Alex Cooley has a thoughtful piece in the latest Foreign Affairs on the political consequences of basing US troops in foreign countries. (Subscription required for full article.)

This past July, the government of Uzbekistan evicted U.S. personnel from the Karshi-Khanabad air base, which Washington had used as a staging ground for combat, reconnaissance, and humanitarian missions in Afghanistan since late 2001. The government in Tashkent gave no official reason for the expulsion, but the order was issued soon after the UN airlifted 439 Uzbek refugees from Kyrgyzstan to Romania — a move that Washington supported and Tashkent opposed. . . The showdown was the latest in a series of confrontations since a much-criticized crackdown on antigovernment demonstrators in the eastern city of Andijon last May.

These events illustrate the enduring problem that U.S. defense officials face as they try to promote democratic values abroad while maintaining U.S. military bases in nondemocratic countries. Although some in Washington acknowledge this tension, they generally argue that the strategic benefits of having U.S. bases close to important theaters such as Afghanistan outweigh the political costs of supporting unsavory host regimes. With the Pentagon now redefining the role of the U.S. military in the twenty-first century, moreover, its officials insist even more on the importance of developing a vast network of U.S. bases to confront cross-border terrorism and other regional threats. Some of them also turn the objections of pro-democracy critics around. They claim that a U.S. military presence in repressive countries gives Washington additional leverage to press them to liberalize. . .

Such arguments have merit, but they do not tell the whole story. For one thing, the political complications sometimes associated with dealing with democracies are ephemeral. For another, setting up bases in nondemocratic states brings mostly short-term benefits, rarely helps promote liberalization, and sometimes even endangers U.S. security.

Via Crooked Timber, Mathew Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld consider the agrument that the Iraq war was a good idea that was botched in its execution and find it wanting.

So was the Iraq War a good idea, ruined by poor implementation? Perhaps the founding myth of the incompetence argument is that the postwar mess could have been avoided had the United States deployed more troops to Iraq. “Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was ridiculed for suggesting that it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq,” wrote Senator Joe Biden in a June 2004 New Republic article. “He looks prescient today.”

Shinseki’s ballpark numbers were based on past Army experience with postconflict reconstruction. A RAND Corporation effort to quantify more precisely that experience, frequently cited by dodgers, concluded that a ratio of 20 foreigners for every 1,000 natives would have been necessary to stabilize Iraq.

The flaw in the popular “more troops” argument is strikingly easy to locate. The 20-to-1,000 ratio implies the presence of about 500,000 soldiers in Iraq. That’s far more than it would have been possible for the United States to deploy. Sustaining a given number of troops in a combat situation requires twice that number to be dedicated to the mission, so that soldiers can rotate in and out of theater. As there are only 1 million soldiers in the entire Army, a 500,000-troop deployment would imply that literally everyone — from the National Guard units currently assisting with disaster relief on the Gulf Coast to those serving in Afghanistan, Korea, and Europe to the bureaucrats doing staff work in the Pentagon and elsewhere — would be dedicated to the mission. This is plainly impossible. . .

T. A. Frank in The New Republic:

Dear Brother,

God only knows how much I would enjoy visiting you in Iraq. The only thing keeping me from packing my bags, donning a burqa, and slipping into a carrier sack on a westbound mule right now is that I’m tied up with promoting my latest book, Man Behind the Mosque: Faith, Community and Discourse in Post-Bunker-Buster Waziristan (334 pp., Madrassa Press, $28.95 Canadian). Did you happen to see me on “Charlie Rose”? I had you in mind when I sent in my threatening audiotape.

I hope the move is going well, and I would love to see a picture of your new house in Falluja. I am glad the old one had insurance, God be praised. I do hope that it has a comfortable recreation room, God permitting, and a spacious, windowless basement with good lighting for the Panasonic AG-DVC7 you were discussing.

However, I do, gracious brother, want to discuss one or two points about strategy and tactics, even as I recognize your pioneering role in decapitation research. In terms of ambition, your plan to explode every Shia in Iraq cannot be faulted for scope, but is it practicable? I worry that the Iranians and others visiting Najaf or Basra might pick up on clues, such as the absence of human life. Mind you, I sympathize entirely with your sentiments, but it might make more sense to focus primarily on the American infidels and to save the detonation of Shia for special occasions, such as birthdays.

More here.

