The Last Word on Lebanon

Gregory Djerejian at The Belgravia Dispatch has offered some of the best Lebanon commentary since the conflict started (I quoted one of his posts at the top of the month). Last week he wrote the definitive summary of the conflict. A teaser:

First, let me stress that no comprehensive, lasting settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict can be achieved by force of arms. So while Israel certainly has a right to self-defense, it should not labor under the misconception that it can eradicate or totally defang or otherwise defeat her foes militarily in some maximal fashion. This is simply not possible, short of a series of nuclear holocausts, perhaps, and so it was surprising to see so many rabid commentators, both here and in Israel, chanting on about Israel not having the will to win, to win totally, that is. This is claptrap, chimerical, absurd—although it appears to provide varied commentators here in New York City and down in Washington with a frisson of macho-thrill—that is, before they abscond back to their think-tank cubicles feeling manlier about having called for a good, old-fashioned bombs-away Armageddon in the Holy Land.

Let’s be clear. Beating Hezbollah ultimately must rely more on what might be described as counter-insurgency tactics, not some Dresden redux. To beat back Hezbollah one must moderate the 40% of Lebanese who are Shi’a, by over time having them pledge their primary allegiance to a strong central government, one that is sharing the economic fruits of Lebanon’s revival with all ethnic groups, so as to ultimately render the social welfare arm of Hezbollah largely irrelevant. Given this, it is manifestly clear that Israel’s reaction to Hezbollah’s provocation should have always been limited to targets south of the Litani River (save the very exceptional target to the north of truly imperative strategic value). This is so that the greatest pain would have been inflicted solely on the perpetrators of the rocket attacks and kidnapping themselves, rather than Lebanon writ large.

This piece is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the conflict and what must be done to effectively address the problem of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Is it too much to ask that we have someone like Djerejian running our State Department or the National Security Council? We need grown-ups in DC instead of kids on Big Wheels (Suskind quoting a "senior White House official").

Finally Some Pushback on Earmarks

It's nice to see some happy news for a change. It is particularly nice to see this issue cross partisan lines. It will take a strong bipartisan coalition to make a real difference on the budget. On the other hand, the partisan aspects of the issue are are noteworthy and should be exploited to the fullest in the midterm elections. It's pretty clear from statistics like this from the story:

When Republicans took over the House in 1995, there were five earmarks in the Labor, Health and Human Services bill, amounting to $2.4 million. By FY 2005, the number of earmarks attached to this bill had soared to 3,014 or $1.18 billion.

If Democrats can use this stuff to their advantage it might light a fire under the fiscal conservatives remaining in the Republican party.

Foreign Policy Amateurs

It stuns me that there are people who think Condi Rice is a competent diplomat. Particularly when I see things like this line in a Jerusalem Post story on the conflict in Palestine:

Abbas's aides said he decided to travel to the Gaza Strip after receiving warnings from Israel and the US that he must resolve the case of Shalit as soon as possible or face more sanctions and military operations. According to one aide, Abbas even turned down a request from Washington to dismiss the Hamas government and to reinstall his Fatah party.

The only expertise of our current State Department appears to be in the field of making bad situations worse. Do they honestly expect a political moderate to take on Hamas at a time when Israel is killing Palestinians in droves and has locked up Palestine's democratically elected government? Is this what they view as an opportune time to have their closest ally in Palestine stick his neck out? The JPost story goes on to describe how the Israeli campaign in Palestine, combined with their apparent defeat in Lebanon, has boosted Hamas' standing and forced Abbas to politically realign himself nearer to Hamas. After months of Hamas desperately trying to get Fatah to join a unity government with them in order to create political legitimacy for their government, now Fatah appears to be pushing for a unity government and Hamas is playing coy, not sure that they want to share the limelight. Well done folks, well done.

More On Security Narratives

First a little housekeeping. As I'm sure you've noticed, the blog looks a little different. I've had several requests for a newer look or more readable fonts, so I thought it was about time for a makeover. Henry requested dark fonts on light background, which I didn't do simply because I liked the look of this template. I certainly could go to that format if it is preferred, let me know what you think. Also I modified this template to widen the text space because it seemed awfully narrow and necessitated a lot of scrolling down to read anything. I, however, have a widescreen laptop, so I'm not sure if this will cause problems on standard monitors. Please let me know if any of you are forced to have a side-scroll bar and I can narrow it back down a bit.

