Losing Iraq; Dan Quayle’s Wisdom ; A Government Raisin cartel;

View 768 Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Continuing some themes from yesterday’s View, all related even if the relationship is not obvious. First, continuing yesterday’s theme about Iraq’s past, present and future. Note that Colonel Couvillon was there before Bremer:

More on Iraq

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/iraq/articles/20130327.aspx

The tribal question is key.

s/f

Couv

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

For those interested, the Strategy Page account of the history and complexity of the Iraqi situation is worth your time. It is very complicated and more detailed than the summary I gave in yesterday‘s View. A key passage:

Both the terrorists and U.S. troops knew that victory was defined as several weeks with no bombs going off in Baghdad. The media was keeping score, and they used their ears and video cameras. No loud bangs and no bodies equals no news. That’s victory.

Not really. The real war is within the Iraqi government. The terrorists lost by 2005, when the relentless slaughter of Moslem civilians turned the Arab world against al Qaeda. Journalists missed that one, but not the historians. The war in Iraq has always been about trying to show Arabs that they can run a clean government, for the benefit of all the people, not just the tyrants on top. So far, there have been lots of victories and defeats in this, and no clear decision overall. Elections have been held several times, but the people elected have proved to be as corrupt and venal as their tyrannical predecessors. Everyone admits that this bad behavior is not a good thing, but attempts to stop it have been only partially successful. Changing thousands of years of custom and tradition is not easy. The clay tablets dug up in the vicinity of Baghdad, reveal similar scandal and despair over four thousand years ago. Most Iraqis realize, however, that if the chain of corruption is not broken, the dreary past will again become a painful present. [Emphasis mine]

The key question is how to extract the US from Middle East affairs without further loss to US interests. I was of the opinion that we are not experts in such affairs and never have been, and our best policy would be to secure energy supplies without further expenditure of blood and treasure. That’s not isolationism, it’s realism. Britain and France have far more interest in Arab, Kurdish, and Persian affairs than we do, and between them they still have considerable resources. It’s not our sphere of influence except for the oil; and there are ways we can get energy supplies for less treasure and far less blood than keeping expeditionary forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and on the Arabian peninsula. But then I have always thought that. I have considerable sympathy for Christian Arabs but we haven’t been very careful of their interests, and indeed they are probably worse off than they would have been had we not intervened – or if we had withdrawn after Saddam was deposed with a warning that we could be back if need be, and left things to cook for themselves. The same goes for Afghanistan. Once the Taliban was out so we should have been also. Our intervention in the Balkans contributed heavily to the ripening hostility between the US and Russia. It’s hard to see what good it did, for us or anyone else really. The invasion of Iraq was justified and perhaps necessary; staying there after Saddam abdicated and we determined there were no stores of weapons of mass destruction was not necessary. When President Bush landed on that carrier and proclaimed Mission Accomplished, we ought to have believed him and brought the troops home. I suppose that’s hindsight but in my defense I will say I never wanted to send them in, and certainly did not think we could rebuild that place. We could have demanded reparations for the cost of delivering the Iraqis from Saddam…

Jonah Goldberg in yesterday’s LA Times. If the background is unfamiliar, go find Goldberg’s article, which explains it well. Murphy Brown was played by Charlie McCarthy’s sister…

Goldberg: The wisdom of Dan Quayle

His 1992 speech criticizing ‘Murphy Brown’ stirred controversy, but he was right about the importance of marriage in raising children.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg-murphy-brown-families-20130326,0,4906956.column

Quayle mentioned "Murphy Brown" once. "Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong, and we must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice. I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but … it’s time to make the discussion public."

Quayle succeeded in launching a public discussion. His side lost. Feminists, Hollywood big mouths and the usual suspects went ballistic. "Murphy Brown’s" producers made the execrable decision to write a show in which Quayle had attacked the "real" Murphy Brown, not a fictional character. In full martyr mode, the make-believe Murphy Brown said, "Perhaps it’s time for the vice president to expand his definition and recognize that, whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes."

There were some who spoke up for Dan Quayle, who had gone in one day from being “the respected junior Senator from Indiana” to an idiot who couldn’t find his feet with both hands in the instant that he was chosen as the Vice Presidential candidate by George H W Bush. I had not known Mr. Quayle but as VP he was Chairman of the National Space Council, which had some power in those days, and when General Graham, Max Hunter, and I went to Washington to present our SSX concept, he asked intelligent questions and when informed by some of his advisors that what we proposed was impossible, commissioned the RAND corporation to do a restudy of the concept: they concluded that it was possible and through Quayle’s influence the Air Force began the DC/X project. I never heard Quayle say anything stupid. He was a lawyer, not an engineer, so he relied on technical advisors, but in my judgment he chose competent advisors.

In any event he was excoriated for his statements about unmarried mothers.

Quayle, of course, never said that families don’t come in all shapes and sizes. What he said was that children raised by married, responsible parents do better than those who aren’t. And that’s where Whitehead came in. Marshaling the still-gelling social science at the time, she put numbers behind Quayle’s assertions.

Back then, Whitehead’s essay was heretical. Today, it’s conventional wisdom. Last year, Isabel Sawhill, a widely respected liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, wrote an op-ed article for the Washington Post titled "20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms."

Sawhill noted that kids raised by married parents — not just parents living together, never mind single mothers — simply do better. They do better academically and are less likely to get arrested, get pregnant or commit suicide. They’re also much less likely to be poor or stay poor.

