Obsidian Wings

Just Guessing...

Yesterday, President Bush responded to the bleak CIA estimates about Iraq's future as follows:

"President Bush, determined to put an optimistic face on deadly conditions in Iraq, said on Tuesday that the CIA was just guessing when it said the war-racked country was in danger of slipping into civil war.

"The CIA laid out several scenarios. It said that life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better. And they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like," Bush told reporters during a picture-taking session with Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. (...)

"The Iraqi citizens are defying the pessimistic predictions," Bush said

Let me see whether I understand this. Our national intelligence services claim that the likely outlooks for the future in Iraq range from bad to catastrophic. (Contrary to Bush's assertions, they did not say that there was any likelihood that "life could be better" in the foreseeable future.) They say this, presumably, on the basis of all the information they have been able to gather, using all the resources of our government. There are, obviously, problems with our intelligence services; however, I can't really see what source of information George W. Bush has that's not available to them. So what, exactly, is he basing his dismissal of their findings on? A Ouija Board? And what gives him any confidence that this basis, whatever it is, is more trustworthy than US intelligence?

Most likely, he has no basis at all. He's just telling us what he wants to believe, not what's actually true. Making decisions on the basis of unsupported assumptions about Iraq while disregarding the views of people whose job it is to know about it has been this administration's modus operandi all along. That's why we're in the mess we're in right now.

Juan Cole has a really good post on what's going on in Iraq, and what it would be like if it were happening in the US. He starts out with a point that's obvious but worth repeating:

"Violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll."

As he goes on, he really gets into the details of the comparison:

"There are estimated to be some 25,000 guerrillas in Iraq engaged in concerted acts of violence. What if there were private armies totalling 275,000 men, armed with machine guns, assault rifles (legal again!), rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar launchers, hiding out in dangerous urban areas of cities all over the country? What if they completely controlled Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Denver and Omaha, such that local police and Federal troops could not go into those cities?

What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?

What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target "safe houses" of "criminal gangs", but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?"

And then, of course, the punch line:

"What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?"

Those are just selected excerpts; read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Britain is planning to cut its troop levels by a third (via discourse.net), and there are more stories of torture:

"Alazawi says that American guards then made her stand with her face against the wall for 12 hours, from noon until midnight. Afterwards they returned her to her cell. "The cell had no ceiling. It was raining. At midnight they threw something at my sister's feet. It was my brother Ayad. He was bleeding from his legs, knees and forehead. I told my sister: 'Find out if he's still breathing.' She said: 'No. Nothing.' I started crying. The next day they took away his body."

The US military later issued a death certificate, seen by the Guardian, citing the cause of death as "cardiac arrest of unknown etiology". The American doctor who signed the certificate did not print his name, and his signature is illegible. The body was returned to the family four months later, on April 3, after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke. The family took photographs of the body, also seen by the Guardian, which revealed extensive bruising to the chest and arms, and a severe head wound above the left eye."

But hey, there's light at the end of the tunnel: Donald Rumsfeld assures us that "At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed and we’ll have enough of the Iraqi security forces that they can take over responsibility for governing that country and we’ll be able to pare down the coalition security forces in the country." And besides, Bush's Magic 8 Ball assures us that the Iraqis are proving all this pessimism wrong, despite what those silly intelligence agencies say, so why worry?

Malkin in the Middle

Professor Bainbridge* and Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost weigh in on Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment"; each has a thoughtful post as to why the blogosphere and media haven't given more play to Professor Muller's takedown of Malkin's arguments. Meanwhile: Professor Leiter weighs in with the expected less-than-temperate take on the matter; Professor Gordon Smith offers some more temperate thoughts on why we're discussing RatherGate and not MalkinGate; and Ms. Malkin still has not responded to Vox Day's challenge to a debate on the Northern Alliance radio program on September 25.

