This Land is Your Land

Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets all across the country yesterday to demand, essentially, that the United States abolish its border with Mexico so that anyone who wants to come into this country can do so. The logical outcome of an open border, of course, is a massive population shift of Mexicans into the U.S. with all the demands on public services that that entails.

Congress is considering bills that would make it a felony to be illegally in the United States, impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants and erect fences along one-third of the U.S.-Mexican border. The proposals have angered many Hispanics who believe it is their God-given right to live wherever they want.

We're curious as to why the sponsors of the bill wish to limit the fence to a mere third of the border. Run it the whole way, for heaven's sake. Good fences make good neighbors, we've been told.

One protestor, Malissa Greer, 29, who joined a crowd estimated by police to be at least 10,000 strong, was quoted as saying of the illegals: "They're here for the American Dream, God created all of us. He's not a God of the United States, he's a God of the world," whatever that has to do with anything.

In Georgia, activists said tens of thousands of workers did not show up at their jobs Friday after calls for a work stoppage to protest a bill passed by the Georgia House on Thursday. That bill, which has yet to gain Senate approval, would deny state services to adults living in the U.S. illegally and impose a 5 percent surcharge on wire transfers from illegal immigrants.

Tens of thousands of Georgians apparently believe that illegal Mexicans have a legitimate claim to your wallet. They wouldn't put it that way, of course. They'd say that they're good for the economy because they do work that Americans won't do. That, however, is not the point. If we need them as workers then there should be a way of bringing them into the country in a lawful, orderly fashion.

In the meantime, if they're illegal they should be sent home and prevented from returning. If the administration doesn't soon provide some common sense leadership on this issue then Bush's approval numbers will continue their descent into political purgatory, and he'll deserve it.

More Clever Ads

No Left Turns, having pointed us to the way-cool beer commercial the other day, links us today to a couple of new car ads that are also cleverly done. For the first go here and follow the link. For the second go here.

You'll need your sound on.

You Are What You Eat

Here is scientific confirmation of what everybody already knew to be true:

Playing violent video games changes brain function and desensitizes chronic players to violence, according to a new study led by University of Michigan researchers. The study, to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, was conducted by Brad Bushman, a professor of psychology and communications studies and a faculty associate at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research; Bruce Bartholow, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia; and Marc Sestir at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Researchers asked 39 male undergraduates how often they played their five favorite video games, and how violent the games were. The researchers also assessed participants' irritability and aggressiveness, asking them how much they identified with statements such as: "I easily fly off the handle with those who don't listen or understand" and "If somebody hits me, I hit back."

The researchers outfitted participants with electrode caps to obtain EEG data, including the average amplitude of a particular type of brainwave, known as P300, which is believed to be an indicator of how people evaluate a stimulus, such as a photograph.

The researchers found participants who routinely played violent video games responded less to violent images, as measured by diminished P300 brainwaves. This was not true of their response to other, equally negative, nonviolent images.

Just as our body reflects what it is fed, so, too, does the brain. Feed the body fat, and it becomes fat (I know this from personal experience). Feed the brain violence, and it becomes violent, or at least more tolerant of violence. It's nice that science frequently just confirms common sense.

Is Polyamory in Our Future?

William Saletan, writing in Slate, doesn't think much of the argument that legalizing gay marriage will make polyamory (polygamy and group "love") inevitable. He states that human jealousy insures that such unions don't last, do not work, and that there will not be a large constituency for them.

His premises may all be correct, it may be true, for instance, that jealousy is an ineradicable human trait, but his conclusion that it would prevent people from wanting to form marriages between multiple partners simply doesn't follow. Just because certain kinds of unions are inherently unstable doesn't mean that people won't want to try them. It only takes a few people who wish to push the envelope, even if they themselves are not interested in a life-long commitment, to challenge the law. And when they do there will be no logical or legal justification for denying them the right to try to make the unorthodox arrangement work.

