Monday Links
- Another day, another IPCC-gate.
- Why remaining in Afghanistan and creating a stable government there is not a precondition to keeping America safe. For more, watch the debate on Bloggingheads.
- Jeffrey Miron: “Leave Mideast, end terrorism.”
- Could Iran’s nuclear program be a sacrificial pawn?
- Globalization: A curse or a cure?
- Podcast: “Liberate Bone Marrow Donors” featuring Jeff Rowes of the Institute for Justice.
A 10-Point, Libertarian, SOTU Address
1. Abandon Obamacare
2. Forget Cap and Trade
3. Reject the Card Check Bill
4. Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan
5. Legalize Drugs
6. Scrap the tax code and replace with a flat tax
7. Expand free trade and immigration
8. Stop the bailouts
9. Cut spending
10. Cut spending
BONUS - Cut spending
Monday Links
- The massive impact government spending has on job creation.
- Why climate change spurs whining about cold snaps.
- Beware the “Crusader Temptation”: “Afghanistan has become a target of aggressive pro-war activists in America, including feminists who believe in waging war to improve the status of women.”
- What happens when the only self-identified socialist in the U.S. Senate starts to look moderate when compared to his colleagues?
- Podcast: “Bush’s Budget-Busting Binge,” featuring Chris Edwards.
Tuesday Links
- Cato Vice President Gene Healy grades President Obama. (Hint: He doesn’t give him a “B+”).
- Afghanistan: A war we cannot afford. “Democrats say raise taxes. Republicans say no worries. The best policy would be to scale back America’s international commitments.”
- Doug Bandow: The war in Afghanistan was justified at the beginning, but to escalate now is the “geopolitical equivalent of shutting the barn doors after the horses have fled.”
- How U.S. membership in the World Trade Organization enhances the liberty and prosperity of all Americans.
- Podcast: “TARP: A Congressional Failure” featuring John Samples.
Talking about Terrorism
Terrorists are named after an emotion for a reason. They use violence to produce widespread fear for a political purpose. The number of those they kill or injure will always be a small fraction of those they frighten. This creates problems for leaders, and even analysts, when they talk publicly about terrorism. On one hand, leaders need to convince the public that they are on the case in protecting them, or else they won’t be leaders for long. On the other hand, good leaders try to minimize unwarranted fear.
One reason is that we shouldn’t give terrorists what they want. Another is that fear is a real social harm, particularly when it is exaggerated. Stress from fear harms health. It causes bad decisions. For example, if people avoid flying and drive instead the number of added fatalities on the road will quickly surpass the dead from a typical terrorist attack. Most important, excessive fear causes policy responses that often damage the economy without much added safety. Measured in lives on dollars, reactions to terrorism often cost more than the attack themselves.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
It’s the End of 2009. Where Are Our Troops?
This is not the change we hoped for. President Obama rose to power on the basis of his early opposition to the Iraq war and his promise to end it. But after a year in the White House he has made both of George Bush’s wars his wars.
Speaking of Iraq in February 2008, candidate Barack Obama said, “I opposed this war in 2002. I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.” The following month, under fire from Hillary Clinton, he reiterated, ”I was opposed to this war in 2002….I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009. So don’t be confused.”
Indeed, in his famous “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow” speech on the night he clinched the Democratic nomination, he also proclaimed, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that . . . this was the moment when we ended a war.”
Now he has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan and has promised to keep the war in Iraq going for another 19 months, after which we will have 50,000 American troops in Iraq for as far as the eye can see. If McCain had proposed this sort of minor tweaking of the Bush policy, I think we’d see antiwar rallies in 300 cities. Calling the antiwar movement!
President Obama’s promises are becoming less credible. He says that after all this vitally necessary and unprecedented federal spending, he will turn his attention to constraining spending at some uncertain date in the future. And he says that he will first put more troops into Afghanistan, and then withdraw them at some uncertain date in the future (“in July of 2011,” but “taking into account conditions on the ground”). Voters are going to be skeptical of both these promises to accelerate now and then put on the brakes later.
The real risk for Obama is becoming not JFK but LBJ — a president with an ambitious, expensive, and ultimately destructive domestic agenda, who ends up bogged down and destroyed by an endless war. Congress should press for a quicker conclusion to both wars — and should also remember the years of stagflation and slow growth that followed President Johnson’s expansion of the welfare state.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Weekend Links
- Health care insurance mandates: Why it is unconstitutional for the government to force you to purchase a product you don’t want to buy.
