SDP Philosophy Note: Is There a Soul Apart from the Body?

No.  That answer is pretty clear from the now famous split brain experiments.  It may seem like I just took a firm stand in favor of atheism and materialism, but neither is the case.  As I have noted before, Dualism has never been the doctrine of any major church.  Dualism is the view that body and soul consist of distinct substances, ontologically independent of one another.   This is the gospel according to Walt Disney: the poor dog dies, but its vaporous, milky soul floats loose.  By contrast, the teaching of Christianity (at least its major institutions) has always been the resurrection of the body.  Christ didn't float out of the tomb, he got up and walked out.  Why else was it necessary to roll away the stone?  And as he did, so shall we do, if ...  Or so the Gospel promises. 

These sorts of metaphysical/theological questions are often thought to be irresolvable, but this one, I think, has been resolved.  According to Dualism, the soul somehow inhabits the body during an ordinary lifetime (with occasional release time, if you believe in astral travel).  My soul is the real "me," while my body is a mere vehicle.  Of course the driver has to get his information from the world by means of the senses and the physical brain, and by those same devices has to steer the vehicle.  It is pretty clear that physical factors can influence the soul.  See: alcohol.  But as to how the "immaterial soul" and the material body interact, no dualist could ever quite say.  This is the famous interaction problem, and it has long been the major weakness of dualism. But however the connection takes place, this much seems clear: unlike the body, the soul of the dualists is one single thing. Information flows in, and the will flows out.  And the soul is where our human consciousness is located.   Nothing that happens to the brain can alter the fundamental unity of the soul.

The split brain experiments demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the soul is no more unified than the brain.  The latter consists of a number of distinct organs, divided into two hemispheres.  The left side of the body is directly hooked up the right hemisphere of the brain, and vice versa.  In most people, the two hemispheres are connected by a thick cable of nerves called the corpus callosum. What happens if the corpus callosum is cut, and the two halves of the brain can no longer communicate with one another?  The answer, astonishingly, is almost nothing. 

Cutting the CC is a radical treatment for severe epilepsy. It keeps the brain storm from crossing between the two hemispheres and so turning into a major seizure.  Patients who undergo such a procedure will afterward report that nothing has changed.  But everything has changed. Such a person is now in fact two people rather than one.

In the experiment, the split brain subject is asked to focus his eyes on a dot on a screen.  Then a word like "cat" is flashed briefly to the right of the dot.  The way the eyes and optical systems work, the subject will see the word only with his right eye.  It will then be transferred to his left brain.  Ask him what he say "cat."  That's no problem, because the part of the brain that handles language is on the left.  Now a similar word is flashed briefly to the left of the dot.  Say: "pan."  Now ask the subject what he saw, and he will say nothing.  The word went to his right hemisphere, which is real good with pictures but can't talk or read or write.  The right brain can't tell you what it saw.  However, it can draw it.  Put a pencil in the left hand of the subject (it has to be the left hand, because that's the hand controlled by the right brain), and he will draw you a picture of a pan. 

If there really were an ontologically independent entity dwelling within the body and interacting with it, you might suppose it would at least be able to get the word "pan" from one side of the brain to the other.  But no, once the corpus callosum is cut, all communication ceases.  Consciousness of concepts and images, the work of the soul if anything is, now goes on in separate chambers.  The human being has become bisouler.

I find nothing to be distressed about in this.  Everything that is wonderful works in this way.  A great painting is chemical pigment given form by the genius of the artist.  No paint and canvass, no painting.  A cathedral is stone and wood similarly ordered, but with human beings convening to prey; and it is that activity on the part of physical  brains bringing left and right palms together, that is the soul of a church.  No physical brains, no prayer.  A human being is an extraordinarily complex organism, capable of doing the work of breathing, eating, praying, and philosophizing. We cannot understand the soul apart from the activity of some body.  If indeed life after death is in the cards, the resurrection of the body is the only way we can understand it.   

