Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"My only real regret is Bush in 2000. I trusted Bush's incompetence over Gore's insufferable ego. But I suspect that with the invasion of Iraq, the end-result would have been the same. They both would have gone in on false pretenses. And would have failed for similar reasons."

Is it possible to find a worse moment of self-justification, of self-absolution and post-hoc rationalization, than this? So Gore, the one major political figure to publicly oppose the Iraq War before its start, who had nothing to do with the neocons and had been part of an administration that focused with urgency during its waning days on the problem of Al Qaeda — Gore is just as likely to invade Iraq as W? "The end-result is likely the same"? This is absurd on its face.

Gore would certainly have invaded Afghanistan, as any American President would have — and then done nation-building, competently, during the critical period as was consistent with his foreign policy statements and advisers in 2000. A Gore foreign policy cabinet would have been entirely different than Bush's, and you know it. There would not have been the neocon-nationalist alliance that provided the key faction in favor of war in Mesopotamia.

I know you have some visceral dislike of Gore; you think this "ManBearPig" nonsense is somehow relevant, rather than petulant; you seem to have imbibed a meme minted c. 1999 by a bored and malignant gang of Press Courtiers, that Gore is unbearably arrogant and mendacious and a legitimate target of scorn (unlike that compassionate, would-like-to-have-a-beer-with fella' from Texas). And so it seems that you did indeed vote (or rather endorse) in 2000 based on personality. You could at least own up to this as an unmitigated error, rather than entertain us with unlikely counter-factuals.

Yes, I did endorse on personality in 2000 – along with Bush's fraudulent campaign as a moderate – and I have owned up to the error. I guess my sense is that Gore opposed the Iraq war in part out of bitterness. If you look at Gore's record – and at TNR, I was hardly unaware of it – it was full of extreme vigilance about Saddam, willingness to use military force for moral ends (as in Bosnia), and completely conventional neocon views on the Middle East. I can absolutely see him going to war against Saddam if goaded sufficiently. Maybe he would have been persuaded by the intelligence that we didn't actually have the goods on WMDs; maybe his hawkishness would have waned in office as it did in opposition. But knowing Gore, I stick with my point. In office, I suspect he would have been much closer to my position on invasion at the time than he was.

Jim Manzi's long article in National Affairs on the international economic order and America's past and future place in it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves (besides a pair of posts by Friedersdorf). Here's a good-sized chunk that begins by criticizing the stimulus:

Only about 5% of the money appropriated is intended to fund things like roads and bridges. The legislation is instead dominated by outright social ­spending: increases in food-stamp benefits and unemployment ­benefits; various direct and special-­purpose spending relabeled as tax credits for ­renewable-energy programs; increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services; and increased school-based financial ­assistance, housing ­assistance, and other direct benefits. The objective effect of the bill is to shift the balance of U.S. government spending away from defense and public safety, and toward social-welfare ­programs. Because the amount of spending involved is so enormous, this will be a dramatic material shift — not a merely symbolic gesture.

Meanwhile, the federal government has also intervened aggressively in both the financial and industrial sectors of the economy in order to produce specific desired outcomes for particular corporations. It has nationalized America's largest auto company (General Motors) and intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings of the third-largest auto company (Chrysler), privileging labor unions at the expense of bondholders. It has, in effect, nationalized what was America's largest insurance company (American International Group) and largest bank (Citigroup), and appears to have exerted extra-legal financial pressure on what was the second-largest bank (Bank of America) to get it to purchase the ­country's largest securities company (Merrill Lynch). The implicit government guarantees provided to home-loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been called in, and the federal government is now the largest de facto lender in the residential real-estate market. The government has selected the CEOs and is setting compensation at major automotive and financial companies across the country.

On top of these interventions in finance and commerce, the administration and congressional Democrats are also pursuing both a new climate and energy strategy and large-scale health-care reform. Their agenda would place the government at the center of these two huge sectors of the economy, sacrificing some economic vitality for public ­control. The latter program would also create an enormous new federal entitlement.

All told, finance, insurance, real estate, automobiles, energy, and health care account for about one-third of the U.S. economy. Reconfiguring these industries to conform to political calculations, and not market-driven decisions, is likely to transform American economic life.

Manzi defends the article repeatedly in the comments at the Scene.

Brussels, Belgium, 2.05 pm

Hitch got there first:

At last November’s gathering for the Committee for the Free World, when things were already beginning to look a bit too bright for holders of the neocon worldview, Frank Gaffney, a Richard Perle acolyte, announced that he and a few hard-liners were setting up a Center for Security Policy to resist appeasement tendencies in the weapons business. Seymour Weiss, one-time Reagan adviser, denounced Helmut Kohl as a dupe for lending money to the East Germans. You would not have guessed that the Berlin Wall was within hours of its fall. But if you had listened to the contribution of Bruce Weinrod, head Heritage Foundation military-industrial acolyte for much of the 1980s, you would have known why the idea was an unwelcome one:

The first thing [Bush] ought to do is call Margaret Thatcher and try to talk some sense into her. She was recently quoted as saying the Cold War is over. That really is a problem if you have somebody who is tough-minded saying that. She may not understand that, at least with the American public, you have to create a sense of some urgency about what we are doing; otherwise, the course resistance is followed and funding shifts to social programs. [Empasis added.]

There went the feline, screeching from the bag. In case of misunderstanding, Weinrod added:

Andrew Sprung gets a case of the Christmas willies about the future of health insurance reform:

It worries me that the health care exchanges won't power up until 2014 (if HCR passes) — while cuts to Medicare Advantage start right away.  Couple this with Democrats' flirtation with weakening the filibuster, and that leaves me chewing a few cuticles about a worst-case scenario: Democrats lose lots of seats and maybe a chamber of Congress in 2010, and the Obama administration goes into a Clintonian holding pattern. The asset bubble bursts in China, or there's some other second wave economic tsunami, or a successful terrorist attack, and the Republicans win the presidency in 2012.  With the filibuster weakened — and the precedent set for weakening it further — Republicans repeal health care reform before the exchanges ever get started.

He thinks the filibuster will then become the Democrats' best friend.

A reader writes:

Your views aren't part of the minority, they're part of the Silent Majority.  The Vocal Minority may win the news cycle (i.e. fantasy world), but out here in the real world, we can see the progress.

Another:

It is disgusting to see the far left complaining about Obama as much as the right wing does. Hope the sane Center holds.

Another:

They want all of the things that they want (albeit not material goods, mostly), and they want them NOW!  And those who are not merely unhappy, but furious at not getting all the wonderful things that they expected from an Obama administration, simply have a more severe case.

Real life doesn't work that way.  But the spoiled baby boomers (and their children who were raised on the same philosophy) never accept that — and I know, that's my generation.  So they will never be satisfied with the performance of anyone, simply because instant gratification is impossible.  It would be impossible even in an absolute dictatorship, and it is many times more impossible in a democracy.  Sorry folks, but you can't have all of what you want; and even the things you can have, you won't get instantly.  Deal with it.

Richard Norton-Taylor notes the moral and legal consequences of the recklessness of the Iraq invasion:

Under the fourth Geneva convention, adopted in 1949, occupying powers are obliged to protect the civilian population of the country they are occupying. No wonder the British and American governments backed away from the description of "occupying power" – as evidence to Chilcot has heard – even though that was their formal status established by the UN.

Some well-placed former public figures involved have said privately that prominent policy-makers in London and Washington at the time could be tried more easily for war crimes for breaching the fourth Geneva convention than for other acts or omissions.

Mark Lynas, who was in the room, says so; Fallows responds.