My last TNR essay mentioned the standoff in Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) talks between the U.S. and Brazil from last month -- mostly due to Brazilian intransigence.

U.S. negotiators, aware of the standstill, "hastily arranged discussions with trade ministers from 16 of the 34 countries" in the FTAA yesterday and today, according to the Associated Press.

The results? According to Reuters, success!!:

The United States and Brazil have compromised on a set of ideas for creating the world's largest free trade zone in the Western Hemisphere, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said on Saturday.

"I think we now have a good basis for a successful meeting in Miami," Amorim told reporters, referring to a gathering in two weeks of 34 regional trade ministers that is supposed to propel negotiations on the proposed Free Trade Areas of the Americas agreement to conclusion by 2005.

Amorim said he and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick presented top trade officials from 14 other Western Hemisphere countries on Saturday with a joint set of ideas for moving negotiations forward after the Florida meeting....

A senior U.S. trade official, speaking on the condition that he not be identified, said negotiators still faced a major challenge to make the Nov. 17-21 meeting a success.

"But I feel certainly better about it today than I did two days ago because I think we got some useful insight in the meeting," the official said.

But wait! A follow-up Associated Press report provides a different spin on the talks -- failure:

The Bush administration reported no breakthroughs Saturday in informal discussions aimed at trying to resolve deep differences between the United States and Brazil over the scope of a hemisphere-wide free trade agreement.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and trade ministers from 15 other nations wrapped up two days of talks in the Washington area on the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The FTAA, which would span the Western Hemisphere and cover 34 countries, is a key economic goal of the Bush administration....

At the conclusion of Saturday's talks, a senior U.S. trade official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, did not report any areas where the differences between the United States and Brazil had been narrowed.

Who's right and who's wrong? Read both reports and judge for yourself. [No, no, no, that's why the people read your blog -- your interpretation of events!--ed. Huh, I thought it was because of all the Carla Gugino links. Hmmm, that's a new name--ed. Yeah, I'm getting hooked on Karen Sisco.

Seriously, I think I'll give the edge to Reuters, since the AP report seems to be based only on the comments of the "senior U.S. trade official." However, if you actually read both stories, what's astonishing is how they essentially report the identical set of facts but with completely different interpretive frames -- I mean, spin.]

Last Sunday's New York Times ran an Ellyn Spragins column on how wealth inequities affect sibling relationships. Her conclusion -- it ain't good:

Because you come from the same gene pool and are raised in the same way, it's much tougher to find a convincing, palatable excuse for why your brother owns his own company, a vacation house and four fancy sports cars - and you don't. Is it because he's blond? Taller? Or is he smarter and better?

"Siblings are about as similar to you as you can get,'' said Margaret Clark, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "So when you compare, and you come out behind, it can be painful."...

Usually it's a less wealthy sibling who chooses to distance himself or herself from a rich sister or brother - or to drop the relationship altogether.

"If you seal off that relationship you don't have to think about the comparison and what it means to your self-esteem," Dr. Tesser said. One way to do that is to slur a rich sibling in a way that lends you superiority: "The money really changed him," for example, or "She sacrificed her family life to be successful."

In my family, this last point is amusing, given that Jay Drezner -- my brother -- makes far more money than I do, but was also the one who decided to go live in Australia for a few years.

Jay read the story and has a lot of things to say about it. Here's the punchline:

[A]sk yourself the following question. Do you think my brother is jealous of me for the money that I make or am I jealous of my brother for the lifestyle he leads? I suspect (being only one of the parties involved) that the answer to both would be a hesitant "No." In the career path that he has chosen my brother has been a success. If posed with the option to reverse history and choose my life instead, I believe he would reject it. Similarly, I would not choose the path than Dan has taken. I believe that the reason for this is, while I'm sure I would like more free time and Dan wouldn't refuse a higher salary, we both made our career and life choices aware of what those choices meant. Eventually, my priorities may change, but given what most people think of my profession, I feel it is appropriate to quote John Milton (Al Pacino's character from The Devil's Advocate), "Free will, it is a bitch."

All I can say is, indeed. [Does this mean you get Connie Neilsen?--ed. Oh, shut up.]

Mickey Kaus links to this Robert Reich commentary that took my breath away because it was both blunt and correct. The key parts:

America has been losing manufacturing jobs to China, Latin America and the rest of the developing world. Right? Well, not quite. It turns out that manufacturing jobs have been disappearing all over the world. Economists at Alliance Capital Management in New York took a close look at employment trends in 20 large economies recently, and found that since 1995 more than 22 million factory jobs have disppeared.

In fact, the United States has not even been the biggest loser. Between 1995 and 2002, we lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs. But over the same period, the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. And get this: Many developing nations are losing factory jobs. During those same years, Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline.

Here’s the real surprise. China saw a 15 percent drop. China, which is fast becoming the manufacturing capital of the world, has been losing millions of factory jobs.

What’s going on? In two words: Higher productivity.

Alas, I could not find a copy of the report on Alliance Capital Management's web site (UPDATE: Ha! Found a cached version), but I did find a much longer Wall Street Journal story on it. Here's a bit more, with special reference to China:

Joseph Carson, director of global economic research at Alliance, says the reasons for the declines are similar across the globe: Gains in technology and competitive pressure have forced factories to become more efficient, allowing them to boost output with far fewer workers. Indeed, even as manufacturing employment declined, says Mr. Carson, global industrial output rose more than 30%....

The job losses in the U.S. have become a hot-button political issue in Washington. Some U.S. manufacturers and labor unions complain that American manufacturing jobs are fleeing to low-cost Asian countries, like China, which is keeping its currency cheap to make exports inexpensive. While there's no doubt some U.S. jobs are moving to China, India and some other low-cost countries abroad, Mr. Carson says that isn't the entire story.