Friedemann Freund at Space.com:

Our Earth is a restless planet. Occasionally – quite often, in some regions of the world – the restlessness turns deadly. Of all natural hazards, earthquakes are the most feared. They are feared because they seem to strike so unpredictably. Yet, for centuries, and even millennia, people living in seismically active regions have noted premonitory signals. The historical records talk of changes of the water level in wells, of strange weather, of ground-hugging fog, of unusual behavior of animals (both domestic and wild) that seem to feel the approach of a major earthquake. With the advent of modern science and technology the list of premonitory signals has become even longer. Among them are

1. Sporadic emissions of low to ultralow-frequency electromagnetic radiation from the ground
2. Occasional local magnetic field anomalies reaching a strength of half a percent of the Earth’s main dipole field
3. Changes in the lower atmosphere that are accompanied by the formation of haze and a reduction of moisture in the air
4. Large patches, often tens to hundreds of thousands of square kilometers in size, seen in night-time infrared satellite images where the land surface temperature seems to fluctuate rapidly
5. Passing perturbations in the ionosphere at 90 – 120 km altitude that affect the transmission of radio waves

More here.

Christine Stansell in Dissent Magazine:

“Something terrible happened here. And I don’t know what it is,” Bill Herod remembers thinking in his first days in Phnom Penh in 1980. He was with Church World Service, one of a group of aid workers allowed into the country after the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 and put an end to the three-and-a-half-year-long nightmare of the Cambodian people. In 1980, Herod had just come from Vietnam. He had seen plenty of devastation, but this was something different, a higher order of magnitude.

In those first months, Westerners were only beginning to grasp the enormity of what the KR—as they’re always called in Cambodia—had done. In the city and the refugee camps on the Thai border, relief workers were piecing together accounts of starvation, brutal forced labor, and mass executions into some comprehension of the whole. Cambodians were stunned, largely affectless, many in a state of shock. Hospitals housed crazed, emaciated children who had been found wandering in the forests, abandoned and lost by parents fleeing KR camps as the Vietnamese approached.

Thirty years later, the extent and nature of the horror are no mysteries. Between April 1975, when the KR overthrew the despised Lon Nol regime, and January 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded, the rulers of Democratic Kampuchea killed—by murder, starvation, and forced labor—1.7 to two million people, close to a quarter of the entire population. In the torment they wreaked on a small country in such a short time, the KR ranks as possibly the most savage Communist Party to curse the twentieth century.

More here.

In Archipelago:

Editor’s note: Leon Bell, a Soviet-trained nuclear physicist who later became a world-class plant physiologist with an expertise in photosynthesis, was born in Texas in 1918, and moved with his family to Moscow in 1931. His life reflects the tragedy of the Soviet Union and the situation of an American-born Jew in Stalin’s Russia. In his unpublished autobiography the author gives an inside view of what it was like to live in constant fear and poverty in a totalitarian state. . .

Part 1

Today is December 23, 1987. I am now sixty-nine years old. You can twist that figure around anyway you wish to, but you will always get sixty-nine—there is no escape. In a year’s time (if I am still alive) I will be seventy, and that is real old age. Time is running out, and if I expect to write about my life, as daughter Natasha has asked me to, it’s time to begin.

Of course, I have my doubts whether it is worthwhile writing. I can’t write a memoir as usually understood—a narrative of the life of a person of fame or one who had experienced a particularly interesting life. I am not famous and, strictly speaking, there were no extraordinary events in my life Then why write? First of all, as I have mentioned, Natasha has asked me to, and wife Ira has supported the idea. Secondly, in my opinion just about anyone’s life can be interesting as a mirror, albeit a small one, of the times in which the person lived.

I am a person of the twentieth century, a stormy and at times, maddening, century. Possibly, in the future some people would like to know how ordinary, not widely known people lived in those times.

The Skpetic reprints Michael Shermer’s review of the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in a Single Atom, which seems to continue in the tradition of the Einstein-Tagore discussions about science and religion (and about Tagore’s The Religion of Man).

This book is “not an attempt to unite science and spirituality,” he explains, “but an effort to explore two important human disciplines for the purpose of developing a more holistic and integrated way of understanding the world.”

He begins his exploration by equating science with the worldview of “scientific materialism,” which “seems to be a common unexamined presupposition” that includes “a belief in an objective world, independent of the contingency of its observers. It assumes that the data being analyzed within an experiment are independent of the preconceptions, perceptions, and experience of the scientist analyzing them.” Well, not quite. Most working scientists do make this assumption when conducting their experiments, but they are well aware that their preconceptions can color their analysis and interpretation. Reality exists, we can agree. Getting an accurate reading on reality is another matter entirely.

