I have a piece on the ongoing North Korean political transition at African Scene, a new-ish group blog started by my friend John Stupart. Check it out – and the rest of the site too.

On Friday the High Court granted an interdict to stop Mohammed Vawda, a local Muslim businessman, from burning the Bible. Unfortunately, the media reports I’ve read don’t explain the constitutional interpretation that the judge relied on when making the decision. They also don’t explain whether the case was judged narrowly, or whether it sets a broader precedent that effectively makes it illegal to burn religious books in South Africa. However, Zehir Omar, the attorney who brought the case, seems to think it’s the latter:

After a 40-minute hearing in the South Gauteng High Court, Judge Sita Kolbe agreed and banned the event. The ruling also amounts to a ban in South Africa on the burning of any Bibles and other religious books.

Lawyer Yasmin Omar, who represented an Islamic intellectual organization called Scholars of the Truth, spearheaded the legal bid with her husband, Zehir. They called Mr. Vawda’s plans “appalling.”

After the verdict Mr. Omar said, “I’m very pleased the judge came to this decision. Not only did he ban this protest but he also banned other people from burning the Bible.

“Judge Kolbe ruled that freedom of expression is not unlimited if one exercises freedom of expression that is harmful to others…. We now hope American judges will see this decision and act accordingly by banning the burning of the Quran in America,” he said.

For the record, I think that Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who wanted to turn the anniversary of September 11 into “burn the Koran day”, is an asinine jerk. I’m glad that he didn’t burn the Koran, and I’m glad the entire American political establishment, from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin (and including Gen. David Petraeus) condemned the scheme. That said, I also think the High Court has made a terrible decision here. As much as I think that burning the Koran or the Bible would be tacky and counter-productive, I also want to live in a country where people are free to do that if they want to. Here’s why:

First, burning the Bible or the Koran is a legitimate form of free speech. The message it conveys is not exactly subtle, in the same way that burning the American flag is not subtle. Nevertheless, it gets the point across: Islam/Christianity/America is bad. Regardless of whether this is true or false, these are beliefs that are sincerely held. The people who hold these beliefs have a right to articulate their views in public, and burning the symbols of institutions to which they are opposed is valid (if distasteful) way of doing that.

Second, church-state separation implies that the state is supposed to adopt a neutral stance towards religion. It should not favour one religion over another, and it should not favour religion in general over secularism. But if the state makes it illegal to burn religious books, this necessarily forces it into the position of having to adjudicate theological disputes over what qualifies as “religious” book in the first place. Will it be illegal to burn the Book of Mormon? What about L Ron. Hubbard’s Dianetics? What about printouts of the Heaven’s Gate online book? Even if these cases can be hand-waved aside, there’s still the broader problem that the state is favouring religion over secularism. What will the response be to atheists who want to prevent people from burning The God Delusion, or communists who want to stop the burning of Das Kapital? To reiterate, the state’s position towards religion should be one of secularism and neutrality. From a secular viewpoint, a book is just a book: the Bible and Das Kapital are both just a collection of words printed on paper; neither one has any intrinsic mystical quality that makes it uniquely worthy of protection.

Finally, there is an argument that burning the Bible or the Koran is an example of hate speech. However, hate speech is an incitement to commit violence, and it’s not self-evident that the burning a religious tract does this. Certainly, burning the Bible is not clear-cut case of incitement in the same way as, for example, RTLM radio telling people in Rwanda to go out and kill Tutsis, or the authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion writing that Jews use the blood of innocent children to make their cookies. Sure, I can certainly imagine scenarios where burning the Bible or the Koran is hate speech. If someone stands up in front of an angry mob and gives a speech about how Muslims are evil and then, as a final flourish, sets fire to a Koran, I have no problem with treating this as hate speech and banning it. But I can also imagine scenarios in which burning a holy book is not hate speech, and is instead a legitimate critique of either the Christian or the Islamic faith, both of which are human institutions and neither of which are immune to criticism. (Incidentally, Mohammed Vawda’s plan to burn the Bible was clearly an example of the latter. He intended it to be a critique of Terry Jones, not incitement to commit violence against Christians.) The appropriate response from the state is therefore to discriminate on a case-by-case basis, stepping in to prevent hate speech when it occurs but permitting the free criticism of religion by way of default.

Count me among those who think that the Nobel Committee has made a mockery of itself by awarding the Peace Prize to Barack Obama. I say this, incidentally, as someone who supports many of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives. However, even in those cases where Obama’s policies are both well-intentioned and well-conceived (for example, pushing for strategic realignment with Russia, exerting pressure on Israel to give up the settlements in the West Bank, escalating the war in Afghanistan*), the fact is that they have yet to yield tangible results. If Obama manages to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict or has a “Nixon-in-China” moment with Iran, by all means give him the prize then. But to give him the prize just nine months into his presidency, when his only achievement has been to give people a nebulous sense of “hope” that there will be “change”, is absurd.

* Obviously, even if escalation is the correct policy, this is not usually the sort of thing Nobel Peace Prizes are awarded for.

On paper, the prospects for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis seem pretty good right now. In the past, Iranian foreign policy has often appeared wild and unpredictable: Iran has lied about its nuclear facilities and provocatively test-fired missiles, all the while issuing bellicose rhetoric on the evils of Israel and America. Last week, however, during talks between Iran and six other countries in Geneva, the Iranian negotiators were in a conciliatory mood:

Knocked off balance, perhaps, by the revelation of a new nuclear site at Qom, Iran seems to have agreed to a more direct engagement over its nuclear programme, despite many previous assertions by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the issue was closed.

