Bring On the Death Squads

Because nothing says Freedom's on the March like roving bands of pro-US assassins. These guys were really thinking ahead when they put John Negroponte in Iraq...

Fare Thee Well, Crossfire

Well, howdy-do, turns out that new CNN President Jonathan Klein agrees with Jon Stewart and has decided to scrap Crossfire, saying "I think he made a good point about the noise level of these types of shows, which does nothing to illuminate the issues of the day". I wonder if we'll hear anything about this on the Daily Show... :)

Delaying the Elections

Former President of the Iraqi Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi has a column in the Washington Post urging that the Iraqi elections be delayed. Pachachi acknowledges that such a delay would be a victory for the insurgents, but feels that it is better for the nation's long term stability to let the insurgents win round one than to put in power a government who most Iraqis will consider illegitimate. I agree with his reasoning on this point, but underlying the decision to delay is an assumption that if the election is held later on security (and thereby voter turnout) will be better. I see nothing to justify that assumption, and, in fact, the insurgents may be emboldened by their success at having forced a delay in the first case.

Tsunami

The scale of destruction by the recent earthquake/tsunami in southeast Asia is quite mindboggling. Death toll estimates continue to climb, now placed at over 25,000 people. The Wash. Post has a graphic that illustrates the path and the toll of the tsunami quite well. The question has of course arisen: was the death toll preventable? The Pacific Ocean countries have in place the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific, which is capable of delivering information regarding tsunami potential in as little as 20 minutes after an earthquake. Such a system obviously needs to be set up/extended in the Indian Ocean area and elsewhere.

Also, if anyone out there is interested in donating to relief agencies involved with this crisis, CSM has a nice listing here.

Blog-o-riffic!

Larry Lessig posted a notice on his blog of a brand new blog that he helped set up, featuring weekly discussions between two University of Chicago professors: 7th Circuit judge Richard Posner, and Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker. This week's inaugural topic: preventive war.

Re: You Spent $10b for What?!

Yeah, and if that wasn't enough, the original projected cost for the satellite was $5 billion. What's another $5 billion among friends?

You Spent $10b for What?!

Apparently a full quarter of the proposed $40 billion intelligence budget is for a stealth spy satellite to be launched sometime in the "next five years". Did we need this? Did someone not get these guys the memo that we've got a half a trillion dollar budget deficit? Says the CIA (paraphrased): it's classified, we can't talk about it. If you want $10b for a fricken satellite, I think you'd be obligated to at least explain why you'd need such a thing. This isn't lunch money we're talking about here...

When the Truth Just Isn't Good Enough

The Washington Post has a great two-part account of the death of Pat Tillman (part I, part II). It was not quite the way the army told it back in April... What's sad is that Tillman's actions were no less courageous than previously made out, and the army lied about what happened, not in order to make Tillman look better, but to cover up their own failure. It's also sad that Tillman and Jessica Lynch were the two most widely told and celebrated individual stories of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both were apparently fallacious propaganda tales.

Teaching Family Values

The Washington Post has an editorial on abstinence only sex ed programs, based mostly on data provided by Rep. Henry Waxman. The editorial criticizes these programs for presenting students with false and misleading information. I just had to post this particular example:

Another offers a fable of a pushy princess who's dumped for a village maiden: "Moral of the story: Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess."

...now get back in that kitchen and bake me a pie!

Sweet Logic and Reason!

Amen and Hallelujah! The Deptartment of Defense's Defense Science Board released a report last week on Strategic Communication that contains some of the most incisive and cogent analysis of the War on Terror produced by any part of the government to date. The report is 111 pages long and is a remarkable work. The Christian Science Monitor has a roundup of coverage, you can find the actual report here. I have to restrain myself from blockquoting the entire thing, but here are some tasty excerpts (and these are from the beginning of the paper, I haven't finished reading it yet):

"To succeed, we must understand the United States is engaged in a generational and global struggle about ideas, not a war between the West and Islam. It is more than a war against the tactic of terrorism. We must think in terms of global networks, both government and non-government. If we continue to concentrate primarily on states (...), we will fail."

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"Policies, diplomacy, military operations, and strategic communication should not be managed separately. Good strategic communication cannot build support for policies viewed unfavorably by large populations. Nor can the most carefully crafted messages, themes, and words persuade when the messenger lacks credibility and underlying message authority."

