Here's a fun little exercise.  Let's say that the vice-president of a political consulting firm went on MSNBC or Fox News with the argument that no matter what the U.S. government said, Osama bin Laden wasn't actually buried at sea.  No, this wouldn't be a claim that Osama had returned as a zombie.  The VP would simply argue that based on past standard operating procedures and the desire of some agencies in the USG to gather forensic evidence, it would seem likely that they would want the body.  In all likelihood the cable anchor would then ask if there was any direct evidence to back up this assertion.  The VP would either say no, dodge the question, or imply some third-hand knowledge, and that would be that. 

Here's my question:  would this cable news hit generate anything in the way of news headlines? 

I ask this because the Drudge Report has headlined:  "WIKILEAKED: BIN LADEN BODY NOT BURIED AT SEA"  This sounds pretty definitive.  But if you look at the actual Stratfor emails that Wikileaks provides on the matter, you get little but speculations and assertions from Stratfor CEO George Friedman and VP Fred Burton.  From Friedman:

Eichmann was seen alive for many months on trial before being sentenced to death and executed. No one wanted a monument to him so they cremated him. But i dont know anyone who claimed he wasnt eicjhman (sic). No comparison with suddenly burying him at sea without any chance to view him which i doubt happened.

And from Burton:

We would want to photograph, DNA, fingerprint, etc.

His body is a crime scene and I don't see the FBI nor DOJ letting that happen....

Body is Dover bound, should be here by now.

That's it.  No sourcing, nothing else.  Friedman is speculating, while Burton makes a somewhat stronger assertion without much empirical foundation.   The only reason this is on the front page of Drudge -- and the only reason reporters are running with it -- is that the Stratfor e-mails were private and not intended for public consumption.  And if it's private, then it must be pretty good!

Or not.  Look, reporters and analysts should pore over these email contents and see if there is anything of value.  But they also need to follow up with outside experts in their reporting to distinguish between what's said in the emails and what's actually true.  Because, to repeat a point I made a few years ago:  "just because someone says something in a Wikileaks memo doesn't make it so."  Indeed, it is precisely this sort of BS pseudo-analysis that makes me distrust the quality of Stratfor's analysis in the first place. 

 *A hat tip to @laurenist for the very clever title to this less-than-clever post)

One of the complaints I commonly hear about the study of global political economy is that it's sooooooo boring.  Security studies has guns and bombs!!  IPE/GPE has.... capital adequacy standards. 

Well, I think it's safe to say that events over the weekend have made both global political economy and global governance more interesting: 

Talks on the Greek sovereign debt crisis and French presidential politics were both thrown into disarray after Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was escorted off an aircraft in New York over the weekend to face sex charges.

Mr Strauss-Kahn was expected on Sunday to appear before a New York court and plead not guilty to charges of committing a criminal sexual act, attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment, according to his lawyers.

The charges resulted from an alleged incident at the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan on Saturday afternoon involving a 32-year-old maid who said that she had been sexually assaulted in a $3,000 per night suite in which police found the IMF managing director’s mobile phone. Police said on Sunday night that the maid had picked Mr Strauss-Kahn out of a line-up. Sofitel said the maid had worked for them for three years.

Both the Financial Times and The New Yorker have been all over this since the arrest on Saturday night, and I won't try to replicate their coverage here.  Let's try to parse out a few of the implications: 

1)  The IMF issued a terse statement that boils down to "The IMF remains fully functioning and operational."  This has the whiff of this scene from Animal House -- except that I suspect acting Managing Director John Lipsky and his awesome moustache will do a much better job of keeping everyone calm than Kevin Bacon ever did.  The real tangle would come is Strauss-Kahn -- or "DSK" as he's known in  France -- fights this in court and refuses to step aside gracefully.  It already appears, however, that the IMF won't invoke diplomatic immunity -- and based on past behavior, DSK would likely resign first. 

2)  One does wonder if this scandal will finally upend a decades-long convention that dictates the head of the IMF being a European and the head of the World Bank being an American.  On the one hand, this same kind of talk occurred after Paul Wolfowitz had to resign as World Bank president in 2007, and Robert Zoellick replaced him.  On the other hand, that was a whole financial crisis ago.

