If you haven’t been reading MANzine this week, here’s what you’ve missed:

• Can a Real Man Drive a Minivan? (James Joyner) – Despite what the advertisements may tell you, manhood has little to do with what kind of cigarettes you smoke, what car you drive, or how white your shirts could be.

• Emergency Flank Steak (Stephen Green) – What do you reach for when there’s a dinner emergency? Why, emergency flank steak!

• Best Dessert Ever: Tort & Port (Stephen Green) – An easy way to make a decadent after-dinner treat.

• Cheap Spanish Wine (Steven Taylor) – A look into some inexpensive, but surprisingly good, Spanish wines.

• How a Suit Should Fit (James Joyner) – Esquire’s advice on men’s suits is not taken by their own models. And it’s incomplete.

• Shopping with the Wife (James Joyner) – Sixty-year-old advice is insulting, wrong, and still rings true!

• Hemingway Motivational Posters (James Joyner) – The manliest of authors is posterized.

• Price of Steak and Beer To Rise (Alex Knapp) – It’s about to get more expensive to get manly staples while dining out. So eat at home!

• Jessica Biel Most Dangerous Celebrity (James Joyner) – The lovely actress is carry a nasty bug.

A while back, in response to a snark from Andrew Exum, I noted that, “As to the side issue of whether the combination of a martini and a steak makes for a good meal, it undoubtedly does.  However, I prefer to have the martini (or perhaps two) ahead of the meal and then switch to wine to better enjoy the complexity of the flavors.”

Today at MANzine, by sheer coincidence, we have the rest of the story.

First, in “James Bond Ruined the Martini,” yours truly discusses some of the finer distinctions of this classic cocktail.  Most notably, that true martinis contain gin rather than vodka.  (Although, in the ensuing comments, Alex Knapp defends the virtues of the Vesper, which contains both gin and vodka.)  Further, whether one should have one’s martini shaken or stirred depends not on one’s sophistication but rather on whether one is drinking a vodka martini or a real one.

Then, in “Steakhouse Steak at Home,” Matt Mehaffey offers a guide to perpetuating your carnivorous habits in style with an iron skillet and some prime beef.  It’s what’s for dinner.

Since obesity has somehow become our unofficial theme this morning, I’d be remiss not to mention Ezra Klein’s observations about trying to eat healthy at Cheesecake Factory.

On first glance, I would have figure the salmon for the lightest entree, followed by the chicken piccata, the carbonara, and the crispy beef. Not so. The salmon weighs in at 1,673 calories — which is to say, a bit more than 75 percent of the food an adult male should eat in a day. The piccata is a comparably slim 1,385 calories. The crispy beef is 1,528 calories. And the carbonara? 2,191. The answer might be that someone looking for a healthful meal shouldn’t go to the Cheesecake Factory. But insofar as you’re already there, or your family wants to go there, making a good decision isn’t a particularly straightforward proposition.This is why the obesity crisis is such a tough issue: Calories are delicious. The Cheesecake Factory isn’t doing anything wrong, either ethically or culinarily. Human beings are wired to prefer abundance, salt, fat, sugar, and value. The Cheesecake Factory is giving people the whole package. Changing people’s eating habits so that type two diabetes don’t become the new chubby would be easy if the food was actually repulsive or the value was bad or it was all, in some other way, a trick. But it’s not. The food is enjoyable. The value is incredible. The cost is long-term, and remembering that we might get diabetes down the road is pretty hard when eons of evolutionary wiring are telling us to eat this stuff now now now now it’s right here now now!

People go to the Cheesecake Factory because they like being there, not because they’re being deceived. The only catch is that they really don’t know how bad the food is for them. Study after study shows we wildly underestimate caloric load of our foods, and we underestimate by more as the meal becomes larger. It’s not clear that nutritional information on menus would actually change eating habits. But it would at least give people a place to start. Diners know what they like. They know how much money they’ll have to pay to purchase it. No reason they shouldn’t also know what it’s going to cost their waistline.

I’ve got no beef, crispy or otherwise, with restaurants putting nutrition information on the menu.  The problem, however, is that there’s really no way to do it unless you’re eating at the sort of place where all the menu items are shipped frozen from a central location and defrosted in a microwave.  Otherwise, each individual portion will vary considerably.   Obviously, we could print averages on the menus but they would be misleading.

