Consolidation Loans

Threats Force Retreat From Wide-Ranging Plans for Iraq (washingtonpost.com)
The attacks have ramped up again after the capture of Saddam and we seem to be responding, politically, in exactly the wrong way. I know the attacks on the troops are not the only issue — getting support from other countries based on a transfer of sovereignty, etc. — and these are the worst reasons to be scaling back plans for the transformation.

If the transfer of sovereignty has to be delayed to meet objectives, then we should do so. It’s unlikely that our troops will be made safer by a quicker handover to a rag-tag government that can’t provide for its own security. We’ll still end up with the responsibility for the security of the country, only in support of a different entity.

The most troubling aspect of the rushed schedule is the delay of a constitution. Once a government is cobbled together and is considered “sovereign” we’ll have even less say in the outcome, which could mean any number of things. The economy could remain socialist and the government could be tyrannical. Considering that we’ll likely get little or nothing from the rest of the world in any case, I see no need to rush to hand over sovereignty.

The United States has backed away from several of its more ambitious initiatives to transform Iraq’s economy, political system and security forces as attacks on U.S. troops have escalated and the timetable for ending the civil occupation has accelerated.

Plans to privatize state-owned businesses — a key part of a larger Bush administration goal to replace the socialist economy of deposed president Saddam Hussein with a free-market system — have been dropped over the past few months. So too has a demand that Iraqis write a constitution before a transfer of sovereignty.

With the administration’s plans tempered by time and threat, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and his deputies are now focused on forging compromises with Iraqi leaders and combating a persistent insurgency in order to meet a July 1 deadline to transfer sovereignty to a provisional government.

“There’s no question that many of the big-picture items have been pushed down the list or erased completely,” said a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq’s reconstruction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Right now, everyone’s attention is focused [on] doing what we need to do to hand over sovereignty by next summer.”

The new approach, U.S. diplomats said, calls into question the prospects for initiatives touted by conservative strategists to fashion Iraq into a secular, pluralistic, market-driven nation. While the diplomats maintain those goals are still attainable, the senior official said, “ideology has become subordinate to the schedule.”

It would be a shame, a real shame, to think we have sacrificed lives and resources only to create an illiberal state.

For more on the casualties look here.

UPDATE: I received a comment from one George Ganza that exceeds 3400 words and is pure crap. I’ve moved it into the extended entry in case anyone is interested in reading it. It takes up too much space on the page and is idiotic as well.

Continue Reading Not Good

Judging from the reviews and IMDb comments, it seems I’m the only person that likes this movie. Paycheck is based on a Philip K. Dick short story — he wrote a ton of them — and is about the futility of being able to see into the future, even if we could.

The movie doesn’t get too wrapped up in the contradictions of seeing the future — if we can see it, and we have the ability to choose, is it really the future? — but focuses instead on the characters and the immediate story-line.

Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman are the main characters. Affleck is an engineer who usually does reverse-engineering of other company’s products and then has his memory erased — yeah, I know, suspension of disbelief — to protect companies against patent infringement and the like. Then he takes an assignment that we later find out is to design a machine that sees into the future.

Knowing his life is in danger as the project is about to wrap, he sends himself an envelope to be opened after his memory is erased and he figures out how to use each piece to protect his life. It’s more interesting than it sounds and John Woo does a good job with the action sequences, as you would expect. He even manages to work in his trademark white doves.

Not a movie to break out the champagne over, but not a bad flick and good for its kind.

8/10

Tough Pill For the Democrats (washingtonpost.com)
George Will is at his sarcastic best in this piece on Duck, M.D. Duck has made so many misstatements it’s a wonder he’s the frontrunner. Some are merely stupid, others are lies.

He actually accused Republicans of wanting to end public education, though even the most open voucher system couldn’t be said to do that because there would still be public funding. The good news is that these statements by Duck are a matter of public record and will be replayed ad nauseum over the next year. The only downside is that he could yet win in spite of his rhetoric.