"The argument that politicians are throwing out there is that we are losing jobs and nobody else is, and that is wrong," says Mr. Carson. "What I found is that the loss of manufacturing jobs that we have seen in the U.S. is not unique. It is part of a global trend that began many years ago."

Here's a bit more from the actual report:

One of our more interesting findings is that, taken on its own, China's job losses are double the average of the remaining 17 countries for the same seven-year period. Manufacturing employment in the 17 largest economies other than China fell a little more than 7%, from 96 million in 1995 to 89 million in 2002. In contrast, China's fell a whopping 15% in the period, from 98 million in 1995 to 83 million in 2002.

Notwithstanding the continuous influx of foreign investment and new employment, China has been unable to escape the drive toward productivity enhancement and the resultant downsizing of the manufacturing workforce. In 2002 alone, although nearly 2 million factory jobs were created, China's manufacturing employment level for the year was below 1998 and far below 1995.

Global competition has forced domestic firms to relocate offshore in order to remain competitive. But in a recent survey of domestic corrugated box makers, 40% indicated that the relocation of domestic manufacturing plants to overseas locations has caused a reduction in revenues in this cycle. (emphasis in original)

Fascinating.

Republicans are justly outraged by the contents of a leaked Democratic memo from the Intelligence committee that outlines a strategy for exposing contradictions between intelligence reports and Bush's claims about Iraqi weapons programs.

However, Josh Marshall raises the point that the Bush administration is taking unprecedented steps to withhold information from Democrats on other issues. From the Washington Post:

The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

The decision -- one that Democrats and scholars said is highly unusual -- was announced in an e-mail sent Wednesday to the staff of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. House committee Democrats had just asked for information about how much the White House spent making and installing the "Mission Accomplished" banner for President Bush's May 1 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, sent an e-mail titled "congressional questions" to majority and minority staff on the House and Senate Appropriations panels. Expressing "the need to add a bit of structure to the Q&A process," he wrote: "Given the increase in the number and types of requests we are beginning to receive from the House and Senate, and in deference to the various committee chairmen and our desire to better coordinate these requests, I am asking that all requests for information and materials be coordinated through the committee chairmen and be put in writing from the committee."

He said this would limit "duplicate requests" and help answer questions "in a timely fashion."

It would also do another thing: prevent Democrats from getting questions answered without the blessing of the GOP committee chairmen.

Now, the Democrat inquiry mentioned in the Post is in and of itself a petty request. And if you read the rest of the story, it suggests that this may be only a temporary state of affairs.

However, I'm also a strong believer in checks and balances, and this move by the White House is... well... imperial. Worse, it encourages precisely the kind of misbehavior that the Dems displayed in the Intelligence Committee. [Maybe this is Rove's brilliant strategery -- drive the Democrats so crazy that they act rashly and stupidly!--ed. Possible, but still irresponsible. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- I don't like it when one party is rendered completely incapable of competent policy articulation.]

Right around the time I was deciding whether to propose to my wife, a worry kept nagging at me -- I was still noticing other attractive women. In my mind's eye, this was a sign that maybe I would be tempted to stray, and thus not worthy enough to get married. Eventually, I decided that there was an important difference between harmless flirtations and unethical actions, so I popped the question. Best decision I've ever made.

Now, I discover that my flirtatious behavior, as well as my mild obsession with Salma Hayek, is not my fault. It's evolutionary biology, according to this Newsweek story, "Sex and Dung Beetles." The good parts:

On his Las Cruces, New Mexico, campus, [New Mexico State University psychology professor Victor] Johnston designed a computer-graphics video that illustrates the spectrum of human beauty, starting with the “hypermasculinized” face (think Schwarzenegger) and morphing gradually to the other extreme, the “hyperfeminized” face (think Kidman). Johnston has shown the video to thousands of test subjects, both men and women, and asked them to choose at which point along the spectrum they find their ideal face. Men, it turns out, unanimously pick as most attractive the face with the most feminine features, which corresponds to a woman with the most accentuated “hormonal markers.” These are facial characteristics developed during puberty from the release of estrogen, which causes the lips to swell, the jaw to narrow and the eyes to widen. These features indicate fertility, and because they’re biologically programmed, they’re common to all cultures.

Women perceive beauty in a more nuanced way. They aren’t always attracted to the hypermasculinized, bushy-eyebrowed, wide-jawed caveman type, flush with testosterone. Their choice of a mate is informed by evolutionary complexities involving not only potential fertility and health but perceived ability to protect the female’s offspring through wealth and power.

More evidence that men are hamstrung by their biology comes from psychologist Devendra Singh of the University of Texas at Austin. In a study of the female form throughout history, Singh confirmed last year that the most important feature of the female body, from the ancient Egyptians to the streetwalkers on Sunset Boulevard, has been the hip-to-waist ratio.

You can read more about Johnson's research here.

If you think about it, you have to think that the producers of NBC's Average Joe are aware of these findings -- otherwise, the show would never work. Consider the following question: would a show called "Average Jane" ever work out?

At a cocktail party recently, someone explained to me that when engaging in political argument, there's a big difference between Brits and Americans. Because the Brits have been trained to debate from an early age, they always sound more coherent and erudite when advancing their arguments. There's certainly a ring of truth to this for anyone who has ever compared Question Time in Parliament to American-style press conferences or debates.

With this in mind, a hearty congratulations to Oxblog's Josh Chafetz for agreeing at the last minute to participate in an Oxford Union against two anti-war MPs on the resolution, "This House believes that we are losing the Peace." Chafetz was arguing in the negative.

According to Steve Sachs, one of Chafetz's opponents, "described Josh's speech as the best prepared speech he had heard at the Union in 17 appearances there." Josh and two undergraduates won the argument.

Josh has now posted his speech in its entirety on his blog. I'm not going to excerpt it -- just go read the whole thing.

