Dana Rohrabacher Got It Right Posted by Heather Hurlburt

You won't catch me typing that very often.  But continuing Suzanne's effort to find common ground with our conservative friends, I want to note that Rohrabacher called it right on Uzbekistan -- and did it while the Administration was still summoning the courage to be "deeply disturbed" about Karimov's use of force.

I caught him regaling NPR listeners about his trip to Uzbekistan just last month, and how he had told President Karimov that he could "leave as a statesman" by allowing a free election for someone else to succeed him, or "leave feet first." 

This time, Rohrabacher understands something too many of our friends in the blogosphere do not -- that there are plenty of options between supporting authoritarian stooges and abandoning a country to extremist rule. 

Or, when it first became obvious a decade ago that Karimov was nobody's idea of a great ruler, there were options.  There were also considerably fewer radical Islamists.  Now there is a powerful, shadowy and highly radical Islamist organization, along with poverty, resentment, heightened ethnic tensions -- all in all, just the place for the US to be building big military installations.

Karimov has squeezed out civil society, peaceful Islam, and other avenues for protest -- and the US military presence makes a mockery of the well-meant efforts of State Department human rights officials to insist that the US really does want change. 

Last July, for example, the US determined that Uzbekistan was not making progress on human rights concerns and cut $18 million in aid.  Just a month later, though, Human Rights Watch says, the Defense Department ponied up an additional $21 million.  If you were Karimov, what would you think?

This is a great opportunity for progressives to stress what we would do differently with respect to two of Suzanne's questions from Drezner readers:  are you for democracy promotion, or not, and what about hypocrisy?

As I have written before, the US will deal with nasty governments in order to preserve our national interests, no matter who is in power.  "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," Emerson says.  But smart policymakers -- a category that doesn't have to be limited to progressives -- will limit their hypocrisies by being able to ask themselves hard questions.  Such as:

how many of our eggs do we really want in this sleazeball's basket?

given the discouraging Soviet and British precedents, do we really want a long-term heavy-footprint presence in Central Asia?

are we diminishing our long-term prospects by getting ourselves identified too closely with this lousy government in the near term?

And, now that this violence has happened, and Karimov appears to be unrepentantly following up by ordering large-scale arrests:

are we stuck?  if so, what levers do we have, beyond expressing "deep concern," to put the situation on a better track and communicate to Uzbeks who aren't (yet) committed to Islamist revolution that there is another way?

Progressives on democracy promotion:  you promote democracy by increasing, in big ways or small ways, the ability of people to make decisions that affect their own lives.  You don't promote democracy by lecturing about it -- how much did conservatives like being lectured by Europeans about our elections?  You don't promote democracy by installing it by force, as I argued (with some nice company, like Wes Clark) in this month's Washington Monthly.   

100,000 stronger? Posted by Derek Chollet

Suzanne has given us a daunting list of questions to deal with, and I’ll go ahead and dive in to try to address one of the tougher ones – the gap between progressives and the military. 

As we’ve argued here before, I think that this is one of the most consequential problems that progressives have to confront over the next few years.  Having been a part of a Democratic presidential campaign, both during the primaries and the general election, this gap was an eye-opener.  Just an anecdote that illustrated this for me: throughout the 2004 campaign, the favorite parlor game for most national security professionals in the Democratic Party was debating who would be Secretary of State, with most choosing between Holbrooke and Biden.  What was amazing is that for the most part, no one talked about who might become Secretary of Defense – and when asked, no one even had any good ideas. 

One should not make too much of beltway gossiping by a bunch of wannabes, but in retrospect, it is illustrative.  Here we are, a nation at war, with nearly 200,000 troops fighting everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan (which by the way, ladies and gentlemen, would still be there today -- although hopefully with more help – if John Kerry had been elected in November) and we were so focused on our “comfort” issues – diplomacy, etc. – that we were overlooking the most important national security job of the new Administration, the 8000 pound gorilla – DoD. 

Which brings me to a big part of the problem: that too many progressives do not see military issues – or “national security issues” – to be as important as foreign policy issues.  In fact, I think that one reason the relentless focus on the flaws of the Bush Administration’s homeland security policies has come up short politically is that most people are left with the impression that we’d rather just have strong defenses at home rather than take the fight to the bad guys overseas. 