Another human trait is that people have a tendency to pull down every stop sign along the highway to total freedom, especially sexual freedom. People can be found who will try to do whatever they think they can do. Once the gender of those entering into marriage is no longer legally relevant there will be no justification for arbitrarily saying that the number of people entering into a marriage is legally relevant. Mr. Saletan is simply naive if he thinks that the human predisposition toward jealousy will insure that the law will not give way to logic.

In A Box

The Federal Reserve and its new chairman Mr. Ben Bernanke are in a box. By this I mean there are opposing issues that prevent them from taking action that will solve their problem.

Consider this report:

This is indicative of a slowing of the economy. In order to stimulate the housing market, the Fed would have to reduce interest rates to make the purchase of new homes more attractive.

The catch is that a reduction in interest rates will make investment in U.S. treasury debt by foreigners less attractive and they will look elsewhere to invest their dollars. If we don't continue to receive the billions of dollars daily from foreigners that finance the U.S. debt, the shortfall will have to be filled by the printing of dollars. This will inevitably lead to more inflation. If foreign investors perceive an inflationary trend in the U.S. they will back off on their investment of U.S. debt. which will fuel a cycle of less investment in the U.S.

Here's another report report that indicates that many existing home owners may already be under water regarding their mortgage and that many individuals are in for some real financial pain.

Given the above, I can only wonder what contribution these people are going to be able to make to the economy in terms of spending. The answer is, most likely, not much. And if that's the case, a recession or worse is likely.

Understanding the current state of affairs, it is easy to see why the Federal Reserve has discontinued publishing the M3 money supply figure as of yesterday. It will make it difficult if not impossible for analysts to determine our true rate of inflation but even so, the results will surely become apparent to the casual observer in short order.

There's no doubt that the money supply is going to go to the moon. I may have been mistaken in my suspicion that the reason for the discontinuance of M3 reporting was specifically because of Iran's intent to establish the oil bourse selling oil for euros but it hardly matters. It appears that several months ago when the Fed announced it would discontinue the report they could see that they would have to flood the economy with dollars (and try to hide the fact) either because of Iran's intentions or because of the news linked above, or for other reasons that we don't know of yet but it hardly matters what the cause is. The fact of the matter is that we are where we are and consequently, it looks like the Fed will be pressured to print enormous amounts of dollars.

Got gold?

Bias? What Bias?

More light is shed on why people are tuning out the MSM:

A top producer at ABC News declared "Bush makes me sick" in an email obtained by the Drudge Report.

John Green, currently executive producer of the weekend edition of Good Morning America, unloaded on the president in an ABC company email obtained by the Drudge Report.

"If he uses the 'mixed messages' line one more time, I'm going to puke," Green complained.

The blunt comments by Green, along with other emails obtained by the Drudge Report, further reveal the inner workings of the nation's news outlets.

A friend of Green's at ABC says Green is mortified by the email. "John feels so badly about this email. He is a straight shooter and great producer who is always fair. That said, he deeply regrets the sentiment expressed in the email and the embarrassment it causes ABC News."

We're sure that Mr. Green, his embarrassment notwithstanding, was boffo in network newsrooms around the country for expressing these bold and courageous sentiments about the evil Mr. Bush. He'll probably get a raise.

The Baghdad Documents

ABC News has examined several documents captured in Baghdad after the invasion and finds evidence that:

1. The Russian ambassador who was also implicated in the oil-for-food scam was relaying military information to Saddam about the composition, deployment, and strategy of American forces. He apparently had a source in American Central Command at Doha, Qatar.

2. There was contact between Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and Iraqi officials concerning the possibility of concerted action against American forces in Saudi Arabia in the mid-nineties as well as possible strikes on American soil.

Of course, the Bush administration has maintained this second point all along, if rather irresolutely, and for their pains they've been made sport of by the lefty media and the Democrats. The argument, however, has been swinging back in the administration's favor for some time now, and the set of plausible criticisms of the White House's decision to go to war continues to shrink.