Beyond that, one of the things that has long occurred to me about restaurant dining is that, because every customer must be served the same portion size (within allowances for human error) they’re naturally going to provide huge amounts of food.  If you serve a 275 pound man an amount of food that would be appropriate for a 125 pound woman, he’s going to still be hungry at the end of his meal and therefore a dissatisfied customer.  Because the marginal cost of additional food (especially pasta, potatoes, and the like) is negligible, it’s just good business to pile it on.  Naturally, everyone else will be given too much to eat and all but the most disciplined will overeat.

Two obvious ways health conscious diners can adjust are to resolve to take half the food home with them — better yet, get a “doggy bag” before starting eating and divide it right away — or to share food.  My wife and I will often order an appetizer and a single entree if we’re out and not returning immediately home.   Otherwise, I’m happy to have extra food for the next day’s lunch.

Regardless, if one combines the meal with half a bottle of wine and a cocktail or two — much less dessert — blowing through the recommended daily calorie allotment is just about guaranteed.

Of course, avoiding restaurants with the words “cheesecake” or “factory” in the name is probably the best advice for those seeking to stay slim.

Patrick Appel titles a post “How to Drink Wine,” providing only a link labeled “A guide.”   I’m pretty sure I know how to drink wine (pour into glass, invert slightly …) but am intrigued and click through to find Aaron Potts‘ “How to Drink Wine Like an Expert.”  I drink quite a bit of wine but am far from expert, so read on.

What ensues is a lesson on the characteristics of wine, including some made up ones like “typicity” and “elegance.” This is somewhat interesting but, alas, does not leave me feeling even the slightest more expert on the subject of drinking wine.

I’m reminded of the 1983 Elton John – Stevie Wonder hit “I Guess That’s Why They Call it The Blues” which, while catchy and enjoyable, provides no useful information on the etymology of the term “The Blues.”  I’ve appended a video of same below so as to make this post not entirely a waste of your time.

USA Today reports on a proposal circulating in the Senate Finance Committee to fund health care through sin taxes on booze.

Beer taxes would go up by 48 cents a six-pack, wine taxes would rise by 49 cents per bottle, and the tax on hard liquor would increase by 40 cents per fifth. Proceeds from the new taxes would help cover an estimated 50 million uninsured Americans.

Matt Yglesias finds this proposal “pretty attractive,” even while acknowledging that the direct public health benefits from reduced alcohol consumption would be minimal.   He notes that this would be a “return to the level of taxation that existed a few decades ago” so it “would not be an unprecedented burden on the American consumer.”

That’s probably right, although it strikes me as highly regressive.  A flat rate based on the category of beverage is especially bizarre.  Why should someone buying a bottle of “Two Buck Chuck” pay the same tax as someone buying a $50 bottle of pinot noir?  Matt suggests that we should instead charge based on alcohol content, which would make sense if the aim was mostly to deter excessive drinking.  But, since we’re trying to fund a health care system, it would make more sense to tax based on price.

Matt asserts “universal health care is highly desirable and has to be paid for somehow.”  I agree with the former, if by “universal health care” we mean that all Americans can afford to get treatment when they’re sick or injured, and the latter necessarily follows.   It’s not at all clear, though, why the “somehow” ought to apply to those of us who use a legal, harmless-if-used-responsibly product.

Matt counters that “the incidence would fall overwhelmingly on a relatively small number of problem drinkers (rather than the broad mass of people who drink moderately on social occasions)” but that’s simply not true.  Sure, a “problem drinker” is likely to consume more booze than a “social drinker.”  But the latter vastly overwhelm the former in number and all of us would pay the tax.

[UPDATE:  In a subsequent post, Matt points to Igor Volsky's recitation of junk science haven Center for Science in the Public Interest data showing that moderate drinkers would pay almost no taxes -- and 35 percent would pay nothing at all! -- whilst the top 5% would pay $215 a year.   I have no data to offer in rebuttal but personal observation makes me exceedingly skeptical of the distribution.]

Given that we’re likely going to have some sort of taxpayer-funded health program passed during Obama’s run, why not simply impose a consumption tax, perhaps excluding food and medicine, instead? It would be less regressive and wouldn’t single out a single activity for punitive treatment.

Photo by Flickr user zsenya under Creative Commons license.

