The Stopped Clock

A Raw Diehl?

2009-11-14T13:26:00.006-05:00

Again cheerleading a significant, long-term escalation of the war in Afghanistan, Jackson Diehl asks,

All that time, no one accused George W. Bush of dithering. So why does Barack Obama keep hearing the taunt as he deliberates about Afghanistan -- and why do even some who sympathize with his dilemma find it hard to shake the feeling that this commander in chief lacks resolve?

If you look at the people who are accusing President Obama of dithering, the answer is self-evident. Is there one among them who is not a staunch advocate of endless war in Afghanistan? They hope that their silly, hypocritical accusations of "dithering" (think Dick Cheney) will somehow embarrass him into doing what they want, and making Obama less likely to impose reasonable demands on Karzai's administration or have a clear end-game in mind before escalating the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

Diehl shows his cards with this claim,

One part of the answer is easy: Bush was renowned for summoning plenty of resolve, and not enough critical thinking. No one questioned that Bush's heart was in his bid for "victory" in Iraq.

He defines "resolve" as the willingness to make a war last forever if it means avoiding admitting a mistake, but (at least in relation to Bush) not as the resolve to commit the troops or forces necessary to win. Which leads us back to the real Diehl: he wants more troops not because there's a plan for victory, or a reasonable likelihood of victory, but because he favors the perpetuation of the war until his unarticulated fantasy version of "victory" is achieved.

(It would be interesting to read an analysis of how all of the pro-war pundits and commentators miraculously settled on a somewhat unusual word, "dithering", to describe Obama's failure to immediately dispatch tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan upon the request of General McChrystal, despite the vast improvement his administration has already brought about in Afghanistan following seven years of malignant neglect by Bush and Cheney.)

Human Rights and Withdrawal from Afghanistan

2009-11-11T14:46:00.003-05:00

A contrarian view of the human rights impact of continuing the war in Afghanistan, but given the author it's not one to easily dismiss: a woman who "was elected to Afghanistan"s parliament in 2005 and kicked out in 2007 by the warlords".

Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.

In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.

The U.S. and its allies are getting ready to offer power to the medieval Taliban by creating an imaginary category called the "moderate Taliban" and inviting them to join the government. A man who was near the top of the list of most-wanted terrorists eight years ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been invited to join the government.

I wish the ideas were better developed, rather than fitting within the @800 word limit of an op/ed column, but if I were to infer why she favors withdrawal it's likely because U.S. policy seems likely to cement in place a corrupt, misogynistic government.

Should We Withdraw from Afghanistan

2009-11-07T23:44:00.004-05:00

The Guardian offers essays on continuation of the war in Afghanistan, arguing both sides of the question (from a British perspective). The argument to stay first observes the effect of seven years of the Bush Administration's neglect and incompetence:

By 2008, the situation had deteriorated so far that, with the Taliban established in outlying districts of the city, friends in Kabul who had returned in 2002 were wondering where to go if forced to flee again.

Things have since improved:

Now, finally, with Barack Obama in the White House and an American military which, for all its faults, has shown an impressive ability to learn (or relearn), we have in place the strategy that we should have had years ago. It depends on restricting the air strikes and the indiscriminate firepower, deploying troops to protect the population rather than treating them as a neutral terrain on which to hunt insurgents, training local troops, creating secure physical space for commerce, political space for some kind of process potentially leading to the eventual creation of a broadly legitimate government structure linked to broader regional initiatives.

That sounds good, right?

But will this strategy work?

Probably not.

To put it mildly, ouch. (Read the editorial for a list of everything that has gone wrong, that we're unlikely to be able to right.)

The human rights argument is weak, too. It is almost certain that any stable Afghanistan is going to be much more conservative, much more anti-western and much more authoritarian than we would like. Better than a Taliban-run state perhaps but more like Saudi Arabia than Sweden. A continued commitment will not guarantee girls the right to go to school across the entire country.

So why fight then? Why send more young men to their deaths? Why spend more money that could be used for hospitals, schools or saving banks?

For the simple reason that we owe it to the Afghans to try to make the new strategy work. Every death is a tragedy, but the price in lives and money is not an exorbitant one given the size, wealth and military history of the UK. After years of errors, we finally have a chance to do something right. In two or three years, we will know if there is a chance that the strategy can succeed. If it does, we can be proud. If it doesn't, at least we are unlikely to have made things worse. More important, we can at least honestly say to the Afghan people that we did our best.

Within the context of a strategy that does not depend upon Hamad Karzai (or his successor) being honest, competent or helpful, with the moderate goal of creating a society that's "merely" extremely oppressive to women as opposed to extraordinarily oppressive... conceding the narrow scope of what we're likely to achieve is a bitter pill. I don't think that argument is likely to persuade anybody who doesn't have a sense of how atrocious life became for women under the Taliban, but I can understand why the author, familiar with that history, wants to give it one more honest effort before we give up.

No More Subsidies?

2009-11-07T23:17:00.004-05:00

Thomas Friedman, in a shallow analysis of the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, concludes,

If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore.

No more subsidies? To either side?

"Independents"

2009-11-06T11:00:00.008-05:00

David Brooks offers his own special insight into what independents want, coincidentally what Brooks himself wants:

If I were a politician trying to win back independents, I’d say something like this: When I was a kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. Each state was a piece, and on it there was a drawing showing what people made there. California might have movies; Washington State, apples; New York, fashion or publishing. That puzzle represented an economy that was diverse and deeply rooted.

We’ve lost that. First Wall Street got disproportionately big, then Washington. It’s time to return to fundamentals. No short-term fixes. Government should do what it’s supposed to do: schools, roads, basic research. It should not be picking C.E.O.’s or setting pay or fizzing up the economy with more debt. It should give people the tools to compete, not rig the competition. Lines of restraint have dissolved, and they need to be restored.

But here's the thing: independents aren't a monolith. Like the supporters of the major political parties, you'll find independents who self-describe as liberal, conservative and moderate. You'll find people who choose a libertarian candidate, a Conservative Party candidate, vote Green, or fervently pray that Pat Buchanan will make another run for President. It's inaccurate to assume that independents hover between the two major political parties and that either could score their votes. Among other factions you have:

People who for a variety of reasons don't want to associate themselves with a specific political party, but nonetheless always (or almost always) vote for a specific political party;
People who either don't have the time or inclination to follow politics - the type of people who argued with sincerity back in 2000 that there was "no difference between Gore and Bush".
People who want the Republican Party to move further to the right, or the Democratic Party to move sharply to the left.
People who think both parties are corrupt and/or incompetent, even if they have slightly different approaches to paving the road to hell.

But let's play Brooks' game, and assume that independents are looking for... an authoritative parent?

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

That does help explain the level of hysteria that the Republican Parties have been trying to whip up over everything President Obama does. "OMG - he sneezed; he wants everybody to catch Swine Flu! While he takes away your health insurance! That's proof that he supports death panels!" Less sarcastically, as Dan Larison points out in the context of Obama's absence from ceremonies commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, the attack machine is nothing more than that:

If people are tired of hearing from Obama and tired of him inserting himself into so many things, as we hear so often from the GOP, his absence from Berlin this week should be a welcome sign that Obama is learning that he needs to have priorities in how he uses his time. Just a few weeks ago, we were hearing how outrageous it was for Obama to shirk his duties and go to Copenhagen, and now it is supposed to be outrageous that he is not going on yet another foreign trip.

If Brooks sees the future of the Republican Party as making platitudinous statements about childhood jigsaw puzzles - a cute image, but essentially a false argument that we can somehow return to the simple days before globalization - and the notion that the government shouldn't exercise oversight even over the companies it bails out, and shouldn't be concerned about the executives of the industry that almost brought down the world economy even as regular, hard-working Americans can't find work - or do, but at a fraction of what they previously earned - all the more power to him. Seriously, "Wall Street got too big, so let's bail it out at taxpayer expense but not regulate it or its pay structure"? Not that the Republican Party has done badly in the past by following the Brooks/Barnum approach of never overestimating the intelligence of the American People.

Whether it's the latest party memo, or the inevitable post-election spin, there are any number of editorials about "the center" and how the only way for Obama to win the next election is to stop governing as a centrist and to start running as a Republican. Brooks' entry may not be particularly impressive, but compared to, say, Krauthammer's latest screed or Gerson's drooling on his keyboard.... But still, aren't we really just revisiting Brooks' "lunch period poli sci",

The only real shift between school and adult politics is that the jocks realize they need conservative intellectuals, who are geeks who have decided their fellow intellectuals should never be allowed to run anything and have learned to speak slowly so the jocks will understand them.

With "conservative intellectuals" still meaning "David Brooks, but with the term "independent voters" substituted for "jocks"?

Afghanistan: In or Out?

2009-11-04T16:00:00.011-05:00

George Will is so convinced that the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, that he comes close to complimenting President Obama:¹

On July 24, 2008, in Berlin, Obama stressed the need to "defeat the Taliban." Then, however, he spoke as a "citizen of the world," not as president. Now he is being presidential by reconsidering some implications of the politically calculated rhetoric that helped make him president. He is rightly ignoring those who cannot distinguish thinking from dithering....

