On Sunday, I speculated that the only thing that separated the second Bush term from the second Nixon term was that "there is (as yet) no hint that Bush himself may have been involved in criminal activity."
When I wrote that, I was aware of Bush's internal spying program and even of Bush's passionate defense of that program. It occurred to me that this issue could be the "crime" that would complete the analogy to Nixon, but I pretty quickly dismissed that idea, concluding that internal spying probably didn't have enough "legs" to create an actual legal problem for Bush, especially since he was not trying to cover it up -- which all have concluded was Nixon's big mistake.
I am not so sure now. What I had failed to appreciate at the time is the extent to which Bush has thrown down a direct challenge to the power, even the relevancy, of Congress. He is basically asserting that the Constitution gives the President the power to ignore federal statutes if he concludes that the strictures imposed by those statutes interfere with what he feels he needs to do to protect national security. Nothing upsets Congress so much as a President telling it the Constitution makes it irrelevant on such questions. As such, this issue may very well prove to have as much "legs" for Bush as Watergate did for Nixon.
One thing seems clear. Unlike most Washington scandals, this one will not involve perjury, obstruction of justice, or other such derivative, investigation-induced crimes. For once, the issue is going to be the action itself rather than the cover-up. And, for that, at least, I give credit to Bush. He is not going to try to hide what he did. He is going to defend it.
Ironically, though, this tactic may make it all the harder for Congress, even a Republican controlled Congress, to ignore the issue, since it is hard to imagine a more brazen assertion of executive pre-eminence and Congressional subservience. Entirely apart from the affront this poses to the hubris of individual Congressmen, Congress as an institution can hardly let such a challenge pass without abandoning any pretense that it is a co-equal branch of government.
The issue has legs in another sense as well. There are going to be investigations. Arlen Specter, a maverick Republican, but a Republican nonetheless, has already said that the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the spying authorizations. There will also be press investigations, with each reporter imagining himself to be the next Bob Woodward, the reporter to bring down a President. There will be adverse commentary, and not all of it from the Left. No less of a Bush fan than George Will is already questioning the legality of Bush's actions and, while continuing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt pending the availability of additional information on how and why Bush used his claimed powers, even Bill Kristol concedes that "Congress has the right and the ability to judge whether President Bush has in fact used his executive discretion soundly, and to hold him responsible if he hasn't." And, especially after the Valerie Plame incident, it is awfully hard to imagine how Bush could resist opening a criminal investigation into who leaked the information to the New York Times. Indeed, at his news conference on Monday, he indicated that, while he had not ordered such an investigation, he "presumed" the Justice Department had already opened an inquiry into who leaked the information about the NSA program. When the President presumes, Justice reacts.
The firestorm, in short, has started, and Bush will no more be able to control the outcomes than Nixon was. More facts on more questionable activities are certain to come out, and, as they do, Congress and the press will get more and more aggressive. With mid-term elections less that a year away, expect a fair number of Republicans, especially those from Blue States, to run for cover. If the Democrats happen to pick up a majority in either House in those elections, the "I" word (impeachment) will start to be heard. The issue, in short, is all set up for the kind of cluster-f**k that can undermine a Presidency.
Stayed tuned. This may get interesting.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Sunday, December 18, 2005
The End Of Another Imperial Presidency
It feels like deja vu all over again.
While I won't pretend to have done any rigorous comparison, the second Bush term seems strikingly similar to the second Nixon term. We are in the midst of a war with little popular support, highly questionable origins, no clear connection to the national interest, no clear exit strategy, and no credible definition or even likelihood of victory. Scandals and charges of corruption abound. High administration officials are under indictment. Stories on violations of law and civil liberites are coming out almost weekly, with the administration defending them on the basis of national security. The press smells blood and is following the scent like ravenous sharks finally released from their cages. The President's party, terrified of the looming mid-term elections, is in disarry and any sembelence of party discipline -- long the has defining characteristic of the Administraion -- has evaporated. And, most telling of all, the President is utterly incapable of reasserting control over the national agenda. He keeps trying, but nothing he says or does makes any difference. The old hot button phrases that have served him so well in the past -- phrases like "war on terror" and "national security" -- have not only lost their political punch they have actually become liabilities. Not only do people no longer believe that his acts serve those purposes, they have come to believe that the phrases themselves are cover-ups. Bush, like Nixon at about the same point in his presidency, is a man utterly at bay. About the only real difference I can see between the two adminitrations is that there is (as yet) no hint that Bush himself may have been involved in criminal activity. That difference plus the fact that his Party controls Congress, will doubtless save him from Nixon's fate. But the spectacle of a President who has utterly lost control is hauntingly familiar.
While I won't pretend to have done any rigorous comparison, the second Bush term seems strikingly similar to the second Nixon term. We are in the midst of a war with little popular support, highly questionable origins, no clear connection to the national interest, no clear exit strategy, and no credible definition or even likelihood of victory. Scandals and charges of corruption abound. High administration officials are under indictment. Stories on violations of law and civil liberites are coming out almost weekly, with the administration defending them on the basis of national security. The press smells blood and is following the scent like ravenous sharks finally released from their cages. The President's party, terrified of the looming mid-term elections, is in disarry and any sembelence of party discipline -- long the has defining characteristic of the Administraion -- has evaporated. And, most telling of all, the President is utterly incapable of reasserting control over the national agenda. He keeps trying, but nothing he says or does makes any difference. The old hot button phrases that have served him so well in the past -- phrases like "war on terror" and "national security" -- have not only lost their political punch they have actually become liabilities. Not only do people no longer believe that his acts serve those purposes, they have come to believe that the phrases themselves are cover-ups. Bush, like Nixon at about the same point in his presidency, is a man utterly at bay. About the only real difference I can see between the two adminitrations is that there is (as yet) no hint that Bush himself may have been involved in criminal activity. That difference plus the fact that his Party controls Congress, will doubtless save him from Nixon's fate. But the spectacle of a President who has utterly lost control is hauntingly familiar.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Fighting Faith
I am about two-thirds of the way through "The End Of Faith" by Sam Harris. I may not finish it. It is one of those books that should have been an essay: an interesting thesis that could have been fully expounded in 10,000 words but that the author felt compelled to expand to 277 pages by making the same point over and over again.
The thesis, though, is one worth thinking about.
Harris' starting point is a commonplace: that faith -- particularly but not exclusively religious faith -- has been and continues to be a source of enormous evil in the world. Indeed, he spends much of his book describing case after case after case s of faith-based evil. His primary targets are the 14th Century Christian Inquisition and the 21st Century Muslim Jihadism. However, he also touches on a litany of other religiously based evil and even takes on such secular "faiths" as National Socialism and Communism. In doing so, he makes, at least implicitly, the point that the evil springs less from what is believed than from the fact of belief itself.
A deeply held belief that I am right and you are wrong on any issue important to either of us inevitably builds resentments between us that can easily escalate into hatred and violence. This is all the more likely where our disagreement is over something that is both (a) profoundlyimportant to at least one of us (e.g. the prospects of and eligibility for an afterlife) and (b) inherently incapable of being proved or even examined in any rational way. These are exactly the characteristics of religious belief, and it is for this reason that the evil produced by religion dwarfs into insignificance anything perpetrated by the Nazis or the communists or the Khmer rouge or all of such secular beliefs combined. But the point is still the same: true believers are dangerous. It is just that religious true believers are most dangerous of all.
If this was all Harris had to say, the book would be trite. But while the point tends to get lost amid a nearly endless catalogue of evils perpetrated in the name of faith, Harris' real message is that it is time for the world to start naming the evil out loud. He rightly points out that in today's society it is pretty much unthinkable to challenge another person's religious beliefs. These are matters that are considered, in the West at least, to be so personal and private as to be utterly beyond criticism. We may, of course, criticize the person's acts or the positions he takes. But even when it becomes obvious that the person's actions or positions flow directly from his faith, we have no ability to attack the faith itself despite the contempt we have for the actions or positions. All we can do, if we are so inclined, is to get into a hermeneutic debate as to whether the undergirdings of his faith (e.g. the Bible or the Koran) really do mandate what he believes they do. At the point at which we have exhausted that avenue (usually very quickly since hermenuetics for most people is itself an act of faith) we simply grow quiet. We feel it is wrong somehow to tell the person or the world that his beliefs themselves are utter nonsense
It is this squeamishness Harris wants us to outgrow.
A belief in a proposition for which there is no evidence is lunacy. We have no difficulty accepting that principle when the things believed in are alien abductions, ouiji boards, seances, invulnerability to bullets; the healing power of the snake oil salesman; etc. But when it comes to the question, say, of whether there is a heaven or hell and who will be eligible for each, we feel compelled to "respect" any belief whatsoever. We are not required, obviously, to ourselves accept what the other believes, but we are constrained by our devotion to "freedom of belief" to forbear from telling the person that his beliefs qualify him as a lunatic. But they do. The psychotic who hears voices telling him he is God has more evidence for that belief that the religious have for their belief in an afterlife. At least the psychotic has the evidence of his own senses. The believer in an afterlife does not even have that. He is in the position of one who believes that the psychotic is God simply because the psychotic told him he was.
There are many lunacies we put up with because they don't do us any harm. If Joe Blow wants to believe he was abducted by aliens, we let him because it really doesn't make any difference to us what Joe Blow believes. But things change when Joe Blow starts recruiting others to blow up things because the aliens told him to. In that case, we have no compunction about telling the potential recruits that Joe is a lunatic. Yet, if Joe tells his recruits to blow up stuff because God commands it (and will reward them with paradise in the after life) our willingness to label Joe a lunatic is significantly vitiated. We may, and do, try to stop the recruits from acting on Joe's instructions. But our argument is always that Joe is misinterpreting scripture or God's commands or whatever. We are very reluctant to call the belief itself lunacy. For if we do, there is no stopping. If belief in propositions for which there is no evidence is a good working definition of lunacy, then all religious belief is lunacy and we have no basis for condemning Joe's particular brand of lunacy any more than we do the lunacy shared by more peaceful co-religionists. All we can condemn are his acts or the acts he is advocating. But this leaves Joe with his most dangerous weapon -- his faith -- unchallenged.
But what about all the good that has been done in the name of religion? First of all, religion hasn't done that much good. Mother Teresa is famous precisely because she is so exceptional. And, for every Mother Teresa there are dozens of pederast priests. Second, the good has been done in the name of religion is far outweighed by the evil that has been done in he same cause. Religion has killed far, far more people than it has saved (in the corporeal sense). Finally, there is (again) no evidence that religion has anything to do with whatever good that has been done by religious people. An equally plausible explanation is that the religious people who have done good have done it because of who they are and would have done the same thing whether or not they were religious. That is, it is at least as likely that the impulse to do good leads some people to be religious as it is that being religious leads some people to do good.
Harris acknowledges a profound difference between 21st Century Christians and 21st Century Muslims. Rarely do you see Christians blowing themselves up in pursuit of their faith (although the actions of Christian fundamentalists shooting abortion doctors and bombing abortion clinics in the name of God seems different only in degree). But, he argues, convincingly I think, that the reason for the general differences between Christians and Muslims today is that Western Christians have largely moved beyond the principles of their faith, at least as those principles are set out in the Bible while the Muslims have not. There are whole swaths of the Bible that most modern Christians would find abhorrent if they ever bothered to read it. If you don't believe me, try reading Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Joshua some day. Indeed, most modern (i.e. non-fundamentalist) Christians see the entire Old Testament as being something of an anachronism in a religious sense. How half of the inerrant Word of God could become anachronistic over time without shaking people's faith in the rest of it is something that is hard to fathom. But it is a commonplace in modern Christian churches for the faithful to blithely dismiss the Old Testament as having been "superseded" by the New. What? The infallible deity changed his mind?
But even if we accept that convenient little sleight of hand, the New Testament itself has more than enough in it to make the modern Christian uncomfortable. Take Revelations for a starter. All of this creates enormous cognitive dissonance for the modern Christian. Yet rather than questioning his faith, he handles the dissonance by simply ignoring the "bad parts" and concentrating on the "good parts": the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the Psalms, etc.
