Year: 2003

I take the point from many readers that Howard Dean has not proved himself in any way committed to true fiscal conservatism. His plan for universal socialized medicine terrifies me, as it should anyone committed to the beleaguered excellence of American healthcare. His reflexive support for tax hikes is also troubling. I don’t trust him on a bunch of other issues like, ahem, national security. But he did balance budgets in the mini-state of Vermont, and he does place emphasis on fiscal sobriety in his campaign platform. As he fleshes out his proposals, we’ll get a better idea. But where else do fiscal conservatives look? In three years, Bush has managed to wreak so much havoc with the nation’s finances it’s very hard to see who could do worse. In his first three years, you have an increase in domestic discretionary spending of 20.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 0.7 percent for Bill Clinton. If a Democrat had this record, do you think Republicans would let him off the hook? Here’s Tom DeLay in 1995: “By the year 2002, we can have a federal government with a balanced budget or we can continue down the present path towards total fiscal catastrophe.” If Clintonomics was a “fiscal catastrophe,” what would an intellectually honest DeLay say about Bush? (I know an intellectually honest Tom DeLay is a bit of magical realism, but bear with me.) We don’t just have big tax cuts; we have a big leap in discretionary spending, huge hikes in agricultural subsidies, no reform of corporate welfare, a huge new entitlement for prescription drugs, big jumps in the number of people employed indirectly by Uncle Sam, and on and on. Looking ahead, the future looks even worse – and that’s even before we try and tackle the entitlement crunch of the boomer retirement. The GOP has to be punished for this. They run the Congress; and they’re now officially worse than Democrats at keeping government solvent or small. Clinton was way, way better. Honest conservatives know this. Dishonest partisans look the other way.

As you know, I’ve so far seen nothing in the Hutton inquiry in London to justify the left’s hysterical complaints that Tony Blair “sexed up” the Iraq weapons dossier against the advice of intelligence experts in Britain. It’s clear to me that it was the BBC that sexed up its reporting to damage the government for purely ideological reasons. And nothing has emerged to give the slightest credibility to BBC hack, Andrew Gilligan’s, specific allegations. Au contraire. But yesterday and the day before provided the first real worries about the process that led the British government to declare Saddam an imminent threat to the West:

Brian Jones, a retired branch head of the defence intelligence analysis staff, told the Hutton inquiry there were several concerns about the 45 minute claim and one of his staff felt some of the assessements of the threat posed by Iraq were “over-egged” in the dossier. The inquiry heard the “shutters came down” on the dossier before intelligence officials’ reservations had a chance to be properly considered and there were fears “spin merchants” had been too involved in the dossier’s production.

The bottom line is that the dossier had not been finally approved in all its nuances by the intelligence chiefs, in the way that Blair had indicated. Here’s a particularly worrying incident:

[Jones] also told the inquiry a chemical weapons expert within his branch was concerned about the intelligence in the dossier relating to the production of chemical weapons in Iraq. “He was concerned he could not point to any solid evidence of such production. He did not dismiss it may have happened… but he didn’t have good evidence it had happened. It is the difference between making the judgment that the production of chemical weapons had taken place as opposed to that judgment being that it had probably taken place or even possible taken place. It was that degree of certainty in the judgment that was being made.”

This is not a smoking gun. It is not as if the government deliberately ignored the advice of its experts; or inserted data that had not been put forward by the same analysts. But the packaging, use of language, spinning of certain imponderables, all might have led to a misleading notion of the certainty that intelligence sources had about Iraq’s WMD capabilities. That matters. Like many people, I simply took on trust that intelligence assessments of Iraq’s threat were genuine. We know now, I think, that the real issue was not Saddam’s imminent capability but his long-term ambitions and connection with the terrorist network. None of this changes my view of whether the war was justified. But it’s troubling. To say the least.

