Blogging on Blogging Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I've resisted the temptation to blog on blogging, but since my husband David has burst into the mainstream media after just a week at the keyboard, I am going to indulge just this once.

This is for any NY Times newcomers to the site, and anyone at all.

I started DemocracyArsenal.org about two months ago with the support of the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress through a joint organization they've created called the Security and Peace Institute.  Since I have a day job and a 9-month old I invited 4 of the sharpest and most creative young thinkers on these issues (all of whom have distinguished avocations galore) to join forces.

Our goal is to offer a progressive take on US foreign policy.  We're not trying to accomplish what others - Kevin Drum and Laura Rozen, for example - do so well in keeping a running narrative tagged to the latest news.   Nor do I think we'll wind up mounting the kinds of amazingly effective one-man lobbying campaigns that Josh Marshall pioneered on social security and that Steve Clemons has been waging so relentlessly on the Bolton nomination.

Our goal is to surface and analyze issues that are part of the progressive critique of Bush's foreign policy or, even more importantly, explain how we would approach things differently.   We're trying to broaden the conversation on these issues and also, ultimately, to drive new ideas and positions.

We've been described as wonky but I don't take that personally because at least part of the time we're trying for something that the blogosphere doesn't always do well:  namely, depth.

Over the past couple months we've covered a dizzying array of topics - lots on Bolton, but also some in-depth looks at what UN reform does and ought to mean; a lot on the military; on non-proliferation; Iraq; Democratization; South America; Zimbabwe; human rights (check out the category links on the left-hand side of the site).  If it matters to U.S. foreign policy and it hasn't been dealt with yet, it will be.

Unlike my husband, I am besotted with the blogosphere.   Although I am outside DC and not working in foreign policy, I get to debate the issues I care about with a knowledgeable group of people every single day (actually night - I am a bat of the blogosphere in that most everything I do happens between the hours of 8 PM when a certain 9-month hold hits the crib and 8.30 AM when I morph into a corporate suit).   

I can blog for 10 minutes or 3 hours.  I can research as much or as little as I care to (though if I opt for the latter, its at the risk of an occasionally embarrassing comeuppance in comment form).  I can pick up on a thread from a fellow Arsenalist or another blog, or I can start my own and try to suck others in. 

I don't have to laboriously restate points already made in order to build on them, I just link.  I don't have to fully spell out someone's argument in order to take it apart - I can let readers look for themselves.

In a strange way, I also feel like I've made some friends here.   Matthew Yglesias who, as far as I can tell, is some sort of youthful prodigy who knows more than most on just about everything and must blog to the point of collapse every day, seems to read and care about what's on our blog.  I love him for it.  I had never met or emailed with Dan Drezner before he lent me the keys to his blog, but I hope someday soon I will.

In my view, for those interested in current affairs its just a matter of time before the spontaneity, interactivity, immediacy, and scope of the biosphere becomes more addictive than any other information source.  The problems of reliability and sourcing will probably get worse before they get better, but they won't hold back the momentum.

The fact that the NY Times saw fit to cover my and David's guest blogging stint as if it were the equivalent of Joan Rivers debuting as a stand-in for Carson says a lot.  The next time the Times has a headline like this With Vigorous Defense, Arsenal Stays Open, hopefully they'll be writing about us.

Husband, Wife and 2.2 Blogs Posted by Suzanne Nossel

New York Times, Sunday May 15 2005

By DAVID GREENBERG

"YOU should have a blog."

Apparently I push my opinions on my friends rather aggressively, because I often hear this remark.

Last week, I had my chance. My wife and I agreed to be "guest bloggers" - the online equivalent of what David Brenner used to do for Johnny Carson - for Dan Drezner, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, who runs a popular libertarian-conservative blog, DanielDrezner.com.

How hard could blogging be? You roll out of bed, turn on your computer, scan the headlines, think up some clever analysis while brushing your teeth, type it onto your site and you're off.

But as I discovered, blogging is no longer for amateurs or the faint of heart. Blogging - if it's done well - has evolved into an all-consuming art.

