Author Page for Robert Farley

What did Jackson do to earn that money?

I agree with Jack Shafer that the New York Times was out of line in allowing this gratuitous cheap shot against Peter Jackson.

Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker who did the impossible on Lord of the Rings. … But there’s a certain piggishness involved here. New Line already gave him enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it’s still not enough for him.

At issue here is whether New Line can sell certain marketing rights to other Time Warner sections at discount prices. Jackson gets a percentage of those sales, so when the rights are sold at below market value, Jackson loses money. Without knowing too much about the business, it seems to me that Jackson is entirely in the right, and precedent seems to suggest that his lawsuit will be successful.

The cheap shot above brings up another issue, however, which is that of fair compensation. When I first read the article, I was reminded of the contention, often made by talking heads of various stripes, that athletes are overpaid. The unnamed source above is making precisely the same argument as the sportswriter who decries every negotiating tactic that Roger Clemens employs by suggesting that Clemens “already has enough money.”

This is rather an odd argument when you think about it. Money does not, after all, appear out of thin air. Neither Roger Clemens nor Peter Jackson are taking money from the mouths of orphans. If Clemens makes $6 million instead of $16 million, someone else gets to keep the $10 million difference. Strangely enough, the person writing the check is often (and in fact, I believe, always) richer than the person receiving the check.

However, no one ever seems to suggest that the owner of the Houston Astros has too much money. No one seems to suggest that Time Warner has too much money. The talking heads only seem to complain when the artists and the athletes make absurd sums, and never when the execs and the shareholders take home huge profits. Indeed, the sports intelligentsia has even managed to convince itself that high ticket prices are the fault of the athletes rather than the owners who set the prices, even though this is logically impossible.

I wonder, is it possible that even our liberal media is more friendly to corporate elites and billionaire team owners than to artists and athletes?

From Ordinary Villainy to Cartoonish Super-Villainy

You’ve got to be kidding me.

But to some Capitol Hill Republicans there is a dark cloud on the Nats’ horizon: the potential that their newly adopted home team could be purchased by billionaire financier George Soros.

Earlier this month, Soros joined an ownership bid being led by entrepreneur Jonathan Ledecky. Their group is one of more than a half-dozen angling to take over the Nats, who are currently owned by Major League Baseball.

In addition to being a well-known currency speculator and philanthropist, Soros is also known in political circles for having pumped more than $20 million in the last cycle into groups seeking to unseat President Bush and elect Democrats.

While the Soros-Ledecky group is not seen as the frontrunner to win the bidding for the Nationals, who should be awarded to their new owner at the end of the 2005 season, the very prospect that Soros could have a stake in the team is enough to irritate Congressional Republicans.

“I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes,” said Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (R), the Northern Virginia lawmaker who recently convened high-profile steroid hearings. “I don’t think they want to get involved in a political fight.”

Davis, whose panel also oversees District of Columbia issues, said that if a Soros sale went through, “I don’t think it’s the Nats that get hurt. I think it’s Major League Baseball that gets hurt. They enjoy all sorts of exemptions” from anti-trust laws.

Indeed, Hill Republicans could potentially make life difficult for MLB in a variety of ways. In addition to being exempt from anti-trust rules, baseball is still under scrutiny over the steroid issue. The Nats, meanwhile, hope to have a publicly-funded stadium built soon, though money for that venture is expected to come through the sale of bonds rather than a federal outlay.

Still, Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), vice chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that covers the District of Columbia budget, said if Soros buys the team and seeks public funding for the new stadium or anything else, the GOP attitude would be, “Let him pay for it.”

“We’re not going to interfere with [the sale], but from a fan’s perspective, who needs the politics?” Sweeney said.

Another senior Republican lawmaker who requested anonymity said that the league should be aware of the perception problem that might be associated with selling the Nats to Soros.

“Why would Major League Baseball want to get involved with George Soros?” said the lawmaker. “It’s about more than just the sale price.”

I’m all in favor of baseball owners being barred from political advocacy, politics, and running for political office. As long, of course, as we make that ban retroactive.