The Dalai Lama’s other bugbear is scientific reductionism, and here I feel he has set up something of a straw man.

The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality.

This view, he fears, leads to nihilism, and with it the loss of subjective purpose and meaning.

The danger then is that human beings may be reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction.

From The Village Voice:

She triumphed over breast cancer 12 years ago, but Ivis Febus-Sampayo stared it in the face again this January when a genetics test revealed she carried a specific gene mutation, which put her chances of developing a cancerous lump in her breast at a roughly estimated, and frightening, 45 percent. A 50-year-old wife and mother of two boys, Febus-Sampayo took aggressive action against the deadly disease. She went under the knife and preemptively had her ovaries removed, narrowing the likelihood of a malignant growth in her breast. With early detection of tumors directly linked to cancer survival rates, Febus-Sampayo has regular mammograms and oncologist visits. Additionally, she has an annual breast MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), recommended only for high-risk patients. While MRIs have been shown to find tumors when they are smaller and easier to treat, misreading the findings can result in false alarms and numerous painful biopsies.

Credit the field of genetics with giving Febus-Sampayo the heads-up about her genetic risks.

More here.

From BBC News:

A swirling image of a peregrine falcon sweeping into a flock of starlings has won Manuel Presti this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. The Italian caught the action scene, titled Sky Chase, high above a city park in Rome. “Sky chase is a powerful image and, like it or not, it’s one that you will never forget,” said Mark Carwardine, one of this year’s judges. The competition has become one of the most prestigious in world photography. It is organised by BBC Wildlife Magazine and London’s Natural History Museum. This year brought 17,000 entries from over 55 countries.

More here.

Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Review of Books:

Early this autumn, as today’s Iranian rulers defied the new Rome by pressing ahead with their nuclear program, I traveled for two weeks through what is now the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the year of their Lord 1384, I talked to mullahs armed with laptops, regime supporters in the religious hotbed of Qom, and Islamic philosophers highly critical of the regime. I met intellectuals of all stripes, artists, farmers, politicians, and businesspeople. Most memorably, I had long, intense conversations with some of the young Iranians who make up the majority of the country’s population. I see their earnest faces before me as I write, especially those of the women, framed in the compulsory Islamic head scarf, the hijab, which they somehow manage to convert into an accessory of grace and quiet allure.

More here.

“Is the world’s top public intellectual a brilliant expositor of linguistics and the US’s duplicitous foreign policy? Or a reflexive anti-American, cavalier with his sources?”

Robin Blackburn and Oliver Kamm, examine the cases for and against Chomsky in Prospect:

The huge vote for Noam Chomsky as the world’s leading “public intellectual” should be no surprise at all. Who could match him for sheer intellectual achievement and political courage?
Very few transform an entire field of enquiry, as Chomsky has done in linguistics. Chomsky’s scientific work is still controversial, but his immense achievement is not in question, as may be easily confirmed by consulting the recent Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. He didn’t only transform linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s; he has remained in the forefront of controversy and research.

More here.

Three friends and readers of 3 Quarks Daily were also on the list of winners: Richard Dawkins came in at number 3, while Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker were numbers 24 and 26. Congratulations to them and all the others from all of us at 3QD.

Peter Campbell in the London Review of Books:

Edvard Munch’s art was made from his troubles. When, in middle age, he retreated to the estate he had bought on the outskirts of Oslo (then still called Kristiania), love affairs, drink, a nervous breakdown and illness had already supplied the subject-matter his peculiarly subjective art required. The ideas he developed early he went on using. Late in his career he wrote: ‘The second half of my life has been a battle just to keep myself upright. My path has led me along the edge of a precipice, a bottomless pit . . . From time to time I’ve tried to get away from the path, thrown myself into the throng of life among people. But every time I have had to go back to the path along the cliff top.’

More here.