There is some of this going on in the Muslim world today. Western Muslim clerics and believers repeatedly stress that Islam is a religion of peace. But Harris makes a pretty good case for the conclusion that they can do this only by ignoring much of the Koranic text and/or by putting on that text "interpretations" that bear little resemblance to the actual language. This is what Christians have also done over the 600 years since the Inquisition. But this civilizing process is not (yet perhaps) taken root in the larger Muslim world. The Muslim masses still believe all of it. And they believe that the words mean what they appear to mean. So, when the Koran says that the reward for dying in the battle against the infidel is eternal salvation (and unlimited sexual promiscuity) that actually believe that. So they go out and blow themselves and their "enemies" to smithereens. Lunacy indeed. Yet the fact that Western Christians do not today share a correlative lunacy has more to do with the fact that Western Christians are today simply more willing to ignore more of their holy text than Muslims are. That was not always the case, though. Witness the Inquisition. And it may not always be the case. As much as we might hope that Islam is headed for its own Enlightenment, it seems at least as likely that Christianity is in the process of a retrograde movement toward Islam. Indeed, American fundamentalists appear to be proving Harris' point: the more believers come to truly believe that the Bible (or the Koran or any religious text) is actually true, the more intolerant, violent and dangerous they become. If we are to stop this, Harris argues, we have to be willing to go beyond condemning the acts and condemn the lunacy that produces them.
I'm not sure where all this leaves me. On a macro scale, much of Harris' thesis is hard to dispute. The historical evidence is just too overwhelming. And, if there is any merit to the injunction to "speak truth to power" perhaps Harris is right to suggest that we all ought to be telling James Dobson and anyone else who listens that he is a lunatic, not just for his positions but for his beliefs.
But when one comes down to the individual level, things get dicier. I have often said that my mother-in-law, Margaret, is probably the one "true" Christian I have ever met. She is profoundly religious yet never have I seen her faith impel her to condemn anyone, even me, her lost sheep. Is there really a need for me to confront Margaret with the fact that her faith is lunatic? Even if I did, she would just smile and say, "Oh Billy. You don't really mean that." Or some such. The fact of the matter is that, religious faith exerts a positive force in the lives of some, perhaps many, people. They recognize that portions of the Bible are problematic, but they just choose to believe that those parts are part of the inscrutable mystery of God. Our problems with the "bad" parts is not a problem with the Word; it is a reflection of our inability to fully understand. While I find this sort of faith hard to understand and impossible to practice, do I really wish that, even if I had the power to do so, I could take that faith from them. In the case of Margaret, at least, the answer is clearly no. Even if it is lunacy, it is a lunacy that is at the very worst harmless and at best a positive force in her life and the lives of those with whom she interacts.
So in the end, the problem Harris has identified -- that much evil is done in the name of faith -- is clearly true, but trite, and the solution he proposes fails because it is overbroad. It is not faith per se that is the problem. The problem lies in what people do with that faith. And, one cannot condemn all faith simply because some of the faithful use their faith for evil purposes.
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
The thesis, though, is one worth thinking about.
Harris' starting point is a commonplace: that faith -- particularly but not exclusively religious faith -- has been and continues to be a source of enormous evil in the world. Indeed, he spends much of his book describing case after case after case s of faith-based evil. His primary targets are the 14th Century Christian Inquisition and the 21st Century Muslim Jihadism. However, he also touches on a litany of other religiously based evil and even takes on such secular "faiths" as National Socialism and Communism. In doing so, he makes, at least implicitly, the point that the evil springs less from what is believed than from the fact of belief itself.
A deeply held belief that I am right and you are wrong on any issue important to either of us inevitably builds resentments between us that can easily escalate into hatred and violence. This is all the more likely where our disagreement is over something that is both (a) profoundlyimportant to at least one of us (e.g. the prospects of and eligibility for an afterlife) and (b) inherently incapable of being proved or even examined in any rational way. These are exactly the characteristics of religious belief, and it is for this reason that the evil produced by religion dwarfs into insignificance anything perpetrated by the Nazis or the communists or the Khmer rouge or all of such secular beliefs combined. But the point is still the same: true believers are dangerous. It is just that religious true believers are most dangerous of all.
If this was all Harris had to say, the book would be trite. But while the point tends to get lost amid a nearly endless catalogue of evils perpetrated in the name of faith, Harris' real message is that it is time for the world to start naming the evil out loud. He rightly points out that in today's society it is pretty much unthinkable to challenge another person's religious beliefs. These are matters that are considered, in the West at least, to be so personal and private as to be utterly beyond criticism. We may, of course, criticize the person's acts or the positions he takes. But even when it becomes obvious that the person's actions or positions flow directly from his faith, we have no ability to attack the faith itself despite the contempt we have for the actions or positions. All we can do, if we are so inclined, is to get into a hermeneutic debate as to whether the undergirdings of his faith (e.g. the Bible or the Koran) really do mandate what he believes they do. At the point at which we have exhausted that avenue (usually very quickly since hermenuetics for most people is itself an act of faith) we simply grow quiet. We feel it is wrong somehow to tell the person or the world that his beliefs themselves are utter nonsense
It is this squeamishness Harris wants us to outgrow.
A belief in a proposition for which there is no evidence is lunacy. We have no difficulty accepting that principle when the things believed in are alien abductions, ouiji boards, seances, invulnerability to bullets; the healing power of the snake oil salesman; etc. But when it comes to the question, say, of whether there is a heaven or hell and who will be eligible for each, we feel compelled to "respect" any belief whatsoever. We are not required, obviously, to ourselves accept what the other believes, but we are constrained by our devotion to "freedom of belief" to forbear from telling the person that his beliefs qualify him as a lunatic. But they do. The psychotic who hears voices telling him he is God has more evidence for that belief that the religious have for their belief in an afterlife. At least the psychotic has the evidence of his own senses. The believer in an afterlife does not even have that. He is in the position of one who believes that the psychotic is God simply because the psychotic told him he was.
There are many lunacies we put up with because they don't do us any harm. If Joe Blow wants to believe he was abducted by aliens, we let him because it really doesn't make any difference to us what Joe Blow believes. But things change when Joe Blow starts recruiting others to blow up things because the aliens told him to. In that case, we have no compunction about telling the potential recruits that Joe is a lunatic. Yet, if Joe tells his recruits to blow up stuff because God commands it (and will reward them with paradise in the after life) our willingness to label Joe a lunatic is significantly vitiated. We may, and do, try to stop the recruits from acting on Joe's instructions. But our argument is always that Joe is misinterpreting scripture or God's commands or whatever. We are very reluctant to call the belief itself lunacy. For if we do, there is no stopping. If belief in propositions for which there is no evidence is a good working definition of lunacy, then all religious belief is lunacy and we have no basis for condemning Joe's particular brand of lunacy any more than we do the lunacy shared by more peaceful co-religionists. All we can condemn are his acts or the acts he is advocating. But this leaves Joe with his most dangerous weapon -- his faith -- unchallenged.
But what about all the good that has been done in the name of religion? First of all, religion hasn't done that much good. Mother Teresa is famous precisely because she is so exceptional. And, for every Mother Teresa there are dozens of pederast priests. Second, the good has been done in the name of religion is far outweighed by the evil that has been done in he same cause. Religion has killed far, far more people than it has saved (in the corporeal sense). Finally, there is (again) no evidence that religion has anything to do with whatever good that has been done by religious people. An equally plausible explanation is that the religious people who have done good have done it because of who they are and would have done the same thing whether or not they were religious. That is, it is at least as likely that the impulse to do good leads some people to be religious as it is that being religious leads some people to do good.
Harris acknowledges a profound difference between 21st Century Christians and 21st Century Muslims. Rarely do you see Christians blowing themselves up in pursuit of their faith (although the actions of Christian fundamentalists shooting abortion doctors and bombing abortion clinics in the name of God seems different only in degree). But, he argues, convincingly I think, that the reason for the general differences between Christians and Muslims today is that Western Christians have largely moved beyond the principles of their faith, at least as those principles are set out in the Bible while the Muslims have not. There are whole swaths of the Bible that most modern Christians would find abhorrent if they ever bothered to read it. If you don't believe me, try reading Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Joshua some day. Indeed, most modern (i.e. non-fundamentalist) Christians see the entire Old Testament as being something of an anachronism in a religious sense. How half of the inerrant Word of God could become anachronistic over time without shaking people's faith in the rest of it is something that is hard to fathom. But it is a commonplace in modern Christian churches for the faithful to blithely dismiss the Old Testament as having been "superseded" by the New. What? The infallible deity changed his mind?
But even if we accept that convenient little sleight of hand, the New Testament itself has more than enough in it to make the modern Christian uncomfortable. Take Revelations for a starter. All of this creates enormous cognitive dissonance for the modern Christian. Yet rather than questioning his faith, he handles the dissonance by simply ignoring the "bad parts" and concentrating on the "good parts": the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the Psalms, etc.
There is some of this going on in the Muslim world today. Western Muslim clerics and believers repeatedly stress that Islam is a religion of peace. But Harris makes a pretty good case for the conclusion that they can do this only by ignoring much of the Koranic text and/or by putting on that text "interpretations" that bear little resemblance to the actual language. This is what Christians have also done over the 600 years since the Inquisition. But this civilizing process is not (yet perhaps) taken root in the larger Muslim world. The Muslim masses still believe all of it. And they believe that the words mean what they appear to mean. So, when the Koran says that the reward for dying in the battle against the infidel is eternal salvation (and unlimited sexual promiscuity) that actually believe that. So they go out and blow themselves and their "enemies" to smithereens. Lunacy indeed. Yet the fact that Western Christians do not today share a correlative lunacy has more to do with the fact that Western Christians are today simply more willing to ignore more of their holy text than Muslims are. That was not always the case, though. Witness the Inquisition. And it may not always be the case. As much as we might hope that Islam is headed for its own Enlightenment, it seems at least as likely that Christianity is in the process of a retrograde movement toward Islam. Indeed, American fundamentalists appear to be proving Harris' point: the more believers come to truly believe that the Bible (or the Koran or any religious text) is actually true, the more intolerant, violent and dangerous they become. If we are to stop this, Harris argues, we have to be willing to go beyond condemning the acts and condemn the lunacy that produces them.
I'm not sure where all this leaves me. On a macro scale, much of Harris' thesis is hard to dispute. The historical evidence is just too overwhelming. And, if there is any merit to the injunction to "speak truth to power" perhaps Harris is right to suggest that we all ought to be telling James Dobson and anyone else who listens that he is a lunatic, not just for his positions but for his beliefs.
But when one comes down to the individual level, things get dicier. I have often said that my mother-in-law, Margaret, is probably the one "true" Christian I have ever met. She is profoundly religious yet never have I seen her faith impel her to condemn anyone, even me, her lost sheep. Is there really a need for me to confront Margaret with the fact that her faith is lunatic? Even if I did, she would just smile and say, "Oh Billy. You don't really mean that." Or some such. The fact of the matter is that, religious faith exerts a positive force in the lives of some, perhaps many, people. They recognize that portions of the Bible are problematic, but they just choose to believe that those parts are part of the inscrutable mystery of God. Our problems with the "bad" parts is not a problem with the Word; it is a reflection of our inability to fully understand. While I find this sort of faith hard to understand and impossible to practice, do I really wish that, even if I had the power to do so, I could take that faith from them. In the case of Margaret, at least, the answer is clearly no. Even if it is lunacy, it is a lunacy that is at the very worst harmless and at best a positive force in her life and the lives of those with whom she interacts.
So in the end, the problem Harris has identified -- that much evil is done in the name of faith -- is clearly true, but trite, and the solution he proposes fails because it is overbroad. It is not faith per se that is the problem. The problem lies in what people do with that faith. And, one cannot condemn all faith simply because some of the faithful use their faith for evil purposes.
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Agricultural Subsidies and the Developing World
I haven't done much blogging for the past month. My wife heard an interview with some guy who has written a book on bloggers and who indicated that something like 85% of bloggers quit after about a year. My first post on this blog was almost exactly a year ago and Judy suggested that maybe I was one of the 85%.
