| Monday
September 20, 2004 CBS gives up, but then you
expected it. With ill grace, but you expected that, too.
The mess in Iraq continues. I have no idea what we ought to
do there; some sources tell me things are getting better, others that we are
getting worse. And there are questions at every level.
Strategically: dare we declare victory and get out? There
are a hundred variants on the theme but they all add up to "cut and run" and
it will make it difficult to get anyone to believe us in future. Or will it?
The Afghan situation was the right model: can we get anyone
to believe we will do that in future?
Morally: we broke it; are we not obligated to fix some of
the broken parts? If so how, and what cost? If we admit we had no business
being there at all, we are obliged to pay far higher costs -- reparations if
you like -- than if we had justification. Oddly enough the WMD come in here:
we believed they existed, Clinton believed it, the Turks believed it, the
French believed it, the Germans believed it, everyone in the region believed
that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons deployed and
ready to use; even his generals believed it, each believing that others had
them ready to use. It may be that Saddam believed it.
If the elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction short of
nuclear justifies an intervention, we were justified; the fact that they
didn't exist is irrelevant, because almost no one was saying they didn't
exist until we went in. Almost no one. -- I believed he had them but that
non-nuclear WMD were at most a regional threat, and Saddam was deterred and
contained, and we were better off leaving things the way they were; but that
is a rare position.
Morally: we eliminated a monster but we left many people --
victims, not masters of the former regime -- worse off than before we
went in. Have we an obligation to put that right?
Economically: it is a terribly expensive war, our deficits
are soaring, and we are incurring the debts not as investment to be paid
back but as current expenses: we are not borrowing money (from overseas,
from future generations, from ourselves in future; against growth) to
promote growth, investing in energy alternatives. The money goes as current
expenses. Borrowing money to meet current expenses means belt tightening and
cut backs in private lives: only government can borrow money to spend for
votes and goodies and largess to the public with no thought of return on
that investment.
It is easily established that the correlation between
economic growth in the West and energy prices is high and negative. Minor
things: shipping movie projectors across country to be used in a convention
now costs $5,000, a significant item in a Science Fiction Convention budget;
when the tradition of loaning out that equipment was established, the costs
were far lower. All travel costs more. Airlines are now losing $4 billion a
year (and insanely paying $14 billion a year in taxes). I could continue,
but the fact is that with $40/bbl oil the world is in trouble and growth
will slow.
Investment in lowering dependence on oil would have a
dramatic effect. We aren't doing much of that compared to pouring money into
the Iraqi sand: if that got the oil pumping it would have a hell of a return
on investment, but so far that isn't happening.
Again: for $200 billion we could have built 100
one-thousand-megawatt fission nuclear power plants, fueling them with
fissionables from surplus nuclear warheads. In those quantities (with some
sane regulation legislation, which ought not have been all that difficult in
the wake of 911: it is after all part of homeland security) the plants
would have cost about $1 billion each, leaving $100 billion for research
into using electricity for transportation to eliminate need for oil use; and
building a fleet of heavy lift vehicles and beginning on solar power
satellites. All that would have taken 4 to 6 years. It will take more than a
decade to become nearly independent of Middle East Oil, but it can be done,
and the costs would not be high compared to what we are spending now to
assure Middle East Oil supplies.
Note that as our nuclear plants come on line, and we develop
more ways to use electricity for transport, the need for oil falls, and the
price of oil falls, benefiting the entire world other than the Arabs.
Whatever the merits of the Arabs, they can hardly claim much credit for
having been born over resources they are themselves unable to extract. Let
the prices fall: it's good for everyone else.
We could still do that: and it would still make more sense
than pouring money into the Iraqi sand.
Which still doesn't solve the problem of what to do about
Iraq; but it is noteworthy that it would still be worth borrowing $200
billion to do that NOW.
On this subject:
Subject: quick exit
Quick exit from Iraq is likely
They must be trying to get _my_ vote. Won't work.
Gregory Cochran
http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak20.html
They will I think keep my vote; having played with the
neo-Jacobin fire, perhaps the Bush people, who were not neo-Jacobins, have
learned. After all Francis Fukuyama has defected, as have others.
It was an expensive experiment: but the Jacobin notion that
every human desires freedom and democracy, and needs only the opportunity to
embrace them, has been with Western Civilization for a long time. Edmund
Burke's REFLECTIONS was written precisely in answer to this, as was his
lecture to the New Whigs from the Old Whigs (to neo-cons from paleo-cons?).
It is an attractive notion, and much taught in American
universities to this day; indeed I make no doubt someone is instilling this
false anthropology into willing young minds even as I write this, and
despite all the evidence from Iraq: for with the belief among the
enlightened in the professorate comes a general hatred of America in
general, and a radical view of society, which generally blinds the
enlightened to illumination from actual events in the world.
But to those in power now perhaps the lesson has become
clear. It was an expensive lesson, but apparently it must be learned every
few generations. In Burke's time The Terror, Thermidor, Directory,
Consulate, Napoleon, all were yet to come when he wrote the Reflections; Tom
Paine and Jefferson were still champions of the Revolution when Burke wrote
his Reflections; it was only what happened later that enlightened some (and
broke Paine's heart as well as his health). But over time we have forgotten
that the ancients considered good government a gift of the gods; that the
Framers full well understood the difficulty of the task they set themselves
in Philadelphia that hot Summer of 1787; that it would be a Republic only if
we could keep it.
We have learned that planting Democracy in Iraq is not so
simple. Simon Bolivar could have told us of the difficulty: seeking to plant
democracy in his country, he said, was to plow the sea. Others have tried.
It was a noble effort; and perhaps those who tried have
learned something from it.
====================
Wade Scholine if you wonder why you don't get mail from me,
your spam filters are working very well
In fact many of you have good spam filters and don't get my
mailings. There is nothing I can do about that. I have put some of the names
in badmail along with some of the reasons, but
in general, if you did not get today's mailing you ought to look into why.
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