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"The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration. . .Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against the stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. "
- Anna Comnena (1083-1153), The Alexiad
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
- Francis Bacon, 1592
Friday, April 9, 2004
Kerry More Warlike Than Bush?
Here's a counter-intuitive argument if there ever was one. I don't buy it myself, but check it out. Some of it's pretty dubious. This is the heart of the argument and the one that's most solidly based:
John Kerry has tried to give off a reassuringly multilateralist aura, and he says Bush has alienated America’s allies. This may be why some people believe him to be less of a warmonger. But they are wrong. First, Bush is himself avowedly multilateralist: the Bush White House seldom misses an opportunity to emphasise his faith in multilateral institutions and international alliances, to boast of how many countries there are in the coalition against terror, or to claim that the Iraq war was necessary to save the credibility of the United Nations. Second, Kerry himself vigorously rejects the idea that US military action can be subject to a UN veto. In December, Kerry attacked his then contender, Howard Dean, on this very issue, and in February he said, ‘As president, I will not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake.’ Even Kerry’s commitment to ‘a bold, progressive internationalism’ is in fact identical to George Bush’s repeated commitments to ‘keep open the path of progress’ in the ‘global democratic revolution’, and to provide ‘leadership’ in the ‘defence of freedom’. Both Bush and Kerry genuflect to the memory of the same Democratic presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.
Kerry is actually more hawkish than Bush about the threat from Islam in general, and about Saudi Arabia in particular. Both of these are favourite neoconservative themes. While Bush has often emphasised that America has no quarrel with Islam, Kerry happily speaks about the specific danger to the USA from the Islamic world, using language which is not substantially different from that in the latest neo-con manifesto, An End to Evil by Richard Perle and David Frum. Kerry explicitly lists certain populations as representing a special danger to America — Saudi Arabians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Indonesians and Pakistanis — and he reproaches George Bush’s own grandiose plan to ‘democratise’ the entire Middle East not for its overweening ambition, but instead for its timidity. Kerry has attacked the Bush administration for adopting a ‘kid gloves’ approach to the Saudi kingdom, which he has repeatedly accused of complicity in the funding of Islamic extremism and terror, and he has said the Saudi interior minister is guilty of ‘hate speech’ and of promoting ‘wild anti-Semitic conspiracy theories’. This recalls Frum and Perle’s surprising classification of Saudi Arabia as ‘an unfriendly power’.
I said this was the section that is most solidly based in Kerry's statements, but here I will say "solid" is relative. Sponge-solid vs. liquid form. What Kerry says that the author doesn't reference is at least as important and, as with almost all of Kerry's policy statements, the half not mentioned here negates what is mentioned in The Spectator piece.
That's because Kerry doesn't want to be caught taking a firm position if he can at all help it. One must instead look at his past career in politics, and one finds a Senator who is hard to aptly describe as Hawkish.
When you're done with that article, check out the Steyn article, on Fallujah and the reaction of some at home.
Yes, I am aware of The War Prayer by Mark Twain. When I supported the war, I did so with open eyes, and I'm also aware of this tradition (more). this is what we're fighting against and why we're fighting, and I post this on the eve of Good Friday: Help us, Oh God.
Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.
The daily news decided to go with an interesting headline, "Condi admits U.S. not on 'war footing' before 9/11". It's news that we weren't on a war footing before 9/11?
The implication there is that Bush's Liberal critics were all clamoring for a war footing then, rather than a "peace dividend". But it isn't news that the country was not on a war footing in the '90s or the first several months of the Bush Administration. What is more newsworthy is that half the country, with John Kerry as their standard bearer saying he's uncomfortable with describing it as a war, doesn't think we should be on a war footingnow:
Bush yet again must remind the American people that we are at war not merely in the Sunni Triangle or in the Afghan badlands, but rather globally and for the liberal values of Western civilization.
When half the population must be repeatedly reminded that we're at war, it is a sign of their mindset, not that of Bush's or the rest of us in the other half of the population, who may not have been on a "war footing" before 9/11 but have remained so since. But that doesn't point fingers at Bush, so it's not a Daily News headline. The Sidney Morning Herald's headline is more accurate. I wish that we, as a country not just an administration (either Clinton's or Bush's) had taken terrorism more seriously than we did. But given that we didn't, and that hardly anyone - most specifically not the critics of the Bush Administration - was clamoring for us to do so, we got what we got. But this doesn't play to the "Bush Knew!" crowd, which is also the anti-war crowd that doesn't believe in fighting a war now, and right now the political strategy of the Democrats is to keep that electorate whipped up on their behalf by simultaneously faulting Bush for not being on a war footing pre-9/11 and for being on a war footing now.
That's the magician's gift; he creates the illusion that events which happened really didn't happen and those which didn't happen happened.
There's also the Doublethink involved with those who fault Bush for not being on a "war footing" prior to 9/11 but also for being on a war footing now rather than returning to the '90s methods and mindset. Somehow it is always Bush's credibility and never theirs which is on the line, no matter what the facts are.
