by Belle Waring on April 6, 2004
Can it really be the case that there are enough US troops in Iraq if wounded marines have to rely on those Blackwater…er…private operatives for rescue?
With their ammunition nearly gone, a wounded and badly bleeding Marine on the rooftop, and no reinforcement by the U.S. military in the immediate offing, the company sent in helicopters to drop ammunition and pick up the Marine.
This is really bad. No wounded Marine should ever be ducking under a hail of bullets with anything but supreme confidence in his heart that a bunch of other Marines are about to come save his butt, any second now. These soldiers-for-hire sound very competent, as they should be, since they are all former Navy S.E.A.L.s or whatever, but having to rely on them to rescue wounded troops is proof that things are going very, very badly wrong. Go read Juan Cole for more informative and terrible news (N.B. this post, “Incompetence or Double-Dealing in Colaition Management of Iraq?”) You can color this actual supporter of the invasion of Iraq (not the popular CT contributor position) depressed. Please, don’t say you told me so. I know you told me so. I have to talk to my mom every week and she is pushing the “I told you so” line with much more emotional oomph than any of you guys can muster, trust me on this.
by Henry Farrell on April 1, 2004
The newest political scientist in the blogosphere, Daniel Geffen, brings up an “important reason”:http://geffen.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_geffen_archive.html#107988195454245271 why Iraq is unlikely to become a democratic exemplar for the Middle East. Oil. Heavy oil exporters have a miserable democratic record, with the sole exception of Norway. There’s little reason to expect that Iraq will be any different.
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by John Q on February 25, 2004
The announcement that Ralph Nader will again run for the Presidency raises the (almost) unaskable question -are there any circumstances under which we should hope for, promote, or even passively assist, the re-election of George W. Bush as against either of the remaining Democrat contenders? I feel nervous even raising this question, but I think it’s worth a hard and dispassionate look.
Regardless of their political persuasion, most people will agree, at least in retrospect, that it would have been better for their own side (defined either in ideological or in party terms) to have lost some of the elections they won. Most obviously, this was the case for the US Republican Party in 1928. Hoover’s victory, and his inability to cope with the Depression, paved the way for four successive victories for FDR and two generations of Democratic and liberal hegemony, which didn’t finally come to an end until the Reagan revolution in 1980. The same was true on the other side of poltiics in Australia and the UK, where Labour governments were elected just before the Depression, split over measures of retrenchment demanded by the maxims of orthodox finance and sat out the 1930s in Opposition, watching their own former leaders implement the disastrous policies they had rejected, but had been unable to counter.
p. So, is 2004 one of those occasions? The case that it is rests primarily on arguments about fiscal policy. Bush’s policies have set the United States on a path to national bankruptcy, a fact that is likely to become apparent some time between now and 2008. Assuming that actual or effective bankruptcy (repudiation of debt or deliberate resort to inflation) is unthinkable, this is going to entail some painful decisions for the next President and Congress, almost certainly involving both increases in taxation and cuts in expenditure. On the expenditure side, this will mean a lot more than the obvious targets of corporate welfare and FDW[1]. Either significant cuts in the big entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare) or deep cuts in everything else the government does will be needed, even with substantial increases in taxes (to see the nasty arithmetic read these CBO projections, and replace the baseline with the more realistic *Policy Alternatives Not Included in CBO’s Baseline*)
fn1. Fraud, Duplication and Waste
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by John Q on February 24, 2004
I was a bit slow to respond to Kieran’s post on the World City System, but let me say that my views on this system are pretty much a cross between Wired and William Cobbett. In a world where nearly all legitimate work of high-pay and status can be performed electronically and remotely, the most plausible explanation of ‘global cities’ is that they facilitate cronyism and corruption.
Updated with a little more evidence 25/2
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by John Q on February 20, 2004
My post on Cyprus raised some eyebrows with its reference to the relative insignificance, in geopolitical terms, of the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Looking back, I’m not surprised that this was controversial. After all, the idea that the war in Iraq is crucially important is a common background assumption in most of the debate, shared by both supporters and critics. Of course, geopolitics isn’t the only criterion of importance – the costs and benefits in terms of lives lost and saved, human rights and so on need to be discussed, not to mention economic impacts. But still, I think it’s fair to say that most people assumed that the presence in Iraq of more than 100 000 US troops, with a demonstrated capacity and willingness to overthrow governments, would make for big changes one way or another.
The most obvious candidate for such effects is Iran. It is number 2 country in the Axis of Evil (and everyone knows North Korea was only thrown in at the last moment for rhetorical balance). It has advanced weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program activities. And its current rulers are the same ones who humiliated the US in 1979 and who were, until Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, US Public Enemy Number 1 in the region.
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by Daniel on February 18, 2004
I didn’t think this was going to be a difficult question to answer, but it’s stumped me, so I’m asking for help.
Is there any authoritative source (for fairly low standards of “authoritative”; as the title suggests, I’m looking for something no worse than the Black Book of Communism) telling us how many people Saddam Hussein killed and when?
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by Daniel on February 13, 2004
Tyler on the Volokh conspiracy links to a New York Times story and comments that “Deterrence doesn’t fully reassure me on the basis of this extract:
“”A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers.
Mr. Hussein believed that a “casualty averse” White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagon’s most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border. “
Lads, lads, we’re not learning the lesson here are we? Testimony from captured military officers, defectors, and anyone else who thinks that they have something to gain by telling interesting stories (which inflate their own importance) is worthless. This is how we got into the whole WMD fiasco. I’ve no idea whether or not this is true as a description about Saddam’s state of mind or military tactics. But after reading this story, given its sourcing, I’ve still got no idea. Stick to the satellite photos, that’s my advice, they don’t lie. That’s how Scott Ritter, Andrew Wilkie and myself managed to get it right on the question of Iraqi nukes.
by Henry Farrell on January 26, 2004
Norman Geras sees some “overlap”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/the_guardian_on.html between a recent interview with Benny Morris (where Morris “qualifies”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/386065.html some of the arguments attributed to him previously), and a “piece”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/editors/from/10_2/fourwars.htm that Michael Walzer wrote for Dissent in 2002 on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Morris argues that the ‘war being waged against us’ [in Israel] needs to be seen in the context of three overlapping conflicts; Walzer argues that there are no less than four ‘Israeli-Palestinian wars’ now in progress. But apart from the basic organizing metaphor, there doesn’t seem to be much overlap at all – Morris and Walzer are making very different (and perhaps radically opposed) arguments, for very different purposes.
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