- Should malpractice reform be included in the pending health care bill?
- The end of globalization? Cato’s trade policy expert Daniel Griswold debates.
- Doug Bandow on the minaret ban in Switzerland: “Swiss voters underestimated the impact on religious liberty when they voted to ban minaret construction. But Muslims whose nations persecute Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities have no standing to complain. The Islamic world needs to respect religious liberty at home before lecturing the West about intolerance, racism, hatred and Islamophobia.”
- More debate over Hayek and spontaneous order at Cato Unbound.
- Podcast: “Obama’s nation-building in Afghanistan“
Obama’s Nobel Speech
I have two complaints about the President’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, one factual, one theoretical. The first concerns his repetition of the common claim that we live in a world of growing instability and civil war. The president said:
The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states — all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos.
Truth requires changing “increasingly” to “decreasingly.” Andrew Mack’s Human Security Brief makes the point. The chart below shows that civil war (intrastate war) — what Obama is talking about here — has become less common over the last several decades. Elsewhere in the report, you can also see that civil war now kills far fewer people than it used to.
My second gripe is Obama’s failure to acknowledge that peace is a value that competes with others. Human beings get along not by reconciling all differences but by tolerating them. Nations avoid war by accepting the small dangers others pose rather than making larger dangers by trying to achieve total safety. If the United States had sacrificed its desire to promote anti-communism and free trade and contain Communism in Korea in 1950, as we did Eastern Europe, we could have avoided the Korean War. By accepting some risk from Iranian nuclear weapons, we avoid preventive war. We keep the peace with Sudan because we do not enforce humanitarian norms in Darfur. We could overthrow the government of Zimbabwe or North Korea and save people from disease and starvation. But we prefer peace. Pakistan undermines its uneasy peace with India because it wants Kashmir back. Israel does something similar in the West Bank.
However one judges these choices, it is important to recognize them as such. Rightful winners of peace prizes are people who sacrificed something important to avoid war, or at least advocated doing so.
It isn’t surprising that the President, given his job, would celebrate the morality of American military hegemony and disregard arguments that it isn’t a source of peace. It was predictable that he would defend the idea that peace in the long term often requires sacrificing it in the short, as we are fighting two wars in the name of stability. What got me was that he failed to mention that peace also requires sacrifice.
To the extent a message unites the speech, it is this: All good things go together. We do not have to choose peace at the expense of U.S. military activism, democracy, justice, or economic development abroad — they all serve that end. The President basically defined peace as a world rid of poverty and injustice. He said, for example, that peace within states is not durable without the sense of justice provided by liberal ideology, because autocratic government causes unrest and violence. Aside from the creative use of history, what’s remarkable here is the failure to acknowledge that maintaining peace with autocracies is usually virtuous but tragic.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security
Afghanistan Withdrawal in July 2011? Don’t Bet on It
Secretary Gates and Secretary Clinton, among other administration officials, indicated this weekend that the July 2011 date for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan should not be interpreted as an exit strategy, but as a “ramp rather than a cliff.” It now appears the president will not be obligated to adhere to any withdrawal date and can adjust as he deems fit.
President Obama’s decision to include a withdrawal date in his speech sends a mixed message to allies and enemies about America’s commitment to the region. It is a misguided effort to placate the American public’s waning support for the mission. Obama should instead be looking for ways to leave Afghanistan, not excuses to dig us in deeper.
Essentially, the strategy is to apply the Iraq model to Afghanistan: a rapid infusion of troops followed by a painfully slow withdrawal. Of course, that strategy is premised on the hope that everything will run smoothly. There is little reason to believe it will.
In the end, the strategy aimed at defeating the Taliban and securing Afghanistan will never be perfect. Instead, a strategy of narrowly defined objectives that center on our original mission in entering the country—disrupting al Qaeda—is the only policy that is acceptable given the costs that the U.S. will incur.
Monday Links
- How the European Union can bring peace to the Middle East.
- Nat Hentoff on the health care debate: “We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.”
- Video: What can autism teach us about economics?
