Monday, April 29, 2013

Religious toleration in Saudi Arabia – The dangers of text-messaging while Shiite

A report that may have originated with an Iranian news service, Mehr News, picked up here.  I don't know how reliable Mehr News is, but this story sounds entirely plausible and unsurprising:
A Saudi woman has been sentenced to eight lashes by a court in Qatif for mistakenly sending a text message allegedly promoting the Shiite branch of Islam.

The 30-year-old woman, identified only as YH, has been pronounced guilty for sending an SMS to another Saudi woman, containing a group of telephone numbers under the name 'Shiite Islamic religious services'.

One phone number apparently led to Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric who is renowned throughout the Gulf for his learned counsel on Islamic law.

The Saudi Arabian state is a staunch adherent to the Sunni branch of Islam, and publicly disparages the Shia sect. Shia Muslims are not allowed to practice their faith, or even profess their sectarian beliefs in private.
That's slightly overstated, though only slightly.  The public manifestations of any non-Muslim religion are strictly prohibited, of course, and although private prayers by non-Saudi workers or visitors may be tolerated, from time to time non-Muslims get arrested for the crime of praying in groups in private homes.  But the situation of the Shiite minority, estimated at 10-15% and mostly concentrated in the eastern part of the country, is a bit more complicated.  Shiites are subject to systematic discrimination and intermittent persecution, but in practice Shiite religious observance is usually tolerated as long as it is private and inconspicuous, and some Shiite mosques are even allowed in the Eastern Province—though at other times they get closed or demolished in periodic crackdowns.

It seems fair to describe the Saudi toleration of Shiite Islam as limited, grudging, and precarious. YH apparently went over the line, in the judgment of the authorities, by electronically propagating her heretical beliefs.
The act of calling people for Shiism, or openly advocating the Shia faith, has been pronounced as haram (forbidden and despicable in Arabic) by the Attorney General, who publicly demanded that YH be severely punished.
The sentence was eventually conferred by judge Davoud Mohammad al-Davoud, who, according to local sources, is an extremist sectarian with a history of harsh judgements.

The defendant, from the district of Awamiyya, vigorously contested the judgement.

"According to claims by the Attorney General, I have sent the SMS wrongly to an unknown number, and this might happen for anyone else, so, I do not accept the accusations," YH told the court, according to a report in Mehr News.

However, despite her vehement protestation YH has been unable to win a reprieve against her sentence.
Of course, the Islamic Republic of Iran doesn't have a sterling record of its own when it comes to freedom of conscience in general or freedom of religion in particular.  There is not even the pretense of granting non-Muslim religions legal or cultural equality; certain religious minorities, like the Baha'i, are persecuted with special ferocity; Muslims who convert to Christianity may be charged with apostasy and face possible execution; and so on.  But there is no question that, overall, there is much more religious toleration in Iran than in Saudi Arabia (a country routinely described as our "ally" and as a quintessentially "moderate" Arab power).  Everything is relative.

—Jeff Weintraub

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Martin Wolf puts the Reinhart/Rogoff controversy and its implications in historical, analytical, and practical perspective

Another follow-up on the controversy surrounding Reinhart & Rogoff's influential, and recently debunked, 2010 paper, "Growth in a Time of Debt".  (For some background, see here & here.)

In a column numbering a mere 1,100 words, Martin Wolf put together a brilliant comprehensive overview of the controversy over R&R's conclusions and its implications for the larger issues at stake:  "Austerity loses an article of faith ".  I would advise everyone to read the whole thing.  For the moment, let me just highlight three elements of Wolf's argument.

=>  First, regarding the historical dimension of the debate:
In 1816, the net public debt of the UK reached 240 per cent of gross domestic product. This was the fiscal legacy of 125 years of war against France. What economic disaster followed this crushing burden of debt? The industrial revolution.  [....]

As Mark Blyth of Brown University notes in a splendid new book, great economists of the 18th century, such as David Hume and Adam Smith warned against excessive public debt. Embroiled in frequent wars, the British state ignored them. Yet the warnings must have appeared all too credible. Between 1815 and 1855, for example, debt interest accounted for close to half of all UK public spending.

Nevertheless, the UK grew out of its debt. By the early 1860s, debt had already fallen below 90 per cent of GDP.  [....]
The point of this example is not that countries never need to worry about accumulating excessive levels of public debt, or that crushing levels of debt are necessarily a good thing.  The point is this:
Quite simply, there is no iron law that growth must collapse after [public] debt exceeds 90 per cent of GDP.
=>  Second, regarding the key analytical issues at stake:
Nevertheless, their work and that of others supports the proposition that slower growth is associated with higher debt. But an association is definitely not a cause. Slow growth could cause high debt, a hypothesis supported by Arindrajit Dube, also at [UMass] Amherst. Consider Japan: is its high debt a cause of its slow growth or a consequence? My answer would be: the latter. Again, did high debt cause today’s low UK growth? No. Before the crisis, UK net public debt was close to its lowest ratio to GDP in the past 300 years. The UK’s rising debt is a result of slow growth or, more precisely, of the cause of that low growth – a huge financial crisis.

Indeed, in their masterpiece, This Time is Different, professors Reinhart and Rogoff explained how soaring private debt [NB: private debt, not public debt] can lead to financial crises that generate deep recessions, weak recoveries and rising public debt. This work is seminal. Its conclusion is clearly that rising public debt is the consequence of the low growth, itself explained by the crisis. This is not to rule out two-way causality. But the impulse goes from private financial excesses to crisis, slow growth and high public debt, not the other way round. Just ask the Irish or Spanish about their experience.

It follows that, in assessing the consequences of [public] debt for growth, one must ask why the debt rose in the first place. Were wars being financed? Was there fiscal profligacy in boom times, which is almost certain to lower growth? Was the spending on high-quality public assets, conducive to growth. Finally, did the rise in public debt follow a private sector financial bust?

Different causes of high [public] debt will have distinct results. [....]
=> Third, the practical implications for economic policy in the US and Europe since the 2008 crash that initiated the Great Recession from which we are still trying to recover.  What should we be doing now, and why aren't we doing it?
Different causes of high debt will have distinct results. [Also], the reasons why deficits are high and debt rising will affect the costs of austerity. Usually, one can ignore the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal austerity: either private spending will be robust or monetary policy will be effective. But, after a financial crisis, a huge excess of desired private savings is likely to emerge, even when interest rates are very close to zero.

In that situation, immediate fiscal austerity will be counterproductive. It will drive the economy into a deep recession, while achieving only a limited reduction in deficits and debt.  [....]  Yet nobody who believes in maintaining fiscal support for the economy in these specific (and rare) circumstances thinks that “fiscal stimulus is always right”, as Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, suggests. Far from it. Stimulus is merely not always wrong, as “austerians” seem to believe.

This is why I was – and remain – concerned about the intellectual influence in favour of austerity exercised by Reinhart and Rogoff, whom I greatly respect. The issue here is not even the direction of causality, but rather the costs of trying to avoid high public debt in the aftermath of a financial crisis. In its latest World Economic Outlook, the IMF notes that direct fiscal support for recovery has been exceptionally weak. Not surprisingly, the recovery itself has also been feeble. One of the reasons for this weak support for crisis-hit economies has been concern about the high level of public debt. Professors Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper justified that concern. True, countries in the eurozone that cannot borrow must tighten. But their partners could either support continued spending or offset their actions with their own policies. Others with room for manoeuvre, such as the US and even the UK, could – and should – have taken a different course. Because they did not, recovery has been even weaker and so the long-run costs of the recession far greater than was necessary.
And here is the crucial point:
This was a huge blunder. It is still not too late to reconsider.
A huge blunder, which continues to be compounded. Recognizing that has to be the first step toward doing something constructive.