Saint Fidel

In the left's pantheon of saints few rank higher than Fidel Castro. Thus when Delf�n Fern�ndez, a former member of Castro's inner circle, starts telling tales, it's as distressing to the left as unflattering cartoons of the prophet (PBUH) are to Muslims. Here's some of what Fernandez says in the Miami Herald:

"The initial idea of Fidel was good. Batista was an assassin," Fern�ndez said. "What happened was, the course he took with the revolution was wrong. It has dissolved into this unstoppable, insatiable corruption without limits, a vast lie. The people are in misery. Cuba's people have been enslaved as cheap labor for foreign businessmen."

Fidel Castro turns 80 this year, and he has become obsessed with his health, Fern�ndez said. The Castro brothers each have their own clinics and their own doctors in Havana's Council of State Building and in the Cimeq Hospital. Last year, Fidel Castro built a multimillion-dollar clinic a few yards from his front door, on the grounds of his Havana estate, Fern�ndez said he learned from his island contacts.

Fern�ndez said he carried suitcases with cash out of Cuba for the Castro brothers. Fern�ndez's photographs include several of him with the children of Fidel and Ra�l at one of their beachfront estates and with many high-profile Spanish businessmen.

"Cuba has a death sentence against me for high treason."

No wonder. He may as well have called the Pope an adulterer as to point out that Fidel lives like a filthy rich capitalist pig. I wonder how many of the proles languishing in the Havana barrios have their very own multi-million dollar clinic. Apparently, Cuba's revolution simply replaced one borgeoisie class with another. So much for Karl Marx's vision of social equality, in Cuba, or anywhere else, for that matter, where communists have held power.

Tarnished Witness

Everyone has been commenting on this already, but it bears mentioning that the statement put out by Christian Peacemaker Teams on the occasion of the rescue of their kidnapped brethren is at the very least, churlish. The statement refers to the rescue as a "release." It thanks the Iraqi people and Muslims around the world for their expressions of support. In it CPT renews their commitment to loving their enemies. But there is not a single word of gratitude to the men who worked so hard and risked their lives to rescue the victims from their captors and those who murdered the American Tom Fox.

The CPT people are able to affirm their love for their kidnappers and murderers, and that is admirable, but where is the love for those who delivered them from the evil they suffered? Where is the acknowledgement of their indebtedness? Or are some enemies just too far beyond the pale to merit being loved no matter how much they risked on behalf of the CPT members?

To be so hostile to the military that a word of thanks for the effort and risk of those young soldiers simply cannot be summoned evinces a coldness of heart that deeply tarnishes the luster of their Christian witness.

Update: Wretchard at Belmont Club holds little back in his assessment of the people at Christian Peacemaker Teams. It's hard to dispute the conclusions he draws about their thoughtlessness.

Further Update: Apparently CPT is feeling a lot of heat and has realized that they've made a substantial public relations blunder. They've issued an addendum tonight to their original statement.

A Meaningful Life

BeliefNet has an interview with Daniel Dennett, the Tuft's philosopher who has written a book titled Breaking the Spell, by which he means the spell that religion holds over people's lives.

BN: Your book implies that many people believe in God or at least believe in "belief" because they don't know how else to lead meaningful lives. How can you explain to someone how life can be meaningful without God?

DD: Well, by leading a meaningful life....Nobody wants to spend their life going around being the 'village atheist.' They're much more interested in just leading a good and normal life.

This is very unhelpful advice coming from a philosopher. One can lead a meaningful life by leading a meaningful life. Yessiree. Of course, the problem is if death is final then nothing we do is really meaningful in any ultimate sense. We're born, we live, we die, and nothing we do in the interim matters. Our lives are footprints in the sand at the edge of the surf. The next wave washes them away, and it's as if we'd never been there at all. I sometimes ask my students this question: How many can tell me anything at all about their great, great grandparents? In a class of thirty I'll sometimes have maybe two or three hands go up. The fact is that those people of three or four generations ago, their hopes, dreams, joys, and sufferings, their whole lives, are anonymous to us even though we are their descendents. Someday someone might ask our great, great grandchildren what they can say about their great, great grandparents - you and me - and they'll just shrug and shake their heads. It'll be as if we never lived at all. Eternal death quite simply renders all life pointless and absurd.

BN: Is it possible to be both religious and rational?

DD: That's what I'm trying to find out.