There may be something to that. But I don't think ennui is really the reason. The real reason is that I find I have little new to say. There is a lot going on in the world about which I care a lot. But it seems like it's just the same thing over and over again. So, when I see something that seems comment worthy, I realize that I have already said everything I have to say about that. And I wonder, "Why say it again?"
Well, whatever the reason, I found something today that piqued my interest again. Actually two things, both op-ed pieces, one in the LA Times and the other in the NY Times Both are on a subject -- the role of trade policy in helping the 3rd World -- that I have been discussing/debating some with my youngest son, who is an International Relations major at the University of Wisconsin.
The LA Times piece argues that eliminating the developed world's agricultural subsidies and other restraints on trade in agricultural goods would be one of the most important steps the developed world got take in assisting economic development in the third world.
It is this point that my son has so much difficulty with. If the goal were actually to help the 3rd world to develop, then lowering barriers to our agricultural markets while allowing them to protect their nascent manufacturing businesses would make a whole lot of sense. Take the choclate example. Country A grows cocoa beans, most of which it exports. It would make sense for them to move up the manufacturing chain and start making cocoa and perhaps even chocolate. But, they have enough trouble competing with the developed world's chocolate manufacturers under the best of circumstances. When that is compounded by high tarriffs in the only markets with significant demand for chocolate, they have no real chance of developing a chocolate manufacturing business. If the goal of the developed world were to help Country A develop, it would be entirely consistent for the developed world to agree to eliminate their tarriffs and subsidies on both cocoa and finished chocolate and yet agree to allow Country A to maintain tarriffs on imported chocolate and subsidies for domestically manufactured chocolate. The effect would be to give Country A greater acccess to the devloped world's markets for both cocoa an finished chocolate and yet allow it to protect it's nascent chocolate industry from competition by establieshed chocolatiers.
There is an obvious asymetry here, but that asymetry is really not all that significant for the developed world. While it is critical that Country A's manufacturers have access to the developed world's chocolate markerts, the converse is probably not true: after all exactly how much chocolate can the people of Country A be expected to buy? Moreover, if the Country A chocolate market is significant, the developed world can get around the tarriffs by building maufacturing plants in Country A. This would allow them to compete in that market and at the same time contribute to Country A's economic develpoment by providing (relatively) good paying jobs to its citizens.
In short, if the goal really were to help the third world, the approach outlined in the LA Times piece would make all kinds of sense even if the third world were not required to reciprocate. As the NY Times piece makes clear, though, helping the 3rd world is not really the goal. The goal is to help the workers and businesses in the developed world. The workers and businesses in the developed world have competing interests, of course, with some wanting to protect exisiting domestic businesses from foreign competiton while others want to expand exports to those same countries. Those conflicts are what drive these countries to even be willing to consider "free trade." But, for concessions to be politically saleable, getting something in return is a necessity. Specifically, if Country A wants access to developed markets in what they presently produce (e.g. agricultural goods) then the developed countries will insist that they give up protections with respect to those things that they ultimately want to produce (manufactured goods). One can easily see how this quid pro quo demand can be seen (or at least portrayed) as a way for the developed world to prevent the 3rd world from ever being able to compete in areas beyond agricultural goods.
The politics of all this is very real and one cannot ignore that reality and continue to be relevant. However, it occurs to me that there is one interest that is being ignored here. Absent economic development, the 3rd world is going to continue to pose security challenges, even threats, to the developed world. Even if it costs us some jobs, mitigating that threat may be worth the cost.
One final point: If you haven't peeked already, who do you suppose wrote the the LA Times piece? Some mushy headed liberal do gooder no doubt, right? Hardly. The author is none other than that arch neo-con Paul Wolfowitz, the man who did more than any other to bring us the war in Iraq. I admit that the thought of agreeing with PW on anything cuases me some significant cognitive dissonance. But there it is. In the 21st Century it gets harder and harder to figure out where on the left-right political spectrum anyone really is.
There may be something to that. But I don't think ennui is really the reason. The real reason is that I find I have little new to say. There is a lot going on in the world about which I care a lot. But it seems like it's just the same thing over and over again. So, when I see something that seems comment worthy, I realize that I have already said everything I have to say about that. And I wonder, "Why say it again?"
Well, whatever the reason, I found something today that piqued my interest again. Actually two things, both op-ed pieces, one in the LA Times and the other in the NY Times Both are on a subject -- the role of trade policy in helping the 3rd World -- that I have been discussing/debating some with my youngest son, who is an International Relations major at the University of Wisconsin.
The LA Times piece argues that eliminating the developed world's agricultural subsidies and other restraints on trade in agricultural goods would be one of the most important steps the developed world got take in assisting economic development in the third world.
Seventy percent of the world's poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture to earn a living and feed their families. But instead of being able to freely sell what they produce, they are often denied entry into markets as rich countries protect and prop up their own farmers — subsidizing products and imposing high tariffs on imports.The NY Tmes article does not really dispute this, but it makes painfully clear the significant practical obstacles that stand in the way:
Rich countries — primarily the U.S., Japan and the members of the European Union — spend $280 billion annually on agricultural support. That's $5 billion a week to protect their often-rich farmers from competition. Ultimately, it is the taxpayers and consumers in these countries who shoulder the costs of these support programs. Economists estimate that consumers pay $168 billion a year because of tariffs, and taxpayers pay $112 billion a year for direct subsidies.
But the real damage is done to farmers in poor countries, because high tariffs keep them out of key markets, and tariffs and subsidies together drive down the world price of their exports. Without the income that trade could provide, it is their children who go hungry and who are deprived of clean water, medicines and other basic necessities of life.
Tariffs also hurt poor countries by blocking them from moving up the production chain. Even though 90% of the world's cocoa beans are grown in developing countries, they produce only 4% of its chocolate. One reason is that tariffs often escalate with the degree of processing — in the EU, producers of raw cocoa pay a tariff of 0.5% of the value of the beans, semi-processed cocoa pays about 10% of its value and chocolate even more.
If the rich countries would agree to level the playing field, everyone would see enormous gains. The World Bank estimates that full liberalization of trade in goods alone could generate $300 billion per year for the global economy. Developing countries would gain $86 billion of this share. And these numbers can grow as producers in poor countries take advantage of new markets.
It's true that the European Union needed to reform its agriculture policies. But any farm sector can absorb only so much reform at once. Unlike the nongovernmental organizations calling so vociferously for cuts in subsidies, governments have responsibilities to the citizens who elect them. The changes we have already begun are having an extensive impact on Europe's farm regions. As a result of the sugar reforms, producers in Ireland and Finland may well go out of business. We have seen no comparably bold action by any other major W.T.O. member, the United States included.Ignore for the moment the absurdity of basing international trade policy on the interests of Irish and Finnsih sugar farmers. (Are there such people?) The argument being made here is that the EU should not be asked to lower agricultural supports and tariffs unless and until the 3rd world countries lower their tarriffs on services and manufactured goods.
As the talks begin today, our fellow negotiators should be in no doubt that all the European Union's governments agree that there is no reason to move further on agricultural tariffs. They all agree that the time has come for others to respond in other areas of the Doha agenda, like lowering industrial tariffs and liberalizing service industries, to the moves we have already made.
It is this point that my son has so much difficulty with. If the goal were actually to help the 3rd world to develop, then lowering barriers to our agricultural markets while allowing them to protect their nascent manufacturing businesses would make a whole lot of sense. Take the choclate example. Country A grows cocoa beans, most of which it exports. It would make sense for them to move up the manufacturing chain and start making cocoa and perhaps even chocolate. But, they have enough trouble competing with the developed world's chocolate manufacturers under the best of circumstances. When that is compounded by high tarriffs in the only markets with significant demand for chocolate, they have no real chance of developing a chocolate manufacturing business. If the goal of the developed world were to help Country A develop, it would be entirely consistent for the developed world to agree to eliminate their tarriffs and subsidies on both cocoa and finished chocolate and yet agree to allow Country A to maintain tarriffs on imported chocolate and subsidies for domestically manufactured chocolate. The effect would be to give Country A greater acccess to the devloped world's markets for both cocoa an finished chocolate and yet allow it to protect it's nascent chocolate industry from competition by establieshed chocolatiers.
There is an obvious asymetry here, but that asymetry is really not all that significant for the developed world. While it is critical that Country A's manufacturers have access to the developed world's chocolate markerts, the converse is probably not true: after all exactly how much chocolate can the people of Country A be expected to buy? Moreover, if the Country A chocolate market is significant, the developed world can get around the tarriffs by building maufacturing plants in Country A. This would allow them to compete in that market and at the same time contribute to Country A's economic develpoment by providing (relatively) good paying jobs to its citizens.
In short, if the goal really were to help the third world, the approach outlined in the LA Times piece would make all kinds of sense even if the third world were not required to reciprocate. As the NY Times piece makes clear, though, helping the 3rd world is not really the goal. The goal is to help the workers and businesses in the developed world. The workers and businesses in the developed world have competing interests, of course, with some wanting to protect exisiting domestic businesses from foreign competiton while others want to expand exports to those same countries. Those conflicts are what drive these countries to even be willing to consider "free trade." But, for concessions to be politically saleable, getting something in return is a necessity. Specifically, if Country A wants access to developed markets in what they presently produce (e.g. agricultural goods) then the developed countries will insist that they give up protections with respect to those things that they ultimately want to produce (manufactured goods). One can easily see how this quid pro quo demand can be seen (or at least portrayed) as a way for the developed world to prevent the 3rd world from ever being able to compete in areas beyond agricultural goods.
The politics of all this is very real and one cannot ignore that reality and continue to be relevant. However, it occurs to me that there is one interest that is being ignored here. Absent economic development, the 3rd world is going to continue to pose security challenges, even threats, to the developed world. Even if it costs us some jobs, mitigating that threat may be worth the cost.
One final point: If you haven't peeked already, who do you suppose wrote the the LA Times piece? Some mushy headed liberal do gooder no doubt, right? Hardly. The author is none other than that arch neo-con Paul Wolfowitz, the man who did more than any other to bring us the war in Iraq. I admit that the thought of agreeing with PW on anything cuases me some significant cognitive dissonance. But there it is. In the 21st Century it gets harder and harder to figure out where on the left-right political spectrum anyone really is.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
The Vatican Position on Gays
Ellen Goodman had a column today that did a lot to help me crystallize my own queasiness about the Vatican's recent ruling on gays in the priesthood.
She starts off recognizing that most peoples' feelings about gays in general and gay civil rights in particular depend on whether they believe homosexulaity is a choice or a trait. Those who believe it is a trait -- something that is intrinsic to who they are -- are generally tolerant of gays and supportive of their civil rights claims. Those who believe homosexuality is a choice are generally intolerant of gays and opposed ot civil rights claims in particular.
Goodman then goes on to point out that the Vatican has turned this common sensical division on it's head, saying that those who are truly gay cannot be priests regardless of how they act while those who have simply dabbled in it are OK.
Mindboggling.
She starts off recognizing that most peoples' feelings about gays in general and gay civil rights in particular depend on whether they believe homosexulaity is a choice or a trait. Those who believe it is a trait -- something that is intrinsic to who they are -- are generally tolerant of gays and supportive of their civil rights claims. Those who believe homosexuality is a choice are generally intolerant of gays and opposed ot civil rights claims in particular.
Goodman then goes on to point out that the Vatican has turned this common sensical division on it's head, saying that those who are truly gay cannot be priests regardless of how they act while those who have simply dabbled in it are OK.
Mindboggling.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Iraq: The End Is In Sight Whether We Admit It Or Not.
[Ed. Note: Below is a post I started about three weeks ago. While there has been a lot of new news on this topic, I find that little of it adds much to the substance. So, I decided to go ahead an post it].
