Doubting Thomas

Letting someone else do the work

In "Misinformation at the Times", blogging superstars, Powerline, debunks Thomas's latest screed against the Bush administration, "Sunday News Quiz". I might have tried to challenge one or two of Thomas's assertions, but Powerline takes them all on! Maybe Thomas's problem is that he listens to too much NPR.

Make Way for Reform

Today Thomas accuses President Bush of "Holding Up Arab Reform".

So I eagerly awaited the third Arab Human Development Report, due in October. It was going to be pure TNT, because it was going to tackle the issue of governance and misgovernance in the Arab world, and the legal, institutional and religious impediments to political reform. These are the guts of the issue out here. I waited. And I waited. But nothing.

Then I started to hear disturbing things - that the Bush team saw a draft of the Arab governance report and objected to the prologue, because it was brutally critical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation. This prologue constitutes some 10 percent of the report. While heartfelt, it's there to give political cover to the Arab authors for their clear-eyed critique of Arab governance, which is the other 90 percent of the report.

But the Bush team is apparently insisting that language critical of America and Israel be changed - as if language 10 times worse can't be heard on Arab satellite TV every day. And until it's changed, the Bush folks are apparently ready to see the report delayed or killed altogether. And they have an ally. The government of Egypt, which is criticized in the report, also doesn't want it out - along with some other Arab regimes.

Thomas has it absolutely wrong here. I've read sections of the other two reports, mostly about Israel. And the stuff in those reports is vile. One of the problems is that by allowing the Arab world to use Israel as an excuse, the US would be allowing them not to reform. So yes, maybe the anti-Israel (and anti-American) stuff is only 10% of the report, it's still significant and should be fought.
More importantly I bring you two frequent critics of the Bush administsration. One, Jim Hoagland wrote in "Subtle Signs of Change":

At the top of the list were President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Ghazi Yawar, the interim president of Iraq. To listen to their accounts, American help has begun to turn the tide against al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist networks of the region, and opened the way to vital elections in Iraq in January.

You have every right to be skeptical about their accounts. Their fates are on the line. It is not in their interest to express doubts or dangers to scribes. My own skepticism about Musharraf's promises to the Bush administration has been stated here often and directly.

But when you hand a Pakistani general a club with which to belabor India's leadership and he declines to swing it, you know some things have changed. He turned away my question about India's intentions by noting that New Delhi is working with Pakistan toward peace and "is looking in a more westerly direction" in foreign policy.

and Jackson Diehl who wrote in "An Opening For Arab Democrats":

Drowned out by the bombings in Iraq, and the debate over whether the staging of elections there is an achievable goal or a mirage, the Bush administration's democracy initiative for the rest of the Middle East creeps quietly forward. In neo-realist Washington, it is usually dismissed -- when it is remembered at all -- in much the same way that, say, national elections in Afghanistan were once laughed off. The unpopularity of the Bush administration and the predictable resistance from the dictatorships of Egypt and Saudi Arabia are cited as proof that the region's hoped-for "transformation" is going nowhere.

And yet, the process started at the Sea Island summit of Group of Eight countries in June is gaining some traction -- sometimes to the surprise of the administration's own skeptics. A foreign ministers' meeting in New York two weeks ago produced agreement that the first "Forum for the Future" among Middle Eastern and G-8 governments to discuss political and economic liberalization will take place in December. Morocco volunteered to host it, and a handful of other Arab governments, including Jordan, Bahrain and Yemen, have embraced pieces of the process.

More intriguingly, independent human rights groups and pro-democracy movements around the region are continuing to sprout, gather and issue manifestos -- all in the name of supporting the intergovernmental discussions. An independent human rights group appeared in Syria this month; Saudi women organized a movement to demand the right to vote in upcoming municipal elections.

Neither Hoagland nor Diehl are among the President's biggest fans, yet each seems to acknowledge that something's changing. Why even Thomas admitted that in the beginning of column today:

What the reform process and the peace process have in common is that neither advances when we Americans tell the parties in English that they have to change. Progress happens only when the people here tell themselves in Arabic that they must change. So I took heart from the blunt manner in which Dubai's crown prince, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, opened his conference by saying, in a speech broadcast by Arab satellite TV, "I say to my fellow Arabs [in power]: If you do not change, you will be changed."

I didn't hear talk like that five years ago. Nor did I hear an Egyptian friend remarking to me that she had absolutely no problem with Hosni Mubarak's son, Gamal, one day succeeding his father. Gamal is a good man. She just had one condition, that Gamal Mubarak succeed his father the same way George W. Bush succeeded his father: in a free election.

Meanwhile, last Sunday, about 1,000 Egyptians gathered in downtown Cairo, many wearing over their mouths yellow stickers with the Arabic word for "enough" written on them, to protest plans by President Mubarak to run for a fifth term.

Notice that Thomas writes that he "...didn't hear talk like that five years ago." Well what's changed since then?
The President for one thing. It's not American involvement per se that aids either the reform or the peace process. It must be the right kind of involvement. It's hard to imagine anyone more involved in the peace process than Bill Clinton and we see exactly what that involvement achieved.
What's different (or appears to be different) is that President Bush doesn't accept excuses. He won't accept the Arab world blaming its backwardness on Israel. And he doesn't push Israel to make concessions when there's no one to make concessions to. If that means if President Bush favors Israel there's nothing wrong with that. It's up to the PA and the rest of the Arab world to change. So far, it would appear, that expecting change may beget change.

You Don't Say

In "Iraq, Ballots and Pistachios" Thomas wonders why more people aren't helping the Americans see to it that Iraq gets free and fair election in a month and a half.