But here’s the opportunity.  Because right now we don’t have enough boots to do much more than we’re doing to take the fight abroad.  The military is under tremendous strain, and nearly every military professional that I’ve met, heard or read over the past few months is deeply worried about “breaking” the all-volunteer force.  This is not just bad for handling today’s challenges – Iraq, Afghanistan, etc – but potential future threats, like North Korea, Iran, or a humanitarian crisis. 

So what do we do?  One way to start the discussion would be to read the recent report by the policy group Third Way, which provides an excellent analysis of the problem and offers a big solution: enlarge the Army by 100,000 troops.  This report -- written by Aaron Scholer, a former Lieberman and Kennedy staffer -- is not too wonky and has lots of interesting tidbits (as well as telling quotes from military brass) about the challenges the military is facing.  The idea behind this report, as with all Third Way work, is to introduce these ideas into legislation in the Senate, so stay tuned.

Newsweek, Cont'd Posted by Michael Signer

More on Newsweek... To paraphrase Chris Matthews from some years ago, talking about the Al-Gore-Is-Stiff meme that captivated most of the mainstream media, jokes work not because of their conclusion, but because of their premise.  It wasn't the specific formulation of Gore's bedevilments (he was Awkward, he was Condescending, he was Boring) that made all of those iterations so funny -- it was the premise behind them:  that the Prince of Tennessee didn't connect with folks.

If this applies to jokes, it also applies to outrages.  Which explains the outrage throughout the Middle East about the Koran-flushing episode. 

We cannot of course retroactively test history, but the reason that Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan rioted was not solely, simply, and exclusively because of the toilet episode.  For the Administration and their toadyish media friends to frame the riots this way attempts, ridiculously and disingenously, to unthread this episode from the tangle of preceding events -- from lies on WMD to abuses at Abu Ghraib -- that constitute the premise that drove the riots:  under the Bush Administration, GWOT policy has been one of bullying and condescension, disregard for local values, and a swaggering parade of ten-gallon hats obscuring a disproportionate focus on energy resources.

And it didn't have to be this way.

Just run the counterfactual.  The Middle East is an interconnected web.  Earthquakes in Aghanistan and Pakistan begin with tremors elsewhere.  Would the Koran episode have triggered riots if the Administration ran foreign policy more through professional diplomats at State than military planners at Defense; if the post-invasion regime in Afghanistan had been run more responsibly; if they had engaged in a subtler and less backfire-prone de-Baathification programme in Iraq; if they had worked directly with anti-war forces rather than brushed them aside, fanning the flames of opposition?

If, if, if.

Suzanne, as always, is on the money here, as is Kevin Drum:

As near as I can tell, the Pentagon has demonstrated more genuine outrage over this incident than they did over months and months of disclosures of similar (and worse) actions at Abu Ghraib. It's revolting.

Kevin gets it right.  What's most aggravating about the White House's approach to the Newsweek story so far is its hyper-political opportunism.  It's well-known in Washington that the Bush White House in general has been proud to the point of boasting about how obedient -- as a general matter -- the press corps has been. 

One exception was the Abu Ghraib coverage. 

We can see in the Administration's approach to Newsweek a chops-licking, sloppy wet kiss of the image of the newspaper's mistake (whether the mistake was actually made -- and it would certainly be grievous if it was -- is immaterial to the Administration's strategic use of the mistake). 

They see this as the signal moment to finally put the press, and, by extension, Congress, the U.N., the Hague, and, for that matter, any legacy-makers, on the defensive about Abu Ghraib and other missteps in the GWOT.

And, as far as casting stones goes, as CAP notes, the Administration itself relied on a single, anonymous source for the mobile biological weapons story.  So where's the outrage there?

Roiling Flush Posted by Suzanne Nossel

So the State Department and Pentagon are madder than hell over Newsweek's poorly sourced report on the Koran flushing incident, discussed here and here.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher says: 

"It's appalling, really, that an article that was unfounded to begin with has caused so much harm, including loss of life,

"One would expect, as the facts come out of how this story was written - one would, in fact, expect more than the kind of correction we've seen so far . . . it's very clear to us nonetheless that the effects around the world have been very bad."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan:

"The report has had serious consequences . . . People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged."

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman:

"Newsweek hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations."

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita:

"They owe us all a lot more accountability than they took."

All these quotes were reported in the New York Times.

If in fact the allegations cannot be substantiated than the Newsweek story will go down in the annals of American journalism as a crushing embarrassment and a somber reminder of the life and death consequences of getting the story right.