Last Sunday, after a cup of coffee, I made my first offering, a smart critique, I thought, of an article about liberal politics in The New York Review of Books by Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?"

I checked back a while later. There were, I think, three responses. Later, another post generated eight replies. Another, two. A couple got zero.

I checked the responses to Dan's posts. He seemed to average about 50. Sure, my wife, Suzanne, had been blogging for weeks on her own site, democracyarsenal.org, but still how was she getting 12, 19, even 34 replies?

I started to worry. It wasn't just my ego. I didn't want to send Dan's robust traffic numbers into a downward plunge.

As I thought about what else to opine about, I started to see that blogging wasn't as easy as it looked. Who were these people, blogging on other sites, who so confidently tossed about obscure minutiae relating to North Korea's nuclear program or President Bush's proposed revisions to Social Security benefits? Where did they find the time? (To say nothing of the readers.)

Serious bloggers, I realized, aggressively report a pet issue, updating their sites throughout the day. They scavenge the Internet for every shard of information on a hot topic, like John R. Bolton's chances of becoming ambassador to the United Nations or Tom DeLay's ethical troubles.

Since I wasn't going to make myself expert on these subjects anytime soon, I decided to write about what I knew, history.

On Tuesday, I posted a link to a piece I'd written for the online magazine Slate, faulting President Bush for his remarks criticizing the 1945 Yalta agreement, in which he said that Europe was unjustly carved up by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.

This time I got a lot of responses - abusive ones. Sample: "Anyone who thinks its 'ugly' to point out what was done to millions of people at Yalta is a moral cretin."

I posted again to clarify my point - that the Yalta agreement wasn't what consigned Eastern Europe to Soviet oppression. But I wasn't looking forward to the next fusillade of invective.

I did have sympathy for the audience. They expected their usual diet of conservative commentary. Instead, they got a liberal foreign policy expert (Suzanne) and a liberal historian linking to Arts & Letters Daily (aldaily.com) and the History News Network (hnn.us).

One Dreznerite vilified me for linking to a piece by the liberal journalist Joe Conason ("Why on earth would you think that gutter-dwelling hack would have any credibility on this blog?").

At one point, Dan took time out from real surfing in Hawaii to post a note informing readers that he had two liberals subbing for him. He must have been watching the train wreck on his beloved blog with horror.

I posted an item thanking readers for their indulgence.

"Could you please stop with these silly remarks about how you 'liberals' have to deal with Dan's 'conservative' readers?" came the reply. "I'm liberal, and I regularly read Dan's blog."

As I checked other sites for ideas, I now realized that I didn't need only new information. I needed a gimmick - a motif or a running joke that would keep the blog rolling all week. All of a sudden, I was reading other blogs, not for what they had to say, but for how they said it.

The best bloggers develop hobbyhorses, shticks and catchphrases that they put into wider circulation. Creating your own idiosyncratic set of villains to skewer and theories to promote - while keeping readers interested - requires as much talent as sculpting a magazine feature or a taut op-ed piece.

I'd always enjoyed kausfiles.com, for example, but I had taken for granted the way my friend Mickey Kaus paced his entries and mixed his news topics (Social Security) with personal obsessions (Jonathan Klein, the CNN honcho).

I knew I wasn't going to master the art in my few remaining days. And the vicious replies were wearing me down. I've gotten nasty responses to my articles before, but blogging is somehow more personal.

When Dan Drezner guest-blogged at the Washington Monthly site, one reader wished bodily harm on his family members. I found the blood lust jarring - especially when it started arriving in bulk, daily. (Suzanne cheerfully said, "Oh, just ignore them!" and kept posting thousand-word items by night.)

It's not that the readers were dim. Some forced me to refine or clarify my arguments. But the responses certainly got reductive, very quickly. And for all the individuality that blogs are supposed to offer, there was an amazing amount of groupthink - since some of them were getting their talking points from ... other blogs.