I'm still not convinced that there's a positive and coherent narrative coming out of Iraq, but it does remind me that there isn't a coherent negative narritive either.

Noam Scheiber has a must-read in The New Republic on the state of the art in primary campaigning. It's ostensibly a profile of Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manager. It's really about how Trippi has exploited the Internet in revolutionary ways. The key part:

Trippi is racking up a hard count most campaign operatives could only dream of--and without having to make a single phone call, knock on a single door, or send a single piece of direct mail. Every time the suits have heard about the Internet changing politics over the last ten years, their eyes have glazed over. And for good reason. Up until Howard Dean and Joe Trippi came along, the only thing I.T. had done was marginally lower the cost of doing the same things they'd always done. And it wasn't even clear it did that. But Trippi is doing something radically different.... the Dean supporters are doing the hard work of organizing for him, which means the cost per body is falling like mad. Come to think of it, the campaign is even making money in the process....

Trippi gets a perfect test of this proposition in late June, right in the middle of the $7.6 million push. Dean goes on NBC's "Meet the Press" and, according to just about every pundit in Washington, falls flat on his face. But the average Dean supporter doesn't quite see it that way. He sees the same candor and forthrightness that won him over in the first place. And, truth be told, he thinks Tim Russert is a bit of an asshole-- constantly trying to trap Dean in contradictions and hypocrisies. Furthermore, he's annoyed at how dismissive the media is when it comes to a campaign that, after all, he partly owns. Pretty soon, he's writing e-mails and ponying up more cash, trying to send a message to the people who would tread on his investment.

Decentralization leads to greater ownership, which in turn overcomes the collective action problems that plague all political campaigns.

Read the whole piece. The figures Scheiber throws around suggests that the polls in many states don't matter so much, because the raw number of Dean's supporters are astonishingly high relative to average primary turnouts [Anything about how this revolution in campaign affairs affects Dean's standing in the South?--ed. No, which offers a glimmer of hope to his opponents. But just a glimmer].

The thing is, as Scheiber notes, this revolution is confined to primaries, not general elections:

The bad news if you happen to be a Democratic partisan intent on beating George W. Bush is that there's no obvious way to organize yourself to a general-election victory. Unlike the primary, where the goal is to win over one or two million hard- core partisans, winning a general election requires something on the order of 50 million votes--many from the vast political center. Take the most successful Internet operation in history, raise it an order of magnitude, and still you don't come anywhere near the number of votes you need.

And that's under ordinary circumstances. The problem grows considerably worse when you consider that your opponent is a president who plans to raise some $200 million and who has spent four years courting his own conservative base. The combination of the two means Bush is likely to have both the money and the political latitude to woo the millions of swing voters he needs to cement his reelection.

Developing....

UPDATE: Jacob Levy has further thoughts.

A lot of commenter to this post seemed irate that I agreed with Kevin Drum that President Bush hadn't articulated the case clearly enough for why the U.S. should be in Iraq regardless of the WMD question. Several mentioned the February AEI speech.

Now, I've linked to that speech in the past -- my point was that according to the Feiler Faster Thesis that I mentioned in my previous post, this point needs to be made and remade for it to sink in, and I didn't think the President had done this since the end of the war.

Which brings us to his speech today commemorating the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. Read the whole thing, but here's the part I wanted to see:

Securing democracy in Iraq is the work of many hands. American and coalition forces are sacrificing for the peace of Iraq and for the security of free nations. Aid workers from many countries are facing danger to help the Iraqi people.

The National Endowment for Democracy is promoting women's rights and training Iraqi journalists and teaching the skills of political participation.

Iraqis themselves, police and border guards and local officials, are joining in the work and they are sharing in the sacrifice.

This is a massive and difficult undertaking. It is worth our effort. It is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes: The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world and increase dangers to the American people and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region.

Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation.

The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.

And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

Therefore the United States has adopted a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before and it will yield the same results.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Drezner also gets results from Kenneth Pollack, who properly frames the current stakes in Iraq in this comment on CNN:

KAGAN: You can't have this conversation without talking about Iraq and what's taking place in Iraq over the last year. The focus on it, it has not gone exactly like this administration had hoped it would. And many people believe this is the make-or-break country and operation in terms of whether this spread of democracy will go throughout the Middle East.

POLLACK: I think there's no question about that, Daryn. And the president hinted at it in his speech. I would have liked to have seen him put this more front and center. Whether you wanted to go into Iraq or not, whether you thought it was right or not, the simple fact of the matter is, that the entire region, the entire Middle East is now watching to see what unfolds in Iraq.

For the longest time, they basically had two options. They had the autocracy offered by their government and they had the Islamic republics offered by the Islamic fundamentalists. And here comes the United States and says, "We've got another idea. We've got another way of doing things, and that's democratization."

The U.S. is trying to do that now in Iraq. We're doing it with 130,000 troops and 100 billion of our own dollars. The rest of the region is watching to see if it succeeds. And if it succeeds, there is the chance that others will start to accept and start to move in that direction. If it fails, every Arab is going to look at it and say, the Americans tried, they tried with $100 billion, and 13,000 troops, and if it can't work in Iraq, there's on way it can work here. (emphasis added)

I've been a big fan of the Feiler Faster Thesis ever since Mickey Kaus introduced it into the lexicon three and a half years ago:

In short, political trends that used to last for weeks now last for hours. It's like watching the 1984 campaign on fast forward, except that the calendar still drags on into early June, meaning there's room for plot twists we could only dream of in 1984. To be commensurate with the speeded-up news cycle, the calendar would probably have to be compressed even more.

The reason I bring this up? The last few days, I've been seeing television ads for the DVD release of Terminator 3 -- Rise of the Machines. The movie was put into theaters just four months ago -- it was the big July 4th release.