But before I put everyone in the same boat, there is at least "the other Kerrey", Bob Kerrey who, while not right across the board, is my idea of what a decent, serious Democratic presidential candidate might have looked like. So of course he stood no chance and never even ran. This Kerrey writes, in rebutting Clarke, that:
Mr. Clarke's most startling statement was that there have been more terrorist attacks against the United States in the 30 months since 9/11 than in the 30 months prior to the attack. You could almost hear a clap of thunder when he went on to say that this happened because we substantially reduced our efforts in Afghanistan and went to war in Iraq, causing a loss of momentum in the war against al Qaeda.
That's his argument. I think he's wrong, but I don't think he is being duplicitous. He is wrong because most if not all of the terrorism since 9/11 has occurred because al Qaeda and other radical Islamists have an even dimmer view of a free and independent Iraq than they do a free and independent United States. A democracy in Iraq that embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the plebiscite is a greater sacrilege than anything we are doing here at home.
Which is certainly accurate and I'm glad that at least some Democrats are able to say so. Kerrey's not trying to appeal to the Democratic base anymore, though, so that gives him more freedom to be candid.
Tom Friedman, another Liberal who I sometimes agree with and who also doesn't have to keep the Democratic electorate happy asks a pointed question for all of us who supported the war. He asks are there any Iraqis in Iraq? Well, based on past polling of the population, there are. A majority of Iraqis see themselves as just that, and want to keep Iraq together. The problem is the peaceful often get outweighed by the violent rejectionists. There is likewise another problem: sure, there are Iraqis, but they have different ideas of what Iraq should be. The real question isn't whether there are Iraqis or not, but whether they will be able to resolve their differences through peaceful, democratic politics or not. Friedman is accurate about the difficulties:
In fairness to Iraqis, though, asking the silent majority there to stand up right now is asking a lot. After decades of Saddam's brutal rule, civil society there was just beginning to come back, and the first threads of trust between the different communities were just beginning to be tied. The whole purpose of the U.S. occupation was to build a constitutional framework in which this center could be developed.
This was always a long shot. But, I believe, after 9/11, trying to build a decent state in the heart of a drifting Arab-Muslim world — a world that is manufacturing millions of frustrated, unemployed youths — was worth trying.
As for his remarks about whether Bush has provided enough resources and legitimacy, that's another question. I believe we should be spending more, but I'll note that the Liberal objections last year to the budget for operations in Iraq were, in general, that it was too big, not too small. This is again part of the magic of those who can on the one hand decry the insufficiency of forces there and on the other hand object to the cost and demure in funding it.
As for legitimacy, if he means what they usually do, that we need the UN and the Iraqis will feel happier with that flag flying, see my previous post. Stanley Crouch is also on this kick. His collumn starts off rather well, but goes downhill. When he gets to his main point, it's fantasy ungrounded in reality:
One could say that we should have finished off things in Afghanistan and kept together the alliance we had against the Taliban - which included Russia, China, Europe, Pakistan and India. Ultimately, that is the alliance that will win the war against jihad. . .
Following terrorist Abu Nidal, these soldiers of jihad hope that secular governments will indiscriminately come down on enough Muslims to provoke the Islamic world to fight an international conflict, which it would surely lose. (Imagine what a truly riled up China could do by itself!) Our job is to win and to reestablish a worldwide alliance against a worldwide threat. It will be hard to do, but it has already been done. The war in Afghanistan is our model.
Ok, pop quiz people: where was Abu Nidal living when he met his maker? The answer of course, is Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.
Another pop quiz: how many resources have China or Russia or India committed to Afghanistan? How many troops? How many Chinese or Russian troops would be welcomed in Afghanistan by the "good guys" there? China and especially Russia were grudging in accepting that we would move on the Taliban, rather than supportive or allied with us in doing so. All in all since the toppling of the Taliban, the "international community" devoted barely 5,000 troops to security in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq has not changed that one way or another (though Spain is now offering to double their commitment, to all of 250 troops. Less than a quarter what they have in Iraq).
People talk about sham coalitions, but it is the "international alliance" that operates in Afghanistan that is more superficial than substantive. The fact is that before Iraq, none of the allies that people claim we alienated were building up for a strong fight against terrorism. If anything, their commitment has since grown - slightly - rather than being alienated and taking their marbles and going home. But the amount involved is, in either case, small and will remain so. I might imagine what a "truly riled up China" might do, but it's unlikely to be directed against Wahhabi terror while China is trying to sway the House of Saud into alliance with them against us. Far more likely that a "truly riled up China" will flex its muscles, with the French fleet by their side, against Taiwan.
Lets also not forget that when it came to Afghanistan this alliance, and the domestic Left, faulted our war there, too. I'm aware that in what I wrote, above, the Left is likely to respond "well, we're just against Bush's Iraq war, not a war-footing against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Everyone was for that." But that is revisionism, an attempt to slip their past criticisms down the memory hole. They faulted Bush for going to war when he did, called Afghanistan a quagmire, faulted us for bombing during Ramadan, claimed massive civilian casualties were not only a likely result but an intended one, and generally complained the whole time and nitpicked at every opportunity. For partisan political reasons they all want that to be forgotten now, but I won't forget and neither should you.
Update: Greg at Begging to Differ has some thoughts on today's Q&A.