On to the topic. Henry and Veritas both had excellent replies to my initial post on this, so I'd like to comment on those, and on the Sunstein blog post V mentioned.

Henry's comments reflected his usual deep pessimism towards the ability of the public to maturely deal with difficult topics combined with a remarkable optimism over the ability to essentially reprogram the public through a more enlightened educational regime. I share much of his skepticism on the former issue, but, while I am guardedly optimistic on the effect of his planned educational makeover, I am also highly pessimistic over the prospects for the implementation of such a regime. As such, I must ask what more pragmatic near-term steps might be available to us. Henry's forecast in that case is fairly bleak, and I don't think he's wrong.

In recognizing the contemporary political strength of the neocon approach, as we both do, we are propelled into the world of paternalism. This is a dangerous place to be, as Henry also acknowledges. It is relatively easy to see when our government is being stupid (particularly when it is monumentally so), but it is nonetheless difficult for an individual or group to justify appointing itself as the overseer of the public good, to maintain its power through deception or manipulation, to exercise it for the good of all. That sounds a lot like tyranny to me. But if tyranny wins elections, what then for democracy?

The upside is I think good narratives sell. We should all recognize by now the immense power of a good story. While it is unfortunate that it doesn't appear to make a big difference whether the story is true, or indeed even coherent, there is no reason why it couldn't be coherent and true. So I think the duty of a committed democrat (small d) in this era is to find ways couch truth and wise policy into a convincing narrative.

The obvious question then is to what degree complexity inherent in truth and good policy can be packaged in a narrative, and, failing that, to what extent it can be boiled away for the sake of storytelling while maintaining fidelity to a democratic ideal. Is it enough to believe in the big picture from which you've constructed your simple myth? Is it possible to avoid the pitfalls of paternalism while telling the public less than the full (tedious) story?

Then, of course, there is still the difficulty of V's comments on Sunstein's mortality salience. While I imagine the issue encompasses a broad sweep of irrationalities of which MS is only a subset, it's a good enough proxy for this discussion. This is, sadly, where the neocons truly shine. Not only have they recognized and embraced the need for paternalism to facilitate the implementation of complex policy, and the need for a simple narrative to sell their paternalism, they have crafted a narrative that appeals to deep emotional needs and responses within the electorate. They take our irrationalities and amplify them back to us. They only needed a violent conflict to tap those emotions and have now created one that will last decades.

As I mentioned in my initial post I am increasingly skeptical about all of this. V asked me in a recent conversation whether I believe we will see an American city nuked in our lifetimes, something he believes (correct me if I'm wrong) will happen. I replied that it is still avoidable. I don't think it will happen in the immediate future, nor do I think events have spun so far out of control that they cannot be reconciled before it's too late. But without any doubt the clock is ticking. And it will take a complete repudiation of everything the neocons have done and everything they believe to avoid a catastrophic global conflict. As much as people are growing frustrated with them, I'm not sure I see that happening. I doubt that we have time to just let things sort themselves out. These are difficult questions and difficult issues, but we need answers sooner rather than later. This country is in dire need leadership. No doubt there are great leaders here, it is only unfortunate that our political system does such a poor job of selecting for them...

The Voight-Kampff Test in Politics

Brilliant!

Constructing a Salable Security Narrative

Israeli activist and negotiator Daniel Levy has an article in Ha'aretz wondering whether and how Israel can extract itself from a "pro-Israel" US foreign policy that appears fixed on using Israel to fight its proxy wars. The neocon foreign policy, he argues, has inflamed opinion against Israel even as it has eliminated any ability for the US to buffer Israel from hostility. As Levy notes:

An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel. The sight this week of Secretary of State Rice homeward bound, unable to touch down in any Arab capital, should have a sobering effect in Washington and Jerusalem.

It should, but will it?

In the end Levy struggles with the same thing I struggle with, and that a post-Lieberman Democratic party is struggling with: how do you create an alternative narrative where peace and security are achieved with negotiations and painstaking diplomacy rather than bombs and missiles? As Levy notes, the neocon vision glosses over the complexities of local politics, the weighty and difficult to deal with matters of context. The neocon narrative is simple, pristine, and, above all, masculine. Like a good Bruckheimer protaganist, the neocon philosophy brooks no bullshit. It kicks ass and takes names. This, as Ron Suskind expertly points out in his talks and writing, is how the Bush political machine sells. The constituency of people tired of the overwhelming complexity of the modern world is vast, and furiously angry. Ultimately, however, policies born of oversimplification are doomed to disaster. Time enough has passed on the neocon experiment for that to begin to show, although the public has not yet begun to grasp the immensity of this disaster. The resulting dissatisfaction may be enough to turn the tide to a small degree, as the Connecticut primary showed. By a very slim margin.