The Obamaton Changes Its Spin on Off Shore Drilling

In quantum physics you have lots of particles with no determined properties.  An object such as an electron can be in two places at one time, and doesn't have a left or a right spin in a magnetic field until someone measures it, or interviews it on Meet The Press.  Well, now we have the Obamaton.  Today this recently discovered particle abruptly changed its spin, and is now in favor of off-shore oil drilling.  From McClatchy:

Barack Obama Friday dropped his opposition to offshore oil drilling, saying he could go along with the idea if it was part of a broader energy package...

The change is dramatic because Obama often pointed to his opposition to drilling as a key difference between himself and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

"I will keep the moratorium in place and prevent oil companies from drilling off Florida’s coasts," Obama said in Florida in June.

Of course McCain has also flipped on offshore drilling.  There is no reason to suppose that either candidate is more honest or genuine than the other on this or a lot of other issues.  But there is this difference: McCain's opposition to drilling off shore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was an eccentricity for a Republican.  In dropping his opposition to the degree that he has, he becomes a little less eccentric and comes to the support of his party in Congress.  This makes it reasonably easy to get an idea of who and what McCain is.  He is a conservative Republican with a pronounced independent streak, who is not above coming back to the fold when political expediency demands it.  Maybe you like that and maybe you don't.  I am comfortable with it.  But it gives you a good idea of what kind of President he would be.  On some issues he will be stubbornly McCain.  On others, a solid Republican.

Obama's flip flops, by contrast, almost always cut against his party's long held principles.  Public financing of campaigns was long a central idea in Democratic campaign finance reform.  Obama didn't just abandon the principle, he destroyed it.  Opposition to new drilling off shore is a principle Congressional Democrats have been defending for decades, which is why we don't have the oil now.  They are currently using every device in the book to prevent new drilling, in the face of strong public support for the Republican position. By flipping on this issue, Obama has cut and run on his Congressional allies and compromised a long standing project of liberal Democrats.  Now it would be one thing if Obama were going against his party on personal principle.  But that isn't what this is.  Obama has no personal commitment to oil drilling.    He flipped just to close off one avenue of attack.  He calculates that he has the Left in his pocket, so he can afford to offend the Sierra Club.  He just has to make it harder to McCain to form an independent-conservative coalition against him, and so he is adopting traditional conservative positions as fast as he can. 

The only trouble is, this makes it almost impossible to guess what kind of President he will be.  Will he transform into a social democrat and try to bring Canadian health care to America, as Bill Clinton did in his first term?  Don't hold your breath, Cory.  Can we expect him to be a traditional Democrat in any sense?  Not based on this campaign.  But neither do we have any sense of Obama apart from the day to day demands of the campaign.  It's no wonder that his campaign slogan, "Change we can believe in," was so vacuous.  There's no there there. 

We won't know what kind of particle the Obamaton is until or unless we measure it in the magnetic fields of the Presidency.  That will be exciting. 

New McCain Ad

The "celebrity" ad was kinda dumb and not funny.  This one is kinda smart and kinda funny.  They are trying to paint Barack Obama as exceedingly arrogant and out of touch with the common man.

SDP Jazz Note: Johnny Griffin 1928-2008

If memory serves, and often it goes awol, I first heard the Little Giant's horn on an NPR special that I recorded years ago, and listened to with ear buds while laying around a campsite in the Ozark mountains. I was utterly captivated by the way that Griffin was able to tell little stories over and over, with each one presenting a different moral. At least that is what I told my brother I heard.

It wasn't until recently that I actually acquired some Griffin recordings.  The first was The Kerry Dancers and Other Swinging Folk. After Jazz, my favorite musical tradition is Celtic. In this recording, Griffin builds on traditional Irish tunes, like Danny Boy and Green Grow the Rushes, without losing a single ounce of jazz feeling. It is not an easy disc to find, but I was pleased to find it on eMusic. The greatest power of a powerful jazz composer is that of listening, and Johnny Griffin knew how to listen to a distinct musical tradition, and how to listen to his own marvelous transliteration of its bones and sinews into the language of jazz.