- Cato’s Malou Innocent debates the troop build up in Afghanistan.
- Over at Cato Unbound, experts discuss the positive and negative outcomes of modernity.
- Podcast: Driverless cars? They aren’t as far away as you think.
Let Us Hope (and Pray) for Peace
There is something immensely moving about young men and women willing to sacrifice their lives for their country. Indeed, patriotism mixed with a desire for action can be a fearsome thing. This combination was on display at West Point after President Barack Obama’s speech on Afghanistan.
The Washington Post reported on a phone call between Academy professor Mike Meese and his son, an Academy sophomore:
Said Col. Mike Meese, chairman of West Point’s social studies department: “There has been an incredible intensity here ever since 9/11. The cadets have a strong belief that this is the defining struggle of their lifetime. Every one of them elected to come here because they want to be a part of it.”
Not long after the speech, Meese received a call from his son, Brian, in his second year at West Point, who watched Obama from the second-to-back row with a solemn face. Brian had spoken with his friends on the walk back from the auditorium to their barracks, and none of them could stop obsessing over one number Obama had highlighted in his speech: 18 months. The deployment of 30,000 additional troops was something they had expected — it was the future for which they had prepared. But why had Obama so forcefully emphasized that he would begin a drawdown of troops in 18 months? What if the war was over by the time they graduated?
Brian Meese, the latest aspiring officer in a family with three generations of service, had prepared to fight in a war ever since he was 12. He had accompanied his father to almost a dozen military funerals, and each one strengthened his resolve. At West Point, he studied Arabic instead of Spanish, judging it more practical for a soldier destined for the Middle East.
“Now I might not get to go,” Brian told his father over the phone this week, his voice betraying disappointment.
“I think you will still have your chance,” his father said. “All of the evil in the world is not going to be defeated by the summer of 2011.”
“You’re taking care of Iraq. You’re taking care of Afghanistan,” Brian told his father. “What’s going to be left for me?”
I can’t help but admire Brian Meese’s desire “to go,” almost irrespective of circumstances. I see the same desire in my nephew, who is currently training to be a SEAL.
Yet war always should be a last resort, a horrid necessity to protect life and liberty within civilian society. The latter may seem boring in a sense, but it embodies the highest values, the ones for which we sometimes must risk everything. Thus, we should hope and pray that there won’t be anything “left for” Brian Meese to do in the Army. Although war can showcase the sublimest of values, such as heroism and self-sacrifice, it more often serves the worst of humanity, spreading death and destruction with wild abandon.
Alas, Mike Meese undoubtedly will be proved right. There is more than enough evil to go around. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that evil will ever disappear. Which is a good reason why the objective of the U.S. government should not be to combat evil, but to protect the lives and freedoms of the American people. Only the latter goal is realistic, let alone consistent with the principles of individual liberty and limited government. Unfortunately, the president’s plan to expand America’s military role in Afghanistan seems more directed at the former.
But until the lion lies down with the lamb, the world will remain a dangerous place. Which means we will continue to need the services of brave young men and women like Brian Meese and my nephew. I can only hope that when their time for action comes (as seems certain, given present policies), they will be better served by their political leaders than have been so many equally brave American military personnel in the past.
Not the Change We Hoped For
Barack Obama first became a credible presidential candidate on the basis of his antiwar credentials and his promise to change the way Washington works. But he has now made both of George Bush’s wars his wars. The Washington Post’s front-page analysis began, “President Obama assumed full ownership of the war in Afghanistan on Tuesday night…” The cover of the tabloid D.C. Express was even more blunt.
Speaking of Iraq in February 2008, he said, “I opposed this war in 2002. I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.” Responding to Hillary Clinton’s criticisms in March 2008, he said, “I will bring this war to an end in 2009, so don’t be confused.” Now he is promising to end the Iraq war in 2011, and to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan in that year. Not the change we hoped for.
President Obama promises that after all this vitally necessary and unprecedented federal spending, he will turn his attention to constraining spending at some uncertain date in the future. And now he says that he will first put more troops into Afghanistan, and then withdraw them at some uncertain date in the future (“in July of 2011,” but “taking into account conditions on the ground”). Voters are going to be skeptical of both promises to accelerate and then put on the brakes later.