On Tuesday [11/14], I argued that we ought to put aside, for now at least, the debate over the run-up to the Iraq war. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post comes to the same conclusion but states the reasons much more eloquently:
These sentiments are almost completely symbolic and are so vaguely worded that a White House spokeswoman was reportedly able to claim that: "The Senate endorsed administration policy, which is a conditions-based withdrawal in Iraq. " But symbolism is important, and the claim that the resolution endorsed the administration's policy is pathetic rubbish.
I am very conflicted on this issue [as are the Democrats]. I have long argued that, having gone into Iraq, we cannnot afford to fail. I still believe that, but the politics is going to make that concern moot. According to the USA Today/Gallup poll linked above, 19% of Americans want the troops brought home now and another 33% want them brought home within a year. Those numbers are only going to go up as time passes, and with the 2006 elections staring the Republicans in the face, only an al-Zarqawi orchestrated attack in the US could prevent a significant "redeployment" of American troops from Iraq next year.
Note to the Iraqis: "Ready or not, we're outta here!"
On Tuesday [11/14], I argued that we ought to put aside, for now at least, the debate over the run-up to the Iraq war. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post comes to the same conclusion but states the reasons much more eloquently:
In political terms, the debate between President Bush and the Democrats over who knew what when on WMD is hugely important. But it's an argument about yesterday.Freed by from fear by (or perhaps gripped by a new fear becuase of) Bush's and the War's plummeting approval ratings (new USA Today/Gallup poll results here), Congress is beginning to get involved in this latter debate. The Senate passed overhwelmingly (79-19) a resolution calling for a "significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty" and "the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq" in the next year. Also passed: an amendment to the Armed Services appropriations bill expressing the view that "2006 should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty."
In real-world terms, the tentative debate that is starting to take shape about how to salvage the situation in Iraq is far more important. It's an argument about tomorrow.
The WMD shootout is more passionate, more colorful, more driven by a desire to win history's verdict on whether the war was a mistake. The press is really getting pumped about this, since it lets Bush backers paint the Democrats as revisionist liars and Bush detractors accuse the president once again of willful distortion.
The second debate, by contrast, is a depressing one with no great options, unfolding against the backdrop of continuing American and Iraqi casualties. . . .
Something tells me the politicians are reading the polls, which show record low support for the war and record high feelings that Bush justified the invasion by misleading the country.
But the polls don't make a solution any easier to come by, not for those who worry that a U.S. pullout would cause the fragile Baghdad government to collapse and lead to civil war.
Which is why the WMD debate is so much easier: All you have to do is bash the otherside.
These sentiments are almost completely symbolic and are so vaguely worded that a White House spokeswoman was reportedly able to claim that: "The Senate endorsed administration policy, which is a conditions-based withdrawal in Iraq. " But symbolism is important, and the claim that the resolution endorsed the administration's policy is pathetic rubbish.
I am very conflicted on this issue [as are the Democrats]. I have long argued that, having gone into Iraq, we cannnot afford to fail. I still believe that, but the politics is going to make that concern moot. According to the USA Today/Gallup poll linked above, 19% of Americans want the troops brought home now and another 33% want them brought home within a year. Those numbers are only going to go up as time passes, and with the 2006 elections staring the Republicans in the face, only an al-Zarqawi orchestrated attack in the US could prevent a significant "redeployment" of American troops from Iraq next year.
Note to the Iraqis: "Ready or not, we're outta here!"
Monday, November 14, 2005
Iraq Intelligence Blame Game
A propos of this, former Rep. Martin Frost (D TX) has it exactly right when he says, on Fox news no less, that:
Here I disagree. Yes, it is reasonable to inquire into the issue. Just not now.
A Congressional investigation into how the Administration spun intelligence will never answer any question that has any immediate relevance. It will necessarily be little more than frenzy of fingerpointing. Yes, there may be some lessons to be learned, and yes, we should study what happened. But we should do it later. Like 10 years or so from now. For now, the central fact is clear: regradless of who is to blame, we went into war based on assumptions or beliefs that were not true. No one disputes that. Whether Bush alone is to blame or whether Congress and the Democrats share that blame is not really all that important right now. Answering questions like that is why God invented historians. For no, we have more urgent problems to deal with.
When a president of the United States makes truly outrageous statements, he deserves to be called on them. That’s exactly what happened last Friday when President Bush spoke on Veterans Day.He is talking, of course, about Bush's Veterans' Day speech claiming that Congress in general, and the Democrats in particular, were equally culpable for the decision to invade Iraq. Frost's rejoinder:
We now know that the intelligence relied upon by the Bush administration to take us to war was faulty. . . . . The issue is not whether the administration intentionally falsified the intelligence but whether the administration was diligent enough in pursuing accurate intelligence—and whether the administration hyped the intelligence it had obtained to sell the war.Yet Frost goes on to defend the Democratic call for an investigation into the uses Bush et al. put the available intelligence, saying "[I]t is perfectly reasonable to inquire about how the administration got it so terribly wrong and why it hyped this intelligence so aggressively."
Here I disagree. Yes, it is reasonable to inquire into the issue. Just not now.
A Congressional investigation into how the Administration spun intelligence will never answer any question that has any immediate relevance. It will necessarily be little more than frenzy of fingerpointing. Yes, there may be some lessons to be learned, and yes, we should study what happened. But we should do it later. Like 10 years or so from now. For now, the central fact is clear: regradless of who is to blame, we went into war based on assumptions or beliefs that were not true. No one disputes that. Whether Bush alone is to blame or whether Congress and the Democrats share that blame is not really all that important right now. Answering questions like that is why God invented historians. For no, we have more urgent problems to deal with.
Well, I Guess Global Warming Could Be A Problem
Here's something interesting. Why is Venus so much hotter than Earth? Silly me, I had always assumed it was because it was so much closer to the sun. But that is apparently not the case. According to a column by Gwynn Dyer*, the real reason is global warming run amok:
Dyer explains that anomoly thusly:
* I originally read this in the Toledo Blade, but since the Blade does not put wire service reports or syndicated columnists on its website, I had to go elsewhere (Salt Lake Tribune) to find a link.
Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and there is not all that huge a difference in the amount of heat they get from the Sun: Earth's orbit is an average of 93 million miles away, while Venus orbits at 67 million miles.And, it turns out, the reason that Venus has all that CO2 is that it has no life:
The average temperature on the surface of our planet, at least since life appeared some 3.5 billion years ago, has always stayed between 50 and 68 degrees. On Venus, in shocking contrast, it is 869 degrees. That is hot enough to melt lead.
The immediate reason for the difference is obvious enough: Venus's atmosphere is 90 times thicker than the Earth's, and it is 98 percent carbon dioxide. It is the runaway greenhouse effect produced by that deep, dense blanket of CO2 wrapped around the planet that causes the incredible surface temperatures.
Venus is the lost, evil twin of Earth, and it tells us what Earth would be like without life. Living things have taken almost all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, incorporating the carbon into their bodies or burying it in chalk and thus releasing the oxygen to create the atmosphere we have today. The current balance of the Earth's atmosphere - 99 percent nitrogen and oxygen and almost no CO2 - is highly unstable, but the activities of living things have kept it the way it is for several billion years. That, in turn, keeps the Earth cool enough for life to flourish here.How's that for circularity: Venus has no life becuase it has too much CO2; and it has too much CO2 becuase it has no life. Earth, by cantrast, has life becuase it has very little CO2; and it has very little CO2 becuase it has so much life.
Dyer explains that anomoly thusly:
Here life released the oxygen and fixed the carbon, leaving just enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (about 0.03 percent at present) for a mild greenhouse effect - and presumably modified that level of CO2 as the sun heated up in order to keep the average temperature in the narrow band that is optimal for carbon-based life.Fascinating.
Whereas if life did get started on Venus and began to transform that planet's atmosphere as it changed the Earth's, at some point it was unable to keep up with the rapid accumulation of CO2 and fell victim to a runaway greenhouse effect.
* I originally read this in the Toledo Blade, but since the Blade does not put wire service reports or syndicated columnists on its website, I had to go elsewhere (Salt Lake Tribune) to find a link.
Piling On
"Time Magazine has given Ohio Gov. Bob Taft a new title: One of the worst governors in America."
Oh, gee, I didn't know that.
Oh, gee, I didn't know that.
I Guess The Hurricane Season Is Over
Or, for the sakes of Julie Wafaei and Colin Angus, I sure hope it is. As reported in tonight's "Geoquiz" from PRI, they are now rowing across the Atlantic from east to west.
This Is Nutty
Can this possibly be true:
The end is near.
According to the NPD Group, a research firm, 18 percent of wireless telephone subscribers in the United States - many of them tech-wise teenagers - download ring tones, at an average cost of $2.32 a pop. Informa, a British research and analysis firm, forecasts that ring tones will grow to a $6.8 billion global business in 2010 from nearly $5 billion in 2005, with the North American business growing to $1.5 billion from $510 million.Five billion dollars a year for ring tones?!
The end is near.
The Problem With Crying Wolf
Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims, but no one believes them.
The intelligence on Iran just might be solid. But they are having a problem getting much of the world to believe them.
The intelligence on Iran just might be solid. But they are having a problem getting much of the world to believe them.
The Buck Stops Nowhere
News flash: Senator Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence thinks Congress ought to "stop and think a moment before we would ever vote for war or to go and take military action."
Yes, indeedy. One would like to think that the Senator had not newly come to such a realization, but I guess late is better than never.
The sad reality, though, is that in matters like this, Congress is at the mercy of the Executive. There is simply no way that 535 congressmen can do independent evaluations of inevitably ambiguous intelligence, especially not within the time frames that are relevant in cases where the issue is whether to go to war. In the end, they, like the public has to trust that the Administration has made the right judgments. And, in the end, it is the President that must take responsibility for being wrong.
Bush is not doing that now any more than he did with regard to the Katrina debacle. Rather than accept responsibility, he is seeking to blame Congress. And, as Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus point out, he is again spinning the facts to do that.
As Senator Robertson effectively admitted, Congress could have done more. But that does not change the fact that Bush was the President who took us to war based on intelligence that was just plain wrong. By constantly seeking to blame someone else, he makes an already bad situation that much worse.
Yes, indeedy. One would like to think that the Senator had not newly come to such a realization, but I guess late is better than never.
The sad reality, though, is that in matters like this, Congress is at the mercy of the Executive. There is simply no way that 535 congressmen can do independent evaluations of inevitably ambiguous intelligence, especially not within the time frames that are relevant in cases where the issue is whether to go to war. In the end, they, like the public has to trust that the Administration has made the right judgments. And, in the end, it is the President that must take responsibility for being wrong.
Bush is not doing that now any more than he did with regard to the Katrina debacle. Rather than accept responsibility, he is seeking to blame Congress. And, as Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus point out, he is again spinning the facts to do that.
As Senator Robertson effectively admitted, Congress could have done more. But that does not change the fact that Bush was the President who took us to war based on intelligence that was just plain wrong. By constantly seeking to blame someone else, he makes an already bad situation that much worse.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Rethinking Withdrawal From Iraq
I have argued before (see this, this and this, for instance) that, however illegitimate our reasons for invading Iraq were, we have no choice but to stick it out until some semblance of order has been restored and the Iraqi government and security forces are sufficiently well-established and stable to provide some hope that Iraq (and we) will not suffer the fate Afghanistan did when the Soviets finally withdrew. Recently, though, I have read some things that make question this belief.
The first of these was an article on the lessons of Vietnam by Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense under Nixon, in the (November/December) issue of Foreign Affairs. The article is more than a bit self-serving. For instance, Laird says that the way we got into Vietnam (with which he had nothing to do, of course) is "a textbook example of how not to commit American might," while the way we withdrew from Vietnam (with which he claims to have had everything to do) is "the textbook description of how the U. S. military should decamp." More broadly, and more irritatingly, the article is full of "I's," as in "I did this" and "I did that", relegating Nixon and Kissinger to the status of a sometimes reluctant acolytes. Still, for all of that, Laird makes two points that bear thinking about.
First, Laird argues Vietnam was doomed not the withdrawal of American troops but by the failure of Congress two years later to continue to provide support financial and military assistance to the South.