Between then and now:

1) Speculation started about what Schwarzenegger would do is the recall succeeded.

2) The petition drive for the recall succeeded.

3) Speculation mounted that Schawrzenegger would not run in favor of Richard Riordian.

4) Scharzenegger defied the conventional wisdom and announced his candidacy.

5) The number of candidates increases to three figures.

6) Schawrzenegger seems to stumble.

7) A Ninth Circuit panel tries to delay the recall.

8) The en banc Ninth Circuit unanimously overrules the panel decision.

9) The whole Arianna Huffington experiment ended.

10) Debates were held.

11) Davis is perceived to have some momentum while Bustamante flames out.

12) The Los Angeles Times springs it's October non-surprise.

13) Davis is recalled and Schwarzenegger is elected.

So, anyway, the DVD will be released next week.

Over the last two days, two good reports on the growth of both manufacturing and services from the Institute for Supply Management.

The Philadelphia Inquirer story on manufacturing:

The nation's manufacturing sector registered its highest level of activity in nearly four years in October, according to an industry report, suggesting that the solid economic growth of the third quarter is continuing in the fourth.

In another positive sign, construction spending in September posted its best month on record, with spending by private builders also hitting a new high, the government said.

"The U.S. economy has solid momentum" carrying on into the October-to-December quarter, said Sherry Cooper, chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns.

The Institute for Supply Management reported yesterday that its manufacturing index rose to 57 last month from 53.7 in September.

It was the fourth consecutive monthly gain and pushed the index to its highest level since January 2000, when it last registered 57. The October reading was well above the 55.5 that analysts had expected.

An index reading above 50 indicates expansion; one below 50 indicates that manufacturing activity is contracting. From March through June, the index was below 50.

The service sector, which has been the mainstay of the economy during the recent lean years, is heating up even more, according to the Financial Times:

The ISM's index of non-manufacturing businesses, intended to act as a precursor of official data, rose from 63.3 in September to 64.7 - well above the 50 level intended to separate expansion from contraction. This was the fifth month in a row that the index had been above 60.

Economists were particularly encouraged by the survey of companies' staffing levels, which raised hopes of a robust increase in official non-farm payroll data, released on Friday.

The employment component of the report rose to 52.9, from 49.1 the previous month. This was the strongest employment reading since November 2000 and suggests that companies may finally be willing to hire additional staff in response to stronger growth.

Click here for ISM's own summary of the data.

Two cautionary notes. First, this data failed to impress the stock market. Second, the key question remains whether this boom in production translates into an increase in job creation. Again from the FT:

Ethan Harris, chief US economist at Lehman Brothers, said the ISM employment index had a poor correlation with the official figures.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, said that employment growth would continue to be slowed by the relocation of jobs abroad by US companies and by tax incentives to invest rather than hire. "It may be over a year before we start to see really strong jobs growth," he said

Developing....

UPDATE: Josh Chafetz links to more good economic news.

Kevin Drum saves a post by linking to me, so let me return the favor -- he's dead-on in this post:

Although bloggers and the political media have been talking for a while about the allegedly real reasons we're in Iraq — drain the swamp, war of civilizations, reduce pressure on Israel's flank, the domino theory of bringing democracy to the Middle East, etc. etc. — it's true that George Bush has not once put his name to any of this stuff, has he?....

Why doesn't Bush tell us why it's important to stay in Iraq? I mean really tell us. Not just in negative terms ("we won't be scared away") but in positive terms of what his goal is. What does he really, truly want to accomplish?

And why are his conservative supporters letting him get away with staying silent? Surely they must know that America's willingness to expend hundreds of lives and billions of dollars depends on believing that our goal is worth it. The longer that Bush avoids talking about it, the more likely it is that public support will decline and the cherished goals of the national greatness conservatives will go up in smoke.

Indeed.

In the conclusion to the Atrios-Donald Luskin dust-up from last week, both Atrios and Donald Luskin have posted a joint statement on their blogs. The key thing is that Luskin has "retracting his demand letter."

Good for both of them. It's refreshing to see that informal norms of civility can surmount the urge to legalize disputes.

I only wish that Luskin had come to this conclusion earlier. In his puursuit of Krugman at all costs, he contributes to a situation that Eric Alterman's arguments in the Nation acquire a whiff of plausibility:

Conservatives, and some not so conservatives, are testing out a new thesis in their effort to shut out ideas that make them uncomfortable: Any attempt to analyze the origins of a distasteful phenomenon is tantamount to endorsing it. Whether the problem is global terrorism or anti-Semitism, the message is the same. "It's bad. It must be condemned. That's all we need to know."

Now, Alterman conveniently omits the following facts:

However, because Alterman could point to Luskin as evidence for his broad swipe, he could safely ignore the more substantive critiques.

Alterman link via Andrew Sullivan, who points out at least one absurdity in the article.

I had not blogged about Deputy Undersectrtary of Defense for Intelligence [and Lieutenant General] Jerry Boykin's controversial remarks about Islam and the tepid administration response, mostly because I was distracted by Mahathir Mohammed's controversial remarks. [Ahem, some conservatives are arguing that the administration is turning on Boykin--ed. He's still got his position, and on the whole the response has been lacksadaisical despite the attention his remarks received in the Middle East].

In contrast, consider this example from Germany, as reported in the Chicago Tribune:

The German Defense Ministry fired a respected army general Tuesday for praising a conservative politician under criminal investigation for remarks that were widely regarded as anti-Semitic.

Defense Minister Peter Struck dismissed Brig. Gen. Reinhard Guenzel over a letter the general allegedly sent last month to Christian Democrat lawmaker Martin Hohmann, who in a recent speech compared Jews in the 1917 Russian revolution to Nazis. The remarks ignited a political uproar as this nation once again confronted its Nazi past and debated questions over how sensitive today's Germans should be in criticizing Jews.