Andrew Exum has “a policy whereby when someone is criticized by name, they have the right to post a response.”  Having yesterday taken exception to a WSJ editorial by AEI’s Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt arguing that Obama and Gates are “gutting the military” and received a lengthy email response from Donnelly, he reprints it today.

Not only is Exum’s “right to respond” policy very interesting, following the three links and reading the content at each will serve as an excellent primer on the defense spending and defense acquisitions debates.

As for myself, I’m more sympathetic to Exum’s position than the AEI position.  Barack Obama is most certainly not gutting the military.  Indeed, as noted previously, I think Gates’ proposed cuts are too small.  Further, as Bernard Finel points out, “the intellectual foundation of the new defense budget is the 2008 National Defense Strategy, drafted by Bush appointees and approved by the Bush White House.” We’d likely have seen similar priorities, then, in a third Bush term (were it Constitutionally permissible and electorally conceivable) or a first McCain term

I do, however, share Dave Schuler’s concern that we need to maintain a capacity to produce such wonders as the F22 in larger numbers if needed.  I predict that, once Congress gets involved, this will in fact happen.

As to the side issue of whether the combination of a martini and a steak makes for a good meal, it undoubtedly does.  However, I prefer to have the martini (or perhaps two) ahead of the meal and then switch to wine to better enjoy the complexity of the flavors.

Gordon Biersch Somerfest pints

Burkhard Bilger explores the rise of craft beers for The New Yorker.

“When you’re trying to create new brewing techniques and beer styles, you have to have a certain recklessness,” Jim Koch, whose Boston Beer Company brews Samuel Adams, and who coined the term “extreme beer,” told me. “Sam has that. He’s fearless, but he’s also got a good palate. He doesn’t put stuff into beer that doesn’t deserve to be there.”

The debate goes back, in one form or another, nearly five hundred years. According to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, or Purity Law, of 1516, beer can be made with only three ingredients: water, hops, and barley. (Yeast was left off the list because brewers didn’t know it existed; beer was naturally fermented, like sourdough bread.) German brewers still observe a version of the Reinheitsgebot, but Belgian brewers, just across the border, have cheerfully renounced it. Their krieks, wits, lambics, and gueuzes are among the world’s most remarkable beers, yet they’re often made with fruits or spices, or fortified with sugar, to become as potent as wine.

In America, brewers have long followed the German model: our major industrial breweries were all founded by German-Americans. But Calagione and others have lately wandered over to the Belgian side—and kept on going. “I’d probably be arrested, tarred and feathered, if I stepped off a plane in Berlin,” Calagione told me. Extreme brewers have helped turn American brewing into the most influential in the world. But they’ve also raised a basic question: When does beer cease to be beer?

A recent Esquire article on award winning chili recipes revealed the author’s discovering that, despite having grown up with very strict rules as to what constituted chili (no beans, etc.), “it’s all chili, and it’s all good.”  The same’s basically true of beer.

Gordon Biersch, a national brewery chain with at least two locations in the DC area, has a range of terrific brews made according to the German purity laws, including an outstanding German-style hefeweitzen.  But those Belgian Wits and blondes and abbey ales are terrific, too.

via Ezra Klein

The original referred to Biersch as a “local” brewery chain but, in fact, it began twenty years ago in Palo Alto, CA and is available nationally. I’d never encountered them before stopping in their DC location.

Bruce Ackerman has read a novel and heard unsubstantiated rumors and from these concocted a Constitutional crisis which he’s convinced the folks at Slate to publish.

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side, opens with a shocker. Apparently sometime in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan issued a “secret executive order” that in the event of the death of the president and the vice president “established a means of re-creating the executive branch.” Reagan’s order violated the express terms of the Constitution and governing statutes.

Does a similar order exist today? We aren’t told. But we do know that Dick Cheney participated in the secret “doomsday” exercises under the Reagan order, and given his central role at present, it is imperative for Congress to find out.

Congress last considered the problem of a dual vacancy in the presidency and the vice presidency when Harry Truman was in the White House. In the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, lawmakers stipulated that if both positions are empty, power passes first to the Speaker of the House or, if she, too, does not survive, to the president pro tem of the Senate. But relying on James Mann’s earlier book Rise of the Vulcans, Mayer reports that Reagan “amended the process for speed and clarity … without informing Congress that it had been sidestepped.” We don’t know how. But if the order bypasses the speaker and the Senate president pro tempore in favor of an official in the executive branch, we have a recipe for a constitutional crisis.

