Food and the politics of power

In the previous post, I suggested that as the competition for resources becomes more acute, it is likely that military force will be increasingly used in a brutally transparent manner in order to maintain the current inequalities in consumption rates. This was not simply a guess on my part. It is based on historical precedent.

In 1948, George Kennan of the US State Department wrote what has since become a famous memo outlining in frank and stark terms what he saw as the main issue facing the United States in its newfound post-world war II role as the dominant economic and military force. He was officially writing about Asia but his analysis extends beyond that.
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The impact of modern agriculture on land use

Agriculture has only been around for about 10,000 years and the reasons for its success are not clear since the archeological evidence suggests that early farmers were, nutritionally speaking, not as well off as their contemporary hunter-gatherers. It may have been that since grains can be stored over years of bounty and used in lean years, farmers were better able to withstand adverse times and thus better able to sustain themselves over longer times than their rivals in lifestyles.
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The food-energy equation

In his February 2004 Harper’s essay The oil we eat, Richard Manning lays out the basic energy equation that underlies food.

All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.
. . .
Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it’s mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can’t eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today.

Humans cannot eat most of the naturally produced biomass each year since it is in the form of grasses and trees, so we destroy that biomass by clearing those fields and planting crops that we can eat more readily or, as is more common, to use as raw materials to produce food in other forms. But each of these things carries with it energy costs. As Manning points out:

America’s biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can’t eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can’t eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don’t. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food. (emphasis in original)

It turns out that about eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to feed livestock and that it “takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way” and “sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.” Livestock produced this way creates high-quality protein no doubt, but at a cost. In addition, the US produces twice as much per capita protein as the average adult needs each day. This results in over-consumption which leads to fat, resulting in an epidemic of obesity, which now is second only to tobacco in being the cause of health-related problems and fatalities.

The higher you go up the food chain, the more energy that is wasted along the way. All of us know that instinctively but I had not fully appreciated the massive scale of wastage as you ascend each rung of that chain.

Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn’t eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.

As Manning sums up: “Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.”

Even avoiding meat does not quite solve the problem since there are hidden energy costs in non-meat foods as well.

The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

It seems to me that if we are going to learn how to become better custodians of the earth’s resources, we need to have a deeper understanding of how those resources are used. It seems like it would be advisable to emphasize the energy aspects of food in our educational system to create a greater awareness of where all the energy goes to and comes from. Right now, I think that students learn about photosynthesis as a purely biological process. Including the energy cycle along with it seems like a good idea, both educationally and in terms of creating increasing awareness of our relationship to nature and the Earth’s resources.

POST SCRIPT: Letting Go of God

Julia Sweeney has a CD of her monologue about her drift away from Catholicism to atheism. She was interviewed by late night talk show host Craig Ferguson.

Saving resources

One of the things that appall me is the waste of food. Whenever I have to throw away food that has been uneaten, I take that as a personal defeat. As a result, the refrigerator in our home is relatively bare since it tends to have things that are likely to be used soon. Even then, I periodically go through the refrigerator and use up everything that is there and only throw stuff away if it is beyond salvaging.

I have the impression that in our highly litigious society, manufacturers have become highly conservative in labeling packages, fearful that they will be sued if someone gets ill. And as a result, the “sell by” dates are likely quite early and a lot of perfectly good food is thrown away unnecessarily because of people adhering strictly to them. It would be interesting to see what kinds of statistics are used to arrive at the “sell by” dates.
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Reduce, reduce, reduce

Environmentalists use the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle” to indicate the different ways that we can lower our consumption of resources in order to save the world. It is true that recycling has become more popular now, which is a good thing.

But we must remember that recycle is merely the third item on the descending list of actions to save the world’s resources. The most important one is ‘reduce’ and I think we not paying anywhere near enough attention to that. If we really want to save the world, we have to focus our attention on the first item in the list: reduce.
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Are we owners or custodians?

In the previous post, when I said that my generation had been poor custodians of the world, I used the word ‘custodians’ deliberately.

I think there is a big difference between those who see their relationship to things in terms of ownership and those who see it in terms of custodianship.