Arthur Goldberg was a fine public servant — secretary of labor, Supreme Court justice, ambassador to the United Nations — but a dreadful candidate for governor of New York in 1970, when it was said that if he gave one more speech he would lose Canada, too. Howard Dean is becoming Goldbergean.

Regarding foreign policy, Dean recently said not only that America is no safer because Saddam Hussein was captured but that America is “no safer today than the day the planes struck the World Trade Center.” Well. He says he supported the war to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, although he thinks it made us no safer. And even though he says the war in Iraq made us no safer, he says he would “not have hesitated” to attack Iraq if the United Nations had given us “permission.”

Because Dean’s foreign policy pronouncements have been curiouser and curiouser, his recent speech on domestic policy did not get the attention it deserved for its assertion that America is boiling with “anger and despair.” Republicans are, Dean says, trying to “dismantle” the welfare state — presumably when they are not enriching Medicare’s entitlement menu — and they aim “to end public education.”

Dean is why there is both good and bad news for Democrats in Newsweek’s latest presidential poll. The good news is that George W. Bush is in a 46-46 dead heat when matched against an unnamed Democrat. The bad news is that the Democratic nominee will have, among other problematic attributes, a name, probably Dean’s.

The unnamed Democrat syndrome. Problematic indeed.

Foreign Affairs – To Form a Government – Lloyd N. Culter
The media has been flooding the zone with coverage of Reagan and it can get tiresome, even for an admirer of Reagan’s. However, we haven’t had a full blown state funeral for a President since Johnson in 1973 and we aren’t accustomed to it. Nixon opted for a more modest funeral ten years ago and it was probably a wise choice given his controversial place in history. I do think Clinton managed to strike the right note at Nixon’s funeral – at that point any wrongdoing was between him and his maker – and was gracious. Either way, we have three more former Presidents that are getting pretty old and I suspect we’ll be seeing more funerals like this in the coming years. Get ready.

All of the talk about Reagan recently prompted me to look for the article from Foreign Affairs during the Carter presidency, mentioned numerous times this week, that suggested we needed to switch to a new system of government, specifically a parliamentary system of government. I think I found it.

Imagine my surprise to see that it was written by Lloyd Cutler, former White House counsel to both Clinton and Carter (I think Foreign Affairs misspelled his name; it would be a remarkable coincidence if he had the exact same name, including initials, with the ‘t’ and ‘l’ transposed). For those who are sincerely trying to understand all of the fuss over Reagan and how he gave the country hope again, this article should do it.

Foreign Affairs is a pretty respected journal, as far as I know, and to have someone of Cutler’s stature proposing that we abandon our system of government is pretty astonishing. Apparently some in the foreign policy establishment had concluded that the Presidency is too big for one person and that we needed a parliament and a prime minister. It seems laughable now – it probably was then, as well – but to have anybody thinking this out loud, much less in a journal of this type, is amazing.

Obviously Cutler was wrong and we just needed a President that could rally the country. That’s what Reagan did. He had a talent for going directly to the American people that rivaled FDR’s and might have surpassed it.

The 1970s was not the Great Depression, but it looked like we were losing our footing economically and it also looked like we might lose the Cold War. Patrick Moynihan, among many others, was warning of Soviet expansion and we were definitely on the defensive. Reagan helped change that.

Our society was one of the first to write a Constitution. This reflected the confident conviction of the Enlightenment that explicit written arrangements could be devised to structure a government that would be neither tyrannical nor impotent in its time, and to allow for future amendment as experience and change might require.

We are all children of this faith in a rational written arrangement for governing. Our faith should encourage us to consider changes in our Constitution-for which the framers explicitly allowed-that would assist us in adjusting to the changes in the world in which the Constitution must function. Yet we tend to resist suggestions that amendments to our existing constitutional framework are needed to govern our portion of the interdependent world society we have become, and to cope with the resulting problems that all contemporary governments must resolve.

