Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Some people out there, those undecided voters who don't pay much attention, might not have known that only one of these guys was on the Yale Debate Team. Presumably, they've figured that one out. What I can't predict is whether they'll actually like that in a president or not.

That said, I think Kerry's best single moment was when he was able to use the 2-word phrase "Nuclear proliferation" as his answer to what was the greatest threat to the US today. Bush's most effective moment was probably his closing statement, which was well-rehearsed and included his signature Biblical allusion of the day. This was not Bush's best performance by a long-shot, but it's not clear to me that anything that Kerry did would be appreciated by the average undecided voter.

Kerry won the debate, all right, but winning the debate is not nearly as important as beating the BushCo post-debate spin - and beating it with true facts. Right now just might be when the blogosphere saves American democracy. Bring it on!

Exceedingly boring debate. After about an hour I fell asleep. Kerry’s presentation was better, but not enough to matter. In the beginning Kerry betrayed ignorance on the cargo container problem. I am working on this problem myself and it’s clear that politicians (like Kerry and probably Bush too) have little understanding of the tradeoffs and technical problems involved. I can only wonder if Kerry thinks we can actually stop and manually inspect every container. We can’t. The real action here is passive and active detection of strategic nuclear materials in a container without major impact on the shipping throughput. This is a really daunting technical problem that requires some basic research in radiation transport physics.

NRO aren't the East German judges, just the East German play-by-play announcers. More comparable to the East German judges were the journalists who reported that Bush won the first debate against Gore in 2000.

To say that Bush's apropos-of-nothing shrieks of "fuzzy math!", which resembled nothing so much as Stockdale's "gridlock!", carried the day was only equalled in sports malfeasance by the three clock 'resets' the Soviet basketball team was given by the Warsaw Pact timekeeper in the 1972 Olympic final against the US.

A Zarkov writes:
>
> Kerry’s presentation was better, but not enough to matter.

I think that fact was probably noticeable to almost anybody watching the debate. The "mattering" part is different, though, because history has taught us that many voters, and probably some undecideds, either don't like/trust that kind of skill, or else prefer somebody folks. That said...

> In the beginning Kerry betrayed ignorance on the cargo
> container problem. I am working on this problem myself and
> it’s clear that politicians (like Kerry and probably Bush too)
> have little understanding of the tradeoffs and technical
> problems involved.

...which is entirely beside the point. Whether or not Kerry or Bush understand the technical problems, it's pretty clear that an issue could become political dynamite. Which is the only reason Kerry wanted to use it. I mean, you could also argue that a missle defense system is completely useless given our current abilities, but that doesn't prevent it from being a potentially powerful issue, either.

“which is entirely beside the point ...”

I don’t think so. Kerry was trying to score points by saying that DHS (and by implication Bush) has been neglectful of the problem. Not true. As I know from personal experience.

“I mean, you could also argue that a missle (sic) defense system is completely useless given our current abilities ... “

Yes you could argue that, but the argument would be weak.

"Yes you could argue that, but the argument would be weak."

Take it up with Theodore Postol.

What can you say about a man who says he'd like to put a leash on his daughters? This was probably the only un-scripted moment in the debates and it speaks volumes about George Bush and his character.

A. Zarkov writes:
> [I wrote]
>
> “which is entirely beside the point ...”
>
> I don’t think so. Kerry was trying to score points by saying
> that DHS (and by implication Bush) has been neglectful of the
> problem. Not true. As I know from personal experience.

What I said was beside the point is the technical issue, and whether the candidates are aware of that issue. Yes, you are right that Kerry was trying to score points that way. But, as we see for maybe the 327th time in this campaign, whether something is true or not is hardly a good predictor of whether it will be effective against your opponent.

"Take it up with Theodore Postol."

Postol discusses missile defense against a sophisticated adversary using penetration aids, not a limited system deployed by a third world country like North Korea.

Correction to above. Postol does discuss boost phase interception for third world missile defense. But in this case he is supportive of missile defense, so we are in concert. I agree with his comments on space decoys.

Zardof,

Take a look at Kerry's book 'The New War' written BEFORE 9/11 where he has a lot about the container issue, far more than can be said in a 90 sec debate slot and more than the US people want to hear.

As for the debate, I think that Bush was sounding shrill at quite a few points, shrill in the traditional sense, not as in the ancient and hermetic order thereof. Bush definitely looked off balance for a goor third of the debate or more. He walked right into several traps laid by Kerry and did not succeed in getting Kerry to walk into any he tried to set.

"Postol discusses missile defense against a sophisticated adversary using penetration aids, not a limited system deployed by a third world country like North Korea."

Postol covers more than this. But if your concern is N. Korea using nuclear blackmail, then you have to consider non-missile delivery. Which brings us back to containers, among other things.

Kerry 1 - Bush 0. Period. Basically Kerry stole the initiave from Bush and ran ahead of Bush with it during the whole debate. And this on foreign policy: The times they are changing...

My source who does high energy xrays of interesting objects for a lot of interesting companies and countries says our customs has some very good intel on which containers to check. He says the problem is FedX and the like.
Enjoy

“boost phase interception for third world missile defense”

Which is not where the vast majority of the money going toward.

With a naval-based boost phase interceptor, only missile threats that come from countries that can launch missiles from far inland are a concern. The countries that fit this criteria are sophisicated enough. I don't think the arguments are "weak".