On the one hand, there is the WSJ editorial on the UN as Saddam's financers, asserting that the UN needs pressure from the U.S. to clean up the mess there and solve the corruption problem.
On the other hand, naturally, is the NYT editorial, looking at the same problems but asserting that it is Iraq and the U.S. which need the UN. Lets start with this unsupported and unsupportable assertion by the Times editorial board:
Reports of significant casualties on both sides in the pitched battle in the city of Ramadi were a grim and powerful reminder of how badly the United States needs a strong, credible and engaged United Nations.
Such assertions are often made, but without any supporting argument. One can look at the situation in Kosovo (again) or Afghanistan, where the UN is fully involved but the situations hardly problem-free. What does the UN have that would help secure Ramadi or Fallujah?
The Times editors do not say. They really can't, because assertions that the UN's presence would help are usually based on assumptions that respect for it provides legitimacy to efforts conducted under its flag. But in Iraq, the main body of the editorial might cause one to wonder whether there would be any such respect or legitimization:
One is a kickback scandal of multibillion-dollar proportions swirling around the U.N.-run oil-for-food program that kept ordinary Iraqis from starving during the long years of punishing economic sanctions.
In the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, that is the UN. It was an instrument for enriching and empowering their Ba'athist oppressors at their expense. This is why ordinary Iraqis express little if any interest in a significant UN role in their country. Indeed, the presence of the UN may just cause them to be more suspicious, as the same people who worked hand in glove in corrupt deals with Saddam came in to work for their interests, again at the expense of Iraq's.
On the corruption at the heart of the UN's bureaucratic apparatus, which the Times editorial attempts to lay at the feet solely of the Security Council, the editorials make a good contrast. Certainly, some of the members of the Security Council - France and Russia in particular - were knee deep in the corruption. But they did so not with the opposition of the UN's bureaucracy, but in partnership with it. The UN itself is complicit, and the WSJ's editorial backs up their remarks with factual examples in a timeline.
"It was my experience that while people oppose all precautions in time of peace, the very same people turn round within a fortnight of war and are furious about every shortcoming. I hope it will not be yours."
- Winston Churchill
Condi Rice is testifying before the 9/11 Commission today. The Commission and its most vocal advocates are a perfect embodiment of the attitude that Winston Churchill was talking about. This makes it the perfect day to highlight this excellent article in Commentary. It is the nature of investigations that they focus on Executive-branch agencies, and tend to ignore the role of Congress or the Courts. This is natural in how the investigations are set up - with Congress always taking the lead - and also because it is easier to "personalize" the story. Congress is a vague institution of 535 members at any one time, not counting past members who may have had their hand in things. Investigations like to focus on a few key officials, invariably executive officials. This tendency is enhanced (exacerbated?) by the way the media report on investigations. In this, the bias is not so much partisan, but storyline-driven. Hundreds may have testified before the Commission, including a good number from Congress. But news reports focus on a few key actors, and invariably from the Executive Branch where responsibilities are relatively clear-cut compared with establishing "blame for what came out of a Congressional Committee or the results of Senate legislation. The Commentary article puts the problem we face this way:
[A] shift of national-security functions, prominently including intelligence-gathering, from the ambit of broad executive discretion to the area where executive action is regulated by Congress and the federal courts. Compared with the "intelligence failures" decried by journalists and politicians today, this shift engendered a continuing calamity.
The article also argues that inter-agency rivalry may not be a bad thing:
[M]ost misunderstood, rivalry—overall—is a virtue. In the government’s vast monopoly, it is essential. Naturally, the seamy side of competition being a perennial best-seller, the public record is replete with hair-raising anecdotes of sharp-elbowed investigators pursuing the same quarry to the benefit of criminals, enemies, and traitors. On a macro level, however, the throat-cutting is statistically insignificant. As a rule, competition impels agents to test their premises and press for better information; it results in the generation of more leads and the collection and refinement of more intelligence. In a world where the Supreme Court cannot decide a case without amicus briefs from innumerable interested observers, where Congress declines to pass legislation without the input of scores of experts, do we really want the President, in matters of national security, reduced to a single stream of intelligence-collection and analysis?
This is a worthy consideration, especially given all the harrumphing and hysteria over Rumsfeld's creation of a "Team B" to look at intelligence and provide him with a second opinion. But there are pitfalls in this as well, including the possibility that different offices can give decision-makers the same analysis and be seen as confirming intelligence, when it is quite possible they are simply reflecting what was gathered from the same source, a problem noted here with respect to international intelligence cooperation.
The point isn't that such methods are useless. The point is that there is no perfect situation and redundancy in intelligence efforts (multiple agencies gathering it) is not problem free. It is arguably better than depending upon a single agency with its institutional blind-spots and axes to grind (all institutions have some). One of the things that needs to be learned is that perfection, while a worthy goal, is unattainable and their will be failures in the future. We can do what we can to make them as rare as possible, but people, especially in the political branches, need to be careful not to characterize every failure as deliberately deceptive, a distortion, an effort to mislead, or a lie.
