Month: June 2005

“At any rate, we can see that [animals] are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God’s creatures . . . Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.” – Pope Benedict XVI, on animal welfare, back in 2002.

The good news – no, make that great news – is that the Bush tax cuts have clearly boosted growth and so helped government revenues in the short term. The budget deficit has now shrunk far more than previously expected this year. But check out the other significant figure:

But Bush’s and Congress’s profligacy remains largely unchecked, with government spending in May hitting $188bn, up 5.7 percent from the same month of last year.

Spending increases amount to an extra $110 billion over last year; and the full impact of the Medicare entitlement hasn’t begun to be felt. Imagine what could have been achieved if we’d had a modicum of spending restraint from the Republicans. As I’ve said before. I’m a big supporter of Bush’s tax cuts (except the estate tax). But we need far greater spending discipline for fiscal health.

FRUM AND MARRIAGE: David Frum argues that the fact that gay and straight marriage rates in Canada are roughly comparable at this point means that gay couples don’t really want the right to marry. He would expect a disproportionately huge burst of marriages among gays, after decades of pent-up frustration. In fact, what happened was a more gentle entering into the mainstream, with rates almost indistinguishable from straights. Unlike David, I’m not sure you can infer a huge amount from this. People have very personal approaches to marriage and every couple is different. Some long-standing gay couples from older generations have defined their relationships, faute de mieux, as non-marital and it would take a big shift in their consciousness to change at this point. Others aren’t ready for the same reaons straight people aren’t ready: this is a personal, not a political decision. More important, there are no gay people in Canada yet who have grown up with the possibility of marriage as a moment in their futures. They don’t yet have family expectations or nagging mothers. All this is complicated, and it will take a generation or so to see how it ultimately shakes out. But let’s say David turns out to be correct, and marriage is less popular among gay men than straights or lesbians. If, as David believes, the fact of gays settling down, and building marital relationships will be so destructive for society, wouldn’t it be a good thing, from his perspective, that fewer gay couples get married? Shouldn’t he be thrilled that gays are staying away from stability and integration? My view is the opposite: that the option of marriage will transform gay lives, relationships and psyches in ways we will not know for years, but certainly for the better. It also seems to me that even if only a few couples want to commit to each other, they deserve our support. In any social movement, a few are in the vanguard, breaking old social habits and pathologies, forging new realities and opportunities. It beggars belief that conservatives would want to actually discourage gay couples from this kind of commitment. Conservatives should surely be celebrating this more than anyone else, as they rightly laud African-American couples who break historical patterns of family breakdown and build stable marriages. Rather than seeing the first wave of married gay couples and using them to dismiss the whole idea, why wouldn’t you find their example inspiring and do all you can to support them and help their example to spread?

That’s the fraction of Americans who pay no income taxes at all – an all-time record. Another reason why the president, in my view, should have pushed tax reform rather than social security reform as his primary second term objective. Too late now, of course. The tax prof explains.

Yes, its important. But here’s some perspective: new research has found that Europe was as warm between 800 and 1300 as it is today. Then we got a Little Ice Age. Just solar variability.

Sorry for the lack of blogging this weekend. We were moving to the Cape for the next three months; and then spent the weekend doing the usual fix-up of the unwinterized condo. It couldn’t be more beautiful this morning: the tide creeping in, and as I look above the laptop, the sun sparkling on the surface of the water. Lucky man I am.

Dave Cullen asks a question that has always bugged me. It’s pretty obvious that many movie actors do a steroid cycle for some roles. I have no problems with that. I think steroids should be legal for adults. But isn’t there a double standard here?