Well, yeah.  But, as Ackerman acknowledges, the Bush Administration has explicitly stated that they’ll follow the Succession Act.  And there’s the Supreme Court, which would surely uphold a duly passed, six-decade-old statute if it conflicted with a “secret” executive order from a dead executive.

Now, as it happens, I think the 1947 process is a dubious one. It simply makes no sense to have an elected president of one party succeeded by someone, potentially of the opposition party, elected only by the residents of one Congressional District.  I’d much prefer, say, the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense to take over.  We should change the law to that effect, in theory, but there’s generally not much impetus to pass legislation on purely theoretical matters that no voter is likely to decide the next election on, let alone if said legislation would shift power, however theoretical, away from the legislative branch.

Still, a Constitutional crisis, it ain’t.

via Dave Winer’s FriendFeed

Anheuser-Busch agreed to sell to Belgium’s InBev last night, demonstrating that all the howls about American pride were mere haggling over price.   All it took was raising the offer to $70 per share from $65 per share — “a 27 percent premium over Anheuser’s record-high stock price in October 2002″ — and giving a Busch a seat on the board.

The combined company will be called Anheuser-Busch InBev, said the sources, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. Anheuser will get seats on the new company’s board, the sources said, but it was not immediately clear how many.

Adding another dimension to any deal was Mexico’s No. 1 brewer Grupo Modelo, which is 50 percent owned by Anheuser. The maker of Corona beer, which has the right to choose its partner, has not yet approved InBev for that role and the two brewers remain in talks, according to one person familiar with the situation.

One suspects that hurdle will prove minor; the combined company would easily be the world’s top beer distributor and it would be foolish, indeed, for Modelo to opt out of access to that network.  What remains to be seen is whether Missouri politicians or anti-trust forces try to stop this deal.

Previously: Anheuser-Busch $46 Billion Belgian Buyout Bid

Related: No Beer, No Civilization, Beer vs. Wine Vote

George Will has been at the top of the pundit game for so long that you’d think he’d have joined a sizable number of his peers in seemingly dusting off one of their stock columns every week. Not so. Will’s latest installment is on the virtues of beer.

“The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying is, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

Will goes so far as to assert that beer is a health food. Reminding you that he is, after all, a conservative who wears spectacles and was once famous for his bow ties, he adds the appropriate dig: “And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.”

Tina Danze also has a down and dirty guide to “What beer geeks know,” including the proper glasses, serving temperatures, and pouring techniques required for various types.

UPDATE:  Steve Bainbridge points out that beer stocks are a good investment, too!  That, incidentally, is in decided contrast to beer itself which, as the old saying goes, you can only rent.

UPDATE (Dave Schuler)

The connection between civilization and beer is even stronger than George Will alleges. Nomads can do a lot of things but it’s darned hard to brew mead or beer unless you adopt a sedentary habit. There are anthropologists who believe that human beings founded the first permanent settlements in order to brew mead or beer. Beer-drinking anthropologists, naturally.

While we’re talking about beer, Anheuser-Busch continues to fend off the advances of Brazilian-managed Belgian-based InBev. A few days ago AB filed suit against the foreign giant to oppose the replacement of the AB board of directors. Now the company is playing “four corners”:

For those whose knowledge of college basketball goes back only as far as the shot clock, the strategy was to tie up the ball for long periods by passing it back and forth between four players. Back in the day, with the right players, the stalling tactic was quite effective in confounding the opponent (and putting the crowd to sleep). Wooden’s teams won 10 National College Athletic Assn. championships.

The delay, in this case, is clear: St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch has held off meeting with InBev to discuss the European company’s $46 billion offer. Meanwhile, the two brewing giants have furiously traded press releases, advertisements, and lawsuits as if they were political candidates battling a disputed election.

Beer poster image via James McGovern. Hat tip to Jonathan Adler for the Will story.

In reference to James’ post below, it’s worth pointing out that a biological cause for homosexuality does not, in any sense of the word, make for a birth defect, and we should be careful how we define the phrase. Calling homosexuality a “birth defect” (as some will no doubt begin to do so), implies that homosexuality causes some interference in a person’s flourishing or capabilities. Clearly, it does not. Calling homosexuality a “defect” is akin to calling left-handedness a “defect”–it doesn’t make sense, because being left-handed doesn’t affect health or flourishing. Neither does homosexuality. Homosexuality is just a difference from the norm. But from a purely biological perspective, there’s nothing wrong with it.

