Nation-Building

Obama takes troop reduction n Afghanistan off the table

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:34:00 +0000

John McCain:

"I think the great danger now is a half-measure, sort of a - you know, try to please all ends of the political spectrum," McCain told CNN chief national correspondent John King. "And, again, I have great sympathy for the president, making the toughest decisions that presidents have to make, but I think he needs to use deliberate speed."

Many people assume McCain's comments only apply to the left, but the fact is that they also apply to the right, and it's precisely because Obama has in fact taken the right VERY seriously indeed that he's in so much hot water with the Progressives (who I admit in the interest of full self-disclosure I do not self-identify with; I am a liberal on a elliptical orbit around the center of political mass, thus I drift rightwards in a very predictable fashion.)

Much of the critique of Obama from the right comes via political scoring rather than a genuine critique of policy; a great example is the replacement of Gen McKiernan by Gen McChrystal. McChrystal's background is special operations, commanding JSOC for five years (and capturing Saddam under his watch). The man is as much an expert in SO as Petraeus is in COIN. That strikes most principled observers as significant, though obviously it's not officially commented on by the White House. The implications of policy shift are clear. That is the President's prerogative; note that he has retained Secretary Gates from the previous Administration (again, a sore spot for lefties, and utterly ignored by righties intent on scoring points).

President Obama has asked for Gen. McChrystal's assessment and he has received it in detail. Now, McCain woudn't be doing his job if he didn't pressure the President to act quickly, but the truth is that when you request a gigantic policy review from your top commanders, you do so because you want to make a decision, not a rubber stamp. President Bush was content to leave broad strategy to Gen. Petraeus and that was also his prerogative, but righties have assumed that this is the normal course of things. It's not; the President, the Commander in Chief, is a civilian. It's the President's prerogative to give a general free reign, but it extends only as far and as long as the Commander in Chief wills it so. In Iraq, that free reign by Petraeus was one thing; in Afghanistan it is quite another. Afghanistan is not Iraq.

No General will ever - if he is competent and values his career - ask for less troops. That Gen. McChrystal would ask for more was a given, but if you read the report you find he makes a very different argument. In General McChrystal's own words:

Success is achievable, but it will not be attained simply by trying harder or "doubling down" on the previous strategy. Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.

Emphases mine. I've spent enough time reading and analyzing it that I refuse categorically to discuss it with someone who hasn't bothered with due diligence; I care enough about the outcome that I take it more seriously than my political allegiances*.

The bottom line is that Obama has already sent more troops to Afghanistan than President Bush did. And Obama has taken reducing the troops serving there off the table. The question now remains, will President Obama send more troops, and if so, how many? That's a decision Obama must make in context of the entirety of the United States security needs, not just in Afghanistan. Gen. McChrystal, on the other hand, makes his recommendations with the Afghanistan theater alone in mind.

And truth to tell, there's a very good argument for not sending any more troops - one acknowledged by McChrystal himself. ending more troops amounts to raising expectations, in the face of increasing public distaste for the war. The amount requested by McChrystal are not a panacea in themselves; to really do secure-and-hold (as opposed to secure-move on-revisit as we do now), you'd need not 40,000 more troops, but 400,000. McChrystal knows this full well, and anyone reading the report in full will understand his reasoning. In a lot of ways more troops as requested wouldn't really improve that much on the ground, but would buy make things easier. The cost would be increased public patience ; the challenge is to find a middle ground between these opposing forces and realities. McChrystal is not only aware of these tensions but states them explicitly in his report - the number of 40,000 quoted is in my opinion a brilliant gift to the President which gives him the executive operational freedom he needs to find that balance. I'm kind of in awe.

The mission in Afghanistan does not hinge upon the number of troops sent, but on the "change in thinking" alluded to above by McChrystal. Marc Lynch lays out the case for simply "muddling through":

Sending more troops may in fact be the right call -- I'm open-minded on that question -- but the attempts to bull-rush the process are problematic on their face.

"All in or get out" is a typical false choice offered by advocates of any position who support the "all in" option in question, since it's so much easier to argue the risks of "getting out" than it is to argue against intermediate options. And as for the rush, why make such a momentous choice precisely at a moment of total political chaos in Afghanistan and the near complete absence of a legitimate partner on which to build due to the rampant fraud which eviscerated the Afghan election?

This is particularly problematic because, as the President's advisers clearly understand, there is absolutely no reason to think that Gen. McChrystal's current request is really "all in". McChrystal's review is admirably clear and quite honest that even with such changes, the policy may not succeed.

The overwhelming odds are that if the escalation option is chosen, in a year or two we will be confronting the exact same questions. More troops will once again be needed, a new strategy will once again be demanded, we'll still be reading about how the Taliban is out-communicating us and about how the corruption of the Karzai government poses a serious challenge. And then the exact same debate will recur… the Kagans will demand more troops, dark mutterings about tensions between the administration and the generals will roil the waters, the Washington Post editorial page will publish debates where everyone is on the same side, the smart think-tankers will agonize over the tough choices but ultimately come down on the side of escalation. Might as well have this debate now, and get it right.

[...]

what's so terrible with muddling through for a while, giving the new tactics a chance to work at the local level while preventing the worst-case scenarios from happening? Why choose between escalation or withdrawal at exactly the time when the political picture is at its least clear? Why not maintain a lousy Afghan government which doesn't quite fall, keep the Taliban on the ropes without defeating it, cut deals where we can, and try to figture out a strategy to deal with the Pakistan part which all the smart set agrees is the real issue these days? Why not focus on applying the improved COIN tactics with available resources right now instead of focusing on more troops? If the American core objective in Afghanistan is to prevent its re-emergence as an al-Qaeda safe haven, or to prevent the Taliban from taking Kabul, those seem to be manageable at lower troop levels.

Good for the President's team to take the time to have a serious debate about this and not give in to the politically expedient path (in either direction). The readouts on yesterday's big Afghan strategy meeting reflect exactly what you want to see from a President making a tough call.

Let's also note something very important here - if you are absolutely against the practice of aerial bombardment and collateral damage - which I am also strenuously on the record about - then Biden's preferred policy (persuasively argued in the LRB by Rory Stewart) of reducing troops and relying heavily on COIN/SO alone is indeed "Chaosistan". There's a direct, causal inverse relationship between number of troops and collateral damage casualties. This is a paradox that no one on the left is willing to grapple with, but must factor into any principled assessment or policy prescription.

My own prediction and preference is that Obama will send more troops, in the range of 5-10,000. More importantly, the budget for Afghanistan is going to rise as the Iraq war winds down - Obama will not spend any more money in total between these two wars, but will shift the expenses from one to the other. The difference is that the same money won't go into funding a huge force of boots on the ground (as in Iraq) but will be channeled into the "change in strategy" of which McChrystal spoke. Call it the "$urge 2.0," because money matters as much if not more than men, this time. If politics truly stopped at the water's edge, this would be a strategy that everyone could agree on. Unfortunately, Obama has a fight on multiple fronts, abroad and at home. McChrystal has a much easier job by far.

*I remind the gentle reader that while I was against the Iraq War, I also was against total withdrawal.

Deserve this! The Nobel Peace Prize Agenda for Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:56:00 +0000

President Obama is now a Laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize. There's enough in that statement alone to drive rightwing conservatives insane. And insane they certainly are, as others are ably and gleefully documenting. The general gist of the response by the Right is twofold, and predictably schizophrenic: 1. Obama has not accomplished enough in office to deserve the NPP, and 2. the NPP only awarded it to Obama because he is a. not-Bush and b. he is African-American. In essence, this means that they are arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize is both a farce and sacred at the same time. Of course, conservatives' enmity for the Peace prize is longstanding, given that it was awarded to Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, and Al Gore, even as they pine for it's omission to George W. Bush.

While the conservatives' newfound concern for the integrity of the NPP is certainly touching, the same critique coming from the Left carries more weight. But to address this, you have to consider the intention of the Peace Prize. And for that, we can look to the wishes of Alfred Nobel himself. In his will, he stipulated that the Nobel Peace Prize shall be awarded to

"to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Now, there's nothing in there about solving the Middle East conflict or riding the world of nuclear weapons, though certainly progress towards these goals would count. But the secific language used to define the concept of "peace" itself is interesting. The NPP is to be awarded for 1. doing work towardds fraternity of nations, and promotion of peace congresses. These are process, not end-result, statements. The sole end-result qualification listed in "reduction of armies" which I don't think any winner has ever managed to achieve, though President Obama's renewed attention to nuclear non-proliferation is relevant here (and explicitly quoted by the Nobel Committee as part of their justification for awarding it to him).

First, consider the process-oriented criteria. What has Obama achieved along these lines? Glenn Greenwald offers a summary of how Obama has "promoted peace" and "fraternity between nations":

Obama has changed the tone America uses to speak to the world generally and the Muslim world specifically. His speech in Cairo, his first-week interview on al-Arabiya, and the extraordinarily conciliatory holiday video he sent to Iran are all substantial illustrations of that. His willingness to sit down and negotiate with Iran -- rather than threaten and berate them -- has already produced tangible results. He has at least preliminarily broken from Bush's full-scale subservience to Israel and has applied steadfast pressure on the Israelis to cease settlement activities, even though it's subjected him to the sorts of domestic political risks and vicious smears that have made prior Presidents afraid to do so. His decision to use his first full day in office to issue Executive Orders to close Guantanamo, ostensibly ban torture, and bar CIA black sites was an important symbol offered to the world (even though it's been followed by actions that make those commitments little more than empty symbols). He refused to reflexively support the right-wing, civil-liberty-crushing coup leaders in Honduras merely because they were "pro-American" and "anti-Chavez," thus siding with the vast bulk of Latin America's governments -- a move George Bush, or John McCain, never would have made. And as a result of all of that, the U.S. -- in a worldwide survey released just this week -- rose from seventh to first on the list of "most admired countries."

That's an impressive list, though the caveats about rendition are noted. Some righties argue Obama should only be "eligble" for his actions as President in the 11 days he was in office prior to the NPP nomination deadline of Feb 1st - which is silly, since the actual deliberations took seven months. Why wouuldn't Obama's actions over that time be relevant to the decision? But it's still worth pointing out that Obama's executive orders on his very first day in office about torture and Guantanamo alone represent as significant an ideological change in direction for America as Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika did (earning him a NPP in 1990, even though the actual and unanticipated breakup of the Soviet Union didn't happen until the following year).

It's clear that Obama meets the process-oriented criteria. But what about "reduction of standing armies" and its nuke proxy? The Nobel Committee explicitly lauded Obama's commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, especially recently at the United Nations. However, the truth is that Obama remains wedded to the double standard on nuclear power, holding Iran and India to one standard while looking the other way when it comes to Israel's obsolete "strategic ambiguity". A genuine commitment to "zero nuke" policy would entail no favoritism, and insisting all nuclear-capable nations sign the NPT, Israel included. The hypocrisy on this does not go unnoticed and the threat of Israeli nuclear power is what drives the nuclear arms race in the middle east.

However, all of this is really beside the point, since it assumes that the Nobel Prize remains an "award" when in fact it is no such thing. It is actually a shrewd vehicle for influencing the power elite, and as such represents an attempt to lobby Obama and influence him over the course of his next term(s). The decsion of who gets a Nobel Peace Prize, and just as importantly who doesn't, is an explicit editorial statement. That President Bush was not awarded one* was a rebuke of the unilateral, pre-emptive, diplomacy-averse doctrine that bears his name. But with Obama, it is an attempt to shape the doctrine yet to be.

Richard Silverstein makes much the same point:

I think this award is really a shot in the dark. A big gamble. They're telling Obama and the world that they have enormous hopes for him. They're also telling us what deep straits the world is in. From Gaza to Teheran to Kabul to Baghdad, things are a mess. A military attack against Iran hangs like a question mark over the Middle East. The committee is essentially saying that tough times demand risk and this award is a risk. It could be that Obama will merit it over time. It could be that the award will make it that much easier for him to achieve some of his agenda. If so, the Swedes are telling us that's all to the good.

Lately, Obama has taken hits both at home and abroad. This award is meant as a shot in the arm, a bit of courage for the tough times ahead. He'll need it.

I hope against hope that this award will encourage the realist camp in dealing with Iran. I hope it will give pause to the Israeli adventurists gunning for a fight with Iran. I do think it will make it that much harder for Obama himself to turn hawkish, as he has intimated he might do if negotiations fail. So maybe there's some shrewdness to this award as well.

Indeed. Liberal critics like Greenwald** point to the Afghanistan War as evidence Obama doesn't "deserve" the prize, but General McChrystal's public call for more troops seems to have influenced Obama to take a troop reduction off the table. This represents a success for McChrystal, who may not (probably won't) get his full requested 40,000 troops, but also won't face the Biden-advocated strategy of reducing troops still further in favor of purely couunter-terrorism operations. The Nobel Peace Prize applies pressure on Obama from the opposite end. Like it or not, Obama has to factor the potential of headlines like "Obama wins Peace Prize, extends War" into his political calculus; the Afghanistan people themselves are making the case already.

I think that the best interpretation of the Nobel Peace Prize is the single word response from Barack Obama's official Twitter account: "Humbled." In his public response, President Obama said, "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments. But rather as an affirmation of American leadership. ... I will accept this award as a call to action."