I'm somewhat loathe to use really long quotes, but these two paragraphs concisely summarize the difference between domestic law enforcement and national security, and thus the conflicting ends in dealing with terrorist organizations:
In the constitutional license given to executive action, a gaping chasm exists between the realms of law enforcement and national security. In law enforcement, as former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr explained in congressional testimony last October, government seeks to discipline an errant member of the body politic who has allegedly violated its rules. That member, who may be a citizen, an immigrant with lawful status, or even, in certain situations, an illegal alien, is vested with rights and protections under the U.S. Constitution. Courts are imposed as a bulwark against suspect executive action; presumptions exist in favor of privacy and innocence; and defendants and other subjects of investigation enjoy the assistance of counsel, whose basic job is to thwart government efforts to obtain information. The line drawn here is that it is preferable for the government to fail than for an innocent person to be wrongly convicted or otherwise deprived of his rights.
Not so the realm of national security, where government confronts a host of sovereign states and sub-national entities (particularly terrorist organizations) claiming the right to use force. Here the executive is not enforcing American law against a suspected criminal but exercising national-defense powers to protect against external threats. Foreign hostile operatives acting from without and within are not vested with rights under the American Constitution. The galvanizing national concern in this realm is to defeat the enemy, and as Barr puts it, "preserve the very foundation of all our civil liberties." The line drawn here is that government cannot be permitted to fail.
(Emphasis added at the end of each paragraph).
I would say that we're still grappling with finding the right balance in the war. It's easy to find fault but harder for reasonable people, that is people who don't handwave away relevant concerns that are at odds with one of the "lines", to find a completely satisfactory solution. It is easy to assert a solution by ignoring, minimizing, or dismissing security concerns or civil liberty concerns, but much more difficult to reconcile both. Congress, because its concerns are primarily domestic, has particular problems in doing so:
But cataclysmic changes were ahead, and their harbinger was President Jimmy Carter’s acquiescence in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Here, for the first time, Congress and the courts undertook to regulate the gathering of national intelligence, particularly by electronic eavesdropping, against agents of hostile foreign powers. . .
The impact on intelligence collection was serious. Previously, it would have been laughable to suggest that foreign enemy operatives had a right to conduct their perfidies in privacy—the Fourth Amendment prohibits only "unreasonable" searches, and there is nothing unreasonable about searching or recording people who threaten national security.
The law as written was not excessively onerous, but the interpretations the courts put on it further hamstrung intelligence gathering:
But reality is rarely an obstacle for those who see life as an ongoing law-school seminar. Gradually, courts rewrote FISA, grafting onto it a so-called "primary purpose" test requiring the government to establish not only probable cause that it was targeting operatives of a foreign power but also that its real reason for seeking surveillance was counterintelligence, not criminal prosecution. . .
. . .Often, the result was weeks or more of delay, during which identified terrorists who happened also to be committing quotidian crimes went unmonitored while the government dithered over whether to employ FISA or the criminal wiretap law. The insanity reached its apex in 1995 with the "primary purpose" guidelines drafted by the Clinton administration: henceforth, a firewall would be placed between criminal and national-security agents, generally barring them even from communicating with one another.
This is why we get the failure to communicate between the FBI and the CIA. But when the 9/11 Commission concludes that it could have prevented with a better flow of information within and between Federal agencies, where are the fingers more likely to point? At the Executive Branch? Or Congress and the Judiciary?
Of course there is an obvious question of whether finger pointing in any direction will be helpful. But if the origins of the problem are misidentified because they don't suit political purposes, or for whatever reason, properly addressing it will be that much harder. Congress of course bears responsibility on another front as well:
First, desperate to cut spending wherever politically palatable, the federal government declared a "peace dividend." This was a fantasy. Although the fall of Soviet tyranny was an enormous blessing, it also presaged a more challenging international environment, filled with threats diffuse, unconventional, and less predictable. Nevertheless, at the urging of many of the same elected officials now complaining about failure, including Senator John F. Kerry, intelligence spending was repeatedly slashed.
Which reminded me of the Churchill quote I used at the start of this post. But of course it has been our experience, and that quote very accurately describes John Kerry and the Democratic Party in general, as well as our current political debate.
There's a lot more in the Commentary article, check it out if you haven't already.
Democrats, in particular John Kerry, fault Bush for failing to listen to "our allies" and for alienating "our allies". By "our allies", they really mean France. They certainly don't mean Britain.
Well it's interesting that Democrats would want us to be more accomodating to French foreign policy and consult with them. The results would be something like this:
But the killing continued even after the RPF took control of the capital Kigali - thanks to a belated, U.N.-authorized intervention by French troops. One of the most cynical and immoral acts of the 20th century, this French intervention ("Operation Turquoise") was actually on behalf of the Hutu murderers in the "Interhamwe" militia and the (French trained and equipped) Rwandan army.
The French troops created a "safe area" where the old Hutu government retained control - and there the slaughter of Tutsis continued under the noses of the so-called peacekeepers until July.
I agree entirely with this observation:
Which makes it all the more sickening that the American Left and much of European opinion now hold France up as the bulwark of international law, multilateralism and morality in international politics.