Well, maybe we can help: If God does not exist then we have no basis for believing that reason is a reliable guide to truth and therefore no basis for trusting it and no particular "reason" to live rationally. If there is no God then our reason has evolved to help us survive the exigencies of prehistoric life, but survival is only coincidentally related to truth about the world. Thus, reason evolved to assist our survival in a world which no longer exists, but it did not evolve as a means of facilitating the discovery of truth. Consequently, not only can one be both religious and rational, but the religious person, who sees reason as a gift from the Creator, has much firmer ground for valuing reason than does the atheist who sees it as a mere by-product of purposeless, non-rational processes.

We cite for Professor Dennett any of the members of the Society of Christian Philosophers as an example of the happy union between rationality and religion, and refer him in particular to Alvin Plantinga's book Warranted Christian Belief.

BN: Do you believe science and religion must be in conflict, or are they ever compatible?

DD: I think there is quite a conflict. I've never been persuaded by those self-appointed moderates in science who keep insisting there's no real conflict between science and religion if they keep to their proper bailiwicks. If you look at what the proper bailiwick for religion turns out to be, it's pretty darn narrow. If you think that religion is a path to any kind of factual truth, on any matter--like the creation of the biosphere, the age of the earth--if you think that religion has anything at all to say about that, or if you think that religion has anything to say about the truths of the stories in its own sacred texts, then you're just wrong.

Well, that settles that. Believers must abandon the field in the face of such powerful reasoning: Religion contains no factual truth, and if you think it does, you're wrong. No wonder atheists like Dennett call themselves "Brights."

The "Manly" Presidency

Ruth Marcus thinks the problem with the Bush administration is that it's too manly. She'd prefer that the Bushies get in touch with their feminine side:

But the manliness of the Bush White House has a darker side that has proved more curse than advantage. The prime example is the war in Iraq: the administration's assertion of the right to engage in preemptive and unilateral war; the resolute avoidance of debate about the "slam-dunk" intelligence on weapons of mass destruction; the determined lack of introspection or self-doubt about the course of the war; and the swaggering dismissal of dissenting views as the carping of those not on the team.

The administration's manliness doesn't stop at the water's edge. Pushing another round of tax cuts in 2003, Vice President Cheney sounded like a warrior claiming tribute after victory in battle: "We won the midterms. This is our due," Cheney reportedly said. After the 2004 election, Bush exuded the blustering self-assurance of a president who had political capital to spend -- or thought he did -- and wasn't going to think twice before plunking down the whole pile on Social Security.

Mansfieldian (A reference to Harvey Mansfield, the Harvard professor who wrote a book titled Manliness)_manliness is present as well in Bush's confident -- overconfident -- response to Hurricane Katrina (insert obligatory "Brownie" quote here). And the administration's claim of almost unfettered executive power is the ultimate in manliness: how manly to conclude that Congress gave the go-ahead to ignore a law without it ever saying so; how even manlier to argue that your inherent authority as commander in chief would permit you to brush aside those bothersome congressional gnats if they tried to stop eavesdropping without a warrant.

Mansfield writes that he wants to "convince skeptical readers -- above all, educated women" -- that "irrational manliness deserves to be endorsed by reason." Sorry, professor: You lose. What this country could use is a little less manliness -- and a little more of what you would describe as womanly qualities: restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt.

That's just what we need. Hamlet in the White House. The only reason pundits such as Ms Marcus want less "manly" men in government is so that the media can bully and henpeck them into doing their bidding. Bush holds the media and their opinions in condign contempt, making them feel, well, emasculated. These political eunuchs chafe at their irrelevancy in matters of policy formation and resent and envy the self-confidence and resolve of those responsible for their impotence. Dr. Freud might say that Ms Marcus and others in the media who hold views similar to hers suffer from a kind of political penis-envy.

Under the Tyrant's Heel

Jeff Jacoby has an excellent column in the Boston Globe titled The Humanitarian Case for the War. Here's the first half of it:

"I WONDERED at first whether the women were exaggerating." The writer is Pamela Bone, a noted Australian journalist and self-described "left-leaning, feminist, agnostic, environmentalist internationalist." She is writing about a group of female Iraqi emigrees whom she met in November 2000.