Indeed, recognition that the award represents global aspirations for peace and an expectation of American leadership should be a heavy burden that weighs on Obama's soul as he occupies the most powerful office in the world, at a time when the world is arguably at its most uncertain and strife-laden. Let's hope that the intentions of the Nobel Committee, if not their specific agenda, come true. As Obama charts the way forward in Afghanistan, pursues non-proliferation, engages Iran and North Korea, promotes a two-state solution, and more, the heavy weight NPP around his neck will hopefully inure him to short-term political distractions and focus him on the end goals, and question whether the conventional wisdoms he so far has largely hewn to will indeed be sufficient for the task.

Related: Mixed responses to Obama's Peace Prize from the streets of Iran, Iraq and Gaza. Also, see the usual lively discussion at Talk Islam. Also, I found Al Gore's comments of interest.

*For what it's worth, if I were eligible to nominate, I'd have nominated Bush, for the sole reason of deposing Saddam. That doesn't mean he'd have won, of course.

**Arguably, though Greenwald won't agree, Obama's decision to send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan in March has actually lessened the need for aerial strikes. The truth behind the troops debate is that the fewer troops we have, the heavier reliance on drone attacks will be and thus the more civilian casualties. This is a fact that lefty critics of Obama's war must accept.

Copenhagen dreaming II: global warming as opportunity

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:17:00 +0000

This is the second part of my series in anticipation of the upcoming Copenhagen conference. The previous post in this series was a defense of the scientific method.

So, what do I think about global warming? The consensus is a powerful one, and it's not built upon one tree ring or one temperature reconstruction, it's been built upon thousands of independent studies by thousands of different authors. That said, there are some valid critiques on methodological issues. Even if those critiques are fully accurate, that isn't enough by itself to warrant throwing out the entire body of literature, which over the years of reading both Climate Audit and Real Climate I've seen extends far beyond just one paper by Mann et al or one set of trees at Yamal. The very fact that there is a controversy, and both sides are able to endlessly rebut the other in a seemingly-never ending cycle of rebuttal, proves that there is indeed more to the story. Like blind men in a room with an elephant, the dissenters and the keepers of orthodoxy have valid observations and methods. Reconciling them requires moving forward, not standing still.

I've watched An Inconvenient Truth and I've seen A Convenient Fiction. I've read the Wegman Report and the RealClimate folks' highly-convincing response on the technical merits. I read Climate Audit and now, thanks to suggestions from others here, will also check out Watt's Up With That, but I also cross-check dissenters' arguments against the RC Archive and RC Index. I think I am doing due diligence here. The consensus for global warming remains robust, despite the dissenters' well-publicized arguments. Until the dissenters repudiate their partisan political fellow-travelers who engage in irresponsible rhetoric about GW being a "massive lie" or the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" they will never attain the credibility they require to persuade and influence the concensus the way it has always been done.

Fundamentally, however, the basic goal of those who advocate anthropogenic global warming is simple: to reduce carbon emissions worldwide. The single best route to doing that is to make our civilization more energy efficient and less polluting. Technologies to make this so represent as much of an immense, industry-creating opportunity as the semiconductor industry or the space program. One of Al Gore's maxims is that you should never underestimate human ingenuity; to this, I would also add the corollary, never underestimate the ability of Americans to make a profit off it, either. Those who argue that the Kyoto Protocol or the upcoming Copenhagen treaty would bankrupt the business world sound to me like Malthusian alarmists, without faith in the genius of men like Norman Borlaug to find ways of escaping the constraints. The business world itself is on board with the opportunity ahead. In that sense, the scientific world has fallen behind. It's time to catch up... to the Chinese and the Indians. They see the writing on the wall - in terms of threat to their own territory from increased sea levels, but also from the basic security/economic perspectives of needing less oil imports and having greater energy to fuel their growing societies.

So, count me as convinced that GW is real and requires action. The dissenters are important, as they provide a needed critique from within. But they cannot and should not be the cause for holding back on moving ahead full speed.

Copenhagen dreaming: In defense of the scientific method

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:16:00 +0000

As the Copenhagen conference on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol draws near, I want to lay some meta-thoughts out about the scientific method which I think are important, as a context for my general support of the theory of global warrming and the need for decisive action by our own nation to reduce carbon emissions and embrace alternative forms of energy (including nuclear). The next post in this series will then lay out my position on global warming specifically.

The debate about Global Warming, not unlike that regarding AIDS, or evolution, boils down to this: the Scientific Method is an attempt by human beings to establish rigorous theories drawn from empirical observations, for the purpose of creating models of reality, so that these models may be employed in some pragmatic fashion. When this method is applied to a topic that is insulated from what I call the Political Method, there's not much controversy to be had. However, the "employed in some pragmatic fashion" part above is where the outcomes of the SM start encroaching on the PM and then battle lines are drawn.

Science is not a clean affair. Its hard, for one thing, and it requires a lot of art in some ways. The basic task of taking measurements is pretty consensus-prone, but everything downstream to that is subject to the old adage, TMTOWTDI. In science, the way things are done usually settles on what has worked before. Science is conservative that way.

The SM method provides an internal mechanism for disputes, however - publishing. Proponents of a minority view who are challenging an orthodoxy often tend to scream conspiracy and exclusion from the literature, but the fact remains that the scientific literature is by far the most open system for dissent that the human race has ever devised. This is because, fundamentally, science rewards its iconoclasts instead of punishing them. The reason for this is a function of the funding system, which penalizes anything that isn't "novel".

The reason that orthodoxy develops in science is because of the mass of literature that accretes over time. Anyone trying to challenge an orthodoxy who simply waves away pre-existing literature as being corrupt or dishonest or conspiratorial is essentially repudiating the system at a fundamental level. Are only the dissenters against orthodoxy the ones with a professional ethos, with ethics and pride in their work? To hear the dissenters gripe, you'd think that they were the sole bearers of the flame of Science and everyone else is a charlatan. Any argument which strays into this territory not only can be dismissed, it must be dismissed. Anyone willing to burn the system down is someone whose own motivations are far more suspect than the thousands of scientists who have dedicated their lives to their field and are willing to play by the rules.

The single biggest (and potentially most cogent) critique that the dissenters make is that the peer review system is essentially a "social network". Well, they're right. It is indeed a social network, of experts in a field. But if you don't do science you can be forgiven for assuming this makes everyone in a field, esecially a small one, seem like pals on facebook all playing the same inane games and joining the same groups and causes ad infinitum. In reality, the smaller the field, the more concentrated the competition. Every research group tries to outdo the other, because the funding game (again, which only cares about "novelty") is literally zero-sum. That said, for the good of the field, everyone does come together and write joint papers for special issues of various journals, review papers and collaborations on multi-center trials or studies. That's part of paying your dues for the good of the field as a whole. But having written a paper with someone - even ten papers - is not an abdication of your ethical responsibilities. Nor would it be very good for your career to be someone else's "yes man". In fact, you'd lose funding and be out of a job if all you ever did was agree with your peers. Very few people outside the system really understand just how precarious most research groups' existences really are, or just how unbelievably damaging it would be to scientists' livelihoods to act in such a cartoon fashion. Indeed, you cant teach a man a thing if his career depends on him not knowing it, but in science the opposite is true - you can't stop a man from learning something in science, because his career depends on him learning it.

Are there flaws in peer review? Oh, Yes. And it's scientists who are at the forefront of self-evaluation and addressing those flaws. If scientists were all Vulcan or robots it would be a non-issue; instead, they are just human beings, and that means they have to accept some basic level of fundamental flaw, and seek to minimize the damage as best they can. The peer review system is not static, it's continually being refined and tweaked, and like democracy it may suck at times but still remains better than anything else by a longshot.

We don't do science by press release. We do it by trial, error, and publishing. If you can't get your amazing challenge to the orthodoxy published, its not because "They" are silencing you, its because you don't have the data. If you are right - and you may well be! - then doing the due diligence is your responsibility.

Fundamentally, the consensus in science isn't an illusion or a conspiracy. It has meaning, and it has validity, and deserves to be taken at face value. That's not to say that the dissenters should be ignored, but until such time as they are able to change that consensus by the virtue of their evidence and their arguments, they cannot be allowed to impede progress.

word cloud and transcript: Sarah Palin on common-sense conservatism

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:15:00 +0000

This is the text and word cloud of the speech by Sarah Palin while in Hong Kong on September 23rd, for the CLSA Pacific Markets Conference. Note the dominant topic (in the cloud) in her speech is obvious, and hardly a surprise given the context and locale of the speech.

You can call me a common-sense conservative. My approach to the issues facing my country and the world, issues that we'll discuss today, are rooted in this common-sense conservatism... Common sense conservatism deals with the reality of the world as it is. Complicated and beautiful, tragic and hopeful, we believe in the rights and the responsibilities and the inherent dignity of the individual.

We don't believe that human nature is perfectible; we're suspicious of government efforts to fix problems because often what it's trying to fix is human nature, and that is impossible. It is what it is. But that doesn't mean that we're resigned to any negative destiny. Not at all. I believe in striving for the ideal, but in realistic confines of human nature...

The opposite of a common-sense conservative is a liberalism that holds that there is no human problem that government can't fix if only the right people are put in charge. Unfortunately, history and common sense are not on its side. We don't trust utopian promises; we deal with human nature as it is.

While we might be in the wilderness, conservatives need to defend the free market system and explain what really caused last year's collapse.

According to one version of the story, America's economic woes were caused by a lack of government intervention and regulation and therefore the only way to fix the problem - because, of course, every problem can be fixed by a politician - is for more bureaucracy to impose itself further, deeper, forcing itself deeper into the private sector.

I think that's simply wrong. We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place. The mortgage crisis that led to the collapse of the financial market, it was rooted in a good-natured, but wrongheaded, desire to increase home ownership among those who couldn't yet afford to own a home.

In so many cases, politicians on the right and the left, they wanted to take credit for an increase in home ownership among those with lower incomes. But the rules of the marketplace are not adaptable to the mere whims of politicians.

Lack of government wasn't the problem. Government policies were the problem. The marketplace didn't fail. It became exactly as common sense would expect it to.

The government ordered the loosening of lending standards. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who, as I say, couldn't afford them. Speculators spotted new investment vehicles, jumped on board and rating agencies underestimated risks.

So - how can we discuss reform without addressing the government policies at the root of the problems? The root of the collapse? And how can we think that setting up the Fed as the monitor of systemic risk in the financial sector will result in meaningful reform?

The words "fox" and "hen house" come to mind. The Fed's decisions helped create the bubble. Look at the root cause of most asset bubbles, and you'll see the Fed somewhere in the background.

Common sense tells you that when you're in a hole, you have to stop digging! A common sense conservative looks to history to find solutions to the problems confronting us, and the good news is that history has shown us a way out of this, a way forward from recession.

Ronald Reagan, he was faced with an even worse recession, and he showed us how to get out of here.

If you want real job growth, you cut taxes! And you reduce marginal tax rates on all Americans. Cut payroll taxes, eliminate capital gain taxes and slay the death tax, once and for all. Get federal spending under control, and then you step back and you watch the U.S. economy roar back to life.

But it takes more courage for a politician to step back and let the free market correct itself than it does to push through panicky solutions or quick fixes...

I can't wait until we get that Reaganomics sense supplied again because we are going to survive, and we're going to thrive and expand and roar back to life. And as the world sees this, the world will be a healthier, more secure, safer and more prosperous place when this happens.

Yet it seems like some are looking to ever more ways that will actually destroy economic opportunities today. Take for example, Washington's cap-and-trade scheme. I call it the "cap-and-tax" scheme.

Right now we have the highest unemployment rate in 25 years, and it's still rising. And yet some in D.C. are pushing a cap-and-tax bill that could cripple our energy industry or energy market and dramatically increase the rates of the unemployed, and that's not just in the energy sector.

American jobs in every industry will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under this cap-and-tax plan. The cost of farming will certainly increase. That's going to drive up the cost of groceries and drive down farm incomes. The cost of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also rise. We are all going to feel the effects. The Americans hardest hit will be those who are already struggling to make ends meet today, much less with this new tax every month.

I am not indifferent to environmental concerns. Far from it. As governor, I created a sub-cabinet to study the impacts of climate change in my state. And I was the first governor to do so. It took us in a new direction.

I'm a supporter of nuclear power and renewables. We can develop these resources without destroying our economy. And we can help the environment and our economy through energy independence.

Now, I seem to have acquired notoriety in the national debate on health care. And all because of two words: "death panels." And it is a serious term. It was intended to sound a warning about the rationing that is sure to follow if big government tries to simultaneously increase health care coverage while also claiming to decrease costs.

Government has just got to be honest with the people about this.

As I said, it's just common sense to realize that government's attempts to solve large problems like the health-care challenges that we have, more often create new ones, and a top down one size fits all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for some one-fifth of our economy.

Common sense also tells us that passing a trillion dollar new retirement program is not the way to reduce health-care spending. Real health-care reform is market oriented, patient centered and result driven.

The ideal plan that I would have in mind would give all individuals the same tax benefits as those who get coverage through their employers. And give Medicare recipients vouchers so that they can buy their own coverage. And reform tort laws and change regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines.

