Protecting Saudi Arabia against witches

The Jerusalem Post reports on the component of Saudi Arabia's religious police that track down agents of witchcraft.

It all seems very foreign until you read this bit

The belief in sorcery is so widespread in Saudi Arabia, that it is even used as a defense in criminal court cases. Last October, a judge accused of receiving bribes in a real-estate project told a court in Madinah that he had been bewitched and is undergoing treatment by Quranic incantations, known as ruqiyah, a common remedy for the evil eye.

In the west of course, one would substitute "addiction" for "the evil eye" and "psychiatric incantations" for "Quranic incantations" without changing the underlying meaning.

Via the Agitator

Bush II and Juan Cole

You do not have to agree with everything (or, indeed, anything) my UM colleague Juan Cole has to say to be rather disturbed by recent stories about the Bush II administrative sending the spooks after him or trying to blackball him on the think tank circuit. The latter business is just sort of petty, and sad as well to the extent that it reflects a view that is just best not to ever hear an opinion that conflicts with one's preconceived ideas.

Of course, such antics are, sadly, in recent years a bipartisan affair. Recall that the Clinton administration used the IRS to go after its critics.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that the very sort of people who eagerly seek to work in the government are often also the sort of people who put party politics and short term political gain ahead of the law and the long run maintenance of a free society.

Oh, and I am not related to the former CIA official called "Jeffrey Smith" mentioned in this version of the Juan Cole spying story. Imagine my surprise at the existence of someone else, no relation so far as I know, with such a unique name.

Hat tip: Jon Lanning

Hitchens on Pakistan's government

A fine rant from Christopher Hitchens. The executive summary: he doesn't much like it.

On the killing of OBL

Dan Drezner makes the case that it matters but then there is the public, at least some of which has a different view. My own view lies somewhere in the middle.

OBL

The US has killed Osama bin Laden without holding a trial and by mounting a military operation on the sovereign territory of another country without letting that country know about it. The president then went on national television to gloat about the killing.

Adding this to the near-miss on Colonel Klink in Libya and it seems we are in the business of directly taking out bad guys these days. May I humbly suggest Mugabe and the Castro brothers go next?

I actually think it makes a lot of sense to kill one bad guy directly rather than hundreds or thousands of civilians or soldiers or followers in an indirect attempt to get at the bad guy, but wouldn't it be a bit more seemly, and a bit more legal and just, to have some sort of trial (in OBL's case) or declaration of war (in Colonel Klink's case) as a lead-in?

Economists misbehaving? Libya and Michael Porter

Economics Principals has a great article, with links to more.

I was surprised that Warsh did not contrast Porter's Libya activities with Milton Friedman's activities in Chile, which ended up bringing him a lot of grief, including protesters outside the Nobel ceremony.

Libya cost/benefit

I watched a fair amount of Libya coverage with my father-in-law on Saturday, including BBC, CBC and CNN. I kept wondering why no one was talking about the cost of the war and thinking about it in cost-benefit terms. Wars that are completely voluntarily should be thought about in exactly those terms. Think how much nicer it would be to use the money we will spend on this adventure to pay down the national debt, or to reduce taxes or to provide public goods. Instead, we distract ourselves from the unhappiness of necessary domestic budget cutting with some expensive boom-boom, as though the country were being run by seven-year-olds.

On Libya - will the third Mideast war be the charm?

I never thought I would type the words "I agree with Josh Marshall", as he has always struck me as a snarky, close-minded ideologue who cares way too much about the daily combat of talking points inside the beltway and too little about economics and empirical evidence. But today, I do.

Here are his closing paragraphs:

So let's review: No clear national or even humanitarian interest for military intervention. Intervening well past the point where our intervention can have a decisive effect. And finally, intervening under circumstances in which the reviled autocrat seems to hold the strategic initiative against us. This all strikes me as a very bad footing to go in on.

And this doesn't even get us to this being the third concurrent war in a Muslim nation and the second in an Arab one. Or the fact that the controversial baggage from those two wars we carry into this one, taking ownership of it, introducing a layer of 'The West versus lands of Islam' drama to this basically domestic situation and giving Qaddafi himself or perhaps one of his sons the ability to actually start mobiliz[ing] some public or international opinion against us.

I can imagine many of the criticisms of the points I've made. And listening to them I think I'd find myself agreeing in general with a lot of it. But it strikes me as a mess, poorly conceived, ginned up by folks with their own weird agendas, carried out at a point well past the point that it was going to accomplish anything. Just all really bad.

I know that Qaddafi has assembled a human shield, but the loss-of-life minimizing policy might still be to simply take him out (along with his sons). Presumably whoever steps into the power vacuum thus created will be both more sane and inclined to act in ways that would avoid a similar fate.

Via: MR

Libya

Slate offers up some tart words from Christopher Hitchens (not all of which I necessarily agree with, but he is always worth reading) and here is the LSE thesis of one of his kids.

Remarks on the Middle East

These remarks from Chris Blattman strike me as right on target. The error term really matters, especially when in a transitional state between relatively stable equilibria.

My Michigan colleague Juan Cole has some useful remarks as well.