Look for the talking heads to nod and agree that baseball should remain apolitical, and that advocates like George Soros shouldn’t become involved, all the while failing to notice that virtually all of the owners of baseball teams are committed Republicans who donate tremendous sums of money to the Republican Party. That they do so while whining incessantly about the lack of public funding for their businesses only drags us farther into the realm of the absurd.

Kitten Porn

This is the kind of brawl o’ blog that I like:

It has come to our editorial attention that certain parties want to make a name for themselves in the kitten game by stepping to us with some pictures of tattered, worn-out, raggedy-ass pussy cats. When you’ve been pimping kittens for as long as we have, you get a rep, and there’s always someone who wants to jump up to the big time by taking you out. It’s an old story, and we’ve heard it too many times already. If we wanted to be cruel, we’d say something about how when people say “look what the cat dragged in”, those cats probably dragged it in. But we don’t want to be cruel; we just want to be real. And we want to send a message, so everybody knows exactly how we play the kitten game.

Kitten Porn

Yesterday

Damn Freaky Cats

Helter Skelter

Land of the Dead

Zombies.

ZOMBIES.

ZOMBIES!!!

ZZZOMMMBBBBIESSSSSSS!!!!!!!

I think we can all agree that George W. Bush is not the President to lead us against the zombie menace. Moreover, I concede that I would consider rampant zombie attacks more than enough cause to enlist in the US Army. Call me a hypocrite.

For those skeptical, shut up. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are immortal classics, and not just of the genre. Day of the Dead. . . eh, I could take it or leave it. If Land of the Dead is just somewhere in between the previous films, I will be pleased.

Friday Cat Blogging. . . Stromboli 

Last Point on Gilliard

What I find most irritating about Gilliard and co. is the profound misunderstanding of the military, what it does, and what it should be. The logic of “if you believe in a war, you enlist” leads to a politically and ideologically charged military organization of exactly the type that we DON’T want, especially if we’re on the left. While it is impossible to keep politics completely out of the military (or the military completely out of politics) it is certainly desirable to minimize the contact between the worlds as much as possible. Military officers should make military decisions, not political ones, and shouldn’t evaluate the political decisions of civilian leaders, even in approval.

A military officer is a professional, just like a doctor, lawyer, or bureaucrat. The same goes for the most experienced enlisted men. The officer corps of the United States military represents one of the most capable and well educated segments of the American population. Moreover, they are drawn from all strata of society (as are the enlisted men). Their duty, as professionals, is to serve their client, which is the United States government. It is better that they serve their client in a non-ideological, professional manner. Claims that “if you believe in the war, you have to enlist” completely misunderstand the purpose of the professional military, especially the officer corps.

The military should have a commitment to serving the civilian leaders of the United States. Ideally, they should take no stance on POLITICAL decisions, of which launching a war is one. Of course, this ideal will never be met, but it is hardly in the interests of progressives to glorify the ideological component of a military organization.

Oh, and yes, I considered military service very strongly back in 1991, when I was about to graduate from high school. I was interested in both West Point and Annapolis, and they were interested in me. What made me decide against military service was not cowardice, as least not in the sense that Steve Gilliard is using the term, and certainly wasn’t “entitlement”. Rather, it seemed to me that I would make a piss poor military officer, and that I lacked the discipline for military life. The course of my life since 1992 has done nothing to dissuade me of that belief. So yes, if I were drafted I would serve, but I have very good reason to think that there are a lot of people who can do this job much better than I could. I would like to think I have a bit of talent for teaching, and after all we need teachers too. . .

Now I’m done with this garbage. Believe what you want.