I think that Griffin's finest work might have been the recordings at the Five Spot Cafe with Thelonious Monk. Monk was almost certainly the greatest composer of the bop tradition, precisely because his work presents such delicious challenges to any interpreter. Griffin is more than up to that challenge. The genius that is evident in The Kerry Dancers is equally evident here: the ability to master the geometry of a new kosmos and create new worlds within it.

Another good sample of Griffin's work is Blues Up and Down, with Eddie Lockjaw Davis. Here the task is to managed a conversation with that other great tenor player, backed by a fine rhythm section.

Griffin died just hours before a concert. He was an incredible beautiful musical mind. Don't let him get past you. You won't hear this again in any universe.

ps.  Go to Jazz Note SDP for a sample of Griffin's music. 

Our Spying vs. China's Spying

Esteemed Keloland Blogger Todd Epp directs our attention to The Only Redhead In Taiwan, who cannot understand why it's wrong for China to spy on visitors and athletes at the Olympics but not wrong for the U.S. to monitor (you can well call it spying) international communications for signs of terrorist activities.  He accuses Senator Brownback of being a hypocrite for complaining about the first while voting for the second.

I will go slowly.  The Chinese clearly want to put listening devices into what are, in effect, people's bedrooms (hotel room computers).  The U.S. programs that Redhead seems to have in mind monitor the stream of international communications which, any reasonably well informed person knows, is already mined by every intelligence service on the planet.  The principle here is the expectation of privacy. 

One might also consider what kind of information China and the U.S. are looking for.  The Chinese are especially concerned to monitor any contacts between foreigners and their own human rights activists.  They want to make sure that they can identify all the agitators for democracy, or more autonomy for Tibet, so they can throw those rascals in the slammer for ten years or so, and shoot 'em up psychotropic drugs.  The U.S. has a rather different motive for spying on international cell phone calls and such.  We want to prevent terrorists from turning living human beings into pink mist.  I humbly suggest that the two motives are not morally equivalent. 

Of course it may be that the U.S. Government abuses its police powers by spying on domestic peace groups and other legitimate political organizations.  The Constitution was designed precisely with such abuses in mind, which is why we have independent courts to sort these things out.  That leads me to a third difference between U.S. and Chinese spying.  China is a totalitarian regime.  No political power is allowed for any person or institution outside the ruling body.  The United States is a liberal democracy, with Courts and adversarial political parties, and Dennis Kucinich.  If you care about things like privacy rights, you probably have to say that spying in defense of the latter is morally superior to spying in defense of the former. 

So I don't think that Senator Brownback is a hypocrite for wanting the Chinese government to respect the promises it made when it accepted the honor of hosting the Olympics.  I dare say the U.S. has made no such promises to Al Qaeda. 

Lawrence Tribe on Kennedy v. Lousianna

I agreed with my colleague, Professor Schaff, in his criticism of the 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana.  The Court ruled that the death penalty could be used only in the case of a murderer or a traitor.  It could not be used in a case of child rape where the victim survived.  I am somewhat surprised to see that Lawrence Tribe, long time voice of constitutional law scholarship from the left, also agrees with Professor Schaff.  For some reason Tribe does not mention Professor Schaff's excellent post.  Here is the Wall Street Journal, is what Tribe does say:

Emphasizing the evolving character of what constitutes an "unusual" if not an unduly "cruel" punishment, the court rested its condemnation of executing the rapists of children largely on what it described as a trend away from the use of death to punish such crimes both here and abroad.

But there was a problem with the court's understanding of the basic facts. It failed to take into account -- because nobody involved in the case had noticed -- that in 2006 no less an authority than Congress, in the National Defense Authorization Act, had prescribed capital punishment as a penalty available for the rape of a child by someone in the military.

