Daniel

Bad news from some newspapers; there are suggestions coming through that Sadr was whiling away the time in Najaf by running a sharia court, complete with executions and mutilations.

The specific allegations about the 20 bodies in Najaf are not what I would call established fact – the bodies might simply be casualties of the fighting, and the fact that the allegations are being made by the Iraqi government undercuts their credibility somewhat given the number of fibs they’ve told about Najaf over the last few weeks – but the general historical sweep is likely to be accurate. When and if Sadr and Sistani are brought into the political process, it is very likely indeed that one of their main priorities will be to introduce sharia courts, and sharia courts execute and mutilate people.

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Gosh, I remember this from my small collection of BCCI books, but had never realised it was the same John Kerry. This really ought to count in peoples’ minds a lot more than any tales of heroics in Vietnam. The fact that George W Bush borrowed money from BCCI in 1987 but John Kerry launched the investigation in 1988 that eventually brought them down really says about all you need to know about the character of the two men. BCCI was a really quite extraordinarily bad organisation and Kerry’s investigation opened the eyes of the whole world to the extent that it was possible to get away with corruption in high-quality financial centres. It was about this time, by the way, that the liberal media of the USA were smearing Gary Webb as a “crackpot conspiracy theorist” for reporting, accurately, on the fact that politically well-connected Nicaraguans were being allowed to get off easily on cocaine smuggling charges. The Washington Monthly story is well worth a read.

Link comes via Atrios, btw, who obviously needs the vast publicity that a CT link can generate.

I’m pretty sure that it was JK Galbraith (with an outside chance that it was Bhagwati) who noted that there is one and only one successful tactic to use, should you happen to get into an argument with Milton Friedman about economics. That is, you listen out for the words “Let us assume” or “Let’s suppose” and immediately jump in and say “No, let’s not assume that”. The point being that if you give away the starting assumptions, Friedman’s reasoning will almost always carry you away to the conclusion he wants to reach with no further opportunities to object, but that if you examine the assumptions carefully, there’s usually one of them which provides the function of a great big rug under which all the points you might want to make have been pre-swept.

A few CT mates appear to be floundering badly over this Law & Economics post at Marginal Revolution on the subject of why it’s a bad idea to have minimum standards for rented accommodation. (Atrios is doing a bit better). So I thought I’d use it as an object lesson in applying the Milton Friedman technique.

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Finally, with the Google IPO pricing way below expectations and with a serious arbitrage[1] showing up on the Iowa Electronic Markets, I get round to reviewing James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”. I’ll save the suspense; it’s a cracking read and well worth buying. To give you an idea of the style, I’ll start this review with my own shockingly unfair parody …

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Stephen Pollard, hack journalist, blogger and perennial feature of the Virtual Stoa’s “Ignorant Git” column, has a column up at the Times (American readers; you are spared this one by the Times’ subscription policy, so it will mean nothing to you. But I don’t complain when you lot bang on about Fox News.). The main conceit of the column is one that we can expect to see a lot more of in the near future; that there is something hypocritical about wanting to see international action to help rescue millions of Sudanese from being massacred, unless you also supported the bombing of Iraq.

Pollard thinks that he has found the true hypocritical heart of the Left here; that it doesn’t care about suffering people but only about “bashing America”. In fact, he’s demonstrated two things to the world:

1) That there are people in the world who know what the phrase “Humanitarian intervention” means (as in the sentence “Have you read the excellent report by Human Rights Watch entitled ‘War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention‘ Stephen? Thought not”), and who believe that there is a difference between intervening in an immediate human crisis and intervening when there isn’t an immediate humanitarian crisis.

2) That in the worldview of a small minority of warbloggers, gathering support for an international effort to do something in Sudan is important, but much less important than reminding the world what a nasty bunch of people “the Left” is for reminding people like Pollard what a ferocious stack of bollocks they bought into eighteen months ago.

One might think that, since a large part of the difficulty in getting any action on Sudan is that nobody trusts us any more because we lied about Iraq, a certain degree of contrition might be in order. But apparently not.

Apparently. Not yet got confirmation from the OAS and Carter Centre that the ballot met standards of honesty and probity, but it looks like Chavez has come in with a pretty thumping majority; 58% of the vote is really rather good on the massive turnout reported.

Of course there is now a fairly substantial Catch-22 situation. Part of the reason why Chavez was able to win was that in recent months he’s been throwing around money like water on social programs. He was able to do this because oil was up above $40 a barrel, generating vast profits for the state oil company. A lot of the reason why oil prices were so high was that … there was significant uncertainty about supply from Venezuela because of the impending referendum. Now that some of the uncertainty has been resolved, oil futures have already started tumbling, meaning that it’s going to be that little bit more dfficult to deliver on these promises; if I were a Venezuelan, I wouldn’t be assuming that we were out of the woods yet.

Update: Carter Centre and Organisation of American States just more or less endorsed the votes; they didn’t find evidence of serious fraud and the results more or less match what the independent observers were seeing.

I looked this one up for an argument in comments to Belle’s post below, and I’ve been laughing and crying ever since. It’s a useful way to think about the extent to which “trickle down” economics has worked for the poorest in society. As we all know because people who know we’ve read Rawls keep telling us, the poorest benefit from economic growth. How much do they benefit?