—Jeff Weintraub

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Inter-faith dialogue in Doha, minus Yusuf al-Qaradawi

More unsurprising news,  from the blogger Elder of Ziyon:
Today is the start of the tenth annual Doha Conference for Interfaith Dialogue:
At the 10th Doha Conference on Interfaith Dialogue, we will celebrate the tenth anniversary of establishing the annual conference on interfaith dialogue in Qatar by presenting to the world the work of interfaith at its best. Therefore, we are inviting organizations, institutions, universities and NGOs working in the field of interfaith dialogue to present their successful projects in this domain, and to display their best achievements during the event. The Doha International Award on Interfaith dialogue will be granted for the first time to a person or institution which will present the best practice in the field of interfaith dialogue.
[....]  But this time, popular Islamic terror supporter, preacher and TV personality Sheikh Yusef Qaradawi couldn't even go along with the charade that he can stand talking to Jews as equals.

Qaradawi rejected participating in the conference when he found out that Jews would be there as well.

Qatar media quoted Sheikh Qaradawi as saying that "after the announcement of the expansion of the conference to be a dialogue between Muslims, Christians and Jews, I decided not to participate in it so as not to sit with Jews on a single platform, as long as the Jews are usurping Palestine and Al-Aqsa Mosque and destroying homes of God, and as long as the question of Palestine [has] not been resolved."

He didn't say "Zionists." I don't know what rabbis actually participate in these things but it is a safe bet that they are not from Israel. Qaradawi is simply proving that he hates Jews.

So far, I have not seen any criticism of Qaradawi for his public display of antisemitism.
=> Some of you might be asking yourselves, who is this Qaradawi person, and why is Elder of Ziyon saying such mean things about him?

Well, the first point to make is that Qaradawi is definitely not a marginal or insignificant crank.  (One may or may not think he's a crank, but he's definitely not marginal or insignificant.)  On the contrary, he's one of the most widely famous, respected, and influential Sunni Muslim clerics in the Arab world (and its diaspora) today.  As the prominent Arabist scholar Marc Lynch, a frequent defender of Qaradawi against allegedly defamatory criticisms, put it in 2010:
Yusuf al-Qaradawi is in the news these days, denounced on a daily basis on Saudi, Palestinian and Egyptian op-ed pages, forums and TV over his stances on Gaza, on Hamas and Abu Mazen, on Yemen, and more. Following those controversies is an excellent window into what divides and arouses passion in Arab politics today. Hate him or love him, the man has a keen sense of Arab opinion -- whether he's following or leading it -- and has a proven track record of driving the debate. The fury of his adversaries on the other side of the so-called "new Arab cold war" is a pretty direct function of the fact that his opinions, aired on al-Jazeera and spread through multiple online and real-world networks, matter.
After living in Qatar for decades to avoid being imprisoned by the Mubarak regime in Egypt, when Mubarak fell Qaradawi was invited back to Egypt for a triumphant return visit, during which which he addressed a crowd in Tahrir square estimated to number up to a million people. Nor is his popularity restricted to the Middle East.  When Qaradawi was invited to visit London in 2005, Mayor Ken Livingstone described him as a man "who preaches moderation and tolerance", and assessments of that sort are not uncommon.  (Juan Cole, on the other hand, has characterized Qaradawi as "an old time Muslim Brotherhood cleric" who "still worships the false idol of terror."  Can't please everyone.)

With respect to the nature and degree of Qaradawi's alleged "moderation" and commitment to "tolerance", opinions can differ.  For example, Qaradawi advocates criminalization of homosexuality, but insists that homosexuals should be punished by duly constituted legal authorities, not simply killed in vigilante attacks.  In a Middle Eastern context, I suppose, that could count as moderate.  Qaradawi has condemned Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, and on those grounds is often described as a critic of terrorism.  But he has strongly and consistently justified the terrorist murder of Israeli civilians, explicitly including women and children.  I suppose if you're living in London or Paris or New York, that overall position may sound reassuringly nuanced and "moderate" (especially if you're not Jewish).  On almost any subject, it's easy to find radical Islamists whose positions are more intolerant and extremist than Qaradawi's, and on those grounds one can always find justifications for seeing him as relatively moderate, if one is determined to do so.

=> When it comes to the Jews, however, even Qaradawi's most determined apologists find it difficult to whitewash or obscure the fact that he is blatantly and undeniably anti-semitic. (He's not an isolated figure in that respect, either.)  So unless they share his intensely anti-semitic views and are willing to say so in public—something that is not considered respectable in most western circles nowadays—they generally try to avoid the topic.

You may be wondering why I would say something so impolite and judgmental about such a learned, respected, and influential cleric and public figure,  Perhaps he's just critical of Israeli policies, or at most anti-Zionist, and calling him anti-semitic is a bit exaggerated?  Well, here are some characteristic statements by Qaradawi on the Jewish problem (which is to say, his problem with Jews).  What do you think?

Excerpts from speeches aired on Al-Jazeera TV on January 28 and 30, 2009:
January 30, 2009:
Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.
[...]
January 28, 2009:
To conclude my speech, I’d like to say that the only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds. Allah’s mercy and blessings upon you.
(By the way, you don't have to know Arabic to recognize that "Yahud" means "Jews", not "Zionists".)

Perhaps some will find these views harmless or understandable. I guess I would have to disagree. But at all events, they help to explain Qaradawi's perspective on the limits of inter-faith dialogue.

—Jeff Weintraub

=> UPDATE 5/9/2013: Yusuf al-Qaradawi's peace plan for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict:
A prominent Islamic scholar making a landmark visit to the Gaza Strip declared Thursday that Israel has no right to exist and voiced his support for rocket fire on Israel, giving a boost of legitimacy to the militant Islamist Hamas rulers of the Palestinian territory.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi is the latest of a few high profile figures visit Gaza, boosting the Hamas effort to break its international isolation. [....] Al-Qaradawi issued the strongest anti-Israel declarations of any of the visitors to date.

"This land has never once been a Jewish land. Palestine is for the Arab Islamic nation," said al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based cleric made famous by his popular TV show and widely respected in the Muslim world.

"The rockets made in Gaza are more powerful than the (Israeli) occupation's rockets," he added. [....]
According to reports from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (not exactly a Zionist propaganda outlet) the "vast majority" of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel "constituted indiscriminate attacks" against civilians, and thus "violate international humanitarian law." Qaradawi's jurisprudence leads him to a different conclusion.

Reinhart & Rogoff versus their critics (contd.)

This follows up and fleshes out some links I tossed in at the end of my post titled Stephen Colbert takes down a key scholarly foundation for austerity economics.

As I said, Colbert's presentation is not to be missed.  But of course the real damage to the conclusions of Reinhart & Rogoff's influential (and now notorious) 2010 paper, "Growth in a Time of Debt", was done by an economics graduate student at UMass Amherst, Thomas Herndon.  Herndon discovered that R&R's analysis in that paper had serious errors, and then he and two tenured economists, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, wrote a systematic critique: "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff".