Whatever strategy Obama adopts, its success cannot depend on America teaching Afghans to [elect good men]. If he is looking for a strategy that depends on legitimacy in Kabul, he is looking for a unicorn.

Here, Will is correct - Karzai's removed any doubt about how he is going to run Afghanistan, or at least those portions under which he (backed by the U.S. military) actually exercises control, and his priorities are quite different from ours. We cannot afford to hope that Karzai and Afghanistan's government somehow magically reform themselves, and a strategy that depends upon that hope is doomed to fail. (One wonders why it took some people seven years to figure that out, but there you go.)

Remember, back in the day, when the neocons were describing themselves as wanting to move away from realpolitik? How they wanted to build real nations, with real, functional, honest governments, and not simply replace one tyrant with another who was more willing to bend to the will of the U.S.? Is anybody still trying to advance that argument? If so, where can I find an example of their putting that into practice? Isn't it the paleocons who have more consistently advocated against military adventurism, the notion that governments can be magically replaced with U.S.-friendly regimes that are also competent, ethical and democratic? Sneering that the paleocons would install somebody like, you know, Karzai doesn't work so well when it's the neocons who most want U.S. soldiers to shed blood to keep him in power. And when it comes to backing traditional U.S. values, such as the ethical treatment of prisoners captured by the military, once again don't the paleocons have the moral high ground?

Turn the page and see exactly what I mean. Yet another unsigned editorial from Fred Hiatt's editorial board, insisting that we back Karzai:

As President Obama pointedly noted in recognizing Mr. Karzai's reelection a day earlier, "the proof is not going to be in words. It's going to be in deeds." True enough -- but it's also the case that the direction of Mr. Karzai's deeds is going to depend to a large degree on whether he believes he can depend on the United States, its forces and especially its president to back him up.

That's true, but not in the sense the editorial intends. Backed in the manner the Post demands, Karzai will continue to be corrupt and self-dealing, unconcerned with establishing a competent, stable government, and unconcerned with the consequences of electoral corruption that demolish our effort to nudge his nation toward democracy. Isn't that the lesson of the past seven years?

Senior envoys such as Vice President Biden have quarreled with him in private, even as Mr. Obama has held Karzai at arm's length in public. This might have made some sense if there were an alternative to Mr. Karzai. But there is none.

Well, um, yeah, there are alternatives. Sure, Bush and Cheney squandered most of the good ones, and even toyed around with a bad one, but no question there are alternatives.

A fair question, what does Karzai actually bring to the table? He undermines our effort to democratize Afghanistan. He undermines our effort to establish good governance. He happily enriches himself at the expense of his people, aligns himself with warlords and Taliban leaders... Is it enough that he looks good on camera? That he presumably pledged his pliance to the Bush Administration? Karzai depends upon useful idiots like Hiatt, always willing to give him "another chance" because "there aren't any alternatives", rather than insisting that he demonstrate that he's worthy of another chance.

But more to the point, how can Hiatt's and his crew, or any neocon, argue in support of the perpetual, unquestioning support of Karzai without admitting that their concerns about establishing good governance in troubled or lawless nations were a fiction? Because here's the rub: If you truly want an Afghanistan that is less tribal, less radical, less fundamentalist, at least tolerant of women's rights, you need to do a lot better than Karzai. Hoping that he'll change, or not even hoping but insisting that he's our Obi-Wan Kenobi,² is unlikely to turn out any better than Russia's experiment with Mohammad Najibullah.

I hate to harp on this, but if the best strategy we can come up with for Afghanistan is to prop up Karzai and significantly expand our military presence in order to just tread water, with no strategy for success or even a concept of what success will look like,³ we're not doing favors to anyone... Well, except Karzai. I would detest a future for Afghanistan that involved a resurgent Taliban, but it's unrealistic to expect that the U.S. will tread water indefinitely.
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1. Ever since Clinton's election, Will's had something of a pathological need to insult Democrats; even, or perhaps especially, when he criticizes Republicans, he traditionally makes sure to suggest that the Democrats are nonetheless worse.

2. "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're our only hope."

3. The "Groundhog Day" approach.

Another Stimulus Bill?

2009-11-03T23:06:00.005-05:00

Paul Krugman interprets President Obama's comments on budget deficits, "that now is the time to 'get serious' about reducing debt", as "an unfortunate tendency to echo 'centrist' conventional wisdom". While I grant that if employment is on a significant upswing a year from now, the size of the deficit won't much affect the election, I think Krugman is missing a couple of important factors.

First, Obama is not merely echoing "centrist convential wisdom". If you take him at his word, he's likely in the same boat as a majority of Americans, and is concerned about the ramifications of Bush's financial recklessness, the cost of two wars, the financial industry collapse, and stimulus spending, on top of the rest of the federal budget. Clearly Obama isn't obsessed with balancing the budget - take a look at the numbers - but he's right to be concerned.

Second, let's assume that Obama doesn't believe that reducing the budget deficit should be a priority within the context of the current economy. He still has to deal with a Congress that does, at least when domestic spending is involved. No matter how compelling the argument, I would expect Congress to reject a new stimulus bill in the current fiscal year.

President Obama is already testing the waters for a second stimulus bill - for now that means sticking a toe in the water and pulling back when the sharks start to bite. If the political climate becomes more friendly to additional stimulus spending, and the bill passes on next year's budget such that Obama can still claim an overall deficit decrease (even if the total deficit remains very high), I think it's quite possible Obama will push additional stimulus spending.

I think that when Krugman and Robert Reich advocate for additional stimulus spending, they help lay the groundwork that could help Obama advance a new stimulus bill. Yet it's not lip service to centrism, but acknowledgment of reality, that unless things get suddenly and drastically worse it's not happening in the current fiscal year. (I'll buy you a cookie if I'm wrong - but you'll have to come here to collect.)

Brooks on Dating

2009-11-03T10:08:00.006-05:00

Poor David Brooks seems to think his children's romantic lives will be ruined by 'texting'. For the most part he's unintentionally funny, but then there's this:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

You know why we think of that as a "Happy Days" era? Because it's a history of dating that can best be gleaned from "Happy Days" reruns. Seriously. Most charitably, the "Happy Days" version of dating represents a brief moment, not particularly representative of what came before or what has come since.

The "decline" of "Happy Days" dating has more traditionally been blamed on birth control. Except in the televised world of Richie Cunningham, it was largely accepted that "boys will be boys" - that "delaying sex" was the role of a "good girl". In reality, sex wasn't always delayed - a lot of young women took unexpected, extended "vacations" that coincidentally were just long enough to cover up a pregnancy and childbirth. A lot of others got married. Does Brooks truly not know the prevalence of teen pregnancy in the 1950's?

The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000....

Further, other than that "fairy tale" moment found principally on TV sitcoms, the "script" for dating has looked more like this: The parents arrange the marriage of a young girl to and older male. She's expected to be a virgin, but he's not. The couple was "guided" to long-term commitment by fault-based divorce laws (or the unavailability of divorce) and, for much of history, the fact that the children were the husband's property so the price of divorce to the mother would be that she would have to leave her children. How... idyllic. It's a darn shame that texting has come along.

Our Corrupt Allies

2009-11-03T09:06:00.006-05:00

Pat Buchanan is upset that the media is paying so much attention to the corruption and ineptitude of Hamad Karzai. He argues that when we're involved in military action in a state or region, and depict a leader as corrupt, it means we're about to abandon our support for him.

When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao’s Communists, we did not blame ourselves for being a faithless ally, we blamed him. He was incompetent; he was corrupt.

We did not lose China. He did.

Let's take a look at that allegation:

Mao Zedong’s communists eventually came to power in 1949. A year earlier, in June 1948, Chiang wrote in his diary that the Kuomintang had failed, not because of external enemies but because of disintegration and rot from within.

You see, sometimes when a foreign leader or his administration is depicted as corrupt and incompetent, the depiction is accurate.

Buchanan similarly complains that South Vietnam's President Diem was depicted as "a dictator... who had lost touch with his people", something he fails to demonstrate is in any way false. He similarly whines that Cambodia's Lon Nol "got the same treatment", again failing to demonstrate that the treatment was undeserved. For some reason, he neglects to mention such illustrious leaders once supported by the United States, including the Shah of Iran, Manuel Noriega... the laundry list of thugs and despots the U.S. has at times supported in South and Central America.... Should we include Saddam Hussein?

Yes, when it's convenient we have historically dropped support for such "allies", and it's no coincidence that the public narrative goes from their being "important allies to the U.S." to "corrupt and incompetent, an impediment to our goals in the region", but the convenient timing of the admission of corruption doesn't make it any less true. It instead highlights how we care more about advancing our interests in a given region than we do about whether that region enjoys honest, scrupulous governance. Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon - yet he claims to know nothing of realpolitik?

Buchanan's memory cannot be so short that he has forgotten his time in the Reagan Administration. Perhaps he remembers a guy named Pol Pot - an incompetent, genocidal leader responsible for the deaths of probably millions of Cambodians. What did Ronald Reagan do after Vietnam toppled Pot's regime?

