Month: February 2003

Some kind of food poisoning struck overnight. Posting will be light today.

“The reason Powell is now so adamantly pro-war is therefore no mystery and no surprise. He is not a former dove who has become a hawk. He is a multilateralist who is actually being consistent. His position is now what it has always been. He naively believed that the U.N. wouldn’t actually pass a resolution it would subsequently revoke under pressure. And the source of his anger at Paris and Berlin is not because of natural differences, but because they are the ones now threatening a complete collapse of international collective security. They are the cowboys now.” – from my latest column, posted opposite.

It’s the economy, smarty-pants. No, not the growth rate which the public is smart enough is not amenable to easy manipulation. Not even the unemplyment rate, which may well recover after the war. I mean the explosive rate of current government spending and the president’s utter insouciance about how to pay for it. I’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his latest budget removes any. He’s the most fiscally profligate president since Nixon. He’s worse than Reagan, since he’s ratcheting up discretionary spending like Ted Kennedy and shows no signs whatever of adjusting to meet the hole he and the Republican Congress are putting in the national debt.

NO WAR BUDGET?? His budget contained the following piece of illiterate flimflam: “The budget would be in double digit deficit if had there never been a tax cut in 2001. The budget returned to deficit because of war, recession and emergencies associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11th.” Up to a point. But as the tables in the budget also showed, the tax cuts have also contributed significantly to the deficit – and they’ve barely taken effect yet. I’m also staggered that the budget does not contain any mention of the looming war. I guess you could make a semantic point about its not being inevitable – but not even as a possible contingency? Is that how an ordinary citizen plans his own budget? Read David Broder’s evisceration of Bushonomics yesterday. Or Steve Chapman’s devastating recent column on the same theme. These guys are not Paul Krugman. They don’t hate the president whatever he does. They’re just noticing an awful legacy in the making. In the first three years of Bush’s presidency, Chapman notes, non-defense discretionary government spending will have gone up an inflation-adjusted 18 percent. In Clinton’s first three years, that number actually fell. Reagan reduced this type of spending by 13 percent in his first three years. Yes, a deflationary and recessionary period probably merited some spending increases. But 18 percent? If a Democrat had done that, the GOP would be all over him. And rightly so.

NO EXCUSES: But what really bugs me is that the president doesn’t seem to give a damn. He could say: look, we’re running deficits because I need to pay for a major war and tax cuts will help get us out of a recession. Instead, he told us last year that deficits would be temporary and this year that, er, well he didn’t say anything much about them in the SOTU, did he? Or he could say: Okay, I know I’ve turned the spigot on for the last couple of years but I’m going to be a hard-ass from now on. But on what grounds do we believe him? Even after the last two years of budget-busting recklessness, he’s still proposing spending increases far higher than the rate of inflation for the next year.

DEBT BE DAMNED: Then again, he might say: I’m deliberately creating new deficits because they’re the only long-term way to keep domestic spending under control. But what this amounts to is saying I’m going to spend your hard-earned money now in order to persuade other people to stop spending your hard-earned money later. What other people? You’re the government, Mr President. And your party controls all of Congress. There’s no way you can pass the buck for plunging the next generation into debt through excessive spending while blaming someone else. His final option is to say: I’m a big government conservative. I want to spend gobs of money on the military and defense, cut taxes, and splurge on social discretionary spending to prove my compassionate credentials. Deficits don’t matter. Debt doesn’t matter. Governments – at least while I’m president – know better how to spend money than individuals do. That would be the honest message. And it might even be a winning one. So why the flim-flam? Maybe because actual fiscal conservatives like me might wail. Well, sorry to disappoint you, Mr President, but I’m going to wail anyway.

No signs yet whether they’re actually serious about sending in thousands of inspectors, presumably with armed support. One attentive reader writes that the

official French radio news service, Radio France International, says that there is no German or French plan, only “elements for reflection,” or “les elements de reflection.” The news announcer also says that the “plan” previously revealed in Der Spiegel has dissolved in “cacophony.” The piece then goes on to note the French denial that there’s a plan at all. After that there’s information about a German domestic legislative presentation of the plan on Thursday, and a Security Council presentation of whatever there is to present on Friday. I listened at 5:30 p.m. New York time on Sunday. Really, three-card Monte would be easier to keep track of than all this.

I doubt it’s serious. The whole game now is to throw obstacles in front of the war preparation so that the window of operation – before April – is closed. France and Germany are not interested in disarming Saddam in any meaningful sense. They’re interested in the pretense of disarmament so that their trade ties with Saddam can recommence, and the United States can be rebuffed. I’ll believe the evidence of their commitment to Saddam’s disarmament when I see it.

A PEACE SIGN?: That’s how the New York Times is describing the Churchill “V for Victory” sign, as featured on a fashion week sweater. The reporter is lucky Winston is not still alive.

A smart, thorough and brutal profile of the chief weasel.