The Court gives itself license to write "evolving social morality" into the fabric of the Constitution whenever it sees fit.  This is not altogether without ground in the Constitution itself.  "Cruel and unusual punishment" is a term that may be said to change with the times, as what was usual once may be very unusual today.  We don't put people in stocks anymore. 

But the problem is that the Court is almost always using this as an excuse to write their own sensibilities into the law.  And in this case, as Tribe shows, they got the direction of social evolution wrong.  Some crimes, especially those perpetrated against children, may well be as horrifically bad as murder, so why not the same punishment as murder?  There is no ground for the Court's decision, either in the logic or the traditions of law, or in the facts of the case. 

So why is Tribe being so reasonable?  Well, to be fair, he has always been more reasonable than a lot of his colleagues on the left (and a few of mine on the right).  But it also looks like he is applying for a promotion. 

Particularly when the court's division tracks the usual liberal/conservative divide, its credibility depends on both candor and correctness when it comes to the factual predicates of its rulings.  Whatever one's view of the death penalty -- and I have long expressed misgivings on both its wisdom and its constitutionality -- it's important that the inequities and inequalities in its administration be minimized. Commitment to that principle, not a rush to the center, lay behind Barack Obama's disagreement with the court's ruling in this case even before the 2006 federal death penalty provision came to public attention.

Well, there you have it.  Obama didn't flip flop.  He was committed to principle.  And it's a principle that Republicans should respect, especially if they still have veto power when Obama nominates Tribe for the next Supreme Court vacancy. 

But just because there may be a political motive behind Tribe's argument, that doesn't mean he isn't right.  Here is a genuine bit of brilliant jurisprudence.

Many who applauded the court's original ruling did so not on the basis of the court's (now evidently faulty) trend-spotting rationale but, rather, on the premise that any way of containing the spread of capital punishment -- such as by confining its use to murderers and traitors -- is a good idea. But even those who harbor serious doubts about capital punishment should feel duty-bound to oppose carve-outs from its reach that denigrate certain classes of victims, or that arbitrarily override democratic determinations that such victims deserve maximum protection.

If a legislature were to exempt the killers of gay men or lesbians from capital punishment, even dedicated death penalty opponents should cry foul in the Constitution's name. So too, should they cry foul when the judiciary holds the torturers or violent rapists of young children to be constitutionally exempt from the death penalty imposed by a legislature judicially permitted to apply that penalty to cop killers and murderers for hire. In doing so, the court is imposing a dubious limit on the ability of a representative government to enforce its own, entirely plausible, sense of which crimes deserve the most severe punishment.

Yes.  Limits on the death penalty may look good to death penalty opponents, but they can be misused like any other arbitrary rule.  That is the trouble with the Court arbitrarily imposing its own political views on the law.  Let's hope Tribe remembers all this if he does get on the bench. 

Todd Epp on the Death of Morgan Lewis

My esteemed Keloland colleague and friend, Todd Epp, posts on the death of Morgan Lewis.  Lewis, a faculty member at NSU was found dead outside Seymour Hall on November 1st, 2004.  After a lengthy investigation, the Aberdeen police department concluded that his death was a suicide.  Now Todd posts a letter he received, from "APD Officer 264". 

Let me tell you from actually working on the case that it leaves very little doubt that this was in fact a murder. even the Coroner ruled it a homicide. A suspect had a motive and knew facts of the case that were never relased to the public. I read the report. I worked on the case. I dealt with the suspect. I like many other officers still feel that it was murder, not suicide. But 2 murders on NSU would look bad in the press and enrollment would drop. A suicide and an accicental death look a lot better to prospective college students than 2 murders with no arrests.