In his letter, Guenzel thanked Hohmann for "an extraordinary speech with the courage to say the truth which has become rare in our country." He added: "You can be sure that you exactly express the feelings of a majority of our people. I hope you don't let yourself be shaken by the accusations mainly from the left-wing camp."

Now, both Boykin and Guenzel are perfectly entitled to hold the views they hold. However, I agree with Eugene Volokh and Phil Carter that someone holding a position of their rank could and should have been -- at a minimum -- reassigned for what he said, because it substantially interfered with the government's mission.

They seem to recognize that fact in Germany. I'm starting to wonder what one has to say in the Bush administration before disciplinary action is taken.

UPDATE: The comments below take up some religious questions about the theological origins of the God of monotheistic religions. Of course, now I discover that Yahweh and Allah have their own blogs. Go check them out. WARNING -- SENSE OF HUMOR REQUIRED.

I've received a lot of e-mail traffic from the Slate piece on whether there was systemic corruption in the awarding of official reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Half of them raise the following point:* even if there's no systemic pattern of corruption, it is true that Halliburton and Bechtel received big, fat, cost-plus contracts of indefinite duration. Clearly, these firms are closely linked to this administration. Isn't this a specific example of corruption?

This is definitely a valid question. My answer here is a bit murkier, but I still say no. The best source on this beyond the CPI report is Dan Baum's June 22nd story, "Nation Builders for Hire," in the New York Times Magazine.

If you read that article and the CPI report, you discover three things:

1) Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) got the current contracts because of path dependence. Because KBR got contracts in the past, it increased the likelihood of getting them now. Consider this paragraph from Baum's story:

The Army says KBR got the Iraqi oil-field contract without having to compete for it because, according to the Army's classified contingency plan for repairing Iraq's infrastructure, KBR was the only company with the skills, resources and security clearances to do the job on short notice. Who wrote the Army's contingency plan? KBR. It was in a position to do so because it holds another contract that is poorly understood yet in many ways more important, and potentially bigger, than the one to repair the oil fields: the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, which essentially turns KBR into a kind of for-profit Ministry of Public Works for the Army. Under Logcap, which KBR won in open bidding in 2001, KBR is on call to the Army for 10 years to do a lot of the things most people think soldiers do for themselves -- from fixing trucks to warehousing ammunition, from delivering mail to cleaning up hazardous waste. K.P. is history; KBR civilians now peel potatoes, and serve them, at many installations. KBR does the laundry. It fixes the pipes and cleans the sewers, generates the power and repairs the wiring. It built some of the bases used in the Iraq war. (emphasis added)

2) The people who work at Kellogg, Brown & Root are pretty good at their job. One example from Baum:

Proponents of contracting make the point that as the the overall size of the military shrinks, the ''tooth'' needs to increase relative to the ''tail,'' or, as one analyst put it, ''You want the 82nd Airborne training to kill people and blow things up, not cleaning latrines or trimming hedges.'' They also argue it's cheaper to hire contractors to do short-term work rather than have the military maintain full-time capabilities it needs only briefly.

A good example is Camp Arifjan, a U.S. Army base about 90 minutes southwest of Kuwait City. Six months ago, this was nothing but a small collection of buildings that was supposed to be a training base. On Oct. 11 -- the day Congress gave President Bush authority to wage war on Iraq -- someone in the Pentagon picked up a phone and told KBR it had nine weeks to turn Arifjan into a full-blown Army base for 7,000 people. The job went to Robert (Butch) Gatlin, a wizened 59-year-old Tennessean who served 32 years in the Army Corps of Engineers before coming to perform the same work, at much greater pay, for KBR.

''When we got here, there was no power or water,'' Gatlin said as we stepped from the air-conditioned trailer that is KBR's Arifjan headquarters into the blinding desert sun. Within about 72 hours of the Pentagon's call, Gatlin had a handful of KBR specialists -- electricians, carpenters, plumbers -- on planes headed here. Most of the rest were hired locally. ''I had a thousand people working here in 24 hours,'' he said. ''The Army can't do that.''

If you read the article in it's entirety, it's clear that comparative advantage for KBR is not necessarily cost-efficiency but speed. Baum concludes, "There is no question that companies like KBR are up to the job."

3) KBR's ability to win contracts they get emerged prior to the Bush administration taking office. Again from Baum:

In 1992 the Defense Department, under Dick Cheney, hired Brown & Root to write a classified report detailing how private companies could help the military logistically in the world's hot spots. Not long after, the Pentagon awarded the first five-year Logcap -- to Brown & Root. Then Bill Clinton won the election, and Cheney, in 1995, became C.E.O. of Halliburton, Brown & Root's parent company. A lot of Halliburton's business depends on foreign customers getting loans from U.S. banks, which are in turn guaranteed by the government's trade-promoting Export-Import Bank. In the five years before Cheney took the helm, the Ex-Im Bank guaranteed $100 million in loans so foreign customers could buy Halliburton's services; during Cheney's five years as C.E.O., that figure jumped to $1.5 billion.

So, the big jump in KBR's contracts takes place under the Clinton administration. By Clinton's second term, "one of every seven Pentagon dollars passed through KBR."

Why the dramatic increase under Clinton? Blame Al Gore. Well, not really, but sort of. According to this section of the CPI report:

At one time, federal agencies constructed buildings, built machines and cleaned offices themselves, or found another agency to do it. Today, the U.S. government spends some $200 billion a year buying everything from information technology services to pencils to advanced weapons systems from the private sector.

The Defense Department alone accounts for 75 percent of that spending. Following a series of scandals in the 1980s, where the Pentagon was revealed to have paid outrageous sums for commercially available products, Congress decided to overhaul government procurement. The result was the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, which simplified the maze of procurement regulations to make it easier for federal agencies to buy products from the private sector.