As many Republican partisans have argued (and I think they're right), rejectionism is not enough to build a political movement. There must be an alternative narrative. But how do you sell complexity in a political system built around 10-second soundbites? How do you get a time-starved public with quick-hit media and short attention spans to engage in the labyrinthine terrain of Lebanese politics? I think a lot about this lately, and as yet I am unconvinced that it is possible. Hopefully there is someone out there in the wide world of politics who can prove me wrong.

Clan Democracy, Clan Warfare

One of the few views I share with neocons is the premise that the spread of Western style democratic government is a key element of lasting global peace. Because of that belief I also believe that it is critical that we start to understand what democracy means and how it works. That is why I've returned now several times to the problem of democratic government in situations where voting preferences are defined by the electorate's racial/ethnic/religious identities. As Fred Kaplan explains in an excellent column on Bush's foreign policy, the old maxim about democracies not starting wars does not apply to those situations:

Again, does the president really believe this? The main thing Iraqis expressed at the ballot box was that Sunnis wanted Sunnis to rule, Shiites wanted Shiites to rule, and Kurds wanted to secede. The election, inspiring as it was to behold, served as little more than an ethnic census. In the absence of democratic institutions to mediate disputes and legitimize outcomes, it might even have hardened the social, political, and religious conflicts that are now—by the testimony of Bush's own top generals—erupting into civil war.

The emergence of democracy marks the starting point of politics. Politics by nature involves conflicts. A democracy thrives or crumbles on how well it deals with those conflicts. There is nothing inherently civilizing about holding elections—nothing unusual, much less contradictory, about a putatively democratic government embroiled in war, civil war, or chaos.

Disengagement's Dead End

Jacob Weisberg has a great Slate article about economic sanctions that I think applies more broadly to the political disengagement tactics so popular within the Bush administration. Weisberg points out that isolation has some use as an international signaling mechanism of disapproval, but often has the unfortunate effect of playing into the hands of the local dictator. The examples of failed disengagements are many. Dan Drezner, while agreeing with Weisberg generally, offered a few counterpoints. Drezner noted that in addition to the popular example of South Africa (which Weisberg discussed), Libya may also serve as an example of a positive outcome of sanctions (I think he's right on that). Also Drezner, citing China, notes that engagement is not always a panacea. I think it's a fair point that economic and political engagement rarely leads to immediate sweeping gains, but I'd argue that China has been trending in a positive direction overall.

The Federal Government and Enron Accounting

I've blogged stories before about the questionable accounting used to tally the US federal budget deficit. A USA Today story is suggesting that even those more realistic assessments of the deficit (usually in the neighborhood of $700b) are far too low. They reached a similar number ($760b) just by applying some basic business accounting rules. But that assessment still does not account for social security and medicare liabilities. Standard corporate accounting practices require such liabilities to reported at the time they are incurred rather than when they come due. Using that system our annual budget deficits run around $3.5 trillion! By these measure the US should have reported $40t in losses over the past 9 years. The first step to solving a spending addiction is to admit you have a problem...

Corruption Watch: University Funding

Just a few quick hits today:

CSM has a strong article on the politicization of federal educational and research funding. It's just one more arena for compromised politicians to extend their tentacles into. Remember when Newt Gingrich built a Republican majority around the idea of clean government?

On to Lebanon. It seems that a small coalition of moderate-conservative realists is coalescing around the Andrew Sullivan blog. These include the Cunning Realist, Dan Drezner, and the Belgravia Dispatch. That last, the Belgravia Dispatch, is the source of the single best piece I've seen on Lebanon so far. Key point:

...this was more by way of an ill-advised temper tantrum than a serious military operation, as Arik Sharon would himself admit, if only he were aware of the disaster underway. Sharon would have recalled previous Lebanese quagmires and would have well understood (aided by the wisdom of years and the lack of any need to prove himself) that resort to airpower, in the main, cannot succeed in this context, with the specter of hundreds and hundreds of civilian deaths earning Israel international opprobrium in every world capital (save Washington), and that there is no real, sustained post-'82 appetite in Israel for a massive land incursion regardless, not least given the ultimate futility of same. No, Sharon would likely have chastised Ehud Olmert for his impestuous over-reaction, one so helpfully fanned on by myopic strategic blunderers and amateurs in Washington, both in policy and journalistic circles.

