works to re-establish the Khilafah state. In this endeavor we are obliged to emulate the Prophet Muhammad (PBUM) in his struggle to establish the first Islamic state in Medina 1425 years ago. The Prophet established this Islamic state without resorting to violence against the Quraish. Instead he worked to mobilize public opinion in favor of Islam and endeavored to sway the political and intellectual elites of the time. This was despite the provocations, the persecutions and boycotts of the Muslims and the threats to his own life. We adhere closely to this struggle because we believe this is the correct and effective way of reviving the Islamic state.

[...]

MA: Can we still speak of a single, coherent HT today?

JP: Yes we can. We have one leadership, one global strategy to revive the Khilafah state and we are all unified in that objective.

[...]

MA: Going back to the question of violence, please provide a final critique of Islamic groups that have taken up arms against their governments, particularly in Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

JP: Islam mandates that the method to re-establish the Khilafah state is to establish it through intellectual and political work. The Prophet (PBUH) never raised up arms to establish a state, rather he worked according to a fixed method in emulation of this. To raise up arms against the regimes contradicts the Islamic method, in our opinion. Furthermore it does not address the problem correctly, as the regimes are one component, albeit very critical, to the present set-up. We need to convince the sincere members of the elites of the viability of Islam so that the Islamic state arises upon a strong powerbase.

So it sounds to me like what we have here is a group that is right on the cusp between the people we need to blow up and the people we need to cultivate as assets for use against those who we need to blow up.  We would probably do well to keep a close eye on these guys, and flip a few of them so that we can work the marginal folks who may be receptive to attacking the Far Enemy.  (That's us.)

Comes now Ariel Cohen, Central Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation, and the Nixon Center, to call for HuT to be added to the State Dept's list of terrorist organizations.  Cohen, for his part, writes up the indictment of HuT thus:

President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan also claimed the attackers may have been past members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami, a global radical Islamist party with a presence throughout the Middle East and Europe, reportedly headquartered in London. Hizb foments antigovernment unrest, advocates overthrowing secular regimes throughout the Muslim world, and fights for creating a Califate, a military theocracy aimed at waging total war on the "land of the sword" — the non-Muslim world.

During congressional testimony in 2003, Cohen advocated that:

to prevent Hizb ut-Tahrir from destabilizing Central Asia and other areas, the U.S. should expand intelligence collection on Hizb.

He went on:

Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami is an emerging threat to American interests and the countries in which it operates.

He then quotes extremely selectively from a scary-sounding tract:

America, Britain and their allies are leading a crusade in Afghanistan…These acts by America and Britain reflect their deep hostility toward the Muslim Ummah. It means that they are enemies. The relations between them and the Muslims constitute a state of war, and therefore, according to Islamic canons, all problems with regard to them should be dealt in accordance with war laws. This state of war also applies to countries that have formed an alliance with these two states.

The war of America and her allies against Islam and the Muslims has shown the corrupt nature of her civilization and her colonial world-view. The War on Iraq…has demonstrated that America and her allies only strive to colonize and plunder the resources of the Islamic world, not to bring about justice and security...

America is intending to deceive you…she is inherently weak as her ideology is false and corrupt…

The time has come for Islam not just in Iraq but in this entire Ummah. It is time for the Islamic State (Khilafah) to lead the world and save the world from the crimes and oppression of the capitalist system.

But he leaves out entirely the context and additional clauses in the statement in question.  Such as, for instance:

The rules of this Message forbids any aggression against civilian non-combatants.   They forbid killing of children, the elderly and non-combatant women even in the battlefield. They forbid the hijacking of civilian aeroplanes carrying innocent civilians and forbid the destruction of homes and offices which contain innocent civilians. All of these actions are types of aggression which Islam forbids and Muslims should not undertake such actions.

Anyone who read Cohen's testimony or his article on HuT would be astonished to find out the argument above or the information in the interview came from its leadership.  I am perplexed as to why on Earth Cohen and the Nixon Center would call for escalation against a group that has credibility among America-hating Muslims and simultaneously says that attacks that kill civilians are unacceptable for Muslims.  Perhaps Cohen and the Nixon Center know something about this that I don't, but I doubt it.

