Yes folks, more good news from the folks who bought you payment option ARMS, collaterized debt obligations (CDO), and credit default swaps. The banking industry (at least the folks not yet in jail) has a great plan to make home buying affordable and stabilize house prices.

They propose that the federal government should make it so that everyone can get a 4.5 percent mortgage through Fannie and Freddie's financing. I know it's rude to question the wisdom of the people who didn't see the housing bubble, but let's try to think about this one for a moment.

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I am in substantial agreement with Mike's post. Indeed, I think he does an excellent job of critiquing a brand of liberal internationalism which, although currently in vogue, has gotten ahead of itself. Historically, liberal internationalism has been about fostering international stability by coupling the projection of American power abroad with the fashioning of international partnerships. To be sure, the founders of liberal internationalism and many of its adherents today (myself included) would be delighted if all the states of the world were democracies. But, as Mike points out, the goal of liberal internationalism was to make the world safe for democracy, not to engage in coercive democracy promotion and nation building. Roosevelt and Truman sought to make partners of the Soviet Union and China; they hardly conditioned their participation in the proposed "Four Policeman" or the UN Security Council on their readiness to embrace democracy.

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Our preoccupation with the immediate crisis of financial capital is causing us to overlook the bigger crisis in America's human capital. While we commit hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, we're slashing our outlays for public education.

Education is largely funded by state and local governments whose revenues are plummeting. As consumers cut back, state sales and income taxes are shrinking; three quarters of the states are already facing budget crises. State revenues account for about half of public school budgets and most funding of public colleges and universities. In addition, as home values drop, local property taxes take a hit. Local property taxes account for 40 percent of local school budgets, on average.

The result, across the nation: Teachers are being laid off and new hiring frozen, after-school programs cut, so called "noncritical" subjects like history eliminated, schools closed, and tuitions hiked at state colleges and universities.

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For anyone seeking real reform of America's foreign and defense policies in the years ahead, Obama's introduction of his national security team was a mixed bag. Set against an increasingly worrisome national security environment -- from the mounting tensions in India/Pakistan to Sunday's New York Times front-page story about epidemic U.S. military-industrial corruption to this week's Washington Post story about Pentagon plans to station 20,000 U.S. troops on the American homeland by 2011 -- it was at least refreshing to see a new row of faces to replace those who have brought us the tragic missteps of recent years. Yet what these appointments really suggest about Obama's broader prospects for reform requires vigilant public attention.

As someone who seeks fundamental reform of so much of the American system, I've been heartened to see a growing number of voices on the airwaves and blogosphere express concern at certain choices made by the Obama transition team that are hard to reconcile with the public's hopes for change. This kind of unrelenting pressure for reform is vital and has already provoked an entirely healthy discourse even among Obama's most ardent supporters, between those who seek far-reaching change and those who see themselves as more pragmatic. Since Obama has not yet even been inaugurated, these voices can only speculate on what his governance might look like, and there's a danger of being either prematurely critical or overly complacent. Still, it's never too early to be vigilant. Let us not forget that it was Obama himself who invited each of us to fulfill our end of the contract between citizen and president in an historic effort to bring about change.

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It is impossible to get Mumbai out of my mind. I keep thinking about two-year old, Moshe, sitting in his parents' blood, crying out to a mother and father who are gone forever.

It is hard to imagine how anyone can justify terror against children but many people do. In fact, fanatics of virtually every faith and nationality do indeed justify killing kids or leaving them orphans. It is sickening. Until humanity comes to the understanding that there is no justification - none, whatsoever - for killing children or making them orphans, we remain uncivilized.

Mumbai, of course, was no isolated case. Since the early twentieth century the slaughter of innocents has been considered a legitimate military tactic or, not much better, unavoidable collateral damage. The Arab-Israeli conflict has not yet fully descended into mass carnage (with the awful exceptions of the Hamas suicide bombings and massacres like Baruch Goldstein's Hebron slaughter) but, no doubt, that is where we are heading unless we begin treating the Arab-Israeli conflict with the urgency it warrants.

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Alex, first thanks for joining us here this week to discuss the series. I have a number of questions. But the first one comes out of my own reporting on Saddam from the earlier part of this decade. I started reporting on Iraq in earnest in early 2002 in Washington, DC. And that was of course quite a hot house atmosphere, hitting think tank meetings about Iraq, listening to emigres tell their stories, hearing the various advocates of regime change, etc.