Also, here's a link to Ron Suskind's latest Miller Center appearance. He was there in late June speaking about the One Percent Doctrine. As always he was animated, entertaining, and insightful. He at moments comes off a little bit arrogant, a little pushy, and has the feel of a televangelist. But in general there probably isn't a more captivating speaker on politics and the Bush administration. I've gone back to the video of his last Miller Center speech several times, and I'm sure I'll come back to this one too.

And finally, this is a bit odd for TBWJ, but I thought I'd post a link to this TV ad. Yes it's for Dow Chemical, yes Dow is probably still evil. But it's some of the prettiest photography I've seen in any sort of video, much less a commercial. It plays sometimes before the PBS Newshour, and I can't recall the last time I was so riveted by a TV ad.

It's World War 3!!!!11!!!1

So there is much that could be said about the Middle East. But I think the most interesting part for me is an opportunity missed. Back when this started (even before Hezbollah became involved) this fellow in Syria, Khaled Meshaal, a member of Hamas, instigated a kidnapping in Gaza. The Hamas leadership in Palestine was obviously taken by surprise, and their initial impulse appears to have been to open a dialogue with Israel to contain the situation. They were initially willing to finally move on official recognition for Israel. The Palestinian PM, also a Hamas member, even wrote a column in the Washington Post asking not for the destruction of Israel, but for the 1967 borders, the right of return, and East Jerusalem, which is to say the usual peace framework. This was one of those rare dynamic moments where a balance has been upset and change can occur. Israel blew Hamas off and opted for overwhelming military force instead. Hamas soon withdrew their agreement to recognize Israel. I understand that Israel is reluctant to deal with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, but at some point they will have to recognize that military force has yet to accomplish anything of significance against them. Israel spent 18 years in Lebanon, and left Hezbollah stronger than when they arrived. Military action may be a necessary element of the Israeli response to these incidents, but it will never be the element that produces meaningful progress. For that political and diplomatic action is necessary, and opportunities like the one Hamas presented are as good as it will possibly get.

Understanding Net Neutrality

This is an issue that interested me even before I started work this summer, but I've certainly been immersed in it these past few months. There is a great deal of confusion over it, and many misconceptions. It's really quite simple, but I think it helps to have a little bit of narrative context. From early on in the development of the US phone network up until the late 1960's AT&T (along with the regional Bell companies (RBOCs) that they controlled) was the telecom sector. Starting in the late 1960's the FCC started giving signs that they wanted to create competition, at least in some limited areas, for AT&T. Taking the hint from the FCC, MCI was created in late '60s with the intention of entering the long distance business, and during the 70's did a remarkable job of plugging themselves into the regulatory and legislative machines in DC. AT&T was not about to take this lying down, and a mighty battle ensued. In the end, MCI won and AT&T, as we all know, was broken up. But they were broken up to break their monopoly on long distance, meaning that the key was to sever their connection with the RBOCs, so that MCI and AT&T could both contract for long distance service with them. It left in place the RBOCs' monopolies on local access to consumers. In 1996 Congress tried to eliminate that monopoly as well. The FCC, in its wisdom, savaged this legislation, leaving the local access monopoly more or less in place. As things turned out, the long distance market was really not worth that much. It's so cheap now that companies can basically give it away, and in the context of voice over IP (VOIP) the entire concept of long distance becomes obsolete.

Local phone service, likewise should not be worth much. But the monopoly on local access allows for more than just the provision local phone service, it allows for providers to tie any other service delivered on those lines to the monopoly. The economic theories now dominant in antitrust law say that this should not be important, that tying of products to an existing monopoly should not allow the provider to milk that monopoly for more money than they could get for collecting rent on the monopoly directly. The efforts of the Bell companies to protect their ability to tie services to their access networks argues to the contrary. When Congress tried to break up those monopolies in the 1996 Telecom Act, the Bell companies spent (if I recall correctly) upwards of $250 million fighting against it in court and in front of the FCC. They won that battle, and for their efforts won the right to tie DSL broadband internet service to their monopoly. The cable companies piggy-backed on their efforts and convinced the FCC to give them similar treatment, ensuring us a duopoly on broadband internet service. Consequently we have fallen far behind competing nations on price/performance in the broadband market.