Todd acknowledges that he has no idea whether this letter is from "a real cop in Aberdeen or someone yanking our chains," but he does not hesitate to add: "it does seem have a ring of truth to it."  I would add that if the post comes from someone who isn't indeed a cop, it has neither a ring nor any other hint of truth to it.  Unless some Aberdeen policeman with a real name comes forward to endorse the note (along with the misspellings) it is mere rumor mongering and innuendo.  If he does, then we will have something to talk about. 

In the almost four years since Morgan died, not a shred of evidence has come to light to indicate the involvement of any party in his death other than himself.  If Todd knows of such evidence, he might have stated it.  Nor has anyone produced evidence to show that it was not suicide.  In light of these two facts, allegations of cover up are mere innuendo.  I am sure that lawyer Epp knows what that means. 

After the investigation was concluded and the police announced their findings, my NSU colleague Jim Seeber and I interviewed the Aberdeen Chief of Police Don Lanpher. The results of that interview were published in the American News.  Todd gave us a great deal of grief for our efforts, calling us the "NSU Hardy Boys."  Now that he has chosen to play detective himself, on the basis of no stated evidence, I am not so embarrassed to reproduce our article.  It indicates the reasons that the Aberdeen police reached the conclusions that they did.  It was published in February 2004. 

The death of Morgan Lewis on November 1, 2004, was a traumatic event for Northern State University’s faculty, staff, and student body. Last Thursday, Aberdeen Chief of Police Don Lanpher held a press conference in the Johnson Fine Arts Center where he announced the result of the fifteen month investigation. The police concluded that Morgan Lewis died of a self-inflicted wound. On February 10 Chief Lanpher returned to campus and was interviewed by Kenneth Blanchard and James Seeber.

This article represents our understanding of the evidence upon which the investigators based their conclusion. We apologize for its bluntness and graphic nature, but we believe that concerns for justice, public safety, and the reputation of the police force are serious enough that these details must be made public. Any errors are our responsibility and not that of Chief Lanpher.

The physical evidence was decisive. The gun that killed Morgan Lewis was made in the early twentieth century and proved impossible to trace. It was found in the dumpster outside Seymour Hall, where Lewis had his office. The police were not able to lift any prints off the weapon.

However, powder residue indicated that Lewis had handled the weapon with both hands. Blowback, a term for blood, hair, and other materials that were recovered from the gun, and blood spatter on his hand, both indicated that Lewis himself fired the shot that resulted in his fatal wound. The angle of entry is consistent with someone holding the gun in his left hand and placing it against his neck, under the left side of his jaw. 

We asked Chief Lanpher a question that many of our colleagues have asked: how did the gun get into the dumpster? The distance between the dumpster and the spot that Lewis’s body was found was approximately forty feet. Much gossip on and off campus was based on the erroneous information that the distance was forty yards. When the gun was fired the shell casing was ejected. Its location on the ground allowed the police to determine that the gun was fired next to the dumpster.

The low caliber shell passed through Lewis’s neck, severing his carotid artery but missing his spine. Had the bullet hit his spine, he would have dropped where he stood. Instead he was able to toss the gun into the dumpster and then walk a short distance, during which time he bled to death. A clear blood trail began at the dumpster. It indicates that he fell once on the grass, and again where his body was found.

Sometime before 5:30 am on the morning he died, Morgan Lewis went outside of Seymour Hall wearing a tee shirt and no jacket. He had left his personal items, including his car keys and the key to the building, inside his office in his backpack. He could not have re-entered the building nor could he had driven home. His wallet was found by his body, empty, but there was cash in his backpack in his office. Lewis had two life insurance policies. The beneficiary was a person with whom he had had a long term relationship. Chief Lanpher declined to speculate on any of this, but we will. It seems likely that when he left the building, Lewis had no intention either of going back inside or going home. He may have had thoughts of making his suicide look like murder.

