[OT] Another heated discussion about the Iraq siutation, war and politics.

[tesco samoa]

Who's Sordid Now?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

It's official: the administration that once scorned nation-building now says that it's engaged in a modern Version of the Marshall Plan. But Iraq isn't postwar Europe, and George W. Bush definitely isn't Harry Truman. Indeed, while Truman led this country in what Churchill called the "most unsordid act in history," the stories about Iraqi reconstruction keep getting more sordid. And the sordidness isn't, as some would have you believe, a minor blemish on an otherwise noble enterprise.

Cronyism is an important factor in our Iraqi debacle. It's not just that reconstruction is much more expensive than it should be. The really important thing is that cronyism is warping policy: by treating contracts as prizes to be handed to their friends, administration officials are delaying Iraq's recovery, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

It's rarely mentioned nowadays, but at the time of the Marshall Plan, Americans were very concerned about profiteering in the name of patriotism. To get Congressional approval, Truman had to provide assurances that the plan would not become a boondoggle. Funds were administered by an agency independent of the White House, and Marshall promised that priorities would be determined by Europeans, not Americans.

Fortunately, Truman's assurances were credible. Although he is now honored for his postwar leadership, Truman initially rose to prominence as a fierce crusader against war profiteering, which he considered treason.

Iraq's reconstruction, by contrast, remains firmly under White House control. And this is an administration of, by and for crony capitalists; to match this White House's blithe lack of concern about conflicts of interest, you have to go back to the Harding administration. That giant, no-bid contract given to Halliburton, the company that made Dick Cheney rich, was just what you'd expect.

And even as the situation in Iraq slides downhill, and the Iraqi Governing Council demands more autonomy and control, American officials continue to block local initiatives, and are still trying to keep the big contracts in the hands of you-know-who.

For example, in July two enterprising Middle Eastern firms started offering cellphone service in Baghdad, setting up jury-rigged systems compatible with those of neighboring countries. Since the collapse of Baghdad's phone system has been a major source of postwar problems, coalition authorities should have been pleased.

But no: the authorities promptly shut down the services. Cell service, they said, could be offered only by the winners in a bidding process - one whose rules, revealed on July 31, seemed carefully designed to shut out any non-American companies. (In the face of strenuous protests the rules were revised, but still seem to favor the usual suspects.) Oddly, the announcement of the winners, originally scheduled for Sept. 5, keeps being delayed. Meanwhile, only Paul Bremer and his people have cellphones - and, thanks to the baffling decision to give that contract to MCI, even those phones don't work very well. (Aside from the fact that its management perpetrated history's biggest accounting fraud, MCI has no experience in building cell networks.)

Then there's electricity. One reason Iraq still faces blackouts is that local experts and institutions were excluded from the repair business. Instead, the exclusive contract was given to Bechtel, whose Republican ties are almost as strong as Halliburton's. And if a recent story in The Washington Post is accurate, Bechtel continues to ignore pleas by Iraqi engineers for essential spare parts.

Meanwhile, several companies with close personal ties to top administration officials have begun brazenly offering their services as facilitators for companies seeking Iraqi business. The former law firm of Douglas Feith, the Pentagon under secretary who oversees Iraq reconstruction, has hung out its shingle. So has another company headed by Joe Allbaugh, who ran the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 and ran FEMA until a few months ago. And a third entrant is run by Ahmad Chalabi's nephew.

There's a moral here: optimists who expect the administration to get its Iraq policy on track are kidding themselves. Think about it: the cost of the occupation is exploding, and military experts warn that our army is dangerously overcommitted. Yet officials are still allowing Iraqi reconstruction to languish, and the disaffection of the Iraqi public to grow, while they steer choice contracts to their friends. What makes you think they will ever change their ways?

[General Woundwort]

Op-Ed Shoving Match
from Donald Luskin, National Review Online

Paul Krugman took a hiatus from his New York Times column in order to jump to the paper's best-seller list with his book, The Great Unraveling. He's been all over the tube with his story that the Bush administration represents (as he says in his book) a "revolutionary power" like the "totalitarian regimes of the 1930s," one that wants to create an America "possibly — in which elections are only a formality."