Here’s another letter from a soldier in Iraq, doing amazing work. He’s Lieutenant Colonel Steven D. Russell, the Battalion Commander of the 1st Battalion of the 22nd Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. I wish, reading this, that it gave me more reassurance. Some progress; some setbacks; but a hellish scene nonetheless. It’s long, but helpful to see this conflict through the eyes of one of America’s incomparable soldiers:

On the 11th of August we successfully raided three more objectives and netted two former Republican Guards officers one a division commander and the other a corps level chief of staff.- The third objective netted us a leader of Fedayeen militia.- By the 13th we had seen small enemy attempts to harass or strike back at us.-On a secondary market street, CPT Boyd’s convoy narrowly escaped harm as assailants rolled a volley of RPGs down the street like some game of ten pins.-The rockets whooshed, skipped and scraped along the pavement, but made no contact for them to explode. The enemy attackers had fired from several hundred meters away in the middle of a street and then fled.
Our actions continued to have momentum.-By mid-month two men wanted by our forces – one who worked for Saddam’s wife turned themselves in to us and on the same day we received weapons from helpful Tikriti merchants with keen eyes.- Even so, the young and the stupid continue to step forward.- In a suburb to our south, attackers launched a volley of RPGs at A Company soldiers in yet another classic miss and run attack.- Our Gators responded so quickly that the enemy was forced to flee for his life and abandoned his rocket launchers in the street.-The attackers melded into the local population before they could be caught.- Hence, we continue to work with the locals, the sheiks and plan more raids. One benefit of our dialogue with the sheiks has been the recruitment of reliable militia that we are now training.- Tapping into some previous experience I had on a much grander scale when I served in Afghanistan forming the plans for the Afghan National Army, we moved out with a modest training program that is producing a good-quality small element to assist the local government and our forces.- Through the great work of 1LT Deel and SGM Castro, and with the assistance of a couple of former drill sergeants in each company, we move forward to train Iraqis in martial and civil arts that will help them stabilize their own town…
The enemy continues to adapt his tactics to counter ours.- His only cowardly refuge has been to hide among the population and among legitimate emergency services.- On the night of the 18th our soldiers at a temporary checkpoint searched an ambulance that was bringing back an older man from the hospital.- Seeing this, a white car placed an explosive on a side street and ignited the fuse.- A Company soldiers reacted to the blast to the west.- The ambulance drove north to get out of danger and as it did, the white car pulled along side the Red Crescent vehicle and sent a burst of gunfire toward another unit’s outpost.- The outpost responded, seeing the fire come from what appeared to be the ambulance.
Also seeing the fire exchanged between the outpost and the ambulance, our snipers engaged the ambulance as it sped north, the victim of a cruel crossfire.- The white car, fully masked in its movements, then dashed down a dark alley and made good his escape. The ambulance shuddered to a stop.- The driver, fearing for his life, got out of the front seat to escape the bullet exchange.- He nearly made it but for one round that hit his ankle.- Another aid man was cut by glass from the windshield.- The older man in transport took a round to the shoulder and the thigh.- The police and our forces quickly arrived along the dark street.- The police took the seriously wounded victim to the hospital where he was stabilized. The ambulance then began its journey northward toward a police checkpoint, met by both police and our scouts.- After much confusion, we determined what had happened and treated the man with the ankle wound.- We took him to better care to remove the bullet.- We also handed over the ambulance back to the emergency workers.- The Iraqis helped us piece together the confusing puzzle and, while frightened and initially angered, became more angered at the fact that the attackers would once again use innocent people as shields.- They are by all estimations cowards… The next day, the 20th, we got an emergency request for help from another unit working in our area.- While coordinating information on a market street, armed attackers masked within the population open up a deadly burst of gunfire.- The soldiers translator falls dead with a torso wound.- A soldier collapses with a serious thigh wound and another is also hit in his extremities severely wounded.- The soldiers return fire.- The enemy’s damage done, he flees, unable to be pursued by this small wounded band.
Men from our C Company rushed to the scene.- Shocked and bloody men are lifted into vehicles, accompanied by their angry and equally shocked peers.- Our soldiers cordon the area, conduct a wide search and gather little from the locals who have either closed their shops in typical fear or claimed they saw nothing. The men’s lives are saved by a medical evacuation.- A translator, an American citizen, will speak no more. Vigilance, vigilance, vigilance.- My burden is that every soldier of mine goes home and with a pair of legs.-God has spared us from much in the midst of our battles.- Psalm 68:19-21.
One such sparing occurred on the 22nd of August.- A tip from a distraught local warned us of a plan to attack the Tigris Bridge.- He stated that the attack would occur within an hour and would be with RPGs, small arms and mortars using a water-services truck as a mask. Our response was immediate.- A section of M1 Abrams tanks changed the scenery of the bridge and our checkpoint there.- The enemy did materialize at a distance and launched a single pathetic 82mm mortar round, impacting just across the near bank of the river at dusk. The scenery of his own attack also changed, he missed and now ran.
An hour later, our Recon platoon headed south along the main highway. They approached a decorative gate incongruently guarding a wadi that funnels the waste byproduct of Tikrit into the Tigris River.– Our men affectionately know this depression as the Stink Wadi.- That night it exuded more than just odor.- A volley of RPGs raced across in a flash from the south bank of the wadi.- Small arms accompanied the volley. The scout’s weapons erupted in a converging arc that raked and then secondarily exploded on the bank. Unable to get to the scene quickly by the nature of the wadi, distance and terrain, the men could not determine the damage they inflicted.- But they blew up something.- When searched later, the area was vacant, revealing little information.
The revelation of information took on a different form in Tikrit the following morning.- Our C Company posted security along the main street of the city near the telephone exchange offices.- Bradley fighting vehicles and tough soldiers mixed with the squat, dilapidated structures of the city.- A small crowd gathered at a new café in town, an Internet café.- Words are exchanged, cameras roll and snap, a pair of scissors is lifted off a pillow as the owner and I cut a ribbon at the entrance.
While thrilled, it all seems so foreign to me given the context of the previous days.- For a brief moment these small trappings of normal life of normal pursuits and daily living awaken me.- As I leave the café an old woman is nearly struck by a car and a bicycle as she attempts to cross the busy street.- Our soldiers step into the four lanes of traffic and she is escorted across the thoroughfare.– As we pull out in our vehicles, we cradle our weapons, begin to watch rooftops, examine every trash pile, and check each alley.- A sea of people is scanned quickly – what is in their arms, what are their facial expressions, do they make unusual movement.-We pull away and
reenter our world.