A particular shortcoming in need of a remedy is the structural inability of our government to propose, legislate and administer a balanced program for governing. In parliamentary terms, one might say that under the U.S. Constitution it is not now feasible to “form a Government.” The separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches, whatever its merits in 1793, has become a structure that almost guarantees stalemate today. As we wonder why we are having such a difficult time making decisions we all know must be made, and projecting our power and leadership, we should reflect on whether this is one big reason.

I don’t know how widely held this view was, but it’s striking today. We’ve had four Presidents since and I don’t recall anyone suggesting the job is too big for one person during that time.

See also this article in Foreign Affairs from around the same time, this article by Gov. Schwarzenegger on Reagan and this article in BusinessWeek on Reagan. A clip from the Arnold article:

We all have such vivid memories of him, because he was a man of clarity – in his heart, in his faith, in his convictions and in his actions. His was a strong, unwavering flame that burned brightly. That is why, although we have not seen him in 10 years, he appears to us so clearly today.

Reagan was a hero to me. I became a citizen of the United States when he was president, and he is the first president I voted for as an American citizen. He inspired me and made me even prouder to be a new American.

He used to talk about the letter he received from a man who said, “You can go and live in Turkey, but you can’t become Turkish. You can go and live in Japan, but you can’t become Japanese. You can go to live in Germany or France, but you can’t become German or French.” But the man said that anyone from any corner of the world could come to America and become an American.

When I heard President Reagan tell that story, I said to myself, “Arnold, you Austrian immigrant, he is talking to you. He is saying that you will fit in here. You will be a real American, able to follow your dreams.”

President Reagan symbolized to me what America represented – hope, opportunity, freedom. He made us remember that the United States stood for something great and noble. Once again, it was alright to stand tall and believe in this country, and in ourselves.

He made each of us, no matter our station in life, feel part of something larger and grander. He saw America as an “empire of ideals,” and he advanced those ideals to the world.

Just Monday, I spoke with some of my friends in Austria and Germany. They told me that every single newspaper, every television station, every radio program around the clock is reporting on the life and death of Ronald Reagan. The reports are not just about the passing of an American president, but intimate stories that capture the essence of the person and the persona – as if he were one of their own.

Yep. At our best we are a nation of mongrels, not united by race or religion, but by ideas. That’s what makes us great and Reagan understood that.

Consider the zone flooded.

Reagan’s death is getting a lot of attention and, I think, with good reason. I do remember how despondent the country felt after losing the Vietnam War and after enduring the economy of the 1970s. I was just watching Senator McCain, every Democrat’s favorite Republican (unless he became a Democrat; they would find him just as infuriating as the Republicans do), on Hannity & Colmes and he made a number of good points about Reagan and about the war on terror.

On Reagan he said that the first time he heard about Reagan was while he was a POW in Vietnam. They would tap on the walls to send messages and apparently Reagan had taken up the cause of POWs as governor of California. That’s how McCain first heard of him. McCain then went into a good discussion of how Reagan was able to change this country from being despondent to seeing hope. I disagree with McCain from time to time – OK, a lot, if you count McCain-Feingold – but we agree on this and we agree about military spending.

McCain also went on to discuss the war on terror and to say that the country isn’t sacrificing enough and that a disproportionate burden is falling on the military. I’m starting to agree here as well. He wants to undo some of the tax cuts, which I would oppose without matching cuts in non-military spending, but if they could be matched I might go along with it. More importantly, he wants to increase the size of the military. On this I don’t see who would disagree (though I’m sure I’ll find out). The nature of the war on terror is such that the best way to win is on offense, until someone comes up with a better answer for dealing with an asymmetrical threat. That means the military. I know that they will supposedly be increasing the military by 40,000 troops in the near future but I wonder if that is enough? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I suspect the answer is “no” given that we are actually (and thankfully) removing troops from South Korea.