It’s worth considering, too, that calling homosexuality a “defect” is based purely on the Judeo-Christian moral sense. Homosexuality is certainly not a taboo in many human cultures, and has been celebrated in many. Additionally, from a pure empirical perspective, you’ll have a tough time convincing me that being gay would be bad for my kids when you consider that homosexuality appears to be based partially on brain structure. Given how intwined the various aspects of brain function are, you have to consider that if a “cure” had been available and used throughout history, there’s a good chance that human culture would have been deprived of the works and ideas of:

* Michaelangelo
* Socrates
* Alexander the Great
* Desiderius Erasmus
* Francis Bacon
* Walt Whitman
* Oscar Wilde
* Cole Porter
* Leonard Bernstein
* T.E. Lawrence
* Christopher Marlowe
* Leonardo da Vinci
* Horatio Alger, Jr.
* Hans Christian Andersen
* Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
* Alan Turing

And many, many others. How sad this world would be if parents tried to change the very structure of their children’s brains because of a primitive superstition regarding love between persons of the same sex. If you ask me, a desire to mold your child into being a person who satisfies your own selfish desires is the defect, not homosexuality.

James Poulous and Rod Dreher weigh in with their recommended adult libations for the summertime. Not surprisingly, since these things are mostly a matter of personal taste, there’s significant disagreement in the lists.

Poulous touts the wonders of Red Stripe, Jamaica’s national beer, while Dreher advises readers to eschew brew altogether and stick to wheat beers if they can not. I drink Red Stripe pretty much only when I’m in Jamaica and do indeed prefer wheat beers when it’s hot. I don’t share Dreher’s aversion to Hoegaarden but do agree there are better choices. I’m particularly partial to Ayinger, Magic Hat’s Circus Boy, and Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat.

I second Poulous’ recommendation of Limoncello, a delightful Italian liqueur, but tend to reserve it for after meals. It’s not something I’d sip throughout the day.

I’m with Dreher on rosé wines during hot weather; I tend to avoid them otherwise. Inexpensive German Qualitätswein, ranging from drier Rieslings to Liebfraumilch to Spätlese are also excellent on hot afternoons.

I find grapefruit too bitter, so have never tried it mixed with gin. Is there an similar substitute?

UPDATE (Alex Knapp) I couldn’t help but chime in here with my favorite summertime drinks.

First and foremost is, of course, the mint julep, which is not only the perfect summertime drink, but it is arguably the pinnacle of American cocktails.

I’d also like to defend the mojito, which James Poulous unfairly maligns in the article linked above:

Learn and move on. Even if the mojito you’re served is perfect, at this point you’re really pigeonholing yourself as someone about to be lapped on the fashion track. You’re probably still working your way through the last season of Friends on DVD, aren’t you?

This just made me bristle. Not only is a properly made mojito refreshing, but it was the preferred drink of ERNEST HEMINGWAY. It’s not some Johnny-come-lately drink. It’s a classic and deserves to be treated as such.

In addition, a properly made martini is always a nice cold drink. And at the risk of sounding elitist (apparently the greatest sin of our age), let me state for the record that a martini is properly made with gin, not vodka (unless you’re making a Vesper), and does not have any fruit or dessert flavors added to it. I was recently at a restaurant which devoted a whole page to “martinis”, which contained over 20 drinks. None contained gin, none contained vermouth, and only TWO contained even vodka. To which I say, how can ANY of those drinks be properly classified as a martini?

But I digress.

Other classic cocktails for the summertime include the Tom Collins and the Old Fashioned, both of which are perfect for summer evenings.

I’ll second James on recommending wheat beers, and if you’re in the midwest I’d recommend Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat, and to New Englanders I highly recommend Wachusett Summer. Any other beer recommendations are welcome.

ID protection Guru Todd Davis is being sued for fraud.

Todd Davis has dared criminals for two years to try stealing his identity: Ads for his fraud-prevention company, LifeLock, even offer his Social Security number next to his smiling mug.