Western negotiators say they won two important agreements. Iran will allow inspectors to visit the controversial new plant later this month. Tehran has also agreed in principle for a large part of the uranium it has already enriched at the Natanz plant to be shipped out of Iran. It would then be processed by Russia and France to a higher grade, for use in a research reactor in Tehran which produces medical isotopes.

The latter concession is particularly important. The dispute between Iran and the West has revolved mostly around Iran’s uranium enrichment capability. Most countries that operate nuclear power plants simply buy reactor-grade uranium from commercial suppliers, rather than going through the difficult and expensive process of enriching it themselves. Iran’s insistence on enriching its own fuel, along with the secretive nature of its nuclear programme and its development of medium-range ballistic missiles, has provoked Western suspicions that Iran’s ultimate goal is to construct a nuclear bomb. But if Iran is willing to send its uranium overseas for processing, there may be scope for a compromise. Such a deal would allow Iran to save face by holding on to its nuclear enrichment facilities, while also giving foreign observers a chance to confirm that Iran is not producing weapons-grade, highly-enriched uranium.

Why has Iran changed its negotiating stance? There are two explanations worth considering. The optimistic explanation is that Barack Obama’s foreign policy is starting to pay dividends. Obama came into office promising to engage with Iran, renew America’s alliance with Europe, and push the “reset” button with Russia. The new spirit of transatlantic cooperation was in evidence when Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy literally stood shoulder to shoulder with Obama when he revealed the existence of the Qom nuclear site. And while the White House insisted that it did not expect to receive any quid pro quo for its decision not to deploy missile interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic, it was pleased when Dmitry Medvedev hinted that Russia might be willing to allow stronger sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. At the same time, Obama’s policy of engagement has convinced the Iranian leadership that his government accepts the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, and that he is negotiating in good faith rather than with an eye towards eventual “regime change”. In short, Obama can wield bigger sticks and bigger carrots than his predecessor, and Iran’s change of behaviour reflects this new set of incentives.

The pessimistic explanation is that Iranian cooperation is merely a ruse, designed to buy time in which Iran will either advance its nuclear programme beyond the point of no return, or fortify its nuclear facilities against air attack. Sceptics were quick to point out that Iran’s concessions are still vague and ill-defined. The decision to send fuel to Russia for reprocessing is still only an agreement “in principle”, and there is no way to guarantee that the uranium Iran intends to send abroad represents its entire stockpile. Moreover, Iran is currently in the process of procuring Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, one of the world’s most advanced air defence systems, which can track a hundred aircraft and engage twelve targets simultaneously at range of nearly 200km. Perhaps Iran is merely trying to stave off an imminent Israeli attack while it gets its air defence network into place.

Or perhaps neither of these explanations accurately captures the complexity of Iranian decision-making. The Iranian government is notoriously opaque. Iran has an elected President and Majilis, an unelected Supreme Leader and Council of Guardians, and a set of powerful bureaucracies such as the military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. In theory, foreign policy lies within the ambit of the Supreme Leader, but since 2005, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards have assumed so much power that it has become difficult to tell where decisions are actually made. There are realists within the Iranian leadership who would prefer to see some form of strategic rapprochement with the United States, but there are also numerous hardliners who view Western influence as the single greatest threat to the Islamic Republic. This may explain why, at the same time that Iran’s negotiators were preparing for the talks in Geneva, its military was testing a new missile that is capable of hitting Eastern Europe. Rather than a country that is hedging its bets, maybe this should be seen evidence of a divided government that can’t make up its mind.

Muammar Gaddafi often comes across as a nutjob, travelling around with his amazon bodyguard and having himself crowned “king of kings”. And his long, rambling, intemperate speech at the UN Security Council yesterday certainly contained its fair share of crazy. However, I’ve suggested before that Gaddafi has more tactical acumen than the media gives him credit for, and this thought occurred to me once again while reading Foreign Policy’s live blogging of the speech. After bashing the United States and calling the Security Council the “terror council”, Gaddafi takes his speech in a new direction:

Now heaping praise on the “black, African, Kenyan” president of the United States

—

“We would be happy if Obama would stay forever as president.”

—

He keeps calling Obama “our son.”

Perhaps this praise was sincere. But I have a feeling that Gaddafi’s comments were aimed at American domestic audiences; in particular, Obama’s right-wing critics. Gaddafi uses the internet, and he surely understands that Obama’s political position has been complicated by the fact that he is seen as less than fully American: either, by the mainstream right, as a globalised “Davos man” with an insufficient appreciation for the importance of American exceptionalism, or, by the birther fringe, as literally a citizen of Kenya rather than the United States. If Gaddafi wanted to deliberately exacerbate these fears, the easiest way to do so would be to effusively praise Obama for the same cosmopolitanism that makes the right uneasy; and that’s exactly what he did.

On the other hand, I don’t see any long-term gain for Gaddafi in annoying Obama, which suggests that whatever tactical acumen he possesses does not necessarily translate into strategic good sense.

Khaya Dlanga touches on something that has annoyed me about the Brandon Huntley controversy: the extent to which South Africans have engaged in gratuitous Canada-bashing:

A lot of people seem to have missed the point. It was not the Canadian government that gave the famed and now much vilified Huntley refugee status. It was not a law passed by the Canadian parliament or their constitutional court. A tribunal that is given the authority to make these decisions on a case-by-case basis. Many of us are already doing our best to vilify and insult Canada. They did not do this. Just a group of ignorant citizens given too much power.