About the only TV show where he hasn't peddled this paranoid shtick is Saturday Night Live. He even showed up on Buchanan & Press, although Pat Buchanan hounded him into stammering helplessness (with a little coaching from yours truly). It got to the point where all Krugman could say was, "Well, all right. Let’s — you know, I thought we were going to have a discussion here." That's media code for "Hey, you said I'd get to promote my book!"

Today, after a two-week absence, Krugman's column is back on the op-ed page of the Times (the one Tesco posted below - G.W.). It's his usual verbal carpet-bombing of innuendo, distortion, and assertion presented as fact — delivered with supreme self-assurance and just enough truth here and there to make it devastatingly effective. Bush lied. Bush is corrupt. Halliburton. Quagmire. Bush lied ... you get it.

Same old stuff. But today there's something different, too. Something quite wonderful.

It seems that while Krugman was busy promoting himself and his paranoid anti-Bush vision, David Brooks — the Times's new conservative op-ed columnist who started just three weeks ago — got mad as hell and decided he wasn't going to take it any more.

Right next to Krugman's latest screed is a column by Brooks that is nothing less than a literary cruise missile aimed straight at Krugman's heart. Of course he doesn't mention Krugman by name. The Times would never let him. But he doesn't have to (it's even classier that way). But the intent is unmistakable. And it's deadly.

Brooks's column is called "The Presidency Wars." In it he noted that the "culture wars" of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to bitter, hateful combat over the very legitimacy of the president. Brooks wrote,

The culture wars produced some intellectually serious books because there were principles involved. The presidency wars produce mostly terrible ones because the hatreds have left the animating ideas far behind and now romp about on their own ... now the best-sellers lists are dotted with screeds against the president and his supporters. A cascade of Clinton-bashing books hit the lists in the 1990's, and now in the Bush years we've got "Shrub," "Stupid White Men" and "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them."

And — it goes (literally) without saying — The Great Unraveling. "Terrible." Brooks has Krugman's MO down cold:

The quintessential new warrior scans the Web for confirmation of the president's villainy. He avoids facts that might complicate his hatred. He doesn't weigh the sins of his friends against the sins of his enemies. But about the president he will believe anything. He believes Ted Kennedy when he says the Iraq war was a fraud cooked up in Texas to benefit the Republicans politically. It feels so delicious to believe it, and even if somewhere in his mind he knows it doesn't quite square with the evidence, it's important to believe it because the other side is vicious, so he must be too ...

The warriors have one other feature: ignorance. They have as much firsthand knowledge of their enemies as members of the K.K.K. had of the N.A.A.C.P. In fact, most people in the Last two administrations were well-intentioned patriots doing the best they could. The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves.

I have to admit that, until now, I have been very disappointed with Brooks. I worried whether he would have the guts to make a difference at the liberal Times (see "Is Brooks Partisan Enough?" August 14, 2003). His first couple columns were, well, terrible. The inaugural one asserted that the Bush administration pretends in public to be infallible, but nevertheless adapts to criticism — sounds innocuous enough, but it came off as a variation on the "Bush lied" theme. Several days later a Krugman column sideswiped Brooks by using his own logic to turn his mild criticism into a scorcher. Krugman wrote,

... I disagree with those who think the administration can claim infallibility even while practicing policy flexibility: on major issues, such as taxes or Iraq, any sensible policy would too obviously be an implicit admission that previous policies had failed.

And thus the op-ed shoving match was started. And now Brooks is shoving back hard. It's something I doubt the typically non-confrontational Brooks would have done in the normal course of sharing a page with Krugman. But when Krugman stepped off the op-ed page for a while, and recreated himself as a media celebrity with a paranoid neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that got him onto the best-seller lists (next to the likes of Al Franken), he made himself fair game.