By the end of the week, with other deadlines looming and my patience exhausted, I began to post less and less. There was a piece for Slate due, a book chapter to finish, my baby boy, Leo, to entertain and a piece to write for the Week in Review.

I wasn't the only newcomer to blogging last week. On the ballyhooed "Huffington Post," Gary Hart, Walter Cronkite and David Mamet dipped their toes in the blogosphere as well.

I don't know how they'll fare, but I doubt that celebrity will attract readers for long. To succeed in blogging you need to understand it's a craft, with its own tricks of the trade. You need a thick skin. And you must put your life on hold to feed an electronic black hole.

What else did I learn by sitting in for Dan Drezner? That I'm not cut out for blogging.

David Greenberg teaches at Rutgers University and is the author of "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image."

Good Walls Make Good Neighbors? Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Here at DA we've been taking note of what seems to be deteriorating U.S. relations with and influence among Latin and South America.

The latest is that Congress has now passed restrictive immigration legislation that would prevent illegal Mexican migrants from obtaining US drivers' licenses and authorize the construction of a wall on the US-Mexican border.  The Mexicans are irate.  The law wasn't Bush's idea but he evidently got behind it after seeing which way the winds were blowing in Congress.   

So this is what happens to the U.S.'s "good neighbor and friend"; the country tapped as the first beneficiary of Condi Rice's goodwill offensive after entering office earlier this year.  The move comes less than two months after Bush, Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin announced a new era of cooperation in North America.

Speaking of the hemisphere, Democrats are saying CAFTA, we don't hafta, and we won't.  The question is whether they will come forward with a viable plan to address the troubling workers' rights, environmental, and poverty-related issues that CAFTA and like agreements raise, so that we won't be stuck on the wrong side of the free trade issue for long.  This issue is on our homework assignment and we ought to get to it.

A Flush Heard 'Round the World Posted by Suzanne Nossel

More on the Koran-flushing incident at the Drezner blog.

So, what now? Posted by Derek Chollet

I’ve tried to stay away from the Bolton mess, feeling that there were already enough cooks in that kitchen.  And now that he is out of Committee and we’re in the often murky land of Senate floor procedure, the nomination will be largely dependent on how the nuclear politics of judges plays out.  It seems to me that if the Republicans are smart they will try to jam a vote in next week before any action on judges; otherwise, the Dems will hold him up – along with many other pieces of Senate business -- in the nuclear winter that would follow the vote on the filibuster.

So for us, it’s not too early to look ahead: after Bolton, what will progressives turn to?  On this score I was sobered to read this piece by Anatol Lieven, the Carnegie Endowment scholar, which appeared in last week’s Financial Times.  For years he has been a staunch critic of both conservatives and progressives in foreign policy, and in this article he makes the case that by a mixture of idealism and old-school realism (meaning a revisionist policy in the Middle East combined with a fairly status quo policy elsewhere), the Bush Administration has left progressives with little to talk about:

“By stealing the Democrats' Wilsonian trousers while avoiding further international adventures, the Republicans have almost paralysed their opponents. Except when a Bolton comes along to concentrate their attention, internal Democratic discussions on foreign policy at present are generally a mixture of nitpicking, imitation and confusion.”

Now, there’s a lot I disagree with Lieven about – in this article and elsewhere – but he does have a point.  I think we at DA and many others have shown that we are capable of far more than nitpicking, but let’s face it, we’re hardly the core of progressive America – in fact, that’s why blogs like DA exist!  In the past few months, the only time progressives have really gotten it together across-the-board in foreign policy is against someone like Bolton.  So after this is over, maybe as early as next week, what will we turn to next?  We need to ensure that the Bolton debate was the start of something, not the end.

Dispatch this Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Just a quick reply to Joseph Britt on Belgravia Dispatch.   Joseph points out that whereas some - Europeans for example -  around the world react to events like the abuses at Abu Ghraib thinking they are at odds with American ideals, others - e.g. in the Muslim world - see such actions as of a piece with our mores and culture.

