Archive for March, 2009
New Podcast: ‘War on Drugs, War on Guns’
Attorney General Eric Holder said recently that in order to quell the violence spilling over from the drug war in Mexico he will push to reinstate the ban on “assault weapons” in the United States.
But, says Legal Policy Analyst David Rittgers in today’s Cato Daily Podcast, a policy like that won’t do much to quell violence.
The [drug] cartels have access to lots and lots of money because of our prohibitionist policies in the US. And because of this money they can get these weapons whether we have them legal or illegal…and they’ll have access to the black market to get fully automatic machine guns if they want them.
… If you like the war on drugs, you’re going to love the war on guns.
Strategy and Counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency expert Andrew Exum, of Abu Muqawama war blog, takes on Justin Logan’s post below. At the risk of restating Justin’s points, I feel compelled to jump into the fray.
Exum says basically this: Our policies have tended to result in small wars, however foolish. We want an Army of our policies. There is, in other words, a difference between operations and strategy. Counterinsurgency experts are just preaching good practice in the former. They just work here. Grand strategy is someone else’s gig.
There is merit in this view. But it has two problems.
First, the COIN gurus do not confine themselves to the operational side of things. Exum works for the Center for New American Security, which has collected counterinsurgency experts who argue that 1) Americans can become proficient counterinsurgents and 2) counter-terrorism requires that transformation. I believe neither. Apparently Exum only buys 1. I hope he can convince his colleagues to stop saying 2.
Second, the stark divide between strategy and operations is an ideal. The theory that the military services are only professional technicians serving the ends of politicians is too simple. The Army has political interests, which change with its structure and leadership. Those interests affect our defense and foreign policy. The causal arrow between national security policy and the structure and doctrine of the organizations that execute it points both ways. Pretending it is not so is a dodge, even if it gets you an A in your undergraduate civil-military relations class. Both Creighton’s Abrams’ reforms ensuring that the president had to activate the reserves to start a war and the Weinberger-Powell doctrine were sneaky usurpations of authority. They were also realistic efforts to avoid bad wars and on balance good things.
Defense writers tend to depict the generals who resist permanently transforming the US ground forces into a counterinsurgency force as benighted fools and the lieutenant colonels who buck them as forces of truth and light. The reality is more complicated. The Big Army that wants to fight only Big Wars reflects a realistic sense of what military force can and can’t do and the insight that reengineering foreign countries goes in the can’t bucket. They make these wars less likely. The little army aligned against them is a result of the fact that these wars occur anyway, and being prepared is sensible. I am not sure who I’m rooting for.
More clear to me is that the realist view of small wars wars could use support. Realists say that what we’ve discovered fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are just COIN best practices, which guarantee nothing because this is ultimately someone else’s politics. They say that the best solution is don’t do it and next best is to severely curtail your objectives and stop confusing counterinsurgency with counterterrorism. If the new counterinsurgency class believes even part of that, they should say so more forcefully.
Republicans and Earmarks
This week, a handful of fiscally conservative Republican senators have been trying to cut earmarks out of the $410 billion omnibus appropriations bill. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, the legislation contains 8,570 earmarks worth $7.7 billion.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has sought to strike specific items, like the $200,000 earmark for Tattoo Removal Violence Prevention Outreach Program in Burbank, California and the $1.9 million earmark to the Pleasure Beach Water Taxi Service in Connecticut.
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has taken a broader approach by introducing an amendment to strike all earmarks from the bill and revert to last year’s spending levels.
Not surprisingly, they have been unsuccessful. And given recent events, one must wonder if these efforts by fiscal conservatives are even welcomed by members of their own party.
The amendments introduced by Coburn and McCain were defeated by opposition from not only by the majority of Democratic senators, but also many Republican appropriators, like Senators Thad Cochrane (R-MS) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
And despite his occasional anti-earmark rhetoric and support for the Coburn and McCain amendments, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is one of the chief beneficiaries of the earmark-laden omnibus bill. Reports suggest he requested either $75 or $51 million for his home state of Kentucky. Either way, he will obtain far more than his Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), whose earmark requests total $26 million.
Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has been fairly consistent in her criticism of the earmarking process and, for the most part, has voted accordingly. Proving that Republican affection for earmarking is a bicameral phenomenon, her stance attracted ire from Representative Roy Blunt (R-MO), formerly one of the highest-ranking Republicans in House, who said he “would hope that Claire would change her mind on this,” as he praised Senator Kit Bond’s (R-MO) prowess at earmarking.