Wait a minute, did I say European Union? Do you know how many trees have been cut down to publish studies about the European Defense Initiative - the E.U.'s quest to build a military force independent of NATO and America? Whole forests have been devoted to studies of E.D.I. So I was thinking: What does E.D.I. stand for today, if not for sending 500 E.U. soldiers to Iraq for a long weekend so that Iraqis might begin to create the first real bottom-up democracy in the Arab League?

Thomas, have you heard about the Oil for Food scam. All sorts of EU types were implicated in the corruption of the program that was meant to help the Iraqi people. Many of those people in France and Germany are not very happy to have lost their meal ticket. Iraq was their personal piggy bank and America put an end to it. They don't want freedom for the Iraqis, they wanted their money, while the people starved and were subjugated.

Wait a minute, did I say Arab League? The Arab League has been sniping at the U.S. from the minute it toppled Saddam's tyranny, constantly barking that the Iraqi government there was not representative. Well now we're trying to help elect one that would be the most representative in the Arab world, and what is the Arab League doing? Virtually nothing. Why couldn't it offer to send some Arab and Muslim soldiers to protect polling places in the Sunni towns of Iraq?

Remember nearly 3 years ago Thomas spent lots of ink proclaiming a "Saudi Peace Initiative?" Why does he think that Crown Prince Abdullah conned him? It was to avoid an American invasion of Iraq. The leaders of the Arab world don't much want to cede or share power. American success in Iraq would be an example to their own citizenry. He shouldn't be so surprised that the Arab League isn't helping. After all, he helped them a few years try to distract the Americans.
Finally we get to the end:

The situation in Iraq is a microcosm of what is going on in the whole Middle East today. Everywhere you turn, the debate is over but the fight is not - because determined minorities are determined to thwart the will of majorities, and the majorities are too weak or divided to push back. The vast majority of Israelis want to get out of Gaza, but a determined, potentially violent, fanatical Jewish minority has been holding them back. Among the Palestinians, the debate is over, but the fight is not. Most Palestinians clearly want an end to the conflict with Israel and a chance to live a normal life, but a determined minority from Hamas has been resisting. Most NATO countries (I hope) would prefer a decent outcome in Iraq, but a determined minority, more worried about an American success than an Iraqi failure, is holding NATO back.

Of course when discussing Israel and the Palestinians, Thomas is all wrong. "[P]otentially violent fanatical Jewish minority? The Jews of Gaza are more likely to be the victims of violence than to cause it. And is someone like Datya Yitzhaki a fanatic? Or is she reacting the way normal person would act when faced with eviction. Nor is there any proof that uprooting her and the thousands of other Jews from Gaza will lead to peace. The withdrawal from Lebanon didn't make Israel saffer, it just redrew the battle lines to Israel's disadvantage.
And is Hamas really the minority? Mahmoud Abbas just visited Syria to coordinate positions with Baby Dictator Assad and the leaders of Hamas. That's hardly a sign that Abbas is a moderate. And it appears that he went willingly. Let's not overstate the moderation of the Palestinian leadership.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

Fewer Scientists?

Thomas is in hysterical mode. We need energy independence. We need more scientists. Getting more of the latter will solve the former. All that in more in today's "Fly me to the Moon."

But because of the steady erosion of science, math and engineering education in U.S. high schools, our cold war generation of American scientists is not being fully replenished. We traditionally filled the gap with Indian, Chinese and other immigrant brainpower. But post-9/11, many of these foreign engineers are not coming here anymore, and, because the world is now flat and wired, many others can stay home and innovate without having to emigrate.

If we don't do something soon and dramatic to reverse this "erosion," Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told me, we are not going to have the scientific foundation to sustain our high standard of living in 15 or 20 years.

This indeed a frightening prospect. But it may not be true.

A report issued by the National Science Foundation last week supports Mr. Lowell's concerns. Although the agency warned in May of the declining number of graduate degrees granted to American students, more recent data point to an opposite trend: Increasing numbers of U.S. citizens are now entering graduate school in engineering and every field of science. Enrollment climbed 6.7 percent from 2000 to 2002 for domestic students.

So maybe Thomas, look at all the data instead of relying on anecdotes to paint with broad strokes. (I believe that Robert Samuelson wrote a column on the subject of the supposed decline of scientists in America. But I can't find it.)
And what about the oil problem? Here's Robert Samuelson:

If prices rise, we blame a conspiracy of greedy oil companies, OPEC or someone. The reality is usually messier. Energy economist Philip Verleger Jr. attributes the present price run-up to massive miscalculation. Oil companies and OPEC underestimated global demand, particularly from China. Since 2001 China's oil use has jumped 36 percent. This error led OPEC and companies to underinvest in new production capacity, he says. In 2002 the world had 5 million barrels a day of surplus production capacity; now it has little. Unexpected supply interruptions (sabotage in Iraq, civil war in Nigeria) boost prices.
Verleger says prices could go to $60 next year or even $80 if adverse supply conditions persist. No one really knows. Analyst Adam Sieminski of Deutsche Bank thinks prices may retreat to the low $30s in 2005. A slowing Chinese economy could weaken demand. But the uncertainties cannot obscure two stubborn realities. First, world oil production can't rise forever; dwindling reserves will someday cause declines. And, second, barring miraculous discoveries, more will come from unstable regions -- especially the Middle East.

To be certain, Samuelson still criticizes President Bush in this column, but that's not the point. Thomas has presented himself as an expert in oil and science. All he's trying to do is make President Bush look bad. So he launches into a screed half-cocked without careful consideration of the facts. Or without a care for what all the facts might be. Next time Thomas, try to do a little research. Seek out information that may conflict with your pre-ordained conclusion. It may make your column a little tougher to write. But it may actually be illuminating. If you'd make the effort.