Well, now is either a time for recriminations and saying "we shoulda done X Y and Z, and this wouldn't have happened". The usual chorus is claiming that if only we had involved the "international community" that Bush alienated for no good reason - 'cause they were just waiting to be asked nicely before supporting us, and petulantly won't help now because we just weren't nice enough to them (there can be no other reason, such as their own interests differing from ours, and their positions and statements played no role, naturally) - things like this couldn't happen.
Which ignores Kosovo (more here), where things have been handled the way they're asserting Iraq should be. It also ignores Afghanistan - where they make similar complaints and demand we put more troops and resources in, neatly side-stepping the fact that Afghanistan is internationalized but the amount of help the "international community" has provided is actually less than the coalition members have sent to Iraq. The point is that this model is not necessarily the solution to all problems, as they continually imply. But for these people, politics start at the water's edge, so the accuracy of their complaints is irrelevant to their propaganda impact. Their goal is not so much to improve our efforts in Iraq, but destroy their political opponents at home by means of politicizing the war. That's what makes it so tiresome - their purpose is so obviously not benign, which would be one thing. I am willing to be convinced that someone other than Bush could handle Iraq and the war overall better, but not by these methods. Such methods are not a serious attempt to propose an alternative, better strategy of achieving victory in the war. They are serious only in an effort to achieve political advantage and victory at home. It is certainly appropriate in a Democracy for the opposition party to seek office - but how they do so is something voters should take into consideration. Showing that they could do better by seriously engaging the real problems and proposing realistic policy alternatives would be a sign that they were ready for office. The demagogy they prefer to engage in instead for cheap political advantage should only be scoffed at.
But what about the fighting there now? Just because the critics are generally ninny, does that mean there are no problems? No. Perhaps we should have moved into Falluja in force sooner. Perhaps we should have found a way to deal with Sadr and his following sooner. But that might have created problems of its own. They have initiated things, and thus perhaps given us the excuse or reason (pick your word) to deal with them. Had we initiated the fighting, it may have simply inflamed opposition, with us being accused of killing "peaceful dissidents". There is no perfect choice in this world, only imperfect options and I cannot say, from here in the States, what would have been better.
The Chinese character for "crisis" is also the same as for "opportunity" Austin Bay is surely right on this score. This is a chance to deal with those elements who will not engage in peaceful politics in a democratic Iraq. Ralph Peters is arguably right as well, that the efforts to patiently persuade them have come to naught. But we did try that, and it was the other side who resorted to force first. Well, again in my best Strouther Martin voice, they wants it, they gets it.
What to say about his remarks that haven't already been said? "Who's politicizing the war?" is my basic reaction, but that's always been true. See the long post from yesterday on Kerry's Band of Brothers for how this works.
Many folks are picking on Democrat Senator Chris Dodd's remarks on Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, former KKK member, that he would have been "right during the Civil War" and comparing them to the Lott comments. Of course, Dodd can say that the Byrd of today would have chosen the right side during the Civil War.
Just last year, though, Byrd had an opportunity to make a choice. The Senator representing the Union state of West Virginia chose to suit up for the Confederacy. We have pictures. Here's another picture of General Cartman Byrd:
As for Chris Dodd, he's got problems on multiple levels and his statements about Byrd don't top my list of reasons why he's a bad Senator.
Some folks might scan my ads now that I have 'em. Please do. You might notice a new one today. No, I haven't changed my position on that issue but I know a number of my readers disagree with me. Make up your own mind and support your beliefs as you desire.
Over the weekend I had a shortish debate via e-mail with George Kysor on the subject of outsourcing. First he asked well, what would happen if American companies decided to move all their jobs overseas, huh? I replied that I found that an implausible reducto ad absurdum argument and thus not really worth pondering, but, ok, what if that happened but then foreign companies decided to move all their jobs here?
He replied to that mail and the exchanges got a bit more substantive and so are worth posting here. His first reply was:
I'm sorry, if you want "a more plausible economic argument," then you'll have to look elsewhere because I'm certainly not an economist. Here's a few examples of what I've observed - rather than how I interpret economic statistics - (1) at first, most all computer programs used in the USA were written by American programmers, then, as as competition increased between program suppliers, programming is now increasingly being outsourced; (2) at first all computers and component parts (such as drives, mother boards, etc.) were produced in the USA, but as competition increased more and more were made outside the USA and now, at best, only assembled in the USA; (3) at first all TV sets (together with the chassis, tuner, tubes & CRT) were made in the USA (my first TV was a 16," B&W, and cost $300) but now all the USA TV manufacturers have gone under and every TV is now produced outside the USA; (4) 70, 60, and even 50 years ago almost all manufactured consumer goods of all types were produced in the USA, but now, however, I'd be hard pressed to find anything that wasn't manufactured in the USA. Therefore it is my contention that a zillion jobs have evaporated in the USA during the last 50 years and, furthermore, the workers now involved in producing all those manufactured consumer goods live outside the USA. See the rest of my argument at The Leveling.