=> Some of R&R's responses to this bombshell can be found here & here.  A careful (and concise) counter-response by Herndon is here.  Parts of the discussion in Herndon's piece are technical, but the main thrust should be clear enough to anyone who reads it carefully.  And Herndon's closing paragraph, about the real-world policy implications of this debate, zeroes in on the crucial issues in a compelling way.
There is not one word in our paper which suggests that a high level of government indebtedness is never a problem.  It would be absurd to think that governments never have to worry about their level of indebtedness.  The aim of our paper was much more narrowly focused.  We show that, contrary to R&R, there is no definitive threshold for the public debt/GDP ratio, beyond which countries will invariably suffer a major decline in GDP growth. The implication for policy is that, under particular circumstances, public debt can play a key role in overcoming a recession. The current historical moment, with historically high rates of mass unemployment in both the U.S. and Europe   and with interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds at historic lows,   is precisely the set of circumstances under which we would expect public borrowing to have large positive effects, with comparably fewer costs. Moreover, it is precisely the set of circumstances under which we expect austerity to have substantial negative effects.

Amen. And here are some pithy comments from Paul Krugman:
OK, Reinhart and Rogoff have said their piece. I’d say that they’re still trying to have it both ways, on two fronts. They deny asserting that the debt-growth relationship is causal, but keep making statements that insinuate that it is. And they deny having been strong austerity advocates – but they were happy to bask in the celebrity that came with their adoption as austerian mascots, and never to my knowledge spoke out to condemn all the “eek! 90 percent!” rhetoric that was used to justify sharp austerity right now. Sorry, guys, but with so much at stake you have a responsibility not just to put stuff out but to make crystal clear what you think it implies for policy.  [....]
(Read the rest, too.)

=>  Some closing reflections:  It's important to emphasize that Reinhart and Rogoff are not hacks or propagandists, but major scholars.  Their book on the history of financial crises, This Time is Different, is widely considered a "masterpiece", even by severe critics of their 2010 paper.  Nor can they just be dismissed as dogmatic ideologues (unlike, for example, some prominent Chicago-style economists with Nobel Prizes who have made high-profile interventions in public debates over economic policy since the crash of 2008).

As I wrote to a friend in an e-mail exchange earlier today, those factors help to make this whole incident both more embarrassing and more instructive than it might otherwise be.  We all make mistakes (even serious major scholars), and we are all susceptible to making mistakes in directions that accord with our preconceptions.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S.  Some usefully pertinent remarks by Akos Rona-Tas (which I just noticed on Facebook):
Here is Rogoff and Reinhart's response. I find it a bit disingenuous that they protest the politicization of their findings. Both Rs are very proud of their political influence judging from their web pages. It is also not a smart thing to rewrite one's past opinions in the age of the internet. Yes, they did say that 90 percent is an "important marker," and yes, they did say that the main direction of causation is debt-to-growth and not growth-to-debt. An example:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-14/too-much-debt-means-economy-can-t-grow-commentary-by-reinhart-and-rogoff.html

They also forget to mention that while "several researchers have elaborated upon" their findings some of those also turned out to be wrong. Alesina and Ardagna's piece, e.g, was clobbered by the IMF.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/02/pdf/c3.pdf
By the way, R&R are not entirely wrong when they assert that some of their policy recommendations since 2008 have diverged from the more extremist versions of Tea Party economics that now predominate among the Congressional Republicans and pervade the right-wing propaganda machine. But (a) that's not really the point, and (b) it simply helps to demonstrate how deranged the current hard-right consensus on economic policy has become.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Pakistan's double, or triple, game in Afghanistan (BBC documentary)

I happened to run across the links to this BBC documentary (in two parts) on a Pakistani website, where they were discussing this question: Afghans love India and hate Pakistan. How can we trust each other again?
The documentary helps explain, among other things, why Afghans express more hostility for Pakistan than for any other foreign country.

For anyone who has been following the news about Afghanistan (and the AfPak relationship) over the past decade or so, there isn't much here that is really new or surprising. But if you'd like to see the overall story pulled together clearly, this is a well-made and informative account.

—Jeff Weintraub




A British political candidate explains why the Jews engineered the Holocaust

In fact, the whole Second World War "was engineered by the Zionist jews and financed by the banksters" as part of a master plot "to create the State of Israel as we know it today.”

These claims by Anna-Marie Crampton, who appears to be a minor local candidate for the (right-leaning anti-EU) UK Independence Party, are all familiar stuff in much of today's world (though in mainstream British politics you're not supposed to get caught actually saying them in public).  But it's sometimes useful to be reminded that nutcase anti-semitic and anti-"Zionist" conspiracy theories can be found across the political spectrum, and in a wide range of national, ethnic, and religious contexts.  For someone like this Crampton person, all that probably sounded quite plausible and even common-sensical ... which is the real point.

One standard dodge in a lot of contemporary anti-semitic discourse, by the way, is to pretend that your anti-semitic ravings are not anti-semitic at all, just anti-Zionist.  As Crampton explained at one point:
The Rothschilds were Zionists .. there is difference between Jews and Zionists.  These Psychopaths hide behind and use the Jews.  It was thanks to them that 6 million Jews were murdered in the war (along with 26 million Russians).  Read the Protocols of Zion [JW: a notorious 19th-century anti-semitic forgery, also cited in the Hamas Charter, dramatized in an Egyptian TV series a decade ago, and a perennial best-seller in the Middle East], all you need to know is in there and it's in their own words.

Well, at least this seems to accept that the Holocaust actually happened.

(Crampton says her account was hacked.  I suppose that might be true ... though I also can't help thinking of a line once made famous by Mandy Rice-Davies.)

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
the algemeiner
April 25, 2013
UK Politician Claims Jews Engineered Holocaust to Guilt World Into Establishing Israel
By Zach Pontz

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A UK politician has claimed that Jews deliberately murdered each other in the Holocaust as part of a master plan to create Israel.

 Anna-Marie Crampton posted the claims on a conspiracy theory website called “Secrets of The Fed.”

According to the website SWNS.com, Crampton wrote:

“Holocaust means a sacrifice by fire. Only the Zionists could sacrifice their own in the gas chambers."

“The Second World Wide War was engineered by the Zionist jews and financed by the banksters to make the general public all over the world to feel so guilty and outraged by the Holocaust that a treaty would be signed to create the State of Israel as we know it today.”

SWNS found other comments on her Facebook page from several months ago that also offer a not-so-subtle view into Cramptom’s noxious mindset.

“The Rothschilds are Zionists..there is a difference between Jews and Zionists. These Psychopaths hide behind and use the Jews.

“It was thanks to them that 6 million Jews were murdered in the War (along with 26 million Russians!),” Crampton wrote.

Another comment says: “I am anti Zionist, not antisemit (sic). I love the true Israel and the Jews.”

Mrs Crampton is standing for the UK’s Independent Party in next week’s county council elections in the traditionally Conservative ward of Crowborough in East Sussex.

A spokesman told SWNS: “We need to chase her down. These comments are really way out there and really hard-core anti-Zionism.”

Anti-racist groups said UKIP had to drop Mrs. Crampton as a matter of urgency.

Sam Westrop, director of Stand for Peace, a leading Jewish-Muslim interfaith organization, said: “Time after time, conspiracy and anti-Zionist sentiment is revealed to be nothing more than thinly-veiled anti-Semitism.

“UKIP, to its credit, has expelled extremist and bigoted members in the past.

“They must also expel Anna-Marie Crampton. Such hatred must be fought at all times.”

Stephen Colbert takes down a key scholarly foundation for austerity economics

Before we get to Colbert's account of this scholarly and public-policy mini-scandal, which is not to be missed, here are some highlights from Mike Konczal's more sober summary:
In 2010, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a paper, "Growth in a Time of Debt." [....]
  Their main finding was that when countries have a level of public debt over 90% of GDP, they hit a kind of fiscal cliff.  Their economic growth slows down significantly.
Countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate, in fact.