Rather than another top down government plan, we should give Americans themselves control over their own health care with market friendly responsible ideas.

So far, I've given you the view from Main Street, USA. I'd like to share with you how a Common Sense Conservative sees the world at large.

Later this year, we will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall - an event that changed not just Europe but the entire world. In a matter of months, millions of people in formerly captive nations were freed to pursue their individual and national ambitions.

The competition that defined the post World War II era was suddenly over. What was once called "the free world" had so much to celebrate - the peaceful end to a great power rivalry and the liberation of so many from tyranny's grip.

Some, you could say, took the celebration too far. Many spoke of a "peace dividend," of the need to focus on domestic issues and spend less time, attention and money on endeavors overseas.

Many saw a peaceful future, where globalization would break down borders and lead to greater global prosperity. Some argued that state sovereignty would fade - like that was a good thing? - that new non-governmental actors and old international institutions would become dominant in the new world order.

As we all know, that did not happen. Unfortunately, there was no shortage of warning signs that the end of the Cold War did not mean the end of history or the end of conflict.

In Europe, the breakup of Yugoslavia resulted in brutal wars in the Balkans. In the Middle East, a war was waged to reverse Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. North Korea's nuclear program nearly led to military conflict. In Africa, U.S. embassies were bombed by a group called Al Qaeda.

Two weeks ago, America commemorated the 8th anniversary of the savagery of September 11, 2001. The vicious terrorist attacks of that day made clear that what happened in lands far distant from American shores directly affect our security. We came to learn, if we did not know before, that there were violent fanatics who sought not just to kill innocents, but to end our way of life. Their attacks have not been limited to the United States.

They attacked targets in Europe, North Africa and throughout the Middle East. Here in Asia, they killed more than 200 in a single attack in Bali. They bombed the Marriott Hotel and the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. Last year in Mumbai, more than 170 were killed in coordinated attacks in the heart of India's financial capital.

In this struggle with radical Islamic extremists, no part of the world is safe from those who bomb, maim and kill in the service of their twisted vision.

This war - and that is what it is, a war - is not, as some have said, a clash of civilizations. We are not at war with Islam. This is a war within Islam, where a small minority of violent killers seeks to impose their view on the vast majority of Muslims who want the same things all of us want: economic opportunity, education, and the chance to build a better life for themselves and their families. The reality is that al Qaeda and its affiliates have killed scores of innocent Muslim men, women and children.

The reality is that Muslims from Algeria, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries are fighting Al Qaeda and their allies today. But this will be a long war, and it will require far more than just military power to prevail. Just as we did in the Cold War, we will need to use all the tools at our disposal - hard and soft power. Economic development, public diplomacy, educational exchanges, and foreign assistance will be just as important as the instruments of military power.

During the election campaign in the U.S. last year, you might have noticed we had some differences over Iraq.

John McCain and I believed in the strength of the surge strategy - and because of its success, Iraq is no longer the central front in the war on terrorism. Afghanistan is.

Afghanistan is where the 9/11 attacks were planned and if we are not successful in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda will once again find safe haven there.

As a candidate and in office, President Obama called Afghanistan the "necessary war" and pledged to provide the resources needed to prevail. However, prominent voices in the Democratic Party are opposing the additional U.S. ground forces that are clearly needed.

Speaker of the House Pelosi, Defense Subcommittee Chairman Murtha, the Senate Armed Services Committee Chair, and many others, recently expressed doubts about sending additional forces! President Obama will face a decision soon when the U.S. Commander in Afghanistan requests additional forces to implement his new counterinsurgency strategy.

We can win in Afghanistan by helping the Afghans build a stable representative state able to defend itself. And we must do what it takes to prevail. The stakes are very high.

Last year, in the midst of the U.S. debate over what do to in Iraq, an important voice was heard - from Asia's Wise Man, former Singaporean Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who wrote in the Washington Post about the cost of retreat in Iraq. In that article, he prophetically addressed the stakes in Afghanistan. He wrote:

"The Taliban is again gathering strength, and a Taliban victory in Afghanistan or Pakistan would reverberate throughout the Muslim world. It would influence the grand debate among Muslims on the future of Islam. A severely retrograde form of Islam would be seen to have defeated modernity twice: first the Soviet Union, then the United States. There would be profound consequences, especially in the campaign against terrorism."

That statesman's words remain every bit as true today. And Minister Lee knows, and I agree, that our success in Afghanistan will have consequences all over the world, including Asia. Our allies and our adversaries are watching to see if we have the staying power to protect our interests in Afghanistan.

That is why I recently joined a group of Americans in urging President Obama to devote the resources necessary in Afghanistan and pledged to support him if he made the right decision.

That is why, even during this time of financial distress we need to maintain a strong defense. All government spending should undergo serious scrutiny. No programs or agencies should be automatically immune from cuts.

We need to go back to fiscal discipline and unfortunately that has not been the view of the current Administration. They're spending everywhere and with disregard for deficits and debts and our future economic competitiveness.

Yet, though we are engaged in two wars and face a diverse array of threats, it is the defense budget that has seen significant program cuts and has actually been reduced from current levels!

First, the Defense Department received only ½ of 1 % of the nearly trillion dollar Stimulus Package funding - even though many military projects fit the definition of "shovel-ready."

In this Administration's first defense budget request for 2010, important programs were reduced or cancelled. As the threat of ballistic missiles from countries like North Korea and Iran grow, missile defense was slashed.

Despite the need to move men and material by air into theaters like Afghanistan, the Obama Administration sought to end production of our C-17s, the work horse of our ability to project long range power.

Despite the Air Force saying it would increase future risk, the Obama Administration successfully sought to end F-22 production - at a time when both Russia and China are acquiring large numbers of next generation fighter aircraft. It strikes me as odd that Defense Secretary Gates is the only member of the Cabinet to be tasked with tightening his belt.

Now in the region I want to emphasize today: The reason I speak about defense is because our strong defense posture in Asia has helped keep the region safe and allowed it to prosper.

Our Asian allies get nervous if they think we are weakening our security commitments. I worry about defense cuts not because I expect war but because I so badly want peace. And the region has enjoyed peace for so long because of our security commitment to our longstanding allies and partners.

Asia has been one of the world's great success stories. It is a region where America needs to assist with the right mix of hard and soft power. While I have so much hope for a bright future in Asia, in a region this dynamic, we must always be prepared for other contingencies. We must work at this - work with our allies to ensure the region's continued peace and prosperity.

I know that you all -- like all of Asia and indeed the whole world - have a keen interest in the emergence of "China as a great power."

Over the past few decades China's economic growth has been remarkable. So has the economic growth and political liberalization of all of our key allies in Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Asia's economic growth and political development, together with our forward military presence in the region and strong alliances, have allowed the region to prosper in peace for a long time.

We hope that Asia will continue to be an engine of world economic growth, will continue to democratize and will remain at peace.

Our future is now deeply linked to Asia's success. Our children's future. We must continue to strengthen our key alliance with Japan, a country going through its own democratic change. Together the U.S. and Japan built the security umbrella under which so many Asians prospered. While there is so much attention to China these days, we cannot forget the importance of Japan in helping to make this the "Pacific Century."

The recent elections in Japan demonstrated that voters wanted reform and an end to debt and stagnation. We have a substantial stake in Japan's success -- our alliance with must continue to be the linchpin of regional security.

With its open political system and vibrant democracy, South Korea wants to play a larger role on the international stage as well. Of course it wants us to work together toward a future where the peninsula is irreversibly denuclearized, and unified. But it also wants to play a global role. We need to work together with Japan, South Korea and our steadfast ally to the south, Australia, to make sure Asia remains peaceful and prosperous.

Australia rightly reminds us to keep our eye on Southeast Asia, where Indonesia has proved that Islam and democracy can co-exist. Indonesia has fought extremism inside its own border and is consolidating a multi-ethnic democracy that is home to hundreds of millions of Muslims.

Those who say Islam and democracy are incompatible insult our friends in Indonesia.

Our great democratic friend India is also "looking East", seeking a greater role in East Asia as well. Together with our allies we must help integrate India into Asia. If we do so we will have yet another strong democracy driving Asia's economy and working on shared problems such as proliferation and extremism.

And we must continue working with the region's most dynamic economy, China. We all hope that China's stated policy of a "Peaceful Rise" will be its future course.

You know better than most the enormous change that has taken place in China over the last thirty years. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have been pulled out of poverty as China has undertaken economic reforms that have resulted in unprecedented growth. Even today, China's economy is projected to grow by some 8%. It is helping to edge the world out of recession.

China has amassed huge financial reserves. Chinese diplomats are engaged on every continent and, through its vote on the United Nations Security Council, China has become critical in gaining UN support on multilateral issues from Darfur to Iran to North Korea.

Just four years ago, then-Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick urged China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system. He observed the many benefits to China of a "benign international environment."

The peaceful regional environment that China has enjoyed was created through the hard work of Americans, Japanese, South Koreans and Australians. Secretary Zoellick urged China to step up and play its role too.

We are working with China to de-nuclearize North Korea. But to be a responsible member of the international community China should exert greater pressure on North Korea to denuclearize and undergo the fundamental reforms it needs. Zoellick urged China to play a greater role in stabilizing the international energy market by ceasing its support of dangerous regimes.

China could play a role in stabilizing its ally Pakistan, and working for peace in Afghanistan. There are many areas where the U.S. and China can work together. And, we would welcome a China that wanted to assume a more responsible and active role in international politics.

But Secretary Zoellick also noted that many of China's actions create risk and uncertainty. These uncertainties led nations to "hedge" their relations with China because, in Zoellick's words: "Many countries HOPE China will pursue a 'Peaceful Rise' but NONE will bet their future on it."

See: this is the heart of the issue with China: we engage with the hope Beijing becomes a responsible stakeholder, but we must takes steps in the event it does not. See?

We all hope to see a China that is stable, peaceful, prosperous and free. But we must also work with our allies in the region and the world in the event China goes in a direction that causes regional instability.

Asia is at its best when it is not dominated by a single power. In seeking Asia's continued peace and prosperity, we should seek, as we did in Europe, an Asia "whole and free" - free from domination by any one power, prospering in open and free markets, and settling political differences at ballot boxes and negotiating tables.

We can, must and should work with a "rising China" to address issues of mutual concern. But we also need to work with our allies in addressing the uncertainties created by China's rise. We simply CANNOT turn a blind eye to Chinese policies and actions that can undermine international peace and security.

China has some 1000 missiles aimed at Taiwan and no serious observer believes Taiwan poses a military threat to Beijing. Those same Chinese forces make our friends in Japan and Australia nervous.

China provides support for some of the world's most questionable regimes from Sudan to Burma to Zimbabwe.

China's military buildup raises concerns from Delhi to Tokyo because it has taken place in the absence of any discernable external threat.

China, along with Russia, has repeatedly undermined efforts to impose tougher sanctions on Iran for its defiance of the international community in pursuing its nuclear program.

The Chinese food and product safety record has raised alarms from East Asia and Europe to the United States. And, domestic incidents of unrest -- from the protests of Uighurs and Tibetans, to Chinese workers throughout the country rightfully make us nervous.

It is very much in our interest and the interest of regional stability that China work out its own contradictions - between a dynamic and entrepreneurial private sector on the one hand and a one party state unwilling or unable to adjust to its own society's growing needs and desires and demands, including a human being's innate desire for freedom.

I do not cite these issues out of any hostility toward China. Quite the contrary, I and all Americans of good faith hope for the Chinese people's success. We welcome the rise that can be so good for all mankind. We simply urge China to rise responsibly. I simply believe we cannot ignore areas of disagreement as we seek to move forward on areas of agreement. Believe me, China does not hesitate to tell us when it thinks we are in the wrong.

I mentioned China's internal contradictions. They should concern us all. We hear many Chinese voices throughout that great country calling out for more freedom, and for greater justice. Twenty years ago, many believed that as China liberalized its economy, greater political freedom would naturally follow. Unfortunately that has not come to pass.

In fact, it seems China has taken great pains to learn what it sees as "the lesson" of the fall on the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union: any easing of political constraints can inevitably spin out of control. But, in many ways, it is the essence of China's political system that leads to concerns about its rise.

Think about it. How many books and articles have been written about the dangers of India's rise? Almost as large as China - and soon to be more populous - virtually no one worries about the security implications of India becoming a great power - just as a century ago the then-preeminent power, Great Britain, worried little about the rise of America to great power status.

My point is that the more politically open and just China is, the more Chinese citizens of every ethnicity will settle disputes in courts rather than on the streets. The more open it is, the less we will be concerned about its military build-up and intentions. The more transparent China is, the more likely it is they we will find a true and lasting friendship based on shared values as well as interests.

I am not talking about some U.S.-led "democracy crusade." We cannot impose our values on other counties. Nor should we seek to. But the ideas of freedom, liberty and respect for human rights are not U.S. ideas, they are much more than that. They are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many other international covenants and treaties.

They apply to citizens in Shanghai as much as they do to citizens in Johannesburg or Jakarta. And demands for liberty in China are Chinese, not American, demands. Just last year, many brave Chinese signed Charter 08, a Chinese document modeled on the great Czech statesman Vlacav Havel's Charter 77.