I actually think both groups see such behavior as some of both.  Yes, its hypocritical in that we talk a good game about human rights, and yet show signs of being unwilling to confront abuses when they occur within our own ranks.  At the same time, they tie the deviance to what they both see (though in differing degrees) as negative features of our culture - boorishness, lack of respect for tradition, moral looseness, glorification of violence.   

These two reactions and the tension between them is itself linked to what they see as contradictions in our society and signs that - Abu Ghraib aside - we are not what we purport to be.  We will confront perceptions of our own hypocrisy and disingenuousness almost no matter what we do.  But events like Abu Ghraib and the latest Koran flushing at Guantanamo only feed into these and make life harder for those charged with getting U.S. policies implemented.

Supporting State Posted by Michael Signer

The rash of violence in Iraq continues, with two Iraqi officials assassinated and 18 more dead yesterday -- an insurgency driven at least in part by local resentment driven by a lack of trust in the occupying forces.  The same dynamic's in place in Afghanistan, too, where there was a massive anti-American riot yesterday. 

Local understanding, based on patient, long-term knowledge of local politics and culture, and long-range thinking about trends and attitudes toward America -- does this sound like a job for (a) the military?  Or (b) professional diplomats at the State Department?

If you answered (b), you win the prize.

Last night, I was at a dinner with Lorelei, several Hill staffers, and an Army officer who has been involved in the reconstruction of Iraq.  The conversation -- over middling but cheerfully served Greek food right near Capitol Hill -- circled around several topics, but most consistently returned to a single glaring focal point:  America lacks a professionalized diplomatic corps to put in place long-term planning and strategy for the world's hot spots.  And our politicians too often lack the will to sell diplomacy to their constituents.

Abu Ghraib and Its Aftermath Posted by Suzanne Nossel

My latest posting on the Drezner blog deals with Abu Ghraib and the long-term implications it may have for American credibility and influence.  I make the point that incidents like Abu Ghraib, coupled with a fairly hollow effort to show that the abuses bore no link to wider policies and cultural factors within the military plays right into the hands of those trying to weaken American influence around the world.

Belgravia Dispatch (Joseph Britt) agrees with me, but points out that such debates will play out in the Londons and Ottawas of the world, not in the streets of Damascus or Ramadi.  I am not sure I understand his point.  He writes: 

What I'm suggesting is that Suzanne's view of the prisoner abuse scandal essentially as a series of policy errors damaging to America's image overseas most accurately reflects opinion in countries other than the ones we are now trying to spread freedom and liberty in. In many of these, America is distrusted not only because it seems we do not mean what we say but also because it seems that we do; not all the things they dislike or distrust about us are the things we think they might or ought to.

I am not sure if he is trying to say that the cultural lenses through which American actions are interpreted in the Muslim world are so thick and distorted that there's little we can do to control our image there.  If that's the point, I think there's some truth to it but that its becoming less true every day.

I don't have proof for this (and I haven't yet thought through whether or how it may have played out over Abu Ghraib) , but my intuition is that the Canadian-European-Australian etc. vantage point on American actions is emerging as a kind of filter through which other parts of the world are also evaluating us.  In other words, if the Europeans are behind something we do, the Arab world - even if predisposed against he particular policy - is almost forced to take another look at it.  They know that if the French haven't found anything to criticize, what we are doing is probably justifiable.

Likewise, if Canada et al decry something, that feeds into the sense in the Arab world that America, once again, is on a power trip or is acting at odds with the Western ideals it purports to uphold. 

In this way, the view of our "friends" (think of someone you went to high school with and still share a deep bond with, but who has irritated you a lot in recent years) may matter more than it used to - - they usually won't themselves act in overtly hostile ways toward us, but others who are listening to them might.

The filter works through debates in the UN corridors, diplomatic ties between all these countries and through the likes of CNN international, BBC, al Jazeera, and maybe even the blogosphere.

Anyway, I'm not sure I got Joseph's point right, but maybe he'll care to clarify.

