Friday, August 26, 2005

Shiites Offer Compromise on Constitution - Yahoo! News

The AP story suggests that the last offer by the Shiites could make or break the constitutional process.

Out of all the writing that I have done as a lawyer, some of the best occurred when I threw out the draft that I had spent days on and started from scratch. It pained me. The results were usually far superior. I could see where pitfalls lay more easily. I did not have to compromise the message to make some rather sloppy drafting earlier in the piece stay.

Is this the best solution for Iraq? It would many, many more dead in the short term. It would possibly mean civil war if the second attempt failed or approached failure. It could mean resounding success if the Sunnis actually had elected persons at the table. It could mean success if the Iraqis had another chance to tighten up the number of parties in competition.

I would guess that some of the parties from the first election have died. Some politicians have proven their incompetence by now. It would crystalize the positions more clearly, which could be good or . . . .

I am not crazy about the idea, but it could be better than now. Could be.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Army Recruitment Is Down? Nope!

Ralph Peters shows that army recruitment is over goals at every level. Let's see how long this story takes to report.

Monday, August 22, 2005

Bad Logic, Mr. President

This AP story bothers me. I have been hearing this logic a lot: we should not leave Iraq because of our prior losses.

This is erroneous. Let's talk about money instead of lives for a moment. It is less emotional.

This is just a human version of an economic fallacy: we should put more money in Project A because we have already spent so much.

If Project A will cost $50,000 in the next 6 months but has shown zero benefit, why does its make sense to look at the $300,000 already spent.

The logic fails because prior expenditures tell us nothing about the project. If the logic is changed slightly, the fallacy can be removed. Take an example of an outdoor, Indiana, water park in late September. If the construction of a new park ran 6 months behind schedule, it makes infinite sense to spend the $50,000 maintenance costs to make it through spring of the following year. If you don't spend for maintenance, the foreclosure or eviction would put the project back to zero. You would have to spend the construction costs again with added expenses of having lost credibility as profitable builder.

The prior deaths in Iraq should not be wasted, but the proper way to express this argument is that withdrawing now will lead to more aggressive acts against America throughout the world. Then any future need to tame a terroristic Iraq would potentially require a whole new war and investment of 1,000's of American lives and billions of American dollars. The loss of withdrawal is the re-investment, not the honor of past lives.

Build memorials to the everyday heros in the military. Pray for them. Tell their stories. Inspire the troops there and here to live up to the valor shown already shown in Iraq. Calculate the cost of getting back to where we are today, but don't calculate on previous expenditures alone.

Friday, August 19, 2005

The Coming Al Qaeda Crisis of Spring 2009

One thing we Americans need to remember is that Al Qaeda's leadership is composed of well-educated and thoughtful hatemongers. They have studied America and its habits. Don't doubt that they have studied our reactions to past crises.

A theory of Soviet behavior is that the Soviets provoked each president to test his resolve and his pluck. The Berlin Wall. The Cuban Missile crisis. Vietnam for several presidents. The Yom Kippur War. I can't think of one for Ford. Afghanistan. Missiles in Europe. Iceland.

The timing was not always at the start of each administration. If I was better informed about the diplomacy of each era, I would hazard a guess that relations were testier at the start of each administration then after the sides had a chance to circle each other for a while.

I would suspect that Al Qaeda and OBL are planning a test for the Spring of 2009 or soon thereafter. They will want to get a quick read of our new president. They have learned from the Soviets. They will use an unsure time to try to establish a new relationship of greater predominance.

If a Republican of prominence from the current administration were to rise to the presidency, this confrontation will likely be smaller. The presumption of continuity will reduce it.

If a Republican from outside the administration were to rise, the confrontation will be more aggressive but dependent on who the Republican is. If it is McCain, I would bet a smaller confrontation. His military pedigree will make his resolve seem larger. If it is Senator Hagel . . . (sorry, I am stiffling an involuntary response), this will be highly unpredictable. He has the Republican moniker, but no history of stalwart, clear policy.

If it is a Democrat, the push by Al Qaeda will be small. They want to make the loss of face for the Democrat to be small and the cost of retribution high. The Democrat will have a portion of his or her (I will use the masculine pronour herein as neuter, as is English language standard) party pushing the pasficist line. The retribution cost will make the pascificist position easier to swallow. Then Al Qaeda has a precedent. They will push again. At some point, the Democrat is either going to have blow the wad on the retribution cost and act in a manner far more dramatic than the situation would seem to warrant at the moment.

