Superb article

Rumsfeld’s Revisionism by Peter Wehner is superb, and the comments are extremely good, also. I particularly agree with comment #8, although it does not explicitly give enough credit to the Iraqis' miserable experience with Al Qaeda rule in Anbar for the success of the Surge.


Alternative history is a game of conjecture, and it can never be more than that. Here's my conjecture:

Claims that, pre-Surge, we did not have enough troops in Iraq are mistaken; we had the right number. That was the result of the "small footprint" policy, even though the rationale for that policy was badly flawed and would have failed on its own. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

The right pre-Surge number turned out to be a number sufficient to avoid complete chaos, but NOT sufficient to bring Al Qaeda under control. If we had brought enough troops to completely control the country, it would have had two bad effects:

First, it would have made us an enormous occupying army, with all the resistance and resentment that always entails. It would have created a false peace by suppression, which would have collapsed as soon as we tried to withdraw; we would have faced a disastrous fight on the way out, leaving a chaotic failure behind us.

Second, by making Al Qaeda temporarily withdraw and lie low, "enough troops" would have meant that Iraqis in Anbar and other places would not have had the awful experience of life under an AQ regime, and it would have allowed AQ to retain its mythical status as resistance fighters and liberators, instead of the murderous fanatics they are and, given the opportunity, showed themselves to be.

Having "too few" troops forced us to create the new Iraqi army as rapidly as possible, and it meant that, in the meantime, the Iraqis by direct experience became eager to see the extermination of Al Qaeda. The success of the Surge depended on both of those things, an increasingly competent Iraqi army and a population fed up with AQ. Both of those, in turn, depended on having approximately the number of pre-Surge troops we actually had there, not the much higher number advocated by John McCain and others. More troops was the correct and necessary recommendation after the conditions necessary for the success of the Surge had been established, but it was not correct before then. What was correct then was about the number we had there.

We were, I think, lucky in another way. It turned out that there really was a hunger for democracy among the majority of Iraqis, something that we hoped and assumed but could not know for a fact. But when given the opportunity to vote, they came out in large numbers even at personal risk; the response of Iraqi women was especially impressive and inspiring. Democratic leanings were initially less evident among Sunnis, who had reason not to trust the process, but we see now that similar sentiments are present among them, also. None of this had to be the case, and many observers doubted that there would be any desire for democracy in an Arab society like Iraq. If we had been wrong about the appeal of democracy, probably no quantity of troops or military strategy would have made much difference.

Byron

GOP future

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/

"If the GOP decides to go in the Bobby Jindal direction (fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism, aggressively anti-gay rights), it will be committing political suicide."

I agree completely. Instead, the GOP future needs to focus on grow-the-pie economic dynamism, meaning entrepreneurship, economic growth, job creation, and the regulatory and tax policies that are known to promote those things. That agenda must be forcefully contrasted with Obama's redistributionist views, which ultimately will result in what that approach always produces: slower growth for the sake of enforcing equal pieces of a diminishing pie. And it must be made crystal clear that there is nothing about a ferocious commitment to economic growth that in any way implies any degree of acceptance of corrupt Enron-style crony capitalism, or of quick-rich, slight-of-hand schemes in the financial markets. Those practices eventually impair economic growth, as we are seeing today, and all such have to be explicitly rejected and the reasons for their rejection explained.

In an email, John Carenen suggests that the GOP needs to formulate a new version of Gingrich's Contract With America. It's an excellent idea, especially if the contract were specifically a roadmap for maximizing economic vitality, opportunity, and wealth creation. But parallel to that must be a program of public education aimed at teaching Americans what capitalism and free markets are, and how they can operate to rapidly raise living standards to unprecedented levels. The economic record is a matter of historical fact, but as it stands now very few people have any clue about the basic principles by which it occurred. That lack of understanding makes them them easy prey for demagogic appeals to the supposedly higher morality of constantly re-cutting the economic pie into more equal-sized pieces, because they lack any understanding of why that process must result in the pieces becoming progressively smaller. We currently see people like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd blaming the sub-prime meltdown on an insufficiently regulated mortage market, when in fact the mess was created by market interference in the form of artificial incentives to make bad loans. Without those non-market incentives, sub-prime loans would not have been made, and the toxic debt instruments based on those loans would never have existed. That such absurd arguments are not laughed off the public stage testifies to how few people in our society have any conception of how markets operate. It's pathetic.