Update: Matt Yglesias emails to note Uzbekistan's diplomatic relations with Israel (one of few majority-Muslim countries to recognize Israel) and Tahrir's bomb-throwing rhetoric against Israel.  Of course, one of Tahrir's primary objectives has long been getting rid of the Uzbek regime and starting their Caliphate project in that country.  Matt seems to further imply that Dr. Cohen, described by his biography as a "passionate debater on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict" may have factored these facts in.  Stranger things have been known to happen, I suppose.

Remember Pravda?

Good lord, the Russian media has really climbed down into the muck.  I was surprised to read this headline on Tass: "Foreign observers laud parliamentary elections in Uzbekistan."  Wow! I thought, every other media report I'd read was wrong.  The Tass story relates its interpretation of the elections in Uzbekistan:

The opinion of representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is very important for Uzbekistan, [head of the Uzbek Foreign Ministry  press service Ilkhom] Zakirov said. The OSCE observers noted “an improvement since the previous parliamentary elections in 1999,” he said. They also officially confirmed that they were able “to concentrate on election laws, elections administering, the election campaign and the role of the mass media.”

and of course

CIS election observers also recognized the Uzbek elections legitimate, free and transparent.

Being the conscientious blogger that I am, I buzzed over to the OSCE website only to find, to my shock and dismay, that

Although minor improvements since the 1999 elections were identified, the Mission concludes that the elections did fall significantly short of OSCE commitments and other international standards for democratic elections.

"Regrettably, the implementation of the election legislation by the authorities failed to ensure a pluralistic, competitive and transparent election," said Ambassador Lubomir Kopaj, Head of the OSCE/ODIHR Limited Election Observation Mission.

They decide, they report.

Andrew Sullivan, Meet Ted Galen Carpenter

Sully laments:

While I’m very sympathetic [to Peter Beinart's call to liberal hawkery]—I remain emphatically hawkish, and if anything I think we need a larger military—my sense is that we need a credible voice for restraint.  American global leadership is the sine qua non of a liberal peace, but the standing army it demands has corrosive effects. Far left critics, in the vein of Chomsky and Zinn, are discredited by their distrust of US intentions, and the same is true of critics on the far right, like Buchanan. We no longer have a Sen. Bob Taft, a man who opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and US military interventions abroad while retaining a belief in the essential decency of he American people. The defenders of internment today represent an obscene caricature of how we’ve gone wrong.

It's a shame that Sully doggedly ignores the relentless output of my employer.  Christopher Hitchens, for his part, ignores our work only to end up (inadvertently?) stealing our ideas.

Michael Ledeen Takes Credit for the Orange Revolution

I'm more in favor of liberalism than I am of democracy, so however Yushchenko has apparently found his way to power, I'm in favor.

My colleague Tom Palmer has run down some of the more bizarre arguments implying that Yushchenko is an American stooge, but not to be outdone, Michael Ledeen offers his own praise for the Orange Revolution by, um...taking credit for it:

The mild support we gave to the democratic forces in the Ukraine proved far more powerful than most of the experts expected. The revolutionaries required a bit of guidance in the methods of non-violent resistance, a bit of communications gear, and many words of encouragement. They did the rest. The same can and should be done elsewhere in the world (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea...)

Methinks this overestimates the amount of credit we should be taking for the OR.  The NED offers up money and election training to all interested parties -- not just the liberals.  Moreover, Ledeen's taking credit for having fomented the OR simultaneously creates vulnerabilities for the liberals in Ukraine by lending credence to the notion that they're American stooges, as well as debasing the initiative of the Ukrainian reformers.

Of course, Ledeen's contorted argument is cast so as to imply that Ukraine can and should serve as a model for what we should be doing in Iran.  The attempt to draw an analogy is ridiculous.  The Iranian citizenry has not, as yet, started a revolt against the government.  This was a Ukrainian revolution, pure and simple.  Ledeen's grandstanding is a sorry commentary on his moral and political perspective on such matters.