"They told me that in Iraq, the country they had fled, women were beheaded with swords and their heads nailed to the front doors of their houses, as a lesson to other women. The executed women had been dishonoring their country with their sexual crimes, and this behavior could not be tolerated, the then-Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had said on national television. More than 200 women had been executed in this manner in the previous three weeks. . . . Because the claims seemed so extreme, I checked Amnesty International's country report. . . . Some of the women's 'sexual crimes' were having been raped by one of Saddam's sons. One of the women executed was a doctor who had complained of corruption in the government health department."

Bone's words appear in an essay she contributed to "A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq," a 2005 collection edited by Wellesley College sociologist Thomas Cushman. To read her essay this week, with the war entering its fourth year, is to be reminded of the abiding moral power of the liberal case for the war. While most of the left was always opposed to liberating Iraq, a small but honorable minority never lost sight of the vast humanitarian stakes: Defeating Saddam would mean ending one of the most unspeakable dictatorships of modern times. Wasn't that a goal anyone with progressive values should embrace?

That was why, "in February 2003, when asked to speak at a rally for peace, I politely declined," Bone writes. "But I added, less politely, that if there were to be a rally condemning the brutality Saddam Hussein was inflicting on his people . . . I would be glad to speak at it."

But condemning Saddam's brutality, let alone doing something to end it, was not a priority for most of the left. I remember asking Ted Kennedy during the run-up to the war why he and others in the antiwar camp seemed to have so little sympathy for the countless victims of Ba'athist tyranny. Even if they thought an invasion was unwise, couldn't they at least voice some solidarity with the innocent human beings writhing in Saddam's Iraqi hell?

Click on the link to read the senator's fatuous reply to Jacoby's question.

If Afghanistan and Iraq can make their liberation stick, the stories of hundreds of thousands of people like these Iraqi women will reverberate down through the caverns of history and future observers will look back at what America has done with admiration and awe. As for those who opposed freeing fifty million Afghans and Iraqis, they will be viewed with retrospective astonishment. How, historians of the future will wonder, could anyone who claimed to care about oppressed people prefer a course of action that would have left the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in power when they could have been removed? And how could those same people, people who claimed to be in solidarity with the downtrodden and the tyrannized of the third world, so hate the one man most responsible for relieving the misery of those whose faces were being ground under the heel of the tyrant's boot?

The answers those questions elicit will probably not be very flattering to the left.

Bush Speaks Out on Abdul Rahman

Some conservative bloggers are dismayed by President Bush's rather pedestrian endorsement of Abdul Rahman's right to embrace whatever religion he wishes:

"We expect them to honor the universal principle of freedom," Bush said. "I'm troubled when I hear, deeply troubled when I hear, the fact that a person who converted away from Islam may be held to account. That's not the universal application of the values that I talked about. I look forward to working with the government of that country to make sure that people are protected in their capacity to worship."

Okay, so it's not Churchillian, exactly, and his use of "held to account" is troublesome, or would be if uttered by someone with greater mastery of the language, but what's most important is what Bush and Condaleeza Rice are doing quietly behind the scenes to impose common sense and civilized norms on Afghan Muslims. We may hope that the Afghans really do want to learn how to live in ways appropriate to the 21st century and that they are being tutored by Ms Rice in the fundamentals of civilized life. We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin has the latest details here.

Historical Perspective

A reader at Andrew Sullivan's blog draws some interesting comparisons between George Bush, Abraham Lincoln, and other war-time presidents:

I believe that if you compare the conduct of the Iraq war by the Bush administration with the record of Lincoln during the Civil War and Roosevelt during World War II, the record will show that Bush is doing a better job than either Lincoln or Roosevelt.

Check out Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, a history of the Civil War era. Lincoln faced continuous vilification by the Democrats and did not think until late in the campaign that he would win re-election. The Union military during the Civil War lost dozens of major battles and suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties due to incompetence and bad decisions going all the way up the chain of command to Lincoln.