None of these claims are particularly controversial among social scientists. And none of this is particularly aimed at gay marriage, pretty much the only kind of marriage liberal elites want to celebrate now.

But where Quayle was wrong — though only partially — was putting the blame on Hollywood.

The black family was falling apart decades before "Murphy Brown." And since then, the white family has been breaking down even as the majority of Hollywood fare continues to romanticize traditional marriage or does an adequate job of showing how hard single motherhood is.

I don’t know why marriage for all but the well-off and well educated continues to disintegrate; maybe it would help if elites "preached what they practiced, " to borrow a phrase from Charles Murray. Forbes writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes that being married correlates about as positively with a person’s wages as going to college does. But experts hammer the importance of college while ignoring marriage.

Maybe after the debate over gay marriage settles down, elites could focus on the far more pressing marriage crisis unfolding before their eyes.

It is difficult to know what the value of laws protecting marriage and the family are, or what those laws should be. There is very little scientific evidence, and of course applying science to generate rules is the job of a legislature, not a court.  The Constitution leaves such matters to the states.

Almost 50 years ago, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, the national out-of-wedlock birthrate was 7%. Today it is over 40%. According to the CDC, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for white children was just 2% in the 1960s. Today it is 30%. Among black children, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has skyrocketed from 20% in the 1960s to a heartbreaking 72% today. The Hispanic out-of-wedlock rate, which has been measured for a much shorter period, was below 40% in 1990 and stands at more than 50% as of the 2010 census.

Juan Williams, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323869604578366882484600710.html

The times they are a-changing. 

The black family was falling apart decades before “Murphy Brown.” And since then, the white family has been breaking down even as the majority of Hollywood fare continues to romanticize traditional marriage or does an adequate job of showing how hard single motherhood is.

I don’t know why marriage for all but the well-off and well-educated continues to disintegrate; maybe it would help if elites “preached what they practiced,” to borrow a phrase from Charles Murray. Forbes writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes that being married correlates about as positively with a person’s wages as going to college does. But experts hammer the importance of college while ignoring marriage.

Maybe after the debate over gay marriage settles down, elites could focus on the far more pressing marriage crisis unfolding before their eyes.

 

Juan Williams says

Juan Williams: Race and the Gun Debate

The No. 1 cause of death for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34: being murdered with a gun.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323869604578366882484600710.html

Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities. Murders with guns are the No. 1 cause of death for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34. But talking about race in the context of guns would also mean taking on a subject that can’t be addressed by passing a law: the family-breakdown issues that lead too many minority children to find social status and power in guns.

The statistics are staggering. In 2009, for example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 54% of all murders committed, overwhelmingly with guns, are murders of black people. Black people are about 13% of the population.

The Justice Department reports that between 1980 and 2008, "blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and seven times more likely than whites to commit homicide."

. . .

This awful reality explains why support for gun control in the black and Hispanic community is overwhelming (71% among blacks and 78% of Hispanics, according to a recent Pew poll). That is a marked contrast with national polls on new gun laws. Those polls show 46% of Americans of all races backing the right to own guns versus 50% who agree to the need for more limits on gun owners. Apparently, the heart of opposition to new gun regulations is in the white community. Yet white people face far less daily violence with guns.

Of course the usual remedy proposed is to disarm everyone.

Bureaus are eternal, and bureaucrats make them hard to kill.

Raisins in the Sun

The Supreme Court is skeptical about federal farm ‘takings.’

[Editorial; no byline.]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324077704578358331242863520.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Taxpayers are wary of government programs that confiscate private property—witness outrage over the 2005 Supreme Court Kelo decision that let government take homes via eminent domain for private use. Now the High Court is considering another program that orders citizens to surrender their assets—or else.

U.S. raisin farmers have been required for nearly 80 years to turn over a share of their crops to the federal government every year, often at below-market prices. Last week the Supreme Court heard oral argument on whether, in the words of Justice Elena Kagan, this annual raisin heist is "a taking, or just the world’s most outdated law."

Horne v. USDA turns on a Great Depression "price stabilization" program that established a Raisin Administrative Committee to control raisin supply. The committee acts as a cartel, setting raisin prices and recommending through "marketing orders" how many tons of raisins must be sold to the feds at a steep discount. The Department of Agriculture enforces the orders.

Raisin growers have to give a certain amount of their product to the Committee which is staffed by civil servants who would lose their jobs if this needless activity were to cease. Those who don’t cooperate are fined heavily and then put out of business. Some growers have sued, and the case is making its way through the courts, at great expense to the growers and of course to the benefit of the government lawyers and the court facilities employed in keeping this going.

For small businesses, these routine confiscations are a special burden because so few can afford to defend their property rights. Similar federal marketing orders cover produce including apricots, avocados, kiwis and olives. The effect is to impose a tax on farmers.

As Justice Antonin Scalia put it, so it’s "your raisins or your life, right? . . . you don’t have to pay the penalty if you give us the raisins." No, Mr. Palmore explained. "They have to give the raisins . . . It’s not a choice." Which is why the Justices should find these takings to be unconstitutional.

If President Obama needs to cut some government programs in order to keep the Parks and the White House and Air Traffic Control towers open, I think the nation might be able to do without the entire Raisin Administrative Committee and all its employees and lawyers and their clerks. In fact I suspect they never would be missed.