The new law dovetailed with former Vice President Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiative, which aimed to trim the federal workforce, and matched the realities of the Pentagon's shrinking budget. As a result, where the federal workforce has shrunk, the contractor workforce has grown.

Matthew Yglesias makes a similar point:

By and large, the Bush administration is following the law and using all the procedures the law lays out. The trouble is that the laws are bad. We've privatized significant portions of government operations in areas where there is no need for doing so. In principle, privatization might lead to competition and cost savings for the taxpayer. In practice, in many of these areas there is no competition -- Halliburton and Bechtel are essentially monopoly suppliers in the fields where they've won contracts. When you outsource services to private monopolies, all you're setting yourself up for is the busting of some public sector unions and some price-gouging at the hands of monopolist corporations. (emphasis added)

I agree completely with Yglesias that there should be a full debate about whether contracting has gone too far. I'd disagree with him, but it's a perfectly proper topic for discussion.

The corruption claim, however, is far weaker.

UPDATE: For a good discussion of these issues, see this transcript from last night's NewsHour. One point made by former Major General Patrick Kelly:

In the case of one of the companies that was cited by Mr. Lewis, which is Kellogg Brown and Root, they, they, the Army and the Corps of Engineers exercised an existing contract with the Army that I might point out was consummated during the Clinton administration. It was not consummated in this administration. And they took that existing contract and then they realized that Kellogg, Brown and Root had the necessary skills, they were in the MidEast, and they could immediately go into Iraq and help restore the oil service industry, which is why they were selected. But they were not given a special contract. They already had that contract.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jon Henke at QandO takes a look at Halliburton's 3rd quarter statement from this year, and notes the following sentence, "Total company revenue and operating income from Iraq-related work in the third quarter were $900 million and $34 million, respectively."

As Jon puts it:

Yep, a profit margin of less than 4%. Good times are here again.

Look, I've no doubt that there is a degree of "politics" involved in the decision-making process. That's true for every industry. I've also no doubt that there is a lot of waste. It is, after all, government.

But the allegations that this is a "pay off" for friends and supporters is simply unsupported.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Adesnik links to this Washington Post op-ed by Steven Kelman, who served from 1993 to 1997 as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. The key bits:

One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded -- whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an independent academic expert -- who doesn't regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd.

The premise of the accusations is completely contrary to the way government contracting works, both in theory and in practice. Most contract award decisions are made by career civil servants, with no involvement by political appointees or elected officials. In some agencies, the "source selection official" (final decision-maker) on large contracts may be a political appointee, but such decisions are preceded by such a torrent of evaluation and other backup material prepared by career civil servants that it would be difficult to change a decision from the one indicated by the career employees' evaluation.

Having served as a senior procurement policymaker in the Clinton administration, I found these charges (for which no direct evidence has been provided) implausible....

The whiff of scandal manufactured around contracting for Iraq obviously has been part of the political battle against the administration's policies there (by the way, I count myself as rather unsympathetic to these policies). But this political campaign has created extensive collateral damage. It undermines public trust in public institutions, for reasons that have no basis in fact. It insults the career civil servants who run our procurement system.

Perhaps most tragically, it could cause mismanagement of the procurement system. Over the past decade we have tried to make procurement more oriented toward delivering mission results for agencies and taxpayers, rather than focusing on compliance with detailed bureaucratic process requirements. The charges of Iraq cronyism encourage the system to revert to wasting time, energy and people on redundant, unnecessary rules to document the nonexistence of a nonproblem.

If Iraqi contracting fails, it will be because of poorly structured contracts or lack of good contract management -- not because of cronyism in the awarding process.

Yep.

*So, what are the other half of the e-mails like?--ed. They're mostly of the "you're a partisan hack" variety, a fact that should amuse my regular group of cantankerous readers.

My first TNR Online essay back in February disputed the notion that the Bush administration was instinctively unilateralist. In Reason this week, Jonathan Rauch picks up this theme in "Bush Is No Cowboy," a critique of Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay's new book, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. (link via Glenn Reynolds). The key grafs:

Obviously much of the world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but to speak of America as isolated or Bush as unilateralist seems an exaggeration, to be charitable. The administration tried hard to get the Security Council to put teeth in its own resolutions against Saddam Hussein. It went to the council not once but twice, when unilateralists said the right number of times was zero. It received support from dozens of countries, including some European biggies (Britain, Spain, Italy, Poland). It sought and obtained the Security Council's blessing for the occupation. It received $13 billion in reconstruction pledges from many countries. It is getting help from 24,000 foreign troops in Iraq, most of them British and Polish, but with support from more than 30 countries. (More than 50 foreign soldiers have died in Iraq.)

And on other fronts? The administration is insisting on a multilateral approach to North Korea—not grudgingly, as NPR's Shuster would have it, but in the teeth of allies' reluctance to get involved. It is trying to mobilize the United Nations on Iran. It has set up a multilateral Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict weapons, with France and Germany among the eight European participants. It recently won a multilateral agreement with 20 Asian and Pacific countries to curb the trade in shoulder-fired missiles.

Bush is not going it alone. He is setting his agenda and then looking for support, rather than the other way around. That is what presidents and countries typically do.

I completely agree that in terms of style, Bush's diplomacy has verged on God-awful. However, Rauch is correct on the substance.

This post is going after three audiences:

A) Loyal blog readers: My critique of the Center for Public Integrity's report has turned into this Slate article. Go check it out!!

B) New Slate readers: Stay for a while -- check out the site. There's a lot about politics and foreign policy, but there are also posts about porn, a list of quality book recommendations, posts that discuss the Hilton sisters, and adorable beagle pictures -- all the colors of the rainbow!! [You're shameless!--ed. Hey, I'm just working the room here!]