For example, if Hillary is elected, she will likely react with overwhelming force the first time. There will be no moderate response. She will then be able to avoid reacting at all to some future response, because, when she is accused of fearing to respond, she will point to her prior overwhelming response.

Unfortunately, this up-and-down response is among the more dangerous options. The less predictible the American response, the easier it will be for the aggressive responses to avoid international screaming.

Am I suggesting that from this alone that all Democrats are unqualified? Absolutely not. This prediction has little to do with what choice America should make in 2008 than it does in trying to predict our enemy's behavior.

Americans just need to be aware of what their future may likely hold based on its collective choices.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Murder as Democratic-Republican Measure?

There is a city where murders and shootings have become notorious. Next door to this history of mayhem sits a government debating the future of its democracy as key appointments are argued about in pitched voices. I am thinking of Washington, D.C. Are you?

Throughout the 1990's the stories of murder and death was ever upward. During this time, did we ever dispare of the future of American democracy?

Murder is not a sign of health in any society. Yet, death and non-military killing is not the same as a coupe d'etat.

Has the American left learned nothing from Secretary of Defense McNamara's fallacy of the bodycount? Robert McNamara came to the Department of Defense from the Detroit auto industry, where life is about measurements. McNamara tried to measure success in Vietnam by the number of Viet Cong killed: the bodycount. Cf. Wikipedia.

The left hated the Vietnam war for its unseemly killing. The My Lai massacre came to represent this unseemly killing. Then Lt. John Kerry comes along and makes it sound like this is the US Army's method of fighting. Not a lot of truth, but McNamara's bodycount didn't help.

I always say that you have to be careful whom you choose to be your enemy because that comes to define you. The American Left is a perfect example. It chose Nixon, bodycounts, and enemy lists. Now its perception of life is based on people that the movement hates, the statistics of dead, and politics of destruction and hatred. From the Clinton era to today, the Left has become what it perceived to be wrong with the other side. Iraq is a failure because of the body count. The Bush administration or Republican de la semaine is evil, e.g., Bush, Cheney, Rice, DeLay, Bolton, etc.

Once you remove the body count, what do we know about Iraq?

The questions to the A.P. about this are a start.

Let's look at a proper measure. Could it be persons jailed for speech against the government? Could it be persons summarily killed in captivity by the government for "crimes"? Could it be persons jailed for belonging to a political party other than the ruling party? Could it be the number of stores opened? The number of cars sold? The number of gallons of gas sold? The number of groceries/green grocers/open-air bazaars open? The number of cafes, restaurants, or food stands open? The number of cells phones in use on the key street corners of a city or town?

Why do we measure success on the number of barrels of oil pumped or schools opened by the government or the number of persons claiming not to have a job? The media, when it does look at numbers, tends to focus on these government and macroeconomic measures. Life is not macroeconomics. Life is the microscopic. Where do I eat? Where do I live? How do I get to work? How do I make money?

We know from American success compared to European and Japanese experiences that the microbusinesses drive economic growth on a macro-level. Big organizations have higher capital investment requirements and, consequently, are more risk-averse. They need bigger government to adjudicate disputes.

Smaller businesses don't. We need to know the number of cell phones or the number of gallons of gas pumped at particular store from month to month. That is life. That is where success is measured by the Iraqi family.

Sunday, August 07, 2005

TIME.com: The Condi Doctrine -- Aug. 15, 2005 -- Page 5

TIME.com: The Condi Doctrine -- Aug. 15, 2005 -- Page 5
This article in Time about Condi Rice pushes the notion that democratic reform has to be timid and methodical in places that have never known democracy. (UPDATE: Powerline comments on the same article.)

This is lunacy. Government change in small increments is bound to be hijacked by bureaucrats or despotic tendencies. The one part of the lunacy of Marxism that is true is that government change must be revolutionary.

It must work quickly and throw the baby out with the bath water. Then building institutions can be slow and methodical.

What modern, successful democracy did not start suddenly and take years to get its feet under them? Compare the democracies that we are always fearing will collapse to a military junta.