Khaya correctly notes that it was not the elected branches of the Canadian government that made this specific decision (in fact, the Canadian federal government is currently trying to have it reversed), but he’s wrong to imply that Canada’s policy on refugees is somehow separate from the rest of its government, or its foreign policy in general.

On the contrary, Canada’s foreign policy and refugee policy both stem from the same set of principles. Over the past twenty years, Canada has made a consistent, good-faith effort to advance the interests of developing countries. More so than almost any other Western nation (with the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries), Canada has made this a central tenet of its foreign policy. It has transformed its military into a force that is heavily focussed on peacekeeping. It has promoted intellectual concepts, such as “human security”, that are designed to improve the lives of people in poor and unstable countries. And it gives away a large amount of foreign aid, relative to the size of its population and its economy.

Canada also has a relatively lenient policy on refugees. It has the fourth-largest refugee population in the developing world, behind Germany, the United States and Britain. This is not by accident, but by design, and is completely consistent with the rest of Canada’s foreign policy. Canada makes it comparatively easy for refugees to gain asylum, so that people fleeing despotic and abusive governments have somewhere to go.

And now, because a white South African took advantage of Canada’s liberal policy on refugees, we have prominent journalists like Ray Hartley writing that “[the decision] says more about Canadian perceptions than South African reality”, and the ANC releasing a statement which says that “Canada’s reasoning for granting Huntley a refugee status can only serve to perpetuate racism”. To put it mildly, this is insane.

The South African blogosphere has been overwhelmingly critical of Brandon Huntley and the Canadian immigration board that granted him refugee status. (See Pierre De Vos, Ray Hartley, Michael Trapido, and Sarah Britten, to name just a few.) However, I think that in the rush to bash Huntley for the sin of bringing the country into disrepute, some interesting aspects of this story have been lost.

I’m basically a Hobbesian, in the sense that I believe the most basic and fundamental duty of state is to protect its citizens safe from physical harm, and that physical security is a necessary precondition for the pursuit of other goods. From my perspective, it seems that Huntley presented two main claims to the Canadian immigration board:

1. That he had been the victim of multiple violent crimes, that the South African government is unable to effectively police criminals, and that if he were to return to South Africa, there is a reasonable chance that he would be the victim of crime again.

2. That white South Africans in particular are targeted by black criminals, making him especially vulnerable to crime.

It is the second claim that has inspired so much criticism. And rightly so! I know lots of white South Africans (in addition to, you know, being one myself), and for the most part we manage to go through our daily lives without fear of imminent racial violence. This is not to say that there are not criminals, black and white, who also happen to be racist – it would be very surprising if this were the case. However, the idea that simply being white creates an omnipresent risk of violence is one that can be safely rejected.

But is claim #2 the really important one? I understand that it’s legally significant, because Huntley had to demonstrate some sort of racial dimension to the attacks in order to qualify for refugee status. However, philosophically, I’m not sure why it should matter. Violence is violence: if you’re stabbed by a mugger, you probably don’t care whether he just wanted to steal your wallet, or whether you wanted to steal your wallet and disliked you because of the colour of your skin. Either way, the end result is the same.

What about claim #1? I’ve heard some suggestion that Huntley might have fabricated or exaggerated his attacks. But this seems unlikely to me: these are claims that are fairly easy to verify, and apparently Huntley was able to present evidence in form of physical scarring and so on which was, at minimum, enough to convince the Canadian board that he had been the victim of violent crime. In which case, a foreign legal body has ruled that the risk of violent crime in South Africa is sufficiently high that, in principle, South African citizens that are particularly risk-prone have the right to seek refugee status. Regardless of whether Huntley himself can and should meet this criteria, this is a serious and damning indictment of the government’s inability protect its citizens.

I understand the emotional instinct to defend South Africa against a perceived slight by a foreign government, but I don’t think that’s the right response in this case. Given the limited extent to which South African citizens can apply pressure on the government to solve specific problems such as crime, anything that gives the government an incentive to do better – including the prospect of international embarrassment – is probably a good thing.

Eusebius McKaiser and Sasha Polakaw-Suranksky try to make sense of Barack Obama’s Africa policy:

Obama’s Africa policy is essentially premised on the promotion of — insistence on, even — good governance. This policy is touted not just as an intrinsic good for Africa but also, as Hillary Clinton said at the Eighth African Growth and Opportunity Act conference in Kenya recently, “good [for] business”.

It is also deeply personal. In Accra Obama gave a pointed reminder of how his father’s career was blunted by cronyism and the muffling of dissent in Kenya. His desire for Africans to take their rightful, prominent place in the world is genuine, but by telling Africans to get their own house in order he risks sounding like yet another paternalistic Uncle Sam. Convincing black heads of state to get a handle on corruption, it turns out, is much harder than telling absent black fathers that “responsibility does not end at conception”.

This is true; and it seems to have come as a rude shock to some African governments that expected Obama to be more sympathetic. But is this consistent with Obama’s overall foreign policy? Obama is generally (and accurately, in my view) seen as a representing a return to realism in US foreign policy. And yet, when it comes to Africa policy, Obama comes off as strangely idealistic, insisting on good governance and democracy in ways that he would not if, for example, he was talking about the Middle-East.