Now, earmarks make up a relatively small slice of the overall budget, but as Coburn has noted, the problem with earmarks is ‘‘the hidden cost of perpetuating a culture of fiscal irresponsibility. When politicians fund pork projects they sacrifice the authority to seek cuts in any other program.”
For more on earmarks, check out the “Corporate Welfare and Earmarks” chapter of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.
Milton Friedman Defends Capitalism
Unfortunately, we don’t have great advantage of having Milton Friedman with us during the present ”blame the free market” storm that is raging in Washington. Still, it’s nice to have clips of this champion in action.
Good Coverage of AG Holder’s War on Guns
As I said earlier this week, Eric Holder’s push for an “assault weapons” ban is a misguided policy that will not have any serious impact on Mexican drug cartels. It really ought to be called a “ban on semi-automatic firearms with politically incorrect cosmetic features,” but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I am pleased to see that CNN is providing coverage of this that notes (1) the difference between semi-automatic sporting arms and machine guns and (2) that Mexican authorities are not releasing the serial numbers of firearms seized from the gangsters. This is probably because many of these guns are coming from the Mexican government, not American gun stores. The drug cartels are putting up billboards to recruit soldiers and policemen as hired muscle. Don’t be surprised when they walk off the job with the guns you issued them, and don’t shift the blame to the Second Amendment.
The Continuing Puzzle: What is the Iranian Government Doing?
The Iranian government has detained another American journalist, Roxana Saberi of NPR. I was waiting to post on this in the event that a concerted effort to free her got spun up, but I’m not seeing anything as yet, so I thought I’d just relate the news.
I met Ms. Saberi once. We were both panelists at a discussion of Iran policy about two years ago, in front of a group of several hundred high school students who were on some sort of DC visit. I found her to be reserved in manner, judicious in thought, and entirely unthreatening. It is unfortunate that the Iranian government does not acknowledge this.
In any case, she should be freed immediately. The Iranian government gets nothing from this sort of thing other than bad press, as it surely recognized when it pointlessly detained and ultimately released Haleh Esfandiari less than two years ago. The Iranians may be using Saberi to wind up (or vent) nationalism in the advent of the June elections, but overall you’d think the Iranian government had more important matters to attend to.
Let her go.
UPDATE: I’m reminded that it isn’t just Saberi that the Iranians have detained. Two Iranian doctors working to prevent HIV have apparently been sent to prison on the grounds that they were “involved in provoking street demonstrations and ethnic unrest in different parts of the country.”You’d think if the Iranians were really concerned about ethnic unrest in different parts of their country, they’d refrain from doing things like having state-run newspapers publish cartoons representing Azeris as cockroaches.
Ed Secretary Crosses Congressional Democrats on DC Vouchers
Libby Quaid, the Associated Press’s intrepid DC education correspondent, has just broken the biggest education story of the year to date: Education Secretary Arne Duncan opposes congressional Democrats’ efforts to kick kids out of the DC voucher program and back into the public schools.
While Duncan said he opposes vouchers, he added that, “D.C. is a special case,” saying that ”kids already going to private schools on the public dime should be allowed to continue.”
I confess, I’m surprised by even the qualified support for DC vouchers expressed by Duncan — surprised, and delighted. From the sound of it, though, Duncan is suggesting only that existing participants be grandfathered into the program, not that any additional children should be allowed to join them.
And Duncan makes a misstep when he implies that school choice can only “help a handful of children.”
Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and a host of other nations have large school choice programs already. The Dutch program is nearly a century old and private schools enroll nearly three quarters of the student population. As for Duncan’s desire to create new schools that will serve whole neighborhoods, he need only visit Milwaukee to see the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been invested in creating new private schools in some of the most depressed parts of the city, thanks to that city’s private school choice program.
School choice is not only good for kids and communities, it’s good for taxpayers. The government of Florida’s own accountability office reported last year that its statewide k-12 education tax credit program is saving $1.50 for every dollar it costs to operate.
Will Duncan’s comment rescue the voucher program from Senate Democrats who are set to vote on the bill in question this week? Stay tuned.
Science: The Final (Budget) Frontier
There are many people who think that little or no “science” will get done — at least “basic” science that has no evident, immediate, practical applications — unless the federal government pays for it. That is a dubious proposition, but it’s not what really alarms me right now. What really troubles me is that scientists, apparently, can conceive of no end to research worthy of your hard-earned dollars, and see things in Washington looking a lot friendlier to their exploring the final, spending frontier. This quote from an article in Inside Higher Ed today says it all:
Pressed by [Rep. Alan] Mollohan and others for how much money the government ought to be spending on science research and education, [National Academy of Sciences President Ralph J.] Cicerone was clearly reluctant to throw out figures; danger loomed that he would look either greedy or unambitious in appearing to speak for the science establishment.