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What the bloody hell is this all on about??? My Spanish is a bit ropey, but I have at least established to my own satisfaction that vheadline.com is correctly reporting a Venezuelan national press story, and VENPRES was reporting a story which El Mundo of Madrid did in fact carry (but isn’t available without paying). In this story, El Mundo is apparently reporting (and, btw, I’ve usually found the Spanish press pretty reliable on the few occasions I’ve had to rely on them) … the following assertions:

Update: thank heaven somebody bothered to check this one out

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From this morning’s papers, a bit more light shed on the questions I raised below. It appears that explanation c) (that the Sadrist forces have been recruiting since April) is at least part of the reason for the discrepancy. I would imagine that the two Londoners who have shown up in Najaf are not particularly representative of what’s been going on, but it makes a useful hook for newspapers, and us, to have a look at what’s going on.

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Another entry in my occasional role as co-ordinator of the Campaign For Real Body Counts; grateful for any comments that might help me make sense of these numbers:

As recently as the April uprising, the Sadrite Al-Mahdi militia was estimated by Iraqi experts to be between 3,000 and 10,000 strong, with the Pentagon suggesting that the hard core of fighters could be as small as 1,000.

In the May offensive against Sadr in Najaf and Karbala, it was once more credibly estimated that 1,500 of the Al-Mahdi Army were killed (note that this reference suggests that, as of the beginning of May, only 1,000-2,000 of the militia were located in or around the city of Najaf).

In the more recent episodes of fighting, official sources have told us that the Najaf branch of Sadr’s forces have taken a further 300 casualties, and lost a further 1200 men captured or surrendered.

So to recap … a force which was meant to have only 1,000 serious fighters, has had 1,800 of them killed and continues to fight on. Sadr had about 2,000 fighters in Najaf, has lost 3,000 of them and continues to fight[1]. Something doesn’t add up (or to put it another way, nothing does add up). Either:

• original estimates substantially underestimated the size of Sadr’s forces, or
• we have substantially overestimated the amount of Sadr’s force which has been neutralised, or
• Sadr has managed to recruit very substantial amounts of force indeed over the last three months.

To be honest, each of these three possibilities looks as bad to me as each of the others. Someone wake me up when it finally becomes acceptable to make comparisons to Vietnam.

Footnote:
[1] Even allowing for the likelihood that the Najaf militia would have been reinforced after May from Sadrite forces elsewhere in the country, I still can’t get this one to pass the laugh test. I’d also note that the 1,500 figure refers to Sadrite casualties in the whole of Iraq and probably shouldn’t be conflated with the Najaf figure of 300, but the qualitative conclusion is unlikely to be affected.

Due to a sudden period of enforced idleness, my insomnia is back (my previous schedule of working five caffeine-fuelled 14 hour days a week and recovering at the weekend had cured it nicely. I can recommend this method to anyone although to be honest, my doctor frowned on it). As a result, I find myself thinking about the aggregativity of capital, labour theories of value, and so on. I therefore pass on this small question which may be of some amusement to those of our readership who indulge in either cannabis or value theory; the two groups may find it equally interesting.

If you had all the wealth in the world, ie you owned every single object of value that was known to humanity ….

what would you spend it on?

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I’m usually about the ninetieth person to get these things (thanks to the pal who emailed it to me), but this one is quite funny:

The Central Intelligence Agency is committed to protecting your privacy and will collect no personal information about you unless you choose to provide that information to us.

Bit of a new departure for the CIA, innit?

I had rather taken my eye off the ball, but was informed by a pal this week that a charge of civil fraud has been confirmed in a US Court against Andrei Shleifer and one of his assistants for investing in Russian companies while they were running the Harvard Institute for International Development’s project in Russia, contrary to their agreement with USAID not to do so. To be honest, it all looks pretty sleazy stuff, and not at all good for the international reputation of the American economics profession (Shleifer was a recent John Bates Clark medal winner).

On the other hand, I find it quite difficult to get wrapped up in moral outrage over this particular charge; the actual charge on which Shleifer and Hay were found to have committed civil fraud was that they acted in concert with Hay’s girlfriend to set up a mutual fund company and try to become the Fidelity of Russia. Which strikes me as a pretty silly idea at the time, but hardly on a par with Pol Pot.

On the other hand, it appears that nobody at the HIID is going to jail (or even being seriously criticised) for the genuine crime that was committed by that institute during the 1980s; their partisanship of Anatoly Chubais and the disastrous privatisation program associated with that government (here’s a potted summary by FAIR of why you should care, and my own analysis of why it was such a bad idea). This, in my opinion (which I hope to flesh out a bit next week) was a crime which does bear serious comparison with some of the middle-ranking atrocities of the last century. And of course, nobody cares, because such is the nature of things. JK Galbraith has a book out this week called “The Economics of Innocent Fraud”, in which he suggests that innocent frauds perpetrated by people acting in good faith are in general far more damaging than culpable frauds perpetrated by people who know what they are doing. It looks like l’affaire Shleifer is proving once more that even at 96 years of age, he’s got more marbles than most of the rest of us put together.

Herve Gaymard. Remember the name of this philistine, moron, horrific Gaullist placeman and all-around fils de putain. I suspect that if the revolution comes and some semblance of humanity, civilisation and decency is restored to the moral cesspool that we see around us, your grandchildren will be encouraged to ceremonially burn him in effigy once a year, on a ritual fire made of oak chips. You might also want to make a note of the name of Denis Verdier, who revisionist historians of fify years’ hence may even suggest deserves more of the blame than the hated Gaymard.

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