This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession. Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity budget states their study "found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth." The Washington Post editorial board takes it as an economic consensus view, stating that "debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth." [....]
This 90% figure has been used as a scary hobgoblin to support contractionary economic policies based on debt hysteria in both the US and Europe.   If the 90% threat is so drastic, then avoiding it should be the most urgent priority, and it's vital to start slashing government spending and taking other steps to reduce government deficits immediately.  (Or else we'll turn into Greece!)

One response to Reinhart & Rogoff, Konczal notes, "has been to argue that the causation is backwards, or that slower growth leads to higher debt-to-GDP ratios."  And in some cases that's probably part of the story.

But it turns out that there's also a more basic problem with their analysis.  The numbers were wrong.  This complication was discovered by a graduate student at UMass Amherst, Thomas Herndon, and then he and two of his professors published a paper demonstrating it.
In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst [...] find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result. [....]
Etc.

=> Colbert's presentation is livelier and funnier.  This video clip is worth watching in full, but the substantive heart of the matter starts around 3:54.

For Colbert's follow-up interview with Herndon, see here:


And for some of the continuing polemics, see here & here & here.

[UPDATE  Also here & here.]

—Jeff Weintraub

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Some partial, preliminary, & unfashionable thoughts toward re-assessing the 2003 Iraq war – Did anything go right, and what were the alternatives?

Lately, like a lot of other people, I've been mulling over the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war and the flood of retrospective commentary it has generated. Nowadays, almost all discussions of the war are dominated by a hegemonic, almost monolithic, "anti-war" consensus that the war was both a terrible disaster and an obvious mistake. (Not just a mistake, but an obvious and unambiguous mistake, which no intelligent and morally serious person could honestly have supported at the time unless they were bamboozled by the propaganda campaign of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration and its lackeys and/or blinded by post-9/11 hysteria.)

There are clearly some good grounds for holding those views (as well as a lot of bad, dishonest, intellectually lazy, and morally evasive ones); and for anyone who supported the war, like me, the past decade has often been a morally harrowing time (or should have been, at least). But I remain convinced that the question was more complicated than that in 2002-2003 and remains more complicated today.

Nor, I would like to believe, do I say that merely to cover my own ass (morally and analytically speaking) with a mealy-mouthed unwillingness to face up honestly to the moral and intellectual issues involved. Back in 2002-2003 I thought (and said quite explicitly) that there were good and bad arguments on both sides of the question (with more bad ones than good ones on both sides), and I think that's still true now ... though any serious discussion would also have to take account of what has actually happened in the past decade. (I could no longer simply repeat all the arguments I made back in 2002-2003 without serious revisions or modifications, but making a full-scale public recantation, as some other one-time supporters of the war have done, wouldn't be honest in my case either.)

I have been struck, in particular, that the vast bulk of recent discussions expressing the "anti-war" groupthink, which is rarely challenged, are marked by two massive omissions.

=> First, while they properly emphasize the terrible results of the war and its aftermath for Iraqis, for Americans, and for others, they almost never consider the actual and probable costs—human, economic, geopolitical, etc.—of the alternatives to war that were realistically available in 2002-2003.  In fact, now as in 2002-2003, almost none of the people expressing the "anti-war" consensus even try to outline or propose, let alone defend, any serious alternative policies that they think could and should have been followed to deal with the very special problems posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq a decade after the 1991 Gulf War.

I've raised those issues in the past from time to time (e.g., here & here), and they still strike me as valid.  For the moment, I will just reiterate some of the relevant points from a post I wrote in 2005.
[...] I did not support the war because I expected rosy outcomes. Instead, I became (and remain) convinced that the war was necessary and justified primarily because I became (and remain) convinced that, by the end of the 1990s, all the realistically (as opposed to wishfully) available alternative options led almost certainly to politically catastrophic and morally appalling consequences.

The key point was that, by the end of the 1990s, the whole sanctions-&-containment system cobbled together in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War was becoming increasingly unsustainable (politically, diplomatically, and also morally), not least because it had been systematically and deliberately undermined by a range of governments acting in loose collusion with the Iraqi Ba'ath regime, and by 2000 or so it was on the verge of terminal disintegration. The perceived economic & political interests of a number of key states, reinforced by a massively successful propaganda campaign which convinced large sectors of public opinion across the world that US-imposed sanctions were starving Iraqi babies, all pushed in that direction. (How many opponents of war in 2002-2003 had previously been urging a policy of tightening up sanctions and continuing them indefinitely?)  [....]
Thus, for these and other reasons, simply doing nothing and assuming that the status quo would automatically continue indefinitely was not a realistically viable option. Inaction would also have been a choice with serious and unpleasant consequences.

(Michael Walzer, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was one of the few opponents of the war who recognized this problem and faced it squarely. Walzer proposed a third option—an escalation of the "little war" that the US and its allies had already been waging in Iraq since the 1991 armistice. But it's not clear that this was really a viable option in 2002-2003; and, at all events, it's not an option that most opponents of the 2003 Iraq war, in the US or abroad, would actually have been willing to pursue. Thus, as I put it in 2005 ...)
[B]y the middle of 2002, there were really only two realistically available outcomes—military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein & his regime, or a victory for Saddam Hussein & his foreign backers. The latter would have been a prelude to the final disintegration of the sanctions-&-containment system, a disintegration which in practical terms would have been irreversible. In realistic terms (and I mean realistic, not "realist"), those were the genuine options—in my possibly fallible but firm opinion—and any serious discussion of the issues surrounding the 2003 Iraq war has to begin by facing up to this reality.

Now, some people might argue that the collapse of containment would have been no big deal, or at least that the consequences couldn't possibly have been as bad as the consequences of military action that we've actually seen. I believe that's wrong.  [JW: And the current death throes of the other Ba'athist regime, in Syria, only reinforce the point that we can't simply take that assumption for granted.]

Most of the discussion of Saddam Hussein's missing "weapons of mass destruction" have had a certain irrelevance and unreality from the start. The size of his existing stockpiles was never the key question. Most informed analysts (including all the major intelligence services), however much they disagreed on details, generally agreed that Saddam Hussein had active nuclear, biological, & chemical weapons programs. (It was German intelligence, not the CIA, that said in 2001 that Saddam was probably about 3 years away from getting nuclear weapons.) It turned out they were all wrong, and the whole thing was a fantastically successful bluff on Saddam's part—though the only reason we know this is precisely that the Iraqi Ba'ath regime was overthrown—but, fundamentally, so what? This was just a matter of timing. Once containment had collapsed and Saddam Hussein was out of the box, he would have been ready and eager to resume his NBC weapons programs. (Scott Ritter, for example, explained this all quite cogently in 1998, before he experienced his strange conversion over Iraq.) It would no doubt have taken Saddam Hussein a while to get a nuclear weapon, and perhaps some stroke of luck in the meantime might have prevented this, but otherwise it was just a matter of time. In the medium term, given everything we know about the nature and history of the Iraqi Ba'ath regime and Saddam Hussein's own history and inclinations, one could expect renewed military adventurism, another of his catastrophic miscalculations, and a bigger and more destructive war down the line.

In the relatively short run, one predictable and almost certain consequence of the collapse of containment would have been another genocidal bloodbath in Iraqi Kurdistan—which, it is quite safe to predict, no one would have lifted a finger to stop. Perhaps I have some kind of strange psychological quirk, since the genocidal mass murder of ethnic minorities seems to upset me more than it does some other people, but I think the prevention of this genocidal bloodbath has to be seen as one argument (among others) in favor of taking serious action against Saddam Hussein & his regime. [....]