That brings us to net neutrality. Having extended their monopoly to provision of broadband internet, the Bell companies now want to push their monopoly still further, into provision of services over the internet. High speed internet has the ability to deliver phone and video (the equivalent of cable TV) over IP for very low prices. This threatens the monopoly rent that the phone and cable companies have collected on these services for a long time. Once consumers are purchasing their TV and phone service over the internet, the phone and cable companies will have no competitive advantage over other providers. Consequently, they will not deliver high speed internet access until they are guaranteed the ability to block competing voice and video services over those connections to preserve their duopoly (the pathetic broadband connections they now sell lack the bandwidth to provide video service). They may also try to collect rent from other online service providers like Amazon and eBay, but I don't think that's really the objective. And I would be very surprised if they ever got into the business of restricting free speech, or any of the other nightmare scenarios that some net neutrality supporters have suggested.

I'm as big a fan of net neutrality as there is. But it really doesn't go far enough. The phone and cable companies have got us by the balls on broadband service and are threatening to hold high speed connections hostage if they don't get what they want. And they're more than capable of doing just that. Hell, they've already done just that. Many other countries have 10+ Mb/s DSL connections and are seeing rollouts of 100 Mb/s fiber connections. We're stuck with 1 Mb/s connections and we're being overcharged for them. Congress needs to go back and finish what it was trying to accomplish in 1996: open up the local access duopoly. But it needs to do it right: complete divestiture of the local access loops. The network access business should be run like a utility. If that were done, net neutrality would be a meaningless concept, there would be no need for it. Competitive pressure would prevent any service providers from trying to block access to internet services.

Unfortunately, the phone companies have the DC muscle to prevent this from ever happening. They've already spent $50 million on net neutrality and appear to have scuttled an important telecom bill because Democrats (to their credit) wouldn't let it through the Senate without net neutrality. These are some of the costs we pay for having a government for sale to the highest bidder.

Off the Bandwagon

First order of business: I am officially off the John McCain bandwagon. It's one thing for McCain to whore himself out on various issues that may not have been critical to him. But he has long defined himself on the two issues of democratic reform and fiscal conservatism. When he declared himself in favor of making the Bush tax cuts permanent (as mentioned in this story) it became crystal clear to me that the John McCain I fell in love with no longer exists. He is, in the immortal words of Obi Wan, more machine now than man, twisted and evil. Perhaps someday when Emperor Cheney is flinging lightning into his son the little sliver of humanity left in McCain will resurface, but I'm not counting on it.

Missing In Action

Fellas, I apologize for neglecting the blog the past couple months. It's been a combination of factors. My work has kept me more busy during the day than has been the case in some time, and I've kept myself occupied in the evenings as well. Additionally, up until the past couple weeks I wasn't inspired much to write about things, and even then I mostly engaged in discussions in other venues. But I'm starting to feel like I've got a backlog of things discuss here, so I'm going to try and jumpstart things a bit. TBWJ has not come to an end. Of course, y'all have been a bunch of lazy bastards too.

What to Do When the Bomb Goes Off

Go around the the corner. Someone on /. pointed this out. It does not appear to intentionally satirical. It's hard not to love DHS..

Killing Innovation

I just wanted to link a fantastic article in the IEEE magazine on how the DMCA (and potentially the broadcast flag) harm technological innovation and development. Hardly an original argument, but they have some really great examples and illustrations. I wish I would have had this when Jane Ginsburg came to visit...

More Than Bullshit

While poking around Slate to find the Metcalf article linked in my Fukuyama post, I came across this article on Iraq by Fred Kaplan. Kaplan is roundly disappointed by the approach of John McCain and Condi Rice to the violence in Iraq, which in McCain's words is to tell them to "stop the bullshit." Kaplan is absolutely correct that this is not a mere matter of bullshit or miscommunication, there is a structural problem with Iraq that threatens to rip apart any democratic government put in place. It's the problem I posted on a month ago (May 2nd) that where people identify themselves more by ethnicity or religion than by other political concerns, democracy only deepens the divisions. Every election in the foreseeable future in Iraq will have the same outcome: Shiites win. If you are a Sunni or a Kurd, democracy means you lose.