Jeb Stuart

I didn’t have much use for the Russell Shorto article in this week’s NYT magazine, which came to the stunning conclusion that Christian conservatives oppose gay marriage because they don’t care for gay people (knock me over with a feather, Russ). However, this passage stood out:

It may have been March, but the Christmas lights were still up. ”The grandchildren like them,” Evalena Gray said. She and her husband, Jim, both semiretired opticians, had invited me to their home in Charlotte Hall, a town in the region of southern Maryland that once made its money from tobacco and oysters but now relies on tourism and high-tech industry. The Grays have converted their basement — paneled, wall-to-wall-carpeted, decorated with Jim Gray’s Confederate memorabilia (a portrait of Jeb Stuart, framed currency) and the twinkling lights — into an office. They each have a desk here, stacked with brochures and books and buttons. Evalena is Maryland’s grass-roots director for Concerned Women for America; she and her husband devote all of their spare hours to convincing fellow citizens of the danger that the institution of marriage is facing. As I visited, they were organizing buses to transport people to an anti-gay-marriage rally that was to be held in the state capital two days later. ”The threat to traditional marriage will affect our society more than any other issue that’s come up,” Evalena said. ”We’re just fighting with everything we have.”

Why doesn’t it surprise me that people who hate gays have an affection for Confederate paraphenalia?

Korea in 2002

Great.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, in a previously undisclosed message to President Bush in November 2002, said the United States and North Korea ”should be able to resolve the nuclear issue in compliance with the demands of the new century,” according to two private U.S. Korea experts who delivered Kim’s message to the White House.

But the administration spurned engagement with Kim who, in response, the authors said, moved within weeks to expel the U.N. inspectors from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reopen plutonium facilities that had been shut down since 1994 under an agreement with the Clinton administration.

In American foreign policy, “toughness” has value in and of itself. That’s a pity, because while “toughness” is often a good policy, it isn’t always a good policy.

On the Occupation

I’ve been reluctant to take this on, both because I’m working on a couple of other projects (my China series, as well as genuine academic work), and because it’s irrelevant to the dispute with Gilliard, but I suppose that I should lay out my own position on Iraq. That my position is in flux only adds to the difficulty.

Disclaimer: If you are intending to respond to this by referring to me as a coward, shameless, gutless, dishonorable, or whatever else you learned from Steve Gilliard, please don’t. You’re wasting my time and yours. If you’d like to respond with a thoughtful critique, please do so.

I have been moving over the last month toward the position that Scott describes in the comments below, which involves setting a definite date for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq. My timeline is probably a bit more extended than Scott’s, and it would be fair to say that I haven’t quite overcome my reservations about withdrawal. Why?

The Iraqi insurgency is bad news. As much as it pains me to say, Christopher Hitchens is right when he argues that the NLF (National Liberation Front, more commonly known as the Viet Cong) was a different critter than the current insurgency. The NLF had a political organization, and acted as a shadow government with a public arm. It had a public face that could be negotiated with. It had clear goals, and the means it employed supported those goals. It had a unified command structure, such that one hand knew what the other was doing. While the NLF did employ violence against civilians, it did so in a careful and measured manner.

The Iraqi insurgency lacks these characteristics. It has no public face. It cannot, apparently, be negotiated with. It has no public goals beyond US withdrawal, and no one, including the Iraqis, believe that it will lay down its arms upon that withdrawal. It employs violence indiscriminately against civilian targets. The central end of its activity seems to be to start a civil war between Shiite and Sunni forces in Iraq. The political structure most easily imaginable, given the constellation of groups involved in the insurgency, would be that of an authoritarian fundamentalist state.

In short, whereas it wasn’t difficult to imagine the situation in South Vietnam improving after the victory of the NLF (if only because the fighting was over), it’s pretty damn difficult to imagine the Iraqi insurgency taking over the state and operating in anything close to a responsible manner. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the constellation of groups involved in the insurgency ever coming together to produce any kind of unified political movement that could then produce a state. Add to this the problem that Shiite elements in Iraq will fight very hard for a very long time to prevent a new Sunni-dominated state, and you have a recipe for a war that could last a very long time and kill lots and lots of people.

This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if I believed that the current Iraqi state could deal with the insurgency, but I have no reason for such optimism. The US Army and US Marine Corps are exceptional military forces that do poorly in counter-insurgency conflicts (at least the former; the latter is more debatable). They have thus far been unable to defeat the Sunni insurgency, or really even to notably slow it down. Iraqi forces, as presently constituted, are almost certain to be less effective against the insurgency than the US organizations. There are several reasons for this, some having to due with short periods of training, others to do with low morale, but the most important reason is that the Iraqi forces are almost completely US trained. The US Army can’t do counter-insurgency, and certainly can’t teach it. The Iraqi Army will be even worse than the US, because it has poor doctrine AND it lacks all the other advantages that the US organizations have.