And so on. I don't want to leave the impression that these are the only likely and predictable catastrophic consequences that would have followed the imminent collapse of the sanctions-&-containment system, but it would take a while to lay them all out in detail, and those will do to suggest the key background considerations.

I waited all through the debates of 2002-2003 for opponents of the war to offer any half-way honest and plausible alternative to military action that took these realities seriously, and that offered a plausible likelihood of preventing the consequences I've just outlined. I never heard anyone offer any such proposal that struck me as even remotely realistic or convincing—which is part of the reason I decided that, on balance, the war was necessary and justified.
I'm still waiting. Here's what I said to Sam Rosenfeld & Matthew Yglesias back in 2005 (in response to their American Prospect piece, "The Incompetence Dodge"), and I would offer the same challenge today to readers who subscribe to the now-hegemonic "anti-war" consensus:
Political judgment requires making choices between a range of realistically available options, based in large part on an assessment of the likely consequences of different courses of action. Your piece argues, in effect, that many of the negative consequences of the decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein & his regime in 2003 were readily predictable and, in fact, highly likely. OK, let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're right.

That's not enough. The relevant comparison has to be with the likely consequences of other possible courses of action available at the time (including inaction). So, to reiterate, what do you think would have been a superior alternative back in 2002-2003? Can you identify and defend a realistically available, morally acceptable, politically workable alternative course of action whose likely and predictable consequences would have been less disastrous than the ones we've actually seen so far?

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. If you or anyone else could (hypothetically) present such an alternative scenario that I found at all plausible & convincing, then I might be forced to reconsider whether my support for the war (trepidations and all) was actually intelligent or justifiable. In the absence of such an account, then it seems to me—rightly or wrongly—that your discussion fundamentally begs the question.
=> Second, people who take it for granted that the war and its consequences were an unmitigated disaster for Iraqis tend to focus exclusively on Arab Iraq.  They almost uniformly ignore Iraqi Kurdistan.  It's understandable why they would do that, and the Arab part of Iraq does account for about three-quarters of Iraqis ... but any assessment of the 2003 Iraq war and its consequences that ignores Iraqi Kurds is obviously incomplete, misleading, and less than fully honest.  It's not just that the actual outcomes in Iraqi Kurdistan have been (on balance, and under the circumstances) remarkably good ... but also that the probable consequences of the realistically available alternatives to the 2003 Iraq war (which would almost certainly have included the final disintegration of the whole sanctions-&-containment system, which had been unraveling at a rapidly accelerating rate, followed pretty soon by another genocidal bloodbath in Iraqi Kurdistan, as I noted earlier) would have been especially awful for Iraq's Kurdish population.

Instead, Iraqi Kurdistan is now autonomous, secure, and thriving.  And depending on the contingencies of regional geopolitics, there are good prospects for that situation to continue.  Iraqi Kurdistan tends to get a lot less attention from the news media than Arab Iraq, but an article in the current issue of the Economist sums up some of the good news.
The relative order, security and wealth enjoyed by the 5m residents of Iraq’s three Kurdish provinces [JW: see the maps at the end of this post] are the envy of the remaining 25m who live in the battered bulk of Iraq, and of others too. Since 2011 some 130,000 Syrian refugees, nearly all of them ethnic Kurds, have been welcomed in as brothers; the UN says that number could reach 350,000 by the year’s end. From the east come Iranian Kurds eager to work on the building sites that bristle across a territory the size of Switzerland. [....] Iraq is now Turkey’s second export market after Germany, with 70% of that trade directed to the Kurdish part; 4,000 trucks cross the border daily.

It was not always like this. Surveying a dusty vista of tents at Domiz, a camp housing more than 50,000 destitute Syrians outside the booming city of Dohuk, an Iraqi Kurd shrugs and says, “Twenty years ago this was us.” He is referring to the aftermath of the Anfal, a campaign in the late 1980s by Iraq’s then-leader Saddam Hussein to crush a Kurdish uprising. It left at least 100,000 dead, destroyed 4,000 villages and created 1m refugees.

Since the American-led invasion in 2003 Iraqi Kurds have rebuilt villages, raised GDP per person tenfold, maintained law and order and turned the peshmerga into a formidable army. Daily blackouts may plague Baghdad, but the KRG exports surplus power to adjacent Iraqi towns. Divided at home, the Kurds have united to deal successfully with the federal government, securing good terms in the 2005 constitution and high office in the capital. [....]

So long as most of Iraq’s oil output came from the south, and so long as it controlled export pipelines, Baghdad held the upper hand. But Kurdistan turns out to have a lot of oil. [JW: Under Saddam Hussein, of course, Kurdistan's oil reserves were a curse, not a blessing--helping to motivate savage repression by the Ba'athist regime, ethnic cleansing and forced Arabization in the oil-rich area around Kirkuk, etc.] [....] Squabbles with Baghdad have led to repeated shutdowns of the main pipeline to Turkey, but growing volumes go by tanker truck, solidifying a budding Kurdish-Turkish alliance that would have shocked both peoples only a few years ago. [....]
Another straw in the wind:  In March I happened to notice a piece in the Washington Post, written by someone who headed an interdenominational religious delegation visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, which was willing to declare unequivocally that Kurdistan has been "an Iraqi success story".
There are actually at least two Iraqs. Because it continues to make headlines, most Americans are familiar only with the southern region and its capital city, Baghdad. The northern region is rarely in the news. By every measure, it is a success story.
And—this is significant—not just for the Muslim majority.
Iraqi Kurdistan has been an autonomous region since 1991, when the United States and its allies in the first Gulf War declared the “Northern No-Fly Zone.” The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has used that security shield to create one of the few safe harbors for religious freedom and pluralism in the Middle East. Remarkably, this liberty extends beyond simple freedom of worship. The KRG has rebuilt seminaries and churches, supported church-related schools and welcomed Christian refugees from southern Iraq and Syria.

This is an impressive achievement in a region with a tragic past and an uncertain future. [JW: Elsewhere in the Middle East, the remaining Christian minorities are almost all shrinking or disappearing, and are often subject to violent persecution.]

Of course, there are a lot of things wrong with Iraqi Kurdistan.  By Scandinavian standards it doesn't measure up very well on a lot of social, economic, or political criteria.  But by Middle Eastern standards, which are more appropriate, it looks pretty good in terms of both present conditions and plausible prospects. And in assessing the overall consequences of the 2003 Iraq war, those outcomes should also count in the balance.

=> Again, this post doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive retrospective assessment of the 2003 Iraq war and its significance.  The relevant issues are sprawling and complex (and the ones I've mentioned above are only part of the Big Picture), so I need to reflect on them a bit longer.  But in the meantime, I offer these unfashionable thoughts for people to consider. More on all of this soon, perhaps...

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub


http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/iraq_ethno_2003.jpg
[From Joel Wing's indispensable website Musings on Iraq.]


[From the Economist.]

Saturday, April 20, 2013

What happens when job-creating businesses are not hampered by strangling government regulation



Food for thought?  —Jeff Weintraub
------------------------------------
=> Vanity Fair (4/18/2013):
[Wednesday evening] a fertilizer plant in a Texan town called West caught fire and exploded, “killing as many as 15 people and injuring more than 160 others, laying waste to buildings and potentially sending toxic fumes into the air,” The New York Times reports. Among the badly damaged buildings, a nursing home; among those already pronounced dead, two E.M.S. rescuers.

Videos of the explosion and descriptions from West's nearby residents are equally unbelievable and upsetting. An example of the latter, per CNN:
“It, like, picked you up,” a woman told CNN affiliate WFAA. “It just took your breath away. And then it dropped you and it exploded everything around you... It was like a suction and then it just blew it all out. You could feel everything. You could feel it on your skin, your hair was being blown. It was crazy.”