The first of these was an article on the lessons of Vietnam by Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense under Nixon, in the (November/December) issue of Foreign Affairs. The article is more than a bit self-serving. For instance, Laird says that the way we got into Vietnam (with which he had nothing to do, of course) is "a textbook example of how not to commit American might," while the way we withdrew from Vietnam (with which he claims to have had everything to do) is "the textbook description of how the U. S. military should decamp." More broadly, and more irritatingly, the article is full of "I's," as in "I did this" and "I did that", relegating Nixon and Kissinger to the status of a sometimes reluctant acolytes. Still, for all of that, Laird makes two points that bear thinking about.
First, Laird argues Vietnam was doomed not the withdrawal of American troops but by the failure of Congress two years later to continue to provide support financial and military assistance to the South.
The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. In fact, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight on its own. . . . Without U.S. funding [to counter the massive support the North was getting from the Soviets], South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973. I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do the same now."Laird's second and more compelling point is that a commitment to withdrawal was actually a condition precedent to getting the South Vietnamese to defend themselves. He points out that, initially, the most ardent opponents of withdrawal were the South Vietnamese government, "which had turned into a dependent." Laird reprots that when he met with Thieu in 1969 to tell him "the spigot was going to be shut off" Thieu wanted more troops not fewer. Laird argues with some force, in short, that neither the Vietnamese nor the Iraqis can be expected to "stand up" unless and until they become convinced that the US is going to start "standing down":
[As we did in Vietnam,] [w]e need to put our resources and unwavering public support behind a program of "Iraqization" so that we can get out of Iraq and leave the Iraqis in a position to protect themselves. . . . The United States should not let too many more weeks pass before it shows its confidence in the training of the Iraqi armed forces by withdrawing a few thousand U.S. troops from the country. We owe it to the restive people back home to let them know there is an exit strategy, and, more important, we owe it to the Iraqi people. The readiness of the Iraqi forces need not be 100 percent, nor must the new democracy be perfect before we begin our withdrawal. The immediate need is to show our confidence that Iraqis can take care of Iraq on their own terms. Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency.Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis of the Center For American Progress make much the same point in a paper being widely circulated among Democrats, arguing that a phased withdrawal from Iraq should begin as early as January of next year:
Our open-ended commitment of a large number of troops has created a dysfunctional political transition and may be preventing Iraqi political leaders from making the difficult compromises necessary to complete the transition.In addition, though, Korb makes an additional argument that, if true, is even more compelling: an open-ended commitment of 100,000 or more troops to Iraq poses a clear and present danger to the U. S. Army itself, at least as an all volunteer force. Korb expanded on this point in an earlier column originally published in the New York Daily News:
Not setting a timetable is a recipe for failure and send the wrong message to the leadership in the Iraqi government -- that they can use the United States as a crutch. As long as the Iraqi leaders believe we will remain in large numbers they will have no incentives to make the compromises in the political transition process necessary to create a stable society. . . . [Also] there is a fundamental problem at the heart of President Bush's vision of our eventual withdrawal of troops -- "As the Iraqis stand up we will stand down." Iraqi forces will never truly stand up on their own as long as we are there in such great numbers. The current debate on Iraqi troop training focuses on building combat skills but ignores an equally important factor -- motivation. Our large military presence creates a disincentive for the Iraqi military and police to step up and take ownership of their security.
Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for President Lyndon Johnson, said that while we sent the Army to Vietnam to save Vietnam, we had to withdraw to save the Army. This is where we are today.It is hard to argue with any of this. But what gives me pause is that the cost of being wrong -- of withdrawing too early or too quickly -- is potentially enormous. Even during the height of the buildup in Vietnam, no one ever claimed that the fall of South Vietnam would pose an immediate threat to US security. No one argued, for instance that Vietnam would attack us. That war was simply one battle in a much larger ideological war against communism. We cannot be so sanguine about Iraq. Absent a stable government, there is a very real possibility that Iraq will become another pre-9/11 Afghanistan. The 9/11 attacks themselves are a testament to how great -- and immediate -- threat that would pose to US security. But, as Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds argue, also in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, it is not just the US that is in danger:
By the end of this year, nearly every active-duty soldier will have spent at least two tours in Iraq. . . . Moreover, since the active-duty Army was too small to implement effectively Bush's preventive war in Iraq, the administration has had to rely unduly on the National Guard and Reserves. Part-time soldiers make up about 40% of the troops in Iraq. In order to keep so many reservists there, the Pentagon has had to violate its norm of not mobilizing reservists for more than one year out of five.
Sending [active duty] soldiers back for a third time will ruin the Army's retention rate, which so far has held up. Staying in Iraq through 2006 will completely undermine the Army's recruiting, which despite massive increases in enlistment bonuses is already a disaster. Keeping 50,000 reservists in Iraq throughout 2006 will force the administration to ask Congress to repeal the law that forbids reservists from serving on the active duty for more than two years.
The foreign volunteers in Afghanistan saw the Soviet defeat as a victory for Islam against a superpower that had invaded a Muslim country. Estimates of the number of foreign fighters who fought in Afghanistan begin in the low thousands; some spent years in combat, while others came only for what amounted to a jihad vacation. The jihadists gained legitimacy and prestige from their triumph both within the militant community and among ordinary Muslims, as well as the confidence to carry their jihad to other countries where they believed Muslims required assistance. When veterans of the guerrilla campaign returned home with their experience, ideology, and weapons, they destabilized once-tranquil countries and inflamed already unstable ones.Moreover, Bergen and Reynolds argue, Iraq could well be much worse than Afghanistan:
The current war in Iraq will generate a ferocious blowback of its own, which -- as a recent classified CIA assessment predicts -- could be longer and more powerful than that from Afghanistan. Foreign volunteers fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today will find new targets around the world after the war ends.My God, what a mess!
Defending Torture
In an op-ed piece in today's LA Times, David Gelertner takes on the daunting task of defending Dick Cheney's efforts to exempt the CIA from John McCain's efforts to "prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in the detention of the U.S. government. " It comes down to this: never say never.
Here's the argument:
The fact that one can imagine a case in which a heinous act might be justified is not a reason for refusing to make that act illegal. If it were, there would be no laws, since one can always imagine a case when breaking any law would be justified. What the law is intended to do is to prevent acts that are almost always wrong. We then rely on the administration of the law -- prosecutorial discretion, jury nulllification, etc. -- to deal with the very rare cases in which the prohibitions make no sense in light of the facts.
The salutory benefit of this apparoach is that it places constraints on those who find themselves in a position to run afoul of the law. Before they act, they must decide whether the harm to be avoided by torture (or any other illegal act) is so great that they are willing to go to jail to prevent it. Such a constraint seems very unlikely to result in preventing a person from doing whatever it takes to find the hidden nuclear weapon in Manhattan. But it might well be enough to prevent the sorts of routine abuses of detainees that have come to light as a result of the war on terrorism.
Update: If you are interested, the text of the McCain Amendment is posted here, on the Physicians for Human Rights website
Here's the argument:
Suppose a nuclear bomb is primed to detonate somewhere in Manhattan. . . and we've captured a terrorist who knows where the bomb is. But he won't talk. By forbidding torture, you inflict death on many thousands of innocents and endless suffering on the families of those who died at a terrorist's whim — and who might have lived had government done its ugly duty.Here's the problem: In the hypothetical Gelertner poses, the law would be irrelevant. Does anyone doubt that torture would occur under these circumstances even if illegal?
The fact that one can imagine a case in which a heinous act might be justified is not a reason for refusing to make that act illegal. If it were, there would be no laws, since one can always imagine a case when breaking any law would be justified. What the law is intended to do is to prevent acts that are almost always wrong. We then rely on the administration of the law -- prosecutorial discretion, jury nulllification, etc. -- to deal with the very rare cases in which the prohibitions make no sense in light of the facts.
The salutory benefit of this apparoach is that it places constraints on those who find themselves in a position to run afoul of the law. Before they act, they must decide whether the harm to be avoided by torture (or any other illegal act) is so great that they are willing to go to jail to prevent it. Such a constraint seems very unlikely to result in preventing a person from doing whatever it takes to find the hidden nuclear weapon in Manhattan. But it might well be enough to prevent the sorts of routine abuses of detainees that have come to light as a result of the war on terrorism.
Update: If you are interested, the text of the McCain Amendment is posted here, on the Physicians for Human Rights website
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Funny Stuff
On the lighter side:
From Broken Newz comes the revelation that President Bush May Send Up To 5 Marines For French Assistance in quelling the riots.
From Broken Newz comes the revelation that President Bush May Send Up To 5 Marines For French Assistance in quelling the riots.
President Bush has authorized the Joint Chiefs to begin drawing up a battle plan to pull France's ass out of the fire again. Facing an apparent overwhelming force of up to 400 pissed off teenagers Mr. Bush doubts France's ability to hold off the little pissants. "Hell, if the last two world wars are any indication, I would expect France to surrender any day now", said Bush.Along the same lines is this:
Joint Chiefs head, Gen. Peter Pace, warned the President that it might be necessary to send up to 5 marines to get things under control. The general admitted that 5 marines may be overkill but he wanted to get this thing under control within 24 hours of arriving on scene. He stated he was having a hard time finding even one marine to help those ungrateful bastards out for a third time but thought that he could persuade a few women marines to do the job before they went on pregnancy leave.
And, there is this brief report from "America's Finest News Source," The Onion: "Faith Healer Loses Patient During Routine Miracle"
Then there is the peek provided by Christopher Buckley into ethics "refresher courses" being taught now at the White House: "Remedial Ethics"
But the best is from the American Comedy Network. As reported in the Washington Post last week, "[With] sustained combat in Iraq mak[ing] it harder than ever to fill the ranks of the all-volunteer force, newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed, rural areas where youths' need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war." This alarmed Karl Rove, of course, since economically depressed rural areas are mostly in Red States. "Horrors!" thought Karl. "We are shipping the future of the Republican "base" off to get killed in Iraq!" Since doing anything to either decrease the demand for cannon fodder or increase economic opportunity for the rural poor was inconsistent with neo-con ideology, Karl realized (brilliant mind that he is) that the only real choice was to equalize the political implications by recruiting more youths from economically depressed urban areas, most of which are, of course, in Blue States. Toward this end, Karl paid an advertising agency 40 kajillion dollars to develop a new ad campaign aimed at the hood: "I Need Soldiers."
Asked to comment on the new campaign, President Bush said that "In the war against the evildoers, all of the poor needed to bear the burden equally."
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Can Bill Keller Be Far Behind?
Surpising exactly no one, Judy Miller has "retired" from the New York Times. Given his role in the go-to-jail fiasco, and the very public blame game he precipitated with Miller (see this and this and this), it may not be far fetched to suppose that Bill Keller will himself follow Judy out the door before too very much longer. Recall that Bill Keller came in to replace Harold Raines as a result of the Jason Blair scandal. Now he has been wounded, perhaps fatally, by his own trust in another rogue reporter. The Times really does need to do something about its quality control.
Update: Lynne Duke of the Washington Post has a great report on conversations with Judy.
I have (very reluctantly, I admit) begun to believe that the Washington Post has supplanted the NYT as the counrty's paper of record.
Update: Lynne Duke of the Washington Post has a great report on conversations with Judy.
I have (very reluctantly, I admit) begun to believe that the Washington Post has supplanted the NYT as the counrty's paper of record.
So it's True? The CIA Does Have "Black Prisons"?
From today's Washington Post:
Congress's top Republican leaders yesterday demanded an immediate joint House and Senate investigation into the disclosure of classified information to The Washington Post that detailed a web of secret prisons being used to house and interrogate terrorism suspects.At first blush this seems just nutty. If it isn't true, how could it be "classified"? If it is true, how could the Republicans want to investigate it?
Puerile Press: Trashing The Cheerleaders
The blogosphere is awash with posts like this one: Carolina Panthers Cheerleaders Arrested for Bathroom Sex. The MSM isn't much better. A search for "cheerleaders" on Google News returned almost 700 articles as of 12:40 pm ET, including reports from such mavens of American cheerleading as the Xinhua News Agency, the Hindustan Times and the the Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald. The frenzy is so high that the Carolina Panthers web site has reportedly been crashed by the voyeurs.