But there are a couple of other facts worth noting here.  First, the Newsweek story was run by two Pentagon officials prior to publication, neither of whom disputed the Koran charge.  Also, at a press conference last Thursday Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers minimized the link between the Newsweek story and the Afghan riots, saying that the violence stemmed from other sources.

Two conclusions emerge:  one, that Pentagon officials did not think the Koran allegations so far-fetched as to question them; two, that there's enough anti-American sentiment and unrest in Afghanistan that Myers didn't think the Koran provocation mattered all that much as part of the mix.

The larger point is that we best not let our indignation over faulty journalism blind them to the circumstances that rendered the Newsweek story the firebomb it became.    After all, 60 Minutes reported just a week ago about menstrual blood being used in Gitmo detentions, an allegation that seems comparably inflammatory, and one that I don't think elicited a peep of rebuttal. 

We have created an environment in which the Koran story seemed credible to those who heard it, including savvy journalists and military officials, and where anti-American riots may not need any special provocation. 

Less than a week ago I wrote this on Dan's blog:

One of the most serious consequences of the U.S.'s lapses in upholding the human rights and related standards that we purport to represent is that we play into the hands of those who claim that our ideals are empty or hypocritical. We allow them to call into quesetion the promise that our principles signify in the minds of their populations. We sow doubts in the minds of people that would otherwise tend to cleave in the values the U.S. stands for, rather than listening to the promises of corrupt leaders.[Ed. I just added this para from the original post on Drezner to make clear that, despite what I say immediately below, I don't regard the Abu Ghraib abuses as purely individual acts - I think the blame has to be a lot broader than that.  I should have said in the sentence below "Some may . . ." rather than "We can . . ."]

We can write off Abu Ghraib as the work of a few misfits. But in the eyes of much of the rest of the world the abuses were linked to a pattern of disregard for international norms governing the treatment of detainees.

Particularly given our under-investment in public diplomacy, we have limited ability to shape how our actions are seen from the outside. When we are seen as not taking the problem seriously, that adds further fuel to the fire of those trying to fan skepticism about American motives.

Though we may not always see the link, I suspect we will be living with the consequences of Abu Ghraib for a long time to come in the form of charges of hypocrisy, doubts about American sincerity, and a sense around the world that America does not hold itself to the standards it would impose on others.

Lawrence DiRita is demanding accountability from Newsweek, but when the Abu Ghraib allegations were revealed he said that those implicated were "still only a tiny percentage of the more than 300,000 troops who have served in Iraq" and that "If you look at the tenor of the coverage, it's been focused on policies and procedures that are at best indirectly associated with the activities at that prison."  Hmm.  Not much accountability there.

Newsweek made a blunder that has led to horrific consequences.  But we all know that the reason its mistake was so serious has everything to do with the context in which it occurred, a context of the Administration's making.  DiRita's insistence on accountability from Newsweek would sound a lot less tinny if accompanied by some accountability from the Pentagon's end as well.

[Ed. one key here is that the facts are not yet fully aired on whether or not the toilet incident occurred.  Flushing of the Koran was described in a witness statement taken by a Shearman & Sterling attorney and filed in a pleading in the U.S. Distict Court for the District of Columbia.  That Newsweek's sourcing was inadequate doesn't mean the incident did not happen. I don't think we know for sure yet.]

Weekly Top 10 List – Top 10 Questions Progressives Should be Prepared to Answer Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Last week on Dan Drezner’s blog I posed a series of questions to conservatives and got an avalanche of answers, some snarky but many substantive and thoughtful.  I am planning to eventually return to all those issues, although doing so seriatum was getting a little tedious.

I promised the Dreznerites I would post a companion set of tough questions for progressives to try and answer. Since Dan’s respondents complained about the loaded phrasing of some of my queries, I am going to try to prove I can take about as much as I dish out. I’ll try to get to answers later this week (and, yes, I do think we have answers to all of these - although some are better thought-out and more persuasive than others), and urge my co-blogganists to chime in as well if they care to. Also curious as ever to hear what the commentariat has to say.

1. The Middle East: Isn’t it the case that had a progressive been in the White House, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, with the Middle East as stagnant as ever? Do you now admit that the only way to get the region moving was to dislodge a major dictator and launch at least one important country on the route to transformation? How else would you have gotten change afoot?

2. The UN: Do you honestly believe that an organization as bureaucratic, nepotistic, fractured and politicized as the UN will ever be a trustworthy foreign policy instrument? Your reform prescriptions do not address the fundamental problem of uneven political will to confront key challenges; until that is addressed, isn’t the UN doomed to be a talkshop or worse?