But I’m willing to be charitable here, for several reasons. First, there’s considerable overlap between the goals of a “realist” and an “idealist” foreign policy: both them want states that are stable and viable trade partners. (Although a realist won’t care whether this is achieved by means of democracy or a benign dictatorship.) Policies such as foreign aid make sense within a realist framework, if you see them as a (benign) attempt to build and maintain a sphere of influence. Finally, to the extent that Obama is guilty is inconsistency, I think this can be at least partially explained by realist motives such as an acknowledgement of the limits of American power and a realisation that pursuing the national interest in different regions requires different means.

In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s Africa trip, the most interesting thing we can say about the way the US deals with Africa is that not much has changed, and not much is going to change. We shouldn’t expect any sort of radical overhaul of US Africa policy. However, this is by no means a bad thing, since Bush’s Africa policy was one of the genuine success stories of his presidency, and we want programmes like PEPFARS, AGOA and the Millennium Challenge Account to remain in place. If Obama keeps the basic framework of Bush’s policies in place, and makes some modest improvements of his own, his presidency will also be good for Africa.

A few weeks ago, I was discussing the launch of the Palm Pre with my friend Darren. I like the Pre, and he does too. I would rather have one of these than an iPhone, even though by all accounts the build quality of the hardware isn’t that great. It makes up for it by having a better operating system, and by including the one feature I always thought the iPhone should have had: a physical QWERTY keyboard. (Incidentally, the Palm Pre is currently only available for CDMA networks, which means it will be a while before it’s available in South Africa.)

At some point, he made the following observation: “A couple of years ago, nobody would have thought that in 2009, the best phones would be American.”

This struck me as an intriguing thought, and correct on both levels. The best phones today are indeed American: the iPhone, the Pre, and the new Blackberry models are all excellent. The best non-American phones use American software, such as Google’s innovative Android operating system. Compared to “smartphones” of a couple of years ago, like the Nokia N-series, using any one of these devices makes you feel like you’ve just stepped out of a time machine.

It is also true that, not long ago, nobody thought American companies could compete in this market. Everyone was watching to see how the Finns, the grand old men of the industry, would respond to the challenge from the upstart Koreans. The only major American company in the market was Motorola, which was large in terms of market share, but had a painfully slow development cycle and suffered from a perennial struggle to remain profitable.

All of these companies were engaged in a features arms-race, loading up their phones with faster data connections and higher-megapixel cameras. But when Apple entered the market, it didn’t even try to win the arms-race. Instead, it did something qualitatively different, fundamentally changing the way in users interact with the device. Tellingly, when the iPhone was first introduced, competitors such as Nokia ridiculed the phone for its slow data speeds and low-resolution camera. Even when presented with the reality of the iPhone, it took them a while to realise Apple had effectively changed the game in such a way that those things were no longer the main determinants of success. This is the concise version of how Apple and other American companies came to dominate the high end of the cellular phone market.

However, this raises some interesting questions. For instance, what happened to Motorola? Motorola is the largest of the American cellphone manufacturers, and historically they’ve been a pretty innovative company. But they seemed as taken by surprise by the success of the iPhone as everyone else, and they’ve been slow to adapt ever since. The company’s fortunes have improved since last year, when they were considering selling their handset business. But they’re not exactly setting the world on fire, either.

I don’t pretend to know exactly why this is. But I want to bring up one of my pet theories, which is that Motorola is to cellular phones as Chrysler Corporation is to to cars, and vice versa. Consider their similarities: they’re both large American companies competing in markets where American companies have often struggled. Their products both tend to be popular in hip-hop culture (okay, so maybe I’m reaching a bit on this point). Most importantly, both companies have tended to be one-hit wonders. Both of them released an exceptional product in 2004, and then failed to capitalise on its success. In Motorola’s case, it was the RAZR cellphone, which featured high-class materials and unique industrial design. In Chrysler’s case, it was the 300C sedan, which combined spaciousness, performance and rear-wheel-drive handling. Motorola followed up the success of the RAZR with uninspiring phones like the PEBL and ROKR E1, and Chrysler’s follow-up to the 300C was the ugly, poorly-performing Sebring. Neither company has managed to fully recover since then (though Chrysler has fared a lot a lot worse).

It’s a pity that companies like Chrysler and Motorola aren’t more competitive, even though they seemingly possess, somewhere in their corporate DNA, the ability to make good products. But it makes me wonder: just as America ultimately didn’t need Motorola to stay competitive in the cellphone industry, can it compete in the car industry without the Big Three? Obviously, this is an imperfect analogy. The car industry is capital-intensive in ways that the cellphone and software industries are not. You need large-scale production facilities and dealership networks in order to build and sell cars, and this is not the sort of thing that can be easily financed through venture capital. Cars have a long development cycle, are complex to design and manufacture, and must satisfy a dizzying array of regulations. It seems silly to assume that the American car industry could be saved by small start-ups.

And yet, if Chrysler is Motorola, then it’s hard not to see traces of Apple in, say, Tesla Motors. When Tesla was selling stripped-down roadsters for more than $100,000, it was easy to dismiss them as a mere curiosity. But Tesla is currently working on a sedan which, they say, will seat five people, accelerate from 0-60 mph in 5.6 seconds, and cost a mere $50,000 – the price of well-spec’ed BMW 3-Series or Mercedes-Benz C-Class. The sedan is also better-looking than virtually anything the Big Three are currently working on, and of course, uses no petrol whatsoever. Just like Apple when it first entered the cellphone market, Tesla is not content with trying to fight its competitors on their own terms. Instead, they’re trying to fundamentally change the game.