My thoughts? If not obvious from my prior posts on Malkin, I'm pleased to see the blogosphere living up to its potential as a true marketplace of ideas. Bad ideas can persist only so long as they remain unconfronted. It's nice to see some confrontin' going on.

von

* Yes, yes, I'm still trying to put him back on my blogroll; hey, I'm technically challenged (like all patent attorneys {snark}).

New Federal Budget Cuts Are "Here"

And by "here," I mean New York City.

Back in May I wrote about the gathering indications, despite all the compassionate campaigning, that the Bush Administration is planning for some significant budget cuts in "virtually all agencies in charge of domestic programs." At that time, the administration was dismissing the alarm bells people were ringing as much ado about nothing...they were simply doing some math and scenario planning: Go back into your houses, folks, nothing to see here.

***Well, as is usually the case with the Bush administration, what you fear they're really up to is mild compared to what they're really up to.*** What's especially disturbing about their latest efforts is that they seem to be specifically screwing some key Blue states.

The Bush administration has proposed reducing the value of subsidized-housing vouchers given to poor residents in New York City next year, with even bigger cuts planned for some urban areas in New England. The proposal is based on a disputed new formula that averages higher rents in big cities with those of suburban areas, which tend to have lower costs. The proposals could have a "significantly detrimental impact" in some areas by forcing poor families to pay hundreds of extra dollars per month in rent, according to United States Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican. That extra burden could be too much for thousands of tenants, "potentially leaving them homeless," Mr. Shays wrote in a recent letter to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Blog Law

From Orin Kerr at Volokh, I see that the U.S. House has "approved a bill that would increase jail time for identity thieves and other fraudulent Web users who register sites under false identities." This is a kinda big deal, because it appears to criminalize the rather-common practice of bloggers to submit false information in registering their web domain names. Well, if this bill becomes law, such a practice could become a felony worth seven years in jail.

By the way, that doesn't mean that it is proper to register a domain name with false information today. Supplying false registration information is a violation of ICANN's rules, and can be grounds for cancellation of a domain name registration. Of course, ICANN can't ("ICANN't"?) toss you in the penitentiary -- like the House bill proposes.

Just a heads up to y'all.

Ticket or Trophy?

On the lighter side of today's news, a motorcyclist in Minnesota was given a speeding ticket near the Wisconsin border for going, get this, 205 mph:

On Saturday afternoon, State Patrol pilot Al Loney was flying near Wabasha, in southeastern Minnesota on the Wisconsin border, watching two motorcyclists racing along U.S. Highway 61.

When one of the riders shot forward, Loney was ready with his stopwatch. He clicked it once when the motorcycle reached a white marker on the road and again a quarter-mile later. The watch read 4.39 seconds, which Loney calculated to be 205 mph.

"I was in total disbelief," Loney told the St. Paul Pioneer Press for Tuesday's editions. "I had to double-check my watch because in 27 years I'd never seen anything move that fast."

My favorite line in this story:

The State Patrol officer arrested the faster rider, 20-year-old Stillwater resident Samuel Armstrong Tilley, for reckless driving, driving without a motorcycle license — and driving 140 miles per hour over the posted speed limit of 65 mph.

My least favorite line in this story:

"I'm not entirely sure what would happen if you crashed at 200 miles per hour," Swanson said. "But it wouldn't be pretty, that's for sure."

My father was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident when I was about 11 years old, so I've always been very cautious if riding one, but you can't help but admire the guts of this guy, if not the brains.

Social Security and Budgets

There have been recent discussions about Bush's proposed budget (see here or here for instance.)

There seems to be some major freaking out about the transition cost of Bush's Social Security Plan. But as Arnold Kling points out the transition cost is not a new government liability. It is simply moving an off-book debt onto the audit books where it belongs:

In fact, the cost of privatization is zero.

Look at it this way. There has been a brouhaha over accounting for stock options in private companies. Companies deny that options are an expense. But as Warren Buffett puts it, "If stock options are not compensation, then what are they? And if compensation is not an expense, then what is it?"