3. Non-Proliferation: What would you really do differently on non-proliferation? Your criticisms center on process more than substance, and its not clear that Bill Clinton’s policies were any more effective than Bush’s. Do you really believe treaties are the answer, and that verification can protect us against dangerous cheaters? You keep saying non-pro's a top priority for you, but how exactly – in a broad sense – would your approach depart from that of the Bush Administration?

4. Democratization: You go on and on about how democracy cannot be forced on other countries.  Does the promotion of democracy belong as a U.S. foreign policy priority and, if so, what's your strategy for getting it done?  Will you do anything beyond lending a helping hand to dissidents and NGOs and hoping for the best?  Don't fledgling democrats expect more from the U.S.; what are you prepared to deliver?  Or have you now decided that democratization is the province of conservatives?

5. Anti-Americanism. How can we be sure you won’t sacrifice American interests out of an urge to be better liked around the world? Don’t you realize that a certain level of resentment against the world’s largest superpower is inevitable? Don’t you see some risk in country’s taking advantage of the U.S. if they believe we are preoccupied with winning other countries’ approval?

6. Overextended Military. If you’re so attuned to the stressed placed on the military and the frustrations that members of the armed forces feel with the current leadership and approach, then how come more servicemembers don’t vote your way? Don’t you realize that all your concern over the need for diplomacy and getting others on board makes the military (and many other citizens) afraid that you won’t be willing to fight back against terrorists and others who threaten us?

7. Hypocrisy. You’re constantly accusing conservatives of failing to match rhetoric with resources when it comes to programs like the Millennium Challenge Account, and of being “hypocritical” in cooperating on terrorism with regimes like Sudan and Saudi Arabia’s, despite their egregious human rights records. Don’t you realize that foreign policy demands tough trade-offs? What makes you say progressives will do a better or more principled job managing the inevitable contradictions?

8. International Law. When push comes to shove, who would you rather have as the arbiter of what’s considered “legal” in international relations – some tribunal, court, or multi-national forum, or the U.S. government? Doesn’t it worry you to vest more and more power in bodies over which the U.S. has no control, and that – while they may have a great many perfectly respectable members – also include countries that are single-mindedly out to get us? I understand why smaller countries want stronger international legal regimes and multilateral organizations (in significant part to hem us in), but isn't the calculus different for the U.S.?

9. Use of Force. Under what circumstances do you think the U.S. is justified using military power without UN imprimatur? Is it only in self-defense? Only when one of the UN Security Council members has what we judge to be a self-interested reason for trying to block what we propose? Is the fact that the rest of the world “just doesn’t get it” enough of a justification for us to act alone? If not, what do we do when others simply refuse to recognize what we view as a real threat?

10. Derek’s point. What’s your agenda? You’re full of criticism and have had a field day with John Bolton, but I haven’t heard many ideas coming from your quarter. If you had to draw up a foreign policy “contract” to offer the American people, what would be in it?

Flushing out the truth Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Since Dan Drezner has returned from Hawaii and ever-so-politely revoked the keys to his castle, I'll update a post I did there on the deadly riots provoked at least in part by a Newsweek report of interrogators at Guantanamo flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet.

Newsweek now says that its report was wrong, and that the source of the supposed incident is unable to confirm that it occurred.  So far the riots sparked by the report have killed 16 and wounded 100.  Today Afghan Muslim clerics reportedly called for a holy war against the United States.  It sounds as though Newsweek may not have actually gotten to the bottom yet of whether the incident happened, but is trying to tamp down the chaos by disavowing its thinly sourced earlier report.

One question from a policy standpoint is whether, if an incident just like this had occurred at one of several points in the past:  say before 9/11; before the Afghan invasion; before the Iraq invasion; before the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the insurgency - - the reaction in the Muslim world would have been the same.  I'm not sure the answer, but there's reason to believe that hostile attitudes have only intensified.  Either way its a pretty terrifying situation when one spotty news report can ignite a region into anti-American rage.   

It will be interesting to see whether the recantation calms things down.  There's plenty more at play here than just the Gitmo incident - concerns about an ongoing US military presence in Afghanistan, Taliban and al Qaeda holdovers, internal Afghan political factionism, and even possible links to Iran.  The Bush Administration prides itself on having spread democracy in Afghanistan and the Middle East (and as I've said before I think he deserves some credit on that score).  But this week's demonstrations suggest its far too early to declare victory just about anywhere.

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.