Rollback was the American end of the proxy war fought between the two superpowers for power and influence in the developing world. The basis was childishly simple: my enemy's enemy is my friend.

To that end the Reagan administration insisted on recognising the deposed Khmer Rouge government in exile at the UN, mostly because it was the pro-Soviet Vietnamese that had done the deposing. This recognition helped maintain a civil war in which many Cambodians were killed and many thousands of landmines were laid.

What defense does Buchanan now offer for Rios Montt, whom Reagan described as "a man of great personal integrity"? Reagan's high praise for Jonas Savimbi? Is it problematic that those leaders are now judged based upon the facts, not upon Reagan's (I would hope knowingly) fabricated songs of praise?

No, fundamentally, Buchanan knows the charges are true. The problem is that the truth is becoming known:

That there are warlords who are war criminals, allied with the Afghan regime and us, that drug-traffickers are abetted by high officials, that Karzai stole the election, no one denies.

That the Pakistani intelligence services are shot through with elements loyal to a Taliban they helped bring to power in Kabul, that there are Pakistani army officers who believe they should be defending their country against India, not fighting America’s war in Waziristan, is also undeniable.

But what does it avail us to insult these people who have cast their lot with us, many of whom will, with famines and friends, pay a far more terrible price than we if we lose these wars.

I'm sorry, but I don't feel any great sympathy for people who "cast their lot with us", enrich themselves, their families and their clans at the expense of their countries and countrymen, undermine U.S. political goals and military efforts, and ultimately lose our support due to true allegations of their greed, corruption and incompetence. I can't feel sorry for somebody who thought that "casting his lot" with the U.S. meant "winning the lottery", and who if deposed will most likely live out his life in a billionaire's exile, supported by the money he has stolen from his (and our) country.

Does Buchanan really believe it's too much to ask of somebody like Karzai to steal a little bit less, or to accept a small risk of losing an election he probably could have won honestly, in order to help us achieve our goals of improving and stabilizing the country he claims to lead? Well, yeah, I guess he does. Because they "trusted us", apparently, to not care if they demolished the foundation of our efforts.

The Washington Post Wants Us Out of Afghanistan?

2009-11-02T11:13:00.008-05:00

Of course not. Hiatt and his boys serve up a typically insipid, unsigned editorial suggesting the opposite. But their image of us standing on the edge of a slippery slope, with their hands at our back ready to push us down, is in may ways a compelling argument to bring our experiment to an end:

One of the rhetorical questions frequently tossed out in the debate over Afghanistan concerns the brewing trouble in Somalia and Yemen, both of which are known to host al-Qaeda cadres and training camps. If it's necessary to pacify Afghanistan to protect U.S. security, goes the taunt, must we also intervene in Somalia and Yemen?

The presumed answer is: "Of course not -- and therefore why bother with Afghanistan?" The more sensible response is: If something is not done soon about these lawless places, one or the other may well become the next Afghanistan -- a place where U.S. military intervention was compelled by a devastating attack on the homeland.

In other words, although it (as usual) has no concept of what a victory would look like or how it would be achieved, and no explanation of how it would improve U.S. security, the Post wants us to invade every nation that could become "the next Afghanistan". When Hiatt and friends pose the rhetorical question, "If it's necessary to pacify Afghanistan to protect U.S. security, goes the taunt, must we also intervene in Somalia and Yemen?" they have already rejected the answer, "Well, maybe it's not necessary to pacify Afghanistan." The only "solution" they can conceive involves spending additional trillions to invade additional nations that we can't realistically pacify, forcing the al-Qaeda camps into other "lawless nations" or across the border into "friendly" states that become de facto safe havens, and in turn become increasingly radicalized and destabilized.

Even if we assume that we have the money and troops to fund unlimited war, how is that a recipe for the long-term security of the United States? What is the actual danger to U.S. interests posed by these training camps? Could it be that it's U.S. military action that's causing al-Qaeda to metastasize, inspiring it to extend into other nations where anti-U.S. sentiment is high and new recruits are easy to find? Where those camps, and associated military action, destabilize neighboring countries? Might we not be more secure if the camps were concentrated in Afghanistan? For that matter, how much direct danger do these camps pose to U.S. interests? The training that put us most at risk wasn't that learned in Afghan camps - it was the training terrorists obtained at U.S. flight schools.

Where can we find even slight evidence that al-Qaeda is any more tied to Somalia than it was to Afghanistan... fighting them "there" so we don't have to fight them "here" doesn't work so well if they leave, let us fight the locals, and carry on business as usual from other nations, and can easily return to fill any void we leave behind. Hiatt doesn't seem honest enough to admit it, but his board's editorial boils down to "Everything we've tried so far has failed, so let's double down!"

"Third Parties Can Fix Everything!"

2009-11-02T10:01:00.008-05:00

In keeping with his penchant to prove how little he knows about... pretty much everything, Ross Douthat argues today in favor of third parties:

Regional parties often start out as ideological enforcers. New York’s Conservative Party, for instance, exists to punish Republicans for drifting too far left — a part it played to perfection by supporting Hoffmann’s candidacy.

But there’s more that such parties could accomplish. They could provide a counterweight to the corruption associated with one-party rule, whether in solidly red states or deep-blue cities. They could get unorthodox candidates elected, and win hearings for unorthodox ideas. And they could help fulfill the promise of federalism, by organizing themselves around local particularities, rather than the national political divide.

Were Douthat to think before he typed, it might have occurred to him that a region "associated with one-party rule" doesn't actually need a third party - it needs an effective second party. I also have to wonder, does Douthat picture the leader of a third party in the role of Two-Face from Batman, flipping a coin to decide whether to be an ideological enforcer or to be a more responsible version of the party in control of government? Really, Douthat wants it both ways.

Let's step back for a minute, and consider what a true third party might do to a state like California, in which supermajority requirements already enable a minority party can already wreak havoc with the budgeting process. Douthat's responsible party could insist upon taxes or spending cuts that neither major party wants to pass, rendering it impossible to pass a budget. (And yes, we're assuming that this third party would in fact be responsible, and not out to enrich special interests by using its minority presence to extort huge concessions just to keep the government running.) Douthat's "ideologically pure" party would refuse to let one side or the other compromise to pass a budget, insisting upon whatever form of purity they're presumed to advocate. Sounds like... heaven.

Really, look at nations that have strong third parties. Occasionally there will be a realignment, with parties merging or with the long-standing third party switching places with one of the others; but you almost never see a strong fourth party, and elections are almost always functionally between the two major parties. A minority government or coalition government is in constant jeopardy of failing, with minority parties often able to extort disproportionate reward for remaining inside the coalition. In countries that offer strong protections to third parties and their role in government, the net result result seems to be gridlock and often what seems like an increase in corruption. At least in parliamentary systems, a government can call an election at its convenience and try to capture more seats. In our system, structured around the two party system with elections at fixed intervals, a proliferation of successful third parties would likely leave us stuck with gridlock until the next scheduled election.

Douthat personifies the problem he pretends to identify. Speaking of Doug Hoffman's role in the race (formerly) between Dede Scozzafava and Bill Owens, Douthat scoffs that Scozzafava "is arguably more liberal than her Democratic opponent" (although he doesn't even try to make the argument), and

Hoffmann has irritated liberals. Scozzafava was their kind of Republican, and by derailing her candidacy — which she suspended over the weekend after polls showed her slipping to third place — he’s turned a sleepy contest between two left-of-center politicians into an ideologically-charged election.

So for all of his lip service to the various contributions a third party can make, Douthat's biggest concern is ideological purity. He sees it as better for Republicans to backstab a member of their own party for not being ideologically pure than for their to worry about such things during the nomination process or to draw lessons of moderation from inside the tent as opposed to from a third party candidate. He also overlooks the fact that the Conservative Party (and other parties) run candidates in a lot of elections around the nation - the difference this time is not that Hoffman is somehow more compelling, but that Republican leaders are so willing to "eat their own" in the name of ideological purity.

Were Douthat honest, he would admit also that in calling Scozzafava a liberal he's really speaking of her views on social issues - she doesn't share his anti-choice views or his contempt for gay rights. When he argues that Hoffman "injected real substance into their races, and they’ve given voters a much more interesting choice than they would have otherwise enjoyed", he's admitting that he actually knows nothing about Hoffman... or elections. As is the case in many Congressional districts around the nation, having a Conservative Party candidate (or other third party candidate) on the ballot is anything but unusual. In 2008, five parties were on the ballot for NY23. It's not the presence of a third party candidate that is making this race more "interesting" - it's the fact that so many Republican ideologues have aligned their endorsements and their money machines behind the third party candidate.

Moreover, Hoffman offers nothing of substance:

I'm running for Congress because I sense the America I love is being taken away from us. I want to tell Washington: No more bailouts. No more taxes. No more trillion dollar deficits. That's what I'm fighting for.