The promises to future Social Security recipients are to the government what stock options are to private companies--off-the-books costs. You could say, "If promised Social Security payments are not obligations of the U.S. government, then what are they? If an obligation of the U.S. government is not debt, then what is it?"

If we decided tomorrow to recognize Social Security promises as obligations, then this would be a huge "cost" in accounting terms, but no change in economic terms. That is what the "cost" of privatization is all about.

This seems correct to me. Take 4 age cohorts: A=0-20, B=21-40, C=41-65, D= 66+. Right now we have a cost of retirement in Social Security for all of them. We pay as we go. Under a privatization plan we pay for D with current accounts just as before. I presume we would phase C into an intermediate system. Part of their Social Security will be paid under the current system, part of it under the new system. The total extra cost over their lifetime is zero because they were going to be paid Social Security anyway. Cohorts A and B are entirely in the new system. Total extra cost is still zero, but unless the economy completely tanks for decades (in which case there was going to be other problems in paying Social Security) they will have a much higher return on their 'investment' into the fund. That means either that they will have more money for retirement, or the government can lower the mandatory contribution amount which functions the same way as a tax.

But none of this is an extra 'cost'.

Now my prefered solution would be to make Social Security a real safety net program instead of a huge citizenship program. If you are of retirement age and are poor, the government provides assistance. The middle class and rich ought to provide for their own retirement. We obviously can't implement that immediately, but we could warn people in their 40s not to expect Social Security unless they are poor. This is something we could easily afford. But in any case it is important to remember that identifying a liability is not at all the same as creating a new cost.

Why Did I Bother? (Blame Blue.)

So you might be wondering why exactly I went to the trouble of writing all those long War on Terror posts. (I remember one commentator saying "Why don't you cast your vote already?", which made me laugh.) Basically, it's all Blue's fault. When I wrote the initial Why I will not vote for Bush post -- the one on the Constitution -- Blue was, if memory serves, one of the few conservatives to comment on it, and his argument was, basically, that after 9/11 we need to keep ourselves safe, and if that requires that we suspend some Constitutional principles, then, unfortunately, we must suspend them. (I apologize if I have got it wrong.) And I thought that argument needed answering.

We can debate whether we should suspend central parts of the Constitution in the name of security when we have exhausted every other means of keeping ourselves safe, and found them inadequate. But even if we conclude that we should, scrapping habeas corpus and the right to counsel should, I think, be an absolute last resort, not the first thing that leaps to mind. And one of the things that bothers me about the Bush administration is that there are so many other things they have not done to keep us safe. They have left tons of fissile material unsecured in Russia, a country which is disintegrating before our eyes. They have, as far as I can tell, no serious plan to deal with other nuclear proliferation threats. Outside aviation, they have not made anything like an adequate effort to secure our transportation, our infrastructure, our borders, and our nation as a whole from terrorist attacks. And these are not subtle, difficult-to-think-of steps: they are completely obvious steps to take if one wants to secure our nation.

The fact that the Bush administration has not done these things is, I think, incomprehensible after 9/11, and it is profoundly irresponsible. But it also makes it impossible for me to accept the idea that the Bush administration's attacks on the Constitution and the rule of law are required by our national security. There are too many other things that should have been tried first, long before we even thought of damaging the Constitution that has served our country well for over two centuries, and that we rightly prize.

So Blue: here's my answer.

Why I will Not Vote For Bush #2d: Homeland Security

After 9/11, you'd think it would be obvious that we should work hard to secure our country against terrorist attacks. Some of this work has to be done overseas, but some of it involves taking steps here at home to make it more difficult for terrorist attacks against us to succeed. The Bush administration has argued that they have made America safer. But if you examine their record on homeland security, there are very serious problems.

Basically, what has happened is this: in the wake of 9/11, after initially opposing both steps, the Bush administration formed the Department of Homeland Security and federalized airport screening. Since 9/11 had demonstrated glaring holes in aviation security, the Congress passed measures requiring significant improvements in baggage and passenger screening. While there have been a few problems (pdf), like the fact that we still screen only 5% of air cargo, air transportation is now much safer than it was before 9/11.