The ownership mentality sees things this way: “If I earn money, that money belongs to me and I am free to do what I want with it. Similarly, anything that I buy with the money is mine to do with whatever I like.” In this view, if I am a millionaire, I should be able to buy five huge homes around the world, each of which uses vast amounts of resources to build and maintain but are empty for most of the time, fly around in my private planes, drive around in huge cars that I replace every year, buy lots of clothes that I discard soon after, and so forth. The feeling is that I have a right to do this because I ‘own’ these things and bought them with my own money.
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The age of consumption

Some time ago I was having breakfast with a few friends and during the casual conversation I said that I felt that our children and grandchildren would judge our generation harshly for what we have done to the world.

One of my companions was surprised and after a moment’s thought told me why she disagreed. She pointed out that our generation (the so-called ‘baby boomers’ although I hate cute labels like these) had brought about advances in civil rights, greater equality for women, more tolerance for gay and lesbian lifestyles, and made tremendous medical advances that had resulted in finding cures for some diseases and even the elimination of some.

I agreed with her on all these points. But my concern was more about how we have treated the Earth’s resources, its environment, and its climate. I have written about global warming before and will write in the future about the consequences of our actions on the environment, but what I told her was that I feel that the people of my generation have not been good custodians of the resources of the planet. We have been so wasteful and profligate with the planet’s resources that we are risk leaving future generations resource poor.

My friend challenged me on this too. She pointed out that our generation has become more conscious about recycling in a way that our parents never were.

This is also true but I think that the advances that we have made in recycling have been more than dwarfed by our massive increase in the consumption of resources. There is no doubt that the current generation of people in the first world has the highest standard of living ever. All the scientific and technological advances that we have been witness to in our own lifetimes have resulted in us being able to possess lots of material goods.

But what this has spawned is even greater levels of consumption. Some increase in consumption is inevitable and even desirable because it means that more people are able to live better lives. No one would doubt the merits of the increased availability of potable water, more food and less hunger, more widespread availability of indoor plumbing and electricity, homes that are better able to withstand the elements, and so. All these things enable those people who are currently living in poverty and squalor and susceptible to disease to live better and healthier lives. Increases in consumption to achieve these ends are clearly desirable.

But what bothers me is the increase in consumption just for the sake of it, just because we can. I am referring now to the kind of lifestyle that is driving people to build huge mansions and own multiple homes on vast areas of cleared land that are vacant most of the time. I am referring to a culture that sees consumption for its own sake as something desirable, where luxury is flaunted, where people feel the need to buy new stuff before the old stuff is completely used up, and where waste is endemic.

This is a disease that afflicts the affluent and also those members of the middle class that aspire to the affluent lifestyle. The media celebrates celebrities and corporate tycoons living lavish lifestyles. This infects the middle classes who seek to emulate the very rich by also living an extravagant lifestyle. The global reach of the media creates similar desires in the affluent classes of the second and third worlds, who also live high consumption lifestyles, which creates similar pressures on their middle classes, and so on.

A lot of this consumption is not based on any physical needs but instead seems to result from a competition to flaunt wealth and consumption, for show, to let others know how ‘successful’ we are. This attitude is like a virus that has spread all over the world.

As a result of all this wasteful and image-driven consumption, I worry that we are rapidly using up the world’s resources without even the benefit of a better quality of life. I worry that at the rate we going, we are going to leave future generations very resource poor.

POST SCRIPT: Analysis of ISG group report

Senator Russ Feingold gives a good summary of the few strengths and the many weaknesses of the report put out by the Iraq Study Group.

And editorial cartoonist Oliphant gives his perspective on the responses to the report.

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‘Tis the season to be petty, fa la la la la, la la la la!

Now that the season to wage culture wars over holiday symbolism has arrived, Tom Tomorrow reports on the kind of petty and absurd incidents that this ridiculous hyping of the ‘war on Christmas’ spawns.

I was a grocery store, waiting in line to check out. The man in front of me approached the cashier with a cart full of groceries. The cashier said “Happy Holidays!”. Well, it goes without saying that the man was furious at this. How dare she not say “Merry Christmas”. He literally stormed out of the store in anger, leaving his groceries behind for the employees to put away. As he was leaving, he said “I’ll never shop here again!”