Charter 08 would not be unfamiliar to our Founding Fathers and was endorsed by Havel himself. No, we need not convince the Chinese people that they have inalienable rights. They are calling for those rights themselves. But we do have to worry about a China where the government suppresses the liberties its people hold dear.

Nothing of what I am saying should be seen as meaning conflict with China is inevitable. Quite the contrary. As I said, we welcome China's responsible rise. America and China stood together against fascism during World War II, before ravages took over in China - we were ready to stand together with China to shape international politics after World War II. Much has been accomplished since President Nixon's fateful visit. And again, we stand ready to work with what we hope will be a more open and responsible China on the challenges facing the 21st century.

All of you here know how deeply integrated the economies of the United States' and China's are. We rely on each other, sometimes unfortunately in unhealthy ways. America spends too much that we don't have, and then we go to China as a lender of first resort.

Our fiscal policy, lately, seems to be "tax, spend, borrow, tax some more, repeat" and then complain about how much debt China holds. America needs to gets its own fiscal house in order. That's a Common Sense Conservative perspective.

We can hardly complain that China holds so much of our debt when it's our over spending that created the debt.

But here's the reality. If in fact the United States does the "right" thing - if we spend less and save more - then China will also have to rebalance its economy. We need to export more to China - and we'd like China to consume more of our goods - just as we need to save and invest more. This vital process - so crucial to both countries - is impeded by problems of market access.

We must talk about these issues with more candor. If China adopts policies that keep our highest value products out of their markets, by manipulating technical standards or licensing requirements, our economic relationship suffers.

Our economic interdependence drives our relationship with China. I see a future of more trade with China and more American high-tech goods in China. But in order for that to happen, we need China to improve its rule of law and protect our intellectual property.

We need to avoid protectionism and China's flirtation with state-assisted "national champions." On our part, we should be more open to Chinese investment where our national security interests are not threatened. In the end, though, our economic relationship will truly thrive when Chinese citizens and foreign corporations can hold the Chinese government accountable when their actions are unjust.

I see a bright future for America in Asia. One based on the alliances that have gotten us this far, one based on free and open markets, one that integrates democratic India into East Asia's political life and one in which China decides to be a responsible member of the international community and gives its people the liberty - the freedom - they so desperately want.

Sadly, however, our largest free trade agreement ever in Asia, with South Korea, sits frozen in the Congress. In contrast, China is behaving wisely in negotiating free trade agreements throughout Asia. We want an Asia open to our goods and services. But if we do not get our free trade act together, we will be shut out by agreements Asians our making among themselves.

All of you here follow global financial markets and economic policy closely, so I know that it will come as no surprise to you that United States leadership on global trade and investment is being sorely tested at this moment.

We are struggling with a monumental debate on whether fiscal discipline, or massive government spending, will drive a sustained recovery. We are struggling to repair the excesses that grew in our own economy and served as a trigger to a catastrophic collapse in the global financial system.

And we are attempting to do so under the weight of a global imbalance of debt and trade deficits that are not only unbearable for the world's mightiest economy, but also unacceptable in that they foster tensions between global economic partners like the United States and China.

I am proud to be an American. As someone who has had the tremendous opportunity to travel throughout the United States and listen to the concerns of Americans in towns and cities across the country, I can tell you that there is a sense of despair and even crisis afoot in America that has the potential to shape our global investment and trade policies for years, and even decades to come.

Never has the leadership of our government ever been more critical to keeping my country, and the world, on a path to openness, growth and opportunity in global trade and investment.

It would of course be a mistake to put the entire burden of restoring the global economy on the backs of America's leaders. There is plenty of work for all of us to do in this matter. Governments around the world must resist the siren call of trade protection to bring short term relief during a time of crisis.

Those who use currency policy or subsidies to promote their nation's exports should remain acutely aware that if there ever were a time in which such policies could be viewed as "tolerable," that time has now passed. All participants who seek to find benefit in the global trading system must also take the responsibility of playing by the rules.

The private sector has responsibilities as well. For instance, it should not be the responsibility of government to dictate the salaries of bankers or the ownership of companies. And yet, due of the excesses committed by some, this is exactly where we find ourselves now because government now owns substantial portions of the private economy - even, unbelievably, in the United States.

These are challenging times for everyone, but we in the United States must humbly recognize that if we are to lead and to set the direction for the rest of the world, it must be by our example and not merely our words. And we must tread lightly when imposing new burdens on the imports of other countries.

Well, CLSA: My country is definitely at a crossroad. Polling in the U.S. shows a majority of Americans no longer believe that their children will have a better future than they have had...that is a 1st.

When members of America's greatest generation - the World War II generation - lose their homes and their life savings because their retirement funds were wiped after the financial collapse, people feel a great anger.

There is suddenly a growing sentiment to just "throw the bums out" of Washington, D.C. - and by bums they mean the Republicans and the Democrats.

Americans are suffering from pay cuts and job losses, and they want to know why their elected leaders are not tightening their belts. It's not lost on people that Congress voted to exempt themselves from the health care plan they are thrusting on the rest of the nation. There is a growing sense of frustration on Main Street. But even in the midst of crisis and despair, we see signs of hope.

In fact, it's a sea change in America, I believe. Recently, there have been protests by ordinary Americans who marched on Washington to demand their government stop spending away their future. Large numbers of ordinary, middle-class Democrats, Republicans, and Independents from all over the country marching on Washington?! You know something's up!

These are the same people who flocked to the town halls this summer to face their elected officials who were home on hiatus from that distant capital and were now confronted with the people they represent. Big town hall meetings - video clips circulating coverage - people watching, feeling not so alone anymore.

The town halls and the Tea Party movement are both part of a growing grassroots consciousness among ordinary Americans who've decided that if they want real change, they must take the lead and not wait to be led. Real change - and, you know, you don't need a title to do it.

The "Tea Party Movement" is aptly named to remind people of the American Revolution - of colonial patriots who shook off the yoke of a distant government and declared their freedom from indifferent - elitist - rulers who limited their progress and showed them no respect. Today, Main Street Americans see Washington in similar terms.

When my country again achieves financial stability and economic growth - when we roar back to life as we shall do - it will be thanks in large part to the hard work and common sense of these ordinary Americans who are demanding that government spend less and tax less and allow the private sector to grow and prosper.

We're not interested in government fixes; we're interested in freedom! Freedom! Our vision is forward looking. People may be frustrated now, but we're very hopeful too.

And, after all, why shouldn't we be? We're Americans. We're always hopeful.

Thank you for letting me share some of that hope, and a view from Main Street with you. God Bless You.

(via)

Should conservatives embrace Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story" ?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:35:00 +0000

I admit to not having ever seen a Michael Moore movie, though from what I understand his film Roger and Me was probably his defining film, one that predated the Bush era and thus was more balanced in its critiques. Of course his latest effort, a rant against the horrors of unrestrained capitalism, is not going to make any converts. Still, I was intrigued by the positive review of Capitalism: A Love Story at AICN by their resident conservative critic Massawyrm (he lambasted the animated film Happy Feet for being a propaganda film against religion, intended to indoctrinate children, and proclaimed The Ant Bully to be a storybook version of The Communist Manifesto. I have to agree with the former, and haven't seen the latter.).

Massawyrm speaks of his admiration for the "old" Michael Moore, invoking Roger and Me, and then makes the claim that this new movie is the closest Moore has come to returning to those genuine speak-truth-to-power roots. And he puts it in context of conservative ideals, even though it's basically an argument for socialism:

Now, it is important to understand that I wholeheartedly disagree with Moore's final conclusions. I do not believe that the framework of a "second bill of rights" - as FDR referred to it - is the solution to the problem. BUT, Moore's argument is compelling and very, very important. He makes a solid, virtually unassailable case against deregulation and fiscal anarchy, showcasing how it has profoundly crushed the backbone of the country and left many of our citizenry looted, helpless and worst of all, holding the bag. And what frustrates me most about all this is that it is an argument those of us on the republican side of the aisle really need to hear right now.

You see, while it is easy to point at the crazed evangelical ultra-conservatives as the source of the Republican party's problems, the truth is they're just the easy target; the loud distraction while the crew cuts in three piece suits repeat over and over that we are a party about freedom (that's good) and freedom means keeping the government out of our daily life (that's really good) and keeping the government out of our daily life means letting the financial industry do what they want without oversight (that's BAD.) In truth, the fundamental core of what a large majority of Republicans believe in is very much rooted in what Moore is talking about. After all, I can name three guys off the top of my head that hated banking, speculation and usury. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Jesus. Not exactly the thinkers most often quoted at liberal cocktail parties. Here Moore refers to them all.

If that segment of the population would see this film and hear Moore's arguments - while they won't throw up their arms and embrace socialism - the argument could become just how to go about fixing [capitalism] again, rather than screaming SOCIALIST! FASCIST! at one another. But Moore commits one, serious, fatal error.

Emphasis mine. This is a remarkable argument and one that in many ways captures my own fascination with conservatism, a movement whose core principles are in many ways complementary to liberalism, not opposed.

The error to which he refers is that Moore doesn't level the same critique at Obama. He puts this in context of marketing, ie that the film will be seen as critical of GOP Presidents but deferential to The One, and thus dismissed by the very people he argues most need to see it. Thats probably a fair assessment, since Obama is a pro-Establishment politician and not a revolutionary. However the bulk of the bank bailouts were indeed the previous Administration, and the Obama stimulus was a much broader package that in no way was limited only to "fat cats". Also, it should be noted that Banks accepting stimulus money were forced to accept exactly the type of rigorous, anti-capitalist intrusive regulation that Moore is probably advocating for, which is why the Banks are trying to give the money back now that they are out of the woods.

At any rate, it's likely that the relevance of Moore's critique to Obama is going to fall along the usual partrisan lines. I don't think omission of the Obama era invalidates the thesis for the preceding Administrations, however.

Do doctors support health care reform? IBD says no, NEJM says yes

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:20:00 +0000

There's an alarmist poll out from Investors Business Daily that makes the shocking claim that almost half (46%) of America's doctors will quit under Obama's proposed health care reform plan. The implications of such a finding - which runs counter to the American Medical Association's own support of President Obama for reform - are that one result of reform would be that America's doctors would revolt. But does this poll make any sense?

It turns out that the poll was a mail-in questionaire, not the usual phone-based poll. This is important because of selection bias; doctors who are predisposed to feeling threatened by proposed health care legislation will be more likely to respond. Also, mail-in responses tend to be skewed towards older repsondents, who also are more likely to be skeptical, or at least more willing to retire.

The poll itself was terribly written; one of the questions read, "Do you believe the government can cover 47 million more people and it will cost less and the quality of care will be better?" which is really three questions, and heavily biased towards skepticism (indeed, 71% answered No). It's worth noting that the pollling outfit has a horrendous track record; polling demigod Nate Silver comments:

As we learned during the [Presidential] campaign -- when, among other things, they had John McCain winning the youth vote 74-22 -- the IBD/TIPP polling operation has literally no idea what they're doing. I mean, literally none. For example, I don't trust IBD/TIPP to have competently selected anything resembling a random panel, which is harder to do than you'd think.

Nate also notes that the poll hasn't released any details of methodology, and bizarrely also says "responses are still coming in." Responses are still coming in? Why would they release any results until all responses have come in? The percentages are utterly meaningless otherwise! Nate advises people to ignore the poll entirely; it's going to be taken up by right-wing idealogues of course, but that was its intended audience from the beginning.

So what do doctors actually think? It's worth re-stating up front that despite the misinformation dogma of the right, the proposed reform is in NO WAY a government "takeover" of healthcare. A govt-run health care system akin to Britain's NHS is one in which doctors are employees of the state and paid from the government, there is no such thing as a private practice. Our reform, in total contrast, is about health insurance, ie who pays the insurance companies for the premiums. For the most part, in the US, the answer is that the cost is shared between employers and employees, whereas the government pays premiums for elderly people via Medicare. Even the most radical reform of this system, a single-payer system which would essentially eliminate the private health insurance industry, woud not aount to a government takeover of health care per se. Of course, a single-payer system is off the table and the so-called "public option" would only apply to a tiny fraction of people who dont qualify for/are unable to obtain insurance through other means. And even that modest reform is likely not going to be in the final package.

All of this boils down to the fact that due to misinformation by the Republicans about health care reform being a "government takeover", it is likely that many people who oppose it think it will be something it isn't. In other words, the misinformation campaign ("death panels!") is working.

But tehre are polls of doctors out there that are reliable and not subject to the bias and error of the IBD poll. The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the pre-eminent medical journals in the world, has results of a truly scientific poll whose methodology is indeed rigorous and public, which looked at physicians' views about the public option and expanding Medicare. Here is a summary of their findings:

Overall, a majority of physicians (62.9%) supported public and private options (see Panel A of graph, at right). Only 27.3% supported offering private options only. Respondents - across all demographic subgroups, specialties, practice locations, and practice types - showed majority support (>57.4%) for the inclusion of a public option (see Table 1, online). Primary care providers were the most likely to support a public option (65.2%); among the other specialty groups, the "other" physicians - those in fields that generally have less regular direct contact with patients, such as radiology, anesthesiology, and nuclear medicine - were the least likely to support a public option, though 57.4% did so. Physicians in every census region showed majority support for a public option, with percentages in favor ranging from 58.9% in the South to 69.7% in the Northeast. Practice owners were less likely than nonowners to support a public option (59.7% vs. 67.1%, P<0.001), but a majority still supported it. Finally, there was also majority support for a public option among AMA members (62.2%).

