Think Tanked

Hoover's Daniel Pipes: Flotilla Defeats IDF

Think tanks are slowly weighing in on the flotilla raid yesterday. Hoover Institution Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow Daniel Pipes posted at National Review Online with a seeming disappointment that Israel didn't strike harder which means, for Pipes, that the "Free Gaza Flotilla Defeats the Israel Defense Forces."

Eventually, however, Israel’s enemies realized that they could not win a conventional war. Instead of launching planes, tanks, and ships at the Jewish state, they turned to other means — weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and (most recently) political delegitimization. Delegitimization turns the rules of war upside down: in particular, strength is weakness and public opinion has supreme importance.

Israel’s command structure, having mastered the old ways of war (the ones that lasted to 1973), has shown utter strategic incompetence at the new ways of war (in place since 1982). The new rules require an agile sense of public relations, which means that a powerful state never physically harms, even inadvertently, its rag-tag political adversaries.

Rachel Corrie has been an albatross around Israel’s neck since 2003; today’s dead on the seas off Gaza will prove an even worse source of anti-Zionism. Thus did the “armada of hate and violence” achieve its purpose. Thus did the Israelis fall into a trap.

Hoover: Challenge for Think Tanks is More Research, Less Politics

Alvin Rabushka, Hoover Institution's David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow, is part of a senior core of think tanks scholars who are not all that happy with what think tanks do these days.

He's written a couple of recent blog posts (that you can read here and here) on how think tanks fall short and challenging them to get better. Rabushka, who has been with Hoover for over 40 years, has certainly watched the changes, including watching think tanks balloon over the last 25 years to 1,1776. And he doesn't find thtem all that useful.

Sticking to U.S. think tanks, there aren’t 1,776 thoughts for think tanks to think. This means massive redundancy and varying points of view on any given thought. It also means increasing competition for a less rapidly growing supply of private funding for think tanks outside public universities. If think tanks were subject to market competition, one would expect to see substantial mergers and acquisition. Rather, proliferation continues, although at a slower rate in the past decade. The explosive growth in think tanks makes it increasingly difficult to disseminate good ideas, to broadcast a strong signal through an atmosphere of static.

Then Rabushka cites this startling research to politics ratio from an interview with Hoover's director, John Raisian.

Raisian stated that in his early years with Hoover he believed that its research would be well received and readily implemented in Washington, but “That was naive, honestly.” “If you’re lucky, 20 percent of the time you’re looking at the analysis of the situation and 80 percent...at the politics of the situation...This can be discouraging for those of us that are scholars because in the end, raw politics is going to determine the outcome.”

Rabushka must take Raisian's numbers seriously...

The challenge for Hoover and other quality think tanks, then, is to raise the 20 percent research component in public policy outcomes and reduce the 80 percent raw politics. I will try to address this challenge in upcoming posts.

Hoover's Varadarajan Warns of Political Cleansing Tuesday

Hoover Institution research fellow Tunku Varadarajan writes today for The Daily Beast:

This political “cleansing,” which can be as brutal and cathartic as that word suggests, should be particularly compelling on this occasion: All American politics, however granular or local, is now seen as a movie trailer for National November. That is when President Obama will face his first formal electoral confrontation with the American people since he ran for office in 2008. And Obama, who does electoral politics far, far better than he does the politics of policy, will find a certain relief in the ballot-box formality, for he will be judged by irrefutable numbers and results, a contrast to the innuendo and bloviating that is the staple of political commentary at the present time (this column, surely, included).

Berkowitz Defends Harvard Law Student Race Email

Peter Berkowitz, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has published a piece in next week's issue of the Weekly Standard. The article ("Harvard Law vs. Free Inquiry: Dean Martha Minow flunks the test"), defends the position of Stephanie Grace, a third-year law student at Harvard University, re-iterated in an email from a dinner conversation the night before.

The conversation and email about race, genetics, intelligence and culture started quite a firestorm.

Berkowitz, however, insists that it was Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow who got it wrong.

Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow promptly responded by issuing a statement condemning the email and reminding students and faculty that the right to free speech comes with responsibilities. Unfortunately, the dean also reinforced the most common and serious prejudice at American universities today, which targets those who think, or who merely wish to examine critically, nonconforming or disfavored thoughts.

Dean Minow’s statement, moreover, failed to honor the scholar’s duty to restate accurately a view one is criticizing. According to Minow, the student’s email “suggested that black people are genetically inferior to white people.” That’s an incendiary revision.

Read Berkowitz's full piece here. 

Think Tanks on the ABC This Week Roundtable

This morning's This Week roundtable was full of think tankers. Center for American Progress' John Podesta, Shelby Steele of Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and Robin Wright from the US Institute of Peace (along with George Will) took on the Times Square bombing attempt.

And then the Miranda debate.

Is Obama Encouraging Nuclear Proliferation?

In an op-ed in today's International Herald Tribune (a version of it appeared yesterday in the NYT), James Woolsey, a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on Energy Policy, argues that the Obama administration is "unintentionally, actually fostering the proliferation of nuclear weapons rather than constraining them."

The arguments on Iran are familiar, but others are suspect too, according too Woolsey:

Like Iran, other countries — including Venezuela and Saudi Arabia — say they want “peaceful” nuclear power for electricity. Given their vast oil resources, that is patent nonsense. They want a reactor in order to get on the road to highly enriched uranium and bomb material.

Check out "Too Much Mr. Nice Guy" here.

Hoover Scholar: Stop Picking on Goldman Sachs

Richard A. Epstein, the James Parker Hall Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, says it's time to back off the "now-humbled" Goldman Sachs.

With the SEC, the Department of Justice and the Senate ("a Soviet show trial"), Epstein thinks it's harmful for this "three-front government campaign."

But now this pesky question: Just what does the public gain from three-prong federal inquisition? Those are hard to quantify, but it is easy to tote up the losses. Start with the disappearance of over $20 billion in market capitalization for Goldman shareholders. Next add the billions decline in value of other bank stocks that could easily become targets of similar investigations, simply because Goldman's now notorious transaction with Paulson & Co., Goldman, ACA and IKB followed a standard template for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Put any one of those other transactions under a legal microscope after the fact, and its imperfections will soon leap out. Only the grace of God for the time being spares other banks a Goldman-like hosing. Wise investors bid down share prices before the other shoe drops.

But Epstein's real fear from "Washington's nonstop abuse" is

The likely consequence of this feeding frenzy is to draw wealth and jobs away from the U.S. To outsiders, watching the U.S. devour its own firms only confirms Americans' perverse bipartisan determination to slip into the second rank in finance, as in other areas.

Read Epstein's entire Forbes column here.