It would be premature to say that the “Tesla model” is the future of the US car industry. Also, Tesla itself is not exactly a triumph of free-market capitalism: the company has benefited heavily from low-rate loans and subsidies from the US government. Still, the fact that a small company like Tesla can generate good ideas and bring them to market faster than the Big Three is certainly indicative of something positive. And it’s worth considering what would have happened if, a few years ago, the US government had decided to artificially prop up Motorola at the expense of its foreign and domestic competitors. In this scenario, it seems likely that neither American consumers nor the American cellphone industry would be as well off as they are today. The “creative destruction” of the marketplace really can be creative.

Marc Lynch’s Foreign Policy article on rap feuds as a metaphor for international relations is well worth reading. A sample:

Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He’s #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable reputation, both artistic and commercial, and has produced some of the all-time best (and best-selling) hip hop albums including standouts Reasonable Doubt, The Blueprint and the Black Album. He spent several successful years as the CEO of Def Jam Records before buying out his contract a few months ago to release his new album on his own label. And he’s got Beyonce. Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. If there be hegemony, then this is it. Heck, when he tried to retire after the Black Album, he found himself dragged back into the game (shades of America’s inward turn during the Clinton years?).

But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint? The changes in Jay-Z’s approach over the years suggest that he recognizes the realist and liberal logic… but is sorely tempted by the neo-conservative impulse.

Michael Gerson, one of the primary architects of Bush’s big-government “compassionate conservatism”, defends needle-exchange programmes for heroin addicts:

They are also at the center of a controversy. Needle-exchange programs have always been politically controversial, with opponents arguing that they send a mixed moral message about drug use. The House of Representatives recently passed an amendment banning exchanges in the District within 1,000 feet of places where children gather — which, if approved by the Senate, would effectively put programs like PreventionWorks out of business. Staffers joke that they could work only in graveyards and the middle of the Potomac.

This restriction might make sense if needle-exchange programs increased the number of addicts. But they don’t.

Gerson’s argument is absolutely correct. This is the sort of “compassionate conservative” proposal that I can wholeheartedly support, in part because it’s about smart public policy rather than simply bribing voters with new spending programmes.

Consider the benefits of needle-exchange programmes. The problem they are designed to tackle is a serious one. In developed countries, transmission from dirty needles is one of the primary causes of HIV; often around 30% in major cities. It also spreads other diseases, such as Hepatitis C, which infects (to use one example) 90% of intravenous drug users in Vancouver. Intravenous drug users are much more likely to die from these blood-borne pathogens than from overdosing on the drugs themselves, and needle-exchange programmes have been effective in reducing these diseases. According to some studies I’ve read, they can reduce the rate of HIV transmission by 30% or more.

What about the downside? A common criticism is that needle-exchange programmes will promote increased drug use. But studies have found that this is not the case, which makes intuitive sense. There are already high costs to becoming a heroin user, including the severe social stigma against intravenous drugs (which exists even amongst users of other, milder drugs) and the cost of obtaining the drugs themselves. It is these costs, not the cost of obtaining needles, that prevent people from becoming heroin addicts. Would you start shooting up with heroin just because you found out that you could get the needles for free? Similarly, people who have chosen to become addicts have already borne those costs, and they’re not going to stop using heroin just because they can’t find a clean needle.

In short, the state can not use needles as a policy instrument to reduce the prevalence of drug use amongst the population. However, the availability of clean needles does play a significant role in accelerating or retarding the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C. So why not increase the availability of clean needles and retard the spread of HIV? That won’t solve the drug problem, obviously, but at it might keep the addicts alive long enough to be rehabilitated.

There is also the matter of the cost of such programmes. Some taxpayers may justifiably resent having their tax revenue used to buy paraphernalia for drug addicts. On the other hand, needle-exchange programmes are very cheap to implement, and in countries that provides some form of public healthcare system (which is pretty much all the developed ones) providing AIDS treatment to drug addicts is extremely expensive for the state. What makes more sense: giving an addict a $1 needle now, or thousands of dollars of AIDS drugs later on? Implemented correctly, needle-exchange programmes can save the government money.

So, to sum up, we have a public policy that saves lives, saves money, and does not promote drug use. So why don’t more national and city governments do it? Because, as Megan McArdle points, of the ick factor. Needle-exchange sounds weird and counter-intuitive at first, and governments in a democratic system don’t want to incur the anger of the public by adopting policies that will provoke gut-feel resistance. However, conservative governments are somewhat less susceptible to this sort of public criticism, and theoretically have more freedom to introduce good drug policies. So it’s more of a pity that Michael Gerson wasn’t able to convince more people that he was right on this issue when he was working for the Bush Administration.

I watched the new Harry Potter movie yesterday, and thought it was pretty good. I’m not sure it was good enough to justify its 78 score on Metacritic, but it’s competently executed, and the film-makers have largely succeeded in their efforts to create a darker Harry Potter that corresponds with the increasing maturity of the books. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way from the days when the extraordinarily banal Chris Columbus was in charge of the franchise.

Still, there’s something missing from this movie. Most of the criticism of The Half-Blood Prince has focussed on the preponderance of teen romance, which is juxtaposed somewhat awkwardly with the good vs. evil A-plot. Personally, I didn’t mind this much. However, I did think the A-plot was underdeveloped. In JK Rowling’s version of the story, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was a thinly-disguised analogue of the War on Terror. The book never lets the reader forget that, even though events at Hogwarts are proceeding more-or-less normally, in the wider world there is a war of national survival taking place – and moreover, it is a war that the Ministry of Magic is losing badly, even though the hawkish neocons under Rufus Scrimgeour have temporarily wrested control away from both Cornelius Fudge’s pacifists and the outright pro-Voldemort fellow travellers like Dolores Umbridge. (It is the latter group, of course, that eventually ends up in control of the Ministry.)