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"A year and a half after going to war in Iraq, Arab/Muslim anger has intensified. Data from Zogby International in July 2004, for example, show that the U.S. is viewed unfavorably by overwhelming majorities in Egypt (98 percent), Saudi Arabia (94 percent), Morocco (88 percent), and Jordan (78 percent). The war has increased mistrust of America in Europe, weakened support for the war on terrorism, and undermined U.S. credibility worldwide. ... Negative attitudes and the conditions that create them are the underlying sources of threats to America’s national security and reduced ability to leverage diplomatic
opportunities."

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"There is consensus in these reports that U.S. public diplomacy is in crisis. Missing are strong leadership, strategic direction, adequate coordination, sufficient resources, and a culture of measurement and evaluation. ... The number and depth of these reports indicate widespread concern among influential observers that something must be done about public diplomacy. But so far these concerns have produced no real change. The White House has paid little attention. Congressional actions have been limited to informational hearings and funding for Middle East broadcasting initiatives, Radio Sawa and Al Hurra.

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"Frames simplify and help to communicate complex events. But like the Cold War frame, the terrorism frame marginalizes other significant issues and problems... Often the terrorism frame directs attention to tactics not strategy. The focus is more on capturing and killing terrorists than attitudinal, political, and economic forces that are the underlying source of threats and opportunities in national security.

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"Information saturation means attention, not information, becomes a scarce resource. Power flows to credible messengers. Asymmetrical credibility matters. What's around information is critical. Reputations count. Brands are important. Editors, filters, and cue givers are influential. Fifty years ago political struggles were about the ability to control and transmit scarce information. Today, political struggles are about the creation and destruction of credibility."

WOW.

Update: Holy crap, IT GETS BETTER. I'm reading Chapter 2 - The New Strategic Environment, and my jaw is on the floor. Great Scott, man, who wrote this thing?!!

More Questions on the Dollar Decline

There is a fascinating article on Asia Times by W Joseph Stroupe predicting doom for the dollar. I'm not sure who the guy is, and his web site looks pretty sketchy. But he throws out a ton of data, I just wish he would have cited his sources. Some of the interesting bits apparently come from this Japan Times story, but even there are only cited back to Morgan Stanley analyst Stephen Roach. So, while I take little of this at face value, the article suggests a number of interesting points to investigate.

• Stroupe asserts that the Fed is printing $1.5 trillion per year. This seems like an absurd amount of money. Is it true? How much does this vary from traditional levels?
  
• Stroupe adds $44 trillion in obligations to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other government spending to the existing $7 trillion national debt to come up with a "total national debt" of $51 trillion. He cites this number to Fortune magazine. I posted a story here some time back about a treasury department study (initiated by Paul O'Neill, before he got the boot) which found that the US had $44 trillion in unfunded obligations over the next four decades or so, which is probably where the $44 trillion comes from. This is a frightening number, but it strikes me as unfair to count long term obligations directly as existing debt.
  
• The article states that including off-budget items the current federal deficit is nearly $1 trillion per year. That sounds high to me. My impression has been that this number would be somewhere in the $500-700 billion area.
  
• Mentions heavy investment ($180 trillion) in derivatives as unstable investments. I have no idea what he's talking about here, but I'd like to find out.
  
• The article states that US consumer debt is $8 trillion. I was searching for this number myself a couple weeks back, without success. I'm curious where he got it.. Also what is the level of US commercial and business debt?
  
• Then there's the quote from Stephen Roach stating that the US currently has $38 trillion in debts. What exactly is being counted in this number?
  
• The article states that Warren Buffet has mostly pulled out of the US stock market. I know that he published an article a couple years back explaining, in great depth, why he was for the first time investing outside the US, citing many of these concerns about debt and the trade deficit. But has he really pulled out all of his US investments?
  
• One of the best parts of the article was the discussion of Russian economic policy. Here he talks about the possibility (which has been discussed here before) that the global oil market may shift from dollars to euros, with disatrous effects on the value of the dollar. Stroupe makes assertions about statements by Vladimir Putin hinting that this change is imminent. I should certainly like to see those statements. He also asserts that Russia has substantially shifted their currency reserves out of dollars. It would also be nice to verify that..
  

Anyway.. there are some very powerful numbers and assertions here, and if this guy is not a complete nut (which it's quite possible he is), disaster may be nearer than I expected.. There are also numbers published in another Asia Times story showing US personal savings as a percentage of income dropping over 15 years from about 7% to 0.2% (again without any cited source). Consumer spending may have kept our economy afloat so far, but that ride looks to be nearing its limit. We live in interesting times...