3)  So, in the past five years, two heads of international financial institutions have been implicated in scandal.  I'd recommend Swiss authorities take a good, hard look at Bank of International Settlements General Manager Jaime Caruana.  These jobs clearly seem to attract bad seeds.  At this rate, these institutions will make the IOC or FIFA start to look ethical. 

4)  The French reaction to DSK's arrest might cure many Westeners of the schadenfreude they felt in response to Pakistani conspiracy theories surrounding the death of bin Laden.  As Philip Gourevitch blogs: 

This being France, within minutes of the first news of D.S.K.’s arrest, there were rumors that he was the victim of a plot. Christine Boutin, the leader of the Christian Democrats in France, declared that D.S.K. had been entrapped, although she did not specify by whom, or how—but there was no shortage of possibilities floating in the French ether today: Sarkozy, of course, or Socialist rivals, or else, I heard someone say, the Russians who are unhappy with how he has dealt with them at the I.M.F., or maybe the Greeks, whose economy has self-destructed almost as thoroughly as he now has. You could even find D.S.K. being called the new Dreyfus. In conversations with writers, and reporters, and intellectuals around Paris today, I found that nobody quite believed these fancies, but nobody could resist speculating about them either. D.S.K.’s behavior, in and of itself, was just too suicidal to make sense entirely by itself.

See also Adam Gopnik on these points. 

The real problem with the arrest is that it appears that the only French politician to offer the right response is ultranationalist Marine Le Pen, who correctly observed that given DSK's past indiscretions with women, this was a long time coming.  This will onky boost Le Pen's chances of advancing to the second round of the presidential election.  Richard Brody explains why that's a problem:

The world of French politics is haunted by the 2002 elections: then, backers of the eliminated moderate-left candidate, Lionel Jospin, a Socialist, joined forces with the moderate right to give Chirac an overwhelming victory in the runoff, in a repudiation of the F.N. One of the leading factors in Jospin’s first-round elimination was the fragmentation of the left among candidates from a variety of parties. Now, it’s the unpopular Sarkozy whose party is falling apart, and who is doing his best not to offend the F.N. (as in recent regional elections, in which he expressed no second-round preference between that party and the Socialists), in the hope of siphoning away enough of its voters to slip into the second round instead of Marine Le Pen.

In effect, Marine Le Pen is the spoiler: any candidate she faces in the second round is sure to win (because voters and parties will unify to keep the far-right out of power); she will either eliminate the moderate right or the moderate left.

Elections in which one of the two choices is simply unelectable are unhealthy for democracy -- they lead to malaise and alienation from the democratic process.  Unfortunately, it looks like France is headed in that direction. 

5) I hereby issue a challenge to the readers to come up with their best joke about IMF conditionality and DSK in the comments. 

I have an essay in the latest issue of The Spectator (U.K.) that starts from a basic premise:  politicians in one country are utterly hopeless in comprehending the domestic politics of other countries.  The opening paragraph:

Ever since the United States rose to great power status, it has displayed bouts of appalling ignorance about the politics and cultures of the rest of the world. Pick a region, any region, and one can find quotations and policies that demonstrate a breathtaking ability to think that other countries were just like the United States. During the Cold War, US policymakers continually misread the Pacific Rim. In the 1940s, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska vowed that ‘with God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up until it is just like Kansas City’. It turned out that the communists were more successful in that endeavour than Chiang Kai-Shek.

This isn't merely an American phenomenon, however. 

Why is all political understanding local?  You'll have to read the whole thing to find out. 

I, for one, am glad that the foreign press is brave enough to cover what America's mainstream media is not -- the U.S. government's complicity in causing the Haitian earthquake. Never mind that the foreign media echo chamber aparentluy started with a false rumor -- with luck, our MSM will now start asking the tough questions.

This is a plan so brilliant that only the Evil League of Evil, in conjunction with the reverse vampires and the Obama administration, could have devised it.

Why, you might ask? What is America's motivations to trigger Haiti's earthquake and then intervene with massive aid in the hemisphere's poorest country? Well, there are different theories bandied about.

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez suggests that this was a practice "drill," designed to test the earthquake weapon before targeting Iran (though see the update below). Very clever!! It is unclear whether Chavez believes that this is a test of the "demonstration effect" variety or not. It is also unclear just how such an earthquake would actually destroy Iran's nuclear program -- the 2003 Bam earthquake certainly didn't.