Overall, 58.3% of respondents supported an expansion of Medicare to Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 years (see Panel B of graph, online). This support was consistent across all four specialty groups, with proportions in favor ranging from 55.6% to 62.4% (P=0.08).

P-values! I swoon. This is a far more reliable study that can and should be taken seriously by policymakers. The full article at NEJM is worth a read, especially the discussion and conclusion, where they note that the support for a combined public/private solution even extends to physicians in the conservative south, physicians with a financial stake in their practice, and members of the AMA (which has historically opposed reform, but has supported the House legislation this time around).

The rationale for physician support for health insurance reform is intuitively obvious; by increasing the number of insured people, more patients are created who will make use of physician services. As the poll notes, support ranges across all physician specialties and practice types. Clearly, physicians as a group understand the difference between health care reform and "government takeover". Granted, opponents of health care reform who insist otherwise aren't exactly brain surgeons, though.

Related: Also see James Joyner's comments on the IBD poll and the discussion at LOG. Meanwhile, NPR has a story on the NEJM-published poll.

towards a "realist" foreign policy

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 11:35:00 +0000

There's a new foreign policy group in town called the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, and they have written a letter to President Obama urging him to "focus US strategy more clearly on Al Qaeda" instead of explicit nation-building. The text of the letter follows:

Dear Mr. President:

During your campaign for the Presidency, Americans around the country appreciated your skepticism of the rationales for the Iraq war. In 2002, you had warned that such an endeavor would yield "a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, and with unintended consequences." You pointed out the dangers of fighting such a war "without a clear rationale and without strong international support." As scholars of international relations and U.S. foreign policy, many of us issued similar warnings before the war, unfortunately to little avail.

Today, we are concerned that the war in Afghanistan is growing increasingly detached from considerations of length, cost, and consequences. Its rationale is becoming murkier and both domestic and international support for it is waning. Respectfully, we urge you to focus U.S. strategy more clearly on al Qaeda instead of expanding the mission into an ambitious experiment in state building.

First, our objectives in that country have grown overly ambitious. The current strategy centers on assembling a viable, compliant, modern state in Afghanistan--something that has never before existed. The history of U.S. state-building endeavors is not encouraging, and Afghanistan poses particular challenges. Engaging in competitive governance with the Taliban is a counterproductive strategy, pushing the Taliban and al Qaeda together instead of driving them apart. If we cannot leave Afghanistan until we have created an effective central government, we are likely to be there for decades, with no guarantee of success.

Second, the rationale of expanding the mission in order to prevent "safe havens" for al Qaeda from emerging is appealing but flawed. Afghanistan, even excluding the non-Pashto areas, is a large, geographically imposing country where it is probably impossible to ensure that no safe havens could exist. Searching for certainty that there are not and will not be safe havens in Afghanistan is quixotic and likely to be extremely costly. Even if some massive effort in that country were somehow able to prevent a safe haven there, dozens of other countries could easily serve the same purpose. Even well-governed modern democracies like Germany have inadvertently provided staging grounds for terrorists. A better strategy would focus on negotiations with moderate Taliban elements, regional diplomacy, and disrupting any large-scale al Qaeda operations that may emerge. Those are achievable goals.

Third, an expanded mission fails a simple cost/benefit test. In order to markedly improve our chances of victory--which Ambassador Richard Holbrooke can only promise "we'll know it when we see it"--we would need to make a decades-long commitment to creating a state in Afghanistan, and even in that case, success would be far from certain. As with all foreign policies, this enormous effort must be weighed against the opportunity costs. Money, troops, and other resources would be poured into Afghanistan at the expense of other national priorities, both foreign and domestic.

Mr. President, there is serious disagreement among scholars and policy experts on the way forward in Afghanistan. Many of those urging you to deepen U.S. involvement in that country are the same people who promised we would encounter few difficulties in Iraq and that that war would solve our problems in the Middle East, neither of which proved to be the case. We urge your administration to refocus on al Qaeda and avoid an open-ended state-building mission in Afghanistan.

(see the article at Politico for the full list of signatories - including Andrew Bacevich, Doug Bandow, and Steven Clemons)

Do thes ekind of letters have any real influence on policy? In a nutshell, yes. It's worth pointing out that a letter to President Bush from the neocon thinktank Project for a New American Century formed the basic template for the War on Terror. The PNAC folks also had tried to goad President Clinton into action against Iraq - it's remarkable how similar their policy prescriptions were; literally, 9-11 changed nothing for these people apart from giving them the excuse they wanted to implement the policy they'd always advocated. The same folks also sent President Obama a letter advocating (surprise) a stay-the-course approach in Afghanistan.

Clearly, the Realistic Foreign Policy folks hope to influence Obama in much the same way the PNAC crew influenced Bush, though of course their policy prescription is essentially the opposite. What worries me is the word "realistic" - it echoes the old, amoral realpolitik far too closely for my taste. I'm more in favor of a pragmatic liberal interventionism, and personally do believe that nation-building is an essential aspect of our foreign policy, but like these CRFP folks I don't think that gigantic military expeditions (with imperial overtones) are the way to go about that.

As I mentioned in my previous post, 9-11 still tends to dominate most foreign policy thinking on terrorism, and the CRFP people are much the same as their ideological opponents at the PNAC in this regard. The focus should not exclusively be on Al Qaeda per se but also on nascent groups like Al Shabab as well, and how to prevent them from imposing (and exporting) their views. Still, the CRFP is doing something valuable here by ensuring that President Obama does hear their argument and is forced to consider it.

Baucus bill follies: the public option is anti-progressive

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:15:00 +0000

I've been reading Tyler Cowen, Ezra Klein, and the League on the matter of the Baucus bill and am frankly bothered by the way in which progressives seem to be losing sight of the main goal of health care: to bring affordable coverage to 100% of all Americans. This is a goal that the vaunted public options does exactly zero to achieve, and it strikes me might actually be undermining these basic principles instead.

It should be noted, again, that the public option would only be available to a small fraction of citizens who are either ineligible or unable to afford private insurance. So the scope of the public option is limited to begin with, and certainly will be constrained so heavily that it will never, ever be the stealth road to single-payer that most of the progressives who are intent on making it a litmus test seem to think it will.

The problem is that the bipartisanship-obsessed reformers like Baucus are trying to trim the overall bill's cost below arbitrary limits as a guiding principle, rather than trying to craft the best policy to achieve the primary goals and then simply determining the cost. What difference does it really make if the final bill costs $800b or $1200b over the next decade? We just spent $800b on bank bailouts! But when it comes to blue-collar industries like the automobile workers, or something as critical as universal health care, suddenly we are being penny wise and pound foolish.

The foolishness is laid out quite starkly in this graph of the cost of the insurance mandate on lower-income middle class families:

Republicans are calling this a middle-class tax increase, and they are right. The solution is not to scrap the bill but to spend more money so that the impact on the middle class is ameliorated via subsidies. Inclusion of a public option would actually suck up even more of the reform budget and cause these effective tax burdens to increase; if progressives really want a progressive policy, then they should concentrate their energy on increasing the overall budget for the reform bill so that the main goals: universal and afffordable coverage, are met.

And let's not forget that Baucus only gets us to 97%. "Universal coverage" still leaves 3% - 9 million people - out in the cold.

Reform won't come cheaply. By trying to play the "cost savings" game, progressives are validating the conservative framing that for some reason, health care reform must be uniquely held to absolute fiscal standards, none of which were required for other reforms in other sectors of the economy (not coincidentally, the ones that cater to upper class and corporate interests). Liberals should be making a forceful argument for spending the money we need to get the job done, not mooning over a fanciful and frankly emasculated "single payer lite" pipe dream.

Not to say that fiscal responsibility isn't important. But instead of jumping through hoops to force the funding in, why not think outside the box for revenue? I am on record as supporting a VAT, coupled with a reduction in corporate income taxes. What if we further specified that all VAT revenue would first be applied to finding health care reform to make up the difference in case of cost overrun? Further, surplus from the VAT could be applied to pay into the Social Security trust fund, and after that pay down the national debt. There's a lot of ways we could tweak the details, but the point is, where are the forceful progressive voices advocating for some manner of VAT to help achieve the goal? Yes, VAT taxes are regressive, but that can be partly ameliorated via subsidies, and let's face it, paying a VAT will cost an individual less than having no insurance, especially if you are poor.

And one more thing - given that Baucus' plan would hurt Medicare Part D to the tune of $174 billion, liberals should also be making a forceful case for drug price negotiation, as well. These are the real lines in the sand. Or at least, where they should be.

Let me reiterate: liberals should be arguing for more spending on the reform bill, new taxes like a VAT (coupled with other measures to make it palatable), and drug pricing negotiation, so as to ensure that we reach the 100% coverage mark and we do not raise taxes on the middle class. Instead, they remain obsessed about the public option. It's a tragedy, and if and when reform dies and we are stuck with the status quo, the progressives' ideological purity won't mean a thing to the family who still doesn't have a way to pay their medical bills for Timmy's cancer.

UPDATE: 543 amendments to Baucus's bill by Democrats alone. Good.

9-11 as an outlier

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:15:00 +0000

Earlier, I posted my thoughts about whether terrorism was still a threat, noting that in one sense the answer was obviously yes, but asking whether 9-11 was the outlier it seemed to be. My post was intended to provoke a discussion, and the best response was by Dave Schuler, reproduced here in full:

The question reminds me of the story of the guy who jumped off the Empire State Building. As he passed the 30th floor, someone yelled to him "How are you doing?" to which he responded "So far, so good."

Of course 9/11 is an outlier. Unfortunately, from a political standpoint that's irrelevant. Any resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will necessarily respond to such an event (my view is that President Gore would have done virtually everything that President George W. Bush did , including invading Iraq, but I seem to be an outlier in that belief).

Yes, terrorism is a threat. As I pointed out in my memorial post, we haven't really responded prudently to the threat yet. In my view there are only two prudent responses: interrupt one of the critical success factors for the attacks on 9/11 or decide we'd rather live with the risk.

"Guys with a grievance", the factor most frequently referred to including in this comment threat, isn't one of the critical success factors.

I don't disagree with Dave. However, I think the response "of course 9-11 is an outlier" is only true depending on how you define "outlier". I agree that 9-11 is an obvious outlier in terms of scale, but was that just luck? if any number of things in the 9-11 plot had gone awry, the best they might have achieved would be a multiple of Flight 93. As Dave notes, these amount to "critical success factors" but interupting them is easy in hindsight knowledge of the plot.

Its possible that there are other similar casualty-amplifying plots out there which also have critical success factors, but for which we lack the benefit of hindsight to interrupt. Ironically, the success of such future plots is probably much lower due to 9-11's success, since 9-11 being so "out of the box" has changed our own security approach to compensate. So 9-11 might well be a one-shot, as long as we continue to be proactive in imagining how our technology can be used against us. I agree there is always going to be some residual risk of a mass casualty attack on the same scale, using a method we havent yet predicted or are able to anticipate.

The trade-off between that residual risk, and our basic liberties, is one that polarizes our modern political discourse. I agree with Dave that President Gore might well have taken many of the same actions as President Bush (though it's certain he would have acted less unilaterally in invading Iraq). Had that been the case, perhaps it would be liberals who now advocate aggressive interrogations and unilateral executive authority, and conservatives defending the liberty side of the security vs liberty equation. As things stand today, however, conservatives betray their heritage by favoring less liberty and more security, rallying behind fmr Vice President Cheney's self-serving insistence that the Obama Administration is making the country less safe.

(for the record, Attorney General Holder's decision to launch a very limited, initial investigation into torture of detainees was an agonizing and painful one undertaken at Holder's own conscience, and actually in defiance of Obama's preference. Obama would rather "look forward" but the Attorney General has the freedom to act as he thinks best.)

But in terms of who carried out the attacks, their motivations, their grievances, etc whether or not 9-11 was an outlier is a different question. If 9-11 was indeed no outlier by these standards (as few would disagree), then why do we need an explicit "war on terror" at all? A combination of heightened security at sensitive points (mass transit, government buildings, landmarks) and good old-fashioned investigative police work and traditional (lawful) interrogation methods will be enough to disrupt plots on Western soil by would-be jihadis - of which all have been rather inept thus far in the post-9-11 era. Case in point: the liquid bomber plot, which finally has resulted in some convictions after three trials.

Conservative partisans of the Bush Administration will sneer at the phrase "post-9-11 approach to terrorism" but the truth is that an obsessive focus on preventing the next 9-11 - and using it to justify all manner of compromises of our basic liberties, embracing illegal methods of torture, and engaging in adventurous military expeditions to remake every possible home for Al Qaeda to take roost - will make us more vulnerable to the actual threat of terrorism, which has continued unabated on a scale far smaller than 9-11, but at a much higher frequency worldwide. Liberal partisans of the "anti-Bush" school will sneer at the phrase "nation-building", equating any military action by the US in a foreign land as imperialism redux, but ignoring the fact that terrorists are able to exploit failed states, and the very real correlation between medieval Islamic regimes and their hospitability to foreign jihadis, will ensure further attempted acts of mass-casualty terrorism, both on our soil and abroad.