Alternately moving and sobering, I’d say.

“In the early 1990’s, I watched a good friend of mine grab a 600 grand a year ‘grant’ from her friend, and fellow JFK Schooler, in the EPA. For the next ten years, my friend got 600 grand annually, (disbursed thru Las Vegas, aptly enough) for doing … absolutely nothing. I mean nothing.
At the end of ten years, my friend had spent all the money, and had produced a series of annual reports, each one approximately 40 pages long, filled with pseudo-scientific booshwah so ridiculous that even her friends couldn’t help smirking when they read it.
70 percent of the money was spent flying to ‘conferences’ with other JFK grantors (always in gorgeous locales) where they gave ‘papers’ and mostly networked with each other to find more grants.
I know this sounds like miniscule potatoes – but multiply this 100,000 times, and over a thousand agencies…
And she was never listed as a Federal employee!
Now the Republicans are in – and my friend is out. But imagine what the new pigs and the new troughs are getting.” Ah yes, and the GOP has hiked the number of pigs and expanded the size of the trough.

More evidence of the runaway federal government under Bush. The sheer profligacy of this administration continues to astound. If you’re a fiscal conservative, Howard Dean is beginning to look attractive.

Here’s an interesting review of whether Congressional discourse has become less civil over the past few years – and the answer is no. The most recent study by the Annenberg Center at Penn shows that the 2001 Congress was one of the most civil in years. Historically, the record seems to be varied, with incivility (and accusations of lying) peaking when the House changes sides. Since the Congress has been far more evenly divided in recent years than in the past, it might even be argued that the representatives are actually extremely civil these days. There are some nuances:

A qualitative analysis of uses of “liar” suggests that in the 1940s and 50s, Members were more likely to accuse a foreign enemy of lying and are now more likely to address such charges against the president, a presidential candidate, an opposing party, or each other. A content analysis confirms that discussions of lying have more frequently referred to or been directed at other Members in more recent times. An analysis of uses of vulgarity suggests that the l04th was less likely to include coarse language than most of the Congresses of the past decade. A comparison of the level of vulgarity in the House and the British House of Commons suggests that the level in the U.S. is somewhat higher.

The latter surprises me. I guess all that braying and “hear-hears” don’t count as rude. Of course, it might also be true that the boring, civil nature of so much Congressional debate means that the real tussle takes place on cable television and in insta-books, like Coulter’s and Franken’s. They deserve each other.

An astonishing leak in London from the office of the foreign secretary, Jack Straw. It’s in the form of prep-notes for a meeting with the prime minister, Tony Blair. According to the Telegraph, Straw argues that

lack of political progress in solving the linked problems of security, infrastructure and the political process are undermining the consent of the Iraqi people to the coalition presence and providing fertile ground for extremists and terrorists.