I personally think that the non-missile delivery problem could very well turn out to be a non-problem. National states want to keep control of their nuclear weapons, that’s why they like missiles. If you send out a weapon with a team they could get caught or could lose custody. Then the loose nuke could come back at you. As far blackmail goes. If (say) North Korea were foolish enough to actually try to threaten us by saying they would smuggle a bomb into the US, this could invite peremptory annihilation. I doubt that they would go this far. Nevertheless we must address the cargo problem if only for political reasons. Then again you can never tell what some nut might do, better safe than sorry.

In his 1997 book “The New War” Kerry takes the position that terror should fall under the civilian policing model, not the war model. I profoundly disagree with this position. I hope subsequent events have changed his mind. The war model doesn’t quite get it right either, so we need some of kind of hybrid, as yet undisclosed by anyone I know.

dougbert:

X-raying cargo containers is not too useful for finding SNM. Then again DHS doesn’t want the containers irradiated very much because stowaways would be dosed. They don’t even want the stowaways to get the allowable limit for radiations workers. As for Intel on cargo containers, that’s very helpful, but is it good enough? I don’t know about FedEx, but I think that problem is technically simpler than the cargo containers.

To A Zarkov's point: "Kerry takes the position that terror should fall under the civilian policing model"

... only up to a point. Kerry spends a lot more
time in that book making the point that the civilian policing model is broken because it ends at the water's edge. He ties the effectiveness of policing to much greater cross-border cooperation, information sharing, extradition treaties, and the like. This is the real work of enforcing some kind of law and order in a globalizing world.

Kerry is lightyears ahead of the Bush administration in his awareness of the need for a hybrid police/war model. Bush/Rumsfeld/Rice are clinging to cold-war style great-power conflict as their model. Why else was their reflexive reaction to Richard Clarke's hybrid team one of puzzlement followed by dismissal?

I don't get it: isn't the "war" model exactly how people like Zarqawi want this to be thought of, as a war between Islam and the West + Israel? It seems to me that saying "This is a war: there are two sides, here, the U.S. and the terrorists." confers symmetrical legitimacy on the terrorists and the U.S. Why should we give them the legitimacy of being our enemies in a two-sided war? Police repression of crime doesn't confer symmetrical legitimacy on the police and criminals.

I realize that almost all conservatives and the majority of liberals think that we should take a military approach to this matter, and I don't really oppose military operations against, say, terrorist bases in the Kurdish regions of Iraq or in Afghanistan, but rhetorically, it seems foolish to me to confer the terrorists with the legitimacy the comes with being a warrior rather than a criminal.

I don't know much about the technicalities of examing cargo containers, but if Zarkov has a (very) short introduction, I would love to read it.

But I think Zarkov is missing the point. The debators have to use short hand to make points. Kerry may have been inaccurate, but for me, the big point was, for example, whether the money that is being spent on building an installation for a poorly tested an unreliable missle defense system would not be better spent on domestic security.

To put it concrete terms, would Zarkov say that his project couldn't make some quicker progress with more funds?

If the choice is between installing a missile defense now and giving people like Zarkov more money instead for a few years until the missile defense system is better tested, I say, give it to Zarkov. That is one of the reasons I am voting for Kerry.

Regarding needing a new paradigm for the war against terror, I agree. Don't particularly want to bring up -um- you know what- but, Kerry has seen guerilla war, and I think that the new paradigm starts from thinking in those terms. So I think Kerry will have a better handle on that too. Though I admit neither candidate has said much that gives me much confidence. Kerry -to police, Bush -way too much war.

The conventional civilian policing model does not function very well when you have to deal with well-funded conspiratorial organizations. They can intimidate and murder witnesses, tamper with juries, bribe judges, bribe police and bear false witness. Look at how long and how much effort it took to take down the Mafia. It really wasn’t until the RICO statutes (specifically designed to deal with conspiratorial organizations) that we were able to send top Mafioso to the slammer. From a civil liberties perspective, RICO is worrisome. It makes it a crime to be a criminal. It uses Orwellian concepts like “predicate acts.” In many ways RICO (both in its civil and criminal forms) is scarier than the Patriot Act, which gets so much criticism. I think Kerry looks at international Muslim terror as a variant of the so-called “Big Five:” The Italian Mafia, Russian Mobs, Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese Triads, and the Columbian drug cartels. I think there are important distinctions between these criminal organizations and the international Muslim terrorists that render the civilian policing model (even with RICO) invalid. We cannot deal with them as either criminals or warriors-- we need a new model. Neither the Bush war model nor the Kerry criminal model (taking extremes here to simplify things) is going to do the job. The new model will have to modify the limitations of the Geneva Conventions and some civil rights in a way acceptable to the public. Whoever wins the election is going to have to come to grips with these realities. So far I haven’t heard anything too inspiring from anyone.

jml:

I would be happy to just get continued funding. I don’t know of a short introduction to the cargo container problem. It involves radiation transport physics, signal processing, and Bayesian inference. It’s essentially an ill-posed inverse problem with very noisy data. Hard stuff. There is a lot of new theory to work out. There is a parallel experimental effort to test out our ideas. Thus far no one I know of seems to have a good handle on how solve this problem.

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