Why the Iraq Fiasco Means We Must Support My Politics

And what is it that libertarians have against the post office? The post office is great! Imagine any other place that does as well, for everyone, for as little. Whenever I hear someone start talking about how we should get rid of the post office I know I’m in nut-land and stop listening.

I’ll step up to defend the Post Office. The modern US postal service has a pretty amazing set of metrics by which it judges it’s success – percent of items delivered on time, average time to delivery, cost per delivery, etc. These measures are generally in line with what the customer wants, and postal service satisfaction rates have gone way up in recent years.

The trouble with Rumsfeld and the private-sector army he enables, is that their metrics – which I’m sure Rumsfeld keeps a close eye on – are not measuring success in terms of US or Iraqi strategic interests, but rather in terms of what’s good for the army and the mighty Military Industrial Complex corporate juggernaut.

I’m sure the top dials on Rumsfeld’s dashboard are things like number of sorties, number of humvees ordered, number of high-dollar weapons systems employed, number of “reconstruction” contracts going to well-connected US firms, etc.

Waaay down on the list would be things like recuiting goals met, electricity or running water production, US casualties, iraqi units “trained.”

Completely missing are measures on the reduction of sectarian killings, number of sectors handed over to iraqi military/police with reduced continued violence, let alone iraqi casualties or “customer satisfaction” i.e. US or Iraqi public opinion.

I’m sure in Rummy’s mind this is a truly raging success according to the measures that matter to him and his cronies. Unfortunately they gots nothing to do with what matters to the overall interests of the US and Iraqi people.

Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department

The ‘decent’ Anti-Decent position on the Iraq invasion (The Anti-This War Now Left – ATWN) has never struck me as very convincing. A war of choice can only be supported, assuming it is essentially in a just cause, if there is an excellent chance of its effect being benign. If the margin of error is so slight that the entire project self-destructs because one broadly middle-of-road administration conducts the war rather than another broadly middle-of-the-road administration – the real difference between Republican and Democrat governments on any historical continuum – then the war is not a good idea at all. The implication that all would have been fine and dandy if Clinton, Gore, Powell or the Von Mises Institute had organised the Occupation just seems to me to be so fine a web of supposition that it cannot be substantiated.

It’s an irony that a version of ATWN is being adopted by Tabbarok, Hitchens et al as an apologia for their crashing error in supporting the war. My own crashing error, I put down to my ignorance, not marginal policy decisions on de-Baathification or whatever.

Hi,

Regarding the U.S. Postal Service, it is a continuous miracle that in this day and age, we can reliably have a parcel PHYSICALLY delivered, within a few days, from our own personal addresses, across thousands of miles, to ANY other address in the U.S. for mere pennies per transaction! What other business provides such great value?

War, on the other hand, is collective insanity that delivers nothing of value. Efforts to analyze it rationally are almost equally daft. Comparing the outcome values of the U.S. military to the value of the USPS is simply absurd.

Have a nice day,
Antti

Who remembers wars fondly??? Oh, yes WWII. I remember it fondly! The almost half a million dead in the battle of Normandy, the bombing of Dresden, the screaming, the smell of burning human flesh. Ah, the memories.

I wonder how he imagines a country would defend itself without any sort of central control? What the need for central control in war might show is that any society who lacks the ability to make decisions collectively will be very disadvantaged when faced with one that has such an ability.

Or perhaps the insurgents are the libertarian ideal for military engagement. It’s true, they probably do lack a bureaucracy. Constant armed sectarian clashes. Now, there’s true freedom!

“Who remembers wars fondly?” – Those who don’t fight in them. Most veterans of WWII spent the majority of their lives not discussing what went on over there, and it’s only in the past few years that memoirs and taped rememberances are coming out. There’s no fondness there.

And as to the libertarian ideal being insurgents, I don’t think the righties see them that way. Their frame of top-down thinking influences how they see insurgents in Iraq and Hizbollah fighters in Lebanon – It’s always an emphasis on taking out Zarqawi or Nasrallah, or getting Syria to “stop this Shizzle” – as if Syria could. I don’t think modern conservitive libertarians truly understand the cellular nature of 4g warfare, which is one of the (many) reasons they won’t win.

Agreeing with #13 and moving beyond — my father, naval veteran with Purple Heart and ugly memories of which he seldom spoke, certainly didn’t remember World War II “fondly.” He did, however, always speak with the greatest respect for his theatre commander, Chester Nimitz, and the overall management of the war. My mother, who saw the war upclose from Naval Intelligence in Washington, always speaks with respect of Eisenhower’s leadership — even though she twice enthusiastically voted against the guy.

And good management makes a difference in wars. Compare Eisenhower’s quick response, immediate commitment of his reserve airborne divisions, and shift in Patton’s line of advance, as well as the overall allied command and control, in the Battle of the Bulge with the German mismanagement of their reserves, inadequate transport allocations, and inflexibility in the same battle.