On another issue, I think President Clinton should be invited to speak at the funeral on Friday. For those of us who already admire Reagan, no selling needs to be done. If we want the admiration to extend to the rest of America, or as much of America as possible, the event can’t look partisan. I know Ford wasn’t allowed to speak at Nixon’s funeral (or chose not to), but Nixon was not a good President and he wasn’t to the second half of the 20th century what FDR was to the first half. If those of us who admire Reagan and his ideas want him to become something other than another Republican president, the funeral needs to be bipartisan. Kerry has been very gracious towards Reagan (he should certainly be invited to the funeral) and so has Clinton. Even Carter was able to squeeze in a good word or two, though it obviously hurt. Clinton should be invited to speak as a gesture simply because he’s an ex-President and he’s the first Democrat since FDR to get re-elected. If Carter wants to speak, he should be allowed to as well, though his praise seemed awfully tortured (Reagan had good taste in shoes!). I’m conflicted about Carter.

One person I’m not conflicted about is Ted Rall. Ted Rall is a no-good piece of shit. He completely lacks any decency. I can muster some good things to say about Clinton even now, without waiting for his funeral, and I certainly wouldn’t piss on his grave. Ted Rall’s I’m not so sure about.

The only good things that came out of the 1970s were the Steelers, the Reds (hey, I’m from Mississippi and we don’t have our own teams!!), some movies and some music.

Virginia Postrel has a couple of years on me, though she’s way ahead on looks and brains, and remembers why Reagan was so consequential:

Amazingly, his prescriptions worked. The economy got worse at first–much, much worse, so bad Reagan himself called it a depression. But he stayed the course, and helped Paul Volcker stay it. The economy got better, and stayed better–mostly good and sometimes even great, except for a few short bumps–for decades.

Most miraculously, the Cold War ended without a nuclear war. And the president took a bullet and lived and told jokes on the way to the hospital.

In some ways, surviving that assassination attempt in good health was the most important thing Reagan did. It robbed history of its inevitable tragic ending. (Remember, too, that the pope similarly survived a bullet, and Margaret Thatcher made it through an IRA bombing.) Reagan became living proof that things do not have to end badly.

Many of his conservative allies, taught by the terrors of the 20th century, firmly believed that history is a tragedy, that the best we can do is to fight a long, twilight struggle. They believed that evil is as strong as, perhaps stronger, than good, and that tyranny is more powerful than freedom. At the time, I believed them too.

Reagan believed in the triumph of good and the strength of freedom. He acted on those convictions, and he was right.

Interestingly, most of the economic problems of the 1970s can be traced back to three words: the Phillips curve. The curve shows an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment; inflation increases, unemployment decreases and vice versa.

Starting in 1971, I believe, the Fed had to learn how to manage a fiat currency for the first time. They needed a guide and they chose poorly. They hadn’t been reading their Friedman (see here and here) or their Postrel, for that matter (first link). Friedman pretty much said the Phillips curve is vertical in the long run and any attempt to inflate the currency to lower unemployment would be a wash inside of eighteen months or so; real prices adjusted to make real output (income) the same. See the first “here” link for a clearer explanation.

The strange thing in all of this to me is that Presidents continue to take credit for great economies and get the blame when things go bad. Their impact can be large, particularly if they are stupid and impose price controls or something similar, but it’s usually minimal. The Fed pulls the strings on the money supply and has most of the control. The Fed’s lack of experience managing a fiat currency had more to do with the economy in the 1970s than anything Carter did as President, though he rode into office claiming he could heal the economy and ultimately got sunk by that along with fecklessness in other areas.

U.S. Plans Major Cut Of Forces In Korea (washingtonpost.com)
The same is supposedly going to happen in Germany, and it’s long overdue. I realize there are some logistical advantages to having facilities around the world, but alternate plans can be made.