He wants more troops and more resources. The Telegraph hints the British initiative is also designed to buttress the White House’s resolve in providing more troops. Let’s hope it works. For the record, I see nothing wrong with the U.S. seeking U.N. help and support in Iraq, even if it means losing some control. What matters now is rescuing Iraq from the logic of chaos and terror. And for the record, worrying about the drift in Iraq is not a function of going wobbly. Not worrying – and coming up with all sorts of facile defenses of what is clearly going awry – that is going wobbly.

THE ENEMY REGROUPS?: More troubling news from the war. This time, in Afghanistan. On the other hand, here’s another report, picked up by an intrepid blogger, that brings better news. Whom to believe? Maybe the truth is that the Taliban are resurgent, due, in part, to our poor follow-through in Afghanistan, but it is just as true that those soldiers who are there are doing a great job, given their limited numbers and resources. Which is why we need more resources for rebuilding Afghanistan and more troops to police it. C’mon, Dubya. Follow-through; follow-through. Some of us are worried not because we want you to fail, but because we want you to succeed.

Here’s a sentence you don’t expect to read in National Review: “Homosexuals are and should be entitled to all of the civil rights that heterosexuals possess.” The author, who pens a screed against gay people being allowed any position of authority in the Anglican Church, nevertheless seems to recognize that civil laws and religious edicts are separate matters. This is huge progress. There is no deeper civil right than the right to marry. It’s great to see NRO publish someone who sees this Constitutional and moral truth. On the other hand, Jonah Goldberg is shocked to find that a few gay radicals in Canada – including the editor of something called “Fab magazine” – don’t want to get married. You could find plenty of “hip” straights who feel that way too, of course, especially if they edit something called Fab. But Jonah doesn’t seem to believe that because many heterosexuals are ambivalent about marriage, shack up, commit adultery or get divorced, they shouldn’t be allowed the right to marry in the first place. Why not?

JONAH AND LINCOLN: Jonah also rebuts the civil rights argument that the denial of same-sex marriage is equivalent to the denial of inter-racial marriage. Why? Jonah argues that it’s because no blacks back in the 1960s entertained radical notions about marriage and family life. Really? Has he read much cultural history? In 1967, when blacks first won the constitutional right to marry whom they pleased, you could also have had a front-page story in the New York Times citing many blacks who disapproved of inter-racial marriage. A hefty plurality still do. Would Jonah have written a column saying: “See? Those negroes don’t even want to marry whites! Why should we debase this sacred institution for just a few of those people who don’t represent most blacks anyway?” I doubt it. The racial analogy is also instructive in other respects. I wonder if Jonah has looked at the rates of illegitimacy, single motherhood, divorce and promiscuity among African-Americans as a group. Does Jonah infer from that that the right to marriage should be denied African-Americans? Of course not. If anything, such a minority, with difficult cultural and social baggage, is more in need of the anchor of marriage than others. And those members of that minority who aspire to marriage are not lumped in with those who don’t, but cherished and supported, as they should be. So why does that logic not also apply to gays? Why should culturally conservative gays be denied the right to marry because more socially radical ones don’t want to? The argument reminds me a little of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas essentially argued that blacks were intrinsically unable to be as full and worthy citizens as whites. Lincoln replied that that was even more reason to grant them equality, so that they could live up to their fullest potential even if it wasn’t as elevated as the white norm. Today we rightly abhor even Lincoln’s bigotry of low expectations. But in the case of gay citizens, some social conservatives endorse not Lincoln’s posture, but Douglas’s.

She’s off to a great start in the fall. Here’s arguably the most fatuous sentence yet penned by the air-brained columnist: “If all those yuppies can climb Mount Everest, at 29,000 feet, can’t we pay some locals to nab Osama at 14,000 feet?” Yep, she wrote that. Yep, they published it. It’s her critique of the armed forces’ failure so far to capture Osama bin Laden. Does she think it’s funny? Does she think it’s insightful? Does she think it’s helpful? Here’s hoping none of that applies. Wouldn’t you love to see her in a room with special forces troops, risking their lives right now to protect us? Wouldn’t you love to see her tell them that an outdoorsy yuppie could do their job better?