Chief Lanpher said there was other evidence that he could not talk about because it would invade the privacy of Lewis and his family. He did tell us that the investigators called in help from a number of different law-enforcement agencies, including State’s Attorney Mark McNeary. In addition, the Aberdeen  investigators submitted their evidence to three outside consultants: a physician specializing in forensics, a firearms expert, and a “cold case” specialist in Florida.  All three, working independently of one another, reached the same conclusion as the Aberdeen police.

Police Chief Lanpher was candid and thorough in answering our questions. We found his account to be very persuasive.

Cory's Excellent Post on Bjørn Lomborg

My esteemed Keloland colleague Cory Heidelberger (whose last name always presents me with a challenge) has a fine post referring to Bjørn Lomborg's piece in the Wall Street Journal.  It is excellent for two reasons: first, Cory does a pretty good job of trying to see the questions from two sides and he acknowledges the rhetorical excesses on both sides; and second, Cory agrees with me about Lomborg, which means that he is surely right. 

Lomborg has attempted to forge a common sense view of global problems, grounded in realistic estimates of costs and benefits.  I have long admired his work.  He acknowledges that global warming is a problem, that it due in some significant measure to human activity.  But he thinks that the costs of reversing global warming are prohibitive, and that much cheaper and more practical measures can do a lot more good.  For a fraction of the hundreds of billions that the Kyoto treaty would have cost (if anyone were abiding by it), we could deliver safe drinking water, vitamins, etc., to millions of people around the world. 

I hadn't seen anything by Lomborg on terrorism before, but as usual he gives us a picture of just how expensive counter-terrorism measures are, and how marginal are the benefits.  I think that this is one topic on which Lomborg's analysis is misleading. It's no doubt true that the death toll from terrorist acts is marginal compared to more familiar problems.  Lomborg cites 420 deaths each year from "transnational terrorism," and that compares with 30,000 deaths of U.S. highways.  But terrorism has a much more profound psychological impact on a nation that crunched up Corollas, just as an airline crash has a much bigger impact than a bad holiday weekend on I 29.  Governments are compelled to respond to terrorism without doing a simple cost-benefit analysis.  But Lomborg is right to insist that we reckon the costs. 

I would note, though Cory does not, that Lomborg is a bete noire of the world left. He has had to defend himself against charges of intellectual dishonesty before the  Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, a scary sounding institution if ever there was one.  There is no question that the charges were politically motivated.  I trust that Cory and I are reasonably safe from the DCSD.  But trying to maintain some common sense on topics like global warming looks like heresy to the true believers. 

I have been posting about global warming on my blogs for several years.  I have found the evidence compelling that we were, at least until recently, in a long term global warming trend.  I thought the evidence convincing, until recently, that human activity was a significant factor.  I think the current cooling period raises serious questions about the climate models that cannot account for it.  But I have also argued, rightly it still seems to me, that there is nothing we can do to halt the human contributions to global warming.  With the growing economies in China and India, there is no way the rest of the world can reduce carbon emissions enough to make a difference, and we just aren't going to strangle our own economies.  So it only makes sense, as Lomborg has argued, to spend our energies and monies on preparing for the effects of future warming. 

Cory issues this challenge:

So how about a deal: let's drop the War on Terror and global warming as rhetorical bludgeons. Better yet, let's cut funding funding for both issues by half and dedicate that money to fighting disease and hunger. Any takers?

That is shrewd, and I applaud.  I am sure that cutting anti-terrorism funds by half would be way too risky for any government to try it.  But I am sure that directing a lot of the money we say we ("we" being the developed world) are going to spend to stop global warming toward more manageable problems would do a great deal of good. 

 

Johnson Airs First TV Ad

Obama Love

We are Winning in Iraq II

Even the New York Times is noticing our progress in Iraq, reporting on how anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is losing power.

The Press Finally Concedes: We are Winning in Iraq

A few days back I posted with this title: "Is the Iraq War Over?"  I quoted reporter Michael Yon to that effect, while sounding some cautionary notes to cover my butt.  Intrepid reader BB responded:

Michael Yon says we won the war? WOW! Stop the presses...and cut and paste. Michael Yon has been saying we are winning for how many years now?