By de-emphasising the politics, the film makes the war itself seem distant and unimportant. When acts of terrorism do occur, they seem absurdly disconnected from any form of strategic logic. In the opening scene, Voldemort’s Death Eaters destroy the Millennium Bridge, for reasons that are frankly unfathomable. Then Voldemort sends his strongest lieutenant, Bellatrix Lestrange, to… well, burn down the house of Arthur Weasley, a mid-level bureaucrat who works in an unimportant government department. It’s hard to detect any kind of calculated genius behind Voldemort’s attacks, and this is partially why the sense of dread and helplessness that pervades the book is largely absent from the movie.

Speaking of Bellatrix Lestrange, I have one final complaint. Why is it that Helena Bonham Carter was (mis)cast in this role? Hollywood operates on autopilot a lot of the time, and this seems to have been one of those occasions. Film studio executives view Bonham Carter as a freaky goth chick who has been in lots of Tim Burton movies, so why not cast her as evil witch? Makes perfect sense, right? Except that Bonham Carter comes across more like a crazy bag lady – a variation on her character in Fight Club – than the powerful and dangerous villainess in the books. The casting director ought to have exercised a little more imagination in this case.

Andrew Sullivan joins the calls for Obama to release his “original birth certificate”:

So many readers are furious that I have dared to ask the president to show the original copy of his birth certificate. The reason for demanding it is the same reason for demanding basic medical records proving Sarah Palin is the biological mother of Trig.

Because it would make it go away and it’s easily done.

I’m tired of these public officials believing they have some right to privacy. They don’t. It’s the price of public office. If you don’t like it, don’t be president. And for goodness’ sake, don’t run for president on a platform of transparency.

I’m not entirely sure whether to credit Sullivan with good-faith argument here. Hearing Andrew Sullivan flatly deny that public officials have any right to privacy whatsoever is jarring, considering that Sullivan wrote “The Scolds” back in 1998 and vociferously defended both Bill Clinton and Gary Condit during their infidelity scandals on the grounds that, well, public officials have a right to privacy.

It seems easier to believe that Sullivan is simply trying to maintain consistency with his position on Sarah Palin, a parallel that he explicitly acknowledges in this post. Like many people who blog about American politics, I thought that Sullivan went off the rails in response to Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy, when he not only attacked her character and suitability for office (which is a legitimate part of political discourse), but pushed the preposterous theory that Trig was not Palin’s biological child (which is not). Ironically, having made the argument that Palin should release Trig’s birth certificate in order to “clear up the issue”, Sullivan finds himself ill-equipped to respond forcefully when the Birthers make the same argument about Barack Obama.

Let’s set aside the issue of whether there actually is an “original” birth certificate, ie. a 1961-vintage piece of paper that is currently being stored in some secret warehouse in Hawaii. This is less interesting to me than the question of whether Sullivan is actually right. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the “original” birth certificate does exist – is Obama somehow at fault for not releasing it?

I believe the answer is no. I think Sullivan was wrong about Palin, and now he’s compounded the error by taking the wrong position on Obama. In both cases, we have situation where public officials are facing absurd theories for which there is no positive evidence whatsoever. In these cases, politicians need not and should not bend over backwards to satisfy their critics. To do so is to reward the purveyors of conspiracy theories, create a perverse incentive, and place an unfair burden on politicians in which they are somehow obliged to disprove every wild and unsubstantiated accusation that is thrown their way. If Palin and Obama were to follow Sullivan’s advice, the more deranged critics of public officials will be incentivised to continually spin deeper and more intricate conspiracy theories, placing the burden of proof on the politicians to demonstrate their innocence at every turn, and declaring victory whenever the politicians are unable to do so.

There are some theories ought not be indulged as a matter of principle. Obama should not entertain the nonsensical demands of the Birthers, just as Palin was right not to entertain the demands of Andrew Sullivan.

I’ll be on CNBC tomorrow at 6:30am, discussing Libyan foreign policy.

During Thabo Mbeki’s presidency, I argued on several occasions that South Africa’s confrontational foreign policy towards the United States did not advance our national interests, to which the then-Department of Foreign Affairs essentially responded by saying that this was a lie, and that their US policy was not confrontational at all.

Thus I was intrigued to read the following blog post by Kristen Silverberg, former US Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, someone who would have dealt extensively with South Africa during its term on the UN Security Council:

Whatever the outcome of the General Assembly debate, the U.S. should continue to work to defend and strengthen the international community’s ability to take action under R2P. Columbia Law School professor Matthew Waxman is currently finishing a report for the Council on Foreign Relations, due out this fall, with a number of important recommendations on how the U.S. can move ahead on R2P.

I have one modest suggestion to throw into the mix: The U.S. should make clear that it will not support any country for U.N. Security Council permanent membership without a demonstrated commitment to R2P. This means countries that have worked to shield Burma and Zimbabwe and Iran from international scrutiny need not apply. (Congress should also make clear that this is a requirement of U.S. ratification of any Security Council expansion proposal.) R2P action is challenging enough under the current membership. If the Obama administration is serious about supporting R2P, it needs a Security Council with members fully committed to effective action.