I've searched for a link that leads to a deeper take on the issues, but no... that's all Hoffman has to offer. But he'll bring back the... love?¹

Particularly at the local level, it often seems that the better approach is to go nonpartisan. That may satisfy Douthat's "counterweight to corruption" or "bringing in unorthodox views" argument, but as he makes plain he doesn't actually care about that side of things. Is he concerned that Scozzafava is corrupt and is not being honest about her views? That she didn't intend to serve her district to the best of her ability? That she was too orthodox? No, to the contrary, those are the things that bothered him about her. His preference for Hoffman is predicated upon a two-pronged ideological litmus test that has nothing to do with what's best for his party, the district, or the nation.

It's also telling that Douthat doesn't want third parties to run for President - "part priest-king, part ritual scapegoat — that chief executives need to represent the broadest possible coalition to have any chance of success". Sure, a third party candidate might highlight problems with the status quo, shed light on corruption, and... oh, yeah. He might force the Republican candidate away from Douthat's ideological litmus test. Besides, who needs a philosopher king, when we can have a scapegoat-priest-king.
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1. Hoffman also states,

In 1980, I helped Lake Placid with our Olympics when the US beat the Russians in hockey...

Um... did he cheer loudly, or something?

Priorities

2009-11-02T09:34:00.002-05:00

Robert Reich, who to date has been arguing that a healthcare bill must be passed before a limited window of opportunity closes, today argues that it's the wrong priority - that instead Obama should be trying to pass additional stimulus measures. Perhaps this isn't the "loss of discipline" Reich warned us about, but results from Reich's concern that the legislation that is likely to pass gives up too much to pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. But Reich doesn't offer much of an explanation.

The problem I have with this type of argument, whether from Reich or anybody else, is that it presupposes that the government is capable of only doing one thing at a time, and also that the government's priorities should change along with their own. Obama has largely deferred the healthcare reform debate to Congress, so who's to say he hasn't been working on other issues? More to the point, there's reason to believe that a healthcare reform bill, even if flawed, will pass, but there's no compelling reason to believe the same of another stimulus bill. I suspect that if Obama were to follow Reich's advice, abandoning healthcare reform while advocating for a @$trillion stimulus bill, he would look silly - and he would fail.

The optimist in me says Obama can pivot off a health-care victory and launch some new initiatives that palpably and quickly spur job growth. The realist says there aren't any such initiatives -- at least none that can work fast enough to reverse the tide of unemployment before the midterm elections.

Is the concern the long-term welfare of the nation, getting people back to work, or the next election? If a job-creating stimulus bill is good policy, it remains good policy even if its effects aren't felt for two years. With due respect to Reich's concern that "getting the nation back to work" is more important than healthcare reform, I can't help but feel that a failure to pass a healthcare bill combined with what now appears to be an unavoidably slow recovery would be worse.

Reich argues that, by focusing on the economy,

Clinton avoided Carter's failure and won re-election handily. But the Clinton years produced few if any major social reforms. Clinton spent so much of his initial political capital, as well as his time and energy, on deficit reduction that he didn't have enough left to enact health care in 1994.

So when he cautions Obama,

If Obama and the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, it will be because the president learned only the most superficial lesson of the Clinton years. Health-care reform is critically important. But when one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, getting the nation back to work is more so.

I can't help but wonder if it's Reich who learned the superficial lesson of Clinton. Taking an "it's the economy, stupid," approach seems likely to similarly deprive Obama of the political capital necessary to enact healthcare or other reforms. And while Clinton did win reelection, it seems fair to observe that his inability to deliver on issues such as healthcare first cost the Democrats their Congressional majority, and later contributed to the election of G.W. Bush.

Something Always Changes

2009-11-02T08:53:00.002-05:00

While Robert Samuelson offers his softball argument against stimulus spending, Paul Krugman continues to advocate for greater stimulus spending.

Without the recovery act, the free fall would probably have continued, as unemployed workers slashed their spending, cash-strapped state and local governments engaged in mass layoffs, and more.

The stimulus didn’t completely eliminate these effects, but it was enough to break the vicious circle of economic decline. Aid to the unemployed and help for state and local governments were probably the most important factors. If you want to see the recovery act in action, visit a classroom: your local school probably would have had to fire a lot of teachers if the stimulus hadn’t been enacted.

That seems accurate, and highlights the unfortunate effect of the losses of tax revenue by state and local government - rather than having a stimulus boost infrastructure spending, it seems to have largely allowed governments to tread water. It would not be a good thing if more teachers were laid off and more schools closed, and its reasonable to recognize the benefits of the stimulus, but it's no surprise that stimulus spending to date hasn't done much to improve (as opposed to maintain) employment.

Unless something changes drastically, we’re looking at many years of high unemployment.

Krugman alludes to economic growth under Clinton, but recall that the growth was driven by something people didn't anticipate - the rise of the Internet, followed by the Internet bubble. We bounced out of the post-bubble recession thanks to the real estate bubble, and... well, I'm not arguing in favor of building an economy based on bubbles, but I think it's fair to observe that things happen - sometimes good things, like the burst of innovation that grew out of the Internet. While I'm not going to argue that we should build public policy based upon wishful thinking, and on the whole it's responsible to look to general economic trends when advocating tax and spending policy, the (largely¹) unexpected is going to happen.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

My concerns are a bit different than those of Washington. I find it unlikely that additional stimulus spending will truly be directed at expenditures that qualify as investment in the future. I am troubled by the concept of bailing out struggling state and local governments to the extent that it enables those governments to avoid revisiting tax and spending policies that contribute to their plight. There seems to be little political will to actually invest in infrastructure improvement, or to invest in schools and colleges to ensure their continued quality and affordability.

I think we're past the point of emergency. To the extent that people advocate for additional stimulus spending, I think it's fair to move out of the bank bailout mode - throw buckets of money on the flames and hope to smother out the fire - and to spell out how much money is being allocated to any particular stimulus goal, along with a responsible argument as to how the spending will bring about a return for the economy.
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1. The real estate bubble was predicted, but the voices of doubt were largely drowned out by those who believed that you really could have perpetual, 20% increases in housing prices and that this should be viewed as a "good thing", not wildly out-of-control housing inflation.

Stating the Obvious Isn't Necessarily Helpful

2009-11-02T08:19:00.005-05:00

Robert Samuelson lectures us about debt and taxes:

Despite huge deficits, interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds have hovered around 3.5 percent. In time of financial crisis, investors have sought the apparent sanctuary of government bonds. But the correct conclusion to draw is not that major governments (such as Japan and the United States) can easily borrow as much as they want. It is that they can easily borrow as much as they want until confidence that they can do so evaporates - and we don't know when, how or whether that may happen.

So we get a conclusion that's both obvious (how many people aren't aware that there are limits on how much a nation can successfully borrow) and useless (if we borrow too much, however much that happens to be, bad things of one sort or another will happen at some point in the future). With due respect to Samuelson's talk of the difficulty of balancing the budget by cutting spending or increasing taxes,¹ and the possibility that taking those steps could also cause bad things of one sort or another at some point in the future, he's tossing out marshmallows. He concludes,

The arguments over whether we need more "stimulus" (and debt) obscure the larger reality that past debt increasingly constricts governments' economic maneuvering room.

To a degree, that observation is as obvious (and useless) as everything else Samuelson has to say. The argument against any stimulus, let alone a larger one, has been that "we can't afford it".

The countervailing argument is that we can't afford not to have a stimulus, even if it means significant short-term borrowing, as without significant stimulus spending our economy will continue to sputter and stall. Samuelson's concern that short-term spending might tie the government's hands in the future reminds me of the concerns of his other friends at the Post, who at best offer lip service to out-of-control spending that goes to things they support (such as wars in the Middle East) but switch from chicken hawk to deficit hawk mode the second we're talking about domestic spending. Samuelson's version of political "truth", similarly, involves slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but makes no mention of military spending.

Perhaps Samuelson hasn't noticed that tax revenues have plummeted in this recession. A stimulus that hastens an economic recovery, a rebound in employment, and improved tax revenues could in fact be much better for the country than wringing our hands and doing nothing out of concerns for nebulous, theoretical economic consequences that... we know wouldn't result from a stimulus even two, three or four times as large as the one the government passed. Unless you're from the "If you can't pay for it in cash, you can't afford it" school of economics, you should recognize that sometimes you borrow not just to spend but to invest.
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1. Samuelson's argument on taxes seems to hold a mirror to GW's. While GW argued that tax cuts were the solution for every economic situation (the economy's strong - let's cut taxes; the economy's faltering - we must save it by cutting taxes; we're in a recession - we must cut taxes), Samuelson seems to be arguing that no matter how strong or weak the economy it's a huge gamble to increase taxes to cover government expenditures. His preference for deficit spending over responsible budgeting is evidenced by his slippery slope argument leading to default, not to a realization that taxes must go up in order to prevent default, even though (with due respect to the timing of tax increases) our nation can afford higher taxes.

While We're Talking About Insults Directed at Obama....