9/11 AND ALBRIGHT: Yes, it seems that September 11 changed everything for our former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. According to Punditwatch, she

claimed that the battle against al Qaeda and resolving the “crisis” in North Korea was more pressing than Iraq, accusing the Administration of a “unidimensional foreign policy.” When host Tim Russert showed her bellicose comments she and President Clinton made against Iraq in 1998, Albright responded, “Things are different after 9-11.”

For Albright, the lesson of 9/11 was that we should be less concerned now about weapons of mass destruction in the most anti-American region on earth getting into the hands of terrorists. Don’t worry about Saddam. Do what we did after 1998: nothing. Look how well that turned out.

No, I don’t mean Madonna. I mean a group called “Glamericans”. These are drag queens, performance artists, and sundry others who form “a non-partisan group of funky Americans committed to non-violence and its promotion through glamorous, media-savvy, cultural events. We believe in America’s potential to be a peaceful and powerful force in the world. We believe that war is bad for our country, bad for our environment and bad for our travel plans.” Dammit. Let Saddam test nerve gas on political prisoners strapped down in hospital beds. Let him gas the Kurds. Let him protect terrorist groups. The important thing is to look good in Tribeca. In some ways, I admire this stuff. It’s more honest than Dave Matthews.

TAPPER ON STONE: It had to happen: a fawning, worshipping Oliver Stone documentary about Fidel Castro. Kim Jong Il was unavailable? Saddam couldn’t commit?

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “Just as some Arab governments fuel anti-American sentiment among people to divert them from problems at home, so a distinct minority of Western European leaders appears to engage in America-bashing to rally their people and other European elites to the call of European unity. Some European politicians speak of pressure from their “street” for peaceful solutions to international conflict and for resisting American power regardless of its purpose. But statements emanating from Europe that seem to endorse pacifism in the face of evil, and anti-Semitic recidivism in some quarters, provoke an equal and opposite reaction in America. There is an American “street,” too, and it strongly supports disarming Iraq, accepts the necessity of an expansive American role in the world to ensure we never wake up to another September 11th, is perplexed that nations with whom we have long enjoyed common cause do not share our urgency and sense of threat in time of war, and that considers reflexive hostility toward Israel as the root of all problems in the Middle East as irrational as it is morally offensive.” -from Senator John McCain’s speech to European defense chiefs in Munich on Saturday.

“You don’t beat terrorists by bombing them. All you do is act as a very good recruiting agent for them because more young people then turn towards the terrorists, and you alienate the complete civil population because you bomb them. Do you expect them to like us any more than they do now, which is not very much. You beat terrorists by talking to them. It’s the only way you can do it.” – Mo Mowlam, former Blair cabinet member, urging a seminar with Osama bin Laden in response to mass murder.

Charming item on a San Francisco lefty internet site this weekend:

Good News:CIA Officer Killed in Afghanistan Grenade Accident by :) Friday February 07, 2003 at 03:26 AM Ok, only two CIA agents dead, but its something. With so much bad news in the headlines its nice to read some good news like this every once and awhile. “WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) – A CIA counterterrorism officer has been killed in a grenade accident during a live fire exercise in Afghanistan as he prepared for an intelligence operation, the spy agency said on Thursday.” “Boes was the second CIA fatality in Afghanistan since the United States launched a war”

Yep, this is how a few of them actually think.

FRIEDMAN ON THE NYT: Sorry, I mean the French, but sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between M. Chirac’s position and Ms. Collins’:

The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam’s part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war.

Tell it, Tom. Meanwhile, more common sense has slipped through Howell’s editorial net:

So, however thin the evidence, experts on intelligence tend not to dismiss the possibility that as a last resort the Iraqi leader just might equip terrorists with chemical and biological weapons to be used against their common enemies: the United States, Israel and the West generally.
Mr. Schweitzer said: “Saddam Hussein can offer his substances to them, and they would not hesitate to accept it, even if they intended to use it in a way the Iraqis hadn’t told them to. This is the greatest danger.”

Eventually, the stronger arguments will have to prevail, won’t they?

SPOKE TOO SOON: Guardian readers have rallied to dismiss Colin Powell’s evidence. I hope my optimism didn’t provoke a counter-blast.

A reader urges us to get our Tom Lehrer song-book open again. Here’s a goodie:

We are the Folk Song Army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.

That just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

Hmmm. Are the French beginning to acknowledge reality? Today’s editorial in Le Monde is called “L’Apres Guerre,” and contains the following sentences:

All smiles, defense secretary Rumsfeld predicted a brief war: “Six days? Six weeks?” Let’s accept that assessment. What then? What about the after-war? … To ask these questions is not to defend the indefensible status quo, the Saddam dictatorship.

The indefensible status quo. But wasn’t that exactly what the French supported only recently, covered by the fig-leaf that somehow more inspectors would make a blind bit of difference? I think Colin Powell was more effective than some gave him credit for.

THE PRICE OF SUPPORT: Bill Keller is a sensible fellow. But his piece this morning gives an insight into how otherwise sensible liberals can come to support this war: only by simultaneously deriding and condescending to the president who made it possible. Is peer pressure that great? I guess so.