C) Those who want more about the CPI report: The following is tailored for those who are still skeptical about my argument. First, click over to my Friday post on the subject. Second, here are some additional rejoinders:

Q: The CPI report did not just argue that campaign contributions determined the awarding of reconstruction contracts. It also implied that insider connections determined who got the contracts.

A: "Implied" is the key word. Windfalls of War has little evidence to back up this assertion. For that, the CPI authors would have to provide a case of a firm being awarded a contract not on the grounds of merit but due to its political connections or campaign contributions. Such a case is not provided.

For example, a subsection of the report, "A Family Connection," looks at the circumstances surrounding the awarding of an Iraq contract to Sullivan Haave Associates, a “a one-man shop run by a government consultant named Terry Sullivan.” Sullivan’s wife is Carol Haave, who has been deputy assistant secretary of defense for security and information operations for the past two years. The clear implication is that Haave wrangled the contract for Sullivan.

However, the report provides not one scintilla of evidence to prove this charge beyond the husband-wife relationship.* Both Haave and Sullivan deny the allegation to CPI. Furthermore, the report acknowledges that Sullivan Haave Associates received two contracts worth $178,000 from the Department of Defense in the two years before Haave took office. This suggests, at a minimum, that Sullivan must have been competent enough to win Pentagon bids from a Democratic administration, even without his wife in office.

Q: In the Slate piece, you point out that the bivariate correlation between campaign contributions and contract size is pretty much nonexistent. Surely, however, once you take into account other explanatory factors, campaign contributions might be more significant?

A: Excellent point -- the distinction between bivariate and multivariate tests.

As a backup, I ran a mulivariate OLS regression with contract size as the dependent variable and the two independent variables provided in the CPI report -- campaign contributions and past contract awards. This variable should act as a good control, since it explicitly measures past success at wrangling contracts from the government and implicitly acts as a proxy for company size [Why would that matter?--ed. One would expect larger firms to win larger contracts in part because they have the administrative capacity to manage them].

The results? Unchanged. [NOTE: the rest of this graf is for stats geeks only.] Campaign contributions take a positive but statistically insignificant coefficient. More importantly, an F-test cannot reject the null hypothesis that the regression is insignificant. The r-squared of .0643 highlights the insignificance of campaign contributions as an explanatory variable.

Q: Is there anything in the CPI report that's worth taking seriously?

A: Ironically, the part of the report that suggests disorganization in the procurement process is far more convincing. The reconstruction bids for Afghanistan and Iraq have been scattered among three agencies: from DoD, State, and USAID. The report notes, "Based on the findings, it did not appear that any one government agency knew the total number of contractors or what they were doing." This anecdote provides an excellent example:

According to information provided by USAID under a Freedom of Information request, Chemonics was contracted to work in Afghanistan for just over $600 million. That total would rank Chemonics third among all U.S. contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, behind only Halliburton and Bechtel. However, the company disputed that total when contacted, at first insisting it had three contracts with USAID worth just $133.9 million, then changing its figures a day later to say that one multiyear contract it had originally put at nearly $1.2 million actually had a potential worth of $35 million for work in Afghanistan and several other countries.

Getting clarification of the numbers from USAID was difficult. "I don’t know where the FOIA office got that information," said one USAID press officer. Chemonics refused to release copies of its contracts, and a Center FOIA request for the contracts is pending. After several queries, the FOIA office told the Center that the contract it had listed as being worth $600 million was actually worth between $599,000 and $1.2 million, which was still inconsistent with the numbers Chemonics provided.

"We don't dispute it," Chemonics spokesperson Denise Felix told the Center when asked about the USAID number. "It is not accurate for us."

[Why is this ironic?--ed. Because the primary thrust of Windfalls of War is that the process is riddled with malfeasance rather than disorganization. The notion that there was a conscious effort to reward Bush cronies with lucrative government contracts would require a lot more centralized coordination than the CPI report uncovers.]

UPDATE: Those who care about the statistical methodologies involved should read these excellent comments by Ethan Ligon here, here, and here(Haynes Goddard has a post that makes a similar point). I respond here and here, to Ethan's satisfaction, I believe.

* For those who believe that the personal relationship between Sullivan and Haave reveal an obvious link, ask yourself the following question -- does this mean that the CIA dispatched Joseph Wilson to Niger merely because he was married to Valerie Plame, a NOC who worked on the nonproliferation division of the Central Intelligence Agency? [You saying there's something to that allegation?--ed. No, I think both of them are absurd.] Why is one allegation different than the other?

As I said last week in my TNR Online essay, "these are not the best of times to be an advocate of economic globalization." Case in point: David Brooks' Saturday column on Richard Gephardt. The key section:

[T]he issue that Gephardt is most passionate about, which gets the heads bobbing most vociferously, is trade. At the climax of his speech, Gephardt describes his visits to factory towns in Mexico and China, where he saw factory workers living in shipping boxes with raw sewage running through the streets.

He describes his meeting with Bill Clinton at which he told the president he would not support Nafta unless there were international standards built in. He ridicules his Democratic opponents for their primary-season conversions on the issue. Sure, they are against free-trade pacts now, he points out, "but I was there when the jobs were on the line!"

Heads are bobbing all around.

The fact is, he's won. For three decades the Democrats have been split on trade, but you'd never know it from this campaign. Just as the Democratic field is chasing Howard Dean on Iraq, it is chasing Dick Gephardt on trade — and repudiating Clinton. It is impossible to imagine the next Democratic presidential candidate pushing free-trade deals the way the last one did....

[H]e's made his trade position politically palatable. He used to project himself as an economic nationalist — as the protector of American jobs against those low-wage foreigners. Now he presents himself as a global liberal, insisting on international environmental and worker standards before trade deals are signed. The policy results are the same — more trade barriers — but now it sounds more humane.