This Canadian-based Centre for Research on Globalization's Ken Hildebrandt offers the following ingenious explanation:

You've likely guessed my suspicions about recent events. I'm not saying this is what occurred, though it's sure a possibility to be considered in my view.

This could hardly have happened at a more convenient time. The president's ratings are plummeting, and his bill to subsidize the insurance industry has essentially divided the nation in two.

What better way to lead the people into believing we're one big happy family than to reunite former Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush along with Obama in a joint humanitarian effort?

This is so convenient... and brilliant!! It makes perfect sense that the Obama administation would try to kill upwards of 200,000 Haitians in order to bring the country together as one! Because, clearly, in recent years, natural disasters have bolstered the standing of U.S. presidents!! Certainly, a calamity in Haiti would work even better! If only Rush Limbaugh had played ball....

What I love about conspiracies like these is the careful balancing of smart and stupid that the key actors have to possess in order for the plan to work as described.

Question to readers: how far and how wide will this meme travel?

UPDATE:  I just received the following from a atrategic communications advisor to the Venezuelan Embassy in the United states: 

In response to your recent post on Foreign Policy’s website, I just wanted to clarify that President Hugo Chavez never associated himself with the theory that a U.S. weapon had caused the earthquake in Haiti.  

The claim was made by a blogger on the website of a state-run yet independent television station. At some point thereafter, someone jumped to the conclusion that President Chavez had agreed or repeated the claim, which is absolutely not true. President Chavez did argue against an increased U.S. military presence in Haiti, but at no point did he question what had caused the earthquake or aligned himself with any conspiracy theories to that effect.

 

Rob Reich is upset that the New York Times and Center for American Progress are taking the question about rising levels of U.S. debt seriously.  He is so upset that he goes back into 1990s memoir mode and starts rolling out the conspiracy theories: 

Odd that it would return right now, when the economy is still mired in the worst depression since the Great one. After all, consumers are still deep in debt and incapable of buying. Unemployment continues to soar. Businesses still are not purchasing or investing, for lack of customers. Exports are still dead, because much of the global economy continues to shrink. So the purchaser of last resort -- the government -- has to create larger deficits if the economy is to get anywhere near full capacity, and start to grow again.

Odder still that the Debt Scare returns at the precise moment that bills are emerging from Congress on universal health care, which, by almost everyone’s reckoning, will not increase the long-term debt one bit because universal health care has to be paid for in the budget. In fact, universal health care will reduce the deficit and cumulative debt -- especially if it includes a public option capable of negotiating lower costs from drug makers, doctors, and insurers, and thereby reducing the future costs of Medicare and Medicaid....

Why are the ostensibly liberal Center for American Progress and New York Times participating in the Debt Scare right now? Is it possible that among the President’s top economic advisors and top ranking members the Fed are people who agree more with conservative Republicans and Wall Streeters on this issue than with the President? Is it conceivable that they are quietly encouraging the Debt Scare even in traditionally liberal precincts, in order to reduce support in the Democratic base for what Obama wants to accomplish? Hmmm.

I actually think Reich has half a point -- if you read either Tim Geithner or Paul Volcker's speeches over the past few years, they've been sounding the debt alarm for some time.    

That said, the notion that this is a non-issue being pushed by conservatives and conservative lackeys borders on the absurd.  Daniel Gross is pretty sympathetic to Reich's substantive view on the U.S. debt issue, but in this Slate essay he's also pretty clear about why the debate has moved to the forefront: 

The interest rate of the 10-year Treasury bond has spiked from 2.07 percent in December 2008, when the world was falling apart, to a recent high of 3.715 percent on June 1—a 79 percent increase. The 30-year bond has risen from 2.5 percent last December to about 4.5 percent today.

You can debate about why this is happening (Gross is worth reading).  A simple dismissal of the issue, however, seems kinda loopy. 

[So you think Reich is wrong on policy?--ed.]  Right now, no -- jumpstarting the economy has priority over mounting levels of U.S. government debt. 

I suspect, however, that my concerns about rising U.S. debt levels will start rising before his.  Anyone who can write this sentence scares me: 

True, [the debt/GDP] ratio is heading in the wrong direction right now. It may reach 70 percent by the end of 2010. That’s high, but it’s not high compared to the 120 percent it was in 1946, after the ravages of Depression and war.