And therein lies the problem. The discourse on both right and left remains dominated by 9-11, even as the right and left shout at each other across a widening rhetorical divide. To really make progress in reducing the threat of terrorism, to both the West and the muslim world alike, we need to be able to free ourselves of the 9-11 mindset and identify the true forces at work which drive these conflicts and grievances. In a nutshell, those forces are nationalism and a backlash against secularism, which has fostered nothing but corruption and autocracy in the muslim world in general and in the Middle East in particular. to put it bluntly, we can use that. The details are a topic for another post, however...

9-11 reflections: Is terrorism still a threat?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:03:00 +0000

The obvious answer to the question is yes - and that goes for before as well as after 9-11. In many ways, 9-11 distorts the picture because it was the single largest casualty count of any terrorist attack in history (unless you start to factor in acts of state-sponsored terrorism during armed conflicts, but let's accept the conventional though arbitrary definition of terrorism as solely due to non-state actors).

The count of all major terrorist attacks resulting in 100 or more fatalities is an interesting one. There were 33 such attacks prior to 9-11, and a huge fraction of the post-9-11 attacks are in Iraq. I may be mistaken but the only attacks of any significant scale in the West after 9-11 have been in London and Madrid, though there have been numerous arrests of various Western muslims (mostly British) for various plots (mostly inept, like the ricin plot, the shoe bomber, and the liquid bombs).

So, what does that all mean?

If we exclude 9-11, then it looks like terrorism is a problem more relevant to the rest of the world, in response to nationalist and post-colonialist political turmoil. 9-11 seems to have been a major outlier. Hopefully that remains the case, though of course the idea that another 9-11-scale attack could recur is one that drives most of the debate here in the US about security, liberty, torture, etc. Some wll point to the lack of further 9-11 attacks as proof that the previous Administration's policies were justified; others will argue that security could have been bought for far less compromise on our basic principles of freedom, but either argument is essnetially impossible to prove.

I don't have any answers. But one thing is certain, that though 9-11 had a lasting impact on our nation's government and policy, it had much less of an impact on the American spirit. In that sense, at least, the terrorists can be said to have truly and utterly failed.

Related: my thoughts last year on the "silence libel" which still persists. 9-11 created a (gradually decreasing) distrust of Islam in the American psyche that the muslim-American community must simply accept exists, and overcome.

Losing Afghanistan: the McChrystal report

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:03:00 +0000

cross-posted from City of Brass

One of the major problems with the Bush Administration and its conservative Republican stalwarts regarding the Iraq War was the "stay the course" dogma which seemed immune to any attempt at an honest evaluation of the war's goals or purpose. There were no metrics for success, aside from a nebulous goal of "victory". Proponents of withdrawal were accused of defeatism and virtual treason. The bottom line was that "failure was not an option", which in the absence of a well-defined success meant perpetual war for its own sake.

President Obama promised a different approach, where success would be clearly defined and measured and the policy would be defined by the facts, not the other way around. The war in Afghanistan will put Obama's rhetoric to the test. Will he stay the course no matter the facts? Or will he be willing to adapt?

It should be noted that the opportunity for genuine and timely intervention in Afghanistan, as far as halting the spread of Al Qaeda beyond its borders, has passed, due to the colossal diversion of the Iraq war. Al Qaeda has now metastasized and infected numerous other places like Somalia and Sudan, not to mention generated sympathetic cells in Indonesia and even the UK. The horrific post-9-11 attacks on Bali and London drive the point home; the mission of containing Al Qaeda has failed. This is the new reality, which must be the guiding context for our policy in Afghanistan proper.

As far as the Afghanistan campaign itself goes, there's a great deal of information now that suggests that a revision of our policy is long overdue. Obama's appointment of Lt. Gen. McChrystal to oversee operations is a positive sign, given the latter's special forces experience and expertise. Along with his superior General Petraeus, known for his own counter-insurgency warfare doctrines, it's clear that the military leadership has the right attitude towards the mission - as McChrystal has pointed out, now one primarily of protection rather than of offense. The increase in troops authorized by President Obama (about 20,000, bringing the total to 60,000, plus 40,000 from NATO) are being put to good use:

[McChrystal's] much-anticipated assessment of the campaign does away with the counterproductive strategies of old, of bombing runs and door-kicking--"disruptive operations"--and emphasizes a sort of armed humanitarianism built upon strong relationships with the local populace. In large measure, the operation becomes a civil affairs mission, and focuses on the doctrine of Military Operations Other Than War. As McChrystal states in his recently issued ISAF Commander's Counterinsurgency Guide, "Earn the support of the people and the war is won, regardless of how many militants are killed or captured."
Infrastructure is just such a mechanism for change. McChrystal advocates a proliferation of projects across Afghanistan that puts Afghans to work and money in their pockets. Jobs, his assessment reportedly states, will solve sixty percent of the nation's problems. In addition to building a sustainable, self-sufficient nation on every level, from village schoolhouses to national highway systems, it will build local trust of the U.S. and ISAF soldiers working side-by-side with them.
A hospitable populace is key to McChrystal's goal of doubling the sizes of both the Afghan army and the police force. Any such plan leans heavily on the force-multiplying Green Berets (in conjunction with U.S. infantry and military police) to recruit and grow the Afghan army. McChrystal, himself a thirty-year Special Forces officer, intends to meet the ambitious target within three years. Any successful exit strategy from Afghanistan will depend on an effective security apparatus.
Not publicly stated, though certainly understood, is that large swaths of combat operations will fall under the domain of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command. Ruthlessly efficient and surgical in its precision, JSOC operates in "the shadows," as former Vice President Cheney once described it. While under the command of General McChrystal, it was JSOC who captured Saddam Hussein, and JSOC who killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (Indeed, McChrystal personally identified the body.)

In June, President Obama tasked McChrystal with doing a comprehensive review of the war in Afghanistan, and his report has finally been submitted. It has not yet been released to the public, but the general gist is well-known - the war is not going well:

The review is expected to confirm that protecting the Afghan people against the Taliban must be the top priority. The document has not been published yet, and the severity of McChrystal's assessment was difficult to gauge. But at an event last week, according to the BBC, he likened the US military to a bull charging at the matador-like Taliban and slightly weakened with each "cut" it receives.
US officials have spoken openly about the failing war effort in Afghanistan and McChrystal's report will be a distillation of their strong misgivings. He says the aim should be for Afghan forces to take the lead, but that the Afghan army will not be ready for three years and the police will need longer.
Although the report does not mention increasing troop numbers, the implication is that more soldiers will be needed to turn around an unsuccessful strategy. Officers in Afghanistan consider much of the effort of the last eight years wasted, with too few troops deployed and many of them placed in the wrong regions and given the wrong orders.

And therein lies the conundrum. When was the last time a military problem was identified by the military as not needing more troops to solve? At some point, a request for more troops is inevitable, and that takes the decision from the realm of strategic to the realm of political.

There are already calls from all sides of the political spectrum to reduce our involvement in Afghanistan rather than to increase it. Conservative commentator George Will details a litany of challenges and obstacles to success in Afghanistan and concludes,

...forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

In this, he echoes the decidedly liberal Rory Stewart in the LRB, who makes a more detailed historical assessment, and concludes:

The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer - perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state. If the West believed it essential to exclude al-Qaida from Afghanistan, then they could do it with special forces. (They have done it successfully since 2001 and could continue indefinitely, though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.) At the same time the West should provide generous development assistance - not only to keep consent for the counter-terrorism operations, but as an end in itself.
A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.

So here we are at a crossroads. One one hand, we "stay the course" - which actualy means more commitment, not less. The other is to back away, though not an outright abandonment of the Afghans to their fate. The concern I have, and the context in which I am still trying to assess where I stand on the issue, is that Afghanistan policy can not be considered in a vacuum, but in the broader strategy of containing Al Qaeda and violent extremism globally. And that is something that seems woefully absent from the debate.

The question has to be asked - how much can we do? If Somalia becomes another haven for Al Qaeda on the same scale as Afghanistan, with Al Shabab playing host rather than the Taliban, then are we obligated to replicate the Afghanistan campaign entirely there? Then what about Sudan? There's an argument for trying to do strategically less than more, not to eradicate, but to contain.

I am still working through my thoughts on this.

Tiller's killers

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:00:00 +0000

The reaction to the murder of George Tiller from the pro-life community is mostly one of horror and condemnation - but there is a substantial minority who aren't quite as interested in principle so much as vengeance.

Some of the raw emotion and hatred lurking beneath the surface erupted into public, ugly view on Twitter, where pro-lifers thought nothing of praising the death of "Tiller the Killer" and tagging their posts #tcot. There's also a lot of chatter about Tiller's murderer "performing a late-term abortion" - a moral equivalence argument intended to blunt criticism.

But the lunacy is not just confined to the Twitter fringe. World Net Daily, a mainstream conservative forum, is running a poll with some truly disturbing results - I just took a screenshot and with 2264 votes, a shocking 16% approve of the "baby killer being brought to justice", praising Tiller's murderer as a "righteous hero" or applauding the fact that the murder helps the pro-life cause because it "sends a signal to other abortionists". Another 14%, even though given other choices to denounce or disavow the murder, chose instead to lament that it was merely "bad news for the pro-life movement", in other words, more concerned with the PR aspects than the moral implications. And there's an additional 12% who admit the murder was wrong, but still "can understand how some might justify" it. This means 42% are simply unable to bring themselves to denounce this act of terrorism, full stop, as others with far more intellectual honesty have done immediately and without reservation.

Here's my screenshot of the poll results, as of this writing (with 2,337 votes). Note that you must be a registered forum member of WND to particpate. I myself voted for the first option, "Murdering any human being is wrong, period."

spare change we can believe in: the case for a VAT

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:42:00 +0000

So much economic hand-wringing, yet all its good for is to reiterate the same tired stale posturing from liberals and conservatives alike. Here's the basic problem.

1. Domestic spending can't go down. It's a fantasy to imagine that even draconian cuts would be tolerable or politically viable. Like it or not, Americans want their social services and safety nets. All the conservative handwringing about Socialism is a Red herring, pun intended. Anyway discretionary spending (non defense, non medicare, non social sec) is a tiny fraction of the overall budget anyway so theres very little to cut; American services are actually an incredible bang for the buck, especially compared to European counterparts.

2. Defense spending can't be cut. The world is a bad place. We have to spend a lot of money in a lot of places for basic reasons of security and global policy. Isolationism doesnt work; 9-11 proved that. Bottom line: we need resources to deal with the crap out there and that cost will only go up.

3. Social security and medicare will not be cut. Fuggedaboutit. It would be nice if we could avoid adding new pieces to it, though, like President Bush did (wouldnt it be great if a president had some constitutional authority to stop legislation in some way? ahh, fantasy...)

(I will admit here that I favor a single-payer insurance system, btw, and am absolutely opposed to social security "reform". Neither one will ever happen.)

So, what are we left with? Its wonderful that conservatives are now concerned about deficits, though they were not quite so worried about them when the cost of going to war in Iraq was being discussed back in 2002. Cheney then invoked Reagan in saying deficits dont matter; its hilarious how libs and cons alike have inverted their positions since then).

Still, we seem to be somewhat on the same page now, at least. Deficits do matter; they make the Chinese unhappy and we cant have that!

So what's the bottom line? We have deficits, and we have spending. So, we need more revenue. 20 years of conservatives arguing that tax cuts are the holy grail for increasing revenue have been shown to amount to essentially nothing; the Laffer curve is discredited. And the less said about "trickle-down" economics the better, voodoo indeed.

However, theres something to be said about reducing (or abolishing outright) corporate tax rates - along with steamrolling out any possible loophole for evasion in offshore tax havens or whatever. Pay less; but pay your fair share. Or, stop using the United States' roads, airports, postal system, electricity grid, water, internet, EM spectrum, etc to do your business, your call.

But ok I've just said we need more revenue, not less. How does cutting corporate taxes help? Well, it doesn't, in a vaccum, but actually cutting corp tax rates (dunno, by half?) might be almost revenue neutral once you factor in the cessation of rampant tax evasion and cheating. Maybe not, but it still needs to be done. Still, the real reason to throw the dog this bone is to help soften the blow for the real medicine: a value-added tax.

"aiieeeee!" scream the fiscal conservative warriors, but they seem to forget that the VAT is the best antidote to assuredly higher corporate taxes down the line. Rep. Bill Thomas (R) tried to start a debate on this back in 2005; presumably he had his own arse handed to him on a platter, but kudos to him for the effort. In fact there are two kinds of VAT, one the European system (which would essentially add a new layer of accounting to our system here) and the subtraction method used in Japan (where the VAT is a modest 5%), which could easily be applied here in the US using the existing corporate tax machinery. We might want to consider a reduced VAT, say half, for the housing industry, though. Plus, leveling VAT on imports and exempting all exports would be a great equalizer for our industries, especially the automotive one.