Any guesses which country the bold part refers to? Also, are we to assume that she is the only one in the US State Department who feels this way?

Peter Singer has an article in the New York Times Magazine, arguing that healthcare should be rationed in order to keep costs down. Peter Suderman at Reason Magazine disagrees:

[T]he QALY standard results in an essentially command-and-control approach to health-care distribution: Rather than let individual preferences and agreements work out prices and reach an equilibrium, the government simply sets the value of a year of good life for all people, without differentiating between them, and extrapolates from there. I agree that, in the end, we do have to make economic decisions about the value of life. But shouldn’t those be decisions made by individuals, their families, and their doctors? Do we really want bureaucrats in Washington handing down indiscriminate dictates on what a year of productive, healthy life is worth? Must everyone be blindly herded into the same pen?

I’m naturally inclined to agree with Suderman over Singer. But I’m not sure this argument makes sense.

As I understand it, there are two fundamental problems with healthcare. First, it is extremely expensive. Second, individual needs are arbitrary and unpredictable. Maybe you’ll get hit by a car in your early 50s and die without ever needing expensive medical care; maybe you’ll develop kidney cancer and need that $54,000 Sutent treatment just to stay alive. One way to deal with this problem would be to let each person bear the cost of his or her individual needs. But this is where the libertarian framework runs into problems. Because this might be the freedom-maximising option, in the sense that no individual is compelled to pay for somebody else’s medical problems, and each person is allowed buy as much medical care as they want. But it’s hard to square this with any abstract conception of justice, because the extremely high cost of many medical treatments makes them prohibitively expensive for even middle-class income earners who are unfortunate enough to require them. Essentially, this would be a system in which life and death decisions would be too heavily decided by luck.

As a result, every healthcare system in the world makes use of some form of risk-pooling. This can either be done through private insurance companies, government institutions like the NHS, or some combination of the two. Everyone in the pool pays money, and the car crash victims subsidise the kidney cancer sufferers. The problem, as Singer points out, is that the moment you have a risk pool, you create a situation in which the cost of each individual treatment effects everyone in the pool, not just the person who is being treated. This is why Suderman’s argument – that cost-benefit calculations should be taken by “individuals, their families, and their doctors” rather than soulless bureaucrats – seems unrealistic to me. Individuals (and their families) will always place an extremely high value on their own life. Moreover, the benefits of longer life accrue solely to them, where as the costs of treatment are spread throughout the risk pool. This creates a prisoner’s dilemma: each individual, acting rationally, will try to maximise the amount of healthcare they receive, even if the care is very expensive and buys only a small increase in life expectancy. But if everyone in the pool does this, the overall cost will become unsustainable, and the risk pool will collapse.

The unpleasant conclusion that we can draw from this is that a risk pool only works by taking away some degree of individual choice, especially at the margins. This can either be done by a government-instituted QALY system, or by an insurance company deciding that it will cover some treatments and not others. This is not an endorsement of Singer’s vision of government-provided healthcare, nor a defence of the current American healthcare system, which is problematic in all sorts of ways. My point is simply that as long as people are part of a risk pool, these decisions are never going to be entirely left to individuals.

Read this account of the Judicial Services Commission, in which a seemingly thoughtful and knowledgeable judge candidate is subjected to a series of attacks over his religious views, his race, the fact that he’s not part of the same club as one of his interlocutors, and a trumped-up accusation that he destroyed the career of a black lawyer (who later turns out to have been a thief). To state the obvious, having capable people in the judiciary is really, really important, and if this how we go about selecting them, that’s a very bad thing.

Critics of “transformation” in South African society often argue that the transformation process, ostensibly intended to redress the injustices of apartheid, is in reality designed to entrench the ANC’s hold on political power. Without weighing in on that particular debate, I will say how I surprised I am that Cosatu’s own press releases have taken to describing transformation as an instrument of political power rather than social justice. Consider the following story in the Sunday Times:

[Cosatu] will also intensify pressure for “radical” transformation of the judiciary and the media, both of which it believes were used by those conspiring against Zuma. At its KwaZulu-Natal congress this week, the federation resolved to launch a “vigorous campaign to ensure that justice is done”. “All former NPA managers who conspired against the president of the ANC (will) be brought to book … (to) destroy the agenda of the right,” Cosatu said, without mentioning Ngcuka or McCarthy by name.

It also resolved to press Zuma’s administration to fast-track transformation of the judiciary, which had “been used in the past to fight narrow factional interests”. The media, Cosatu said, had been used for the past 15 years to “serve the interests of counter-revolutionary forces and the capitalists”. Cosatu KwaZulu-Natal secretary Zet Luzipho said the union federation’s provincial leadership would look at what form the campaign would take. The issues around the NPA, the judiciary and the media would be linked, possibly into a single campaign.

There is almost no attempt here to disguise the political nature of Cosatu’s objectives. The calculation is presented straightforwardly: the media and judiciary attempted to block Jacob Zuma’s accession to the presidency, and therefore they must be “transformed”. This will fulfil a twofold purpose of punishing them for their intransigence, and pre-emptively stifling any resistance to the implementation Zuma’s political project.

Of course, it is very important that Cosatu not succeed in all of this. In order to survive, democracies need to be able to protect civil society against encroachment by the government, and to protect certain branches of government (like the judiciary, the central bank and the military) from being politicised by the elected branches. If a democracy can’t rigidly maintain these sort of internal distinctions, power eventually becomes concentrated in the hands of a small oligarchic elite, and this starts to erode the democratic character of the state. In short, South Africa’s success over the next ten years will depend to a large degree on whether our civil society and government institutions are strong enough to resist the attempts of even powerful elites, such as the ANC-affiliated Cosatu, to control them.