Thus, I expect that any withdrawal will result in a very bad insurgency going up against less than competent state forces. The prognosis for success is very, very grim, I’m not optimistic regarding Iraq’s ability to avoid a long, brutal, destructive civil war. I expect that lots of people will die (more even than we’ve killed), and the region will suffer from the effects of a broken Iraqi state for a very long time.

So, why have I been gravitating toward a withdrawal?

I am not confidant about the ability of the United States to defeat the insurgency. Every year that the US continues to fight radicalizes the insurgency, radicalizes the region, and helps break down whatever forces might be friendly to us in Iraq today. I have a terrible sense that we are only delaying the inevitable by staying in Iraq, and, moreover, that we are making the reckoning more terrible than it needs to be. I am deeply skeptical about the ability of the Bush administration to improve the Iraq situation in any way, and I’m not convinced either a)that there will be anything left to save by 2009, or b)that Bush will be replaced by someone more competent.

But, I’m not quite there yet. Insurgencies have been defeated in the past, and the US Army and Marine Corps have a lot of smart people who might figure it out. The political process in Iraq may actually pay dividends by creating the sort of legitimacy that the South Vietnamese state never had, or at least had only in its last years. The Sunnis may simply weary of fighting, and the Shiites may figure out a way to bring enough Sunni elements into the political process to limit the size and power of the insurgency.

So, for now I’m still inclined to argue that the occupation should continue. But I can see the merit of the withdrawal option, and I may be there before all that long.

Personality Disorder

Weird.

America’s Best Blogger

Lance Mannion. Hands down.

China, Part I: Foreign Policy Conflict

Where do China and the US disagree? Before we start thinking about the geopolitical implications of increasing Chinese power, let’s think about the actual disagreements that might spark conflict. Stalin and Truman didn’t just wake up in mid-1945 hating each other; rather, the USSR and the United States had a series of more or less intractable foreign policy disputes that made friendly, mutually beneficial collaboration extraordinarily difficult. It was obvious well before the end of World War II that these disputes would exist, and the only question was whether the leaders on both sides could resolve them in a peaceful manner.

There are a few areas of genuine disagreement between China and the United States. Taiwan is the big problem, as I’ll discuss tomorrow. China’s claims on various island chains create friction with several Asian countries, and thus the United States. China’s mild support of North Korea has been a source of mild tension.

But what else? Other than Taiwan, nobody thinks that any of the above would be worth fighting for. China has acquiesced in U.S. global hegemony. China has decided to play an active, supportive role in the economic order that the United States has created. Since the 1970s, the People’s Republic of China has made no effort whatsoever to revise the structure of international politics. Rather, China has enthusiastically joined and participated in that system. China has not even made a serious effort to challenge the ideological underpinnings of the modern US-dominated state system.

The contrast with Soviet behavior in 1945 could not be starker. The US and the USSR disagreed about the division of Germany, the disposition of Eastern Europe, the balance of power in China, the reconstruction of Japan, and the role of the Allies in Iran. Moreover, the USSR represented a fundamental challenge to the international order the United States and its allies were trying to construct. The ideological conflict was genuine and serious.

So, given that we have some grasp on what China does not want (a transformation of the international system), what does China want?

The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is built around two pillars. The first of these pillars is economic growth. The People’s Republic of China is dedicated, therefore, to foreign policies that maximize the opportunity for successful economic growth. In pursuit of this goal, there is no conflict whatsoever with the US dominated world economic system. That system creates no limitations on the economic growth of particular states, only on the method by which such growth can be achieved. While I suppose it could be argued that China’s semi-market economy is ill-equipped to match the challenges of the US dominated system, the empirical evidence seems to suggest that the Chinese economy is doing just fine. Although China’s economic statistics are suspect, and developing countries have more room to grow than developed ones, it’s pretty hard to argue that ANY country has done better economically since 1990 than China.