The problem with Kysor's analysis is that it sees only half the picture - in a dynamic economy, jobs are being eliminated all the time, but also new jobs are being created - and at a higher rate - all the time. Likewise, American companies may employ people overseas, but so to do foreign companies employ Americans, and "outsource" jobs from their countries to ours. Would America be better off if no one "outsourced"? No, it would be worse off. He replied:
Yes, Porphyrogenitus, I am looking at only one sector of the economy: manufactured consumer goods. This is the sector that I consider to be one of the primary economic-engines, if you will, for the creation of wealth. By taking raw material and fashioning it to produce something useful/needed/wanted for others is to create wealth. Without that wealth-generating sector in the USA, it is only a matter of time before the economic leveling.
You're not even looking at one sector of the economy, you're looking at only one half of a single aspect of that economy. If you actually look at the American manufacturing sector, it has grown, not shrunk, recently. Go ahead and look at the economic reports. Job losses in the manufacturing sector have *not* been primarily due to outsourcing, but due to surging productivity over the last several years. If you're implying that America is deindustrializing, I've been hearing such claims all my life and once believed them myself, but the truth is as I said: manufacturing, as a % of GDP, remains ~the same now as it was 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and more. Again, factual knowledge rather than manufactured hysteria is important here.
The problem with politicians who get people to focus on outsourcing is that they whip the economically ignorant into a frenzy, and make people rush to inaccurate conclusions such as the one in your latest mail.
That was the end of the e-mail exchanges so far. On Sunday he sent me a mail with a large file attachment, presumably on Outsourcing, but my policy - my adamant policy - is to not accept file attachments from folks I don't know very well (thus no need for someone to write in and say "well, it's really ok", 'cause I aint downloading it. Btw, links to articles are fine. I don't like links pdfs as much, they're clunky).
Here's an extended response though, that goes beyond the e-mails. People have been saying we're deindustrializing for as long as I've been alive, but it hasn't happened. I used to have the same concerns/fears that George expresses. I don't think it's unacceptable to have such concerns, but it's best to keep your eye on empirical reality and test them against it. A lot of things sound plausible but aren't born out in reality. Colbertism/Mercantilism and French economics generally sounds plausible, but doesn't work well in reality. Similarly, one can be concerned about the loss of this that or the other manufacturing sector - but in reality manufacturing remains about the same proportion of our economy as it has for the last quarter century. We used to make things that we no longer do, but we always move on to making higher value-added goods.
The problem isn't other countries grabbing our jobs, it's that we move up the technological scale. Likewise, one can say that yes, for at least the past quarter century manufacturing has been roughly the same proportion of the American economy, but before then manufacturing was a higher proportion. But likewise, a majority of Americans were once employed in the agricultural sector. I know that, my family (the Ruhlands, Becks, and Zimmermans) are were Wisconsin Dairy farmers. Indeed, some of my distant relatives still are. But not most of those in my mother's generation, and hardly any in my generation. I bring this up because, as America switched to a manufacturing economy from an agricultural one, people also engaged in a lot of worry about how it would be the doom of us.
Manufacturing is not the job-growth sector of the American economy, though it is a job-growth sector of less advanced economies. The reason isn't de-industrialization, but productivity growth in American manufacturing (less workers needed to produce the same result, the same as with agriculture) and the development of new economic sectors: the information economy, for one. This is a good segue to George's article, The Leveling, which begins as follows:
My belief that a world-wide free market will cause leveling of wages and prices is, as far as I know, not shared by any other libertarian.
Similar concerns were expressed in the past. I remember being a big Prestowitz fan in the late '80s to early '90s, and was big on Reich and Kuttner (and pre-NYT ranter Krugman), and Lester Thurow. A lot of people said, during the '80s and '90s, that we would have a race-to-the-bottom in wages.
Didn't happen. Americans are more prosperous than before. Personal income has risen. Some point to household incomes being stagnant or declining, but the reason for that is smaller household sizes, not declining incomes. Now, there might be a global leveling, but the way it will happen will be incomes in other countries growing and catching up as they develop and productivity improves - not immiseration in the U.S.
Again, we can test that against empirical reality and that's what we see happening - except in economies that make too much of a fetish out of retaining jobs in declining industries and preventing economic turnover, the "creative destruction" that results in greater prosperity. If one looks at continental Europe or even at Japan, this is the cause of much of the problems they have - and economic growth has been slower than in the U.S. as a result.
I recommend past posts I have made related to this subject. Don't forget to check out the links included in them:
Finally, don't forget my analysis of Noam Scheiber's TNR article where he admitted all this stuff about outsourcing &tc was bovine fecal matter but fine for Kerry (and others) to engage in as long as it conned the electorate into voting Bush out and Kerry in.
Ok, here's an article I wrote and submitted to Enter Stage Right, but they seem to have disapeared all the sudden - donno what it is (server meltdown? Just vanished after years of existence? Who knows. If you do, let me know). So I'll post it here directly:
John Kerry talks about his band of brothers who fought by his side thirty years ago and have returned to fight with him today. He is most openly referring to the men who fought by his side in Vietnam. But John Kerry has another band of brothers who served with him in the ‘70s, in a cause he remains proud of. But do John Kerry’s anti-war activities in the ‘70s have to do with his candidacy today? Quite a few attempts have been made to spotlight his anti-war record. These include symbolically linking him to Jane Fonda in photographs, including a reprehensible instance of a doctored photograph. Others have gone over the congressional testimony he gave that was based on the fabricated “Winter Soldier” materiel and his other activities as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But the average voter can be forgiven for asking what all this stuff from thirty years ago has to do with the present and future of this country.