She managed to cover one of her children, she said, and “grabbed my little one and dove through a door. It was chaos. All my windows blew out, my doors off the hinges. All I had were my keys in my hand and I just threw the dog, everybody in the car and we took off.”
[....]
=>   Fox News (4/20/2013):
[R]esidents attempt to recover some semblance of normalcy in the 2,800-person town of West, Texas. "The devastation is immense," said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott of West, Texas, while another official added, "There are homes flattened. Part of that community is gone."

The explosion occurred around 8 p.m.  Wednesday and could be heard as far away as Waxahachie, a town 45 miles north. Flames spiraled into the evening sky and rained burning embers, shrapnel and debris down on frightened residents.

A member of the West City Council, Al Vanek, said a four-block area around the explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. Plant was "totally decimated."

The Dallas Morning News reported that among the dead were at least 11 emergency responders, three of whom were training at the time of the blast to become EMTs. They valiantly rushed to the growing smoke plume that could be seen for miles around the small community of 2,800 people. It would be, as the paper said, "their last call." [....]

Other witnesses compared the scene to that of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and authorities said the plant made materials similar to that used to fuel the bomb that tore apart that city's Murrah Federal Building.

In addition to the dead, approximately 200 people were injured by the blast. [....]
=>  Talking Points Memo (4/19/2013):
Sixty people remain unaccounted for after a massive fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas on Wednesday, according to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

"We still don't know the extent of their loss," Cornyn said in a news conference Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal. [....]
=> ThinkProgress (4/19/2013):
The Associated Press is reporting that the fertilizer plant in West, Texas that exploded on Wednesday night hasn’t been inspected by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) since 1985, nearly three decades ago. It was issued a fine on its last inspection for a violation related to storing ammonia:
Records reviewed by The Associated Press show that OSHA issued the West Chemical & Fertilizer Co., as the plant was called at the time, a $30 fine for a serious violation for storage of anhydrous ammonia.

OSHA cited the plant for four other serious violations of respiratory protection standards but did not issue fines. The maximum fine for a serious violation was $1,000.
The plant was also cited for failing to get a permit in 2006 after a complaint of a strong ammonia smell. That smell was reported to be “very bad” on the night of the explosion. Storing ammonia at fertilizer plants can be very hazardous; in 2008, the Center for American Progress found a fertilizer plant that stored millions of pounds of anhydrous ammonia in Pasadena, Texas to be among the most hazardous chemical facilities in the country, with more than 3 million people living in range of a worst-case ammonia gas release.

A day after the explosion in West, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a new report documenting a widespread lack of workplace inspections by state OSHA programs. After surveying 22 state-run programs, it found that the agencies had problems with hiring and retaining inspectors, in part due to low pay. State budget cuts have had a big impact, leading to funding problems, and the federal agency often hasn’t taken over state plans because its own budget is too tight. This has meant that a workplace only gets a visit from OSHA inspectors every 99 years on average, with some state programs even worse. In Texas, a plant can only expect an inspection every 126 years.

The report led Rep. George Miller (D-CA) to introduce a bill to give the federal agency more authority to intervene in state plans and strengthen fines and prosecutions against violations. The lack of OSHA inspections contributes to a high rate of workplace deaths in the U.S., with over 4,500 in 2010 alone. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already stated its opposition to Democrats’ efforts to strengthen workplace safety regulations.

Update

The plant in West was inspected in 2011 by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which issued a fine of $10,100 for missing placards and “not having a security plan” in violation of Hazardous Materials Regulations. A compromise was reached in 2012 after corrective actions were taken, which included the plant admitting to the violations and paying a lowered penalty of $5,250.

Today's Poland and the Jews – Some conflicting signals?

Three recent events underline the complexity of the situation, which seems to have both encouraging and worrisome aspects. Overall assessments will depend, among other things, on what criteria one uses (better or worse than what?)  and what kinds of evidence one emphasizes. Here are some of the positive signs, reported in the Forward, via Norman Geras at Normblog:

--------------------------------------------------
Bridge from the past to the future
On the eve of World War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, with 3.3 million Jews making up one-tenth of the country's population. More than 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust; thousands more survivors left in the wake of postwar pogroms. Still more departed in the 1960s amid anti-Semitic campaigns by the Communist regime.

[JW: Now there are probably some 10,000-15,000 Jews left in Poland, though estimates vary wildly.]

But with the fall of communism, there has been a revival of Jewish life in Poland and a movement by Jews and non-Jews to reclaim Jewish culture.
That's from a report about a new museum about to open in Warsaw, ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising:
Krzysztof Sliwinski, a longtime Catholic activist in Jewish-Polish relations, gazed wide-eyed at the swooping interior of this city's Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Nearly two decades in the making, the more than $100 million institution officially opens to the public this week amid a month of high-profile, state-sponsored events marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

"It's incredible, incredible, incredible how things have changed," Sliwinski told JTA. "I remember commemorations of the ghetto uprising under communism when only a few people showed up. How good it was that we were optimistic."
The rest is here.
--------------------------------------------------

On the other hand, not all signs point to unalloyed optimism.  In a recently published interview a well-known historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, caused a stir by asserting, among other things, that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves, and were just trying to deflect their own guilt onto innocent parties like the Catholic Church and the Polish people; that any anti-semitic pogroms carried out by Poles during and after World War II (if they happened at all) were understandable; and that "It looks like the Jews haven’t learned their lesson and haven’t come to any conclusions yet."
The Jews have a problem because they are convinced they are the chosen people. They feel they are entitled to interpret everything, including Catholic doctrine.... I am convinced that there is no point in dialogue with the Jews, because it doesn’t lead anywhere.
These kinds of views, which would once have been unsurprising in Poland (and a lot of other countries), are no longer mainstream in educated public discourse, and in fact the editor of magazine that published the interview indicated that he and his colleagues were a bit startled by Jasiewicz's statements: "We were very surprised that such extreme views were expressed by a highly educated scientist and researcher."  But as the editor also observed,
We showed that anti-Semitism among scientists doesn’t just belong to the past, but still exists today.
What about the younger generation?  Here are some results from a recent survey of Polish high school students, reported and considered at the intelligent group blog Crossing the Baltic under the heading Are Polish teens anti-semitic?.  Their assessment is ... not really, though it's true that some of the results are "rather shocking" :
The fast approaching 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was marked by an opinion poll conducted by the Homo Homini Institute, surveying the attitudes towards ‘Jewishness’ of a representative sample of 1250 Warsaw high school students. The results have been reported by some of the mainstream media, including Israeli news portals or the British Daily Mail, as proof of deeply rooted anti-Semitic attitudes amongst Polish youth.

It is true some figures are rather shocking – 60% of the polled 17-year-olds declared that they would be unhappy (‘niezadowolony’) if they found out that their boyfriend or girlfriend are Jewish. Only 16% declared they would be happy (‘zadowolony’) about such revelation, with 22% declaring indifference. Almost 45% of those polled would not want to have a Jewish neighbour, and a similar number would resent having a Jewish relative. Journalists also underline the poor knowledge of the history of Polish Jews – the students gravely underrated the number of Jews living in pre-war Warsaw (indicating 17% as opposed to the actual 31%), and 30% of those polled could not correctly indicate the year of the Ghetto Uprising (1943).