From BBC News:

The rodent had been radio tagged and its movements tracked by researchers to learn more about pest species and how they invade small islands. The rat was released on the uninhabited island of Motuhoropapa but refused to be captured at the project’s end. The NZ team tells Nature magazine the animal finally turned up on the nearby Otata Island – a mighty swim of 400m. James Russell, from the University of Auckland, and colleagues think this may be the longest distance recorded for a rat swimming across open sea. “Norway rats can supposedly swim up to 600m but, to our knowledge, this is the first record of a rat swimming hundreds of metres across open water,” they write. In total, the rat was free for 18 weeks. It was eventually killed in a trap baited with penguin meat.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Of the two greatest dramatists of the 19th century, Chekhov and Ibsen, it is the infinitely lovable Dr Chekhov who holds the highest place in our affections, both as man and as author. But Ibsen, the forbidding man of the north – accusatory eyes fiercely staring out at us from behind steel-rimmed spectacles, thin, severe lips tightly pursed amid the bizarre facial topiary – may be the one who speaks most urgently to us today. At the time of his death, almost 100 years ago, Henrik Ibsen’s significance as a leader of thought was overwhelming. In 1900, the young James Joyce, still a student, wrote of him: “It must be questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times … his genius as an artist faces all, shirks nothing … the long roll of drama, ancient or modern, has few better things to show.” Joyce (and later Wittgenstein) learned Norwegian specifically in order to read Ibsen’s plays in the original.

More here.

William B. Greenough III in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

The U.S. government’s post-9/11 effort to make citizens more “secure” has had some frighteningly destructive consequences. One of the most egregious examples is the government’s prosecution–using new departmental powers of Homeland Security and the PATRIOT Act–of Thomas C. Butler, a distinguished scientist and doctor.

By the time you read this, Butler will have been in prison for well over a year. It’s a curious place for the U.S. government to put the man who is credited by the World Health Organization with saving the lives of more than two million children every year through a cholera treatment he helped to develop. Moreover, at the time of his arrest in 2003, Butler was researching ways to protect Americans from plague, a weaponizable pathogen.

Human plague, endemic in the United States, in Texas and other parts of the Southwest, is caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis and carried by rodents. From time to time, plague spreads to Americans who hunt or handle the infected rodents. But across the globe in Tanzania, plague is far more common and kills people regularly.

Butler, then a professor of medicine, chief of the Infectious Diseases Division of Texas Tech University, and one of the most knowledgeable and experienced clinical scientists in plague infections, was worried that if the disease were to arise in the United States–either naturally or through terrorism–the country would be ill-equipped to treat the victims. Both streptomycin and chloromycetin, the two antibiotics currently recommended to treat plague and prevent death, are old and not readily available at U.S. health centers. Butler felt that it was urgent to test the efficacy of two other readily available antibiotics–gentamicin and doxycycline. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fort Detrick, Fort Collins, and at the Food and Drug Administration agreed and were happy to collaborate in his research.

More here.

“Faith in a higher being is as old as humanity itself. But what sparked the Divine Idea? Did our earliest ancestors gain some evolutionary advantage through their shared religious feelings? In these extracts from his latest book, Robert Winston ponders the biggest question of them all.”

From The Guardian:

…it is easy to suggest a mechanism by which religious beliefs could help us to pass on our genes. Greater cohesion and stricter moral codes would tend to produce more cooperation, and more cooperation means that hunting and gathering are likely to bring in more food. In turn, full bellies mean greater strength and alertness, greater immunity against infection, and offspring who develop and become independent more swiftly. Members of the group would also be more likely to take care of each other, especially those who are sick or injured. Therefore – in the long run – a shared religion appears to be evolutionarily advantageous, and natural selection might favour those groups with stronger religious beliefs.

But this is not the whole story. Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework – and enforcing it – we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion. Psychologist Eliot Turiel observed that even three- and four-year-olds could distinguish between moral rules (for example, not hitting someone) and conventional rules (such as not talking when the teacher is talking). Furthermore, they could understand that a moral breach, such as hitting someone, was wrong whether you had been told not to do it or not, whereas a conventional breach, such as talking in class, was wrong only if it had been expressly forbidden. They were also clearly able to distinguish between prudential rules (such as not leaving your notebook next to the fireplace) and moral rules.

This would suggest that there is a sort of “morality module” in the brain that is activated at an early age. Evidence from neuroscience would back this up, to a degree.

More here.

Robert Birnbaum interviews Jonathan Lethem (recent MacArthur genius).