As the Party slogan goes in George Orwell’s in Nineteen Eighty-Four, who controls the present controls the past: who controls the past controls the future. In the ‘70s John Kerry was an activist in the New Left, and as such he and those he served with in “The Movement” absorbed the ideology of the New Left. This ideology was influenced by precisely the brand of intellectuals Orwell was pointedly satirizing in Nineteen Eighty-Four. They are now using the tools of the New Left’s cultural analysis in the current political campaign. Kerry’s activities then are instructive now because he was not alone. His ideological “Band of Brothers” are with him now, rallying behind him to fight political war against what Howard Dean reminded us all was “the real enemy here”. In case you were confused, that enemy is George Bush and the Right, not Osama bin Laden.
Kerry’s generation’s Long March Through the Institutions has proceeded to the point where they have risen through the ranks of the country’s institutions in the natural progress of things. Just as Kerry has become the standard bearer of the Democratic Party, others have reached the age and status where they hold the positions of authority in political institutions, interest groups, academic institutions, and media organizations. They are thus in a position to apply their authority in ways that try to shape the terms of political discourse.
The ideas of philosophers like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Antonio Gramsci were influential among the New Left, disillusioned as they were with orthodox Marxism. After the revolution failed to materialize, these philosophers helped answer not only the question of why, but more importantly how to carry on the struggle. They overturned Marx – the cultural rather than economic base of society was its determining factor, the instrument of control. From Marcuse came the idea of “Liberation Tolerance” – that is, tolerance of the views of the Left, intolerance towards the views of the right. This he counterpoised against “repressive tolerance”, what we would call free speech, speech that allowed criticism of the Left. From Gramsci came the idea of “hegemonic discourse” and the idea that the Left could triumph not through revolution, but through a “long march through the institutions” of society, gaining control and using them for progressive ends. They don’t believe objectivity is possible and they believe fairness means partiality to progressive ideals and opposition to those that oppose them, rather than fairness as evenhandedness. Though many who were radical activists in the ‘70s have since lost their revolutionary zeal these concepts remain part of their mindset and influence how they behave today.
Look at the Kerry campaign and Democrats generally and how they respond when disagreement with them and criticism towards them is expressed. They are quick to assert that the speech of their opponents amounts to attempts to stifle their dissent. Kerry can give the most vitriolic speeches imaginable, filled with bile and venom directed at his opponents, while simultaneously asserting that any unflattering reference to his record is a personal attack conducted by the most crooked liars he’s ever seen.
In this, he is being backed by much of the mainstream media, which is also aligning with the Democrat’s efforts to impose a “hegemonic discourse” on political discussion. This is aimed at determining not only what is discussed, but how it is discussed, and shape the boundaries of permissible debate. Anything outside those boundaries is declared to be “divisive”, a word aimed at discrediting views that disagree with theirs without having to make arguments on the merits. It is simply aimed at closing debate by rendering it illegitimate. Note that this term, and similar ones (like “wedge issue”) are never employed to describe the political tactics of Democrats, they are invoked exclusively against conservative arguments and Republican positions. Likewise, Democratic policies, no matter how controversial they may be, are described as inclusive. They are selectively employed in a manner Marcuse would have approved of. Liberals cannot by definition be divisive because everyone is supposed to accept what they say unquestioningly. So when the Right highlights the contradictions of Kerry’s record, or the contradictions in the statements of Richard Clarke, for example, that is described as an attempt to destroy people - read, out of bounds of acceptable civic discourse. Kerry can talk about his Vietnam-era experiences, and he and his proxies can smear Bush’s without it being described as the politics of personal destruction, but any critical reference to Kerry’s record is called a personal attack. Kerry can talk about his opposition to “Reagan’s illegal war” in the ‘80s, but Kerry’s record in the ‘80s is declared off limits. Kerry and other Democrats can make any insinuation about how Bush is handling things without ever being accused of “politicizing the war” or “questioning Bush’s patriotism.” We see this played out on other issues as well. Kerry’s lambasting of Bush’s economic policies in the most demagogic ways imaginable are acceptable even to the moderate Liberal writers in the New Republic, such as Noam Scheiber, who admitted that he doesn’t mind Kerry using such tactics as long as Kerry doesn’t believe what he’s s saying. They actually consider it more acceptable for him to be insincere and deceptive in his methods than really believe what he is saying.
Using all these methods Kerry’s willing accomplices in the media work to determine what issues can be raised, and how they are to be dealt with, and in a way that favors Democrats and makes conservative arguments illegitimate before they are even made. John Maynard Keynes once said that “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” The point here is that it is not necessary to believe that everyone engaging in the activities we see studied the writings of these philosophers. But their ideas were part of the intellectual atmosphere of the era, and were transmitted in a variety of ways. They still are, though few if any still embrace the Marxist goals that Marcuse, Adorno, and Gramsci were trying to see fulfilled. But how they portrayed the world influenced the New Left in its formative years on multiple levels. One does not have to remain wedded to the entire Leftist program to have one’s views of how the world works shaped by the arguments you absorbed in your radical youth. Furthermore, these ideas may not have accurately portrayed the discourse of the liberal democracies they were meant to describe, but the New Left and its heirs believed it did and, more to the point here, these methods became their model to follow now that they are in the position to shape debate.