What became very obvious was that the terribleness and brutality of Saddam's regime had become overlaid with a coating of clearly fantastic, sometimes bizarre or even campish tales meant to appeal to the lurid fascination of Westerners, particularly Americans. To some degree, virtually everything we heard about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the lead up to the war fell into this category. But I also remember various stories about people being fed to Zoo animals, various kinds of torture (some of which I'm sure happened), etc.

You hint at this at a couple points in your post. But I'm wondering if my impression strikes a chord with you in what you found researching the series and how you went about chiseling away some of this accretion of lurid tales to get to as real a picture as we can ever get of what really happened, who this man and his circle was?

When I first heard of the proposed mini-series 'House of Saddam' I was suspicious. Why would the BBC/HBO, UK/America, want to make a drama series about Saddam Hussein? I wondered what the hidden agenda might be. Were they trying to cash in on the demonisation of Saddam - already Enemy Number 1 as far as the Western media were concerned? Whose "version" of history was this going to be? After meeting Alex Holmes I soon realised that this drama series would be different. Not a lesson in the history of Iraq, not about condemnation or praise, it was to be about understanding a tightly knit group of people whose lives orbited around their sun, Saddam Hussein. The perspective was going to be from inside the inner circles and family, looking out. It would be an attempt to go behind closed doors and shed light upon the man himself. That really interested me so I spent the next 2 ½ years researching and script editing the 'House of Saddam' mini-series.

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What I appreciate most about this book is that it takes the goal of democracy (or in Mike Lind's words, republican liberalism) and subjects it to the most searching, pragmatic critique, in the process providing a vision of how democracy best fits into a non-ideological, non-faith-based foreign policy programme. Particularly because democracy is such an intensely hopeful and optimistic political theory, it can elicit a kind of chaos when it comes to strategy. Freedom, it seems to me, is like that. Like pure oxygen, it can inspire and vivify but also make us dizzy. We've seen this from our politicians, whether Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush, and we've also seen it from theorists of democracy -- whether Patrick Henry saying "Give me liberty or give me death" or Natan Sharansky saying that freedom should always be pursued, even if it might give violent extremists even more power than they already have.

One of the many changes that President-elect Barack Obama promises is a shift from an ideological or even faith-based reasoning behind our foreign policy to one grounded on the edits of pragmatism -- over and over again, Obama invokes "what will work" as the major criterion. This is a richer standard than you might at first think -- what "works" for a republican liberal, in Lind's terminology, will not "work" for a neoconservative or a paleoconservative. The traditional progressive will be examining whether results are helping the world become more progressive -- they might apply a more traditionally "pure" ethical standard to foreign policy. Lind applies a more hard-eyed, nationalistic analysis -- the American republican liberal will be looking at whether results on the ground square with an increase in liberty that redounds to America's security interests -- whether, in Lind's words, the strategy has resulted in the "defense of the American way of life."

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From Mike Allen at Politico (pardon my italics):

NBC News plans to name David Gregory as moderator of "Meet the Press," infusing one of television's most prized franchises with a sharp edge leavened by a youthful style and versatility, according to network executives.

Gregory, 38, celebrated his 30th birthday -- complete with cake -- aboard George W. Bush's presidential campaign plane, the assignment that solidified his stature as a network rising star.

Eight years on, Gregory has not distinguished himself for independent thought, though a certain grumpiness won him an easy reputation for such among people who think that a birthday cake on a campaign plane is what solidifies "stature." See here for an interesting item from the Columbia Journalism Review. Here are some questions I raised about Gregory's acumen in August. Here he was his penetrating question of Sen. John Thune (R, SD) at midnight after Sarah Palin's St. Paul speech: "Senator [John] Thune, was a star born here tonight with Sarah Palin?"

I try not to rush to judgment. I'm trying. Trying.

A lot of folks take the fact that most high-tech industries appeared in the modern period of anti-union rules and thus there are few unions in such industries to mean that unionism itself doesn't "work" for high tech, high-skilled workers. But then you have one of the original high-tech industries-- modern aviation -- and a massive union of engineers and technical workers who just approved their contract with Boeing:

Nearly 21,000 engineers and technical workers for The Boeing Co., most of them in the Puget Sound area, have approved new labor contracts that will give them more say in the company's controversial outsourcing decisions and the use of contract workers. They also will receive more for retirement and a pay raise that will average about 20 percent over four years.

I've never quite understood the logic that says that blue-collar manual workers have something to gain from more democratic say over their wages and conditions of work, but higher-skilled workers don't.

