Brendan Nyhan

After (appropriately) mocking Mickey Kaus for relying on a single report from a blogger to evaluate the prospects for the “surge,” Kevin Drum makes an important point about the blogger tendency to overreact to news from Iraq:

A consistent mistake made by a fair number of partisans on both sides — Andrew Sullivan is the archetype here — is to make way too much out of individual day-to-day incidents. Occasionally this is legitimate (the Golden Mosque bombing, for example), but usually it’s just simpleminded emotionalism. Purple thumbs: whee, democracy is coming! Helicopter crash: boo, Iraq is a hopeless mess!

But there are always going to be bits of good news and bits of bad news out of Iraq. What matters more are the underlying dynamics…

That’s exactly right. And as Drum says, the underlying dynamics remain sadly unfavorable to the US and the “surge.”

Writing in the Washington Monthly, Robert Dreyfuss argues that the prospects for Iraq after a US pullout are not as bad as some have suggested. As evidence for this, he quotes a statement from President Bush out of context:

President Bush himself has warned darkly that after controlling Iraq, Islamic militants will “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.”

However, President Bush didn’t say that militants will establish an empire from Spain to Indonesia — does anyone think the US would let that happen? The President actually said that the militants want to “establish a radical Islamic empire”:

Third, the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.

Bush did warn against dismissing these goals as unrealistic:

Some might be tempted to dismiss these goals as fanatical or extreme. Well, they are fanatical and extreme — and they should not be dismissed.

However, he certainly did not assert that militants “will” establish an empire, as Dreyfuss states. Shouldn’t the Monthly correct this?

Writing in his Altercation column, Eric Alterman quotes from Newsweek:

Indeed, [Richard] Hohlt is such a good source that after [Robert] Novak finished his column naming [Valerie] Plame, he testified, he did something most journalists rarely do: he gave the lobbyist an advance copy of his column. What Novak didn’t tell the jury is what the lobbyist then did with it: Hohlt confirmed to NEWSWEEK that he faxed the forthcoming column to their mutual friend Karl Rove (one of Novak’s sources for the Plame leak), thereby giving the White House a heads up on the bombshell to come.

Alterman interprets this passage to claim that Novak “cleared his Plame-leak column with Rove in advance”:

What more do you need to know? The guy [Novak] cleared his Plame-leak column with Rove in advance. Are there any rules at all on the Washington Post edit page?

But the passage above doesn’t state that Novak knew Hohlt would fax the column to Rove. Maybe he did, but we have no evidence for that assertion; it’s purely speculation on Alterman’s part.

The media’s distortion of what former Harvard president Larry Summers said about women’s representation among math and science faculty continues.

In December, the New York Times said the “idea voiced” by Summers was that “women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are somehow innately deficient in mathematics.” Then, earlier this month, the Times wrote that Summers had suggested “that a lack of intrinsic aptitude could help explain why fewer women than men reach the top ranks of science and math in universities.”

Here are two recent examples spurred by the hiring of new Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust. On National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” yesterday, co-host Renee Montagne said “His presidency [Summers] was marked by controversy, notably his remarks that women might not have aptitude for the sciences.” Similarly, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman wrote that “President Larry Summers suggested that a lack of ‘intrinsic aptitude’ was partly why few women made it in academic science.”

The impression that these statements leave is that Summers said women are not as good at math and science as men. But as I’ve pointed out before, that’s not accurate. Summers did not state that women are “innately deficient” in math and science, that they have “a lack of intrinsic aptitude,” or that they “might not have aptitude for the sciences.” (You should be suspicious when reporters exclusively paraphrase a controversial statement — see the Al Gore Internet myth, for example.) In statistical terms, he did not argue that average (mean) ability was different between genders.

Summers actually made a more subtle argument that the variability of mathematical and scientific ability may differ between genders, which means that there could be more men at the high and low end. In statistical terms, he suggested that the variance of “intrinsic aptitude” might be greater for men. That claim may be wrong or offensive, but it’s a more complicated one than what the media is attributing to him. Unfortunately, most reporters don’t understand statistics and haven’t read what Summers actually said, and so we get these distorted paraphrases instead.