But it isn't just Yon anymore.  It's the Associate Press.  You read that right.  From the Rapid City Journal:

The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace _ a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

That, I suppose, is what winning looks like.  If you want to get out of Iraq, if you want to transfer more troops to Afghanistan, winning in Iraq would be the ticket.  Of course, you would have to admit that George W. got one thing right, and that Barack Obama, along with most the Democratic leadership, got it dead wrong.  Even the AP can't deny that now. 

Obama the Inflexible?

Perhaps the best sober analysis I have seen of Barack Obama's thinking on Iraq policy and strategy is John Dickerson's piece on Slate. 

When Karen Tumulty of Time asked Obama what he'd learned on his trip, he said, "It confirmed a lot of my beliefs." Lara Logan of CBS asked him if he was ever in doubt that he could lead the country in war as commander in chief, and he answered, "Never." After seven and a half years of George Bush, we should pause when a man auditioning for president says that the facts confirmed his beliefs and that he's never in doubt. As Obama himself has warned us at other moments, these are signs that a fearless leader may be letting ideology or rigidity steer him in the wrong direction.

Well, yes.  Obama is surely right to want to assure us all that he is up to the job of President, but just as surely the right thing to say was: "of course."  Then he could point out that any serious person would have some doubts in the face of such an awesome job, but that he is confident that he is the best person to take it on.  His unequivocal "never" shows us how much of a typical twenty-first politician he is. 

But a more serious question is whether he can respond to events in the world, and change his mind when changing is warranted.  After all, this is supposed to be George W.'s biggest flaw, that he always responds to failure by "doubling down." 

The main complexity Obama has to confront in Iraq is the apparent success of the most recent phase of U.S. military strategy, of which the troop surge was a key part. Violence has come down from stratospheric heights. The success is relative (violence is still at 2005 levels), but the situation is far better than Obama predicted. When he voted against the surge in January 2007, he claimed on more than one occasion that it would lead to increased casualties and sectarian violence. It didn't. How'd he get that one wrong? In January 2007, Obama claimed that the Iraqi government would make no hard choices if the United States stayed. But they have made hard choices. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched incursions into Basra and confronted cleric Muqtada Sadr, both of which helped pave the way for the Sunni faction's return to the government. This is not enough progress to suggest Iraq is anywhere near stable, but like the drop in violence, it's more than Obama predicted.

The success of the surge strategy in Iraq is one of the most important new, and encouraging facts that one must think about when trying to get a handle on what we should do next.  Paradoxically, it makes it easier to contemplate staying in Iraq or leaving.  But as Dickerson points out, "Obama still holds the same policy views he did more than a year and a half ago." 

I would add to what Dickerson says that Obama has a unique problem here.  His single most important claim on behalf of his candidacy is that he was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning.  Of course, he did not get to vote on it at the beginning, so we don't really know what he would have done.  If he was in the Senate at the time, would he have acted on principle and voted no, or would he have acted like Kerry and voted for it before he voted against it?  I think all the evidence points to the latter. 

But when he did get to vote, he voted against the surge.  That might have been the most important vote he cast in the Senate, and it was a mistake.  Perhaps Obama thinks that to admit that mistake, and the mistaken thinking underlying the vote, would undermine the case he is making for himself.  Maybe.  But as Dickerson points out:

In his book The Audacity of Hope, he writes about pulling aside reporters who were living in Iraq to get their views about the war. He expected them to agree with his call for a troop reduction. They didn't. They said a troop reduction would start a civil war. Obama called for a troop reduction anyway, but we know his mind is alive enough to capture and remember a piece of data that didn't fit with his pre-existing views. Are contradictory observations fine for a book but off-limits when you're a political candidate? Admitting you're wrong, or even that your thinking has evolved, is risky for a politician. Maybe too risky. That's certainly what George Bush believes.