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As I considered Mumbai, living in Jerusalem, a few hundred yards from many such attacks, I came upon this paragraph during my bedtime reading, in Adam Gopnik's lovely book, Through The Children's Gate. Adam is recalling a conversation in New York, just after 9/11. Think of it as we judge what President-elect Obama means by wedding military power to other power:

Later that day, I bump into F.A., the Arabist, and we have a talk about What Is To Be Done. I ask him if there is anything we can do about madmen who worship psychopathic gods. And he says something obvious but interesting: that there's nothing to be done about the core, the real nuts, but they exist, as human beings must within concentric circles of culture: an immediate circle of murder-minded sympathizers and financiers; a circle just outside that of sympathizers who would not do such things themselves but will not stop them from happening; a circle beyond that of people who choose not to know what is being done but sympathize with the radical purpose; a circle beyond that one of the fearful and even sentimentally sympathetic--and on and on, each circle of culture outside the actual nucleus of evil a little larger and a little less regular in its orbit than the one before, and therefore able to be dried up, reduced, set loose. Attack and persuade the outer circles of culture to abandon the inner circles, and eventually, the core will be all alone, isolated and futile.

Basically, Michael is asking how much we should care about goings-on in other lands; how much we should do about them; and how the first question relates to the second. It's one thing to be horrified by man's inhumanity to other (wo)men, but another to view it as an imperative to get involved. Doesn't the nation-state system offer valuable stability, which we weaken at our own peril?

The arduous efforts to democratize Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing if not injunctions to be less ambitious, meddlesome, and presumptuous. But how cautious should we be? Can the values agenda be pursued more prudently, or would the truly prudent course be to ditch that agenda altogether?

Michael's safe-for-democracy strategy is too passive, heartless, and unambitious for my taste. On the other hand, I think many of the related concerns can be assimilated into a more carefully calibrated liberal interventionism.

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The law is anything I write on a piece of paper.

Saddam Hussein had a way with words. I came across this quote of his relatively early on in my research into Saddam and his inner circle for the HBO/BBC miniseries, House of Saddam, which airs on Sunday night. It was a phrase that echoed in my mind, not just because of the terror and hubris it suggested was at the heart of our character, but also, as a screenwriter trying to tell the story of a regime I had never experienced directly myself, I took it as a warning. Writing things on bits of paper could be powerful, and with that power came a responsibility.

I had a responsibility to the people whose lives we were dramatizing, to fairly and honestly represent their actions, to those people who had suffered and died at the hands of his regime, so that the cause of their suffering wasn't misrepresented, and to be fair to our audience, so that the view the series would give wasn't to partial or incomplete so as to be misleading.

Stick to the facts and you can't go wrong. That would be a good place to start. If only it were as simple as that. When it came to the task of telling the story of Saddam's inner circle there were two challenges to following this good advice. The first was: whose facts?

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I'd like to thank the Book Club for hosting this discussion of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life, which is now out in paperback just in time for the change in administrations. I should mention that Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly, in its latest issue has published my exploration of the implications of the book's thesis for U.S. military strategy in "A Concert-Balance Strategy for a Multipolar World," for those who are interested.

I wrote The American Way of Strategy for two reasons. The first was to describe and rehabilitate an important but almost forgotten way of thinking about U.S. foreign policy. The second reason was to defend an older tradition of liberal internationalism which seeks to promote nonintervention as the chief norm in world politics and holds that a concert of status quo great powers can preserve international peace at the lowest cost to a free society in the United States and similar democracies.

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We have two projects running at TPMCafe this week, both focused on Iraq.

First we'll be running a discussion between TPM's own Josh Marshall and Alex Holmes, a co-writer of House of Saddam, a four-part miniseries documenting the rise and fall of the Iraqi dictator. Produced in partnership with HBO and BBC, the drama aired in Britain this summer, and will air on HBO starting December 7. We'll be posting a few clips from the film throughout the week, so stay tuned.

At our Book Club, Michael Lind joins us for a discussion of his 2006 book, The American Way of Strategy. Lind, once the darling of conservative circles, now bills himself as a member of the "Radical Center" and serves as a senior fellow at the New America foundation. In the book he asks:

Is it all propaganda, then? Is the statement that American soldiers died in foreign wars defending the liberties of Americans nothing more than a patriotic lie? The thesis of this book is that the assertion is true ... The purpose of the American way of strategy has always been to defend the American way of life.

Other Book Club participants this week include: David Rieff, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research; David Shorr, the program officer in Policy Analysis and Dialogue at the Stanley Foundation, and coeditor of Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide; Michael Signer, the Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and author, Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies; Charles Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow and Director of Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Join us.