But he made clear that he would welcome a way of ensuring growth for federal spending on science, perhaps, he said, through a mechanism that tied spending to “the number of highly competitive proposals” agencies receive, to ensure that there is enough money to cover all research proposals that scientific peer review processes grade above a certain level.
When Mollohan asked what was the appropriate “end point” for growth in federal science funds, Cicerone said that “we are so far away from that level that it’s hard to say.”
So science can tell us a lot, but not how far we are from adequate science funding. I, however, can put it in a little perspective: In 2006 the federal government spent more than $31 billion on research at ”educational institutions.” If the funding end point is, say, Saturn, then to at least some scientists it seems we haven’t even gotten to the moon.
Get ready for scientists to blast off with your wallets anytime now.
New Podcast: ‘Blood and Treasure and Costs of Foreign Policy’
President Obama has promised to make spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq more transparent during his term. That’s a step in the right direction, says Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign policy studies, but have Americans looked at the true cost of the wars the nation is fighting?
In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Preble examines the price the United States has paid for the past six years of war.
The costs of maintaining a US presence in Iraq through the end of 2011…will continue to be quite substantial. We’re spending on the order of $10 to $12 billion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined each month.…The costs in terms of dollars will continue to be quite high.
Preble is the author of a forthcoming book, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free, now available for pre-order.
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Here’s a new list of bloggers who are citing, discussing and writing about Cato commentary and analysis:
- The Economist blog “Democracy in America“ comments on Gene Healy’s DC Examiner op-ed about the rise of executive power.
- On Overton’s Arrow, Carl Oberg cites Doug Bandow’s Cato@Liberty post about the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that the Obama stimulus plan will ultimately make the country worse off economically.
- Freedom’s Lighthouse posted a video of Daniel J. Mitchell’s commentary about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to the White House.
- GlobalWarming.org editor William Yeatman discusses Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast with Patrick J. Michaels on climate change.
- Aristotle the Geek examines Paul Krugman’s critique of a 2007 Cato Tax & Budget Bulletin about Iceland’s flat tax.
- Brian Doherty reviews Gene Healy’s book, Cult of the Presidency at The Freeman Online.
If you’re blogging about Cato, let us know on Twitter (@catoinstitute) or email cmoody@cato.org.
House Bans ‘Driving While Mexican’
Buried in the $410 billion catch-all appropriations bill now before the U.S. Senate is a provision that would end a program that has allowed Mexican truck drivers to deliver goods to destinations inside the United States.
A provision in the original North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 was supposed to allow U.S. and Mexican trucking companies to deliver goods in each other’s country. But opposition from the Teamsters union and old-fashioned prejudice against Mexicans has derailed implementation of the provision.
Under current restrictions, goods coming into the United States from Mexico by truck must be unloaded inside the “commercial zone” within 20 miles or so of either side of the border and transferred to U.S.-owned trucks for final delivery. U.S. goods going to Mexico face the same inefficient and unnecessary restrictions.
The Bush administration established a pilot program that allows certain Mexican trucking companies that meet U.S. safety and other standards to deliver goods directly to U.S. destinations, while the Mexican government has agreed to allow reciprocal access to its market. But the Democratic Congress and the new Democratic president have vowed to finally kill the program, and the provision inside the appropriations bill will probably deliver the final blow.
As I argued in an article in 2007, the Mexican trucks that have been allowed to operate in the United States under the pilot program have actually had a better safety record than U.S. trucks.
As I noted in the article, and it still applies today: “The real objection they have to Mexican trucks making deliveries to U.S. cities is not that they are unsafe, but that those trucks are driven by Mexicans. In the eyes of congressional leaders, ‘driving while Mexican’ remains an unacceptable public hazard.”
Defense Cost Overruns
Wow, a bipartisan effort to actually do something about government waste. From the Washington Post today:
A bill to end cost overruns in major weapons systems would create a powerful new Pentagon position — director of independent cost assessments — to review cost analyses and estimates, separately from the military branch requesting the program.
Those reviews, unlike in the current process, would take place at key points in the acquisition process before a weapons program can proceed, according to legislation sponsored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
This seems like a step forward, but cost overruns are a big problem across the entire federal government, not just at the Pentagon. Federal financial management of energy, highway, and computer projects has been appalling, for example. I’ve written about this here and elsewhere.
The government needs to buy weapons, and so we should try to improve the Pentagon process as best we can. However, the federal government does not need to buy highways, airports, air traffic control computers and many other things that have chronic cost overruns. Those items should be privatized.
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