Life in the Kool Aid Jacuzzi Posted by Lorelei Kelly

Small steps forward for the UN: In the interests of documenting UN reform, how's this?:  Recently Kemal Dervis was named head of the United Nations Development Programme despite financial enticements offered to the organization by two other nations with candidates in the running, Japan and Norway. Meritocracy worked.

I agree with Derek about the need for Members of Congress and their staffs to travel abroad. The more international perspectives we can get on Capitol Hill, the better. As a Hill staffer, I experienced both the boondoggle and the worthy educational tour. Sometimes they were truly over-the-top. Awhile back, I was on a trip to view some very expensive military hardware with a group of (mostly Republican) staff. It was like being the Greenpeace observer on a tuna boat--with the crew eating roasted dolphin for dinner. Unbelievable. Over the course of a week, defense industry lobbyists in tow, I found out how easy it was to go from drinking the kool-aid to full-out swimming in the kool-aid jacuzzi. Eeeuw! I had to shower for a week when I returned.  But most of the international trips were to rainy Brussels in January to discuss NATO or the European constitution. Not too sexy, but very helpful.

Congress insanity:  The Hill --when not fleeing incoming cessnas-- is going through its yearly appropriations process--the time when the money is doled out.
Here's how distorted the oversight and budgeting procedure has become: The State Department requests funding through the Defense budget because it is so beleagured and unsupported that it can't get the funding in its own right.  Then the Defense Department transfers the money back to State.  Why? Because Congress only really wants to fund military spending.

Why is our policy making process so out of whack, despite the many warnings from all quarters, criticisms from greybeard Republicans and promises to improve heard across the government? I'm relying once again on the social sciences for an explanation.  Remember intro psychology? More to the point, remember the Stockholm Syndrome?  It is commonly known as identifying with the hostage taker--named after an incident in Sweden in 1973.

Well, both political parties are presently stuck in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of defense policy, captured by President Bush, his right wing allies, and cowed by his main policy theme: inspirational fear.

Captives of Stockholm Syndrom begin to identify with their captors initially as a defensive mechanism, out of fear of retribution and based on the idea that the captor will not hurt those who cooperate (They won't run those awful ads in my district.) Small acts of kindness by the captor are magnified and are cause for groveling or rationalization (I feel queasy, but, well, he did go to the UN, so let's go ahead and approve of pre-emptive war in Iraq by 77-23 in the Senate and 296-133 in the House.) Capitives also vociferously defend the hostage taker (Zell Miller at the convention.) Rescue attempts are seen as a threat (Quit giving me all those namby pamby alternatives, traitor!)

Putting policy makers in analysis: Foreign Policy in Focus has just released its Unified Security Budget which makes the case that it is pro-military to be against militarization.

"During the last year, the ground under the security debate has begun to shift. A diverse and growing universe of voices, including former national security advisors, representatives of the business community, and the Bush administration itself, now recognizes that expanding the role of nonmilitary tools in our portfolio of security spending is necessary to keep Americans and the rest of the world safe. In the
federal budget, though, where the debate takes concrete form, this shift barely registers. Small increases planned by the administration for some nonmilitary security programs would still leave the overall proportion of resources severely unbalanced."

This document underscores the need for more soft power--economic aid, rule of law support, diplomacy--in other words, the power to attract others to our interests.  But it also moves beyond the traditional liberal "guns versus butter" framework and moves forward with the guns versus guns debate.

So now everyone is on the same page about the need for more soft power to balance out our military dominance--neo-cons and liberals. A true test of this belief will be if President Bush aligns his administration and the Republicans on the Hill with his rhetoric, and follows it up with demonstrated political will. Although many military professionals are talking about the need for change, few civilian elected leaders stand up for real difference. 

There is no obvious political constituency for soft security and team Bush squandered a great public education opportunity to talk to Americans about new threats and different priorities during campaign 2004. Instead, he skewered John Kerry repeatedly for saying that defeating terrorism will require a law enforcement and an economic strategy. His campaigned continued this absurd line of reasoning despite the fact that his own administration testified to the same end in Congress. 