Korea, in particular, seems like a bad idea. We have 37,000 troops tied up there and they can do nothing that the South can’t do to stop the barrage of artillery that would come from the North in the opening hours of a war. Tens of thousands would die within a few days and our soldiers are basically hostages there. Not much value there and we can return in larger numbers if war does break out.

The United States plans to withdraw a third of its 37,000 troops stationed in South Korea before the end of next year as part of the most significant realignment of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula in half a century, South Korean officials said Monday.

The withdrawal underscores a broader move by the Pentagon to transform troops stationed at traditional, fixed bases into more mobile forces for rapid global deployments. Defense officials also have proposed pulling two armored Army divisions out of Germany and repositioning some fighter aircraft and Navy command staff in Europe to make it easier to deploy forces to the Middle East, Central Asia and other potential hot spots.

In the case of South Korea, the planned move would mark the largest U.S. troop withdrawal from the peninsula since the Korean War, while shifting a greater burden of defense to the South Koreans themselves. A U.S. delegation, led by Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Lawless, informed the South Koreans Sunday night of the Pentagon’s intention to withdraw the troops, South Korean officials said.

The Pentagon has already announced plans to redeploy 3,600 troops this summer from South Korea to Iraq. The new proposal greatly expands the number of troops to be withdrawn – involving about 12,500 by December 2005, Kim Sook, head of the Foreign Ministry’s North America bureau, told reporters in Seoul on Monday.

It was not immediately clear which U.S. forces would be going – or where. A senior U.S. military officer familiar with the planning, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in an interview that many such details have yet to be worked out.

“Much of the planning has involved thinking in terms what military capabilities will still be needed in Korea, not the specific soldiers or units,” the officer said.

By most accounts the younger generations of South Koreans don’t want us there, either. Might as well use the troops to lighten the load of the military as a whole or bring them home.

Economist.com | Europe and America
The Economist seems to understand the reason so many in America were angry with Europe last year: obstructionism. Even when we have made mistakes in the past – Vietnam could be considered one, though it did have the effect of destroying a lot of Soviet infrastructure and contributed to their downfall – Europe looked the other way and let us do what we wanted. Not so with Iraq. They also touch on the fact that Europe has an inadequate military and is very reluctant to use what they do have.

I still think we need a new military coalition with minimum spending requirements on defense so we don’t end up carrying the bulk of the load, as is the case today.

The second world war left America with a military, economic and moral pre-eminence that made it the natural leader of the free world. Its military power is still unsurpassed. But now Europe is rich too, and – more than two centuries after America’s constitutional convention – inventing its own continent-wide system of power in the shape of the European Union. Mr Chirac wants the EU to be a counterweight to America. But even Europeans who do not share the Gaullist horror of a “unipolar” world think differently nowadays about the alliance. Free from the fear of Soviet invasion, they do not feel the same need of American protection, and so are less inclined to defer. Some Germans were ashamed when Mr Schröder found it electorally convenient in 2002 to denounce Mr Bush’s “adventurism” in Iraq. Others greeted this as an overdue coming of age.

You do not save a partnership by glossing over such profound changes in interests and attitudes. The transatlantic alliance will probably never again be as strong as it was when the Red Army was poised to storm through the Fulda gap and NATO was poised to repel it. And although a new and common peril has arisen in the form of Osama bin Laden and his jihad against “Jews and Crusaders”, this is not likely to provide the same sort of transatlantic glue. The nature of the new threat is too amorphous, and governments hold too many differing views about the right ways to deal with it. In the meantime, having finished its half-century post-war task of making Europe “whole and free”, today’s America has shifted its focus to threats farther afield. Having been let down by France and Germany in Iraq, it may prefer in future to form ad hoc alliances with other countries instead of turning instinctively, as in the past, to a Europe that spends too little on defence and seems allergic to using what little military force it has.