The problem is, though, that all of these reports have almost no connection to reality.
First, the cheerleaders were not arrested for having sex in the bathroom. Thomas is charged with misdemeanor battery for striking a woman and with "giving a false name and causing harm to another," a third-degree felony. Keathley was charged with two misdemeanors, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. No one has been charged with anything remotely related to sex.
Second, the story that they were having sex is almost certainly BS as well. The actual facts -- which have been available from the outset but largely ignored -- were reported yesterday in the Tampa Tribune (albeit in paragraph 10 of a 15 paragraph story:
The problem is, though, that all of these reports have almost no connection to reality.
First, the cheerleaders were not arrested for having sex in the bathroom. Thomas is charged with misdemeanor battery for striking a woman and with "giving a false name and causing harm to another," a third-degree felony. Keathley was charged with two misdemeanors, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. No one has been charged with anything remotely related to sex.
Second, the story that they were having sex is almost certainly BS as well. The actual facts -- which have been available from the outset but largely ignored -- were reported yesterday in the Tampa Tribune (albeit in paragraph 10 of a 15 paragraph story:
Jennifer Chaconas, who said she was in the bar at the time, disputed the pair were having sex. Chaconas, 29, said she and a friend were waiting in line to use the restroom when others became agitated because two stalls were out of order and two women were sharing a stall.The true story is almost certainly prosaic: Thomas was throwing up and her friend was helping her. But that's not news, is it?
The other women shook the stall door, saying things such as, "What are you doing in there, having sex?" Chaconas said.
At the time, the woman later identified as Thomas appeared so drunk that she "couldn't stand right" and slumped against the stall, Chaconas said. Keathley stood on the toilet to look over the top of the door and said something such as, "We have an issue."
Holden said Monday that she heard moaning but "couldn't tell what was going on."
Farming Frenzy
The federal government is poised to pay $20+ billion dollars to corn farmers this year. Not to buy corn, mind you. But to cover losses the farmers would otherwise suffer becuase they produced far more corn that they can sell.
How can such a thing be justified?
How can such a thing be justified?
Hooray!
This is encouraging on so may levels:
All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.Full NYT article here.
Some Really Bad News Of A Personal Sort
billy bob, a friend, both of me and this blog, is on his way to Iraq.
I am depressed.
The very best to you, billy bob. We will be thinking of you.
Stay in touch.
I am depressed.
The very best to you, billy bob. We will be thinking of you.
Stay in touch.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Political Pendulums
James Taranto had (for him) a singularly introspective piece in today's WSJ Best of the Web. He argues, quite rightly I think, That JFK represented the high point of "confident liberlaism;" that the ensuing years marked a gradual decline in the power of liberalism culminating in the disasterous Presidency of Jimmy Carter; and that Reagan marked the beginning of an era of "confident conservatism" that has culminated in the Presidency of George Bush. Looking forward, he sees "the presidency of George W. Bush, and especially his muscular foreign policy, as a continuation of the Reagan era." But even he does not really believe that, for he goes on to acknowledge that:
Where I think he is wrong, though, is in his prediction (more properly hope, I think) that "confident conservatism" will survive George Bush. We may have to go through liberalism's analog to Richard Nixon and conservativism's version of Jimmy Carter first. But my guess is that, 25 years from now, we will all recognize that the admisistraion of George Bush was the point at which "confident conservatism" began to wane as a force in American politics.
And then the cycle will start all over again, of course.
There is an argument to be made on the other side: that conservatism is now in its LBJ phase, having produced swollen government at home and overextended America's capabilities abroad. The left, meanwhile, is as weak, angry and paranoid as the right was in the heyday of the John Birch Society--but perhaps one day it will reconnect with reality and resurge politically.I think he is right in a general sense: there is an ebb and flow between progressive and conservative impulses and the success of either inevitably generates in its devotees the hubris that in the end is its downfall. I also tend to think he is right in his charatcterization of today's "Left": they do tend to resemble the Right in the days of LBJ.
Where I think he is wrong, though, is in his prediction (more properly hope, I think) that "confident conservatism" will survive George Bush. We may have to go through liberalism's analog to Richard Nixon and conservativism's version of Jimmy Carter first. But my guess is that, 25 years from now, we will all recognize that the admisistraion of George Bush was the point at which "confident conservatism" began to wane as a force in American politics.
And then the cycle will start all over again, of course.
Cat Fights
According to an e-mail I got this afternoon from the NY Times, the most-read article for October at Times.com was Maureen Dowd's "What's A Modern Girl To Do?. Like all of Maureen's stuff, it is full of amusing one-liners and over-the-top charicatures, and, no doubt, it's "most-read" status was helped by the fact that many on-line readers have been deprived for the last month of Maureen "fixes" becuase she and the other Times op-ed columnists are now confined to the paid-subscription-only "Times Select" site. But, if I am representative, most of these readers came away from the read feeling a trifle embarrased by the transparently personal complaint that seems to underlie Maureen's Lament: (a) Dowd wants to be married; (b) she has failed to achieve this becuase men are scared of strong, intelligent women and want relationships only with dependent serving girls; and (c) she feels abandoned by today's young women who (she believes) are willing, even eager, to sacrifice their own ambitions in order to catch a man.
I would go on. But the critique has already been done for me by Katie Rophie's piece in Slate entitled Is Maureen Dowd Necessary? If you are one of the (apparently many) who read Dowd's lament, you owe it to yourself to read Rophie's response as well.
I would go on. But the critique has already been done for me by Katie Rophie's piece in Slate entitled Is Maureen Dowd Necessary? If you are one of the (apparently many) who read Dowd's lament, you owe it to yourself to read Rophie's response as well.
What the Polls Say About Bush -- and about Us.
I am normally not poll maven, but I found the results of the latest Washington Post/ABC poll fascinating. Bush gets hammered, of course, but the interesting thing is the breadth and depth of the antipathy. The public is evenly split (49% to 49%) on whether Bush "can be trusted in a crisis. " But on every other issue, the negatives significantly outweigh the positives, by nearly 2-to-1 in many cases. To me, the most startling of these is the responses to the question of whether the interviewee is personally satisfied with Bush's policies. 60% said no, and over 40% of this total (25% of the overall sample) said they were actually angry about these policies.
Two other things about the poll suprised and pleased me. First, despite massive dissatisfaction with Bush and despite solid majorities who believe that Iraq was not worth it (60% to 39%) and did not contribute to US security (52% to 46%) a majority (52% to 44%) still favor keeping troops in Iraq until civil order is restored. Second, 64% want Roe v. Wade to be upheld with only 31% wanting to see it overturned.
These results are, I believe, a testament to the basic good sense -- and sense of reponsibility -- of the American people.
Complete results are here. But some of the more interesting results are set out below:
Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?
a. The situation in Iraq:
a. He understands the problems of people like you:
Two other things about the poll suprised and pleased me. First, despite massive dissatisfaction with Bush and despite solid majorities who believe that Iraq was not worth it (60% to 39%) and did not contribute to US security (52% to 46%) a majority (52% to 44%) still favor keeping troops in Iraq until civil order is restored. Second, 64% want Roe v. Wade to be upheld with only 31% wanting to see it overturned.
These results are, I believe, a testament to the basic good sense -- and sense of reponsibility -- of the American people.
Complete results are here. But some of the more interesting results are set out below:
Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?
- Approve: 39%
- Strongly: 20%
- Somewhat: 18 %
- Disapprovel: 60%
- Somewhat Disapprove: 13%
- Strongly Disapprove: 47%
a. The situation in Iraq:
- Approve: 36%
- Disapprove: 64%
- Approve: 26%
- Disapprove: 68%
- Approve: 48%
- Disapprove: 51%
- Approve: 36%
- Disapprove: 61%
- Approve: 34%
- Disapprove: 61%
- Right Direction: 30%
- Wrong Track: 68%
a. He understands the problems of people like you:
- Yes: 34%
- No: 66%
- Yes: 47%
- No: 53%
- Yes: 49%
- No: 49%
- Yes: 40%
- No: 58%
- Yes: 40%
- No: 58%
- Great deal: 15%
- A lot: 14%
- Some: 22%
- Little: 41%
- None: 8%
- Increasing: 2%
- Decreasing: 49%
- Remained the same: 48%
- Positive: 38%
- Enthusiastic: 8%
- Satisfied: 30%
- Negative:62%
- Dissatisfied: 37%
- Angry: 25%
- Excellent: 7%
- Good: 25%
- Fair: 29%
- Poor: 38%
- Risen: 17%
- Fallen: 43%
- Same : 39%
- Worth fighting: 39%
- Strongly: 25%
- Somewhat: 13%
- Not worth fighting: 60%
- Somewhat: 12%
- Strongly: 48%
- Contributed greatly: 25%
- Contributed somewhat: 21%
- Did not contribute: 52%
- Keep forces: 52%
- Withdraw forces: 44%
- Uphold: 64%
- Overturn: 31%
Greenspan's Parting Shot: Reduce The Deficit
Allen Greenspan testified before Congress yesterday for what may well be the last time as Fed Chairman. His message: For now, the economy is doing well depsite the hurricanes, but the continuing growth of the federal deficit is unsustainable:
Kevin Drum argues that recent events in Colorado may signal that our our quarter-century love affair with tax cuts is fading a bit:
I'm not sure what the point of all of this is, for I have no solutions. I guess I am just discouraged, and I know I fear for my children.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday that the U.S. economy is in generally good health but will suffer in coming years unless Congress slows the growth of federal budget deficits. . . ."Unless the situation is reversed, at some point these budget trends will cause serious economic disruptions," he said.I have to admit that my first reaction to this was pretty negative. I agree that deficit reduction is a (perhaps the) top domestic priority, but, even assuming federal spending cuts are the best way to do reduce the deficits, the idea that we will ever have the political will to cut spending appreciably seems laughable. As others have noted, the Republicans are no better at spending restraint than Democrats. Where Democrats (at least historically) could fairly be labeled the "tax and spend" party, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the "borrow and spend" party. The common demoninator to both is "spend." The only difference is where the money comes from: American taxpayers or Chinese investors. And, it is a mistake to blame the parties or politicians themselves. As the old saw goes, in a democracy, the people end up getting the government they deserve. The basic problem is that we the people want things that we are not willing to pay for, not just from government, but in our private lives as well.
Greenspan also repeated that he favors extending recently enacted tax cuts that are scheduled to expire in coming years but only if they are offset by spending cuts of similar value so they do not boost the deficit.
"We should not be cutting taxes by borrowing," Greenspan said, sticking to a position at odds with the White House and Republican congressional leadership. "We should be cutting taxes by reducing the level of spending."
Kevin Drum argues that recent events in Colorado may signal that our our quarter-century love affair with tax cuts is fading a bit:
Business is the chisel driving a crack between moderate Republicans and the anti-tax fanatics. Although there is no group in Washington more loyal to the GOP's anti-tax doctrine than the Chamber of Commerce, in the states, reality often trumps ideology. “For businesses to be successful, you need roads and you need higher education, both of which have gotten worse under TABOR [Clorado's "taxpayer Bill of Rights]and will continue to get worse,” says Tom Clark of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, who notes that higher education has shrunk from 25 percent of the state budget in 1995 to about 10 percent today. “I'm a Republican,” Clark says, “but I made the decision not to give any money to the state [Republican]party.”He then refers to a WSJ article reporting that:
And what happened? On Tuesday, Colorado voters passed Referendum C, which gutted TABOR: The Taxpayer's Bill of Rights is "as good as dead" in Colorado, state Rep. Joe Stengel told conservative leaders from across the country Tuesday.
[C]onservatives immediately fretted that the Colorado vote might signal an erosion of public support for spending discipline. And early indications for the next test suggest they have good reason for concern.I hate to burst Kevin's bubble, but the votes in both Colorado and California do not appear to have much at all to say about a wllingness to pay taxes. Each, rather, is a vote against constraints on government spending. And, therein lies the problem: We voters do not like to limit on government spending any more than we want to limit our own spending. But this says nothing about our willingness to pay taxes any more than it says anything about our willingness to pay our credit card debts.