Now, Lifelock customers in Maryland, New Jersey and West Virginia are suing Davis, claiming his service didn’t work as promised and he knew it wouldn’t, because the service had failed even him. Attorney David Paris said he found records of other people applying for or receiving driver’s licenses at least 20 times using Davis’ Social Security number, though some of the applications may have been rejected because data in them didn’t match what the Social Security Administration had on file.

Davis acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that his stunt has led to at least 87 instances in which people have tried to steal his identity, and one succeeded: a guy in Texas who duped an online payday loan operation last year into giving him $500 using Davis’ Social Security number.

I do believe these people have a case….

Image via Ryan Healy

California wine impresario Robert Mondavi has died at the ripe old age of 94.

Robert Mondavi, the man hailed as the ambassador of the Napa Valley and the godfather of California wine, no longer owned a winery when he died today at his home in Yountville at the age of 94. The winery that bears his name is now part of the portfolio of wine and spirits giant Constellation Brands.

But Mondavi leaves a legacy far greater than just that winery. For years, he captured the imaginations of wine producers, urging them to compete with the world’s best, and of wine drinkers, opening their eyes to how this simple beverage could enrich their daily lives.

Recognizing that a rising tide would lift all boats, he promoted the cause of premium California wine even as he pushed his own brands. With his energy, enthusiasm and vision, Mondavi arguably did more to raise the reputation of California wine – and, in particular, Napa Valley wine – than anyone.

I prefer wines from the Willamette Valley, personally, but the widespread availability of truly excellent domestic wines is at least partly Mondavi’s doing.

The Pentagon is backing a massive development project financed by Marriott and others to gentrify Baghdad.

Forget the rocket attacks, concrete blast walls and lack of a sewer system. Now try to imagine luxury hotels, a shopping center and even condos in the heart of Baghdad. That’s all part of a five-year development “dream list” — or what some dub an improbable fantasy — to transform the U.S.-protected Green Zone from a walled fortress into a centerpiece for Baghdad’s future.

But the $5 billion plan has the backing of the Pentagon and apparently the interest of some deep pockets in the world of international hotels and development, the lead military liaison for the project told the Associated Press. For Washington, the driving motivation is to create a “zone of influence” around the new $700 million U.S. Embassy to serve as a kind of high-end buffer for the compound, whose total price tag will reach about $1 billion after all the workers and offices are relocated over the next year. “When you have $1 billion hanging out there and 1,000 employees lying around, you kind of want to know who your neighbors are. You want to influence what happens in your neighborhood over time,” said Navy Capt. Thomas Karnowski, who led the team that created the development plan.

[...]

But developers are clearly looking many years ahead and gambling that Baghdad could one day join the list of former war zones such as Sarajevo and Beirut that have rebounded and earned big paydays for early investors.

Spencer Ackerman is outraged at the very idea.

Your neighbors! Your actual neighbors, the ones whose country it is, experience shortages of water, electricity, fuel, cooking oil, medical care, security and more. The rise of this hotel compound will drain resources away from a desperate population.

[...]

Never, ever, let another warmonger get away with telling you that you want to end the war because you don’t care about the Iraqi people’s fate. He probably has his luxury suite already booked in the forthcoming International Zone Hilton.

I’m quite dubious of the plan and certainly wouldn’t invest my retirement savings in developing luxury resorts in the middle of a war zone. Still, the idea makes sense. Presumably, companies investing $1 billion in facilities will have a great stake in working to improve the infrastructure, security, rule of law, and other things necessary to ensuring the success of their business venture. Even for conglomerates, that’s real money.

At what point is it conscionable to build luxury hotels? Certainly, most of Cairo, Egypt is a slum by Western standards. Yet, there you will find more than a dozen magnificent luxury hotels, mostly clustered into a central zone, which cater to well-off tourists. Is that immoral? Or does it provide jobs for locals and gradually improve their standard of living?

For that matter, while America’s inner cities are a far cry from Baghdad, many of them are nonetheless impoverished, crime-ridden, and dysfunctional. Yet, almost all of them have luxury hotels, condos, restaurants, and so forth. Indeed, that’s true of our nation’s capital, where $500 a night hotels and restaurants selling $200 bottles of wine are within easy walking distance from neighborhoods none of the patrons of said establishments would venture into at night.

Wealth and abject poverty, safety and danger, and have and have not often coexist in close proximity. And the good often “draws resources away” from the bad. Why should Baghdad be any different?