Lethem: Now we’re arriving at the bug [that was] in my ear when I said we should talk again. It’s all coming back. Certainly, yes, there’s a kind of relentless bad faith expressed when reviewers or critics remark on one element in a novel as though it’s a remarkable piece of metaphor or surrealism, as though they’ve never encountered such a thing before. They’re shocked, just shocked that something is being proposed—they act as though it is utterly unfamiliar to them, what they really mean is that they object to it on principle, on class or political grounds like those I just described. So, by reacting as though the incursion were new, instead of familiar, it permits a kind of disingenuous head-scratching: “Hmm, perhaps this new method is of interest, or could be, in the hands of the most serious of writers. We’ll have to watch closely and see.” You saw this happening when Roth’s new book was reviewed. Roth’s use of the “alternate history” was treated, in certain quarters, as though, first of all, Roth himself had never written a book that challenged mimetic propriety—suddenly The Breast didn’t exist, suddenly The Great American Novel didn’t exist. Suddenly Counterlife didn’t exist. To write about this thing with a 10-foot pole, and say, “What’s this strange method? What have we got here? One of the great pillars of strictly realist fiction has inserted something very odd into his book. We’ll puzzle over this as though it’s unprecedented.” It was as though there had been no Thomas Pynchon. As though Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, Robert Coover had been thrown into the memory hole. Was there never a book called The Public Burning? Do we really have to retrace our steps so utterly in order to reinscribe our class anxieties? Not to mention, of course, the absolute ignorance of international writing implicit in the stance: where’s Cortazar, Abe, Murakami, Calvino, and so very many others? Well, the status quo might argue, patronizingly, those cute magical-realist methods—how I despise that term—are fine for translated books, but we here writing in English hew to another standard of ‘seriousness.’ Not to mention, of course, the quarantine that’s been implicitly and silently installed around genre writing that uses the same method as Roth’s with utmost familiarity. Well, the status quo might argue, sounding now like an uncle in a P.G. Wodehouse novel: Ah, yes, well, we all know that stuff is, how do you say it, old boy? Rather grubby. No, I say, no. This isn’t good enough, not for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, in 2004. Let me say it simply: there is nothing that was proposed in Roth’s book that could be genuinely unfamiliar to a serious reader of literary fiction of the last 25 years, 30 years, 50 years. To treat it as unfamiliar is a bogus naiveté—one that disguises an attack on modernism itself, in the guise of suspiciousness about what are being called post-modern techniques. It actually reflects a discomfort with the entire century.

more at The Morning News here.

Jill Lepore on the origins of American democracy in the New Yorker.

Readers may weary at the length of Wilentz’s book, but, as a model for integrating social and political history, it’s hard to dispute. That it will be disputed is, however, certain, if only because Wilentz has been such a vigorous critic of his colleagues. He has had little use for historians who defend Federalists like Noah Webster. To those who celebrate Federalists for their opposition to slavery, Wilentz counters, “Rarely has any group of Americans done so little to deserve such praise.” In his New Republic reviews, Wilentz has been particularly indignant about historians who place Federalists in a better light than Republicans or who dismiss Jefferson’s entire career because he owned slaves (including some who were almost certainly his own children). David McCullough’s “John Adams” was, in his view, “popular history as passive nostalgic spectacle.” Garry Wills’s book about Jefferson’s election, “Negro President,” he deemed “misadventurous.” In another essay, Wilentz concluded, “Were he alive today, Jefferson would probably regard modern American historians as a rascally bunch.”

But one thing that Federalists understood—for all their failings, for all their unmitigated snobbery—was the fragility of democracy. I’d be willing to consider you an angel, Webster told Jefferson, if you could show me a democracy that isn’t corrupt, or if you could protect the United States from “the instruments with which vicious and unqualified men destroy the freedom of elections, and exalt themselves into power, trampling first on the great and good, and afterwards on the very people to whom they owe their elevation.” Webster may have been a prig, but he wasn’t a duffer.

Sandwiched between ‘70s agitators like Ant Farm and more recent groups like the Yes Men, Negativland has been going strong for twenty-five years, an anniversary commemorated by this retrospective of their work. Among their best-known culture jamming exploits is their album U2, which includes liberal sampling from U2’s album Joshua Tree (prompting a landmark 1991 intellectual property case in which U2’s record label, Island Records, sued Negativland and SST).

more from Artforum here.

From The New York Times:

There is physics. And then there is physics with music.

And so, when a new opera about the atomic bomb, of all things, opened to acclaim this month in San Francisco, I traveled across the bay from a conference in Berkeley. It has been 60 years since the atomic bomb emerged from its cradle at the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, N.M., to punctuate the end of World War II with a blinding flash and the cries of the burned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am old enough to have emerged from that same cradle, fussing and complaining, old enough to have seen the Beatles and to have watched and felt the desert shake one cold loud morning in 1968 as one of those beasts went off and a radioactive dust ball drifted off toward Canada.

As an ex-physics major, sci-fi addict, science writer and lover of apocalypse, I long ago concluded that there was not much new to say about the atomic bomb. But I was wrong.

More here.