Whatever our views on this topic, can we at least all agree to not take our annoyance out on employees such as shop clerks and cashiers and waiters? These people are usually underpaid and overworked (especially during this time of year), usually have no say about company policy on how to greet people, and are routinely treated with lack of consideration, if not discourtesy and outright rudeness. People should never use their power as customers to vent their spleen on such employees, who have no option but to bite their tongues for fear of losing their jobs.

I thought that I would repost something from November 30, 2005 that deals with my own views on the silliness of such culture wars.

“Merry Christmas” or “Season’s Greetings”?

In a comment to a previous post on Thanksgiving and Christmas, John made an interesting observation. He said that, given his reading of my political and religious leanings from my blog, he was surprised that I had used the term “Christmas shopping season” instead of the more generic “holiday shopping season,” since I am obviously not a religious person.

I must admit that I was taken by surprise by his comment. I had written “Christmas” season almost without thinking because I see it as such. But perhaps I should not have been surprised because I am also aware of how touchy the issue of Christmas has become.

For example, somebody named John Gibson has actually written a book called The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. And Bill O’Reilly, who can always be depended on to waste his outrage on the trivial, has declared that he is going to “save” Christmas by bringing back the greeting “Merry Christmas” and fighting those stores that have promotions saying “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays.” A guest on his show suggested that these more generic greetings do not offend Christians, to which O’Reilly replied “Yes, it does. It absolutely does. And I know that for a fact. But the smart way to do it is “Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Season’s Greetings, Happy Kwanzaa.”

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell, in a fierce competition with Pat Robertson for the Religious Doofus of the Year award, says that he too is fighting to save that holy holiday and that he’ll sue and boycott groups that he sees as muzzling Christmas. Finishing a strong third for that same award:

American Family Association President Tim Wildmon,…wants to see “Merry Christmas” signs displayed prominently “if they expect Christians to come in and buy products during this so-called season.”

And he isn’t worried if they offend people who aren’t Christian.

“They can walk right by the sign,” Wildmon said. “It’s a federal holiday. If someone is upset by that, well, they should know that they are living in a predominantly Christian nation.”

So John was quite justified in being puzzled as to why, in this climate, I was so casually tossing the word Christmas around when everyone seems to be so touchy about it.

To be quite honest, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see people like Gibson and O’Reilly and Falwell and Wildmon getting into a lather about what is the proper thing to say at Christmas. How can adults waste their time on the trivial when there is so much other stuff to think about?

As for me personally, I just can’t take this matter seriously. I have never been offended by other people’s religious beliefs. Perhaps it was because I grew up in a multi-religious society, had friends of other faiths, and celebrated their religious holidays as well as my own. It does not offend me in the least when people wish me greetings that are specific to their own religious traditions or in some neutral terms. What is the sense in being offended by someone who is wishing you well? The words do not matter in the least. It is the sentiment behind it that is important.

I have always liked Christmas as a holiday, especially its focus on children, and its message of promoting peace and goodwill among people. I am glad that even people who do not share its religious orientation still share in the peace and goodwill message. I do not appreciate the fact that it has become largely a merchandizing tool.

I simply do not care how other people view Christmas or how they express their views and it amazes me that some people are using it as yet another means of waging a cultural war. Why are some people so touchy? When someone wishes me “Season’s Greetings,” I take that as a thoughtful gesture of friendship and caring and I am touched by the sentiment. The same goes if they wish me “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” or “Happy Kwanzaa” or “Happy Solstice” or any other greeting from any other religion. I return the greeting in kind, even if I am not a believer in that faith, because all that such an exchange signifies is that two people wish each other well. If someone says to me “Merry Christmas” and I reply “Same to you,” this is not an affirmation of faith any more than “Season’s Greetings” is an act of hostility to religion. To take such greetings as a challenge to one’s beliefs and start a fight over it is to demonstrate churlishness to a ridiculous degree. O’Reilly and his partners in this stupid battle need to grow up.