Update: I went hunting for more info on Stephen Roach's $38 trillion figure, and while I didn't find it, I did find an insightful recent column by Roach analyzing the economic prospects for the Bush administration's second term.

The Body Politic Has Got A Cancer

It's amazing that there's still so much resistance to serious campaign finance reform. The case for spending limits and public financing seems obvious and critical. Particularly when you have a Senator like Fritz Hollings commenting in this Time Magazine interview:

"The body politic has got a cancer of money. I ran in 1998, and I raised $8.5 million. That's about $30,000 a week, each week, every week, for six years. If I missed Christmas and New Year's weeks, I'm $100,000 in the hole. So the race begins the next day [after your election]. We're collecting for six years out. That means we don't work on Monday. We don't work on Friday. I've got to get money, money, money, money. And I only listen to the people who give me money. With the shortage of time and everything else, you've got to listen to the $1,000 givers. I mean, no individual is corrupt, but the body has been corrupted."

"...Money, money. That's got to be excised. I don't have any time for the people. I don't have any time for the Senators. I just got time for money. Hurry up and get the money so I can get on that TV to get re-elected."

And we wonder why they vote on bills without taking the time to read them...

Re: Spending Addicts

I was not surprised at the news Congress was raising the debt ceiling, as that was a necessary consequence of the policies the Bush administration and the Republican Congress agreed to long ago (and it was not the first time in the last four years we had to raise the debt ceiling). What concerns me more is the fatalism with which most politicians approach the spending glut.

The notion that Democrats are the tax-and-spend party should be laid to rest--unless one is making the point that when Democrats spend, at least they have the courtesy of taxing to pay for it.

Michael Kinsey of the Washington Post crunched some numbers a few months back to explode the myth that Democrats are the bigger spending party.

I also came across this graph showing the national debt across presidential terms. I have no idea whether the data is reliable.

Glad to see a post from you, Ryan!

Iranians: Evil, or Smart?

Richard Cohen has a brilliant column on Iran's quest for nukes in the Washington Post. When I say brilliant, what I mean is that he writes what I've been saying since IAEA first started to be concerned about Iran's nuclear facilities :). From Iran's perspective it's the obvious and rational thing to do...

With Arafat Gone, Hamas Ready To Go Political

As the Palestinians prepare for new elections, Hamas plans to run candidates for municipal and legislative positions. This is the best news for the prospects of peace in Israel in a long time...

re: Spending Addicts

By the way, Ryan, nice to have you back! Robert Samuelson has a Washington Post column discussing the possibility of precipitous drop in the dollar. He absurdly dismisses the impact of budget deficits, and focuses purely on the $665b trade deficit (he still ends up with a scenario not so different from those theorized on at Boys' Weekends). When you consider that somewhere around half the $500b budget deficit is being financed by foreign investors (not to mention commercial and private debts), we're dumping nearly a trillion dollars (10% of GDP) onto the global markets each year. That is just unbelievable. Meanwhile, Bush claims he is going to fight for a strong dollar, not surprisingly the currency markets think he's full of shit.

Bad Advice

The Washinton Post has a column on attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales's work writing execution summaries for review by George Bush when they were in Texas. Author Alan Berlow is not exactly impressed by Gonzales's efforts.

Election Over, We Can Stop Pretending...

...that we care about Sudan. A Washington Post editorial takes the Bush administration to task for "shrugg[ing] its shoulders last week at the genocide". The U.S. led a special meeting of the U.N. security council to a toothless and largely meaningless resolution, then held press conferences to declare victory.

About Scott Castle

Since this came up in an offline conversation today, here's a little background on Scott Castle, former General Counsel for the CPA in Iraq (and former UVA grad). The article, written back in June, also mentions Brett McGurk, who is an adjunct professor at UVA right now, and who was also at the lunch session last week (although he didn't have as much to say).

Spending addicts

I am now convinced that the whole of Congress needs to be admitted to a rehabilitation program for spending addicts. They have just agreed to raise the debt limit for the government by another $800 billion, making the total allowable debt a whopping $8.18 trillion. Meanwhile, Mr. Greenspan is warning that the continuing trade deficit is likely to have dire consequences for the US economy and recommends reducing the federal budget deficit as a key component in stabilizing the economy. Not that his opinion matters; he is only the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Interestingly, the Democrats now appear to be taking up the cause of fiscal responsibility in asking for pay-go rules.
Apparently all of this extra spending is necessary to secure the American people in the war against terrorism. It looks like economic security has been left out of the equation.