Reading Battle Cry of Freedom, you realize nothing ever changes, and that Bush is doing better than Lincoln when the two are compared. The confederate raiders like Quantrill were as bad or worse than the insurgents operating today, and Lincoln's suddenly changing the reason for going to war, from saving the union to freeing the slaves, was as controversial and criticized as the decisions made by Bush. The critics in 1862-1864 ridiculed the idea that slaves could be made free men, even as critics today ridicule the idea that Arabs can have a modern democratic government.

Ku Klux Klan terrorists were active in the post Civil War south to such a large extent that President Grant, 1869-1877 kept large numbers of federal troops in the South and needed to conduct fairly large military campaigns against the Klan. When President Rutherford Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South as part of his deal with the southern states to win the presidency, the KKK was able to terrorize and keep black Americans deprived of their civil rights until the 1960s. Even though the remnants of the confederacy were still fighting 100 years after the civil war, Lincoln is not regarded as incompetent for failing to prevent the depradations committed by the KKK.

In World War II, the US marine corps suffered major casualties at Iwo Jima and Tarawa because of bad planning and leadership, on even simple matters of sending in reinforcements and pre-landing bombardment. Hundreds of army soldiers drowned in a D-day practice landing because their backpacks were too heavy. The Army suffered heavy casualties at Omaha beach on D-day because it was not scouted properly. The Army was undermanned at the battle of the Ardennes in 1944 because the USA deployed 100 fewer divisions than the planners said was necessary. The lines were stretched so thin because of the shortage of infantry that the Germans successfully broke thru during their 1944 winter offensive, Bradley and Montgomery gambled that the Germans would not attack in the Ardennes sector.

When the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe after WW II, Roosevelt (and Truman) were blamed for awhile for not preventing this in the aftermath of the war. In addition, communist governments took over in China, North Vietnam, and North Korea, as a result of the destruction of pre-existing dictatorships in Japan and Germany. Even though Roosevelt failed to plan against the communist takeovers in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, and Vietnam, he is not considered incompetent.

I would argue that by any fair, realistic comparison with past wars, the Bush administration has run the Iraq war with a minimum of American military and Iraq civilian casualties, and has accomplished as much as Lincoln or Roosevelt accomplished in their wars. The news media of the time never complained about America's firebombing of Japanese and German civilian populations.

Another apt comparison, perhaps, is with George Washington (See David McCullough's 1776) who as Commander of the Continental Army was vilified, abandoned, under-supported and unable to gain a victory over the British until the Battle of Trenton. Yet he has gone down in history as one of America's greatest wartime leaders.

The Skeptical Evolutionist

You might think that the following passage appeared in a creationist text like Of Pandas and People. It's certainly very much the same thing that creationists like Duane Gish and the late Henry Morris have been saying for decades:

We agree that very few potential offspring ever survive to reproduce and that populations do change through time, and that therefore natural selection is of critical importance to the evolutionary process. But this Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric.

Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement. One mutation confers resistance to malaria but also makes happy blood cells into the deficient oxygen carriers of sickle cell anemics. Another converts a gorgeous newborn into a cystic fibrosis patient or a victim of early onset diabetes. One mutation causes a flighty red-eyed fruit fly to fail to take wing. Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear.

Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation. Then how do new species come into being? How do cauliflowers descend from tiny, wild Mediterranean cabbagelike plants, or pigs from wild boars?

This is not, however, the superstitious ravings of one of those benighted folk at the Institute for Creation Research. This was written by committed evolutionists Lyn Margulis and Dorian Sagan in 2003 (Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of the Species, pg. 29, Basic Books, 2003)

In other words, the classical mechanisms of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, genetic mutation and natural selection, in the minds of these writers, just aren't credible as primary engines of evolutionary change.

Evolutionists disagree on the rate of evolution and the mechanisms responsible for it. The only thing they agree on is that it happened, and, even though they don't know how it happened, they're convinced that no non-physical causes were involved. This is very odd. Given the degree of uncertainty about the major elements of the theory, why are evolution's proponents so adamant that naturalistic processes are solely responsible for it? Obviously a metaphysical bias for materialism or physicalism is driving their science, but, if so, on what grounds is pure physicalism preferable as an explanation to a partial physicalism that leaves room for intelligent agency?