Socialism is a system of misconceptions that is very easy to accept. It's easy to grasp, it sounds good -- how can planning be bad? -- and it contains an explicit moral rationale that capitalism lacks. It is unfortunate that the ideas comprising market economics, an economics that ACTUALLY WORKS to produce wealth and opportunity, are not self-evident; those principles and processes have to be systematically explained. On the bright side, the internet now makes possible any number of creative and appealing ways to accomplish that task. It will take a sustained and systematic effort, aimed at No Citizen Left Behind. (By analogy, the primary reason that creationist nonsense gets the traction it does is the abysmally poor job that's been done in biology classes of teaching the basic principles of natural selection. Science deserves the lion's share of blame for that, just as the economics and business professions deserve the blame for widespread ignorance of basic economics.) This is an important and necessary job of public education that we will continue to neglect at our peril. It needs to be done, and done right, because the rotten fruit of that neglect is on the verge of poisoning our nation's political and economic life. It is sad commentary indeed that it actually could be possible that the educated Chinese population now has a better understanding of market economic than ours does. If they leave us in their dust, we shouldn't wonder how it happened.

If any of this has merit, it suggests why Mitt Romney would have been a far superior candidate to John McCain. I originally didn't think that, but I do now. Romney is an articulate, experienced spokesman for market economics, and he would have challenged Obama's redistributionist blither in instructive ways. The gospel of opportunity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship is one that has always resonated in this country, and properly so; people across the globe know that those ideas define us as a nation at least as much as anything in our founding documents. Many thousands of inspiring success stories are there to be held up as examples; they are motivating, and they are found in every community and among every category of persons. Even if Romney had ultimately lost the election, public understanding of economics would have been advanced by his campaign. Progress would have been made, some interest stimulated, some appetites whetted.

In that regard, I don't detect any positive residue at all from McCain's candidacy, which suffered, ironically, from our success in Iraq. As that issue receded, it was replaced by concern about the economy. That should have been no problem at all, because economic matters should always to be the GOP's strong suit, its special expertise. But McCain had already admitted it was a subject he didn't know much about. That left Obama free to spoon out his redistributionist baby food far and wide without serious, informed challenge. Late in the game, and by sheer dumb luck, Joe the Plumber appeared out of nowhere to tee up the Golden Teaching Moment. But it was whiffed, evoking nothing but some outraged talk about the moral injustice of the government taking money from one person and giving it to someone else. Nothing about the bad economic consequences of doing that sort of thing, no description of the chain of causation by which those bad consequences come about. Just a diffuse moral objection that the Obama campaign quickly labeled as simple selfishness. Game, set, match.

So, we here we are, lying face down on Square One, at best, as our standard bearer exhorts us to all unite behind Obama. You don't know whether to laugh or cry. Going forward, what I really don't want to hear about is some intensified focus on the brand of conservatism described in that quote at the top. In my opinion, any future prospects for the GOP lie in a completely different direction, and the party needs to re-tool intellectually. In my fantasy, step one is a call that goes out sometime soon, inviting 50 or so of the best free market economists and economics educators in the business to a general meeting, the premise of which is the proposition that socialism cannot be sold to an educated public. The question then will be how to get from here to there, which means the development of a public curriculum and the vehicles to most effectively present it.

Byron

Age of Obama

In January Barack Obama will be sworn in, and part of me hopes that he will enjoy the same level of good will, respect, and benefit of the doubt from Republicans as George Bush received from Democrats. To accomplish that, it will be important that each and every act or proposal from the Obama Administration be viewed as a product of some combination of evil motives and abject stupidity. To his great credit, Bush never responded in kind. Obama is very smooth, he makes himself easy to like, and he will have the huge advantage provided by an adoring national and international media. He is, however, naively over-confident in a way that only someone completely untested can be, and that makes him dangerous in matters involving national security. For me, his use of Iraq for his own political purposes was and is disgraceful, and never to be forgiven.