Here’s an argument that we have plenty of troops to do what we need to in Iraq. Count me unconvinced. One responsibility any invading army has, it seems to me, is to retain order. Once we take over authority, we have a moral obligation to ensure that mayhem isn’t the result. We didn’t simply fail to do this from the fall of Baghdad onward, we fully intended to fail. There wqas no plan to restore civil order after victory – and 12,000 Iraqis have died as a result. I don’t think anyone can seriously claim that the insurgency didn’t gain enormously from this power vacuum. Meanwhile, another alert reader queries my analogy to the successful British pacification of an Iraqi insurgency in 1920, as highlighted by Niall Ferguson. In Niall’s words,

How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons stand out. The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had enough men. In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements. Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000). The trouble is that the population of Iraq was just over three million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24 million. Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at most, 23 to 1. Today it is around 174 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, about one million American troops would be needed.

Here’s my correspondent’s argument against Ferguson:

They didn’t have native security forces then, nearly all of those men were from the Indian Army. The US has a couple of hundred thousand native allies. I think you need to add those to your number.
In addition, the British problems extended from Basra to Kurdistan – every wild character, Shiite, Sunni and Kurd, was up in arms. The US has only a subset of that population to worry about. US deployments are only in a limited area of the country.
The British were also forced to maintain large inflexible garrisons because it was terrifically difficult to move around in Iraq at the time. Their force utilization was very inefficient.
Last, the US never had the force structure to maintain many more in Iraq long term, under a peacetime economy and mobilization scheme, than it now does. The US economy would be in pretty bad shape with a “full” deployment as you desire. It isn’t prudent for longer term US strategic purposes to take an economic hit. A draft is a bad idea. What you have is what you are going to get. The solution, as it always was, is Iraqis. It will take time.

My correspondent has a point. And this thing is still winnable. But running the war in this way risks something significant: that the costs and extra time involved in fighting such a campaign on the cheap will eventually wear on Americans’ patience. We’re already seeing that with falling support for the war. Moreover, the administration told us that this was a critical venture for our very survival. If it is that critical, why take the kind of under-manning risks we’ve taken? If it isn’t critical, then why did you tell us it was? My only fear all along is that we might fail. I cannot understand why this administration would have made decisions that made this process so much harder than it might have been. If they’d called for a draft after 9/11 or for a massive influx of new soldiers, don’t you think the American people would have agreed? Instead, they aimed low and placed a great deal of reliance on hope and luck. Hope and luck can indeed win wars. But actual soldiers are more reliable.

Terry Moran is actually asking this administration to back up its statements. Can you believe that? Money quote:

Q Scott, is the insurgency in Iraq in its ‘last throes’?

McCLELLAN: Terry, you have a desperate group of terrorists in Iraq that are doing everything they can to try to derail the transition to democracy. The Iraqi people have made it clear that they want a free and democratic and peaceful future. And that’s why we’re doing everything we can, along with other countries, to support the Iraqi people as they move forward….

Q But the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: The Vice President talked about that the other day — you have a desperate group of terrorists who recognize how high the stakes are in Iraq. A free Iraq will be a significant blow to their ambitions.

Q But they’re killing more Americans, they’re killing more Iraqis. That’s the last throes?

McCLELLAN: Innocent — I say innocent civilians. And it doesn’t take a lot of people to cause mass damage when you’re willing to strap a bomb onto yourself, get in a car and go and attack innocent civilians. That’s the kind of people that we’re dealing with. That’s what I say when we’re talking about a determined enemy.

Q Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics.

Q What’s the evidence on the ground that it’s being extinguished?

McCLELLAN: Terry, we’re making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements. You’re seeing Iraqis now playing more of a role in addressing the security threats that they face. They’re working side by side with our coalition forces. They’re working on their own. There are a lot of special forces in Iraq that are taking the battle to the enemy in Iraq. And so this is a period when they are in a desperate mode.

Q Well, I’m just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency.

McCLELLAN: Well, you can go back and look at the Vice President’s remarks. I think he talked about it.

Q Yes. Is there any idea how long a ‘last throe’ lasts for?

McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve….

Is there some metric for when the truth is in its “last throes”?

Bush is more genuinely liberal, when it comes to elections in the Islamic world. Norm Geras explains.

TWIN POWER: We thought we had a dynasty problem? Check out Poland.

The evidence mounts.

RED CHINA: I’ve always liked that soubriquet – and it remains true.