All eyes now turn to California, where voters Tuesday will decide on a state spending cap that would limit education spending. A Los Angeles Times poll this week shows that the measure, backed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, faces an uphill fight.
I'm not sure what the point of all of this is, for I have no solutions. I guess I am just discouraged, and I know I fear for my children.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Spinning Iraq Intelligence: The Reasons Matter
Today, both Robert Brooks in the New York Times and the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal take the Democrats, and Harry Reid in particular, to task for claiming that the Bush Administration "manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq." Brooks' piece is much the more amusing of the two, portraying Harry Reid as a demented conspiracy theorist "sit[ting] alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes." But Brooks' basic point is that most of the claims made by the Bushies in the run-up to the war had been made before -- by Democrats in the Clinton Administration:
Still, it seems to me there is a difference. It lies not in the fact of the "spin" but in the reasons for it. The goal of the Clinton administration was to keep the United Nations from abandoning the inspection process and the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War. The goal of the Bush Administration was to take us to war. That difference is important. It is one thing to ignore ambiguity when the proposed reponse is diplomatic and economic pressure and another thing entirely when the proposed response is war.
It is not the "manipulation" of intelligence that is the real problem here. It is the willingness of this administration -- any administration -- to go to war in the face of very ambiguous intelligence about the degree to which US security is actually treatened.
Even more, I think, it is about trust. I can remember reading Colin Powell's address to the UN and thinkng, "Is that all?? Man, that's thin!" Yet I, like so many others, bouyed in part by the apparent success of the invasion of Afghanistan, decided to trust them. It is the fact that this trust was so obvioulsy misplaced that generates the real bitterness and anger.
On most issues, people expect politicians and editorialists to "spin" the facts and are therefore suitably skeptical of arguments made for and against a given proposal. Not so with wars, though. The decision to take the Country to war is the single most important decision any government can make. People expect that, on this decision at least, their leaders, regardless of political party or ideology, will not take the Country to war without a very, very good reason for doing so. People also recognize that the publicly available facts may be only a small part of the story. As a consequence, on questions of war, people are much more willing to trust the President and his advisors than they are on virtually any other issue. When it turns out, as it so often has in the last several decades, that this trust has been misplaced, that an Administration's reasons for going to war had more to do with ideology than security, people get angry and, in the end, lose a bit of their capacity to trust even on questions of war. That is a very dangerous thing, becuase there someday might actually be a real good reason to go to war, yet the people may be unwilling to believe. One can only cry wolf so many times.
- "[In 1998] Clinton argued, 'Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions ... and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.' "
- "In 1997 Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen, went on national television and informed the American people that if Saddam has 'as much VX in storage as the U.N. suspects' he would 'be able to kill every human being on the face of the planet.' "
- "Secretary of State Madeleine Albright compared Saddam to Hitler and warned that he could 'use his weapons of mass destruction' or 'become the salesman for weapons of mass destruction.' "
- "Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned that 'Saddam's history of aggression, and his recent record of deception and defiance, leave no doubt that he would resume his drive for regional domination if he had the chance. Year after year, in conflict after conflict, Saddam has proven that he seeks weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, in order to use them.' "
- "[I]n 2002 Al Gore declared that Saddam Hussein 'has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.'
- "In 2001, a Clinton assistant secretary of state, Robert Einhorn, said at a Congressional hearing, 'Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors.' "
- "Clinton National Security Council staffer Kenneth Pollack has written, 'The U.S. Intelligence Community's belief toward the end of the Clinton administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons.' "
In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan 500-page report that found numerous failures of intelligence gathering and analysis. As for the Bush Administration's role, "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," (our emphasis).And, as, Max Boot pointed out in yesterday's LA Times, Wilson was at least as guilty of "manipulating" the facts as anyone else:
The Butler Report, published by the British in July 2004, similarly found no evidence of "deliberate distortion," although it too found much to criticize in the quality of prewar intelligence.
The March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence was equally categorical, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . .analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments."
* * * *
In short, everyone who has looked into the question of whether the Bush Administration lied about intelligence, distorted intelligence, or pressured intelligence agencies to produce assessments that would support a supposedly pre-baked decision to invade Iraq has come up with the same answer: No, no, no and no.
Everyone, that is, except Joseph Wilson IV.
The problem here is that the one undisputed liar in this whole sordid affair doesn't work for the administration. In his attempts to turn his wife into an antiwar martyr, Joseph C. Wilson IV has retailed more whoppers than Burger King.OK. OK. Surprise, surprise. No one is pure. The intelligence was spotty and ambiguous, and politicians and op-ed writers on both sides of the political spectrum emphsized the parts that advanced their underlying agendas and de-emphsized or ignored the rest. What else is new?
The least consequential of these fibs was his denial that it was his wife who got him sent to Niger in February 2002 to check out claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium. . . . Much more egregious were the ways in which Wilson misrepresented his findings. In his famous New York Times Op-Ed article (July 6, 2003), Wilson gave the impression that his eight-day jaunt proved that Iraq was not trying to acquire uranium in Africa. Therefore, when administration officials nevertheless cited concerns about Hussein's nuclear ambitions, Wilson claimed that they had "twisted" evidence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." The Senate Intelligence Committee was not kind to this claim either.
The panel's report found that, far from discrediting the Iraq-Niger uranium link, Wilson actually provided fresh details about a 1999 meeting between Niger's prime minister and an Iraqi delegation. Beyond that, he had not supplied new information. According to the panel, intelligence analysts "did not think" that his findings "clarified the story on the reported Iraq-Niger uranium deal." In other words, Wilson had hardly exposed as fraudulent the "16 words" included in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In fact, the British government, in its own post-invasion review of intelligence, found that this claim was "well founded."
Still, it seems to me there is a difference. It lies not in the fact of the "spin" but in the reasons for it. The goal of the Clinton administration was to keep the United Nations from abandoning the inspection process and the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War. The goal of the Bush Administration was to take us to war. That difference is important. It is one thing to ignore ambiguity when the proposed reponse is diplomatic and economic pressure and another thing entirely when the proposed response is war.
It is not the "manipulation" of intelligence that is the real problem here. It is the willingness of this administration -- any administration -- to go to war in the face of very ambiguous intelligence about the degree to which US security is actually treatened.
Even more, I think, it is about trust. I can remember reading Colin Powell's address to the UN and thinkng, "Is that all?? Man, that's thin!" Yet I, like so many others, bouyed in part by the apparent success of the invasion of Afghanistan, decided to trust them. It is the fact that this trust was so obvioulsy misplaced that generates the real bitterness and anger.
On most issues, people expect politicians and editorialists to "spin" the facts and are therefore suitably skeptical of arguments made for and against a given proposal. Not so with wars, though. The decision to take the Country to war is the single most important decision any government can make. People expect that, on this decision at least, their leaders, regardless of political party or ideology, will not take the Country to war without a very, very good reason for doing so. People also recognize that the publicly available facts may be only a small part of the story. As a consequence, on questions of war, people are much more willing to trust the President and his advisors than they are on virtually any other issue. When it turns out, as it so often has in the last several decades, that this trust has been misplaced, that an Administration's reasons for going to war had more to do with ideology than security, people get angry and, in the end, lose a bit of their capacity to trust even on questions of war. That is a very dangerous thing, becuase there someday might actually be a real good reason to go to war, yet the people may be unwilling to believe. One can only cry wolf so many times.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Living Large
From a friend, the following advice, penned originally by I know not whom:
Our goal in life should NOT be to arrive safely at the grave in an attractive and well preserved body. We should rather aim to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!
And So It Begins
The nomination of Harriet Miers made the Right realize that what they wanted almost as much as a conservative justice was a knock-down, drag out fight. Well, it looks like they will get their wish:
From People for the American Way:
Update: From Planned Parenthood:
If you're interested in reading a lot more of these knee-jerk reactions, the Washingtomn Post Supreme Court Blog is compiling them.
From People for the American Way:
BUSH PUTS DEMANDS OF FAR-RIGHT ABOVE INTERESTS OF AMERICANS WITH HIGH COURT NOMINATION OF RIGHT-WING ACTIVIST ALITO.It's hard to see how this is good news for the Country.
PFAW will wage massive national effort to defeat nominee who would dramatically shift balance of Court.
Update: From Planned Parenthood:
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) today called for the Senate to reject President Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.From NARAL:
"Judge Alito would undermine basic reproductive rights, and Planned Parenthood will oppose his confirmation," said Karen Pearl, interim president of PPFA. "It is outrageous that President Bush would replace a moderate conservative like Justice O'Connor with a conservative hardliner. There is no room on the court for someone with a judicial philosophy that places at risk the rights, freedoms, and liberties that Americans hold dear."
NARAL Pro-Choice America announced its opposition to President Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito, Jr. to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In choosing Alito, President Bush gave into the demands of his far-right base and is attempting to replace the moderate O’Connor with someone who would move the court in a direction that threatens fundamental freedoms, including a woman’s right to choose as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.
Samuel Alito’s record reveals troubling elements that place him well outside the American mainstream
If you're interested in reading a lot more of these knee-jerk reactions, the Washingtomn Post Supreme Court Blog is compiling them.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Getting The Iraqis To "Stand Up"
A depressing article in today's New York Times points out one of the problems the Iraqi army faces in "standing up" so that we can "stand down":Lack of Armor Proves Deadly for Iraqi Army. In this regard, a couple pictures are worth several a thousand words:
When the article talks about a lack of armor, it is not talking about tanks. It is talking about armored personnel carriers and body armor. How can we expect the Iraqis to stand up in a war of ambush and IEDs without such basic protections, especially when the people they are supposed to replace DO have them. Under such circumstances, the wonder is that they fight at all.
The explanation is even more troubling:
I'm not suggesting that we should stop equipping our own troops in order to equip the Iraqis. But, it does seem to me that three plus years after the war began, we would have found a way to meet the needs of both armies.
If it is true that we can't leave until the Iraqis can take responsibility for fighting the war themselves, then we damn sure ought to be bending every effort toward at least getting them the equipment they need to have a chance.
When the article talks about a lack of armor, it is not talking about tanks. It is talking about armored personnel carriers and body armor. How can we expect the Iraqis to stand up in a war of ambush and IEDs without such basic protections, especially when the people they are supposed to replace DO have them. Under such circumstances, the wonder is that they fight at all.
The explanation is even more troubling:
The Army unit in charge of equipping and training the Iraqis, the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, said it was trying to replace much of the Iraqi fleet with new armored trucks.
But it has largely restricted its shopping to American companies that are still swamped by orders for American troops. The unit's biggest initiative, to give the Iraqis 1,500 armored Humvees, will not begin until December, and most will not be built until next summer, military and company officials said.
The Pentagon still has only one contractor in Ohio armoring the Humvees, and a backlog of orders for American troops that dates to the early months of the war has forced the Iraqi troops to the end of the line.
"We're competing with the Army on that," said Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who led the transition unit until last month.
I'm not suggesting that we should stop equipping our own troops in order to equip the Iraqis. But, it does seem to me that three plus years after the war began, we would have found a way to meet the needs of both armies.
If it is true that we can't leave until the Iraqis can take responsibility for fighting the war themselves, then we damn sure ought to be bending every effort toward at least getting them the equipment they need to have a chance.
Plame/Wilson/Libby/Rove Redux
My October 18 post on the then-possibility that Scooter Libby and/or Karl Rove would be indicted, has generated more comments than any post in the 10-month history of this site. And, the comments demonstrate that I need to clarify what I am saying both in the original post and in the follow-ups here and here.
The main thrust of the comments was disbelief that I could say outing Valerie Plame was not a crime. This comment comes, I think, from the different meanings of the term "crime". (Do I sound Like Bill Clinton?)