For democracy to take hold and work, the revolutionaries must throw out the old guard from top to higher middle management. This inevitably means several years of poor management. Shake raw milk. It takes time for the cream to surface.

The building of a system of government works from ideals to bureaucracy. Working the other way -- from bureaucracy to ideals -- means that those who can find power through milking the system will control the bureaucracy. This is dangerous. It is this power stealing process that leads to juntas. The bureaucracy with the guns gets fed up with a feable system. Unfortunately, this often fails because the military's strict control system does not lead to good democracy.

It is the street revolutions that work. The chaos of the masses insisting on good government. The chaos of constitutional conventions that insist on principled government. The implementation through the chaotic first parliament or congress. The implementation through oversight of the brand-new bureaucracy. The law of averages in the pendulum swing.

Everyone is uneasy. Everyone is seeking power and control simultaneously. In the military juntas, power at the top is already guaranteed by gunpoint. The rest of the bureaucracy is seeking its power without much citizen input or restriction.

Now this chaotic transformation has one guaranteed result: the pendulum swing. The Brent Scowcrofts of the world don't fear the pendulum swinging away from their collective noses. They fear its return. They fear the bloodied nose. Here the General and its adherents have defined victory incorrectly. They need to move their nose out of the path of the returning pendulum.

Think about it. If you define your success as making every democracy your ally, when a new government arises that does not agree with you, you have failed. In the Cold War this Kennansian view may have made sense.

If you define victory as building a democracy that later may have a Chancellor Schroeder, how can you have failed when the Chancellor gets thrown out on his ear after a few, peaceful years militarily even if they are a diplomatic nightmare. The Chancellor is removed by his own people. The pendulum swing moves toward the party historically more friendly to the US.

In Iraq, we must admittedly fear the first few pendulum swings. The fear should not be of the Kenansian variety. We should fear that the Iraqi version of the Articles-of-Conferation period or the Iraqi Yeltsin-era not being able to survive to the next pendulum swing. We should not fear the chaos for sake of fearing an unknowable future.

We should fear that the patience of the Iraqi people leads to a knee-jerk revolution against democracy because of their fear of chaos -- even explosive chaos. (Trust me, my fear of explosive chaos would rationalize such a knee-jerk response if I lived in Iraq now.) But it is in such chaos that true democratic strength arises.

Condi has shown confidence in the democratic process. She is right to do so. A successful Iraqi democracy will produce a Iraqi Chancellor Schroeder. I don't doubt sooner than later. The question is not who is the country's leader at any moment. It is what system is necessary for that difficult leader to be removed. If it is by the ballot box or by constitutional limitations, the who is irrelevant. (I mean the top dog, not the puppet, in the Iranian style.)

The pendulum's swing must always pass through the bottom of its swing. As long as the swing always stays centered on a democratic system, over time the pendulum will swing in slower, shorter arcs. These shorter arcs is where we build our true allies.

Radicalism is merely the attempts to push the pendulum out of its swing to the middle. Someone like Venezula's Chavez is dangerous because he pushes the pendulum wide of its natural swing. The swinging is in wider, eratic, circular swings. This is the real danger of getting a blood nose. You have to stand much farther away. When the swinging becomes smaller and more focused on one path, you can stand closer to the pendulum and never get a bloody nose.

The Scowcroft method by comparison is to have some group hold the pendulum with the hope that they will slowly set it in the middle. This is folly. The middle is not defined by one person. An attempt to have one person find the middle just means that a new person holds the pendulum or the holder is moving around.

Being able to predict the pendulum's movement is more like having a circle of people each pushing the pendulum. If each person gets a chance to push the pendulum, there is less need to push the pendulum excessively hard. Build the pendulum and let it swing. Focus on limiting the arc, not setting still.

Rapid City Journal: Alan Aker, 8-7: Mainstreamers have lost their way

Rapid City Journal: Alan Aker, 8-7: Mainstreamers have lost their way: Now that is to the point writing!

Friday, August 05, 2005

TCS: Tech Central Station - Oil, Money and Confidence

TCS: Tech Central Station - Oil, Money and Confidence Russia is on the rise. I hope this is in the best sense of the rise of democratic republic, rather than the ChiComm -- or should I say the fascist Chinese.