The issue of how to structure a government that can satisfy all three groups was a major question before we even set foot in Iraq (and one I raised in several contexts pre-TBWJ). They tried to hash this out in the constitutional convention and failed miserably, and basically left the constitution completely open-ended, deferring the problem to later. Now Iraq has struggled month after month just to put together a government after the December election. They haven't even broached the difficult (and likely intractable) question of creating a coherent state in which Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds can all be satisfied. That is not bullshit. That is likely game over for our grand plan to plant the seed of democracy in the Middle East.

Breaking Iraq into three independent nations will have consequences we won't like (destabilizing Turkey (and possible Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia) and creating an Iranian client state in the south), but it may be the only way to end the violence. But as Kaplan points out, there is really no one who can implement a plan like that. The Shiites (who will rule the country as it now stands) have no interest in it. The US and the UN don't appear to have the ability or wherewithal to impose it. Iraq appears to be completely dead in the water, adrift in violence and chaos with no route out.

I give Kaplan credit as well for trying to establish the distinction between Realpolitik and realism that I've argued for here before.

Fukuyama on Neoconservatism

I watched a video tonight of Francis Fukuyama giving a talk at the Miller Center a couple weeks ago. Fukuyama, a very prominent neocon, released a book not that long ago critical of the neocons, and the first part of his talk was a critique on what the neocons got wrong on Iraq. Attacking the neocons on Iraq is, at this point, a shooting fish in a barrel type exercise. But it's interesting to hear the views of someone sympathetic to that philosophy. The second part of Fukuyama's presentation was a critique of the immense focus that the Bush administration has put on democratization, making it the centerpiece of their war on terror. Not that Fukuyama is critical of democratization as a long term objective, but that lack of democracy is not a core cause of terrorism. Then he took a half hour of questions (it's a one hour video), and they were mostly excellent questions. As one questioner notes, Fukuyama covers an immense amount of ground over the course of the hour, but, I think, covers every topic thoroughly.

I have never read any of Fukuyama's books, although I've seen them mentioned often. I have read some of his op-ed's and have generally not been a fan of them. I was, however, pretty much blown away by his performance at the Miller Center. There were only a few minor points where I disagreed with him (primarily his brief comments on domestic policy), and I found him to be very insightful and persuasive, particularly on the second part of his speech (the sources of terrorism) and his discussion of the application of American power in the post-Cold War environment. His presentation of the neocon philosophy as a counter to Kissengerian realism was also quite interesting and has some real merits. His criticism of Kissenger is, in fact, little different from my own. I highly recommend taking the time to sit down and watch this video.

Update: I just wanted to add a link to a great Slate article from last month discussing the Broken Windows theory that Fukuyama mentions. This is not a reference to the broken window fallacy, which is a perfectly good theory, but rather a cockamamie scheme by which major crimes can be reduced by harsh enforcement of minor infractions. The Metcalf article debunks the idea that Broken Windows was a key to crime reduction in New York, and argues that it is merely a nicely dressed up rejection of causal explanations for social phenomena that conveniently allowed Giuliani to bring the full force of the state to bear on socially undesired persons. I found it to be an interesting and persuasive argument and so was disappointed when Fukuyama appeared to give Broken Windows a ringing endorsement in his speech. That was really my only major quibble with what he had to say...

Let's Go Home

Former NSA director and retired military man William Odom has a great piece in Foreign Policy Mag advocating an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Odom argues that stability for Iraq exists only on the other side of a civil war at the end of which some sort of consolidation of power will occur. That's a more pessimistic view than I would endorse, but I think it's not far off. Odom also argues that every other element of our foreign policy and our war on terror is being held hostage by Iraq, and until we get out we will be unable to make any forward progress. My favorite part is his discussion of the political impacts of withdrawal:

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the world’s opinion of the United States has plummeted, with the largest short-term drop in American history. The United States now garners as much international esteem as Russia. Withdrawing and admitting our mistake would reverse this trend. Very few countries have that kind of corrective capacity. I served as a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during Richard Nixon’s Watergate crisis. When Nixon resigned, several Soviet officials who had previously expressed disdain for the United States told me they were astonished. One diplomat said, “Only your country is powerful enough to do this. It would destroy my country.”

Deficits Matter

Here's a brief update on how we've lost control of our own interest rates, and now sacrifice our economic welfare to fund the federal deficit.