2009-10-30T14:34:00.003-04:00

Robert Kagan suggests that Obama is being "played" by Iran. The thesis here appears to be that we have three tools to use with Iran: diplomacy, sanctions, and war. And although Kagan is presently directing his insults at Obama, I expect he was equally derisive of Bush's choice of diplomacy. That said, Kagan's argument is silly.

Kagan doesn't believe that diplomacy will work, or in the alternative doesn't believe that a diplomatic solution will prevent Iran from continuing to advance a nuclear weapons program. I suspect that he's correct - that Iran will continue to work to develop nuclear weapons even if slowed by a diplomatic solution. But Kagan is willfully blind to the fact that sanctions could have a more pronounced effect - even if we could convince the rest of the world to go along with them - causing Iran to cast off any pretense that its nuclear program is about peaceful energy generation and to accelerate its nuclear weapons program.

But more to the point, as Kagan concedes, Russia is part of the game. How does Kagan propose that the U.S. could effectively sanction Iran without the cooperation of a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council? Unilaterally? By trying to get other nations to voluntarily team up with us, even as goods continue to flow into Iran through nations that are not cooperating?

Meanwhile, Iran plays an important role in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and as difficult as they can be they can make important contributions to stabilizing or destabilizing our efforts in those nations. If we cast aside diplomacy and unilaterally impose what amount to toothless sanctions, we not only risk making Iran seem tough - unafraid to stand up to the U.S., and unfazed by our sanctions - but we may jeopardize our progress in two major wars.

But really, Kagan is less interested with succeeding with non-military options than he is with forcing military action. He would be profoundly disappointed with a diplomatic success, but he would be ecstatic with a failure of sanctions - a failure that would take our two non-military options off the table. We would then be left with the choice of looking weak - folding our cards and walking away - or bombing Iran. Never mind that few think that bombing Iran will succeed in eliminating its nuclear program - while again allowing it to claim to have stood up to U.S. aggression.

The question is thus much less "Is Obama being played [by Iran]" than it is whether Kagan and friends can successfully play Obama. So far, despite considerable effort, they appear to have failed. I somehow don't think that Obama's so insecure that Kagan's swipe at him will have any effect. And, despite the possibility that Iran will continue to develop nuclear weapons despite the present round of agreements, that's a good thing. (For goodness sake, if this type of attack by the likes of Kagan didn't work on Bush, why would he expect them to work on Obama?)

"Fixing" Afghanistan

2009-10-30T13:17:00.005-04:00

Among the many incompetent decisions of the Bush Administration were its decisions to team up with camera-friendly, English-speaking, but exceptionally corrupt leaders whom it hoped would rule over Afghanistan and Iraq. With Iraq overshadowing Afghanistan, not many people paid attention to the regime of Hamid Karzai, until the recent election fraud. Now his corruption, unpopularity, inability to govern outside of Kabul, and familial ties to the drug industry are getting considerable media attention.

We're dealing with similar phenomena in Iraq and Afghanistan - ethnic allegiances that trump the concept of national unity. It seems pretty clear that in both countries the factions that don't feel that they will benefit from "national unity" govenrments, or don't feel that they'll get a suitably proportionate (or disproportionate) share of power, influence and money through a democratic process, are content to wait us out. Years ago, George W. Bush told us that "The Surge" would be a failure if it didn't bring about significant, quantifiable political progress. It has turned into an escalation that certainly has helped segregate warring factions, but the political progress we've been repeatedly promised seems to be at a standstill. Meanwhile, following his seven years of neglect, the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating - although my guess is that the Karzai family's wealth is now assured for generations, even in exile.

Proponents of continued war in Afghanistan have no suggestions on how to achieve national unity. They have no plan for defeating the Taliban (the Taliban being native to Afghanistan and borne of the numerically dominant Pashtuns, 40% of the nation's population). They have no plans for defeating corruption. Some explicitly eschew the notion of rebuilding (or is it building) the country. They offer little explanation beyond nebulous talk of al-Qaeda getting its safe haven back (one it presently enjoys across the border in the territory of our ally, Pakistan), as to the U.S. foreign policy interest in perpetuating the occupation. Still, they insist, we must fight the war until we "win", whatever that means.

First case in point, David Brooks, who serves up an appeal to anonymous people he contends are authorities on... something:

[The people I consulted but choose not to identify] are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.

There's an inherent tension here: If in fact the military experts trust Obama to make good policy choices, then they trust him to make a good decision as to whether the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan or end the war. That should pretty much end the debate. Instead, Brooks turns it into some sort of test of toughness. Sure, Obama could do the "intellectual, good policy choice" thing and end the war, but then the unnamed, tough-guy military experts would accuse him of wimping out. While I'm sure President Obama is touched by Brooks' concern, somehow I doubt that he's too concerned about sticks and stones from "experts" who don't even have the courage to attach their name to their superciliousness.

Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all.

Funny, how every single expert Brooks (supposedly) consulted said exactly the same thing, coincidentally exactly what Brooks believes, and like Brooks offers nothing but empty-headedness when it comes to explaining how a war in Afghanistan might be won, how we would create a stable government for Afghanistan (even if we discard any notion that it be progressive or friendly to the West), or how we would keep a post-occupation government from devolving into the same type of ethnic warfare that followed the end of the Soviet occupation. The various warring factions of Afghanistan know that the occupier always leaves. To a degree, Brooks knows this:

And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws.

But doesn't that betray Brooks' fundamental ignorance of Afghanistan? He sees, I guess, a nation of urbanites from Kabul, and "villagers" in other areas. Pasthun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, Turkmen? What's the difference, right? A commentator who knew enough to be discussing this issue might be skeptical that "villagers" who aren't Pashtun, who don't want a return of the Taliban, are afraid to cooperate with the U.S. - if he was truly speaking to experts, it's not like any of this is a secret.

Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.

Get real. Karzai may be corrupt but he's not stupid. If Karzai's government fails, he'll be on the first plane out of the country.

It's wonderful to speak of what we can accomplish for women in Afghanistan, something that seems to be at best an afterthought for people like Brooks, but it's not clear that we're being particularly successful in that goal even now, let alone that improved status and opportunity for women can be sustained in the event of U.S. withdrawal, whenever it occurs. On the other hand, it's useless to talk about Afghanistan as a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda, when they already have a safer haven in Afghanistan.

The simple question for war proponents is thus, "What does victory look like", with the equally simple follow-up, "How do we achieve it?" Brooks has no answer, save perhaps for a blank stare, so he implies that it would be wimpy to withdraw before the undefined concept of victory is magically achieved.

Second case in point, Charles Krauthammer, who is having a major temper tantrum over the fact that G.W.'s many policy failures are being described in accurate terms. Never mind that Bush's incompetent strategy in Afghanistan, and his choice to pursue a war of choice in Iraq led to seven years of neglect and deterioration of military efforts in Afghanistan. Darn it, Krauthammer supported all of that and how dare Obama question Krauth... I mean Bush's competence. Look how he soft-pedals Bush's incompetence, both in Afghanistan and Iraq:

In both places, the deterioration of the military situation was not the result of "drift," but of considered policies that seemed reasonable, cautious and culturally sensitive at the time but that ultimately turned out to be wrong.

I wonder if any of the anonymous "experts" consulted by Brooks would agree with that... that "we'll be greeted as liberators" was sound policy for going into Iraq with insufficient troops to provide even basic post-war security, or that "we need those troops to invade Iraq" was a good reason to neglect the situation in Afghanistan.

The logic of a true counterinsurgency strategy there is that whatever resentment a troop surge might occasion pales in comparison with the continued demoralization of any potential anti-Taliban elements unless they receive serious and immediate protection from U.S.-NATO forces.

Yet, again, we're not going to stamp out the Taliban in Pashtun areas. We may cause it to recede during a period of escalated combat, but Afghanistan is the Taliban's home. It's not going anywhere, and its members will wait us out. So again we have a recipe for endless war and occupation, without any thought toward what a victory will look like or how it will be achieved. We may end up with better segregation of warring ethnic factions, and a sufficiently "stable" governing structure that (assuming we can convince Karzai to stop committing election fraud) could conceivably vote on post-occupation power-sharing. But is there any reason to believe that the government we leave behind will be any more stable, or any more resistant to civil war, than the government left behind by the Soviets?

Seriously, enough with the attacks on Obama. If you advance the continuation or escalation of the war in Afghanistan but can't articulate a strategy for victory, let alone articulate what a victory would look like, you have nothing to contribute to the debate.

Fighing the War on Drugs... With Anecdotes and Bad Reasoning

2009-10-29T11:52:00.011-04:00

Although he makes his own view difficult to pin down, George Will seems to endorse the war on drugs, from marijuana to... whatever, quoting Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, i.e., the "Drug Czar".

Nature made Kerlikowske laconic and experience has made him prudent, so he steers clear of the "L" word, legalization, even regarding marijuana.

Asked whether he thinks that it is a "gateway" drug leading to worse substances, he answers obliquely: "You don't find many heroin users who didn't start with marijuana."