However, nothing about al Qaeda's history suggests that having used airplanes to attack us once, they will stick to airplanes in the future. This being the case, we should have worked equally hard to protect ourselves in other vulnerable areas. But we haven't. As the 9/11 Commission report notes (p. 391), "Over 90% of the nation's 5.3 billion investment in the TSA goes to aviation -- to fight the last war." Other areas remain dangerously insecure, in a way that, after 9/11, I find it hard to understand. For some highlights, read on.

If a Tree Falls in the Woods, but the Media Don't Cover it...

In a thread about the war in Iraq (which I'd ask you to go to if you wish to debate that topic), constant reader sidereal made a very interesting comment about the media. I'll begin with the comment that prompted his comment for background (but again, there's plenty o' room for discussion on the war over there...this thread's about the media):

It was Bush who decided that our goals in Iraq were worth American and Iraqi lives. If that was a mistake the blood is on his hands, not his critics'.

No, in our postmodern media-driven world (in which Brooks is steeped to the eyeballs), you create realities by describing them. According to his fundamentally damaged perception, Kerry would be 'responsible' for Iraq being a mistake by being the person who talked about it, creating that storyline. Since Bush talks about Iraq being a golden domino of something or other, he's responsible for that being true, which it is, because he said it and people believe it.

More evidence that the media aren't biased, they're just pathologically broken.

IMHO, reality currently lies somewhere between the influence "created storylines" have and the actual events (afterall, Bush's rosy portrait of Iraq isn't quelling the insurgents at all). But this middleground reality is alarming, because "Reality" should lie squarely with the actual events as much as possible. I know PR is just another tool of war, but the idea that Kerry is held even partially responsible for our failure in Iraq because he was bold enough to describe the actual events is, again, alarming, and this phenomenon does seem to be getting worse (oh, where are you Ken White?). And what's the logical conclusion of this trend? Will events eventually be totally influenced by media. If the media don't cover an event, does it not happen? If media simply say something happened, will the world make it so?

Variations on a Theme

Vox Day offers to debate Michelle Malkin regarding her book, "In Defense of Internment," on September 25, 2004 on the Northern Alliance Radio Show. Eugene Volokh is calling on Christians to condemn certain extraordinarily condemnable remarks by Jimmy Swaggert regarding homosexuality. Eric Muller is noting the curious tendency of many in the right-wing blogosphere to express skepticism regarding Michelle Malkin's internment claims, but to nonetheless praise the book itself.* Different topics; same theme. Volokh puts it most directly:

This is one of the responsibilities of being part of an ideological movement, of urging others to join your movement, and of praising the movement as good for society: You need to police your own, or those who purport to be your own. Not an onerous responsibility, or an unreasonable imposition, it seems to me.

In other words: intellectual honesty and ethical acuity always trump ideological purity. Listen to the message before you kill the messenger. Police your own. Do the right thing.

Indeed, these are rules I someday hope to apply to my ideo-mate(s). 'Course, first I have find another liberal Republican . . . . who didn't praise Bush's handling of the Iraq war in prime time at the RNC. Really, I think all of them were there, and on message. (Apparently, my proposal to give a speech on "why the Iraq war was a noble thing, but Bush is an incompetent boob" was lost in the mail. Next time, maybe.)

von

*Muller's attack on Glenn Reynolds, however, is unfair: Reynolds forthrightly stated that "Muller makes a pretty strong case that [Malkin is wrong]." What more does Muller want? Reynolds to devote his blog to Malkin-Gate? A banner at the top of InstaPundit that reads "Malkin is still wrong?" Reynolds to knight Muller Blogospheric Champion par Excellance? (Are such Knighthoods available? If so, can I have one?) Gimme a break. Bloggers are allowed to post on that which they want to post, and if Reynolds wants to save all of his virtual ink for RatherGate, so be it.

UPDATE: Professor Muller indicates that he's updating his post's discussion of Reynold's coverage. Bravo for him.