Steven Friedman critiques the public criticism of Peter de Villiers:

The problem is not that people criticise De Villiers — or Percy Sonn or Norman Arendse or black lawyers and business people whose names come to mind: in a free society everyone can criticise everyone else. It is that they are reduced to buffoons, butts of ridicule, much as smiling minstrels were in the days when prejudices were expressed more directly because they were the law.

It is possible that some who are reduced to comic cutouts in this way are as foolish as those who denigrate them claim. But it seems highly unlikely that there is a law of South African life that decrees that all black people who gravitate to posts many whites believe to be beyond them, or express views many whites would rather not hear, happen also to be clowns. It seems far more likely that some end up saying injudicious things because the constant sneering of detractors convinced that black people are simply not up to particular tasks take its toll — and more than possible that some are not foolish at all but are lampooned in this way because this enables some whites to convince themselves of their own superiority and to console themselves for their loss of power.

I think there are several problems with this. First, Friedman speculates on peoples’ motives, which automatically makes his argument suspect, because the inner motivations of any person are inherently unknown and unknowable to others. As a matter of courtesy, our default position should be to assume that others are arguing in good faith unless we a very good reason to believe otherwise. If someone criticises the public pronouncements of Peter de Villiers, we should generally assume that they are making a good-faith critique of his suitability as coach, rather than a bad-faith critique designed to camouflage some form of racism. If we don’t make a default assumption of good-faith argument, we effectively lose any possibility of having a civil discourse, because we replace arguments about issues, which can be at least obliquely tested against some kind of objective reality, with arguments about motivation, which can not.

As for the substance of his argument: Friedman contends that blacks who succeed in traditionally “white” fields are pilloried as buffoons, and that they “are lampooned in this way because this enables some whites to convince themselves of their own superiority and to console themselves for their loss of power”. But this assertion simply doesn’t stand up to empirical examination. I could come up with a long list of non-whites who have succeeded in white-dominated fields and have not been portrayed as buffoons. Pius Langa, Barack Obama, Tito Mboweni, Richard Maponya, Lewis Hamilton, Jonathan Jansen, Bryan Habana and Tiger Woods have all succeeded in traditionally “white” fields, and have all been the subject of respectful (and often adulatory) coverage by the South African media. Conversely, George W. Bush was “reduced to a buffoon” and turned into “a butt of ridicule” with far greater severity and frequency than Peter de Villiers.

If George W. Bush, Peter de Villiers and John Hlophe are portrayed as buffoons in the media, while Barack Obama, Bryan Habana and Pius Langa are not, shouldn’t we apply Occam’s Razor and assume that the negative coverage of the former group is driven less by race than by the nature of the public statements they have made?

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes about leadership, in a long paragraph that deserves to be quoted in full:

Gandhi thought people should generally be nicer to Untouchables but other than that the caste system was just fine, and the best way forward for India was to eradicate modern technology and revert to an agrarian state of proto-nature, a vision which might not unjustly be called totalitarian. Abraham Lincoln played fast and loose with habeas corpus in ways that would make Dick Cheney blanch, famously wrote “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”, and reassured in many speeches that just because slavery could be abolished, don’t worry, it won’t ever mean that blacks will be allowed to marry white people. Martin Luther King let himself be taped by the FBI, even though he knew he was under surveillance, committing adultery and yelling “I’m not a Negro tonight!” Although many people who admire him would, I don’t count John Paul II’s stance on matters of sex as a flaw, but you could pin on him the institutional Church’s indifference to pedophilia scandals, if only because the buck stops at his desk. Henry Ford was a rabid anti-Semite and a worshipper of fascists everywhere and, of course, Margaret Sanger embraced eugenics with gut-churning glee. Charles de Gaulle, one of the men in history I admire the most, lied his way into office, implying as strongly as possible that he was the candidate of French Algeria when he had resolved to end it, and used constitutionally dubious means to advance his political ends. Winston Churchill was a racist and a retrograde, and it was probably as much a blessing for the world that he rose to power in 1939 and that he was voted out in 1946 (in particular, while the NHS is not what I would do if I had to design a health system from scratch, Churchill’s views on the NHS make Ron Paul sound like Peter Orzag). FDR committed countless blunders with damaging repercussions (upon reading the Yalta minutes one gets the feeling that he looked into Stalin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul”) and lied to the American and worldwide public throughout his public life about his health, picking a crazy guy as VP even though he knew his days were numbered.

Gobry suggests that we can respond to the flaws of great leaders either by rejecting their “great” status or accepting them as flawed human beings. But what if the flaws and the heroism are different manifestations of the same unusual psychology that propels people to greatness in the first place? Maybe Churchill would never have had the resolve to defeat the Nazis if he hadn’t been inculcated into the military culture of Victorian England, with all its racism and paternalism. Maybe Lincoln’s ruthlessness and determination to preserve the Union, even at the expense of the slaves, were the things that ultimately put him in a position to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Maybe MLK’s extramarital affairs and civil rights leadership were different manifestations of the same underlying will to power. Who knows? This is a more unpleasant interpretation, because it suggests that untainted, heroic leadership is impossible – not just practically impossible, because of the inherent flaws of human beings, but logically impossible, because the flaws are a necessary precondition for the heroism. Still, it’s worth considering the possibility.