This goal does not a revolutionary power make. Indeed, it clearly inclines China towards a status quo position in international affairs. If China is doing well in this system, and if this system indeed seems to be leading to a degree of Chinese economic hegemony, then the Chinese really have no reason to change it. Rather, China’s interest is in upholding that system. Empirically, it would be difficult to argue that they’ve been doing anything other than that. The CCP has gone so far, in fact, that they’ve tied the health of the Chinese economy tightly to the health of the US through exports and investment in US debt.

As far as I can tell, the only remotely plausible argument that has focused on economic conflict between China and the United States regards scarcity of energy resources. As the Chinese economy grows, it will use greater energy resources. If the arguments about peak oil are anything close to correct, oil production will not be increasing to meet the Chinese demand. Eventually, we could see some sort of conflict between the United States and China over access to oil.

I don’t find this scenario particularly plausible. Oil has been crucial to the economies of the developed world for the last century, and has only played a significant factor in one great power conflict, that between Japan and the United States. In that case, the oil problem was only a surface manifestation of a deeper disagreement between Japanese and US foreign policy aims. The Japanese economy could have (and since 1945, has) grown without the need for the conquest of the oil resources of Southeast Asia. The Japanese desire to overturn the Eurocentric international system and the consequent need for control of oil resources caused the war, which is different than saying the war started because of oil scarcity. The Cold War wasn’t even remotely about access to war. Indeed, rather than fight about it, the Great Powers of the twentieth century tended agree more firmly about the flow of oil than just about any other issue. Thus, I think that oil scarcity will no more be a source of conflict between China and the US than it will between Japan or Europe and the US.

The other pillar of CCP legitimacy is national greatness. Nationalism causes difficulties, and is sometimes in tension with economic prosperity. The two pillars aren’t always in conflict, as national greatness requires a degree of economic prosperity. However, the goal of national greatness can create problems in relations between countries, as we saw in the recent disturbance over Japan’s lack of war guilt, or as we’ve seen in a few tense moments between the US and China. Nationalism can also turn small problems into big ones, as governments tend to be reluctant to back down even in minor disputes. With an authoritarian government, one that relies, as the CCP does, on being a defender of national greatness, real problems can emerge over small causes.

Chinese nationalism is a cause for worry, but it’s worth noting that the problem is limited in scope. The Chinese state is not expansionist in the same way that the Russian and eventually Soviet states were. To the extent that China has territorial disputes with other countries, they tend to involve areas once controlled by the Qing Dynasty. Even in these cases, Chinese action has been relatively subdued. The PRC has made no effort to regain control of Outer Mongolia or the Maritime Province, although it might well have the military power to do so. Chinese nationalism has made control of several island chains a touchy question, but is unlikely to lead to a major conflict, except in the Taiwan situation.

China’s diplomatic activity supports my argument that Chinese foreign policy goals are not directly in conflict with those of the United States. Over the past five or six years, China has taken pains to establish positive relations with its neighbors. Recently, China has even managed to patch things up with India a bit, suggesting that predictions of future Sino-Indian rivalry may be premature. China’s behavior during the War on Terror has been extremely supportive of the United States. It’s extremely odd that France, our democratic ally, supplied the primary diplomatic opposition to the Iraq War and that China stayed very quiet. A China even slightly hostile to US hegemony would have taken to opportunity to score some diplomatic points against the US. The Chinese did nothing. Can you imagine the Soviet Union taking a similar position on a US foreign policy move during the Cold War?

The realists and the hawks face a burden on the China question. Supposedly, China’s growing power will throw it into conflict with the United States on any number of different issues. That hasn’t happened yet. The one issue on which China and the United States might end up fighting, Taiwan, has been a point of contention for the past fifty years, and has nothing whatsoever to do with China’s increasing power. A period of mutual hostility may be on the way, but it certainly hasn’t hit yet.

This is the first in a six part series on the future of US-China relations.

Part I: Foreign Policy Goals of the CCP
Part II: China’s Growing Military Power
Part III: In Defense of Ambiguity: Taiwan, China, and the United States
Part IV: China and the Republican Party
Part V: A New Cold War?
Part VI: Chinese Democracy