I am talking here about how the holiday is interpreted in the private sphere of person-to-person interactions. If some company puts advertisements in the paper and tells its employees to greet customers by saying “Season’s Greetings,” why should it offend me? The same thing if they order their employees to say “Merry Christmas” instead. That is not something that bothers me, because such mandated greetings are not borne out of personal care and concern but are just marketing tools and are meaningless in terms of content and intent, whatever the words used. It is in the same category as the mandated “Have a nice day.” You can always tell, by the eyes, the tone of voice, and the smile (or lack of it) if the person is genuinely being friendly or simply saying it because it is required. The actual words are immaterial.

If Bill O’Reilly gets all warm and tingly when a store employee is forced to say “Merry Christmas” to him and gets angry when that same employee is forced to say “Season’s Greetings,” then he is a man in need of serious therapy because he clearly cannot distinguish the real from the counterfeit. I hate to be the one who breaks the news but he should realize that the employee probably does not care for him personally, whatever the greeting.

The question becomes different when we talk of the public sphere because then we are talking about the government taking an official stand on religion and this raises tricky political and constitutional issues. There it seems to me to be appropriate to be scrupulously religiously neutral because I am a believer that a secular public sphere is the one most likely to lead to peace and harmony between diverse groups. Governments are supposed to be representatives of everyone and to single out one particular religion or ethnicity for preferential treatment is to create discord.

But when it comes to private exchanges between people, we should all relax and let people express their good feelings for one another in whatever way they choose and are most comfortable with and not try to make it into a battle for religious supremacy. You can always tell when people genuinely mean well and when they are pushing an agenda, whatever the actual words used. We should learn to accept the former gracefully and ignore the latter.

POST SCRIPT: Holiday punditry

We started with Tom Tomorrow and we can give him the last word too.

A national disgrace: The case of Jose Padilla

There is perhaps nothing that exemplifies the disgraceful contempt displayed by this administration for law and human rights than the way they have treated Jose Padilla, the man labeled by the government as a ‘dirty bomber’ although the indictment that was finally brought against him says nothing of the sort and has been reduced to vague charges of being involved with terrorism. But because of the huge amount of government propaganda surrounding his arrest, he will always be thought of in the public mind as having planned to detonate a radioactive bomb in an American city.

The news article by Deborah Sontag in the December 4, 2006 issue of the New York Times reveals the depths to which the government has sunk in its cruelty to this man. This is something that will be a source of shame for a long time, if it isn’t the case that we have lost all sense of shame already.

In an affidavit filed Friday, [Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers] alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan”. . . [The lawyers] argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

As Digby points out:

I think isolation and lack of a sense of time and strange repetitive interrogations may be even more cruel than physical punishment. The belief that it will never end, that you’ve lost all normal sense of personhood and control — that your mind is being stripped away and there’s nothing you can do about it — must be terrifying.

This one telling detail alone illustrates the extent to which the government will stoop in its cruelty. To take him to a dentist, in addition to shackling his legs and manacling his hands, the government put on thick noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes so that Padilla would not see or hear anything from the outside world while making the trip, thus keeping his isolation from humanity complete. Even the guards’ faces were hidden behind plastic visors because how terrible it would be if he should make eye contact or even exchange a smile with another human being, or that he should see the sun or trees or hear birds or even a bit of music from a passing car. Experiencing those sensations would have the disastrous effect of reminding him that he was a human being and not just a collection of cells subject to experimentation on the effects of sensory deprivation.

Of course, those seeking to justify this kind of treatment will employ the usual trope to justify execrable behavior and point to someone who might do even worse: “al Qaeda wouldn’t take their prisoners for a root canal.” They will try and portray Padilla as someone who is actually being treated well and is just a whiner complaining about minor discomfitures. But Digby sees through this bogus toughness.

I know that all the tough guys on the right will say that Padilla is just being a typical whining malcontent but I have a feeling that most of them would crumble into blubbering babies after five minutes in his position. This treatment is extremely inhumane.

It seems like Padilla is already a broken man, so destroyed psychologically that he is unfit to stand trial. In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.'” He was denied access to any lawyers for 21 months so that even now he is mistrustful and unsure whether his lawyers are on is side or are secretly working against him. Furthermore, according to the New York Times report:

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.”