I doubt that you find many heroin users who "didn't start with cigarettes", or "didn't start with alcohol", or "didn't start with"... something else. That people who are inclined to seek out an illegal, highly addictive street drug have previously tried various legal and more easily obtained illegal drugs is anything but a surprise. The question is, does that suddenly transform correlation into causation. Obviously it does not.

But Kerlikoswke also served up this anecdote, offered with a distinct lack of detail:

During his immersion in his new job, Gil Kerlikowske attended a focus group of 7-year-old girls and was mystified by their talk about "farm parties." Then he realized they meant "pharm parties" - sampling pharmaceuticals from their parents' medicine cabinets.

The Post added a short description to Will's piece - a tag line - "Seven-year-olds party with pharmaceuticals they steal from their parents", but that's not what Will wrote. It's not clear from the anecdote whether the girls were asked if they knew about "pharm parties" as opposed to participating or organizing them. Were we to shift back a few decades, I could see Kerlikoswke being similarly surprised that what he thought was a focus group about cooking utensils turned out to be about marijuana. ("I was mystified by their talk about 'pot', but then I realized....")

Note that it's not just older siblings or relatives who could be introducing seven-year-olds to the concept of "pharm parties", but that knowledge can also come from anti-drug education. Consider, for example, DARE:

Statistics have shown that teens believe prescription drugs are safer than illicit drugs, driving the proliferation of such trends as "pharm parties" where teens mix and trade pills with one another to get high, leading to dangerous and sometimes deadly outcomes

At least DARE's not trying to depict this as a new trend for second grade students.

But let's go back to the notion of the gateway drug. Is Kerlikoswke suggesting that these kids are finding Marinol in their parent's medicine cabinet, and that it becomes a "gateway drug" to other medications? Or are the kids heading right to the opiate medication and benzodiazepines? There has been a huge uptick in opiate abuse in our nation, and of other pharmaceutical drugs, and it's not because of "gateway drugs".

Further, one of the problems of depicting a drug as a "gateway drug" that leads kids down a slippery slope into "harder" drugs is that you create a context where a lot of kids will find out that you're lying to them. They'll try marijuana, not get addicted, and may wonder if the anti-drug messages given about "harder" drugs are also overhyped. Tens of millions of Americans have tried marijuana - 42% of the population - including quite a few recent Presidents. While it would be interesting to hear Presents Bush and Obama speak to the notion of marijuana as a gateway drug to cocaine, it should be remembered that the addictions they did develop - Obama's nicotine addiction and Bush's alcoholism - were to legal drugs.

Commenting on legalization, Will also offers the nebulous comment,

Kerlikowske is familiar with Portugal's experience since 2001 with the decriminalization of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine.

What lessons can we draw from that experiment?

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Kerlikowske sees that as a policy failure? It would have been interesting to hear his explanation.

Unfortunately, to the extent that it suggests Kerlikowske has a different opinion, when it comes to law enforcement policy Will quotes The Economist and not Kerlikowske:

"There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer." Do cultural differences explain this? Evidently not: "Even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates."

You might even infer that there's a subset of the population that is predisposed toward addiction and, whether given an "open market" where they can find their drug of choice or a more limited market where they must instead choose a drug they find somewhat less appealing, most will become addicted to something. Talk to some alcoholics and see how hard it is to find one who, following their first exposure to alcohol, thought of little beyond their next opportunity to get drunk.¹ There's no magic answer to eliminating drug abuse and addiction, but the evidence is pretty clear that addiction is better approached as a public health matter than as a criminal matter.²

Update: An editorial takes on the latest version of "reefer madness" (the correlation between marijuana use and psychosis, the notion that marijuana is stronger than it used to be, and that this justifies increasing criminal penalties for possession and use:

The other paradox is that schizophrenia seems to be disappearing (from the general population), even though cannabis use has increased markedly in the last 30 years. So, even though skunk has been around now for 10 years, there has been no upswing in schizophrenia. In fact, where people have looked, they haven't found any evidence linking cannabis use in a population and schizophrenia.

The author expresses concern that criminalization and misinformation make the drug more enticing, and advocates honesty about drugs:

We therefore have to provide more accurate and credible information. We have to tell them the truth, so that they use us as their preferred source of information. If you think that scaring kids will stop them using, you're probably wrong.

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1. It isn't hard.

2. There's an argument that having a criminal law element can be important both to helping some addicts find their "rock bottom" - the point where the cost of addiction exceeds the benefit - although my experience is that few addicts are inspired toward sobriety by an arrest. There's also an argument that the coercive element of probation and possible incarceration can help keep people in treatment; countered by the fact that treatment really only seems to work when the addict wants to get better, and not in the sense of "all I want for Christmas".

"I Hit a Car? I Don't Remember Anything Like That...."

2009-10-29T11:39:00.002-04:00

You have to wonder what the excuse sounds like:

Charges have been laid against the 62-year-old woman who became a viral sensation after video of her painfully bad parking job made it onto YouTube.

In the video, captured by a surveillance camera, the woman's black BMW SUV is seen pulling into the parking lot of an Extreme Fitness location in Thornhill, Ont., north of Toronto. The car swings around into a parking spot, then suddenly accelerates, lurching forward and driving up onto the hoods of two parked cars in front of it.

It slowly backs off the crushed cars, pauses, then slinks away out of the camera's view.

In case you haven't seen it:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Liebermans for Lieberman, CT)

2009-10-27T15:21:00.006-04:00

I'm still not sure why he hasn't been reminded not to let the door connect with his backside on his way out....¹

Update: "At Least Pretend You Know What You're Talking About, Lieberman."? Um... were that to happen, at least on a policy question, wouldn't it be a first?
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1. It has yet to be seen if Lieberman will fold like a cheap suit if in fact he is instructed that the cost of his joining a filibuster will be that he no longer heads any committees.

But What Does "Conservative" Mean?

2009-10-27T08:44:00.007-04:00

Bill Kristol is urging the Republican Party to continue its hard tack to the right, pointing to a Gallup poll in which 40% of Americans described themselves as "conservative". Um... as if there's only one definition of conservative, and any person who self-describes as "conservative" lacks even an ounce of moderation? And what does that mean for the future of the Republican Party?

That nominee seems unlikely to be a current officeholder. Right now, the four leading candidates for the GOP nomination are private citizens. In a recent Rasmussen poll, the only candidates with double-digit support among Republicans were Mike Huckabee (at 29 percent), Mitt Romney (24 percent), Sarah Palin (18 percent) and Newt Gingrich (14 percent). These four are running way ahead of various senatorial and gubernatorial possibilities.

I have never been particularly impressed with the concept of Newt Gingrich as a man of ideas - at least if we're limiting the discussion to good ideas. But really, he's running behind Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, two candidates whose prior national campaigns suggest that if either came up with an idea it would be very, very lonely.¹ As for trying to pick a candidate a couple years in advance of the start of the next Presidential campaign, potential candidates people have heard of do better in the polls than potential candidates most haven't heard of. News to Kristol, perhaps, but no real surprise to anybody who actually pays attention to these things.

Indeed, I suspect that the person most likely to break into this group of front-runners would be a businessman who stands up against President Obama's big-government proposals, a retired general who objects to Obama's foreign policy or a civic activist who rallies the public against some liberal outrage.

Where are Al Haig and Ross Perot when the Republican Party needs them? A civic activist? Surely he's not thinking of Sarah Palin (despite his undying crush) - a "civic activist" sounds like somebody Palin would describe as having no real responsibilities. What might we expect from a Palin candidacy? Angry, bitter, mean-spirited devolution into self-parody, and perhaps an electoral vote count favoring the incumbent that would make Reagan's 1984 landslide look weak by comparison.

On to the next poll:

One reason is that many Republicans lack confidence not just in Congress but even in Republican members of Congress. In last week's Post-ABC News poll, a plurality of respondents disapproved of Obama-type health-care reform. In other words, they agree with the Republicans in Congress. But when asked how much confidence they had in congressional Republicans to make the right decisions for the country's future, only 19 percent of respondents expressed much confidence in the GOP -- well behind the confidence levels in congressional Democrats (34 percent) and Obama (49 percent).

Well, no. Imagine that the Democrats proposed painting the Oval Office blue. And the Republicans angrily insisted not only that the Democrats were going to use green paint, but that it must be painted red. An opinion poll might show that a number of Americans opposed the color choice of blue, and others were confused by the Republican Party's misinformation and were adamantly against the color green. But that doesn't mean that they prefer red or, going back to healthcare, a mysterious, undisclosed Republican alternative to the current healthcare system or reform ideas. (Could Kristol really be so dense as to believe what he's writing?)

The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties.

He's comfortable with that?

The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites.

The strange thing is Kristol was able to name two Republican media elites, and cheerlead the angry, often hate-filled rhetoric and misinformation they (and Sarah Palin, another "leader" he again singles out) use to "lead" the Republican Party. But when he drops in a bromide about "liberal media elites" he's unable to name even one - let alone one of any real influence.

If nothing else, he's made clear which party is being run by grown-ups.