Nonetheless, the Homo Homini poll seems to indicate a general lack of knowledge of Polish history among Warsaw students, rather than of the history of Polish Jews in particular. In fact, while 23% of the 17-year-olds erroneously thought that the Ghetto Uprising was victorious, almost 40% thought the same about the ‘Polish’ Warsaw Uprising of 1944. In addition, surprisingly in view of the other results, over half of those polled correctly identified Mordechaj Anielewicz as the leader of the Ghetto Uprising.

The issue of the media alarmism about the prevalence of anti-Semitism could also be questioned. After all the majority of the polled students declared that they would be happy or indifferent if they were to find out one of their family members was Jewish, if they were to have Jewish classmates, or Jewish neighbours. The students also ranked the Ghetto Uprising as the 7th most important event of Warsaw’s history, ahead of the 1989 Round Table Agreement that opened the way to the first free election in Communist Poland.

Read http://bit.ly/17076qR for some of the detailed results of the poll (in Polish). [....]
Glass half-full?  Perhaps, though that's not the only possible interpretation.

It's true that even if one finds the results of this survey a little disquieting, one needs to put all this in perspective.  There are plenty of countries whose Jewish communities have largely or completely disappeared where intense and virulent anti-semitism is widespread and thoroughly mainstream.  (That category includes much of the Arab world, for example.)  And there are some other countries in East/Central Europe and the Balkans where unabashedly anti-semitic tendencies have a visible, though not central, presence in electoral politics.  There is no question that Poland is simply not that kind of country any more.  Anti-semitic elements haven't entirely vanished from the culture, and occasionally they surface in various contexts, but they no longer dominate the picture.  Overall, I would be inclined to emphasize the bright side.  Still, it's not always easy for societies to escape from their history.

—Jeff Weintraub

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Two Hizbullah terrorist attacks and their political reverberations

Since there is so much attention focused on the terrorist double-bombing at the Boston Marathon earlier this week, any discussion of terrorism right now should probably begin by emphasizing that, so far, we have no idea who is responsible for the attack in Boston.  That's certainly true for the general public, including me, and there's every indication that it's also true for the various agencies investigating the attack.  Making that point isn't a matter of politically correct wimping-out, either.  It's easy to develop a number of plausible scenarios in which this bombing was the work of various possible perpetrators, domestic or foreign, with a range of possible agendas.  So it's important to insist that we don't know who did it, and no one should pretend otherwise.

=>  On the other hand, this incident reminded me of two earlier terrorist attacks, also aimed at the deliberate mass murder of ordinary civilians, where we do know who did it.  Both of them have been in the news recently, for different reasons.  One was the bombing of a tourist bus in Burgas, Bulgaria in July 2012 that killed five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver.  In February of this year the Bulgarian government announced the results of its investigation, which indicated that this attack was organized by Lebanon's Hizbullah.  The other is the July 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires (an attack on Argentine Jews, not Israeli Jews) , which killed 85 people and wounded hundreds of others. It was established a while ago that this was almost certainly a joint operation by Hizbullah and the Iranian government (or, at least, important elements of the Iranian government), and for some time Argentine courts have been fruitlessly trying to extradite figures from Iran and Hizbullah accused of having played key roles.  But now, according to an announcement in February of this year, the Argentine government seems to be trying to cut a deal with the perpetrators to whitewash the whole affair.

In both Europe and Argentina, the politics of telling the truth about these Hizbullah terrorist attacks are complicated.  A recent piece by Lee Smith usefully explained some of the political complexities at the European end.  (Yes, occasionally even the Weekly Standard has some pieces worth taking seriously, mostly written by Andrew Ferguson or Lee Smith.)

The bus bombing in Bulgaria targeted Israelis, whose bus just happened to be in Burgas rather than Tel Aviv, and many people consider Israeli civilians legitimate (or quasi-legitimate) targets.  But the fact that Hizbullah carried out such a blatant terrorist attack in a European country, and was publicly fingered for it by an EU member state, may strain Hizbullah's relations with other European governments and the EU—despite the fact that many European diplomats and officials are very reluctant, for various reasons, to admit publicly that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization.  On the other hand, this unwelcome attention comes at a bad time for Hizbullah, which faces some serious political complications in its own neighborhood.  Among other things, Hizbullah's prospects are closely bound up with the ongoing struggle for Syria.  It is actively allied with the Assad regime and depends on it as a link to its patrons in Iran, so it will face very serious problems if the Assad regime is eventually overthrown—which looks likely.

Here are some of the key factors in play, as Lee Smith outlines them:
It would be hard to overstate the resolve the Bulgarian government showed in making the announcement. “Sofia came under enormous pressure from among others the French and Germans to 'nuance' the report and avoid antagonizing Hezbollah,” says Omri Ceren, a senior advisor at The Israel Project. [....]

The operation at the bus station in Burgas was one of Hezbollah’s few successes, and Bulgaria’s response comes in stark contrast to the decision recently taken by the Argentinean government to form a “truth commission” with the Islamic Republic of Iran to investigate the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. [....]

[There is an] ongoing debate within the European Union whether or not to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. France and Germany are against listing Lebanon’s Islamic resistance, and led an aggressive campaign to convince the Bulgarians not to name Hezbollah as the culprit. The Netherlands, on the other hand, has been pushing for designation and has blacklisted Hezbollah separately from any EU actions. The UK meanwhile has designated Hezbollah’s “military wing,” an action taken largely because of Hezbollah fighters that squared off against UK troops in Iraq, and intended to distinguish it from the outfit’s “political wing,” a distinction that the Bulgarian report made implicitly. [....]

The distinction between the two “wings” is simply a convenient fiction invented by European policymakers. [....]  Because U.S. officials are not allowed to deal with a designated foreign terrorist organization like Hezbollah, the Europeans are able to step in and fill the gap. But if Hezbollah is designated as a whole, and not simply its “military” wing, then the Europeans will lose one of the few cards they have to play in their Middle East policy. [....]

Indeed, the Europeans were already pushing back even before the report. EU counterterrorism official Gilles de Kerchove argued the day before the announcement that there “is no automatic listing just because you have been behind a terrorist attack… It's not only the legal requirement that you have to take into consideration, it's also a political assessment of the context and the timing." [....]

The Europeans are primarily worried about losing their diplomatic prerogative, but are also, understandably, concerned about winding up in Hezbollah’s crosshairs. Hezbollah and Iran were effectively at war with France in the 80s, often in Paris itself, and with French troops and civilians filling the UNIFIL ranks in southern Lebanon, they’d prefer to avoid shaking the hornets’ nest. [....]

Finally the Europeans reason that designating Hezbollah might destabilize the Lebanese government. This is a particularly odd rationale given that Hezbollah controls the government and destabilizing it, or forcing Lebanese parties to abandon their alliance with the party of God, would serve the interests of Beirut’s pro-Western parties. Already the announcement seems to be having an effect inside Lebanon. [....]

“It will be hard for Hezbollah’s allies to back it when Europe turns against it,” says NOW Lebanon’s managing editor Hanin Ghaddar.[....] According to Ghaddar, the Bulgaria report is as significant as the special tribunal for Lebanon that named four Hezbollah members guilty for the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri.[....]

It seems that the party of God is fighting on every conceivable front, and not faring well on any of them. In Syria, it’s sided with Bashar al-Assad’s besieged regime, sending forces to take on a Sunni-majority rebellion that will in time inevitably take its revenge on the Shiite militia. Its terrorist operations around the world are proving failures, except for the one in Bulgaria, which may in time turn Europe as well as its Lebanese allies against it.

We'll see.  Meanwhile, read the whole thing (below).