My argument was not that the fiasco of the war proves that government is incompetent. I already know the government is incompetent. The fiasco of the war is simply another instance of the general principle.

My argument was addressed in particular to libertarians and conservatives who accept the government’s incompetence and mendacity in other areas but who blithely accept that the government will “defend” us. I do not trust the government to run the lives of American citizens where at least we have checks and balances – of course, I don’t trust the government to run the lives of Iraqi’s.

To answer Uncle Kvetch, yes, the logic of the argument suggests that the Pentagon budget is bloated and should be cut back. And Henry I don’t think that markets would necessarily run wars better I simply want fewer wars – peace, free trade and comity among all nations.

Liberals, however, should use the war to adjust their priors. It is a mistake to simply blame a few people like Bush or Cheney. (Fiasco in fact shows that the rot was much deeper.) Instead you should look for deeper principles that might explain this and many other instances.

Alex–would you consider the first Gulf War to have been carried out with incomepetence and mendacity that equal this one?

Besides being a bad argument, it’s also bad grammar. The misplaced apostrophe (and lack of a comma after Fiasco) left me completely confused.

No, it’s not a good argument. The Post Office works pretty well, and the problems in Iraq derive not from bureacratic failures of the military but from political decisions. I’d say that as in Afghanistan and the first Gulf War, the military did what it was designed to do brilliantly and efficiently.

It’s a government failure and not just a Pentagon failure but do note that Fiasco argues that the Pentagon did fail badly. Quoting the review from the Wash. Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/27/AR2006072700958.html

With devastating detail, Ricks documents how U.S. generals misunderstood the problems they faced in Iraq and shows how poorly prepared the Army was for the unanticipated danger of a postwar Sunni rebellion. For ignoring the risks of an insurgency after Saddam Hussein’s fall, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, “flunks strategy,” Ricks writes; the war’s commanding general designed “perhaps the worst war plan in American history.” Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the invasion, and his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace (who’s since been promoted to take Myers’s old job), come off as smiling yes-men who went along with amateurish impulses from the Bush administration’s political leadership and who forsook their duty to offer detached, professional judgments, acting instead as administration flacks in both private and public.

BTW, Henry, I hadn’t read the title of the post at first; you said everything that needed to be said with that.

Agreed.

To use the same argument, crime is inevitable. Rape, murder, and theft are all to be expected from any society, as evidinced by the history of every culture across the world. That doesn’t mean that specific rapists, murderers and theives are absolved from the responsibility for what they’ve done.

Perhaps it’s true that no one should be surprised that this war was conducted poorly, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold people accountable for their incompetence.

The sort of “analysis” that Alex employs is straight out of talk radio. I’m not sure why it is honored with space here. He is capable of better, but rarely tries. He is so eager to sling his own prejudices around that he is apparently unable to fathom their implication.

One criticisms of the Bush administration that will make it into any honest history of this period is that he failed at governing because he did not believe in, and may not even have understood the puropse of, government. Alex doesn’t believe in government either, so he fails to see that Bush’s failure is any different from any prior president’s. Whatever the merits or demerits of the first Iraq war, being back in Iraq is nothing like evidence that the first war was a failure. What were the goals of the first Iraq war? If you don’t know, then you cannot judge the war to be a failure. All this assertion does is reveal a prejudice lump all war together and argue from there. But we already knew that. “I don’t want to get into a debate about which war was the most incompetently run” when the first assertion was that this particular was is no worse than others is a complete dodge.

I don’t like rap (or whatever it is called this year) but I still understand that some of it is better than the rest, and some worse. Alex is pouring hooey into his own brain every time he waves his blunt libertarian excuses around, instead of actually trying to discern the differences between cases. And trying to pour hooey into our brains while he’s at it.

In his response, Alex excuses his argument as meant for special audience. I fear that what he really means is that his vacuous arguments about the sameness of all government endeavor is excusable because he was preaching to the choir. Making bad arguments is not excusable simply because the arguments were meant for an audience unlikely to discern how bad they are.

A lecture to “Liberals” – ooohhhh don’t ya love this lumping together that the Gingrich/DeLay era has validated – ensues, telling them how THEY need to think differently because THEY are the problem. Alex has some deeper principles for us? Not on the strength of the writing offered here. No. Shallow repetition of libertarian talking points is not a good preface for insisting that “deeper principles” await.

But what incentives does our government have to prevent abuse of their citizens? Democracy here probably makes the problem worse because of anti-foreign bias, the ease with which we can ignore the deaths of innocents abroad, and the fact that foreigners lack representation in our legislatures or the courts…

Are you surprised that wars are much more likely to be started when the economy is doing badly and the President is low in the polls? I am not.

These sound like criticisms of democracy, rather than bureaucracy or the state per se. But for all of us non-libertarians there is one obvious remedy: stronger global governance.