A noteworthy fact from The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat:

And although Brownback is the only candidate in the field so far with Bush’s personal connection to the party’s religious conservatives, everyone—even McCain, even Giuliani—is actively courting them. This is partly because without evangelical Christians, there would essentially be no Republican Party anymore: Evangelicals provided more votes to the Republicans in last year’s midterms than African Americans and union members combined gave to the Democrats. [my emphasis]

Good for Chris Wallace for calling out the dissembling Douglas Feith on Fox News Sunday (via Atrios):

WALLACE: Now a follow-up to our interview last Sunday with former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Many of you asked us to check out the claim. Here’s what he said to us.

FEITH: Nobody in our office said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. It’s not correct. Words matter.

WALLACE: But it turns out he did make that case in a memo he sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee in October of ’03. “The Weekly Standard,” which saw the memo, described it this way. “Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training and explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda.”

Writing in the New York Times, David D. Kirkpatrick claims Hillary Clinton’s favorable ratings are “unusually high”:

Mr. Keene said, “[Hillary Clinton’s] image as the wicked witch of the left was burned in the minds of conservatives and the larger public before she tried to moderate her image.” He noted that polls consistently give her the highest unfavorable ratings among the front-runners, typically more than a third of the public. (Her favorable ratings are also unusually high.)

But is this really true? Consider favorable/unfavorable numbers from the latest USA Today/Gallup poll (2/9-2/11):

Hillary Clinton: 58/40
Barack Obama: 53/19
John McCain: 57/26
Rudy Giuliani: 66/22
Mitt Romney: 18/18
John Edwards: 49/31
Al Gore: 52/45

Or consider the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll (1/16-1/19):

Hillary Clinton: 54/44
John McCain: 49/35
Barack Obama: 45/29
Rudy Giuliani: 61/29

In short, Hillary’s favorable numbers are not particularly unusual when compared with her most well-known competitors, and her unfavorable numbers are higher than any announced candidate (only Al Gore compares).

Jonathan Chait says what needs to be said about the bizarre Giuliani-as-foreign-policy-expert meme:

he normal rule in American politics is that if you run for president and your experience comes at the state level, most people will assume that foreign policy is your weak point. You can overcome that political vulnerability–as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and other governors did while getting elected. One would presume that this applies even more to presidential candidates whose highest office reached is mayor. And yet we have the strange case of Rudolph Giuliani.

Giuliani’s presidential campaign is starting to win a cult following among conservatives. It’s not his position on domestic policy that’s doing it–he has nothing to say about that. Lord knows it’s not his social issue positions, which even his strongest backers acknowledge are his political weak point. No, he has somehow built a record as a foreign policy guru despite having no experience beyond the municipal level.

Read the whole thing.

Instead of creating a model democracy in the Middle East, the sectarian chaos we have created in Iraq is apparently being exported to other countries by Iraqi refugees:

Now [Laith al-Ani, a former American detainee] is among the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who have taken refuge in neighboring Syria and Jordan, where sectarian rifts are springing up.

In one area of Damascus, Shiite refugees from Iraq have established a mini version of Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood. Sunni refugees, in turn, are forming their own enclaves.

What people don’t realize is that ethnic hatred is not constant. Instead, as Cass Sunstein argues, it can occur as part of a “social cascade,” as it apparently did in Iraq after the fall of Saddam:

During discussions of Iraq, many people have suggested that with the fall of Saddam, ancient, even primordial hatreds have bubbled up to the surface. On this view, the current situation is what it is because long-suppressed ethnic and religious antagonisms are now in full bloom. The problem with this view is that ethnic hatreds are usually not primordial. Part of what we have been witnessing is a kind of rapid “ethnification,” in the form of a social cascade.

Some societies show low levels of ethnic activity. In most American cities, for example, most people do not act publicly in a way that draws even the slightest attention to their ethnicity. But some societies show slow or rapid ethnification, as people devote more of their efforts to showcasing their ethnic identity. We can easily find eras in the United States in which ethnic identification grew (usually just a bit) or declined (sometimes a lot). As Hitler obtained power, many German Jews became more closely self-identified as Jewish, in part for reasons of self-protection.