“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.

No one has better expressed outrage over Padilla’s treatment and the cruelty with which the government is treating so-called enemy combatants than Glenn Greenwald. He is also amazed that a country that prides itself on being a nation of laws has sat back and let this happen not only without an outcry, but with some sectors even cheering the government on. And if this can be done to Padilla, who is a US citizen who was arrested within the US, think what must be happening to those unfortunates who are not citizens or who were captured abroad or are being held in foreign prisons.

As Greenwald says:

As I have said many times, the most astounding and disturbing fact over the last five years — and there is a very stiff competition for that title — is that we have collectively really just sat by while the U.S. Government arrests and detains people, including U.S. citizens, and then imprisons them for years without any charges of any kind. What does it say about our country that not only does our Government do that, but that we don’t really seem to mind much?

Along those lines, it is hard to express the contempt merited by the drooling sociopaths who not only endorse this behavior but, with what can only be described as serious derangement, laugh about it and revel in its cruelty and its lawlessness.

In a subsequent post, he examines the reasons for the public apathy on this issue and points to the disgraceful attitude taken on this issue by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post.

This is the reason why. Over the last five years, the media (with some notable and noble exceptions) essentially embraced the central premise of the Bush administration — that in order for us to be protected, we must place our faith in the Leader and know that he is doing Good, because he wants to protect us.

He may err at times. He might even go a little too far or be a little zealous in what he does to make us safe. But there are Very, Very Bad People in the world who want to kill us — Padilla is “accused of plotting a dirty-bomb attack”! — and the Leader needs the power to get his hands dirty and take care of them. The last thing we should be concerned with is what the Leader does to them.

Greenwald gets it exactly right. What is happening is a disgrace.

POST SCRIPT: Staying in Iraq “until the job is done”

As the Iraq Study Group delivers its report today, the Daily Show looks at all the advice the Bush is getting and what he is likely to do.

Return of the best and the brightest?

Many years ago, David Halberstam wrote a book about the Vietnam war called The Best and the Brightest. In it he pointed out how the architects of the Vietnam war under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were considered brilliant thinkers and strategists, successful in many other fields before they entered government. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara came from being the head of General Motors and was supposed to be a real genius, brilliant with numbers and having a reputation as a formidable thinker and strategist in the corporate world. Others like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow were also seen as the very smart people.

And yet, as Halberstam pointed out, this did not prevent Vietnam from becoming a total debacle. It seemed that all the brilliant minds and their strategizing could not prevent the US from sliding slowly and painfully into defeat. The problem was, of course, that strategy cannot save you when the underlying political decisions are bad. In Vietnam, that bad decision consisted in sending in forces to prop up a corrupt minority government in the face of an insurgency that was determined to oust the foreign US forces and had already defeated the French colonial power. The insurgents even had the support of a substantial fraction of the local population, as well as the backing of the significant standing army of North Vietnam, which in turn was headed by the wily General Giap. This combination of factors almost certainly doomed the US to a bad end. In such a situation, all that strategizing can do is perhaps determine what is the best way to leave.

I was reminded of those days in the current breathless speculation around the Iraq Study Group (ISG), the body headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton whose report on what to do about Iraq is eagerly anticipated within establishment circles and is due to be released on Wednesday, December 6, 2006.

What struck me is this extraordinary situation in which the US government is seemingly outsourcing an important policy and military decision to a group of people outside the government. As Robin Wright of the Washington Post reports: “In the history of U.S. foreign policy, there’s been nothing like it: a panel outside the government trying to bail the United States out of a prolonged and messy war.” What does it say about the level of competence of this administration when the president, asked about what he plans to do about Iraq, says that he is waiting to see the recommendations of outside groups like the ISG?

The composition of the ISG is also interesting. It was formed by a hitherto obscure outfit called the US Institute of Peace which says on its website that it is an “independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress.” The ISG group membership seems to be composed of your standard issue, run-of-the-mill politicians (one could even label them political hacks), except for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. None of them seem to have any expertise with the Middle East.