Kristol's fantasy of a conservative movement uniting behind a Sarah Palin, or some other "leader"² who represents only one faction of convervatism (religious right conservatives / social conservatives, economic conservatives / free market conservatives, foreign policy conservatives / interventionists / non-interventionists... there are factions within the factions). That's the same sort of foundation upon which Ross Perot built his Reform Party - not so much "vote for us" but "don't vote for them". And when the Palin/Gingrich ticket brings in 19% of the vote....³
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1. I don't want to be unfair to Romney, who was once a successful corporate raider (who now prefers "venture capitalist"), but the image he seemed intend upon presenting during the last campaign was that of an empty head propped on top of a stuffed shirt.

2. Palin has demonstrated little ability to lead those who aren't already in lockstep with her message. While the modicum of leadership she demonstrates by telling her devotees what they want to hear may qualify her as a "leader" in Kristol's book, her failure as an executive both at the state and local level may give others pause.

3. While Kristol was heartened that 40% of Americans deem themselves "conservative", he somehow forgot to mention (or perhaps failed to read) that only half of that number (20%) describe themselves as "Republicans".

Carts, Horses and Healthcare

2009-10-26T14:00:00.005-04:00

Tyler Cowen takes a valid premise, and then gallops off in the wrong direction.

The proposals now before Congress would require just about everyone to buy health insurance or to get it through their employers — which would generally result in lower wages. In other words, millions of people would be compelled to spend lots of money on something they previously did not want, at least not at prevailing prices.

That is the unfortunate result of our current "no new taxes" culture. It would be better for the poor, as well as for uninsured and underinsured working Americans, if a sensible tax reform funded basic insurance. People could still choose between plans, but we wouldn't have to worry about subsidies or whether the cost of insurance will be too onerous on people of limited resources. Obviously, forcing people to buy insurance for a price they deem to high - let alone at a cost beyond what they can reasonably afford - could (would) create a lot of resentment.

However, I think his argument that national healthcare amounts to a tax that would discourage the poor from trying to earn more is absurd. First, I don't know of many people who even think that way - "No, boss, I'm turning down that raise because due to its effect on my health insurance subsidy I'll only put half of it in my pocket". (Without digressing into the vagaries of the human mind, there's evidence that earning "more than the next guy" is a much more compelling factor than take-home pay.) Second, people don't always have the luxury of turning down a promotion, even if they want to. Third, people actually do recognize that raises and promotions are incremental - this year's raise may not be as much as you would like, but maybe next year's will be better. Fourth, most people are happy to pocket extra money, even if they would prefer to have more.

But I digress. The argument he offers that I find to be most flawed is this:

We’re often told that America should copy the health care institutions of Western Europe. Yet we’re failing to copy the single most important lesson from those systems — namely, to put cost control first.

Which European nation, in adopting a national healthcare plan, put cost control first? It seems to me to have been quite the opposite - that national healthcare plans were implemented in order to properly serve the needs of the nation's population, and that concerns about cost control arose considerably later. It may well be that, once a nation has implemented a national healthcare plan, cost control becomes a leading consideration, but the plan still comes first. If anything, doesn't Cowen's argument support the idea that the best way to make cost control a priority is to extend insurance to everybody through a nationally managed program?

Medicare vs. Private Plans

2009-10-26T13:37:00.005-04:00

Robert Samuelson, whose prior commentary on healthcare reform issues is pretty atrocious, again takes on the subject. A brief response to a couple of his points:

The public plan's low costs would be artificial. Its main advantage would be the congressionally mandated requirement that hospitals and doctors be reimbursed at rates at or near Medicare's. These are as much as 30 percent lower than rates paid by private insurers, says the health-care consulting firm Lewin Group.

You know what I would love to see, and what people like Samuelson would probably hate to see? A full, public disclosure of private insurance company reimbursement rates. You see, Medicare reimbursement rates are public - anybody can access and review them. Health insurance companies keep their reimbursement rates under wraps. I'm really not convinced by the argument that "Medicare rates are 'as much as' 30% lower than our secret rates" - it's easy to cherry pick an outlier to make such an argument. Let's see the real numbers so we can determine for ourselves whether Medicare truly undercompensates the doctors... who voluntarily accept it... or if the insurance industry is again playing games with statistics or "making stuff up" to subvert the debate.

As for administrative expenses, any advantage for the public plan is exaggerated, say critics. Part of the gap between private insurers and Medicare is statistical illusion: Because Medicare recipients have higher average health expenses ($10,003 in 2007) than the under-65 population ($3,946), its administrative costs are a smaller share of total spending.

You see, administrative costs go up when plan members don't get sick and don't make claims. To enjoy cost savings in administration, you need to insure people who get sick a lot, go to lots of different doctors, hospitals, and other treatment facilities, and create an avalanche of claims for reimbursement each time. This is why private insurance companies were so eager to insure the elderly prior to Medicare, and why they complain so bitterly that the government excludes them from that market - or inadequately subsidizes their participation.

Likewise, Medicare has low marketing costs because it's a monopoly. But a non-monopoly public plan would have to sell itself and would incur higher marketing costs.

Medicare Advantage plans don't compete with Medicare? Private prescription plans for seniors don't compete with Medicare? Wow, when you ignore the facts and make stuff up, you can make all sorts of interesting arguments.

Even Hacker concedes that without reimbursement rates close to Medicare's, the public plan would founder. If it had to "negotiate rates directly with providers" -- do what private insurers do -- the public plan could have "a very hard time" making inroads, he writes. Hacker opposes such weakened versions of the public plan.

But wait a minute. Don't a lot of private insurance plans avoid the need for actual negotiation - or even a lot of the difficult, costly work in developing reimbursement rates - by tying the scope of their coverage and their reimbursement rates to Medicare rates? If Samuelson is deferring to Jacob Hacker as an authority on this subject, perhaps he should start by reading what Hacker has to say:

Over the last two decades, moreover, Medicare has increasingly emphasized improved payment methods and rigorous reviews of technology and treatment, and it has made increasing investments in quality monitoring and improvement. Revealingly, private plans generally use the public Medicare plan’s criteria for covering treatments as their standard of medical necessity, and they have adopted many of Medicare’s innovations in payment methods. As Robert Berenson and Bryan Dowd note in a recent Health Affairs article, “Traditional

As for "marketing expenses"....

In one study that assumed widespread eligibility, the Lewin Group estimated that 103 million people - half the number with private insurance - would switch to the public plan.

When half of people with private insurance say, "I don't know how much a public plan will cost or what it will cover, but it has to be better than this ****," why does Samuelson find it so troubling that the industry will face competition?

If We Assume a Slippery Slope....

2009-10-26T12:41:00.005-04:00

It's not that Fred Hiatt's editorials are usually good, but he usually hides behind the anonymity of his editorial board when he makes his most inane arguments. So I was a bit surprised when he regurgitated some of his recent anonymous inanity in an editorial to which his name is attached.

From the start, the Obama administration has said that health-care reform has to make health care both more accessible and less costly . If Congress does the first without the second - guarantees a new entitlement without controlling costs - it will bankrupt us, because health-care costs are rising faster than the overall economy is growing.

Hiatt distinguishes the cost of wars from the cost of healthcare, arguing that we can spend ourselves into deficit oblivion over wars "because wars end", but what of the military budget? Even excluding the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hiatt should be wringing his hands over the inevitability that the military budget will bankrupt us. After all, the same slippery slope argument applies to any category of spending where costs are increasing faster than inflation. I would infer first that Hiatt doesn't recognize that slippery slope reasoning is not logically sound,¹ and second that his concern about deficit spending is based primarily (perhaps exclusively) on whether he supports or opposes the government action at issue.

Hiatt suggests that only two things are needed to eliminate healthcare inflation.

First, we need to tax the middle class and try to economically pressure employers to diminish the quality of healthcare plans available to their employees. This is the Gingrich model - the idea that if you force employees to pay for their healthcare out of pocket, they will be more selective about what care they obtain and costs will decline. Never mind that there's no evidence that this will work and, with the experience so far with low-coverage, high-deductible plans that costs for healthcare consumers will in fact go up.
Second, we need to have Congress "cede its power to regulate the minutiae of Medicare coverage" - because, um, it would be better if that were done by magic or something. (Hiatt doesn't explain.) Seriously, healthcare inflation for Medicare is lower than inflation for all other healthcare, yet Hiatt thinks we can solve the world's problems by making some sort of undefined change to "the minutiae of Medicare coverage". Where's his call for private insurers to "cede [their] power to regulate the minutiae of [health insurance] coverage"?

Hiatt continues his silliness by arguing that a public plan won't actually save money over private plans:

If, as advocates sometimes argue, a public plan operates without favoritism, it will be simply one more entrant in the marketplace. Like other companies, it will have marketing and administrative costs. In some markets served by few private plans, it could offer a useful alternative. But it won't radically reduce costs.