A key factor here is whether the relevant social norms impose pressure to identify in ethnic terms, or not to do so. It may be “politically correct” to broadcast one’s ethnicity, or it may be politically correct to hide it. Sometimes the governing norms shift abruptly. When this is so, there can be intense pressure to self-identify in ethnic terms, sometimes to retain friends, sometimes to obtain material advantages, sometimes to save one’s life.

Focusing on ethnic hatreds in the former Yugoslavia, the underlying process has been illuminatingly discussed by economist Timur Kuran in a 1998 paper (apparently unavailable on line but published as “Ethnic Norms and Their Transformation through Reputational Cascades,” in the Journal of Legal Studies). Even at a late stage, people in the former Yugoslavia lived together harmoniously, and supposedly primordial hatreds played no role in the lives of most people. Old historical events were hardly salient. But as Kuran writes: “Within months, millions of Serbs who had shown little ethnic fervor began paying attention to ethnic statistics, promoting symbols of Serb exclusiveness, vilifying and ostracizing non-Serbs, referring frequently to the sufferings of their ancestors, and supporting the enlargement of Serbian-held territories.” Previously happy mixed marriages disintegrated. Historical events that had mattered not at all suddenly became central to political debates.

A major conclusion is that even the most intense forms of ethnic hatred and fear can be a product of a process of ethnification, rather than a cause of that process. A careful investigation of the situation in Iraq would be necessary, of course, to know whether this conclusion holds for that country. But ethnic hatred is not in anyone’s blood. Whether people focus on ethnic identity, or on something else, is partly a product of (current and recent) social pressures, not of anything that happened in the distant past. It is reasonable to speculate that Iraq has witnessed a period of ever-intensifying pressure to identify in ethnic terms–pressure that people increase even as they capitulate to it.

Some good news is that ethnic hatred can decline fairly rapidly as well, especially when it is a product of social norms to which people have unenthusiastically yielded. Some bad news is that when violence is rampant along ethnic lines, any such decline is extremely difficult to engineer.

If Iraqi refugees are spurring such cascades in other countries, the prospects for regional stability are very dark indeed.

It’s sometimes shocking how little people understand the constraints that the separation of powers, the filibuster, and the veto place on the US political system. To change policy, the Democrats would need a 2/3 House and Senate majority to override a presidential veto. There’s no way around that constraint. Indeed, Democrats can’t even send legislation to President Bush without getting 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. (For more on these constraints, see my post on the gridlock zone, a concept from political science that systematizes these ideas.)

Matthew Yglesias offers a case in point — liberals who complain that Harry Reid can’t get anti-“escalation” legislation through the Senate, not realizing that there’s little Reid can do without sixty votes:

Sometime in December, however, people seem to have gotten it into their head that something else would happen. That narrow congressional majorities were actually going to seize control of American national security policy in the face of determined opposition from the President of the United States supported nearly uniformly by his copartisans in congress. Thus, Matt Stoller includes on his list of “groups and individuals” who are “blocking real progress on Iraq,” “Harry Reid, who failed to get a vote on a non-binding resolution in the Senate, and doesn’t think his original war vote was wrong. It’s Bush’s fault apparently that Reid voted for the war. Like with his stance on Alito, Reid is giving the impression of action, but not the teeth.”

Well, no. Look, Matt Yglesias leading a caucus of 51 Democratic Senators that includes Joe Lieberman, Bill Nelson, and Tim Johnson couldn’t get much done in these circumstances either. Nor could Matt Stoller. It’s not Reid’s fault that there aren’t 60 votes for a non-binding resolution on Iraq in the Senate… Blame Lieberman. Blame Jeff Sessions. And, again, ask yourself: If Reid’s resolution is so useless, why is the GOP so determined to defeat it? And if it’s so difficult to get 60 votes for this measure, what would the point be in proposing something more far-reaching that would only fail by a larger margin? The sad reality is that what Matt and I would like to see the Democrats accomplish is, under the circumstances, very difficult to achieve. Progressives should keep the pressure on for action, but we need to understand that objective circumstances matter. This is a slow boring of hard boards kind of situation, and it’s extremely frustrating, but it’s also George W. Bush’s fault, not Reid’s.