For policy, then, The Stockholm Syndrome is self-defeating.  But not for elections. At least not yet.

Congress Abroad Posted by Derek Chollet

Having spent the last week on vacation in Ireland, it has taken me awhile to clear the cobwebs (ok, I really mean the Guinness) out of my head.  But a week out of Washington does wonders and, as always, provides a different perspective on the scandals that fuel so much of what happens here.

No, thank god, I did not hear or mention the name John Bolton once while abroad.  But one name that came up was Tom Delay – as I’ve written elsewhere, the Europeans are completely obsessed by all things Bush, and are intensely interested in all the maneuverings of those around him, especially those from Texas, and those who they see as pulling the strings: the likes of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and yes, Tom Delay.

Delay’s troubles have been the scandal of the season here in Washington, much to the delight of Congressional Democrats (especially the besieged House Democrats) and progressives everywhere.  The details of the scandal are dizzying – involving Indian casino gambling, Scotland golf getaways, Moscow meetings, and the activities of one of the most infamous Beltway Bandits, Jack Abramoff – and the heart of issue is one of Washington’s oldest and enduring problems: influence peddling.

But the reason I started pondering this is not because I’m thinking about what to do about the House ethics committee debacle or whether or not Delay should go down, but what the unintended effects of all this might be for a responsible Congressional role in foreign policy.

You see, Delay is in trouble (in this scandal at least) because of who funded some trips he and his staff took overseas.  Now these trips have all the trimmings of good old-fashioned boondoggles, but a worry I have is that the effects of this scandal will make legitimate Congressional travel abroad (and by that I mean traveling to meet with foreign leaders, see our troops, attend policy conferences to discuss issues, or see challenges first-hand) harder – and therefore more rare – because everyone will be worried about getting into trouble or getting caught up in some political payback for Delay’s fall.

Having worked on Capitol Hill and having done a bit of official travel both with a Senator and on my own as a staffer, I can tell you that the environment up there is, for the most part, already one of extreme caution when it comes traveling abroad.  For many, the trouble just isn’t worth it.  Some offices even have a blanket policy of not allowing any travel overseas that is paid for by someone else – a think tank, foundation, etc.  But the problem is that other official travel – that paid for by the American taxpayer –is just as unattractive to many members of Congress.  Given the potential for such trips becoming a political liability (especially when members are “in-cycle,” or up for reelection), they just choose to stay at home.

A decade ago, we went through a version of this – remember the Gingrichites coming into Congress bragging about how many of them did not have passports?  This helped create an atmosphere of isolationism in Congress that plagued the Clinton Administration.  There is already evidence that the Delay scandal has created a similar chilling effect on the Hill by making the issue of travel politically toxic again.

A Congress that stays at home is not good for the institution, and it’s not good for our foreign policy.  In fact, at a moment when the world is becoming more interconnected and our challenges abroad becoming more complex, creating a more isolated Congress is just perverse.

So what do we do?  I think that we must seek a bipartisan effort to create some sort of compact regarding legitimate congressional travel.  Part of the problem has been that the rules are riddled with loopholes (which those like Delay appear to have used), and what we need are clearer rules of road to define what is above the board and what is not.  We also need a strong endorsement from current and former Congressional leaders (from the likes of Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, John Danforth, Tom Daschle, Al Gore, etc) as well as former Presidents and Secretaries of State about the value of legitimate Congressional travel -- and clearly defining what that is -- and the responsibility members of Congress have to remain engaged and informed abroad.

According to today’s Washington Post, the House leadership is talking of doing some things along these lines – including by implementing the sensible policy of requiring prior ethics committee approval before a trip – but so far they are not including the Democrats in these plans.  This is a huge mistake.  For the good of Congress and the country, this is one issue where we have to demand that our leaders rise above partisanship and do something for the greater long-term good.  Ok, I know, maybe that’s the optimism of my vacation (or the Guinness) talking – but at least we can hope.