People who are truly sick like their Medicare coverage. I know of few people who don't have gold-plated insurance who, following a serious illness, think highly of their private insurance plans. People see value in both having available, and having as a competitor to private insurance, a plan that won't spend huge amounts of money trying to deny coverage it owes under contract. The extraordinary misconduct and, at times, overt fraud committed by insurance carriers should give anybody pause about whether reform could be achieved without a public alternative. Hiatt may be correct that a public plan that competes with private plans doesn't produce much in the way of cost savings, but it could produce a lot in terms of peace of mind. (And if Hiatt were truly in favor of cost savings, he would be looking at various other nations' successful efforts in that regard, rather than throwing up a smokescreen in the defense of our nation's abject failure to control healthcare spending.)

I doubt that a public plan will face much in the way of marketing costs. Everybody will know what it is, where to find it, and what it offers. Besides, how much marketing does Hiatt believe private insurance companies direct at the uninsured and underinsured markets? At least if we're talking about legitimate companies.

If, as advocates argue at other times, the point is to insure sick people whom private companies, despite all regulatory efforts, find ways to shun, the public plan could offer a valuable safety net. But that wouldn't save money.

I've previously pointed out that it is ill-advised to pursue the approach that to be acceptable, any healthcare reform bill must fix every defect of the current system. Here, Hiatt extends that argument to an absurd level, suggesting that it's not enough that the bill fix all problems in the aggregate, but that each and every element of the bill advance all three goals (universality, cost control, and patient choice). At the same time, he does not propose how things would be better in the absence of a public plan - and proposes nothing to pressure private insurance companies or healthcare providers to reign in costs.² If Hiatt believes what he's suggesting, he's an idiot. If he doesn't, yet still expects you to buy his argument, he thinks you're an idiot.
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1. It could be that Hiatt knows his logic is childish and flawed, but that he doesn't care. He later presents another slippery slope argument, whereby a public plan gradually bankrupts every private insurance plan and becomes the only option based upon an entirely speculative set of future events and assumptions. Perhaps he imagines himself as a silver-tongued advocate, whose sophistry and illogic will not be detected by his readers....

2. Granted, this could be because he doesn't care about the inflation caused by the private side of the market, and favors a system in which private insurers maximize their profits even at the expense of the three ostensible goals of healthcare reform.

Budget Mendacity From the Washington Post

2009-10-24T13:52:00.008-04:00

Have you ever seen Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory? Recall Gene Wilder's "protests" when the various naughty children engaged in acts that he knew would lead to very unpleasant consequences? Somehow Fred Hiatt's gang brought that image to mind with their argument that their acceptance of massive deficit spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is consistent with their insistence that healthcare reform be revenue neutral.

In principle, all wars should be paid for, just like all other federal spending. We criticized President George W. Bush for sticking with tax cuts rather than calling for national sacrifice after Sept. 11, 2001, and for failing to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So we start with a general statement of principle, with no indication that the Post has any interest in standing behind that principle. Hiatt's editorial board protested, Willie Wonka-style ("Oh! I wouldn't do that... I really wouldn't"), at some point in the past and, having given lip service to their principles, proceeded with full-throated advocacy of the wars and their escalation.

If Mr. Obama were to propose offsetting the cost of additional troops in Afghanistan with a gasoline or carbon tax, we would support it.

But not if he proposed such taxes to fund healthcare reform - for that, Hiatt and his crew want new taxes on the middle class. But take a step back in history to the budget surpluses G.W. inherited and frittered away on tax cuts for the wealthy and a ruinously expensive war of choice in Iraq - why not let some of those tax cuts expire to fund the war? Or to fund healthcare reform?¹

Hiatt and his crew then argue that the budget games they're using to avoid funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are analogous to arguments that future savings in healthcare costs should be considered when calculating the cost of a reform bill. An obvious flaw in this argument is that, at least in any modern western society, the state cannot avoid healthcare costs. It's perfectly appropriate in that context to consider how reforms might bring about savings, and how that will relate to future expenditures. When the government chooses to spend vast amounts of money on a war of choice, the baseline for spending is $0 and (unless you endorse some modern form of loot and plunder) there's no way to achieve "savings" by making that number negative.

Further, the Post combines spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggesting that "savings" that may be achieved from possible troop reductions in Iraq could be applied to the increased budget for the war in Afghanistan, thus bringing about a net "savings". If the Post believes this argument, then it has justified in spades what it deems to be the "creative accounting" behind the healthcare reform bill. Further, money is fungible - why not apply the Post's imagined "savings" from Iraq to healthcare reform, and pass the Post's proposed new taxes to fund the war in Afghanistan? ("Did we just say we opposed sticking with the Bush tax cuts for those wars, so that we wouldn't run up huge deficits? Well, that was so five minutes ago.")

The Post continues with a similar quality of logic:

All this assumes that defense and health care should be treated equally in the national budget. We would argue that they should not be, for two reasons. One is that wars, unlike entitlement programs, eventually come to an end. A guarantee of health care for all, particularly in the context of steadily rising costs, will bankrupt the nation if not matched by a steady stream of revenue.

Sure, wars end... Even the Hundred Years War came to an end. I suspect, though, that the Iraq war would have wrapped up sooner or perhaps not been launched at all if G.W. had told the wealthy, "Sorry, you won't be getting those tax cuts after all, and estate taxes will not be reduced." The Post's tax proposals are consistent with this - they're big on picking the pockets of working Americans, but in relative terms the proposals they're presently endorsing will have a small impact on the wealthy.

Since wars do end, it's reasonable to ask "When will these wars end, and how much will they cost?" The best answer we're likely to get from Hiatt and his boys is probably Jackson Diehl's² "Nothing's anything like Vietnam" argument - a shrug. Who knows, who cares, it's probably best not to even ask - and don't mention long, costly wars we entered with no vision of how we would achieve victory or an exit strategy, because they're nothing like what will soon be our longest war ever with no end in sight."

The Post's slippery slope argument on healthcare costs is amusing, given the Post's strong opposition to the cheapest alternative to the status quo - a robust national healthcare plan, even a single payer plan. I find it childish to suggest that the inevitable consequence of providing health insurance to every U.S. citizen will be that the nation is bankrupted. It's not at the level of "death panels", but it's still a dishonest, fear-based argument.

The point hidden behind the hypocrisy and logical fallacy is actually a good one - when we're committing to an indefinite expenditure we should consider how we are going to pay for it. But the Post's definition of what expenditures are of a limited nature is reminiscent of how the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution's provisions on copyright - anything that's less that indefinite in duration is "limited". When there's no end in sight to war spending, and no plan or strategy that will bring an end to that spending, the open-ended nature of the commitment makes it little different than entitlement spending - infinity is not so much different from "infinity minus one".

The Post's last argument is that wars are necessary to defend our nation and its people, while healthcare reform is not. Again we have dubious logic - that any money spent on wars and the military, no matter how spent, is necessary to the defense of the state. Would Fred Hiatt expand that "reasoning", Candian Bacon-style, to a war of choice against Canada? Some wars aren't all that important to our defense. Jackson Diehl just got through suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are less important "in its consequences for the United States" than was the Vietnam War - we ended the war, the North took control of the country, it's still a communist nation, and... Americans can easily and safely visit Vietnam as tourists, and we have normalized diplomatic and trade relations. How would that have been improved by giving the Vietnam War an indefinite³, deficit-funded blank check?

Combining the Hiatt crew's assertion, "the nation's security must be the president's first priority", with Diehl's insistence that our current wars are less important than Vietnam, would the Post endorse a decision to end both the Vietnam and Iraq wars on the ground that they're less important than Vietnam and we did pretty darn well despite having ended that war with an outcome falling far short of victory? Or would we hear Diehl shriek, "Any analogy to Vietnam is imperfect - continue the war forever (less a day) if necessary to win!" With Hiatt chiming in, "At any cost... to the middle class and future generations."

Since we're focusing on the question of what bankrupts a nation, potentially leading to collapse, it seems reasonable to ask this question: In the history of the world, how many nations or empires have collapsed under the weight of healthcare costs (or any other public benefit), and how many have collapsed under the weight of costly wars and imperial overreach? Sometimes wars end because they bankrupt the proponent.

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1. Here, they may be channeling Lionel Hutz. It says we argued "No New Taxes'? They got that all wrong. It's supposed to say 'No! New Taxes!"

2. Jackson Diehl is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

3. Limited only by the Post's assertion that all wars eventually end.

A New Twist on Learning From History

2009-10-24T13:20:00.003-04:00

From what Jackson Diehl has written, it appears that the new lessons of history are:

Unless the current event is exactly like the historical event, there's nothing to be learned from history.
If somebody has drawn a historic analogy that proves flawed, it conclusively proves that any comparison of the current event to the history event is flawed.
If somebody claims that a particular lesson is to be learned from a specific historic event, and you disagree, you can reject the idea that anything can be learned from the historic event.
Absent a perfect analogy, anybody who analogizes a current event to a historic event is being unhelpful.

Diehl is offended at the notion that the war in Afghanistan can be compared to the war in Vietnam, arguing "No military mission since Vietnam has come close to that war in the number of casualties, or in its consequences for the United States". Those are the only two measures that are relevant? And when Diehl suggests that the consequences of the war in Afghanistan are significantly less for the United States than the consequences of the Vietnam War, is he making an argument for withdrawal?