Pop quiz for Gephardt -- you said back in February:

At many points in the last half century, our nation has faced a choice between taking a global leadership role or reverting to the illusory security of isolation, as we did after World War I. To our great benefit, our leaders have repeatedly committed themselves to the first path through their keen understanding of America’s long-term interests, their constant recognition that the United States must be engaged in world events, and their sustained efforts to draw other nations to our cause and the values that guide it.

I am determined to further this tradition of committed leadership and have pursued such a course in international affairs throughout my career.

How do you plan on reconciling your protectionist trade proposals with continuing "America's leadership role?"

[You do know he's not going to answer -- you know that Brooks' thesis is that politically, this message is selling in the primaries--ed. Hence my mood.]

The "general interest" book for this month is one of my favorite cookbooks -- Seductions of Rice, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. It's a global cookbook, providing myriad rice recipes from a diverse set of cooking traditions. This includes Chinese stir-frys, Spanish paellas, Japanese sushi, Cuban soups, Indian thorans, Thai salads, Turkish pilafs, Italian risottos, Uzbek plovs, Senegalese yassas, and American gumbos. For those who like to cook new things, give it a read.

[UPDATE: Josh Chafetz has fun with ellipses. I think he's been reading too much of The Boondocks as of late.]

The international relations book has been selected in the wake of reading David Rieff's New York Times Magazine cover story on the failures in the pre-war planning for the post-war occupation of Iraq. As someone who's followed this closely, I'd say that Rieff's story is a decent summary of the facts as we currently know them, with the occasional touch of exaggeration.

So, the international relations book choice for November is Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Graham Allison.* This is probably the one "political science" book that real-live foreign policy professionals ever claim to have read.

In the book, Allison outlines three possible models to explain U.S. and Soviet behavior during the crisis. Model I is the rational choice paradigm, which gets short shrift.

Model II is based on a theory of organizational process that argues large bureaucracies operate along standard operating procedures from which deviations are rare. This describes Rieff's point in the story about how the uniformed military services, with a long history of disdain for non-combat operations, failed to plan properly for the occupation phase.

Securing Iraq militarily after victory on the battlefield was, in the Pentagon's parlance, Phase IV of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Phases I through III were the various stages of the invasion itself; Phase IV involved so-called stability and support operations -- in other words, the postwar. The military itself, six months into the occupation, is willing to acknowledge -- at least to itself -- that it did not plan sufficiently for Phase IV. In its secret report ''Operation Iraqi Freedom: Strategic Lessons Learned,'' a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Times in August, the Department of Defense concedes that ''late formation of Department of Defense [Phase IV] organizations limited time available for the development of detailed plans and pre-deployment coordination...."

Without a plan, without meticulous rehearsal and without orders or, at the very least, guidance from higher up the chain of command, the military is all but paralyzed. And in those crucial first postwar days in Baghdad, American forces (and not only those in the Third Infantry Division) behaved that way, as all around them Baghdad was ransacked and most of the categories of infrastructure named in the report were destroyed or seriously damaged....

It is hardly a secret that within the Army, peacekeeping duty is not the road to career advancement. Civil-affairs officers are not the Army's ''high-fliers."

Allison's Model III is bureaucratic politics, the "pulling and hauling" of policy among different bureaucracies with different agendas. Rieff's discussion of the internecine struggles between State and Defense show how bureaucratic politics can lead to the compartmentalization of information:

Although [Iraqi-American lawyer Feisal] Istrabadi is an admirer of [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, he says that the rivalry between State and Defense was so intense that the Future of Iraq Project became anathema to the Pentagon simply because it was a State Department project. ''At the Defense Department,'' he recalls, ''we were seen as part of 'them.''' Istrabadi was so disturbed by the fight between Defense and State that on June 1, 2002, he says, he took the matter up personally with [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Douglas Feith. ''I sat with Feith,'' he recalls, ''and said, 'You've got to decide what your policy is.'''

The Future of Iraq Project did draw up detailed reports, which were eventually released to Congress last month and made available to reporters for The New York Times. The 13 volumes, according to The Times, warned that ''the period immediately after regime change might offer . . . criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting.''

But the Defense Department, which came to oversee postwar planning, would pay little heed to the work of the Future of Iraq Project. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired Army officer who was later given the job of leading the reconstruction of Iraq, says he was instructed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to ignore the Future of Iraq Project.

There is a bias in the field of international relations in favor of "systemic"-level theories, so the bureaucratic politics paradigm has made little progress since Allison first published Essence of Decision in 1971.** This is unfortunate, as Rieff's conclusion highlights how relevant this theory is for real-world politics:

Call it liberation or occupation, a dominating American presence in Iraq was probably destined to be more difficult, and more costly in money and in blood, than administration officials claimed in the months leading up to the war. But it need not have been this difficult. Had the military been as meticulous in planning its strategy and tactics for the postwar as it was in planning its actions on the battlefield, the looting of Baghdad, with all its disastrous material and institutional and psychological consequences, might have been stopped before it got out of control. Had the collective knowledge embedded in the Future of Iraq Project been seized upon, rather than repudiated by, the Pentagon after it gained effective control of the war and postwar planning a few months before the war began, a genuine collaboration between the American authorities and Iraqis, both within the country and from the exiles, might have evolved.

*Allison's co-author on the second edition of this book is Philip Zelikow.

**Allison didn't help matters with his work following the publication of Essence of Decision. In later review articles he conflated his Model II and Model III, to the confusion of many. Then, in his second edition of the book, he and Zelikow abjectly failed to engage in the best critique of the first edition: Jonathan Bendor and Thomas Hammond, "Rethinking Allison's Models"
American Political Science Review 86:2 (June 1992): 301-322.

If you really want to see something else published recently about bureaucratic politics, click here.