Of course, John McCain thinks that even a tentative promise to get out of this war after a decade is too much. “Success is the real exit strategy,” he says. And if there’s no success? Then presumably no exit. Antiwar voters may still find a vague promise of getting the troops out of Afghanistan three years after the president’s inauguration preferable to what a President McCain would have promised.
But as Chris Preble wrote yesterday, this increase of 30,000 troops — or 40,000 — is not going to win the war. The U.S. military’s counterinsurgency doctrine says that stabilizing a country the size of Afghanistan would require far more troops than anyone is willing to invest. So why not declare that we have removed the government that harbored the 9/11 attackers, and come home?
The real risk for Obama is becoming not JFK but LBJ — a president with an ambitious, expensive, and ultimately destructive domestic agenda, who ends up bogged down and destroyed by an endless war. Congress should press for a quicker conclusion to both wars.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Wednesday Links
- Chris Preble on Afghanistan: It’s time to leave. “We don’t need 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan chasing down 100 al-Qaeda fighters.”
- Malou Innocent on Obama’s West Point speech.
- A few possible outcomes of U.S. military engagement in the Middle East.
- More updates on ClimateGate.
- An overview of all the hidden taxes in the health care overhaul.
- Podcast: “Obama’s Afghanistan Contradiction“
President Obama to Announce Troop Increase in Afghanistan
There are two things that President Obama’s plan won’t do: win the war, or end the war.
While all Americans hope that the mission in Afghanistan will turn out well, the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency doctrine says that stabilizing a country the size of Afghanistan would require far more troops than the most wild-eyed hawk has proposed: about 600,000 troops. An additional 30 to 40,000 troops isn’t just a case of too little, too late; it holds almost no prospect of winning the war. Accordingly, this likely won’t be the last prime-time address in which the president proposes sending many more troops to Afghanistan; my greatest fear is that this is only the first of many.
But we shouldn’t just commit still more troops. President Obama should have recognized that the goals he set forth in March went too far. A better strategic review would have revisited our core objectives and assumptions. It would have focused on a narrower set of achievable objectives that are directly connected to vital U.S. security interests—chiefly disrupting al Qaeda’s ability to do harm—and that would have left the rebuilding of Afghanistan to Afghans, not Americans. President Obama’s national security team seems not to have even considered this course. Instead, the administration focused on repackaging the same grandiose strategy.
Secretary of Defense Gates fixed on the dilemma several weeks ago when he pondered aloud: “How do we signal resolve and at the same time signal to the Afghans and the American people that this is not open-ended?”
It turns out you can’t. The president’s decision to deepen our commitment to Afghanistan while simultaneously promising an exit is ultimately absurd on its face.
I’d be surprised if any foreign policy analyst would bet his or her next paycheck that this is going to work. I wouldn’t.
Comparing Vietnam and Afghanistan
Reports have leaked out over the past week that President Obama will announce that he is sending additional troops into Afghanistan. The only question seems to be whether he will send 30,000, 40,000 or some number in between. That is, frankly, not a very important issue.
And for all of his talk about “off ramps” for the United States if the Afghan government does not meet certain policy targets or “benchmarks,” the reality is that he is escalating our commitment. Since Obama has repeatedly asserted that the war in Afghanistan is a war of necessity, not a war of choice, his talk of off ramps is largely a bluff—and the Afghans probably know it.
There are obvious hazards in equating one historical event with a development in a different setting and time period, but there are a couple of very disturbing similarities between Vietnam and Afghanistan. In both cases, U.S. leaders opted to try to rescue a failing war by sending in more troops. And in both cases, Washington found itself desperately searching for a “credible” leader who could serve as an effective partner in the war effort.
The United States never found such a leader in Vietnam, and was frustrated by a parade of repressive, corrupt, and ineffectual political figures. That experience sounds more than a little like the problem the Bush and Obama administrations have encountered with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government. That fact alone suggests that our Afghanistan mission is not likely to turn out well.
Monday Links
- Three decades of politics and failed policies at HUD.
- Michael D. Tanner on the Senate Sell-Outs: “At a time of 10.2 percent unemployment, they voted to make it more expensive to hire workers, especially low-wage workers. With the economy struggling, they voted for $485 billion in tax hikes. They voted to raise the payroll tax, limit your flexible spending account, and tax your health insurance plan. This is moderation?”