Cobra II

A friend passes along a link to a fascinating interview at Democracy Now with the authors of Cobra II, a book on the lead-up to the war in Iraq written by General Bernard Trainor and journalist Michael Gordon. At one point in the interview General Trainor says:

Well, I think you have to step back and look at the situation as it existed. The international community, all the intelligence agencies were all convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And this administration saw that as a threat that required preemptive action, because -- not that Saddam Hussein was going to pop a nuclear weapon or chemical weapon here in the United States -- but he saw that after 9/11, the threat of amorphous terrorism, with terrorists getting chemical, biological weapons and ultimately nuclear weapons without any national fingerprint on it. And how do you deal with something like that?

So the policy was, we have legitimate right to defend the United States. We have the responsibility to defend the United States. And in this instance, we have to preempt the Iraqis from providing the wherewithal to terrorists. And so, that convinced a lot of people. It convinced the Congress. And it convinced the average man on the street that this was something that should be done. Obviously, there were certain people that did not agree. But the fact is, the Congress supported the whole thing.

The Secretary of State's position wasn't quite as crude as you describe it, as waiting for a second election. He wanted to give diplomacy a chance. It wasn't that he was opposed to going into Iraq. It was a matter of timing. And that's what he was insisting on. See if we can't build up a coalition, whereas the troika (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld)felt that they could pretty much act independently and a coalition would follow after the defeat of Saddam Hussein.

The whole interview is interesting because Gordon and Trainor, though not trying to defend the administration, really absolve it of the charge that they deliberately mislead this country into war.

Big Expensive Ad

The universe of good beer advertisements is not large, but this one is a hoot. Be sure to turn on the sound. Music lovers will appreciate the use of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

The White House's Biggest Failure

Tim Hames of the Times Online has an article which he closes with this trenchant observation:

The tragedy of what went wrong in Iraq, therefore, is that the failure to locate WMD has made action against Iran or North Korea far harder to advance to Western public opinion. This would have been true even if Iraq, post invasion, was now a land of peace and plenty.

The final tragedy is that while many will prosper within Iraq over the next three years, the price of inept peacetime policies between 2003 and 2005 is that there will be no more Iraqs in the foreseeable future. To that extent, the Stop the War coalition, assisted, ironically, by the Pentagon, will be satisfied.

And what does this mean in practice? It means no more sadistic totalitarian dictators removed from office. It means no more free and fair elections for those who have never had them. It means no more openings for civic and religious liberty. It means no more chances of a cultural reawakening. Democracy might well progress in parts of the Middle East but, alas, mostly in the states that were most benign to begin with. There is little reason to suppose that the ruling elites in Damascus, Tehran or Tripoli have the cause for fear that they must have briefly felt three years ago. Nor have the people under their yoke any reason for optimism that they might yet escape servitude.

It has become fashionable in certain American neo-conservative circles to declare that Iraq has been "lost" and to wash their hands of the enterprise. Personally, I have never been part of that fraternity. It seems to me that their logic is dubious. Iraq has not been "lost", there is still a reasonable chance that by the actual seventh anniversary of the incursion the vast majority of people there will be more content than at any time in their history. It is the enslaved Middle East beyond Iraq that has been "lost" and thus remains an intense threat to our security.

Hames is almost certainly correct that the left has won a strategic victory in Iraq. It's a case of having lost the battle and won the war. They were unable to prevent the Iraq invasion, but by souring Americans on that undertaking they have almost guaranteed that whatever circumstances obtain in Iran or North Korea, the chances of military action in those climes are much diminished.

The administration must also be assigned some responsibility for making the left's victory an easy win, not because of their failed pre-war intelligence about WMD, because that appears to have been a universal mistake - even Saddam's top military officers were shocked to learn that they had no such weapons in their arsenal - but because the post-invasion phase of the war has been handled so badly.