How much? well, taxes tend to increase over time, and its best to start out small and grow as needed. So, I'd favor a 15% VAT (half that for housing, none on food), with exports exempt. In addition, the AMT should be repealed and the corporate tax rate cut in half, as well as personal income tax reduced to zero on family incomes below $100,000. Plus, by law 50% of all revenue from the VAT would be required to pay down the deficit for the first ten years.

Who am I kidding? Obama wont dare break his sacred moderate mold - he's already taken single-payer health care off the table (even though its by far the best bang for our healthcare buck, and preserves the best aspects of the present system including consumer choice). So its no surprise that a VAT is off the table, at least until his second term. But I doubt Congress will play along either even then, thanks to that annoying two-year turnover on the House which guarantees that our elected representatives are always focused on the elected part instead of the representative part.

And the political establishment is not going to be any better - see here for a preview of the knee-jerk anti-tax attitude from Republicans, and Dems will also chime in in sorrowful tones about the regressiveness of it all upon the poor. Still, in principle a VAt is just a tool, and there should be some way of reaching bipartisan agreement about how to implement it for maximum benefit to actually solve the problems we have instead of just exploiting them as grist for our endless political mills.

The Specter of Souter's replacement

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:26:00 +0000

The news just broke an hour or so ago that Supreme Court Justice David Souter will retire. Souter was appointed by George HW Bush and proceeded to drive conservatives insane by refusing to bend to the right-wing agenda. Instead he has been what I consider a moderate voice on the court, though in general he has voted along with the liberal bloc. He was not as unpredictable as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was, for example.

Naturally this gives President Obama an opportunity to leave his mark by appointing a judge early on in his term - and thanks to Sen. Arlen Specter's party switch a few days ago, the Republicans are in a uniquely powerless position to interfere with Obama's selection.

Unfortunately, this golden opportunity is kind of wasted, since Souter was already a member of the liberal bloc on the Court, so any pick Obama is likely to make probably won't vote much differently than Souter would have, on average. A real coup would have been for a conservative justice to be retiring, which would then allow Obama to shift the balance of power, something that President Bush was never able to achieve despite having two opportunities to appoint new justices.

Still, if Obama picks a woman justice (as is being rumoured) then there still will be a shift in perspective in the Court - the decisions that SCOTUS renders are important not just for the end result but also for the opinions and dissents therein, and a female voice in all of that will be a good thing. Since Justice O'Connor was the first woman to serve on the Court, and after her retirement was replaced by another male (Justice Alito), there's an opportunity here to bring some of that balance back. Plus, she was of an earlier generation, so Obama's hypothetical female Justice pick would probably be someone younger for whom the equal rights battles of the Sixties are history rather than experience. So we can assume that the replacement would be more, ahem, militant in some respects when it comes to womens' issues. I think that is fantastic; of course the Republicans are going to freak out accordingly.

Overall, President Obama has a chance to influence the Court in a more subtle, yet nevertheless profound, way. Let's hope he doesn't botch it and pull a Harriet Miers...

respect, but don't fear, the Tea Parties

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:47:00 +0000

Yesterday's nationwide Tea Bagger tax protests seem to have been reasonably successful, with total turnout probably at least a couple of hundred thousand people. Despite dogma by the conservative blogsphere that the media was ignoring them, it seems that coverage was everywhere - including on NPR, which even interviewed Glenn Reynolds.

One of the more fairly written articles about these protests was at The Daily Beast, which pointed out that there was also a substantial Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS) mentality running through them:

But when I saw the giant placard which read “Hussein = Commie,” the time had come for some counseling. The guy holding the sign looked like he could have come over on the subway from Williamsburg, wearing a hoodie, sunglasses, and an iPod. I asked him if the sign was serious. Oh, yes. “Every-time he opens his mouth he spouts textbook Marxism, Communism, Socialism,” said the man who initially gave his name as “Barry Soetoro”—Obama’s name when he lived in Indonesia as a child. After some prodding, it turned out the protester was named Ted Houvouras, a Manhattan real estate executive with a degree in economics from Georgetown. The pedigree didn’t make his analysis any more persuasive, but it hammered home one point clearly. Hating President Obama has already become a cottage industry for a hard-core fringe, as it was for Clinton après-Monica and Bush after the invasion of Iraq.
[...]
The conservatives organizing these events kept studiously repeating the apparently poll-tested line that these rallies were not about Republicans or Democrats, but their appeal is self-evidently partisan. It’s part of the “patriotic resistance” recruitment drives that started popping up online days after the election. It brings to mind loaded old slogans like Nixon’s “silent majority.” And when the president is cast as somehow un-American there is a rank ugliness to the sentiments that are being stirred. It may be good for ratings, but it’s bad for the country.

Given that these people were essentially protesting the expiration of tax cuts that President Bush intended to expire, amounting to a few percentage points for the topmost tax bracket, the stated rationale for the protests comes across as rather selfish, the antithesis of "Country First". Still, there is a real policy difference at the heart of these protests, the belief that government should be smaller, and thus the tax burden should be lower. However the fundamental problem with this philosophy is that "big" government is not the problem, it's bad government that is. The simple truth is that government is not going to get smaller, and rightly so; the challenges of the modern world require it. In a sense these protests are a denial that elections have consequences; to expect a liberal president to pursue a course of government reduction is absurd, and given that he won't (and the American people prefer it that way), then either he raises taxes or he doesn't. Not raising taxes, the fundamental goal of these protestors, would inflate the deficit far, far worse than raising them a minor amount (as Obama is proposing to do). And yet it is deficit spending that these protestors claim to be against.

A simple rebuttal to the tax parties is this: why weren't you worried about deficit spending when you supported the Iraq War? They have no answer other than to point lamely to their signs now accusing Bush alongside of Obama for being "part" of the problem, but again, there were no protests on Tax Day the past eight years.

Related: Dear Conservative Teabaggers at Daily Kos.

Nick Lampson for NASA Administrator?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:51:00 +0000

Eric Berger, science blogger at the Houston Chronicle, points out that NASA remains a headless organization under Obama's administration:

It's clear Obama is unhappy with NASA's plan to rely on Russian support for five (or maybe even six) years while awaiting results from its work-in-progress Constellation program. He also just doesn't seem all that interested in space.

These are hard times for folks at Johnson Space Center. They support manned spaceflight. But the shuttle program is coming to an end in a couple of years and the new boss may not support a robust manned spaceflight program in the future. That's bad for Houston.

Perhaps even worse right now, NASA doesn't even have a new boss and the uncertainty over the future is palpable and damaging. The message to NASA from the President, whether intentional or not, is pretty much: "You're not a high priority."

The comment thread is interesting however, pointing out that NASA's Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake is now represented by a freshman Republican, Pete Olsen, who narrowly defeated incumbent Nick Lampson (D). As a result, NASA lost a huge amount of political capital, to the detriment of the entire Houston region.

As it happens, this hasn't gone unnoticed by the residents of the Clear Lake area, resulting in a grassroots effort to draft/pitch Lampson for the job as NASA's chief. The Bay Area Houston blog has a post on Lampson's qualifications:

Prior to re-redistricting, Nick served the Galveston, Beaumont, area and a small part of Harris County which included NASA/JSC. He has always been an advocate for the space program and during his last term forged bipartisan support for long term funding. Unfortunately, he wasn't a republican, so the voters elected rookie Pete Olson.

NASA/JSC lost a tremendous amount of clout when Olson was elected. With a Democratic Administration and a rookie Congressman, JSC had no voice in the White House. Lampson was in line for the chair of the Space Subcommittee which oversees NASA. Olson, as a rookie, is now the ranking republican on the Committee. The chair, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is a Democrat from Arizona and a good friend of Nick. Gabrielle is married to an astronaut, which just can't hurt.

Nick, as a Congressman, had always been one to reach out to everyone in his district. During his last two years, he had townhall meetings across his district, including a monthly event at a local NASA restaurant to discuss space policy. The crowd was a great mix of young, old, engineers, administrators, republicans, and Democrats. There was never a screening process on attendance, or a screening process for questions and answers.

And notes that Pete Olsen himself is supportive of Lampson taking the post. The Houston establishment is coalescing around Lampson, in fact - a Houston Chronicle story reported that Lampson was a finalist contender for the spot, and the Texas Congressional delegation has already written to Obama in support.

Lampson himself is on-board, as well - a local news station, KFDM News, spoke with Lampson on the phone about it:

KFDM News spoke with Lampson by telephone Thursday morning. He told us he hasn't been contacted by the Obama administration nor spoken with anyone in the administration about the NASA post.

"They are keeping it real close to the vest," said Lampson. I don't know anything about it. I'd be flattered if I were asked. I'd certainly give it consideration. I'd be honored to serve if I'm asked."

Lampson says he's aware that some time ago lawmakers wrote letters supporting him for the position.

There are other candidates, including a former astronaut, but it's clear that NASA needs a politician rather than a technocrat at the top if the agency is going to thrive and make tough choices ahead.

It's so hard to find good help these days

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:52:00 +0000

The Obama Administration's woes in filling political appointees are getting a lot of attention in the media. However, it should be noted that Obama is doing better than average when compared to previous presidents.

Much of the problem is that Obama's ethical standards are so stringent that qualified candidates with relevant experience are forced to screen themselves out of consideration. For example, Obama's ban on lobbyists sounded great in theory, but often people with the right skills do have lobbyist gigs on the side. There's a good story at NPR on this, too.

Plus, there's a decent amount of scalp-hunting at work here that ultimately goes against our national interest - as Megan McArdle puts it,

This new tradition of bulldogging every appointee in the hope of embarrassing the president has to stop. We should be focusing on whether or not the nominee can do the job, not whether there is some small breach of an onerous regulation in his history that can possibly be dug up. It feels good in the short term, but when ability to find a native-born nanny becomes a more important qualification for the presidential candidate than experience relevant to the job to be done, it's time for a national rethink.

Global warming: is relative humidity increasing or decreasing?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:31:00 +0000

I am not a global warming expert but I do follow the debates with reasonable attention to detail. I think my scientific training provides me the tools to assess the scientific claims to a reasonable degree even though I lack the training to go much deeper than abstracts, figures, and conclusions of papers on the topic.

Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit (the global warming skeptic's counter-site to the Real Climate project) points to a new paper that purports to show that the relative humidity of the upper atmosphere is declining rather than increasing as one might expect based on climate models. The implication pertains to how much feedback there is with increase in atmospheric CO2 - a positive feedback (increasing relative humidity) would imply greater temperature change per doubling of CO2 concentration increase, ie making global warming worse, whereas a negative feedback would imply the opposite, that global warming is less of a threat. Note that the debate is only about the magnitude of the increase in temperature change with increased CO2, not a repudiation of global warming outright. In fact the whole issue of relative humidity essentially validates the main assumption of global warming as caused by CO2 in the first place.

Still, the paper is getting attention from committed GW skeptics like Dave Price at Dean's World, who interprets the results as a "collapse" of a "central pillar" of global warming theory. Anthony Watts, another GW skeptic, also suggests that the paper's findings "could be significant". However, a reading of the paper's abstract and conclusions show a far milder assertion, related to data collection protocols using balloons in the atmosphere, rather than any such monumental toppling of the central GW dogmas.

The paper makes the following claims (see the abstract reprinted at Climate Audit):

- relative humidity has been thought to be increasing with global temperature (ie, positive feedback)
- in the upper atmosphere, according to balloon data, the paper reports that relative humidity has actually been decreasing (ie, negative feedback, with the warming trend that the authors explicitly acknowledge exists)

the authors themselves do acknowledge in the abstract itself that balloon data must be "treated with great caution, particularly at altitudes above the 500 hPa pressure level", though Anthony Watts does not mention this admission in his summary. The abstract only reports a negative feedback trend above 850 hPa for the tropics and southern midlatitudes, and above 600 hPa for the northern midlatitudes. The abstract goes on to explicitly state that the humidity trend is "significantly positive below 850 hPa in all three zones" - which is where the vast bulk of the water vapor in the atmosphere resides.

the main conclusion of the paper is not as bold as Dave implies - they merely state that the data suggests that there might need to be a review of data collection protocols using balloons, since the data is so iffy indeed and at odds with satellite measurements (which contrary to Watts' assertion, are probably more accurate for annual average measurements than spot measurements by balloon. see notes below for an analogy as to why). Here's the first paragraph of the conclusion proper from the article full text (courtesy of Watts):

It is of course possible that the observed humidity trends from the NCEP data are simply the result of problems with the instrumentation and operation of the global radiosonde network from which the data are derived. The potential for such problems needs to be examined in detail in an effort rather similar to the effort now devoted to abstracting real surface temperature trends from the face-value data from individual stations of the international meteorological networks. As recommended by Elliot and Gaffen (1991) in their original study of the US radiosonde network, there needs to be a detailed examination of how radiosonde instrumentation, operating procedures, and recording practices of all nations have changed over the years and of how these changes may have impacted on the humidity data.

emphasis mine. The conclusion goes on to state that "trends of water vapor shown by the NCEP data for the middle and upper troposphere should not be “written off” simply on the basis that they are not supported by climate models". I agree, but they should heed their own advice when they state a few sentences later, "it is important that as much information as possible be retrieved from within the “noise” of the potential errors." If the balloon data is inherently noisy (partly due to collection protocols that the authors themselves acknowledge must be refined and reviewed) then making claims about the trends of relative humidity from that data alone is essentially treating noise as data. In light of the problems with the balloon data - again, explicitly acknowledged by the authors in their own abstract and conclusion - it's perfectly reasonable that review papers continue to assert that there is a scientific consensus that water vapor provides a positive feedback.