- The limits of U.S. power in Afghanistan: “Even if more troops were better deployed, the odds of reasonable success in reasonable time at reasonable cost are long.”
- Republican and Democratic senators pushing for subsidizing prayer.
- In Washington next week? Tom Palmer will be here Tuesday, Dec. 1 to discuss his new book, Realizing Freedom. Can’t make it? Watch live online.
- Podcast: “Money, Greed and God“
Monday Links
- Report: New threats to free speech.
- The politics behind the health care overhaul.
- Mass corruption in Afghanistan. Malou Innocent: “Washington has already surged into Afghanistan once this year. The United States should not spend more American blood and more of its ever-diminishing financial resources to prop up Karzai’s ineffectual regime.”
- A government takeover of health care is not pro-choice — for anyone: “Whatever your views on abortion, the fight over abortion in the Obama health plan illustrates perfectly why government should stay out of health care. When the government subsidizes health care, anything you do with that money becomes the voters’ business. And rather than allow for choice between different ways of doing things, the government typically imposes the preferences of the majority — or sometimes, a vocal minority — on everybody.”
- Podcast: “A Proposed Beat Down for Banks“
Who Will Protect the Women?
As I mentioned here yesterday:
[W]hen some people in Washington hear that nation-building in Afghanistan is not a precondition to making America safer, or that prolonging our presence undermines America’s security, the argument for remaining then shifts to preserving the security and human rights of the people of Afghanistan.
For example, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, (D-MD), a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Aid and Dean of the Senate Women, said last April, “The United States should do everything it can to encourage Afghanistan to respect the basic rights and welfare of women and children.”
But Malalai Joya, an Afghan woman elected to her country’s Parliament, says in yesterday’s Mercury News (via GG):
As an Afghan woman who was elected to Parliament, I am in the United States to ask President Barack Obama to immediately end the occupation of my country.
Eight years ago, women’s rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women’s rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.
In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Wednesday Links
- Things you might not want to know: Have you ever thought about how dirty the money in your wallet might be?
- The case for dropping out of NATO.
- Gene Healy on the “arrogance of power” involved in running for president these days: “What sort of person wants the job badly enough to spend years living out of a suitcase, begging for cash, glad-handing through primary states, and saying things that no intelligent person could possibly believe?”
- Doug Bandow: “The fall of the Wall, and the evil system behind it, deserves to be celebrated. Not just on Nov. 9. But every day.”
- Podcast: “A Looming Decision on Afghanistan“
Our ‘Reassured’ Allies
Justin Logan beat me to the punch, but Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal’s op-ed in the Washington Post warrants more than just one comment. Kagan and Blumenthal fret that the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic reassurance” is sure to fail. Aimed at encouraging Russia and China, especially, to cooperate with the United States in dealing with a number of common threats, the two predict that the policy will succeed only in making “American allies nervous.”
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Not that we should go around making our allies nervous just for the heck of it, but I worry that our allies have grown, well, too comfortable with the current state of affairs in which American taxpayers and American troops bear a disproportionate share of the costs of securing global peace and prosperity.
And who can blame them? From the perspective of our allies in East Asia (chiefly the Japanese and the South Koreans), and for the Europeans tucked safely within NATO, getting the Americans to pay the costs, and assume the risks, associated with policing the world is a pretty good gig.
The same Robert Kagan made this point explicitly, if somewhat crudely, in his book Of Paradise and Power, when he cast the United States in the heroic role as sheriff, while our wealthy allies were portrayed as cowardly, sniveling townspeople, or, worse, saloon keepers who benefited from the protection of the Americans while selling booze to the bad guys.
For at least two decades, we have adopted a strategy designed to comfort our allies. Our goal has been to discourage them from taking prudent steps to defend themselves. Many Americans are beginning to appreciate just how short-sighted this policy was, and is. Such military capabilities might have proved useful in Afghanistan, for example, and they might ultimately serve a purpose in checking Russian and Chinese ambitions, which would be particularly important if these two countries prove as aggressive as Kagan and Blumenthal claim.
Instead, we have a group of militarily weak and comfortable allies who spend a fraction of what Americans spend on defense, and who can muster political will with respect to foreign policy only when it entails criticizing the United States for not doing enough. In other words, we are reaping what we sowed.
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