Even this wouldn't have been too corrosive of American public support, though, if the administration had made a consistent, competent, articulate effort to keep the goals, necessity, and progress of the effort in Iraq in the public mind. This they haven't done, and their failure has contributed to the public perception of a land in hopeless chaos. The administration has allowed an antagonistic media to establish the psychological "wallpaper," as it were, for all thinking and public discussion on Iraq.

This is, in my mind, at least, the Bush administration's biggest failure. They forfeited this battle and ceded the field to the left when it would have been easy to keep fighting, and the consequences of their forfeiture will ripple through American foreign policy for decades.

Balancing the Budget

Andrew Sullivan has some pretty good ideas about what to do about the budget. Since they are good ideas they'll never be acted upon by congress, but they should be, or at least most of them should be:

Kevin Drum has challenged me to detail how I'd balance budgets while keeping Bush's tax cuts. (A small clarification: I'd keep the estate tax as it once was; and I'd add a buck to the gas tax pronto.) I'd prefer experts like Brian Riedl or Veronique de Rugy to propose detailed cuts. But my back-of-the-envelope wish-list is that I'd repeal the Medicare drug entitlement, abolish ear-marks, institute a line-item veto, pass a balanced budget amendment, means-test social security benefits, index them to prices rather than wages, extend the retirement age to 72 (and have it regularly extended as life-spans lengthen), abolish agricultural subsidies, end corporate welfare, legalize marijuana and tax it, and eliminate all tax loopholes and deductions, including the mortgage deduction, (I'd keep the charitable deduction).

For good measure, I'd get rid of the NEA and the Education Department. I'm not an economist, so I do not know whether this would do the trick entirely, and I'm open to debate on any of the particulars. But you get my drift. Maybe someone out there could do the math. I'm also fascinated by Charles Murray's new proposal to abolish the entire welfare state and replace it with with cash grants to individuals. I look forward to conservatives continuing to insist I'm a lefty. I also look forward to ferocious opposition from the left. But the bottom line is that the middle class and the prosperous elderly are far too pampered by government in this country. They need to get rid of their debilitating and unaffordable dependency.

The gas tax might not be such a good idea since it'd be highly inflationary, raising the cost of everything we buy, and the estate tax is unjust should be largely done away with. Other than that, Sullivan's proposals sound very attractive. The NEA and Education Departments are as useless as they are costly, and it is simply insane that the president doesn't have a line-item veto.

In any event, these ideas have as much chance of going anywhere as Dick Cheney has of winning the Democratic party's nomination in 2008.

Legacy in the Balance

Like a flock of disoriented geese, President Bush's approval numbers have been heading south this spring, but the Democrats shouldn't take too much solace from the fact. The primary reason for his drop into the mid-thirties is disaffection among Republicans and other conservatives fed up with a White House that refuses to cut spending or stop the flood of illegals pouring across our borders. Republican outrage at the Dubai port deal was really a consequence of the frustration many feel at Bush's apparent insoucience concerning secure borders. The failure of Republicans to get behind his Social Security reforms last year was the fruit of having been pressured against their better judgment to earlier support the administration's profligate medicare bill.

Fiscal conservatives are not pleased that Bush is passing out money as though it were beads at Mardi Gras, and they want it stopped. Neither are they pleased that Mexicans continue to breach our borders like tourists pouring through the turnstiles when Disney World opens for the day.

So why isn't this necessarily good news for Democrats? Two reasons: First is that conservative voters are not likely to hold their legislators responsible for Bush's perceived shortcomings in the November election. Republicans are not going to punish their congressmen because of their pique with Bush. Congressional candidates who run on fiscally and socially conservative principles will get plenty of support from the base.

The second reason is the Harriet Miers syndrome. Conservatives were outraged when Bush nominated Miers to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, but all was quickly forgiven when he recovered his balance with Samuel Alito. Republicans want to like George Bush. If he changes course and adds to his sterling record on tax cuts, judgeships, and the GWOT, by kicking the immigration and spending monkeys off his back, his numbers will bounce right back up to the mid- to upper-forties.

This is a very big "if," however, and it's doubtful that Bush has any inclination to reform. His legacy hangs in the balance, though, so we'll see.