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
The Weekly Standard (On-Line)
February 6, 2013
Blaming Terrorists for Terrorism
Lee Smith

Yesterday the Bulgarian government announced the results of its investigation into the July 18, 2012 bus bombing that killed 5 Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver in the city of Burgas. At least two members of what appears to have been a three-man team belong to Hezbollah. More specifically, explained Bulgaria’s interior minister, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, they were part of Hezbollah’s “military wing”—a peculiar turn of phrase that hints at the political implications of the Bulgarian investigation, which may have a major impact on European Union foreign policy as well as Hezbollah’s ability to operate on the continent. And yet the most serious repercussions may be felt inside Lebanon, where Hezbollah is already feeling the pressure.

 Even as late as the night before the announcement, says Matthew Levitt a former Treasury Department official and now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “U.S. officials didn’t know if Bulgaria would go ahead and name Hezbollah. The Israelis seemed more confident, but remained tight-lipped about it.” And the Bulgarians, Levitt told me, “spoke truth to power. They made it clear these were Hezbollah operatives, funded by Hezbollah in a Hezbollah plot.”

It would be hard to overstate the resolve the Bulgarian government showed in making the announcement. “Sofia came under enormous pressure from among others the French and Germans to 'nuance' the report and avoid antagonizing Hezbollah,” says Omri Ceren, a senior advisor at The Israel Project. “That Bulgarian officials were willing to let the evidence guide them and expose who was behind the attack, even at this very delicate time for the European Union and for Bulgaria's place inside of it, took genuine political courage.”

There had been some speculation that the Bulgarians might hint at Hezbollah involvement without naming the group and likely inviting further attacks from an outfit that has picked up the pace of its terrorist operations abroad in the last three years. As Levitt shows in his new study, “Hizballah and the Qods Force in Iran's Shadow War with the West,” since January 2010 the Lebanese group and its Iranian partners have plotted numerous attacks throughout Europe and the rest of the world, targeting Israeli embassies and Jewish communities in, among other places, Cyprus, Turkey, Thailand, Kenya, India, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

The operation at the bus station in Burgas was one of Hezbollah’s few successes, and Bulgaria’s response comes in stark contrast to the decision recently taken by the Argentinean government to form a “truth commission” with the Islamic Republic of Iran to investigate the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The purpose of the agreement is to bury the case and whitewash Hezbollah’s role in killing 85 people and wounding hundreds, exactly 18 years to the day before the Burgas bombing. Bulgaria chose instead to underscore Hezbollah’s bloody career.
The Obama administration and other U.S. officials greeted the Sofia report with enthusiasm. The White House’s counterterrorism adviser John Brennan commended “its friend and NATO ally.” Obama’s nominee for CIA director has in the past indicated he’s somewhat confused about Hezbollah, recommending for instance that Washington should seek to empower the terror group’s so-called “moderates.” But regarding the Burgas bombing, Brennan was clear-eyed. “Bulgaria’s investigation exposes Hizballah for what it is,” Brennan said in a released statement, “a terrorist group that is willing to recklessly attack innocent men, women, and children, and that poses a real and growing threat not only to Europe, but to the rest of the world.”
New Secretary of State John Kerry also weighed in, urging “other governments around the world – and particularly our partners in Europe – to take immediate action to crack down on Hizballah. We need to send an unequivocal message to this terrorist group that it can no longer engage in despicable actions with impunity.”
Kerry is referring to the ongoing debate within the European Union whether or not to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. France and Germany are against listing Lebanon’s Islamic resistance, and led an aggressive campaign to convince the Bulgarians not to name Hezbollah as the culprit. The Netherlands, on the other hand, has been pushing for designation and has blacklisted Hezbollah separately from any EU actions. The UK meanwhile has designated Hezbollah’s “military wing,” an action taken largely because of Hezbollah fighters that squared off against UK troops in Iraq, and intended to distinguish it from the outfit’s “political wing,” a distinction that the Bulgarian report made implicitly.
In a statement following the report, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued against this idea, saying that “there is only one Hezbollah, it is one organization with one leadership.” As it turns out, Netanyahu’s interpretation is backed by Hezbollah itself. "All political, social and jihad work is tied to the decisions of this leadership," senior Hezbollah official Naim Qassem told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. "The same leadership that directs the parliamentary and government work also leads jihad actions in the struggle against Israel."
The distinction between the two “wings” is simply a convenient fiction invented by European policymakers. No one is fooled against his will, and the reality is that the Europeans aren’t even fooling themselves with their hairsplitting. The effect of separating the two “wings” is to give Hezbollah some wiggle room. If only the “military” side is listed then the “political” group can still raise money on the continent. The purpose of the distinction is to give European diplomats an advantage over their American counterparts. Because U.S. officials are not allowed to deal with a designated foreign terrorist organization like Hezbollah, the Europeans are able to step in and fill the gap. But if Hezbollah is designated as a whole, and not simply its “military” wing, then the Europeans will lose one of the few cards they have to play in their Middle East policy. 
Spilling blood on European soil should make it much more difficult for the French and others to avoid designating Hezbollah, but “we’re not at a place yet where designation is certain, there’s a lot left to be done. There is no longer a debate over the facts,” according to Levitt. “The debate now is over policy—is it a smart move to list them?
Indeed, the Europeans were already pushing back even before the report. EU counterterrorism official Gilles de Kerchove argued the day before the announcement that there “is no automatic listing just because you have been behind a terrorist attack… It's not only the legal requirement that you have to take into consideration, it's also a political assessment of the context and the timing."
If de Kerchove seems to be making room for some sort of justification that Hezbollah might offer for the attack, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was even more mealy mouthed. "The EU and Member States will discuss the appropriate response based on all elements identified by the investigators," said Ashton, noting “the need for a reflection over the outcome of the investigation.”
The Europeans are primarily worried about losing their diplomatic prerogative, but are also, understandably, concerned about winding up in Hezbollah’s crosshairs. Hezbollah and Iran were effectively at war with France in the 80s, often in Paris itself, and with French troops and civilians filling the UNIFIL ranks in southern Lebanon, they’d prefer to avoid shaking the hornets’ nest. However, the fact is that Hezbollah has already targeted French UNIFIL troops, and those of other EU members, including Spain and Italy.
Finally the Europeans reason that designating Hezbollah might destabilize the Lebanese government. This is a particularly odd rationale given that Hezbollah controls the government and destabilizing it, or forcing Lebanese parties to abandon their alliance with the party of God, would serve the interests of Beirut’s pro-Western parties. Already the announcement seems to be having an effect inside Lebanon.
“It will be hard for Hezbollah’s allies to back it when Europe turns against it,” says NOW Lebanon’s managing editor Hanin Ghaddar. “Yesterday, Prime Minister Mikati said he condemns Bulgaria bombing, and the Lebanese government is ready to cooperate.” Mikati is not affiliated with the pro-democracy March 14 forces but was handpicked for the premiership by Hezbollah. “If you support them on the bombing then you’ll have problems in Europe,” says Ghaddar. “Mikati has business in Europe so he’s going to be very careful with this.”
According to Ghaddar, the Bulgaria report is as significant as the special tribunal for Lebanon that named four Hezbollah members guilty for the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. “Nasrallah has a speech in ten days,” says Ghaddar, “and everyone is saying that Hezbollah will have no comment before that, but I think they don’t know what to say. Again Hezbollah is in big trouble.”
It seems that the party of God is fighting on every conceivable front, and not faring well on any of them. In Syria, it’s sided with Bashar al-Assad’s besieged regime, sending forces to take on a Sunni-majority rebellion that will in time inevitably take its revenge on the Shiite militia. Its terrorist operations around the world are proving failures, except for the one in Bulgaria, which may in time turn Europe as well as its Lebanese allies against it.