Robin Wright says that “The panel was deliberately skewed toward a centrist course for Iraq, participants said. Organizers avoided experts with extreme views on either side of the Iraq war debate.” This sheds an interesting light on the Washington mindset which venerates “centrism” or “moderates,” without those words having any operational meaning other than simply standing for a very narrow range of opinions around the status quo.

Exactly what, for example, might constitute an “extreme” antiwar view? Since no one is seriously suggesting that the US government surrender to the Iraqi insurgents or re-installing Saddam Hussein as the Iraqi leader (even though an increasing number of people, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, are saying that average Iraqis are worse off now than they were before the invasion), one can only conclude that what the ISG considers an “extremist” view is that calling for a complete withdrawal of US troops beginning immediately. Thus the deck has already been stacked to produce a report that will not disturb the status quo, since it has eliminated one option that is widely supported.

The ISG group has supposedly listened to ‘expert’ advice given by four ‘Expert Working Groups’ and a Military Senior Advisor Panel.. But there is some cynicism as to whether the expert panels are just window dressing for a pre-ordained conclusion. As one member of one of the expert groups says: “[The ISG] doesn’t have to take any of our recommendations. . .They can come up with something entirely different. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they do.”

In fact, although George Bush has said that he is looking forward to hearing what the commission is going to recommend, the very fact that he has been so outspoken in what he will and will not do seems to have caused the ISG group to try and tailor its recommendations to what they think that Bush may consider accepting, rather than what the expert groups might suggest are the best options.

One of the curious things about the ISG is the murkiness of its origins. It suddenly appeared in March of this year. Its website says that this “effort is being undertaken at the urging of several members of Congress and the White House welcomes it.” Who are these members of Congress? It does not exactly say and I have been unable to pinpoint exactly how and why the ISG came into existence. The only person I could find who is named as an initiator is congressman Frank Wolf (R-Virginia).

One possibility is that this murkiness is deliberate in order to hide one of two possibilities. The first is that the White House, despite its public statements of confidence about how well things are going in Iraq, privately agrees with those who say it is a disaster and is now seeking a face-saving mechanism to extricate itself from the mess without actually admitting they have blundered. This means that they have already decided what they want to do and the ISG will provide them with those options, but the White House does not want to admit that the ISG is merely a front group.

The second possibility is that the White House is still in such a state of denial, and that this detachment from reality has so alarmed even those people close to the administration (such as Bush’s father), that they cobbled together this commission to put further pressure on the White House to try and get them to face the facts rather than continue to wallow in delusions.

My guess (and it is only that) is that it is the second option. This is because the latest leak from the ISG says that they will “recommend withdrawing nearly all U.S. combat units from Iraq by early 2008 while leaving behind troops to train, advise and support the Iraqis.” Support for my guess comes from the harsh pre-emptive attack on the ISG from the most fervent and last-ditch supporters of the Iraq war, such as the Weekly Standard, the National Review and assorted columnists.

Given that Bush seems to think that leaving Iraq would mean that he has failed, that he has said that it will be up to future presidents to decide when and whether to withdraw all US troops, and “I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me”, I predict that after the ISG presents their report to him he will say, “Thanks, but no thanks” and go on doing whatever he wants. Of course there is a little wiggle room between “all troops” and “nearly all U.S. combat units” to allow him to reverse course but, as Bush has famously said, he “doesn’t do nuance” and I doubt whether he will exploit that particular loophole.

Perhaps the last best hope for this country is that Barney looks like a smart dog. If he can be persuaded to turn against Bush, Bush might finally realize that his Iraq policy has been a failure.

POST SCRIPT: The God Delusion

Watch an excellent interview of Richard Dawkins talking about his new book The God Delusion on the BBC show Newsnight.

It is so refreshing to see a low-key interview in which the interviewer is thoughtful and quietly tries to probe the author about ideas, rather than engaging in a debate. There is no interrupting and no crosstalk and no grandstanding, and yet the questions posed were challenging. It was so unlike a lot of talk shows where the host sees the show as a vehicle for expounding his or her own views, rather than having the guest elaborate on their ideas.