A few of you complained that I was going wobbly in the war on terror in my posts yesterday. Au contraire. It’s precisely because I believe in this war passionately that I believe we need more commitment, more money and more troops to aid the effort. The issue should never be: do you support the president? The issue should be: is what the president doing going to work? I’m not omniscient, but it’s simply crazy to deny the real problems we are facing right now and the need for clear and urgent thinking about them. Many Americans who support the war agree. That’s not going wobbly; it’s doing what any thinking person should do, which is try and figure out what’s going wrong and how to fix it. Mercifully, the administration seems to be trying to find a way to make the liberation work, with more international back-up. They’re not that pig-headed. The president has no bigger fan in his conduct of the war so far. But my fear is that he is going astray. Am I supposed to keep that under wraps? As for the aricraft carrier landing, my point is that Bush gave the impression that the war was over by that event. That very signal made it look as if the current violence – a war with growing intensity – is somehow a reversal of that achievement, rather than a continuation of the struggle. It has undermined him. And we need him. I’m still wildly unconvinced that any of the Democrats can be trusted with this war. Which is why it’s even more important to ensure that the only man who can wage it doesn’t fail. Want to hear reflexive defenses of everything the administration does? Go read someone else.

AIDS RACISM? A bizarre piece in today’s New York Times, reminiscent of the worst of the Raines reign. A front-page story trumpets that Africans are better at taking their anti-HIV drugs than Americans; and that worries about their not being able to do so amount to “racism.” But then when you read the story, you find that we’re not comparing likes at all. The data on Americans includes very complex regimens – especially in recent years. My own intake amounted to a couple dozen a day at different times and in different combinations. But in Africa,

Compliance has become easier because drugmakers from India and elsewhere are beginning to make triple-therapy cocktails that come in as few as two pills a day. (These are not available in the United States yet because of patent problems – no Western company makes all three drugs for an ideal cocktail.)

Hmmm. Do you think that might have something to do with it? The difference between two pills that combine all the drugs and twenty-five that don’t would make a difference in getting the compliance right, no? And worries about Africa were mainly about medical supervision in rural areas – not a function of racism. Other factors that make Africans more adherent are their greater exposure to actual sickness. Many who are on meds have experienced opportunistic infections and witnessed death. The drugs make them feel better. In contrast, many Americans have had no HIV-symptoms and the meds make them feel worse. Hence the temptation to miss a dose sometimes. I’m not saying that this research isn’t interesting and valuable. I am saying that the spin at the Times is preachy and over-reaching. And wrong.

BUSH-HATRED REVISITED: Yep, there’s barely a soul in Provincetown who doesn’t hate George W. Bush. The stores are fully of fatuous t-shirts, lamenting Bush’s alleged stupidity. I know of about five people who support the war on terror. People randomly express their hatred of the president on all sorts of occasions and expect you to chime in. There really is a phenomenon here. I’m not sure it’s worse than the loathing some parts of the right felt for Clinton but it’s disturbing – and way more stupid than Bush could ever be – nonetheless. But the trope that has really caught on among elites is the notion that Bush is a liar. The New Republic and Paul Krugman trumpeted this charge early on, and now the Washington Monthly has chimed in, with one of the most fatuous and rigged pieces of lazy insta-journalism I’ve read in a while. (Bob Somerby gets it right, for once.) It’s not just that I find the Monthly’s (and Krugman’s) charges silly. They conflate mis-statements, deliberate confusion, euphemism, ignorance and dishonesty in ways that make it hard for anyone to emerge a non-liar. It’s more that when you start using the term “liar” promiscuously in public discourse, you make such discourse increasingly impossible. The term should be reserevd only for a conscious and deliberate statement that you know is untrue as you sepak or write it. It’s rarer than you might think. That’s why calling someone a “liar” is forbidden in the House of Commons. It undermines the good faith necessary for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al Franken are all about.

MOORE CONCEDES ERROR: This is a major news event. Hard-lefty admits he was wrong. Kinda.

ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE …: … comes out against the Federal Marriage Amendment. The arguments are rock-solid. George Will and Bob Barr have been there already, of course. Opposing a measure that would trivialize the constitution and destroy states’ rights should be a no-brainer for conservatives.

HOW THE LEFT COLLAPSED: A spritied and lively essay by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on what 9/11 continues to do to the Western Left.

THE CHURCH AND EVIL: More evidence of the Vatican’s complicity in sexual abuse. This particular child-abuser was promoted to the higher ranks of the Vatican’s diplomatic staff, despite his own admission of heterosexual minor abuse. He’s still a priest “in good standing.”

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Of course, the euro alone is not to be blamed for slow growth. The weak global economy, including moribund America, is part of the problem. But a good monetary system should protect an economy.” – Joseph Stiglitz, the Guardian. If America’s economy is “moribund,” what does that make Europe’s?