As for Bush in retirement, a lesser man might well be tempted to reprise the corrosive role that the terminally bitter Jimmy Carter adopted these past eight years, or to emulate Bill Clinton's breathless pursuit of an enhanced legacy. But Bush has too much class for either of those, and too much respect for the office that he occupied. Bush held office through interesting times, to say the least. It's at least 75 years too soon to know how historians will view his presidency, but Bush is certain to be credited with keeping the nation safe when few believed such a thing would be possible. If Obama and his ilk, who either do not understand what Iraq is about, or who cynically pretend not to, do not manage to squander what has been accomplished, I think Bush will eventually also be credited with initiating fundamental political and social reform in the Arab Mid-East, the only possible solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism. By contrast, future historians will spend little time debating about either the Carter or the Clinton years. The former comprise a brief but nearly unbroken record of mediocrity and failure, while the latter contain essentially nothing of lasting significance.

Byron

Important videos from Fox News

Fox is no more biased to the right than MSNBC is to the left. But, really, so what? They each preach to their own choirs. Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say, left, right, and middle. How else do you think it should work in a free country? The model going forward is the sort of free access provided by the internet, which is daily demonstrating the limitations of the traditional, flat-line media and its "opinion makers." The stock price and bond ratings of those outfits tell you about all you need to know about where they are headed.

However, it is the case that taking the current national media as a whole, there is simply no comparison when it comes to predominant ideological slant. None. Given that, the liberal obsession with Fox is ungracious, to say the least. Fox's success to begin with is largely a product of lopsided liberal domination of the rest of media: Liberals have available a large number of sympatico media outlets, while conservatives have basically only one place to go, other than talk radio. With respect to the latter, note that you are not required to support Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, while I as a taxpayer have no choice but to have my money spent in support of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered, plus Counterspin and Bill Moyers on PBS. If you think that is fair, then we must agree to disagree.

In any case, trust me, those on the right would swap media positions in a nanosecond. Of course, that would still leave left dominance of the journalism schools, of academia generally, and of the entertainment industry. But conservative will gratefully take what they can get, so please see if you can arrange the media swap. If I only had Fox to complain about, I would think I'd died and gone to Heaven.

Thanks,

Byron

Aunti Zeituni

Headlines:

AP REVEALS: OBAMA AUNT LIVING IN U.S. ILLEGALLY...

Boston Housing Authority 'flabbergastered' Zeituni Onyango living in Southie...

Obama's family in Kenya stops media interviews...

Let's review the bidding here. Obama writes a self-serving memoir (two, actually) in which his Kenyan origins and Aunti Zietuni and other family members are used as props. He writes about a village school, which turns out to be a very poor thing to which he made promises of help. It wouldn't have taken much to have made a big difference, but he never came across with a dime. It was used for his purposes, then stiff-armed and discarded. His half-brother lives in a hut.

Aunti Zeituni Onyango was a useful prop, too. But, having served her purpose, having been used to further Obama's ambitions, she lives out her life in a Boston slum, as an illegal alien. Lawyer Obama, the compassionate, does not seem to have even inquired about her immigration status, let alone offered any help in mounting an appeal on her behalf. Now the Bush Administration has stepped in to protect her from deportation, while Obama makes speeches about the importance of family. His believers are tearful with gratitude that once he is elected, they won't have to worry any more about gas bills and mortgage payments. He coasts on the surreal and groundless image that the media has not only allowed him to create, but which they have contributed to constructing. It's grotesque.

The depth of Obama's ego-centered, manipulative cynicism seems to be without limit. You expect to see a healthy ego and a surplus of ambition in any presidential candidate, but this verges on the pathological. Hundreds of thousands of people have early-voted for Obama without any clear understanding of what kind of person he is. They voted in ignorance because the media did not do its job, but instead bent their efforts to getting him elected no matter what. Obama's calculating, manipulative character was allowed to pass under the radar; the media gave him a pass, while his opponents and critics were/are systematically savaged on his behalf.

It is not that Obama is simply unqualified to be president, although he surely is, having done essentially nothing but write memoirs and run for office. It's that he is wholly unsuited to be president. That a slick, self-aggrandizing, calculating, manipulative phony like Barack Obama could be elected over a man like John McCain is truly sickening.

Byron