In common parlance, we tend to call actions we think of as despicable "crimes," as in the statement "That's a crime!" I myself used it in that sense in the post on Frank Rich's Op-Ed piece in the October 24 NYT. Rich described a wag-the-dog scenario in which Rove/Libby/Cheney et al. had quite self-consciously manufactured evidence for going to war in Iraq in order to assure a Republican victory in the 2002 mid-term elections (Rove's motivation) and to further the neoconservative wet dream of "mak[ing] the Middle East safe for democracy (and more secure for Israel and uninterrupted oil production)" (Libby/Cheney's motivation). In Rich's view:
But, when it comes to indictments, the word "crime" has a much more technical meaning: it is that set of acts and states of mind that the law says is criminal and nothing more or less. It was in this sense that I was using the term when I argued that outing Valerie Plame/Wilson was not "a crime." I did not intend to suggest the outing was reasonable or appropriate or anything of the kind. What I was saying was that, however despicable the outing and the motivations behind it may have been, Fitzgerald was not going to be able to indict Libby or Rove for the outing itself, because he was not going to be able to prove that Rove or Libby knew Plame was a covert operative and knew that the CIA was then trying to keep her CIA employment a secret. And, without such knowledge, telling reporters that Plame worked for the CIA was not "a crime."
And therein lies the problem I see in the Libby indictment. When a person does something that is despicable but not technically a crime, we have a tendency to want to get him for something that is a crime (in the technical sense) in order to punish him for the act that is really at issue but is not legally punishable. It is this motivation that led us to go after Al Capone on tax evasion and it is this same "rough sense of justice" that leads us to applaud the indictment of Libby on perjury and obstruction of justice. We are not, I submit, angry at Libby for lying about who told him Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. That is venal and contemptible and cowardly, but, if he had been lying about something trivial (like Clinton's affair with an intern), my guess is we would feel a lot less gleeful about the fact that he was indicted. The things we are really angry about are the lies that contributed to getting us into war and the subsequent attempts to cover-up those lies by punishing personally and vindictively a critic that was in a position to call those earlier lies into question. It is for these acts we want to see Libby and Rove punished. But those acts are not "crimes" in the legal sense. So, we want to get them for things we don't really care all that much about, but which nonetheless result in what we feel is well deserved punishment.
I don't deny a certain atavistic satisfaction seeing Libby indicted. Still, I must confess to being a bit embarrassed by that feeling, for there is a very great danger involved in saying, in effect, "Look, this is a very bad man who did very bad things, so we have to convict him of something, never mind what." It is hard to assure that such a genie, once let out of the bottle, will only be loosed on those who really deserve it.
The main thrust of the comments was disbelief that I could say outing Valerie Plame was not a crime. This comment comes, I think, from the different meanings of the term "crime". (Do I sound Like Bill Clinton?)
In common parlance, we tend to call actions we think of as despicable "crimes," as in the statement "That's a crime!" I myself used it in that sense in the post on Frank Rich's Op-Ed piece in the October 24 NYT. Rich described a wag-the-dog scenario in which Rove/Libby/Cheney et al. had quite self-consciously manufactured evidence for going to war in Iraq in order to assure a Republican victory in the 2002 mid-term elections (Rove's motivation) and to further the neoconservative wet dream of "mak[ing] the Middle East safe for democracy (and more secure for Israel and uninterrupted oil production)" (Libby/Cheney's motivation). In Rich's view:
Mr. Libby's and Mr. Rove's hysterical over-response to Mr. Wilson's accusation, [was the result of the fact that Wilson] scared them silly. He did so because they had something to hide. Should Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove have lied to investigators or a grand jury in their panic, Mr. Fitzgerald will bring charges. But that crime would seem a misdemeanor next to the fables that they and their bosses fed the nation and the world as the whys for invading Iraq.I allowed that, if this were true, that would be "a real crime."
But, when it comes to indictments, the word "crime" has a much more technical meaning: it is that set of acts and states of mind that the law says is criminal and nothing more or less. It was in this sense that I was using the term when I argued that outing Valerie Plame/Wilson was not "a crime." I did not intend to suggest the outing was reasonable or appropriate or anything of the kind. What I was saying was that, however despicable the outing and the motivations behind it may have been, Fitzgerald was not going to be able to indict Libby or Rove for the outing itself, because he was not going to be able to prove that Rove or Libby knew Plame was a covert operative and knew that the CIA was then trying to keep her CIA employment a secret. And, without such knowledge, telling reporters that Plame worked for the CIA was not "a crime."
And therein lies the problem I see in the Libby indictment. When a person does something that is despicable but not technically a crime, we have a tendency to want to get him for something that is a crime (in the technical sense) in order to punish him for the act that is really at issue but is not legally punishable. It is this motivation that led us to go after Al Capone on tax evasion and it is this same "rough sense of justice" that leads us to applaud the indictment of Libby on perjury and obstruction of justice. We are not, I submit, angry at Libby for lying about who told him Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. That is venal and contemptible and cowardly, but, if he had been lying about something trivial (like Clinton's affair with an intern), my guess is we would feel a lot less gleeful about the fact that he was indicted. The things we are really angry about are the lies that contributed to getting us into war and the subsequent attempts to cover-up those lies by punishing personally and vindictively a critic that was in a position to call those earlier lies into question. It is for these acts we want to see Libby and Rove punished. But those acts are not "crimes" in the legal sense. So, we want to get them for things we don't really care all that much about, but which nonetheless result in what we feel is well deserved punishment.
I don't deny a certain atavistic satisfaction seeing Libby indicted. Still, I must confess to being a bit embarrassed by that feeling, for there is a very great danger involved in saying, in effect, "Look, this is a very bad man who did very bad things, so we have to convict him of something, never mind what." It is hard to assure that such a genie, once let out of the bottle, will only be loosed on those who really deserve it.
Through The Looking Gas
From the LAT's story on Exxon's $9B quarterly profit:
For one thing, the idea that it is the oil companies' fault that there have been no new refineries built in 30 years is laughable. The reason is the maze of regulation that any new refinery faces counpled with pervasive "nimby-ism". Everyone wants more gasoline, but they don't want to have anything to do with the processes required to make it, and they especially do not want these processes anywhere within sight. There is now one new refinery on the drawing board in Arizona. It has taken nearly 15 years and over $33 million to find an "acceptable" site and to obtain the necessary permits. It will take another 5 years and $3 billion to build it -- assuming it isn't killed by public opposition of ever changing governmental requirements in the mean time.
Problems like this have forced the industry to increase production at existing sites. Yet this process generated what has become known as the "USEPA Refinery Enforcement Initiative." The latest "victory" in this in initiative was aExxon to spend $590 million in unproductive capital and pay $18.4 million in penalties and penalty projects. EPA boasts that it has now subjected 77% of the industry to such "settlements."
I am not saying that there was no legal basis for such settlements. I am saying, though, as a lawyer who was deeply involved in some of these settlements, that the legal basis was far shakier than EPA will ever admit. Indeed, the thing that drove most of these companies to settle was that they had to get "peace" with EPA in order to pursue their plans for expanding production. The idea that the government is "shocked, just shocked" that we have a shortage of domestic refining capacity is utterly preposterous.
Another thing that bothers me is the idea that the refining industry controls the price of gasoline. That too is laughable. Three years ago, when gasoline was selling for $0.89/gallon and the refining industry was losing money hand over fist, no one complained. Now, when gasoline is pushing $3.00/gallon, everyone sees a conspiracy. Gasoline is a commodity just like sugar, flour, milk and coffee. Absent price-fixing or government price supports, the price of gas or any other commodity is dictated by supply and demand. There has been no allegation of price fixing in the industry (and given the intense level of competition and the number of competitors in the market, price fixing seems far-fetched) and there is certainly no price support by the government (except for the fact that a large chunk of the price of gas is taxes). Gas is high right now for one and only one reason: there is a lot more demand than there is supply.
The final point that bothers me is the notion that oil companies "have a responsibility to expand." If they have such a responsibility, it is not to the public but to their stockholders and it arises not because of past profits but because company managements believe that expansion will result in greater future profits. The oil companies are not public interest organizations. That is not to say that they should not act responsibly toward the public. But it is to say that they are not in the public service business and that they have no responsibility to expand except as dictated by their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.
Gas prices are high because the demand for it has outstripped the supply. Supply is low because it has been constrained by governmental policy and public opposition to such an extent that the shut down of 10% of the domestic refining capacity due to hurricanes causes major dislocations in the market. Demand is high because we use so much. Everyone is in favor of conservation so long as it is someone else doing the conserving.
As Pogo said, "We have seen the enemy, and it us," not the oil companies.
I have some real problems with all of this."The financial results drew outrage from politicians and consumer advocates who see historically high U.S. gasoline prices as evidence of profiteering.
"This is a staggering profit and proof that we are being gouged by the oil industry," said Jamie Court of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica.
Court said oil companies had refrained from building domestic refineries so that tight supplies would push up prices.
'Now Exxon needs to invest that money in making more gasoline,' he said. 'Neither Exxon nor the industry has opened a new refinery since 1976 because the companies know keeping refined supply low is a recipe for huge profits.'
Certainly, political pressure is building on the industry to increase its refining capacity, even from a GOP that this year championed an energy bill that included new subsidies for the oil and gas industry.
'These companies are turning in record profits 'they have a responsibility to expand,' Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Thursday before the Senate Energy Committee. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called for an investigation of possible profiteering."
For one thing, the idea that it is the oil companies' fault that there have been no new refineries built in 30 years is laughable. The reason is the maze of regulation that any new refinery faces counpled with pervasive "nimby-ism". Everyone wants more gasoline, but they don't want to have anything to do with the processes required to make it, and they especially do not want these processes anywhere within sight. There is now one new refinery on the drawing board in Arizona. It has taken nearly 15 years and over $33 million to find an "acceptable" site and to obtain the necessary permits. It will take another 5 years and $3 billion to build it -- assuming it isn't killed by public opposition of ever changing governmental requirements in the mean time.
Problems like this have forced the industry to increase production at existing sites. Yet this process generated what has become known as the "USEPA Refinery Enforcement Initiative." The latest "victory" in this in initiative was aExxon to spend $590 million in unproductive capital and pay $18.4 million in penalties and penalty projects. EPA boasts that it has now subjected 77% of the industry to such "settlements."
I am not saying that there was no legal basis for such settlements. I am saying, though, as a lawyer who was deeply involved in some of these settlements, that the legal basis was far shakier than EPA will ever admit. Indeed, the thing that drove most of these companies to settle was that they had to get "peace" with EPA in order to pursue their plans for expanding production. The idea that the government is "shocked, just shocked" that we have a shortage of domestic refining capacity is utterly preposterous.
Another thing that bothers me is the idea that the refining industry controls the price of gasoline. That too is laughable. Three years ago, when gasoline was selling for $0.89/gallon and the refining industry was losing money hand over fist, no one complained. Now, when gasoline is pushing $3.00/gallon, everyone sees a conspiracy. Gasoline is a commodity just like sugar, flour, milk and coffee. Absent price-fixing or government price supports, the price of gas or any other commodity is dictated by supply and demand. There has been no allegation of price fixing in the industry (and given the intense level of competition and the number of competitors in the market, price fixing seems far-fetched) and there is certainly no price support by the government (except for the fact that a large chunk of the price of gas is taxes). Gas is high right now for one and only one reason: there is a lot more demand than there is supply.
The final point that bothers me is the notion that oil companies "have a responsibility to expand." If they have such a responsibility, it is not to the public but to their stockholders and it arises not because of past profits but because company managements believe that expansion will result in greater future profits. The oil companies are not public interest organizations. That is not to say that they should not act responsibly toward the public. But it is to say that they are not in the public service business and that they have no responsibility to expand except as dictated by their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.
Gas prices are high because the demand for it has outstripped the supply. Supply is low because it has been constrained by governmental policy and public opposition to such an extent that the shut down of 10% of the domestic refining capacity due to hurricanes causes major dislocations in the market. Demand is high because we use so much. Everyone is in favor of conservation so long as it is someone else doing the conserving.
As Pogo said, "We have seen the enemy, and it us," not the oil companies.
Friday, October 28, 2005
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