Absent the Soviet Union, an estrangement of this kind need not be fatal to world order. But it would still be a needless loss. When they act in unison, the rich democracies deploy overwhelming political and moral as well as military force. And there is much on which they should still co-operate: securing Afghanistan, sorting out Palestine, spreading democracy to the Arab world, persuading Iran not to build an atomic bomb. Some Americans think they can do all this alone; Iraq did after all show that France and Germany cannot prevent America from going to war if it wants to. But their opposition has made the post-war job in Iraq very much harder. And that is where to start mending relations. For all their pre-war differences, both sides have an interest now in making sure that Iraq enjoys peace and prosperity rather than degenerates into another terror-breeding failed state. The UN this week appointed an interim government for Iraq. What better moment to put aside the recriminations and work together for that?

It would be nice to be able to put differences aside over Iraq, but it’s not likely to happen and I’m not sure what we would gain from it. True, Europe does have a good deal of wealth, but their economies are weak, they aren’t creating very much new wealth these days and their population is aging rapidly. I’m not sure what we would gain by bringing them to the table other than a lower decible level for their complaints.

CNN.com – Bush: America would do it again – Jun 6, 2004
It’s sad to think that this ten-year anniversary will be the last that a good number of the actual veterans of the Normandy invasion will be able to attend. Facing that kind of peril took enormous courage and these vets are entitled to any and all recognition we can give them before they pass on.

With it being D-Day and all, I’m feeling particularly magnanimous and won’t take any cheap shots at the French. I do hope that we will one day be allies with them again in a meaningful sense. Until then it’s worth remembering the sacrifices that were made to defeat the Nazis and Japan. What they represented, alone, justified our entry into WW2 and that we could rid the world of a totalitarian belief system in the process allowed millions to live in freedom.

The alliance forged between the United States and Europe during World War II is strong “and is still needed today,” U.S. President George W. Bush told veterans commemorating the 1944 D-Day landings.

“America would do it again for our friends,” he said of the key role played by the United States in helping to free France from Nazi occupation.

[….]

Bush told those who had fought to liberate Europe on June 6, 1944: “You will be honored forever and always by the country you served and the nations you freed.”

Bush and French counterpart President Jacques Chirac stood side by side at the vast American war cemetery to start a day of somber reflection over the heroism and loss of life during the D-Day landings in Normandy 60 years ago.

Later world leaders gave a standing ovation to D-Day veterans Sunday at a moving ceremony overlooking the invasion beaches of June 6, 1944 at Arromanches.

Chirac, the host of the commemorations, said modern leaders had a duty to honor the values the soldiers died for by defending the cause of freedom and democracy together.

“France will never forget what it owes America, its steadfast friend and ally,” Chirac told a ceremony attended by about 20 heads of state and government at the coastal village which was the scene of heavy fighting on June 6, 1944.

“Like all the countries of Europe, France is keenly aware that the Atlantic alliance remains, in the face of new threats, a fundamental element of our collective security.”

Blackfive has a comprehensive post on D-Day as does Sgt. Hook. They are far more qualified to tell this story than I.

UPDATE: Spoons has a link to the beaches that were invaded that day.

Chris Lawrence has a post on blogging frequency and the like. This explains a lot of my recent rollback in posting. I have other commitments over the next couple of months and blogging has started to feel like a chore. I have noticed a steep dropoff in people that are hitting the main page since I didn’t resume my normal blogging after Memorial Day. Apparently my traffic levels were tied heavily to my frequent posting, but it’s gotten to the point that blogging isn’t that much fun anymore and that’s a sure sign of a need to throttle back for a while. From now on I’ll only be posting when I’ve got something to say. Hopefully that will improve the quality of the site, regardless of traffic, and make the people that do read happier.

It’s odd that it coincides with my two-year blogiversary but that, combined with a weekend away from the computer almost all of the time, played a big role in the cutback. That and the realization that more than 4600 posts in two years is insane. That rate was never sustainable over the long term, unless you are Glenn Reynolds. I’m not and I’ve really enjoyed spending more time away from the computer and when I’m there I do more reading than before. That’s a good thing.