It is not inaccurate to say that an entire vocabulary and style exists to dictate the language of public debate. Those who use it are not above misrepresenting or distorting facts, but when used properly everything can be factually accurate and both sides presented, but a distorted picture conveyed none the less, framing things to move the audience towards the “correct” Liberal conclusion. This is generated with the selective presentation of information, how it is organized, the selection of quotes, and the selective vocabulary used to describe the parties involved.
The fact that one can point to the growth of alternative media and the decline of the mainstream media does not mean that the effort to control the terms of debate does not exist. It simply means that it is not completely successful, and that there remains resistance to the “hegemonic discourse”. Indeed, the fact that much of the conservative media – publications, talk radio, web magazines, and the like – devote much of their time to responding to and rebutting what is reported highlights, rather than refutes, the degree to which the discussion remains dictated by the “mainstream” institutions. Even the fact that the term “mainstream” is applied to institutions promoting the Liberal vision is an example of this method of pre-determining the terms of debate at work.
That said, it must be noted that there is no grand conspiracy nor is censorship involved in this process. People do not meet in a room and plot out strategy on behalf of Kerry, or coordinate their activities. Nothing is more effective than the cop in your head, as the saying goes. If people are hired who hold certain beliefs, they don’t have to be told what to say, they will police themselves. When the staffs of institutions are predominantly people with similar views, the effect will be pervasive. They won’t have to be directed by a “Vast Left Wing Conspiracy” to duckspeak Democratic talking points, they’ll do so reflexively. This is a natural behavior given that they have absorbed the idea that there is no such thing as objectivity and in many ways it means their influence on civic discourse and politics in this country are harder to combat.
Conservatives have groused about media bias for a long time. But while alternative sources of information have grown, it is impossible to look at the state of mainstream reporting today and not see how it has changed from even ten or twenty years ago. You don’t have to be a conservative or a Republican to see that things have shifted, that reporting has become more actively political. On the March 31st edition of Fox’s O’Reily Factor, Ted Koppel said he has noticed the shift compared to ten or twenty years ago. Their efforts to determine the terms of political debate, what can be discussed and how it can be discussed and by whom, are aimed more than ever at determining the outcome. This is why John Kerry’s radical past, and that of his ideological “Band of Brothers” matters today.
Sorry about the total lack of posting yesterday after having said I'd blog later. The truth is I was too tired after work, mainly 'cause I didn't sleep at all the previous night (no specific reason, just one of those nights, so no need to worry or write letters of concern).
I have a meeting this morning but hope to write some stuff this afternoon, including a debate between myself and a letter writer on outsourcing, and also a Commentary article on Congress' role in creating the intelligence problems we have (link sent by Alene, via e-mail).
Till then, check this out if you want to be even more depressed about the current state of affairs in Iraq.
Also, from Richard Meixner (via e-mail), this post at Oxblog on the current state of things in Sudan. Just when you thought peace might break out, it gets worse.
Finally for now, this piece by David Warren on democratization in the Arab World and the split in opinion among Arab leaders on how to handle pressures for reform.
Former Clinton officials and their supporters continue to claim that he made fighting terrorism a top priority - a claim that is technically true, because in America's first post-modern Presidency, everything was a "top priority" and thus nothing was.
They are attempting to rely on people having bad memories, or malleable ones, as if Clinton and Gore spent the 2000 campaign alerting us to the dangers of terrorism. But the reality is, as usual, at variance with their claims. In the Nov/Dec 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, Sandy Berger wrote an article on a Foreign Policy for the Global Age. The threat of terrorism and how to respond to it is barely mentioned in this lengthy (18 print pages) article.
The Clintonite spin was rebutted here and remains unbelievable and in any case has nothing to do with the question of what we should do going forward. Indeed, it's an effort to derail serious efforts on the terror front so that we can go back to 90s-era somnolence on the issue, where we pretended to take everything seriously but took nothing seriously - except Democratic retention of the White House, the real goal now being the same.
The weekend news from Iraq is pretty bad. It's meant to be. We've known that as the date for the transition of sovereignty approached, those who oppose a democratic Iraq would become more violent in the hope of derailing it. That includes not only the Ba'athists and outside Sunni/Wahhabi terrorists, but elements of the Shi'ite community following the radical al-Sadr (more here).
Some are saying now that we should push back the date of the transfer from June 30th to some other point in time. But that would be to play into the hands of those who oppose a democratic Iraq, who want to be able to tell their followers that we were never sincere in what we said. Some people apparently don't understand that pushing back the date of transfer would likely make things worse, not better. They're making the perfect the enemy of the good and would cede initiative completely to the violent elements in Iraq, who would then be able to rollback any future date simply by initiating more violence in advance of it. We need to demonstrate that they do not control the future of Iraq, the peaceful and democratic elements of Iraq's population do.