At the moment of his greatest triumph, Krugman has made himself vulnerable by daring to venture outside the aura of prestige provided by the "newspaper of record." Outside that aura, his crazy and hateful ideas don't seem quite so authoritative as they do on the op-ed pages. In fact they're rather silly and embarrassing — to both Krugman and the Times.

Now that Krugman has stepped outside, maybe Brooks's column today is symbolic in some sense that the Times is reluctant to let Krugman back in.

— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com.

[tesco samoa]

good one! I enjoyed reading that one!

Question. Is the article wrong on questioning the rebuilding phase of Iraq ?

I think not.

P.S. 2 more days to Virginia. Cannot wait.

[rextorres]

Well there is no getting around the fact that the budget has $550B deficit and growing and there is no denying that Bush's OWN forecasts call for a deficit even when the economy turns around.

I am still unclear how a $550B deficit is a good thing - and no it has nothing to do with the war in Iraq (which is the latest falacy presented by Bush and his supporters) there was a $400B deficit before the money requested by the administration for the war.

Conservatives can attack Krugman all they want to discredit him, but he's right on one point in his book: either Bush is ignorant and doesn't care what will happen after he is President or there is some hidden agenda going on to bankrupt the country so that social programs need to be eliminated. I still haven't figured out which is worse.

[ September 30, 2003, 21:52: Message edited by: rextorres ]

[General Woundwort]

Conspiracy or no conspiracy, social programs are bankrupting the country. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, not the Defense Department, are what will wreck the budget. Just wait till all these boomers start retiring. Then who's going to be earning the massive amounts of money required to pay off this Ponzi scheme?

The only comfort I have is in watching all these "Don't trust anyone over 30!" types growing old, and making utter fools of themselves trying to cover it over and deny it. Or is it a co-incidence that Viagra just got invented in the Last 5 years?

[tesco samoa]

hey i am over 30

[rextorres]

Originally posted by General Woundwort:
Conspiracy or no conspiracy, social programs are bankrupting the country. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, not the Defense Department, are what will wreck the budget. Just wait till all these boomers start retiring. Then who's going to be earning the massive amounts of money required to pay off this Ponzi scheme?

The only comfort I have is in watching all these "Don't trust anyone over 30!" types growing old, and making utter fools of themselves trying to cover it over and deny it. Or is it a co-incidence that Viagra just got invented in the Last 5 years?

It's mystery to me why people forget that the money being collected for these social programs via the payroll tax is being spent on non social security items. When I listen to rush, sean, and bill I always wonder why they conveniently forget this. Do you think it's because they make millions of dollars? Makes you wonder.

Anyway no one likes to remember but there is a huge surplus in the money collected via the payroll tax and if it were not spent to fund things like a tax cut then there would be plenty of money for the baby boomers. That was what the "lock box" was all about.

The fact of the matter is the two biggest line items that are breaking the back of the budget are the $400B or so spent on defense and the interest on the debt which is around $350B. There is lots more money coming in to pay for social security - via the social security tax - and what's left gets spent instead of being set aside for the future.

That's why Bush's budget either HAS to be a cynical ploy to get votes now or a conspiracy to end social security.

[ October 01, 2003, 04:15: Message edited by: rextorres ]

[General Woundwort]

The size of the surplus now (which may or may not be bookkeeping legendermain) is not the issue. Future obligations are. And with the rise in retirements, inflation, and the continuing reduction of the "workforce-to-benefit recipient" ratio, that's what could bring the whole structure down.

http://money.cnn.com/2003/05/29/news...security_pain/

[rextorres]

Well YOUR source speaks to my point. I don't disagree with anything in the article. If you run around a $500B deficit over 75 years you'll have something like a $44T debt. Obviously that's a bad thing.

[ October 01, 2003, 09:48: Message edited by: rextorres ]

[General Woundwort]

Look again at what they are saying in that article about the future projections of income vs. obligations. The state of the SocSec budget now is almost irrelevant. The budget deficit now is mostly not related to SocSec. The problem is, what is going to happen when masses of new recipients place a larger and larger burden on a proportionally smaller and smaller support base?

http://ideas.repec.org/a/red/issued/...3p575-675.html