This war in Iraq has been run especially incompetently. The first war with Iraq in 1991 was much better organized and executed.

Unlike the first Iraqi war this administration ignored advice, ignored history and ignored the world. The present Iraqi war has been waged by children in comparison. This war was based on the juvenile ideology of going it alone, which is lethal when mixed with inherent incompetence and petulance.

What dismays me is, where’s the outrage. Why aren’t people impeached or fired for this debacle? Hopefully that will come.

Talk of gittin rid of local post offices is akin to screaming for the end of the penny. Or putting Ronald Reagan’s name on another airport or jetport or heliport or aircraft carrier-port.

On edit: the exception must, I suppose, be the Pacific War in World War II, with Japan, but someone with much more WWII experience must tell me how the language-intelligence problem was surmounted, especially since we thoughtfully sent our Japanese-Americans to internment camps. That the problem was solved with atomic bombs is the usual answer.

But what incentives does our government have to prevent abuse of their citizens?

Alex makes an important point here. But again, this is not an inevitable structural problem in government as such. It is an argument for a powerful institional bias towards government operations in other countries listening and responding to the needs and opinions of other countries’ citizens and institutions. One reason why US efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq have gone (relatively) better with Zalmay Khalilzad in charge is that he is someone with an instinctive understanding of consensus and of the region he’s dealing with.

I think Alex is pointing towards an important point: there is a bizarre incongruity in the fact that those on the conservative and libertarian end of the spectrum so often point to the inevitable perverse or unintended consequences of government in every field EXCEPT warfare (where in fact perverse and unintended consequences are most inevitable and most severe). However, this critique misses many of the factors that have made US government performance in Iraq much worse than government performance often is. Many of these factors – the subordination of intelligence, research, and analysis to political and public-relations goals; the intense politicization of what should be non-political organs of expertise – can be generalized throughout contemporary US government. And they’re part of the reason why the government is functioning so poorly at the moment.

To get back to the “incentives” point: one of the reasons why US government is so unresponsive to the interests of Iraqi citizens is that it’s SO responsive to the interests (= political sentiments) of US citizens. This is true of US foreign aid as well. When these organizations are very responsive to US voters in the short term, they become less responsive to the foreigners they’re supposed to help, in the long term.

I find it interesting that the US postal service has been defended here. I agree that the USPS provides low cost service pretty well but it has also completely missed out on the revolution in communications that has happened in the last quarter century. So the USPS is a success in very limited terms. (To be clear, I’m not necessarily blaming the staff at USPS for this failure; I realize they are operating under regulatory restraints.)

Is the conduct of warfare analogous to the physical delivery of mailed items. Very doubtful.

In answer to Sara (#41), I believe the answer to the Japanese language problem in WW II is twofold. One, there were exceptions made to the policy of interment on the grounds of military usefulness. Two, since this was a total national commitment by a government that was not fundamentally anti-intellectual, they simply took the available educated people in language, science, whatever, and trained them in Japanese and other needed languages. The one name I know is, strangely enough, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek at Oxford, and sometime Conservative intellectual.

Since the most important triumph of intelligence (and since Japan was in important respects thoroughly beaten by a very skilled American (and Allied) war effort in 1942-44 the atomic bomb, whatever one thinks of Truman’s decision, is irrelevant) was the planning for the battle of Midway in June 1942 the Navy had obviously been thinking about this for some time. There may have been some use made of suddenly acceptable Asian populations on the West Coast (Chinese and Filipino) who were bilingual, but I think it was basically recognized as a relevant skill and maintained through the 30’s.

Bush is in no way libertarian and has zero connection with libertarianism. He has increased the size of the government and aggregated power at the top level. He very nearly stands for everything I stand against.

Dear 48, Not to get snippy over nothing, I’m well aware of the educational, engineering, religious interaction starting between the US and Meiji Japan. It is, after all, the reason my undergraduate college in Massachusetts had Japanese graduates in 1877, while not letting Catholics and Jews in for another thirty years or so.

But two things happened in the 20’s — Tokyo Earthquake (good), refusal to exempt Japan from racist provisions of immigration laws (real bad). So I don’t think there was quite the steady trend you envisage. Hence the training of academics and others as Japan experts (I can think a few others nobody would have heard of), and the reliance on West Coast populations (including some under-the-covers Japanese Americans) for language and cultural expertise.

“If the USPS is doing so great – as many say above – then why does it need a legal monopoly on the delivery of 1st class mail?”

The legal monopoly is needed if uniform pricing is to be maintained. Otherwise entrants could offer competition for low-cost service, such as delivery between points in a given city, and leave USPS with the high-cost services. You may not like uniform pricing, but that’s a separate issue.

Hello. This is the tabarrok 0.9 econbot beta release. Markets good. Governments bad. I am a human entity, capable of expressing intelligent thoughts. Trust me. Hello. This is the tabarrok 0.9 econbot beta release.

You need to work on the bugs there, Henry.