The authors have made a good case for a review of balloon data collection protocols, but have made no claims on whether the data we have from balloons so far is of any value. The "central pillar" (not really) of GW theory has certainly not been "collapsed" by this paper in any sense.

Incidentally there is a lot more information about humidity and water vapor effects available from other science bloggers. See:

Water vapour: feedback or forcing? at Real Climate
Evaporating the water vapor argument at Skeptical Science
Anti-global heating claims: Myth #18 at Scholars and Rogues

As far as the meta arguments about science go, note that the paper in question was accepted but according to Watts is being "ignored". As far as i am aware, publication is the exact opposite of being "ignored". One of the authors of the paper in question points to a single vitriolic and political comment by a reviewer as evidence that the paper's refusal at a more prestigious journal is evidence of a deeper agenda at work; he may not be aware that reviewers are also human, that sometimes prestigious journals refuse perfectly valid papers for trivial reasons. Since they haven't released the full text of the reviewers' comments, we are not able to discern whether there were perhaps more substantive reasons for the refusal of the paper at the big journal.

At any rate the simple fact of the paper being accepted (granted, by a "lesser" journal than the author's ego would prefer) puts the truth to the lie that anti-GW skeptics are being shut out by the all-powerful, money-grubbing GW consensus conspiracy.

finally, one note regarding satellite vs balloon measurements for long term averaged regional data. Balloons provide a single spot measure whereas satellites can integrate over a far larger area. The former are very vulnerable to local variation and noise whereas the latter can average these out by simple virtue of broader field. It's like trying to assess whether a patient has fatty infiltrating liver disease by taking a liver biopsy: you take a tissue sample over here, but what if the diseased tissue is over there? if you image the whole liver at once (analogous to satellites), then you get the broad picture and can make a global (liver) assessment more accurately and safe from measurement variation.

Do the Marines respect the Commander in Chief?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:18:00 +0000

One of the strategies of the conservative right has been to try and politicize the military. The confuse their own military fetish and partisan self-interest with genuine patriotism and the public good (because in their view, they hold a monopoly on both). In so doing, they disrespect the very troops they allegedly revere. For example, the Bush Administration paid great lip-service to veterans on the field but left them hanging out to dry when they got home.

Now, the right is taking their insult to the military to new levels, by promoting this video which allegedly shows that the military does not respect Obama the way they did Bush:

At Redstate.com, the bloggers crow that this is the "Semper Fi Zone" which is about as gross an insult to the professional ethics of the Marine Corps as you can imagine. In the fevered imaginings of the conservative right, a military that shows a preference for one political party over another is actually a desirable thing, instead of the incredible threat to democracy it would actually represent. But turning America into a banana republic is apparently one of their political goals.

Grayhawk, one of the most level-headed military bloggers - and a genuine conservative instead of these Republican hacks at RedState - took serious issue with the video above:

I'm concerned it might be one compiled to give the impression that the current President of the United States lacks the support from the military his predecessor had. That is not the case, and to imply otherwise is an insult to the integrity of the US military, and in my mind reflects both wishful thinking and ignorance on the part of anyone making the claim.
...
it's worse than what I thought. The first video above is the cheapest of cheap shots. Marines in the Obama video have been clearly called to attention, and are standing at attention when he enters. Whooping it up for the Commander in Chief therefore is not an option. Period. As for the fadeout, cheers can be heard (and they aren't 'tepid') until the audio is cut to go "back to the newsroom".

Unfortunately, principled conservatives like Greyhawk are increasingly being drummed out of the GOP and the conservative ranks. He's feeling the pressure right on his own site.

And as far as the Marines go, they stand above these cheap attempts at stealing their honor for political gain. Here's the proof:

Zakaria on The Curse of Oil Wealth

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:12:00 +0000

In Fareed Zakaria's book The Future of Freedom, he makes an extended argument for why the possession of oil resources has historically been a barrier to liberalization and freedom. He made a condensed version of that argument in an essay in Newsweek back in April 2003 when the Iraq war was just beginning:

A 'SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGE'

Vice President Dick Cheney recently remarked that Iraq's oil resourcesóthe second largest in the world--will be a "significant advantage" when building democracy. This is a common refrain, echoed by many within and without the administration. Unfortunately, the opposite is closer to the truth. With the exception of Norway, virtually all the worldís oil states are dictatorships. This is not an accident. Oil--like other natural resources--does not help produce capitalism, civil society and thus democracy. It actually retards that process.

Countries with treasure in their soil don't need to create the framework of laws and policies that produce economic growth and create a middle class. They simply drill into the ground for black gold. These "trust-fund states" donít work for their wealth and thus don't modernize--economically or politically. After all, easy money means a government doesn't need to tax its people. That might sound like a good idea, but when a government takes money from its people, the people demand something in return. Like honesty, accountability, transparency--and eventually democracy.

This bargain, between taxation and representation, is at the heart of Western liberty. After all, that is why America broke away from Britain. It was being taxed but not represented in the British Parliament. The Saudi royal family offers its subjects a very different bargain: "We don't ask much of you [in the form of taxes] and we don't give you much [in the form of liberty]." It's the inverse of the slogan that launched the American Revolution--no taxation without representation.

THE CURSE OF OIL

Far from limiting state power, oil actually strengthens it. There is always enough money for the army, the intelligence services and the secret police. Saudi Arabia, for example, spends 13 percent of its annual GDP on the military, four times America's level. Oil also means that corruption infects every aspect of the society. Businessmen are valued not for what ideas they have or how hard they work, but for who they know. Oil states have a courtier culture, not a commercial culture.

The only thing Zakaria is missing here is that part of teh reason for the above is that oil wealth also invites interference from other nations and powerful entities (corporations, crime syndicates, etc) and these also play a role in retarding the process of liberalization. in fact the entire history of the Middle East is one long excercise in interference by the "free" countries to keep the region under autocratic rule, the better to ensure "stability" with respect to the supply of oil. One wonders just how much of our freedom depends on the lack of it for others.

Republican strategy: party before country

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:05:00 +0000

The GOP is in full obstructionist mode regarding the economic stimulus plan - there's an excellent summary at myDD of the GOP's general strategy:

The GOP's main contention has been now for over 30 years that by reducing the top tax rate on personal and corporate income that a large increase in aggregate total savings would result. Yet the savings rate of American households has been declining for more than a decade and it now stands at the lowest level of the post-WW II era. Since 2003, the combined annual net savings of households, businesses, and government have declined to about one percent of gross national income. So if increasing the savings rate is the goal so as to thus increase investment, cutting taxes hasn't worked.

And yet the GOP continues to pitch the idea that tax cuts lift the economy. Well, the Democrats are batting now and they shouldn't swing at balls outside the strike zone. To continue the metaphor, this is the GOP's set up pitch. They want the stimulus to fail and they know full well that the gravity of the situation portends an extended economic downturn that they will look to blame increasingly on the Democrats on the hope that Americans have short memories when it comes to assigning blame. That's their game plan. They want the President and the Democrats to strike out. Tax cuts pacifies their base but not ours and doubly does next to nothing when it comes to lifting the economy. For them, it's a win-win. But it's a lose-lose for the American people.

The reality is the tax cutting regimen has been a race to the bottom for most Americans. The top 300,000 Americans collectively now enjoy almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980 and equaling levels not seen since just before the onset of the Great Depression. Earlier this year, Citizens for Tax Justice released a report finding that 70 percent of the benefits of the capital gains and dividends loopholes will go to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers in 2009. Same as it ever was for the GOP. The game is the same as always, starve the government of funds and you might just prevent a national health care system. It's time for a different course.

A different course indeed - and Obama has the popular mandate to do so. As Obama said to the GOP leadership (in a meeting on his second day as president - unprecedented!) - "I won."

“We just have a difference here, and I’m president,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. Cantor, according to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who was at the meeting.

Mr. Emanuel said that Mr. Obama was being lighthearted and that lawmakers of both parties had laughed.

Mr. Cantor, in an interview later, had a similar recollection. He said the president had told him, “You’re correct, there’s a philosophical difference, but I won, so we’re going to prevail on that.”

“He was very straightforward,” Cantor added. “There was no disrespect, but it was very matter-of-fact.”

In other words, it's time to try something different and there isn't any reason to play by the GOP playbook anymore. That's what winning entails: elections have consequences, regardless of what the sore losers whine about.

Sore Loser watch: wanting Obama to fail

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:42:00 +0000

More Obama Derangement Syndrome, this time from Leon at RedState, who labels Obama as "corrupt" and "morally deparaved":

as we will remember in two short days, all is not morally well in America. Barack Obama is sure to have a lengthy honeymoon with many people, who will be willing to overlook his essential moral emptiness for as long as it appears that he is doing a competent job of running his Administration. As for me, it is my hope for America that Obama’s moral emptiness will be exposed through his actions for all to see, and in such a way that we will not continue to allow ourselves to sweep it under the rug.

I anticipate that after Obama's (second) term as president ends, these will be the same voices calling for him to be impeached.

The Obama Administration policy on nuclear power

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:02:00 +0000

The Senate testimony of Steven Chu for Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration gave a very specific, detailed look at how the new Administration will treat nuclear energy as a priority. The NEI Nuclear Notes blog, which follows the commercial energy industry, has compiled a list of excerpts from the testimony in which Chu is questioned on specifics about how he would promote nuclear power. Chu answered a number of questions from Senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, about the various issues including waste storage and loan guarantees. I think this final back and forth with Senator Mary Landrieu served as a good summary:

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA): My question is, to follow-up, and I ask this, because, not because it hadn’t been asked ten times to you this morning, but I think, in asking, you’ll understand how many of us feel about nuclear. You’ve had a least six or seven questions. Mine’s going to be the eighth. It’s just apparent to us, mainly based on the great leadership of Senator Domenici, who is with us, I think, this morning, and others, the importance of getting off the dime on nuclear. So would you just briefly state again what are your number one, number two, and number three strategies to move us forward on nuclear?

Steven Chu: The first is to accelerate this loan guarantee program for the several [new] nuclear reactors, their need to start, to restart the nuclear industry. So that, certainly, you’ve got to get going as you say. I agree with you, Senator. The other question, and it’s a concern of other Senators, is that we need to develop a long range plan for the safe disposal of the waste. And this is something that’s the responsibility of the Department of Energy. And that has to go forward as well, because you have to develop that concurrently with the starting of this industry again. And so those are [inaudible], in my mind, the two highest priorities. The third is that there is research that has to be done. Again, because reprocessing has the potential for greatly reducing both the amount and lifetime of the waste and to extend the nuclear fuel.

Sen. Landrieu: Well can we, can this committee count on you to go to bat in the atmosphere of these troubled financial markets? Can we count on you to go to bat with the Administration to make sure that the energy sector of this country is given priority, in terms of stabilizing markets so that we can get a lot of this done with government, you know, not being done by the government but supported by the government?

Steven Chu: Yes. It’s been said again and again on the importance, for example, of that $18.5 billion loan guarantee program that to start moving in that direction.

That's a very refreshing attitude. It should be noted that we are, as seemingly always, behind the Chinese when it comes to commercializing nuclear energy:

While the West frets about how to keep its sushi cool, hot tubs warm, and Hummers humming without poisoning the planet, the cold-eyed bureaucrats running the People's Republic of China have launched a nuclear binge right out of That '70s Show. Late last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors - enough to generate twice the capacity of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam - by 2020. And even that won't be enough. The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants. A team of Chinese scientists advising the Beijing leadership puts the figure even higher: 300 gigawatts of nuclear output, not much less than the 350 gigawatts produced worldwide today.

To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.

The pebble-bed design is the future of nuclear energy and as the excellent article in Wired points out, makes the traditional nuclear industry obsolete. We need to catch up, and quickly.

ODS: "Obama is evil"

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:43:00 +0000

Obama Derangement Syndrome is here to stay. This lunatic says that Obama is "evil" and prays for the President to fail:

I do not hesitate today in calling on godly Americans to pray that Barack Hussein Obama fail in his efforts to change our country from one anchored on self-governance and constitutional republicanism to one based on the raw and unlimited power of the central state.

It would be folly to pray for his success in such an evil campaign.

I want Obama to fail because his agenda is 100 percent at odds with God's. Pretending it is not simply makes a mockery of God's straightforward Commandments.
...
Nowhere in the Bible does it teach us to obey evil rulers. Nowhere.

This is a time for principled biblical resistance, not phony Christian appeasement.

To summarize, Obama wants "unlimited central government" and he is evil because this conflicts with the Commandments (I must have missed the one where it says, Thou Shalt Not Vote Democrat).

This is rather poor sport of me, nutpicking like this, but it serves a useful purpose in pointing out that there is a regressive resistant core of idiocy, racism, and intolerance in every society, no matter how enlightened the mainstream is. This guy's ravings would do Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden proud.